Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 3, "The Wardrobe".
This past week has been a great deal of reading: I finished Pride and Prejudice in a week and read about a score of Romantic poems, which were all by Wordsworth, except "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". To make matters worse, the professor assigned us to read each poem twice. That makes sense, since it is poetry and sometimes rather obscure, but it also makes the process twice as long. By the end of this week, my brain is all screwed up--I think like Jane Austen, and am tempted to eulogize nature like Wordsworth. Which is frustrating, since I don't much like either author!
During MBW class Friday morning, we started "Bride and Prejudice", the Indian movie version of Pride and Prejudice. It's gaudily colorful, flagrant, happy-go-lucky, full of lush characters and settings. I enjoyed it for the most part, except for a couple of scenes which (in my opinion) should've been skipped. Archaeology, which came after MBW, seemed rather dry and dull--all about smoke-blackened potsherds and chips of worn flint, instead of exotic saris and wind-blown palm trees and sharp spices.
I ate lunch with an Egyptian girl, a Lebanese girl, and a Chinese girl. The Lebanese girl looks to me like the embodiment of the goddess Athena (except that she doesn't have grey eyes). The Chinese girl looks like a pretty little porcelain doll, with a timid voice and a demure smile. When they left, Matt and Jenny sat with me. On Monday at lunch, Jenny made fun of me: "You eat like a rabbit!" she said when she saw my PB&J sandwich. "The only thing that disqualifies you is your chocolate chip cookie!" Friday, though, I teased her back since she just ate two apples for lunch--a green Granny Smith and a red-and-yellow Gala. Matt and I engaged in a hot discussion of a story he's making up, a realistic retelling of the Cinderella fairytale.
Princess came with my mother to pick me up this afternoon and take me home. I went running before they arrived, and returned from the shower the minute after Princess called my room to tell me they were waiting for me. On the drive home, the sun set in a blaze of splendor--a glaring and rather painful blaze, for awhile, as it shone directly in our eyes. Then it darkened, like old taffeta. The far hills were deep blue, reflecting the sky. In the east above the hills, the horizon was dusky mauve, rose and indigo, like the blending of glossy glazes on pottery. The moon swam palely just above the pink--a lucent blue, like frosted glass. It glowed with pale blue light like Marigold's eye when the sun slants into it. In the west, the sky burned translucent: vivid turquoise at its peak, fading to greenish aquamarine, then kindling again to saffron and apricot, like a wall of transparent flame. The butterfly-wing-colors shimmered across the sky, horizon-to-horizon, as though the sky was scintillating wings hovering above the earth's grey body.
At home, we microwaved leftover chicken for supper. We went to Daisy's and Brother1's basketball games, which started at 6:00 p.m. Both teams won easily. For the second half of the boys' game, Princess and I crouched in a corner with Meri and a bunch of the girls from the girls' basketball team (Meri is on the girls' team with Daisy). We teased each other about clothes. Laura and Katie, two of the girls, showed off their stylish, sequined purses. Katie and Meri laughed about mistakes they'd made in the game, while Laura critiqued the referees' calls as the boys sprinted down the floor. Claire stretched out in Meri's lap, and Meri proceeded to kiss and tickle Claire while Claire giggled and wiggled.
This morning Princess and I watched a little bit of "The Village". We wanted to watch it last night, but prudence told us that neither one of us would be able to sleep if we did. I had forgotten how lovely those first thirty minutes or so are: the stylized, flowing violin music matching the patterns of the trees against the sky and the water over the streambed, and the quiet, firm faces of the characters.
Brother1 took Princess and Daisy to robotics club this morning, while my mother and I went shopping. I bought art supplies for the First Seminar (orientation) class, and spent half the afternoon posting pictures, and half the afternoon at Brother2's basketball game. Brother2 plays on a public Parks&Recreation league. His team won handily.
I went for a walk in the evening. The sun set behind a steely grey sky, clouds like waves on a dark lake, drowning out the daylight. As I passed the Ys house, I saw Mr. Y working on his toolbench in the garage. Ray-ray, their little daughter, toddled out of the house with Kitty, their dog, bounding ahead of her. Kitty recognized me and jumped across the street toward me. Mr. Y called her back, without turning his head, but Kitty joyfully disobeyed him. She nosed around a telephone pole across the street from their house, then prepared to leap back into the street--just as a car was coming. I seized her collar and dragged her across the street. Mr. Y left the garage to see what the commotion was about. "Oh, I was just letting her stretch her legs," he said as he saw me come up the driveway. "A car was coming," I explained, fondling Kitty's ears. She grinned up at me, while Ray-ray stared solemnly, sucking one finger. "Drat--I was hoping to get rid of her that way, " Mr. Y laughed.
Since Daisy and (yeah! the start of track 9! GO PETER! save your sisters from the river! woo hoo! *pardon me* :) Brother1 were still slaving away at robotics, it was just my parents, Brother2, and me for supper. We had quite a cheerful meal, discussing classes, plans, basketball games, and the "Horatio Hornblower" books. My parents tossed a pun about moles (the animals/the unit of measurement) back and forth across the table while Brother2 and I listened, grinning.
This evening, my grandparents came over to watch a live TV broadcast of my cousin's basketball game on the internet. They're downstairs with my father and Brother2, watching the computer. I think it's the only time they've ever come over to our house to watch TV: we don't have a TV, so when there's a big sports event on, the boys usually go over to their house to watch it.
14 January 2006
10 January 2006
second semester, day 2
Now Playing: "The Village" soundtrack by James Newton Howard. Track 8, "The Gravel Road" (at least I think that's the name).
When I crawled out of bed this morning, I peeked outside, and was surprised to see pink snowflakes whirling through the dim, pre-dawn glow past my window. The street was wet, and the grass below my dorm was soggy with snow.
Rachel and I ate breakfast together. She told me about the computer program she's using for her calculus class.
After breakfast, I read the first two Books of Augustine's Confessions. I had forgotten how vivid and intense his writing style is, despite is denseness. Thankfully, there's an introduction to the Confessions at the start of the book that gives a concise outline, which acts as a helpful guide to the actual plot of the book so that I don't get lost in the elegant syntax.
I practiced my flute for an hour and twenty minutes. For awhile, the practice rooms were full of us: two flutes and a menagerie of pianists--Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and I'm sure there was some jazz or Joplin in there, too. Then a bass started to warm up. He's the same fellow, I think, as was practicing "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera" last semester.
After practicing, I dutifully marched down the hall to my flute professor's office for my lesson at 10:30. But when I knocked on the door, Dr. Gr looked at me in bewilderment. "Didn't I schedule you for Thursdays?" he asked kindly. "Since you have more classes on Tuesdays, I thought that would be easier for you." "Oh, yes, yes. I'm so sorry. Thank you!" My heart sank, and with many flimsy apologies, a flurry like the snow outside, I backed out of his office. As I returned to my dorm, I cradled my flute in my arms, pressing it against my damp coat, while snow pelted my face and snagged in my eyelashes.
"The Romantic Period in British Literature" was my next class, at 11:00, in the cramped graduate student seminar room in Zink Hall. That's the same room as my MBW II class is in. Most of the classroom is taken up with a huge table, fringed with chairs, and there are more chairs on the edges of the room. The room is much too small to accomodate two classes as big as MBW II and RPBL, since not everyone can fit around the table. Those who do sit at the table are crowded for elbow space to write in; those who don't sit at the table have to balance their notebooks on their knees and try not to bang the chairs of the people at the table.
Dr. A, the professor of RPBL, is a brisk, plump woman, but different from the professor of MBW. Dr. A has dark, curly hair, ruddy cheeks, and a slight accent--perhaps French or Arabic. She's businesslike but eager to engage the students (and she doesn't see everything as a joke!). She does blink a great deal, though. Thanks to MBW, RPBL, and Honors, I now have a grand total of three ten-page research papers due at the end of the semester. As I complained to Rachel later, it wouldn't have been nearly so bad if these papers had been for classes last semester: ancient literature (Honors) and Anglo-Saxon literature (MBW I) are my two "specialties", but Romantic British literature and modern British literature are definitely not my areas of interest--and those are the subjects for two of the research papers! I suppose I must find something interesting to write about the lurid poetry of Byron or Keats or Coleridge... but I'd much rather do "The Odyssey" or "Beowulf", thank you! *grins*
When class was done, I marched over to the bookstore and picked up my last two textbooks for the semester (hopefully!): a slim little volume on art and beauty in the Middle Ages, and a whopping Norton Anthology that could kill a person if I dropped it on them.
After lunch, Rachel and I walked to our next class, which we have together: a "first seminar". As we entered the classroom building, we glanced to our left and right, pausing to stare at the stiff portraits of the building's donors, a man and his wife, gazing at each other across the entry area. Our class was a motley crew--a jumble of students from a variety of Arts and Sciences majors. The professor is a heavyset older man with a deep, gravelly voice and deliberate mannerisms. His talk to us was sprinkled with "don't be judgmental" and "think outside the box" and "make the straight crooked", etc. The class certainly will be a variety of assignments--drawing, sketching, essays, discussions, lectures. One of the textbooks we're reading is Flatland, a novel about mathematic perspectives. I was a bit afraid it would turn out to be a relativist modern work, but it was written by a priest in the late 1800s and looks engaging.
As soon as we left the building after class, Rachel and I glanced at each other--then burst out laughing. Something about the loose requirements, the lack of guidelines, is completely absurd. He asked us to write an essay entitled, "Rating My Ability to Cause Change, to Cope (create stories, draw, sculpt, paint): I can...." "I have no idea what he wants!" I exclaimed, laughing despite my frustration. We sat up in my room and talked while I hung up my coat to dry--the front and sleeves were soggy, plastered with sleet. We discussed the class, and Dr. Ak from Honors. "She seems apologetic about religion. She kept assuring us that we wouldn't be discussing it too much in class, despite its importance in medieval life," I commented. We talked about Narnia. Rachel told me that one of her friends liked the battle a great deal, but wished that Aslan's resurrection had been his favorite scene, and I heartily agreed. Rachel didn't much like the depiction of the beavers as somewhat vulgar--more as comic relief than the stolid peasant types they are in the book.
I spent the afternoon when Rachel left doing homework. A.C. came over to check a class time on my computer (I guess she doesn't have internet). We chatted for an hour, joking about names ("Augusta Wind", and a woman whom A.C. knows whose name translates from Spanish, "A Rose of the Garden" since her first name is Rose and her husband's name is Garden), resurrecting old ancestors, and discussing literature--she likes Tolstoy; she's reading Anna Karenina right now.
The sun has set quickly, in just an hour. Streaks of cloud waver across the sky like hair snagged in a comb. The snow has melted, and the street is almost dry. People jog around the track, frozen in the glare from the white lights.
Suppertime....
When I crawled out of bed this morning, I peeked outside, and was surprised to see pink snowflakes whirling through the dim, pre-dawn glow past my window. The street was wet, and the grass below my dorm was soggy with snow.
Rachel and I ate breakfast together. She told me about the computer program she's using for her calculus class.
After breakfast, I read the first two Books of Augustine's Confessions. I had forgotten how vivid and intense his writing style is, despite is denseness. Thankfully, there's an introduction to the Confessions at the start of the book that gives a concise outline, which acts as a helpful guide to the actual plot of the book so that I don't get lost in the elegant syntax.
I practiced my flute for an hour and twenty minutes. For awhile, the practice rooms were full of us: two flutes and a menagerie of pianists--Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and I'm sure there was some jazz or Joplin in there, too. Then a bass started to warm up. He's the same fellow, I think, as was practicing "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera" last semester.
After practicing, I dutifully marched down the hall to my flute professor's office for my lesson at 10:30. But when I knocked on the door, Dr. Gr looked at me in bewilderment. "Didn't I schedule you for Thursdays?" he asked kindly. "Since you have more classes on Tuesdays, I thought that would be easier for you." "Oh, yes, yes. I'm so sorry. Thank you!" My heart sank, and with many flimsy apologies, a flurry like the snow outside, I backed out of his office. As I returned to my dorm, I cradled my flute in my arms, pressing it against my damp coat, while snow pelted my face and snagged in my eyelashes.
"The Romantic Period in British Literature" was my next class, at 11:00, in the cramped graduate student seminar room in Zink Hall. That's the same room as my MBW II class is in. Most of the classroom is taken up with a huge table, fringed with chairs, and there are more chairs on the edges of the room. The room is much too small to accomodate two classes as big as MBW II and RPBL, since not everyone can fit around the table. Those who do sit at the table are crowded for elbow space to write in; those who don't sit at the table have to balance their notebooks on their knees and try not to bang the chairs of the people at the table.
Dr. A, the professor of RPBL, is a brisk, plump woman, but different from the professor of MBW. Dr. A has dark, curly hair, ruddy cheeks, and a slight accent--perhaps French or Arabic. She's businesslike but eager to engage the students (and she doesn't see everything as a joke!). She does blink a great deal, though. Thanks to MBW, RPBL, and Honors, I now have a grand total of three ten-page research papers due at the end of the semester. As I complained to Rachel later, it wouldn't have been nearly so bad if these papers had been for classes last semester: ancient literature (Honors) and Anglo-Saxon literature (MBW I) are my two "specialties", but Romantic British literature and modern British literature are definitely not my areas of interest--and those are the subjects for two of the research papers! I suppose I must find something interesting to write about the lurid poetry of Byron or Keats or Coleridge... but I'd much rather do "The Odyssey" or "Beowulf", thank you! *grins*
When class was done, I marched over to the bookstore and picked up my last two textbooks for the semester (hopefully!): a slim little volume on art and beauty in the Middle Ages, and a whopping Norton Anthology that could kill a person if I dropped it on them.
After lunch, Rachel and I walked to our next class, which we have together: a "first seminar". As we entered the classroom building, we glanced to our left and right, pausing to stare at the stiff portraits of the building's donors, a man and his wife, gazing at each other across the entry area. Our class was a motley crew--a jumble of students from a variety of Arts and Sciences majors. The professor is a heavyset older man with a deep, gravelly voice and deliberate mannerisms. His talk to us was sprinkled with "don't be judgmental" and "think outside the box" and "make the straight crooked", etc. The class certainly will be a variety of assignments--drawing, sketching, essays, discussions, lectures. One of the textbooks we're reading is Flatland, a novel about mathematic perspectives. I was a bit afraid it would turn out to be a relativist modern work, but it was written by a priest in the late 1800s and looks engaging.
As soon as we left the building after class, Rachel and I glanced at each other--then burst out laughing. Something about the loose requirements, the lack of guidelines, is completely absurd. He asked us to write an essay entitled, "Rating My Ability to Cause Change, to Cope (create stories, draw, sculpt, paint): I can...." "I have no idea what he wants!" I exclaimed, laughing despite my frustration. We sat up in my room and talked while I hung up my coat to dry--the front and sleeves were soggy, plastered with sleet. We discussed the class, and Dr. Ak from Honors. "She seems apologetic about religion. She kept assuring us that we wouldn't be discussing it too much in class, despite its importance in medieval life," I commented. We talked about Narnia. Rachel told me that one of her friends liked the battle a great deal, but wished that Aslan's resurrection had been his favorite scene, and I heartily agreed. Rachel didn't much like the depiction of the beavers as somewhat vulgar--more as comic relief than the stolid peasant types they are in the book.
I spent the afternoon when Rachel left doing homework. A.C. came over to check a class time on my computer (I guess she doesn't have internet). We chatted for an hour, joking about names ("Augusta Wind", and a woman whom A.C. knows whose name translates from Spanish, "A Rose of the Garden" since her first name is Rose and her husband's name is Garden), resurrecting old ancestors, and discussing literature--she likes Tolstoy; she's reading Anna Karenina right now.
The sun has set quickly, in just an hour. Streaks of cloud waver across the sky like hair snagged in a comb. The snow has melted, and the street is almost dry. People jog around the track, frozen in the glare from the white lights.
Suppertime....
09 January 2006
second semester, day 1
Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 9, "To Aslan's Camp", one of my favorites on this CD.
I just finished Volume One of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and am now working on archaeology homework, with two Books of Augustine's Confessions still to go (you'll be pleased to know, SwanElf, that I have to read both Einhard and Notker, who stammered, on Charlemagne for my Honors class).
After breakfast this morning, I walked over to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks. On the way, I met Rachel. "Rachel!" "E--! Good to see you!" A brisk hug. "How was your vacation?" "Good." "How was yours?" "Good." And so on. She told me about her brother, who got a haircut while she was there, and about her sister, who's turning ten next week and kept joking about breaking into the "double digits". In the bookstore, we had some confusion over which window to go to. As Rachel observed, there are far too many booths and windows in the bookstore. There were several other confused students standing around, waiting "to be helped", and three or four frazzled elderly women retrieving heavy sacks of books for the students from the stacks in the back of the store.
In the bookstore, Rachel and I ran into Jenny and Tara, who were browsing through the bookstore, looking for textbooks, and then on the way back to our dorms, we met Jenny H., who is almost-but-not-quite recovered from being sick just before Christmas. She was chatty and bubbly, partly thanks to her cold medication.
My first class this morning was at 9:00 in Zink Hall, the English building. The professor for Major British Writers II is a plump blond woman, noisily cheerful, very friendly and outspoken. She kept commenting on how quiet the class was. She plied the class with questions about society, culture, and why people comply with standards. She told us that the first novel was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "It's awful!" she exclaimed. "Ridiculously allegorical. Characters named Chastity or Prudence, who stand for the qualities of their names." Everyone nodded wisely, agreeing with her, while I frowned indignantly.
