The crash; Should I marry a murderer?

Karin returned to the office after a week’s vacation. I am at home with the boys – including Samuel, who has been puking – and with the three cats.

“School of Hard Knocks” Dory still fights with Ziva and Jasper. We worry for her permanency in our house.

She is gentle with humans, only occasionally biting them (in self-defense).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Two noteworthy Netflix docs:

(a) The Crash

(b) Should I Marry a Murderer?

I don’t often look at Instagram or TikTok, so these two shows were something of a revelation for me.

Text messaging has for some time been a staple exhibit of the true-crime genre. (See, e.g., Lover Stalker Killer.) But, to my knowledge, only in the last year or so have documentarians made much of compulsive video posting.

The first show’s protagonist is a villain. The other show’s protagonist is a victim/​witness. The former is a teenager just out of school; the latter is a thirty-ish professional – a forensic pathologist (!).

It’s the teen who’s coldly calculating. The corpse dissector is warm-hearted, loyalty-torn, and ultimately heroic.

What they have in common is, they’re always posting video.

And, in the footage they post, using drugs.

(Each program goes to some length to explain that its protagonist’s drug use is tangential to the outcome.)

Both protagonists have unconditionally supportive parents, for better or for worse.

One show is as chilling as can be; the other is almost heartwarming. I recommend them both.

On holiday in the “Region” (Northwest Indiana)

Karin & I will soon have been married ten years.

To celebrate, we dropped off Jasper, Ziva, and Dory at a cats’ hotel and headed west with our three little sons.

Not very far west.

Not as far as Illinois. Not even as far as Gary, Indiana. We did cross over into the Central Time Zone.

Our activities in the “Region” were zoological, botanical, athletic, culinary (White Castle), and commercial.

We toured: Michigan City, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Hobart, and – unpremeditatedly – Beverly Shores.

Beverly Shores is a beach town next to the Indiana Dunes National Park. Our phone GPS took us there because we asked it to find a playground. But we couldn’t park the car without a city-issued permit, so we didn’t play in Beverly Shores.

Instead, we drove and gawked. We could see Chicago across the lake, and there were spectacular houses that looked out in that direction. Some had been built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and then transported east, by boat.

I hadn’t known that there was such glamor in the “Region.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our hotel was in Portage. It had a breakfast buffet and an indoor swimming pool. We used those conveniences daily.

It took all our effort to keep the children from destroying our suite. Abel, in particular, was a menace.

Samuel asked to go home and, the first night, was physically ill. He improved.

It was Daniel who took to the holiday with especial keenness. We hardly could coax him out of the pool.

One night, our family was bathing when a man and a woman came into the pool area. They looked very sheepish (they had come in and gone out once before). They disrobed, got into the hot tub, worked up some courage, and, I daresay, proceeded to do the deed while we were across the room. You’d think it was their honeymoon or anniversary; such was their involvement. But I suspect they were adulterers who had come to the “Region” to escape detection.

Dory

The kitten – now named Dory – is still with us. She came through her surgery just fine.

She’s a sweetheart. The children love her.

This photo is cute, but it doesn’t show how long-bodied and scrawny Dory is.

We mostly confine her to the bathroom. We’re introducing her to the house and to the other cats a little at a time, as advised in books. We’ll keep her if: (a) she and Jasper and Ziva get along, and (b) we don’t find anyone else who would like a cat.

A photo of Karin and Dory:

As you can tell, Dory already has ruined some of our blinds.

Cat people

My 2025–2026 reading cycle has ended. On the last day, I finished reading six books. I came up three books short. (The final tally was fifty-seven.)

I thank Karin for her tolerance.

I caught Samuel trying to put one of my books on its shelf. He couldn’t slide it into the space; he was jamming it in. I stopped him before he could wrinkle the cover.

He’d brought the book downstairs from his play-room.

“Why did you take my book upstairs?” I asked.

He said: “I just wanted to copy out some of the text.”

I didn’t object to that answer. Indeed, I was rather pleased.

We have a new cat in our house: a young “queen” that Karin rescued from a gang of “toms.” We’re keeping her in our bathroom. The plan is to get her spayed ASAP; we’ll then consider whether to give her up or keep her. She’s starved but friendly, a year or so old. She may be the offspring of the winsome, irresponsible cat that lives across the street.

