Variation on a Primal Theme (Poetry)

VARIATION ON A PRIMAL THEME

A wizard told me a strange tale ’bout a

future simian of transmuted sight,

reborn to light new and unheard of fires,

unique, but not for long a neophyte.      

Hear him scratch, digging for he knows not what,

roused by the two-legged beasts who plunder. 

No alliance will he broker with them. 

He’ll only hold them somewhat in wonder.

He will ponder the riddle: why these beasts,

keenest of mammals, their assets intact,

has him mimic their coarse proclivities,

despite the rude ribaldry of the act.

What storms of mind, what spasms of the heart

render keepers as possessed as the kept?

Is it some passion or idiocy,

something drunk or some foul bed where they’ve slept? 

He’ll evade this boorish display no less

than a hidden hornet’s nest, but he’ll probe

his newfound heart and soul and signify

by a scratch fore and aft of his earlobe.

Some strange mogul of the id will teach him

that reason lies within his gifted touch,

not to be deceived by cookie fortunes

inside nut shells, cocoanut husks and such.

All alone for what he’s compelled to prove,

only by instinct will he construe it,

no cricket, frisky frog or tipsy toad

as intrepid as he to pursue it.

Like his human forebears will he then note

a grip his primate’s paw has never known, 

a distension from fetal hunch, as from

some covert nucleus suddenly grown.

A new current in the brain, a new stretch

of skin, new quickening concentration,

new sight with which to see, new vigor in

the mind, free of animal fixation.

Erect with his new and riveting thoughts,

each moment will face him with a new door,

entranced at the sun’s elixir, over

which only lymphatic sight glanced before. 

The blink in his eyes will become a flash,

opening the shutters to seek and find,

the tongue, rash with sparks of speech, feet in stride

with drummers in far corners of the mind.

Thereafter, in a sedentary pose

he’ll peruse what miracle has been wrought,

his chin cupped in upturned hands so as to

buoy the sacred head busy with thought.

Hands will rest upon hips as if to hold

in regal place the new vertical line

drawn from the earth beneath his feet and the

celestial heavens by his robust spine.

      

But a click of the heels together won’t 

transport this pilgrim home or make his day.

He must trample the serpent’s lair, eat grass, 

trusting soil and rock to meet him halfway.

He must be quicker than quick sand, kick stones,

walking and running for all that he’s worth,

with dagger speed cutting the air in front,

ready for the next hard place in the  earth.

From nature below his feet and the grand

heavens above his keen head, he will learn.

When he finds his way back to the other

mammals, some of them will greet his return,

though they will be reticent to applaud.

But eager for requital he will chance

To don friendly footwear and on two legs

will with open arms break forth into dance.

The caper this time will be all his own,

no mimicry, no burlesque, no pretense.

To no drummer but his own will he jump.

He’ll sing his own tune and make his own sense.

How reads the weird tale after that, in what

precise place will he be consigned to dwell?

No oracle, no reading of the stars,

no fervid prophet’s tongue can yet foretell.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Forrest Gump (Movie Review)

                                      Forrest Gump

                            (2 hrs & 21 min, color, 1994)

Absurdist comedy in motion pictures has been around now for quite some time.  When I think of this genre, my mind jumps immediately back to “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Graduate” and to the1960s in general, when it began to stake out a place for itself in the mainstream of even Hollywood product and has since become entrenched in the movie audience’s fertile field of familiarity.  There is a difference between absurdist comedy and screwball comedy.  The latter has been around ever since the 1930s.  A screwball comedy is humor that has not a single serious thought in its head – pure fun, tomfoolery, escape.  The absurdist, on the other hand, takes the drama of the real world very much to heart but tweaks it until it makes ridiculous sense.  The absurdist gives the world a chance to laugh profoundly at itself.  Absurdist humor, if it’s worth its salt, is also sobering.

The 1994 classic “Forrest Gump” is absurdism of a very high caliber.  It takes the late twentieth century just far enough out of the bounds of painstaking realism without undermining its basis in fact.  It does not make the world as we know it and have absorbed it disappear; it makes it stand on its head and shake off all allegiance to probability so that instead of its bare facts we get a slant upon its giddy and relevant truth.  

Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) is a deep south fellow with a pea-sized brain but with unheard of motor attributes and an innocent and trusting nature.  His life story through which we are conducted is as unlikely as any fictional adventure can get – unlikely, but likeable, yea, even loveable to many including myself.  In the course of the narrative, thanks to a loving but feisty mother (Sally Field), he goes from playground “idiot” as a child to college football star to Vietnam War valiant to industrial millionaire to loving father.  He turns out to be an effortless match for every crisis faced by the Baby Boomer generation.  Hanks is one of the very few actors who in my estimation are equal to giving him force and dimension and soul, and he does so superbly without compromising the characterization’s unusual premise.

While Gump is unspoiled by the onslaught of staggering world events, he finds that challenges of the heart are much more formidable.  One challenge is the bitterness he encounters from a lieutenant under whom he serves and whose life he saves in the midst of combat.  It seems the lieutenant loses both legs and resents Gump for depriving him of the honor of dying on the battlefield in the tradition of other fallen heroes in his family line.  Gary Sinise portrays him in realistic mode, becoming a kind of dramatic straight man to Gump’s outrageous innocence and comes to play a very vital part in the narrative.  Much of the absurdist comedy’s sobering effect derives from the stark contrast between the two figures.                  

The other challenge of the heart is the childhood sweetheart Jenny (Robin Wright) who weaves in and out of Forrest’s life and is slowly worn down by his good intentions and patience, before their relationship reaches a bitter sweet conclusion.  I will not say anything more about that or the relationship with the lieutenant for the benefit of those who have not seen this classic.  All I will say is that Forrest may not have much of an IQ, but he has a king-size heart, acquires a heap of common sense and gives pure pleasure as we  watch him wend his way.

There are some nitpickers who have accused the movie of glorifying brainlessness.  How so?  Does “Tobacco Road” glorify poverty and ignorance?  Does “Lord of the Flies” glorify juvenile malevolence?  Does “Young Frankenstein” glorify grave robbing?  What we have in “Forrest Gump” is a motion picture with a wide wingspread that encompasses a host of issues and emotional plateaus. The character of Gump is all of us denuded of our guile, sophistication, and self-possession.  His story gives us a kind of uncluttered window on the world we know, and he makes something disarmingly pure out of passive aggressiveness.

Robert Zemekis takes the directing honors.  Eric Roth wrote the cockeyed screenplay, derived from a novel by Winston Groom.  It won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director and in the eighteen intervening years has never been out of circulation.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Sunday in the Park with George (Stage Musical)

                             Sunday in the Park with George

                                (2 hrs & 26 min, color, 1985)

“Art isn’t easy.” 

Those words of dialogue that are uttered in the second act of this landmark work of musical theater should ring true for any number of people – certainly for the patron who attempts to penetrate the mysteries of a painterly image, also for those who aspire to put something on canvas, and most especially for those who attempt a whole new approach to the craft.  I know for a fact that there are many practicing painters among my readership, and it would be a shame if any of you should leave this world without seeing this miraculous achievement in words, song, choreography, set design, technological prowess, visual virtuosity and soulful resplendence.  It draws its audience many fathoms deep into their ethereal selves.  That any finer tribute could be paid in theatrical terms to those who wield the brush or to creativity in any artful form is inconceivable to me.  It has been twenty-seven years since it skyrocketed to critical and public acclaim on the Broadway stage.  And what we have here is a televised presentation that was mounted in 1986, one year after that premiere, and is now widely distributed in DVD.  (Netflix has it.)  Recently I revisited the disc and was so moved (once again, as way back when) that I have purchased my own copy for future revisits.       

The George of the title is the Frenchman Georges Seurat, who lived a very short life from 1859 to 1891.  Seurat introduced a new kind of dot-like brush stroke, his canvases consisting of thousands of tiny flecks, so close to each other that it remained for the eye to combine them into amalgamations of colors that fused and formed light-struck surfaces.  No mixing on a palate was required.  The work to which he devoted two solid years of his life was “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a landscape with many individuals in their Sunday best clothes casually posed in profile on the sloping bank of a river, and it languished in back rooms for many years afterward before finding its audience.  Today it is a revered portrait hanging in the Chicago Museum of Art and the focus of this musical.

