Arlene

Today I was part of the funeral and burial of Arlene--someone I never met and yet know very well and who was a gift to me in a profound way.

It started like this: my friend, Maggie, who I know because we both do work for the Mastery Foundation, called me, oh, I think it was six months ago though linear time is not my strong suite. She called with what at the time seemed like a strange request though it turned out to be a gift I never deserved (though who among us deserves the gifts life sends us?)

Maggie's cousin, Arlene, was terminally ill. And I think what Maggie wanted was for someone who was 'spiritual' (though that hardly applies to me) to be in Arlene's life as she moved toward 'that good night'. There were a couple of calls from Maggie and I emailed her something about a story of a young monk who was telling his superior that he was having difficulty meditating because people kept showing up in his life that took his attention. And the Prior told the young monk, "whenever people show up when I'm trying to be contemplative, I always say, 'Jesus Christ, are you here again?'"

Something like that. But any way, since I couldn't say 'no' to Maggie ever, I called Arlene.

The first call was really strange, "Hi,", I said, "you don't know me but Maggie sent me to be your....I don't know what...."

Arlene laughed. And her laugh hooked me.

I talked to her on the phone a more than a dozen times over those months, for hours and hours, and it was always her laughter that hooked me. Arlene, this woman who had battled cancer for 12 years, found something worth laughing about most of the time we were talking. And though I knew from Maggie that Arlene was in pain and losing weight and in hospice care in her home, she was gracious and lovely and positive and oh, so humorous all the time.

We never got around to 'serious spiritual stuff' (what I call 'sss'). And every conversation was full of life and wonder and hope--and if that isn't 'spiritual' I don't know what is.

I never got up to where she lived--somewhere in a part of upstate New York that was as familiar to me as Bulgaria. It would have been a nearly 4 hour drive and she always talked me out it coming to see her--mostly because, I think, she never wanted people to make a fuss about her. But I'm almost glad that we only knew each other on the phone. There was an open casket at the funeral and I realized Arlene didn't look anything like I had imagined her. She was gaunt to a fault--most likely because of the struggle with her disease--and had reddish hair. I had imagined her as a bit over-weight and perky and twinkle eyed and having gray hair. I'm sort of glad that the healthy and vital person of our phone conversations remained the image of her that I had. There were pictures of her around the funeral home and she had been beautiful in her youth, but I'm somehow glad I 'knew' her as the way she sounded--full of life and joy and irony and humor--instead of seeing her in the last stages of her disease.

For me, Arlene was always vital and optimistic and so fully alive. The shell that was her body in that casket wasn't the woman I knew and learned to love. I'll keep my image of her as 'being Arlene' rather than the image of her corpse.

(That's probably why I don't like open coffins at wakes and funerals. I think people should remember people who have died as 'alive'. That's why I've arranged for a funeral director friend to use a flame thrower to cremate me where I fall....Don't look at my dead body, remember me as alive and ironic and a bit crazy....OK?)

Anyway, the funeral was in a place called Haverstraw, up Route 9 across the Tappen Zee bridge, far enough north to have 'real' mountains and the Hudson River being the Hudson River. And one of Arlene's step-sons (I think, I never got the relations down very well) and a friend who had known her since they were in grade school and two of her granddaughters--one very beautiful and the other beautifully boyish--spoke along with Michael, Maggie's husband, reading an email from Maggie, who was in Europe with their daughter. And nothing any of them said did anything but reinforce the Arlene I knew but had never met. Wondrous, full of humor, never complaining, ALIVE, just like that, ALIVE....

Maggie had called me wondering if she should leave the country with Arlene so near to death. I told her what her cousin told her the last time Maggie saw Arlene, "go have some fun" and then she hit her on the shoulder with her frail fist.

