Illness; reading to Samuel; reading to Daniel; the canceling of books

Nasty colds this week for Samuel and Daniel. It’s the first cold of Daniel’s life. Samuel, poor lad, is old enough to ruminate upon how unpleasant illness is – and to feel not just ill but, also, demoralized.

To cheer him up, I read him four chapters of Fantastic Mr. Fox. He enjoys it well enough, and then he abruptly goes off to play.

When he is demoralized again, I read him half of The Enormous Crocodile.

“Do you like this book, Sammy?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

But we soldier on. When we finish, I again ask, “Did you like that book?”

“Yes,” he says in a low, raspy voice.

It won’t be very many days until we finish Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then Samuel will have had his first full excursion through an (almost-)novel. We’ve read a good amount of Stuart Little, too, but I had to put that devastating book down for a bit because I was demoralized. Samuel liked it pretty well until he was confronted with E.B. White’s rather technical descriptions of the schooner Wasp.

He may not yet be ready for Herman Melville or Patrick O’Brien. I may never be ready for Patrick O’Brien.

Like his brother before him, Daniel has been signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and this week he received the usual first installment, The Little Engine that Could, which I neither enjoy nor admire, and of which we already own maybe a half-dozen copies. This version has new drawings. Have the old ones been deemed to be morally beyond the pale? Or just too ugly? I know that a couple of years ago Samuel was given a copy with the old drawings. Since Samuel was born, some of Dr. Seuss also has been canceled, and Roald Dahl has had his bitter prose sweetened up by his publishers. I need to make sure to buy the editions that I like before they disappear.

(It’s hardly a new thing, of course – the canceling of children’s books because of a decline in tolerance for this or that wrongful or different attitude.)

Whales, cont.

After a hiatus, I’ve gone back to Moby Dick.

Readers, you’ve had a narrow escape. This entry was going to be a long quotation from Chapter XXXII, about how Ishmael classifies the whale as a fish.

I read that quotation again and again, and I asked myself: “Would it improve the world to post this?” I decided it wouldn’t. Delete, delete.

Thinking about the general state of the world is a symptom of depression.

I’m much happier than I was some years ago. But melancholy still afflicts me – especially when my physical health is lousy. At present I’m not suffering too terribly. My throat is sore, and my body aches; but I’ve been able to go to work, and I’m not always wracked by pain.

Karin also is sick and sad. One of us gave it to the other.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Having just finished reading a good book about El Salvador, I’m revisiting some classics: Huckleberry Finn and The Sun Also Rises. The Twain book is about as enjoyable as it was 23 or 24 years ago. The Hemingway book, I’m reading for the third time. I understand it better than I used to. In high school, there were some things I didn’t pick up on, like that the narrator had had his penis injured during the war. And this time I noticed right away that Georgette is a prostitute; before, I’d taken it for granted that the narrator wanted to buy her her dinner.

Some bedmates

Another visit to Jasper; this time, we shared potatoes & Salisbury steak. By “we shared” I mean I let Jasper have some of the dregs of the gravy. Then I napped in Karin’s bed. Jasper snuggled with me for a bit.

I read more of Moby-Dick. I’m on Chapter XIX, seven behind schedule. One hundred pages into the book, just now Ishmael and his savage bedmate, Queequeg, have signed up to go whaling with the Pequod; they still haven’t set out to sea. (I may have blogged about this when I last tried reading Moby-Dick.)

My boss in the high school English Dept is reading Moby-Dick with Martin and me. She told me that she intends, when she retires, to visit Nantucket and Walden Pond. This person taught Karin in high school (Karin was a little alarmed of her). “Karin …,” my boss recalled, “Karin! I loved her! She was so funny and smart, and she had such big, brown eyes!”

Later, she told my other boss, who runs the Social Studies Dept, that our match was made in heaven.

The wedding planner

It hasn’t been so bad at Planet Fitness. I’ve still got plenty of stamina from a couple of years ago, when I weighed forty fewer pounds. Speaking of whales, Martin and I are reading Moby-Dick, one chapter every day. Today is the fourteenth day. You are welcome to read it with us.

I suppose I’d better report some things about my wedding.

It’ll take place on May the Twenty-first.

There is some pressure to change the venue: the guest list is too large for our church. I’m all for casting out a good many of the spectators. But my future in-laws keep on suggesting more spectators to bring in (which is tiresome of them).

Of course, I’d like to include all of our near and distant family and friends – and some enemies, for gloating over – but, in the end, having the wedding at our church is more important to me. (What are Karin’s feelings? I don’t presume to state them.) Besides, after our honeymoon, we might have a casual party for the cast-outs.

I hear them, my detractors. “Only John-Paul would write so cynically about his wedding.” Well, you should have heard what I used to say about weddings, when I thought myself a paragon of rationality. I have become much more marriageable than I used to be.