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.
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.
Really CHEESIN’ at the Dairy Barn!
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.
Just call me Quasimodo.Hot stuff coming thru!
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.
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.”
It is the last day of August! Zut alors–the year continues to fly by.
Today is the birthday of the great actor Fredric March (1897-1975) who won two Oscars for Best Actor and two Tonys for Best Actor. I suppose he is all but forgotten these days, but he was highly thought of for decades and I always liked him.
(March is on the right in The Best Years of Our Lives.)
March also made several spoken word recordings, including a version of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant in 1945. Here it is. (You might want to get your Kleenex out.)
The boy turned me on to the old What’s My Line show (1950-1967), which you can watch on Youtube. It is a rather sophisticated show, especially by today’s standards. Here is the episode with Fredric March:
Daughter #1 gave me the sad news that Ed Asner has died at 91. Asner is the most decorated male performer in Emmy history and received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2001. He is also the recipient of five Golden Globe Awards and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We remember him, of course, as the lovable Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and as the bad guy Bart Jason in one of our favorite westerns El Dorado (1966).
I cannot say what he was like in real life, but I knew and liked his cousin Herschel Asner who took classes at my flyover institute. Herschel was a paratrooper in WWII who jumped into France on D-Day. Unlike his cousin, he led a relatively quiet life after the war. He was a really good guy.
Today we also remember the Puritan John Bunyan who died on this day in 1688.
“All states are full of Noise and Confusion, only the Valley of Humiliation is that empty and solitary place. Here a man shall not be so let and hindered in his Contemplation, as in other places he is apt to be. This is a Valley that nobody walks in, but those that love a Pilgrim’s life. And tho’ Christian had the hard hap to meet here with Apollyon, and to enter with him a brisk encounter, yet I must tell you, that in former times men have met with Angels here, have found Pearls here, and have in this place found the words of Life.”
The Pilgrim’s Progress
And isn’t this an interesting story? A Pixar artist who made beautiful maps of Christian’s journey to the Celestial City.
How was your weekend? After a busy Friday with two social engagements and multiple phone calls with loved ones, the rest of my weekend was very quiet. But as the dog days of August wind down, we are looking forward to a busy September.
FaceTiming with Katiebelle
I did my homework for my Bible class, which meets on Thursdays. There are 40 or so women in the class, so it is divided in two and I am in the class with mostly old ladies. I was shocked to be so placed, but then I remembered that I am an old gray-haired lady. I do not feel like one, but it has been many years since my children were in middle school! There are a few women with college-aged kids in my group, so I don’t feel too bad. Anyway, we are reading Leviticus, which you will recall, is the third book of the Pentateuch, following Exodus. It is all about being holy.
We also put the patio umbrella on the new (old) table.
Here is a great prayer by Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) for us gray-haired oldsters. “Now, when I am old and grey-headed, forsake me not; but let Thy grace be sufficient for me; and enable me to bring forth fruit, even in old age. May my hoary head be found in the ways of righteousness!” Read the whole thing.
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.
I have several books going right now. I just can’t get into any of them, but I will keep plugging away.
I am almost finished with The Only Woman in the Room, which hardly does justice to the remarkable Hedy Lamarr. It is as shallow as a movie of the week. It is not enough to say, this was a beautiful woman who was also smart. You need to show it. Good grief, writing 101. The main character has no personality and moves through the book like a face in a movie stilI.
It’s not enough to say she disguised herself and escaped to London and met Louis B. Mayer there and he got her to Hollywood. You can read that on the back of the book jacket. Sigh. Clearly the author was not up to the subject.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek has potential, but it is a novel with obvious hooks and gimmicks and I have to just get over that and read. It is better written than the Hedy Lamarr book.
For Old Crime’s Sake is standard Jane and Dagobert Brown fare, which I really enjoy, but I need to read it during the day when I still have some mental energy.
The Patriot was written in 1960 and is about a teenage WWII recruit learning to be a fighter pilot. We’ll see. I think he is not a patriot. Lots of irony.
Maybe I’ll just re-read Busy, Busy Farm (see above).
Anyway, here’s a good post about reading TLOTR for the first time as a 45-year old: “If [Tolkien] had to do it all over again, I bet he would make Mark Zuckerberg into Sauron…” I bet you’re right.
In other news, daughter #1 went back to JC yesterday after a fun few days spent taking it easy and indulging ourselves. We watched a couple of movies. After discussing the End Times while drinking margaritas, we thought it only appropriate to watch Ghostbusters (1984). “Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”
Somehow it resonates today.
We also watched Wonder Man (1945), a truly bizarre Danny Kaye vehicle, also starring Virginia Mayo and Vera-Ellen in her first movie.
BTW, Amazon Prime has a whole bunch of Danny Kaye movies available to watch for free if you are so inclined.
Last night the OM and I went to an event at the Eugene Field House/Museum featuring the Missouri Bicentennial Quilt. It was pretty cool. Each county in the sate had a quilt square. I must say, however, that St Louis had a mighty disappointing block.
