November feasts

Happy feast of All Souls and a belated Feast of All Saints!  Our celebration was marked by eating lots of candy left over from Halloween, which conveniently fell on a Saturday before Fall Back time changes.  What could have been a great excuse to have a late night party was just a good excuse to watch scary movies past midnight. (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer, anyone? Sorry, Abe, I couldn't stay awake to see how your honesty might be tested, and I forgot to ask the kids how it ended. The kids also watched the original Ghostbusters, which is the inspiration for some cute little kid costumes for the DIY crowd, but I wonder how many of those littles will be begging to watch the film before they are old enough to overlook the innuendoes...) 

To mark the holy days, we pulled out some coloring pages and lit a candle with saint stickers on it. Usually I set up the photos of the great-grandparents and line up our selection of pewter saints on the table. Maybe tomorrow... Our pewter saint selection contains patrons of each of the kids' name saints and most of their confirmation saints, but St. Elizabeth of Hungary was sold out this year. I waited months before finally contacting the company and asking for a refund.  They offered to send one of those cheap plastic saint statues painted by machines that miss the exact placement of the eyes and lips, but I declined. 

We actually did have a festive brunch with homemade cinnamon rolls that didn't quite complete their second rise. Our oldest came home for the weekend - well, he stopped in at the house as a rest stop on the way to and from visiting his friend in Ventura whose first baby was baptised this weekend. Almost like a grandbaby! The baby was born a couple weeks ago, but I haven't sent a gift yet. I have about 5 different books in the cart, but can't decide which ones to send.  Do you like to send books as baby gifts? Do you have a favorite go-to baptism gift for a young Catholic family? I'm thinking A for Altar to read and appreciate now and The Clown of God to appreciate later, but I like some of the newer baby board books out right now. Such pretty designs! We often send Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever as a baby gift, so I might send that, too, along with a stuffed lion in honor of the baby's name. Richard Scarry never gets old. 

For dinner tonight we ate baked chicken tenders that looked like bone fingers - as close to pan de muerto as we got.  I forgot about making it, partly because I spent all day talking to students in Zoom conferences. While these conferences have been the highlight of the semester, they have drained my days and my energy.  I met with some students in person one day on campus, masked and sitting across a six-footish table.  It was truly a delight to see them in person and talk to them instead of looking at their distracted faces or avatars on Zoom.  And it was a thrill to be on campus. The school where I teach is located right on the coast, along a cliff that overlooks a favorite surfing spot. People come to this school for the view.  We could easily hold class outside almost every day of the year, but it would be a bit distracting on a warm day to watch the surfers crest the waves below. 

Although I found the conferences to be really fruitful and a great way to give the students a chance to talk freely, they took up four entire days. Now I am behind on everything, grading, laundry, planning, dishes, teaching the first grader, motivating the high schoolers, exercising, making special feast day treats -- you name it.  Oh well. The end of the semester is three weeks away, plus an additional week for finals, which I hardly count. I'll be ready for a pause.  I've a big stack of books to read, after all the holiday prep is done... or the Covid Christmas version of holiday prep. The Christmas card letter will be short this year.

This week is full of big events, right? Tomorrow we can stop being confronted with election ads, even if the election decision continues to be postponed to count straggler mail in ballots.  Our church is holding a day of adoration and prayer for peace. I've signed up for an hour to pray for peace, for an end to the pandemic, and for all the people and things on my prayer list, even though I won't be praying for either candidate to win, and will instead be praying for peace in our hearts and peace in the whole world. 

I know my position as a conscientious objector to this election is not popular - I have been told by people on both sides that my refusal to vote is actually a vote for their opponent - so they each get a vote! Or ... neither does -  neither will be able to claim my vote in their tallies of the popular vote.  I did send in a ballot and voted for other offices and referendums after doing a little research. I am grateful we are still registered in Illinois as that ballot had about 8-10 bubbles to fill in, while the California ballot had dozens.  Our four young adults over the age of 18 each received a ballot at our home address, even though only one lives here, and one is not registered in California anymore.  It has the most complicated propositions in the nation, I would hazard to guess. 

