Friday Disconnected Ramble

TV and the NYT bring to mind that my international economics professor at the University of Michigan liked to say the only role of Congress in wartime is to criticize the President’s prosecution of the war. He was looking back at WWII and Korea. Seems still so.

Friday again, eh! Tass and Jeremy, Caroline and Charlotte arrive from Tallahassee late this morning for Charlotte’s sixth birthday weekend. Nancy is baking a cake double chocolate and Charlotte the chocoholic will want chocolate ice cream to go with it.

Lenten Wednesday Evening has been a favorite weekday church event since the 1940s. We had a covered dish supper every Wednesday evening of Lent at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church my growing up years. Always delicious food especially the collards often brought by Mrs. Baker, Henry Breland’s grandmother. Her collards, and the very large baked red snapper my mother brought. After supper the youth were excused and the rector had a teaching on “Love, Acceptance & Discipline.” I felt fortunate to be "youth" having come not to listen but to eat collards and red snapper. Eating really good at church in Lent helps deepen one's sense of sin and penitence until Wednesday comes round again.

That was sixty and more years ago. My favorite Lenten Soup Supper dish these years is Linda’s oyster stew, incomparably sinful. Nearly a gallon of oysters, milk, half and half cream, onions, celery, “and an old shoestring” as Colonel Sanders used to say on TV when talking about his secret fried chicken recipe, in the days when Colonel Sanders was a real person though not a real colonel. What makes the oyster stew so special? The old shoestring. Whoever missed Soup Supper at Holy Nativity last Wednesday missed it missed it missed it. All the soups were tasty and the rector's open discussion was good and all sins of gluttony are forgiven. +

The other memorable Lenten Wednesday evenings were soup & bread suppers at St. Thomas, Laguna Beach. Wonderful fellowship especially when Easter was early thus making Lent early and our beloved Northerners were still here. Jammed church for worship followed by Soup & Bread Supper in crowded Jewell Hall.

Jewell Hall was named for the Reverend George A. P. Jewell, who was here in the 1940s and into the ‘50s. Mr. Jewell was English, divorced, lived in a trailer on Baker Court and was active in our parish life at St. Andrew’s. After St. Thomas by the Sea, Laguna Beach was formed Mr. Jewell was called to be their priest. Mr. Jewell was very likable. Every Saturday morning he came into our fish market on 12th Street in St. Andrews, visited with me for a few minutes, and got his “free pound of shrimps” as he said, our weekly gift because he loved “shrimps” so much.

My grandfather, A. D. Weller, was the first treasurer of St. Thomas by the Sea when St. Thomas was a new mission of St. Andrew’s and Pop was treasurer there as well. He drove a 1937 Chevrolet Master Town Sedan until Kaiser-Frazer came out and he drove a 1947 Kaiser for a few years. Kaiser and Frazer cars were made in a former WWII bomber plant in Willow Run, Michigan. By the time of St. Thomas, Pop was back to Chevrolet again. 

Enough rambling disconnected nonsense for this morning.

Tom+