The Quest

Verily did the Warrior Matron cast herself into the small cavern beneath the desk upon which sits the computer, and found that there were within cables like unto Devil's Snare which sought to entrap her in their coils. And lo, there also were gossamer threads woven by the descendants of Shelob and Aragog. Yet bravely did she toil and bravely did she thrust her bare arm into the crevice from which the cables descend, though by some magic it snapped upon her arm and bit her fierce. And yet she labored on until at last she discovered the futility of her quest on realizing that this labor required two valiant souls. 

But still the vision of the larger goal bestirred her heart, and yea did she connect the monitor, and yea did she attach the keyboard with its mousy familiar, and yea did she awake the great power of the grid. And though the cables writhe upon the desk, and sound there is not, and printing there is not, and she is sore-wounded unto the requiring of the ointment of Neosporin, yet, forsooth, there is Microsoft Office and there is Publisher, and she hath the power to summon the battle of the bulletin to her home.

AMDG

Walker Percy Moment

This is the road that we have to take to work everyday.

If you aren't familiar with Walker Percy, this quote from The Moviegoer ought to explain.

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

I don't know about anyone else around here, but I'm getting a bit irritated with the Temptations.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On a more serious note, they have a diagnosis for what ails my mother. She has been having a really rough time of it, so if you have a moment to say a prayer for her, please do.

AMDG

Peace

I'm about to head out for the hospital where my mother is recovering from a stomach virus and being tested for some heart problems. Please keep her in your prayers.

So, I only have a couple of minutes, but I wanted to write a few observations about the prayers in the Vatican Gardens this afternoon with Pope Francis, Shimon Peres, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. This is going to be quick and off the top of my head, so please forgive any mistakes, and what will probably be terrible grammar.

A short while ago, Maclin posted an item on Light on Dark Water entitled Thank Heaven for EWTN or something very like--I don't have time to check--and I thought about that as I watching and thinking, "Thank heaven I don't have to watch this accompanied by the incessant chatter of people who think they know what they are talking about. The fact that there was only translation and no commentary was a great blessing. Of course, it may have been that way on other channels. I don't know because I only watched one.

And then there were the prayers--so similar.  Who could have told them one from the other. Of course, they were mostly based on the psalms, but I still thought how similar our prayers are. This always strikes me when I watch a movie directed by Majid Majidi.

As I watched the musicians, I saw how some members of each group (or in the case of the Moslem, the one man) would be nodding their heads to the rhythm of the other group's music. It has always seemed to me that music is the closest thing to pure spirit that we can experience with our bodies, and, of course, it is the language of love, not just human love, but that Love from which all other loves proceed. So, it was lovely to see these musicians caught up in that language being created by those whom they might oppose on any other day.

Just looking at the group, I thought how seldom it is nowadays to see a group of people gathered and to see no texting, noone wearing a bluetooth, or plugged into headsets, no one holding up a phone to take a picture. Everyone there (although I'm sure they were distracted in their own minds) focused on the one person speaking or praying and the God Who was listening.

And, peaceful it was--profoundly peaceful. I'm so glad that it was outside.

And bless Pope Francis. Who else could have pulled this off?

Well, I have to run.

AMDG

For Now

Well, I really wanted to post something tonight about our trip to Louisville, but after spending the better part of an hour searching 5 flash drives, 2 desktops, a laptop and my phone card, I have determined that the pictures I was going to post have disappeared from the face of the earth, or perhaps only from Mississippi. I could substitute some pictures from online, but they aren't as good, and so I'm going to wait until Monday to see if perhaps they aren't on my computer at work.

In the meantime:

I try to go to the church for a minute at lunchtime to say the Angelus (or currently the Regina Caeli) most days.  A couple of weeks ago, I dragged myself into the church after a busy, confusing day. I was worried about my mother and some other things, and knelt down in my customary pew. When I looked up, this is what I saw.

At first I thought it might be Elvis--the church is very close to Graceland--but on closer inspection, he turned out to be Frankenduck. I left him in the church for a couple of days in case someone came back for him, but now he lives on my desk.

I'm not so worried about my mother anymore. In case you are picturing some dreary old folks home, this is where she eats.

