I can’t believe Sylvia has moved.
I’m a man of habits and Subway is one of them. For six years, Sylvia has managed the Subway where I often go. She knows the routine: wheat bread, turkey and ham, provolone, all vegies (including spinach) except lettuce, vinegar.
But her husband got transferred to Houston, so they’re gone as of this week.
For six years we chatted briefly. She’d ask how things were going at church, and I’d ask how things were at the store.
It’s the funny thing about being in a place for so long. I buy cars from Chris (if new) or Cal (if used). Brent handles my insurance. Floyd and Kay deliver our paper. And Kelli cuts my hair.
For 15 years she’s cut my hair. There’s less in back now than when she started in 1991, but she still gives it her best effort. When we first moved here, I wandered into a clip shop between our house and ACU. She happened to be available. When she moved downtown years later, I followed.
Now she’s at Jodelle’s. It’s a tiny bit girlie for me. There’s no TV with ESPN, and no Men’s Health magazine is in sight. But the two of them are wonderful. Besides, I could name names of guys who sometimes read this blog who also go there.
- - - -
Took a little walk in Nashville this morning. Just incredibly gorgeous!
I just came across these words from a Wheaton English prof: “The stories most greatly treasured, and treasured for the longest periods, are those that trace, in bold lines, the outlines of our deepest experiences.”
G. K. Chesterton pointed to the three great kinds of stories: The Iliad (battle), The Odyssey (journey), and the book of Job (riddle).
Battle, journey, and riddle. Most of the time, I think of my own life through the great themes of journey. But battle and riddle certainly fit as well.
How about you? Which is a defining metaphor for your life?
A couple more pieces from C. S. Lewis about conversion and friendship:
“I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when getting on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master: but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs–or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, or pipes. There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”
“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him Whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Thanks so much for those wonderful memories of Narnia in yesterday’s comments.
- - - -
And while we’re thinking about books for children, I miss having one small enough to read Dr. Seuss to. Our all time fav? Go, Dog, Go.
Halloween was a blast last night, with my three little nieces and their parents joining us for the traditional Halloween night spaghetti. This tradition goes back to Searcy days when Matt and his cousin Kari would trick-or-treat together, along with Megan (dressed in her little pumpkin costume). Apparently a couple years we had spaghetti. It wasn’t intentional; it was just fast. Then the next year, we were starting to prepare something else, and Matt said, “Where’s the spaghetti? We ALWAYS have spaghetti on Halloween?”
Can you hear Tevye in the background? “TRADITION!”
My favorite trick-or-treaters last night were seven high school students who were a punk band — guitars, singing, wild outfits, and all. They were having a blast together. I just put the bucket in the middle of them and said, “For that performance you can have all you want.”
- - - -
A little audience participation today. Anyone out there have a story involving the “Chronicles of Narnia” — maybe about being read them by your parents, or enjoying them as a teen, or reading them to your kids?
(Has it come to this? A preacher looking for stories from his blog? I’ll try not to make a habit of it.)
As a little C. S. Lewis bonus, here are words from The Four Loves:
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a friend. . . . In some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”