Back Again!

Well, it has been 9 weeks since I've written anything. I've been reminded about that more than once, so I'll do my best to write updates and all.

Today the summer program at Holden got going in full swing. We have a really good Teaching Staff so early in the summer, and the conversation should be lively indeed. Fred Niedner, who teaches theology at Valparaiso University is the Bible Study leader. This happens at 9 a.m. every morning Monday-Friday. He's very good, and today he got us thinking about biblical promises. The summer theme is All the Promises of God. He came up with a really good phrase:"the grammar of promise," which already appeared in Carol Hinderlie's excellent Vespers this evening.

We're into the summer worship schedule as well, with everything in the Village Center and a start time of 7:30 p.m., a half hour later than Fall-Winter-Spring. It makes for a late night, especially when there's a session after Vespers. Tonight David Wee, a retired St. Olaf College English professor, simply read poems by Billy Collins. They are wonderful and hilarious, and we had a great time listening. Today we also had sessions on American movies with Sam Graber who teaches American Studies at Valparaiso, and Melissa McBain who teaches theater and English at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. After dinner there was a writing workshop with poet Rebecca Wee, who also teaches at Augustana Rock Island, and is the daughter of David Wee. They are all very good, and it's hard to have to work and try to dash in and hear a whole session or even part of one. It's handy that our offices are right off the Koinonia balcony, as we can just slip in and out when we have a chance. We all try to go to the sessions, as it encourages the whole conversation of the Village.

For those of you following the ankle drama, things are really improving. Just in the last couple of days I've noticed a pretty significant change for the better. I've abandoned my hiking boots for trainers, and that seems to be going pretty well. This week I hope to get in some walks on the road to increase my exercise regime. It's still a long haul, but I'm encouraged each day.

I have been reading mostly mysteries (what a shock) especially because some new volumes from favorite authors appeared. Alexander McCall Smith's The Double Comfort Safari Club is really good, following new adventures of Precious Ramotswe and company. I really enjoy his gentle prose. There was one thing missing in this book. In each of the previous books, there is a little word picture that appears either on a front or back page. It looks like this:

africa

africa africa

africa africa africa

africa africa

africa

I've always enjoyed that, particularly after traveling to Tanzania. But it's not in this one. I discovered that his website has an actual pathway to ask him questions. I asked this about a month ago and have yet to receive an answer. I'll try again.

I read the latest Laurie King Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes book, The God of the Hive. It's a sequel to The Language of Bees. They are both very good, but you need to read them both in order. She's done an excellent job of creating this female counterpart to Sherlock Holmes.

I just finished the latest Elizabeth George, This Body of Death. At 726 pages, it's quite a tome. I have enjoyed these Inspector Lynley books from the beginning, but I think her usual adept characterizations failed in this one. Lynley seems a bit out of pattern in his choices, and some of the development of a new female officer doesn't ring quite true for me. But it is, as always, a great plot, and, when you come to the end, the title from Romans 7:24 is dead on. (So to speak.)

So there you have it for tonight. Now I get to go pick a new book to read. Yippee!

Wednesday Books

Well, the blog is back. I'm calling this Wednesday Books - plural - because I've had a lot of reading time over the last five weeks. On the morning of February 17 - Ash Wednesday - I stepped on some ice on the Chalet Hill outside our place. My left leg shot out at 60 mph, bringing my right ankle under and in. Although we did not know this until later in the day at the Lake Chelan Community Hospital when doctors and x-rays got involved, I badly broke my right ankle. I had 3.5 hours of surgery the next afternoon, and I now have 14 titanium screws and a plate in that ankle. So the last five weeks - and more weeks to come - have been about trauma, surgery, and ankle recovery. Finally this week I am feeling normal - with my ankle in a big cast. I cannot put any weight on it, so I get around in our apartment on a nifty wheeled "crutch substitute," as it's called it the medical world. They take me down the hill in a 1950's snow vehicle called the Imp (its real vehicle name - not a Holden nickname!). Until Tuesday, I was only going down on Sunday afternoons for dinner and church. Yesterday I spent all afternoon through dinner in the Village, getting up and down stairs with muscle (mine) and help, and with the assistance of a nifty stair-climber one of the carpenters made. So things are improving, but it is a long haul. Larry is fabulous in every regard with all this. I call him St. Larry.

