January 9, 2010

Today is Sophie’s birthday. Last night we took eleven girls roller skating at the Carousel Family Fun Center in Whitman. Following that, the girls camped out in P’s living room watching movies and playing games and talking late into the night. P got very little sleep. Today Larry and Sue and Scott and Erin came to dinner. P was mad and resentful of me most of the night without saying why.

The walkway on the Powder Point bridge is covered with snow and ice making walking difficult. There was a flock of eiders in the water and the usual pigeons seagulls and crows hanging out on the railing. It was not too cold only about 28 degrees but the strong wind made my ears and face cold. Another new sign at the beach end of the bridge warning that there are now infrared cameras watching the beach at night.  Heaven forbid a young couple might sneak onto the beach at midnight or a group of boys hang out behind a dune, or an insomniac or poet be driven to walk the beach in the dark. More cops, more equipment every year to protect Duxbury Beach from terrorists and evildoers.

Grey Monday

I got a close up look at a loon in the bay in its winter colors.  It was an incredibly graceful bird and dived smoothly into the water when I stopped to stare at it.  I did not see it come back up.  It was a  still grey day and not too cold.  I walked the bridge and back at lunch time.

Among my father’s personal effects was set of rosary beads that had been given to him by an Englishman who had found them on the battlefield during World War I. My dad had been billeted with an English couple before he was sent to France during the war. When he told the story of the English couple, he always spoke with amazement that the English who he had been taught to hate could be so good to him. They would take him once a week to a neighbors house for a bath, they having no bathtub of their own. My dad told them of his Catholic faith and the man, not being Catholic himself and having no real use for them, and knowing that my Dad would soon be in the war, he gave him the rosary beads. They stayed in touch for many years after that.

A very high tide just going out, a breeze from the east, some crows, ducks, walkers. The temperature is mild, the sky clear. In the bay are a couple of trawlers and a large red tugboat anchored off of Green Harbor. It probably towed the large barge with a crane into the harbor.

Notes on My Father’s Death

The night I left after being with him all day, Sunday the 6th of September, I held him in my arms for a minute and looked deep into his eyes. He was still completely mentally aware although his body was slipping away. We were not physically close in my memory, but there is a picture of me hanging on his pant leg as a little boy and one of him holding me when I was a baby so I know at one time we must have been. That embrace was an impulsive act on my part but it is a connection with him I will never forget. The next day he was just suffering and unable to talk clearly, then on Tuesday he died. Pam, Cynthia, Caty and the nurse were with him when he died.

A few more observations about that time:
I lost an awareness of him being old. It seemed that I was relating to his spirit rather than to one who was old, or sick or dying. And I saw him clearly, no different than as if he was still a boy or a young man. His essential being that I knew so well had no reflection of decay or death although it seemed that he was depressed and afraid at times.

There is nothing beautiful about death. He suffered, especially those last few days, pain, thirst, fear, loss of basic abilities to even reach out and control the events and circumstances around him. He began to see things that weren’t there, to reach out for things, groping, frustrated.

That Sunday before he died, Pam and I, Scotty, Paige, Corinne and Sophie all came up to see him. He was still able to get up and walk a little, he sat outside for a while, he could talk but his voice had become hoarse. The girls were very affectionate with him and I am sure those final goodbyes meant a lot to him. They meant a lot to me.

Two weeks later I am still processing everything. I do not think he was a Christian in the sense of it that I have, putting my faith in Christ, his deity, his death and resurrection. He prayed the rosary all his life, but would not attend church. But he was kind to my mother to the end of her life. And Jesus said that anyone who offered a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because they are believers would not lose his reward, and Paul says that the unbelieving spouse shall be saved by the believing spouse.

It was a surprisingly warm day following a drenching rain. There was a flock of Eiders floating in the bay, two males and nine females, as well as a few gulls that seemed to be harassing them. Perhaps due to the rain there were few people on the beach and only one boat in sight on the ocean. It looked like a tugboat, moving slowly off of Green Harbor

On the Edge of Winter

I got a chance late this afternoon to walk out over the Duxbury bridge to the beach. Work is very slow and the winter looks to be a lean one. The air was surprisingly warm and the walking pleasant.

I saw several older couples walking the bridge, several young women walking or running their dogs, I saw a cormorant fishing in the bay, and sandpipers in their winter colors feeding between the beach stones and the surf. There were about five crows at the beach end of the bridge. A bright green grasshopper caused me to stop suddenly on the way back and stare into its oddly blank eye, the intensity of its greeness shining in the late afternoon sun.

Pumpkin Moon

I have been one aquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-and back in rain
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Last night I walked my old route out to Cove street and back down Lover’s Lane in the dark. The moon was rising over the far beach a great orange globe suspended over the bathhouse. This evening I did it again and walked further around the circle of Cove street which is a hidden little neighborhood on a peninsula surrounded by the marshes of the back river. There was a football game in progress, the football field for Duxbury High School backs up on the marsh just off the little peninsula and in the dark the sounds of the game seemed to be not more than a backyard away.

In my father's color slides taken during the sixties, there are two photos; one my Dad took of me standing on a country road on a fall day with a shotgun across my arms, and another that I took of him in the same pose. That was a scene from one of the best times of my childhood. My Dad used to take me hunting in the fall to a place in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Leaving my mother and sisters behind, we would leave early in the morning from our house in Watertown and drive through Belmont, past McLean’s Hospital and onto Route 2, passing, each time, the familiar landmarks which were, for a boy, the opening up of the wide world, passing the granite walls of the road cuts oozing ice, stopping at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and doughnuts, going around the rotary at the Concord Reformatory and then driving west to the woods and farmland of the Nashoba valley.
We would always park the car at the same spot at a farm where there was a dirt access road through the fields leading to the woods beyond. We would take the guns out of the trunk of the car, careful to leave the shotgun unloaded and open and walk down the road between barbed wire fences and manure piles. We walked on cornstubble, crunching the stalks and frozen, half rotten apples, and fallen leaves, between juniper trees and under the great old pines into the wild to walk all day and see, as Thoreau said, what men who stay at home in parlors never dream of.
It was cold starting out but I would soon warm up from walking. The sun would rise up and the ice in the edge of the dirt road would melt. The little ponds would sometimes make whooping sounds like someone striking a large piece of sheet metal. When we stopped to rest, the chickadees would fill the branches in the pines near ground level calling chee dee dee to each other and the bluejays would call from higher up. I became attached to the sounds and sensations of the woods and to the easy measured pace of traveling by foot, fortified against the cold by an inner furnace. The woods were a place of escape, a place of freedom and peace. There were old stonewalls, overgrown gravel pits, rusty farm machinery; harrows and plows, and abandoned cars usually filled with rusty bullet holes. They were relics, to me, of a distant and mysterious past; these signs of a long history of people working the land gave me a sense of place in time no less than if we had walked through the ruins of Rome and Greece.
He was careful to teach me to carry and use a gun with great care and responsibility. He told me, never point a gun, loaded or unloaded at another person. The first time I shot it I aimed it at a little dead tree as he stood behind me to brace me. I still remember the copse of woods and the uneven ground under my feet and the feeling of dread and anticipation, the squeeze of the trigger, the leap of the barrel and bang of the gunstock against my shoulder, dead leaves fluttering, and the giddy feeling as my brain tried to piece together what had happened; the blast by my head exploded the world for a brief instant. It was a thrill I’ll never forget, I think I was seven years old.
He knew what gunshot wounds could do to the human body. He had served in Graves Registration in the army during the second world war, which meant that he had to take the bodies off the battlefield, prepare them for burial and bury them. The war to me was like those old cars from some lost age, but was, no doubt, hardly passed to him. The boots that he wore only on these trips were from the army; he had worn them in France and in Belgium. And his field glasses were a German officer’s, for they buried German as well as American dead, taken from the battlefield, an officer whose brothers and sons and parents were likely still living. Older men stack up decades in their memories like old newspapers but I had little perspective on time and place when I was scarcely ten.
By noon, we were pretty hungry and had walked probably for four hours, so we would make our way back to the car and drive into Littleton to an old time diner in a silver-bodied railroad car to have lunch. My dad's favorite was liver and onions, I would have a hamburg or a clam roll and a chocolate frappe. There is nothing like good food after working up an appetite.
After lunch, we would hunt on the other side of the road where we parked where there was an apple orchard. My dad explained to me how the pheasants would run ahead of you in the grass until they ran into an obstacle and then they would take flight. I remember many times scaring them up into the air with their loud drumming wings, and then the blast of the shotgun and my heart pounding. He sometimes came home with a pheasant or a duck when he went hunting with his friends, but I don't remember ever bringing one home when we went together, and I don't think I cared. We rarely, if ever, shot an animal just tin cans and dead trees.
We estimated we walked ten or twelve miles a day, so by the late afternoon, I was tired, the light and my energy fading rapidly. There are two things that mean a lot to children; one is routine or repetition because it creates anticipation and a sense of security, the other one is candy. My father knew how to provide both. A short way up the road heading home we always stopped at the country store. It had real cracker barrels and cheese wrapped in cheesecloth and it had a glass display counter filled with bins of different candies for a penny a piece. He would let me pick out what I wanted and I would eat it all on the way home. We sat quietly in the car and hardly said a word retracing our route to Watertown, looking out at a long line of red tail lights, going home to a smaller more confined world.
That was what we did each autumn, from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was in my teens. I scarcely think about it now, about how much that simple activity meant to me. About the age of fifteen I lost the ability to talk easily with my parents. I entered adulthood with mixed feelings of anger and love for my parents which took me years to sort out. But I had something I think many boys never had and that's a father who spent time with him and taught him about the world and his place in it and who taught him about himself. And who gave his son the things that boys need from their fathers and who really knew how to make him happy.

