Lazy is my middle name and computers are the bane of my existence

OK, so here's what happened, I was about to write some tonight since I've been too lazy to write for a while and hit enter after typing in the title of the posting: Lazy Is My Middle-Name and instead of being able to type, I posted a blog without writing anything....And didn't know how to fix it. So, here's another try.

I'm aware I still have to finish the stuff about fundamentalism (a joke: Why can't fundamentalists have sex standing up???? It might lead to dancing....)

I'm committed to writing for an hour tonight, after I finish watching a Law and Order I've never seen and I'll try to return to fundamentalism as well as other things. For now, I have to go back to the TV.....

Good Show. I watch a lot of TV and don't apologize or rationalize about it. My watching TV is sort of like my driving on Interstate Highways. I'm a baby boomer and figure TV and Interstates were built for me. So, if I have a seven mile trip by state roads that is a 9 mile trip if I get on an interstate, I'll invariably choose the latter. TV's like that. I love TV. Many of my friends take pride in never watching House or Bones on Monk or The Closer and being smug about that. I watch them all--and more besides. Every sport including the World Series of Poker and I'm addicted to MSNBC's news stuff--Hard Ball, Keith Oberman, Rachel Maddow, like that. Here's my advice for folks 50 and over--watch lots of TV and always drive on the interstate system: they are OURS and we should use them....

My uncle Harvey, who was a preacher in the Pilgrim Holiness Church until he became too liberal for that ("too liberal" for the Pilgrim Holiness Church means you think God might look somewhat favorably on Methodists....) and became a Nazarene preacher--he once told me that 'mixed bathing' was a sin. "Mixed Bathing" meant going to swimming pools or the beach anywhere. Boys seeing girls in bathing suits would, in his mind, would drive boys to such extremes of lust that they would commit sins unspeakable. There was, it seems to me, no equal 'lust drive' for girls seeing boys in swimming trunks. One of the things I always remember about being a fundamentalist is that it was the uncontrolled, sinful, awful 'lust' of boys that was the root of all evil. Girls were the 'objects' of lust, never the lusting ones.

Lust is the primary sin for fundamentalists. As a man passed 60, it seems to me that lust wears off along the way. Greed and advarice weren't big sins in my fundamentalist childhood--mostly because in my Pilgirm Holiness Church everyone was poor and powerless to the point they couldn't imagine 'greed', much less practice it. We were all just scraping along trying to control our lust. The males at any rate. I was never sure what sin the sisters were battling with.

My father was a Baptist and not a Fundamentalist. He always referred to himself as a 'hard-shell baptist', the meaning of which I don't understand though I should probably Google it. He didn't take to the Pilgrim Holiness faith of my mother's family. In fact, he would drop my mother and I off at the church in Conklintown, West Virginia and drive around the mountain roads for a while, arriving back in the cinder-block church's parking lot to read the Sunday paper from Bluefield and smoke cigarettes while we were inside battling with Satan.

One Sunday, Preacher Peck, our minister, got going in his sermon and referred to the heathen out in the parking lot smoking and reading the paper while the Chosen People were working up a sweat of no mean consequence battling with Satan. It was at that point that my mother (bless her heart) came and took me from my pew where I was scared literally shitless because I was such an odious little vermin, yet unsaved and certainly un-sactified, and took me out to whichever black Ford my father was driving at the time (he traded in his black Ford every three years and got another black Ford from the Ford dealer in Keystone after several hours of bickering, walking away and compromising) and told my father that we had to go home and find a new church.

We became Methodists, a cult I have always since contended 'can't hurt anyone' because it was the closest church to our home. There wasn't an Episcopal church within miles and miles of where I grew up, and had it been next to our home, we wouldn't have gone there. Moving from Fundamentalist to Methodist was on the level of moving from the John Birch Society to the ACLU--moving to the Episcopal Church would have meant becoming atheistic communists back where I grew up....

The deal with Fundamentalists of whatever ilk (Christian, Muslim, Right Wing Republicans) is this: the world you live in as a Fundamentalist is like all those great Jimmy Steward movies--black and white. What makes a Fundamentalist, in my mind--and there are liberal Democrat 'fundamentalists' as well as those folks who blow themselves up and kill people for Alla--is that the world isn't technicolor.

I knew a guy a few years ago who was color blind. That fascinated me. I'd always ask him what color my shirt was and if it was white or black (back when I used to wear clergy shirts) he would know that. But nothing else. I kept trying to trick him into recognizing blue or red, but he truly couldn't. I just couldn't imagine what the world looked like to him. Seeing in black and white is unthinkable to me. And that's what Fundamentalists do. It is black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, evil or holy, saved or lost, Christian or heathen.

