I think not. Anyway, it's official: in company with two super-excellent other writers, Danielle Bean and Simcha Fisher, I'm going to be guest-blogging for The Anchoress while she's in Rome. Bright lights! Big city! Look out, because Ma Kettle's got Mapquest. Whatever . . . that . . . means, exactly.
While Ma fiddles with the GPS, I have to think about things. Lately I haven't been doing that -- at least, I've been thinking, but the effort of rendering thought into prose has made me go all lethargic somehow. I can say, this happened, and then this happened, and then we did this, the end, thanks for playing, but when it comes to putting it all together on a larger level, talking about the how and the why and the what-it-means, I lie right down in the middle of the road and say to my favorite demon, Sloth, "Why don't you just come run over me now?" And he does. And then he backs up and does it again. Demons are so obliging when you play their way.
I'm trying to write fiction -- yes, yes, serial-story fans, the operative word here is trying, which as we all know is the word we use when we're not, really, all that hard. Honestly, I don't know yet what Maris is supposed to do next. I'm not sure she's supposed to have done the last three things she did, or that we didn't start off on the wrong premise altogether. The thing about writing fiction, as I am discovering, is that making a world, whether it's another one altogether or a reasonable facsimile of our own, you inevitably run up against all those same questions I've been avoiding lately. It's hard to know what your people do, and what they do next, and then what they do after that, if you don't know what the basic rules are in your universe: the right and wrong, the history that tells you what people have always done, whether your people choose to do -- whatever it is -- that way or not. Now, you can get a fair distance down the road on simple instinct, because funnily enough the laws of your created world do kind of comport with your instincts. But it seems to me that at some point you have to start articulating to yourself what those instincts are, and it also strikes me that you can have been a reflective person all your life and still find that hard.
Or maybe that's just Sloth revving up for another run over my treadmarked soul. I don't know.
At any rate, bright lights/big city is a theme I want to ponder this week, as is the ongoing-unto-perpetuity-world-without-end slapdown thing that seems to go on between the "Trads" and the "Mods" whenever anyone starts talking about Catholic liturgy as, for example, Father Rutler did the other day On the Square. As a convert of fairly recent vintage I feel something like an adoptee who comes bringing, on the one hand, a certain set of baggage -- I tell people my favorite hymn is "Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies," and realize that unless my husband is present, I'm the only person in the room who's ever heard of it. On the other hand, I have virtually none of the lifetime-Catholicism baggage which animates these arguments from both sides: mostly I think neither, "Thank God for freeing us from that dead and rotting language," nor, "Thank God for freeing us from meaningful eye contact with Father during the hand-holding around the altar, let it be anathema." Okay, maybe already you can tell that I have certain biases, but they really don't have much to do with the language, as in the tongue, of the Mass. Suffice it to say that I'd like to probe those a little.
Meanwhile, because of course I have to write what we did, and then what we did next, let me just share that I spent the early part of the day promising several pounds of flesh to the very nice orthodontist in exchange for something for which there isn't exactly one good word. A particular child's dentist had told me, at our last visit with him, that this child had a pre-molar "growing through the roof of his mouth." I believe those were the exact words he used. He intimated that this might really not bother the child too much.
Oh, how I longed to believe that. You do not, I promise you, want to lie awake at night visualizing a tooth growing through the roof of your child's mouth, let alone imagining what that might feel like.
So today I am in love with the orthodontist, because now I've seen a picture of the inside of this child's mouth, and it's honestly not the nightmare I was trying not to have. "Growing through the roof of his mouth" translates, as it turns out, as "Well, basically, his canine tooth and his pre-molar are sort of next to each other, which is why the canine sticks out funny." For some reason, and of course teeth are not rational, the tooth which should have slipped neatly into the space provided for it behind the canine decided instead to double-park.
That's not nearly as horrifying as what I had imagined, but it's still going to take about two years, not to mention a fair amount of metal, to repark those teeth. And then there are the pounds of flesh to reckon with. But the orthodontist is, as I say, a nice guy, which is good since we're going to be seeing a lot of him.
Watch this space, because having acquired the nifty new computer, I'm itching to try out more podcasting and other special effects. And whatever I put up at The Anchoress I will cross-post here -- though I hope you'll visit there and keep us all company.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
And a Sunday Smile
When my brother and sister-in-law were here two weeks ago, we returned from Mass to the sounds of banjo-pickin' on the front porch. Crispina was eager to try out her own pickin', and sartorial, style, and my brother took this picture of her. It's been a long time since I posted identifiable photographs of my children here, but this one was just too cute to keep to myself.
Sunday Chant Experiment #1
Well, by the grace of God and my sweet husband's generosity -- he underwrote this development with his earnings from last weeks' conference -- I have a nifty new computer. Oh boy, oh boy, repeat ad infinitum.
Now, I've long been interested in the idea of podcasting. My friend The Anchoress has often recorded herself reading or singing the Daily Office, and some time last year, when I was trying to explain to someone how we have chanted our prayers here at home, it occurred to me that it would be cool to be able simply to sing them into the computer, provide a link to them, and say, "We do it like this."
So I've been messing around with things, and have managed to 1) record myself singing some chant, and 2) figure out how to upload the file to a site on the net, so that I can link to it from here.
Buyer beware. I am not a trained singer. Besides, singing to the computer makes me feel like a dork, and when I'm self-conscious, my throat just closes right up. But I gave it a try because, you know, this whole audio thing has potential beyond my inflicting my singing on an unsuspecting world, and I'm very keen to try it out.
Chant is easy to sing, and at Saint Dymphna's we tend to sing a lot of it, partly because if we don't, nobody will ever hear it or know that it's part of their heritage; and also because when your choir numbers range from six down to . . . well, sometimes zero, and very often one, you have to have something simple-yet-effective to whip out of the binder and unleash on the congregation.
Today's chant, and I really did sing this at Mass this morning, in front of real live tolerant people, is Ave Verum Corpus.
Let's see if it works . . .
Now, I've long been interested in the idea of podcasting. My friend The Anchoress has often recorded herself reading or singing the Daily Office, and some time last year, when I was trying to explain to someone how we have chanted our prayers here at home, it occurred to me that it would be cool to be able simply to sing them into the computer, provide a link to them, and say, "We do it like this."
So I've been messing around with things, and have managed to 1) record myself singing some chant, and 2) figure out how to upload the file to a site on the net, so that I can link to it from here.
Buyer beware. I am not a trained singer. Besides, singing to the computer makes me feel like a dork, and when I'm self-conscious, my throat just closes right up. But I gave it a try because, you know, this whole audio thing has potential beyond my inflicting my singing on an unsuspecting world, and I'm very keen to try it out.
Chant is easy to sing, and at Saint Dymphna's we tend to sing a lot of it, partly because if we don't, nobody will ever hear it or know that it's part of their heritage; and also because when your choir numbers range from six down to . . . well, sometimes zero, and very often one, you have to have something simple-yet-effective to whip out of the binder and unleash on the congregation.
Today's chant, and I really did sing this at Mass this morning, in front of real live tolerant people, is Ave Verum Corpus.
Let's see if it works . . .
Saturday, August 28, 2010
This Guy May Just Save All Our Lives
Because sometimes the arty-humanities family needs saving.
Check it out.
Many, many, many tips of the hat to Izy for pointing me this way. I'm going to try her fried-rice and tofu recipes, too.
Check it out.
Many, many, many tips of the hat to Izy for pointing me this way. I'm going to try her fried-rice and tofu recipes, too.
Friday, August 27, 2010
A Week in the Life and Other Thoughts: Seven Quick Takes: Updated and Illustrated!
1
This week first- and second-grade homeschool looked something like this:
*a decade of the rosary
*a short read-aloud
Currently we're reading Caryll Houselander's beautiful Catholic Tales for Boys and Girls, which Amicus had given to Helier for his birthday back in the summer, but which had sat unread till now.
Today, though, we read about Saint Monica, since it's her feast day.
*some language-arts work.
The routine we've settled into is to begin with a handwriting exercise or some copywork: something that can be done quietly and without much direction from me.
Then we do spelling. I am having them keep informal spelling journals, which are really right now just a piece of that elementary writing paper, with the dotted line in the middle of each line, folded in half vertically (so the lines are still horizontal), to make a small booklet. It's tall enough to accommodate two of the three holes made by a three-hole punch, so fits into the bottom two rings of each child's binder. As we fill these (a set of four words per half-sheet page per week), we'll add more pages.
I'm taking four words from each child's reading lesson of the week (the first grader is doing CHC's Little Stories for Little Folks phonics program, which she loves, while the second grader is devouring their Bigger Stories for Little Folks. It's an easy read for him -- in fact, he's already finished it -- but each story comes with useful practice words, and I'm planning to go back and have him reread and narrate by illustrating each story next week. And I cannot overstate how much he loves this book. Highly recommended).
Each child copies the words one day, then we look at them and spell them aloud without looking, then we do the venerable old "look, cover, write, check" method a few times over. Today I had them both practice their words orally, then I gave them to them as dictation.
Then the second grader reads to himself, while I take the first-grader into another room to have her read aloud to me.
*math
Right now we're just doing basic-facts drill and review. I drew each child a number line to work with, which seems to be a better option for us than manipulatives, which are distracting. Why add seven and five when you can build a house with the Cuisenaire rods? I did their number lines in ink, hole-punched them so that they can live in binders, and have had the children work out their addition and subtraction problems in pencil, so they can erase their "bounces." The first-grader just finished a page of "sums to seventeen," and the second-grader, having just done a review round of subtraction, embarked this week on basic mathematical laws: the commutative property, the associative property, the zero or identity property, the law of inverse operations. I'm thinking of giving these to him as copywork next week.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for some math literature to arrive in the mail, to give us an excuse to use some of our math time for yet more read-aloud time. I ordered The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat for this age group, and
The Number Devil
for, potentially, everyone.