The “toms” have been prowling outside our house all day. I just saw them have their way with another “queen.” One can’t save them all.

Jasper and Ziva are none too pleased, perhaps because a new cat is in the house, perhaps because Karin medicated all three cats against fleas.

A story

“Of the Coming of John”: the only fictional chapter in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, the book that my reading group discussed tonight.

There are similarities to Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson. What this means, I’m not sure.

I’m too tired to say more.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Update (7 Feb): Good morning! Last night, I left the blogging until the last minute, and fell asleep.

’Tis the season! I bought Karin some roses. A week early, yes. But the opportunity presented itself, and I thought that this year I wouldn’t leave things until the deadline.

There was a table at the supermarket with bouquets and cute little buckets. I chose a bucket with roses because I knew those flowers wouldn’t poison the cats. I brought it home.

Uh, that’s a bush, for planting, said Karin.

Trouble is, we’d agreed to uproot an existing rosebush from our yard.

Could you have it on your desk, at work?, I asked.

Not enough sun.

The moral is, what matters isn’t to be early but to put thought into your gesture! It’s the thought that counts! (A corollary is, the supermarket pretends to be helpful by putting these displays near the checkout area, but it isn’t! It’s just rushing you! Beware!)

O Christmas tree

We erected and decorated our waist-high plastic Christmas tree.

Karin was dissatisfied. The tree stank. The cats had peed on it in the storage-room.

So, Karin’s friend, Nora, lent us a taller plastic tree. Samuel and Daniel decorated it.

Almost all the ornaments now hang from the bottom third of that tree.

(Some have been smashed.)

We put gifts under the tree. Samuel has been tearing off the wrappers.

May’s poem

My precious History of Art by H. W. Janson remained intact for one month. Samuel climbed the bookcase yesterday and hauled it down, ripping off its cover.

Our superglues have all dried out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our household, minus kitties, went to the zoo with Karin’s mom, who is making the most of her grandparental season-pass (she went again the next day). In the African section, the wild dogs were in fine form, running laps, in contrast to our by-then-unenthused children. Lions, gators, snakes, and sloths practiced immobility. Kangaroos stirred more than usual.

My favorites are the huge animals: the bison, the rhino, the giraffes. The latter, in zoos, often languish down in some ditch, on the same eye-level as their observers; but at our zoo, one can walk up to their feet and let oneself be towered over.

This month’s poem, in honor of Mother Karin’s Day and our wedding anniversary (May 21), is “Pharaoh Story”; the lyrics are by Tim Rice. I’ve come, reluctantly, during our marriage, to like it.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Pharoah, he was a powerful man

With the ancient world in the palm of his hand

To all intents and purposes he

Was Egypt with a capital “E”

Whatever he did, he was showered with praise

If he cracked a joke, then you chortled for days

No one had rights or a vote but the king

In fact you might say he was fairly right-wing

When Pharoah’s around

Then you get down on the ground

If you ever find yourself near Rameses

Get down on your knees

Down at the other end of the scale

Joseph is still doing time in jail

For even though he’s in with the guards

A lifetime in prison seems quite on the cards

But if my analyis of the position is right

At the end of the tunnel is a glimmer of light

For all of a sudden indescribable things

Have shattered the sleep of both peasants and kings

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star!

Could be a star!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Closing credits

What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.

Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.

I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.

Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.

My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”

She is too young to understand.

Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.

Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.

Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.

I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.

It ends like this.

[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.

On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.

So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.

Karin’s tender heart

I am James John
I have my helmet on

One more of Samuel’s imaginary people.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy birthday to my grandpa. He is ninety-six. We went to his house for cake and ice cream.

Upon our return, a friendly kitten greeted us on our lawn. Then, while Karin & I were moving the children from the car to the house, I realized that the kitten, too, had ventured indoors.

Kudos to Jasper & Ziva for not attacking it.

Karin picked up the kitten and cradled it for a bit. I made her put it back outside.

