May | 2014 | dual personalities

May 19, 2014

“Things happen and we do our best to keep in the saddle.”*

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? Mine was relatively quiet and low-key. No socializing, no trips downtown, no eating out. Just a lot of puttering about in the house and garden. The weather was lovely–cool and sunny.

The OM and I attempted to go to the boy’s play-off game, but we went to the wrong school. We drove around the Priory campus wondering where everyone was. It never occurred to our befuddled minds that it was, indeed, a HOME game. We surrendered and went home. C’est la vie.

I contemplated staying in bed and reading on Sunday morning, but I went to church because I remembered that I had given the altar flowers in memory of my parents and my friend Irene. They were very nice.

The church does not list, thank you…but I guess I do.

One of the readers was a scion of what we used to call a “socially-prominent” flyover family–does anyone say that anymore?–who makes a practice of wearing old baggy blue jeans to church. Furthermore, he looks like he has been wearing the same pair all week while driving his tractor around the south forty. I suppose we should be happy he tucks his shirt in. He has the flowing locks and facial hair of someone who would have fit right in with Bedford Forrest at Shiloh. I don’t know why this always bothers me, but it does. I mean, c’mon.

Besides the regular sermon, there was a children’s sermon given by our choir director to a group of younguns who scampered up to the chancel to sit on the floor and listen attentively. At the end he led them in song and they were adorable and quite amusing. They cheered me up. There is one little girl who can answer every question posed and belts out every hymn like a mini Martha Raye. If this child doesn’t grow up to be something special, I’ll eat my hat.

In the afternoon I read outside–a most unusual and lovely pastime.

In conclusion I should note that seventy-nine years ago, at the age of 46, T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”, was fatally injured in an accident on his motorcycle in Dorset. Six days later (on May 19) he died.

Lawrence on his Brough Superior SS100

He was buried in Dorset. There is a memorial in the very old Anglo-Saxon Church of St. Martin

and a memorial bust in the crypt of St.Paul’s Cathedral.

I will leave it to my dual personality, who has read a lot more than I about T.E. and has visited his resting place, to write about him sometime, but I thought we should take note of his passing.

He was a gallant soldier and a Christian gentleman and more than worthy of a toast to that effect tonight.

*T.E.L. I had this quote on my senior page. It could be my mantra.

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May 17, 2014

We had a party!

by chuckofish

Son #2 graduates from college tomorrow. Both his brothers having arrived safely home in time for the festivities, we invited a few of the graduating seniors and select guests to an informal late afternoon-early evening soiree. All day rain served to cool things off — it had been too warm and muggy — and let’s face it, clouds hide more than the sun; all those dusty corners I didn’t quite get to just faded into the background. Everything went quite smoothly…

We set up the beer/soda fridge in the mudroom.

and the wine in the dining room

James uncorks the wine

along with the food.

The hungry hordes did a great job eating up the munchies — look at all of those empty plates! Conversation was entirely pleasant and mostly about movies (quelle surprise!).

I confess that these mellow pictures are somewhat misleading as they were taken toward the end of the party when I finally remembered the camera. Earlier, when there were more people and the apartment mates put on their favorite lp, Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell (don’t ask, but, yes, vinyl on a turntable) it felt more like this,

though, alas, we have no cat. A fun time was had by all!

Today, we get to recover and then it’s on to graduation tomorrow. I’ll take a host of pics and post some of them if I get the chance. In the meantime, have a great Saturday!

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May 16, 2014

“Mac, you ever been in love?”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982)–star of stage and screen and progenitor of one of those film dynasties they have out in Hollywood. He was baptized an Episcopalian (although raised as a Christian Scientist) and an Eagle Scout.

He is not one of my all-time favorites or anything, but I always liked him and his wonderful midwestern voice. He reminds me of my father, without the glasses.

Fonda, as you know, had quite a long and celebrated career culminating in finally winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for On Golden Pond in 1982. He played an old, befuddled man and was hardly acting, but oh well. I’m sure Warren Beatty, Burt Lancaster, Dudley Moore, and Paul Newman, who were also nominated that year, understood that that’s how Hollywood operates–right?

He made some of his best movies with John Ford, including one of my top-ten favorites, My Darling Clementine (1940) which I wrote about here. He was on quite a roll with Ford with Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), then with The Fugitive (1947), Fort Apache (1948) and Mister Roberts (1955). Many actors had a hard time working with Ford, but I remember hearing Fonda say that making a movie with him “was like going to summer camp.” Clearly Ford treated him differently. I would love to know why. The results of their collaborations were excellent, so, whatever.

My Friday Pick for you then is to watch one of Henry Fonda’s movies tonight and raise a glass to old Hank. For me, it will be My Darling Clementine.

I should also note that May 18 (Sunday) is the birthday of country singer George Strait, aka Strait the Great.

So it wouldn’t be a bad idea to dust off Pure Country (1992). (I know you have a copy. If not, I’m sure it is on YouTube. Or running in a loop on GAC.)

