Add 'this' to 'that'....

Out of nowhere, it seems, the Justice Department announced today it is their intention to resume federal executions if they can clear all the hurdles to restore that punishment that has not been used in years. They even named the first five people they would execute--all of whom committed murder of children or the elderly, to make the public embrace the move.

The astonishing roll-back of regulations on environmental issues, immigration issues, and other protections imposed by former administrations is one thing. Renewing federal executions just adds this to THAT.

As state government's, even Red states, move to abandon executions, the Justice Department wants to renew it! Absurd! Astonishing! Absolutely wrong!

They made not be able to do it. Lots of steps along the way. And law suits after that which could tie things up in court for years.

But why? That's what you have to ask.

Could it be because the very people who would support the death penalty would be the people who voted for the current President, who will not be named here?

Of course that's it. Blood in the water for the 'base'.

When a vast majority of Americans and the members of advanced societies around the world abhor the idea of the death penalty (if only one innocent person might be executed, no one should be executed) this move is to satisfy and further attach the President's base to him.

Killing people for a political agenda.

As I said before: absurd, astonishing, absolutely wrong.

Pray for our country--hard and often....

Mueller Time

It went on forever, the two committee meetings. Robert Mueller seemed old, hard of hearing, tentative.

But his answers,  many of which were one or two words, painted a painful and terrifying picture of what went on before and during the election and the obstruction of justice of the President during the investigation.

He all but said that if the President had not been President, he would have indicted him. All but said. He was, as always, sticking to his guns and only referring to the report. Many questions were not answered because they stayed outside his report.

I was horrified at how rude and disrespectful Republicans were of a war hero, head of the FBI, security guru and special council. Republicans have circled the wagons to defend a man who has violated federal law and lied to us all 7 to 10 times a day in tweets and in person.

I am gravely disappointed in the party my father supported his whole life. He wouldn't recognize the budget conscious, small government Republicans he loved in a party that is sheltering perhaps the most corrupt administration in history which is driving the national debt to record highs, rewarding the rich and trying to take health care from average citizens and benefits from the poor.

People on either side will have vastly different views of what happened today. That just underscores how radically this President has divided the nation.

I long for justice and truth and the administration deals with evasion and lies.

I've said it before--here and in person--"Lord, help us!"

If we ever needed God's help, it is now.

Holding doors

I realize my view of the world and country--recorded on this blog--is rather negative and disappointed and even nihilistic.

So, today, I wanted to say something positive and uplifting.

I go to a Package Store in the north end of town that is owned and run by a wonderful family whose roots are in India but who lived in England before coming to America. It's a husband and wife and uncle and children and some interestingly bizarre young white men. One of the sons and his wife (also from Indian descent) recently had a baby boy and his picture is by the cash register. They are a lovely group. The mother (and seeming 'boss' of the whole bunch) calls everyone 'love', which I find precious.

Anyway, I've noticed people in the town of Cheshire (30,000 or so of them, becoming less homogeneous each year--more blacks and browns and Muslims) always hold the door for you at the package store.

Once I noticed that, I began to notice that people all over town, at the businesses that don't have automatic doors, do the same.

There is something to be said for an upper middle class white man holding open a door for a Hispanic just off work or a Black woman or someone with a hijab. And the opposite is also true--people who are diverse holding doors for others is a remarkably positive thing.

The question is: how do we start holding doors open for 'the other' on a national level?

How do white Republicans walk through doors held open by 'the squad' that the President has attacked so viciously? How do recent immigrants, even undocumented ones, walk through doors held open by 6th generation Americans? How do GBLTQ folk hold open doors for straight folks--and the opposite?

How do we turn holding doors open into a 'way of being' in this country?

The next time someone holds a door for you or you do for them, ponder my queries.

"Open doors" are the key to being truly free and united, Whenever someone holds a door for me, I give thanks. And when I hold a door for someone else, I am thankful as well.

Ponder that, deeply.

The 'believer' world

I just read an article on line about a NASCAR driver (I've driven his name fast from my mind) who said he 'isn't a believer in the moon landing 50 years ago!

Since when has their been a 'believer world' vs. a 'non-believer world' about what HAPPENED.

We landed on the moon! It happened.

You don't have to 'believe' it--IT HAPPENED!!!!!

6% of Americans and, get this, 11% of millennials don't believe we landed on the moon.