The beastie was very calm with us. I think it’s used to people; it probably belongs to some neighbor. I suspect we’ll see it again. Karin left it some food.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I may start keeping track of scholarly articles and monographs that acknowledge or are dedicated to me. The number is greater than you’d think. Quite a few mention audiences at Cornell University; I may not have said anything to the philosophers who gave those talks, but I was a member of those audiences.

Today I saw this especially pertinent dedication in Eric Olson’s book, The Human Animal: “To the unemployed philosophers.”

Another mouse

We aren’t very sick anymore. I have to blow my nose a lot, but that’s the extent of it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night, we saw a mouse in our basement. Get it, Jasper!, we said.

A little later, we saw our champion mouser trotting along, his mouth full, a bit of brown fuzz dangling out of it. Karin followed after Jasper with an empty potato-salad container. He tried to escape into one of his hidey-holes to play with his prize, but Karin caught him and he grudgingly released the limp thing.

It was a plastic toy. The bit of fuzz was a dust bunny. We didn’t see the mouse again.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This, at last, is shaping up to be the August when I read all of Light in August.

Some more August reading:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The Merchant of Venice.

Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre.

Storm, by George R. Stewart.

Something crime-ey as soon as I wind up The Dain Curse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ana & David and their children, Ada and George, will be in town from Saturday to Saturday.

Hop on pop

Every day, Daniel clamors for a half-dozen dozen or so readings of Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop in addition to the other readings that I have been trying to impose upon him.

Not only does he like to hop on his real-life pop, his taste is for frantic literature. I am partly to blame for this. Some people read slowly to their children; I tear through a book once I’ve figured out which syllables to emphasize. What with all the practicing I’m compelled to do, I eventually knit together a seamless and rapid cadence for each page.

It’s like practicing a level of Super Mario Bros. – run, run, jump! run, jump! duck! … repeat.

I imagine it’s also like rehearsing for the theatre.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Every day, also, Daniel knocks my books off the top shelf of a particular basement bookcase. (He can reach that shelf from the stairs.)

Tonight was the last straw. I hauled all those books over to a corner of the laundry room. This made Jasper very happy. Now he can lie on that shelf, just underneath a vent.

Alas, for the second straight summer, our air conditioner is failing to cool the house.

A technician fixed last year’s leak. But he said the machine was about to die.

Has it died? We’ll find out soon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel, too, likes to unshelve my books – especially if they belong to a set. Then he arranges them in patterns. (I discussed this once before; tonight Samuel took those same books and laid them out on the staircase, two to a step.)

In this photo he has made a grid of some black Penguin Classics and my set of Lord Peter Wimsey paperbacks.

Karin came home from work early today. She has a fever.

The year of the dandelions

Jasper, poor boy, is walking around with a silly-looking shaved leg where the veterinarian put in an IV. She made him unconscious so that she could clean his teeth. (One especially bad tooth had to be extracted.)

She also found a single flea. Jasper now must undergo a de-fleaing regimen.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I mowed again today – not that it’ll make much difference, tidinesswise. The lawn is infested with dandelions. They regrow themselves in one or two days.

And not just our lawn. The whole neighborhood; maybe, the whole city. On our block, even the neat freaks’ lawns have dandelions this year.

But not the lawn directly across the street. That neighbor – an old woman – has an immaculate lawn, tended to by her middle-aged children, who take turns coming over to work on the yard. I used to think them overly fastidious, but now that I see how they’ve overcome the plague of dandelions, I tip my hat.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m no baseball lover, but this documentary about Yogi Berra looks wonderful. This review begins with an illuminating story.

One night, a friend of mine who lives in Montclair, New Jersey, drove me around the exclusive neighborhood on the hill to show me all the mansions. … We came to a fork in the road, and my friend said, “No matter which fork you take, you get to Yogi Berra’s house.” He then drove me around the circular road to show me.

Closing credits

This year, I read at least two books by each of these authors:

• Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers; The Dogs of Riga)
• Joe Queenan (One for the Books; Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon)
• Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You)
• Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis 1 and 2)
• Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; Pop. 1280)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes; Mr. Fortune’s Maggot)

A few of these books, I’m still working on, but I’ll’ve finished them by January 1.

