The Post Where I Mostly State the Obvious

This is no news to anyone at all, but...catastrophes are occurring at an increasingly alarming rate, as if the earth is a giant gameboard and someone has lost his temper and flipped the whole thing over. I almost always start to blog about these various disasters, but then the posts go unpublished because this has just never seemed like the right place to write about such things. On the contrary, this is the space where I proffer up too much information about my children, my many embarrassments, the minutiae of my days, my attempts to write stories.

So I won't say much, but I will note that a few days before the earthquake in Japan, Bino posted on Facebook that he'd had a dream about the end of days. And this thing—these tremors and waves and nuclear explosions—seems like just that: the end of days. After the fact, someone else reminded his friends to live, for God's sake because all of this is so very, very over. And today while I was washing dishes, I wondered what people say to each other in those moments before certain death, while the water rises or the ground falls away. And I wondered about the pain of dying from radiation poisoning, and if anyone is allowed to touch you, and if they aren't, how sad that is.

I've made a conscious decision not to talk to my kids about the breadth of the devastation or to show them a bunch of images; I don't know if that's right or wrong. There were some families at their school who are affected, and one of my twinkers is particularly close to a boy whose cousin was lost for a number of days (he has since been found), so they are very much aware. But I think it feels to them more like a scary movie than like something that has actually happened/is happening.

Tangent alert! Tangent alert!

I'm reading The Chronicles of Narnia to the girls, and right now we're finishing up The Horse and His Boy. When I read this series of books as a child, I didn't—despite a Catholic upbringing—pick up on the Christian references at all (so I wasn't the snappiest snap in the snap container; SO WHAT?!), and since I'm not pointing them out as we read, and since we're raising our children as moral-less, soul-less heathens, there's no reason to think they'll pick up on them either. What I am concerned about is the overt racism in The Horse and His Boy and if they've taken note of it. I'm waiting 'til we get to the end to poke around in their tween brains.

And that's the end of that.