The play is a witty, mirthful, multi-faceted musical with a huge cast and a libretto that stands very much alone in the halls of fame.  Two genius minds essentially brought it about – the composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, a man of many original concepts that have made stage history over the past half century, and a writer named James Lapine (who also directed the original stage version).  The director of this televised version is Terry Hughes.  But there are numerous technical wizards who engineered the unusual stagecraft that gives visibility to the Seurat technique in terms that the average member of the audience can comprehend.  Translucent scrims play a vital part in visualization.  Actually, the production as conceived would have been an impossibility not too many years earlier.  The technology had not yet been invented.  Much use is made also of overlapping dialogue/lyrics and scenic juxtapositions.  The play would be a delight just to watch, if its content were run-of-the-mill.  But there are delights upon delights upon delights, for both the eye and the ear.

The narrative is a work of fiction inspired by the idea of Seurat.  Next to nothing is known about his private life.  George (portrayed by a fabulous Mandy Patinkin with a voice that contains almost as many contrasting shades and dimensions as the painting) is a kind of Everyman Artist, and Dot, the woman in his life, is brought to exciting life by an equally fabulous Bernadette Peters.  What a twosome they make – impeccable chemistry!  She is at first both his lover and his model.  The opening scene has her standing grumpily in the hot sun wishing they were back at his studio making love, while he sketches and sketches in the shade.  The lyrics she bounces about are hilarious, reflecting her mixed feelings about him, loving his art but feeling discounted.  They are of course in Paris of the 1880s on that La Grande Jatte island on a Sunday, a place where the working classes normally strolled about, with occasional high society visitors as well.  Here the scenery is manipulated by Seurat’s wave of the hand to suggest the phase to which his concept of the painting has evolved at each given moment. 

During Act I we meet an assortment of colorful, highly energized  characters – George’s mother and her nurse; a German couple trying to enjoy their day away from sweaty labor; two dithery, giggly young women with eyes out for available young men; a woman-chasing chauffeur; a soldier; a fellow artist of Seurat, his wife and bratty girl child; a boatman and his dog; a baker (whom Dot later marries when she gives up on George); and an elderly American couple from the deep south licking their French pastries and making snide conversation about the country they are visiting.   The nineteenth century scene comes to a climax during the first five or so minutes of Act II, when Seurat has finally gotten everybody positioned on the canvas precisely the way he wants them.  They all act as if they are Seurat’s captives, not happy with their poses or profiles and complaining about the heat under their thick clothing and parasols.  The sequence is a real hoot; it almost makes me double over with laughter. 

Then for the rest of Act II we find ourselves in America a whole century later, in the 1980s.  Another George (also portrayed by Patinkin), descendent of Seurat, is displaying a new invention called a chromalume and honoring his ancestor by the showcasing of “A Sunday Afternoon” in an adjoining gallery.   He is making his presentation assisted by his grandmother Marie (again, Bernadette Peters), a ninety-eight-year old senile woman who is the daughter of the original George and Dot, still hanging onto life decades later.  All the performers we saw in Act I return playing various individuals reacting with varied opinions to the works on display.  George bristles under some of the inane comments he hears, voicing his irritation to the audience.  He walks patiently nevertheless in Seurat’s shoes “bit by bit putting it together” and is finally confronted with the question of where his artistry might go in the future.  He gets some very unexpected help in resetting his sail, and the play reaches a final and heart swelling peak.

In spite of the comedic tone, there are moments when we do get some sobering insight into this obsessive man’s soul and spirit.  Dot accuses him of hiding in his work.  He replies that he does not hide in it; he lives in it.  “I am what I do.”  He demonstrates that claim when she informs him that she is about to give birth to his child (to be Marie of the second act) and that she is going to marry the baker.  He is compassionate with her but encourages her in her decision.  He cannot give her what she wants; the baker can.  It is that simple for him.  And the process by which the painting emerges, the day by day sweat and labor, is wonderfully envisioned.  The scene in which he works on the canvas all alone behind a scrim is a phenomenon of music, lyrics and controlled lighting.  There simply has never been anything else quite like it in the history of theater that I know of.