I am not going to explain why I feel like I can't in good conscience vote for either candidate here, - but I am expressing my surprise at the number of people who responded negatively to Peggy Noonan's article in which she expresses her reasons for refusing to choose between Biden and Trump, and instead writing in a candidate. I looked it up online after reading it in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal because I was thinking about sharing it with a friend with whom I had been discussing this idea since we both had similar perspectives.  However, when I read it online, I was surprised to see that 901 people had taken time out of their day to write comments on this article.  How many of these 901 would take the time to compose a handwritten letter to the editor that might be printed in the hard copy of the paper?  I hazard to guess only a small portion - although I could be mistaken.  I was surprised to see how many angry commenters there were - which led me to keep reading, wasting my own time.  These angry commenters appeared to take both positions: How dare you not vote against Trump and for Biden? How dare you not vote against Biden and for Trump? (there seems to a be a number of people who see voting as a way to vote AGAINST someone instead of FOR someone else.) 

Here is a long portion of what Noonan wrote.  I can see why some people might be angered by her position.

Bits and pieces

Every year when I change the calendar to November, I think of the epigraph from a poem by Thomas Hood that prefaces the account of the month in Tasha Tudor's A Time to Keep: "No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!"

The aesthetic of her books - and the Prairie books and the Anne books and any number of others - probably contribute to the wistfulness I always feel this time of year for fall and seasonal changes.  Here the change of seasons is marked by resetting clocks for an earlier sunset.

Even as I dream of someday settling east of the Mississippi in a little Cape Cod in a small country town with a picket fence and an English garden, my children declare their love for California, and my college son admits to being homesick for surfing and his toddler sister. I offered to buy him a ticket home for Thanksgiving, even though he has a standing invitation at his grandparents' house only 3 hours from school. He said he could tough it out until Christmas break, but he wants to surf every day he is home. And my high school daughter is thrilled we aren't moving next summer. She wants to live in California always, she says. Woe to me!

Maybe when we do finally move away - although we could just get moved up the coast next - I will feel more love in my heart for California. I should have read more Steinbeck and Stegner. Maybe if we move off of our busy street to a place with a small yard, I will be more content, I think.  But the reality is a spiritual weakness, I fear: an unwillingness to feel at home because of that selfishness that prefers something other.  It is difficult to discern what is a weakness of will and what is a wound that needs healing.

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In other news, we have caught two rats and wounded, mortally, I hope, a third.  He set off the trap and left a trail of blood.  I couldn't find his corpse. More rodents may be in residence, based on the teeth marks in our little pumpkin on the counter, but our traps haven't been sprung in the past few days, nor have I discovered any more droppings since the pumpkin was gnawed before Halloween. That was when I finally set out poison, something I was reluctant to do because I didn't want to smell the dead bodies before I found them.  I have emailed our landlord but haven't really pushed for anything because I feel some what responsible, since we leave out crumbs and candy packages and crusts of sandwiches in abandoned lunches.  Since the rodent alert was raised, food is prohibited from leaving the kitchen/dining area, but this rule is difficult to enforce on the toddler and preteen who slip snacks into their pockets and bags. At least the toddler is now aware that we can't have food in her room because we have "mice," as she told the neighbor the other day.

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Tomorrow is voting day.  A historic moment for our country - was there ever an election when the candidates were more disliked by their own parties?   I feel nothing about this election. I can't believe our country is where it is in terms of candidates.  It's a farce of the darker kind.  The options are so preposterous, so undesirable, so unbelievable, that I can't really get worked up about who wins on Tuesday.  I wasn't going to participate in the election as a conscientious objector, but in the end, because my husband filled out the ballot request online, I did go ahead a vote for a write-in, just to exercise my civic duty.

As a wonderful distraction, the Cubs won the world series! I haven't watched a baseball game in years, but  Illinois is our state of record, so I watched the last two innings of that last game, as did the kids.  That last hit was a more uplifting historic moment.

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It seems like most people I know are doing the mail-in votes this year. Is this because most people I know are military who are registered to vote somewhere else or are California voters, who mail in their votes because they have so many ballot measures to decide yes or no that it takes a week to read the ballot booklet?

The mayoral vote is pretty exciting here, as is the school board contest. I'm trying to read up on the local politics and ignore what is happening on the federal platform, even though I can't vote locally.

It will be interesting to wake up Wednesday morning and read the news.