For a very long time I haven’t been the world’s best sleeper. My mother used to report that when I was an infant, I was pretty good at self-soothing and going to sleep. I was a thumb sucker until I was 5 or 6 years old. Fairly early in my life, though, I taught myself to wake up when there was something I wanted to do. When my father offered to take me to the airport and to go flying, I could rouse myself and be dressed in just a few minutes. Over the years there have been a lot of nights when I was so excited that I would sleep lightly and wake often.

During my working years, I used an alarm clock but I’m pretty sure that I woke myself just before the alarm went off as often as the alarm woke me. I used to say that the reason I set an alarm was so that I could sleep. If if didn’t set the alarm, I would keep waking and checking the time to make sure I didn’t over sleep.

For much of my career, I would receive calls in the middle of the night that required me to get up, get dressed, and respond. I didn’t really mind those calls and I was pretty good at dealing with whatever needed attention and then returning to bed for whatever time was left. I go to sleep easily and when I have trouble sleeping it is usually difficulty staying awake, not going to sleep initially.

I can remember a few nights when excitement kept me from sleeping as much as I might have otherwise done. The night before we met our daughter, I slept fairly well. The next night, however, when she was actually our responsibility, I was awake most of the night. I don’t know how many times I checked on that baby. When she did wake crying, I had her diaper changed and her formula mixed and was ready in record time, even though I had no previous experience with baby formula. I had seen my mother and others test the temperature of a baby’s milk by pouring a few drops on their wrist. I went through that motion, but within a few days, I could tell if the contents were the right temperature by how the outside of the bottle felt in my hands.

I remember the time that followed as being a time when I was often tired. I was waking up multiple times in the night. The baby developed ear infections on several occasions and I didn’t know how to soothe her. Several times I had to wake Susan to ask for her help, or at least for her to relieve me for a few minutes. Initially, I was working a part time job that required me to be at work at 5:30 am. Like other ministers, I often found myself in meetings in the evening that lasted late. I would sneak a nap when time permitted. I’m pretty good at taking short naps and waking up ready to go, but in those days there weren’t many opportunities for naps.

I’ve often said that while our first child was a good sleeper - so good that I was tempted to brag about our superior parenting technique. At least I thought that our bedtime routine was something that other parents could benefit by imitating. Our second, however, was not a good sleeper. I joke that she once slept all the way through the night when she was five years old. That isn’t quite true, but over the span of her life, I was awake with her in the night a lot.

I was still awake in the wee hours of the morning when she was in her twenties, but my worries had shifted. I worried about her friends and especially about a couple of boy friends who didn’t treat her as well as she deserved. I worried about parties and alcohol and driving. It turned out that I need not have worried as much as I did, but I didn’t know. When it is 2 am and your twenty-something daughter isn’t at home, one doesn’t exactly think rationally.

Right now, I’m feeling that excited awareness in the best possible way. This afternoon just before 4:30 their time, which is 1:30 our time, she and her son will board an airplane in Columbia, South Carolina. They’ll fly to Dallas/Fort Worth airport where they have a layover of a couple of hours and then board a flight to Vancouver British Columbia. Vancouver International Airport is just under 40 miles from our home. They arrive there at 11:05 pm. That is a bit after my usual bedtime, but you can count on a couple of things. One is that I will be wide awake. The other is that I will have arrived at the airport earlier than necessary.

With the international border crossing, we need to allow about an hour to get to the airport and a few more minutes to get parked and find the place to meet incoming flights. When their airplane lands, they have to go through customs, retrieve their luggage and walk out to the place where we can meet them. Our almost-five-year-old grandson will be pretty tired. After all it will be nearly 3 am by the time zone where he lives. But I’m guessing he’ll also be excited. He can fall asleep in the car while we drive back to our house.

Maybe I’m not quite as excited as I was the day we first met her, but it is pretty close. I know where my mind will be wandering during our church service this morning. I don’t expect to pay very close attention to the sermon and I’ll have my private prayers going during the time for the pastoral prayer. It is a good feeling.

I think it knew it before I met her, but one of the lessons she taught or at least reinforced is that there are lots of things in life more important than sleeping. You can make up sleep later when you need. I can sneak a nap sometime tomorrow. I don’t mind missing a bit of sleep one bit. I’ll be too excited to sleep anyway.

In October we will have lived in this house for three years. We are starting to feel at home here. We’ve been collecting the memories that make a house into a home - inviting friends over for dinner, sharing family meals around our dining table, hosting family members and friends when they come to visit, tending the plants and garden, planting a few new things, making a few home repairs, and just living day to day. By now I have multiple routes to familiar places. I’ve done enough wandering on the roads of the county to know where to buy honey from other bee keepers, buy berries directly from farm stands, find restaurants that serve the foods that we like, pick up straw for mulch in the garden, and a host of other items.

We are starting to get to know some of our neighbors. the couple in the house that is next to ours on the East we’ve gotten to know well enough to remember their names. We met in part because their cats came over to explore and visit and when they were looking for the cats and calling them we sometimes knew where they were. We know where the man works. He is a physical education teacher and coach at an elementary school in Bellingham and some of the children we know from church know and love him as a teacher. Coach John is one of the treasures of the school. But I can’t tell you what the woman does. I know she works away from the home, but I don’t know her job. They like to host small parties with a few friends. They will be away for much of the summer, and we expect we’ll get to know a son who will be stopping by to check on the place from time to time.

The neighbors to the west of our house are people about which we know almost nothing. We really see them out in their back yard and have never had a conversation with them. I can’t even tell you for sure how many people live in their house.

The folks to the north across our backyard fence smoke, but not in their house, so we see them on the back porch in all kinds of weather. The woman likes to speak on the phone when she is outside smoking and sometimes is loud enough for us to understand her side of the conversation. The man wears high visibility clothing to work and often comes out to the back yard in his work clothes. They have an adult son who either lives with them or comes over often. Their parties usually involve just a few others, but often are accompanied by loud music and lots of talking and the odor of marijuana, which is legal here.

Like us, the folks in one of the houses across the street from us moved here to be closer to grandchildren. They used to live in Casper, Wyoming, so know how to drive in the snow, a skill that is rare in this neighborhood. Then again, snow is rare, too. He works for the Washington State Ferry System. She works for a propane company. They have two grandchildren who visit often.

The widow down the street walks her dog at least a couple of times a day. We talk with her often and know her name. It hasn’t been long that she has been a widow and her grief is fresh, but she keeps her spirits up and is interested in others. I keep meaning to ask the name of her dog.

Around the corner live a mother and an adult son. They both work for an import/export business and know a lot of the towns in the US on the Canadian Border. They’ve both been to North Dakota in the winter and know where Grand Forks, the place where our daughter was born is. Her mother is a master gardener and has a greenhouse in Blaine where the daughter keeps her horse. We’ve been up there and we get our tomatoes and some other bedding plants from her. They are always high quality at very low costs.

The family across the street from them have a new baby. The baby’s name is Finn, but we don’t know the names of any of the others in the household, though we’ve had conversations with the parents and with the grandparents while walking around the neighborhood.

Another family down the street, next door to the widow, is Sikh. They hosted an elaborate wedding last summer and we enjoyed watching all of their guests come and go. We’ve visited with them and with their grandchildren, but we don’t know any names yet.

And across the street, next door to the folks with the Wyoming Cowboys bumper sticker on their truck, is another Sikh family. Their son is a good basketball player and used to play in the street with Coach John and with his friends. He graduated from high school last year, but continues to live at home. One of the products of this phase of his life is a newer car. He frequently has friends over to their house. Right now, however, the family is hosting relatives for a wedding. The house is decorated with lots and lots of lights. We think the basketball player has a sister who is the bride. We’ve seen her coming and going wearing a small veil. Like the other Sikh family down the street, they often host guests with British Columbia license plates and we think they, like many others, have relatives on both sides of the border. Just 20 miles away on the other side of the border is a very large Sikh community that hosted an event earlier this year that drew 60,000 people for a parade and community meal.

I wish we know our neighbors better. It would be really interesting to be invited to a Sikh wedding. We know that there are distinct ceremonies for introductions and the blending of two families. For some events they wear traditional dress and for others they wear western formal wear.

It is taking us time, but we are starting to feel at home in this place. I just wish we knew more of our neighbors. From what we can looking out our windows and walking around the neighborhood, they have interesting lives and will be fun to get to know.

When I kept my pilot’s license current, part of the process was having regular physical examinations by doctors who were certified flight surgeons. The examination was a bit more thorough than the annual wellness checks I now receive from my doctor. One part of a flight physical that I don’t remember having been administered in other exams is the color blindness test. My eye doctor does administer a simple color blindness test at each exam, but the tests from flight physicals involved several pages of images from which I read numbers to confirm that I was noticing the contrasts between various colors.

So far as I know, I don’t suffer from color blindness. I don’t know much about color blindness except that it is much more common for men to have some degree of color blindness than for women and I heard somewhere that the genes involved in color blindness are inherited from one’s mother. Some people have a degree of color blindness from birth. Others develop the condition as they age. Some diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis result in those who suffer developing color blindness. There are also some medications and drugs that have color blindness as a side effect.

While I don’t think I suffer from color blindness, I do sometimes hesitate when describing the colors I see, especially when asked to describe someone’s clothing. I do well with the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. I can identify black and white. But sometimes I hesitate over aqua or burgundy or goldenrod. I’m familiar with a basic twelve hue color wheel. There are, however, a lot of nuances between various colors and I sometimes don’t use all of the names that clothing manufacturers use.

I describe my perception as having a smaller color palate than some. I blame Crayola brand crayons.

When I went to first grade, the list of supplies we were to bring to the first day of school included a box of eight crayons. My parents followed those instructions to the letter. While quite a few of the other kids in my class had boxes that contained 16 crayons, I had only eight. I used all eight of them during the school year, but I didn’t bother to learn the names of the additional crayons that were in the boxes of my classmates. We all had Crayola brand crayons. I don’t think that the dime store in our town carried any other brand.

Later, when I was older and the school supply lists specified that we have 16 crayons, 16 is what my family got for me to take. One year, when I was old enough to participate in buying my own school supplies, I splurged on a box of 24 crayons. While I don’t think our family was impoverished, splurges were not all that common. My parents both came into their teenage years during the Great Depression. They were uncomfortable with unnecessary spending and taught us to be careful and purchasing a huge box of crayons was on the list of things that one did not need to do.

Perhaps I should explain that I entered first grade the same year as the Crayola company introduced the super box of 64 colors with a built in sharpener. Before that, the largest box of crayons available from the company had 48 crayons and was said to contain one of every color that a the company made. The announcement of the 64 color box included not only the announcement of new colors, but the elimination of some of the color names from the 48 color box. That box was a thing of beauty. 64 colors arranged in four rows of sixteen with each row higher than the one in front of it. There were dividers in the middle of each row creating eight definite sections of colors. And when a new box was opened the colors were not arranged in the order of the color wheel. There were yellows in several different sections, as well as reds and greens and blues. I know because Debbie B., who lived at the end of the same block as our home, brought a box of 64 to school on the first day of fifth grade, which she repeated. Before that she was a year ahead of me in school, but we caught up in the fifth grade. I never did get as tall as her. I never had as many crayons, either.



When our children went off to school, the standard box of crayons was 24, I think. Over the years the names of the colors in the 24 crayon box have changed. Cerulean has been one of them for as long as I can remember, but Bluetiful is a color in the new boxes that wasn’t in the ones of my childhood. New boxes of 24 have both Green Yellow and Yellow Green. I couldn’t identify the difference without the names on the crayon labels. I stumble with red and scarlet as well. For the record, I think dandelion and sunshine are the same color.

Yesterday I went to a craft store with our ten year old granddaughter and we paused at the display of crayon boxes. Oh my! We’ve moved on from 64 colors! They had the 64 color boxes. But they also had ones with 96 crayons, and others with 120 crayons, and even an “ultimate” box of 152 crayons. It looked to me like there were multiples of some colors, but I suspect that the Crayola company came up with 152 different names for the labels.



If she had asked me, I would have bought the 152 color box for our granddaughter. Those would have been used at home, however. These days the kids don’t bring crayons to school. They are supplied and all of the children have access to the same colors.

I haven’t kept up with Debbie B. I wonder if she has to pause when getting dressed in the morning to discern if salmon goes with burnt sienna, or if she can wear raw umber shoes with neutral gray slacks. Do you suppose she has both rose pink and brilliant rose lipstick?

As for me. I’m pretty much back to 16 crayons and that seems like enough colors for me to be happy.

About a year before I got married my great uncle sold me his car. He decided that it was time for him to quit driving and his six year old car was in excellent mechanical condition with very low mileage. The car was an Opel Kadett, a two-door sedan with a 1.2 liter inline four cylinder engine. The car was mechanically simple and very easy for owner performed maintenance. I could accomplish most needed routine maintenance with simple hand tools. Items like oil and fuel filters, spark plugs, rotor, cap, and wires were readily available. At the time General Motors was experimenting with the brand and many Buick dealers sold Opel cars and stocked their parts.

I am not a skilled mechanic, but I have some abilities. I have been collecting tools since my early teen years and at the time had a basic set of hand tools and enough skill to perform most needed tasks. There were several times, however, when I had trouble diagnosing problems and a couple of times where I missed maintenance issues. Once I failed to notice that a u-joint was loose and failing and it failed while driving on the freeway near Chicago. The car had to be towed and spent a couple of days at a gas station while the station’s mechanic ran down the necessary parts.

The most perplexing issue with the car was that it was prone to leaking water through the distributor cap when driving in rain. I eventually learned to dry out the cap and rotor and found an aerosol electric sealer that helped. There were several times, however, when I found myself trying to diagnose problems with the car while away from services.

I distinctly remember one time when I called my father from a pay phone in a small rural Montana town and asked him for advice. My car was broken and I was stranded and I was unsure of what to do. After talking to him for a while, he sadly told me that he couldn’t fix my car over the phone. I had to find someone who could come and look at the car and help me figure out a solution.

That line, “I can’t fix your car over the phone,” came to me many years later. I used it with both of our children when they were young adults and experienced mechanical problems with their cars. I loved the role of being a consultant to our children. I still treasure the phone calls when they ask my advice on a problem with a vehicle. I don’t have the answers to very many problems that occur with modern cars. Most mechanical diagnosis on modern vehicles requires a computer and a code reader. They also require a trained technician who knows how to interpret the computer codes to determine necessary repairs. I don’t do much of the maintenance on our vehicles these days. Outside of an oil change, replacing windshield wipers, and a few other minor fixes, my advice to our children is usually about who to call or where to take the vehicle for service.

Even though I can’t fix a car over the phone, and probably usually can’t fix a car if I am in the same place as the vehicle, it still feels good to me to get the call and be consulted. I hope it means that I have given good advice in the past and that I am trusted to help them find solutions to their problems. Fortunately for me, both of our children and their spouses are good at making decisions and have years of experience in solving their own problems. Most of the time these days they don’t need my advice. They just appreciate another point of view as they assess their options and choose their solutions.

I have been thinking of that line, “I can’t fix a car over the phone,” as I have read recent articles about Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. The pair are in no danger, but their visit to the International Space Station has been extended for more than a week because of issues with some of the thrusters of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that took them to the Station and was supposed to return them to the earth a week ago. After many delays, the Starliner was launched on June 5 despite there being a small leak of helium gas. Helium is used to push propellent to the thruster systems used for maneuvering in space and slowing down the ship to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. The leak was extremely small and it was determined that it would not affect the mission so the launch proceeded. During the mission further helium leaks developed. As the Starliner approached the space station, five of its 28 thrusters cut out. Four of them were restarted and the ship docked successfully with the station. The plan had been for Williams and Wilmore to make a brief visit to the station and to return to earth in eight days. Now, according to NASA the pair will remain with the seven astronauts already on board the space station until sometime in July while engineers on the earth work on solutions to the problems with their craft.

It isn’t exactly like me standing in a phone booth near a dusty gravel Montana road calling my phone, but it is a case of people with the skills to diagnose and repair problems being a long way from the vehicle that is in need of repair. The tools available to them are limited and for obvious reasons and abundance of caution is warranted. Complicating the decisions about return is that when the crew module returns to Earth it will jettison its service module to burn up in the upper atmosphere. The leaking thrusters and helium system will not return to earth with the crew and therefore can never be inspected in person by technicians who need to diagnose the problem and make necessary modifications to future launch vehicles. The delay in the return launch is in part to allow technicians to understand the problem so that malfunctioning components can be replaced on future flights of similar vehicles.

