“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

Hot today, huh? I mowed this morning: it was only going to get hotter. I left ten percent unmowed. I felt like collapsing.

I lent the mower to our neighbor, and he mowed his lawn and felt like collapsing. When he returned the mower he told us about his recent excursions to Kroger. The security guard there embroiled himself in a dispute, and a half-dozen shoppers slipped away without paying. Another shopper loaded a hundred dollars’ worth of meat into his cart and fled without paying. Our favorite worker got fired for shoving someone in a dispute; he’ll get rehired, our neighbor expects. Our neighbor “almost got into it” with the butcher, then with the deli worker. Then he “almost got into it” with the worker who shelves the sleeves of bread (who’d nearly run him over in the parking lot). “Sounds like you need to chill out,” I told our neighbor. We like him, we get along great, but the better we know him, the more people he tells us he’s “almost gotten into it” with. He’s a chill guy, he assures us.

I worry that our Kroger will close down, because that’s something that happens to less-than-upscale supermarkets like ours. Please pray that it doesn’t close down. We love and need our Kroger.

Dandelions, again

The mower has been “serviced” and cuts beautifully. But I’m frustrated. Headless dandelions tower over our lawn not two days after its trimming. The neighbors’ yards also are plagued. Is this how it’ll always be? Will the infestation be worse every summer? Is it caused by the warming of the Earth? Are dandelions mutating into super-dandelions?

Karin’s colleague keeps his dandelions in check. He constantly plucks and re-seeds his lawn. But he’s a childless bachelor with nothing better to do.

It was gusty a few days ago, and our useless, gigantic aerial blew off our house and hung, as if impaled, upon our fence. Our neighbor, Luis, kindly sawed it into bits for us. The weather is fine today, slightly less gusty, and I hope to coax the children out to the back yard.

I’ve begun my “weather disaster” reading with Maclean’s Young Men & Fire.

I intend, also, this year, to read all the novels by Agatha Christie that I haven’t finished: one each month. These include the novels that she wrote as “Mary Westmacott.” The first is Giant’s Bread.

Freddie Freeman, pt. 2

John-Paul: “Children, what should I blog about?”

Samuel: “Blog that we’re getting a new brother – ‘Pip’.”

A heartwarming answer.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Let us again salute Freddie Freeman, who has homered in every game of this World Series. (As I type, it’s the third inning of Game 3.)

Freeman looks just like Mike, my next-door neighbor. Talks like him, too.

I mentioned it.

“It’s been pointed out before,” Mike said. “It’d be nice to be him.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Is it strange that I want to read a 900+ pp. textbook of British criminal law?

Is my anglophilia/​crime lit appetite out of control?

Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).

Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.

Body-text fonts, pt. 27: JY Alia

Rain … all week, pretty much. Last night was dry. I and the neighbors had the same idea at the same time: mow the grass.

Everyone mowed except the guy who works nights.

The guy who works construction mowed his back yard wearing his high-visibility safety vest. It must feel wrong for him, laboring while not wearing it.

The grass was wet, heavy, and long. I mowed my front and back lawns, the latter to the nub (it has been growing too fast this season). Mowing can take as little as forty-five minutes; this took eighty.

I fell asleep two hours earlier than usual.

It rained again today.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m sorry this entry is … underwhelming. The children kept me busy tonight. They are tricky, voracious little creatures, like their father.

It is fitting, perhaps, that this month’s font sample should be taken from Jay Nordlinger’s fine book Children of Monsters.

The typeface, JY Alia, is interesting for being so uninteresting: a nondescript blending of Bembos, Garamonds, and Jansons (in which manner it’s like the more famous Hoefler Text). I might not have identified JY Alia but for the lowercase italic “y”: look at “Daily Mail” above, and compare it to this professional specimen. I’ve never seen JY Alia in anything else.

Some neighbors stop by

Urchins knocked. They talked to Karin, who stood in the doorway.

“Is your son here?”

“Yes,” said Karin, bemused, as Samuel rushed over to see who was inquiring. “But he can’t go out. He’s just a little boy.”

“We mean your other son.”

“He’s even littler,” said Karin. (Just then, in another room, Daniel howled.)

Disappointed, the urchins went away.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Not long afterward, they knocked again. I opened the door this time.

“Can we [mumble, mumble, mumble],” the smallest one said.

“What was that?” I leaned down.

“Can we swim in your pool.”

“We don’t have a pool.”

They looked stunned.

“We have a sprinkler … ” I offered.

“Can you tell ⎯⎯⎯ to come outside?”

“I’m sorry. No one named ⎯⎯⎯ lives in this house. Is that a real tattoo?” (I asked the smallest boy).

“Yes.”

It was a huge tattoo – elbow-to-wrist, almost.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twelve.”

“Well, like I said, ⎯⎯⎯ doesn’t live here and we don’t have a pool. Are you thinking of the people next door? They used to have a pool, but they tore it down and moved away, and now someone else lives there.”

They’d had enough. My interlocutor wheeled around. His companion jumped down off the recycling bin he’d been sitting on, and they left.

I like to think that some day my sons will roam the streets with other neighborhood boys.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Have you ever heard the term threenager? It’s apt.

Samuel already wants to break out of our little household cocoon.

“Sammy and Daddy can go outside now,” he said. “To the street.”

I.e., not to the back yard.

(Karin and Daniel were at the doctor’s.)

I walked to the library with Samuel. As usual, he didn’t read there; he played with the toys. He did not want to leave.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. Daniel doesn’t have too much lead in his blood anymore.