The Problem of Distinguishing Good from Evil.

to say all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds is to say we cannot distinguish good from evil. Quoted from the CED mailing list

I have trouble trying to understand why so many Christians support the war in Iraq, which, to me, seems unequivocably wrong. It is true that some good could come out of it, the fall of Saddam, the re-building of the country etc. And it may also be true that it is part of God’s plan, as in the book of Revelations we see Him visiting war on humanity as just punishment for evil. Can it be then that George Bush is God’s instrument of vengeance. On one hand I can see that possibility, however, for the most part, for the apparent motivation, and manner of the attack on Iraq, I do not see the hand of God at work myself, perhaps others do. Yet the possibility alone leaves me baffled and unsure of what is evil and what is good as the atheistic contributor to the mailing list uses just the same stumbling block to justify his atheism.

In an an attempt to reply and to clarify my own thinking I made the following notes.

All of us can innately distinguish good from evil. This is my first premise and what I actually believe to be true.

The question is, does it matter? If there is no God, it does not matter if we do evil or do good. Debate about the matter becomes irrelevant because good has no intrinsic worth and evil no intrinsic harm. If the rapist rapes, it does not matter that he is doing evil, at least from his perspective. We should say that without God, good and evil are irrelevant because the consequences are relative, and not say that good and evil themselves are relative because even the rapist will acknowledge that his actions are evil, although he might rationalize rather than admit.

If God punishes an evil world with evil, is God evil?

The world generally is about evil on evil.

Human beings innately know good from evil and they have an innate system of justice expressed as a craving for vengeance when evil is done.

My biblical reference for this is Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.


And in Romans

8:28:

All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

1:32

Although they know God’s righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.



Topic: The Distinction between Good and Evil

Thesis: We are all innately capable of distinguishing good from evil.

Discussion:


The argument that the contributor to CED gives for his conversion to atheism for stumbling on the block of Good versus Evil are:
1. In the Old Testament God occasionally commands men to kill, yet he also gives the general command, “Thou shalt not kill”.

2. Bad things happen to good people. And we say it was the Lord’s will or that all things will work together for good, apparently unable to distinguish good from evil. And then he says,

“But if we cannot distinguish good from evil, then all our moral judgments are
compromised -- including any trust in any so called covenant with the deity that created that condition”.
3. God has shown that he will break his promise because that is what is really good for us.

This man is saying that :

1. God is a hypocrite.
2. God is a shallow ingrate, not rewarding those who do his will or punishing those who do evil.
3. God is a liar.

These personal impressions are what lead him to state that we cannot distinguish good from evil, therefore we cannot know that there is a God, therefore he does not believe there is a God.

Or perhaps he is saying that if there is a God, based on his personal observations and reading of scripture, he is a hypocrite, an ingrate and a liar and he chooses to have nothing to do with him.

Questions:

Is the pain one experiences at the dentist or the doctor good because the end result is good?

Is pain good because it warns us forcefully of damage occurring to our bodies?

The real evil is the damage, the pain is symbolic.

…
In the case of the war in Iraq, either I am misinformed and my conclusion about the evil nature of our part in the war is wrong or I am not misinformed and my conclusion is correct. There is no possibility that Bush is doing good but disguising it as evil. In other words it is possible to distinguish good from evil.

My Dad has signed the hospice care papers and agreed to move into my sister's house. She does not expect him to live much longer because he is not eating. I know he does not want to live as an invalid, or have extreme procedures done to prolong his life. He has even stopped drinking Jack Daniels.

I bicycled out to the beach this evening, strong wet winds, heavy surf, there was seaweed all the way up to the snow fencing and it appeared that the last section of walkway had been swept away.

Old men ought to be explorers

T.S. Eliot

I stayed in town tonight and went to the beach for the first time in a long time. It is Spring finally and all the flowers are in bloom including the roses on the beach. There is fragrance in the air. There are not too many people out this evening. The guard shack has had a makeover. The upper beach has a solid bed of rocks, there is almost no sand at all above the high water line.

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh" Genesis 2:24.

This is something I wrote ten years ago to help clarify my own thinking before teaching a class for young people.

Our culture glorifies sex, we make it the center of our lives and its attainment our life's highest purpose. It is not related to intimacy, or commitment, or love. It is a light subject, like Bud Lite, another product to be consumed with much gusto but not much thought. Movies, songs and tabloids have discarded the concept of marriage. The magazines in the supermarket all feature on their covers women whose breasts virtually spill out into the checkout aisle and their lead articles focus on sex technique the same way that Bicycle magazine focuses on tightening spokes and waxing seat covers. The church, however, teaches that sex has transcendent meaning and commands us to refrain from immorality and remain abstinent until we are married. Sexual activity by the unmarried is sin. How then do we as Christians reconcile these two ideas in our lives, one from our culture and one from our faith, especially when we are likely to face long years of singleness?
The impulse to seek a wife or husband is a fundamental part of our nature. We all crave sexual contact with a suitable and permanent mate, and that is a natural and God given inclination and the very persistence of this drive is a clue to a mystery not to be understood in this life. It is more than a biological imperative to reproduce, although that is the simplest and easiest to understand explanation. Our bodies have a physical aspect that demands to be shared with another person through their body, but sexuality goes far beyond the physical differences and the wonder and mystery of romance and love go far beyond the mechanical act of coupling.
It is imperative that the unmarried Christian be able to live happily and independently because there are times in our lives when God will call us to be single and because only from a position of independence and contentment can we enter into a healthy marriage.
It is easy to see all of our needs met in someone of the other sex. After all, in our imagination, she or he can not only meet our sexual needs but provide us with affection, intimacy and purpose. But, we are to look to God, not another person to be the source of all the good things we want in this life. He says He "will meet all our needs according to His riches and glory". Now God's riches are not the world's riches and His standards are not the world's standards.
The desire for sex is not overwhelming in itself, it is only when it is mixed up with other feelings that it seems to be overwhelming and temptation impossible to control.
We all have a need for intimacy, which is the desire to share our deepest thoughts and feelings with another person. We have a need for affection and appreciation. We all have a need to fit in with our group and to measure up to the standards of society. When society puts such a high emphasis on sexual experience and physical appearance it swells our perception of our sexual needs far out of proportion to what they really are.
When we strive to walk in the Spirit and focus our attention on the Lord and not on self gratification, we find riches all around us. Riches, principally, of Him working in and through us and visible in the people he loves. He may give us close friends or one close friend, someone who is closer than a brother and who is around and faithful long after wives or husbands have come and gone. He may give us a warm loving family, brothers and sisters or people in the church who love us and appreciate us on a level that often is never achieved in marriage and seldom in a purely sexual relationship. And He gives us insight into reality far deeper than those who claim wisdom and experience with wordly things, so much deeper as to make their wisdom pure foolishness. And he gives us knowledge of the truth that sets us free from the enslaving standards of beauty and performance that the world sets.
So some practical suggestions to living the single life are; Cultivate friends of both sexes, take the time to get to know people really well, whether it leads to marriage or not it will be a treasure you will have for a long time. Don't believe the big lie the media tells you that looks and sex are the center of life. Be friendly, reach out to people, be interested in people, walk in the Spirit, consider the Lord in all you do and say. Do not forsake your family, don't forget to continue to build relationships with your parents and brothers and sisters. Get involved in things that challenge you and develop you and bring you into contact with people. You may have to wait and do without for a time, but you will have a much better chance that marriage will work when it comes.

The chief end of man is to glorify God
And to enjoy Him forever.

I walked the bridge to the beach this morning. The wind was out of the northeast blowing cold and damp. I am taking my father for radiation treatment again this afternoon. Work has completely dried up.

3/25/2009
I filled the truck with gas at Barney’s Gulf in Duxbury this morning. Barney’s is run by the man whose father and grandfather owned the lumber yard on railroad ave. His father also owned property throughout town most of which has been sold off to developers. The four buildings around the old train station are still in the family as is the Gulf station. He has one sister who lives in Ontario and a brother who died several years ago.
I asked him about one of the buildings that looked like it was having repairs done to the roof. The side of the building has the outlineof an old loading door that I knew was from the time when the railroad ran right next to it. He began to tell me a lot about the land and the buildings. The building that recently housed the fish market is basically a nondescript one story ranch, so I thought. But it is actually the old train station that has had the passenger platform filled in and been re-sided and painted white.
Walter Prince bought the building in 1940 after the rail lines were taken up in 1940 and remodeled it. The steel rails were sold to Japan, ironically just before the war.Their are still two steel rails under one of the buildings that the grandfather had kept. And there is a film from 1938 or 1939 of one of the last trains pulling into the station with the grandfather standing in the loading door of the old grain building.

