Body-text fonts, pt. 51: De Vinne

Our ten-year anniversary festivities continue. On the day itself – Thursday – we took Daniel and Abel to the beach; Samuel was in school, but Karin’s mom joined us. Then, today, Karin & I left all three children with Karin’s dad and traveled to Niles. We watched The Sheep Detectives and ate cheap hot dogs at the cinema, strolled through the park, bought books and fancy candy, and dined on pizza. It was very “us.”

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Penguin typeset a 1988 edition of The Virginian (1902) in De Vinne, a font from the late nineteenth century …

… only to re-set and reissue the book in Stempel Garamond, a little later. I guess the initial nod to quaintness was regretted.

Time was, this book was taught in schools.

Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

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My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

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I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

Happy birthday to Abel

He turned one. He slept most of the day because the doctor gave him five shots.

More appealing, if less vital, were these gifts:

Cupcakes.

Onesies (i.e., bodysuits).

Wagon, Radio Flyer, plastic, small. For giving rides to stuffed animals. (Did I mention he walks now?)

Dog, white with black spots, plastic, noise-making, profoundly disturbing to Samuel.

Literature: Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. Not really meant for Abel’s age-group (he doesn’t object). Amusing to Samuel. Mildly disturbing to Daniel. Both reactions are correct.

Most of these gifts were from Karin’s dad’s family.

Abel was to have had a little party at my parents’ house, but my mom slipped on some ice and broke her arm. She’ll have surgery later this week. Last night, when I called, she was in high spirits: adequately drugged, surrounded by other progeny.

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Here is another quote about the postman Courtney Elliot, from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole:

Courtney Elliot has offered to give me private tuition for my “O” levels. It seems he is a Doctor of Philosophy who left academic life after a quarrel in a university common room about the allocation of new chairs. Apparently he was promised a chair and didn’t get it.

It seems a trivial thing to leave a good job for. After all, one chair is very much like another. But then I am an existentialist to whom nothing really matters.

I don’t care which chair I sit in.

I don’t think I would leave a university if I didn’t get a Chair, but I might if I didn’t get a chair. Some intellectuals (e.g., Victor Hugo, Sam the Architect) stand before a desk to work, but I’m not so vigorous as to do that.

Not just any chair would do. I would need a sofa, or at least an armchair from Goodwill.

Quality time with Abel

Karin drove to Cleveland to see Weird Al in concert for the second time in two years. Daniel and Samuel slept over at their grandpa’s. Abel remained with me. I took advantage of the quiet and put on the first half of The Brutalist. At intermission (yes, that’s the kind of movie it is), we went to the neighborhood’s new Popeyes; then, we came home and finished the movie. Abel slept through most of the second part. He slept the rest of the night, too, except for brief awakenings to suck from his bottle. He was lively, early the next morning; when he was hungry, he said Ma, ma, ma, ma, and I knew I was no proper mother substitute.

The Brutalist is long and arbitrarily plotted but has some striking scenes, none better than the “Statue of Liberty” scene near the beginning.

Was it really made for just $10 million? That’s amazing.

I waited for months to see it, but I have to say, Anora is better.

Happy Father’s Day

… to all fathers; particularly:

• mine own
• mine by marriage (two living, one deceased)

My family almost always spends the day with Karin’s dad and his dad, in Goshen. We eat grilled meats, then go out strolling in the heat. Today it was painfully bright if not quite sweltering. We took the boys to a park.

Photos of my progeny: Samuel, Daniel, Abel.

Notice Samuel’s fighter jet: a gift from his grandpa, who, I believe, had just toured the Grissom Air Reserve base. (Daniel got one, too.)

The boys all loved the swings. Daniel fell off his, soon after the pic was taken.

I’m not used to being celebrated. It’s been only a few years since I became a father. Karin asked if I wanted anything. I said an opportunity to mow, a fastfood snack, and a thriftstore book hunt; and that’s what I got.

