I’m back from my long weekend celebrating my niece’s wedding. It was fun being with my brother and his family.
Chris with his son Foster
My dual personality was there with one of her sons.
There was a lot of music.
…and plenty of cousin time…
Foster and the boy
Cousins, including Ellen, the bride
Good times.
*e.e. cummings
All this rain and cool weather is doing great things for the iris and for our grass–is it ever green!
In other news, the OM and the boy and I are jetting off this afternoon to Pennsylvania where my niece will get hitched this Saturday. Daughters #1, 2 and 3 all have prior engagements (two graduations and another wedding) so they are not coming. C’est la vie.
The wedding is in Meadville, the home of Allegheny College. William McKinley, you will recall, attended this college and Clarence Darrow and Ida Tarbell graduated from it. The wedding is taking place at the Unitarian-Universalist Church.
Fun fact: The song “Bittersweet Motel” by the Vermont jam band, Phish, was inspired when keyboardist, Page McConnell, left a wedding in Meadville and drove down to the Pittsburgh Airport.
Halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh
You’re putting me through hell
On the highway to the Bittersweet MotelWhen the only tool you have is a hammer
Everything looks like a nail
And your living at the Bittersweet Motel
Indeed, there is no quick and/or easy way to get there, so this will be an adventure in more ways than not. But I am up for an adventure this weekend…how about you?
Safe travels to all who are traveling. See you ’round campus, man!
*Toby Mac
Today is the birthday of Ezio Pinza, Italian opera singer and Broadway star.
So let’s all sing a rousing chorus of “Some Enchanted Evening” as a toast to Ezio and to cheer ourselves up!
C’mon now, did you sing along with Mary and Ezio?
Fun fact: Ezio Pinza died in 1957 at the age of 64 and his funeral was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He was buried in the Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, CT, with the likes of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. Which begs the question: was Ezio an Episcopalian?
Sometimes the Apartment Therapy blog drives me crazy with their You Need to Do This and Right Now posts, but this and this were right on I thought.
I have been re-using my candle jars–the pretty ones at least–for quite some time.
And in my humble opinion there is nothing so special that you should save it, except maybe that one bottle of Dom Perignon that is waiting for some special announcement down the road.
When you go to as many estate sales as I do, you know how ridiculous it is to save the good linens, starched, tied with a ribbon and still in the original box, for a special occasion. Basically, you are saving them so your children can sell them at an estate sale!
The same goes for your china and all those things you received as wedding presents. Use them! Enjoy them! Everything tastes better on Wedgwood! If you break a plate every once in awhile, so what? C’est la vie.
As Emerson said, “Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.” It might be those pillow cases you finally sleep on!
*Calvin and Hobbes
Happy Pentecost! How was your weekend?
We went to the last lacrosse game of the season on Friday after work and enjoyed sitting outside on a beautiful day, watching the game and the people around us. We never talked to the boy but the OM took a few pictures of him across the field with his giant lens.
On Saturday I went to several estate sales, including one in the lovely home of the brother of a former president of the U.S. His wife died a few months ago and I suppose he is down-sizing–you know, the kids took what they wanted and they were getting rid of the rest. The house was lovely and unpretentious, full of familiar things (books and LPs and monogrammed towels) and comfortable in an old school, slightly shabby way–just my style. They even had one of these–our family totem:
(I didn’t buy his, because I have already given one to each of my children.) I did buy an old child’s chair, which had been chewed by a family dog, and a BCP.
A good morning’s outing to be sure.
I finished Nightwoods by Charles Frazier and I highly recommend it. Good characters, tightly paced–well done. I am now reading Hope Leslie written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick in 1827, encouraged by daughter #2 who has read all of Sedgwick’s oeuvre for her dissertation. I am pleasantly surprised to report that Sedgwick is a regular Jane Austen, writing with a wry humor about “early times in Massachusetts.” Indeed the action takes place in the early seventeenth century and explores the “tumultuous relations between Puritans and Pequots.” I love this scene, described in a letter, where the fourteen-year old son pokes fun at an Anglican newcomer during a storm:
But Dame Grafton was beside herself. At one moment she fancied we should be the prey of the wild beast, and at the next, that she heard the alarm yell of the savages. Everell brought her, her prayer-book, and affecting a well-beseeming gravity, he begged her to look out the prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians. The poor lady, distracted with terror, seized the book, and turned over leaf after leaf. Everell meanwhile affecting to aid her search. In vain I shook my head, reprovingly, at the boy–in vain I assured Mistress Grafton that I trusted we were in no danger; she was beyond the influence of reason; nothing allayed her fears, till chancing to catch a glance of Everell’s eye, she detected the lurking laughter, and rapping him soundly over the ears with her book, she left the room greatly enraged.
