big ol' tree

There is a huge horse chestnut tree in our front yard. Actually, it's on the property line between us and Bernie, who spends most of the year in Boca Raton. When it falls, as it surely will someday, it will most likely hit Bernie's house rather than ours. Most likely it should be cut down before it falls down in a storm, for everyone's sake. But it would cost a mint--Bernie could do it out of pocket change but we'd have to mortgage the dog.

Besides, it is a noble old tree and still gets leaves and still drops chestnuts--which, if you could eat them would be neat....but you can't. I've tried and rue the day....

There is something haunted house about it when it finishes dropping nuts and loses its leaves. It is about 100 feet high, I estimate, and, like chestnut trees are want, very spread out.

The nuts make Bern's hand push mower crazy and drop on cars going down Cornwall. But there you are. I really like it....besides, if my estimates are right, it is tilted toward Bernie's house and he's gone a lot and has insurance....That's not a nice attitude, I think, but so it goes....

another day in paradise

So, here I am on Oak Island, North Carolina. It is a south facing beach and staring out at the Atlantic, the sun is setting brilliantly on my right. It is high tide and the beach is only about 10 yards wide. At low tide it is about 40 yards and you can walk about another 100 yards and not be in water higher than your waist.

The wind is blowing hard off the water. I'm in a house with some of the people I love most in the world. What could be the problem?

Nothing really.

Yesterday was our 40th Anniversary--Bern and me--and we went to a great restaurant in Southport--Mr B's Bistro. Astonishingly good sea food. Mimi and Tim and Sherrie paid. John drove. It is a wonderful quartet for us to share that round number anniversary with.

We eat like fools. Drink a bit. Sit on the breeze way, out of the sun, or on the deck or on the rooftop deck and read and read and read. Consuming syllables like nectar of the gods....which words are.

Pelicans sweep by in formation, crashing into the ocean for food. Way out a container ship has sat all day, waiting, I suppose, for news from Wilmington that the berth is ready. Who knows....

How soft and lovely it all is.....

Into the eye of the storm

Last year we left the beach on Oak Island a day early since a hurricane was coming. It chased us up I-95 for hundreds of miles.

This year, It looks like we'll be driving through Earl (what a dumb name for a hurricane--of course, naming hurricanes is dumb in and of itself) to get there.

You really can't mess with Mother Nature, you know....

more than you want to know...really....

Someone emailed and asked why I've been neglecting my web.

The truth is, the last week has been a blur of pain, discomfort and narcotic relief.

The faint of heart should stop reading now!!!

Last Wed, unbeknownst to me, the urinary tract infection I didn't know I had blocked my (how to put this politely?) well...urinary tract.

Bern took me to the hospital where they discovered the infection and put in a Foley tube to relieve me. The tube didn't work and by the time we drove back home I told Bern I needed to go back.

It was on the second visit that I heard six of the most terrifying words I've ever heard: "You need a larger tube...." After misadventures galore, it was finally in place and we came home about 2 am.

By 5:30 I called an ambulance. I wasn't coming home this time until they fixed it. After about 35 minutes of savagery, they finally gave me an IV and a shot of some of the nicest stuff I've ever met and decided to wait for the urologist on call.

I got another IV hit of that wonderful stuff (I'm glad I don't remember what it was since I would probably be tempted to steal some) before the urologist arrived. He looked for all the world like Kurt Vonnegut and put in a tube with three separate openings in the end with a simple twist. I told him he was good at it and he said, "I do this for a living, afterall."

He sent me to the floor and they hung two bags about 3 liters each above my bed and started them running inwards to where liquid usually doesn't come from in that direction. So the rest of Thursday and Thursday night I absorbed enough saline to flood the lowlands and got several pills that we're as good as the injected stuff but good enough. The nurses on the floor were amazing--Florence Nightengales on each shift--but the urologist who came to check me out Friday afternoon (Kurt Vonnegut having left for the weekend) decided not to remove the tubes until after the weekend to give the antibiotics time to do their wonders.

I tried to protest but all he had to say is, "If I take it out now and you don't do well you have to come back through the ER."

Come Monday the infernal internal plumbing was removed and after nearly blacking out the first time two times I did what the tube had been doing, it settled down a bit. They had given me Oxycontin to take home. (I call it "hillbilly heroine" since people in Appalachia crush their grandmother's prescription up and inject it--a real problem in the mountains.)

All was almost well.

(I once visited a sometimes member of the parish in the hospital after surgery and asked when he could go home. "As soon as Mr. Poopy comes" he told me.

An elderly, distinguished man, waiting for 'Mr. Poopy". Which I had to do until today....)

Well, I warned you to stop but there you have it--why I haven't been writing on my blog....Just in case you wondered....

Rainmaker

Here's something I've noticed this week--any time I start to take the dog out, it starts raining, sometimes violently. So, I've been thinking, maybe I could hire myself out in drought plagued places and Bela and I could make it rain. I told Bern, thinking it was a good idea.

Bern told me it was ready to rain almost at any moment this week and the dog and I had nothing to do with it.

Another idea was to get advertisers to hire me to tell them if their commercials were a. lame,
b. misleading or c. trying to sell something people don't really need.

