Although there’s nothing going on here to rival the election miasma or the American League playoff series, or even Chris Locke’s amazing Sunday, the past twenty-four hours have offered plenty of attention-grabbing developments.
First, Pippa will be coming home in a couple of weeks. She sized up life in Durham and life in Evanston, and estimated that the benefits of living up north here outweighed the benefits of living down south. She reached the decision with impressive calm and diplomacy. She astonishes Margaret and me time after time.
Margaret made the plane arrangements last night, late, and we figured out that Saturday would be the day. She and Pip will fly in, and on Tuesday, Margaret will fly out. Si and I will scramble a little to make sure Pippa’s covered through our busy schedules (AKMA: busy with classes, meetings, appointments, services, sermons; Si: busy sleeping and going to friends’ houses to watch movies and commiserate about [other] fickle teenagers), but everything will work just fine.
Second, I covered services for one of my former students this morning (I think that may be a first) and was assisted by another. I led worship for the early “traditional-language” and the midmorning “contemporary-language” services, and I taught the Adult Education group between the two. The Adult group was a blast; I’m always excited to work with people who want to learn more about Scripture and the church, and these parishioners could have pursued our discussion for hours longer. The services went fine; Harry was preaching and deaconing, so I didn’t have much to do. The services went fine, although (sorry to talk technical-Episcopalian stuff here) the second service was Prayer C, already not my very favorite, chanted all the way through. Now, I love singing the service, so that’s fine with me — but at St. Giles, they use the Simple Tone and I’m strictly a Solemn Tone guy, to the extent that I have a very hard time adapting to Simple Tone ever, at all. Singing all the way through Prayer C, to an alien tone, while trying to keep track of my manual ritual actions, overmatched me for a few phrases about two-thirds of the way through the chant. I lost track of my tone, and just wavered up and down a few tones till I got back onto the track at one of the cadences.
Third, Bea ran away from home for a few minutes this evening. She came back, but it would’ve been catastrophic if she hadn’t.
I was awake late last night and up early today, and even though I fell asleep at the computer for a while this afternoon (“Huh? What? Oh, hi, Si!”), I should retire soon. It’s hard to go to sleep while the Red Sox haven’t yet successfully eliminated themselves, but I’m pretty groggy.
DRMA: Power Of The Gospel by Ben Harper; Jennifer She Said by Lloyd Cole And The Commotions; Bye Bye Baby by Little Hat Jones; Waiting by Cake; Lord, In My Soul by Trumpeteers; God Don't Like It by Elder A. Johnson; Brilliant Mind by Furniture; At the Hop by Devendra Banhart; Satisfied Mind by Ben Harper; Float On by Ben Lee
Posted by AKMA at October 17, 2004 10:52 PM | TrackBack