Just a wave, not the water

A slice of bittersweet loveliness from Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Bill Frisell, Jerry Douglas and Viktor Krauss.

Eve Tushnet likes Up too:

Really, one of the best children's movies I've ever seen--maybe even second-best after the indescribable Last Unicorn. I'd say it's tied with The Great Muppet Caper. It's a beautiful story of love and grief, of fulfilling one's dreams and sacrificing them, of hope and wanderlust and discovery and homecoming. I think maybe the Kevin-the-bird arc is the subplot which defines the movie's heart: Obligations mean that sometimes a beautiful creature wanders into your world, and you fall in love with her, and then you let her go home.

She's right. Usually I tolerate, at best, kid's movies, but I became totally absorbed in, and was really moved by, Up. It's a movie that is framed around a great loss, and one man's attempts to somehow compensate for that loss -- the ridiculous lengths he is willing to go to, the struggles he is willing to undergo, and what he learns along the way. It's a fantasy, of course, and an adventure -- and a very good one -- but a movie that attempts to address some very big questions.

I've always thought that the best "children's" music, movies and books should be able to engage adults as well in some meaningful way. There is a select group of kids movies and TV shows -- the British stop-time animation Wind in the Willows series, a lot of Warner Brothers cartoons from the 40s, 50s and 60s -- that manage it, albeit in different ways. Up is in that category. It's no small accomplishment.

Jackson considered

Sometimes it takes a crudely drawn anthropomorphic toy animal to sum it all up:

“When your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young
once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is
unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.”

(Via Tim Blair)

Little lake to appear

Frankly, it's the most compelling news item I've come across today:

According to deputy mayor of Kyiv Ihor Dobrutsky, not only Kreshchatyk Street, but also Zankovetskoy and Horodetskoho Streets will be blocked at week-end. A little lake will appear on Horodetskoho Street. Alive carps will live in the lake. “Japan carps koi, algae and lilies will exist there. Sponsors will assist us”, statesman tells, ForUm informs, referring to MIGnews.

Karajan conducting Ravel's Bolero

Sometimes, while sifting through the mountains of junk on YouTube, you run across the right clip at the right time. This was it for me tonight. Sound and video are slightly out of sync, but it doesn't matter. Glorious.

The last day of school

As we hang out on the playground waiting for the one-hour "day" to begin, I notice my youngest daughter seems a bit melancholy. I ask her if she is happy that the summer is about to begin. She says: Yes, but I'll miss my teacher. I tell her to be sure to go to her teacher and tell her how much she has enjoyed having her, and how much she will miss her.

A few minutes later, she starts looking around the playground for her "fifth grade buddy," Mashay, who she also feels very fondly toward. She doesn't see her; I tell her to feel free to walk over to where the buses drop kids off to see if she can find Mashay. She heads over in that direction, milling about and looking, and comes back seeming a bit disconsolate. No Mashay. Maybe, she says, Mashay is just late. I assure her that she will probably see her after school, and be able to say her thanks and goodbyes.

Well, maybe Mashay will be there, and maybe she won't. As I watch my daughter standing twenty feet away scanning the playground for this girl she has come to know and care for, I think: there she is, learning one of those lessons about life that even we older and supposedly wiser adults must learn over and over again. Even life's joys and pleasures can be tinged with sadness. Even the prospect of a summer free and clear of the usual obligations and responsibilities carries with it a pang, or maybe more than a pang, of regret.

What a world we live in! Would we change it, if we could, so that all pleasures and joys were unalloyed, so that nothing we loved ever changed? I don't know. It's not the best world, to be sure. But it's the only one we've got.

Israel 2

From Tel Aviv, we headed to Tiberus, by way of the Roman city of Caesarea and the ancient battleground, Meggido. But the payoff for me after an exhausting day of traveling and wandering around ruins was arriving at the Sheraton Moriah in Tiberius, and finding a very well-appointed, modern and comfortable hotel. The beer of choice at the hotel bar was, again, Carlsberg (as it was in so many places). I was happy to find out that drinks at the bar could be charged to my room, but chagrined to realize that, of course, they had to be paid for before I checked out. Which is something I should have thought of ...

