What’s the story, Morning Glory? What’s the word, Hummingbird?
Well, we’re all here, hanging out in flyover country.
Toasting with Margaritas at Club Taco.
Frolicking on the lawn. Life is good.
Today we’ll get the wading pool out and the wee cousins will come over. And in between we’ll get ready for our party tomorrow.
Have a great weekend! Make good choices.
I hope your week is going well. We are experiencing heat advisories, but this is nothing new in my neck of the woods. It’s July, after all. I went to the grocery store and experienced, once again, that hot hit of heat when exiting the store. I remember as a child feeling that and also the getting into our heat box of a car (no air-conditioning) and returning to our house, also without air conditioning. Truly every summer of my youth was a long, hot summer. I am grateful for my air conditioned car and home, but sometimes I like to go out to our Florida Room and experience the summer heat of my childhood again and breathe the fresh air.
Yesterday was the 9th wedding anniversary of the boy and daughter #3. They have been a couple since 2009, and as you know, they were engaged at aged three while in preschool together.
Everything has not been all sunshine and roses for the handsome couple and they have truly been through a lot together…
…cancer, preemie twins in the NICU for three months, owning a store during COVID–but they’ve weathered it all admirably. I certainly admire them. They are a fine example of sticking together through thick and thin and smiling along the way.
“In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.”
Timothy Keller
May God continue to bless you two and your wee family.
And God bless our nephew Foster who got hitched to Goksen in Izmir, Turkey earlier in the month and also my DP’s son Chris whose postponed wedding has been re-scheduled and is in less than two weeks. Mazel Tov to you all and to your parents as well.
And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
John 1: 16
*Johnny Mercer
Well, I have to say these Presbyterians I worship with now sure can belt out a hymn–four hymns, in fact, every service. Everyone sings, even the teenagers! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. It surprises me every week. What a nice surprise!
The twins came over twice this weekend. On Friday morning we entertained each other while daughter #3 did something. Lottie, ever the chatterbox, brought me up to date on all the goings on in her life. The wee laddie, who plays his cards much closer to the chest, concentrated on his cars.
On Saturday we celebrated the OM’s birthday. His favorite present was a DVD from daughter #1 of his favorite movie Ford vs Ferrari (2019).
Yes, I know, we look like Mr and Mrs Crypt Keeper, but even in our decrepitude, we had fun and it was even balmy enough for us to sit out on the driveway.
While daughter # 1 was in town we also managed to have a margarita at Club Taco, while enjoying the musical stylings of Dusty Rhodes.
We also went to a couple of estate sales and braved one un-airconditioned antique mall. (I learned from my friend Becky always to travel with a fan.)
In other news, the boy and his family ventured to Grant’s Farm for the first time in ages…
…and daughter #2 and famille ventured to the beach in North Carolina.
(Baby Katie’s bathing suit care of daughter #3’s golden needle!)
And these made me laugh out loud.
Have a good week. The peace of Christ be with you.
The OM and I drove over to Jeff City to visit daughter #1 for the 4th of July. The weather was hot, but not overbearingly so. We were able to visit our favorite winery in Rocheport and sit outside and enjoy the river views.
We did a little “vintiquing” and checked out the the city’s downtown festival district. The next day the boy and his little famille joined us and the pace of our adventures picked up 100%.
We walked over to the capitol and visited “Aunt Mary’s” office and ran amok through the building, which was okay, since there were very few people there. It is indeed a very neat space full of fascinating things.
Love those N.C. Wyeth murals!
It was fun to introduce the small fry to Missouri history, flora and fauna. And we went on a bear hunt through the halls, looking for all the ubiquitous ursi…
That evening we walked with our folding chairs over to the House parking garage where daughter #1 had staked out a parking place on the top floor where we set up for viewing the fireworks. We had a perfect view of the huge and impressive display on the river. It seemed like a long walk home after that, but we made it.
We went home the next day and recovered.
Happy 4th of July holiday! I hope everybody celebrated appropriately yesterday, i.e. in noisy American fashion. We went down to Jefferson City and celebrated in the state capitol with daughter #1 and the boy and his family. I’ll have more on that tomorrow.
Anyway, I forgot to mention that last Thursday was the anniversary of daughter #2 and DN. Mea clupa.
I had retirement on my mind, but when reminded, it was nice to remember that lovely summer day back in 2017 when these two lovebirds tied the knot.
