She could be hiding
And you wouldn’t know it
Smiling widely
Refusing to show it ✏️ 🎤 🎵
“I mean, you can’t just be a wimp and call yourself a pacifist.”
— Carla
Carla, man.
That’s a scan of a pen-and-watercolor cartoon she is sending to the captain of the sailboat she and her dad piloted this past summer from Bermuda to Connecticut.
Carla: Oof, Sully’s YouTube video made me nauseated. Is that a thing? Can a YouTube video make you nauseated?
Scott: Carla, anything can make you nauseated.
“I just don’t picture myself as a secretary.”
— Carla, substitutes and budget secretary at Delta, to Heather, other secretary at Delta, standing in the Delta office considering a recent College Township job opening for a secretary
You bring the fog
In the fall a soft fog
And I follow a call
Saying, “Come” ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Mother Nature’s little sister
Taught me everything I know ✏️ 🎤 🎵
It’s fine, Babe
It’s fine.
I do it all the time, Babe.
Except I never know what to tell you when I’m done. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
🎨 I’m dithering writing to myself about Paul McCartney while wife is making this:
Carla: There’s a book I wanna read.
Éa: Me, too. But I finished it.
If something matters to Carla, then it matters to me.
Things I learned today:
- Orientation towards accomplishment and order is going to be hard to mix back into orientation toward people and whim.
- Local democracy is a lot of fun when it involves something you care about.
- Carla is clever and thoughtful.
- Buying presents for nephews and nieces is way fun (at least when you know what to give them).
- I’m eager to be done with the HRIS selection at work.
Éa: You’re very good at putting buns in. But you’re not very good at sleeping in them.
Carla: Build me up and tear me down! Build me up and tear me down!
Éa: At least you’re even!
Family walks are the best.
Scott: You can’t touch my face. I’m in quarantine.
Carla: Well, I can punch your face!
Carla: [Saint] Paul totally bonked. He was a-bonkin!
Scott: Paul wasn’t bonking.
Carla: C’mon. You know he was bonking!
Scott: You are the strangest Christian wife I could have acquired.
My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!
— Carla, to Frank
Today I am grateful for the following:
- the self-control Éa is demonstrating as she practices her first riff on her new Washburn Maverick electric guitar (“Smoke On The Water,” of course)—let’s hope she has the self-control enough to power through the rut of learning your first riff and never moving past it because it’s the only thing you’ve mastered;
- the goodness of setting aside time to walk, read, engage in hobbies, and journal. May my good friend learn it, too;
- the faithfulness of Carla, my wife of coming on fifteen years next year. Whoa.
Éa: What’s a placenta?
Sullivan: What!? You don’t know what a placenta is? Mom, we have failed.
Carla: Why can’t I be a ten-year-old boy? I’ve always wanted to dress like a ten-year-old boy!
Scott: You often do.
[overheard while Sullivan and Éa build a precarious fort]:
Éa: Sully, did you just swear!?
Sullivan: What!? No!
Éa: No really, Sully, did you say the S word?
Sullivan: No! Only Mom does that!
And then I wrapped my ankle brace around my uterus.
— Carla
Scott: Sometimes I wish I were the smaller one.
Carla: Why, so you could beat me up?
Oh my gosh. Jesus.
— Carla