The way a Monday should be....

Now Playing: Flook, "Haven". Track 1, "The Tortoise and the Hare". (Thanks to Philip!)

A brief request, for those of you not on the church mailing list: One of my friends had one of her friends from college killed in a car wreck with three other members of his family. Some of his siblings are orphaned, and his girlfriend is very "cut up" by his death. Please pray!

May 21, 2007.

This morning I was roused out of a very strange dream, promising to turn into a fine nightmare, when my alarm clock went off at five-forty. I shook my head, dressed, and snuck downstairs. The house was dark and quiet, but there was a light on in the half-bathroom down by the garage door, where my mother was getting ready to go walking around Boomer Lake with Mrs. P, the good 'ol Dawn Treaders still in fine form. She had invited me to join her on her early-morning excursion. We drove over to Boomer Lake, the early morning chilly and grey. In the east there was a bank of low clouds, but the sky over the clouds was turning silver and pearl. Nighthawks dove and dipped through the cool air, chasing mosquitoes. Mrs. P pulled into the little parking lot shortly after we did. I had decided that it would be better for me to run than to walk, so I hopped out of the car, put on my MP3 player, and set off jogging north along the sidewalk, leaving the two women to follow more slowly.

I listened to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack. I skirted out from a thicket of cottonwood trees onto the northern end of the lake. Geese were paddling out by the island, and an early cliff swallow was already darting under the bridge, skimming low near the water. The sky was turning hazy colors, grey tinted red, blue overhead. In the meadow, where the sidewalk curved east, there was coreopsis, yarrow, and indian paintbrush blooming. Geese on the path honked and waddled in front of me as I jogged toward them. By one of the peninsulas there was a heron fishing, and a red-winged blackbird flashed colorful shoulder patches as it darted up from the long grass. The air was cool, with a slight south breeze, just enough to keep the bugs off.

Back at the starting point, I walked out onto the peninsula across from our little parking lot, turned off my music, and sat down on the bench at the end of the peninsula. A heron flew low over the water, its wings nearly touching the low waves. It made a harsh croaking call that reverberated in the stillness. The sun was higher now, from deep magenta to orange to gold, coming brighter through the clouds. A big yellow-bellied fish flopped up out of the water. The waves were full of splashes--lots of other fish, jumping up to catch bugs. Geese and goslings and mallard ducks paddled quietly in an inlet under the shelter of the trees. I sat for awhile in the stillness on the bench and prayed until I became chilled from the cool breeze and my own sweatiness. So then I sat in the car and dozed until my mother and Mrs. P returned, at about seven o'clock.

My mother and I drove home. Mandy and Sandy were waiting for us, and I fed them. My father was fixing breakfast in the kitchen, toasting and buttering waffles for Philip and Stephen, cooking oatmeal for Laura. My mother disappeared into her room to take a shower, but I had cooled down enough. So I made myself a cup of tea and then sat down to breakfast with my father, just the two of us. He told me a little bit about the undergraduate math class he's teaching this summer: analysis (if I try to spell the full name, I'll misspell it, so ask him!) of the same sort that the human ear does naturally, analyzing sounds by their frequencies. He told me about a talk he'd done one time at a Christian college, an elementary discussion of this sort of analysis. After the talk, one of the students had piped up and asked him confrontationally, "How can you say that such an intricate thing was made by chance?" My father laughed, remembering. "I said, 'Well, I don't'." I grinned. "He thought you were just the garden-variety university professor," I said, and thought about how neat it would be if such a thing were to happen where I go to school--not likely!

My father and I had family devotions together, reading Deuteronomy and praying, and then I went upstairs and took a shower. After my shower, I settled down to attend to the duties of the morning: my own devotions, writing e-mails, etc.

At ten o'clock, my mother, Laura, and I drove over to O'Higgins, a garden supply store, to meet my grandmother. She was to take Laura to her house for the day. We found her browsing out in the open-air lot behind the store, which is full of plants for sale. My mother and I poked around out there for awhile ourselves, looking through the plants. My mother picked out a fuzzy, shimmery little artemisia plant and also a butterfly bush promising to shoot out flower stalks. There were also mahonia bushes, hollies, azaleas, roses, grasses, young trees, and hydrangeas--I like hydrangeas; they remind me of when I was younger because they used to grow around our "old house". Whenever I see their big clusters of blue blooms, I think of water splashing down in cool places among lush leaves, and remember playing with the big dried flower heads, collecting them in plastic tubs and stashing them in my "fort" under the lilac bushes. With our plants we walked back through the open shop, big high-ceilinged rooms with concrete floors loosely stocked with fertilizer, garden ornaments, tools, etc., and opening off on either side into greenhouses full of flowers and herbs. While my mother and grandmother paid for their plants, Laura and I looked at a display full of packets of seeds, trying to decide which ones to buy. Impatiens, sunflowers, snapdragons, asters, columbines, hollyhocks, zinnias, marigolds, daisies, and poppies, California and Oriental.

My grandmother and Laura drove to my grandmother's house out at Golden Oaks, but my mother and I drove into town. We stopped by the First Presbyterian Church to return the keys (they let us use their chapel for the baccalaureate service), then Wal-Mart (so that I could buy backing for Philip's quilt), then Hobby Lobby (where my mother bought picture frams and I bought a big stack of scrapbooking paper--selling back textbooks means a nice little sum of money to use for fun!).

It was just my mother, Stephen, and me for lunch. We watched an episode of Superman--Stephen and I laughed at it a good deal, I'm afraid. We helped my mother clear away the lunch things. Then, while Stephen and my mother did some yard work, I listened to a Dorothy Sayers mystery on cassette tape and worked on scrapbook pages left over from the end of March. The wind rushed coolly through the maple trees, a sound like endlessly-falling water, silver in the leaves.

At three o'clock, my mother dropped me off at OSU so that I could go to work in the parking garage. I marched over to the Student Union and down the rattling metal stairs, down the long narrow hallways like a mole tunnel, to clock in. Since this was the afternoon shift, my "trainer" today was a highschool girl, Ginny, not the woman I worked with last week. The girl was nice enough, though neither one of us were much inclined to talk. We chatted a little bit--basic facts about our families, school, etc. Once I was settled in the booth, she sat across the drive on the sidewalk with a box of colored chalks and drew stars on the concrete. I read Agatha Christie mysteries between cars, and so the long hours were whiled away. I watched a kite soaring, swinging, swooping over the tall cypress trees by Theta Pond. Its tail veered and tipped to the wind, its wings scooped like a hand to catch warm updrafts. The wind powdered Ginny's jeans liberally with colored chalk dust. She lay down on the sidewalk to snooze. People driving by looked at her and made various interesting comments: several people wondered if she was dead and asked her if she was alright; one woman who drove past laughed, "Having a slumber party?"

Afternoon became evening, and evening became night. I listened to NPR, which turned from its national news broadcasting to Native American broadcasting to Performance Today to random Classical music.... A premier of a beautiful new piece about the Orpheus legend, a thoughtful, echoing piece. Big storm clouds came over, but it didn't rain. I turned on the little light in the booth, and leafhoppers and gnats buzzed annoyingly around it, hopping accidentally onto my book and me. At about nine o'clock, we counted the money, filled out the shift forms, etc. Ginny went to raise the gates. We walked back down to the office together at about nine-fifteen to drop the money in the safe. Then I said good-bye and walked up to my car. I was cold, thanks to the breeze and the chilliness in the air.

At home, I found my mother lying on her bed, reading, with Mandy to keep her company. I warmed up some leftovers and ate supper. The house was quiet--all the other kids were in bed. At about ten o'clock, I went up to bed myself.