I’m not much of a sports fan. I try to keep up with who has won some of the games so that i can carry on an intelligent conversation with friends, but I rarely invest my time in watching games on television or attending them live. Our daughter married into a family with a history of dedicated fandom of baseball and football teams. She has adopted the loyalties of her husband and of his father and grandfather before him. During the baseball season, I try to keep track of the Washington Nationals because it is their team. During football season it is the New York Giants. They dress themselves in the jerseys of their teams, have their favorite players, and can quote team statistics. I try to pay enough attention to wins and losses that I can hold intelligent conversations with our daughter and son-in-law. I get the impression that be and his parents are a bit baffled by our lack of attention to sports.

Back when we lived in Chicago in the late 1970’s, I got interested in the Chicago Cubs baseball team. It seemed to be a very Chicago thing to root for a team that hadn’t won the world series since 1908. Being a fan of a losing team seemed to fit my sensibilities and I have since declared myself to be a fan saying, “Anyone can cheer on a winner. It takes character to remain loyal to a team that doesn’t win.” So in 2016, when the Cubs did win the World Series, it was seen as a big deal to my friends who are real sports fans. I paid attention to the playoffs and series that year in part because it was a topic of conversation with our daughter and her family as well as a lot of folks in the church. It was kind of fun to be identified as a fan of the team that was winning.

However, I can’t tell you much about the Cubs except that they haven’t won the World Series since. They haven’t even made it to the final series since then.

I sometimes call myself a morning-after sports fan. I am not enough of a fan to watch the game while it is going on, but I pay enough attention to check the score the next morning.

I barely know the basic rules and flow of the game of hockey. We had hockey sticks and used to push a puck around the ice when we were kids and I know the basics of scoring by hitting the puck into a goal, but that is about it. When we lived in Rapid City there was a young man who was in our youth group who played hockey and I attended a few of his matches to support him. Sitting with his family meant that I learned a few of the nuances of the game and it was easy for me to support his team because I knew him. That was quite a while ago and I haven’t been to a hockey match since.

However, I do live just a few miles from the metro Vancouver, British Columbia area. I can see the lights of the city from my back yard. I can watch airplanes descending to land at Vancouver International Airport. I listen to Canadian Public Broadcasting on my radio. We can see the buildings of Surrey BC as we drive about our neighborhood or walk to the beach. On Friday when we drove to Point Roberts it took us about the same amount of time to drive to the border as we waited to cross.

These days I check the northern horizon every night when I wake during the night because there have been some intense solar storms and the northern lights have been putting on a pretty impressive show. They are supposed to reappear in our night sky within the next couple of weeks, so I’m sticking to my habit. I plan to pay special attention to the night sky and perhaps look a bit earlier tomorrow night. If the Vancouver Canucks win their home hockey game on Monday I’ll likely be able to see the fireworks from our back yard.

The Canucks are tied 3 games even with the Edmonton Oilers and the final match of the seven game series will be a home game for the Canucks. It’s a pretty big deal in Vancouver. Mind you this is not the Stanley Cup Championship Finals series yet. The two Canadian teems are meeting in what is called the second round. The Canucks made it to the second round by defeating the Nashville Predators four games to two in the first round. The Oilers won their series against the Los Angeles Kings four to one. The Oilers were preferred by the oddsmakers to win the series but the Canucks have held their own and there could be a slight home team advantage tomorrow night.

Hockey is a Canadian sport in many ways. You don’t think of outdoor winter sports when thinking of Los Angeles or Nashville. Then again the Florida Panthers have already advanced to the Conference Final round on the other side of the bracket. They’ll be facing the New York Rangers. At least the lakes freeze in New York in the winter. And the winner of the Canucks-Oilers series will face the Dallas Stars. Dallas is another place where one doesn’t expect to see much ice outside of arenas with artificial ice making equipment. Still, the Canadian match up seems like what one would expect from the Stanley Cup playoff series. Canadian Public Radio has done a number of interviews with families that have ardent fans of both teams in the same family. They’re especially keen on covering married couples who disagree on which team to cheer on.

I don’t think proximity is going to make me much of a hockey fan. Living in Chicago for four years didn’t really make me a baseball fan. Still I’ll be paying attention tomorrow evening. And, if the Canucks win, I guess I’ll have to pay attention to what happens in the next series. After all if they were to bring home the Stanley Cup we’d probably notice more than fireworks in celebration.

