my friend John

John is my second oldest friend. The only older friend I have is Mike, who I saw this spring for the first time in 20 years. But John has lived in New Haven almost as long as we've been in Connecticut. So, I see him a lot. And have for years. He was a graduate student in Morgantown, WV when Bern and I lived there in 1971-73. He's a West Virginian, like Bern and I. He's a psychologist who works for the VA in West Haven and has a private practice. He is an unconventional therapist, which is one of the things I like about him since I've always been an unconventional priest.

We met because he's an Episcopalian and we went to church together. In fact, now that I think about it, I met him in the late 60's, before Bern and I were married, at St. Gabrial's in Morgantown and then re-connected when Bern and I came back after my two years at Harvard and our marriage in rhere.

John is one of the two people who goes on vacation with Bern and Mimi and Tim and I each September. This time next week we'll be in our house on Oak Island and ready for our first night there.

John is remarkably funny. Not just humorous but by having jokes.

Two he told tonight when he came for dinner.

A blind cowboy walks into a girl's Biker Bar. He gets a drink and says, to whoever is near him, "Anyone want to hear a blond joke?"

The woman to his right says, "I'll give you a break because you're blind. But need to know that I'm blonde and I'm an ex-Marine and the bartender is blond and she's an ex-Marine and the woman on the other side of you is blond and she's an ex-Marine and four women at a table over there are karate teachers and they're all blond. So, do you want to tell your 'blond joke'?

"Well, no," the man said, "not if I'll have to explain it seven times...."

The other one goes like this:

A man sees someone he's known for years and is really good friends with and is so excited to meet up with him on the street. The only thing is, his friend has a big orange head.

So the guy talks to his old friend for a while, catching up, and then says, "what happened to your head?"

"Oh," the old friend tells him, "I had a genie in a bottle and I had three wishes. My first wish was for a wonderful house. See that house over there with  the pool, that's my house. My second wish was for a beautiful, loving wife. See that beautiful woman by the pool? She's my wife and she loves me to death. Then, I think the mistake I made was that I wished for a big orange head."

People differ greatly about what they think is funny. John had told those two jokes to Sherry, the sixth person of our vacation 'family' and when he told the second one she said, "why did he wish for a big orange head?"

I'm sure you've been in the position to 'explain' a joke. You just can't. Jokes are like this--you 'get them' or you don't and there is no place in between to explain them.

John and Sherry will be going to Oak Island with Bern and Mimi and Tim and I. And at no time will any of us try to explain that joke.

John is dear and funny and a profoundly good friend. I look forward to our time together in a week.

The invitation came.....

Yesterday, in the US Postal service 'mail' came the invitation to Mimi and Tim's wedding. I wish I knew enough about media to reproduce it here for you. But I don't.

It's in odd colors and invites us to be there on October 12 in Brooklyn. The address was, in wonderful calligraphy, The Father and Mother of the Bride and our address.

I just took a deep breath. My little girl is getting married. (Of course, she is 36 years old and not a 'little girl' by a long shot. But in my heart and mind she is that little girl running down a hill in my father's front yard that I took a picture of and have it in a frame downstairs. Toe-head child, jaw set, arms pumping, 4 years old, running.

Even when I pronounce Mimi and Tim, "husband and wife", which I shall do on that day (given permission to do so by the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island and the City Clerk of New York City) I will see, in my mind, that four year old puffing down that hill that I captured on a real camera--not on a smart phone.

And she is breath-taking. Really. And always has been.

And Tim is her mirror image.

They'll be with us 8 days from now on Oak Island, North Carolina where she went for 17 years or so, with Bern and me and her brother Josh, until neither of them wanted to go to a place so deserted and cut off from the world as that. And then, maybe 6 years ago, she called to find out where that place was and she and Tim went and ever since we've gone with them, along with John, my longtime friend, and Sherrie, Bern's long time friend.

We'll leave a week from today, all of us--John and Sherrie and Bern and me in John's Landrover and Mimi and Tim in Mimi's Forrester, which is her first car, being a NYC girl but needed because she works for Jacob's Pillow now and has an apartment in Stockbridge, MA as well as the apartment she shares with Tim in Brooklyn.

And we'll spend a week on that deserted island (since it is a "family beach" and school will be in session and we'll have a hundred yards or so of private beach, like we always do after Labor Day.

