"He Mourns for the Change That Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved and Longs for the End of the World"

That is the title of today's poem. The poem itself is enigmatic, which is why, I suppose, the title is so descriptive. Yeats seemed particularly affronted by the fact that beauty fades with age. There are also lots of poems about the loss of love that comes with time. Bright, happy stuff. Even a poem entitled "The Coming of Wisdom With Time" ends thus: "Now I may wither into the truth."
That is as good a segue as any to take us back into our discussion of justice and Ron Paul. Let's pretend we're C.S. Lewis and use a metaphor, shall we? We went to the Children's Museum this morning. In the Tot Spot there is a small, wooden, kid-sized car that will comfortably seat 4 toddlers. Generally, things go pretty smoothly when it comes to taking turns because there are numerous fun activities in the car room that don't necessitate sitting in the car. Today, however, there was a little girl (who was technically too old to be in the Tot Spot, but had come in with younger siblings) who had taken the car hostage. Harper wisely assessed the situation and came over to me and mentioned quietly that she would like a turn in the car. I redirected her to another activity to give the girl's mom a chance to notice what was going on. Another 15 minutes passed and the girl still hadn't budged and neither had the 3 kids she was allowing to be on the car with her. Her mom didn't seem to be paying attention. Harper and her friend Joseph both wanted to play on the car now. I said, with a voice slightly louder than I would use normally, "Yes, it IS time to take turns with the car now, ISN'T IT?" Still nothing. Another little boy got brave and tried to climb in over the back seat and the Despotic Girl started to push him. I leaned down and said in a low voice, "You will not push. It is time to share." At this point her mom finally saw what was going on and came over and forcibly removed her and her younger sister from the car. Harper and Joseph and a couple of other kids who'd been patiently waiting finally got to play in the car for a few minutes until the Sisters Aggressive came back to reclaim their territory while their mom was distracted tending to their younger siblings. We left.

Ron Paul believes in non-intervention as a means of foreign policy. No preemptive strikes, no nation building, no propping up of fledgling democracies, no entanglements in internecine struggle. If we will just mind our own business, the rest of the world will leave us alone. Here is the problem with that, as I see it. What about the world leaders who act like despotic children? Do we leave them to their wooden cars and walk away? What if their wooden cars have a trunk full of enriched uranium? What if their mommy (let's call her the U.N. just to be cute) is too busy tending to the other children to notice? What if they were never even supposed to be allowed to play in the wooden car in the first place? What if they don't listen when another mommy (let's call her Diplomacy, just to be cute) tries to talk sense into them? It's like I wrote on my book club blog about Jane Austen's world the other day: she writes about the world as it should be, rather than as it actually is. I WISH it were the case that non-intervention would work. I just don't have that much faith in mankind. I'm honestly not sure what the answer IS when it comes to this issue, I just think I know what it IS NOT.

3:10 to Yuma

I don't, as a rule, enjoy movies that are violent. I'd prefer to watch, as I did Sunday night, a new PBS version of Jane Austen's "Persuasion". However, I enjoyed "3:10 to Yuma" just as I enjoyed, many years hence, "Unforgiven". I think it's interesting when a storyteller attempts to make stock characters three dimensional. I'm not talking about the whole "take the villain and make him the hero" thing that's so popular these days. In more thoughtful movies, the Good Guy is sometimes unsure, and the Bad Guy will perhaps choose to do something merciful and right in between his bouts of selfishness. I thought "3:10"did a good job of showing the shadows. It was also interesting for me to watch it the night after I had so enjoyed the ordered, manicured world of "Persuasion". I've also, to add some cayenne to the boiling soup that is my thought process, been doing a little reading up on Ron Paul. Here's what these two movies and one presidential hopeful have in common: interesting, and somehow similar views of justice. In Jane Austen's world (early 19th century England) there is no mention of a larger Justice. As society goes, everyone is exceedingly well behaved. The only mention of guns is in reference to shooting pheasants as sport. The ill-behaved suffer only withering glances of disapproval or, on the rare occasion that the behavior is deemed truly heinous, the shunning of polite society. In this tidy world things, for the most part, remain tidy. In "3:10 to Yuma" which takes place in late 1860's Arizona, nothing is tidy. The guys who are supposed to be keeping order are greedy and cowardly, the honest man is plagued by drought and a mercenary moneylender, and the outlaws pillage unchecked and without conscience. One of the over-arching themes of the movie is this: If no one is watching, will a good man chose to do what is right? So, what does any of this have to do with Ron Paul? That will have to wait until tomorrow. The napping have awakened.

Harper had a little lamb

So the afternoon after I wrote that Harper couldn't possibly understand David and his angst, this happened:
We were at the park and Harper was trying, rather unsuccessfully, to push her Lightning McQueen in a baby swing (he is small and kept rolling through the leg holes) when she happened to look over and notice that Hudson was sitting down enjoying the contours of a small leaf which he had clutched in his little fist. She came charging over, bent down, and proceeded to pry off his tiny fingers and snatch the leaf. The park, it should be noted, is covered with approximately 86,745 leaves like the one he was holding, half of which she had stomped over in her zeal to steal his. I demanded she return the leaf, and also required a Lightning-free interlude during which she had to sit and Ponder Her Actions. It's like when the prophet Nathan went to David after David had Uriah killed so he wouldn't find out David had gotten Bathsheba pregnant (ah, yet another wholesome Bible story). Nathan tells him a story of a poor man with one little ewe lamb which he'd nurtured from birth, and the rich man who, though he had many lambs, took the poor man's treasured lamb to feed his guests. Harper, I am sorry to say, did not feel the same remorse as David. She did not pen anything remotely resembling Psalm 51. Though she was sad to be cast from the presence of Lightning McQueen. That's a start, hopefully.

