The ἄρτος of Life (sermon/homily)

See that ye walk carefully, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not foolish, but wise, understanding the will of the Lord. (Ephesians 5:15-17). You may be seated.

Every third or fourth Sunday morning I stand here in your pulpit (my pulpit too, seeing Linda and I’ve been members here since 1955), I stand here in the pulpit making a fool of myself, because we are fools, every so-called Christian so-called Preacher stands under 1 Corinthians 4:10 as a fool for Christ, so I surrender my introversion, modesty, reserve and self-consciousness to make a fool of myself. 

I surrender all, I surrender all

all to Jesus I surrender

I surrender all. 

and what else?

What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus; What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Unsophisticated, non-Episcopal, totally unAnglican, two of my nevertheless all time favorite hymns of surrender. Last Sunday morning the choir sang, and the Sunday before that we all sang “Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me, O Lamb of God, I come” another all time favorite evangelical hymn that hangs in my heart lifelong because we sang it to close worship Sunday mornings with my grandfather at East Hill Baptist Church, Pensacola, watching sinners walk bravely down the aisle to claim the blood of Jesus, and accept Christ as their personal saviour. 

When, last Tuesday morning, I texted asking the rector if he had any ideas for what I might preach about this morning, he texted back without hesitation, “Bread.” So, bread it is, and if on the way home from church this morning you ask yourself or someone else in the car, “What the heck was that sermon all about, that didn’t make no sense at all,” that’s not my problem, that’s your problem, my problem of the moment is to make a fool of myself yet one more time again and then go sit down in red-faced embarrassment, as all for Jesus I surrender.

We are today in the fourth of five Sundays reading from John chapter 6 that scholars call “the bread of life discourse,” when I like to sing “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” yet another all-time evangelical favorite, as the fraction anthem (when the celebrant breaks the Communion Bread). 

I think Gospel John is a little nutty, why?, he’s non-sequitur, dichotomous, he fails to round out and close his plot as though it did not even occur to him. Gospel John alone presents Jesus as the Bread of Life and yet, unlike Mark, Matthew and Luke, the synoptic gospels who focus on Jesus subtly making every feeding event a Eucharist, Taking and Blessing and Breaking and Giving the Bread whether it’s Bread and Fish for five thousand, or Bread and Fish for four thousand, or Bread and Wine with just his disciples at the Last Supper, or, as at Luke 24, just Bread with Jesus and a couple of friends who don’t recognize him until the Breaking of the Bread - - unlike all those synoptic connected dots, the Gospel according to John - - with all his focus on Jesus as the Bread of Life - - not only is Gospel John surprisingly not eucharistic, but at the Last Supper, a central event of the gospels, John doesn’t even mention bread (or wine) - - he’s all New Commandment and washing feet. Washing feet and New Commandment: Love. 

I just don’t “get” Gospel John. But no, that’s not so, I do get him, his agenda and all, and I love teaching the Gospel according to John second only to the Gospel according to Mark - - I just don’t understand the man himself, the mind of the man we call “John the Evangelist,” Gospel John, who, in his Gospel, proclaims Jesus the Lamb of God at the very beginning  right after the baptism, and then at the very end proves the Lamb of God on Good Friday, the day of the slaughter of the Passover Lambs - - Gospel John, who has Jesus enraging Judean Temple and other authorities by repeatedly and sacrilegiously calling himself “I AM,” Greek “Ego Emi,” Hebrew “ee-Yeh,” or “Y’Veh,” which in Jewish lore is the unspeakably sacred Name of only God’s own self, no wonder they crucified Jesus. 

But my bone to pick with John is Chapter 6, his emphasis on the Bread of Life, Jesus says

“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, (מָ֣ן ה֔וּא man-hu, yuk! what is it?) and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever,” see?

And/but then, as I say, unlike the synoptics, John fails to seal his proclamation eucharistically in the Feeding of the Five Thousand, or at the Last Supper, or even later in Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance on the beach, where he feeds Peter and other apostles and the Beloved Disciple bread (and fish) again. John misses it, and I don’t understand, why John, and written at so late a date, why John of all evangelists is so - - oblivious of the Holy Eucharist, misses the eucharistic opportunity.

