I'm almost ready to take my taxes to the tax lady

Taxes, for 'ministers of the gospel' are a little odd, so I'm glad Jane is there since she's seen me through them for a bunch of years now.

Here's the oddest part of taxes for 'ministers of the gospel'. We are, by law, allowed to not declare any income that we can demonstrate went to the cost of housing. The history of this IRS allowance goes back to the point where it applied to ministers, school teachers and members of the armed forces. Over the decades the other two groups lost the exemption, but the Church, for all its flaws and warts, still is a mighty lobby in Congress. So it is still true.

So, if I can verify it, I don't have to declare any income for utilities, mortgage, repairs, improvements even toilet paper, if I have the receipts. AND, get this, I can still deduct my mortgage interest! Talk about 'double dipping'. Amazing. And, as Conkrite used to say, 'that's the way it is...."

Every penny I get paid by the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry is, on my W-2 form "housing". Not declared as income. And whatever beyond that is housing expenses I can deduct from my Church Pension Fund payments and not declare.

SS, of course, which both Bern and I get, is not taxed since the money I make working is 'housing' and not income though I make enough that if it were income I'd have to give $ back to SS. Go figure....

Here's the problem. We did some major stuff last year:
        new roof--$11,500
        paint house--$5,900
        new kitchen--$16,000

Add that $33,400 to the normal $24,000 in housing expenses and chances are, we'll pay no taxes this year and get a load of money back from both the Feds and the State.

My question for Jane is going to be this: can we spread this out a bit AND will this tax filing flag us for an audit?

I can pass the audit, it's just that I've been told it's a pain.

So, here's the thing: The Church Pension fund is a good reason to feel a call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church. We had more income this year than we ever had when I was working full time. Is that crazy?

And now my biggest worry is that I might be audited by the IRS. Is this life 'through the looking-glass or what?'

marriage equality

I took a poll on The Cheshire Patch website today but my response will never be counted since I declined to join said Cheshire Patch and receive updates about life in Cheshire each day. My life in "The Shire" is fine and I don't really need to know how it is for others in our town, which may seem a bit distant and withdrawn, but the reason I love Cheshire is that 'life in Cheshire' essentially has no peaks and valleys. It's just sort of peaceful and full of sameness.

The poll was asking about my opinion regarding marriage equality. I have, when you think about it, no particular wisdom on the subject but I do know that I define my life and who I am in a very few ways and one of them is being married to Bern. I just don't understand why the opportunity to define your life by your marriage and your spouse should be denied to anyone.

As a child and adolescent, I had a lesbian first cousin who was in a decades long committed relationship with another woman. They lived in Florida and both taught at the same High School. But they drove to work in separate cars and didn't socialize at school. They were faithful their whole adult lives to each other but had to keep that defining relationship of their lives secret. Maybe knowing Sarita and Eloise as I was growing up--they were always around at holidays and during the summer--seeped into me by psychological osmosis. I really loved them--they were so much more interesting and fun than most of the Bradley family.

What I  heard today from one of the lawyers for Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court about 'the purpose of marriage' was mindless and outrageous. He suggested the purpose of marriage was procreation. Justice Kegan got the biggest laugh of the day by saying people over 55 who were married weren't going to produce a lot of kids. Bern had her tubes tied when our daughter, Mimi was born. According to the logic of that argument, Bern and I had no business being married anymore since we would never produce off springs again. How ridiculous is that?

The kids of gay/lesbian relationships were on the heart of Justice Kennedy, who will probably be the vote that decides if the Supreme Court even addresses marriage equality on this go-around, commented that the children of same-sex relationships needed their parents to be legal and recognized. I never thought of that though I know a bunch of gay/lesbian couples who have children. In an era when so many children are born (as the old saying goes) 'without benefit of marriage', it just makes sense to provide the opportunity for as many as possible to have two parents. I never thought of that but it should be a position of the evangelicals who so object to children out of wedlock! How ironic would that be--the right-wing supporting same-sex marriage to make children 'legidimate'.

I'm the wrong one to ask. It just seems so unfair to keep people who want to be married from being married, period. I'm a great believer in marriage. Some of my colleagues in ministry used to call me "marryin' Sam" because I'd be a part of most any wedding since I thought if people wanted God somehow mixed up in their relationship, I ought to help them do that.