Michael seemed to be sending Maggie the service. His smart phone was on a chair in the front row of the funeral home chapel and leaned against the tombstone next to Arlene's grave. I never understand social media stuff, but I did talk to Maggie as the hearse driver was about to take me back to the funeral home from the steep slope where Arlene will spend time (overlooking the Hudson, quite a view). She was still beating herself up a bit for not being there, but that's just crazy. She should have been with her daughter, absolutely, even Arlene told her so, with a punch to her arm.

Here's the thing, you just never know what life will hand you and there is never enough thanksgiving to give for the gifts. Arlene became a part of my life. I've told lots of people about her and half a dozen or more of the folks at the funeral told me she had told them about me.

Someone you never met, face to face, can bring wonder and grace and beauty and great good humor into your life, over a cell phone over six months or so.

What a gift that seemingly crazy invitation Maggie gave me to call her dying cousin turned out to be. I love Arlene. It was a joy and privilege and humbling experience it was to count her as a friend, never met, and to be a part of her 'leaving'.

I once counted up the funerals I had been a part of. It was close to a thousand. Imagine that, being a part of the 'leaving' and walking them to their graves....almost a thousand people. What a humbling honor and privilege.

And this one really mattered in a way I still do not understand.

Often in life, when I'm trying to do something else that I think is important, I find myself saying, "Jesus Christ, is it you again?"

Thank you Maggie. Thank you Arlene. Thank you God. Thank you Life....really....

flies and my finger tip....

Do you remember Nancy and Sluggo?

If you don't then you're too young to understand 'Truth, Justice and the American Way...."

Nancy and Sluggo were the characters in a comic strip. One I remember after all these years has Sluggo telling Nancy why he loves winter: "No hot days, no sweating, no mosquitoes or gnats or flies..."

Then snow falls out of a tree and covers Sluggo and Nancy says, ...."no Sluggo...."

I do hate flies.

I kill six or seven a day and Bern does as well....

Then I almost cut the tip of my ring finger off on the lid of a pull off can of artichoke hearts. I hate pull off tops and am always afraid I'm going to cut myself. I was holding the can in my left hand and pulling the little pull tab with my right hand and suddenly the can was open and I was bleeding all over the counter top and in the sink and on the floor.

I could tell from the copious blood that it was a bad cut but I couldn't stop the bleeding to see how bad it was. So Bern gave me a bag of ice and I pressed it against the cut and wrapped it in a kitchen towel and she drove me to urgent care about five minutes away.

I know all about finger cuts since two thanksgivings ago I started to open a drawer to get a spoon and the antique glass knob shattered and cut my right index finger so badly I need  stitches and only now can bend it fully. That day my friend John and my daughter Mimi took me to the Mid-state emergency room and it took an hour and a half and Mimi kept taking pictures of the stitching on her phone and sending them to Tim to show Bern and Hanne, who were at home waiting for dinner.

This time Bern took me and couldn't stay in the room because she has this thing with blood, but I got four stitches and we were home in 40 minutes.

(Bern's blood thing looks like this: once Mimi who was 2 1/2 cut her head in our house in New Haven and it bled like all forehead wounds do, so Josh, 5 1/2, called me at the church and said, "Mimi is dying!"

The church was next door and when I got there in a few minutes, Josh was still screaming about his sister's demise, Bern had a dish towel over the cut and told me to press hard, then she fainted dead away, luckily she was sitting on the floor and hadn't far to fall. Then Josh started screaming, "Mommy is dying!".... Bern's 'blood thing' is like that....)

The ring finger types the letters: swq2 and x and any time I've had to type 'w' it's come out w3e or something like that so to write this I've done lots of deleting and backspacing....Just want you to realize how hard I've had to work--with a bum finger and all.....

my huge, absolutely fabulous, wonderous day....

So, last night, it pains me to tell you, I spilled about a half glass of white wine (Pinot Grigio) on my computer keyboard. Let it be said, it was the first glass of the night and the glass was cold and slick and all that....Really....