I hope to post the notes from the eulogy I gave for Liz shortly.

I walked over the bridge at lunch time for the first time in a long while. The whole community seems to be hunkered down for a long winter. Except for the work on the Leahy's old house there is little new construction. Last winter a number of big remodeling jobs were starting, this winter all is quiet on the waterfront. And so all is quiet on the business front for me. I looked in the Clipper today to see a half a page of contractor advertising. I wonder if I should add my name to it.

The wind is out of the northwest, it is cold but, once warmed up from the walk, not uncomfortable. There are a few people on the beach and on the bridge, but not many for a holiday.

We went to the Marshfield Fair Sunday and E and I went on the ride named Freakout. It is merely a steel rod swinging from one end with a rotating piece on the free end. There are sixteen seats around the perimeter of the rotating end in groups of four. The floor drops from under the seats before it starts to swing and it begins gently and then gets a boost that causes it to swing to about 4 o clock. The rod is 43 feet long and the end with the people on it swings up to 73 feet off the ground. I remember the height, the fall with the air rushing around me, and the centrifugal force. There was a feeling of being in the grip of a powerful mechanical force and a terrifying free fall. It was like being in an out of control airplane about to crash. And for the first time I experience the feel of a fall from a great height. E seemed to be not at all phased by the whole thing.

We saw four deer in the parking lot of the Alden museum yesterday about 4 o clock. My son spotted them. I turned the truck around at Railroad ave to go back. They were still there when we drove into the parking lot. A doe and three fawns, two male and one female. The fawns were fairly grown and all four gracefully ran off to the woods behind the building.

June 5, 2008
North wind, wet, grey, cold. The surf driving in hard onto the beach, one solitary tern.

May 30, 2008
8 pm

The tide is at its peak. There is a wind out of the south south east. Black clouds blanket the sky in the west and the sea is grey and choppy. Crossing the bridge I pass two girls walking, and a young Chinese couple fishing. There are a few power boats out in spite of the cold. Again I saw only one tern, a few sandpipers, a flock of geese or ducks high over the inland shore of the bay and a solitary gull floating above the bridge in the stiff wind.

May 28, 2008

The water in the bay is a muddy green today. The water in the sea dark blue. A cool wind blows from the east. One tern circles over the bridge. The guard is at the gate; The summer season has begun.

I walked out to the beach today after looking at a job I have going on powder point.
There was a strong smell of rotting seaweed on the beach end of the bridge and a smell of manure on the land end of the beach. Yesterday I noticed the smell of wind blown sand.

buenos dias muchachos, aqui estoy esperando el dia. Me quedo aqui en la casa de mi mujer. Ella se duerme en tristeza asi que sus hijas estan con sus padre y las estrana mucho.

He decidido que la unica cosa que merece mi esfuerzo es escribir un libro. Y el libro que quiero escribir es uno de la naturaleza que glorifique a Dios.

Los domingos es importante que me descanse y que alabe a Dios. Pero hoy yo he trabajado en considerar una compra de una propriedad. Por eso tienes mi vida. Que va?

I have been listening to Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea on tape borrowed from the library. It is an interesting story, poetic in a sense. He dreams of lions on the beach. It is existential, a rich tapestry without meaning, The Life and Death of a Fish. A crazy old man, alone but loved by a boy, an old man with experience and skill and knowledge of the natural world engaged in a life and death struggle.

October 12, 2006
Alces alces The Uncommon Moose
One morning at about quarter to six last July, My son Scott and I were driving down route 3A towards Kingston when we saw the moose. As we came down the hill towards the mill pond, I saw the figure of a large animal, like a deer but bigger, run across the street at the bottom of the hill where the road goes over the outlet from the pond. I slowed the truck and said to Scott, "look in there," pointing to the driveway where the animal had gone. Scott looked up, he had been half dozing. Standing in the driveway was the oddest looking deer we had ever seen.. It was as big as a pony but with legs twice as long. It stood with its feet planted. We stared at him and he stared back at us. It was young, and its antlers were small. They were mitten shaped, covered in a light brown velvet. "It’s a moose!" I said.

This is the second story addition we are doing in Norwell.

4 September 2006
My Dad has recovered from surgery after a long trial. He has been talking more about his past more than he ever has before, at least to me. He was telling me about his grandfather.
John Cook (Koch), was born in Germany, probabably about 1850. He served in the Prussian army before coming to America with his wife. Their first child, Helena, my grandmother, was born in New York city in 1880 and came to Watertown at the age of four. John worked at Lewandos in Watertown square as a master dyer, my Uncle John says that he was the owner for a short time although I am not sure how he would have come to own it or how he would have lost ownership. He had a son Phillip whom I remember from my childhood as Uncle Philly,who owned a cottage in Hampton Beach and also owned my current house where we Maloneys grew up on 15 Dana Terrace. He also had another daughter, Barbara, who married and had two sons, John would never talk to her again or acknowledge her existence because her husband was Jewish, and their sons were raised as Jews. My father remembers they always came to family events like funerals and remembers that they were friendly; he would talk to them but could not tell his mother that he had. John’s wife left him for another man after they had eight children together. She had a son with the new husband. John lived near Newton corner off of Galen street, my grandmother used to serve him breakfast, which he would refuse to touch until she put a beer on the table to go with the meal. My grandmother was living in Watertown square when she met my grandfather who was a mail man and a volunteer firefighter. My grandfather Thomas was born in 1878 and died when I was a child. He is buried in Saint Patrick’s cemetary in Watertown. His father James was born in County Mayo Ireland in 1858.
One of my earliest memories is of my father’s aunt another of John’s daughters and her husband. They lived off of Watertown square across River Street. I remember going there, and I remember them as a friendly old couple with flower gardens around their house. Strangely, one of my father’s earliest memories is also of this same couple in that same house a generation earlier.
Some of the traits ascribed to John Cook are familiar traits of the Maloney family; such as severity and stubbornness. I remember visits to my grandmother’s house on Green street. Everyone, including the children sat around the living room with the backs of their chairs against the wall, my grandmother in her rocker by the window.

