Basket!!! At a request, I'm recalling and writing down personal memories of my eight years as a student at Cove Elementary School, Panama City, Fall 1941 through Spring 1949, first grade through eighth grade, teachers Violet Heyward through our beloved Virginia Parker. Writing it started off with a bang, and I've roughed it out through fifth grade, then let it slide several days, with sixth, seventh, and eighth grades yet to be stirred and written.  Encouraging the memories to surface  is fun and good, and I'll get back to it in due course. Needless to say, that I'm soon coming up on my ninety-first birthday tends to give the little project a certain urgency! For a title, it's "Golden groves and crystal waters," which was the opening line of our Alma Mater song at Cove School, but memory slips and I'm missing a line of the song I thought would stick with me lifelong. I remember all the words of "On our city's northern border, reared against th...

  Was ist heute? Heute ist Dienstag, nicht wahr? Today is Tuesday, and my one commitment today is a 9:00 AM appointment with the dermatology clinic. They will, no doubt about it, cut pieces out of me and bill for it; somebody's got to make the Escalade payments, eh, nomesane? No, I'm still alive because of them and others who've known what they are doing over my years of life.  And there's always something about me that needs cutting. In fact it's been observed and said that Mr B has gone off eccentric, if not downright weird at Times. Maybe it's the meds, the little tablets in their plastic containers that ship from GOK where several Times a year: I've been taking them nearly sixteen years now, same Time span as writing this more or less daily nonsense.  My Meds, the tiny pills, started that October Sunday in 2010 when, pale green of pallor, I was delivered to the ER and The Man asked, "Has anyone ever told you that your EKG is TERRIBLE?" No. ...

  Around here we see ospreys every day, they are local here in St Andrews, circling high over the Bay and diving for mullet, often flying by right close to 7H porch, with or without a fish. But I've not seen an active local osprey nest in years. The nest I watch in Colorado, though, via the Boulder County Fairgrounds Osprey Nest Camera in Longmont, is an annual treat starting when the osprey male and female arrive from their separate migrations in South or Central America early spring. Some years there's still snow on the calendar, even heavy snow, maybe endangering the eggs; the pair mating, the mom bird laying her eggs, beginning the countdown to hatching that shows which eggs are viable; the actual hatching, which I've watched some years; the parents catching and feeding live fish to the hatchlings as they grow into recognizable young ospreys, I snapped this picture yesterday: to when the chicks fledge, are taught to fish in the adjacent waters; then in the autumn of eac...

Tomorrow's OT lesson from Genesis 21 is below, along with my fooling-with-it notes inserted. It has been some years since I taught my adult Sunday school class and the prep effort and actual presentation are in my rearview mirror anymore; but I liked to make the Sunday school hour specifically relevant by focusing on the Lectionary readings for the instant Sunday.  Just so, if I were teaching a class tomorrow I'd work on the Genesis 21 story, which is a continuation - (that's the way Lectionary Year A OT readings after Pentecost work, series of stories) - a continuation of last week's droll story about the conception of Isaac, son of Sarah and Abraham (?!) by the Holy Spirit. Last weeks' story has 90-year-old Sarah laughing when The Lord promises that she will give birth to a son, and The Lord taking offense at her for laughing. Her laugh, though, seems not to be delight, you see, it's scorn; because the promise itself is outrageously absurd. And it's on top...

The rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola, Florida is looking ahead, toward the parish bicentennial in 2036, and asked if I'd assemble some memories of our Time there, fourteen bright and happy years from July 1984 through September 1998. With help from Linda, I've put together a mind-dump, a disorganized stream of consciousness sort of memoir that just keeps adding-to the longer I sit here and type.  Our Apalachicola chapter of life came together largely because, newly ordained at the Time, I was quitting and turning over to my partner my defense industry consulting business in Pennsylvania, Washington and Australia; and bringing to its inevitable end my six or seven years as an adjunct professor of political science teaching graduate course in defense weapons systems acquisition for the University of West Florida; as well as considering a call to be rector of a parish in the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania - - when my mother phoned long distance from Panama City t...