As a schoolboy, summer was my favorite time of year. Always. And my topmost favorite long moment was the walk home from the last day of school until September. Exhilaration. Time. Freedom. One with William, for the lucky enough to have known, or been, Richmal Crompton’s boy William.  But this predawn’s 77F 93% would not have bothered me in those days before air conditioning with the attic fan droningly pulling damp outside air into the open window and across my bed.  Coming upon the news, some who Text & Drive will be among the righteous indignant outraged that a gorilla was killed to rescue a four year old boy. Same mentality of decades-unborn second-guessers who beat the breast about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that saved a generation of 18 and 19 year old Americans from Operation Downfall in Pearl Harbor's karma. My loving patience with the righteous indignant is nonexistent. Lingering Memorial Day afterbitter? OK. I remember, as they cannot. http://www.upa.pdx....

Memorial Day here at my Bay window where binocular shows many boats at Shell Island, more heading across. I’m all chair & view over salt, surf, sun & sand. Tomorrow, final Bible Seminar, something new come September, life brings change and surprise, doesn’t it, and at the concert yesterday Captain Jack reminded me I can be whatever I want to. Truth, I can look around at life and confirm: four-score years that has been so. Same for most anyone: be what you will. Election year, at long last Ordinary Americans protest the in-crowd. If Ordinary Americans were serious, instead of just shouting Bernie and The Donald they would be voting out of office the McConnells and Reids and every other son of a leach whose sole interest is making a political career on our taxes and padding their retirement on the income of our great-greatgrandchildren. I still like my constitutional amendment: one term, we shake your hand and gift you a one-way bus ticket home. Two terms, you walk u...

Thou shalt do no murder Hercule Poirot dead of heart failure, I can hardly believe it. The walk. Mustache. The astonishing mental precision. Finally, the twisting, weaving of morals and ethics to deal with legal impossibilities, while clinging to the rosary.  Having been there, the implausibility was Poirot with his angina lifting the villain’s sleeping body from chair to wheelchair and wheelchair to bed. But I learned that I do like television after all. English mysteries. Miss Marple. Father Brown. Poirot. And there’s another priest isn’t there, an English vicar. But with Poirot's death, humanity’s loss of such fiery synapses; see, they all stop in Time, a light turned off, a candle snuffed.  As for the Sixth Commandment, how deontological shall we be with Hercule standing in for Yhwh? Or may we rule in partnership with ? We should judge, eh, in our age in which rules of warfare, death and killing have so changed. Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our he...

ἀγαπή to φιλέω: finally ὁράω the difference What to say when so stunned you don’t know what to say, if anything. Or whether perhaps good, better, best keep your mouth shut lest you showcase the fool yet one more time again. One name, how many blanks are on the board for the Weller Scholar award that was inaugurated last night at the Holy Nativity Episcopal School middle school graduation? Congratulations, Ivy! and will they really continue it, and that long? How long does an honor last, how long does honor itself last? How long does ἀγαπή last? What if and when they discover and realize others were first and before and far more to be honored? Because there were, and are, and I can name them. Even refusing to start a paragraph with “I” I cannot believe this happened, ἀγαπή you loved me, us, by surprise. ἀγαπή - - no, more than ἀγαπή — even φιλέω: we got affectioned, cherished last night. That’s all I can say.  Sometime this morning I’m going out and tell Bill abo...

An interesting story, all three versions of which (Luke 7, Matthew 8, John 4) the ill one is in Capernaum and Jesus heals him from afar at the request of an anxious Gentile who believes in Jesus. Each evangelist tells differently. In Luke the patient is a slave who is ill and dying and the centurion sends Jewish elders to Jesus. Matthew has a servant (different Greek word) who is paralyzed and the centurion himself comes to Jesus. In John a royal official (we aren’t told his rank) whose son is dying comes to Jesus in Cana, a distance away. Some scholars have Luke and Matthew using Sayings Gospel Q as source, John the Signs Gospel (both hypothetical documents) and this is the Second Sign; or maybe Luke condensing Matthew. Maybe we’ll look at it in Sunday School. For sure, we won’t be talking about the presidential election. Gospel for Sunday, May 29, 2016 Luke 7:1-10 1 After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. 2A centurio...

quick'n the dead My stash may last, we’ll see. Chocolate. Dark chocolate. For years I’d thought it was just the black coffee, but chocolate added quickens me quicker than coffee alone, quickening that I can sense happening. One. One square, morsel, triangle, truffle. With coffee as companion, melting on the tongue and melding with the brain such that world clarifies, Bay comes into view and life into focus. Happening at this moment, even as dancing fingers prance shamefully. But the stash: couple chocolate bars hoarded on pantry shelf. Half tin TJ wedges. One unopened tin Tabasco triangles. Jar choc-covered espresso beans. Bit at each of my three chairs here in 7H: Bay, Beck, bed. Christmas supply being carefully rationed out serving by daily serving, no waste, to last until 14Sep16 for a scrooge too miserly to buy his own chocolate, counting on the gift-day charity of loved ones. As for the world into which JavaCacao have quickened Bubba: a fine age to be 80 instead o...

