Lift Up Your Hearts!

This morning, the mp3 player that powers the perpetually random assortment of music emanating from our stereo system struck up Stacey Lynn Regan's, I Offer My Isaac.  Seven years after our firstborn's firstborn made his grand entrance and agonizing departure from the stage of this world, Stacey's song still has the power to stop me mid-anything and tap into deep wells of sorrow.  So do In Christ Alone, which our church programs into the service with alarming frequency, heedless of the fact that one choir member can never make it all the way through the song (breaking down at "from life's first cry to final breath" if not before), and also There Were Roses, a powerful song made all the more poignant because I first heard it, around the time of Isaac's death, in the Green Linnet version—where the name of one of the protagonists is Isaac.

Music has such strange power.  These songs call forth deep sobs of agonizing grief, but it is not a miserable sorrow.  There may be wounds that time cannot heal, but the lively presence of Isaac's subsequent siblings is a powerful healing agent, as is the certainty that Isaac is safe in God's keeping and we will be reunited at the right time.

Without any justification for such images, other than that he was born blond, I have a definite picture of Isaac in my mind:  a cross between C. S. Lewis's Prince Caspian (from the books, not the movie) and George MacDonald's Sir Gibbie; of no particular age, blond, blue-eyed, and almost always laughing.

Here's to our firstborn grandchild, with joyful sorrow, on his birthday.

Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, London, 2002) and The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, London, 1994)

These two books are meant to be read together, with the story of Troy second.

After my very positive experiences with Green's books on Robin Hood, King Arthur, and ancient Egyptian stories, I expected too much of these two.  I still recommend them; they are worth reading, and I found that within a week something I read there helped me understand a story I heard later.  Nonetheless, there are drawbacks. (More)

RootsMagic, my favorite genealogy database program, has released RootsMagic Essentials, a version you can download that is absolutely free!  In case anyone is wondering, I don't get a thing for this endorsement; I just like RootsMagic, and I like encouraging interest in genealogy.  It looks as if one can do a lot with Essentials, and it might be a great, commitment-free way to keep track of family information even if one doesn't have (yet) a desire to delve any further.  Sadly, one of my favorite features, color coding of families, is not part of the stripped-down version, but—tanstaafl—if there is, sometimes, a free lunch, the full-course dinner always costs.

If any of my family members decide to download RootsMagic Essentials, I'll be happy to send along a copy of my database.  :)

Some things one can never tire of, like the light of understanding in a child's eyes, the leap of the space shuttle into the sky, and the magesty of animals in their natural surroundings.

As a rule, on most days I take time out for a four-mile walk/run, followed by a swim when the weather permits.  My legs are short, so this usually excises an hour and a half from my day.  Being a procrastinator by trade, too much of the time I find myself attempting to squeeze it in before sunset.

It doesn't help that here in Florida we do not have the long twilight that northerners enjoy, so I need to watch the clock rather than the window.  I can leave home in broad daylight, and by the time I return it is dark.  The halfway point is in a small, nearby park with a jogging trail through the woods, and before I finished my circuit the other day, dusk was well-settled.  I prefer not to run under those conditions, since it's harder to see the potentially treacherous dips and hills in the path—but there are advantages.

Like the sudden, silent flight overhead of a huge barred owl, who obligingly paused on a tree branch long enough for me to admire it briefly.

I continued my run with a lighter step.

In Forgetting the Unforgettable, I remarked on how ordinary were my diary entries when the Berlin Wall was breached.  In a subsequent comment, Stephan mentioned that he barely remembers the event, despite living so close to Germany.

Soon thereafter, while taking my customary walk and listening to a history lecture on my trusty mp3 player, I was reminded that the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred when I was the age Stephan was when the Wall fell.  I have no memory of the event whatsoever, nor of any particular anxiety because of the imminent threat of nuclear war.  We had "air raid drills" in our elementary school, but that was nothing new; they were a normal part of school, like the equally-frequent fire drills.  If the adults in my life worried about the situation, none of that filtered down to me.  My life comprised surviving fifth grade, playing with my friends, and enjoying my new baby brother.

Curious, I delved into the journals that my father had kept, hoping there would be entries for October 1962, and there were.  I looked forward to hearing how he and my mother had dealt with the fears that, I'm told, caused families eating breakfast to wonder if they'd still be alive at dinnertime. (More)

This day in 1918 marked the end of the War to End All Wars.  Less than a handful of veterans of that war remain to be honored.  But where there are people, there will be wars; where there are wars, there will be veterans; and where there are veterans, they deserve honor and respect.  In any conflict there will be some, to be sure, who serve dishonorably, for their own gain, with evil intent, or with twisted logic, as recent events attest.  The hanging scene in Shakespeare's Henry V is intense, and shocking to our modern sensibilities, but makes the point that in a civilized society wrongdoing in members of the armed forces is even more offensive than civilian crimes.

