Our Thanksgiving With Ducks

As a treat on Thanksgiving day, Ginny and I fed ducks in Riverside Park a few blocks from our home. We saw a bald eagle soaring above as we strolled beside the lake.

Here’s an early 1900s postcard showing where we enjoyed this beautiful day:

Feeding the ducks reminds me of three things:

· Tony Soprano, the tv gangster;

· Our youngest daughter, Patricia, who plans to marry on January first;

· and The Lord God Almighty And His Duck Matilda.

I identify with Tony Soprano more than with any other character on tv. He’s my kind of guy. Sure, he cracks heads and breaks legs and makes problem people “go away”. I haven’t done any of that stuff, yet. But Tony and I are on the same wave length when it comes to ducks.

You’ll see why by the end of this posting.

Then there was the incident when our daughter fed the poor starving people…

Once when Patricia was 13 or 14 she encountered a poor family on her way home from school. Neither Ginny nor I were home at the time so Patricia decided to make up a food basket from canned goods and food from our kitchen. She packed a couple of grocery bags with cans of Spam, tuna, beans, powdered milk, etc. Also in her food basket for the poor, she placed a loaf of bread from the freezer..

Now for ages, Ginny has saved all bread scraps from family meals (crusts, moldy slices, half-eaten toast, broken cookie crumbs, etc) so that when we go to a park we’d have something to feed the ducks. It was Ginny’s custom to store these scraps in an old bread wrapper in the freezer until she accumulated a bagful. Also, she’d buy several loafs of real fresh bread at a time and freeze it till she was ready to use it.

You guessed it.

Patricia inadvertently gave the poor, starving family the duck food in the bread wrapper when she carried her two food packets to their house.

It wasn’t till Ginny got home that evening that the error was discovered!

Ever since then the whole family has teased Patricia unmercifully about being cruel to poor starving wretches by making them eat duck food.

Naturally, Ginny and I remembered that incident and laughed about it all over again yesterday.

Then, on a sad, sad note, as I fed ducks yesterday I remembered an entry in my diary on May 31, 2006. I repeat it here:

The Lord God Almighty and His Duck Matilda

My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.
I had a duck I liked to hold.
And now my story is all told.

These words of that great American poet Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss, (1904-1991) sum up my day Tuesday.

Yes, Matilda the duck is no longer with us.

Beginning on May 13^th, my blog has periodically chronicled how this wild duck came to stay in our back yard after being attacked by a raccoon.

We have fed the duck. We bought a pool for the duck. We protected the duck from neighborhood cats.

And we learned from the duck.

Ginny and I enjoyed a perfect day together yesterday. We lingered over coffee talking. We lounged in our swimming pool. We read our books. We napped. We enjoyed a two-hour lunch at a favorite restaurant talking about raising children, Indonesia, computers, and a host of other topics.

We decided that Matilda the duck no longer needs the refuge and safety of our yard. We decided that we should take her to a local park with a lake sprinkled with other ducks. We feared that as her wings became stronger she might fly over our fence and land in a neighbor’s yard among dogs. We decided that the best thing to do for her was to set her free.

It may sound dumb but we prayed about our decision.

Yes, we prayed for a duck.

The Scripture says that God knows every sparrow that falls.

Maybe so, but are ducks included in God’s care?

One of my favorite hymns is All Creatures Of Our God And King, written by St. Francis of Assisi. In his poem, Francis calls upon all nature, clouds, winds, birds, animals, men to praise our Creator.

When I looked at Matilda the duck, I’d also remember the words of the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878).

Bryant watched a waterfowl flying across a marsh and thought about how the good Lord God guides us through life:

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Ginny and I tossed a wet beach towel over a protesting Matilda.

We were carefully not to squeeze her or to break a feather.

Ginny drove while I cradled the frightened duck in my lap.

We parked as close to the lake as possible.

Here’s an old postcard showing where we released Matilda:

We carried a bag of bread scraps. Ginny scattered the crumbs in one place to attract the other ducks away while I unwrapped Matilda at the far side of the pond.

