Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Two days ago I walked around our thawed and soggy yard
checking the flower beds for signs of life, and I saw that the daffodils had begun to poke their yellow-green pointy heads through the soil. A thin glaze of ice topped by five inches of snow covers those daffodils today.
11:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, February 27, 2001
The distant screeching sounded as if it might be coming from an automotive belt slipping under a load, but when it didn't fade away after a few seconds, I walked around to the front of the fellowship building Sunday after choir practice to discover the source of the din. Once there, I saw that snow geese blanketed the cornfield that lay between the highway and the Kansas River a half mile to the north.
And then they flew.
In ten minutes the service would begin, not nearly enough time for a flock this size to coordinate a flight. More geese than I have ever seen � aloft or grounded � rose from a field darkened by rain and snowmelt. The flock would rise, divide, swirl, drift up and then down, and finally return (for a forgotten toothbrush?) to galumph and squawk around the muddy cornfield. A few ragged and rumpled chevrons continued their flights across the river, but the main flock continued to take off and land, each time coming another hundred yards closer to my lookout point. When the service ended an hour later, the geese were gone, and the cornfield was quiet and dark again.
Today, snow quietly fills the cornfield and the skies above it.
2:00 PM CST (GMT -6)
Well, after that Aldo Leopold moment, I'll now mention that we're having another day of winter wonderland in Kansas, something I don't think I've seen so much of since arriving here over twenty years ago. The kids' school was canceled early in the morning. I was in class for an hour before the administration finally decided to dismiss classes for the day, so I drove to work on ice and returned home in a blizzard, stopping to vote in the primary for the city commission race before arriving home about 11 AM.
2:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
I spent the afternoon grading papers and shoveling snow, but I also had time to finish King's On Writing. As I've said, I'm not a fan of the horror genre, so I'm not familiar with his recent writing, but I did find this small book with its conversational tone to be very entertaining.
7:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, February 25, 2001
Can someone who can't tell the sun from the moon be trusted to identify a flock of white, goose-sized hummocks grazing in a milo field? I think not. I didn't have time to stop as I drove by them Friday, and rain glazed the driver's side window and obscured my view, so I can't say that they were snow geese or egrets grounded by the freezing rain, or white pillow cases blown from a passing laundry truck; therefore, I'm sticking with hummocks, moving hummocks.
When I mistook the sun for a daylight moon on Thursday, I envisioned a haiku after the fashion of Mother Teresa that whispers about the moon's beauty and ends with the observation that my enjoying this moon in daylight requires that others elsewhere endure a dark, moonless night.
Take my sharing that maudlin tidbit here as a token of my trust.
6:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
The purity of Taylor's insight must have been tainted at school, because it didn't happen here. Last night's dinner viewing on the small screen in the kitchen was the movie Stuart Little, based, of course, on the E.B. White classic. He opined that E.B. White's children's books (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan) were the best-written children's books he had read and that the movie version of Stuart Little was bound to be a disappointment. I'm pleased that on his own he recognizes the clarity and wit of the sainted Elwyn Brooks's writing. No, I'm glowing.
8:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
I'm off in a minute to sing "Deep River" with the Unitarians. It's a beautiful spiritual with a melody both plaintive and hopeful.
8:20 AM CST (GMT -6)
Some of the notes we hit today in choir practice could crack the tooth enamel of singer and listener alike, but when our time to perform during the service came, we had "Deep River" down. It has quickly become my favorite. Most of our members might find the lyrics incongruent with their beliefs, but I think we're capable of draping the current lyrics in our own private metaphors.
Deep River, my home is over Jordan,
Deep River, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.
Oh don't you want to go
To that gospel feast,
That promised land
Where all is peace.
I suppose we could bowdlerize these lyrics to suit our purposes ("interconnected web of all living things" isn't particularly easy to dance to, however), but I think the preferred course would be to let the melody carry its own message.