But then when I tried to pull up the text of the sermon for today, suddenly 80 different documents showed up on my screen. When I finally got them all back in the document library, I tried to google my blog to write about how weird that was, I typed "blogspot" and it came out 'Ux23sok" on the google line.

The advice I've always gotten about how to fix glitches in a computer is to unplug it and plug it in again. So I did. And then turned it back on and got to my password and typed in the 9 characters of my password and what showed up in the password space was '***********************', more than twice the number of things I typed.

So I called my friend John, who does my computer stuff for me and didn't hear back and decided that  my keyboard must be fried. Still not hearing from John today, I took my keyboard to Staples and asked if they could tell me if it were fried or not. But they couldn't tell me because I hadn't brought some thing-a-majig I didn't even know existed that was plugged into my computer somewhere I didn't realize was there that made the wireless keyboard work. So I mentioned the thing about trying to bring up a document and was told (much to my surprise) that a keyboard and a mouse live in the same universe and if one is fried, they both are.

So I bought a keyboard and mouse and thing-a-majig made by Microsoft (since there is no billionaire I'd rather give my money to than Bill Gates who does so much good through his Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

Then I got home and almost broke down in tears because I had no idea how to do anything at all about a computer beyond turning it on, clicking and typing.

But I put the AAA batteries in the keyboard and the AA batteries in the mouse (though I put the ones in the keyboard in wrong which I realized when the dam thing wouldn't work)--the fact that Microsoft has batteries included makes me love Bill and Melinda even more....

Then I traced the old mouse back through the tangle of wires John has on my computer and found the little plug in hickey (I still don't know it's name) and unplugged that one and plugged in the new one and lo and behold, here I am typing again (after the keyboard battery thing, of course)!

It is a fabulous experience for me to actually fix something about my computer without John's help! I love John like a brother and appreciate all he does for me but sometimes I feel like I'm always standing in front of him with a pitiful look on my face, holding up my empty bowl and saying, 'more gruel please....

I did it myself! Holy Cow, I MIGHT HAVE SOME MODICUM OF COMPETENCE AFTER ALL....

Or maybe not. Maybe it was just dumb luck.

But it feels real good (as modest as it may seem) to me....Fabulous in fact....

That calls for a glass of white wine....just not near the keyboard this time....

Going to the Country...

 (It's an occupational hazard, when you're a priest, that people think you know what happens when we die. I have no idea. Some things I leave to God and that's one of them. But I did write this once and it comes as close as anything to my imaginings of an after-life....)

Going to the Country

My father had a compulsion about ‘leaving early’ that bordered on a mental illness. And that never showed itself with such clarity as when we went to ‘the country’. Truth is, where we lived was ‘country’—extremely rural. I grew up in a town with less than 500 residents and McDowell County was about 1/3 the size of Rhode Island and had some 68,000 citizens when I was growing up—nearer 25,000 now, which makes it a ‘ghost county’ rather than merely ‘rural’. Nevertheless, we called Monroe County, where my father grew up, ‘the country’ and when we went there we had to leave an hour or two before dawn.

When I was smaller, he would take me from my bed and put me in the backseat of whatever Ford he owned at the time and we’d stop somewhere along the two hour drive for me to put on the clothes my mother had brought for me. Later, he would simply wake me up at 4 a.m. and tell me “it’s time to go to the country.” We went once or twice a month, leaving before dawn on Saturday and coming back in the early afternoon of Sunday. I have hazy and dream filled memories of those early morning trips. We’d arrive before 6 a.m. at the house where my father lived as a boy and be greeted by my Grandmother Bradley—her name was Clieve, pronounced ClE-vE, which, if were short for anything I never learned what. I was a teen-ager when I realized that Clieve wasn’t truly my grandmother—she was my step-grandmother, the wife of my grandfather in his later life, after my father’s mother had died. But that wasn’t simply an oversight—not knowing our actual relationship—it was the way the Bradley side of my family operated. I grew up calling lots of Bradley relations “aunt” or “uncle” only to realize when I was older that they weren’t aunts or uncles at all. This for example: Aunt Ursa and Aunt Denie (Geraldine) were the children of “Aunt Annie” and “Uncle Buford”, who were, in truth, my father’s Aunt and Uncle. That made Ursa and Geraldine my second cousins! Such misrepresentation would have never happened on the Jones side of my family. The Jones’ were very precise about relationships—“your third cousin by marriage”, like that. The Bradley’s were less formal and anybody you were related to might be called “aunt” or “uncle”—it just didn’t matter as much to them. My actual first cousin Greg Bradley (well, actually, actually my double-cousin, according to the Jones’, since his mother was my mother’s first cousin and his father was my father’s brother…but the Jones clan kept score relentlessly) tried to put together a genealogy for the Bradley family but kept running into trouble since no one seemed to know the exact relationship of relatives!

