dual personalities

Tag: family

April 28, 2021

The scent of water

by chuckofish

Who didn’t get the memo? JK, there was no memo, which is even funnier.

Today I am standing in for daughter #1, who drove all over Missouri yesterday, after driving us around all weekend. I know she was exhausted when she finally rolled into Jeff City late yesterday afternoon, having made a side-trip to Springfield (to film a video) on the way home.

I too went back to work (in my upstairs office at home) and tried to get my mind off everyone leaving by concentrating on other things. Likewise daughter #2 is recovering from her trip home with her bright-eyed and very energetic baby. Life barrels on.

“Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.”

― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water 

This article by John Piper about angels interested me. “So, all angels serve the good of all Christians all the time. They are agents, as it were, of Romans 8:28, making everything work together for good under God’s providence.” As a matter of fact, I call on angels every day, especially when my children are driving around the state and flying on planes. Does that surprise you?

Willie Nelson will celebrate his eighty-eighth birthday tomorrow. Here is one of my favorite recordings of his, a duet with Emmylou Harris from 1990.

Have a great Wednesday. I thank God that his mercies are new to me every morning and that his grace is sufficient for all situations that I may encounter. Peace to you.

4 Comments
April 27, 2021

Unlatching the door to the canary’s cage

by chuckofish

We had one more fun day with daughter #2 and Katiebelle. We stuck to our plan of going to the zoo between Zoom meetings,

but then our plans fell apart in the afternoon. We found out the hard way that our local custard station hasn’t opened for the season yet, Club Taco is closed on Monday, Hacienda had a 25 minute wait at happy hour and so on. We finally went home and daughter #1 made Margaritas the old fashioned way (in the blender). We ordered takeout from Dewey’s and the OM picked it up. Splendid.

Life is too short to sweat the small stuff.

Today daughter #2 and Katie are heading home to DN and we are very sad 😭, but we will see them soon.

And here’s a poem by Billy Collins:

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

4 Comments
April 26, 2021

Postcards from the weekend

by chuckofish

Daughter #2 and Baby Katie made it to flyover country on Saturday which was rainy and dark, but this little cupcake brightened things up right away…

We went to our favorite winery in Hillsboro and the wee twins came over for a frolic. Baby Katie was chill throughout–quelle trouper! I managed to go to church for the 4th week in a row! And we celebrated two birthdays.

Today I am supposed to be working, but we are sneaking off to the zoo between Zoom meetings. Sounds like a plan.

3 Comments
April 19, 2021

Postcards from the weekend

by chuckofish

I turned in a huge project on Friday–a grant proposal years in the making–and so when daughter #1 arrived in town, we celebrated at our favorite local re-opened wine/Tapas bar with a glass of wine and some hummus. Delightful. That set us up nicely for the rest of the weekend which involved a 4.5 hour babysitting assignment with the wee twins on Saturday, followed by a reprise on Sunday afternoon.

It was a lot, but a mostly delightful experience. I also managed to go to church for the third week in a row! In addition, we ordered a car seat and stocked up on Pampers and organic veggie pouches in anticipation of daughter #2 and Katie’s visit this coming weekend. We watched Hatari (1962) in two parts. This movie is a lot of fun and was a huge hit in 1962. All the actors did their own stunts with the wild animals–amazing!

It is a celebration God’s creation, plus there is a lot of chain-smoking, hipster merry-making.

It is fun to have four-year olds with whom to share the bounty of spring: the beautiful blooming trees, the lush green grass, the bugs that are appearing, the hosta poking through the dirt, along with the iris, the roses, the Euonymus and Ajuga, the peonies, the ants.

We even found two plastic Easter eggs that had not been found two weeks ago during our egg hunt! The chocolate bunnies inside were gobbled up immediately!

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
    or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
    or let the fish in the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
    and the breath of all mankind.

–Job 12: 7-10
9 Comments
April 5, 2021

Postcards from the weekend

by chuckofish

Kilroy was (t)here. (We missed you!)

I hope everyone had a lovely Easter weekend. Mine was exhausting! SO much social activity after weeks, months, a year of not much going on.

I was busy on Friday getting ready for Saturday.

