changes

Other than ships passing, the only thing that changes here is, and not much is lovelier than, our weather, at the moment all of it offshore stretching from Mobile to Port St. Joe and moving east. The lightning brought me outside, but water on the railing says it rained not lightly at some time tonight. And the Bay, more often totally quiet, lapping noisily ashore seven floors below. Thunder rumbling far off. Is the best part of life what you see or what you hear? It's what you feel: a deliciously cool breeze here, but some sailor is getting scary weather out there this morning. I know the feeling.

What appalls? That everybody likes a populist who has the bull in a china shop bluster to wave and shout what people think regardless, and won't take it back. Until our invasion of Iraq, I'd noticed that it made no difference who or which party was president; except for that wart it's all bureaucracy out of control and will be so until the Day of the Lord. How have we done this to ourselves, and where to run to get away from it, some remote and inaccessible island or pastoral scene. Comes to mind C. S. Lewis, haunting me with dots of light in the firmament, distant and receding, dark, angry souls lonely and alone. And we'd thought they were stars.

Crossroad. A fork. Twenty-five years ago, August 1990 I dropped my happy girl at her college in Virginia and drove on "up home" to Pennsylvania whence we had come and where we'd left a chunk of our hearts. With a picnic lunch, next morning I drove up the road on the east side of the Susquehanna River and spent the day in a park north of Harrisburg, watching a groundhog the size of a small dog watch me watching him watch me, gazing across the river, wondering what had happened and how I could get it back and knowing it was gone forever. And not only in the rectory, it was a time of change in the church I led, I spent time that day contemplating the future, theirs and mine and preached about it the following Sunday. Change comes round like the theological cycle in the Book of Judges. Sometimes I wonder if anyone's read it besides me. It's all there if you look for it.

Gave my elderly white Buick to my grandson and now the itch returns, browsing Cramer's online used car lot. Thought at this age I'd be in a red convertible, but the last time that happened was summer 1955 or 1956 when my next door neighbor Bill Guy went to St. Paul to visit Aunt Maggie and left his 1949 Ford

 in the garage with the top down, for me to drive. 

Changes: my third girl is grown and gone.

I've lost my feeling of permanence. A shot, a pill, a spoonful of elixir or a wave of the wand, doesn't anyone have an antidote for this passage of time?

W