“Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.”
–Susan B. Anthony
Okay, name that first line!
It is, of course, the great first line of The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna, published in 1962. I was reminded of this when I found the book at an estate sale on Saturday and bought it.
I plan to read the book soon, but I had hoped to watch the movie. I thought we owned the DVD, but I was wrong. We only have the 2-video VHS set! The story of my life. So no Steve McQueen this weekend.
This is a great movie, you will recall, and it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. It won NONE. They were robbed! This was the year (1966) that A Man for All Seasons took home the big awards–you know, that movie about Thomas More. Bah. Give me Steve McQueen any day.
So anyway, I will have to Netflix the movie and watch it later. Meanwhile, despite this disappointment, I had a good weekend. I had lunch with the boy on Saturday after going to an estate sale together. I worked in the yard and started my DIY project in the bathroom. I went to Church!
I celebrated daughter #2’s birthday with her father by making a trip down to:
A real treat.
And the Florida room is officially open!
Have a great week! It is supposed to rain here all week, but that’s okay. You know what they say about April showers.
Sunday is daughter #2’s 23rd birthday. So today we wish her a Hipy Papy Bthuthdy!
“Can you read, Pooh?” Owl asked a little anxiously, and this is what he wrote:
HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY.
Pooh looked on admiringly.
“I’m just saying `A Happy Birthday’,” said Owl carelessly.
“It’s a nice long one,” said Pooh, very much impressed.
“Well, actually, of course, I’m saying `A Very Happy Birthday with Love from Pooh’. Naturally it takes a good deal of pencil to say a long thing like that.”
(In Which Eeyore has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents)
I’m just saying.
This is my favorite picture of daughter #2 from back in the days when her role model was Stephanie Judith Tanner and she was writing a novel called “A Man from Melville”. Probably because she had two active and outspoken older siblings and had endured years of endless teasing, the Belle was always good at entertaining herself. She was so adept at shrugging it all off and going to her room where she could spend hours working on craft projects and reading Christian romance novels. She’s come a long way since then, but thankfully she is still the same old girl with the sunny, forgiving, glass-is-half-full personality.
I have mentioned before that, although as parents we look back nostalgically at our children’s childhoods and we miss “those days” (and our youth), it is truly wonderful when they turn out to be great adults. We appreciate and love them on a whole new level. And it is true that people who have a sunny, forgiving and generally positive attitude toward life are frequently not appreciated for their depth. In daughter #2’s case, this is a big mistake.
Who else but the Belle could have persuaded me to read Moby-Dick?
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Happy birthday and God keep thee!
*A birthday shout out to our girl Sarah Michelle Gellar as well!
Sarah was born on April 14, 1977. As our loyal readers know, her alter-ego, Buffy Summers, shares a birthday with our mother. We consider her kin.
“How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun.”
– Vincent Van Gogh
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
A new calendar page:
crazy weather:
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
– Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, 1926
It was just days ago that these were under 12″ of snow!
spring cleaning and DIY projects:
flowers on my desk at work from spring gardens:
birthdays:
New spring dresses:
April is Laurence Olivier month on TCM. His movies are featured every Wednesday this month.
Set your DVR tomorrow for Sleuth (1972), A Little Romance (1979) and Clash of the Titans (1981).
And, of course, April is this:
Hope your April is off to a good start!
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth.
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.
–Ezra Pound
Easter turned out to be a lovely day in our flyover town. Warm and sunny. The boy and his bride joined us at church. We were surrounded by small children. They were adorable in their Women’s Exchange finery, but very distracting. I didn’t get a whole lot out of the service, but oh well. It was nice just to be in a (full) church with my family (such as it is with the daughters so far away).
The boy’s Best Man was in town with his girlfriend and they were also at church.
After church we went to Easter brunch at the boy’s in-laws. I brought the dollar rolls and the sticky buns. I did not give the boy a basket this year since he is all grown up, but I had to give him some of these:
I worked in the yard a little when I got home, but since I hurt my back last weekend shoveling snow(!), I couldn’t do much. But it was nice to be outside, soaking up the vitamin D.