It would appear that our class is one of the most "diverse" I've had yet: a "returning student", as my father calls them (a woman who's probably got a family of her own by now); a young man from Venezuela, wearing a red Nike soccer jersey; a very dark-skinned young Black from a French-speaking country; a young man with a learning disability; and a young man who looks Arabic and has extremely thick, bushy black eyebrows.
At 10:00 came archaeology class in one of the little, weird, triangular rooms in Kendall Hall that look as though they were modeled on one of those unsolvable wooden puzzles--no matter how hard you try, you never can get the cubes and pyramids to fit perfectly into each other. The professor for archaeology is a short, older man with a bushy white beard and glazed blue eyes, wearing the requisite khakis and vest. He seemed quite eager to teach, and left most of the class period open for the students to ask any questions they liked, which was encouraging.
As soon as archaeology was over, I took my flute and music down to the practice rooms in Tyrrell Hall. I had reached the Poulenc sonata when I heard a terrifying howling, screeching sound coming from the practice room next door to me. It sounded like a fire engine--but then I realized that it was only a soprano doing her warm-up exercises.
When I left Tyrrell, I met Alisha walking to lunch, and fell in step with her. She described her break, and I told her about the ball. We compared notes about our first day of classes. The cafeteria was crowded when we entered. Danielle was there, bouncing happily from friend to friend. She put hot pink highlights in her short, brown hair over the break. Alisha and I sat with the two Jennys, near Matt and Andrew and Katie and other RUF people. All day it's been like this: the quick hugs with the girls, the bright exclamations, "It's so good to see you, Alisha! or Tara! or Jenny! or Nicole!"; the brief, shouted, "Hey! Matt or Alex or Andrew or Austin!" to the boys.
At 2:00, I marched to Chapman Hall for Honors class. The professor is a tired older woman dressed in plain, neat business clothes. She plied us with questions about our interests, and Nicole, Rachel, Russ, and I did our best to answer some of her questions. She inquired, "Has anyone read Augustine's Confessions?" Rachel and I both said that we had, and she pressed us to tell her our impressions of the Confessions. "Wow, my highschool education was sadly lacking! You two both read the Confessions in highschool?" Rachel and I admitted that we were homeschooled. When I piped up with an answer to one of Nicole's comments on the Black Plague, the professor seemed immediately to think that I have a specialty in the area of the Plague. "Ok. Now, has anyone read Don Quixote?" Rachel and I were the only ones who raised our hands. "Wow! I'm very impressed. Have you read all of it?" Rachel and I looked confused. "Did Don Quixote die?" the professor asked. We nodded. "Now I'm amazed. Later in this course, we'll be talking about the 'Song of Roland'. Has anyone read that?" Sheepishly, I raised my hand and muttered, "Yes, for fun." "Good grief! You must never have been allowed outside to play!" she cried.
After Honors, Rachel and I laughed about the professor's impression of us.
The wind drove misty clouds across the skyscrapers downtown, and my blowing bangs felt damp as I strolled to my dorm. They've finished the construction in front of the dorms, and now the lawn below the library, which is flanked by dorms and classroom buildings, looks very elegant, with broad sidewalks lined with straight rows of trees, alternating with lights. Strips of sod mask the scars left by dumptrucks and bulldozers, and the expansive sprinkler system keeps the new grass in a state of perpetual muddiness.
I spent the afternoon reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack and "Invocation", a Celtic CD by Anuna. A.C. and I ate supper together. She described for me how her parents usually bake ham for Christmas dinner, and about the ornate nativity scenes that her mother sets up for Christmas (her mother is Catholic).
A weeping saint, haloed with gold leaf, sits beneath a tree on the cover of the Confessions, which lies on the desk beside me. Outside, fluffy clouds scurry past, blurring the lights of the skyscrapers with their speed and wetness. Right now (thanks, most likely, to having read too much Jane Austen), I feel as detached and satirical as any social commentator, and it probably comes across in this exceedingly dull post. Congratulations to anyone who managed to finish it. *haha*
I just finished Volume One of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and am now working on archaeology homework, with two Books of Augustine's Confessions still to go (you'll be pleased to know, SwanElf, that I have to read both Einhard and Notker, who stammered, on Charlemagne for my Honors class).
After breakfast this morning, I walked over to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks. On the way, I met Rachel. "Rachel!" "E--! Good to see you!" A brisk hug. "How was your vacation?" "Good." "How was yours?" "Good." And so on. She told me about her brother, who got a haircut while she was there, and about her sister, who's turning ten next week and kept joking about breaking into the "double digits". In the bookstore, we had some confusion over which window to go to. As Rachel observed, there are far too many booths and windows in the bookstore. There were several other confused students standing around, waiting "to be helped", and three or four frazzled elderly women retrieving heavy sacks of books for the students from the stacks in the back of the store.
In the bookstore, Rachel and I ran into Jenny and Tara, who were browsing through the bookstore, looking for textbooks, and then on the way back to our dorms, we met Jenny H., who is almost-but-not-quite recovered from being sick just before Christmas. She was chatty and bubbly, partly thanks to her cold medication.
My first class this morning was at 9:00 in Zink Hall, the English building. The professor for Major British Writers II is a plump blond woman, noisily cheerful, very friendly and outspoken. She kept commenting on how quiet the class was. She plied the class with questions about society, culture, and why people comply with standards. She told us that the first novel was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "It's awful!" she exclaimed. "Ridiculously allegorical. Characters named Chastity or Prudence, who stand for the qualities of their names." Everyone nodded wisely, agreeing with her, while I frowned indignantly.
It would appear that our class is one of the most "diverse" I've had yet: a "returning student", as my father calls them (a woman who's probably got a family of her own by now); a young man from Venezuela, wearing a red Nike soccer jersey; a very dark-skinned young Black from a French-speaking country; a young man with a learning disability; and a young man who looks Arabic and has extremely thick, bushy black eyebrows.
At 10:00 came archaeology class in one of the little, weird, triangular rooms in Kendall Hall that look as though they were modeled on one of those unsolvable wooden puzzles--no matter how hard you try, you never can get the cubes and pyramids to fit perfectly into each other. The professor for archaeology is a short, older man with a bushy white beard and glazed blue eyes, wearing the requisite khakis and vest. He seemed quite eager to teach, and left most of the class period open for the students to ask any questions they liked, which was encouraging.
As soon as archaeology was over, I took my flute and music down to the practice rooms in Tyrrell Hall. I had reached the Poulenc sonata when I heard a terrifying howling, screeching sound coming from the practice room next door to me. It sounded like a fire engine--but then I realized that it was only a soprano doing her warm-up exercises.
When I left Tyrrell, I met Alisha walking to lunch, and fell in step with her. She described her break, and I told her about the ball. We compared notes about our first day of classes. The cafeteria was crowded when we entered. Danielle was there, bouncing happily from friend to friend. She put hot pink highlights in her short, brown hair over the break. Alisha and I sat with the two Jennys, near Matt and Andrew and Katie and other RUF people. All day it's been like this: the quick hugs with the girls, the bright exclamations, "It's so good to see you, Alisha! or Tara! or Jenny! or Nicole!"; the brief, shouted, "Hey! Matt or Alex or Andrew or Austin!" to the boys.
At 2:00, I marched to Chapman Hall for Honors class. The professor is a tired older woman dressed in plain, neat business clothes. She plied us with questions about our interests, and Nicole, Rachel, Russ, and I did our best to answer some of her questions. She inquired, "Has anyone read Augustine's Confessions?" Rachel and I both said that we had, and she pressed us to tell her our impressions of the Confessions. "Wow, my highschool education was sadly lacking! You two both read the Confessions in highschool?" Rachel and I admitted that we were homeschooled. When I piped up with an answer to one of Nicole's comments on the Black Plague, the professor seemed immediately to think that I have a specialty in the area of the Plague. "Ok. Now, has anyone read Don Quixote?" Rachel and I were the only ones who raised our hands. "Wow! I'm very impressed. Have you read all of it?" Rachel and I looked confused. "Did Don Quixote die?" the professor asked. We nodded. "Now I'm amazed. Later in this course, we'll be talking about the 'Song of Roland'. Has anyone read that?" Sheepishly, I raised my hand and muttered, "Yes, for fun." "Good grief! You must never have been allowed outside to play!" she cried.
After Honors, Rachel and I laughed about the professor's impression of us.
The wind drove misty clouds across the skyscrapers downtown, and my blowing bangs felt damp as I strolled to my dorm. They've finished the construction in front of the dorms, and now the lawn below the library, which is flanked by dorms and classroom buildings, looks very elegant, with broad sidewalks lined with straight rows of trees, alternating with lights. Strips of sod mask the scars left by dumptrucks and bulldozers, and the expansive sprinkler system keeps the new grass in a state of perpetual muddiness.
I spent the afternoon reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack and "Invocation", a Celtic CD by Anuna. A.C. and I ate supper together. She described for me how her parents usually bake ham for Christmas dinner, and about the ornate nativity scenes that her mother sets up for Christmas (her mother is Catholic).
A weeping saint, haloed with gold leaf, sits beneath a tree on the cover of the Confessions, which lies on the desk beside me. Outside, fluffy clouds scurry past, blurring the lights of the skyscrapers with their speed and wetness. Right now (thanks, most likely, to having read too much Jane Austen), I feel as detached and satirical as any social commentator, and it probably comes across in this exceedingly dull post. Congratulations to anyone who managed to finish it. *haha*
04 January 2006
a big black dog
This afternoon I went for a walk around San Born Lake. As I strode through the neighborhood toward the SBL trail, a massive black labrador retriever galloped toward me. It had been sniffing in the lawns along the road, but as I passed, it wheeled ahead of me and began to jog before me down the street. I supposed that it belonged in the neighborhood and would turn back when I reached the trail. It was one of the biggest, most powerful dogs I've ever met, with an easy, effortless gait. (When I retold the story at supper, my mother interjected that she thought the dog must've been part horse.)
However, when I set out on the trail itself, the dog loped ahead of me, his paws thumping the grass. If we came to a fork, he would run down one branch until, glancing back, he saw me on the other branch. Then he would bound toward me, paws thudding, tail wagging, and jog on ahead of me. If I ever got out of sight, he would stop and nose around in the brush until I caught up. When we crossed the bridge, he stopped on the other side and waited with head cocked to make sure that I was coming. Across the meadow, I jogged behind him. He lengthened his stride until he was out of sight, and I couldn't hear the jingle of the metal tags on his rough canvas collar. When I breasted the hill, though, there he was at the top, poking idly through a stand of sumac until he spotted me. We raced through the gully, his broad pads and my white running shoes raising puffs of dust.
Back in the neighborhood, he still marched ahead of me, though his breathing was somewhat ragged, and there was froth on his jaws. A little girl was pedaling her pink tricycle on a driveway as the dog and I went by. The dog loped up to her, his breath rasping but his tail wagging. She jumped and squealed, afraid. Her grandmother called her into the garage, and the dog turned away carelessly, glancing at me apologetically. "I'm sorry," I reassured the grandmother, "he's not my dog, but he won't hurt you."
When I reached my house, I sat down on the front porch. The dog had jaunted on down the street, sniffing the kerb. He stopped suddenly, realized that I was sitting, and leaped towards me. He nosed the gate expectantly. I got up and went in, filled a bucket with water, and brought it to him. He lapped, then paddled with his forepaws in the water until it was full of mud and crushed maple leaves. After slurping contentedly, he bounded onto the front porch. I called Daisy and Brother2 outside on the walkie-talkie. As they piled out the door, the dog surged toward them, but I twisted a hand in its collar and held it back. "He won't hurt you!" I cried breathlessly. Daisy scurried indoors to wake my mother, who was napping (she's been ill with a cough, and has spent most of the day in bed with Mandy snoozing beside her). My mother staggered outside. "E--, we are NOT taking care of that dog!" she growled as the beast, straining against my hold on its collar, pushed toward her. "No, no!"I said impatiently. "There's a phone number on its collar. Go call its owner!"
A while later, the owner pulled up in his red pickup. The dog had bounded down the street a little ways. A short, older man stepped out of the car (a geezer, if I ever saw one). "Bo! Bo!" he drawled, "Git in the truck." Instantly, the dog returned, and sprang gracefully into the cluttered bed of the truck. "Thanks, girls. He's real friendly. All he wants to do is play ball. As soon as ah opened th' gate, he made a break for it. Good evenin'," the man said, as he tied a rope to the dog's collar. The huge beast waved its plumed tail magnificently from the back of the truck as its master stumped to the front and clambered inside the driver's seat.
The sunset tonight was red and gilt silver, streaks of clouds, like upswept horses' tails.
During supper, when I retold the story of the big black dog and how it had diligently muddied its drinking water, Brother2 giggled. We hosted Bible study at our house tonight after supper. The Ps, except Mrs. P, and Mr. and Mrs. W came. Mr. P led the study on Luke 11.
After the Bible study, the children, as usual, raced outside. I spotted Will sneaking across the back porch, armed with a flashlight. Indoors, Brother1, Sam, Mr. W, Mr. P, and my father were discussing the airforce (Mr. W's specialty) and academics (my father's specialty). While my father described a peer review article he's examining right now, Mary flounced in and began to play with Brother1 and Sam. Brother1 stole the little yellow fuzzy lamb that Mary had been carrying around and stood it on one of the blades of the ceiling fan, seven or eight feet off the floor. Mary played with Sam, yanking his shirt, tugging his shorts. He whipped his shirt over her head, then whipped it off again, and she emerged, laughing, with her hair frizzing around her cheeks.
"Look up there, Mary," Brother1 coaxed. Mary stared up and caught sight of the lamb perched on the fan. She stretched a hand up to reach it. Brother1 picked her up easily, and Mary batted the lamb down. "Oh, look! You made it fall thousands of feet!" Sam reprimanded her. Mary giggled. They repeated this process a couple of times, until Brother1 swiped the lamb. He passed it from hand to hand around his chest while Mary skipped around him in circles, grabbing at the lamb whenever it came within reach. Her laughter nearly drowned the staid conversation of the men, who watched her antics with broad smiles. Mary kept dashing around and around Brother1, until Brother1 suddenly put the lamb back onto the fan. Mary didn't see this move until, overbalancing on the slanted blade, the lamb tumbled onto the floor. "Oh!" she giggled. Brother1 swept the lamb up, and Mary started to chase it again. He tried to pass the lamb off to me, but I refused it, so he laid it on top of the fan, sideways, so that it wouldn't slip off again.
"It's up there, Mary!" Sam said, pointing to it. "Lift me, lift me!" she chirped. Brother1 put his hands around her chest and tried to lift her. "Oooh, you're too heavy!" he moaned. "I can't lift you." She skipped over to Sam, who also pretended to try to lift her. "It must've been those cookies you ate!" Brother1 exclaimed. Mary glowered at him, her forehead creased with worry and puzzlement. "Jump Mary, jump!" Sam urged her. Mary bounced up, and Sam, lifting her as she jumped, hefted her above his head. "Wow, you're strong, Mary!" Brother1 said. Mary giggled in excitement and bounced on Sam's feet. "Owowow!" Sam wailed. Mary laughed louder. Sam picked her up again, but this time, his hands slipped, and she slid down, hitting his feet with a bump. "Owch!" she exclaimed, and picked herself up. "Don't you ever do that again!" she scolded, laughing. "Ok, Mary. Can you be quieter now?" Mr. P asked, shepherding her out of the dining room and into the living room where the women were chatting.
However, when I set out on the trail itself, the dog loped ahead of me, his paws thumping the grass. If we came to a fork, he would run down one branch until, glancing back, he saw me on the other branch. Then he would bound toward me, paws thudding, tail wagging, and jog on ahead of me. If I ever got out of sight, he would stop and nose around in the brush until I caught up. When we crossed the bridge, he stopped on the other side and waited with head cocked to make sure that I was coming. Across the meadow, I jogged behind him. He lengthened his stride until he was out of sight, and I couldn't hear the jingle of the metal tags on his rough canvas collar. When I breasted the hill, though, there he was at the top, poking idly through a stand of sumac until he spotted me. We raced through the gully, his broad pads and my white running shoes raising puffs of dust.
Back in the neighborhood, he still marched ahead of me, though his breathing was somewhat ragged, and there was froth on his jaws. A little girl was pedaling her pink tricycle on a driveway as the dog and I went by. The dog loped up to her, his breath rasping but his tail wagging. She jumped and squealed, afraid. Her grandmother called her into the garage, and the dog turned away carelessly, glancing at me apologetically. "I'm sorry," I reassured the grandmother, "he's not my dog, but he won't hurt you."
When I reached my house, I sat down on the front porch. The dog had jaunted on down the street, sniffing the kerb. He stopped suddenly, realized that I was sitting, and leaped towards me. He nosed the gate expectantly. I got up and went in, filled a bucket with water, and brought it to him. He lapped, then paddled with his forepaws in the water until it was full of mud and crushed maple leaves. After slurping contentedly, he bounded onto the front porch. I called Daisy and Brother2 outside on the walkie-talkie. As they piled out the door, the dog surged toward them, but I twisted a hand in its collar and held it back. "He won't hurt you!" I cried breathlessly. Daisy scurried indoors to wake my mother, who was napping (she's been ill with a cough, and has spent most of the day in bed with Mandy snoozing beside her). My mother staggered outside. "E--, we are NOT taking care of that dog!" she growled as the beast, straining against my hold on its collar, pushed toward her. "No, no!"I said impatiently. "There's a phone number on its collar. Go call its owner!"