On our first night in Tiberius, after the tour members had gone their separate ways and our responsibilities were over for the night, a coworker and I walked along the boardwalk in the balmy November weather and drank vodka and 7up out of plastic cups while looking out on the Sea of Galilee. It was Saturday night in Israel and Shabbat had just ended, so the place was bustling -- Arab merchants selling bootleg CDs, a miniature amusement park with people crowding to get on the rides, and all sorts of people of varying shapes, sizes and complexions wandering around and taking the air, just as we were. On a wide concrete platform behind the hotel that jutted out into the lake, a number of people were taking dance lessons.

I still remember the strangeness of being transported from a place that had prematurely turned bitterly cold -- Chicago -- into a Mediterranean climate. It was November, and I was wandering around in my shirtsleeves. As difficult as the days were, the nights had their moments of liberation. Thinking about those moments, I wouldn't mind being in Tiberius and charging another Carlsberg to my room right now.

A well written note

There is a book whose title I have always remembered: "The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible!" I take the point. Modern conveniences have made our lives much easier. Would you rather haul a block of ice into an icebox, or put your perishables into a refrigerator? Turn up the heat with an electric thermostat or stoke a fire with coal that has been delivered through a chute into your basement? The answer for most of us is easy.

But I still maintain that there were habits of behavior and of thought in days of yore that were desirable and tended to make people more ... literate and articulate I guess. Take music, for example. When many living rooms had as their centerpiece a piano, or when more people were used to singing hymns in parts in church, you can bet that more people had a knowledge of the rudiments of music. The ability to read music even in some halting fashion has faded as the habit of making music has been replaced by simply listening to music. Convenience has introduced a world of music to our ears, but our hands no longer know how to work their way around a keyboard, and our voices have been stilled.

It's the same with writing. Clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand, William Zissner once said. When people were in the habit of using letters as one of their primary forms of communication, rather than the telephone, or the much less formal writing found in emails, instant messages, etc., more people wrote well. It was not that they had studied writing -- they were just used to the hard work of having to put their thoughts onto paper and make them understandable to the person on the other end.

All of this crossed my mind as I went through some old papers at my Mother's house. Among them, I found a little note, one that I had read many times before, that my Mom dashed off to the many people who had written to express their sympathies at the death of my Grandmother. Here is what she wrote:

As much as I would like to, I am sure you will understand that I cannot personally acknowledge the many messages that I have received following Mother's death. I hope that you will accept this somewhat formal looking note as a personal expression of my deep gratitude for the assurance you have given me of your thoughts and prayers for me and my family in this time of our sorrow.

I thought I knew something of the wide circle of Mother's friends and how greatly she was admired and loved, but the many expressions of sympathy and the moving testimonies to the influence of her life which I have received have been overwhelming and only deepened my sense of gratitude to God for all that she was and all that she was enabled to do. To say that all this has been a comfort to me is to say too little; it has served to strengthen my faith in that Gospel which we profess and by which she sought to live, the consolations of which have deeper sources than memory, since they spring from the victory which Christ has won for us over death and the grave.

Two paragraphs, four sentences. Each time I re-read it I am impressed by the economy, and touched by the obviously deep emotion held in reserve carefully and with dignity, by the note of transcendence, of faith, hope, and love, at the end. Memories fade and bodies fail, but some things endure. Take away my email if you must, but let me be able to create one well written note.

Thanks Mom.

Lament for the caboose

I remember as a kid driving with my Mom down Monroe Street toward downtown Springfield and having to wait at the tracks at 3rd Street for a freight train to pass. I was always happy for the delay. My brother and I would count the cars, and always hoped for the trains to be as long as possible. I loved the racket, the somewhat menacing swaying to and fro of the cars, the names and slogans emblazoned on them ("Cotton Belt," "Southern Serves the South," "Main Line of Mid-America") that reassured me that there was a world, vast, intriguing, and a bit mysterious, beyond Springfield's borders, and that some people were already on their way there.

And a caboose -- there was always a caboose. For awhile, I decided that sitting up in the little cupola, waving to passengers in waiting cars and kids hanging out by the tracks while the train passed through towns, and maybe stepping out occasionally on the little porchlike area at the back of the car to take the air, was the job for me. (Really, it still sounds like the job for me). Of course I had no idea what the man in the caboose actually did; I just liked the fact that he got to do it where he did.

