Proper 18     The Sunday closest to September 7 Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,, one God, now and for ever. Amen. A memory of our Harrisburg years is the time we hosted the Reverend Canon Bryan Green on a preaching mission (our term in Anglicanism is “preaching mission” instead of “revival”). The year was 1980, which as usual I remember because of the car I was driving, and during that week old Navy friends Gary and Jeri Hahn, who had been our neighbors in Japan in the early 1960s, stopped to see us in Harrisburg. I had been retired from the Navy a little over two years, and Gary also was retired.  My recollection, which may be lacking, is that over his three or four day visit, Bryan Green preached first at St. Stephen’...

Even if she holds your finger while she drifts off to nap, never bond with someone else’s baby, else they move on and break your heart.  Bad enough bonding with my own four, who to my dismay all grew up and away. Early 1960 before Malinda was two years old, the Navy transferred us from my first ship, a destroyer in Norfolk, Virginia, to Naval Station, Mayport, Florida. One evening, we had Tom and Ann Byrne over for supper. Fr. Tom had been our rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Panama City during our years at Cove School and Bay High, and they were living in Jacksonville now. Seems to me Father Tom was either on the diocesan staff or at St. Mark’s. Holding Malinda and totally smitten, I’d said, “She’ll never leave her daddy.” Father Tom says, “Oh yes she will, let me disabuse you of that notion right now! Your job as her father is to make sure she does exactly that.” He was right, and besides my own I’ve bonded with other people’s a couple of times, not a good idea, an...

Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (RSV) The voice of my beloved!     Behold, he comes, leaping upon the mountains,     bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle,     or a young stag. Behold, there he stands     behind our wall, gazing in at the windows,     looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one,     and come away; for lo, the winter is past,     the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth,     the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove     is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs,     and the vines are in blossom;     they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one,     and come away. +++   +++   +++ This is our First Reading for tomorrow, we’ve finished our summer’s stories of David, ending with Solomon, and now just...

Gggg find a nice l.c. gamma golf gee and get going with the morning. Actually, it's nice sitting here eyes closed while fingers tap. Forgot to pick up glasses before sitting down to Kona and chocolate, but it's nice: TGIF begins with mug and square. Early predawn dark in the city park below and to my left. Guarding against erosion, a boardwalk stretches over the bank and down to the Bay shoreline, where two or three decks allow visitors to stop and enjoy. Sometimes picnic or a wedding. When I went out at 3:55 while coffee perkled, a child was squealing delightedly on the middle deck, perhaps at the Bay with its sparkling emeralds and rubies, or the moon in the western sky teased by clouds and streaming its beam across the Bay. I've been on that deck in one of Panama City's many wonderful parks, and my seventh floor outlook is even better. Good, better, even best. Friday. Walk. Return home for breakfast and shower. Meeting. L. M. Wait for Joe. Kristen....

On my porch this Thursday morning late in August, the sky is clear, the Bay is flat, a small tug is crossing toward the west. A light breeze is, thankfully, pretty much lifting away the cigarette smoke that’s coming up from the porch two or three stories below me. I’m not complaining. Yes I am, but with 72F and 66% the morning is too delightful other than to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. And don’t mess with Mr. In-Between. How old does that make me? Someone is fishing below, casting out some few yards. If not a regular, he’s no stranger, though we’ve never seen him catch anything.  Tomorrow is on the calendar for a festive day. Joe arriving from NC for the week. Tass & family from Tallahassee for the weekend. Kristen home from Atlanta. Remember the cliche, a child is a person who travels through your life on the way to becoming an adult. We are  no more kittens or puppies than our dogs and cats, but humans hold on longe...

Belshazzar Redivivus Remembering the Cold War and those years of the “Red Menace” and the nuclear arms race with its insane foreign policy of Mutually Assured Destruction and HUAC and the witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy and Marx and Lenin and Stalin and our obsessive fear of communism and Red China, it is beyond incredible that we have come to the point that economies of the world are shaken by machinations of China’s currency and the Chinese stock market. Throughout history every empire has had its rise and fall, including Egyptian and Assyrian and Babylonian and Persian and Roman and Holy Roman and Ottoman and Japanese and British and the ludicrous but incomprehensibly evil Thousand Year Reich and the Soviet Union, and I’m wondering who realizes what we’re living into the beginning of.  Fools will puff up and cry “treason” but history speaks for itself when more Buick automobiles are built and sold in China than in the land of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Che...

