Heat

In years gone by, people would say, on days like today, "hot enough for you?" And I'd reply, honestly, "Not nearly! And more humidity too!"

I used to love the heat. No more, beloved.

Many older folks I know are always complaining about the chill. Not me, never again.

Any time I went out today I wanted to faint away or lay down and die. My dog, luckily, feels the same way about the heat, so he 'gets busy' and we go back to where it's cooler.

I wonder what flipped in me. I really did relish the heat in years gone by. I loved to be sweaty and press glasses of ice water against my face. Now I want to live in 68 degrees always.

I've even embraced the cold after, what is it, 27 years, in New England. There are always more clothes to put on in winter. In summer, to stay legal, you have to keep one layer on even if you'd like to shed your skin....

One thing though that is wondrous about summer: we have a half-bath on the first floor of our house. It was an add on about forty years ago and the exhaust has about a 5 foot trip to the outside. Every year birds, I think they are swifts, nest at the end of the exhaust pipe. It doesn't blow hard enough to disturb them and when you sit on the toilet you can hear them singing. Not a bad way to (excuse my language) 'take a dump'...to bird song....

Our Baby's birthday

Today Mimi turned 38. How on earth can our youngest child be 38?

We talked with her on the phone just now. She is not only 38, she is 8 1/2 months pregnant with our 4th granddaughter "Ellie".

Mimi's real name is Jeremy Johanna. Named for her god-mothers, one of whom, Jeremy, was a Sister of Mercy. I intended to call her JJ but all that changed because for the first 6 months of her life, she was the worst baby in the history of babies! She cried and arched for about 5 of those 6 months and our son, Joshua, would sing to her, "Jere-mimi-mimi-mimi..." trying to calm her. So, she became our 'screaming Mimi' and when, at 6 months, her brain flipped and she became the best baby in the history of babies, she was already and irrevocably, "Mimi".

Ellie will actually be "Elliot" though she and Tim toyed with Elenore for a while.

Mimi has been a golden one--so kind and so understanding and so easy to be with. She and Tim have gone to Oak Island, North Carolina with us for the past 5 or 6 Septembers. Having them around is like being surrounded by grace. We've put off the vacation until after the middle of September this year in case they'll feel up to coming with Ellie. I pray they will. John Anderson and Sherry Ellis go with us and I hope Tim and Mimi will be able to come and say, "here's the baby, she's yours until we leave."

Below is a poem I wrote on her 30th birthday. She was in Japan with the American Ballet Theater and it was the only birthday we didn't either have her with us or talk with her.

Bless her, my baby girl....

                      

                      

                          PHOTOS OF MIMI

 

The house is full of pictures of her.

In some of them, she is a tiny, chubby baby.

In others, she is a little girl possessed.

In one she gains speed, running

down a hill in front of my father's house,

her tongue out, her blonde hair flying,

her small arms churning

like the wind.

In another, taken the same day,

she is solemn, not looking at the camera,

considering something out of the frame,

unsmiling, gazing at the future perhaps.

 

She grows through the pictures—though they are random

on the walls and shelves, so she doesn't grow evenly.

A beautiful, awkward teen, smiling in spite of braces,

her jeans decorated in ink, a hole at the knees,

her shoes half-tied, embarrassed, I think, by the camera.

There is a sagging Jack-O-Lantern at her side,

smiling a smile as crooked as her own.

 

A whole group pictures when she was finishing

high school—a lovely, wistful, long-haired girl

exploding gracefully into life and what comes next.

 

I love the photo from her college graduation,

the four of us, this little family, her brother posing,

Mimi—short-hair and sun-glasses—smiling.

Just the four of us, a tiny clan, so different and distinct,

frozen in time on a mountain in Vermont, timeless, eternal.

 

I walked around the house today, looking for her visage--

bride's maid at Josh's wedding, clowning in a hotel doorway,

holding one niece or another with her boyfriend

(she natural, laughing, Morgan content on her lap,

Tim is a bit anxious and Emma is pulling away from him),

sitting on our back deck at an age I can't remember

when her hair was a color not found in nature,

and she is, as always glancing away from the camera,

playing on the beach as a toddler, sandy, nude,

hands in the sand, staring backward through her legs

(a photo a camera shy person would hate later on!)

 

I made my circuit, stopping before each photograph,

amazed at the memories that leaped out of the frames

and enthralled me.

Amazed more that such a beautiful child and woman

could have lived with me so long

and left imprints on my heart so deep.

 

She is half-a-world away.

In a land I can only faintly imagine.

I will not talk with her today—her nativity day.

I cannot even remember, as I gaze at photos,

if it is today or tomorrow in Japan.

Or yesterday.

 

Then there is the photo I love most.