Oh, she was happy to be free.

In her own element, she flapped and dove and preened…

Then three male mallards saw her and attacked. They chased her around the edge of the pond. They chased her out of the water, pecking and grabbing her neck and fighting over her.

Were they killing her?

Were they mating?

I ran over and kicked the three males away.

Matilda ran quacking up under a hedge with the three males charging in hot pursuit. Great squawking and shaking of bushes.

Soon the three mallards emerged.

Alone.

They began chasing another female across the grass.

We searched the undergrowth, but saw no further sign of Matilda.

We think they killed her.

As a Christian I believe (barely) that Scripture which says, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose”.

That’s a tenant of my faith. But why does it so often seem otherwise in my day to day experience? Why do so many of our efforts seem so futile?

Why would God allow us the nurse this duck back to health only to have her raped or killed by her own kind?

That makes no sense to me in my limited human experience. Maybe it does make sense in some vast eternal plan, but it doesn’t seem right to me in the here and now where I live.

My faith says “Good”.

My experience says “Crap”.

I can not deny my personal observation of life; neither can I deny the love of God.

It’s hard for me but I try to move beyond my own observations and experiences to a place where I can say with Paul, the quintessential realist, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

I believe that.

On a shallow level I really do believe that..

But sometimes, even when you do what is reasonable, even when you act with the best intentions, even when you plan ahead, even when you do what is right, even when you do what is logical, even when you pray — even then, your duck gets screwed.

Or worse.

Two "Almost" Lessons

By going to afterburners, working intensely, and putting in overtime, I pushed through and reformatted all 22 of my books so they now are available in three formats: print copies, downloadable to desktop computers, and e-books which can be read on e-book reading machines.

I’m proud of myself.

This represents an enormous accomplishment for me since normally my only computer skills are limited to cutting, pasting, and finding porno sites.

Thus, my on-line book catalog stands ready for the onslaught of book buyers which the newspaper tells me will surge onto the internet on the day after Thanksgiving. If my surge goes like last year’s, that means about three people will actually buy one of my books between now and New Years.

Hey, a surge of three people is better than no surge at all.

Personally I have never read an e-book. I like a physical ink and paper volume. But there is a new age of readers out there in the world. I’ve even met one lady who can read books on her smart phone! My son’s e-book reader holds the text of hundreds of books in a little device hardly bigger than one of my paperback books. He loves the gadget.

While preparing the additional new formats for my writings I… er, learned is too strong a word… observed is also too strong a word…. maybe noticed …. Or even thought about…two lessons.

Maybe God is trying to teach me something and I’m just beginning to get a hint.

First thing I noticed is that I learn how to do something after I’ve already done it and am not likely to ever need to do it again.

I learn how—after the fact.

For instance, AFTER I reformatted and resized 19 book covers for this e-book project, working one file at a time—I learned how to do that operation to dozens of book covers as a batch in one single computer operation!

If I had know how to do that beforehand, I could have saved hours and hours of time.

And here’s another thing, after I had individually worked with 17 files of my 22 book files uploading them one at a time… I discovered that in computer jargon the words unpublish project and delete project do NOT mean the same thing.

You don’t want to know how I found that out!.

You really don’t.

Had I known the difference beforehand, I could have saved a full day’s work on this endeavor. But I didn’t find that out till only five books remained to be processed.

I doubt that I will ever again in my life need to do this kind of clerical/editorial work again… so I wonder why it is that I learn how, after I no longer need to know how?

Is there some spiritual insight to be gained here?

I don’t know.

Another thing that strikes me… the other day I expected a visitor, a friend of my son’s and his wife’s. I wanted to make a good impression, so I made all sorts of preparations. I emptied the ashtrays. Swept the front walk. I shaved. I bought special cookies to serve. I unstopped the bathroom sink—which in the divine order of the universe always clogs up when company’s coming unless there’s a whole bunch of company coming then it’s the toilet that clogs just hours before they are due to arrive.

