wet days and some dry humor

Now Playing: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, "Pathetique".

Last night at work while I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy, I was listening to an old cassette recording of this symphony, a cassette that Philip found at a library sale one time. It reminded me of the last Signature Symphony season, and those crazy fun rides to concerts with Syneva and Alisha. Such wonderful music.... And that one time, last year, when the Symphony played the "Fountains of Rome", and at the very end, during the magnificent fanfare, trumpeters suddenly started to play up in the balcony above the audience so that it sounded as though a grand army was marching up behind in victorious procession. So brave that it brought tears to my eyes.

A couple of days ago, my mother took Laura and Stephen to piano lessons. Laura actually rode her bike, leaving the garage door open. I left for work, shutting all the doors behind me, so I didn't see what awaited them: When they got back, there was an immense turtle sitting disconsolately in the garage. "It was the size of a football!" said my mother later. Apparently the large creature was staring dolefully at the door to the outside, so my mother took it outside and carried it across the street, pointing it in the direction of the creek. She couldn't figure out how on earth it had gotten into the garage. Stephen and I surmised that it was actually a wasp that had found the old broken down transmogrifier we keep in the garage, and that it had accidentally blundered into the transmogrifier and had been transmogrified into a turtle. Sounds like the most sensible explanation, right?

(Go look at "Calvin and Hobbes" if you don't know what a transmogrifier is.)

Today my mother and I went shopping at the "new" Wal-Mart in town. The place is huge and smells like rubber. It reminds me of Tesco in Scotland. We were looking for Asian noodles in the Asian section, and I was startled when I saw three bottles of rooster sauce in a row staring balefully up at me from the shelf. "Hey, Kevin carries that stuff with him everywhere, and puts it on everything," I said. My mother looked at it, read over the ingredients, and decided to get some...! No, I am not going to start carrying it around in my knapsack.

Before we went shopping, we dropped Laura off at my grandmother's house to do some baking. Unfortunately, upon investigating the stores of flour, we discovered weevils in it. Of course it couldn't be left that way. So while Laura went merrily outside to put seed in the birdfeeder, my mother took all the packages of flour, sugar, etc. out of the cupboard and inspected them, while my grandmother held open a garbage bag so that the infested goods could be thrown away. When the cupboard was empty, I went after the nasty little squirmy things with boiling hot soapy water and Raid. Death to all such villainous creatures!

It keeps raining and raining here. Pretty soon we'll all be marshwiggles. On the way home from the store, we saw someone driving down the street with a green canoe strapped to the top of their SUV. "Do they know something we don't?" my mother chuckled wryly. I like the rain, at least for the most part: it does have a tendency to drive bugs into the houses, and then when the low places get full, the water decides to come into the houses and join the party. But our house hasn't had any trouble at least with water... yet.

At least everything is so green that it really looks like the Shire right now. The wildflowers are simply stunning, and along the fencerows the grass is taller than I am. All the birds are out, meadowlarks and starlings, chickadees and cardinals, kites and swallows and finches.

Oh, look.... It's raining again!

scatterings

Now Playing: "Pilgrim's First Progress" (an adaptation of Pilgrim's Progress in Western style by The Shadow for VBS in July).

My apologies to my aunt: certainly not crazy but enthusiastic. :o) That quilting post was much edited, but apparently not edited enough!

Last night was a night of smells, biking home from work at the parking garage: the reek of rubbing alcohol from a rag abandoned on the sidewalk; spicy coolness from a freshly-cut juniper hedge; cigarette smoke from a porch where a bunch of college guys were sitting around and talking; the smells of food from Pizza Hut and Kyoto, the fancy Japanese restaurant, across the street from each other; the throat-catching tang of gasoline at the corner station; and finally the sweet relief of woods, water, and grass at the entrance to our street where the creek flows past.

Pictures from the Memorial Day picnic are up on photobucket. Check a recent post somewhere down there for the username and password.

I went back to Tulsa on Sabbath afternoon to see friends there. It was good to see them again--to have tea with Tara Monday morning, and to ride fifty miles an hour in Jenny S.'s car with the moonroof open. Joanna was having a birthday party, so a bunch of RUFfians were there for that, most of the people who are still in Tulsa. I actually got to see just about everyone because after the birthday party, Jenny, Tara, and I stopped by the Knorrs' house, too, and visited briefly with them.

On Monday I had to run some brief errands on campus. It was strange to see campus so empty, not to be able to go into the dorms or see familiar people walking across the lawn. Strange to go by Tyrrell Hall and not hear the noises of people practicing in the basement.

When I was younger, I always used to think that when Christ said, "He who keeps his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for My sake will find it," He meant that you actually had to lose your life, to die as a martyr, for Him. But I wonder if that verse doesn't have a broader application. In some sense I feel as though I lose my life, the life that I try to build for myself, giving it up (imperfectly and sinfully) in order to follow His calling.

As I consider finding life, though, I think of Christ's promise of Heaven, and the Psalm, "In Your glorious presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures for me evermore." In Tulsa I looked at one of my friends and thought what an awe-some creature she will be when she comes to Heaven. Imagine having Christ's work perfect in each of us, being able to serve Him fully together as one unified body, as His church. In one sense, clinging so much to the people on this earth is like clinging to a person's shadow when the person is walking toward you: certainly, we are to love the other members of Christ's body, but we are not what we will be when we come before Him, and indeed even in Heaven we will still only be reflections of His glory. So every moment past is more time moving us toward that glorious reality, finding life in Him.

I just finished reading The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs, a Puritan author. An excellent study, I thought. He encouraged faithfulness for those who were discontent with the job that they had because it seemed "mean and worthless", as he might put it. He talked about how God rewards those who are faithful even in small things. God Himself is faithful in small things: He built a world packed with thousands and thousands of tiny details, from the grain of the wood in the dining room table to the way the molecules interact in photosynthesis in every leaf of the maple trees outside my window. So by being faithful in the apparently insignificant callings to which He may call us, we are actually reflecting an important part of His character (important because He has filled the world with it!).

What else is on my reading list for this summer? Well, let's start by what I've already finished: seven Agatha Christie mysteries (picked them up at the OKC library booksale, so I felt obligated to read them); The Complete Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers; A History of Old English Literature; Poems by C.S. Lewis (excellent!); and The Rare Jewel (as mentioned above).

I am now in the midst of Collected Poems by G.K. Chesterton, which I actually don't like as much as C.S. Lewis's (sorry, RCS :o). The only really amazing poem so far has been "The Ballad of the White Horse", which I'm in the middle of right now--very stirring, with beautiful word-pairings reminding me of Anglo-Saxon kenning. Oh, and I'm also reading The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, an incredibly battered copy that I bought at the OKC booksale years ago (with Anna) because I liked a picture of a medieval chalice that I found in it. It's proving to be somewhat useful in getting ready for study abroad, though I wish I knew Gaelic so that I could pronounce the names properly!

Coming up: The Divine Comedy by Dante (with beautiful illustrations by William Blake), Selected Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney (we'll see how far I get through that one--the only contemporary poet on my list for the summer!), and a book of poems and prose by Rilke that my grandparents gave me awhile ago. Possibly also Spenser's Faerie Queene, though I have a bad copy of it, so I'm reluctant to try it. Then of course there's a biography of King Henry VIII, a History of Wales (from Tara), and an anthology of Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as another book about Anglo-Saxon poetry that I really should read before I go to Ireland. Also, Grace in Winter, a book of Samuel Rutherford's work in verse from my parents.

Then there's a long list of more "religious" books: God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis, Heart Aflame by Calvin (but that's a day-by-day sort of thing), Knowing God, by Packer, and The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. These are lower down on the list simply because I don't have copies of them, whereas I have copies of all the ones listed above.

It looks like a long list, but believe me, when you have thirty-six hours a week to read, the books go by fast!

hot and sweaty

Last post for the day....

Pictures from Nacogdoches, TX are up on photobucket.

Username Elfellyn
Password flook07

another one

Well, there's another fairytale up on Through A Glass Darkly for those of you with too much time on your hands. :o)

Right now the wildlife count between OSU and my house, seen from my bicycle, stands at:

Two kites;

Assorted vultures;

One large dog (standing in the middle of the sidewalk while I was biking home from work a couple of nights ago; it ran off to one side and stood and glowered at me as I passed);

Cats (two kittens with mother near the mobile home park that I bike past);

Two raccoons (down in the culvert by TCS; one of them sat and stared at me for a long time);

No rabbits or deer yet, but I have hopes.

And why, may I ask, are all the posts about "100 Years of Oklahoma Weather" on www.wunderground.com so incredibly gloomy? It seems as though every day was the anniversary of a tornado that ripped up a town out in the boondocks, or a hailstone that damaged mobile homes, or a big wind that blew someone's car away. *humph*

how to

Now Playing: Stravinsky, "The Firebird", "Ronde de Princesses".

Since very few of you commented on that last serious and deeply philosophical *hem* post, time to try something different. (And my thanks to those who did comment.)