PTown
Some Years Back

Labor day my son Scott and I bicycled to Plymouth to catch the ferry to Provincetown. I had bought him a new bike this summer and we had not had a vacation or done anything for a while so I thought we could go try the bike trails in the National Seashore and climb the P-town tower. I checked the weather before we left and there was a block of thunderstorms south of the Cape moving north but they seemed to be going to pass out to sea beyond us. The captain of the ferry warned us it might be a rough ride. It was foggy and windy and starting to rain when the boat pulled out of Plymouth harbor. But once underway the fog lifted and the rain stopped. We sat up on the top deck in the open with most of the other passengers. There are always foreign tourists in Plymouth, in particular Japanese tourists. The Pilgrims seem to have meaning for the Japanese. On the ferry. there was a group of Dutch or German tourists I couldn't tell which and their English was good enough that they spoke it almost as well as their own language. The boat is fairly noisy but my first thought was Dutch, I don't know why. One young woman sat in front of me she had a graceful neck and blonde hair tied in a pony tail, the curve of her hips was in my view on the edge of her seat, I could picture myself coupled with her, my face buried in her long smooth neck.
It is quite a sight to see land , thin, sandy land, lighthouses, churches appear out of the sea, the last solid earth before Gibraltor. The sand spins around the tip of the Cape. The boat followed it into the harbor. The captain said this was one of the finest harbors anywhere, deep water and complete protection from the northeast winds. But this one is only attached by a long spindle to the mainland, there is no room for a city of any size here, just the main street and rows of beach houses and inns. He pointed out the big grey building on pilings we were to tie up at and return to at 4 pm. Scotty and I carried our bikes off the boat and decided to head first for the Provincetown tower, or Pilgrim Memorial tower which dwarfs everything else in town even the hill it stands on. I had been here twice before, once as a child on a summer vacation drive through the cape and once when I was fifteen and staying with two friends in Chatham at a motel owned by my friend Kevin's brother in law. Then we had not bothered to pay for admission but had hopped the fence. Then too we had bicycled from Watertown to Chatham in two days. This time the short ride from Duxbury to Plymouth had taxed my strength. And this time we paid admission. The clerk was very obviously affected, that is, with flowery shirt and florid face, flaming, care free and happy, in short gay and proud of it. The tower is about 250 feet tall, an elongated granite rectangle one stone thick with gargoyles and the semblance of a bell tower, but no bell at the top. It is copied from a tower in Italy. The observation deck is enclosed all around with wire and clear plastic; it is too perfect a place for suicide. There were tourists here too and several languages, little kids, and some from Revere or Everett I would guess the way they talked and the way they recognized the towns of Massachusetts engraved in the granite blocks. Scotty and I scoped out how we would get to the National Seashore. But first it was time for lunch.
We were not familiar with the restaurants, I commented to Scott that if we went into the wrong one I might have a sudden attack of homophobia. It was easiest to go to MoJos on the pier by the big grey building. It was one of those places where you order at the window and eat at an outside bench. Everywhere there are openly gay people, mannish women, womenish men, the world turned upside down, men holding hands, girls striking marlboro man poses. Inside the window there were two teenage girls taking orders and a middle aged man with a long grey mustache giving orders and I guess cooking. I went to place our order. The girl had a cute but ordinary face with brown hair and a low cut tee shirt her breasts were big like ripe white melons I wanted to look into her shirt as she leaned close to take my order; I looked at her face and then off at the ice cream machine. I had a fried fish sandwich with guacamole Scotty had a swordfish sandwich. Once I was young and such temptations were not irreconcilable with the facts of my age, but once also I knew of no heaven more real than a beautiful girls body, that has changed, I know there is a larger heaven, a better heaven but I still remain fascinated by girls.
After lunch we headed out down Ptown's pedestrian-crowded main street. I wanted to find a map so we could find the bike trails at the national seashore. Main street is all kinky little gift shops, for practical purchases we had to go back into trafficland and find a combination gas station convenience store. The girl at this counter was blonde, young and pretty and she did not speak English very well. I got a map and Scott and I headed off to find the other wild side of the cape. The once barren desert described by Thoreau now museumized with trails, parking lots, bath houses, ranger stations, and visitors centers. Genesis 1:28 says:
God blessed them and said to them, "be fruitfull and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue
it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves
on the ground."
This is the fate of the man-dominated earth. I would, wrestling with God, leave some of the earth unsubdued, dangerous, for the sake of adventure and romance, but I cannot deny that this mandate is inexorably fulfilled everywhere even in my short lifetime. And to think this is preparation for a fiery end to all of creation and all the works of man.
It did not take long to bicycle from the town shore to the seashore. We rode a short way to find the beginning of the bike trails and followed them up through the sand hills, there were pines in the hollows and sand higher up, many footprints ran into the dunes from the bike path, and I saw some of the strangest mushrooms and fungi growing among the pines. At the crest of one dune, we could see the ocean. We stopped at the visitors center and climbed the stairs to the observation platform. Scott bought a b'osun's whistle at the gift shop, I thought about buying a book on seashore botany, I should have. We looked out to the sea and I was beginning to wonder if I was going to make it all the way. In my twenties I used to ride 70 miles a day, I never got tired, I flew over the highest hills, but now I struggle. It doesn't seem so long ago or part of another life yet twenty five years have gone by since then. My body is only now slowing down and my dreams are virtually the same and still largely unfulfilled, to be a writer, to have a good marriage. But I have changed on the inside, gone from death to life, from darkness to light, from despair to hope, and that in Christ.
We get to the beach and sit on the warm sand, the sea is deep and churning, a young couple man and woman play and laugh in the surf, another couple, a man and a man dressed identically, hold each other looking at the sea. Later the young woman comes over and asks if I have seen her daughter, we all look for her hoping that the worst has not happened, but then she appears in the grass on the hillside a little child in a vast landscape quietly playing in the grass and thankfully not swallowed by the sea.
We need to return to town by four to catch the ferry home so we head back down the same bike trail until we are again walking our bikes down the crowded main street, there is an incongruous mix of children on scooters, and bicycles and gay people. I enjoy the pedestrian dominated street; autos annoy me to no end, but I like people and I am interested in the human condition and here it is all laid out but perhaps still wanting interpretation. There is a huge white wooden church, one of the most notable landmarks seen from the incoming ferry. It has been converted into a museum. In this city of sin the church is no longer central or foundational to society, if it exists, it is without public prominence. What a city ripe for evangelization; so many lost souls filled with anger toward God and toward those who dare question the validity of their sexual persuasion. There was, on the sidewalk in front of the church, a mime dressed as a mechanical doll. She, it appeared to be a she, moved mechanically to a whirring sound coming from a basket in front of her. She looked just like a doll, her body was sexless, her face pretty like a young girl, her hair a mop of bright yellow curls, her eyes as blank as a machine but written across her face was the brightest, friendliest smile. I took a picture of her and of the church, then we walked on. We came next to a store that sold salt water taffy we went in to buy some, I remembering how I used to watch it made in the storefront at Hampton Beach when I was a child. When we stepped outside the same mime was walking by. She moved close to me, I was not conscious of her approach until, from the corner of my eye, I caught her broad smile. I instinctively looked up and said, "Hello", and looked into her eye as I have done many times when I was fortunate enough to receive a smile from a pretty woman. Catching a woman's eye and reading her approval is something I sometimes think I live for. But these eyes did not respond, no trace of bashfulness, or flirting or anger. There was nothing in those eyes. I instantly knew this was not a woman. She or he walked on swaying and smiling down the street. And I, puzzled, watched her go. Her gait was strong, light, agile and manlike in the sense of a male ballet dancer. The smile on the outside, the lifelessness inside; this was a tragic figure, definitely male, definitely making a personal statement to the crowd. I sensed an invulnerability that can only come when one embraces death.
We got back to the big grey building on the wharf early to wait for the boat to leave. There was a young woman with a bicycle and a backpack with flags from all over Europe on it. She was traveling alone. Twenty five years ago she might have been the perfect one for me. I don't remember meeting any woman traveling or walking or running alone on my many excursions, young, free and lonely. The captain warned us the seas might be rough so I went downstairs for dramamine for me and Scott. It was a little rough but we didn't have any problem with sea sickness. The boat pitched and rolled and the spray reached us on the top deck. The weather was pretty clear now and we could see both P-town and the mainland. With the sun low in the western sky, the mainland was dark, we were headed toward the Manomet Hills, with the power plant on the canal visible to the south and the headlands of Marshfield or Cohasset to the north. But P-town, catching the direct sunlight shone golden on the water like a mythical city in the middle of the sea; the tower so out of proportion to the rest of the town and the sand so golden and the water glinting around it. When Thoreau described it one hundred fifty years ago there was no tower but he describes the same sight of being halfway across the bay. In his day the mackerel fishing boats encircled it with their white sails the last thing to be seen as the boat moved away.
When the boat tied up in Plymouth, Scott and I and the young woman with the bike were the last down the gang plank with our bicycles. We headed home riding up route 3A. We were tired now and just labored along, it started raining a little again, we got back to Duxbury about 7pm. I think this would be a good trip to do again now that we know where we are going and if the weather was a little better for the beach. We could head directly to the National Seashore and swim and lie in the sun. The surf was high and the water warm but the air was cold and windy and by the time we got to the beach, with diversions to the tower and to eat and find our way, it was almost time to turn around. This would also be a good trip to bring company on who come to visit our area. Its a trip we'll always remember.

Natural selection is self limiting. As non-random selection occurs from generation to generation the inherent variation from which the selections are made decreases naturally limiting how far things can go. Random mutation is the hypothetical mechanism of creation of new variation that biology teachers invoke to cover this gaping hole in the theory of evolution. They spend little time analysing the science that supports the viability of such a mechanism.

It rained all day. I went to Watertown this morning for my Uncle Ed's burial service at Ridgelawn cemetary, where my mother is also buried. Funny, I had trouble finding it.
Later there was a gathering at the Verona restaurant.

In the afternoon I went to work on the house. I put in two windows and worked stripping paint from the columns on the porch. I stopped by my friend Rick's house just before going home. He is almost done with his book.

Now I am at Angela's house. Her daughter's friend is sleeping over. I am playing on the computer.

Rainy Sunday

I have just finished listening to the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty written by Caroline Alexander. It is a book worth reading or listening to on tape as I did. The film starring Marlon Brando was the first movie I ever saw, my dad took me to see it in the sixties at the theater on the Cambridge-Watertown line. I still remember the scenes of keel-hauling, whippings, and the tyrannically cruel Captain Bligh. In this book Bligh, while not a hero, is not altogether bad, not nearly as old as in the movie, he just seeme to be a little poor at interpersonal relations and had not been given sufficient support to his authority. In the end, they burn the ship as they did in the movie. The book tells a fascinating story, revealing the complexities of the case and its mysteries. It follows in particular the story of Peter Hayward, who was sixteen at the time of the mutiny, who did not go to Pitcairn but lived on Tahiti with a tahitian wife until discovered and arrested by the royal navy. He was returned to England in chains, tried and convicted to death, but then pardoned by the King and went on to a long career in the navy, as did Bligh. Several others tried with him were hanged. The mutineers who went to Pitcairn left many descendants but all but one disappeared, or were killed by the tahitians that they took with them.

