Well, we got more snow–how about that? Luckily I had gone out early in the morning to run errands, so I could just stay home and watch the snow fall. Thankfully, daughter #1 had cancelled her drive to Indiana for work, but she still had to drive home from downtown and that was moderately traumatizing.
The snow was really coming down when I took this picture, but the iPhone does not capture that adequately at all!
The Easter weekend was a blur of activity, but I do remember that something fun happened on Good Friday. I went over to daughter #1’s house for an impromptu lunch after which we hopped over to an estate sale nearby at a Clayton penthouse. Normally condos are not worth going to because the people living in them have already down-sized, but this one was listed by our favorite estate sale company and there were a lot of books.
We did, indeed, find a few books, but I also found an antique loveseat that had been recovered in a fab fabric. (Like the Madcaps, no beige for me!) I started to fill out a bid card, but Lamar called us over and looked at it and gave it to me for my asking price (60%)! Plus he threw in everything else for the Lamar discount of free.
One of their guys delivered it to my house and he and his son got it upstairs and into my office easy peasy. I am thrilled.
And I made it to church by 6 o’clock!
With all the excitement I almost forgot it was my birthday. I received many lovely birthday gifts over the weekend…
My children know me so well.
My daughters also gave me fancy beauty treatments which I very much appreciate, because they are “in the know” and I am not. They know too to put the effort into fancy wrapping and ribbons, which they learned from me and I learned from my mother. They also know to go to the Dollar Tree for fab decorations! This warms my mothers heart.
All the rain, of course, has resulted in lush growth everywhere. Look at Don’s beautiful creek bed–fresh rainwater runoff over bedrock behind his house…
This week was a scorcher, but par for the flyover course. The forecast for the long weekend is optimistic so we’ll see.
Daughter #2 and her family escaped to Michigan, but they encountered a huge storm halfway through their vacay which knocked out the electricity to 400,000 people and their running water!
C’est la vie. Before the weather catastrophe, my brother and sister-in-law drove over for a short visit…
…and caught up with the comings and goings of Pete the Cat et al.
Yes, the month is winding down. I will toast Jorge Luis Borges again and suggest you read this short story about a man whose father tells him he had “Lunch with Borges” once. It reminded me of my father telling me he sat on Gertrude Stein’s lap as an infant. We know our parents so little really.
As in dreams behind high doors there is nothing, not even emptiness. As in dreams behind the face that looks at us there is no one. Obverse without a reverse, one-sided coin, the side of things. That pittance is the boon tossed to us by hastening time. We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
This is an interesting reflection on Peer Gynt, showing how a troll becomes a troll. “In 2024, we live in a world of trolls. What is the name for cowardly people who leave hateful comments on the internet? Trolls. Our family’s word for road-ragers? Road trolls. Peer Gynt is a story for today.”
And here’s a heads up that the Church of England remembers John Bunyan with a Lesser Festival on 30 August. I was glad to see that a memorial window to Bunyan was unveiled in the west aisle of the north transept of Westminster Abbey in January 1912. It was erected by public subscription and designed by J. Ninian Comper and shows eight main scenes from the first part of Bunyan’s most famous work The Pilgrim’s Progress. The inscription reads: In memory of John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress. B.1628. D.1688.
“You are not yet out of reach of the gunshot of the Devil. You have not yet resisted unto death in your striving against sin. Let the Kingdom be always before you, and believe with certainty and consistency the things that are yet unseen. Let nothing that is on this side of eternal life get inside you. Above all, take care of your own hearts, and resist the lusts that tempt you, for your hearts `are deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.’ Set your faces like a flint; you have all the power of Heaven and earth on your side.”
My week is off to a quiet start and that is okay with me. I don’t have much going on besides having to do my homework for my Bible Study which starts anew on Thursday.
This week I will also be reading works by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, poet and philosopher, whose birthday we celebrate on August 24. Here is a snippet from an interview with William F. Buckley where he speaks about the English language…
I could listen to him talk for hours.
Meanwhile Don’s dahlias are beautiful…
As a member of the Asteraceae family, the dahlia has a flower head that is actually a composite with both central disc florets and surrounding ray florets. Each floret is a flower in its own right, according to Don, but is often incorrectly described as a petal. God’s amazing creation!
I guess things went well on the first day of school…
And here’s a fun fact to know and share: In 1954, Charles Schulz introduced Charlotte Braun to the Charlie Brown cast as a loud-mouthed female character (a role Lucy would later inherit). Readers disliked Charlotte, and she disappeared a few months later after only about 10 times in the strip.
