March was a slow reading month. Too much student work to read. In fact, looking back on the month, I’m not even sure what I finished reading.
| Author | Book |
|---|---|
| John Polkinghorne | Belief in God in an Age of Science |
| Gary Paulsen | Nightjohn |
Month: March 2010
Productivity
Spring break has arrived, and as always, I am certain I will make it a productive time.
First, planning: I fire up my word processor of choice and begin planning the creative writing course I’m teaching when we return for the final quarter of the year. Nine weeks, three major topics: creative nonfiction, poetry, and short stories. It’s a bit ambitious, I’m sure. One adviser recommended that I stick to poetry. “A short story is such a complex thing to write.” Perhaps, but I’ll give it a try anyway. Yet no matter what, I’ll change it substantially before next year’s session: I just can’t leave well enough alone.
The yard needs some work. Our neighbor has been kind enough to share the massive amounts of chickweed and dandelions that have utterly conquered her once-magnificent yard, and the only way to get rid of weeds — as with so many other issues in life — is to pull them up by the roots. Even then, I’ll be out there again in a week, fighting more.
Our kitchen faucet is leaking. The whole thing probably needs to be replaced. Our back sillcock, freshly replaced, needs to be replaced yet again. “Faulty manufacturing,” the gentleman at Home Depot tells me when I take it back. I exchange it with another one, same model. It’s a crap shoot, I’m sure.
Productivity, then, seems to be temporary, cyclical even. After all, if I fixed a leaky faucet and it stayed fixed, what would I do in three weeks’ time?
Two Recent Portraits
Inevitable
It’s a nightly occurrence: a few minutes after we put the Girl to bed, she calls one of us. It’s usually “Mama!”
We take turns answering the call, and L doesn’t seem to matter who responds.
“Yes, sweetheart,” I say as I open the door, and I immediately one of several possible answers. Sometimes it’s just a fragment of a story she remembered; sometimes it’s something straight from her imagination. It could be that she needs juice or that she wants to rock with me in the rocking chair for a moment. Occasionally she’s not pleased with the sleeping music.
“Yes, L,” I say tonight as I enter her room.
“We didn’t rock,” she replies calmly.
I take her out of her bed and sit with her own my lap. Usually she’s a little squirmy. Tonight she’s too tired to squirm.
Out of the blue, she opens the age-old conversation: “Tata, I don’t want to grow up.”
“You don’t have a choice. None of us do.” I think this, but I certainly don’t say it. Instead, I simply ask her if she likes being three.
“Yes,” she says quietly. She snuggles a little closer, pauses, and leaves me speechless, whispering, “Three’s easy.”
Handmade
While Babcia was here, she kept busy. Luckily for us (or should I say “Luckily for L”), the way she usually keeps busy is through crotchet. Her visit gave Babcia just enough time to make a dress and cap for the girl.
Let’s Go Fly A Kite
March is a month for kite flying. Though I rarely flew kites, it was always a favorite pastime for me as a kid. Perhaps it’s the indirect flying. We introduced kite flying to the Girl this weekend, much to her excitement.
When shopping for our kite, there was only one criterion: there must be a princess on it.
“I’m not a _____! I’m a princess!” L is fond of saying these days. In the blank can be just about anything, even “little girl” (or “big girl” for that matter). Once the princess kite was assembled
and launched, L was fascinated.
For about three minutes.
Much more inviting were the rocks and twigs scattered about.
Myrtle Beach
If there is a town with kitsch as the central design premise, it is Myrtle Beach.
As a kid, I’d always wanted to go there. All my friends went there during the summer, and for us southwest Virginians, it was at least a seven-hour journey. It was not a place where one merely spent the weekend.
I finally went to Myrtle Beach this weekend for a middle school conference. It was everything I expected.
All decor seemed to have a heavy-handed marine theme, especially for the restaurants
and the stores. My companions and I wondered about the warmth of being invited into a shark’s mouth for a little shopping
Given the fact that all such shops are peddling to tourist, it seems somehow perfectly appropriate.
The kitsch extended all the way to the oceanfront, with hotels painted colors that only rarely occur in nature.
And then there were the mini-golf courses. We counted at least twelve on the main road, each with a different theme applied to the same goal: knock a golf ball through some obstacle.
“Who knew that the market could support this number of courses,” I muttered as we passed by yet another.
But we weren’t there for entertainment but for education, and we all received enough information to make us wish we could turn back the calendar to the beginning of the year and start again. In that sense — as well as the collection of mini-golf shots — it was a greatly successful weekend.
February’s Books
| Author | Book |
|---|---|
| Richard Neuhaus | As I Lay Dying: Meditations on Return |
| Shakespeare | Romeo and Juliet1, 2 |
| Donald Sopoto | In Silence: Why We Pray |
| Alf Mapp | The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed |
| Yann Martel | Life of Pi1 |
Romeo and Juliet
Every year I teach this I learn something new about it. This time, I noticed some symmetry in Juliet’s lines when she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt and Romeo’s response to the opening scene’s brawl. Juliet describes Romeo in III.ii:
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
These oxymorons mirror what Romeo says in I.i:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,
sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
And I was struck, ever more forcefully, by Romeo’s utter immaturity. He whines and cries in III.iii, learning of his banishment, as if here were a toddler who’d had his toys taken away from him. In fact, that seems to be all Juliet is in that passage.
As I Lay Dying: Meditations on Return by Richard Neuhaus
This book opened my thinking in many ways. First, it introduced me to the writings of Simone Weil and inspired me to buy one of her books, Gravity and Grace.
The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed by Alf Mapp
We often hear claims about the Founding Fathers’ religious views, with those claims fairly accurately reflecting the religious and political beliefs of the speaker: conservatives claim they were all traditionalist Christians; liberals claim they were deists with only a token belief in God.
A few surprising things I learned:
- Ben Franklin was positively polytheistic, believing in a supreme god who was over a lesser god, the creator of our universe.
- Thomas Jefferson’s books were not place in the Philadelphia Public Library’s circulation as late as 1830 because of a belief that he was an atheist. He was, briefly, in his youth. Eventually, he became something of a Christian, though he rejected all notions of the supernatural. He even edited his own version of the New Testament, removing all reference to miracles.
- Benjamin Franklin was a guest of the Hellfire Club at least twice, though according to some sources he was merely spying.
- George Washington refrained from taking communion. There is some conjecture that he did so because he felt “unworthy”, as defined in First Corinthians 11:25-29, with verse 29 being key: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”
- John Marshall was famous for his Christian ethics and charity, but like Washington, he didn’t take communion.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
It used to be one of my favorites. When I learned about the charges of plagiarism, the book lost a lot of its sheen. Still, the combination of zoology and spirituality makes the book worth it on a basic level. (I read this during our daily Silent Sustained Reading period at school. I wasn’t necessarily intending on re-reading it, but I needed to set the proper example, and that was the the only book at hand.)
1. Re-read
2. For school