Lift Up Your Hearts!

I recently finished reading a book called The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.  That's not what this post is about, because while the author, David Kupelian, does have some important insights into how our culture got to be the way it is, his tone is too strident to allow me to recommend the book with particular enthusiasm.  However, he cites his sources well, and thus I am able to give full credit for what is perhaps my favorite part of the whole book, the following great quote from G. K. Chesterton.

Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution.  That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all.  It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose.  Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway.  But the house is very much larger than the gate.  There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.

— G.K.'s Weekly, January 29, 1928

It is a great tragedy of our day that we have been all but convinced that the gate is all there is, that the house and fields beyond it are, and have always been, no more than a romantic, imaginative dream—at best.  Perhaps we need a Puddleglum to stamp on the enchanted fire and clear our heads.

Perhaps the strident tone of Kupelian's book is, after all, just the un-enchanting smell of burnt marsh-wiggle.

Don't take my word for it; read about Our Big News in Janet's own words (and pictures).  For the really curious, you can find a link to Stephan's blog there.  Hmmm, her webmaster is going to have to make a change, and move thduggie up from Friends to Family on the sidebar.  And while I'm at it, will IrishOboe change to SwissHarp, or maybe SwissFiddle?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I'm contemplating the complexities of having an international family.

Such as figuring out how to type umlauts.  In Word, it's easy—CTRL/SHIFT/colon key followed by the letter, in this case "u"—easy to remember because the colon looks like an umlaut turned 90°.  In HTML, ü translates to ü, and in LifeType one can insert it via the "custom character" button.  (Technically, in LifeType it's called "u diaeresis," but while that may matter to people like Peter, it's a distinction without a difference to me.)  There's also an easy out:  one can write "ue" instead.

Oh, I know there are a few other difficulties, such as no matter where they live, at least one half of the couple is going to be too far away from family.  But I'm not thinking about that (much) now; instead I concentrate on the delightful side, such as having in-family tutors in another culture and several other languages.  It's not all bad to have an excuse to visit Europe.  :)

And have I mentioned that Stephan is a nice guy, that he and Janet seem to complement each other very well, and that he makes her very happy?

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

— Frodo to Sam, at the end of The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Thanks to Janet reminding me (she'll have to write her own post as to why), I was able to watch NASA TV live coverage of the landing of Phoenix on Mars (and at a much more reasonable hour than she did).  For obvious reasons (the view out our front door) I pay more attention to Shuttle launches than other NASA activity these days, but watching this excitement took me 'way back.  Back to 1969 and the Apollo 11 moon landing...stories from my cousin who worked in the space program...some of the first pictures of the Earth from the moon that were treasured trophies from a Boy Scout (Explorer) program I participated in with General Electric...and even 'way, 'way back to standing on the porch with my father, watching Echo I pass overhead.

Thanks for the memories, Janet and Stephan!

I actually enjoy airplane food, perhaps because I don't eat it all that often.  It's part of the adventure of flying, and something to break up the monotony of a long flight.  But maybe next time I should wave away the attendent with the tempting tray.  Recent research has shown that fasting for about 16 hours can reset the circadian rhythms and speed adjustment to a new time zone.

At least if you're a mouse.

I don't enjoy reporting bad news, really.  It makes me sound old and curmudgeonly.  Okay, so I am old and curmudgeonly, but that's beside the point.  So today I feature an exciting story from the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Midwife Diane Goslin has emerged victorious from a court case in which the State of Pennsylvania accused her of practicing medicine without a license by assisting at home births.  (See my previous post.)  The author of the article, Angela Couloumbis, and the headline writer who created the title, Birthing Women Win Legal Decision understand that this victory is not about one person's profession, but about one of our most basic freedoms:  choosing where and with whom we will give birth to our children.

I could point out that some of the rejoicing may be premature: the State is considering appealing the decision, and the court only dealt with the charge of practicing medicine, not with the problem that Pennsylvania is not among the 22 states in this country that recognize the Certified Professional Midwife license.  There is cause for joy, to be sure, but not for letting down our guard.  But we'll take our victories one at a time, and be thankful for daily bread even if we're not certain of next week's provision.

Anything less would be curmudgeonly.

I don't yet know how I'm voting in the upcoming presidential election, though I do know it will be a matter of the least objectionable candidate rather than some ringing endorsement. Frankly, I find them all objectionable; the question is, Who will do the least harm? So I'm not endorsing any candidate at this point, but as I've said before, Barack Obama scares me because he's so charismatic he might very well succeed in implementing some very dangerous policies.

