No Rest

The heartbreak of seeing your grandsons incarcerated

God offers to every  man the choice between truth and repose. Take which you will, you can never have both.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the quotidian pleasures Mrs. Orr and I enjoy is working crossword puzzles. We haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in many years, but a friend does, and Mrs. Orr will often bring home copies of the puzzle from the paper. It’s a pleasurable way to unwind in the evening or in the mornings while trying to clear the cobwebs from the head. Mrs. Orr enjoys working the crossword while she’s cooking.

Lately, our pleasure in the puzzles has become steadily diminished. The people who write the puzzles seem intent on throwing in as much woke nonsense as they can, with typical clues pointing to various LGBTQwerty things. For example the one I worked on this morning had the clue “Grooms exchange them with each other,” and the answer was “I do’s.” So not a bride and groom, but grooms. Or clues like “Greatest threat to humanity,” with the answer being “climate change.” It’s like this every day. I doubt that I will continue working the puzzles from the newspaper. I’m unwilling to expend the calories to ignore this foolishness for the sake of working a puzzle. Perhaps we’ll start buying the paperback books full of crosswords, and perhaps we’ll be spared the wokeness. For now. Perhaps. We’ll see.

**

We continue to marvel at how cold the cold feels this year. My feet are numb right now while I type these words. It made it up to 50F today, but the house never really warmed up for my liking. It’s supposed to be near 60F by Thanksgiving, which will be a welcome break for the old bones. Mine, not Mrs. Orr’s. Because I would never label her bones as “old.”

**

I was walking around in the back yard during my lunch break, enjoying the thin sunshine and relative lack of body heat-sucking breeze. The mossy area near the silver maple where the chipmunks play in the warm weather is quiet and still. I miss their antics. I made myself laugh envisioning them, cartoon-like, snuggled down in their dens with little plaid pajamas and teeny slippers. I know this is more of my ridiculous anthropomorphizing of animals, but I can’t help it. But I am of sober mind, and I know chipmunks don’t wear such things. Any scientist knows that chipmunks wear terrycloth robes and footies.

**

We watched two movies over the weekend and enjoyed them both. One was a recent film called “Where The Crawdads Sing,” a character study and murder mystery. I enjoyed the quiet pace of the film and the gorgeous soundtrack music. And David Straithhairn, whom I usually find off-putting, gave a nice, understated performance as a kindly small-town lawyer.

The other movie was “Ondine,” from about 10-12 years ago, starring Colin Farrell as a lonely fisherman who pulls up what appears to be a mermaid in his trawling net. It was quite a touching movie, again with a lovely soundtrack, and some of the most eye-knocking scenery (filmed in Ireland) I’ve seen in a while. So nice to be able to enjoy a movie without being bombarded with foolishness. And then the beaten-down Puritan in me rises up to sneer, “You shouldn’t be watching movies anyway! A carnal waste of time! You could be memorizing the catechism!”

See, that’s my problem right there. Insufficient catechesis.

**

Actually, my problem is spiritual restlessness. Not in the sense that I hop from belief to belief like an autistic buffet patron, but rather a sense of the eventual dimming of my willingness to go all-in on a given belief system. Belief system….that’s essential. The systematizing of religious faith and things eternal seems to eventually quench the very fire that led the system’s followers to burn with questions and ideas. Decades of Protestantism cooled down to a period of searching and introspection, followed by a deep affection for the traditional Roman Catholic faith. But then Covid slipped its leash, and the Catholic Church joined all the other churches in a headlong rush to compromise and corrupt itself in the hunger for government and celebrity approval, and the ardor cooled again. I don’t want to get fooled again; never can I forget what They did and what They allowed. So I am restless, looking for the genuine article in a world of fakery. And on the rare occasions when I publicly talk about this, I’m never short of those who want me to trust them, just this once, because they have some authority to which I am supposed to submit, because they have some answers that they were taught. It won’t do.

**

While we were back in Texas, we visited the town of Corsicana and made a beeline for the famous Collin Street Bakery, renowned for their fruitcakes. Most people don’t like fruitcake, but I was raised on my mother’s homemade ones, and they were the best I’ve ever tasted. The offerings by Collin Street Bakery are a respectable second. We bought a small one and it’ll be gone long before Christmastime is over. One of my fondest memories of my late father-in-law, who was a fruitcakius omnivorous of the first order, is the one from Christmas about 20 years ago or so. He arrived at our house on Christmas Day with gifts and food, and a large Collin Street fruitcake balanced on top. I greeted him at the door and exclaimed over the treat. “Man, this is great! I love fruitcake. Thank you for bringing it!”

My wife’s father stared at me with the same steely eyes he passed on to his daughter. “I’ll be takin’ whatever we don’t eat back home with me,” he growled. And when he gathered his things to go at the end of the evening, he had that fruitcake tucked under his arm like a Heisman trophy contender.

**

And a final visit to the topic of how cold it’s been lately. Over the weekend, my wife expressed concern about what the electric bill will look like next cycle, since we’ve been running the heat pump more than usual.

“Hey, we need to stay warm,” I said. “No need for us to live like refugees.”

And on cue, Mrs. Orr began to sing “Living Like A Refugee.” But she wasn’t singing it to the tune of Tom Petty’s hit. No, she was singing it to the tune of James Brown’s “Living In America.”

Go ahead. Try it. I double-dog dare you.

~ S.K. Orr