Maché Artist: Celebrations and Reflections

I Have Words!

2011-01-10T23:56:00.000-05:00

James A. H. Murray, long-time editor of the OED, working in his Scriptorium.

Two of my favorite books are The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, both by Simon Winchester, and both related to the creation of the largest and most comprehensive dictionary in the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, or the OED, for short. I’m not going to review the books here, other than to say I was fascinated with the decades-long work of collecting words for that magisterial dictionary.

When I was in high school, I started collecting word lists. Whenever I read, I would write down unfamiliar words, words that I simply wanted to be more familiar with, or common words I wanted to appreciate more. I’ve continued this practice to this very day and have no intention of ceasing the practice. Words are beautiful, they have power, they amaze me. The other morning, shortly after I woke up, I reached for the notebook I keep by the bed and with my favorite mechanical pencil began free-writing…about words. And this is how it came out:

______________________________

I have words! Oh yes, I have words. Folders stuffed with sheets of loose-leaf filled with words collected from books and magazines and anywhere I found them. There are strange and exotic words. There are ordinary, commonplace words that would scarcely make a jaded reader bat an eyelid, but still they are good words, honest words – and without them, the more sparkling, dazzling, exorbitant words would not find a context within which to sit. One thing is for sure – they are all beautiful words, glorious and necessary…as necessary as air or water; I can’t do without them.

I have notebooks full of words, and lists of “vocabulary” words on my computer. And I keep adding more words all the time. Some of the words I add, I don’t know, or I want to know better. Others I know quite well. They are simple, common, everyday words – but I don’t want to fall into the trap of taking them for granted. I used to lie on the ground for an hour or more at a time studying the shapes and structures of blades of grass, watching the ants stroll by, or imagining what a microscopic view of the physical structure of a grain of red clay might look like. I am just as fascinated with words.

Words give me joy. They fill me and fulfill me – they nourish me. Sometimes they hurt me, scold me, or embarrass me (I even have vulgar words in my list… “those” words, the ones we used to look up with relish in the dictionary in junior high). They have all earned the right to be on my lists, even archaic words that long ago fell from common use, because someone at some time has used them. They have expressed, admonished, encouraged, enlightened, frightened, challenged, disgusted, chastened, delighted – in all cases they have elevated the blandness of mere survival to the heights of meaning. I have words. And before the day is over, I will have a few more.

Resolution 1 - Write and Get Published

2011-01-03T03:22:00.000-05:00

When I was a boy, and people asked me that standard question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I cycled through some of the typical answers…fireman, cowboy, and for some reason, I seem to remember I told people for a while I wanted to be a motorcycle when I grew up (yes, it's bizarre, but I have no recollection of what my little-boy brain was going through at the time). I don’t recall, however, telling anybody I wanted to be a writer.

By the time I was in high school, though, it was clear to me – I wanted to be a writer. Whatever chain of events led me to such a desire are lost to history. I’ve found stories that I wrote when I was still a young boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, that are respectable, even though the topics are pretty common. There was an adventure with Lassie (the collie) and a trip with some green aliens on a flying saucer. By the time I was settled into my miserable high-school career, I was writing poetry (don’t all teenagers?), starting mystery and suspense stories, and constructing essays that explored my views on everything from feelings about girls to religious convictions to the problem of excessive violence in the world.

In 11th grade, I believe it was, I signed up for a typing class. Those were the days before word processors or computers, so all the paperwork in an office had to be spaced and centered and lined up on manual or – if you were fortunate – electric typewriters. I had no interest in being a secretary; I just wanted to learn the keyboard well enough to type my poems and stories. The school year, in those days, was divided into six-weeks for the purpose of reporting a student's progress (or lack thereof). By the end of the third six-weeks, my grade was down to a not-so-respectable…zero. That’s right. I was typing away every day, but I didn't complete a single class assignment – for the entire six weeks! Finally, my teacher told me if I wasn’t going to do the assigned work, I might as well just go to the library. Fine, I thought. So, for the next two weeks, I sat in the library reading. Then one afternoon, Ms. Smith showed up at the library. Framed in the doorway, arms akimbo (she didn’t come in – I was sitting near the door…in case friends walked by), she said, “I’ll tell you what. You come back to class, and do half the class assignments. The rest of the time you can write whatever you want, and I’ll count that.” I walked back to class with her, and by the end of the term, I actually passed with a 76, and had lots of story starts, poems, and essays.

After high school, I went into the Marine Corps. I spent the next 3 months at Parris Island, South Carolina, undergoing the grueling program of training to become a United States Marine. Most of the writing I did for those months was in the form of letters home. During the few minutes of free time we’d have in the evenings, I still wrote a little bit. After boot camp, I had electronics and avionics training. Along the way, my interest shifted to comic art. I still wanted to be a writer, but more than that, I wanted to be a comic book artist, or maybe even an animator. I still wrote, occasionally, but most of my creative energy was spent practicing drawing superheroes, silly animals, or Disney characters.

Through the years, writing has always been a very pleasant obsession. I don’t want to mislead anybody – I don’t write enough. Never have. During college and seminary, I wrote a lot of academic papers, and along the way received frequent compliments on my writing, and a few suggestions that I should be a writer. If I had been more focused and disciplined, I might have had several best-sellers by now. Actually, my writing (much like my music…more on that another time) has mostly been a very private thing. With fits and starts, I have begun projects, filled notebooks and folders, written and re-written, and had things published in school papers, church and denominational newsletters, and local newspapers, but I haven’t been the successful writer I dreamed of becoming all those years ago.

It’s time. I have been actively working on a novel, and I have several other projects in the works. “What’s your book about?” people ask. “Uh, I guess you could say it’s a contemporary fantasy.” I don’t like to talk about my work. It has been encouraging to find out I’m not alone among writers. Most, if not all, writers of any merit don’t talk about their work in progress very much, unless it’s something under contract to a publisher and they want some advance publicity. I found an imperative in a book I recently bought, another inspirational book for writers, Page after Page, by Heather Sellers, but I will have to paraphrase, because I can’t find the exact sentence again, after looking though the book for 10 minutes – don’t tell people what you’re writing. Yes! I had to show this to several people, I was so excited.

Writing is hard work! There is no way around this. I confess, I avoid it more than I do it, but I am going to change that nasty habit this year…this month…this day! I am a writer. Even though I have no books on the best-seller lists, or essays in prestigious journals, or a short story published in the New Yorker, I am still a writer. Just like I am a musician. I don’t have any albums out. I don’t play with a band or perform in concert. But I play instruments, and I sing, and quite frankly, I’m not half bad at it. Same with writing. I’m not half bad at it. But this year – I will write. I will publish!

New Year's Resolutions for 2011

2011-01-02T00:56:00.003-05:00

Wow!!! My last entry was in November of 2008, I am ashamed to say. I never intended to leave my blog unattended for so long. But...I am back!

I usually avoid making New Year’s resolutions, but this year I decided to change that. This year I have made resolutions. There is a chance I may add more, but these are the basics. For the year 2011, I hereby resolve:

1) To write and get published.

2) To blog regularly.

3) To sculpt and get my work into a variety of markets.

4) To read more intently.

5) To learn prolifically.

6) To increase my mastery of Spanish.

7) To brush up on my French.

8) To learn how to read Sanskrit and Arabic.

9) To become more skilled in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

10) To start drawing cartoons again.

11) To meditate.

12) To believe again, and ever more wisely.

13) To return to an intensive exercise program.

14) To try to figure out the meaning of life...again.

15) To enjoy being human, and to embrace all that entails, both good and bad, pleasant and painful.

16) To be more loving, and hopefully more lovable.

17) To continue sharing my warped sense of humor by unleashing the corniest off-the-cuff jokes and puns. (This is a given, every year!)

18) To rekindle my love of growing plants.

19) To consider attending church again, albeit sporadically and with great apprehension.

20) To watch more movies.

21) To look for stories everywhere.

22) To nurture my passion for and fascination with...everything!

23) And last (and possibly most important) to be happy!

I was going to elaborate on each of these a little bit, but it was turning into a pretty lengthy piece of work. So…I will leave it at this for now, and I will explain more about these in subsequent blog entries.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I wish each of you the happiest and most prosperous year ever.

Way-Back Machine -- "A Shrine for Things Taken for Granted"

2008-11-25T09:46:00.004-05:00

In case you don't remember the Way-Back (WABAC) Machine, you can take a look at my blog entry for Friday, February 23, 2007.

From my Journal entry of July 30, 2000:

A book listed in "A Common Reader," August 2000 catalog, is They Have a Word for It by Howard Rheingold. It is a gathering of foreign words that have no equivalent in our tongue. One mentioned is the Japanese hari kuyo which is "a shrine where broken sewing needles are put to rest after a life of service." That's incredible! We just toss things. What if we had shrines composed of faithful objects that had served us well? What if we just developed a profound sense of appreciation for things we take for granted? Say ink pens -- old shoes -- car keys -- etc. We need a shrine dedicated to "all things taken for granted!"

The Hand

2008-11-24T01:11:00.002-05:00

This morning in church, my grandson, David, was playing with crayons, and he dropped several on the floor. He bent down to pick up the crayons, and I saw my daughter put her hand under the hymnal rack anticipating David would lift his head oblivious to the danger. Sure enough, David lifted his head, but instead of hitting it on the sharp corner of the hymnal rack, his head met the soft, loving hand of his mother.

This was a simple scene, but to me it was so tender and touching, and it seemed to be a moment where something remarkable had been shown to me. Perhaps, I thought, this is how God’s hand works. He anticipates a danger and puts his hand there to protect us. There are two moments which came to mind, one recent and the other which happened a couple of summers ago.

It was opening night of Baldwin High School’s production of The Wiz, and my son Patrick had several roles in the play. After the play was over, a couple of judges from state who were in the audience to evaluate the play’s potential at state competition, went back with the cast to talk about the performance. It took a while, and afterwards we were hungry, and since it was so late, we decided to go eat somewhere. Trying to decide where was not easy, since choices at this hour were limited to a few fast food places. I reluctantly agreed on Kentucky Fried Chicken.

When we pulled up in the parking lot of KFC, we weren’t sure if the place was still open. There were no customers in the store, but when we walked in, a girl welcomed us and asked for our order. No sooner had we begun placing our orders than there was a loud pop from the back, and a girl began screaming, “Fire!” She added some other colorful language I’ll omit, since I try to keep the blog at least GP rated. Another young lady, apparently the manager, came into view from the back and shouted to us there was an emergency and we’d have to leave, that they were now closed. In all the frantic commotion we decided to stay to make sure everyone was all right. The staff consisted of three girls, a couple of them probably high school age. They couldn’t get the fire extinguisher off the wall and were all panicking. The girl who was waiting on us began filling a large pitcher with water. As she headed in the direction of the fire, I screamed, “No! Don’t throw water on a grease fire!” She turned around and questioned, “No?” I explained quickly what throwing cold water on a vat of flaming grease would do. It would most likely have exploded and thrown hot grease over everyone nearby, and the fire would spread as the flaming grease floated on the water.

They were eventually able to get the fire extinguisher off the wall and got the fire put out, but that was a close call. As we left, I was suddenly aware that we had come to KFC for one reason – I had to be there to keep that young girl from throwing water on that fire. She probably would have been severely burned. As I slipped into the car, the realization of this made me weak for a few seconds. There was “The Hand”.

Two summers ago, we took a group of high school and middle school kids from our church to Brunswick, Georgia. The mother of one of our college students had opened her home to us so we could go to the beach. We left in the afternoon to get there in time to have supper at a popular sea food restaurant on St. Simons Island, then returned to the house where we spread blankets and sleeping bags on the floor in several rooms. The trip over the causeway to St. Simons had whetted our appetite for the beach the next day.

The next day, we loaded up and headed back to St. Simons. After a bit of shopping in some of the interesting stores on the island, we headed to the beach. It was a sunny day and very hot. It was a pleasure to get into the water. Being one of the adults in charge, I kept my eyes open, constantly scanning the water to keep up with our kids. I noticed my youngest son Patrick floating on a football had gotten a good distance from the shore, so I waded out as far as I could stand up and yelled for him to come back closer to the shore. He yelled back that he couldn’t – he was caught on a current. I can’t tell you the shock of watching my child in the ocean well out of reach and heading for deeper water. Immediately I started swimming out till I reached him, but when I I turned around and tried taking us back to shore, I realized two things: 1) we were further out than I thought, and 2) we were both caught in a current taking us even further out. I tried swimming with all my might, but I wasn’t making any progress. The beach and all the people looked so far away, but I started screaming. No one heard. I can’t remember being as scared. I noticed a man with a boogey board and a couple of girls that were a little closer in playing with a Frisbee. I screamed as loudly as I could, and the man finally heard me. As soon as he realized we were in trouble, he headed out to us. He was able to pull us back in, and finally I was able to stand on the bottom. Fortunately, not only was he equipped with a plastic flotation device, but he was also a trained lifeguard who just happened to be within hearing range of my screams. There it was – “The Hand”. I still shudder when I remember that afternoon.

Of course, some will be quick to point out that there are many times when “The Hand” doesn’t seem to be there. I constantly question why bad things have to happen – earthquakes, floods, the terrible tsunami of December, 2004. Why do children get sick and die? My first son never came home from the hospital, but died in my arms at 9 days old. Why? I just don’t understand. However, this doesn’t keep me from seeing “The Hand” so many times, just like my daughter’s loving hand stretched out to protect her son from harm. And for that, I am thankful.

Mâché Creations

2008-10-22T22:03:00.011-04:00

There is something beautiful about discarded paper -- newspapers, old memos and reports, magazines, catalogs...it doesn't really matter. I see things there that most people probably don't see -- dragons, turtles, giraffes, fish, castles, and characters of all sorts. It is my job to bring them to life so others can see them. I have named my studio (a loose term given to describe any place where I happen to be creating) Mâché Creations.

Here is a sampling of what's going on in the studio these days: from the magic of chips of paper, to the creatures arising out of them.

It all begins here...with paper. Big sheets torn repeatedly, or cut into tiny pieces with scissors, until I have the raw material to begin shaping into what my head visualizes (but not entirely...the paper has a will of its own and comprimises must continually be made).

This is tedious work, but the results are even beautiful before the process of gluing pieces of paper together begins. Shapes and sizes and colors yield an appealing texture that never ceases to thrill and fascinate me.

I need a variety of sizes. The smallest pieces -- about 1/8 of an inch -- are for forming more precise shapes. I have returned to a process of gluing pieces of paper together, one by one, and working the shape as I go. Everything I do is freehand. I go from the paper chips you see to the eventual shapes using only the air for an armature. The only exceptions are the occasional rolled tube that establishes the form of a leg or arm on a creature. Dragons are my favorite subjects, and I have a variety of characters in the works.

In the rising menagerie are fish and turtles, giraffes (not pictured), and a variety of dragons. There are many other creatures abiding in my mind waiting to get out and express themselves into form.

I love the graceful curves of dragons' necks. Just wait until you see them with wings and ears. After I have them basically formed in this manner, I will take paper pulp made in the blender and kneaded together with glue, and with it cover the figures and sculpt the fine detail work. Previous work can be seen in an earlier blog post.

Stay tuned! I will be sharing more as the work on these projects progresses.

[Photos by Cris Bohannon]

September 22nd...the day I became a Marine.

2008-09-22T20:28:00.010-04:00

Today is September 22, a very special date. Yes...the first day of fall, but something much more important to me. It is a birthday for me. Not the day I was first born, but a birthday no less. On September 22, 1976, I graduated from Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. It was the day when I became a Marine and was first called by that title. It still brings a thrill to think about it.

On June 28, 1976, six nervous recruits left from the AFEES building in Atlanta for the airport where we were flown, courtesy of our dear Uncle Sam, to Charleston, South Carolina. There we were met by a Marine Corps liaison and began meeting other young men from around the country who would share one of the most frightening experiences of our lives -- our arrival via bus. Our "incarceration" had begun. We were limited to a small area of the airport where we were able to have supper, but those who wanted alcohol to settle their nerves found out everyone there was in on the plot. Just like the flight attendants on the flight to Charleston, the airport staff would not serve any recruits alcohol. It was all for the best, because it would be three days before we would be allowed to sleep again.

The ride from Charleston to Parris Island was made in the dark of night. We weren't to be allowed the pleasure of scenery, or to comprehend the route to the island that would be home for many of us for the next three months. As we rode past the sentries, we all realized it was about to happen. We were about to meet the people we'd had nightmares about for months. The Marine who came onto the bus to deliver our "welcome" didn't disappoint. We all flew off the bus and headed for the yellow footprints which would give us our first lesson on how to stand with our heels together at a 45 degree angle. Throughout the night, we were shuffled from place to place, filling out paperwork and having instructions barked at us...more instructions than we could possibly remember. Around 4:00 a.m. we were marched into the barbershop for a "trim". Stout South Carolina barbers were waiting to begin the first step of making us all look alike -- our first step of becoming a uniform outfit. The haircuts were brutal -- shears were pressed onto our scalps, and with long sweeps off came hair, warts, moles or any other obstacles that might reside on our heads. I saw several recruits come from the barber chair with lines of blood streaming down their heads.

Over the next several days we went through medical tests and inoculations; had every possession we arrived with bagged , marked, and taken to a warehouse; were issued our clothing and 782 gear (basic field equipment); and spent hours marching clumsily from place to place and standing in lines for hours. About the third day we were loaded into a trailer and taken to our permanent barracks where we met our platoon's senior drill instructor and drill instructors. While this was another nerve-wracking experience, it was also a relief from the stressful days of formation. We ran into our barracks -- my platoon was on the second deck (floor) -- and found the rack that corresponded to our laundry numbers. Since I was Bohannon, my laundry number was 4, which put me only one set of racks away from the DI hut. We spent 30 minutes standing at attention on our knees on the concrete floor. The senior drill instructor explained a few days before graduation why they do this -- they have to weed out quickly anybody whose knees won't take the strain of prolonged pressure.

Marine Corps basic training takes place in three phases. Phase 1 is a period of complete breaking down of the individual. The stress, physical and emotional, is intense and never lets up. We have our initial PFT (physical fitness test) and begin PT (physical training) and lots of drill. We learned how to do a school circle -- which is usually four even columns. Our classroom instruction did not take place in chairs or desks, but sitting at attention on hard floors.

Second phase consists of the rifle range, water qualification, and various other training. The breakdown period of first phase transitions into a phase of grooming Marines, but the pressure still never lets up. Third phase we finally get to get high and tight haircuts instead of the shaved heads that we've worn through the first two phases. We are becoming Marines. We've qualified with the rifle and passe other important tests; we are feeling more like fighting men.

Third phase consists of intense combat training. We get to participate in military maneuvers and learn important combat skills, like how to throw a hand grenade, how to use the bayonette to look for landmines, how to detect booby traps, etc. The training culminates in several intense days which are now called "The Crucible", but when I was in boot camp it was called Individual Combat Training (ICT). There was also the Essential Military Subjects Test (EMST), where we were examined in 12 areas, including NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical warfare -- which includes a visit to the gas chamber), UCMJ (the Uniform Code of Military Justice), Close Order Drill, Marine Corps History, Military Customs, field stripping the M-16 and putting it back together, identifying various grenades by touch, and first aid.

One of my favorite parts of boot camp was the Confidence Course. There are various structures designed to intimidate and test courage and strength. Probably the most well-know obstacle is the Slide for Life. The recruit slides across a rope stretched over a pool of water. There are three positions: the recruit begins with his stomach on the rope, one foot over and one leg hanging down; at the changeover point, the recruit hangs by hands and legs with head facing the destination; finally, the recruit changes to the same position but with the feet heading toward the destination. Anyone falling has to snap to attention and yell "Marine Corps!" till he hits the water. Fortunately, I didn't fall -- even though two mischievous DIs began shaking my rope for their amusement.

There is no way to put into words adequately the stress, the uncertainty, the homesickness, and all the other emotions and sensations of the training that leads to becoming a Marine. All I know is on the final day it was all worth it as I marched across the parade field and heard that depot band playing the marching songs, then standing at attention as we were first called Marines, then hearing the "Marine Corps Hymn" for the first time as a Marine. Fortunately, one of the benefits of becoming a Marine is -- Once a Marine...Always a Marine. Don't call me an ex-Marine. I am a Marine. And today is my birthday. And I'm still proud, and the "Marine Corps Hymn" still gives me goosebumps and leaves tears of pride in my eyes. SEMPER FI!!! and OOH RAH!!!

____________________

Photos:

James O. Bohannon, 1st Recruit Training Battalion, Alpha Company, Parris Islcand, South Carolina, graduated 22 September 1976.
The yellow footprints that greet every new recruit to Parris Island.
The Slide for Life (I notice now there is a "net" -- we were over water the entire time).

Storm Lee Bohannon...the newest member of the family

2008-09-05T23:29:00.003-04:00

On Thursday, September 4, 2008, at 12:32 p.m., we welcomed into our world Storm Lee Bohannon. Everything went well with the labor and delivery, except for a brief scare as Storm's heart rate began dropping just before delivery. He is a healthy, beautiful little boy. He was 6 lbs. 4.3 oz. and 19 inches long.

This afternoon I got to spend some time holding him. He seemed to be just fine with me talking to him -- he slept right through it. His big brother, Rain, isn't too sure about having to share the limelight, but his cousin David (my other grandson) definitely loves him and can't wait for Mommy to have his little sister or brother in February. I guess it goes without saying, but I must say it anyway -- I love this little boy with all my heart. During this hurricane season, finally a Storm we can be glad to welcome!

A Survey from MySpace...

2008-09-05T22:03:00.012-04:00

If you have a MySpace account, then you are familiar with the Bulletin Board, where you can post something so all your friends can see it and respond if they want. Honestly, I rarely ever check the thing, because the bulletin board gets so cluttered with stuff, and I don't have time to fool with it. But...occasionally I will check out somebody's "survey" and even reply, and it's a lot of fun. Here's a reply to one that my buddy JohnBoy posted. They are the same questions he had answered, but the replies are all mine:

____________________________

Do you miss the way things used to be?

There are many ways things used to be, and I miss many of them. I miss being a child and standing on the couch looking out the window...I miss being an active duty Marine...I miss college and all the friends I had then...I miss seminary at Emory University...but I'm continually looking forward to new things, even while relishing the way things used to be.

Who is the oldest person on your top friends?

Cris (my wife).

Who is the youngest?

Angel Grace (my sweet Angelita).

Last person you gave/received flowers to/from?

Cris (my wife)...but I've also given flowers to my daughter, Elizabeth; my friend, Terri; my mother in law; and my sister in law. I haven't received any, but I'd like to!

