Quote for a Sunday: What breaks us apart

"At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.” ~~ Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Mama Squirrel's "Reading Week"

I am on a two-week break between "Foundations of Adult Education" (course #1) and "Facilitating Adult Learning" (course #2). Last week for me was mostly writing/editing/formatting/publishing. This week is "vacation," so I'm catching up on reading and other things.

Mama Squirrel's Reading List

The Meaning of Adult Education, by Eduard Lindeman (1885-1953)

The Cocktail Party, by T.S. Eliot. I just finished this, and I won't pretend that I understood it all, but it was interesting.

Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song, by Brian Wren

Sabbath, by Wayne Muller

The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections, by Frederick Buechner

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee (a birthday gift last month)

Quote for the day: "What we furnished home with"

"Like everybody else, what we furnished home with was ourselves, in other words. We furnished it with the best that we knew and the best that we were, and we furnished it also with everything that we were not wise enough to know and the shadow side of who we were as well as the best side, because we were not self-aware enough to recognize those shadows and somehow both to learn from them and to disempower them...It was the little world we created to be as safe as we knew how to make it..." ~~ Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home 

Let's talk about holiday clothes (I am not Red Riding Hood)

Christmas clothes in my olden days

Christmas clothes now

"Are you going to be Red Riding Hood?" asked the thrift store cashier.

Umm, no...but it's December and this red, buttoned, fringed cape was trying to get my attention all during my volunteer shift. Hello, see me hanging over here? I'd look good with grey clothes, you know? I'm very festive! But warm too!

So when I was done sorting books, I tried on the cape, and bought it along with a navy scarf (photo) and a Frederick Buechner book.

You can always wrap a cape instead of buttoning it.

It will go with pretty much all my skirts and pants, and a couple of dresses, since they're mostly medium to dark grey (plus blue jeans). I won't bother with photos, because all you'd really see is the cape.

What else do I have to wear to church, to a concert, or to a not-too-fancy dinner out? (We are not anticipating "cocktail parties" or anything like that.)

Revolve Dress from Encircled, with a scarf and the heels I thrifted last week

The dress becomes a top to go with the maxi skirt from the thrift store. I would add some beads to this.

And I could add a grey poncho on top of that. Or make it grey dress pants or cords insead of the skirt.

The wine-coloured maxi skirt again, dressed down a little with a pullover and beads

Well, that was fun! And better than "The up-dated Peasant Look [that] features shape-keeping bonded acrylics." (Ghosts of Christmas past, for sure.)

Quote for the day: two words to live by

"Pay attention. As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that. And as a talisman or motto for that journey in search of a homeland, which is what faith is, I would settle for that too." ~~ Frederick Buechner, "Faith and Fiction," in The Clown in the Belfry

Quote for the day: Simply the news

"The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us; by whatever gifts he or she has of imagination, eloquence, simple candor, to create images of life through which we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives. Before the Gospel is good news, it is simply the news that that's the way it is, whatever day it is of whatever year."

~~ Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth

Quote for the day: the reason for the journey

"To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake--even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death--that little by little we start to come alive."

Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

Wednesday Hodgepodge: Spaghetti Dreams Edition

Notes from our Hodgepodge hostess:  "Here are the questions to this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge. Answer on your own blog, then hop back here tomorrow to share answers with the universe." 

1. What's the last thing you did that could be described as 'taxing'? 

Shovelling slushy snow when we should have been seeing dry pavement.

 2. If you could plant a garden of anything, what would be in it? 



Oh, that's fun...real or imaginary? Something to eat? How about...muffin bushes?

Or if you were serious: I would plant some tomatoes, zucchini and peppers, and hope that the bugs and critters didn't get to them before I did. We must be the only people on the planet who don't have much luck with zucchini.

 3. April 10-16 is National Library Week...will you celebrate with a visit to your nearest library? When did you last make a trip to the library? What are you reading right now? What's one title on your want-to-read list? 

I am having trouble even getting to our regular library because of road construction; and the one further away has to be a special trip. So I've been splitting my reading between what's already on the shelf, and the library books I can download for free through Overdrive. But the sun is shining and I might try walking over there today.

On the list of books I don't own, and that I don't think are at our library, is The Singing Bowl, poems by Malcolm Guite. And along with that, I want to actually read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Apprentice (our oldest) read it for homeschool, but she read it to herself and I never got through the whole thing.

 4. Share a saying or an old wives tale you heard while growing up, you believed to be true or that you paid attention to 'just in case'? 

That eating anything strange before bed would give you bad dreams. It always seemed to come true in stories.

Peter and the Story Girl, so it appeared, had wooed wild dreams to their pillows by the simple device of eating rich, indigestible things before they went to bed. Aunt Olivia knew nothing about it, of course. She permitted them only a plain, wholesome lunch at bed-time. But during the day the Story Girl would smuggle upstairs various tidbits from the pantry, putting half in Peter's room and half in her own; and the result was these visions which had been our despair. 

"Last night I ate a piece of mince pie," she said, "and a lot of pickles, and two grape jelly tarts. But I guess I overdid it, because I got real sick and couldn't sleep at all, so of course I didn't have any dreams. I should have stopped with the pie and pickles and left the tarts alone. Peter did, and he had an elegant dream that Peg Bowen caught him and put him on to boil alive in that big black pot that hangs outside her door. He woke up before the water got hot, though." L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

 5. Are you a fan of onions? Garlic? Ginger? What's a dish you love that contains one, two or all three items listed? 

Of the three, ginger. But honey-garlic chicken is good too.

 6. Where does nurturing end and indulging begin? What are some skills or qualities you think a person needs to posess in order to be viewed as mature? 

Some friends and I had a discussion about this awhile ago. Indulging is a parent having to phone their adult offspring's boss to say that said offspring is too sick to come in to work, since if offspring was not living at home, they'd have to do the phoning themselves anyway. Most of us agreed with that, although I was willing to plump for "well, there might be circumstances..."

 7. What leading figure in any field would you like to hear speak, and why? 

Oh, I can think of several writers and thinkers and teachers I'd wish would make a stop by here.

How about Frederick Buechner?



 8. Insert your own random thought here.

We get a NYT section in the weekend paper, and there was a column this week that mentioned the idea of "erasing" people, or groups of people, that we don't like. Not physically killing them, but, perhaps, moving them out of our awareness. We were watching the Mr. Selfridge television series (which I have mixed feelings about, but we're still watching it), and one storyline in the first season concerned a store employee who was let go for petty theft, who then could not get another job and was so desperate that she threw herself in front of an underground train. This caused her co-workers to wonder if they were wrong to try to "erase" this woman from their lives, because of her mistake. One of the best articles I've read this week is Compassion Needs Imagination at the Circe Institute blog. The last church sermon I heard spoke about the definition of grace (shouldn't every sermon be about grace? The Lutherans at least would say yes), and grace definitely includes compassion. The article quotes Atticus Finch and his attempt to define compassion to his daughter:

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—”

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Which, we hope, is one of the things that reading does for us.

Illustration from Many Moons.

Linked from the Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

Quote for the day: Where your feet take you

"I say that if you want to know who you are, if you are more than academically interested in that particular mystery, you could do a lot worse than look to your feet for an answer. Introspection in the long run doesn't get you very far because every time you draw back to look at yourself, you are seeing everything except for the part that drew back, and when you draw back to look at the part that drew back to look at yourself, you see again everything except for what you are really looking for. And so on. Since the possibilities for drawing back seem to be infinite, you are, in your quest to see yourself whole, doomed always to see infinitely less than what there will always remain to see. Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are." ~~ Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

Time for another book binge?

I go through times when I read a lot in a short time. Then I do something else for awhile. Make Christmas presents. Write things. Then I need to fuel up again.

Right now it's time for some reading. We went yardsaling yesterday and I found a copy of Frederick Buechner's The Alphabet of Grace. I've already finished it (it was that good). (Review coming.) There are a few books sitting on my shelf that got halfway done, so I guess those are next.

To be alive, to be really alive (Frederick Buechner quote)

I found this in Buechner's memoir The Sacred Journey, where he remembers a hungry, cold, wet supper during his infantry training. Just before this he has been talking about St. Francis of Assisi and his Canticle to the Sun--"the madness of throwing away everything he ever had or ever hoped to have for love of the creation no less than of the creator...."

"With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air."

Saturday's yard saling and thrift shopping and just not paying too much overall

We are trying hard to stick to useful stuff, not just frivolous...like the giant ceramic walnut with a squirrel on top that I saw at a yard sale yesterday morning and left right where it was. (Kind of like this one.) (Now if I had seen this one instead, I might not have been able to leave it there.)

What did we bring home?

The Bible Book of Lists, by Joy MacKenzie and Shirley Bledsoe--looks very useful

The Story of the Church, by Walter Russell Bowie

The Sacred Journey: a memoir of early days, by Frederick Buechner

Little Women Living Classics kit--not a book, a "treasure chest" with embroidery stuff, a card game, map of Civil War battles and so on--just a couple of the paper dolls and a booklet of game instructions are missing (OK, that IS practical. Not that things are missing, but that there's a brand-new mini-embroidery set in there plus all the historical stuff.)