A while later, the owner pulled up in his red pickup. The dog had bounded down the street a little ways. A short, older man stepped out of the car (a geezer, if I ever saw one). "Bo! Bo!" he drawled, "Git in the truck." Instantly, the dog returned, and sprang gracefully into the cluttered bed of the truck. "Thanks, girls. He's real friendly. All he wants to do is play ball. As soon as ah opened th' gate, he made a break for it. Good evenin'," the man said, as he tied a rope to the dog's collar. The huge beast waved its plumed tail magnificently from the back of the truck as its master stumped to the front and clambered inside the driver's seat.
The sunset tonight was red and gilt silver, streaks of clouds, like upswept horses' tails.
During supper, when I retold the story of the big black dog and how it had diligently muddied its drinking water, Brother2 giggled. We hosted Bible study at our house tonight after supper. The Ps, except Mrs. P, and Mr. and Mrs. W came. Mr. P led the study on Luke 11.
After the Bible study, the children, as usual, raced outside. I spotted Will sneaking across the back porch, armed with a flashlight. Indoors, Brother1, Sam, Mr. W, Mr. P, and my father were discussing the airforce (Mr. W's specialty) and academics (my father's specialty). While my father described a peer review article he's examining right now, Mary flounced in and began to play with Brother1 and Sam. Brother1 stole the little yellow fuzzy lamb that Mary had been carrying around and stood it on one of the blades of the ceiling fan, seven or eight feet off the floor. Mary played with Sam, yanking his shirt, tugging his shorts. He whipped his shirt over her head, then whipped it off again, and she emerged, laughing, with her hair frizzing around her cheeks.
"Look up there, Mary," Brother1 coaxed. Mary stared up and caught sight of the lamb perched on the fan. She stretched a hand up to reach it. Brother1 picked her up easily, and Mary batted the lamb down. "Oh, look! You made it fall thousands of feet!" Sam reprimanded her. Mary giggled. They repeated this process a couple of times, until Brother1 swiped the lamb. He passed it from hand to hand around his chest while Mary skipped around him in circles, grabbing at the lamb whenever it came within reach. Her laughter nearly drowned the staid conversation of the men, who watched her antics with broad smiles. Mary kept dashing around and around Brother1, until Brother1 suddenly put the lamb back onto the fan. Mary didn't see this move until, overbalancing on the slanted blade, the lamb tumbled onto the floor. "Oh!" she giggled. Brother1 swept the lamb up, and Mary started to chase it again. He tried to pass the lamb off to me, but I refused it, so he laid it on top of the fan, sideways, so that it wouldn't slip off again.
"It's up there, Mary!" Sam said, pointing to it. "Lift me, lift me!" she chirped. Brother1 put his hands around her chest and tried to lift her. "Oooh, you're too heavy!" he moaned. "I can't lift you." She skipped over to Sam, who also pretended to try to lift her. "It must've been those cookies you ate!" Brother1 exclaimed. Mary glowered at him, her forehead creased with worry and puzzlement. "Jump Mary, jump!" Sam urged her. Mary bounced up, and Sam, lifting her as she jumped, hefted her above his head. "Wow, you're strong, Mary!" Brother1 said. Mary giggled in excitement and bounced on Sam's feet. "Owowow!" Sam wailed. Mary laughed louder. Sam picked her up again, but this time, his hands slipped, and she slid down, hitting his feet with a bump. "Owch!" she exclaimed, and picked herself up. "Don't you ever do that again!" she scolded, laughing. "Ok, Mary. Can you be quieter now?" Mr. P asked, shepherding her out of the dining room and into the living room where the women were chatting.
29 December 2005
Malory, "The Shadow", and four crazy girls
Now Playing: "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 6, "The King of the Golden Hall". (At least I think that's the name of the track--I'm not as good with TTT track names as with the other soundtracks.)
Well, I suppose I'd better find something to say on here. From tomorrow to Monday evening, I'll be gone with the rest of the CY to the youth retreat, so there won't be any posting during that time, and probably not any posting after it, either, at least for awhile.
On Monday, my father and I drove up to a city north of us. We took Mrs. P up to meet Mr. P there: she had been too ill to travel up with the rest of her family last weekend, so we were to take her halfway, to this city, and Mr. P would take her from that city the rest of the way. She chatted busily with us, refined, ladylike conversation. She and my father discussed churches, schools, the fates of their children, the antics of their pets.... I saw the sunset as a stained-glass window, shining saffron and scarlet, veined with the laced fingers of silhouetted cottonwood crowns.
We ate supper with Mr. and Mrs. P in a little diner, after having tried a KFC and a pizza joint, which were both closed, and a seafood restaurant, which was far too crowded. After supper, my father and I drove down to a bookstore on the highway. I browsed the fantasy section, more for the fun of seeing the familiar faces on the Lord of the Rings books. I looked at shelves of poetry, too, which was incredibly depressing. If that's what people think of when they think of poetry, I might as well lie down somewhere and die. Any attempt at writing something remotely resembling poetry seems so hopeless: it will either be latched onto by avante-gard, skull-wearing teenagers as great literature (if it contains profanity and pornography), or it will be labeled as doggerel by all and sundry (if it contains rhyme, rhythm, and anything verging on happiness). My father and I examined the C.S. Lewis section--thoughtful, intricate work, like strange mosaics. I eventually bought an elegantly-bound copy of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and a thick tome containing Sagas from Iceland. On the way home, we listened to Holst's "The Planets". I stared out the window at sheets of silver stars, like light sparkling on deep water. The Milky Way shimmered like the curve of a sail. I asked my father about their patterns, their orbits, their brightness. He said that you can see Venus at midday if you know where to look because she is so brilliant. When I glanced back out the window, a shooting star streaked across the western horizon.
On Tuesday, during lunch, we watched "The Shadow", an old superhero movie. The bit of Calvinism at the beginning (the man who becomes the Shadow starts out as a villain and is told that he "will be redeemed whether he wants to be or not") was intriguing. Violin and SwanElf came over Tuesday afternoon. The four of us (Daisy, too) spent an hour sprawled on my bed, laughing about old movies and joking about "Bob". Daisy had basketball practice, but Violin, SwanElf, and I went out for a walk. When we returned, the reek of garlic, onions, and chili powder made my eyes sting: my mother was stewing chili for supper.
All four of us slept in the study. We only stayed up till midnight. Daisy insisted that she and SwanElf switch places since Daisy had been lying by the door, and then got spooked. For awhile, Daisy gave humorous summaries of chick flicks she's watched at people's houses, with Violin and SwanElf adding in ridiculous comments.
Wednesday morning, Violin and I walked the Ps' dog, Lucy, for them. When we returned home, we found Daisy and SwanElf in the middle of making gingerbread cookies and listening to Chopin. We jumped in. SwanElf squealed when Violin spilled flour on her jeans, and Daisy made a face when Violin draped her sticky, floury hands around Daisy's neck, leaving long, white fingerprints on Daisy's mulberry sweater. I hastily gave Violin the job of greasing the cookie pan, while Daisy whipped eggwhites into powdered sugar for icing. Violin rolled out sheets of cinnamon-brown cookie dough, and laid crisp hearts, Jewish stars, and teddy bears on the cookie sheet.
Just before lunch, I drove Violin and SwanElf home. During lunch, we watched "Batman". My grandmother took the four of us kids out for ice cream. We spent a long, quiet evening at home. My father read Lieutenant Hornblower to us in the living room while Daisy cross-stitched a lighthouse, Brother2 played basketball with a little blue foam ball, and Brother1 pieced a puzzle he got for Christmas.
This morning I woke up from a horrible dream about Princess that left me feeling positively ill. After breakfast (and feeding Lucy, who had rocket shoes in her paws this morning, it seemed), my father and I drove to the drugstore, where a crisp clerk took my picture for a passport. Passport pictures always turn out hideously! Then we went to the county courthouse to file the application for a passport. The county courthouse looks imposing and classy on the outside, but inside it's all marble and dirty bronze--looks like a mausoleum to me.
My parents went out together for lunch. Brother1 was helping Mr. S cut brush out on his ranch--there's been an alert for brushfires recently. Daisy chose a "Three Stooges" episode for herself, Brother2, and me to watch during lunch. It was really ridiculous, but it was also a relief to be able to laugh--I've spent these past few days feeling like a metal beam with too much torque exerted on it.
Next door, they're cutting down two of my neighbor's pear trees. She has a stately row of pear trees in front of her house that burst into white bloom, like plumes of swan's feathers, in the spring. Now two of the trees are gone. The racket of the wood shredder was horrendous, as though the workmen were shredding pieces of brittle sky in their machine.
Well, I suppose I'd better find something to say on here. From tomorrow to Monday evening, I'll be gone with the rest of the CY to the youth retreat, so there won't be any posting during that time, and probably not any posting after it, either, at least for awhile.
On Monday, my father and I drove up to a city north of us. We took Mrs. P up to meet Mr. P there: she had been too ill to travel up with the rest of her family last weekend, so we were to take her halfway, to this city, and Mr. P would take her from that city the rest of the way. She chatted busily with us, refined, ladylike conversation. She and my father discussed churches, schools, the fates of their children, the antics of their pets.... I saw the sunset as a stained-glass window, shining saffron and scarlet, veined with the laced fingers of silhouetted cottonwood crowns.
We ate supper with Mr. and Mrs. P in a little diner, after having tried a KFC and a pizza joint, which were both closed, and a seafood restaurant, which was far too crowded. After supper, my father and I drove down to a bookstore on the highway. I browsed the fantasy section, more for the fun of seeing the familiar faces on the Lord of the Rings books. I looked at shelves of poetry, too, which was incredibly depressing. If that's what people think of when they think of poetry, I might as well lie down somewhere and die. Any attempt at writing something remotely resembling poetry seems so hopeless: it will either be latched onto by avante-gard, skull-wearing teenagers as great literature (if it contains profanity and pornography), or it will be labeled as doggerel by all and sundry (if it contains rhyme, rhythm, and anything verging on happiness). My father and I examined the C.S. Lewis section--thoughtful, intricate work, like strange mosaics. I eventually bought an elegantly-bound copy of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and a thick tome containing Sagas from Iceland. On the way home, we listened to Holst's "The Planets". I stared out the window at sheets of silver stars, like light sparkling on deep water. The Milky Way shimmered like the curve of a sail. I asked my father about their patterns, their orbits, their brightness. He said that you can see Venus at midday if you know where to look because she is so brilliant. When I glanced back out the window, a shooting star streaked across the western horizon.
On Tuesday, during lunch, we watched "The Shadow", an old superhero movie. The bit of Calvinism at the beginning (the man who becomes the Shadow starts out as a villain and is told that he "will be redeemed whether he wants to be or not") was intriguing. Violin and SwanElf came over Tuesday afternoon. The four of us (Daisy, too) spent an hour sprawled on my bed, laughing about old movies and joking about "Bob". Daisy had basketball practice, but Violin, SwanElf, and I went out for a walk. When we returned, the reek of garlic, onions, and chili powder made my eyes sting: my mother was stewing chili for supper.
All four of us slept in the study. We only stayed up till midnight. Daisy insisted that she and SwanElf switch places since Daisy had been lying by the door, and then got spooked. For awhile, Daisy gave humorous summaries of chick flicks she's watched at people's houses, with Violin and SwanElf adding in ridiculous comments.
Wednesday morning, Violin and I walked the Ps' dog, Lucy, for them. When we returned home, we found Daisy and SwanElf in the middle of making gingerbread cookies and listening to Chopin. We jumped in. SwanElf squealed when Violin spilled flour on her jeans, and Daisy made a face when Violin draped her sticky, floury hands around Daisy's neck, leaving long, white fingerprints on Daisy's mulberry sweater. I hastily gave Violin the job of greasing the cookie pan, while Daisy whipped eggwhites into powdered sugar for icing. Violin rolled out sheets of cinnamon-brown cookie dough, and laid crisp hearts, Jewish stars, and teddy bears on the cookie sheet.
Just before lunch, I drove Violin and SwanElf home. During lunch, we watched "Batman". My grandmother took the four of us kids out for ice cream. We spent a long, quiet evening at home. My father read Lieutenant Hornblower to us in the living room while Daisy cross-stitched a lighthouse, Brother2 played basketball with a little blue foam ball, and Brother1 pieced a puzzle he got for Christmas.
This morning I woke up from a horrible dream about Princess that left me feeling positively ill. After breakfast (and feeding Lucy, who had rocket shoes in her paws this morning, it seemed), my father and I drove to the drugstore, where a crisp clerk took my picture for a passport. Passport pictures always turn out hideously! Then we went to the county courthouse to file the application for a passport. The county courthouse looks imposing and classy on the outside, but inside it's all marble and dirty bronze--looks like a mausoleum to me.
My parents went out together for lunch. Brother1 was helping Mr. S cut brush out on his ranch--there's been an alert for brushfires recently. Daisy chose a "Three Stooges" episode for herself, Brother2, and me to watch during lunch. It was really ridiculous, but it was also a relief to be able to laugh--I've spent these past few days feeling like a metal beam with too much torque exerted on it.
Next door, they're cutting down two of my neighbor's pear trees. She has a stately row of pear trees in front of her house that burst into white bloom, like plumes of swan's feathers, in the spring. Now two of the trees are gone. The racket of the wood shredder was horrendous, as though the workmen were shredding pieces of brittle sky in their machine.
26 December 2005
Psalm Sing, Christmas Day
Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack, by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 2, "Evacuating London". My father gave this CD to my mother for Christmas. This scene, where the Pevensies' mother tells them good-bye at the train station, is the one scene where my mother felt like crying, at least that's what she said. I like the clicky little song that plays while they're on the train. Princess suspects that the two children who share their compartment are the children of the young woman who played Susan on the BBC production (they have her last name, Cook, and they look a little like her).
Disclaimer: In this post I list all the Psalms we sang along with the families that requested them. In some cases, I have listed a specific person from a family as requesting a Psalm. These specifics are educated guesses, based either on seating order or on handwriting. As a result, they may not be entirely accurate. However, the families will always be accurate since I have my father's sheet on which the requests were made, by family.
Last night, at 7:00, my family hosted a Psalm sing at our house. The Ws came early, for supper. After supper, everyone pitched in to prepare for the Psalm sing. My father rinsed dishes, while I screwed the lids on the jelly jars and the salad dressing and put them away. While my mother finished up the dishes, she chatted with Mrs. W. They shooed me away when I reentered the kitchen: they said that they were talking "girl talk", and immediately began to discuss my sweater, until I turned tail and scuttled off, thinking, "I must not be a girl!", with a sparkle of laughter. My father and Brother1 arranged a conservative ring of chairs in the living room, heeding my mother's dour predictions that no one would come because they would all be too sleepy from their afternoon naps. Brother1 carried the two plastic tubs of toys down from the schoolroom and put them in the dining room, where the tables had been pushed to the sides of the room. Melissa teased Brother1 and asked if the toys were hers. "Have at it!" he replied. My mother set out the tea things beside an enticing collection of desserts in the dining room: fudge from Princess's family, a rainbow of cookies from the F family, and mints from the Ps. We sat around in the living room, waiting for people to arrive.
When people did come, it was all at once, just after seven: the entire C clan, a troop of Ss, and a zoo of Fs. Brother1 and I scrambled about, scrounging up more chairs. Princess, Marigold, SwanElf, Katie, and Beth ended up sitting on the hearth, while various little girls crowded onto the sofa, and Brother1 roosted on the piano bench. Mr. C and Mrs. C sat near me, and Emily, their new daughter, sat beside me, for a little while--until she spied the toys. Then Mrs. C carried her off to play with Fric, Frac, and Sis in the dining room. Dani and Mrs. C kept a careful eye on them throughout the Psalm Sing.
Everyone was talking and laughing so loudly that my parents, the leaders of the Psalm Sing, had a difficult time making themselves heard. They had seated themselves near me, at the head of the living room, with rather the air of a king and queen on a dais. My father gave us selections from "The Life of Christ" in the Psalms to sing first.
During one of the selections, I noticed Mr. C making strange hand signs to Brother1, who merely stared at him in confusion. My mother noticed it, too, and interpreted the signs to mean that Brother1 should turn on the lamp on the piano. Mr. C chuckled, because this was not what he'd meant. Watching with amusement, I saw that William, Mr. C's oldest son who was sitting in front of Brother1, had a baseball cap dragged down over his eyes. "Do you want Brother1 to take off William's hat?" I whispered to Mr. C. "Yes." So I succeeded in catching P's eyes and made more hand motions at him. He stared at me like a befuddled owl until I glared at him, and then he whipped off William's hat. He grinned at Mr. C.
After singing part of "The Life of Christ in the Psalms", we moved on to selections from the congregation. My father had passed around a sheet of paper with each family's name on it, and each member of a family wrote their selections under their family name. The Carrolls were first with 100A, stanzas as dependable and unchanging as Scottish hills. We sang 119X, courtesy of Ruth. The little children clattered happily behind me. Fric made her plastic men converse, while Emily carefully lined toy cars along the back wall.