It is pinned to the cork board beside my desk,

where I sit and write.

 

She is framed in a glass doorway. Her hair is long.

I can't remember how old she way—in college, perhaps--

and beyond the door you see, fully lit, dunes of Nantucket.

Mimi is in shadow, almost a silhouette cut from dark paper,

in full profile. Only the back of her hair is in sunlight,

shining, translucent, moving in the wind.

 

I love that picture because it is Mimi stepping through the

Door of Life, moving away from the infant shots,

the little girl, the teenaged child,

moving into life beyond me...half a world away.

All grown and still, all new....

 

jgb/July 21, 2008

Enough is enough

You might have noticed I've resisted blogging about the Republican National Convention. It has taken an act of will.

Chris Christie's "guilty" speech about Hillary Clinton and the chant, "lock her up! lock her up!" was bad enough but nothing compared to Al Baldasaro's comments.

Baldasaro a delegate to the convention from New Hampshire said that Hillary should be 'put on the firing line' and 'shot for treason'. That was after he called her 'a piece of garbage'.

The Republican rhetoric about Hillary has been horrendous through the whole thing. Trump's supporters seem to think tearing down Hillary is more a more promising strategy than being positive about Donald. Which might be realistic since I can think of almost nothing 'positive' about Trump except that his kids seem to have grown up sort of normal (if being wealthy is ever normal) and his third wife is beautiful (and such an admirer of Michelle Obama that she uses Michelle's words!)

But, it seemed to me that suggesting a public figure be executed by a firing squad went beyond the pale.

I just read on line that the Secret Service is talking with Baldasaro. Last I knew, threatening someone like Hillary was against the law.

The rest of the stuff (almost all of it) that made me a little sick that's come out of the last three days...I'll just stick to my act of will and let it lie there. (I know 'lay' is the word, but 'lie' just fits....)

Am I that out of line?

In my sermon on Sunday, I apologized to the congregation and to David, who was being baptized for the Collect of the Day. ('Collect' is Episcopal-speak for a prayer....also, the entryway to the church is the 'narthex' and the basement is the 'undercroft'--go figure Anglicans!)

Here it is: the collect for the Sunday closest to July 20...

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking; Have compassion on our weakness and mercifully give us those things  which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

OK, in one prayer (sorry, 'collect') we are calling ourselves "ignorant, weak, unworthy and blind". And we prayed that prayer on a day when David IV (and the other three were all there!) was being 'marked as Christ's own forever' and declared both a child of God and a member of Christ's Body.

It is times like that which cause me to think Christianity is schizophrenic! On a day we declare David and ourselves "marked as Christ's own" and, indeed, Christ's Body in this world we decide that we are, as Marcus Aurelius (not a Christian, a Stoic) said: 'a bag of bones and foul smell'.

Ignorant, weak, unworthy and blind are hardly attributes of "Christ's Body in this world". And certainly far, far, far short of the Bible's assertion that we are created 'in the image and likeness of God'.

So, which will it be? God's beloved or pond scum? The Body of Christ or miserable, nasty, sinful, awful creatures?

So I told the group I go to on Tuesday mornings about my apology and read them the collect to prove my point. They'd all heard it since 3 of them were priests and the 4th is an every-Sunday worshiper.

And to my utter dismay, none of them were offended at all by the collect. They even seemed to agree with it. I became so irrational that I really could do very little except sputter in exasperation and utter four-letter words....

I just assumed they, like me, thought of human beings (much less Christians) as beloved 'children of God'. Can I be that out of line? I'm not stupid. I can't miss the incredible evil of the world. But I simply assume that 'evil' is a perversion of who we really are.

I have known for some decades that my heresy of choice is Pelagionism. Pelagious was British but taught his theology in Rome in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. What he taught was rather simple (if condemned by 5 or 6 church councils and St. Augustine!). It went like this: human beings were born with the same free will and moral choices as Adam before the Fall. Humans could choose to do 'the right thing' without Divine intervention. The concept of 'original sin' was rejected by Pelagious.

I reject it too. I told David IV's parents that God loved David IV as much before he was baptized and God would love him after  he was baptized. We are not 'born sinful' in my theology.

(By the way: since you're going to be a heretic anyway, CHOOSE your heresy carefully. I start my classes in Gnostic Christianity at UConn by saying, "How many of you are heretics?" Only a brave soul or two might giggle and raise their hands. Then I ask, "How many of you believe in the Immortality of the Soul?" Every time either all or almost all raise their hands. "So," I tell them, "read the Nicene Creed. We believe in the 'resurrection of the body', not 'the immortality of the soul'. You're all heretics!")