Unless of course he’s leaving that proclamation to me and other fools for Christ down through the ages of ages: the Body of Christ, the Bread of heaven. The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.

I don’t know. I do not know. 

I just don’t know.

I do know this: the Bread is not God. The Gospel according to John, where “I AM the Bread of Life” was written a generation later than Mark, the first and foundation of the Synoptics, Mark, Matthew and Luke where the Eucharist is subtly but discernibly central in every feeding account. But not for Gospel John, where LOVE is central.

Maybe John does not go off eucharistic on us because as he writes, maybe 90 to 125 AD, he looks around and sees what is already happening in the Early Christian Church: that is to say, the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament where the Bread is God. But God is not Bread, God is Love. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church, where “The Holy Eucharist (is) the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day” (BCP 13). We Take and Bless and Break and Give the Bread as “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.” But Bread is not God. The bread is a material Sign of God who is Spirit and Love, a way materially to ingest God and become part of God and God part of us. A spiritual transubstantiation of us. The Bread is semeion, John’s New Testament Greek, σημεῖον, a sign. In our sacramental terms, the Bread is not God, but an outward and visible sign of God. Which comes back home to precisely what Gospel John wants me to proclaim to you this morning: this Bread means Jesus loves you. It’s that simple. This Bread means Jesus loves you. Will you remember that?


Jesus loves you: the Gospel of the Lord, Hallelujah!!

++++++++++++++++

Sermon in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, FL on Sunday, August 19, 2018, Proper 15B. The Rev. Tom Weller. Texts: a doubtful mixture of Ephesians 5 don't be a fool, and John 6, I am the artos (table bread) of life.

Bread image pinched on line with apologies.

has gone out.

Friday is fish day, seafood day. As it was in the beginning, is now ... 

We pretty much have three meals, little or no snacking. For me, odd something for breakfast, yesterday a sardine sandwich, Thursday morning a double cheeseburger leftover from party for Joseph at church, day before that an anchovie sandwich, different things. One day earlier in the week a chik-fil-a biscuit. Sometimes eggs.

So but then dinner at lunchtime, between about 12 noon and two o'clock pm a meal: something meat and one vegetable of some sort, one day the lamb shank with carrots, rice and gravy. Ice water, 3 to 5 ounce glass of red wine. Actually, the lamb shank lasted for two days dinner. A cookie: this week we're working through a package of thin and crispy gluten-free ginger cookies that Linda found at Trader Joe's the last time we were in Tallahassee. 

Friday, as I say, fish. Last week I bought a red snapper at Tarpon Dock and Linda baked it, one of our favorite seafood dishes. Shrimp sometimes, may be two kinds of shrimp, steamed at Buddy Gandy's. Yesterday for the first time in years we went to Captain D's and ate in. Fine, but the white fish that used to be a large scrumptious slab of fish is now a thin strip like a fat soda straw, rolled and rolled and rolled in flour until it's breaded thick enough to fry and serve without shame. Looks pretty on the plate though. Linda had the catfish, which they do southern style breaded in cornmeal. 

Finally supper? a cup of yogurt or a cheese cracker or some such except Wednesday evenings supper at church. Try to have supper at five o'clock, no later than six, so as not to have indigestion during the night. Linda looks great, I can't seem to get back down to looking great. If I get down to great weight, in the mirror I see a gaunt old man whom I don't want to look at much less be; and it all comes back anyway, plus a pound and levels back off, so the hell with it, I'm done worrying about it. At 82 my main worry is whether the sky will fall, and I think it has done.

What else do I want to admit about me? 

Mornings of course black coffee and a square of dark chocolate starts the brain working.

Bus load of Yemeni schoolboys killed by a rocket strike and all is well, rocket furnished by the United States and all is well? I don't think so. A nation where ... never mind. Never gardenia alphabet mind. From tomorrow's lectionary, "Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil." 

I need a picture. Lamp of Wisdom. Waterperry Gardens, Oxfordshire, UK. 

