Book Confessions Meme

Emily tagged me for this one...

1. To mark your page you: use a bookmark, bend the page corner, leave the book open face down?
I always use a bookmark. Years ago, I made several, by putting lengths of assorted ribbons inside sheet protectors. You place a dish towel over the sheet protector and iron it. The sides of the page protector then sort of meld together. Cut out the ribbons using a straight edge and a razor knife, and voila, bookmarks.

2. Do you lend your books?
Never. I buy copies for people who may want to read them.

3. You find an interesting passage: you write in your book or NO WRITING IN BOOKS!
I write in certain books, usually paperbacks, usually devotional or theological books.

4. Dust jackets - leave it on or take it off.
Ditto Emily's response:
I take it off while I'm reading the book. I wouldn't want the dust jacket to get scuffed up.

5. Hard cover, paperback, skip it and get the audio book?
Hard cover. Paperback for a second choice.(Emily's words again)

6. Do you shelve your books by subject, author, or size and color of the book spines?
Whatever arrangement fits on my limited shelf space. We have tons of book cases, but most of them are occupied by Demetrios' extensive library, and most of those are medical. Within space constraints, I group by subject.

7. Buy it or borrow it from the library later?
Buy it. I've gotten out of that excellent habit of visiting libraries.

8. Do you put your name on your books - scribble your name in the cover, fancy bookplate, or stamp?
What for? I already know the book is mine. My address book/day planner is the only book bearing my name, in case it should be lost.

9. Most of the books you own are rare and out of print books or recent publications?
I have an Anglican/English Book of Common Prayer old enough to include prayers for Queen Victoria, and my Third Great-Grandmother's Gaelic Bible, and a couple of other antique books, but no more than half a dozen.

10. Page edges - deckled or straight?
Straight.

11. How many books do you read at one time?
Usually two, sometimes three.

12. Be honest, ever tear a page from a book? Once. I carefully cut (did not tear!) a color plate of a wonderful icon of St. Demetrios from an illustrated book of icons. I had the St. Demetrios framed to give to my husband on his feast day.

If you are reading this, you are TAGGED!

5th Photo Meme

The game here, which I picked up from Deb, is to show us the fifth photo in your fifth photo folder. YOU are tagged!

This is my Great-Great-Great Grandmother, May McLeod McKenzie, shown with an abbreviated genealogical chart. (Those are my parents, David and Barbara, listed at the bottom of the chart.) Click if you wish to enlarge.



P.S.) I have her Bible. It's in Gaelic. Recently, I had a conservator mend and treat it and make it a special acid-free box.

123 Meme

Emily tagged me for the 123 meme, which I played once before, but will enjoy doing again. The rules: pick up the book nearest you and:

1. turn to page 123,
2. count the first five sentences,
3. post the following three sentences.

The book nearest me at the moment is A Basket of Chips. It's a collection of poems by my great-grandfather, Joseph Bert Smiley. On page 23 is "Lament of the Dying Red Man," and I'm afraid it's a bit - um, well, see for yourself. Not counting the first 5 sentences, here's the rest of the poem.

Never again will my fair Indian roses
Dance in the thinnest of barbarous clotheses -
Paint on their faces and rings in their noses,
Never, Oh, never again.

Never again will I glide o'er the water,
Never, Oh, never again,
And make Meechee paddle the way that I taught 'er,
Never, Oh, never again.
Never again will my spirit of honor
Proudly exult at the work heaped upon her,
The Great Spirit whispers that I am a goner -
Never, Oh, never again.

If you have read this, you are tagged. 'Fess up; what reading material is nearest you right now?

Celebrity Meme

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Here's a meme I found that intrigues me:

If you could spend 24 hours with a celebrity:

1. Who would s/he be?
2. Where would you expect him/her to bring you?
3. Where would you bring him/her?
4. What would you like to do with him/her?
5. What’s the one thing you’d been always wanting to ask the celebrity?
6. If s/he didn’t treat you well, would s/he be your favorite celebrity?
7. What would you give to him/her as a gift before saying goodbye so s/he’d remember you?
8. Tag 3 people.

I have always wanted to meet Queen Elizabeth.

I suppose she would bring me to Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle.

I would probably bring her to the Jefferson Hotel downtown for tea. No way would I bring her to my house. I'd have to spend a fortune first, getting it anywhere near fit for a queen. Why would she be interested in it anyway?

Tea is what I'd mainly like to do with her. It would be fun to go to each other's church services together, too. (I wouldn't dream of spending a full 24 hours with her, though.)

The one thing I've always wanted to ask (but without a clear invitation, never would) is whether she enjoys being the Queen, and why or why not.

