Linkety Links

The week's winding down and you've got some time to kill, maybe. Have a bit of linkage.

First off, in regards to the recent post about my 7yo's reading difficulties, the Dyslexie font. Dyslexie is free to download for personal use, so we're going to see if it makes any difference for her.

Today in history: The battle of Yorktown begins. Here's the cast of Hamilton performing The Battle of Yorktown, sans rifles, because remember a million crises ago when a man who swore allegiance to ISIL shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando the day of the Tony Awards. 





Conserving the Blue Boy, the famous Gainsborough painting at the Huntington:

With a master of science degree in art conservation from the University of Delaware, O’Connell is trained in chemistry as well as studio art and art history. In addition to a rigorous educational background, paintings conservators need what she calls “hand skills”: manual dexterity, steadiness, and artistic ability “to intricately reintegrate any damages so that the original brushwork of the artist can be seen and understood.” The Blue Boy’s issues that need fixing are “both structural and visual,” O’Connell says. The original canvas was lined a century or so ago, and the lining is beginning to separate. Paint is lifting and flaking in some areas, though it’s being held down by multiple layers of old varnish; as O’Connell removes yellowing topcoats and trapped dirt, she’ll deal with the deterioration beneath. The painting’s wooden stretcher is visible where the canvas has worn away at the edges; O’Connell hopes to confirm that it is the original, 18th-century support.  

How editing saved a manuscript and made it stronger

I spent the next five months, from mid-January to mid-June of 2016, redoing the whole book, rethinking it from top to bottom. 

I began by taking his letter and his marked-up version of the manuscript with me to Austin, Texas, where my wife and I were taking a break in February from the long Maine winter. (Austin is a great town for live music, food, and hiking—and its winter feels to me like Maine in the summer.) I sat in the backyard and read and reread Scott’s comments. I didn’t argue with them. Rather, I pondered them. If he thinks that, I would ask myself, how can I address the problem? I underlined sections. At one point he pleaded in a note scrawled in the margin, “If you would only defer to the narrative, you could get away with murder.” I liked that comment so much I typed it across the top of the first page of the second draft, so I would see it every morning as I began my day’s work.   

The elements in haiku



If Bostonians loved other institutions like they love their local sports organizations

— Hear that new one from the BSO? 

— Shit, yeah, that Brahms? That one knocked me square on my ass. Even more so than the Shostakovich. Pardon me, the Grammy Award-winning Shostakovich. 

(They toast.) 

— We should repeat. 

— We should but we won’t, because the Recording Academy hates Boston. Watch. Watch them give it to the frigging New York Phil, which is a fine orchestra if you like listening to a bunch of soulless prima donnas collect paychecks. 

(They nod, drink.) 

— Gotta respect Andris Nelsons. 

— The kid can conduct his ass off, in the bravura tradition of Seiji Ozawa. 

— Friend of mine down in Quincy just named his pit bull “Ozawa.”

Famed American author Shirley Jackson, writer and housewife:

The housewife role also provided Jackson with a form of camouflage. Bowing to stereotypes, she preferred to present herself to reporters and critics — virtually all of whom were men — as a women’s-magazine-certified happy homemaker who tossed off her stories during breaks from dusting. “I can’t persuade myself … that writing is honest work,” she said cheerily in an interview with Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review. “Fifty percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to — well, create concrete things again.” The pose sometimes worked too well. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan myopically criticized Jackson as part of “a new breed of women writers” who wrote about themselves as if they were “‘just housewives,’ reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA.”

This is how longform is done: Eccentric Culinary provides us with a deliciously detailed history of chicken and waffles, in two parts.
Part I
Part II

Last Words

GeekLady has a poignant post on suffering which describes an incident which I've seen riling a number of NFP-using Catholic women that I know online. I'll quote her opening:

Today, I read something which demonstrates a fundamental failure within the pro-life movement. I read a FaceBook status by Abby Johnson stating that she had been told of a woman who was in the throes of an unexpected pregnancy who was ‘praying to miscarry.’ Abby proclaims,

“This is not normal. Does it happen? Do women sometimes have these fleeting thoughts? Yes. But these are unnatural thoughts that enter our mind because of the abortion culture we are living in. Life becomes cheap…so mothers (prolife mothers) wish for death of their children.

I understand traumatic pregnancies. I understand traumatic births. I get it. But it’s still not okay. And it makes for lasting guilt.”

I'm not here to say what a women in an unexpected pregnancy should or shouldn't feel. I haven't and can't experience that. But when I read the Abby Johnson quote, I remembered an incident from a long time ago.

Fourteen years ago, because of our own unexpected pregnancy and the financial and living space problems it created, MrsDarwin and I moved in with and became live in caretakers for my grandmother, who was ninety-two years old and frail. I say we, but although during the evenings we both shared the load of caretaking, much of the work fell upon MrsDarwin: caring for a toddler and a strong willed ninety-two year old while I did a fifty mile commute through heavy traffic twice a day to go to work.

This only got harder when, trying to hurry to the bathroom one day without using her walker, my grandmother tangled herself in her oxygen cords, fell, and broke her arm. That kind of shock to an already frail system can cause a sudden decline, and it did. Within not much more than a week she was nearly confined to bed, showing signs similar to dementia, and on heavy pain medication. We personally were at the end of our collective rope. Grandma's pain and confusion made her suspicious. She became convinced that I didn't go to work everyday, but rather that MrsDarwin hid me away from her out of spite. She started to refuse to take her medicines. This included her pain medications. Skipping those increased her discomfort. It also included her anti-depressants. Skipping those made her combative and scared. I remember a Friday morning, it would be her last, when she was yelling at MrsDarwin and refusing her meds. I went in to try to reason with her. Often she thought I was my father, and she would listen to my father. Sometimes.

That day she didn't listen. I was already late, and thinking of the traffic stacking up through Pasadena. My ninety minute morning commute was becoming two hours. I would be late, and I couldn't make her take her pills. I too got angry. Finally I had to go. I left MrsDarwin to deal with the situation, knowing that I was leaving her aggravation, and that the aggravation was my family's, aggravation visited upon her while she struggled with a child and another on the way and no friends nearby. I was angry at my grandmother and angry at myself.

I nurtured that anger all the way in to work. The traffic made it easy to hold on to, stop and go all the way. I got to the office late, and the receptionist who kept the time cards marked me as such. I went to the break room to get coffee. My boss saw me there.

"Sleep in this morning?" he asked in a jovial tone.

It was the match to my fuse and the frustration's I'd been harboring for the last two hours of heavy traffic boiled over into sharp, childish words such as could have been said on a playground. "I swear, if that old lady doesn't stop it I'm going to kill her."

He stopped, surprised to have drawn real emotion with his question. "Are you having trouble with your wife?"

It took me a moment to realize he thought I was using the phrase "old lady" to refer to MrsDarwin. It's a common enough usage for husbands talking to other men to refer to "the old woman" in that fashion, but it had never occurred to me in relation to her, nor has it since. When the words fell into place I went into slightly mad laughter. "No. No. It's my grandmother. The one we moved in with. She's being very hard to deal with. I'm sorry, it's been a rough morning." I laughed it off, and we went about our day.

