onion juice

well...I'm down here in Mesa and it's cooling off.  Me and the dogs have been holding the fort all day.  I got here last night.  I've been reading 'Charming Billy' by Alice O'Connell.  Her picture is in the back of the book.  She looks like an old neighbor of mine from my childhood.  It's a good story.  I spent most of my day reading it.  I could identify with the Irish Catholic factor in the story line because that's what my family was although my mother was Lutheran growing up.  She converted to Catholicism when she married my dad. 

My daughter is about to give birth to her first child.  She and her husband are naming the baby 'Harrison' but her husband says they won't call the boy 'Harry' but they'll call him 'Harris' so we'll see how it flies.  He's going to be tiny and red and want to sleep 24/7 right at first.  They'll be all dedicated to the new parent mode which is to be in total awe of their new child until he finally sinks in that he's no longer a lump in his mother's tummy.  He's finally arrived.  She does look rather distended now, these are the last few days before he comes into the world.  I'm sleeping in the guest bedroom where the laptop and desk are located.  That's why I'm posting, because there's time and resource to do so.  I had just the most wonderful day getting down here.  My neighbor was going to Port Angeles so I rode in with her and caught the bus at Tarciscio's in Sequim.  We did a little shopping.  I didn't buy much because I was already packed to the gills but I did get the book that I've been reading and some yarn for little Harris's afghan which I should continue to plug away at in hops that it gets done before he arrives.  I don't know about that one...I've been working on that thing since I found out he was coming and I haven't gotten that far on it.  Plus I have to study for EMT because we're due to take the exam in another month..yikes

I was thinking that the blogging thing, the recipes for successful blogging, might begin like the Julia Child adventure in cooking up her recipes and then writing about them.  That was a good approach to the sharing of information.  There's also the day by day observing, trending it's called...like observing that Russell Crowe is up the street in Vancouver BC being in a movie about Superman.  He's the dad in that one.  I wonder if he'll come down the straits in a fishing boat one of these days.  Going out to Port Renfro would be a good trip for him.

