The summer is drawing to a close. The boy and the twins took a last trip to the zoo before school starts and rode the train. I had lunch with my old friend and former administrative assistant and heard all about the goings on at the university. I took the Mini in for an oil change.
Katie starts kindergarten today! She met her teacher yesterday and wore her favorite dress which belonged to her aunt back in the day.
I am looking forward to September and the return (hopefully) to some semblance of my old routine.
Life goes on and I am grateful.
“I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matterwhether over mud or over stones.”
Yesterday we were able to do some driveway sittin’ when the boy came over with the bud while Lottie was in dance class. The bud drove the little Raptor around and we had a gay ol’ time gabbing away. Truly there is nothing better on a lovely spring day than to sit and soak up some vitamin D under the blue, blue sky.
Meanwhile I have been crossing items off my to-do list. The Review is at the printer. I have been to the dentist. And so on. I am reading another Agatha Christie–Ordeal by Innocence, published in 1958. Life goes on at a retirement pace–I have no complaints.
In other news, the pope died. I will let Carl Trueman speak for me. “Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.”
I talked to my 90-year old Catholic friend yesterday about the pope’s passing. She thought he was great–he really cared about the environment. So go figure.
And news alert: there’s going to be a rare ‘smiley face’ celestial alignment in the morning sky this Friday, April 25, so make a note.
My friend Carla gave me Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott for my birthday. I have read it, but I read it again (I do that a lot.)
When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow. Spring is crazy, being all hope and beauty and glory. She is the resurrection. Spring is Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” I read Hopkins for the first time in seventh grade, when I also first read Langston Hughes, and between the two of them, I was never the same.
Poetry is the official palace language of Wow.
Buds opening and releasing, mud and cutting winds, bright green grass and blue skies, nests full of baby birds. All of these are deserving of Wow–even though I have said elsewhere that spring is also about deer ticks–and everywhere you look, couples are falling in love, and the air is saturated with the scent of giddiness and doom. Petals are wafting and falling slowly through the air, and there is something so Ravel, languorous, reminding me to revel in the beauty of the things wafting.
Daughter #2 is back today! I am happy to report that my daily reading habits have persisted, and while there are always misses among the hits, I have several good things to share.
Quick notes: I failed to finish Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) — there is a reason Jane Eyre (1847) is the better known work — but while I trudged through the first half, I also read and thoroughly enjoyed two Fred Vargas mysteries. My mother had mailed them to me, which I appreciated, since I do not think my local prairie library carries French mysteries in translation. My mother has blogged about Vargas many times, but I’ll link to this post, which — bonus — mostly discusses her reading of The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a novel I love dearly and re-read at the beginning of the year.
My local prairie library does carry two shelves of “General Fiction,” which feature a funny mix of contemporary “chick lit” and classic canonical works. Something compelled me to grab John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and I found it surprisingly easy to read. It is one of those epic long novels that, because the chapters are so short, allows you to leisurely chug along with great and frequent reward. Steinbeck alternates between naturalist descriptions of the American landscape, mini treatises on the American economy, and what I found to be the gripping plot of the Joad family’s Dust Bowl journey from Oklahoma to California. I was very happy to read in context the passage quoted in one of my favorite blog posts.
When Katie assembled this Duplo truck with trailer and a multitude of passengers, I couldn’t help but think, “It’s giving me Joad family jalopy vibes.”
Finally, I recently finished Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006). The novel’s dual protagonists are wise in different ways: Paloma beyond her 12 years, and Renée beyond her station (which she believes precludes the intellectual life she keeps a secret). When a Japanese man moves into the apartment building where they both live, the three forge an unlikely friendship. Interestingly, Kakura Ozu is able to intuit the rich inner lives of Paloma and Renée, and draws them out of their shells despite the social structures in which they find themselves stuck. While it was all a little far-fetched, I did appreciate the idea that we can recognize a kindred intellectual spirit when we encounter it, even briefly.