Of toilets

The British famously named one of their scientific boats Boaty McBoatface; in the same spirit, I hereby christen our new toilet Flushton McFlushface – “Flushy,” for short. (Karin’s dad kindly installed it yesterday.)

“Flushy” resided some days in our parlor, inside a big box, and became like a piece of furniture to us – which, I suppose, is what it is. Samuel and Daniel played upon, and inside, the box.

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The Middle Ages weren’t always so-called. Likewise, our old toilet, previously unnamed, is now “Not Quite Flushy” because of its position in the History of Toilets – and because of its chief defect.

We carried it out to the front porch where, due to rain, churchgoing (ours, not the toilet’s), etc., it has remained. With luck, it’ll be immortalized by Google Street View. This afternoon it toppled onto its side. I don’t know if it was pushed by wind, urchins, or stray cats; or if a part of it simply crumbled.

I intend to break it into smaller pieces with a hammer, to fit it into the trash.

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Enough of toilets. For the second half of my reading year I’m plotting a march through Dostoevsky. Curious thing. His canon is crowned by the “five major novels.” Russians list them differently than do English speakers. Russians include The Adolescent; English speakers typically don’t. They might include Notes from the Underground (a novella) or reduce the list to four. It’s not as egregious as, e.g., Oregon’s having become the best college football team in the Midwest’s 18-team Big Ten Conference; but it’s gerrymandered, all right.

Anyway, I plan to read Notes, the Russians’ “five,” and probably The Double and The Gambler; so, either way, I’m covered.

P.S. See this useful webpage re: translations.

An ode to Tubi

My father-in-law remarked:

“I pay for all these streaming services, and which do I end up watching? The free one: Tubi.”

Hear, hear. I could go on about Tubi … and Canela, Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, and Pluto (not to mention subscribable services like ViX that provide a surprising amount of free content). But, for now, let me just discuss Tubi.

I’m scrolling through my queue. I’ve added classic cartoons and movies; trashy old TV movies; British TV; Australian TV (Crime Investigation Australia and Crimes That Shook Australia); and a low-budget documentary series, Village of the Damned, about crime in Dryden, NY, some 20 min. east of Ithaca – not a topic of universal interest, but an alluring one for this ex-resident of Tompkins County.

Indeed, to scroll through Tubi’s main page is a revelation. This isn’t Netflix’s conveyor belt of formulaic, in-house content. No, Tubi is still a chocolate box, in the Forrest Gump sense.

Stay gold, Tubi, stay gold.

Zuleika; LOTR; Farmer boy

One of my favorite chapter openings, almost as good as “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”:

Her actual offspring does not suffice a very motherly woman. Such a woman was Mrs. Batch. Had she been blest with a dozen children, she must yet have regarded herself as also a mother to whatever two young gentlemen were lodging under her roof. …

The same is true of Karin: not with lodgers but with pets and strays.

This time, ’twas a spider. It spun its web on the prongs of our “Medusa” lamp.

Karin once feared spiders – maybe she still does – but she treated this one oh so tenderly. She brought it ants and flies.

Last night, she brought it a live Junebug. That cracked something inside of her. She was anguished for the Junebug: “It just fought so hard to live.”

She carefully removed the spider from our house.

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Her actual offspring are with their grandfather tonight. A respite for us.

This morning I hazarded a library outing with them. They were loud, and I had to drag them home when Daniel wouldn’t stop running through the stacks. But it was gratifying that at first they shunned the e-⁠tablets. Samuel built with blocks from a Jenga-like game. Daniel filled, emptied, and refilled the Connect Four grid.

I kept an eye on them and read Tolkien. Pippin tries to sneak off with the palantír. Gandalf scolds him; then they ride away in the night, on Shadowfax.

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.

Thus ends LOTR bk. III. Tolkien is at his best in the concluding paragraphs of the “books.” So far, he has always concluded with a scene of hobbits. There are grand things in this story, but they are best viewed through hobbits’ eyes; they are too grand for anyone less humble. Tolkien himself may have been a bit of a hobbit, recording momentous and homely detail, for homely folk.

