January | 2017 | dual personalities

January 19, 2017

Happy birthday, Mary, Dolly and Buffy!

by chuckofish

Can it be January 19th already? Zut alors! Readers of this blog may remember that this is the birthday of our dear mother, as well as Dolly Parton and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Truly a day to celebrate!

Here is a photo of our little mother holding one DP who is one-year old.

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I think my older brother (age 6) took the picture because 1) the look on our mother’s face and 2) the artful set-up of the snapshot, the empty garage taking a prime part of the photo.

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There are other snaps in this series taken by my mother of the baby in the stroller and of Cowboy Chris. But I’m betting my brother picked up the camera and said, “Let ME take a picture of YOU!”

Anyway, I’m glad he did.

Well, I plan to toast Mary, Dolly and Buffy tonight. (Drynuary turned out not to be a thing.) In their honor, I may watch one our mother’s favorite movies. Possibilities would be:

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Decisions, decisions…

In the meantime, here’s a little Bruce Spingsteen to brighten your day: O, Mary, don’t you weep no more…a rockin’ rendition of an old favorite.

Have a blessed day and never forget that pharaoh’s army got drowned.

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January 18, 2017

Against the arrows of the coming sun

by chuckofish

Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring stew them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievences.
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On the every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of winter past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnwort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial, – purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.

–Henry David Thoreau

Flyover photos via KMOV.com

2 Comments

January 17, 2017

A bushel and a peck

by chuckofish

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Here’s a snapshot I found of our older brother when he was a few months old in 1951. Our mother’s younger sister is holding him. He was born a little early and only weighed about 5 lbs. He looks a little stressed. (Note furrowed brow.)

But look at the bouncing baby boy a few months later!

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Babies.

5 Comments

January 16, 2017

Day by day

by chuckofish

Happy MLK Day and, if you are lucky enough to be home like I am, I hope you are enjoying your day off.

That’s ice on the trees…

In fact, this has turned out to be a very nice four-day weekend for me, because we had a “snow day” on Friday due to the ice storm here in flyover country. I stayed home for two days puttering around and re-organizing drawers and shelves and closets.

By Sunday morning the storm was pretty much over. I went to church and was surprised by how many people were there. The OM said they were probably stir crazy and just wanted to get out of the house. Well, maybe.

After church we went to lunch and then to the hospital to see the wee babes and their parents who were kangarooing as they do every day (even during the ice storm).

We watched Sully (2016) over the weekend and liked it a lot. Tom Hanks was just right as the remarkable pilot who landed the plane on the Hudson River without a single loss of life back in 2009. I think the movie could have used a little more backstory, but I won’t quibble. It was good.

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I cannot say the same for the much heralded Manchester By the Sea (2016) which I did not like.

Bad things happen in life, terrible things, but this movie seems to say that all of life is just a long, sad, hopeless journey and then you die. The characters in this movie are uniformly unable to express their feelings, much less talk without use of the F-word in every sentence. After the movie the OM and I both wondered what the writer/director was trying to say. I just didn’t get this movie.

Well, today I am going to enjoy my day off as the temperatures continue to climb and the ice melts. And I will continue to believe that life has meaning.

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak — even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. “Be not afraid,” says another, “for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

–Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

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January 14, 2017

The weather outside is frightful…

by chuckofish

An ice storm is due to hit my dual personality’s flyover town this weekend.

I just hope they don’t lose their power. Even if it doesn’t last, ice can do damage that can take weeks to fix. Back in the “Great Ice Storm of ’98” hundreds of electrical pylons simply buckled under the weight of the ice, and it took more than three weeks to restore power to some areas.

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Ice is not all bad, though. Take, for example, what our northern neighbors in Ottawa have been doing on the frozen Rideau canal:

You can read more about it here. Apparently, dragon boat ice racing is a thing in northern and eastern Europe because, hey, otherwise people could only skate, play hockey, ice-climb, ice-fish, ice-boat (yes, it’s real), go curling, or — for the really crazy people out there — down hill racing on ice skates. Seriously.

What next?

Personally, I’m not in favor of risking life and limb for a thrill or money. I’d rather stay inside with a good book and a cup of tea, and I fervently hope that my DP will be able to do just that until the weather improves.

Wherever you are, have a safe, non-slip weekend!

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January 13, 2017

Have a nice weekend

by chuckofish

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Since I will no doubt be stuck at home this weekend due to inclement weather–and today is a snow day–I think I will round up all the Richard Scarry books I have and see if the boy wants to take his copies home to the nursery.

