1. It's 8:30 p.m. on November 25th. Normally, I would have written this blog post in the morning, twelve hours ago.
But, I was out the door at 5:45 this morning, rocketing to the Sacred Heart Medical Center where I had blood drawn and tested, an ultrasound of my bladder and the kidney I received, and I talked with Dr. Murad about my morning labs and the ultrasound.
More details tomorrow -- but because of post-Sacred Heart be-popping around, I didn't return home until around 4:00 this afternoon.
And now I'm blogging about Sunday.
I spent much of the day reading more deeply into the contradictory, complicated, and increasingly obsessive life of Timothy McVeigh.
I thought back to one of the riddling experiences I've had over the years with the plays of Shakespeare.
I thought about Macbeth, one of Shakespeare's most violent and obsessive characters.
I remember how the more the play revealed about Macbeth, the murkier my understanding of Macbeth became.
Shakespeare creates ambiguity, not by withholding details, but by piling them on, unfolding more and more of Macbeth's many dimensions.
I'll write more about this later, but as I learn more and more about Timothy McVeigh's life and how his thinking expanded and shifted and he sharpened his sense of purpose, the more mysterious he becomes to me.
No, I don't think he's a Shakespearean tragic hero at all, but I also don't think you can reduce his character or his turn to terrorism to a few simple reasons.
Nor do I think this turn was predictable. It might look, looking back, inevitable, but I don't think it was predictable.
2. So earlier in the week, I made an eggplant sauce to serve over pasta. Today, Debbie marinated chicken party wings in a tamari sauce and baked them along with roasting thick onion slices and she reheated leftover pasta with leftover eggplant sauce and sautéed zucchini, all in one cast iron pan, and, taken together, these very different food items worked together beautifully as a great dinner.
3. St. Augustine wrote ". . . when the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil --not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked."
I think the book I'm reading about Timothy McVeigh could be titled, The Turning. I don't know if one can pinpoint the moment when McVeigh began turning from a principled man, a man of strong convictions and high ideals, to a man who abandoned higher ideals and turned to performing a violent act of mass killing in the name of ideals. But it's what he did and as I read more, I'll write more about McVeigh's turn to unimaginable destruction and murder, to acting out his convictions in such a horrific way,
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