Taster

Yesterday at, the time marker on the photo says, 6:01 a.m., Linda called my attention to a passing ship and I went out on 7H porch to snap it. The various larger ships are more interesting than the daily coming and going of smaller ships plying between here and Progreso. This was BBC Lines' vessel SE Nicky 590x98 arriving to offload general cargo, due to depart 12 June. The schedule no longer tells us ships' arriving and departing draft, and this entry doesn't say where the ship came from or where she's going next, although the first part of that I could find out from online sources just by a couple of clicks.

As I was adjusting the camera on my cellphone, the osprey swooped in close to me, a bit too close for comfort, as clearly he was deciding whether I was too big to carry back to the nest. I jerked my camera up to snap him, but as I moved, he instantly soared away and I didn't get him up close. But close he had been.

The ship is being assisted in forward movement by a tug pushing from astern. Not certain, but this only seems to happen with the larger ships that are fully loaded, and I'm thinking the tug helps both with the ship's movement and perhaps keeping the ship's larger and deeper propeller from unduly stirring the bottom of the channel, which I think is kept at about forty-tw0 feet depth.

My pictures are far from first class quality, but they preserve my flagging memory well enough for me to look back in later years if there are any!

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Reading several books. One about Galileo based on letters to him from his daughter Virginia, who in his honor took the name Sua Maria Celeste when she became a nun. That the communication is one-sided reminds me of the letters of Paul where a lot has to be conjectured about what's going on. Evidently, the convent where she was cloistered destroyed Galileo's letters to her after her death, perhaps simply to honor privacy, perhaps because what he wrote about scientific matters that were counter to church doctrine could have been used against him by the Church that he loved. Religious institutions have certainly and most wickedly and inhumanely confused their adamantly defensive certainties with Faith throughout history. Needing a rationalization, people who have quit the church because of the Question of Theodicy, which actually is easily answered, might better have left because of its history of oppressive exercise of authority over the gullible.

Also reading another Fredrik Backman book. Backman wrote "A Man Called Ove", which I thoroughly loved, and "My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry," so "Anxious People" is his familiar idiosyncratic writing style for me. In no hurry, I'm reading and laying aside for some days, reading again and ... Yes, books are like friends whose visit you don't want to come to an end, but they are also like supper that's so delicious you don't want it to finish. I have those at any oyster bar. And right now, Linda is fixing "Mom's Usual Pot Roast" because Malinda and Kristen are coming over for noon dinner tomorrow: I'm the step by step Taster, which is my greatest talent in life. As a boy, son and oldest child, it's also what I was in our family, the Stirrer and Taster as Thanksgiving and Christmas drew near and Mama enlisted me to help with making various batches of candy for the holiday season. It's what I do best in life.

But, oh, my books, I wandered away.

"Hebrew Gospel of Matthew" by scholar George Howard. It's side by side Hebrew and English, and I've looked at some of the English translation; but before going on with that I'm reading Howard's comments in the back, Part Two: Analysis and Commentary. I don't think Howard is trying to convince me, but he's comprehensively laying out what he found in the Hebrew text and it's absolutely fascinating. I'm looking forward to his Summary and Conclusions; but so far, the ancientness of the text, what he calls Biblical Hebrew, seems very persuasive. Matthew is a name assigned to an anonymous writer who never tells us who he is, though as above with Paul and with Galileo's Daughter, we can conjecture with a great deal of confidence.

My ponderable problem is that Hebrew Matthew is coming out so thorough and original sounding, true to ancient Hebrew writing customs that do not appear in Greek Matthew lifted from Greek Mark, how to reconcile an original-seeming Hebrew gospel with scholars' source hypothesis that proves Matthew's major dependence on Mark. Maybe George Howard will address that, for me, conundrum, before he's finished.

See, this is the sort of thing that intrigues me in my retiring Time.

A new book that arrived and started yesterday, "Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl Gonzalez,

a native of Brooklyn, she writes a favorite blog "Brooklyn, Everywhere" that's free for Atlantic subscribers and that is as fierce and raw as her novel is turning out to be. Xochitl's love for Old Brooklyn as opposed to New Brooklyn keeps me wondering how my life might have turned out if I had said "Yes, I accept" when in late 1977 and I was in a job search interview, an institution in Brooklyn asked me, "Will you accept the position if we offer it to you today?" I was more than highly qualified, but I was leery of the idea of living in Brooklyn. Xochitl's love of Brooklyn makes me wonder if I made a big mistake? It might have included my going to General Seminary instead of Virginia Episcopal and Gettysburg Lutheran. What then, and Where now? Robert Frost's "Road Not Traveled" again.

Reading continues to include Atlantic and THE NEW YORKER and their contributing columnists, including Xochitl, who publish interesting blogs. As well as Smithsonian magazine. Quality writers, I couldn't possibly give a hoot less if you and the rest of the XNRT contemn them as leftist - -

my final and ongoing difficulty, the gut-wrenching News about the consummately selfish, seeringly evil Fact that my beloved country has become, is turning into . I cannot watch News on television, News in a nation of people who love their rights more than they love their neighbors' children. My sadness and shame, and, yes, anger and contempt, are so deep as to shake my sense of allegiance. What to do, where to go? It's a puzzlement.

RSF&PTL