slow day....

Now Playing: "The Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd-Weber. Track 14, "Learn to be Lonely".

This morning I ate breakfast in my room: the Ls' doughy bread and orange spice tea. I wrote in my journal and wrote e-mails, studied archaeology, and studied RBL. Just as I was looking over the midterm exam from RBL, Tara knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with her. We went downstairs to collect Alisha, and as the three of us were walking out the door, we bumped into Jenny, who joined us. After lunch, I spent the afternoon studying: first RBL, for an hour, then archaeology, for an hour. Then I slept for an hour-and-a-half, and then studied MBW for half-an-hour. At five-thirty, I walked downstairs to meetMatt, Sam, Asher, Daniel, Tara, Rachel, and Jenny to drive over to Bartlesville for supper at the house of the Ds, Jenny’s friends and members of the church the Ks go to, I think.

We finally left. I led for awhile because Jenny gave me directions, and Matt didn’t have directions, but once we were on the highway for the forty-five minute drive, Matt zoomed ahead. He tried to get me to race, by pulling alongside close, then zipping ahead, but I just plugged along steadily, despite the hoots and laughter of Jenny and Asher, who tried to goad me into racing. Jenny finally decided that we should go around the car, and everyone should list the characteristics of their ideal spouse. *cough*

We finally found the Ds' house: a little brown house, comfortable and plain. The Ds are an older couple—their children are grown, but they’re still working. Mr. D is tall and rather heavyset, with crew-cut grey hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He’s from Boston and his accent confused me occasionally. Mrs. D is shorter, slender, with blond hair and a pretty face. Everything about her was youthfully elegant. She’s from Mississippi, and spoke with a slight drawl. They welcomed us warmly. They have a huge dog, a Great Dane named Elsa. She’s cream-colored, and her head comes above my waist. When everyone went outside onto the back porch, Elsa galloped around like a horse, being very friendly and very excited. She could easily have bowled Tara or me over, so Mrs. D banished her indoors. The dog obediently stood in the laundry room, kept back only by a plastic baby gate leaning against the laundry room doorway. She could easily have knocked it over or leaped over it, but she just stood there, tail wagging slowly, watching us disappointedly.

Outside, Mr. D set up the grill and cooked the meat, while Asher, Tara, Mrs. D, Rachel, and Jenny played croquet on the lawn. Daniel, Sam, Matt, and I watched. Jenny and Mrs. D teased each other constantly: both were pretty competitive. Jenny only laughed at everyone, and won. I spotted a robin nesting in the little pear tree behind the back porch, and I pointed her out to Tara and Rachel. You could just see the robin’s black-and-white flecked head poking above the edge of the sturdy little nest, which was wedged carefully between two thick branches. I lay in the grass and listened to the hum of conversation. The sky above was aquamarine, vibrating behind the shimmer of smoke from the grill. Above the wooden privacy fence, I could see another row of houses behind the Ds’, and then nothing but an open meadow—harsh golden-brown grass, rippling young green on the trees, leaves catching saffron light like water on their palms as the sun set. When the meat had finished grilling, we gathered on the back porch, and Mr. D prayed, thanking God for “this day, which is a manifestation of You”, and for the food.

Everyone gathered around two tables on the back porch, and we ate our smoky meal with good fellowship. The conversation finally settled on movies, specifically thriller/horror movies. Mrs. D laughed about a time when she had just watched a horror movie with an incredibly spooky main character. Her husband had dressed up as the main character, lurking in the dark hallway, and had nearly frightened her to hysterics. “It was pretty funny,” he laughed as she told the story. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then!” she protested. I curled up in my chair, shivering in the cold south wind that was blowing over the porch. When everyone had finished eating, we cleared away the paper plates and cups, and went indoors. Mr. D brewed coffee and tea, while Mrs. D passed around a platter of soft cookies. Elsa eyed the proceedings from behind her baby gate. We stood or sat around the small dining room and kitchen, attracted like moths to the warm light. Matt and Jenny told funny stories about their crazy cats. Veterinarians told Matt's family that one of their cats needed to be put on antidepressants because she would spend all day staring out the window, terrified that she would be attacked. Jenny laughed about her psycho cat: “Yeah, if you’re standing and looking out the door, the cat will leap at you, dig its back claws into your knee, and bite you, to make you let it out,” Jenny laughed.

At about nine-thirty, Jenny said, “Well, sorry guys, but I need to do some studying when I get back. I think it’s time to go.” Mr. and Mrs. D gave us a hearty, friendly farewell. They invited us all to come back, and were deep in conversation with Matt about playing Risk the next time he visited as we walked out the door.

On the way to Tulsa, Jenny said, “I’m going to have to listen to some more peppy music. Do you mind?” “No,” I said, with a little sigh. We’d been listening to Loreena McKennitt on the way there, but I think I was the only one who enjoyed it. Daniel and Tara, sitting in the back seat, kept up a friendly, brother-sister conversation the whole way back to Tulsa, while Jenny surfed the radio, looking for a good station. She found country, and classical (“Ew!” Tara squealed from the back seat), and a Latino rap group (“Ugh!” I groaned from the front seat), and finally a Christian rock station, which she settled on. She sang along to the songs as the dark miles rolled by. I asked her questions about going home and about summer conference—we talked about cooking (she and her brother like to cook together) and catamarans.

I relaxed when I saw the familiar skyscrapers poking unexpectedly above the black hills, star-staircases against the blank sky. Trying to weave my way through the maze of highways, I took the wrong turn. So we ended up driving the “scenic” route through Tulsa, past factories, bars, and pawn shops. The car bumped and thudded over the rutted road. Again, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw lights—this time, the string of white lights that line the eastern boundary of campus along the sidewalk past the fraternity houses and the basketball gym.

Back in Lottie, Tara, Jenny, and I marched down to see Alisha. “Hi, Alisha! I’m going to go check my mail, then meet me in the study lounge, and we’ll study,” Jenny said brusquely. “She said she’d be really stressed tonight,” Alisha chuckled as she turned off her laptop to move it down to the study lounge. “How many pages do you have?” Tara asked, looking at the draft of Alisha’s twenty-page paper for her liberalism class. “Fourteen point one,” Alisha said, tallying the pages up on a scrap of paper. She and Tara discussed plans for shopping at resale stores. I finally went upstairs to bed, though the rest of them planned to study for another couple of hours (it was ten-thirty).

In my room, I saw the light flicking on the answering machine. To my delight, I found a message from Violin—it was just a pleasure to hear her voice. Then I checked my e-mail. Dr. T had sent me an e-mail concerning my revision of a poem I'd written for our extra credit assignment. He wrote, “You, my dear, need extra credit for a grade like a hole in the head...:-) but I must admit I did read it and I like it.” It made me smile. I must be such a stinker of a student to have! Always bothering my professors to read drafts and extra credits and such. I showered, read Luke, and went to bed.

dead days... really?

Now Playing: "The Book of Secrets" by Loreena McKennitt. Track 5, "The Highwayman".

Well, well, look at this.... I've actually been on here for a year-and-a-day. Yesterday was the year anniversary of this blog. But don't go back and read those posts, because I was still figuring out how it worked.

My thanks to those who suffered through that last post. I admit, it was dreadfully long. This one may be somewhat shorter and thus more manageable.

Today was the first dead day. No classes and not much happening on campus. I woke early and drove out to the Ls’ house to give Karis a lesson. Karis opened the front door with a smile. Everyone was still eating breakfast, except Karis. The house smelled warmly of freshly baked bread. “I just baked them,” Mrs. L said, pointing to racks of honey-brown loaves on the counter, “and I’d like to give you one when you leave.” Karis and I had a good lesson in the little cluttered schoolroom: meter, rhyme, and pun.

At ten o'clock, I met with Dr. A about my Honors paper. I found her in a cheerful mood. We laughed about interruptions: she told me that being a religion professor has its drawbacks because she’s constantly getting calls or e-mails from people who want to know things that they could just as easily find out by looking at the Bible. “I had a news reporter call me over Easter and ask me if the resurrection had really happened!” she laughed. “I told him to go look at the Bible.” We talked about my paper, straightening things out somewhat. She encouraged me in a couple of spots that I had been unsure about. When there was nothing else to say, and neither one of us could stretch the time any longer, I left. “Salve!” she murmured after me as I went down the narrow hall. I returned to my room with a bittersweet feeling.

For the rest of the morning, I worked on my Honors paper. Tara knocked on my door at about twelve-thirty. “Hi, Evelyn! Ready to watch a movie?” she asked. We went down to the Lottie lobby together to watch “Whisper of the Heart”, an Anime film that Matt had lent me and had recommended to both Tara and me. We curled up in the lobby on the floor in front of the big TV. The lobby was dim and empty, the tall windows only showing strips of cold, grey sky outside. Using the overstuffed footstool as a table, I sliced chunks off the warm, doughy loaf that the Ls had given me, spread them with butter and jam, and ate that as we watched. I shared the bread with Tara, too. The movie was sweet, if a little corny in places--about a girl who writes fairytales. The animation was impressive: some of the scenes of the sky were so detailed as to look real.

After the movie, I spent the afternoon trying to study, though I was so sleepy that my attempts weren’t very successful. In the evening, I walked over to Kendall Hall for a staged reading of “Everyman” by one of the other Honors sections, Dr. C’s section. The theatre they used was Theatre II, smaller than the main theatre and used mostly for classes. I stepped through a narrow entry area into the theatre itself, which was basically a big, black box. No windows, but a ceiling that shot up to a dusty roof. Props, cords, and chairs were tossed untidily in the corners. Red sheets covered a bank of mirrors across the room. I glanced about uneasily as I took my seat in one of the few rows of chairs that had been set up. There was no stage, but the center of the floor had been cleared and set with props for the play. Students from the Honors section, the actors, horsed around. As the play began, the seats around me filled up: most of the audience was late, including Rachel, who winked at me as she came in. The class performed “Everyman” in its entirety. Each actor wore a black T-shirt with the name of his or her character printed across the chest. The stage was set up with twelve stations, and at each station was an actor embodying some characteristic: Good Deeds, Wealth, Fellowship, Beauty, Strength, Knowledge, etc. Each actor had a prop to clue the audience as to his or her characteristic. Danielle, playing Five Wits, scribbled busily in a notebook, while the boy who played Wealth had on a big shiny belt buckle and strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads strung around his neck, and Fellowship drank constantly from a plastic tankard. A small girl sitting beside me giggled at the most religious parts and made fun of the actors. The actors themselves were rather irreverent: Whitney, a girl, played God. On a philosophical level, I found the good-works-will-save-you message disappointing (to put it mildly).