the age of innocence

My poem a day plan is going fairly well. The only glitch is that I've been reading them aloud while Harper and I eat breakfast. Yeats, I have concluded, is not for children. I had also been reading a Psalm aloud and had just started at the beginning because it made it easy to remember where we left off. Many of the Psalms, I have concluded, are not for children. Yeats and David have some ideas in common. And they are ideas I am not ready to address with my two year old. I've been thinking about the fact that many modern children (excepting those in the Third World, and those who live on farms) can live for years without being directly affected by death or suffering. This IS a good thing, isn't it? Do children need to be aware of death and suffering to be truly thankful for their blessed lot? But here's the problem there: kids don't get empathy until years down the road. The reason I don't let Harper watch a documentary about Darfur is because she can't possibly understand. So how can I expect her to understand David's plight? Or Noah's? Or Jesus'? So far, she understands that she does wrong, and that when she chooses to do wrong she loses favor with Mommy and Daddy. She is sad, sometimes to the point of tears, when this happens. She generally changes her behavior, though not always immediately. We don't use words like 'sin' or 'repentance' or 'evil' or 'holy'. Not yet. We are introducing her to the person of Jesus, but we have not yet talked about the crucifixion. The people Jesus ministered to in his lifetime loved him for who he was before they had any idea of what he would eventually do for them on the cross. Two thousand years later we do have the whole picture but is that where we are supposed to start? If we start with the cross, it seems like you're taking a kid to the funeral of someone they barely know and then feeling dismayed that they aren't sad. I've wondered what Jesus spoke to the children about when he gathered them unto himself. I'm pretty sure he didn't have them fashion a serpent out of marshmallows which is the actual craft a friend's two year old made in Sunday school a few weeks ago. So. I'm open to shock and admonishment, prayer, words of advice...

an anthemic amen

I remember a couple of years ago seeing a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow holding her daughter Apple who was wearing protective headphones because they were at a Coldplay concert and Daddy and his friends are loud when they are plugged in. I thought about it this morning at church because we needed a couple of sets of those headphones. Because Mr. Seay and his band sound a little something like Coldplay AND because, while anthemic tunes probably need to be loud to fill up stadiums, Ecclesia meets in a space closer in size to your living room than a stadium. Harper covered her ears and sang "Alleluia" in a key known only to herself and I covered Hudson's ear while he clung to me like a baby possum and, incredibly, FELL ASLEEP during the second verse of "All Creatures of Our God and King." Our other church never necessitates ear covering because, well, even if the Bach score reads forte, the violins and cellos just can't get that loud. Hudson has never once fallen asleep there.
Speaking of apples, we've enjoyed some good Fujis this week.

Euclid's carpet

I wrote a short story once about a girl who would use the phrase, "It has a certain Euclidean purity," on dates as a litmus test for prospective husbands. Not to see if they knew what it meant, mind you, but to see if they would laugh at her for trying to sound pretentious. Anyway, pretensions aside, when my husband vacuums, the result does indeed have a certain Euclidean purity. The above is the end result of the hours he spent making our old apartment look as good as it did the day we moved in. The faux wood floors will not lend themselves to such artistry.
Harper has for a while now been extremely interested in automobiles. She enjoys them small and Matchbox, she enjoys them large and lined up in parking lots. Her favorites, in very specific order are:
1. Volkswagon Beetles (she calls them Beetlebugs)
1. (tie) Mini Coopers
2. Jeeps
3. Minivans
4. Porsches
5. Land Rovers
6. Ferraris

You will notice that her tastes run toward the high end. However, while she is pretty accurate with the others, any car that is red and even remotely sporty is a Ferrari. Because she has seen an actual Ferrari exactly once and it was red. There is also something of a blur between minivans and Land Rovers. In fact today on the way to the zoo she pointed to this very fancy orange Range Rover and said, "There's an orange minivan!! I LIKE that minivan. We should BUY that minivan." Then she changed her mind when she noticed the Porsche Cayenne right next to us. "I like that minivan too. Mommy, we should buy THAT minivan instead!" Ah, how the mighty are brought low. And as evidence that the low are, at times, exalted (and also that girls might be born with an innate ability to flatter boys) this little red Lexus coupe drove by us when we were out for a wagon ride a couple of weeks ago and she, much to the delight of the driver, who had his window down, started squealing, "A FERRARI!! MOMMY LOOK IT IS A FERRARI!!!"

I played my best for Him

I realize the December Blog Challenge is over. I meant to post last night but instead celebrated New Year's Eve by going to bed at 9pm. Harper got a guitar for Christmas and she also got an Ezra Jack Keats (he of The Snowy Day which we also love) book entitled Little Drummer Boy. It's simply the text of the song with Keats' beautiful, collage-y illustrations. Every time I read it to Harper and Hudson I get a little choked up when I get to the line "I played my best for Him." It's such a perfect reminder of what we ought to be doing with our days. So last night while I was brushing her teeth Harper was humming "pa-rum-pa-pum-pum" and I told her how special it was that the Little Drummer Boy thought that he didn't have anything to give to Jesus, but that it turned out that playing his very best on his little drum was just as good, if not better, than all the fancy gifts Jesus had already received. What do you think you would give to Jesus? I asked. She thought for a moment and I just knew she was going to say that she would sing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Nope. "I would give him P.B.," she decided. P.B. is the name she has given the stuffed moose her friend Chelsea from Canada sent her. Hudson got one too. I was pretty impressed because she really likes P.B. "Wow Harper, that's such a wonderful generous thing to do, wanting to give away your special moose." "Actually," she added expansively, "I would give him Hudson's moose instead." Ah, a substitutionary philanthropist.