The Worst that Men Can Be

Between books, films, theology, lectionary, weather, Rhode Island, Bible, cars, oysters, mullet, 7H, Navy, Panama City, summer camp, WashDC, family, Japan, California, church, Anglicanism, and other growing-up memories, now and then politics, I have more than enough that occurs to blog about mornings. But this particular issue (scroll down) brings something back to mind.

The spring of 2008 I attended Credo, an eight-day invitational retreat for active and retired Episcopal clergy. Mine was for retired priests, and at 72 I was neither the youngest nor by far the oldest clergyman there. Some of them were quite well known in the church as leaders, authors, professors, teachers. One had been on faculty at Sewanee and while a professor there had taught a seminary student, an extremely difficult priest whom I had served with, and told me the faculty had found him "incapable of learning" and the seminary had not recommended the man for ordination, but that his bishop had (obviously) ordained him anyway - - which had not turned out well.

At Credo we had eight full days and evenings of sessions both plenary with the whole crowd of us, maybe forty or fifty priests, I really don't remember; and also the ubiquitous "small groups" that conveners invariably resort to when they don't know what else to do with all the people. Our small groups were four men each (there were no women clergy there as I recall), except that they were one short for all quadruplets and my group had three, myself and two others. The sorting into small groups may have been done alphabetically until they ran out with our group of three.

I don't remember their names. One was a nice but almost insufferably self-focused fellow who somewhat confrontationally wore a ballcap reading "Obama 08" and who, though we were unendingly patient with each other, we had trouble tearing him away from talking about all that he'd done, the book he had written and was still for sale and he had brought a few copies along to Credo and we could buy one from him for $XX, and begging us to recommend him to the national Credo director at Episcopal Church HQ in NYC to serve on Credo staff in the future. The other guy probably was kind enough to do that, I was not (although I did buy his book); and if he'd been a naval officer under me I wouldn't have given him a good fitness report either. 

But about the other guy. An Episcopal priest as we all were, he had grown up Roman Catholic and had been ordained in an RC religious order, I don't remember which one, so he was not what they call a "secular priest." He seemed a sad and broken man. As a monk, he had fallen in love with a divorced woman whom he'd met, left his order, renounced his priesthood, married her and they had children in addition to children she brought from her first marriage. And he soon thereafter came into the Episcopal Church as a priest, as Roman priests now and then do, and vice versa. At Credo, he was now retired.  

I'm writing a full decade, ten years later this morning, so some of my recollection details may be off. Anyway, now with our small group as audience, this man had memories he needed to share. As a boy, his RC parish priests were known sexually to seduce young Altar boys in the parish, but it was unspoken, nobody talked about it. He said that every summer, the Altar boys in that parish, and in several surrounding parishes in the diocese, were invited by their clergy and were expected to attend, summer training camp for Altar boys, and I believe he said it was a week or two, out of the country on an offshore island nation, maybe Bermuda or Bahamas, I don't recall; and that the real agenda was sexual, young boys nudity with the priests. I asked if he went, and he said that when he found out what it was all about, he had refused to go. That his parents, lifelong faithful Roman Catholics, had been upset with his refusal to go to this more or less institutionalized summer camp event.

Again, I remember him kindly as a broken man who had experienced in the Catholic Church the worst that men can be among those who trust, look up to and even idolize their clergy, who came out of the Church seeing the cancer of sexual abuse of children as institutionalized, endemic, systemic, kept quiet but known and accepted among the clergy, like a lodge secret. What else do I remember? That we also discussed cars, and his car, perfect for his remote home in New England winters, was an AWD Toyota FJ Cruiser 

that he and his wife loved as their car. I think of him with enormous sadness everytime yet another sexual abuse scandal explodes in the Roman Catholic Church somewhere in the world, and he came to mind again with this latest sickening revelation. It is a fact that sometimes even large institutions can best serve humanity, earth and Maker by going the way of all flesh. From my car perspective, Packard, Franklin, Nash, Studebaker, Crosley, Auburn, Kaiser; the Roman Empire, the British Empire, European colonialism, the Empire of Japan; in this case, a Church which has befouled its role and image as the Body of Christ.

