Today is the birthday of Charlie Chaplin and here’s to you too Charlie! I myself am beginning to look like Charlie, around the hips especially.
Also of the Pope. Kudos to the former Cardinal Ratzinger!
It’s vacation week here in my state so I thought I might celebrate by marking 'This Day in History'. I guess I started doing this yesterday with that post about Julie Christie, last seen in the film Away From Her where she plays a woman being slowly enshrouded by the fog of Alzheimer’s. Near the start of the film she dries off a washed pot and carefully places it the freezer, as her husband looks on in silent horror. (That part sure hit me: once I tossed a brimming cup of cat kibble into the washing machine with a full load of dainty slips and panties.)
It’s the 100th anniversary of the day Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly over the English Channel in 1912, and yes that was the very day after the Titanic went down with its loss of over 1500 souls.
As you can imagine the first-mentioned fact was overshadowed by this last.
It’s tough to be overshadowed. Mother Teresa died the day before the funeral of Princess Diana who had her heart jerked free of its moorings in the back seat of that speeding car under the Paris streets.
This seemed like a terrible shame to me Mother Theresa, getting such low billing. I admired her a great deal.
I admired her no less when documents revealed that at least for one chapter of her long story she had more doubt than faith. We are all enshrouded by doubt. I attended a Bible Study for 15 years whose clergyman leader often quoted a phrase from Tennyson, There lives more faith in honest doubt than an in half the creeds.
That seemed so kind to me, and comforting too, his reminding us of this truth. We live out our days, at times summoning the joy to twirl our canes and doff our hats in comical fashion. We fly across a wide channel, from this near shore to that distant one, but then we arrive. What did the poet say? We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time? The character played by Olympia Dukakis says it in this clip: “It's just life.” Only life after all.
