Lucy (playing with my hair): I’m going to pull your hair out (=make it stand up). I want to make it look funny. Like Daddy.
Lucy (checking Craig’s knee with a hammer): I’m not a doctor, I’m a fixin’ girl.
On Waiting
“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”
Sleeping Lucy
Ah, Lucy. Lucy was very wiggly last night. She didn’t particularly want to go to sleep, but she laid down with Samantha and me and proceeded to wiggle her self to sleep. After flopping, flailing kicking, blankets on, blankets off, and repeating it all several times, she curled up in a ball. Then she pulled her head towards her knees. And again. Finally she was backwards in the bed, and she stretched out on her stomach. I laughed, thinking she would right herself soon.
The next time I woke up, she was not only still backwards, but her feet were the only part showing out from the blankets where her head should have been.
Can you say “Soy-sage”?
Craig was pretty excited about his Whole Foods deli purchase. We brought it all home (going to Whole Foods is like a pilgramage – it’s forever away and only done on occasion when we’re feeling rich) and I heated up the roast. We started to eat, and Craig wondered out loud if it was cooked through when purchased, or if we should have cooked it more than the quick nuclear reheat. I asked him if he was sure this was meat.
Of course it was meat! It was “field roast”. What could roast be, besides meat? Probably meat which lived in a field. What kind of meat didn’t matter, it had looked good in the deli window.
Blame it on Spring Fever
In an attempt to make up for the long, long silence, here are some pictures. First, the “man pit” that Craig build over the old (dug out hole in the grass) fire pit. It is now an oven and stove. I picked up the brick off the curb, in my church clothes, no less. Dad would be proud.
The roasted (in brick oven) vegetable quesidillas (cooked on brick stove) were really, really good.
We have done a little planting. We’ve had several dafodills bloom, and the tulips and iris are ready to bust.
It’s a what?
Lucy (about the glass coaster on the coffee table): “It’s made out of whack!”
Apparently in reference to my just calling something “wacky”.
How peculiar…
“The Lord, your God, has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own.”
-Deuteronomy 7:6
This was part of the reading of the Morning Office today, and it really struck me. Forgive me if I stretch the translation a little! You might think, hearing that God’s people are “peculiar” I would be a little concerned. But no, this is actually comforting to me, because I’ve been feeling a little peculiar lately. Mostly when I’m out in public. For example, when at a Catholic schools week dinner, the Ave Maria melts seamlessly, without even a breath of pause, into the Pledge of Allegiance, complete with gigantic waving flag on the projector screen. I know that I blanched at the juxtaposition of the two; it was like being punched in the gut. And once the whiteness passed, I wondered how I could sit in a room and continue to smile and make small talk.
Re-membering
“My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are all alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember–re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality–that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could, after the Resurrection.”
Captain’s Prayer
When we were at Tulane, and I went to daily Mass at the Tulane Catholic Center, there was an elderly gentlemen who came sometimes whom I only knew as “Captain”. I don’t know his name, or any part of his story. His face looked like he had been injured during his service, or it could have been scars from surgery, or cancer, I don’t know because I never asked. He walked with a cane, and when he finally stopped coming to Mass I think I remember hearing that it was because the steps to the upper room chapel had finally become too much for him.
16-year-olds are people too?
“There is a natural and accepted view that one of the main purposes of education is to prepare young people directly for a place in the labour market. Obviously, general education should do this. But there are two complications. First, thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first 16 or 18 years of a person’s life are not a rehearsal. Young people are living their lives now. What they become and what they do later depends on the attitudes and abilities they develop as they are growing up. Linear assumptions about supply and demand can and do cut off many potentially valuable and formative experiences on the grounds of utility.”
