...bows out.

We inherited this picture from my wife's grandparents after they died (many years ago). At the picture's bottom is inscribed:

14 colors were used to achieve this effect.
This picture is also known as "St. Veronica's Handkerchief" and is a copy of the celebrated painting by Gabriel Max, an Austrian, who was born in 1840. The original painting, valued at $25,000, is in a private collection in Prague, Austria. His best known work in America is "The Last Token" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

But it also says: "If you watch the eyes closely, they will suddenly open!"

It's never worked for me, but maybe it will for you. You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it before trying.

Provoked by political scandal, Emily takes another look.

I buzzed a lot before I died
And joined the stillness of this room,
Before the presidential pique brought down
The cultured hand of doom.

He fixed me with his gimlet eye -
Calculating, cold, was he -
No Buddha in transcendant trance who
Took no note of me.

He's bound (he claims) by higher things,
Like fixing health care 'ere we die,
By duty at a camel strains but
Must needs swat the fly.

"All victory to the King!" they cry
As one (a monolithic group),
"His stroke was pure, the outcome sure,
No maggots in the soup!"

But every creature finds its niche - I've heard -
And mine is surely here,
Sucking presidential sweat
From off the royal ear.

Power corrupts, we must conclude - for
When it came to me -
My crucial place in God's good plan
He could not see to see.

He who loves diversity lets
All creatures in the door,
But looked down so indifferently
At me on the floor,

Where, before the windows failed,
He saw but one of me -
My many-chambered eyes saw death -
In multiplicity.

I've been wanting to put up a post dealing with all kinds of important matters, but the several of you who still visit are lucky I'm here at all. I should be a dead man. I came into the house the other evening after mowing the yard, all filthy dirty and sweaty and looking forward to the required refreshment. I walked into the living room where the wife's relaxing in a recliner and watching TV. "It's done," I said. "We're the envy of the street."

"Oh, good," she said. "There's something for you out in the guestroom."

"For me?" It's not my birthday so I'm puzzled. "Should I go out there and see what it is?"

She nodded. So I head out to the other building and find a good size, brand new barbecue grill waiting for me, which we've been needing because the bottom's rusting out of the old one. Well, I thought, ain't that sweet? She saved me a trip to Home Depot. On the grill was a card saying "1973-2009. WOW! That's a long time!"

I don't know what's happening to my mind, but for some reason I thought she was congratulating me for keeping the old grill going for so long. It wasn't until I got back inside that the math settled out and it occurred to me that we hadn't owned that grill for 36 years. It was only about 20 years old.

"Well thanks," I said, "is that my Father's Day present?"

She just rocked back and forth in her combo rocking chair-recliner and wearing a half-smile with a sort of bitter twist to it. "Did you see the card?" she asked.

"Yeah, 1973 to 2009...?"

She looked briefly toward the ceiling, then turned that weird smile back on me, which set my mind to racing. My head had been filled lately with the kind of desperation that accompanies the need to think of something for a daughter's birthday, something for my Dad on Father's day, to find time to fix the gutter, repair the chimney, put a new screen on the front door, take a chain saw to the camphor tree, write a blog post, do some reading and finish a painting and so on. So my mind was racing through June trying to figure out what I'd overlooked. Then of course it hit me.

"Is today the 15th?"

She nodded and rocked.

"I forgot our anniversary?" She nodded and...

I put my head in my hands. It wasn't entirely an act. "Can I make excuses?"

She shook her head.

"What are you going to do to me?"

"Do? What can I do that would do any good? You are what you are."

"You do realize I've treasured every moment."

She was back to nodding and rocking.

"Thirty-six years," I said, in a voice filled with awe. "That's a long..." She turned the weird smile upon me.

"Well," I said after a moment, "why have you stuck it out so long? A normal woman would have gotten rid of me."

"Oh, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death..." It sounded like she was reciting the sentence she'd been handed by the judge.

"Hell," I said, "nobody pays attention to that anymore."

"Maybe not some people."

"It's the girls, isn't it? I gave you a couple of good-looking, good-hearted daughters so you thought you'd reward me by hangin' round."

"They haven't hurt any."

I finally wished her happy anniversary. She said, "Thanks, Bill," then went back to watching TV. I dragged my dirty sorry self outside, flopped down in a rubber deck chair and started sucking down the Pauli Girls. I suspect anniversaries are more important than all the other days we celebrate except maybe the religious ones. You can't have fathers' days and mothers' days and grandparents' days and kids' birthdays without them. A marriage has to come first. And I'd forgotten it. Even Valentine's Day points in that direction. Even Christmas and Easter are different when you're married with children. I don't know how much I'd care about them without my marriage. Its anniversary really is more important to me than all the others. And I'd forgotten it. She seems to have moved on, but I don't know what it does to a woman inside, because they're real good at hiding that sort of thing. I ain't dead yet, but I probably oughta be.