T

Wasted our lives’: Catholic sex abuse scandals again prompt a crisis of faith

The Vatican referred to this as “the summer from hell for the Catholic Church.” In the pews on Sunday, many struggled to cope.

By Julie Zauzmer, Michelle Boorstein and Michael Brice-Saddler  •  Read more »

Also Tuesday, the Catholic World Meeting of Families opens in Dublin, Ireland, with Pope Francis expected to attend over the weekend. The gathering, which happens every three years, unites as many as 20,000 faithful from dozens of countries. It comes as the church grapples again this year with fallout from decades of child sexual abuse by clergy, with cases reported from Pennsylvania and New York to Chile, Australia and the Vatican. The Pope also recently has made waves with changes in how the church views the death penalty and homosexuality, so there’ll be plenty to talk about.

5. A bombshell hit the Catholic Church.

A searing report issued by a grand jury on Tuesday said bishops and other church leaders in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years.

The Vatican’s response, two days later: “The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible.”

Across the country, Catholics reeled from the graphic descriptions in the report and parishioners at one Pittsburgh church finally found out why their priest had suddenly retired.

TOP STORIES For years, a Catholic church in Pittsburgh wondered why their beloved pastor abruptly retired. Then came the Pennsylvania sex abuse report. Saturday, August 18, 2018 6:27 PM EST The Rev. John David Crowley for decades had been the hero of Holy Angels, a white clapboard church in southeast Pittsburgh, tucked below the bypass, by the old narrow-gauge railroad running along the creek. He was the pastor there for nearly 34 years, known as one of the most popular priests in the region. Then, in 2003, he abruptly retired. This week, the church learned why: Father Crowley had been accused of sexual abuse, including of a minor, and the claim was found to be credible and substantiated. Read More »

David Von Drehle  The Church is tempted by power and obsessed with sex An organization ostensibly dedicated to good made hiding credible accusations of sexual assault business as usual. Read more »

Pressure is mounting on Pope Francis to respond to the Pennsylvania grand jury report that details decades of sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests and bishops in the state, along with various cover-ups. The Vatican hasn't commented on the explosive report yet. A Villanova theology professor called the Vatican's silence "disturbing." The clergy sex abuse scandal is a growing crisis, with the Catholic Church forced to deal with abuse allegations around the globe that for many have meant a lifetime of trauma.

• The Vatican said in a statement on Thursday that the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests, detailed in a grand jury report released this week in Pennsylvania, was “criminal and morally reprehensible.”

“Victims should know that the pope is on their side,” the statement said.

Pope Francis has faced mounting criticism that he had a blind spot in dealing with the abuse of minors by clergy.

• A top Roman Catholic Church official in the U.S. said that much of the blame lay on the shoulders of bishops and promised that there would be change.

Thursday: lookin' good

Up in the darkness, lightning and distant rumbles and rain, becoming hard rain but somewhat clearing intermittently, still scary out there instead of appealing as was the case before Summer 2018 closed in on us. 

Bit later now but still threatening yea unto foreboding as hard, driving rain eclipses Shell Island and moves a solid white wall toward us.

A great welcome home party for Joseph last evening at HNEC. I took no pictures but there will be some on FB. 

The relief at seeing him up, about, alive and well is still emotional unto tears. And

Linda and somebody, IDK.

What's this? It's a 1955 Ford hardtop coupe and I can prove it. Subtle but nevertheless obvious differences in the 1955 

and 1956 Fords, especially top o' the line models, chrome strip on the sides, and for all models a slightly different front grille. 

And, for the top model, that little Ford emblem over the chrome on the front door. If these things aren't questions on the entry exam, I've got a lot of otherwise worthless stuff in my head.

Solid white outside now, coming to a close but still lightning.

T

color me Red

Linda likes to park her car in a parking space at the Bay end of the underground garage here at Harbour Village. Each time walking to and from the elevator lobby and her car, we salute the HV mascot who faithfully guards all the cars down there, like a watchman in the night. I am thinking HVM would make a suitable flag to fly over the clock tower at all times as a symbol of our castle home.