Tim at Random Observations once again has a thoughtful post, this time on why Obama scares him. Check it out.

I'm chronically bad at making decisions.  Not that I usually make bad ones; actually, most of them end up being pretty good.  But whether the decision is big or small, buying a house or choosing from a restaurant menu, I agonize over each decision and often experience second thoughts as soon as it is made.  Porter tells an old joke about a man ordering dessert:  The waitress informs him that they are offering apple pie and cherry pie, and after considering the matter for a while, he chooses the apple.  A few minutes later she returns to his table and say, "I'm sorry, sir, I forgot to tell you we also have coconut cream pie."  "Oh!" the diner exclaims, "In that case I'll have the cherry."

The point of the joke is the man's irrational behavior in changing his mind after the addition of irrelevant information, but I understand him completely. Coconut cream pie has nothing to do with it.  He couldn't decide between apple and cherry, and when he finally closed the door on the cherry pie, it suddenly seemed the more attractive.  The waitress's return gave him a chance to change his decision.

With that in mind, you can see why I was attracted by the headline of a New York Times article by John Tierney called The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors. It seems I'm not the only one who likes to keep her options open:  In a series of experiments, MIT students playing a game chose to take what amounted to a 15% penalty in their earnings (cold, hard cash) in order to keep unnecessary doors from closing.

The researcher, Dan Ariely, is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and at his website, Predictably Irrational, you can find not only this game but others, and much more on the subject of how we often act contrary to our own best interests.  I'm sure some of his experiments violate a research code of ethics somewhere, such as the experiment in which male college students were asked questions about sexual behavior before and after viewing Internet porn sites.  Nonetheless, even that research revealed some unexpected and frightening results.   Ariely has a book by the same name, which I would order from the library if I didn't already have a backlog of five library books pining away in the not-ready-to-be-returned state.

The proper answer, at least as taught in elementary school, is "nothing."  Get yourself out as fast as you can; don't waste time taking anything with you.  Once past that simplistic answer, there are obviously exceptions:  adults, at least, are allowed to take their children with them.  People will take time to look for pets, and I know I would try to grab a few things, such as important papers, laptops, and family photos, even though I'm sure that's officially frowned upon.

Once out, with firefighters on the scene, one can pretty much count on not being allowed back in for anything, even children, as the professionals prefer to do the work themselves without adding another potential victim in need of rescue.

Unless one lives in Germany, where firefighters are currently battling a fire at the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.  This is Europe, where classical music and musicians are respected and understood more than in the United States.

Bassoonist Stefan Schweigert said the fire brigade had allowed musicians into the building to remove instruments that had been left in lockers overnight....

Prince Caspian, One Sentence Review:  Not a bad movie, but several times I had to wonder where the story line came from.

A few more thoughts: 

Reminded me greatly of The Lord of the Rings movie:  take the names, places, and surface plot of a popular book, then make up your own story to hold it all together.

Great animation and special effects, measured mostly by the fact that I hardly noticed them.  Walking and talking badgers and mice seem perfectly normal, and even the centaurs are convincing.  Reepicheep is wonderful; they did a great job with the mice, not just the animation but also the dialogue and action.

The actress who plays Lucy does an excellent job, and the actor playing Edmund is pretty good, too.

One thing that had bothered me about the first Narnia movie was what appeared to be a deliberate flouting of Lewis's determination that the girls not be fighters if at all possible ("battles are ugly when women fight").  After having read an interview with the director of the movies, it concerns me less, as I see his point that Lewis's view towards women changed through time, no doubt at least in part due to getting to know Joy Davidman, the strong, intelligent woman whom he eventually married.  I'm not sure that even were he still alive today Lewis's views would have evolved to the point where he would have been happy with women fighting on the battlefield, but I doubt he would have objected to strong, wise, competent female characters.  Indeed, girls are often depicted just that way in the books, but the movie is so focused on the battles that there is hardly time for any character, male or female, to show strength and courage in any other way.

Battle fatigue.  Enough with the fighting, already!  Reminded me of a Presbyterian sermon:  first third, interesting and valuable; second third, unnecessary rehash; final third, soporific.  Much too much violence for its PG rating, in my opinion.