After the play ended,I spent the hour until RUF studying. During RUF, the group sung many hymns, with readings from Isaiah interspersed. After the time of worship, Mr. K asked the seniors to come up and give testimonies. Then Mr. K turned off the lights, Jason turned on his laptop, and we watched a slideshow of pictures from the past year set to various songs. (If you want to see a few pictures from the slideshow, go to Jenny S.’s Xanga.) I began to realize just what a blessing this semester has been, in some ways. After the slideshow, Mr. K asked his wife to pray for the seniors, and she did, solidly and faithfully mentioning each one of them. He closed, pronouncing the benediction on our bowed heads.

After RUF, I stood and talked with Syneva about our plans to go to the Philbrook. Alisha stopped by to tell us that she probably won’t be able to go (we were hoping to go together as a threesome) because she has two twenty-page papers due, and she spent most of the afternoon today on the phone trying to straighten out complications with airplane tickets: she and Tara are going to South Africa on a mission trip this summer, and somehow her tickets were messed up. Mandi came by to work out details for the barbecue/game night this Friday. Then she looked at me. “Hey, am I going to see you again?” I shook my head with a smile. “Well, I guess I’d better say good-bye then.” She hugged me. “You’d better hug her twice,” Syneva said snidely, watching us with an impish grin, “You know she’s going on an airplane, and you may never see her again. She might die.” “Oh, dear! Will I be invited to the funeral?” Mandi asked. “Yeah, sure. I’ll be there. Sort of. But I won’t be able to hug you,” I laughed.

After awhile, Syneva and I decided to leave. We walked to Lottie, where I went up to my room to grab Esther’s amaryllis plant, which had been donated by my mother and Brother2 for me to give her. Syneva came along to see my room. We scurried over to the apartment, bracing ourselves against the cold north wind that raced down the street. Syneva opened the door to the apartment, and we stepped into the warmth thankfully. The living room was dim with lamplight. Esther lay on the sofa, wrapped in blankets, her neck still in its brace. Flowers in vases stood everywhere—on the counter, on the TV table, on the dining table. “Smells like a greenhouse in here,” I commented, sniffing the polleny chlorophyll smell. I sat on a chair by the TV, while Syneva sprawled on the floor. The three of us carried on a good conversation, Syneva contributing snide jabs whenever there was an opportunity. Esther was quite pleased to see the amaryllis, though it’s only budding now, and eagerly requested that I ask my mother for directions about keeping it over the winter. Esther’s mother, sitting elegantly in an armchair by the sofa, said that one of Esther’s great-uncles used to keep a greenhouse full of amaryllises.

I told Esther that the neighbors across the balcony from the apartment were moving out. “Good!” she said. “Too bad there isn’t much time left to enjoy it.” “They were the noisiest people here,” Syneva explained, “their parties would spill out onto the balcony.” “And whenever you went over there,” Esther added, “it reeked of beer. I went over there a couple of times to ask them to be quiet, and they would quiet down, at least long enough for me to go to sleep.” I told them the story from our old house: When it was on the market, of course, there was a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. One night, when the house was dark, a group of students from one of the rental houses down the street decided to have a party. The party spilled over into our yard. M woke up in the middle of the night to discover two people smooching outside her bedroom window! Not best pleased with the situation, she marched outside in her nightgown, her hair all frizzled, brandishing a broom. All she had to do was turn on the porch light, and her fearsome appearance frightened off the intruders immediately. Esther laughed and laughed.

Syneva walked with me back to Lottie because she had to pick up her car from the parking lot. When I tried to take a shower, there was no hot water, and as a result, I lay in bed and shivered uncontrollably for an hour before I fell asleep.

It never rains but it pours--literally!

Warning: This post is a whopper. It should hold you guys over for awhile. :)

It's been quite an exciting day. I woke up grumpy this morning, not looking forward to having to spend two more weeks in school. But somehow, things conspired to make the afternoon and evening quite exciting....

We begin the saga with this afternoon at one-thirty, when I was innocently working on my Honors paper in my room. Glancing out the window, I noticed that the sky was starting to get dark and the wind was kicking up. The more time went on, the darker the sky became and the stronger the wind grew. So I decided to walk over to Chapman Hall for Honors class before the storm hit. Bundling my books into my knapsack, I started off. When I opened the door into the outside, the wind hit my face. My skirt kited around my knees. I was thankful, for once, for the warm, heavy load of books on my back, a good ballast against the wind.

I curled up in the entry area in Chapman with my books on a bench, but the storm outside distracted me. The three-story windows soared up, expanse of glass like a clear waterfall, showing the turmoil outside: clouds whirling overhead, foaming like waves, seething like live things. The elm and goldenrain trees outside Chapman kicked into a white froth. Leaves, plastic bags, debris flailing through the air, whipped high over the buildings. Power crackled from cloud to cloud. Occasionally, a petite Asian girl would poke her head out of the writing center and stare, worried, at the sky. People banged into the entry area, the glass doors slamming behind them. Some laughed, some exclaimed, some cursed. Two women came in, giggling and breathless. One of them called her husband “on the farm” to tell him to “cover the greenhouse”. Water streaked glasses and beaded damp skin. At two fifty, I walked upstairs, just ahead of Dr. A. Nicole entered, too. We were just getting settled down, marveling at the strength of the storm, when a sound like a gunnery in full fire splintered the silence. Rain, mixed with hail, battered the windows, hard barrage of ice and water. As though the sky were a big ship-of-the-line attacking a little sloop. Nicole and I pressed our faces to the glass. All over the building we could hear squeals of surprise and dismay. Every one of the huge plateglass windows was under attack: I wondered if they would all shatter, the storm having battered in our portals, leaving the building to sink under ice cold water and wind. Jessica and Lewis blustered in. “Ow, ow, ow!” Jessica was complaining, “See! Look! That’s from the hail!” she gestured to several red welts on her bare legs. “We don’t have storms like this in Kentucky!” she moaned. “I’m just wondering about my car,” Dr. A said, “While I was visiting my mother in Minnesota over the break, they had baseball-size hail that damaged my car. I just had it repaired. One of the other professors took my keys and said he’d put it into shelter, but I hope he was in time!” I wondered uncomfortably about my own car. Rachel entered, soaked to the skin, her hair dark and wet as though she’d just been washing it.

Dr. A finally managed to establish order, and class commenced. She wrapped up our survey of the Middle Ages by discussing other eras’ attitudes toward the Middle Ages. She also described to us the main characteristic of the Middle Ages: “If you run across any piece of art or literature that presumes a center, a focus point, then it’s medieval. If it presumes an orderly cosmos and a certain ‘fitness’ to things, then it’s medieval.” My mind leaped to the Calvinist doctrine of vocation, and C.S. Lewis’s theories about all human beings being made to glorify some specific aspect of God, either by beatitude or by judgment, for both these systems presume a “fitness”, an aptitude, to the world. Russ came in for the last fifteen minutes of class, just as Dr. A reached this climax. He, Nicole, and Rachel carried on the discussion about whether Christ’s physical body had to be physically handsome as a manifestation of His divinity. The rest of us listened. After class, Rachel and I walked outside into a fairly tranquil world. The wind still soughed intermittently through the trees, sprinkling thick drops, like silver seeds, on the sidewalk. But in the west the sky was a-dazzle with pale yellow. Rachel went to put on some dry clothes. I hurried to the parking lot to inspect my car, which was undamaged, then spent the afternoon working on the Honors paper.

As the afternoon progressed, the sky began to darken again. A huge, branched canopy of cloud blossomed overhead, as though a tall, dark tree were unfolding above the campus. Wind returned to stir the trees. I went running. The wind yanked my hair loose, as it had yanked leaves loose. My new shoes squelched through mud and slithered on drifts of fallen leaves, pressed like hands to the damp sidewalk. As I ran past Twin South, I passed Andrew, who greeted me courteously. Back in my room, I showered, then walked over to the cafeteria for supper. Andrew, Katie, and Crystal were sitting at the usual table together: the long table on the west side of the cafeteria. As I strolled up, Andrew said, “I saw Evelyn running today. It made me feel lazy.” “You are lazy,” Katie teased. She and Crystal insulted him for awhile. Jenny joined us, and Rachel. We sat and laughed and talked. Asher came, too. Asher asked if Rachel and I were going to the orchestra concert tonight: it’s at the PAC downtown. Asher called Kevin’s parents, and we managed to work it out, in the end, so that Kevin’s parents would take both Rachel and me. After supper, we parted: I returned to my room, where I tweaked my paper some more and yanked on a blue sweater over my lime green Systematic Theology Class T-shirt.

At seven o’clock, I skipped downstairs to meet Kevin’s parents on the southeast corner of Twin South. Rachel hurried up, while Asher, JAH [Jenny H.], Matt L., and Jason emerged from various locations. JAH was dressed in crisp black-and-white. “I felt like dressing up tonight,” she explained, flouncing her loose white skirt. We stood on the kerb for awhile, waiting. A couple of dudes in a rip-roaring green pickup truck howled by. “They’re going out to chase the storm,” JAH said noncommittally. Staring west, I saw that they indeed had a storm to chase: a line of angry blue clouds strung across the horizon. Already its vanguard had begun to ride over the university, and the main body of the force was swallowing up the skyscrapers downtown. A nervous RA from Twin Towers, in baggy pants and carrying an oversized flashlight, watched jumpily with us. The air was dead still, heavy. Everyone jumped then: the tornado sirens went off. Adrenaline licked through my body, lacing every vein. We scurried inside, while the eerie sirens screamed like aliens in the background. Inside Twin South, the RA strode up and down the halls, thudding on the doors with the butt of his flashlight. People crowded out of their rooms into the narrow hallway. We (Jason, Matt L., Rachel, JAH, and I) went down to the end of the west hallway, where we found James and Eleanor, together as usual. David and Spencer joined us later.

For awhile, people were pretty rowdy. We were on the boys’ hall, and the crowd was made up mostly of boys, who sat down the hall from us, shouting and guffawing, stirring about impatiently. We occupied the sliver of hall across from the room that James and Asher share. James let JAH, Rachel, and me inside. We poked our heads up to the window, and JAH gasped in awe. “Look, you guys!” The blank darkness that had enveloped downtown was surging toward us, though the air at our level was dead still. “That’s bad,” I said, “if it was raining or windy, then we’d be safe. But that’s bad.” The trees were still as becalmed ships. We crowded back into the noisy hallway. JAH called Kevin, urgently telling him to call his parents and tell them to get to shelter. Rachel and I followed JAH into another boy’s room, where someone showed us radar pictures: an angry red blot, like a brushfire, boiling toward us. We tried to settle down in the hall. JAH brought a box of food from James’s room, and she and Rachel munched goldfish and fig newtons. I whispered snide remarks in Rachel’s ear about asking to be saved from the zoo in Twin South. “I’d rather brave the tornado than this mob in here!” Rachel paraphrased with a chuckle. The boys were scattered up and down the hall, like pieces of their own messy belongings that were strewn about their rooms. A boy and his girlfriend were playing computer games on their laptops, side-by-side.