     

The show ends the way it begins, with George considering manifold possibilities and naming the qualities of which canvas art consists:  “Order, Design, Tension, Composition, Balance, Light and Harmony.”  Each word is sounded out as if it were a chime or bell being rung.  For me the play rings many exciting bells, and I am not a painter.     

Anatomy of a Murder (Movie Review)

Anatomy of a Murder

(2 hrs & 40 min, b&w, 1959)

Old black and white movies are still with us, and it is my hope that they always will be, not that I have a particular preference for those colorless, silvery images as opposed to the chromatic brilliance of current footage or the digital displays that are the up and coming thing.  I simply believe that there is cinematic gold in dem dere hills, however erstwhile.  I promised in my opening remarks upon the installation of this blog to do my part in keeping the classics alive by trimming some of the weedy overgrowth that hides their luster from contemporary eyesight, from time to time calling attention to the lasting quality and significance of choice works that deserve special consideration.  I now continue with my efforts to do just that by taking us back to a 1959 masterpiece that might sound upon brief description like a standard crime thriller but is actually a landmark achievement that helped reshape the public conception of how the justice system in this country works, smashing a few movie taboos in the process.       

A more appropriate title for the film would be “Anatomy of a Murder Trial.”  It has emerged as probably the best court room drama ever given movie treatment and surely one of the most realistic.  We never see any homicide nor any act of violence committed anywhere in the footage.  The crime that gets court room attention has already been perpetrated as the story begins.  The screenplay by Wendell Mayes is based upon a novel of the same name by John D. Voelker (who at the time of the book’s publication took the pen name of Robert Traver), a practicing attorney and not unacquainted with high voltage felony cases.  It was produced and directed by Otto Preminger, a film craftsman whose body of work is at best spotty; sometimes he excelled and sometimes he failed miserably.  “Anatomy” is commonly regarded as his best achievement.  If all his work had been this good, he would occupy a place in the hall of fame on a par with Alfred Hitchcock.

And what a sterling cast!  James Stewart (giving another of his seemingly flawless commanding performances) is a small town Michigan lawyer who was recently forced into private practice when he failed to be reelected as county prosecutor.  Work has since been so scarce for him that he has been able to spend many hours fishing and stuffing his bachelor refrigerator with his catch.  His underpaid secretary Eve Arden comments that if he keeps it up, that refrigerator is likely to take off “upstream and spawn.”  His luck changes when he gets a call from a young woman he has never met (Lee Remick in her first starring role, in which she really excels). She is the wife of a soldier stationed in town, and she pleads for the lawyer’s help.  Her husband is being held in the county jail for the murder of a bartender who has allegedly raped and brutalized her.  Stewart is reticent to take the case in view of the likelihood of the soldier’s guilt and the hostility of the man when he visits him in the jail, but is swayed by a has-been attorney friend (Arthur O’Connell) as needful of his bread and butter as Stewart.  Stewart takes his friend on as a partner on the case.  Ben Gazzara fills the role of the accused man in uniform, giving a static electric portrayal that did much to jump start what turned out to be a notable acting career.  As does George C. Scott, breaking out of previous obscurity as a confrontational state prosecutor who chews up more than his fair share of the scenery with searing cross examinations, earning himself his first Oscar nomination.  The judge is portrayed by Joseph Welch, an actual judge who played a very conspicuous part in the McCarthy hearings just a few years earlier.  And Duke Ellington provides a laid back jazz score and makes a brief cameo appearance. 

Yes, lots of star quality and movie-making brilliance, generously showcased!

