Some of us (I am one) are not enthusiastic about heights. As well as the ongoing review of high school plane geometry, one of several things I appreciated about the scaffolding that clung to both sides of Harbour Village during our soon two years of ongoing repairs after HMichael was ease in walking the highest level sidewalks not plastered against the wall.  Airplanes were fine. And Navy helicopters. But not rooftops and not railings looking out into space from on high. My first realization of that was Summer 1943 in the highest level of the Capitol dome in WashingtonDC, back when tourists could climb all the way to the top inside, looking down at the tiny ants in the Rotunda a straight drop down. I backed quickly away from the railing.  My one time overcoming that dis-ease was Summer 1957 at Officer Candidate School, Newport, RI. Recalled this here before. We were marched into a high hangar that may once have housed blimps, dirigibles the Navy had used for ASW in the ...

  Are you thinking what I'm thinking? That it's Bad Word Time again? Pretty dandelion near it. There are two of those suckers down there, and a calm, harmless, mild, nonthreatening, building, sneaky, devious, crouching, raging, pouncing gardenia Cat5HMichael comes to mind.  Y et one more time again, eh? no worries, right?  I'll clear off the porches this weekend.  Our diocesan bishop two or three back taught me to camouflage what I'm about to say with flower names. It's nowhere near as effective in venting the rage and releasing the pressure, but it somewhat avoids being the jackaxe one has made of oneself and knows oneself to be right afterward as one murmurs the embarrassed apology.  It doesn't always work for me.  I confess to Almighty God, to his Church, and to you, that  I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word, and deed, in  things done and left undone; especially (confess flowery thoughts as well as flowery words)   Fortunat...

  The other book I picked up instead of Buechner is one I read nearly ten years ago. Ed Richards gave it to me during my 2010-2011 heart adventure, and I enjoyed and appreciated at the time: The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything , J ames Martin, SJ. It may be the only pleasant, fun, spiritual book ever.  Well,  The Seven Storey Mountain , Thomas Merton, though in prejudice I dislike Merton because, having perfected himself as a typical convert who now is Certain, he puts us down without understanding us, based on a shallow family experience. I don't appreciate Merton. But anyway, Martin SJ. After all these years, I opened it again, random at page 126,  Listening  and read awhile. Martin SJ got my attention with a paragraph opening sentence, "Few people say they have heard God's voice in a physical way. (That is, few sane people)."  As one of the "Few" - - not a secret, I've told it hesitantly in sermons and gatherings now and then since my cold Pennsyl...

  Yesterday while we were out, after Linda's lab work we stopped by my office at the church to get a couple of things.  A scale model car my parents gave me, which I got and it's here now under caring eye. My first knowing that such costly little heavy and precise replicas were on the market. Adult toys for sure. My parents paid over $100 for it thirty or forty years ago, quite a price, but a gift they knew I'd appreciate. I was astonished, and I remember one of them saying, "We thought it might be the only Rolls-Royce you ever own!" In years that followed, my mother enjoyed selecting and ordering more model cars for me. So did my son Joe. Most of the cars made it safely through the hurricane. This, the RR, lost it's windscreen and another piece in being packed away afterward. And I thought to pick up a couple of Buechner's books that I was blogging about recently. But instead of Buechner, I selected two other books. Black & White , a collection of Ers...

  Almost never do I publish two blogposts in one day, but this seemed appropriate to get out there. https://www.texmed.org/TexasMedicineDetail.aspx?Pageid=46106&id=54216

Me, I'm pretty much a loner. Always have been, always will be. I try not to make trouble, I don't bother anybody, and I want nobody bothering me! It's a glory of living way up here in this remote far end of the line corner condo that is 7H in this chapter of life. Which, knock knock, so far is realtime and not an epilogue.  Had a nice walk yesterday, which was good, especially because instead of a walk after church Sunday I had a martini, a small tenderloin steak with asparagus, and a two hour nap. Deliciously tender steak, rare, 3/4 to an inch thick. Cut them myself from a whole tenderloin I bought early when all this covid19 started, and froze until recently.  But the walk. At the east side Harbour Village fence, the gate into Oaks by the Bay Park is down, hasn't yet been replaced, so I walked out the open gateway into the park and around the park for a while. At the east side where the park borders Chestnut Avenue, the sidewalk heads on down south toward...

  As outrage, panic and despair set in when I let myself read about and dwell upon developing possibilities endangering the general election, it occurs to me to divert my mind, and my mind is easily diverted. By sunrises and sunsets. By stirring memories, by thinking about my children, by wondering if one of the fish markets has mullet today, by worrying that it's Monday and I should be thinking about posting the lectionary Propers for next Sunday instead of this rubbish, by my most recent dreams - - last night they included an almost inconceivably ugly brown Lincoln car, from the late-fifties early-sixties but brand new in my dream, grotesquely enormous, not incongruous or untimely in my dream  and my walking 'round it thinking "Why oh WHY did I buy this monstrosity when I'd rather have a Cadillac? I won't even be able to get it in the HV garage." That particular Lincoln, 1958, 1959, 1960 model years, they boasted that four people could comfortably sit in the...