1,321 square feet

1,321 square feet.

I used to live in a house that size. Matter of fact, the one I live in now isn’t that much bigger.

So you’ll drop your jaw like I did when you hear this.

I was out driving through the fancy new neighborhoods springing up in northwest Oklahoma City and Edmond, and came up with a new definition of obscene.

1,321 square feet.

Huh?

Yep, I stopped in front of one of these fancy new homes to get one of the description sheets from the sign out front. I play a guessing game about how much these castles cost.

The price--at the bottom of the page--was enough to gag you. $415,000! And it wasn’t the fanciest, or the biggest, in the area.

Then I started reading all the wonderful ingredients that made this house supposedly worth $415,000.

There it was, second from the top:

“Four car garage (extra long), 1,321 square feet.”

Can you believe it? First of all, the people buying these homes have children and young teenagers. So they don’t have four cars.

But if that baffles you, keep reading.

Total square feet, 4,000(not including garage).

Plus a “futures” room of 640 square feet. That’s an unfinished room upstairs in the attic that you can expand into after you find yourself a little cramped by 4,000 square feet plus the 1,321 square foot garage.

This house has 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, a formal living room, formal dining room, a family room, a study with built in computer desk, a breakfast room, a utility room, two jetta tubs, Grecian marble showers, marble built-in bar and brass rail, large closet, cedar closet, hidden closet, marble fireplace, regular patio and balcony patio.

 Not sold, are you? I know, you'd feel a little crowded.

Remember this is in a “gated” community(today’s version of a moat) with guards and tall brick fences and a fancy name (“Oilymonde”), all designed to keep the riffraff like me out. They let me in ‘cause they probably though I wanted to contract the yard work.

But I know you think the house is scrimping a little, so there’s more, besides the landscaping and sprinkler system.

Six rooms are wired for cable. Christmas electric plugs are already outside with inside switches, and for outside ground lights. And ceiling fans, exhaust vents, alarm system, extra crown molding, wood shutters, and 34 tons of cut Ada rock on outside of house.

I know this is still beneath your standards however, so there’s one other item mentioned that will surely sell it to you.

Two drop down ironing boards.

Huh again?

Do you know anybody that would buy this house, pay the $5,000 or so monthly payment, the huge utility bills, plus the yard care, who would do their own ironing? Would you?

Not me. I don’t do ironing now. But of course, I don’t have 1,321 square feet in a four-car garage.

A poet "passing time"

American poet Billy Collins' new book Ballistics, tells you he's getting old--reading between the lines and the lines themselves. Susan gave me the book, inscribed , prophetically inscribed "We have shared this poet a long time...."

Such imagery from the former poet laureate of the United States...and many lines I've marked because I can see myself there.

From The First Night (we're dead): "This is where language will stop, ..."
From Scenes of Hell: "the boss trapped in an hourglass, ..."
From Carpe Diem: "not just another card in the deck of the year,..."
From The Lamp Unlit: "as the caravan of time crosses the sand, ...."
From "On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor: "it seemed that death had blundered once again...
"that sent his car up the long winding driveway?...
"If only death had consulted his cracked leather map...."

No, they're not all about death--some great images from Paris-- and they're not all depressing, but, perhaps like Johnny Cash's final songs as death approached, these images are always present as time passes and Collins' writing brings fresh thoughts to mind. This is certainly poetry, but it's also non-fiction.

Turning a phrase, or several

If you go through the books I read, you will find a multitude of varied marks...no real code, except may for a star by something exceptional, and I know I've told you this.

Although I didn't mark much in John McPhee's last book, Silk Parachute, each of the essays grabbed me. A reviewer wrote that McPhee can make anything interesting, and I started to disagree, seeing the essay on golf. But he did that too.

One essay was about his daughter and her photography partner who take large format photographs. Thus the title, "Under the Cloth."  Anyone familiar with large format cameras will love it.  Here are a few well-turned phrases I marked or underlined.. McPhee's ability to see in detail, and thus write great non-fiction:

"When they study the ground glass under the dark cloth, they are cropping the landscape rather than the picture."

"The darkly outlined final product was brightened by motion:...the ninety minute brushstroke of the moon."

"...the Deardorf spent ten evening minutes drinking in the Bridge Street bridge."

"...Laura and Virginia were drawn off the turnpike and into the kipukas of Carteret, where bungalows with picket fences survived the industrial magma."

From "Season on the Chalk," (the chalk of Europe--chalk cliffs of Dover and French champagne country) he goes into the geology of chalk embedded with flint: "Flints from English chalk ignited the powder that answered the shot heard round the world."

From "My Life List" (food he has eaten): "Sam knows the name and address of every rattlesnake in the northern five thousand acres of the island."

Of humidity in New Jersey:  "You could drink the air."

Enough quotes. Other essays are about Lacrosse, fact checking at The New Yorker, high school basketball, canoeing, and New Jersey.  All with well-turned phrases. Makes one want to write.

