A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.

Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)

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.

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.

Zadok the priest; Pop. 1280; a recipe

Karin: “Zadok the priest
And Nathan the prophet
Were hangin’ out,
Doing some stuff.”

Some commenter on YouTube: “Can you imagine when the Queen eventually passes away, and Charles becomes King. As he walks through Westminster Abbey on the day of his coronation … 95% of the viewing public are going to be thinking to themselves, ‘Why the bloody hell are they playing the Champions League theme?!?!’”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Per this entry: Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 has arrived from a library in Connecticut. So far, it’s better than The Killer Inside Me. Funnier, at least.

I’d been thinking it was about time to do some political campaignin’, since I had a pretty tough opponent coming up for a change. … [¶] Always before, I’d let the word get around that I was against this and that, things like cockfighting and gambling and whiskey and so on. So my opposition would figure they’d better come out against ’em, too, only twice as strong as I did. And I went right ahead and let ’em. Me, almost anyone can make a better speech than I can, and anyone can come out stronger against or for something. Because, me, I’ve got no very strong convictions about anything. Not anymore I haven’t.
[Ch. 9, ¶¶ 1–2]

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today’s lunch:

Ingredients for the rice cooker:

• Butter (1 tablespoon)
• Brown rice, dry (1/3 cup)
• Water A (2/3 cup)
• Red lentils, dry (1/2 cup)
• Water B (1 cup)
• Russet potatoes, raw, cut into 1/2-in cubes (5 oz)
• Jalapeño peppers, raw, chopped (2 oz)
• Yellow onions, raw, chopped (3 oz)
• Broccoli, raw, chopped (5 oz)
• Sazón Goya (1 packet)
• Water C (1/2 cup)

Other ingredients:

• Tortillas
• Sour cream
• Cheese, shredded
• Etc.

The steps are what you’d expect.

There are approx. 835 kcals in the pot; the amounts and kinds of tortillas, sour cream, cheese, etc. are up to you. The filling, once cooked, is pasty, like refried beans. It’s lumpy where the potatoes are, and just a little crunchy because the rice retains some hardness (don’t worry, it’s edible). To make the rice come out softer, if that is your desire, use more water, although that’ll make everything softer. Or, I dunno, use less rice.

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Scott was baptized in a small church in Michigan; afterward, there was special music by one of the congregants. “The guy told us he’d recorded four CDs,” said Jennifer, Karin’s stepsister. “I wasn’t expecting him to sing them all.”

All in a day’s screen time

Samuel and Daniel have been watching domino-toppling and marble-racing videos, among others. After a couple months of escalating wildness, this is what my YouTube account has suggested we view:

“Hamster Escapes Pool Ball Traps for Pets in Real Life in Hamster Stories #2”:

Bizarrest cinema I’ve encountered in a while. Part rat maze, part funhouse, part video game, part fifties horror movie. Samuel loves it. Loves – present tense; as I type, the channel is streaming live.

The video goes on forever. This is what people do now, Karin says. This is how they spend their time: making and watching stuff like this.

I admire the video (I think?). Certainly, I admire the craftsmanship. I do feel sorry for the hamsters. I guess that in a perfect world, living, breathing creatures would be spared such an ordeal. But “sometimes you have to break a few eggs,” the makers of The Adventures of Milo and Otis must have told themselves every day they were filming. It’s more compelling that real hamsters are being filmed: just as it’s more compelling that, in Fitzcarraldo, the actors (well, the extras) really dragged the steamboat over a hill; that De Niro really gained weight for Raging Bull; etc., etc.

This video is what Karin & I put on after we watched the quiet, reflective Ruby in Paradise. Samuel begged for YouTube all through that movie. Now he is getting his wish.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We spent half the day in Karin’s mom’s house because an exterminator was treating ours. We’ll go back to Karin’s mom’s house tomorrow. Scott, her husband, is getting baptized.

When we were driving home on SR 23, we passed a truck with two large, flowing, half-Union/half-Confederate flags. We must have gawked too hard. The driver gave us a dirty look. Half a city later, when we turned into our street, we saw him right behind us. He kept on going. He probably wasn’t deliberately following us, but I felt better when we got off the main road: his causes wouldn’t have been welcomed in our neighborhood.

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.

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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)

A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:

“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.

I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.

A wedding

Continuing on the subject of gluttony, yesterday was my “last hurrah,” at least for the season: I made two trips down a Polish buffet line. (If anything has a claim to being “South Bend cuisine,” it’s Polish food.) The occasion was my mother-in-law’s wedding. You’ll recall that she was widowed in 2020. Now she is married to Scott, her dead husband’s ex-roommate. It was a canny move. When Rick died, she griefstrickenly bequeathed Rick’s guns to Scott; now, presumably, she has got them back. Karin and Samuel and I rode to the wedding with McKenzie, Karin’s mom’s ex-foster daughter. McKenzie wore sweatpants and swigged from a half-gallon of milk and talked on her phone to her imprisoned boyfriend. “I have a gift card,” she told him. “I’m going to sell it to buy you another phone card.” It was a cheerful conversation. Like Scott and unlike the rest of my mother-in-law’s family, McKenzie is a happy-go-lucky sort of person. She gleefully told her boyfriend that her tattoo artist had just been jailed.

We also had a delicious venison stew, courtesy of my mother-in-law’s Uncle Fred, who shoots deer and hangs them up in his front yard. Uncle Fred preached the sermon. Karin said it was about sin (Uncle Fred is another happy-go-lucky sort of person). I didn’t hear it; Samuel started howling as soon as the bride walked up the aisle, so I took him to a Sunday School room where he played with toy cars and I read Agatha Christie. Karin told me not to bring a book to the wedding, but I did anyway; one never knows. I don’t think Karin’s mom noticed. She seemed to be relishing everything else that was going on.

My bachelor party

We held my bachelor party last night. It was nothing very strenuous. I figured I was too fat to fulfill my longtime dream of playing soccer, so I planned only to have a meal.

As the meal began to wind down, various partiers excused themselves. The others wondered what we’d do next.

“We could go to Barnes & Noble,” I said, “and each of you could buy me a book.”

A few more of the partiers excused themselves.

Martin arrived late. A graduating high-school student had chosen him as his most influential teacher, and Martin had been obliged to go to a ceremony to be honored by him. The student hadn’t attended the ceremony.

“We could go home and watch TV,” I said. “Those are the two things that I enjoy doing. I like to buy books and to watch TV.”

“Shots!” said my friend Brandon.

“No.”

My tone was curt. I didn’t want to drink shots.

“I mean, penalty shots!” said Brandon. “Soccer shots!”

That seemed like a good idea. Kicking penalty shots wouldn’t require too much effort.

Brandon and David and Stephen and Martin and our other friend Scott and I got into our cars and headed over to Bethel to take penalty shots at the goals there. But one field was being sprinkled, and the other had players on it, and the remaining goals were chained away out of reach.

“The Kroc Center!” we said.

“Peace out,” said Martin and Scott.

Brandon and David and Stephen and I went to the field at the Kroc Center. It was full of child lacrosse players, playing in some organized league. I felt some resentment toward the middle classes.

“The Trinity School!” we said.

The field at that school is sometimes accessible. We tried our luck. The gate was open.

We played three penalty shootout tournaments. My objective was to score at least one goal. (At a bachelor party, it’s important for the groom-to-be to score at least one goal.) Once this was achieved, I basically stopped trying and let the ball sail wherever it wished to.

Tomorrow, Karin & I’ll get married. I feel the momentousness. I’m slightly quieter than usual.