I was going to comment further on the O'connell book, charming billy.  I found it to be very eloquent in its descriptive style, a passage about the main character's mother and father, the girl telling the story, and the love between her parents, so good.  She talks about the resilence of a happy marriage, not always in bliss but always in loyalty and steadfastness, wherein the couple realizes towards the ends of their lives that this is what it has been for them, a devotion to one another that encompasses their lives together, makes it what it has been to both of them, a constancy and a source of their daily happiness, what makes them what they are, a resolution to that end.  It's very well told, this story, but it has the shortcoming of being a description of a lifelong depression in alcoholism.  It made me understand a little better how to avoid that condition: never dwell too long on your disappointments but focus on the things that you have loved and be happy whenever you can.  Surely we all have our upheavals but to over and over again drown our sorrows in the lake of alcohol, well that part is told well, you can do it, you can suffer, but should you?  and should you let those others that are of that belief: in sorrow and despair, disappoint you as well.  Even though the story is about Catholicism, in a sense, it doesn't give a terribly strong picture of the parish priest, which may not account for the attitudes of the characters as much as it makes me wonder why we don't tell that better, explain the mysticism of catholicism..why it works for me and for others.  we're born into it certainly, but along the way it takes hold of us and we're routinely reconverted by our daily lives to that blind faith in what we believe: that Christ is in the communion host, and he's there with us throughout the week until we replenish him again on Sunday at communion.  so we're not really blind as much as we're on autopilot, letting our free will be guided by that light inside us.  I kind of wanted to see O'connell talk to this but she didn't really, other than to take some of the trappings of the faith: the smell of incense, the church clothes, the monsignor urging the parishioner to believe her widowhood was intended for her.  accepting the death of a loved one is never an easy thing to do but if you just take it day by day, it becomes tolerable over time
in the case of billy, the charmer, he was in love with a girl one summer and planned to marry her, talked of her constantly, but she went home to Ireland and married someone else.  his family told him she died.  this gave him the opportunity to become an alcoholic, to delude himself that she had broken his heart when every day, he rebroke himself and not his faith and not his familya nd friends could put him back together, though they did make the effort to see he didn't fall apart too quickly.  more than anything the book speaks to the absolute lack of any kind of psychiatric therapy, there's no mention of it, other than the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a group therapy kind of organization that works for some and not for others.  People I know who belong to it are like Billy, they'd still have a drink if they weren't totally convinced that they shouldn't.  A therapist might have gotten to the bottom of Billy's issues, that the girl had died, he thought, gave him the opportunity to grieve and so he did.  He recognized that the love he felt for this girl was the best thing that ever happened to him and nothing that ever happened after that time would be as good.  He didn't find in his daily life, although the author described these further moments well, the same joy he had found in the company of that girl.  I've known people like that.  It's like the light has been shut off inside them and they can't let go of their disappointments.  That was Billy.  It was frustrating to read how he kept going back to the bottle without ever again being as happy in his life as he had been with the first girl he ever loved.  He drowned in his disappointmentsead of realizing that was what his life was, fulfilled.  Some of us are like that, we always know our life is joy, a taste of heaven before we get there, others do not.  I think maybe in a post nuclear age, like we're evolving towards, we'll all be 'fulfilled'.  We won't be worried about global aggression, we'll have bigger things on our plate, like new planets to colonize.  All of us will be thinking in those terms, we'll be bred to it.  Maybe the sixties movement was the big wakeup call in that direction.  Maybe.  Maybe we were all meant to be able to laugh heartily and readily.  Maybe we're not cloned after all.  hehe...perhaps O'connell's book is about the ability to just gestate and be yourself.  The struggle for it.. 
I suppose it is a moral tale of how not to find happiness in your life.  For me, I've never been content to sit still and let life unfold.  Not worrying about conformity, if I might be unhappy for a time.  Truthfully, I glanced out the bus window on the way to the airport and there was someone I saw outside whom I recognized.  A person that made me very unhappy once upon a time.  Now he looked like a kind of a pilgrim on his way to wherever he was going and I didn't care about seeing him one bit.  I knew he was still alive, still riding a Harley, still wearing a beard but he wasn't anything to do with me anymore.  That was a good thing.  I felt nothing seeing him, not even anger, or disappointment, nothing.  A chapter from the past.  That was all.  How better Billy could have felt upon meeting up with his Eva, had he had that ability.  He wouldn't have drown himself.
There was also the wife that pulled him out of the gutter whenever he fell down in it.  She was as flat and colorless as beige walls, as responsive.  There must have been some intimacy between them, her and Billy, but you don't hear that, read it.  You don't see how she was a good wife to him, if, in fact, she was at all.  She was the sponge that absorbed all his disappointment.  They apparently lived on it, his disappointment, for the rest of his life until he died in production of it.
How can we be so negative and have so much potential at the same time.  A man who carried a book of Yeats along wherever he went, a real admirer of poetry.  Someone to shed a little light for the rest of us on why that would be a good thing.  A person who could describe the wing of an angel as it lifts off to heaven. Well, I guess I've gone on enough about Billy so I'd better let it go.  There's more interesting things afoot now, like actually having a blog.  hehe...what to write about...how not to clone a depressed alcoholic perhaps, and how to gestate the best of humankind..possibly...there could be some thought in that...well..it's morning again, I've discovered how to charge the computer so it functions, the hot tub is available..my lips are chapped from sleeping with my mouth open, I've been very tired from all the excitement...there's a baby coming..adieu mon amis..

issues of studying..