I spent a good part of this Easter weekend watching Ben Hur. My husband surprised me with the fancy 50th Anniversary boxed set (on super sale since that was 4 years ago!) Blu-Ray edition of the film–complete with a book about the making of the movie, a facsimile of Charlton Heston’s diary and a whole disc of special features.
Never since the old Lord of the Rings days have I felt like such a nerd. But a happy nerd.
How was your weekend?
Here is the King’s College Cambridge version of one of my favorite Easter hymns which we never sing at church.. It does not include verse 4–my favorite–but I could not find the Radney Foster rendition.
“Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”
This is a long quote, but I hope you read the whole thing and did not skim. Dear daughter #2 shared this quote with me yesterday with the suggestion that “it’s nice to fall back on the Transcendentalist ideas if the institution of the church is failing you.” I guess my recent posts had her a little worried. But fear not, my relationship with the Episcopal Church, though a love/hate one, is a long-term one. From time to time I threaten to leave, but I probably won’t. I just continue to lower my expectations!
Thanks also to daughter #2 for sending her old mama some new music!
Josh Ritter and Trampled by Turtles! Great choices for me, especially the TBT–nothing gets me going in the morning like 21st century bluegrass! Here is my favorite song, titled appropriately “Walt Whitman”:
This song gets my Barbara Stanwyck alter ego all charged up and ready to go. Sometimes I think my driving may suffer, but so far so good.
Happy Easter and have a great weekend!
I regret to say that as Lent comes to a close I haven’t blogged about or even mentioned my usual Lenten movie watching traditions, because, alas, I haven’t watched any of my favorite Lenten movies! Last year I wrote about them here and here and of course here.
Indeed, it hasn’t been a typical Lent. In fact, the only thing I gave up for Lent was going to church! Sigh. Well, anyway, I will definitely watch Ben Hur on Good Friday.
Earlier in March I did try to watch The Bible, the television miniseries produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett on the History Channel, but I really couldn’t watch more than 15 minutes. Myeh.
Perhaps this weekend I will watch some of Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, the miniseries first aired in 1977 which I like very much. It has a wonderful script by Anthony Burgess and I like Robert Powell as the unblinking Jesus.
Also memorable are Laurence Olivier as Nicodemus, my girl Claudia Cardinale as the Adulteress, Ralph Richardson as Simeon, and Ian McShane as Judas. James Farentino (!) as Peter and Ann Bancroft as Mary Magdalene, prove that, although it helps, you don’t have to be British to star in a biblical film. They are both wonderful.
Speaking of favorite biblical miniseries–I love Peter and Paul, a 1981 biblical drama starring Anthony Hopkins as Paul of Tarsus.
Ever since first watching it in 1981, whenever I read the words of Paul, I hear them spoken in Hopkins’ Welsh accent.
What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
“For thy sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8: 31-39
Well, we all worship in our own way.
In weather news the National Weather Service said 12.4 inches fell here on Sunday, beating the one-day record for St. Louis of 12.1 inches set one hundred years ago on March 24, 1912. Woohoo! The high Monday reached the mid 30s, compared with a high of 76 degrees a year ago on that date and 59 the normal high on March 25.
Yesterday I decided to venture forth into our flyover landscape which was draped in the fluffy white stuff. I decided that such an expedition warranted the wearing of my size 5 1/2 Fabiano hiking boots that I wore everyday when I was a junior at Williams College back in the day. They are one of the few things that still fits from my college days–haha! As you can imagine, I do not have many occasions to wear them anymore.
Tromping about in the snow is one of my favorite things to do, and there was much to see in the winter wonderland that is our yard.
This is a flower pot on the front porch:
I wonder how the birds are who live in this rhododendron bush?
This chair looks like it is upholstered in snow!
I guess these guys will have to wait a little longer to adorn the garden.
“You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there–the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
The dual personalities frolicking in the snow with their older brother circa 1964
Let it snow! We’ll be roasting here before you know it.
*Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse
dual personalities 