But that's just me, I guess. The winds of opinion have shifted greatly, but there are still many people who just don't get that love is love and commitment is commitment.

Gay and lesbian folks are often labeled promiscuous by straight folks. I wish I had kept count of how many straight men and women over the years of my ministry said to me: "if I WASN'T married" before telling me the affairs they would have had. I believe the vows of marriage have a "objective reality". Marriage, like other sacraments of the church, aren't simply 'symbols'.

Most Episcopalians who know me think I am hopelessly 'low church' since I went to Virginia Seminary and push informality to the limit. But the truth is, I truly, absolutely believe in the "objective reality" of the sacraments. Once, when St. John's in Waterbury was the site of the Downtown Co-operative ministry's Good Friday Service, an American Baptist was helping me give communion from the reserved sacrament (since Eucharist cannot be celebrated on Good Friday or Holy Saturday). I was administering the bread and he was passing the cup. I heard him say to someone at the altar rail, "this symbolizes the Blood of Christ". I went over to him and threatened to take the wine from him if he didn't tell the Truth as I believe it, "This IS the Blood of Christ".

The celebration and blessing of a marriage is a sacrament. It is (I know you know this....) The Outward and Visible Sign of an Inward and Spiritual TRUTH.

Sacraments matter ultimately to me. I've been a part of several same-sex marriages. Until this year, I was forbidden by the bishop of CT to hear the vows and pronounce the couple 'married'. I could 'bless' the union but not sign the marriage license. There had to be a JP or someone else who could sign the letters there. That's changed now with our new bishop. But I've not yet been involved in truly celebrating the sacrament--spiritual and legal--for a same sex couple.

I hope I get to do that sometime.

It will come. Marriage equality, love equality for gay/lesbian folks and straight folks will win the day at some point. And my granddaughter will not remember when that wasn't true. Perhaps not this time, though I hope and pray, but it is as inevitable as a tsunami. Just as it should be, I say.

Just as it should be....

pimento cheese

Pimento cheese was a food group where I grew up. I'd take pimento cheese sandwiches (along with potted meat sandwiches and fried Spam sandwiches) for lunch when I was in elementary school. I can eat it with a spoon (which I highly recommend!) And since we're good friends with the Ellis' in New Haven (Jack's from Roanoke, Virginia and Sherry is vaguely from North Carolina) I sometimes get the pimento cheese they make. "Very tasty," as Jack would say. "Not bad for food," Sherry would answer.

Then, a few weeks ago, perusing the hummus section of Stop and Shop, I happened up on containers of "Palmetto Cheese", the "pimento cheese with soul". It's from Pawley's Island, for goodness sake. "Real Cheese, Real Southern and Really Good" it says there on the container. The only mildly strange thing is that the label also says, with some pride "Wisconsin Cheese".

I mean, this stuff is great. There is a little heat and a little kick to the pimento cheese. There is another variety of Palmetto Cheese with jalapenos. I haven't tried that yet, but will.

So I brought it home so excited I opened it as I took it from the bag (which took me some time since I've reached a place where I can't seem to 'open' much of anything) and tried it on Saltines. Oh, my goodness! Heaven sent! I've since tried it on most pimento cheese delivery devices and it never ceases to amaze and delight.

He's what I haven't figured out: why didn't I know my wife, Bern, who I've been married to for almost 43 years and known since I was 17 and she was 14, loved pimento cheese almost as much, if not more, than I do?

I mean I'm an Appalachian, white-trash, potted meat and Spam eating guy. Bern is half Italian and half Hungarian--ethnic through and through. Where does pimento cheese enter into those two noble cuisines? I'd never seen her eat it before, not even each fall when we're in North Carolina and Sherry either makes some or we go to the Pimento Cheese section of Food Lion (they have about a dozen choices). Never once, in all these years, this life-time we've shared.

Who knew she liked pimento cheese?

Well, I can't seem to keep us in the stuff. She is a binge eater know to have consumed a whole bag of Twizzlers or Super-sized potato chips in a sitting. And her latest binge is pimento cheese....

So, whenever I'm interested in having a pimento cheese encounter, the container is almost empty.

I even bought 2 containers a week or so ago and put a B on one and a J on the other. Three days later, both were gone.