I have a feeling Charlotte may have hit too close to home for some people (loud-mouthed females). But she’d fit right in now…
Today we remember the Victorian poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) who was born on this day 212 years ago. He wrote many long, wonderful poems including “My Last Duchess”, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “The Ring and the Book” and many more.
I actually had a couple of lines from “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” on my senior page. (Yikes.) Over the years he has had many detractors but also many fans, including Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote “Browning Decides to Become a Poet”:
Today he is probably as well known for his romance with poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning as for his poetry, but c’est la vie. His poems are pretty great. You can read some here.
And if you have a mind to, you could watch one or both of the two filmed versions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
So dust off an old college book and read an old poem by Robert Browning (or Borges).
The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn; God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world!
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset Swiftly flow the days Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers Blossoming even as we gaze
(Jerry Bock)
Oy. On that note we remind you of the poet Robert Herrick (1591-1664) who wrote:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.
And can it already be the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges? It is!
And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
Bonus: this is an excellent article by Kevin DeYoung about corporate responsibility, repentance and guilt. “The sins of the past are far from irrelevant. And yet we are not meant to live with a sense of corporate guilt for an ethnic, racial, or biological identity we did not choose and from which we cannot be free. Self-flagellation is not a requirement for spiritual maturity.”
So festina lente, keep cool, read some poetry, and note the time–it’s later than you think!
Well, I am thankful that I no longer am a member of a church where they might say the “Sparkle Creed“. And “I’m gonna laugh endlessly at their stupid “sparkle” god like Elijah laughed at the prophets of Baal.”
Moving on, I loved this by John Piper about his most influential teacher.
Another summer is slipping away. The twins have started kindergarten! The time just skis by.
Sunrise, sunset.
I must note that tomorrow is the birthday of the great Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). A toast (or two or three) is in order for this great Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, who thought about time a lot too.
We are the time. We are the famous metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.
We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.
We are the river and we are that greek that looks himself into the river. His reflection changes into the waters of the changing mirror, into the crystal that changes like the fire.
We are the vain predetermined river, in his travel to his sea.
The shadows have surrounded him. Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.
Memory does not stamp his own coin.
However, there is something that stays however, there is something that bemoans.
“and for your penance, translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.”*
Although I think of my mother every day, Mother’s Day is an occasion to give a special thought to the woman who loved me fiercely and without ebb.
My mother taught me to like poetry. (I certainly did not learn to at school.) She liked to read poems out loud and she liked to write them.
She never really got around to teaching me to cook or sew or really anything very practical, but we watched a lot of movies together and listened to a lot of records and talked about a lot of books we read. We took long drives together and went out to lunch. We went shopping and went to art museums and pointed out the things we liked. Pretty much this is what I did with my own children while they were growing up and still do whenever we can.
We pass down the love of poetry and a predilection for historical fiction and biography as well as the old furniture and handmade dresses. We pass on the love.
Here’s a favorite poem by one of my faves, Jorge Luis Borges, which seems particularly resonant on Mother’s Day.
From a lineage of Protestant ministers
and South American soldiers
who fought, with their incalculable dust,
against the Spaniards and the desert’s lances,
I am and I am not. My true lineage
Is the voice, which I can still hear, of my father
Did you know that in 1961 Jorge Luis Borges, aging and mostly blind, began teaching at the University of Texas, Austin, and the state of Texas captured a special place in his heart, as reflected in his poem “Texas”?
Texas
Here too. Here, as on the other unfurling
Frontier of the continent, the great
Prairie where a solitary cry fades out;
Here too the lariat, the Indian, the yearling.
Here too the secretive and unseen bird
That over the clamorous strains of history
Sings for one evening and its memory;
Here too the mystic alphabet, the word
Of stars which dictate to my cursive flow
Names that the days on their labyrinthine way
Will leave behind them: San Jacinto, say,
Or that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.
Here too that unknown, brief,
Needy and fretful commotion, life.
–translated by Robert Mezey
Well, he did. The world is more than we know.
Daughter #2, along with my dear DP, will pick up the slack on the blog while we are out of town, so be sure to tune in for an update on Miss Katiebelle, fashion-setting trendsetter of the daycare set.
And pray for traveling mercies as we launch ourselves out into the unfurling Frontier of the continent.
dual personalities 