I Love a Good Wedding

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A young friend of mine (a former student) was married on Saturday.  Loree’s wedding to Andrew was simply splendid.

It began with multiple groups of grandparents processing down the aisle to Moonlight Sonata.  Exquisite music.  I immediately thought, “Why have I never played this for a wedding before?”  When we thanked the pianist after the ceremony, Summer said “I told Loree that I regretted getting married without a bit of Debussy.” 

The kiss: what I loved is the look Andrew gave Loree–a full thirty seconds I’d guess–drinking in her smile before the kiss.  We got the sense that this remarkable young man is deliberate in all he does.

The knot: the two fathers brought up a large coil of nautical-grade rope.  The bride and groom took these two ropes and made a lover’s knot.

After the bride and groom tied the knot the wedding party all tugged on the rope to tighten the knot.  It was festive and fun!

A favorite moment was meeting Andrew at the end of the receiving line.   Smiling, he extended his hand and was genuinely pleased to meet Curt and me.  But when Loree leaned into him and said, “She wrote the words,” Andrew changed into hug mode.  Of course the words are not my words, but a quote I wrote in a card.

Here are the words.

All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in the company of my friends–
to talk and laugh and do each other kindnesses;
read pleasant books together,
pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again;
differ without rancor, as a man might differ with himself,
and when most rarely dissension arose
find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it;
teach each other and learn from each other;
be impatient for the return of the absent,
and welcome them with joy on their homecoming;
these and such like things,
proceeding from our hearts
as we gave affection and received it back,
and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes,
and a thousand other pleasing ways,
kindled a flame which infused our very souls
and of many made us one.
This is what men value in friends.

~ St. Augustine

Making a Good Place to Live

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The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or
agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills.  It is not bred
in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to
the next, it is lost. 113


There is a main road–not Main Street–that grew out of our small town, much like roads spawned in every town.  We call it “the Strip”.  Fast food restaurants, gas stations, box stores, service-oriented businesses and a few banks populate two miles of avenue.  Buildings are plopped at random angles to the road, all out of joint with their neighbors; instead of continuity there is discord, and most structures are simply ugly. 

I appreciated reading The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape because it helped me answer why an ugly urban/suburban landscape is so typical, so, so common.  The quick answer is a lack of connectedness, a lack of respect for the surroundings, a premium on convenience and a strong shot of individualism.

The organic wholeness of the small town was a result of common, everyday attention to details, of intimate care for things intimately used.  The discipline of its physical order was based not on uniformity for its own sake, but on a consciousness of, and respect for, what was going on next door.  Such awareness and respect were not viewed as a threat to individual identity but as necessary for the production of amenity, charm, and beauty.  These concepts are now absent from our civilization.  We have become accustomed to living in places where nothing relates to anything else, where disorder, unconsciousness, and the absence of respect reign unchecked. 185

Cars, televisions and the resulting cultural decay get a scathing condemnation. So do faux front porches and front garages.

The main problem with [the suburban sub-division] was that it dispensed with all the traditional connections and continuities of community life, and replaced them with little more than cars and television. 105
The least understood cost [of long commutes]–although probably the most keenly felt–has been the sacrifice of a sense of place: the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are. 118
 

Nor do shopping malls escape prophetic wrath.  Kunstler points out that a vacuum of human contact and conversation led to the phenomenon of shopping malls.  Malls are little islands isolated from the community.  And if your dream vacation destination is Disney World (she rolls her eyes), be prepared to be disabused of some of your jolly ideas.

...new merchandising gimmick called the shopping mall…offering a synthetic privatized substitute for every Main Street in America. 108

The decay of property is the physical expression of everything the town has lost spiritually while the American economy “grew” and the nation devised a national lifestyle based on cars, cheap oil and recreational shopping. 184

Neighborhoods in Maine seem to me the best examples of good place-making.  New construction is architecturally designed to fit with the older homes; there are “greens” and “squares”–shared public spaces–built into many new subdivisions.   

This book is a diagnostic tool, not a solution manual.  The tone is quite pessimistic.  But if you have an interest in architecture, in sociology or cultural trends, you may find–like I did–much to ponder.