4:45 PM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, February 22, 2001
The writer of my February 21 entry on the flotsam side reads here once in a while. From this log she picked up my wish to read Jimmy Carter's new book (An Hour Before Daylight) and picked up a copy for me at her local library. The library in her nearby burg still had the large print edition available. I wouldn't ordinarily choose that edition, but I'm grateful to have the book available so promptly. As the eighteenth person on the waiting list at my own local library, I might have had to wait a year.
When I drove to work this morning, the moon � full and huge � hung in the mist, a shining silver disk. No sun or color, just clouds, haze, and moon � the silvers and grays of winter here.
This would be all well and good, except that this disk had to be the sun.
11:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, February 20, 2001
Yesterday, the adults of this household were off work. The she-who and a co-worker eventually went to Topeka to shop, while I stayed home alone to catch up on grading and to catch the boys when they returned from school.
I had both the time and the weather for a good walk (50� F when I walked, rising to 60� afterward), so I walked to the public library to return the overdue Mortimer book (Summer's Lease). While there, I picked up Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Steven King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Because I'm not a fan of the horror genre, I haven't read any other of King's books since I read Christine in the 70's. I am enjoying this bit of light nonfiction very much, but he does leave me curious about why he chose to toss in so many gratuitous expletives in a narrative that is largely reflective and autobiographical. I can admire and appreciate a good, well-timed, fricative "fuck", but his use of the expletives seems poorly timed and inappropriate, as if he were an innocent trying to fit in with a tougher crowd. Nonetheless, the book so far is very entertaining and often insightful, and it's a far more vigorous read than the Willie Morris (Good Old Boy) that I have set aside because I found it too similar to his reminiscences about his dog and his cat, books I read just last year.
3:00 PM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, February 18, 2001
Those of us designated to fleece the flock for the Unitarian's building fund (the same scurrilous lot that gathered at Brice and Shirley's home on February 3rd) met at the fellowship Saturday morning. The details of the meeting are unimportant here except to note that Brice runs a tight meeting: He convened promptly at 10 AM and let the gavel fall for the last time at 11:15 as promised. Actually, because we are a gavel-free zone, he stood and, looking like a tousled version of Garrison Keillor's older brother, he wandered about the room for a minute tucking in his shirt until he found the exit.
Brice makes a mean quick-and-dirty white chili, and had the recipe in hand when I met him yesterday morning (I'd requested the recipe when I left his home after the previous meeting), and here 'tis:
Brice's White Chili
- 1 lb dry white beans (Great Northern)
- 1 lb chicken (white meat)
- 1 large white onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- cumin, salt, and white pepper to taste
- Grated white cheese (Monterrey Jack, for instance)
- Chopped chives or green onions, and chopped green and red peppers.
In cooking the beans, add some chicken broth to the water. Cooking the beans too long might result in too much bean "cream" and too few solids, so gauge that according to your own preferences. Otherwise, this pot, like most chilies, is easy to assemble. Cook the chicken in the pot after the beans are on their way, or brown it in skillet first and add it later. Adjust the seasonings to taste.
Garnish individual servings with the white cheese, chives/onions, and bell peppers.
This recipe has fewer moving parts than some of the others for white chili that I found online, and I enjoyed this dish. It wasn't, however, a hit with the rest of the family. The quantities in Brice's recipe yielded about four quarts of chili, and three of them remain, so I'll pawn some of it off as a side dish tomorrow, and I'll down the rest myself in lunches throughout the week.
7:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Before I made the journal public, I maintained a page for new books, a "somedaymaybe" list of authors and titles that I hadn't yet gotten to but was attracted to by a review or a mention. Maybe I should do that again. Somedaymaybe.
In the meantime, a review in the NY Times today attracted me to Island: The Complete Stories, by Alistair MacLeod. For now, this is the list. The reviewer's observation that MacLeod uses accretion of physical details, inventories, to buttress his narrative recalls John McPhee's method in his nonfiction. It's a method I greatly admire in McPhee. Perhaps this other Mac handles it as capably.
4:20 PM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, February 16, 2001
I had other things on my mind, so I didn't get around to recording the fact that on Wednesday morning, when I didn't have to be in class until noon, I sat here about to abandon the February 14th entry, and at precisely 10:20 AM Karen called from the office to tell me that classes had been cancelled because of the slick road conditions. Although I love my work, the time stuck in my mind because the words "no school today" are as sweet to me today as they were in second grade.