So, you may be asking, what did I do that whole week while I was in Texas? Actually, you're probably not asking, but I'm going to tell you anyway. :o)

Laura, Lillian, and Annalee built a complex system of mud towns and watch-posts down in the creek, while Peter and Stephen annoyed them by building dams and cutting off the water supply to the towns. Andrew worked with the lawn care company that employs him, and Ross worked at his internship as a mechanical engineer at a manufacturing plant, coming by the house for occasional evening visits. Philip did things on his laptop, including teaching Go to Andrew in his spare moments, and indoctrinating five-year-old Mary into the wonders of "La Bamba", which is probably one of the stupidest Spanish guitar songs you'll ever hear, and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (from Disney!) and Mark O'Connor Cajun music. But she loved it.

Uncle Kirk worked, but came home more often than in the past, usually "just in time for a meal" (as Pippin would say :o), and my father sat in the living room and read books about the sacraments.

Aunt Lisa, my grandmother, my mother, and I worked on a comforter for Philip. Aunt Lisa provided technical support since she was working on her own quilt at the same time. My mother helped with the ironing, and Grammy helped with the pinning. Now, in case you were wondering again (and I'm assuming that today you're in an inquisitive frame of mind, whoever "you" is), here are the steps for making a quilt:

1. Scrounge up fabric. Random places are best for this. Stephen picked up a bunch of frog fabric at a Cottontails going-out-of-business sale. My mother rummaged through her scrap collection, and I went through my basket of odds-and-ends, mostly leftovers from cloak-making projects.

2. Measure the size of the blanket you want--this will take some thinking, a blunt pencil, a piece of scratch paper, and any arithmetic you happen to remember from highschool--and figure the number of squares necessary.

3. Start to cut out squares, generally speaking to the size you want them. Fudging is acceptable. I was all set to do it the old fashioned way, cutting out the squares one by one with a cardboard template, but my aunt (and hopefully yours) is more up-to-date. She produced a rotary cutting mat with inches neatly marked out and a rotary cutter, and initiated me into the art of rotary cutting which, if done right, will result in neat stacks of squares in about half-an-hour. N.B.: If the power goes out because of a thunderstorm while you're doing this, ask your aunt to hold a flashlight for you. Mine was most obliging....

4. When the fabric you've assembled turns out to be lacking color, go to your aunt and ask her to look through her fabric collection. If your aunt is anything like mine, her collection will turn out to fill a couple of monstrous cabinets stuffed with cloth in all colors and patterns, including but not limited to florals, cats, cranes, butterflies, insects, frogs, jungle animals, swirls, polka dots, stripes, zig-zags, stars, and chickens. To keep Stephen's frogs company, insects are best, especially if in between the insects are words that say "Gross!", "Slimy!", "Yuck!", and the like.

5. Once you've got your squares, sew them together into blocks of four. This is where mother and grandmother are splendidly diligent to assist--mother to iron, grandmother to pin.

6. Now comes the fun of laying out all the blocks, and seeing how they look together. More than likely, the chickens you chose because they were weird won't "fit", and that's where the insects come in. With your aunt and grandmother overseeing the process, lay out your blocks on the living room carpet, six across by eight down. Aunt and grandmother will give you tips about how quilters usually do this sort of thing, telling you that it's not "done" to have dark colors running in odd directions--instead, all the dark colors should be lined up in diagonals going one way, and all the light colors in diagonals in the other way, like a chess board. Also, they'll hint that it might look more artistic if you put all the predominately dark blocks along the edges, and the lighter ones in the middle, gradually going outward, so that you get a sort of explosion effect.

7. Once you've arranged all the blocks in a color-coordinated fashion, so that the quilt really does look like an artistic study in greens and blues (with bugs, frogs, and blue Spiderman fabric thrown in for good measure), ask your aunt to help you keep it organized. Ten-to-one, she'll have a clever system of squares cut from index cards, each square with a letter and a number on it. Together, she and you will pin these squares to your blocks so that each block has its letter and each row has its number--very efficient, and saves a good deal of fussing later on.

8. Sew the blocks together into strips, and the strips into blocks. Mother and grandmother here were again wonderfully helpful, and with their help the comforter top came together in the matter of an afternoon.

9. Now that you have the top all finished, the real work begins. Because you came down to Texas expecting to be making squares in the plodding old-fashioned way, you didn't bring your backing or batting with you. But my aunt took me to Wal-Mart and Hobby Lobby, where we bought a full sized navy blue sheet for the backing, batting, needles, and bright green pearl cotton thread. (And I was very grateful....)

10. Next morning, having gone out to supper at Cotton Patch between finishing the top and starting the process of finishing the comforter (after all, the sheet needs to be washed, dried and ironed, and the seams ripped!), push the dining room table aside, sweep the floor, and lay the sheet down very carefully on the dining room floor, which in my cousins' case was tile (it's a bad idea to use the living room because it is carpeted, and carpet is not part of your quilt). At your aunt's suggestion, take packing tape and tape the sheet flat and taut to the floor. Spread it out carefully so as to avoid all wrinkles. Then lay the batting down, and the top of the comforter last so that it all makes a sort of batting sandwich.

11. Now, if you have any stray cousins or siblings lying around, the way I did, this is the best time to make use of them. Scout them out from the creek, the computer, the back bedroom, or wherever else they may happen to be, and get them to help you pin it. With all eight of you, including aunt and mother, working on it, the pinning will probably only take about fifteen minutes, tops. Safety pins will do, but most likely your aunt (if as wonderful as mine) will have proper quilter's pins, which are bent and so pop back up through the fabric obligingly.

12. Once you have all three layers pinned together, rip the tape off the floor--most likely your little girl cousins will be most enthusiastic about this part, and you'll get to help the littlest one make an immense, sticky wad of tape--and roll the whole bundle up. Move the dining room table back into place, lay the bundle on the table, and ask your mother and your aunt to help you tie. This will probably take an hour or so, with all three of you working on it. You do have to be careful to get all three layers (top, batting, backing) into the knot, or else it won't be any good--the best thing to do is after you think you've finished, turn the quilt over and look to see where you missed spots. In my case, the bright green thread stood out nicely against the navy blue backing, so it was quite obvious where a knot hadn't gone through. Retie the ones you missed. And because everyone is getting hungry and wants to use the dining room table for lunch, they'll all be very eager to help you unpin the quilt so that it can be draped over the sofa during the meal.

13. After eating lunch, your aunt may suggest that you, your mother, and grandmother drive to a nearby small town where there's a quilt shop. For the fun of it, go along. My aunt advised that I put a binding on the quilt, but I was skeptical. She finally said that she would buy the fabric and help me put it on because she was so sure that it would add so much to the quilt. So when you get to the quilt shop, choose out a fabric that coordinates with the top. I chose a green one, mottled to look like lily pads or stagnant water--it would help out the frogs.

14. Of course, once you buy the fabric, it has to be washed and ironed. The rest of the afternoon, after you return from the quilt shop, will be spent mucking around in the creek, taking a group picture of all your very unwilling siblings and cousins (at your grandmother's instigation, and with your mother as accomplice), and writing in your journal.

15. After supper comes the process of making the batting. Sew the fabric into two-and-a-half-inch strips. Sew the strips together at right angles, then sew them on raw edges to the quilt itself.

16. The last step is hand sewing the binding onto the quilt, folding over the unsewn edge and tacking it down with hem stitch to the back of the quilt so that it neatly covers the open edges of the quilt where the batting pokes out. My mother, aunt, and I all worked on it, while everyone else was watching an Albert Campion mystery (BBC TV show). It took us about an hour, all told.

17. Then finished product is to be held up and admired. A comforter with a binding all round the edge is like a picture with a frame.

18. The last step is your brother's responsibility: to lay the comforter on his bed, in his college dorm room, for everyone who comes into his room to exclaim over, laugh at, examine, praise, or make fun of, as the whim takes them.

And that is what I did while I was in Texas.

Now Playing: "Michigan: The Great Lakes State" by Sufjan Stevens. Track 15, "Vito's Ordination Song".

"I've made a crown for you
and put it in your room....
and when you write a poem
I know the words
I know the sounds
before you write it down....
Rest in my arms
sleep in my bed
there is a design
to what I did and said...."

Philip reminded me of this song recently, and it is comforting somehow. As the Psalmist occasionally does, the lyricist speaks as though with the tone of God speaking to one of His children, using Biblical ideas of predestination. It's a good song about the practicality of doctrine, and how the doctrine of predestination--God's foreknowledge and forethought into every detail of life, from what I put on in the morning to what I write in an English essay--ought to be a comfort, a matter of peace, a fixed resting place amid all the rushing confusion of life.

