The Palestinian mopping method is to dump soapy water all over the floor, then squeegee it out the door. It works quite well, though turns into rather a scramble if your floors are slanted away from the door.
When I made my first tentative in this activity on Thursday, most of the water gathered under the radiator on the other side of the room, and when I went to remove it, I commented that the wad of paper that lay, now soaked, under the radiator, looked like a Pendle Hill pamphlet, one of the Quaker mini-books written by Friends in residence at Pendle Hill, the Quaker worship and study center in Pennsylvania.
Lo and behold, it was a PH pamphlet.
Fittingly, the pamphlet is called "The Testimony of Integrity" and who knows how long it dwelt under the radiator. So impressed was I by its own integrity that after having initially tossed the partially dissolved booklet, I fished it out of the trash and dried it on the kitchen window sill.
Wilmer A. Cooper begins his pamphlet with a story of a woman who, feeling as though the wellspring of Quaker inspiration dwindled to a trickle, sought a refreshed energy for teaching in George Fox's home town.
Sitting in the church where young George worshipped with his family on First Days (the Quaker phrase for Sundays) this teacher "saw in her mind's eye the boy George Fox." She envisioned that he was puzzled by his neighbors' piety while in Meeting, and relative depravity during the week.
"He saw that there must be a correspondence between one's faith, between what one professed on the Sabbath, and what one does during the daily work week."
Fox recognized the inconsistency, dubbed it wrong, and went on to make integrity a central part of the faith community he founded, the Friends.
In the texts we're reading in my classes this week young boys face questions of "good and bad" which are anything but black and white.
Jonas, the The Giver, learns that choices have been painstakingly removed from his community's life. Everyone is colorblind for instance. When he sees color for the first time, he is angry that such diversity has been withheld. "If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! I blue tunic, or a red one?"
The real question for Jonas is whether he enlighten his friends and family to their own bland existence.
In James Joyce's story "The Sisters," the narrator, a young boy, considers the recently-dead priest who was rather a mentor for him. He dreams of the "heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle."
Is this a good guy? Can someone give us the heebeejeebees and still be a good influence, or an intellectually safe acquaintance? I'm encouraging my students to allow texts, events, relationships, characters, to be hard to categorize and characterize. It makes them harder to write about, but more realistic.
We'll look at heaps of characters this year who aren't as golden-good as Fox, but have redeeming even heroic, characteristics.
Can't wait.
When I made my first tentative in this activity on Thursday, most of the water gathered under the radiator on the other side of the room, and when I went to remove it, I commented that the wad of paper that lay, now soaked, under the radiator, looked like a Pendle Hill pamphlet, one of the Quaker mini-books written by Friends in residence at Pendle Hill, the Quaker worship and study center in Pennsylvania.
Lo and behold, it was a PH pamphlet.
Fittingly, the pamphlet is called "The Testimony of Integrity" and who knows how long it dwelt under the radiator. So impressed was I by its own integrity that after having initially tossed the partially dissolved booklet, I fished it out of the trash and dried it on the kitchen window sill.
Wilmer A. Cooper begins his pamphlet with a story of a woman who, feeling as though the wellspring of Quaker inspiration dwindled to a trickle, sought a refreshed energy for teaching in George Fox's home town.
Sitting in the church where young George worshipped with his family on First Days (the Quaker phrase for Sundays) this teacher "saw in her mind's eye the boy George Fox." She envisioned that he was puzzled by his neighbors' piety while in Meeting, and relative depravity during the week.
"He saw that there must be a correspondence between one's faith, between what one professed on the Sabbath, and what one does during the daily work week."
Fox recognized the inconsistency, dubbed it wrong, and went on to make integrity a central part of the faith community he founded, the Friends.
In the texts we're reading in my classes this week young boys face questions of "good and bad" which are anything but black and white.
Jonas, the The Giver, learns that choices have been painstakingly removed from his community's life. Everyone is colorblind for instance. When he sees color for the first time, he is angry that such diversity has been withheld. "If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! I blue tunic, or a red one?"
The real question for Jonas is whether he enlighten his friends and family to their own bland existence.
In James Joyce's story "The Sisters," the narrator, a young boy, considers the recently-dead priest who was rather a mentor for him. He dreams of the "heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle."
Is this a good guy? Can someone give us the heebeejeebees and still be a good influence, or an intellectually safe acquaintance? I'm encouraging my students to allow texts, events, relationships, characters, to be hard to categorize and characterize. It makes them harder to write about, but more realistic.
We'll look at heaps of characters this year who aren't as golden-good as Fox, but have redeeming even heroic, characteristics.
Can't wait.
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