Archive for March, 2010
Filed under: faithPosted: March / 31 / 2010
One of the consequences of growing up in church is that I’ve heard many of the stories many times. Some – like Palm Sunday – many, many times. In these cases, I often find myself thinking about peripheral aspects of the story. Like this Sunday, I noticed the colt and the rocks, and the ways in which this story is about how grace is restored to nature too.
We’re told that Jesus sent them out for a colt who had never been ridden; either Jesus is some kind of amazing horse whisperer, or he was being bucked all over the place on the way into Jerusalem. I rather think the story would have been a bit different if that were the case. Nope, they brought him a horse that hadn’t been broken in, he got on, and rode it a long way along a confusing path, with people yelling and waving stuff at him, not the kind of thing a newly broken-in or unbroken horse generally tolerates well. This little horse has his little part in the redemption story, and he does it well.
When Jesus is scolded by the Pharisees, who ask him to shush the people, he responds that the stones would praise him if the people didn’t. One has to admire the restraint of the stones, yearning to call out their praise; they’ve been silent since creation, and now, at this moment when they long to sing out, they remain silent. I wonder if they know how their song would terrify the people; even though this is their salvation too, they maintain silence for our sakes. (If the rest of creation fell with humankind, surely they are offered redemption together with us).
Well, Miss Baby woke up this morning with the dry heaves. She didn’t have anything to barf up. She sat on the couch with her daddy most of the day, watching TV, taking a break to cuddle with me long enough to barf all over me. Poor thing; she kept begging for carrots or raisins or milk. Eventually, we gave her some apples, and they stayed down. Eventually, she was watching Kai-lan, and the Little Guy found Miss Baby’s tiger tail (we have a lot of costume equipment), and was Rintoo. Miss Baby perked up, “Miss Baby Hoho!!!” and insisted that we give her a tail too. We did so, and a slow-speed chase in a circle around the couch followed in due course. We’re hopeful.
The Little Guy and I were driving home from church, when we saw a whole bunch of police cars in front of an apartment building on Ramsey Street. The Little Guy said, “Something happened there,” and I said, “Something bad, by the looks of it.”
This worried him: “There are bad guys in Fayetteville? That means our house isn’t safe. What about those people who broke into your car?”
“Ahh, those were just teenagers,” I said.
“But those are the worst bad guys, aren’t they? Teenagers?” he said.
Well, one day he’ll be a teenager, so I don’t want to tell him I generally find teenagers tedious. So I tried to explain that teenagers aren’t necessarily bad, but they’re halfway between being kids and grownups, and they are trying to find a way to be different from their parents. They’ve always done what their parents have told them, and they want to be different, so sometimes they do bad stuff to be rebellious, not because they’re really and truly bad. I suggested that maybe a teenager could find a way to be different from his or her parents without doing bad stuff. He agreed readily: “Yeah, I’m going to start a railroad. That’s something my parents never did, but it’s a good thing to do.”
That’s my boy. He’s eight, and he has his constructive, socially responsible teenage rebellion all planned out.
OK, so, the Little Guy has been tremendous this week at school. Not just good, but off the charts. On Monday, he asked me what he could do to make the day go faster, and I said, when you are working on something, think only about that thing. Then things will get done quicker, and the day will seem faster. He’s been working on this method all week (earning high priase from his teacher) and has even branched out to improve other areas of his life. He tends to be a bit of a loner on the playground, and sometimes he wishes other kids would play with him. My DH suggested that sometimes he should play what other kids are playing (instead of some complex activity that relies heavily upon his internal train monologue), so he tried it. He built a volcano out of traffic cones with all the girls (he listed them — seriously, it was all the girls but the one he considers his enemy).
Well, we felt the need to reward him in a dramatic way that would stress how pleased we were with this week’s events, so we took him to the NC Transportation Museum, in Spencer. That’s 155 miles each way; we rode a train, looked at many old trains and old cars, and rode the turntable. The site used to be a major steam train works, as it is halfway between DC and Atlanta. So they have a teriffic facility, and as you can imagine, the Little Guy was over the moon.
Miss Baby had a surprisingly good day too. Normally, this is the kind of excursion she enjoys too — she likes spending time in the car with her brother, and she likes trains and cars and the like. When we arrived, she exclaimed, “Here it is!” However, she had a rough start to the day — we almost didn’t go, because she woke up barfing. However, she was really hungry after that, so we fed her a little gentle food, and figured that, if we kept her in her stroller, it would actually be a somewhat mellow day. So, off we went, after explaining to the Little Guy that we might have to turn back if she got sick. Well, she barfed again, about 10 miles before we got there. We went ahead, figuring she had nothing left to barf. I cleaned her up — she sadly observed the process, saying, “oh no!” as I unbuckled her seat belt to find her lapful of barf — and off we went. She was fine, enjoyed everything, asked for cookies and ice cream and got neither.