*history and science
I put these two together not because they're afterthoughts. They actually took a lot of our time this week, but overlapped so much that it's hard to say exactly where history ended and science took over. Part of that's a function of what our history topic is at the moment. This year the first- and second-graders are doing a timeline project on, for lack of a better name, Bible history. That is, we're following the Old Testament as an outline, starting each new unit with Bible stories, but studying as much as we can of the whole context of each period, with geography, art, and examination of the various civilizations who enter the picture -- ancient Egypt, for example.
So right now we're in Genesis, at the Creation. Not a lot of art and architecture and civilizational overlap to deal with. So instead we've spent some time on dinosaurs and other prehistoric matters (with discussions about the different ways the story gets told), and wound up on a Creation-Day-Three rabbit trail about plants. I did some reading aloud from a book from my own childhood, Exploring Nature With Your Child, 
which gave us the image of the leaf as a factory, taking in carbon dioxide and water, breaking them down into their separate elements, using the carbon and hydrogen to make sugars and other foodstuffs for the plant, and giving off the excess oxygen, which we then breathe. (and I never knew this, but apparently at night plants give off carbon dioxide the way we do -- I guess because they need light to break it down. So if you have lots of houseplants in your bedroom, be sure to keep the window open).
So we've picked leaves and examined them. We've drawn and labeled and colored leaves (I had them make more mini-books like their spelling ones). And today we did a leaf project which I only thought to do because the first-grader's girls' group at church did the same thing last night.
To do this project you need a clean white cloth, big enough to be folded in two (or else two clean white cloths to lay one on top of the other), a hammer, and a nature walk to find leaves. We went over behind the old high-school gym at the bottom of our street, where there's a shallow ravine which functions as an undeveloped neighborhood park. The kids collected magnolia, redbud, sweet gum, and maple leaves. We laid our cloth -- each child had his own -- out on the pavement by the gym, arranged our leaves on half the cloth and folded the other half over the top. Then we hammered on the dim shapes of the leaves inside the cloth. This made the green sap bleed out, staining the cloth top and bottom in roughly the shape of the leaf being thus battered. When all the leaves are hammered to a pulp, you shake, or peel, or scrape them off the inside of the cloth, and you have a sort of green batik-look piece of semi-accidental art, suitable for hanging up on your wall with poster putty.
We brought ours home and ironed them to try to "fix" the color -- we'll see how long it lasts. Apparently you can also put them in the dryer. Anyway, it's a good exercise in identifying different kinds of leaves and in really noticing chlorophyll.
I'll post pictures as soon as the picture-posting computer comes home. (and now they're posted, as you can see)
Addendum: This unit study has a literature component, too: we're reading The Magician's Nephew. Plus we're doing copywork, art -- plant art, for example -- and as much other stuff as I can come up with to append to our study.
2
Okay, so that was a long take. This one is quick.
3
See?
4
Meanwhile, the seventh-grader has just finished tracing a map of the ancient Middle-East and labeling Phoenician trade routes, the Phoenicians having been his historical-research topic this week. And the senior just appeared in the doorway wearing safety goggles: for chemistry today she has to measure the density of pancake syrup, and the directions specify that she wear safety goggles, lest she spill some Mrs. Butterworth's in her eye.
5
From my Holy Hour reading last night, a meditation by Fr. Thomas Dufay on Jesus' words in Mark 1:15, "Be converted and hear the gospel":
I might . . . suggest the view of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is widely considered the best novelist of the nineteenth century. In one of his letters we read: "I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect that Jesus -- not only is there no one else like him, there never could be anyone like him."
. . . [I]ndeed no man has spoken as this man has. The reason of course is that he happens also to be divine. People who are well on the way to a deep love for truth, goodness and beauty readily embrace his person and his message. Because they are converted, they welcome the gospel -- just as Jesus said they would.
It's true that if I have trouble loving the gospel, if one teaching or another comes hard at a given time, I can remedy that by thinking about the Person, from whom, in His whole divine humanity, or human divinity, you really can't isolate anything He said.
6
On the vanity front, I bought myself a great dress. I bought it because I thought I was going to England on a little journalistic spree and would need something I could pack in a briefcase and wear basically every day. The journalistic spree did not pan out, alas, but I'm not actually sorry to have bought the dress. I wear it backwards, because the front's a bit low-cut for me, so in the neckline it looks not like what you see in the picture, but sort of early-Sixties Muriel-Sparkish instead. I can't find the precise photograph of Dame Muriel that I'm thinking of, but it's on the front of my friend Al's volume containing Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington. (and darn, even on Amazon there's no image for this volume, so you'll just have to continue in the dark).
Anyway, it's a great dress, very light and drapey and flattering to the imperfect figure. I've worn it bare-shouldered, I've worn it with various cardigans, and yesterday I wore it under a lightweight jersey pullover, because I was going to be at church most of the day, and it's always cold in the building. The fabric is what I guess you'd call travel fabric, a sort of sheen-y poly-spandex no-wrinkles knit which is much cooler than it sounds. It's fairly thin, and if you happen to be wearing it, and you pull it away from yourself a little and look at it, you can see right through it, which is alarming, especially in the middle of Mass. I'd looked at myself in the mirror that morning to be sure nothing was showing that shouldn't, and nothing was, that I could see. Afterwards I grilled every member of my immediate family, making them look at me as I stood in front of the sunny window, and everyone swore my dress wasn't see-through at all.
So, a mystery.
7
My journalistic spree is off, but other things are on the horizon. A blogging friend is going on a spree of her own, to someplace where she expects to have limited internet access and not so much time for keeping up with her blog. More details to come; suffice it to say that you may find someone you know playing dress-up in a pair of more-than-excellent blogger shoes. (not to mention this really great lady-journalist travel dress, with various cardigans and earrings). Who says you have to leave home to find adventure?
Thanks to Jen for hosting yet another Friday Quick Takes. Isn't this a little like hosting a potluck while you're having your kitchen gutted? Heroes among us, &c.
PS: Of course you know all these book links are sponsored and generate a fortune for us here at the Castle. Vacation greetings from the trap and skeet range. Wish you were here.
This week first- and second-grade homeschool looked something like this:
*a decade of the rosary
*a short read-aloud
Currently we're reading Caryll Houselander's beautiful Catholic Tales for Boys and Girls, which Amicus had given to Helier for his birthday back in the summer, but which had sat unread till now.
Today, though, we read about Saint Monica, since it's her feast day.
*some language-arts work.
The routine we've settled into is to begin with a handwriting exercise or some copywork: something that can be done quietly and without much direction from me.
Then we do spelling. I am having them keep informal spelling journals, which are really right now just a piece of that elementary writing paper, with the dotted line in the middle of each line, folded in half vertically (so the lines are still horizontal), to make a small booklet. It's tall enough to accommodate two of the three holes made by a three-hole punch, so fits into the bottom two rings of each child's binder. As we fill these (a set of four words per half-sheet page per week), we'll add more pages.
Each child copies the words one day, then we look at them and spell them aloud without looking, then we do the venerable old "look, cover, write, check" method a few times over. Today I had them both practice their words orally, then I gave them to them as dictation.
Then the second grader reads to himself, while I take the first-grader into another room to have her read aloud to me.
*math
Right now we're just doing basic-facts drill and review. I drew each child a number line to work with, which seems to be a better option for us than manipulatives, which are distracting. Why add seven and five when you can build a house with the Cuisenaire rods? I did their number lines in ink, hole-punched them so that they can live in binders, and have had the children work out their addition and subtraction problems in pencil, so they can erase their "bounces." The first-grader just finished a page of "sums to seventeen," and the second-grader, having just done a review round of subtraction, embarked this week on basic mathematical laws: the commutative property, the associative property, the zero or identity property, the law of inverse operations. I'm thinking of giving these to him as copywork next week.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for some math literature to arrive in the mail, to give us an excuse to use some of our math time for yet more read-aloud time. I ordered The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat for this age group, and
The Number Devil for, potentially, everyone.*history and science
I put these two together not because they're afterthoughts. They actually took a lot of our time this week, but overlapped so much that it's hard to say exactly where history ended and science took over. Part of that's a function of what our history topic is at the moment. This year the first- and second-graders are doing a timeline project on, for lack of a better name, Bible history. That is, we're following the Old Testament as an outline, starting each new unit with Bible stories, but studying as much as we can of the whole context of each period, with geography, art, and examination of the various civilizations who enter the picture -- ancient Egypt, for example.
which gave us the image of the leaf as a factory, taking in carbon dioxide and water, breaking them down into their separate elements, using the carbon and hydrogen to make sugars and other foodstuffs for the plant, and giving off the excess oxygen, which we then breathe. (and I never knew this, but apparently at night plants give off carbon dioxide the way we do -- I guess because they need light to break it down. So if you have lots of houseplants in your bedroom, be sure to keep the window open).
To do this project you need a clean white cloth, big enough to be folded in two (or else two clean white cloths to lay one on top of the other), a hammer, and a nature walk to find leaves. We went over behind the old high-school gym at the bottom of our street, where there's a shallow ravine which functions as an undeveloped neighborhood park. The kids collected magnolia, redbud, sweet gum, and maple leaves. We laid our cloth -- each child had his own -- out on the pavement by the gym, arranged our leaves on half the cloth and folded the other half over the top. Then we hammered on the dim shapes of the leaves inside the cloth. This made the green sap bleed out, staining the cloth top and bottom in roughly the shape of the leaf being thus battered. When all the leaves are hammered to a pulp, you shake, or peel, or scrape them off the inside of the cloth, and you have a sort of green batik-look piece of semi-accidental art, suitable for hanging up on your wall with poster putty.