4/16/01
We leave Logan airport at 9 AM, the plane heads out over Boston Harbor. We can see all the harbor islands below, the sky is clear, Duxbury bay and the thin edge of Provincetown are visible in the distance, most of the experiences of my life are encompassed by the view from this airplane window as it turns to the north and we pass over Lynn and Nahant beaches where my mother used to take us when we were kids, then we pass up the coast along Plum Island and right over Rowley where my mother spent here last days in the nursing home. We turn back to the west and Hampton beach is visible to the north where our family vacationed every year. We fly to Cleveland and then on to Phoenix. I try to read my Chinese Bible. We arrive in San Luis in the evening.

I seem to have recovered my blog from sparclinux, although I've lost my picture of the madhatter.

I had a strange dream Friday night . I woke up from the sound of a large fly buzzing around my head. Still more asleep than awake, I turned on the light to try to kill it. The clock read 2:45 am. I could not see the fly although I looked and listened. Giving up I went back to sleep with the sound still over my head. The next morning P called with the news that S had woken at 2:40 that night screaming and throwing up, then C woke up covered in hives and P herself began to experience the symptoms of a urinary tract infection. She was up all night. I thought of the story of Job, and of Beelzebub, the lord of the flies.

We framed the Roof on the job we're doing, again very hot to work.
P and the kids are down at the beach waiting for me.

For a journey and such a long journey

Random Thoughts

In an entirely different way, some philosophers have always found something fishy in the Darwinian theory of evolution. An obvious sticking point is the concept of fitness itself. If by the fitter organisms, biologists mean merely those that survive, then the doctrine that natural selection winnows out those organisms that are not fit expresses a triviality. This is a logical point and not a matter of experiment or research. The biologist who wishes to know why a species that represents nothing more than a persistent snore througout the long night of evolution should suddenly or slowly develop a novel characteristic will learn from the neo-Darwinian theory only that those characteristic that survive survive in virtue of their relative fitness. Those characteristics that are relatively fit, on the other hand, are relatively fit in virtue of the fact that they have survived. This is not an intellectual circle calculated to inspire confidence.... The doctrine that survival favors the survivors is what logicians call a *tautology*, a statement that is all form and no content. For obvious reasons, the evolutionary biologists are uncomfortable with the idea that the chief claim of their theory is roughly on the intellectual order of the declaration that whatever will be, will be" (Berlinski, D., "The Evidence for Evolution," in "Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck,")

Little Wonder

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd__
"I came like Water, and like Wind I go".

from the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam

I really screwed up today; I called P Liz when I talked to her on the phone. I desperately do not want to self-sabotage another relationship, but I do want this relationship to be God’s will or not be at all, so I will have to let this gaffe ride out and hope it didn’t too much damage. And I will have to put more distance between myself and Liz, first because I might inadvertently give her the false impression I am still hers, and because, as has already happened once, I might drive away someone who I could actually be happy with.

P and I walked on the beach last night with a thunderstorm flashing to the north and east. The tide was out enough that the walking was fairly easy on the sand flats. Little birds wheeled around us in the dark and the wind blew strong and constant from the direction of the storm.

B called yesterday. I am not sure what exactly he wanted but basically he called me a scumbag which, from his perspective I probably am, God help me.

The paper work is starting to pile up around my ears in my room. It is good to have a night to catch up a little on it.

Memories and Great Expectations

Where, like a pillow on a bed.
A pregnant bank swelled up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

from The Ecstasy by John Donne

Scotty graduated from High School today and we had a party. P made all the food. Fred Byrne helped set up at the Beans and ran the grill. The guests were: My dad, my sister Cynthia, her daughter Caty and son Jeff, my sister Judy and her son Rick, my friend Rick Tulipano, his wife Lane and his son Gabriel, Scott’s friend Nathan and Nathan’s girlfriend Sue, Fred Byrne, Joyce Bean, Scott’s friend Annie, and Paul Yoon, Liz, Bob Friend, Cynthia’s boyfriend Dave and his two daughters, the neighbor Joe and his kids Emily and Ben. It was a good party thanks especially to P and Fred.

Tomorrow Scott and I have to go to the U of H for orientation. Liz wants to come, but I am hoping she is too tired to get up. June 15 Scott and Liz leave for England, June 11 John leaves for the track for ten days, June 18 and 19 my sister Nancy is visiting from Washington, Cynthia will be having a cookout the 19th. Rick and Lane want to meet P, I think especially Lane.

After the party and after cleaning up everything and taking a shower, I went to the beach. There was a long jagged line of purple clouds in the north off the setting sun, the tide was out, it was a beautiful time to walk, rain is on the way. I need to get to bed early but I am still hoping to hear from Pam even tonight when I don’t expect to. We sat together in the kitchen last night talking by candlelight. I still sometimes feel really awkward with her; she is so beautiful.

Jesus is My Homeboy

Fold of Valour, sleep a little, Glory of the Western world;
I am wondering at thy beauty, marvelling how thy locks are curled

It was a very emotional service this Sunday. Ray’s whole family was there. His funeral was only Friday. Our new Pastor preached well again, making some changes in the order of the service. Brenda and Jack C were there today. I think they will start coming again. I have really missed them. And Russ H came in the evening.

I bicycled to the evening service. 10 kids were baptised, most of whom I know well. It was quite a thrill to see so many profess their faith: Justin, Alex, Mark, Collette, Kelly, James, Bobby, Corey, Vincent, and David. Their parents were also thrilled; it means everything to us as parents, more than college or good health, or anything in this world to know that the ones we love the most are walking in the Lord’s will.

I did not get to Watertown this weekend as I had planned. S went to the Prom last night with a girl named Annie. They rode in N’s dad’s purple cadillac. S was in last night but long after I was asleep.

My dad is thinking seriously of selling his house. It is really run down and I think the best thing may be to tear it down and re-build, but the lot is so small it would be difficult to do. The buyer would also have the option to renovate it entirely but all systems are at the point of failure. It may be an opportunity for me but I will have to move fast or lose it. I don’t know where to look for financing, I don’t know the zoning by-laws, or any local contractors, I don’t know the appraised value or the rental rates. There is a lot of work to do but someone will buy it and make it into a usable home. It may as well be me.

Black Marigolds

Even now
My thought is all of this gold-tinted king's daughter
With garlands tissue and golden buds,
Smoke tangles of her hair, and sleeping or waking
Feet trembling in love, full of pale languor;
My thought is clinging as to a lost learning
Slipped down out of the minds of men,
Labouring to bring her back into my soul.

I am too tired to put anything into this tonight. L is on the warpath again. Everything she says about me and now about P as well is really exactly what she herself has been and is. Sometimes I still feel bad about divorcing her especially when everything is going so badly for her now, but when she calls up and swears at me I know I did the right thing. She is so venomous and hateful and self-deceived. The bible says rightly that Christ has no fellowship with Belial. As for P, I am still baffled why such a young, beautiful woman would be interested in me. I hope I can do the right thing by her in every way.

Prayer List

Because of that great nobleness of hers;
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs
Burns but more clearly.

W.B. Yeats

That all the subs get to the Williams next week and that Mike and I finish the carpentry.
That I get organized to make the most of the summer.
That P and I grow closer, if it is the Lord’s will, especially spiritually and emotionally.
That she and her husband arrive quickly at a fair settlement, again, if it is the Lord’s will.
I pray that God will give her and me the wisdom to know what his will is and that if he will not bless this relationship we would not go too far before finding that out.
And that I not add to P’s already excessive burdens. Even more, that I might be able to make this week easier for her.

Lights Out

Pensaran vuestras mercedes que es poco trabajo hinchar un perro?

Cervantes, from the preface to the 2nd ed of
Don Quixote

Amanda has been here for several hours with S. It was good to hear them talking and laughing in the kitchen; they have been friends since they were kids. Now they have gone out for a walk. L is still missing, I haven't been able to find out where she is. She does not answer her cell phone. I am looking forward to getting a full night's sleep tonight although I would not trade the last few weeks for anything.

Monday Routine, Not!

I’ll not forget the warm blue night when my bold girl,
Whose kissing lips smell sweet of honey and of rose water,

Came softly to my room, and my room glowed
As if the moon at her bright full had entered to me.

Wow!!!

Notes from a Fallen World

Last night my kisses drowned in the softness of black hair,
And my kisses like bees went plundering the softness of black hair.
Last night my hands were thrust into the mystery of black hair,
And my kisses like bees went plundering the sweetness of pomegranates
And among the scents of the harvest above my queen’s neck,
the harvest of black hair;
And my teeth played with the golden skin of her two ears.
Last night my kisses drowned in the softness of black hair,
And my kisses like bees went plundering the softness of black hair.


