Below, scroll down, is a NYT column that catches me this morning at 5:21 and still pitch black dark outside. I’m afraid there are children who board the school bus in the predawn and are delivered home after dark, what misery. But today’s Saturday, isn’t it, a reprieve.  Looking across the room I see the sofa we bought at a Southern California furniture store that fall 1969 just before my ship deployed for WestPac and whatever contribution we made to the Vietnam War. The elegant new sofa in our living room on the moss green carpet of our house in Chula Vista, San Diego. The house was our first purchase, brand new, the builder had done a good job, except that the outside walls were not insulated, so the hot western wall could make our bedroom unbearably hot on summer and fall afternoons. No air conditioning either, didn’t need it most of the year. That was Southern California sixty years ago. One evening - - Linda, Malinda and Joe must have been in Arizona visiting Linda’s parents -...

  Life seems to be getting fuzzier somehow, and all the humor about doctor appointments for old people is coming home to roost, nomesane?  Forty years ago I came over from Apalachicola and drove my parents up to Dothan for cataract surgery, that was the start of my real awareness of it. Now, between us, we have one or two or three doctor appointments every week, we have to take the calendar everywhere because for sure another one will be scheduled before we get home and we need to avoid conflicting appointment Times.  This morning after hitting two grocery stores, Bill's and Publix, we arrived way early for a dermatologist appointment and were taken in half an hour early: clean the surgery sites, dab salve on, new bandages and come back in two weeks to have stitches removed at both sites, nose and behind the ear. Meantime, ear vacuuming, eyelid surgery, and leg veins.  Are you sure you want to live into your own nonagenarianism?! It's sort of fence-walking: On one si...

  Late Wednesday night, early Thursday morning, the Time is 12:03 AM and I don't often do this, but I'm up late enjoying being alive.  Life is short, and we haven't much Time. These days I spend too much of it napping because of the One Thing Rule (we can do one thing, and then we have to have a sit-down (Linda in the blue riser chair) or outright lie down (me), pull up the covers, and go to sleep, usually an hour or two, sometimes three hours.  At this, my post-midnight moment, I'm thinking about being ninety, which I never expected, so now and then I do something, like now, to be in life itself, enjoyment of, and  gratitude for,   shehechehyanu, who gives us life - - and sustains us, and has brought us to this Time, blessed are You. ++++++ Looking at the Colossians reading for the upcoming Sunday: it's loaded with heavy theology, and it doesn't matter, but like many, I cannot see Paul having written this. Greek readers can dig into Colossians and report back s...

Fr Richard's meditation for this morning (scroll down) is, for me, one of the best. For one, ironically yea unto humorously, it confirms my own experience of life as priest, pastor, preacher, teacher. For two, it speaks my mind to everyone I've known and know who has reacted negatively to my efforts to convey Truth as I've explored and found Truth that strains boundaries beyond and outside my own tradition.  Maybe for three, it parallels my "life verse" picked up in that proverb inscribed in the lintel over the library door at the Episcopal theological seminary I attended, SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL; and the yardstick-slamming shout of Bill Weeks, my most competent high school teacher, "DON'T BE A SHEEP, BE A GOAT."   The integrity of one's search for Truth rests entirely in whether one is searching with an open mind or fooling oneself and simply, obtusely "proof-texting." It's called "apologetics,...

My +Time blogposts are linked here on Facebook for a day or two then the link is moved to archive. But for anyone who wants to read later, the blogposts themselves are still on my +Time blogpost all the way back to Cleveland Clinic fifteen years ago when Jeremy created the blogpost for me to log my progress through the heart adventure. It's named +Time mindful of soccer rules that seem indefinite about how long a game will go, referee discretion like Life Itself, providing for adding Stoppage Time after regulation time to make up for various delays. +Time is my Stoppage Time added for divine discretion after my Time at Cleveland Clinic.  What I set out to say before typically wandering off into some netherworld is that if anyone wants to read a blogpost they missed, or re-read, it's still and always online at plusmoretime.blogspot.com  but it's no longer "in your face" on my Facebook page.  Why would I move the links to archive? For one, because in years of vocati...

5  And  God  saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  6  And it repented the  Lord  that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.  7  And the  Lord  said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. (Genesis 6:5f, KJV)   Russian drones being shot down over Poland, a "sabotage" explosion to destroy a Polish rail line used to transport supplies to Ukraine. Putin bound to nothing but his own will for former Soviet territories, and testing NATO resolve. It's like fires or heavy rains that weaken underlying land in California, bringing on landslides. The northern hemisphere is sliding again into major war, and a war with Russia and the US as enemies t...

  A fact of my life is that I lived in the wrong day and age - - too late for my enthusiasms. Were I to have planned it myself I'd have been, like Lamont Cranston, a wealthy young man about town in the early 1930s. In my early middle-age I'd have downsized modestly in the early 1940s so as not to present myself ostentatiously during that Time of the Great Depression, to a car such as this 1941 Packard One-Twenty sedan. Time, after my grandfathers' prime, When long-distance travel here in America was by the trains that I remember and loved, specifically the Pullman Palace Cars that were air-conditioned.  And also When, days that I wanted to go to Pensacola to visit my brother, I could walk down to the train depot that was here in St Andrews and board for the ride instead of driving. Well, I got part of that, didn't I -> in my day, if you wanted to go to Dothan or Atlanta, you could ride up on the Bay Line; did it more than once. ... those were the days, my friend, I t...