Platypus of Truth

...and cold hic jacets of the dead... I have loved and feared cemeteries for as long as I can remember.  I grew up surrounded by them and so some sort of reaction to their ubiquitous presence was inevitable.  While the fear has lessened to the point of being negligible, the love has grown to make them one of my favorite places.  Fortunately, my wife shares this attraction so that our summers in New England have involved numerous trips to grave yards.  Featured here is a gem I found while looking for the graves of several Sheltons in Derby .  It's a family plot, but contains only three burials that I could identify.  This is common in 19th century cemeteries: acquiring wealth gave one generation a desire for permanence but keeping wealth required the next generation to embrace mobility.  The oak sighs in Mamre, but there is no one left to bear a coffin up from Egypt. The funerary arch at the rear of the mortuary garden gives the name of the Family.  The words "come u

Lieutenant Daniel Shelton, the first of his family to settle in the town that now bears their name.  The lichen grows thick on his stone, but careful observers can still make out the name. On my father's side of the family, the Irish and Italian, we're recent immigrants; solidly 20th century.  The Rileys and Kennedys on my mother's side go back to the potato famine. The Quebecois stretch back to the 1600s, but that side also migrated to the states in the 20th century.  Much of my family's world began in the mill towns of Northern Massachusetts.  The Italians fared better opening up a diner in Hartford that was a stop-off for musicians in the Jazz Age. Our roots were shallow and therefore easy to pull up.  The family tree has fared well in new soil from California to North Carolina.  We've done well, but my heart still belongs to the little Connecticut hill town where the bones of the founding families lie thicker than glacial rock in the fields.  Some of them ar

When I began The Platypus Travels thread, I never thought that I would reach fifty-one posts.  The Platypus of Truth was originally conceived as a sort of daily journal share-able thoughts.  Around 2007-2008, it evolved into a literary blog with The Platypus Reads taking the lion's share of each year's posts.  The share-able thoughts and the book reviews have remained, but I'm pleased to see that The Platypus of Truth as grown over the past years to include poems, academic reflections, classic gaming reviews, and now travel blogging.  If one thread doesn't appeal to you, hopefully another will. From a small seed, this blog has grown into a vast tree and every branch and leaf is dear to me. Today's post, then, is a short follow-up to this discussion of Victorian stained glass .  Specifically, I want to show you the companion piece on the west side of the church.  This window is in a more traditional style and features the Agnus Dei, or "Lamb of God".  The

Summer is dead and gone good lady; Summer's dead and gone.  The sunny season has finally given way to her more temperate cousin and that means it's time to take stock of this year's Summer Reading.  As usual on this blog, that also means that I'm handing out awards for the seven best books I've read during the break.  The awards are themed around the attributes of the seven medieval heavens in honor of C.S. Lewis and Michael Ward.  So, without further ado, here are this year's winners. Moon: The planet of madness goes to a book that nearly drove me mad:  Night Train to Lisbon .  Pascal Mercier's story of a Swiss school teacher's mid-life crisis is the sort of book that reminds you of the emperor's new clothes.  It attempts to cow you with its own pretentiousness.  That's sad, because with another round or two of merciless edits, I think it could have been a good book. Mercury:  This year's award for the planet of wordsmiths goes to one of

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing‐masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. - Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yates Having a Tiffany factory in town has its advantages.  There are two windows in the old Episcopal church that dominates one side of the green (the other, true to form, belongs to the Congregational church).  One of these windows (featured to the left) depicts Saint Paul, the saint after which the church is named.  We caught the image at the right time of day with the morning sun was streaming through the East windows.  It was  a weekday, and the secretary was nice enough to lend us the  key along with as much viewing time as we wanted provided that we lock up and return the key once we were done. Having had a good bit of time to view the window, then, let me