Today at the historical society’s research library, we discovered that our house was built in 1908—two years earlier than we had been told.
Audit is officially over as of today. I’m started to feel normal after a weeklong cold. I’m off work next week. Things are looking up!
Will there still be old men sitting in restaurants at 6am drinking coffee and talking about nothing in particular by the time I’m old enough to join them?
Rachel has more or less finished the floor refinishing project. I think it looks wonderful! She also made herself a great reading corner.
I’ll be so glad when this election is over. I always resist writing about electoral politics because 1. what the hell do I know and 2. I hate the dread I feel after I do say something. Still, I wrote something yesterday and then woke up at 12:19am and deleted it. (Way too late, obviously.) Not that I said anything wrong. Basically, it’s bad practice to presume to peer into the inner workings of people you don’t actually know, despite the fact that everybody with internet access does it every damn day. Also, we have got to learn not to trust any opinion that gives us the pleasure of feeling superior. Those two sentences, removed from the context of our miserable godcursed politics, are the heart of what I wanted to say.
The Given Life, part two
My earliest religious memories took place at Trinity Pentecost Mission. (Yes, Pentecost. Like Episcopal and Episcopalian, the folks weren’t always sure whether they were Pentecost or Pentecostal.) My grandpa helped build the church when the congregation outgrew its old building around 1970. My grandpa was also Sunday School superintendent at that church for thirty years. I have the bell he used to ring to round up the children. Springville church (as it was more commonly known) was truly a country church.
The Given Life, part 1.5
I need to clarify some terminology. I mentioned in the first post in this series that the Holiness churches were “fundamentalist.” Now, I know many people use that as a term of abuse for basically any conservative religious organization that they don’t like but I do have a specific meaning for it. I believe I got this from James Ault’s book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, which I read shortly after leaving the Holiness churches.
Good list of eight ways of connecting from Ted Goia. Some of these I was already doing okay with and some still need a lot of work. The two I’ve been working on the most recently are:
- Connection with history and tradition
- Connection with the community via institutions and organizations
This morning I heard a bit from The Wayfinders by Wade Davis, a book about the Polynesian open ocean navigators. Astonishing. Not only the volume of knowledge required to do such navigation, but the types of information used–observations in minute detail gathered over centuries–is amazing.
To all the folks complaining about how popular Halloween is among adults today, I offered this as my considered reply:
