← I just finished reading a wonderful text-book size book, dealing with the issue of the intellectual sustainability of Christianity.I’m referring to John W. Loftus’s [2008 release]:
Why I Became An Atheist.
If you have not read my former blog about this book, I encourage you, dear reader, to → check it out.
And read the stimulating discussion that follows in the comments section. Even the author of the book joins in!
It’s really a superb book. I shall write a review of it, soon.
Did I become an atheist?
No.
I think I am what can be called a TEA©.
Thoroughly Entrenched Agnostic.
← OK, so I am in the beginning stages of a return to some fiction.Reading Margaret Laurence’s [1974] The Diviners.
Classic Canadiana fiction!
The Diviners is the culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle.
This is the fifth of the pentalogy.
I am cheating a bit… I read three of the others, and skipped one.
Anyhoo, into the first 100 pages of it I am loving the thing.
Reminds me so much of my own small-town Saskatchewan prairie childhood. The main character, Morag Gunn, at least in her younger years, reminds me of the female equivalent of Salinger's Holden Caulfield.
Here in The Diviners, Morag Dunn is growing up just one province east of me, in Manitoba, [for those of you that would do poorly on Jeopardy!]
Part Two of the book is titled The Nuisance Grounds and well, as I read certain portions of it [where Morag actually climbs around a bit in the “nuisance grounds” more commonly known as “garbage dump” where her foster-father is the proprietor] I was reminded of a vague and distant memory.
We too, once had to TAKE our garbage to the “nuisance grounds”. And for some reason, I recall this one time when my sister and I were at this “dump” with some relatives, who were shoveling junk off the back of their half-ton truck.
We discovered a strange thing.
A veritable treasure trove of ICE-CREAM.
Yes, thrown out there…. in the big buckets it is sold in.
And even though it was blazing hot out, this ice-cream was all frozen.
So we started eating it.
Thing is, I am doubting my memory faculties here.
It does not seem reasonable that there could be frozen and perfectly good ice-cream thrown out at a garbage dump.
So I am going to have to phone my sister, out on Vancouver Island, and ask her -- I need verification.
I’ll be back in a bit, in the comments section, to corroborate or nullify all of the above.
-- Cip
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3 comments:
Hah!
I finally [after hours] got through to my sister.
And she confirmed all of my Nuisance Grounds memories. It's true. She even finished the story before I told her what I was wondering about.... as soon as I said, "Remember when we were kids and went to the Nuisance Grounds?"
She knew what I was talking about.
Here is what happened.
My aunt and uncle were out there with us that day, and when my aunt saw all of this perfectly good ice-cream that had been thrown away, she loaded it up and put it in her deep freeze.... like TONS of ice cream. And we ate it.
Tons of ice cream in big brown buckets, ever flavor imaginable, in her deep freeze out on the farm.
And we ate it.
Oh, yes we did!
Wow! I never found anything that great! Although you made me think of a memory I had to check out with my sister; we lived 3 houses down from the Pen and one day a white horse escaped from their farm annex and ended up on our front lawn. Imagine; 2 young girls and suddenly there's a free horse right there... they came and took it back immediately though :(
When I was little my grandfather worked on the railroad and we had a huge drum of the strawberries that Breyer's uses in their ice cream that, literally, fell off the train. He brought it home and my mom divided it up into a bunch of plastic containers and I remember eating the frozen strawberries all that summer. Yum!
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