I shared this idea with Bern but she allowed that advertisers are, in no particular order, a. trying to distract you with something lame b. misleading or c. sell you something you don't really need.

So two ideas for my next career bottomed out in the same day.

There's always tomorrow.

That old unfamiliar feeling

Yesterday I went to the Open House at UConn/Wby for the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI). The place was packed and the joint was jumping. The director of the program said that this year the number of students at OLLI might surpass the number of regular students at the branch. I'm teaching a 4 session class in Oct. on the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. The told me the class was closed---fully enrolled and asked if I would allow 5 more. I did and then asked for 2 more spaces for two friends who had been too late.

During the day walking around, listening to a fascinating physics lecture, talking with people, explaining what we'd be doing in the class, I got that old 'unfamiliar' feeling that receded deep inside me decades ago. I got in touch with what was my goal and passion in my 20's--to teach. I was going to go to either the U. of Virginia and get a Ph.D. in American Literature or go to Iowa's writers' workshop after my BA. Either way I would have gone I would have ended up spending my life in college classrooms. That was what I wanted to do with all my heart...

But there were two problems: one was a war in SE Asia and my draft # was something like 14! and I had applied, just to get my two favorite professors off my back about it, for a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a Trial Year in Seminary. I kept telling the people from the Foundation that I didn't want to go to seminary and they keep smiling and saying, that makes you perfect! They annoyed me so much I accepted it when offered--one year at Harvard (I didn't even apply--Rockefeller $ opened many doors...) and then back to my game plan...back to teaching young minds for the rest of my life, trying to ignite them with the love of words.


The second day I was in Cambridge, I got drafted. The letter really begins, "Greetings". After a lot of time on the phone with my college chaplain and then the Bishop of WV, I was a 'postulant for holy orders' and my draft notice was rescinded. Those were the days when Episcopal bishops could boss draft boards around! If I had gone to UVA or Iowa I would have been in the Army or in Canada. So, I took it as a sign that I should give theology a whirl. And several years later I was visited by an Archangel and became ordained. The rest is what my life has been.

But yesterday the smell of chalk--actually I didn't see any chalk--white boards and markers and big screens around the room have done away with black boards--so, it was walking around that building, seeing those classrooms and those active, older minds longing to be ignited that made me nostalgic for the boy I was at 21. "Professor Bradley", I thought it would be, not "Father Bradley". I don't regret in any way the direction I went...but it was exciting and inspiring to rediscover that old unfamiliar feeling. "Gladly would I learn and gladly teach...."

on the road

I'm hard pressed not to think the economy is doing better than is reported after driving to Baltimore on Friday and back on Sunday. There was scarcely anywhere to park in any of the stops on the New Jersey Turnpike, Delaware Turnpike and I-95 in Maryland. Every time we stopped--and we stopped more than usual because I have been hydrating so much that I have to plan ahead for rest stops. 3 times down, 4 times back--7 different stops and the same mobs at all of them. Long lines for Starbucks and in some cases, the women's bathroom. People buying $3 bottles of water like water was going to disappear somewhere in New Jersey. The traffic wasn't terrible but the traffic reports were. On the way down Radio 880 kept saying the GW bridge was a minimal wait. We spent an hour getting across the Bronx and Manhattan. On the way back there was supposedly a 40 minute wait on the upper level and we took less than 10 minutes. Go figure.

The Delaware River Bridge has a message board above the 4 or 5 lanes in both directions that says--has said every time I crossed it--"IN CRISIS...CALL..and then a #". Bern thinks its for people who have anxiety about crossing bridges (since she does) and I thought it was to convince people not to pull their car over and jump (though I don't really think about jumping off high places...well, I do....). Most likely it is for people in these edgy time who are having trouble getting through the day, but making a cell phone call on the Delaware River Bridge seems risky at best.

It's truly amazing to me that there aren't 3 or 4 pileups every 50 miles on I 95. thousands of people, in heavy traffic, going 80+. Don't tell me human beings don't have really good fine motor skills. And a lot of luck.

We visited Josh and Cathy--well, actually Cathy and the girls (our 3 granddaughters) because Josh was in Peurto Rico for a bachelor's party. Then, in a couple of weeks, all 5 of them are flying to Germany for 4 days for a wedding. These wedding rituals are out of hand, it seems to me. My best man, Dan Kiger and my father had a couple of beers sitting at my parents' kitchen table the night before my wedding. And the reception had cake and punch--and liquor for Bern's family and a few of mine in the basement of the Gary Country Club. That was it. And that was 21 days short of 40 years ago. Bern and I started dating when I was a Senior and she was a Freshman in High School. We've known each other for 45 years. I'm not sure what the strain of a 3 day bachelor's party on an island or a wedding in a European Union country would have done.

It reminds me of Roger Rose, who I saw at a 10 year high school reunion. He said, "those were the best years of our lives, weren't they?" I replied, "Lord, I hope not!"

I noticed over the years the expanding tendency of 'front loading' the wedding process to such an extent that many people get divorced still owing money on the reception.

Lord, I'm becoming my father, complaining about how things have changed....