Would you ever live with anyone on your top friends?

I already do...Cris, my wife. Also with my son, Patrick, and my daughter, Elizabeth.

Is there anyone you wish would just fall off a cliff?

Osama Bin Laden and every terrorist, every dangerous ideological extremist, and every street thug out to pop a cap in somebody for fun...and I'd help push to get them started.

Last fast food you ate?

I don't do fast food anymore except under duress, but I'd have to say a fish sandwich at Burger King a few months ago.

What's the most fun you've had lately?

Being with the "young people" (don'tcha hate that term!) at the Hopewell lock-in a few weeks ago playing games and acting silly the whole night long...playing with my grandson, David...and getting to hold my new grandson, Storm, this evening.

Do you have text messaging on your phone?

Don't have a cell phone anymore, but I used to have it -- and, by golly, I know how to use it too!

Do you have a lava lamp?

No...but they are kinda cool, in that 60s nostalgic sort of way.

When you drive, do you use your rear view mirrors?

Yes...and the windshield and windows too!

Do you miss anyone?

Lots of people -- especially my mama!

[Mama & me in 1993]

What kind of mood are you in?

A pretty good one...but I'm sort of frustrated at all I need to get done.

Are you tan?

Some places yes...most places no.

Have you held hands with anyone in the past three days?

Of course I have...my wife, and my grandson

What do you think your best friend is doing right now?

I haven't the foggiest idea.

What is your favorite thing to eat?

Yogurt and raw spinich salads (not necessarily together), from a sheer nutritional standpoint, but one of my all-time favorite meals is fried salmon patties, mashed potatoes, and English peas.
Have you kissed anyone in the past three days?

I sure have...I kissed a girl, and I liked it! :)

Do you like your hair?

It's okay. Sometimes I look like Einstein, but it's okay -- I like Einstein. All of us geniuses have to have weird hair!

Is there someone on your mind that shouldn't be?

Yes...probably...oh, I don't know...it's my mind, why shouldn't somebody be there if I want them to be!

What do you think of people who smoke?

They're human beings just like the rest of us -- they just don't smell as good.

Do you prefer warm or cold weather?

Nice crisp autumn weather, or the first hint of spring in the air after a cold winter.

What was the last thing you laughed really hard about?

Something funny my grandson, David, did -- I can't remember what it was...he's so amazing, he's always doing things to make me laugh.

Could you go a day without eating?

Sure...but I wouldn't like it. And you wouldn't want to be around me!

Have you ever kissed someone and never saw them again?

Yep...and that's all I'm gonna say about that!

Are you still best friends with the same person as the beginning of the year?

Of course I am! Why wouldn't I be? I'm a fantastic friend.

Do you think a lot of people think bad things about you?

I'd like to think not, but I'm sure some people do, but they probably have no reason to. There's a lady at church who for years refuses to speak to me, treats me very rudely whenever I see her there or elsewhere, and generally acts like I'm invisible to her. It hurts, and I've racked my brain trying to remember if there was anything I ever did to her to make her hate me so...but there's nothing I can think of. And if there was...there's no way it was intentional. This has gone on for years, and it always hurts just as badly -- and there have even been times I considered leaving our church because of it. It's a very private pain.

What are you excited about?

Several things: being a grandfather several times over, sculpting and writing projects, getting re-aquainted with some old friends on FaceBook, and making lots of new friends.

What was the first thing you said when you woke up today?

I am exhausted! I barely slept at all last night!

Have you ever had a best friend who was of the opposite sex?

Most of my best friends are and have been of the opposite sex. For some reason I have always been more comfortable relating to females.

Was your morning good and why?

No...I slept like crap and was exhausted -- the house smelled like something dead was under it (and I didn't have a chance to go under there and check till tonight -- and sure enough, there was...a very dead cat!). Tomorrow's got to be better!

Stay Tuned!!!

2008-08-28T23:37:00.003-04:00

Greetings, dear readers. Maybe you've noticed I haven't updated in a while...(hopefully someone has noticed). Well, I'm back, and over the next few days I plan to be adding more posts on a variety of topics. I have a full notebook...it's just a matter of developing some of the topics a little more fully.

Some things I plan to talk about:

1) My Uncle Brooks (Garland Brooks Turner), a World War I veteran who lived to tell about his own funeral.

2) Reflections on the presidential campaign and my feelings about some of the issues (including "climate change", terrorism and the hunt for Bin Laden, health care, the war in Iraq, etc.). Should be fun!

3) Flannery O'Connor -- world renowned author and local Milledgeville resident, who died much too young of complications from lupus. I want to talk about the author personally and analyze some of her work I think will interest you.

4) An update on my journey of working out, eating right, losing weight and getting back into shape nearly 10 months in. If I can do it, you probably can too.

5) My renewed determination to establish myself (or, I guess I should say, re-establish myself) as an artist.

6) My fascination with the world of online audio sources, from podcasts to Pandora, from audiobooks for purchase at Audible.com to free audiobooks at Librivox and Podiobooks.

These and many other interesting topics will be showing up here at the blog very soon. So...stay tuned!

A Visit to the Georgia Aquarium

2008-06-14T23:20:00.013-04:00

When I was in my early teens, I had a book on aquarium fish full of pictures and information that gave me hours of pleasure. I dreamed of one day owning an amazing aquarium. For starters, I planned to have a basement, and one entire wall was going to be an aquarium sectioned off into various environments. Plants and fish and rocks and assorted scenery decorated my mind (still does, as a matter of fact).

Actually we've owned two or three aquariums over the years, nothing approaching even in miniature the fantastic dreams I nursed in my youth. After a while the aquariums became the visual equivalent of white noise at best -- or worse, a tedious chore. Too many things in real life competed for money, time and energy, and it seemed like the only fish we had any success with were plain-colored danios.

On Friday my dreams took flight again. We visited the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, the world's largest aquarium. It turned out to be an expensive day after tickets, gas for two vehicles, and food, but it was worth it. We all had a ball!

I want to share some of the pictures of our day at the Georgia Aquarium, and if you're ever in the area -- I highly recommend a visit there.

There are spectacular views throughout the aquarium.

A hammerhead swims among assorted fish and rays.

Can you believe it! A petting zoo at the aquarium! It was fun, even after one of the bonnet sharks swam over my hand and tried to take a nibble (we didn't realize it was almost feeding time).

The anemones were beautiful -- and you can touch them too!

This beluga whale was a big, graceful showoff. It was my daughter's favorite.

This South African penguin enjoyed watching us as we watched back from a glass enclosure inside its habitat.

I can't remember the species of fish, but this pretty specimen is indicative of the beauty housed in this aquarium.

I couldn't leave without giving a hug to Deepo, the Georgia Aquarium mascot. Boy, I love fish!

A Flower for Mama: A Lesson That Finally Bloomed

2008-06-05T22:08:00.003-04:00

The house in which I grew up was small and Spartan. My mama seems in my mind to be perpetually standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out the window at a little patch of the world she loved and from which she never strayed far or for long. There was no running hot water in the kitchen, and Mama always kept a kettle on the stove to heat water for washing dishes. The immediate view out the kitchen window was the crepe myrtle just across the driveway, surrounded by one of the poorest scraps of soil on the property, so when one of the tulips Mama had planted there actually came up and bloomed, it gave her a simple yet profound private joy of which her three year old son (that would be me) was utterly unaware.

Playing in the yard early one afternoon, I noticed the flower. Knowing how Mama seemed to enjoy flowers, I thought she would love to have this one in the house, so…I picked it. Mama must have been at her post staring out the window, because she met me at the door as I rushed in to present the gift. I couldn’t wait to see how happy Mama would be, so I was completely unprepared when she began scolding me for picking her flower. When I started sobbing hysterically, Mama was immediately repentant and took me in her arms trying to console me and apologizing for scolding me, because she realized I was only trying to make her happy. But the episode left a shadow on my early childhood that led to an event which my daddy enjoyed telling with a chuckle for years.

I was riding in the car with Daddy down a country road. In those days seatbelts and child restraints were unknown, and I always traveled standing in the center of the front bench seat with my arms spread across the back of the seat for balance. We came to a field that seemed literally to explode in color with wildflowers. Daddy pulled the car over and started to get out. He said, “Let’s get your mama a bunch of flowers.” With a serious look, I shook my head and said, “No, Daddy. Mama don’t like flowers.”

He couldn’t coax me out of the car, so he climbed back in and we went home. He told Mama about the flowers and what I’d said, and she explained about the tulip. It was something Mama always regretted. I remember once when we were sitting around the table at Mama’s house sharing this story with my children, Mama laughed, but she came over and kissed me lightly on the back of the neck, hugged me and said, “He just wanted to give his mama a flower, and I should’ve just taken it.”

In my teens, I fell in love with growing things – flowers and plants of every kind. I started a compost pile and took cuttings, seeds, and bulbs from all my elderly aunts whose houses lined the street across the field from our house. Eventually I worked some good topsoil and compost into that sorry patch of earth across from Mama’s kitchen window and planted cannas which had been struggling to grow in another part of the yard. They performed magnificently, reaching seven feet in height and blooming profusely. I told mama I had finally made up for picking her tulip. She just laughed and hugged me and said she loved looking out that window more than ever. I was wrong, Daddy – Mama really did like flowers.

Happy Memorial Day!

2008-05-26T21:28:00.005-04:00

In The Declaration of Independence, we find these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

We Americans are a privileged people. Although we are continuously reminded these days of the proliferation of anti-American sentiment by various people around the world (and even some in this country), we are heirs to a heritage of freedom, hope, and optimism that much of the world can only dream of. With tremendous privilege comes tremendous responsibility. Today we remember and honor those who have borne that responsibility with their lives.

Consequently, we are reminded of the service of every man and woman who takes the oath of military service. In November of 1975, with my heart pounding and goosebumps rushing to cover my body, I raised my right hand and repeated these words as I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps:

I, James Oscar Bohannon, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Today I salute all my brothers and sisters in arms who’ve shared that oath (or one very similar) and who bear those arms not for malicious purposes, but who bear them to stand guard over my freedom and yours, and to keep safe the country that, despite its many flaws and shortcomings, stands as the greatest beacon of hope to the world. To those who’ve paid the ultimate price for freedom and honor, and for those who’ve been willing to face the possibility of paying that price, may God bless you always – and, indeed, may God bless America!

SEMPER FI!!!

Rip Van Winkle, the Prodigal Son, and the Author of this Blog...

2008-05-04T23:17:00.004-04:00

Hmm...now just what do Rip Van Winkle, the Prodigal Son, and the author of this blog have in common? Tick, tock, tick, tock, buzzzzzz...time's up. They all disappeared and didn't show up where they belonged for quite a while. Wow! Can you believe it's been over three months since I last posted anything at my blog! That just will not do, and I can't let that happen again.

So much has happened since the last time I spoke to you. My brother went into the hospital again with congestive heart failure and almost died again (but he's back home, on regular dialysis, and better be watching his diet). A good friend of mine got very sick, and my wife and I took her to the emergency room with a fever of 104 degrees, and we were waited on by a medical team that obviously either trained with the Three Stooges or got their credentials from Clown College. But...she survived and recovered after lots of tender, loving care. I celebrated my 51st birthday (on March 28th), but I haven't felt younger in years (probably in great part because I'm still working out regularly...yay!). Cris and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, but we didn't get to go to the bed and breakfast in the mountains like we'd planned, because the transmission went out in the car and sucked nearly $2000.00 out of savings, and this just after paying nearly $400.00 for repairs on the van. This left roughly enough in our bank account for us to stay in bed here and have a bowl of cereal for breakfast (not the bed & breakfast we'd envisioned for a milestone...but we're gonna make up for it as soon as school's out!).

I have lots of notes about subjects I want to write about, like how my writing has not been going well at all. Heck, it hasn't even been going badly. It just hasn't been going...but that's changing. I'm also working on sculpting using a new technique -- more on that later (when something is finished and I can show you). There is a presidential campaign going on -- in case you haven't noticed -- and I have some thoughts. Boy, do I have some thoughts. Oh...my one year old grandson lost his Medicaid, and we've been unable to get it back, and we can't apply for the children's health insurance, because he qualifies for Medicaid (go figure!). Soooo...my toddler grandson is uninsured. Meanwhile, my oldest son lost his job (painting houses) weeks ago and has run out of unemployment (and has a second child on the way). That means I have two grown children and their families with no health insurance and inadequate incomes. Don't you just love the American Dream!

Ahhh...yes, there is so much to talk about, but for now, I just wanted you to know I'm still around. So, kill the fatted calf, bring the best garments and the family ring, and stir up the merriment -- the Prodigal has returned!

Happy Birthday David Jeremiah Garcia!!!

2008-01-30T22:47:00.001-05:00

My first grandson is one year old today! It's hard to believe. The joy he has brought into our lives is indescribable, and I can't imagine a world without him. We'll have a party on February 9th (yeah...I know, but we tend to draw birthdays out for weeks around here).

FELIZ PRIMERO CUMPLEAÑOS!!! Mi Davidito, ¡te amo mucho!

~ Tu Papa

The New Year...So Far

2008-01-11T21:57:00.000-05:00

We're heading for the two week mark of the new year, the point where I understand many people start falling by the wayside on those ambitious resolutions. That's just one reason why I never make any. I have resolved not to resolve -- and that's the only one I keep. However, I do have some serious plans and resolute intentions for this year, and I am sticking with them. I actually began before the new year, but I plan to keep the momentum going throughout this year -- and beyond.

Getting in Shape

It's about time to check the classifieds -- I want a treadmill. This may be the time when all those good intentions are wearing thin, and those people who splurged on fancy exercise equipment have decided to cut their loses. Don't know where I'm going to put it, but after taking a run on a chilly afternoon it's taken days to shake the cough (actually, I still haven't shaken it). I'd love to be able to run in my office with some good, inspiring music blasting from my Bose speakers. Fortunately, we do have a new exercise bike -- the kind with the pedals out front -- that I got for my wife, who recently had knee surgery. We are putting it to good use.

I'd bought a new weight bench a few months back, and immediately hurt my back and was in such pain I couldn't even assemble it. Then my oldest son came over and put it together -- but we had no weights. We finally went to Academy Sports & Outdoors and got a set of steel free weights, and I was like a child at Christmas (even though we got them a few weeks before Christmas). It still took a couple of weeks to get going, but thanks to my youngest son -- who has been using them -- I worked out one afternoon, and I've been doing it ever since.

I've lost about 15 pounds, dropped two pants sizes, and my musculature is re-appearing with surprising definition. And I'm feeling good (except for the tendinitis in my left arm). I'm not eating nearly as much, and I don't miss it. A couple of weekends ago, we had to go shopping. I needed new clothes! From size 40 to size 38, and I'm on the way to 36! Pardon me if I sound a little boastful, but I feel I deserve it. This has taken weeks of hard work and determination -- and I am a little proud.

Writing

I've been writing for years, but I've never had the focus to stick with a project longer than a modest poem -- not counting journal entries and the occasional blog. Now, however, I am actively working on my first novel. I've enlisted a bakers dozen of some of the most intelligent and wonderful people I know to be readers for my book, and I plan to be ready to shop for an agent by April. Now I feel like I can really call myself a writer.

In case any of you were wondering why my blog hasn't been updated in nearly a month -- now you know. But...I hope to do better with posting. I started this blog as an outlet to share my writing and ideas, and I don't plan to abandon it.

Best Wishes to My Blog Readers

To all of you who've been faithful readers, and to those who stop by from time to time -- and to those of you who may have just now discovered my little home on the Internet -- I wish a very blessed, peaceful, and successful 2008.

Is Anything Made in America Anymore?

2007-12-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

This is a wonderful time -- looking forward to a first Christmas with my two grandsons and great-nephew. There is nothing I can imagine that could be better for Christmas than the gift of these precious little boys.

Yet...this is one of the most frustrating holiday seasons ever. With three little boys to shop for, thoughts go to Fisher-Price, Mattel, and all those other toymakers who made our holidays past so memorable. But -- all these names mean to me this Christmas is..."Made in China", lead paint, and toxic! I am furious at these corporations for betraying me, my grandchildren, and my country!

I've looked online for "Made in America" -- and I've found some things. So what's the problem? First, there is selection. There's not a whole lot that looks like a modern child might be thrilled to see under the tree. Maybe fifty years ago -- but not today. The second, and maybe the most significant -- price! Good gracious -- $50.00 for a set of 28 wooden blocks? Bless them for using "non-toxic ink", but do they really need to gouge me this badly!

All I want for Christmas is a non-toxic, reasonably priced toy, or two! What happened to Sam Walton's philosophy of American made? Surely the traditions of stocking stores and conducting transactions that made a simple Arkansas businessman the world's richest man, while selling quality, safe, American-made goods was good enough. Are his offspring so greedy that they would sell the nation's soul for a little more profit? And, mind you, this is not just a mere matter of what Walmart sells -- as Walmart goes, so goes the rest of the retail industry. The bottom line is dependent on competition, and competition has already been devastated by Walmart. Now that they've traded our national soul for a bowl of pottage, it's unlikely that any other merchants will do very much to try to bring us redemption.

Michael James Bohannon -- Happy Birthday, and Rest in Peace

2007-12-09T23:51:00.001-05:00

Today (December 9th) is my firstborn son's birthday. Michael James Bohannon was born at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. He was two months premature and weighed a little over 3 lbs. 5 oz. Nine days later, after a battle with necrotizing entercolitis and two surgeries, Michael passed away quietly in my arms in a "quiet room" at the hospital. As impossible as it may sound, just before he died, my tiny son opened his eyes, looked up at me, and smiled. He then made one last gasp, and I knew he was gone. The nurse came in and listened with the stethescope and confirmed it.

On this, his 29th birthday, I still miss Michael, and I love him very, very much.

Happy Birthday, Michael! I love you! ~ Daddy

First Steps...

2007-12-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

My grandson, David Jeremiah Garcia, began walking yesterday. Oh, he's been standing on his own for a few weeks, and he's taken a very tentative step or two, but yesterday he took a step while reaching for me, and doing that sneaky grownup thing, I moved back just out of reach. David kept stepping, and I kept moving back, encouraging him forward the whole time. Then I reached out, picked him up, gave him a big hug and kiss, and said, "You walked!" He smiled and wiggled a bit. He knew he'd just done something amazing. Needless to say, it made me feel good that the first walking David did was to get to me -- his Papa. We then called Mama and Grandma in from the yard and showed off for them.

This whole experience has been a reminder that we are constantly learning to walk, in one way or another. There are all sorts of steps we must learn to take. First we learn to balance ourselves and stand upright. Then we hold onto something and practice getting one clumsy foot in front of the other. Then someone we trust lets us hold onto their hand while we practice for the real thing. At last comes the day when we let go and take those anxious, uncertain steps and walk.

That is how it has been with so many aspects of my life. When I went to Marine Corps bootcamp, the first thing I had to look for after getting off the bus was the famous yellow footprints. We had to learn how to stand all over again -- heels together, feet forming a 45 degree angle. Then we had to learn how to walk, together -- left...left...left, right, left! "Don't bounce, this ain't a dance sweethearts!" "Get in step, get in step!" "The other right foot!" For 13 weeks I learned how to walk, until I was able to march off Parris Island as a United States Marine.

The latest walk for me, of course, is my writing. I've been learning how to balance, and how to take a few tentative anxious steps. Now, all of a sudden (or so it seems) I am walking -- stumbling and clumsy, yes...but writing! David just learned how to walk, and he will spend the next couple of years perfecting his steps. Soon he'll be walking without even thinking about his steps; he'll only be concerned with where he wants to go. He's given me a refreshing shot of courage, because I know that while I'm having to pay too much attention to my steps right now, before long I'll write and only be concerned with where I want to go.

David Jeremiah Garcia, I love you, and Papa's so proud of you! Now I want to succeed so you can be proud of me.

[Photo: David Garcia holding his Papa's hand at the Milledgeville, GA, Christmas parade, December 2, 2007]

A Novel Idea!

2007-11-29T23:45:00.001-05:00

I have finally begun work on a novel. I won't be saying much about it here, because...well, because I don't won't to talk about it a lot; I just want to write it. I have set myself some pretty serious goals.

By December 15th, have a detailed outline of the entire book completed.

By December 30th, have the first three chapters finished.

On or shortly after January 1, send the first three chapters to my volunteer readers -- so far there are 8 of them, one in Oregon, one in Montana, two in Florida, and four in Georgia.

I've started researching agents who may be interested in the kind of book I am writing. It is a fantasy story rooted in mythology, faerie lore (most of which I'm making up), and quantum physics. There is a battle of good and evil -- which is a universal theme, but I hope to put my own very special twist on this theme. Stay tuned.

_________________________

A couple of good quotes I found today that are appropriate to the plot of my story:

"The myth is the foundation of life, the timeless scema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious."
~ Thomas Mann, "Freud and the Future"

"Man, apparantly, cannot maintain himself in the universe without believe in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth."
~ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

Morning...

2007-11-27T06:33:00.000-05:00

The stark raving sky
pushes the moon aside
lunacy!

The cold golden sun
inches its way up earth
hand over hand
growing warm from effort
till it burns.

______________________
(Photo: Sunrise, Oct. 10, 2006
by Jim Bohannon)

Up, Down, and Holes in the Ground

2007-11-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

Some stream-of-consciousness reflections from my journal today:

I looked up at the stars and watched the heavenly dance about me, a slow dance measured in the steady rhythm of the universe. What is up there, out there, down there -- I say "down there" because in a sense, I am up here looking down on other worlds. When I was a boy, I used to get dizzy looking up. Flying and looking down at the ground from tall buildings never bothered me, but looking up at an airplane or a tall skyscraper disoriented me, made me feel woozy and a little nauseated -- do they make groundsick bags? It is because I realize the concept of up and down is an illusion generated by the random direction of gravity, and gravity, being the weakest of the four physical forces, shouldn’t be allowed to dictate as much as it does. Of course, I know gravity has power over me, and for that I am mostly grateful. It would be most uncomfortable to keep floating out of my seat as I try to type or read. Yet, it would be most dangerous if I decided to fly off the top of a tall building hoping to fly over the countryside to explore its beauty. I would die. That’s what gravity would do to me. Gravity is weak, and it has no conciense. (If I am wrong, I apologize to gravity.)

