Behind Infinity

In the past week and a half since I last posted, I’ve:

• given a talk at GVSU on how Classics and liberal arts relates to “Real life”

• fixed my barn roof
• attended a lecture by Laura Ingraham and went on a date with Micah to “Grand Rapids Symphony plays Disney”
• spent a lot of time with friends

I will talk about tall this stuff eventually. Right now in my “spare time” I’m cleaning up the notes from my talk into a more coherent mini-essay, which I will post ASAP (and which will also be posted on the GVSU Classics website. I have lots of photos to post too. But keeping up with freelance and trying to make fixes to the church website leaves not a lot of time to blog-post, I’m afraid.

So for now, I just wanted to share a quote from one of my favorite new blogs, Stacy from Louisville. This is a paragraph of the most authentic and heart-wrenching prose I’ve read in quite a while.
Stacy says:

“This world makes my soul ache. The fact that I was made for eternity but born into a world of sin is like being captured in a net. Even when circumstances in my life are stable the ache is still there, reminding me that eternity is just a whisper away. For me, the crescendo of following Christ reaches its culmination the split second I experience eternal life without sin. But for now, the ache remains. I’m telling you, there’s not one thing authentic in me other than the reality of my failures.”

Read the rest of her entry here.

Seriously, you wouldn’t think that my name on a piece of cardstock would be this exciting.

but it so is.

Apparently the Classics Kidz still love me because they felt compelled to call me today. They put me on speakerphone and spent a good 10 minutes telling me about life in the Classics suite this year.
I feel so special and loved.
Also, this is the week I get to go back to school and give a talk (which I really should be writing tonight) on “How I got a Real Job in spite of my Latin degree.” Should be adorable.

On my way to a friend’s house after work tonight, I ended up getting lost when the I-196 Chicago Drive exit was detoured. Actually, I wasn’t necessarily lost, because I always knew pretty much where I was going. I just wasn’t getting there by the streets I would have preferred to take.

Anyway, there I was, tooling through the rain-soaked 30 MPH streets of Grandville, in the sort of neighborhood that has lots of perfect houses and some schools and nursing homes and whatnot, when I came upon a rather large traffic backup (large, that is, for suburban Grandville). The backup was caused by a flock of about 50 ducks who had decided to congregate in and around the road. They were large ducks…not your average Mallards with green heads, but rather of a rotund, fancy-speckled grey and white variety.

The suburbanite Grandville motorists were obviously quite perplexed about how to handle the situation. Thankfully, everybody was benevolent enough not to plow right through the mass of quackers. Instead they stopped, and inched forward, and every now and then a car would get through but then several ducks would flop back in and block the lane and others would commence bathing in the gutter.

Being somewhat late because of my detour, and in a rather foul mood to begin with, at first I just rolled my eyes and waited my turn. But after waiting a few minutes and barely moving at all, the absurdity of the situation caught up with me and I realized, “Duh. I live in farmland. I so know how to fix this situation.”

Out here in the boondocks, the neighbors’ chickens and ducks can’t be trusted to stay put and you’ll sometimes come across a few on your way to work or church in the morning. You have two options: sit and wait, or do something. (Or if you’re my brother, you just plow them over.)

So I hopped out of the truck (barefoot because I had removed my work shoes on account of blisters) and, waving my arms, swept towards the fat grey and white ducks in an effort to shoo them out of the road and back up onto the lawn of the nursing home from whence they presumably came. As I did so, I gently scolded them in the voice I reserve for the dogs and the horses–that voice being a loud, screechy falsetto which likely grates on the nerves of every human in earshot–saying, “Duckies, Duckies!! Get out of the road, little duckies! Ducks don’t belong in the road, nooooo, they definitely don’t!” (et cetera.)

The ducks were a stubborn bunch and unafraid; they’d let me get within two feet before nonchalantly waddling back towards the curb and hopping up onto the sidewalk. It took me a few passes to get them all out of the road.

And as I went back to my truck, my fellow motorists honked their horns, clapped, cheered, and whistled at me out of their windows. It was pretty terrific.

True story, the end.
(Boring blog isn’t boring anymore.)