We brought ours home and ironed them to try to "fix" the color -- we'll see how long it lasts. Apparently you can also put them in the dryer. Anyway, it's a good exercise in identifying different kinds of leaves and in really noticing chlorophyll.
Addendum: This unit study has a literature component, too: we're reading The Magician's Nephew. Plus we're doing copywork, art -- plant art, for example -- and as much other stuff as I can come up with to append to our study.
2
Okay, so that was a long take. This one is quick.
3
See?
4
Meanwhile, the seventh-grader has just finished tracing a map of the ancient Middle-East and labeling Phoenician trade routes, the Phoenicians having been his historical-research topic this week. And the senior just appeared in the doorway wearing safety goggles: for chemistry today she has to measure the density of pancake syrup, and the directions specify that she wear safety goggles, lest she spill some Mrs. Butterworth's in her eye.
5
From my Holy Hour reading last night, a meditation by Fr. Thomas Dufay on Jesus' words in Mark 1:15, "Be converted and hear the gospel":
I might . . . suggest the view of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is widely considered the best novelist of the nineteenth century. In one of his letters we read: "I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect that Jesus -- not only is there no one else like him, there never could be anyone like him."
. . . [I]ndeed no man has spoken as this man has. The reason of course is that he happens also to be divine. People who are well on the way to a deep love for truth, goodness and beauty readily embrace his person and his message. Because they are converted, they welcome the gospel -- just as Jesus said they would.
It's true that if I have trouble loving the gospel, if one teaching or another comes hard at a given time, I can remedy that by thinking about the Person, from whom, in His whole divine humanity, or human divinity, you really can't isolate anything He said.
6
On the vanity front, I bought myself a great dress. I bought it because I thought I was going to England on a little journalistic spree and would need something I could pack in a briefcase and wear basically every day. The journalistic spree did not pan out, alas, but I'm not actually sorry to have bought the dress. I wear it backwards, because the front's a bit low-cut for me, so in the neckline it looks not like what you see in the picture, but sort of early-Sixties Muriel-Sparkish instead. I can't find the precise photograph of Dame Muriel that I'm thinking of, but it's on the front of my friend Al's volume containing Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington. (and darn, even on Amazon there's no image for this volume, so you'll just have to continue in the dark).
Anyway, it's a great dress, very light and drapey and flattering to the imperfect figure. I've worn it bare-shouldered, I've worn it with various cardigans, and yesterday I wore it under a lightweight jersey pullover, because I was going to be at church most of the day, and it's always cold in the building. The fabric is what I guess you'd call travel fabric, a sort of sheen-y poly-spandex no-wrinkles knit which is much cooler than it sounds. It's fairly thin, and if you happen to be wearing it, and you pull it away from yourself a little and look at it, you can see right through it, which is alarming, especially in the middle of Mass. I'd looked at myself in the mirror that morning to be sure nothing was showing that shouldn't, and nothing was, that I could see. Afterwards I grilled every member of my immediate family, making them look at me as I stood in front of the sunny window, and everyone swore my dress wasn't see-through at all.
So, a mystery.
7
My journalistic spree is off, but other things are on the horizon. A blogging friend is going on a spree of her own, to someplace where she expects to have limited internet access and not so much time for keeping up with her blog. More details to come; suffice it to say that you may find someone you know playing dress-up in a pair of more-than-excellent blogger shoes. (not to mention this really great lady-journalist travel dress, with various cardigans and earrings). Who says you have to leave home to find adventure?
Thanks to Jen for hosting yet another Friday Quick Takes. Isn't this a little like hosting a potluck while you're having your kitchen gutted? Heroes among us, &c.
PS: Of course you know all these book links are sponsored and generate a fortune for us here at the Castle. Vacation greetings from the trap and skeet range. Wish you were here.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
First-Communion Thoughts
This morning at our annual mandatory look-out-here-it-comes catechists' meeting, a friend of mine fell to reminiscing about her First-Communion dress. She had made her First Communion in the mid-Seventies, when the going look was a miniskirt and white nylon knee socks, a kind of retro which has yet to come back into fashion. The contemporary First Communicant Girl -- if my class last year is any indication -- envisions herself more as a billowy Disney-Princess-in-Waiting, with veil.
My friend asked me what my First-Communion pictures looked like, and I said I didn't really have any, having made my First Communion as quietly as I could manage at the age of 42. I don't remember what any of us wore, only that Amicus was running a fever in the triple digits and read the first lesson at Mass with sweat visible on his upper lip. In a way, except for the fever, it was what my wedding might have been like, had I been in charge: small, simple, over as quickly as possible, so as to get on with this whole new life I'd decided, more or less irrevocably, to embark on. I do not, incidentally, regret one bit having lots of pictures of my wedding, or anything else about it, for that matter. It was beautiful as it was, thank you very much. On the other hand, nor do I really regret not having a framed memento of my taking passage in the Barque of Peter. Of that experience I can carry what matters, easily, in the pocket of my soul.
So it's not exactly because my own First Communion lingers so vividly at the forefront of my memory that I'm serving as the First-Communion catechist at Saint Dymphna's. It's more a case of, well, here am I, a warm idle body at coffee hour. At least, that was last year. This year, it's knowing how great the harvest, how very, very, very few the laborers, and how very, very, very much else the DRE has to do already besides hunt down more help.
Also, last year was fun. And I like seeing my last-year's students in Aldi. "Hey, Miss Sally! Hey, Miss Sally!" they yell across the parking lot as they pile out of the car, their Spanish-speaking mothers nodding cordially as they swirl towards the door on an eddy of children. "Hey!" the former First Communicant will occasionally add. "I made my Ninth Communion last week!"
Or, well, sometimes they don't say that, because they haven't been back to church since the dress went to the dry-cleaner's. But they still greet me like a long-lost distant eccentric great-aunt, and I am glad to see them.
Meanwhile, now it's this year, and I'm walking in with my eyes open, I hope. I won't, I won't, I won't get caught out by the fact that Father wants First Confessions in January, or that there will be appearances by various saints who, delightful as they are, do take up class time. I will, I will, I will assign homework, mostly along the lines of Make your family pray the Rosary this week. If they don't want to, tell them it's your homework, and you don't want to flunk Faith Formation. I will also forbid bathroom breaks unto perpetuity. Whatever faith formation goes on the in the bathroom does not concern us at this time.
Things we are doing this year:
1. Making a First-Communion notebook, which will include
* a checklist to keep track of Masses, confessions, reading, prayers, and sacrifices. I'm not quite so gullible as to think that they won't all just check off everything because they wish they'd done those things all week, or would like me to think that they'd done them, but I think we'll just have to let that be a private matter, between each person and God. I'd rather trust them than police them.
*a calendar page for each month, with saints' days marked and the appropriate liturgical colors colored on (I want us to see the overlap between the world's calendar and the Church's, month by month)
* copywork, chiefly of prayers we want to memorize (with illustrations; we'll append images of the Trinity to our page with the Sign of the Cross, for example)
* narrations-via-artwork
*coloring pages
*writing (letters to God, etc)
*what else? Help me out here, those of you who've done FHC notebooks before.
2. Reading Saint Patrick's Summer, by Marigold Hunt. I'm going to use this as a spine, rather than the Faith and Life textbook which covers essentially the same ground less living-bookishly. While the children do quiet work (copying, drawing), I'll read aloud to them, and then they can narrate what we've read.
3. I want to use Fr. Bliss's My Path to Heaven
as a mini-retreat during Lent. My idea is that I'll scan the Caryll Houselander illustrations so that I can project them, via a computer-projector hookup, onto the wall for the children to see, while I use the text for a series of guided meditations.
4. Sending them home to (I hope) engage their families in the practice of their faith. On a pragmatic level, I don't have an enormous amount of hope that they will all actually go home and evangelize their families, but what are we going to do, not try? If one kid talks his or her family into praying a daily Rosary this year, I will fall down in gratitude.
This, then, is the game plan. Prayers appreciated. If it happens that you're teaching First Communion this year, too, I'll pray for you.
My friend asked me what my First-Communion pictures looked like, and I said I didn't really have any, having made my First Communion as quietly as I could manage at the age of 42. I don't remember what any of us wore, only that Amicus was running a fever in the triple digits and read the first lesson at Mass with sweat visible on his upper lip. In a way, except for the fever, it was what my wedding might have been like, had I been in charge: small, simple, over as quickly as possible, so as to get on with this whole new life I'd decided, more or less irrevocably, to embark on. I do not, incidentally, regret one bit having lots of pictures of my wedding, or anything else about it, for that matter. It was beautiful as it was, thank you very much. On the other hand, nor do I really regret not having a framed memento of my taking passage in the Barque of Peter. Of that experience I can carry what matters, easily, in the pocket of my soul.
So it's not exactly because my own First Communion lingers so vividly at the forefront of my memory that I'm serving as the First-Communion catechist at Saint Dymphna's. It's more a case of, well, here am I, a warm idle body at coffee hour. At least, that was last year. This year, it's knowing how great the harvest, how very, very, very few the laborers, and how very, very, very much else the DRE has to do already besides hunt down more help.
Also, last year was fun. And I like seeing my last-year's students in Aldi. "Hey, Miss Sally! Hey, Miss Sally!" they yell across the parking lot as they pile out of the car, their Spanish-speaking mothers nodding cordially as they swirl towards the door on an eddy of children. "Hey!" the former First Communicant will occasionally add. "I made my Ninth Communion last week!"
