What a busy weekend! In fact, it was so busy that I did not have time to write a blogpost. All I have for today is this photo of the wee laddie wearing the new onesie I gave him for Valentine’s Day.
And it is Monday once again. The week begins anew. Have a good one, pilgrim!
What a long week this has been! I am way more than ready for the weekend!
Daughter #1 is driving in from Columbia tonight and we will watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics and toast our American team.
Team U.S. Curling is ready to go!
On Saturday there is a gallery auction at the Link Auction House and we are going–how nice to have company!
Have you been looking for a copper deep sea diver’s helmet? There are two available!
Tomorrow night is the “Elegant Italian Dinner”–the annual fundraising event for our youth mission trip at church–such a major social event!
The OM will accompany me, but daughter #1 will be otherwise occupied.
And, of course, we hope to see the wee babes, those adorable goofballs.
That’s enough, don’t you agree?
“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”
–Thomas Merton
*tobyMac, “Speak Life”
Well, a weekend without many plans turned into a pretty busy weekend after all. And it was cold again–it even snowed on Sunday!
I followed my usual weekend routine plus I re-read The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which was good but not as good as I remembered. I was overly aware of his details and his writing in general. But there is some real truth in it.
She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.
I watched The Shape of Water (2017) which has been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, and has already won a slew of awards.
I did not like it. “‘The Shape of Water’ is partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful,” gushed the reviewer in the NYT. I would beg to differ. “Bigotry and meanness flow through every moment like an underground stream,” he continued. This is true. We are shown several examples of this. Women, blacks and gays are treated badly. We see, we understand, we virtue-signal our superiority. Men are the bad guys in this movie, the enemy. The only decent man is gay. (Oh, and the other is a communist spy.) The #1 scary villain, of course, is a white male who works for the military, is married, has two children, lives in suburbia, and aspires to own a Cadillac. He is the real monster. I am tired of being hit over the head with this view of the world. “The most welcome and notable thing about ‘The Shape of Water’ is its generosity of spirit,” the NYT reviewer concludes. Is he kidding?
The wee babes, thankfully, came over for dinner on Sunday night. They cheered me up! They are so active now and curious, so happy. They get very excited about peanut butter and jelly, 30-year old toys, investigating the kitchen, and checking out the handles on the highboy. The wee laddie climbed all the way up to the second floor twice.
Miss Lottie slept on my shoulder after arriving, but perked right up once she awakened. She is a speed demon on all fours and can crawl the circuit of our first floor in under a minute.
The wee laddie can take up to six steps on his own and is swiftly gaining his sea legs.
Now it’s back to the salt mine–have a good week!
*Isaiah 40:31
“Having the right approach to life was a great gift in this life….Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself…You can do that in the company of an old friend—you can close your eyes and think of the land that gave you life and breath, and of all the reasons why you are glad that you are there, with the people you know, with the people you love.”
―Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club
Do you have exciting plans for the weekend? As usual, I do not have exciting plans. I’m not sure I even know what exciting plans are. But I have a couple of estate sales to go to and the OM and I are going to get the ball rolling on having new kitchen counters installed.
I can’t say I care about the Super Bowl. Football is on the way out if you ask me. I won’t be sad to see it go. And I am not one of those people who watches the Super Bowl in order to see the commercials. I mean, commercials are the bane of my existence! I hardly even watch network tv anymore, such is my loathing of commercials.
I saw something online about this emotional-support peacock and I thought it was a joke! Imagine my surprise reading this in the WSJ! Good lord! What is the world coming to?
If you want a weekend movie pic, here’s an idea. After watching The Valley of Gwangi last week, I thought I’d watch The Big Country (1958) which also features great music by Jerome Moross. So I watched it last night and enjoyed. It is not a perfect western–mostly due to the annoying character portrayed by Carol Baker–but it is still a good one, and the music really is great. Gregory Peck is at his most appealing and Burl Ives certainly deserved that Oscar he got for supporting actor. You gotta love straight talkin’ Rufus.
Well, the wee babes will be over on Sunday with their parents.
There is no pick-me-up like laughing babies.
