January 11, 2009 @ 9:40 pm | Filed under:
Books Film critic David Denby, writing of his experience revisiting, in his forties, the Great Books
core courses he had taken as a freshman at Columbia University thirty years earlier:
I was reading seriously, reading Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, all the Greeks. But I needed more time. Life got in the way—a good life, but in the way. I had always known it would, but I was determined not to rope off my school adventure, not to become a hermit, anything medieval or cloistered, but to remain a modern middle-class man, living my life as normally as possible. As if I had any choice! There were days when I wanted to be free just to study, to eat at any hour and sleep whenever I wanted to, unshaven and raw as an eighteen-year-old—and then the little one, Thomas, would take my hand and lead me into his room to show me something he had drawn, pulling me away from Plato, and I was exasperated but grateful, because a child’s hand is like nothing else on earth.
January 11, 2009 @ 12:33 pm | Filed under:
Pregnancy My traffic has been through the roof these past few days, and while I’m sure much of that is due to the magnetic allure of Angelica’s milk-white shoulders, it dawned on me that a sizable number of the hits are from friends dropping by to see if there’s any baby news. This became all the more apparent when I switched the glitchy Twitter widget (which scrolled my tweets in the sidebar) to a just-plain-Twitter-button, and the outclick rate to my Twitter page quadrupled. May I just say it is awfully sweet to know how much y’all care? 🙂
But there’s nothing to report. Great checkup at the OB on Friday. Baby’s got plenty of fluid, excellent heart rate, is a happy camper. If nothing happens before Tuesday, I’ll go back for another round of checking up.
BUT SOMETHING IS BOUND TO HAPPEN BEFORE TUESDAY.
Ahem.
Meanwhile, my mama is spoiling me rotten, doing all my household work PLUS beautifying the backyard in the most magnificent way. She is a treasure, my mother, let me tell you. My daddy is pretty swell too—and it’s nice of him to part with my mom for two weeks so she could come entertain my younguns and do my dishes and fill me full of cornbread and ham.
Anyway, all’s well, and I’m in good hands, and we’re all hoping this little person decides to join the party very soon. As in: today would be nice!