May 16, 1994

As I reflect on this day, I am struck by the contrast between the morning filled with warm Spring sunshine and the evening dark and rainy.
It was one of those intoxicating Spring mornings. Scott and I and even Liz woke early. We had cleaned the house on Saturday so everything was in good order for a day that we could just enjoy. Scotty and I went to church. The music of the bell choir playing matched the iridescent beauty of the morning, the Pastor spoke about encouragement and about the power of words to lift up or to tear down.
When we returned from the church, Liz was still up. Scott and I headed to Watertown to go to the Spring-fest along the Charles river with Caty and Jeff and Cynthia. Liz had other plans.
There were so many beautiful women there and I tried to remember the words from the book of James that the wisdom from above is first of all pure, I desired that wisdom and I desired those women. After the Spring-fest we visited my parents and then my sister Judy. And, last of all, we went down to the Tulipano’s house, by then, it had turned cold and was raining pretty hard. Scott and I went to Friendly’s and then headed home in the dark with the windshield wipers on at high speed.
At home the doors were locked and Liz was gone. We cozied in to our beds and went to sleep.

One Day at a Time

Sweet friend, I will part the curtain of black hair and let you
Into the white garden of my breast.
But I fear you will despise me and not look back when you go away.
I am so beautiful and so white that the lamp-light faints to see my face,
And God has given me for adornment my heavy black hair,
---Last night my kisses drowned in the softness of black hair,
And my kisses like bees went plundering the softness of black hair.

The last few days seem to have dragged out for ages. Less than a week ago the thought of kissing P was an idle fantasy; now it is an easy reality. I have somehow got from Boston to London but I can’t remember what flight I took. I enjoy being in London though and could stay here quite a while.

Lazy, Lazy Sunday

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I woke this morning with a headache and had it all day, too sleepy to be much good. ‘Spent the day with P. It was one of the best days of my life.

Meanwhile, in Faluja, 880 people killed. What are we doing there? I am afraid America will have to pay a great price for this. Our president wants to change the world; he should read his job description: to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Exasperated

Western wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

Exasperated is how I felt when I found out today S had not filled out the financial aid application I had been reminding him about all week and had not followed up on information that his application for financial aid to his two top picks for schools was held up for some reason and he did not even tell me about it or try to fix the problem.

He had karate tonight and I had Youth Group. The kids had a lot of fun tonight. I am always amazed at how many adults start to do Youth Group and drop out half way through the year. N and her husband have been great, they have taken up the slack from others who were supposed to be in charge this year. But they are moving to Virginia next month.

I walked down to the cove in the dark and the fog. The river is filled with water, the surf is loud and the spring peepers have come back to life.

April Rain

---Como dice usted que se llama el pueblo que se ve alla abajo?
---Comala, senor.
---Esta seguro que ya es Comala?
---Seguro, senor.
---Y porque se ve esto tan triste?
---Son los tiempos, senor.

Dull, dreary day. I got a lot of office work done. DB did not show up to do the concrete floors, H did not do front hallway as planned, but the painters are working wonders, the electrician to be there tomorrow.

PM concert at the high school. The Wind Ensemble was a little weak. The Jazz band was really good, dynamic. They had a vocalist, a girl, sing on one number. She sang Aint Misbehavin with a lot of soul, breaking into scat. S looks good in a tuxedo, he has good stage presence.

'Looking forward to the weekend.

Good Friday

I have of sorwe so grete woun
That joy gete I never noon
Now that I see my lady bright
Which I have loved with al my myght
Is fro me deed and is a-goon.

Allas, Deeth, what ayleth thee
That thou noldest have taken me
When thou toke my lady sweete
That was so fayr, so fresh, so fre,
So good, that men may wel se
Of all goodnesse she had no meete.

P came down Friday night and we went together to the Good Friday service. After the service, J and A invited us to go get something to eat with them. I said okay without even bothering to look at P to see what her reaction was; I am going to have to learn not to be so careless.

We went to the restaurant, one of Duxbury’s 3 watering holes for the rich and obscure and had some light food and light conversation. Having known J and A for years, having traveled with J under sometimes difficult conditions, having taught all 4 of their kids in Sunday School, I have come to highly admire their God-centered marriage and family life. Their children are miles ahead of other kids in self respect, godliness and wisdom. The purpose of life is to glorify God and the S family does just that.

P was gracious and friendly in conversation, as always, but as I watched her I could see that something was bothering her. Everything about her is fascinating, her body, which I am still only allowing myself to observe around the edges but now in greater detail, her mind, her drive, her spirit seeking after God and her intense but intensely controlled emotions.

After we left the restaurant, P changed into her walking shoes and we drove down to the bridge to walk the beach. How delightful it is to be out under the stars, to be moving under my own power and to have the company of a woman who herself puts the stars to shame.

We walked all the way to High Pines and saw no one else on the beach. I think she would have kept going to the Gurnet if I had not turned back. The rush of new things to talk about has started to abate, so we will need to be more deliberate and creative and even content to walk in silence.

I think I offended her by prodding for more answers about her marriage when she has already made it clear where it stands and that she has made a difficult but unequivocal decision. Because she is still married and her husband has only recently left the house, I know I am on dangerous ground, not only morally but also socially and personally. And the only way I can rationalize it is to say that I will let the relationship develop naturally and slowly, giving God control of the outcome. She is either an answer to prayer beyond my wildest expectations or she is the subtlest, most powerful temptation I have ever faced. Taking it day by day as Pansy advised, any given day with her is a gift from God, who knows my heart.

After the walk we talked in the kitchen until late at night.

Not Unconsarned

“Why, the sun’s in the suds and the moon in the high Horicks; there’s a clipstick comin; an’, an’; there you’re both as unconsarned as if it was about to rain mether. Go out and cross youselves three times in the name o; the four Mandromarvins, for as prophecy says: -fill the pot, Eddy, supernaculum- a blazing star’s a rare spectaculum. Go out both of you and look at the sun, I say, an’ ye’ll see the condition he’s in -off!

Simply said, there’s too much work and no conceivable way to leverage it. I had a business plan once, two in fact that served me well for many years. Then I changed my plan when I thought I could actually get a job as a teacher, a real job with security and stuff like that, and still be able to dabble in business in the summers. The painters working with me now are all retired teachers with pensions. But now I think it is not feasible to get a job as a teacher or to survive financially on a starting salary, especially with the onerous payments I must make to my dear ex-wife. I need to make decisions about what kind of jobs I will do and what kind of help I will have to have to do them. I also need to decide how to work with M; I need his help but remain reluctant to make a partnership. He lost his shirt on the last job he did himself, that is what it takes to learn. perhaps he will try again, but then I will have to hire someone, (something like adopting a child). S will work for me this summer and perhaps his friend G.
Some options for a plan are: spec building, which is very high risk, competitive and requires capital investment, another is custom home building which is what I am doing now. This job has been good to do so far, financially and has been enjoyable; if all continues to go well, I may be recommended to do more. Building is a different game from the remodeling which I usually do. My weakest point is slowness in returning with estimates followed by a lack of a consistent, skilled crew. Yes it would be wonderful to be able to put my son through college, buy a small home, travel a little each year and stay out of the poor house in old age.

S has not been home this evening, it is not like him not to let me know where he is going.

Tir-na-n-og

Even now
If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again
Weary with the dear weight of young love,
Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms
And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,
As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease
Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

I am wondering what plans to make for my life. I am at a turning point; my divorce is finally done, S is making plans to leave home to start his own life. I know the things I want in life. I know who and what I live for.

For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:3

What I do not know is what tomorrow holds; but that scarcely matters to me anymore because I know I am to live each day in complete dependence on and faith in God. (Although I must confess I am in a good mood when there is money in the bank and I am in a bad mood when there is not.) There is no security in earthly things, none whatsover.
But there is a responsibility for us to at least set a course. For although the wind of this earthly life will not blow forever, while it does, we ought not to drift aimlessly.

Broadly speaking, I want the same things most men want: a good marriage, my own home, good health, a satisfying career.. Specifically how to arrive at those is the more difficult question.

Unagrocracy

“Look where you cut me, you villain,”says she, and she held out her arm to him-and, my dear, he thought the sight id lave his eyes.

The news has just been released that 7 American soldiers have been killed trying to restore order in Baghdad. Al-Sadr’s call for violent uprising is the most troublesome development to date for the occupation authorities. The Bush administration is trying to say that his is a small radical faction, but in fact he has significant popular support especially in the Shiite ghetto of Baghdad. If we lose the Shiite cooperation there will be no containing the country.

There is an inclination that is as old as human history for conquering armies, upon meeting resistance, to raze the cities and lay waste to the land, killing every human soul. We Americans have that inclination as much as the Romans did but it is held in check by the self-delusional charade we play that we are the good guys. If we are going to be conquerors, bring it out in the open. If not, bring our troops home. Unless we want to bleed our country to death there are no other options.

Baghdad Burning

WHITE

I thought that it was snowing
Flowers, but no, it was this young lady
Coming towards me.

From the Japanese of Yori-Kito
(19th Century)


This morning S and I drove to Burlington for an informational session for Hofstra University. I, sneezing and dizzy, hid in a corner of the room while S took the initiative to ask questions of the representatives, both students and Deans. Their presentation was not as elaborate or as polished as the one we went to last time for the University of Hartford. But this seems to be S’s new first choice. They told him he could continue his music without actually being a music major, and he likes the fact that it is just outside Manhattan. I am hoping that he will have a positive and memorable college experience, that he will get a well rounded education, that he will broaden his horizons, and that he will find a group of sincere, Christian young people who will encourage him to grow in faith. My prayer has always been that he will glorify God with his life and his life’s work; that Christ might live in him, that he might be compassionate, gracious and filled with the hope of the knowledge of God both in adversity and in abundance.

Low Energy Day

Bless’d be the hour she cooled in her linens,
And blythe be the bird that sings on her grave.
Come to my arms my Katie, my Katie,
O come to my arms and kiss me again!

This cold I’ve had for three days pretty much put me out of business today although I did get some work done in the morning and went to see PD who had asked me to do a couple of small jobs. She is English and the widow of an Iraqi surgeon and a she has a different perspective on Iraq than most. She also likes art and has some interesting reproductions of masterpieces on the walls in her condo. She had a new one by Matisse in a gold frame that I liked and commented on. She said most people don’t like that one. Well, that’s par for the course with me. I spent the afternoon doing laundry and trying to rest. PT called and talked for while. Later Scott, Nathan and Liz and I went out to eat as we usually do on Saturday evening. The boys have taken the truck for the night.

Sittin’ Thinkin’

Lo! The winter is past;
The rains are over and gone.
The time of the singing of birds
Has come.

I can sit here and think for ages and never write anything. So, I’ll just recount the last few days. Friday Scott was away. P and I went to dinner at Carmela’s and then went for a long walk on the beach. Needless to say, she is what I am sitting here thinking about more than anything else. Saturday morning I did paper work and picked up Scott’s graduation photos. In the afternoon I went to Watertown and climbed up the old slate roof at the house on Dana Terrace to try to re-mortar the chimney at my Dad’s house. Afterwards, I walked down to the T’s to talk to Rick for a while. Little Gabriel is walking now, he has curly brown hair just like his Uncle Tony had when he was a kid, (that’s remembering way back). Sunday morning I had three kids in Sunday School, Evans, Matt and Suzannah. We sat around a round table in the fellowship hall prayed, talked about a lot of interesting stuff, and read 2Kings 3. P came to church, and afterwards we took a ride in her car and talked. When she left to get her kids, I went down to Pansy’s to bring her some red cyclamen and take her trash to the dump. She was too sick to come to the door.
In the evening Scotty called from Bridgeport and said to call the Hunan crowd because he wanted to go out to dinner. Nathan wasn’t around but Liz joined us later for dinner. Today I worked alone at the Williams starting to do the finish work inside.

P-town 2001

You do not know,
You do not know what life is,
She said,
Slowly twisting the lilac stalk
between her fingers

There was, on the sidewalk in front of the church, a mime dressed as a mechanical doll. She, it appeared to be a she, moved mechanically to a whirring sound coming from a basket in front of her. She looked just like a doll, her body was sexless, her face pretty like a young girl, her hair a mop of bright yellow curls, her eyes as blank as a machine but written across her face was the brightest, friendliest smile. I took a picture of her and of the church, then we walked on. We came next to a store that sold salt water taffy we went in to buy some, I remembering how I used to watch it made in the storefront at Hampton Beach when I was a child. When we stepped outside the same mime was walking by. She moved close to me, I was not conscious of her approach until, from the corner of my eye, I caught her broad smile. I instinctively looked up and said, "Hello", and looked into her eye as I have done many times when I was fortunate enough to receive a smile from a pretty woman. Catching a woman's eye and reading her approval is something I sometimes think I live for. But these eyes did not respond, no trace of bashfulness, or flirting or anger. There was nothing in those eyes. I instantly knew this was not a woman. She or he walked on swaying and smiling down the street. And I, puzzled, watched her go. Her gait was strong, light, agile and manlike in the sense of a male ballet dancer. The smile on the outside, the lifelessness inside; this was a tragic figure, definitely male, definitely making a personal statement to the crowd. I sensed an invulnerability that can only come when one embraces death.

The Entire Poem

The mountains of Bech-Parma are great enough,
But my love is greater.

The glaciers that marble their tops are white,
But your breasts are whiter.

The antelope stricken by my bullet
Weeps a red blood from its wound

Which dyes with large red flowers
The field of the blowing jasmine flowers of snow.

Your arms are whiter than the jasmine flowers of snow
And your kiss is redder than the blood of the antelope.

The mountains of Bech-Parma are great enough
But my love is greater.

II
The wind screaming in the forest when the wind of Russia blows
Is milder than the desire that draws me to thee.

Your body smells richer than the resin
That weeps in the sun from slender pines.

And your mouth has more of odours
Than mint flowers throw on the air.

When you are by my side, I feel in my body,
A warmth more suave than the softest sun-rays.

And when you go away from me, my sadness
Is blacker than the lowering night black with storm.

The wind screaming in the forest when the wind of Russia blows
Is milder than the desire that draws me to thee.

Daghestan

Strange Days

Your arms are whiter than the jasmine flowers of snow
And your kiss is redder than the blood of the antelope

S is in Valley Forge Pennsylvania this evening if all went well. He left last night with his friend Warren from CueTime. They planned to drive from midnight non-stop. He is participating in the 18-and-under billiards tournament at the Billiards Exposition held at the Radisson Hotel.

I talked to P yesterday at the library. She was studying algebra for a test that evening. She had on a lime green sweater and was wearing just a touch of a really nice perfume. She came by Friday night and we talked for a long time in the kitchen and then went for a walk down to the cove. That night she had on an orange sweater and just a touch of orange in her lipstick. I am really enjoying getting to know her.

Pansy is supposed to go in for her second chemotherapy, (oxymoron!), treatment tomorrow. I’m not sure who is taking her; I should have called. It seems wrong for someone who is so healthy to be made so sick by her doctors.

A Quiet Sunday

--Yo te agradezco, Abenamar,
Aquesta tu cortesia.

It has been a quiet Sunday, I rested all afternoon. This morning I taught Sunday school. We read a little from 2 Kings and made Italian ice.

S came with me this morning to church and P came too and sat with us. I talked briefly with HN and when the conversation turned to building houses, he intimated that he could get me money to do a spec house. We did not pursue the subject, I dislike talking business in church, but it gives me something to think about.

The sermon was excellent, about Jesus’ resurrection. I drank it up. I wondered what the reaction was in S’s mind, he appeared restless and disinterested. I also wondered what was in P’s mind as I am not sure where she is spiritually. I hope the Holy Spirit is working on their hearts.

This afternoon I finished the book TheDaVinci Code which was leant to me by the Ws. It is a clever book about a modern day pursuit of the holy grail. It reads like a movie script with a lot of fast action and little character development. The protagonists follow a long, almost tedious, series of riddles, there are many twists of the plot and much suspense. The premise of the book is that Christianity, a false religion, supplanted the ancient goddess worship that preceded it; the goddess worship is the true religion now subordinated by Christianity and preserved in secret by the Priory of Sion. Of course Mary Magdalene is the goddess and was married to Jesus, their children are the royal line whose existence threatens the church to this day. It is so clever only the devil could have thought this up.

Testing new picture

Testing new background color

P and I took a walk in the snow today and agreed we shouldn’t be seeing each other. B was very upset she came to church with me last Sunday. I told her she was incredibly beautiful and truer words were never spoken.

It snowed almost all day today. I did not have work. It is amazing how uneasy I feel when I am not working, as if I had been holding the world on my shoulders and now it is in danger of collapse.

Today is the last day before our divorce becomes final. I hope and pray that she and I will remain friends for life. And though it's sad to put an end to the hopes and dreams we had, I know that this life and everything in it with its cloud of sin is fading away fast. I'm putting my hope in His coming and, God willing, she will be there too.

S registered to vote today at the Duxbury town hall.

But Not in Despair

La gloire, la gloire, c’est de la merde

I was sure for so many years I was going to marry Susan, although most of the time she wouldn't even speak to me. I finally gave up on her, but later found out that if I had hung in a little longer and tried a few more times it might have happened. When Liz came along I wanted her and gave up on Susan. Susan gave up on me when I married Liz. Then I remained married to Liz. through hell on earth until finally I was enticed by Sandra and I set down the road to divorce, meanwhile Sandra disappeared off the face of the earth. Now I wonder if there will ever be anyone suited for me; Liz certainly wasn't, probably not Sandra, although she did not stick around long enough for me to find out, maybe Susan, but she's happily married now. It has been a lifetime of waiting for the right woman and always, always, always without one. I don’t know of anyone else who waits so long before giving up on someone and yet it seems I never wait long enough. God help me! Although I am sure he has a hand in all this.

Sheng Dan Kuai Le

Christ climbed down
From His bare Tree
This year
And softly stole away
Into some anonymous Mary’s womb again

Last night, Christmas Eve Scott and I went to the service at the church. There was a small group there mostly old and good friends celebrating Christ. It was for me the best part of Christmas. When we went home we finished decorating the tree and wrapping the presents for the next day.