This isn't the sort of exchange that I'd remember with clarity, right down to the appearance of the coffee maker in the dimly lit break room tucked into a corner of the warehouse, except that Grandma died that weekend. Peacefully. In her sleep. On Monday I called my boss to tell him that I wouldn't be in that day because my grandmother who we lived with had died and we had a lot of things to take care of. "She died?" he asked. "I thought she was doing well on Friday and causing all sorts of trouble?"

There aren't any other conversations of mine that I remember, word for word, from that week fourteen years ago. I don't remember the last words I exchanged with Grandma. I don't remember the words I used to tell my father, himself (I couldn't know then) with less than three years to live.

I remember some words I didn't mean, said in anger. "If that old lady doesn't stop it I'm going to kill her."

They were words said for effect. Words that were a cry of pain, a cry for help from a twenty-four-year-old way out of his depth in life: short of money, short of time, scared, seeing life into the world and seeing life out of it.

I know that I loved my grandmother. I know that she knew that -- at some essential part of herself that was confused and lost under the pain and hallucinations of an ebbing life. I know that my words did nothing to bring on her death. I don't feel guilty about them. Indeed, at some level, I suppose it's a relief that my frustrations boiled out into angry words far away from her, in the office, in a stupid, schoolyard expression. I'm glad I didn't say something like that to her.

But even so, even with all those protections from a phrase I didn't mean, I'm sad that they're the only words I remember, that I'll ever remember, from those last days. I remember them because the odd sort of prophesy they turned into. I remember them because they weren't true. They will always be with me.

A couple years later, in another state, expecting another baby, MrsDarwin miscarried. It had been a surprise pregnancy. It was not catastrophic. After a precarious couple years we had a house and full time job and health insurance. But baby was nonetheless a complete surprise, the sort of pregnancy which the NFP method suggested should not be able to happen. Perhaps there was always something precarious about baby. We had a few weeks to adjust to the idea, weeks in which it seemed all the harder to believe because MrsDarwin was not sick at all unlike the last two babies. And then baby was gone, leaving us with a sadness and emptiness that we couldn't have imagined before.

Why do these things come together in my mind? Because sometimes the words we say, words in said real pain, words we don't mean, become memorialized in ways we could not have expected by what comes after. Words are powerful things. Putting something into words is different from thinking it or wanting it. We forget, all too soon, the full force of how we felt. Yet words can be hooks for memories we don't want to have. Nothing would make me forget that those last days with Grandma were hard, and that I was frustrated with her at times. But I wish those weren't the words that I remember from that week.

And that's what strikes me about the idea of praying to miscarry. I don't think God would be shocked, He knows His children's suffering. I don't think it's a sign that life is cheap or of giving into an abortion mentality. I think it's something people in desperate circumstances have done throughout history. But put something into words and the words come true -- not because you said them but just because that was the way it was going to be. How will those words echo down through memory? Who knows. People think about things differently. People think about words differently. But the idea of thinking back on words like that scares me.

Reader Madness

At the tender age of 4 or 5, I narrated the kindergarten play because I was able to read the script better than anyone else in my class. My mom tells me that on the night of the performance, she was surprised because she didn't know I could read so well. So I didn't learn how to read as a result of direct instruction from my parents, and I don't remember the steps of being taught. As far as I can remember, I've always known how to read, and it was always easy.

It's due to no merit of my own that I read early. I just had a knack for it, as some kids can draw or dance. But the upshot is that I don't remember the process of learning to read, and it's frustrating for me to work with a child struggling with reading. So far I've taught four children to read, and they've turned out all right. None of mine, so far, have been as voracious a reader as I was, but the older ones have all had their click and read independently and proficiently.

I'm hitting my Waterloo with my current reader-in-training.

My seven-year-old daughter is having a tricksy time with phonetics, to an extent I don't recall with the others. Her short-term memory for words and sometimes even letters is very scattershot -- she often won't remember a word she read in the sentence before, and doesn't always remember basic sounds like short e. The other day she couldn't remember the sound of "m", the very first letter sound she learned. She has a few sight words -- the, to, I, a -- but everything else she sounds out piecemeal, often as if she's processing each letter for the first time. She often reads predictively, guessing "can" for "cat". She adds sounds that aren't there, or will say some entirely different word after laboriously sounding out a word bit by bit. When asked to say the whole word she's just sounded out, she sometimes puts the ending sound first, and often doesn't remember the word so we have to start the process over again.

Rules such as silent e or "when two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking" don't seem to stick well, and although we've finally gotten the "th" sound down, other common blends such as "ar" or "sh" or "ch" require reminders. She consistently mixes up d, b, and p.

Some days are better than others, but her reading is very very slow. The eye doctor says her vision is fine and shouldn't be an impediment. She doesn't show any signs of having learning difficulty in other areas, though (as with all my children at this age) I usually have to sit on her to make her do her work. She isn't really interested in learning to read and doesn't do much independent sounding out of signs or books.

She can write her letters and spell at the basic level her phonics workbook requires. (I figured there wasn't much point in working on formal spelling until she could read a bit better.)

My sense, from years of parenthood, is that this is just going to take time and daily work and perseverance on my part. But if you have any encouragement or advice, throw it my way -- I could use it.

Orphan Opening: Dream Edition

Last night I dreamed that I was with a group going to visit a large abandoned book warehouse. We'd feared that everything would be damp and moldy, but the warehouse had been shut up tight and air conditioned. It was dry and cool, and filled with shelves stretching out as far as one could see in the dim space.

There were two staircases going down to the lower floors, and rumor swirled that there were rare books on the deepest level, a first edition of Jane Austen or so. A large contingent went down one staircase, but I went down the other with my three-year-old, holding his hand tight so he wouldn't get lost. The manager of the space was with me. On the lower level, we wandered a bit, always staying near the group, and then prepared to head down again. The manager took one last look around, shining his flashlight over the floor.

I saw a baby rocking in a swing.

"Stop!" I said. "There's a baby over there."

The manager played his light in the direction I pointed.

"I... don't see anything," he said.

The baby's blue eyes sparkled in the light.

We headed down behind the rest of the group.

Then I woke up, and it was a great relief.

Spelling Test

1. Banner
It's a fine life, carrying the Banner.

2. Fame
Fame, I'm gonna live forever.

3. Later
When a girl says later, she really means, "Not ever".

4. Hammer
If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning.

5. Seven
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone.

6. Barrel
Perhaps your horse's name was Barrel.

7. Dollar
A day late, a dollar short.

8. Letters
She receives letters, Mrs. Bennet, because she writes letters.

9. Silent
Silent E is a ninja.

10. Wild
The wild things roared their terrible roars and showed their terrible claws and rolled their terrible eyes and gnashed their terrible teeth.

11. Swift
Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels.

12. Bottle
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

13. Pineapple
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

14. Traffic
Everything that traffic will allow.

15. Eleven
It goes to eleven.

Fr. Martin: Nihil or Obstat?

The current controversy over Fr. James Martin and his book (lengthily titled: Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity) seems odd to me. In rough outline:

Various loud (and honestly, mostly unpleasant) conservative groups have been waging a campaign to get Fr. Martin dis-invited from giving talks about his book at Catholic institutions, on the theory that since he scrupulously fails to discuss Church teaching in his book on the Church and the LGBT community, while calling for greater charity between the two, he must clearly be advocating a soft-pedaling of practice or change in teaching.

