(Apologies to Dion)

Jim Maney has been a wanderer as long as I’ve known him, not only in his travels but also in his interests and—to a lesser extent—his careers and choice of domiciles. He’s traveled throughout the US and to a lot of distant places. Recently, he was posting pictures from Amsterdam.

On September 25, 2016, Claud “Tex” McIver shot his wife in the back, through the seat of her SUV. He killed her. McIver is an older white man, a lawyer, and a man married for more than a decade to the wife he killed. The couple was wealthy.

Most of the above makes Tex McIver a part of several cohorts to which I belong: old, married, white guys.

Recently my youngest grandson inadvertently reminded me that I am old, very old. Not that I often forget it.

He was telling me about the research paper he was writing in his history class. It was to him, I suppose, ancient history. But I remember it well, along with millions of my fellow citizens who were alive at the time.

It was a terrifying five or six minutes. Not in the same way it was terrifying when the jetliner suddenly dropped about five hundred feet and a single oxygen mask deployed from the overhead, but terrifying enough.

And it happened while I was sitting in my own house watching the PBS News Hour.

A couple of weeks ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a front-page retraction on a story about UGA football players. It admitted that there were two statements in the series, one of which was substantial, that did not meet the AJC’s journalistic standards. The reporter, a 24-year veteran of the AJC, was fired.

As a certified old person, I have lived through a lot of eras that began, flourished, and ended. In some cases, the end of an era was a blessing. If I never see plaid bellbottoms or a powder blue leisure suit again, I’ll be just as happy. The others are sad and are to be mourned: the ability to have a calm, fact-based discussion about politics, for instance.

I’m tired. And it’s not just because I am old and worn out. A part of it—perhaps a  large part of it—has to do with the continual argument that invades our space but doesn’t really seem to move our understanding forward. We seem to noisily disagree about nearly everything. It takes up our headspace and frays our nerves, but we still keep doing it.

During the past year, I have gained more insights about death than ever before. Four long-time friends, all my age, passed away. I received a master class in the different ways we remember those who were important to us but are no longer there.

Then, this weekend, I gained yet another insight: that another thing that passes when we lose someone close to us is our shared experiences.

It’s been just under two-and-a-half months since the Republican Red Trickle gave them a slim majority in the US House of Representatives, and they’ve wasted no time showing us what they think governance looks like. In fewer than  75 days, these are some of the wonders we’ve seen.

I was watching the second game of the playoffs earlier this week (the one that the Braves won 3-0). Matt Olson came to the plate, and I had a couple of flashbacks. It was a simple thing; all he did was stride up to the plate, look at the pitcher, and settle into his stance. No wasted motion. No visible emotion.

Once upon a time, there was a conservative writer whom I admired greatly, even as I disagreed with much of what he wrote. He thinks there are too many laws, that hate crime legislation is "virtue signaling," and that we're making too much of climate change. None of these are a part of my belief system, but they ae pretty much what you'd expect from a Conservative.

This morning I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of agreeing with Bryan Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor of Georgia, running to succeed himself. (So  far as I’m concerned, he didn’t succeed the first time.)

In his victory speech, Kemp was attempting to whip up “Team Kemp” for the November contest against Stacey Abrams.

This is the third one of these I’ve written this year—remembrances of people who were important to me and are no longer with us. It is, I suppose, a function of getting old and having friends for a long time.

There are similarities in all three: they lived a long time, they accomplished things, and they had family and friends that they loved and who loved them.

Several years ago, I read a book about “group intelligence that said that groups (families, political parties, countries, companies, etc.) are more intelligent and effective when they are led by a majority of the female persuasion. The author presented research and examples.

However, I didn’t have any problem accepting his thesis.

Martin O. Hufham, better known as Toby, passed from this world yesterday morning, just a couple of days after his 83^rd birthday. His faculties, both physical and mental, were failing him, and I’m sure that if he were given a choice between going as he did, peacefully and without pain, and enduring any of the foreseeable prospects, he would have chosen to go.

The Atlanta Braves won the World Series, and they were given a parade through downtown Atlanta and out to Truist Park in Cobb County. (I’m not going to add to the carping about what appeared to be their unseemly haste to get out of town to the suburbs.) I pulled for them through the last half of the season and through the playoffs and series.

