Moonbeams

Moonlight be a friend tonight
We're all wrecked up on these dreams
Holding on a bit too tight
I've got splinters from these moonbeams
If it seems we're falling down
If it seems we're falling through
Darlin' you know that is nothing
Darlin' you know that is nothing new

-Bill Mallonee, "You Know That (is Nothing New)"

Highs

An unusually fine weekend for games...
1. 4-Square (mentioned below)*
2. In a Pickle**
3. Apples to Apples
4. Throwing frisbees at Elias, Ben, Ben and Bill***
5. This is a Thing**
6. SNAP**
7. Excuse Me - What Are You Doing?**

*Haven't played since 6th grade!
**Entirely new to me!
***Not technically a game, but satisfying nonetheless

Highs

1. Playing loud, summery music in the car
2. 4-square
3. Driveway chalk drawings
4. Venn diagrams

Systems of Local Transport

Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children—and I liked them too—but I was more interested in systems of local transport: airport luggage-handling systems (those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a corner, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits); supermarket checkout conveyor belts, turned on and off like sewing machines by a foot pedal, with a seam like a zipper that kept reappearing; and supermarket roller coasters made of rows of vertical rollers arranged in a U curve over which the gray plastic numbered containers that held your bagged and paid-for groceries would slide out a flapped gateway to the outside; milk-bottling machines we saw on field trips that hurried the queueing bottles on curved tracks with rubber-edged side-rollers toward the machine that socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes; Olympic luge and bobsled tracks; the hanger-management systems at the dry cleaner’s—sinuous circles of rustling plastics (NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY!) and dimly visible clothing that looped from the customer counter way back to the pressing machines in the rear of the store fanning sideways as they slalomed around old men at antique sewing machines who were making sense of the heap of random pairs of pants pinned with little notes; laundry lines that cranked clothes over empty space and cranked them back in when laundry was dry; the barbecue-chicken display at Woolworth’s that rotated whole orange-golden chickens on pivoting skewers; and the rotating Timex watch displays, each watch box open like a claim; the cylindrical roller-cookers on which hot dogs slowly turned in the opposite direction to the rollers, blistering; gears that (as my father explained it) in their greased intersection modified forces and sent them on their way. The escalator shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride.

-Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, 35-36.

Sometimes by Step

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break
Sometimes the morning came too soon
Sometimes the day could be so hot
There was so much work left to do
But so much you'd already done

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me
He was a stranger in this land
And I am that, no less than he
And on this road to righteousness
Sometimes the climb can be so steep
I may falter in my steps
But never beyond your reach

Oh God, you are my God
And I will ever praise you
I will seek you in the morning
And I will learn to walk in your ways
And step by step you'll lead me
And I will follow you all of my days

-Rich Mullins and Beaker

The Mice Sneezed!

But no sooner had he finished speaking than all the Mice turned round at once, and sneezed at him in an appalling and vindictive manner, (and it is impossible to imagine a more scroobious and unpleasant sound than that caused by the simultaneous sneezing of many millions of angry Mice)...

-Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, 98.

Life Together

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 19.

Echolocation

“I find my way around as the bats do—echolocation. I am the next stage in evolution. I shriek and listen to hear the contours of objects. I caress the world with my voice. It is a quaint and frivolous habit that shall one day prove to be mankind’s salvation.”

-M. T. Anderson, The Clue of the Linoleum Ledhosen, 56.

Batty

The baby bat
Screamed out in fright,
"Turn on the dark,
I'm afraid of the light."

-Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

Connectors

When [Lois] Weisberg looks out at the world or Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don't see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don't look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven't seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

-Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 53.

Highs

Beachreading:
1. The Face of the Stranger, Anne Perry
2. The Children of Green Knowe, L.M. Boston
3. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
4. Inkheart, Cornelia Funke

Post-beachreading (books that accompanied me to the Cape, but didn't get read...yet):
5. The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, Stanley L. Jaki
6. Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
7. Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Wrinkles

His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

-L. M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe, 11.

Highs

I'm going to the beach today...Will return on Sunday!

Come Unto Me

Come unto me. Come unto me, you say. All right then, dear my Lord. I will try in my own absurd way...For who am I? I know only that heel and toe, memory and metatarsal, I am everything that turns, all of a piece, unthinking, at the sound of my name. Am where my feet take me. Buechner. Come unto me, you say. I, Buechner, all of me, unknowing and finally unknowable even to myself, turn. O Lord and lover, I come if I can to you down through the litter of any day, through sleeping and waking and eating and saying goodbye and going away and coming back again. Laboring and laden with endless histories heavy on my back.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 28-29.

Accustomed to My Face

I have grown accustomed to my face and so have my family and friends. If it does not have in it the power of certain rare faces to rejoice the hearts of all who behold it, under the right circumstances it can moderately rejoice two or three selected faces. It also, as far as I know, causes no one anywhere to be afraid or to despair. I see things in my face that I wish were not there. I see things in my face that I am content to see there. There are times when I see it almost as a stranger's face. But all in all, it is a face that has served me well enough over the years and that I can live with.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 26.

Goodnight Moon #7

What do you want, Mary? What do you want? You–you want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.

-Jimmy Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life

Goodnight Moon #6

The moon belongs to everyone,
The best things in life are free.
The stars belong to everyone,
They gleam there for you and me.

-Buddy De Sylia and Lew Brown

Goodnight Moon #5

Honorable Moon, I look to you,
Honorable Moon, as lovers do.

-Ira Gershwin

Goodnight Moon #4

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silvery shoon.

-Walter De La Mare

Highs

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Goodnight Moon #3

Your silvery beams
Will bring love dreams,
We'll be cuddling soon,
By the light of the silvery moon.

-Edward Madden

Goodnight Moon #2

Night and Day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.

-Cole Porter

Goodnight Moon #1

There's a long, long trail awinding into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing and a white moon beams.

-Stoddard King