I am eating bundlesof rye crackers..I am crocheting..I am blogging, but I am not studying!  The teacher of the class even dropped by, but I'm not into it evidently.  It's a gorgeous day.  I'd like to sit o utside inthe s un with my sunglasses on, just warm up because it's a bit chilly in here.  Reflect on what I've been up to since I last posted here.  That thing I just wrote, I was musing about married life and then I sat in a friend's lap and he reminded me of my foster kid, a sort of inside out, reverse sort of hug because I was thinking of him.
That's kinda weird but how I recognized it.  Went to fluff out a house for someone very ill.  Me and another friend, we fluffed and buffed and threw away old fish and vodka.  The windows were opened, the carpet shampooed, the furniture vaccumed, the floors mopped, the fridge cleaned, emptied and cleaned and refilled.  One cabinet is almost all medicines.  There are used needles and boxes of glucose solution.  We toss a lot of things like the package of shrimp that was in the truck where the keys weren't.
As it happens I come home from that adventure, where I had stared at the empty swimming pool and wondered if it were boardable, and walk straight into another one.  My neighbor's mother is visiting.  She looks like Hughie Tierney from back in the day but she's much like her daughters as well.  She did well with them, they're all vi brant and sociable, very nice ladies, consistently pleasant I think you'd say.  They were having a fish fry in honor of their mother's visit.  I was handed a Corona with lime, a plate and directions to load up.  That was a delicious meal and as I finished it, I was handed dessert involving strawberries and an angelfood cupcake with sauce drizzled on it.  How very pleasant.  They lit a firework called a 'Cornupcopia' in the back drive,  We were entertained.
Doggiwoggs and I went home after that because it was evident they weren't starting a bonfire and the marshmellows I went home for would have to wait.  I hung up a fresh load of clothes on the line, hammered in the piece that wants to peel off of the clothesline, hopefully it's secured.  Contemplate digging a hole for the new clothes line but decided I am tired enough to go inside, which I do.  Flip on the tv and 'Missippi Burning' is on television.  Gene Hackman has a wonderful role, I should check to see if he got an Oscar or a nod for his role.  It's good.  He's portraying Every Man buying a soda in nowhere land, which if you've been there to say "Alabama' you know it's pretty weird, all the separate entries that are fading away.  Kind of hard to believe those white boys would just arbitrarily go shooting people of the colored community, but it seems they did.  When I went through Alabama, I was thinking of that little guy Wallace that used to run that state and how his influence might have colored things.  Well things is still colored but not really anymore, just different.  I got okra there and flew it  home with me.  It stayed in the freezer while my partner and I threw things at one another and then one day I made a gumbo with the Okra and a salmon I caught, and the partner brought me back here.  I'm not from the south but I love a good gumbo, the more peppery the better.  Well, soon be home to have my latest creation, big beef bone with meat, want to say brisket but I dunno if it's actually that, around the knee of the cow, with red beans, cabbage, cooking simmering for a while till it's all slush in the pot.  Tossed in a little basil, seasoning salt, no onions but I have plenty of them, probably have with a slice of rye and more of that Irish cheddar.  Maybe a jigger of cold vodka to wash it down, 
So the painting cycle is heading up as well, with two maybe more waiting on the runway to take wings and fly.  Have left the jar of paint open so that I'm bound to attend to it, and I have, a couple of strokes at a time.  Gardening t his morning, with a great pile of manure from the farm, thank you very much, which got shoveled here and there and the ground sighed in a great gasp as I tossed it over it.  There was steam rising.  Surprising how warm it gets.  Methane processes, evidently.
Later today am attacking barberry on the trim and thin/weed aspect.  My arms are chilly.  There may be a picnic involved to which my friend is invited.  I was bringing the woodcutter but I didn't think he was picnic material and I don't want him getting the wrong idea.  I haven't studied anything yet.  Next week I have to put on an art exhibit.  Strange how things have reverted to the old days of hammering nails in the wall and entertaining the press in hopes of a review.

