That's A Little Harsh!

WORD COUNT: 39,677

Today in Minot, drive carefully. Even though it was eight degrees yesterday (minus thirteen degrees Celsius for my metric-using friends) when I woke up to deliver the papers and didn't get much better through the day (my hands were shivering inside two layers of gloves!) today it started at twenty-eight degrees (minus two) and now we have continuous light snowfall. Martha left me the van today to drive, which is usually cause for me to rejoice ... unfortunately, the snow even without ice does not help me grip the road and I was having to push my brakes to the floor several times to stop before I even got to work today!

Martha and I were home with Jeffrey Friday night -- Sarah spent that night with a friend of hers -- and while he was playing a game on our iPad we were watching the movie Pygmalion based on the Bernard Shaw play of the same name (the 1938 black and white edition of the 1912 play; if you remember the musical My Fair Lady, that's the basic plot) on our Nook. It was fun to watch Leslie Howard in ... I suppose the title role, as a professor of phonetics who claims he can teach anyone to speak well and pass them off as anything. The title itself is a throwback to the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion who sculpted a woman so real (to him) that he prayed for her to come to life and his prayer was answered.

But Shaw was a cynic that raised the bar for cynics, so the outcome of Professor Higgins' offer to teach Eliza Doolittle of Covent Garden to speak and act as a duchess is totally different. Higgins says that in six months he'll introduce Eliza with her new pronunciation and style into royal society and says:

... you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you're not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the angels will weep for you.

At the end of "presumptuous flower girls" was when Jeffrey said, without looking up, today's title. (Which would have been yesterday's title except this dashed piece of electronica kept pausing and otherwise uncooperating with me! But I digress.) And the play if you've read it goes a little beyond this! I like to think I'm above ... some of it ... on Tottenham Court Road.

This weekend when we did not see snow on the ground or it wasn't flying in our face -- we're supposed to get more in a few days from the east -- the family and I were in church, where Sarah and Jeffrey sand in children's choir and with Dalyce I taught twelve third and fourth graders in Sunday School an oldie and a goodie (for me anyway; it was the play "The Birth of Jesus As Seen Through Marty's Eyes" that I had written two years ago). Now Sunday school being only forty minutes or so that I have, I allow the kids to have some fun but there is a time we have to settle down and read the lesson so we have time to perform the play. One kid did go upstairs to the office because he was especially disrespectful.

There's a page on Facebook -- and evidently many adherents to it -- titled "Killing Sunday School" with the idea to have a series of multigenerational activities in church to appeal to all ages. Some of the ideas there are good, and I will admit Sunday school as it's taught is often short of what it needs to be, to induct basic knowledge and principles of the Christian faith with activities that not only challenge but also motivate us at any age to pursue the will of God in the world around us ... but I question whether their approach with (I believe it's called) Faith5 throws the baby out with the bathwater. After all, didn't Jesus Himself come to Earth as a baby boy? Of course, by the time frame of my Nano novel, he's a year and a half old ...

Which reminds me I must get to finishing that first draft up!

David