So I've been reading lots of books. I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (spoken of with reverence in previous blogs) and it is indeed stunning from beginning to end. I read In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, which was the March selection of the Faith Women's Book Group which paid a lovely visit up here the first weekend of the month. I liked the novel very much, especially in its look into the cultural struggles of educated Egyptian women in the 1970's. Then I read the latest Karin Fossum, a Norwegian mystery writer. Her detective is Inspecter Sejer. This one is titled The Water's Edge. They all make you wonder about the effect of dark nights and deep fjords, but she's good at her craft, and the translations are excellent. I read Laurie King's The Language of Bees, the latest in her Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell series. I've enjoyed this series all along. I think she has convincingly found a female partner for Sherlock. She nicely weaves in Conan Doyle's character threads and Holmesian history to make it all compelling and believable. And she writes well. And now I have just finished catching up on The #1 Ladies Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith - I read five in a row! They are good. They are all the same length (about 200 pages) and his writing style is such that you just whip through them. But it's nice writing, and the musings and humor make them highly enjoyable reads. Today I started a novel called The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil. Seems pretty good so far - a nice story line that should be interesting, interlinking generations in a small English town along with some very high-flying journalistic types.

In the meantime there is Holy Week and Easter. They are well in hand. Just have to get down there to get it all organized! Holden is a great place for help in time of need, and I am very grateful for that.

That's all for this Wednesday. Now that I have some energy and focus back, I may blog more often. (I know, I know, I've said that before...)

Wednesday Book on Thursday

Lots of people in the Village are trying to finish The Brothers Karamozov in time for the discussions we'll have this weekend on the book. Doug Thorpe, who teaches English at SPU, will be here to lead those discussions. Doug, a member at St. Mark's Cathedral, is a long-time Holden person, most recently a regular on the Teaching Staff. There are few Spark notes around, and yesterday Carol Hinderlie downloaded the Wikipedia synopsis! It is a long book, but what a good one! I read it 35+ years ago, and I don't remember enjoying it so much. This is a newer translation - 1999 - which received rave reviews as making Dostoevsky's style really come out in English. So maybe that's the whole thing. But it is a great book. I'm especially impressed with the dialog. He is clearly one of those authors - Iris Murdoch being another - who can write pages of conversation and you never lose track of who is talking. Amazing.

Some non-book notes: it's been snowing today, which will be nice for all the people coming in for the week-end and for next week. The Village will more than double in size. It will put quite a strain on the power supply, so we're all cutting back on any unnecessary electrical use - even more than we've cut back already. It's very interesting to live so close to all the things that make our little town work. In the city, the sweep in so broad you lose track of the infrastructure. Here, it's part of your dinner conversation!

Back to the vile Karamozov and his screwy sons!

A Beautiful Mountain Day

Although the weather has been unseasonably warm, with forecasts for more temperatures in the 40's, we awoke today to a beautiful cold, clear day here in the Railroad Creek Valley. Here's a picture of Copper and Fernow this morning:
We had a wonderful Woman's Retreat over the weekend with an excellent group of women, mostly from Western Washington, with a few from Minnesota. Now we have the "Spinning Sisters" from St. Placid Priory in Lacey. They come up with their spinning wheels and all and teach anyone who wants to wander into the Dining Hall. This all started in 1998 when Sister Monika met Pastor Jim Christiansen at a spiritual directors' retreat at the priory. He raises sheep, they were learning to spin, and the rest is history. They have become quite famous for their felted sheep, many of which are sold in the Holden store. (See blog Post 1 for a picture of our welcome sheep!) One of the nuns at the Priory is just knitting sheep #900! Jim gets all the centennial sheep, so this one will add to his collection. They also lead worship for us while they are here, which is very nice. They have adapted the Benedictine hours into a lovely set of very inclusive liturgies that work well here at Holden. Jim also brought fresh lamb for us, which will be lovely for dinner one day.

Tuesday evening is craft night after dinner (we've had our worship for the day at breakfast) and tonight the St. Placid folk will teach how to needle-felt hearts for Valentine's Day. Fun!