Fr. Martin has responded with some vigor that his book does not contradict Catholic teaching, and he has pointed to several Catholic authorities (the Jesuits, various bishops) who have stated as much.

Thus far, so good. But here is where I fail to understand: If Fr. Martin is in fact not suggesting any change in Catholic teaching, then his book is a flowery exercise in saying nothing much, a 150 page David Brooks column. The problem between the Church and the gay community is not one of schoolyard taunts which can be easily resolved by the kindergarten teacher telling everyone to play nicely. The Church's teaching on sexual morality is the substantive reason for the strife between the two groups. The Church says that sex outside of marriage is wrong and that marriage can only be formed between one man and one woman, while most people in the gay community believe that this teaching is both wrong and hurtful. Civility is good, of course, but it comes nowhere close to dealing with the core of the issue.

If Fr. Martin is not in fact in favor of some kind of change in Catholic teaching, then there's really very little reason to ask him to speak about his book at all. He has nothing much of interest to say, and there are others who have already written much more interesting books actually tackling the question of how LBGT Catholics can live in tune with Church teaching and how the Church should change the way she speaks to and about them to recognize that they are indeed called by our doctrines to a difficult life requiring support and fellowship from the Church.

On the other hand, if Fr. Martin is in favor of some kind of distinct change in Church doctrine or practice, then it's hardly surprising that Catholics who believe that the Church's teachings on this matter are correct would object to him being brought in as a speaker. And if that's the case, dissembling about one's actual beliefs is a pretty poor tactic all around.

Could Trains Have Saved Irma Evacuees?

In the tenth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell's satiric tapestry of mid-Twentieth Century British intellectual and artistic circles, several characters set up a left wing publishing house, yet are stymied by how to make a commercial success of a novel of socialist realism in translation which is near to the heart of one of the their patrons. That they are trying to make a commercial success of a piece of socialist realism is, of course, one of the understated sources of humor, as is the unwieldy title: The Pistons of our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers (Eventually this is shortened to the more marketable title Engine Melodies.)

There's something about trains which seems to appeal to ideological and technological Utopians across ideological boundaries. Affection for trains is a staple of progressive thinking these days, and yet Ayn Rand also idolizes trains in her massive novel Atlas Shrugged.

Perhaps, then, it's no surprise that someone over at the World Socialist Web Site wrote a piece asking: Why aren’t trains evacuating people from the path of Hurricane Irma?

The author complains at people being forced to use cars and planes to leave Florida due to the "abysmal, anarchy-filled state of transportation in America."

Why haven’t passenger trains, which could carry a thousand people a time, been sent to Florida to help? Residents without money or the ability to travel by car or plane could be taken to designated points of shelter and food.

Prior to Hurricane Gustav in 2008, there was a small successful example of this, as some 2,000 residents of New Orleans were taken to Memphis, Tennessee on special trains. A worker who participated in the rail operation noted that “At least 50% of the passengers were elderly, many in wheelchairs, on walkers or canes and generally unable to move very well without some assistance.” On a return trip, many passengers brought more luggage, as they could buy essential supplies in Memphis that would have been out of stock or priced-gouged in New Orleans. With baggage cars and plenty of space, the train accommodated this for free—compared to an airline that would charge $50 per bag.

That operation was minimal compared to what could be done, and yet with Irma, nothing similar has been attempted, despite a far larger forced evacuation. If the state and federal government, FEMA, and corporations cared to, dozens of sets of passenger train equipment could have been sent south during the week and made several trips from South Florida to points farther North. This would require workers trained in advance to conduct the operation, and designated points of shelter established in places like Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; and other cities.

As one example, the commuter rail system of Chicago, Metra, has a daily ridership of 295,000 riders. If equipment on that scale were provided to a region at risk of a hurricane, an enormous number of people could be taken to safe shelter. Instead, all that has happened is that Amtrak ran its regular trains out of Florida up until Friday, which, of course, were sold out.

There are some pretty basic reasons why this wouldn't work, and they have to do with how trains as a mode of transportation work. Trains are good at moving predictable numbers of people over predictable routes. That's why commuter train systems such as the one in Chicago cited above are a moderately efficient means of moving people. You know that every work day basically predictable numbers of people will want to move from specific residential areas to specific business areas, and you build your tracks and schedule your trains accordingly. For this kind of highly predictable movement through dense areas, trains can indeed be more efficient than cars. While the train itself may get very full, the tracks do not get overloaded and backed up the way that a freeway does at rush hour, so the schedule can be somewhat more predictable, and a full train uses less fuel per passenger to move people over a given distance than having all those people take separate cars.

However, trains are only good at moving people over expected routes. Imagine that there was a sudden need to evacuate most of Chicago's residents to cities nearby cities like Peoria and Indianapolis. The commuter rail system vaunted above would be of no use at all, because the tracks don't go there. Trains are far less flexible than cars. You could use the same car you used to drive in to downtown Chicago to evacuate to Indiana, but you could not use the same train you took to downtown Chicago to evacuate the metro area instead.

This is something I encountered a good deal in doing research for the novel, in that a great deal of military planning done prior to World War One centered around trains. With the mass use of trucks and automobiles still in its infancy, mobilization plans made by the European powers centered around moving soldiers on trains. Even in the relatively dense confines of Western Europe, the standard rail system would not have remotely sufficed for Germany to move over a million soldiers to the French and Belgian borders during the course of a few days. They had to build massive redundancy into their rail network leading to the West, with extra sidings to allow trains to pass each other and rail heads with a dozen or more sidings where trains could stop and disgorge the soldiers who had just spend a couple days in cattle cars. All of this rail infrastructure was built just in case Germany went to war with France, and it allowed for only approach to doing so. The German high command did not have the option of choosing to attack in a different place than they had planned years in advance, because the rail lines had been built to support the planned route of attack.

If this was a massive undertaking to support moving a large number of people along one planned route of military attack, imagine trying to build a network capable of performing natural disaster evacuations. The sort of slightly increased high speed rail network which train enthusiasts suggest to replace Americans' habit of driving or flying when they want to go somewhere a few hundred miles away would not do. Such a network would be build to carry the normal number of people who wanted to travel in a given direction for business or pleasure at normal times. To be able to accommodate a significant portion of the population suddenly needing to evacuate elsewhere, you would need massively redundant rail lines in order to accommodate the sudden burst of travel in one direction. You would need to have this excess rail capacity in many places going many directions: Do you need to evacuate New Orleans toward Houston or Houston towards Dallas? Do you evacuate Florida to Georgia and the Carolinas, or the opposite direction? Not to mention that you'd also need contingency plans to actually get the needed trains to wherever it was you suddenly needed to evacuate so many people from.

Messy as it looks, the highway system and the use of cars, trucks, and buses is actually a much more efficient means of responding to unexpected surges of transportation needs. Yes, results in traffic jams and gas shortages, but despite the apparent chaos it's actually a much more flexible means of moving people around, because the same vehicle and roads which are normally used and be instantly repurposed to evacuation.

Immediate Book Meme

photo by Evan Laurence Bench

There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.

1. What book are you reading now?

The Weeping Time, by Anne C. Bailey
An advance reading copy of a book Darwin was sent to review, about the largest slave auction in American history. Very sobering, and makes the evil and corruption of slavery vivid.

