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 for 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.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 83: Pride and prejudice

Karin wanted to sit through this BBC miniseries – one of her staples – while on (unpaid) maternity leave. So we did. It was my second viewing. I enjoyed it better this time, probably because we watched 50, not 150, minutes each night.

As you’d expect, the dialog is witty, and there’s lovely scenery, architecture, costuming, etc. But it’s the reaction shots that distinguish this production. Whenever some fool runs his or her mouth, Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) cast exquisitely disparaging looks: Lizzy’s, half-pained, half-amused; Darcy’s, woeful. (Firth, who is always turning to the wall, seems physically ill in two-thirds of his scenes.) Other superior persons – notably, old Mr Bennet (Benjamin Whitrow) and Miss Caroline Bingley (Anna Chancellor, a.k.a. “Duckface”) – are more overtly contemptuous. As for the fools that these higher beings must endure: Mrs Bennet (Alison Steadman) and Mr Collins (David Bamber) are too ridiculous for my taste, but Miss Lydia Bennet (Julia Sawalha) is superb; she isn’t stupid so much as lively, ignorant, and selfish. (I knew a girl at school who looked and acted like Lydia. She was amusing – and rather a dear – at arm’s length; her closer associates suffered. Happily, she did grow up.)

I needn’t rehash the plot of Pride and Prejudice. The themes are matchmaking and, especially, money.

“How long have you loved him?”

“Well, it’s been coming on so gradually, I hardly know. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

As for the actors, it might be useful to list some of their other notable performances.

(1) Julia Sawalha (Miss Lydia Bennet): A Midwinter’s Tale, reviewed by me. She’s just as lively in that movie. She has kept on getting parts, but I know of nothing comparable to her mid-nineties work. Her looks haven’t deserted her. Her youthfulness has.

(2) Susannah Harker (Miss Jane Bennet): Midsomer Murders, s12e02, “The Black Book.” The most intriguing murder suspect in that hilarious episode.

(3) Barbara Leigh Hunt (Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Strangled in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

(4) Adrian Lukis (Mr Wickham): Blair Toast, Stephen Toast’s insufferable military brother, in Toast of London.

(5) Emilia Fox (Miss Giorgiana Darcy), of the prolific Fox family. Kind-faced, handsome, unremarkable. Such actors are necessary. Typical work: the everlasting autopsy/⁠forensics drama, Silent Witness. Atypical work: Cashback, as a supermarket checkout girl. Most effective work: as one of the blondes in Roman Polanski’s Pianist.

(6) David Bamber (Mr Collins). He is in absolutely everything. My choice is his turn as a harried piano teacher/⁠road accident victim in the miniseries Collision.

(7) “Duckface” (Miss Caroline Bingley): Four Weddings, of course. Honorable mention: Ken Stott’s love interest in the lurid crime series The Vice.

The best tribute to this Pride and Prejudice is this YouTuber’s, who re-enacted it by himself.

I am reminded of Snoopy’s unabridged sock-puppet show of War and Peace, which goes on for days and is viewed, in its entirety, only by Linus.

Correction (29 Jan): Lucy. Give her her due!

R.I.P. Grandpa

His obituary.

A few labels to identify him by:

• Hoosier farm boy
• educator
• churchman
• “seagoing cowboy”

Re: the last (and most glamorous) label. He transported livestock, in the 1940s, to war-ravaged Greece.

This portrait is from a 2014 “seagoing cowboy” reunion.

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He was best known as a missionary to Ecuador.

He lived in Esmeraldas and evangelized throughout the rustic northwestern provinces. He’d walk many miles from little town to little town.

The church published this condolence:

(The verse is actually Psalm 116:15. Here, in the Reina-Valera translation, estimada – like precious in the KJV and NIV – means costly. Compare: Mucho le cuesta al Señor ver morir a los que lo aman [this translation is Dios Habla Hoy]. The basic idea is the same as in “Jesus wept.”)