It’s the clouds, I think, that make it, the sky, sunset, sunrise, whatever goes on between. And reverse, the day and today’s thought from Bob Dylan, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” That’s where I am, in retirement a success at last, doing what I DWP. That’s where it matters though, as we find out soon enough. Inevitable regrets, but  important not to be ashamed when we get here.  It’s the moon too. Waning and a rising - - Barbara Crafton’s piece this morning, a re-run from 2009, calls goodbyes to mind. Some vivid, some a stretch to remember, some tender. Some with tears stretching into the years, some requiring a long morning alone in a riverside park composing to face the rest of life and wondering whether that’s going to be possible.  Boat speeds by on a Bay so flat the boat had to have been on wheels. Or hovering, leaving not even the mark of wake.  7H ...

Morning photo that excites nobody but me, including a seagull flew by just as I snapped it, missed the bird and hand movement gave a bit of fuzzy. So’s the mind this late-rising Tuesday with our next-to-final Bible Seminar. This term we finished Luke and Revelation, today in fuzzy mind, two obscure books, we’ll see how’t goes, eh? Waker-upper this morning was a somewhat scientific article that makes me think I should have been daily eating yogurt these years, to have been a nice person instead of this grouchy old crab sticking my head up out of a garbage can now and then. NFL withdraws their $16 million contribution to NIH lest a physician on a study conclude there’s a link between football and brain injury; nothing like integrity. SCOTUS getting along better with eight justices than nine. One minute vigorous workout in the gym downstairs equals my Mon/Fri walk? Hmmm. Major presidential candidate knows the American mentality is keener on somebody else’s scandal than on ...

Nine o’clock last evening, rounds the hairpin turn a small ship enroute to Port Panama City under the light of a full moon ascending over downtown, my green channel marker light over to the far right.  Couple minutes later she passed our porch with confident speed, no tug waiting. Monday: park behind the Beloved School and walk in the Cove, seems a perfect morning for it, back home for shower and breakfast before staff meeting. Yesterday was a near-perfect Trinity Sunday, I think there were active acolytes behind me in church at the ten-thirty service, but never bothersome unless one is swinging a cincture rope behind me during the Eucharistic Prayer. “Perfect” was only “near” though because leaving a home Communion site later, I spotted my keys on the seat inside my locked car and so walked home to get the extra keys; lesson learned that I’ll have to sort out as the dark chocolate and black coffee take effect. Thoughts running through the mind this morning, not go...

Mars and the Moon from 7H The United Methodist Church had their quadrennial churchwide conference, just concluded, facing among other things the sexuality issues that other denominations deal with. They have the same difficulties as other folks in coming to agreed decisions, referring the same-sex issue to committee for further study, in lieu of determinative votes that would have led to schism; so, pushing the matter down the road. Despising the rages of entrenched certainty that other churches, including ours, have experienced, and the breakups, I sort of admire the Methodists for what they did this time. It isn’t that they’ve agreed to disagree and remain together, they’ve backed off for the moment.  The Episcopal Church has dealt with the issue and predictably split for it. That was not pleasant for a Christian body, especially in that the two sides seem generally, with exceptions, to have ended up with ongoing enmity, hostility, mistrust. Unfortunate and sad. Thi...

In the late 1970s early 1980s when I was traveling and away from home 75 to 80 percent of the time, driving a lot but also an enormous amount of flying here and there, I liked having reading material with me, and two favorite carry alongs were The Atlantic magazine and The New Yorker . New Yorker was usually available free in the magazine rack in the front of the airliner cabin, and though I had favorite contributors, buying it every week could get pricey. Atlantic I had no choice but to buy, and in the late seventies and early eighties was upset if missed a James Fallows article, this morning I don’t remember why, it has been that long ago.  Because of that history enjoying The Atlantic , recently -- some months ago -- I came upon and subscribed to a free online daily The Atlantic: THE EDGE, “A daily roundup of ideas and events in American politics.” In The Edge  I find interesting stuff.  Yesterday, reading at my Bay window on a rainy afternoon while waitin...

Little could be more exciting than wake up as the leading edge of a “severe t-storm” rages across StAndrewsBay and through town. My only surpassing such was at HighHeaven, 15th floor, I looked it up: Tuesday, October 14, 2014, storm seemingly as violent as standing inside a tornado. HighHeaven sold us on 7H, and here we are.  In his program years ago 25? a lawyer in our Rotary Club at Apalachicola briefed us on the progressively tyrannical administrative federalism enslaving Americans. No political radical, I’d never thought of it until that moment, but have never stopped noticing it since. No p.c. radical either, neither way, left nor right, I nevertheless notice and increasingly hate (yep) the vigorous little dictatorships in Washington going after the Redskins, use of restrooms in public schools, lying Justice Department lawyers; and incomprehensibly extreme stupidity during the Bush era, tour guides in some national parks forbidden to discuss the geologic age of park featu...

potpourri of the incongruous Another plane missing. Overwhelming sadness, a devastating age in which to live out life that seemed so good becomes hatred and indiscriminate senselessness. Kyrie eleison, but of course Kyrie does not eleison. Or maybe Kyrie is eleisoning and we don’t get it: Obadiah Redivivus and we are not mom’s pet as we imagined but the hairy red beast. How to resume a dream and capture the escapee this time round? Wednesday evening at my church is the event of the week, overrun with eager children and young parents; the Episcopal Church should live so long, but it has. Try free cheeseburgers, all you can eat. Try agápē.  Love that centers on how you treat others. In the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade that follows, experience is no longer reality but history. If experience is in the mind, and a dream is in the mind, does predicate nominative make a dream reality, is the question. Closing hymn last evening: Heal me,...