Or, well, sometimes they don't say that, because they haven't been back to church since the dress went to the dry-cleaner's. But they still greet me like a long-lost distant eccentric great-aunt, and I am glad to see them.
Meanwhile, now it's this year, and I'm walking in with my eyes open, I hope. I won't, I won't, I won't get caught out by the fact that Father wants First Confessions in January, or that there will be appearances by various saints who, delightful as they are, do take up class time. I will, I will, I will assign homework, mostly along the lines of Make your family pray the Rosary this week. If they don't want to, tell them it's your homework, and you don't want to flunk Faith Formation. I will also forbid bathroom breaks unto perpetuity. Whatever faith formation goes on the in the bathroom does not concern us at this time.
Things we are doing this year:
1. Making a First-Communion notebook, which will include
* a checklist to keep track of Masses, confessions, reading, prayers, and sacrifices. I'm not quite so gullible as to think that they won't all just check off everything because they wish they'd done those things all week, or would like me to think that they'd done them, but I think we'll just have to let that be a private matter, between each person and God. I'd rather trust them than police them.
*a calendar page for each month, with saints' days marked and the appropriate liturgical colors colored on (I want us to see the overlap between the world's calendar and the Church's, month by month)
* copywork, chiefly of prayers we want to memorize (with illustrations; we'll append images of the Trinity to our page with the Sign of the Cross, for example)
* narrations-via-artwork
*coloring pages
*writing (letters to God, etc)
*what else? Help me out here, those of you who've done FHC notebooks before.
2. Reading Saint Patrick's Summer, by Marigold Hunt. I'm going to use this as a spine, rather than the Faith and Life textbook which covers essentially the same ground less living-bookishly. While the children do quiet work (copying, drawing), I'll read aloud to them, and then they can narrate what we've read.
3. I want to use Fr. Bliss's My Path to Heaven
as a mini-retreat during Lent. My idea is that I'll scan the Caryll Houselander illustrations so that I can project them, via a computer-projector hookup, onto the wall for the children to see, while I use the text for a series of guided meditations.4. Sending them home to (I hope) engage their families in the practice of their faith. On a pragmatic level, I don't have an enormous amount of hope that they will all actually go home and evangelize their families, but what are we going to do, not try? If one kid talks his or her family into praying a daily Rosary this year, I will fall down in gratitude.
This, then, is the game plan. Prayers appreciated. If it happens that you're teaching First Communion this year, too, I'll pray for you.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Last-Ditch Quick Takes
We've had rain this week, rain on rain, mostly at night, with intervals of thunder and lightning. The other night I was awakened not so much by the weather as by the dog, who was crying at the bedroom door to be let in out of . . . well, not the storm itself, obviously, because he was already inside the house, but out of the loneliness of the other room, which the storm outside served to magnify. I crawled out of bed and opened the door, and he came slinking miserably in and lay down not on his bed, ie the bed in our room where he sometimes likes to sleep, generally when the futon is occupied by houseguests, but on the hard wood floor by my side of the bed. Actually, he managed to wedge about two-thirds of himself under the bed, and there he slept the remainder of that turbulent night.
*
The nights have been turbulent, not only because of the rain, but also because Aelred has been at a conference in Colorado all week. When he is away, I sleep badly and have bizarre dreams, most of which I don't remember later, which is a mercy for you, because then you don't have to read about them. Suffice it to say that when I'm alone I habitually wake up disoriented at two-forty-five in the morning, thinking I'm in some other house, or on some other planet, maybe, or convinced that there's someone else in the room -- besides the dog, that is. I wake up worried or grief-stricken about things I can't even remember; all that's left of whatever I was dreaming is the lingering sense of anxiety, guilt, or heartbreak generated by some forgotten action in my subconscious.
*
Meanwhile, some of Aelred's confreres at this conference -- say that five times fast -- who don't know me, I might add, have taken to calling me "Mary McCarthy." At the beginning of the week, Aelred told me, one of these confreres was talking about an article he had read, which he had liked very much and sent around to all his friends; he thought it was maybe by Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, but as it turned out it was by me, who am reasonably alive, if a little hung over from all the night turbulence. So now people keep telling Aelred to tell Mary McCarthy hello, and I keep telling him to tell them that I really dig all that Catholic symbolism.
(I should add, because I habitually remember the joky part but not the charitable part, that I'm really flattered that anyone would recommend something that I had written, and perfectly happy to be mistaken for Mary McCarthy, or anyone else, for that matter.)
*
The summer is getting on. The nights, between rains, have a soggy, hung-over feel, and the lightning bugs are thinning out, maybe because nobody feels like chasing them any more. It's that elegiac time when you -- I, I mean -- recount all the things you -- that is, I -- meant to do with the beautiful days and didn't. The squirrels have eaten the corn and torn down the sunflowers; by the backyard wall, the morning glories which were trellised on Helier's sunflowers have buried the broken stalks, in the way that kudzu will bury an eighty-foot tree overnight, the chief difference being that kudzu doesn't bloom.
Anyway, it's all a mess out there, and I keep thinking that when the weather cools off I'll care again, which of course is exactly what I said, or the inverse of it, in February and March, when things were a mess and the wind was cold. And as I say it, I keep wondering whether I'll ever actually do anything about anything, or whether the rest of my life will be always the wrong season.
*
In the mountains it's been wet, and the creeks are running high and fast. On Wednesday, however, the day was bright and hot in that slanted golden way that almost tastes of fall. The children and I went up on the Blue Ridge Parkway with a cluster of families: some homeschoolers and some school-schoolers, a religious and ethnic mix of families who know each other from Irish dance and bagpipe corps and I'm not sure what all else, who have been holding a last hurrah in the mountains at the end of every summer for I'm not sure how many years.
We went to a place with picnic tables and a creek. The little kids waded and fished for minnows in the sunlit-amber water where it rattled over rocks as coldly smooth as ancient eggs. The teenagers took the dogs and went for a five-mile hike, from which various parties came straggling back over the course of the next three hours, having completed more or less -- or less or more -- of the loop trail.
Several mothers and two little girls went hiking as well, though not nearly so far. We crossed the creek and followed a trail which doubled back along it, through meadows of goldenrod, thistle, and some purple flower both like and unlike a butterfly bush, all higher than our heads. The sun shone hot on the flowers, and the butterflies lolloped past us, and the creek plashed and swirled and threw its shine back at us like an unseen person signalling with a mirror.
Then the trail swung into the trees, and we were among primordial-looking ferns and the smell of wet leafmould, in places the sun didn't touch. At one place, an enormous triangular boulder stooped over the path to make not a cave, exactly, but a sort of rock lean-to, which pleased the little girls exceedingly. Just beyond that, the trees opened out on the stream again, and there were wide flat rocks where mothers and girls could sit and put their feet in the cold water, listening to the rush, rush of the current which never stops, which goes on while we sleep, which is going on even now, like the time which slips away from us while we're not paying attention. We could stop; it kept running away over and under and around our bare feet.
*
I read this today in Saint Louis de Montfort, whom I am still reading even after having made this consecration last Sunday:
*
And finally, the new American Science and Surplus catalog is here! We're somebody!
Now, whether we're somebody who needs, for example, squirrel underpants (also fits guinea pigs!), I'm not really sure. What I'd like is a set of squirrel neckties -- very, very tight squirrel neckties, for all those fat happy corn-and-sunflower-seed-hogging boa rats out there. On the other hand, there's the satisfying thought of the squirrel wedgie . . .
Or, looky here: an arachnid as big as a pizza. In the normal scheme of things, I like my arachnids as big as, oh, I don't know, something outdoors, if you get my drift, though not a tree or a car. So maybe pizza-sized isn't such a bad set of dimensions for a spider, especially if it's a fakester.
Or if you don't like spiders, you can get a desk viper.
Or a "Boy Scout in a Bottle." I was prepared to think this was really funny, until Amicus explained to me that it's just a survival kit in a water bottle. Survival schmurvival. I was hoping for something that went "A Scout is helpful . . . " when you shook it, or tried to sell you popcorn.
I'm happy to see they still carry my favorite item, the Screeching Monkey Superhero, something we should all be with and not be without.
Well, it's 11:45. I've staved off the nocturnal weirdness as long as I can bear to, or maybe I haven't. Maybe I've gotten it over with. That's a hopeful notion, and I think I'll try to sleep on it.
Thanks as always to Jen for hosting Friday Quick Takes. Wishing Conversion Diary a smooth conversion to Wordpress; my, that vodka cranberry looks appealing.
*
The nights have been turbulent, not only because of the rain, but also because Aelred has been at a conference in Colorado all week. When he is away, I sleep badly and have bizarre dreams, most of which I don't remember later, which is a mercy for you, because then you don't have to read about them. Suffice it to say that when I'm alone I habitually wake up disoriented at two-forty-five in the morning, thinking I'm in some other house, or on some other planet, maybe, or convinced that there's someone else in the room -- besides the dog, that is. I wake up worried or grief-stricken about things I can't even remember; all that's left of whatever I was dreaming is the lingering sense of anxiety, guilt, or heartbreak generated by some forgotten action in my subconscious.
*
Meanwhile, some of Aelred's confreres at this conference -- say that five times fast -- who don't know me, I might add, have taken to calling me "Mary McCarthy." At the beginning of the week, Aelred told me, one of these confreres was talking about an article he had read, which he had liked very much and sent around to all his friends; he thought it was maybe by Mary McCarthy, who died in 1989, but as it turned out it was by me, who am reasonably alive, if a little hung over from all the night turbulence. So now people keep telling Aelred to tell Mary McCarthy hello, and I keep telling him to tell them that I really dig all that Catholic symbolism.