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He was the grandparent I knew best … the one near whom I lived longest … and the one who took me with him on several long trips (to Panama and Jamaica, and around Ecuador).

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He was the grandparent who’d discuss literature and movies with me. I’ll dwell on this at some length. Grandpa was a humane man. His Christianity certainly touched everything about him. But his faith wasn’t the only thing that made him humane.

I trust the other tribute-givers to highlight his more overtly spiritual qualities.

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He disagreed – respectfully, if somewhat impishly – with my rather bloodthirsty literary tastes.

Once, having read the Lambs on Shakespeare, I was going on about Macbeth (or whatever). Grandpa was unimpressed.

I think that when Shakespeare makes someone die, it’s because he has no further use for him.

That’s quite a notion to put to a second-grader. I’ve been mulling it over, ever since.

He didn’t care for Agatha Christie, either. The murders were too gleeful.

The detective story that I like best – he meant “A Scandal in Bohemia” – is a sentimental tale, in which the detective falls in love.

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But his was a sin-conscious romanticism. He was keenly attuned to grades of evil and redemption.

I told him, when I was reading Huck Finn, that I imagined Huck’s father to be like the drunkard in Hoosiers.

No, no, much worse, he said.

It was an enlightening correction.

Once, we watched a series of Disney movies together (he was looking after us children while our parents were out of town). He enjoyed the movies’ wit. But, to his own surprise, he was deeply moved by Beauty and the Beast.

I thank you, Father – he prayed with us that night – that you have made it possible for people to change.

He had no use for such movies as Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its casual, cynical violence, or Inherit the Wind, which treats an entire society as contemptibly cartoonish.

Not that he disliked cartoons as such: he relished 1066 and All That, Flannery O’Connor, and Peanuts.

As an adult, I lent him David Michaelis’s biography of Charles Schulz. He returned it with profuse thanks. I enjoyed it very much, he said, that is, until Schulz’s life went off the rails.

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I spent college vacations at his house. I’d catch him sneaking into my room, returning furtively borrowed novels by Kenzaburo Oe or J. M. Coetzee. Some he liked, some he didn’t. I could tell what he thought of a novel by how he put it on the shelf.

Of Coetzee’s Michael K, he said: This book describes a redemption that even a severely limited man can attain.

His own daily life was disarmingly simple. I believe he once seriously considered retiring to a trailer house. For lunch, he’d open a can of beans, or he’d take me down the street to Wendy’s, where he was content to eat a baked potato. His love for the underdog was almost fanciful. Hence his delight in such charmers as The Mouse that Roared and – to his family’s considerable amusement – Baby’s Day Out, which he first saw in Ecuador, on a bus. (I’ve already mentioned Hoosiers.)

He also liked novels that told the story of a life (the odd Dickens or George Eliot) or that described rural societies that preceded or coincided with his own (Stowe, Twain, Tarkington, Stratton-Porter, Rawlings; he was raised in Indiana but also spent time, as a youngster, in Florida). I believe his favorite book in Spanish was a rural idyll called El camino – most likely, the one by Miguel Delibes.

He spoke and wrote beautifully. I was in high school when I began, consciously, to pattern my syntax and cadence after his.

If I strain after a turn of phrase, it’s because I merely imitate, all-too-imperfectly, what came naturally to my exemplar.

The same is true of many of his descendants, in their respective pursuits.

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He died on Friday morning, of a heart attack. He’d turned ninety-seven the previous day. His widow, my step-grandma, is my sole remaining grandparent; my grandma died in 1991.

February’s poem

It’s by Yeats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

After the Super Bowl, Samuel wanted to listen to Taylor Swift.

Taylor: “She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts …”

Samuel: “I wear t-shirts. And underwear.”

Yes, he does.

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Karin & I spent our Valentine’s outing (yesterday) getting haircuts and eating at Hacienda. Most years, we eat in the mall food court, so this was a step up.

Wheel, Jeopardy!, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days played on TV in the restaurant.

I really love Karin.