Jesus Christ, Almighty God, save me from this!

Shit happens.

Jews died in Germany by the millions. We've had two World Wars. Kids were killed in Sandy Hook. Obama was born in Hawaii. The earth is round. On and on--'believers' and 'non-believers'.

There is nothing to believe or not believe when stuff happens.

I've lived too long. Reality has altered into a flat-earth 'belief' or 'non-belief' world.

I celebrate WHAT HAPPENED  50 years ago today--not what "I believe" happened 50 years ago today.

Save belief and unbelief for mysteries, not reality.

Sunday's sermon

6^TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST—Emmanuel, Killingworth

            Today we heard the story of Mary and Martha. Martha is fretting, doing chores, cooking and worrying while Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and absorbs his wisdom. Martha comes to complain and ask for Mary’s help and Jesus tells her, “Mary has chosen the better part.”

            I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but in the honestly of your heart tell yourself if you are more like Martha or Mary.

            I bet I’m talking to a bunch of Martha’s here today!

            Most of us, most of the time, are fretting like Martha, working on many tasks, not taking time to call out our Mary side and listen quietly to the ‘still, small voice of God.’

            That’s what we need to do, especially in these times: sit and listen for the wisdom of Jesus.

            I’m going to tell you about my upbringing a bit, because it will lead me to what I want to say later.

            I grew up in the southern most county of West Virginia, McDowell County. If you’re from there you say ‘MACK-dowell’ instead of Mac-Dowell. There were about 100,000 people in an area larger than Rhode Island—about half Black and half White.

            Though half the people in my little town were African American, I knew only two of them by name: Gene Kelly, who worked in my uncle’s grocery store and his wife, Delia, who was my uncle’s housekeeper and cook. But many of the Black adults and a good number of the kids knew my name since my two uncles owned a grocery store, a dry goods store and the Esso station and my father sold them insurance.

            I was never in a classroom with an African American until my senior year of high school though it was over a decade after Brown vs. The Board of Education. The next year the two separate school systems were going to merge, so Gary District High sent 6 students to be in my senior class: three talented male athletes and three very smart females to smooth the way. They weren’t allowed at the prom, so I didn’t attend either.

            I was good friends in college with a young man who graduated from Gary District. He would introduce me to his friends by saying, “Jim and I went to different high schools together!”

            And it wasn’t just race. When I was leaving Anawalt Junior High to go 12 miles down the road to Gary High, our Principal addressed the 9^th graders. (Anawalt was almost completely Anglo Saxon, and Black of course, but almost no people of other ethnic origins.) Principal Ramsey told us (please excuse the language but I want you to hear what he said): “The Hunks and Tallies and Pollacks down at Gary aren’t going to accept you. You will be shunned.”

            A man with a Master’s Degree told 14-year-old kids that!

            It was a dark and racist time for me growing up. Which brings me to another place—today our country seems to be moving back toward those time instead of toward more diversity and more inclusion.

            Attacks against Muslims and Jews are way up from 5 years ago. Hate crimes are increasing. White Nationalists and Neo-Nazi’s are bolder and more public now. Immigrants and even ethnic people born in this country are more fearful than they had been. Human beings fleeing, in most cases, for their lives are separated from they children and held in cages along the southern boarder.

            I’m not talking about policy disagreements. In a democracy, there are always policy disagreements—it is a sign of the strength and health of the democracy. I’m talking about the violation of basis human rights—rights all of God’s children should expect in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’.

            Martha work is needed to correct all this—but Mary work is needed more. We need to sit with God and ponder God’s wisdom and wonder how things have gone wrong. Before Martha gets to work, Mary must drown out the rhetoric and the noise and ponder the will of God, seeking guidance for the work to be done to insure ALL PEOPLE a part of the Dream of this great and good land.

            So, let your Mary side ponder our plight so her wisdom can guide the work our Martha side has to do.     Amen.

Wellness visit

I went today for my annual 'Wellness Visit'. I love my doctor, let's get that straight, but he's a part of a nationwide G.P. group and the way they work is problematic.

First of all, I had to fill out 5 or 6 pages with answers before I went, and the largest number of questions were about my mental health and how to avoid falling.

I know those are two problems people of a certain age have--but it seems overdone.

