two words that make me sad

Lots of times when I'm talking to friends, they'll say something about the niece playing field hockey or the nephew's piano lessons. Little conversation bits about the children of your siblings or your mate's siblings. Every time nieces and nephews come up, I feel sad and a bit cheated. I don't have any.

I'm an only child and neither of Bern's older siblings have children, so she and I are neice-less and nephew-deprived.

Don't get me wrong, I seldom feel sorry for myself about being an only child. After all this time I've become comfortable and content with it. And I'm never bored--which is a blessing of an only child. And whenever I think it might be nice to have a sibling or two, all I have to do is have a short conversation with someone who does...and I'm back to contented with my situation!

But I would like some nieces and nephews. I grew up with scads of uncles and aunts. Eight on my mother's side and 6 on my father's side. (Truth is, I used to think everyone on my father's side was an aunt or uncle because I grew up calling all my father's 1st cousins "Aunt somebody" or "Uncle somebody.' When I was in my teens I finally began to figure out that Uncle Pat and Uncle Ralph and Uncle 'Shortie'--and yes he was--Uncle Opel and Aunt Denee and Aunt Ursa and Uncle Buford and Aunt Arbana and Uncle Hovie--my father's family had some names, I'll tell you--were, in point of fact, my second cousins. By then it was too late since they 'were' aunts and uncles in my mind and heart.)

I was the youngest of all the multitude of first cousins (18 in all) until My Uncle Harvey and my mother's sister, Aunt Elsie adopted Denise who was 6 years younger than me. I was in my teens by then and she was 10. I guess not having nieces and nephews pales beside the fact that my son and daughter have no first cousins and I had so many. But nieces and nephews would be nice.

The thing is, I think Bern and I would be great at being Aunt and Uncle. I'd be considered a little eccentric but a good listener and Bern would be seen as a font of wisdom and advice. We'd have them come and stay a few days every once in a while. I used to go visit Aunt Elsie and Uncle Harvey for a week every year and was always around my Dad's brothers and my mother's sisters. I liked having so many adults that were like my parents except NOT!

Bern would make them cabbage rolls with sour cream and I'd ask them about what they've been reading and take them to movies. Bern would tell the nieces all they need to know about boys but their parents won't tell them and I'd take the nephews on walks around Cheshire and listen to their angst and confusion about girls (none of which I could clear up in any way!)

We could email with them and call them on their birthdays and they'd all tell us we were their favorite Aunt and Uncle even if we weren't just to please us.

Nieces and Nephews--you have any spare ones we could have? We'd take good care of them and send them back when you wanted. 

Winter is coming

Monday, they tell us, winter will arrive with sleet and freezing rain and some sprinkling of snow. That's what the National Weather Service says. And it may be so. The first snow of winter on December 8. Not bad, all things considered in New England.

Winter is also coming to me, I believe. Last night I had a great idea for a post that would have brought pondering to all who read it. It was such a good idea that I knew it would keep for a day and I could write it tonight since I really wanted to go to bed last night when the idea came.

All day I've tried to remember the wondrous thing I wanted to write about last night. To no avail....

An idea so wondrous and profound that I thought I'd never forget it is gone, gone, gone.....

Besides that, my ankles  have ached for two days because when I go to the Y to walk on the treadmill, I always read a book. And on Thursday I was finishing Scott Turow's new novel called Identical. It was so good that I walked for about an hour and 15 minutes when my usual walk is 40 minutes or two miles, whichever comes first. I walked almost 4 miles without moving an inch and my ankles ached for two days.

A decade ago I could have done that and my ankles would have only ached and made me walk funny for a single day. Before that, they wouldn't have ached at all.

"I grow old, I grow old, should I wear my trousers rolled or eat a peach?" I've become Prufrock, wondering how to 'be' at an age I never imagined reaching.

(And, when I was 40 or even 50, I wouldn't have forgotten completely that great idea for a post. I could have brought it back, detail by detail. But now, at 66, it is gone and I know it is gone forever.)

I don't mind getting older--it's a lot better than the only other option. And I forgive my memory since I still have enough memory to forgive such things. But, this I know and know fair well...Winter is coming.....

It gives me real empathy for those older than me. I used to get annoyed with old folks for moving so slow and forgetting things and dropping into the cracks in their brains.

I don't any more. I see it coming the way the National Weather Service sees winter coming day after tomorrow.

It's not frightening, just sobering. Perhaps it is a good thing to notice that things you could do 20 years ago aren't possible now.

Growing old is like closing doors that you know you'll never need to enter. I'll never deep-sea dive or sky dive or take up archery. I'll never drive a racing car or learn to do brain surgery. I'll never milk a yak or clime Everest. But most of the doors still open to me--loving my family and my friends, being a good priest, eating well, enjoying wine, walking a treadmill for less than an hour at a time, cooking, reading good novels, writing on this blog, pondering life--those things I still do and since they are part of a finite number of doors still open, I enjoy them more than I ever have.

