Dead Days?

Now Playing: "The Nutcracker" ballet by Tchaikovsky. Act 2, No. 15: "Apotheosis".

I love this music! Thank you, Syneva! :o)

This morning Rachel and I slept in until eight o'clock or so. We went downstairs to visit Mary and Nicole for prayer at about eight-thirty. Mary was still sound asleep, but Nicole was up and cheerful. Rachel brewed tea for herself, and we sat and chatted and shared prayer requests. Though Nicole hissed at Mary, Mary refused to budge from her nest of blankets. So the three of us prayed, and then Rachel and I returned to our room.

At ten o'clock, I went to Tyrrell to practice my flute. I've really enjoyed the Telemann sonata, and I'm kind of sad about setting it aside. My jury is on Saturday. After an hour, I hurried over to the caf for lunch. The caf was almost empty, so I sat in a booth by myself. As I was finishing up, poking idly at my bowl of soup, Andrew shuffled up and asked if he could sit with me. We talked about literature, specifically American literature--Emily Dickinson, etc.

After lunch, I walked briskly to ACAC to meet with Mr. K. In ACAC, I found Spencer working at the little coffee shop. Nicole and Mr. K both happened to be there, so we stood and chatted for a bit. Then Mr. K and I went upstairs into the atrium. We spent a long time talking about serious matters, and ended in prayer.

I walked over to Zink for TURC at two o'clock. Dr. S has been away over the weekend, so she came flying up to her office, looking rather frazzled. "I'm sorry. I haven't read your paper at all yet," she said. So while she sat and skimmed my paper, I scribbled in my notebook. We went over the paper, section by section, together. It's about Milton's use of epic similes in Paradise Lost--how he uses similes, and other epic forms, to demonstrate human limitations (our readiness to side with evil and our inability to draw near to God by ourselves) and to baptize epic form itself (by setting forth a new heroic ideal, Christ, the suffering servant, as opposed to Satan, the proud, selfish Achillean type).

Back in the room, Rachel was gone, and I curled up in bed for a bit, until she returned. She had run to ACAC to pick up a package from her parents. Just as she stepped into the room, the fire alarm went off. The two of us scrambled to grab our keys and our shoes, and we ran downstairs. A trickle of girls poured outside with us, doors slamming and banging in the dorm. Outside, we found Syneva standing, to our surprise. She'd come to meet with Amy. We'd hardly been outside five minutes when the fire alarms were silenced, and we were let back into the building. Syneva came upstairs with us. Rachel dived into her package and produced an aluminum-foil wrapped parcel of oatmeal-and-chocolate cookies, which she shared with us. We stood around, munching the cookies and waiting for Amy to arrive. When Amy came, she ate a cookie, too, and admired our room before she and Syneva left.

I worked on my TURC paper for awhile. Tara called at about four forty-five to say that she was off work. We had agreed to go shopping together. Rachel and I bundled ourselves up and drove over to Tara's apartment. She was standing on the kerb, waiting. She hopped into the back seat. We drove down Delaware to Fifteenth Street, and pulled into a shady little strip of shops at the corner. One of the shops is a used bookstore, The Oak Tree. Rachel held open the door as we stepped up over the threshold. Along the front wall were nice copies of the "classics" in gold-embossed leather, and right by the front door are a couple of glass cases full of antique books, covers so faded that ink has become thin scrawl on brown covers. A girl who had been shelving books the moment before asked if she could help us find anything. "Can we just look?" asked Tara, and the girl smiled and disappeared behind the counter. The three of us dispersed. Immediately we found ourselves in a maze of books. Tall shelves had been cobbled together every which-way, crammed with books. Pictures, posters, and lists were pinned or taped at odd angles on the ends of shelves, or hung on the narrow strip of wall between shelves and ceiling. Brown carpet, brown walls, brown ceiling, brown windows. A stick of incense burning on the counter sent long curling wreaths like fingers through the air, spicy and heavy, mingling with the musty smell of old carpet and old paper and old ink. Lamps were perched in unexpected places on the tops of shelves, shedding cones of light over faded spines. Books everywhere: Sections of childrens' books, where I found familiar old friends--Lloyd Alexander, Susan U. Cooper, Brian Jacques, E. Nesbit, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle.... A beautifully illustrated copy of The Beauty and the Beast, rich colors like stained-glass windows. There were cookery books, fishing books, gardening books, birders' guides, field guides for plants and trees. There were thick books about northern European history, Tutankhamun, the Etruscans, and the Incas. There were shelves full of books by Oklahoma authors, and books about Native Americans, arranged by tribe. There were shelves and shelves and stacks and stacks of sci fi and fantasy and fiction--Tolkien, Sayers, Peters, Lewis, Rowling, the Brontes, O'Connor, Doyle, Dana all together. Mysteries, Classics, romance. Like looking at endless rows of doors, into any one of which you could step and discover another world. A wood between the worlds. :o) Rachel found a series of A.A. Milne's plays. Tara and I inspected the poetry section. Plenty of Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. I finally settled on a couple of battered paperback copies of Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch, two Susan U. Cooper books. I found The Black Cauldron, the only one of the Prydain Chronicles I'm missing, but the cover was very strange, so I decided to hold out for another time.