Stewart discovers that the prosecution has evidence that points to the possibility that the soldier is an insanely jealous and violent man and that the wife, who may or may not be “coming on” to the lawyer, has a reputation for playing around.  These defense lawyers know they have their work cut out for them, and have to resort to some very devious devices to find counter evidence.  Yes, things get very dicey as this floor show gathers steam.  All we ever learn of the details surrounding the nasty murder is what we are told in testimony, dialogue and sworn statement by the parties involved, and there are no flashbacks.  The viewer has to sit through it knowing nothing more than does the jury, the opposing attorneys, the judge and those in attendance at the trial.  We get no inside look at the private lives or the psyches of the husband and wife.  The two of them never even have a scene together, except at the defense table.  Lots of ambiguity!  Lots of guesswork!  Even after the proceedings are concluded and the jury’s verdict is awaited, the defense lawyer’s secretary admits that she is not sure how she would vote, if she were on the jury.  I of course will not give away the ending, except to say that the verdict is only a part of the development that brings finality to the story.

Many in the movie audiences of that half century ago were aghast at the liberties with language that this audacious screenplay took (tame of course by current standards).  Words were used that no one had ever heard before on a theater screen – intercourse, panties, [sexual] climax, etc.  More importantly, the film covered many legal fine points and added considerably to the lay audience’s understanding of vital criminal codes.  Aside from being first class entertainment and at many points quite amusing, it was and is quite educational.  We see what our justice system is in real essence.  Though we never get to meet the jurors or look in on them during their sequestration, it is clear that trial by a jury of peers is what the film is so scrupulously examining.  Twelve individuals, strangers to each other, must come together to determine how the scale of justice has weighed in their eyes – twelve citizens, non-professionals, who are given the task of making sense out of the tangle of contradiction and obfuscation and fragmentation that has been dumped out before them by adversarial advocates.  They must do this knowing that society is breathing down their necks and that lives and reputations are in their hands.  Chancy, of course, but no one has ever come up with anything better in a democratic society.        

Give yourself three carefully set aside hours and have a go!  Netflix has it, as do some local libraries.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Gilead & Home by Marilynne Robinson (Fiction Review)

Gilead & Home by Marilynne Robinson

Over the weeks it has taken me to read and devour them, I have grown quite fond of two works by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist named Marilynn Robinson.  They are concerned with life during the 1950s in a very small placid Iowa town (named Gilead) somewhat remote and sheltered from the busy world of social ferment and change going on hundreds of miles away.  But they are alive, ever so pleasingly alive, with characters so real and so commonplace and so wonderfully developed that it is difficult at times to believe that they are fictional creations.  Surely they must walk the path that many in small town America have traversed over the length of its days, and Robinson quietly celebrates their simple faith, struggle and frail heroism.    

The curious fact about these two sparely composed pieces – “Gilead” and “Home” (not to be confused with a novel having the exact same title recently published by Toni Morrison) – is their interrelation.  They both address the same human environment but from different points of view.  “Gilead” is not in the truest sense of the term a novel.  It is a journal containing scores of anecdotes.  A seventy-four-year-old Congregationalist pastor named John Ames is suffering from a terminal illness, with only weeks or months at most to live, and is spewing forth reams of secretive writing meant only to be read by Robby, his seven-year-old son, when he becomes a grown man.  Because of the boy’s late, late arrival in Ames’ life (this clergyman having lost his first wife by an untimely death and remarried) he will not experience his father in the flesh during most of his formative years.  Ames is afraid he will not remember enough about the man who sired him or the family background the two of them share.  By this rambling posthumous correspondence he takes the boy-to-become-a-man-someday back as far as the Civil War, in which the boy’s great grandfather played a big part.  The anecdotes he lays out, covering all the years since, are for the most part quite curious, funny and filled with quirky happenings.   He does not preach to the boy or talk down to him; this minister is not a staunch evangelical trying to indoctrinate, rather more of a humanist in the language he uses and a great lover of life.  He even assures the boy in one place that he is not a saint, and his personality embodied in his profusion of words is anything but saintly.   He in fact opens up much more on paper to his son than he has ever been able to do face to face due to the vast age gap.  We are left hoping that Robby will someday read it and take it to heart.

A noticeable factor in Ames’ life and one he shares much about in his journaling is the family of a fellow clergyman, a Rev. Boughton, a staunch Presbyterian, a very dear friend from childhood and a fellow cleric, and Boughton’s somewhat prodigal son Jack with whom Ames has had an irksome acquaintance in years past and about whom Ames retains mixed feelings.  It seems Jack once brought scandal into his own family and the small town by his siring of an out-of-wedlock daughter whom he never publicly acknowledged to be his before she died within the first few years of her life – which brings me to the other book, “Home,” a novel, unlike “Gilead,” in every sense of the word and much more bitter sweet. 

