Peter Quince

I'm running a little behind in postings. Here's the first part of the early August performance at Purchase College of Midsummer Night's Dream in which Becca played Peter Quince:

Cape

We're just back from a few days at the Cape. When we first got to the Cape we shopped at the Hyannis Mall to make Becca happy.

In Provincetown we went to the Race Point Beach,ate lobster at Clem and Ursie's,shopped, and visited the Bearded Lady to see what was wrong with Becca's ear cartilage.

We saw the new Woody Allen movie and spent part of two afternoons swimming at Hathaway's Pond, one of my favorite swimming spots in all the world. It's got beautiful surroundings, a clear sandy bottom in the part of the pond near the beach, and is usually uncrowded since most folks who don't live in the Barnstable area or don't scuba dive seem unaware of it.
And our last night there, after lobster rolls at Seafood Sam's, Becca and Kathy competed with each other in minigolf (and I competed with myself).

Macy

About a month ago, the man next door moved back to Australia and Macy came to live with us. Here are the first few pictures we've taken of her:

Summer Reading

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve sat waiting for Becca to come out of various activities or been at airports waiting for planes to take off, I’ve finally had the chance to get a lot of “summer reading” done.

I’ve made through all four of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy. I really enjoyed the new world developed in Uglies and elaborated upon in Pretties a lot. By the time I got to Specials however, I’d sort of lost interest with what would happen to Tally Youngblood and her friend Shay since that volume didn’t seem to contain any more creative developments about the world in which they were living. Extras was exactly the opposite. The idea the fourth volume took on was a very creative one, but I just couldn’t get into it because none of the lead characters (all different from those in the first three books of the trilogy) really interested me. I’m glad, though, that I stayed with Extras to the end since the last part of it was the best.

I finally got the time to read Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels, a novel that does a superb job of capturing the personalities involved in the decisions at the Battle of Gettysburg and gives a much less textbooky feeling to the issues that drove the Civil War. I also read Rise to Revolution, the book about the beginnings of the Revolutionary War written by his son, Jeff Shaara. Of the two, I think I preferred the latter, though not because it was better written, but because I enjoy the time of Adams and Franklin with its international issues more than that of Buford, Longstreet, and Lee with their more narrow national focus.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad was a delightful change of pace! I loved the way she developed the story around the hanging of the twelve maids, played with the symbolisms throughout the Odyssey and brought several of the characters who were mere placeholders in Homer to life in her book. If I ever teach the Odyssey again, I think I’ll use it as a supplemental reading.

Minneapolis

We spent the weekend in Minneapolis with Kristen, Kathy’s niece, and Heidi—and of course with Chewy, Gromit, Shmadios, and Taice,their dogs and cats. For a long while now Kathy has wanted to go out to visit them, so I'm glad we could do it.

Saturday we did a driving tour of both Minneapolis and St. Paul’s, went to the Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden,

and stopped nearby for the mini-golf course designed by artists. We had some of the best falafel I’d ever had at the Holy Land (even better than a lot of what I’d had in Jerusalem!), snuck in a little gardening, and ate with Heidi and Kristen’s friends M.B. and Alex at another good restaurant whose name escapes me. Sunday, Kathy got a chance to play several hands of canasta with Kristen while Heidi and I went to a workshop on communicating with animals. Then, after a little partner canasta and some brief time riding on motorbikes--

I still haven’t gotten the hang of making a left turn without speeding the bike up, but I enjoyed riding more than Kathy did-- and a great meal at home, we ended the evening by competing on the Wii. I now know that I can’t hoola hoop for my life!

I really enjoyed Minneapolis' greenness (so much parkland and so many bodies of water) alongside what seemed like most of the benefits of a large city--theater, progressive ideas, and good food. And I hope that Kathy found it a nice blend of seeing a new place and family time.

King and Country

So much of my latter life was shaped by the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 60s. From the time I was a very young child, my mother held up John Kennedy as a hero and even when I was a toddler, I can remember being taken in a stroller to civil rights marches. In 8th grade—after the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert Kennedy and the arrest of the Berrigans in Catonsville – I began to be aware of a call to be a minister, though the call seemed to have less to do with church committee meetings and more to do with the kind of social justice work that I associated with religious folks who wanted to make God’s kingdom a reality in the world. It’s because of that focus to my sense of call that I chose Union Seminary (NYC) as my place to train for ministry.

And then, after years of waiting for a family to catch up and be comfortable with my call, I finally went into parish ministry at a congregation known for its social justice emphasis. And yet, despite the work on issues of homelessness, prison reform, lgbt issues, and peace, somehow I kept feeling the gnawing feeling that we’ve begun to lose the passion that drove the rights issues of the 60s. When I was at Maryknoll in June, a lot of the Bible readings were connected in discussion with the words of King, Day, Gandhi, and Berrigan. It made me want to go back to the roots of my call. And so I’ve spent most of the month of July reading recommended books about King and Kennedy.


The book about King I read was the new edition of Vincent Harding’s Martin Luther Kin: The Inconvenient Hero which I chose because it’s focus was to move us away from seeing Martin as the sweet civil rights leader who made the nice integration “I Have a Dream” speech in ’63 and toward the Martin that had learned a more radical, widening agenda of non-violence and rights for all God’s children, the King who in April of 1967 made the powerful Riverside Church speech that almost no one refers to in any January MLK celebration, the King who stood true to his call to ministry even as friends stepped away from what they saw as his distraction from work on issues of race. Harding’s pieces—almost all written in the 80s and 90s, are strong, but it was the King quotes that stood out for me in the book.


Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Mattered took a very different focus. Looking at the period in Kennedy’s life from the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 to his death in November 1963, Douglass focuses on the ways in which Kennedy’s thinking had moved away from Cold War imperialistic thinking toward unofficial, peaceful negotiations with folks like Khruschev and Castro. While Douglass’ organization is at times difficult—he circles back over material frequently in his writing—his argument that shows how JFK became more and more of a threat to the U.S. military-industrial complex, large business, and the FBI and how they responded comes through clearly. Oswald’s connections with Jack Ruby as well as how he was set up over a period of months to be the “patsy” for the assassination is also covered. I found the book slow-going but well worth my time. Americans would do well to wake up and learn how US power has responded over and over in this country to those who—like Kennedy or King—are threats to what King called the three evils of militarism, racism, and materialism.

The Invention of Everything Else

Throughout the summer, whether at Maryknoll, sitting watching the laughing gulls at Chincoteague, or waiting at the train station for Becca, I’ve spent small snatches of time on Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else. Today I finished it and I’m not sure whether I loved it or am indifferent to it. That’s because the book is so uneven.

The dazzling and creative descriptions of life in New York City in 1943 that make up the background of much of the book were well-done, drawing the reader into what life at that time much have been like. And I found Nikola Tesla, who for most of the book, is an old man holed up in the Hotel New Yorker with his pigeons, fascinating. I really enjoyed both Hunt’s imaginings of what his inner thoughts were along with the flashbacks to his being exploited by Thomas Edison or beaten out of the Nobel Prize by Marchese Marconi, hanging out with Mark Twain, or sitting in the park with his pigeons.

But what I didn’t care much about was the other main character, Louisa Dewell, who is a 24-year-old main working at the hotel. I kept waiting to get interested in her life—in her relationship with her father and crazy uncle who wants to travel through time, in her romantic interests, in her pigeons, or even in her relationship with Tesla. It never happened. (And I’d expected the opposite, since reviews I read had said that Hunt was much better at describing the thoughts and feelings of the 24-year-old than the 86-year-old.)

So I'll have to ruminate some more on whether or not the book was worth my time. Right now I'm just not sure.