One Week Until School Starts ... One Week Until School Starts ...

I expect that's become the mantra of a great many parents in my area (and some kids, believe it or not) for the summer programs out-of-home are about expired and their children can't stay outside ALL the time. It helps to have my wife Martha's family close by so there is always some place for Sarah and Jeffrey to go and we don't have to splurge on day care -- make no mistake, we do pay for Grandma and Grandpa and Mary and Donovan and Margaret and Allan and Lesa (pick a person any given day, according to their work schedules) to watch them while we're working, but not as much as we'd pay a licensed day care facility. They're kept in the family that way.

Before I brought the kids to Martha's parents' house where Donovan was watching Josceline, the kids and I sat back after breakfast and watched our DVD MythBusters: Mega Movie Myths and got treated to learning whether or not some stunts and equipment we've seen work in movies would work in real life, in a fun way WHICH WE WILL NOT TRY AT HOME! A car ejection seat propelling you to safety? Plausible. Leaping a ravine like The Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee? No (or in the parlance of the show, "busted"). Falling through a set of awnings to break your fall? Again, plausible. Shooting a lock to open a door? Only with heavy artillery.

Mr. Dryer, my middle school math teacher, was in my face -- literally, all I remember seeing of him WAS his face -- and asked me after I'd opened the screen door to the porch of the house I grew up in where the peppers were. Behind him next to our "wishing well" (named because of the structure Dad built around our hot water heater) there was a smoking white car reminding me of a longer version of MY first car, a 1981 Chevy Chevette, with two older women there. The one on the left had gray curly hair and a white shirt; perhaps a neighbor of ours I recall, and the one on the right reminded me of Rosie whom I know from church, but she's wearing a late 90s Winn-Dixie uniform ...

Then I heard my four am alarm (Boogie Go Go on my phone), I woke up, and I made ready to deliver the Minot Daily News uptown this morning, my turn. Fifty-six papers later, I got back home and Jeffrey who was already sleeping on our older couch was soon joined by Sarah on the opposite side. They wanted to be sure to see Martha before she left for work -- she has to be there by seven, so everybody was up by six-fifteen. After she left and the kids had showered and changed and ate, I crashed for another hour and the kids were building a fort and not planning each other's demise (at least not acting on it) too much.

Turn the clock back five centuries. I've always liked Anne of Cleves, she whom history usually remember as the fourth wife of Henry the Eighth, the especially plus-sized king of England. (Easy way to remember the Six Wives -- at least what happened to them: Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.) Reading Robert Lacey's The Life and Times of Henry VIII (ISBN 1558594515) took me a few months to finish, not due to its length but due to the fact that I set it down when it got plodding or something else caught my eye ... but once I got back into it, I found out a lot more and liked it than I realized!

Of course, a good biography keeps me glued to my seat. And this seems to be my year for them -- I must make a list of the ones I've read soon! The long and short of it: Henry who was never expected to become king became king because his older brother (Catherine of Aragon's Husband #1, and she became Henry's Wife #1) died; the Roman Catholic Church which had honored him with "Defender of the Faith" would soon get on his bad side for first calling his marriage to his brother's wife sinful -- we must have different interpretations of levirate marriage, but I digress -- and second not allowing him to divorce Catherine for the future Wife #2 Anne Boleyn.

A few centuries ago, it was all about having legitimate heirs to the throne. And Catherine couldn't provide one, but not through lack of effort. In between the occasional continental war and the Protestant Reformation's push westward -- it started in Germany, remember? -- and the regular hunting parties and tournaments, Henry somehow found time to switch the primary faith of his country (but not his own, remaining a staunch Catholic in his eyes throughout his life) and as we noted before, bring in Anne (who was Elizabeth I's mom) and later four other wives in the attempt to bring a male heir to the throne.

Don't feel too bad for Anne (Wife #4, not Wife #2) though; despite the fact she and Henry didn't stay married for even a year -- evidently the picture he got of her didn't live up to reality, and the alliance with her home state didn't either -- she got a country estate in England and for the rest of her life got to call herself the King's Beloved Sister. AND outlived the other five (wives) and the king too. What kept me going through the book was not only its emphasis on Henry VIII and the world around him -- most bios tend to emphasize the wives -- but the author's use wherever possible of primary sources, not just what historians say. Still in very readable English.

Yes, you will read about Guardians of the Galaxy tomorrow!

David