What a Great Idea

This past weekend Pam and I had the solo stove fired up on the deck one night. After the sun went down it started to feel chilly out so it was perfect timing. The great thing about a fire is its hypnotic effect. As you watch the flames rise and wiggle themselves skyward it calms you. After a while you realize that you have not taken your eyes off the fire for half an hour. All of the conversation between us gets spoken into the fire. The words you speak seem more meaningful when spoken into the dancing flames.

At some point Pam starts telling me about something she saw on television or the internet about Black Friday, that particularly American embarrassment of greed. She told of someone who said, “Look, we all have big screen TVs now. Why do they put them on sale for Black Friday? If they really want to put something on sale for Black Friday why don’t they discount groceries by 50% for 24 hours?”

What an awesome idea. The inflation of the past 18 months has driven up the cost of basic groceries to the point where some families are truly struggling. Pam sometimes comes home from the grocery store with three bags, shaking her head when she comes in the door. “Guess how much these three bags cost? $125! It’s ridiculous!” For us, the rise in grocery prices is an annoyance, not a crisis. For others every trip to Publix or Food Lion is a gut-wrenching cost/benefit analysis.

This morning I saw where a friend of mine posted an idea on Facebook. You know how sometimes grocery stores will do buy one get one free promotions on random items? Well, this lady told how her store had one of those promotions on bags of potatoes. She loves potatoes but they don’t eat them fast enough to use an entire bag before some of them have gone bad. So, as she was standing in the checkout line she noticed the family in front of her looked like they might could use some help so she says to them, “Excuse me, there’s a buy one get one free sale on potatoes but my husband and I will never eat two bags fast enough before they go bad. Could you use this extra bag?”

What a fantastic idea. My church does a monthly food bank drive. They hand out special bags with a shopping list inside that provides ingredients for multiple meals for a family of four for one week. We fill the bags and bring them back to church the following Sunday. Each month we take a 3000 pound load of groceries to the Goochland food bank. In November there’s a special full Thanksgiving meal shopping list for a family of four, another good idea.

As we enter the holiday season we all need to think about the folks around us in our communities who are struggling with tight budgets. We need to come up with our own ideas about how we can help, we who have been given so much. Yes…there are government programs that help and yes…we pay taxes that fund those programs. But, why should we let the government have all the fun? Besides, with every government assistance program comes paperwork and bureaucracy, and as a result many people fall through the cracks. That’s where people like us, like you and me come in.

Make a fire one night this weekend. Sit under the stars and stare into it, giving thanks for your great good fortune. Maybe a great idea will come to you.

Temporary(?) Insanity

I’ve got a million things going on in my head this morning, none of them good. In a life full of ebbs and flows, insanity is flowing like a river at the moment. Seriously people, sometimes when I read the news I think I am a spectator at a theatre of the absurd. I look at headline after headline with slack-jawed confusion and embarrassment. How can any of this be happening? 

Of course, its not like this every day…thank God. Most days I’m busy tending my own garden. Most days my thoughts are occupied by plans for the future, friends, and family. But when the pace of life momentarily slows I have time to catch up on the world outside my small slice of it—and I have to say—the world has gone mad.

There isn’t even any one thing I can point to that illustrates the point. Its not one thing, its a Cobb salad full of things great and small that bring me to the conclusion that mankind has lost any connection to reality. Either that or insanity is the new reality. Since I don’t want to believe that, I’m going with the reassuring modifier, temporary insanity.

This morning I was confronted with two stark and honestly terrifying photographs. Were they of mutilated bodies in the Middle East? The agonized screaming faces of refugees from the God forsaken Gaza Strip? No. I was spared that catastrophe. But these two catastrophes were bad enough…

I was introduced to the bi-vocational mayor of a small town in Alabama whose other job was pastor of the local Baptist Church. She/He made the news when they shot their self in the head after their double life as a cross-dresser with an appetite for trans porn was outed on a blog. My mind is simply unable to wrap itself around something like this. Later on in my news skimming I encountered this actual headline:

Author comes out as trans MAN after spouse comes out as trans WOMAN

Again, I have no frame of reference for this despite 65 years of education, training and experience. Therefore I don’t know how to respond in any meaningful way. So I sit here dumbfounded. Gobsmacked. Perplexed beyond understanding.

