the delightful Titus Andromedon:
In my case, it was getting up. Anyhow, I need to drink some tea now and read a book. But don’t worry, I’ll be back later (maybe Monday, which is my dual personality’s birthday). In the meantime, have a truly relaxing weekend and don’t forget to have fun and enjoy the beautiful weather.
TGIF. Boy, am I ready for the weekend! I plan to take it easy. How about you?
In the meantime here are a few end-of-the-week odds and ends.
1. I really want this house. I may have to buy my first lottery ticket.
2. The Ford Mustang was introduced to the public on this day (April 17) in 1964. It was named after the WWII P-51 Mustang fighter plane.
What a great car!
3. It is Thornton Wilder’s birthday today. I think I’ll eat some ice cream in his honor, because you know–“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.”
4. It is also William Holden’s birthday.
He was born in O’Fallon, Illinois–just over the river from here–in 1918. So I suggest we watch one of his movies in his honor. When I think about it, I realize that he really is one of my favorites, although I seldom give him credit for being so. He was also one of those men who kind of just got better with age. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible alcoholic and died ignominiously. But you know, he had a younger brother, Robert W. “Bobbie” Beedle, who was a U.S. Navy fighter pilot and was killed in action in 1944–maybe that had something to do with it.
Anyway, there are obviously lots of good William Holden movies to choose from. My favorites are: Born Yesterday (1950), Sabrina (1954), The Horse Soldiers (1959), and Paris When It Sizzles (1964)–but there are lots of other good ones. I’ll leave that up to you.
5. Going to Athens, GA? You won’t want to miss this!
Have a great weekend!
One of the blogs I follow–Interesting Literature–had a post on 10 Rare But Useful Words Everyone Should Know. The first word is “UHTCEARE“ meaning ‘lying awake before dawn worrying’. I think this should be on my license plate or something. I mean, I do that all the time. All the time.
Do you?
I try to remember the “have no anxiety about anything” commandment:
Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Philippians 4:6)
And Jesus was very clear when he said:
Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? (Matthew 6:25)
And, of course, there is my favorite:
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34)
I know that if I just trust in the Lord, all will be well. But we puritan types have a hard time letting go of taking responsibility.
Well, I guess we can take some solace in the fact that old St. Paul probably had some sleepless nights too:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. (Romans 7: 15-20)
Sigh. In the early morning when I cannot go back to sleep, I sometimes just get up and read.
I am working on being more happy-go-lucky.
Any suggestions?
Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. He was shot on April 14 (only five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox), but he lingered until the morning of the 15th.
The death of President Abraham Lincoln had a profound impact on the poet Walt Whitman and his writing. It is the subject of one of his most highly regarded and critically examined pieces, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865-1866) and one of his best-known poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” (1865-1866). Whitman also delivered (sporadically) annual public lectures commemorating Lincoln’s death beginning in April 1879.
Here is the first poem Whitman wrote about Lincoln’s death.
(May 4, 1865)
HUSH’D be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.
No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps,
know it truly.As they invault the coffin there,
Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.
Let’s all take a moment to ponder our fallen president and the great national calamity that was his death.
Today is daughter #2’s 25th birthday! Hurrah for a quarter century!
Since all the rest of us were gathered together this past weekend toasting her sister and her running accomplishments, I felt that she might be feeling a little left out.
But I’m sure she found something fun to do.
Even if she’s in the living room doing her ‘homework’, chances are she’s enjoying herself.
“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.” (HM, Moby-Dick)
So we’ll be toasting you tonight, belle! (No fancy cocktails like you’ll be drinking, but something–“We’ve got pinot!”) Wish we were all there with you!
Quelle weekend! So much activity–and driving–to the airport and downtown twice! Oh my.
I was outside my comfort zone several times. But it was all good.
After picking daughter #1 at the airport bright and early and getting her checked in downtown for the race, we sat out in the sun and watched lacrosse. The Hounds were triumphant 21-0 in a rout of embarrassing proportion.
But a win is a win. They were gentlemen about it.
We got up at 4 a.m. on Sunday in order to get daughter #1 downtown and into her corral by 6:15. We watched 15,000 people run the half marathon,
Still smiling near the finish!
and cheered and held our signs up like lunatics.
Daughter #1 finished the race in 02:13:27–faster than she expected–and you bet we drank free beer at 9:30 in the morning–only in St. Louis!
We celebrated back in terra cognita with breakfast at Schneithorst’s afterwards and, of course, there were several other runners there sporting handsome medals.
It’s such a small town.
On April 9th, 1942 the Japanese army in the Philippines forced its recently captured American and Filipino prisoners to begin a grueling 60 mile march across the island — the Bataan Death March.
