All posts by David Todd

book reviews, C.S. Lewis, poetry

Book Review: “The Allegory of Love”

Leave a comment
Not sure I will finish this.

One of my goals is to read all of C.S. Lewis’s works: books, magazine articles, and misc. stuff. I’d like to do this more or less in order written, the same as I’m doing to the works of Thomas Carlyle. Except the first thing I read of Lewis was The Screwtape Letters back in 1975 when I hardly knew who he was. Then I read several of his later works.

Then I decided to start at the beginning of his adult writing career. Except I decide to skip his first two early poetry books, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926). The put me to Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), which I read a few years ago. Next in line is his 1936 academic treatise The Allegory of Love. Written while he was building his academic career as an Oxford don and tutor, it is considered a masterpiece.

I approached it with trepidation, however, since I am far from a scholar. Would Lewis be speaking to me at all? Would I understand him. Let me answer that by inserting a quote from the second chapter.

It is true, as I said before, that the Psychomachia is not a good poem: if it were indeed the result of some purely unpoetic purpose it could hardly be worse. But there are many ways in which poetry can go wrong and an impurity in the intention is only one of them. The Psychomachia fails, partly because Prudentius is naturally a lyrical and reflective poet—that is some fine, cloudy grandeur in the Hamartigenia—to whom the epic manner comes with difficulty, and partly for a deeper reason.

I have no idea who Prudentius is, never heard of him until reading this section, never heard of the two poems mentioned, so obviously can’t understand what Lewis is talking about.

At this point, 70 pages into this 360 page book, I don’t expect to finish this. I’d like to get 1/3 of the way in before I decide to quit. That will take me four or five days to get to that point at the rate I’m reading it.

My preliminary conclusion: unless you can get this book for 50¢ as I did at a garage sale/thrift store, or unless you are a dedicated C.S. Lewis scholar, don’t waste your money and time on this.

I’ll come back with final conclusions when I either finish or abandon it.

miscellaneous, moving

New Venue, Old Routines

Leave a comment

We are in our new house in Lake Jackson, TX. Many boxes are unpacked and broken down, but many more are pushed against walls, waiting their turn.  We haven’t found a few things, though every day, as a new box gets opened, we find something we’d been looking for and say, “Oh, that’s where that was.”

We still have no inside fridge, relying only on the old fridge we brought from Arkansas and set up in the garage. I had many other things to do so didn’t rush the refrigerator. But the estate sale at our house was last weekend, we netted what I hoped we would, so now we can go buy the fridge. Today I’ll visit a couple of places, and hopefully we will buy it and have it installed tomorrow.

Today is the first day for me to work in my office. It’s not fully set up, but it’s functionable. I placed a few stock trades this morning and here I am writing a blog post. I’ll likely cut this show to see what more I can set up. It’s about time to take a look at income taxes, I have filing to do, and must find a few things yet.

So I’ll end this a little short. Time to get to my other work. Still thinking of a name for my office. “The Dungeon” won’t do anymore.

Decumulation, miscellaneous

Driving Tomorrow

Leave a comment

Edit on Feb 16. Well, I never got this done in a timely manner. I’ll post it now for what it’s worth.

I’m actually writing this Tuesday morning, February 3 and  scheduling it to  post on Friday Feb. 6th. On Friday I get the U-Hau; in the morning, the loaders load it in the afternoon, and on Saturday we drive. The following week, the estate sale people come in and whatever we leave behind will be sold the 13th-14th. The house should go on the market after that.

I’ll add an update on several days this week, at least until our internet is cut off, probably Thursday afternoon. I don’t yet have internet at the new house (investigating options), so I’m not sure when I’ll post again unless I write another one for posting during the dark time.

The Dungeon is all packed except for the modem, signal booster, and two mostly packed but not yet sealed boxes, waiting to see if I have any more small items to go in the top.

Tuesday, Feb 3. I woke at 3:45 a.m. and never got back to sleep. I read in the recliner for a while, in the last of the magazines I want to read and put in recycling before we leave. Then I tried to sleep, but couldn’t relax due to the massive amount of work yet to do. So I went out to the garage and worked on that. I had already packed my tools, but the box was too big. I got them re-packed in a properly sized box, boxed up the small amount of hardware I’m taking, pulled some shelf units out to the middle of the garage that I hope will fit in the truck, then went back in the house. I decided I won’t bring my drill, only the drill bits. I don’t know whether I’ll have to do any drilling. If I do, I will get a modern, cordless, chuck-less drill and let someone buy this old one.