Mimosas are a good start to any party.

Liz got emotional opening daughter #1’s handmade baby blankets. After a yummy lunch (chicken salad, of course) we sat outside in the sun and watched the wee babes frolic on the driveway. After her husband picked Liz up and daughter #3 went home with the babes, we went to pick up margaritas at Club Taco. We finished Ben Hur, which we had started the night before.

On Easter morning we got up early and went to the 8:00 am service at an actual church. It felt great to sit in a pew again and sing hymns. God-honoring worship with the Word of God faithfully preached and the Lord’s Supper celebrated was much appreciated. It will take awhile to get used to not kneeling and to drinking grape juice at communion, but I think I can manage.

When we got home, I made Episcopal Souffle (ironic, yes) and then the boy and his family came over. The babes opened their Easter baskets.

Daughter #1 gave the wee laddie a book on Porsches (estate sale find), which he opened to squeals of joy. He carried it around for the rest of the day.

Note the book in back of the Cooper (ingenious)

We had a super fun egg hunt.

Once again we sat on the driveway in the glorious sun and watched the world bicycle/drive/stroll by. Two days of beautiful spring weather and a little social interaction can do wonders for one’s spirits.

And now it’s Monday. What the…

“Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.”

— from John Updike’s Seven Stanzas at Easter

4 Comments
March 29, 2021

Sittin’ on top of the world

by chuckofish

We took the train, as planned, to Jeff City on Thursday and got our 2nd vaccine shots on Friday morning at the HY-VEE. Everything was blooming in JC…

…and the river was high.

After saying ‘hey’ to old friends,

…and rewarding ourselves with a Chick-fil-A breakfast, daughter #1 drove us home. I took a nap.

We took it easy for the rest of the weekend, but the wee babes came over on Sunday. We blew bubbles on the driveway…

…and read the liner notes on some cool LPs we got at an estate sale…

and played with some more vintage wooden toys we unearthed in the basement…

…and only one boo-boo resulted.

Good times.

Here’s Paul Zahl’s list of movies to watch on TCM in April. Once again he hits the nail on the head.

Sir Laurence Oliver’s Henry V was produced in England in 1943 with morale in mind. Somehow it has never dated. (I prefer it to the Kenneth Branagh version for all kinds of reasons.). And the music, by Sir William Walton — well, one can remember almost every note.

He is my soul brother.

Have a good Monday! And here’s something from Josh Turner and Carson McKee who always make me smile.

5 Comments
March 26, 2021

“May you have a strong foundation/ When the winds of changes shift”*

by chuckofish

Friday again. The OM and I are in Jefferson City getting our second Pfizer vaccine shot. We took the train in yesterday after work and daughter #1 is going to drive us back home later today. We lead such glamorous, fast-paced lives, n’est-ce pas? Anyway, I will be glad to have all this vaccine business behind us.

Speaking of Jeff City, daughter #1 sent me this article about hometown Hollywood producer Gina Goff, who just made a movie starring 90-year old William Shatner. It’s a small world.

Meanwhile the spring term at my flyover institute commences on Monday. A whole year has gone by since we canceled our spring term last year. Yes, we are still online and Zooming.

“This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend.
For I perceive the way to life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let’s neither faint nor fear.
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.”

John Bunyan, “Christian” in Pilgrim’s Progress

We could all be reminded of this, written by William Crawford,  Minister of the Gospel at Wiltown, Hawick From A Short Practical Catechism, 3rd edition, Edinburgh, in 1745.

Are you following @ultimatelacrosse on Instagram? The boy has started making videos again and they are pretty great. Daughter #1 is his producer. (You have to click on the link to watch the videos.)

And here’s to DN whose birthday is today. You know we’ll be thinking of you and toasting you tonight! L’chaim!

In other news, I watched Seven Samurai (1954) again and it was great.

It took two nights, because it is a long (207 minutes) movie, but I highly recommend it. It is a top ten film in the foreign film category.