Then there’s the second picture. I am told that oddsmakers in Vegas tell us that this is the most likely matchup in 2024’s presidential election despite the fact that overwhelmingly it is by far the most dreaded by the American people. Now, I know that what I am about to say is probably over the top and certainly the most reductionist reaction possible. But, people…if this happens, if these two men are once again thrust upon us in an election, we are finished as a nation. 

On the plus side, Patrick, Sarah and this guy…



…will be arriving this Thursday for a two week visit! They will be working from home while mixing in lots of side trips around our beautiful state culminating in being with us for Thanksgiving. So excited!!

Let’s Try a Risky Joke

I have decided to do something very risky. I’m going to tell a joke, but not just any joke. This one features an Imam, a Priest, and a Rabbi, and I’m telling it in the midst of a war between Hamas and Israel. Why am I doing this? Well, for starters, I think its a really funny joke. But I also think that humor is for all seasons. We seem to be living through the Era of Hurt Feelings, as the historians will one day refer to the early 21st century in America. Everyone seems aggrieved about one thing or another and those grievances are being worn on our shoulders. But I still hold to the conviction that reasonable people should be able to coalesce around a decent joke. I did not come up with this particular joke. But I should point out that it was told to me by a Jewish man.

So, an Imam, a Priest and a Rabbi had a standing tee-time every Wednesday morning at the local golf links. They played early in the morning and they liked to play fast. But on this day when they arrived on the first tee they noticed that a single golfer along with his caddy had just teed off first, ahead of them. They thought, “no big deal, a single won’t hold up our threesome.” The problem was that this single golfer was the slowest they had ever seen. Every single shot the caddy would meticulously line him up and talk to him at great length about each shot…it was infuriating! It ended up taking the Imam, Priest, and Rabbi over 6 hours to complete their round! When they finally finished all three of them stormed into the Pro-shop demanding to see the head pro. They began their complaints—“What the heck, Pro? It took us 6 hours to play our round because of the single slowest golfer we have ever seen. Their was no martial, no nothing. This is an outrage!

The Pro leaned over his desk and said in a soft voice, “Look guys…you do know that that golfer is blind, right?”

Immediately the Imam and Priest, looked completely embarrassed and ashamed. The Imam says, “Oh Allah, forgive me for my insensitivity. I promise that I will give a month’s pay to the American Foundation for the Blind” Then the Priest says, “Oh Lord, forgive my uncharitable heart. I too promise to give a month’s pay and I will have my church take up a special offering for Helen Keller International.”

After a short pause, everyone turned to the Rabbi who had fallen silent. Finally he looked at them and lifted his palms upward, “What?! He couldn’t have played at night?”

The Covered Dish Supper

Growing up as the son of a Baptist minister brought with it many unique experiences, substandard housing, Sunday night services and living next to a cemetery just to name a few. Being Baptist, of course, meant that church wasn’t just for Sundays. As the child of the Pastor you were expected to be at church every time the doors were opened. For me that meant Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, plus that special service meant for the faithful few—Wednesday night prayer meeting. In addition, for the even faithful fewer, there was Tuesday night visitation. Thankfully, kids weren’t expected to endure that drudgery. So growing up the church building became like a second home for me. And what a strange place it was.

First, there was the smell of the place. Even though our church was meticulously cleaned by a team of janitors, there was a persistent odor that permeated every inch of the building. Perhaps odor is the wrong word. The smell wasn’t exactly a bad smell, rather it was unique inasmuch as I have never encountered its like in any other building I have entered in my lifetime. It was a baffling combination of mold, hair spray, and Aqua Velva…with hints of furniture polish and mothballs. To me that smell meant…church.

Then there were the odd names thrown about to describe sections of the building that I have never heard used in any other context. Words like narthex, vestibule, and the all important fellowship hall. Although I never got an understandable explanation of what a narthex was, I knew exactly what the fellowship hall was and what purpose it served. It was the place where from the day I was born until I graduated from high school, all the most prominent meals of my life were served. I am referring, of course, to the Baptist covered-dish supper. Some churches called them pot luck dinners, but rumor had it that it was mostly liberal churches that used that term. For us, it was covered dish suppers, and they were amazing. It seemed like we had one at least two or three times a month, usually either on Sunday nights or after the service on Sunday morning. The reasons given for having a covered dish supper ran the gamut from celebrating some significant anniversary to mourning someone’s death. Sometimes it seemed like any excuse would do. The thought was that people who eat together, stay together, I guess.

