Tongue

I was at the grocery store at 7:30 this Saturday morning. I was walking around, and found these awful looking things in the meat department.

This is tongue. Cow tongues, lined up next to pigs feet and tripe.

Much of my life relates to the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary that I heard over and over and over again as I was growing up. This morning Ramona came to mind again—the time her and her sister had to make dinner, and had to use tongue because it was inexpensive. The characters narrated how awful a thing tongue was, and always in my mind, tongue was gray and about the size of an adult’s hand. If you can’t tell by my cell phone picture, tongue is slimy and looks like a mid-sized animal curled up in the package. Like a cross between a goldfish and a housecat.

Speaking of tongues, I am taking a class about the phonetics of Spanish. A good part of studying consists of looking at diagrams of how the mouth shapes sounds. (And trying to imitate them—slowly and thoroughly) I am gaining a new appreciation for the versatility of the tongue.

The little white dot left of center in this picture is the author Orson Scott Card—the author of Ender’s Game and a whole bunch of other books. He spoke at the school.

Listening to Orson Scott Card was kind of like reading his books. There are a few things that draw me in, like the book Ender’s Game did, and then other things—like most of his other books—that just don’t really hook me. As I listened to him though, he spoke about some things in a way I had never quite thought about before. Like how we can’t know things, but we can decide what things we will take as truth based what we experience. And that we have to be skeptical, but we decide what we will have faith in. If you are skeptical about everything, then you just have faith in skepticism.

Faith and skepticism aside, I spent the night Latin dancing. After I helped sculpt an ice cream head with the neighbors.

Fiction and Life

If you haven’t read the seventh Harry Potter and are planning to—this post has some spoilers.

I finished it this afternoon, sitting in my backyard. Midway through chapter 33 I started crying. Harry Potter was going to be killed—he wouldn’t grow up, he wouldn’t even see the end of all the horror. And it was that horror that made me cry, too. That things were so dark, that people lived in fear and couldn’t move about and live freely. That he saw the bodies of his friends.

It felt ridiculous that I listened to the leaves rustling in my backyard and thought about these tragedies. JK Rowling writes fiction, so it wouldn’t ever matter what happened to Harry Potter the literary character. But I was bothered, in the back of my mind, by how that battle scenes and dying aren’t restricted to works of fiction. And that real battles aren’t so clearly divided between good vs. evil. Real life is so much more complicated than that—good and bad are all mixed together. Like in Iraq. I imagine both sides (if there even were clearly defined sides) feel they are fighting for country and for a good government and for freedom.

I had always wondered, had I been born in the midst of the American Revolution or in Nazi Germany or during the Civil Rights movement, what I would have done. I wonder what side I would have joined—or if I would have even recognized what was going on around me. I have a feeling that, in such extraordinary circumstances, I would have kept my head down and my nose clean. Which makes me feel guilty.

Home!

Everything is so familiar. It is good to be home.

So many times while I was in France, I would wake up and think, “I’m in France!” and simply be amazed. Since I’ve gotten back, it’s switched to waking up thinking, “I’m in the United States!” When it all comes down to it, that’s pretty amazing as well. I’m an American. I’m in the US. How cool is that.

I started reading Harry Potter today. Not the seventh yet. I was planning to read all of the books before the seventh, then that looked like a lot of work, so I decided just to review the sixth. But then…I decided I really did have to start back at the beginning. I finished the second book today, and it felt wonderfully like summer. I laid in the hammock in our back yard. It was hot, beautifully and so dry-hot. The mountains, which I missed, the hammock, and a good book. After all the rain in Normandy, it finally felt like summer.