I remember so much about Mimi from her early childhood.

Now she's getting married.

Now Tim will really be our son-in-law, though it's felt that way for a decade or so.

And a week from tomorrow they'll be with us again.

I can hardly wait. I love them both so.

Two Nature Miracles

So, I was out on our deck waiting for the charcoal to be ready in our chimney (yes, Beloved, we still have a Weber grill and still use charcoal) when two remarkable miracles of nature happened.

First, on the south end of our deck. I saw a spider, seemingly hanging in mid-air. But then I realized the spider had spun a web, vertical to the earth and sky. But as closely as I looked and peered, I couldn't see the strand of web that held the web vertical. It could have been to a Rodademdrum tree a yard or more away. Beyond that, it must have been attached to a fir tree 8 feet away or a Red Maple even further away.

I knew I could find out by moving my hand above the web--but that would have destroyed the whole thing.

Seemingly , to me, the web simply hung, unsupported in the air. Amazing.

Then a few moments later, walking back to the north side of our deck, I heard something whiz by my head. I thought it must be a bumble bee--but when I turned, I realized it was a ruby-throated humming bird that hung, suspended in space like the spider's web, about two feet from me. The wings were a blur, but I saw it's tiny body and face clearly, and the legs/feet tucked tightly  against it's body. I could have reached out and touched it (not really, it would have easily escaped my grasp). It hovered for a moment and fed for a moment off a red flower on a vine Bern has on our deck. Then it looked at me again and off it went to the north and disappeared.

I'd never been that close to a hummingbird before. It was magic, transforming, amazing.

All that on a cool (for August) afternoon on a deck in Cheshire.

How much more could you ask for or stand without breaking into song and leaping into dance?

Thinking back, I should have found both song and dance. Instead, my heat almost broke from joy!

The Darkness and the Light

The Darkness and the Light are both off the Sports pages today.

The Light: Mo'ne Davis, the 13 year old Little League pitcher who was the first young woman to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series. In an interview she is sweet and modest and smiling. What a great kid. Cover of Sports Illustrated this week, no less!

Good for her.

We are all better than Mo'ne is in our world.

The Darkness: Johnny Manziel, the rookie with the Cleveland Browns who was a Heisman Trophy winner at Texas A&M and a hopeless bore.

He was captured on film giving the finger to the Washington Redskin bench because they were razzing him for having a piss poor game. "Johnny Football" has annoyed me from the beginning in college. He was too fond of the spotlight, to quick to seek applause, too glib to be gracious.

Look, Jerk, you are a high payed rookie quarterback that has shown very little in the pre-season other than late night antics and partying with people even richer than you. You are going to have other teams yelling at you. You just are. And you cannot respond like a prick. You take the cat-calls away with your performance. You think it was bad against Washington, after the low rent response you gave it is really, REALLY going to get BAD now!!!

All those big old boys striking out against a small girl--Priceless.

Johnny Manziel, what a waste of protoplasm.

The Ivy League

I listened to an hour long discussion on Public Radio today about Ivy League education and college education in general. I found it fascinating. One guy had written a book about how 'the elite schools' were no longer the 'best schools'. His theory was that the Ivy League creates a new generation of 'elites' because you need to be rich or extremely lucky to go to one of those schools and many of the students (not all by any means) see going to Yale or Harvard as a ticket to the 1% rather than a place to be challenged, to learn and grow, to find your 'true self'.

It reminded me of a story from my past.

I went to West Virginia University and got a BA in English and a minor in Political Science--thinking I either wanted to be a college professor of American Literature in some small Liberal Arts College (and write THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL along the way) or, if I found money mattered to me, I could go to law school. I had a 3.87 GPA and graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa (I long ago lost my key). But instead of going to graduate school in American Literature or Law school, I got this crazy 'Trial Year in Seminary' offer from the Rockerfeller Foundation. The committee asked me straight out where I wanted to go to seminary, and I said, off the top of my head: "Harvard". So they got me in without applying. (What the 1% can do!)

