dual personalities

Well, it’s Tuesday again. Feels like a Monday, but it’s Tuesday. And I didn’t forget to write a blog post. Go me.

After my success with the new sewing table last week (and because I left the back seats down in my car), I brought back an antique army field desk my mother got at a local auction. I’m not sure how I managed to carry it up the stairs and lift it onto the table, but somehow I did.

I need to watch some videos on antique lock-smithing so that I can fix the latch/lock to keep it closed. However, in the meantime, I get to enjoy filling it up. It really adds some nice old, brown-furniture vibes to the room and I’m so happy with it! I might use the writing desk part as ironing surface. Plus, there’s an old key for those drawers which is the stuff of my childhood dreams.

Speaking of childhood dreams, my mother has been cleaning out the closet in my old bedroom (which later became Daughter #2’s room) and found this box of mail I received while away at camp. The box, dutifully warning my brother to KEEP OUT, is postmarked 1996 from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Anyway, I was worried the letters would take me back to dark times ie MIDDLE SCHOOL but thankfully, the letters have instead painted a picture of happy years. Here’s a sample:

Today I joined Susie in the beautiful multi-purpose room for the camp ‘picnic’–hotdogs, salad, chips, and brownies, plus red juice. Yummy. Then Susie and the 2-4th graders put on their Rugrats skit (Susie played Chuckie)–it was pretty lame. But Susie was cute. Unfortunately she didn’t have enough to do.

My mother to me circa 7/11/97

A tough crowd.

Other highlights from my box of mail include a letter from my father, the summer we moved, telling me that they had found my American Dolls and their things in a box labelled “Katie’s winter clothes.” I remembered none of what I read. I am grateful to my dear mother for writing me dutifully every day even when she felt there was nothing to report in As the Comptons Turn. And I am very sad that letter writing has gone by the wayside because I wonder what else I’ve forgotten!!

I will dig into the box and come up with some more A+ future material.

To close, I invite you all to enjoy this rousing Mac Powell (formerly of Third Day) song. It should get your Wednesday off to a good start. xo.

Do you ever feel that whenever you try to do the right thing, it backfires? Well, I feel that way a lot and this week was no exception. Anyway, when I wasn’t irritating somebody, I spent some time looking at beautiful paintings and reading seasonal-appropriate poetry. I liked this painting by Finnish artist Thure Sundell (1864-1924), and this poem called “September Midnight” by Sara Teasdale, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.

“This is the day which the Lord has made,” says the 118th Psalm. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you’re wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you’ve been waiting for always that you’re missing. 

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from them. Today is the only day there is.

–Frederick Buechner, “Whistling in the Dark”

And while we’re thinking along those lines, let’s go back to one of our favorites by Walt Whitman:

O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Well, I thought I would finish my elephant needlepoint by the end of August, but as you can see, I did not. But I am getting close! Little victories. You just have to keep plugging away…

We did have some good news this week. Pastor John MacArthur and Grace Community Church won their legal battle with the state of California and Los Angeles County after the governments agreed to pay $400,000 each as part of a settlement for violating the church’s religious liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic. California has already paid over $2 million in legal fees to other churches. Yes, it’s a drop in the bucket for California, but it is important.

Yahooooo.

In other news, I watched the first three episodes of Only Murders in the Building, the new “series” starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez on Hulu. I really liked it!

It is funny without being silly and the characters develop along with the story. Considering the stars, we were not surprised that the cool kids show up in cameos–so far, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and Sting–but it has something serious to say about loneliness and how little we know our neighbors. I recommend it.

Count it all joy.

Happy first day of September. It’s a fast downhill to the new year now! I know you enjoyed last week’s post, but Daughter #1 is back with some witty banter and odd ramblings today. Because I was off blog duty last week, I didn’t get to post about the State Fair. It was a great day, full of bacon, golf cart rides, and ice cream. It never ceases to amaze me the number of embroidered polo shirts one sees on Legislative Day at the Fair. Thankfully, I was not required to wear mine. You can watch a quick recap video here.