Today, after opening the presents under the tree, Scott, John and I went to the Cannata’s for our traditional Christmas breakfast with Becky, Eddie, Emily and Nathan. Emily had a new dance machine that she danced on in coordination with the tv display. After breakfast, Scott and I headed up to Watertown to visit with my Dad. My sister Cynthia came over with her kids Caty and Jeff and my sister Judy came with her son Rick. We visited until about sundown and then headed home. The kids are all grown now they’re all as tall as the adults, Caty is a beautiful young woman. Dad gave me the gift he gives me every year, a bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee whiskey that I have to remember is not wine. Then we went down the street to see Rick and Lane Tulipano and their young son Gabriel. Rick’s parents were there, his mother home from the nursing home. And Louis was there, the handicapped man that Rick has befriended for years and always brings to the family holidays. Finally Scott and I went to Liz’z for dinner and to open presents. Liz’s Mom and Stepdad were there and Joe and Rocky and Penny Liz’s dog. We are home now recovering from all the traveling.

I am working on a new house in Duxbury and working with an excavator approaching retirement age who has lived and worked in town all his life. His name is F. He has been telling me stories of Duxbury before it became Yuppyville. He used to plow the field where we are building the house back in the fifties before there were any houses here. His grandfather was George Loring who had an ice business where he used to deliver ice to all the surrounding towns by horse drawn cart until the invention of the refrigerator put him out of business. Loring also used to bring his oxen over the Powder Point bridge and out to Saquish and walk them across to Clark’s Island at low tide where they would spend the summer. F told me he built the house the Hogans have just moved out of at the bottom of Tremont street when he was in his twenties, and he told me a lot of other stories about builders and developers around town. The field where we are now working ended up belonging to Bud Goodrich as compensation for unpaid bills to his feed and grain store, (Goodrich Lumber), Bud gave it to his daughter Nina and Nina sold it to the present owners.

It seems to me that it is better to live working outside, and with your muscles and your brains in a smalltown society rather than to work in an anonymous commuter-computer, bedroom community. Think of the advantages: You work with your body, physically, everyday, you work in the elements and close to nature and you work where you live. I think we have lost so much that was a part of the New England experience for 3 centuries. Now commuters want to re-create a fantasy of rural life but without the essential elements. Frank is moving to Maine when he retires and I think he is moving closer to home than farther away. He has 7 children of his own and his wife has four from a previous marriage. He went through a bad divorce in the seventies and ended up losing all he owned and owing thousands but he has managed to put himself financially on a high road for retirement, mostly because of the land he has owned for thirty years, now worth over a million dollars

The Roots of War

I worked upon a farm in Illinois.
The squad appeared; I marched away.
Somewhere in France, amid the trenches gray
I met grim death with many other boys.
I gave my life for freedom—this I know.
For he who bade me fight had told me so.

Saddam Hussein was captured this morning. He was hiding in a hole, he must have known his days were numbered. He will now either be tried and executed or tried and imprisoned for life. I think, if it was me, I would rather have been killed, and I would rather not have been captured hiding in a hole. It is a political victory for Bush and for supporters of the war. Of whom, I am not one.
If Bush is able to bring peace and democracy to Iraq it will truly be a great accomplishment in spite of the lives lost and the dollars spent. Time will tell if it can be done and if the US government truly is willing to see that come to pass. The danger in success is that it will set a precedent and we will have to re-write our constitution to allow the president free reign to re-engineer the world in our image. As for me, I still believe we were lied to about the real reasons for the war and that the conduct of and the rhetoric of the war is based on hypocrisy, a willingness to use the same means of violence and subjugation we claim we are overthrowing. War fever siezed America and her government and propelled us into yet another war that really did not need to be fought. But now with Saddam as a public prize and a reminder of the evil we defeated, Bush may be able to claim victory and go home to the applause of history.
War is evil on evil. My biggest problem with the war is the almost unanimous backing it has among the evangelical community. To me, it is associating the name of Jesus with evil. I am puzzled and confused. I hope someday to resolve this issue. But now I do not see good coming of this other than the creation of another heroic-American myth. And a crudely created one at that.

Day of Infamy


What could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

As I in horror watch this war in Iraq unfold, I wonder if all our wars were not birthed in like fashion. What I see in sequence is a nation, prosperous, and powerful and at relative peace called to war by its leaders for reasons that seem false and unsound. The nation, convinced, responds with fervor, the thrill of battle overtakes us. The people are enticed into war by the lust for glory, power and righteousness, for purpose, for solidarity, for entertainment. We love war, at least we love the idea of a glorious struggle against evil. We love the myths of our warrior heroes. And our leaders steer us, not way from war, but into it.

God Is Love
I wonder, reading about an illegal round used to kill an Iraqi insurgent,
Just what kind of ammo would Jesus use?

I wonder looking at the evangelical Christian Bush responsible for some sixteen thousand Iraqi deaths and some 400 Americans, if Christians are not less concerned about the consequences of death or is it just that Bush is not a Christian except culturally. The Puritans were men who risked their lives for their faith, who dared the unknown, who acted much as my own church does, yet their war against the Pequots was excessively brutal, (though outnumbered they wiped out a whole village). And so many of the Christians I know, whose faith I do not doubt and in many cases consider superior to my own, support this war. And they lend the name of Christ to a war that the world sees as motivated by greed for power and money.

Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented; and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways . It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty . Let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things ”praying, working, teaching, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts”not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
C.S. Lewis

Lost and Found

Una vez Noe
A la selva fue
Metio los animales
Y empezo a llover

Lord
Have
Mercy
On
Me
A
Sinner

Rain is falling and drops of rain are splattering their selves against the house.
I have spent the evening doing nothing, going nowhere.

Toikey Day

For everthing that God created is good , and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:4-5

The seals have returned to the mouth of the North river. I could see them yesterday leaping out of the water chasing fish in the incoming tide.

Economy

Nothing that is complex is useful,
And everything that is useful is simple.
Kalashnikov


Simplicity is the first element of beauty: economy of force in war, economy of words in writing, economy of parts in machines, economy of ideas in theory. I firmly believe that experience in a craft teaches above all else, that the shortest and simplest route to a desired end is the best. As I became more adept at carpentry over the years, it became clear to me, and remains a rule when I am building something, that if the solution to a mechanical problem starts to become too complex and too difficult, you can be sure that you are on the wrong path. There is always a solution that is beautiful in its simplicity; the inexperienced workman is easily led down the wrong path, piling piece upon piece unable to discern the danger inherent in complexity, and not having in his possession the faith to wait for the certain appearance, with time and thought, of an elegantly simple answer both in its performance and in its result.

In the same vein, when faced with an intractable problem, the skilled man or woman knows instinctively not to fight with it or struggle in frustration, like the martial arts master he looks carefully to discern the weak point, the plane of cleavage where an easy blow will accomplish the desired task. This is a combination of patience and of confidence in his mastery of the material world.

Having learned that in carpentry and believed in it in writing I hope I might also apply the same principle to some of the other intractable problems of my life. I hope I don’t bore you, dear reader if, for my own sake, I list them that I think of: The problem I have with making enough money, or shall I say the fear that I have about it, the problem of being totally unable to find a girlfriend most of my adult life, and the problem I have finding,still, a course for my life now perhaps more than half over.

Celestial Guidance

Two gods guides me, the ane of them is blin,
Yea, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie,
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

I have been having long conversations with two women in their early forties, younger than me, who both seem to share much in common with me. This is remarkable because I have a history of long years of being ignored by women but, now in my declining years, (said only half in jest), here are two attractive and intelligent women who seem to be interested in me, although they are married and, I hope not interested in anything more than friendly talking. And both these women have interests and intellects compatible with mine, when, so often with everyone, man and woman, my perceptions are radically different. But now here suddenly are two who are capable of connecting with me intellectually and they seem to enjoy talking to me. They both said something similar about religion. They both are Episcopalian but do not fully agree with the theology and seem to be searching. It is odd that the Lord has brought these two at the same time into my life.

Baghdad George

With a multitude of counselors, go to war.

Now that we are in Iraq it may be in our national interest to stay there and stabilise the country. This does not mean I support George Bush’s Iraq policies; I firmly believe that this war was not in our interest and that we were lied to and manipulated to support the invasion. But I absolutely want to see the president defeated in the next election; He deserves to go down for leading us into this mess.

Mass Architecture

I walked behind the Middle School last night for the first time since they began to build the new performing arts center., I used to go out there every night to run around the track. At first in the seventies there was only the track, some exercise bars, and a swing set in the grass. Then they built a play ground, now they have torn down the play ground and built a performing arts center that looms over the track filling the grassy area where the swings were. For all the money they must have spent on that building, they should have designed something with some visual interest. Obviously it is a very clever design but its appearance is monstrous. It looks like a misshapen, out of proportion brick wall without symmetry or balance or any sort of visual order, or any 3 dimensional detail, not even windows.