If there was an emergency, the Starliner would be used to safely return astronauts to Earth. For the time being, however, the well-provisioned space station will provide a safe place for the astronauts to stay while issues are resolved. After all it is a $4.2 billion vehicle. It should be possible to use it for reliable transportation. We’ll see if they can fix it long distance.

The Washington Post recently ran an article comparing how American households spent money in the 1970s and how households spend money today. Much of the analysis and the charts used to illustrate the article compared percentage of household spending in various categories. The report does not address how spending within a particular category has shifted. For example, spending on telephones and service has remained relatively steady around 3% of family spending. Fifty years ago, however, private ownership of telephones was very uncommon and the Internet was not yet a factor for private citizens. Today spending in that category has shifted to cell phones and internet access.

There were a few surprises for me in the article despite the fact that I have lived through all of the changes outlined. The span from the 1970’s to today is roughly the span of my adult life. I had forgotten that the typical US household used to spend more on clothing than health care. The increases in health care spending are interesting for several reasons.

Of course, one would expect my personal health care costs to increase as I age and the general aging of the population of the United States is likely a factor in the total spending, it is interesting to note that health care spending as a percentage of total household spending was generally static, even decreasing some years, prior to 2000. While spending on clothing has steadily decreased since the 1970s, health care costs declined slightly before beginning to trend upward in the 1980s, and then began to rise dramatically, peaking at the height of the pandemic before decreasing slightly since.

Another area that has shown consistent declines in percentage of household spending is food. The trend was basically downward until a slight uptick since the pandemic. I wonder if that uptick is primarily related to the cost of food delivery rather than actual grocery store prices, but that information was not available in the article I read.

I suspect that the primary driver in the decreased spending on food is technology. During the farm criss of the 1980’s it was clear to me that the number of people required to produce food was declining. Fewer farmers were producing more food at lower costs. This meant the death of many rural small towns as small farms became incorporated into larger farms. Larger farm equipment and other technological changes allowed fewer people to be more productive and literally cover more ground.

Technology has also been a major factor in health care. However, the increase in technology in health care has not resulted in lower overall costs. Automated billing and record keeping systems has not resulted in lower labor costs in health care. While many surgical procedures are less invasive and involve shorter hospital stays the costs of those procedures has continued to rise.

One surprise for me in the report was the decline in the cost of transportation as a percentage of household spending. There are definitely more cars per household these days. While families owning only one car were common in the 1970s, most households have at least two and many have three or more. In order for the numbers to come out the way they did in the report the cost per vehicle must have decreased despite the increases in fuel costs. This must have to do in part with the fact that people keep cars for longer periods of time. The cars of the 1970s rarely lasted a decade and major maintenance costs such as engine overhauls often cropped up around 50,000 miles. We now drive our cars to above 200,000 miles. There are a lot of cars that are more than 20 years old still going strong. The technology in cars has changed dramatically with computers.

Of course technology isn’t the only factor in the shifting numbers. There has been a shift in the makeup of households in the last 50 years. A major driver in the makeup of households is the dramatic rise in spending on housing. Young people are slower to create their own households. The number of retirees has increased steadily over the last 50 years. The study doesn’t have all of the information on family makeup, but I suspect that the average household is roughly the same size now as was the case in the 1970s but that the makeup is quite different. Families have fewer children but the children they have remain in the home for more years. More households have multiple generations as working families take on the care of elders in their homes. The cost of housing means it is harder for young adults to become independent and even middle aged adults remain dependent on the wealth of elders to cover housing costs.

On the topic of housing, I was surprised by a chart comparing renting to home ownership. As expected the cost of renting has remained higher than owning with a brief time prior to the collapse of the housing market in 2008 when renting and owning were almost the same. Since the great recession, however, rents have continued to rise dramatically while the total cost of home ownership has generally declined. Despite recent raises in interest levels, interest has generally been low in the 21st century so far.

A single article cannot begin to answer all of the nuances in questions about spending, but reading the article did spur some specific memories for me. Since we were married 51 years ago, I have personal experience with the time covered by the article. There are other trends over that time which may have affected costs, but without more data it is hard to say their impact. For example, we used to be careful to purchase clothing made in the United States, but that is nearly impossible in today’s markets. There is simply less clothing manufacturing in our country. And clothing is only one thing that we import at high levels. The number of recent immigrants we encounter in obtaining health care make it seem as if we import a lot of doctors, nurses and technicians from other countries. The number of imported automobiles continues to rise.

Certainly reading the article has not made me an expert, but it has inspired me to write a thousand words on the trends in household spending. I wouldn’t have done that 50 years ago.

I was twenty when we were married. Twenty years and one week to be precise. At the time I thought I was old enough and mature enough to make responsible decisions. As it turned out the decision to marry was one of the really great decisions of my life. I’m glad we were married. I’m glad we married when we did.

At twenty, I measured my life by landmark years. I got my driver’s license when I was 15. I soloed in an airplane when I was 16. I got my pilot’s license when I was 17. I continued to count landmark years for a while. I graduated from college when I was 21. I completed my doctorate when I was 25. I was ordained at 25. Our first child was born when I was 27. Of course, the year doesn’t reveal all of the details of my age. I got my driver’s license on my birthday. I was married one week after my birthday. I graduated from college and graduate school just before my birthday. Our son was born nine months after my birthday. These days I’m less precise my thinking about age. When asked, I often say, “I’m in my seventies.” Sometimes I’ll say, “I’m in my early seventies.” When we married, I was aware of the age difference between me and my wife. These days that difference seems meaningless. I feel like we are the same age. After all we are both at an age when we feel younger some days and older on other days.

I was thinking about the age of marriage recently because the law just changed in Washington where I live. As of June 5, no person under the age of 18 is allowed to marry in our state. Previously a 17-year-old could be married with parental consent, and anyone younger than 17 could be married with a judge’s permission.

In colonial America, English common law was the general practice until specific states enacted laws to modify it. Under those laws the minimum age as 12 years for females and 14 years for males. Marriage licenses were not required until 1753 in England and different states had different rules regarding marriage licenses in the early years of our nation’s organization. This system developed into different laws regarding marriage in individual states. Those laws are changing. Most states are moving to a uniform age for males and females and the general marriage age has been trending downward. The minimum age for Several New England States, Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota share the 18 year marriage age with Washington. The age is 17 in about 10 states. In a majority of the states 16 is the minimum age, though some require consent of a parent or a judge to marry at that age. In Kansas and Hawaii the minimum age is 15, while California, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Mississippi have no minimum age, though the general age for marriage without consent or court approval is 18 in all states except Nebraska, where it is 19 and Mississippi where it is 21. The details of other states isn’t something one has to keep in mind unless you are an officiating clergy person who crosses state lines.

During my career as a minister, I checked out the laws governing marriage to be sure that I was in compliance with state laws as an officiant. For example, Idaho required a clergy person to be registered in order to officiate at a wedding when we lived there. Idaho also had very lenient common law marriages. Couples who had jointly owned property but who had not gone through a marriage ceremony sometimes found out to their surprise that they were indeed legally married. I knew of one case where one member of a couple had to obtain a divorce in order to get a license for what he had though was his first marriage.

When we lived in South Dakota the law was changed to make it a misdemeanor for a clergy person to perform a wedding ceremony if there was not a legal license from the state present. The law was enacted in an attempt to prevent clergy from performing marriage ceremonies for same gender marriages, but a few clergy persons received fines for signing marriage licenses with expired dates or for returning a license to the Register of Deeds late. A license becomes void after 90 days in South Dakota and the executed license must be filed within 10 days for the marriage to be valid. I don’t believe that the South Dakota law had any effect on clergy who performed marriages for gay couples. That became moot once the Supreme Court declared equal access to marriage for all couples.

I once officiated at a wedding in Oregon at which a Washington license was presented. Since I was unaware of the legality of such an action, the couple, witnesses, and I drove across the state line and executed the license, marking the place of marriage in Washington rather than Oregon where the ceremony had taken place.

I learned early on in my career to have a routine for executing a marriage license properly. In some states the couple has to sign on the day of the ceremony. In others the couple does not sign, only the officiant and the witnesses. I learned that it is easier to specify exactly when and where the license will be signed after the ceremony to avoid having to run down a witness in the middle of a reception. Different states have different age requirements for witnesses to ceremonies. Some states have waiting periods after the license is issued before it can be executed, sometimes called a waiting period.

Some of my clergy friends see the church ceremony and the civil ceremony as completely separate and do not sign civil licenses, requiring couples to have a civil ceremony in addition to the church service.

I don’t know exactly what the laws should be, but there have been some important national conversations about marriage including overturning laws attempting to prevent miscegenation and gay marriage.

In our case, however, I’m glad that we were able to obtain a license to marry when I was 20. It seems to have worked out wonderfully well. Besides, we lived together and owned joint property in Idaho for a decade, so I’m certain we’d be legally married anyway.

We had the fun of attending a high school graduation party yesterday. The party reminded me of so many we have attended over the years. In the home of the host family there was a photo display. The dining room table was filled with all kinds of delicious foods. There were lots of people visiting. Since the weather was lovely, much of the activity was out on the back deck which overlooked the back yard. The house is built on a hillside with a daylight basement so the deck is above the yard. On the deck most of the people were friends of the parents. We were among the oldest in attendance, but there were others our age around. The mother of the graduate was surrounded by co-workers and other friends. In the kitchen, I ran into the older brother of the graduate with a small cluster of people his age and caught up a bit on how things are going with him. I am a fairly regular customer of the place where he works, so I see him from time to time when I do business there.

As I commented to several folk, the real party was going down in the back yard. The graduate was surrounded by a cluster of high school students and recent graduates, visiting and enjoying one another’s company. There were a few games set up and friendly competitions were being held. The students were enjoying a few snacks, but in general didn’t seem to be eating as much as the adults. The focus of their party was the joy of being together. It was a delight to witness when I was up on the deck, and a wonder when I went down and talked with the youth.

Over the years we have been to a lot of graduation parties. There were some years when we went from one to the next in rapid succession trying to squeeze in as many as possible and deliver congratulations to all of the graduates who were our friends. Sometimes the graduates were people we had known all of their lives. One of the joys of serving a long-term pastorate is that you get to see babies born grow up into delightful young adults.

This party, however, was a bit different. First of all we have only known the graduate and her family for three years. We are newcomers to this community. Fortunately for us, we have become fast friends with a few folks. The party wasn’t our first visit to their home. Still it is a bit different as we have known this young woman only as a high school student. She is a delightful young woman and we really enjoyed working with her as she volunteered in our church’s faith formation program.

As we have aged, we have moved from the generation of the graduates to the generation of the parents of the graduates and now are the generation of the grandparents of the graduates. Each step puts us into different portions of the community. I’m pretty sure that the youth in the back yard think of me, if they remember my visit at all, as an old man. I don’t mind. I’m accepting that image more and more these days. When I was a student, I generally thought of people the age I now am as old folks. I like being a grandpa.

What struck me, and what I have been mulling since the party, is how few people from our church were in attendance. There were a few, but I expected a few more to be present. When we were in the active portions of our careers we would generally find a large support crowd of church members at graduation parties. We worked very hard to make our churches safe places for young people and centers of supportive community. By the time youth reached high school graduation there was a community of people invested in that person’s success who celebrated with them and their parents. We knew that there were many challenges ahead. Navigating the route to college, military, or other post-graduate experiences, managing the separation from family of origin, exploring relationships and forming intimacies, figuring out a career path and finding the resources to pursue that path - all of these things are difficult life challenges with significant risk and we know that the graduates and their families will need plenty of support in the years to come.

These graduates, however, are post-Covid graduates. They had their high school careers interrupted by Covid. Most of them have already experienced a year of remote learning and have had to take increased responsibility for their own education. They have had to be isolated from their peers much more than was the case of those who graduate from college before the pandemic. Generational theorists often comment, “who you are today is in part where you were when,” referring to the way significant historical events shape the lives of people. Just as we baby boomers educations were shaped by the Cold War, these student’s educations have been shaped by Covid.

In their world, the center of community has shifted significantly. Not only did they have separation from the usual community of school during their high school years, they also experienced separation from the community of the church. I don’t know the stories of the youth with whom I visited in the backyard yesterday, but I’m fairly confident that most of them not only didn’t grow up in the church, at least some of them have parents who didn’t grow up in the church. The struggle for them to find safe space and the support of genuine, long-term community is real.

In the card we left with a small gift for the graduate I wrote that I feel proud even though I have no right to pride. The accomplishments belong to the graduate and her family. I did nothing to contribute to her success. Still, I feel deeply moved by being included in the circle of community that gathered to celebrate her graduation.

May we continue to create safe spaces and supportive community for our youth. As an old man I see the deep value of offering our unconditional support and genuine community to them. They will continue to amaze us with their intelligence, grace, and energy.

My grandson and I have been working to repair a fence at their farm. The fence is around the orchard and is not part of the system of fences that keep livestock in their pastures. This fence is primarily ornamental. It shows off the farm to those driving by on the road. It also marks the boundary of the yard for the youngest child in their family. The fence is now nearly complete. We are at the stage of painting. Although the old fence was white, we are painting our repaired fence red.

When it comes to painting fences, things have changed quite a bit since I was the age of our grandson. And they have changed even more since my father was his age. Other things, however, haven’t changed. I work with our grandson primarily because it is a fun thing to do. Working side by side gives me an opportunity to tell him some of our family stories and maybe even to teach him a thing or two about life.

Yesterday’s chore was pretty simple. We have designed the fence so that the picketed portions are in sections that can be lifted from brackets on the fence posts. We remove the sections and lay them on a tarp on the ground to paint them. This allows us to return them to places next to plants without getting paint on the plants. The section where we are currently working has a lot of lilacs on one side of the fence. On Friday, I had painted two sections of the fence on the ground and our job yesterday was to lift those sections back into place. The job took less than five minutes.

I had carefully warned our grandson that there might be some places on the panels where the paint might not be fully dried and suggested that he might want to wear gloves. What I didn’t count on was that he might maneuver the panel into place by pushing against it with his body. The result was red paint on his orange shirt. Fortunately for us, the paint is latex and I was able to clean the paint out of the shirt. He also had to wash some paint off of his hands.

The lesson I learned is that we really can’t do any projects involving paint with him unless he is wearing his painting clothes.

We are fortunate, however, one of the changes from my youth is that fences and barns are now painted with latex paint. Cleanup is with soap and water. When I was his age most exterior paints were oil based and required paint thinner for clean up. Clothing that came into contact with paint usually was permanently stained.

The experience prompted me to tell a story about my father, his grandfather, when he was a teen. My dad grew up in a family with five boys. There were a lot of stories about all of the boys, many of which involved some kind of adventures with the youngest, whose name was George. My grandmother often called him Georgie, but I don’t think he favored that appellation.

The boys were charged with the job of painting the windmill. As was common on farms and ranches of the day, the exterior of all of the farm buildings were either red or white. Barn paint was less expensive than other colors. The windmill was to be painted red. Painting it involved climbing it. There was a ladder built into the tower, but getting the entire tower painted meant climbing on the structure away from the ladder. Rather than try to lift the entire five gallon paint pail, the boys were dipping about a half gallon of paint into another bucket and painting from that bucket. Carrying the paint up the tower was time consuming so they came up with the plan of rigging a rope so that a person on the ground could pull the rope and the bucket would rise to the one on the tower with the paintbrush. Georgie was elected to be the one on the ground pulling the rope.

The rope was rigged and the bucket was tied to the end. George pulled and it rose toward his older brothers. He looked up at it as it rose. When the bucket was just a bit too low for my father to reach it, the lip of the bucket struck a cross bar on the tower, tipping the bucket. The result was that Georgie’s face and shoulders were painted red. Although they scrubbed Georgie, there was still paint visible in his hair for at least a week.

I suspect that the story became exaggerated in the years of telling. I heard both my father’s and my grandmother’s versions of the story. My grandmother’s version had Georgie as an innocent victim who was simply following orders from older brothers. My father reported that Georgie was careless and didn’t listen to advice from his older brothers.

I think the story came out when I was about the age that my grandson is now after I had ruined a nearly new pair of jeans by choosing the wrong clothing to wear when painting an out building at our place. I had been sure that there was no way I would get paint on my pants, but I had been wrong. I didn’t get into much trouble for my mistake, but I did have to listen to the story about Georgie a few times. I guess it was a cautionary tale not to mess with paint.