Now, of course, there is little Katiebelle to celebrate as well. What a big, strong, happy girl she is!
Which brings me to this interesting article, which sums up pretty well how I have been feeling about our current content-creating culture. “Have we lost the ability to simply experience the goodness of life because we have become so obsessed with documenting and sharing it?” You may have noticed that daughter #2 did not post a baby update last week. We talked about it and both agreed we needed to back off. Katie deserves her privacy. This is a topic that everyone needs to think seriously about. “Let’s just be present. Let’s just experience life and not be so concerned about documenting it. We don’t need to be our own biographers. We don’t need to build our own brands.” We will continue to blog about our quite ordinary lives, but we will focus more on poetry and history and genealogy and movies and other things that interest us.
Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness,
BCP
and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Let us all be thankful for our many blessings!
My four day trip to Maryland went smoothly and I traveled without a hitch. Air travel was on time and, though crowded, not terrible. DN picked me up and dropped me off in Baltimore and drove everywhere in between.
We celebrated Katie’s first birthday for several days filled with fun activities, which included driving to Virginia with my backseat buddy…
Wearing matching Mommy and Me outfits…
And other new clothes…
With cake…
Lots of walking with the stroller…
And several alfresco dining adventures…
Checking out antique malls and vintage brown furniture…
And with special presents…(Daughter #1 made the pink pillow out of quilt squares my mother had cut out over 30 years ago.)
I am grateful to have such a lovely, accommodating family with such a happy, healthy doll baby. (And a son-in-law who willingly drives all over creation in Beltway traffic and then throws a lovely dinner together.)
Life is good and I am happy to have traveled again for the first time in 2 1/2 years, but as always it’s good to be back home in flyover country. (The OM picked me up at the airport. And he didn’t burn the house down while I was gone.)
Praise Jesus.
I hope you had a lovely weekend. I puttered around, planted some more annuals in pots on the patio, trimmed ivy, tidied up the house so that the wee twins could wreck havoc in it again…the usual.
The highlight was going to my new church with the boy and getting to spend a few hours together–an unusual thing since he is almost always working or in the midst of twin-created havoc. We had coffee afterwards at Bread Co. and had a real conversation. Super. Nice.
I watched some PGA tour action on TV and a couple of good movies, including Stagecoach (1939) and Wagon Master (1950), both directed by John Ford.
Stagecoach is, without a doubt, 96 of the best minutes ever put on film. Orson Welles called it textbook filmmaking and he was right. It is tops in storytelling, character development, acting, action, romance, cinematography, score–it has it all.
Wagon Master is also about a (bigger) bunch of misfits (Mormons, outlaws and stranded medicine show con artists) going on a journey and meeting up with impediments along the way. Even without John Wayne or, really, any star, it is a lyrical yarn with meaty characters, beautifully photographed.
I recommend them both, and seeing them together, is an interesting and worthwhile undertaking.
I also re-read a good bit of Harry Carey Jr.’s memoir about his life as an actor in the John Ford “stock company” which was somewhat enlightening about the behind-the-scenes goings-on of making Wagon Master and other Ford movies. John Ford was an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, as they say. But he sure made good movies.
The wee twins came over Sunday night and annoyed the OM and even prompted me to give them another mini lecture on the doctrine of total depravity. They look innocent enough, but…
We had fun, of course, and the boy got a second helping of tortellini.
And so, sleepy, cowpokes, goodnight.
*Travis and Sandy, singing in Wagon Master.
How was your weekend? Daughter #1 came home on Friday afternoon and we convinced the OM to take us out to dinner. We sat inside at Amigo’s and had a margarita and quesadillas while he ate enough for three people. We girded our loins for the following day when we babysat the wee twins for a full 4 1/2 hours. (This may not sound like a long time–but multiply everything by 2 and you might get an idea of the chaos.)
We had fun playing,
FaceTiming with Cousin Katie (waving furiously),
eating lunch, playing some more,
and finally, camping out in the tv room to watch Disney’s Tarzan (their new favorite),
We also put together our large 49-piece puzzle map of the U.S.A.
This led to a discussion of geography and the wee laddie corrected me when I foolishly said there are 5 continents. “There are 7 continents,” he said and then he sang me a little song naming them. Miss Lottiebelle is a chatterbox with something to say about everything, but he comes in with the zingers.