imbroglio et fettucine...the blandness of argument

some of my senior friends are going to Italy.  I should like to stay home while they post letters from Palma but eh...I know they'll see Florence and the Vatican, and it'll wait...I'm just learning to be comfortable in cooler weather of the moment, cooking if I can seize the time, delightful repasts that fill the house with delectable aromas...painting on the side deck, thinking about dueling it out with the creekside some more...will dig up a good portion of the grape hyacinth that goes crazy in this yard, toss it back there, mow it down with the weedwacker , look for willow starts...get more yummy dirt, say a eulogy for the turd lawnmower to die of a slammed crankshaft (kaablong...dink)thuggy thuggy won't start again, ebbers...not trying to be cute, hate writing like that but do talk it, like going up to sol ducky...where they need haus kippers...hehe...that's going to be interesting, fluffing out the mausoleum of a stone col'drinker...I just thought it wo uld be interesting since he has a pool and they're so few and far between here...like when the river and the strait is across the street and it comes up in the yard like it is in the winter.
so for now, this is just words being blopped onto the screen and there's no stories being told today about Al and the life of a NYC cop although I was going somehwere with that one once u[pon a time although I think he became that Cafferty character with the pregnant belly, egads that makes me squint, at least, hehe
hmmm..
yep, there's the subject at hand, how women view men that they want to know intimately..
well, first you get your ideal, w hich for me is the actor Russell Crowe, that to me is the ultimate manly man because I really like the way he looks, now granted I know as a person he'd be a chump full of change probably, but that's as it is...am I any great shakes as a female? I  dunnno, but I'm myself and I think that means something...so
you gotta go for looks first off, because that tweaks the heart muscle in and laying over that the female organ of nursing...I don't say that any other way because I don't, what it does, that FOON..is get like someone blew a lot of air into the balloon and it's encased in this bridle harness of a garment known as la brassiere.which you know is pretty well filled up when you're lookin' over this guy's credentials in the 'do I turn you on?' department and he's filled out like well, the guy who reads the kids' their bedtime story and brushes his teeth before  he crawls in next to you and blows some warm air behind your ear (please don't tell me what a major tunnel the real RC has been known to be because this is the doppleganger theory taking hold here, ok)...a person can be the essence of the very intense emotional outlay trigger by looking the part, but what you want is that he know the part...so wouldn't you want your husband to be that...I don't think any of  us is perfect, but I do want him in frayed bermudas on Sunday afternoons looking in tidepools and being macho when we find the octopus...and what is macho?  it's like, ah, he knows how to chop lettuce and change oil, he can finetune the carbeurator and he is an English Lit major like me...he wasn't in the service, he was a detective in LAPD, he was a pediatric surgeon, he had his own hamburger stand...he shaves and wears cologne, but just a little bit to let you know if you get that close up to him that he smells very good and your toenails have permanently curled up and you'll have to get a little chainsaw to bust them loose..
so what does that do for you? well for me it keeps me going because my spouse was fremlicarta...I don't say the race or whatever because it doesn't matter, it isn't anymore...it cannot be because there's this...which I didn't mess with but it evolved... into this other ideal which you know, I don't get much chance for that kind of social interaction where I am and I don't go hunting it out like I have done in the past...yegads was I ever into that but a bit, what challenge, what fun...but...now I see that it can be that I am the soccer coach, blowing my whistle, spinning the ball on my pointer finger, tucking it up under my arm and exhorting the little soccer boys to run, run...while I blow my whistle at them...women don't whistle at men but sometimes they are quite worthy of it...our hearts are like magnets, glinnnggg, across the universe we find one another and there's it is...I love you, you love me, we are fitted together like inseparable pieces of a puzzle of our lives...the main sections of it, our family beside us, our dogs, cats, trees, houses, cars, faith, hope charity, that love...our dinner menu, what we eat for breakfast, read in the paper, heat the house with...I could go along the floor rolling over and over picking up the dust of your footsteps so I would glow and be a bit dirty...I shouldn't have gotten so particular about what I wanted from a marriage but I have because each day is the light into the next one, the eternal sun of it...and my little fetish works to sustain me in that it is continuitous unto itself and some good examples provided...he should be of a certain height and breadth, or he should be as intuitive as I need him to be, or have a gravely voice or know how to hit a baseball, what he should be is a man and what I am is a woman and that's what I want...no pale imitations, no guys polishing their shining armor until they can see their own face in it...some kind of guru of his own class...which I don't know what that is but he's about as into what he wants as I am...and so we become into it together and our children number over one dozen, I thought fourteen was a good number, gadzooks anyways...that's enough bubble gum to tar the driveway and glue on the roof...enough eggs for forty million pancakes and twenty cows for thirty million gallons of milk - an eggzageration but not that much...a guy that would do that for me there would have to be that many kids coming out of it...because he'd see them as I do...little windows of the soul with voices and armpits and teeth and eyes and toes and bedtimes and music lessons and hikes and beachcombing..
from the moment they're born they're like the page of poetry we were reading before we created them...why you liked it why I found it so eloquent, where you want to put the polish on the Guillietta...where I want to weld on the wing of the Cessna...we debate helmets for the motorcycle ride, I'm Triumph girl and you're just the beefcakes BMW because everyone knows those who ride Harley bild'm..more or less...I think of you on the paradise of a lost shore and then I walk the beach with the little white dog and it's a good story and one that sustains me, I'm never without it and it's part of my faith and hope and love that I have it...it's the containment of my female self within the large aspect of the marital bond...it's what makes the muffins rise, the spaghetti sauce get that certain sheen...the mushrooms brown up nicely...the flower open...the ground be quenched by rain...what is love...
well I wanted to go into it more but now there's this gray raincloud hanging over things...I don't think it bears mentioning since this is the decades of experience piece about what marriage is...you brought the Italian cold cut sub to it and I brought a cream soda and a celeriac because we both know that those good for you drinks like vitamin water are ok but they need a little zip...we had a slice of cheese cake walking through the park, the squirrel got some nuts, I told you I was nuts about you and felt like all I wanted to do was read the original score of one of Mozart's more popular pieces...and you said the same thing only you said that you wanted to rebuild the engine on my Accord because you got a reading on the compression that told you the block was very good for the work...neither of us could decide who was the more eloquent, I thought maybe that if I said that you were electricity you would tell me I was the rain, we're just electrical together, conducting...and I would say to that do you dance, which I could see your stomach would kind of curl up and you'd exhibit a sort of shyness then while I'd go off to the dance floor and sort of dance it out, how I felt...with my eyes closed because I'd be embarassed to see you see my face, so I understand that you won't dance, but I guess you do that too only you take me in your arms and whirl me close to you, a kind of control thing wherein the pressing the flesh gets the message across, you see, there's the stern paternity issue that the actor gives off but that's the actor, the real person, the ideal...another thing, a joker, practical joker that loves laughter which in my world would be like the night in the day...there would be an absolute absence of darkness in that humor...he'd giggle because he'd be delighted to have confounded you and you'd look at him and say, you will remember that you did this to me because I am going to get even with you...and I would
but I'd do something like rent a huge billboard on Madison Avenue that reads I LOVE YOU...YOUR WIFE