Below is a picture of a church that we went to on Saturday and Monday. It's a Dominican parish and on Saturdays they have a holy hour and confessions and noon Mass. When we visited my daughter on Thanksgiving vacation, we made it for the entire time, but this time we didn't get there until shortly before Mass began. 

When I looked at the church's website, I noticed that they had confessions for an hour before noon Mass Monday through Saturday, so we went back on Monday and when we got there, 30 minutes after confessions began, there were people lined up halfway down the church aisle--on a Monday. I was pretty impressed. Even though we stood in line for 30 minutes, we still had to wait until after Mass to confess. There was only one priest hearing confessions. On Saturday, they have three and the lines are even longer.

Now, anyone that has been reading this blog for any length of time knows that I really want to go to Spain and make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. As time passes, and falling trees and dying swimming pools consume what little money I have, and I get older and older, that hope is becoming rather wan; however, while we were in Louisville, we began another sort of pilgrimage. And one neat thing is that we got a passport to take around with us just like we would on the camino.

There are eight stops on the Bourbon Trail, and we got our little stamp for the first one.

We went to the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience and now I know all about how to make bourbon. At the end of the tour, we got to go into a little tavern which was much cooler and more authentic looking than the one in the picture on the page I linked to, and taste a couple of different kinds of bourbon. Unfortunately, I liked the more expensive one better, which is the story of my life. If you visit all eight locations in a year you get a t-shirt. Although I think I'll be going to Louisville fairly often now that my daughter lives there, I don't know if I can go that often, but then, I don't often wear t-shirts.

Well, if nothing else, this post is eclectic.

AMDG

This Too

Noticing his misery, his father gave him an instruction that Charlie always remembered when he needed to. "You think it's awful. And it is. But I'll tell you something. You can't believe it now, but times will come when this won't be on your mind. You won't think of it."

Wendell Berry, A Place in Time, Drouth

I first noticed this phenomenon after having a few operations. When you come home from the hospital, the cause and results of your operation, whatever it my have been, occupy your consciousness almost completely. You probably hurt, and every move you make reminds you that you hurt. You're always thinking about how to move just so, so that you won't make the pain worse. You think there might be something wrong. Your incision doesn't look right. You're not sure you are following the doctor's instruction correctly. Your medication doesn't seem to be working right. 

In a week, or a month, or maybe two, you're feeling better, but there's still an ache here and a twinge there, and you're exhausted. Your incision begins to itch. You're ready to get back to your normal life but you're soooo tired. You feel almost well, but you have a little relapse. 

But then a day comes when you realize you haven't thought about your operation for a couple of weeks. You feel really good. You can do everything you used to do. Pretty soon the whole experience, which was so all-consuming has disappeared beneath the waters of your everyday life and you only remember it when operations or sickness come up in casual conversation.

Then as I got older, some serious things began to happen in our family. I'm not going to go into details here, but we had some hard times--times when it seemed that everything we hoped for was lost--times when it seemed that it would be impossible to be really happy ever again. Even in the midst of those times, though, there were days that weren't so bad, when life pretty much went on in a normal way, and moments when we were happy. Berry speaks to this paradox further on in this story about the effects of a drought on a young boy.

For me, it was a summer of need--of more need, probably, than I was capable of recognizing or feeling. That one may be grieved and in need and all the while living one's life, often enough with interest and even pleasure, was an ordinary oddity far beyond my years and understanding. Grief, great as it might be, did not consume all the world, but now, for me, it had taken its place among the world's other things.

"Grieved and in need" we were indeed, but time passed, and grief did not consume all the world, or even our small part of it. Eventually, things got better--much better--although as Sam Gamgee hoped, everything sad has not yet come untrue. Now, we don't think about those times often, and when we do, much of the pain has been relieved.

Lately, things have been kind of hard, both physically and emotionally, but I know that down the road a bit, I won't think about them much. In the meantime, things are looking up. Thursday, we moved Mother into her new apartment. It's really a lovely place. It's on the 10th floor of the building and it's a corner room with fairly large windows, and it's next to a park, so the view is wonderful. I wish I had pictures, but I was too tired to get my phone out of my pocket. Hard as it was to prepare for and make this move, it was great to see my family working together to get this done. I think that Mother is happy to be there. I'm sure it will be an adjustment, but everyone there has been very, very nice, and soon, I think, she will feel at home there.

