MOMMENTARY |
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Sunday, January 04, 2009 ( 11:06 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Well, December was crazy. In the first place, my mother died, aged ninety. She fell and struck her head, causing bleeding into the brain. In view of her age and frailty, the doctor advised against an operation to clear out the hematoma, and she was moved to the hospice part of the hospital. There she was comfortable and received water and medication, and all her children visited her. By the time I got there she was unconscious, but it's impossible to tell how much a person in that state hears - patients sometimes come out of comas and relate long conversations that took place in their presence - so we spoke to her. I felt odd talking to someone who didn't respond, so I mostly sang the things she used to like to hear me sing. She died very peacefully, not many hours after I saw her last. It had been in my mind for the past few years, as my mother got older and vaguer, that there might be a quarrel in the family about the circumstances of her death. I'm the last practicing Catholic, as far as I know, and I wasn't sure whether my brothers and sisters understood, or were prepared to abide by Catholic principles about end-of-life care. I did them an injustice in that. Nobody was reaching for the lethal injection, and it even turned out that the one I expected to be the most worldly was the hardliner about wanting to try the surgery in the teeth of the doctor's recommendation. I suppose, as even the idiot Peter Singer conceded under similar circumstances, it's different when it's your mother. Anyway, she was well taken care of, was visited by a priest, and had all her children with her in her last days. That's a pretty good way to go. Requiescat in pace, Mama. # Thursday, November 27, 2008 ( 12:07 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The government has been helping again. This year I thought I would do two turkeys, since everybody seems to love turkey sandwiches and one or two other things I make with the leftovers. On Monday I bought two frozen birds, figuring that I'd roast one on Wednesday and one today, and put the meat from the first into ziptop bags to await later use over the weekend. I've never paid any heed to apocalyptic warnings of the disease and death that would surely smite my family from a frozen turkey's being thawed at room temperature in the sink, but as I had two this time, and didn't need them both on the same day, I thought I'd humor the USDA this once and thaw the Thursday turkey in the refrigerator. I left the Wednesday turkey in the sink, like any sensible person would, and roasted it as per schedule. It turned out beautifully, and after it cooled I put the meat away in the fridge. What a sap I was - the second turkey came out of seclusion today, after being in the refrigerator for days and days, still hard as a rock. How frozen is it? Fired from a naval gun, it would breach the hull of an enemy warship with one shot. The Smithsonian wants to analyze it for traces of ancient air. If you hooked it up to a ventilation system, it would air-condition Madison Square Garden. The International Court of the Hague has moved to have it banned as an illegal weapon of siege warfare. The sailors are calling it Titanic's Bane. This baby is solid. I think it's colder than it was when I bought it. Fortunately, we have yesterday's turkey to eat today, and I will be able to roast Little Antarctica on Saturday or Sunday. Let this be a lesson to all of you, as it has been to me: if the government's way of doing things differs from the way your mother did them, stick to your mom's way. If I'd listened to the government, we'd be eating Quarter Pounders with cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinner. # Tuesday, November 18, 2008 ( 9:17 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I just can't get excited about Thanksgiving. I don't know if it's from distaste for the Puritans, or resentment at all the lies we were told about them in grammar school, or whether it's just that it's such a confoundedly Yankee holiday. Probably it's some of each. In the first place, the Puritans did not, as we were informed in parochial school, come to the New World to establish religious tolerance but to eradicate religious tolerance, which clearly got on their wicks in a big way. In the second place, it annoys me that my schoolteachers were invested in the False Heroes business to the extent that they were. In the third place, what the Puritans actually did right, in the realm of political organization, gets pushed aside by a lot of malarkey about corn and beans and buckled hats. Fourthly, it's far too New Englandy for my taste. Finally, Thanksgiving has in too many families had the fell effect of bringing incompatible elements into one room and fostering unnecessary quarrels. All in all, it doesn't appeal to me. I do the turkey and so on because Cacciaguida and the children like it, but I can't get emotionally involved with it. # Wednesday, November 12, 2008 ( 10:26 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Is it just me, or is there something intrinsically incongruous in a Mormon writing a vampire novel? Vampires are a profoundly Catholic concept, an inversion of the sacrifice of the Cross and of the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord Jesus Christ voluntarily gave his Blood and died so that we might have everlasting life. The fictional vampire forcibly takes another's blood so that he himself might have everlasting