We sang 39B, which seemed to jar a bit with the holiday mood. As my father said, though, it shows just how broad a range the Psalms have by reflecting not only holiday joy but also a time of spiritual drought and despair. We sang 80B (courtesy Princess's family), the stirring words a battlecry for God's justice. We sang 99C, courtesy Melissa's family. People constantly jumped up in the middle of a Psalm, or between Psalms, to grab styrofoam cups and moisten harsh throats. SwanElf, who'd gotten up to pour herself a drink, came and took Emily's vacant seat beside me. We sang alto together on 116A, which was requested by Brother2, but we were so loud that it rather drowned the sopranos. My father joked that 98A, which is a perennial favorite, had "dropped off the charts" and was "no longer going to be played on pop radio" because no one had requested it--quite unusual.
We sang 146B, thanks to the Cs. Then came 84A and B, the first courtesy of the F Family, the second from the Ws. SwanElf and I giggled together about how happy we were that we were going to sing these--and then burst out laughing because neither one of us had requested them. 84A dragged so sluggishly that my mother had to start presenting, marking the beats with one hand so that people would move more briskly. My father called everyone to stand up for 84B. SwanElf, Princess, Beth, and I perched on the hearth, joking to Mr. W, who was standing in front of us, about having "heavenly voices" pealing in his ear. "Advancing still from strength to strength!" we sang joyfully.
The Ss requested 125 next, and then, of course, one of the Carrolls chose 105D. Mrs. W teased Mr. C that it fit his personality: the tune is in a dismal minor key, and Mr. C is always half-seriously, half-jokingly complaining about the joyful celebration of birthdays and holidays. The tune kept creeping sharp, despite Mrs. F's and my mother's best efforts.
I was surprised and a bit disappointed when my father announced that 105D was the last Psalm.
After the Psalm Sing, Princess gave me my Christmas present: six sheets of pretty, pastel scrapbook paper and a sheet of vellum friendship stickers (which I've been wanting for some time). I said that I'd finished almost all the paper SwanElf had given me for my birthday, except for the two sheets on which was printed an elegant, dreamy seascape. "I can't find any pictures pretty enough to put on them," I complained. "Well, go find some prettier friends!" someone exclaimed, and we all laughed. SwanElf put her hands on my shoulders and bounced up and down enthusiastically, talking about the youth retreat next weekend. I helped Mr. F search for three missing Psalters--the inevitable difficulty at such gatherings, despite the fact that each family religiously labels their own Psalters.
After the Ws left, Violin, SwanElf, and Brother1 stood together, vigorously discussing Johnny Cash, while Princess and I stood and listened.
After everyone left, I chased Daisy upstairs for her bath. My parents and I cleaned up downstairs: wiping off the tables, sorting out the jungle of chairs, moving the tables back into place. "The Psalm Sing was wonderful! Thank you, A--," my mother said to my father. "It made my heart soar and my throat sore," she quipped.
"Can't close my eyes... they're wide awake..." sings Imogen Heap on the Narnia credits song. And that's how I was after my bath. Exhausted all day, wide awake at night, my mind busy with Psalms and stories and all the bright, strange, lovely things of daylight and half-light and starlight. "It couldn't be... anymore beautiful... I can't take it in...."
Disclaimer: In this post I list all the Psalms we sang along with the families that requested them. In some cases, I have listed a specific person from a family as requesting a Psalm. These specifics are educated guesses, based either on seating order or on handwriting. As a result, they may not be entirely accurate. However, the families will always be accurate since I have my father's sheet on which the requests were made, by family.
Last night, at 7:00, my family hosted a Psalm sing at our house. The Ws came early, for supper. After supper, everyone pitched in to prepare for the Psalm sing. My father rinsed dishes, while I screwed the lids on the jelly jars and the salad dressing and put them away. While my mother finished up the dishes, she chatted with Mrs. W. They shooed me away when I reentered the kitchen: they said that they were talking "girl talk", and immediately began to discuss my sweater, until I turned tail and scuttled off, thinking, "I must not be a girl!", with a sparkle of laughter. My father and Brother1 arranged a conservative ring of chairs in the living room, heeding my mother's dour predictions that no one would come because they would all be too sleepy from their afternoon naps. Brother1 carried the two plastic tubs of toys down from the schoolroom and put them in the dining room, where the tables had been pushed to the sides of the room. Melissa teased Brother1 and asked if the toys were hers. "Have at it!" he replied. My mother set out the tea things beside an enticing collection of desserts in the dining room: fudge from Princess's family, a rainbow of cookies from the F family, and mints from the Ps. We sat around in the living room, waiting for people to arrive.
When people did come, it was all at once, just after seven: the entire C clan, a troop of Ss, and a zoo of Fs. Brother1 and I scrambled about, scrounging up more chairs. Princess, Marigold, SwanElf, Katie, and Beth ended up sitting on the hearth, while various little girls crowded onto the sofa, and Brother1 roosted on the piano bench. Mr. C and Mrs. C sat near me, and Emily, their new daughter, sat beside me, for a little while--until she spied the toys. Then Mrs. C carried her off to play with Fric, Frac, and Sis in the dining room. Dani and Mrs. C kept a careful eye on them throughout the Psalm Sing.
Everyone was talking and laughing so loudly that my parents, the leaders of the Psalm Sing, had a difficult time making themselves heard. They had seated themselves near me, at the head of the living room, with rather the air of a king and queen on a dais. My father gave us selections from "The Life of Christ" in the Psalms to sing first.
During one of the selections, I noticed Mr. C making strange hand signs to Brother1, who merely stared at him in confusion. My mother noticed it, too, and interpreted the signs to mean that Brother1 should turn on the lamp on the piano. Mr. C chuckled, because this was not what he'd meant. Watching with amusement, I saw that William, Mr. C's oldest son who was sitting in front of Brother1, had a baseball cap dragged down over his eyes. "Do you want Brother1 to take off William's hat?" I whispered to Mr. C. "Yes." So I succeeded in catching P's eyes and made more hand motions at him. He stared at me like a befuddled owl until I glared at him, and then he whipped off William's hat. He grinned at Mr. C.
After singing part of "The Life of Christ in the Psalms", we moved on to selections from the congregation. My father had passed around a sheet of paper with each family's name on it, and each member of a family wrote their selections under their family name. The Carrolls were first with 100A, stanzas as dependable and unchanging as Scottish hills. We sang 119X, courtesy of Ruth. The little children clattered happily behind me. Fric made her plastic men converse, while Emily carefully lined toy cars along the back wall.
We sang 39B, which seemed to jar a bit with the holiday mood. As my father said, though, it shows just how broad a range the Psalms have by reflecting not only holiday joy but also a time of spiritual drought and despair. We sang 80B (courtesy Princess's family), the stirring words a battlecry for God's justice. We sang 99C, courtesy Melissa's family. People constantly jumped up in the middle of a Psalm, or between Psalms, to grab styrofoam cups and moisten harsh throats. SwanElf, who'd gotten up to pour herself a drink, came and took Emily's vacant seat beside me. We sang alto together on 116A, which was requested by Brother2, but we were so loud that it rather drowned the sopranos. My father joked that 98A, which is a perennial favorite, had "dropped off the charts" and was "no longer going to be played on pop radio" because no one had requested it--quite unusual.
We sang 146B, thanks to the Cs. Then came 84A and B, the first courtesy of the F Family, the second from the Ws. SwanElf and I giggled together about how happy we were that we were going to sing these--and then burst out laughing because neither one of us had requested them. 84A dragged so sluggishly that my mother had to start presenting, marking the beats with one hand so that people would move more briskly. My father called everyone to stand up for 84B. SwanElf, Princess, Beth, and I perched on the hearth, joking to Mr. W, who was standing in front of us, about having "heavenly voices" pealing in his ear. "Advancing still from strength to strength!" we sang joyfully.
The Ss requested 125 next, and then, of course, one of the Carrolls chose 105D. Mrs. W teased Mr. C that it fit his personality: the tune is in a dismal minor key, and Mr. C is always half-seriously, half-jokingly complaining about the joyful celebration of birthdays and holidays. The tune kept creeping sharp, despite Mrs. F's and my mother's best efforts.
I was surprised and a bit disappointed when my father announced that 105D was the last Psalm.
After the Psalm Sing, Princess gave me my Christmas present: six sheets of pretty, pastel scrapbook paper and a sheet of vellum friendship stickers (which I've been wanting for some time). I said that I'd finished almost all the paper SwanElf had given me for my birthday, except for the two sheets on which was printed an elegant, dreamy seascape. "I can't find any pictures pretty enough to put on them," I complained. "Well, go find some prettier friends!" someone exclaimed, and we all laughed. SwanElf put her hands on my shoulders and bounced up and down enthusiastically, talking about the youth retreat next weekend. I helped Mr. F search for three missing Psalters--the inevitable difficulty at such gatherings, despite the fact that each family religiously labels their own Psalters.
After the Ws left, Violin, SwanElf, and Brother1 stood together, vigorously discussing Johnny Cash, while Princess and I stood and listened.
After everyone left, I chased Daisy upstairs for her bath. My parents and I cleaned up downstairs: wiping off the tables, sorting out the jungle of chairs, moving the tables back into place. "The Psalm Sing was wonderful! Thank you, A--," my mother said to my father. "It made my heart soar and my throat sore," she quipped.
"Can't close my eyes... they're wide awake..." sings Imogen Heap on the Narnia credits song. And that's how I was after my bath. Exhausted all day, wide awake at night, my mind busy with Psalms and stories and all the bright, strange, lovely things of daylight and half-light and starlight. "It couldn't be... anymore beautiful... I can't take it in...."
23 December 2005
walking through a wood alone... wishing Tumnus would come along....
Now Playing: "The Village" soundtrack by James Newton Howard. Track 1, "Noah Visits".
This past week has been fairly quiet in some ways. I spent the days from Monday evening to Wednesday morning at a friends' house. She had invited me to the Christmas ball that her church sponsored. The ball was just contradancing: the Virginia Reel, the Fairfax Fancy, the Waves of Tory, and other such English, Irish, and American line dances.
Wednesday afternoon I spent with Mrs. Y. We talked the afternoon away: it's been a very long time since we've actually sat down and talked to one another, so we had a great deal to discuss. Raychel, her little daughter, surreptitiously spirited away the contents of her mother's purse, and Joseph, Mrs. Y's young son, contentedly grinned at me from his mother's arms. When Daisy asked me what we'd done all afternoon, and I told her, she rolled her eyes and muttered, "Adults!".
On Thursday, my mother, Daisy, and I went shopping for Christmas. We went to a used clothes store first, where my mother found a dress and a jumper, along with several sweaters, for Daisy. I found long-sleeved shirts and a black dress. The streets were busy, thick with cars as autumn fields swarming with starlings. In Wal-Mart, we met Mrs. P, who was shopping for her family. That afternoon, I went for a walk around San Born Lake by myself, to think. There are a great many things to be considered right now--hints that people have dropped, my friends' behavior, stories being worked on, classes next semester. Thin white clouds, like reflections of light on a blue satin dress, rippled across the sky.
Today my mother, Daisy, and I went grocery shopping. Of course, I would get lost looking for a CD for one of my brothers. It took me half-an-hour to reconnect with the other two. This afternoon I walked around the lake again. The colors were rich, though bleak: the lake a polished, unruffled sheet of grey; the junipers dark green; the cottonwoods and willows hovering like silver mist along the banks; ruddy grass staining the meadows between the trees, remnants of sunflowers, asters, goldenrod, coreopsis. A heron flapped low over the water, wings mirroring the darkening clouds above.
Yes, it must be admitted, "The Village" puts me in a sombre mood.
Here are nine ways you know it's Christmas in our household:
1. My mother digs out the decorations from the topmost cabinet in the laundryroom. Since she has vertigo, she makes Brother1 and me put them up for her: the evergreen swag across the doorway from the dining room to the living room, twined with lights and hung with a raucously-colored conglomeration of ornaments collected from various grandmothers, aunts, second cousins, and old friends.
2. In the process of retrieving the ornaments, my mother discovers the cloth gift bags she's used to wrap our presents in for the last ten years. They, along with our purchases from Thursday, mysteriously disappear into her bedroom. Only the bags reappear, curiously full, and piled like a heap of fat, sunning sea lions on the living room table.
3. Brother2 goes around with an angelic smile on his face, asking people sidling questions about their favorite CDs, calendars, etc., and when you ask him what he bought from Amazon, he only grins as broadly as Sandy when she's been well-fed.
4. Daisy develops a sudden, unquenchable interest in baking butter cookies, which she then feels compelled to smother in vanilla icing. Needless to say, they all look so stiffly beautiful that, when it comes to dessert time, everyone is too timid to actually eat one.
5. My father leaves for work late and comes home from work early. Of course, his extra time has to be spent in replacing the batteries in the broken garage door opener and helping me to buy textbooks for next semester--an expensive endeavor.
6. Christmas cards line up like lights along the fishline strung from one side of our chimney to the other. Cards from people I couldn't recognize if you paid me. A card from my old flute teacher with her husband and two children, which makes my mother say, "Oh! The boys are so big! A-- is already missing his two front teeth! He'll be grown up before I know it!"
7. Brother1 has to bike down the street to check on the Ys' house to make sure that everything is "hunky-dory" (as he says) with their crazy dog, Kitty, while they're gone.
8. And I lock myself in my room with "Adventures in Odyssey" to work on mysterious projects. The mysterious projects, of course, only boil down to a dozen scrapbook pages and two trashcans full of paper scraps.
9. The house reverberates to Handel's "Messiah" blasting from the old LP record player in the living room, and smells spicily of cinnamon and cloves boiling slowly on the stove.
This past week has been fairly quiet in some ways. I spent the days from Monday evening to Wednesday morning at a friends' house. She had invited me to the Christmas ball that her church sponsored. The ball was just contradancing: the Virginia Reel, the Fairfax Fancy, the Waves of Tory, and other such English, Irish, and American line dances.
Wednesday afternoon I spent with Mrs. Y. We talked the afternoon away: it's been a very long time since we've actually sat down and talked to one another, so we had a great deal to discuss. Raychel, her little daughter, surreptitiously spirited away the contents of her mother's purse, and Joseph, Mrs. Y's young son, contentedly grinned at me from his mother's arms. When Daisy asked me what we'd done all afternoon, and I told her, she rolled her eyes and muttered, "Adults!".
On Thursday, my mother, Daisy, and I went shopping for Christmas. We went to a used clothes store first, where my mother found a dress and a jumper, along with several sweaters, for Daisy. I found long-sleeved shirts and a black dress. The streets were busy, thick with cars as autumn fields swarming with starlings. In Wal-Mart, we met Mrs. P, who was shopping for her family. That afternoon, I went for a walk around San Born Lake by myself, to think. There are a great many things to be considered right now--hints that people have dropped, my friends' behavior, stories being worked on, classes next semester. Thin white clouds, like reflections of light on a blue satin dress, rippled across the sky.
Today my mother, Daisy, and I went grocery shopping. Of course, I would get lost looking for a CD for one of my brothers. It took me half-an-hour to reconnect with the other two. This afternoon I walked around the lake again. The colors were rich, though bleak: the lake a polished, unruffled sheet of grey; the junipers dark green; the cottonwoods and willows hovering like silver mist along the banks; ruddy grass staining the meadows between the trees, remnants of sunflowers, asters, goldenrod, coreopsis. A heron flapped low over the water, wings mirroring the darkening clouds above.
Yes, it must be admitted, "The Village" puts me in a sombre mood.
Here are nine ways you know it's Christmas in our household:
1. My mother digs out the decorations from the topmost cabinet in the laundryroom. Since she has vertigo, she makes Brother1 and me put them up for her: the evergreen swag across the doorway from the dining room to the living room, twined with lights and hung with a raucously-colored conglomeration of ornaments collected from various grandmothers, aunts, second cousins, and old friends.
2. In the process of retrieving the ornaments, my mother discovers the cloth gift bags she's used to wrap our presents in for the last ten years. They, along with our purchases from Thursday, mysteriously disappear into her bedroom. Only the bags reappear, curiously full, and piled like a heap of fat, sunning sea lions on the living room table.
3. Brother2 goes around with an angelic smile on his face, asking people sidling questions about their favorite CDs, calendars, etc., and when you ask him what he bought from Amazon, he only grins as broadly as Sandy when she's been well-fed.
4. Daisy develops a sudden, unquenchable interest in baking butter cookies, which she then feels compelled to smother in vanilla icing. Needless to say, they all look so stiffly beautiful that, when it comes to dessert time, everyone is too timid to actually eat one.
5. My father leaves for work late and comes home from work early. Of course, his extra time has to be spent in replacing the batteries in the broken garage door opener and helping me to buy textbooks for next semester--an expensive endeavor.
6. Christmas cards line up like lights along the fishline strung from one side of our chimney to the other. Cards from people I couldn't recognize if you paid me. A card from my old flute teacher with her husband and two children, which makes my mother say, "Oh! The boys are so big! A-- is already missing his two front teeth! He'll be grown up before I know it!"
7. Brother1 has to bike down the street to check on the Ys' house to make sure that everything is "hunky-dory" (as he says) with their crazy dog, Kitty, while they're gone.