In other words, I prepared.

The visitor postponed our meeting.

I realized that, not just this week, but all my life, I have spent inordinate amounts of time preparing for things which never happened.

Now here is my puzzlement—I’m writing a book about how God leads us—and I can’t help but wonder that if I am led by the Spirit of God, then why do I get ready for stuff that doesn’t happen? Couldn’t the Spirit have told me, “Hey, back off, John. Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. Just do your normal jobs and quit obsessing about making a good impression”.

Did the Spirit tell me that?

If He did, then I didn’t hear Him.

Oh.

Have I stumbled onto something here?

Perhaps God would have taught me how to batch-manage files if I’d read the instructions beforehand. Maybe God’s Spirit did tell me to relax and not go to afterburners and not obsess about that postponed meeting, but I was not listening.

Maybe this whole work week has not been about preparing manuscripts but preparing me.

The kingdom of Christ on earth may just possibly muddle through without my real books or my e-books… maybe what needs reformatting here is me.

On another note:

Our family decided to each one spend Thanksgiving in their own homes this year instead of gathering for a massive feast in one place.

Ginny and I are looking forward to that; we never get enough time alone.

Weeks ago, Donald and Helen had invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at their home.

Then last week Donald called to un-invite us.

He said, “Dad, we’ve met this really nice couple at church and they asked us out to Fleming Island for dinner with them. They are really nice and we want to go there instead of having you and Mom here”.

So I said, “Well, if you’d rather spend Thanksgiving with nice people instead of with us, go ahead”.

Lord, but we laughed over that!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Hope to see you after the weekend surge.

John

Thumbnails

Yesterday someone had asked me for help, but they did not show up to get it.

That missed appointment freed me to work on turning my 22 print books into E-BOOKS to add to my online book catalog in addition to my hardcopy, real book print editions.

Same book text but in different formats.

Because I was not spending the time I’d expected to in helping, I’ve been able to expand my E-BOOK editions by another nine volumes.

I’ve never read an E-BOOK myself, but I’m told that people buy these things to read on their little machines, and I want to have them ready for the Christmas shopping season which starts next Friday… So I’ve really felt pressed for time. Problem is…

In my on-line book catalog, an e-book thumbnail looks to me exactly like a real-book thumbnail. How can buyers tell them apart?

I know.

I’ll make a different thumbnail. One with a little gold seal on the book cover saying, this is not a real book but an E-BOOK.

I’m proud to announce that John Cowart, King Of The Geriatric Computer Geeks, solved this knotty problem with my usual hi-tech skills.

All I needed were Ginny’s nail scissors, a paper oval, tweezers, something with my Bluefish Books logo, a glue stick, a post-it note, 22 books covers, and a pack of cigarettes.

So, I printed out a smallified Bluefish Books logo. Using Ginny’s nail scissors, the kind with a curved blade, I cut it into a perfect oval. I unraveled a pack of Ginny’s cigarettes so I could take out the gold-foil lining. I glued the little paper oval to the foil from the back, then traced a bigger oval around the little oval. Then I—am I boring you with all this hi-tech computer jargon?

All I needed to make was 22 of these shiny seals for my book covers…

Problem is I can’t cut ovals.

Can’t cut along the traced lines.

I remember back when I was in the first grade, my teacher, Miss. Ink… midway through my first grade something happened to Miss. Ink and her name changed to Mrs. Skeleton. That was a shame because Ink was so much easier to spell than Skeleton… Anyhow, Miss. Ink whacked my fingers with a ruler because I could not cut out the mimeographed figure of this purple pumpkin. I could not stay on the lines and she checked the scraps to see if there was any purple showing and to hide my scraps I turned them face down on the desk but she turned them over, saw the purple where I cut outside the line and she whacked my fingers and fussed at me and I cried.

Anyhow, yesterday I needed to cut out 22 oval shapes and I couldn’t.

