quotes | dual personalities

February 14, 2014

And life barrels on like a runaway train*

by chuckofish

Sunday is the birthday of Eugene Hugh Beaumont (February 16, 1909 – May 14, 1982) who you will recall was an American actor and television director. He was also an ordained Methodist minister. Hugh Beaumont is best known for his portrayal of Ward Cleaver on one of my favorite TV series, Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) which I watched for years after school when it was in syndication.

Ward was not perfect. He made mistakes and he tried too hard sometimes and he lost his patience with his sons when they didn’t act as he thought they should. But he loved them and he could laugh at himself. Ward was a role model, and I have to say, it was very comforting to watch that syndicated show after school every day.

It has been suggested that Hugh Beaumont felt that he had been type-cast as Ward Cleaver and that his career suffered. Maybe it did. But I hope he knew that besides entertaining generations of people, he probably touched a lot of kids out there whose parents were not perfect and whose family was not as “functional” as the Cleavers. He touched me. I still cannot watch the above clip without getting a little misty-eyed.

Rest in peace, Hugh.

And here’s hoping you all have a nice Valentine’s Day and that someone gives you a nice card like the one above.

P.S. FYI One of the writers for the show was Joss Whedon’s grandfather. This does not surprise me in the least.

*Ben Folds

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February 13, 2014

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I have been reading Oscar and Lucinda by the Australian Peter Carey, winner of the Booker Prize in 1988. It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on a ship going to Australia and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement.

I have been reading it slowly, appreciatively, with care. Because it is SO good.

The writing is excellent. The characters are wonderful. Oh my. All of the characters, even the most minor, are drawn with fine, detailed strokes. I care so much for the two main characters, Oscar and Lucinda.

“Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet–it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too…we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…I cannot see,” he said, “that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence…It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.”

…”That such a God,” said Oscar, “knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing the line first, unless…unless–and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me–it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.”

Religion in the novel is not absurd. There is a pattern in everything.

The book is composed of 111 short, titled chapters (like in Moby-Dick), each a self-contained episode, each one a testimony to luck.

I find myself constantly scribbling in the margins–I read with a pencil at hand–and underlining passages. I have not been so excited since I discovered Willa Cather last year!

She had judged him too hastily. This was a bad habit. It had caused her trouble before. She had compared him to Dennis Hasset and had pursed her lips when he picked up his tea-cup a certain way, or placed the pot back on the table a little too heavily. She had felt slighted when he had scurried back into his room and shut the door on her. And yet–how quickly it happened–she had come to be proud of the propriety with which they now shared a house, the sense of measured discipline (a virtue she much admired) that they brought to their conduct so that there was great closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but of neighbors. They occupied a position well above the Philistines who snubbed and slighted them. God, who saw all things, would not find their conduct unbecoming.

My oldest friend, who has similar taste in literature, has suggested I read The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell, which won the Booker Prize in 1973.

She is trying to read Booker prize-winners she has missed over the years, which is a great idea, and one I may embrace.

Another friend handed me a copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Flight Behavior.

Since I have it in my hot little hand, it will probably be next on my list, although BK tends to be too political for me. I’ll give it a try.

What are you reading?

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February 11, 2014

February Days

by chuckofish

photo from Pinterest

Who could tire of the long shadows,
The long shadows of the trees on snow?
Sometimes I stand at the kitchen window
For a timeless time in a long daze
Before these reflected perpendiculars,
Noting how the light has changed,
How tender it is now in February
When the shadows are blue not black.
The crimson cyclamen has opened wide,
A bower of petals drunk on the light,
And in the snow-bright ordered house
I am drowsy as a turtle in winter,
Living on light and shadow
And their changes.

–May Sarton (1912–1995)

I blogged about old May Sarton here. She’s real good, n’est-ce pas?

7 Comments

February 5, 2014

And make rough winter everlastingly*

by chuckofish

N.C. Wyeth, “Snow Platform”

Well, we are digging out from more snow. Aargh.

So here is a poem for a snowy day. The last verse is rather famous, but perhaps you have forgotten the earlier part.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, 1923

*William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”

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February 4, 2014

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” *

by chuckofish

“I think of a person I haven’t seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife’s and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.

I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: “You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.”

–Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing to make a special report in a weekly meeting I attend at work. Doing this always makes me very nervous. I tell myself these people are not scary; they are my peers. It is no big deal. Still, I get nervous. I have trained myself not to ruin the day worrying about things that will take place in the future. Still, I worry.