Now, as I feel rubbed raw after the past month's good-byes, I go back to this idea and am comforted. It was worse in that first month of May, saying good-bye to Rachel. I could hardly think clearly for that weekend when I was in Stillwater between the end of finals and going to Summer Conference. The good-byes at Summer Conference were not as hard because of the week of fellowship that blunted the pain, and especially because of the worship of that week that turned me to find greater comfort in the truth of Christ's High Priestly prayer in John. Realizing, as Syneva said, that the desire for unity among my friends and family in all their disparate places is not wrong, but instead is a way in which I am allowed to mirror Christ--that realization is somehow reassuring. It does not remove the pain completely, but at least it reminds me that I am being allowed to suffer along with Christ, who desires the unity of His people more than I could ever imagine, and who died to promote that unity with more suffering than I could ever undergo. In being like Christ I find joy, and from joy comes strength to persevere until the redemption of the promised possession.

So it's fitting to be thinking about these things the evening before going to church. Someone was telling me this evening that they were longing to be back at church, in fellowship with believers. "I want to hear a good sermon," were this person's emphatic words. I've been surprised these past few weeks by how happy I've been to be at church. The peculiarities of the people around me are not embarrassing but beautiful, somehow--to see everyone behaving with their own idiosyncracies week after week is something that delights me. It was the same at RUF large group: I'd look around the room after the service ended and think that the room looked like a scene out of "Star Wars" where all the hundreds of different kinds of aliens are standing around talking to each other, no two alike, all of them slightly ridiculous but fitting together somehow and amazingly loving one another.

Perhaps I'm in a serious mood this evening because serious things have been happening here. We went away to Texas to visit my mother's brother and his crazy family :o), and came back this evening to find that one of our neighbors, the old Russian woman who lived on the corner, had died on Wednesday, and that the whole town had flooded last night, leaving our neighbors across the street with a partially-ruined house. On the upside of matters, one of my friends here found a perfect job this week, and her family bought a car so that she can drive to her job, not to mention the fact that one of my other friends returned safely from almost a semester away from home last weekend (one of her first times to be away from home for so long). So it's a Sufjan Stevens night, thoughtful and poignant.

"You came to take us....
To recreate us...."

And God has recreated us, will complete His work, until we are perfect and whole before Him. What a blessing it is to know that every part of every day, every good-bye, every meeting, is part of that recreation, and will finally be understood as part of His glorious work.

raining and raining

Now Playing: Brahms, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor. Track 1, Maestoso. (Drumroll shaking my laptop! Intense, dramatic, full of pathos. I will never forget the way Syneva played this piece. It brought tears to my eyes.... So incredibly lovely.)

So far these past few days have been "social butterfly" days!

On Thursday, Laura and I had an "outing" together. We went clothes shopping, which was good fun, making fun of all the outrageous items of clothing in the stores where we went. Laura found one strip of cloth which she was sure was a miniskirt. "Ick! How could anyone wear that!" she exclaimed. "That's not a miniskirt. It's a strapless top," I said dryly, and she was even more disgusted--justifiably so! But we found an elegant green gown for her and a white eyelet sundress for me, which was nice.

Friday I went to work at the usual time but was let off at six o'clock instead of at nine-thirty. I drove over to the community center for the Irish Dance performance in which Laura, Anna, Ruth, Dani, Hannah, Rebekah, and Susannah were all dancing. I got there in time for the last half. The group did brilliantly, of course, and after the formal dancing ended there was a set of the bag dance in which the audience was included. It was fun to watch Elizabeth and Danielle skipping down the lines together, tall over all the little girls, and Mr. Spitler stooping to hold hands with Susannah.

Laura and I spent Friday night with the Spitlers. We watched a couple of episodes of "Dr. Who", a British sci fi TV show. On Saturday, Laura and I helped the Spitlers clean house to prepare for the Memorial Day picnic that evening. We also had a mini ceilidh (three hand-, two hand-, four hand-, and fairy reel). Sarah and I scrapbooked and ran errands for Mrs. Spitler, being as silly as possible while we were about it. People started to show up at the Spitlers' house at five o'clock for the picnic. Despite the threat of rain and the soggy state of the pasture, almost everyone in the church turned out for the picnic. We ate, and then people split up for various activities: volleyball, ultimate frisbee, fishing, or just sitting and talking.

After church on Sabbath in the evening, my family went to the Enid Bible study. I rode in the Fishers' van, which was crammed full of noisy kids. The sunset was absolutely beautiful, huge thunderclouds glowing gold and purple and icy blue against the dark eastern sky while the sun sank in the west. On the way back to Stillwater, Elizabeth, Danielle, and I sat in the front bench and had a heated discussion with Mr. and Mrs. Fisher about marriage, which was interesting to listen to.

Today my father and I installed a webcam and Skype on my computer, for use while I'm in Ireland. The whole family ate lunch together, a very unusual occurrence, and watched part of Spider-man 2. Philip and I went out for ice cream after lunch, and then we drove out to the Fishers' house. We found Greg, Calvin, and Christa on a frog hunt in the front yard. They'd already collected eight fine amphibians in an empty plastic ice cream container, which they proudly exhibited to us. Philip and I picked up Anna and took her to my grandmother's house, where we spent the rest of the afternoon talking, teasing, drinking cranberry juice, and eating cookies. My grandmother told us all about her Bible school, her trip to Kansas with my mother over the weekend, the doings at Golden Oaks, her views on immigration, etc. We looked up woodpeckers in her bird guide, and Philip helped her make hotel reservations.

After taking Anna home, we went back home ourselves. Laura and Stephen were just getting back from an afternoon at the Parnells' house. We found that Logan had come over for supper, so the rest of the evening was spent in a good fellowship.

And now I'm sitting alone in my room, listening to crickets in the trees outside and an owl down in the creek bottom.

Time to hang a "Gone to Texas" sign on this blog! Woo hoo!

The way a Monday should be....

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

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

May 21, 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

are we asleep yet?

Pictures from the baccalaureate service are up on photobucket.

Can I find anything more edifying to say? It is, after all, Sabbath evening.... Well, here's a poem, written on one of those long drives back to Tulsa, on a Sabbath afternoon, as a matter of fact.

In Place

Shadows swimming, sliding down the road,
These rippling hills shaken blue beneath the sun,
Like green sand slipping as the shadows run,
The silver grass slides past and cannot hold,
This scalloped foam that shimmers as it rolls.
Such shining sheaves lie shaken to the sky,
Blade on blade, leaf on leaf, branches underlie—
Black net of veins through earth, through dusty sky.
Can any count the number of these seeds?
Enlist each branch, or census every tree?
Who holds the matted roots when autumn comes,
Or knows each falling leaf as it burns down?
Who sends the winter wind to bleach the grass,
To blacken trees, turn limbs to candle-ash?
And when night comes, who keeps the rolling hills,
Who keeps their colors as the darkness fills
The empty valleys till the morning comes?
Night eyes these hills, veined where the small lights run,
The skies and hills both seeded with bright stars.
Who holds the lights so that no darkness mars?
Who keeps the lights that pulse across the land,
Or holds the constellations where they stand?
Who banks the fiery sands till morning breaks,
And then re-ripples hills for winds to rake?
If forces only keep the small things fast,
What holds the forces in their place? At last,
Behind the powers of the ringing world,
Must live some brilliant stillness who can hold
From oak to ash to pulsar in its place,
As Word well-woven veil before His face.

photos

Pictures from summer conference are up on photobucket!

Username Elfellyn
Password flook07

eavesdropping

Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack by Howard Shore. "Evenstar".

"I ain't been droppin' no eaves sir, honest! I was just cuttin' the grass under the window there, if you follow me!"

"A bit late for trimming the verge, don't you think!"

***********************************************************************************

I'm feeling very pressed for time. Rachel, forgive me, but I'm having to post some of the e-mail I sent you up here as a blog post to let people know what happened at summer conference.

Last week I was in Florida at Laguna Beach Christian Retreat with RUF for Summer Conference.

I spent the night in Tulsa on Saturday (May 5), sleeping on the floor of Syneva's stripped apartment. On Sabbath morning, I helped Stefni, Syneva's younger sister, pack the car. We went to Christ Pres for the morning service, and after the morning service, all the RUFfians gathered in the parking lot to get organized before we started off for Florida. Syneva was in charge of the expedition, and she was incredibly patient. She managed to gather all the drivers around her to hand out gas money, maps, and walkie-talkies for staying in touch, as well as coordinating which cars were going to caravan together. Since there were forty-two students total, and about ten or eleven cars, we split up into caravans of two or three. I rode in Syneva's suburban with Amanda, Stefni, Mary, Nicole, Tara, and Syneva. Mattlock's truck and Amy's car completed our caravan. We grabbed lunch at Sonic before we set off on the highway, and for supper we stopped at a grocery store somewhere in Mississippi, bought bread, cheese, and fruit, and ate standing in the parking lot. The whole group met up and spent the night at a campground in Mississippi, and started off bright and early next morning. Unfortunately, our caravan took a wrong turn so that instead of driving in the fast highway down to Laguna Beach, we were on a slow, two-lane highway that took us through every little tourist town along the coast. It took us twice as long to reach our destination, but we arrived safely at least.

