Telling Secrets

It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, 3.

Retreat Highs

1. Bioluminescence
2. Blindfold Pictionary, Zoom, Never-Have-I-Ever, Shuffle-Your-Buns
3. Beach devotions with Mike - meditating on 1 Peter 1:1-5
4. A VERY COLD dip in the ocean, followed by hot chicken soup for lunch
5. Coloring books and macaroni necklaces
6. Paper bag skits
7. Joey's benediction

Little Deaths

I've died several times since then, and it's getting to be routine. In fact, as I'm writing this I see another death hovering on the horizon. A big one. And I'm starting to feel like my father, with one crucial difference.

Though he claimed to have lived countless lives, each in a different body and at a different place and time, I boast of having lived about five or six lives in the same body. Sometimes even in the same place and at roughly the same time.

I just don't seem to get this reincarnation thing right. I've even returned to a place I once lived, seventeen years later, as a very different person, in an older, more vulnerable body. It would have been so much nicer to have returned with a new body, and a tougher heart.

There are many ways to die. One one kind is final, of course. But before that one pulls you under, many others come along, like waves at the shore.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, 375.

Sneezes

In honor of my head cold, may I direct your attention to five posts tagged with the word sneezes.

Highs (Looking on the Bright Side Edition)

1. A job I can do from home, in my pajamas
2. Sudafed Severe Cold Formula
3. Pink kleenex
4. A surfeit of library books
5. Tuesday night - starting to turn the corner!

Lows

1. I have a cold, and I think I'm going to die...

Weekend Highs

1. Making a heck of a lot (186?) of meatballs
2. Skyping Jessie first thing Saturday morning
3. Crashing Presbytery to hear David Wells
4. Walking in the woods - taking an unfamiliar trail, and finding my way back to civilization...eventually
5. Library books and Chinese food, a perfect pairing since South Windsor Public Library is just around the corner from Sun Sun, and it's always so nice to enjoy a meal with a good book
6. First SNAC meeting of the year, replete with new faces

Review: The Willoughbys, Lois Lowry

This is a book about four old-fashioned children, their nefarious parents, a not-really odious nanny, an affable infant, and a melancholy tycoon...among others. It’s tongue-in-cheek, reminiscent of Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I was taken aback by the cynical tone of the first few chapters. (When I first picked this up, I was searching for a Fairmont bedtime story...and a book in which the main characters ruthlessly abandon an infant seemed a bit too dark. Ruthlessly - hah!) But I’m happy to say there is redemption, and things end well for almost everyone. Except, perhaps, the parents. But they are nefarious, so it’s okay. SO, this was a fun read. And Lois Lowry is a great author. The end.

Adjectives

The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power...

-J. R. R. Tolkein, "On Fairy-Stories," A Tolkein Miscellany, 108.

When You Wake Up in the Morning...

Later on, when they had all said “Good-bye” and “Thank-you” to Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.

-A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 159-160.

Rejection

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (well, not quite leaned down, she’s the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn’t. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway, there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.

-Brian Doyle, "No", The Kenyon Review (hat tip Our Girl in Chicago)

A Very Long Sentence

In after-years [Piglet] liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.

-A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 145-146.

Metaphors Matter

I loved explosions. I loved them in war movies. I loved them off in the distance as I went to sleep. I loved them even more close up when we set off firecrackers.

I loved the sound of the match head on the rough side of the matchbox, the flare: so suddenly there. I loved the sight and the phosphorus smell of the burning match as it approached the fuse on the firecracker, as it transferred that living flame to it. And I loved the sight and smell of the fuse as it came alive and was consumed, eaten by time and fire.

Such a perfect way of thinking about those fuses, and also life. You begin at one end, and as you make your way forward, point by infinitesimal point, you give off sparks. And what you leave behind is charred, consumed, transformed. But that glorious voyage toward the end: poets never grow weary of trying to describe it. The end, or telos, as Aristotle or Aquinas would tell you, is the very reason for existence, the purpose of anything that exists. Our telos as humans, yours and mine, is to abide with God for eternity. The sparks on our way there, large and small, call them love. The telos of a fuse on a firecracker is a nice explosion. The sparks on the way there, call them love too.

On a really good day, I will fight to the death with anyone who tries to tell me that those sparks are not also love, fight with my bare hands or the jawbone of an ass or the broken stump of a sword. Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, 64.

Preamble

If all the characters in this book are fictional, none of them knows it yet.

All resemblances to actual persons were preordained before the creation of the world. It matters little that the names don't always match.

All the incidents and dialogue come straight from God's imagination. As does the author himself. And the reader.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana

Simile

I think we all want truth
But truth, it is just like cream
It will rise straight to the top
But not unless you stop stirring it up

-Jonny Rogers, "Jerusalem"

The Country

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

-Billy Collins

Heaps of Ert

...We have a large number of negative words—inept, disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt—for which the positive form is missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, “She’s so sheveled,” or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert.

-Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, 68.