Damn, Miss Ink/Skeleton anyhow!!! She was supposed to teach me not whack my fingers. If I had ever learned to cut pumpkins, then ovals would be a snap.

Being a hi-tech genesis, albeit a clumsy one, I figured out a way to transfer the one seal I did manage to cut into a mostly oval shape from one book cover to another.

What I did was I folded a post-it note into eight little folds, sticky-side out and stuck it to the back of the one foil oval. Then I could use the tweezers to peel it off and move it to another book cover.

Damn but I’m cleaver.

So I stuck my shiny oval Bluefish Books seal onto the front cover of a book and scanned the whole cover in anew. Because of the bright light of the scanner, the gold foil reflects down and comes out scanned looking gray… but people who buy E-BOOKS should be computer literate enough to see that this is an E-BOOK not a real book that they are buying.

When they buy an E-BOOK, they get it in-hand immediately. Since production costs are lower the price is cheaper. And there are no shipping and handling fees to pay, so you save more money that way.

Here is a scanned copy of one of my book covers with a shiny seal to prove that it is an E-Book, not a real book:

I still have a bunch of these thumbnail thingies to make, but I think I can have all 22 E-BOOKS available on line in my catalog at www.bluefishbooks.info by tomorrow night.

The 22 E-BOOKs are added at the tail end of my catalog. The same book in print editions, I put at the top of the catalogue listings.

Oh, by the way, the person who had asked my help, said she wanted “to pick my brain about preparing her books for publication”. Alas, She could have learned so much about writing and publishing from me. Always glad to share my expertise with young writers.

I’m proud of my technical ability in preparing these E-BOOKS for publication. I keep abreast of the latest technological developments. Stephen King must be able to cut out ovals quicker than I can because he has a lot of such E-BOOKS available on line. I’m trying to catch up with him as America’s best-selling author, so if you see him—hide his nail scissors.

We Received A Kindness From Davy

As soon as we got back from vacation out in the woods where there was no cell phone service, we learned that Ginny’s 86-year-old mother had been seriously ill.

Three different hospitals in two weeks.

She returned home with a pacemaker and appears to be recovering nicely now.

Much loved, her being down generated much prayer, much concern, and a flurry of long distance phone calls. Her seven children live across the U.S. Scattered between California, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, and Virginia. Reams of e-mails and replies between brothers and sisters burned up the airways.

In the midst of all that inbox activity, I received a special kind missive from a stranger in Scotland, a man I had never even heard of before. All his e-mail said was “Repaired with my compliments. Davy from Scotland”.. Attached were several restored family photographs.

Back on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 Treasured Photographs I posted a blog entry about some old family Danny, one of Ginny’s younger brothers, sent to us. Here’s a copy of one of the ones I posted:

Out of the blue, David Wilson, the gentleman in Scotland, picked out several of these old family photographs from my site, and beautifully restored them. He did this out of the goodness of his heart.

Here’s the same photo after Mr. Wilson fixed it:

I hesitate to say just how old this antique photo is, but my wife is the smallest person in the picture; her mother, Alva, stands in the back row on the left.

What a nice surprise this gift from a stranger was, especially coming in a time of family crisis.

I replied to his e-mail: “Thanks Davy. The photos are from my wife's family I'll show these to her. Your unexpected gift comes at just the right time. Ginny's father died last summer and her mother is seriously ill in a hospital this week. Perhaps the Lord directed your timing. Thanks again!”

David Wilson (at dw010f4707@blueyonder.co.uk) replied, “John, if you have any more old or new photos that need some tender loving care just email them to me and i will do my best. I do this sort of thing for fun, i hate to see old photos that have been through the wars. Most are easily fixed and bring a smile to someone’s face at no cost. Davy.”

I am really touched by his kindness from across the world.

Thank you, Davy.

In a different vein…

As Ginny shopped for groceries this morning, I sat on a bench outside the store watching pretty girls wag by and praying. If these activities seem inconsistent, they are, and I am. The most consistent thing about my Christian life is that I’m inconsistent.