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, translated by Malcolm C. Lyons
subtitled: The First English Translation of a Medieval Arab Fantasy Collection. To be honest, I picked up this book because as I walked by it on the library shelf, it looked too beautiful to pass up. These are tales from a manuscript discovered in a library in Istanbul and first translated in the 1930s. The aged manuscript, with a torn first page, is thought to be an earlier collection of some of the tales from the 1001 Nights. The book is as advertised: the tales are pretty marvelous and strange. We tried reading them aloud, but they're rather convoluted, not helped by the fact that some of the pages were too damaged to decipher. It's easier to read them myself than try to make sense of them to the kids.

1a. Readaloud

Victorian Cakes, by Caroline B. KingA delightful memoir about a Victorian girlhood in Chicago, framed through the cakes and other delectables baked in the family's ample kitchen. I tried to get a child to read this herself, but found it easier to read it aloud. The kids are fascinated, and indeed, there's been a spate of cake-baking in an attempt to recreate some of the recipes in the book.

2. What book did you just finish?

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

I was considering this for my readaloud to the kids, but it had been years since I'd read it myself. After consideration: no, this is not one for the kids. Wilde was one of the Decadents, a movement of writers and artists devoted to outré experiences and the pursuit of sensation without consequences, and there's a unsavory undercurrent to the book. Interestingly enough, Dorian Gray flirts with Catholicism because he's drawn to the aesthetic, sensual elements, but he has the idea of Sacrament directly backward: he believes that the elements of the Catholic sacraments are merely symbolic, though powerful in their symbolism, but that his other obsessions, such as perfume or gemstones, have some kind of sacramental power that effects what they symbolize. He thinks there can really be some magic or alchemy such that a topaz gives long life or a ruby can poison or an emerald enhance sexual pleasure. (I just made up these examples, but the actual text isn't much different.)

Anyway, The Hound of the Baskervilles would have the same feel but be a lot more acceptable for reading to children. 

3. What do you plan to read next?

Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie
The girls just watched this on Netflix, so I wanted to read the book to see how Christie told the tale.

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

Abandonment to Divine Providence, by Jean-Pierre de Caussade
I took this on vacation with me to copy quotes for my novena, and it hasn't made it out of my bag yet.

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Darwin narrated this to us at the dinner table a few years ago when he was listening to it, and I've seen the Masterpiece Theater version, and I've bought a copy of the book, which sits on my shelf now. But I've never cracked the cover.

6. What is your current reading trend?

I don't know if I have one right now.

Twenty Years

September 5th, 1997, these twenty years ago, I put on a tie and bowler hat and went to the Courtyard Rock, a freshman mixer dance. With me were a few friends, similarly attired. We'd gone to some other, earlier dance wearing the same thing, being a bit odd as a youthful affectation and because none of us had anyone in particular to impress. This second dance was three weeks into the semester -- an eternity -- and was the end of the getting-to-know-you shindigs Steubenville threw on its own dime. After that, you had to meet people on your own.

As I say, this was the second dance we went to in our hats and ties, so we must have been recognizable. At least, someone had noticed us before, and as it happened, I was introduced to him by a mutual friend. "You probably already know each other," she said. "You're both in Honors." We didn't know each other, not being in the same section, but we set about remedying that posthaste. We talked class. We talked hats. We talked I don't know whatall -- nothing of great import, really, except that everything he said was interesting. He was funny and easy to talk to. That's a freshman way to describe a freshman attraction, the sort of thing that a lot of students said about each other in those early days. But I say it because it's true. He was funny in the exactly the way I found most amusing, and easy to talk to in the way in exactly the way that appealed to me most. If there was an immediate click, it was the click of two pieces fitting together perfectly.

We danced together, and since swing was the style of the late 90s, we swung. I've never been a crack dancer, and he was less so than I was, so we spent more time laughing than getting the steps right. After a while the party shut down, but we weren't done talking. So we went to the student center -- the old JC, for those who were around before it was gentrified -- and sat in ugly corporate seating and talked, and talked, and talked. And then a friend I'd known before I came up to college passed through, and said hi, and asked about my boyfriend back at home.

Proving that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing, my annoyance made me realize that I'd actually had no intention of mentioning that I had a boyfriend at home. We'd gotten together hastily and perhaps ill-advisedly before I left -- we'd shared some common life experiences and needed someone to talk to about them, proving that unhappy families are all unhappy in the same ways. That was not a reference he would have gotten. He was not a great reader, nor of an markedly intellectual bent, but a nice and gentle guy who deserved better than a girl who got together with him and then went off to college. I'd had plenty of time to meditate on this fact three weeks into the semester.

As it was, this revelation didn't change anything, because there was still plenty of conversation to be had. At 2 am we were kicked out of the student center and headed back toward the dorms. "The time has come," he said, "to talk of many things..."

"Of shoes and ships and sealing wax..."

"Of cabbages and kings..."

"And why the sea is boiling hot," we finished together, "and whether pigs have wings!"

I didn't know any guys who'd read Louis Carroll, and none of them would have admitted it if they had.

At his dorm we parted, but he had in his pocket a card with his dorm phone and mailbox number on it, and he gave it to me, and you can read the rest of the story here.

Steubenville was a small place, and Honors was a small set. We'd have met eventually, and the same sort of thing would have happened, but we happened to meet on September 5, twenty years ago.

Almost immediately after we got together, a week and a half later, I put things on hold. "I need to break up with my boyfriend," I said, "but I can't do it until Saturday." This won't make much sense to the youth of today, but those who had reached their majority by 1997 will remember the days of phone cards and reduced rates on the weekend. I couldn't afford to call long distance until the lower weekend rates. Saturday evening, I was sadder but wiser after discovering that breaking off a relationship even for many good and rational reasons is a wrenching thing to do.

"I asked him, " I said in a muffled voice, "if he could like reading and theater and all the things that I loved. And he said, 'I would if you wanted me to.'"

And he winced in sympathy, because he knew that that wasn't enough. I didn't want someone to love these things because I loved them. I wanted someone to love them because they were good things themselves, so that our shared loves could be a participation in something bigger than ourselves.

And for twenty years now our shared loves have grown and multiplied many times over, until we needed a huge house to contain all the little bodies that keep turning up. Tonight we went out and talked and talked again, only this time we had a sleeping, snorting baby with us, and we came home together to a passel of children talking as fast as their parents. In a few years our oldest is going off to college. Perhaps I'd better buy her a bowler hat.

Age of Faith, Age of Virtue?

I got into a discussion about the Middle Ages on Twitter last night, which is a bad idea because I seem to be too middle aged to succeed in doing anything with Twitter other than posting the occasional link or quip. So I'm going to be like the old fashioned creature that I am and write a blog post instead.

What initially caught my attention was this comment from a friend:

One suspects heaven is more well-populated with medieval peasants than modern Americans.

— Brandon McGinley (@brandonmcg) September 1, 2017

I should admit right off that a portion (perhaps the major portion) of what rubs me the wrong way on this is that I tend to distrust any speculation about who is and is not in heaven. There's an appealing sort of Catholic triumphalism about imagining the Middle Ages as a period when everyone was on our side, while in modernity we face a fractured Christendom and many people who aren't Christian at all, but I'm very leery of saying that the people 'on my side' are actually more likely to get to heaven than others. It smacks of a bit of presumption, and also it being 'my side' I'm in a good position to appreciate all those people's worst points.

