Weekend | dual personalities

June 3, 2016

“What’s playin’ at The Roxy? I’ll tell you what’s playin’ at the Roxy”*

by chuckofish

Four-day work weeks are the best, n’est-ce pas? It is Friday already. Glory hallelujah!

I have few plans per usual. However, I am going to hear the author Nathaniel Philbrick speak about his latest book, Valiant Ambition, a “surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution, and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold.” You will recall that he is the author of In the Heart of the Sea and several other books about American History. I especially like his book Why Read Moby-Dick?

In this short book he says,

He tells us to call him Ishmael, but who is the narrator of Moby-Dick? For one thing, he has known depression, “a damp, drizzly November of the soul.” But he is also a person of genuine enthusiasms. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher int he Rye, he is wonderfully engaging, a vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest to murder the blues by shipping out on a whaleship.

I love this, because it is exactly what I thought when I read Moby-Dick. I mean, don’t you just love it when you read something that is exactly what you thought already? Great minds and all that.

Beyond this intellectual outing to the Ethical Society, I am going to pursue my usual weekend activities of puttering and straightening up my house.

I may do some further planning for my trip to Kansas City next weekend. Yes, I convinced the OM to take a day off from work and drive out to the western edge of our great state and do some looking around in the Westport area.

Independence and the Opening of the West by Thomas Hart Benton

Good times await. Everything’s up to date in Kansas City, or so they say.

Enjoy your weekend!

*Guys and Dolls

4 Comments

May 31, 2016

Grace and peace to you

by chuckofish

Did you have a wonderful three-day weekend? Mine was quite pleasant. I went to a couple of estate sales and I showed great restraint, which always makes my puritan soul happy.

I rescued one piece of vintage needlepoint–a little Victorian foot stool with K’s in the design.

And I got a giant fern at the grocery store for $12.99.

I went to church and read the prayers of the people. I had lunch with my BFFs and caught up with them before they head off to distant and exotic lands. I also caught up with laundry and cleaning and yard work–all the things that go with home ownership.

I finished Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass which is really more creative non-fiction than fiction. Halfway through I realized that “the Browns” were a real sibling singing group popular in the ’50s and ’60s, not a fictional group imagined by the author. (Jim Ed Brown also had a solo career–remember “Pop a Top”?)

Anyway, the book is reasonably well written and readable–although Bass uses the word ‘incredibly’ as an adverb way too much, a real no-no in my book.

I watched a couple of good movies. Spotlight (2015) about “the true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Catholic Church to its core,” which actually won the Best Picture Oscar this year, is quite good.

Everyone in it is good and Billy Crudup gives a stand-out performance in a small part. It is directed with care and restraint by Tom McCarthy. Maybe a little too much restraint, if you ask me…but effective.

Anyway, I looked up Tom McCarthy to see what else he has done and so watched The Cobbler (2014)–a picture excoriated as the worst film of the year by critics. It was a total box office bomb and a disaster for its star Adam Sandler, but I liked it.

It is the story of a fourth-generation Jewish cobbler on the lower East Side, who is bored with his life when he stumbles upon a magical heirloom that allows him to become other people and see the world in a different way. I have no idea why people hated it so much. Perhaps they expected something different from Adam Sandler–over-the-top vulgarity and crude, slap-stick humor? This movie has none of that. (I’m not sure it was even rated R.) It is thoughtful and sly with good performances all around. Dustin Hoffman even makes an appearance. Perhaps it hits a little too close to home? Well, I say, give it a try on Netflix Watch Instantly.

On Memorial Day the boy and daughter #3 came over for a BBQ. Although all the TV news stations said it would rain all weekend, it never rained until the OM went out to barbeque. Haha, no kidding.

C’est la vie. Happy Tuesday.

3 Comments

May 19, 2016

Soldier, keep movin’ on*

by chuckofish

All this rain and cool weather is doing great things for the iris and for our grass–is it ever green!

In other news, the OM and the boy and I are jetting off this afternoon to Pennsylvania where my niece will get hitched this Saturday. Daughters #1, 2 and 3 all have prior engagements (two graduations and another wedding) so they are not coming. C’est la vie.

The wedding is in Meadville, the home of Allegheny College. William McKinley, you will recall, attended this college and Clarence Darrow and Ida Tarbell graduated from it. The wedding is taking place at the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Fun fact: The song “Bittersweet Motel” by the Vermont jam band, Phish, was inspired when keyboardist, Page McConnell, left a wedding in Meadville and drove down to the Pittsburgh Airport.

Halfway between Erie and Pittsburgh
You’re putting me through hell
On the highway to the Bittersweet Motel

When the only tool you have is a hammer
Everything looks like a nail
And your living at the Bittersweet Motel

Indeed, there is no quick and/or easy way to get there, so this will be an adventure in more ways than not. But I am up for an adventure this weekend…how about you?

Safe travels to all who are traveling. See you ’round campus, man!

*Toby Mac

3 Comments

May 16, 2016

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!” *

by chuckofish

Happy Pentecost! How was your weekend?

We went to the last lacrosse game of the season on Friday after work and enjoyed sitting outside on a beautiful day, watching the game and the people around us. We never talked to the boy but the OM took a few pictures of him across the field with his giant lens.

On Saturday I went to several estate sales, including one in the lovely home of the brother of a former president of the U.S. His wife died a few months ago and I suppose he is down-sizing–you know, the kids took what they wanted and they were getting rid of the rest. The house was lovely and unpretentious, full of familiar things (books and LPs and monogrammed towels) and comfortable in an old school, slightly shabby way–just my style. They even had one of these–our family totem:

(I didn’t buy his, because I have already given one to each of my children.) I did buy an old child’s chair, which had been chewed by a family dog, and a BCP.

A good morning’s outing to be sure.

I finished Nightwoods by Charles Frazier and I highly recommend it. Good characters, tightly paced–well done. I am now reading Hope Leslie written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick in 1827, encouraged by daughter #2 who has read all of Sedgwick’s oeuvre for her dissertation. I am pleasantly surprised to report that Sedgwick is a regular Jane Austen, writing with a wry humor about “early times in Massachusetts.” Indeed the action takes place in the early seventeenth century and explores the “tumultuous relations between Puritans and Pequots.” I love this scene, described in a letter, where the fourteen-year old son pokes fun at an Anglican newcomer during a storm:

But Dame Grafton was beside herself. At one moment she fancied we should be the prey of the wild beast, and at the next, that she heard the alarm yell of the savages. Everell brought her, her prayer-book, and affecting a well-beseeming gravity, he begged her to look out the prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians. The poor lady, distracted with terror, seized the book, and turned over leaf after leaf. Everell meanwhile affecting to aid her search. In vain I shook my head, reprovingly, at the boy–in vain I assured Mistress Grafton that I trusted we were in no danger; she was beyond the influence of reason; nothing allayed her fears, till chancing to catch a glance of Everell’s eye, she detected the lurking laughter, and rapping him soundly over the ears with her book, she left the room greatly enraged.

Now that is funny. “The prayer for distressed women, in imminent danger of being scalped by North American Indians.” I already like this Catherine Maria Sedgwick a lot.

The rest of the weekend was spent pleasantly puttering around, working in the yard, eating the donuts that my friend from Atlanta brought to me at work on Friday (he was in town for the air show)–note they are the “right” donuts–

and going to a garden party in support of the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.

It was held at our friend’s 1867 house high up overlooking the mighty Mississippi…

There was even a bassett hunt.

Not bad for a stay-at-home introvert!

*Psalm 104

4 Comments

May 13, 2016

Weekend plans

by chuckofish

We have had a rainy, stormy week, but the forecast for the weekend is good. I plan to take it easy and prepare for next weekend when I am going to my niece’s wedding in Pennsylvania.

“I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.”

–J.D. Salinger, A Boy in France: Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945

Sounds like a plan to me.

(The painting is by Thomas Hart Benton)

6 Comments

May 2, 2016

Stir up, O south, the boughs that bloom…”*

by chuckofish

…Till the beloved Master come…”

How was your weekend? Mine was quiet and restorative, but also a little sad, since I was thinking always of the weekend before when so many people were visiting. C’est la vie.

I finished E.L. Doctorow’s The March, which, again I say, is so good and wise and well-written.

I did a little yard work, but it was pretty wet and rainy. It is certainly looking lush in flyover land.

I watched a few movies: Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which I finally got my hands on…

(This film recreates the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima scene, taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by photographer Joe Rosenthal. The three surviving flag raisers make a cameo appearance during this scene . Rene A. Gagnon, Ira H. Hayes and John H. Bradley are seen with John Wayne as he instructs them to hoist the flag (Wayne gives the folded flag to Gagnon). The flag used to recreate the incident is the actual flag that was raised on Mount Suribachi.)

and Learning to Drive (2014), a little film starring Ben Kingsley as a Sikh taxi driver/driving instructor and Patricia Clarkson as a book critic whose marriage is falling apart.

