Some Days I Just Wing It

We read, "As a reward for his courage, Iobates gave Bellerophon half his kingdom and the hand of his younger daughter in marriage."

Jeffrey: (to me) He just took her hand?
Me: No, it means he married her.
Jeffrey: What could he do with just her hand?
Me: (laughing) I took your mom's hand in marriage. It means I took all of her, not just her hand!

For the second day in a row, for Jeffrey's daily reading (10 minutes) we've read out of a children's book of myths and legends I own which distills a lot of them into two-page blurbs and the reading above comes from “Pegasus and Bellerophon”. We also read “Ananse and the Sky God's Stories” today, yesterday we did “Prometheus and Pandora” (and I meant to elaborate that I chose that one because I had the kids wonder where the name Pandora originally came from) as well as “The Twelve Tasks of Hercules”. I may also have the only boy in first grade who knows where the phrase Midas touch came from …

Really, I wasn't much older than Jeffrey was when my interest in mythology began. The first book I remember reading was a Roman myth collection; I remember that because of Prosperina's name at the end of the story about why we have the seasons. And Roman mythology is basically Greek adapted to serve a more … shall we say practical culture (in Greek myth, Demeter's daughter and Hades' wife is Persephone), while if you read Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor as a kid you were getting spoon fed a mite more family friendly Norse – which where I live is “Norwegian” – mythology. And I still get a lot out of rereading these stories and more often realize how much of our world is not really new …

Spring Break starts tomorrow for the kids, only for them and us it's the pre-spring (the first official day of spring is next Thursday) equivalent of Thanksgiving weekend, just four days! But I count on Sarah and Jeffrey to make the most of it; last night Jeffrey was with his Cub Scout troop at our local fire station and I met the family at home for dinner after my church's Bible study on the second chapter of Acts. It was a lot of fun to share some down time with them, for with Lenten service tonight and choir tonight and Martha's bowling league meeting tomorrow … I really miss her, and I know I want to be more available for my family. But I have other promises to keep.

France's final trial by combat – where two knights faced off against each other and who was right or innocent of the charges against them was judged to be the one who remained alive at the end because God gave him the victory – was the subject of Eric Jager's The Last Duel (ISBN 0767914171), and the further I got into the story, the more I saw there might be more than one side to this. We started in early 1386 with a squire favored by his lord arriving at the manor … taking advantage of a knight's wife while he's off to war. The knight returns, his wife affirms that she was taken advantage of by this squire (both serve the same lord, but the knight is out of favor with him and the knight and squire haven't spoken for years), and the squire protests his innocence to the very end when he dies.

Good story, though if you are convinced you know the truth you won't be by the end … at least I wasn't, or rather not convinced that I knew the full truth. But do we ever? By Monday night I'd also finally finished Dover Thrift Editions' African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927 (ISBN 0486296040) and I liked it. I truly wonder whether an European-American Poetry anthology would sell though, or if your average book buyer would even know what that refers to. Theodore Roosevelt's opinion on hyphenated Americans and Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement regarding being in the same boat now rattle in my head reading that.

And I just learned about the twenty-fifth birthday of the World Wide Web today, David