Only three days left to pack a lot of stuff.

books, Decumulation, family

A Week and a Day

1 Comment
The view this morning from my computer desk in The Dungeon. The rest of the house looks more or less the same, probably a little worse.

That’s all we have left at our current home. Just a week and a day. Then we move to Texas.

The whole house is discombobulated now, with packed boxes, half-packed boxes, packing materials, sorted and unsorted stuff strewn everywhere. If you’ve moved anytime recently, you get it. We haven’t moved since 2002. If you’ve downsized, you get it. We up-sized in 2002 and remained in accumulation mode, rather than decumulation.

Ah, well, decumulation began in 2020, when I decided I’d had my dad’s old tools for 22 years, had done nothing with them, and that other people needed them more than I did. I found lots of buyers on Facebook Marketplace. Before long, my garage looked better. With a little help from our son on one of his trips here, we even got to the point where we could get one car in.

Then I tackled the books, and between selling and donating them, we got rid of a couple of thousand. Before long, I moved on to paper items, digitizing my genealogy files and recycling the paper. Then on to writing files, making sure I had digital copies and back-ups, and again recycling the paper. All told, I was able to get rid of about 200 3-ring binders. The last 50 will go in our estate sale, each with a few tab dividers and sheet protectors in it.

I’m not sure whether I’ll get to post again from this side of the Red River, though I’ll try. If not, I’ll be back at it at some point. Y’all be good in the meantime.

 

family, letters

One Special Project Completed

Leave a comment
The box of Wayne’s letters written during World War 2.

My sleeping rhythms have been off lately. If I wake up at or near 3 a.m., I can’t get back to sleep. I’m restless lying in bed. After a half hour of lying there awake, I generally get up and try to sleep sitting in my easy chair. That will work maybe one day out of three. Sometimes I read for an hour then am tired enough to sleep for an hour. Other times I just recline, maybe dozing a little but mostly trying to still my racing mind.

Monday-Tuesday night and Tuesday-Wednesday night was different. Oh, the waking up at an importune time for getting back to sleep happened. But after an hour or so passed, putting me in the 4 o’clock a.m. hour, I decided why the heck am I trying. I got up, got dressed, took my computer to The Dungeon and decided to begin my day. I worked on the letters, and in those two days was able to finish the transcribing work. I also was able to go back and correct one letter I realized I hadn’t completed.

The rest of the work consists of putting the letters into one document file, formatting it, sorting through photos of that era and adding them to the file, then computing publishing tasks. Proofreading will be included at some point.

Unfortunately, all that will have to wait until our move from Arkansas to Texas, plus finding the energy to set up the new house. When I get the book done—perhaps I should say IF I ever get it done—we’ll have to see.

 

family, moving

The Time Is Getting Closer

Leave a comment
The mess is real. Oh dear me.

We move from NW Arkansas to Lake Jackson, TX either Jan 31 or Feb 7. Or maybe a day either side of that.

Where there once was a little organization there is now chaos. Where there was once order that is now…something, I suppose disorder is a good enough word.

But where there used to be areas jammed with stuff, there is now much less stuff. It may all be in disarray, but a lot of stuff is gone. Some was taken on to Lake Jackson before Christmas. So has been tossed out. Paper and cardboard has been recycled. One refrigerator was emptied and moved, the other is much reduced in contents at we consume what was in it. I wonder why we ever bought a 3-lb bag of frozen blueberries. They will be fully consumed by tomorrow. I took a package of what I can only call mystery meat out of the freezer last night. We’ll see shortly if its thawed enough to know what it is, and if we’ll be having it for supper tonight. The pantry is bordering on empty now, although there’s enough canned goods left to give us some interesting meals the rest of the way.

I’m not sure whether I’ll find the time to post again this side of the move, but maybe next Monday.

Bible study, expatriate life, family, Genealogy, self-publishing, The Forest Throne

Writing Hopes for 2026

2 Comments
Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.

Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.

But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.

  • Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
  • Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
  • Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal  with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
  • The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
  • At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
  • One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.

There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.

Bible study, Documenting America, self-publishing

Writing in 2025

Leave a comment
Volumes 1 through 6 are now published.