The little, tiny babies won’t be home for awhile…

…but they’ll be needing books soon, right? Yeah, they will.

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Meanwhile, I am going to try to enjoy staying inside and catching up on all the things that need catching up.

You know, re-organizing my office.

Putting away the Christmas stained glass which I forgot to do last weekend. Checking to see what other Christmas decorations I missed.

And tonight I’ll toast James Joyce who died on this day in 1941. It was he who said: “I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.” [“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (27 April 1907), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002)]

Good point.

Have a good weekend…It’s a long one too!

3 Comments

January 12, 2017

By the way

by chuckofish

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Thank you, Billy Graham, for reminding us.

Some of us seem to have forgotten this.

And also let’s try:

Screen Shot 2017-01-11 at 3.47.05 PM.png Thank you, Instagram!

Have a good Thursday. We are bracing for a winter storm/ice storm–oh, boy! We’ll do our best to keep calm and carry on.

4 Comments

January 11, 2017

“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second”

by chuckofish

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”

–William James

Today is the birthday of William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) who was an American philosopher and psychologist and a teacher (among his students at Harvard were Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and George Santayana). He was also the brother of Henry James. His godfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson! He went in the spring of 1865 on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River with Louis Agassiz! He is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology.

Although I cannot say I have read widely in his work or am an expert on William James, I aways liked him.

“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.”

What a good face.

He always seemed to have a lot of common sense. And he understood the importance of just being kind.

So I will toast William James tonight. Join me, right?

The humble James plot in Cambridge Cemetery

3 Comments

January 10, 2017

Now King David was old, advanced in age; and they covered him with clothes, but he could not keep warm.*

by chuckofish

Winter is here. I am grateful for my warm house and my Austrian wool coat and my heated car.

I often think of those brave pioneers facing the cold without Gore-Tex coats and down mittens.

“All day the storm lasted. The windows were white and the wind never stopped howling and screaming. It was pleasant in the warm house. Laura and Mary did their lessons, then Pa played the fiddle while Ma rocked and knitted, and bean soup simmered on the stove. All night the storm lasted, and all the next day. Firelight danced out of the stove’s draught, and Pa told stories and played the fiddle.”

–Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

I mean really.

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Take heart though–it’s supposed to get up to 61 degrees today!

*1 Kings 1:1

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January 9, 2017

“Memory is a strange thing”*

by chuckofish

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Thirty years ago: the boy, suitably attired in black tie with his Auntie DP at Christmas.

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Yesterday: the boy with little Lottie in the NICU. Ah, sunrise, sunset…

I spent my weekend catching up at home, putting everything back in pre-holiday order. But, without fail, there is always something I cannot find and sure enough, this year was no different. C’est la vie. I am coping.

We also celebrated daughter #3’s Epiphany birthday and had a ~~gourmet~~ meatloaf meal, because she is so easy to please. Then we watched 3 Godfathers. Is she not the best daughter-in-law ever?

The OM and I also watched a couple of other movies this weekend. Our favorite was Hell or High Water (2016) starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster as two modern-day bank-robbing brothers set on saving the family ranch. Jeff Bridges plays the Texas Ranger bent on catching them.

Directed by the unknown-to-me Scotsman David Mackenzie and with a screenplay by actor/writer Taylor Sheridan (he was in Sons of Anarchy), it gets high fives from me. I appreciated its excellent, intelligent screenplay featuring interesting, relatable characters and a plot that kept me guessing. The acting was top-notch. My only complaint was the sound mixing, which like most modern movies, stunk–i.e. it is frequently difficult to understand what people are saying. And what they were saying was worth hearing, for once.

We also saw Arrival (2016), which was also very good and thought-provoking too. It stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. It is science fiction, however, and not really my thing. My DP really liked it though and recommended it highly to me, so I pass that along.

I will also note that we saw La La Land (2016) last week, which has received rave reviews and a lot of hype. Directed by newcomer Damian Chazelle and starring the appealing Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, it is about two young people struggling to make it in L.A. I didn’t buy any of it.

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Not to be harsh, but I found it amateurish and forgettable in every way. Rent Singin’ In the Rain if you want to see a good musical.

P.S. You can bet that La La Land will win all the Academy Awards this year (as it swept the Golden Globes), and that is why I no longer watch the show.

*Dr. Louise Banks in Arrival

3 Comments

Month: January, 2017

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