Uncle Ezra is a good example. I called him Uncle Ezra all my life but as close as I can get to figuring out how we were related was this: Ezra was the first cousin of Filbert, my grandfather, and Annie, my father’s aunt. That means that ‘Uncle’ Ezra’s mother was the daughter of my great-grand mother’s sister. So, if I can do the math, that would make him my third cousin, once removed, whatever the hell that means! I need a Jones relative to help me sort it out. All I know is that he was Uncle Ezra to me.

Ezra was a tiny man married to ‘Aunt Clovis’ (actually my third cousin, once removed, by marriage—go ponder that!) who was a woman of substance, which means, in Bradley Family Speak, she was a big, big woman. The last time I saw Ezra on this side of the mysterious door of death, his eyes looked into my chin. I was only 14 or so and about 5’7” tall (I reached my full growth at 15 which explains why I was a star on my junior high basketball team and didn’t make the cut in high school). I suppose, just guessing, Ezra was 5’4” or so and probably weighed 115 pounds. At 14, when Clovis hugged her ‘nephew’, my face was pressed against her ample breasts. So, she might have been 5’10 and weighed, let’s be Bradley nice now…220 pounds. Jack Sprat and his wife, for sure—that was Uncle Ezra and Aunt Clovis.

Ezra’s stature was fertile ground for jokes his whole life. One story I was told a hundred and one times over the years was about the night Uncle Ezra got saved. It seems he had gone to a revival meeting and felt his heart convicted to give his life to Jesus. He’d gone up to kneel at the rail and when the out-of-town revivalist came by to pray with him, that preacher said, “God bless the little boys….” Well, as it turned out, Ezra was 22 years old and long since fully grown. After the service some of the local young men gathered around Ezra and started saying, over and over: “God bless the little boys….”

As the apocryphal family story goes, Ezra, who was little but not meek, hitched up his pants and told the crowd around him, “I’d rather be a little fellow like me and go to heaven than great big sons-of-bitches like you and go to hell.” Well spoken, Uncle Ezra, well said….

Uncle Ezra, like most of the Bradley side of my family, was a man not unacquainted with strong drink. Whenever we visited my father and Uncle Russell would disappear with Ezra into the barn of his farm while I was being loved up and fed sweets by Aunt Clovis. When they returned, a half-an-hour later or so, they were flushed and glassy eyed and full of salt and vinegar. Aunt Clovis would shake her head and say, either to me or the cosmos, “Men have to drink, but not in my house….” Most of the men on the Bradley side of my family, all of whom liked a drink or two, seemed inevitably to marry women who didn’t approve of alcohol. My Uncle Sid was the exception that proved the rule. He and my Aunt Callie (who was both my aunt and my second cousin—go figure my family!) both liked a taste….God bless them.

