My daughter recently recommended to me Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (The Anne of Green Gables woman).  She thought I’d like the bit about the 12-year old girl bustling about to run her own little household.

What I discovered is that its an idyll.  And hat tip to friend E.C. who pegged Montgomery as an excellent idyll writer.

Idylls are hard, of course, because where does the drama come from if people are happy and the land is green?

In this book her technique was interesting.   There is an over arching drama about the girl’s parents.  It’s played lightly, but its there, and it gives you the plot.  There is also the daily challenges of the girl figuring out how to run a household on her own.  Quotidian challenges–the plum pudding that doesn’t quite work–would be a normal technique for a cozy domestic idyll.  But here Montgomery plays them very lightly.  They are just mentioned in passing and not given much in the way of arc.

The main thing Montgomery does is to start the girl in a bad situation and then to go on for pages and pages and pages about how bad it is.  She’s with her grandmother who’s awful, so awful that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief.  It all seems tedious.  But then when the girl makes it to the idyll, it all seems interesting by way of implied contrast to the now off-stage horrors.  It works quite well.

Some interesting parallels to the plan of happiness and why we needed a messy mortal experience before our own eternal idyll.

Glenn Reynolds is trying to find a way to make exploding nuclear bomb space ships — Project Orion — compatible with existing international agreements.

Make Project Orion Legal Again.

If that doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what to say.

One of my young fellas comes to me recently.  “Dad, when I grow up, I decided I want to pilot a nuclear bomber.”  “Why does that appeal to you, son?”  Silence.  Then we both burst into laughter.

I had a daughter who was the perfect kid.  She hit an age, 10-11, that was ideal for her.  Everything about her was suited to that time.

One day I caught her crying.  What’s wrong, sweetheart?  I don’t want to grow up, Dad.  I like being a kid.

I hugged her and told her it would be OK.  And it was OK.  She’s a good, even a great teenager.

But she was also right to cry.  The girl she once was still echoes, but that year or two of perfection is gone and who knows if she will ever hit her stride quite like that again.  And it is still gone even if she does; no matter how perfect the rhythm, it won’t ever be quite the same rhythm.  She was right to cry.  I should have cried for her too.

Today was Betsey’s dying day. (more…)

Let righteousness cover you like a blanket, held close to ward the chill.

This is the first time in my life I’m paying $4 or more for gas a gallon.

The prices have just been going up up for the last several months.

I was on the road. Enclosed car with soft heated air. Podcast piped into my ears. Cruise control and lane guides on. Too dark to see anything other than headlights. I realized that I was as about as disconnected from anything real as it as possible to be. There are worse horrors than being comfy, but still . . .

So as the highway cut through the hills, I pulled off a short winding way and got out in the cold air to be under the stars.

That is the perfect place to end, the virtuouso literary touch. Except as I walked in the dark there in the hills, an unmoored fear came over me and I scurried back, thumping over the wooden bridge on the path with a sound that felt like it would wake trolls.

I was often the guy who blatantly ignored the mask mandates. I got a real kick in walking through a sea of masks with my grinning face grinning, daring somebody to say something about.  But also sometimes I just forgot.

A few days ago the masks around here just evaporated. Mandates gone overnight.

The strangest thing happened. All of a sudden I started feeling weird not having a mask on in public settings.  The brain’s little alarm goes off every time I’m about to go through a door and I have to remind myself we’re all done with that now, and me long before now.

I can’t account for it.

A number of things, but maybe most of all the sense of the sacredness of places and peoples.

You meet a guy from the tribe of Whatsit and you remember the sacred story about how the Whatsits were founded by your great great great grandfather’s sister when she married this one guy and so on and so on.

You are out and about and you see a pile of stones, oh yes, that’s where Laban and Jacob made their deal.

I just now realized that the word wholesome means “whole”-some.  I love wholesome things.  But I also love things being integrated together, integrity through time, integrity across relationships.  Maybe they are one and the same.

StC recently took us to task, somewhat feistily, for grumbling a bit too much.

I said something extremely funny in response, because I’m a funny guy, and some of our friends pushed back on him a bit.

Which is fair enough.

What I do want to say, though, is that there is never a bad time to be reminded to be more faithful to the kingdom and the prophets.  StC, his comments, and others like him are always welcome here.

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Working together as a family and having fun while you work is one of the peaks of human existence.

Watering each other and the plants.

Singing while washing the dishes.

Making charcoal for your garden and deciding among you to see if you could make a charcoal cardboard crown for no good reason.

Its a synthesis of virtues.

Getting there is not just a matter of will.  It takes a fair amount of slogging and sloth and labor without much fun and fun without labor.  The Plan of Salvation in microcosm.

By the way —

Slog + Sloth = Boredom

My stake and my 15-year-old son have been invited to attend FSY, “For the Strength of Youth,” a six-day/five-night gathering of hundreds of the church’s youth. This one will be held at the University of Maryland campus. This seems to be a more ecclesiastical version of the long-running EFY, “Especially For Youth,” program that had been run by BYU. I and my family have no experience with EFY.

When it was announced a few years ago that FSY would replace some of our stake youth functions, I didn’t care for the idea, and wariness was my initial impulse on reading the invitation for my son to register for FSY. In this internet web space last summer concern was expressed about “the bureaucratization of everything including the gospel,” and that is certainly what FSY is. (more…)

Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.

-thus C.S. Lewis

Mos:19 — And it came to pass that he fought with the king; and when the king saw that he was about to overpower him, he fled and ran and got upon the tower which was near the temple.

6 And Gideon pursued after him and was about to get upon the tower to slay the king, and the king cast his eyes round about towards the land of Shemlon, and behold, the army of the Lamanites were within the borders of the land.

7 And now the king cried out in the anguish of his soul, saying: Gideon, spare me, for the Lamanites are upon us, and they will destroy us; yea, they will destroy my people.

8 And now the king was not so much concerned about his people as he was about his own life

Its difficult and probably unnecessary to sort out the day to day specifics in the Ukraine right now in the cloud of competing claims.

But what does seem certain is that we are getting close to launching our financial nuke, if we haven’t already: cutting off Russia from the international monetary system that we control.

I can’t help feeling that this is a mistake, that we will be squandering something pretty significant in return for no real gain.  It hurts us and Russia but does not help the Ukraine.  I fear we are ruling recklessly these days, without even an eye for short term gain.  Governance by emotional spasm.