no sails

For some reason, lots of things bothering me this morning, not simply ineffable but hiding, invisible, unseen even to the mind. So I’m trying to get them, get to them, ID them whatever, whoever, wherever they are and whatever they have in mind. Likely they are deeply personal and, as this is blog not diary, likely will remain so. In my waking dream I couldn’t find the keys to the Green Dodge, parked somewhere on a campus of parking lots distant, vast and hopeless as the anonymous narrator's bleak, endless boarded-up and largely deserted city in The Great Divorce.

Shrimp boats is a-comin'

Their sails are in sight

Shrimp boats is a-comin'

There's dancin' tonight

Why don't-cha hurry, hurry, hurry home

Look here! The shrimp boats is a-comin'

There's dancin' tonight

No longer wanting songs that take me back: Joan Stafford, 1951, were you there? I hate, fear, dread songs that disrespect my break for freedom, that punch through the hard shell of the blue firmament into my 2016. Eighty can be difficult not being fifteen.

To my south and beyond the flat Bay, clouds, some puffy, most puffy, but from here three anvils tapping the horizon of the Gulf of Mexico. Davis Point and round beyond it the stormy origin of my personal heilsgeschichte.

Tomorrow we have a Bible story, Naaman in the River Jordan washing clean of his leprosy. Would a quick dip in StAndrewsBay wash away my sin? Fact is, I do have a bottle of River Jordan water used only for baptisms, maybe a couple drops for shaving this morning will do it for me.

There are no sails on the horizon, these shrimp boats ply the deep channels of the Bay, return every dawn, pickup trucks waiting, and who knows whether there’s dancing …

DThos+

2 Kings 5:1-14

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman's wife. She said to her mistress, "If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy." So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, "Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.”

He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, "When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy." When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, "Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.”

But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, "Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel." So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha's house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean." But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, "I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?" He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean'?" So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.