However, the other thing which strikes me here is historical. The more time I spend on history, the more it strikes me that when we look at a past time and note that certain vices common in society now were less accepted then, what we often miss is that other vices sprang up instead to take their place. Human beings are a fallen bunch, and I can't see it that we're notably better in one era than another. This is something which has struck me a lot when doing novel research, admittedly dealing with the era only a hundred years ago. One frustration I have with a lot of modern historical writers is that they write their characters as if they were really exactly the same as now in their family and moral attitudes. A basic amount of primary source reading makes it clear that this was not the case. But it also makes it clear that while some of our chronic modern problems were not common then, there was a whole other set of problems in their place. People were neither better, nor worse, nor the same: they were different.

As Brandon expanded on his thesis, however, it proved to mostly center on closer connection with the sacraments and the graces which they provide:

Human nature doesn't change, of course, but it seems to me they would have had more social structures in place to nurture virtue.

— Brandon McGinley (@brandonmcg) September 2, 2017

I think we can say a society ordered around the sacramental life of the Church is qualitatively superior to one ordered around "liberty"

— Brandon McGinley (@brandonmcg) September 2, 2017

To expand my comment above in non-Twitter language: I think that there are two questions to consider here.

The first is whether people were really as steeped in the sacraments and the life of the Church as we might like to imagine. It's certainly true that there was no distinction between the secular calendar and the liturgical calendar. Holidays were just that: Holy Days. Times of fast and penance also shaped the year, as did the cutting loose which preceded such sober times.

And yet, we also know that this did not necessarily look like the practice of people who devotedly live the liturgical year now. Reception of the sacraments was not necessarily all that frequent. When the Fourth Lateran Council made clear the necessity of going to confession and receiving communion at least once a year, that was because it was fairly common for people to receive the sacraments even less often. There were major problems with corruption and ignorance among the clergy, and thus in turn among the flock they were supposed to be guiding. It's late to be truly medieval (1500s) but Carlo Ginzburg's classic study The Cheese And The Worms about the inventive heresy developed more or less through ignorance by a small town miller in northern Italy (which eventually led to his burning at the stake) helps underscore that however pervasive the Church was as a structure, even somewhat educated people (the Miller could read) often knew startlingly little about their faith.

There was also the difficulty that the integration of the Church into everyday life could actually make people resent it. We think of anti-clericalism as something which broke loose in many traditionally Catholic countries in the modern era, but it's arguably that it was the toppling of old structures in modernity which allowed much older resentments to be expressed. When very poor people owed significant portions of their labor or the products of it to the local institutions of the Church, it's natural that the Church would become a target for economic resentment. We see some of that in the humorously derisive anti-clericalism in works like The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. I think this history is also arguably why modern age revolutions in Catholic countries (France, Mexico, Spain, etc.) often involved repression of the Church and mass killing of priests and religious -- resentments against power and the rich inevitably ended up becoming tangled with resentments against the Church because the Church was seen as (and was) powerful and rich.

The second question is whether, granting that people were more deeply connected with the Church and her sacraments on a daily basis, that actually led to people being more virtuous.

This reminds me of questions I've struggled with in the past in regards to prayer: On the one hand, we believe that prayer does actually accomplish something. To pray for someone's healing or someone's conversion is actually to do something which has an effect on the other person. And yet, when we turn that around, I'm hesitant to make arguments like: "He didn't convert because not enough prayers were said for his conversion." or "She didn't recover from her illness because not enough people prayed for her healing." And yet, if we can't say "This person was healed because he was prayed for, and if he hadn't been prayed for he wouldn't have been healed" then what exactly do we mean by prayer having an effect? (I don't know the answer to this.)

Similarly, I believe that it is good for people to receive the graces of the sacraments and to know the teachings of the faith. And yet, we also know that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. I believe that it's a good thing that I go to mass every week and receive the Eucharist. But it seems a very dangerous presumption to say that because of this I'm more likely to go to heaven than my neighbor who doesn't. The Bible and the saints often speak of the great dangers faced by those who believe they are righteous. Does that mean that one is more likely to make it to heaven if one doesn't participate in the sacraments and the life of the Church? Certainly not. But I'm also hesitant to say that we know we're more likely to be saved if we're active in the Church.

Again, I think we see some of this in medieval history and literature. The Canterbury Tales are the story of a group of people setting off on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a great saint. And yet, they're actually a fairly worldly bunch, and remain worldly on the journey. Perhaps it's still more of a force for virtue in their lives than if they were moderns embarking on an Alaskan cruise. Or perhaps not. I don't know.

I've spent much of my life around social groups defined by active participate in the life of the Church. I think there are benefits to living in that way. And yet I'm also very much aware of the resentments, pettiness, selfishness, and abuse of power which is fairly common in those groups, and sometimes seems to be all the more vicious because people believe they're doing it all for God.

I want to believe that it could be (and was) different. But I'm not sure that I do.

Eli, Eli

Not an Orphan Opening, exactly.

***

Out of the depths I call to you, Lord.

When the prayer chain began to light up -- baby drowned, heart stopped for almost half an hour -- Kaye sprung into action. Within moments she had alerted the support group, found a contact email for the mother, written a blog post, and created a hashtag: #prayingforbabysam. The first familiar pangs of panic and grief subsided beneath the flurry of making a difference. As long as she was doing something to make things better, she could look at the pictures of little Sam in his hospital bed and keep breathing.

Like water my life drains away.

The support group buzzed with prayers and sage counsel, wisdom dearly bought. Each person knew the pain the parents were feeling, knew it in their bones, had buried it in tiny plots in small hometowns or manicured city memorial parks. Kaye had brought them together. She monitored the prayer line, moderated the comments, posted the memes, wrote the columns about What Not To Say to a Grieving Parent or Five Ways to Support Your Bereaved Friend. Within private forums, she gave the good advice about allowing yourself to mourn, about celebrating the anniversary, about visiting the grave, about seeking help when the waves of agony pulled you underneath as you tried in vain to reach your baby.

Save me God,
For the waters have reached my neck,
I have sunk into the mire of the deep,
where there is no foothold.
I have gone down to the watery depths;
the flood overwhelms me.

Kaye understood.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents,
And all your waves and breakers sweep over me.

She had lived each step of the process. She knew everything that Sam's mother was going through. She knew the shock of discovery, the horror, the deadly hope, the helpless vigils over the small still body covered with tubes, the beeps and then the silence of the monitors. She knew the stresses that could tear a marriage and a family apart. And she knew how to rebuild, to channel her grief into something good and productive: a support network for parents like her, so that no one should have to go through the worst moments of their life alone. Eli's Miracle was named for her own son, the miracle being that life could go on after death. She couldn't save Eli, but in his name she did everything possible to save other parents. Time brought wisdom and solace. God's will was inscrutable, but now that Kaye was on the other side she could see how far she'd come. She was a #survivor.

He reached down from on high and seized me;
drew me out of the deep waters.