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I also am reading the Little House books. Nine-year-old Almanzo, in Farmer Boy, isn’t quite a hobbit, but he is driven to and fro by industrious larger creatures. The temperatures are frigid; the work is hard; but all is worthwhile because it is fueld by mountains of rich food, described unstintingly.

Misdeeds

The boys and I didn’t stay long at the library this morning.

Daniel kept trying to sneak out of the building. He would open the front doors by pushing the buttons meant for disabled people.

There was nothing for it but to drag him home, and Samuel too – just when he was occupied with the library’s Lego collection.

The protestations!

Samuel can be so quiet, one forgets that he has no sense of decorum. It’s usually all right to take him places, but, occasionally, one regrets it.

They really like it here, I told the librarians who watched me pull my shrieking children past the circulation desk.

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I viewed soccer this afternoon and came away from the TV to find Samuel “cooking” grits. It was his idea to add the taco seasoning.

Here is a more flattering depiction of the brothers. They supped at Karin’s dad’s house last night and managed to pose for him, more-or-less obediently.

Karin & I were busy celebrating our anniversary. We got haircuts and ate salad. We like the salad bar at Macri’s. It’s simple, but the ingredients are good: I especially like the beets.

We usually can’t finish the entrées we order with the salad, so we eat them the next day. They taste better after cooling and reheating.

Having eaten our salad, we went to a hardware store and looked at some macabre weeding tools.

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Today I have a cold. I feel as though my nose will fall off.

I’ve begun reading a book I swore I’d never touch: Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. As I age, I have less and less appetite for camp, but after the 8,392nd TV reference, the urge got the better of me.

I’ve also been reading Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread; various previously mentioned books (Tolkien’s dwarves keep reminding me of the twelve tribes of Israel); and some Platonic dialogs I hadn’t gotten to (more on them later).

As I type, Samuel threads a USB cable through a grate in the floor of our house.

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.

Birthdays; mischief; the Fruit of the Spirit; a word association; a walk; a rogue motorcar

Happy birthday to Karin; to my sister-in-law, Ana; and, apparently, to quite a few of my acquaintances.

Here’s an old photo of Karin and her dad.

My parents baked Karin a cake. Daniel got it all over himself, and we had to toss him into the bath.

We asked Samuel if he wanted to bathe; he demurred. Later – too late – he apprehended that we were respecting his stated wishes, that we in fact didn’t intend to bathe him. He grabbed some fistfuls of cake and judiciously applied them. So we bathed him after all.

Daniel, whom we’d dried and partly dressed, climbed into the water again.

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This morning, I was urging Samuel to be patient, which got him onto his favorite Sunday School topic – the Fruit of the Spirit – and so we read from Galatians 5, which also mentions walking along with (beside, behind, in step with) the Spirit; which made Samuel impatient to take a physical walk; which we did take, along the perimeter of the nearby school. We observed the physical education students riding bicycles upon the running track. I never got to ride a bicycle in P.E. in my day. … Even stranger, a few yards ahead of us, a car casually drove over the grass and mounted the sidewalk and ambled behind the tennis courts and into a parking lot. I could hardly believe I’d seen this, but I checked the grass, and the tracks were there. What was so strange was the nonchalance of it, as if it were a familiar route for that car.

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.

I report on a matter of personal taste

Samuel stayed over at his (maternal) grandpa’s house last night. Karin & I took Daniel out on the town. Or, rather, to some cornfields – specifically, to Prairie Camp, the denomination’s local church camp. It was the first time I’d attended a service there. Readers will recall that earlier in our marriage, Karin & I made a few trips to Brown City Camp – in the “thumb” of Michigan – a larger, slightly more rustic version of Prairie Camp. And of course, I’d grown up visiting the campamento in Same, near Esmeraldas.