For most of my life, I have contended that ignorance was a matter of whose turf you were on. There are a few things I know a lot about and multitudes more that would display my ignorance if I should choose to voice it out loud.

Today is my mother’s 100^th birthday. However, she’s not here to enjoy it. In fact, I doubt that she would be enjoying it even if she were here. So far as I know, being 100 years old was never on my mother’s bucket list. She only made it about three-quarters of the way.

Early in WWII, Anita O’Day and the Gene Krupa band recorded a lively jazz tune entitled Harlem on Parade. In one chorus she sings;

I am afflicted with earworms, sometimes more dreadfully than other times. For instance, we watched an ABBA special on public television one night, and “Dancing Queen” banged around in my head for about two weeks. And that’s about the level of sophistication my earworms bring.

Occasionally, one just pops up to bite me.

Last week, on the way to the grocery, I passed a little clump of people standing at the curb. It included a man, a woman, and a child who looked to be about three years old. The man was holding a sign asking for help in feeding his family and paying the rent.

The man looked sturdy enough, and the woman and child were neatly dressed.

A couple of weeks ago, two young people I know had their first encounter with death. They met it with pain and puzzlement. Someone they knew was no longer with them. I thought then that one thing that age does is it helps you deal with the death of someone you care about.

The National Review was founded in 1955 and has had a long and often honorable history as a conservative journal. It was started by William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was probably called many things, but I doubt that anyone ever called him dumb.

That’s the reason I was surprised by Kyle Smith’s hit job on Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation.

It’s strange. With all of the craziness that’s been swirling around this country during 2020, the emblematic picture that I’ll retain isn’t the frothing mobs spewing COVID germs at Trump rallies, or Trump making claims about a rigged election, claims so unsubstantial that “baseless claims” has become a single word on most news programs with credible journalists.

I was reading through some of my old blogs recently. When I started them, they were reminiscences of other, simpler times, observations on some of the less logical aspects of our existence, and gratitude for the kindnesses and help I’ve received from others.

Some were intended to be humorous. And I think some were.

I only lettered in one thing in high school. And it may have been the only year they actually gave a letter for debating. I still have the letter, propped up against the back of my desk. I’m pretty proud of it.

The sad death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg has brought out a torrent of tributes, emotions, ignorance, and abject stupidity. Generally, the first two of those things don’t come from the same people as the last two.

Whatever else the year 2020 will be notable for—the pandemic, the protests, having to live without college football—there’s another thing this is real if not so familiar: this will be the year of the most wasted advertising in US political history.

According to Advertising Age, the advertising tab for the presidential campaign passed $1.5 billion as of August 18.

Recently, writing about Trump supporters, I said: They, like creatures who live miles beneath the surface of the ocean, have developed marvelous mechanisms for survival. These mechanisms usually involve either dismissal or denial. Sometimes both.

Unfortunately, that was an understatement. They have since added justification.

Some time ago, I realized that civil political discourse had essentially become a museum piece, largely because the people with whom I engaged spouted Fox talking points or—when shown a citation of fact—yelled “fake news” or “lame-stream press.” Worse than that, they said things that were demonstrably ridiculous and called me uncivil names when I pointed out the error of their ways.

In 1938, H.L. Mencken wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” It later became more popular in its paraphrased version: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

I have had a number of conversations with my grandchildren about the prefrontal cortex. It’s a neat little feature developed over several million or several hundred thousand years that’s there to keep us from doing dangerous, stupid, or socially unacceptable things. It’s not fully developed until a human is  in his or her twenties. It’s the reason that 18-year-olds usually make good soldiers and lousy strategists.

Sometimes when I feel the need to write but don’t have an idea, I scan through my journals. Sometimes I find something worth stealing from me.

Or sometimes I don’t, as with this entry: Observational journaling is hard, especially when you don’t go anywhere.

I did find the following, though, dated November 2017:

I watched an old movie: Stormy Weather.

Yesterday I learned of yet another victim of the Trump presidency: my ability to speak courteously in the face of what strikes me as insanity. An old friend asked me to explain to her why she, a life-long Republican, should vote for a Democrat in the 2020 presidential election.