If they'd devoted less screen time to killing, they might might have had room for some of my favorite scenes from the book, like the Romp with Bacchus when Aslan awakened the trees, the Feast after the battle, and what Aslan and the girls did in Beruna. 

My two favorite scenes from the movie, though neither is in the book:  the cat in the castle, and Lucy drawing her dagger on the bridge with Aslan.

If the main characters are disconcerted by the time shifting between the two worlds, I am equally so by the incongruities in the movie.  I could understand a re-setting of the story so that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were modern children, but in that case, why keep the World War II setting?  In the book, the characters' speech, actions, and attitudes reflect either the mid-twentieth-century world, or the quasi-Medieval world of Narnia; in the movie, the setting is WWII London or Narnia, but the culture 21st century Hollywood.  Including some romantic scenes that are totally unnecessary and definitely not in the book.

Was Prince Caspian worth seeing?  For us, yes, since our tickets were only $5 each, we already know the books well, and I want to be able to converse about it.  Would I see it again?  I doubt it, and therein is a great difference from the book, which I have probably read more than two dozen times in the last 45 years.  If the movie encourages people to read the Narnia books who otherwise wouldn't, then, yes, it's well worth seeing.  But don't watch the movie and think you know much at all of the story as C. S. Lewis wrote it.  Perhaps it is possible for a movie to convey the delights of a book like Prince Caspian, but it doesn't seem to happen very often.

Having finished watching all the available “Best Picture” Oscar-winners—all except for one or two he decided early on weren’t worth the wasting of his time—Porter is catching up on the James Bond movies he’d missed, which was many if not most of them.  Not feeling any lack whatsoever for having missed them myself, I’ve generally elected to indulge in what to me are more profitable activities, such as reading, writing, or sleeping.

Every once in a while, however, I’ll find myself sucked into the story, never long enough to see the entire movie, but enough to provoke a few of thoughts.

There’s a lot of fun in the Bond movies, or at least the early ones, which is all I’ve seen so far.   Many of the lines, and in particular the way they are delivered (by Sean Connery, anyway) are genuinely clever, and some of the scenes border on slapstick, which I was not expecting.

What surprised—and disturbed—me most, however, was how tame the movies have seemed so far.  In violence, sex, and foul language they are far outdone by today’s ordinary, broadcast television fare.  Yet I remember how shocking James Bond was when first he came to the theaters.  Few of my young teenaged friends actually managed to see the films, but reading the books—or pretending, or wishing, to have done so—was risqué and definitely cool.  I remember the birthday when my mother gave me The Diamond Smugglers in an attempt to satisfy my desire for a Bond book.  How ignorant and uncool could she be to have picked out one of the very few books by Ian Fleming that was not about James Bond and in fact was not even fiction?  Ignorant like a fox, my Phi Beta Kappa mother!

Even from a perspective 40 years in the future, there are scenes in the films I would not want an adolescent to see; I’d rather not have seen them myself.  To this day I remember lines from one of the Bond books I managed to read that I wish had not been burned into my brain.  (My naïve imagination was not up to visualizing the scenes very well, but words stick.)  Yet that from which we were sheltered is standard fare for elementary-aged students (most of the children in Janet’s middle class, suburban, second grade class had watched R-rated movies—and that was 20 years ago); many of today’s teenagers have had more sexual encounters than James Bond himself, and been exposed to more violence.  Without the cool gadgets.

I recently read the answers to a genealogist's request for people's "top three genealogical regrets," and discovered that I am not alone.  Hands down, the greatest frustration and sorrow reported was over not recording stories and asking questions of those who died taking irretrievable history with them.  I'm far from the only one who developed an interest in family history too late to get easy and accurate answers to the family mysteries that are now taking so much time and effort to unravel, and which may never be made clear.  From bare-facts birth, death, and marriage information, to photographs of people and places once dearly loved by those whose love made us what we are, to the unique, intimate, and irreplaceable stories of a family's daily lives, thoughts, feelings, and culture—these personal connections with history all too often mean little to the young, engrossed as they are in the here and now.

Even those fortunate young people who take an interest in their elders' tales are rarely forward-thinking enough to make sure the stories are recorded, nor do they often know at the age of 20 what questions they will wish answered when they are 50.  It must, therefore, be the responsibility of the older generation to assemble, record, and save what information they can, keeping it safe "against that day" when their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren will be grateful for their efforts.