More and more these days, I find that I'm outside the 'orthodox' box. I've never much wanted to be 'inside' it, but I'm often struck by how 'out of line' I am.

I still think that's a terrible Collect!

Some of the Episcopal Church's collects are wonderful in their wisdom and guidance. My favorite is the Collect for Good Friday. Listen: Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross.....

Now that's something to hang your Pelagion hat on: we are God's 'family' and Jesus was willing to die for us.  That's the humanity I'm a part of. Part of the Family. Worth dying for. Know what I mean?

Am I that out of line?

 

Pokemon...NO!!!

Ok, I'll be honest, I scarcely know what Pokemon is. I didn't get it first time around and I don't get it now.

But from all I can hear or see or learn about 'Pokemon Go' it is like a mind-altering drug.

So, it's an 'augmented reality' game, whatever that is?--played on a smart phone (which I don't own) by downloading an apt (or is it ap?--I don't do it so I don't know). You walk around and see what is right in front of you on your phone (which you could see for real if you put down your phone!) and these Pokemon characters appear in the 'reality' on you're smart phone. (If anything on a phone can be called, accurately, 'reality'.) Then you, what? Capture or kill them? I'm not sure.

So, your 'reality'--which isn't really 'real' if it's on your phone--is 'augmented' by this game I don't understand nor care to.

People are walking into traffic, falling off cliffs, bumping into people (with or without smart phones) and generally spending literally hours doing whatever it is you are doing in Pokemon Go.

Several universities have opened their football fields to make sure students playing Pokemon Go are safe. The Holocaust Museum had to post a sign forbidding people from doing Pokemon Go in the museum! On the other hand, Westboro Baptist Church, which has anti-gay protests are funerals for soldiers killed in duty (since LGBTQ folks are what cause God to make wars!) is an official 'Pokestop'--a place where you can get "Pokeballs" to capture the Pokemon and 'eggs' which grow into Pokemon. None of the Pokemon (which is a plural noun if you didn't get than already) must be gay since 'God hates fags', according to WBC.

People have apparently made 'Pokestops' in places without getting permission. One family I saw on line had dozens of people a day knocking on their door because their house was a Pokestop and the strangers wanted Pokeballs and eggs. Pretty annoying, I'd say. Also, playing Pokemon Go apparently eats up your power and may even cost you lots of money because of the data it uses (whatever that means--no smart phone, no charge for data!)

Four or five of the jokes on "Wait, Wait, Don't tell me" this week were about Pokemon Go. So, if the game has the attention of Public Radio it must be a phenomena since Public Radio is still trying to understand baseball as a cultural event.

I will never play it and promise not to write about it again. But since it's interfering with my Public Radio addiction, I had to mention it today.

The final segment of Wait/Wait asked the three panelists to predict what the next 'ap phenomena' (or 'apt' or whatever) might be. Jessie, a comedian, said "Pokemon NO...it doesn't do anything but it does blow up your phone."

Well put, Jessie.

In this night

The moon is almost full
but the clouds make it only
an image through gauze.

There is a concert
at the park
across from the high school,
but I can only hear echoes,
not the words,
only the rhythm.

There is a spider
who keeps building
a web that touches
our porch post
and banister
and a wind chime
of wolves
that my daughter
gave me years ago.

There are little moths
I call 'millers'
(from my childhood, surely)
who bat against the light
on our back porch
and, from time to time,
rush my face
as I sit smoking.

And there are the crickets
in my head
that are called tinnitus
and are always there
on the back porch
or wherever I am.

The clouds will move
and the moon will shine
and the clouds will move
and the moon will shine.

The concert will end
whether I hear it end
or not.

And because the spider
is so unwise
the web will break
if not by morning
some time tomorrow.

The little moths, most of them,
live only a few days
and won't bump against
the light on the porch
beyond Monday.

The crickets in my head continue.
But when I come to die
we will say goodbye
and part forever.

Like this night
nothing endures.
Change is the reality.
Permanence is a myth.
Like the sea,
all roll on.

Day will come, surely,
to end this night.

And then, night again.

Rhythm is what goes on.
And on and on and on....

7/16/16

Thunder

This afternoon about 5:30 it got really dark and we had a brief thunderstorm.

There's not a lot I like better than a thunderstorm unless it's a thunder storm at the beach.

I sat out on the porch today and watched the whole thing. The lightening was above the clouds and back lit them. It was great. Though greater still is the lightening way out on the ocean.

We'll be on the beach in September--a good time for thunderstorms. Downside: once we had to leave early because of a hurricane.

Don't like hurricanes. Like thunder and lightening a lot.

I'm having a colonoscopy tomorrow and took the yukky stuff right after the thunder storm so I'm having my own internal thunder storm right now.

Which means, I need to end this now....