I don’t write a lot about the benefits of being very old. I come from a line of people who are dragged into each succeeding year, kicking and screaming. Frankly, about the only real benefit we see to aging is that it does, as they say, beat the alternative.

However, the current pestilence has made me admit that there are advantages to being old.

This week a respected polling organization published a survey that said that 60% of the respondents approved of the way that Trump was handling the pandemic. My only thought about that was that I must know more about communicable diseases and their epidemiology than 60% of the population.

And there’s a reason for that.

I’ve been reading obituaries for years, long before I expected to find myself in one. When I was traveling, I would get a local paper and scan the obituaries to learn about the local population. Obituaries tell you a lot.

For instance, I spent a good deal of time with obituaries in Chicago.

About six months ago I started to take a tai chi class. I probably did it for less than noble reasons. One was so when my doctors asked if I exercised regularly, I could say, “Yes, at least twice a week.” I didn’t have to go into the fact that it was no-impact, non-cardio exercise.

In fact, it’s slow-motion exercise.

In 1980, Rosie Ruiz began the Boston Marathon, then got on a subway. She rode to the stop about a mile from the finish line, got off, and finished with a great time. Her problem, however, was that the facts didn’t support her conclusions.

Tonight Donald Trump is going to do the same thing. He will brag about the finish without referencing where he started.

This morning when I opened the paper, the faces of three young, white men stared back at me. They had been arrested in North Georgia, a matched set for the three that were arrested elsewhere yesterday. All of them had a common goal: to ignite a race war.

The thing I noticed about the three in the paper this morning was the deadness of their eyes.

I found out yesterday that I am a serial microaggressor. That surprised me, since I’ve never considered myself much of an aggressor, micro or otherwise. Except maybe in creative conferences, where I defended our concepts vigorously and often loudly.

When I was a child—maybe six or seven years old—Dan Gilbert, Richard Britt and I used to play a game that involved which sense or body part we would choose to lose if we had to lose one.

When I was in high school, I was required by Mrs. Lambert to memorize bits and pieces of poetry and other famous literature. I hated it, probably because memorizing is not something I’m particularly good at. But I got a small benefit from it as watched the tributes to George H.W. Bush. One of the passages that we memorized was Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

I may be one of the few remaining subscribers to the print edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The morning newspaper has been a habit with me since I was in grade school, and I usually look forward to reading it with my morning coffee. However, yesterday morning I opened the paper and saw a truly terrifying headline.

KEMP: I’LL CARRY OUT CONSERVATIVE AGENDA.

This past week more than a dozen pipe bombs were mailed to Democratic leaders, including an ex-president and an ex-vice-president, several members of Congress and various others who had been critical of Trump.

Yesterday, a man walked into a synagogue during services and gunned down 11 worshipers.

In his commercials before the Republican primary, in addition to playing with his guns, his chainsaw, and his big pickup, Kemp proclaimed himself to be a “proud Trump Conservative.” Putting aside the fact that there is nothing conservative about Trump and the wonderment at anyone wishing to associate himself with a President best known for not telling the truth, I did find one characteristic that Kemp and Trump share: they

In his book, Costly Grace, subtitled “An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love,” Rob Schenck tells about a presentation from a fundraising group who was promoting “Fear and Anger” as their primary motivator.

Recently, my 11-year-old grandson told me that they were studying the Civil War. Although I’m not a big fan of the Civil War, I wanted to be an attentive grandfather, so I asked him what he had learned.

“That it wasn’t over slavery,” he said.

Once upon a time I wanted to be a mathematician. However, as I quickly proved, as I had with music and chemistry, that I didn’t really have talent in that field.

They’ve already started, the PAC commercials claiming that Stacey Abrams is too liberal for Georgia. They present damning evidence: she’s a Democrat, supported by the Democratic leadership. Other than that, they don’t say much.

From an advertising point-of-view, they would be funny in their shallowness, except that I’ve already seen that line repeated by people trolling Abrams’ Facebook posts.

