A Feast for the Dog Days of Summer
The celestial debut of Sirius the Dog Star in Canis Major heralds the Dog Days of summer, The Great British Baking Show, and some long-awaited captive culinary arts.
“The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates,
And Phibbus’ star
Shall shine from afar
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.”
When the idea of These Stone Walls was first proposed to me in the summer of 2009, I was very skeptical that I could write a weekly post. I thought it would take me only six weeks to run out of things to write about. When I protested,TSW’s publisher, said, “Don’t be afraid to write about mundane things.” This is a blog, after all, not the New York Times Book Review. There is always something to write about.
The word, “mundane” comes from the Latin, mundanus-a-um,/em>, meaning “of the world.” Its opposite would be “celestial,” meaning, “of the heavens.” I have written a lot about the celestial – some might say I’ve written too much – but the mundane affairs of this world do make an occasional appearance here. I’ve had posts about missing socks, prison food, and prison baseball. These Stone Walls has been no stranger to the mundane.
I mentioned in a recent post that I am unable to retain hard copies of what I write so I have only a list of my titles. I somehow had it in my mind that I try to write shorter posts with light-hearted topics for the month of July. One of my mundane summer posts had readers atwitter in lurid expectation of “The Birds and the Bees Behind These Stone Walls.” But alas, it really was only about birds and bees. And it was written in a time and place of confinement in the extreme.
For the nine years of this blog’s existence, visitors to TSW are much diminished in July. It makes sense. Who wants to read much ado about nothing written from inside a prison on a nice beach day in July? But every July something seems to happen to defy my plan for nice, simple posts that are controversy-free.
A year ago this week, we posted the phenomenal “How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis” by guest writer and historian, Craig Turner. I feared no one would read this tour of the 20th Century, but readers flocked to it by the tens of thousands.
July posts of other past years also included hot topics such as “Why Are so Many Catholics so Angry with so Many Priests?” Despite the fact that it was first published in 2012, it today shows up week after week among our most popular posts six years after it was written. I still don’t have a clear answer to the question it asks, but everyone agrees that it’s a good question.