We found out that Mother was going to have to sell her house, and many of her possessions, and find a new place to live during the first week of April, and all this was done by May 29. That is truly amazing. We had a contract withing 3 weeks of putting the house on the market, and there wasn't the slightest hitch along the way. The people we found to buy her things were absolutely wonderful to her, and I think they were truly fond of her by the time our business was finished. We seem to have found the perfect place for Mother to live. I believe that this is an answer to prayer and the gift of a loving Father, but it really puzzles and humbles me when I think about it. Why are we so blessed when I see others struggling so much? It seems almost an act of presumption to say that I think it's God's work, but on the other hand, it would be an act of ingratitude to say that it wasn't. I guess that all I can do is just be truly grateful, and try to live in a way that shows that gratitude.

I guess this precludes complaining about my little miseries, but I'm going to have to try to do it anyway.

AMDG

The Horror in the Back Yard

RIP-Literally

But let me back up a bit.

This was taken on July 4 last year. All my children and my mother and 6 grandchildren here to celebrate the day.

We had a great time and this little one was especially happy as she had spent most of the day floating around in that little inflatable car that her uncle has commandeered in this picture. Most of you have read in previous posts that the next day, July 5, a huge tree fell on my house. As I sat in my room, feeling quite secure, I heard the winds rising and thought, "Darn, we left the pool toys in the pool and they're all going to blow away."

Well, after the big fall, we ended up spending the rest of the summer and part of the fall elsewhere and by the time we got back home, the pool was in pretty bad shape. This was going to happen anyway. We had been patching little tears in the liner for a couple of years, and the tears and patches had been getting bigger all summer. The neglect probably helped things along, and in the end we had to decide whether to fix the liner for several thousand dollars or fill the pool for several thousand dollars. It was a really hard decision, but for a variety of reasons--future expense--the enormous amount of time my husband spent on the pool every summer--the fact that the pool just doesn't get that much use--the fact that I never wanted a pool to begin with--we decided the pool had to go.

So, the big day came and this monster arrived to start hammering holes in the concrete. I just noticed how small the pool looks next to the beast.

When it was finished all the concrete was in the pool. I missed this first part because I was at work. I came home to find all the concrete in the pool. I figured at this point our decision was pretty irrevocable.

Then, the next morning, a Saturday, Junior showed up

and started hauling sand and dirt from the big truck in the drive to dump it in the pool. The truck couldn't get close to the pool because it was too heavy to drive over the line to the septic tank--we weren't going to ask for any more trouble.

Now I want to make sure you notice that the one thing I worried about the day of the storm did not come to pass. C. S. Lewis said that the hundred different things we worry about never happen, it's something new that surprises us. I guess that in this case, he was right.

Ten months later, and here's a little inflatable pink boat. I think the car actually DID blow out of the pool.

But there were plenty of other toys left, and maybe 100 years from now, somebody will find them here.

It was kind of hair-raising to me to watch this guy dump stuff in the pool and then drive out to the very edge of the dirt pile.

And there he sits victorious on the no-longer-a-pool.

And there it isn't. I love it that the angle of the picture makes the well-head cover look like a tombstone.

Unfortunately, we also have a sort of driveway through the yard now. We want to plant grass, but it was too early a couple of weeks ago when this happened and also, as soon as the trucks left, it started raining torrentially and has been doing so frequently ever since. As far as I can tell, Mother Nature is trying to recreate the pool. I think if you stepped on it, you would go to spend eternity with the pool toys.

I have had some sad moments since we filled the pool, but I haven't really had much time to think about it as we have moved on to the next big thing. I'm really glad that we had that nice family gathering on the last day, though. Sadly, most of the kids won't remember the day, and some of them won't remember the pool, but I'm thinking about printing a little book about it so they can see the day pool disappeared.

AMDG

BTW, my granddaughter Tessa, The Great Photographer, took that picture. I think she took it the night before the tree fell, but maybe not.