The work that went into a covered dish supper was done by a surprisingly small group of women. These were the ladies who actually ran the church, worker bees who could organize a meal for 150 people in a matter of minutes, with enough food to fill rows of folding tables for as far as the eye could see. Then, after it was over, they would drag their husbands in from the parking lot to put away the tables and chairs, carry out the trash and mop the floors. It was an amazing organizational and culinary feat.

But, the covered dish supper eventually disappeared from my life. First I started attending a much larger congregation where the sheer size of the membership made impromptu meals problematic. Then about six years ago I joined a Presbyterian church and apparently we don’t do the covered dish thing. At Hope, we have meals catered! I didn’t realize how much I have missed it until this past Sunday. I attended a retirement celebration for my Mother in Law, 25 years of service as the church secretary at Hunton Baptist church. It was my first time inside a Baptist church in a while…same exact smell. After the service we were herded through the vestibule, across the narthex, into the fellowship hall, where we were greeted by this…

The ham slices were half an inch thick. The fried chicken wasn’t from Chick-fil-A. Was it homemade? Maybe. Then came a plethora of macaroni dishes, mac and cheese, and mac and some such thing which I couldn’t identify. There were green bean casseroles, corn pudding, and three different options for potato salad. There were deviled eggs, black-eyed peas and a giant bowl of butter beans. There were only three beverage options, water, sweet tea, and coffee.

The dessert table was filled with pre sliced cakes, pies, cupcakes and cookies. Four types of pound cakes (I sensed that perhaps there was a backstory of feuding bakers), pecan pie, and one plate of brownies that remained untouched—no doubt a back story there as well.

It was a lovely meal and a joyful experience to revisit.

As we were leaving I tried to stay clear of the army of stern-faced old men as they lifted the tables and chairs onto racks and rolled them away. 

Probably stored them in the…narthex.

Thanks, Lucy

Each morning when I lift the lid of my iPad part of me is holding my breath. What horrors of human depravity might await me? What events hatched overnight from the four corners of this world will threaten my life and livelihood? This morning was relatively normal. The conflict in Gaza threatening to evolve into WWIII, the Maine shooter found dead at his own hand, Matthew Perry found dead in his hot tub.

This morning’s stories were made easier to process by the presence of…my dog.

Lucy picks and chooses her days. She doesn’t always hop up on the sofa beside me as I drink my morning coffee and read the news. She is a notoriously late sleeper, not a morning dog. But occasionally she finds her way downstairs and takes her place beside me as I read. More times than I can count Lucy will let out a loud and long sigh at the precise moment when I have discovered a particularly disconcerting story of man’s inhumanity to man. Unimaginative people will dismiss this as coincidence. But dog people know better. We understand this as more proof that dogs are angels. Each time I hear Lucy sigh I look at her and give her hip a scratch and I am comforted. I am reminded that she has everything that she needs, a warm house, loving people, good food and yummy treats at the ready. And so do I.

Thanks, Lucy

Not Exactly a Disaster But…

Tonight the recipe was for pasta bolognese with Italian sausage. I was amped up for this one because I had never made it before. When Pam got home I made a big deal about how I didn’t want her to help me. I wanted to do everything myself. Incidentally, in the writing trade this is what is known as foreshadowing.

Everything started out well. I had laid out all the ingredients and read the recipe instructions through from start to finish at least three times. I was ready. First I chopped up the onions and carrots. Pam sat at the counter working on her laptop pretending to not be watching my work. During the slicing phase the only thing she said was, “be sure to cut them up in small pieces.” As I attempted to follow her advice I noticed that more and more bits of onion and carrots were flying all over the place, glancing off the backsplash, skidding across the floor, a complete hack job. But I persevered.

By the time I was ready to toss the tray of Italian sausage into the Dutch oven, beads of sweat had formed on my forehead. Pam reminded me to be sure and break the slab of sausage up into small pieces. Apparently this dish requires everything to be small. As I began to break up the sausage I discovered that when I had lifted the slab out of its styrofoam tray I had forgotten to peel off the thin paper liner on the back. As I began to break it up with the wooden spatula I realized my ghastly mistake, then set about picking out pieces of the paper from the Dutch oven for the next ten minutes, feeling like an idiot. It was about this time when I began to notice a strange smell. It wasn’t a bad smell necessarily but it wasn’t particularly appetizing either. My spirits began to flag.