When I was a boy, I used to love climbing into holes in the ground. Nowadays I am claustrophobic, and there is no way I would go into some of the holes or crawl through some of the tiny pipes that I did in those days. I cringe to think about it now, and yet in a way I long to be able to do that again, to do it without fear. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become fearful of being trapped -- of being trapped in the debris of a collapsed building or the crumpled wreckage of an automobile. Perhaps it’s the looming fear of being forever trapped in the grave. And yet, I feel - I believe - there is something more. The grave cannot hold me. "O, death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?" Is there existence beyond death, or is it an all-encompassing, eternally peaceful rest trapped in the debris of a dying world - universe? What is existence anyway? Philosophers debate and speculate and argue and become self-assured, but in fact, nobody knows, not even the most brilliant of the philosophers. All of us are doomed to speculate, to believe, and we divide ourselves most hideously and most violently over issues of what will happen after death. The Muslim extremist kills himself and innocent people because of the promise of an afterlife full of sexual bliss. The Christian fundamentalist spends her life in torment with the world because she believes everyone around her is going to hell "without Jesus". There have been times in my life where I was cocksure I knew. Now I’m humbly uncertain, yet eternally hopeful. But I’m still avoiding small spaces.

Reflections on Nabokov's Lolita

2007-11-25T23:17:00.000-05:00

I'd been wanting to read it for a long time. Lolita, that is. The novel by Vladimir Nabokov. I finally did, and here's how it came about (from my 2005 Journal):

____________________

Friday, October 21, 2005 (12:37 a.m.)

Late this evening I walked down the moonlit driveway and crossed the highway (with flashlight lit) to fetch two boxes from Amazon.com. Two of the books I ordered were waiting there for me. Thousands of books in my possession, and it’s always such a delight to get new books – especially these. These are Nabokov! I’ve never owned a work of Nabokov. A softcover copy of Lectures on Literature (edited by Fredson Bowers, with an introduction by John Updike) and The Library of America volume, Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962 (including Lolita, Pale Fire, and the screenplay for Lolita that Nabokov wrote for Stanley Kubric). I’ve already been reading in them – particularly the editor’s forward to Lectures on Literature, and a few random passages from Lolita. No doubt I will learn a lot about reading, about literature, and about how to craft my own writing to make it alive and vital.

[end of journal selection]

____________________

Lolita, following in the footsteps of other great works, such as James Joyce's Ulysses, has been regularly and frequently banned. When it was first published, Nabakov had to resort to a French publisher, because no American publisher was willing to take a chance on such subject matter -- a fictitious prison memoir of a relationship between a middle-aged man and a 12 year old girl. On its premier publication, one reviewer in London called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography," which probably assured the book immediate success. The great writer (and British spy) Graham Greene, on the other hand, called it one of the best novels of 1954.

The book is one of the finest I have ever read. We see into the head of Humbert Humbert, and far from being an apologetic for pedophilia, we see Humbert for the monster that he really is. Nevertheless, we also see him as a human being, which is the real magic of the book for me. The prose is exquisite, which is amazing in itself considering Nabokov initially established his career in literature in his native Russian and only began writing in English later in his life. Perhaps that is why he was such a master of the language. When he wasn't writing, Nabokov was most frequently pursuing his other great love -- chasing butterflies. He was an avid lepidopterist. What an apt metaphor, because one can imagine him chasing and capturing the most beautiful words and collecting them in his prose.

I saw this title on a list of suggested books for the local book group I recently joined, and I hope we will select this for one of our monthly discussions. If you've not given Nabokov in general, and Lolita in particular, a chance -- perhaps because of the "scandalous" topic, or because you are intimidated by "great literature" (remember, great literature is great because it is first of all good literature) -- I hope you'll take a look at it. The poetry, the sheer loveliness of language, is evident in the rhythm of the opening lines, some of the most beautiful in all of literature:
____________________

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Oh, Christmas Tree...

2007-11-23T22:21:00.000-05:00

When I was a boy, I spent a lot of time roaming through the woods. Usually I'd carry a hatchet and either my .22 rifle or 410 shotgun, and I'd be gone for much of the day. Those were very different times. I can't imagine spending the better part of a day with my children wandering Lord knows where. I want them close to my sights, if not directly in them, so I can be ready to rescue them from whatever crazy danger contemporary society might have in store for them. Ahhh...those were very different times indeed.

One of my annual chores was to hunt down a Christmas tree -- always a cedar; I didn't even realize there was any other kind till I was well into my teens. I'd usually have a spot already staked out and hoped I'd remember how to get back to it when it was tree cutting time. I'd try to find the prettiest, shapeliest cedar in the woods, and finding that perfect tree was always a thrill. I can't imaging getting that much deep-down joy from a video game! Dragging the tree out was always a challenge, especially having to tote a hatchet and rifle too.

Yesterday we went tree hunting. We wandered deep into the wilds of Walmart, right into the middle of the garden section, and there it was. A 7-foot Douglas Fir -- it assembles in three sections and comes pre-lit! I never saw one of these in the woods. Dragging it out was still a chore, because for some reason we'd completely forgotten to get a shopping cart. No fear -- He Man is here. I hoisted the box over my head by the straps, and we began the retreat to the checkout counter. Trudging through Walmart holding a boxed fake tree over my head, I felt somewhere between extremely virile and very foolish. Confused shoppers gave me plenty of room.

The tree's in the attic now. We have to clear out a spot to put it. At least that part's the same as when I was a boy. Gabriel was upset that we got a pre-lit tree. "But I wanted to put the lights on!" he said. "What are we going to do with the lights now?" I told him to decorate the outside of the house or the yard -- anything. But if he puts them up, he takes them down. I've done my chore.

Thankful!

2007-11-23T00:19:00.000-05:00

Thankful... meaning literally "full of thanks". My favorite talk show host (actually the only one I listen to) is Dennis Prager, and he is very big on happiness. He has written a book on the subject (Happiness Is a Serious Problem) and gives lectures around the country. According to Dennis, thankfulness is essential to happiness. I have to agree with him. Have you ever seen an ungrateful person who was happy?

Once a year we have a day formally set aside to be thankful. Believe it or not, Thanksgiving is for more than just eating a lot (although that's a pretty neat side benefit). It's even for more than getting together with loved ones (or in the case of some families, getting together with people whom you try to tolerate once a year). It's a day on which to be full of thanks.

This Thanksgiving day found me celebrating with lots of people whom I love -- and eating and napping and taking some time to read and playing my guitar and chatting online with a dear friend. I am "full of thanks". A list of things for which I'm thankful would be too long to post, but would include:

my family (of course)
my books (lots and lots of books!)
my guitar
getting to be with my two grandsons and my great-nephew (all in one day!)
my computer (because it opens up the world to me and connects me with friends)
music (and, in particular, my subscription to Rhapsody music service)
airplanes (even though I can't afford to fly anymore, I can still say I'm a pilot - I got to fly!)
a meaningful job (even though it ain't the highest paying one)
a love of writing and words!
that my brother survived his near-deadly medical ordeal, and I got to visit with him last weekend!
Books-A-Million
coffee!

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving wherever you are, and one more thing for which I am thankful -- all of you who honor and humble me by reading my blog.

Blessings, peace, & love to each of you!

~ Jim

The Parable of the Oak Tree

2007-11-21T03:31:00.000-05:00

When I was in the eighth grade, I found a tiny live oak tree in the woods in which I was tramping. I knew if I left the tree there, it probably wouldn’t survive, and I wanted it – needed it. I was in the midst of a passionate love affair with plants, and I felt a harmony with growing things that has enriched my life to this day. When my spirit gets dry, I listen to the trees calling. I hear their song.

I planted that tree in a corner of the yard, and I surrounded it with white quartz rocks so it would be protected from clumsy feet and deadly lawnmower blades. The little tree thrived on my love, and by the time I had grown up and left home to make my journey into the distant world, it had grown into a big, spreading tree with limbs overhanging the little road in front of the house.

That tree has listened to me and nurtured me through unnumbered crises and joys. It has watched my children play and given them shelter from the biting sun. It has been home for bird families and nourished the world with their songs. It has been a magical tree. That’s how I have always seen it – and how I always will.

The tree lived in the yard of my mother’s house, and when I had to sell the place, the tree had to go too. What the new owners have done with it, I don’t know. I haven’t had the heart to go back and see. They don’t know that tree, even though they may “own” it. By now they may have even cut it down. There were complaints about how the tree had spread into the neighbor’s yard, and how it was threatening to obscure visibility on the little road beside it. But what nobody knows is that I took the tree with me – in my spirit. I had to – it was part of me.

Thinking about my oak set me to thinking about how we see things – the differences in viewpoints, in perspectives, in angles. One tree – many trees. Here is a tale about seeing a tree.

____________________________

There was an oak tree that sat on a small hill – a live oak that had sent its first roots into the soil more than a hundred years before. It had stretched out to the sky in praise while its limbs were shaped by the wind and from following the sun each day, and its acorns had fattened generations of grateful squirrels. Many people had looked upon the tree, and each had seen something different.

A carpenter saw beautiful wood with a fine, golden grain. Hard wood and solid that would make admirable furniture that would impress everyone with his art and skill.

A poor man who lived close to the earth saw enough firewood there to keep his family warm through a long winter, to fuel the stove that would belch out pan after pan of biscuits, to give a soft light and take the sharp edge of darkness off the bitter night.

An artist saw grace expressing itself in every elegant twist of limb, in every shadow cast by fat green boughs, in billowing verdure swept across a backdrop of sky and cloud. Her palette came to life with color, and shape and form fastened themselves to her canvas, and she captured a reflection of the image of the tree – and she saw that it was good.

A civil engineer saw an obstacle to his project, an object that must be removed and carried away so progress could be made – until the plans for the highway route changed, and the tree didn’t matter anymore.

A philosopher pondered the tree and saw the mystical Tree – Plato’s Real Tree, but perhaps not the tree itself. It was something to think about, something aesthetically exquisite.

A local historian thought about all the generations of folk that had passed by since the tree had crept from its acorn and established itself on the edge of town, how many significant events had taken place, and this tree (much like the ancient turtles of the Galapagos) had been alive through them all – and still lived.

The birds and the squirrels saw shelter and food, but there was nothing remarkable about that – there were countless other trees (oak, poplar, hickory, maple, and otherwise) that would provide the same thing.

Perhaps the saddest of all were those who never even saw the tree. Their eyes were fastened onto other things, things less permanent, but always more important than a “dumb tree”.

To the tree none of this really mattered. All that really mattered was the little boy who came almost every day to sit beneath its shade, to run his fingers across its bark, to fondle its leaves, to tell it all of his secrets, all of his dreams. The tree became part of the boy, and the boy part of the tree in a mystical bond more mysterious than even the philosopher was able to apprehend.

And they both live to this day, ages hence – tree and boy, boy and tree. Happy is the one who understands this parable of the tree, and saddest of all the one who can not see.

Comfort...Reflections from My Journal

2007-11-21T00:32:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving day is nearing, and with it, like Christmastime that gallops in on its heels, memories of holidays past... places we've spent those times before, and the people with whom we've spent them, places and people in many cases no longer here, and in all cases no longer the same. One of those significant places for me is my boyhood home in Hillsboro, Georgia, and one of the most significant people is my mama. Holidays tend, in many ways, to make me more uncomfortable than happy. It's not all bad, because there are certainly new memories to carve out this holiday. But the past, like omnipresent Dicken's ghosts, is always haunting the present -- and the future. Here is an entry from my journal from a few months ago that helps put this in perspective -- and indeed gives me comfort:

___________________________

Saturday, July 14, 2007 (3:07 a.m.)

Some things just don’t feel comfortable anymore. Like my boyhood home. I have very fond memories, but I also remember how uncomfortable the place had become when we’d go up to visit Mama. The beds were uncomfortable, and the arrangement of the house just didn’t appeal to the gentler senses.

It was Mama, and it was me. That’s what made the place special. Those walls and floors and the space within was sacred. But it was the presence of certain people through the years that hallowed them, not any innate virtue.

The spaces have been taken from me – the sacred floors and walls desecrated by the business exchange of a sale. Yet the spaces within me – one might call them memories, but they are something more…much more – are still pure and true. There is something real and eternal that transpired in the mundane act of growing up and making a life my own way that inhabits the spaces that I have brought with me. They’re no longer “up the road a piece, in another county” – they are with me all the time.

I take great comfort in that, but it has taken lots of time for that comfort to settle in. It's still far from complete, but its real presence is clear – like the Spirit of Christ in the Eucharist.

A World Without Us

2007-11-14T22:37:00.000-05:00

There is a fascinating discussion on today’s Dennis Prager Show with author Alan Weisman, who has written a book called The World Without Us, an imaginative look at what would happen to the world if all of a sudden humans disappeared. Dennis asked what the first most noticeable characteristic of a humanless world would be, and Weisman replied, “The sounds.” He says the noises of human activity would disappear and all that would be left would be the sounds of wind and rain and birds.

He goes on to explain he isn’t anti-human, he just wished there were places we could go where we could hear the sound of nature without the background hum of human activity. Most of the places that people went to in the 50s and 60s when he and Dennis (and I, for that matter) were growing up are now strip malls and industrial complexes. Weisman says as a journalist he has been fortunate enough to travel to places that are still pristine (my word, not his), but he had to travel a long way. He mentioned the Arctic and Antarctic, and Dennis, who has been to Antarctica interjected that while that may be so, he was amazed at how noisy penguins were. Weisman agreed, and he also commented that when you get close, they are also very smelly.

Most of us are relegated to experiencing our visits to pristine locations vicariously, through photographs and video images. Something we don’t always remember while we’re admiring the breathtaking majesty are the noises and smells associated with the location and its wildlife, geothermal extrusions, and what have you. Not to mention the dangers.

This makes me appreciate the Internet so much more. The past few days not only have I engaged in communication with people and places around the country and around the world, but I have visited spots throughout the solar system and traveled into deep space via images from the Hubble Space Telescope and various space probes. I've even been able to listen to Saturn and some of its moons! (I wrote about this before in a previous blog -- take a look Space Music. And for more about my fascination with space, take a look at Space...What a Wonder!)

About a world free of humans – I'm voting against that one. I'm rather partial to humans. But I am fascinated with those spots where our presence is missing – except by imagination.

The Write Gyro

2007-11-13T23:38:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, while at work, I wrote some journal entries on loose-leaf, and – as is so often the case – I bemoaned my lack of writing progress, and I just wanted to analyze that here for a while. I am inflicted with a serious writing avoidance gyro that diverts me from most of the opportunities available for me to write. since it has never shown up on any of the many MRIs or CAT scans I’ve had across the years, I’m not sure where that gizmo is physically located, and prospects of having it surgically removed are practically nil. The only solution I see is to implant another gyro – one that pushes me into writing opportunities, even when none seemingly exist. The new gyro I will simply label as “Write Gyro”, and the old gyro will be hereinafter known as “Wrong Gyro”. Hence my new mission will be to discriminate continuously between “Write” and “Wrong” and always to follow what is “Write”.

There are many avoidance behaviors that lead me down the “Wrong” path:

Problem – I surf obscure points on the Internet that, although sometimes seem interesting (but much of the time do not), do little to enrich my time. It furthermore occurs to me that I frequently use these diversions as an alternative to stimulation. I become passive letting the Internet do most of my thinking for me.

Solution – Actually, there are two. First of all, I could altogether avoid random surfing – which will be incredibly hard to do, since I have a terrible case of OCD. Second, and preferable, in my opinion, is to dialog with what I find, to use it to let my fingers return to the keyboard and chase down thoughts as I form words in my word processor. Much like stream of consciousness writing, this could be called “stream of consciousness surfing”.

Problem – Snood! For those who may not know, Snood is a computer game that you can download for free. If you want to play unlimited games (and I don’t exaggerate), you pay a one-time fee and have a lifetime access code. Snood begins with rows and columns of colorful Snoods in 4 shapes and varieties, and you have a Snood launcher with which you aim and launch a Snood toward the wall of Snoods. Three in a row, and they vanish, and when you remove a row of Snoods holding others, they drop, thus clearing the way deeper into the wall of Snoods. The more you drop off, rather than just make vanish, the more your launcher is re-charged. If your power goes dry, the wall descends toward you one level. The object is to clear out the entire wall of Snoods. There are several levels, Child, Easy, Medium, Difficult, and Evil being the basic (I always play the Evil level, because I want to battle against evil). This is really a game of strategy, and it is actually categorized as an educational game – but it is also addicting. Now to defend myself, I mostly play Snood while I’m listening to audio, because I can’t do one thing at a time. I was an obsessive multi-tasker before the term was coined.

Solution – Instead of dropping Snoods, drop letters. Approach a little playful writing like dropping Snoods. Get addicted! Loose all inhibitions and let the words pile up. Let audio stimulate thoughts and reactions. It actually does anyway, but I just need to respond. Active listening taken to a new level.

Problem – The myriad distractions: the kids who keep barging in to tell me about the latest micro-detail of a videogame I’ve never heard of, or who decide there’s a shirt I must wash “right now”, or who want to know why there are no clean glasses (I’m obviously the only one in the house who can wash a glass). The piles of clutter (because I’m obviously the only one in the house who can pick up anything weighing over 5 milligrams – especially if it’s lying in the middle of the walkway through the house), etc.

Solution – I could move and not leave a forwarding address, but I’m sort of very, very attached to this bunch of folks around here. I could pick up a baseball bat, slam it into my open hand while growling and letting foamy saliva drip from my face, but that one doesn’t scare them anymore. But the only thing that is going to work here is – focus. Pick up what I can. Listen for a reasonable amount of time, but then let it be known I’m a video game know-nothing and always will be (at least about any games beyond Snood) and I’m very comfortable in the skin of a video game know-nothing. But – stay at it and WRITE.

Follow the “Write Gyro”, and in the end everything should come out all write.

NaNoWriMo progress: Ha ha ha ha ha...! Seriously, just over 23,000 words behind at this point, which means I need to come up with just over 48,000 words before November 30th becomes history. 3000 words a day will do it!

Sunset on Mars

2007-10-25T16:26:00.000-04:00

I was just listening to and watching the enhanced pictures from a podcast called Riding with Rockets, a wonderful podcast featuring reports and images from non-manned space probes in deep space. The images are quite often breathtaking, but one in particular almost brought me to tears – sunset on Mars. I’ve looked up the image on the Internet and found it at the NASA image site. The picture was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on May 19, 2005. Wow! It almost gives the impression of a sunset on the Mediterranean overlooking some Greek isle.

Update, NaNoWriMo, etc...

2007-10-22T22:46:00.000-04:00

Wow! I didn't intend to be away from my blog this long! Good news about my brother. He went home today! It's been a long several weeks. Thanks to all who've been holding us in your thoughts and prayers.

I've come down with another respiratory illness of some sort, so I've been feeling rotten and didn't go to visit my brother this weekend. The last thing he needs is some cruddy bug to infect him while he's so weak and vulnerable.

_______________________

I met with some friends of mine yesterday at the Blackbird Cafe in downtown Milledgeville to discuss books and NaNoWriMo. Don't know what that is? It's the official abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. This is an annual event beginning November 1st and ending November 30th. The goal is to write at least 50,000 words toward a novel. There are no rules about how or what to write -- just write! I've decided to shoot for 10,000 words between now and then, so my goal will be to add at least 50,000 words and have a solid working first draft for a novel. The group of friends with whom I met yesterday plans to meet once a week to encourage each other, see what the others are doing, and to hold each other accountable. I'm excited about this.

If you're interested, check out the official NaNoWriMo website and sign up today. I'd love to hear from you if you decide to take the challenge.

~ Jim

The latest on my brother...

2007-09-27T23:44:00.000-04:00

My brother has improved, but we all still have a long road ahead. They removed the ventilator and feeding tubes last Saturday night. He was able to talk with us some, but it was very hard to understand him most of the time. By the next evening, he was able to have some liquids. He has been in a good humor and understands what happened and has been busy catching up with the news. They moved him from ICU to a room a couple of days ago, but he is still unable to do a lot for himself. They've had physical/occupational therapists working with him as he tries to regain strength enough to hold a cup or eating utensil. Somebody has to stay with him 24 hours a day. This weekend I'm planning on staying around the clock so my niece can have a break. Meanwhile, catching up on the chores around here has been occupying a lot of time. Both lawnmowers were broken -- I finally got the push mower repaired and was able to cut some of the grass before we were declared a national forest. My office renovation has been on hold, so I'm still without my books, papers, etc. being readily accessible. We're just taking things one day at a time right now, and we're incredibly glad to have Brac with us still.

For those continuing to think about us and pray for us -- and for Brac in particular -- thanks!

Next week Cris is out of school and will have surgery on her knee, so it will be another busy week. She talked about putting it off, but I told her she needs to go ahead and have it done. We'll manage. Hopefully, in spite of everything, I will be able to get back into a regular routine with my blogging very soon.

Blessings,
Jim

Update on my brother...

2007-09-19T21:29:00.000-04:00

Today they were able to remove Brac from the ventilator for about three hours. He was very calm (they were concerned that he might have to be restrained, but they don't know what a tough and great guy my brother is). He had a dialysis treatment yesterday and will have another tomorrow. He is off the sedative and is on pain medication, and I'm sure his throat will be very sore after having all those tubes in there. At this point we are optimistic. He's so much better than he was a couple of days ago. We're still facing a long road, but if we get to keep him a while longer and let him know how much we love him, I'm set for the journey.

Thanks for all the prayers and expressions of concern!

~ Jim

My Brother

2007-09-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

For those checking for new blog entries, I apologize that I haven't added anything since Wednesday. I was working on some new things to post, but on Thursday I got bad news, and practically every minute since then has been occupied.

My brother was taken to the Middle Georgia Regional Medical Center in Macon, Georgia, by ambulance from church on Wednesday night. He's had congestive heart failure episodes in the past, plus he has other medical issues, and he realized that something wasn't right. Someone called 911, and he was taken to the hospital.

Somewhere in the hospital while being moved from one location to another, he stopped breathing and his heart stopped. CPR was started in under a minute, and after 5 minutes they had a pulse. I didn't know this was going on. Thursday my niece called and told us he was in ICU and his kidneys were shutting down.

I was afraid of the worst as we drove over to Macon Thursday afternoon, but my brother has been making some slow progress. He is still in ICU, and he has a variety of problems. He is still sedated and on a respirator, but they hope to wean him off the respirator. So far medication has his kidneys working, but there is still a chance that they may have to start dialysis tomorrow. At any rate, he -- and we -- have a long road ahead. He is still a very sick man.

My bother, Brac, is 18 years older than I, and he's been like a second father to me. In the future I plan to blog about my brother so those of you who don't know him can meet a kind, talented, and funny man, a man that I'm proud to be related to. He means the world to me, and I'm not ready to give him up. I've been reliving so many memories, and I've shed gallons of tears. This and all the peripheral logistical issues are presenting the family with some tough challenges, so please keep us all in your prayers.

~ Jim

A Few Teasers from My Writing Notebooks...