My grandson got the same treatment yesterday. He wasn’t scolded for his carelessness, but he did have to endure listening to me tell a story that I think he had previously been told.

In the end the windmill tower got painted. The boys grew up. Life went on. The prognosis is good for similar results at our son’s place. The fence will get painted. The boy will grow up. Life will go on.

I won’t be there to hear it, but one day our grandson will tell the story of painting the windmill to someone, perhaps to his children. The concept of paint that won’t scrub off might be foreign to them. Maybe painting with a brush and a pail will be obsolete. I’m sure I can’t imagine all of the details of the lives they will live. The story, however, will likely continue to be told for generations to come.

According to the website of Hallmark greeting cards, the theme of a 51st wedding anniversary is photos/cameras. I was thinking of family photographs before I looked up the list of traditional anniversary gifts because as part of the celebration of our 50th wedding anniversary a year ago we had a friend who is a professional photographer take pictures of our family. There are several prints of the photos taken last year on the wall in our family room. Another photo on that wall, though not taken by our professional photographer friend, is a picture of our five grandchildren lying on the floor with their heads together fanned out in a circle. That pose has been a tradition that began when our fourth grandchild was a baby, I asked our children to be sure to take a picture each time all of our grandchildren are together. When that first picture was taken, we lived in South Dakota. We had three grandchildren in Washington and our fourth lived in Japan. When the four were together we couldn’t be with them so getting pictures was important to me. I loved that picture so much that it has become a tradition to get a picture of our grandchildren lying on their backs on the floor each time they are together. Last year’s picture seems a bit dated. The children change so quickly.

In just over a week, we will have all of our grandchildren together when our daughter and grandson come from South Carolina for a visit. You can be sure that getting a picture will be one of my priorities for the visit. And the new photo will take its place in the frame on our family room wall which now has several layers of photos of grandchildren.

And, although today is the actual day of our 51st wedding anniversary, after 51 years we’ve learned that the celebration doesn’t have to be on the exact day. Last year we celebrated a week early because our daughter’s husband’s parents’ anniversary is the day after ours and they wanted to have their family at both celebrations. By having our celebration a week early we allowed for a more leisurely pace for their travels with our celebration in Washington state and theirs in Washington, DC.

Round numbers, especially even decades, seem to get more attention than other anniversaries. Planning a big party for our 50th seemed important. Somehow 50 is a significant milestone. We had a fun family gathering for our 40th anniversary. But we haven’t made too big of a deal about other anniversaries, usually celebrating by a dinner out and some special time to express our gratitude to each other.

On this, our 51st anniversary, I am filled with gratitude. We have been granted more years of marriage and friendship than many other couples get. There is deep joy in waking up next to my best friend. We’ve been through enough to know that life is fragile and that we have been very lucky in life and health and family.

In some ways, I don’t have much to say about 51 years except that they have been good. I feel like the most fortunate person in the world.

For those interested in numerology, I will note that 51 is three times 17.

Back in 1990 when we had been married 17 years, we were half way through our decade of living in Boise, Idaho. I was focused on the upcoming waterspouts camp for high school youth that was coming. There were sail boats and wind surf boards and canoes to line up and get ready. There were plans for a river raft trip that had to be finalized. I was still recruiting staff for the camp. It took a lot of volunteers including water safety and boating instructors, an EMT certified to teach CPR, a chaplain, cabin counselors, arts and music leaders and more. Our children at 6 and 9 weren’t yet old enough for that camp, but camping was definitely on our agenda for the summer.

In 2007, when we had been married two times seventeen years, we had been serving the congregation in Rapid City for 12 years, matching the longest pastorate in the history of the church. Our children were 23 and 26 and we were planning a trip to Hartford, Connecticut for the 50th anniversary synod of the United Church of Christ. The meeting was quite a celebration. One member of our church, Barak Obama, was running for President of the United States and addressed the Synod. We also heard speeches by Bill Moyers, a UCC member who was a White House Press Secretary and UCC member Charles Townes, one of the inventors of the laser. We drove from Rapid City to that meeting which got our camper to the northeast where we were able to vacation after the synod, driving north to New Brunswick after visiting friends in New Hampshire and Maine. Then we drove back home across Canada camping all the way.

And now we have been married for three times seventeen years. We don’t have any big trips on the horizon for this year, but are planning to travel to South Carolina in the fall.

Today will be pretty low key for us. Our son and four of our grandchildren will be coming to our house for dinner this evening. We’ll have our anniversary dinner one day next week. We’ve even reached the age where we may have our special dinner as a special lunch. We haven’t got all of our plans in place yet. Getting ready for our daughter and grandson to visit will be high on our agenda for the next week.

Still, fifty one years is worthy of recognition and celebration. When we were first married, I was not able to envision what 51 years would feel like. I know I had no idea how quickly the years would pass. What I did know is that I was deeply in love with Susan and ready to make a lifelong commitment of that love. It was the right commitment for us to make. The promises of that day have been central to our lives. How fortunate we are to have made them.

Our homeowner’s association is responsible for maintenance of several common areas in our neighborhood. There are a few empty lots that perhaps will be developed into parks some day, but now are simply mowed during the summer. There are some other common areas that are left completely natural. And there is a settling pond. Rainwater that falls onto driveways and streets runs into a storm sewer system that empties into the pond. When the pond is full the overflow runs down a ditch to a place where it flows into Terrill Creek about a half mile from where Terrill Creek flows into the Salish Sea. The settling pond is fenced. The area outside the settling pond is kept mowed by the same crews that mow other common areas. Last year the area inside the fence was trimmed from time to time by crews using string trimmers. This year, however, the area inside the fence is being maintained by rental goats.

When we went on our walk yesterday there were a trailer load of goats eating their way around the area between the pond and the fence. The trailer was backed up to the gate and the owners of the goats were standing by as the animals fed. When we saw them I expected that the goats might be left inside the fence overnight or even for a couple of days. However, by the time we returned from our walk to the beach the goats had all been loaded up and taken away. I don’t know the plan for the goats. Maybe the goats only work a few hours each day and are taken home at night. Perhaps the fence is insufficient to keep the goats corralled and they need human supervision when in the area. Maybe the goats ate the amount deemed necessary for yesterday and will return at a later date as the grass and weeds grow in the area.

What was fun about the goats was that our neighborhood not only got weed control from the goat rental, we also got entertainment. When the goats were in the enclosure, children from the neighborhood lined up along the fence to see the goats. A few managed to get a short pet of a goat by putting their hands between the bars of the fence. Some of us who are older were entertained by watching the human kids interact with the goat kids. From my point of view, it seemed a lot more fun than the noisy, smoky weed eaters that the crew ran in the area last year. I’m curious if and when the goats will return.

With apologies to Stephen Colbert, I’m imitating his comedy bit for a series of short vignettes.

Meanwhile, the choir at our church put together a small gift for our Minister of Music who is leaving our church as her family is moving to Oregon. Since she loves chocolate, we put together a basket of specialty chocolate bars for her. Each choir member brought one or two bars to contribute to the basket. When I heard of the idea, my first thought was to get a few truffles from the C-Shop, a family business just down the street from our house near the beach. They make their own candy and sell it along with ice cream, snow cones, popcorn and other treats all summer long. I also thought of a shop in Mount Vernon, were we lived for a year before moving up to Birch Bay. Forté Chocolate is an award-winning artisan chocolate company overseen by Master Chocolatier Karen Neugebauer. They have a retail store in Bellingham as well. From another choir member I learned of Seattle Chocolate Company, a woman-owned and run company in the Pacific Northwest. From yet another choir member, I found out that a Bellingham chocolate factory is now the largest chocolate maker in the Pacific Northwest. K’UL Chocolate produced more than 300,000 pounds of chocolate chips last year and is set to produce even more this year. K’UL is Mayan for “the energy and interconnectivity between all living things.” That’s a mouthful for one word. Their specialty dark chocolate bars are also a mouthful from what I hear. Who knew there would be so many specialty chocolate shops in the Pacific Northwest or that so much chocolate would be produced here?

Meanwhile the berries are starting to come on in our part of the country. Strawberries and cherries are already available at area fruit stands and the you-pick strawberry fields are available. The cherries on our tree aren’t quite ripe and I’m having a bit of a contest with a crow who insists on stealing cherries before they ripen. Our tree produces enough to share, but I guess I’m a bit greedy and I wish the crow would at least allow the cherries to ripen. A few ripe cherries have been picked and they are sweeter and more wonderful than the ones from the freezer. Last year’s cherry harvest produced enough to last us all winter long. We’ve still got at least one big bag of cherries in the freezer. At the farm the blueberries are starting to turn color a sure sign that we’ll be picking them soon. Like cherries, blueberries freeze wonderfully, providing good eating all year round. Blackberries are late season fruit here and will ripen with the raspberries in August and many stretch into September. The blackberries however are blooming and providing a good source of pollen and nectar for the honey bees.

Meanwhile I have two colonies of bees that are going great guns and don’t need to be fed. They are sending out plenty of forager bees and I’ve already added honey supers to their hives. It is looking like it will be a good year for honey. I also have two new colonies that are struggling to get established. I have them in another area of the farm, on the other side of the barn and am still feeding them. They are going through a quart of syrup for each colony each day right now, so I’m assuming that they are producing brood and soon will have larger numbers of foragers bringing nectar and pollen back to the hive. A honey bee will produce a teaspoon or less in its lifetime, so it takes a lot of bees for the gallons of honey we harvest each year.

Of course there are a lot of other things going on meanwhile, but some stories will wait for future editions of my journal.

Over the years, some of my friends have taken mild offense at the fact that I’m not a big television watcher. When we lived in North Dakota the fact that we didn’t have a television set bothered some of our friends enough that they gave us a used set. The parsonage where we lived had recently gotten new siding and It was decided to wire the house for cable television when the siding was off of the house. The congregation paid for the utilities in the house and added cable television to the included utilities. I actually got into watching television on a fairly regular basis during that time period. I would get up with our infant daughter, change and feed her and often she would be slow to go back to sleep. I’d turn on the television and watch reruns of M*A*S*H. I don’t think anyone was offended. They just thought that I was conservative about spending money and the gift of the television set was a genuine show of support for their pastor. I suspect that the pastor who followed us in that parsonage appreciated the cable connection as well.

We bought our first television set when our children were in elementary school. There was a Christmas when a new television set and a VCR were among the gifts from Santa. I got so confused and overwhelmed shopping for that television that I walked out of one store that had dozens of models on display, all showing pictures at the same time. I don’t remember exactly how we narrowed the decision down to a single set, but we found one inside of our budget. We put it in a basement family room. It moved with us to Rapid City where we could get several channels with the antenna in the rafters of our garage. I got into the habit of watching the Red Green Show on Public Television on a fairly regular basis.

After our children grew up and moved out of the house the television wore out and replacing it wasn’t a priority for us. In the meantime how people consume television has changed quite a bit. Although we don’t have a television set, we have a computer monitor that is as big as the televisions we have owned, though not as large as the televisions hanging on the walls in many of the homes of friends. We can stream movies and watch programs on our computer, so it isn’t as if we don’t have a television at all.

A few years ago, when we were still living in Rapid City, a friend commented to me that he was a bit intimidated by the fact that I reported to not have a television. He had worked hard to develop a home theater with a large screen television and a high quality sound system and he said that it felt as if I were judging his love of television and movies to be somewhat inferior to my preference for reading books. I don’t remember ever thinking of television as a moral mark for other people. We were careful in what television we allowed our children to watch when they were growing up, but after they got to the age where they were making their own decisions about television I didn’t see anything particularly unique about not making television a priority.

I have, however, noticed that there are some settings where I don’t appreciate television. Restaurants that have multiple televisions tuned to multiple programs are places where I try to sit so that I cannot see the televisions. They are distracting to me and I’d prefer not to see whatever sports events are being displayed. I also have a dislike of nursing homes and care centers where the televisions are constantly turned on. For a while the constant presence of televisions in all sorts of medical environments was distracting for me. Televisions in waiting rooms, however, seem to be going out of favor. People watch what they want on their portable devices. There was a time when every doctor and dentist’s office had a television in the waiting room, but that seems to have passed. Televisions in care centers, however, seem to continue to be omnipresent.

When I was regularly visiting in care centers, I would occasionally turn off the televisions in the common areas. Other times, I’d turn down the volume so that we could visit without shouting. I also would often change the channel if I could find the remote controls. A constant stream of Fox news doesn’t help someone with cognitive decline to discern reality from fiction.

Even worse than the news, in my opinion, was the practice of leaving the television set tuned to the weather channel. The weather channel can almost always find some weather emergency or disaster to cover and if there isn’t a storm currently battering a place where they have reporters, they will play footage from past storms. I don’t know how many times I have concluded a visit to someone in a nursing home and they warn me about going out in the storm when there is no storm in the place I was visiting. Persons living in nursing homes often think that what they see on the television is happening in their location.

For example, Hurricane Alberto is approaching the coast of Mexico bringing heavy rains, coastal flooding, and gusty winds along the coasts of northeastern Mexico and Texas. A heat dome is bringing record temperatures to New England. And here in the Pacific Northwest we are enjoying a few days of pleasant early summer weather.

Alberto, however, tips me off to something about this year’s hurricane season. Hurricanes are named to avoid confusion if multiple storms occur simultaneously. The name lists are recycled every six years with a few changes if a storm is particularly strong or damaging. For example Katrina was removed from lists after the 2005 hurricane and Harvey was retired in 2017. Alberto signals the only list in the series with the name of one of our immediate family members. In Alberto years, Isaac is on the list and most years there are enough storms to get past I. This year is forecast to have a high number of storms, perhaps enough to move from English to Greek names after going through the entire alphabet. So storm Isaac is coming.

I don’t need a television or the weather channel to know this. I read it on the website of our local newspaper. And the last time a hurricane made landfall around here was extratropical cyclone Freda in 1962. The water off of our coast is just too cold to spawn hurricanes and those that blow north from warmer waters rarely make landfall because of our colder waters. Furthermore, Isaac is on the Atlantic list, not the Pacific list, so we won’t be seeing the storm with our son’s name around here. Instead, we get the real person which is a lot more fun.

Technically today is the last day of Spring. Summer arrives with the solstice tomorrow. I don’t know if it is a product of age, or of living in a place that has its share of cold and wet weather in the spring, but I find myself looking forward to some warmer days. Last Sunday the woman presenting the time with children in our worship service did a good job of getting the children and the rest of us to think about some false dichotomies. That is a difficult concept for people of all ages. She polled us about our preferences: Chocolate or Vanilla? Dogs or Cats? Already I was having trouble deciding which way to “vote.” I like chocolate and I like vanilla. I like dogs and I like cats. When she got to “summer or winter” I began to think, “This is unfair. What about people who prefer spring or fall? What if you like both summer and winter equally?” The choice that stymied the children, and most of the rest of the congregation for that matter was “Brussels sprouts or okra?” Most of the kids in our Pacific Northwest location didn’t know what okra was and many of them didn’t know what Brussels sprouts are either. Even when the presenter described them, they sounded similar and unappealing.

Then she asked, “hitting or not hitting?” The children all went for not hitting. And she said, “It depends, doesn’t it? In baseball, hitting is a good thing.”

That, of course, was the point of the entire presentation. Things aren’t always as simple as they appear. It was one of those Sundays, and there are a lot of them, when the time with children made a more lasting impression than the sermon. the sermon was rambling and unfocused and, in my opinion, never got to the point.

All of which is to say that although I am looking forward to summer this year. I’m hoping for a few days of sunshine. Even though I’m still healing up from a round of treatment for pre-cancers on my hands and face and I have to be slathered in sun screen and under a floppy hat or a sun hood, I’m ready for some sunny days. The tomatoes and peppers and sunflowers and dahlias in my garden agree. They are all showing signs of needing just a bit more sun.

Summer begins with a joyous celebration for me. Saturday will be our 51st wedding anniversary. When we were married one of my friends ribbed me about choosing the shortest night of the year for our wedding and I responded by saying, “When we are married every night will be too short.” Little did I know at the time that all it takes for every night to be too short is to have an infant in the household. A couple of kids seemed to add up to a couple of decades of feeling short of sleep regardless of the season of the year.

