babies | dual personalities

April 17, 2017

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”*

by chuckofish

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4)

I spent most of Saturday getting the house ready and cooking for Sunday. I also gabbed on the phone with my dual personality and two daughters. And I watched Ben-Hur (1959) and some of the special features on Friday and Saturday nights. My life is just too exciting sometimes.

Sunday dawned rainy and dark–too wet for the egg hunt at church which had to be moved inside–bummer! Our service was very nice with a brass quartet (but no timpani). I was the second reader and got to read the above passage from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. I was more dressed up than usual, so I was wearing heels, and I worried that I would fall on my way up to the lectern. I kept picturing Catherine O’Hara in Best in Show…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3io93ee0GTY

But that drama was thankfully averted.

The boy and his wee family and his in-laws came over for brunch after church. We served Episcopal souffle and fruit salad and croissants and mimosas…

–the perfect brunch in my book!

It’s always nice to get out the silver and the crystal, isn’t it? I didn’t use my fine china because it didn’t look right with my tablecloth. But the old Wedgwood worked fine.

The wee babes were adorable and as entertaining as always.

The little bud shows the OM his right hook.

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Also, I should have noted last Friday, that besides it being Good Friday, it was also daughter #2’s birthday! I think she had a nice day.

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…and I did manage to send a birthday package to her which got there in time for her birthday!

The plates are the same, and she hasn’t changed so very much either!

Have a good Monday!

*Luke 24:5

3 Comments

April 7, 2017

Savior, let me walk with thee*

by chuckofish

Well, here we are about to enter Holy Week and I haven’t watched even one of my favorite lenten movies! I guess I will have to make up for lost time this weekend…I think I will probably work my way through Jesus of Nazareth, Franco Zefferelli’s epic 1977 mini-series…

This film still looks like a Rembrandt drawing, doesn’t it?

…and, of course, finish up with Ben-Hur (1959) on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. I am, after all, a creature of habit.

Sidenote: They remade Ben-Hur last year–did anyone see it? I didn’t think so. It was, indeed, the summer’s biggest box office bomb, and one of the biggest flops of 2016. When is Hollywood going to figure out that you can’t/shouldn’t try to re-make classics? No one wants to see a digitized chariot race.

Please. We want the real thing.

Anyway, this Sunday is Palm Sunday and I am the Narrator of The Passion of Jesus Christ According to Saint Matthew which is very cool. In my world anyway.

Wall painting by Hippolyte Flandrin, early 19c.

Here’s a little Buechner to get you in the mood for Palm Sunday:

“Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord,” the cry goes up. There is dust in the air with the sun turning it gold. Around a bend in the road, there suddenly is Jerusalem. He draws back on the reins. Crying disfigures his face. “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace.” Even today, he says, because there are so few days left. Then the terror of his vision as he looks at the city that is all cities and sees not one stone left standing on another – you and your children within you – your children. “Because you did not know the time of your visitation,” he says. Because we don’t know who it is who comes to visit us. Because we do not know what he comes to give. The things that make for peace, that is what he comes to give. We do not know these things, he says, and God knows he’s right. The absence of peace within our own skins no less than within our nations testifies to that. But we know their names at least. We all of us know in our hearts the holy names of the things that make for peace – real peace – only for once let us honor them by not naming them. Let us name instead only him who is himself the Prince of Peace.”

–Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember

And hopefully the boy will catch up on his sleep.

Probably not.

Have a good weekend!

*Fanny J. Crosby, “Close to Thee”, Methodist Hymnal

4 Comments

April 3, 2017

“The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand”*

by chuckofish

Well, for the first time in three months, the OM and I didn’t have to venture out to the NICU on Saturday–yay!

Indeed, I had nothing planned for the weekend besides a funeral on Saturday for another pillar of our church, a classy 95-year old lady who was the last of our British war-brides. The service was Rite I Burial of the Dead, which took well over an hour–just the way I like it. Why shouldn’t a funeral be long? The woman’s three children and one daughter-in-law spoke beforehand and the rector gave a better-than-usual homily (he actually knew the deceased). The grandson who is in divinity school was the cantor and intoned the initial anthem (“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord”). It was a lovely service and there was even a piper at the end playing “Loch Lomond”. The reception was a proper English Tea with cucumber sandwiches etc. and even wine for some of us unruly Americans–just kidding, no one was unruly.

In other news, I read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, which, I must say, still holds up after 50 years and, indeed, packs quite a punch. I mean a book about hoodlums that can make this jaded lady cry (several times) must be darn good. I was impressed and I recommend you read this classic young adult novel. Written by a sixteen year-old back in 1966, it still rings true. “Things are rough for everybody.” Next I am going to find the movie (1983), which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred a panoply of rising 80s stars.

I remember it being pretty good. Ralph Macchio and Matt Dillon stand out in my memory.

Meanwhile the yard is greening up and the birds are chirping merrily. Could it be spring for real?!

Well, the Florida Room is open for business.

And the boy and his wee family came over for our first barbecue of the season on Sunday evening. Of course, they were dressed appropriately in their Cardinal gear for the season opener.

They weren’t very interested in the game.

And the boy can now make gifs!

Cool, right? Have a good week. It’s going to be a busy one.

*Psalm 121

3 Comments

March 28, 2017

“Happiness is singing together when day is through And happiness is those who sing with you”

by chuckofish

cake

What a whirlwind of a long weekend I had! Daughters #1 and #2 were in town and we had fun, fun, fun gabbing away, driving all over town, checking off things on our wedding to-do list, culminating in a lovely, lovely bridal shower hosted by my sweet friends, Carla and Becky.

As you can see, even Lottiebelle attended!

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It was a lovely day and weekend. Sigh.

And tomorrow the little guy goes home!

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“Look, Mom, no tube in my nose!”

Here’s to the little guy going home and to the daughters’ next visit in May!

*You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, “Happiness”

4 Comments

January 23, 2017

Grant us strength and courage

by chuckofish

Quelle busy weekend! The weather was beautiful on Saturday (72 degrees!) so everyone, including me, was out and about.

Grandpappy and I visited the wee babes at the hospital.

Lottie is now big enough to fit into preemie clothes!

Little boy is over 3 lbs! It won’t be long before he can wear pants too.

On the social side we went out to dinner with old friends. I attended my church’s annual meeting and stayed for the service following. Afterwards I had lunch with my pal Carla.

In between all these activities I managed to work in the yard and go to an estate sale, but there was not much time for puttering around the house.

Having finished The Thin Man, I moved into deeper water and started to re-read the wonderful A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly, a hero among Quakers and in the larger world of Christian mystics.

To this extraordinary life I call you–or He calls you through me–not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me.

This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such respectable and amiable people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and as conventionally religious as were the church folk of three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a new discovery and with all the energy of dedicated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died.

The weekend sped by and now it is Monday once again. I’m off to the salt mine. Enjoy your day, okay?

*BCP, Post-Communion Prayer

7 Comments

January 17, 2017

A bushel and a peck

by chuckofish

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Here’s a snapshot I found of our older brother when he was a few months old in 1951. Our mother’s younger sister is holding him. He was born a little early and only weighed about 5 lbs. He looks a little stressed. (Note furrowed brow.)

But look at the bouncing baby boy a few months later!

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Babies.

5 Comments

April 1, 2016

Fat baby Friday

by chuckofish

Move over Gerber baby, Avery Rose is here! And she’s adorable!

She arrived early in the morning on Monday. (Her mother and grandmother were not in church on Easter, so I knew something was up. Nothing gets by me.) Carla is not my first friend to become a grandma, but she is the first one who lives in town.

In honor of this occasion, my Friday movie pick is to watch a movie with a baby prominently featured. The pickings are amazingly slim.

There is this trio from the 1980s:

Three Men and a Baby (1987)

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Look Who’s Talking (1989)

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Baby Boom (1987)

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All three are amusing and so 80’s that they are fun to watch.

Another movie with a very cute baby (although you have to wait ’til the very end of the movie to see it) is the classic musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

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Of course the best movie with a baby as a main character/plot device is Three Godfathers (1948), so if you didn’t make it part of your Epiphany viewing, why not watch it tonight? I mean I ask you, what could be better than John Wayne and a baby?

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