“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” ― Jonathan Swift |
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The woman who Charlie has invited along as Bob's "date" is completely wrong for him- loud and obnoxious. You can literally see Bob, already unsure about attempting to socialize, withdrawing into himself. His attention is completely captured, however, by the waitress who approaches to take their order- Grace. He has the odd feeling that he knows her, and asks Grace if they've met before. She has the same feeling, but before they can talk further they're interrupted by Bob's assigned date who is annoyed by his attention not being on her. She is really rude and condescending to Grace, who proceeds, humorously, to own her completely without being mean in return, much to Bob's appreciation and amusement. Grace goes back to work as the other woman sputters angrily and complains loudly about her. Bob decides he's had enough and has one of his employees call him on his cell and say he's needed at a job site. As he leaves, he runs into Grace coming from the kitchen. She asks if his girlfriend and the rest of his party is staying, and he replies forcefully that she's not his girlfriend; she's barely an acquaintance. Smiling, Grace gives him one of the takeout meals on the house and says she hopes he comes back. We later see Bob sitting in the back of his pickup at the deserted work site eating the takeout; he pulls out a letter to read. It's the thank you letter Grace wrote to the family of her heart donor. The next day Bob gets a call that his phone was found at the restaurant; he had laid it down on the counter while taking the meal from Grace and left it behind. He goes there after work to pick it up; the restaurant is closed for the night but when he knocks on the door Marty- Grace's grandfather- opens it; he and his pals are gathered around a table playing poker. Bob explains about his phone and Marty lets him in; Bob casually asks if the staff has all gone home for the evening and is visibly disappointed when he's told that they have. Marty introduces him to the guys and without knowing quite how it happened, Bob finds himself playing poker with a bunch of garrulous old men and enjoying himself for the first time in a long time. Upstairs in her apartment, Grace has just had a shower and is gazing moodily at the scarring on her chest when she hears a storm blowing up. Realizing that she left the painting she's been working on in the garden, she heads downstairs to retrieve it and cover some of her delicate plants. As she enters the restaurant area in her bathrobe, fuzzy slippers, and shower cap, Grace freezes in horror as she sees Bob seated at the table with her grandfather and his pals. After an uncomfortable and embarrassed- on her part- greeting, Grace says she has to cover her plants; Bob ask if she needs help but she quickly says no and escapes out the door. Bob looks at the old guys, an unspoken request for advice and, eager to matchmake, they vociferously encourage him to go give her a hand. In the garden, Bob admires Grace's painting and helps her cover the plants while she recovers from her embarrassment and begins to see the humour in the situation, able to converse more comfortably. As they finish, Bob suddenly asks Grace if she will go out with him. Eager to do so but completely unnerved because she's literally never been in this situation before, Grace manages to say yes and agree to a night and time. After Bob leaves, Grace runs to Megan's house and, when her pajama-clad friend opens the door, excitedly tells her that she's met someone. (To Be Continued...) Related Posts: As you know, I did not enjoy the last book my online book club read- The Violent Bear It Away. I have, however, high hopes for the new book assigned: Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis. I've read a lot of Lewis' non-fiction but not his fiction books, other than The Chronicles of Narnia of course. As it happens, I'd actually downloaded this book along with his Space trilogy before Christmas but hadn't got around to starting them, so am glad to be compelled to do so. I'll be starting to read it today and will update at a later time. Related Posts: Peace Like A River was written by Leif Enger and published in 2001. Its title is taken from the first line of the well-known Christian hymn It Is Well With My Soul: When peace like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul. This hymn- one of my favourites- was sung at Enger's wedding and its message is why the song is popular at both Christian weddings and funerals. The lyrics were composed by Horatio Spafford (1828-1888) who was a devout Christian and very successful businessman. A prominent lawyer in Chicago, he had invested in numerous properties around the city and was quite wealthy. In addition, he had a loving wife and five children- four daughters and a son, a truly blessed existence. But then things went terribly wrong. His four year old son died suddenly of scarlet fever and the following year the Great Chicago Fire occurred in which most of the real estate Spafford had invested in was burned. This was closely followed by the Panic of 1873, a financial crisis which caused an economic depression across Europe and North America (it was referred to as The Great Depression until the 1930's) and which depleted a lot of Spafford's remaining investments. Hoping to get his family away from the turmoil for a while, Spafford planned a family trip to Europe where he and his wife would help out for a while with Dwight L Moody's evangelical meetings. He booked passage for them all on the steamship Ville Du Havre but was himself delayed by business- zoning issues caused by the Great Fire. He sent his wife and