Also, I enjoyed these authors:

• H. W. Brands (I finished Dreams of El Dorado)
• Ben Macintyre (I finished The Spy and the Traitor)

They both write popular histories/biographies. I can’t commend them enough: almost every page is rewarding.

I’m not including such deserving authors as Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown. Not because I didn’t read enough of their books or because those books are for children or are too short, but because I didn’t read them for my own sake. I also read lots of Mother Goose.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Rooney’s Conversations with Friends may have been my favorite read of the year. That, or Roughing It, which is hilarious but doesn’t have the same narrative urgency as Conversations with Friends, even though some chapters of Roughing It are life-or-death. (Being a coming-of-age tale, Conversations only feels like it is life-or-death.) The lesson of Roughing It is this. The people of the United States are compulsive liars; also, they love to believe lies. It becomes less strange, upon reading Twain, that Donald Trump should have been elected President. The predilection for outlandish untruth has been around for a long time. Twain lampoons the lying while himself resorting to embellishment. I suppose that as a satirist, that is his right.

Chapter I of Pudd’nhead Wilson has this epigraph: “Tell the truth or trump – but get the trick.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Otherwise, this hasn’t been a year for getting through the classics. I did finish reading the Purgatorio. I am eager to read the Paradiso so that I can move on to the Decameron, which I became perversely eager for after I saw The Little Hours.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

On to the domestic front. I obtained a new stepfather-in-law. A nephew and a niece were born to me. My son Daniel was born in February. He’s now been outside his mother longer than he was inside her (unless each of us, in his or her earliest stage of development, is a pre-fertilized egg). For a couple of months Daniel seemed not to have a personality. Now he is an enterprising, zestful, strong-willed young man. Samuel likes him but constantly knocks him down or pushes him away, usually due to some property dispute. Daniel has learned to push back. I’m disturbed and pleased. Every night, I pray for my sons to love each other and get along; but I also want them to fight for the good, and being able to fight for the good entails being able to fight.

Ziva is the same as always: desirous of being stroked, she wakes me in the night. Jasper seemed ill – he lost many lbs. – but today the veterinarian confirmed that it’s because of the dieting we’ve been forcing him to do (he’s at his ideal weight for the first time since he took to stealing Ziva’s kitten food). Karin & I have continued our march through British TV. This has been the year of the Hobbit-like actor Ken Stott, who appears in the police procedurals Crime and, with Caroline Catz, The Vice; and of Catz’s sadly truncated Murder in Suburbia, in which two unmarried, lovelorn policewomen investigate crimes by “Karens” (“Grangerites,” in South Bend parlance). So, nothing too profound.

Of course, we all watched the World Cup.

We also explored our new neighborhood. I regularly visited the local library branch. I’d check out books and print out journal articles (up to 33 B&W pp./day, gratis). This library branch has a reputation for patron misbehavior – I learned this when I interviewed for a job there a few years ago – but I haven’t observed a single episode. This really is a tranquil part of town in which to live.

The blizzard; a lean Christmas; a border crossing

So far, this hasn’t been such a formidable blizzard, although, surely, someone is suffering from it, and for all I know someone has died or will die; and it’s costing us a chunk of change because two nights ago Karin was in a minor crash in a snowy intersection. She had to pay the other driver; her own car’s headlight was smashed; and yesterday, she found out that her car was leaking steering fluid. This is one of those mishaps that it’s dismayingly hard to budget for. (This, and Jasper’s veterinary needs, which never fail to astound.) I have called this blog entry “A Lean Christmas,” although that isn’t really true: we already have bought our goodies, and our needs are met. It might be a lean-ish winter, though.

Edoarda & Stephen have traveled to Nicaragua, as they usually do at Christmastime; on this occasion, they flew to Costa Rica first. I understand that they walked across the border with their suitcases. It’s easier than having Edoarda’s family drive across from Nicaragua and then across again.

The U.S. snowstorm wreaked havoc upon their air travel. They spent a night in an airport terminal.

John-Paul: “Have you arrived in Nicaragua?”

Stephen: “Yes.”

Stephen: “After 30 hours of planes, (sky)trains, and automobiles.”

Stephen: “We left right before the storm got too bad in South Bend. The flight almost didn’t leave.”