Yesterday, Linda and I and our children took a long stroll down distant-memory lane and saw the documentary about Fred Rogers and his neighborhood. Our little group was representative of the entire audience, older people and middle-aged people, the children who had watched Mr. Rogers and the parents who let them.

I’m awful at garage sales.

We did one several years ago, and one of the early scroungers was looking at a table we had priced at $30.

“I’ll give you $20 for it,” he said.

“Ok,” I said.

He looked hurt. He couldn’t decide whether he’d heard right or maybe I just didn’t know how to play the game.

For most of my life, Mother’s Day has been a larger holiday than Father’s Day. In the days before direct-dial long distance, there was always a newspaper story about Mother’s Day having the highest call volume of any day of the year, children calling Mom to wish her happy Mother’s Day. There was never a story about the number of people calling Dad.

It was a strange place to find inspiration for a Mother’s Day blog: the Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington competition.

I’ve written blogs about my mother and my children’s mother, both of whom have been very important to me. I’ve written about my grandchildren’s mother, who’s important to them and to me. But this year I was at a loss.

Until I watched part of the Essentially Ellington competition.

There have been a variety of reactions to the student walkouts over the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Many people have been supportive, understanding that students are rightfully concerned for their own safety and the safety of others. Many have just ignored it, preferring to give their attention to more personal or more pressing concerns.

Like most people, I have opinions about how to improve our public schools. Unlike many, because I have friends who are professional educators and know a lot more about it than I do, I have been reluctant to voice those opinions. However, since the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, I have become emboldened.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Charlie Sykes. At least a little bit. A successful Conservative radio host in Wisconsin for more than 20 years, Sykes found himself to be a man without a party, out-righted by Trump supporters. To his credit, Sykes stood up to them and took the consequences. Like many conservatives who opposed Trump, he was trolled and attacked, often maliciously.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, black, female, gay, or Jewish. That, in my opinion, disqualifies me from defining racism, misogyny, homophobia, or anti-Semitism. I can recognize any of these, especially in their more obnoxious forms, but if a member of one of these groups tells me that they are threatened or offended by something that seems harmless enough to me, I listen.

In terms of growing old, this is—to steal from Mr. Dickens—the best of times and the worst of times. Medical science now has answers for things that sixty years ago weren’t even questions. Things like genetic engineering, injections that very specifically target the bad cells in our bodies, and technology that does surgery without really cutting you.

A friend died last week. Perhaps, even in these days when we stretch the word “friend” on social media beyond recognition, it’s presumptuous of me to call her a friend. We’d spent maybe twenty minutes together over the last sixty years. But I still thought of her a friend.

Silvia Gaines Johnson was, in my opinion, a rare sort. For most of us, modesty isn’t much of a problem.

Perhaps it’s the large part of my life spent in advertising that gives me such a distrust of slogans. I’ve written a lot of them, a few of them still in use decades after their creation. Generally, I’m proud of them. At best, a good slogan sums up the client’s desired position in a few words. At worst, they’re just puff of empty air.

This week, Donald Trump more or less revealed his tax plan, mostly dealing with adjectives rather than numbers. According to Trump, it’s called “a middle-class miracle,” probably by those thousands of Muslims who danced in the streets of a New Jersey city celebrating 9/11. I can’t imagine any other middle-class people cheering the elimination of a tax that doesn’t kick in until the taxable portion exceeds almost $11 million.

Last week I received a series of texts from my oldest granddaughter that, in Tin Pan Alley parlance, made the strings of my heart zing. She said that she was studying Beowulf and was “loving” the class. Then she sent a picture of her teacher, dressed in what looked like a dinosaur costume.

At first, I was puzzled.

A couple of years ago my brother, yet another ink-stained wretch who makes his living stringing words together, asked me if I knew how one family from Benson produced two writers who could survive (and occasionally thrive) by writing.

It’s not that Benson didn’t have its share of successful people.

It was a damp, hot Saturday in Mobile in 1962, and I was a young Public Health Service employee who probably wasn’t much use to anyone. But it was an important day, and I remember three things about it.

It was a very long day. From the time we opened the doors that morning, people walked through gymnasium, getting their sugar cubes.