(I should add, because I habitually remember the joky part but not the charitable part, that I'm really flattered that anyone would recommend something that I had written, and perfectly happy to be mistaken for Mary McCarthy, or anyone else, for that matter.)
*
The summer is getting on. The nights, between rains, have a soggy, hung-over feel, and the lightning bugs are thinning out, maybe because nobody feels like chasing them any more. It's that elegiac time when you -- I, I mean -- recount all the things you -- that is, I -- meant to do with the beautiful days and didn't. The squirrels have eaten the corn and torn down the sunflowers; by the backyard wall, the morning glories which were trellised on Helier's sunflowers have buried the broken stalks, in the way that kudzu will bury an eighty-foot tree overnight, the chief difference being that kudzu doesn't bloom.
Anyway, it's all a mess out there, and I keep thinking that when the weather cools off I'll care again, which of course is exactly what I said, or the inverse of it, in February and March, when things were a mess and the wind was cold. And as I say it, I keep wondering whether I'll ever actually do anything about anything, or whether the rest of my life will be always the wrong season.
*
In the mountains it's been wet, and the creeks are running high and fast. On Wednesday, however, the day was bright and hot in that slanted golden way that almost tastes of fall. The children and I went up on the Blue Ridge Parkway with a cluster of families: some homeschoolers and some school-schoolers, a religious and ethnic mix of families who know each other from Irish dance and bagpipe corps and I'm not sure what all else, who have been holding a last hurrah in the mountains at the end of every summer for I'm not sure how many years.
We went to a place with picnic tables and a creek. The little kids waded and fished for minnows in the sunlit-amber water where it rattled over rocks as coldly smooth as ancient eggs. The teenagers took the dogs and went for a five-mile hike, from which various parties came straggling back over the course of the next three hours, having completed more or less -- or less or more -- of the loop trail.
Several mothers and two little girls went hiking as well, though not nearly so far. We crossed the creek and followed a trail which doubled back along it, through meadows of goldenrod, thistle, and some purple flower both like and unlike a butterfly bush, all higher than our heads. The sun shone hot on the flowers, and the butterflies lolloped past us, and the creek plashed and swirled and threw its shine back at us like an unseen person signalling with a mirror.
Then the trail swung into the trees, and we were among primordial-looking ferns and the smell of wet leafmould, in places the sun didn't touch. At one place, an enormous triangular boulder stooped over the path to make not a cave, exactly, but a sort of rock lean-to, which pleased the little girls exceedingly. Just beyond that, the trees opened out on the stream again, and there were wide flat rocks where mothers and girls could sit and put their feet in the cold water, listening to the rush, rush of the current which never stops, which goes on while we sleep, which is going on even now, like the time which slips away from us while we're not paying attention. We could stop; it kept running away over and under and around our bare feet.
*
I read this today in Saint Louis de Montfort, whom I am still reading even after having made this consecration last Sunday:
. . .[Y]ou never think of Mary without Mary's thinking of God for you. You never praise or honor Mary without Mary's praising or honoring God with you. Mary is altogether relative to God; and indeed, I might well call her the relation to God. She only exists with reference to God. She is the echo of God that says nothing, repeats nothing, but God. If you say, "Mary," she says, "God." St. Elizabeth praised Mary, and called her blessed, because she had believed. Mary, the faithful echo of God, at once intoned: "My soul doth magnify the Lord."
That which Mary did then, she does daily now. When we praise her, love her, honor her, or give any thing to her, it is God who is praised, God who is loved, God who is glorified, and it is to God that we give, through Mary and in Mary.
*
And finally, the new American Science and Surplus catalog is here! We're somebody!
Now, whether we're somebody who needs, for example, squirrel underpants (also fits guinea pigs!), I'm not really sure. What I'd like is a set of squirrel neckties -- very, very tight squirrel neckties, for all those fat happy corn-and-sunflower-seed-hogging boa rats out there. On the other hand, there's the satisfying thought of the squirrel wedgie . . .
Or, looky here: an arachnid as big as a pizza. In the normal scheme of things, I like my arachnids as big as, oh, I don't know, something outdoors, if you get my drift, though not a tree or a car. So maybe pizza-sized isn't such a bad set of dimensions for a spider, especially if it's a fakester.
Or if you don't like spiders, you can get a desk viper.
Or a "Boy Scout in a Bottle." I was prepared to think this was really funny, until Amicus explained to me that it's just a survival kit in a water bottle. Survival schmurvival. I was hoping for something that went "A Scout is helpful . . . " when you shook it, or tried to sell you popcorn.
I'm happy to see they still carry my favorite item, the Screeching Monkey Superhero, something we should all be with and not be without.
Well, it's 11:45. I've staved off the nocturnal weirdness as long as I can bear to, or maybe I haven't. Maybe I've gotten it over with. That's a hopeful notion, and I think I'll try to sleep on it.
Thanks as always to Jen for hosting Friday Quick Takes. Wishing Conversion Diary a smooth conversion to Wordpress; my, that vodka cranberry looks appealing.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Homeschool Notes
"It's that time again," she said, her voice freighted with doom.
Actually, if she'd done what she said she was going to do, it would never have been not that time, but she had yet to come up with the spinal fluid necessary to making children subtract fractions with different denominators one from another in July. And so, having not been that time in what seemed like a time without time -- July, plus the first two weeks of August, in other words -- it was that time again. So she said.
You know, I don't exactly wake up every day and thank God that my life is not a novel, but it occurs to me now that maybe the reading public ought to.
Anyway, it is that time again, because I did say so, because I think we've all had enough of its not being that time. People who were traveling have come home; people who were not traveling have been bored unto destructive interpersonal behaviors; people who were doing all the driving and listening to all the fighting have been thinking, "Man, could we use some new vocabulary words or what?"
One argument against year-round school, which I always think I'm going to do and then never pull off (I'm sure there are some smug old posts on this theme from long about mid-April), and so have to come up with arguments to make myself feel better about it all, is that I think I'd miss the rush of relief with which a bunch of kids, overdosed on a few weeks of what passes for leisure around here, greet the first day of school. We've gone shopping for the new notebook paper and the stickers to decorate the binders. We've put the new books in the workboxes. We're still waiting for the chemistry DVD and the answer key to the algebra II set, but that's okay, because we can just about manage the experiments and problems in the "Intro To" chapters. It is time, we all feel, to have something to get up and do every day, and so starting yesterday, that's what we're doing.
Friends, as Lawrence Welk used to say, here are some highlights.
Epiphany's coursework:
1. English: Currently she's reading Middlemarch, plus finishing a course in grammar and composition undertaken this summer (the arguments against year-round school don't apply to her, because she's done it). More novels from her reading list this fall, including The Betrothed,
with a detailed study guide. In the spring, an intensive poetry study using Sound and Sense
.
2. History: A course I put together, which I'm calling "History of Ideas." It's really a sort of humanities/Great Books thing, using Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization
as a spine, and involving a lot of short papers. In the first one, if memory serves me, she will be asked to explain how Oedipus Rex refutes an assertion by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, which I now can't remember to save my life, but it's there in the book. She'll do a lot of "real text" reading -- Dante, Shakespeare, and so forth -- look at period art, listen to music, examine maps. In the spring semester, she'll choose a topic inspired by all this reading and write a researched senior thesis.
3. Math: Algebra II. Using Teaching Textbooks. Cannot overstate how much this program is a gift to the aspiring liberal-arts major. Wish we'd found it, oh, five years ago or so . . .
4. Science: Chemistry. I think. Though the experiment where she compared a blown-up balloon to an empty one to see that air has mass went well, she later came downstairs, kicked the doorframe, and said, in essence, "Let it be anathema." I think we're ready for that DVD to turn up on the doorstep. And I'm going back to look at these suggestions for a "living chemistry" course.
5. Religion: moral theology, using the fourth book in the excellent Didache series, Our Moral Life in Christ. May or may not
be taught by our parish priest in a class setting. I rather hope it will be, just for variety's sake, though she likes these books enough to enjoy working through the course on her own.
Electives: we'll do a half-credit each of economics and American government in the spring.
She's also taking violin with a new teacher. We spent a year tumbling to the realization that violin teachers are a commodity unavailable to the Greater Fiat Metropolitan Area, and then another year on the waiting list for a teacher at an art school in Panacea Falls. Periodically the secretary at this art school would call us to say, "Why exactly do I have your name and phone number?" We would say we were on Mrs. Stringfellow's waiting list, and she would go, "Oh!" So we'd say to each other that surely now we were on the waiting list. Finally Epiphany rang them up, and while it turned out that indeed, once again, we were not on Mrs. Stringfellow's waiting list, they had hired a new teacher, and he didn't have a waiting list at all, so come on over.
And he's great. He works her hard, but also tells her she's wonderful, so she hardly notices that she's frustrated with herself. Now, if only we could find a chemistry tutor who'd do the exact same thing . . .
Meanwhile, there's a line for the computer, so, friends, the rest of the highlights will have to wait till later.
(Amazon links are sponsored, as always. We'll send you a postcard from our borrowed-bass-boat cruise along the lovely Catawba Riviera.)
Actually, if she'd done what she said she was going to do, it would never have been not that time, but she had yet to come up with the spinal fluid necessary to making children subtract fractions with different denominators one from another in July. And so, having not been that time in what seemed like a time without time -- July, plus the first two weeks of August, in other words -- it was that time again. So she said.
You know, I don't exactly wake up every day and thank God that my life is not a novel, but it occurs to me now that maybe the reading public ought to.
