This story gave me chills--the good kind!
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/mother-of-the-unborn.html

As both National Review Online and my friend Leda Miller have noted today is the birthday of Bilbo Baggins and of his illustrious nephew Frodo! Birthday wishes from one hobbit to another!

Where were you on September 11?

On September 11, 2001, three of my four children still lived at home. I was alone at home on that beautiful, sunny day while they were at school. I rarely watch television during the day, so when my mother-in-law called me that morning, I had no idea what she was so upset about. “Turn on the TV!” she said. When I did, I saw what was happening. By the time I called her back, I had realized what the two planes hitting the towers meant. “This is an act of war,” I told her. “It’s like Pearl Harbor. I think David [my older son, who was eighteen at the time] will have to go to war.”

“Oh, no,” she cried, getting upset. “Not that!”

I realized what a mistake I’d made and calmed her down.

I remember looking at that perfect blue sky and marveling, with a sense of dread, at its emptiness of airplanes. I also remember how anxious I was to have my children home again that day.

I remember praying for the victims and for my country and for my children.

The next day, I was teaching a literature class at a local Catholic college. I said a prayer before class, something that I did not normally do because the college’s Catholic culture was not particularly strong. On that day, though, I felt a need to take a stand, to reach out in faith. However, I noticed that several of the students were restless. Some of them didn’t believe in praying; others blamed America for the attack. There was no illusion of unity in my classroom.

The following weekend, as my son and his friends played a gig with their swing band at a local park, I wondered, with a welling of tears, where all those young men would be in a few years. Would they all be drafted, like the young men of my father’s generation? What would happen next?

The world was a different place.

For all the victims: Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

I found this little period piece when we were cleaning some old college papers out of the attic yesterday. I must have written it while I was still in college because it is written in my handwriting and signed by my maiden name, but I have no memory of composing it. Obviously, I must have recently read Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock before writing it! Note: I attended Seton Hill College, at that time a women's college, and the nearby men's college was St. Vincent College, probably most famous now as the training camp for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Its students were known to us as "Vinnies."


A College Pastoral

While all the world is longing for the Spring,
Sally Setonian wants a wedding ring;
Considering that she's spent four tiring years,
A lot of money, and a sea of tears
In chasing Vincent men, consuming beer,
Buying new fashions--her new hunting gear--
Surely she has a right to be upset--
Books aren't what she came up here to get!

The noble Vinnie, meanwhile, staying clear
Of all her wiles, cries, "No--just one more year!
One year of freedom, money, other girls--
Then, darling, then I will be only yours!"

False promises! A year from now will see
Him with Diane, Debbie, or Sarah Lee--
While she consoles her broken, aching heart
With Frederick, with Dan, or freaky Art.

But now to classes merrily they go
And strive to see how little they can know;
Although to learn a cool three thou. they pay
Their efforts have one end--to get away.
Get through this course, and that's three credits more;
Do least, but get the most in grade-point score.


Times have certainly changed. Yes, college really did cost only three thousand dollars when I was there! Of course, that three thousand dollars was worth much more than it is now. When my husband and I were newlyweds, we could live on $3600 a year, if we were very careful.

Published ten years ago (2001), Declare is Tim Powers’ Cold War novel. It focuses on the disturbing figure of Kim Philby, the famous British Cold War traitor. I have often been puzzled about the motivations of Philby and his companions, Maclean and Burgess; why would the scions of privileged families turn on their own country and betray its secrets to the Soviets?

Powers’ novel attempts an explanation, and it also attempts to account for the depth of evil into which the Soviet empire sank over its depraved history.
Powers is known for using historical figures and events as the basis for fantasy literature—known as “magical realism” if the author is considered to be “literary”—in novels such as The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides. In Declare, Powers takes this technique to an astonishing level.

The world of espionage is a natural place for the strange and surprising; after all, it is a shadowy world in which the players of the “great game,” a phrase which Powers borrows from Kipling’s Kim, rarely know quite what is happening or whom to trust. At the same time, the players may sense that they are involved in the real mainsprings of the events of history, but the history is unknown to those who are not initiates. Thus the appeal is to what C. S. Lewis called “The Inner Ring” in an essay of that name. The desire to be “in the know,” to be one of the small number of a secret but powerful elite, is a powerful one, and it is gradually revealed to be a mainspring of the action of Declare.