2007-09-13T00:47:00.000-04:00

I was just glancing through some bits and pieces that I've transcribed from my writing notebooks (a generous title considering these are collected odds and ends, brief snatches of inspiration, loose papers stuffed into manila folders) onto the computer, typing them and saving them in word processor files so I have them more readily at my disposal. I just thought I'd share a few that I was looking at and thinking about revisiting and developing a little bit -- maybe a story or two will evolve. There is something about each of these that I like (even as I'm aware of the flaws in these small blurbs). They are unpolished, shared here just as I jotted them down -- all of them were scribbled down in early 2004:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Piece 1:

She strolled down the green garden path among flowers blazing with color -- hollyhocks, zinnias, marigolds and petunias. It was deep summer, and the warm humid breeze carried the sound of screaming insects. Most of the garden spread underneath the full sun, but here and there around the edges the shadows of oak and pecan limbs danced a lazy gray rhythm.

She bent down and smelled a scarlet blossomed petunia. The smell of petunias carried her away to her childhood days at her grandmother’s. The fragrance of life was so thick she could taste it, feel it, embrace it. She had always loved flowers, trees and all growing things. She was sensitive and felt things very deeply, far more deeply than most folks, so she was thought of by some as odd.

She came around a bend in the path, and on the ground lay a dead kitten, a yellow tabby. Its fur was damp and there were clumps of froth on it. She bent down and almost touched the poor thing, but she leapt up with a start. "Mad dog!" she thought. The town crazy was ranting at the general store this morning about a mad dog, but everybody dismissed his testimony as another delusion.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Piece 2:

Mike was four years old, and he came strolling into the kitchen and climbed onto one of the tall chairs with the enthusiasm of a rock climber scaling a cliff. He stood on the chair so he could see over the counter to his mother, and so she could see him.

“Wallace is gone again.”

“Wallace will be back dear.”

Wallace was a battered old teddy bear that Mike had taken to when he was about two years old. It had belonged to an uncle when he was a boy, and the uncle had given it to Mike since he was childless himself. Soon afterwards the uncle drove over an embankment and was killed. He was drunk at the time, although nobody ever remembered him being much of a drinker.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Piece 3:

Nelson sat on the patio in a battered blue bathrobe, smoking a cigar [specific] and reading the newspaper [specific]. He had on a pair of black socks and brown leather slippers. He had slept lousy. All night he thought about the double-cross. That troubled him. The murder did not.

Running

2007-09-10T22:59:00.000-04:00

A stream-of-consciousness exercise. I do very little running anymore, but sometimes I miss it -- and other times I thank God I can just sit here and remember doing it:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Breathe, just breathe. Breath goes deep, it feels so cold it burns – my side hurts, the sharp stab of an oxygen deprived stitch – (come on, you can describe running better than this!) – step, step, tap, tap, one foot out, then the other, pace yourself, just be absorbed in the moment, don’t think about the distance, pay no attention to what’s far off, it only makes it worse – Zen it out, live in the moment, oh God, I’m going to puke – oh it hurts – my mouth is sticky, I can’t swallow my spit – ka whoo – I spit it out, end over end, a white bubbly sticky goo – water, I could drink a bucket, I could suck on a fire hydrant.

Running on the beach, the sand gives way, but it gives no traction, but I feel I could run for days running in the desert at night – in the smooth cool dry desert evening, I get my second wind and I could run all night. I don’t want to stop. I just want to run, to feel the breeze from my speed, to feel the air, its smooth, slow rhythm, in-and-out of my lungs – past my nose, into my windpipe, life-giving molecules crammed into my lungs so tightly I feel I may explode – to feel my heartbeat – I’m so alive; this is a moment of existential perfection (what do I know about existentialism? – learn!), a battle against nihilism, a defiant strutting sneer at existential angst – the extreme moment of knowing, the moment of extreme knowing – I run, I breathe, I hurt, I keep going, I breathe some more, I feel the universe sail past and I know that I am.

[Picture - Attic Black Figure Lekythos, ca. 550 BC, depicting two racing runners. University of Pennsylvania Museum Object ID MS739.]

The Remodeling – So Far...

2007-09-09T23:21:00.001-04:00

Well... so much for having the office finished and being moved in by this weekend. New goal – by next weekend. Progress is happening though, in spite of the ever-present effects of Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong... yep, it usually will. For instance, the other day I unplugged my computer, as I always do before I leave the house, and the entire socket pulled out of the wall.

This is an old house, and there is nothing normal about it. There's not a single square corner anywhere. So remodeling and repairs become major expeditions into the vast wilds of patience. Replacing the electrical outlet, for instance. People who know (supposedly) gave me advice about how to cut out the sheetrock and how the outlet box would be nailed to the stud in the wall. Well... I cut the sheetrock, and the outlet box is not nailed to a stud. There's not even a stud near it. There are two parallel pieces of wood running horizontally, and the outlet box was screwed in between these pieces of wood. Cris had picked up two different boxes at Lowe's for me, while I was at work, and – as Mr. Murphy's venerable principle would have it – neither fit. A return trip to Lowe's yielded a box that would work, with some tweaking, and I got the new outlet wired up and into the new box and the box snugly attached to the boards. But... (and there's always one of those) the sheetrock didn't go back on the same way it came off. For some reason, it wasn't flush with the wall – it was sunken in about a quarter of an inch, or so. Soooo... I had to build (actually, am still building) it back up with sheetrock mud. That means that wall will be about three days behind the others – and final clean up and the reuniting of my books, papers, and notes and reference materials for various writing projects will not take place for several more days yet.

This has been a learning experience, though. I have learned that I absolutely hate working with sheetrock, deplore painting, and find replacing electrical circuitry a pain in the backside! I've learned that being surrounded by books rather than drop cloths and paint buckets is more my cup of tea. But it doesn't look like it's going to be tea time for several more days. Cold scones, anyone?

[Pictures of the same corner – the first is from yesterday morning and the second from this evening. See... some progress is being made.]

Labor Day -- and I've Been Laboring

2007-09-03T23:45:00.001-04:00

It's Labor Day, and Patrick (my youngest) had a good question. Why is it called Labor Day when everybody is off from work? Chalk that question up as another of the imponderables like, "What is the meaning of life?" and "Where did we come from?" I, however, while off from my regular job, spent the day working nonetheless.

This weekend and holiday have been spent patching, sanding, and priming the walls of my office. The fumes are still potent, but I'm still trying to get in some other work. Tomorrow, hopefully, I can get some painting done. I'm ready to get my office put back together (but better) -- my bookshelves and books and papers and the various miscellanea of trying to write will hopefully be better accessible and better organized, and the office will definitely look a whole lot better.

Although the work on the house is just beginning, so finishing the office won't be the end of the work around here, hopefully when it is finished I can get my blogging routine back on track. I've already been asked what's happened to the Revelation blogs? Well -- they will be revealed... in time. I've got lists of topics I want to address that I hope will be enlightening, informative, and entertaining. They're on a piece of paper amidst other pieces of paper that are presently stacked in my bedroom, along with a couple of thousand books and stacks of notebooks and stuffed file folders.

Hope you've all had a happy and safe Labor Day.

38 Questions

2007-09-02T21:27:00.000-04:00

A friend had posted these questions on a MySpace bulletin, and I thought I'd answer them and post them here. I get varieties of these things via MySpace and e-mail all the time. Feel free to copy and paste and send me your own answers to these questions. This gives a little (maybe too much) more insight into this strange blogger whose stuff you're reading.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1. Do you know anyone in prison?

One of my best friends from childhood is serving a 20 year sentence. Not to mention I teach inmates at a state prison -- so I personally know lots of people in prison.

2. Have you ever logged onto a boyfriend/girlfriend/crush's MySpace?

Yes..my wife's -- but only to help her set up her account, because she is essentially helpless when it comes to the computer. I know her password, but I'd never log on without her consent.

3. When is the last time you ate peanut butter and jelly?

A couple of days ago. I love 'em.

4. Do you have a desk in your room?

My bedroom? Nope -- but I plan to rearrange and put one in there.

5. Have you ever gotten naked at a party?

No...but the last time I was ever drunk (about 25 years ago) at a Halloween party for cast members of a play I was in, I went to sleep in the bathtub upstairs, woke up to the sound of tinkling, sat up, heard a girl scream, and lay back down and went back to sleep. I was wearing a tux.

6. What kind of car insurance do you have?

Nationwide -- been with them for twenty something years.

7. Are you named after one of your parents or grandparents?

Named "James" (Jim) after my Grandpa Jim Bohannon -- middle name is Oscar, after my daddy -- and Bohannon after thousands of Irish ancestors.

8. Does your first significant other still live in the same town as you?

No -- if you mean my first serious love, she lives in Monticello, Georgia (as far as I know). My first wife lives in California (as far as I know -- haven't heard from her in a couple of decades or so).

9. Do you throw up gang signs?

I wouldn't recognize a gang sign if somebody nailed it to a post and stuck it in front of my face, so I sure hope not.

10. Have you ever broken a rib?

One of mine? Nope.

11. Would you rather be a girl or a guy?

I've never been a girl, but I don't have any desire to be one. Not that I have anything against girls -- I like them a LOT!

12. Who is the most spoiled person you know?

The person is a minor, and I'm not going to say.

13. Would you rather have a million dollars or true love?

True love. Every time I have money, I end up giving a lot away and spending the rest catching up on necessities. It's just not a priority.

14. Have you ever had sex in church?

Heck no!

15. Is your boyfriend/girlfriend a marine?

No... but my wife's husband is a Marine! OOH RAH!!!

16. Do you watch the Grammy's?

I don't watch TV period. As far as the Grammy's, I'm not interested in the multi-billion dollar music industry -- I listen to a lot of indy stuff.

17. Would you ever work for the border patrol?

No quiero trabajar con el Border Patrol de los Estados Unidos!

18. Which one word would describe your last relationship.

Forever. (It's still going strong!)

19. Would you rather date someone 2 years older than you or 20 years?

Somebody 20 years older than me? Maybe 20 years younger. ;^) (If I wasn't currently attached.)

20. Have you ever had an eating disorder?

Yes... there have been times when I didn't know when to quit! But those that make you skinny -- nope.

21. Do you have a porn collection?

Hmmm... let's see -- I have Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Do those count? Oh... somewhere, I have a book on sensual massage for lovers (naughty, but nice).

22. How many proms have you been to in your life?

One -- and it wasn't mine. I don't think my school even had one.

23. Have you ever been in an inter-racial relationship?

Nope. I've just never been romantically attracted that way. Don't know why.

24. Is your birthday on a holiday?

No... but by golly, it should be!

25. Are you old enough to vote?

Unfortunately, yes -- and those idiots at the courthouse use the voter registration list to call me for jury duty about once a year. I believe in doing my fair share, but c'mon -- I have people tell me they haven't been called in years! (I know -- you just asked if I was old enough -- not about all the peripheral baggage attached... sorry.)

26. Do you have any friends or family in the War right now?

Yes, I do.

28. Do you worry about global warming?

Not at all. I think it's over-politicized and over-hyped, and I don't agree with the politically-correct, Al Gore version at all. I worry about real stuff -- like how to fill my gas tank to get to work and Islamic terrorism and what I'm going to write for my next blog entry.

29. Do you like polar bears?

I love Klondike Bars, and I just ate one, and there's a picture of a polar bear on the Klondike Bar wrapper, so I guess I'd have to say... yes, I like polar bears.

30. Do think it is worse to cheat or steal?

It's worse to steal, but I really deplore both -- strongly!

31. What kind of birth control do you use?

HA HA HA HA HA!!! Oh, were you serious?

32. What slang word(s) do you call marijuana?

Stupid -- idiotic -- foolish -- and other such words.

33. Are you an atheist?

Nope. And I don't believe in atheists.

34. Did you lose your virginity to your neighbor?

Nope.

35. Did or do you think your childhood dreams will come true?

Well... I wanted to meet the Beatles (I'm listening to them right now) -- that one won't come true. I wanted to date Eve Plumb (Jan Brady) -- that one won't come true. I wanted to marry the most wonderful girl in all the world and have the most gorgeous children and grandchildren one day -- that one came true.

36. Do you wear your sweetie's clothes?

You've been peeking in the window, haven't you! How did you know? I sometimes wear a bra like an aviator's cap. I think it looks cool! I only wear dresses on special occasions, though. (I have a bizarre sense of humor -- and yes, I will slip something on to see how long it takes somebody around here to notice.)

37. What's your opinion on gold diggers?

Can't stand ulterior motives of any kind! Especially using people for selfish ends.

38. Are you a country or city girl/boy?

I'm a country boy with certain city sensibilities. I wouldn't want to live in the city, but I wouldn't like to know I couldn't ever visit there.

Drawing

2007-08-29T06:32:00.000-04:00

We went to Parris Island, South Carolina, this past Friday to watch a friend of ours graduate from Marine Corps boot camp. We didn't spend as much time on the Island as I wanted, because we met up with friends and went to eat lunch with them. After lunch we drove past the Beaufort, South Carolina, Marine Corps Air Station, where I was stationed for several months while I was training to become an avionics technician.

Being in Beaufort brought back many memories, but one set of memories in particular -- memories of drawing. It was while I was stationed in Beafort that I became fascinated with drawing cartoons. I bought dozens upon dozens of comic books, everything from Spiderman to Richie Rich to Disney comics, because I was determined to study the characters and practice drawing them. Sitting in my barracks on my lunch break one day, I drew my very first picture of spiderman, and I was hooked.

For a brief time, I decided I wanted to become of cartoonist, even though I had no formal art training at all. It was a dream I toted seriously for a while, then rather loosely in my back pocket for a longer while, and eventually gave up altogether. But I've still enjoyed phases of drawing. When I began substitute teaching in local schools in the late 90's, I started drawing again. I would draw pictures on the board -- Scooby Doo, Tweety Bird, Winnie the Pooh (those seemed to be the most popular). With elementary school classes, I would draw a picture based on a story we'd read, and all the students would gather around utterly fascinated, then they'd retreat anxious to try their own drawing.

Sometimes I still long to draw again, but so many other things intrude to occupy the time. My determination to be a cartoonist has long since waned into the obscurity of distant memory, but I still love cartoon characters, and I guess (hope) I'll never outgrow this pleasant, mild obsession.

[A sampling of my various doodles through the years -- Groo the Wanderer, Pebbles Flintstone with her teddy bear, Underdog, an unnamed alligator character of my own creation, and Snoops the cat .]

Parris Island Bound

2007-08-22T23:31:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow afternoon, our plans are to head to the Days Inn in Ridgeland, South Carolina, where we will spend the night in anticipation of a visit to Parris Island on Friday morning. For anyone who may not know, Parris Island is the home of Marine Corps boot camp (there's another in San Diego, California, but Parris Island is where I graduated on September 22, 1976).

A friend of ours, Chris Redding, will be graduating Friday morning, and we plan to be there. We are very proud of this young man -- becoming a Marine has been a dream of his for a long time, and now it's about to happen.

It was on June 28, 1976, that I rode onto Parris Island on a chartered Greyhound bus full of nervous young men not knowing what to expect. Six of us had left Atlanta earlier in the day and met up with the rest of the group from around the country at the airport in Charleston. We hit the Island about 9:30 that night, and we were promtply greeted by a nice gentleman who began shouting in a deep raspy voice that if we had tobacco or gum, we'd better swallow it, and directed us to get off the bus and get on the infamous yellow footprints. Thus began my 13 week ordeal of being broken down from a soft civilian and re-built as a lean, mean fighting machine -- a United States Marine, and I wouldn't take anything for the experience.

This will be my first trip back to Parris Island in 30 years, and I'm very excited. I've been looking at the web site, the Google Map, and other associated web sites, and the memories have left me teary-eyed more than once. Parris Island is where I was born as a Marine, and this is like a homecoming. And I'm looking forward to meeting Christopher Redding, fellow United States Marine!

OOH RAH!!! SEMPER FI!!!

Information Indigestion

2007-08-19T22:50:00.000-04:00

In David Denby’s Great Books on page 36 he writes about following stories on CNN, watching updates even when awakened in the middle of the night. He concludes “the business of being ‘informed’ could be nightmarish...” He compares it to feeling like “a ball rolling over and over, or the hands of a clock coming back to the same point.” This is a fair representation, I think, of being so saturated and bombarded with information all the time that there is little genuine reflection. We have come to mistake information for knowledge -- and worse yet, for wisdom. Undigested information is neither, and too much information can give one a severe case of indigestion. That is one problem with the Internet. It is a wonderful source of information, but it’s too easy to become infatuated with the frantic flow of information and neglect reflection.

Rain...Beautiful Rain

2007-08-18T22:20:00.000-04:00

We are sweltering away in 100 + degree heat and have been for days on end. Cris and I worked in the house doing a lot of cleaning, getting rid of lots of junk, and trying to get the house back to normal -- or as close to it as we can hope to get. Even working inside is hot. I've been covered in sweat most of the day and have taken two showers. I'm longing for cool weather -- and for rain; it's incredibly dry as well as hot. Even the kudzu that covers acres of Georgia roadside is turning brown and dying.

I was taking a look though old journals again and came across an entry that made me feel good. It's about rain.

____________________

Thursday, August 12, 2004 (around 10:20 a.m.)

There is rain today, lots of rain. The sky is an absolutely whitish-gray, and the trees across the street are muffled by a watery gray veil. I am sitting at the bedroom window facing the front yard with an open window before me. The sounds are wonderful – the loud continuous splash of water running off the house to my left, the lighter whir of rain on leaves and yard, and a backdrop of occasional distant muted bass crashes of thunder.

I left the lights off – I’m writing by the soft gray light slipping in through the window. I didn’t want the sharp white-yellow artificial incandescence to intrude. I need a little time with the rain and my memories. There is something about a solid rainy day that nudges gentle memories – memories of rainy days in other times and places.

Elizabeth is like me, she loves the rain. She is not here – she is in Howard with the Garcias. I wonder if she is enjoying the rain today.

Suddenly, I’m a little boy, standing on my knees on the settee, looking out through the rain across our little front yard, across the road, out across Mrs. Mamie Wynens property to the trees beyond. I am snug in a little gray-green world, nestled in the shadows in a secure place.

I am at Parris Island – Marine Corps boot camp. We are at the rifle range waiting to see if the rain will let up. It never does. We have on our green plastic ponchos, but we’re all pretty much soaked through. I’m snug in the rain. It makes the world almost sane again.

I lift my head and look out the window at one of the nandinas. I used to deplore these tacky bushes standing like stubborn guards in front of our house. Today, though, I look at the rain dancing with the leaves, the silvery light reflecting off the wet greenness, and I love this plant. It is suddenly beautiful.

By the Numbers

2007-08-15T22:55:00.001-04:00

It occurred to me a few weeks ago as I was talking with someone about some of my favorite movies that there was a common theme -- mathematics: A Beautiful Mind, about a brilliant mathematician dwelling in an imaginary world of spies and secret codes created by his paranoid schizophrenia; Proof, about the daughter of a renowned mathematician whose life and career succumbed to a cruel mental illness, and she appears to be the inheritor of his genius and, she fears, his craziness, as she reluctantly confesses that she is the author of one of the most elegant and phenomenal mathematical proofs in recent history; and Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon makes his stellar debut as a tough street kid working as a janitor at MIT who sneaks into the mathematics department at night to solve complicated equations that have stumped even the most brilliant students in the department.

There is something inherently and deeply fascinating to me about mathematics. This is amazing considering that in high school I barely squeaked by in my math courses. That, however, was more closely related to my attitude towards school in general, and math in particular, and my firm resistance to homework or studying. It was in college where my affinity for mathematics first shone like a light in the darkness of my math anxiety, and not only could I do math, but I could do it well; not only did I understand math, but I loved it.

With the bad taste of high school still fresh in my mouth, I dreaded the required college algebra course. When it became inevitable that I would have to take it, I called a buddy of mine who was a math major and got his assurance that he'd be standing by if I got into a jam. I never called him back. Over the course of the ensuing quarter, I consistently made A's on homework, quizzes, and exams; the lowest grade I earned was a 93.

Nobody could have been more stunned about this than I, but I listened in class, took notes, read and studied the textbook, and best of all -- I got it! I even liked it -- liked it so much, as a matter of fact, that I discussed with my professor the possibility of changing my major to math (which I never did). The final exam was an interdepartmental final, which meant the exam was created communally by the five professors teaching the course that quarter. Dr. Mayberry cautioned us that we might encounter unfamiliar material, but not to worry, since different professors had not covered all the same material, and that would be considered in assigning final grades.

Since I had, in my own reading and studying, actually covered more material than we'd covered in class, I hoped I would be prepared. The students from all five classes gathered in Russell Auditorium to take the exam. Two hours later I walked out drained but exuberant. I was confident I had done well, but I was still shocked when the exam grades were posted: I had scored a perfect 100!

In my current vocation, I teach inmates in a state prison. For most of my Adult Basic Education and GED prep students, math is the subject they most often dread -- even fear -- but we have a great record of success. It is a source of continuous reward when working with these men, many who've been failures all their lives, when that light goes on and they get it. From time to time a student will even light up my heart by saying, "This is fun!"

Mathematics has become transformed in my judgment from a once mysterious and frightening subject to an avenue of tremendous beauty and delight. There is much that I don't understand, and I still study new areas of math, but I'm grateful that I see even the mystery of that which I don't yet understand as something of wonder and beauty. I'm reminded of the verse in the Bible, "Perfect love casteth out all fear." No longer do I fear math; I love it.

From the Writing Journal -- Assymetry and Pain

2007-08-10T21:44:00.000-04:00

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Once I was a little boy playing barefoot on the clover beneath maple trees beside a sleepy small-town street, but that was so long ago and so far away. Sometimes, especially late at night, I try to reach out across the cosmos and grab that time again, to pull myself back toward it, but other times I just catch a glance back, like watching scenery sail away through a rear window.

The hog feeder lids tapped the night away in asymmetrical rhythms, and it made me regret living with a man [my father] who found joy in raising animals, and it made me feel sorry for the hogs, and I quit eating ham or bacon, because I never knew if this might be an animal I had known, or perhaps a distant offspring. So early on I decided the farm life was not for me, and I concluded Oliver Wendell Douglas was one deluded son-of-a-bitch wanting to leave a wealthy law firm for a dirt farm.

______________________

Asymmetry – the fusion of disparate shapes into an awkward montage that, nevertheless, was continuously leading the eye in all sorts of pleasing directions.