In other news, I took last week off, because I was taking annual leave from work for several days just to not work. I spent four days in St. Louis and did some toodlin’ around with my mother. We had success at an estate sale–and ventured to IKEA. I was looking for a new table for my sewing room–and my eagle-eyed mother found the perfect one!

After asking a co-worker to help haul it in from my car (one of the perks of living across the street from the office), I set to work using my power drill and assembling the new table.

As you can tell, there is still some work to do on the room, but the new table is just amazing. There’s enough surface area to make cutting out patterns a dream, and I can have the sewing machine out and still have basically another table space for pinning fabric etc. The next step is finding somewhere to store the fabric in the corner.

I made a pair of (elastic waist) pants this weekend which I am pretty pumped about. And also a little jacket that definitely has an air of “green linen seemed like a good idea at the time.” Nevertheless, I persist.

In still other news, yesterday, I received this text from my father:

Funnily, I did know that. Because it was legitimately big news.

I didn’t go check it out because a) it was hot and very humid and threatening to rain and b) my co-worker tipped me off that the entire town was camped out to see Big Boy. Front page news, right there.

It all had a very sweet It Happened to Jane vibe.

Anyway, I’m just over here trying to find joy in little things. I’ve been “reading” The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder since my mother recommended it several months ago. I use quotation marks because my brain is such mush that “reading” is difficult and it feels like I’ll read a page and before I know it, I’ve stopped and am back on my phone. Anyway again, this struck me as apropos.

“If the spectacle of one defeat, or a hundred defeats, discouraged a man, civilization wouldn’t have gone anywhere. There’d be no justice on earth, no hospitals, no homes, no friendships, like yours and mine. There’d just be moaning people, creeping about.”

The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder

Something to think about.

It’s Friday already! I have done nothing noteworthy this week unless you count work (which I don’t). Desperate to find something to watch last night but too tired to bother looking for long, I settled on Netflix’s Misha and the Wolves, a documentary about a Belgian woman who became famous back in the late 1990s-early 2000s with a false Holocaust narrative. (Apparently, her story became a worldwide sensation. I had never heard of her).

Misha claimed to be Jewish and that her parents had been taken off to a German prison camp during WWII. She was hidden by a Catholic family who didn’t treat her well. In an effort to find her parents, she, a mere child of seven, set off into the woods, where eventually a pack of wolves adopted her. Unlikely, you say? From the start, the story seemed preposterous and it surprised me that anyone would believe it. None of the so-called evidence added up. Nevertheless, she wrote a book, became a celebrity, a movie was made and scandals ensued. It turned out that she was Catholic, not Jewish, and that her father, a member of the resistance, got arrested and betrayed his compatriots under torture. Her parents died at Auschwitz, but her father was remembered as a traitor. The child Misha escaped into a fantasy world and eventually cashed in on her fantasies. The whole sordid affair happened because some people, Misha included, got greedy and others just wanted to believe. A holocaust historian who appeared in the documentary had this to say:  

The danger of believing everything (we are told) puts history, as a historical reality of genuine survivors, at risk. I think that we would like to believe that Misha Defonseca believed that she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I think that we would like to believe that we were not so naïve, that we believed it because she believed it, and we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose, because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose, we were so naïve, (and) it was all a fabrication.

That about sums it up, but it got me thinking about how easy it is to dupe the public these days, especially with all the new-fangled technology. Sometimes people we see in ads aren’t people at all. They’re computer generated.

That’s all well and fine, you say. It’s only an ad. But what about the news? See this, for examples of how easy it is to manipulate the viewer. People constantly demand that we follow ‘science’ and ‘stick to the facts’ but it’s getting increasingly difficult for us to tell what those are.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to blunder on and do our best, but beware — if the truth is out there, it’s hiding.

*Mark Twain (if I can trust my source)