But us RUFers congregated together, around Jason and James and the guitar. I reminisced to Rachel and JAH, remembering all the funny stories I could about tornado alerts at home: how my father had to shake Brother1 awake one night when a tornado really was coming because Brother1 had slept through the sirens; how we dragged all our pets (guinea pig, rabbit, and cats) into my parents' closet to wait out the storm—how the cats had been terrified of the rabbit, and the rabbit terrified of the guinea pig (sharing the cat carrier with him), and the guinea pig had quietly munched his hay in the cat carrier, and how the cats had paced nervously until we penned them in my parents' bathroom. Jason sang dead love songs about cowboys, with a rakish grin (he knew he was being silly). Occasionally, he would interrupt himself to advise Matt L. about what chords to play next. Matt L., who’s very proficient at the guitar, strummed away imperturbably. Then he passed the guitar to James, and opened his Bible—for the rest of our forty-five minute imprisonment, he read studiously, an impassive smile on his face. Meanwhile, Jason, who’s always onstage, flipped out his umbrella in perfect timing to “Just A Spoonful of Sugar” from “Mary Poppins”: JAH, Rachel, and I sang along to the chorus. He sang a song from “Willy Wonka”, and JAH followed his voice. We were interrupted by the strict RD, who told us in no uncertain terms not to open the bedroom doors, to stay in the hall, and to be quiet and still if the power went out. After her announcement, the rowdiness resumed, storm surging back over its own eye. JAH sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, her husky voice twining itself with a lovely, unexpected twang through the tune, while Jason sang bass. Jason, JAH, and Rachel sang rounds. Then Jason and JAH sang something about a lion coming out tonight. JAH’s voice ululated up through trilling African animal calls, while Jason burred away below her. I sat and scribbled prayers in my journal. Spencer grinned rakishly at me from behind a corner.

Finally, at seven forty-five, they announced that we could leave. “The storm will be back in about an hour-and-a-half. There’s another one coming up I-35. So you all can go out and get whatever you need to, but be ready to come back.” Jason, David, JAH, Matt L., JAH, and Asher decided that they were going to go to the concert, though JAH changed into jeans and a T-shirt. “I’m not getting caught in a tornado in this!” she said, waving a hand at her finery. Rachel decisively marched back to the Honors House. I hesitated: I wanted to go to the concert, to listen to the orchestra perform, but my mind lingered on my laptop and my unsaved paper sitting up in my room. So, wishing aloud that I had more courage, I hugged JAH good-bye and ran back to Lottie.

I spent the evening working on my paper, which is almost finished, except for the conclusion. It has a wonderful, rousing bit toward the end: God was gracious to give me some epiphanies today in the realm of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Between writing, I listened to NPR on my computer and watched out the window. Big storms were moving through Oklahoma City and Stillwater, so I sat and prayed, and wondered what was happening in Tulsa. At nine o’clock, I strolled down to the study lounge for the hall meeting. I curled up on the sofa to write in my journal. Tara bounced in, wearing blue plush pajama pants. “Hi, E--!” she cried, “I haven’t seen you all day!” We discussed plans for watching a movie tomorrow, and wagged our heads over the storm, as everyone else was doing. When most of the girls had arrived, Julie, our RA, came in and talked to us about proper tornado procedures and the process for checking out. We listened attentively: a rim of girls around the room, all eyes. Not a silence of mere respect: Julie had brought ice cream, which kept everyone quiet. J I slowly slurped my vanilla-and-chocolate until the meeting was over. Julie begged us to finish the ice cream, so Tara and I both helped ourselves to seconds.

I asked Tara if I could come down to her room to write in my journal. “Sure,” Tarasaid cheerily. I padded after her to the room down the hall, which she and Jenny share. She perched on her bed, and I sprawled on the floor, and we ate our ice cream flavored with companionable conversation. Outside, the storm had returned: lightning danced devilishly across the sky, like blue witch-fire. Then came thunder, low and ominous like beating drums, then louder, until I half expected to see pieces of the sky crumbling off. Rain spattered the windows, then fell harder and harder, until the window was covered by another window of rippling water. Rain blew in sheets across the parking lot outside, driven from the north. I settled down to write in my journal. The room was fairly quiet: hiss of rain on the window, growl of thunder, and the buzz of Jenny’s weather bug. The bug perches on Jenny’s shelf and chirps like a loud cricket whenever the weather is changing: it’s been singing a real solo tonight. Tara asked about how tornados form, and I tried to explain about hot and cold air and fronts and things. At ten o’clock, Tara left to study with Nicole, but she said that I could stay in her room as long as I wanted. Too lazy to move, I accepted her offer. I’m crouched on the floor like just another stack of books, amid flip-flops, knapsacks, socks, papers, and empty styrofoam ice cream bowls. The storm has quieted outside. I’m tired myself.

high time for a "real" post

Now Playing: Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, "The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader'" by C.S. Lewis. Track 3, "On Board the 'Dawn Treader'".

Well, I'm sorry that I haven't posted on here in so long. But this week has gone fairly well. Three papers are done, with one to go, due at the end of finals week. Today I'm playing my flute jury (for which I'd appreciate prayer), and after that, there's finals.

Another piece of good news: Esther came back to Tulsa yesterday. She's in the apartment she's been living in this semester with Syneva and one of their other friends, Rachael.

Yesterday was a fairly normal day, but since it's been awhile, I guess I'll just tell you all about what happened then.

Classes are starting to draw to a close. In MBW today, Dr. F brought in two recordings: one of "Beowulf" read in Old English, and one of the same poem read in modern English by Seamus Heaney, an Irishman who recently made a famous translation of "Beowulf". She played excerpts from both readings for us, the Old English first. I shut my eyes and listened in delight to the hard, bright syllables, the sharp, warlike rhythm. I could catch some of the phrases. Then she played "Beowulf" in modern English. Heaney read mellowly, soothing, turning the battle poem into a lullaby. When the excerpts were over, Dr. F asked us what the differences were between the two. She asked, "Would you all like it if I put on the Anglo-Saxon reading for the rest of the class period?" She expected, and got, an enthusiastic "No!" from everyone--except me, of course, who sat and smouldered quietly at the back of the room. "You could fall asleep to Heaney's reading," someone said happily. I wrinkled my nose. I could've listened to the Anglo-Saxon indefinitely: harsh in its loveliness, like sunshine streaking through clouds, clashing on wet grass. I must say that Dr. F always gets the response she wants from the class. She may claim, and the students may boast, that they're thinking for themselves and being truthful and innovative, but they're all sitting smugly on the same bandwagon together.

In archaeology, Dr. O lectured more about the Maya, the last civilization we've studied this semester. Like Dr. F, Dr. O always draws in the most abrasive political criticism--he usually isn't openly angry about it, but he snidely mocks Christianity and Conservatives. Like Dr. F, who harps endlessly on the fact that Heaney, an Irishman, definitively translated the English "Beowulf". Dr. O is always wagging his head about overpopulation and the like, which seems ironic, considering that the population of the world could comfortably fit into the state of Texas! Either their conclusions are warped, or they make an enormous mountain out of a molehill. Both of them also adopt the confident position, "We used to think.... Now we know....", as though modern man is now omniscient. Darwinism at work: progress is assumed. *cough* "I've seen it all in an egg. In Narnia, we call that going bad."

After class, I practiced my flute. As I swabbed out my flute in my room, A.C. knocked on my door. I was pleased and surprised: she moved out of the dorm last week, and I didn't think I'd see her again. The two of us ate lunch with Tara and Alisha. I spent the afternoon working on my Honors paper, typing up a study guide for archaeology, and sleeping. The Honors paper has been enjoyable to write: poking through dusty old books about Anglo-Saxon poetry, reading scraps on their history and looking at glossy pictures of intricate jewelry and crumbling walls. One book I found is a wonderful anthology of the different genres of Anglo-Saxon literature, with a nice, concise history of the people in the front, and photographs of artifacts and architecture sprinkled throughout.

There were very few people in the cafeteria during supper this evening. Most of the other RUFers, including Rachel, went to spend the weekend at a vacation house on Grand Lake. A family in the church that most of the RUFers go to owns the vacation house, and occasionally invites everyone down there for a weekend. After supper, I walked around campus, studied, then went to a performance of a student string quartet in Tyrrell Hall. Syneva was playing cello. They performed Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" string quartet, the quartet in D minor. They played very well: an intense, delightful performance of a very difficult piece of music. Syneva frowned angrily at the low, growly bits, or raised her eyebrows at the plucking, and grinned at the first violinist as each movement began. I heard someone say afterward, "That cellist is crazy!", which made me smile.

After the concert, there was a reception in the hallway outside the performance hall. Mrs. C, Syneva's mother, brought a small chocolate fountain, and fruit to dip in the melted chocolate. One of the other girls brought cookies, and the second violinist's mother, who's Greek, made baklava. I stood and chatted with Mrs. C and Mandi. Mrs. C watched in consternation as people accidentally dribbled melted chocolate in her new white brocade tablecloth. A plump woman served fluffy pink punch, and everyone crowded in the hall and talked. I ate a piece of the baklava--gooey and crunchy, and so honey-sweet as to be almost bitter.

I ran back to my dorm, for the sheer joy of it, and showered, and tried to go to sleep. Of course, the girl who lives next door to me, as usual, had friends over, and they were (also as usual) watching a noisy movie. So it took a long while before I finally drifted off.

update

Now Playing: "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 6, "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony".

From what I've heard, Esther is doing better. Her injuries were mostly to the head, but the doctors say that she will recover. She's quite conscious, though on heavy pain medications, but she's able to talk and to remember. She's physically well enough to stand up and walk about, but because of the nature of her injuries, she gets dizzy easily. Hopefully, she'll be back in Tulsa by this weekend (she's been at the hospital in Oklahoma City these past days). Thursday evening, one of the other RUF girls is driving down to see Esther, and Rachel and I are planning to go with her.

Thank you all for your prayers.

a prayer request

I just learned that Esther, one of the seniors in RUF, was in a bad car accident last night. The doctors say that she's in "serious but stable" condition. Please pray for her, and for wisdom for the doctors, and for comfort for her family.

briefly....

First, two notes of thanks: One to SwanElf, who made a batch of delicious ginger cookies two weekends ago. They kept me awake through several rounds of studying for the Major British Writers paper, and kept me company last Saturday afternoon as I read through a book (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--don't ask why, and don't read it unless you want to skim a lot and laugh mildly). And one to Marigold, Princess, and Daisy, who made a batch of bloom buns on Saturday. Marigold was thoughtful enough to send three back with me, one of which I ate for breakfast this morning--delicious cinnamon-and-sugar, though sticky, washed down with a cup of orange spice tea.