I did fall once, three or more years ago and tore the ligaments in my knee and had surgery and a long spate of P.T. No falls since and actually I was coming downstairs and missed the next to last step.

But, my mental health is without fault. I may be happier than I've ever been. I have the love of my life in our house on Cornwall Avenue--50 years married 55 years a couple. I have two wondrous children who are successful, happy and in great marriages. And, undoubtedly, the 4 best grand-daughters in the universe.

My physical health is above average. I read 5 or 6 books a week, between my pension, both our social security checks and my part time job doing what I love to do--being part of 3 amazing communities--I make much more money than I ever make working full time.

We have a house and two vehicles long ago paid off, a sweet and precious dog and all the friends we need.

I mean it, I am a happy, satisfied, prospering elder.

I know many elders aren't and I ache for their pain.

But the best thing about my wellness visit was it made me realize how lucky and blessed and happy I am. I sometimes don't acknowledge that fully.

I will now. Every day. I will be thankful with every breath.

Did this before....

I've posted this about a year ago, but I was thinking about it today and decided to send it out again, in case you didn't see it.

Glad for Gladys

            Gladys Spinet is dying. Not that it matters much to most people, but she’s dying and that should be worth something. It should matter—make a difference.

            Elsie Flowers told me today—about Gladys dying. Walking down the main road, along Mrs. Flowers’ fence, I saw her in her garden and heard her hoot me over. She asked if it were hot enough for me and since it was I told her, “yes, plenty warm, thank you.” She brought her hoe over to the fence and wanted to hear all about me and what I was doing. When I told her, I was working on my doctorate, she thought I was going to be a physician. So, I explained I wouldn’t be that kind of doctor, not the kind that looks down your throat. Then she talked to me about her cabbages and politics and all kinds of things, and, right in the middle of something else, she said, “Oh, ya know, don’t ya, ‘bout how Gladys Spinet is dyin’?”

            I stood there, trying to remember who Gladys Spinet was and feeling profoundly sad that knowing someone was dying didn’t matter much to me—no more than Mrs. Flowers’ cabbages or Senator Jennings Randolph, who she found too liberal.

            She leaned on her hoe, as if to make it final, and said, “She is…really…dyin’.”

            A tiny necklace of dirt ringed Mrs. Flowers’ neck. Her garden and her sweat gave her a necklace like kids get when playing ball on a hot, dusty day. It reminded me of Julia, the eight-year-old girl I’d seen that morning wearing a necklace of the pop-tops from soda cans. I took her picture and asked if the tops ever cut her neck. “Jist sometime,” she said, “ain’t they purdy?”

            I wanted a picture of Mrs. Flowers with the necklace of dirt around her neck, thinking how it would look beside Julia’s picture. Julia had been leaning on her bike and Mrs. Flowers was leaning on her hoe. I imagined the photos, in identical black frames, stark against the white of my study’s walls. I was on the verge of asking to take her picture when Mrs. Flowers said, “Cancer, rite here,” pointing to the end of her dirt necklace right below her ear. “Too late to ketch it and she’ll be dead ‘for winter. It’ll eat up to that little part of your brain with the long name. Jason tol’ me what’s it called, but I forgit. Anyways, when it does, Gladys’ll die, quick-like.”

            I almost said, “you can’t ‘catch’ cancer,” since I thought she meant ‘catching it’ like the mumps or a bad cold. Luckily, I paused long enough to realize she meant “it can’t be treated.” Then I caught myself about to say that the part of the brain she meant was the medulla obbligato, but with Gladys Spinet dying that didn’t seem important enough to mention. Suddenly, all I could think of was that the next time there were cabbages in Mrs. Flowers’ garden, or a senatorial election so she could vote for the Republican, there wouldn’t be Gladys Spinet.

            And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to make it matter as much as I wanted it to.

            Gladys Spinet, Mrs. Flowers told me, “went to Charlottesville las’ month.” Going to Charlottesville—to the University of Virginia Hospital—was the kiss of death where I grew up. You only went to Charlottesville when no doctor in southern West Virginia had any answers. And Charlottesville didn’t have answers either. In Charlottesville they did research on things without answers.

            Mrs. Flowers rambled on about how her nephew, Jason, worked at the hospital in Charlottesville and what a good job it was and how beautiful the mountains there were in fall. “There bein’ more maple there and maple turnin’ brite red.” While she talked, I thought about Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s house in Charlottesville, about the big calendar clock that covers a wall of that house, keeping perfect time after all these years, counting out the moments of Gladys Spinet’s life.