Lots of pictures of Beethoven

When I wrote that Samuel’s been saying “Beethoven is so sleepy,” I didn’t realize he’d go on talking about Beethoven for days and days. When Samuel gets sad, he says, “Beethoven is so sad.” When he’s scared, he says, “Beethoven is so scared.” When he pulls my hair, he says, “Don’t pull Beethoven’s hair.”

Beethoven has become the all-purpose surrogate.

When Samuel wants breakfast, he says: “Let’s go to the kitchen, Beethoven.” “Have some candy corn, Beethoven.” (I’m not sure when we last had candy corn in the house. I think our supply was eaten by the mice.)

Really, what kid wouldn’t be obsessed with Beethoven. There’s the music, of course – Samuel’s favorite compilation is Beethoven for Babies – and then there’s this portrait that comes up on Spotify.

I wondered what Beethoven looked like in other pictures.

I found some.

Little boy Beethoven. Not so unlike Samuel.

Youthful Beethoven.

(These are from the chronological sequence on this webpage.)

Beethoven standing by a park bench.

Beethoven resembling Marcelo Bielsa.

Brooding Beethoven.

A bust of Beethoven: no doubt, the one on Schroeder’s piano.

This artist, Hadi Karimi, makes 3-D likenesses of famous people. Beethoven, appropriately, is a subject.

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My school friend, Hoku, has brought his family for a visit, one county to the north of us. I’ll do my utmost to see him.

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Now, some sadder news. Our congressional representative, Jackie Walorski, died in a car crash today. The South Bend Tribune published this report.

Quino

Happy birthday, yesterday, to my dad. I spent a couple of hours at his house, along with Karin, Samuel, and Daniel. Stephen dropped by, too.

It turns out that my dad shares a birthday with Quino, the famous Argentinian cartoonist who died two years ago. If I had to rank newspaper comics in terms of, I dunno, some combination of intrinsic merit and life-impact, Peanuts would tower above all the others; and then would come Condorito, and then the gag comics of Quino. (I also grew up reading Quino’s daily strip, Mafalda, but was less taken with it.)

No niche-occupiers for me. I like my cartoonists to have hugely universal appeal.

Quino was just featured in a Google Doodle, throughout Latin America and in parts of Europe. I guess his appeal isn’t universal enough for the United States.

He isn’t a good caption writer. His best work is mostly wordless. Or it uses gibberish, as in this famous strip.

A few themes:

Owners.

Workers. (Uber, anyone?)

Politicians.

Law and order.

Reading/dreaming. (He is very good at drawing dreams.)

More reading.

Loneliness (one).

Loneliness (two).

Death (one).

Death (two).

The closest thing in this country is The Far Side. But Quino draws better, and with a certain grandeur.

Leaves migrating south for the winter

Temperatures got up to the high forties (F) today. Had it not rained, Samuel and I might have kicked a ball around on a field near our house. Instead, we did some napping.

I have told Karin I won’t buy any more books this year, at least not out of pocket (i.e., without gift money).

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The Atlantic has been publishing a special series about U.S. democracy. Online, that is. The articles will reapper in the January/February print issue. That’s why some of them talk as if we already have come to the anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack, though that attack took place on January 6 of this year.

The Atlantic must not be the only medium that is talking like this. One of my right-wing Facebook friends, who wouldn’t be caught dead reading that magazine, posts:

The fact that January 6th is even a topic of conversation anymore, let alone the object of extensive judicial inquiry, is mind-boggling.

My mind is boggled that his mind is boggled, though by now the mutual incredulity is predictable. I have no great point to make about this. Why mention it, then?

In one of my favorite Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown overhears Lucy explain to a very young Linus that in the autumn, leaves fall off trees because they are migrating south for the winter.

“My stomach aches,” Charlie Brown says.

For many of us, engaging opponents, listening to opponents, has become well-nigh impossible because it’s just too stomach-churning. Not because of mutual contempt, name-calling, etc., though those things are bad, but because facts and plausible interpretations of those facts are treated contemptuously, while ludicrous interpretations and lies are treated as truth.