Cabooses are all but gone, replaced by something called a "flashing rear-end device", which, though it may hugely improve efficiency, doesn't exactly fire the imagination in the way the caboose does. If you're interested, do some online shopping for an old caboose, or an old passenger car, or freight car ("priced to sell!") here. Surprisingly affordable.

We Will Go Sailing

The other day my eight-year-old daughter couldn't sleep. After tossing and turning for a bit she said that she had a poem going through her head that she wanted to write down. It was late, but I dropped my Strict Dad facade and let her go into the kitchen and write. As she went to bed she said she didn't want me to read her poem; a few minutes later, she called from her room and said that I could, if I wanted to. Of course, I did want to. Here's what she came up with (I corrected one spelling error and added one comma):

We Will Go Sailing

Look away you sailor!
Look up to the sky.
Today is the perfect day to
go sailing, you and I.
The sail shall billow
as we draw away
from the shore.
We shall not come back
until we've had that adventure
far from the shore.

No, she's not Lord Tennyson. But I genuinely liked it -- the image of a perfect day, a friend, an "adventure far from the shore" out there waiting. I thought of a lovely little anthem we sang last fall with the choir, one that both she and I loved, a setting of this text by Thomas Campion. Maybe she still had that image of ships and sails, of going on journeys and returning home, in her mind.

I'm a proud Dad, so what else can I say? Keep writing honey, and trying to translate those ineffable feelings and impressions into words.

My father asks for nothing

Touching. Read it.

(With thanks to Solomonia)

Israel 1

Last fall, I took my first trip to Israel. Circumstances were not ideal. It was a working trip, and helping lead a group of 120 for ten days through an endless round of tourist sites is more exhausting than I could have imagined. It would have been nice to have more free time to explore at will. But it was an opportunity too good to pass up and I'm happy I went, especially since I almost certainly would never have had the opportunity otherwise.

Though I intended to keep a journal, that idea got thrown out after the first day when I saw how demanding the routine was going to be. But, sitting in the hotel in Tel Aviv overlooking the Mediterranean on that first jet-lagged day, I did manage to write the following:

At the Newark airport, our flight is given a special gate to depart from. This area is secured and swept by security personnel before we are checked in. People boarding the flight are swept with wands and given several different passport checks before boarding. I've heard from many about how serious Israel is about security, and they weren't kidding.

The boarding area in Newark is a sea of humanity of all different religious persuasions. There is our group composed mainly of Christians, some of whom pray before boarding. When I tell one of my co-workers that I have just spoken to my wife on the phone and she is suffering from salmonella poisoning, he immediately calls over one of the pastors in our group and we form a tight circle and pray, in the sight of everyone, for her healing. Public prayer like this is not something I'm used to, and the moment is awkward at first, but I come away a bit touched by the whole thing; the confidence of my fellow travelers that this is indeed the first order of business upon discovering that someone is ill, and their concern for someone who is a total stranger to them.

There are also many orthodox Jews. As the time to board draws nearer I see what I think is a line of them forming to use the bathroom, but it turns out they have gathered in a small alcove to say their afternoon prayers. Their prayer books are out, and they are nodding back and forth repeatedly just as I have seen pictures of them doing at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The next morning on the plane, some gather at the exits and do the same thing. Wherever they are, when it is time to pray, everything else stops.

In waiting area at Newark, something else happens that makes an impression. As another tour leader and I are lining up to board, an elderly Israeli man walks up and says to us, “I just want to say I think it’s great what you’re doing. My son is a tour guide in Israel, and during the second Intifada it was Christian tourism that allowed his business to survive.” It's the kind of unsolicited comment that cuts through a lot of rhetoric, and gives you a small feeling that you are doing something that has value.

The plane trip is long and uneventful. But there are some breathtaking views. Taking off from Newark, we are treated to a beautiful view of Manhattan on a perfect autumn late afternoon. Hours later, as dawn breaks, I watch the sun rise as we fly over Italy, and see the glowing lights of Rome just below us. Later we pass over Greece, and flying over the Mediterranean I see dots of small islands below, and think of the ancient history of the land we’re passing at 33,000 feet. It's hard not to think: What a rich and mysterious world we live in.