I just can’t stop myself.  Here’s one last quote:

Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. […] Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed in tension, like the tension between private space and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of a space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply in a building. […] If nothing is sacred, than everything is profane. 168

A Story in Four Pictures

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1. January 9, 2010
Jeff spends an afternoon with our college friends
Norm and Michelle in Budapest.
We’ve not seen Norm and Michelle since 1976;
 however we managed to stay in touch all these years.
J, N & M are all missionaries in Diósd, Hungary.
We met Jeff in February 2009 when he preached at our church.


2. February 23, 2010
Jeff is in our home in Oregon.
He brought us hugs and Hungarian paprika from Norm and Michelle.
(Thanks, Michelle! I can’t wait to make Chicken Paprika!!)


3.  Our Katie is the reason Jeff is in Oregon/Idaho now.
She is a precious jewel.
Katie is an honorary member of our family.

 
4.  It’s Facebook official: they are in a relationship. 
Katie’s Dad gave his blessing.
We are giddy! (times twelve!)
As Curt puts it, we are gurgling joyfully.
And, according to FB comments, so is the rest of the world!

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow…

Diamond Days

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Diamond days.
Rams, lambs, llamas, geese.
A bald eagle convention.
Bracing cold and piercing bright.
Grace multiplied.
Newborn babes with rosebud mouths.
Singing that carries you to heaven.
A grand slam sermon.
My husband, a car and a country road.
A cup of chai to go with sunset.
A heart quaffing mercies,
attempting to print these wonders
permanently in my memory.

O taste and see that the Lord is good.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

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A pillow case from my friend Noki in Zimbabwe


A Delft vase given to me as a wedding present
by my Grandma Harper’s best friend


a cross-stitch piece my sister made for Curt


My Grandma Stover’s pocket New Testament/Psalms
in Dutch…as a girl she brought it to America from the Netherlands


Here is Psalm 103 from the back of the Dutch Bible.


I bought this at a craft show for $3. It makes me smile.


A photo Katie-of-my-heart gave me of a kitchen in El Savador


Hanbury Print 1/25 made by one of my student’s moms. (Silkscreen?)
She cut out all those intricate details for the stencil.

 
An image made of butterfly wings, brought back
from Africa by Kerry in 1978.

 
A small plaque that I grew up with.  I think it was
in the pantry.  This is my inheritance and I love it.


My brother Jim paints watercolors when he visits Monhegan,
an island off of Maine.  After I wheedled and begged, he
gave me one of his creations. I’m a spoiled younger sister.


Katie made this cork board.  The corks were supplied
by my brother Dan, the wine connoisseur. 

 
Curt made this for me during the first year of our marriage.
It’s made out of curly fir.


Matt, a craftsman in our church, made this Celtic cross
which graces our entry way.  This was my Christmas/
Birthday gift to my husband. 
It’s the best money we’ve spent on art.

~     ~     ~

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
~ John Keats

Swooning Over This Book, I Am

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Safe Passage has shanghaied me.  The minute I finished, I was ready for a second reading.  I want to send it to friends who live life with ferocious passion.  Or passionate ferocity.  The ones who dream, who wonder, who say, “what if?”  Visionaries who can execute a plan.  Friends for whom zest is more than a lemon.

Forget Thelma and Louise.  Ida and Louise will bowl you over.

The book covers three periods in the life of British spinster sisters.  Each one, alone, would make a dazzling book. The first period (1923-1936) paints their love of opera and initial friendships with opera celebrities.  The second season (1937-1939) narrates their travels to Germany almost every weekend under the guise of going to the opera in order to facilitate emigration for desperate refugees.  The third act (1939 -1950) gives a remarkable account of life in London during the Blitz and post-war operatic adventures.

Listen to me.

You don’t have to know, understand or even like opera to enjoy this book. Because the remarkable thing is how two typical office workers making £2 – £3 a week saved £100 each to travel to New York to see an opera.

It never occurred to Louise and me to suppose we might get someone
else to provide us with what we wanted, or to waste time envying
those who…could do with ease what we must accomplish with difficulty
and sacrifice. All our thoughts were concentrated on how we could do it.

First Louise bought a gramophone and ten records. When Amelita Galli-Curci made her English debut, Ida and Louise skipped lunches, scrimped to buy tickets.  They discovered opera.  Galli-Curci, their favorite soprano, only sang opera in America.  It was simple: if they wanted to hear her in an opera, they must travel to New York.  (I get this: I flew to Chicago to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the cello; our family and friends drove six hours through an epic snowstorm to hear blues singer-songwriter Eric Bibb.) Without telling anyone, the Cook sisters sketched a budget and systematically saved £1/week.    They continued to attend operas, queuing on camp stools for up to 24 hours in order to get cheap seats in the gallery. Rarely are such exacting frugality and such exuberant extravagance found in one personality.

