May 2026, can you imagine? Today, Friday the Fifteenth, is Robert's ninety-first birthday, who'd have thought?! As children, we grew up together  on Massalina Bayou and were at each other's birthday parties when we turned seven, eighty-four years ago. Classmates In the Cove School class of 1949 we both love Cove  School, where together we suffered third grade with the exacting Miss Ruth Martin but endured, and together we love shared memories of eighth grade with Miss Virginia Parker.  In our aging years, Robert arranged and hosted class reunions, including fish fries at Cove School.  At one year's reunion, by unanimous acclamation, Robert was elected President for Life of our Class of 1949. Another  year, maybe our last reunion, Miss Parker joined us.  In the old Time, Virginia Parker was the pianist at St Thomas by the Sea Episcopal Church in Laguna Beach out on the west end of Panama City Beach. As the priest at St Thomas, I visited Miss Park...

  When it comes to mimd, mornings during nesting season I check the status and what's going on with the osprey nest in Longmont, Colorado at the Boulder County Fairgrounds. This morning the wind looked high as the nest swung back and forth above the pond.  A couple days ago I got a screenshot , early of the male bird sitting on the eggs. Mostly mom bird does it, I reckon it's Women's Work except when she needs to fly off and do her business. In the photo above, she's back and sitting on the perch for a bit before she moves over to the nest and shoves the male off the eggs.  Male and female are easy to tell apart, the female has the brown nest feathers in a "necklace" across her chest, the male's chest is all white. Maybe I'm not "there" as much as I've been in the past, but it seems to me that this male bird doesn't stick around as much as the other males I've watched there over the years; although I don't think the mom bird s...

No doubt it’ll require pausing now and then for thought, but maybe this’ll be the FYI List blogpost I’ve been thinking to write. Or maybe the mind will wander off again as usual, IDK. Probably wander, eh? Don’t send me messages on Facebook Messenger: it’s all locked up because of spamming I’ve encountered, so if you write to me on FB Messenger I don’t receive it.  A cloudy day and a pitch black dark predawn are as beautiful as a sunshiny day. Especially here in 7H. True to my favorite proverb, my life’s work as a nonagenarian is seeking the truth and loving the search. The proverb challenges “seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will” - - I’ve found it very costly indeed, but I prefer the cost, disillusionment, to living with illusions and nonsense. I live with the realization that I know nothing. It’s very freeing. I find AI online to be a good source of personal medical information: when I Google medical questions AI gives me straight answers instead of “oh, we don’t ...

One of the seven major celebrations of the church year, The Ascension story is on our lectionary calendar for this coming Sunday. Visualized elegantly in the above painting by Salvador Dali, it's told at the end of Luke's gospel, then more extravagantly at the beginning of Acts, which is our lectionary reading.  Over the ages of the Christian church, the Ascension story has been the object of many works of art, much of which features what is whimsically called "the disappearing feet" with disciples standing or kneeling to watch Jesus' feet vanish into a low cloud. Some of the art includes Jesus' mother Mary, the woman clothed in her traditional blue.  "Why is it necessary for Jesus to ascend bodily into the sky?" is a great discussion question for an adult Sunday school class or small group Bible study to explore. Often coming out in those discussions is the inspired suggestion that, like the stories of Jesus raising children from the dead as Elijah ...

Sean Dietrich and his wife are on their second pilgrimage walking the Camino de Santiago, and he's keeping his readers informed, posting about it every day.  If I read him correctly, it only takes one such walk to capture the soul, to make the pilgrim obsessed with it. Sean makes it a compelling spiritual journey. As nonagenarians (she will become a member of the club exactly two months from today, knock knock, God willing, wishing you long years), Linda and I don't want to walk it, but we might if we were twenty years younger. I'd like to be out where the night sky is free enough of ambient light for me to contemplate Earth's view of our Milky Way Galaxy, which is the starting point for where I myself grasp the Creating God who told Moses, "I AM that I AM, I WILL BE whatever I WILL BE." In other words, "don't mess." But anyway, heck, if we were half a century younger we might make an avocation of it. In fact, Sean wrote that he's met a pilgr...

Below, scroll down, is a NYT column that catches me this morning at 5:21 and still pitch black dark outside. I’m afraid there are children who board the school bus in the predawn and are delivered home after dark, what misery. But today’s Saturday, isn’t it, a reprieve.  Looking across the room I see the sofa we bought at a Southern California furniture store that fall 1969 just before my ship deployed for WestPac and whatever contribution we made to the Vietnam War. The elegant new sofa in our living room on the moss green carpet of our house in Chula Vista, San Diego. The house was our first purchase, brand new, the builder had done a good job, except that the outside walls were not insulated, so the hot western wall could make our bedroom unbearably hot on summer and fall afternoons. No air conditioning either, didn’t need it most of the year. That was Southern California sixty years ago. One evening - - Linda, Malinda and Joe must have been in Arizona visiting Linda’s parents -...