Laguna Beach turned out to be beautiful. The Christian retreat center there is made up of white buildings with green roofs, built on either side of the little two-lane highway. The girls all stayed in a "dormitory" overlooking the beach. I was in a room with Jenny H., Amanda, and Hannah--the rooms were like hotel rooms, but they had extra bunk beds in them. In the mornings, we'd wake up at about seven o'clock for breakfast and then go to opening exercises, which consisted mainly of prayer, singing, announcements, etc. Then there were two sessions. During each session, everyone could choose a class to attend. You could go to one four-day class and two two-day classes. I went to a four-day class with Rachael, Tara, Jenny H., Alisha, and Nicole about sin, to a two-day class about worldview, and to another two-day class about total depravity/idolatry. Then we'd have lunch, and after lunch the afternoon was free. I spent every afternoon on the beach. :o) Syneva, Amanda, Stefni, and I lay on the beach together, and Syneva read some of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins to us. We also went out on sea kayaks, and I went for walks on the beach. The water was very clear, and the sand was white. In the evening, there was supper and then a worship service. Pastor Jones from the Redeemer church plant in Tulsa was the speaker. He preached about sanctification--very, very good sermons, about how Christ's work applies to our lives, giving courage. He really emphasized the power and fullness of Christ's love for His people, so it was wonderful to have a deepened understanding of that.

On Saturday (May 12), we spent the whole day on the road, a sixteen-hour trip through Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. We reached Tulsa at one-thirty Sabbath morning, and then I drove home. I was in bed by about three-thirty--oh, I was so tired when I woke up for church!

Yesterday I spent the morning doing business transactions with my father's help. We went out to eat lunch with the grandparents to celebrate Mother's Day, and in the afternoon, my family went to see Spider-man 3. It was alright. I thought that the bells were the best part--all the imagery surrounding bells of the power of the voice of God, the majesty of the church, the call of holiness, etc.

Today I started my job at OSU. It's alright. My coworkers are older women who are all very talkative, and very rough, but also friendly and patient so far at least.

leaving the inn

Now Playing: Vivaldi, "The Four Seasons". Track 10, "Winter: Allegro non molto."

Well, I'm back in Stillwater now.

What happened last week?

Monday was the day of that nutty post, which I don't need to rehearse for you.

On Tuesday I had my Music History II exam, which went fine. Afterwards, I went running, sold back my books, and ate lunch. I met with John in the afternoon, which was pleasant: good to have one final talk with him, to be reminded of the justification--God's love for me means that I can love others unreservedly because He has supplied my needs, and I must love others, must reach out to them for His glory. A fitly-timed reminder before I go to Ireland. In the evening, I took my supper over to the Chalet and ate with Syneva, Amanda, Stefni (Syneva's younger sister), and Rachael. Then we all drove over to the Knorrs' house for RUF at seven-thirty. Instead of having a sermon, tonight was a hymn-sing. I squeezed on a bench near the door with Rachel, Tara, and Stefni, and listened to the singing. Syneva played mandolin and piano; Spencer played guitar; Alisha played her violin; David even played his harmonica, and Jenny S., Joanna, and Ange led the singing. They did sing Psalm 51, and it was an immense blessing to be able to join the rest of the group--all the well-known faces upturned in the lamplight. After RUF, people hung around for awhile. I got Kevin and Jenny S. to write in the little black book that I'm taking with me to Ireland. Then I went back to the Chalet with the girls, and we (Syneva, Amanda, Rachael, Stefni, Tara, and I) watched an episode of "Foyle's War", a detective series set in World War II. After the show ended, Amanda found a spider in the bathtub, which put everyone into a great uproar. Of course I was the one who had to kill it. It was midnight by the time Tara and I left. I walked back to Lottie alone, feeling a bit nervous because the night was so still and dark. (One of my friends had recently been accosted by a strange fellow on such a walk across campus, and I was not eager to repeat her experience.) But then Kevin came along, so we had a nice chat, and then I finally went up to bed.

Wednesday was very wet and rainy. Rachel and I went out in the morning to Wal-Mart, and she spent the morning packing up while I wrote out journal entries and e-mails and poems. All her odds and ends somehow, after a great deal of deliberation, managed to fit into a few boxes and suitcases. We ate lunch together. After lunch, she went to a final exam, while I went to Borders to use the prize money from "Stylus". I bought a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems and prose, a book of poetry by Seamus Heaney, and a journal. Then I spent the afternoon reading and praying, alone until Rachel finished her exam. We had a bit of a chat, and I helped her carry her boxes down to the car of a woman from her church, who was going to store the boxes over the summer. Then I walked over to the Penthouse, and Jenny S. and I drove down to south Tulsa for Jamba Juice. Good fun. We laughed at all the awkward moments that happen and at a group of rather silly highschool students hanging around in the shopping complex where we were. Back on campus again, we said good-bye, and I walked over to Lottie. I stopped to chat for a bit with Katie, Crystal, and Grant, and then drove down to Christ Pres to do babysitting. In the evening, Hobgoblins met. We went to the coffee shop and sat outside on the rather damp patio for our last meeting. Rachel read us some poems by G.K. Chesterton and some limericks that she'd written about Herodotus, which set everyone laughing. Asher, Andrew, Tara, Leslie, and I all shared poems, a mix of sonnets and limericks. When the meeting ended, Tara, Rachel, and I went back to the Penthouse. We spent the rest of the night drinking chai tea, eating raisins and popcorn, and watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was good fun.

Yesterday was the last day at Tulsa.... In the morning, I packed up. The hardest part was stripping posters and pictures off the walls, taking down the two paper cranes that Rachel had given me at the beginning of the semester, peeling the maple leaves off the window. Rachel and I took our lunches over to the rose garden. We spent about three hours there, eating, walking around, talking. Long, quiet, serious hours. Watching the frogs in the lily ponds, watching a kite swing elegant arcs across the sky, laughing at a squirrel that boldly sniffed Rachel's boot, watching a little sparrow bathe itself in the dust. Talking about the past year, about God, about family and friends. The wind combed gently over the roses and blew their sweet smell up to us, and our feet sank deep in the wet grass under the oak trees. Late in the afternoon, Rachel went to the library. I moved out of the room: four suitcases, a bag of blankets, my lamp, a piece of posterboard with pictures on it, a paper bag of cleaning supplies, and my messenger bag, all hauled down to the car and stowed away. Then I checked out. Rachel walked with me down to the car, and we said good-bye. The atmosphere was rather damp, in more ways than one.... I left feeling as though I had been kicked to pieces, and drove back to Stillwater in a thunderstorm. Back in Stillwater, after I'd eaten some supper, my father and Stephen helped me carry my things to my room. Laura chattered excitedly, showed me her garden, showed me the guinea pig, and even helped me unpack. With her help, I unpacked amazingly quickly and got the room set to rights. I went to bed early, but I had a hard time falling asleep at first--I wanted to hear someone else's quiet breathing on the other side of the room, but of course there was no one.

This morning, after I ate breakfast, I drove over to the Cottontails warehouse. They're going out of business, so they're selling clothes cheaply. I bought a pair of brown slacks, a sleeveless blue sweater, and three shirts for nineteen dollars. Not bad, considering. The rest of the day I've spent tidying things, putting away papers, writing up yesterday's journal entry, doing some laundry, helping my father with the car, playing with the cat, watching Narnia during lunch, etc. The house is quiet. Philip will be in Tulsa until Saturday, Stephen is playing on the computer, my father is administering a final exam, and Laura and my mother are at Irish dance class.

It is hard to remember: "Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home." - C.S. Lewis

ooogh....

Pictures are up on photobucket!

Username: Elfellyn
Password: psalm84
Album: Rachel Rose Garden

I'm exhausted in every sense of the word.... Physically, mentally, emotionally. I have a cold and I said good-bye to one of my very best friends today. And I nearly drowned in a thunderstorm on the way home for about ten minutes.

the best days of the year....

Greetings and salutations everyone.

Guess what I found hopping around my computer this morning?

A WHITE RABBIT!

:o)

anyone for a few finals?

Now Playing: Giuseppe Verdi, "La traviata". (Under duress!)

Nice big storm brewing outside at the moment. Rachel came breezing in, declaring, "I've decided that this weather is not for barrettes," and immediately began to brush her hair. I must confess to a strong Marianne streak when it comes to big storms. I had my window open until Rachel came in, so that all the maps and papers on the walls fluttered, and was sticking my head out it a good deal, but now it's raining and blowing tempestuously, so those adventures have to be stalled for a bit.

Someone was complaining that I haven't posted on here in awhile. I'm not much worse than anyone else.... Go check ALF's blog or the Shadow's blog. *grin*

Why, oh why, does my Music History II professor like opera so much? Italian opera I can just bear and listen to if forced--but he makes us listen to Weber and Wagner, and, as though to add insult to injury, completely skims over all the wonderful symphonic and chamber works out there by Romantic composers! During these last two weeks or so, even a string quartet by Schumann (if such a thing exists) would be welcome, not to mention the human cheerfulness of Mendelssohn or the Christian hope of Brahms, but instead all we get is overblown, superstitious, ridiculously dramatic, and brazenly nationalistic stuff about fat dwarves and childish gods and stupid sleepy blond girls and men with big helmets.