When Ezra died (since I’m still on him and will get back to Grandmother Clieve soon) I was 15 or so. He died in February of one of the winters of my life. His funeral was in the Union Church (Baptist 1^st and 3^rd Sundays, Methodist 2^nd and 4^th) in Waiteville. The preacher took a great deal of time preaching Uncle Ezra’s funeral since the young men hand digging the grave were having a hard time. They’d started two days before but the ground was so frozen and it was so cold to dig that they kept having to pause for coffee and a drink of bourbon, just to warm them up. But after a dozen or so pauses those first two days, they were too drunk to dig. One of them kept coming in to whisper to the preacher that the grave wasn’t quite deep enough yet, so the sermon got longer and longer. Finally, after we’d been there for almost three hours, one of the grave diggers stumbled up the aisle and said, in slurred speech, “da hol is ready, preeecher,”

So Ezra joined the scores of those sleeping in that little country cemetery. Many of them are somehow related to me. I remember on one Memorial day, wandering through the graveyard, coming upon two worn tombstones with my name on them: James Gordon Bradley. The sky was white, as in often is in those climes, and I felt dizzy for a while. It was my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. I hadn’t realized I had a ‘family name’ since it skipped two generations. My grandfather was Filbert and my father was Virgil—good time to go back to what worked in the past!

Most Memorial Days, my crazy ‘Aunt Arbana’, who I never saw because she was crazy and a recluse (and Lord knows what my true relationship with her was—she was probably a fifth cousin once removed or something) would come over before anyone else got there and put little Confederate flags on the graves of many of my distant relatives. Uncle Russell would take them off in a huff while Uncle Del was laughing and Uncle Sid was making jokes. My father would just shake his head and wonder. “Some year I’m going to take them and stick them up her ass,” Russell would say. “Do we even know where she lives now?” Del would ask. “Or how big her ass is?” Sid would ask.

Back at Aunt Clovis’ house, after Ezra had joined his not so clearly defined ancestors in the so frozen and so rocky dirt of the Waiteville Cemetery, I noticed that there were several bottles of whisky set out with all chicken and green beans and pies and cakes. At that time, I simply noticed it—now I wonder, why couldn’t that have been so when Ezra was alive and thirsty?

We’d arrive at Clieve’s house and she would start talking the minute we came up the walk. She was the most talkative person I’ve ever met. When you were with her you were reduced to listening and listening only, with an occasional nod or clucking in surprise. My father’s brothers—Del and Russell and Sid—would never come to stay with her. Russell had a farm in Waiteville through his wife’s family—she was a LaFon, just like my aunt Annie’s husband (actually my great uncle by marriage—I’ll stop trying to explain my family now!) but Russell’s wife Gladys wasn’t from the same LaFons as Annie’s husband…just because I’m from West Virginia doesn’t mean I’m the product of massive intermarriage). In fact, one of them spelled it with a small ‘f’ and the other with a capital ‘F’, though for the life of me I don’t remember which was which now. Anyway, my father’s brothers wouldn’t visit Clieve because she never stopped talking and they couldn’t stand her, never had. But we always stayed with her when we were in the country.

So, surrounded in stereo by Clieve’s constant chatter (oh, by the way, though I called her “Grandmaw”, my father called her Aunt Clieve though she was his step mother—one last example of the looseness of the Bradley clan regarding relationships) we’d enter the little house to the smell of a full breakfast. By ‘full breakfast’ I mean this: sausage gravy, scratch biscuits, fried apples, grits swimming in butter, country ham and red eye gravy, eggs fried within an inch of their lives so the yoke was hard and the edges were brown and crunchy, coffee perking on the stove, three kinds of home canned preserves, fresh churned butter, and potatoes cut thin and fried in bacon grease plus the bacon they were fried in. Clieve must have been up before my father to assemble such a feast by 6 a.m. I had a method to the madness of such a meal. I put sausage gravy on my eggs, biscuit and potatoes and red-eye gravy over my grits and ham (usually a lot since red-eye gravy is made with coffee instead of water and my parents wouldn’t give me coffee yet). Then I’d have another plate for apples and biscuits with butter and preserves. Lordy, lordy, what a banquet! It was in Grandmaw Bradley’s kitchen, under the drone of her gossip and stories (like elevator music, in a way) that I came to believe, as I believe to this day, that gravy is a food group.

