A restaurant review

Samuel went to his grandparents’ house, so Karin & I tried a new restaurant I’d read about. We had to chase Daniel up and down the dining room. But we’re willing to do that now and again; it’s chasing two children through a restaurant that’s intolerable.

Besides, most of the time, we were the only diners, and the waiter was hiding in the kitchen. A rough-looking DoorDash driver skulked around, cursing. The food took about forty-five minutes to reach our table. A little before we received it, another couple came in. They surveyed the near-empty dining room with palpable dismay. They asked if we were open. We don’t work here, we told them. But yes, the restaurant is open. They sat down and made various criticisms. Then another couple came in. They, too, seemed disappointed. But they put on brave faces, girded their loins, and seated themselves.

The food arrived. It was unpleasant to eat, which is saying something, because I’m not picky. (And it was expensive. But we’d already accepted that.)

How was everything? the waiter asked, afterward.

I’m sorry to say that we politely told him an untruth.

Karin went to the toilet but didn’t use it because there was fresh urine everywhere. Maybe the angry DoorDash driver left it.

I won’t name the restaurant. It’s downtown. The interior is bright, clean, neat, and comfortable. The exterior is bizarre. The main entrance appears to be a former service entrance. To get to it you have to walk across an especially muddy, pot-holed stretch of parking lot. Getting into the parking lot is an ordeal. There’s one sign, and it isn’t easy to see at night. The restaurant is open just a few nights a week. I don’t see how it could survive without income from, how shall I put it, an avocational source.

The Dain curse; a weekend outside the house

Not a good novel, The Dain Curse (1929). Indeed, not really a novel. Mostly, self-contained stories, strung together.

(I wonder how often this sort of detective “novel” used to get published. Agatha Christie’s The Big Four [1927] is another specimen.)

Here’s a passage in which the detective recites a non-exhaustive version of the casualty list. (To reduce spoilage, I’ll replace the victims’ and perpetrators’ names with capital letters.)

“Are you sure,” Fitzstephan asked, “that you’re right in thinking there must be a connection?”

“Yeah. A’s father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been slaughtered in less than a handful of weeks – all the people closest to her. That’s enough to tie it all together for me. If you want more links, I can point them out to you. B and C were the apparent instigators of the first trouble, and got killed. D of the second, and got killed. E of the third, and got killed. Mrs. F killed her husband; G apparently killed his wife, and D would have killed his if I hadn’t blocked him. A, as a child, was made to kill her mother; A’s maid was made to kill H, and nearly me. F left behind him a statement explaining – not altogether satisfactorily – everything, and was killed. So did and was Mrs. G. Call any of these pairs coincidences. Call any couple of pairs coincidences. You’ll still have enough left to point at somebody who’s got a system he likes, and sticks to it.”

Fitzstephan squinted thoughtfully at me, agreeing:

“There may be something in that. It does, as you put it, look like the work of one mind.”

In the last two chapters, Hammett somehow makes good his detective’s hunch and ties all these crimes together as “the work of one mind.” He also wrings as much comedy as possible from his distressed damsel’s morphine withdrawal.

The ending almost makes the book worthwhile.

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Karin’s dad & Carol took Samuel to Fort Wayne over the weekend. It went well enough until bedtime, when Samuel shrieked and shrieked that he wanted to walk home to be with Mommy & Daddy.

In South Bend, Karin & I took Daniel to get his hair cut. Later, we took him to a park. He loved it so well, he protested (shrieking) all the way home from the park.

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Something’s wrong with how I’ve been sleeping. Today my head and shoulder and the back of my neck feel like somebody whacked them with a board.

A wedding

Our big event this weekend was the wedding of our friend, Eman. She was Karin’s colleague and mine in different jobs before Karin & I were married.

