14. Working Hard

Thursday 9 January.  Saffron Walden.  7:30 a.m.  Dark outside.  I don't think of my age much any more, except that I am in my 40's.  When someone asks me my age, I have to stop and think, am I 40, 41 or 42?  I'm not sure what happened to my points of reference, unless it has something to do with this year away from work.  Yesterday morning, after a fitful night's sleep, primarily, I suppose, because of the grouse dinner the night before, an overheated room and the same party (of ghosts) outside our window between 3:40 and 4:00 a.m., I had a feeling as we left Edinburgh that I wished I belonged somewhere, and didn't feel as if I did.  Even the prospect of Saffron Walden offered little comfort.  Not surprisingly, after a long morning of travelling and our safe arrival at our comfortable abode, I felt differently than I felt in the dismal and dark early morning hours.

It is wet and windy outside, one of the three or four storms like this I can remember here: the sound of water falling on the gravel outside echoes against the sides of the house, and we hear the occasional whoosh of the wind. 

I have been practicing my "whooshes" for Thomas, as I tell him the story of the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs.  I've told it to him four or five times since New Year's and each time I expand it: making the telling a bit longer, elaborating on the details, making it better – or so I think.  Thomas loves the end and laughs when I send my wolf down the chimney, then out again with a hot bottom.  He can hardly wait to hear that part.   

My favorite thing Thomas now says is that when he grows up, "I will be a doctor, and I will make you better, Daddy."  This sort of fits with his prior habit of cleaning up, i.e., health, cleaning up and good organization, though I don't think he does much of that any more.  He usually has an excuse, "I'm too tired."  (My father is a cleaner upper.)

Thomas says "pickur" for picture.

Same day, 11:15 a.m.  Raining all morning, with wind, but not very cold.  No frost.

At mass this morning I mediated on the words: "He so loved the world that he gave his only son to death for us."  These are some interesting ideas.  How can a father give away a son?  Granted that it was a death "freely accepted," the passage still implies a dominion of father over son no longer suited to our times, though a control which we understand might have existed in the "old days."  Is this just a father with greater wisdom than the son,?  All of these human understandings seem ill suited to understanding God.  They seem to imply a dominion of God the Father over the Son which does not comport with perfect fatherhood.  I mean, ordering your son to death or giving away your son!  How do you own your son?  How much of my problem lies in trying to understand a 2000 year old image of father/son?  How much is based on my lack of a better understanding of the nature of God?

I saw myself this morning (on the way to mass) admire the figure of a young woman and then almost at the same time feel my spirits rise as I saw a little child (3 perhaps) in wellies crossing the street.  Feminine beauty and childhood innocence are two sides of the same coin: innocence and potential.  I thought more about this as I gave my sign of peace in church to middle aged (old, medium and young) women.  (Most days there are not more than three or four of us at mass.)  The women were attractive, but what caught my eye was the bright look on their faces and in their eyes, signs of intelligence and friendliness, unlike the 20 year old mother, whose youthful beauty and figure dominates my perception to the exclusion (at least initially) of any thought of brain power.

Lastly this morning, I thought of death.  I wondered if the move to the west as the U.S. developed is symbolic of an attempt to move away from death.  In Britain there are graveyards everywhere and one cultivates one's ancestors, depending on them for so much, something we definitely do not do in America.  How do these attitudes distinguish us?  Perhaps it frees us in America to think more of today than tomorrow and to be more adventurous and more willing to try new ideas than people over here.

I remember the essayist on the radio who humorously observed that Americans think that death is optional. All of our jogging, health consciousness, cosmetic surgery, etc. is aimed at beating the clock. Are the conspicuous lack of graveyards in our everyday journeys (at least mine) a cause or effect of this attitude? As usual, hard to tell which is just a symptom and which is the disease itself.

From our "Front" Door
Looking Across Westfields Lane in the Snow 

St. John's