Twenty Years at the Same Location

 Twenty years ago this past weekend, we moved into this house. Our first two nights here we ate at restaurants, for the kitchen sink wasn't in place. On the third night, we ate at home and did the dishes in the basement utility sink. The radiators were not connected, and were pushed out of the way as suited us.

The house had not been lived in for something like five years when we bought it, and had not been maintained for some years before that. During the first heavy rain after we moved in, we found water rolling down the attic steps; a bit of plywood, nailed against joists, remediated that. During another early storm, we watched with interest, almost awe, as a gutter shot water several feet out from house.

We brought some skills to the work, and learned more, but we needed a competent contractor, whom we eventually found. Still, we did a great deal of the work ourselves. We refinished every double-hung window, we removed all the old varnish from woodwork, and restored it, we painted every room in the house at least once.

Before we got to twenty years, each of us had lived here longer than anywhere else. We lived in Maryland for fourteen years, and before that my wife's longest was twelve years in Central Pennsylvania, mine was twelve years outside of Cleveland.

Lists and Litanies

 Lately I have noticed that journalists think that "litany" is a fancier word for "list", or perhaps means "long list". In today's newspaper, one writes that the failure of Rudolph Giuliani's bankruptcy filing exposes him to a litany of creditors. I wonder how anyone so understanding "litany" came to hear of the word in the first place.

It is true that some litanies are built on lists: of divine or Marian titles, of saints, of sins to be protected against. But the list as such is not a litany, without the response from the congregation, say "Have mercy on us" or "Pray for us". The word derives from the Greek "litaino" or "litaneuo", beseech or request.

Pollen

 At the end of June and in July, lilies bloom in the garden. They are beautiful to see,

 

 

and in places they are hard to brush past without touching the stamens. As you would suppose, the pollen that comes off on one's clothes is the color of ground red pepper. After a day or two, it fades to a yellow-brown like that of a turmeric stain.

Fortunately, the errands that take me past the lilies do not require good clothes.

Heavy Hitters

 Early on in a recent New Yorker piece about repeat memoirists, the author writes

To be fair, memoirs have exhibited a tendency to multiply ever since Augustine recalled pocketing those pears. His "Confessions", which began appearing around 397 C.E., were spread over thirteen books, each conceived as a distinct unit.

Well, the last four books consist of philosophical and theological reflections. And in this case "book" means something other than a hefty bound volume: the handiest copy of The Confessions on my shelves, Garry Wills's translation, runs to 340 pages, autobiography and the rest together. The modern memoir of a comparably young man, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, takes four hundred pages to cover fewer years.

The next sentence runs

In his wake, heavy hitters have included Diana Athill, Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, and Augusten Burroughs, each of whom have produced a proper shelf of memoirs.

Someone understanding the reference of "heavy hitters" could say whether it is a match card or a lineup card we should not trust the author with.