daughters (aged between 11-2) on ahead, planning to rebook himself on a later ship and meet up with them in France. It was then that tragedy struck: mid-Atlantic the Ville Du Havre collided with another ship in the dark. It was sheared nearly in two and sunk within minutes, killing 226 people. Mrs. Spafford was found unconscious, floating in some wreckage, but all four of their daughters were gone. Horatio Spafford got a telegram from his wife which read, heartbreakingly, "Saved alone..." Grief stricken, Spafford boarded a ship to rush to his wife's side. During the trip overseas, the captain called Spafford to the bridge and, showing him the charts, told him they were passing over the exact spot where the Ville Du Havre had gone down. After gazing out over the water, Horatio Spafford returned to his cabin and penned the words of It Is Well With My Soul. The message of this hymn is deceptively simple, heartfelt, and borne out in Spafford's life: whatever our lot in life, through the good times and bad, the beautiful and terrible, God is with us. We may be bowed down with grief, but our souls shall not be broken. In the words of the Apostle Paul: "Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. " -Philippians 4:11-13 KJV What does all this have to do with Peace Like A River, you might ask. Well, it seems to me that this attitude is the mindset of Jeremiah Land in the novel. Whatever happens, he retains his faith in God and in the worst of circumstances declares that the victory has already been won. Now, I broadly agree with this attitude, but in specific circumstances disagree with how Jeremiah puts it into practice. Which I'll expand upon later. Jeremiah Land is portrayed as something of a Christian prophet or mystic who throughout the book, on occasion performs miracles, documented by his younger son Reuben who is narrating. In my summary of the novel I don't actually mention many of these because frankly, they don't very often affect the story. There are exceptions: at one point they are trying to avoid police checkpoints with the Airstream and they drive for a very long time on an empty tank because they can't stop at gas stations. And there's one near the end of the book which affects the outcome so I won't spoil it. This is just my opinion of course, but I would have been just fine if the miraculous stuff had been left out; the plot could have played out in pretty much the same way without them and I would have frankly preferred to have it without the distraction of the seemingly miraculous. Don't get me wrong, it's refreshing to have a Christian family at the center of a popular novel in which they are not portrayed as the bad guys, or treated condescendingly as backwards, back woods yokels. I just was more interested in seeing Christians struggle with the issues involved according to their principles without the narrative being occasionally muddied with some sort of miraculous occurrence which isn't actually needed to further the story. But maybe that's just my Independent Baptist suspicion of latter day miracles. I'm not saying that God can't still perform them- obviously He can if He so chooses- just that seemingly everyone who claims to be a conduit of them these days is a phony. As I said though, this is subjective and others may certainly disagree. What really interests me about Peace Like A River has little to do with the miraculous. Rather, it's the moral conundrums that the characters face and wrestle with in their own ways. I'll discuss these in part two. Related Posts: I may have mentioned on one or two occasions that I do not generally enjoy romantic comedies produced after about 1955 or so, and avoid them whenever possible. But for Valentine's Day, I will talk about one of the few- the very few- that I actually enjoy: Return To Me. Return To Me came out in 2000 and it stars David Duchovny and Minnie Driver as the two main characters but also has a number of very good actors in supporting roles. These include Carroll O'Connor, Bonnie Hunt, James Belushi, David Alan Grier, and Joely Richardson... to name a few. Actually, Bonnie Hunt was a busy lady while working on this movie as she wrote the screenplay, acted in it, and was the director as well. At the beginning of the film, Elizabeth Rueland (Richardson) is a zoologist who works with primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. She is speaking at a fundraiser to build a huge new enclosure for the gorillas which her husband Bob (Duchovny)- an architect- is designing. It's a big success and Bob promises Elizabeth that he'll get the enclosure built, getting her to promise in return that she'll take some time off and go on a trip to Italy with him. But on the way home, they're involved in a car accident and Elizabeth is killed. Bob is taken home from the hospital by Charlie, a friend who works at the zoo as a veterinarian. Once there, he collapses on the floor, utterly devastated by the death of his wife. Meanwhile, also in Chicago, Grace Briggs is slowly dying of heart failure in the hospital; having inherited heart disease from her mother (now deceased) she's been on the transplant list for a long time and she doesn't have a lot of time left. But suddenly a heart becomes available and she is rushed in for surgery as her loved ones gather at the hospital to wait and pray. The operation is a success and unexpectedly- miraculously- Grace has a life to look forward to. The movie then skips a year into the future. Bob is morose, unable to move past Elizabeth's death. He works all the time, is stubbornly putting in extra hours at the zoo to finish the enclosure and keep his promise, and comes home every night to an empty house where Mel- their dog- refuses to go anywhere except the entryway, staring