See Through History: Ancient Rome, by Simon James (an illustrated book with transparencies)

A big boxful of ribbon for $2

Some knit fabric that Ponytails bought--how cool is that? (It's something she wanted.)

About $50 worth of groceries from Giant Tiger--enough to hold us for awhile

A pair of lace-up runners for Crayons, also from Giant Tiger

Graph paper and page protectors for The Apprentice's fall term, also from Giant Tiger

And The Apprentice brought me home three free Family Circle magazines that the hair salon was cleaning out. I appreciated that very much.

What has Mama Squirrel read this year?

Besides purely school books?

Mama Squirrel made up a reading list last December of 20 Library Books to read in 2009. In some cases I never did locate the book and ended up reading something else by the same author or another book on the same topic. Here they are, with the ones I finished in bold and the ones I at least started in italics:

1. Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses
2. Story of French
3. Freakonomics
4. Half in the Sun: an anthology of Mennonite Writing
5. Bumblebee Economics
6. Of This Earth (Rudy Wiebe) (it's usually out)
7. King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the man who saved geometry
8. The Bone Sharps: a novel
9. Rough Crossings: Britain, the slaves, and the American Revolution
10. De Niro's Game
11. The Skystone (some heavy-duty adult content)
12. Black Swan Green
13. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
14. Three-Day Road
15. A Most Damnable Invention: dynamite, nitrates, and the making of the modern world
16. On Chesil Beach
17. Divisadero (I got halfway through and couldn't handle any more)
18. The Library at Night
19. The Man Who Forgot How to Read (Engel) (I keep looking for it and it's always out)
20. The Writing Life (Annie Dillard)


I did finish several of them--and started a few others but didn't get all the way through due either to lack of interest or, in a couple of cases, getting very grossed out at what currently passes for acceptable content in mainstream books. I'm not sure whether to start a new library list for this year or just keep working on this one--I think I might keep working on this one, since I haven't yet got to that tantalizing book about dynamite.

So along with those library books that I did locate and read, and some favourite re-reads (noted), here is my Yes I Read It list for 2009, so far. At the minute I've dropped everything else so that I can work on Dawn to Decadence (and read Steph's slow cooker book).

A good chunk of the Bible
Plutarch: Life of Theseus, Life of Romulus
Marva Collins' Way

Books on writing:

How to Grow a Novel
Reading like a Writer (Prose)
Turning Life into Fiction (Hemley)

Books on Real Life:

Fast Food Nation
Discover Your Inner Economist

Books on homing:

Tightwad Gazette books (re-read)
Two "Lasagna Gardening" books
Introducing Whole Foods Cooking (Gregg)
Welcome Home, by Emilie Barnes

Books on books:

84, Charing Cross Road / The Duchess of Bloomsbury
Inside Prince Caspian (Brown)

Books about people:

The Small Woman
King of Infinite Space

Fiction:

Most of the Mitford books (re-read)
Daughter of Time (re-read)
Kingfishers Catch Fire (Godden) (re-read)
Oh What a Paradise It Seems (Cheever)
The Moonstone
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Goldengrove (Prose) (did not like this one at all)
Burglar on the Prowl (Block) (sometimes Mama Squirrel likes a good scary mystery)
The Heart of Midlothian (Scott)
The Silence (Endo)
Deep River (Endo)
Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom (Paterson)
The Storm (Buechner)
Jeanne, fille du roy (Martel)
Some of Tolstoy's stories
Some of Chekhov's stories
Peace Shall Destroy Many (Wiebe)
The Living (Dillard)
The Stone Diaries (Shields)
Jayber Crow
Four of John Buchan's Richard Hannay spy novels (very racist but fun)

Books partly read:

Future Grace, by John Piper
Begin Here (Barzun)
Soul Survivor (re-read) (Yancey)
The Brothers K, by David James Duncan (I'm still working on this)
Make It Fast, Cook It Slow, by Stephanie O'Dea (ditto)
From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun (ditto)

February Reading List

In January I was very disciplined. I read one book, then I started another one. This month I keep starting books and then starting other ones. Sometimes it's more fun that way.

I'm crossing them out as they get done.