Measured by books published, 2025 was a good year.

Measured by book sales, 2025 was an okay year.

Measured by new writing, 2025 was a so-so year.

As with my last post, I’ll do this by bullet points.

  • I started 2025 having just had a seizure, and not really feeling like writing—or really doing much of anything. Another seizure in April interrupted whatever progress I was making. I would wake up each morning, not feel like writing, or stock trading, or much of anything. I had a lot of what I call “file maintenance”—that is, organizing computer files to eliminate duplicates, putting the files in the right place, changing the names to descriptive names. This is a lot of what I did in in 2025.
  • I published Vol 1. in my Bible study series, A Walk Through Holy Week, in early 2024. I had volumes 2-8 written by the end of 2024. They were only awaiting final editing and publishing. I managed to do that for Vol. 2 and published it on March 22. Vol. 3 followed on March 28. Both of these required little work except formatting and final creation of the e-book and paperback. Vol. 4 came out on May 1st, Vol. 5 on Sept. 5, and Vol. 6 on Oct 31. Volume 8 is within a week or two of being published. That will finish the series.
  • The work is published, though due to finding additional letters I’ll have to edit and republish it.

    The only other book I published was The Saudi Years In Letters, the collection of letters from our time in Saudi Arabia, 1981-1983. This was mainly for family members. Alas, I have since found another dozen letters to add to it, and will have to re-do it.

  • My total book sales for the year were only 238. That was with no author events. That was my third best year, but well below 2024’s 326 sales, my best year. My historical-political series, Documenting America, continues to sell many more copies than anything else.

I have another three to five days of editing on the seventh in my Bible study series, then maybe a week of formatting and file creating. I hope it will be published by Jan 15. After that, I’ll be hot and heavy in moving from Bella Vista, Arkansas to Lake Jackson, Texas.

I’ll do one more post in this series, on my writing goals for 2026.

Decumulation, Health, holidays, St. Lucia, travel, Uncategorized

Quite A Year

4 Comments
Snow greeted our year, but my doctor said I shouldn’t shovel it.

A year such as 2025 can most easily be shared as a series of bullet points.

  • We began the year in Worcester, Massachusetts. This was a five-day trip by air, delayed a week after I suffered a seizure with ER visit on Dec. 22, 2024. We visited our son and his husband. It was a good trip, during which we celebrated my 73rd birthday and New Year’s Day rather than Christmas.
  • Charles was in good spirits before his brain surgery.

    In February, our son, Charles, had brain surgery due to the seizure he suffered in Oct 2024. We flew back for the surgery. The surgery was successful, and his recovery was much more rapid and complete than the most optimistic expectations.

  • In mid-April, I suffered a second seizure, of about the same severity as the first one. This left my speech further impaired than it had been after my two strokes in 2024. But except for speech, I seemed to have no impairments from the seizures.
  • We traveled masked so as not to infect Charles.

    I completed out-patient cardio rehab in March. Recovery from my Sept 30, 2024 open-heart surgery for valve replacement has been good. I get a fleeting pain once in a while, but all in all I’m glad I went through with the surgery and pleased with the results.

  • You never know who you’ll run into in Worcester.

    The months of April-May-June-July were mainly taken up with decumulation tasks and yardwork. My blackberries did well. But I made only one cobbler and didn’t come close to picking all the berries. I lacked strength to do all the work required. Consequently…

  • …I did no stock/options trading until almost the end of May. Of course, that means I had almost no exposure to the wild market gyrations of Feb. and April.
  • The Berkshire woods looked a lot like our Ozarks woods.

    We decided to get away for a while, and built an almost 4-week road trip in August around my 55-year high school reunion. We spent a few days in Rhode Island with friends for the reunion, then a week on Cape Cod that included excursions to Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard, then two weeks in the Berkshires, just enjoying our resort, taking easy hikes, walking the resort grounds, and doing a few tourist things. On the return drive, we spent two days at the Columbus OH zoo, which Lynda had wanted to see for several years due to its connection with Jack Hanna.

  • We decided to drive to Lake Jackson, Texas in early October to visit Sara and her family. We hadn’t seen them since Thanksgiving 2024. We got to attend cross-country races and other things. It was an enjoyable trip, which we thought might be the last for te year. However, three more adventures awaited us.
  • Finally went to beautiful St. Lucia after years of dreaming.

