Saturday morning, looks nicer than Friday, sunny but 40° with wind from the north at 13 mph and "feels like 33°" isn't appealing for the Mardi Gras festival that's going on in StAndrews yesterday and today. Finishing my hot and Black (my politically correct pc is now spell-checking black to a capital B), no matter.  The protests over the 15 year old Russian ice skater being allowed to compete on the ice in China were shamefully self-righteous shows of jealousy that the media could have spared us.  The media will make the most of this as well: inevitable the family's anger over the two year prison sentence given the White woman, the former police officer who in a moment of panic grabbed her pistol instead of her stun gun and shot and killed the young Black man. The media will make big over it, feigning outrage and stirring up protests, but the fact is, the System not the mob is supposed to decide sentences. I would be angry too, even tempted to take the law into ...

  Hemingway was right, but Huck Finn is not required reading any more because people don't understand that learning what we are and are becoming again by rehearsing the worst that we have been, can be painful and seem scandalous.  Even more than "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" this book is about what we are. Unutterable, it's full of the verboten n-word, the speaking of which even if "quoting" has become ruinous - - well beyond what the s-bomb and f-bomb were in my Time. Twain's story, over against the human decency of the Black slave Jim, and beyond the profoundly simple naïveté of Huck himself, the book shows up the rest of us for what we are, incredibly selfish, uncomprehending, uncaring. Surely it cannot possibly be true that we are created in God's image, in the divine likeness. Hopefully not. Or, if so, we have not evolved that far yet. And now, sliding as we are into an evil state that, at least to me, would have been unimaginable forty years a...

Good morning, and there's not going to be a blogpost today. Rising late, after five o'clock, there was the coffee, hot and black, along with what I call "sermonizing" to get a leg up on Sunday morning.  We don't preach these things extemporaneous, you know, there's a lot of pain involved. Furthermore, my memories include an Easter Sunrise service with lots of folks and all the members of the Apalachicola Ministers Association out on the end of the pier at LaFayette Park, waiting for the sun to peek over the horizon the other side of Apalachicola Bay. That year, our designated preacher for the service was one of the Pentecostal pastors: two or three minutes into his sermon he stopped, a Time gap passed, and he said, embarrassed, "folks, pray for me, because the Holy Spirit has left me". So, no, get it together ahead of Time. The general guideline offered at my seminary was that a sermon should take about eighteen hours preparation. But the idea is to ...

  Poem.a.Day is here every morning, arrives about five o'clock, so if I've done an early rise and email scroll I miss it, because I generally don't go back for another scroll. This line just came, not in the poem but in the poet's words about it: memory works this way, some incidental moment setting a buried memory—here, a scrap of remembered dialogue, but from whom, and where?—into motion, up toward the surface, into the light of remembering what had lain hidden What a happiness that I didn't miss it, the poet saying lyrically what happens often at this age, something triggers a memory set long ago, and you get to live there again. +++++++ What is superb writing? It varies from one to another, for me, superb writing moves me, stirs memories, makes me think "yep", maybe about something I once expected to do or wanted to be, or when and where I was for what I then thought would be always but now seems to have been but a moment in life. Superb writing isn...

  Remember the Maine, Remember the Alamo, Remember Pearl Harbor, most recently Remember 9/11. Nobody remembers the Alamo, but when I was a boy plenty of people remembered the battleship USS Maine exploding in Havana harbor on this date in 1898 and the national outrage and the Spanish American War. In my early days at Cove School, Pearl Harbor was fresh in every mind, and we loved singing the song as part of our daily devotional in class Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR As we go to meet the foe. Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR As we did the Alamo. We will always re member h ow they died for Liberty. Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR And go on to victory." If you don't know the tune, ask me and I'll sing it for you one of these days. My octogen-voice isn't so great, but early as a priest I used to chant part of the liturgy back and forth with choir and congregation, and it was fun and nice. The rector I "trained" with in the early 1980s required it of me, saying ...

  The good life, right, nomesane? Dawn over StAndrews Bay, one of the small container ships arriving on her regular transit between Progreso and Port of Panama City. A cup of black coffee from my coffee club Xmas treat, and a line of uncommonly good white cheddar cheese from Trader Joe's cut up into nine tiny cubes for savoring with. The cheese is long-lived and I play lolly linger longer eating it.  Last evening I started a blogpost after checking the spelling of "whoa" and finding out that spelling for dummies has it up for grabs, if you don't really care you can now legitimately misspelled it "woah" - - so I'm thinking the new shortcut sort of writing brought on by rabid cellphone texting may change a lot of our American English spellings. Over the coming generation, word spellings could change faster than new iPhones come out. Every misspelled word in the National Spelling Bee with be up for challenge. Anyway, I pressed Publish and sent that blogpost...

  What's bothering me this morning?  Evolution. Again. Or still. Evolution, as in a question during my growing up years, "Do you believe in evolution, or the Bible?" Well any good Southern Bible Belt Christian knew the answer to that one, not just the right answer, the true answer. Same in my Cove School days as, "Are you for civil rights or states rights"? I dunno, what are they? "Civil rights means Blacks would go to school with us."  I'm not as stupid as I used to be. On either subject, either question. I never did Blackface myself, but I remember Al Jolson, and I do remember the "Minstrels" that we loved having in our class at Cove School. And Amos and Andy, and Jack Benny and Rochester. Yes, hilarious, obliviously putting down an entire category of human beings. How could we have been so? Belonging to a college fraternity that glorified a shameful era of American history. Going in the Navy when Stewards serving in officers' quart...