Anyway, it is that time again, because I did say so, because I think we've all had enough of its not being that time. People who were traveling have come home; people who were not traveling have been bored unto destructive interpersonal behaviors; people who were doing all the driving and listening to all the fighting have been thinking, "Man, could we use some new vocabulary words or what?"
One argument against year-round school, which I always think I'm going to do and then never pull off (I'm sure there are some smug old posts on this theme from long about mid-April), and so have to come up with arguments to make myself feel better about it all, is that I think I'd miss the rush of relief with which a bunch of kids, overdosed on a few weeks of what passes for leisure around here, greet the first day of school. We've gone shopping for the new notebook paper and the stickers to decorate the binders. We've put the new books in the workboxes. We're still waiting for the chemistry DVD and the answer key to the algebra II set, but that's okay, because we can just about manage the experiments and problems in the "Intro To" chapters. It is time, we all feel, to have something to get up and do every day, and so starting yesterday, that's what we're doing.
Friends, as Lawrence Welk used to say, here are some highlights.
Epiphany's coursework:
1. English: Currently she's reading Middlemarch, plus finishing a course in grammar and composition undertaken this summer (the arguments against year-round school don't apply to her, because she's done it). More novels from her reading list this fall, including The Betrothed,
with a detailed study guide. In the spring, an intensive poetry study using Sound and Sense. 2. History: A course I put together, which I'm calling "History of Ideas." It's really a sort of humanities/Great Books thing, using Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization
as a spine, and involving a lot of short papers. In the first one, if memory serves me, she will be asked to explain how Oedipus Rex refutes an assertion by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, which I now can't remember to save my life, but it's there in the book. She'll do a lot of "real text" reading -- Dante, Shakespeare, and so forth -- look at period art, listen to music, examine maps. In the spring semester, she'll choose a topic inspired by all this reading and write a researched senior thesis.3. Math: Algebra II. Using Teaching Textbooks. Cannot overstate how much this program is a gift to the aspiring liberal-arts major. Wish we'd found it, oh, five years ago or so . . .
4. Science: Chemistry. I think. Though the experiment where she compared a blown-up balloon to an empty one to see that air has mass went well, she later came downstairs, kicked the doorframe, and said, in essence, "Let it be anathema." I think we're ready for that DVD to turn up on the doorstep. And I'm going back to look at these suggestions for a "living chemistry" course.
5. Religion: moral theology, using the fourth book in the excellent Didache series, Our Moral Life in Christ. May or may not
be taught by our parish priest in a class setting. I rather hope it will be, just for variety's sake, though she likes these books enough to enjoy working through the course on her own.Electives: we'll do a half-credit each of economics and American government in the spring.
She's also taking violin with a new teacher. We spent a year tumbling to the realization that violin teachers are a commodity unavailable to the Greater Fiat Metropolitan Area, and then another year on the waiting list for a teacher at an art school in Panacea Falls. Periodically the secretary at this art school would call us to say, "Why exactly do I have your name and phone number?" We would say we were on Mrs. Stringfellow's waiting list, and she would go, "Oh!" So we'd say to each other that surely now we were on the waiting list. Finally Epiphany rang them up, and while it turned out that indeed, once again, we were not on Mrs. Stringfellow's waiting list, they had hired a new teacher, and he didn't have a waiting list at all, so come on over.
And he's great. He works her hard, but also tells her she's wonderful, so she hardly notices that she's frustrated with herself. Now, if only we could find a chemistry tutor who'd do the exact same thing . . .
Meanwhile, there's a line for the computer, so, friends, the rest of the highlights will have to wait till later.
(Amazon links are sponsored, as always. We'll send you a postcard from our borrowed-bass-boat cruise along the lovely Catawba Riviera.)
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Meme: What Are Your Favorite Prayers?
Well, there's this:
It's the introit for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which we celebrate tomorrow. The Latin text of the antiphon is from the Book of Revelation:
I'm trying to learn it to sing at Mass tomorrow, and I'm not remotely doing it justice, but boy, is it ever sublime. I was playing the video and trying to follow along in my music earlier, when some child or other happened to pass my desk and remark, "Oh, good. Chant karaoke." These are awfully sarcastic people I'm raising.
It's a stretch, however, to say that it's my "favorite prayer" -- it's my favorite right this minute, but when Pentimento tagged me to participate in this meme, I imagine she was thinking "favorite," as in prayers to which I turn often, as to the dearest of my friends. The list of those is long and varied, and varying all the time, but here are my three most constant companions, off the top of my head:
1. The Salve Regina. I like prayers I can sing; as distracted as I usually am at prayer, I need to get double for my money.
2. The Angelus. It marks the noon hour every day, and having to present myself as the handmaid of the Lord, accepting God's will for my life, day after day, never gets old. I never stop needing to say those words.
3. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, particularly the first two. I need to pray the Annunciation in the same way that I need to pray the Angelus, and being so often thoughtless of the needs of others, I find myself nourished by the Mystery of the Visitation and the reminder of Mary's active love for Elizabeth. I get given that as a penance in Confession so often that the story has started to seem grafted onto my soul. Whether it bears any fruit or not remains to be seen.
At this point in the game, which I think began as "Name Your Five Favorite Catholic Devotions" over at The Anchoress (though on reading Pentimento's fine post more carefully, I see she got it from Tertium Quid), I think everyone I'd have tagged has already played. If you want to tag yourself, of course, feel free -- just link back here, because naturally all your readers are going to want to hang on my every word.
How did I come to have such sarcastic children? Search me . . .
It's the introit for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which we celebrate tomorrow. The Latin text of the antiphon is from the Book of Revelation:
A great sign appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet; and on her head, a crown of twelve stars.And the verse comes from Psalm 97:
Sing unto the Lord, for he has accomplished wondrous deeds.
I'm trying to learn it to sing at Mass tomorrow, and I'm not remotely doing it justice, but boy, is it ever sublime. I was playing the video and trying to follow along in my music earlier, when some child or other happened to pass my desk and remark, "Oh, good. Chant karaoke." These are awfully sarcastic people I'm raising.
It's a stretch, however, to say that it's my "favorite prayer" -- it's my favorite right this minute, but when Pentimento tagged me to participate in this meme, I imagine she was thinking "favorite," as in prayers to which I turn often, as to the dearest of my friends. The list of those is long and varied, and varying all the time, but here are my three most constant companions, off the top of my head:
1. The Salve Regina. I like prayers I can sing; as distracted as I usually am at prayer, I need to get double for my money.
2. The Angelus. It marks the noon hour every day, and having to present myself as the handmaid of the Lord, accepting God's will for my life, day after day, never gets old. I never stop needing to say those words.
3. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, particularly the first two. I need to pray the Annunciation in the same way that I need to pray the Angelus, and being so often thoughtless of the needs of others, I find myself nourished by the Mystery of the Visitation and the reminder of Mary's active love for Elizabeth. I get given that as a penance in Confession so often that the story has started to seem grafted onto my soul. Whether it bears any fruit or not remains to be seen.
At this point in the game, which I think began as "Name Your Five Favorite Catholic Devotions" over at The Anchoress (though on reading Pentimento's fine post more carefully, I see she got it from Tertium Quid), I think everyone I'd have tagged has already played. If you want to tag yourself, of course, feel free -- just link back here, because naturally all your readers are going to want to hang on my every word.
How did I come to have such sarcastic children? Search me . . .
Monday, August 9, 2010
I Wish I Had Written This
Betty Duffy on boys and who gets the army man.
Well, really she's talking about responding to children's fighting, but I think that army man in her header shot is awfully cool, not to mention brave to be taking on those giant flowers.
Well, really she's talking about responding to children's fighting, but I think that army man in her header shot is awfully cool, not to mention brave to be taking on those giant flowers.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
A Big Job, and Other Stories
I was going to give this piece an obnoxiously triumphalist title like, "What Happens When You Read to Your Child," but it's not really about something that happened while we were reading to our children. In fact, it's about something that went on while we were neglecting them.
In truth, we weren't neglecting them all that badly. We had sent them to bed -- the little ones, that is. The older ones were watching a movie on my computer in the hall, from the stack which a friend of ours sent home with Epiphany the other day, all chickie flickies of one kind or another. Amicus didn't especially want to watch a chickie flickie, but as his only other Uptown-Friday-Night option was to go to bed with the little guys, he succumbed. Let it be known, however, that nobody held a gun to his head.
Aelred and I carted the other computer into our bedroom, locked the door, turned out the lights, and -- what? Stop looking at me like that. This is a family blog, I know, but if I tell you that what we proceeded to do was watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, yes, yes, everyone else in the world saw five years ago, this is not just curtains fluttering in the night wind. It's what we did. You have to understand, we never, ever, ever go to movies. At home, even, we don't watch them much, and even then we hardly ever watch them together. When we have a chance to do something together, generally what we want to do is talk, and stuff.
So around here, sitting down in the same room -- alone, even -- to watch a movie is a big deal. Uptown Friday Night, indeed. The movie itself hardly mattered, though I thought it was cute enough as these things go. But really: do they have organs in Greek Orthodox churches? Do they play Mendelssohn's "Wedding March?" It's been my impression that they did things differently there in the Eastern tradition, and I'm not about to mistake a movie for an authoritative source of information.
My thought is that they felt they had to put that music in there, or, the film's title notwithstanding, the general moviegoing audience might not realize that a wedding had taken place. This is less a comment on the audience than on the expectations of the people paid to underestimate the intelligence of that audience. Teach to the middle, the saying goes, and of course the more you do that, the closer to the bottom the middle turns out to be.