    In June, Charles attended a professional conference that included a keynote presentation about universities and slavery. That got him interested in where our black ancestry came from, and said, “We need to go to St. Lucia.” That’s been a dream of mine for years, to see the place my maternal grandmother grew up in. It turned out Thanksgiving was the best time, so we took our third plane trip of the year and spent seven days/six nights in Castries, using up all accumulated timeshare points (and some cash). It was a wonderful trip, one I’m planning to blog more about.

  • Charles had finally convinced Lynda that if we moved in a downsizing, it would be better if we moved to the Lake Jackson-Houston area rather than to Massachusetts. So we made plans to move in about a year. Then, a week after we got back from L.J., and house very close to Sara went up for sale. It was the perfect downsize for us. We made another road trip to L.J., saw the house, it looked just right, we put in an offer, and bought it.
  • So now our decumulation has turned into moving preparation. We took a U-Haul load on Dec 19 and stayed through Christmas. Now we are planning on moving for good around Feb. 1, 2026. I don’t want to be paying for two houses for too long.

So that’s our year. With all the trips and work, I put off having knee surgery, originally scheduled for Nov, then Dec, then Jan, until sometime after the move. I suspect it will be part of my 2027 story.

Also, I’ve said nothing about my writing activities. So stay tuned for another post in a couple of days to cover that.

family, Genealogy, St. Lucia, travel

My St. Lucia Genealogy

Leave a comment
The probate file confirmed what we had pretty much concluded beforehand, that George Victor Hepburn was NOT my great-great-grandfather. More likely he was my great-grandmother’s brother—though that is not yet confirmed.

Part of the reason for our recent trip to St. Lucia was to see what we could learn about my St. Lucia roots. We have a lot of what I call “family lore”, but not much of that is backed up by documentation. My maternal grandmother talked about St. Lucia all the time, and how they were high society there, having servants.

She came to the USA in May 1918, and my mother was born in September that year. I found documentation for those two events, a combination of recordings on calendars made by my grandmother’s uncle David Sexton. And we knew my grandmother’s mother, Henrietta (Hepburn) Sexton Harris. She lived well into her 90s, and I knew her and spent many a holiday when she visited in Rhode Island.

Although, it wasn’t until I made contact with cousins in New York City, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s half-sisters that the full story came out. But it came out as family lore. Henrietta was one of six siblings, but the cousins couldn’t agree on who those children were, nor on the name of her father. They agreed on three of the six, but not the other three. So, as the years progressed, I knew a trip to St. Lucia was necessary. But would it be productive?

My grandmother, Alfy Sexton, a year or so after emigrating to the US.

The answer is yes. The first morning our son and I drove to the St. Lucia archives. It’s not a big building from the outside, and they were in the process of moving from one building to another. But the women working there were friendly and helpful. I paid the research fee, then Charles did most of the talking. He had the names we were interested in, the type of documents we hoped to get copies of, and the years of interest. Meanwhile, the archivists were anxious to see the photos I had, and to scan them. One lady worked on scanning while another did a preliminary check of their indexes to see if maybe some of the documents we were interested in were in the archives. After the public hours closed, they would do a more complete check.

This was actually more than we’d hoped for. I had heard that the St. Lucia archives had few documents, and those disorganized—that many documents were destroyed in major fires in Castries in 1927 and 1948. Maybe some records were lost, but it seemed they had many extant, and an organized system for retrieving them.

We went back the next day to see what they actually found (in many places, sometimes an archive index can be erroneous). This gave us a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to have copies of. While we were doing this, I noticed the receptionist had one huge book open and was transcribing records. I didn’t come up to look over her shoulder to see what the records were. Suffice to say that additional deeds or marriages or birth records or powers of attorney or probate matters were added to the digital archives that day.

Those were the only two days we went to the archives. We paid fees  (cash only, though they take US dollars) to receive digital copies of the documents, and they came a week later as email attachments. Family lore was confirmed in some cases, but confusion added by other documents. Oh well, we have time to sort it all out, come up with ancestral link conclusions and working theories of paths for future research.

I’ve researched in a few courthouses in the US, but this was the first time for me to go to a foreign archive in the hope of receiving relevant documents and data. A good experience, though I suspect this was a one-time only experience.