She always treats everyone well, at least on the surface. That would suffice. I wouldn't expect her actually to like me and that wouldn't matter very much. (She would not appreciate being asked any personal questions, I think, and those would be the ones I'd be dying to ask! I wouldn't ask them, but it would likely be very clear I wanted to.)

Do not know! What does one give a queen? She has everything. Perhaps a small photo album containing half a dozen pictures of our visit together? Perhaps an Orthodox prayer book?

I tag Anne the Weekend Fisher, Steven Robinson, and Christopher Hall.

A Meme

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Pr. Hall has tagged me to play a meme. The rules are:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

Okay, the nearest book of that length turns out to be Winnie-the-Pooh, because Deb had posted something about it back in December, I think, as a result of which I pulled if off my shelf and have been reading it. And sometimes I read a story from it to my sister, Barbara, when she calls at bedtime. My volume is actually two Pooh books in one, and I've finished the first book and am beginning the second, The House at Pooh Corner.

Page 123 is taken up mostly by an illustration of Piglet looking out onto the flood surrounding his tree. Skipping 5 sentences, then, we come to:

Then he put the paper in the bottle, and he corked the bottle up as tightly as he could, and he leant out of his window as far as he could lean without falling in, and he threw the bottle as far as he could throw -- splash! -- and in a little while it bobbed up again on the water; and he watched it floating slowly away in the distance, until his eyes ached with looking, and sometimes he thought it was the bottle, and sometiems he thought it was just a ripple on the water which he was following, and then suddenly he knew that he would never see it again and that he had done all he could do to save himself.

"So now," he thought, "somebody else will have to do something, and I hope they will do it soon, because if they don't I shall have to swim, which I can't, so I hope they do it soon." And then he gave a very long sigh and said, "I wish Pooh were here. It's so much more friendly with two."

I tag Deb, Bill Weedon, Ezekiel, Elizabeth, and -c.

Christmas Memories

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Emily, at The Children of God, has tagged me to share three Christmas memories. Okay…

The Black Doll

We were very poor, and the blonde, blue-eyed doll cost $12.00, which for us, in 1974, was a lot to spend on a four-year-old. So we bought her the brown-skinned, black-haired version of the same doll, for half the price. It would broaden our daughter’s awareness.

That was the same Christmas my parents, in addition to inviting the whole family as usual, had invited the Brooks family. Their daughter had committed suicide earlier that year, and we didn’t want Col. and Mrs. Brooks to be alone for Christmas.

“Why did you have to go and buy a black doll just because the Brookses are coming?” asked my Mother. “What are they going to think?”

“I bought the doll before I knew they were coming!” I protested. “It has nothing to do with them! I promise, it’s just coincidence!”

So on Christmas morning, we all waited with some apprehension as Erin opened her gift (Col. and Mrs. Brooks having been forewarned). She looked at her new doll. Then she looked up at Mrs. Brooks, then down to the doll again, then up at Mrs. Brooks again. Finally she stood up, walked over to Mrs. Brooks, and held out her gift.

“If you want to play with my new dollie, you can,” said Erin. “She’s just about your size.”

A Soldier’s Memoirs

The family was gathered around the table, the Christmas meal was finished, and we were waiting for dessert, when Dad brought out his World War II diary, and, standing at the head of the table, began reading from it.

25 December, 1944, Ardennes, France. It was what would become known in history as the Battle of the Bulge, a terrible but decisive battle. Dad wasn’t supposed to keep a diary, for security reasons, but he did, anyway. Now he began reading to us the musings of a lonely and no doubt scared young officer, camped out in the cold, far from home.

“And that was 50 years ago today,” he concluded. “And now, here I am, surrounded by my children and grandchildren, in a warm and happy home, and I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I feel…” and then he couldn’t speak any more, and neither could we.

It was a while before dessert was brought out.

Russian Christmas

Christmas was past, but Demetrios and I had not had time to take down the decorations or the tree, because his mother was in the hospital. It was feared she would die; Christos had come from Greece.

I had been sitting with her in her hospital room that Monday when Christos came in and said, “Go take a break. Maybe get yourself something to eat.”

So I went to the cafeteria downstairs, and there saw a tall, bald man, two or three scraps of long beard hanging from his cheeks, crutches propped against the table, sitting with a small, dark, young woman.

I knew who they were, because they had been introduced in church the day before. They were Fr. Vladimir, come all the way from Russia for hip surgery, and his daughter, Daria, who was accompanying him because she spoke English and he didn’t.

So I took my tray to their table, introduced myself, and was invited to join them. It was pleasant, but before long, Daria excused herself. “I must go find a taxi,” she said, “to take us to my father’s orthopedist.”