And now baby Sam's mother needed her. Kaye kept vigil with her, constantly monitoring for updates. In the middle of the night she checked her phone for fresh news to share with the support group. Sam's anguished mother was keeping in constant touch. Kaye knew too well not just her present sorrow, but the horrors of the coming days as the family would have to make decisions about removing life support. Nothing, nothing could prepare them for that awful moment, but Kaye would walk with them every step of the way, praying when they prayed, crying when they cried. And when they needed it, the GoFundMe account was there as well to cover the hospital bills. Kaye did not talk yet about the funeral expenses. The family was still choking on hope. It was wise to let them take the time they needed. After all, everyone was #prayingforbabysam, praying for that miracle.

I shall not die but live
and declare the deeds of the Lord.

Talitha koum, and Sam's eyes opened. He spoke. He ate. His brain activity was off the charts on the high side. "I'm not a religious man," Sam's doctor proclaimed, "but the only word for this is 'miraculous'." The hashtaggers, the memers, the prayer warriors on the other side of the screen watched the miracle unfold and proclaimed it #blessed.  His mother posted photo after teary photo of the child as each day some new wonder unfolded, and day after day Kaye shared them with all who were #prayingforbabySam.

But Kaye was not praying.

Then the waters would have engulfed us,
the torrent overwhelmed us,
the seething water would have drowned us. 

She had sought for so little. Nothing unreasonable or extraordinary. The basic, common, decent process of healing for the shattered parents and sobbing siblings was all she requested of God. And God betrayed her, and betrayed Eli, by sending some other family a literal fucking obscene miracle. The years she'd spent in coming to terms and reaching peace and transmuting her suffering into ministry were a timeline of mockery. Everyone's suffering had been wasted. Baby Sam stirred in his bed, and walked, and talked, and said, "Mama", but her baby, her own sweet Eli for whom she prayed, was only in goddamn heaven.

Cast them into the watery pit never more to rise.

On the day that everyone posted the pictures of Sam toddling out of the hospital, Kaye went to Eli's grave. She smashed a vase of flowers against the small flat stone. She lay her body over the patch of earth that covered her son and begged God to give her baby back to her. No answer came but the prick and sting of shattered glass. As the blood trickled down her forehead, she lifted up her voice and cried, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

8th Grade American History: A Reading Course

Many wonderful people who provided book recommendations as I put together the reading list of our second eldest's eighth grade American History reading list, and so it seemed only fair to share out what I've put together.

The student in question professed herself bored by history, perhaps in part due to a poor textbook selection last year, and in part due to lack of desire to put in effort. Needless to say, this sort of statement puts pangs in my heart as someone who has history as a primary interest. My main goal this year was thus to put together a reading list of highly readable popular history books for adults (rather than a grade school or high school text book) and show the student that history can be involving. Because several of the books I've picked are very long, and I wanted to set the history reading quota at ~100 pages per week, this meant only covering a few major topics in American History. However, my hope was to make up for this by covering these with interesting enough books to make the student want to eventually go back and read more about other connecting topics.

I'm also trying to cover some gaps with my selections for reading/literature and for science. The student's main science course this year will be a video based astronomy course, but I'm also including some inventions/technology reading to cover elements of history that relate to science and technology.

History Books

Eyewitness to History (selections) I struggled with a number of options dealing with the Spanish discovery of the Americas and the following conquest, etc. However, I couldn't settle on something which looked interesting and balanced enough yet also wasn't hugely long, so we're going to start out with several short selections dealing with the discovery and conquest of the Americas from the collection of primary sources Eyewitness to History which I happened to have sitting around. It's a useful (though often British/European focused) collection of short primary source selections which I've turned to at times over the years.

One Small Candle: The Pilgrims' First Year in America by Thomas Fleming deals with the journey on the Mayflower and the first year in America in vivid narrative form. Fleming came highly recommended by Jay Anderson.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow The kids were all big fans of Hamilton the musical, and when she flamed out on her textbook last spring I had this student start reading Chernow's book, which although brick-like in length reads almost like a novel. She read the first part and said she liked it, though she dropped it over the summer, so I'm going to have her finish this to cover the American Revolution.

Selected Founding Sources: Declaration of Independence, Selected Federalist Papers, Preamble to the Constitution, Washington's Farewell Address

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson This is a fairly opinionated account of the civil war (and I actually haven't read all of it, though I'll be reading it along with the student to discuss it) but I picked it for two reasons: 1) It's only one volume, while Catton and Foote are three each. 2) Due to the nature of the course I needed a Civil War history which dealt in depth with slavery and racial issues as well.

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes Again, a pretty opinionated history, but I wanted a history of the Great Depression which was heavy on anecdote and yet fairly sound on economics. This seemed to cover both.

Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War Two by Robert Leckie This was a tough one for me, because the world wars and their interpretation is a topic which I care a lot about. However, looking over a number of general histories of the war, this looked like the most readable one for someone who is not currently a history geek. Thanks to Rich Leonardi for this recommendation. I knew of Leckie but not of this book.

High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis by Max Frankel This was a bit of a coin toss. I was looking for a short (200-300 page) book on a post-WW2 topic: Cold War, Civil Rights, 60s Revolution, Vietnam, Nixon, Gulf War & Middle East, 9-11 I struggled to find something which was a short, contained work that did a good job with it's topic. This looked like it would fit the bill.


Literature

End of Track Autobiography of a man who lost a leg as a teen soldier in the civil war but went to a career as a work gang manager building the railroads across the west.

By the Shores of Silver Lake Of the Little House books, this one is set when Laura is the student's age (and she mostly has only read the early books) and also deals with railroads and the westward expansion.

The Last Days of Night I discovered this recent novel set in 1888 when looking for a biography of Westinghouse. It deals with the War of Currents; Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison; the industrial barons, and the boom in business and technology of the late 1800s. I found it an enjoyable read and surprisingly for a modern novel for adults there's nothing at all one would hesitate to put in front of an eighth grader in it.

My Antonia or One of Ours I'm still trying to decide whether to go for the famous Willa Cather novel or the one that also gets in World War One.

To Kill a Mockingbird Somehow I didn't read this classic till a couple years ago, but 8th grade seems like a traditional time for it.

Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March Since the Civil Right Movement didn't make it into the history list, this autobiographical work seemed like a good one to include. (Thanks to Mar Grady for suggesting this and also the next one.)

A Night Divided Okay, so this isn't about American history, but I was a sucker for the idea when Mar pointed me to a historical novel for the age group which was about the building of the Berlin Wall, especially since my recent kick has been histories of post-war Europe. And it's not a bad idea to get in a book dealing with communism as it actually existed.


Science

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers

Confirmation #1

Given Topic: Faith and Baptism. What I actually talked about: Baptism and Confirmation, compare and contrast.

First off: We recited the first five popes. Every year the bishop gives the same confirmation homily -- why not? It's generally a different audience each year -- and each year he asks questions. This past year at my daughter's confirmation, I diligently wrote down each question so that I could cover them with my confirmation class. Of course the program on which I wrote them went missing the day I needed it, after weeks of floating around the library (don't ask me why I didn't put it in a safe place. Just don't do it.), so I'll have to wing it on the rest of the questions, but one thing I do know is that every year his gag question is to ask the names of the first x popes. I'd remembered the number being five, so my daughter memorized the first five popes, and then that year the bishop went and asked for the first 25 popes. So, this year, St. Mary's PSR is going to memorize the first 25 popes, and when the bishop asks, I want every kid to stand up and start reciting. Let's do this thing.