John-Paul: “Mom & Dad told me about most of it. How was the Costa Rica-to-Nicaragua border crossing?”

Stephen: “Not bad. Took about 30 minutes total.”

Stephen: “But then … we left behind my carry-on.”

Stephen: “Here’s what I told Mom about it:”

Stephen: “‘I have some bad news. When we crossed the border, someone in the family took my carry-on. I heard people discuss where to acomodar it as I went in the truck, but it somehow got descuidado and left at the border. I lost most of my clothes that I brought, Edo’s Christmas present, and your copy of Shantung Compound. 🙁 I’m sorry.’”

John-Paul: “I’m sorry. It sounds like the border crossing in No Country for Old Men.”

Stephen: “Ha, not that bad.”

Stephen: “Just got back from getting some new clothes. I’ll survive.”

John-Paul: “I’m sure you are as well turned out as ever.”

Stephen: “T shirts and shorts.”

Stephen: “Some underwear.”

John-Paul: “Yes, go on.”

Stephen: “Socks.”

Stephen: “That’s it.”

Stephen: “I forgot to get some zapatillas.”

(Lightly edited.)

I have returned Stephen’s copy of Faceless Killers and am reading The Dogs of Riga, which is shaping up to have more snow in it.

Karin’s quiet birthday; a mermaid; return to Puffin Rock

Happy birthday to Karin: treasured wife, adored mother, possessor of immeasurable intrinsic value. Witty, dreamy, pretty, kind.

Somehow, Etsy knows that it’s Karin’s birthday and that I’m married to her.

Here, have some ads in your email.

Thanks, Etsy.

Curiously, a lot of the ads have to do with the Zodiac. But the ads don’t seem to know what Karin’s sign is. I don’t think she’s one for embroideries and wall hangings of Scorpio the scorpion.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate kitsch. She bought me this skeleton of a mermaid, for the Halloween season.

Tonight, we watched the final episode of Cat Hospital, and then Karin put on Puffin Rock for Samuel (and for the rest of us; we needed a change from Samuel’s YouTube videos). It’s been many months since Samuel watched this show, which used to be his favorite. He seems to have forgotten a lot of it. He resisted it at first, but now he’s deeply invested in the story. He supplies a running commentary.

Oona is so bad!

No, Sammy, Oona is good.

Oona is good. Mossy is so bad!

No, he’s just silly. And hungry.

Mossy is so silly!

Yes.

So, this bodes well. Lately, he’s been downright distressed when we’ve played his old shows or read his old books. He seems to have intense, nostalgic, none-too-happy reactions to things from his past.

But we need him to come to terms with the past, because soon it’ll be time for Daniel to be exposed to these shows and books.

Last night, I went out to buy milk; when I returned, Daniel had learned to raise himself into a sitting position. Since then, he has been practicing sitting up, and tipping himself over onto the floor. Thunk! His poor little head!

Dinner with in-laws; another couch; September’s poem

Another dinner at Karin’s mom’s house. We watched Notre Dame lose, and then the conversation turned to how contemptible Joe Biden is and how “they” (the bad guys, i.e., the liberals) are coming after “us.”

“Personally,” McKenzie declared, “I’m looking forward to ‘the purge.’”

Karin’s mom had previously mentioned that she and her new husband intend to build a “family compound” in Kentucky.

“With whom does she expect to live in this compound?” I asked Karin.

“With all of us,” Karin sighed. “With all of her family.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Back at home, we have a new old couch. It was free for the taking. My parents happened to notice it while passing through Bremen, and some locals offered to haul it over to us in their truck (they were heading toward our part of South Bend, anyway). The couch is brown and plaid, and it’s from the 1980s. It looks like the furniture of Quito’s old Missionary Church Dorm.

Even more than our previous old couch, it “ties the room together.”

The cats already have peed on it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s poem, by Rudyard Kipling, is “Recessional.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word –

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(For the Diamond Jubilee of 1897)

The old couch

Some UEFA Champions League matches are free to stream through ViX Deportes.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Goodbye, goodbye to our long-serving couch – I used it the last ten years, after it was passed around by various members of my family, including myself on previous occasions. (Or so I believe; I’m not sure about that last detail.) Tonight, the couch is out beside the curb. It has become filthy and ragged, due to the children and the cats. It never was beautiful. Well, did it have “character?” No, it did not. But it did “tie the room together.”