“Who’s his orthopedist?” I asked, idly.

She told me, and I said, “But that’s my mother-in-law’s orthopedist! Come in my car! I know how to get there!”

Fr. Vladimir’s surgery was the next day, so when it was Christos’ turn to sit with Mama, I went and sat with Daria in the surgical waiting room.

A couple of days later, I went to Fr. Vladimir’s room. Daria had gone to do some errand. I had brought some photographs of my baptism and chrismation, which I began showing him. He recognized what they were, but didn’t know what to say. Finally, he blurted out his frustration in a prayer, which “for some reason” came out, “Ach, Gott, helfe mir!”

Whereupon God did just that. “Sie sprechen Deutsch?” I asked, startled. "You speak German?"

“Ja.”

Now we could communicate verbally!

That night, I said to Demetrios, “You ought to stop by these people’s room when you’re through visiting your mother. They are people you will want to know.”

He did, and he came home quite upset. “The man doesn’t even have a bathrobe!” he exclaimed. “They had him walking up and down the corridor half naked in his hospital gown, a priest!” He pulled some cash out of his pocket, handed it to me and said, “If you aren’t too tired, would you please go to Penney’s and buy him the best robe you can find? Look for one just like mine.”

A few days later, Mama was ready to be discharged from the hospital. Christos went back to Greece. She asked if she could come live with Demetrios and me again, just for a little while until she recovered, and she promised to behave. So home she came, and I divided my days between caring for her and chauffeuring Fr. Vladimir and Daria to doctors. By then, they had been given a tiny guest house to live in, on the hospital campus.

“Do you know what happened to my father?” Dasha (her nickname) asked me. I didn’t, so she told me. Her father had for many years been a lay assistant to Fr. Alexander Men. The famous name meant nothing to me at the time, but she gave me to understand that Fr. Alexander had been martyred recently, axed in the head. Whereupon her father had asked to be ordained to serve that church. He had been officiating at a funeral, and was being driven back from the cemetery, when gunmen ambushed the car and shot and killed the driver. The car had gone careening down the street in Moscow, driverless, until it had hit a tree, and her father’s hip had been smashed. He had lain in the hospital for months and nobody was able to do anything for him. Now they were in America, another long story, and had some hope of his eventually getting well.

It was January 6 when I said to Demetrios, “You know, we still have our Christmas tree up, and it’s Russian Christmas. Why don’t we invite Fr. Vladimir and Dasha, and we’ll have Christmas here?”

He thought that was a splendid idea. “Yes, it must be terrible to be poor and sick and alone on Christmas! We even have some Russian Christmas music, haven’t we?”

So we picked them up that afternoon at the hospital and took them to our nearest shopping mall. Demetrios bought Fr. Vladimir a suit and a belt and some shoes. (“He hasn’t worn a suit since his wedding,” said Dasha, “and that was rented.”) Dasha we invited to pick out a skirt and sweater. She had a hard time finding any clothes that said, “Made in America,” but finally we found a lovely outfit.

Then we went home and dressed up (Demetrios tying Fr. Vladimir’s new tie for him), put on the Russian carols, and had a fabulous meal. I don’t even remember what we ate. We needed four languages among the five of us: Greek, Russian, English, and German, but we all managed very well. We read the first chapter of the Gospel of John in all four.

But what we all remember most is the joy, the stories, the tears, and the miraculous, mysterious Love, so strong, so palpable, so overwhelming, that we all realized it as the fulfillment of the promise: “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I, in the midst of them.”

It had been a very warm December until that day, when it turned bitter cold. Just before dinner, it had begun to snow. After dinner, Fr. Vladimir took a chair and sat out on the porch to be in the cold and to watch the snow fall, because, he said, it reminded him of home.

In fact, it snowed so much our guests were obliged to spend the night. We didn’t yet know it, but that was the Blizzard of ’96. It was four days before our streets were plowed out. By that time, none of us wanted to part. Dasha and Fr. Vladimir stayed with us 13 miraculous days, until the day they had to go back to Russia.

Fr. Vladimir’s hair and beard never grew back, but his hip healed, and his male parishioners shaved their own heads and beards to welcome him home. Dasha and her husband, Fr. Vichislav, had a baby within a year, and I went to Russia to become Timofei’s godmother.

Oh, and my niece, Madison, was born during that blizzard, a snow plow preceding the ambulance which brought her mother to the hospital.


I tag Christopher and Elizabeth.

You're It!

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Okay, I tag Fr. John Fenton, Deb, Christopher Orr, and Pr. Randy Asburry. If you've been tagged before, you have to think of seven MORE things to say. Unless, of course, you aren't a reader of this blog, in which case I suppose you'll never know you were tagged.