at the door as he waits for Elizabeth to come back home. After getting frustrated and yelling at Mel because he won't come eat in the kitchen, Bob realizes that something has to change, telling the dog that they both need to snap out of it. He calls Charlie, who has been trying for months to get Bob to come out with him for an evening and socialize, and tells him he'll go out with him on Friday night. In the meantime, Grace is trying to find her footing in the new life which has opened up for her. She's working at her grandfather's restaurant and living in an apartment above it, spending time with her best friend Megan (Hunt) and struggling to write a thank you letter to the family of her organ donor, agonizing that just a letter seems "not enough" somehow. She's also trying to dodge her grandfather's cronies'- and Megan's husband's- well meaning but clumsy attempts to set her up with various guys. They are not good choices. Grace would actually like to be in a relationship with a good man, but having been medically incapacitated since she was 14, feels uncertain and inexperienced. She's also self-conscious about her heart transplant; often people who find out about it treat her differently, as though she's fragile and might break at any moment. She wears high collars to hide her scar so that people won't ask about it. In addition, she hesitates to tell anyone when she's feeling down or lonely because she doesn't want to come across as ungrateful for her new healthy existence. This isn't to suggest that Grace is actually unhappy- she is enjoying a life now where getting on a bicycle isn't a death sentence, where she can work in her garden again and paint- she's quite a skilled artist- without gasping for air. And then one Friday night while she's waitressing, her grandfather (played by Carroll O'Connor) surprises her with a plane ticket to Italy so she can go there to paint. She's happily contemplating this when she heads over to a table to take the orders of the people sitting there. It's Charlie and Bob, Charlie's date, and another woman that they've invited to introduce to Bob. (To Be Continued) Related Posts: We celebrated one of my nephew's birthdays yesterday afternoon (the actual date is today). Instead of a cake, he requested an ice cream sundae bar, so that's what we had, with various flavours of ice cream, hot fudge sauce, a variety of toppings- and whipped cream, of course. It proved to be a very popular choice. He's a little outdoorsman, so for his gift I sewed a backpack for him out of some camo canvas which I found on sale for only $3.49 a meter. I do like a sale... I prefer to say I'm thrifty, not cheap. Anyway, I got the fabric for practically nothing and the other supplies I had to buy- webbing and D-rings for the straps, piping, elastic, and a bit of lining- didn't amount to much; I already had some matching thread and fusible interfacing. So the pack didn't cost me much except time, and it was actually quick to sew together, being mostly straight seams. It took longer to cut out all the pieces than sew them together, in fact. I tossed a couple of things into the pack as well: The two player water hockey game I picked up because, as a kind of nostalgic joke, I bought a ring toss water game and put it in my mother's Christmas stocking. To my surprise, it was a hit with the younger nephews and nieces... they'd never seen the like. So I got him one he can play with others. I found a brand new copy of Old Yeller in a thrift store while perusing its DVD section (you know my thoughts on buying physical media). Also, I only buy Disney products used now, because I refuse to give the modern Disney company any money if I can help it. It can go belly up for all I care... not that it will, unfortunately. Old Yeller is, of course, a movie from 1957, during the era when Disney was making a lot of their most well-known live action films. It's based on the 1956 novel by Fred Gipson, who also helped write the screenplay for the movie, and stars two of the perennial Disney child actors from that period: Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcoran. Frequent Disney adult actors Dorothy McGuire and Fess Parker are in it as well. The titular dog Old Yeller is played by Spike, a mastiff/Labrador retriever mix/rescue dog who also starred in A Dog of Flanders (1959), as well as appeared in a few other movies and quite a number of TV shows including Lassie, The Westerner, and Hondo. I'm not going to get the plot of Old Yeller; I assume most people have either seen it or have at least a vague notion of its plot- and how it ends. Suffice to say, it's the quintessential boy-and-his-dog movie and I think the nephews will enjoy it. The DVD also contains the sequel to Old Yeller: Savage Sam, which is also based on a book by Fred Gipson. I've never seen it- or read the book- so can't say much about it, though I assume it's about Yeller's son, the puppy at the end of Old Yeller. Guess I'll have to watch it with the lads at some point. Related Posts:Draft copy of my nephew's (home)school essay on the meeting between Augustine and Pontitianus, a soldier and Christian who came, like Augustine himself, from Roman North Africa. Not a whole lot is known about Pontitianus- mostly just that he was born in Africa, was a soldier (perhaps a Praetorian) and a Christian convert. From Constantine's writings, we know that the man had an influence on his own conversion to Christianity: "Such was the story of Pontitianus; but Thou, O Lord, while he was speaking, didst turn me round towards myself, taking me from behind my back where I had placed me, unwilling to observe myself; and setting me before my face, that I might see how foul I was, how crooked and defiled, bespotted and ulcerous. And