We made that trip to the country dozens and dozens of times while I was growing up. And the day we never missed was Memorial Day. There was a Memorial Day dinner in the grange hall that raised the money each year for the upkeep of the Waiteville cemetery where generations after generations of my family lay sleeping. People who had years before moved away came back on memorial day because someone they had loved was in that cemetery and the only way to insure the well-being of that four acre plot of hilly ground was to buy your ticket to the Memorial Day Dinner and eat yourself into oblivion.

I’d be introduced to and shown off to about a hundred people who I was told were my relatives every Memorial Day. Given the Bradley proclivity of fudging relationships, I have no idea how many of those people actually shared my DNA. But let me try to tell you what there was to eat.

There was pork ribs cooked off the bone with sour kraut, fried chicken to die for—crispy on the outside and cooked to juicy perfection within, country ham sliced as thin as paper (as it must be) and cured ham pink and tender, beef stew that would melt in your mouth, baked chicken, and fried pork chops. There was corn—on the cob, slathered with melted butter; creamed, cut from the ear; beans cooked in bacon with potatoes you didn’t have to chew; squash of many sorts (which I didn’t like as a child and long for now); tomatoes huge as softballs cut into thick slices; cucumbers and onions cut up and brined in vinegar; tomato stew with dumplings; fried onions and peppers; rhubarb cooked to tender, tart perfection; creamed onions and peas; green salad made from lime jello, nuts and cottage cheese; red jello with fruit cocktail suspended in it; baby carrots cooked with brown sugar and walnuts; slaw—both vinegar and mayonnaise based; and tossed salad with vinegar and oil. There was, for desert: pecan pie, cherry pie, apple pie, fried apple pie, strawberry and rhubarb pie, German chocolate cake, devil’s food cake, angel’s food cake and homemade ice cream to pile on top of it all. And to drink there would be (what else) sweet tea and perked coffee…is there any other kind of tea, any other kind of coffee, really?

Here’s the point to all this: one of the images that Jesus uses for the Kingdom is the image of the Heavenly Banquet. I take great joy in that and in the passages from the gospels where the resurrected Jesus seems hungry. If there is a life to come—and for me the jury is still out, probably will be until I come face to face with my finitude and stare off into oblivion or whatever comes next—I am ecstatic to imagine there will be eating and drinking there. And that Jesus chose to leave us as a metaphor of what heaven is like, a table set with fair linen and candles where we share in a Eucharistic feast of bread and wine—that is the kicker for me.

Breakfast at Grandmaw Clieve’s house and dinner at the Memorial Day dinner—I couldn’t ask for anything more. Over the years I have certainly developed a palate for other things: Chinese, Thai, Italian, French cuisines; however, if it is eternity we’re talking about, for my taste those two menus will suffice for the first eon or so.

I don’t have a view of heaven much past a place where there are giant women—like Aunt Clovis, sitting in enormous rocking chairs who will rock you and sing to you and stroke you whenever you want. But beyond that, the best I can do with the whole life/death thing is to imagine that someday I’ll be lifted from my bed by strong, loving arms and placed in the backseat of a car, covered carefully with a blanket and, after a trip of confusion and dreams, I’ll wake up “in the country.”

That’s the best I can do about ‘heaven’.

And, for me, at any rate, it works….

Glasses

I have two pairs of glasses. Both are retro looking. The pair I wear most have black on everything but the very bottom of the lenses. The other pair is plastic and clear all over. Both of them get me complements from strange places. I was wearing the black and clear ones at UConn, Waterbury and three students--one black, one Asian, one Hispanic--complemented me on them.

"Cool glasses," the black guy said.

"Like your frames," the Asian guy said.

"Yeah! Your glasses," the Hispanic guy said.

No women of any ethnicity and no white men ever commented. Take from that what you will.

