five below
Yes, I'm too early up, but it's a day of life to live, love, anticipate, and enjoy - - Robert Frost is right "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep"
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Life has its memorable historic moments, Where were you when you found out President Roosevelt was dead? Where were you when you heard the neighbor shout, "The Japs Have Surrendered!!"? Where were you when you found out President Kennedy had been shot? Where were you on 9/11? Remember watching on television, Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler pathetically shuffling slowly toward the stage, then, on coming into view of the audience, straightening up and walking briskly toward his podium?
There are powerful personal images as well. Some I've shared here, always to prod their own memories for whoever might be reading this. Brilliant white light over me, strangers in white surrounding the table I was lying on and looking down at me, two years old, for tonsillectomy. A morning I stood in the back door beside Mama as we watched my father and Old Dave carry Patsy, our German shepherd, up to the back yard to bury her after she was found poisoned, was I maybe three years old, or four? I remember asking, "What's wrong with her?" Mama said, "She's dead." I asked, "When will she be alive again?" Mama said, "Never," and in that moment I learned something about life.
Standing at the sink in the same kitchen and being asked, "Did you know your grandmother died today?" the jolt, the sob, the sudden huge lump in my throat and chest that lasted for months.
Sitting in the Fathers' Waiting Room as the doctor said, "You have a son."
Listening to Pop, my grandfather Weller, tell me about the year he lived with his brother Heber and family in Wisconsin, the Sunday afternoon he hitched a one-horse sleigh, drove over the snow to the home of a girl he was in love with, Pop must have been sixteen or seventeen, and, while they were out together, stopping the sleigh and leaning over and kissing her. Pop told me, "It was the first time I kissed a girl!"
Sitting here typing just now, dozens of images and sounds, sometimes fragrances, start surfacing in my mind as I think "certain moments" that I could share.
Standing on the car floorboard behind my mother, watching my father walk toward our car from the ice plant where he worked (the car was our 1935 Chevrolet, I must have been three or four years old) and we left without him, so maybe Mama was taking him his dinner, IDK.
Watching a mountain of quail and dove simmer in bubbling thick dark brown gravy in the huge black cast iron skillet on the flaming burner of my grandmother Gentry's old fashioned gas stove top, and, OMG, the aroma. Yes, the stove was identical to this, cream with green trim, oven on the right side
Mom, my grandmother Weller, also had such a stove, but Mom's was kerosene fired, not gas.
Autumn 1958 walking wobbly dizzy down the pier and back toward my car at the end of my first day at sea on a Navy destroyer. I hadn't been seasick, because my Chief brought me saltine crackers to munch on. It was a sea-trial day, the ship was just finishing shipyard overhaul and there were heavy cables everywhere: carefully stepping ON instead of OVER a heavy cable, remembering the advice of an old chief who one day told our OCS class, "Always step On a cable, never Over a cable: if the cable suddenly jerks tight, it's better to be thrown thirty feet than to be cut in two."
As General Quarters rings ding ding ding ding ding and the voice says, "... all hands man your battle stations," running toward the crypto shack, up a ship's ladder into a closed hatch and sliding back down the ladder half-conscious and thankful I had my hat on. Climbing back up the ladder, spinning the hatch wheel, lifting the hatch, and going on, feeling like a fool but having just learned to look up when climbing a ship's ladder.
Some priests' hands trying to mash me into the floor as the bishop intones, "... and make him a priest in your church."
Life and its chief companion the human mind also hold on to a few moments too personal to share but always there, and one never knows in the moment that what is happening and what one sees and feels will always be there to happen again on call, even fifty years on, or seventy years - -
as Robert Frost's raspy voice that evening, listening as the poet reads his poems. I heard him several different Times, always some different poems from the last visit, but two or three that he knew he must always read, including "Stopping by Woods," and hearing him say "there's no death there" regardless of what analysts always like to insist on.
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Friday, December 23rd, 2022. Snowy winter morning minus five degrees Fahrenheit, that's Joe's red car parked at the garage door outside his window in Louisville as I write. Joe's flight is rescheduled for same time tomorrow, Saturday, Christmas Eve. At the moment the weather is -5°F in Louisville, yep minus five, five below.
Ray &c coming early Saturday to start prepping for roasting Sunday's feast, family declared they're taking over the cooking! Maybe Kristen will drive us to the airport to get Joe, she has a new car to show! With the revised schedule, today I plan to fix my oyster casserole, which I decided to shift to in place of the oyster dressing that nobody eats but me.
What's good news about the promised horrible weather? That it doesn't matter the freezer and refrigerator are so full, because we can use 7H porch as backup reefer.
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Christmas is coming! There are stories I recall and sometimes tell, maybe but never intentionally to burst bubbles, at this Time every year, either in Sunday school and/or here on +Time - - coming ready or not.
First a lesson I learned from a friend maybe what? ten years ago? IDK - - about the manger scene
There was no stable, nor does Luke say there was a stable; this was the Middle East two thousand years ago, no stables, the manger would have been on the ground floor of a house or inn, where the animals were brought at night for protection from wild animals and thieves. No separate stables.
And as for the inn, Luke says there was no room for them in the κατάλυμα. The kataluma was the upstairs chamber or guest room, for example, the upper room where Jesus hosted the Last Supper was the kataluma. So, it's a story of course, but to clarify, there was no stern innkeeper turning them away, there was a host, maybe the home of a relative or a resident of Bethlehem who was renting out safe sleeping space for visitors in town for the census; no room available in his kataluma, so he puts them up in the groundfloor space with the animals who are safely inside for the night, and when Jesus is born, Mary and Joseph (and maybe the host's wife, who knows?) seeing to the safety of the birthing mother, wrapping the baby up and laying him in the manger that held food for the animals.
So a kataluma is/was a guest room in a home; at an inn or hotel, such as in Jesus' parable about the Good Samaritan, he took the injured man not to a kataluma but to a πανδοχεῖον, pandokeion, a different word and meaning from kataluma.
The rest of my story may be more bubble-bursting, but that's not my intent. In those days, once a couple were betrothed, they were husband and wife; in fact (look it up) the gospels refer to Mary as Joseph's wife. Betrothed, they did not live together until the husband had prepared a house or other living space ready for himself and his wife, at which Time there would be the wedding celebration and the couple would go to their new home. While waiting for her husband to make ready their new dwelling, the wife stayed at home with her parents, and the husband was free and entitled to spend the night and sleep with her; and sometimes the wife was pregnant by the Time of the wedding.
Why do I tell this? I'm not writing a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation, so I'm not bothering with references, but there is history of life in the Middle East in Jesus' day and age.
The virgin birth is more important to some Christians than to others. For anyone who doubts the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth, there's a possible explanation for you in marriage customs of Jesus' day and age. Bear in mind, though, that it's a story. Bear in mind that Paul, who knew nothing about an empty tomb at Easter, also knew nothing about a virgin birth of Jesus. And in that Time, people would generally have had no problem accepting the idea of virgin birth. Here in the twenty-first century we tend to be more scientific minded; but there's no reason we can't hear the old stories and sing the old hymns as Christians who understand Christianity not as what we are required to believe and say aloud every Sunday so we can get into heaven, but as our baptismal call to ἀγάπη (agapé) -- love, goodwill, lovingkindness as our way of life here and now.
Anyway, there you go.
Christmas Eve Eve 2022
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