Then, on the night before this meeting, I turned the page-a-day calendar I have to the next day. The Bible verse was: “For God did not give you a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and of love and of self-control.” My favorite Bible verse from First Timothy! And it couldn’t have been more appropriate. I wasn’t nervous anymore.

I do not believe in coincidence. I believe in the whispering voice saying, “You’re doing fine.”

Have you ever had such an experience? Pay attention and you will see that it happens with some frequency.

“This is a dynamic and mysterious universe and human life is, no doubt, conditioned by imponderables of which we are only dimly aware. People sometimes say, “the strangest coincidence happened.” Coincidences may seem strange, but they are never a result of caprice. They are orderly laws in the spiritual life of man. They affect and influence our lives profoundly. These so-called imponderables are so important that you should become spiritually sensitized to them. Indeed, the more spiritually minded you become the more acute your contact will be with these behind-the-scenes forces. By being alive to them through insight, instruction, and illumination, you can make your way past errors and mistakes on which, were you less spiritually sensitive, you might often stumble.”
― Norman Vincent Peale, Stay Alive All Your Life

* Albert Einstein and also Albert Schweitzer who said, “Coincidence is the pseudonym dear God chooses when he wants to remain incognito.”

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February 3, 2014

‘If Candlemas be bright and clear There’ll be two winters in that year’*

by chuckofish

It rained all day Saturday, so I stayed home and puttered around the house. I would probably not have ventured out at all, but the old man and I had tickets to attend the “Elegant Italian Dinner” at our church.

Every year the youth of the parish (and their parents) put on this dinner to raise money for their annual spring mission trip. Frighteningly, this was the nineteenth such dinner. All three of my children participated in this dinner and so did I–usually in the kitchen, serving up the plates and washing dishes.

So now it is nice to go and sit at a table with friends and be on the receiving end.

Everyone comes to this party and by Everyone I mean even the Old Man.

It is always the same menu: salad and lasagna and Italian bread with some fancy desserts thrown in. “Elegant” means they use real china and hang up some strings of twinkly white lights in Albright Hall. There are checkered tableclothes and candles in chianti bottles. You get the picture. The teenage waiters wear white shirts, black pants and bow ties. Oh my.

Everyone goes home at 9 o’clock. And, thank you, I would rather attend this function than any society ball or self-aggrandizing academic ceremony you can name.

On Sunday we watched the Super Bowl with some other like-minded, football-indifferent friends. I rooted for Peyton Manning and his Broncos, but was uninvested really in the outcome. (Ever since the Rams lost that heart-breaker in Super Bowl XXXVI and Kurt Warner moved to Phoenix, I haven’t cared much about football.) It was a major bummer, nevertheless, that Peyton’s team lost and lost Big Time, but oh well. It is just football. We enjoyed seeing our hometown Clydesdales in the latest AB commercial. However, my favorite (besides the Oikos Full House reunion) was the Go Daddy commercial with the running bodybuilders.

Now our local weather wizards are saying we’ll have more snow this week. But Candlemas was dark and dreary, so I hope that means that we will NOT have two winters. However, I see that Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter, much to the chagrin of everyone hoping for an early spring. Conflicting superstitions. C’est la vie.

How was your weekend?

* Charles Causley

12 Comments

January 30, 2014

And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky

by chuckofish

“Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulfstream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.”

–Henry David Thoreau, 1858

Hiroshige–“Snow Falling on a Town”

7 Comments

January 29, 2014

How the West Was Won

by chuckofish

Today is the 176th anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite ancestors, John Wesley Prowers, who was born on January 29, 1838 near Westport, Jackson County, Missouri.

Readers of this blog will recall that John was the older brother of our great-great-grandmother Mary Prowers Hough. Not much is known about their parents, Susan and John Prowers. Some say they came from Virginia, arriving in Missouri where John built a sturdy two-story log cabin near the Missouri River, which stood for nearly 75 years. The senior Prowers died (we know not why) in 1840, leaving 22-year-old Susan alone (literally) in the wilderness with two children under two and very little else save the sturdy cabin. She re-married–what else could she do?