Ah, well, the final exam is tomorrow, and then I can forget all this Germanic national nonsense, and go back to fugues and requiems and symphonies.

Yet the question persists: Why are the cream of the great composers German? Bach, Beethoven, Brahms ("The Three Bs," as Syneva irrevrently calls them), Mendelssohn, Mozart (well, he was Austrian, but that's just across the border, after all), Handel, and Haydn, not to mention Schubert and Schumann, who were both nuts as far as I'm concerned.

At least Gluck and Bizet and Poulenc were French, and Vaughan-Williams was British, as were Holst and Elgar, and then there's the zoo-ful of Eastern Europeans--Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Chopin, Liszt, and that flamboyant bunch--and of course nowadays we have Copland, Barber, O'Connor, and co. to give the Americans some hope in the world.

Anyway, enough musical jargon. Only Pip will be interested, I daresay.

Yes, I have been reading this week. That's what finals week is for, right? No one in their right mind would read their textbooks, but they'd turn to something more interesting as a sort of exercise to relax the brain before exams. So I've taken up Dorothy L. Sayers again. (Does it show? I feel as though I've quite imbibed Lord Peter's ridiculous trick for babbling on meaninglessly....) I finished Have His Carcase just before my jury on Friday, sitting in the warm morning sunshine in the library plaza until ten minutes before I had to play. Then in the car on the drive to Oklahoma City on Saturday for Philip's piano competition, it was short stories by Sayers. And this afternoon, between selling my textbooks and editing my Lyric paper, I wrapped up Strong Poison.

Not bad, I'd say, but I think I'll take up Gerard Manley Hopkins for a change. Writing like Sayers is all very well, but thinking and talking is quite another thing, and will become exceedingly annoying presently....

Now if only study abroad arrangements could be polished off as easily, then I'd really be able to sit back and laugh at the world. Questions about banks, bicycles, and housing deposits are looming large in my mind, while ID cards, plane tickets, power converters, clothing, hot pots, and classes scurry about in the background.

Well, if you want a more staid account of what I've been doing lately:

Last week, Monday was the last day of classes.

Tuesday was the first day of dead days. I went to a review session for Novels, played a long flute lesson, splashed around in the rain, and fixed curry for sundry and various people in the Penthouse.

Wednesday was the second day of dead days. I had a study session with Kayla for Music History II, babysat at Christ Pres during their evening meeting, and studied for Novels some more in the coffee shop on 15th street with Katie and Grant.

Thursday was the first day of finals, so I locked myself in the room and worked on the British Novels final, a take-home set of two essays. I also briefly went shopping with some of the girls (Nicole, Jenny H., Crystal, Mary) and played some soccer in the evening with other RUFfians, as well as climbing around on a gigantic backhoe with Rachel (that was fun!).

On Friday I played my jury, ate lunch with Tara outside, read a couple of old "World" magazine issues, and drove back to Stillwater, where I spent the afternoon ruthlessly cleaning out my room.

Philip had a piano competition in Oklahoma City Saturday morning, so I dutifully went along with my parents and the aforenamed brother. He played beautifully, though he didn't win anything. In the afternoon, my mother and I had our requisite grocery shopping venture. Logan came over for supper, and after he left (when us kids were already upstairs getting ready for bed), we had guests show up, the Raymonds from Arizona. They stayed the night with us.

Sabbath was the day for going to church. Unfortunately, I didn't actually get to go to church because it was my day for nursery duty, so Anna and I amused ourselves for most of the morning with Joseph and Dinah in the nursery during the service. We played in the water fountain and tried to stop the two little ones from murdering each other over toys. In the afternoon, my father read to us kids, my mother and I went for a walk, and I read some more. After supper, I drove back to Tulsa.

Today has been long and uneventful: studying, finishing the Lyric paper, taking care of business matters, etc. I was supposed to meet with John this morning, but he never showed up.... On the other hand, I ended up sitting in ACAC for an hour, reading, and over the course of the hour I had a nice couple of short chats with Tara and Amanda.

It's still raining outside, oh the bliss of watching water fall from the sky. Like magic. Why does water come out of the sky, anyway? It seems such an unexpected place for water to come from, but it does. I suppose Noah and co. must've been rather surprised when they peeked out and saw water coming down from the sky, if the watercolor rendition of the Flood in Peter Spier's book is to be taken as correct. I suppose it's because the sky looks so blank and big and solid that someone could go through life never expecting anything to come out of it. But all sorts of things can: comets and bits of rubbish and birds and spaceships and aliens.

Most importantly and gloriously, of course, someday our Lord will come out of the sky to the earth as He has promised: Like rain, to wash creation clean, to wash away the evil of the world, but those who are founded on Him will stand despite the flood of His wrath, and will come out to find a world recreated with the baptism of His Spirit.

Hmmm.... Talking like a poet already.... Maybe I should stay away from Hopkins after all. Sayers makes me silly, but Hopkins is guaranteed to make me try to wax poetical, and we all know how dreadful that can get.

So beware! Because I'm off to do some more reading....

walking with Shandy and other adventures

Yesterday was a very wonderful day... in fact, it's been a wonderful week.

On Monday, I spent the morning being unusually productive. I studied for Music History II (which included reading and listening), read for Honors and Novels, applied for a job, and worked on a paper. In the evening, I met with a young man who's a student at Queen's University. He's studying abroad in Tulsa, and we spent an hour talking about Queen's. He showed me pictures and told me all about the city. After that, I went to the last intramural boys' soccer game, and then visited the Penthouse (Alisha-Tara-Jenny S.'s apartment) for a little while. Crystal was baking coffee-and-chocolate cookies and let me taste some of the batter. Powerful stuff!

Tuesday was a rainy day, and a rather strange day. I had most of the late afternoon occupied with a ceremony, which was rather dull. RUF in the evening put me in a weird, distant mood, for some reason. But it was lovely to splash around through the rain and hear the grass slosh and squeak wetly underfoot as I crossed the lawn to Lottie again.

On Wednesday, we had the last orchestra rehearsal, and the last walk to Tyrrell with Syneva. In the evening, Eleanor and I drove down to Christ Presbyterian Church, which "oversees" RUF, to help with babysitting during their Wednesday night service. We only had one baby, who went to sleep with Eleanor's help, so Eleanor and I sat and chatted. After that, I went to the coffee shop with people for Hobgoblins.

Thursday afternoon, Syneva and I walked together over to the university school. We sat in an arbor in a butterfly garden kept by the students, and chatted. The afternoon was warm and windy, and a mockingbird was singing in the big oak tree over the arbor. At suppertime, I packed a sandwich in a box and took it over to Syneva-Amanda-Rachael's apartment. Syneva and I ate our supper together before Bible study and watched a little bit of Ivanhoe with Alisha and Amanda. After Bible study, Jenny H. and I lingered in the apartment for about an hour and a half, telling funny stories.

On Friday, I spent most of the day locked up in my room, working on papers. In the afternoon, though, I went to a prayer time with some other RUFfians. Then Crystal and I walked all the way down to the 15th street coffee shop, where we spent a couple of hours, and then we walked back to campus. The whole time was delightful: good to be out in the sun and wind, good to sit in the cool quiet coffee shop and drink iced tea, good to chat with Crystal (who rambles inordinately--she herself joked that she talks the way Laurence Sterne writes in Tristram Shandy), good to see Tara on the job (she's working at the coffee shop, and she swirled a heart into Crystal's latte). In the evening, I went to Syneva's senior piano recital. She played the three Bs, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, with more power and intensity than I've ever seen before. It was mesmerizing. After the concert, Alisha and I spent a little while standing on the porch outside Tyrrell. She reminded me of some important things, and comforted me. Then Rachel and I drove to Stillwater together to spend the weekend. It was great to get to talk to Rachel: as she said, we need to get acquainted after the past few weeks, in which we've hardly seen each other. We got back to Stillwater at about ten-thirty, were greeted warmly by my mother, and then went upstairs to bed. Rachel helped me change the sheets on my bed so that she could sleep in it, but when I went into Stephen's room (where I was to sleep), I discovered that he had taken the pillow off the bed, leaving in its place (to my amusement) a Calvin and Hobbes book, hidden in the blankets.

This morning I drove over to OSU for a job interview, which went fine. Being back in Stillwater after two weeks away is almost surreal. I have strong, vivid flashbacks to last summer, not all of which are good. It is good to be home, but I'm afraid of reverting back to old habits, of becoming trapped here.

The irises are blooming in the garden outside, though, and Laura is busy making plans to plant pumpkins in her patch of ground, and Sandy is curled up asleep on a chair.

from last weekend

Pictures are up on photobucket.

Username: Elfellyn
Password: psalm84

making music

Now Playing: New Song, "Stronghold". Track 17, "Benediction".