In his book Glass House, Brian Alexander recounts the struggles and eventual disappearance of the century-old glassware maker, Anchor Hocking. He also documents the decline of Lancaster, Ohio, hometown to both Alexander and Anchor Hocking.

It takes Alexander nearly 300 pages to tell the story. The short version is this: for a hundred years, the glassware maker was a major part of the city’s core.

I have discovered that when you’ve grown old your mind wanders down dark roads kicking up dusty recollections and strange memories. That happened to me this week after I heard about the six teenagers killed in two separate accidents.

Two of them—brothers—were on their way to a dentist appointment. Four were going somewhere else; the news didn’t say.

Last week I had two insights about race in the world around me. I doubt either of them is particularly original, but it was enough to make me think.

The first was during a lunch with an old friend. I’ve known him for fifty years, and I know he’s not a racist.

They are things we’ve been doing for years.

Not being able to come up with the name of the guy who starred in the movie. Standing in front of the open refrigerator wondering why we opened it. Suddenly discovering we’re further along on our trip and not remembering exactly how we got there. Putting our car keys down somewhere, but nobody knows where.

The recent election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States has spurred a renewed interest in literature. Novels such as Brave New World, 1984, and It Can’t Happen Here are frequently discussed and probably occasionally read. They all seemed to portend things to come, especially the newspeak from Orwell’s 1984.

Last night I think I got a glimpse of why so many people are so worried about immigrants.

On Jeopardy!

It was the final night of the Jeopardy College Championship, and the three contestants were a Stanford student of Indian descent, a Naval Academy freshman whose last name was Tshu, and an MIT student from Decatur, Georgia of Chinese descent.

Twice this week I have been warned of an impending takeover of the United States by Muslims and once I have been asked to vote on whether Sharia Law should be banned in the United States.

I am offended, deeply offended.

However, it’s not because we’re going to be taken over by the Muslims. I can’t believe that.

I do not like Donald J. Trump. That puts me in the company of something over half the citizens of the United States.

Trump seems to honor no one but himself. He is, by his own admission, either a serial sexual predator or a liar or both. He seems to have an insane view of the rightness of his actions.

No, I do not like Donald J. Trump.

The internet enables many things, some of them useful. However, one thing it does, not original with the web, but spread much more quickly and indiscriminately, could be termed “advocacy through innundo;" that is, appearing to say something without saying it at all.

It’s amazing what you can learn by reading the funeral industry’s trade publications. For instance, I learned that in the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s, there a spike of between 3% and 9% in terms of natural deaths. There is not, contrary to the persistent myth, a spike in suicides.

I was a beatnik. We wore our hair long—longer than the business majors, but not as long as the hippies who came along a decade later. We postured in turtleneck sweaters and pipes, attempting to look wise and world weary and probably failing at both. We insisted that we understood the rambling, loosely connected sentences of Kerouac or the shouting poetry of Ginsberg. And sometimes we might have.

All my life I’ve been told that I shouldn’t criticize anyone until I’d walked a mile in their shoes.

In my young and more literal days, I thought that would probably hurt since I had, as my father said, been blessed with a very solid foundation. I envisioned pinched toes, blisters, and all sorts of other foot pains.

In my history book in the fourth or fifth grade there was a painting of a group of Pilgrims and Indians gathered around a table. As I recall the story that accompanied it, the Indians had brought food to the Pilgrims, helped them get through the winter, and together they celebrated the harvest at the first Thanksgiving dinner, which was either in 1621 or 1623.

I have accepted that Donald Trump is now the president-elect and will be president in January. I have accepted that almost half of the voters selected someone whose campaign was largely pandering, falsehoods and name calling. I have accepted that my side lost this time.

It’s time to move on. And I got delivered a message last week on how to do it.

This morning I woke up, and Donald Trump was the president-elect. By tonight, a number of things will have happened.

I and my family will be poorer, along with anyone else who has invested in the stock market over the years. The market will eventually come back, but—if President Trump gets to carry out any significant part of his fiscal plan—it’ll take a long time.

In 2015 news anchor Bryan Williams admitted that the story that he had told about being on a helicopter that was struck by an RPG and small arms fire was not true. He had arrived in another helicopter approximately an hour after the damaged helicopter landed.