I also suspect I better put that grill to good use this weekend. She likes porterhouse, with a subtantial tenderloin attached. Rare. Coming right up.

From the old archives, July 2004. I keep finding things that never made it over here.

---

Mr. Buckley: Recently from these quarters I spoke with Malcolm Muggeridge on the subject of the search for religion, his encounter with it, and the desolation of abomination that came from it. What we did not get into, and propose to do in this hour, is the question of denominationalism. Is he a member of a particular communion, and if not, why not? What is the role of the institutionalized church? ... These questions...we explore in the study of Malcolm Muggeridge...who...says he has visited America for the last time, and if this is indeed the case, we can be grateful, as we seldom have been before, for the benefits of television.

I'll begin, then, by asking what I suppose is the most obvious question, particularly inasmuch as I am one myself: Why are you not a Catholic?

Mr. Muggeridge: It's not altogether easy to answer that actually, Bill. I've, believe it or not, longed to be a Catholic...I've longed for it as though it were the most marvelous thing, but I've never been able to feel in honesty that I could present myself for instruction, and it's extremely difficult to know why. The truth is, I think, that I take a very pessimistic view of the Catholic Church, despite the very brilliant Pope you've now got. It seems to me that it's dropping to pieces; and of course it had a severe blow after the Vatican Councils. Therefore, I would be joining something of which I was enormously critical, and this isn't really an honorable thing to do.

Mr. Buckley: That's never bothered you before.

Mr. Muggeridge: I've never contemplated anything so serious as joining a church. I mean, even if you were to turn to mundane things - joining a club - if you were to join it quite confident that you were going to challenge all its rules and have rows with all its members, it would be a rather foolish step to take.

Mr. Buckley: You once called yourself an imperfect Christian. Is this a sign of pride?

Mr. Muggeridge: I don't think so, because I would have no troubles if I felt that I could go as a sinner into the Church. I'm sure many people have. It's a feeling that I would go there in some degree under false pretenses. I don't know. There was an incident which, trivial in itself, played quite a part in my decision not to become a Catholic. The time when I was nearest to going and asking to be instructed - and I'd planned that I would go to Father D'Arcy because I had a great love for him - it was when I was rector at Edinburgh University, and I ran into a row there which you might have heard of when I was asked, as rector, by the students -

Mr. Buckley: To supply contraceptives.

Mr. Muggeridge: That's right - to recommend that they should be given, unquestioningly, free supplies of contraceptives by the University medical unit, and I refused to do this and there was a hullabaloo. And I thought to myself, you see, "Well, there are a thousand Catholics in the University, and they'll be on my side anyway. I've got a thousand men on my side." What happened was that the first big blast against me was a letter in The Scotsman by the Roman Catholic chaplain at the University, saying what a monstrous thing this was that I had done.

Mr. Buckley: Excuse me, but why was it monstrous?

Mr. Muggeridge: It was monstrous, according to him, because it accused the students of wanting to be promiscuous; but in a letter I wrote in answer to it, I said I wondered what the Reverend Father thought they wanted the contraceptives for? Was it to save up for their wedding day? He offered no answer to that. But then I thought that somebody would give him a very big reprimand. But no such thing happened. Then I thought he'd almost certainly become a bishop. But that didn't happen either. What happened is the perfect payoff of the whole episode: He's now rector of Edinburgh University. (laughter)

Mr. Buckley: Is that right?...And did they get their contraceptives?

Mr. Muggeridge: Oh yes, oh yes. But there was nobody who reprimanded him. One Jesuit monk wrote to me and said that he thought it was monstrous and that he'd written to this Father and suggested that he should apologize to me, but nothing came of that. Anyway, it was a small episode, but it gave me the feeling that - One of the things I admired the Church for so much was Humanae Vitae. I think it's absolutely right that when a society doesn't want children, when it is prepared to accept eroticism unrelated in any way to its purpose, then it's on the downward path. So I admired it so much, and then I realized that since I was involved in this row, their adherence to it was very, very ceremonial rather than actual. They didn't really believe in it themselves...and they haven't practiced it.

Mr. Buckley: Well, I'm, to put it lightly, stupefied that you would make a decision whether or not to extend your loyalty to an institution based on the behavior of some its communicants. I can't imagine any time in history when anybody would have become a Catholic if he had been so easily put off.