I sidled up to the counter and bought my books. Then the three of us returned to the cold evening. It was almost dark outside, a chilly blue dim like glazed glass hanging over the slushy streets. I poked my way slowly through traffic to the highway, which we took to Memorial, and then turned off from Memorial to Wal-Mart. We parked way out in the "boondocks", and so had to walk a long way in the cold to the store. Tara and I both had lists of things to buy. I had my mother's recipe for curry, plus a short list of odds and ends of things. Tara had groceries to get for herself. This particular Wal-Mart is probably the largest and seediest Wal-Mart I've ever been in. I'm sure everyone in there spoke Spanish as at least one of their languages--either Spanish or Black slang. "Yep. This is the ghetto Wal-Mart," Tara chuckled uneasily as we jostled past some rather unsavory characters. Rachel and I went off to look for scrapbook paper (for the cover of my P&P portfolio), and got separated from Tara. Rachel, with her usual good common sense, steered us in the right direction. Past aisles partitioned off with yellow tape because the floor was wet from leaks in the roof, past shoppers with carts piled high with Christmas presents, past overweight women in wheelchairs sitting in the middle of the aisles talking. We found Tara in groceries, and managed to piece together the last of the items on our list. We waited in line for a cashier for a long time. With a jump, I realized that the baby seat of the cart in front of us contained a mop of brown fur--a moving mop of brown fur, as a matter of fact. The mop turned around and grinned at Tara, who squealed with surprise. It was a little dog with black eyes and a very pink tongue, panting cheerfully at us. It was dressed in a blue-and-red dress (no, I'm not kidding). The two men who were the owners of the mop of fur were the finest specimens of rednecks I've ever seen--wearing filthy, holey overalls, overweight, with bristling beards, unkempt hair, weatherbeaten faces, and hands the size of hams. But the dolled-up dog belonged to them. As we slid into the car and drove back to campus, Tara, Rachel, and I laughed long and hard.

We stopped at the apartment, and Rachel and I helped Tara carry her groceries up to the apartment. Then Rachel and I drove to Di's house for supper. Di is a friend of the Ks. She's the head of the education department at the university. She lives alone in a house that backs up to the Ks' house, and she invited everyone to her house for supper and a "study break" tonight. Rachel really wanted to go, so I drove both of us over there. Her house is one of the delightful old brick houses that populate the Ks' neighborhood, with unexpected windows and fine wooden trim inside. We found Di busy heating up the grill on her back porch as we arrived. Indoors, we found Bob, Leslie, Andrew, David, Asher, Nicole, Ange, and Crystal hanging out. Crystal, Leslie, and Bob were ensconced in the living room by the fireplace, studying. A fire roared happily on the hearth. Inside, the house was very cozy and elegant, the walls painted tasteful shades of jade green and cream. Wood floors, long bookshelves full of commentaries and Bibles, racks of CDs, and artistic black-and-white photographs on the walls. Rachel and I joked with Andrew, Asher, and David about LOTR, plays, and art in general, while Di bustled in and out with the meat. The smell of grilling meat drifted through the banging back door. The food was ready very quickly. "I have six brats, six hotdogs, and six hamburgers, five with cheese, and one without, in case there's anyone who doesn't like cheese," Di announced. I grinned and rolled my eyes at Rachel. Unfortunately, Andrew (who already has a weird enough idea of me since he caught me reading Schaff while I ran yesterday) saw this gesture. "You don't like cheese?!" he exclaimed. "Umm.... No," I said. He and Asher stared at me for a full five minutes until I couldn't laugh at them any longer. "Do you guys want cookies, or burgers?" Di yelled from the grill, so we obediently filed outside to get our food. With our plates, Rachel and I settled ourselves on the floor by the enormous sofa where Crystal was sitting. Bob, Asher, Andrew, Leslie, and Joanna managed to find space to sit, all of us crowded together on chairs, the hearth, and the floor. Joanna and Bob looked at pictures on Facebook while Crystal and I condoled each other about the P&P portfolio. Rachel and I sipped root beer, and I laughed about Iron Bru (Scottish soft drink--WEIRD!). Spencer, Jenny, and others showed up later, adding their quirky laughter to the house.

At about seven-thirty, Rachel and I left. Andrew stood on the back porch to watch and make sure we arrived at the car safely since I'd parked closer to the Ks' house than to Di's house, and it was somewhat of a walk down the muddy kerb in the dark. Rachel and I went to Jason-and-Mardel's apartment. Mardel had invited everyone in the girls' Bible study over to her house to make Christmas ornaments, watch movies, etc. Rachel led me behind one block of flats to another block, and rapped confidently on the first door. "Come in!" someone shouted from inside. We let ourselves in. Inside, we found a circle of girls crowded together on the floor, hunched around a low table covered with craft materials. Sequins, ribbon, pins, scissors, and foam balls were scattered everywhere. The apartment itself was crowded with furniture, pictures, and odds and ends of things. A radio on the kitchen counter played Christmas music. Sometimes a molasses-voiced DJ named Delilah would come on to spout cheesy Christmas anecdotes, or collect them from callers. Rachel and I joined the other girls. Mardel, Syneva, Amanda, Amy, Jenny H., Alisha, Tara, and Lacee were all there. All of them were busy making ornaments: pinning variously-colored sequins onto styrofoam balls with tiny metallic pins. I curled up between Tara and Amy and just watched for a long time. Apple cider simmered on the stove, and Mardel and Amanda munched popcorn. Alisha opened a bag of oreos. Someone decided to turn on a movie, which turned out to be It's a Wonderful Life (I think). I only watched the first part. When Alisha left, I walked out with her, the two of us traversing the cold, dark parking lot together. I walked back to Lottie very much alone. The moon hung like a squashed face in the dark sky. Wet snow squelched under my feet.

Up in the room, I worked on my portfolio and my TURC paper. Rachel breezed in at about nine-thirty. She asked to see my portfolio when I finished it, so I handed it over to her. And I took some small pleasure in hearing her little sighs of delight as she browsed through the poems. I worked on my TURC paper until I felt as though my eyes were going cross-eyed, and now am trying to finish this quickly.