So now we’re back, returned from our adventure. The Little Guy has a brain full of Railroad history, and Miss Baby took a relieved little bath and crawled into bed. Her blankets came out of the drier just a few minutes after I laid her down, so I brought them in to her: “Thank you blankets, Mommy,” she said, with a wan little look.
…unfortunately, it’s in Vaudeville.
The Little Guy has been inventing jokes lately. Here are two:
What kind of sickness does a refrigerator get?
A cold!
What kind of furniture does a cow sit on?
A couch!
Classic 8-year old material.
Well, we had a springlike first day of spring. We got up this morning and went to the consignment sale at the big church at this end of town, picking up a few warm-weather items for the little people. Then we drove to Cary, about an hour north. It was a nice drive, with all the pear and tulip trees and forsythia in bloom. We even saw sheep and lambs. We had a picnic lunch in a nice park; the Little People enjoyed the playground and played nicely with others (the Little Guy sat on the swings and chatted with a little girl for some time). Afterwards, we went to Trader Joe’s, our actual goal in going that far, and stocked up on frozen orange chicken and pinot grigio. The Little People pushed little carts, and we had to stop Miss Baby from filling hers with wine (trouble like that, I don’t need). Home again, the Little People played until dinner. After dinner, the Little Guy and I went to Target, and I bought a bike (it was on sale). Really! I’ve wanted a bike for a while, and we are trying to get the Little Guy enthused about bike-riding. I’m thinking the Guy might be better-motivated if he has a riding partner.
The Little People really enjoyed themselves today. Most of the way back, they sang and lauged to each other. They rolled the windows down and waved their hands out the sides, chatting about the “windy wind.” Miss Baby was amused at her hair: “Windy wind hair, Daddy!” I remembered all the family trips we took when I was a kid, and would sit in the back playing and chatting with my brother, and thought of that moment in Up, when Russell comments that “I guess it’s the little stuff I remember the most” (approximately). I hope they remember these things when they’re older.
I have a student, an accounting major, who came to me after class to ask about Pacific Islander literature. (Even accounting majors have to take literature courses here, and this is her second one with me).
She’s interested, because she is from Guam, and she wants to write, mostly books about her family. I could recommend some Filipino writers, but I don’t know of any Guamian ones. Anybody out there have any suggestions?
If we can’t find any other Guamian writers, I guess that means I know one of the first.
At school, we were discussing Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” (along with Bierce, Twain, and Crane). The title character of Alcott’s story dies after the assault on Ft. Wagner. I came home to find my DH watching Glory.
It’s Civil War night here.
Last week I read A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. It’s an interesting — long! — autobiography by a fellow who was involved with the early development of manga. It totally has that “Floating World” feeling, as the protagonist moves from between Osaka and Tokyo, joining different manga groups and publishers, sometimes living in apartments with other artists, sometimes working, sometimes not (living with other artists seems to be detrimental to the creation of art — drinking is involved). The book definitely doesn’t feel tied to that whole Aristotelian beginning-middle-end thing; there’s no big ta-da ending to the book. Still, it is interesting, and often quite beautifully drawn.
It’s interesting to me that while he re-names the character that represents himself, Tatsumi still draws him somewhat accurately. Even though he has a different name, he looks like Tatsumi, which has started me thinking about self-portraiture in graphic novels. Joe Sacco always draws himself as a gawky caricature with flat, round glasses, so that you can’t see his eyes; Marjane Satrapi’s style is so stylized that her drawn self blends in rather than stands out….
Well, I’ve read two mystery novels this week.
The first was Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time . Alan Grant finds himself in the hospital after what must have been a dramatic chase scene; the entire story takes place in the hospital as he recouperates. Friends bring him books and the like to while the hours, but he fixates on a picture of RIchard III, whom he thinks doesn’t look like a criminal (evidently he would know). He’s put in touch with an expatriate American historian who becomes his researcher, and they work to find out just what happened to the princes in the tower. It’s more exciting and interesting than it sounds, but then, I find well-paced research exciting and interesting. It’s rather persuasive on the subject of Richard III, too. If I were teaching a history class, I’d definitely consider assigning this, especially as it frames lots of nice questions about historiography, research, evidence, etc.
The second was Amanda Cross’ Death in a Tenured Position, which I also enjoyed as a sort of amusing relic of the second wave. The mystery surrounds the fictional first tenured female English prof at Harvard; most of the book explores sexism in academia. A lot of this stuff is still out there, in different ways and to varying degrees, but this book presents an extreme case. It will make you glad you didn’t go to Harvard (and those grapes were sour anyway), and the detective is an English professor, so I’m there with her. I like that she solves the mystery by reading the deceased professor’s books, but was rather disappointed with the way it came out in the end (I won’t tell, so as not to spoil it). I am interested in reading something else with the same detective, though; it’s not her fault the author wimped out in the end.
