quotes | dual personalities

January 20, 2014

“May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks”*

by chuckofish

Happy MLK Day! A three-day weekend is most welcome, n’est-ce pas?

I am enjoying my Monday at home. Hope you are as well.

Yesterday after church I convinced my old man to drive to West Alton to the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, located at the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. It is primetime for watching Bald Eagles and Trumpeter Swans.

Here is a cool video about the awesome Mississippi Flyway:

http://riverlands.audubon.org/videos/spectacle-birds

It was very crowded at the Audubon Center (which is lovely), so we didn’t stay too long, but headed north up the Great River Road.

We saw a lot of eagles. (You know how I feel about raptors.) And eagles are the coolest, right?

“…and there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

(H. Melville)

Someone else’s cool picture of a Bald Eagle on the Mississippi Flyway

I did not take any good pictures with my iPhone, although I tried (see below).

But they were there. The river was filled with chunks of ice.

We drove all the way up through Elsah and Grafton to Pere Marquette State Park and stopped for lunch at the historic Lodge,

but the wait would have been too long, so we headed back down the road and home to terra cognita and our local Schneithorst’s Bavarian Koffee Haus. It was not crowded.

On my own “Road to Oscar” travels, I watched the movie Nebraska this weekend.

It is a “comedy-drama” starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte and is directed by Alexander Payne. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where Bruce Dern won the Best Actor Award. It has also been nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. My guess is it won’t win anything except maybe the screenplay award. We’ll see.

I can’t say I was impressed. It is one of those movies where nothing much happens and is, therefore, “arty”. Plus, it is in black and white, and that makes it even arty-er. It is also about people who live in flyover country, so they are all kind of stupid, vulgar and boring. (I live in flyover country and I do not know anyone like the people in this movie; they are what people who live on the East/West coasts think people in flyover country are like.) The only person who is at all nice is the son played by Will Forte. I kept waiting for something to happen, for the Bruce Dern character to finally have a say, but he never comes out of his dementia-fog. Why the French thought him worthy of the Best Actor award, I’ll never know.

It held my interest–mostly because I was waiting for a pay-off (none came)–and I have to say, my old man sat through the whole thing without a break. That is saying something. However, he didn’t like it either.

I also watched, per my recommendation on Friday, Buffy’s season 4 birthday episode with Giles as a fyoral demon.

It was a much better choice.

P.S. The Broncos won–go, my man, Peytie Pie!

*Gandalf

6 Comments

January 15, 2014

Just routine

by chuckofish

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

For the past 3-4 weeks my routine has been disordered. The holidays will do that.

Sometimes, I admit, it feels like we are adrift in chaos. But I choose to believe I am an individual–created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where I am supposed to be. Therefore, it behooves me to get my act together.

So slowly I am getting my house back in order and my daily routine in sinc.

By the way, last night I watched the second episode of Justified (season 5)–Hello, Raylan.

I have to say: those people live in chaos.

3 Comments

January 14, 2014

Darlin’, pardon me

by chuckofish

Some people, like my dual personality, have inconvenient birthdays right before Christmas. Other people, like daughter #3, have birthdays ~~too soon~~ right after Christmas. Hers is January 6, and what with the polar vortex dropping a foot of snow on our flyover town, we were not able to celebrate until last night.

So, darlin’, happy belated birthday! You are a good sport to come over on a Monday night for toasted ravioli and salad and mini cheesecakes! Best wishes for a fantastic year!

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

3 Comments

January 13, 2014

Weekend update: Another chance to disapprove, Another brilliant zinger, Another reason not to move, Another vodka stinger*

by chuckofish

Mostly this weekend was a time for catching up. I had no social plans beyond a birthday lunch with my girlfriends and church on Sunday. We had a baptism and it was good to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness with my brethren. At the end of the service we sang the interminably long but deeply wonderful “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”. Verse 6 always brings tears to my eyes:

Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

On the literary front, I finished In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, which daughter #2 had encouraged me to read. I enjoyed it, but it was the kind of book where you are always aware that you are reading “literary” fiction. Not really my cup of tea. Great literature does not hit you over the head with its worthiness. Furthermore, I have to say that while some of the characters are engaging, they are also anarchists/terrorists. So again, how can you really care what happens to them? In point of fact, I didn’t.