It’s the one on the right with the braille inscription, representing the Missouri School for the Blind. All very well and good, but really, what about the Gateway to the West and the Arch and all that? St. Louis County has Grant’s Farm–appropriate. Jefferson County has Mastodon State Park–appropriate.
Jackson County (where my ancestors settled) has that cool covered wagon and the jumping off place for the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail.
C’est la vie.
Well, today I start my Bible Study at my new church. We are reading Leviticus. I’ll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, have a fine day! Try to “slander no one…be peaceable and considerate, and always gentle toward everyone. At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us…” (Titus 3:2-5)
Hello from daughter #2! I am here to provide a fun little update (and perhaps some grumblings and thoughts, too). You might have heard that sweet Katiebelle started walking this weekend.
After taking a couple of tentative steps here and there, she was off to the races with a short trip down a hallway on Friday night. By Saturday, she was walking everywhere. Though still a bit wobbly, Katie goes for it with gusto and is pretty fearless. She wants to walk around every corner of the house, in the parking lot, at the playground — anything goes.
“Am I missing something?”
We haven’t quite mastered stairs, but not for lack of trying.
Unfortunately, learning to walk has been a big milestone among many setbacks — Katie’s first ear infection, an RSV diagnosis, and a big molar coming in (with several other teeth on the way). No one has gotten much sleep for a couple of weeks now, and Katie is in and out of daycare. I can tell Katie has been feeling bad because sometimes she doesn’t even finish her banana (“NAAA”) at snack time. Quelle horror.
But we trudge along and I try to embrace the extra time hanging out with the babe. It’s been a busy time at work with the semester starting, so Katie visited my office over the weekend to watch DN help me get a few things set up. Lots of new doors to open — fascinating!
I hadn’t realized that it was a move-in weekend, so we had to navigate the traffic jam of SUVs filled with laundry baskets, mini fridges, and angst. It was a lot, and I’m sure people were confused by the presence of a toddler. Katie was equally wary of them, but here she is, ready for Intro to Literature:
I, for one, have been trying to get myself back in the mood to read something good. My mother very kindly sent me some of the Christian Romance novels from my teenage reading years — as a joke, she insisted, but I couldn’t help but skim one. (OK, I legit read it.)
It was, ahem, not good.
I always turn back to the nineteenth century when I need to read something that will get me to snap out of it. Self-reliance, anyone?
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But Emerson can be a little much. I always remember the anecdote I learned in a college class, that Emerson would invite Margaret Fuller over for dinner and then walk and talk with her — not his wife — after the meal. When he journaled about his wife’s unhappiness with this recurring scenario, he said something like, “Well, Margaret has things to teach me! There is nothing left to learn from my wife.” Well then.
So I have been thinking of re-reading The Blithedale Romance, the novel of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s that I have read the least number of times. Something about Hawthorne always soothes me, because he wasn’t such a genius as his Concord contemporaries, but he’s still so, so good. I always think he would understand my less-intellectual moments. (Maybe he’d even understand reading a Christian Romance novel once in a while!) He loved his wife and his children dearly.
Maybe by the time I blog next I’ll have actually finished a book. For now, a plan. And until then, a gif:
How was your weekend? It was blazing hot here (well, not that hot) but at least there were no damaging storms to wreck havoc and make a big mess.
On Friday, the boy brought the twins over for a visit. Lottie complained about being hot…
while the wee laddie got busy emptying out the garage.
After a couple of hours, we did go inside where we ate some pretzels and cooled off.
Daughter #1 drove home that late afternoon after a busy week in JC for some downtime in our flyover town. On Saturday we were very successful at an estate sale and I bought a classic Forshaw wrought iron table and chairs for our patio. I have been on the lookout for a nice set for a couple of years, so I was very pleased. And what a bargain! The boy picked them up on Sunday morning before he opened his store and we went to church. How nice to have a son with a truck who so cheerfully pitches in!
Later on Sunday the boy came back for tacos with the wee babes. (Daughter #3 was getting ready for the first day of school today.)
Lottie still balked at playing outside, but Aunt Mary was there this time to make it all okay.
Fun times.
But it occurred to me the other day that I was way behind in pre-Christmas planning/present stockpiling. For some reason, I feel very unmotivated this year. I’m not sure why. Uncertainty about the world order? Feeling anxious about the end times? Wondering what God is requiring of me today?
When as the grass the wicked grow,
when sinners flourish here below,
then is there endless ruin nigh,
but you, O Lord, are throned on high;
Your foes shall fall before your might, the wicked shall be put to flight.
Hymn #635
Yes, I remind myself constantly, our Lord is throned on high.
Cheer up, Christian! Things are not left to chance: no blind fate rules the world. God hath purposes, and those purposes are fulfilled. God hath plans, and those plans are wise, and never can be dislocated.