I’d never attended any sort of Islamic service, so I was keen to view the proceedings. The Imam gave a short discourse on marriage. The observant men retired to pray in a far corner of the hall. The Best Man gave a wise and humane speech on how a relationship changes when the children arrive. I also was interested to see Muslims of a variety of origins make each other’s acquaintance and place each other on different spots of the map (Chechnya, Turkey, etc.). In this way the service wasn’t so unlike a gathering of expatriates at Quito’s English Fellowship Church.

Eman and Ahmed sat on a high-backed white couch; guests took turns approaching them to offer congratulations. For dinner, we had such Islamic delicacies as mashed potatoes, roast beef, and Chicken Kiev. The venue was attached to a golf course. Deer roamed the links. Karin’s dad and Carol, his girlfriend, watched over Samuel and Daniel for us at their house.

Another night out

I went with Karin and her mom to St. Mary’s College and viewed a performance of Legally Blonde Jr.: The Musical. This “junior” version is Legally Blonde: The Musical with the spicy bits excised. The actors were in elementary or middle or high school. Our old pastor’s daughter had a small but crucial role. She’s been performing for some years, but this was the first time I’d gone to watch her; I thought she was remarkable. But then, I’m biased: I’ve known her since she was a blobby little infant.

(Our own infants, Samuel and Daniel, were supervised by Karin’s dad and his girlfriend, Carol.)

After the show, the director came onstage and started talking about the sponsors and the crew and the “message” of Legally Blonde (“Follow your dreams,” was her take). “Lead us out of here,” Karin’s mom said, and so I did. When we got to the parking lot, Karin’s mom thanked me for having had the courage to leave before the speeches had ended. “I wouldn’t have done it on my own,” she said.

Karin has quite the weekend lined up for herself. Tomorrow she’ll hear Billy Joel at Notre Dame Stadium, and on Sunday she’ll watch a performance of Anastasia. I’ll look after the children.

A visit to Mexico; Easter; body-text fonts, pt. 2: Trump Mediaeval

Samuel asked to do an Easter egg hunt. We never taught him this custom. He must have learned it from the TV.

Karin bought the candy and plastic eggs. Her dad and his girlfriend Carol had Samuel over on Saturday to do the hunt. They kept him until Easter morning.

At home, it was very quiet, very peaceful.

Karin & I took Daniel out to a Mexican restaurant that we hadn’t tried. The other diners all knew each other. They also knew the prices, which weren’t written on the menu. I felt sorry to have to ask what the food cost, but it was good that I did: some of the meals weren’t cheap.

We watched a mariachi concert on the huge TV. The singer rode around the arena upon a dancing horse.

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The next day, quite a few people were in church for the Easter service. Three were baptized in a kiddie pool. Then we went to the city of Goshen so that Daniel could meet that branch of Karin’s family. Samuel was a great hit with his second cousins, girls aged eight to fifteen.

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And now, this month’s font, which is Trump Mediaeval.

(Samuel has the qualities of Matilda and the others in the Wormwood family. He is a great reader of books, but he also watches plenty of TV.)

I considered typesetting my dissertation with this font because (a) I was writing about political philosophy, and (b) at the time, Trump was the POTUS. But I chose a different font instead.

Ecuador 3, Bolivia 0

The goals were scored in the first twenty minutes, and the rest of the game was a cool-down session for our starters and then a tryout for various bench players. Énner Valencia broke Ecuador’s career scoring record.

Afterward, Bolivia’s captain, the goalkeeper Carlos Lampe, was interviewed.

He said: We were our own worst enemy – or something to that effect.

Let the scoreline not cause us to forget the solid defending that we did in the second half.

I’m afraid he was deluding himself.

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We’ve moved to South Bend. Kind church friends helped us; so did Sam the architect; so did my parents; so did Karin’s dad & Carol, his girlfriend. Samuel was parked in front of the TV for many hours in a mostly happy state, but he would cry whenever I’d leave to move things into the new house. When I’d come back, he’d hug me and whimper, “Don’t go.”