But let no one suppose we were not happy. Going without things is
neither enjoyable nor necessarily uplifting in itself. But the things you
achieve by your own effort and your own sacrifice do have a special flavour.

They did something wonderfully naive: they told Galli-Curci their plan.  She was delighted, offered tickets and asked them to look her up in New York.  Thus began the first of many close friendships with the celebrities of the day. The Sisters Cook were commoners, plain British women (think Susan Boyle…before).  Yet their enthusiasm, their untrammeled joy must have been attractive, as evidenced by their host of friends.

Ida began writing romance novels to finance their opera habit.  A trip to Verona followed a trip to Florence; they traveled to Salzburg then to Amsterdam to see Strauss conduct.  Through their friendship with opera stars they became acquainted with Jews looking for an escape from the Nuremberg Laws.

And so, at the very moment when I was making big money for the first
time in my life, we were presented with this terrible need. It practically never
happens that way. It was much the most romantic thing that ever happened
to us. Usually one either has the money and doesn’t see the need, or one sees
the need and has not the money. If we had always had the money we might
not have thought we had anything to spare.
For an German adult to emigrate to the safety of England, a British citizen had to guarantee financial responsibility for life for the emigrant.  After Ida and Louise exhausted their resources, Ida took any public speaking invitation to inform people of the urgent need for sponsors.  Ida bought a flat in London for transitional housing for the refugees; the sisters continued to live with at home with their parents.  The sisters’ efforts secured safety for twenty-nine people.

When September 1939 arrived, their refugee work was over.  What follows is an extraordinary account of life during the Blitz.  An entire city worked during the day and slept in underground shelters at night.

One of my most vivid memories of that first night was the five minutes before
“Lights Out.” There were prayers for those who cared to join in, but no
compulsion on those who did not. Only a courteous request for quiet
for a few minutes. In the crowded, rather dimly lit shelter,
there was the murmur of a couple of hundred voices repeating
the ageless words of the Lord’s Prayer. And the not very distant crash
of a bomb lent a terrible point to the earnest petition, Deliver us from evil,
breathed from the farthest, shadowy corner.

Though Ida and Louise didn’t have the faith of Corrie ten Boom, there is a quote my husband has already used in a Sunday School class.  [When polio struck Marjorie Lawrence she had to give up opera and sing from a wheelchair.]

“What was it, Marjorie,” I asked at last, “that keeps you bright and courageous
in spite of everything? You must have some very clear and remarkable
philosophy to support you.” She smiled a little mischievously,
but replied without hesitation, “Well, you see, many people
believe in God and make themselves miserable.
We believe in God and have lots of fun. That’s all.”

Safe Passage is part Julia Child (if she took to opera like she did to cooking), part Oskar Schindler.
(Thanks to Frankie, reconnected friend from long ago and co-bibliophile; she lived through the war in London. I will always read the books you recommend.)

Little House on the African Highlands

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Sometimes she [Tilly, the author’s mother] spoke aloud in my presence
without exactly speaking to me; I was a kind of safety valve, helpful to
her feelings even in a passive role.

Pioneer stories capture me.  I cut my reading teeth on the Little House books; I have a secret desire to test myself in a lifestyle where one has to adapt, work hard, keep cheerful, play with pig bladder balloons and make corn husk dolls for one’s daughters.  Even though I’m a capital W-Wus, I like to secretly preserve the happy fiction that with courage and determination I could survive in the Big Woods.  

At such times, when all the furtive noises of the night beyond that
speck of firelight crept unasked like maggots into your ears, you
could feel very isolated and lonely.

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood is an extreme version of the Little House books.  When Elspeth was six her parents, Robin and Tilly, purchased a desolate piece of land northeast of Nairobi, hoping to establish a coffee plantation.  The year was 1913. Naturally, the mores and the customs of the Africans and the Europeans were not in sync.  Robin and Tilly have the friendship of other colonial settlers, but have to learn how to operate their “farm” with the native workforce they’ve hired.

Tilly was downcast; as with all perfectionists, it was the detail
others might not notice that destroyed for her the pleasure of
achievement. I doubt if she was every fully satisfied with
anything she did.  But she breasted each failure as a dinghy rides
 a choppy sea, and faced the next with confidence and gaiety.