Over the course of the journey, prisoners were given little to no food and water and no medical aid. Forced by the intense heat to drink reeking sludge out of buffalo wallows, men came down with dysentery and weakened rapidly. Those who fell behind or left the road to relieve themselves were beaten, bayoneted or beheaded and left to rot. Some were just shot out of hand for no discernible reason.
Those who survived the horrible journey ended up in equally horrible prison camps such as Cabanatuan. One of the survivors was a chaplain in the U.S. Army, Robert P. Taylor, whose story I hope you will read more about here and here.
Already the recipient of the silver star for risking his life repeatedly to evacuate wounded soldiers from the front while lines under heavy fire, Taylor survived Japanese prison camps in the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea and on a Japanese ‘Hell Ship’ that got bombed by American planes who didn’t realize that POWs were on board. Throughout his ordeal, he ministered to the despairing soldiers, risked his life to get them smuggled food and medicine and never gave up his faith. Lift a glass to this ‘unsung hero’ today and remember those unfortunate but brave victims of the Bataan Death March.
*Chaplain Robert Taylor to fellow prisoners
Another busy week (almost) in the bag. Ugh.
I went to a cocktail party last night where Hal Holbrook was the guest of honor.
I wish Dixie Carter had been there. I miss her.
Oh well. C’est la vie.
Tomorrow I head to the airport to pick up daughter #1 who is running in the Go! St. Louis half marathon on Sunday.
She’s been training for awhile now.
Anyway, this race crosses two bridges back and forth over the mighty Mississippi. How cool is that?
It promises to be a busy weekend!
Baseball season has started, so I guess it is appropriate that we have been experiencing baseball-sized hail in our flyover state!
Photo lifted from KMOV.com
Well, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
The sky in Farmington, MO the other day.
Oh, springtime in the Midwest!
We would be remiss if we did not mention that today is the 326th anniversary of William III and Mary II being crowned as joint sovereigns of Great Britain.
Huzzah!
Have a great weekend!
“It was like I was empty. Well, I’m not empty anymore. That’s what’s important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what’s wrong for what’s right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don’t change the truth none. There’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.”
– Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (1960)
I have an event-packed calendar today, so I need a little John Wayne to get me started. That and a little Philippians 4:13.
Have a great day! Tomorrow’s Friday!
It’s a great art, is rowing. It’s the finest art there is. It’s a symphony of motion. And when you’re rowing well, why it’s perfection. And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine. It touches the you of yous. Which is your soul. (George Yeoman Pocock)
I am reading The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.
It is the story of the hard-working varsity crew at the University of Washington who beat out their American college rivals for a chance to show the world how great they were at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Most of these guys were already working their way through college (because it was the depression) and then working on top of that and their school work to perfect their “swing” on the crew team. What a work ethic!
It is a wonderful story of those fine young men from “the greatest generation” who later would trounce Hitler in the war.
This book is particularly appealing to me because I rowed in college.
The boathouse on Paradise Pond at Smith College
I took a class and then I rowed on an intramural team. I admit, I was pretty terrible. (My excuse is that my hands were too small to really get a good grip on the oar and my 110 lb. frame was pretty wimpy.) But I loved it. Eventually I moved to the coxswain’s seat, but I had a tendency to veer. I am no athlete, okay? But I did love being on the water and I rowed enough to understand what it’s all about.
There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find it. Others find it but can’t sustain it. It’s called “swing.” It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of synch with those of all the others.
I wanted to row because when I was a freshman at Smith, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall was the President of the College. It was his final year, and I actually had him in a freshman history course. He was the kind of professor who invited each student individually over to his house to discuss their final paper. We had tea in his messy study. It was the greatest.
Anyway, he rowed. A graduate of both Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he captained the Balliol College crew while at Oxford. Later he coached the Berkeley College crew while teaching at Yale, served as an informal coach for college rowers at Smith and wrote three books on the subject, including A Short History of American Rowing.
I went to the Head of the Charles regatta my freshman year and Mr. Mendenhall was there talking to the coach of the Olympic crew team. He knew everyone.
TCM (in red jacket) with U.S. Olympic crew coach at the Newell Boathouse, Head of the Charles 1975
I kept in touch with Mr. Mendenhall after he retired. If I wrote him, he always wrote me back. On the day I graduated I ran into him by chance on the sidewalk outside the President’s house. He asked me what I was doing after graduation and I told him I didn’t know, because I had been turned down for the Master’s Program at William and Mary. Back in St. Louis a week later, I got a phone call from the head of the History Dept. at W&M and he said they had a spot for me after all and some money too. Well. I always thought that perhaps Mr. Mendenhall had given them a call. I’ll never know for sure, but he was that kind of guy.
Anyway, The Boys in the Boat is a good book and a rousing story. Word is that a movie is in development and that Kenneth Branagh has signed on to direct it. This story would make a great movie, although we do know how it works out.
The Nazis lose.
dual personalities 