Four sickies; a recipe

We’re all sick this afternoon. So far, our COVID tests have been negative.

Daniel stayed healthy the longest, but today he’s been snorting and coughing. His mood is good. This might be the very first uninduced illness of his life. (He’s had a few brief fevers, brought on by inoculations.)

Today I’ve had clogged sinuses, a sore throat, aching joints, pain behind the eyes, and lethargy (the earth’s pull has felt stronger than usual). And, unlike Daniel, I’ve been dreading the symptoms that are still to come. And I’ve been thinking about death.

Samuel has got a runny nose and lots of energy for climbing upon his parents. His elbows and knees are especially sharp today.

Karin wavers between feeling well-ish and feeling flattened. She’s missed two days of work.

At such times, it’s good to eat a warm meal that slides comfortably down the throat. Here is my own trusty recipe.

Machines:

• Rice cooker
• Can opener

Ingredients:

• Grits (1.5 cups)
• Butter (1 tablespoon)
• Water A (6 cups)
• Green beans (2 cans)
• Tuna (2 cans)
• Herdez salsa cremosa (especially, one of the cilantro-based flavors; 4 tablespoons)
• Water B (1 glass per person)
• Mucinex (1 tablet per person)

Combine grits, butter, and water A in rice cooker.

Plug in rice cooker.

Close lid over rice cooker.

Place rice cooker on “cook” setting.

Open cans.

Drain liquid from cans. Give tuna water to cats.

When rice cooker switches to “warm” setting, pour mixture into large bowl.

Add green beans, tuna, and salsa cremosa to bowl.

Stir.

Serve warm.

Swallow Mucinex and water B.

Makes two meals. Each has approx. 650 kcals: a little less than a Burger King Whopper, and more filling.

By all means, vary the ingredients however you like; but one-to-four is a good grits-to-water ratio for the rice cooker. The cooked mixture will firm up a bit when you stir it.

An update about the pork: Or, what we did this weekend

The pork has been cooked and pulled. It required hours and hours of labor. Karin & I took turns tearing strips of meat off the bones and putting them into baggies for freezing (1 lb. in each baggie).

We employed different techniques. I bagged the meat together with the fat and the skin. Karin separated the fat and the skin from the meat; then, she fried the skin strips, for snacking, and saved the bones, for brothing.

Jasper and Ziva lurked close by.

I’ve been trying hard to stay within my caloric budget. To eat a decent quantity of pork in one sitting, I must forego its garnishes: sauces, coleslaw, etc.

We’ve had one pork meal so far. I ate my pork with a nearly plain baked potato.

Tonight, we went to Karin’s mom’s house for the monthly family dinner. A lot of my in-laws on that side of the family have worked as cooks. I wasn’t about to brag about how we had managed to cook our pulled pork.

They had plenty to talk about, anyway: shooting ranges; home arsenals; the bar scene; enormous, muscular bouncers with gentle dispositions; bouncers who work at shooting ranges, who used to be prison guards; and where in the Bible it says that God never gives you more trouble than you can handle (it says it nowhere, Karin’s seminary-trained mother told them; the idea that the Bible says this is hogwash).

May’s poems

So, the lawns aren’t looking good. They ought to have been cut two or three weeks ago. I left gasoline in the mower all winter, and the mower won’t start.

Our air conditioner isn’t working, either. But we have been using fans, and the house is quite livable.

Since Daniel was born, I’ve gained approx. 25 lbs.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

And now, three poems from The Norton Book of Light Verse.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Hen it is a noble beast;

The cow is more forlorner,

Standing in the rain

With a leg at every corner.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(William McGonagall)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If I were a cassowary

On the plains of Timbuctoo,

I would eat a missionary,

Cassock, bands and hymn-book too.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Samuel Wilberforce)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

What a wonderful bird the frog are

When he stand he sit almost

When he hop, he fly almost.

He ain’t got no sense hardly;

He ain’t got no tail hardly either.

When he sit, he sit on what he ain’t got almost.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Anonymous)

This last poem is for my sons.