I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation
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Whether To Smile Or Something Else
Yesterday, people at my office were talking about 9/11. That murky, sinister incident will color much of the 21st century, I think. It is the “flashbulb memory” of younger people, much as JFK’s assassination was for the generation before mine. I actually remember the day of JFK’s shooting, being a small boy and seeing my mother and grandmother cry, and telling me that a bad man had shot the President. My coworkers were playing the “What were you doing when the planes hit the towers?” game, and one of the women with whom I work was asked the question. Her response brought me to an internal standstill. “I don’t remember,”…
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Scenes From A Small Farm
A fly got into the house tonight and bedeviled my wife for the better part of two hours. She kept attempting to kill him by using her tried-and-true method of fly mesmerism. I’ve seen her do this many times — she holds her hand over the fly when it lands, lowers it slowly and steadily, and then WHACK! She rarely misses. But tonight, the trick just wasn’t working. After a while, we were sitting and reading when the fly landed on my right hand. Sotto voce, I alerted my wife to his location. “I’ll put my hand down on the chair, and you whack him.” She stood carefully and approached…
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Honey, We’re Running Low On Tinfoil
I’m not very conspiracy-minded, but today I had a somewhat cloak & dagger thought. The older I get, the less I can rely on my memory, and my memory is taxed frequently by passwords. I have so many, I have to keep track of them in a little pocket notebook and a few other hiding places. And I create good passwords. No obvious personal info in any of mine — my passwords are as random and bizarre as could be imagined. And I change them frequently. After morning prayers and lectio divina, I use a password to get into my laptop. Then I use a different password to access my…
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Let’s Test That Theory
Yesterday, I spent considerable time thinking on the subject of suffering and how we face trials. If suffering comes today, I thought with the glib certainty of theoretical emotion, I would be able to endure it better than in the past. In the evening, our nearest neighbor, a dear woman whom we love and appreciate, came to the door bearing gifts. She had almost two dozen large brown eggs from her son’s hens, and a sack full of tomatoes and cucumbers. We stood chatting in the fading light while the hummingbirds flew resupply missions in the muggy air above our heads. Nodding at the eggs, she said, “We’ve got to…
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And All He Got Was This Gideon’s Bible
Last night just at dusk, my white-faced old dog began kicking up a fuss, quickly joined by my wife’s little alleged dog. They were at the glass patio door, and when we went to investigate, we assumed the possums had showed up early for supper. But no. There were three baby raccoons scampering up the Japanese maple just outside the door. It was raining pretty steadily, and they seemed content to rest up in the leafy bows of the treetop. The dogs were not as content to rest. I truly hope the ‘coons do not hang around. Despite my affection for living creatures, I have strong memories of the predations…
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The Potential To Waste
I caught myself. Driving down the mountain, looking at the haze in the air, that wispy harbinger of the 90-degree day just then in blossom, I caught myself in a familiar and hated ritual: rehearsing and rehashing all the resentment and distaste I have for the behavior of the people with whom I work every day. Like most people, the quotidian necessities of my life require that I spend a large portion of my life in close contact with a group of people with whom — if I had a realistic choice — I would not even be near for more than five minutes. All the petty squabbles, the laziness…
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In Which S.K. Flinches
I’ve lived in the South most of my life, with a few periods of residency overseas and in other regions in the USA, so I’m used to the scarab beetles known as June bugs. But I’ve never understood why they’re called “June bugs,” when they almost never show up until the first week of July. Nor have I ever gotten used to how these things will fly straight at my head, with a volume 11 buzz that sounds like a plague, the kind of plague Apocalyptic John would have described as having been poured out of a phial onto the wicked nations of the earth. All this week, every time…
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Answering For It — REVISED
Near my job is a building I pass every day. A low-slung affair in the middle of an over-large parking lot, it resembles a bank or a real estate office. The grounds are aggressively landscaped, deliberately shaded with ornamental trees, marked out by mulched quilts of annual flowers and bright shrubs. There are always cars in the parking lot, even on the weekends. The building is a nursing home. Most mornings when I pass, the front lobby isn’t fully lit, and there are few signs of activity behind its glass walls. But along the exterior walls there are many windows, and the windows are almost all fully lit, even in…
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A Wonderful Plan
This morning I read a post by Dr. Bruce Charlton, a post examining the idea of finding the spiritual — the significant — in everyday life. Dr. Charlton uses Rudolf Steiner as a platform from which to dive into this topic. I had never heard of Steiner before reading of him in the past on Dr. Charlton’s blog, and I will confess that my attempts to read Steiner have not panned out well. I lack the intellectual muscle-tone to heft this sort of weighty writing (I often have to read some of Dr. Charlton’s essays several times before I can grasp the points he is making). But the central idea…
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One Good Turn
I’ve recently become quite the do-gooder…at least towards members of the animal kingdom. Within the past week, I’ve rescued a snake and a wasp. This afternoon, I added a spider to my list of loyal friends. Arriving home, I fed the dogs and headed out to cut the grass, since it’s supposed to start raining tomorrow and rain through the weekend. When I pulled the starter cord, the blade sounded like it was scraping something. I realized that I had neglected to clean the damp grass from the undercarriage after the last mowing. The stuff can solidify into something the consistency of bread dough, and it both impedes the blade…