            When I got away from Mrs. Flowers, carrying three Big-boy tomatoes in a brown paper sack for my uncle, I stopped at a road-side grocery to buy a Dr. Pepper from a fat woman whose name I couldn’t remember just then. Her name is Mrs. Goins or Mrs. Cones or something like that. When I paid her, she asked me about her bursitis since my uncle had told her I was studying to be a doctor.

            I was about to explain Ph.D. and M.D. when Sam came in, his hands greasy black from working on cars, to buy some Lucky Strikes. Sam is my age—a Little League teammate who dropped out of the high school where I excelled. He asked where I’d been and what I’d been doing and how I came to be visiting ‘home’. And then he told me, in the matter of fact way he said everything, “ain’t it sumthin’ ‘bout Gladys Spinet dyin’?”

            For Sam, she was already dead. There’s something about cancer, something about how much we fear it, something about how some people—Sam, for one—call it ‘the big C’, that makes the diagnosis final, a death warrant.

            “The big C’ll git ya, Richie,” Sam told me solemnly, “never fear. Never fear.”

            I was on the verge of saying that ‘fear’ seemed an appropriate reaction toward cancer and death and about to tell Sam that I couldn’t remember the last time I was around someone who smoked Lucky’s when, without warning, a picture of Gladys Spinet jumped into my mind with both feet.

            I saw her, clear as day, running down the main road in winter, ignoring the icy patches on the pavement and the snow piled almost as high as the fences on the shoulders. She was running like mad, in my unexpected memory, coatless---running to her retarded brother, Casdy, who was sitting in the middle of the slippery road playing with something he’d found there: a small animal, a chipmunk or something, dead.

            I remembered Gladys’ face then. It was a soft, round mountain face—like my mother’s, like mine beneath my beard—with small eyes and thick brows, full lips and a weak chin. Sam’s face…and Mrs. Goins’ face. Mrs. Flowers’ face, and Julia’s. Gladys Spinet’s face leaped into my memory, out the mirror in my bathroom.

            Someone once told me that Gladys Spinet changed Casdy’s diapers even though he was almost fifty and very fat. Her other two brothers, I remember hearing—one not much brighter than Casdy and the other a preacher of some ilk—wouldn’t lift a finger to help. So, Gladys Spinet changed Casdy’s diapers and took the dead things he collected along the road out of his pockets each night.

            I remember Casdy the way you remember bad dreams. He is so large and so retarded, drooling a lot, that he frightened the wits out of me as a small child. I even remembered the dead things he carries around in his pockets. Dead things are always frightening to little kids…or fascinating. I’m too old to remember which.

            Standing there, talking to Sam, I remembered how Casdy isn’t afraid of his dead mice or frogs or birds at all. Casdy takes them out of his pockets to show you as if he were showing you something glowing, or a shiny quarter he had to buy some gum.

            My ‘killing time’ with my uncle, back where I grew up, suddenly seemed pointless. I had wanted a week or two way from my apartment and my thesis, a few weeks to take pictures and sleep late and walk the mountains without thinking or reading or writing. Instead, I’d walked right into the drama of Gladys Spinet’s death—a drama that depressed me because it didn’t seem to matter.

            I’m going back to Cambridge day after tomorrow. I’ve decided I actually want to be near the library. There are several things I need to know about Stephen Crane before I can finish what I’ve been working on. I won’t find out those things here. All I can find out here is more about how Gladys Spinet is dying. I realize there’s nothing I can do to prevent that, or even make it matter much to me.

            Gladys’ dying may matter to Casdy—someone else, after all, probably someone less gentle and loving, will have to chase after him and change his diapers. But he’ll most likely think of Gladys as one more dead thing he found and wish he could put her in his pocket.

            I’d like to write Gladys a note, but it would be maudlin and vain and she wouldn’t remember me or understand. I’d like to tell her, somehow, if I only could—“O God, Gladys, I am sorry you’re dying.” But for all my good intentions, it still wouldn’t matter much.

            What would matter is if I could tell her something hopeful, joyous, glorious. Like that her life will soon be still and over. Like that I’m glad for her. Glad.

Conklintown, West Virginia 7/28/74