death-in-life. That's why crucifixes and the Sacred Host are inimical to him, because he exists as a kind of reverse Christ, and the Real Thing zeroes him out. It's also significant that a vampire is killed with a wooden stake: even when the vampire myth began, there were quicker and surer ways to kill than with wooden weapons. Wood is used because it is the material on which Our Lord shed His Blood on Calvary, and the wood of the True Cross has had a powerful hold on the Catholic imagination ever since. What could a nice LDS lady - and I don't doubt that Mrs. Meyer is a very nice LDS lady - know of all this? Cacciaguida says that Twilight is only circumstantially about vampires, and that the real point of the story is that girls want to be courted in certain ways. That may well be so. All I can say is that it's exactly like a Mormon to come up with a socially-adjusted vampire who tries to Choose The Right and be a good citizen. Sheesh. # Sunday, November 09, 2008 ( 5:19 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Some random reflections, brought about by my recent trip. There are three things wrong with traveling, from my point of view. First, you have to leave home. Second, you wind up someplace else. Third, you have to use transportation to get there. It was nice to meet the undergraduates, however. You know you're in a lame airport when one of the regular announcements over the public-address system is (in the usual milk-and-cookies reassuring feminine voice), "Welcome to ___________ International Airport. If you feel you have been overcharged, please dial . . ." The principal trouble with air travel is that it necessarily involves airports. The second trouble with it is that weather which would not normally affect automobiles, trains, buses, oxcarts, skateboards, rollerblades, and other earthbound forms of transit, will nevertheless cripple all plane travel. This week I got it coming and going. I find I'm turning into the sort of person who remembers how long it's been since I last washed my hands, and what of a possibly hazardous nature I've touched since then. No doubt this is merely because I've reached an age at which I no longer bounce right back from minor ailments, and thus need to take a little care to avoid common routes of infection; I hope, at least, that it doesn't indicate that I'm getting to be a neurotic about germs. I very much liked the three people I mainly went to New Haven to meet. I was also delighted to meet another, who picked up immediately the thread of a mildly humorous remark I made, and elaborated in just the characteristic Cacciaguida vein of whimsy. I've finally seen a hotel room which would not fill me with dismay if I learned I would be obliged to spend a month in it. The rooms at Cacc's usual caravanserai are simply furnished and not luxurious in any way, but the wood looks like wood, the lamps look like lamps, and the curtains and framed prints are just such as I might choose for myself if I had a room of my own to fit out. This is good. The universal pattern of beginning any account of one's thoughts or actions these days seems to be "so". This started to get on my nerves a bit, hearing a fifteen or twenty articulate young people saying "So, I was thinking . . ." and "So, I was walking . . ." and "So, I was at the library . . ." one after another. This is a bad habit of speech, and should be resisted. Students come and students go, but Yorkside, thank the Lord, just keeps rolling along. # Wednesday, November 05, 2008 ( 2:08 PM ) Elinor Dashwood If Smart Girls Know their butt from a hole in the ground, it's more than one could guess from reading the eponymous site. Check out this intelligent analysis of the international political situation: Did you know that the U.S. currently ranks 71st in the world in women’s political representation? That’s right…women leaders make up just 16% of the Senate, 23% of state legislatures, and 10% of big city mayors. My response: "Is there the slightest purpose in pointing out that a woman is not unrepresented just because her elected representative is not a woman? I felt very truly and responsively represented when the president was Ronald Reagan; I would feel not only unrepresented but also threatened and ashamed if the president were Hillary Clinton. Likewise I’d feel well represented by a sound, pro-life, fiscally conservative woman, and not by a tax-and-spend proabortion liberal man. A woman is a political actor in her own right, and has convictions that reflect the things that are important to herself: she is not merely a unit of a faceless mass called 'women'. It’s foolish to speak as if a woman could only be effectively served by an elected official who had the same arrangement of X chromosomes as she has. It’s the principles that count." The fallacy, long deplored on this site, that a woman isn't a woman unless she's a feminist, is alive and well. It shouldn't be any wonder that I bolt the doors. # ( 10:37 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Remember, these things go in cycles. They go in sixteen-year cycles, to be precise. Think back to 1960, 1976, and 1992. Americans, being on the whole comparatively prosperous and remarkably free from political oppression, have somewhat immature ideas about politics. Specifically, they have short attention spans, and after eight or twelve years of more or less stable government, they get bored. They want to have somebody new to look at, and something new to think about. So they elect somebody really different from the preceding president, and for a while they're