The truth is, the mostly black glasses are the oldest of the two. When I got the clear ones, the opthamologist gave me too many "this better or that better?" and the distinctions were too severe and I ended up with glasses, though new, that I couldn't see as well through as my older ones. So, I wear the black (mostly) ones until I lose them and when I do I wear the clear ones until I find the others. And I loose my glasses a lot since I really only need them to really watch TV, to drive and that's about all.

If I never watched TV from 8 or more feet away and never drove, I wouldn't wear glasses at all.

It was not always so.

As a child my vision was 240/20. Which meant I couldn't see the blackboard in first grade and thought I was stupid. My mother, a first grade teacher herself, knew for a fact I wasn't stupid so we went and got glasses for me. (Bern, whose vision was not much less nearsighted than mine, and I knew our kids would need glasses and got them much before 1st Grade. Two of our three grandchildren have glasses at 6 and are not stupid. But then, both their parents are blind in a way so who's surprised?

Bern and I have both had cataracts removed from both our eyes. Mine were nearly 20 years ago and probably caused by the steroids I've taken for allergies over the years of my life though my allergist would never admit that. Never mind, I got 30/20 vision from that. Bern had her surgeries about 7 years ago and got vision that can be corrected to 20/20 by one soft contact. She wears glasses to watch TV when her contact is out.

Here's the thing: wearing glasses has been so much of 'who I am' that if I had perfect vision I'd probably get glasses with plate glass in them.

People I know who have never worn glasses and now need at least reading glasses are so awkward and embarrassed about them that it is painful to watch.

For me, glasses just come with the territory. I AM my glasses and my glasses ARE me....just like that.....

rain....

I love rain, everything about it. I should live in Seattle or Scotland or somewhere where it rains a lot.

Truth is, it rains about as much in Connecticut as it does in Seattle. I looked it up.

Thing is, we folks in New England don't brag much about things--even rain.

Late this afternoon I sat out on the back porch and watched it rain like crazy for almost half-an-hour. The temperature dropped from 78 to 69 while I watched. One reason to love rain.

Of course, as soon as the rain stopped, the heat revved up again, only wetter....

One reason I love to go to the beach in North Carolina is that thunder storms, which happen almost daily, are so astonishing. Lots of black, black clouds and stiff sea breezes and lightening over the ocean and thunder rolling and rolling and rolling.

What's not to like about rain, that what I want to know?

Let it come. Let it pour....

Where I've lived

I've been pondering (now that I'm six and a half more decades into this life) where I've lived. I took some time and made a list.

1) I lived the first 18 years of my life in a two bedroom apartment over Barney Yates grocery store on the main street (almost the only street!) in Anawalt, West Virginia (pop. 400) until Barney closed his store about the time I was 13. After that, winter's were colder since there was no central heat and the heat from Barney's stoves--2 of them I remember--rose and made our apartment warmer. There was a back porch some 30 feet above the ground that used to terrify me because my cousin Marlin used to love getting outside the railing and walking around out there.

2) I lived one year in Arthur I. Boreman Hall, a freshman dorm in the midst of the downtown campus of West Virginia University. I lived there with Mike Lawless, my friend from high school.

3) I lived one year at (get this) 69 Richwood Avenue in Morgantown with three roommates--Mike Lawless who was there the first semester and Mike Miano (another high school friend) who was there second semester since both Mike's were Mining Engineer students and had one semester on and one off to work for a coal company. Our other roommate was Doc Likens, who one of the Mike's knew, who was from Summersville and a total slob.

4) The next year I lived in a room at 75 Richwood Avenue and my high school--lifetime long friend--Jo-jo Tagnesi lived in another room there and we shared a bathroom. The old woman who owned the house, whose name I do not remember, was happy to have two 'boys' who were quiet and studious, except when Jo-jo's mother would mail him a roast chicken and a holiday would fall in between when she mailed it and we got it and the whole house would smell for days.