Anyway, at Prairie Camp, we left Daniel in the nursery, and then it dawned on me that this would be the first time in years that I’d be around Youth Group Christianity. (My own church doesn’t have more than one or two teens.) The high schoolers occupied the first few rows of the packed tabernacle. They waved their arms. The music was very loud; apart from that, it was pleasantly non-bombastic. A youth pastor preached the sermon. He told a story of a youth group game gone wrong. The game resulted in high schoolers trampling hundreds of marshmallows into a church’s carpet. The youth pastor had to clean the church by himself until five in the morning. This was a prelude to his message about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. (The prodigal son makes a mess of his life.) It was a good sermon.

Nothing about Prairie Camp was very objectionable, except, perhaps, the spiritual arm-twisting at fundraising time.

But man oh man, am I glad not to have to go to youth group meetings anymore.

But this is why it’s good to have institutions like Prairie Camp, where the old and the young mingle, because otherwise I doubt the different Christian groups would mingle at all.

More groups oughta mingle. Not just old and young white Hoosier Low Protestants, but other groups, too. There oughta be a camp where all the Christians meet together.

It would be a logistical nightmare, of course. Feeding would either have to be subsidized by some Christians or else managed on a “loaves and fishes” basis.

I leave mass transit (to the cornfield) and lodging (in the cornfield) as exercises for the reader. …

P.S. J.K. Rowling addresses these two problems in Harry Potter, book 4, in her discussion of the Quidditch World Cup. Spectators camp out in tents. That seems workable. Transit is trickier. It involves something called a “portkey.” That seems a little too mystical for traveling to church camp.

Body-text fonts, pt. 14: Weiss

For Easter, we went to Goshen, where Karin’s dad’s parents live. Samuel found the touchscreen that controls his great-grandparents’ security system. He set off the alarm and instigated a confrontation with the police. … This is the third time he has summoned the emergency services. Some months ago he called 911, but I was able to pursuade the operator that it wasn’t an emergency. Another time, I saw an ambulance travel up and down our street; the driver seemed unable to figure out which house had issued the summons. I checked my call log and learned that Samuel had again called 911. … Since that day, if I catch him playing with my phone, I toss him immediately and mercilessly into the Chokey.

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I found a copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo upon the library sale cart. Surely, I thought, the library is divesting itself of this outdated and offensive tale! I paid a few cents and brought it home. …

(It turns out, the library has retained four copies – one of which is missing.)

Perhaps, despite its window-dressing, Tikki Tikki Tembo isn’t really about the Chinese – at least, no more than A Comedy of Errors, with its italianate duke and its Roman Catholic abbess, is about the historic city-state of Ephesus. …

No, that’s disingenuous. Justly or unjustly, the book satirizes the Chinese ethic of filial piety. Perhaps this subversiveness is what has made Samuel so fond of Tikki Tikki Tembo. He listens to it three or four times or until we make him stop. Fortunately, we don’t have to read it to him; he puts on a CD with a reading by Marcia Gay Harden (it was included in a flap at the back of the book). Whenever it’s time to turn a page, a gong sounds and Samuel turns the page and does a little dance.

Daniel, I am sorely tempted to call “Chang” – the name of the second son – but he already has plenty of nicknames.

The book is set in Weiss:

Other books set in Weiss:

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart.

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

I am told that the design of the Swedish typeface Berling was inspired by Weiss.

“To grandfather in the village”

This is a holiday weekend, which, for Karin, means half-days at the office. Karin’s dad whisked Samuel away for a sleepover, leaving Karin & me with just one child. We used our exotic new freedom to eat inside a restaurant and shop at Goodwill.

We bought Daniel some much-needed shoes. He refuses to walk in them. At home, I carried him to the back yard, plunked him down on the grass, and watched him crawl sadly over and beg to be held.

He’s happy to walk around in socks. It’s shoes that freak him out.

At Goodwill, I also found a volume, published out of India, of fifty Chekhov stories translated by Constance Garnett. Amazingly, I hadn’t previously owned any of Chekhov’s writings. I read “Vanka” when I was little and thought it unbearably sad (for by then I had lived away from my parents). Shirley Jackson’s “Lottery” is light and airy compared to “Vanka.”

