Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to colored toilet paper. . . . Looking out at the Aviara hillside in Carlsbad, CA with the Batiquitos Lagoon below. The air is clear and crisp after rain came through yesterday. Very beautiful, quite relaxing. . . . Hard to believe that December is almost here. This begins a time of transition: from Fall into Winter, 2009 to 2010, past frustrations to future hope. It’s hard to believe this is our first and only vacation week of the year. At my age I once thought vacations would run 2-3 weeks at a crack in exotic locations. But life has a way of finding paths of its own, our best efforts notwithstanding. . . .
Came all this way and could not watch SC-UCLA game last night. Fox Sports West showed the Kings hockey game instead of the football game. It ran on Fox’s Prime Ticket in Southern California, which the villas of Aviara (and many other places out here, apparently) does not carry. So, I’ll have to go back to Dallas and my DVR to see the game. As daughter Jennie would say, crazy. . . . Rick Neuheisel, UCLA coach, continues to show that he is an unprincipled jerk. Meanwhile, Pete Carroll’s charges showed up with apparently more resolve than they brought to the Oregon and Stanford games. . . . Meanwhile, Charlie Weis appears to be history at Notre Dame. We’ve never been too fond of Notre Dame coaches, Charlie among them. Though we did enjoy taking it to Ara Parseghian year after year, save the 51-0 beating he oversaw in 1966. That was a low point in my young and naive life. . . .
Going to a memorial service on Tuesday for Kathi Dunham Svarc. Way too soon. It’s hard to believe, though the suffering she experienced over the last three-and-one-half years as she bravely and faithfully fought ovarian cancer and it’s spread was nothing short of remarkable. It doesn’t really seem all that long ago that we were carefree teenagers at Huntington Beach. . . . A year or two into her battle I shared with Kathi C.S. Lewis‘s words near the close of The Last Battle, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia: “‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended: this is the morning.’ “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is
the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. “But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” . . .
I am struck by the power of one’s work culture to feed or starve the spirit. And to promote or punish creativity. The reality of it all is so much more powerful than the intellectual pondering of it. . . . . Saul Bass, in his iconic short film, Why Man Creates, comes to this conclusion: “Why does man create? and determines that man creates to simply state, ‘I Am.'” Where the value of people is diminished, where I am recedes into bureaucracy and control, the spirit is crushed and “I am” degenerates into “I once was.” . . .
Meanwhile, we settle for less. We blame our diminished hopes on the economy or health or age. C.S. Lewis says enough of that in The Weight of Glory: “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
And then there was the waddle of penguins that was always accused of being overdressed.