Growing old is not for the faint of heart. But every day is more precious to me since I got this old. More precious and more rare. Every day....What a gift aging is, in the end....

With great humility and graditude

I don't deserve to write about Nelson Mandela.

Lots of folks who will write of him in the coming days, don't deserve to either.

Quite frankly, in the time I've been alive--over 6 decades now--no one...and I mean that, NO ONE has done more to promote the dignity of being human and the righteousness of being equal than Nelson Mandela.

I'm sure, in the decades ahead, people will dissect his life and find his clay feet. I'd be disappointed if they didn't--it is the clay feet of heroes that make them really special and truly human--showing that 'truly human' people can make a difference that changes the world in a way that is good.

All that I can say, from the depths of my heart and soul, is that I am both humbled and proud to live out my life in some of the same years that Nelson Mandela lived.

It was a rare and special privilege. Thank you, Nelson, for that.

And may your soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.

You gave the journey grace and love and forgiveness and nobility.....Thank you again.

The Sound...the very Sound...

In spite of the fact that I often write skeptical things about right wing assholes--ok, I didn't mean that, I meant 'right wing well meaning but misguided folks'--in this space, I am, deep down, believe me, a sentimentalist.

I just finished watching Carrie Underwood in The Sound of Music on live TV and I'm a little misty. Plus, a daughter of some friends of ours and granddaughter of someone I love dearly was Marta, the second youngest girl in the cast. Grace did great.

Plus, just to prove I have some gentle bones in my body in spite of what I have to say about Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz--those well meaning but horrible misguided as..., folks--I watched a video online tonight about a designer in Germany who brought in 6 disable people--two in wheel chairs, one missing a leg and one an arm, a woman with extreme curvature of the spine and a dwarf and created mannequins exactly like them. The disabled folks were weepy about seeing their 'disabilities' portrayed. Then they put clothes on the mannequins and put them in display windows in Berlin. Then there was video of people looking at them--some shocked, some dismayed, some horrified, some sympathetic and some who even tried to put their bodies in the same poses....

I went downstairs weeping a bit and told Bern about it .

Maybe, since I'm getting older, I'm even more sentimental than I've always been.

I'm a lot closer to tears in moving moments than I've ever been.

But Michelle Bachman and Glen Beck don't make me sentimental. They just make me furious....

The awful-est person in the world...

OK, to be the AWFUL-EST person in the world is a real challenge. There is President Assad of Syria, President Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Senator Cruz of Texas, Rush Limbaugh of Hell, Mylie Cyrus, all the Kardashians, that idiot country singer who hates Obama and everyone who likes or is neutral about Obama, the whole congregation of the Baptist church in Kansas who think American soldiers who die, die because of Gay People...oh, the list is endless.

But the AWFUL-EST person in the world, hands down, is Michele Bachman. She said the other day that not only will the Affordable Health Care Law destroy Life as We Know it and not only has the President re-written the Constitution, for God's sake, to implement it but something even worse and more despicable.

She said the horrible and embarrassing, absolutely terrible roll out of the HeathCare.gov web site, the most distressing and damaging event of Obama's entire presidency, was, (get this) ON PURPOSE AND INTENTIONAL by the Administration so that the Civilization Ending results of t he Affordable Care Act won't become obvious and undeniable before the 2014 mid-term elections.

Sit back and take that in for a moment....


Rep. Bachman says that the absolutely worst thing that has happened in the President's term was not only INTENTIONAL but PLANNED by the administration. So, President Obama on purpose made his signature legislation screw up in the worst possible way, making him plunge in the polls and threatening the Democrats majority in the Senate because he wanted to keep America from knowing about the Death Panels and forced abortions and socialism of health care until the mid-term elections that have become a lot more difficult for Democrats because of the INTENTIONAL and PLANNED failure of the web site.....Duh....Double Duh....

There have been horrible and awful persons who have lived in the past. People who destroyed whole populations. Hitler and Attila the Hun come to mind. Make your own list after that. But I've never doubted that folks like that were smart. Smart and Awful.

But Michele Bachman is not only Awful, she's Stupid.

A dangerous combination--Stupidity and Awfulness....about the worst.

Granted, she hasn't done as much damage as Hitler and Attila, not by a long shot. But if Stupid was terminal, she'd be long dead.

I'm just sayin'.....