Second, a link. Go to www.photobucket.com . Type in "Elfellyn" for the username, and "psalm84" for the password, and you'll have a link to some of the pictures from last Friday. Most of you won't know any of the people, but I did write out a few captions, and at least you'll get a sense of what the goings-on looked like.

yesterday afternoon/evening (an edited journal entry)

Note: My apologies to all of you who go into Information Oveload Mode. :) This post is rather long (that being an understatement). But I still value your comments, even if it's only "hi" to let me know that you stopped by.

This afternoon I spent a little time studying before I collected my belongings and hurried outside to meet Jenny H. and Kathryn at four-fifteen. We were going to drive to Jenna’s house and make supper for ourselves, Jenna, Kevin, Crystal, Asher, and Andrew. As I went outside, I realized that the sky was totally dark. Rain had begun to spit down, in cold flakes. When I turned the corner of the building and stepped out onto the street, the wind hit me so that I almost fell over backwards. It swirled around the corner of the building, turning in on itself so that my body was yanked in all directions at once. I forced my way across the street to my car, and hastily took shelter, shivering, in the driver’s seat. Jenny H. joined me, and we both sat, shivering and waiting for Kathryn. Jenny H. outlined to us her plans for the evening’s cooking, and we listened like obedient servants of an elite chef. It began to rain properly as we drove to Jenna’s house. I tried to wipe my windshield, but it was so dirty from the dust storm last night that the windshield blades created a morass through which I could hardly see. At Jenna’s house, Jeremy, her husband, was cooking pancakes, which he shared with Anna while the four of us started to cook. Jenna put a country CD onto the CD player—a drawling woman, her voice rollicking over the clanking piano. Jenna put on the rice to steam, while I ripped up cabbage leaves, and Kathryn sliced carrots. I sat at the little high table in the kitchen, across from Jeremy, with Anna between us. Through forkfuls of pancake, Anna would turn to stare at me. The wet cabbage leaves reeked. Rice sizzled on the stove as Jenna sliced fat from half-a-dozen chicken breasts. Jenny H. needed the blender to puree onions, garlic, carrots, cabbage, and chicken, and this sent Jenna and Jeremy on a hunt to find the parts of the blender, which were scattered through the cabinet. Jenny H. made do with what they could find. She dumped the sliced onions into a bowl, gasping at the stench. The two of us jammed cabbage leaves into the blender and whirled them into slivers. Then the carrots, and, finally, the chicken. Jeremy brought in a big bowl full of rain-wet cilantro from the garden outside.

Jenna brewed tea for us: lemon for Jenny H., apple for Kathryn, raspberry for me. Mine was deep red in an enormous blue ceramic mug. It had an earthy taste to it—a blurry, pulpy edge, like the taste of grass. Jenna left to drive Jeremy to the airport: he’s going on a business trip to Chicago this weekend. Kathryn, Jenny H., and I pressed on. Jenny H. stirred up the sliced ingredients in a large bowl. Then she filled a smaller bowl with two or three beaten eggs. She spread out the spring roll “papers”, thin, flat sheets made mostly of flour and water, and she showed us how to roll a small amount of the filling into each sheet, folding and sealing the roll, like an envelope, with egg whites. We talked about our class schedules for next semester. The house was gently warm—the satisfying crackling of the gas stove, the patter of rain on the small windows.

Then Andrew and Asher arrived. They took Jenna’s guitars and walked around, strumming them. Then they put rock music onto Jenna’s stereo and sat in the dining room, listening to it. Kathryn and I, perched on either side of the small kitchen table, busily rolled spring rolls. We made fifty of them, stacking them on a plate by the stove. Our fingers grew sticky from the egg and the raw chicken. Jenny H., in turn, heated water and oil in the smaller of the two woks. The wok began to pop and click, like beads swinging together. It fizzed as Jenny H. popped half-a-dozen spring rolls into the water. They bobbed and jostled against each other as she turned them, rolling them over with a pair of wooden chopsticks. She stacked the golden-brown spring rolls on another plate. She sliced one in half and let Kathryn and me “taste-test” it. It was still hot, so it scorched my tongue, but it was also very good—heavy, warm, delicious. Jenna came back, with Anna, her one-year-old daughter. The boys laughed with delight over Anna’s antics. She scooted across the floor on her seat, alternately grinning and being coy. Jenna began to fry the rice, pouring half the white rice into the other wok with oil. The deep mounds of sticky rice sizzled softly. I chopped ham, and slid the cubes into the rice. Andrew added soy sauce. Jenny H. and Jenna were both worried because the rice wasn’t turning brown, showing that it had fried properly. Andrew suggested that they put all of it in a separate bowl, then return it, bit by bit, to the wok, with more oil. He put half-a-cup of rice into the walk with a tablespoon of oil, and proceeded to fry it: but this experiment disgusted Jenny H., who teased him endlessly about it. Jenna, Andrew, and Asher each ate a forkful and pronounced it delicious, but Jenny H. would have none of it. “That much oil is gross!” she squealed. We waited for Crystal and Kevin to arrive. They called Andrew to say that they were bringing David, too—but the three of them never showed up. Jenna showed Asher how to make egg drop soup on the stove. When it was done, she dished it into deep bowls, which Kathryn set on the table in the dining room.

We sat down at six forty-five to a delicious meal. Jenna prayed, and we ate: piping hot spring rolls with gooey peanut sauce; sweet, sticky rice; egg drop soup with swirls of egg and rings of green onion floating in the chicken broth. The Asian spices burst in my mouth—peanut, pepper, onion, soy. Everyone complimented the meal, and we ate with contentment and good fellowship. Jenny H., bubbling with energy, finished her food in a hurry and began grating carrots to fix vegetarian spring rolls to take to Katie, who’d wanted to come but couldn’t. I poked my head into the kitchen to see what she was doing, and was rather ashamed by the mess we’d made. As Jenny H. told Katie later, “We used up just about every dish in the house!” The two woks sat like fat cats on the stove, beside the cauldron of egg drop soup and the empty, grimy rice container. One of the woks had burned, and there was a nasty black scorched spot on the bronze surface. In the sink, ceramic mugs, bowls, and plates were stacked, with a wooden spoon and fragments of carrot and cabbage. The colander I’d used for the cabbage straddled the edge of the sink. The little table still held the remains of the spring roll operation: empty packets of wraps and the neglected bowl of egg.

However, the meal had to be cut short: Syneva’s junior cello recital was at seven-thirty. So Andrew, Asher, Jenny H., Kathryn, and I piled into our cars, with apologies for leaving Jenna with all the dirty dishes, and hurried off to the recital. As we left the car in the parking lot, the cold wind cut into our arms. Kathryn, Jenny H., and I scurried down the sidewalk toward Tyrrell. Jenny H. was carrying a bottle of chili sauce and a Tupperware container of spring rolls for Syneva, who’d also wanted to come. Its sides misted in the cold, and the warm scent of the Asian spices seeped into the foyer of Tyrrell as we stepped indoors. The three of us sat in a long row with Jenny, Tara, Rachel, Alisha, etc. Alisha had brought her visitors: her sister and one of her friends from home. I sat and laughed at Jenny, who scribbled in my journal before the concert started. Syneva played quite well. She performed Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, Bach’s third cello suite, and a short, modern piece called “Prayer”. As we clapped after the concert, Alisha brought her a bouquet of flowers. When they hugged, the applause swelled, and Syneva smiled. Onstage, she is so serene as to be impassive.

After the recital was over, everyone just sat for awhile. Jenny had almost fallen asleep. I crept out, feeling exhausted. Syneva and I chatted for awhile, surrounded by other RUF people who also joined the conversation. Then Syneva graciously excused herself and went off to talk to her other guests. Rachel hurried off to retrieve her jacket and her book from the Honors House: she, Jenny, and Tara wanted to come back to Jenna’s house with Jenny H. and me. Kathryn had to stay on campus to study. Jenna had invited us to come over after the recital for ice cream and a movie. Jenny H. was deep in conversation (and a piece of moist carrot cake) with Syneva’s mother, so we left her to come later with Jenny, Tara, and Ange. Rachel and I drove to Jenna’s house ourselves. Rain flecked the windshield. I asked Rachel how her day had gone. “Oh, it was wonderful!” she said enthusiastically. She told me that Calculus class had been wonderful (at which I smiled, knowing how I would feel in Calculus class), and that she’d been working at the Battle of the Bands with Tara, and that it had actually been fun. The Battle of the Bands is a TU event at which various local bands perform for prizes. Students come out to listen, eat food, have fun. At Jenna’s house while we were eating supper, I could hear strains of rock music drifting through the open window, and I guessed that it was the Battle of the Bands. Syneva told me after her recital that they had been setting it up on the library lawn, but that Syneva’s cello teacher had been very worried by this (Tyrrell is on the lawn), so she’d persuaded the dean to get the concert moved to behind ACAC (which is a good distance away, on the other side of the library).

At Jenna’s house, we found Jenna spooning applesauce into Anna’s open mouth and listening to country music. She had washed all the dishes, and the kitchen was spotless. We sat with her at the dining room table, chatting and laughing at Anna’s antics. I pulled hideous faces at Anna, but that made her smile. She clapped her hands at Rachel, who grinned and clapped back. She loved looking at Rachel’s flushed, happy face. Shortly after we arrived, Jenny, Tara, Ange, and Jenny H. came, shaking the rain from their clothes. “We brought a boy with us!” Jenny announced with a big laugh, and David trailed in, smiling sheepishly. When Anna was finished with her meal, Jenny took her out of her high chair and played with her. David played with Anna too, pushing a pillow gently into her face. She pushed it back at him, smiling and blinking happily. Jenny and I served ourselves peanut butter cup ice cream from the refrigerator while Tara brewed tea in a red-bellied pot on the stove. I licked the creamy ice cream, crunching the peanut butter and chocolate, savoring the thick peanut butter on my tongue. Jenny borrowed Jenna’s computer and showed David and Jenny H. pictures of her siblings on their spring break. Jenny’s siblings look like herself—they’re a handsome bunch, as wildly exuberant as she is.

Eventually, Jenna made Jenny pipe down, and we all settled in the living room to watch the movie Jenny had brought: “In Good Company”. Syneva and her mother arrived and joined us. Rachel sequestered herself in a corner by the fire place, reading a book about economics. The movie was sad: about the struggles of people trying to keep their jobs in the corporate world, trying to be honest and moral. It was a parody in some ways. One of the main characters was so focused on climbing the corporate ladder that he got himself divorced, and after his divorce he threw himself into his work. “If I ever get that way, somebody shoot me,” Jenny groaned. The language was awfully profane, and there.

