No Name

Davis Point in background, Gardno 656x79 arriving yesterday to load wood pellets for Tyne. Polsteam is a Polish shipping line, good photos of their ships online. Stirs in my feeble mind being told about a dentifrice company that put on the market a tube product that said "Polish Toothpaste," meaning shiny but read as Eastern Europe national toothpaste and nobody would buy it. As the Bulgarian buttermilk I love but seldom buy because of the calories and fat, the reason it's so delicious is that they are not encumbered by all the American sanitary regulations.

Well, okay, nevermind then.

Semiannual visit to my GP this morning: perfect labs. Cutting the coreg in half again because so many days it pushes BP and pulse down to like 85/47 pulse 31 and recreates me as a zombie instead of a human being such that my day is spent napping instead of whatever is on the calendar.

Breakfast: chik-fil-A biscuit and black coffee after the doctor's visit. If the long line of cars outside the new Chik-Fil-A at 23rd and MLK turns you off, then park and go inside, we've not found it crowded, just good old fastfood.

For some reason, Camp Weed days on my mind this morning, Barnum and Charlie and Van and George and Harry and Bert and Hunley and my cousin Bob and Philip and Peter and my best friend Jack. In those days of the late 40s and early 50s, except for StMary's Jacksonville with Father Frank Dearing, who had been our rector in the late 30s and early 40s, we were strictly a low-church diocese under Bishop Frank Juhan. Priests were "Mister," never "Father." But we campers heard scandalous stories of the Diocese of South Florida where Bishop Henry Louttit wore a cope and mitre and where all the priests were called "Father," and we took up the practice, never in the bishop's presence, of calling our summer camp priests "Father" and their First Name. Thus Van Davis, a work-force teenager (which indicated he was already taken under the bishop's oversight and destined for seminary) then college, then Sewanee seminarian then deacon, became priest and our own Father Van. So, an early assignment was as curate at Christ Church, Pensacola under the wise, revered and sometimes feared long-term rector Dr. Henry Bell Hodgkins (1936-1966). In that time, teens of their youth group, most of whom had known and adored him summers at Camp Weed, took to calling Van "Father Van" or "Father Davis." My story in mind this morning that came back to me from my almost lifelong summer friend Jack Dennis of Christ Church Pensacola, and by Van himself during my visit to him decades later, was of a member of the Youth Group (named the YPSL in those days) looking for Van one evening as their YPSL meeting was about to start, opening the door where vestry was meeting and asking, "Is Father Davis in here?" Whereupon Dr. Hodgkins responded, "Mr. Davis is no father, and he can prove it." The story made the rounds of the diocese for several seasons. He, the Rev. Lavan B. Davis, later rector of St. Christopher's Pensacola, was a perpetual bachelor until into the mid-1980s, when he married Ann Robinson.

Remembering that we had been together at Camp Weed, Van invited me to come from Apalachicola about 1985 or 1986 to give a Lenten program. I did, stayed overnight at his bachelor pad; without a priest assistant at the time, Van asked me to come be his assistant and upon his retirement be in position to succeed into his position as rector, St. Christopher's. Tempting yet even with a family history and many beloved relatives in Pensacola, I declined, reminding him that he would have nothing to say about selection of whoever priest became rector after him.

Extending, my final memory this morning is about Van's marriage, to show the busybodyness of parishioners in any church. Before Ann, Van had dated another woman, I don't remember her name, but my aunt EG (my father's sister Evalyn) had loved her dearly and wanted and expected Van to marry her. When he dated, proposed to and married Ann, EG was furious, not sad and disappointed but enraged, furious that he had married Ann instead of the woman whom she and other churchladies had selected for him. Which reminds me that about a year after we, Linda, Tass and I, arrived at Trinity, Apalachicola in 1984, one day I took Communion to a sick parishioner at his home. Leaving, I stopped in the kitchen to visit with his wife, who was preparing fried squirrel for their dinner. As we chatted, she told me that several single women at Trinity had expressed their sadness, wishing that I were single. Innocently I asked, "Oh! Who?" to which she coyly replied, "I'm not telling."

My intention had been maybe conclude this blogpost with a Bible verse, but instead I'll just warn single male clergy, beware, as folks are inclined to mind your business as well as their own!

T