5) My last year of college I lived in a dorm whose name I don't remember being a dorm monitor for Freshman who had gotten in at the last minute. It was a horrible job but I endured it since it was free room and board.

*Just to be transparent, my parents bought a house (for cash!) in Princeton, West Virginia, a town of 20,000 or so, when I was a freshman in college. So I lived there each summer of my college life except for after my Junior year when I was a camp counselor in a camp in Logan County, West Virginia.

6) I lived in Divinity Hall on Kirkland Street in Cambridge, MA in the academic year 1969-70. I met Dan Kiger, one of the best friends I've ever had, in Divinity Hall. I haven't seen him for a couple of decades, but if we met, I would imagine we'd take right up where we left off.

7) My second year in Cambridge, I lived on Kirkland Street, in an apartment next to a Jewish Deli, just 20 yards or so from Sommerville. It was the last habitation before Cambridge turned into Sommerville. Bern and I lived there the first year of our marriage. It was not easy, let me tell you. I was completing a master's degree at Harvard Divinity School and she was going to Northeastern University and I was 23 and she was 20 and we had no idea whatsoever of what being married was about.....

8) I almost forgot the year we lived in a trailor....Bern and I. Out near the Med School in Morgantown where we'd moved so she could finish her degree in drama and I could teach school, having qualified through the National Teacher's Exam while still in Cambridge. (Dan Kiger helped us move and gave us $75 when he drove back to Ohio. We needed it.) However, when they saw my shoulder length hair and huge beard, they lost my file and I didn't have a teaching job. We went on food stamps and I found a job at the Public TV station in Morgantown (located beside the morgue of the Med School) as a cameraman and made so little money we still qualified for food stamps and had an incident trying to get my food stamps and the head of the Welfare Department told me to take the Social Service test, which I did, and being good at tests, if nothing else, became a social worker.

9) Bern and I moved to Forrest Avenue and it was there I was convinced by a Saint named Miriah to go back to Seminary. I stayed on at Forrest Avenue for 9 months or so, while Bern moved to New York and acted in several off-Broadway shows.

10) We reunited in Alexandria, on Kenmore Street in a Garden Apartment for two years until I graduated from VTS and was ordained. Bern did dinner theatre and waited tables to support us.

11) We lived on Richwood Avenue in Charleston WV for 5  years while I was Vicar of St. James, Charleston and Episcopal Chaplain to West Virginia State College. My first year I earned $14,000, which was enough to live well in Charleston in 1975. Both our remarkable children were born in Charleston. If for no other reason, the five years there were some of the best of my life....

12) I was elected Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven, CT and we lived at 612 Chapel Street until I went a bit crazy and Bern and I separated.

13) For almost a year I lived in an apartment down by the water in New Haven and Bern and the kids lived in an apartment up on the hill near the Divinity School.

14) When our relationship was transformed, we moved to Everitt Street in a wondrous rented house with a cat attached. We lived there until June 1989 when I was called to be Rector of St. John's in Waterbury.

15) Then we moved to 95 Cornwall Avenue in Cheshire where we've been ever since and I hope to be until I die. We've lived here for 24 years, longer than I've lived anywhere, long enough to launch our children into live beyond us, long enough to realize this might be the best years of our lives, long enough to know ever inch of this house and love each one, long enough to know we are, after all these wild and wondrous years--Home at last....

(Reviewing: I lived 30 years in West Virginia, 2 years in Cambridge, 2 years in Alexandria and all the rest, 32 years in Connecticut. 32 years below the Mason-Dixon Line and 34 years in New England. Got that?)

I have pondered so many things reviewing the places I've lived and discovered so much, that if I weren't too humble to suggest it, I would suggest you take pen and paper and make a list of everywhere you've lived and ponder what it all means and what you learn by doing that exercise. I would recommend it, really....half an hour to remember where you 'come from' might just tell you multitudes about the Past and open up some possibilities about the Future.

Just me talkin'.....But ponder it. I encourage that pondering......