Yesterday, Saturday, was a good day. Logan and Philip came for another visit. It was really pleasant to see both of them again and to get to hear about things that have been going on with them lately. We went to the Gilcrease Museum and looked through most of the galleries, laughing at some of the paintings, commenting on others, puzzling over some of the statues. By the time we were finished inside, the clouds had broken outside, and the sun was coming through, so we spent awhile walking around in the gardens. Everything was wet, water running everywhere. We ate supper with Kevin, Spencer, Jenny S., and Holly at a sushi restaurant that Kevin likes, which was something of an adventure. I would've expected some other RUFfians to be there--I had invited Rachel--but it's the end of the semester, and people are busy. At seven o'clock, I had to go to an orchestra rehearsal for the concert tomorrow afternoon (Sabbath afternoon concert! blech!). The rehearsal went fairly well, I thought. Mr. W, our conductor, had a rare burst of frustration when the first violins got completely lost. He whacked his baton down viciously on his music stand, but he apologized immediately. "Oh, I'm sorry. That was a blatant show of frustration, wasn't it?" he said, with characteristically dry humor. We didn't get out of rehearsal until about nine o'clock, but when we did, Kevin drove Syneva and me over to Lottie for Art and Coffee: Since the Lottie piano is back, RUF decided to hold Art and Coffee in the lobby of Lottie.

Syneva and I were both really tired, so we kept our spirits up by running upstairs during intermission of Art and Coffee so that I could give Syneva her birthday present, a Mark O'Connor CD. To end Art and Coffee, Kevin, Syneva, and I played the first movement of the Bach sonata in E minor together. I thought that it sounded frightfully out-of-tune, but it was fun to play with Syneva and Kevin, and apparently everyone else liked it. After Art and Coffee, I hung around for awhile, chatting with Mary, until the noise and crowd became too much, at which point I went up to bed.

This morning I went to Redeemer Presbyterian Church with Jenny S. and others. The sermon was excellent, about John 21. I remember this particularly: God's ability to use frail instruments for His glory. Pastor J. told an anecdote about Wynton Marsalis, a Jazz trumpeter (he's played with Mark O'Connor before). Apparently, at a festival, Mr. Marsalis was showing off his incredible virtuoso abilities by playing a very beautiful, soulful song. The auditorium was completely silent as Mr. Marsalis reached the pinnacle of his song--and just then, someone's cellphone went off. Of course, that shattered the moment. People started to get up and talk and laugh. But Mr. Marsalis kept playing, and everyone gradually realized that he was playing the tune that the cellphone had rung. People laughed at first, but then they became silent as Mr. Marsalis eased back into his song at the exact point where it had been interrupted, and he finished the song to complete awed silence. So--God chooses to show His magnificence not through perfection but through His use of flawed, unfaithful, sinful beings to His glory. He restores and redeems us to use our abilities for His Name's honor.

After the service, I rode with Amy over to Christ Presbyterian Church, where I met up with Syneva and her family. Syneva's parents dropped the two of us off at the Performing Arts Center downtown. The concert this afternoon was played in the smaller of the two performance theatres--a theatre comfortably sized, in which, as I heard one old lady comment later, "You could actually see the players!" The concert went quite well, I thought. Syneva and Kayla played magnificently, of course, and all the touchiness in the orchestra seemed to be smoothed over. There was a reception after the concert, but I just sat in the hallway outside the reception room and read, though Syneva laughed at me later for being so stuffy. I rode back to campus with Syneva and her family, thoroughy enjoying their warm fellowship.

For supper, Alisha, Kathryn, Tara, Rachel, and I drove down to Woodward Park and had a picnic. The park was rather crowded: There was a man playing a doumbek drum, and a couple of teenage guys practicing tightrope walking on a thick rope tied near the ground taut between two trees, and a family of Hispanics eating their supper perched on the wall of the rose garden, and a man and a woman walking three huge German shepherds and one little fluffy white dog. The five of us sat quietly on a patch of grass in the sunshine, laughing some, talking some, and sitting silent some, just enjoying the warm sunshine and the vivid blues and greens around us. I rode back to campus with Tara in her car, and Alisha came up briefly to the room so that I could loan her my copy of the Brahms "Requiem". I've spent the evening quietly since then, listening to Psalms and typing up journal entries.

A quote from Jeremiah Borroughs that reminded me of Pastor J.'s sermon this morning, and that reminded me to delight in all the small blessings that God sends throughout the day: "Now just as God lets out a great deal of his power in working miracles in smaller things, so he lets out a great deal of goodness and mercy, in comforting and rejoicing the hearts of his people in little things, as well as in great." - The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

"O thank the Lord, for He is good; His grace will endless be." - Psalm 118C

thank God!

I have been given a place at Renwick House, the RP house for students in Ireland in Belfast.

He who had no place to lay His head has given me one to lay mine.

This is a major part of my study abroad process, so praise Him for His provision!

so go the days....

Now Playing: Vivaldi, "The Four Seasons", "Autumn", Movement 1, "Allegro".

Rachel is just going out with a huge box of laundry to wash.

This morning I sent a few e-mails and studied. The day was chilly and windy when I left Lottie to walk to Zink for an appointment with Dr. S at eight-thirty, to talk about the Novels research paper coming up. After a good discussion, we sketched an outline, and then I went to the library to study some more before Lyric. I went to the student study lounge on the third floor. It was quiet in there, pale sunshine filtering through the bubbled glass windows over the faded green carpet and scratched tables. After about half-an-hour, I went up a little half-flight of stairs to the special collections classroom, where Lyric class is meeting these days.

After Lyric, I went back to my room and read for Honors and for Lyric. I ate lunch alone in the corner booth by the window and then returned to my room to study until Novels. In Novels today, we finished The History of Ophelia. I walked out with Amanda. We laughed together about study abroad and taking pictures. I stopped by the Housing and Dining office after that to cancel housing for next year, and then went down to Tyrrell to practice. At four-fifteen, I went down the hall and knocked on the piano majors' practice room door. Syneva was inside, busy banging out her Brahms concerto, and didn't hear my first knock. When she did hear me, I went in, and we tuned, and then played the first movement of the Bach sonata in E minor together. It was exhilarating to play with another musician instead of just by myself, and I was pleased that my sound seemed to be in pretty good form today. But the piano, with its powerful sound, rather overpowered my flute, especially in the acoustically lively practice room. I found myself running out of breath both because we were playing slowly and because of all the air I was having to use to compete with the piano. A little while later, Kevin showed up with his cello. I was rather nervous: playing with two other musicians is a bit unusual for me, especially two other student musicians (I've played with Elizabeth on violin and a faculty accompanist before, but never in a situation where I had to take the lead). When the three of us got going, piano, cello, and flute, the sound was quite lovely, I thought. It's thrilling to hear the parts of the piece fall into line, the melodies and harmonies running together "the way it's supposed to sound". (Though all of us needed some practice!) The one trouble was that the powerful combination of Kevin and Syneva was quite overpowering, and despite my best efforts, my sound was quite engulfed (except on that "nice" *cough* high G, which always squeals!). After one run-through, Syneva suggested that Kevin use his mute, which helped, and she laughed that she was playing "too Romantically", so she tried to play more like a little brittle harpsichord than like a monstrous modern piano.

We spent a delightful fifteen minutes or so going over the piece a couple of times. Then Syneva had to leave. But Kevin didn't have anything better to do, so the two of us stayed in the practice room and played through the first movement some more. We worked on a couple of spots, one in particular where the cello part appeared to have been transcribed incorrectly. Syneva and I had played a little bit of the fast second movement while we were waiting for Kevin, but with Syneva gone, Kevin, flipping through his part, suggested we try the third movement. The third movement has a lovely running cello line, like water flowing over a waterwheel, or like a Chopin nocturne, endless moving chords under the flute's aria-like melody. So we played that through together, which was good fun. Like flying, spinning out the long vibrating Ds over the moving cello continuo.

As I packed up my flute, Kevin played a little bit of the slow movement of a Haydn cello concerto. The two of us walked out of Tyrrell together, and as we left, we met up with Dr. P, one of the piano professors, who also happens to be an elder at Christ Presbyterian Church. The three of us walked together. Dr. P asked Kevin and me what we're doing this summer, and he and Kevin talked about petroleum engineering.

I read Sense and Sensibility up in my room for Novels. Then I went to the caf and ate supper with Holly, Bob, Grant G., and some other freshmen. After supper, I changed clothes and walked over to meet Syneva, Alisha, and Kent. The three of them were to play in a Tulsa Signature Symphony concert tonight, and as always, I'd asked to tag along for the ride. Alisha and Kent both came after I did, so while we waited for them, Syneva and I sat in the car and chatted. The conversation on the drive down to TCC was quite animated.

Syneva dropped me off at the door of the TCC PAC. I always feel incredibly out-of-place at these concerts: The crowd is composed of elderly couples who are obviously all rich and all know each other, or of rather dowdily-dressed women with young children tagging along. Occasionally there will be a parent on a "date" with a teenage child, or some highschoolers on a "real" date.