After the movie, we all left. I drove Rachel to the Honors House—on the way, we talked about the emptiness of life without Christ, eating the orange peel without the fruit. I staggered up to my room, rain freckling my face. I locked the door and checked my e-mail. My mother had sent me a message about the doings at home: the basketball banquet, the CY movie night. I read it, and tears welled up in my eyes. “I want to go home,” I sobbed softly. Oh, I was tired. I undressed. My heart fluttered and my stomach contracted at the thought of all the work I had to do. Kathryn had told me that Dr. T has assigned two papers, not just the leaf paper, due on Tuesday in the First Seminar class (Kathryn is in that class with Rachel and me). That makes five papers, plus the archaeology project, which makes six. I was exhausted, driven to the point of despair by the work. “He gives His loved ones sleep,” I remembered. So I went to bed, but the girl next door was hosting a bunch of friends. They were watching a movie, laughing, talking. I woke up once and rolled over grumpily to look at the clock: the red numbers glowed one fifty-four. I could still hear the music pounding through the wall. It sounded as though they were dancing. I yanked the blankets over my head and nestled down, worming my way back to sleep.

a quick update

Now Playing: "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 15, "The Hornburg".

Some of you may be wondering (though probably most of you are not) whatever happened to the poems I submitted to the university magazine last semester. I was wondering, too. Today the editor sent out a list of things accepted, and of the works that won the magazine's competition. Here are the results (as far as they concern this author):

"Purgatorio" won third place. Why? I'll never know. That has got to be one of the weirdest, most overblown poems I've ever written.

"Fire" and "Daddy O's" were also accepted for publication.

It's happened again.

Now Playing: "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" soundtrack by Howard Shore. Track 2, "Concerning Hobbits".

First of all, thanks to my aunt who recieved a scatterbrained prank call Saturday night. The call was intended for someone else (namely, the zoo from home, which was down at my aunt's house visiting). My aunt was gracious about the whole matter, but I felt pretty foolish afterwards.

And now, my disclaimer: It's happened again. Thanks to the fact that three or four professors apparently got together and schemed before the semester started, I have three research papers due by the end of this month (not to mention the other papers/projects that are due for other classes). Yes, you all have heard far too much about them by now. But it is because of these papers that I'm hanging another "Gone Paper-Writing" sign on this blog.

In short: I will certainly post on here again, but probably not for awhile.

poetry and fish

Now Playing: "A German Requiem", by Johannes Brahms. Track 6, "Here on earth have we no continuing place".

Here follows a long, flowery (or fishy) post, a slightly shortened version of yesterday's (March 28) journal entry.

Today was a busy day. I was exhausted still when I woke up. After breakfast, I left to drive to the Ls’ house to teach Karis, my poetry student. I arrived fifteen minutes early at the Ls’ house, despite thick traffic. The morning was clear and cool, pale yellow light slanting through the trees and haloing their fuzzy buds. I drove through the Ls’ neighborhood for awhile, admiring the enormous houses perched on the steep hillside. Thick oak trees shaded immaculate lawns and flowerbeds. When the time came, I drove back to the Ls’ house and knocked on the big front door. Their house is older, shabbier, and more “lived-in” than most of the other houses in the neighborhood, which are all grander and more elegant, lacking the tricycle forgotten in the front yard and the cowboy boots tumbled on the front step. Indoors, Karis escorted me to a little side room hung with Precious Moments paintings of Bible stories. We had our lesson at the big table in there. We covered simile, metaphor, and rhyme, especially how to use a rhyming dictionary.

Back on campus, I spent a little while working in my room, then walked to RBL. In RBL today, we discussed “Manfred” and “The Vision of Judgment”, both by Byron. After RBL, Tara and I strolled together to Alisha’s room to pick her up and go to lunch. (FS was canceled today.) The three of us ate lunch with Sam, Asher, Rachel, Kevin, and Katie, who all descended around us, having swooped up from a booth like a flock of starlings. They talked about not-a-date, and Asher described silly puns he’d made up in Goethe class that morning.

After lunch, I practiced my flute. Then I hurried back to my room, put things away, grabbed car keys and various other accessories, and strode out to my car again to drive down to Jenks and meet my mother, Daisy, and Brother2 at the aquarium. It was just after two fifteen, and I chafed at the slow traffic. All the streets were congested with cars. I listened to the “Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” soundtrack as I drove: down Harvard to eighty-first street, where I would normally turn left to go to the Lowerys’ house. Here, though, as Mrs. L had suggested this morning, I turned right and drove over to Delaware, then turned left again and took Delaware until it merged into ninety-sixth street. I stared about me in awe: Fancy new shopping malls, a cluster of skyscrapers, and various sleek apartment complexes flashed past my window. I sensed the river as I approached it: the trees and buildings fell away, and pale sky shone without the city clutter. Ninety-sixth swept me up, over a broad bridge above the Arkansas River, then down and into a maze of little streets that run behind and underneath the bridge to the Oklahoma Aquarium. The lanes took me right down to the river, which was more like a trickle of limpid silver water between vast red sandbanks.

My heart leaped with relief when I saw the aquarium: A long, low white building with many pointed roofs and towers. Its clapboard siding shone like the inside of a clamshell. To the towers plastic pennants, faded from long sunlight, were attached to look as though blowing in the wind—red, blue, yellow, like scarves tied to sticks on the pinnacles of a sandcastle. Indoors, the large entry area was dim after the bright, white sunshine. I strolled uncertainly up to the attendant’s desk and purchased a ticket. “How old are you?” the attendant asked. I paused, almost said eighteen, but remembered, and said, “Nineteen.” He handed me my ticket, then said, “Are you sure you’re nineteen? You sounded a little uncertain there.” “Yes,” I said, trying my best to smile. I waited around in the entry area. After awhile, when my mother, Daisy, and Brother 2 didn’t appear, I decided to venture into the exhibits to see if I could find them. I stepped into a long hall, from which nooks and tunnels opened, lined with tanks. I found them in front of one of the biodiversity tanks.

We left the biodiversity area and looked at the invertebrates. In the center of the invertebrate room was a glass dome under which lay a pickled octopus, its tentacles writhing at the underside of the dome. Daisy thought it looked like a brain. In a tank behind the glass dome was a real octopus, which had wedged itself into one of the crannies in the rocks. We could see its suckers undulating, and the curtain-like web of its skin vibrating as it whooshed water out of its siphon gently. The jellyfish across the room fascinated Brother2. We watched white spotted jellyfish, with canopies like mushrooms, flash across a well-lit tank, and Brother2 stood mesmerized by the moon jellyfish in another tank. The moon jellyfish hung limpidly in the dark water, their translucent canopies slowly billowing, the four-clover pattern on their canopies pale as the pock marks in the moon. In a large tank beside the jellyfish swam half-a-dozen lionfish. Spines radiated like sharp manes from just behind their gills. White stripes slashed their coppery bodies, like the patterns of light and shade thrown by a kelp plant. Daisy commented, “These used to be my favorite fish, until I learned that they’re poisonous.” Beside the lionfish were a couple of small sharks. Suspended in their tank, in a special glass box, were a couple of sharks’ eggs: mermaid’s purses, their dark-green surfaces ridged like oleander leaves. Across from the octopus, half-a-dozen small white fish hovered in a tank. They had made holes for themselves in the gravel of their tank, and whenever Daisy flashed her hand in front of the glass, they would lever themselves downward into their holes with their fins. Only their heads poked out, eyes scanning their territory like prairie dogs until all was clear and they could pop up again. In the invertebrate room there were also three kinds of seahorses: Yellow ones, bobbing cheerfully to and fro in the water; a pair of large black ones which obliged Brother2 by turning green, chameleon-style, while he watched; and a drove of tiny white ones, which gobbled microorganisms from a gooey pink cloud in the water.

After the seahorses, we crossed the hall and entered the Oklahoma fish room. At the front of this room was a large open tank full of turtles. While we watched, two people were catching the turtles and handing them to two other workers to be inoculated. The turtles splashed frantically through the water and paddled their forearms rudely when they were caught. We looked at fish: alligator guar, bass, sunfish. In a tank by themselves resided two enormous alligator snapping turtles. One was slightly smaller than the other, and it heaved itself up on a log to breathe. The other sat under the log like a boulder, algae waving on its monumental shell. It must have been at least three feet long from snout to tail. While we watched, it turned its huge, hideous head and grinned at us hungrily.

From the Oklahoma room, we moved on to the tropics. In an open tank, a tidal pool had been simulated. Anemones like purple and orange jester’s caps waved tentacles in the swirling water. A starfish in a raised pool allowed us to stroke it gently. Pale purple algae growing on its rough skin made it feel slimy. The reek of salt and fish rose from the bubbling water. Nearby, a crowd had gathered at one of the aquarium’s largest tanks: the tropical reef. Two workers in diver’s suits had splashed into the tank and were scrubbing the rocks. One of the workers, an older man, swam up to the glass and made hand signs, grinning at the children who watched him in awe. He would cock his head at the children inquiringly and hold up a few fingers as a guess at their age. Smiling shyly, prompted by their mothers, the children would press their own fingers to the glass in reply. When he saw Daisy, the man waved twenty-five with his hands, and Daisy giggled. She and I turned away from the large tank, and she led me past the rays, down into the darkness of the shark display.

Behind a two-inch-thick plate glass ceiling, four sharks flickered restlessly through a spacious tank. Hardly any light shone through the dark water—only rayed fragments came down and flashed on the sharks’ bodies like white fingers. One shark hung, motionless, in a dark corner. The others swooped over us, mouths open so that we could see their daggered teeth, tails lashing the water, fins dragging above the surface and creating black ripples. My mother, Daisy, Brother2, and I stood for awhile under the glass ceiling, watching the powerful beasts as they soared overhead.

From the shark tank, we emerged into the brightly-lit tropical room. Daisy pointed out a tank of small coral fish: orange, velvety pink, blue, yellow, brown—as though they had been painted on Faberge, with turquoise water instead of gold lining between the panes of color. In the center of the tropical area were two open tanks of rays. In one tank, the rays flashed about impetuously. One of them swam along the side, its flapping body splashing our faces with water. Another ray slapped its fins on the water and wagged its tail in Daisy’s face, then paddled down to my mother and stuck its brown snout in the air as though it wanted to kiss her. The rays’ glossy bodies flew through the water, shimmering like starlings’ wings. Broeth2 said they looked like bats. In another tank, half-a-dozen sand-colored rays swam leisurely along the floor. Pale blue spots on their backs made them blend with light and shadow. We stroked their skin. Under the grainy sand, their skin was surprisingly soft and slimy. Their wings pulsed with life under my fingertips.

After touching the rays, we went back to the coral reef tanks. In a couple of small tanks, a variety of little fish swam. My mother exclaimed in wonder at a small green fish, marbled with dark orange and bronze, flecked with gold. The little fish fluttered its flared wings at the glass and poised itself politely while I took its picture. The four of us turned to the big reef tank, in which the two men were still working, scrubbing away at the slimed rocks. Fish flashed past the glass: shoals of gleaming fish with silver sides like new nickels; a large pink parrotfish with pale green stripes; an assortment of smaller reef fish, like fragments of colored glass in a mosaic. Brother2 gasped when a huge puffer fish, at least eighteen inches long and very fat, emerged from one of the rocks. It wasn’t so kind as to blow itself up, but it paddled about slowly, then returned to its hiding place.

