Thursday, October 27, 2005

Caleb, lemon-yellow in his jammies and peaches and cream in his cheeks, had a great time simply smiling at me yesterday.  He smiled at me for about two hours last night.  Lynn-nore had to step out – it was an emergency, we were out of diapers – leaving Caleb and I to camp out on the living room floor and mutually entertain each other.  I entertained him with some scrunchy circles.  One is green, with wavy lines.  The other is blue, with more wavy lines.  It has a bell inside, to which Caleb likes to listen.  He doesn’t really know what to do with these crunchy circles when he gets his hands on them.  His hands wave around like blindfolded pre-schoolers at a hyperactive piñata, but he still manages to hurl the greenie about 3 feet when I look away.  Grinning and squeaking adorable as gingerbread sugar all the while.

Kara is a good 50 pages into The Silver Chair.  I’m amazed at C. S. Lewis’ fondness for lengthy description.  He can go for as long as two pages simply describing Narnian marshland and some low hills.  I resolved last year, just a few pages into Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not to elide a single word.  Nevertheless, Kara seems to follow along.  “Why is Aslan in all of these books?” she asked me last week.  “Ah!” I intoned, “that is not for me to say, but for you to figure out.”

Two applications went out last night.  I was up late writing long-answer essays for one of them.  It is hard to not really enjoy having my books upstairs.  They seem so happy to see me, and even Lynn-nore, who seemed a few years ago to have had quite enough to do with bookshelves-as-décor, says hello to them.  Occasionally, during their 3-year basement exile, I’d go down there and greet them and make alligator promises.  But the light of one solitary bulb coupled with the concrete cold of it all made subterranean study or writing an impossibility.  “One day you’ll have a proper home,” I’d tell them.  And, even now, it could be years before they see proper shelves.

My Dad called the other day.  Turns out he liked the N. T. Wright lectures I gave him (I knew that he would.)  Why is it that Anglicans are turning out such good stuff – N. T. Wright, Marva Dawn, Rowan Williams -- even as their denomination turns to mush?  Could it be the subtle influence of creedal Christianity providing a little backbone, even from the bottom of the denominational wastebasket; a suppressed influence, wandering like a stray wind through the prayer book and tradition?