8. And I lock myself in my room with "Adventures in Odyssey" to work on mysterious projects. The mysterious projects, of course, only boil down to a dozen scrapbook pages and two trashcans full of paper scraps.
9. The house reverberates to Handel's "Messiah" blasting from the old LP record player in the living room, and smells spicily of cinnamon and cloves boiling slowly on the stove.
19 December 2005
having fun upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber
Now Playing: Brother2, who's bouncing a foam ball against his bedroom door while he's supposed to be doing his schoolwork
This post concerns the CY game night held at Mr. and Mrs. Y's house last Saturday, December 17, from 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening. Here goes....
After supper, Ross and Brother1 drove down to the Ys' home, which is only a few houses down from ours. The Ys moved in last week. Ross and Brother1 took along a couple of pans of chocolate-chip-and-butterscotch cookies that I'd baked in a flurry before supper. Peter, Daisy, Andrew, Brother2, and I walked (or ran, as the case may be).
The party was already well underway when we arrived. Everyone was eating cookies and popcorn and lounging around in the den at the bottom floor of the Ys' house. Mrs. Y was busy trying to finish setting out all the food, so she gave Joseph, her baby son, to me to hold. I held him awkwardly on my hip while SwanElf teased me about holding him. I finally gave him to her to hold. She settled herself in an overstuffed rocking chair with a placid smile on her face and the baby cuddled against her chest. People were still arriving. I gave Meri her birthday present: she turned seventeen today! She and Princess watched the fun from the stairs until Mr. Y organized us into two games: a game of Taboo, in the den, and a game of balderdash in the living room. Mr. Y handed children's books to everyone to use as writing desks. Marigold, Meri, Daisy, and Betty busily flipped through the Disney retellings of fairy tales, giggling the while. Sadly, the Ys couldn't locate their dictionary, so Daisy had to run back to our house to pick up the second volume of our weighty Webster's set (the second volume because the X, Y, and Z words are all the most interesting ones in the dictionary, of course). Until she returned, Peter used the Ys' little Roget's dictionary/thesaurus. The first word he picked was "fortuitous". Ross, Henry, and I all knew what it meant. Ross and Henry wrote down fake definitions, but I sat and looked sheepish, refusing to write down anything, while everyone made fun of me for knowing the word. "You're an English major! You know everything!" was the oft-repeated refrain. Ross read books to Raychel, the Ys' almost two-year-old daughter.
Eventually, I picked myself up and went down to the den to join Taboo, which was just getting started after a hunt to retrieve the Taboo set from a box. Boromir sat on the stairs and watched, munching peanut butter popcorn. The boys (Mr. Y, Ross, Brother1, Daniel) were on one team, and the girls (Violin, SwanElf, Hannah, and I) were on the other team. We had a delightfully uproarious game. Ross had been rather taciturn the whole time my cousins had been here, but he became quite jovial as the night progressed. Violin and SwanElf made fun of the boys' attempts to win the game. Someone decreed that the "hot seat" for the girls' team was a leather-upholstered rocking chair, while the "hot seat" for the boys' team was a sway-backed, orange sofa. Violin perched on the sofa's arm with the "buzzer" (which Mr. Y pretended to use as a razor, as a joke) to buzz the boys' reader whenever he said a taboo word. The tactics used by the reader to get his or her teammates to guess the word were quite hilarious. Ross used "the thing on the flag that the weirdos carry in the student parade" to try to get people to guess "rainbow" (the emblem of the Diversity Tribe). He also used Beevo, the emblem of the college that rivals his, to get people to guess "steer"--fortuitously for him, Brother1 recognized the name, though no one else in the room except the three of us knew what it meant. I tried to use it myself later on "meatloaf", but none of the girls had caught the reference from earlier. Mrs. Y sat and watched. Shadow crouched next to Raychel on the stairs, observing the fun. Raychel assiduously munched a bag full of potato chips, scattering fragments, Gretel-like, wherever she went.
Meanwhile, Shadow and his siblings arrived. He and his brother set up a Nintendo game set on the Ys’ television across the den from our Taboo game. Daniel and Boromir were soon glued to the TV. After the girls' Taboo team beat the boys' team, Ruth, Marigold, Peter, and Shadow joined us for another round, in which the other team (Violin, SwanElf, Ross, Brother1, etc.) won. I prowled upstairs to see what was going on in the living room. Princess and Marigold had brought out Cranium, and everyone was laughing and sitting around a blue card table. Brioni hovered nearby, holding Joseph, and smiling shyly at the fun.
Back downstairs, I slouched on the orange couch. The noise and laughter was becoming rather too much for me. Though Taboo and Cranium are not noisy games, everyone was so excited that they were all shouting. Mrs. Y rocked placidly in the midst of it all. Raychel clambered up onto the sofa beside me, dragging behind her a little plastic toy eggbeater, with one of Mrs. Y's old blue hats jammed onto her head. When Raychel discovered that if she drilled the eggbeater on my hand, I made a horrific howling sound, she grinned broadly. She drilled my hand for awhile, then my hair, and up and down my arms, chuckling evilly as I howled in mock pain. "Do you just enjoy hurting people?" I whimpered. "Yes," she lisped nonchalantly. She yanked the blue hat down over my eyes and drilled the eggbeater on my head, which made me hoot in pretend agony. Brother2, watching the Nintendo games, bounced up and down on a huge purple exercise ball and read "Fox in Socks" out loud to anyone who would listen. The ridiculous Dr. Seuss rhymes, and the crazy animals that looked as though they'd stepped out of a three-year-old's scribblings, mirrored the carefree, barely-contained joviality of the evening.
The Taboo game evaporated after awhile, as did the game of Cranium. In the living room, Brother1 and Meri organized a game of Mafia. Violin sat beside Mrs. Y in the den and gave her a long, complicated description of children's speech development patterns. Like Fric, she thinks with her hands--she used rapid gestures to supplement her "lecture". Raychel, the blue hat bobbing against her eyebrows, played with Ruth.
It was getting late. Mrs. Y took the little ones upstairs to bed, and Mr. Y sat on the stairs, guarding the bedrooms. Meri and Brother1 put together a game of sardines. Brother2 bounced his fist over outstretched hands as he counted, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers, let him go, eeny, meeny, miney, mo; my mother told me to choose the very best one and you are it!" Boromir was the first one chosen to hide. Mr. and Mrs. Y courteously turned off most of the lights in the house. Princess, Marigold, Hannah, Violin, SwanElf, and Ruth had to leave, and for awhile the entry area was a mess as Marigold tried to find her missing shoe from the sea of shoes stacked by the door. I waved them off, my breath hanging mistily in the dank air, shimmering like chain-mail mesh.
When I stepped indoors, I heard a great deal of giggling emanating from the guest room, just off the entry area. I stepped inside and found that everyone was jammed into the closet, including Boromir, who, suiting his small stature, had wedged himself on one of the shelves. Peter was the first to find him (my cousins are experts at hiding on shelves--when we play sardines in their house, shelves and cabinets are always the first places to be checked because that's where they hide--you even have to fumble along the topmost shelves of the closet, because Peter and Andrew can climb like monkeys), so Peter was the next to hide. Everyone gathered in the den and stood around, counting loudly, while Peter hid. Then we all separated to look for him. Estella and I groped into the Ys' garage and poked around inside the car. Henry checked the laundry room. Sam and Boromir looked under the computer desk in the study, while Brioni wandered around, smiling mysteriously and giving us the hint that "Whoever hid wasn't very original." It didn't take me long to figure out where Peter must've gone: back to the closet. I crouched in the corner behind the door. Pretty soon, everyone else except Henry had secreted themselves in some nook or cranny of the guest bedroom. We waited and waited, huffing and giggling in the dark. My legs grew cramped. Brother1, lurking in the wardrobe, finally shouted, "Henry! We're NOT in the guest bedroom! Nope! There's no one in here!". We all laughed loudly, which, of course, produced the desired effect: Henry appeared, blinking at us blankly as we streamed past him to the den. Meri was the next to hide. Estella and I looked everywhere for her. I couldn't figure out why all the boys were hanging around Mr. Y's computer: Ross was even sitting in the chair, messing with the screensaver. At last, they started to laugh at us, and we realized that Meri was hiding under the desk.
"Ok, guys! Load up! Time to go home!" I declared. "Oh, just one more round!" Ross begged, but I insisted. I hated to leave the Ys' new house in such a mess, but considering that all the lights were off and that Mrs. Y seemed to be in bed, there wasn't much use in fishing around for the vacuum cleaner. I sent Peter, Andrew, Daisy, and Brother2 scuttling down the street, while Brother1 and Ross drove. I realized that the knife that had gone with the cookies could be missing, so I ran back to see if I could find it. Meri, Estella, Betty, Sam, and Boromir were having their midnight snack in the dining room--leftover sandwiches and chips. I sprinted home, my shadow wavering on blue mist as a passing car's headlights illuminated the foggy night.
This post concerns the CY game night held at Mr. and Mrs. Y's house last Saturday, December 17, from 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening. Here goes....
After supper, Ross and Brother1 drove down to the Ys' home, which is only a few houses down from ours. The Ys moved in last week. Ross and Brother1 took along a couple of pans of chocolate-chip-and-butterscotch cookies that I'd baked in a flurry before supper. Peter, Daisy, Andrew, Brother2, and I walked (or ran, as the case may be).
The party was already well underway when we arrived. Everyone was eating cookies and popcorn and lounging around in the den at the bottom floor of the Ys' house. Mrs. Y was busy trying to finish setting out all the food, so she gave Joseph, her baby son, to me to hold. I held him awkwardly on my hip while SwanElf teased me about holding him. I finally gave him to her to hold. She settled herself in an overstuffed rocking chair with a placid smile on her face and the baby cuddled against her chest. People were still arriving. I gave Meri her birthday present: she turned seventeen today! She and Princess watched the fun from the stairs until Mr. Y organized us into two games: a game of Taboo, in the den, and a game of balderdash in the living room. Mr. Y handed children's books to everyone to use as writing desks. Marigold, Meri, Daisy, and Betty busily flipped through the Disney retellings of fairy tales, giggling the while. Sadly, the Ys couldn't locate their dictionary, so Daisy had to run back to our house to pick up the second volume of our weighty Webster's set (the second volume because the X, Y, and Z words are all the most interesting ones in the dictionary, of course). Until she returned, Peter used the Ys' little Roget's dictionary/thesaurus. The first word he picked was "fortuitous". Ross, Henry, and I all knew what it meant. Ross and Henry wrote down fake definitions, but I sat and looked sheepish, refusing to write down anything, while everyone made fun of me for knowing the word. "You're an English major! You know everything!" was the oft-repeated refrain. Ross read books to Raychel, the Ys' almost two-year-old daughter.
Eventually, I picked myself up and went down to the den to join Taboo, which was just getting started after a hunt to retrieve the Taboo set from a box. Boromir sat on the stairs and watched, munching peanut butter popcorn. The boys (Mr. Y, Ross, Brother1, Daniel) were on one team, and the girls (Violin, SwanElf, Hannah, and I) were on the other team. We had a delightfully uproarious game. Ross had been rather taciturn the whole time my cousins had been here, but he became quite jovial as the night progressed. Violin and SwanElf made fun of the boys' attempts to win the game. Someone decreed that the "hot seat" for the girls' team was a leather-upholstered rocking chair, while the "hot seat" for the boys' team was a sway-backed, orange sofa. Violin perched on the sofa's arm with the "buzzer" (which Mr. Y pretended to use as a razor, as a joke) to buzz the boys' reader whenever he said a taboo word. The tactics used by the reader to get his or her teammates to guess the word were quite hilarious. Ross used "the thing on the flag that the weirdos carry in the student parade" to try to get people to guess "rainbow" (the emblem of the Diversity Tribe). He also used Beevo, the emblem of the college that rivals his, to get people to guess "steer"--fortuitously for him, Brother1 recognized the name, though no one else in the room except the three of us knew what it meant. I tried to use it myself later on "meatloaf", but none of the girls had caught the reference from earlier. Mrs. Y sat and watched. Shadow crouched next to Raychel on the stairs, observing the fun. Raychel assiduously munched a bag full of potato chips, scattering fragments, Gretel-like, wherever she went.
Meanwhile, Shadow and his siblings arrived. He and his brother set up a Nintendo game set on the Ys’ television across the den from our Taboo game. Daniel and Boromir were soon glued to the TV. After the girls' Taboo team beat the boys' team, Ruth, Marigold, Peter, and Shadow joined us for another round, in which the other team (Violin, SwanElf, Ross, Brother1, etc.) won. I prowled upstairs to see what was going on in the living room. Princess and Marigold had brought out Cranium, and everyone was laughing and sitting around a blue card table. Brioni hovered nearby, holding Joseph, and smiling shyly at the fun.
Back downstairs, I slouched on the orange couch. The noise and laughter was becoming rather too much for me. Though Taboo and Cranium are not noisy games, everyone was so excited that they were all shouting. Mrs. Y rocked placidly in the midst of it all. Raychel clambered up onto the sofa beside me, dragging behind her a little plastic toy eggbeater, with one of Mrs. Y's old blue hats jammed onto her head. When Raychel discovered that if she drilled the eggbeater on my hand, I made a horrific howling sound, she grinned broadly. She drilled my hand for awhile, then my hair, and up and down my arms, chuckling evilly as I howled in mock pain. "Do you just enjoy hurting people?" I whimpered. "Yes," she lisped nonchalantly. She yanked the blue hat down over my eyes and drilled the eggbeater on my head, which made me hoot in pretend agony. Brother2, watching the Nintendo games, bounced up and down on a huge purple exercise ball and read "Fox in Socks" out loud to anyone who would listen. The ridiculous Dr. Seuss rhymes, and the crazy animals that looked as though they'd stepped out of a three-year-old's scribblings, mirrored the carefree, barely-contained joviality of the evening.
The Taboo game evaporated after awhile, as did the game of Cranium. In the living room, Brother1 and Meri organized a game of Mafia. Violin sat beside Mrs. Y in the den and gave her a long, complicated description of children's speech development patterns. Like Fric, she thinks with her hands--she used rapid gestures to supplement her "lecture". Raychel, the blue hat bobbing against her eyebrows, played with Ruth.
It was getting late. Mrs. Y took the little ones upstairs to bed, and Mr. Y sat on the stairs, guarding the bedrooms. Meri and Brother1 put together a game of sardines. Brother2 bounced his fist over outstretched hands as he counted, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers, let him go, eeny, meeny, miney, mo; my mother told me to choose the very best one and you are it!" Boromir was the first one chosen to hide. Mr. and Mrs. Y courteously turned off most of the lights in the house. Princess, Marigold, Hannah, Violin, SwanElf, and Ruth had to leave, and for awhile the entry area was a mess as Marigold tried to find her missing shoe from the sea of shoes stacked by the door. I waved them off, my breath hanging mistily in the dank air, shimmering like chain-mail mesh.
When I stepped indoors, I heard a great deal of giggling emanating from the guest room, just off the entry area. I stepped inside and found that everyone was jammed into the closet, including Boromir, who, suiting his small stature, had wedged himself on one of the shelves. Peter was the first to find him (my cousins are experts at hiding on shelves--when we play sardines in their house, shelves and cabinets are always the first places to be checked because that's where they hide--you even have to fumble along the topmost shelves of the closet, because Peter and Andrew can climb like monkeys), so Peter was the next to hide. Everyone gathered in the den and stood around, counting loudly, while Peter hid. Then we all separated to look for him. Estella and I groped into the Ys' garage and poked around inside the car. Henry checked the laundry room. Sam and Boromir looked under the computer desk in the study, while Brioni wandered around, smiling mysteriously and giving us the hint that "Whoever hid wasn't very original." It didn't take me long to figure out where Peter must've gone: back to the closet. I crouched in the corner behind the door. Pretty soon, everyone else except Henry had secreted themselves in some nook or cranny of the guest bedroom. We waited and waited, huffing and giggling in the dark. My legs grew cramped. Brother1, lurking in the wardrobe, finally shouted, "Henry! We're NOT in the guest bedroom! Nope! There's no one in here!". We all laughed loudly, which, of course, produced the desired effect: Henry appeared, blinking at us blankly as we streamed past him to the den. Meri was the next to hide. Estella and I looked everywhere for her. I couldn't figure out why all the boys were hanging around Mr. Y's computer: Ross was even sitting in the chair, messing with the screensaver. At last, they started to laugh at us, and we realized that Meri was hiding under the desk.
"Ok, guys! Load up! Time to go home!" I declared. "Oh, just one more round!" Ross begged, but I insisted. I hated to leave the Ys' new house in such a mess, but considering that all the lights were off and that Mrs. Y seemed to be in bed, there wasn't much use in fishing around for the vacuum cleaner. I sent Peter, Andrew, Daisy, and Brother2 scuttling down the street, while Brother1 and Ross drove. I realized that the knife that had gone with the cookies could be missing, so I ran back to see if I could find it. Meri, Estella, Betty, Sam, and Boromir were having their midnight snack in the dining room--leftover sandwiches and chips. I sprinted home, my shadow wavering on blue mist as a passing car's headlights illuminated the foggy night.
17 December 2005
They're after us!