From memory, and assisted by my notes:

Why are we here? What's the purpose of sitting here in this Confirmation class? It's the same reason we're here at all, that we exist: to love God, to learn to be better able to respond to his love, and to share it with others. That's the reason for this class, for the Church, for your whole life: to love God. The Church provides us with the surest way to know and respond to God's love, and Confirmation is the sacrament that completes our initiation into that church.

Lots of great things come in trilogies: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings -- and the sacraments of initiation are no exception. Can anyone name them? Baptism, Eucharist, and Confirmation. This reflects another great trio of our faith: the Trinity. Baptism is the sacrament of the Father, the Eucharist is the sacrament of the Son, and Confirmation is the sacrament of the Holy Spirit. In some dioceses, they've restored the original order of the sacraments so that you receive Confirmation before your first communion, because the Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith.

But why do we need Confirmation to be fully initiated into our faith? Isn't that what Baptism does? Why do we need an extra sacrament for that? Come to that, why do we need Baptism at all? Why couldn't God have just made us members of his family already without needing a special ceremony? He can do that, right?

Well, consider my co-teacher Baby Paul here. God could have made it so that he came into the world already able to feed himself and dress himself and change himself. But as it is, Paul relies on me for everything. All he knows is that he's warm and fed and dry and feels secure. I feed him, I change and clothe him, I protect him from dangers he isn't even aware of -- being too close to the edge of the bed, or his three-year-old brother coming at him with a lightsaber. We stand like that in relation to God. He guards and guides us in ways we don't even realize, and he provides us with a family, the Church. Baptism is our entry into that family. It also washes us free from the stain of original sin, that human urge to separate ourselves from God and do the wrong thing. You all know about this. You understand the temptation to do something wrong. Sometimes we even do the wrong thing while wishing we could do the right thing. Saint Paul says, "I do what I do not want to do." (From memory, so no citation.) Baptism makes us a new creation in Christ, 2 Cor. 5:17. Also, Jesus commanded us to baptize and be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Matt. 28:19. So we're baptized in obedience to that command.

But why Confirmation? How is it different from Baptism?

Confirmation is the deepening and completion of our Baptism. Let's look at it this way. Who here is involved in sports? Okay, wow, that's a lot of you. So, is it enough to just make the team? Are you ready then to go out on the field and win your first game? No, of course not. What sorts of things do you need? Yes, equipment, uniforms, practice, drills, coaching, the rules -- all these things go into making you ready to play the game. Making the team is necessary, but to fully play the game you have to go deeper.

Here's one I like: theater. How many of you are involved in drama? Okay, not enough of you. Why aren't you all in drama? Anyway, is it enough just to be cast in the play? Are you ready then to go out on opening night and perform? No, of course not! What else do you need? The script, a director, rehearsal, props, costumes, sets, lights, makeup... All these things are necessary for being able to put on a show. Getting cast is the necessary first step, but you have to go deeper if you want to give a good performance.

Let's try one more that ought to be increasingly relevant: college. The first step is getting admitted, right? Is that enough to be able to graduate? What else do you need? Intelligence, books, study, teachers, a library, room and board, financial aid -- and lots of that! To go to college of course you have to be admitted first, but if you want to get the most out of your experience you need more than just that acceptance letter.

In Confirmation, we receive the graces that we need to go deeper into the Christian life. We receive the Holy Spirit, and he gives us his gifts. Can anyone name them? Well then, good thing I have them written down here: Wisdom, Counsel, Knowledge, Understanding, Fortitude, Piety, Fear of the Lord. Let's try our college example again and see how these gifts might play out there, to get a feel for what they are.

Wisdom: an example of that could be knowing not to party hard, or to start your paper well before the deadline.

Counsel: counsel is the giving of good sound advice. Advisors fill that role, helping students know what courses to pick and how to get the most out of their class selection so they can graduate in four years instead of eight.

Knowledge: knowing the facts. Books, class, study -- all these things help you gain knowledge.

Understanding: But knowing just the facts isn't enough. Understanding helps you to order them, to see how they work together, to make connections and really get to the heart of what you're studying.

Fortitude: Anyone know what fortitude is? It's strength, but not physical strength. It's moral strength, courage. It's being able to say no when everyone else says yes, or to say yes when everyone else says no. It's being able to stand up for what's right and for those who are weak. Pretty applicable to college, or high school, or middle school for that matter.

Piety: the old Roman virtue of piety had to do with reverence for ancestors, parents and grandparents, etc. We can see that here as respect for teachers and those in authority -- administrators, bosses, RAs. Also it can be seen in love of your alma mater, such as when you cheer for Ohio State over Michigan (cheers from the class).

Fear of the Lord: What's this? Anyone fear your parents? I don't mean being afraid of being beaten or abused -- if that's the case, please talk to me after class! But when you obey your parents, often there's an element of knowing that they have the authority to discipline you if you don't listen to them. We know that God loves us, but we also fear him because he is all powerful and holds life and death in his hand. God makes himself weak and small for our sakes, so we can relate to him and also learn compassion for the weak. He comes as a tiny baby, or as a small round piece of bread. You can smash the Eucharist. You can spit on it, or break it. But does that mean that God himself is weak and mockable? No!

Did anyone see the eclipse? I did. When you look up at the total eclipse, you can look at it with your naked eye. The sky is all dark, and there's the black moon looking huge, and behind it the sun's corona is all white and flaming. You can look at the sun's light directly, because the round disc of the moon shields you from its blinding power. And the Eucharist is a small disc that allows us to look directly at God himself and live. We should have a healthy fear of that power and glory, and respect and love God in every form.

Oh yeah, how's that apply to college? You turn in your papers not just to please your professor and to know your knowledge of the subject, but because you know that if you don't, you might fail out. You respect the rules because there is power behind them. You can be thrown out of your dorm, or fail out, or be expelled if you don't have a healthy fear of the authority behind the rules and regulations and the syllabus.

Hey, look, it's break time! Ten minutes outside!

(I know that this isn't the most in-depth treatment of the gifts of the Spirit, but we do have another class devoted to that topic. I just wanted an intro so at least people would have something to hang the concepts on.)

In The Moon's Shadow

As MrsDarwin wrote, one of the legs of our recent family road trip was visit Nebraska and see the total solar eclipse.

It wasn't my first time going to try to see an eclipse. My family wasn't much of one for big vacations. To support a family on a planetarium lecturer's salary, my father always worked a patchwork of several side jobs, and since people visit museums and planetariums when they are on vacation, the times when other people were taking time off were often when he was busiest. There was, however, one big exception. In 1991 a total solar eclipse crossed over the tip of Baja California and also the Big Island of Hawaii. The community college where Dad worked agreed to send both Dad and one of the astronomy professors on eclipse viewing expeditions: Dad to Hawaii, the professor to Baja California.

With the college paying for Dad's travel and hotel room, the rest of us just needed plane tickets and other traveling expenses to tag along, and so we spent about a week in Hawaii: hiked through a rain forest, visited the volcano, tasted sugar cane, played on a black sand beach. We did all of the satisfying tourist things. And on the morning of July 11th, we got up early and boarded the buses with the rest of the big eclipse tour group, many of us wearing our eclipse tour t-shirts. (Being a tourist destination already and the only part of the US when the eclipse would touch, Hawaii was loaded with eclipse merchandise.)