Wednesday Book

After the weirdness of Merrily Watkins in cider-coated Herefordshire, I went back to Scandinavia and read K. O. Dahl's The Fourth Man. It is a very good read. I almost suspected I had read it before when someone's hytta (Norwegian "chalet" they say in the book) burned down, but I think that happens often in these Norwegian/Swedish/Icelandic mysteries. (Anybody know a Danish one?) It is a nice complex plot, clearly nicely written and good in translation.

I moved on from there to my next Andrea Camilleri Inspector Montalbano book, Rounding the Mark. This one is laugh-out-loud funny. I love these books! They are so real and such good stories, full of all the joys, sorrows - and, being Sicily, crime - of human life. Salvo Montalbano is a terrific character. In this book his very favorite restaurant closes when the owner retires, but he quickly finds another as good. The descriptions of him eating and savoring his food are worth the books. I want to go to Sicily for pasta in squid ink! Please, read these books! Here they are in order, and in order they should be read:

The Shape of Water (La forma dell’acqua, 1994)
The Terracotta Dog (Il cane di terracotta, 1996)
The Snack Thief (Il ladro di merendine, 1996)
The Voice of the Violin (La voce del violino, 1997)
Excursion to Tindari (La gita a Tindari, 2000)
The Scent of the Night (L’odore della notte, 2001)
Rounding the Mark (Il giro di boa, 2003)
The Patience of the Spider - 2007 (La pazienza del ragno - 2004)
The Paper Moon - 2008 (La Luna di Carta - 2005)
August Heat - 2009 (La Vampa d'Agosto - 2006)
The Sphinx's Wings - 2009 (Le Ali della Sfinge - 2006)
The Sand Path - 2010 (La pista di Sabbia - 2007)
The Potter's Field - 2010 (Il campo del vasaio - 2008)
The Age of Doubt - 2010 (L'età del dubbio) - 2008

There are two more, but they aren't translated yet. There's TV, too, and two episodes were aired in England in 2008. They don't seem to be appearing here yet.

Now I finally gave in and started Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning novel about Thomas Cromwell. What a book. It is amazing writing and story/history telling. It is a reading feast. We have a stop day here tomorrow, and it's a good thing or there might not be a sermon on Sunday! I will have to take a break though as we have the annual Women's Retreat this weekend and I have to do Bible Study. (The Bible - I recommend that one, too!) But we also have Doug Thorpe, who teaches English at SPU, coming up over Valentine's weekend to do sessions on The Brothers Karamozov, and I'm going to take a shot at getting through a lot of the newer translation that came out in 1999 - supposedly way better than the one I read in college! So Wolf Hall will have to wait until the week after next. That's ok. It's the kind of book you don't want to finish in a hurry because it will be over.

Happy reading!

Texas! Part 2

The Hispanic Theology Conference in San Antonio was the program for the regular January gathering of ELCA pastors in Texas. The three synods in that state join forces each year for their pastors' conferences. Carol and Nancy learned a lot not only about Hispanic Theology, but also about Texas Lutherans and pastors. We had a very good time. I felt just as much at home among those folk as I do here in the Pacific Northwest. Very nice indeed.

The speakers were quite different in many ways, but each good in her/his own regard. Probably the star of the show was Dr. Justo Gonzalez, a Methodist pastor and theologian. His main presentation was a very poignant (and very funny!) assessment of what it's like to be an "in-between" person in the United States. One of the interesting features of him and one other speaker was that they both came from educated, doing-fine families before coming to the US, and then were surprised at being regarded as neither here - in fact, not being regarded at all. Gonzalez also did a Bible Study on Acts 6 which was very good - a new view.

Another speaker spoke about the love for the Virgin Mary in Hispanic culture, likening it to other ancient observances, and even to the huge esteem still showered on the late young rock star Selena. Others included an ELCA pastor who works at churchwide, and a seminary professor from PLTS. As noted above, each brought a different perspective to the blessings and challenges of being Christian and Latina/o. We learned a lot.

Two of my dearest friends from my seminary days are pastors in Texas, and I was very happy to be able to visit with David Henry, a soon-to-be-retired pastor in Marble Falls (he and I have these almost exactly parallel careers!), and Don Carlson, on the staff of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod. It was really fun to see them. For all you Faith folk, I also had a great visit with Charles and Phoebe Meyer. Charles is Rich Meyer's brother, and part of that host of people from Faith who have gone into ordained ministry. His whole career has been in Texas. Carol and I also made good Holden connections with Ann Hafften and Franz Schemmel, as well as recent staff member Mindy Roll.