As evidence has it, a year or two ago, or since the last time the garage floor was massively cleaned, the HV Mascot was darting across the concrete floor a bit too casually as a car or pickup (larger trucks are not allowed, but there are any number of American he-man pickups) swerved around the garage's eastern south-most corner. HVM has lain sentinel there ever since, pressed almost part and parcel of the HV structure itself.

In other news, today is the first day of school for some Bay County students. Primary election results are pouring in from across America. And WH tweets are narcissistic OCD: little did the nation know on voting to drain the swamp and rid itself of government by bureaucracy, that the main focus would be instead on swatting away irrelevant gnats.

In my own small small world after all, Norm emailed me a link (scroll down) that stirred up a regret going back 52 years this summer. In July 1966 when we left Japan on PCS to Washington DC, my heart & soul & mind were set on buying a new Mustang. Color me Red, my only issues were AT or stick, V8 or Six.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/08/14/first-owner-ford-mustang-discovers-car-worth-350-000/983144002/

But a dear relative wrote me that Mustangs were deadly, gas tanks exploding when they were rammed from the rear. So instead, I bought Middle American, a Dodge station wagon. My regret lingers even more than half-century downstream.

T

  




   

No Name

Davis Point in background, Gardno 656x79 arriving yesterday to load wood pellets for Tyne. Polsteam is a Polish shipping line, good photos of their ships online. Stirs in my feeble mind being told about a dentifrice company that put on the market a tube product that said "Polish Toothpaste," meaning shiny but read as Eastern Europe national toothpaste and nobody would buy it. As the Bulgarian buttermilk I love but seldom buy because of the calories and fat, the reason it's so delicious is that they are not encumbered by all the American sanitary regulations.

Well, okay, nevermind then.

Semiannual visit to my GP this morning: perfect labs. Cutting the coreg in half again because so many days it pushes BP and pulse down to like 85/47 pulse 31 and recreates me as a zombie instead of a human being such that my day is spent napping instead of whatever is on the calendar.

Breakfast: chik-fil-A biscuit and black coffee after the doctor's visit. If the long line of cars outside the new Chik-Fil-A at 23rd and MLK turns you off, then park and go inside, we've not found it crowded, just good old fastfood.

For some reason, Camp Weed days on my mind this morning, Barnum and Charlie and Van and George and Harry and Bert and Hunley and my cousin Bob and Philip and Peter and my best friend Jack. In those days of the late 40s and early 50s, except for StMary's Jacksonville with Father Frank Dearing, who had been our rector in the late 30s and early 40s, we were strictly a low-church diocese under Bishop Frank Juhan. Priests were "Mister," never "Father." But we campers heard scandalous stories of the Diocese of South Florida where Bishop Henry Louttit wore a cope and mitre and where all the priests were called "Father," and we took up the practice, never in the bishop's presence, of calling our summer camp priests "Father" and their First Name. Thus Van Davis, a work-force teenager (which indicated he was already taken under the bishop's oversight and destined for seminary) then college, then Sewanee seminarian then deacon, became priest and our own Father Van. So, an early assignment was as curate at Christ Church, Pensacola under the wise, revered and sometimes feared long-term rector Dr. Henry Bell Hodgkins (1936-1966). In that time, teens of their youth group, most of whom had known and adored him summers at Camp Weed, took to calling Van "Father Van" or "Father Davis." My story in mind this morning that came back to me from my almost lifelong summer friend Jack Dennis of Christ Church Pensacola, and by Van himself during my visit to him decades later, was of a member of the Youth Group (named the YPSL in those days) looking for Van one evening as their YPSL meeting was about to start, opening the door where vestry was meeting and asking, "Is Father Davis in here?" Whereupon Dr. Hodgkins responded, "Mr. Davis is no father, and he can prove it." The story made the rounds of the diocese for several seasons. He, the Rev. Lavan B. Davis, later rector of St. Christopher's Pensacola, was a perpetual bachelor until into the mid-1980s, when he married Ann Robinson.

Remembering that we had been together at Camp Weed, Van invited me to come from Apalachicola about 1985 or 1986 to give a Lenten program. I did, stayed overnight at his bachelor pad; without a priest assistant at the time, Van asked me to come be his assistant and upon his retirement be in position to succeed into his position as rector, St. Christopher's. Tempting yet even with a family history and many beloved relatives in Pensacola, I declined, reminding him that he would have nothing to say about selection of whoever priest became rector after him.

