For the month of November, Ginger and I are writing down everything we spend so we can get a good picture of where our money goes. (All of a sudden, all I can hear in my head is Robert Palmer singing, “She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went.”) It was her suggestion,…
One of the first churches I remember going to regularly was the Argyle Road Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. We went there while my parents were in language school before we began going to the predominantly African churches. The church was a British Baptist Church, which was different from Southern Baptist life in several ways,…
When Ginger and I first moved to Massachusetts in 1990, we settled in Charlestown, one of the neighborhoods of Boston and home to the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument. We lived first in a small apartment on Pleasant Street, in the shadow of the Monument, and then in a row house, circa 1840,…
Sleep came before words last night. They aren’t coming so easily this morning either, so I’ll pass along some words and music that have been collecting in my mental jukebox recently. Thanks to John Brashier for pointing me to the new John Mellencamp song, “Our Country,” which you can listen to here. Makes me want…
I begin with thanks to Mark Heybo for pointing me to some of Frederick Buechner’s words: The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind and it can be cruel. It can be beatiful and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to…
I was almost a teenager when Planet of the Apes hit the theaters in 1968. The film was a futuristic cautionary tale of what we were in for if we kept living like we were living, ending with a shocking image of the Statue of Liberty buried up to her armpits in desert sand. My…
I discovered a new website today in a rather circuitous way. Quotidian Grace was kind enough to comment on my post about Zambia yesterday, so I clicked over to find out what she has been talking about. Scolling down over the past few days, I read about the theme for the PCUSA General Assembly and…
Today is the forty-second anniversary of Zambian Independence. I was living in Lusaka, the capital of the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, on the day it became the nation of Zambia. For months we had practiced our new national anthem in school so we would be able to sing out proudly when we became our…
Yesterday was a day outside; today was a day inside: I worked for twelve and a half hours. I came up to write tonight with few words anywhere in or on my person, so I decided to go back through last week’s poems at The Writer’s Almanac. Maybe reading how someone else puts words together,…
Today was a quintessential slice of New England autumn: crisp, cool air; brilliant sunshine; trees ablaze with color; and a hymn sing in our little white clapboard church next to the cemetery. Ginger left a message on my cell phone yesterday suggesting we spend time together after church driving around to see the leaves and…