Now playing: cousins, cousins, and more cousins
This morning my father went to the grocery store and bought two big boxes of donuts--one with chocolate frosting, and one with glaze. I ate a chocolate donut, and half of Lillian's chocolate donut, which she didn't want. When I went out to check the cats, Mandy was particularly friendly and began to purr as soon as I picked her up: she hadn't been fed. She decided to lick my ears as bribery.
Brother2 had a basketball game this morning, to which my parents, Brother1, and Uncle Kirk went. The boy cousins were all too interested in playing computer games and blowing up robots upstairs. Aunt Lisa had just gone running, and so needed a shower. She agreed to stay home with the boys and Mary, while Daisy dragged me, Lillian, and Annalee over to San Born Lake. We made quite an expedition: Annalee with her coat hood dragged down over her curls; Daisy and Lillian with their snow hats pulled down to their eyebrows and the pompoms at the tops of the hats wagging ridiculously, and me striding rather grouchily (at first) at the train of the procession.
Daisy led us on a long rabbit trail, down a sandstone path between juniper trees, across a meadow, and through a thicket of mulberry trees, their trunks writhen and spotted with green lichen. We ploughed through a glade, scrambled through some trees, and came out on a gravel road leading toward the lake. I spotted a horseapple tree near the road. We trooped over to inspect it. Horseapples (also known as Osage oranges) were sprinkled in the ditch under the tree. The three girls picked them up, inspected them, sniffed them ("Ew! Smells gross!" exclaimed Daisy; "Smells like a grapefruit," said Lillian), and stuffed them into their pockets, handling them clumsily because of their oversized gloves. "It's squishy!" said Daisy. "Probably bad," I said, and picked one up. "Feels like a brain," I commented. "Ooooh," giggled all the girls. "Feels like a dog brain!" chortled Daisy. "Yep. Dog brain, dog brain," said Lillian cheerfully. "Maybe a bunch of dogs lost their brains here," said Daisy, "maybe that's why they're so dumb." Annalee laughed.
Having filled their pockets with horseapples, they continued on their way, with me following. We jumped a fence and walked across a closely-mown lawn. We poked our heads inside an old shack and found a little path running into the woods. Suddenly, just as we started onto the trail around the lake itself, Daisy realized that she'd lost the walkie-talkie that we'd brought along (one walkie-talkie with the expedition, one with Aunt Lisa at home). We hurried back, searching the ground carefully. I found it where we'd jumped the fence. Annalee insisted on calling Aunt Lisa. When I told Aunt Lisa that we were alright, she said, "That's appreciated," in her dry way.
As we returned to the path in the woods, I poked my head out of a thicket. "Look out," I said. "There's spies over there. We have to hide from them." The little girls hastened up beside me and peered over my shoulder. "What?" asked Lillian. "Spies. We have to hide. Let's wait until they're on the other side of that building," I replied, "and then we'll run for it." There were four or five unsuspecting adults strolling about near the lake, close to an old house that people rent and use for parties occasionally. They sauntered towards the house. As soon as they were out of sight, I took of running, with the three girls skeining out behind me. We sprinted down the path, over a little rise, and were soon buried in a maze of trails and walkways running through the woods. Dangling honeysuckle ropes brushed our shoulders as we crossed a creek. We poked around by a pond upstream from the lake, separated from it by a very tall dam.
Further on, we came to a place where there was a stream. Beavers had dammed up the stream years ago, and though last summer the water finally cut a channel through the dam, there were still broad, muddy flats behind the dam where the water had once been. We found deer prints in the mud. We bounced on a fallen elm tree, its limbs creaking like arthritic joints, as though we were playing "horsie" with a grandfather. We followed the creek as it flowed through fairly open ground. At one point, under a clump of junipers, we found a good hideout. The floor was drifted, soft and deep, with silvery bermuda grass, like baby's hair. We curled up there and rested since Annalee's short legs were getting tired. After awhile, we continued on, hopping from sandstone rock to rock. The boulders shifted and slid, clinking like broken glass, under our feet. Annalee sat down on one of the red boulders to rest, watching Lillian and Daisy as they poked about in the mud by the creek. In one place there was a thin skim of ice on the brown water. Black fish, like slimy leaves, flickered in fear as I poked a hole through the ice and pushed it about on the tip of a long stick. Sluggish water sloshed to and fro as the ice rose and fell. We brushed through tall stands of ruddy grass, like Roman candles. Fluffy, cream-pale seed pods drifted down the breeze and caught on Lillian's teal snowhat. Baby's breath tinkled, like little bells, and last autumn's asters shattered like falling stars at the touch of a hand. Daisy held tangled skeins of wild rose bush aside for us as we crossed the creek and returned to the path.
Back on the path, Daisy and Lillian found a branch from a juniper tree that had been lopped off by some careless person. Annalee and I went in front, while they brought up the rear, dragging the branch to erase our footprints so that "they" couldn't follow us. As a helicopter buzzed in the distance, we hid in a thicket of juniper trees, crouching like hunted animals and whispering excitedly. A flock of sparrows, startled, leaped from the cattails by the creek. The roar of their wings made us jump. "You know," whispered Annalee, "they could've attached cameras to those birds." "You're right!" I said. "Let's hurry."
Geese paddled serenely on the lake, like brown lichen on a smooth, dark grey boulder. We hurried down a curving path and scrambled up a steep slope. Our feet slid on rocks that crumbled into red and yellow dust as we crushed them. Racing into a ravine, we climbed into a hollow and huddled near a dead cactus while the helicopter growled in the distance and a jet roared past overhead. Once the two noises had diminished, we raced across a broad meadow. Our feet pummeled the springy grass. Dead sunflowers rattled in a thin east wind. We debated for awhile about which way to go: south, over the dam and through the back properties of our neighborhood, or southeast, through the neighborhood itself. We finally decided (with the help of my conscience, which said that my mother wouldn't appreciate it if we took the back way) to go on the street and try to "blend in". Annalee was decidedly lagging behind by now.
To keep the spies from recognizing us, we pulled our hats and hoods low over our eyes and started off down the street. I balanced my long stick on my shoulder, shortening my steps to stroll beside Annalee, while Lillian and Daisy shuffled their feet through drifts of leaves. We cast suspicious glances at any car that passed, and when a door slammed shut behind us, Daisy jumped. To keep the spies from knowing where we lived, we walked up the easment and entered our yard through the back gate. We tracked leaves and clotted clay from our shoes onto the dining room floor as we trooped inside. Daisy immediately began to fix hot chocolate for anyone and everyone, while Lillian and Annalee prowled around, and Aunt Lisa finished off the hat she'd been knitting. Lillian proudly showed Aunt Lisa her horseapple, which made Aunt Lisa stare rather ruefully. Mary smiled her sunny, squinched-eyes smile at me as I flopped down on the sofa with a magazine. I chatted with Violin on the phone for a little bit. Her squirrely siblings were chattering in the background at her house, and my own squirrely relations were making the dining room quite a zoo on my end of the line.
When Brothers 1 and 2 returned with my parents and Uncle Kirk, my parents set to making lunch. When Uncle Kirk heard about the horseapples, he chuckled loudly, especially when Aunt Lisa told him that Lillian had told her, "They feel like brains!" "Is that any reason for bringing them home?" Aunt Lisa inquired.
I can smell burned cheesemelts from the dining room where my mother and Aunt Lisa are talking. Uncle Kirk stumps down the stairs. Mary babbles, "Jingle bells, jingle bells" in the living room, and the boys growl upstairs at their computer game. Andrew squeals--Ross probably just jumped on him. The little girls thump around in their room over my head, probably trying to rearrange the sleeping quarters. "Food!" shouts Aunt Lisa. It's lunchtime.
This morning my father went to the grocery store and bought two big boxes of donuts--one with chocolate frosting, and one with glaze. I ate a chocolate donut, and half of Lillian's chocolate donut, which she didn't want. When I went out to check the cats, Mandy was particularly friendly and began to purr as soon as I picked her up: she hadn't been fed. She decided to lick my ears as bribery.
Brother2 had a basketball game this morning, to which my parents, Brother1, and Uncle Kirk went. The boy cousins were all too interested in playing computer games and blowing up robots upstairs. Aunt Lisa had just gone running, and so needed a shower. She agreed to stay home with the boys and Mary, while Daisy dragged me, Lillian, and Annalee over to San Born Lake. We made quite an expedition: Annalee with her coat hood dragged down over her curls; Daisy and Lillian with their snow hats pulled down to their eyebrows and the pompoms at the tops of the hats wagging ridiculously, and me striding rather grouchily (at first) at the train of the procession.
Daisy led us on a long rabbit trail, down a sandstone path between juniper trees, across a meadow, and through a thicket of mulberry trees, their trunks writhen and spotted with green lichen. We ploughed through a glade, scrambled through some trees, and came out on a gravel road leading toward the lake. I spotted a horseapple tree near the road. We trooped over to inspect it. Horseapples (also known as Osage oranges) were sprinkled in the ditch under the tree. The three girls picked them up, inspected them, sniffed them ("Ew! Smells gross!" exclaimed Daisy; "Smells like a grapefruit," said Lillian), and stuffed them into their pockets, handling them clumsily because of their oversized gloves. "It's squishy!" said Daisy. "Probably bad," I said, and picked one up. "Feels like a brain," I commented. "Ooooh," giggled all the girls. "Feels like a dog brain!" chortled Daisy. "Yep. Dog brain, dog brain," said Lillian cheerfully. "Maybe a bunch of dogs lost their brains here," said Daisy, "maybe that's why they're so dumb." Annalee laughed.
Having filled their pockets with horseapples, they continued on their way, with me following. We jumped a fence and walked across a closely-mown lawn. We poked our heads inside an old shack and found a little path running into the woods. Suddenly, just as we started onto the trail around the lake itself, Daisy realized that she'd lost the walkie-talkie that we'd brought along (one walkie-talkie with the expedition, one with Aunt Lisa at home). We hurried back, searching the ground carefully. I found it where we'd jumped the fence. Annalee insisted on calling Aunt Lisa. When I told Aunt Lisa that we were alright, she said, "That's appreciated," in her dry way.
As we returned to the path in the woods, I poked my head out of a thicket. "Look out," I said. "There's spies over there. We have to hide from them." The little girls hastened up beside me and peered over my shoulder. "What?" asked Lillian. "Spies. We have to hide. Let's wait until they're on the other side of that building," I replied, "and then we'll run for it." There were four or five unsuspecting adults strolling about near the lake, close to an old house that people rent and use for parties occasionally. They sauntered towards the house. As soon as they were out of sight, I took of running, with the three girls skeining out behind me. We sprinted down the path, over a little rise, and were soon buried in a maze of trails and walkways running through the woods. Dangling honeysuckle ropes brushed our shoulders as we crossed a creek. We poked around by a pond upstream from the lake, separated from it by a very tall dam.
Further on, we came to a place where there was a stream. Beavers had dammed up the stream years ago, and though last summer the water finally cut a channel through the dam, there were still broad, muddy flats behind the dam where the water had once been. We found deer prints in the mud. We bounced on a fallen elm tree, its limbs creaking like arthritic joints, as though we were playing "horsie" with a grandfather. We followed the creek as it flowed through fairly open ground. At one point, under a clump of junipers, we found a good hideout. The floor was drifted, soft and deep, with silvery bermuda grass, like baby's hair. We curled up there and rested since Annalee's short legs were getting tired. After awhile, we continued on, hopping from sandstone rock to rock. The boulders shifted and slid, clinking like broken glass, under our feet. Annalee sat down on one of the red boulders to rest, watching Lillian and Daisy as they poked about in the mud by the creek. In one place there was a thin skim of ice on the brown water. Black fish, like slimy leaves, flickered in fear as I poked a hole through the ice and pushed it about on the tip of a long stick. Sluggish water sloshed to and fro as the ice rose and fell. We brushed through tall stands of ruddy grass, like Roman candles. Fluffy, cream-pale seed pods drifted down the breeze and caught on Lillian's teal snowhat. Baby's breath tinkled, like little bells, and last autumn's asters shattered like falling stars at the touch of a hand. Daisy held tangled skeins of wild rose bush aside for us as we crossed the creek and returned to the path.
Back on the path, Daisy and Lillian found a branch from a juniper tree that had been lopped off by some careless person. Annalee and I went in front, while they brought up the rear, dragging the branch to erase our footprints so that "they" couldn't follow us. As a helicopter buzzed in the distance, we hid in a thicket of juniper trees, crouching like hunted animals and whispering excitedly. A flock of sparrows, startled, leaped from the cattails by the creek. The roar of their wings made us jump. "You know," whispered Annalee, "they could've attached cameras to those birds." "You're right!" I said. "Let's hurry."
Geese paddled serenely on the lake, like brown lichen on a smooth, dark grey boulder. We hurried down a curving path and scrambled up a steep slope. Our feet slid on rocks that crumbled into red and yellow dust as we crushed them. Racing into a ravine, we climbed into a hollow and huddled near a dead cactus while the helicopter growled in the distance and a jet roared past overhead. Once the two noises had diminished, we raced across a broad meadow. Our feet pummeled the springy grass. Dead sunflowers rattled in a thin east wind. We debated for awhile about which way to go: south, over the dam and through the back properties of our neighborhood, or southeast, through the neighborhood itself. We finally decided (with the help of my conscience, which said that my mother wouldn't appreciate it if we took the back way) to go on the street and try to "blend in". Annalee was decidedly lagging behind by now.
To keep the spies from recognizing us, we pulled our hats and hoods low over our eyes and started off down the street. I balanced my long stick on my shoulder, shortening my steps to stroll beside Annalee, while Lillian and Daisy shuffled their feet through drifts of leaves. We cast suspicious glances at any car that passed, and when a door slammed shut behind us, Daisy jumped. To keep the spies from knowing where we lived, we walked up the easment and entered our yard through the back gate. We tracked leaves and clotted clay from our shoes onto the dining room floor as we trooped inside. Daisy immediately began to fix hot chocolate for anyone and everyone, while Lillian and Annalee prowled around, and Aunt Lisa finished off the hat she'd been knitting. Lillian proudly showed Aunt Lisa her horseapple, which made Aunt Lisa stare rather ruefully. Mary smiled her sunny, squinched-eyes smile at me as I flopped down on the sofa with a magazine. I chatted with Violin on the phone for a little bit. Her squirrely siblings were chattering in the background at her house, and my own squirrely relations were making the dining room quite a zoo on my end of the line.
When Brothers 1 and 2 returned with my parents and Uncle Kirk, my parents set to making lunch. When Uncle Kirk heard about the horseapples, he chuckled loudly, especially when Aunt Lisa told him that Lillian had told her, "They feel like brains!" "Is that any reason for bringing them home?" Aunt Lisa inquired.
I can smell burned cheesemelts from the dining room where my mother and Aunt Lisa are talking. Uncle Kirk stumps down the stairs. Mary babbles, "Jingle bells, jingle bells" in the living room, and the boys growl upstairs at their computer game. Andrew squeals--Ross probably just jumped on him. The little girls thump around in their room over my head, probably trying to rearrange the sleeping quarters. "Food!" shouts Aunt Lisa. It's lunchtime.
16 December 2005
What a bunch of funny people!
Now Playing: lots of cousins
Cast of Characters (though most of you won't need this):
Uncle Kirk: my mother's younger brother, a doctor; with greying black hair and a funny smile (and he likes Tolkien! :)
Aunt Lisa: homeschool mother, math teacher, and quilting-and-knitting aficionado; long, straight, blond hair, and precise, deliberate way
Ross: my eldest cousin (17); thickset, muscled; with very short blond hair that used to be curly, until he went into the ROTC and they shaved it all off
Andrew: my next cousin (15); slender, dark-eyed, a carbon copy of my uncle
Peter: 13 or thereabouts; dark-haired, shorter and broader than Andrew; a friendly chap
Lillian: 11 or thereabouts; slender, dark-eyed, and freckled; almost a female version of Andrew
Annalee: 8 or so; short, with a headful of irrepressible blond curls; she bounces everywhere
Mary: 3, short, with a very sunny smile and hazel eyes; like Annalee, she seems to skip or hop everywhere she goes
Yesterday my cousins drove up from the south. They're all pansies, not being used to the cold weather. Last night we took them with us to Brother1's and Daisy's basketball games.
The first thing I heard this morning was the little girls (Daisy, Annalee, and Mary) giggling in the bathroom. They clattered around trying to find ribbons for their hair, and slammed my bedroom door open, and giggled some more, until Lillian, who's sleeping on a cot in my room, got up and joined them. I stayed hidden under the covers until they had cleared out, and then cautiously dressed and made my way downstairs. Of course, everyone (except Ross, who just finished his freshman semester in college) had already eaten. The adults were sitting around and discussing church controversies--sole Psalmody and the federal headship group.
After breakfast, I helped my mother wrap presents for the cousins, which my mother promptly gave to them to open. The three girls received bead packages, and the boys got a puzzle. Andrew immediately dumped the puzzle out onto a table, and he, Brother2, and Peter proceeded to sort through the jumbled pieces. I talked with Ross and my uncle about linguistics and music. The house was chaos: Ross went off to play computer games (chiefly composed of loud, zooming cars), the three younger boys were arguing and sorting out puzzle pieces, and the little girls were putting together necklaces, scribbling silly stories on pieces of paper, and generally spreading plastic baby toys all over the house.