One of the things I like about wooden canoes is that they are nearly silent when paddled in calm water. I prefer wooden paddles, except when paddling in whitewater. My whitewater canoe also isn’t wood, but rather an advanced plastic material that makes the boat nearly indestructible, even if it strikes rocks or other debris. I enjoy the whitewater boat and the thrill of whitewater paddling, but I prefer flatware paddling. For most of my life I paddled in lakes and reservoirs. A fair percentage of the total paddling of my life has been in Sheridan Lake a reservoir in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The lake is relatively small and easy to cover in an hour’s paddle. I enjoyed paddling around the perimeter of the lake, going into small inlets and bays.

One of the treats of paddling in Sheridan Lake was the presence of a pair of Great Blue Herons that showed up every spring. Early in the season, I would occasionally see them both standing in the water near the edge waiting for small fish to swim close enough for a quick bill stab. The fish is then shaken before it is gulped down. Occasionally it would surprise me to see how large a fish a heron could swallow. It seemed like the fish might be too big fro that narrow neck, but I never witnessed a problem.

Herons are patient fishermen. According to one article I read they spend up to 90 percent of their waking hours stalking prey. I’ve known a few human fishers who could do that for a single day, but none who maintained that practice day after day. Herons aren’t strictly monogamous, but they stay with the same partner throughout the nesting season, building the nest together, sharing duties of sitting on the eggs and hunting to feed the young. When the birds are sitting on the eggs, which takes about four weeks, they hunt one at a time. This is when I was most likely to see a heron at Sheridan Lake, so I generally saw them one at a time. Since herons can live 15 to 20 years, I theorize that the birds I saw at the lake were often the same bird year after year.

I’m not sure I could identify an individual by sight, though.

Now that we have moved to a new place, I have discovered that the herons I saw at the lake in South Dakota were a bit atypical. Generally herons for nesting colonies. Out here on the coast we have several large colonies, sometimes called “heroines” or “rookeries.” There is one near our home in Birch Bay State Park with hundreds of breeding pairs. They spread out along the shore and it is not uncommon for us to see dozens, especially after the chicks have hatched and before they have fledged when they are constantly hunting for fish, crabs, and even a few insects.

We call them dinosaur birds, in part because of the sound they make. It sounds otherworldly, like I imagine a pterodactyl might have sounded. Their appearance is quite different from other birds. They are graceful flyers and swimmers and can fly at slow speeds and land quietly. However the transition from standing in the shallows to flight generally involves a bit of splashing and seems somewhat awkward. Calling them dinosaurs, however, isn’t accurate. The fossil record shows they have existed for at least 1.8 million years, but the general thought is that they date back to about 25 million years ago during the Cenozoic age. That’s a far cry from pterodactyls that lived over 200 million years ago.

As I grow older, I think I appreciate looking at herons a bit more. I admire their patience. I appreciate their ability to stand calmly and consume few calories while remaining alert and ready for quick action. The transition from standing completely still to holding a fish in the bill is lightning fast.

It might just be my memory or the fact that I generally view herons while walking these days while I used to view them while paddling, but it seems that the herons out here are a bit smaller than the ones I used to see in South Dakota. It may be that I see a few birds that are younger here. They are still large birds. They can stand up for 4 feet in height and have a wingspan of nearly 6 feet. That’s significantly smaller than the bald eagles which are common around here. Eagles can have a wingspan up to 8 1/2 feet. They are chunkier, weighing between 7 and 14 pounds. Thats a big difference from the herons that might weigh 5 or 6 pounds. The herons stand taller, however. Their long legs and necks make even the silhouette easy to distinguish from an eagle. Eagles soar high in the sky. Herons tend to stay low, gliding near to the water’s surface. Both birds, however, seem to prefer tall trees for nesting.

One of the images I hold of this place is the memory of the birds silhouetted in the evening appearing as graceful dark figures against the reflection of the water.

Yesterday we took a tour of Point Roberts, the western end of the border between the US and Canada, the longest border in the world. There is a monument on a bluff above the shore that marks the spot and you can stand with one leg in each country there. To get to Point Roberts from our town involves a 20-nile drive through Canada. Point Roberts has several lovely parks with walking trails leading to the water where there is plenty of bird watching. We could see dozens of eagles soaring over the cliffs and multiple herons patiently fishing in the shallows. In the surf they seem to prefer standing on rocks as they look for the tiny heron swimming in the shallows. We did a fair amount of walking, but we also had time to just stand and watch. We aren’t as patient as the herons, but we took enough time to lear a bit from them.

This weekend marks the official beginning of the summer tourist season here in Birch Bay. During the winter, our town is a sleepy little hamlet with only a few businesses and services. Many of the restaurants have shortened hours. The C Shop, a candy store where they make most of their own candy and sell popcorn, shaved ice, ice cream and a variety of other treats, is closed during the winter months. The locals get used to walking and biking in the middle of the streets. Our town is a golf cart zone, so we are used to folks driving around in golf carts often going only 10 of 15 mph. We get used to having the beach to ourselves and knowing that many of the houses and cottages are unoccupied during the off season.