In celebration of the coming of summer, it seems appropriate to expand my vocabulary a bit since there is a bit of a heliophile in everyone. A heliophile is one attracted or adapted to sunlight. Even though the spell checker in my word processor doesn’t know it, the word is in the dictionary. In marine biology heliophile is used to describe aquatic alga specifically adapted to attain maximum exposure to sunlight. I guess that contemporary understanding of the dangers of skin cancer might discourage people from being heliophiles, perhaps we might apricate a bit. Technically apricate simply means to expose to sunlight, but it can be used to describe basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays. The word, however doesn’t appear in Webster’s Dictionary. I had to go to the Oxford English Edition to check the spelling as it is another that my word processor doesn’t know. While in the OED, I discovered another form of the word, apricity, which refers to the joy of the sun on a winter’s day. That seems like a really good word to have in my vocabulary as it is a sensation that I have often appreciated and the phrase “appreciate apricity” rolls off the tongue in a most pleasant manner.

Wandering around the Oxford English Dictionary, of course, gives me an opportunity to find some other words that aren’t normally in my vocabulary and that confound my computer’s spell checker. I like new words for both of those reasons. While I may not technically be a heliophile, I approach the word with philocaly, which is the love of beauty. It is how I feel about the dahlia blossoms and the seashore and the mountains and the people in my life. Philocaly rescues me from mubble fubbles or a state of depression or melancholy, despondency and low spirits. That is a new term for me. I don’t think I’ve ever before used it. That may be because I am not prone to mubble fubbles. It is, however, a good term to apply to those days when everything seems to be going wrong. I guess I can just say that I got up on the wrong side of the bed, but that is nearly impossible. I don’t sleep alone and haven’t done so for 51 years. It is simply easier to get up on the “right” side of the bed and really awkward to get up on the “wrong” side of the bed. I don’t know if we could sleep if we switched sides. We’ve simply never done so and I see no reason to begin now.

The dictionary, however, doesn’t lead you to all of the fun words for summer or any other season. Scandinavians know how to grueglede or “dread something happily.” They are not locked into binary choices, I guess. Brits spend time gongoozling: “staring idly and protractedly at something.” I suppose that you might do that if you are experiencing kalopsia when things look more beautiful than they are.

As spring concludes and summer begins, I am feeling philocaly: taking pleasure in the small joys of life. Typing silly words is just the beginning. May your summer be filled with joy.

The year that we were married, an Arab oil embargo sent energy prices soaring around the world. There was a shortage of refined gasoline at pumps here in the United States and lines began to form at stations as people waited for an opportunity to purchase without regard to price. We had a small car in those days, an Opel Kadette. The gas tank on that car held 40 liters - about 10 1/2 U.S. gallons. I remember commenting to whoever would listen that our car wouldn’t hold $5 worth of gas. A year later the price of gas had shot up from 39 cents a gallon to a whopping 53. At over 50 cents a gallon, the car would technically hold more than $5 of gas, but if we ran it that low, we would have been out of gas, so fill-ups were still less than $5. I used to try to have $20 in my wallet when we started a trip from Montana to Chicago or back home again just in case we encountered a situation where we needed gas and couldn’t find a station that would accept our credit card. We only had one credit card in those days and it was accepted only at Mobile stations and we couldn’t always count on finding a Mobile station when we needed gas.

All of that sound a bit dramatic if you don’t remember that there has been general inflation and the price of everything along with people’s incomes has gone up significantly. Corrected for inflation, the 1974 price of gas would be about $3.19 per gallon, compared with $3.69, which is the price of a gallon of regular at the gas station where we usually buy our fuel these days.

A few years after we graduated from seminary and had traded for a slightly larger car. Our Ford Pinto had a 13 gallon gas tank and the price of gas went above $1 per gallon for the first time in our lives. Corrected for inflation, the 1980 price of $1.19 after the Iran-Iraq war began, would be about $4.25 in today’s prices.

The bottom line is that over the span of our careers, the price of energy has been about the same percentage of our income, with spikes early in our career and again about ten years before we retired. The debate over the price of fuel and fears over the world’s dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, however, have dominated a lot of our conversations over those years.

Back in our seminary days, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter made an address to the nation about the energy crisis. The impact of rising energy costs had driven inflation to keep rising and President Carter called the energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” He called on all Americans to conserve energy. The Carter energy policy focused on conservation, efficiency, and domestic technologies to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

One of our beloved teachers at the time told our class a story of a personal experience he had that opened my eyes to how I thought about aging. Our professor reported that he had been out of town visiting his mother. She had the thermostat in her apartment turned down during his visit and he was cold, so he asked her to turn up the temperature. She refused, saying that she had listened to the President’s speech and the President had recommended lower thermostat settings. Our professor argued to his mother that the President had specifically exempted senior citizens from the request to turn down thermostats to which his mother replied, “If you think I’m less patriotic because of my age, young man, you’ve still got a lot to learn.”

The thing that opened my eyes in the story was our professor reporting that his mother had called him “young man.” We knew our professor was 74 years old. He taught a class for seminary students titled, “Spirit in the Aging Years.” We assumed that he was qualified to teach the class because of his own personal age. After all, I was 50 years younger than he. He seemed almost impossibly old to me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be the age of his mother - 94 years.

These days I’m starting to narrow in on the age of our professor. I just turned 71. I’m starting to think about the impact of age on my life and my relationships with others. These days it is not at all uncommon for me to be one of the oldest persons in a group. I serve on committees where I am the oldest member. In fact, I serve on some groups where my age is probably the reason they invited me to participate. I’m the token old person invited to demonstrate a diversity of ages. Whereas our professor has always seemed wise to me, I don’t feel particularly wise myself. I have learned that older isn’t always wiser.

Those thoughts came to me yesterday as I struggled to write a poem. It wasn’t coming together and I was facing a deadline. I belong to a poetry group where we are challenged to write poems and I was expected to have a poem to share at last night’s meeting. Somewhere in my struggles, I remembered that same professor once saying bluntly to me, “One day, young man, you will write poetry.” I imagine he was using the same tone of voice his mother used with him when they argued over the thermostat. Yesterday, however, I decided that I am only 71 and he was 74 so I should have 3 more years to learn to write a poem. It feels like it could easily take longer than that. Although my teacher was a wise man, his prediction about me and poetry may have been wrong. And if I am not yet wise enough to write a decent poem, I wonder what other areas of wisdom I lack.

At this rate, I guess I should be hoping to make it to the age of our professor’s mother. In another 20 years or so, I’m pretty sure that I won’t be driving a car that uses gasoline and the price of gas won’t be a concern of mine. I may not have become any wiser, but sometimes problems go away even without my wisdom.

As for poetry, only time will tell.

I like to think of myself has having a good sense of humor. I’m proud of the times when jokes written into my journal entries make others laugh. I tried hard to use humor appropriately in my preaching. As a pastor, I recognized that it took congregations a while to get to know me and to learn to relax and laugh in worship. My first attempts at humor when serving a congregation that does not know me well usually fall short. I say something that I think is funny, but when I look at the congregation, I don’t see the smiles and laughter that I imagine I might.

The change in a congregation can take place pretty quickly. I’ve only preached at Lummi Island Congregational Church three times, but the folks there are already starting to appreciate my sense of humor and learning to tel when I am joking and when I am serious.

During our years in the ministry before retirement we made several attempts at holy humor services. The tradition of celebrating humor during Eastertide is an ancient one, begun by early Greek Christians. “Bright Sunday” also known as “Holy Humor Sunday” is usually celebrated the week following Easter Sunday. Parties and picnics were planned to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. One year a particularly successful attempt included planning the entire worship service backward, starting with a benediction and concluding with a call to worship. I entered the sanctuary by walking backwards up the aisle. It was a lot of fun planning and executing the service and the congregation appreciated it. There were quite a few laughs during a service that took a few members of the congregation by surprise.

Many people think of religion as pretty grim. They may have memories of being told to be quiet during worship as a child, or of funeral services when the community shared deep grief, or of being bored during worship that was filled with a lot of talking and not much action. On many occasions I have noticed a room go quiet when I entered as people think about what is and is not appropriate to say in front of a minister. My uncle used to joke with me that he needed me to go out of earshot for him to start his chainsaw. The process required him to say words that he could not say in front of a minister. I never told him that I’ve hear all of those words said by ministers.

I thought that I might come up with some good jokes for my journal about last Friday’s meeting between Pope Francis and over 100 comedians. Of course the pope has the ability to draw crowds. If I were to invite the hosts of late night talk shows and stand-up comedians to come to a meeting with me, I doubt if any would bother to come. But Pope Francis got a pretty good turn out. 107 comics and humorists from 15 countries participated in the meeting. There were some big names: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Jim Gaffigan, Chris Rock, Tig Notaro, Mike Birbiglia, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kathleen Madigan, and Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi prompted plenty of laughter and cheer from me with her roles in the Sister Act movies. She has participated in worship at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and has been in the congregation several times when Jeremiah Wright was preaching. I used to wonder what it might be like to have such a famous person in the congregation. I imagine it could be a significant distraction for a preacher.

Of course addressing a crowd of 107 comics would be daunting for any preacher. According to the reports I have read the pope made several attempts at humor including making a silly gesture placing his thumb on his head and wiggling his fingers. I guess you had to be there to see the humor in it, but at least one article I read said that it got a laugh from the comedians. Making a room full of comedians laugh has got to be a good feeling for any public speaker.

Were I pope, I think I would have been tempted to also invite a rabbi to the meeting just to prompt a few “a priest and a rabbi walked into a bar” jokes. Then again, I’m not the pope and the pope probably doesn’t see see as a source of humor. I never received an invitation to attend the meeting. And the pope has never invited me to write any of his material. He seems to be doing all right without me.
The meeting ended with the prayer for good humor. It is a good prayer and Pope Frances says he has prayed it daily for more than 40 years. While the Pope attributed the prayer to St. Thomas More, it is unlikely that the attribution is correct. Even the National Catholic Register reported that the prayer, which can be found ion Chester Cathedral, is anonymously-authored. Knowing what I do of Thomas More, I suspect that he might have benefitted from a prayer for humor. The philosopher, author, and statesman is sometimes called the patron saint of lawyers. Personally, I don’t find much humor in his ordering the execution of those with whom he disagreed during the English Renaissance.

As a protestant who values my friendship with many good member of the Roman Catholic Church, I try to be careful with my use of humor about Catholic priests, saints, and others who are venerated by the faithful. While I think the church often takes itself a bit too seriously there is a big difference between someone who jokes from the inside and someone who is looking in from the outside.

I will note, however, that the famous prayer for good humor begins by asking God to grant that one’s stomach doesn’t rumble. “Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest,” is a pretty dramatic opening line for a prayer and not one that I have ever used. I do, however, like the end of the prayer and I suspect that it is that part of the prayer that has inspired Pope Frances for so many years: “Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humor. Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy, and to be able to share it with others.”

By inviting all of those comedians to a meeting, the Pope demonstrated that he indeed has the grace to take a joke.

We’ve been enjoying some pretty nice weather lately. Yesterday we had some light rain showers with periods of sunny skies between. It rained enough that I didn’t have to water the garden, but it was sunny enough that we were able to go for a walk and cook outdoors without rain gear. I was tending some salmon filets on the barbecue and watching our son playing with his two-year old son. Our back yard is relatively small. There are two cherry trees in the corners and we have flower and vegetable beds around the edges of a small patch of grass. One of the changes between this home and the home we had in South Dakota is that for 25 years in South Dakota I mowed a half acre with a walk behind lawn mower. It took me about two hours to mow my lawn. Here I can mow and trim everything in 20 minutes - 15 if I rush. That is just another way of saying that the patch of grass is small.

Our grandson was barefoot. One of the routines for our grandchildren is that they take off their shoes when they come into the house. They live on a farm with lots of dirt. There are chickens and cows on the place that leave behind their droppings. Taking off shoes at the door just makes sense. The grandchildren have their habit and they shed their shoes as they enter our house. Our youngest grandson not only takes of his shoes but also is in the habit of pulling off his socks as well. He likes the feeling of being barefoot. Yesterday he paused at the front door to pull of his shoes and socks and headed straight though the house to the patio sliding door to see what I was doing outside. His father followed. The feel of the lawn on his bare feet delighted him and he spent some time just running back and forth on the lawn in his bare feet. His father and I were delighted to watch him. His joy was contagious. Our son at first sat on the steps of our deck, but soon was lying on the grass himself and playing with his son. There were a few unripe cherries that had fallen from the tree, perhaps encouraged by a crow who comes and takes a few before they are ready to pick. Our grandson picked up a handful and took them to show his father. Seeing his dad lying on the grass he soon abandoned the cherries and was down on his hands and knees crawling over his father.

I looked at the pair on the grass and suddenly had a flash of memory of my father. My father died the fall before our son was born, so they never met face to face. What our son knows of my father is from the stories he has heard and a bit from the ways in which my parenting style imitated that of my father. Of course he also shares the family genes passed down from my father to our son and on to his children. Because my father died at a relatively young age, I never got to see him with our children. But I have sisters who are significantly older than I and I did see him with my sister’s children.

My dad struggled with chronic back pain for most of his adult life. He was injured when he was a young man. An airplane that he was flying experienced a catastrophic engine failure and he was forced to bail from the disabled craft. The descent of the plane caused him to be hit by the tail as he exited before he opened his parachute. The chute saved his life, earning him a membership in the silkworm club and a purple heart all in one event. As a result of his injuries, he could get significant relief from pain by lying flat on his back on the floor. He often came home from work and stretched out on the floor. He had the capacity to nap when there were all kinds of activities in our house. It was common for him to be dozing on the floor and one of my sister’s kids to crawl or run over to grandpa and climb on him.

That memory flashed through my mind as I watched my grandson climb on his dad in our back yard yesterday. The pure, unfiltered joy that children bring to us is something that I know my father experienced, that I experience, and that our son experiences. I can’t help but wish that our grandchildren all have the opportunity to experience that joy when they become adults.

I am immensely proud of our children and their accomplishments. It is something that my friends all know about me. I’m constantly bragging about them and the wonderful things they do. Our son has a truly impressive career of serving others. He is redefining the role of the library in his community and pioneering an expanded vision of library as community center. He genuinely believes that libraries are essential community services - as critical as fire and police protection and he has made a good case for that image in the community he serves. He has led the community in building a new library/community commons/city parking facility that is the largest infrastructure project in the history of the city. The multi-million dollar project is being completed without any tax increases. No bond had to be passed to pay for the building. It is fully funded through community partnerships and grants.

As proud as I am of his work, however, I am even more proud of the father he is. He is fully engaged in the lives of his children. I’ve watched him change a diaper and I’ve watched him create a shared project that fully engages a 13-year-old. And I have watched him simply delighted with his children, enjoying being with them just as they are.

There is no better father’s day gift than watching one’s children being good parents. To recognize a bit of my father in the exchange makes the experience even more rich. The mood for this father on this father’s day is gratitude. I am indeed blessed.

I am not a psychologist though once I aspired to become one. I did two back to back internships in a counseling center and was well on my way to full certification with the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors before I entered the parish ministry. I even intended to complete my counseling credentials during my early years as a pastor, but the rural and isolated location of the first congregations we served made getting supervised practice a nearly impossible challenge. The main reason I didn’t complete the process of becoming a psychologist, however, was that I discovered the joy of being a pastor. I decided that I didn’t want to be a therapist to the people I served. Throughout my career I made referrals to psychologists on occasion and I explained to those who had need of a psychologist that I wanted to be able to provide love and support to them instead of maintaining the distance that a professional relationship requires.

From observation of some of my younger colleagues, I think that there are now pastors who also maintain that professional distance, learning the intimate details of the lives of those they serve without sharing their personal lives with their congregations. That, however, was never my style as a pastor. I tried to allow myself to be seen by the congregations I served and to lead by example as well as word.

More importantly than technical distinctions between pastors and psychologists was that I withdrew from the collegial and professional relationships that enable psychologists to keep up with continuing education and develop a growing understanding of human psychology. Although my educational background gave me insight and I used a lot of the knowledge of developmental psychology in understanding children and youth in my work, I never aspired to provide psychological counseling.

The longer I live, the more aware I am that I do not possess the skills and understanding of a psychologist. There have been some occasions in my life when I have gone to a psychologist for counsel and have been grateful for their training and gained from their understanding of what is going on with my psychologically.

Other times, however, I have worked through psychological challenges and dilemmas on my own, combining a variety of different coping skills including sharing with family and friends, writing in my journal, prayer, and meditation. There remain, however, some things about my personality that are mysteries to me.