a new day in the neighborhood

summer is here

hail with it

the yard is begging for a facelift but it keeps being miserable outside.  I'm taking EMT classes, leaving by 8:45 a.m. and so far we've been cut short two out of the three days I've gone because of response calls coming in.  I've been learning to use the blood pressure cuff and the little finger clip monitor that analyzes the space between the heart beats.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Reading, I've finished the sequel to gone with the wind  which was a real potboiler and I liked it good enough.  Wondering about the summer, if it will ever get here...
Did a painting I called "japanese spring' after the incident in Japan.  Had an easter card from my brother and apparently their airport got blown around in a tornado.  He just bought a new house in the St. Louis suburbs...I guess they're ok according to family but what a thing to happen...
Today I helped the girls next door get the gallery for our women's conciousness raising session and book discussion club.  We generally have the book club on Tuesdays the last week of the month and the consciousness raising gets done on that Thursday, or vice verssa, but we couldn't this month because the girls were away doing their thing so we're doing it today.  I helped mop floors and get it tidied up.  They fed me an egg salad sandwich, which was nice of them.

mermaid icons

I've been working here and there lately.  One day it was absolutely beautiful outside, Saturday.  We got up early and went to the beach at Shipwreck Point where we scoured the beach and cleaned the roadsides
that was pretty much fun.  After that we had barbeque with theother beach cleaners.  Then we came home and unloaded the trash we'd found.  There was a rug and a tire with a rim also.  We tossed the tire and the rug is being cleaned for the rental house.
We're back to Monday now.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  I went to the Presbyterian Church breakfast but didn't get up in time for services at the Rock.  Went to Easter Mass at St. Thomas and then had a long nap because the day started so early.  Later on we had Easter supper at By the Bay Cafe and then watched television till bedtime.  I was crocheting a rainbow colored legwarmer. 
Today I am dressed warm because it's raining again.  I have to go to Tops at 3 and then to the firehall at 6 for the beginning of EMT training.  Another busy week lining up it seems.
The mermaid icons have been showing up.  I found one this past week that was oriental in nature but the woman had a fish tail so it qualified as a mermaid.  Not sure where I saw it, possibly the co op when I was in there for juice and milk.  I sometimes feel as though I ought to appropriate the mermaid symbols when I see them but I should just draw them in my own version of what I've seen.  That would be the thing to do.  I have wash on the line from Saturday, getting a nice dose of fabric softener in the rain fall.

