Sandburg's Lincoln

 

… General O. O. Howard’s right arm was shattered, and when he met General Phil Kearney, who had lost his left arm in Mexico, the two men shook hands on Howard’s saying, “Hereafter we buy our gloves together.”

 

…

 

In a little wilderness clearing at Chancellorsville, a living soldier had come upon a dead one sitting with his back to a tree, looking at first sight almost alive enough to hold a conversation. He had sat there for months, since the battle the year before that gave him his long rest. He seemed to have a story and a philosophy to tell if the correct approach were made and he could be led to quiet discussion. The living soldier, however, stood frozen in his foot tracks a few moments, gazing at the ashen face and the sockets where the eyes had withered – then he picked up his feet, let out a cry and ran. He had interrupted a silence where the slants of silver moons and the music of varying rains kept company with the one against the tree who sat so speechless, though having much to say.

 

…

 

Just two of many excerpts that appealed to me reading Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (found on pages 171-172 and 282-283 of my 1974 Dell paperback). O to write like that! I suppose a deep-depth sounding of poetry should coincide with the writing of the Great American Novel …

 

Thanksgiving 2022

Well, the girls had off for the week and the Mrs. took vacation time, so I did, too. We decided to motor directly east 1,100 miles to visit my mother-in-law in Hilton Head, South Carolina. We hadn’t been there since summer 2019, and she was celebrating her 80th birthday just after Thanksgiving.

To be honest, the trip had its ups and downs. The biggest up was my nine-day respite from work, especially after the intense effort I had to put in the week prior to get ahead of the curve on my return.

Other ups? The drive east was remarkably fun. Relaxing, scenic, low-pressure. I’m used to taking I-95 south from New Jersey to South Carolina to get to Hilton Head. That involves about a half-dozen toll booths, long patches of 55 mph speeding zones (the entire state of Delaware, for example), and driving through several megacities. The 10 miles before and after hitting Washington DC would take us two hours to get through with all the unpredictable traffic. This eastern commute through the northern parts of the Deep South held none of that.

On the way east. Coming back west, however, we were stuck driving in a raging gale force storm all afternoon, so that was a quite unpleasant white knuckler.

North-South was an 865-mile trip for us, and we’d do it in about 15 hours. This time we broke up the trip into two days, stopping about two-thirds in at a Marriott or a Holiday Inn. Going there we stopped in Montgomery, Alabama, and had a pleasant dinner in a bar and grill walking distance from the hotel. Coming back we stopped in historic Vicksburg, Mississippi, but, try as I might, I could not locate the Civil War battlefield before we were out of the area. I’ll have to get back there again sometime in the near future.

Speaking of historic Vicksburg, I did put away 190 pages of Carl Sandburg’s biography of our Civil War president, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. And I also found a trio of other paperbacks thrifting on the island with Patch: a gnarled, well-worn biography of Einstein, a gnarled and well-worn copy of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and, believe it or not, a gnarled and well-worn Treasury of Greatest Poetry, the latter of which I read profusely before bed each night.

As usual, we ate like royalty. I had fish and chips, linguini bolognese, shrimp and grits, fish tacos, and, on Thanksgiving, the Mrs.’s awesome pumpkin pie (of which I ate perhaps 3/4). Thrice I did a morning walk listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, trekking along the perimeter of the cove where we stayed, and once Patch and I did an evening walk on the docks. The room we rented had a Bingo board game, which the girls had never encountered before, so we had to play that as a family three or four nights, complete with stupid challenges and duel-like allegations of cheating. The little ones also assembled a thousand piece puzzle. It was fun.

And yes, I did do some deep thinking.

Nana had a great birthday. My wife hooked her up with some Chanel bling and I bequeathed her my copy of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. (Nana is a retired architect and current reading enthusiast.)

The downs were the aforementioned drive home in the rain (much like driving with a fire hose blasting at your front windshield for four hours), a week of overcast and cool weather, a senior citizen who went horn happy on me as I was backing up out of a parking space. Our room was above a wine bar, and one night a patron tourist had a bit too much of the grape and woke my daughter up barfing below her bedroom window. But it was still great to be back on the island.

We’re staying local next month for Christmas, though we may drive out to see my sister-in-law and her family in Austin one day. This would be a return to where I saw the Museum of the Pacific War back in July. Though this time I’d like to check out something a little more … spooky. The Marfa Lights are way too far west (420 miles) but … the Museum of the Weird is located right in downtown Austin! Now if only I can persuade my family to go …

 

Some pics:

Thanksgiving Plans

  

Man, what a crazy two weeks it’s been.

I had a regular physical at the end of September with my new doctor. He’s a young Americanized Indian dude, very upbeat and positive, a runner, and very friendly and outgoing. My concerns all turned out to be of the “nothing to worry about but let’s keep an eye on it” variety. One thing he did want, since I haven’t been to a cardiologist in several years, was a complete “snapshot” of my heart.

My blood pressure was a little high, so, yep, he put me on the meds and the BP came down immediately. I also was a very good patient in that I actually followed doctor advice. For the month of October I avoided soda, pasta, sweets, and walked/lifted weights three times a week. Result? I lost ten pounds. On my follow-up visit just before Halloween he seemed very pleased with my results.

He also scheduled me for bloodwork, which came back “normal” for me: slightly elevated cholesterol and obnoxiously elevated triglycerides. Both should come down if I stick to my diet / exercise regimen over time. There’s a follow-up for that in March. Then I went to a cardiologist and she, after taking in my very detailed cardiac rap sheet, ordered me to get a very specific type of bloodwork done and referred me to another facility to get an image of my heart. I’m currently waiting on the results of both of that, though I haven’t had a heart issue in a very long time.

Well, enough of that, except to note that all this driving around to keep appointments kept me busy.