We’ll see: this is supposed to be Tyndall morning, to the barbershop. Maybe new black socks at the BX, and there was a time when I'd browse their electronics section but seems to me they’ve dropped Apple Mac products, maybe because, like me, browsers are not shoppers. There’s a little “food mall” with three or four vendors, one sells Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, they'll stack on all the sliced tomato you want, and with an AAFES credit card 10% off. It’s the only time I drink Coca-Cola, they hand you a cup, you add ice and fill it with coke, and half the sandwich comes home with me because even though it’s only a medium I can’t eat it. Why I don't order small IDK, maybe I think I'm still twenty-something. Naanh. The Commissary to check out their meat: I usually buy a package or two of buffler except they call it cubed bison low-fat: a pack of two patties makes lunch for the two of us two times, medium slightly pink, half a patty each, so lean it's a little tough...

With my three favorite teams going into the season unranked, I’m not investing my heart in college football. If the bad news was Ohio State as unanimous #1, the good news is that nobody stays on top for ever, and that there’s nowhere for them to go but down, and that the A.P. noted “four teams since 2007 received nearly all the first-place votes in the preseason poll — and that none of these teams ended that season in the top spot.” Resurrection: if Easter comes this fall, I’m counting on Harbaugh for the empty tomb. Further south, I’m sick of crow, wouldn’t it be nice if McElwain and Spurrier gave us a Happy Thanksgiving weekend. To wake up for this morning’s walk: Kona and one square of dark chocolate. Got to leave for Cove School in an hour, I can’t believe it’ll be light by then. That’s it for today, and I’m all TGIM. W

Seldom do I open email or news before loosing the magic fingers to start their mad dance of nonsense -- but sometimes there's an eerie feeling that something happened on the other side of this big world as I slept. Nome sane? I didn't have that feeling this all too early a morning even for a Sunday, but I opened News anyway and sure enough, nothing had happened. Or if it had I didn't see it, because the headline was still yesterday's news about the Americans who helped stop a terrorist on the train in France, which I read yesterday. And anyway I only scrolled down as far as the headline from HuffPost about Sagittarius 5, the ginormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.  It has been so long since I was current on the latest news about the cosmos that I didn't know about the black hole. I didn't know about the word “ginormous” either and find it suspect, just as others may be suspicious of my word “certitudinous”. I suspect “ginormous” may be ...

Good’n Ugly At noon today, Malinda and Kristen are coming over for Saturday dinner with us, and we are having shrimp grits. Grits are a native species here, as are the shrimp from local Bay and Gulf waters. For the shrimp, we went to Tarpon Dock fish market, where for the first time in a display case I saw lionfish, an ugly, ugly sea creature. We bought one lionfish. The young man behind the counter filleted it and Linda cooked it for our supper last night, stovetop in a pan with a little olive oil, a pat of butter, and a touch of Old Bay seasoning. Delicious. Firm, white meat. They’re selling lionfish cheap compared to other seafood. We have wild Pacific salmon about once a week, and the lionfish are so tasty we’ll add them to our menu. Ugly was what originally turned Mayflower pilgrims off to lobster, and here’s a chance to eat something good and ugly while it’s cheap.   http://myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/nonnatives/marine-species/lionfish/ Five-thirty in the morning, n...

Don't even bother reading this morning. Instead of sitting here [[actually lying propped up and stretched out on the bed in the Bay bedroom with my square of dark chocolate and mug of Kona on the tray beside me]] letting the magic fingers type at will, it's about what I did between 2:57 and now (it's 4:11).  This coming Sunday is not only our last reading from Jesus' Bread of Life Discourse (John chapter 6) but also the last for our seasonal reading through Ephesians. It's the famous and appealing conclusion of the treatise: Ephesians 6:10-20 (NRSV)  The Whole Armor of God 10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 1...