Owen and I were home together today � a school holiday for both of us. I took my morning walk to the public library where I picked up Faulkner's Mississippi, by Willie Morris and William Eggleston, a coffeetable book, and Willie Morris' Good Old Boy, a 1971 book about his boyhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi, written for his own son, born and bred in New York City. I had initially thought to reread North Toward Home but I decided I wanted something less demanding of my limited attention. Reading these two books won't require that I focus as much; I can get away with browsing them.
While at the library, I put my name on the waiting list for the latest (and last) Inspector Morse mystery (one folk ahead of me) and for Jimmy Carter's new book, An Hour Before Daylight (eighteen folks ahead of me, alas).
On the walk home from the library, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a thing (A "thing"? It comes in a cardboard cylinder that holds 26 oz, a container that probably is the same now as it was when I was a child, and I don't know what it's called? The word "carton" doesn't suit it, does it?) of salt, which I needed this afternoon as an ingredient for a loaf of french bread.
We buy yeast in a bundle of two one-pound packages. In the making of today's loaf, I had to open a new bundle. Our supply of yeast seems to last forever, but I really don't know how long two pounds of yeast lasts here. I know that by the time I've exhausted this bundle, I will have forgotten when I opened it. By noting it's grand opening here, I can test to see if I remember that I recorded its opening here. Stay tuned. For months probably. Check back in, like, November. Remind me, maybe.
Of such banalities are good days made.
8:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, February 15, 2001
Hold your breath! Get ready! We are going to evolve again in Kansas.
Although the August �99 changes to state science standards in Kansas might have been intended to discourage the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution in high school classrooms around the state, the changes only removed teaching of evolution as a required element of the science curriculum.
The changes didn�t forbid its teaching. In fact, the evidence suggests that no local school districts in the state changed their science curriculums either to eliminate or to modify the teaching of evolution. That�s not to say that the changes were good, because certainly some individual public school teachers might have been more cautious than the scientific facts warrant in educating their classes about Darwinian theory and its evolved successors.
And the changes certainly required a significant expenditure of financial and political capital that might have been spent more wisely elsewhere.
But last fall, voters removed a few of the religious conservatives on the state board of education who had voted for the ouster of evolution as a required element of the curriculum, and yesterday the newly constituted board voted to reinstate the theory of evolution as a required component of the state science curriculum.
1:00 PM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, February 11, 2001
When I wrote in Thursday's log that Taylor would return to school on Friday, I had forgotten that Friday was a district-wide in-service day for the teachers, so there would be no school for him or Owen that day. And I wasn't sufficiently prescient to realize that one of the bigger snows we've had in recent years would fall on the layer of ice that was falling as I typed and would confine us all to the house.
Many businesses in town took a snow day on Friday. My own classes were cancelled (even the Thursday evening one), as were those at KSU, where there had been no snow days in twenty-two years according to radio news reports. The public library closed for the day as well.
We dug in here at home, shoveling the walks outside after the snow stopped falling, and then hunkering down inside to read or nap, enjoying the luxury of an unexpected day off.
After shoveling the front walk, I did nothing more strenuous Friday than turn a page in a New Yorker and keep an eye on the seed in the bird/squirrel feeders.
Several cardinal and junco pairs have visited the feeders, and even a mourning dove or two has appeared there, but the usually more abundant sparrows are dining elsewhere. Their absence from our feeders this winter worries me.
Owen and Taylor spent most of Friday and Saturday building fortifications and digging caves in the snow. Owen moves mounds of snow, Taylor compacts the pile with a full-body press, and then they both lie prone in the snow to scrape out caves and tunnels in their mound.
The newscasters on the local radio stations report that five inches of snow fell, but the depths I saw when I scraped the sidewalks appeared to be more nearly eight to ten inches. That's not a lot compared to the snowfalls that folks in snowier regions see regularly, but it's a lot for this part of Kansas. And it's snow enough that the boys can spend days face down in snow banks learning about the cold and the warmth of snow, an education our typical light dusting doesn't offer them.