Hats and Scarves

Scarves and Hats are appropriate in this season. It is getting colder, which is something I like about living in New England. It gets cold here. I like having four seasons. I did like the seasons better in the upper elevations of southern West Virginia when I was a boy. Four months of Spring, two months of Summer (because we were in the mountains), four months of Autumn and two months of Winter--bitter and cold and lots of snow (because we were in the mountains)--that 4/2 and 4/2 ratio seemed perfect to me.

But I do like Winter because you get to wear hats and scarves.

I have two hats I wear in winter. One is a lion cub hat my brother in law, Father Dan (a late vocation Roman Catholic priest) gave me years ago. It is lion tawny with two brown ears and a mane. I like it a lot. My friend Fred gave me a picture that is about a yard wide and two feet tall of me in that hat. The picture is in front of our kitchen fire place. How cool is it to have a kitchen fire place?

The other hat is an Afghan hat of wool that looks like a round room. It belonged, originally, to Brian Vaugh, who was my lay-assistant for several years at St. John's in Waterbury, CT until he became a Buddhist priest, which I was fine with since Buddhists aren't deists and Christians can be Buddhist too. The greatest line about being a Christian I've ever heard was when Brian, who'd just gotten back from a month long Buddhist retreat was telling Larry Brown, a rather conservative member of the parish about his month at coffee hour. Larry is long dead (God bless him) but that Sunday he was taken off guard and said to Brian, "Brian, are you a Christian?"

And Brian said, without a heart-beat between the question and his response: "at least".

Being 'at least' a Christian seems to me to be about right.

When I was wearing Brian's hat, which I picked up off the clothing table in St. John's Soup Kitchen because Brian had put it there and I wanted it, a big--I mean BIG Black man at the bus stop in downtown Waterbury (I often rode the bus to work and back to Cheshire because I liked the people who rode the bus a lot--'real people', if you know what I mean...Real People who worked like dogs and couldn't afford a car and were very friendly on the bus) said to me, when I was wearing Brian's Afghan hat: "Are you a Muslim, man?" And I said, because he was really BIG, I mean seriously BIG and ripping with muscles under his coat, "if you want me to be...."

And people in 7/11's often told me, "That's from my country, your hat." Some even named it for me but I can't remember, being old, what name they told me.

I also have two scarves. One of them if from Brian as well. It is a rainbow scarf made by little old ladies in Appalachia, where I come from. He gave me two and I gave one away to a friend--the husband of a gay priest I know--because he admired it. That's why Brian gave it to me in the first place, because I admired it. Brian often gave me things of his I admired. I always wished he had a Mercedes so I could admire it. But he didn't. An Episcopal Buddhist would never own an expensive German Car, not ever.

That scarf played a big roll in my retirement from full time ministry. Jay, one of the members of the church, used it to wrap around the neck of my effigy and then had it dry cleaned and gave it to me as a gift.

My other scarf is one I bought for Bern, but since I usually by people things because I like them, I would wear it from time to time. It's a huge scarf, in muted colors, about a foot wide and 5 feet long. It wraps around my neck a couple of times with lots to hang down. She recently told me it was 'mine' because it was too big for her. I love it a lot.

Noone can be mean to you when you wear a lion cub hat.

Noone can be aggressive towards you when you wear an Afghan hat with a tiny polar bear pin that people keep trying to wipe off until they recognize it's a polar bear pin and not rubbish.

And most people, I've discovered, love people who wear scarves made by Appalachian women or scarves that are a foot wide and five feet long.

Hats and scarves....they make me lot winter.... 

Thanks to Thanksgiving

Mimi came first (my 'princess', my love, the one who calls me 'Baba') on Monday.

Josh and the girls came on Tuesday from Baltimore. Morgan, Emma and Tegan flowed out of the car and flowed over us again and again until they left with Cathy on Saturday (she came on the train on Friday since her father was sick and she wanted to help her mother).

Tim came on Wednesday, giving joy to Mimi and us all (the 'girls' most of all since they are 'uncle Tim groupies').

On Thursday John came first with the deep fryer for tiny onions (for Tim since he's allergic to shell fish) and oysters for the rest of us.

Then came Jack and Sherry and Robbie from New Haven (Robbie from the left coast home for Thanksgiving) We've known them all since 1980, Robbie growing up with Josh and Mimi.

And we ate and ate, as you should on Thanksgiving. And we toasted Sumi (Josh and Cathy's dog--Cathy's before Josh--who had been with us so many Thanksgivings and died in August at 15 or so) and I toasted them all because they are the people I love most in the world. Truly.

How many times do you get to sit at a table with 12 of the people you love most in the world and eat a meal with them. I was sorry Cathy wasn't there to make it 13.

How rare is that? How wondrous? How wild and truly blessed?

I was deeply Thankful this Thanksgiving and I thank Thanksgiving for that opportunity.

(Bela did nip at Robbie as an outsider, but we won't let that detract from the magic....)