Hymn · to · Apollo

"She'll just go in there and wreak havoc," he tells me.

"Oh, let her explore," I say.

"She'll only leave a swath of destruction in her wake," he predicts ominously.

"Your militarized language is a bit excessive," I reply.

This morning, as soon as Madeline went into the closet, Malkhos shooed her out, which sent her to me, crying (faked); she somehow knows I'll give in but the trade-off for me is she'll actually let me hold and hug her while I comfort her in her pretend despair.

Once her tears subsided, I let her go back into the closet, knowing too that this would predicate one of Malkhos's unmitigated disaster assessments.

"See? See?" he says, pointing at something I can't even see through the wall.

I go into the closet and he points to several empty hangers from which she's pulled off the clothes. She's also opened drawers and half-emptied them, so I start putting the clothes back where they belong. In the meantime, Malkhos picks up an empty hanger that's snapped in two.

"What should I do with this?" he says. "Should I spank her?"

"No spanking," I say, the thought being too close to Mommie Dearest for my comfort. "Throw it away. No, wait, keep it for a minute. Go show it to her."

"Why? So she can gloat over her victory?" he says, using that military analogy again.

"No, silly; so she'll develop a conscience and feel bad that's she's broken my hanger," I say.

"She won't unless you spank her," he said.

"Chrissakes, I'm not spanking her over it! Give it to me. I'll make her feel guilty about it. That's a mother's province anyway."

So Andrew decided he would take a more subtle approach. He expressed this to me as I was taking him out for ice cream one night.

"I like girls with yellow hair," he informed me.

"You mean blondes?" I said.

"No, yellow hair," he replied. "They're hot chicks."

"Jesus Christ, Andrew, who taught you that?"

He told me it was his uncle, and I made a mental note about working up a way to undo this at a later time.

As we were waiting to go through the drive-through to get his ice cream cone, he spotted a young, very pretty blonde--excuse me, yellow-haired--woman come out of the store. She was obviously on a date, but that didn't deter Andrew. He rolled his window down.

"Hi," he said to her.

The woman looked around until she spotted him in the car, then smiled--she was cute--and waved at him. "Hi!" she said back.

"I have a broken leg," he told her. Aha! I thought. The sympathy approach.

"You do?" she said. "You poor thing."

"I know," he said. "It will get better." Then he started babbling the whole second-broken-leg story, obviously confusing her, but she was polite about it.

"You're a cute little boy," she said.

"I'm a big boy," he informed her. "I have muscles."

She laughed, which only egged him on. He started to say more, but I finally interrupted. "Andrew," I said. "She's on a date. She can't go out with you tonight."

So he waved goodbye, clearly pleased with his progress. He hadn't creeped this one out.

At the park today, there was another family there in which the children included four daughters from about ages two through eight. Since Madeline alone can play on the playground equipment--Andrew has eleven days left in cast #2--he's been spending his time at the park striking up conversations with anyone in his proximity. Usually he tells whatever poor soul he's hooked his life story--he can do quite a bit with five years, particularly since memory only begins at about three--and embellishes along the way. Today, though, he set his sights on all four girls. He wheeled over for the kill.

He tried to engage them in conversation, but they ignored him. So then, he declared to Malkhos, "They would be interested in me if I had a motorcycle."

Or maybe he should just stick to older women.

Now that my brother and sister-in-law, whom I half-affectionately, half-irritatingly refer to as the Rats, are expecting their first child, a son, in September (whom I refer to as the Pinky—that’s what baby rodents are called in the States—though I do not, of course, say this to their faces), my sister-in-law is all of a sudden wanting me to commiserate with her about the aches and pains of pregnancy and asking me questions about childbirth and motherhood in general. 

stefanie_bean

A few comments:

--The only one that embarrasses me is Gone With the Wind.  Drivel.  Horrid drivel.  Or at the very least, too melodramatic for my tastes.

--I have only read Le Petit Prince in French, never in English.  Loved that little narcissistic, coughing rose.