Now that is funny. “The prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians.” I already like this Catherine Maria Sedgwick a lot.
The rest of the weekend was spent pleasantly puttering around, working in the yard, eating the donuts that my friend from Atlanta brought to me at work on Friday (he was in town for the air show)–note they are the “right” donuts–
and going to a garden party in support of the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.
It was held at our friend’s 1867 house high up overlooking the mighty Mississippi…
There was even a bassett hunt.
Not bad for a stay-at-home introvert!
*Psalm 104
I’ve been too deep in history this last week…I’ve been seeing too many remains of past glories; I can’t even look at a row of overpowering columns in a ruined temple without thinking of the men who built them and walked there. And of their great-great and not so great grandsons who let them be destroyed. Let them be destroyed? What else, when you counted the years of acquiescence and drift before the actual destruction began? yes, you looked at the temples, at the nobility of man’s taste, and you remembered the art and the law and the philosophy and the knowledge that had gone with them; and then you thought, unhappily, angrily, why did those men let all that pass out of their hands into alien control? They had something worth keeping and they let it slip away. At what point could they have saved it? The point just before they started to be afraid of dying? Better barbarians than death — had that been their comfort? And the beginning of their end? (Helen MacInnes, The Double Image, 1965)
Discuss among yourselves and have a great weekend.
We have had a rainy, stormy week, but the forecast for the weekend is good. I plan to take it easy and prepare for next weekend when I am going to my niece’s wedding in Pennsylvania.
“I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.”
–J.D. Salinger, A Boy in France: Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945
Sounds like a plan to me.
(The painting is by Thomas Hart Benton)
My dual personality and her best friend Lars were huge fans of the St. Louis Blues hockey team back in the 1970s. I was never a big ice hockey fan, but I seem to remember them really liking Garry Unger and his flowing blond locks in particular.
While I was perusing the internet for the above pic of Garry, I was reminded of these great guys of yore…remember Red Berenson?
Barclay Plager?
Noel Picard?
There’s nothing like a skate down memory lane, right?
Meanwhile the current Blues are headed to the Western Conference finals for the first time since 2001.
So how can we not say:
“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis – only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.”
–Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, “The Unsettling of America”
The wood engraving is by Clare Leighton – Scything, 1935
Today is the 153rd anniversary of the death of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (age 39) following the Battle of Chancellorsville, when he was shot by friendly fire on the moonlit night of May 2, 1863.
“Chancellorsville” portrait, taken at a Spotsylvania County farm on April 26, 1863, seven days before he was wounded. What a face!
Here he is younger and beardless. Pretty dreamy.
I have always admired Stonewall Jackson as an exemplar of the Scotch-Irish Protestants who came to this country in the eighteenth century, many of them as indentured servants, and worked and fought hard to make a home here. In fact his paternal great-grandparents (John Jackson and Elizabeth Cummins) met on the prison ship from London and fell in love. They married six years later when they gained their freedom.
The family migrated west across the Blue Ridge Mountains to settle near Moorefield, Virginia in 1758. In 1770, they moved farther west to the Tygart Valley. They began to acquire large parcels of virgin farming land near the present-day town of Buckhannon, including 3,000 acres in Elizabeth’s name. John and his two teenage sons fought in the Revolutionary War; John finished the war as a captain. While the men were in the army, Elizabeth converted their home to a haven for refugees from Indian attacks known as “Jackson’s Fort.”
Yes, the Jacksons were awesome.
Furthermore, Stonewall was a profoundly religious man and a deacon in the Presbyterian Church. One of his many nicknames was “Old Blue Lights,” a term applied to a military man whose evangelical zeal burned with the intensity of the blue light used for night-time display. He disliked fighting on Sunday, although that did not stop him from doing so after much personal debate.
Here is a poem by Herman Melville that pretty well sums up my feelings about the great Stonewall:
Mortally Wounded at Chancellorsville
The Man who fiercest charged in fight,
Whose sword and prayer were long –
Stonewall!
Even him who stoutly stood for Wrong,
How can we praise? Yet coming days
Shall not forget him with this song.Dead is the Man whose Cause is dead,
Vainly he died and set his seal –
Stonewall!
Earnest in error, as we feel;
True to the thing he deemed was due,
True as John Brown or steel.Relentlessly he routed us;
But we relent, for he is low –
Stonewall!
Justly his fame we outlaw; so
We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier,
Because no wreath we owe.
Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA
*Stonewall Jackson’s dying words–beautiful!