But this weekend everything changes. Many tourist areas in the United States won’t officially kick off their season until Memorial Day next weekend, but we always start a week early because it is a big public holiday weekend in Victoria with nearly everyone having a three day weekend. There will be parades and fireworks on the Island and in Vancouver and plenty of folks have reserved time shares and vacation rentals in Birch Bay for the weekend. By tonight the majority of the cars on Birch Bay Drive will be sporting British Columbia license plates.

Victoria Day is a Public Holiday in seven of the Canadian provinces and all three territories. Only Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec do not observe Victoria Day as a Public Holiday. As you might imagine, British Columbia, the capitol of which is Victoria, is a place where Victoria Day is observed with enthusiasm and rigor.

In the United States we have President’s Day, which is a combination of two former holidays: Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Washington’s Birthday on February 22. Those holidays, however, were instituted after the deaths of the two presidents and were not recognized holidays during their lifetimes. Things are a bit different in the United Kingdom. In general, with the exception of Victoria Day, which is unique and not recognized throughout the kingdom, the queen or king’s birthday is officially recognized during their lifetime but not after their death. For example the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II was officially celebrated from the time of her ascension to the throne in 1952 until her death in 2022. Interestingly, her official birthday was not on the day of her birth, April 21, but rather on the second Saturday in June each year. She was not the first monarch to have a private birthday and an official birthday. The tradition was started by King George in 1748. With a November birthday being too cold for a celebratory parade, he tied his annual celebrations with the annual Trooping the Color military parade. While a parade could certainly have been held in April on the Queen’s birthday, Elizabeth chose to continue the tradition and have the official celebration of her birthday on trooping day.

The celebration is quite a spectacle. Over 1400 parading soldiers, 400 horses and 400 musicians take part in the Trooping the Color parade. The monarch arrives at the House Guard’s Parade in Whitehall, receives a royal salute, and inspects the troops. Military bands perform, and the regimental color is taken on procession down the ranks of soldiers. The royal carriage then journeys back to Buckingham Palace at the head of a parade. The Birthday Habits list is also released on that day.

While the events of Trooping the Color are reserved for England, Canadians have been observing Victoria Day for a long time. During the reign of Queen Victoria, May 24, the queen’s birthday , was declared a holiday in Canada. After Victoria’s death in 1901, an act of the Canadian Parliament established Victoria Day as a legal holiday to be celebrated on May 24 (or May 25 when May 24 fell on a Sunday). Now Victoria Day falls on the Monday between the 18th and 24th (inclusive) and, so, is always the penultimate Monday of May).

In the United States, Memorial Day was observed on May 30th, the date General Logan had selected for the first Decoration Day. But in 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in may in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees.

Susan reported to me that Mrs. Pfeiffer, her 5th Grade teacher, was Canadian and she learned that Victoria Day was May 24. Furthermore her teacher told the class that when she was a little girl Victoria Day was the first day that she was allowed to go barefoot outside. That gave me pause for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are some places in Canada some years when going barefoot on May 24 would mean walking in the snow barefoot. I’ve done it, but only for short distances, usually followed by dipping my feet into a warm pool of hot spring water. Secondly, had I know that when I was in elementary school, I would have deemed it to be a grave injustice because in our house, we were not allowed to go barefoot outside until Memorial Day. Memorial Day always being after Victoria Day, I would have been unable to understand why Canadians got to go barefoot before we did.

These days I rarely go barefoot outdoors. A couple of surgeries to remove squamous cell carcinoma combined with semi-annual visits to the dermatologist to have numerous precancerous cells frozen to induce me to cover up most of my skin when venturing outdoors. While I still swim barefoot, I do wear a swim top with long sleeves and am careful to slather on additional sunscreen. Most of the rest of the time I cover up my skin, including my feet. I have a very comfortable pair of plastic clogs that are easy to don that I keep near the patio door for quick excursions to the barbecue or to tend plants in the yard. And I own more than my fair share of shoes for other occasions.

So summer arrives today. We plan to mark the occasion with a day trip to Canada. One of the challenges that we have accepted is to go someplace new at least once a year. There are plenty of destinations that are close to our home just across the border for us to explore for years to come. We understand that we’ll have to wait a few minutes longer in line at the border crossing when reentering the US because many Canadians will be celebrating by coming to the US and the crossings will be busy, but we travel at a leisurely pace these days and a few minutes will not cause us stress.