For lunch we drove out to my grandmother's house. She lives in a duplex at an independent living facility where they have lunch for the residents and whatever guests the residents happen to invite. On the way, we passed red gashes in the fields where construction is going on. Blue trees the color of indigo at the heart of a candleflame, and saffron fields the gold of the flame's edge, had been bulldozed to make way for little "ticky-tacky" houses, in which all the beautiful bits are tossed together randomly, producing a peculiar and rather unpleasant architectural concoction.
At my grandmother's place, we all trooped into the communal dining room. There were sixteen of us (my other grandparents came, t00). Quite a sight. The elderly residents ogled us dully as we entered the room. After lunch, some people went home, but my grandmother, Aunt Lisa, Uncle Kirk, and I drove down to a little town southwest of where I live--a little town dropped like a pebble into rippling fields of winter wheat and cattle pasture. We went to a house fitted out as a quilting shop. While Uncle Kirk stroked the shop's cat, a sleek, black-and-white feline named High Dollar who purred uproariously at anyone who came near, Aunt Lisa and my grandmother poured over the racks of cloth and patterns. A couple of elderly women stitched leisurely at brightly-colored flannel quilts. I strolled about, looking at the cloth myself. Cheerful, fuzzy flannels; swirly, water-stained batiks; Asian patterns, gold-edged cranes and lotus flowers. There was Amish cloth with tiny, dark prints; black-and-white polka dots; red maple leaves veined with gold thread; orange patterns like swirling firebird feathers; green palmetto frond prints; blue stars.... Like being in a glowing underwater grotto--the fantastically-tinted, weird shapes of tidepool creatures, and the delicate fans of coral reefs. I helped Aunt Lisa pick out fat quarters for Peter's quilt: more muted colors (no florals!).
At home I showed my grandmother some new blogs, with which she was fascinated. I lounged on the sofa, feeling luxurious, and wasted time by reading "Calvin and Hobbes" comics. I helped my mother with supper: setting the long table for the seventeen of us, putting out fruit, etc. The house smelled salty, of ham, and brown-sugar-sweet, of squash. All my relatives who live in town came to eat supper with us, and a merry meal it was. The adults got to go first, leaving the children sitting and giggling, quarreling, complaining, or yawning at the lower end of the table. Peter put on a special hyena-yawn for the picture I took of him.
After supper we drove to a community band Christmas concert. Despite her protestations to the contrary, Mary fell asleep on the way and had to be tumbled not-too-gently out of her carseat. The community theatre was fairly full. I think whatever architect built that theatre was rather ambitious--I've never seen the place actually packed, nor do I think it could be. The band played fairly well. Fuzzy, jazzy Christmas tunes that are about as interesting to me as Hallmark rhymes. But they did play the overture to Handel's "Messiah", and three Christmas folk songs that I hadn't heard before. Afterwards (joy-of-joys!), I got to talk to my flute teacher, who was playing first flute in the band. She's doing quite well.
We got home around eight thirty, but of course everyone between the ages of sixteen and nineteen stayed up until ten thirty talking. My aunt was good enough to stay up with us (Brother1, Ross, and me). She sat, knitting, at the table, while the three of us lounged around and talked about the weird customs they have in ROTC and meal plans and unpleasant professors and getting out of labs. After awhile, my aunt finally put down her knitting and said, "Well, kids, it's ten thirty..." I took the hint and promptly went up to bed, only to find Lillian fast asleep on her cot in my room.
Cast of Characters (though most of you won't need this):
Uncle Kirk: my mother's younger brother, a doctor; with greying black hair and a funny smile (and he likes Tolkien! :)
Aunt Lisa: homeschool mother, math teacher, and quilting-and-knitting aficionado; long, straight, blond hair, and precise, deliberate way
Ross: my eldest cousin (17); thickset, muscled; with very short blond hair that used to be curly, until he went into the ROTC and they shaved it all off
Andrew: my next cousin (15); slender, dark-eyed, a carbon copy of my uncle
Peter: 13 or thereabouts; dark-haired, shorter and broader than Andrew; a friendly chap
Lillian: 11 or thereabouts; slender, dark-eyed, and freckled; almost a female version of Andrew
Annalee: 8 or so; short, with a headful of irrepressible blond curls; she bounces everywhere
Mary: 3, short, with a very sunny smile and hazel eyes; like Annalee, she seems to skip or hop everywhere she goes
Yesterday my cousins drove up from the south. They're all pansies, not being used to the cold weather. Last night we took them with us to Brother1's and Daisy's basketball games.
The first thing I heard this morning was the little girls (Daisy, Annalee, and Mary) giggling in the bathroom. They clattered around trying to find ribbons for their hair, and slammed my bedroom door open, and giggled some more, until Lillian, who's sleeping on a cot in my room, got up and joined them. I stayed hidden under the covers until they had cleared out, and then cautiously dressed and made my way downstairs. Of course, everyone (except Ross, who just finished his freshman semester in college) had already eaten. The adults were sitting around and discussing church controversies--sole Psalmody and the federal headship group.
After breakfast, I helped my mother wrap presents for the cousins, which my mother promptly gave to them to open. The three girls received bead packages, and the boys got a puzzle. Andrew immediately dumped the puzzle out onto a table, and he, Brother2, and Peter proceeded to sort through the jumbled pieces. I talked with Ross and my uncle about linguistics and music. The house was chaos: Ross went off to play computer games (chiefly composed of loud, zooming cars), the three younger boys were arguing and sorting out puzzle pieces, and the little girls were putting together necklaces, scribbling silly stories on pieces of paper, and generally spreading plastic baby toys all over the house.
For lunch we drove out to my grandmother's house. She lives in a duplex at an independent living facility where they have lunch for the residents and whatever guests the residents happen to invite. On the way, we passed red gashes in the fields where construction is going on. Blue trees the color of indigo at the heart of a candleflame, and saffron fields the gold of the flame's edge, had been bulldozed to make way for little "ticky-tacky" houses, in which all the beautiful bits are tossed together randomly, producing a peculiar and rather unpleasant architectural concoction.
At my grandmother's place, we all trooped into the communal dining room. There were sixteen of us (my other grandparents came, t00). Quite a sight. The elderly residents ogled us dully as we entered the room. After lunch, some people went home, but my grandmother, Aunt Lisa, Uncle Kirk, and I drove down to a little town southwest of where I live--a little town dropped like a pebble into rippling fields of winter wheat and cattle pasture. We went to a house fitted out as a quilting shop. While Uncle Kirk stroked the shop's cat, a sleek, black-and-white feline named High Dollar who purred uproariously at anyone who came near, Aunt Lisa and my grandmother poured over the racks of cloth and patterns. A couple of elderly women stitched leisurely at brightly-colored flannel quilts. I strolled about, looking at the cloth myself. Cheerful, fuzzy flannels; swirly, water-stained batiks; Asian patterns, gold-edged cranes and lotus flowers. There was Amish cloth with tiny, dark prints; black-and-white polka dots; red maple leaves veined with gold thread; orange patterns like swirling firebird feathers; green palmetto frond prints; blue stars.... Like being in a glowing underwater grotto--the fantastically-tinted, weird shapes of tidepool creatures, and the delicate fans of coral reefs. I helped Aunt Lisa pick out fat quarters for Peter's quilt: more muted colors (no florals!).
At home I showed my grandmother some new blogs, with which she was fascinated. I lounged on the sofa, feeling luxurious, and wasted time by reading "Calvin and Hobbes" comics. I helped my mother with supper: setting the long table for the seventeen of us, putting out fruit, etc. The house smelled salty, of ham, and brown-sugar-sweet, of squash. All my relatives who live in town came to eat supper with us, and a merry meal it was. The adults got to go first, leaving the children sitting and giggling, quarreling, complaining, or yawning at the lower end of the table. Peter put on a special hyena-yawn for the picture I took of him.
After supper we drove to a community band Christmas concert. Despite her protestations to the contrary, Mary fell asleep on the way and had to be tumbled not-too-gently out of her carseat. The community theatre was fairly full. I think whatever architect built that theatre was rather ambitious--I've never seen the place actually packed, nor do I think it could be. The band played fairly well. Fuzzy, jazzy Christmas tunes that are about as interesting to me as Hallmark rhymes. But they did play the overture to Handel's "Messiah", and three Christmas folk songs that I hadn't heard before. Afterwards (joy-of-joys!), I got to talk to my flute teacher, who was playing first flute in the band. She's doing quite well.
We got home around eight thirty, but of course everyone between the ages of sixteen and nineteen stayed up until ten thirty talking. My aunt was good enough to stay up with us (Brother1, Ross, and me). She sat, knitting, at the table, while the three of us lounged around and talked about the weird customs they have in ROTC and meal plans and unpleasant professors and getting out of labs. After awhile, my aunt finally put down her knitting and said, "Well, kids, it's ten thirty..." I took the hint and promptly went up to bed, only to find Lillian fast asleep on her cot in my room.
08 December 2005
RUF formal, Part Two
Now Playing: "The Planets", by Gustav Holst. Track 5, "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age."
Over the time we’d been there, I’d been wondering where Alisha and Jenny were. They arrived long after everyone else because they’d gotten lostTara
People around us munched chocolate cheesecake, cookies, or crackers. The warm, rough smell of coffee and the sharp, spicy smell of apple cider steamed from a couple of carafes on the kitchen counter. People laughed and talked.Despite all the merriment, the moving people, and the little girls scurrying through the crowd, the candles on the table burned impeccably without a flicker, as smooth as candles painted with oils on a canvas.
After awhile, Syneva and Matt gathered people together in the long room to dance the Virginia reel. There were perhaps fifteen couples (at the party there were at least forty people total, if not more), which was far too many despite the size of the room. Rachel danced withAustin
When one round was over, people stepped out, men and women took new partners, and the dance restarted. I danced this time. Once again, “Ode to a Butterfly” came on, and we danced and danced and danced…. It was as though I was inside the music—the two lines intertwining, like mandolin and fiddle, bodies trapped by the guitar, the boys’ feet stomping and the girls’ feet clicking in time to the bass. The painting came to life; the music became visible—tapping feet, swaying skirts, clapping hands, and all the time the unquenchable mandolin skipping, tripping, laughing, feet and faces and hands and glistening dresses.
The joy of it left me breathless.
After the dance, I sat by Rachel on a pair of chairs near the dance floor. People blew the foam off cups of punch and drank and talked.
After awhile, I was hurried off by someone—Matt or Alisha or Syneva—to join the broom waltz.
Over the time we’d been there, I’d been wondering where Alisha and Jenny were. They arrived long after everyone else because they’d gotten lost
People around us munched chocolate cheesecake, cookies, or crackers. The warm, rough smell of coffee and the sharp, spicy smell of apple cider steamed from a couple of carafes on the kitchen counter. People laughed and talked.Despite all the merriment, the moving people, and the little girls scurrying through the crowd, the candles on the table burned impeccably without a flicker, as smooth as candles painted with oils on a canvas.
After awhile, Syneva and Matt gathered people together in the long room to dance the Virginia reel. There were perhaps fifteen couples (at the party there were at least forty people total, if not more), which was far too many despite the size of the room. Rachel danced with
When one round was over, people stepped out, men and women took new partners, and the dance restarted. I danced this time. Once again, “Ode to a Butterfly” came on, and we danced and danced and danced…. It was as though I was inside the music—the two lines intertwining, like mandolin and fiddle, bodies trapped by the guitar, the boys’ feet stomping and the girls’ feet clicking in time to the bass. The painting came to life; the music became visible—tapping feet, swaying skirts, clapping hands, and all the time the unquenchable mandolin skipping, tripping, laughing, feet and faces and hands and glistening dresses.
The joy of it left me breathless.
After the dance, I sat by Rachel on a pair of chairs near the dance floor. People blew the foam off cups of punch and drank and talked.
After awhile, I was hurried off by someone—Matt or Alisha or Syneva—to join the broom waltz.
Syneva and Matt showed us how to dance the broom waltz. There were one-too-many boys. The music played, and everyone danced until Esther, sitting by the side, tapped a spoon against a glass. Then all the boys had to find a new partner, and whoever was left out had to dance with the broom. Syneva suggested that everyone just dance a plain, two-step waltz. By the end of the dance, I felt like a broom myself, having been passed off every couple of minutes from one boy to the next.
I stood with Alisha and Rachel for awhile, talking about the waltz. I tried to demonstrate the true waltz step for them, hitching up my skirts above my ankles and watching my silver sandals sparkle through the steps. Jason happened to be passing by at the moment, and said, “Oh! Do you want to dance?” I glanced up, startled, and looked at Rachel and Alisha. “Sure… sure,” I said. He went over and turned on “Ode to a Butterfly”. Couples gathered and… we danced the Virginia reel again! Skirts spun outward and swayed back again, rippling as couples galloped between the lines in the sashe. As everyone ducked under the short arch that Mr. and Mrs. K made, people laughed and cheered.
After that last reel, I was very tired. People gathered for pictures: first girls, then boys, then everyone together, which was quite a feat. We all crowded beside the Christmas tree, the tallest boys in the back standing on their tiptoes, the shorter girls in the front crowding together, some of the girls kneeling, and some of the boys reclining or sitting in the very front. Glossy smiles, shining eyes reflecting the camera lights like snowflakes, glittering dresses—flash of the camera, and captured, frozen.
When the pictures had been taken and the thank-yous made to our hosts, the party began to break up. Like flakes of paint falling from a canvas, people drifted away, gowned girls trailing behind the suited boys (who had, as a courtesy, done most of the driving) to the cars. Kevin, Daniel, Rachel, and I were among the first to leave. As we drove toward downtown, the lights flashed off in the skyscrapers. Kevin dropped me off at the dorm. I scurried inside, my skirts gathered up around my legs.
Once in my room, I locked the door, changed clothes, and went to bed.
Later, I learned that the others’ night had not been nearly as serene. Apparently, the last three cars to leave the party had had serious difficulties. Mr. K locked his keys in his car (the rest of his family had already gone home). He called Mrs. K, who brought an electric door opener, but the door opener didn’t have enough power, so she had to hurry to the store to buy batteries. They finally got the car unlocked. Meanwhile, Katie’s car blew a tire half a mile away from campus. She and the other two people in her car ran the rest of the way to campus; apparently, Katie was so chilled that she sat up for a couple of hours by the fireplace in
the longest post of the century: the RUF formal, Part One
Now Playing: "The Planets" by Gustav Holst. Track 3, "Mercury: The Winged Messenger."
A short preface: I wrote most of this entry yesterday over the course of the day, so if you get tired reading it, don't feel bad because I got tired writing it. Nothing has been added, though some things have been taken out.
Tuesday night was the RUF formal. Here is a detailed description.
I tried to see to whom I have already introduced you all, but since I couldn’t find a post I thought I’d made with most of these people in it, I suppose I shall have to re-describe them—please excuse the repetition.
Cast of Characters, in order of appearance:
Tara (whom you already know)
Rachel (whom you already know)
Katie: an English major who dresses like one, with clinking bracelets and a coat brocaded with roses, who is friendly to everyone
Kevin: a quiet young man who plays the cello and is studying to be a petroleum engineer
Daniel: an Asian boy who reminds me of Will P., quietly cheerful, and very courteous
Asher: a young man with a bushy beard who occasionally wears Jewish-style clothes and who tonight had on a hat, a black suit, and a red umbrella slung over his arm
Andrew: Matt’s brother; a very, very tall young man, quiet, with dark hair; he also was wearing a hat
James: a quiet young man who’s a psychology major, loves French, and comes from
(and various other boys with whom I am not well acquainted)
Jenny H. (whom you already know)
Spencer (whom you already know)
Jessica: a quiet but bubbly blond girl who hangs out a lot with boys
Katherine: the girl who joined us on our outing to find kites—a quiet girl with dark hair and a wide smile
Amanda: a very pretty, cheerful, softspoken young woman who’s an English major
Syneva: a dark-haired young woman who’s very similar to Amanda (though, just from my brief friendship with the two, I would say Syneva is the more practical of the pair), and who is Amanda’s best friend; she’s a double piano/cello major; she has a chuckling laugh
Esther: a slim young woman with short, curly hair and a bubbling giggle
Matt: a dark-haired, pale young chap who’s an English major but loves philosophy and thinks seriously about everything, then laughs about it later
Mr. K: the leader of RUF; a short, hobbit-like man who’s energetic, forceful, outgoing, and welcoming to everyone
Jenny (whom you already know)
Alisha (whom you already know)
Jason: a friendly young man with large ears and a big, happy smile—about all I know of him is that he’s a good dancer
When
After supper, Tara, Katie, Rachel, and I ran back to our respective rooms. I tossed my sweater and pants onto my bed and scrambled into my slip, struggling with the hook in the back. The layers of taffeta and net swished around my ankles like snow. I slid the shimmering, blue, mermaid’s-tail dress on over it, clasped my necklace on, and brushed my hair. Then I hurried down the hall to
Everyone shivered as the wind hit us outside and tossed our skirts around our knees. Jenny complained about her toes being cold. We clattered over to
We drove down the highway south, out of the city with its thickly-layered highways and buildings. On the left, the land fell away, but the misty valley below was strewn with thousands of lights—streets, homes, shops. On the right, the land rose in a steep embankment crowned with silent trees, gaunt latticework pressed against the dark sky. At last, turning west, we entered a quiet neighborhood—large houses on expansive lots, with pastures between them in places. We turned into one of these houses, a big home that sparkled like a gingerbread house, encrusted with frost and glittering with lights like jellied candies. A pond glittered on the lawn below the house, its edges rimmed with ice. We entered through sliding glass door at one side. Through the glass, the huge room at the back of the house looked like a Christmas card picture: the tree shining in the middle of the room, decked in gold and silver and crimson; the young men standing about in their coats and ties; the young women hovering like scraps from a tailor’s shop, dressed in satin and velvet and taffeta, blue and pink and dark green; and a few children (the Ks’ children) in miniature versions of the adults’ clothes. Then we stepped through and became part of the picture.