Pardon My Interruptions “General aboard.” “Good morning. Be easy, men. How’s everybody doing?” Pair of egrets flying low, the after one squawking like his mama might get away. “Care for coffee, General?” There goes an osprey clutching a fish. Early morning scene and lines in the television movie The Day After as the general arrives and is briefed by a major while the plane lifts off for the day. Turns out to have been the first day of the rest of their lives.  Jason Robards is the surgeon. Setting is a small town in Kansas, which when all is said and done is really what American is all about. Missile silo out in the near pasture. One large Navy craft heading out for another busy day at sea.   The movie was shown in 1983 when we seriously were arrogant enough to believe we were that important, opposing governments and political and economic systems, actually to destroy all humanity and “this fragile earth, our island home” as a habitable place. Everything was...

Never having been to the Holy Land, I am as ignorant about this as I am about everything else, and would do better if I'd been there and had memories and mental images of what’s there so it could come alive for me. But not so. With help from the internet, I’m visualizing.  In our Bible story this Sunday, Solomon finishes building his temple as the house of God to hold the ark of the covenant. Long lost in time, it was a chest that, by tradition, held the tablets of the law that Moses brought down from the mountain, and that was God’s dwelling place. From pictures and other stories,  I visualize the ark as a box with long handles on each end so men could carry it; and on top, two animal images, perhaps bovine, calves, or angels, or eagles, one on each end of the lid, facing each other; and between the images is the mercy seat for God to sit on. Ebenezer, maybe it goes back to "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebeneze...

Retirement is where Monday and Tuesday are the same as Saturday. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday too if that's what you want. It's even better than good old TGIF.  Like a comic strip character waking with a 'pop!', my dreams usually evaporate with the rising sun, but this morning's dream woke with me. In uniform, I was in the Navy, deciding to stay instead of retiring and going to seminary. Service dress blue bravo, blue uniform (it's actually black, don't know why it's called blue but it is, and it's pretty much the same uniform in all navies of the world) with three gold stripes on each sleeve, ribbons not medals, white dress shirt with plain straight collar, black tie, shiny black shoes, white cap cover. We used to have service dress blue alpha, which was the same except blue (black) cap cover. The uniform one wore was prescribed by the commandant of the naval district, and I started in Newport, Rhode Island, where the commandant of the First N...

schwarze Dark chocolate lasts long because I allow myself one . One bit, one piece, one morsel, one truffle, one square. This morning one square . Einzig ein. Auf deutsch, mit dem kaffee, ist das recht? Oder richtig? Die wunderfullen schokolade my German professor liked to say.  Remember, es ist meiner blog, für mir. Does "for" have an umlaut? Does für make the pronoun dative? IDK anymore.  Makes no sense. I don't remember. It's been 2015 – 1955 = 60 years. Moving on, I cannot stand television it's no sort of intellectual snobbery, I just can't stand it. Nor the radio blaring. Maybe it's because of the tinnitus. Except for weather o­r something specific, tv bugs the alphabet aitch out of me. Yesterday afternoon after arriving home from what seemed to me our best ever Backpack Sunday & Rally Day,  the tv was on, so I opened the MacBook, stuffed in my earbuds, clicked YouTube and watched a segment of Das Boot -- which I first ...

At three-oh-four Sunday morning, I’m wondering if the worst of the miserable hot summer is over and heading toward cooler cider season, because for the past few days, sliding open the porch door at this hour I’m not slammed in the face with a blast of air too close, hot and steamy for breathing. Over the Gulf, the southern summer night sky is intermittently lightning, but no thunder wafts through. A nice day would be bless our wonderful Sunday at hand, our best of the year with young families and dozens of children piling their school backpacks around the Altar to be blessed for Tuesday’s schoolday and the year ahead. Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day.  Sometimes that rhyme charm works, it’s worth a try, sorry if your reservoir is going dry. One of these days I’m going to ask my favorite weather lady why typhoons seem to be coming off the coast of California this season instead of hurricanes off the coast of Africa. Has anyone besides me noticed that? If so, d...