Sunday is Palm Sunday and marks the beginning of Holy Week:

And when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Beth′phage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, 2 and said to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat; untie it and bring it. 3 If any one says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.’” 4 And they went away, and found a colt tied at the door out in the open street; and they untied it. 5 And those who stood there said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 And they told them what Jesus had said; and they let them go. 7 And they brought the colt to Jesus, and threw their garments on it; and he sat upon it. 8 And many spread their garments on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields. 9 And those who went before and those who followed cried out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the highest!”

11 And he entered Jerusalem, and went into the temple; and when he had looked round at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Mark 11:1-11

To help you picture the landscape of the scriptures, here are a few photos from my trip to Israel in 2018, including one of the model of ancient Jerusalem.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

*Bob Dylan, “Forever Young”

2 Comments
March 8, 2021

Create in us clean hearts, O God

by chuckofish

The OM and I drove down to Jeff City to get our first vaccine shots on Friday, because God Only Knows when we would have gotten them in STL County.

Here we are after our shots, waiting for 15 minutes in the HY-VEE grocery store. I am on the phone, dealing with a problem at work that my assistant called me about–(“Call me as soon as you can!!”)–apparently I am indispensable. Also I look 100 years old and have morphed into my Mother or maybe my Grandmother. C’est la vie. Whatever.

We were there for less than 24 hours but we had fun with daughter #1. We ate lunch at an actual restaurant and drove to the outlet mall at Osage Beach where we did a wee bit of actual in person shopping. It was kind of mind blowing. We had ice cream at the Central Dairy, Jeff City hot spot.

Back in St. Louis, I caught up on laundry and vacuuming and all that stuff. I watched Sling Blade (1996) from my lenten movie list.

I hadn’t seen it in many years as it is super intense, but it was awesome. It actually has a lot in common with Shane–particularly the relationship of the boy and the stranger who comes to town. He is very passive and mysterious and he doesn’t say much, but he is taking it all in, and in the end he knows he must act to protect those he has come to love. It reminded me of Woody Allen’s comment about Shane–“Sometimes there is no other way out of a situation but…to go in there and kill them. Very few of us are brave enough or have the talent to do it….there are times when that evil reaches the level of pure evil.” Spoiler alert–This is also the situation in Sling Blade. Anyway, I highly recommend it. John Ritter as the gay friend, who like the farmers in Shane is helpless against the evil badman, is priceless, and, of course, I love Lucas Black so much. Cousin Dwight Yoakum is equal to Jack Palance in menacing scariness. Billy Bob Thornton, who wrote, directed and starred as Karl Childers, won an Oscar for screenplay, but deserved more. It is a gem of a movie.

The wee babes came over on Sunday night and brought their scooters and chalk, because it was a beautiful day.

Lottie drew a picture of me.
And I drew a picture of Lottie.

We saw lots of people walking by and a myriad of dogs, plus one red sports car, which was extremely exciting. Good times.

I liked this article. “Sin is not just the doing of bad, but also the failure of doing good.” Episcopalians know a lot about this:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone…

Oh, those sins of omission. They do pile up.

O Thou that asketh much of him to whom thou givest much, have mercy. Remember me not for the ill I’ve done but for the good I’ve dreamed. Help me to be not just the old and foolish one thou seest now but once again a fool for thee. Help me to pray. Help me whatever way thou canst, dear Christ and Lord. Amen.

Godric in Godric by Frederick Buechner

We’re off to a busy week. Have a good one.

5 Comments
March 1, 2021

Give it a whirl

by chuckofish

This weekend I started re-reading The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder and I had a hard time putting it down. Boy, is it good. Though there is a murder mystery in the novel, the main focus of the work is the history of the Ashley and Lansing families and how they cope with the after effects of the murder.

Writing about it years after it was first published, John Updike said,:

The Eighth Day was published in late March of 1967, three weeks before Thornton Wilder’s seventieth birthday. Reviews were mixed, from Edmund Wilson’s calling it “the best thing he ever wrote” to Edith Oliver’s judgment, in The New Yorker, that “none of the characters, major or minor, is essentially credible to the reader” and Stanley Kaufmann’s, in The New Republic, that “we have—from a man who has always meant well—a book that means nothing.” 