The problem with pimento cheese (and why I shouldn't have taken it in a sandwich to school) is refrigeration is strictly necessary. So, I can't hide my container in my sock drawer or anywhere.

There it sits, in the refrigerator that Bern opens as if she owned it, ignoring the J on the top of the container and--presto-changeo--pimento cheese is a memory.

She says she's cutting back but I noticed a bag of potato chips in the pantry--which is  her pimento cheese delivery system of choice--so I'm just not sure I can believe her.

Maybe I should bring home potted meat and Spam....Those, I'd bet you a lot, she's leave be....

Everrit Street Redux

When we were much younger, we lived for 4 years or so on Everit Street in New Haven. Josh was 10, Mimi was 7 and Bern and I...ah, we were so much older then, we're younger than that now...(Thanks Robert Zimmerman).

Anyway, the people next door had four children, the people across the street had 4 children, the people down the street on our side had 3 children and down the street on the other side had two. All of them were within 4 or 5 years of each other. The Vandals were at the gate. The children were running wild. They prowled the street like wolverines, racing in and out of all the yards and houses, eating enough food in each to feed a third world nation, having plays in the backyard, careening up and down the street, coloring the sidewalks with pastel chalk art work, making up games and they ran, wild and out of control.

And it was great. I hope all those kids remember those years as fondly as I do. The parents, for their part, made trips to the grocery store for apple juice and grapes and cheese and made trips to the package store for wine and beer, which we drank, talking to each other across back yards, listening to the whoops of the banshees that were our children.

I'm so happy we could give our kids Everit Street for a few years, living as we did on the corner with East Park Road that led up the hill to woods where our kids would wander until darkness fell on summer nights.

That was my childhood, only in a rural place, and Bern's as well. Running free--no soccer or softball, no dance classes or music lessons--just wild abandon, just freedom, just safety, just 'being children'....

We have new neighbors next door to the east. They  have at least 3 kids and to the west our neighbors have 4 and 2. And in these last few days, I've come to believe we're back on Everit Street, only Cornwall Avenue now, as those kids have begun, as a blessed warming has begun, to run riot between the three houses.

What a joy to hear their screams and laughter and sounds of mindless play. They do have soccer practice and softball games and lots of other things that are now de rigor for a suburb like Cheshire. But they do have a few hours to maraud in a tribe, back and forth between their homes.

I heard a woman on radio today who writes for The Atlantic, saying that the screens and pads and tablets that our granddaughters are so drawn to are just like the last obsessive toy they had and they will leave them behind and seek the freedom and chaos of simply being children. I so pray she is right.

My childhood was so free of structure and organization and adults thinking they knew what children needed that I wish that for every child. I know it isn't possible because that kind of childhood requires the assumption of safety and most children live on unsafe streets, in dangerous places far from the freedom of Everit Street and Cornwall Avenue and southern West Virginia.

I know for a fact that I hate for my life to be too structured or organized or compartmentalized. That's why I'm so good at being retired. When people ask me if I'm bored with retirement I look at them as if they were a squirrel or a snail that somehow learned to ask a question in English. I LOVE being retired. I have more than enough to do and the rest of the time I have 'nothing' to do and do, well, mostly 'nothing'. I'm not even sure I know what 'being bored' would look like. Hey, I'm an only child who never knew the distraction of siblings and grew up wandering the woods for untold hours, just learning to appreciate my own company and being perfectly content to be alone.

"Boredom" is a concept like "light speed" to me. I simply have no idea what it means.

I listen to the banshees of Cornwall Avenue in the late afternoon and remember the Vandals of Everit Street 25 or more years ago and the endless varieties of green of the mountains where I grew up and spent those endless summer days.

I take a deep breath and remember all that and ponder how wondrous childhood should be...and seldom is....

Petie

My aunt Georgia (we called her 'Georgie') was my mother's younger sister. Her husband, Jim, got 'shell shocked' in the Pacific during WWII. Today we would call it Traumatic Stress Syndrome and would, hopefully, have helped him reintegrate into civilian life. But Jim didn't. He had spells of amnesia and once was missing for a long time, turning up in San Diego, if I remember correctly. He had been in the Navy so that would make sense, that in his not-knowing-who-he was he would have found himself in a place where the Navy congregates.

