Twenty-Two. Time and brainwork, research, struggle, and lots of Time to bring Sunday's sermon together, at least for me. And I like my notes to end up with nine pages, max eleven, in my 20-pitch, wide-margin, 1.5 line spacing format - - which puts it at nine to eleven minutes in the pulpit. This morning I was up early, though, and the sermon notes are twenty-two pages, so my choices are clear: narrow the margins, reduce the print size, or cut out half the words. So, cutting.  Someone once told me, "I never get tired of your preaching!" Well, I can fix that; it's been decades since I preached a twenty-five minute sermon, but've done it. Years ago, an English bishop was the presenter at one of our clergy conferences, and I remember him saying, "If you're not preaching forty-five minutes you have no business wearing a collar." In my Time as an active parish priest I participated in God only knows how many clergy conferences, including quite a few about ...

  Arial Rounded, largest. It's a matter of perspective, isn't it! Some of the blogs I read have appealing, artistic, sometimes delicate, fonts that are difficult for elder eyes to read. Some physical features of, like, church buildings, are threatening to older parishioners because the younger folks in charge don't, even cannot, see the dangers of older members tripping and falling. Some church bulletins have print too small for elder eyes.  It's no "pat on the back" but ever since, it would have been 2004 or so, a church member asked what I might do to help her daughter, who loved to sing, but whose vision was too weak to read lyrics in the hymnal, and I started printing hymn lyrics in the worship bulletin, in very large type size for her. Why am I on this trail this morning? IDK, it just come to me, nomesane? Aging has helped my awareness of other people's needs. I guess you have to be there/here, or very deliberate about others, otherwise you are blind ...

  "Damn! Apple pie and no cheese." Thirty or so years ago we were with Paint and Jim, Linda's mother and step-father, having supper at The Club on the mountain in Birmingham, Alabama - - the first time Linda and I were there was summer 1954, when Linda's parents had made an appointment with cardiologist Dr Edgar Givhan, for me to have my heart checked, and Linda's cousin Joe Farley treated us to dinner, just the two of us, at The Club. What I remember best, and it's all gone now, is the hellish, fiery mountaintop view of the iron foundries at night. Anyway, on this more recent occasion, and Jim loved taking us to dinner at The Club, where his special waiter, whose name I forget, made a point of making absolutely sure that nobody but himself took care of Mr Graham's table, likely because of Jim's tipping practice. Again, anyway, what do I remember? Dessert time came, and we ordered our selections, Linda's mother ordering apple pie. The waiter arrive...

  66°F 96% humidity, Wind SSE 12 mph, a more typical January winter day here on the Florida Gulf Coast than the freezing hours we had a couple days recently. Wind is the worst thing about cold weather here, damp and raw.  Hot & black and a little pile of cornbread cubes this dark, early hour. The cornbread has bits of green pepper in it. Even if the political news is close and appalling, the wars are being expanded and the news is incredibly horrendous on all fronts. Shot down and all killed: a Russian transport plane carrying Ukrainian POWs; in Gaza a UN compound sheltering civilians targeted with disastrous results. Political leaders are - - what's that flower? - - narcissistic and paranoid, dangerous, elected by fools and impossible to dislodge.  We hate people who are different from us. There is no morality, and immediate direction of world events seems headed to nuclear exchange, Where will you go to hide? And, especially, Why? +++++++++ Sunday's coming: The Coll...

  Cheese grits this morning, leftovers from Tuesday supper; enhanced with extra Swiss cheese, dashes of Tabasco, and a chunk of cornbread crumbled and stirred in thoroughly. Second mug of hot & black. Seriously did I consider making a grits sandwich, but don't need the extra bread. Mama used to tell me about Kahn's Delicatessen, at lunch break walking distance when she was in school at her business college in Pensacola in the early 1930s. For 15¢ a roast beef sandwich, or chicken salad; maybe 12¢ for tuna salad, pimiento cheese, or egg salad; but for 10¢ a dime you could get a baked bean sandwich or coleslaw sandwich that was packed high and just as filling. Mama had a steno pad (two-column) and could write in shorthand faster than I could talk.  When I was a boy she also had a stenograph machine that printed a tape just like an old fashioned adding machine.  While our father was at sea with the Maritime Service during the War,  Mama worked at insurance...

  Monday morning, 22 Jan 2024, who'd've thought, that day of fifth grade at recess on the grounds of Cove School when, in my thoughts, the year 2000 seemed inconceivably distant in some remote future. My friends, life is short, and we haven't much Time.  That would have been 1945-46, World War Two ended with VE Day and then VJ Day, and there was talk of helicopters: they would become ordinary, every family would have a helicopter. I remember asking Mama, "Will we have one, can we get a helicopter?" and she said Yes.  Something's wrong with me, I like peace and quiet so much that it never occurs to me to put on my hearing aids mornings. In fact, it's on my check-list of Nine (Ten if I'm preaching and need to bring my sermon notes) things to make sure of at the front door as we leave 7H for church Sunday mornings. I call it "My Count" and, yes, the Nine includes phone, eyeglasses, white collar tab, wallet, zipper and several other things. If I ...

Opening email, my computer went down a side road and highlighted an 11/28/10 email from Gina Weller Webb, an exchange about The Scallop Fiasco, a family memory from the early 1950s. Gina’s dead, I can’t ask her family questions anymore, or have conversation about our childhood and teen years, and I’m so glad to be a sentimentalist who saves old things, old emails. Old bits of conversation become treasures, both emails popping up and memories surfacing at random.  A conversation while visiting that summer when Gina was in hospital with a heart issue, Linda and I had been staying in the rectory at Trinity, Apalachicola a couple of weeks while the rector was overseas on holiday and I was filling in as Supply Priest for her; and I came back to PC because Gina was in hospital. A long, mutually informative conversation that visit. Earlier, spring/summer 2011, a long, revealing conversation that I've recalled here before. The two of us meeting and stopping to stand at the front door of Co...

Thursday morning -> what to do? Fun, have fun: read. Read a bit. Reading is fun and good. From the latest issue of The New Yorker, which arrived in yesterday's mail, read a dozen or so of its first pages, saving fiction "The Beach House" for later. "Tables for Two." A couple of short features. A little longer one about a coffee-tasting competition (Brazil won) sponsored by Illy. A few more pages of "Before the coffee gets cold" - - "a novel" so charming and magical that I have to make it last and last, cannot read devouringly through and be done. Fun. But don't I have more important things to do than read? As a matter of fact, No, I do not, because, though there were years when I forgot, from way, way early in life I found out that nothing is more important than reading, reading is the most important thing I've done and do in my Time of life. Uncle Wiggly. Dr. Doolittle. Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys. We Were Tired of Living in a Hous...

When I was a boy and attention was on Europe, it'd've occurred to few to nobody that seventy-five years thence world peace, or at least peace in the northern hemisphere, would teeter on events in Iran where the theme is hatred, and North Korea where the theme is paranoia about not being noticed. But that's where we are. Also when I was a boy, nobody would ever have thought that three-quarters of a century on, the American public itself would be a hatred-divided populace voting on whether to hang on to the beloved American dream or to emulate 1933 Germany. But, incredibly, that also is where we are as 2024 moves forward. Someone needs to travel back in Time, to the Jurassic, and step on an ant or something, so we wouldn't be what we are becoming. It's 23°F here, wind N 10 mph, 71% and Feels Like 12° according to the Weather icon on my phone.  CSL FLEXVIK 492x77 arriving to load Kraft liner for Moin. Magic mug: last two sips of coffee still hot an hour and a half late...