Flame Trees differs from Little House in that you never fully hear the author’s childhood voice.  No other children appear, she never calls her parents Father and Mother and curiously Elspeth-Huxley’s first name- is never once mentioned, nor is a pet name like Half-Pint.  She has an exotic story, but Huxley’s prose made this book.  Rich, delightful, capable of expressing universal responses:

This declaration put a full-stop to the conversation,
as Hereward’s remarks were apt to do, whereas
with Lettice and Ian, or Robin and Tilly, talk would
volley gently to and fro until halted by some external event.

One story line, told with tact, of neighbor Lettice’s infatuation with Ian (as in not-her-husband) and the resulting tension, would never be included in Laura’s world.

“[Shooting] is much less alarming when you fire [the gun] off
yourself than when other people do,” Tilly explained.

“Like sins,” said Lettice.

“What sorts of sins?”

“Any sort. 
When other people commit them you are startled,
but when you commit them yourself,
they seem absolutely natural.”

Naturally, a book set in Africa will have mosquitoes and mosquito nets:

No sound concentrates so much spitefulness and malice
into a very small volume as the pinging of mosquitoes,
as if needles tipped with poison were vibrating
in a persistent tattoo.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Flame Trees of Thika.  I have half a dozen Africa books in my Read Around the World plan, and I am eager to compare this book with others on my list.

Little House on the Oregon Trail

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The first books, other than the Bible, that I owned–the seed corn of my personal library–were the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My dad and mom, both avid readers, gave them to me as soon as I could read. I received a beautiful hardbound copy of the next book in the series each birthday and Christmas. I read and re-read these treasures countless times.

So it makes sense whenever I read a “pioneer” story to have a flash of recognition, like seeing a long-lost cousin as a grown-up instead of a child. Written in 1968 by the 84-year old author, Walter L. Scott’s book Pan Bread ‘n Jerky is a rustic autobiography of a settler who saw a lot of life here in Eastern Oregon.

I call it rustic because the writing is choppy and lacks cohesion.  The author’s eighth grade education isn’t the problem as much as lack of editing. Rustic, because it describes a rough life.  Not unhappy, but full of the vicissitudes of living in a wild country.  Food was hunted, trapped, gathered, and gleaned, seldom purchased.  The pioneers were scrappy folk who eeked out a life any way they could from the land. 

Walter Scott was a horse man.  Many times he earned his bread by handling horses. My favorite sentences of the book:

Horses have played an important part in my life since I was a colt myself.  Many times I’ve been on a horse when I went up but there was no horse there when I came down.  I’ve been bitten, kicked, struck, stepped on, run away with, treed on a corral fence, and had horses fall on me, but I still like horses.

The stories remind us that the “good old days” had their share of sorrow and tragedy. Gold mines used cyanide in the 1890’s and dumped it into the rivers.  A boy lost both legs from cyanide poisoning after wading in the water.  Snowslide, homicides, horse rides, suicides all snuffed out lives.  But there are huckleberries, sage grouse, snowshoes, and horses which mitigate the austerity. 

103_1187

This a bear killed by the author’s father.

The bonus for me is that all the locations of this book are…local.  Believe me, you East Coast and European friends, not many books are located in Eastern Oregon.  (Okay, I forgot about The Shack.)  Getting a glimpse of life here a hundred years ago was worth the wade through the problematic prose.

 

Not Ashamed

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Our dear friend, Stephen Bump, puts words to music whenever he studies the Bible.  He doesn’t have a CD, nor does he promote the songs, but they have been sweet to the congregations who sing them. 

When I rerun Chris and Jessie’s wedding (oldest son), two songs come to mind.  My brother filling the upper space of the room with The Lord’s Prayer, the soaring notes of for Thine is the kingdom bringing tears to those around us.

In contrast, the other song was quiet, a song of benediction, written and sung by Steve, with his acoustic guitar. 

Now I commit you to God, to the Word of His grace,

which can build you up with the rest of the saints.

This morning we sang Not Ashamed in which the epistle to the Romans is condensed into seven verses.  Here is one section of the song. When my flesh is whining and demanding, I’m going to say, “Not obliged, pal.” 

In Christ no obligation to satisfy the flesh.

In Christ no condemnation as the slaves of righteousness.

We’re free to serve our Master, our new Father and our God,

Who has freely bestowed His salvation.