After watching the creatures on the reef for awhile, we browsed through some of the side rooms. In one room, Brother2 came across a tank full of mudskippers. He and Daisy giggled, watching the queer little creatures which hopped in and out of the water. The mudskippers flailed thin, brown gills and wagged their shining, slimy bodies to and fro. “These are some of my favorite fish!” Brother2 laughed. As we left, we passed the turtle pond. I grinned when I saw half the turtles perched on the logs, sunning themselves under a lamp. The rest of the turtles bulldozed through the water, banging their shells against the sides of the tank. We left the tanks and reentered the entry area. The same soothing, cheerful flute music, sounding hollow and watery, was playing over the sound system as had been when I came in. The ever-changing flute melody threw streaked gleams of light and shadowed water behind my eyes. Outside in the parking lot, I hugged my mother, Daisy, and Brother2 good-bye. I tried desperately to be cheerful.

As I pushed through congested five o’clock traffic, I listened to “Can’t Take It In” and sang along with “Wunderkind”, the wind from the open window ruffling my hair. Back at Tulsa, I went to my room and studied for a little while before going to supper. After supper, I worked frantically on my archaeology paper. Having not done any serious work all day, I felt quite behind.

Just before seven-thirty, I walked to RUF. The night was strangely still, hardly a breath of air stirring the trees. Fuzzy elm seeds blossomed like a galaxy of tiny green stars in the streetlights. Sweetgum tapers glimmered. Upstairs, Andrew, Tara, and Daniel welcomed me. When Tara asked about the trip to the aquarium (I’d invited her along, but she’d had class), Andrew pricked up his ears. He said that he loved to visit the aquarium (though he doesn’t like zoos—the animals look so bored; it’s hard to empathize with fish), and he asked about a certain display they used to have: A glass tank in which a jet of water constantly spewed upward. Tiny jellyfish, floating in the tank, would hop onto the stream of water, ride it up, then drift down, only to allow themselves to be swept into the current again. “They looked as though they were having more fun than anyone,” he said.

During RUF, Mr. K preached about Isaiah 40, and giving comfort to God's people. After RUF, back in my room, I worked on archaeology for an hour-and-a-half. Bleary-eyed, I managed to finish the paper, just after ten-thirty.

Another Dull Day in the Life of a Hobbit

Now Playing: The "Chariots of Fire" soundtrack by Vangelis. Track 7, "Chariots of Fire, Film Score".

I'm sorry it's been such a while since I've posted on here. Perhaps I can explain some of that as I describe today.

This morning Rachel and I ate breakfast together, as we do on most mornings of the week. After breakfast I spent the morning sending e-mails to various people and tidying up other matters left over from the weekend.

In Major British Writers class this morning, we began to put together a study guide over the Modernists for our final exam, which is in four weeks. We also have a research paper due at the end of April. The professor will let us extend the paper we wrote earlier in the semester, which makes the process a lot easier, but I still need to do some work on that. For these past couple of weeks, we've been studying the Modernists: T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and all those strange people. It's been sad to watch English literature decay from the Anglo-Saxons in MBW I to James Joyce in MBW II. As we put together the study guide, certain distinct characteristics emerged, all of which are tied (in my mind) to the rejection of God: meaninglessness, reckless experimentation, alienation from community, depression, rejection of authority and tradition, triviality, and mockery of ideals and established morals. The Modernists, for the most part, realized what the consequences were of their rejection of God, but they preferred to live with the hideous consequences than to embrace the only One who could save them. That's what makes them so sad.

In archaeology class today the professor lectured about domestication. We're actually studying real cultures now, instead of the methods of archaeology, the way we did for the first half of the semester. The professor has assigned us to complete a virtual set of archaeological excavations which are on a CD/textbook set so that we can see how the archaeological methods work out in "real life". The lectures have been fairly interesting, and will become more so, hopefully: We're supposed to cover Sumerian, Egyptian, and Mayan culture before our final exam at the end of the semester. The articles that the professor has assigned have been really fun to read, for the most part, for this half of the course. Last week, we were assigned an article about a man who's doing an excavation of a gigantic tomb in Egypt. This tomb is the largest ever discovered in the Valley of Kings, with hundreds of rooms--pillared halls, stairs, false floors, secret passageways, statues and paintings. The thought of that enormous, dusty darkness, with the relics of a lost civilization buried inside, gave me the shivers.

After archaeology, I practiced my flute. For juries at the end of the semester, I've decided to play the first movement of the Poulenc sonata. That sonata is such fun to play that I wish I could perform all of it. If there was a recital that I could play in (even at home :), perhaps Syneva would be willing to accompany me, but I don't have enough repertoire from this semester to set up a recital of my own.

During lunch I sat with some acquaintances and listened to them talk. One of them, Nicole, is in my Honors class this semester. She sends her Honors paper to her father via e-mail so that he can edit them for spelling and grammar mistakes.

After lunch, I had all afternoon to waste, proverbially speaking. Of course, I couldn't waste it. Honors class was cancelled so that we could work on our midterm papers, due this afternoon at five o'clock. So I spent the first hour touching up my paper, easing out a few tangled clauses, etc. Then I read a book called Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, by Umberto Eco, for Honors class on Wednesday. It's quite a fascinating book. Since it doesn't have any pictures (strange for a book about art), it's more about the philosophy of medieval art than about actual examples of it. Eco's tenet is that since medieval people lived lives that integrated religion and the "real world" much more than modern people's lives, their art blossomed from a sense of the wholeness, fitness, and beauty of the world as God's handiwork. He pointed out, interestingly enough, that only ascetics trying to conquer their desire for worldly pleasures could truly appreciate how wonderful physical beauty is. I think there's a measure of truth in that: Often the people who try to overcome something are the ones who have a realistic grasp of its power.

After finishing Wednesday's reading for Honors, I proceeded to work through The Guide, by R.K. Narayan, which Dr. F assigned for MBW. The Guide is a sadly absurd modern novel about an Indian man. He starts out life as a shopkeeper, becomes a travel guide, falls in love with the wife of one of his tourists, lives with her and turns her into a famous dancer, then gets jailed for embezzling. When he leaves jail, he wanders to a temple, and a stupid villager, seeing him perched on the temple steps, thinks he's a holy man. By virtue of this rather ridiculous plot, the book makes fun of every institution imaginable--marriage and religion especially. Of course, it doesn't make fun of art: The dancer lives happily ever after (in a manner of speaking) because her art is so wonderful and she's so wrapped up in it that everyone praises her. But since art is the savior of mankind (according to just about everyone), that isn't surprising. *cough*

Finally I roused myself from my afternoon of hibernation and marched over to the Arts and Sciences building to drop off my Honors paper (now I get to start on the Anglo-Saxon research paper--it will be great fun except that the topic is so obscure, and the library doesn't appear to have very much material on the subject of the role of Anglo-Saxon poets). James and Eleanor, two young people who go to RUF, were playing lacrosse on the green lawn below the library, giggling and laughing at each other's mistakes. Across the sidewalk from them, two or three guys were tossing frisbees around, and a girl was curled up, reading, under a sycamore tree.

I ran in the gym, showered, and sat outside to finish The Guide before supper. The wind, wavering all day, had switched around to the north and seethed over the short, very green grass. Early dandelions bobbed like guttering candles in the wind, and sycamore seed balls danced overhead. Thin clouds streaked the sunset deep red and silver.

Rachel ate supper with me. We discussed our Honors papers, and plans for studying abroad. She wants to attend a highly reputed economics school in England during the summer after her sophomore year. I told her about the woes my father and I are suffering while trying to figure out Cambridge's schedule.

After supper, I've spent the whole evening cloistered in my room, working on the archaeology project. It's actually more than halfway done. The part that I had anticipated being so difficult, the actual excavations on the computer program, were very easy. It turned out that all I had to do was to hit a few buttons, and the schemes of each site appeared neatly laid out, complete with artifacts sorted into categories and little circles or squares for houses or hearths or graves. The data all lines up clearly so that the patterns for the prehistoric people I'm supposed to be studying are fairly plain. Now all that's left is writing the paper to describe what the "excavations" uncovered.

That's enough for today. I almost fell asleep this afternoon, and again this evening in the middle of my archaeology project. There must be something soporific about stories of foolish Indians and excavations of bones and stones.

So I'm going to bed. Good-night, and God bless.

a picture

Now Playing: Liszt's 30th Transcendental Etude--in my head. Syneva just finished her junior piano recital, and she played this piece. It was my favorite. Rocking, bold, noble chords.


Isn't she pretty?

















Here's something I wrote. This scrap of verse was written for the First Seminar class. One of the only things (well, there are more things that I like than just this) I like about the class is the fact that the professor accepts poetry for paper assignments. This particular bit was written when we were assigned to describe a "creative encounter" (whatever that means). It made me think of the constant barrier between the original inspiration and the actual product. No matter how hard you try, you often can't get words to capture exactly the ideas you want them to.


Chasing the Light
a creative encounter

Thudding on the screen through the May night,
One moth and half-a-dozen junebugs buzz,
Drawn to my desk light. I’m trying to write:
About Danielle, how we went swimming, shrugged
Cool water down tanned arms; how we chased links
Of tawny sunset, flared, aquamarine—
Borealis on concrete. Fan whirs. I blink.
Junebugs still rattle on the thrumming screen.
Remember: how the chlorine tasted, how
The water hit my forehead when we dove,
Hunting reflections of sun’s lyre. Light bowed
Across, ahead, but not beneath. A drove
Of junebugs still gropes for my nightlight’s glow,
While I bang meter, try to grasp light’s throe.

a poem

Now Playing: "Fifteen Variants on Dives and Lazarus", by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. (Also known as Psalm 22C.)

Here's a poem that you all may be able to help me with. It seems to be missing something to me, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.

Note: The dashes on the last two lines are put in to make those two lines stand out instead of being "justified" with the rest of the poem since I can't get this ridiculous publishing format to accept the "tab" command.

