Phil and I didn’t collude to leave this blog high and dry next week. We each planned our vacations independently, without consultation, resulting in the Great Abandonment we now face. I apologize on our behalf. Phil has promised to try to put something up from time to time, and I’ll try to do the same, if I can get the WiFi to work in Minot.

Still, the ugly fact is that Brandywine Books will be, for one week, like one of those antique shops with a sign in the window that says “OPEN BY CHANCE OR BY APPOINTMENT.”

Or like one of those cards they used to flash on the TV screen—“WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. PLEASE STAND BY.”



A memory flashed into my mind today, and with it a long-ago memorization assignment. The only words of Indonesian I know, and I only know them phonetically (and probably wrong):

“Kame orung deso ini. Senung sekali, maslamat, datankan, Bapak. Samogamoga tuhan, manyulamatkan, Bapak.”

It must have been about 1960. I was in 5th grade, I think, and my elementary school had organized a Christmas pageant (yes, children—public schools used to have Christmas pageants) with the theme, “Christmas around the World.” I was given a role in a scene depicting Christmas in Indonesia. It involved a shadow puppet play about the Nativity of Christ (yes, children, they did talk about the Nativity in public schools back then), narrated by an itinerant wise man. I was to play the village chief, and I had to memorize the speech printed above, which (as best I can recall) was a greeting to the wise man, saying how happy the village was to welcome someone of his eminence and holiness.

We were doing Christmas in Indonesia because we had a teacher who had formerly lived there. He was a Dutchman who’d prudently fled the islands when independence happened, and if he was representative of the colonial Dutch, I can’t fault the Indonesians much for kicking them out. Some people described him as a disciplinarian, but the students knew better. You can tell when somebody likes the punishment for its own sake, and this guy liked it.

But I’ve carried that phonetic speech around in my head ever since. I suspect I could have found better use for the space.