I Can't Wait For School To Start!

Me too, Sarah … sometimes getting my daughter and her brother Jeffrey out the door without pounding the stuffing out of each other can be a fight, so when she said this in exasperation over something that I have already forgotten about, I said under my breath “me too”. Minot Public Schools start here for all students on the twenty-eighth of this month, 22 days from now. And YES, I'm counting them too.

My mom would have turned seventy-seven years old yesterday. I hope my remarking on that will enable you to forgive my more-than-usual lack of coherence. Sometimes it is hard that both of my wife Martha's parents are still alive – heck, I seem there near every day, they are such a big help watching our kids while Martha and I work – and mine aren't. Is it true, I'm supposed to really grow up after both my mom and dad die? I wouldn't accuse Martha of being immature, no not at all …

Sunday after church Martha was the one who wanted to – and did – mow most of our backyard. We'd been letting it sit when the push mower that we got from her parents started sparking due to, we found out, dirt and mud building up on the blade and it grows really fast. The area church that hydro seeded our lawn advised us to water the lawn every day, but we have not had to since so much main has fallen in scattered showers over the last few weeks. Indeed, I wonder if there were weeds left in there.

I mean, if we'd lost this war . . . I dunno. I think it might have driven us a little crazy, y'know? As a country.

Watchmen, chapter II, “Absent Friends”, the Comedian to Dr. Manhattan in flashback

I recall a letter of Franz Kafka's where he said we should only read the books that wound and stab us. Such was the latest novel I've read, Frederic C. Rich's debut novel Christian Nation. It starts out speculating what if Barack Obama lost the 2008 United States presidential election, and it goes from there with – I'm quoting the book jacket here – “the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifying path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.”

Being a Christian myself, I found it unsettling. And like The Handmaid's Tale, the novel we could debate it most closely resembles (and which is also told in first person, in this case by a lawyer who observed this happening from the beginning, ISBN 9780393240115) it is all too plausible if you cut off the hydra's head that something worse, something unfreedom and inequality, is going to spring up with all the right reasons yet all the wrong methods. Not how I understand God to work in you or me …

The duplicate of that alien farm-boy had the tenacity to beat me at chess last night.

Superman: Red Son, part I, “Superman: Red Son Rising”, Lex Luthor to his wife Lois

My son Jeffrey DID beat me at chess Sunday afternoon! (And no, I did not let him, he checkmated me fair and square.) We have this glass game set that Martha and I got as a wedding present ten years ago that we hardly use; it's kept upstairs and you can play checkers, chess, or backgammon on it. Jeffrey got me to promise that I'd play chess with him – Saturday we were at Main Street Books and we played with this large checkers set there, and he won then too!

And chess isn't really hard, you just have to plan ahead and look at all possibilities for your opponent to move. Once he got the basics of movement – those of you who play chess know what I'm talking about – I found that I had been planning so far ahead I had missed the obvious. (Do not talk to me about how I got to his end of the board, exchanged my pawn for a queen, and still got it taken by him!) If I had just not castled when I perhaps did not need to …

Last night I came home with Sarah and Jeffrey and fixed them Hamburger Helper Stroganoff … Sunday we also started them out again with chore charts so they would fold their clothes, put them away, clean their rooms, help with dishes, etc. and they're doing great with that so far. When I asked Jeffrey how he liked what I served him, he said, and I quote, it doesn't taste burnt. (Not offended, for I have been known to burn food when I cook it.)

And last night before bathtime (for Jeffrey; Sarah had her bath Sunday night) we watched the live-action movie The Cat in the Hat on our laptop computer. I've read them the book and they've read it themselves before, and this time it – the movie, not the book – didn't seem as stupid as I remember it. Though I have entertained the idea of writing an alt-version (check it out, all the books I've cited today are in some way alternate histories) of the Dr. Seuss story, The Fish in the Pot. Unfortunately, as I'm thinking about it now it rather sounds socialist …

Yep, I can't wait for school to start!

David