I watched two movies–one was a really good one: Oscar and Lucinda (1997), an Australian movie directed by Gillian Armstrong and based on the Booker Award-winning novel by Peter Carey. Boy, I really liked it.

Ralph Fiennes plays an Anglican priest in the mid-18th century who is an obsessive gambler. His reasons for gambling are pure and his Pascalian argument for his legitimate use of it as a Christian, completely righteous. He meets Cate Blanchett, who is a compulsive gambler, on the ship going to Melbourne and they become friends. Lucinda bets Oscar her entire inheritance that he cannot transport a glass church to the Outback safely. Oscar accepts her wager, and this leads “to the events that will change both their lives forever.”

I was so impressed with Ralph Fiennes who plays the innocent and devout minister without the least bit of irony or judgement. He is totally believable and likable. Cate Blanchett is as always intelligent and precise and believable. Both are so good as kindred spirits. Plus there are lots of fine actors in smaller roles. The production is beautiful. The music is by Thomas Newman.

Just a great movie! I will have to read the book now.

I also watched Company (2011)–a filmed version of the Broadway show which won the Tony for Best Musical back in 1971.

I was talking to someone at work awhile back and I said I hadn’t ever seen Company and the next thing I knew he had brought it in for me. He said I’d like it. Well, I finally got around to watching it and I did not like it. Stephen Sondheim’s negative take on marriage and relationships (and women in general) is very cynical and “sophisticated”.

Puff puff. But there is not one likable/relatable character in the bunch. The main character, played by one of my least favorite actors–Neil Patrick Harris–is a jerk. Poor Mr. Sondheim. I feel that he was writing from experience.

On the home front, I took down our outside Christmas lights. It was 60-degrees yesterday so it seemed like the smart thing to do. I was impressed with what a good job the boy did putting them up. I guess he isn’t an Eagle Scout for nothin’!

Golden Globe update: FYI June Squibb is from Vandalia, Illinois. You go, Flyover Girl!

And I thought Diane Keaton was lovely.

* “Ladies Who Lunch” by Stephen Sondheim

5 Comments

January 8, 2014

The frolic architecture of the snow

by chuckofish

The Snow-Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

3 Comments

January 6, 2014

The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches*

by chuckofish

Yes, yesterday we had a blizzard.

I ventured out in my trusty college boots, but the snow was way over the rolled cuffs of my jeans and the wind was howling so I headed back inside.

I put away the rest of the Christmas decorations–back to the basement–and tidied up. A blizzard is a great time to get one’s house back in order.

I also responded to some new interest in my old blogpost on the Sand Creek Massacre. The comments section was blowing up! I heard from a Japanese-American who lived as a child in the Amache Internment Camp during WWII and also from a retired history teacher who lived in Lamar, Colorado. It is amazing how the internet connects people.

Blizzards are also excellent for encouraging reading without guilt. I finished re-reading Sackett by Louis L’Amour. L’Amour, you will recall, was the author of 89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction and was considered “one of the world’s most popular writers” during his lifetime. A lot of what he wrote is not that great, but I like Hondo and Sackett. As I have said before, sometimes you are just not in the mood for great literature and need a good yarn.

“People who live in comfortable, settled towns with law-abiding citizens and a government to protect them, they never think of the men who came first, the ones who went through hell to build something.

“I tell you, ma’am, when my time comes to ride out, I want to see a school over there with a bell in the tower, and a church, and I want to see families dressed up of a Sunday, and a flag flying over there. And if I have to do it with a pistol, I’ll do it!”

Sackett–a man after my own heart.

Today, of course, is a snow day as there is no getting out of our driveway. Daughter #2 and I shall attempt to clear it. Onward and upward.

*e.e. cummings

2 Comments

January 2, 2014

Have no anxiety about anything*

by chuckofish

I think this will be my mantra for 2014. It is a good mantra.

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie ten Boom

Be strong! Have a great day.

*Philippians 4:6

4 Comments

January 1, 2014

Face to the front

by chuckofish

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.

–Henry Ward Beecher

AMEN!

Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 – March 8, 1887), you will recall, was quite a fellow.

The son of the celebrated preacher Lyman Beecher and the brother of renowned author Harriet Beecher Stowe, he was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God’s love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His personal life was the thing that soap operas are made of and it is pretty amazing that no one has thought to make a movie about him. (But we do not want this guy to play him!)