Mr. Muggeridge: That's true. That obviously wasn't a major thing, Bill, but what it did was it kind of crystallized certain feelings I had that these things that I so enormously admired...are the very things that it's turning its back on - that I would be involved in endless controversies connected with them.

Mr. Buckley: Well, you would be the millionth Catholic who was.

Mr. Muggeridge: (laughing) Yes, I suppose so. But can't you see that the - Perhaps it's an excuse I've invented myself. It's quite possible.

Mr. Buckley: You have no problem then, I take it, with the Apostles' Creed?

Mr. Muggeridge: None at all.

Mr. Buckley: Or with apostolicity?

Mr. Muggeridge: Not at all. I assent to it. Or the infallibility of the Pope; that doesn't worry me at all. I can see the purpose of all those things, and I see the context of people that I so admire - like St. Augustine and St. Francis - who were ready to accept all that...On the contrary, it's the feeling that the Church itself is moving away from these basic beliefs that is distressing. Or maybe it's just some kind of instinct.

Mr. Buckley: But there can't have been a more resonant reaffirmation of them than by the present Pope. I'm not here to try to convert you. I'm just exploring.

Mr. Muggeridge: No, no, no. I know. This is absolutely true, and of course, it has given great joy to many people because of that, but it still remains the case that I can't join it; and I'll have to meet my Maker not having joined it. Probably I'll get a frightful pacing in purgatory for it, but I can't help it. No.

© 1981, by the National Committee of Catholic Laymen - a transcript from Firing Line

Issue 2 of The Christendom Review is now available for purchase in book form here. There is also a cheaper pdf download on the same page. Please support us. The online version will always be free.

Since the Review is available only in black and white, art lovers can purchase separately, either in book form or download, the visual arts excerpt featuring Tim Jones' fine work.

I should mention that Lydia has an article in the June Touchstone that is sort of an offspring of her TCR piece. You can view the table of contents here, but hers is not available online, so I guess I'll have to buy the freaking issue. Since the impetus for it was the fact that she had managed to collect (and put in one place on the web) all the 2000 Schiavo trial testimony for the Review article, it seems exactly the sort of article that ought to be online. But they don't exactly consult me on editorial matters.

Got a daughter coming to town, so there doth my interest lie.

Still, I should make mention of Paul Cella's visit a couple weekends ago. He and his father-in-law (a great guy - Paul got lucky in his in-laws) hit the links with Bernadette and me. I've got video of Paul's swing, but not permission to post it. Let's just say that he now knows more about Florida wetlands than the Okeechobee Water Management District. And yet a pleasanter course companion you could not ask for. (Bernadette, by the way, beat us all. Handily.) He can't blame his golf on the clubs, though. We gave him the set Bernadette used in her first year on tour, top-o-the-line Callaway irons, the driver she used to place 10th at Q-School, a Cleveland wedge, and a Taylormade putter. (I'll have to say he putted well and wanted to keep the instrument of his success.) The reason he had to use Bern's clubs is that his own were stolen out of his own car in front of his own house right there in All-American suburban Atlanta. Afterwards we came back to my place and sucked down some Newcastles and Coronas before Paul and his Dad-in-law had to rush back to Disney so as not to displease the wives, who apparently had everyone on a schedule and no idea what a cold beer and good conversation mean to a man after 5 hours in the hot sun and 95% humidity. "Who's running things?" I asked the father-in-law.

"They are," he said, no hesitation.

That was Monday. Friday, after getting into town, Paul and his wife and three daughters came for dinner. That's right, count'em, 3. One man against 4 women. He's a goner. The girls, if I recall, are two, four, and nine. And basically delightful. It was fun watching Paul's wife (not using her name because I don't know if she wants me to) cut up the barbecue into little tiny chunks for the little ones. I'd forgotten I used to do that. We had ribs, pulled pork, fries, beans, slaw and cornbread. I'd mowed the yard earlier to make the place look half decent, so I knocked back a fair number of Staropramens and Coronas. Bernadette pretty well kept pace with me. I love having daughters for drinking companions. Paul managed one or two Newcastles, and everybody else was on water and cranapple juice. The oldest daughter (Paul's) played the piano (as did TSO's wife when she was here) and drew a picture on a sketch pad I loaned her. The weekend happened to coincide with Elizabeth's birthday, and Mary Helyn missed her so much she went ahead and bought a birthday cake and watched Paul's kids eat it. And then, before I knew it, it was over. Paul and I didn't get to talk much about The Important Things, but then the important stuff was probably happening right in front of us. Said he'd be back soon, though. He'd mentioned bringing along some Chesterton to read in his down time (I can't imagine when that might have been) and has posted some of the fruits of it here. Pretty good stuff.