At All Times, in All Seasons, the Earth Casts a Slim Wedge of Shadow into Space; When the Moon in Her Journey Passes Through that Umbra, Let Us Gather Under the Stars to Reflect, One to Another, That There Is No Charioteer Who Illuminates the Day, Nor Huntress Who Hides from the Sun’s Face, But Only Reason That Lights Our Understanding of What Nature Has Ordained
There will be a total lunar eclipse beginning at 9:01 p.m. Central Standard Time on Wednesday, February 20, 2008. My roommate and I have decided to make this astronomical treat the occasion for a party. If you’re reading my blog and you find yourself in the Houston area on February 20, if you’d like to join us.
Note: The prompt was to “create a working title that is the longest one you’ve ever written.” I’m not in the habit of giving working titles to any of my texts, so coming up with any title at all made for a challenging assignment. I like the idea of looking up at the ruddy, darkened moon and thinking of all the fanciful explanations that primitive people might have conceived for this lovely phenomenon. Giving myself permission to turn this exercise into a party invitation was the cherry on top.
I played my usual game in the bank drive-through. I pulled into the lot to get out of the street, but hung back a moment to size up the traffic flow. In Lane One was a late-model Cadillac with a wisp of white hair barely visible above the headrest, followed by a panel truck decorated with cheap magnetic signs for “Hernandez Bros. Electrician.” In Lane Two, a soccer mom waited behind a PT Cruiser. Lane Three started with six or seven construction workers piled into an old Ford pickup, then a pretty blonde in a convertible bimmer. Lane Two seemed like the obvious choice, so it had to be wrong. I flipped a mental coin and nosed my rust-bucket into Lane Three.
From my vantage point at the tail end of Lane Three, …more
This piece is so far from being complete that I thought it might clarify matters for my readers if I put my note at the start instead of at the end, which is where I usually have been placing notes about the texts.
The assignment was to write about a book that’s had a big influence on me. I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly why this has been the hardest exercise for me since the 50/50 class started. I love books—lots of them! I could name many books that have had a profound impact: The Chronicles of Narnia, any Ray Bradbury short-story collection, The House of the Spirits, Illusions, Walden, A Christmas Carol, Welcome to the Monkey House…the list goes on and on and on. But I settled on One Continuous Mistake a few moments after receiving the assignment, and I’ve been chipping away …more
There is an expression in the Roman language, genius loci, “the spirit of a place.” It has acquired a modern, figurative sense in the realm of landscape and architecture—a characteristic atmosphere. But its meaning is rooted in a literal, supernatural sense—the guardian spirit that protects a place.
I try to describe Rome to you without resorting to the clichés and hyperbole that pour from the reservoir of what I have read and heard and seen on television:
I’m so excited! My blog has been cited by Bingo News (“Complete Bingo Resource”). I’d like to thank the spider or robot responsible for this moment in the sun.
I never suspected that there were resources for bingo players. Oh brave new world…!
I’ll bet you thought you were never going to hear from your youngest grandson again. I wasn’t too regular about writing to you for the last decade or two of your life, so you certainly shouldn’t be surprised that you haven’t heard from me since you left us.
From your vantage point, I would think it’s easy for you to see why I didn’t stay in closer contact. Not long after the last time I saw you, when we got together with Laura and Yvonne, Karl and Edith, little Karl, Linda and her kids, Jane, Dad, and all those others at your place in Middle River, my life started heading in a direction that I wasn’t ready to share with you. I hate the way that time and circumstances isolated me from you. It wasn’t that I thought you couldn’t handle the secret …more
I have about 30 minutes left to tell you everything I need to say, and there’s no way it’s enough. God, I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just dive in with a couple of minutes of background information, how I got to be typing this letter right now, and then I’d better get straight to the message I’m supposed to deliver. That’s the important part, but it also seems pretty important (to me, anyway), that you have some reason to believe that I haven’t gone completely out of my mind and run off to Belize like I always talked about doing.
This symbol means negation. This isn’t part of the message per se, but they say it’s important for you to know this if you’re going to understand all the rest.
No time for the whole story, so here it is in a nutshell: I was sitting on the picnic table on the patio, and I heard a noise down in the woods, a kind of crackling sound. …more
Dr. Everett Clinton Raines, Jub.D., couldn’t find a single soul who enjoyed cleaning toilets. So 156 years after taking his doctorate and 27 years after playing a substantial role in the establishment of the Freude Three colony, where he remained a thought leader and a sort of elder-among-elders, he returned to academia, this time to pursue a degree—or rather to acquire practical expertise, if you asked him—in robotic engineering.
This wasn’t the first time that Dr. Raines had reinvented himself, but the stakes had never been higher. At risk—the very founding principle of Freude Three: the premise that in a sufficiently large closed system of fully actualized human beings, if every citizen were free to follow his or her joy, all discord would disappear, and a utopia—a heaven-on-earth—would naturally evolve into being.
By the time I got to Angie’s neighborhood, I didn’t see any ambulance or highway patrol cars. I looked for signs of an accident, a mark on the pavement or something out of place. But what she’d said on the phone had been real sketchy on details, so I wasn’t even sure I was searching in the right spot. There, in front of the Diamond Shamrock, where the road makes a lazy s—were those skid marks on the wet asphalt? Had that light pole always tilted a little to the right? Maybe it had.
I’d driven to Angie’s house a thousand times, but not usually in the early hours of the morning, and not after being woken up from a hangover sleep by a hysterical phone call. And I hadn’t made this trip very often in the rain …more
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