Many, most, maybe all of us have crossed paths in life with someone who stands out as a person greatly to be admired. The crossing may be personal, it may be someone we see on television or other media, or a political or religious or military figure. There are any number in my life. Some local, whom I will not name lest I embarrass them. Father Tom Byrne, our priest and mentor my high school years. Winston Churchill has been one, including as war leader, author, I've read many of his books on the history of England, Britain, and I loved his buttheaded defiance of Germany and Hitler. One book about Churchill caught me up short though, describing his war with, treatment of, and contempt for other than white people, Africans and people of India during the Raj. But I guess if you can let George Washington go on being the Father of our Country and a six-star General even though he owned slaves, I can love Winston anyway as a man of his Time. Even Jesus was a man of his day and age,...

  After drafting a blogpost early, I deleted it in total disinterest and made a spot decision not to blog today; I'd suit myself as I DWP, do some reading, play some online card games that I work for fun mental exercise instead of crossword puzzles. I might enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles as of old, but there isn't space here and I don't want to get into it. So, various card games of Solitaire, read, blog are my main things. Work up a Sunday School session if this is my week to lead the class, which it is not; or fiddle with a sermon if it's that week for me, which it is. But today the decide was to give myself a break. Read, play Solitaire.  But then. One of my reading pastimes includes various blogs. Several from The Atlantic, although it's a royal pita to log onto them even though I'm a paid subscriber, leading me frequently to say to heck with it (anyone who knows me knows DW that I never say "heck").  Other blogs I enjoy are a few Bible scholars, unive...

Strange, but to me connecting somehow, to be reading Revelation at a Time when dragons, monsters of Evil like Vladimir Putin and Payton Gendron  https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/17/payton-gendron-parents-buffalo-shooting/ and dupes of conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook, and Q-anon, and the stolen election, and the pandemic hoax, and now the great replacement - - the terrifying naiveté and extreme stupidity of people who buy into such rubbish. My first knowledge of such nonsense was in 1963, about the assassination of JFK.  Revelation, apocalypse, becomes real, draws nearer, with every event of such σκύβαλον, abuse of the internet, which is so marvelous with knowledge heretofore virtually inaccessible, but abused to spread Evil by demonic humans. Americans arming themselves against each other, specifically ready to kill each other, the growing attitude and action that fills anyone of human decency with revulsion. Again, Not My Lan...

  Phone, now it's my phone. I can't keep track of my blasted cellphone. It's missing again, maybe I left it in Linda's car. At the house, The Old Place, it was my wallet and my car keys, and thirteen rooms to search upstairs and down; but moving into 7H I settled on a permanent no-think place for them. So now it's my obscenity telephone, only three rooms to search, plus elevating down to the garage to check whichever car was used last and elevating back up. Anyway, it's missing again now. If you called me, that's why I didn't answer, but you may text me and I can get that on this computer via the internet. So okay, next, breakfast. For a couple months I'm settled into a regimen: second mug of hot black coffee and a hundred-calorie packet of Quakers original oatmeal (original means plain), half cup water and half cup blueberries. Stir and microwave for experimenting Times: 90 seconds boiled over, 75 seconds doing fine but not quite cooked; this mornin...

  +Time, eleven, ten, and nearly a dozen years ago and more, I used to get up early, four o'clock my latest, sometimes three, bright-eyed and ready for another day of life doing something mental, write, read, think, or plan. Of all the years, it was most fun in Apalachicola, waking up in Trinity's rectory to the wonderful sound of roosters crowing, peering out a window at earth and sky as the Day worked out what it was going to be for us. And - - unintended by me, my mind went to those years that started in 1984, my summer of being 48, but in my mind the years rolled by even faster than it happened in real Time, and it all came crashing down when memory took me to the late summer day we dropped Tass at her college in Virginia. It was summer into fall 1990, and my grief, inconsolable, flattened me for months. I did not intend to go there this morning, but the mind does its own thing. Taking me to a morning alone on the beautiful banks of the Susquehanna River, north of Harrisbu...