1. I drove up to the Shoshone Medical Center around noon. I have become a familiar sight to several of the staff at the hospital. I'm the guy with "his little box". My little box is a mailer. Inside is a styrofoam shell that holds a vial to be filled with blood, a label for the phlebotomist to date and initial, and a plastic bag which holds the shell with the labeled vial inside and goes in the mailer, the little box. So, after I registered at the front desk, one of phlebotomists arrived in the lobby and said, "Ah! The guy with his little box! Come on! Let's go take care of this!" And she did. Now my vial of blood will take flight to Baltimore and the U of Maryland Transplantation Center will have another fresh tube of my blood on hand to test should a kidney come available to make sure the donor's kidney and my blood are compatible.
2. Today I finished reading Great Expectations. I shut off my Android tablet and sat and stared for several minutes. I snapped out of my trance because it was time for Maggie and Charly to eat and we had no dog food on hand. At Yoke's, I wandered the aisles, thinking about what I experienced reading this book.
Against my will, I suddenly felt a cold fear arrest my chest. It was a once familiar dread that used to grip me in graduate school: What am I going to write in the paper I've been assigned about this book?
I haven't been a graduate student for twenty-six years and haven't had a paper due on a novel I read for over thirty years. Nonetheless, that old dread returned, as if it were the inevitable consequence of finishing a novel.
I realized at Yoke's, as I strolled past cans of sardines and tuna and anchovies, that that dread was grounded in the way I never really wanted to write scholarly papers on novels or poems or plays in graduate school.
I wanted to write sermons, secular sermons, sermons appropriate for secular studies. Maybe I should use the word "lecture". Maybe I wanted to write lectures, not papers. Maybe, in my mind, a lecture is a secular sermon.
For me, the works of writers like Dickens or Shakespeare or George Eliot or Jane Austen, didn't work as sources of theoretical scholarship, but were sources of a more common wisdom and insight about what it means to be human and helped deepen my understanding of goodness, compassion, interdependence and other human virtues as well as the darker, destructive aspects of being human like coldness, selfishness, jealousy, or anger, to name a few.
As an instructor, I think I succeeded in exploring these matters with students in the classroom; I think the two lectures I gave in the Copia Lecture Series over fifteen years ago also succeeded. But when it came to writing papers for academic courses or to writing my dissertation, I never figured out how to succeed. I think a way to do this existed. I fell far short of doing so. It was my failure.
As I made my way to the dog food aisle, I thought about how, in Great Expectations, Charles Dickens examines ways that coming of age as an adult is largely a softening of the heart, of growing more and more flexible, of becoming increasingly capable of gladly communicating to the necessity of others. In Dickens' telling of his story, this softening is inseparable from disappointment, brokenness, regret, and periods, especially in Pip's life, of self-centeredness and an unwarranted sense of superiority. This softening is a kind of redemption. Pip and other broken characters' maturity, their coming into their own, is evidenced not by their worldly success, not by wealth and status, but by the blossoming of their soft and flexible natures, by their embrace of goodness, a goodness which is best understood and experienced as a social virtue, not so much as a measure of the individual.
3. I browned two chicken thighs. In the bottom of our Dutch oven, I placed sliced lemons, fresh basil leaves, and chopped red onion. I placed the thighs on top of this pile and over the top I poured a mixture of a can of coconut milk, green curry paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, and brown sugar. I had a pork stock bubbling in my crockpot and poured a cup of pork stock over this mixture. I brought the liquid to a boil, quickly turned down the heat, put on the lid, and let the chicken slowly cook for over an hour. I had some leftover rice in the refrigerator. I removed the chicken, warmed up the rice in the liquid, and soon I ate a bowl of chicken, curry sauce, and rice for dinner.
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