The concert was quite good. The orchestra played a symphony by a modern composer, Roy Harris, to start the performance. Harris is an Oklahoman, and his symphony, a shorter work in one movement, was actually quite lovely: cool, sweeping, with constant running undertones in the strings like wind over grass, a dark piece, with bursts of brass here and there like bursts of sunshine through blue cloud shadows over windy grass. Then they played a piece by Liszt, which was rather overdone, in typical Romantic fashion. The last piece that the orchestra played was "Variations on a Theme of Paganini" by Rachmaninoff. The soloist was a man named Leon Bates. He was quite an amazing pianist, and the piece showed off his technique stunningly. It's a beautiful piece, too, constantly changing moods--hints of Ragtime, little tinkly places like a music box tune, long sweeping nocturne parts, full of pathos, and a huge dramatic section at the end, which clips off unexpectedly with a little joking chord to conclude the piece. I felt a ripple of laughter at this unexpectedly humorous ending running through the audience as we stood to applaud. The audience called Mr. Bates back for two curtain calls! Everyone, audience and orchestra, sat silent while he played. First he played a piece by an American composer, Louis-Moreau Gottschalk, a piece called "The Banjo". A flavorful piano piece, full of very difficult and complicated rollicking chords. Then after that encore, when the audience clapped him back again, he played "Someone to Watch over You" by Gershwin. This was greeted with murmurs of approval and sentiment from the audience. I actually didn't particularly like the Gershwin piece, though for some of the older members of the audience it obviously had some emotional meaning. It was impressive to watch the pianist's ability, though.

After the concert, I sat outside in the atrium, waiting to be collected by Syneva and Alisha. Eventually, I managed to meet up with them. (Kent was going off with his parents, who'd come to the concert.) Syneva, Alisha, and I drove back to campus together. There was the usual post-concert burst of frivolity. Alisha, in running back and forth between the car and the atrium to see if Kent needed a ride, had been "cornered" by a ferocious elderly couple. She proceeded to give us a ridiculous account of her conversation with them, and to impersonate all at once the old couple, Kent, Mr. Bates, and the conductor of the orchestra. She had Syneva and me in tucks of laughter.

Back on campus, the three of us said good-night to each other. I walked back to Lottie. Rachel was busy getting a load of laundry ready when I came in. She told me a little bit about Bible study.

Now the two of us are sitting, typing away frantically at our computers.

where has everyone gone?

Now Playing: Brahms, Piano concerto in D minor, first movement.

Hmmm.... Seems as though long journalistic posts are out of fashion these days. Oh, well. I always did like long-dead, out-of-fashion things. :o)

Today was long....

While I ate some breakfast today, I worked on a paper for Lyric. Then I practiced my flute in Tyrrell. I'm playing the first two movements of the Bach sonata for my jury in two weeks, and I absolutely love them. They're so beautiful. Though my professor keeps cancelling lessons, so I've mostly been on my own for learning the music this semester, which isn't exactly a good thing.

In Music History today we listened to some more Mendelssohn. And we listened to the fourth movement of Brahms's Requiem, the lovely setting of Psalm 84, which made me blissfully happy. Kayla, the girl who sits next to me in Music History, also really likes the Requiem, though she prefers the third movement. She's a devout Catholic. She's a freshman, but she's married, and she looks like an Elf--tall, slender, with long straight thick blond hair, high cheekbones, and very fair skin. We also listened to a couple of 19th century American hymns, done with shape-notes. After class, I stood in the hall for a little while, listening to Kayla and a couple of other girls talk excitedly about the possibility of forming a small four-person ensemble to sing and perform shape-note hymns next semester. They invited me to join them (which completely surprised me since I've had no vocal training whatsoever, and none of the girls really knew me!), but I pointed out that I'm studying abroad--though the opportunity sounded like a lot of fun. The music is simple and beautiful in a spare way.

As I walked to the caf for lunch after class, I walked through a whirl of white flakes. It was snowing. Snow falling over the bright green trees and the deep green grass, over the creamy dogwoods and the budding azaleas. Rather peculiar.... I ate most of lunch alone, reading a novel for British Novels. But when I got up to leave, I walked by a table where some other RUFfians were sitting, so I sat down and joined them for awhile. Tara, Kathryn, Rachel, and David M. were there, as well as a couple of other people. Kathryn was full of the giggles, and she and David got each other laughing and laughing by telling us stories about stupid practical jokes in the freshman dorm (they're both RAs in the freshman dorm).

After lunch, I spent half-an-hour working on an Honors paper. Then I walked over to ACAC to meet with John (he likes to get together one-on-one with RUFfians to talk, to give advice, to be a good pastor and a good friend). I was settling down rather forlornly on a sofa to wait when Daniel shouted my name--he was sitting at a crowded table with some of his friends. I went over and chatted with him for awhile. He asked about how Philip and Laura's robotics team did, and we compared notes about robotics competitions. Nicole came along after awhile, and Spencer was working at the little coffeeshop, so there was quite a little knot of us standing and talking when John finally came up.

John and I drove over to the coffeeshop on 15th Street, and spent a good while talking about a good many things. He closed in prayer before he dropped me off at Lottie.

I walked briskly up to the room. The sun had broken through the clouds, but the day was only getting colder. I worked on my Honors paper for another half-hour, and then walked to orchestra. In orchestra today, we spent a rather long two hours working on Berlioz, Prokofiev, and Brahms. Kayla is playing the Prokofiev third piano concerto with us, so she came to rehearse today. The piece is more beautiful with the piano, but it still sounds nasty and sarcastic and bitter to me. I love the Brahms, though.

After orchestra, Syneva, Amy, and I walked together as far as Tyrrell. Then Amy went to Lottie. Syneva and I continued across the lawn to the Penthouse. The evening was very chilly, with a nasty northwest wind. Low pearly grey clouds were scudding over the high pale blue sky. I ran up to the Penthouse and passed Alisha on my way--she and Syneva were going to work on Bible study together. In the Penthouse, Tara was working on her laptop, while Jenny was getting dressed. Tara and I chatted and laughed at Jenny, who tried on a couple of scarves, and finally settled for a tan cowboy hat.

Jenny and I went out for supper together. In the car on the way, we listened to Sufjan Stevens and joked around. Jenny looked very tall, swaggering into Panera in her cowboy hat. We ordered sandwiches and sat in a quiet booth. The restaurant was nearly empty, only a few pairs of women sitting in corners and chatting. Jenny and I ate our meal, laughing together, and talking about serious things some, too.

On the drive back to campus, Jenny put in Hilary Duff, which made me laugh at her even more. Watching her zip down the road, with her blond hair all wild underneath the cowboy hat, singing along, was quite funny, but appropriate somehow. Such joi de vivre. After a quick hug, I said good-bye to Jenny and walked across the lawn to Lottie.

Up in the room, Rachel was sending e-mails when I came in. While I packed up, we chatted, which turned into a mini-philosophical conversation. Another good conversation--about what to do when people give you honors for accomplishments, both of us puzzling over how to honor God in such situations.

I said good-bye to Rachel and walked down to the car. As I went through the parking lot, I heard Spencer shouting at me. He and Kevin were just getting out of Kevin's car, so I waved to them. I called my parents to let them know that I was on my way (it was late, after eight o'clock), and then set out on the drive to Stillwater. I listened to Loreena McKennitt on the way and rehearsed the day in my mind. I love Loreena McKennitt's music--it seems very appropriate for a traveler. The hills grew darker and darker around me. Across the west there was spread a great deep grey sweep of cloud, like an unfurled wing or an outstretched hand. The sky behind the cloud hovered ringing blue, and at the upper edge, where blue became black, there hung a star. I watched the sky hang above me, over the dark hills, as I drove toward the cloud, and then came underneath it. The quiet greys and blues of the evening countryside were lit in the southwest lurid pink, where Stillwater's city lights stained the underbellies of the clouds.

When I pulled into the driveway, my father opened the front door, and as I came into the house, Laura flung herself at me. She and my mother and Stephen and Philip and my father all gathered round to greet me. We haven't all been together for a couple of weeks, so it was good to see them all. Philip laughed when he heard how enthusiastic the Tulsa people have been at the news that he's coming to school there. He and Laura and my mother told me some about the robotics competition. Their "team" (their team plus the two teams allied with them) placed third-and-a-half (they tied for third), and their individual robot placed forty-second.

Once I was inside, my father sat us all down for family worship. We read Luke 7:1-10. I was struck by the faith of the centurion, who believed that no problem is too small to escape God's notice, and that Christ has authority over all things, authority even to speak and change the tiny details of our lives. I was struck by Christ's willingness to help the centurion, a Gentile, and by His concern in those small matters as the centurion entrusted them to Him. We sang Psalm 103 and prayed.

Then my mother, Philip, Laura, and Stephen went back to watching the end of Castle in the Sky--my mother decided to watch it, since we'd rented it for a week last Saturday. Stephen said he thought it was funny, and my mother thought it was funny, too. I had to remind them that it is, after all, just a fairytale. I think the beginning is much better than the end. I love the pictures of the old civilizations, the ruins, the little tower with the doves, and the trumpeter's song echoing down through the cliffs where people's houses are perched on niches in the morning sunrise. And I like the Leonardo-da-Vinci feel to it, the agedness of it all.