Williams apologized, was suspended for six months by NBC, and then exiled to MSNBC.

I was called a rather vile, anatomical name on Facebook the other day by someone who disagreed not only with my political tendencies, but with my indirectly correcting one of the misspellings in his post.

The week after September 11, 2001 I had to fly west on business, changing planes in Denver. When I got off the train at the concourse for my connecting flight, all I saw was a big emptiness. There was no one there. As I walked to my gate I saw a single figure, a soldier carrying a rifle.

I was overcome with a strange feeling.

I always stand up for the Star Spangled Banner. Unless, of course, I’m in the band playing it, where it’s considered bad form for anybody but the director and the percussion section to stand up.

And I have essentially given up on wasting my emotional energies on other people’s actions that really don’t affect me one way or the other.

I was watching Leslie Stahl’s 60 Minutes interview with the Republican nominees the other night, not too closely since it was a little tiring to watch Trump do his alpha dog act on Mike Pence.  Pence  continually referred to Trump as “this good man.”

Then I heard something that got my attention.

I hope that there is such a thing as alternate reality, a reality where it makes sense to repeal Glass-Steagall, to cut the taxes for the richest, and to keep the minimum wage as low as possible because raising it might cut jobs. I hope that there is such a reality, because none of those things make sense in this one.

If Dad were alive now, he would be 105 next Monday. And he would have hated it.

My father was a peaceable man, mild in all things except for his war against ageing. He stopped counting birthdays at 39 and died just short of the 25^th anniversary of his 39^th birthday. And he fought a good fight.

Last week, in a generally congenial if somewhat heated discussion on Facebook, the person I was jousting with said—after I’d pointed out just a few of the inconsistences and the general lack of substance in Donald Trump’s utterances—“I don’t care what he says as long as he gets the job done.”

Since, in my opinion, the Donald approaches complex major issues much the same way the Big Bad Wolf approached

Over the years I’ve encountered a lot of information about mating habits. I know, for instance, that mountain goat males literally butt heads to see whom Miss Mountain Goat goes home with. Strongest mountain goat wins.

Then there’s the blue peacock who struts and fans his tail feathers to attract his chosen peahen. If the exhibition impresses her sufficiently, she chooses him back.

Bill Sammon begins his book Misunderestimated with George W.

On page 92 of his book, Stars Beneath Us, Paul Wallace writes about learning something he already knew—a second learning, as it were. I experienced that as I was reading his book: Wallace articulates—and does it well—something I had only been able to intuit.

When I was very young, during the war that wasn’t supposed to be (since we had already fought the war to end all wars), we had blackout drills. We would pull the shades, turn all the lights off, and wait to be told that we could turn the lights back on again.

I was too young to wonder why.

I find that Facebook is a wonderful source of adrenalin-inducing anger, laughter, and the occasional “SAY WHAT?!”  I encountered the latter last week when a Facebook friend who is my age posted one of those “if you (fill in your own cause, belief, or threat here), share this” memes. This particular one had to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Being a person who has strange and random thoughts has its advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage is that it’s a cheap and portable form of entertainment, sometimes causing you to laugh out loud in a solemn place like the line at the DMV. The disadvantage is that it sometimes causes you to laugh out loud in solemn places, causing people to wonder, quite correctly, if you’re weird.

A couple of weeks ago Linda and I were having lunch with my ex-partner (and one of my older—in several ways— friends) and his wife. Between us we had something over 100 years of married life and we had all gone through almost all of the marriage vows—better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health. And we’re well on our way to the “until death do you part” one.

Recently I saw a post on Facebook where the poster said that she’d done everything she had ever done without any help from anybody else. “Nobody gave me anything,” she wrote.

That made me sad. If that was indeed true, she had a much rougher time than I did, even though we came from similar circumstances.

Years ago I had a partner named John Thomas. He was a man of many talents, but one the most impressive was that he frequently drove into a crowded parking lot and found really good parking place. I usually ended walking long distances to get to the same place.

I asked him how he did that. “Just lucky I guess.”

Finally I figured it out.

