It’s 5:30 in the morning, 5:31 and that looks like a total eclipse coming on. “Blood moon” they said in an online newspaper last night, and there it is. First time I watched one was in the early nineteen-forties, Mama kept me up to watch and we did from start to finish. That was our front yard. More than seventy years later, this is my only time watching the moon extinguish itself before my eyes in the southwestern sky from the fifteenth floor balcony of a Gulf front condo  Seeing, it’s easy to understand ancients believing they had angered Yarikh and if we sacrifice a few people the Lesser Light will return and not abandon us to the darkness. Jorah, we call him, the Illuminator. And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater ligh...

This is the House that Alf Built By far I certainly do not know every house in town, but mine may be the only classic American Foursquare home left in Panama City. My grandparents Alfred D. and Carrie Weller (Mom and Pop to their children and to me) built it for their large family, county records say in 1912, my father always said in 1913 and had a memory of the move. My guess of the two different years is that it was permitted in 1912 and the family moved in sometime in 1913.  There were four children, son Alfred, Jr., daughters Evalyn and Ruth, and the younger son my father Thomas Carroll Weller, who all his life was called Carroll. My father’s younger sister Marguerite was born in 1917, bringing the family to seven with their five children.  Standing on this lot before this house was built was the blue house across the way from us at 2215 W. 9th Street. I have a photo of Mom sitting on the wooden steps in the front yard, holding my father, and that older ho...

leaky cup Monday, often a nonsensical ramble, let it be so and can somebody say “amen.”  Six-monthly dermatology visit early, he zaps, mutters about cutting, checks his notes and remembers the pink dot high on my left cheek is the first thing my mother saw moments after I was born.  Presumably the next thing Mama saw was blue eyes: they have not been my enemy these eight decades. Adult Sunday School table continues full, but Mike and I miss Jane. Yesterday we looked at the Oct 5 gospel reading and compared Matthew’s treatment of it as strong allegory, to Mark’s version, then back to the same parable in the Gospel of Thomas, which may be closer to Jesus’ original.  Physically and mentally exhausted couple emptying an enormous house of a century of generations’ possessions so the realtor’s photographer can come take pics before the listing goes online and people start traipsing through. A proverb somersaults to out of mind out of sight because of the nu...

good news and bad What? Short incoherent ramble. In every generation the apocalyptic lunatic fringe have and do and always will perceive in the interactions and actions of humans, and in the nature of things, and from the heavens of outer space beyond the firmament tumbling toward us, that the end of the world is imminent and already underway, and some head for the mountaintop to greet the Coming, certain of everything especially their own Rapture. Same here for me, lunatic fringe perceiving in my dotage. Disease, a plague, ebola out of control and finally nature has its victory and After People ensues. Religious certainty and hatred gone mad, in the Middle East, spreading, murdering, threatening; the necessary insanity of destroying the global village in order to save it being the only realistic response; yet the timidity of authority who are reluctant and incompetent to wage war; and doomsday at the end of either The Road Not Taken or the one less traveled by.  What will...

Galilee and ὕψιστος Summer 1984 we sold our house on the Conodoguinet Creek in Pennsylvania and relocated from Harrisburg to Apalachicola, and “we’re on our way - - - to Apa-lach-i-co-la F-L-A” I sang all the way home with Bing Crosby and Incredible Joy, Relief, Escape and Release. No longer would I be Mr. Yoyo on the end of a string, popping out to wherever the Navy assigned me, then back home to the Florida Gulf Coast at every opportunity including every occasion of PCS and military leave; then after Navy retirement the University of West Florida flying me down to teach as adjunct professor half a dozen times a year. All our twenty Navy years we had agreed, and I had clung to my unshakeable determination, to move home at the opportunity. Now, God had presented it in the form of the altar and pulpit of Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola, Florida, and I had to go. Striving to be other , I had to go, though the decision process left me better understanding Jacob's night al...

Day in the Life of a Bubba This would be the day to begin with so or well but resisting, so here goes. Up at 1:29 a.m. because Father Nature kept whispering “Wee hours, Bubba” and Father N. gets painful and ugly. Unable to go back to sleep, so downstairs for Kona coffee and what? working on a sermon during Wee hours yields even more nonsense than usual, so nap on Tassy’s green sofa. Up at 4:30 because of Linda rattling round in the kitchen, down the front path for her PCNH. Stay up to work dragging art and furniture into a “staging room” because early this morning Specialists of the South’s haulers are coming to move a large batch of our accumulated objects to their auction warehouse.  After they leave we must get the house ready for a photographer to come on Monday, so may stay as late as noon before returning to High Heaven for coffee and a sit-down and when it turns five o’clock somewhere, anywhere, a glass of red wine. What time is it in London? No? how about Sydney? S...

Taps and Reveille “Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.” Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)  Some will remember with me Gandhi as a man of our lifetime, Gandhi as a person, a humble being, a man of noachic righteousness, of gentleness and messianic goodness. That I lived in the age of the consummately evil Stalin and Hitler, Pol Pot and now ISIS, and of our viciously bitter political system, is redeemed by having breathed air in the same world and time as Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi. I feel that way also about Martin Luther King, Jr. And especially about Winston Churchill, war hero of the ages. Winston died when I was on Navy assignment in Taipei and I listened over Armed Forces Radio and Television Service to his state funeral.   “Lives of great men all remind us,” w...