Memoirs
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Trying To Make It Home
When I arrived home from work, I fed the dogs and was puttering around the house, doing a few chores, when our small dog began woofing. Not barking, but woofing. A soft, short woof that she likes to utter particularly when she’s perturbed at something. When the woofing went on for more than a few seconds, I went to investigate. What I saw was this: A little rabbit, seeking shelter from the rain that had just started blowing in, was trying to make friends with our dog through the glass door. Our dog woofed a few more times, but she seemed content to mostly just sit and stare at the…
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Sitting Outside The Gates
This week marks the one-year anniversary of two deaths. The contrast between the lives of the two dead people is more striking with every passing day. The first was a young woman from an affluent background. She was sullen, self-absorbed, and from what I could see, cruel to her family. Her parents had done everything they could to usher her into adulthood, providing for her material and educational needs, and supporting her frequent and wildly unrealistic ideas about what she wanted to be when and if she grew up. When she died, it was what coroners like to call “death by misadventure.” The remaining question for her family and friends…
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The Last Sunday of Spring
This morning when I went outside, it was just a bit warmer than it has been the past few mornings. Yesterday, it was chilly enough that my wife and I had blankets on our laps while we drank our coffee. The humidity is creeping back in, though, and this week will likely be an end-of-spring-in-the-Appalachian-mountains mixed bag of balmy humidity and hit & miss showers. My frosty-faced old dog let us sleep in just a bit this morning, postponing her jaw-creaking yawns and face-slathering wake-up call until after dawn had slipped its leash and spread rose-hued light across the tops of the poplars. I accompanied her and my wife’s pooch…
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Ascension Sunday
Cooler, drier air, and the hours of sleep last night in my chair were deep and sublime. Then the elderly dog decided that 0420 was a pleasant hour to awaken, and she insisted that I join her. Her tools of persuasion include full-facial swipes with her tongue and digging at my arm with her spade-sized paw. My wife got the same treatment and so here we went. A pre-breakfast ramble in the fresh morning braced me for the day. I took several photos and gathered some wildflowers — blue chicory, daisy fleabane, and Queen Anne’s lace — planning to construct a vase-full for my wife. She harvested her own flowers…
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Faith In Exile, Part III – Conclusion
The Lenten season is upon us, and I am adrift. From what I understand, the majority of people who join the Catholic church are received into her arms during the Easter Vigil. Because of complications in my past life including divorce, along with complete uncertainty about which version of Catholicism I should be following, I have resigned myself to probably never being a real, official Catholic. Yet hope remains. I realized some time ago — gradually, like the sunrise, not an immediate clap of thunder — that I had come to believe the Catholic church is the one, true faith…that the Church truly is the pillar and bulwark of the…
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Faith In Exile, Part II
To continue… I began searching out and reading Catholic blogs and websites, and was soon dismayed at what I read. Well, let me clarify that. I was dismayed at what the articles pointed me towards. All the time I had been circling Catholicism, thinking in terms of doctrine and authority and salvation, I had managed to somehow ignore the fact that I was contemplating the Catholic church during a time of great upheaval. I found myself confronted with scism and sexual scandal and allegations of cover-ups and Vatican II this and sedevacantist that and vacant seats and impious popes and illicit popes and illegitimate popes and angry laypeople and apathetic…
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Faith In Exile, Part I
I’ve never until this moment written the following words down, and I’ve only spoken them aloud to my wife. I consider myself a Catholic. I was raised in a non-religious home, although my mother taught us to believe in the God of the Bible, and in His son, Jesus. She allowed us to attend church with friends if we wished, and she prayed with me at my bedside when I was a little fellow. The doctrines — if they can be called doctrines — that I was taught were standard but elusive. The Ten Commandments, and the Sinner’s Prayer, and Jesus waits to be invited into our hearts. But even…
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Beginnings And Endings
Forty years ago today — was it really so long ago? — I took one of the significant steps in my life. I had been thinking and researching for some time when not driving a forklift and swinging a hammer on the shipping dock of a local factory, and I had reached a decision. The decision was hastened along by the mental suffocation and lack of prospects in my home town; it was a time of youthful necessity. I walked in the cold stillness of the bare-treed day downtown, down past the local newspaper where an old editor with eyebrows the size of ferrets had laughed in my face when…
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In The Shadow Of The Senses
Even now as I sit here, placing these words onto the page, the presence lingers. Our senses not only pick up on external stimuli and alert us to their presence, they also remind us of both the effects and the significance of those stimuli. Sometimes it would be desirable if the senses were not so diligent in their duty. We fell asleep last night in our chairs. More and more, this is the pattern, especially on weekends when I do not have to rise in the dark and prepare for a work day. The very ritual of preparing for sleep — turning back the covers, placing a glass of…
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Cleansing Motion
Sitting at a traffic light this morning, I saw something I did not expect to see, something I realized that I have not seen in a long season. It was a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of his shop. I can remember as a high-schooler, working after school and on Saturdays at a small haberdasher’s in my hometown. One of my tasks was the sweeping of the entrance-way and sidewalk out front, a task I actually enjoyed immensely. Sweeping outside gave me the opportunity to get out from beneath the high banks of humming florescent lights and the drone of my boss’s conversations with his ossified friends who were…