Easter on the Appian Way

Paul trudged this road...the Appian Way

And through this gate at the south edge of Rome

He just wouldn't shut up.

The guards were tired of listening to him. He never stopped talking, rambling sentences that never seemed to end, and the topic never changed. He spoke three languages fluently, and if you tried to argue with him, his debating skills were smooth and powerful and led to more harangues.

Soon you learned to just keep your mouth shut and keep the procession moving, a step at a time, day after day.

Pity the poor soldiers who had been months with him on the ship or in house arrest. At least at the end of this road, you’d be relieved and other soldiers would be saddled with bringing him to court.

At first, he was entertaining, and interesting. He’d certainly seen much of the world, Asia Minor, Greece, troublesome Judea. But the stories soon wore off. He lived up to being a pedantic, preachy Pharisee.

He just wouldn’t shut up.

Officers joked that being handcuffed to him was not to keep him from running away, but to keep the guards from deserting their duty.

Appia Antica, road sign, with dog, Rome 

Now at long last, he walked up the ancient stone road, the Via Appia, past the tombs of the nobles, flanked by Roman soldiers.

Someone told him he ought to be ashamed, being hauled to the world’s capital city, on its main thoroughfare, in chains.

That started another sermon: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ for it is the power of God for the Jew and the Gentile,” he spouted. He was a wizened, old man with bad eyesight, but there was nothing wrong with his voice.

The trouble was he was a Roman citizen, and he had the gall to appeal to Caesar. He was proud to be “an apostle to the Gentiles,” and never missed a chance to preach, to try to convert the solders, and others throughout Italy to what he called The Way.

He obviously wasn’t afraid of death, and used the tombs along the way to keep nagging about a different kind of life. He’d cheated it many times already. Ask him and he’d tell you he’d been shipwrecked, stoned, imprisoned several times, beaten and chased by his own countrymen, almost drowned, lied about and betrayed.

They were disgusted with him, but his determination and courage astonished them too.

He was on a mission, a religious fanatic who would stop at nothing to do his job. He almost bragged that God was sending him to Rome, although both the guards and he probably knew it could cost him his head for treason and insurrection.

Instead, he was happy, smiling almost as much as the suffering guards when they approached the southern gates to the Imperial City, after years in prison, in Judea, a year-long voyage, months in Malta after shipwreck, and then up the 300-mile coast, a step and a day at a time.

He just wouldn't shut up  about the poor Jew who’d been disgracefully crucified 30 years before, whose believers were turning the Empire upside down. He acted as though that troublemaker was still alive.

Dare to warn him of the consequences of continually running off his mouth, and it only ignited another sermon.

He preached on, unfazed, unashamed, unafraid. On the way into town, he passed the Roman Forum, Agrippa’s Pantheon, the temples, even the Coliseum where some of his ilk were murdered.

Other soldiers were stuck with him as he spent two years in house arrest awaiting Caesar’s pleasure. He preached like he wrote, long rambling sentences filled with passion.
He left Rome and then came back, and there, the guards probably joked, the guy who figuratively lost his head over religion, literally did also.

They didn’t get it. They couldn’t grasp what drove him. But he knew what was important.

Facing death years before, he argued with and assured his fellow believers of what he considered “most important”: “If Christ is not raised, your faith if futile; you are still in your sins…. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead…. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection…. Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

This Easter Sunday, when the sun comes up in Judea, and Rome and across the world, remember the Apostle Paul and his words of encouragement to the followers of that Hebrew who preached not a politically motivated intolerance; not fancy, fake, money-grubbing religion, but simplicity and sincerity; not hate, but love, caring for poor people, not prosperity and materialism; not damnation, but forgiveness; not death, but resurrection and life.

***
Writer’s note: I walked the Appia Antica, on a Sunday morning, crossing the same stones Paul trudged up, flanked by those suffering guards, and through the gate to Imperial Rome. Paul isn’t dead either.
***
Facts and Scriptures come from the New International Version of Luke’s history (Acts), and Paul’s letters to disciples in Rome, Corinth, and Philippi.

The pages of March, 2010

Four books helped fill the pages of the month as they flipped by.

First was Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It makes you want to travle and write.

Second was  George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, a look at the probabilities of the future, which he says will be an American Century. But he predicts  the other emerging powers will be Russia--which is happening now, and headed for another collapse, and the growth of Turkey, Poland and Mexico as regional powers--also happening now.

Third, was John McPhee's Silk Parachute, my favorite author's rare look inside his own life in a series of essays. He can make almost anything interesting, including the last essay, Rip Van Golfer.

And last night, I finished poet Billy Collins latest book Ballistics. His fresh way of looking at the everyday is refreshing. And yes, I've underlined and checked and marked and circled lines and words throughout all four

Hmmm, a non-fiction month. Yes, you have to take Collins' poetry as non-fiction.

In April, I don't know. A pretty good year so far. Too bad there's not another Harry Potter book coming out.

Selections soon.


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