Perfect morning for January 31, less so for May 31: 71F, 98%, Wind 0 mph. But more comfortable than the overnight temperature in the downstairs back quadrant of the house HVAC system, which has it at 78F. So this day starts outside for me. The downstairs front screen porch. I can feel the slightest stirring, and so can the dogwood tree in front of me. It was pleasant walking down for Linda’s PCNH, so here I am, coffee, MacBook, and the world around me. For today, the weather map shows one of these little hickeys:  I don't believe it for a minute. Yesterday we ran errands ( drove errands), went to the bank and took our wills out of the lock box, we’re going to go over them, the lawyer put them in language that only a judge could understand, and possibly have them redone. Stopped by the hearing clinic to buy replacement batteries and those little dome things for my magical squealing ears. Made hospital visits. Had lunch at Chow Time. Unless there’s Peking Duck on the buffet ...

Queue up.  Too often my first act of the morning -- [ well, it isn’t first, is it, first has changed since we bought the dehumidifier. First, coming down the stairs, is to notice that it’s humming, OK “buzzing obnoxiously” which is good: when full it goes off, telling me to empty it -- two or three times a day, several gallons of water extracted daily from the front downstairs part of the house, which is why we bought it, to rid the place of that musty smell that reminds us we are living in an old folks’ home. See, this letting myself get distracted must be what happens as I keep climbing the fence to peer over the wall at eighty years of age. What’s there? More fence to climb, or a void, or a green valley where I can walk barefoot again, or that dead, dismal, endless district of abandoned warehouses and boarded up houses and dim tobacco shops through which the narrator of C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce walks at perpetual dusk in a chill, light drizzle before...

Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. This is our collect, prayer for today, because today, forty days after Easter Day, is Ascension Day on the church calendar. It’s a fantastic event that has been the subject of much pious art over the years, mostly through the middle ages with paintings that are described as "the disappearing feet," but even into the twentieth century with this startling work by Salvador Dali.  In our less pious and more daring age, the ascension has also been the basis of light humor.  Luke the Evangelist may have received the ascension as oral tradition in the budding Christian Church, although if that’s the case it’s hard to understand why it only appears in Luke’s writin...

to post or not to post not to post or to not post No one likes some fool preacher ranting about current events. No one likes , much less needs , but the brain disconnects and the fingers keep dancing. In the end, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” is not about morality but about dozing off to sleep while writing my blog. Unspeakable evil of radical Islamists spotlighted in Nigeria kidnapping young girls, daughters. Such evil could not possibly help any cause they might be pressing, but it is their way in a new world of senseless inhumanity that explodes indiscriminately in the marketplace.   Modern commercial airliners disappearing into the night.   Chaos near anarchy in Ukraine, warring rebels and the doubtful  necessity of their massacre. Presidential assurances, read my lips, no new taxes, end the war and bring the troops home, you can trust me on this one, Americans will soon be out of Afghanistan. The slipping and sliding, peeping ...

That thy peace which evermore ... This is an odd sense: the pleasure of sleeping until five o’clock in the morning, marred by waking up, glancing at the clock and feeling I’ve been robbed of two hours of my life. But there it is, morning’s first awareness.  It comes from long years as a parish priest living in a rectory next door to the church on a main highway, the habit of getting up very early to enjoy the only time of day I would have to myself. Before dawn, even the Deity wouldn't knock on the door requiring my soul or asking for a handout, and the tramps and transients are still sleeping it off in the motel room I paid for last night.  More, it comes from those three months mid-October 2010 through mid-January 2011, rising as early as possible certain, because of my medical prognosis, that this would be the day to drive my Chevy to the levee, so enjoy the ride. Getting there is half the fun.  In fact, getting there is  all the fun. And, y...

The Navy Hymn Facing It Yusef Komunyakaa, b.1947 My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t, dammit: No tears.  I’m stone. I’m flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash. Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s  wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet’s image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window. He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase n...

Crazy, isn’t it. Elliot Rodger, 22, killing a bunch of people and then himself, because, he says, “a beautiful environment can be the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone.” Girls weren’t attracted to him, he says, and he can’t figure out why. Clearly impressed with Elliot’s life, Jon Swartz, who wrote the USA Today news article, mentions Rodger’s BMW five times. Elliot in fact did not have to experience it all alone. One wonders (1) why Elliot didn’t just get in his BMW and drive across town looking where the girls are, girls are all over the alphabet place and millions of girls would have gotten into the BMW even with a creep like Elliot; (2) why Elliot and suicidally, murderously angry people like him are driven to kill innocent people, why they don’t just shoot themselves and be done with it; (3) whether Elliot was, objectively, a creep: some people just creep you out; and (4) why these creeps are always male. This is Sunday, so there needs to be something r...

Here’s the trend then, eh? a military coup d'etat. Rogue general rises up in Libya and other general officers join him to lay some sort of stability and stomp out radical Islamists while the Obama administration falls all over itself minding everybody else's business and protesting a coup. What? Send them drones. Also to Egypt. And now in Thailand, a military coup in the midst of chaos, to set the country on the right path. More protests from Washington. Maybe that’s what we need, eh? a military coup. At the end of World War II, Douglas MacArthur and Ike Eisenhower, our two superheroes from the war, were touted for president. My mother was horrified at the idea of a general becoming president: he would establish a military dictatorship. Douglas was an arrogant essohbee but Ike made us proud. At least, I was proud. When I was at Navy OCS the summer of 1957, Ike came to Newport and we all paraded out to greet him. He stood up in an open Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertible, lifted ...

It isn’t hot chocolate but a k-cup of cocoa run over ice in my Panama City Beach Pirates mug, a splash of milk to top it up this lateness just before midnight. As easily, I could have poured milk with Hershey’s syrup and ice cubes. My first taste of chocolate milk on ice was at Walgreen’s on Harrison Avenue downtown Panama City. It would have been fall, winter, spring 1949-1950. A freshman at Bay High, I was walking home from school with Tommy Fidler, who went to Cove School in our class. Easy to remember the time, because Tommy only went to Bay High that one year, then off to the Bolles School in Jacksonville, a military academy. Always spit and polish, he was suited for that, I suppose, I was not. After Bolles, Tommy went to the Citadel where his freshman year roommate was Charles Duvall, who thirty-five years later was my Episcopal bishop. It’s my blog, I can go where the trail takes me, but we stopped in Walgreen’s that day for a coke. Tommy said he was going to order chocolate m...

Whine Reading about English scientist Peter Higgs this morning, attracted by The Guardian article, “Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists,” then caught by a link to an earlier one, “I have this kind of underlying incompetence,” which Higgs said in an interview last December.  Under my pointy dunce cap, perched on my stool facing the corner as Doubting Thomas, Jr., I have this sense that matter has already been, was indeed, created from light (Genesis 1:3f) without a collider and that, sure enough, “greater works than these you will do” (John 14:12), not to mention heart surgery and weather satellites. But what grabbed me was “I have this kind of underlying incompetence,” which with no false modesty is who I see shaving mornings. Best shave in the shower, by feel, not facing that reverse creature staring back at me, knowing me almost as well as I know myself. Plus, in the shower, you can sing. Mario Lanza recidivus. A mild digression fr...