--I thought I might not make it through One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I did.  Once I start reading a book, I usually finish it, no matter what.

--The one I am most proud of is Ulysses.  I couldn't make it through Finnegan's Wake, though (sorry, Martin).

--Some of them I have actually read two or three times.  Why would I do that when there's so many other books to read?  Even so, this list indicates to me I probably need to get out more. 

Bolded = Have read
(*) asterisked = Partially read
Italics = Want to read someday

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible Atheist J.M. Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) supposedly read the Bible five times through. So I figure I could read it through at least once.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

“This is an unmitigated disaster,” he says.
“What?” I say.
“Madeline just came in here with two bananas!”
“So?”

* * *
“Well, that was an unmitigated disaster,” he says.
“What?” I say.
“When she took her bath, she refused to sit down because she claimed ‘Too hot! Too hot!’” he says.
“You should have put more cool water in it, then,” I say.
“I did, but she still refused to sit down,” he says. “She only began to splash water out of the tub with her foot, maintaining a precarious balance upon the other, screaming the whole time,” he says.
“She’s two. She’s crazy,” I say. “Haven’t you learned that yet?”

* * *
“So I took them outside—“ Malkhos says.
“Wait, wait—some unmitigated disaster befell you?” I ask.
“Yes,” he replies. “Madeline got a soda and then pretended to want to drink it, but she’d only take mouthfuls of it and then spit it out onto the patio.”
“Maybe she thinks she’s a camel,” I suggest.
“Why does she do that?”
“You know, if you considered the how of things rather than the why all the time, maybe you wouldn’t be so disaster prone,” I say.

* * *
I have one long day at work this term. The last time we had a rainy day on this day I would be at work through the evening, I suggested Malkhos take them to the museum and then perhaps for ice cream.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he says.
“Because?”
“Because the last time I took them, it was an unmitigated disaster,” he says.
“The museum?”
“No, the ice cream,” he says.
“How so?”
“When her ice cream started to drip, she started rubbing it all over the wall,” he says. “It was horrifying.”
“Well, then, you should have taken it from her,” I say. “Or gotten her a spoon to help her out.”
“I have no business to attempt anything like that,” he says.

* * *

Malkhos called his mother to tell her Andrew had broken his leg again. The whole conversation turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.
I asked him, "What did you say to your mother?"
He said, "I told her 'Andrew broke his leg again.'"
"So what did she say?" I ask.
"'Hello? Hello? Hello?'"
"Oh, God. Then what?" I say.
"'Andrew's broken his leg,' and then she said 'Are you there? Are you there?' so by this time I was shouting and I told her 'You really need to go get a hearing aid' to which she replied 'Hello? Are you there? You have to speak up!' so I hung up the phone."
"You hung up on her?"
"Of course I did!"
"Well," I say, "I guess I'll go call her back and make amends."

Madeline picked out her grandmother's card. After I pointed out the grandmother card section to her, she vacillated between one with butterflies ("Fly up in the sky," she kept singsonging, twirling her index finger to demonstrate) and one with three baby bluebirds sitting in a nest on the front. "We can only get one," I told her, and so Madeline finally decided on the bluebird one.

But it was Andrew who assigned which bird was which on the inside of the card--when the card opens, two of the birds, now wearing party hats, are taking flight and the third, wearing a party hat too, is still in the nest.

"The one wearing the blue hat and flying is me. The one wearing the pink hat and flying is Madeline," he instructed, and so I wrote their names on the birds as he told me to.

"And the third?" I asked. My sister-in-law is expecting their son's arrival in September.

"That's Jakob," Andrew said. "He's still cooking in Heidi's tummy, and he can't fly yet." And so I dutifully wrote the name on that bird as well.

