What’s the story, Morning Glory? What’s the word, Hummingbird?
Well, we’re all here, hanging out in flyover country.
Toasting with Margaritas at Club Taco.
Frolicking on the lawn. Life is good.
Today we’ll get the wading pool out and the wee cousins will come over. And in between we’ll get ready for our party tomorrow.
Have a great weekend! Make good choices.
This morning I am going to the airport to pick up daughter #2, DN and Katiebelle! They will be here for the weekend and will attend our 200th Birthday of Missouri Statehood party on Saturday. Also on Saturday is my DP’s second son’s re-scheduled wedding. How did this scheduling snafu happen you ask? Long story…but c’est la vie! This weekend is party central for both DPs.
This was an interesting article about raising children by Episcopalian Sam Bush. “God does not aim to quell our anxiety by offering us helpful tips or boosting our self-esteem.” Yes, but I do get tired of articles that go on about how hard everything is, including child-rearing. Everything is an excuse for anxiety. Of course, raising children is hard, especially in this iPhone-addicted age. But your children do not ultimately belong to you; they belong to God. Turn your worry and your cares over to Him. A lot of our modern problems are due to our trying to go it alone, with only “science” to help. Good luck with that. Be sure to watch the Parks and Recreation video–priceless Ron Swanson (who I have no doubt is a Calvinist.)
And I found this article to be quite compelling.
Happy birthday to Wendell Berry, who turns 87 today. It is also the birthday of Guy de Maupassant, the master of the short story. He wrote his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing,” which should be a warning to us all. A toast to them both!
“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.”
Robert Farrar Capon, “Between Noon and Three”
Hello, readers. Daughter #1 here. Back from a conference in Utah. Thank you Daughter #2 for covering for me. Yes, I travelled to Utah for 3 1/2 days of talking to people I don’t know and wearing a very large nametag, even in public. I had not flown in over a year and a half and it’s just as hellish but now with a mask! At least if I sat at a bar nursing a diet coke, I could remove it. A warning–the Salt Lake City airport, though brand new and featuring a security set up that looks as if it were designed and implemented by Chick Fil A employees, has a walk that must be at least two miles long from the pick up/drop off to the Southwest gates. At one point, half-way through, there is a sign that literally says “7 Minute Walk to B Gates” OKAY.
Anyway, the first night, I braved an enclosed tram full of 50 people to ride up a mountain for this view. I can’t imagine skiing down! The conference itself was interesting and I am I glad I went. But I was also glad to get home.
We also got to see the Utah State Capitol–and while it was pretty, I like Missouri’s more.
Our tour guide told us that the seagulls you can just glimpse at the top of the rotunda have a wingspan of six feet when you are up close. From the floor, obviously, they look quite small. My mother, of course, knew the the significance of seagulls to the Mormons–read more here.
Beehives are also of importance to Utahans and their State Capitol is full of them. Beehives are a favorite of mine–and I enjoyed spotting them throughout (much like visitors to the Missouri State Capitol can go on a scavenger hunt for bears).
And lest you think I would travel to Salt Lake City and not go see the LDS temple, never fear, I went. But! It is closed for four years as they totally retrofit it and raise it to put it on shock absorbers to protect it in the event of an earthquake. They did the same thing to the State Capitol in 2004. Wild stuff.
Anyway, it all makes me glad to be back in Missouri–even if I did overschedule myself this week and try to cram two weeks of work and travel into three days! This made me laugh:
And I thought it was interesting that my mother included a link to an article about the power of singing on Monday’s post because I had planned to include the song below after hearing it for the first time on my drive back to Mid-MO on Saturday.
Life, as we continually discuss on this blog, is more than we know.
So have you been watching the Tokyo Olympics? Me neither. I have just lost all interest since everyone went professional. But I did enjoy being reminded of Billy Mills, the only American to win the Gold Medal for the Men’s 10,000 meters long-distance running event at the Summer Olympic Games. A Native American from the University of Kansas who was a three-time NCAA All-America cross-country runner but not expected to distinguish himself at the Olympics, he surprised everyone when he won Gold in 1964 in Tokyo. It is exciting to watch him come from behind and blast over the finish line.
That is what the Olympics are all about to me. Amateurs who push themselves to do more than they think they can do and are proud to represent their country.
I had forgotten that they made a movie about Billy Mills called Running Brave (1984) which starred Robbie Benson. I have never seen it, but I may have to check it out if I can find it.