Have a great weekend!
*Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country
Yesterday was the birthday of one of our favorite ancestors, John Wesley Prowers,
the older brother of our great-great grandmother, Mary Prowers Hough. I toasted him and we watched Red River (1948) in his honor.
A more appropriate movie would probably be The Rare Breed (1966) with James Stewart, which is a fictionalized account of the introduction of the Hereford breed in America, but I didn’t feel like it. Red River is a much better movie.
It is, indeed, a fine, fine movie. The first hour is really great. It wanders a bit after that–especially when John Wayne is off stage–and my mind did too. Watching this time, I was struck by several things.
1. Ricky Nelson In Rio Bravo a few years later is really channeling Montgomery Clift hard. He even rubs his nose the same way.
2.Walter Brennan plays a character named Nadine Groot. I wonder if the character Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is named after him. If not, he should be.
3. Young Noah Beery reminded me a lot of Nathan Fillion.
Anyway, John Prowers, a bonafide cattle king, died of cancer at age 46 in 1884. He was laid to rest in Las Animas Cemetery in Bent County, Colorado–not on the lone prairie, but in his family plot.
William Bent is buried there as well.
Maybe I will make it to Las Animas some day. It is kind of a godforsaken place, but that is not in itself unappealing.
“O bury me not on the lone prairie.”
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of the youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of dayHe had wasted and pined ’til o’er his brow
Death’s shades were slowly gathering now
He thought of home and loved ones nigh
As the cowboys gathered to see him die“O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where coyotes howl and the wind blows free
In a narrow grave just six by three—
O bury me not on the lone prairie”“It matters not, I’ve been told
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold
Yet grant, o grant, this wish to me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”“I’ve always wished to be laid when I died
In a little churchyard on the green hillside
By my father’s grave, there let me be
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”“I wish to lie where a mother’s prayer
And a sister’s tear will mingle there
Where friends can come and weep o’er me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”
I always liked this song, don’t you? The theme is played throughout Red River and a lot of other great westerns too. Think Stagecoach (1939).
*Emily Dickinson
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
We had more lovely warm weather this weekend and everyone was out and about. I even got the OM moving. (He usually hibernates in January.)
I also went to the church annual meeting…
…and the dedication of our new labyrinth in Albright Hall. The labyrinth is pretty cool. You will recall that the labyrinth in Christian parlance is a spiritual tool for prayer, a metaphor for your own spiritual journey–taking the next step with God. There is a famous one at Chartres Cathedral in France and they have one at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco.
We used to have a portable labyrinth on a large piece of fabric which we would haul out from time to time. It finally wore out and, when we needed to renovate the floor in Albright Hall, someone had the bright idea of building a permanent one. Pretty clever.
Speaking of floor coverings, I rescued an amazing handmade needlepoint rug at the most recent Link Auction–for $10!
How great is that? The amount of work that goes into a needlepoint rug is beyond, you know, my comprehension. I also picked up a copy of the Women’s Exchange cookbook (Memphis, TN) from 1966 in my travels this weekend. What a classic! The recipes are all like: “Punch (My Mother’s)” with the notation that “one quart of champagne may be used instead of ginger ale.” My kind of ladies. Plus they all have names like Mrs. Stovall Jeter and Mary Chism Roberts and Mrs. Shelby Foote. There are also quotes sprinkled throughout (“Coquetry whets the appetite, flirtation depraves it” in the appetizer section). Fun to read and who knows, maybe I’ll make some of Mrs. Lucius McGehee’s Rum Mousse. I will not, however, try Mr. Johnny Jacobs’ recipe for Barbequed Raccoon.
The wee babes came over for dinner with their parents on Sunday night and we had tortellini–always a popular choice–although the wee laddie preferred the organic cheese ducks (like Pepperidge Farm Gold Fish).
I had cleaned up an old Fisher-Price horsie we found in the basement (from the 1980s) and the wee babes loved it.
Good times. (Thanks to the boy, once again, for the pictures of the babes.)
Have a good week!
I kept getting interrupted every time I sat down to write this post yesterday, which was par for the course as my plans kept changing all weekend. But c’est la vie.
