The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” has become one of my favorite poems. If April is the cruellest month at all for me so far at least – I quote the first sentence of that poem's first section beneath the title, which I'll be doing all week – I'd say it's primarily due to the weather. A few years ago I read “The Waste Land” and realized that when I was a teenager I'd started writing a story along its lines! It was called “Lifeline” and the title referred to a group of rebels in a world where the Civil War was still going on – just a really toned down one, and it affected everything else in the then-present day of 1986. Some of the characters and events from it appear in or I refer to in my Progeny, Legacy, and Victory novels, and I've still got a broad outline for the story itself. But I have one life and it's short enough – will I go back to that?

Friday night I got home and Sarah's classmate Scottie was staying the night with us and they were just finishing homemade spaghetti and garlic bread. If I thought my kids were big eaters; Martha told me Scottie ate two plates of spaghetti and two slices of garlic bread, and our own kids and Martha and I did a fair showing ourselves (but still had leftovers; when we do cook, we cook a lot – still got macaroni from a week and a half ago which hasn't grown its own civilization yet). Then we all settled in to watch a movie, Short Circuit from 1986. The movie with Number Five, the robot that gets struck by lightning and comes alive – alive in this context being self-aware. No disassemble, Stephanie, NO DISASSEMBLE! Talk about a flashback for Martha and me, and a new experience for Sarah, Jeffrey, and Scottie.

I was at the house Saturday morning when Scottie's aunt picked her up after breakfast and after a few hours of playing hide and seek and assorted computer games I brought Jeffrey to his friend Jasper's house for a few hours of playtime while Sarah and I bonded before Martha got off from McDonald's by visiting a few Main Street establishments. And she was getting so tired that she was more than ready to go home, and so was I. But then I picked up Jeffrey and I got to chat a bit with Jasper's mom and dad – Jasper and his sister Eleanor are homeschooled by their mom, and their dad besides working at Minot State is also Jeffrey's den leader in Cub Scouts – and then went to the other McDonald's (not the one where Martha works, but the one with the marvelous new play area called Obstacle) because he was hungry – ok, so was I – and I got to meet some marvelous people too!

Speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese and teaches English as a second language right now at Ramstad Middle School, with three kids about the age of mine. And they – so far – share the love of Skylanders and video games. We'll see what happens with that … Jeffrey and I got home and I was asked some hours later to pick up some Dairy Queen treats (small ones, I can be fair about that). Sunday morning has us going to church where Martha did the lesson reading I usually do and I was a communion assistant with a good crowd – I had to remind myself since I was handing out bread yesterday to say “this is the body of Christ, given for you” (I garbled it a few times!) And for Sunday school hour parents and children got together to build a tomb and rock garden, pretty much what I'm saying it is. The grass will take a few weeks to grow, of course, but well worth it!

Got to walk Martha to Chamber Chorale practice last night – it's at First Lutheran Church across Broadway from where we live! The kids and I played games, they bounced off the walls, did their reading for the day (RAH, Reading at Home) this morning before I brought them to school, I finally got our state income tax return off in the mail – in Florida where I grew up I didn't have to do this, it's one of ten states that HAS no state income tax; it's the sales tax that kills you – and now at work there's quite the bit of money coming in. And that's a good thing, keep us operating; and it's a beautiful sunny day outside and supposed to keep in the fifties and sixties. Spring has at last arrived, let's rejoice!

April is pretty nice, David