After the movie, we went outside, despite the fact that it was drizzling, because we had reached our limit of inside antics. We threw the frisbee around, played a little field hockey, checked out the ants under the Hosta, sat in the back of the Cooper, and blew bubbles. The boy picked them up right on schedule and we retired inside to clean up the living room and drink a bottle of Rosé while listening to angsty tunes from the 2000s.
On Sunday we went to church where we reassured ourselves with Romans 8:
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?
As it turned out, the boy didn’t go into work, so the babes did not come over after all. Daughter #1 headed back to mid-Mo and I headed to bed, where I read and talked on the phone and napped. I think I am recovered sufficiently to work today.
And here are Josh and Carson with another cover from 1973.
*Riverboat Shuffle by Hoagy Carmichael
How was your weekend? Mine was pleasantly eventful. I took Friday afternoon off and had lunch with my pals, sitting outside–such a treat. Then daughter #1 came home and we sat outside at Club Taco, nursing a margarita and listening to the musical stylings of “Dusty Rhodes.” (Like him, but not him.) Then we made our way home and the OM provided dinner while we listened to more music.
On Saturday we went to lunch for the first time in ages (sitting inside) at the Sappington House. We moved on to the South County Antique Mall–50,000 square feet of “unique items”–where we walked up and down many miles of booths perusing the vintage junk. We headed home empty-handed to get ready for the wee babes and their parents who came over for a barbecue. Unfortunately, the day was rainy and cold, so we had to be indoors the whole time. Several mishaps ensued, but we had fun and nothing (and nobody) got broken.
I received many lovely and thoughtful gifts from my children, including these beautiful flowers from daughter #2:
But of course what warmed the cockles of this grandma’s heart was reading the “All About My Grandma” questionnaires that the twins had filled out. I was glad to know that Lottie thinks I am 200 years old and that she loves her grandma because “She is beautiful.” The wee laddie, on the other hand, loves me because I “do nothing.” Precious moments.
There was cake too!
In other news, there was a Black Bear sighting in Kirkwood on the grounds of Ursuline Academy which is a stone’s throw from our house! It moved on to Webster Hills Methodist Church where we buy pumpkins. I mean really. I do not need bears in my backyard. First armadillos, now bears. What is happening? (Update: the bear moved on to Brentwood and was tranquilized in a tree.)
Happy Monday! Keep an eye out for bears!
*WRC jr (having eaten a lot of cake)
How was your weekend? Mine was not so quiet as I first anticipated. Saturday was a lovely, sunny day. I bought some geraniums and planted them in the pots on my front porch. I weeded. Then the OM and I drove to Washington on the Missouri River and sat on a roof deck and enjoyed the scenery. Nothing fancy, but nothing better.
That night I watched The Wizard of Oz (1939) and was reminded once again what a perfect movie it is. I wouldn’t change a thing. Of course, it only won Oscars for best song and score. But the sets, the costumes, the art direction! The technicolor! The acting and direction! Zut alors! I highly recommend re-watching this movie the next time you are looking for something to watch.
On Sunday I went to church–ah, how nice that sounds–and then went home and continued reading The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge.
This old-fashioned novel about a city-bred woman who moves to the English countryside when she inherits a house from a mysterious elderly relative is a type that is never written/published these days. It is a pleasure to read its carefully-written prose and its slowly unfolding story. Not much happens, but the characters grow in self knowledge and spiritual maturity. They are interesting people, not cardboard cutouts.
Next up is S.C. Gwynne’s Rebel Yell about Stonewall Jackson. I am no fan of the Confederacy or its generals, but I have always loved Stonewall Jackson, who was a devout Calvinist. I love the story of his Scotch-Irish ancestors who came to this country as indentured servants in the 18th century and fought hard and bravely to forge a home in the wilderness and improve their lot in life.
The wee twins came over Sunday night per usual with their parents for some frolicking goofball fun.
They are getting to be so grown up!
In other news, my Christmas cactus is blooming!
One more thing: here’s an interesting article. “As for security, it is the utter madness and control freakery of our age that thinks we can stay secure and somehow transfer that to our children. The gospel takes us out of ourselves and our efforts and places us in Christ where there is total security.”
So another week begins. Make it a good one!
*Lamentations 3:24
dual personalities 