Anyway, John Wesley Prowers did not get along with his step-father and skidaddled in 1856, at the age of eighteen. He went to work for Robert Miller, Indian agent for the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of the Upper Arkansas region. They headed for Bent’s new fort. Soon he was working for Colonel Bent at the fort, who put him in charge of the wagon trains, freighting supplies from the trading posts on the Missouri to those west, making twenty-two trips across the plains over the next six years.

In 1861 he married the 15-year-old Indian “princess” Amache Ochinee, the daughter of Ochinee, a sub-chief of the Southern Cheyennes, near Camp Supply in Indian Territory. In 1862 when John made his usual trip to Westport he took his bride east with him and she remained there with his sister, giving birth to their first child. They named the baby Mary Hough Prowers after her aunt (my great-great-grandmother, Mary Prowers Hough)–which has been confusing genealogists ever since.

The Prowers went on to have nine children, eight surviving to adulthood. John became a cattle baron, building up his herds until at the fall round-up of his ranch, the cattle shipment was a matter of train loads, not carloads. Sometimes, according to his daughter, as many as eight train loads left the ranch for eastern markets. At one time, the fall “check-up” showed 70,000 cattle bearing the Box B and the Bar X brands. Later Prowers cut out the middle man, building his own modern slaughter-house in Las Animas.

For a man with very little formal education, he was a creative and scientific rancher/statesman. He was always trying to improve his herd and his ranch. He experimented to find the cattle best suited to the plains country, bringing cattle from Ireland (the Kurry breed) and he bought “Gentle the Twelfth” from Frederick William Stone of Guelph, Canada. At last he turned to the Hereford as the best North American beef animal, calling it the “American type.” Thus he set about systematically improving and enlarging his herds and acquiring larger range. During his lifetime he fenced 80,000 acres of land in one body and owned forty miles of river front on both sides of the Arkansas River, controlling 400,000 acres of land.

He liked to experiment with things other than cattle as well. He introduced prairie chickens and Bob White quail at the mouth of the Purgatoire River. Hoping to increase the wild game in the county he brought in white tail deer. He also experimented with irrigation, having miles of ditches dug on his ranch.

Unlike his sister, who was a devout Baptist, he belonged to no church or lodge, but he always gave generously to resident pastors, no matter what denomination. He founded a bank and had numerous partners who ran stores and shipping operations. He was elected to represent the county in the Legislature and again to represent Bent County in the General Assembly. Furthermore, he sent all his children, boys and girls, to school and to college.

My great-great-grandmother was a great believer in women’s rights and the need for women to be educated and to have their own property. I have no reason to believe that her brother didn’t feel the same way. I’m sure this stemmed from their own mother’s predicament when her husband died.

When a new county was created from Bent County on May 3, 1889, it was named for Prowers, the pioneer and cattleman. I could go on about this great man, and I haven’t even mentioned his dealings with the Cheyenne, but that’s enough for now. Tonight let us raise a toast to him in remembrance.

These words, attributed to the great warrior Tecumseh, seem appropriate:

“Live your life so that the fear of death can never enter your heart…Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and in the service of your people…Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself…
When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose lives are filled with the fear of death, so that when time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”

John Prower’s 14-room house in Boggsville, Colorado

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January 28, 2014

In the deep heart’s core

by chuckofish

William Butler Yeats, famous Irish poet and playwright, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, was 73 years old when he died on this day in 1939.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

You can read more poems by W.B. Yeats here.

4 Comments

January 27, 2014

Grant us strength and courage*

by chuckofish

How was your weekend?

I started mine off by going to a “Mass of Remembrance” (in other words, a Memorial Service) on Friday for the daughter of a friend of mine–a sad occasion, indeed.

However, I have to say that I, who am not easily shocked these days, was shocked to find out that this R.C. church uses white wine in the Eucharist service! (The explanation was that it is easier to clean and does not stain the linen.) Heavens to Betsy! What is the world coming to? I would sooner drink grape juice with the Baptists than white wine at communion. Gluten-free wafers and white wine. I will spare you more grumbling…but honestly what’s next?

I watched Hondo on Friday night and that cheered me up.

Then I had lunch with the boy on Saturday.

We went to Steak ‘N Shake which never lets you down.

Sunday was the pick day weather-wise with blue sky and temperatures in the fifties! I went to church but skipped our 155th Annual Meeting. I walked around my favorite antique mall and then took a long walk around our flyover town in the afternoon and then did some world-class puttering around our house. I caught up on my “desk work” as my Aunt Susanne used to call it.

All in all, not a bad weekend!

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson