Tom T. Hall's Old Dogs & Children, Watermelon Wine plays in the background but it’s currently Old Breviaries, Irish Histories, and Guinness Stout in reality. Giddily printed twenty or so pages (mostly at random) among the Dublin Review, a prayer book and various & sundry others as provided by Google’s antique book program via Bill White. Closest thing you can get to time travel I’d say. They say you have to visit another country in order to understand your own, i.e. in order to see its strengths and weaknesses. So you have to travel to another time in order to see our own time in its proper perspective. History does it too, but modern histories are often so soaked in the Zeitgeist that the past feels less like a foreign country than Muncie, Indiana. But reading the sources, the first person accounts, singes with authenticity. Only the must & dust are missing.
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I think Fall officially began this week, replete with fogs and clouds and the occasional crystalline day. Time to give the ball to the Southern Hemisphere. My wife and Hambone say this is their favorite time of year but I say it’s an acquired taste – by the time you acquire it, it’s winter. They may think it sweet but it’s bittersweet, stocked as it is with nostalgia. The burnt-sienna memories come flooding back like the cool in the nostrils during high school football games when you get the sensation of running loose on the wet grass without ever actually having done so. Some memories aren’t even memories! But there I am, Tony Farkus, the shiftiest little running back that ever graced a football field. And if he’d shake a tackle he’d get loose like a eight-ball streaking headlong towards the pocket.
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Nostalgia, yes. As another blogger recently haiku’d:
I never ate paste.A worthy epitaph: "I never ate paste."
Kindergarten memories
abound as fall comes.
The paste eater, she
chewed erasers in first grade.
Bad pencil lendee…
Kindergartens too
exist in a fallen world.
In schools and in homes.
Nostalgia yes, but the kind that haunts too. Like the time I was in the hospital for a week, a seven-year old scared and lonely, and how there was great comfort in television commercials, as if everything would be okay if there were still commercials. The dark abyss of night was overcome by the light and ease emanating from the pitchmen. I made a mental note at the time that if I were ever in this predicament again I could rely on commercials. Wrong. So wrong.
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The morning lawn is full of dew, soaking through the mesh of my running shoes. I guess mesh is a “feature, not a bug” but it feels otherwise given wet socks. The street is dry and I enjoy the rare morning walk and the odd sensation of sun coming from the opposite direction. The ancients knew their sun. In Ireland we toured Newgrange, an ancient construction that allowed the sun to strike the inside only at the winter equinox, the turning point for longer days. When the cats ascend to the window we call it “Kitty TV” but to the ancients the stars were their television and they knew them like the back of their hands. The natural world was their entertainment in a way we can scarcely comprehend.
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Is it just me, or is the Drudge Report is becoming ridiculously kitsch-y? My wife’s pastor loves Drudge and has made it his home page; he must have a wider curiosity than me. I suppose you could see it as a window on breaking news and pop culture. I suppose the natural tendency of aging is that one’s interest narrow and, ideally at least, deepen. I don’t care one iota what Madonna is doing and I’m irritated he’s publicizing her. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…well if Madonna outrages Christians and no one hears it, did it still happen? Talk about living off the capital of Chrisitanity! I guess she’s doing what Shelby Foote said James Joyce did – reacting against their Christian upbringing for fame and profit. It works apparently. Today’s Drudge featured a photo of Babs Streisand sans bra. Breaking news – famous singer goes out without benefit of a bra! I think Drudge has jumped the proverbial shark. If I wanted to see braless singers I'd subscribe to Maxim.
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How sweet it is to think that just as God commends us to love Him with our “whole heart, our whole soul, and our whole mind” he therefore loves us with his whole heart, whole soul and whole mind. What a good deal for us! Reading St. Paul’s famous passage on love, “Love is patient, love is kind.. “ in 1 Corinthians 13 it becomes clear that Paul is seeing a bigger picture than the Corinthians were. He was seeing the ends and they were concentrated on the means. The end result of speaking in tongues would be...personal satisfaction and personal consolation. The end result of prophesying was far more useful, since it helped the Church, and he spoke well of it. But overarching all was love, that oftimes elusive slippery word.
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Sister-in-law’s party was a bit more colorful than normal. I think the unusual timing, a Friday night, was responsible. Everyone's a bit slap-happy from the fatigue you naturally accrue by Friday night. Does “Happy Birthday” span a full octave? I guess what The Star-Spangled Banner is to professional singers, Happy Birthday is to amateurs. It’s tough to get the crowd in tune on that one. It's hard to sing it when someone nearby is out of tune since it feels like you’re singing out of tune. But, as Letterman said, "it's not a competition; please no wagering."
The controversies were many, including a gas leak, and not the kind where you call the power company. Hopefully she’ll “just say no” to baked beans in the future. Other controversies included a case of marital interruptus of the rudest kind; she smiled sheepishly but we were hoping for a bit more blush in her face as this was discussed. Heard bro-in-law was wearing a Superman shirt at the family camping trip we missed a couple weeks back. He’s got the chest for it, much like George Reeves did. C.S. Lewis’s famous line about “men without chests” can’t apply to Chrismon. Given his general fearlessness it almost makes a phrenologist out of me, or the chesty equivalent.
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