If you spend much time online, you have to wonder if the entire population of the United States is bipolar—that is, everything is just a or b.

For instance, if I am for expanding background checks for people buying firearms (and I am), then I am against the Second Amendment.

Or if I grieve over a 12-year-old child shot by the police, then I’m anti-law enforcement.

In yesterday’s AJC there was a picture of man with a colander on his head. It seems that he’s a Pastafarian, and he’s claiming that the head dress was a part of his religion. If, he says, other religions are allowed to wear their head coverings (yarmulkes, hijabs) in driver license photographs, he should be able to wear his.

Age is…

Have you ever noticed that the people who say that “age is just a number” have an age that’s a fairly small number? In other words, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

There are probably several hundred different ways to finish the sentence “Age is …,” some more pessimistic than others and almost none being particularly optimistic.

When I was teaching Sunday School I rather dreaded the lessons in the run-up to Christmas. For one thing, I had been teaching the same class for nearly 10 years, and it was tough not to repeat what I had said for the last six, seven, or eight years. After all, everybody knew the story and how it came out.

When I was very young, my dad owned a gun. It wasn’t much of a gun, a single-shot twenty-two. Occasionally, late in the afternoon, he’d go down to the trash dump and shoot rats. When I got older—say, four or five—I owned cap pistols (also single-shot) and later a lever-action air rifle.

The attacks in Paris and the millions of Syrian refugees have caused a lot of soul searching on social media (which may not be the best place to search your soul, anyway). Some people don’t have a lot of problem making a decision, such as the man who said that he “didn’t suffer from the moral ambiguity” that caused people to wrestle with what our response should be.

Last week, in one of my morose moods, I remembered the final lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Lament: Life must go on; I forget just why.

In college, wallowing in beatnik angst, I would often mutter that line, attempting to look world worn and profound at age 19. I also spent a lot of hours trying to write a line of my own as bleak as that one.

It seems that the big news on the funeral front these days is holographic eulogies—technology that allows a holographic image of the dear departed to get up a say a few words to the folks at the funeral.

I taught Sunday School for about forty years, and for most of that time I was guided by a simple rule: I didn’t teach anybody under four feet tall or over fifty years old. The first part of that rule was because I’m not a good match for children; I tend to talk to them as if they were very short adults.

In this Year of Our Lord 2015 it appears that if you wish to be in step with the times, you have to be ticked off at something or somebody. If you frequent social media, it’s obvious that rage is all the rage today.

I have a difficult time enlisting in other people’s anger armies; so I usually just ignore the memes with aggressive comments or foul language.

My introduction to Joe was a little unusual.

It was my first night as a volunteer at Clifton Presbyterian’s homeless shelter. My daughter Leslie had been volunteering there and suggested I join them.  On that first evening, the people who ran the kitchen quickly and accurately appraised my cooking skills and assigned me to the serving/cleanup crew.

Several months ago we had occasion to file a police report, and DeKalb County wanted to send someone out rather than take it over the phone or have me come in. About 10 o’clock that night a police officer showed up at the door.

He came in. He was very courteous and efficient. He took our report and explained how we could get a copy of it.

I have a friend named Ron Burch.  I’ve known Ron for nearly fifty years. He was a rep for a type house in the early 70s when my partner and I were trying to grow a creative boutique, and for years I’ve used him as an example of how a salesman should deal with customers.

We have a lot in common.

Having been a Baptist for most of my life, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the Popes. About the closest I ever got to a real interest was a prolonged discussion of Papal Infallibility I had with a professor at Spring Hill College when we lived in Mobile. It was a civil discussion, lubricated by several bottles of beer, that really didn’t change anybody’s opinion. He subscribed.

Last week I read End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). (Not just the title, but the whole book.) It was an adventure. I laughed. I cried.

In the 1940s Sunny Skylar wrote the lyrics to a catchy tune named It’s Gotta Be This or That. Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Glen Grey and a lot of others recorded it. Essentially, it says that things have to be in one of two states: wet, dry; gross, net; got, get. It’s toe-tapping fun.

It also makes almost no sense.