7:55 AM CST (GMT -6)
Thursday, February 8, 2001
Quick notes:
Two books in the "Briefly Noted" section of the February 12th New Yorker caught my eye last night: Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood; and Kim Todd's Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America.
Carter's lastest book, a memoir, is receiving the kind of attention a new book by Willie Morris might if he were still alive, a kind of attention that transcends Carter's status as a former president. Todd's book is about the introduction of non-native (animal?) species into North America.
Taylor will observe his school's pajama day at home today. He might return to school tomorrow. Of course, I said that yesterday too. The good weather yesterday (it was still 60� F here yesterday at 6 PM) might have raised his spirits, as it did mine, but the flu still hasn't released him.
This morning the precipitation started as a fog, but it has progressed from mist to drizzle. As the temperature drops throughout the day today, the roads here should become slick before the big snow arrives tonight or tomorrow. I've been spoiled in recent years by the mild winters we've enjoyed, but this winter has given us more than our share of snow and gray days.
1:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Wednesday, February 7, 2001
"'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy", a site new to me, collects and archives mondegreens � misheard or misinterpreted lyrics. The site takes its name from the Hendrix lyric from "Purple Haze" ("kiss this guy" should properly be "kiss the sky"), and it lists hundreds of mondegreens. It also links to another great source of mondegreens, "The ants are my friends" ("is blowing in the wind"). Both sites are a little visually cluttered, but they feed my inner geek.
7:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
I had no classroom responsibilities until noon today, so I stayed home with Taylor while he spent another day recovering from the fever and aches that befell him yesterday. I graded papers and he stayed close by.
Once in a while, he would sigh wistfully "Now they're finishing music," or "Now they're returning from the computer lab." He really misses the class activities and hopes to return to school tomorrow to participate in pajama day, when students and teachers will attend school in pajamas or robes.
During a break, I struck up a conversation about whether the apparent flavor of a cup of coffee varied with the size of the mug it's served in. After a perfunctory test we have concluded that the flavor is better in a smaller mug. (Small matters amuse small minds.)
During our coffee survey, he opined that reading is important in any job. He expanded that theme for a minute or two while I marveled at how he had managed to say that without sounding like Eddie Haskell.
4:45 PM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, February 6, 2001
We attended a performance by the two bands at Owen's middle school last night. For the first time they played in the gym instead of in the "cafetorium." From the school's standpoint, this means fewer folding chairs must be put away; the audience, however, must suffer some bleacherbutt.
The big brass (two trombones and two tubas) in Owen's group of forty-five kids played very well. The band members are grouped for these performances not by ability but by the hour that they attend band during the school day, i.e., either first or second hour. Owen's second-hour group consistently outperforms the first-hour band. The instrumental music instructor tries to balance the talent across both classes equally, but the second-hour group clearly performs far better than the first-hour group. This was true of the fall semester grouping, too. I don't know what to attribute the disparity in their performance levels to; the difference is too striking to lay off to my parental pride.
I had stacks of grading to complete last night, but by the time we returned from the middle school, I was feeling pretty unfocused, so I turned in early. My five AM wake-up allowed me to catch up a bit, but I'm already bushed and looking forward to the end of the day, and one more class looms ahead of me tonight. IthinkIcanIthinkIcanIthinkIcan. IthinkIcan foresee an early release.
Taylor woke up this morning complaining that he was sick, so we took his temperature. Finding that he had a fever, we kept him out of school today. He is the only one of our boys to complain convincingly and sincerely that he always gets sick on the days when they're doing something fun. He is genuinely distressed that he is missing school. Today, the fun activity is a "bit of technical writing" (as he describes it). They must compare two advertisements from competing businesses and design a new ad to replace the one they regard as inferior. Boy, I'd get up from a sickbed for that one. Life just isn't fair.
4:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, February 4, 2001
A neighbor a block away has sold his house, and he and his wife will move into a local retirement community next month, around the time when in past seasons he has planted onions and potatoes in his garden and has spread manure on his asparagus bed. Although he was able to walk up and down the steepest hill in town several times a week until he had his second knee-replacement surgery last year, he and his wife felt that keeping up the house had become too much trouble now that they're both over ninety.