Crucifixion

I cannot see his face. His head is flung
Against the sun, and shimmers in the heat—
Bronze heaven glaring down on molten earth
And metal men, their shining faces slashed.
His hands clench as his legs tense helplessly—
Push up, a gasp of bloody air, then hang,
His chest bowed outward from the splintering wood,
So sun shines resolutely on whipped back,
On writhing fingers, thorn-crowned head. “My God,
My God, why have you cast me off?” his voice
Breaks thirstily. Blood seeps from cracking veins,
A thousand needles pricking out my sins—
His flesh inscribed with quivering miniscule.
I’m kneeling suddenly. A Roman foot
Kicks Mary, his mother, toward me, and
Her tears stain my shoulder. Golgotha’s rocks
Bruise my heels as I cradle Mary’s weight.
Crowds jostle past. A Jew with hanging locks
Laughs, “Look! He saved others, but cannot save
Himself!” His two sons snicker. Their fringed robes
Are hitched above defiled dust. Dust coats
My toes, my hands as they strut past their king,
Their king upon the cross. He coughs, he breathes,
“Father forgive,” through gall-and-wine blanched lips.
“Oh Magdalene—my son, my son,” sobs Mary.
John rests his hands on her shoulders. “The ground
Is shaking!” gasps Salome. Rocks slither past.
A blinding instant—I see crosses tip
And quiver, then the sun is dark. Half-heard,
I hear him sigh, “It is finished.”
------------------------------The earth shakes,
And soldiers curse.
------------------------------Hours later, evening sun
Casts wavering crosses on the bloody rocks,
Three shadows swimming through bronze air. He hangs
Limply, head lolling to stained chest, hands stiff—
I seem to hear again, “My God! My God….”

Days of Grace, Part 3

March 10, 2006

This morning Rachel and I ate breakfast together. After breakfast, I worked on my Honors paper. During MBW today, we discussed Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon, both WWI-era poets. Their poetry is so dismal, hopeless. It is painful to watch English society decay: from the measured praise of Christ in “The Dream of the Rood” by the Anglo-Saxon poet to the ironic nursery-rhyme of Thomas Hardy about final death, decay, and forgetting, without triumph or eternal life. During Archaeology, we had a quiz, and discussed prehistoric hunter-gatherers. I practiced in Tyrrell for an hour, and as I left, I fell in with Rachel. We went to the cafeteria together to pick up our lunches. Rachel told me about her economics professor. The women serving in the line seemed as gay as the students. “Have a good spring break!” one of them called to me. Outside, we waited with Jenny and Tara for Alisha to come out with her food. Jenny sat on the stone wall and ate her lunch while Tara snacked. When Alisha came, we walked together to the apartment. Jenny was ridiculously hyper. “I’m a sugar child instead of a flower child!” she joked, swigging a Dr. Pepper. We made a jovial five, marching along in the bright sunshine, matching our swinging steps to the time of our laughter. Gleeful as mockingbirds, talking loudly, laughing loudly, drunk on sunlight and warm air. The wind ruffled our hair, tugging it teasingly over our eyes. Jenny complained about a professor who had assigned her to write an instruction manual for making a banana split (“I mean, how lame is that?!”), and Alisha told me about her midterm in Music History.

Esther and Rachel were both at lunch, and Matt, Andrew, and Grant came later. Matt and Andrew both seemed as vaguely sober as ever. Matt gave Tara a copy of his poem to edit. “Whenever you feel like writing something good about the poem, write something good about yourself, then write something nasty about the poem,” he told her. Jenny lounged in an armchair, put her feet up on a trunk, and laughed and laughed the whole time. Esther curled up in the other armchair and teased Tara, while Alisha and Rachel sat on either end of the sofa. The three of us talked about Rachel’s economics professor who said today in class that there’s a group of men suing for the requirement of child support to be lifted, on the basis that if a woman can choose not to support a child (i.e., to abort), then a man should be able to make the same choice. “It’s logical, but people don’t like it. They don’t realize that their presupposition is wrong,” Rachel commented. After Rachel left, the conversation became more ridiculous. They started talking about fish. “Some fish will resurrect after you freeze them,” Grant informed us. “Let’s try it on Alisha,” Jenny giggled. “What?! No!” Alisha exclaimed. There ensued a grotesque conversation involving decapitation and death by freezing. Jenny said that she would want to die skydiving, while Matt wondered if he would have wings in heaven.

I walked back to Lottie alone. I spent the afternoon working on my Honors paper and reading archaeology, listening to the "Two Towers" soundtrack, the Brahms violin concerto, and the "Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack. I cleaned my room, and went downstairs at four forty-five to meet my father. He helped me carry my things to the car (a red suitcase, my knapsack, a trash bag full of dirty clothes, and my potted rosebush), and we left Tulsa. I slid in the Tchaikovsky piano and violin concertos on the CD player. The sky was grey behind the steel skyscrapers as we left Tulsa. Billows of smoke hazed over the clouds—black paint swirled on grey pottery. The sun set through a blank white crack. I fiddled with the CD player. My father and I talked about the Signature Symphony. He asked questions about the ins and outs of the Signature Symphony and the TU orchestra, and he asked about Alisha and Syneva. I told him about them, and about Andrew and Matt, and all the goings-on. The land around us was beginning to be green: the elm trees had begun to put out fuzzy catkins, and some of the willows and cottonwoods were blushing at the tips. In the patches where fire had burned, green grass licked like a new fire over the black ground, lushly vibrant. But most of the hillsides and pastures were still brown, though glowing reluctant gold in the sunset—tawny as an old lion’s mane. And most of the oak trees stood stark and black against the sunset, fine lines—like strokes of a pen across patterned paper.

At home, Henry and my brothers were busy filming another movie in the backyard. I shook my head in disappointment at the withered blooms and skimpy stems of the daffodils along the front bed, but marveled at the riot of yellow and white daffodils blooming under the redbud tree in the backyard. My mother was in the midst of supper, listening to the CD of dancing music for the Irish Dance class. I relished the mysteriously happy tune of the gypsy jig, the oboe and flute twining themselves luringly through synthesizer and drums.

My father picked up Daisy from basketball practice. Daisy and I tickled each other and teased unmercifully, tussling like silly little puppies. Upstairs, after supper, Brother1 brought Sandy into his room. He ruffled up the fur behind her ears so that she looked as though she had an Indian headdress of orange feathers, or as though she was sporting an Elizabethan collar. We made fun of Sandy’s faces. She was alternately very pleased with herself, beaming at whoever scratched her between the ears; or she was sleepy, grinning drowsily; or she peered frightenedly at us as we jostled around; or she glanced from side to side, searching for a way of escape. She finally did escape.

My father read Hornblower and the "Hotspur" to us and did devotions. Now Brother1 is showering, while Daisy and Brother2 have gone to bed. My father works on papers in the study, and my mother grades paper in the living room, popping bubblegum as she does so. I sit and type at the old oak table to one side of the living room—this table that came out to Kansas in a covered wagon, a hundred years ago, and now gives a glossy place for my laptop to perch.

Days of Grace, Part 2

Now Playing: "The Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd-Weber. Track 2, "Think of Me".

March 9, 2006

This morning I joined Rachel and one of her friends from the Honors House, Heather, for breakfast. They had been talking animatedly, but the conversation petered out when I joined them. After breakfast, I spend the morning working fiercely on my Honors paper. The morning was damp and dreary, with a slight smattering of rain. I practiced my flute. My flute lesson didn’t go so well—I hadn’t practiced the third movement of the Poulenc as much as was needed, and I made a variety of rhythmic mistakes. In Romantic British Literature today, we talked about Byron more—themes of darkness, the mind shrinking on itself, and the transience of nature (“The Prisoner of Chillon” and “Darkness”). Dr. de A let us collect our exams. I was surprised and happy to see that I’d earned an A on my exam! I sailed outside in a state of euphoria, with Tara hopping beside me. She, Alisha, and I went to lunch together, though Tara picked up her food to go and went shopping with Esther. Alisha and I sat at lunch and talked about the backhoe digging a hole outside the cafeteria window (Alisha made fun of it), about papers and professors and movies. She asked about Honors. She likes The Song of Roland, and we discussed characteristics of epics. She demanded that I explain why I like Beowulf, so I tried, but she just laughed at me.

After lunch, I walked back to Alisha’s room to pick up my things. “You can come down and study here, if you want,” Alisha offered. “Oh… ok. Thanks! I will,” I said, impulsively. “Great. I’ll be here. You should come down more often. Whenever you walk off, it’s so sad. I always think, ‘That’s got to be so lonely,’” she told me. I went upstairs with a light heart, amazed a little at Alisha’s friendliness. In my room, I packed up my laptop and brought it down to Alisha’s room. I sat cross-legged on the floor and worked on my Honors paper amid a smatter of my own books and Alisha’s books—The Song of Roland and The Rule of St. Benedict heaped with books about Palestinian women and issues of “USA Today”. (Alisha is a Political Science (commonly known as “poli sci”) major.) She was studying for her Music History exam tomorrow, listening to clips of Handel and Haydn and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. We compared notes about violinists, kicking around Hilary Hahn, Josh Bell, Izhak Perhlman, Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh, and Beethoven and Barber and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Meyer. Alisha doesn’t like Mozart’s music because it’s so repetitive and even-tempered. Alisha complained about her Music History professor, who breaks up pieces into short clips. “I’m sure he’s taken ten years off my life by breaking up pieces like this,” she complained. “It’s one of my pet peeves when someone just switches off a classical piece in the middle.” Esther popped in to study for awhile. She curled up on Alisha’s bed. She guessed at what was happening in the opera clips. At one point, in “Don Giovanni”, Alisha pointed out that one of the characters was dying. “Wow, he can still sing—with vibrato, no less!” I giggled. “Yeah. That’s just the way I’d want to die,” Esther chuckled.

Alisha and Esther had a prayer meeting at three fifteen, so I trailed back upstairs to my room and spent the rest of the afternoon working hard. After supper, in my room, I changed briskly into black slacks, then dashed outside. Just as I pulled up at the kerb, Rachel came jogging down the sidewalk, her cheeks flushed in the chilly air. We stood and talked for a long while, kidding each other about procrastinating by looking at our friends’ blogs, and about going home. Mourning doves cooed and squabbled, clattering their wings in the dark pine tree behind us. Alisha and Syneva were late to pick us up for the concert. Alisha and I scrambled into the back seat of Syneva’s car as she pulled up, with Alisha’s violin between us, and Rachel climbed in the front. On the drive to the concert, we all laughed… and laughed… and laughed…. “Sorry I’m late,” Syneva said. “That’s ok. But the others will probably get there before us—the whole entourage that I invited along,” returned Alisha. “Oh, yes, Alisha has an entourage of courtiers. Now all she needs is a knight in shining armor,” I quipped.

Syneva dropped Rachel and me off by the door of the concert hall. Inside, we picked up tickets from the will-call line. I gave Rachel her ticket, but I kept the other three in case Katie, Asher, Tara, Kevin, or David would need one when they came. When Tara and Asher arrived, we huddled in a corner to try to decide what to do about tickets. A plump woman in a blue satin blouse came over and, seeing our debate (and our threadbare state—bona fide students!) gave us a ticket. “Here,” she said, “My date didn’t show up. Neither did my babysitter,” she growled, “but you can have this.” We took it, though it turned out that we had one extra ticket in the end. Katie and Asher sat up on the next-to-the-last row with Rachel and me. We watched the orchestra warm up. I looked at the program Rachel had managed to extract from the thrifty ushers. It had a tentative calendar for next season’s concerts, and with a thrill of delight, I read that they were planning to play Barber’s violin concerto and Beethoven’s seventh symphony, on the same night! To add to my glee, they’re playing Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” on another night, and Mark O’Connor is coming for their Pops series!

