Breakfast this summer Friday morning outside on 7H porch, pint mug of ice coffee and a tin of sardines from Portugal, packed in olive oil with teriyaki sauce, tasty and sweet. The strong temptation, to which I may yet yield, is to sop the sauce up with a morsel of bread.  Scattered thunderstorms at work over the Gulf to the south and west of 7H, as well as drenching downtown PC and the Cove and coming my way. Often the rain headed this way detours off to the south and over Shell Island and we don't get a drop.  Rain and the sun shining: when we were small my cousin Ann used to say it meant the devil is beating his wife. Same source that taught Ann and me that if there's enough blue in the sky to make a Dutchman a pair of pants, the weather'll clear up.  Raining on the porch here now. It'll pass. If it doesn't, we still have a beautiful July day, mild temperature and a light breeze up here. Life Is Good, Better, Best. Four nice sardines, and now a small slice of wh...

  Haircut this afternoon of a summer Thursday, I'm out here on 7H porch enjoying an 81° mid-day while looking east toward downtown, the view blinded out by white driving rain that's moving toward us.  Seems like we're getting a fair amount of this gray weather this summer, more than usual. Or maybe this is the new usual, IDK. I sort of like it. There's a picture of our new kitchen, snapped just after the cabinet installers left yesterday afternoon. They were as proud of it as we are happy with it.  The countertop people came out Tuesday to make their pattern for cutting the slab of whatever material it is that we selected, I forget the name of it. It's white with some sort of subtle streaks in it. They said it'll be seven to ten days before they're back with that. Then they'll measure for the backsplash, that's to be of the same material that's to go from the countertop all the way up to the cabinets, and I guess another week or so for that. Nu r...

This is highly personal, a memory that, because a human mind can be impossible to understand or explain, to me distantly relates to what is happening in Gaza.  Over a period of seven years, some forty-five and more years ago, I was being flown down from WashingtonDC and Pennsylvania six Times a year to teach graduate courses in major defense acquisition management as an adjunct professor at the University of West Florida.  Actually, someTimes I flew and someTimes I drove. A couple of Times I stopped in Pensacola on my way home from business trips to Australia or the West Coast. Three Times, twice driving and once flying, when coming down from our home in Pennsylvania, I brought daughter Tass along with me because I usually stayed at my parents' home, the Old Place, and it was an opportunity for me to be with Tass, and for her to visit her grandparents while I was away teaching at UWF during the day. On one occasion, we arrived to hear that my father was planning to trap a vici...

The Sermon On Sundays and other Major Feasts there follows, all standing The Nicene Creed ++++++++++ ENS, the Episcopal News Service, which is published online about once a week or so (you can subscribe for free) Monday 21 July had an article about the Nicene Creed commemorating its dating from 325 AD, 1700 years ago this year. The Nicene Creed, which we say at regular Sunday services of Holy Eucharist except when we're having Baptism, is one of my favorite subjects. It's our prime instance of humans arguing and fighting and struggling with each other to decide what God is like, to settle basic Christian doctrine. A lifelong Episcopalian, I've been standing and saying the Nicene Creed in Sunday worship all my life. I still do, but I stand back contemplating it because it asserts characteristics of God that are beyond human knowing, including some that are not based on Scripture but on what a committee decided Christians would be required to believe (or at least to say we be...

Tinned anchovies and tinned sardines have long been among my favorites. Tinned and glass jarred. With anchovies, I eat them from the tin or on saltines or cut up in a salad or, best, a can of flat anchovies laid out on very thin bread to make a sandwich, an occasional breakfast treat. You can use mayonnaise or just use some of the olive oil they're packed in.  Sardines are also a breakfast treat, usually nothing with them but mustard, one of my mustard varieties. This morning I had an apple with my hot & black, then Linda remembered, "You were going to have sardines this morning," which I'd forgotten. So, peel back the lid on a tin of sardines from Portugal, a Fathers Day gift. Portuguese sardines are famously best, and they can be priced higher than those from Spain France Italy Norway &c. These were good, sans mustard, they were enjoyable just plain from the tin, at our table outside here on 7H porch.  Yes, it's warm and I won't stay out here long, b...

  Taken with this first century AD notion and religion with doctrine of God Incarnate, that Pantokrator, the Creator of all that is, deigned to come to Earth as a creature: why? Why? why all of it: nativity, baptism, preaching and teaching, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and expectation, why? Pathetic, self-obsessed minuscule ant-sized creatures on an obscure little planet in a remote solar system on an outlying ring of an average galaxy among some two trillion galaxies, Why? It boggles the mind.  It staggers the imagination. Is it Truth, or is it our ignorant, arrogant flat-Earth egocentrism? If true, Why? Doing something that I generally oppose, mixing two Gospels, Mark and Matthew, Jesus says he's come to preach (Mark 1:38) and Matthew says he proclaimed " Μετανοεῖτε  repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). Matthew calls it the kingdom of heaven, Mark calls it the kingdom of God, same thing. Jesus is not talking about pie in the sky, H...

Wait v Seek. Seek v Wait. Here is a thought from Simone Weil that strikes a note with me as I contemplate that seemingly for me everlastingly tormenting proverb that I learned looking out the window of my Episcopal seminary classroom and reading it inscribed in the lintel over the door of the adjacent library building, Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will. New to the idea at the Time, the proverb struck me as liberating that my denomination's seminary, which I'd expected to Teach Me The Truth, was open enough to signal that they were not the repository of Truth, but the place where I might begin my own search for Truth.  A reason that Simone Weil's thought appeals is that instead of seeking God that is Truth and/or Truth that is God, I might relax and let the Truth of God seek and find me instead, if God wishes and not if God does not wish. At any event there is surely no rush, for God is never in a hurry and I have no expectation of a successful end to my ...

  Shredded Ralston for your breakfast starts the day off shining bright, gives you lots of cowboy energy, with a flavor that's just right. It's delicious and nutritious, bite-size and ready to eat; take a tip from Tom, go and tell your mom "Shredded Ralston can't be beat."  Our final Navy tour and transition into USN (Ret) and on to theological seminary, we lived a short distance from a Purina plant that, when the breeze was in our direction, made the world like my mornings as a boy when the kitchen had the wonderful aroma of Hot Ralston cereal cooking.  About myself as a retired person. An old friend and parishioner, herself now retired, posted the story below, which is too good to not share not only as almost incomparable but also, as a retired person myself, as a sample of what we retired person might visit upon society around us.  Myself, I type these +Time blogposts and after posting on Facebook leave them online for only a day or so lest someone who thinks t...

  Long years since I rode in a DeSoto. Walter, a colleague in my Charlie-Four Company of our OCS class in Newport Rhode Island the summer of 1957, owned a 1953 DeSoto six sedan exactly like the photo above, same two-tone colors, a popular combination that year. A heavy automobile with automatic Fluid Drive and a six cylinder engine, that was one sluggish car on the take-off. Walter's last name I don't remember, but he very kindly rode me in his DeSoto one Saturday morning, from the naval base, across the Jamestown Ferry, across the Jamestown Bridge and on over to South Kingstown, RI, where Linda was waiting for me.  Driving through South Kingstown on Main Street, Highway 1A, Walter dropped me off at the intersection of our road heading south, and I walked down the several blocks to the brown clapboard house where Father David Damon, first Rector of Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, PC,  had lent us the upstairs apartment.  Anyway, the DeSoto, as we drove from Newport t...