As the story opens, the protagonist, a British lecturer, Andrew Hale, receives a coded message in a phone call on the second day of 1963 that reactivates him as an agent for the first time in ten years, and about fifteen years after he has ceased to be an active agent. Hale was baptized a Catholic as a child but has lost (or abandoned) his faith and has given his primary loyalty to the British Crown. From the beginning we see that Hale has suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress, but what is the source? Is it simply the stress of the life of an espionage agent, or is there something more? Gradually the events that led to his dismissal from the service are revealed to the reader, through a series of flashbacks. Hale’s reluctance to think about the circumstances is evident in the way that the story unfolds and contrasts with his acquiescence in his reactivation; it takes some time for him to admit to himself and for the reader to discover what is behind his mixture of feelings about Declare, the project on which he was working at the time of his greatest failure.

The role of Communism in the story is partially exemplified in the character of Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, a Spanish woman who when Hale meets her in 1941 is a devout Communist and considers herself married to the Party. Her journey both contrasts with Hale’s and parallels it.

The fantastic element in the plot involves interaction of occult and even demonic forces with the dark world of espionage, a remarkably good fit. Powers uses gaps and unexplained aspects of the life of Kim Philby to insert this element in a plausible and compelling way. Philby’s father was a noted Arabist, and the Middle Eastern connection with this story is fascinating. (Powers discusses his approach to Philby’s life in an Author’s Note and in this interview: http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com/exclusive-author-interview/exclusive-author-interview-9/.)

Andrew Hale’s fear of the supernatural (entirely justified by events in the plot) is balanced by his attraction to the power and knowledge that it seems to offer to him; Philby, too, reveals his desire to be the one who knows all that is to be known. The lives of each reveal the consequences of the character’s choices.
In Declare, questions of deception and recognition are crucial. Who will recognize a character, and as what? What kind of union does one want to achieve, and with whom? I found a passage in Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two that touches on a theme of Declare: “’Eternal life’ is gained through ‘recognition’, presupposing here the Old Testament concept of recognition: recognizing creates communion; it is union of being with the one recognized. But of course the key to life is not any kind of recognition, but to ‘know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’ ([John] 17:3)” (83). Indeed, to be recognized by the occult supernatural powers is a terrifying experience in Declare, but the events of the novel leave an opening for other forms of recognition.

As a reviewer at Amazon remarks, Powers’ work is reminiscent of the novels of Charles Williams. Declare reminds me of Williams’ All Hallows’ Eve in the significance of baptism and of Descent into Hell in the use of the doppelganger. Indeed, doubling is almost a theme of the novel, and several characters encounter doubles and alter egos.

Declare touches on the deepest aspects of life and on some of the most compelling events of the history of the twentieth century. It is a novel that lingers in the thoughts long after the reading and that repays rereading.

My father, William Kindelan, died unexpectedly on Friday, July 29, at age 87.

Dad was a faithful man, and, not coincidentally, he was (as my daughter noted) a happy man. Several days before he died, just before he was taken into surgery, he said to my mother, “We’ve had many happy years together.”

Just days before we took him to the emergency room, my mom was in the hospital, and he drove himself to Sunday Mass and then to the hospital to be with her. We had no idea then that he had stage four metastatic colon cancer and was so anemic that he would need two units of blood as soon as he entered the hospital. Nor did we know that once he went into the hospital, he would not be leaving alive. He was carrying on with his normal life almost to the very end.

It’s hard to convey what he was. He was intelligent and well-read and witty, right to the end. He liked to have a good time. He was devoted to his family. He was a small man in size, but big-hearted.  My children said that he looked like a leprechaun, maybe a reflection of his Irish heritage—or of his mischievous streak.

So many memories come back to me. We had an above-ground swimming pool when I was a child, and Dad used to hop into it with us when he got home from work. He’d pretend to be a shark while we’d shriek with delight.

As I became a teenager, sometimes I would have trouble sleeping.  On weekends, Dad liked to stay up late watching old sci-fi movies on Chiller Theater, a Pittsburgh-area institution. We’d talk about whatever was bothering me. I remember asking him how we could know that God existed and how we could know that the universe was real and not an illusion. He always respected my questions and showed me ways to understand. Unlike my religion teachers at school, Dad really knew his faith and could defend it.

Dad also used to read Chaucer and Shakespeare to me. When I read the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, I still hear his deep, resonant voice.  Hamlet’s advice to the players—“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as some of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines”—was a favorite of his, and I also savor the memory of his reading from Julius Caesar: “And Brutus is an honorable man.” When Dad was in his forties, one summer he contracted rheumatic fever; I was dispatched to our neighbor’s house to borrow books from his extensive library, and Dad devoured them over the weeks of his recovery. He read most of the books that I brought home from the library, too, and we shared enjoyment of science fiction. I’m sure that much of my love of literature and reading is owed to him.