One of those mysteries is my reaction to hospitals. Throughout much of my career I worked in hospitals with ease. I understood the processes of modern health care enough to be an advocate for church members who were hospitalized. I kept my credentials in place to visit regularly in hospitals. I often found myself in emergency rooms and intensive care units in the middle of the night working with the people I served. I was comfortable in those places.

Towards the end of my career, in 2019, my wife was hospitalized to be treated for atrial fibrillation. I was comfortable accompanying her to the emergency room and through the process of admission and treatment. I used my familiarity with the hospital, the fact that I had hospital credentials as a pastor, and my law enforcement credentials to have extended visiting hours and came and went from the hospital on my own schedule, balancing my work at the church and my desire to be with her as much as possible. After she had been hospitalized for a week she had a reaction to a medicine that she was receiving and went into cardiac arrest. If you are going to have a cardiac arrest, a hospital is a good place to be. A code was called and the trauma team administered CPR effectively. Though she arrested a second time, care was administered appropriately and she made a full recovery. Today she is in excellent health with no signs of heart rhythm problems.

After the experience, I noticed that I had completely lost my comfort with being in the hospital. When she was hospitalized for an overnight stay following a heart cauterization and ablation procedure, I could barely stand to spend hours at the hospital. I was nervous and experienced flash backs to her cardiac arrest. I noticed that this discomfort extended to other situations. When I was in the emergency room to provide care for a family who had just lost a loved one to suicide, i was distracted by the announcements on the hospital PA. Hearing a code Blue called sent my heart racing and robbed me of my ease with being in that place. Fortunately I had access to a very good trauma psychologist and I followed up with care for myself. I discovered the distinction between a genuine panic attack and my reactions. I learned to monitor my heart rate when I thought I was having a panic attack. I discovered how my mind could play tricks on me and mislead me. I returned to breathing exercises and meditation techniques that had eased me through challenges in other situations.

It wasn’t long after that the Covid-19 pandemic shut down my visits to hospitals. Then I retired and have given up hospital visits except for visiting family and friends. I no longer have flash back dreams. I am quite comfortable with my life.

However, this year, Susan has received outpatient treatment at the hospital twice. The first was a routine colonoscopy which was performed at the hospital because of her now known drug allergies. Anesthesia was used but general anesthesia was not required. Then, last week, she had laparoscopic surgery to remove her gallbladder. Although the procedure was performed under general anesthesia, an overnight stay was not required and I was able to bring her home the same day as we went to the hospital. What I learned about myself an my psychology from those experiences is that I am not “recovered” from the trauma of 2019. I know all of the codes that are called over the hospital PA. I even know Code Gray (combative or violent patient), Code Silver (weapon or hostage situation), and Code 5 (shelter in place). Code Gray was called once when I was at the hospital with Susan, but I’ve never been present for a Code Silver or Code 5. Rapid Response calls, Code Blue, and Code Yellow still send my heart racing. I can monitor the increase in heart rate with my smart watch.

I am not a psychologist. I don’t fully understand all that is going on with me. But I am grateful that I have retired from near daily visits to hospitals. I’m ready to leave listening to all of those codes and being prepared to respond to others. And I am grateful to have my loved ones safely in our homes. I am also grateful for hospitals, but I’m willing to accept that I’ll never be quite as at ease in those institutions as once was the case.

Years ago I had a friend who was a few decades older than I. He was a wonderful curmudgeon of a man. When I first met him he was struggling to care for his wife who was suffering from a wide variety of illnesses. They lived in a small town in Southwestern North Dakota and the pair traveled to Rochester, Minnesota to the Mayo Clinic for her care on several occasions. Bill had served in the United States Army in the European Theatre during the Second World War. He had been a military journalist, covering special stories for The Stars and Stripes Newspaper among several different assignments. One of his reporting tasks involved being present at the liberation of several concentration camps toward the end of the war. He didn’t talk very much about his war experiences, but on occasion I would get “I’ve never told anyone before” stories from him. Since I was also friends with his daughter, son, granddaughters and grandsons, I would always respond to those stories by encouraging him to tell them to his family. I think that he did share some of them with his family, but it was difficult for him. He had been ordered not to speak of much of what he had witnessed and he had kept silence for nearly four decades by the time I met him.

Bill had other stories as well. One of his stories involved a brief time when he worked at the local bank when he was a young man. I’m not sure if his time at the bank had been before he went to the war or immediately after, but it was many years ago when I heard him tell the story. The story did, however, contain the name of one of the elders of our community who had made his career as a banker. It was the same bank where Bill’s son-in-law was an officer when I first met him.

I won’t be able to tell the story as well as Bill and writing it separates it from the twinkle in his eyes, his ever-ready smile, and wonderfully engaging laugh. Here is the gist of what he told me.

He had been charged with stating cancelled checks. He was given a stack of checks that had been processed by the bank and were set to be returned to the account holders with their statements back in the day when having a checking account involved having the actual paper checks returned after they had been cancelled. He had a rubber stamp and a stamp pad and was seated at a metal desk in a small office behind the tellers. He was stamping checks one day. Bill was methodical and he definitely had his own pace, whether telling a story or performing any other task. When I knew him he was an on-the-air personality on our local radio station and one of the stars of a very popular call-in show called “This, That, and the Other” or “TTO” for short. He’d amble through the news room into the studio at his own pace, often causing the other radio voices to stall while he got settled. He hd a bit of a reputation around the radio station for throwing off the timing of programs.

Anyway, back when he was working at the bank, his boss, a senior bank officer, stopped in while he was stamping cancelled checks. As he told the story, Bill made the motion of stamping, hitting his fist on the table once to indicate when the stamp hit the ink pad and a second time when it hit the check, then he’d make a motion with his other hand to demonstrate moving the check to another pile before repeating the motion. In his version of the story, his boss chastised him for being so slow and told him to speed up his work.

Bill responded by adding a new sound to his slow motion. After hitting his fist to indicate the stamp on the ink pad, he rocked his arm and hit his elbow on the table. He then hit his fist, showing the stamp on the check, then hit his elbow on the table one more time. In his demonstration, the checks were being stamped at the original speed, but there were twice as many thumps on the desk and it sounded like he was working twice as fast.

Bill rocked with laughter as he told the story. His laughter probably spurred a coughing fit. Bill was a chain smoker and did a lot of coughing in those days. It was impossible not to laugh at the story when Bill told it and I heard him tell it on several occasions and treasured it each time he told it.

I think Bill might have hd some sympathy for the workers at Wells Fargo who were disciplined recently. It turns out that these bank employees had been working from home since the Covid-19 pandemic. The bank was using sophisticated equipment to monitor their work habits on bank-owned computers. The bank installed sophisticated software on the computers that track eye movements, take screen shots, and log which websites are visited by the computers. The employees were employing high tech devices to evade the surveillance. Among the devices used by the employees were devices called “mouse jigglers” which are widely available online and make computers appear to be more active than they actually are. The bank employees were fired or asked to resign “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.”

It appears that there is a bit of a game of high tech cat and mouse with the employees seeking ways to make the employer think they are working harder or being more productive than is actually the case and the employer trying to monitor employee activity to enforce work standards. It is a game that I think old Bill would appreciate even though he died before personal computers were common and working from home was unheard of in the banking industry. Bill was a bit of a rebel all of his life and would be rooting for the employees of the large corporation which, in his opinion, could probably afford to pay them regardless of their output.

I’m sorry that the bank employees lost their jobs, though I might have said that they should have been able to see the action coming since they were defrauding their employer. I wouldn’t advocate for such behavior. Somehow, however, I think my friend Bill would have appreciated the employees ingenuity and celebrated their ability to get away with it even if it was only for a short amount of time.

Bill never did tell me the story of how his employment at the bank ended or how he got into Radio as a career. It might be an interesting story.

I’ve never gotten into genealogy. What I know of my ancestry comes mostly from stories that I heard my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles tell. My mother did spend significant energy and time researching genealogy after I moved away from home and I now have her notes on genealogy. I dabble at getting those notes organized, scanned, and into a form that might be accessible to others and I hope to wade through many boxes of family history in a process of transferring all of those boxes of paper records to digital records, but I am making slow progress. Often days go by when I haven’t worked on the project at all and when I do work at it, the sheer mass of paper seems overwhelming. I don’t know about other people, but my life continues to be full of uncompleted tasks. Boredom doesn’t seem likely anytime in the foreseeable future.

There are a few conclusions about family and family history that shape my approach. The first is that while genetics are important and shape who we are, the biological connections between people are only part of our human story. For some, tracing those genetic connections is important. For me, however, the importance of those connections is less important. I haven’t been tempted to explore any of the commercial DNA tracing programs that exist. I know several people who have done AncestryDNA, 23andMe, or CRI Genetics. I also know that there are medical and health-related benefits that can come from some forms of DNA testing. So far, however, I haven’t been attracted to any of those programs. In terms of how I live my life, genetic relationships are only part of the story and perhaps not the most important part.

I grew up with adopted brothers and sisters. I have an adopted daughter. For me family has always been more than an assembly of people who are biologically related. My people are not defined by the DNA we share. Perhaps because that is an important part of my story I have been attracted to the many places in the biblical narrative where families are blended and people from outside of the family are brought in. Ruth chose to go with her mother-in-law Naomi rather than return to her genetic family when she was widowed. Her story is one of the great hero narratives of our traditions. As far as I am concerned there is no meaningful distinction between my brother who was adopted into our family and my brother who was born of the same mother and father as I. All of us were raised by the same parents under the same roof. All of us have lifetimes of shared memories. We belong together.

Our daughter is every bit as much our daughter as the daughters of people who conceived and birthed children. Her son is every bit as much our grandson as the children of our son and daughter-in-law who carry our genetic lineage.

Tracing DNA might be valuable in discovering part of our story, but it would only be part and the other parts are equally important in my way of thinking.

Another reason I am less interested in following formal genealogies is that the communities of love and support that have surrounded us through our life journey are not attached to place. While there is a farm in Montana that has been tended by five generations of my mother’s family, my mother did not stay on the farm. She married a man who wasn’t from that place and spent her time in other places. She was born in Montana, but lived in California, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Dakota as well as living in Montana. On my father’s side of the family a couple of generations is the longest any of our people stayed in the same place. My father was born in the same part of North Dakota as his father, but my great grandfather was born farther east. Follow the family back a few generations and you find a blending of people who left various parts of what is now Germany before a unified Germany existed. Some ended up in Pennsylvania and others in Ohio Amish Country. Other relatives made a more convoluted trip from the places where they got their German names, attracted to the Volga region of Russia following the Crimean War. Others settled temporarily in southern Ukraine. They all retained bits of German culture and language when they left Russia and Ukraine for the United States, settling in the Great Plains.

Sometimes my father would refer to our ancestry as Pennsylvania Dutch, sometimes he would refer to Germans from Russia. He knew bits of the stories of several branches of our family tree. Like those generations of family, we have never quite landed in a single place. Susan was born in North Dakota and I was born in Montana. We met in Montana and lived there before living in Illinois, North Dakota, Idaho, South Dakota, and now Washington. The place we stayed longest in our marriage was South Dakota which was our home for 25 years. We know people whose family ancestry can be traced for dozens and dozens of generations in a single place. Our Lummi neighbors say their people have lived in the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial. For them place is critical to their identity. This is less true for us.

I find my story to land somewhere between indigenous people who have somehow survived in place for countless generations and recent immigrants who are seeking some place to call home. I think of 1.7 million people forced from their homes in Gaza since October. Their stories combine with others for a record-breaking 120 million new refugees in the past year. Taken together that is more than the population of Japan. Some call Congo or Myanmar or Syria or Sudan home. Some have fled Lybia and other countries. A few seek a new home in the USA to which my ancestors came as refugees years ago.

I am kin to all of these people, whether we are connected by DNA or by the simple fact that we are all trying to live peacefully together on the same street in a small coastal community. Ours is Nooksack and Lummi but also Sikh and Ukrainian and Mexican. We visited the regional hospital in Bellingham yesterday where they need translation services for 30 different languages. Susan volunteers in our grandchildren’s primary school where she knows children who speak English, Spanish, and Russian at home. Ours is a blended family in a blended community. And we are all connected regardless of what the DNA tests might reveal.

I am as fascinated by the diversity of my neighborhood as I am by the specifics of the genetics I carry. As our Lakota friends say, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ”. We are all related.

Before I knew that I was going to move to the Pacific Northwest, I had my eye on this region. Over the years we have made occasional trips to the Seattle Area, visiting my brother who has lived on Whidby Island in the past though he now lives on the mainland at Lynnwood, a bit south of where we now live. Later, our destination was Olympia when our son and his wife lived there. Our two grandchildren were born in Olympia. After the birth of our first grandchild we made a trip to this region at least once each year. When our son and his family moved north from Olympia to Mount Vernon, I made a trip to help with the move.

During our 2006 sabbatical we took the ferry from Victoria BC to Port Townsend WA on our way from camping adventures in British Columbia to Portland, OR, where we departed by airliner to Australia.

Another summer we made the trek up the Olympic Peninsula from Olympia to Port Townsend to visit the town famous for wooden boatbuilding, scout out some kit manufacturers, and shop for cedar for building canoes and kayaks. We traveled back to South Dakota from that trip with cedar boards strapped to the roof rack of our pickup. Port Townsend is one of the places I plan to visit again when my schedule allows. On the other hand, we’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for nearly four years now and I have not made it over there yet.

Were my schedule different, I might have enjoyed being in Port Townsend yesterday. For that matter, were my schedule different, it would be fun to be in Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Port Townsend. Today at noon, most of the small fleet of boats participating in this year’s Y2AK race will depart Victoria, round the end of the big island and head north. Y2AK is a famous boating race only if you are a fan of ocean racing, or a follower of wooden boats, or perhaps just a follower of little known trivia.

I don’t know the complete story, but it has been reported that Y2AK began with a bar bet made during the 2014 Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend. The bet was about which sailboat could get to Alaska from Port Townsend first. The bet turned into a formal race which now has been run seven times since 2015, missing two years due to the pandemic. The rules of the race are simple. The race is open to any boat that does not have a motor of any kind. The race starts in Port Townsend and runs to Ketchikan, Alaska up the inside passage. Crews must run the race unsupported, sleeping in their boats or camping ashore along the way. The first place prize is $10,000 cash, awarded to the first boat to finish without any type of handicapping. The second place prize is a set of steak knives.

That’s it. The race is mostly about bragging rights. Most years there are only 30 or 40 craft entered in the race, though some have been pretty spectacular. Per the race rules, the fastest boats are sailboats, but kayaks are eligible for the race. Of course a sailboat with a crew can run 24 hours a day, typically with crews keeping watch 4 hours on, 4 hours off around the clock. A kayak needs to go ashore and camp, which introduces the additional challenge of avoiding bears that frequent the remote coastal areas where the race is run.

Karl set a record in the race in 2017 when he became the first, and only, person to paddle the full 750 mile race course on a Stand Up Paddleboard (SUP), completing the race in 14 days and 6 hours. He has since completed two legs of paddling the Northwest Passage on a SUP.

Karl isn’t the only member of his family worth watching. This year I’ll be following his daughter, Raven, who is 17 years old and is competing on her own 29-foot sailboat crewed by Raven with three of her teenage friends. The Y2AK is a daunting race. Typically only about half of the entrants complete the race course. I’m confident that this young team has a very good chance.

They proved themselves already yesterday, sailing across the Straight of Juan de Fuca on a day when the winds were really ripping in our area. The passage is a test of the fleet. Those who make it are officially on the list of competitors for the official start this noon. Those who fail to make the crossing on time or who need to be rescued are out of the race. Remember these are sailing vessels, traveling at very slow paces. The Strait is 30 miles across at its closest point and can be a place of violent weather. The waves are typically high enough that the small boats in the Y2AK race disappear from sight between them. Yesterday was a good example of the brutal weather than can hamper the passage. It isn’t just a matter of managing the wind in a wind-powered or paddled vessel. Crews also need to understand the currents that frequently flow through the strait at speeds that exceed the speed of the boats. Timing is everything. Add to the wind and ocean currents the fact that the passage crosses an international border and requires customs inspection upon landing at specific locations. To make matters even more challenging the Strait is filled with shipping. Huge cargo ships and tankers traverse the Straight at speeds up to three times that of the tiny sailboats. The passage is a good test of the crews.

