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Hey!, as they say, I showed up again this morning. Alive, I like being alive. I've been under deepest anesthesia for surgery several Times, and came back having been nowhere, absolutely nowhere, not even in darkness, but beyond the nothingness of oblivion so total as to not even have existed, nonexistence: to NOT BE. 

Returning to life, I realized that Time had passed during which I was not. There was Before Me, and there will be After Me. To any extent I WAS before being conceived, it was the WAS-ness of a dream, not even my dream but someone else's dream. To any extent I WAS during deep anesthesia, it was the WAS-ness of memory, someone, anyone, else's memory, not mine. Not "NDE," a near-death experience, it was the experience of no experience at all, not remembered upon returning, but realized, the experience of death, which, having returned to think about it, I realize it to have been no experience at all, none whatsoever, fading into eternity.

To be raised and summoned with every other of the billions of humans who ever lived, to meet God in the clouds for judgment at the end of Time? I don't know about that, I doubt it, but I do not know: relatively speaking, I know, have knowledge of, nothing. Faith is not knowledge, faith is the comfort of things hoped for, the assurance of things unseen. Neither is Belief knowledge, and no amount of belief makes anything True.

Why am I here thoughtwise this morning? One reason, because overnight I had two dreams that I remember. Each of them was, both of them were, absurdities that only dreams can be, and even though I remember each of the two, I can't describe them even to myself in any way that makes sense. Then I started thinking about the dreams for passing my Time that I had planned for the hours of my open heart surgery fifteen and some months years ago. They were wonderful, that I had been looking forward to for while I was "under," but upon returning I realized that there had been no dreams, nor any sort of consciousness whatsoever. No worries, no pain, no sorrow, simply nothing. Then I researched and found out that in deepest anesthesia one not only has no pain, which is the idea, but one has no consciousness, none at all. The heart is kept beating, and the lungs breathing, but only to keep cells and self from dying. So, blood is moving through the brain, but perhaps no brain waves?

Not a Saint Paul fan, I nevertheless see that he had one idea right: that we "sleep in Jesus," his euphonym for death, until the end of Time. Then, Paul says, the trumpet sounds and all sorts of things happen, which are the subject of Faith and Belief, not of Knowledge.

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MeanTime, I'm still alive, living, showed up again this morning. For what? No longer an employed and engaged person, I'm on my own to work out the "for what?" myself, for myself. There is the beauty around me, there is Linda and other loved ones, and others to love as in Love God Love Neighbor, there is the water traffic passing 7H porch to watch, there are our restaurants here in downtown St Andrews; there are the naps, my morning and afternoon naps, almost all days there's one or the other, some days there are both; there's thinking to do, there's Amazon to think up ordering stuff from. 

And I'm experimenting with learning to cook some things: I have the items here for it and have cooked sous vide; last week I learned to cook grits, using the quick grits that I grew up having for breakfast almost every morning of life. I made them as cheese grits, with more cheese than grits, and man alive were they good; this morning I ate the last of the grits, formed into a thin block, then coated with beaten egg, one duck egg and one hen's egg, and cooked stovetop in a skillet. Oh boy! Close to but not quite what Mama used to do with leftover grits.

My next cooking project is a strawberry pie with cooked, not raw, strawberries. I found an online recipe, I bought the frozen strawberries that it calls for, and I bought the pie crust. Linda already has the pie pan. I'm ready, and I think I'll do it this week. If it turns out to please my palate, I'll blog about it. If it turns out bad, this is the first and last that you'll ever hear of it, nomesane? 

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Church was interesting yesterday. We went to eight o'clock instead of ten-thirty, as we do about one Sunday in three or four. The liturgy is a staple of my Being, the bread of life, so to speak. A "staple," as I say, that I remember from before anything else in life except my parents, siblings, grandparents and two or three first cousins. Now the mind begins to wander, doesn't it: riding to church, our grandfather driving us in our grandmother's new light green 1942 Chrysler Windsor sedan, 

and my cousin Bill saying, to pull our grandfather's chain a bit, "Daddy Walt, I'm going to be a Catholic," and Daddy Walt, our Gentry grandparent, saying, "Oh yeah? Where're you gonna live then?" It was the Southern Baptist household that our parents grew up in, and where Margaret Ann and Bill and their father, my mother's older brother, were living and my two cousins grew up after the death of their mother. To accommodate, our grandparents added a second floor with two bedrooms and a bathroom on the back half of the house. It was a place I loved, in my heart, my "second home," where I learned to ride a bike, and to skate (Pensacola had sidewalks, here in PC we had dirt roads still).

That's the house, above picture. In my mother's Time there was no second story. In my Time and Mama's the front porch was screened in, with screen door opening onto the front steps and another screen door on the east (in the picture, left) side onto steps; and as you drove into the driveway you drove under a porte-cochere with wire screen for a top/roof, and always thick in bloom with bugle/trumpet vine and with pink vine. And there was no handrail on those steep solid concrete steps up into the kitchen. IDK, the gas meter for inserting quarters for the natural gas may still have been on the wall under the kitchen window. To me, the sidewalk completely around the block was magical. 

The pen for Daddy Walt's hunting dogs was out back, behind the garage, and you did not pet the dogs. 

In the garage there was, from those earlier years of automobiles, a deep pit that you could stand up in, to service the cars underneath: change the engine oil (and change the oil filter when oil filters came along), and lubricate the chassis. My grandparents bought that house in 1915, and they moved in from the house they had been renting right across the street. Mama's early memory was of "moving day," when family, friends and neighbors ran back and forth across the street moving furniture, pots and pans, and clothes from the old house to the new one. 

Okay, I've wandered again. Maybe before the week's over I'll do what I intended to do with this blogpost, which was to meander over one of our bible readings for next Sunday. 

Life goes on, doesn't it.

Clear day here, I can see across Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico. Wonder whether they have a nice day like this up on Lake Ontario?

RSF&PTL

T90