Jim Thorpe–All-American (1951), starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Michael Curtiz, tells the story of another great Native American athlete who won medals at the 1912 Olympics and distinguished himself in various sports, both in college and on professional teams. But the injustice of taking his medals away upset me a lot as a child when I first saw this movie and it still rankles, especially considering how everyone gets paid for everything now. (His Olympic honors were reinstated in 1983, thirty-two years after this film was released and thirty years after Thorpe’s death.)
Well, a toast to Billy Mills and to Jim Thorpe. And while we’re at it, I’m going to toast Buffalo Bill Cody, who was no Olympian, but could have been. When a scout for the U.S. Army, he performed an exceptional feat of riding as a lone dispatch courier from Fort Larned to Fort Zarah (escaping brief capture), Fort Zarah to Fort Hays, Fort Hays to Fort Dodge, Fort Dodge to Fort Larned, and, finally, Fort Larned to Fort Hays, a total of 350 miles in 58 hours through hostile territory, covering the last 35 miles on foot. Cody was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872 for documented gallantry above and beyond the call of duty as an Army scout in the Indian Wars. It was revoked in 1917, along with medals of 910 other recipients dating back to the Revolutionary War, when Congress decided to create a hierarchy of medals. Good grief. His medal was reinstated in 1988.
Frankly, you can have your medals. This is how my mind works.
*Maxine Kumin, “Morning Swim”
The last of the Hibiscus unfolding…beautiful!
How was your weekend? Mine was pretty quiet. Daughter #1 returned from her conference in Salt Lake City, but she went home on Saturday to attend to things in Jeff City before leaving again on Monday. I practiced driving the OM’s new car. I am so used to driving my little Mini Cooper that it takes quite an adjustment to get used to a large SUV with all the whiz bang updates. My car doesn’t even have a rearview camera much less a buzzing seat to tell you when you are drifting over the line!
This is an interesting piece about the Unifying Power of Singing. I have mentioned how nice it is to attend a church again where everyone sings–and sings with gusto. I grew up at a church where everyone sang and we all sang in morning chapel at my private school. But increasingly (in the Episcopal Church anyway) it seems that singing has been left to the choir. It is part of the show, something to be appreciated, but not to be participated in. Maybe the small congregations feel self-conscious singing, who knows. But singing is good for the soul.
I recorded Paper Moon (1973) on TCM and watched it the other night. I had not seen it since 1973 when my Aunt Susanne took me to see it when I was back East visiting colleges the summer before my senior year in high school. I liked it then and I liked it this time around.
Well directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who keeps it simple, it was shot in Kansas and Missouri in black and white. It feels authentic to the 1930s without being precious. Ryan O’Neal plays an itinerant con man, Moses Pray, who meets nine-year-old Addie Loggins at her mother’s graveside service, where the neighbors suspect he is Addie’s father. He denies this, but agrees to deliver the orphaned Addie to her aunt’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri. O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal work well together and Tatum steals the show without any Margaret O’Brien-style showing-off. I liked her. In reading about the movie, it seems that Bogdanovich had a hard time pulling a performance out of her, sometimes taking up to 50 takes of a scene (which sounds like borderline child abuse), but it doesn’t show.
Tatum O’Neal won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but clearly she is not a supporting actress. She was only nine years old, however, so I guess they thought that award was appropriate. Madeline Kahn was the supporting actress in the film and, as usual, she is terrific. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.
Here is Paul Zahl’s next list of “to watch” movies on TCM. As usual, he is right on target, but I do disagree about Vertigo (1958) which I find hokey and unwatchable. C’est la vie. I love it when he says a movie “is worth seeing once.” Quelle burn.
Here is a summer reading list of books on historical subjects from Albert Mohler, whose opinion I respect.
And finally, Baruch dayan ha’emet, Jackie Mason, who died on Saturday at age 93.
*Stuart Hine, “How Great Thou Art”
Normally, that haiku would describe me perfectly, but in preparation for next Saturday’s wedding I’ve been stepping up my game – or at least planning to. So far, I’ve concentrated on purchasing specialist cleaning supplies on Amazon and rearranging the china while I wait for my packages to arrive. You see, I bought these two little demitasse cups from the same place I bought the Russian cup and saucer and I had to find a good place for them. Here’s a close up.