Samuel Butler

it was the above named author that put me in mind of new zeland, the book erewhon...which I read in a very tumultous time a few years back.  i was soothed by it and intrigued by the author, who lived about hundred fifty years ago and I know nothing of him.  it appears he was a 'serious' satirist'.  i suppose the clowns who now write for saturday night live would do well to study him a bit...I again exposed myself to the humor of snl.  it again defeated my laughing whereas the purloined video tape (yes, Mrs Woolf, we still have them about) of Adam Sandler doing a takeoff of his sabbath singing would have been the kind of humor to toast my gabotchniks.  there's no depth to humor on snl.  the little fatboy 'big k' doesn't do it.  well he never did.  he's still a kidnik, what do they call those? boychicks?  yeah, that's him...lemmee see...the last macro of the corpse of john belushi...something like that
I sound kind of putzki myself making fun of a show still trying to be on the air
well yeah, we used to write for it, in black humor at 3 am on yahoo chat on sat/sun mornings, sat eve sun morn and laughed until we fell out of our chairs
where's the ability to do that anymore? can I find humor in the fact I'm staring the financial stew with a twisted stumick? nah..I was writing about the Butler book 'the way of all flesh' which kind of rung true, although it too smacked of the worry over one's pitiful financial picture (I look like the grim reaper in the mirror on that one, ishh)
butler's book, the way of all flesh, expounds on the limits of child abuse, in the educated...it was a good thing thought by this narrowminded minister who married a woman he couldn't hardly love but he did and had three children with her once he figured it out...I came away from the book, because it was hardly bearable to read that this minister assaulted his oldest boy for having a lisp, he couldn't say his 'c''s...it was painful to read and quite shocking
i could think in butler's day that the presentation of this child abuse would have been the thing to think on if one were looking toward the victorian era and the happy family of victoria and albert..that this righted the path to that end and thus a family was endowed with the graces it was intended
i would think also that love comes naturally if all else is in place and that such ideas as whaling on a child for speaking as a child wouldn't even have been a consideration...ah, but it was the father/minister himself that had been born without a good cause..that he came into the world was possibly to contain the essence of his wonderful grandpapa..who, as butler tells it, was one of those lights of the world that lands just in the middle of a common everyday settlement of people, individuals of all sorts, to whom his light spreads and things are good...he gives (the grandpapa) by his being among us, the joy of our existence...let's us know, here's why we're here...so his vessel of soul is maintained by his progeny, of whom he only had the one son..who was a prig, a bore, a bastard at heart and so on...according to butler
but, as we bear on in the book, and we do, we can't be putting it down because we're stuck in airports the long day, all day, from early on, we're reading it to find out a little on the advent of victorianism, which it is...and it does create the very fecund environment of victoria and albert and their many children...I do n't want to know about them, but I do know that if anyone read butler's book in his day, they would have thought the child beating passage most cruel..and also the alcoholic wife of the beaten son...who never seems to cut a break in his life until he's grown past most of it, including the raising of his own two lovely children (better off without me, he says)...bummer
what is life if you have kids and aren't there...I dunno, I figure I am, somehow, most of the time, but I'm me too and perhaps that's it, that's the sacrifice of the past centuries that we would now know ourselves a little better, go to a psychoanalyst of some sort and get our rages, dispossessions and so on, ironed out...I should hope that's what we've learned...It's kind of like treading familiar ground, this butler book, kind of peeping in the window and listening to incessant yammering of the quasimodo sort, where the dragons of no faith are ever in the cobwebs and the dust bunnies of life...
he doesn't go in for that sort of detail, butler, he tells a little of a house the beaten son occupies for a time, but only at the onset of the habitation (I'm talking in the vernacular of the book here), rather he goes on a mile about faith, belief in faith, faith as a constant, faith as a moral bankruptcy that it is so poorly interpreted
certainly we had lovely books on the saints growing up - oh yes, my catholicism is coming up like a newly forming volcano here, but I leave it aside to examine the fortitude of the epistle (the way of all flesh)...I also pad away a moment to investigate my own hearth..
 there, situation adjusted, fingers a bit stiff with cold, certainly that is the season, it's dribbling rain outside - we're used to it but it is dreary, so the thoughts about this book are of that sort, that its issues with theology lie buried in the attitudes of the family explored.  there is no joyousness in this family, and I don't recall its name other than it was of the cloth, throughout, the beaten son even ordained into it but not a minister, at last, rather a newborn theologian asking his readership (if there was) to qualify their beliefs in the foundation of his own thought.  That I had a challenge with.