When I look back at what I know about my father’s long life, I can see how many challenges he faced. A child of the Great Depression, Dad liked to tell the story about how his own father found ways to care for his family even when laid off from his job at the glass factory by raising rabbits and chickens and by doing odd jobs for the better-off neighbors. (My hometown of Jeannette, Pennsylvania, used to be known as the “Glass City” because it was a center of the glass industry.) Dad enlisted in the Army during World War II and served as a clerk in the Air Corps in England for several years, giving up a full scholarship to college to do so. Once, one of my children asked him what he had learned from his wartime experience, and his answer surprised me. He said that as a “good Irish boy,” he had hated the English, but after living in England, he came to love them. In fact, he asked an English girl to marry him, but she couldn’t bear to leave her family, and he couldn’t bear to stay in England and leave his family, so he came home alone. He was almost thirty years old when he met and eventually married my mother. When he returned to college on the GI Bill, he earned a teaching degree with a double major in biology and English, but he took a job as an industrial engineer in the glass mold factory at which his brother was a vice president. In the 1970s, as the glass industry declined, he retired from the mold company shortly before it closed and took a variety of other jobs to keep our family going. He was fired from a position at a glass factory in our town when he got too close to exposing the fraud that caused the company to close soon after.

Just a few years ago, the state department of transportation gave my parents six months to get out of the house in which they had spent about 50 years and which Dad had remodeled himself, a move that broke my father’s heart.

But through it all, Dad was always faithful. Several doctors commented during his last illness on my parents’ devotion to each other. The night before he died, when we knew that he would not last much longer, all of his children and grandchildren came to be with him. A priest came and anointed him, and we talked and cried and even laughed as we remembered his life and gathered to see him off on his last journey.

Yesterday my aunt, Dad’s youngest sister, called me, and in the course of our conversation, she said, “I thought you would sing at his funeral. “  I did sing for his brother, my Uncle Bud, but I just couldn’t do it this time. This is my tribute to my dad. I couldn’t speak at the funeral, and I couldn’t sing a single note, but I can write for you, Dad. Thank you for your faith and for your devotion to my mother and to your family and to your country. As my husband said, “The world is a poorer place because he is no longer in it.”

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.

My first plant today is teasel. It's easy to remember the name because of Lady Teazle, the character from School for Scandal. Teasel is a plant introduced from Europe, where its spiny heads were used (my plant book informs me) to bring up the nap in woolen cloth. I'm also pretty sure that Ayla (of Clan of the Cave Bear fame) used it to brush her horse!



I think this one is a bull thistle; it's spiny everywhere except the flower! The plant was almost five feet tall, so its flower was easy to photograph.


Here's the Canada thistle, which my book calls "this obnoxious thistle" because it's an introduced species that is quite invasive. However, it's still pretty, even in its huge colonies formed from deep rootstalds! The flowers are small, and many of them grow on a single stalk.


I think this plant has hosted Slugfest 2011 because it's so full of little holes! This is the common nightshade. I see its relative, deadly nightshade, far more often, but this one is poisonous, too. Another member of the nightshade family is this one: 



It's called horse nettle, and I had never seen it before.

I'll close today with one more mystery flower: 


I love this tiny orange flower, but I can't find it in my book! Maybe someday I'll figure out what it is.

That's all for now! I think one more entry will complete this series.

Well, it wasn't all on Lafferty Street, but it was all in my neighborhood walk. Lafferty Street in my town sits at the bottom of a cliff too steep to build on, so the area is "waste space" and has filled with trees, weeds, and wildflowers over the last hundred years or so. An amazing variety of wildflowers appears in the area, and I've been enjoying them this summer. Today I took my camera. 

Here's a familiar one:

This is the ubiquitous (in Pennsylvania, at least)  jewelweed. It tends to grow where there is a lot of poison ivy, which is equally ubiquitous in Pennsylvania. Legend has it that its sap can relieve the itching, but personally I think Zanfel works better.

The image above shows pokeweed flowers. The berries eventually become almost black; people used to make ink out of them. The next image shows a bit more of the plant, which is very large, sometimes about six feet:



The milkweed is almost done blooming in my neighborhood, but a few plants are still open for business:



I think that the flowers in the next two images are soapwort, which is a much uglier name than this plant deserves! The sap apparently lathers up a bit like soap.






Here's another familiar roadside plant of Pennsylvania, but it's a pretty one: 



Yes, it's chicory, against a background of Virgina creeper. Here it is again:



I also found a mystery flower. I have no idea what this is!



I'm hoping that when the bud opens the whole way, I will suddenly see a flower that is quite familiar!

I'll post more of these tomorrow.

Hat tip to Happy Catholic for this one! b-moviecat.blogspot.com/2011/05/4d-man.html