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Showing posts from 2008

Before TV, There Were Porches

Annie Dillard once wrote "The creator...churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care." Sitting on my front porch this morning, I was overwhelmed by the gratuity of nature while watching a robin bathe in a puddle. It rained last night, lots of good lightning late into the darkness. The road when I woke this morning was still pockmarked with dampness, and across the street along the chainlink fence a long puddle remained between it and the road. I sat with a mug of tea, letting my morning buzz of thoughts calm into a navigable flow. I watched with delight as a robin threw his pudgy red body into the puddle and shimmy into the dampness, fluffing and spasming in the water to get every feather wet. With a last shake, he flew above the neighbor's garden onto an electrical wire and began to dry himself in the same way he washed himself, fluffing and shaking. He would pause sometimes, as if he had gotten d

Worth Its Weight In Years

Wow. It's a lot of heavier than you think. And I don't mean in grams or karats. I got engaged yesterday. Officially. Engaged. With the ring and the one knee and the tears. And it was just how it should've been. It was just right. The story. Dave works in a machine shop down on OSU campus, playing wth melted metal and giants of machining from the second world war, happy to end his work days smelling of coolant and wearing smears of oil and metal shavings. It's a world of manufacturing, which I had no concept of before meeting him. My dad writes something and shows me papers for work; Dave takes a block of metal and turns into something of practical use I can hold in my hand. It's a totally different world. I love watching, the deceptive look of melt-your-flesh liquid metal, the smell of cutting metal and grease, the movements of the machines. There's an unexpected art to it all, and an incredibly meticulous element. Knowing that I like to watch him work, sometime

Snow Day

What a marvelous weekend. In a "blizzard" that set record breaking cumulation for a 24-hour period, as snow shut down Columbus with depths that my Buffalo-born roommate had not seen since coming to Ohio, chaos began to creep Friday night and was then muffled by two glorious feet of snow Saturday morning. Dana and Beth and Claire came downstairs with the marvelous realization that their jobs were in malls that were now closed by the level 2 snow emergency. After dragging a couch from the other room into our front room, where we could watch the drifts pile and our cars disappear, we hunkered down for a morning slumber party. For a while we watched the morning news, a disgruntled anchorwoman reminding viewers every ten minutes that they had been there since SIX this morning and will have CONTINUOUS coverage of the weather ALL DAY LONG. And when one field reporter got so desperate for new ideas that she stacked two bags of burgers on one another to portray the depth of the snow,

Because Tracts Lead So Many to Christ...

My boyfriend likes guns. Not for hunting, so fanatics hold onto your red paint cans, but for the enjoyment he gets out of them as both a boy and and as a mechanical engineering major. The boy in him loves the "bang!", the ME major loves that it's a machine. And, as everyone knows, everything comes back to guns. Like politics? Comes back to guns. The number of times I've heard that boy lament that Democrats will get into office and guns will be all but flatly illegal... And then I heard this comment in a movie. A bad movie, but a funny line. Ben Stiller and his father are New York-natives looking for this women Stiller fell for in Oklahoma and his father cautions him, "We're in Bible belt country now, people here have guns!" Yeah, conservatives like guns, and Oklahoma is Republican to my understanding. I saw Dave for a few minutes tonight, and he tore open a package he had just gotten in the mail. I asked if it was a gun part (which is a rhetorical quest

Dropped Into the Headlines

"Something is wrong with him. He can't cry," Carlene murmured with a sage nod with her gnarled old hands on her cane. I chewed on a banana chip, comtemplating the past couple days, wondering if something was wrong with me for not crying. Women were walking around the store either without make up or smeared mascara; Maria started crying hard into the dip of my shoulder when I hugged her; I haven't once truly teared up. One of my coworkers was killed, and I can't stop asking if something is wrong with me. I was walking to work on Friday morning. It was the clearest and coldest day we've had for weeks, and I reveled in the frigid sunshine. Walking down Arcadia, I passed East High School, and noticed two news cameras on the brick sidewalk, pointed at the school building. A tall man with glasses and a long grey overcoat came out of the school and his path intercepted mine. As I stepped around the cameramen, a young brunette reporter with a sympathetic face greeted