While we were watching the movie and thinking these thoughts, the people upstairs in bed were not idle. At least, one of them wasn't. About halfway through the movie, an envelope shot through the crack beneath the bedroom door. Another followed it immediately. One envelope contained the following:
Translation:
Dear Dad, I am just sitting up above your head in my room. Not much to say. Let me tell you a story. Santa went down the chimney and said ho ho ho. The end. Love, [your child]
The other letter contained the following text, with the above illustration:
Now, here's where I was tempted to employ the triumphalist title -- though perhaps it could more accurately have been rendered as, "What Happens When You Convince Your Child That Copywork Is Fun." But I can't really be triumphalist at all, because although I have read to all my children, all their lives, and they've all also done their share of copywork, only one of them does this kind of thing recreationally. All of them have fairly fertile imaginations, in their own ways, but only one of them is this driven to draw and write what she -- and it's giving the game away, but it is a she -- has to say.
Actually, that's not entirely true. When she was this child's age, Epiphany was going to school in England, and at one parent-teacher conference early in that interesting pilgrimage, the teacher showed me some writing Epiphany had done: a response to something on an "assessment," I believe. They were ever and always being assessed. In answer to some question or other, Epiphany had produced a couple of inscrutable sentences, not unlike the "Dear Dad" letter above in spelling and phrasing.
"Now," the teacher said in her soothing way, "to us this may initially look a bit worrying, all these misspellings and so on. But what this says to me is that she's actually trying to say something rather ambitious and complex. She can imagine what she wants to say, and even though she doesn't quite have the mechanics, she tries it."
Or, well, something like that. I'm reconstructing a bit, but that was the gist of what she said, and I've always remembered it, albeit imperfectly. And what that teacher said that day has been, in my mind, a continual reinforcement of the received wisdom that you should choose read-aloud books well above the level at which your children currently read and write. At the moment, for example, I'm reading Andrew Lang's fairy tales to Helier and Crispina, and with each story I'm struck by how knotty the narrative is -- there's nothing simple in the telling of a fairy tale, let me tell you, with all its complications, and the complicated processes by which problems are undone -- not to mention the complexity of Lang's prose. Here's a first sentence, by way of example:
Drakestail was very little, that is why he was called Drakestail; but tiny as he was he had brains, and he knew what he was about, for having begun with nothing he ended by amassing a hundred crowns.
Of course, nobody on first reading that sentence knows even who Drakestail is. The sentence seems to assume that the reader or listener will be content to ride along with it to find out, which is partly true. My listeners are content enough to ride along after they've interrupted me mid-sentence to ask, "Who is Drakestail?" Listen, and the story will answer your questions, I always say. And of course this story rewards the listener by explaining how a duck comes to be a king.
Standardized tests, as we know first-hand, measure a child's ability to puzzle out words and to understand what a paragraph is talking about. These are skills which we associate with the discipline of reading: that c-a-t means the thing that says meow, and that from a story in which a cat passes through a room and then a goldfish bowl is discovered to be empty, one may infer in reasonable safety that the cat has eaten the fish.
But this, we hope, is only the ground floor in the castle of infinite stories -- storeys, I should say, as the British spell it, because that's what I mean. Of course it works the other way, too. Any child learning to read lingers a while in this drab entryway, laboring sound by sound to put together a narrative composed of monosyllabic words which ultimately reward the reader with the knowledge that the baby is on the swing, and the dog is running. And the thing is, for the child who's not read to, or is only read to "at grade level," as they say, that's it. The entire written world, in that child's imagination, resembles nothing so much as a stick-shift car stalling out at stoplights. It's not that that child doesn't learn to read, necessarily. It's not that that child doesn't learn, eventually, to like to read. It's not that that child inevitably turns out to be a stupid or an unlettered person. But -- well, I used to have both high-school and college-aged students who would write, Once upon the time . . . which always signalled to me the existence of a deep and invisible poverty in these people, who had not internalized even the most commonplace opening phrase to a fairy tale.
*
There is something in the human voice when it tells a story -- whether the story is written or told aloud, whether it's elaborate or simple, whether the storyteller relishes the telling or has three minutes between chores -- which a child who hears stories instinctively finds interesting, in the way, maybe, that dress-up clothes are interesting. It's something to try on. What struck me about this "Dear Dad" letter slid under the door was that even without all the moving parts in place, the writer was trying on something. She was trying on a voice. Actually, she was trying on two voices. I'm not sure where the beginning of her letter comes from, but the story the letter proceeds to tell derives almost verbatim from something which happened long before she was born.
Once when our niece was small, she asked the mutual grandmother to read her a story. Probably she had asked for this story fifty times already that day. I still remember the book: a "board"-type book which had originally been part of a Teddy Ruxpin set -- the battery-powered bear that read stories, remember? Anyway, the grandmother had gotten it at a yard sale for a nickel, minus Teddy Ruxpin himself, and despite the fact that there were lots of gaps in the story where presumably the bear would have taken over from the book, it was a favorite of our niece's for a time.
So she asked the mutual grandmother to read her the story, as she had already done who knows how many times that day. They sat down on the couch together, and the grandmother opened the book.
That's the way it always is, isn't it? Think how many old-fashioned storybooks have titles like Tales Heard at Grandmother's Knee. Anyway, this grandmother, who was busy making dinner for a houseful of family and not exactly free to offer her knee for extended tale-telling, opened the book and, turning two or three pages at a time, said, "It was Christmas and they put out all the stockings and Santy Claus came down the chimney and said ho ho ho the end."
Slap, she shut the book, and went back to making dinner.
Aelred said, "That was some story, Mom."
"Well," she said, laughing. "You try reading that thing."
As I think about it, the story about reading and storytelling is bigger than this moment in an evening, when a child is pestering a grownup to read a book, and the grownup is busy with other things, and the book is not all that conducive anyway to being read aloud by an actual flesh-and-blood person, instead of a battery-powered bear. The bear can fill in the gaps in the story, maybe, but how many kids would pester a toy to read to them if they had any other choice? For a nickel, the grandmother got a reason to sit down with a loved child, and the child, now an accomplished young woman, got her grandmother's attention -- not that one needs reasons, and not that love isn't on offer for free, of course, all the time, but the book was the thing at hand.
Beyond that, though, for the onlookers, and for the people who weren't born yet and are onlookers in only the most secondhand of ways, the story is about the storytelling voice itself. What's funny and interesting in the telling of that Santy Claus story is that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, all packaged up in the most efficient of ways, and delivered in the voice of probably the most organized person I will ever know -- the person who, as I'm reminded, taught Aelred to read at four. She is a person who likes to get things done, and you can hear it in her turns of phrase.
One of my grandmothers liked to lie back in her armchair, feet on the ottoman, cigarette smoke drifting to the ceiling with the same languid current on which her conversation floated. "Well, you know, dahlin', she went to Europe, but of course she never married . . . . "
My other grandmother, who never learned to use a washing machine, delighted in the irrelevant detail. "I can say one thing in French," she used to tell me. "Qu'elle heure est-il? Qu'elle heure est-il!" She would repeat the phrase to make sure I'd heard it, and strike the card table with her fist for emphasis, making the Pokeno chips shiver on the game cards.
She was also anxious about many things: the wasps in the attic, the poison oak in the woods around the house, the water moccasins that might lie in wait beside the muddy pond. Once she overheard my teenaged cousin making arrangements to meet another cousin someplace in town and, while my cousin concluded this business over the telephone, stood before her waving her hands as if to flag down a train. When at last my cousin set the phone down, my grandmother cried, "Annie! Annie! We don't go places we've never been before!"
My grandmothers are dead, and I will never hear them speak again this side of the veil. But if I want to conjure them in imagination, all I have to do is recall the unimportant, everyday things they said and how they said them. It's not that the utterances themselves were of great import or uniqueness, except that of course every living person is sui generis, and even in exchanging a simple good morning, no two people tell the same story.
This is why eavesdropping is such an endlessly fascinating enterprise. It's about not what people say; in fact, the most pregnant exchanges are the ones where little is actually said.
"Well . . . " says one person open-endedly, leaning back in his restaurant chair.
The other person scrapes his chair back. "Well!"
In this you have the makings of a story, the groundwork for two entire characters. One would stay longer, one is ready to leave. Why? That's the question the story will answer, if you ever get around to writing it.
But you can tell a story without having to know the answers, or even to find them out. You can tell a story, as we do in our house, because the sound of something has caught our ear. Aelred likes to recount a brief conversation he once had with a handyman who, when Aelred was ten or so, came to kill a nest of hornets which had taken up residence in the back yard. The handyman, proposing to pour gasoline on the nest, remarked to Aelred who was following him around, "It's hard on 'em."
Did the hornets die? Presumably. Where did the handyman come from? After he'd dispensed with the hornets, what did he do with the rest of his life? No idea. Out of that phrase you could construct a character, plain-spoken but given to understatement, and move him through a series of conflicts which he would meet with stoicism, but never stupidity. Or you can let it drop there, the voice hang on the air, the echoes linger suggestively, telling their own tales.
And if you are a child, and you grow up hearing your father telling this story, and many others, the story then for you is how you will retell it: the voice at the heart of the story, framed by your father's voice, now framed by yours, which is the one you're least sure of. So you're six years old, and alone in the night you want to tell a story, and that's how you do it, working back in your mind from what you know. And you seal it in an envelope and slide it under the door, a letter that says, I'm yours, all right. I'm speaking with our voice.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Quicktakes
1. This is about all I can manage. I mean, the quick-takes thing, not just this one. Lately the very idea of public discourse, particularly of the internet sort, gives me the dry heaves.