Now it was time to add the beef broth and diced tomatoes. This was completed without incident. I glanced over at Pam and found her engrossed in some problematic email, completely ignoring me. This buoyed my spirits. If she was ignoring me I must be doing alright. At this point the recipe called for 12 oz of pasta which I first had to rinse with cold water—a confusing instruction that I had have explained to me. Something to do with rinsing off extra starch. Whatever.

Finally, an hour after I had begun the project, the dish was ready to be served. However when I dished it out of the Dutch oven on to the plates it was…runny.

Pam, who is like a cooking detective when it comes to finding where I went off the rails, looked at the recipe and opined that I had erred by placing a cover on the Dutch oven while it was cooking. This prevented the excess liquid from properly evaporating. But, she was soon exclaiming with great enthusiasm how wonderful it tasted. My wife is like my hype man. She’s constantly giving me excessive praise for my efforts at the stove. Clearly, she doesn’t want me to get discouraged. But after tonight I’m starting to question the motivation behind all these accolades. Hmmm…

Tomorrow night Sharon is bringing us dinner.

Thank God.

Even though tonight’s effort wasn’t the greatest I have to admit that its a little bit…fun. If I had to do this every night for the next 20 years it probably wouldn’t be. How Pam has managed to do this for the past 40 years is something very close to a miracle. But the bottom line of all this is the fact that at the end of the day I am enjoying taking care of her.

How Many Deaths Are Enough?

When Hamas terrorists rampaged through southern Israel on the morning of October 7th killing over 1400 people and kidnapping over 200 others, the entire world knew that once the Israelis overcame the initial humiliation of being caught so dreadfully unaware, their military response would be overwhelming and deadly. Hamas, the organization which governs the Gaza Strip, has in its very charter the stated goal of wiping Jews and specifically the Jewish state off the map. The citizens of Gaza voted to install Hamas into power, replacing the Palestinian Authority in 2007. But that isn’t to suggest that all Gazans are part of Hamas, anymore than it would be accurate to say that all Americans are Democrats because Joe Biden is President. As the kids like to say…it’s complicated.

So here we are 17 days after the barbaric invasion where brave terrorists killed babies and kidnapped grandmothers at $10,000 a pop, with a death toll in Gaza of 5,000. And the threatened Israeli ground invasion hasn’t even started. The world has reacted in largely predictable ways. Many in the West have expressed cautious solidarity with Israel while most of the Muslim world have hit the streets in support of Hamas. Chants of Jihad, Jihad, Jihad ring out through the streets of London.

It is extremely difficult to understand what it must be like to live in a place where you are surrounded on all sides by people who despise you and want to see you dead. I try to imagine what it would be like as a Virginian to be the avowed enemy of everyone in Maryland, West Virginia and North Carolina…how it would feel to have survived two wars where all three states attacked you at the same time just in your lifetime, and what my reaction might be to events of October 7th if they occurred in Danville or Winchester?

My own personal opinion falls into the camp of those who believe that Israel has the right to defend their existence and to avenge their dead. To do any less would seem to me to guarantee more of the same. But, how far does the right of self defense and justice for innocent victims go? Are 5,000 dead Gazans enough? If not, what is the correct number of dead?

I hear Israeli generals and some politicians talk of the annihilation of Hamas and I wonder how that can be done without also annihilating innocent Gazans. Which brings up the thorny question of are there innocent Gazans? I think back to World War II and the bombing of Dresden. Were the thousands of German citizens killed in that horrific bombing raid all Nazis? Were they all combatants? Or, after the full extent of Nazi brutality had been revealed was Dresden an act of vengeance for the horrors that the Germans had inflicted on the world? These are all unthinkable matters. Debates will rage for all eternity about what rules, if any, are appropriate during wartime.

Which brings me back to the Middle East. We say we support Israel’s right to defend itself. How long will that support hold? So far with 5,000 dead the support is complete. But at what point do we waver? 10,000 dead? 25,000? 100,000? In addition, should we ask a question of Israel as the death toll and destruction increase—what are your plans for Gaza after the killing stops? Is it to be rebuilt, or just bulldozed, salted over and abandoned, whatever Palestinians still alive left to go back to their Bedouin roots and roam what’s left of the desert? Hard questions for hard times.