The new house is crammed with disordered furniture and boxes. The rooms are impassable. Karin’s dad & Carol helped us to tidy up our bedroom, so at least we’ll have a place to sleep tonight.

Jasper and Ziva are distressed, of course, but they have been venturing out from their hiding places in the basement.

A storm at suppertime

That incredible lad, Samuel, again seized the fancy remote control and subscribed our household to My Outdoor TV.

This time, he turned on a show about hunting in the Yukon. I had never heard such strong Canadian accents.

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Spectacular rain and thunder tonight. Karin & I tried to take Samuel over to Karin’s dad’s apartment, but the car wouldn’t start, so Karin’s dad and his girlfriend, Carol, came to our place instead. We ate on the (covered) back porch while the storm raged around us. Samuel threw his chicken and pasta onto the floor, so I took him down from his highchair and he ran laps around the supper table.

Even now, close to midnight, the storm is quite loud.

Karin has lain in bed, sick, the last couple of days.

Highsmith; Dickens; Potter; Schulz

We had to tell Karin’s dad that we couldn’t attend his Christmas party this year due to COVID-19. He looked terribly sad. Then he perked up when he saw Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt on my bookshelf. It seems he enjoyed watching the movie Carol, which is based upon The Price of Salt. (Also, his girlfriend’s name is Carol.)

I haven’t read The Price of Salt or seen Carol, but what I am reading, for the first time, is A Christmas Carol.

It’s pretty funny. Some do-gooders ask Scrooge to donate to a homeless shelter during the Christmas season, and Scrooge is like, What? Are there not enough prisons?

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Beatrix Potter is hard to read to Samuel – we don’t often get farther than two or three pages before he loses interest – but the other day we did make it through all of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (the link is to the Project Gutenberg page). I kept laughing out loud, which must have been very confusing for Samuel.

Then I remembered how, in Snoopy Come Home, Snoopy laughs and laughs at Miss Helen Sweetstory’s Bunny Wunny books until the librarians throw him out onto the sidewalk.

I wonder if Schulz was recalling his own experience of reading Beatrix Potter.

Some visitors

Samuel has been packing on the lbs. (not that he’s been eating larger portions). You can see it in this photo taken today out on the back porch with two of his grandparents: Karin’s dad and Carol (Karin’s dad’s girlfriend).

We ate burritos together. Karin’s dad, who rides his bicycle for dozens of miles every day, decided to fry the soft tortilla shells in the hamburger grease. The effect was that Karin & I had to sleep for several hours after the visitors left the house.

Why is Samuel being held by non-immediates, you may ask.

What about the COVID, you may ask.

Indeed.

The answer is that sometimes people just hold little Samuel no matter what. And today it enabled Karin to cook and me to mow the front lawn.

We had visitors on Tuesday, also. Our church’s small group held its last meeting of the season out on the porch. We all sat many feet apart and talked over the traffic and factory noises. Two fans blew, but the temperature, which was in the high eighties (Fahrenheit), was still a bit much. Ice-cream, when we tried to eat it, melted quickly. Through the porch screen, we surveyed the dead grass on the back lawn that I’d raked into piles earlier that day in conditions even more brutal.

Four days later, the live grass is longer, and those piles remain.

The theatre-goers

On Saturday, we drove to Fort Wayne – a city of a quarter-million people, Indiana’s second-largest – and spent the night with Carol, Karin’s dad’s girlfriend. We met Carol’s family and viewed a local production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was our first trip, since Samuel’s birth, away from the environs of South Bend.

We drove home the next day and took Samuel to his first cinematic screening. It was of Kiki’s Delivery Service, at Notre Dame. Samuel was quiet through the first half of the movie. Then we lost his pacifier and he howled. We watched the last scenes behind the other audience members, near the exit.

It was a good movie to watch in an auditorium full of children. They all cheered for Kiki at the end.

Tomorrow night, Karin and her mother will view a theatrical production of The Lion King. I’ll stay home with Samuel. Matilda and Kiki were quite enough for me.

