Calvin and Hobbes | dual personalities

The gentle ranks of the meek

by chuckofish

Signs of spring are everywhere. Soon it will be time to clean up the Florida room and move all my plants. Some of them are getting to be rather large.

But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. We’re bound to have some more cold temperatures and maybe some more snow. One thing I have managed to learn over the years is to take one day at a time and enjoy its blessings.

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.
Genesis 8:22

We haven’t heard from Anne for awhile, so here’s this. She reads all the things and is on X, formerly twitter, so I don’t have to be. She is brilliant and I am grateful. “[Madi is] screwed because she was born into a world where breakdancing was a thing, and worse, people following their hearts was the highest and best good. Her wretched father should have been a plowman with no better options. Madi herself should have been allowed to have servants and write a hefty amount of poetry. And all the people who walk across my parking lot should have been allowed to go to a store that figured out the through line between the self-checkout line and the bottom line.”

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December 11, 2020

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart”*

by chuckofish

Hugo van der Goes *Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem* (1475)

Two weeks until Christmas! Of course, there will be no parties this year, no church…but our little family pod will persevere.

In fact, we will rejoice!

Indeed, daughter #2, DN and sweet Katie are coming home! (Please keep them in your prayers as they drive here today.)

Speaking of prayer, this article about not-my-favorite Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) makes some good points.

Here’s what I wrote about it a few year’s back. They would never make a movie about the power of prayer these days. It is worth watching for that reason.

This old article also makes some good points about the old movie. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we envisioned, does it? Our hopes and dreams may never come to pass.” But be grateful for what you have. It’s probably pretty great.

Anyway, I think I will skip this version slated for viewing this Sunday night. Yeah, no.

Be patient. Enjoy the day. Smell the pine in your nostrils.

And don’t forget that PBS is airing A Charlie Brown Christmas Sunday night!

*Psalm 27:14

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October 25, 2017

Deep thoughts for Wednesday

by chuckofish

Today is St. Crispin’s Day and the 602nd anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt!

It is also two months until Christmas! Have you started planning for Christmas?

I have–just barely. But I have been thinking about it. This year, in addition to daughter #2 visiting, we will have her husband staying with us. Zut alors! We will also have grandchildren present for the first time. (Last year they were in the NICU.) And daughter #1 will be driving in from central MO, not jetting in from NYC, praying for good weather. Times change faster than the blink of an eye.

This all got me thinking about the passing of time, which sometimes can be a bit depressing. So here are a few thoughts to get you thinking as well.

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
―Martin Luther

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”
―Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
―Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Do you see yourself as a leaf blown by the wind or someone on the road and growing in righteousness? Or are you fishing and gazing at the sandy bottom?

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Discuss among yourselves.

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May 17, 2016

“They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.”*

by chuckofish

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

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February 16, 2016

The long procession

by chuckofish

Well, I might not go quite so far as Calvin, but there is something to what he says. These gray winter days are certainly conducive to reflection. And reflection is a good thing.

“[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly any time at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.” (Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels)

Let’s all try to work some “studying” into our schedule.

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April 29, 2013

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.”

by chuckofish

I had a bad day on Friday and it carried into my weekend. I’m afraid I am not spiritually advanced enough to power through those bad days. I disappoint myself, but it’s the truth.

It takes some work you know. I won’t go into all the details, but I finally had a breakthrough when I watched Awakenings (1990) on Saturday night.

No, that is not Robert De Niro in the car with my brother! That's Robin WIlliams.

No, that is not my brother in the car with Robert De Niro! That’s Robin Williams.

Leonard Lowe, De Niro’s character, who has been “awakened” from a 30-year catatonic state, tells us:

Read the newspaper. What does it say? All bad. It’s all bad. People have forgotten what life is all about. They’ve forgotten what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded. They need to be reminded of what they have and what they can lose. What I feel is the joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!

It is important to be reminded of this frequently. I highly recommend this wonderful movie, although be prepared to cry off-and-on for two hours. This also is a good thing (see here.)

I went to church on Sunday and was under-whelmed by the service and the sermon, but was gladdened by the display of new spring growth evident in the church grounds.