Tagged

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Ow! I don't even know how to do this game...but dear William Weedon has tagged me, and apparently I am supposed to share seven true things about myself. As if anybody wanted to know...

Okay, okay.

1.) I grew up in an Army family; we traveled a lot. When we were stationed in Germany, my parents (and I) made the excellent decision to send me to a German school instead of the American. I went there two years and would not trade the experience. I had to take religion, too. The two established, state churches were the Katolische and the Evangelishe. I chose to take instruction in the latter, which meant Lutheran catechism, once a week.

2.) Six months or so ago, a social worker from hospice came to my father’s room in the retirement home to interview him and Mom and me. After a review of our family history and everybody’s feelings about it, the social worker said, “It sounds to me like the theme running through all this is gratitude.” Dad said, “That’s exactly right,” and Mom and I nodded tearfully. That’s true. There have been hard times and good times, heartbreaks and rejoicing, but the overall result, when we look back, is gratitude.

3.) Demetrios and I sold a property recently. He wants to use the money to buy a place to live in England or Scotland. I’m thinking an adorable, thatched-roof, stone cottage on some windswept moor, as if we could begin to afford that. He’s thinking (more realistically!) a tiny flat in a city like Liverpool or Glasgow. He likes city life, with lots of people all around. Liverpool or Glasgow sounds dreary to me, but he says I will love the way of life there, and okay, I can definitely appreciate the advantages of a northern climate from about mid-June to mid-August when Greece is an oven.

4.) I have two dreams. One is to live somewhere like Hawaii or Puerto Rico, where I can snorkel over a coral reef year-round, never see snow, and never have to wear a muffler or gloves or a winter coat. That’s the secular, carnal self dreaming that. Another side of me dreams of living in Russia, cold winter and all, and working, for minimal pay, at the orphanage I visited there, and having access to all those church services in Old Slavonic, with Russian music! And sharing the sweet communion of friendship with my “family” there, my godson and his parents (and brand new sister), and his grandparents. As between Hawaii and Russia, Greece seems a pretty good compromise! There’s an orphanage within walking distance of here (the one from which Mena was adopted!) and if we do end up spending most of every year here, I shall check that out.

5.) Demetrios is not the reason I became Orthodox. In fact, I met him in an Orthodox church I had already been attending for more than 3 years (without any intention of becoming Orthodox). I became Orthodox when I saw what a wealth of “stuff” (Tradition) Orthodoxy had that nobody else did. Not just, love your enemy, but HOW to go about loving your enemy. Not just forgive your brother, but HOW to accomplish that. St. Dorotheos of Gaza (I think it is) has a 26-step program for forgiving somebody! And it’s so cool because it’s so true. For example, one stage is when you no longer speak evil of a person, but you take a certain delight in it if someone else speaks evil of him! A sure sign you aren’t there yet. All this “stuff”, spiritual how-to, biblical commentary, etc., etc., I realized, was true teaching, and nobody else seemed to make much use of it. So I knew this was the True Church, years after I had given up supposing such a thing could exist.

6.) When I was a lonely ten-year-old (with a brother and sister 13 months apart who may as well have been twins), I prayed every night for a baby sister, to be my own. About a year later, she was born. Mom said it was going to be a boy and she would name him Christopher Robin, but I said it would be a girl and it was, named Barbara. She has cancer. It started five years ago in her breast. A year ago, on September 18, a metastasis was removed from her brain. This past April 18, one was partially removed from her spine. Then two spots appeared on her liver. She is cancer-free now, and hopefully forever. She became Orthodox last December 4, the feast of St. Barbara. Deb is her godmother; she’s the sister of Cindi (Mrs. William) Weedon.

7.) I’ve spoken twice to my guardian angel, over the telephone, I mean. I thought I was talking to a black policewoman who called herself, “Officer Childs.” She even spelled it for me, at my request. She gave me the information I so desperately needed. She told me how to go about verifying the information, and I later did, and it checked out in every detail, and it saved my family from disaster. She made me promise to call her back “at this same number when your nightmare is over, and tell me how it came out.” I did, but nobody at that number, or any number of any law enforcement agency in town, had ever heard of any “Officer Childs.” The only female officers in “Tel-Com” (Telephone Communications, which she had told me was her department) were Jones and Evans, both Caucasian. A private detective I knew vowed to find her for me, free of charge, but after a lot of investigation, all he could say was what the Greek priest also said, “It’s got to have been your guardian angel.” Indeed. Come to think of it, I wasn’t Orthodox then, either. I was an Episcohindubuddhapalian.

Now I'm supposed to tag someone else. Later! I've just been interruped. Friends want us to come for dinner.