And here’s what they look like on the shelf in my kitchen.
It took us a while to identify the maker because the stamp on the bottom is in Japanese, but eventually the DH discovered that they were made in the early 1970s by a company called Dai Ichi Taki. You can see more of the pattern here. They are nothing special but I really like them, so they’ll take a place on the shelf until the next time I change the display.
Pretty china aside, have you noticed how crisp and perfect those photos are? No, I have not suddenly steadied the tremor in my hands. I did something even wilder – the DH and I took the plunge and bought a smartphone! It’s your basic black Samsung Galaxy A32. It’s not the newest model but it seems to do everything except fill out your taxes and write your will for you.
We didn’t really have a choice after ATT warned us that they would not continue to support our 3G flip phone. Once the new phone arrived, I spent a good hour Zooming with my youngest son who taught me how to use it. Then I spent another hour with an ATT rep to register it. The latter was quite the ordeal, although the customer service man was patient and nice. All is up and running now and I should be ready to take good photos of the wedding festivities. My goodness, between the car and the phone I’ve had my fill of 21st century technology. I think I’ll go read a book.
Have a grand weekend!
*A haiku by Kobayashi Issa
I hope your week is going well. We are experiencing heat advisories, but this is nothing new in my neck of the woods. It’s July, after all. I went to the grocery store and experienced, once again, that hot hit of heat when exiting the store. I remember as a child feeling that and also the getting into our heat box of a car (no air-conditioning) and returning to our house, also without air conditioning. Truly every summer of my youth was a long, hot summer. I am grateful for my air conditioned car and home, but sometimes I like to go out to our Florida Room and experience the summer heat of my childhood again and breathe the fresh air.
Yesterday was the 9th wedding anniversary of the boy and daughter #3. They have been a couple since 2009, and as you know, they were engaged at aged three while in preschool together.
Everything has not been all sunshine and roses for the handsome couple and they have truly been through a lot together…
…cancer, preemie twins in the NICU for three months, owning a store during COVID–but they’ve weathered it all admirably. I certainly admire them. They are a fine example of sticking together through thick and thin and smiling along the way.
“In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.”
Timothy Keller
May God continue to bless you two and your wee family.
And God bless our nephew Foster who got hitched to Goksen in Izmir, Turkey earlier in the month and also my DP’s son Chris whose postponed wedding has been re-scheduled and is in less than two weeks. Mazel Tov to you all and to your parents as well.
And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
John 1: 16
*Johnny Mercer
Daughter #2 here with a guest post while my sister is traveling. We might make this a semi-regular thing: an occasional Katiebelle check-in, hopefully with some deep thoughts thrown in (or not). Today, I will mostly be reporting tales from our first beach vacation as a family of 3.
Katie was totally unafraid of the chaos of the sea. I am sorry that I don’t know how to upload video of her confidence at the water’s edge, so photos will have to suffice. She was ready to march right into the waves, and we spent a lot of time hunched in the sand, holding her back. The stiff knees were totally worth it for pictures like this:
I, on the other hand, felt increasingly aware of the ocean’s creepiness. For the first time, we stayed in a “beachfront” house with a full wall of windows looking out on the ocean. I couldn’t help think of Moby-Dick every day…
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Chapter 58, “Brit“
OK, it was also really pretty.
In addition to entertaining ourselves with buckets and umbrellas…
…we also managed to dress up and go out to dinner a couple of times. Katie is increasingly more toddler than baby, so sitting at the dinner table is becoming more of a challenge, even with a wine list and tableware to inspect.
We did a lot of picking up this and that off of the floor wherever we went, though as you can imagine, no one seemed to mind. Katie stole the hearts of many a server.
Now we are back home, back at work and daycare, getting back into our routine. The semester starts in a month, which is nuts. We do seem to live for the weekend, but when the weekend means walking practice and park visits, how could we not?
*from Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau
We think a lot about the passing of time and this was a shocker:
Yes, the album was released on May 26, 1967–54 years ago. And WWI was only 50 years before that. Western culture had changed a lot in those 50 years, but think about how much it’s changed in the past 54 years.
As usual, I am trying to escape our crumbling culture by reading something uplifting. Currently I am re-reading Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. This novel has much to say about the passage of time and people living in community.
As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.
Frederick Buechner calls it “the Room called Remember.”
The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.
Anyway, I highly recommend both Wendell Berry and Frederick Buechner.
