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Recently some folks expressed disappointment with changes in my blog, that instead of regular and daily, I'm posting from time to time, now and then, and that I've taken to leaving posts up for just a day or so instead of permanent. I'm not having second thoughts, and living into and, hopefully, through the pandemic is putting me in a different frame of mind than whatever old normal was, and I like it this way, the changes, evolution of sorts into something new, different. As if I'm getting off at a different bus stop anymore and walking a different path to wherever I'm going instead of whatever.
Nothing feels the same, and as a matter of fact, nothing is. They're even having heat waves in Seattle and Canada while I'm sitting outside on 7H porch thinking what a pleasant summer. Are things really different, or is it just you?
I keep getting Linked-In notices, why I don't know, I've never done Linked-In. Have no idea what Instagram is. I don't tweet on Twitter either. And I'm a member, but never or seldom scroll Facebook, though I did post on FB once a day the ten years and more when I was blogging +Time every morning. Sometimes, like now, writing is just right, other times though, and more, I'd rather sit here in one of my chairs, I have three, no four, no really five, okay what the hell six now that I count them, chairs that I sit in depending on, because I cannot stand to have just one place to sit and work or worry or fool around.
This 7H where I'm staying these days is an action spot and my favorite thing to do, and I have three different chairs for this, two inside and one outside, may be staring out across StAndrewsBay at The Pass, and on clear days over Shell "Island" (it won't be an island again until/unless they open up the Old Pass) into the Gulf of Mexico.
People are all the time asking me, in fact I was asked this morning, "Tom, are you okay?" It must be because I'm looking serious or absent? Well, hell no I'm not okay, I'm eighty-five alphabet years old, almost eighty-six, how would you like to be eighty-something? I'm quite different to me from whoever that was when I was seventy-five. Not just in the mirror either. Something on the inside, and I keep trying to make sure it's just strange and doesn't go off crotchety, because I can't stand a grouch. Someone, well, it was Sam Hardman, who was Bishop Duvall's archdeacon and Canon to the Ordinary thirty and forty years ago, once said there are two priests in the diocese whom he doesn't understand, Jack Wilhite and Tom Weller, and I'm good with that. I didn't understand Jack either, and I'm not so sure about me, and I rather like it that way.
Jack was the rector at Grace Church PCB two or three priests before I was Interim Rector there. He never wore socks, just shoes, and he was an avid sailor. Once or twice during my tenure at Trinity, Apalachicola, he and friends anchored their sailboats in the Apalachicola River and came to my church on Sunday morning. No socks, but I'm good with that, I don't always wear socks myself. Once just his friends came and when I asked about Jack they said He's asleep on his boat, he said why should he do a busman's holiday.
Where I was going with this before straying off into the briar patch is that I've gone back and converted the last week or so of +Time blogposts from Draft to Published. Once I get settled down into this New Normal, whatever it turns out to be, I'll leave my +Time blogposts up a couple weeks or a month before taking them down. At least, I think I may do that, though everything keeps changing, including my mind.
Anyway and whatever, I don't write my blogposts to offend people, and some of them were doing that, so if something I write offends you, take comfort: it won't be up for long.
I'll make this commitment: to keep the promise I made to a dear friend about six years ago, to post my sermons on +Time, and I'll leave them up on my Facebook page and Holy Nativity's Facebook page at least for a while.
It's still the Fourth of July. We're going out to eat and celebrate in about an hour. Mostly eat. No wine, but maybe a beer or two. It's just a short distance, and when I was that seventy-five that I was talking about, I'd walk. Nowadays though, I could walk there, but the CHF wouldn't let me walk back postprandially, so we'll drive. Besides that, I'm in bed at eight o'clock, sometimes nine but usually not that late.
What changes people? Fear for a child's life. Losing a child would take me to the brink, and probably over the cliff. Chasing an ambulance through the black of night and into wee morning hours. Seeing your hometown after a category 5 hurricane has swept through. Losing part of a child to a stroke. A lightning strike. Living into and through a deadly pandemic. Knowing that someone near or far, stranger or dear, is hurting terribly yet I'm powerless to help. Realizing decades later that it was true: a child is a person who moves through your life on their way to Becoming.
Today I think I'll blog something tomorrow, but I know that tomorrow I won't.
What would I choose to be if I could? An old man sitting in a chair looking out across StAndrewsBay and remembering Life and Himself when he was Real.
The pictures are of me when I was Real. The top one is of, left to right, my grandfather Pop, A D Weller, my father T C Weller, me age 25 holding infant Joe, and Malinda standing in front, at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida the day Joe was baptized, November or December 1960 or maybe Spring 1961.
This picture is of me standing by a tree in our back yard when I was 26 or 27, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1962 or 1963.
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