London 22.12.10: Christmas Markets and Nutmeg Candies

Sitting now in a Pain Quotidien in Covent Garden, waiting for our evening musical, “Oliver,” to begin.  It’s just up the street.  We bought tickets at the half-price booth early today.

We ate in one of these Pain Quotidien places in New York last time we were there, near the Strand bookstore, and liked it.  Getting a table this evening was an adventure.

London 22.12.10: Mince Pies and Panforte Farces

I have no proof that the young man at the coffee shop yesterday was Canadian.  Save for those shibboleths that supposedly set the speech of much of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and B.C. apart from the speech of the upper half of the U.S.—oot and aboot—the two speech patterns sound much the same to me.  Except that he said bēēn.  And that, of course, could be a self-conscious adoption of the standard English pronunciation by an American living in England.

London 21.12.2010: Second Sleep and Queue Police

Now in London.  We walked a bit in Kensington High Street yesterday after we arrived, and then I crashed.  Slept from 5 P.M. to 8 A.M. with a little wake-up period around midnight, when I drank a cup of decaf coffee and had a comforting tiny dram of brandy, thinking of Pepys and others (Shakespeare?), who write about the second sleep, when people got up in the middle of the night on long nights, ate, drank, smoked, made love, visited with neighbors, and then returned for a second sleep. 

London 19.12.2010: Atlantic Wastes and Lambs of God

Plane, en route to Atlanta, where we’ll board a flight later today for London.

One of the lessons of growing old is that one no longer has the luxury of a wide range of personae to try on in various situations.  This is not due to lack of imagination or opportunity.

Denver 20.11.2001: Cathedrals and Statehouses

The sad little knick knacks purveyed by tourist shops.  They must be a vestige of the pilgrimage days, when you returned home with the palm in your hat, the city emblem nailed to your walking stick?

Writing in the basement of the Colorado state capitol, where we've taken refuge after having found the library closed.  Monumental architecture everywhere in Christian lands is such a fluid expression of the merging of throne and altar.  Take the cathedral, turn it 90◦ in the direction of neo-classicism, and voila! you have a state capitol.

Today's USA Today has a letter from a man in Nacogdoches, Texas, proposing that it be made constitutional that the U.S. president be required to be a military veteran.  Sure.  Why not go whole hog and become an outright military dictatorship?  One that bans contraception, requires women to stay at home, and jails homosexuals?  Let's become our enemy: let's become, world, a congeries of ugly macho nation-states staring each other down and trying to outdo the other in cruelty and steely resolve.

Salt Lake City 4.6.2000: Nameless Others and History

Salt Lake City: watching a t.v. film of the Lewis-Clark expedition last night.  Clark took along a slave, and it was him the Indians found exotic.  They gave him some honored name that I've forgotten.

This story told by an Indian, a descendant of the tribe who gave hospitality to the explorers.  It has remained vivid memory for them.

And that makes me think of when and what we remember, in history.  We recall the Lewises, the Clarks, but not the thousands of nameless laborers who made their memorable accomplishments possible.  My passion as an historian has always been to give those others faces, to make their voices speak.

I am an historian.  I am a theologian. I'm a writer.  Those words trip off the tongue.  I like the sound of them.  Are they true?  Is it possible to make them true?  My strategy: detach if I can, slow down, and relinquish expectations.  See what happens then.

Surrealistic conversations all around.  I listen shamelessly for . . . a clue?  It starts on the shuttle to the airport.  Three young women I first encountered in the hotel accompany us.  The one who fascinates me has a mask-like face, lips as if they've been permanently pushed apart, open, to reveal a gaping set of teeth, more snarl than smile.  She piles her things outside the elevator, a luggage cart occluding the button, so that I have to excuse myself to push it.  She doesn't acknowledge my apology, looks blankly angry that I've disturbed her.

In the shuttle, I realize there's simply nothing going on in the head behind the blank stare, the pouting full lips, the scary white teeth.  A mindless stream of chatter, about the "product" she and the other women sell.  They've been to a convention where they learn to sell "product" better.  Heather, that's my new color.  I plan to make all my demos heather--the "ea" pronounced like a short  "a," the "r" mercilessly extruded between the clenched white teeth: hatherrrrr!

Then in the airport a woman who could be Bimbo #1's double breaks in line ahead of us.  As we dutifully follow the snake formed by nylon loops, she skips a whole coil of the snake by opening the nylon barriers with supreme insouciance, as if the world entitles her to be at the head of the line.  Like Bimbo #1, she's in a blue denim shorts jumper with a white t-shirt beneath.  The woman she's with has bright red hair, apparently natural, a lime-green t-shirt, and eyes made exotic by a red line of eye shadow on the lower lids, badly applied.

And now in the waiting room, the man beside us casually dials his cell phone, speaking loudly to the air, "Mornin,'" for all the world as if he's in an acoustically isolated room, carrying on a monologue to which no one else is listening.  It's all about outfits his friends were wearing this morning, bright Hawaiian shirts.  As he ends the call, a man behind, talking to a child, says, "Yeah, I once had a Pepsi there," as though one remembers places visited by the soft drinks--the specific soft drinks--one once consumed within their limits.

Ozarks 18.10.03: Crescent Moons and Moss-Clad Alders

At Kat's Rest, lying on cushions on the porch.  I definitely feel her spirit here, and want to have a formal dedication ceremony for the cabin.  As we drove on the road up to the creek, a sudden image of her in my mind, and the thought--as if I were in inner dialogue with someone who had just asked which of my aunts influenced me the most--that her spirit was so strong.  It's that that has influenced me.

I don't know precisely what I mean by strength of spirit.  I don't have it.  What she had was rare.  It wasn't fierceness, precisely, but a quiet determination that could be fierce if necessary.  Self-determination: she knew her mind, what she wanted and needed, and never wavered once her mind was fixed.  She was not selfish, though the partiality of her excuses for those to whom she was devoted could appear selfish.  But she herself never benefited from that lavishly bestowed loyalty.

Her convictions and determinations were hammered out in the depths of her soul, presumably.  I say presumably, because she kept her own counsel.  Pensive as a nun: no one was privy to what went on in those depths.  She was not garrulous, and had the dignity of a queen addressing commoners: just this much and no no more might be said; just this far and no further.

I am very unlike her.  I blab all.  My soul struggles are spangled across the front pages of the paper, as with my grandmother.  Never a secret anguish, never an unaccentuated sigh (and the watching eye to see how my drama affects my audience).

Kat loved nature because she knew how to be: silent, impassive, patient, soaking it all in without appearing avid or rushed.  She would have liked this place.  She would not have admitted it.  She would be very happy we could obtain it by her gift to us.  

And here's what I see as we arrive and settle in: deep blue sky.  A crescent moon is high in the west, though it's just past noon.  From where I lie, I see the green pine-clad western slope, the brown and yellow oaks to the north swaying in the slight breeze, the mahogany red dogwood with its enameled red berries on the south side of the creek.  The wind chimes tinkle a haunting, faint tune.

In the shade on the north bank of the stream is the alder close to the porch, now bare of leaves.  Its black and silver limbs are an intricate tracery, the moss on its trunk a beautiful thing, but an ominous indicator of the tree's soon demise, and an explanation of its unhealthiness.

Klinkenborg, Rural Life: "In April what you see are our own intentions.  In October you see their unexpected wreck and fulfillment" (p. 171).  And: "A garden is so full of cheap sermons" (p. 172).