Happy Victoria Day to our neighbors and happy start of summer to the rest of our friends who live north of the equator. I’ve heard that autumn is a lovely season in the southern half of the globe.

Many communities have “before and after” stories. The stories are memories of events that happened in the past that transformed the community, usually through some traumatic event. Members of the community who experienced that event or series of events are distinguished from those who joined the community afterward. Sometimes those divisions in the community play out in unexpected ways.

From 1985 to 1995 we served a congregation in Boise Idaho. Part of the history of that congregation is that the congregation had lost its building to a fire in 1942. It had been a real struggle for the congregation to rebuild a larger and more fireproof building during the war with all of the rationing and the shortages of labor that were the result of the war effort. Then, in 1952, a second tragic fire occurred. This one burned the roof off of the building, but the main structure was saved. The congregation once again re-built, this time adding an education wing to the building. After all of that building with the accompanying fund-raising required to pull it off the congregation was exhausted. There was no more building for a long time. When we arrived in 1985, the congregation was in need of a wide variety of building improvements and the building was too small for a growing congregation in a rapidly growing community. Part of our ministry of the next decade was enabling the congregation to believe that they were once again capable of building, raising funds to purchase additional land and to play building improvements and additions including new stairways, elevator access to all levels, remodeled and expanded offices, additional parking and more. By the time the remodeled building was rededicated the congregation had a sense of unity that it had not felt for a long time because the majority of the congregation had shared in the more recent building project and the old divisions of those who came before and after the fires faded from their identity.

Rapid City, where we served for the next 25 years was a community that had experienced a devastating flood in 1972. Over the night of June 9-10, 1972 more than 15 inches of rain fell in parts of the Black Hills. Rapid Creek and other waterways overflowed. Canyon Lake Dam on the west side of town became clogged with debris and failed causing a wall of water to tear through the town. The result was 238 deaths and over 3,000 injured people. Over 1,335 homes and more than 5,000 cars were destroyed. The aftermath of the flood and the shared trauma of the event distinguished those who had survived and witnessed the flood from those who moved to the area after the flood. It happened that we visited family in Rapid City during the year after the flood and so had some personal memories of having witnessed just a part of the aftermath. Those memories provided openings for us to talk with flood survivors as we served the congregation and helped to bridge the gaps in the congregation. Careful storytelling as part of the 25th anniversary of the flood helped the congregation to continue to offer healing to those who had been a part of the flood while still providing welcome to those who had come to the community after the flood.

One of the “before and after” stories of Bellingham, the community where we now attend church, is the Olympic Pipeline Explosion. It is interesting to note that the event, like the Rapid City Flood centers on June 10. On June 10, 1999, the Olympic Pipeline exploded in Whatcom Falls Park sending a fireball down Whatcom Creek killing three people and injuring an additional eight. Local businesses were evacuated, Interstate 5 was shut down, maritime traffic was halted in Bellingham Bay. Property damage was estimated at over $58 million. One house was completely destroyed and the city’s water treatment plant was severely damaged.

The Lummi House of Tears carvers created a story pole to memorialize the explosion and to help the community heal. The pole is displayed at the Woburn Street Trailhead in the park.

The Olympic Pipeline which transports gasoline from the BP refinery which can be seen from our home to Seattle, continues to operate. Last December at Conway, about 32 miles from the Whatcom Creek explosion, there was another spill on the pipeline. This one did not result in an explosion or fire. About 25,000 gallons of gasoline were leaked but no injuries or fatalities were reported. It was a reminder of the vulnerability of the pipeline and of all pipelines. Pipelines transporting oil and refined products made from oil have an important symbolic value in indigenous communities. The traditional stewards of Whatcom Creek are the Coast Salish tribes including the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Tribe. From time immemorial the tribes established fishing and shellfish harvesting camps along the banks of the creek. The town of Bellingham grew from the selection of the creek as the site of a sawmill established by settlers intent on harvesting the wood to provide for expanding cities including Seattle and other communities as far away as San Francisco. The name Whatcom, now the name of our county, is an adaptation of a Coast Salish word meaning noisy or rumbling water.

Indigenous tribes across the continent have banded together to protest the construction and expansion of pipelines. In the winter of 2016, tribes and supporters from many nations gathered at Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. Police used crowd control weapons including water canons in an attempt to control the protestors. Since that event and eventual disbanding of the encampment members of many indigenous tribes around the world have adopted the name of “water protectors.”

As was the case with the church fires in Boise and the flood in Rapid City, we are late comers, having arrived years after the pipeline explosion and fire. It is not difficult, however, to see the effects of the event and to witness the ongoing healing that remains. Just like the trees in the park all of which are younger than the surrounding forests, it will take years - even centuries - for restoration and healing. The community will retain the distinction of before and after for a long time. Knowing the story and respecting the ongoing healing is part of learning to live in our adopted home.

