none are Best

On the Good, Better, Best scale, like a sermon, a blogpost is Good if it stirs a memory in someone, and yesterday's blogpost was Good, Better because a friend's memories that he shared back at me stirred my own memories in turn. 

It started with the duck the hunter shamefully left injured in the Bay, to an injured duck that my friend's family nursed back to health many years ago, to a story that in my mind was parallel enough to trigger my memory - ->

Having been writing this blog over fifteen years now, I'm not sure if I've told this before, but no matter, here it is.

The house where we grew up was in a then undeveloped, woodsy neighborhood of The Cove. A wooded vacant lot on one side of us, and behind us thick woods from our house all the way back to the part of Massalina Bayou that looks over on Tarpon Dock Bridge. Thick woods with well-worn paths through, where we played our childhood away. In the woods and all around us there were animals of all kinds. Skunks (we called them pole cats), bats out at sunset feasting on mosquitos, fireflies (we called them lightning bugs), squirrels of several kinds including now and then we saw a flying squirrel sail from one tree to another; all manner of birds - - mockingbirds, cardinals, blue jays, pigeons, quail, brown thrashers, whip-poor-Wills who did their chant at sunset and Bob Whites who whistled at the same evening hour every day. Raccoons, possums, rabbits. I'm thinking of the baby possum who, lost and finding himself in our back yard, adopted us one season some eighty years ago. 

We took the little possum in and raised him lovingly, kept him inside on the screened porch as I recall. Don't remember whether we named him, but probably. As he grew larger, our parents said it was Time to give him up, to let him go. 

In those years when Mama was working - - from WW2 when our father was away, and on through our teen years, Mama always had a - - maid we called them, maybe half a dozen different Black women over the years. The maid's primary job was to look after us while Mama was at work. I try to remember their names, only one comes to mind right now, there was Margaret, there was Ella, there was one who annoyed Mama by calling her "Miss Louise," there was Elvie I think she was, who volunteered to take our possum home with her. We gave the little guy to Elvie, knowing he would make a nice pet. 

A couple weeks later it occurred to me, and I told Mama, "I'm gonna ask Elvie how the possum is doing!" And Mama said, "Oh, Bubba, they already ate that possum."

There's a hurt feeling of betrayal, of having been deceived, tricked, that  comes on when that happens. In Time it goes, but the memory stays. 

Mike will connect our family stories, their duck and our possum. 

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Not similar but comes to mind anyway our family experience of Homing Cats. There were homing pigeons, we had homing cats - - the most extremely productive female cat, whom we had back in the nineteen-forties. Her latest litter of five or seven kittens, we had given away all the kittens friends and neighbors would take, and we were stuck with this batch. 

One evening while Mama was visiting her parents in Pensacola, our father gathered the kittens and mama cat in a box, but them in the back of The Pontiac (a 1936 business coupe that he had converted to a pickup truck), and with our father driving, we all rode way out north on Cove Boulevard (that section that is now named MLK), turned east into a residential area, drove the rutted dirt road about as far as it went, stopped in the middle of a block with lots of shanties, and left the cat and kittens there. 

If you are getting riled up, don't bother.

We left the cat family there in what in that Time was called ShineTown, and drove back home, shed of the cat family once and far all. 

Some five weeks later, as we sat outside on the screen porch, there was a scratching and meowing at the screen door. The mother cat and all but one kitten had done a Lassie Come Home.

I don't remember the rest of that story except that we did have those cats around for years to come.

There was a family picture around for years, maybe Gina or Walt got it, of our large dog Happy lying asleep in the back yard, with the same mother cat lying on top of him, napping in the sunshine. Fiercely protective of us three children and of all that was his, Happy would not tolerate any dog having a go at his cat.

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There's always something religious or churchy in my mind, that I mean to say the next Time I open my computer screen to set the fingers loose writing a blogpost, but it always evaporates before I can get it down. Same this morning as we wait for Kristen, Tass, and Jeremy to arrive. T&J are coming over from Tallahassee to pick up Caroline (named for me) at the airport early evening. Caroline is returning today from visiting a friend in Toledo, Ohio. The plan is that about twelve thirty or one, we're all going out for Sunday dinner, I think to a steak house.

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Let me think. 

There's a point in the Eucharistic Prayer where the priest says "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" and all the with it Episcopalians take the opportunity to make the sign of the cross - - forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder in the Western Church. Some Episcopalians like to bring it back to the chest with a tap tap tap. The liturgical words are called the "benedictus qui venit" fully from the Latin Mass, "Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini." In the Latin Mass it was a Time that the communicants, none of whom understood Latin, crossed themselves because to them the word Benedictus meant they were getting a blessing. To some extent, the habit stuck, but that's its etiology.

Modern day Episcopalians have no idea why they're crossing themselves, and have evolved to the theological assumption that it means Jesus has come present so cross yourself. Which is a pretty good transition, actually. 

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Raised as a PK, a priest's kid, my grandfather Weller lived in a sort of self-made torment as the liturgy evolved over the years, concerned about what was supposed to be done that the reformed liturgy omitted, and at what the people now joined in on that the priest alone was meant to say. I used to be somewhat that way myself; but nowadays in my ancient age, I simply relax and let it roll over me. My Time in that role is passed and both Earth and I move on unfazed.

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Our gospel reading today was Gospel John's version of the baptism of Christ. For Gospel John's own theological reasons, unlike the synoptics, Gospel John does not report that John the Baptist baptized Jesus. But it's a notable passage: 

As the synoptics do, Gospel John has John the Baptist disclaim messiahship and point to Jesus instead.

At the very beginning of his story, Gospel John acclaims Jesus as Lamb of God, setting the stage for Jesus' crucifixion not on Passover as do the synoptics, but on the day the lambs were slaughtered for Passover, literally or metaphorically making Jesus the Lamb of God.

In this passage, Gospel John is very different from the synoptics in that Andrew seems to be the first disciple (Andrew and Philip), and Andrew brings his brother Simon Peter to Christ. 

It's a wonderful passage for discussion in adult Sunday school or a midweek Bible study.

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Still in my "Seek the Truth" phase, constantly discovering and realizing how little I knew, how little I know, and stretching to go on with how much there is yet to learn. For which,

RSF&PTL

T90

whatever religious I was thinking about is gone into the mists, so I'll knock it off here

pic: 1936 Pontiac business coupe like the one we had back in the 1940s and early fifties.