Monday, August 06, 2007

I should just pour my heart out while it is full – full of hurt and confusion, full of dismay – I am grieving, grieving because of those who withdraw their lives from me. They are not dead, but they have pulled out of my life, so I am heartbroken – I am grieving, I am in mourning, my heart hurts to badly it feels as if it might burst, it feels so heavy that it just might fall and never get up. That is how I feel. How do you describe a feeling of such utter pain in a way that someone else can feel it. That’s the gift I need as a writer, the gift to be able to take someone else by the hand and lead them into the place where I am. First of all, I suppose I need to explore the place myself, because exploration can perhaps lead to understanding and healing.

The Wayback Machine -- "An old Beatle's Romance"

2007-08-05T23:34:00.000-04:00

In the year 2000, just two years after the death of his beloved Linda, Paul McCartney found love again. Of course, we know how that relationship turned into a sour mess, and Sir Paul's name was dragged through the mud by the media, but there are many of us who believe he is a true gentleman, as well as a legend.

I grew up in the 60's feasting on each new Beatle album, and listening to their music today still transports me to a magical place. When Paul found a new love just a couple of years after Linda's death, some people were critical. My comment on March 18, 2000 (ironically my wife's birthday) was "I'm glad Paul has found somebody. I don't see a thing wrong with it either. Boy...I feel a story coming on..."

Here is the story -- replete with references to Beatles' song titles and lyrics. See if you can figure out the references. Hope you have fun with it!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He saw her standing there -- Long Tall Sally. She was just seventeen. He wanted to say something, but the words wouldn't come. Finally he eased up beside her and whispered, "Listen...Do You Want to Know a Secret...do you promise not to tell?" His heart melted. He stuttered, but got out the words, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand!" She smiled and offered him her dainty palm. It was instant love. With soft music it seemed always playing in the background they romped like school kids (well...she was a school kid) in Strawberry Fields for what seemed like forever.

Well, the days grew into weeks, the weeks into months, and their love grew. One day he looked into her eyes and said, "I can't believe we have been together for all these months. It seems like we met just Yesterday!" He got on his knee and asked her to be his bride. The wedding day was wonderful. She had a gorgeous dress made by a talented seamstress named Eleanor Rigby who lived near the church. As she walked gracefully and elegantly down the aisle her heart was Free As a Bird.

The days afterward were very kind. He became a best-selling Paperback Writer and she had a very successful career in marine biology and explored the seas around the world in her Yellow Submarine. They made lots of money which they invested conservatively in CDs. Their accountant, Lew Beethoven suggested when the CDs matured next they might consider
investing in something that would have a better yield, but they felt things were just fine the way they were, so they said, "Money's fine, but Money Can't Buy Me Love. Just let the CDs Roll Over Beethoven."

One afternoon while sitting in a tiny bistro nestled snugly among the quaint shops along Penny Lane, they looked back over their lives together. Sally had never been one to show her emotions very openly, but it was clear she was touched by the romantic moment. He gazed into her eyes and said, "Sally...I Love You!" "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" she replied. In the passion of the moment he poured out his heart and shared the dream that had been sitting at the back of his mind for Eight Days a Week. "Darling, I know it'll be a Long and Winding Road, but I want to start a rock and roll band and move to America and make records and be on the Ed Sullivan Show. What do you think about that?!" Her face sunk, she shook her head and said, "No, Paul, just Let It Be."

There were stirrings of a Revolution in his heart. It must have been stirring in hers too, because the next morning he found a letter on the table saying she was leaving...she needed some space to think. He was confused and restless. He hardly slept that evening. It was a Hard Day's Night, and his mind was working like a dog. The next day he searched all over Kidneypool until he found her listening to Sergeant Pepper's band at the Lonely Heart's Club. He pushed his way to her side and shouted, "I found your Dear John letter. By George, I want my ring-o back!"

She said softly, “Did you read it all?” He stood there a moment before reaching into his pocket. He pulled out the tattered letter and read the last line: “P.S. I Love You!” He stood there and tears welled up in his eyes. He looked up and found tears in her eyes too. The place had grown completely silent until some bloke belted out, “Hey pal, can’t you see...She Loves You!” The chorus erupted, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” He said, "Baby, without you my life would just be Helter Skelter. Can you take me back?" She grabbed him in a passionate embrace and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh!"

Revelation – Christ Nature - vs - Antichrist

2007-08-04T19:52:00.000-04:00

The book of Revelation is considered by many to be one of the main biblical texts of eschatology (the study of "last things"), or "end times" theology. In a later post I will talk about the various viewpoints, historical and contemporary, about how the last days are supposed to pan out according to Christian theology, namely views of the "millenium". First, however, I want to talk about one of the major topics of eschatology, that famous - yet confusing - character known as the antichrist, even though the concept of antichrist is not introduced in Revelation, but in other books:

Dear children, the last hour is here. You have heard that the Antichrist is coming, and already many such antichrists have appeared. From this we know that the last hour has come. (1 John 2:18, New Living Translation)

And who is a liar? Anyone who says that Jesus is not the Christ. Anyone who denies the Father and the Son is an antichrist. (1 John 2:18, New Living Translation)

He will exalt himself and defy everything that people call god and every object of worship. He will even sit in the temple of God, claiming that he himself is God. 2 Thessalonians 2:4 (New Living Translation)

This man will come to do the work of Satan with counterfeit power and signs and miracles. He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them. 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10 (New Living Translation)

________________________

Among historical and contemporary Bible scholars, theologians, and amateur eschatologians, there are various views about who, or what, the antichrist will be, whether antichrist is present, or whether the antichrist will come in the last days, before God's judgment and Christ's reign (if you're not familiar with these theological concepts, don't worry, they're not critical to an understanding of what I will talk about). Some believe antichrist referred to various Roman emperors. The number associated with the antichrist, 666, has been attributed to code meaning Nero, one of the most notorious persecutors of Christians. Nero allegedly blamed Christians for the burning of Rome, and as a result, Christians were burned alive on poles. Some reports claimed the road into rome was sometimes lighted by burning Christians. No doubt, this was an antichrist nature (which I will talk more about later) Others believed various Popes were the antichrist, and others believed antichrist to be certain governments (the Roman government being the first considered as a candidate for antichrist). Still others believe that antichrist is a general spirit that is present in every age. This is essentially my personal view.

________________________

Whether one is a Christian or not, Jesus Christ is still one of the amazing individuals of history, and his nature (the Christ nature, I will call it) was exemplified in the way he lived and the way he treated others. This Christ nature is still very present, but the antichrist nature is present as well.

Here are some distinctions that compare the Christ Nature and the Antichrist Nature, and I believe the application to some very contemporary events is clear:

___________

Christ Nature:
Acceptance of all human beings and a desire to see them redeemed, reflected in his love and compassion for everyone.

Antichrist Nature:
Only select people – a certain group, clique, or tribe, are worthy of love or acceptance.

___________

Christ Nature:
Sacrifices himself for others – even “sinners”, those who hate and abuse him.

Antichrist Nature:

Sacrifice themselves to win some heavenly reward – martyrdom becomes self-serving instead of sacrificial.

___________

Christ Nature:

Sacrifices himself to save others.

Antichrist Nature:

Sacrifice themselves to kill and hurt others.

___________

Christ Nature:
Brings peace.

Antichrist Nature:
Brings terror.

Whatever the theological differences about who or what antichrist may be, and whether we are Christians or members of other faiths or members of no faith group at all, it is clear to me that we all have a human duty to exemplify the spirit of Christ, and to overcome the spirit of antichrist.

Blessings,
~ Jim

NOTE: If you're interested in a more detailed historical analysis of antichrist, the Wikipedia article is a pretty good place to start.

[Pictures: Final showdown of Christ and Antichrist by Albrecht Durer, and Jesus Blessing the Children by Benjamin Robert Haydon.]

The Dickens, You Say!

2007-08-04T01:13:00.000-04:00

Several years ago, the Book of the Month Club offered a 23 volume set of The Oxford Illustrated Dickens, which claims to contain all of the published works of Charles Dickens. The set was around $350.00, which wasn’t a bad price for 23 nicely produced hardcover books with dust jackets, but I didn’t have the money at the time, so I just dreamed about owning them. Eventually the price went down to $150.00, which was still a lot of money for me to spend at one time on books. Then it happened – a brochure came featuring the Dickens set at $100.00 with free shipping, and I couldn’t resist any longer. It’s a lovely set of books, each one slightly larger in dimension than a paperback, and at the price, I paid less than I would for a comparable set of paperbacks.

I have been intending for the longest time to start at one end of the bookshelf and read all the way across to the last volume, but I haven’t mustered up that kind of discipline yet – or maybe I have. I’ve picked up various volumes and begun reading, relishing Dickens’ delightful mastery of character development and meticulous detail, but now I’ve picked up David Copperfield and started reading it again, and this time I’m determined to go through all 23 volumes. These books are a gold mine chocked full of ore for anybody interested in writing.

For anyone interested in literature and what it can contribute toward an inwardly better, richer, and wiser life, and especially for anyone interested in creating literature of one’s own, there are three writers worthy of regular re-readings, each reading revealing something fresh and wonderful – William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, and Charles Dickens. Shakespeare is a master of pure story whose plots have influenced countless stories over the past few centuries, Proust is the quintessential guide into the magical wonder of ordinary life, and Dickens excels in capturing humanity and helping us to love it. The advantage of Dickens lies in his accessibility. Shakespeare and Proust take a bit more work than the average reader cares to invest (although the investment carries rich rewards). Dickens, on the other hand, will take you by the hand and lead you like a caring friend into his remarkable world. His loveable characters become intimate friends, and his villains leave you fuming at injustice and unkindness, but you will not walk away from Dickens without being deeply moved – perhaps even changed.

Revelation – yes, that Revelation!

2007-07-31T00:21:00.000-04:00

Every so often, we used to get oversized postcards emblazoned with fantastical monsters, horrifying creatures that looked like something you’d see in an old Japanese monster movie, but these postcards weren’t about movies – they were announcements for a local seminar on the book of Revelation. Even though there wasn’t a prominent indication of where these cards came from, they were from the Seventh Day Adventist church. That knowledge alone was enough to let me know what I could expect if I attended one of these seminars, but I never went to one, because I don’t happen to believe Revelation is a scary book at all.

My wife is one of the leaders of the youth group at our church, Hopewell United Methodist, in Milledgeville, and our junior high group has decided to start a Wednesday night Bible study. She came home last Wednesday and told me about it and asked, “Guess which book they want to start with?” Without giving me 66 guesses to run through the list of the canon, she answered her own question, “Revelation!” (Thank goodness she’s aware of one of my big pet peeves and did not call it “Revelations” – the title has no “s” at the end.) Not such a bad choice, in my opinion. After all, it is one of the most mysterious books in the Bible, and probably one of the most alluring, even for non-religious people.

We can all recognize some of the terms and images that find their genesis in Revelation – the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, the number 666, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to name a few. Historical and contemporary interpretations are loaded with contradictions and extreme speculation, so what is the real message of Revelation? Even the name seems to be deceptive – in the Greek, the title is “apokalypsis”, which means literally “uncovering”, as to uncover something that has until now been covered so it is in plain sight. Many people would argue that nothing in this book is in plain sight.

I’ve been drafted to help my wife out, and while she'll do the presenting and leading of discussions, I'm planning to do my own updated study and put together some notes in as systematic a manner as I can. It has been several years since I led a Bible study on the book of Revelation at the last church I served as pastor, and one of the greatest compliments I received when it was over was by an elderly gentleman who came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “You know, Preacher, I’ve always been scared of the book of Revelation, but I’m not scared anymore.” I’m going to share this fresh journey I’ll be taking through Revelation here at the blog, and I invite you to come along. If you agree, disagree, or plain don’t understand what I’m talking about, feel free to comment or send me an e-mail. At any rate, I hope when it’s done, you won’t be scared anymore.

Blessings,
~ Jim

Magic... The Critical Element

2007-07-30T01:02:00.000-04:00

Listening to an audio presentation from The Gnostic Society entitled “Harry Potter and the Roots of True Magic” -- Dr. Stephan Hoeller, in his strong accent (German?) is talking about the Harry Potter books with reference to other mythological themes -- the Authurian legends, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings tales, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, just to name a few. He talks about Carl Jung and about the fairy story. Now -- for some reflections on this topic:

The fairy story, mythology, the tales of the hero -- our contemporary disillusionment with things related to magic -- the tendency of contemporary literature towards realism (meaning, what seems to me, a dark and depressing type of realism...what I’ve sometimes believed seems to be an aversion to hope and happy endings). The question -- How do we (how do I) recover the proper perspective of magic -- of the fairy story, of myth, of religious literature, of wonder and fantasy? This, it seems to me, is the most important task in which I could engage whatever humble talents I may have as a writer and thinker.

I can see things in my head. I can feel things deeply. There are images and imaginations that sometimes bring tears to my eyes and set my neck tingling with goose bumps. Sometimes the magic spills over into my reality. That is what I want somehow to bring to life and deliver to the world. The reference to Harry Potter continually comes to mind, because those books have meant so much to me in finding my way back into a world of magic. The things I want -- need -- to write about explore a world of magic even more deeply astounding and real than the world of Harry Potter. I must bravely and confidently step foot into that land of magic and wonder, and danger, and tell about it.

When I was a boy, I used to dream of living in a house nestled between the Munsters and the Addams family. There is a delightful creepiness about these characters, and I wanted to be at the center of it. This too is part of the magic I want to capture. The magic of houses and landscapes and weird, yet loveable, characters. Often, the most truly detestable characters in the episodes of these TV shows are the “normal” characters who just don’t get it -- who are frightened and judgmental, and who jump to the wrong conclusions. Another character I just thought of who fits this pattern is Casper the Friendly Ghost. Poor Casper just wants to be a friend and to have friends. He is a genuinely loving spirit who cares about people and animals, yet they are horrified by him. They mistake his character and his intentions. I’ve often wondered about the nature of the boy to whom this disembodied spirit belongs. It must have been an exemplary child. This type of character must have a significant place in my fantasy world.

Some important themes -- there is good and evil, and often there is an unclear distinction about which is which. Evil comes in disguise, but no disguise is ever completely adequate. Good also comes veiled, but not in deliberate disguise. Instead Good comes shrouded in the misunderstanding and fears of those who don’t recognize it. There is also the fact that there is no truly perfectly noble character. The good character comes flawed, but it is the Good that always triumphs, sometimes in spite of imperfection, sometimes because of it.
Love in all its healing and redemptive power, and in the sadness of loss, must also find a home here in my world. Friendship and courage, rising above fears and weaknesses -- these too are part. And redemption -- oh, how wonderful and critical this is.

Space Music

2007-07-26T01:29:00.000-04:00

In the late 1980s, I discovered, quite serendipitously, a fascinating program on public radio called Music from the Hearts of Space which featured New Age music. Up till then, I was completely unfamiliar with the genre, and when I first heard it on the radio, my first thought was, "I've got to find out what this is!" It wasn't long before I'd discovered several artists and become a serious fan of the genre, claiming it, whenever asked, as my favorite type of music.

The hosts of Music from the Hearts of Space, Stephen Hill and Anna Turner, called the music that was the show's foundation "space music". I loved that! Since I was a small child, I've been intoxicated by a passion for anything related to space -- planets, stars, manned and unmanned space exporation, the prospect of extraterrestrial life... in short, the entire realm of the cosmos. In later years this would lead to other obsessions -- quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, relativity, superstring theory, the search for a "theory of everything", you name it, and if it hasn't captured my imagination yet, it will.

Space music gives me a spiritual lift into the cosmos, where I stroll like a star-struck tourist on a Hollywood back lot, but the "celebrities" that most fascinate me are real stars -- and while I'm by no means oblivious to the loveliness of the female form, the heavenly bodies that turn my head the quickest are really heavenly bodies. Among my favorite artists are John Serrie (And the Stars Go with You, Lumia Nights, Flightpath), Constance Demby (Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate), and Michael Stearns (Encounter, Singing Stones).

A couple of days ago I was listening to a podcast of, I believe, a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) program which featured a scientist with NASA who specializes in recording audio of space sounds. Space is not a dead, empty place, but is full of gases and dust, movement and activity, and solar wind moving at a million miles an hour can generate a heck of a whoosh going around celestial bodies. Some fascinating space sounds have come from the Cassini mission to Saturn, and you can listen to wave files at the website -- it's eerie how much this sounds like the effects from 50's sci-fi movies like Forbidden Planet. (There's another cool page of planet sounds from Jupiter, Uranus, and Earth.) I half expected to look around and see Robby the Robot in my kitchen. Which would have been very cool indeed.

Live long and prosper, and may the force be with you!

Some Controversial Issues on the Eve of Harry Potter's Final Tale

2007-07-19T22:53:00.000-04:00

[NOTE: Please excuse my long absence. I've been busy having grandchildren and other such exhausting feats of derring-do... but I'm back now.]

Creation Science - vs- Evolution

To begin with, I'm a practicing Christian and a former Christian minister, who still has a pastor's heart for the gospel and for people. That said, I think Creation Science should be booted out of public schools and should in no school be taught side-by-side with evolution. Folks -- Christians, atheists, agnostics, lapsed believers, monkeys, and single-cell organisms -- I tell you all, evolution is an indisputable fact. The scientific evidence is clear, and only self-delusion could lead one to any other conclusion. How's that for certainty. Does that mean there is no God, no Creator? No! It just means true faith isn't dependent on fairy tales. Evolution is a mechanism -- not a purpose, and I still believe in a purposive Creator. In my mind, there's no conflict with faith and science. Neither, properly exegeted, contradicts the other.

Harry Potter -vs- Christianity

"Harry Potter is evil because the Bible says God abhors witchcraft and sorcery." Oh, how this sugary flowing sentence makes me gag -- forgive me, those of you who may agree.

Folks, the "witchcraft and sorcery" that the Bible says God eschews were some serious things -- not the whimsical, fantastical versions of the Harry Potter series and other wonderful stories (i.e. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, etc., etc. etc.). That brand of sorcery defiled humanity, committed human sacrifice to gain power, tortured and maimed pracitioners and victims alike. It wasn't wands and pointy hats. It was truly evil -- much more akin to violent Islamic jihad than to storybook tales.

When the first Harry Potter movie came out in theaters, my son came home with a flyer that had been placed on his windshield while he was at the mall. He didn't go the the movie, but the theater was at the mall. A local church group had put together the flyer to warn the vulnerable of the "evils of Harry Potter". They had quote after quote, each of which they used to describe how Harry Potter "encouraged evil" and lured children into "the spell of witchcraft". The problem was, every quote was taken out of context. The evil quotes were clearly from the evil people who were clearly evil in the book, but this church group was on such a "mission for God" that it didn't matter to them that they were complete liars. It's like taking a quote from the devil in the Bible, or taking an evil act of a bad person, and saying, "Look! The Bible clearly encourages evil!" The church folks may have been sincere, but they came across looking like fools, and they were actually, in my opinion, an embarrassment to the Church.

Harry Potter is a story about good and evil, where evil is clearly evil. It's a story about love and friendship, courage and morality, and even that value that some would like to keep at arm's length these days -- honor. Harry Potter is in essence a manifestation of the Christian story.

UFOs -- Real or Fake.

Real!

After all, UFOs are "Unidentified Flying Objects", and there's no doubt there are many flying objects that aren't readily identifiable. But space ships from distant galaxies? Come on! No way. We are not being watched by space creatures. There are no flying saucers, flying cigars, or metalic disks that hover in the night competing with Christmas trees.

Alien Abductions -- genuine or phony?

Except for the occasional Mexican or Honduran or Columbian who enter our country illegally and eventually kidnap someone, there are no alien abductions. The phenomenon is clearly induced in a person's mind when he or she awakens during the phase of sleep during which the brain essentially paralyzes the body.

And finally...

Elvis -- alive or dead?

Elvis will ALWAYS live in my heart! Thank yu' verah much!

~ Jim

"Ladies and Gentlemen -- Jim has left blog!"

Book Clouds

2007-06-16T01:54:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I wrote about two web sites I discovered for cataloging your books and sharing your "shelves" with the public. One of the interesting features of the sites is the "cloud" -- Shelfari has a tag cloud, and Library Thing has an author cloud. They generate lists based on your entries, and the more frequently something occurs, the bigger its name in the "cloud". It's a fascinating visual display of information about your personal library. I'm working on another post about reading, but I thought I'd share what currently appears in largest letters (meaning the most frequently appearing in my library) from my tag and author clouds.

The main tags in order, but not exhaustive are:

non-fiction, history, literature, fiction, classics, short stories, religion, Christianity, biography, American history, politics, theology, spiritual writing... and more. Now, this is a very incomplete list, because I've only added tags to a very small portion of the books that I've classified, but it's still fascinating to me as I look at which genres seem most conspicuous. There will be some shifting as I tag more, but this looks like a fairly accurate hierarchy of my interests.

The prominence of authors in my Library Thing catalog does take into consideration all the books I've added so far. There's still room for shifting as I add more, but so far it looks like a fairly accurate, albeit incomplete, representation of my favorite authors -- I must add that Charles Dickens is actually number one, but I haven't catalogued any Dickens books yet -- I own the Oxford Complete Dickens, a set of 23 hardcover volumes of everything Dickens published -- so be aware, Dickens' name will eventually be the largest in my author cloud. So far, however, the leaders are:

C. S. Lewis, Elizabeth Goudge, William Shakespeare, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Clifton Fadiman, Louis L'Amour, Marcel Proust, J. K. Rowling, Max Lucado, Alfred Hitchcock, J. R. R. Tolkein, David G. Hartwell (the editor of several short story collections I own), Robert Heinlein, Mary Norton, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O'Connor, Annie Dillard... and more.

I also have to add a few more disclaimers -- my favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, but since she wrote only the one book, her name will never appear large in my author cloud. Similarly, Flannery O'Connor, one of my biggest influences, will not appear as large as she actually is in importance. I own all her published work, but her early death precluded a very large body of writing. The clouds aren't perfect representations, but I just thought they were interesting enough to share, and hopefully you will find some author or subject here that is a favorite of yours, or perhaps a new author you might want to try. You can see my shelves at both websites by following the links.

Hats and Manners

2007-06-11T01:17:00.000-04:00

Hats… there was a time, maybe 60, 70 years ago when men wore hats. Not baseball caps turned backwards, or slightly askew, but, at the very least, reasonably classy fedoras placed conservatively straight upon the head, or, in the case of sports, at a jaunty angle signaling a devil may care self-assurance. A hat wasn't merely an accessory; a man would no more go out in public without a hat in those days than he would without pants these days.

