Trains and Streams

Sundays are when I usually post reviews of books, but I'm still working on the latest, The Passage by Justin Cronin.  I was groanin' when Lori brought this home from the library, apparently another Entertainment Weekly recommendation, a nearly-800 page gorilla of a book.  But, I'm somewhere south or north of 500. Pages, that is. And it's still keeping my interest. It is an interesting book and I hope it turns out well. But I still don't know what "The Passage" is. So far, the weakest part seems to be the title.  Or a single flimsy character, now long dead. But I have one theory of what it could be and if there were the case, I'd be quite ticked off. But I don't think it can be that.

I used to post sermon notes from church on Sundays, but two things happened. First, we learned that Ben wasn't able to attend two nursery services, he didn't have the strength/stamina and was getting mean, so no more attending both services. I felt like the sermons were so rich that it needed two hearings to capture everything. Also, they changed the sermon notes so there were fewer blanks to fill in and less space overall to fill with notes. Three things - because they also changed the order of the service itself. Now, instead of doing most of the singing before the sermon, it's after.  I really don't like it. First, that's less that Ben can experience before I take him to the nursery - he loves the loud music and just closes his eyes and rocks like crazy. Second, we enter the sermon lower than if we'd done a lot of singing - it was like the singing got us really amped up before the sermon but now we're not on that high - and so when the sermon is over you expect it to be done but instead there's all these songs.  And for me that's just extremely intellectually frustrating because I want to talk about what I just heard, not sing some tangentially relevant songs. They might be supremely relevant, but I attach a lot of personal meta-data to songs. I hear a song and I flash back to the point in my life when I heard it a lot or what I was thinking the last time I heard it. And if that wasn't church, that kind of rips me right out of the church service. Worse yet, I sit there thinking about how I want to talk to Lori about what I just heard and what it means and did I hear it correctly and what does she think but instead I'm forced to sit or stand there in my own little bubble singing, trying to worship God while feeling frustrated as I try to hold on to the thoughts slowly seeping away. I guess when the sermon was at the end, noisy children in the car could also disrupt an shared intellectual dive into what we'd just learned, but those were temporary interruptions and we often used to go out to eat afterwards and could talk further with each other or with the larger group.

We were talking today about how daring crows are and how they just hop out of the way of cars or just fly at the last minute if at all, usually because they don't want to get too far away from the squished squirrel sushi they're eating in the road. We wondered if crows love cars because of how much less work is now necessary to get fresh raw squirrel and other delicacies now. Rachel suggested that we should buy a crow a car so they could kill their own squirrels and that seemed dangerous - maybe they needed a monkey to drive the car.  Until we remembered that only penguins and humans can drive cars¹ - so then it was proposed that the monkey could stand on the side of the road and point. I do not think we should buy a crow a car for his birthday.

I thought there was something else, but like so many things, it was fleeting and possibly gone, to return never or in 20 seconds.  Who knows. Efforts to eliminate the second space in my writing continues to be a struggle.

¹ Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. Directed by Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, Conrad Vernon (2012, Glendale, Calif: DreamWorks Animation, 2012), DVD