Raven’s crew, which call themselves “The Juvenile Delinquents,” passed that first test and are set to launch with the rest of the field today. Something tells me that this crew of teens are not only out for the adventure of their lives, but that they will demonstrate skills that will enable them to go on to even greater adventures throughout their lives. After they complete this race there are lots of other goals they might tackle.

You can follow the race at this link. I wish all of the boats fair winds and following seas. Be safe out there. We count you as you depart and we count you when you return, hoping for the same number each time.

I have a fractured molar at the back of my mouth. There is no opposing tooth as I had it extracted several years ago. The fractured tooth had a previous root canal so it does not cause me any pain. I have decided to have the tooth extracted. I do not intend to have an implant in that space as I believe I can live without that tooth indefinitely. Dental health is a challenge for many older people. We get a second chance with our teeth before we are 10 years old, but that set has to last us for the rest of our lives. In my case those “second” teeth are all over 60 years old now and I’ve had my share of problems including extractions and implants, root canals and crowns. Despite having relatively good dental insurance, I have invested tens of thousands of dollars in my mouth.

This particular tooth has been broken for more than three years. I have been receiving regular dental care including cleanings and the replacement of multiple crowns during that time. I see a dentist regularly. However, my dentist will not perform the extraction. I think it is probably a part of a nationwide trend of specialty dentists and a referral system. In years past, family dentists performed many extractions. General dentists perform plenty of extractions in community health, jail and prison settings.

I have finally been referred to an oral surgeon to have the tooth extracted. However, I couldn’t just make an appointment to have it extracted. First, I have to have a consultation. That is scheduled for today. Yesterday I took a phone call from the oral surgeon’s office that reminded me of my appointment, informed me that they needed an up to date list of the medicines I take, proof of insurance. And I was also informed that there will be a $125 charge for the consultation which needs to be paid in advance, but which will be applied to a surgical procedure if one is performed.

It is an interesting business practice that seems to be common with most dental practices these days. The patient pays any charges, co-pays, deductibles and charges over insurance allowances before any procedures are performed. It makes me wonder what would happen if auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians demanded payment before performing any work. I suspect that oral surgeons would complain about such a practice.

After agreeing to the terms, I had a meeting last night at which it turned out that I sat next to a man who works to arrange mobile dental clinics that are held at churches, food banks, and shelters for unhoused people. The mobil clinics take place in special vans designed for dental practice. Dentists and oral hygienists donate their time. Supplies and other parts of the system are financed by donations and overseen by a nonprofit corporation. The vans make regular visits to locations where there are underserved populations and offer examinations, cleanings and emergency care. With rising numbers of people who don’t have places to live and have no access to dental care, there is no end in sight for the mobile clinics. The nonprofit that sponsors the clinics is seeking to expand despite significant financial hurdles that need to be cleared.

It is easy for me to see why there are plenty of people who simply do not access dental care. In fact I have a nephew who had a major toothache and who declined to visit a dentist because he has limited financial reserves and because there was no dentist who would offer same day treatment. He finally had the offending tooth extracted with a bit of financial assistance from family, but not until after weeks of delays and unnecessary suffering.

At the same time, with good dental insurance and a regular family dentist, I know I can count on emergency treatment should the need arise. Compared to a lot of people, there is really nothing for me to complain about. I have the money in the bank to pay the oral surgeon’s fee. The offending tooth is not causing me any pain. I have simply endured a minor inconvenience and a bit of annoyance at the state of dental practice.

I don’t know much about dental practice. I don’t know if there is a general shortage of dentists as is the case with most other medical practitioners. I know that dental practices have had to take additional precautions and face additional expenses due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A patient is not able to wear a face mask during a procedure. On the other hand, dental practices were well supplied with personal protective equipment for all employees long before the Covid pandemic. The practice of gloving and masking for all procedures began during the HIV crisis and has continued to this day.

It does seem to me, however, that there might be other models for providing dental care as a part of a wider public healthcare system. Good oral health can help control and decrease risks associated with heart disease, diabetes, pregnancy, and other conditions. Tooth decay and gum disease can lead to more serious health problems. A strategy of effective preventive dentistry will result in overall lower healthcare costs. Someone who is unable to access dental care who then ends up in a hospital emergency room with a health crisis and no ability to pay is a significant expense for the overall system. Providing free care using tools such as the mobile dental clinics costs less than not providing that care. The clinics are saving taxpayers significant expenses.

Providing health care, however, is seldom seen as a wise investment strategy. Too often our healthcare system focuses on salaries and profits rather than on access to care. In a purely capitalist system, those with money get access to care and those without money do not. Not only is such a system inherently unfair, it ends up costing more than providing care in the first place.

I don’t have any solutions, but I was struck by the contrast between the story told by the staff person from the oral surgeon’s office and the story told by the volunteer who helps arrange free mobile dental clinics for unhoused people. Frankly, I know to which one it would be easier for me to write a check. I suspect I know which dentist, the specialist who has paid staff to make sure fees are collected in advance of all visits, or the one volunteering at the free clinic, goes home with the highest level of satisfaction at the end of the day.

I grew up on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. I learned early in my life that you can’t always drive directly from one point to another in the mountains. Sometimes the shortest route in distance is the longest in time. Sometimes there simply isn’t a way to drive over some hills and mountains. You have to go around them. Hiking in the mountains is rarely a matter of going straight up a mountainside. Trails use switchbacks to gain altitude and often have to take circuitous routes to reach a desired location.

We lived straight north of Yellowstone National Park, but there is no entrance to the Park in the center of its northern boarder. You have to either go west or east from my home town to get to a road that takes you to one of the park’s entrances. One of the family stories is that our father, before I was born, drove a jeep up the Main Boulder River, past the mining ghost towns of Independence and Silver City to the end of the road then continued south traveling off road to the slough creek divide, sometimes clearing their path by cutting fallen trees. There was never a road on that route, but it had been traversed by horseback and there was a sort of a trail.

I knew the route because my father flew fire patrol over Yellowstone National Park and I was privileged to fly along with him scouting for smoke from our small Piper Cub. He would have me name every creek and watershed along the way saying that it was critical that pilots know exactly where they were in case they were forced to make an emergency landing. There weren’t many places suitable to land even a very small airplane in the tree-covered steeps below us, but he would quiz me about the names of creeks as we flew to and from the Park.

When I became an adult, I was attracted to back roads and obscure paths. When we lived in Idaho, the quickest route from our home in Boise to my parents’ home in Montana and beyond that to where Susan’s parents lived at the time was to cross southern Idaho to Idaho Falls then cut north to West Yellowstone and up from there to Bozeman where we’d turn east toward our destination. There were, however, a lot of other routes over the mountains between Idaho and Montana. Over the years we’ve frequently followed Interstate 90 over Lookout Pass. But I also enjoy driving over Lolo Pass on US 12. Farther north, Wautoga Pass provides gorgeous scenery. But you can also cross the mountains on Interstate 15 south from Butte, Montana, which is a pretty flat route and not what you might call a mountain road.

On family vacations with our children, we also took the trip over the Lemhi Pass, a dirt road crossing the Beaverheads in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. The top of that pass was the first place the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery looked over into Idaho, but they were forced by the terrain to turn back and make their full crossing farther north.

There are other routes as well.

Once, when driving between Rapid City SD and Boise ID, we crossed Wyoming and Went over Teton Pass between Jackson WY and Driggs ID. The route is narrow and winding and spectacularly beautiful. Being a lover of mountain roads and passes, i enjoyed driving over that route. You can’t make that drive today or anytime in the foreseeable future, however. A huge landslide has swept the road away and it was closed indefinitely last Thursday. At the time of the road closure there were 8-inch cracks in the road surface. An attempt to create a detour around the slide area involved removing pavement and heavy fill material from the original road surface, but the slide continued to move eventually taking out the entire road. Fortunately no equipment was lost in the slide and none of the construction workers were injured. Where there used to be a culvert channeling water under the road there now is a huge gap in the highway with no way to get past it.

Those needing to travel between the mountain towns in the area will need to go a long ways around for the foreseeable future. The Wyoming Department of Transportation has no estimate of when the damage will be repaired. At this point a repair has not even been engineered. It will be a challenge coming up with a route for the highway now that the slide has occurred.

Seeing photographs of the road with a missing section brought to mind other times I’ve seen pictures of mountain roads destroyed by the natural process of shifting mountains. In 1959 an earthquake centered in Yellowstone National Park caused an entire mountainside to slide burying the road and the river. A new lake formed. Eventually engineers used explosives to create a spillway for the lake and new roads were constructed, but the shape of the land was permanently changed by the earthquake. A few years ago extensive flooding breached several roads within the Park necessitating some pretty extensive emergency engineering and design of roads.

Change is a part of mountain landscapes. Of course change is a part of all landscapes. The rise of oceans that is a part of global climate change will continue to reshape coastlines. Sometimes major events such as earthquakes which can be accompanied by huge tsunamis when occurring under the ocean will reshape coastal areas. Geologists tell us that there is a huge fault off of the coast of Washington where we live that could cause major disaster at some point in the future. The tsunami evacuation routes that are posted near our home are informed by those predictions. Fortunately for us our house is in the safe zone to which others would evacuate in the event of a tsunami. We are nearly twenty feet higher than the area that would be affected by a 10 meter wave which is theoretically possible following a major offshore earthquake.

On occasion our eyes are opened to the massive power of this ever-changing planet that make human engineering efforts small by comparison. The landslide on the Teton pass is one more reminder that our world is constantly changing. Only time will tell what the future may bring.

My face currently looks like I imagine a serious drinker’s face might look. It is red and a bit swollen with the skin stretched tightly over my nose and around my eyes. may forehead and cheeks are dotted with red blotches that are on the edge of looking like active sores. It feels like a sunburn, but worse than any sunburn I’ve had in decades.

It isn’t from drinking. I never was much of a drinker and when I experienced atrial flutter followed by an ablation procedure I gave up alcohol completely. It was an easy thing for me to do. Susan had previously stopped drinking any alcohol after a round of atrial flutter. Alcohol can be a trigger for hearth rhythm problems and since we have both undergone heart catheterization procedures with ablation, it makes sense to do what we can to avoid a repeat.

And I am not sunburned. I put sunscreen on my face every day and am careful about wearing a hat and/or an SPF 50 hood over my head when venturing outside. I’ve had a couple of rounds of surgery for squamous cell carcinoma and take the dermatologist’s advice about staying covered up and avoiding sunburn seriously.

My red face, is, rather, the direct result of taking the advice of my dermatologist. Since my positive biopsies for carcinoma, I have visited a dermatologist every six months. Most visits result in a dozen or more spot cryosurgeries to treat pre-cancerous lesions. On my last visit, the doctor prescribed a mixture of two creams applied twice daily for five days to clear up all of the pre-cancers on my face, forehead and the backs of my hands. After a bit of an adventure with my insurance company denying coverage of one of the cremes, I discovered that I could download a coupon from the Internet that gave me a 90% price reduction on the retail price of the medicine. With the cost of the creme reduced from $490 to $49, I paid the smaller amount and began treatment, strictly following my doctor’s orders.

At first the treatment didn’t involve much discomfort. By the fifth day, when I reported in to my dermatologist online my face felt as if it were sunburned, but I had no scabs or sores from the treatment. My doctor looked at the pictures I uploaded and suggested that I continue for three more days. I wasn’t eager to do so, but I am not eager to mess with potential cancer, either, so I complied. Day six had me reaching for aspirin and spending a bit of time feeling sorry for myself. Day seven is beginning with the pre-cancers all visible as red spots, ready to become open sores soon. I still have to get through all of today and tomorrow before reporting in again and I’m not looking forward to it.

I can no longer ignore my face and forehead. And for readers who don’t know me, the pictures on my web site are dated and I have much less hair than I once did. My forehead now stretches nearly all the way across my skull.

I’m beginning to wonder what kind of a patient I must be. Lots of people endure medical procedures that are much more invasive and disruptive than a week and a bit of applying cremes to their face. I don’t have anything to complain about. Still, I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself and I’m really looking forward to completing this round of treatment. I also hope that it will be a long time before I have to repeat it.

Over the course of my career, I visited a lot of people in the midst of medical treatments. There were some who remained cheerful and upbeat regardless of the discomfort they were experiencing. Others were full of complaints. For a short time I had a family doctor who had a long list of medical problems. I always left his office feeling pretty good about myself. “At least I’m not as bad off as he is,” I would think. In the process of those years of visiting folk, I resolved that I would not be a complainer when I experienced treatments. I am very careful to listen to and learn names of all of the people who provide care for me, to thank them repeatedly for their care, to smile regularly when receiving treatment, and to keep my small pains to myself.

But here I am, haven written 750 words about a minor inconvenience of a bit of face cream applied for a few days. And it is looking like there are another 250 words on the topic yet to come. I don’t want to be a complainer, but here I am complaining. I’m hoping that venting to my journal will keep me from showing any displeasure when answering the questions that are bound to be a part of my choir rehearsals, worship, and board meeting scheduled for today. I intend to say, “I look this way because I am the survivor of an assault by a dermatologist. No the ‘other guy’ doesn’t look worse than me. In fact “he” isn’t a guy at all. He’s a she with a medical degree and a specialty. I’m not messing with her. She’s already demonstrated her ability to make me feel bad.” That’s probably too much to say and with any luck I’ll shorten my response, smile, and say, “It’s a bit uncomfortable, but it will soon be over.”

It will be good practice for the inevitable more serious health issues I am likely to face in the years to come as I add decades to my already advanced age. I’m in this life for the long haul and I’ve got a few more trips around the sun in me. I want to keep orbiting with a positive attitude and a smile for those who grace my life with their visits and attention. The last thing I want to do is to make it a challenge for folks to be in my presence. I need those folks in my life and I intend to treat them with gratitude and good cheer.

I just need to give myself a pep talk from time to time and this journal seems to be the right place for today’s pep talk. I’m ready to take on the world with a smile. Thanks for listening.

The world of cricket is all abuzz because both the United States and Canada have won matches in the Men’s T20, something that almost no one expected to happen. the United States won super over in a match tied with Pakistan. Canada beat Ireland bye 12 runs. That was after the United States beat Canada by seven wickets, which surprised no one, except a few Canadians who thought that it was a curling match. And if you don’t know the difference between a broom and a cricket bat, which looks a bit like a canoe paddle, you just aren’t up on your sports.

It seems that there needs to be a guide to the world of cricket for those of us who don’t know anything about the game. And, since the United States is playing co-host to the ninth edition of the Men’s T20 World Cup, sharing the honors with the West Indies, I thought that a journal entry on the subject would help those of my readers who aren’t up to speed with the game.

First of all, if you don’t follow cricket, what’s with you? Didn’t you know that it is the world’s second most popular sport. Only soccer, known to most of the world as football, but definitely not American football, is more popular than cricket. Cricketing legends like Ian Botham, Jacques Tallis, Gary Sobers and Kapil Dev are household names all around the world. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Then again, I have no idea who they are and wouldn’t recognize any of them if I met them walking down the street, which is unlikely because I live in Birch Bay, Washington where locals and tourists are known to walk down the street keeping an eye out for golf carts which drive on the streets with the regular cars, but which isn’t exactly a destination for famous people. There is a golf course in town, but we don’t have a cricket oval, which I’m sure you know is a large grass field with a strip of very short grass 22 yards long. To follow the game, you should understand that there is an outfield and and infield, not to be confused with the close infield, which surrounds the pitch. the outfield and infields are oval shaped, but the close infield is kind of like two overlapping circles or a figure eight with the rectangular pitch in the center. Now that you understand that all you to have to know is that close to the center of the field is finer, whereas farther from the center line is wider. Of course you have to understand where off-side to the right and left occur. Just think of the center of the oval as stiller and the outside as deeper with shorter being between the two. If you can picture backward and forward in relation to the pitch and longer and squarer in relationship to the outfield you can picture a game in your head.

If you want to appear knowledgable about cricket, once you’ve learned the terminology you need to have a bit of patience because games, also called matches, can last five days and still end in a draw.

Don’t worry, all you have to do is to learn a few simple rules and you’ll be able to sound like a player. Just remember:

Each team consists of 11 players, including a wicketkeeper, several specialist batsmen and bowlers and some who both bat and bowl called all-rounders. You want to be an all-rounder developing the skill to bat and bowl to a high standard. Don’t worry, the game doesn’t involve real bowling balls. The ones used in cricket are much lighter.