Anyhow, aggressive drivers intent on holiday shopping squealed through the parking lot vying for close parking spots in the rain. Saw several near-accidents.

An elderly man pushed a shopping card down a lane; it supported him as he pushed it. Through puddles.

A Ford Expedition wheeled from one lane to another. The driver, I’d guess a vice-president type, brooked no interference as he drove, window down, CD blaring.

The tottering old man blocked his way. The driver shoved forward and forced the old guy to step back into a puddle. Way clear the Ford zipped into a parking space…

And as he did, several bills of money blew out of the driver’s side back window. I could not see the denominations but it looked to be three bills. Unaware, the driver jumped from his car and marched (looked like that executive stride they teach up-and-comers ) toward the store.

The old man let him stride. Then he bent painfully over and picked up the cash. For one moment I thought he was going to call the asshole back and tell him he’d dropped the money. I could see the wheels turning in his brain. On mature reflection he let the guy stride away. He folded the money and stuck it in his shirt pocket and kept pushing his cart through the rain toward the store.

When I told Ginny about the incident, she said, “He was just conducting an exercise in justice”.

God bless the old guy.

As my Aunt Hazel, God rest her, once told me, “Youth and skill is never a match for old age and treachery”.

At Silver Star

Thursday my friend Barbara White treated me to lunch at Silver Star Chinese Restaurant—great food!

Hadn’t seen Barbara since before Ginny and I went on vacation so we had lots of conversation to catch up on both at my home and at Silver Star:

Barbara’s chemotherapy seems to have taken. Hardly any cancer markers left in her blood. But she feels bone weary and lethargic.

I said that feeling is natural. After all, when Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, He did not tell him to go hoe corn; He said to loose him from the winding sheets and give him dinner—relaxation before activity.

Ever notice that Jesus has common sense?

Barbara’s doctor tells her that her cancer may reoccur; statistically this kind often shows up again in three to six months after a first round of chemo. Barbara feels well at the moment and is still thinking about starting the evangelistic/Christian life meetings we talked about last time.

Barbara, an award-winning newspaper columnist, is the author of the Along The Way series of books at www.bluefishbooks.info .

I told her about my continuing frustrations over writing the book on the will of God, (haven’t touched it since before vacation) and that led us into an interesting discussion of Scripture.

Barbara is a groupie. She meets with a bunch of different groups. Yesterday she’d joined nine other ladies in a tea room for a two-hour discussion of whatever a group of nine ladies discuss. (Do nine ladies with tea leaves make a quorum or a coven?).

Barbara also attends a Bible study at her retirement home, church functions, and she faithfully goes to her Tuesday Night Group—which for the past 15 years has met on Thursdays.

In one of these groups the discussion touched on Luke Chapter Eight, where Jesus claimed kinship with “:These which hear the word of God and do it”.

(Mathew, Chapter Eight; and Mark, Four and Five, cover more or less the same series of incidents.)

“Now it came to pass on a certain day, that He went into a ship with His disciples: and He said unto them, ‘Let us go over unto the other side of the lake’. And they launched forth”.

Jesus went to sleep in the bow and there arose a great tempest in the sea.

“Lord, save us! We Perish,” the disciples yelled as water filled the boat.

He woke up, and first rebuked the disciples “Why are ye fearful?”, then He rebuked the waves, and the sea obeyed Him.

They may have been afraid of the storm waves, but now they were even more afraid of Jesus!

“The men marveled saying, “What manner of Man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him”?

The boat no sooner landed in the country of the Gadarenes, than a wild man raced from the tombs screaming and frothing. The demons in him made him cry and cut himself with sharp stones. He broke the chains when people tried to control him… “But, when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshiped Him”.

Jesus cast the demons from the man into a herd of pigs which ran off a cliff.

When the villagers came out to see—they “see him that was possessed with the devil and had the legion, sitting, clothed, and in his right mind: And they were afraid”!

They begged Jesus to—Go Away.