I had a good weekend even though I ended up not doing much. I watched a couple of great movies–Allegheny Uprising (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944)–and the OM hooked up the new DVD player so we could finally watch Hell Is For Heroes (1962) which he got in his Christmas stocking. (It would not play on our old DVD player.) It is not the greatest movie–it is kind of like an extended Combat! episode–but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to SMcQ movies. And Bobby Darin was pretty great too.
I went to church on Sunday and read the Prayers of the People. The temperature got up to 63-degrees (not a record) and everyone in town was out and about. It smelled like spring! The old January Thaw.
The wee babes came over for dinner with their parents on Sunday night.
And here’s a song from ol’ Tom Petty that I like:
Have a good week back at the salt mine.
Today is our mother’s birthday. She would have been 92! It seems impossible that she has been gone thirty years. Well, gone, but certainly not forgotten.
“There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”
–Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
This year I will turn the age our mother was when she died. It is a strange feeling.
I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?
–Patti Smith, M Train
Yes, indeed, how did we get so damn old?
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I’d just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that’s the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we’re like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn’t any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.
–Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished
Well, I didn’t mean to get all serious, but, you know, sometimes we do.
P.S. Big congratulations to our other birthday girl Dolly Parton,
who was recognized in the Guinness World Records 2018 edition for earning the records for most decades with a Top 20 hit on the US Country Songs chart as well as most hits on the U.S. Hot Country Songs chart by a female artist. You go, girl!
Hey, it’s Friday! Have a good weekend!
There was a lot of coming and going during this long weekend, and sometimes this old lady could barely keep track of who was here and who wasn’t.
C’est la vie and I am not complaining. I am rejoicing.
It even snowed a little, just a dusting, but enough so we could see red fox tracks zipping through our yard.
Life is full of wonder.
Although it was only four o’clock, the winter day was fading. The road led southwest, toward the streak of pale, watery light that glimmered in the leaden sky. The light fell upon the two sad young faces that were turned mutely toward it: upon the eyes of the girl, who seemed to be looking with such anguished perplexity into the future; upon the somber eyes of the boy, who seemed already to be looking into the past. The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.
–Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“Clouds Coming Over the Plains” by Albert Bierstadt
Visit then this soul of mine, pierce the gloom of sin and grief!
Fill me, radiancy divine; scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display, shining to the perfect day.
–Charles Wesley, hymn #7
Boy, do I love a three-day weekend! Don’t you? Daughter #1 stopped overnight Friday on her way to Indianapolis to meet up with some old college friends who also had had exciting careers in NYC and then moved back to the midwest. Then she stopped last night on her way back to central Missouri. How fun is that? We watched The World of Henry Orient (1964)–“an Upper East Side” movie and one of our faves. It is by far my favorite Peter Sellers movie and the girls in this film are dear to my heart.
(Like all trailers, this one does not quite convey the true idea/flavor of the movie.)
In between I met with my girlfriends to plan a bridal shower in March. Bells are ringing (again)! I puttered around the house putting stuff away. This is what I do and this is what brings me joy.
We had a guest preacher at church on Sunday–the Bishop’s Deputy for Gun Violence Prevention. I thought, oh brother, are we in for it, but he actually preached on MLK (his feast day is April 4, whatever) and tied it into the OT reading. Okay, then.
The wee babes came over on Sunday night for dinner and to show us their new haircuts.
That face!
Their mother loves to take them to have their locks shorn–I’m not sure why and neither are they.
But mine is not to reason why. They are adorable regardless.
Here are a few things from the internet:
This was interesting. #6 is particularly true–especially for those of us with scary RBF**: “Remember to smile. It will brighten your aspect and your voice, and serve as a corrective to the inevitable facial droop.”
I couldn’t agree more with this. Bravo.
Have a great week.
Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which Thou has given me, for all the pains and insults which Thou hast borne for me, O most merciful Redeemer, Friend and brother, may I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, and follow Thee more nearly, day by day.
–St. Richard of Chichester
*I Samuel 3:10
**Resting Bitch Face
dual personalities 