In many old pictures I’ve seen of busy city streets and sports events, in addition to the standard coats and ties, men were wearing hats. This was maybe in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Somewhere, or some time, along the way, there was a shift in values and dress. The extinction of the hat in society has been attributed to the failure of John F. Kennedy to wear a hat to his inauguration (in spite of the fact that the hatters' union had given him a brand new one the day before). It is said that a hatless president set the standard, but I suspect the fashion was ready to change anyway. This might have precluded – perhaps predicted – a shift in all values.

Men lose hats, and they grow hair – the Beatniks then the hippies become the new cultural symbol. The tidy suits and ties of the ballroom eventually give way to the bare feet and open shirts (or no shirts) of that quintessential 60s cultural event, Woodstock.

When I was in the Marine Corps, we were forbidden to wear the uniform outdoors without the appropriate cover (basically our name for a hat). Certainly the mere act of wearing a hat didn't make you able to fire your weapon with more accuracy or fight with any extra portion of strength, but it was an important symbol, a basic practice of etiquette -- or what we in the south might call manners. It showed respect for the uniform, for the Corps, and for ourselves. That is the essence of what the donning of a hat meant to a gentleman 60 or 70 years ago.

Nowadays it's in fashion for young men to wear a baseball cap turned around backwards -- not to mention their pants hanging halfway down their...uh, well, you know what I mean. That is symbolic, too, I believe, of a society that has become very self-centered, where manners don't matter much anymore. It's all about "me" and you better get used to it, like it or not. I have to admit, this annoys me.

I have a hat that I wear on occasion. It's a replica of the hat Indiana Jones wore in all his movies, but less sophisticated folks confuse it for a cowboy hat. It draws comments whenever I wear it, because wearing a hat is no longer part of belonging to polite society. It is, instead, a curiosity. When I’m accused of wearing a cowboy hat, I say, “It’s not for chasing cows! This is my action-adventure hat. It’s for wild romps through jungles, and for hanging from the landing gear of a plane at 10,000 feet.” It says – I am different. Perhaps I should try something really unusual – like wearing my hat… without pants. But I won't, because I still believe that wearing both appropriately is a matter of good manners. And to me, that's still important.

Lists of Wonder!

2007-06-09T21:50:00.000-04:00

I love making lists – lists of words to learn (in English and Spanish), lists of books to read, lists of names of people from my past, list of just about everything. Lists are important, because they give a sort of order, and they help us to remember, and sometimes they even help us examine our random thoughts and analyze our unconscious resources. Here’s a list that I wrote in my journal a couple of years ago, and just reading over the list elicits so many feelings and thoughts. See how many, if any, you know and love:

________________

dinosaurs, flying saucers, time travel, little green men, faeries, elves, munchkins, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Neverland, dragons, wizards, unicorns, flying pirate ships – the fairy tales of the brothers Graham, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang – folktales from people and cultures around the world – King Arthur,

Sherlock Holmes, Narnia, middle Earth, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Bermuda triangle, Atlantis, Shangri-La – the mythologies of Greece, Rome, the Norse people – the religious visions of the Orient – the dreams of the philosophers – Gilgamesh, the Vedas, The Song of Hiawatha, angels and demons, ghosts and goblins, anthropomorphism, the wonders of art and architecture – all wonder!

Famous Monsters of Filmland, Ray Bradbury, Vincent Price, Ray Harryhausen, Forrest J. Ackerman,

comic books, Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, Popeye the Sailor Man, science fiction, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stephen King, Peter Straub, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, haunted houses, Bullwinkle and Rocky, Brigadoon, Somewhere in Time, Ben-Hur, Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits,

Lost in Space (one of my all-time favorites), Get Smart, My Favorite Martian, Gustav Holtz’s The Planets, superheroes, the Sunday funny papers, Pogo, Deputy Dawg, UFO, Starman, Back to the Future, Edgar Allan Poe, space music and New Age music – more to come, I’m sure…

Two Poems..."The Pond" and "Catharsis"

2007-06-09T00:26:00.000-04:00

I don't consider myself a poet, but I love poetic language, so sometimes I play. Arranging and rearranging words and images and rhythms is, if not beneficial, at least a harmless pastime.

The Pond

In the thick summer air
a dragonfly dances,
his brilliant blue body
and wings lit
with the low morning sun,
while fat frogs sing
bass notes in three-quarter time,
the waltz of the pond.

Catharsis

We sat on the floor
in small groups
as sunlight poured
on our heads
from the skylight,
sharing our secret pain
with strangers,
carefully creating
new, acceptable selves.

A "Big Silk Elephant"

2007-06-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

One of the wonderful things about free-writing is that it's so revealing, just raw thought and emotion. This is a snippet from a much longer exercise. I'm presenting it here because it contains a singular thought -- a story maybe, or perhaps just a dream...actually just a sketch.

Free writing

He used to call the twilight of dusk a "big silk elephant", because it was gray and had big ears that could hear your thoughts, and it came up behind you and trampled over you, not hard and violent but soft, and it felt smooth on your skin like silk. He loved elephants and had a big poster of one from the circus taped to the door of his little bedroom, a room so tiny that it would probably just barely hold a real elephant. He said elephants were the most beautiful animals and you could look into their eyes and see right into their souls, could feel their stories and how sad they were because they had been taken away from the place they loved most and where they felt comfortable -- their home -- but now they were prisoners, one foot chained to a big cruel ugly stick driven into the ground by big dirty men with greasy hair and nicotine stained fingers. The twilight of dusk was like that too, sad-eyed and big and gray. One particular dusk he died and was carried out of his sadness on a big silk elephant.

Online Discovery...For Book Lovers

2007-06-05T22:27:00.000-04:00

In another blog post I talk about my passion for books. If you are as fond of books as I am, then I think you may be interested in an online discovery I made recently.

How would you like to catalog your books? That's easy, you say, all you need to do is get some index cards, or make a spread sheet on the computer, or even do what I've done in the past and type them into a word processor file. No problem -- just time and patience. But what about fun? Is any of that really fun? Maybe you can keep the excitement going for the first one hundred and fifty books or so, but then that fantastic head of steam you'd built up condenses into moist drudgery.

How about a way to catalog your books, look for others who have the same books as you, and develop connections with other avid readers and book lovers? Sound like your cup of tea? Well, pull out the silver serving set and the fine china, because I'm going to tell you about a couple of web sites you won't want to miss.

The first site is called Library Thing. It's been around for a while, but I've just decided to create an account, which is very easy. All you have to do is select a user name and password to set up a free account. With a free account, you get to enjoy all the features of the site, including cataloging up to 200 of your books. If you want to catalog more, it costs $10.00 a year, or a one-time $25.00 payment for a lifetime membership. You can enter your books' ISBN numbers, titles, Library of Congress catalog numbers, and the search engine scans several databases, including Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and over 60 international university libraries. If your book is in the database, you select it and add it to your library. For most books, an image is available, and if one is not, you can upload your own book images. It's a lot of fun to look at your book images or the libraries of other members. For all the information on how to join and use Library Thing, just go to LibraryThing.com.

The other site is Shelfari. It's a newer site, and I've found lots of my books (particularly older ones) are not in the database. It searches Amazon.com also, but it doesn't have an option to enter your books or book images, which is a helpful feature of Library Thing. One feature that makes it very appealing is that it's free! The site owners have assured me they are looking at ways to add new features to the site where users can contribute info and book images. Members have their own profile page, and they can enter as much (or as little) information as they want. Members also have their own "shelves" where their books are displayed. Shelfari has a very user friendly social network. You can leave notes for other users and add friends, much like MySpace or Facebook. You can take a look at Shelfari.com.

By the way, if you're interested in looking at my shelves at either place, you can take a look at my LibraryThing libary at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/macheartist. My Shelfari shelf is at http://www.shelfari.com/macheartist/shelf. If you decide to join, look me up and add me as a friend. See you at the library!

Back again...

2007-06-01T01:01:00.000-04:00

That amazing philosopher packaged in the humble guise of baseball catcher, and later manager, Yogi Berra, was famous for his malapropisms. One of my favorites is, "It's deja vu all over again." Whenever I hear the phrase (with which I've titled this post) "back again", I'm given pause, like I am whenever I encounter one of Berra's Bloopers, because it seems to me that if you have returned somewhere, you are "back", and you are also there "again", so wouldn't it be sufficient to say, simply, "Back?" or "Again?" Now that I've clarified my awareness of the dubious doubling up of similar meanings to embrace a single event, I am now free to tell you, that's not what I meant.

No, indeed, I really mean, "back again!" Last week, my lower back was a little sore. I have a recurring problem which made a profound onset after a five-vehicle pile-up on July 12, 1993, in which we were unpleasantly engaged as vehicle number 2 -- a date which will live in infamy; at least it will in our household. It's nothing unusual for me to have back pain, and sometimes of debilitating severity. By last Friday I could barely get myself out of bed, and getting up was probably the most painful part of the process -- walking the second most painful, but not very far behind -- and doing anything else at all a very close third.

Friday I didn't go to work. Sunday I didn't go to church. Monday was, thankfully, a holiday. By Tuesday I felt better and went to work. As the day went on, I even seemed to feel better every hour. Wednesday I felt pretty good, until... and "untils" are important when it involves pain... about 30 minutes after my afternoon students left. I was sitting in my chair at my desk innocently reading the introduction in a paperback of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (my favorite Shakespearean play, by the way), and when I got up to go fetch my lunch from the refrigerator of a neighboring office, I began to hurt again. By the time my night class was over, I was miserable. Wednesday night -- pain! Even rolling over in the bed was excruciating. Thursday morning -- more pain! And that on the tail end of a very restless night. I went to work today, but I was in misery the whole time.

After I got home from work this evening, I went to bed and read for a while. I decided to get up and eat a little something so I could take my medications (for physical stuff, not mental, lest you should get a wrong impression...even though I could probably do with something for mental stuff at this point), and getting up was its most painful yet. I've been listening to some of my podcasts, checking e-mail and some blogs, and otherwise sitting here hurting like hades. I guess I'll make a Friday trip to the doctor (not that that usually helps) who will bless me by separating me from a portion of my filthy lucre (that's cash, for those of you of a non-Biblically literate persuasion). We'll see afterwards which hurts worse.

Weird and Weirder...Part 2

2007-05-27T22:08:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago, in “Weird and Weirder…Part 1,” I wrote about some strange events that happened during the time I lived in a house with four other guys a few blocks from the college I was attending. I concluded by hinting that the strange phenomena have continued, so I want to share how life continues to be weird and weirder.

______________________

"What's going on in here?" That’s the question that was on my lips late one evening as I opened the door and entered my oldest son’s bedroom. There was no answer, because he was lying under his covers sound asleep. Let me back up a little and tell you what happened.

The house in which we live now was the first place Cris and I lived after we were married. For a time, she and her family lived here when she was a little girl. This place was actually two separate houses at one time, but the other house, in which my wife’s grandmother lived until she passed away a few years ago, had been moved and joined to this one to form one house. The house originally belonged to her great-uncle, and it's very old judging from the timbers – and some of the electrical wiring.

We moved out of the house for several years after I went into the United Methodist ministry. After several years enduring the strain of trying to balance full-time graduate school, a growing family, and parishioners who felt that all my time should be spent focusing on them – plus ongoing pain and recuperation (including neck surgery) from an automobile accident – I left the ministry, broken and exhausted, and we returned to this house. There was a lot of stuff already in the house, so we had to make do, stashing stuff here and there for a while.

We had to place two dressers in a corner on adjoining walls in my oldest son’s room in such a way that the front corners almost met. This left an unused square space that I decided to utilize. I had several boxes of books and magazines that would fit perfectly, but the only way I could get them in the corner was to hold them above it and drop them in. I stacked boxes to the tops of the dressers and a couple beyond. The boxes were heavy, and I realized the only way to get them out would be to move one of the dressers, but I didn’t anticipate needing any of these books before making more convenient space somewhere else.

Late one evening I was sitting doing a little reading and writing in the former dining room that we had converted into my study. One wall of this room adjoined my son’s room. All of a sudden there came a sound of banging and crashing from his room. It sounded like somebody was tearing the room apart, so I quickly went to his door and pushed it open. I was shocked to see every one of those boxes of books scattered across the floor, with some having burst open scattering their contents. I said, “What's going on in here? How in the world did this happen?” But I realized my son, lying in bed under his covers, was sound asleep.

I picked up some of the strewn books and placed them back into boxes and shifted the boxes out of the way as best I could. The next day I asked my son what was going on in his room and why were my boxes of books scattered. He was obviously as perplexed as I was, and when I asked him about it recently, he shook his head and assured me he had no idea what happened that night.

Looking back, there were several other events that happened here through the years that were creepy and generally unexplainable. When my oldest son was a toddler, he came out of our room where he’d been playing screaming. We held him and tried to get him to show us what was wrong, and we examined him to make sure he wasn’t hurt. He couldn’t tell us what had happened, and we examined the room and found nothing. He wouldn’t go back in the room without us for some time.

After we moved back into the house, because of limited room, we originally set up the youngest two boys’ bunk beds against a wall in our room. One night Gabriel went in the room and came out screaming a couple of minutes later. He was terrified and told us his dinosaur (a stuffed Toy Story character we’d gotten at Burger King), had moved across his bed and flew off. Sure enough, when I went in the dinosaur was lying on the floor, and earlier it had been on his bed propped against his pillow.

Another evening Gabriel woke us up screaming. I jumped up and ran to him and held him. He told me he had seen two dark figures with red glowing eyes standing between his bed and ours. He said the figures were watching him. I tried to convince him he was probably dreaming. Gabriel still insists emphatically that he was wide awake and that he did see the shadow figures. It sounds like a phenomenon I believe parapsychologists call “shadow men”.

The boys have complained many times about hearing doors opening and footsteps. I shrugged it off reminding them that you hear noises in old houses. Then one day I was sitting at the computer typing when I heard the back door of the other part of the house open and footsteps sounded through the house, into the kitchen to the hallway and through the living room. Then I heard the front screen door. I jumped up and ran to see who had walked through the house, and – you guessed it – there wasn’t a soul there…at least not a living soul.

Neither of the youngest boys will go into the other side of the house (the part that used to be Granny’s house) alone, because they insist it’s haunted. Gabriel claims one of his sisters dolls eyes opened and the doll looked at him. I’ve always written it off to an overactive imagination, until the other afternoon my niece, who comes down to play sometimes, found out I was writing about the weird things in the house. She told me that one evening one of the dolls was looking at her. I have to admit, when I go over there at night, the porcelain dolls give me the creeps. Another afternoon, she and the boys had gone into the other side of the house when, according to the three of them, the temperature all of a sudden dropped, and one of my wife’s music boxes (that hadn’t been wound in years) began to play.

Here lately there have been several times when I’ve seen someone out the corner of my eye, or so it seemed, but when I look, no one is there. Our cats have exhibited bizarre behavior on several occasions recently (bizarre even for cats). For instance, one of our black cats started staring at one of my bookcases in my study, then he bowed up and his hair stood on end. A few days later another one of our black cats reacted the same way and then started trying to get behind the book case. Of course, I suppose that could be explained. A mouse, perhaps? Do mice make the hair stand up on a cat’s back? Do mice make a cat bow its back? We carefully searched behind and around the book cases, but we found nothing strange.

The room on the other side of the wall from my study (the same room that was my oldest son’s when the boxes were strewn) now belongs to my next to youngest son, Gabriel, and he says he frequently hears my chair sliding and the keys of my computer being typed upon when I’m in bed. Patrick, my youngest, says he’s heard it too, and one evening he heard the familiar sound and thought I was in here and came in to ask me something – but I wasn’t here. Who knows – maybe my ghost has followed me here, and maybe it has something to say. If my ghost happens to start a blog, I'm very interested in reading it.

Space...What a Wonder!

2007-05-26T23:56:00.000-04:00

Space has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Looking up into the sky and imagining what worlds are spinning around each of those stars sometimes literally makes me dizzy. For me, watching the earth ease its shadow across the moon during a lunar eclipse seems to be a moment of intimacy with the cosmos. Several years ago I got my first chance to see Jupiter and three of its largest moons through a telescope, and I literally had tears in my eyes. One scene indelibly burned into my memory is the brilliant full moon on Christmas Eve 1968 as, for the first time, human beings -- Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders -- orbited the moon in Apollo 8. It staggered my imagination to stare up from my backyard and realize that men were actually up there. I had heard them a few moments before on the TV as one of the crew read the opening words of Genesis, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."

In recent years, the celestial event that most touched my emotions and imagination was seeing Comet Halle-Bopp as it made its way through our neighborhood in the late 90s. I found an undated account of this in a copy of a letter I wrote (it would have to be from 1997, but exactly when, I don't know), and I'd like to share it with you:

__________________________

I have been easing deeper and deeper into a serious love affair with the night sky. The other morning Cris, my wife, got in from work about 5:00 a.m. I had just dozed off (I can never sleep when she's closing the store and has late nights) when she came in and told me I had to come see something outside. I got up, groggy and cold, because I dozed without any cover, stumbled out the door with my feet shod only with socks, and they quickly began absorbing cold water from the ground, adding to my chill. She said, "Is that the comet?" There it was! There it was, a fuzzy star looking thing with a clearly visible tail. It was eerie standing there half-asleep, shivering with cold, looking out across millions of miles of space at a ghostly visitor I had never seen before. It was an awesome experience. The next night I began watching for it to see exactly when it would show up over the horizon. During the evening I watched the Big Dipper travel across the sky. I finally dropped off to sleep, but Cris woke me up when she came in. I went out and just stared -- and wondered. We got the older two children up to come see it. After everyone else had gone inside, I just stood there watching my new friend sailing across the cosmos when all of a sudden a spectacular meteor, sparks flying, streaked its way across the sky just above me. What can I say? Wow! What a night!

[Image Credits: (1) Earthrise from Apollo 8 by NASA, (2) Halle-Bopp Comet by Ian Griffin Astronaut Memorial Planetarium & Observatory, Cocoa, Florida, October 5, 1997 http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/images9710.html]

Wayback Machine...A Sleep Interrupted on a Cold Winter Night

2007-05-24T00:27:00.000-04:00

An interrupted sleep in the wee hours of a cold winter evening left me awake with my thoughts. One of the wonderful gifts of journaling is finding refuge at any moment to reflect on life - to analyze and record life in general, and my life in particular. The crisp early morning hours in an insomniac daze seem to nourish serious reflection unlike any other time of the day. Let's take The Wayback Machine to December 2004:

Thursday, December 2, 2004 (4:39 a.m.)

I woke up over an hour ago to the sound of a dog barking repeatedly. I wrestled myself through layers of sleep until I was aware of it. It sounded as if it were off in the distance, but not to far. At first I figured it was Carol’s black Lab, but then it sounded like Toby. I realized he must have gotten loose and was trapped somewhere.

I stumbled around and got blue jeans and a sweat shirt on, slipped on my tennis shoes without socks, and finally found two flashlights in the den where Patrick had them (it’s generally impossible to find one in an emergency). I headed out the door, but Toby had stopped barking by the time I got outside. I whistled and called, and he finally yipped a little. I traced where the sound had come from, and after a few false starts into the woods made my way into the thicket until I found him.

He had pulled the chain and post out of the ground, and it was wrapped around a sapling and undergrowth. It is miserably cold out – at least for stumbling through the night after being startled out of sleep – and my hands were stinging as I fumbled to unwrap the chain and retrieve the post. Toby and I made it out of the woods, and I got him established by his doghouse.

I came inside to look for something to put in his house to help him stay a little warmer. Cris roused long enough to go through the stack on the cedar chest and pulled out an old threadbare pink and white sheet with a hole ripped into it – I believe we’ve had that sheet since we got married. I took it to the doghouse and got Toby to go in. He’ll probably have it pulled out and ripped up by morning. Why is it that animals and children seem to rebel against anything you do to try and take care of them?

After I came back inside and got my hands washed in lots of hot water, I climbed into bed, but I couldn’t relax to go back to sleep. I lay there a while in the dark with Cris snuggled near – which is the only reason I didn’t go ahead and get back up. It’s hard for me just to lay in bed when I’m awake in the wee hours...my mind gets troubled with all sorts of thoughts.

One of the things that was going through my mind was what will it be like when I get too old to go stumbling through the woods for my animal in distress? Who will I turn to? Who will I depend on? Being old is a frightfully helpless state of existence, even worse, in my imagination, than the helplessness of an infant. At least the infant grows and matures and develops into a self-sufficient person. Aging leads into deeper stages of helplessness. Is that really all there is to look forward to, if you don’t die early enough? It’s a bleak thought, but one, I suppose, that I must keep studying. My hair is gray (albeit prematurely) and some wrinkles are already starting to settle here and there on my face. It will only get worse as time goes on. I’m on the other side. I’m in decline. How does one overcome the looming tragedy of that?

Memories – just how far back can they go?

2007-05-22T00:28:00.000-04:00

Some people apparently don’t have many memories of their early childhood years. At least that’s what I gather whenever I reveal just how far back my memories go. For some reason, I have very clear memories of my earliest years. One memory that is particularly clear may be the earliest. When I shared the details with my mama several years before she died, I found out just how early. As I relayed to her details of that memory, her eyes grew wide and she said, “Jim…do you remember being born!” Believe it or not, I was only five months old. Here’s how I know.

When I was born in March of 1957, my brother was a senior in high school. He turned 18 that April, graduated that June, and went into the Air Force immediately after he graduated. That meant he completed boot camp in August 1957. The place I described to my mama’s astonishment belonged my brother’s girlfriend’s family. We had gone there during the week he was home from boot camp. March to August – five months.

We were at a cabin, and there were woods nearby. There was also a stream. The cabin was made of dark, flat wood interspersed with wide white lines. Inside was a golden wood floor. There was a squarish hallway, and someone was holding me around my waist and under my arms facing away from her (the person was female, most likely my brother’s girlfriend). There was a guitar hanging on the wall in the hallway, and whoever was holding me took my left hand and strummed my fingers lightly across the strings. Next I remember being held under my arms by someone who was letting my bare feet dangle in the cool running water of the stream. Images of the water on my feet and the pebbles in the streambed, even of the diaper I was wearing, are still as vivid as ever.

There are many other things I remember from before I was two years old. How do I know? Because many of the memories are from the year we spent in Savannah. I remember standing in our empty house in Hillsboro, all the familiar furnishings already packed and probably en route. I was very sad, even the emotions are still clear. I also remember how happy I was when we moved back into the same house. After that, I always had a fear of moving again.

I remember my second Christmas, being taken out of my baby bed in the corner of Mama’s and Daddy’s room, and carried to the room where the Christmas tree stood. There were presents and toys, but I can’t remember any in particular. It would be another three months before I’d be two years old. A couple of months before that, I remember Halloween night and being terrified of the trick-or-treaters. As I stood with Mama in the doorway, a group of kids in costumes terrified me, and one of them, a little girl (a few years older than me) that often came over to play with me, pulled up her mask and said, “It’s just me, Jim.” That didn’t help – I remember clearly thinking that whatever these monsters were, one of them must have eaten her.