happy. After a year or two they discover to their dismay that this new guy is really different from the preceding president, and they get angry, as if they'd been cheated, and as if people with steadier heads and a more historical perspective hadn't warned them. Then they elect a whole slew of new congressmen and senators and governors at the first opportunity, to take Mr. New Ideas down a peg, and settle in to watch the fur fly. Then they get exasperated when the president can't work with Congress to Get Something Done, and the wheel begins to turn around once more. I won't pretend that I'm happy about the result of the election, but I'm beginning to take it in a more philosophical spirit. I just hope The Intern doesn't happen before Jonathan Lee gets out of the Marines. # Tuesday, October 28, 2008 ( 12:01 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I stayed behind after Mass to watch a short DVD about voting one's Catholic convictions. It was mostly out of curiosity, since Father said it was from the USCCB, and I offered to bet a nickel with an acquaintance who was also watching that there would be a lot about welfare and hardly anything about abortion. It was an interesting production, in some ways. In the first place, there was no narrator; all the text appeared on the screen. This is no doubt done with a wary eye on challenges to tax-exempt status, and I don't blame the producers. (And, incidentally, I don't quarrel with the fact that it is thus particularly directed at people who can read.) If the names of the two candidates appear for the same amount of time and in the same font and size, there can be no claim that one is implicitly favored over the other. Likewise, without a narrator there can't be an assertion that anything in his or her tone suggests the greater desirability of one candidate: in other words the complaint, rightly detested by men, that it wasn't what they said but "the way they said it." I'd have lost my nickel, by the way, if my acquaintance had taken the bet. There was a certain amount about what CTA types love to call "social justice" - as if abortion were not the most unjust thing our society has ever countenanced - but plenty about the right to life. I surmise from this, and from a rather painful shot of Knights in fourth-degree regalia, that the ever-admirable Knights of Columbus paid for the production and distribution. God bless the Knights - you'll never find a worthier set of men, and they wouldn't stand for any nonsense in the matter of abortion in an ad intended to remind Catholics to vote with their consciences. I've been thinking about this. There are pro-abortion politicians who have been always in the habit of thinking that abortion is essentially a question of equality. It doesn't speak well of their common sense, and hardly reflects a spirit of justice, and of course they're dead wrong and do a great deal of harm. I don't, however, feel toward them the sense of visceral hatred and devouring scorn I bear toward those politicians who were brought up and educated as Catholics, who know better but have yielded to expediency and embraced legal abortion. You cowards suck, and, what's more, you know very well you suck. # Thursday, October 16, 2008 ( 9:55 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Happy Battle of Zama Day! Which falls on or around this Sunday. On or around October 19, 202 B.C., Roman armies under the command of the general Publius Cornelius Scipio defeated the Carthaginians outside the city of Carthage itself. This feat is the more impressive in light of the fact that Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian commander, had carried the fighting virtually to the outskirts of Rome earlier in the war. The Romans, as the historian Robert Garland freely admits, simply didn't know they were beaten, and fought on, driving Hannibal back across southern Europe and northern Africa to the very gates of Carthage. For this victory Scipio was given the name "Africanus" and a triumph on his return to Rome. Read Chesterton's The Everlasting Man (read it all, but especially the chapter called "The War of the Gods and Demons") to understand the debt we owe to Rome for crushing Carthage, and think about what the ancient world might have become if the lares and penates of Roman religion had been overwhelmed by the horrid leer of hungry Moloch. Give a grateful thought to Scipio on Sunday - Rome wasn't perfect by any means, but it was much better than the alternatives. It's a thought to ponder in this election season, when the world might again be spared a great evil, all because some leathery old campaigner didn't know when he was licked.  The only thing the average Joe knows about Hannibal is that he crossed the Alps with elephants. It's a mental picture which has captured the world's imagination for centuries, and countless artists have rendered it in many forms. I always think that this work, which looks 19th century to me, ought to be titled, "Gods dammit, there goes another #$%&*@ elephant!" # Wednesday, September 17, 2008 ( 9:11 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Why, exactly, did I go to Yale? I've been trying to remember what I thought it would be like. Certainly I never imagined that it would be full of screwed-up people, but it was, and remains so, by what I can see in the current Yale Alumni Magazine. One tender soul hopes, in the letters column, that in addition to thinking up names for two new residential colleges, the University will rename Calhoun, instead of perpetuating the legacy of an apologist for slavery (or