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.

Ancestry

There is a surge of COVID-19 across the land. Even so, last night, several dozen descendants of Karin’s father’s parents gathered in the small ancestral house for a Christmas party that had been postponed by December’s storm.

This photo shows representatives of three generations. Daniel sits upon his grandfather. Standing, hunched over, is Daniel’s young granduncle. (I am almost as old as he is.) Finally, there is Daniel’s great-grandfather – Karin’s grandfather. Karin’s generation isn’t represented in the photo.

I ate barbecued meatballs and wieners and bemusedly watched the many children scurry around. Our own boys were shell-shocked by all the relatives and gifts.

Now that we are at home and things have quieted down, Samuel’s favorite present is a miniature basketball hoop-and-balls set given to Daniel. Daniel’s favorite present is a large, plush, green dragon given to Samuel, which Karin has named Draco.

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Karin’s grandfather was adopted. Recently, he took a DNA test and learned about some of his biological relations. He spoke last night of Scottish, English, and Irish ancestors. (He used to say he was Hungarian.)

Karin’s mom also was adopted. Much of Karin’s ancestry – and our children’s – is unknown.

As for mine: Mary’s DNA was profiled a few years ago, and it turns out that I and my siblings are largely North African. “Which is hardly surprising,” David said, “when you think of what we share with Mohamed Salah, Zinedine Zidane, et al. …”

Daniel is dedicated; speech and song

What do you get when a writer and director of commercial TV is a trained phonologist (and a person evidently steeped in great literature)? Brilliant YouTube, that’s what.

In Disgrace, Coetzee writes of his protagonist:

He finds … preposterous [the premise]: “Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.” His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Funny to think that iambic pentameter is what fills out the overlarge and rather empty English soul.

Un mundo inmenso’s newest video, on the Canary Islands, also touches on some distinctly musical speech.

Topography determines phonology which determines usage. (Of necessity, the speakers of this whistle-language use a lot of synonyms. The video explains.) Mindblowing stuff.

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We took Daniel to the front of the church on Sunday and dedicated him to the Lord along with three other infants. He was observed from the pews by four grandparents, two step-grandparents, and two great-grandparents, as well as by his brother, Samuel, who howled and squirmed in Karin’s dad’s arms.

Afterward, my half of the family posed for this photo. (Karin is behind the camara.)

Only two games per day now. I have World Cup withdrawal: twitching, hallucinations, etc. But yesterday I made up for it by streaming France vs. Poland a day late (it was broadcast while we were in church). Mbappé made two golazos. He is so good, but he is such a twerp. He did a couple of ostentatious, pointless backheel touches. He is out-twerping his clubmate, Neymar, who has been injured most of the tournament.

Some more, final, last hurrahs

As I type, Daniel is on the kitchen floor, perching on all fours and rocking forward and backward; he’s very near to doing his first crawl. In church this morning, I took him to look at a newborn child (well, a two-or-three-week-old) and he beamed down like a benevolent little giant upon that new churchgoer. Samuel, meanwhile, went to his first Sunday School class with the children who’ve graduated from the nursery. Karin & I peeked in: he was tampering with the laptop that was broadcasting the singalong music.

His first day of school, and already he’s misbehaving with electronic devices.

Yesterday we went to Bremen, one county to the south, and attended a surprise party for another churchgoer. She might be the spryest ninety-year-old I’ve known. The cheese-&-chicken dip was a work of art (in the “grease” category of art); the corn chips belonged to one of the cheapest store brands. That’s Midwestern church food for you. We also ate those little barbecued meatballs and some other meatballs that were mixtures of sausage and cheese. It was an excellent late-afternoon snack; a little later, once Karin & I had dropped the children off at her dad’s house and begun our romantic evening together, which was supposed to be our last hurrah, foodwise, I was compelled to order a salad.

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.