Anyway, he spent most of the rest of his life in various veterans hospitals in WV and Virginia. I saw him occasionally when he was out of the V.A. system and remember visiting him in Radford once. He always called me 'Skeezics' for reasons I never understood nor questioned. Maybe he just couldn't remember my name, for all I know. But I liked him a lot. He was my favorite uncle on my mother's side, probably because he wasn't so terribly ordinary as the others. There was an edge to Uncle Jim that I enjoyed as a child. He taught me to shoot a rifle once up in an old corn field in late Autumn. Perhaps my parents should have been outraged that I was shooting a gun with a man who had spent time in mental hospitals. But we just shot at cans and bottles and since there were always gun shots around where I grew up, nobody thought anything about it. He was my uncle, after all.

Georgie was named, the family lore goes, after the doctor who delivered her, whose name was George. But my grandparents turned it into 'Georgia' from George. I guess it's lucky the doctor's name wasn't Stanislav or something like that. My maternal grandparents had some issues, it seems to me, coming up with names for their children. There was Juanette, Elsie, Cleo, Craham, Leon and Ernest (both died in adolescence) and, of course, "Georgia". You got to admit there aren't many Marys or Sues or Bobs or Richards in there.

Georgie and Jim were the parents of my two favorite first cousins: Mejol and Bradley Perkins. Mejol, again lore and legend, was named after a Native American character in a book my Aunt Georgie was reading while pregnant. I don't know about that, but I've never met another Mejol. Bradley, so the story goes, was supposedly named after my father, his uncle but my father's given name was 'Virgil Hoyt' so the last name had to do. (My youngest granddaughter is Tegan 'Hoyt', which gives me great joy....)

Any way, Mejol was always around, went on vacations with my parents and me to the Great Smokey Mountains. She once locked me in her bedroom with a copy of Catcher in the Rye  with an album by Bob Dylan ("Highway 61 Revisited", I think) on her record player. When I came out of that room, I was a different person and my life has never been the same since--only better than I imagined it could be.

But enough of all that. This is about Petie, Aunt Georgie's parakeet who could talk like a three year old child. "Pete's a pretty bird" was just the beginning. In his life with Aunt Georgie, he picked up lots of words and phrases, my favorite being "Aw Shit!" which he would say at the least suggestion that he should.

Petie lived in Aunt Georgie's trailer and was sometimes in a cage. He would sit on you finger, your shoulder, your head and talk you to death. Of course, I always encouraged "Aw Shit!" and Pete was  happy to oblige.

I've been thinking about people in my family a lot lately. I have only my nuclear family in my life (though do, from time to time, see Mejol and her two children and her grandchildren in Baltimore when we are there visiting Josh and Cathy and the girls)--my two kids and three granddaughters. When I grew up I was awash in family--almost a dozen aunts and uncles and the youngest of 15 first cousins until my cousin Denise was adopted by my Uncle Harvey and Aunt Elsie Ours when I was a teen.

Maybe it's the antibiotics I'm on (which are powerful, I can tell you from how they make me feel) but I've been lonely for family the last few days. Georgie was a wondrous aunt, a bit out-of-sync with the evangelical Christian ethos of our family. She smoked and had a drink from time to time, for goodness sake! That was my mother's family. My father's family were defined by tobacco, much of it chewed and alcohol, but, mostly, in moderation. I've been dwelling in those days when 'family' was a tsunami that ran over me again and again.

I think I'll call my kids tonight and just check in. And, if they're interested, tell them about Pete the Parakeet who could say "Aw, Shit!" on cue....

it's not over, not by half....

When I was a child in McDowell County, West Virginia, half a century ago, all the black adults in Anawalt (and it was about 50/50 Black/White) called me "Mr. Jimmy". I swear to God that was true. People older than my parents called me "Mr. Jimmy" and I called them by their first names: "Gene and Lauretha and Marcus and Richard and Flo." As a kid, I called a 60 year old woman who worked for my Uncle Russell and Aunt Gladys, "Flo". And she called me, 13 or so at the time, "Mr. Jimmy."

It makes me want to puke. It was just the way it was but I should have realized a lot sooner than I did that it was wrong. Dead wrong. Damn wrong.

So, fast forward to today. Our President is Black. Most of the most wealthy entertainers and professional athletes are Black. Black is beautiful, right? "I want to be like Mike," (meaning Jordan) is the rule, not the exception.

