We are emerging from the Covid pandemic, and Loretta and I were invited to a fellow teacher’s house for lunch.  It was a wonderful time.  He’s in his nineties (World War II veteran).  I think that as we get older these sociable events take on more meaning.

He’s a recent widower, so the cooking was done by an aide procured by his daughters.  The aide is a young man who worked for a caterer in Los Angeles but was laid off by the pandemic.  The aide knew how to shop for the items at Uncle Giuseppe’s, and so had the ingredients for an easily prepared Italian lunch of stuffed shells, meat balls and sausage.

With the pandemic the Lord is telling us, straighten out your lives and values, so you can continue to enjoy the things that matter in life.

Can a whole population be educated to be kinder and more just?  Look at the random shootings in the U.S. and compare that with the random shootings in Switzerland where each citizen keeps a military carbine at home with a small amount of ammunition.  They almost never have a misuse of that weapon.  Is it the culture?  The education?

I think it’s the influence of religion in Western culture.  Nobody wants to be the crazy guy.  There’s a strong sense of community approval.  This in a nation that counts many admired heroes in its history.

Whatever the cause, there’s hope for mankind.  Don’t give up yet.  There is hope we’ll come out of this yet.  And don’t neglect prayer.

Philip Roth did his best with what he had, but secular society can be somewhat arbitrary in its judgments.  I, on the contrast, had almost no fame, but no misgivings about how I treated women, or how I viewed them in my innermost psyche.  You see, I was in on the intimate sayings of the Redeemer, something Philip almost caught in his desire to be a full-fledged American.    

The advice I took saved me not only from adultery, but from hurting some beautiful young female with the sobriquet of a kept woman or worse.  I love the freedom of innocence.

I don’t recall any of Roth’s writings, but it hurts to hear he left no children.  I know my writings are no assurance of some kind of literary immortality, and his may, in some opinions, not be either.  But the mental trials he endured to reach earthly fame may be worth an enduring kingdom.     

The patio glider, a comfortable, two-seat swing, collapsed this morning when a rusty connection broke.  I reversed the strut and bored a new hole after removing the bolt.  I found a new bolt and went to buy a lock nut for it.  The Trio hardware man handed me the nut and said, “Put it into your pocket and have a good day.”  It was a freebee.

I thought up the solution strategy myself.  (We can rely on the Holy Spirit, even unasked.) The real effort was putting the tools away.  I always enjoyed solving problems around the home, but the real challenge was in Nature—bedbugs.  We picked them up on the way to Charleston.  Being on a teacher’s salary, I always chose the cheapest motels.

To live life is to go through toil and turmoil, as the operas say, and one day, though we don’t see that we’ve done it, we realize that long ago, somebody died for us around this time of the year, and that has made all the difference.

Biden is bidin’ his time.  The verb biding comes from the Old High German, bitan, to wait.  Like the lapsed Catholic that he is, Biden is waiting to reap his earthly goods from China. While Latino immigrants were his hope of salvation — they were the one thing Trump didn’t do better– now there are accusations that pedophiles have infiltrated the Border staff, and Biden’s attempt to win the public’s approval is on shaky ground.

He is a politician, used to mounting the high ground in what the Left likes: Planned Parenthood, overly generous government spending, friendship with nations who don’t have America’s standing in mind.  Not much has been said about his son Hunter’s deals with China and the Ukraine.  But he wants to be one of those politicians who leave office wealthier than when they entered.

Sure, we are all corrupted by this world, the media no less than those they report on.  So this brief article is really nothing new; it is merely a reality fix.