“Home” takes us inside the Boughton family and traces the course of personal relations over the same time period.  In “Home” Ames is a supporting player, who only puts in three brief appearances in its pages, though he inadvertently catalyzes an emotional crisis in the Boughton household, one of which he is never told, at least not in the scope of either of these books.  (Robinson’s characters are rarely confrontational with each other.)  The narrative of “Home” is constructed not from the widowed Rev. Boughton’s point of view but from that of his thirty-eight-year-old unmarried daughter Glory, who has quit her teaching job in another locality and moved in with him, now that he is retired from the local pastorate and is, like Ames his neighbor, in failing health.  Glory literally takes the place of her deceased mother who was expected to be her husband’s caretaker.  She cooks and cleans for him and nurses him full time, anticipating his death, with plans to be gone after he is dead.  

Glory is the youngest of several children, too young to remember much about her older brother Jack, who left home after high school when Glory was still a child and has not been heard from for an entire twenty years.  As it so happens, Jack the prodigal returns to his father’s house early in the book, only to find Glory his kid sister, practically a stranger to him, running things.  The delicate ménage in which sister, brother and their father are forced to engage is the essence of the story and the source of this novel’s subtly provocative power and charm, with a little of the mysterious into the bargain.  At first Glory fears her brother, a very reclusive, emotionally timid, guilt-prone and inscrutable man who is stingy with information about what he has been doing for those twenty years.  She also gets drawn into the role of mother for both men and something of a mediator between their dissimilar, mutually wary souls and temperaments.  Jack does not get into heated fights with his father; he remains respectful though distant and tentative.  Fascinating things happen as the three of them abide with each other, nothing that would make headlines anywhere in the news world or provide heart-stopping entertainment but worthy of scrupulous examination by the minds and hearts of all devout and spiritual individuals.   Jack’s visit does have an impact upon the home, one the reader is likely to spend much time assaying long after the reading has been completed.

“Gilead” is written entirely in the vernacular of Rev. Ames, actually a very well educated man.  Ms. Robinson never stands apart from him or comments; she just lets him talk.  The novel “Home,” on the other hand, is the kind of writing that one cannot rush through.  The character portraits are too tightly woven and intricate for hurried reading.  I do not recommend taking it on a late plane flight when you wish to unwind with something diverting and relaxing.  It will not grab you and sweep you along.  Almost each and every paragraph is a work of literary art, scrupulously constructed and bristling with nuance, requiring clearheaded concentration.  Many times in my reading I felt the need to stop and go back and reread a passage, sensing that I had missed a shade or two of reflection, perhaps something cosmically important.  Those who prefer super thrillers and fast moving action or high drama will not relish it.          

Both books were published during the past decade – “Gilead” in 2004 and “Home” in 2008.  I strongly recommend that both be read and that “Gilead” be read first.  There are disclosures in it that will make material in “Home” much clearer in meaning when one comes to it.  Robinson’s prose in “Home” is nothing short of exquisite.  But why should I talk about it?  I am going to conclude this review by giving a few samples and letting them speak for themselves:

[In reference to the home environment during Glory’s childhood]  “Truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be at serious odds with kindness.” 

[Glory’s assessment of her religious heritage]  “For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ.  That was church.”

[On the sad subject of Glory’s apparently assured spinsterhood]  “Glory had always thought home would be a house less cluttered and ungainly than this one [her father’s], in a town larger than Gilead, or a city, where someone would be her intimate friend and the father of her children. . .Then she could learn what her own tastes were, within the limits of their means, of

course. . .She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies

. . .different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent.  She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust.”

[In reference to Boughton’s idea of devoutness]  “Her father had always said, God does not need our worship.  We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always.” 

“The room was filled with those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them – porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs – and Robby’s eyes were bright with suppressed attraction to them.”

“How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant – that is what her mother always did.  After any calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. . .You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands.  And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around the table.”

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net