I pretend I don't have Facebook. I write comments on blogs, then at the last minute I delete them. Or if, as sometimes happens, I lose my head and post them anyway, I run as fast as I can in the opposite direction -- well, in literal terms, this would mean that I'm doing a lot of fleeing down the hall from the kitchen, which would raise the sardonic eyebrow among certain of my offspring. What really happens is that if I slip up and venture into some online conversation where angels surely fear to tread, I then do my best to contract amnesia -- my best stopping short of occasioning an actual blow to my own head -- just forget the whole thing, until the conversation has slipped off the page and over the precipice and into the netherworld of the blog archive, never to be seen again except by the occasional zealot.
Why? Well, for somebody who writes a blog about her private life, I'm kind of a private person all of a sudden. Also, I brood on things way too much.
2. Then there's what's happening to discourse. Yesterday, as I was waiting for Epiphany to finish her violin lesson, I picked up an old copy of the National Geographic and read the letters to the editor. One reader, responding to some article about Australia, objected to the author's use of the phrase "before recorded history," on the grounds that the aboriginal peoples have been around for a long time, and that as terms like "recorded" and "history" mean different things to them than they do to us, any human era "before recorded history" cannot be said to exist, unless he who employs that phrase is prepared to be called a Eurocentric pigdog. I read this, and then I put the magazine down and closed my eyes.
3. And then there's Hotmail. They've upgraded again. It was kind of them to suggest that I upgrade my browser to keep apace of these developments, but I'm afraid we're stuck in 1997 around here, and if you've emailed me lately and I haven't responded, the reason is that I now can't seem to type in the "Reply" box. That is, I can type all I want, but nothing will show up. So -- well, the one constant in my life for the last twelve years (besides my husband and fully half of my children) has been my email address, but I fear I'm being asked to let the dead bury their own dead. It's harder than you might think.
Also, on the off-chance that you're Mary Rose Somarriba and you've received items from a gmail address you don't recognize, that would be me.
4. The air conditioner is working again, in a limping, creaking sort of way. The short-term problem was that it had blown a fuse; the longer-term, more problematic problem, is that the motor is -- what was the word the repair consultant used? "Shot," I believe he said, or possibly "kaput." Or "toast." One of those words which are not music to the ear.
On the bright side, I'm not actually sweating as I write this, and that is something. It's hot outside, but cool in here, where I'm waiting for Shorty the Dude -- our plumber's actual name is Slim, but I'm dubbing the AC guy Shorty -- to come on wings of glory with the replacement motor.
5. Nine days shy of the Feast of the Assumption, and our parish is collectively undergoing a consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary via the method set forth by Saint Louis de Montfort.
Now, if you know me at all, you already know how it's going. In Confession last week, as I was unburdening myself, again, of my usual difficulties with prayer, I remarked that this total-consecration thing for me was sort of lacking in the totality department. How consecrationary is it, after all, to slide your eyes across the page and ten minutes later realize that all you can remember of your holy reading is that the couch really doesn't need to go under the window, and the beans have burned to the bottom of the pan?
Well, my confessor said, consecrated doesn't have to mean perfect. And it's not magic, either. You just . . . keep . . . doing it.
Well. Contra what I had assumed, you can do this consecration thing again and again. I had thought that it was, I don't know, like getting married or something: I thought you did it once, and that was your shot at it. Consecrated or bust.
So, whew. Maybe next time I'll shoot for actually reading The Imitation of Christ. This time I'm concentrating on, for example, finishing all the passages in Luke's Gospel and paying attention while I read the Litany of the Holy Spirit. I mean, the couch doesn't need to go under the window, but there's no reason why I have to think about that all the time.
(also, my kids keep taking my copy of True Devotion to Mary, so maybe that's good for a little advance cubic zirconium in my crown).
6. I have been saving egg cartons to pass along to a friend of mine who currently has nineteen chickens laying, out there on her farm in the wildwood. Epiphany just cleared the cartons off the top of the fridge: two garbage bags full. I'm not sure how embarrassing that is.
7. Gorgeous George is no more. Gorgeous George the guppy, that is. I can't remember whether I've written about him before, but anyway, it's too late now. A serial killer lurks in our fish tank and, having worked his or her way through a selection of relatively anonymous zebra danios, he (or she) has targeted a local celebrity. Gorgeous George was, like his wrestler namesake, blond and flamboyant, rippling in slo-mo along the front of the tank while the neon tetras flickered from among the plastic plants.
One of those neon tetras, actually, has bulked up alarmingly in recent days, but I suspect the algae eater, a bottom feeder with all the charms of the natural-born thug. Aelred wants to use the algae eater for bait, but then, what if it really is that chunky desperado, the neon tetra?
And here I thought fish would be so peaceful.
Thanks as always to Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting Seven Quick Takes.
I pretend I don't have Facebook. I write comments on blogs, then at the last minute I delete them. Or if, as sometimes happens, I lose my head and post them anyway, I run as fast as I can in the opposite direction -- well, in literal terms, this would mean that I'm doing a lot of fleeing down the hall from the kitchen, which would raise the sardonic eyebrow among certain of my offspring. What really happens is that if I slip up and venture into some online conversation where angels surely fear to tread, I then do my best to contract amnesia -- my best stopping short of occasioning an actual blow to my own head -- just forget the whole thing, until the conversation has slipped off the page and over the precipice and into the netherworld of the blog archive, never to be seen again except by the occasional zealot.
Why? Well, for somebody who writes a blog about her private life, I'm kind of a private person all of a sudden. Also, I brood on things way too much.
2. Then there's what's happening to discourse. Yesterday, as I was waiting for Epiphany to finish her violin lesson, I picked up an old copy of the National Geographic and read the letters to the editor. One reader, responding to some article about Australia, objected to the author's use of the phrase "before recorded history," on the grounds that the aboriginal peoples have been around for a long time, and that as terms like "recorded" and "history" mean different things to them than they do to us, any human era "before recorded history" cannot be said to exist, unless he who employs that phrase is prepared to be called a Eurocentric pigdog. I read this, and then I put the magazine down and closed my eyes.
3. And then there's Hotmail. They've upgraded again. It was kind of them to suggest that I upgrade my browser to keep apace of these developments, but I'm afraid we're stuck in 1997 around here, and if you've emailed me lately and I haven't responded, the reason is that I now can't seem to type in the "Reply" box. That is, I can type all I want, but nothing will show up. So -- well, the one constant in my life for the last twelve years (besides my husband and fully half of my children) has been my email address, but I fear I'm being asked to let the dead bury their own dead. It's harder than you might think.
Also, on the off-chance that you're Mary Rose Somarriba and you've received items from a gmail address you don't recognize, that would be me.
4. The air conditioner is working again, in a limping, creaking sort of way. The short-term problem was that it had blown a fuse; the longer-term, more problematic problem, is that the motor is -- what was the word the repair consultant used? "Shot," I believe he said, or possibly "kaput." Or "toast." One of those words which are not music to the ear.
On the bright side, I'm not actually sweating as I write this, and that is something. It's hot outside, but cool in here, where I'm waiting for Shorty the Dude -- our plumber's actual name is Slim, but I'm dubbing the AC guy Shorty -- to come on wings of glory with the replacement motor.
5. Nine days shy of the Feast of the Assumption, and our parish is collectively undergoing a consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary via the method set forth by Saint Louis de Montfort.
Now, if you know me at all, you already know how it's going. In Confession last week, as I was unburdening myself, again, of my usual difficulties with prayer, I remarked that this total-consecration thing for me was sort of lacking in the totality department. How consecrationary is it, after all, to slide your eyes across the page and ten minutes later realize that all you can remember of your holy reading is that the couch really doesn't need to go under the window, and the beans have burned to the bottom of the pan?
Well, my confessor said, consecrated doesn't have to mean perfect. And it's not magic, either. You just . . . keep . . . doing it.
Well. Contra what I had assumed, you can do this consecration thing again and again. I had thought that it was, I don't know, like getting married or something: I thought you did it once, and that was your shot at it. Consecrated or bust.
So, whew. Maybe next time I'll shoot for actually reading The Imitation of Christ. This time I'm concentrating on, for example, finishing all the passages in Luke's Gospel and paying attention while I read the Litany of the Holy Spirit. I mean, the couch doesn't need to go under the window, but there's no reason why I have to think about that all the time.
(also, my kids keep taking my copy of True Devotion to Mary, so maybe that's good for a little advance cubic zirconium in my crown).
6. I have been saving egg cartons to pass along to a friend of mine who currently has nineteen chickens laying, out there on her farm in the wildwood. Epiphany just cleared the cartons off the top of the fridge: two garbage bags full. I'm not sure how embarrassing that is.
7. Gorgeous George is no more. Gorgeous George the guppy, that is. I can't remember whether I've written about him before, but anyway, it's too late now. A serial killer lurks in our fish tank and, having worked his or her way through a selection of relatively anonymous zebra danios, he (or she) has targeted a local celebrity. Gorgeous George was, like his wrestler namesake, blond and flamboyant, rippling in slo-mo along the front of the tank while the neon tetras flickered from among the plastic plants.
One of those neon tetras, actually, has bulked up alarmingly in recent days, but I suspect the algae eater, a bottom feeder with all the charms of the natural-born thug. Aelred wants to use the algae eater for bait, but then, what if it really is that chunky desperado, the neon tetra?
And here I thought fish would be so peaceful.
Thanks as always to Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting Seven Quick Takes.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Fi-Null-Lee
New chapter's up at the story blog. I just banged it out, and it seems like a heck of a lot of dialogue, but still, there it is. Inching forward . . .
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