In between the lectures and the visiting, we walked the Riverwalk and enjoyed ourselves. Here's a picture of Carol on the Riverwalk:
On Monday night we walked to an interesting-sounding restaurant in Southtown that was a Latin American fusion place. The name is Azuca. We again made a meal of appetizers, and a very good one it was. Tuesday night dinner was part of the conference after a Eucharist at St. John's Lutheran Church.

On our way to the Eucharist with Mindy Roll, we stopped at a shop we'd seen the night before and bought hats! These were used to great effect when we returned to Holden, both getting off the boat and getting off the bus. Lots of fun! Here we are in our hats:
We returned to Seattle on Wednesday evening. Nancy had a Candidacy Committee meeting on Thursday, then picked up Carol in Mukilteo and we headed for Leavenworth and another great meal at South - a really fine Mexican restaurant right there in everyone's favorite Bavarian Village.

So now we're back at Holden and it's February. Lent is not too far away, and the warm temperatures give us a hint of the Spring to come. But we'll remember January 2010!

Texas!

The second trip in January was to Texas. Holden Director Carol Hinderlie and Nancy signed up in the Fall to attend the Tri-Synodical Pastors' Conference in San Antonio January 25-27. We had heard about it because the program title was Hispanic Theology. At Holden each August there's a Spanish-speaking week called Abriendo Caminos, and Carol thought it would be helpful to hear the perspectives of the speakers at the January conference. Nancy went because of her role as chair of the Candidacy Committee in the Northwest Washington Synod. There are two Latino candidates in Mt. Vernon who are doing their seminary work in what's called TEEM: Theological Education in Emergent Ministries. The candidates are raised up and work in their own communities, and work with specific seminaries for their theological education. These two do their education at Lutheran Seminary Program of the Southwest in Austin. TEEM was going to be a major part of the conference.

The conference was in San Antonio. But, since we both enjoy good music - especially Texas-style bluesy stuff - we flew into San Antonio on Saturday afternoon, rented a car and drove north to Austin. We had a great hotel to stay in - the Hotel San Jose - on South Congress Street right across from the Continental Club, a fairly famous funky Austin music club. Here's a picture of the hotel:

We started out with a dinner of appetizers at an Italian restaurant down the street called Vespaio. Go there if you're ever in Austin. Terrific. We got the recommendation from someone on the Holden staff who has friends who run an organic farm in Austin called Boggy Creek Farm. They supply organic vegetables to this and other Austin restaurants.

After that we set off on foot across the river and checked out 6th and 4th streets. We were a little early, but things cranked up eventually. We heard great blues in two venues. We really liked a woman named Tish Lancaster and her Mizzbehavin' Band. Great stuff. We walked and walked and listened and looked and just took it all in. We took a cab back to the hotel and then walked across the street to the Continental Club for the 10 p.m. show. We heard a Texas Roadhouse Blues singer who's been doing this a long time and was fabulous. Her name is Lou Ann Barton. Her guitar player was amazing. After all the walking, and then standing for over an hour in the club, we were ready to go to sleep!

The next morning we didn't do church (boo), but we knew we'd be doing it for three days at the conference, so with no guilt at all we got great coffees and delicious home-made jalapeño scones at the funky coffee place next to the hotel. It was a beautiful day, so after we got organized and checked out, we headed west for Johnson City for the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park and the Johnson Ranch. It was very interesting and a beautiful spot. Here's a picture from the ranch - Lyndon, the Bull:
We headed to San Antonio from there, stopping on the way at a wine-tasting room of Texas wines and found a couple pretty nice bottles for Larry and Paul.

On our way into San Antonio we stopped for an early dinner at a Luby's cafeteria. The Hinderlies have enjoyed these for years when they came down to South Padre Island for a winter break. It was pretty good. We learned it had actually started in San Antonio. We returned our car, went to the airport, and then took a cab to our hotel. After checking in, we watched the Vikings and the Saints football game, checked out the Riverwalk, had a glass of wine in the bar, and retired. We had another nice walk in the morning before the conference.

This is part 1. Part 2, with more pictures, tomorrow!