Integration has worked, right?

When I was in college at WVU, I became friends with the first black friend I ever had. Truth was, Ron grew up 8 miles from me and we went to high school about 1/4 mile apart. But we never met. When Ron would introduce me to other black folks, he would say, "Jim and I went to separate high schools together." I thought we were on the cusp of something wondrous and magic. The culture was going to be ONE, finally.

And then I was the priest of an almost all-black church in Charleston, West Virginia. Ron's sister and brother and law and niece were members there. We were all middle-class and college educated. This was the wave we'd be waiting to break over us all. Right?

Today I talked to a young white man who has begun his practice teaching in an urban middle school in a major metropolitan area. The school is almost 100% Black and any relationship to Dodd Middle School in Cheshire is purely coincidental. Dodd is a great school, 99% white and Asian. My friend's school, he told me, in a nightmare. He said he'd been called "white boy" by dozens of students when, in his mind, being 'white', wasn't anything of interest.

Discipline and learning in his school is all but non-existent. Hope isn't even in the equation. Most of the teachers have given up and are just going through the motions. He was very depressed, though he had decided to resist depression and give it his all.

Republican state legislatures around the country are being creative in how to deny the vote to Black and Hispanic folks. Nobody--not our Black President or anyone else--talks about the poverty gap or the racial inequality these days.

I notice that most of the drivers pulled over in Cheshire, where I live, by the police, are people of color.

Where is Lyndon Johnson when we need him?

Why is no one talking about the racial divide that colors our culture? What happened to Martin Luther King's dream?

Does anyone care? That's the question that haunts me--does anyone care?

Pneumonia Winter...

My grandmother, bless her heart, used to tell me about the 'old days' when things were harder than I knew, harder than I could imagine.

One of the things she told me--my mother's mother, Lina Manona Sadler Jones--was about what she called "Pneumonia Winter". What she meant was the few warm days, late in winter, that were promises of days to come but were ephemeral, passing, and the cold would return. In February or March there would be almost a week of spring like weather and the old folks would think it was real and stop dressing warmly and generally act foolish and spring-like. And a few of them would catch pneumonia and die, back there in her childhood when antibiotics were not yet a reality.

Pneumonia, she would tell me, was God's way of culling the herd, of taking away the weakest and least fit and sending them home so when Spring really came, only those truly able to embrace it would be around to lean into the warmth.

One might think that a Grandmother shouldn't put such thoughts in a young boy's mind. Young boys, people might think, should be sheltered from the world and reality and have everything given to them sanitized and soft. But that wasn't Grammaw's way. "Reality", to 'Nonie', which is what people who weren't related called her, was simply that: reality and a young boy should learn about the world he lived in with open eyes.

I'm in my 60's. My grandmother was probably nearly that when she told me about 'pneumonia winter'. So, that's going back a century or so, to her girlhood in a time harsher than I have known or could imagine. To her--a Christian woman of the first order--Nature had it's ways to clear away the excess and make way for the New. People simply got sick and died from Pneumonia in those long ago days. It was natural and, in Nature's way, simply right.

Earlier this month there was almost a week of warm weather in March. I was delighted! The winter had grown old on me and I longed to lean into Spring. So, I didn't dress warmly those few days and generally acted foolish about the false Spring.

So, yesterday, I learned I have pneumonia. What used to be called 'walking pneumonia' since I don't need to take to my bed but walking up a flight of stairs reminds me to breathe. Unlike the old folks of my grandmother's childhood, their are antibiotics aplenty (perhaps too many) in my day, so I won't be culled from the herd. I'll be better each day until I'm well again.

But it reminded me of her. It really did. She is so long ago in my life that I don't do her the honor of memory enough. But 'pneumonia winter' brought her back near to me. I can almost hear her laugh and feel her arms around me, telling me 'it will be alright....'

So, for me, in pneumonia winter I will get the stuff together for our taxes and take it to the woman who puts it all together and sends it in.

One other thing my Mammaw used to say is this, "God will slow you down when you need to be slowed down."

Not bad wisdom. So, I'll rest up, take the antibiotic and get my taxes together....

Thanks, Mammaw. In spite of the impetus, being with you in my memory the last few days has meant the world to me. You were the best. I couldn't have asked for more....