Here is a painting of Loki from 1863 (I haven't tracked down the myth yet):

And, for comparison, the same in contemporary printing:

This link seems to have all the rest of his work on the web:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A5rten_Eskil_Winge

I love to garden. I now mostly grow flowers although I used to plant large vegetable gardens too. (I would like to go back to doing that, but that would be a huge project because there's so much wildlife around here I would have to devise some clever way to keep the deer, rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, etc. etc. out of it.) Anyway, here are some photos of some of our lovely blooms this year. Later in the season when all the flowering plants have grown, I will post more pictures in their maturity.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10/Flowers

Growing up, I was always closer to my father than my mother. I was his favorite—you know, the child with whom you have that special affinity. Wherever my father was, I wasn’t far behind. I tended to prefer his company over everyone else’s—if he were changing the oil in the car, I’d be there handing him his tools. If he were remodeling the kitchen, I’d patiently chip old tiles off the walls with a hammer and chisel. It was my father with whom I’ve ridden thousands of miles on our bicycles, whether it was the local Strawberry Ride or rising before dawn in Utah on a family vacation, finding ourselves being the only ones on a desert trail, watching the desert sunrise with the only sound being the wind. It’s always been like that.

Maybe I’m his favorite because, by his own admission, I’m the one most like him. Even my brothers admit this.

It’s hard for me to put myself in Malkhos’s position, who has no relationship with either parent. I guess this is because on some level he’s always known that both his parents are incapable of being parents. It must been difficult to be a child to a mother who was too immature to be a parent and a father who never really wanted to be one. However, that’s Malkhos’s story to tell.

One thing I’ve learned from my father is that being a good parent has nothing to do with age. My father became a father at the age of twenty; my mother was seventeen. Even so, from the minute he became one, my father—never once in his life—ever made a decision thereafter in which he didn’t put his family’s interests first. If he had other aspirations, we didn’t know it. If he’d given anything up for us, we weren’t aware of it. If he wanted to do more or see more or experience more, he recognized early that what he wanted didn’t really matter anymore if it meant his children or wife would be adversely affected. It seemed everything he did, he did for us. Nor was it always easy for him—my oldest brother’s birth was traumatic and as such he was born profoundly affected with cerebral palsy—to this day, my brother Mark cannot walk or talk or care for himself at all, and yet steadfastly my parents have cared for him all their lives. One of my earliest memories is of seeing my father, holding my oldest brother (who sometimes had trouble sleeping as a child) on his knee late into the night while my father studied. At the time, my father was working on his Master’s degree (not to pursue his own intellectual interests, mind you; he went so he’d be better able to support his family)—he worked full-time all day, went to school at night, and studied after that. Yet how like him, that he would even take care of Mark well into the night so my mother could rest when he was probably more tired than she. My second brother became an insulin dependent diabetic at the age of five—I distinctly remember, although I was only three, seeing my mother sobbing and weeping because her second child was in a coma, hovering between life and death—and my father was there, trying to comfort her and telling her everything would be all right. I remember being very afraid—I knew enough to know Michael was very sick and not at home; I overheard my father telling my grandmother Michael’s “odds are 50/50” although I had no idea what that meant, but still my father took the time to notice me, sitting on the stairs with tears running down my face, frightened and feeling all alone by all these things I couldn’t understand—illness and possible death; my mother’s hysteria—to pick me up onto his lap, comfort me, and make a little joke to make me smile. He just coped, quietly and patiently. And so very early on, I formed the opinion that nothing could make my father come undone.

He didn't spoil us, either. He had high standards for our behavior but understood when, humanly, we made mistakes. If he had to punish us, he would. He was temperate in his praise, though he gave it when we earned it. He didn't want us to grow up full of false pride or empty vanity; he wanted us to be aware of our own strengths and weaknesses. Again, because of this, I formed the opinion that his way was the right way.

Those early views of him I formed, as well as others, were absolutely correct. I’m not apt to idealize people, to see them as perfect—but if my father has a major character flaw, I still haven’t figured out what it is after almost forty-one years. Even Malkhos can't find one, so it isn't just me.