As the years progressed and I grew from a toddler to a boy, a boy to a teenager, a teenager to a young man, and a young man to the present, thousands of images, crisp and vivid, have accumulated in my mind. Sometimes late at night, when the world around me is quiet and I am still, I can play these memories like old movies. I have often wished there was some way to project them on a screen so others could see. It’s awfully lonely sometimes, especially since most of the memories are of people no longer alive and places that have drastically changed. The quantum singularity of time and space seem to have been suspended somehow in my subconscious, and on some quiet evenings it seems I might be snatched back to some other time, and it’s frightening. As much as I cherish the memories, it’s the pleasure, or trial, of the present moment that suits me best. And on a still evening in the future, it’s likely that this moment too will play like a video in my mind.

[Note: The photograph is my mama and me on my first Christmas.]

A One-Legged Prisoner and Robert Frost

2007-05-21T00:49:00.000-04:00

As a teacher of inmates at a state prison, I strive to create an environment in my work area that is different from the rest of the institution. I have a genuine concern for these men, and in my vocation I not only teach academics, but I try to be a positive role model, and I try to treat each inmate with dignity and respect. That, in my opinion, is part of their education as well. How can you learn how to treat others with dignity and respect if you rarely see it modeled in the way others treat you? I bring to the job compassion and a sense of humor, and I try to share that with everyone - staff and inmates. Sometimes, though, it's simply sad to work at a place where human beings are like cattle in cages. Here is an excerpt from my journal about a prison moment which I hope will give you a bit of illumination about the strange world called Prison:

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Oftentimes I watch from the glass door of my building at the prison as inmates walk by, and I am sad for them. Some look invalid or mentally challenged (we would have said retarded, when I was a boy). This afternoon I was in the library, and I noticed a paperback of Robert Frost’s poems and The Best American Poetry of 2003 stacked on a desk. An inmate had just checked them out and was waiting to take them. He was a young-looking guy with a sad looking face, made sadder by scars tracing here and there a story of some past trauma.

I pointed to the Frost book and said, “Good choice.” He told me he likes to write the poems out and send them to his girlfriend. His voice was a bit shaky and rang of mental slowness. He reached down, for some reason, and popped off a prosthesis that was most of his left leg, and he began unscrewing something on it -- some sort of adjustment, I suppose.

As he put his artificial leg back on, I asked, “You like poetry?” Again, he explained, like I should have understood the first time, "I like to write it out and send it to my girlfriend." I wondered about what kind of girl would wait for transcribed Robert Frost poems from a crippled prisoner with a badly scarred face. I wondered what he had done to be in prison. I felt deep sadness at the pain that this young man has obviously been through, and I wondered about the pain through which he had put others.

Wonder!

2007-05-19T22:31:00.000-04:00

A number of years ago, some friends of mine (along with a few folks that I didn’t know) started up a small-circulation magazine called Wonder. I was hooked from the first copy I got, but as things in publishing usually go, the magazine was not a smashing success, and the labor of love proved too much labor for the available love, and Wonder went the way of most start-up periodicals. It was sad to me, because the premise of the magazine’s origin is one that should be spread far and wide – the sense of wonder that is all around us. That magazine focused on literature and movies, but I personally extend wonder to every field of inquiry – nature, science, mathematics, work, etc.

At one time or another in my life I’ve had formal training in psychology, theology, and electricity and electronics. But on my own, I’ve studied a far wider range of topics. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an insatiable hunger for learning something new all the time, and an intense fascination with the magic that is constantly present in the world. In my years of junior high and high school, I was a mediocre student, just doing enough to get by, because the standard curriculum and the means of transferring it just did not appeal to me. It wasn’t that I was a lazy student – I was constantly studying. Dictionaries and encyclopedias formed a world that was a second home to me. There were new worlds to which I could always travel, and travel I did...oftentimes without even having to leave the living room couch.

But the wonder was not only to be found in books, I also wandered the woods near my house, taking in with my eyes and my soul every tree, every shadow, every breeze, like a starving man taking in food. Then when I was in the eighth grade, I chose for a 4-H project to grow tomato plants from seed, and this led to a deep love of growing things. For years afterward, I studied everything I could get my hands on about plants and flowers. I collected cuttings from several of my elderly aunts and great-aunts who has splendid begonias, sultanas, and a lovely red and purple variegated plant they called goose gizzard. I ordered seed of all sorts and got on the W. Altee Burpee and Parks mailing lists. I subscribed to Flower and Garden and Horticulture magazines. The whole world of living things seemed to call out to me.

I didn't take on hobbies; I took on passions. Through the years I've become fascinated by airplanes, paper maché sculpting, crocheting, old time radio shows, stamp collecting, the theater, classical music... and the list goes on. Some of the passions have fallen by the wayside, and others have remained to this day. But the sense of wonder has been continuous.

Being bored was rarely a problem for me when I was a child, and it still isn’t. Everything offers fascination of one sort or another, whether intellectual or spiritual – and after all, aren’t those two pillars of the same building. I have lain upon the ground and watched ants traveling along dragging bits of leaves or cookie crumbs, I’ve marveled over a couple of square feet of soil as tiny flower seeds germinated and began searching for sunlight, I’ve ravished the night sky with my eyes absorbing from a billion stars the light that began its journey billions of years ago.

Books, music, magazines, movies, the theater, the science lab, the inventor’s workshop, the artist’s studio… and on and on it goes, this marvelous path of wonder that waits at the tips of our toes for us to step onto it. Like the Yellow Brick Road led to the magical Emerald City of Oz, so lies the road of wonder before each of us. All we have to do is take a step, then another, then another, then…

Why Maché Artist?

2007-04-29T00:12:00.000-04:00

A few years ago when I first got on the Internet, I noticed all these fascinating noms de guerre people had created for themselves… names like “Lips2Sweet4U” and “2L8_4myLuv” for the girls, which, once I thought about it, really made me feel pre-rejected by people I didn’t even know and whose lips I had no interest in anyway; or names like “superSTUD4babes” and “Guy2Hot2Handle” for guys with some serious superiority complexes, which, for some neurotic reason, made me feel surprisingly inferior. For a long time I humbly went by… well, Jim Bohannon. Nothing like using your real name to throw people off! There came a time, however – a fateful time – when I decided I should set up yet a second Yahoo! account, and since my real name was already taken and I was already having to use it with the number “1” attached to it, instead of going for Jim_Bohannon2 (and since “studmuffin879” was also already taken and I had little interest in trying to remember “studmuffin880”) I decided I’d call myself something that represented me to the core. So Maché_Artist it was (Maché is pronounced “mah-shay…some people have trouble figuring it out).

Why would any self-respecting, net-surfing e-mail hopper name himself after a French adjective that literally means “chewed up”? Simple. I love paper maché. When I was boy I discovered a recipe in The Family Book of Games, which I had gotten in an introductory package from Doubleday Book Club (which I had inadvertently forgotten to tell my mama I’d sent off for…but that’s another story). Well, I didn’t care much about soaking strips of paper in a galvanized washtub, boiling them down, and beating them to a pulp. I decided what I would do is tear newspaper (and we always had a stack) into tiny pieces and stick them together with glue made from flour and water. I used this method to make toys for myself. The first thing I made was a very detailed Lunar Excursion Model (LEM) which stood about 5 inches tall and actually came apart so I could both land on the moon and take off from it. The poor LEM – after dozens of landings on the dining room table (aka “the moon” – the white tablecloth was perfect), I hopped off the couch one afternoon forgetting about the lander, and it met with a cataclysmic force from my foot, rendering all future moon explorations unfeasible.

In later years I began to wonder if I could make art with this method, so I began gluing these pieces of paper together to make more detailed works, including an elephant complete with tusks and a long-neck, cartoonish turtle. As the years went by, I made various starts and stops with this art form until I decided to pulverize paper in a blender and mix it with flour and water to make a moldable mash. This worked very well, and my skill increased, until I had a bout with clinical depression and gave up art for a while. Recently I have returned to my passion for sculpting in paper mâché with the enthusiasm of a teenager who’s just discovered girls (maybe that’s a bad analogy, but you get the picture). I made a half-hearted attempt to do some things with clay, but it left me uninspired – and it also cracks very easily.

The problem with working in paper mâché, at least the method of building from scratch that I use, is it takes lots of time. Each meager stage of production has to dry completely before I go on, so keeping the motivation for major projects such as I have in progress now requires lots of patience – and it’s perfect for somebody with a short attention span, because I can work on a piece, then set it aside for days and work on something else. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so it takes endurance, coupled with downright mule-headedness, to keep going. I've also had to change the recipe – I no longer use flour, because those same beetles that love breakfast cereal also love flour...even when it's mixed with pulverized paper. Now I use Elmer's glue, which makes an incredibly strong product when dry, and an incredibly sticky mess while in progress, but one must suffer for one's art.

Something that I really like about my art medium of preference is that I take trash (literally) and turn it into a work of art. There is something profound in that for me – it’s a metaphor, much like what I try to do in my other job as a teacher of inmates at a state prison. Where you see trash to be dropped off at the dump, I see dragons lifting their wings to fly, Civil War soldiers haggard from war, frogs playing musical instruments on lily pads, a country baseball pitcher in mid-windup, and…well, lots of possibilities.

So…I figured that would be the perfect “other name” for myself. How appropriate, because life has a way of leaving us mâché-ed (chewed up) and spit out, and I’m no exception. It’s just that I want to take the chewed-up experience and turn it into something beautiful – and if not exactly beautiful, at least a whole lot of fun!

[I've included a couple of pictures here – an older work (a dragon perched on a rock) and a piece in progress, Dragonlock Holmes, who will sport, when completed, a trenchcoat and the typical Sherlockian cap, and will hold a magnifying glass in one hand and a Calabash pipe in the other.]

Good Friday

2007-04-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader,

I am a Christian, and today is one of the most significant days of the Church calendar – it’s Good Friday, a confusing name for the day when Christ was crucified. Who was this Jesus? Did he really make claims of divinity? Did he even really exist? People have chosen a variety of answers to those questions, but one thing is certain – Jesus was, for whatever reason, the most significant person in history. So significant, in fact, that recorded time is divided into two distinct parts by his birth. Christianity and Jesus get a lot of bad rap, and to be honest, some church folks don’t help his case any. But I’d like to invite you, just for a moment, to put aside all your negative stereotypes and consider a few possibilities.

The first thing that I find wondrous about the Judeo-Christian heritage is the book that, for the most part, we share – the Bible. Unlike the claims made about the holy books of some faiths of a specifically divine origin, the Bible is a book of the people. The language of the original scriptures was not some idealized “holy” language – it was pure, everyday language. The Bible was born out of the struggles and experiences of people trying to find their place in history as it related to God’s presence with them. The Bible is not a sanitized account of a people, rather it paints them with all their failures and blemishes. Failures and blemishes – now that’s something I can relate to!

Another attractive point of Christianity to me is the intimate involvement of God in the lives of ordinary people. There is a doctrine in Christianity that many folks find odd (therefore they often dismiss it as superstition, a myth, a fairy tale) and that is the doctrine of the incarnation – carne being from the Greek word meaning flesh. In other words, in Jesus, God became flesh. I can see why people have trouble with this, and why they would scoff and laugh at it, but hear me out. What better thing could happen if there is a God than for God to become intimately involved in the lives of human beings by becoming one? Have you ever heard the wise old saying, never judge a person till you’ve walked a mile in that person’s shoes? Well God decided to go even further – to become one of us. Not just to walk a mile in our shoes, but to spend a life from infancy to adulthood experiencing pain and rejection, joy and delight, hunger and fullness, all the things we experience. This is what incarnation is about.

Another doctrine of Christianity is the dual nature of Christ. An early church debate that raged for a while was about this issue. Some pointed out the human nature of Christ (Jesus had to be human, or he could not have been tempted or have suffered); others pointed out the divine nature (only God could forgive sins and work miracles). How can he be both? The question can be posed like this – “How could somebody be human and God at the same time?” Is he half man, half god? No, the church finally concluded – he is 100 % God and 100 % human. That just doesn't make sense, at least not to our natural sense of logic. How can we understand it?

Well now, have you studied quantum physics, or the nature of light? Here, I believe, we have a kind of analogy in the natural world. Quantum physics is the branch of science that focuses on the sub-atomic world, and we’ve found that to be a very strange world indeed. For instance, did you know that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time? They can also travel in two directions at the same time. Odd? You better believe it’s odd. It contradicts every shred of evidence available to our sensory experience. But there it is. Scientists know it’s true, but it simply doesn't make sense, and nobody can understand how or why it can be true.

Scientists had a long battle with the concept of light. Is light a wave, or is it a particle? It had characteristics of both. This isn’t a far-fetched hypothesis – it’s an experimentally verified fact. Light is a wave, and it’s also a particle. It has characteristics of two different natural phenomena.

Does this prove that Jesus could have two natures? No, it doesn’t. But it does prove that there are things in this world that contradict our natural experiences, even if we can’t explain them. That should give pause to an outright dismissal.

This isn’t a polemic to try and get you to believe a certain thing. It’s just an explanation, and hopefully a characterization of what some people have believed for centuries, and some of us still believe today. We don’t understand it, but we embrace the notion that God loves us so much that God came and dwelt in our midst, experiencing life from our perspective. If you read about the life of Jesus, you can’t help but notice that he was not an ordinary person, and he never tried to please the powers that be – in the political or the religious world. He pointed out that our notions of power and success are off the mark, that what really matters is selfless love expressed through compassion.

Good Friday is good because it reminds me that no matter what I go through, no matter how bad and hopeless I feel, that God walks with me. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen to me – and I mean to me, not around me. My first two children died, my first born son in my arms, and my daughter just over a year later as I listened from the emergency room door as the heart monitor went silent. I’ve been through a divorce. My family and I have gone from a fairly prosperous life several years ago to one of constant struggle and trying desparately to hold poverty at bay. But one day something with ultimate finality will happen to me. I will die. Good Friday reminds me that death even happened to God. I am not alone, and I will never be alone, and even the worst thing that could ever happen to me is only a stepping-stone to something far greater.

I wish you a blessed Good Friday and a joyous Easter, whatever your faith – or even if you don’t have one. You can still rejoice, and I hope you will.

Peace, blessings, and love,
~ Jim

Weird and Weirder… (Part 1)

2007-03-31T22:29:00.000-04:00

From ghosties and ghoulies,
And long-leggety beasties,
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord deliver us.

- Old Scottish Prayer

Do you believe in ghosts and other strange things that go bump, or otherwise disrupt the night – or perhaps even the day, if they’re malicious or mischievous enough? I have to admit, I’m a pretty hardcore skeptic. I don’t believe in UFOs or ghosts or aliens who abduct innocent earthlings from their beds to poke and prod them. If there are aliens, and I’m sure there’s something else living out there somewhere, and there is probably a lot of intelligent life in the cosmos, but they surely have more pressing things to do than pick on us. However, that being said, I do have a history of strange experiences that lasts till this day, and I really can’t explain much of it away. Let me take you back to when it began – or at least when it became very noticeable.

In the summer of 1981, a year after my discharge from the Marine Corps, I enrolled at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. After four years in the Marines and a year spent working hard at a variety of jobs, there wasn’t a lot that I was afraid of. That was a good thing – a very good thing.

After commuting my first couple of quarters, I moved with three friends into an old house a couple of blocks from campus. Originally there were the four of us who'd agreed to split the rental cost of the house – Mike, Andy, T.K. and me – but soon Ron, a friend of Andy's, an English major transferring from the University of Georgia, moved in with us.

The house was a two-story white wood-frame, and the inside walls were plaster. The front door opened to a small entrance way which led to T.K.’s room on the left and the living room on the right. In the center, there was a large open room which we called “Central Receiving” because that’s where we put all our stuff while we were getting settled in. Central Receiving opened into the kitchen and into a very small square hallway leading into my room and Andy’s room, and a tiny cramped set of jury-rigged stairs leading to one big room with a bathroom and shower upstairs. My room was the smallest and had two doors, one leading to the kitchen the other to the small hallway.

The first time I recall noticing anything strange was one morning shortly after Ron moved in. His stuff, including a large box of books from literature courses, was sitting in Central Receiving, and I was in the kitchen cooking some sausage for my breakfast. There was a double sink that dripped constantly, and the faucet was over a glass of water in the right sink. The drip-drip-drip was annoying, so I pushed it over the center so it would drip silently on the metal . Since watching sausage fry is pretty boring, I walked to Central Receiving and began lifting Ron’s books out of the box one-by-one looking at titles. I went back to the stove to turn the sausage, and started to return to Central Receiving and noticed drip-drip-drip. The faucet was over the glass of water again. I pushed it back to center thinking I must have meant to move it and just thought I really had. I looked at a few more book titles before returning to the stove for my sausage. When I went to the cabinet for a plate I heard drip-drip-drip. This time I knew I had moved the faucet. It was tight and didn’t move freely; it would have taken a stiff push to place it back over the right sink to drip annoyingly in the glass of water. Odd, I thought… no, not odd – creepy!

Not long afterwards I came home from class and opened the door to my room. It was late afternoon and the room was dark – I had the window covered with a blanket, since we bachelors didn’t know much about putting up curtains. As I opened the door something came shooting out of the room and hit me square in the center of the chest. I saw the blur sailing toward me, but I didn’t have time to react. I picked the object up off the floor – a piece of hard candy, like a generic red Jolly Rancher. I flipped on the light and searched the tiny room. Nothing out of the ordinary – no hidden catapult or rigged strings. I mentioned it to my roommates, but they denied knowing anything about the candy and said they had never even seen a piece of candy like that.

A few weeks later something similar happened. I opened my door and, of all things, a potato came flying out of the room and hit me so hard that it left a red mark on my chest. This time my girlfriend was with me. Fortunately she was out of the way, but she saw it happen. We searched the room. Just like the previous time, there was nothing, but the potato had sailed out of the room like it had been hurled by a baseball pitcher.

Several other strange things happened over the next few months before I got married and moved out of the house. One evening while I was lying in bed reading, the light in the little hallway came on for a few seconds. I thought maybe Mike or Ron had returned – both of them were out of town for the weekend. I got up and ran up the cramped stairs; luckily I didn’t trip and break my neck. I checked everybody’s rooms. There was nobody there except me and… whatever.

Meanwhile, Andy had his baby grand piano moved down from Covington, Georgia, and set it up in Central Receiving. One night as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep a key struck – and sustained. I jumped up and ran out to see who was getting ready to play the piano at that hour. You guessed it. Nobody was there.

Another evening, T.K. and I were the only two at home. He was in his room in a separate corner of the house, and I was in my little room. There came a loud sound like the crashing of a box of glasses. The sound came from Central Receiving. I ran into the room to see what had happened. T.K. came in a few seconds later. "Did you hear that , Jimbo?" he asked. I told him I had, and we both searched the room and the kitchen and the living room, but there was nothing disturbed anywhere. Everybody had begun to talk about my ghost, and T.K. just looked at me and said, "The ghost! " We laughed it off nervously and went back to our rooms.

Another phenomenon that I was experiencing at this time was that various outdoor lights would go out as I walked or drove by. I mentioned this to some of my friends, and some of them even experienced it with me. One evening I was walking with a girlfriend (not the one who witnessed the flying potato) across the campus. There were two lights that stood on either side of the steps to Atkinson Hall, the building where business administration classes were held. They were mounted on brick columns and covered with large spherical globes. As we walked by, the first light went out. The girl looked at me and said, “That was weird!” I said, “I’m used to it.” When I made the return trip across campus alone a few minutes later, as I walked by that same light, it came back on. I stopped for a second, took a deep breath, then continued walking.

I talked about these things with a good friend of mine who had an interest in strange phenomenon. His eyes got bigger as I relayed story after story. “It’s a poltergeist!” he exclaimed. “The house isn’t haunted; you are!” I dismissed the whole thing. “There’s got to be a logical, non-supernatural explanation for all of this,” I reminded myself. My two youngest sons are amazed that all of these things could have happened to me – and that we continue to experience strange phenomenon on a regular basis – and I can still be so skeptical. I still don’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal. I’m sure there are things that go on all the time that we simply don’t have the empirical foundation to explain, but I hold my ground on my disbelief. Nevertheless…I still get the creeps walking around this house in the dark. Why? That’s for part 2 of this story, which I’ll tell you soon.

The Ocean

2007-03-23T22:46:00.000-04:00

This is a short stream of consciousness piece from 2004 that still moves me:

Grains of sand, gold and sharp, tiny festering pinpricks of granulated discomfort, bubbles in the seaweed, riding the surface, rising with the waves – it is scary for me to visit the ocean, to see all that water riding the curve of the earth – how does it stay in there? It looks like it will ride in and swallow me up. But after a little while, when I meet the ocean at the edge of the sand, the breeze whispers past and comforts me, and the ocean itself gently laps at my feet, teasing and playful. Fear transforms, and like darkness melting into the soft light of dawn, fear becomes wonder. It almost takes my breath away, and I feel like I have come home.

Books, Reading and the Spirit

2007-03-18T00:24:00.000-04:00

Marcel Proust wrote, “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” (Quoted in The Seven Stairs, by Stuart Brent, p. 127)

The experience of reading is a spiritual exercise. This is true, I believe, of all reading, not just that which is explicitly religious or spiritual. The book is the talisman of that sacred act. Nothing else, in my experience, can compare to the magic and wonder of a book. To feed this wonder in my life, I have collected literally thousands of them, from old paperback westerns with pages yellowed by age to elegant hardcover reference books with pristine pages of acid-free paper.

This joyful addiction began in earnest when I was a teenager, even though I had amassed quite a stash of Little Golden Books much earlier. When I was a boy, one of my favorite playmates was my cousin Betsy Turner. One afternoon we were visiting her grandparents, Mr. Homer and Mrs. Anna Jordan, in Monticello. Betsy and I were playing in her grandparent’s room, and beside their bed was a table, and beneath that table in neat stacks were more books than I had ever seen in one place in my life. They all belonged to Mr. Homer, who was an avid reader of westerns and adventure novels. Several years later, Mr. Homer passed away, and one evening while I was getting ready to go to town to hang out at the Dairy Queen with most of the other bored teenagers in the county, Mrs. Anna called and asked me to stop by her house when I came to town, because she had something she wanted to give me. When I got there, Mrs. Anna had several boxes full of Mr. Homer’s books. “I know how much you admired them, so they’re yours.” Christmas morning had never been this exciting. The back of my ‘66 Buick Riviera was full of books!