My favorite section of the novel, “On Grammar,” centered on the trio’s shared appreciation of language and disdain for those who misuse it. When Renée and Ozu meet, they both flinch when another — supposedly refined — tenant makes a glaring grammatical error. Their friendship is forged in this moment. And at one point, Paloma snaps when her literature teacher makes an asinine comment about grammar. Later, Paloma reflects in her journal,
“Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, ‘Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is! How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!’ I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility. I find there is nothing more beautiful, for example, than the very basic components of language, nouns and verbs. When you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the core of any statement. It’s magnificent, don’t you think? Nouns, verbs…
“Perhaps, to gain access to all the beauty of the language that grammar unveils, you have to place yourself in a special state of awareness. I have the impression that I do that anyway without any special effort. I think that it was at the age of two, when I first heard grown-ups speak, that I understood once and for all how language is made. Grammar lessons have always seemed to me a sort of synthesis after the fact and, perhaps, a source of supplemental details concerning terminology.”
Paloma is a little overdone as a precocious tween, but I can’t help but relate to much of this. It’s very obvious to me that toddlers intuit grammar from the language around them, and yes, as their mother, I believe that Ida and Katie have an “elegant style” of speech. Ida once looked at the rainy back deck and said, “I wish we could go outside today.” (For reference, at her age, “go outside” would be typical.) Solid and ingenious, rich and subtle indeed!
Up next, I am testing my endurance with Wolf Hall. So far, so good!
I am currently working on an article for the Kirkwood Historical Review about A.G. Edwards, an early “pioneer” of our adopted hometown. They weren’t fighting off Indians or anything, but those mid-19th century guys led very interesting lives nonetheless.
Edwards was a graduate of West Point (class of 1832) and was 45th in a class of 45–the goat. I should note here that the term “Goat” holds a special place in U.S. Army tradition. The term refers to the cadet graduating from West Point with the lowest Grade Point Average (GPA) or “the man who would have stood first if he had boned (i.e. studied)”. Rather than being a badge of shame, it recognizes the tenacity or foolhardiness it takes to be the last graduate of the best of the best. “It is definitely an honor; it is in no way a joke,” according to
James Robbins, author of “Last in their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point.” At West Point, where plenty of cadets “wash out” years before graduation, there’s a genuine respect for the cadet who faltered, but graduated. And, truly, General A.G. Edwards went on to great things.
In other news, this appeared on my Instagram feed on April Fool’s Day:
Well, to infinity and beyond!
Also, I really like John Piper’s answer to Jordan Peterson’s take on happiness–it is wonderful. “Jordan Peterson is negative about happiness as the aim of life because he defines happiness as fleeting, unpredictable, impulsive, and superficial rather than as deep, lasting, soul-satisfying, rooted in God, and expanding in love. He’s probably right that for most people, happiness is experienced as fleeting, superficial, unpredictable, and impulsive rather than as deep and lasting and soul-satisfying and rooted in God.” Read the whole thing.
And here’s a poem: Always Marry an April Girl by Ogden Nash
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.
JESUS IS APT TO COME, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but . . . at supper time, or walking along a road. This is the element that all the stories about Christ’s return to life have in common: Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there—someone she thought at first was the gardener; all the disciples except Thomas hiding out in a locked house, and then his coming and standing in the midst; and later, when Thomas was there, his coming again and standing in the midst; Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore, near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?”; the two men at Emmaus who knew him in the breaking of the bread. He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.
–Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
This is a thought-provoking article about a group of ‘Jesus Geezers’ and the sad death of Gene Hackman. Everyone needs a church community!
–Evangelist tells Christian and Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress
Don’t forget to look up today! Seek Him through a grateful heart.
At the suggestion of daughter #1 I am re-reading TheDaughter of Timeby Josephine Tey. It is very good and the type of literary mystery written by an intelligent and educated author, which you rarely run across these days.
