Posts

Remembering

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A friend sent me a couple of pictures from Panama City's older days, my earlier years.  This is Bay Memorial Hospital, a much later iteration of its beginnings - - I remember a smaller single brick building with an appearance somewhat like Lisenby Hospital was in those days, must have been two story, the entrance was south-facing on 6th Street the block west of Cove Boulevard, now MLK, in the late 1940s or early 1950s. My father went there for a tonsillectomy, I remember driving him and Mama there for his admission, and leaving to drive home as he stayed overnight; it wold have been summer 1950 or later, because I remember driving Mama home in our Plymouth station wagon, which my father bought the summer of 1950.  Brother Mac, the Rev McDaniel left his ministry as pastor of First Baptist Church to be the first administrator of Bay Memorial Hospital. A tall, thin, bald man, popular with the kids, he was often seen around Cove School and likely other schools, always being called...
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as on the Day of Midian

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Our OT lesson for next Sunday is from Isaiah (below), and while the lectionary does a good job of tying the whole story together from our Christian gospel point of view, the Isaiah lesson cuts off with the phrase, "you have broken as on the day of Midian," and some folks may not know the OT salvation story of Gideon with pots and trumpets and torches, scaring the Midianites witless in the darkness and defeating them as they fled in their panic. So, that story is printed below from Judges chapters 6 and 7. Judges itself is a marvelous book about various leaders of Israelite tribes before the era of kings. The book shows a fascinating repeating theological cycle of God's loving presence and action in Israel's history, their holy history of peace, sin, judgment & condemnation, repentance, and redemption, and I often recommended it as ideal Lenten reading for Sunday school class and Bible study groups that I led over the years. Anyway, here's next Sunday's Isa...
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none are Best

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On the Good, Better, Best scale, like a sermon, a blogpost is Good if it stirs a memory in someone, and yesterday's blogpost was Good, Better because a friend's memories that he shared back at me stirred my own memories in turn.  It started with the duck the hunter shamefully left injured in the Bay, to an injured duck that my friend's family nursed back to health many years ago, to a story that in my mind was parallel enough to trigger my memory - -> Having been writing this blog over fifteen years now, I'm not sure if I've told this before, but no matter, here it is. The house where we grew up was in a then undeveloped, woodsy neighborhood of The Cove. A wooded vacant lot on one side of us, and behind us thick woods from our house all the way back to the part of Massalina Bayou that looks over on Tarpon Dock Bridge. Thick woods with well-worn paths through, where we played our childhood away. In the woods and all around us there were animals of all kinds. Skunk...
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Saturday morning in January 2026

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Saturday breakfast: from yesterday's visit to TAFB Commissary, Schaller & Weber's liver pate with goose on rye bread with a slice of cheese and a smear of mustard and mayonnaise, second mug of hot & black, and the daily handful of prescription meds for the nonagenarian.  An internationalist I have long been because interdependence forces peoples of Earth closer together whether we like it or not, and sets the stage for peaceful coexistence as in each nation's self-interest. As between us and Europe, us and Asia, us and South America, the case is clear, except (and I'm not positive) I don't see how Russia has ever contributed anything our way, what do they have, what could Russia have offered that anyone else wants or needs? Well, natural gas for heating Europe? IDK other than creating my taste for caviar; the Pennsylvania restaurant where we used to have Sunday brunch buffet after church because of the enormous bowls, one of red caviar, one of black caviar, ...
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IMAGES FOREVER IN MIND

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There's never a reason I can't start with a car picture if I want to. And by no means does the car have to relate in any way to whatever the magic dancing fingers produce. It may simply be that, having loved cars all my life, a car picture begins my effort with a smile.  An image forever in my mind - - the early 1940s, a dark night as we head home to Panama City from visiting beloved family in Pensacola - - a small boy maybe five years old, standing up behind my parents, in the back seat of our car  as we drive that long, dark, empty stretch of two-lane US Highway 98 through the woods somewhere east of Destin and well before rounding the curve past Camp Helen to the Phillips Inlet Bridge, our car is overtaken by a faster car coming up from behind us. By the custom of the day, the driver blinks headlights as the car passes us. Now ahead of us, as it pulls back into the eastbound lane ahead of us, I observe loudly, "a Packard with a trunk rack!" I was four or five. The ...
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window of the mind

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  Having a second mug of hot & black this morning while the steak comes to room temperature before I cook it along with fried eggs. I cut a thin breakfast steak off of the standing rib roast that didn't get cooked at Christmas because we had more than enough food as it was.  On high heat, this steak will get seared eight to ten seconds until crispy black and the room fills with smoke, then flipped over and the other side seared for almost ten seconds until black, then onto the warmed plate to wait in the toaster oven while I fry three eggs over medium to lay on top of the steak.  Various things on my mind this morning. One is that now in full retirement I'm no longer blogging daily as I did for fifteen years, age 75 to 90. Couple of factors occur to me, one is that I'm no longer deeply involved and invested in intellectually converting a Bible text to a sermon that makes sense to me these days when "Seek the Truth, Come whence it May, Cost what it Will" begins...
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Tomorrow's Sunday

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Indiana - Oregon, wow. Cignetti, Mendoza, Hoover, CFB has changed so much since my UF days 1953-57, like professional football more an industry than "our local team" of guys you see in class with everybody else. IDK, for school spirit, maybe drop back to high school football?. It's just as well to be ninety! I was always more a Buick fan than a baseball basketball football fan anyway, nomesane? +++++++ Friday evening: pizza at Enzo's then home to 7H for movie night. Enzo's is tops for pizza, it's right down the street, I can see it from my study/office/den, and their eggplant dishes are superb. For an "appetizer" yesterday we had the eggplant: three slices of breaded and fried eggplant with cheese dripped on top and tomato sauce all around it; one slice for each of us. The next Time we go to Enzo's I may just get the eggplant and let the pizza go. I used to get an "individual" thin crust pizza with double anchovies and mayo on the side,...
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