The highlight of my life vocationally were the years I was involved with Holy Nativity Episcopal School working with Beverly McDaniel. I'll have a brief opportunity to say so tomorrow afternoon at her funeral service. There'll never be Time to say it all, so maybe I'll just touch on the peaks. I won't mention my frustration when she was tardy to Wednesday morning middle school chapel, which was every single week without fail, arriving ten to twenty minutes late, once or twice even while the students were lining up to receive Holy Communion. 

Neither will I mention Beverly's bravery a quarter century ago, through what the most veteran of us still call The Troubles. The episode was the reason we separated the school legally and financially from the parish church, chartered and reorganized it as Holy Nativity Episcopal Private School, Inc. and leased the school building and property to the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast instead of turning it over to the parish vestry. It was a wrenching Time that, in her lovingkindness, Beverly let go of and moved on with her life and her service to the school and children. I will say, with some anonymity for her, that only Carolyn and I still hold on to what Beverly long ago was able to forget.

Neither will I mention what I recall as one of the happiest summers of my life, summer 2010. The appearance of the school property, which is owned by the Holy Nativity School Foundation, had gone shabby, with peeling paint and rotting wood at the roofline all the way around the building. Calling myself The Landlord, I took on a refurbishing project, hiring and supervising a group of workers, buying the lumber and other supplies and bringing them to the campus in my station wagon, and being there from early morning to early evening to open and close the building and to oversee the work throughout every day. Amy Moody snapped the above photo of me that summer, waving from the roof of the auditorium at the north end of the building. 

Looking at that photograph, I wander for a moment. For me that summer was a Time of precarious health. After a lifeTime of medical attention to a heart murmur that was first diagnosed in 1950 when I was fourteen and getting my physical exam for summer camp, that had been examined again by a cardiologist in Birmingham, Alabama the summer of 1954 when I was eighteen, and that had I was and l 

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