My maternal Grandmother, God bless her soul, Lina Manona Sadler Jones, divided the world's people into two groups--'church people' (Fundamentalists) and everyone else. She had an insight into the meaning of 'gentile'. That was anyone who wasn't like her.

But my father's habit of staying well clear of the Pilgrim Holiness people and smoking cigarettes and drinking the whisky he kept in the coal house to keep my mother satisfied--it was him that brought out of Fundamentalism to the gentle, pot-luck dinner, sweet harmlessness of Methodism. God love him for that.

It made my next jump into the realm of the Prince of Darkness and Anglicanism possible.

I'll tell you about my baptism sometime soon--and how mountain Methodism wasn't so large a leap from Fundamentalists as you might think. But for now, one last word on Fundamentalism and a further last word about my father.

The horrible conflict within the so-called Anglican Communion since New Hampshire elected a gay bishop is about Fundamentalism. Most of the s0-called Anglican Communion aren't, in my mind, Anglican at all. Anglicanism, at its root is a reasonable and open and inclusive kind of Christianity--the faith of "all sorts and conditions" of humankind. Most of the people in the world and some of the people in the US who call themselves Anglicans are really Fundamentalists. They see the world in Black and White no matter how high their worship might be and how many bishops they have. That too I'll save for another time, just wanted to flag it now.

And my father...there is this, April 1 is his birthday. He was born in 1903 in Waiteville, West Virginia. Waiteville is in Monroe Country, bordering on Virginia and in sight of the Blue Ridge. He would be 106 today, but he isn't, he's dead. Yet I hold him in my heart this day in a remarkable way. His name was Virgil Hoyt Bradley--consider living with that moniker!

Virgil, my father, grew up on a farm where the cash crop was turkeys. His father, Filbert, and his brothers Russel and Adelbert and Sidney, lived daily with hundreds of turkeys. And never ate one of them. You don't eat the cash crop. In fact, they were told only stupid people in the city ate turkey--it was dry, tasteless and insipid. My father was a grown man when he first tasted turkey and didn't believe that wondrous meat could come from one of the thousands of stupid birds he had helped nurture. The cook at the boarding house where he was living in the coal fields of West Virginia had to take him into the kitchen and show him the carcass before he could acknowledge that turkey was tasty and he'd been lied to his whole life.

He was in the Army during WW II. He landed on Omaha Beach in the second wave and, stepping over and on fallen comrades, somehow made it to France and then Germany. He was in the Engineers. His job was to help build bridges over rivers so Patten could take his tanks across and then blow the bridges up since Patten had no plans to retreat.

Someday I'll write a blog called V.H.BRADLEY--ODE TO A COMMON MAN and tell you more about him.

Today I simply want to honor his birthday--April Fool's Day--how ironic. And tell you this: I love him more today than I ever did in all the 83 years of his life. In fact, I never loved him honorably while he lived. It is only in the life-time I've lived since he died that I have come to realize how lovable he was and how profoundly, unconditionally he loved me, his only child, without my returning that love in any meaningful way. I was, in my mind, an awful son to him--never anything dramatic--but it is in the ordinary ways that I did not honor his unrelenting love.

Happy Birthday, Daddy. Know this, wherever you are, I love you now in ways I could never have imagined when you were there to love. I cannot even begin to apologize for my lovelessness. I only hope you can realize--in ways I cannot comprehend--how dear you are to me now. And 'who I am' is a testament to your great love of me. I can only pray you would be proud of me...but then I know this: you were proud of me, even when I did not appreciate either your pride or your love.

I don't know if you can resonate with that, you who might read this. He loved me absolutely and that absolute love formed me though I did not, in his lifetime either acknowledge or return his devotion.

He used to tell me about the draft horses his family owned. They plowed the fields and carried him and his brothers over the mountain to get the mail from the county seat since his family delivered the mail to Waiteville. He told me, more than once, how he never appreciated those horses and how they waded through snow and pulled great loads and carried him safely across the mountain to Union over and again. I understand now. He was that draft horse that, without any appreciation or love, carried me through life and set me on the path to a place that I appreciate and respect and am eternally thankful for having reached. He did that for me. I only regret it took me all these years to fully realize how I am a product of his steadfast, reliable, constant concern and love.

Virgil Hoyt Bradley
1903--1986

I had grown a bit closer to him in his last years. I was with him in the hospital minutes before he died. I said to him, "Dad, I need to go home now." And he replied, "I'm going home too, real soon." I thought he was delusional, as he often was and drove across town to my home. When I came in, the phone was ringing to tell me he had died. Had a parishioner said "I'm going home", as many have, I would have known to stay. But he was my father and I didn't 'hear' him--as I seldom heard him over all those years. After I hung up the phone and before I drove back to sit with his body for a while, my daughter came to hug me. "You're an orphan now," she said.

And so I am.

Happy, happy birthday, Daddy.

I hope you can know how much I love you now....