When I speak of elders, I do not necessarily mean old folks.  Trust me, when you try to remember events for which you have no written record, you discover you can recall but little of many momentous occasions you were certain you'd never forget, so don't think you can easily delay the project till the time when your kids are all grown, or when you retire.  Here are some lessons I've learned, mostly the hard way, about how to avoid genealogical regrets.

• Keep a diary. I speak as one whose own journal-keeping has become exceedingly spotty in the last couple of years, and who wishes she'd started it sooner than after her youngest child was already two years old, so I'm no role model.  But what have managed to record has been an invaluable memory aid and a source of many great family stories that otherwise would have been lost.  The thought of keeping a written, daily journal can be intimidating, but almost anything is better than nothing.  Even brief notes, such as "Today Bill, Joan, and Tiffany came for dinner," or "Jeffrey swam the full length of the pool," can trigger memories for later expansion.  The more detail the better, especially if it includes thoughts, feelings, and philosophical musings, but good enough is better than perfect if perfect isn't going to happen.


• Take pictures, and label them.  Digital cameras make it easy to take photographs, but all too often that means 100 times more unlabelled photos to puzzle over.  When I look up to the shelves above my desk and see album after album of photos. most of which will lose all meaning if I don't identify them, I become Dorothy, watching the sand pour inexorably through the hourglass and trying not to panic.


• Identify family heirlooms.  You may treasure your great-grandmother's teacup, but if your heirs don't know it was hers, it's just another non-microwaveable dish.  Take pictures, label them, and make sure your kids know where the information is stored. 


• Write down the stories from your past, especially where they intersect other people's.  As important as I believe my genealogical work to be, always nagging at the back of my mind is the realization that I am the eldest in my family, and if I get killed by a car as I bike along the trail (as happened to one woman here recently), many stories will be lost that my siblings and children would rather hear than know the identity of their great-great-great grandparents.


• Find a safe place to keep your irreplaceable information.  The three most important words in data storage:  backup, backup, backup.  Don't trust to one medium, either; CDs deteriorate over time, hard drives crash, papers get moldy.  Determine the person in your family most interested in taking over your family history collection after you die, and include that bequest in your will.  If you can find no one who cares enough to save it for future generations, consider bequeathing some of it to a long-standing and reputable genealogical society.


• Document your sources.  Facts and stories are of minimal value when stripped of source information.  Does Great-Great-Grandpa Jim's birth date come from a family Bible, an unreliable Internet genealogy, his birth certificate, or the failing memory of Aunt Jane?  Who told the story of Uncle Dick falling out of the apple tree—Dick himself, or his second cousin who wasn't there but heard the story from his sister?


• Organize, organize, organize.  All the data in the world is useless if no one can find it, or if it fills 20 large books no one else will want to store, much less read.


• Distribute your work.  Don't wait till it's perfect, or even half done, to share your discoveries with others.  Several short stories now are much more likely to bless your family than a masterpiece unearthed only after your will is read.  Put your unfinished (but organized) work where it can be seen:  you'll gain proofreaders and contributors, you may inspire others to record their own family history, and you'll have established another level of backup for your data.


• Don't be overwhelmed, but start today and be consistent.  Find five minutes at the end of each day to jot down a few notes and you'll create a priceless legacy for your children.  Can you spare twenty minutes instead?  Choose one project—photo identification, writing your children's birth stories, whatever inspires you at the moment—and apply the Daffodil Principle. Dedicate a mere 15 minutes a day to that project—consistently, four days a week, for a just 40 weeks out of the year—and by this time next year you will  have put in a full work-week's worth of time and accomplished wonders.  Maybe even have moved on to another project or two.


• Don't allow the knowledge that the future is rapidly closing in on your ability to document the past take away from your life in the present.  I'm still working on this one, too.

Earlier this month the Seattle Times ran a heartwarming genealogy story by Jan Burak Schwert about her husband's accidental meeting, in a German pub, of a man who shared both his interest in genealogy and his great-great-grandfather.  The meeting itself was not planned, but the ground well-prepared, since they were in Germany, and that particular small town, searching for  information on his ancestors.  ("You fly down the street on a chance that you'll meet, And you meet—not really by chance.")  Despite the dilution of so many generations, the two looked like brothers.