One of the realities of life is that no one can pick who your parents are—I just happened to get pretty lucky in that department. And even if I am mostly like my father, there’s one thing I know about that—I’ll never be, fully, what he is.

Someone bought him a Transformer stroybook. Its text is purely Manichaean, with the Transformers emerging from light and the Decepticons their fallen counter-parts from the darkness locked in eternal struggle throughout the universe. No slavation is at stake, jsut lots of pyrotechnichs.

Today he received a transformer Jigsaw puzzle. As I assembled it with him I saw that it showed an army of giant robot scorpions attacking St. Catherine's Monastary on Mt. Sinai. What could this be except a parody of Revelation 9:

[1] And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.
[2] And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
[3] And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
[4] And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
[5] And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
[6] And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
[7] And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
[8] And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
[9] And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
[10] And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.
[11] And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

The artist was even imaginative enough to apply the passage to a Gnostic setting. Gnostics would consider conventional Christians as unholy, so of course, it is the Orthodox monks there, not truly sealed with the seal of God, who are attacked.

So may choose to beleive I have gone mad rather than accept my interpretation of the image, but see for yourself:

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-2007-TRANSFORMERS-70-Pc-PUZZLE-with-STICKERS-3_W0QQitemZ290150138063QQihZ019QQcategoryZ146071QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1742.m153.l1262

My first ambition in life was to be a nun, and it was a strong one. That story, however, would mean a much longer post, so perhaps some other time.

A few weeks ago, Benicek inspired this post by looking at Andrew's newest toy, a statue of Zeus, and suggested we get a statue of Jesus and have the two battle it out. I explained to Benicek that would mean buying nothing since I already had some thirty little statues of saints and created my own kitsch version of the Vatican across the top of some bookcases. I then asked if he would like to see more of them--they are Catholic kitsch at its best--and he said all right. Another LJ friend particularly wanted to see St. Lucy holding her eyes in a bowl and so she is featured among the pictures of some of my little statues.

What a strange child I must have been! Obsessed with saints and martyrs and flagellants and stigmata, collecting statues of saints and prayer cards (of which I have an even vaster collection) while my peers collected trading cards from Charlie's Angels and Star Wars and baseball players. So far, my children haven't shown the same predilection, but time will tell.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Anebo10/Sancti

As we arrived at the bottom of the drive, I immediately noticed a terrible odor and knew there must be a dead animal nearby, and sure enough, within a few minutes I saw the body of a dead raccoon lying near a woodpile. It wasn't very old because it hadn't reached its full size yet. It didn't appear to have any obvious wounds, so I figured it had died from disease. It also was quickly becoming flyblown.

Later in the day, Malkhos walked the children back down there with instructions from me that he should take a shovel and toss it deeper into the woods. However, Malkhos decided to give it a proper burial which Andrew was anxious to do. The child even offered to help dig its little grave though later Malkhos informed me Andrew only dug about ten percent of it and he himself, despite his inclinations to the contrary, engaged in work of the noble proletariat, gravedigging.

Before its actual burial, Andrew kept calling out that it was alive and its eyes were moving. Then after the burial, he inquired whether it too would grow into a Spartan like the buried dragon's tooth. Malkhos informed him that more probably the raccoon would turn into worms which would be eaten by birds and those by foxes so that in time the raccoon would become a fox. Malkhos and Andrew each poured a libation for the spirit of the dead animal and Malkhos commended it to the care of Hades and Persephone. However, inasmuch as the soul had been joined to an animal body it was probably not destined to make the return to the One in this generation, so Malkhos did not speak to it the Orphic secrets nor the passwords given to the initiates of Eleussis. Perhaps next spring an Easter egg could be dedicated at the grave. Unfortunately, St. Francis was left out of all this religious ritual, much to my dismay. While Andrew and Malkhos were busy with all this, Madeline ran off to the garage to sit on the tractor to play instead.

So both children have seen death firsthand and don't seem unduly traumatized by it.