moon & jupiter
Though it's helpful, distracting and focusing mental exercise, probably not the best use of Time is the 16 to 32 minutes, mean and mode 20 minutes, spent solving a two-suite spider solitaire game online. Or Easthaven Solitaire. I might do Churchill Solitaire, but I'm not about to pay to play.
As to investment or expense, that Time might be profitably invested finishing another chapter or two of one of the four novels or two World War One diaries I have open and with bookmarks or dogeared pages. Or reading a paper from Academia website about the General Councils and development of Nicene orthodoxy, a favorite topic for causing myself to be appalled and bringing on dismay. It always surfaces Steve Job's graduation speech about living one's own life and following one's own mind vs being trapped in dogma that is the result of other people's thinking.
Yesterday's family gathering to honor my birthday was perfect, the laughter and happy noise that filled 7H. Most beloveds of my life. Everything that goes on stirs the brain to wander: yesterday mine wandered into the joy I feel when the sounds of children are bouncing off the walls of the church sanctuary throughout worship, vs the solemn liturgical worship I grew up thinking was proper - - unless we were singing good old hymns at East Hill Baptist Church, Pensacola, and everything about those days and years with our Gentry grandparents and their happy household that I knew at 1317 E Strong Street.
Saturday I enjoyed a biography of German hero Friedrich Schleiermacher, late 18th and early 19th century pastor, patriot and theologian who loved the hymn-singing worship of the Moravian Brethren far above and more from the heart than the liturgical worship of the Reformed and Lutheran official churches. Friedrich: they called him Fritz. He had an interesting life, intellectually, personally, socially. Fritz married his best friend's widow, who called him "Schleier," loved and raised her two toddlers as his own, had more children with her, and they adopted two more children as well. Fritz acknowledged that the Nicene Creed asserts things about God that are beyond human knowing so why say them as if they were known true facts instead of the faith items they actually are. When Schleiermacher died, the king's carriage led his funeral procession in mourning.
Yesterday, more. Watched QE2's coffin driven by Mercedes hearse from Balmoral to the castle at Edinburgh. Googled and found that a coffin (a spooky out of use word in America, we prefer casket) is a six-sided body-shaped container; and remembered that, whereas people here in the South prefer the casket with two lids so only the waist-up is shown, back in Pennsylvania where I started officiating funerals, people preferred one-lid caskets.
Watched 7/11 exercises in WashDC and NYC, and remembered my own Time that day: bought a new, red Chevrolet Tahoe from Cramer's, only to arrive home with it to Linda running out of the house waving me in to see the horrifying news on television. Then drove out to Grace Church, PCB, where I was Interim Rector, to watch the rest of the morning's outrage on a tiny old black & white television set that we dug out of a closet and rigged up with tinfoil dangling from the rabbit-ears to get a fuzzy picture. Again, the mind wandering to a professor in my MBA program at Univ of Michigan who reminisced about hearing the news of Pearl Harbor on the radio, and thinking "How different it will all be tomorrow." Sure enough, how different from 9/12 and from a Time of contented Peace into twenty years of war that began (?) the nightmare of America's slide into wherever we are headed as a nation that my father and grandfather would not recognize. Kyrie: eleison.
3:10 a.m. snap of sky and clouds.
Feast yesterday: Maryland crab cakes, peas, a uniquely magical fruit salad that I'm still working on, lemon icebox pie, whipped extra heavy whipping cream, chicken enchilada from Cahall's, cake, glass of Zinfandel with a couple of salty dried okra from TJ's to munch on. Sound of charades with someone tasked to act out "onomatopoeia" - - it could only have been louder and happier if Uncle Joe had been here!!
RSF&PTL
T
top: why this horrifying image? because more than any other, it reignites my anger
alamo
uss maine
pearl harbor
9/11