I'm not likely to have such an experience in a small, foreign town, since I must go back one generation further still to find my first ancestor not born in this country, and I don't think anyone would look at me and say, "Irish."  Nonetheless there's something wonderful about connecting with long-lost relatives, even first cousins.  :)

Having been alerted to the Evangelical Manifesto by both GroshLink and John Stackhouse, I decided it was probably worth reading.  I generally shun labels other than "Christian," if I can, and "Manifesto" sounds a little radical to me, but there's a lot I can identify with in this document.  I greatly appreciate its even-handed, moderate, dare I say Christ-like approach. It may sound ho-hum to some, but I suspect that a clear and courteous statement of basic beliefs and principles is more necessary than we'd like to believe.  Others apparently read the Manifesto as a wimpy effort not to be identified with Fundamentalists, though what I see is not one-sided, but a true effort avoid both Scylla and Charybdis.

If Christians are to have any reasonable voice in the public square we need to get out from under stereotypes and "past watchful dragons." The Evangelical Manifesto seems to me to be a reasonable attempt so to do.

A friend of mine once lamented that at her church Mother's Day received more attention than Easter.  I'm sure most churches do better than that, but I'm equally sure that in many churches, at least in the United States, yesterday received more honor as Mother's Day than as Pentecost.  We celebrated both, making the Christian festival primary, but not disdaining the secular celebration.  I like the way our rector mitigates the other problem with Mother's Day celebrations, the pain they cause women suffering from infertility, by asking to stand first all great-grandmothers, then all grandmothers, then all mothers, then all daughters, till all the women of the congregation are standing, and all the men of the church pray for us.  Still, the main focus was Pentecost, and we even had a baptism to go with it.  We sang a lively and appropriate anthem by Pepper Choplin called Fill-a Me Up! for two services, though we sneaked out of the second service after the anthem to get in a few minutes of our Sunday school class.  Unfortunately, the anthem is sung after the sermon; good as the sermon was, I'd happily have skipped the second hearing to have attended more of the class, but the memory is still too strong of one occasion in which the normally long-winded preacher (in a different church) drastically and inexplicably cut short his sermon.  We didn't want to risk not returning in time.

Knowing many churches give short shrift to Pentecost, I asked Jonathan if they had done anything special for Pentecost in his church.  "No," he replied.  "Do you know what Pentecost is?"  "Yes, I do!  We saw a movie about it.  I remember the part about the paper clips...."  Hmmm.  That part of the coming of the Holy Spirit had apparently escaped me.  Later, Heather cleared up the mystery by remembering that they had seen a movie about the Holocaust.  Not quite the same thing, but you can see the confusion.  I still wonder about the paper clips, though.

On the way home from church we stopped by Lowe's and did our part to stimulate the economy—of the U.S. and, unfortunately, of China too.  Nothing against the Chinese people, but I'm not happy with their government, their cavalier attitude towards health and safety, their blatant disregard for patents and copyrights, and the fact that it's so difficult to find items that are made anywhere else but in China.

It wasn't completely an impulse purchase—I believe Porter had been ruminating on the idea for quite a while—but nearly so: Porter had to go home (fortunately only about 2.5 miles away) to exchange our smaller car for the one that could carry...A PORCH SWING! I love porch swings, and I remember many happy hours reading, napping, or just daydreaming on my grandfather's porch swing, which turned into our porch swing when he moved in with us.  Sadly, when it was my father's time to move to a place too small to accommodate the swing, it had deteriorated too much to make it worth moving 1000 miles south.  Nonetheless, that swing remained the gold standard for porch swings in my mind, and though we've looked at swings off and on over the years, I've never found one that really excited me.

Until yesterday.  That's why I was able to overlook the "Made in China" label, and the fact that Lowe's was rather disorganized and we had to wait quite a while before they actually found a swing we coudl take home.  Porter spent the afternoon assembling the swing (no small task—it might have been worth the $10 assembly fee, except that an installer wouldn't have done such a careful job), and there it is on our porch, looking very much like the picture, except without the sunshade, which we don't need.

Quite a Mother's Day present, huh?  It's as much like my grandfather's swing as makes no difference, perfect for naps, meditations, sitting side-by-side with my sweetheart in the evening, and reading aloud with grandchildren snuggling on either side.  What's more, it opens out into a bed; I foresee a "rite of passage" for the grandkids, marked by being old enough to sleep on Grandma and Dad-o's swing.  (Age is important because of the proximity of the pool.  No sleepwalkers need apply.)

Of course the very best Mother's Day presents were the cards and calls from our children and grandchildren!  No, scratch that.  The VERY best Mother's Day present is having such children and grandchildren as we do.