The concert was delightful. The Grieg piano concerto was especially wonderful: First, the morning river, then the river in rain, then the river flowing down to meet the sunset. It was a little unpleasant to be sitting so close to the back because people kept coming in and out, banging the hall door shut just when the clarinet was tapering its phrase, or the French horn was rising to a climax. During the intermission, Kevin, David, and Tara joined us in the empty seats in our row. Katie was in awe of the piano concerto, and when I laughingly asked if she was asleep (remembering her drowsiness at lunch), she replied indignantly, “Are you kidding?! That was the most awesome performance ever!” Rachel told me about the latest economics book she’s been reading, by an author who advocates rather radical, total capitalism. The Tchaikovsky symphony (the 4th symphony) was lovely, simple. After the concert, we stood in a ring outside the hall, waiting for Alisha and Syneva. Asher talked enthusiastically about the Barber concerto, which has spurred him to audition for the Signature Symphony. I asked Kevin about his exams. Syneva and Alisha came up with bright smiles. Asher offered to carry Syneva’s cello, and we walked out to her car together. The rest of the group went to their cars.

We laughed… and laughed… all the way back to campus. Post-concert adrenaline, which had filled our conversation with laughter as with helium on the trip to the hall, buoyed our laughter like explosive sparks. Sitting in the parking lot for awhile, Alisha and Syneva joked about the pianist. “I liked her dress,” Alisha said, “It wasn’t too outlandish.” “Yes, but I was hoping it would be more outlandish. She wore a baseball cap to every rehearsal,” Syneva returned. “And she brought her dog, a little white dog! Did you see it?” Alisha exclaimed. Apparently, the pianist, a young woman, had brought her dog to every rehearsal and had allowed it to frisk freely around the concert hall. It took particular interest in Alisha’s odiferous stand partner (who has lots of cats, to judge from the smell of his clothes--or so Alisha says), sniffing his feline-perfumed clothes and violin case all over. Surprisingly, the conductor, though a very strict man generally, seemed not to notice the little dog at all.

We turned off the lit highway onto the narrow, dark streets—like plunging from the cliff-tops to the shadowed valleys. We passed a sign for Oz (“Silver Jewelry; Gifts for Under Twenty Dollars!”), with an art-noveau woman relaxing languidly in a mulberry gown with blue hair against the O. We passed Mother Trizzo’s Pottery Shop, with painted ceramic pots and lion-maned sunfaces in the window. We passed a bead shop, the glass trinkets sparkling like strings of stars in the window, and little boutiques, and a bar, “The Yellow Brick Road”. Back at Lottie, I staggered up to my room, showered, and went straight to bed.

Days of Grace, Part 1

Here begins a series of posts from this past week, one for each day (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday). I realize that most of you probably won't know any of these people, but God saw fit to make these past three days very pleasant for me, and I hope you'll enjoy reading about them and the people I shared them with.

This morning I ate breakfast with Rachel. She told me about the economics club meeting last night. I spent the morning sending a few e-mails and working on my Honors paper. During MBW today, we talked more about “The Importance of Being Ernest”. Dr. F gave our exams back to us. She had scribbled a round A, in green pen, on the last page of mine. She let us out early. As I waited in the hall before Archaeology, I noticed four short, bow-legged little men walk by. They were dressed in holey, baggy construction jeans, stained with rust and red dirt. Most of them had on equally filthy shirts, though one was dressed in a long-sleeved, white collared shirt that was immaculate in its stainlessness. All of them wore thick belts with tools strapped to them, that thudded against their legs as they walked. Their faces were strongly Eastern European, wind-wrinkled, brown, with the hawk noses and the slanted eyes and sharp smiles. As they passed, I heard them talking in a guttural language—Russian, perhaps, or some relative of it.

I ate lunch alone in the desolate cafeteria, and after lunch, I worked on my Honors paper for a little while. It now has this imposing “handle”: “The Monk and the Knight: Contrasts between Memory, Identity, and Prowess in Church and Chivalry during the Middle Ages”. During Honors, we talked about The Song of Roland and Oliver’s strange change in the middle of the battle when Roland finally decides to blow Olifant. Dr. A showed us pictures of Roncesvaux: pictures of green mountain passes, steep meadows close to the clouds, and a white stone set up on a hillside in memory to Roland. After class I practiced my flute. The wind soughed and squealed against the practice room windowpanes. Back in my room, I worked on the paper until five-thirty, when I skipped downstairs to meet Jenna in the Lorton parking lot. The girls’ Bible study was to fix supper at Jenna’s house tonight (reminder: Jenna is a woman in her late twenties, married, with a one-year-old daughter and a son on the way; she lives near the campus), and the boys’ Bible study was to come over to share supper and to bring dessert.

I walked to the kerb just as Jenna pulled up. At Jenna’s house, Jenna set everyone to work. Crystal sliced mushrooms, while Anne chopped onions. She added Crystal’s mushrooms to her onions and sautéed them all together in a big saucepan, as a topping for hamburgers. Meanwhile, Jessica fixed a spinach-and-strawberry salad, topped with baked almonds. Jenna brought out two packages of raw hamburger meat to the dining room table, and assigned Eleanor, Rachel, Kathryn, and me to shape the raw meat into hamburger patties. Kathryn and Eleanor both wrinkled their noses at the distasteful job, but we all dived in, slapping the red meat about until it fit our palms in ruddy, plump patties. We made twenty-five burgers, scraping up the last few curlicues of meat and patting them into the burgers. Our hands were slimy with raw meat, so we all washed ourselves in the kitchen sink.

Anne was still busy sautéing mushrooms, and Jessica sat perched on a tall stool at the kitchen table and sliced strawberries. I fixed lemonade and arranged the table. Jenna took the plates of patties outside and heated up the gas grill to start grilling the burgers. Upbeat hymns (many of them the ones that RUF sings on Tuesday nights) played happily out of a CD player perched on an old sewing machine in the dining room: “Arise, arise, arise my soul, arise!” As I stood by the kitchen sink and stirred the lemonade, I noticed with surprised awe that sunset filled the west above the dark trees. The grey ceiling of clouds had been stained, as though a peach had burst and dripped pink and gold on the sky. The clouds were suffused with light. Lilac on the edges, orange and flaming magenta toward the horizon. The black trees stood up starkly against the glowing glory.

When the lemonade was done, I stood in the living room and listened to Eleanor, Jessica, and Crystal discuss boyfriends and dumb antics. Glancing over my shoulder through the archway from the living room to the dining room, I could see through the screened-in porch on the dining room and out the back door. As I looked, I noticed that the flames on the grill seemed to be unusually high. I banged open the screen door and shouted, “Jenna, do you need some help!” “Um… yeah,” she replied. Her white apron fluttered in the gloom. I stripped off my socks and danced across the prickly lawn. Pecan shells poked my toes as I pattered up beside Jenna under the little concrete-and-metal shelter in the back of the yard. (It has one wall, on the west, at the side furthest from the house; the front is open, and it has a metal peaked roof.) The fire was so hot that it charred the outside of the burgers without cooking the inside. The wind, scurrying underneath the metal roof, from slant to slant, fanned the flames so that they became angrily-whirling dervishes—fingers of fire groped out like trailing ends of sleeves. I brought out a plate to take the half-done burgers from Jenna, and brought them inside for Anne to sautee (which she did, though she’s a vegetarian) on the stove indoors. I held a flashlight for Jenna outside so that she could see what she was doing.

As Jenna was starting to grill a second batch, the boys, Katie, and Jenny arrived. Kevin immediately came outside. “Do you need some help?” he asked courteously. “I’m a little grill-savvy.” “Yes, please!” Jenna said, and handed the long spatula over to him. She went inside to supervise the start of the meal, while I stayed outside. Kevin was surprised by the ferocious flames, which leapt out and died down sporadically. One particularly mean burst jumped out and singed the hair on his knuckles. “That has got to be the most mean-tempered fire I’ve ever seen,” Kevin said, shaking his hand. Grease dripped from the burgers and sizzled on the coals. Kevin took the long metal spatula in one hand, and the flashlight in the other, and tried to keep the flames under control. As Kevin finished a batch of burgers, I’d carry them inside and put them on a plate, then patter back outside again with another plate.

Being outside but under the shelter was comforting, somehow. The prickly grass, the pecan tree, the high privacy fence surrounding the little yard, and the half-seen glimpses of other privacy fences and other little houses on little yards reminded me of San Antonio. Lights glowed in the upper windows of the small homes nearby, twinkling like will o’ the wisps in the gloaming. The wind seethed in the pecan tree above the little shelter, and the tree whooshed, like the flames on the grill. Tree and flames flared together as the wind took them. The trees were huge, curving billows of grey waves, the clouds above them froth steaming from their wind-whipped peaks. A jet roared over. The eye of the fire condensed all the swirling darkness to one warm heart--like a windblown tulip bobbing on a wind-whipped lake.

It was nearly eight o’clock when Rachel and I finally sat down to eat in the living room with everyone. The wind and smoke had made me very hungry, and the smoke had roughened my throat so that I was hoarse. The sweet salad, with creamy poppyseed dressing, soothed my throat, and the substantial burger, cooked thoroughly and with the bitter edge of charred meat to cut through the sweet tastes of mushrooms and onions, satisfied my hunger. Jenna and Jeremy (her husband) laughed about the grill. “You know, if I’d gotten leaner meat, we probably wouldn’t have had so much trouble with the flames,” Jenna said. In the corner of the living room, Anne and Jenny played with Anna (Jenna's little daughter). Anne stroked her hair and dangled toys in front of her, while Jenny spooned vegetarian chili into her little round mouth. Eleanor and James, on the sofa under the window, took turns strumming Jenna’s guitar, while Kathryn, squeezed on the couch, sat with her eyes half-shut, sleepy and content.

Jenna drove Jenny, Anne, Jessica, and me back to the university. I was almost surprised to see the familiar campus buildings again. They seemed sterile, impersonal, after Jenna’s house—the classy creams and blacks looked harsh compared to the reds and greens and warm browns on Jenna’s walls, and the uniform buildings looked stiff compared to the odd little nooks and crannies, the unexpected windows and cubbyholes of Jenna’s house (one closet in her house has a little arched hole cut in the bottom of the door, so that a cat could climb in and out of the closet). Back in my room, I took a shower and sat down at my laptop to write up today’s journal entry. I listened to Loreena McKennitt and gulped hot orange spice tea, which scorched away the hoarseness in my throat. The cinnamon steam warmed my cold cheeks. I had a brief e-mail conversation with my mother about rides on Friday, did my devotions, and went to bed.