Besides, there’ll be more of Matilda in the coming months: South Benders will perform the play.

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R.I.P. Terence Penelhum (1929–2020), a Christian philosopher who wrote on religious topics, as well as on David Hume and Joseph Butler. His autobiographical chapter in InterVarsity Press’s Philosophers Who Believe is, for me, one of the more compelling ones. I especially like this passage:

For a period of some four or five years, … my parents became influenced by Christian Science. This is a sect toward which I have never since been able to assume the attitude of easy derision shown it by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers. Its thought may be egregiously confused; but it has no religious monopoly on this. I can well recall the exemplary serenity of one of the lady readers whom we came to know, and who had been converted to Christian Science through the dramatic physical healing she experienced from it. I also recall very clearly one occasion during the war when we were attending a service and the air-raid sirens sounded. The service was moved to a supposedly less vulnerable part of the building (I think a corridor). Another of the readers made the comment that the move had been made to conform to government regulations, but that since we were all in the care of God’s love, where could we possibly be safer? Such a direct and simple absorption of the New Testament preaching of Jesus (and there was no particle of anxiety) is something I much aspire to now, and have rarely encountered. If it was combined with muddled metaphysics, I am not so consumed by analytical fervor as to believe that this matters greatly.

This brief period introduced me to the possibility of deriving unorthodox results from biblical texts. My recollection may now be faulty; but a frequently repeated juxtaposition of readings yielded the following argument: All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made; God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good; ergo, evil and disease do not really exist. The well-known dismissal of the reality of evil as “error” follows from this conclusion, and the perhaps muddled, but certainly very real, spiritual life of the few Christian Scientists I knew rested in no small measure on this argument.

One can see why Hume should have appealed to this philosopher, un-Humeanly modest though he is, Christian though he is.

There’s also this story about Penelhum, from a Leiter Reports correspondent:

[H]e didn’t like going to the American Philosophical Association meetings. He said he couldn’t abide sitting around with his fellow tenured friends drinking while watching all the unemployed new PhD’s running around begging for jobs. This was in the early 80’s. I don’t think much has changed. I always thought well of him for that comment. It revealed to me a kind heart.

Moving, pt. 4

A brutal couple of days of packing and moving; then, after tonight’s supper, an evening of book sorting – until the capitulation of my back and legs. Karin’s mom, Karin’s dad, and Carol – Karin’s dad’s girlfriend – acted as beasts of burden. They helped us to make many trips between the apartment and the house, carrying our things in SUVs.

And this was only a fraction of the month-long move.

Here is a photo of the living room’s current state:

The photo shows the living room’s good half. Beyond the rightmost bookcase are more stacks of books and many boxes filled with books.

To the left of the book-covered armchair is our TV.

I’m sitting outside the photo in another armchair on the other side of the TV. It, too, used to be filled with books. We required about an hour to clear them away so that I could sit on a chair in the living room.

Observe the white cardboard box. We got it from a supermarket. It used to carry eggs. Such boxes are the best ones for hauling books, I’ve heard.

The first shower

Karin & I held the first of two gift showers for our son. This shower, organized by Mary, was attended by friends and family members who don’t worship at our church. (The church’s shower will occur next month.)

As the gifts were being unwrapped, I realized what a large proportion of the clothes from Karin’s wish list were fox-themed. Our boy also received some Fighting Irish onesies from my Domer cousin, Vickie; some Star Trek-themed Little Golden Books and clothes from Karin’s dad and his girlfriend, Carol, who are die-hard Trekkies; and a few tiger-themed items, including a Cincinnati Bengals outfit (the Bengals are Carol’s team).

Not only have our son’s gender, nationality, and religion – the standard identities – been settled well before his birth, but also, apparently, his mammalian, collegiate, intergalactic, and athletic preferences.

I was the only man at the shower. I tried to watch Manchester City vs. the Potato Tots on my computer, but the flash player wouldn’t work.