So, if we want to talk politics, we talk with people who agree with us. Or we attend to those on the other side to get a perverse pleasure from what they say. But, in the long run, those things also are stomach-churning. They’re like eating stale food, or like eating junk food that gives us a quick high and then leaves us ill and out of shape.

Maybe the best course is to be like Charlie Brown and not have any friends, only enemies; to lament that they are our enemies; and to live, as fully as possible, with the constant stomach-ache.

O Christmas tree

Quito, my birth city, turns 513 years old today; its fiestas should be just concluding. Last night, its suburb of Sangolquí observed a great success. Independiente del Valle built a two-goal lead over Emelec in the first of two games that will decide the Ecuadorian championship.

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Karin put up a Christmas tree, and, predictably, Samuel has been knocking it over and taking off the ornaments. Even so, he’s treating it more reverently than I expected. He knows a thing or two about Christmas trees, having familiarized himself with a picture-book version of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I am so tired of reading that book, last week I broke down and ordered the DVD. I hope it calms his urges.

Fear not, Samuel says, quoting Linus’s recitation about the angel and the shepherds.

Today I saw him paging through a Christmas board book that he never used to look at much. He was talking to himself about the baby Jesus.

Midlife

As I watch the gentle, rather silly new crime drama McDonald & Dodds, several of the actors seem middle-aged; but when I look them up on IMDb, I learn they are much younger than I am.

What is more disturbing, the actor who plays Detective Sergeant Dodds – the show’s “doddering old man” – is only fifteen years older than I am.

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I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have begun a “philosophy of the stages of life” binge: not only Kieran Setiya’s Midlife, but also Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age and John Martin Fischer’s & Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin’s Near-Death Experiences.

Perhaps Dante is my subconscious inspiration.

Perhaps it’s just that these books are written for a popular audience, and reading them has been an easy way to meet my daily quota of philosophy.

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I actually think the “stages of life” approach is overblown. Life is less like a journey, more like a series of Peanuts strips, in which each character plays out endless variations of a core individuality. Even the extremes of the natural lifespan – the beginning and the end – are more like waking up and going to sleep, or growing and shrinking, than like starting and ceasing to be. I was in a class in which the teacher surveyed what each philosopher thought happens when you die. What about Leibniz, someone asked. The teacher said, Leibniz thinks that when you die, you get very small. And then, of course, you grow again (Leibniz believed in resurrection). The “oscillating universe” theory of cosmology may not be fashionable these days – I wouldn’t know, I stopped paying attention after Carl Sagan – but an “oscillating self” theory seems plausible to me (until it doesn’t, until it does).

The homework machine; “Peruvians live in Peru”; classic toons

I found, on YouTube, a record that I used to listen to when I was a child in Esmeraldas: Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.

Side 1:

Side 2:

Along with the Hardy Boys novels, this record introduced me to U.S. teenhood. From it I picked up 1950s–1960s lingo (This must be how teenagers talk, I thought) and some regrettable attitudes about doing homework.

The story is told as a musical. When I was a child, I didn’t relish this. Now I think the songs are pretty funny:

Girls are a pain

You know what I mean

They like going shopping

And they like keeping clean

And now I realize that the characters are pre-teens, not teenagers.

The best song is by a girl whose computer-generated report on Peru has been sabotaged; and who, therefore, must “wing it,” Sally Brown-style, in front of the class:

Peruvians live in Peru

Just like you’d expect them to do

Just like Romans live in Rome

And the Finns make Finland their home

Peruvians live in Peru

Just like you’d expect them to do

I like it that her classmates start singing along with this drivel. Then the song morphs into a mariachi or whatever. Wrong country … but this does reflect the student’s predicament.

Samuel was fascinated by all of this – the songs, the disembodied dialog (he hasn’t heard many podcasts or radio dramas), and, especially, the computer noises.

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An even better find: five hours of classic Looney Tunes, gorgeously remastered.