“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekly” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.”
The Daughter of Time was chosen by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time(!). After this, I will try to find some of her other books to read.
I wonder if Hilary Mantel read this book–because Tey brings Sir Thomas More to task for writing the “definitive” history of Richard III based soley on hearsay. He was actually five years old when everything transpired. He was not a witness. Did this book get her thinking about Thomas More? Did she come to the conclusion that Thomas More was a monster and not a saint….Interesting.
Well, the bud and his dad came over yesterday afternoon and we had a gab fest and the bud jumped in with the Beanie Babies for a rollicking good time…
We discussed movies and books and the state of the world.
I liked this one from Tim Challies. “God’s plan all along has been to use ordinary leaders to accomplish extraordinary things.”
Monday I successfully dropped off Mr. Smith at Silver Maple kennel after an early morning belly-scratch session. He never looked back, so happy was he to be there. He definitely is a ‘no regrets’ kind of dog. I’m sure there is a lesson there for all of us.
The weather has been lovely–blue skies and temperatures in the 60s–I even went to the park and walked around the pond. Hard to believe it was so cold and snowy last week!
I talked to my sister who is a grandmother as of last Friday. Congratulations to all! The baby boy weighed over 10 pounds!
The boy brought the bud over yesterday afternoon while Lottie went to dance class. The bud wanted to do some driveway sittin’ (the first of the year!) and I can’t say no to him. He broke up some ice on the driveway and made friends with the cat next door (named Messi after his hero) and patted a dog walking by. There were a lot of people, in fact, passing by and cars with whom he raced (a Honda! a Fiat! an Audi!)–good grief. He wiped out racing a UPS truck and we went inside to get a bandaid and watched some Wild Kratts until his dad returned. All in a boy’s day…
Daughter #1 returns today from work adventures in Indiana and I am looking forward to a glass of wine and hearing about her exploits.
I talked to daughter #2 and she told me she had just read Home by Marilyn Robinson, which was quite a delight after all the bad contemporary “literature” she has read recently. This warmed my heart. She had many good insights with which I concurred. I started re-reading Gilead after our conversation. Wonderful.
“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
So praise God from whom all blessings flow, pet a nice dog, watch a boy play in the yard, read an old book, reach out to the ones you love. They are God’s grace to you.
Today we toast Don Knotts, who died on this day in 2006. I have to admit that he made me laugh as a child and he still does. Knotts won five Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Comedy between 1961 and 1968. Barney Fife was one of a kind.
And you have to love Andy who is always so patient with him. He was the perfect foil.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Most of Don’s movies were not great, but I have to admit a certain affection for The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964). I wonder what the twins would make of it? We may have to check it out.
Truly Hollywood could never make a movie like that today. “I wish, I wish, I wish I were a fish…”
Enjoy your Tuesday. I think I’ll work on memorizing the preamble to the Constitution.
Yesterday was quite a lot. I was happy to sit and watch all the celebrating from my warm flyover home. The vibe has changed.
It was also Martin Luther King Day, so here’s a quote from his “The Measure of a Man”:
“So I say to you, seek God and discover him and make him a power in your life. Without him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without him, life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St. Augustine was right—we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in him.”
Well, the sun came out yesterday and we enjoyed blue skies. Unfortunately the temperature peaked in the mid-twenties and nothing melted. Our driveway did get plowed on Tuesday night so we were free to leave, but I was not moved to do so.
But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a few straggling snow-flakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to their coverts, and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. Hear how Homer has described the same. “The snow-flakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.” The snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the castle, and helps her to prevail over art.
Inspired by HDT, I donned my winter wear and sallied forth to walk around my yard. Not a whole lot going on. Saw some rabbit tracks. I came back in and then struggled mightily to get my Hunter boots off. Good grief, Charlie Brown.
In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skilful physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an oriental, but a boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.
dual personalities 