One of my favorite memories is of the boy when he was around 9 or 10 years old, sitting in the giant mulberry tree in our yard, singing at the top of his lungs:

All my ex’s live in Texas,

And Texas is a place I’d dearly love to be.

But all my ex’s live in Texas

And that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.

Just thinking of that made my day! Happy birthday, Henry and George!

*Wyatt Earp says this in My Darling Clementine. [The response to this question is: “No. I’ve been a bartender all me life.”]

4 Comments

May 15, 2014

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” *

by chuckofish

According to Wikipedia, “memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Encoding allows information that is from the outside world to reach our senses in the forms of chemical and physical stimuli. In this first stage we must change the information so that we may put the memory into the encoding process. Storage is the second memory stage or process. This entails that we maintain information over periods of time. Finally the third process is the retrieval of information that we have stored. We must locate it and return it to our consciousness. Some retrieval attempts may be effortless due to the type of information.”

I have been thinking about memory a lot lately. Probably because that pesky “retrieval” process is becoming such a pain.

Perhaps recently experiencing a reunion has made me more than usually aware of this. People remember different things and they remember those things differently.

Class Day rehearsal–I am so “in character” as my pater. As I remember it, I was awesome.

Also, looking back over my years as a mother, I realize that so much of my children’s “wonder years” are a blur. A real blur. If it weren’t for snapshots, would I remember anything?

I think I need to make more of an effort here. Take some notes. I need to be more intentional about thinking.

Here’s Frederick Buechner on the subject:

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” (A Room Called Remember)

I think our culture is becoming less and less intentional about thinking. Everything is presented in a shorter (and shorter) format. Our brains bounce back and forth from subject to subject. Focusing is hard. What will the result of all this be I wonder?

Discuss among yourselves.

*Nathaniel Hawthorne

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May 14, 2014

And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky

by chuckofish

“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.”

–Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

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May 13, 2014

“Dead men tell no tales, Mary.”*

by chuckofish

“He took her face in his hands and kissed it, and she saw that he was laughing. “When you’re an old maid in mittens down at Helford, you’ll remember that,” he said, “and it will have to last you to the end of your days. ‘He stole horses,’ you’ll say to yourself, ‘and he didn’t care for women; and but for my pride I’d have been with him now.”

― Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

Happy birthday to Dame Daphne du Maurier (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989)!

According to IMDB, “Daphne Du Maurier was one of the most popular English writers of the 20th Century, when middle-brow genre fiction was accorded a higher level of respect in a more broadly literate age. For her services to literature, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, the female equivalent of a knighthood.” In other words, they don’t write them like she did anymore.

Yes, it may be time to dust off Jamaica Inn or Frenchman’s Creek. I wish they would do justice to her books on film, but I haven’t seen any that really come close to her prose power. The Birds maybe. I must say, they keep trying. Check out all the versions here.

*Jamaica Inn, of course

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May 12, 2014

“There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas.”*

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? Mine was a busy one.

We went downtown. The sky threatened, but nothing much happened.

The Shocktop–mobile was down on Clark Street with a beer tap in the trunk and lots of girls in hotpants throwing bar towels up to us on the balcony. (I got one. Thanks.)

You could see into Busch Stadium from our vantage point, but the Cardinals were away Friday night.

Happily my friend in Atlanta sent me this from Wednesday night’s game:

Saturday afternoon I went to cheer on the Hounds in the boy’s lacrosse game to no avail. They lost, but it was a lovely day to sit on folding chairs and enjoy the breeze. The OM ate a hotdog, a hamburger and a brat. I got sunburned in awkward places. Good times.

Coach Compton restrains himself

Sunday I went to church where I substituted for both lectors and got a high-five from Jim, the assisting priest. I also heard that the boy’s best man and best friend (finally) got the green light from the Bishop of New York to become an Episcopal Priest. The number of hoops our denomination makes a person jump through is truly astonishing. Now he will start applying to divinity schools and continue to wait for another year to get the ball rolling. So hats off to Michael and cheers to a fine young man.

And as the weekend drew to a close, we went to the boy’s house where he and daughter #3 prepared a delicious Mother’s Day bar-be-que dinner for us, her parents and her lovely grandmother.

What a great weekend!

*Well, there ain’t, but there is a country song: “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”…

There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas
Creation’s most unique and precious pearls
And heaven help us always to remember
That the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world

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May 10, 2014

[S]he was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed…*

by chuckofish

I approached this last week with mixed emotions. First, I had to attend a departmental retirement party. The festivities were complicated by internal politics, the details of which I will spare you. Suffice it to say that one of the retirees (a dear friend) refused to attend, several faculty members weren’t speaking to each other, and there were awkward pauses during the speech-making as people struggled to find nice things to say. The DH and I cut out as soon as we could.

