Monday no naming names

Nice: 78° on 7H porch at five-thirty and six o'clock, 91% humidity, wind ENE 8 mph, feels like 78° a lovely Monday morning, and just a small craft or two moving across StAndrews Bay. Every Day Is A Beautiful Day, which you also will realize when you get to this point in life, and today's day is not and never will be "just one more day in the life of" but its own Beautiful Day for me to thank God we both woke up, plus there's not a hurricane making landfall, is there.

A person, a friend I loved and admired, in his life after being diagnosed with a terminal health issue, once lay in a pond, a small lake, to enjoy a thunderstorm with fierce lightning that drove everyone else inside the house. What he did that day will, to me, always symbolize perfect values and the ultimate perspective on life itself - - which his life had always demonstrated anyway. For me, it was a picture to hold in my own mind, a statement that life is worth the risk.

But I wander, as usual.

First mug of hot but not black, seeing it's a happy Monday morning, treated generously with Connelly's Irish Creme, which I bought cheap at Aldi's when they first opened, an occasional treat. Second mug is true hot & black along with a piece of cornbread, sliced up finger-thin and toasted, then a half pat of butter on each slice. Linda makes perfect cornbread, we like our cornbread with no sugar; if I want it sweet, that's why the bottle of pure cane syrup is on the table. Don't try to sell me cane syrup improved with corn syrup and other pollutants!

Can't get the Southerner out of me, and I really don't want to because everybody's got to be somebody somewhere, not only physically but mentally and emotionally, and if I'm going to be something somewhere I might as well be who, what, and where I already am, nomesane? About which maybe more later, IDK. Or maybe not.

What? Well, from Time to Time, now and then I rediscover myself and realize it's a flurry of irrational contrasts and contradictions. Sometimes it's as if Pandora has come in the night and opened my box, or somebody dropped my copy of Flannery O'Connor's complete short stories, open to her wonderful tale of the phony Confederate general, which makes fun of all of us fools. "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" features General George Poker Sash who is now like 104 years old. At the end of the story the General - - he had actually been an ordinary soldier, a private in the CSA army, but at some point someone needed a colonel or general for something, got him a uniform, and he took to the charade and bought into it permanently and before long he and everyone else thought he really was a Confederate general (if you've not already read Flannery's stories, don't, please, because I don't think you'll "get it" and I know you'll be deeply offended) - - the General dies (the death scene is hilarious) as a hole opens in his head and widens as his consciousness escapes, and there's nothing left of him but his elegantly uniformed corpse sitting in a wheelchair on a hot day at a festival while his oblivious nephew who is pushing the wheelchair waits in a long line at the Coca-Cola concession stand. Seems to me the boy was at least sort of obliquely aware that his charge was dead, but the important thing to the boy is that he is so thirsty and really wants a cold Coke so he stays in line with the dead man in the wheelchair. 

Where was I going with this? Oh, my own self-awarenesses escaping as my Pandora's box is opened, and also very much like the metaphorical hole in the skull of General George Poker Sash as his delusional reality escapes its earthly case.

One of my problems in life is that I intentionally shun absolute certainties. With half the American population, and half my own colleagues, relatives, friends, parishioners, and acquaintances disagreeing with me on every issue, political, social, theological, I work hard to keep myself aware that I may be wrong and they may be right. For example, this morning it surfaces like the wake of a periscope - - because I don't want anyone to see the submarine, you do not know me, I am myself and neither who, what, nor where you think I am - - as we, our parish, are just beginning to enter into the lengthy process that will be meant to call just the right Episcopal priest to be our next Rector. I'm not on the search committee, God forbid, and I don't even think to offer them "advice" even though I do have thoughts, also which I will not presume to express, except maybe here, to myself alone. So, these are wicked spirits from my Pandora's box slash my General Sash's brain.

For the past nearly two decades, we've had just the right Rector; but it's possible to call the wrong person, as, e.g., before this one, the last search committee recommended, the bishop approved, and the vestry called a flaming disaster that even the chairman of the search committee admitted was the biggest mistake he'd ever made. For my own part, at a conference a few years later I made friends with another priest, who had been on seminary faculty when that fellow was a graduating student, and the seminary had actively recommended to the man's bishop that the man was not suitable for ordination; but he was ordained anyway, with ultimately disastrous results. 

Therefore, great care, tremendous caution, s'il vous plait, not only because of our congregation, but especially because of our school. I'm not about to get into it, but I'm hoping the search process goal and end result will be To find just the right person for parish rector and school chaplain and religion teacher, and Not To showcase the current peculiar sociological obsessions of the Episcopal Church at large. 

This is yet another instance of hesitating to speak my mind lest I prove myself politically incorrect; so that's all I'm saying about that, except that my thoughts are in terrible conflict with each other - - which is what this blogpost is about to begin with - - that I don't need to contrast and conflict with you, it's enough that I can't even agree with myself.

So.

Do you think we'll have rain?

RSF&PTL

T

Oh: need a picture to head this blogpost. Let's see. Sunday Breakfast: fresh farm eggs kept for Sunday only, scrambled with cheese, one patty of sage-flavored sausage from Grocery Outlet (we call it "Bill's") and a thick slice of pan-cooked tomato. Utensils: stainless steel fork, because the egg would tarnish the silver.