And, of course, there’s always Jorge Luis Borges…
In the golden afternoon, or in
June, 1968
a serenity the gold of afternoon
might symbolize,
a man arranges books
on waiting shelves
and feels the parchment, the leather, the cloth,
and the pleasure bestowed
by looking forward to a habit
and establishing an order.
Here Stevenson and Andrew Lang, the other Scot,
will magically resume
their slow discussion
which seas and death cut short,
and surely Reyes will not be displeased
by the closeness of Virgil.
(In a modest, silent way,
by ranging books on shelves
we ply the critic’s art.)
The man is blind, and knows
he won’t be able to decode
the handsome volumes he is handling,
and that they will never help him write
the book that will justify his life in others’ eyes;
but in the afternoon that might be gold
he smiles at his curious fate
and feels that peculiar happiness
which comes from loved old things.
*Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2016
How was your weekend? Ours was quiet. Daughter #1 arrived on Sunday after church. She is going on a business trip on Tuesday, leaving from our airport, so that is why she came into town at the end of the weekend. The boy and his family were in K.C. all weekend and came home on Sunday afternoon. We had the pleasure of the boy and the wee laddie’s company for a barbecue Sunday night…
…but the girls were too tired and stayed home. It is always interesting to see one twin without the other. They are two very different people indeed.
I watched Tombstone (1993) on Friday night. I had seen it back when it came out and I didn’t think it was a good movie then, but I thought it might bear watching again. I was so wrong. I had forgotten how really bad it is. First of all, it is totally derivative of classic westerns, but of all the obvious things: you know, lots of cloud filled sky and lawmen walking/riding four abreast.
Anyway, it was just a mess–a horrible bloodbath of a violent nightmare. The movie starts off with a gang of cowboys shooting up a happy Mexican wedding for no reason. Yeah, that happened a lot. The movie doesn’t even try to be realistic or to be historically accurate.
The acting is pretty bad and also derivative. Powers Boothe offers a full blown imitation of Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance. Kurt Russell struggles (and fails) to be Henry Fonda. Was Bill Paxton going for Earl Holliman? 100%. I couldn’t help wondering what Sam Elliot, stiff and uncomfortable, thought of this mess. Only Val Kilmer attempts to make his part his own and his Doc Holliday is lost in the flood of violence and competing action. There are no good guys. Everyone is drowning in liquor, drugs and/or gambling. Nobody actually works. No one has a plan. The Earps just want to get rich so they can, what, settle down with their families? There is no ethical standard to judge right or wrong here. Is this the point, because, if so, it is a false point. This is a 20th century, post-Christian point, thank you, imposed on a revisionist dream of fake history.
The women are all cardboard and the actresses can hardly handle walking in their overly fancy dresses. Dana Delany plays a “modern” woman who has a crush on Wyatt Earp and doesn’t care that he is a married man. She just wants to have fun! Wyatt is attracted by this crazy idea (having fun, ordering room service) and to this liberated woman (who nevertheless rides side-saddle). It made me long for Burt Lancaster and his puritanical version of Wyatt Earp in the bad, but infinitely better, Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957).
All this made me want to watch My Darling Clementine (1947) which I will do soon. First I had to watch Red River (1948) on Saturday night in honor of National Cowboy Day. I almost cried, the contrast was so great. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift = perfection.
Sorry about the rant, but I despise movie makers who think a western is just an excuse to fire guns and kill a lot of people. There is talk of border ruffians in Missouri and lots of threats of violence, but only one person dies in Red River and he is trampled to death by stampeding cattle.
On a totally other subject, I liked this about going about your business in our rock-star culture:
But I say: Be nobody special. Do your job. Take care of your family. Clean your house. Mow your yard. Read your Bible. Attend worship. Pray. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Love your spouse. Love your kids. Be generous. Laugh with your friends. Drink your wine heartily. Eat your meat lustily. Be honest. Be kind to your waitress. Expect no special treatment. And do it all quietly.
You want to be a spiritual hero? Distinguish yourself? Ironically, you have to give it up. This sounds like “lose your life so you can save it” for a reason. Being nobody special will feel like losing your life, maybe the life you’ve dreamed of in front of the mirror…But to distinguish yourself in our world, you must be happy about being a nobody.
Matthew Redmond, The God of the Mundane
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
*Stumpy in Rio Bravo (1957)
