τὸ δαιμόνιον scrambles my eggs “Ain’t nobody gonna stand between me an’ that hat, mister — surely — not you.” Face contorted with hatred and contempt, says Jimmy Cagney (Lieutenant Commander Morton, ship’s captain) to Lieutenant (junior grade) Doug Roberts (Henry Fonda) in the movie Mister Roberts  as Cagney holds up the commander’s hat  that’s the coveted object and goal of his driving Navy ambition. Linda and I saw the movie at the Ritz Theatre, it would have been 1955, likely during college summer vacation.  The hats, I know about the hats. Mine was summer 1971, the happy day the admiral promoted me from hat  to my hat with scrambled eggs. Navy terms, from junior officer to senior officer. And there was a time, ten years earlier than that, when I wanted and, rather arrogantly I suppose, expected another, The Hat, before I was done. I let that strange ambition go in November 1969, the first night at sea, underway for our deployment to WestPac.  De...

Walk this morning and, as Monday opened gray, windy and chilly, I dressed for it.  Wobbled down Linda Avenue into Massalina Drive, round to Hamilton Avenue and back up to the school. For some it’s Cove School, for some Holy Nativity Episcopal School, for a select few whose salvation is assured, it’s Both.  Sometimes my key comes along, it had today, but the main front door was unlocked. Folks working inside. One classroom is a traditional stop and leave a love note on the — well, okay, whiteboard.  Out the north end door that 75 years ago opened to our playground. That was the door we exited both for recess and at day’s end. My first specific memory of that door, which opened to bare ground and under oak trees, is fall 1941, going out and looking for my mother’s car. It wasn’t there. I stood and looked. From a car parked about where ours always had been I heard my sister call “Bubba!!” There they were in a brand new 1942 Chevrolet. One of the last two new Che...

Shhhhhhhh. Listen — You who dwell in the shelter of ElYon,     and abide in the shadow of Shaddai —     I say of the Lord, my refuge and stronghold,     my God in whom I trust,     that He will save you from the fowler’s trap,     from the destructive plague. He will cover you with His pinions,     you will find refuge under His wings;     His fidelity is an encircling shield.     His fidelity is an encircling shield. You need not fear the terror by night,     or the arrow that flies by day,     the plague that stalks in the darkness,     or the scourge that ravages at noon. A thousand may fall at your side,          and ten thousand at your right hand,     but it shall not come near you. You will see it with your eyes,     you will witness the punishment of the wicked. Because...

Colder outside than it was yesterday, clear sky, Bay is calm and flat, but wind 14 mph, so the Bay surface is not mirror flat but slightly ripply.  Mindful this is no journal or diary, we are driving up to Chipley early afternoon to attend a friend’s funeral at St. Matthew’s. Sad but this is what happens, isn’t it. Not finished either, something about closed in the sod , as William Alexander Percy put it hauntingly. Still worrying Psalm 91 for tomorrow. For one thing, unlike some translations for Christian use, looking at several direct translations from the Hebrew into English for Jewish reading, it isn’t awkward at all, the shifting of persons is quite clear, it makes perfect sense and poetry. One translation of Shaddai reads "… in shadow of Who Suffices …" What bothers me? Not much. What intrigues me? The 1940 LaSalle was magnificent, but was the final year even though GM had a 1941 ready.  The 1940 Lasalle and the 1940 Cadillac were indistinguis...

Black holes collide a billion light years away, producing gravitational waves detected on earth. Though nobody has ever seen one, a black hole is not an empty place in space that cannot be touched, but an object so dense and with gravity so intense that it cannot be seen because even light cannot escape from it to be seen from a distance. Well, it could be seen by inference, hiding stars and galaxies in the distance behind and beyond it so that it appears as a black hole in space.  Depending on where one reads online, and a black hole’s size, temperature in a black hole is somewhere between incredibly hot and a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The other thing my inquiring mind discovered this morning is that Engelbert Humperdinck’s real name is Arnold George Dorsey, but there are so many car facts clogging my mental traffic that I won’t be able to remember that when the time comes.  Not sure how to work subtly into a sermon. Thos+

Math isn't the only thing I don't understand Thursday grousing Psalm 91    Qui habitat 1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, * abides under the shadow of the Almighty. 2 He shall say to the LORD, "You are my refuge and my stronghold, * my God in whom I put my trust." (BCP) Somehow, I don’t think so. It’s too smooth. From memory, I think Psalm 91 opens more jerky than that. See, this is what comes of not being very smart in the first place, and in the second place what comes of not reading and understanding the language. Hebrew was not part of my curriculum at LTSG. I asked my OT professor to tutor me in Hebrew my first summer but he said he was going on sabbatical and declined. The years that followed, my late forties, fifties and sixties, were too rushed and full to add anything. And trying to learn Hebrew by myself in my seventies proved futile, a fiasco, I couldn’t even remember the letters.  One single word I recogniz...

40F at 4:06, going to 38F by 8:00, a car or two moving on Beck Avenue. From 7H I can see three traffic signals, Beck and 11th Street, Beck and 15th Street, Beck and Hwy 98 out at St. Andrews Baptist Church. All three lights keep changing, hoping, I suppose, for cars to come and affirm their function. As Mrs. Macready chides the four arriving Pevensie children in TLTW&TW, “Everyone has their function. One mustn’t deprive people of their function.” So, cars must come, otherwise there’s no need for the lights. Pancakes last evening, pancakes and sausage, also jambalaya with shrimp, quite tasty. For a few years I kept a quart jug of maple syrup in the fridge at church for Shrove Tuesday, eventually brought it home. Mine is thick, dark and earthy as though made from the roots of the maple tree, incomparable, and in a fit of enthusiasm eight or ten years ago I ordered enough to last me a lifetime. Unopened, it keeps forever; opened if kept in the refrigerator.  But one mustn’t av...