Random Memories

You know how you're wandering around listening to music and all of a sudden you're taken back? Your history washes over you like a wave, the good, the bad, and mostly the absurd.

Here are a few memories that I recalled recently:

When we lived on our five-acre property out in May Valley we used to have huge gatherings for Mother's Day, Birthday Parties, and a lot of different events. E, A, G and I used to hide in the thorn bushes at the end of our driveway and attack the cars that came with bows, arrows, and spears... just to make sure they knew what driveway was ours.

There was this huge, 200 foot cedar tree in our big field that I used to climb during windstorms and be tossed about like a doll... it was wild. Rain, wind, thunder... ahh.

One Sunday School our teacher gave us little cherry tomato plants to take home for Mother's Day. I planted mine on a little hillock and Dad mowed it over. I cried. I think it was dead already but... mowing is a hard way to go. :-)

Oh, speaking of mowing... I did most of the mowing because E and Dad have allergies. Our big field took exactly 2 hours (a lot of rosaries) to mow on our riding mower. I could do it with my eyes closed. We used to soup up our mower and drive around like wild banshees with a huge trail of smoke behind us. We also used to take it off jumps and drag stumps out and go though alder groves with it. It was an amazing mower. They don't make them like they used to.

We used to jump the fence running around the landfill and play in the mile buffer zone between us and the landfill. There was this creek that we would build boats for and sail them... with our GI Joes and Legos. A lot of our games involved those. We would run fishing line from treetops to our bedroom window and use those little green berry baskets to carry messages back and forth.

I used to save a lot of my money for Radio Shack and I'd pick up wire and buzzers and motors and lights. I made this contraption out of foil, and wire and put it under the front doormat so that it would make a buzzer go off in my room when someone stepped on it (completing the circuit). I always wanted to make something with this used washer machine motor I found but I couldn't come up with sufficient electricity to power it. I stayed away from wall sockets because I had shocked myself so often. I made an anti-burgle device for my upper bunk by running wires from the socket to various wires on my ladder. It didn't work.

I remember we had this huge cathedral ceiling and we put a crucifix up in the middle above the alcove and had lamps on either side that made it look like the crucifix had wings when we had both of them on. It was cool.

I had a teddy bear named berry and made him clothes... usually out of felt and staples because while I could sew it took too long. He had a bed right by mine in the very corner of the ceiling sloping down.

I had this "study" underneath the house in the dirt 4 foot ceiling basement. I had a desk, ran electricty, had an olllllldd computer and a little lamp.

E and I used to climb these huge trees by taking pieces of 2X4 and 2X2 and nailing them all the way up the tree. We would get 50 feet up no problem and then build a fort. We made the first 2-3 steps pivot on one nail so the little kids couldn't climb up. We would fall out of our forts on occasion. But mostly we shot arrows from them and read books.

I remember I fell in love with Huckleberry Finn and went without shoes whenever i could and jumped out of windows and made a hut like his raft. We had this amazing tree formation that we called Jumping fort because these trees had bent over and were covered in moss and we could climb and jump and hide underneath and use them as elevators going maybe 5-6 feet up. It was sweet.

We used to pretend we were Barsarks too where we would run through the forest with our shirts off and not feel the thorns and branches cutting us. AH Vikings!

I used to make maps all the time too... crosscut, aerial, topographical... it was fun.

"Ah me! Ah Life!"

A Meditation on Gift

I was pondering gift today... in a similar manner to an earlier post (circa 2005). And the idea of gift really is essential to getting through life in an worthwhile way. Realizing that your left hand, your nose, your pair of shoes, your hair, the food you eat, your taste buds, the fact that food tastes good in addition to keeping you alive, your eyes, your sight, the beautiful and ugly things you get to see, waking up, being able to dream, meeting friends, smiling at other people, that there are other people, that you can read, that you can understand what you read, that you can pray, that you can stub your toe, that you can burn your tongue... all is a gift from God and need not be that way at all.

If I can really appropriate that awareness and deep sense of gratitude that stems from such an awareness... I really cannot be unhappy ever again. I can be awed at the breath coming through my nose and the fact that there is a floor beneath my feet that I can walk on. I can wonder at the fact that I don't fall right through the earth and that I can communicate with other people. The radical givenness or conntingency of existence is a means for joy and hope... because it could be so many other worse ways... but it isn't. Yay for Puddleglum and Chesterton!

Architect of Spears by GKC

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in
most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man
ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral
tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the
presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and
silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked
birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the
servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a
sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one
ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or,
again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use
of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting
than the Greek. There is more truth in this; indeed, there is real truth
in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the Censor
of Plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals; but
indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate. We
should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing "Bill
Bailey" in church. Yet that would be only doing in music what the
mediaevals did in sculpture. They put into a Miserere seat the very
scenes that we put into a music hall song: comic domestic scenes similar to
the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing. But though
the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it also is not the secret of
its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese
sketches. But delightful as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper
houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of
a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some
have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure
in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is
rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed
after the same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating
bristles, are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all
the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and
almost equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in
mediaevalism; and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and
simplicity, as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again,
the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the
ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such
as the Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of
these explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about
Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of
furniture-vans.

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the
smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall
cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the
yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across
that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the
more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it
like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this
ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly
coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond that
the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,
straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as
the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;
what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not
variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,
but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man
of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an
Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had
mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this
gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving
towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across
the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with the
clouds. Then I saw what it was.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is
on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting
architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the
arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and
numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial
elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into
battle; the silence was deafening with ail the mingled noises of a
military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its
thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all
the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core
of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of
brass,

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in
the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the
voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears.
I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew
indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the
trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had
marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the
desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke
at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall
pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every snake or
sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the
architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the
flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across
dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of music and darkness
and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill. So for some
hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic; then the
last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw only a church tower in a
quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating.