Mottoes, slogans, wise sayings, favorite proverbs, one of mine is "don't believe everything you read" and it's in my mind today on my 87th birthday as I read online that "in ten years, 90 will be the new 40" It ain't no way, hoe-zay. I remember 40, buddy boy, I remember 40 well and good, and it ain't no way.  unless in ten years technology has developed a Time machine that actually makes it happen. For me, step into the transporter booth, scroll down to 1975, press GO, and jump back out real quick, forty and ready. +++++++++++ It's a happy birthday. Nice things said about me by nice folks who don't know me as well as I know myself! Amy posted on my Facebook page, a picture I love that took me back, not to forty, but to good, better, best of all, when I was Chaplain and religion teacher at Holy Nativity School, a school year reading, watching movies and in Narnia, another year in Hobbiton and throughout Middle Earth, another year at Hogwarts...

  Though it's helpful, distracting and focusing mental exercise, probably not the best use of Time is the 16 to 32 minutes, mean and mode 20 minutes, spent solving a two-suite spider solitaire game online. Or Easthaven Solitaire. I might do Churchill Solitaire, but I'm not about to pay to play. As to investment or expense, that Time might be profitably invested finishing another chapter or two of one of the four novels or two World War One diaries I have open and with bookmarks or dogeared pages. Or reading a paper from Academia website about the General Councils and development of Nicene orthodoxy, a favorite topic for causing myself to be appalled and bringing on dismay. It always surfaces Steve Job's graduation speech about living one's own life and following one's own mind vs being trapped in dogma that is the result of other people's thinking.  Beautiful flat Bay, clouds over the Gulf dancing with flashes of lightning. Yesterday's family gathering to ho...

Lightning with no thunder in clouds way out over the Gulf of Mexico. And it's the effect of low clouds, but snapped at 3:44 a.m. while having early coffee out here on 7H porch, reddish-pink lights in the direction of Tyndall AFB Operations and beyond to Mexico Beach and Port St Joe had the appearance of a fire burning in the distance, and reminded me of World War Two years when we had to observe blackout. Starting every evening at dusk and lasting the night: at home, blinds closed, shades and curtains drawn shut. Seems to me Harrison Avenue downtown was darkened. Cars and trucks had the top half of their round headlights painted black to reduce light shining up and being more visible from the sky or at sea. The mind wanders back in Time and I remember driving home to Panama City from Pensacola, two lane highway US98 through SJPC pine forests in Walton County, past Camp Helen, and out along the Gulf shore, a boy's wild imagination fearing a German submarine might have us i...

Evident from the sudden announcement and scenes of the royal family arriving in cars, there was no doubt that the Queen's death was imminent, announced here just after noon dinner Thursday. Everybody and his brother will be airing memories of Elizabeth, and I was having my own.  From the radio in our fish market in StAndrews, I listened to the excitement of her wedding with Prince Philip. Later I listened on the same radio the announcements that King George VI had died in his sleep and Elizabeth suddenly was queen. What I remember best though is newsreel shots of her during World War 2, dressed in uniform, wielding a wrench or driving an Army truck. I specifically remember the newsreel with the wartime shot of her by the ambulance.  She was a mechanic and a driver, and may have driven that ambulance, I don't know.  There was no doubt in anyone's mind that it was sincere, that she was indeed part of the war effort as a worker, and there in London during the ...

  Don't bother clicking on to read about the fifty-foot megalodon shark; it was a school of mackerel.  In our prayers at church last Sunday: Eliza Fletcher, age 34, mother of two and kindergarten teacher at an Episcopal School in Memphis, who was forcibly abducted while out on her morning run. Her body was found and the creature who abducted and murdered her tracked down and arrested: Cleotha Abaston, recently early released from prison for the crime of abduction.  His likely fate: detention without bond, trial, conviction, back to prison for life without parole? There is a sickening imbalance, injustice, unreason, illogic, and contempt for victims and their families, in the values of a society that suffers the continued existence of its monsters. Some acts against other humans are so heinous as to warrant the forfeiture of one's human, legal, and constitutional rights.  It defies reason that those and their institutions who vehemently oppose capital punishment ...

  "Actually, you were in until I looked at your Facebook memes" ++++++++++++++ Sean Dietrich, who writes the astonishingly consistently well-done daily essay "Sean of the South", is a theologian whether he sees himself as such or not. Sean is at least as competent a theologian as any I ever studied in theological seminary and decades since; including the flat-earth bishops, emperors, and others who took themselves so seriously when they convened at Nicaea and Constantinople to argue with each other about what Christians should be required to say we believe about God and Jesus.  Sean Dietrich gets it. And he writes about it so kindly, lovingly, self-deprecatingly, and tongue-in-cheek. On the odd occasion when he writes about God, he helps me get it too. That's at least in part because Sean, for all his pain and love in life, never takes himself seriously. Today's essay "Me and God" is case in point, from which I can wander down into the theological ...

  Everything exists for some end, a horse, a vine. Why dost thou wonder? Even the sun will say, I am for some purpose, and the rest of the gods will say the same. For what purpose then art thou? to enjoy pleasure? See if common sense allows this.  Marcus Aurelius, Book 8  Everyone has a destiny? Everything happens for a reason? Not my holding, but whatever. We have one absolute rule: Sunday afternoon is go nowhere and do nothing. This is different, but predictable for our extreme old age: Linda is not feeling well. What am I to do vis a vis understandings? Summon the screaming ambulance? Not. Absolute not, the understanding is that neither will put the other on a course to hospital except with consent. What then? Wait it out. Though every day is a beautiful day, tomorrow may be even lovelier, or not.  A friend whom I admired above almost anyone I'd ever known, a man of ultimate peace: while everyone else flees inside, floats outside in the po...