I went to the Dairy Queen and spent a little while just hanging out, but the books kept luring me back to my car, where I’d sit and pick up a handful and thumb through them. That was one night on the town that I couldn’t wait to get home.

My daddy could never understand this affinity for books. He had purchased a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1970 edition, which I adored (and which I still have, by the way), and to his way of thinking, that was all the books anybody could or should ever want. My daddy never cared if I drank beer or liquor, it couldn’t have bothered him in the least, but I had to hide my book addiction from him.

While I was in the Marine Corps, the collection continued to build. When I was going to basic electricity & electronics and avionics schools at NAS (Naval Air Station) Memphis/Millington, Tennessee, I had a roommate who had the top of his wall locker literally packed full of fantasy and science fiction paperbacks, including just about every Edgar Rice Burroughs novel ever written. He graduated from his school and got orders to another duty station, and he decided he didn’t want to lug all those books with him, so he asked, “You want ‘em?” Well… yeah! When I went home on leave that Christmas, I filled one sea bag with those books and could barely get it clamped shut. They were waiting for me at home when I got out of the Marine Corps, and it was a grand reunion.

In the years since, one of my favorite pastimes has been hanging out at bookstores and used book sales. Several years ago, my brother, an avid gun enthusiast, invited me to go with him to a gun and knife show in Atlanta. He bought two .22 rifles, and I bought… yep, four books. He said I was the only person he knew who could go to a gun show and come away with books. One of those books happened to be a flight manual for the P-47D Thunderbolt (airplanes are another passion), one of my favorite WWII aircraft, so it wasn’t really a completely nerdy thing to do.

These days I keep myself surrounded by books, and whenever I visit a home where there are no books, I feel completely out of place. It makes me more nervous than if I’d just walked in on somebody naked. Usually if I’m going to anybody’s house for any length of time, I bring a book (or, more likely, books) anyway, so I’m not usually uncomfortable for long. Well, let me get back to my latest spiritual endeavor, A.G. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life: It’s Spirit, Conditions, Methods, one of the two dozen or so books I’m reading at the moment. And I wish you…happy reading.

Dreams Stirred by a Visit to My Empty Boyhood Home

2007-03-13T00:18:00.000-04:00

There is no way I can translate the visceral hold my childhood home had, and still has, on me. The place is no longer mine -- my brother and I finally realized we couldn't hold onto it forever, and neither of us had the money or the time to keep the place up. Before we let it go, I made a couple of trips to visit on the premise that I was going to clean the place up, but I was actually passing precious time with an old friend. I said my good-byes through tears so thick I couldn't see anything more than a blur -- like a dream fading away.

I've found that the exercise of "free-writing" or "stream-of-consciousness" is not only good writing practice, but it's often therapeutic. In this type of writing you basically let go, it goes where it will; puntuation and polish are secondary, but even that seems to add to the magic of it. Here are some images that streamed from deep within me after one of those last trips home:

Willow branches dance and leap in the wind, sunshine fire flashes like lightning in the shadows...layers of soft dirt are lifted up on the swirling breeze and take wing on the liquid waves of soft warm air...the chimera of swirling dust plays tricks on my eyes, and I wonder what it’s all about, what it means... I search through the meadow looking deep into the grass, trying to find something that I lost when I was a little boy, a beloved toy that came from a penny gum machine, a cheap trinket that is more priceless than gold to a naïve little boy, barefoot in dirty green shorts, a motley face, traces of dirt smeared against the chocolate milk that trickled out of the corners of his favorite cup...it’s a yellow cup with a top on it, like a Tupperware cup...maybe it was a Tupperware cup, I don’t know...there are so many things that I remember, and so many things that I can’t seem to place, I can’t put all the pieces together...I was afraid of elves and fairies, afraid that little people dwelled in my house... now my house is empty, and I wish that the little people did dwell there, that they would protect it, keep it safe -- on Saturday nights there was country music at the big Hillsboro dance, and people came from all over: Monticello and Jackson and Juliette...there was live music by Harry Lynn and the Stardusters – oh, how I would love to taste the sounds of that sweet homemade stardust once again...it seems that it has been forever ago, and I suppose it might as well have been, because when something is over and past, it’s gone...as far as I know forever, and forever is a terribly long time to long for something that doesn’t even exist anymore...there is no longer a barelegged little boy with cowlicks in his brown hair roaming the fields and woods and dirt sidewalks of Hillsboro, Georgia -- before the ringer washing machine came to live on our back porch, there were heavy black-iron wash pots of boiling water for washing clothes... the fires that sent water to boiling have long since grown cold, but the memory of the tender smell of burning wood in the distance, like fragrant incense, is closing in on me taking me back...the sun glints in my eye, through my eyelashes I can see it, experience it, but nobody else can, and I want so badly for someone else to feel this with me... but they have their own experiences and I can’t know them...I can project from my own experiences and try to imagine what it may be like for them -- maybe there is a way to feel what another feels...true, deep empathy...is it possible? There is so much I don’t know, so much I cannot fathom...maybe there is magic...maybe there are ghosts and little people living in my little house, like I believed when I was a little boy... but the little house is no longer mine... only the dreams...only the dreams.

The Wayback Machine… Compassion and love of neighbor

2007-03-10T23:43:00.000-05:00

This is a passage adapted from a theological journal I kept for a systematic theology class I took at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally dated 9/16/92, this particular event still resonates deeply within me, because of the problems and disappointments I’ve experienced with the church since that time, and because of the hope that I realize abides in the church that properly lives out its professed faith in the Compassionate Christ.

September 16, 1992

Tonight my friends and I were stopped behind a row of cars at a red light on Moreland Avenue when my buddy, who was driving, said, “There’s someone laying in the road up there.” A myriad of thoughts flooded my mind. Perhaps it was a drunk passed out. Or maybe it was someone who had been hit by a car and was lying there dying. My wife and I had watched as a man was struck by a car while crossing the street a couple of years before, and I’ve never shaken the horror of the sound, of watching the broken body fly like a limp rag doll through the air for what seemed like an eternity, and of the pool of coagulating blood gathering around his head as he lay on the pavement in a heap. My thoughts were interrupted when my buddy said, “Everyone’s just driving around him.” I immediately jumped out of the car and ran ahead to discover a black man, probably about my age, who had fallen off his bicycle and had apparently broken his leg. Nobody else had even bothered to stop and check on him.

Here was a man lying in the road at a terribly busy intersection, and people were just driving around him as if he were merely a nuisance, thrown down on the pavement to interrupt the smooth progression of their evening. The man who had been beaten by robbers in the story of “The Good Samaritan” came instantly to mind. I wondered how many of the people passing were Christians. It was a Wednesday night; how many were on their way home from Bible studies or prayer meetings. Perhaps none of them, but that’s very unlikely. After I got to him, a young lady came running over saying she was a nurse. Someone went to call 911. A young man, dressed well and wearing a tie (was he coming home from church?) came running up saying he too was a nurse.

As I stood with the man directing traffic so no one would hit him and waiting for help to arrive, I saw the curious passers by straining for a good look, trying to see what strange event might be unfolding on the road in their paths to wherever. I imagined the stares of the curious at the homeless who line our city streets, at the mangled homes of hurricane victims in southern Florida, at the emaciated bodies of starving Somalis lined across TV screens. How often do we strain for a better look from the comfort of our protected spaces? And the words of Jesus, speaking about the beaten man, the religious leaders, and the socially unacceptable Samaritan, rang clearly in my head – “Which one of these was this man’s neighbor?”

Time, and Time Again

2007-03-06T00:31:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite spots in the world was the front porch of my Aunt Bet’s house. When I was a teenager, I spent many a long happy summer evening sitting in one of the white cane-bottomed rocking chairs with my feet propped on the banister just a few feet from one of the most magnificent magnolia trees on the planet. It was heaven, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. There was something about those treasured summer nights that was magical. I didn’t look out across the future to a time (which is now) when I’d look back and long for those times. It was pure existential pleasure, and the thought of those times ending never seriously entered my mind. Of course I’ve always had a stark frightening realization of the fleeting temporal nature of people, places, and situations.

There is something about the passing of time, about being unable to embrace it and have it stop for even the briefest wisp of a moment, that forbids my senses even a shadow of understanding. The opening line of a long-running soap opera always began, “Like the sands through the hour-glass, so are the days of our lives.” But even the sand and its movement is something concrete, something we can witness and take in with mortal senses, but the time that the sands of the hour-glass measures still eludes our comprehension, defies our straining glimpse into its mysteries.

One thing the discipline of journaling does it to bring full force into my consciousness the ceaseless flowing of time. It is wonderful to be able to look back over the events, people, situations, and even the dreams of my life, but at the same time it is somewhat unnerving to ponder that today’s entry and the events and thoughts recorded in it are immediately swept into history. That history grows more distant in a smooth, even motion, but for some reason it is startling to stand at certain points along the way and look back and realize just how distant points in my history have become. It’s much like watching a child grow up. You see that child each day, and she grows all the time, but every so often there is a startling epiphany of just how much this child has grown. It’s almost as if you suddenly saw her grow before your eyes. Without the objective evidence of a date’s notation, it would often be difficult to remember if certain things happened two years ago or five.

It’s amazing how often reflection about time itself comes up in my journal entries. It’s such a compelling phenomenon, I suppose it’s inevitable, especially considering how focused on the specific date and hour each entry keeps me. I’ve often tried to reconcile my aging with memories of my youth. I remember once when my mother, starting into her eighties, looked at me with a sense of panic and said, “I’m old! How did this happen?” She was having one of those epiphanies of existential terror that we all go through from time to time, and no doubt these epiphanies become more dramatic to the soul as we get older.

Here’s a reflection on this very topic from a past journal entry. It was written on a loose sheet rather than in my regular journal, and the only notation of time was a year – and a very fateful year, because not long after I wrote it, my mother died:

From an undated journal entry in 2001:

The child...I watch my little girl (15 now) walking about the kitchen, and I look at her with a heart that could almost burst with love, and I think...what happened to the little girl who was four? Then I think ahead, ten years, twenty, and where will this little girl be...the child? But then I think, the child is there...the 4 year old, the infant, the 12 year old – all there. How about me?...I'm still that little boy sitting on the couch wearing green shorts and picking up gumballs with my bare toes. And Mama...still John White's little girl...and Grandpa, still a little boy growing up in the 19th century...in all of us the child is there. No one will enter the kingdom of heaven, Christ said, unless he or she becomes like a child.

The Wayback Machine... Night Shadow

2007-03-01T22:57:00.000-05:00

Just a brief clip from my journal, dated 12-21-05:

I awoke sometime during the night when there were no shadows, because the night was all shadow. Wrapped up in shadow I lay there till I nearly burst from its exquisite softness. My hand reached out and touched the muffled blackness, pushed through it and came back to me to lie limply on my pillow beside my head. My eyes ached looking into it, so perfectly deep and infinite in its caress. For a moment I thought perhaps I had died.

What the world needs now is… imagination!

2007-02-28T00:20:00.000-05:00

Quite a few decades ago Jackie DeShannon made famous a song penned by Hal David, with music by Burt Bacharach – “What the World Needs Now”.

Go ahead, sing it with me – “What the world needs now, is love sweet love, it's the only thing, that there's just too little of…” Who could disagree with that? I surely couldn’t. But – and forgive me for doing this – I want to change the lyrics for a moment. Ready? “What the world needs now, is imagination…” Sacrilege you say? Well, let me explain.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who teaches at Georgia College and State University invited me to come to her class to speak about and lead a discussion on Flannery O’Connor. Coincidentally, about that same time I was developing some thoughts on “imagination”. When I began my presentation to the class, I began by talking about imagination instead of Flannery O’Connor. I think my friend (the teacher) was a little stunned, until she realized where I was going with my thoughts. Let me share with you briefly how the subject of imagination came to me, and how my thoughts developed.

One long-running program on C-SPAN was Booknotes. In each episode Brian Lamb would interview a significant author, and the January 4, 2004, episode featured Brenda Wineapple discussing her book Hawthorne: A Life (a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne). One of Hawthorne’s best friends was Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States, who was an adamant proponent of the institution of slavery. Lamb asked about Pierce, “Why was he pro-slavery?” To which part of Wineapple’s response was:

“Why was he pro-slavery in that way? I think because he lacked the imagination to think of what it really is to be a slave. You know, I mean, I think it was a real failure – it’s a failure of moral nerve and it’s a failure of imagination that comes to Pierce that he didn’t bother to think about it. He never got beyond the rule of law. So it wasn’t real to him.”

Ah… a failure of imagination.

About the same time, I read an interview in Sojourners magazine with author Wendell Berry. Addressing how separate local regions interact without becoming isolationist, he brought up the topic of imagination in a similar context:

“The serious question is whether you’re going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors.” (Sojourners, July 2004)

What does this have to do with Flannery O’Connor, or any other serious fiction writer for that matter? Everything! Without imagination we cannot empathize; we cannot feel what other people, particularly people different from ourselves, feel. We are trapped in the narrowness of our own flesh, of the self-centered and preoccupied experience of our microscopic arena of existence, and there is no hope that we can become anything more or better. Imagination is the gift that allows us to break free from our shackles, to become truly human, truly real beings.

In this context, imagination is not an escape from reality; it is entering into the fullness of reality. The most significant thing about art, literature, and music is the contribution they make to our imagination. Art does not supersede the thoroughly practical existence; it brings the practical into its stunning fulness. As an example of this, I offer my father’s contention that my interest in growing flowers was a waste of time and effort. “You can’t eat a flower,” he said. Therefore, to him, it was useless. I replied, “If there were no flowers, there would be no reason to eat, no reason to exist. And even the beans and squash in the vegetable garden begin as flowers.” As the Bible says, we human beings “do not live by bread alone…” Or in another place, “where there is no vision, the people perish.” I could paraphrase with no loss of meaning, “Where there is no imagination, the people cannot live.”

In summary:
(1) Imagination is not an extraneous and frivolous part of our being – it is vital.
(2) Not only should imagination be encouraged, it should be nurtured in a positive way. That alone is justification for literature and the arts.

In the midst of war and terrorism, possibly more than ever, what the world needs now is… imagination. Hence, I invite you – come, imagine with me!

The Wayback Machine - On Color

2007-02-24T12:30:00.000-05:00

From my journal, dated Wednesday, March 16, 2005:

There is an article in the New York Times about a blue lobster. Lobsters have a combination of red and blue pigments which give them camouflage on the ocean floor. The red color is from the astaxanthin molecule, a relative of beta carotene, the chemical that gives carrots their orange color. The blue color comes from crustacyanin (astaxanthin clumped together with a protein). According to the article, one in a million lobsters is blue. One theory is that the protein pulls the astaxanthin molecules close together, and the change in the orbits of electrons causes the absortion of red light.

Color – what an amazing thing it is. I studied color in psychology courses in college, from the physical causes represented by wave frequencies to absorption and reflection, to the biological mechanisms in the eye and brain that are responsible for color perception. There is also an aesthetic dimension to color. Colors give expression to emotions and add to the drama of works of art.

I am fascinated by the concept of color. What is absorption and why does it happen? What is reflection? What are complementary colors, and what makes them so? There are so many questions that it is probably impossible to answer, but I love asking them and thinking about them. I suppose pondering unanswerable questions gives a deep satisfaction because of its very basis in mystery – like the mysterion in which we contemplate and discover God. Perhaps the essence of these unanswerable questions is ultimately part of God.

The Way-Back Machine

2007-02-23T23:39:00.000-05:00

When I was a boy I didn’t miss an episode of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. If you’ve ever seen it, you know there was a regular segment called Peabody's Improbable History with Sherman and Mr. Peabody. Sherman was a redheaded boy with horn-rimmed glasses, so we instinctively recognize that he is the nerdy, bookish type. Mr. Peabody, who wore a similar pair of glasses, was a dog of superior intellect. No, he didn’t fetch Frisbees with his hind feet while balancing on his nose or tap out the square roots of integers with his paw – he spoke quite fluent English, and he invented things. His most amazing invention was The WABAC (way-back) Machine! Using this marvel to defy all principles of the space-time continuum, Sherman and Peabody would journey back to witness a different famous historical event each episode.

You’ll never believe this (don’t worry, I’m making it up anyway), but I found the original plans for the WABAC machine, and I’ve installed one here at the blog. From time to time we’ll journey back, not to famous historical events but to significant events recorded in my journals through the years. If you like, you can just call them flashbacks, but I prefer to imagine it as a trip in the WABAC. I will label those entries with “The Way-Back Machine”. Stay tuned…

CPAP. CPAP run. My First-Grade Level Ruminations on Sleep Apnea

2007-02-21T00:33:00.001-05:00

Oh, the pain, the pain! Tonight I have a splitting headache, but that’s no reason not to write.

It began this morning, just that subtle feeling floating somewhere behind my forehead like a puddle of chocolate pudding shifting slowly around my frontal lobe with each movement of my head. I’m no stranger to headaches; I’ve been battling them for years. But the last couple of weeks have been different, because I found out my blood pressure – always the picture of textbook perfection – was suddenly trying out for a new job in entry level hypertension.

After I got to work this afternoon I was feeling awful, and a couple of folks told me I looked exhausted. One of the inmates said, "Mr. Bohannon, you better go to medical and get your blood pressure checked." Since they had been doing intake (of new prisoners) this morning, there were still a few nurses and a blood pressure machine in the back section of our building, which spared me a walk to medical.

Once securely fastened to the machine, the cuff pumped up and started measuring. When it stopped, instead of a number it pumped up again, tighter. I said to the nurse, "Uh oh. This isn't good." When it stopped, the warning alarm went off and scared me to death. Why do they make blood pressure machines that produce loud noises and flashing lights when your blood pressure is dangerously high? Don't they realize that makes it dangerously higher?

Anyway, my BP was 191/100! I immediately called Cris and asked her to call my doctor and told her she might have to come get me because I was a little unsteady. Impatient with waiting on word to be relayed from Cris to receptionist to nurse to doctor and back up the line to me, I eventually drove to Blandy Hills Elementary, where Cris works. We finally got word from Dr. Duke telling me to go to the ER (oh how those words brought joy to my heart...not).

My blood pressure was better in the ER, but still high, and since I had the excruciating headache and the skin on the right side of my face felt like it was crawling off, they took me back immediately. By this time my headache was excruciating.

The ER doctor was great! She talked with me, not to me. I'd previously been diagnosed with sleep apnea, and sleep studies showed I would have positive results with the CPAP machine. That’s a piece of equipment inspired by 1950's science fiction movies that has a hissing, knob-encrusted metal box that spews streams of air through a montage of flexy tubes capped with a tiny face mask and straps just the right size to traumatize the imagination of anybody prone to claustrophobia aggravated by anxiety attacks (like ME). She seemed to have a more positive view of CPAP therapy and insisted it would most likely make me feel lots better. She agrees with the other docs, each of whom I'd decided must have family connections to the CPAP industry, that my sleep apnea is largely behind my headaches and blood pressure problems, and re-affirmed my need to have a fresh sleep study. She said she's seen people on three different blood pressure medications go completely off meds after a couple of weeks with the CPAP machine. She said I probably don't even realize how bad I'm feeling (although, just between you and me, I've got a pretty darned good idea), and the CPAP would most likely make a world of difference. Sleep apnea deprives your brain of oxygen, and the brain doesn’t like to be deprived of oxygen anymore than I liked to be deprived of Apple-Cinnamon Pop Tarts at breakfast.

CT scans were ordered, blood was drawn, and a urine specimen collected (which, by the way, was still sitting on the table, untested, when I left the hospital). The CT scan indicated chronic sinus disease, but my brain looked fine. (Imagine that!) Finally, after the test results satisfied the doctor that I wasn’t having a stroke, nor did I have meningitis, and the fact that I didn’t remember when I had my last tetanus shot didn’t matter, she gave me a Lortab (7.5 mg) -- I didn't want a knock-out shot -- and a prescription for 15 more of the pills. Earlier she had given me a 50 mg Topral for the blood pressure, and it was down to 135/85 before I left. I have a prescription for that too, and a pack of Azithromycin (antibiotics) for sinus infection, just for good measure. She reiterated once again the need for this sleep study, so I guess I'll go ahead and set it up. She wants me to stay out of work for a couple of days. Fat chance! But if I do decide to stay home from work, I’ll be too scared to sleep. My brain needs the oxygen!

A Friendly Introduction

2007-02-20T00:53:00.000-05:00

I've finally gone and done it! I've started a blog. I've been journaling for a good couple of decades, and from time to time I like to share some of my entries with family or friends. I figure this way I can share it with everybody. Even if you're a stranger, I'm sure we could be friends if we got to know one another.

I’ve got lots of stories to tell, and there are plenty of subjects I’d like to reflect on. My interests include, but are not limited to, family, music, art, literature, airplanes, my Taylor guitar, books, philosophy, theology & religion, beautiful sunsets, mathematics, Spanish, and… well, I could go on for a day or two. You can figure it out as we go along.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I’m Jim Bohannon (no, not the one that’s on the radio), and I live in Milledgeville, Georgia, with my wife, Cris, and my two youngest sons. I have another son and a daughter who are both grown and married. My daughter gave birth to our first grandchild on January, 30th, and my son and his wife are expecting in July… so you can believe there will be some grandfather talk around here.

Milledgeville was the capital of Georgia during the Civil War, and the old capitol building and Governor’s Mansion have both been renovated recently. Milledgeville was the home of the writer Flannery O’Connor (another of my major interests). Andalusia, the O’Connor family farm, has recently been opened to the public. Film legend Oliver Hardy also lived here, before leaving to go into show business. This was also home to the Honorable Carl Vinson, longtime congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Over the years I’ve been a U.S. Marine, a college student, a process control supervisor with a kaolin company, and a pastor of United Methodist and non-denominational churches. I am currently employed as a teacher at a local state prison. Since I’m the only teacher, I like to tell people I am the entire education department. I handle literacy, adult basic education, GED preparation, and English as a second language. At the moment, I even have a student who is studying Spanish with me. Meanwhile, I am trying to establish a business as an artist – I’ll share more about that later. I’ve registered an Internet domain name and I’m trying to learn how to build a website, and I’ve established eBay and Pay Pal accounts, but I’m not quite ready for market yet.

There’s a lot I want to talk about and share with you. Don’t be surprised if I throw out an insight or opinion about politics or religion. You don’t have to agree with me. Even though I’m a former preacher, I don’t like to be preachy. Hopefully this will be a welcome place where you’ll feel you can come to be refreshed. I’ll be here, so ya’ll come around any time you feel like it.