Special Glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are no available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you—
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses,
but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

-Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry, 40-41.

Happy Endings

Gilly was crying now. She couldn’t help herself. “Trotter, it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it’s supposed to.”

“How you mean supposed to? Life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ‘cept maybe tough.”

“But I always thought that when my mother came...”

“My sweet baby, ain’t no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had all that figured out...All that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?...Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.’ Like life owed you good things...And there is lots of good things, baby, Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular—don’t nobody owe ‘em to you.”

“If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”

“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”

-Katherine Paterson, The Great Gilly Hopkins, 147-148.

Mooreeffoc

And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkien Miscellany, 129-130.

We Make Because We are Made

...To quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”...

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misued). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

...Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

-J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkein Miscellany, 127.

Cheese and Crackers

The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits [crackers]. Biscuits – to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits – to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Cheese"

Optimistic About Nothing

However, American culture is by nature more upbeat, more optimistic than European culture, more about opportunity than about our lost philosophical bearings, so it tends to think differently about our lost center. It is naturally more hopeful. It therefore stares not so much at the void as at the prospect of a Caribbean vacation, at the high-end catalogs, the upward move, and the new Lexus. Europeans might still see themselves in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Americans are more inclined to while away the time by watching something distracting or amusing. Maybe Seinfeld. This brilliantly acted television show was, by its own reckoning, a show about nothing. Beckett's world, too, was a world in which Nothing reigned. Here are two streets that end up at the same destination, one at a highbrow level and the other at, well, a lowbrow level. But Beckett's was nastier.

-David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, 110.

The Case for the Ephemeral

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish. For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on which side we fought.

-G. K. Chesterton, "The Case for the Ephemeral"

Curious Link of the Day

Museum of Bad Art

Rain

I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And poured into my brain,
So pardon the wild, crazy thing I just said—
I just ain't the same since there's rain in my head.

I walk kinda careful,
I turn around slow,
I can't run or jump
Cause I might overflow.
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of rain in my head.

-Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

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)