I was terribly intimidated about going to an Ivy League school, thinking I surely didn't belong. Harvard Divinity School had folks from several state schools, but I was from West Virginia. I had a hick accent. I surely didn't measure up. Plus my next door neighbor in Divinity Hall, where I lived the first year, was a Harvard College undergrad. I was sure I wasn't up to Cal's standards. I mean, West Virginia University vs. Harvard College--no contest, in my mind. He must be a font of wisdom and knowledge and I must be only a trickle.

The first time we talked I was very nervous and he talked fast and I thought slow and at some point he said to me, "you just contradicted yourself."

I'm sure I had, but I replied, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradicted myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

He gawked at me and said, "wow, that's great!"

"It's Walt Whitman," I said.

He looked confused. "Walt 'who'?" he asked.

Suddenly I wasn't nearly as nervous about being on Harvard's hallowed grounds as I had been but a moment before....

Another beautiful day...

August rolls along in Connecticut the way it has--high to  mid 70's in the day low 60's in the night. We haven't used the air conditioner in our bed room for over a week. Wondrous weather. I slept until 10 a.m. on Saturday! I know that as you age you are supposed to sleep less--but I've been able, since I retired from full-time ministry, to sleep past 9 most nights I don't set my alarm and I only set it on Tuesdays (I have a 9:30 commitment) and Sundays. Go figure.

We'll be waking up on Oak Island, North Carolina on Sunday, two weeks from now. Vacation is upon us. We drop off the dog on August 29 (the kids next door look after the cat and bird) and stop in Virginia for the night and get to the beach on Saturday. John and Sherry will go with us, as they do. Mimi and Tim are driving down in Mimi's first car and are going to make it a three day trip and stop in places they want to stop.

Here's what we'll do when we're there: read, play in the water and eat. That's about it, besides talking and laughing only as people who have done this five or six times (or over 20 times for Bern and Mimi and me....) can do.

I want some of my ashes scattered in the waters off Oak Island--that's how important that place is to me. And it will be achingly joyful, as always, with wine enough to make it mellow. We used to spend three weeks or a month there when the kids were young. Amazing memories. We 'grew up' as a family there.

I was talking to Darcy today, telling her about it, about Oak Island. She said she'd look it up on line because it sounds like a place she and Justin would like to go. But I don't want to talk to too many people about it--it's almost empty after Labor Day and I want it to stay that way....

I'll take my lap top and blog from there...if I can remember my password. On my desktop I can go straight to it. But not always on the laptop....

It's still too weeks away, but I'm ready inside. More from me before then in this place, under the Castor Oil Tree.....

Enough is enough

We really have to do something about Westboro Baptist Church--they're the folks who bring hate and nonsense to the funerals of brave men and women who die in defense of our country because...hell, it's hard to say why exactly...but it has to do with GLBT stuff and the Defense Department's acceptance of the fact that there are military folks who are gay. Go figure.

Now they have announced via Twitter that they plan to protest against the hellish behavior of GLBT folks at Robin Williams' funeral. Apparently he was an 'enabler of gays' (whatever the hell that means) and he make jokes about God.

(What did Jesus say to the bartender? "Bring me water in a wine glass."--Maybe the Westboro folks will show up at my funeral now.....)

Seriously, this kind of hate and nonsense has no place in the world of death and funerals.

I often ponder the hate that people have for 'the other'. The gospel this Sunday is about Jesus' conversation with a Gentile woman in Matthew( also told in Mark). She comes to ask him to heal her daughter. The disciples want to send her away because she is 'the other'. And even Jesus tells her he has come to the children of Israel and the bread of the children should not be fed to 'dogs'.

Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?

That passage, only in Mark and Matthew is the only place in the gospels where 1) Jesus is unkind to someone asking him for help and 2) learns something from 'the other'.

The woman says to him, bowing before him, "but shouldn't the dogs be allowed to eat the crumbs from the children's table?"

Jesus is suddenly stunned by the Gentile woman's faith and heals her daughter.

I don't want to suggest we should wonder "What Would Jesus Do?"--those wrist bands with WWJD drove me crazy.

But isn't it time that the supposed sane--you and me, for example--stood up in some productive way to the obviously crazy--like Westboro Baptist Church and say, "For God's sake, enough is enough! Go under whatever rock you crawled out from under and hate as much as you want--but you have no right to be in 'our space' and especially in the space where we are mourning the death of a patriot or a beloved comedian...."

Wouldn't that make sense? I'm just asking.....