But since they were at the end, I didn't sit and watch it with them. I took a shower, and was out just before the movie ended. They all came upstairs, the other kids to go to bed, my mother to say good-night. Laura brought Curly out of his cage and held him snuggled against her face. He nibbled her ear and her nose, and she giggled. Philip, Stephen, and I made fun of the guinea pig. :o) After everyone else was in bed, I had some trouble getting Laura to go to bed. She sat in the bathroom and chattered about robotics while I got ready for bed myself. Then I sent her packing to take a shower--only to discover, half-an-hour later, her head poking into my room through the bathroom door, asking me advice as to what to give Philip for his birthday.

What a bunch of funny people!

yesterday

Now Playing: Tchaikovsky "Pathetique" Symphony No. 6.

April 4, 2007.

This morning RCS left briskly again, as she has been doing these past days, while I was still doing my devotions. I ate raisins and peanuts for breakfast, sent some e-mails, and studied for MH II and Honors. I practiced my flute for awhile and then went to MH II. In class, we listened to pieces by Felix Mendelssohn. I like Mendelssohn: he’s not dysfunctional and crazy like the other Romantic composers, nor is he completely foolish like Mozart. His music is full of personality, of humanness—humor, quirkiness, pity, fear, buoyancy—you can hear everyday experience in his music, like being seasick or having to deal with the very poor or watching someone dance or silly mix-ups. It’s such tuneful music, permeated with such joy.

After class, I ate lunch with Tara, Nicole, Hannah, Grant G., David, Asher, and DMac. It was a fun meal. Everyone was talking about the concert tonight. I asked Tara about her work at the 15^th Street Coffeeshop, which she’s really enjoying. I scandalized DMac and Asher by announcing the fact that I don’t like pizza—they both acted completely shocked and surprised in response to this. Asher is of the opinion that I’m heading down a “slippery slope”, and even the other girls seemed to be surprised. Asher immediately showed off his eating prowess by eating a large salad sprinkled with feta cheese, and following that up with a ridiculous “sandwich” consisting of a brownie, a “blondie”, ice cream, peanut butter, and hot fudge, which concoction he ate without the assistance of any silverware. You can imagine how messy that was! He complained that the hot fudge burnt his fingers, and when he finished the concoction, he wiped his fingers so daintily with a napkin that Nicole, Tara, and I couldn’t help laughing at him.

After lunch, I worked on revising my Lyric paper. Then I went to Honors at two o’clock. We had a very interesting and heated discussion about the criteria for rationality. Russ is of the opinion that someone is reasonable as long as they’re behaving consistently with their tenets. In other words, everyone is reasonable, though their behavior might not appear to be that way because they might have false tenets. He thinks that as long as someone is consistent, no matter how false their tenets, they’re still rational. It was a stimulating discussion and went by very quickly. After Honors, I went back to the room briefly and checked the mail on the way.

At about three-thirty, I walked over to orchestra. We had a woodwind sectional today. It was rather imposing to be sitting on the front row with Mr. Wagner glaring down at us from his conducting stool. At one point, he sent Laura and Kendall (the first oboist) out to rehearse a duet together, which meant that I got stuck playing the exposed bits on my own. So he gave me in particular some instructions, which made me a bit nervous at first. I must learn to be more confident in my playing. It’s taken me all semester to be able to squeak out these things…. But I thought the sectional went pretty well.

Afterwards, I went back to my room, changed clothes, and then went running. As I crossed the lawn to the gym, I breathed a sigh of contentment. The afternoon was cool, with a light north breeze in the young leaves. The sky was peerless blue behind the green leaves. The grass was deep green, rippled like water. Four or five boys were playing frisbee on the lawn. I saw Laura pedal past John Mabee on her bicycle—she always looks elegant, sitting upright on her bicycle with her brown hair done up carefully. The sun shone warmly on the library and the other sandstone buildings. The usual collection of Saudis was playing soccer on the intramural field. I ran, listening to FOTR, and then took a shower and went to supper. I ate with Kevin, Jenny H., James, and Eleanor. Well, mostly just James, Eleanor, and Kevin, since Jenny H. left soon after I arrived. Kevin asked me how I’d been, and I mentioned my unexpected piece of good news. “Wow, how much further can you go? You’ve reached the epitome of greatness now!” he said with laughing sarcasm. I laughed back at him. “Who do you want people to liken you to?” he asked. That got us talking about poets—I was actually surprised by how much the three of them knew about poets. Kevin seemed to know all about Byron and Shelley, and we made ruthless fun of them, though Kevin says he likes Byron because of his bravado. We also made fun of Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman. Towards the end of the meal, the conversation became goofier and goofier—Kevin and Eleanor started to practice their face-making abilities on each other. They practiced crossing their eyes, etc., while James and I watched and laughed at them. Afterwards, leaving the caf with Kevin, I passed Tara and Crystal, who are going to a rock concert tonight with Kevin and Katie. We cancelled Hobgoblins because of that concert. *sigh*

Up in the room alone, I settled down to study. The evening outside was cool and sunny, with the north wind still blowing. I put on Felix Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky and read for Novels. I made myself a cup of tea and finished the chocolate kisses that M had sent me for Valentine’s Day. I wrote e-mails to my mother, to Logan, and to Jenny S. I tried calling Alisha a couple of times to see if I could go to the Penthouse to study, but the second time I called (she was out the first time), she said that she wasn’t going to be there much longer.

So I settled back, feeling rather lonely, at my desk. Tchaikovsky was done, so I put on Loreena McKennitt, and was just starting to work on a rather dismal poem when Rachel came in. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were shining: she’d just been working on an economics project with a fellow-student, and the fast interchange of ideas had been exciting to her. She asked me how I was, and I smiled but told her honestly that I was a little bit lonely. So she settled down kindly to chat with me for awhile. She asked about the interview with Dr. G, and I told her some of the similarities we have in our writing process. Both of us laughed about how the process is similar, but the output is very different. I postulated that it was because he sees the empty use of forms in contemporary poetry and shies away from that, wanting the form to fit the content in a very rigorous fashion. So he goes out looking for forms that fit the meaning, and comes up with his own forms in response to the tried-and-true ones. That reminded Rachel of an economics talk she’d heard, where the speaker had complained about the empty use of Christmas traditions. “I agreed with him in a sense. We do need to be good stewards of our resources and not waste them. If the forms are meaningless, then we should get rid of them. But we should also seek to put meaning back into those forms, I think, because it is good and right to show people our appreciation of them,” she said. We talked about the nuance of the Christian position: how it is necessary for Christians to hold two seemingly opposing views at the same time, such as God’s providence and man’s free will, or the idea of environmental stewardship with the idea of man’s dominion over creation. Our conversation circled back to the discussion of rationality in class today. As Rachel pointed out, most people behave irrationally. That is, they do not consider their beliefs/worldviews, or the “tenets” (as Russ called them) behind their actions. Their actions do not flow logically from their tenets. Part of the problem is that most people never think about God and death and such things. They don’t extend their time frame far enough to get all the data they need: they think only about happiness right now, or prosperity in twenty years, and don’t realize that in a hundred years they’ll be dead, and all their works will be useless and meaningless to them. If they were to realize that fact, then happiness in the present would become most important: since you can never know when you’re going to die, you might as well be happy all the time, and not worry about the future. That’s why so many of the great writers killed themselves—they wanted to die gloriously or in a burst of pleasure, and not wait for a shameful or painful death. Like Byron and Hemmingway. But most people don’t think about this, or if they do, they feel guilty. So I think I understand now why the Psalmist is always crying out against the happiness of the wicked: they never consider death or judgment; they never realize that their works are going to perish. They block those thoughts out like unwanted noise and seem to putter along happily until their death. But death isn’t the end….

After a lot more discussion (with which I won't bore you, though I found it very encouraging), Rachel went out to call her parents, then, and I settled down to finish my poem. It was so good to get to have a philosophical discussion with Rachel—we haven’t had one of those in months, it seems, and they’re always refreshing to me. Then both of us went to bed.

I think I need to go back to telling these stories to the little girls....

Goodness gracious, you guys are being far too literal! It's a fairytale, after all! :o)

Maybe the "bad man" in the story went up to Jason's beloved's house and held a gun to her father's head and told her that she had to marry him in three days since obviously no one could have survived the storm that carried Jason out to sea. Now this is an objection I understand, and I should've been more careful about editing it. But these others...!

Breathing underwater is part of the normal magical mechanics of every fairytale.

Everyone has breath in them, and most normal people have the capability of having breath taken away. There are certain breath collectors who go around, known as Mr. Speed or Mr. Bad News or Mr. Beautiful Landscape and the like, who have a tendency to snatch people's breath away.

*laughs*

Now, here's another fairytale up on Through A Glass Darkly for your reading pleasure....