Already reading:

The Heart of Mid-Lothian, by Sir Walter Scott
Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen
Rough Crossings, by Simon Schama
Godric, by Frederick Buechner
Plutarch's Life of Theseus
Deep River, by Shusaku Endo

Waiting to start:

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard
Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, by Katherine Paterson

Books Read in 2009: The Storm, by Frederick Buechner

"It was a miracle, Willow had said, that Violet Sickert had been clever enough to bully Dalton Maxwell into coming to the island for the birthday weekend, and a miracle too that he had let himself be bullied. Violet Sickert was really not very clever, and Dalton Maxwell was of all men least tractable. Neverthleless it had happened, and by calling it miraculous she sensed the working of some behind-the-scenes power that now and then made things happen in a way that was different from the way they would have happened otherwise. She thought about the death of her first husband as another case in point. Who could have foreseen it--a healthy young man done in by something as ridiculous as having his appendix out? Yet that's the way it had fallen out....Who could say how different her life would have been if he had bounced out of the hospital with nothing more than a small pink scar? At times such as that, the power seemed to work as darkly as some deep-sea current that could suddenly, or so she had heard, drag down to destruction an entire ship and its crew. But at other times it seemed to be almost friendly."--Frederick Buechner, The Storm

Can you ever have too many versions of The Tempest? This is the second one I've read in the past year.

You don't have to have read Shakespeare's play to make sense of the book; it's only loosely based on it; but it does help to give the characters and setting some context. There's an island, although it's a summer resort for the wealthy, and nobody's shipwrecked on it. There's an 70ish man named Kenzie Maxwell who is struggling with events in his past--I suspect he's more or less Frederick Buechner. There are the equivalents of the evil Sycorax (Miss Sickert), the handsome but aimless young prince Ferdinand (Nandy), the monster Caliban (Calvert, whom one character says looks like a werewolf), and the sprite Ariel (Kenzie's windsurfing stepson Averill). There are also traces of Shakespeare in the storm, the boat, strange music in the air--or of the air-- (Rumer Godden also used that heavily in her version), and Kenzie's bathrobe decorated with stars and moons.

One reviewer commented that Buechner spent more time developing his characters than he did really doing anything with them, and I agree that the action and conflict, such as it is, all gets resolved quite quickly in the last few pages of the book. Maybe like a Shakespeare play. But still, I liked it a lot--probably more than anything else I've read this month. I think it's because of the affection he shows towards even his most unsympathetic characters, more even than we'd like him to give some of them. It's also interesting to read yet another book with older-than-average main characters (Jan Karon's Mitford novels come to mind, and The Bone Sharps was another one).

In that and in other ways (the emphasis on fractured or patchwork families, the older brother who can only hold things together if there are no surprises and variations), this book reminds me of some of Anne Tyler's novels. For Buechner, the line is very finely drawn between saints and sinners; in that, his characters are somewhat like Flannery O'Connor's. I also read a review that compared some of his work to that of Charles Williams, but I haven't read Charles Williams so can't give an opinion on that.

You can read the book fairly quickly, but there are things you'll want to come back to--some of the musings about destiny, and the place of what some call the numinous or the fates, some call the workings of God, in the way things turn out.

A postscript: Right after I posted this, Mr. Fixit was listening to Supertramp's album Breakfast in America, and some of the lyrics really jumped out at me in connection with this book. Maybe it's just the clichéed thinking of someone still somewhat mired in the 1980's, but maybe not.

Where are you from?--Frederick Buechner on Story

This is what I was looking for when I stumbled over that Grinch post.

"The Child in Us"

"We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still....The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into the world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again...."

Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, included as the "May 6" reading in Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner.

Saturday yard-saling

Mr. Fixit was feeling well enough for a short jaunt to a church sale this morning.

He found a walkie-talkie. Crayons found a Barbie. Ponytails found a couple of things.

Mama Squirrel found books, because this particular church sale almost always has a wonderful book corner. Also a brand-new set of Christmas-coloured table runner/napkins/placemats which Mama Squirrel would have no intention of putting on her Christmas table but which might work very well for gift bags or other Christmas-fabric crafts. Also a brand-new set of two cocoa mugs plus cocoa mix, final destination still unknown. Also a couple of part-sets of nice stationery.

The books are:

Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case (Mama Squirrel and Crayons just finished Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang) (Review comments: These are fairly amusing but contain a bit too much grade-school potty humour for MS's taste. The Hooded Fang is probably the best of the three.)

The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler (M.S.'s copy disappeared awhile back)
Hymns for Primary Worship
Freedom and Beyond, by John Holt
Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner
Making Men Whole, by J.B. Phillips
Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook, by Joetta Handrich Schlabach (the 1991 followup to The More-with-Less Cookbook)

And my favourites out of the pile:

Selected Burns for Young Readers, published by Geddes and Grosset. Amblesiders and Martha fans, check this one out! Nice big print! Glossary of Scottish words in the back! An introductory biography of Burns, and introductions to each of the poems! Lovely.

Songs of the Saviour, and Out of Doors Nature Songs, both by Annie Johnson Flint. Paper-covered, tied-with-cord booklets of her poems, published I-don't-know-when by Evangelical Publishers in Toronto--I'm guessing the early twentieth century, though.