Now Thornton and Edna are giving away household items that won't fit into their new apartment and that their own hordes of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren have probably already declined. From Thornton and Edna we have received a child's toy, the kind of toy Rube Goldberg would appreciate. It's probably about twenty years old, and maybe it cost ten bucks when new. A small, motorized tractor grinds deliberately around a looping, plastic track, picking up and dropping off marbles at various places around its closed, little system. After the tractor starts, the game will go on perpetually (for the life of two AA alkalines).
We received this from Thornton in pieces, without instructions, without even a picture to guide us in reassembling it. I was sure that all the pieces were there, because Thornton is very fastidious in all he does, and had even included two new batteries for the tractor. Since the accident (i.e., the last fifty years of living), I have lost much of my ability to generate the kind of mental imagery necessary to assemble something like this that must be assembled in a specific order and that probably has only one solution, but Taylor is still competent, and we both have a Y chromosome, a state which discourages close attention to written instructions anyway.
Although I was not hopeful that we would succeed or that Taylor would enjoy the toy if we did succeed, we set to work. After a little consideration, a little logic (What does this do? What happens here? What has to happen before that happens? What fits?), and thirty minutes, we had the sumgun cleaned, assembled, and working perfectly, thanks mostly to Taylor's intuitions.
When we finished, Taylor was enthralled. Although he owns two Game Boys and many glitzier toys, he exclaimed throughout the rest of the day that the person who designed this simple toy must have been a genius.
Takes one to know one, Kiddo.
Thanks, Thornton. I thought this toy was trash, but I think you knew it was treasure.
As good as that memory is, I'm not sure it's the best of the day, but this recollection of what I do regard as the best memory of Saturday must be brief and sketchy. Saturday evening, I attended a dinner meeting of the fundraising committee for the UU fellowship at the home of Bryce and Shirley. Nancy P. attended without her husband of over fifty years, and because I was also alone, I became her dinner partner. I admire Nancy and Charlie for many reasons, but the reason that comes to the fore in this recollection is the character of their apparently very good and clearly enduring marriage.
Midway through the meal, in the soft, cultured drawl that Earl Hamner used when he spoke at the end of each episode of The Waltons, an accent that in Nancy's case comes from somewhere between Lynchburg and Appomattox, Virginia, and that permits her to say house as if it were hoose, she said wistfully and apparently apropos of nothing, as if it were a sudden realization, "Charlie can't cook."
That Bryce, the male of this household, had prepared the white chili might have prompted her observation, but the way she spoke suggested that the thought had arisen unbidden from a deeper source.
"Charlie can't cook."
10:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, February 3, 2001
Well, that's a fine kettle of fish! Look at the way this week � in fact, most of January � got away from me. In a later pair of entries on the flotsam side of this place, I'll probably explain why the month got away from me so easily. One entry has a few notes about depression (my own, I think) and another will recall a local friend who died yesterday.
(Why why why do I make such promises!)
For now, I'll just update with a pair of items about Taylor.
First, he reigned once again as the fourth grade spelling champ at his school's spelling bee preliminaries. Today, eleeomosynary; tomorrow, mayonaisse or mayonnaisse or maybe mayonnaise. Hell, Miracle Whip.
Second, early last year, with money he'd earned from chores and neighborhood cat-sitting and the like, Taylor bought himself a new Game Boy, but life in our jungle requires great craftiness to protect favored toys from being appropriated by older brothers, so Taylor hid it in a cabinet, safe from harm. And then he forgot about it. He forgot not only about the Game Boy, but also about his latest hiding spot for it.
This Christmas, we replaced the Game Boy with a new one, figuring that the first one was lost forever. Yesterday, the she-who of this household uncovered the original Game Boy when she was excavating a kitchen cabinet. There it rested, right under the plastic vomit he'd covered it with, beneath the electric waffle maker that we've used twice in twenty years.
Now he owns two Game Boys and he has his plastic vomit back. Life is good.
9:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
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