Whereas we may all at some point be recognizable as churchgoers, when the chips are down, we have only our faith to turn to.  Do we?  would we if we knew what I now know about this particular English family?
Well, in a quick moment I recollect that we're never going to be the supreme being that God is.  If anything, The Way of All Flesh makes this a graphic presentation.  Here is the main church in England, I don't think Butler even calls it 'Anglican' though I suppose it must be, what else would it be? I came away not knowing for sure if it was the Anglican church, but I guess if one attends Cambridge and becomes a minister from it, then that must be what he was ordained to be serving in..hmm
What the book does is tell all that is without foundation in belief.  It comes up with the platitudes of belief - that God serves the daily prayer, but we don't see the characters being sustained by this, rather that they survive somehow in spite of it.  Only the original patriarch, the grandpapa early on in the story, has any joy of being in him.  Only he recognizes the true worth of life, that it is to be lived to the fullest.  Butler suggests this grandpapa may have been steered a bit by taking a wife it would appear to be not the most satisfactory spouse, but even this the man makes a good sort from, and they have a child.  It is this child that raises the ugly head of the best of our existence, our original sin in not recognizing life as a state of paradise.  Grandpapa knows well that life is this paradise.  He lives  his life out in this joy as Butler tells it.  Further on his family would have disappointed him no doubt, but had he been there to sort it out, surely it would have been a better thing.  Each child would have known his place in that man's heart one feels assured of it.
In the end the beaten child, whom I now feel confident (again the language of the story) to name as Ernest, whom he was.  Ernest lives to share with the rest of us, through Butler, how we may accomplish our life to the best of our ability.  We may be like a boat at sea in many storms, but if we listen to our inner voice, which we wou ld probably define as 'our soul', we may achieve the peace of knowing our place.  To reflect on how we got here, well, if it doesn't s uit, why bother.  That we are, and shall be, that's what we must do.  The book is an exercise in this  achieving element.  To be saddled with a set of behavior tools that don't suit us, as Ernest was at his father's knee (again and again) may take away our awareness of the essential goodness of being, most of it being compromised by situations that confound us, we may also know that having been born as Ernest was, in the bosom of the church, we may learn from it what not to take away from it.  That while God may be with us from the moment we are born, he does not sit idly by letting us be coddled by his presence.  Rather if we are the people in his service, we may be challenged beyond our ability to actual be human, and become as automatons of the written word of those with whom we share this life.  Did they know heaven on earth, could they understand suffering and death, were they not vile greedy sorts that consumed all in their path?  Some of them, perhaps, but they stand as effigies of the wrong way, and if they are the ones representing what He wants for us, then we know from that it is not what He wants for us.  So that is why Butler wrote the book for his time and for those after, that we may understand from it that we can choose our way, we can be strong, or we can crumble.
Certainly some of those characters in the story did crumble, or were made into clay statutes of their time, like Ernest's parents, who were outwardly the ones we would look up to, as minister and his family, their behavior was exemplary.  This is what also called them to be so cruel to their children as they thought it was called upon them to do so.  Their nature was not allowed to flourish and respond to the light of faith but rather to carry it out as some sort of dire military service, which in their recklessness was never made obvious to them.  They didn't squirm other than to respond to the base needs of their personalities.  As such, you can only surmise to get through it, the story, that this is faith on the surface when confronted with the choice to do evil.  I should survive it even if it calls to me like a siren.   Butler does reflect on Scylla and Charbydis a bit, in the case of Ernest and his choices as a youth, but we know that these are only for him signposts and he learns what the wrong turn can lead to. 
my fingers are still cold and I don't hear the fire crackling...I shall return momentarily
 here's momentarily...fingers again cold...fire is absolutely NOT cooperating, although I've finally made it go..
well...lots to think about with butler's book, but it boils down to live the life you've been given with as much good grace as you can give it..don't dwell on shortcomings but make the most of your opportunities, be enthusiastic, innocent and yet, trust in the Lord, for he knows all and will sustain you in spite of the major obstacles that a person like Ernest must face..to retain one's niaevete in certain danger is to be vindicated, however long that takes, it shall happen...and whatever theology one encounters, temper it with the experience of life for there is where you shall see love and grace in their element, and in no other place, however fine the speech...hehe, like here, haha