Past & Future -- With Noodles

First, before I begin this posting, let’s all bow out heads and close our eyes to observe a moment of silence:

Momofuku Ando died last Friday in Osaka, Japan.

He was 96.

Our world is diminished.

Mr. Ando invented instant ramen noodles. He was inspired to create the cheap, salty treat by food scarcity in postwar Japan.

“I happened to pass this area and saw a line 20, 30 meters long in front of a dimly lit stall from which clouds of steam were steadily rising,” he wrote. “People dressed in shabby clothes shivered in the cold while waiting for their turn. The person who was with me said they were lined up for a bowl of ramen.”

“I realized that people were willing to wait patiently just for a bowl of ramen,” he said.

He took that vision home with him and, using a secondhand noodle-making machine and a large wok, Mr. Ando sprinkled soup on the noodles with a watering can, then kneaded and loosened them by hand after letting them partly dry.

“This allowed the noodles to soak up the soup on the outer layer,” he wrote. “I then dried the noodles so they would keep longer and could be easily prepared with boiling water.”

The company he founded, Nissin Food Products, now produces 16 flavors of Top Ramen and Cup Noodles. Last year, 46.3 billion packs and cups were sold around the world.

In July, 2005, astronauts carried packets of Mr. Ando’s ramen noodles into space aboard the Discovery space shuttle on their twelve day mission.

Without Mr. Ando’s invention, my family might well have starved back when we were poor.

I owe him a debt.

Yes, in the past we were once dirt poor, but the Lord (and Mr. Ando’s noodles) pulled us through.

But my past doesn’t count for much.

As my e-friend Darlene Schachts said in her blog this morning, “It doesn't really matter where I've been, or what I've done, it's past. The past that does matter is what Christ has done for me”.

Yesterday my scanner buzzed and zipped and whirred as I scanned in 85 pages, about half, of those 17^th Century Puritan diaries I’ve mentioned before.

I realize there is virtually no commercial market for this work, but when did that ever stop me from fiddling with manuscripts, my own or other people’s? I do this work because I love it. There are worse reasons to labor.

Another profitless project:

The librarian at Argyle Branch Library, (7973 S Old Middleburg Road, Jacksonville, FL, 32222, Phone Number: (904) 573-3164) invited me to give a lecture on an overview of Jacksonville history at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 16^th.

If any of you blog readers in the Jacksonville area would like to attend, I’ll be happy to see you there.

Here is a photo of me speaking at such a lecture last year:

Another exciting thing ahead:

Next week my youngest son, Donald, and I plan to help my friend Barbara set up her computer and establish a blog. Barbara is a retired religion editor and won many national writing awards for her weekly “Along The Way” column which tracked her deep personal devotion and prayer life amid horrendous problems.

I’ll let everyone know when she gets on line…

Maybe.

Thing is, Barbara often calls me for computer advice.

The Scripture that applies here is “… And they both shall fall into the ditch”.