A Half-Finished Book Is A Half-Finished Love Affair.

Dates are a very useful invention. We could not do without them but unless we are very careful, they will play tricks with us. They are apt to make history too precise.

I open today with Hendrik Willem van Loon's intro to the Middle Ages in The Story of Mankind (oh, if you're thinking of me for Christmas I would love a new copy of this as mine is falling apart!) because I was thinking how to tell you about the three books I have finished so far this week. Two of them I finished yesterday, but back to those in a minute ... having finished David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas (ISBN 9780812994711) after watching the movie a few months ago, I can say this might be the only novel I have read that breaks even. That is, nine times out of ten the movie based on a book is worse than or tells a totally different story from the book itself, but there are exceptions (Forrest Gump, The Princess Bride, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? come to mind -- the books have a totally different feel to them, from a few scenes to the entire book; Rabbit keeps a single line from the book it's based on, and some of the characters).

I refer to dates because every section of the Cloud Atlas film, save the frame story where Tom Hanks' end time character is supposed to be relating this series of interconnected tales to an unseen audience, had a date to give viewers a time to focus on, from 1849's "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" to 106 winters after the Fall for "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin After". The only section of the book I remember seeing dates, even though you can loosely guess a time from the dialogue in each section, is in the epistolary story (a ten-dollar word for a story told through a person or group's letters)  "Letters From Zedelghem" which is set in 1931. Today's title comes from that section, in fact; the writer of the letters says that because he's read the first half of Adam Ewing's journal and gotten as far as we the reader have -- it stops in the middle of a sentence because the metafictional -- a work of fiction within a work of fiction -- journal's been ripped in half.

I had better not go on with that or we'll be a while. Like I said, I finished the book Sunday night and you will find (at least I did) a lot of quotable make-you-think material in it. Got to go through my list again before I return the book to the library. Sunday was also our first day of Sunday school, what we at Bethany Lutheran call Rally Sunday; I didn't have a class that day because we've had to consolidate to four classes since we moved sixth grade to confirmation and now have first through fifth grades in rotation among Noah's Arkade, Garden of Eatin', Parable Playhouse, Creation Station, and Holyword Theatre. This lesson going through the nineteenth of next month's about Jesus finding the men who will be His twelve disciples, and I'll start up Parable Playhouse with Jesus' Temptation (by Satan after his 40 days in the wilderness). On year forty-nine of Karn's service with our Sunday school program, that means I have a few weeks to write up the script! This can and will be done.

"Tomorrow?" said Roo hopefully.
"We'll see," said Kanga.
"You're always seeing, and nothing ever happens," said Roo sadly.

Hasn't every kid called their mom or dad on this at one time or another? I finally finished A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner (440-03795-095) that I'd started last year, and pre-Disney (in fact, another section of Cloud Atlas, "An Orison of Sonmi-451" set in the early 22nd century, any visual entertainment is called a disney) the adventures of Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Tigger, Rabbit, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Christopher Robin are fun to read, or perhaps more fun to hear read (pronounce that one "red"). Should I be doing the reading in the near future, I'll have to test that theory ... and about eleven hundred miles from the center of the earth is the point or barycenter that both the Earth and Moon orbit, not the Moon orbiting Earth, is one of many things I learned from Ron Miller's Seven Wonders of the Rocky Planets and Their Moons (ISBN 9780761354482). That, and behind every good man is a better woman.

Seriously! In 1877, Asaph Hall was on the verge of giving up looking for any signs of Martian moons (though Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels told about two moons of Mars in some detail when he could not have seen them a hundred fifty years before) when his wife Angeline urged him to keep trying. On the third week of August, Hall found the moons in Mars' reflected glare and Angeline got a crater on the larger one named for her (by her maiden name, Stickney, a five-mile-wide crater on Phobos). Sunday night while Martha went to Chamber Chorale practice the kids and I saw the Star Spangled Sunday presentation at First Presbyterian Church, a simulcast with speakers from all over the country which for the most part they were attentive to. And the only kids in there too; all together there were fifteen people in the sanctuary. Jeffrey asked me when they'd get to the history of the Star Spangled Banner itself, and it was interspersed throughout the program.

Francis Scott Key's fifth generation descendant (also named Francis Scott Key) led the congregation in saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and with varied calls for prayer and national revival we were moved and urged to move, encourage voting for the midterm elections in two months' time. Not only do we have candidates' political fates to decide, but also we have several measures to vote on. Two that come to mind are a proposal to move the start of the school year to the day after Labor Day, as opposed to the Wednesday before it when school starts now. After reading a reasoned pro/con column about that, I'm inclined to lean the other way and stick with pre-Labor Day (but don't tell my kids!); the other issue, overturning a law that requires any retailer containing a pharmacy to have the pharmacist own 51% of the establishment. One imagines Wal-Mart and Target would love to see that done ... but I wouldn't; one sees the bigger retailers take advantage of it.

Last night after work I met Martha and the kids at Longfellow Elementary's open house. It started with a PTA meeting that I missed, crocodile tears I weep, and when I arrived they were in Mrs. Tillema's room (Sarah's teacher) and Sarah showed me where she sat and some things she had done. Then we went downstairs and saw Mrs. Braasch's room and we got to talking how attendance for this open house was pretty low. That is a misfortune, yet we caught up with the kids' kindergarten teachers too (Mrs. Burckhard for Jeffrey, Mrs. Thomas for Sarah) and the former joked when Jeffrey couldn't remember some lesson they'd done there two years ago that he'd need to come back to kindergarten again! Naturally my son was not thrilled about that, and I think he grew during the night last night! Could explain why he's so energetic and Mom and Dad seek to bottle some of what he's got and have it in the stores by spring -- sorry, Christmas is too close!

Oh, how many half-finished books I have ...

David