Typical New Yorker, right? And The New Republic–please. I think all the characters are believable and deeply so. John Updike agreed. Yes, it is a bit of a spiritual mish mosh, but it is a pleasure to read. I highly recommend.

Perusing my favorite booth in a local antique mall this weekend, I found a 1925 copy of The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton, about whom I had been recently reading.

Halliburton, you will recall, was an American travel writer, adventurer, and author who is best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, following in the footsteps of Carthaginian general Hannibal by riding an elephant over the Alps, photographing Mount Everest from a biplane, and for disappearing in 1939 while attempting to sail his Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. You can read more about him here. “Halliburton was described by his Princeton classmates as “an original” who rejected his father’s pleas to adopt an “even tenor,” settle down and raise a family in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He defied convention and expressed an unquenchable thirst for the unknown and the dangerous. He was driven by impatience, by a great awareness of the ephemeral nature of life, perhaps explained by the sudden and untimely death of his younger brother from illness in 1917.”

Well, I’ll give it a whirl.

This was an interesting article. “One of the negatives of social media is the manner in which it has encouraged us to think of life as a performance: we are all stars in our own reality TV show now.” Boy, ain’t that the truth.

And, yay, Paul Zahl has annotated another list of movies playing on Turner Classic Movies. “The performance — of the minister, I mean — [in Arsenic and Old Lace] is pitch perfect, as that is the way many Episcopal rectors really were prior to 1979: a little fuddy-duddy (yes), generally learned, mostly more or less Ivy League, kind of a tad detached from reality, but entirely benign.” (How times have changed.)

The wee babes came over with their dear parents on Sunday night and we had fun playing and talking and eating dessert. (Dinner is more problematic.)

And now it is March 1! Have a good Monday.

“We all know more than we know we know.”

Thornton Wilder
6 Comments
February 8, 2021

What is your life?

by chuckofish

Brigham Young University Museum of Art

David Zahl used this Norman Rockwell painting “Lift Up Thine Eyes” (1957) as a sermon illustration this week and I thought I’d share it too. Rockwell depicts New Yorkers with hunched shoulders and downcast eyes passing St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. They are not looking up at the beauty around them or at the message on the church sign or at their fellow man. Nowadays he would no doubt illustrate people with eyes locked on their cell phones, oblivious to their surroundings and their fellow man. But the sign on the Episcopal Church wouldn’t quote scripture–it would probably say, “All are welcome here” and fly a rainbow flag. And the church would still be empty.

We didn’t get much snow, but the temperature plunged. It was 7 degrees when I checked on Sunday morning.

It was the kind of weekend where you were content to sit by the fire…

and/or cuddle under a blanket.

On Saturday I did venture out to an estate sale at a very modest house in my flyover town, a house which I would normally skip. However, the pictures online of the interior of the house revealed a lot of nice things, including a mysterious array of early 1960s high-end children’s clothing. There were Steiff animals, needlepoint canvases, worked and unworked, and other signs of cultural familiarity.

When I got there my interest was piqued…

and when I found these M.I. blazers, I knew the house had belonged to someone I knew long ago.

Indeed, it all came together and I remembered reading that this woman, who was in the class below me all during my growing up years at school, had died a month or so ago. Well, estate sales can become very creepy when you realize you knew the person(s) who lived there. This happens more than you might think, mostly because I know a lot of older people because of my work. However, a surprising number of my contemporaries have departed this mortal coil, and that does start one thinking.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” (James 4:13-14)

Well, I bought a book–I already have a copy, but I always pick up out-of-print treasures like this when I get the chance.

Sigh. All this has caused me to feel a certain nostalgia for the wretched 1970s!

In that spirit, I give you the Grateful Dead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xy86mFF8ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xy86mFF8g

P.S. While looking on Youtube for the GD version of this song, I found this cover by some talented youngsters–I love these guys! Jack-A-Roe (or Jack Monroe) is a traditional English folksong which has been recorded by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, among others. Time goes by, but things stay the same, right?

Have a great week, starting with today–Monday! Look up! Pray for the day ahead. Pray that you might bring glory to God, in thought, word and deed. Thank God that his mercies are new every morning. Thank God that his grace is sufficient for all situations that you may encounter.

5 Comments