I beheld and stood aghast; and whither to flee from myself I found not. And if I sought to turn mine eye from off myself, he went on with his relation, and Thou again didst set me over against myself, and thrustedst me before my eyes, that I might find out mine iniquity, and hate it. I had known it, but made as though I saw it not, winked at it, and forgot it." - Confessions, Augustine of Hippo This meeting between the two men which had such a profound impact on Augustine took place in Milan, where at the time Augustine was employed as a professor of rhetoric. This is the account- again from Confessions, of their conversation: 14. Upon a certain day, then, Nebridius being away (why, I do not remember), lo, there came to the house to see Alypius and me, Pontitianus, a countryman of ours, in so far as he was an African, who held high office in the emperor's court. What he wanted with us I know not, but we sat down to talk together, and it fell out that upon a table before us, used for games, he noticed a book; he took it up, opened it, and, contrary to his expectation, found it to be the Apostle Paul, -- for he imagined it to be one of those books which I was wearing myself out in teaching. At this he looked up at me smilingly, and expressed his delight and wonder that he had so unexpectedly found this book, and this only, before my eyes. For he was both a Christian and baptized, and often prostrated himself before Thee our God in the church, in constant and daily prayers. When, then, I had told him that I bestowed much pains upon these writings, a conversation ensued on his speaking of Antony, the Egyptian monk, whose name was in high repute among Thy servants, though up to that time not familiar to us. When he came to know this, he lingered on that topic, imparting to us a knowledge of this man so eminent, and marvelling at our ignorance. But we were amazed, hearing Thy wonderful works most fully manifested in times so recent, and almost in our own, wrought in the true faith and the Catholic Church. We all wondered -- we, that they were so great, and he, that we had never heard of them. 15. From this his conversation turned to the companies in the monasteries, and their manners so fragrant unto Thee, and of the fruitful deserts of the wilderness, of which we knew nothing. And there was a monastery at Milan full of good brethren, without the walls of the city, under the fostering care of Ambrose, and we were ignorant of it. He went on with his relation, and we listened intently and in silence. He then related to us how on a certain afternoon, at Triers, when the emperor was taken up with seeing the Circensian games, he and three others, his comrades, went out for a walk in the gardens close to the city walls, and there, as they chanced to walk two and two, one strolled away with him, while the other two went by themselves; and these, in their rambling, came upon a certain cottage inhabited by some of Thy servants, "poor in spirit," of whom "is the kingdom of heaven," where they found a book in which was written the life of Antony. This one of them began to read, marvel at, and be inflamed by it; and in the reading, to meditate on embracing such a life, and giving up his worldly employments to serve Thee. And these were of the body called "Agents for Public Affairs." Then, suddenly being overwhelmed with a holy love and a sober sense of shame, in anger with himself, he cast his eyes upon his friend, exclaiming, "Tell me, I entreat thee, what end we are striving for by all these labours of ours. What is our aim? What is our motive in doing service? Can our hopes in court rise higher than to be ministers of the emperor? And in such a position, what is there not brittle, and fraught with danger, and by how many dangers arrive we at greater danger? And when arrive we thither? But if I desire to become a friend of God, behold, I am even now made it." Thus spake he, and in the pangs of the travail of the new life, he turned his eyes again upon the page and continued reading, and was inwardly changed where Thou sawest, and his mind was divested of the world, as soon became evident; for as he read, and the surging of his heart rolled along, he raged awhile, discerned and resolved on a better course, and now, having become Thine, he said to his friend, "Now have I broken loose from those hopes of ours, and am determined to serve God; and this, from this hour, in this place, I enter upon. If thou art reluctant to imitate me, hinder me not." The other replied that he would cleave to him, to share in so great a reward and so great a service. Thus both of them, being now Thine, were building a tower at the necessary cost, -- of forsaking all that they had and following Thee. Then Pontitianus, and he that had walked with him through other parts of the garden, came in search of them to the same place, and having found them, reminded them to return as the day had declined. But they, making known to him their resolution and purpose, and how such a resolve had sprung up and become confirmed in them, entreated them not to molest them, if they refused to join themselves unto them. But the others, no whit changed from their former selves, did yet (as he said) bewail themselves, and piously congratulated them, recommending themselves to their prayers; and with their hearts inclining towards earthly things, returned to the palace. But the other two, setting their affections upon heavenly things, remained in the cottage. And both of them had affianced brides, who, when they heard of this, dedicated also their virginity unto God. Frankly, I didn't know about Pontitianus at all; sometimes looking over my nephews' schoolwork is good for my own edification.
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