There is no question that we live in a conflict-torn world. A quick trip through the headlines leaves no question about the brokenness of this world. The Biden administration plans a billion dollar arms shipment to Israel. Hundreds of French police officers are deployed in the search for an escaped prisoner and those who attacked a police van and freed him, killing and injuring officers. Lawyers for a former president attacked the credibility of a lawyer who once represented that same man in a criminal trial in which the candidate leading in the polls is the defendant. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing may face criminal prosecution over 737 max crashes. Fourteen people were killed, dozens injured and more may still be trapped because a billboard collapsed in Mumbai. Illegal shipments of rosewood to China fuels an insurgency in Mozambique. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing Rafah with nowhere to go and almost no food to eat. An Australian who exposed war crimes is in jail for stealing military secrets. A cyber attack caused the famous art auction website of Christie’s to go down as it seeks to sell high art and rare wine. The Scottish government has declared a national housing emergency.

In the midst of all of this and so much more, yesterday in what I am sure was a moment of perfect peace, a 92-year-old woman suffering from heart disease and cancer took her leave from this life. Alice Munro was widely acclaimed and given award after award for her mastery of the short story. She quietly slipped from this life leaving behind a literary legacy that will go on for generations. It was just a decade after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

She will be missed, but I can’t help but feel that the time for her death was right and we have no reason to ask her for another story. What she has written is sufficient.

There are other authors and other stories, but Alice Munro had the capacity to tell a story that makes you want to inhabit it not so much to find out what happens or how it ends, but rather to simply see the world from the perspective of one of her characters. It is worth reading her story just to know that such characters exist.

I one heard an interview with Munro in which she said she wrote short stories because she had no other choice. She was a young mother with three young daughters who didn’t have time to devote to a novel. She wrote stories sandwiched between the washing machine and the dryer because she could take a brief moment there to think without losing her focus on her life as a homemaker. I think that the story, while true, is only part of the story because by the time she published her first book, a collection of short stories, in her thirties, she had been publishing short stories since she was an 18-year-old student. She had more rejection letters than published stories, but she was a writer before she became a mother. But her life, like her stories, doesn’t require her stories to cover every possible truth or every possible angle. I love the image of a harried young woman, trying to live up to society’s often unfair expectations of women, while refusing to allow her creativity to be stifled by the responsibilities of home and the demands of raising children. Knowing that story is enough for me to believe in the creativity potential of every woman regardless of her circumstances or the judgment of the world.

I do not believe that Munro’s stories are scripture, but they do help me understand why sacred stories are so important in this life. We treasure stories that invite us to inhabit them without assurance of their endings, but rather because of the value of the stories themselves. I am a Christian not because of some preacher’s description of heavenly glory - of gold-paved streets, endless choirs of angels, instant ability to tune and play a harp, or face-to-face encounters with those who died before I was born. I am a Christian because I have been invited into the story in which the awesome power of empire, capable of judging and destroying humans by nailing them to a cross, is not the end of the story. I want to live in a story where justice comes to the dispossessed, the widows and orphans, those forgotten by society. I want to live in a story where the powers and principalities of this world do not get the final word on the beauty, the meaning, and the worth of human life. I want to live in a world where faith, hope, and love abide and the greatest of these is love. For that world, I need more than the headlines and the awesome communication powers of contemporary media. For that world, I need sacred story. For that world, I choose to inhabit stories that our people have been telling for millennia. For that world I choose to tell those stories to my children and grandchildren.

I choose to meet with the survivors of suicide and sit with them as they tell the stories of their trauma and loss not because I want to know the end of the story, but because I want to see the world from their perspective. I want to live in a world where the human spirit is capable of meeting the overwhelming power of that tragedy and not only surviving, but thriving and inspiring others to live.

I think Alice Munro understood that world enough to know, even in the face of debilitating illness and the realities of the frailness of the human body as it approaches a century of living, that the story does not end when the last breath comes. We can love her stories and accept her death.

I invite you to read a story by Alice Munro. Pick up Who Do You Think You are? or Boys and Girls or How I met My Husband. Read through a list of her stories or pick up one of her collections. Find about gutting turkeys and fox faming, of felling trees and harsh country schools, of lingering illness and obscure shame, of the lives of girls and women. Start reading wherever you choose and stop wherever it strikes you. Don’t focus on reading them all or knowing all about her as a writer. Take a moment to simply look at time and life and relationships from a new perspective.

The story goes on.