It’s a pleasure to watch old favorites like “A Corny Concerto” (the second cartoon in the video) looking this good.

Samuel liked this pretty well, too.

More house hunting

This is turning out to be one of the most unpleasant things I’ve had to do.

Not long ago, after an evening during which Karin & I visited five houses, I woke up around 3:00am and lay in bed for two hours with what felt like electric current speeding through my body. I finally gave up and went to the living room.

Jasper took it as his cue to spread out on my lap. He must have comforted me: I promptly fell asleep.

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Tonight we toured another house. It was inexpensive; it seemed comfortable enough to live in; it was in an unkempt neighborhood, next to two abandoned houses. It seemed like a good “backup” option. We decided not to rule it out. On the main level were a couple of large, open rooms through which Samuel ran back and forth. “That’s the boy I know,” said our realtor, who is finally warming up to him (the realtor is a bit of a sourpuss).

We toured an abandoned house on Wednesday. Our realtor wouldn’t go inside with us. We found rotten food, dead mice, etc. I wouldn’t allow Samuel to run around in that house, though he tried to squirm out of my arms.

The house itself wasn’t bad, but the one we saw today was better, and it costs about the same amount.

Tomorrow, two more houses.

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In Texas, David is reading War and Peace with his book club. I said I’d read it at the same time; but, obviously, I’m finding it impossible to keep up, what with all this worrying about houses.

Before all of this, Karin & I had been planning a little vacation, but that’s on hold. I don’t think we’ve said a word about it since we visited our first house.

Puffin rock

A day in the 40s (F) – a nice temperature because the snow melted and I didn’t have to shovel. The next days will be in the 20s, so I made sure to go strolling. I’m afraid Samuel doesn’t enjoy these cold-weather strolls. When he saw I was going to put his coat on him, he tried to crawl away, which he’d never done before. But, of course, I caught him.

Though the temperature wasn’t piercing, the wind was. Samuel was glad when we came home.

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Samuel’s favorite TV show is Puffin Rock. Karin & I have begun saying “P-U-F-F-I-N-R-O-C-K” to one another because if Samuel hears the words “Puffin Rock” he gets a little wild. The show itself is not very wild. Two pufflings, Oona and Baba, live with their parents and various other small animals – foxes, frogs, owls, bunnies, shrews, hermit crabs, etc. – on an island off the southwest coast of Ireland. Their gentle adventures are narrated by Chris O’Dowd.

Oona is a kind soul. Baba is so infantile that he looks like a fluffy white tennis ball with big eyes. He expresses himself in a lively but inarticulate fashion (he reminds me of Woodstock, Snoopy’s bird friend in Peanuts). I wonder if Samuel is in especial sympathy with Baba; in any case, he laughs and laughs whenever the puffins carry twigs or fishes in their beaks.

Here is a scene in which the puffins guide a lost frog back to its pond.

Tonight, Karin & I put on an episode of Wallace and Gromit – A Matter of Loaf and Death – and, alas, Samuel was terrified. Which was a proper reaction, since it really is an unsettling little movie.

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.

Diploma

It’s been reported that the iconic Chilean cartoon strip, Condorito, begun in 1949, will no longer be printed.

This is big news. Condorito is the Peanuts of Latin America.

I could single out many great jokes from this comic, but I’ll recount just one: “Diploma.”

A traveler drives through Andean farm country. He stops his car and gets out to stretch his legs.

He asks a farmer for a drink of water. (The farmer is Condorito.)

A little boy is helping the farmer out in the field. The farmer tells him, “Diploma, fetch this traveler a glass of water.” The little boy goes. Presently, he returns with some water.

The farmer says, “Thank you, Diploma.”

The traveler slowly drinks his cold water. Then he turns to the farmer and makes conversation: “I couldn’t help but notice that the little boy is called ‘Diploma.’ A curious name! What is the reason for it?”

The farmer ruffles the boy’s hair. “Several years ago,” he says, “his mother went off to the city to attend the university. She told everyone that she wouldn’t return until she had a diploma. And here he is.”

