I Can't Place the Accent

Tea: Mandarin Green with honey

Music: Aztec Camera, "Oblivious"

Time: Afternoon.

So after dropping the kids off at church for a weeklong mission trip to California (Missouri, that is), it was errand time.

First stop: Hobby Lobby, where "Selected Home Accents" were 80 percent off.

I have no idea what a "home accent" is. This stuff looked like knicknacks, geegaws and assorted -- well, stuff.

Call me strange, but I have never looked at a room and thought, "You know what this needs? A little wooden cow, right over there." (I suppose the pertinent home accent for that would be a Texas Panhandle twang.)

And I fail to see what enhancement a blue glass pumpkin or a large metal wall hanging of a key might provide to any space. (I'm sure my Philistine accent is showing now, huh?)

In my world, if a living room has books, a place to sit to read them and enough light to do so comfortably, I'm good. I'm not opposed to miscellaneous items placed in the right spots, but they should be functional.

(It must be noted that a piece of original art does not count as a knicknack. It also must be noted that big box stores might sell the materials for original art, but I've yet to see one carrying the finished product.)

In the kitchen, the important things are (a) cookware and utensils, (b) storage and (c) something on and in which to actually cook. (Yes, and food.) If you need a ceramic rooster sitting on your spice shelf to feel at home ... you need to get out more.

And don't even get me started on bedroom "accents" and "accessories." What in the world is a "pillow sham," anyway? If it's not a real pillow, why do I want it on the bed?

Maybe the people who thought up "home accents" are the same people who came up with different colors of tissue. I don't care if it's blue, green, white, paisley, plaid or tie-died -- in the end, it's just something to sneeze at.

As with any rule, there are exceptions to the Accents are Laughable Code. The following items are always suitable for display in any space:

Rubber ducks;

Geodes and pieces thereof;

Statuettes of Frank White and/or Gollum;

Fossils;

And other cool stuff like that.

(Full disclosure requires me to note, though, that there is a line of nonfunctional birdhouses along the windowsill in the kitchen. Sometimes I do know when to nod, smile and keep my mouth shut.)

Cup XXXVI: Stories in Stone, Told by the Unlucky

Tea: Earl Grey Smokey

Music: Endusk, "Moth" and "Four"

Time: Night, and ages ago

Today, while watching a frightened black Labrador puppy being cajoled into a new -- and better -- life, I broke off a bit of yellow-gray rock.

It is full of fossils -- delicate ridged shells, narrower than the nail of one of my little toes. This part of the world is haunted by the stone ghosts -- the tiny and the titanic -- of an ancient sea.

I wasn't here the day this particular fossil bed was laid down. But most likely, something happened to flood the seafloor with mud, burying everything in its path. Over time, rock replaced bone and shell and exoskeleton.

We learn about the life of the past from the lives lost by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A chunk of the universe falls to Earth, and it's exit dinosaurs, stage left. A volcano in Idaho lets go, and a herd of rhinoceroses in Nebraska never knows what hit it. A sabre-toothed cat moves in on a mastodon, stuck in a sticky black trap, and both of them sink out of sight.

Like the gastropods and gorgosaurs, the tiny horses and giant beavers, none of us -- save, perhaps, those whose ends come at their own hands or at the state's -- knows the day or hour of our personal extinction events. The difference is that we know it will come.

This is both a shadow and an advantage. We can live each day in fear that it will be our last, and so not begin anything anew, or live so that if any day were our last, we would have begun something to last beyond ourselves.

My father was fond of a quote attributed to Martin Luther. As he and others have told it, someone asked Luther, "What would you do if you knew the world was going to end tomorrow?"

Luther's reply: "I would plant a tree."

I don't know if I could do that. But I do know that each of us has a chance to do something good and lasting each day. That means me, yeah -- so that if Yellowstone pops tomorrow, I can combine a sense of accomplishment with my futile screaming and running.

Here ends the pontification. Here follows tonight's story:

Sabine Baring-Gould, "H.P."