something). As I have had occasion to observe before, if there has ever been an African-American non-smoking lesbian scientist who died of lung cancer brought about by second-hand smoke originating from oppressive white-male colleagues (once you get involved with PC types you end up working your hyphen key pretty hard), we already know what at least one of the new colleges will be named. I wasn't a Hounie, but I trust that there are limits to the fatuity even of Yalies, and that all the existing colleges, Calhoun included, will retain the names by which they've always been known. The class notes in this month's YAM contain reports of several same-sex unmarriages. Judging by the twittering tone of the announcements, I gather that the newspapers of Peachtree GA, Harrison OH, and countless other small towns lost ideal candidates for the post of social reporter when my contemporaries on the Other Team enrolled at Yale. # Monday, September 15, 2008 ( 5:47 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Hmm. I found a site called White Elegance while searching for modest clothing shops online. This is a big concern in the LDS community, as it ought to be in ours. One page on the site offered mens all-white clothing for Sunday wear, and posed the thought-provoking question, "Is It Time To Get Your Own Pants?" Having submitted the matter to careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that there can be only one answer. Yes. Arrangements for sharing trousers can be, at best, a temporary expedient, but cannot be considered a satisfactory permanent solution. Yes, gentlemen, it is time for everyone to get his own pants. # Sunday, September 14, 2008 ( 11:54 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Kee-rikey! How did this come about? A site called Virtual Woman's Day named me one of "96 Women Bloggers To Watch For Spring 2008". The weirdest things happen when I'm not looking. # Friday, September 12, 2008 ( 10:01 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I've had rather a surprising piece of news today. A man whom we knew a while back has died in the act of saving his disabled son's life. Read the story here. We knew the Vander Woudes when we lived in Manassas and were fellow parishioners at All Saints. I say fellow parishioners advisedly, because they had the most fellows (seven sons) and we had second most (four). Commenters elsewhere have speculated on what Tom would have said in answer to praise of his action, but in fact he wouldn't have said anything. He'd have turned his head a little, crinkled up those blue pilot-guy eyes a bit more, and given just one small shake of the head. He wasn't much of a talker, but just being in his vicinity made you want to stand up straight and quit griping about your fiddling little troubles. On the one hand, I'm very sorry to hear of his death. On the other hand, is there a better way to die than to come home fresh from Mass and then give your life for your child? God rest his soul. # Friday, September 05, 2008 ( 6:00 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Statler: It's nice to be heckling again. Waldorf: It's nice to be doing anything again! (The Muppets' elderly stage-door johnnies, as ghost Marleys in the Muppet Christmas Carol) I'm glad to resume blogging. It affords a comfort Facebook can't really give, in an opportunity to spread myself and say everything that's on my mind. Facebook has several very attractive features, but this is one thing that's easier and more rewarding on Blogger. Very likely I won't be able to post again until we get Hannah out of our hair. Until then, keep dry. # ( 5:47 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Even some voters who were initially enthusiastic about the Palin pick were now more circumspect in the wake of the new revelations. Christina Hewitt, a mother of three from St. Charles MO, attended a rally Sunday inO'Fallon MO and screamed enthusiastically for Gov. Palin. But just two days later, the enthusiasm had died down. "It is a little bit shocking because I'm pretty conservative so it was hard to swallow," Ms. Hewitt said. (WSJ, 3 Sep 2008, page A1) Yes, perfectly dreadful, isn't it? What a mercy that our children never make mistakes, commit sins, or demonstrate bad judgment. At least, yours don't, Christina. I think that, in the public interest, Mrs. Hewitt, you ought to tell us how you manage to bring up perfect children. It would be such an example to us all, and then we, too, could afford to be sanctimonious prigs about other people's fallible offspring. # Wednesday, September 03, 2008 ( 11:09 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Okay, I'm back. I couldn't let Sarah Palin get by without adding my meed to the praise she's getting on all [right-minded] sides. I don't know how to talk about her without sounding like a gushing fan, so I'll act like a gushing fan: SHE IS SO AWESOME! She's exactly the sort of woman who normally gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I won't pretend that I'd be thrilled if she moved in next door to us and set about quite naturally doing everything much better than I do. (Except knitting, that is. I'm fairly sure I could hold my own in any company with a set of knitting needles.) But she's exactly what the country needs, and I devoutly hope the Republicans win and she continues to steamroller over the Giuliani wing of the Party. Does she remind you of President Reagan? She sure reminds me of him, and there's hardly any higher praise I could give a candidate for office. # |
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