Work has been insane, too.

Basically I’ve had to do two weeks work over the past five days in order to make-up for, uh, my announcement to follow down below. To do this I worked a couple hours last Saturday, a couple hours Sunday, and clocked in an hour early every day. As a result, I’m exhausted, and had very little free time in the daylight. I’m starting to dream about spreadsheets.

Enough of that.

All this is to explain, meekly and humbly, the three week dearth of postings here.

So the big announcement … the family is loading the SUV and driving out to Hilton Head for the next nine days! We’ll be visiting my mother-in-law, celebrating her birthday and Thanksgiving, but we’ll also be staying in a room overlooking the bay with a balcony and various amenities, similar to the ones we’ve stayed in annually until this overhyped thing known as the Wu Flu shut everything down for two years. We’ll be back and the island will be at a peak capacity of 25% that of summer (due to being off-season with few tourists), so it’ll be very cozy and pleasant. Looking to do some extensive reading, relaxing, and thinking.

And no, I will not be bringing the laptop. So again there will be a dearth of posting, this time for nine days.

I have some thinking to do about my Great American Novel, about my belief systems, about my health and habits, and about what I want to accomplish in the third third of my life remaining. Hopefully I’ll have some paradigm shifts and zeitgeist shattering insights.

In years past I’ve been reading Dickens around Thanksgiving, but not so last year or now this year. I think Dickens and Thanksgiving forms a perfect trifecta with my parents’ house in Pennsylvania. Next year we’ll try for that, and I’ll bring one of the old English master’s works with me that I have not tackled. This year I’m going to try my hand with a bucket list item, Lincoln: The War Years, by Carl Sandburg.

Happy Thanksgiving all!

Book Review: The Pillars of the Earth

 

© 1989 by Ken Follett

 

Finally! A semi-bucket list item crossed off with satisfaction.

The Pillars of the Earth has been on my radar for over twenty years. Many is the time I perused a library or book store shelf and plucked it off for closer inspection. But the novel is a hefty investment and not for the light-hearted. Recognizing this, I kicked it down the road far too many times than I should have.

This was the first book I purchased after we moved down here to Texas last July. And still it sat on my bookshelf for 14 months! Yet at the tail end of September I took the plunge, and was well-rewarded for it. My paperback copy has 983 pages, in six Parts plus a Prologue. It took me exactly 40 days to wind my way through (though I did concurrently read two much shorter books and a couple of plays by ancient Greek writer Aeschylus). That’s just less than 25 pages a day, but in truth when I did read it I found it difficult to put down.

The Pillars of the Earth is a deceptively simple tale of a noble goal – the building of a cathedral during the Middle Ages. The action – yes, it’s a story with plenty of action – takes place over the span of 40 years, with that prologue happening 12 years earlier (which sets up the backstories of two major characters, slowly revealed over the course of the tale). Sure, there’s lots of architectural exposition tossed in, but man did I not anticipate the amount of political intrigue – often deadly political intrigue – involved in constructing a House of God.

England at this time (the early-to-mid 1100s) is torn by civil war, leading local lords, barons, and earls to rampage without consequence throughout the countryside. The clergy stands as a bulwark against this lawlessness; that is, the clergy that is not corrupt and willing participants. The peasants are starving, the rents are too high, outlaws fill the woodlands, and life is cheap, nasty, and short.

But a man named Brother Phillip, abbot of Kingsbridge, wants to build a glorious cathedral to rival the masterpieces beginning to dot the continent.

The Pillars of the Earth, and my hand

There’s a cast of about twenty regular characters throughout the novel, mostly salt of the earth peasant types with a sprinkling of royals to varying degrees and a handful of religious brothers. Some are nice and decent, pleasant chaps and ladies you’d like to spend an evening with eating roasted hare out in the forest. Some are a bit nastier, others quite nasty. All the characters, however, are a thousand percent real, multi-dimensional, filled with hopes and dreams and desire beyond filling that belly with warm rabbit meat.

Of the protagonists I identified with Brother Phillip the most. A touching backstory, a compelling rationale for building this cathedral, and a simple man of the cloth, putting his faith wholeheartedly into the thing which most of us do not. I also liked Tom the Builder, the man Phillip saves from starvation to design and construct his new church.

But I think The Pillars of the Earth shines best in its villains – two of the worst I’ve read this side of a George R. R. Martin novel. One’s the brains, one’s the brawn. There’s young William of Hamleigh, who attains earlhood though trickery and deceit and the entire surrounding towns must suffer for it over many, many years, and who nearly destroys Kingsbridge itself in one of his rages. And then there’s oily Bishop Waleran, Phillip’s sworn enemy, who will stop at nothing to keep the cathedral from being built – and I mean nothing. True to the aforementioned Mr. Martin, these two villains and their henchmen subject our heroes to a never-ending battering ram of brutality time and time and time again.

It’s a very emotionally wringing written novel. There’s GOOD – characters falling in love immediately; characters falling ever so slowly in love over many months; the spiritual triumph of good over evil, which involves the getting up time and again after being knocked down; and many extremely clever (perhaps too clever, given the time period) solutions to outwit the schemes of evil foes. There’s BAD – not one but two brutal rapes; pillaging and murder; two hangings; a woman’s death in childbirth; a baby left out to die in the cold (though it’s rescued by a man of God).

There’s a sequel which I may check out in a year or two. Not sure. As good as the novel is, it did take something out of me. It was an ordeal, but a worthy ordeal, much like the constructing of a cathedral in England in the 1100s. I hope to become a better writer having read it.

Grade: solid A.

 

Public Service Announcement

 

A very important and timely reminder. That is all.

Book Review to follow tomorrow, with a Thanksgiving announcement on Friday.

Thanks!