Meanwhile, back at home, the mountainous backlog of laundry continued to grow as we awaited the washing machine repairman. On Monday he arrived promptly as promised and after fixing the problem swiftly and surely, left with a gentle admonition to keep an eye on the first load to make sure that the machine really was working. That should have clued me in, but he left, I did laundry, and then got engrossed in my book (more on that later). Much to my chagrin, when at last I checked the machine I discovered that my basement was flooded (what, again? you ask).

like this, but not this

Urgent telephone calls and more waiting ensued. All this enforced leisure was to the good, however, as I had plenty of time to start my summer reading.

First on the list was the book that my dear, retiring friend lent me, Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James. It’s an inspector Dalgliesh mystery set at an Anglican seminary in East Anglia. It was very enjoyable and well written (I learned new words: etiolated and orotund) as well as a great deal about the inner workings of the Church of England.

Central to the plot was the controversy over modernizing the church to be relevant to ’21st century people’. I could certainly relate to that as my own church is suffering from the urge to modernize (especially regarding pronouns) in order to ‘be inclusive’. Those who hold this position apparently consider Christianity to be a nice fairytale generated by humans to console themselves. I have nothing against changing church-made rules, but if you can change the core beliefs at will to suit yourself, then it is all meaningless. So whether I’m ‘old and wise’ or just ‘tired and disappointed’, I’m not going to stop referring to God as ‘the father’.

Having finished the mystery, I have started a reread of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I hope to use in an independent study in the fall. Inside my copy it reads (in my own handwriting), “to Sarah from Daddy, Christmas 1971”. It was kind of a big deal to get a copy of the book. In those days there was no Amazon and so my father had to do some serious research to find it and then special order it through his favorite local bookstore, Paul’s Books. I remember being really thrilled by this gift as I had become fascinated with T.E. after seeing the movie “Lawrence of Arabia”.

Can you blame me? Look at how cute Peter O’Toole is! My BFF, Lars, gave me the deluxe anniversary edition of that movie a few years ago and I clearly need to watch it again very soon.

I’m simultaneously reading James Webb’s Fields of Fire, another work-related read. It’s a famous Vietnam war novel similar to Karl Marlantes’, Matterhorn, except that it came out in 1979 instead of 2010. It will be interesting to see to what degree the immediacy of events shaped Webb’s understanding of his experience. Both authors served as marines in Vietnam and both were highly decorated for their efforts.

After I finish these books, I’m going to find something romantic and/or funny — I’ll definitely need a break from war. Any suggestions?

*T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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May 9, 2014

All shall be well

by chuckofish

What could be better than Julian of Norwich and the Moody Blues on Friday?

It was Julian’s day on the Episcopal Calendar yesterday. I am a big fan. She is “venerated” in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but has never been officially beatified by the R.C. church. Oh, really, you say?

Anyway, she was born in England about 1342 during the time of the Black Death. When she was thirty years old, she became gravely ill and was expected to die. Then, on the seventh day, the medical crisis passed, and she had a series of fifteen visions, or “showings,” in which she was led to contemplate the Passion of Christ. These brought her great peace and joy.

Julian on the west front of Norwich Cathedral

She became an anchoress–a person called to a solitary life, but one that was not cut-off from the world, but one anchored in it. Her life was one of prayer, contemplation and counseling, a life highly thought of by people of the time. Her home was a small room, or cell, attached to the Church of S. Julian, Bishop of Le Mans, just off one of the main streets of Norwich. The results of her meditations she wrote in a book called Revelations of Divine Love.

And from the time that [the vision] was shown, I desired often to know what our Lord’s meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward I was answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: ‘Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.’

Thus I was taught that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God made us, he loved us, which love was never slaked nor ever shall be. And in this love he has done all his work, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had a beginning. But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end …

I have read her wonderful meditations and let’s just say there was a whole lot of hi-lighting going on.

I have a busy weekend planned. How about you?

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May 8, 2014

A hill of beans

by chuckofish

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.

–Henry David Thoreau

Well, I know just what old Thoreau is talking about. Do you?

I go out to see if my pumpkin plants are still where I planted them every morning and then again when I come home from work.

The OM says, ironically, “Are they still there?” But I am worried about them! My past experience teaches me that their chances are not particularly good. Pesky garden varmints enjoy digging around in this bed, but so far so good.

I love this time of year though, don’t you?

When the plants are just starting to come up and the weeds and violets and creeping vines have not taken over.

peony buds

The first rose bud

When insect life is minimal. When it is still cool enough to enjoy my time in the yard. I admit I lose interest quickly when our flyover temperatures soar. I am a fair-weather gardener.

But you know how my mind works. Thoreau’s quote got me thinking about “a hill of beans” and how that expression became a synonym for something of negligible importance or value. I wonder how that came to be the case? Anyway, this made me think of that famous scene at the end of Casablanca, when Rick says to Ilsa: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that…”

Yeats, you recall, wanted “Nine bean-rows” and “a hive for the honey-bee” in his Innisfree home.

Hmmm. If my pumpkins amount to even a hill of beans this year, maybe next year I’ll plant some beans.

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Month: May, 2014

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