While I am on vacation in Cape Cod and Kill Devil Hills, I have pre-loaded some thematic sentences for your reading pleasure . . . some of you might remember the long winded e-mail updates I sent out each week while Catherine and I were teaching in Syria; I have decided to revisit these in order to find the best moments and condense them into single sentences . . . so here is Syrian Memory #1: just after we arrived, my wife and I took public transportation to the ancient Christian village of Maalula, where the houses are nestled in the high desert mountains and painted a pleasant blue and where the people still speak the language of Christ, Aramaic-- and though I helped unload the vegetables from the van we did not receive a discount on our fare; we hiked above the town to visit the main attraction: the Shrine of St. Tekla-- here, supposedly, a woman converted to Christianity just before she was to be wed to a pagan man and she was flogged for this heresy, and then she fled and, miraculously, a beautiful gorge opened in the rocks to facilitate her escape and there is now a monastery at the foot of this gorge and inside the monastery are the typical relics and pictures and also a fountain where water drips into a basin and this water is supposed to relieve flatulence, and oddly, Catherine (who is never flatulent) drank from this fountain, but I did not . . . and in retrospect, this was my greatest regret from all our overseas adventures, that I didn't drink from that fountain, because sometimes, especially when I mix beer and ice cream, I wish I drank from that fountain.
"my wife, Vicky, and I"
ReplyDeleteI admire the skill being an English teacher for all these years has brought you: it dictates that my confusion from a sentence like this stems NOT from how fountain water can relieve flatulence or why on earth you would not drink from it when you do things like eat cicadas but how with sentence structure like this I feel the need to tell you that your wife's name is Catherine, not Vicky.
. . . but as I was mentioning to someone just yesterday, boy, are we glad you were in Syria 10 years ago and not now.
ReplyDelete. . . and I did buy Live Skull's Positraction CD back from The Band Box and give it to you as one of my groomsman gifts (along with your Nicks hat). Look for it in your stack of CD's.
ReplyDeleteWho gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?
ReplyDeleteokay-- for all the millions of people reading this who don't know me personally: vicky, my wife, and i.
ReplyDeletethat was a great groomsman gift-- very thoughtful.