Both supplied an entertaining diversion, but were not super great, if you know what I mean. Sands of Iwo Jima features John Wayne saying “Saddle Up!” continuously, so it wins as far as I’m concerned.

I went to church and was a reader–my passage was from Revelation 21 by John, the Revelator, so that was fun. The first lesson was from the book of Acts where Paul goes to Philippi in Macedonia and goes down to the river to pray and meets Lydia. All this made me want to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) which I did.

It was a good choice. (And the last good movie George Clooney made.)

(This is how my mind works.)

*Gerald Near, Christ Has a Garden Walled Around

3 Comments

April 18, 2016

With hearts aflame*

by chuckofish

It was a lovely flyover weekend with temperatures here near 80 degrees on Sunday.

I worked hard outside on Saturday spreading mulch and my back hurt on Sunday so I slowed down some. I planted geraniums in pots.

The boy came over on Saturday night because he was “batching it”–we watched our all-time favorite episodes of Miami Vice:

“Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” (season 2, episode 3)

with Bruce McGill as Hank Weldon

and “El Viejo” (season 3, episode 7)

with Willie Nelson as Jake Pierson

They never disappoint. We are huge nerds, I know, but we amuse ourselves.

In church we sang one of my favorite hymns which always makes me cry.

And it did.

I leave you with the third verse:

The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days;

oh, may thy house be mine abode and all my work be praise.

There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come;

no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.

(Isaac Watts)

Have a good week.

*Hymn #478, Jesus, our mighty Lord, our strength in sadness

8 Comments

April 11, 2016

Consider the lilies of the field

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? Mine was pretty busy–at least for me. I went to a few estate sales, but didn’t find anything of note. I went to a funeral and I went to a fundraiser that daughter #3 had organized with the student government of the high school where she teaches. It was a benefit for the Greater St. Louis Honor Flight which sends WWII veterans to Washington to see the WWII memorial there. The boy was a “guardian” on one of these trips a few years ago. Anyway, we enjoyed the event and the movie about how the charity was started.

Afterwards we went out for pizza and beer.

When I got home I tried to watch Straw Dog (1949), the great Akira Kurosawa film about post-war Japan. A very young and handsome Toshiro Mifune plays a rookie detective who has lost his gun and is madly trying to find it. It is a great, great movie, but I fell asleep.

Mea culpa. It had been a long day.

I re-read Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons. It was her first book and very good indeed.

On Sunday I did a lot of cleaning in my house, throwing away copious amounts of detritus. This always makes me happy.

Now it is Monday. Daughter #1 starts her new job. She no longer works for The Man, but for a start-up digital network, working with creative types who have man-buns. You go, girl!

P.S. Don’t forget in all the hubbub of your daily life to take a moment and enjoy the scenery.

Vintage illustration by Mary Blair

6 Comments

March 4, 2016

A woman at the sink

by chuckofish

“My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink. I felt resentful and bitter towards Helena and Rocky and even towards Julian, though I had to admit that nobody had compelled me to wash these dishes or to tidy this kitchen. It was the fussy spinster in me, the Martha who could not comfortably sit and make conversation when she knew that yesterday’s unwashed dishes were still in the sink.”

―Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

It’s been a busy week and I am looking forward to my weekend. How about you?

3 Comments

February 15, 2016

Meet, right and our bounden duty

by chuckofish

Sunday was the first Sunday in Lent so we had the Great Litany at the beginning of our service–you know, that’s the one where we implore Christ to preserve us from evil and wickedness, from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil, and from everlasting damnation, etc, etc, etc.

We also switch to Rite I in our church so we go back to “and with thy spirit” and “we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries.” Of course, I am one of only a handful of people that probably enjoys this, but oh well, c’est la vie.

It snowed Sunday morning, so a lot of people stayed home, and I might have myself but for the fact that I was reading. It was a good reading too: Romans 10:8b–13

The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); ⁹because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. ¹⁰For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved.¹¹The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” ¹²For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. ¹³For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”

After church, I had to go to the grocery store to pick up the cake for the baby shower I was co-hosting with Becky. The driving was worse than ever, but I got the cake and made it home. Then the OM drove me over to the baby shower and dropped me off with all my stuff. It was a fun party and the mama-to-be received a lot of presents.