It's About A Girl Singing!

 

 

 

Our son Jeffrey's eagerness to see Annie for our annual Christmas Day movie with me, Martha, Sarah, Mary, Breanna, and Josceline began with that sentence, without us even asking him what the movie's about. When I first saw the preview some time ago, a still small voice whispered that would likely be the movie we'd see -- and the closer we got to THE DAY the more I got eager to see it. What I especially loved about this movie I thought I'd find too sappy is that it's not afraid to poke fun at itself for being a musical; other than this, the "Little Orphan Annie" story gets updated to 2014 with the Daddy Warbucks figure being Will Stacks, the owner/operator of a cellular phone service provider who's running for mayor of New York City and Annie's a sprightly ten-year-old without that (I always found annoying) red curly head. And Miss Hannigan who runs -- the word "orphan" even gets scrubbed here, Annie corrects "foster child" -- where Annie lives actually gets a background.

Like all of us, is capable of being kind. So often though, we get burned by life and choose not to be.

Christmas Eve dinner was after church and it was spaghetti for sixteen people -- that would be in no particular order, Martha's parents Robert and Sharon, Martha's oldest sister Malesa and her three sons Mathew, Brandon, and Trevor, Martha's next-oldest sister, Martha's next-next oldest sister Margaret and her boyfriend Milton, Margaret's daughter Breanna and Josceline, Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I. Somehow all of this, along with family friend Donovan who came later, took four jars of spaghetti sauce (and oh, I live for the day it's not going to get mixed in and become unrecognizable) and THEN we opened the presents in ascending order of age and caught photos of most of it AFTER a family sing-along of "The Twelve Days of Christmas". From Trevor, Jeffrey, Sarah, Josceline, Brandon, Mathew, Breanna, Martha, Margaret, me, Mary, Malesa, Milton, Robert, and Sharon.

from James Rogers' The Dictionary of Cliches:
Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law. You are in a stronger position if you have something in hand or under your control than if you merely claim it. Once the expression was "possession is eleven points of the law," and it appears that way in B. Discolliminium, a book published in 1650. Whether eleven or nine, the idea is that nearly all (eleven of twelve, or nine of 10) of the points that may be raised in a legal action are in your favor. 

Oh, I didn't forget Donovan, he came just as we were finishing! (I came across the "possession" quote in my reading today, and I'd always wondered about its source. And someone else might!) Last night after getting home from Annie I got to finish a book I'd been reading for a few weeks, Murat Halstead's Illustrious Life of William McKinley, a 1901 hardcover memorial of the twenty-fifth President that I bought at a closing sale for Dakota Antiques at half-price. The book came out a month after McKinley had died from being shot, and Theodore Roosevelt his vice-president and successor tends to eclipse him. Bit of a shame really; last Civil War veteran to be President, past governor of Ohio, lawyer, Representative, commander-in-chief during the Spanish-American War -- sometimes you get astounded by the paeans of praise such older books can be, yet they do have substance. A lot of it, if you give them time.

Samuel Mercer's 1921 work The Life and Growth of Israel reminds me why I ultimately chose not to become a professor. Because I didn't have the patience for it, maybe, or I wanted something that I wrote to be -- I don't know, accessible and useful? Not that I didn't like reading this study which made the rise and fall and rise and fall again of Israel as expressed through the Old Testament and Apocrypha like a coming-of-age story (from the date, you can probably tell I also bought it at Dakota Antiques); toward the end though it felt mashed together. But it's always fun to read these books detailing Israel and the Bible in general pre-1948, when Israel became a modern nation-state, seen by many Jewish and Christian orthodox as a fulfillment of prophecy. Not so much to mock them because they're off, but to get our minds blown by how much in hindsight they and the Law and the Prophets have proven to be right! How faithful can we be now?

Will the sun come out tomorrow?

David