The traveler goes ¡Plop!

When I was very little, I used to go around telling people this joke, not really understanding it. They would give me funny looks.

But it seems to me that this joke has somehow become one of the great themes of my life.

The wedding; the honeymoon; Independiente del Valle

Amazing, how when a task is so carefully rehearsed, its execution is so simple. There were next-to-no problems during the wedding. Apparently one of Karin’s cousins showed up drunk, but he behaved himself. Slightly more annoying was one of Karin’s great-uncles, who, as he congratulated me, told me to keep my wife in line by beating her. “No, no, no,” I said. Then, during the reception, he accosted me a few more times and made other bizarre remarks.

“My mom detests that guy,” Karin told me. “And guess what his job is? He’s a pastor!”

Apart from that horrid person, all the guests were lovely, and the officiants and maids and men performed their duties, and many other people helped out in small ways so that Karin & I had only to say our vows and to receive our greetings.

Then we went home and ate Chinese food.

The next day we rode the train to Chicago. The day after that, we got up at 2:30 in the morning, trudged to the airport, and flew to Salt Lake City. The young man who sat next to us was determined not to acknowledge us. I offered to buy him a drink, but he kept his face glued to the window. He reminded me of Charlie Brown’s tentmate (click to enlarge):

In Salt Lake City, the air was a little thin. “Mountains!” Karin said, astonished. “One sees them in pictures, but look, those are really there!” Indeed, the scenery was stunning all during our drive to Southern Utah, to the national parks. (Later I’ll discuss that trip in greater detail.)

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Independiente del Valle have qualified for the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores. Here is their penalty shootout.

Los regalos

December is just beginning, and already we’ve erected our Charlie Brown Christmas tree and put gifts under it. Why are we so “Christmassy” this year?

Because of David. Some weeks ago, he sent us his wishlist. (Life in Houston must be very dull.) Since then, we’ve all been posting wishlists. I’m not sure how effective those lists will turn out to be. For example, I can’t buy what Mary asked for; I mean, not without withholding the Gift of Rent from her.

She, on the other hand, has been buying quite a lot of gifts. Useful gifts. Salutary gifts.

She bought a storybook for her little niece.

She’s going to buy gum surgery for her husband. (These holidays, poor Martin will subsist on liquids.)

To me, she said: “I won’t tell you what I bought you — it isn’t what you asked for, but it’s for your benefit.”

Edoarda & Stephen bought a bookcase for me, which is nice, because now I’ll be able to bring more of my books up from the basement. Stephen gave some old shoelaces to Bianca.

Christmas 2012

Christmastime: family, family, and more family. It’s been kind of nice.

I hadn’t expected that Mary & Martin would be here in South Bend — they’d intended to go to Illinois — but on Christmas Eve, Mary got an infection and had to be admitted to Memorial Hospital. I visited her for several hours. It was kind of nice.

She’s out of the hospital now. She’s better.

I spent three consecutive days with my Uncle John, my Aunt Lorena, and their daughters, Annie & Vickie. Today I went to their house for Christmas dinner. At first they were surprised, but then they remembered they’d invited me. We ate spaghetti. It was good. … I convinced my aunt and cousins to read Wuthering Heights with me, one chapter each day. I’ve never read it. My aunt has, several times.

Annie was given a tree for Christmas — a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Here it is:

:) :) :)

Tomorrow is Carlos Muñoz Day.

Columbus Day

I almost forgot!

What: World Cup qualifier, Ecuador vs. Chile.

Where: Quito.

When: TODAY !!! (Friday) at 5:00pm, U.S. Eastern Time.

Pray for Ecuador to win.

Antonio Valencia, our best player, has been suspended. But some fine Chileans will be absent as well.

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[Edit:] In Ecuador, today is El Día de la Raza; and where I am, in this empire of rugged individualists, it’s Columbus Day.

For years I searched the Internet for one particular comic strip, and never found it. But here it is, thanks to my brother Stephen:

This is just perfect.