The laws of cricket are enforced by umpires. You can recognize the two on the field, but the one off the field makes the really tough decisions, such as whether a catch was taken correctly or if the ball has gone over the boundary. Fortunately the umpire off the field can use television replays to secure the correct judgment.

A test match is usually played over five days with two innings per side. Limited overs or one day cricket is usually 50 overs per side which I’m sure you know means 300 balls per side for one inning each. Then there is Twenty20 crickets amounting to a 20 overs which means 120 balls slog per side. Got it?

A coin toss decides which side bats first with the other side bowling to them. Batsmen play in pairs, each has his own bat, one at each end of the wicket. The bowlers are trying to dismiss the batsman by bowling an over. There are several ways a batsman can be dismissed. They can be bowled, caught, stumped, leg before wicket (low) or run out. They can also be called out for treading on their own stumps or handling the ball. Don’t worry if you can’t remember all of this, I’m pretty sure that T20 players hardly ever think about treading on their own stumps. Basically a batter doesn’t want to have the bal hit their protective leg pad when it would have hit the stumps had their leg not been in the way. It’s just like baseball: keep your eye on the ball.

The batting side tries to score as many runs as possible before they lose ten of their eleven wickets. The bowling side tires to limit the number of runs and get the other side out. Then the sides switch so the batting side is now the bowling side and vice versa. The switching of sides happens only once a day in limited overs games. However it can occur twice in international test match cricket.

Now that I’ve explained the rules, I’m sure you will have more fun watching cricket on television and following all of the games of the Mens T20. Just be sure to keep track of where the games are being played since both the West Indies and the United States are hosts to the games or matches or whatever they are called.

If you have any further questions, just ask an umpire. One of them isn’t even on the field and can be distracted because they have access to television replays if they miss the live action. Be sure to print a copy of this journal entry to serve as your guide when watching the game.

I know that words have different meanings in different cultures, but somehow I was surprised this morning to look up the term “diddle” and find out that in England the slang term is used informally to mean “to cheat or swindle (someone) so as to deprive them of something. To victimize.”

Whoa! I don’t use the word in that sense at all. I use it in the sense of American slang: “To pass time aimlessly or unproductively.”

I guess you learn something every day.

I looked up the word because it occurred to me that I might write a journal post about how I spent my afternoon yesterday, and many blocks of time lately. I had in mind the nursery rhyme attributed to Mother Goose:

Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Now, i keep trying to interpret that rhyme in the English sense of the word. I don’t think that is what is going on even though, I didn’t used to trust cats at all. You see, my brother had a cat who was terribly loyal to him. She had all kinds of privileges. She was supposed to be kept out doors, but she would climb the tree outside our house and drop down onto the roof. My brother’s room was in the peak of the attic and he would open his window and the cat would jump from the roof to his window sill and he would let her into the house. He got caught when she had kittens in the crawl space at the edge of his attic room and refused to allow anyone to go in to look at them. My brother simply couldn’t hide that from our mother.

That particular cat had it in for me. One night she used my American Bricks for a litter box. I had to scrub all of the individual bricks by hand. It was a mess that I haven’t forgotten - and probably haven’t fully forgiven - to this day. Another time I was wrestling with my brother. It was summer and we both were wearing cut off jean shorts and t shirts. My t shirt was pulled up with the strain of wrestling my brother. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, that cat jumped onto my bare back with all of its sharp points bared. She drew blood at several places. In my memory she shredded my back, which i’m sure is an exaggeration, but my scratches were enough to cause our mother to scrub the wounds. She was a nurse and you really didn’t want her to scrub any part of you, especially tender skin. An application of disinfectant followed and that really did sting!

I have since learned to make peace with cats. Our children had several cats and I had genuine affection for them. They were such excellent teachers of many life skills to tour children. One big tomcat was a special favorite of mine. He liked to hang out with me. I used to watch the Red Green television show on PBS in the evening after a long day at work. I’d head to the basement where we had a television. I’d turn on the TV and plop down in a comfortable chair to watch the half hour program before getting up and getting on with my day. That cat would come running from wherever he was and jump into my lap to watch the program with me. He had a loud purr and I enjoyed him.

Still, we had another cat that our daughter says adopted her at the pound. That little cat always acted afraid around me. I was always gentle with it, but it cowered whenever I was around. I suspected that it might have been abused by an adult male. I was specially careful to always be gentle with the animal. Later in its life, it did warm up to me a little bit and would allow me to pet it if there was no one else at home. Our son, however, roughhoused with that cat. He would pick it up and toss it into the air, chase it up and down the stairs, grab it by the scruff of its neck, and twirl it around. That cat adored him. If he came home when I was petting it, it would run away from me to greet him. When he went away to college the cat sulked, and when he came home for a break, it followed him around the house constantly.

I’m trying to make things up with cats. I’ve been visiting them from time to time at a local shelter. I’m intending to adopt a pair of cats to live in the shop in the barn at our son’s farm. I’m hoping they will keep the mice at bay. Sometimes the mice come into the shop and chew up a bit of paper on which I’d sketched some plans. Sometimes they leave messes. I’m pretty careful to be sure to not have food in the shop, but that doesn’t stop the mice. I’m hoping a couple of well-fed and well-loved cats might enjoy hunting mice for sport. I haven’t adopted any yet, but may do so before long. It would raise my image with our daughter who is coming to visit this summer. She is a lover of cats and has challenged me several times to get a cat for our home. She’d be happy if I had a couple of cats over at the shop.

At any rate, I was thinking of the nursery rhyme because yesterday afternoon, I went to the farm and I didn’t really accomplish anything. I thought I was diddling, though I had no intention of cheating of swindling and there were no victims to my behavior. I went to the farm with the intention of moving a bee colony, but decided not to do that job in the middle of the day because it was warm and the colony was sending out all kinds of foragers. I feared that moving the colony might leave foragers confused if they were out when I moved it. I’ll move them late at night someday soon when most of the bees are inside the hive. That will be better for them.

So I cleaned out the back seat of the truck. I didn’t clean everything, but I did clean out the back seat. I put away some tools and some supplies we use when repairing wiring on a vehicle or trailer. I prepared a new hive to receive bees. I cleaned up a bit of garbage. I looked at some trees we planted earlier. I checked the chickens. I talked to my grandson. I prepared the area where the bees new home will be. I decided to run to town to get a propane bottle filled. I got home after 5 pm having accomplished nothing. I feel like these days I’m getting better at diddling than was the case when I had a full time job. Perhaps diddling is a retirement activity for me.

Then this morning I read the English definition of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary online edition. I’m not sure I want to learn how to diddle anymore.

When we leave our home we cross railroad tracks about half way between our house and the farm where our son and his family live. The tracks are a spur line that goes from the mainline to two oil refineries that are on the coast south of Birch Bay. We can see the BP refinery at the end of our street and south of it is a Phillips 66 refinery. The tracks often have trains of 100 cars and more carrying crude oil to the refinery and refined fuels away from the refinery.

Then, after we leave the farm, we cross railroad tracks once again before we get to the freeway that connects Seattle and Vancouver BC. We drive on that freeway to get to church and to shopping in Bellingham. In addition to petroleum tank car trains, these tracks have a lot of coal train traffic. Coal trains operate around the clock hauling coal from the Black Thunder Coal Mine to a coal shipping port in Vancouver, British Columbia. Black Thunder is the nation’s largest coal mine with the largest working dragline in North America. That dragline is only one of six operated at the mine. The mine can load 20 to 25 trains per day and there is nonstop train traffic between the mine and the shipping terminal where the coal is sent overseas, primarily to Japan which is using coal as a temporary fuel for electricity generation in the wake of suspending all nuclear power production in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

After we had moved away from South Dakota and shortly before we moved into the home where we now live, I was working on a project at the farm one day when I noticed black smoke boiling into the air to the east of the farm. Our daughter-in-law reported to me that there had been a train derailment with a fire that had forced the closure of the interstate and the evacuation of the area near the fire. The farm was placed on notice to be prepared for evacuation should conditions warrant. We did not need to evacuate. The fire was more than a mile from the farm. However, the location of the derailment and the temporary closure of the Interstate meant that I had to take an alternate route to go back to our rental home in Mount Vernon that afternoon. Later I learned that the elementary school our grandchildren now attend was in the evacuation zone. The school was not in session on that day due to being closed during the pandemic. Ten tank cars had derailed just a short distance from the school and three caught on fire. The train was carrying crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to a local refinery. The fire was extinguished and people were allowed to return to their homes within 24 hours of the accident.

The accident raised our awareness of the dangers of living near railroad tracks where trains carry volatile substances.

On Tuesday night another derailment caused the closure of a local road. Portal Road, which runs parallel to the freeway and which we cross when going to and from the elementary school, was closed at the crossing near the school north for about a mile all day yesterday. The crossing we use was not affected by the closure. The accident occurred at about 10:45 pm on Tuesday night and we didn’t hear about it until yesterday morning. Six cars were derailed. They were carrying molten sulfur.

Fortunately, as was true of the fire and derailment in 2021, no one was injured in the incident.

What we are learning, however, is something that has been true all along. The transportation of dangerous substances is a dangerous business. Accidents and spills occur. While we now are familiar with local roads and know many different ways to go around the railroad crossings we use daily, we know that an accident that will disrupt our lives and could leave us needing to drive several miles out of our way to get between places we travel every day is possible. On the one hand, two accidents in three years may be an anomaly. There have been much longer periods without accidents. On the other hand, recent accidents are the result of both increased train traffic and aging tracks. It seems prudent to be prepared for possible future accidents.

The county sheriff and other local emergency responders have plans to coordinate responses with the Burlington Northern San Francisco Railroad, the Washington Department of Ecology, the Federal Railroad Administration, and the National Transportation Safety Board for the investigation of accidents and the making of plans to prevent future accidents.

Train derailments are dramatic events. Specialized equipment is required to clean up after an accident and it can take hours to get the equipment to an accident site. Damage to the tracks often results in the need for additional equipment to make repairs in order to get cranes and other equipment to the site. Containment of spilled substances and environmental cleanup can take a long time and serious damage can occur. Evacuations are sometimes necessary in order to keep people safe.

This week’s incident is a reminder to me that I need to learn the exact nature of how an evacuation of the school might take place. If students were bussed away from the school, I presume they might be taken to Ferndale where the district has more school buildings. It is important for parents and grandparents to know that information before an incident occurs. Confusion could easily cause trauma for students as they have to wait to be picked up and transported home after an incident. I seem to be able to find plenty of things to worry about in my retirement. Perhaps the extra time of being retired allows me to overthink and to worry a bit more than necessary. I seem to still be a novice at retirement. There is a lot more that I need to learn.

For now, we are all safe. We had a lovely family dinner last night to celebrate our oldest granddaughter’s tenth birthday. The train derailment was in a place that did not disrupt any of our activities. Still, it is a reminder that we need to be aware and prepared.

Last summer in the last week of our service as Interim Ministers of Faith Formation at First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bellingham, we participated in a summer day camp that we called “Creation Care Camp.” The program was instituted the year before as a kind of replacement for a traditional Vacation Bible School. After a couple of years without formal summer programming for children during the Pandemic other than the delivery of home lessons and projects for families to use, it was good to return to face to face programming during the summer of 2022. Because our church was still participating in masking in all indoor spaces it made sense for us to plan outdoor programming so that the children could maintain separation while learning together. Although the mask mandate has been dropped by the summer of 2023, we continued with outdoor programming. It is a natural fit for children’s summer programming. There is a wonderful park with lots of open space within easy walking distance of the church which allowed us to plan programs without the added complexity of having to transport children in vehicles.

Part of the outdoor programming was led by a retired forester and his wife who was a retired teacher. The pair had come up with a variety of hands-on experiences for the children. We had a few slices of tree trunks that allowed the children to count rings, estimate the age of the tree, and see different rates of growth in years with different weather patterns. The slices had come from a tree that had to be removed from the church yard, so it had a real connection to the place where we met.

Another part of the presentation involved the forester using a trowel to dig in the duff at the base of one of the trees in the park. Just below the surface of the earth, he pointed out a fine, white, furry structure that looked like a mass of branching and intertwined fibers about the thickness of sewing thread. The slender strands were entangled and when he pulled on them it was obvious that they were connected to many more underneath ground that had not been dug up. The strands are called hyphae and they are part of a larger structure called mycelium and they are fungus, parts of a large network of fungus that branches throughout the soil.

This presentation was new to me. I had spent most of my life prior to moving to the Pacific Northwest in dry areas. It would be much harder to find fungus when digging in the dry soil at the base of trees in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There is fungus there and there are mycelium under the ground in the pine forest, but here it is much easier to find and locate just beneath the surface. The forests here store a lot of moisture and the undergrowth is mostly moss and ferns. The dirt is soft and easy to dig. It is quite a contrast with where we have lived for most of our life.

I knew a bit about hyphae and mycelium from some of the reading I have done since retiring. I had time to read several books by Peter Wohlleben including “the Hidden Life of Trees,” “The Secret Wisdom of Nature,” and “the Inner Life of Animals.” We had heard him speak at an event hosted by a local bookstore to announce the publication of his book, “The Power of Trees.” Wohlleben is a German forester who has written extensively on ecological themes and makes a strong case that plants are sentient lifeforms that a communicate effectively with one another. His work has been corroborated by other plant scientists including Susan Simard whose book “Finding the Mother Tree” details her work in the coastal forests of British Columbia very near to our home.

Nutrients flow from one tree to another through hyphae. If a tree is in need of more moisture or of more nitrogen, a nearby tree can share water, nitrogen, and other essential nutrients with the tree in need. Scientists have done extensive research about how this network of trees and fungi are all interconnected in a healthy forest. The lesson our forester friend was teaching the children is that soil, that appears to be filled with decaying plants is in reality a living and essential part of the overall culture of the forest. It is a new way of thinking for an old guy like myself. I tend to think of soil in terms of compost - decaying plants that release nutrients essential for the growth of other plants. There are a couple of different composting operations on our son’s farm and we contribute all of our kitchen scraps and the plant waste from our lawn and garden to one of the compost piles. In tern we dig compost that we spread on our garden beds each year to encourage growth of our flowers and vegetables. I understand that the soil is alive, but I hadn’t thought of fungus as much more than the mushrooms that appear in my lawn. The fungal network is much more extensive than the few blossoms that appear above the surface. Understanding the fine strains as channels of communication and sharing gives me a whole new way of understanding the soil beneath my feet.

I try to imagine the fungal network as being full of busy communications between all of the plants of the forest. They’ll need a lot of communication this week as we make the transition from an atmospheric river which has now passed over our heads leaving a lot of rain behind. That system has moved east and is currently dropping a lot of rain on the Cascade mountains. Today we’ll begin to experience the edge of a heat dome that is currently south of us, but expanding north. Today’s high temperature is forecast to be twenty degrees higher than yesterday. These swings from one extreme to another are part of the process of climate change that is already occurring throughout the world.

Not only are these changes causing conversation between we human inhabitants of this planet. I imagine that there is a lot of communication between the plants buzzing over the hyphae network beneath our feet. And, like our forester friend, I suspect that there is much we can learn from the plants.

Upon graduating from seminary, Susan and I accepted a call to serve two congregations in southwest North Dakota. We lived in a parsonage next to the larger church in the larger of the two towns that were 17 miles apart. Each Sunday morning and several times each week we made the trip to the smaller town to lead worship, visit folks, attend meetings, participate in the youth group, meet with the women’s fellowship and join work days at the church. Over the seven years we served we helped paint the bell tower, put new shingles on the church roof, replace hail damaged siding on the church building. We also joined the congregation as it celebrated high school graduations, met to bury those who had died, pray for those who were injured or facing hard times and share the life of a small community. It was a tradition in that congregation to close each worship service by singing together the hymn “Till We Meet Again:”

Till we meet, till we meet
Till we meet at Jesus’ feet
Til we meet, till we meet,
God be with you till we meet again!