Extending, my final memory this morning is about Van's marriage, to show the busybodyness of parishioners in any church. Before Ann, Van had dated another woman, I don't remember her name, but my aunt EG (my father's sister Evalyn) had loved her dearly and wanted and expected Van to marry her. When he dated, proposed to and married Ann, EG was furious, not sad and disappointed but enraged, furious that he had married Ann instead of the woman whom she and other churchladies had selected for him. Which reminds me that about a year after we, Linda, Tass and I, arrived at Trinity, Apalachicola in 1984, one day I took Communion to a sick parishioner at his home. Leaving, I stopped in the kitchen to visit with his wife, who was preparing fried squirrel for their dinner. As we chatted, she told me that several single women at Trinity had expressed their sadness, wishing that I were single. Innocently I asked, "Oh! Who?" to which she coyly replied, "I'm not telling."

My intention had been maybe conclude this blogpost with a Bible verse, but instead I'll just warn single male clergy, beware, as folks are inclined to mind your business as well as their own!

T         

just thinking

Boulder, Colorado. Been watching the osprey cam off and on from one egg to two eggs to three eggs to hatch and fledge. This year's three chicks are hunting and bringing fish home to the nest. No bird expert, to me they look like adults and it's fun to watch them mature. In due course they will leave on their migration south. From what I read (check out the link below), they don't stick together in migration and over the winter, but go their independent ways, and the first year the new young remain behind while the others head north again, but when they return, the same two parents mate again for another season at the same nest. 

https://www.bouldercounty.org/open-space/management/osprey-camera/

The sermon yesterday, I was really taken with it. The owl story brought one of my own life stories to mind, of which I, like the boy in the story, have always been ashamed. When I was ten or twelve, my main Christmas gift was a Daisy BB gun, which I expected and intended to be my first of many guns for hunting and for all our regular good old boy Southern stuff. One day I was "hunting" in the back yard and saw a bluejay flutter over and light in one of the chinkapin trees that were where our carport was built in 1948. I took aim and fired. Good shot! The bird fell to the ground and I ran to pick it up. Dead in my hand was a baby bird, a bluejay fledgling. I was so sad and ashamed that I never shot at another animal. 

Like the boy in yesterday's story, that moment has stayed with me, come back to me from time to time, affected me in various ways throughout my life. What might my life have been had I taken a different road in the yellow wood that day, missed my shot, never had that unfortunate awakening? For one thing, up until then I'd thought to be a bird hunter like Daddy Walt, my grandfather Gentry, because I loved the dove and quail my grandmother used to cook for us. But a dead little bird in my hand. This, my story, I don't think I've ever told anyone. It's one of my secrets. I'm still ashamed. Please don't tell.

There was so much in the sermon. I was glad we had a lot of visitors there to listen. As the preacher's idea of making one's life stories developed, some of my own stories flashed through my mind, most of them far too personal to share outside my own head , and they will die with me unless at some point I become so addlepated as to begin writing them down, typing them out as they come to mind. I'd have to get my priest confessor to set aside a large block of Time, over days and weeks, to hear me for Reconciliation of a Penitent. And, it being years too late to make amends for most of them, I'd be stuck with. Sometimes at church, indeed again yesterday, some of my stories pass through my mind during the liturgical general confession, and I make the sign of the cross during the absolution as the priest says "Son," hopefully forgiven.  

As I listened to the sermon I wondered if, at 82 fixin' to turn 83, I'm finished making stories. Life now is watching from 7H more so than doing anymore. No more cruises, no more flights, no more long drives, no more travel trailering - - I like life this way.

Our visit to the TAFB commissary, I bought a few lamb shanks, individually packaged. The one in the stew pot for today's dinner weighs over two pounds. There are carrots, celery. There'll be rice, Japanese rice, our favorite since 1963 when we moved to Yokohama, where still other roads diverged in Frost's yellow wood.

Monday then.

T