They bused us out to an open field before sunrise, and we spread out picnic blankets, set up telescopes and cameras, and looked nervously up at the broken clouds overhead. Through the gaps between clouds, we saw most of the partial phases of the eclipse, but then a few minutes before totality the sun went behind a thick, low, cumulus cloud. Right on schedule the sky got dark. It stayed dark for the four minutes of totality, then it gradually brightened again. Several moments after totality, the sun emerged from behind the cloud.

Of course, the thing about missing the eclipse by such a small margin is that across the island experiences varied quite a bit. For us, it was during totality that the sun went behind a cloud. For others, including the staff back at our hotel, the sun had come out from behind a cloud just in time for totality.

Still, we had at least been in Hawaii. The astronomer who had led the group down to Baja California saw the eclipse, but on the way back their buses broke down, people suffered heat and lack of water, and the astronomer ended up in the hospital for a week with malaria. Perhaps in the end, missing the eclipse was the better part of the deal.

In the following few years, we managed to see partial and annular eclipses. We watched the spectacular comets of the 90s: Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, Comet Hyakutake, and Comet Hale–Bopp. But we never did see a total eclipse.

My father died in 2006, still never having seen a total solar eclipse. When my faithfully science minded brother reminded me that there would be an eclipse crossing the US in 2017, I decided that I owed it to family memory to try again. The older kids were also agitating for a visit to their friends in Texas, and so the great Darwin cross-country road trip was born.

***

My Dad used to describe his fatalistic streak as "being Irish", after his mother, who faithfully reared him in the Irish-American experience of the depression even though he was born in 1948. It's not surprising. Grandma was 19 when the stock market crashed in 1929. She came of age in the depression. Her family lost their farm in Iowa and drove out to the West Coast, where her father sold various things door-to-door in order to put food into his children's mouths. Eventually he hit upon selling insurance, and opened the first State Farm office in San Diego. Post-war, this would lead to security and something a bit like prosperity, but by then Grandma's view of the world was already formed.

I have have this fatalistic streak myself. Dad used to tell a story about how Grandma was convinced she wouldn't live past some age (I forget what exactly) in her mid-sixties, for the simple reason that everyone else in her family had died before that age. As it was, she lived into her 90s, but apparently right up until the night before that record-making birthday she was convinced she wouldn't last. Since I knew Grandma as someone who remained alert and tough past 90, this seemed a funny story to me. But now, as someone whose father died of cancer before turning 58, I myself find it hard to imagine that I'll turn 60.

Through some similar sense of fatalism, even as I planned the eclipse trip, I never quite imagined it would come off. This fear was not helped by the fact that as soon as a 10-day weather forecast became available for the eclipse day at our planned viewing location of Lincoln, NE the weather services predicted "partly cloudy".

It was going to happen again, my heart told me. I now had kids the age I had been when we were clouded out in Hawaii, and I was going to take them to be clouded out in turn.

The morning of the eclipse itself did not reassure. The sun was in blue skies overhead, but the wind was from the south and clouds were blowing up from that direction. As the hours passed, the clouds closed in. They were, at least, high, thin clouds. As we looked up through our solar filters, we could see the sun, but we could also see wisps of cloud passing in front of it. Here's the view six minutes before totality:

We gathered under partly cloudy skies at the Lincoln Diocese's seminary.

As the remaining exposed part of the sun narrows to a sliver, the quality of the light changes. Like everyone, I'd heard all the warnings not to look at the sun without a filter, lest the image burn into my cornea. Yet, catching brief glimpses from the corner of my eye, I could see that rather than its usual brilliant disk the sun now had the quality of a very brilliant star. A star brighter than any in the real sky, bright enough to cast crisp shadows. But now very close to a point of light rather than a disk of fire.

The older kids were worried that baby would in his bleary way stare at the sun in this condition, so they put a hat over his head while he slept:

At last, it went dark. You could no longer see anything through a solar filter. And to confirm what we already realized, the leaders of our viewing group blew a whistle to let everyone know that for the next minute it was safe to look directly at the sun.

I lowered the filter I had been looking through and saw perhaps the most beautiful natural sight of my life.

I'd seen plenty of photographs of the total phase of a solar eclipse, the black disk of the moon surrounded by the ghostly white corona of the sun -- the sun's thin upper atmosphere which is normally invisible because it is so much dimmer than the sun itself.

Those photographs are beautiful, but they don't at all capture what you see with your eyes during a total solar eclipse. The human eye is an amazing thing, able to deal with differences of brightness and scale which a camera cannot. You've probably noticed this if you've ever tried to take a picture of a full moon rising over a landscape. To your eye, the moon looks huge, and you can see all sorts of detail on the moon itself while at the same time seeing the landscape in twilight. Yet if you try to take a picture, you'll notice several things: The moon looks much smaller if you have a wide enough field of view to see the full landscape. Also, you either see the landscape, with the moon burned-in as an undifferentiated bright blob, or else you see the moon clearly and the landscape is dark.

In camera terms, your eye has the ability to zoom in and out instantly, giving you a sense of the moon looking huge against the landscape features it's rising behind and also of the wider landscape. Your eye is also hugely adaptable to different levels of light, so it can both focus on the bright surface of the moon and make out details on it and also see the dimly lit landscape in the foreground. The only way to reproduce this in a photograph is to take two different photographs (one getting the moon clearly and one getting the landscape clearly) and combine them after the fact. And even then, a photograph can't reproduce the ability of your eye to see both narrow focus and wide angle at the same time.

So when the eclipse becomes total and you lower your solar filter to look at the sun with the naked eye, you don't see the totally black sky and the fringe of corona around the sun such as you see in up close photographs taken through telephoto lenses or telescopes. You see a dark but not black sky, with a few stars dimly visible, like the twilight sky half an hour after sunset. All around the horizon, however, you see the orange light of sunset, because in every direction you are seeing areas of sky not in the path of totality.

The sun (covered by the moon) is itself small. Just as at any other time, you could cover the sun with a thunbnail held out at arm's length. And yet the ghostly light of the corona seems to light up the sky around the black disk of the moon for a good eight or twelve solar diameters in every direction around the sun. And since your eyes can both zoom in on that sight of the sun itself, and also zoom out to look at the wider landscape, you perceive the sun and the halo around it as huge even while seeing the landscape, the horizon, and the sky all at once.

I tried to take a quick picture with my iPhone, but the sun is totally burned-in so that you can't even see that the moon is covering it, and really all it does is give you a sense of how perfectly the clouds parted to make it visible for us.

I've been searching like crazy for an photograph which gives even a slight sense of what seeing totality looks like. I found examples like this:

[source]

However, reading the description of the photograph I see that even this (which does not fully capture the effect) is in fact a "composite of simultaneous telephoto and wide angle frames".

Seeing a total solar eclipse is different from seeing a partial one (or a lunar eclipse) in kind, not in degree. Having finally experienced it, I want very much to do so again. The only thing that strikes me might be similar might be seeing the northern lights (something I have yet to experience.) However, even that is a strange effect during a normal night. This is something that sweeps down upon you in the middle of the day.

I can see now why some people travel the world to see eclipse after eclipse, and why they were taken as signs and portents in the ancient world. I can see why ancient peoples developed mathematics in order to calculate celestial events such as this. If you ever get the chance to see one, do not pass it up. It is one of the most wondrous things you will see.