We sang it as we bid farewell to high school seniors leaving town for college. They almost never came back to live again. The town exported its youth to larger communities until one day, not long after we had moved from that town, the high school closed. Three decades after we had moved the small church ran out of members and no longer was able to continue worshiping. By that time we had returned to celebrate the centennial of the congregation, to hear the bell ring once more and to sing the song with the few old timers who were left. Over the next few years we made occasional treks up the 165 miles from our home in Rapid City to officiate at the funeral of another member of the congregation. After a service at the church, we’d head half a mile east and 1 mile south of the town to the cemetery on the west side of the road. We sang the song standing on the windy hillside of Rose Hill Cemetery under the metal sign welded by Tex Byers and his sons. Tex’s body was laid to rest there not far from the graves of his parents, Marge and Benton. Later his wife Bev was buried next to him. There are a lot of other names we know on the stones in that cemetery: Hansons and Conrad’s and Bakers and Andersons, Bohnes and Frandsens, Hofflands and Knutson, Olsons and Sacks, Wagners and Wothes.

That song comes to my mind on other occasions when I remember those days and those people, but also sometimes out of the blue as I am working at the farm or paddling my kayak on the bay. I’ll find myself humming it when I’m checking on the bees or watering the garden.

I’m still confident that God is with those we love till we meet again.

This week, and many others, I have another song that keeps playing in my mind. It is another old hymn, not completely politically correct, with some language that is a bit dated. That happens with songs that have been around for a long time. This song’s words and tune keep playing in my mind as I walk and work and go through my days:

Bind us together, Lord, bind us together
with cords that cannot be broken
Bind us together, Lord, bind us together,
Bind us together with love.

At the Lummi Island Congregational Church it is a tradition for the congregation to stand and hold hands in a circle in the center aisle of the church as they sing that song together. These days there will be a few members joining on Zoom and the iPad with the small images of those folks is moved to the head of the circle so they can see the congregation and the congregation can see them as together they sing. As the song ends a voice, usually from the Zoom, says, “And the people said . . .” and everyone responds, “Amen!”

The song, however, continues to ring in the hearts and minds of those who have worshiped. Its sentiment has already been fulfilled. In fact those who worship with that congregation are bound together. The island is not unlike the small town in North Dakota in many aspects. There are very few children. Folks can remember when there was a Church School and Vacation Bible School every summer, but there are no children for those events these days. The children have grown up and taken the ferry to the mainland and gone off to jobs and careers. When a house is sold on the island these days the new customers are almost always retired folks. Some come to the church, become involved, and help to keep things going. The congregation can no longer afford a full-time minister, but their part-time pastor is a great match for them. When the waves are high and the ferry cannot make the passage the congregation will still gather even if the pastor is on the other shore. They might not have a sermon, and there might not be anyone to play the piano, but they can still hold hands and sing, “Bind us together with love.”

We have only worshiped with the congregation a few times, but that song is already a part of our lives. We know a few of the names of the folks in the pews. And even the names of a few of the folks in the cemetery next to the church building. We look forward to opportunities to take the ferry to the island. When the weather is good we don’t really need our car on the island and we can just walk onto the ferry. The church is about a mile up from the ferry landing. Chances are pretty good that someone will stop and give us a ride before we have walked all the way.

And when we get back to the ferry and it heads across to Gooseberry Point, over the drum of the engine and the whistle of the wind we hear from our hearts, “Bind us together with love.”

Sometimes I think it calms the chickens and the honeybees when I sing it as I feed them. I know it calms me.

When I was young my aunt and uncle went to India as agricultural ambassadors under a program jointly sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of State. The program took US farmers abroad to various countries to meet with farmers in their host country and share agricultural techniques. My aunt and uncle were dryland wheat farmers in Montana. Following World War II they surveyed and laid out all of their fields in strips, alternating the strips between production and lying fallow each year. The technique allowed the fallow strips to store moisture. The producing strips helped to prevent soil erosion due to wind. The practice, still used today, produces higher yields year after year compared to farming all of the land every year. Depending on the practice, it can require a fair amount of herbicide to control weeds and mechanical tilling of the fallow land for weed control consumes a lot of fuel. My first summer job away from home was working summer fallow on their farm for several weeks followed by helping with the harvest.

I was young enough that I don’t know how much of their agricultural trip focused on teaching their farming methods to farmers in India, but I certainly got the impression that their farm was more efficient than the ones they visited in India. Rural America was the “breadbasket of the world,” according to what I had been taught. The abundance of my uncle and aunt’s farm was evident to us. We hauled 30-gallon barrels of wheat from the farm each harvest. The wheat was stored at our place and ground into cereal and flour to last us throughout the year until the next harvest. Hard red winter wheat makes great bread flour and cracked wheat cereal was a staple in our family diet.

After visiting India, my aunt shared a lot of recipes for Indian food with our family. When we would visit she would demonstrate the sahris she had brought home with her, often wrapping up one of my sisters as a demonstration. They we would sit down to a meal that featured heaping bowls of cooked rice. I’m not sure I understood how techniques for wheat production in Montana translated to rice farming in India, but we would look at the color slides my uncle had taken on their trip and my father and he would discuss farming methods.

Later my aunt and uncle made other trips as a part of the farm exchange program, traveling to several Central and South American countries. We had bright colored knitted wool face masks that they brought home from a trip to Bolivia and Peru that we enjoyed wearing for outdoor play on cold winter days. I never mastered the technique of keeping my glasses from fogging up when wearing the face masks, but I managed to wear one when delivering newspapers in below zero temperatures.

To this day part of my image of India is colored by the photographs, meals, and stories that were a part of family gatherings after my aunt and uncle traveled to India. Later, when I was an adult their son, my cousin, made a different kind of pilgrimage to India, visiting some of the same places where they had traveled but focusing on getting to know and learning from the farm people he met on his trip. He told me about how he learned about discovering joy in simple everyday things and learning to live more simply, consuming less.

My image of India and its people is incomplete I am sure. What I do know is that it is a very populous country with significant poverty in some places. I also know that has invested heavily in education and produces many doctors and health care professionals who move to the United States to address our shortages of health care workers. India also has a growing tech sector with Indian workers providing much needed labor for the manufacturing and servicing of computer hardware and software. The distinct Indian accent is often heard when calling for tech support.

I really am, quite ignorant, however about the country, its cultures, and ways. Over the past few days, however, I have read several news articles about the dangerous heat wave that has swept over the country. More than 50 people have died in India over the past three days as a brutal heat spell continues to grip parts of the country. The country held a general election on Saturday with results set to be announced tomorrow. The general election is held every five years. This year the election has taken place during record-breaking high temperatures. India has been experiencing more frequent, more intense, and longer heat waves in recent years. The federal health ministry confirmed nearly 25,000 cases of heatstroke during March, April, and May. News reports suggest that the actual number could be much higher. Police officers, security guards, and sanitation staff were among the victims of the hot weather.

In Odisha district there have been reports of 99 suspected heal stroke deaths in the past 72 hours. Twenty cases have been confirmed according the the Special Relief Commissioner. There have also been heat-related deaths in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand.

Heat stroke is very dangerous when not quickly treated. The India Center for Disease Control says the mortality rate from heat stroke is between 40 and 64%.

One news source reported that the capital Delhi is nearly “unbearable” with temperatures rising above 50 degrees Celsius, which is 122 degrees Fahrenheit. More than 37 cities in India recorded temperatures over 45C in the past week with Delhi registering a record temperature of 52.3C (126.1F). Water supplies have been running short in the heat wave with supplies cut to some areas while tankers have transported water to other places. Strict water restrictions have been imposed with officials have been enforcing rules designed to prevent waste.

In India people are praying that the monsoon season will arrive soon. It could begin any day now.

Meanwhile here in the Pacific Northwest it is soggy outside as we sit under an atmospheric river. It has left me feeling a bit like I did when I was a child. Confronted with news of suffering in India I felt a need to share but did not know how to do so. I am as powerless to send our comfortable weather with ample rainfall to another part of the world as I was to send the abundance of wheat that we took for granted when we were growing up. I think, however, that my cousin got part of the solution right. I can help by consuming less of everything. Global climate change is in part the product of human greed and over consumption. Learning to live with less is a skill worth my attention and care.

We went to a delightful party last night. The party was in celebration of the 40th anniversary of dear friends. There weren’t a lot of people we knew at the party, but the thing we all had in common - friendship with this couple - gave us an instant bond. The adult children of the couple did a delightful time of welcoming all who came and providing some wonderful laughter with games and announcements while we sat at tables. There was a touching service of vow renewal co-officiated by a college friend of the couple and a younger friend who also is a minister. We all heard stories about the couple that we had not previously known. The hall was decorated with some of the couple’s wedding pictures. Thee was a buffet with appetizers as we arrived and a very nice dinner with lots and lots of food served a bit later. Our hosts know how to throw a party and we felt lucky to have been invited.

There was a lot of party left to go on as we quietly exited the event. A DJ was playing music from the 80’s and folks were dancing. We are leading worship at a small church this morning and have been looking forward to this event as well, so wanted to get to bed near our usual time to be refreshed for today’s activities.

We’ve been to other 40th anniversary parties in the past. What was different about this one is that we have been married for more than a decade longer than the celebrating couple. We celebrated our 50th last June and our 51st is just around the corner. Somehow, however, we aren’t used to being the old folks at a party. It doesn’t seem all that long to us that we were at the 40th anniversary of friends and seminary classmates when we visited them in Australia. But that trip and that anniversary party was 18 years ago. Actually, when they played a trivia game about the events of 19874 at last night’s party, we did a pretty good job of figuring out several of the answers because we could remember the time quite well. In 1984, Ronald Regan won a landslide victory in his bid for a second term as President of the US. His opponent, Walter Mondale, won the electors of only one state - Minnesota. I knew the price of an Apple Macintosh computer was $2,500 because we ended up making a deal to buy a used one a couple of years later after wanting one since they came out. The Summer Olympics were in Los Angeles.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of television shows and movies, so I was less familiar with those questions - I would have missed a lot of them back in 1984 as well. Back in 1984, we were still adjusting to what it means to be parents. Our son was three and our daughter was not yet a year old. Our lives were busy with jobs and children.

And now it is 40 years later. As we were reminded at last night’s party, a couple very much in love got married. They met in college. They both were Elementary Education majors. In those 40 years they brought together their extended families, had children of their own and raised them to adulthood, traveled the world, pursued varied and successful careers, mentored countless young people into their own adulthoods and careers, made friends, and found delight in one another. They are both retired - something we had not yet pulled off by our 40th anniversary. We opted for a family gathering for our celebration. Interestingly, even though we lived and worked in South Dakota at the time, we chose to celebrate our anniversary here in the Pacific Northwest gathering our children and their families for a fun time. We only had one grandchild at the time and they lived in Olympia Washington. Gathering at a campground in Anacortes with their family and our daughter and her husband made for a wonderful celebration. We took a whale watching cruise in the Salish Sea around the San Juan Islands, waters that now are more familiar to us than they were then. A family dinner in a restaurant capped a wonderful celebration. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to celebrate with friends with a big party. Arranging events for groups of people, including arranging for them to be fed and entertained, was part of what we did for a living. A more quiet moment with family met our sense of recreation at the time.

It continues to surprise me by how quickly time flies by. Shortly after our wedding we attended a 50th wedding anniversary celebration at our church. I remember many comments about us being the newlyweds at the party. I relished in the attention. I liked being seen as a married person. Now we attend anniversary parties as the old married couple. We’re the ones who greet the younger people at the parties. Folks don’t expect us to know all the answers to the trivia games - we’re old and they suspect our memories are not as sharp as once was the case. They don’t expect us to stay up all night dancing. Being old has a few advantages. We don’t get pressured to get up from where we are sitting to dance. People are kind to us and make sure we have gotten everything we wanted for dinner. They offer to get beverages for us and bring them to us. And we know we aren’t the center of attention, so there is no pressure on us to perform.

We are, however, honored to be included in the celebrations of people who are younger than us. We enjoy the leadership and initiative of young people at such events. Last night’s party was a celebration of people of all ages and a tribute to the couple we were honoring as they have drawn all of us together.

Sometimes it is quite comfortable to be the old couple sitting in the corner who leave before the party is finished. It was a good dinner. The conversation was enjoyable. The occasion was worthy of a celebration. And we didn’t have to do the planning. What is more, we know that there are more parties to come. We show no signs of running out of friends with whom to celebrate.

I heard a term that is new to me the other day: “Juneuary.” It is an amalgam of June and January. The term was used by the Bellingham Herald to describe the weather that is forecast for the next few days around here. An atmospheric river will drop between 1 and 2 inches of rain in the Whatcom County lowlands today through Tuesday. Normal June rainfall is 1.61 inches. We could get more than that from a single storm in the first three days of the month. The weather pattern moving into our area is very similar to a winter storm, but temperatures are forecast to be higher than is the case in the winter. According to the article, the term “Juneuary” is a common colloquialism in this part of the country. I guess that the fact that I had not before heard the term is because I haven’t lived her long enough to see this type of storm.

The atmospheric river that is causing our rain is also known locally as a “pineapple express” because the rain clouds develop over the South Pacific and travel north and east until they com ashore in our area. Predictions from the Northwest River Forecast Center show that although the rivers will rise, the Nooksack River should remain below flood stage. The Nooksack has flooded a few times since we moved into this area, but our home is far enough away that the flooding has caused very little inconvenience for us.

Nonetheless, I’m not very excited about the forecast. Our tomatoes are already looking a bit glum because they aren’t getting enough sunlight. The plants are tall, over two feet high, with lots of blossoms and a few tomatoes beginning to set, but the plants are thin and don’t have many leaves on the bottom of the plants. What they need is sunshine. Well, what they need is more sunshine. I’m making it sound like we haven’t had any and that isn’t true. Yesterday was a day without any rain and it was sunny most of the day and there have been several days this week that have been a mix of clouds and sunshine.

The rain might put a bit of a damper on my spirits, though it isn’t likely. I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow for some time. It will be the second week for us of leading worship at Lummi Island Congregational Church. We are providing leadership while their pastor is on a vacation. And tomorrow we will be celebrating communion with the congregation.

Celebrating communion was a part of my life for many years. I was licensed to serve a congregation during my last year of college, 1973-74. I celebrated communion with that congregation. The next year we were off to seminary where we celebrated communion regularly with the seminary community and in 1978 we were ordained to the ministry and began a life of celebrating communion regularly. It was such a part of my life that I had the liturgy from the book of worship memorized. I know the words of institution and prayers of consecration by heart. During the last decade of our active ministry, I worked hard at developing new communion liturgies that gave the words of institution and consecration to the congregation. Our Rapid City congregation became used to having the traditional words printed in the bulletin as responsive readings and unison prayers.

Then, in June of 2020, we retired. I stopped being the officiant at communion. There were many things about retirement to which I was looking forward, but somehow it feels like I didn’t think through what it would be like to suddenly stop celebrating the sacrament. It isn’t that I have been absent from communion. I still receive communion regularly and I am grateful to be part of a worshipping congregation that celebrates regularly. But I have not been the one to break the bread or raise the cup. I have not put the stole around my neck with a prayer in preparation to serve a congregation. I didn’t know how much I would miss it.

I have had some experience with retired pastors. We have had retired pastors in the congregations we have served throughout our careers. At one point, when we were serving Rapid City, there were ten retired pastors in the congregation. I made a point of having them participate in serving communion from time to time and I frequently called upon retired clergy to serve communion in care centers and homes. I was used to the retired pastors expressing their gratitude for being invited to lead. I just didn’t think about how I would feel when I retired.

Tomorrow we will celebrate with a small island congregation and no amount of rain will dampen my spirits. I’m ready to gear up in full rain coat, pants and boots to ride the ferry and take the shuttle bus to the church. It can be pouring rain and I will have a sunny disposition. And I will be grateful to the pastor who invited us to lead the congregation.

I believe that the sacraments belong to the congregation. That is why I worked to develop liturgies that gave the formal words of institution and consecration to the congregation. I believe that ministers are ordained to serve, not to be in authority over congregations. I don’t need to be in charge. But there are some actions and some words that have become so ingrained over the years of serving that I miss them. Celebrating communion is near the top of the list.

At its heart the sacrament is one of connection. When we celebrate we remind ourselves of Christians who celebrate all around the world and of generations of faith people who have celebrated throughout the history of the church. We sense our connection with those who will come after us. I believe in those connections deeply. I am connected to the congregations I once served even though I have moved away. When they celebrate, I am still present. I don’t need to be dressed in a robe and stole and standing in front to be connected. When I taste the bread and cup, I am connected regardless of who says the words and leads the service.

But this weekend, rain or shine, I will recall decades of congregations and so many people with whom I’ve been able to share even though it will be a small congregation, perhaps even smaller than usual because of the rain. “Wherever two or three are gathered,” the scripture promises the presence of Christ. We will gather. And I will give thanks.