He is cool enough, after all, to have a statue in Brooklyn.

Statue of Beecher in Brooklyn, NY

I would like to go see the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn where he was the first pastor. (This would be a fun walking tour.)

57 Orange Street between Henry and Hicks Streets in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood

According to the NHL, it was designed “to accommodate the large crowds that came to hear Beecher and his cohorts. Its simple design reflects the Puritan ethic of plain living and high thinking, and the walls that once rang to the sound of abolition oratory remain largely unchanged.”

Among those who came to hear Beecher were Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. In fact, so many flocked to hear his sermons that special “Beecher boats” were needed to ferry the throngs from Manhattan!

Abraham Lincoln stained glass window by Frederick Stymetz Lamb

“The stained glass windows of Plymouth Church are widely recognized as artistic treasures. The prominent artist Frederick Stymetz Lamb designed, and his brothers of the J. and R. Lamb Studios in Greenwich Village built the nineteen major windows of the Sanctuary, and installed between 1907 and 1909. As planned by then-minister Newell Dwight Hillis, they are unusual in depicting historical, not religious, subjects, taking as their theme the influence of Puritanism (the parent of Congregationalism) on the growth of liberty in the United States-personal liberty, religious liberty and political liberty.”

Well, it’s my kind of place. And as you know, this is how my mind works.

Happy New Year! Thanks for reading our blog in 2013! Keep reading in 2014!

3 Comments

December 31, 2013

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come*

by chuckofish

The blogosphere, as you can imagine, is all about new year’s resolutions right now. Lists of resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking, save money, get fit, drink less, manage stress. You get the picture. Well, no thanks. January, I will admit, is a good month to get one’s closets in order, to edit one’s stuff, to clean house. But so is every month. You gotta keep up with these things or you can be buried alive.

That goes for a lot of things.

When it comes to New Years Resolutions, we can do better. I suggest we read the Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards– all 70 of them.

According to the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, the Resolutions were Edwards’ guidelines for self-examination. Puritans set great store by biblical injunctions to submit themselves to divine searching and to monitor their motives and actions. On a community level, congregations were exhorted to practice introspection as a duty of great consequence.

Edwards lays out the Resolutions in a matter-of-fact style, treating them much like scientific principles. Of the seventy resolutions, the first one dated, No. 35, was written on December 18, 1722, when the Diary begins. The last, No. 70, was composed on August 17, 1723.

Let’s resolve to be more self-examining. We can do better.

“There are always two sides to every story, and it is generally wise, and safe, and charitable, to take the best; and yet there is probably no one way in which persons are so liable to be wrong, as in presuming the worst is true, and in forming and expressing their judgement of others, and of their actions, without waiting till all the truth is known.”
― Jonathan Edwards, Charity & Its Fruits

*Alfred Tennyson

3 Comments

December 20, 2013

People disagreeing everywhere you look makes you wanna stop and read a book.*

by chuckofish

So recently the Man Repeller’s Amelia Diamond was cogitating about who she would choose as her celebrity BFF. You can read it here. This is a brilliant topic.

She was writing about her imaginary friendship with Mindy Kaling, a twenty-something wunderkind with whom I can not relate. Daughters #1 and 2 think she is hilarious, but I’m afraid I am neither young or hip enough to get her. She went to Dartmouth and so did my BFF, so we have that going for us. I will probably reverse my opinion on Mindy at some future point, but sorry, no.

The comment section of this post was fascinating. Answers included Emma Stone, Tina Fey, Cecily Strong, Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Axl Heck from The Middle and Bernadette and Penny from The Big Bang Theory. And Angela Lansbury. (I have no idea whether these people realize that some of these are fictional characters or if they mean the actors who play them. If that is, indeed, the case, they should know the names of their BFFs.) Okay then.

Well anyway celebrities don’t really matter much to me these days. The only well-known person I would like to hang out with is of course, Bob Dylan. We could be BFFs.

We are a lot alike. We read a lot. We stay out of politics. We love the Lord. He is a better and more prolific writer than I am, but I understand the process. We trust our gut. We are even starting to look alike.

And we are in total agreement that:

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed…

I have also always felt that Johnny Depp is probably a long lost family member. He always reminded me of my older brother in his younger days. This may come as a surprise to his children, but it’s true.