EAT MOR FOX

‘tis the season to be jolly so to go negative is neither helpful nor fun; but so much of the world is negative, or seems so. A dedicated American teacher assassinated in Benghazi days before he was to come home for the holidays, a young man, an idealist, helping people. The senseless hatred kills me. Fast and Furious star Paul Walker killed being fast and furious: Westboro Baptist Church to blaspheme his funeral with the presence of their evil hatred. Vehement hatred of President Obama always without exception coming from open or latent racism and jealousy and hoping the man fails over hoping for America's wellbeing, politics at its near-worst. Astonishing hatred of Pope Francis as he moves the Church beyond guilt, obsession and abandonment into lovingkindness, what a downer in the Season. Those who so hate are surely soul brothers and sisters of WBC, senseless hatred that not only kills the soul of the man but kills the soul of man. Yet there are stories of love and hope, at my church a backpack ministry to make sure a hundred hungry children have food to eat at home each weekend. In the NYT the story of Jacob, one of the Lost Boys out of Africa,

determined to make it in what is still and all a land of hope and promise:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/a-lost-boy-grows-up.html?smid=gp-nytimes

What brings me to the negative about hatred is our consuming intercollegiate football and other sports rivalry that we no longer seem to know, if ever we knew, is totally artificial, occupying the fringe of reality. Building over the CFB season to the climax of last week's Rivalry Games, intense feelings that we actually without shame express as hatred for other schools and opposing teams. In some European countries the sports rivalry leads to violence, riots, injuries and often deaths. We've lost a healthy sense of sportsmanship and become fools. Years ago Linda and I used to visit with relatives in the Birmingham area, all gathering at a mountaintop restaurant called The Club said with the emphasis on the. We lost interest in seeing them and stopped caring for those folks and ceased all contact after we found their entire table discussion always focused offensively and personally on intrastate football rivalry. In this and other CFB seasons I find myself getting to such feelings, which diminish my humanity as a child of God. To clarify: does it matter to God? In our mind we know that when all is said and done "it's just a game." Not even the stupidest of us would assert that the outcome of this weekend's NCAAF conference championship games is of concern to the Deity. Sin is defined precisely as that which matters to us that does not matter to Adonai Elohim; and that which matters to God about which our lives show that we don't give a damn. We are witnessing the personification of this in the life of Pope Francis, and the personification of Satan in those who are coming out hating him.

Climbing out of my trench ---

Fox for lunch.

Not to lunch, for lunch. Good spaghetti and tomato sauce made with fox meat. Italian ensign on my first Navy ship said they call it gravy not sauce. Whatever, it was tasty. When I said cheaper to trap and use raccoon meat Linda said I spell it wrong, faux not fox. Whatever. French faux tastes the same as American fox.

Raccoon too gamey anyway. Possum, too greasy.

Not eat more chikin, but eat mor faux, n'est–ce pas?

On the positive side, we haven't had any raccoons here in over a year now, a possum now and again, neighbors had raccoons, we gave them our trap, which they baited and set, next morning hauled a raging monster across town and released him in your yard. Has not found his way back yet far as we can tell, he's so cute when he's angry, do please make him and his mate and little family welcome in your attic.

Speaking of which (this story has been told here before) long years ago, late 1940s or maybe 1950, in a day and age long preceding neutering campaigns for anyone who wants to go off selfrighteous on me, our cat continued to have kittens galore to the point that one moonless night we put all eight or ten or a dozen in a box and hauled them way up Cove Boulevard in "The Pontiac" coupe that my father had removed the trunk lid and converted to a pickup truck bed. Memory is of riding in the back and gently holding the box shut on what this morning Anu Garg tell me was a nimiety of cats.

Driving north on 77, at about -- maybe 14th Street -- we turned right onto the dirt road and drove east for several blocks, turned left onto another dirt road, circling round the block. In a dark neighborhood of little houses we paused under the stars, put the box of cats in someone's front yard, and drove quickly away, shed of them forever.

This is by far not the most shameful story of my life: stay tuned.

A cat that can't travel as the crow flies nevertheless has the homing instinct of a pigeon, and one evening some five or six weeks later, the lot of cats no longer kittens but plump and healthy meowed at our back door returned safely home.

Not needing my comment this morning, life and death of international hero Nelson Mandela, with Desmond Tutu, the incomparable man of my lifetime, perhaps even above Winston Churchill

as history moves on.

Go Spartans.

T