Horrendous exceptions to the contrary, soldiers and sailors, be they enemy or ally, are standing "between their loved home and the war's desolation."  As J. R. R. Tolkien reminds us in The Return of the King:  "It must often be so ... when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."

Thank you, veterans and current members of our Armed Forces.

Where were you 20 years ago today?

My own journal entry is remarkably filled with the mundane details of life with two young children.  There is one exclamatory sentence, "Would that every day could be like this!" but it was referring to Heather's having awakened with her alarm clock, showered, dressed, made her bed, cleaned her room and finished all her chores before school.  Not as momentous as events on the other side of the world, but a personal triumph. (More)

What do hippies and Christians have in common?  A lot more than you might think.

The stereotypes:  Hippies are free-lovin', goddess-worshipping ultra-liberals who rebel against society's norms and customs; Christians are moralistic, hyper-conservative corporate capitalists; and never the twain shall break bread together.

Quite the contrary.  Christians and hippie types alike tend to look at society's conventions with a skeptical eye. (More)

Today's Stone Soup says it all.  Far from being boring, the people I know who are not active on Facebook are choosing instead to live their First Lives.  :)

More from the backblog . . .

The Strange Double Standards of Abortion  John Stackhouse muses on the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, vigilantism, and hypocrisy. (More)

Despite my efforts, my backblog appears to be growing faster than I can deal with it.  Here's a quick look at several interesting health-related issues that have come my way recently.  (Where "recently" is defined as "sometime within the last year or two"; that's how old some of my backblog is.)

Acknowledging Preindustrial Patterns of Sleep May Revolutionize Approach to Sleep Dysfunction  Do you worry when you awaken in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep?  Your body may be rebelling against unnatural sleep patterns imposed by artificial lighting and our frantic schedules. (More)

Recently I enjoyed the position of Grandma-in-charge for Jonathan and Noah while the rest of the family spent the day in Pittsburgh.   It was loads of fun, but by the end of the day I could identify with Zoe in the Baby Blues comic below.

Jonathan discovered language early, and has been exceedingly verbal ever since.  He also shares with his Aunt Janet a vivid imagination and an endless capacity for story-telling.  Unlike his aunt, however, his stories have a decidedly Y-chromosome twist.  (More)

This actually seemed like a good idea at the grocery store.

V-Fusion, by the same folks who brought you, "I could have had a V-8."  (More)

Funny how things click together in this world.

I would never have heard of the award-winning Swiss movie, Vitus, had it not happened to be featured in an article in the Hartford Courant when our daughter's Swiss in-laws happened to be in Connecticut, and happened to look through the newspaper.  (Why, O why does English not have a word for the "our child's in-laws" relationship?  I have need of it often enough.)  Knowing my interest in Swiss German, her father-in-law cut out the article and sent it to me.  (I am going to have to invent my own term, I can see.)

That was months ago, and only recently did I have the sense to see if trusty Netflix could provide the movie.  Much to my surprise, they could!  We watched it this afternoon.  Our intention had been to watch part during lunch and finish it during dinner, but we couldn't bring ourselves to turn it off.

I've deliberately not included any links to Vitus, because they contain spoilers that I certainly would not have liked to have known about before seeing the film.  But I do recommend it, as we thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's PG, with a few words I wouldn't want the grandkids to pick up, but that would require reading the subtitles.  I'd say they'd probably lose interest in a foreign-language film, but Swing Girls was a hit even though in Japanese.

Vitus combines some of my favorite themes:  brilliant children, music, and loving families.  Sure, I could complain about one or two things, but overall it was a delightful movie.  Actually, the main disappointment was the language, which was falsely billed as Swiss German.  I caught a few Swiss German words (and felt for the student being told by his teacher to speak High German only), but mostly I'd say I understood far too much of the German for it to have been anything other than High German throughout most of the film.  I'd be interested in the verdict of those who know better, however.  The characters freely mix English words and phrases in their speech, so maybe they are equally freely mixing the two Germans, and I'm only catching the few High German words and the much fewer Swiss German phrases I know.  Or Swiss German words similar enough to High German that they sound familiar to my ear.

One question I had from the beginning was how they managed to get the actors to look so much as if they were really playing the piano—it looked far too good to be fakes.  Here's the answer:  Teo Gheorghiu, who plays the older Vitus.

How do we know this is really a Swiss film?  The characters carry their cut flowers upside down!

Studies showing that teachers will form expectations of a student's character and ability based on nothing more than his or her name are unfortunately nothing new.  Students with "traditional," common names are more likely to receive higher ratings on both academic performance and behavior than those with names perceived as odd.  What makes this article worth commenting on is not the results of the study, but the names themselves.

The study reveals that . . . traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.

 (More)