I spent some time last week reading Hitler’s speeches. It’s not that I think Der Fuhrer really has anything to add to the current conversation or that I have any affection for him or anything he stands for. I was just checking to see if what he said was as close as I thought it was to Donald Trump’s pronouncements.

First a disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, female, Jewish, Black, gay, lesbian, or transgendered. I am an OWG (Old White Guy); so if anybody disagrees with the opinions that follow on the basis that since I am not a member of (insert offended group here), I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll probably agree.

It seems that I’m a combatant in a war and didn’t even know it. So much for my fabled powers of observation.

Twice last week I was told that there was a war on Christianity, that my faith was under attack. I thought this was a bit strange since more than 70% of the US population self-identifies as Christian.

My two grandfathers could not have been more different. My father’s father was very quiet; so quiet that he almost wasn’t there. He’d come home from the mill every afternoon and eat dinner in the kitchen by himself, still wearing his hat. Although I was thirteen when he died, I don’t ever remember him ever saying anything.

A few weeks ago a Georgia legislator announced that he was going to introduce the “Pastor Protection Act.” Specifically the act was going to protect pastors from having to compromise their religious beliefs and perform same-sex marriages.

The first thought I had was how silly this was. Pastors have been refusing to marry people for a variety of reasons for years and will continue to.

I have always been a stalwart defender of the separation of church and state. I’d like to say that it’s because I come from a 400-year-old religious heritage symbolized by Roger Williams stomping through the snow in what became the smallest of these United States. However, it’s more likely that it’s because I couldn’t spell Deuteronomy on my fourth-grade spelling test.

Fourth grade was a memorable year for me.

I fear that I have sinned against my heritage.

Recently, as I was leaving a group of people, I said, “You guys have a great day.”

“You guys?”

That was wrong on several levels. In the first place, several of the people in the group were not “guys” by Damon Runyon’s definition.

As I remember her, Mrs. Mary Duncan was a small woman, made smaller by rheumatoid arthritis, her limbs drawn into tortured angles and her hands so gnarled that her fingers curled over each other. She had been an English teacher at the high school, but in the days before biologics, it didn’t take the arthritis long to end that.

I’ve been wondering why milestones make us so sad and anxious. After all, getting to the next milestone is something we pray for, plan for, and work on. Successfully reaching one should be unmitigated joy. But, it’s not.

This weekend we’re celebrating the graduation of our oldest grandchild from high school. In a couple of weeks he’ll begin college, working on yet another milestone.

Sometime during the 1980s my mother was named “Humanitarian of the Year” by one of Benson’s civic clubs. The picture in the Benson Review shows her standing there while one of the club’s officers, holding a plaque, reads the citation. She stands there with a slightly amused smile, the same expression she had in every picture ever taken of her.

In the south we knew how to grieve. Our grieving isn’t as well documented as the Irish wake or the Jewish family sitting shiva, but it was every bit as ritualized. With the Irish, the identification was whiskey, and with the Jews, it was covering mirrors and tearing garments.

We had food.

I was raised in a world without pizza. Or pho or tacos or sushi.

However, it wasn’t until I was grown and became acquainted with all of the above that I realize that I had come from as rich a culinary tradition as could be found anywhere. I was raised on southern cooking.

If at the age of 10 I had known the definition of homogeneity I would have marveled at what a pure model Benson, North Carolina was of it.

In the mid-1950s, in the empty room over Creech’s Barbershop that served as the remote studio for WCKB, a group of pickers gathered around the microphone and sang the tune that opened every show. It started out:
Howdy, all you friends and neighbors
Out there in radio land.
Momma’s doing the washing.
Daddy’s hanging ‘round like a man.

I was watching my grandson’s first Tee-ball practice. The coach, a young man, obviously the father of one of the little balls of energy bounding about him, tried to rein them in.

“Everybody run to first base,” he yelled, and his team took off.  Two things were immediately obvious.

Loami Gilbert’s parents were evidently Bible readers; Loami is a Bible name. But evidently they didn’t read it too closely, because the name translates from the Hebrew as “not my people,” and the Loami in the Bible was the younger brother of “Unloved.” It’s all in the first chapter of Hosea.

When I was hired by Mr. Gilbert, I was sixteen, and he was somewhere north of 70.