The view from the room at the Dan Panorama in Tel Aviv (above) was a good reward after a long trip, as was the hotel bar, the "Old Tel Aviv," where Carlsberg was on tap and flowing freely. During a couple of free hours prior to dinner, I walked across the street to the sea and sat watching planes on final approach into Ben Gurion airport. Plenty would happen in the next 13 days, including many emotional highs and lows (mostly lows), but at this point I remember feeling very content, and wishing that I could set up camp at the hotel for a few days, sit on the balcony and soak up the heat and sun, both of which were absent in Chicago upon my departure.

Springfield, Illinois

Springfield, Springfield, it's a hell of a town? I don't know about that, but it is where I'm from, or at least where I spent much of my childhood. For me, it's the kind of place that you itch to leave, that you're happy to leave, but gain some appreciation for later on.

Much of that comes with having kids and finding that, in that situation, there are benefits to having things a bit simpler. During visits downstate, I recognize that there are things to like -- the slower pace, the managability of the daily run of life, the relative affordability, the lack of pretense and affectation. But living very near a big city is seductive, and becomes something that you get used to, as I have. As much as it is liberating to leave the city for a time, I would miss the restless energy.

Springfield has produced a few people of note, one of them Vachel Lindsay. Lindsay was a utopian and a dreamer, son of a well-to-do family who became a poet and a writer, resisting his family's efforts to push him into more practical pursuits. In his younger years he traveled the country, observing and writing about what he saw. I remember thinking, reading about this stage of his life in his biography, that he was something of a spoiled rich kid, repeatedly contacting his family for more money so that he could live like a wandering bohemian. Maybe. But I think he produced some things of value, and I do return to regularly and enjoy some of his poems, which capture a time, a place, and a certain way of looking at the world, pretty well.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois). Here, it's hard for me to relate to the utopian longings of Lindsay's "spirit-dawn" and "white peace." I suspect Lindsay thought that some sort of ultimate peace was within reach if only people would reform their ways. I'm more of the opinion that war and conflict are permanent factors of our existence -- things that we can mitigate, but not eliminate entirely. When C.S. Lewis' said that "a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war," he summed it up for me.

But I'm still drawn to the poem, not so much because I think Lindsay's hope of world peace has even a shred of a chance of ever coming to pass. It's the picture he paints -- the"bronzed, lank man" who "cannot sleep upon his hillside" wandering through the backyards of Springfield in the midnight darkness. I've walked and ridden my bike through the rolling landscape of Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Lincoln is buried, and spent a lot of time in those Springfield backyards on muggy summer nights. When I'm at my mother's house even today, smoking a cigarette in the backyard at a late hour, I could almost imagine, for a moment, seeing the man with the high-top hat passing at a distance, near the high wooden fence by the alley.

A summer night

For the past few days, this scenario has been running through my mind: It's a summer night, right around twilight. You're a child, say 9 or 10 years old. You've been playing hard with your friends since after dinner, working up a sweat in the muggy August heat, and taking long drinks from the hose to ease your thirst. The cicadas are droning on, and lightning bugs are thick in the air.

Sooner or later, as the evening goes on, you hear the sound of a screen door opening and slamming. Your mother calls you -- it's time to come in. Tonight, though maybe not every night, you're the first to be called. Maybe you resist and beg for a few more minutes, and maybe you don't, but either way you end up coming in. Disappointment and annoyance follow. Can’t she see, you think, that the party’s still going on? You can still hear your friends, and long to still be part of the crowd playing and laughing and shouting outside; you wish for a night that did not have to end.

As much as we like to think we grow up, some things don’t leave us. Whatever our age, we all at one time or another feel like that kid who is the first to be called in. We feel envy toward our fellows for what they are able to enjoy and we can’t, envy that can turn into lingering resentment if we’re not careful.

What to do with it? George MacDonald said: “"Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers; if I may not, let me then think how nice they would be, and bury myself in my work. I do not think the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the world holds, and be content without it."

MacDonald is talking about envy of others' wealth, but the principle remains the same. I don’t know if, in his own life, MacDonald followed his own advice. It's noble, and something to aspire to, but tough to put into practice on a night when we know full well that there are still adventures to be had.

Poem for the day

The Farmer's Bride, by Charlotte Mew. I heard it read once, and it really struck me -- a veritable stew of love, longing, dangerous, unthinking passion, fear, pity. It's terrifying, and strangely beautiful, all at once.

Read more by Charlotte Mew (it's worth it) here.