Amanda greeted us and took our coats. Her pale pink dress was wrapped gracefully around her waist. She hurried away into the labyrinthine house. For awhile, Rachel and I stood uncertainly by the door. Then Syneva came up to us. She had on a smooth satin gown, white with dark blue edging, and she wore elegant white gloves that fit tightly above her elbows. They reminded me of cat’s paws. She chatted with us and helped us to join in the game that people were playing. Everyone had a name taped to their back, and they had to go around asking yes or no questions of people to figure out what name they were. Syneva had Eleanor Roosevelt. She asked questions of Rachel and me until she finally guessed it. Esther came over to us for a little while and asked a few questions. She had on a dark green dress, smooth satin like Syneva’s, but with a high, Jane-Austen-style waist and long ribbons in the back. Later, I told her that she looked like a character from Jane Austen, and she laughed that she’d always wanted to be Lizzy Bennett.
Rachel and I stood together in the kitchen, sipping rose-colored, lemon-tangy punch and trying to figure out what names we were. I eventually managed to narrow it down to someone “related to Abraham”, but I didn’t realize that I should think beyond Abraham’s immediate relatives. Syneva and Amanda joined us. “Am I… Eve?” I asked suspiciously at last, and I was. Amanda and Syneva tried to help Esther guess who she was. Esther finally guessed correctly: Hermione from the “Harry Potter” books. She didn’t like her name, so she gave it to Syneva to wear. I had a hard time answering Rachel’s questions. When I’d seen her name, I had been unable to suppress a shout of laughter—she was Athena, which seemed quite fitting considering Honors class. At last she guessed it. We helped others with their names: Austin, who turned out to be Rosencrantz, and James, who turned out to be Sigmund Freud, which occasioned a great deal of laughter. Austin, Rachel, and I hadn’t been very helpful to James, who knew more about Freud than we did—we only gave him misleading answers. It took Katie’s assistance before James figured out who he was.
07 December 2005
Plato, Narnia, and "in the world but not of it"
(This was supposed to be published on Tuesday, December 6th, but my blog seems to be having difficulties with publishing.)
Now Playing: The "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" soundtrack by
Yesterday I spent all morning studying impatiently for my Pocahontas class final exam. The exam was at 11:00 a.m. It was an in-class essay. I think I did alright, though none of my ideas were very original, and I'm a little bit worried that she'll count off for that. But if I were to put down any of my "original" ideas, and tell her exactly what I thought about the text, she'd probably just get mad, and that wouldn't accomplish anything. So I just wrote a bland essay analyzing the text and trying not to put any opinion into it whatsoever, which was very boring.
In the afternoon, I met with Dr. G about my Honors paper. We sat and discussed Plato's "Symposium" for quite awhile. It was very interesting--in fact, it led to a "lightbulb" moment later. You see, after our discussion, I walked over to the library and sat in the student study for awhile, scribbling notes all over the margins of my essay. Chequered afternoon sunshine slanted through the windows and warmed my chapped hands. I stared out the window at the blank, white sky beyond the ripply glass, like looking down a road through a mirage. And I realized something: Plato's ideas in the "Symposium" get so very, very close to Christianity that it's almost painful. And that's all I shall say here (*hem* you'll have to go to my other blog to get the full philosophical diatribe).
Rachel, Matt, James, Emily, and I ate supper together. Emily is studying to be a mechanical engineer. James is a softspoken boy from
After supper, Rachel and I got into a heated discussion of Plato. We were standing outside, and I began to shiver so hard that my voice shook, so I suggested that we go indoors. We sat upstairs in my room and talked and talked, about Narnia and Plato and other things. We watched the big Narnia trailer together. It's going to be another week at least until either one of us sees it, which is rather a sad thought. After watching it, we were both quite enthusiastic, despite some of the changes they've made. The change that irks me the most is only a tiny one, but very noticeable: Aslan snarls at the Witch's creatures as he walks up the hill to the stone table. Now, this would be excusable were it not for the fact that Aslan is such an obvious picture of Christ. Christ went "like a lamb to the slaughter; He opened not His mouth". To have an Aslan that snarls puts a stain on the picture of Christ as the humble, innocent sacrifice, willingly offering Himself without a hint of anger or desire for revenge.
Last night I went to bed early, and this morning I woke up late (in other words, eight o'clock). I've spent all morning in a state of scatter-brain-ed-ness: editing my Honors paper to reflect my "lightbulb" moment (without explicitly stating anything about Christianity--*growl*), sending e-mails to various advisors to change course sections, looking up textbooks for next semester on the web, and fiddling with my template (with the patient help of the Shadow). And, yes, that lovely image you now see at the top of the page (which, in fact, reminds me of Elves--there's another version of it that looks like Gondor's White Tree in bloom) is courtesy of the Shadow himself.
Tonight there's an RUF formal--games, dancing, and dessert, or so I've heard. Syneva, hopefully, will teach us how to do contradancing and other plain dances, like the Virginia Reel, which is always fun (though I can't imagine trying to do that one in a long skirt!). And this afternoon I'm supposed to meet with Dr. S about my British Writers paper. And of course, I've got pages and pages of things to memorize for my final exams this Thursday and Friday, and next Thursday, though I think I have the material for British Writers under control.
Well, this is enough. Whenever I get in one of these brisk moods, my fingers refuse to stop dancing over the keyboard, and I've taken up too much space already.
04 December 2005
dumb movies, cats, and basketball
Well, it's nearly eleven o'clock and I'm exhausted. But someone either next door (A.C.) or downstairs is watching an action movie, and it's really loud. People keep screaming, and there are lots of explosions, howls, screams, etc. Also plenty of raunchy laughter.
Last week was fairly good, actually. Perhaps that was just because I got to go off campus a couple of times, and that's always a big treat. On Wednesday night, the girls in my Bible study went over to the house of two brothers, Matt and Andrew, who are also in RUF. The mother of these brothers lives in a nice neighborhood in an older, nicer part of Tulsa-- elegant houses, like Victorian women in satin ball dresses. The brothers are leaders of the freshman boys' Bible study, and the two studies (freshman girls' and freshman boys') combined to do supper together. The boys cooked supper, and the girls brought dessert. Matt and Andrew and their mother have three cats: a medium-sized, elderly black-and-white cat; a fat brown-and-white cat with sides as shiny as polished tortoise shell (he was frightened of all the people), and a little, fuzzy grey cat who draped herself over the luxurious sofa in the front room and purred appreciatively whenever anyone rubbed her stomach or her ears.
Thursday night, I was up until two o'clock discussing the Gospel with A.C. By the end I was swaying with weariness. I showed her the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16, and she read carefully for quite awhile. This was at the end of our discussion, and she finally handed the Bible back to me, saying that she needed to go to bed, thus ending our talk. Syneva told me when I described the occasion to her, "The Word of God is like a lion: you let it out into the room, and it can take care of itself." Thursday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at Syneva's apartment, just talking. She loves J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, too, so we discussed those. The discussion was earnest, but not argumentative. She also likes Rosemary Sutcliff (yes!!), and, of course, music. At one point, one of the girls who shares her apartment, Amanda, came in and asked us a question about the definition of cruelty, which was the topic of a paper she was working on, so the philosophy added some spice to our conversation.
This week was the last week of Tuesday/Thursday classes. I'll miss Major British Writers and Honors, a little--though they were challenging, they were also very interesting. Honors provoked so many good discussions. On Thursday, Rachel and I could hardly stop talking after class, so deep were we in conversation about love (we finished Honors with Plato's "Symposium), literary criticism (how much can you infer from the order in which Plato placed the speeches in the "Symposium"?), and methods of presenting the Gospel, using Paul's speech on Mars hill as an example of a presentation that both preserves the Gospel intact while connecting with the audience.
Friday night, twelve girls from RUF drove an hour and a half to another city, Syneva's hometown, for the RUF girls' retreat. Syneva's family hosted the retreat. They have an enormous house on seven levels--the house is like a child's lego construction, with funny little rooms thrown out here and there. Syneva's family has a big, fuzzy dog and two cats. They also have a music room containing a grand piano, a synthesizer, an organ, two flutes, a violin, a trumpet, a clarinet, a saxophone, a harp, and a hammered dulcimer. The dulcimer and the harp were both fascinating to me (the flutes were both low-end brands). The dulcimer had a brittle, elaborate, crisp sound, but the harp was goldenly resonant--a sound that, if it were to be made into sight, would look like a lion's mane.
After supper Friday night, we had a Bible study on the topic of romance. *hem* Not my specialty, exactly, but most of the RUF girls think about boys a lot. It was a bit uncomfortable for me. However, we also discussed "self-image" and behavior in a large group, which was slightly more helpful. When our study was over, everyone crowded into the kitchen to eat chocolate cake. I joined the conversation for awhile, chuckling with the gales of laughter as we shared funny stories, but then my scanty five-and-a-half hours of sleep from the night before began to wear thin. While they stood around and laughed, I slipped out and curled up on the sofa with the cats to drowse for a little bit.
We stayed up late watching "Miss Congeniality 2", a very dumb movie about a woman who's an FBI agent and a beauty queen. The plot would've been palatable had not there been some rather objectionable humor (nothing too dreadful, just unpleasant).
After the movie, everyone trailed off to their sleeping places. There were beds or cots/air mattresses for everyone. Syneva, Alisha, and I were to sleep in Syneva's room, Syneva on the floor and Alisha and I in Syneva's double bed. While Alisha (she's a quiet, Elvish sort of girl who plays violin) was out getting ready for bed, Jenny bounced into the room. Jenny flopped down on the bed and I stretched out beside her, while Syneva collapsed onto her mattress on the floor (she, too, was exhausted). Jenny was high-strung and hyper from the late night. Her loud, contagious laughter filled the little room. Jenny H. came in. (Jenny H. is a lithe Japanese girl with slender hands and dark, glossy hair--she reminds me of a kitten.) "Jenny," Syneva moaned to Jenny H. from the floor, "your job is to grab Jenny by the ankle and drag her out of here." So Jenny H., giggling, grabbed Jenny's tanned, muscular ankle and yanked. Jenny just lay still and laughed even louder. Even Syneva smiled at Jenny H.'s ineffectual attempt.
At last both Jennys bounced out of the room, and everything was quiet. But I lay awake for a long while, holding myself stiff for fear of disturbing Alisha, and sniffling uncomfortably from my cold and allergies. Alisha slept deeply--though, I must admit, she did make the weird clicking noises that Violin sometimes makes in her sleep. (Alisha confessed in the morning that she grinds her teeth in her sleep, too, so that her dentist had to make a special mouthpiece for her to keep her teeth from being worn down.) As I lay awake, I could hear Esther and Jenny whispering and giggling in the next room. I could also hear Syneva sighing and shifting restlessly on her pallet.
My mother came for me at noon on Saturday and drove me home. I spent most of the afternoon working on an Honors paper, though I also watched Brother2's basketball team, which his team won--partly thanks to a "sweet" layup that he scored in overtime. My mother, Brother2, and I ate supper with my grandmother at a Chinese restaurant since my father, Brother1, and Daisy were in another city at a basketball tournament for Brother1's and Daisy's teams. When they returned home, we discovered that both teams had taken second place in the tournament.
I was so tired that I nearly fell asleep during family devotions!
Last week was fairly good, actually. Perhaps that was just because I got to go off campus a couple of times, and that's always a big treat. On Wednesday night, the girls in my Bible study went over to the house of two brothers, Matt and Andrew, who are also in RUF. The mother of these brothers lives in a nice neighborhood in an older, nicer part of Tulsa-- elegant houses, like Victorian women in satin ball dresses. The brothers are leaders of the freshman boys' Bible study, and the two studies (freshman girls' and freshman boys') combined to do supper together. The boys cooked supper, and the girls brought dessert. Matt and Andrew and their mother have three cats: a medium-sized, elderly black-and-white cat; a fat brown-and-white cat with sides as shiny as polished tortoise shell (he was frightened of all the people), and a little, fuzzy grey cat who draped herself over the luxurious sofa in the front room and purred appreciatively whenever anyone rubbed her stomach or her ears.
Thursday night, I was up until two o'clock discussing the Gospel with A.C. By the end I was swaying with weariness. I showed her the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16, and she read carefully for quite awhile. This was at the end of our discussion, and she finally handed the Bible back to me, saying that she needed to go to bed, thus ending our talk. Syneva told me when I described the occasion to her, "The Word of God is like a lion: you let it out into the room, and it can take care of itself." Thursday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at Syneva's apartment, just talking. She loves J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, too, so we discussed those. The discussion was earnest, but not argumentative. She also likes Rosemary Sutcliff (yes!!), and, of course, music. At one point, one of the girls who shares her apartment, Amanda, came in and asked us a question about the definition of cruelty, which was the topic of a paper she was working on, so the philosophy added some spice to our conversation.
This week was the last week of Tuesday/Thursday classes. I'll miss Major British Writers and Honors, a little--though they were challenging, they were also very interesting. Honors provoked so many good discussions. On Thursday, Rachel and I could hardly stop talking after class, so deep were we in conversation about love (we finished Honors with Plato's "Symposium), literary criticism (how much can you infer from the order in which Plato placed the speeches in the "Symposium"?), and methods of presenting the Gospel, using Paul's speech on Mars hill as an example of a presentation that both preserves the Gospel intact while connecting with the audience.
Friday night, twelve girls from RUF drove an hour and a half to another city, Syneva's hometown, for the RUF girls' retreat. Syneva's family hosted the retreat. They have an enormous house on seven levels--the house is like a child's lego construction, with funny little rooms thrown out here and there. Syneva's family has a big, fuzzy dog and two cats. They also have a music room containing a grand piano, a synthesizer, an organ, two flutes, a violin, a trumpet, a clarinet, a saxophone, a harp, and a hammered dulcimer. The dulcimer and the harp were both fascinating to me (the flutes were both low-end brands). The dulcimer had a brittle, elaborate, crisp sound, but the harp was goldenly resonant--a sound that, if it were to be made into sight, would look like a lion's mane.
After supper Friday night, we had a Bible study on the topic of romance. *hem* Not my specialty, exactly, but most of the RUF girls think about boys a lot. It was a bit uncomfortable for me. However, we also discussed "self-image" and behavior in a large group, which was slightly more helpful. When our study was over, everyone crowded into the kitchen to eat chocolate cake. I joined the conversation for awhile, chuckling with the gales of laughter as we shared funny stories, but then my scanty five-and-a-half hours of sleep from the night before began to wear thin. While they stood around and laughed, I slipped out and curled up on the sofa with the cats to drowse for a little bit.
We stayed up late watching "Miss Congeniality 2", a very dumb movie about a woman who's an FBI agent and a beauty queen. The plot would've been palatable had not there been some rather objectionable humor (nothing too dreadful, just unpleasant).
After the movie, everyone trailed off to their sleeping places. There were beds or cots/air mattresses for everyone. Syneva, Alisha, and I were to sleep in Syneva's room, Syneva on the floor and Alisha and I in Syneva's double bed. While Alisha (she's a quiet, Elvish sort of girl who plays violin) was out getting ready for bed, Jenny bounced into the room. Jenny flopped down on the bed and I stretched out beside her, while Syneva collapsed onto her mattress on the floor (she, too, was exhausted). Jenny was high-strung and hyper from the late night. Her loud, contagious laughter filled the little room. Jenny H. came in. (Jenny H. is a lithe Japanese girl with slender hands and dark, glossy hair--she reminds me of a kitten.) "Jenny," Syneva moaned to Jenny H. from the floor, "your job is to grab Jenny by the ankle and drag her out of here." So Jenny H., giggling, grabbed Jenny's tanned, muscular ankle and yanked. Jenny just lay still and laughed even louder. Even Syneva smiled at Jenny H.'s ineffectual attempt.
At last both Jennys bounced out of the room, and everything was quiet. But I lay awake for a long while, holding myself stiff for fear of disturbing Alisha, and sniffling uncomfortably from my cold and allergies. Alisha slept deeply--though, I must admit, she did make the weird clicking noises that Violin sometimes makes in her sleep. (Alisha confessed in the morning that she grinds her teeth in her sleep, too, so that her dentist had to make a special mouthpiece for her to keep her teeth from being worn down.) As I lay awake, I could hear Esther and Jenny whispering and giggling in the next room. I could also hear Syneva sighing and shifting restlessly on her pallet.
My mother came for me at noon on Saturday and drove me home. I spent most of the afternoon working on an Honors paper, though I also watched Brother2's basketball team, which his team won--partly thanks to a "sweet" layup that he scored in overtime. My mother, Brother2, and I ate supper with my grandmother at a Chinese restaurant since my father, Brother1, and Daisy were in another city at a basketball tournament for Brother1's and Daisy's teams. When they returned home, we discovered that both teams had taken second place in the tournament.
I was so tired that I nearly fell asleep during family devotions!
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