As Jesus got back into the boat, the man that had been possessed with the devil prayed Him that he might be with Him.

Jesus would not let him come.

“Go home,” Jesus said, “To thy friends and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee”.

Barbara noted how many things people were afraid of in this passage: The storm, the sea, Jesus stilling the storm, the demon-possessed man, Jesus casting out the demons, the loss of the pigs…

This Jesus is one scary dude. Strange things happen around Him.

And in a letter addressed to Christians, the Scripture says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”.

Barbara said the Gentleman Formerly Known As Legion did the will of God. He did not go with Jesus. He did not get in the boat. He did exactly what Jesus said. “He departed and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men did marvel”.

I don’t know the reference, but Barbara said that at a later time Jesus visited that same territory and a crowd of 4,000 people gathered to hear Him—perhaps as a result of the obedient, healed wild man who did the will of God.

What a cool conversation we had over egg foo young.

Barbara also mentioned that in one of her groups, one guy began talking about the return of Christ quoting Thessalonians, another man waded in with verses from Revelation…

With a groan, I put in my own two cents worth.

“I go along with Paul,” I said. “Wherefore, beloved brethren, confront one another with these words”!

Cancer will never get Barbara—she’ll choke to death on an egg roll laughing at my stupid jokes.

Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part Four

Here’s a photo of our queen-sized bed at the vacation cabin:.

No Post Today.

Yesterday, I’d promised to write on the subject of sex and I did. Of course, you know me; I would never overstep the boundaries of good taste. Nothing I write would ever be inappropriate or insensitive.

Nonetheless, I asked Ginny to read and review what I’d written for today.

She said it made her uneasy. She is humor impaired and lacks my refined sense of good taste, but she does have a certain feel for things.

So I chose to scrap my writing on this subject for now.

In other news…

Back at work this afternoon. I’m swamped. While we were on vacation in the deep woods, Lulu Press, the company I use to print the books I publish, began offering a program to turn print books into E-Books.

The three main advantages of E-Books is that they cost less; you can download them immediately; and you have no shipping and handling charges to pay.

Sounds like a winner to me.

I’m beginning to restructure some of my books into an E-Book format so readers will have a choice between a print copy, an E-Book, or a downloadable copy.

Given my computer skills, this project looks to take me forever.

We’ll see how it turns out.

Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part Three

During the 1890s Charlie Edwin Turlington built a log cabin in Lafayette County, Florida, near where Ginny and I vacationed..

We visited the pioneer cabin one day during our anniversary vacation; and as we toured the structure, I reminisced about my grandfather’s cracker home place near Graham, Florida. The footprint of the Turlington cabin and my grandfather’s place displays typical Florida cracker architecture.

Turlington built his log cabin with two equal rooms separated by an open porch. A kitchen/eating building lay behind, away from sleeping quarters in case of fire. Another open porch, called a dog trot, connected the kitchen building with the front rooms.

I have no idea why it was called a dog trot.

I imagine that originally the present corrugated tin roof was made of split cypress shingles. My grandfather had a tool called a froe which he used to make such shingles.

Here’s a photo of Ginny which shows how Turlington notched the logs together:

Notice how Turlington caulked outside gaps by splitting saplings and wedging them bark-side-in between the logs. Inside, he sealed the rooms with clay plaster.

In 1919, Senator Fred Parker bought this log cabin from Turlington for $50. The Parker family kept the cabin till 1926 and eventually the cabin came to the town of Mayo, Florida, where it now sits on a lovely town park shaded by majestic oak trees.

As I pointed out log cabin features to Ginny, we imagined how blissful life might be in simpler times—HA!

I remember some of the human relations that went on around my grandfathers place. Think Desperate Housewives by kerosene lamp—the sister who stole away the other sister’s husband. The brother who rescued a baby from off the railroad track, a hero till suspicions arose that he was the one who put the kid on the tracks in the fist place.

Anything that goes on in a highrise condo today, might have gone on in a log cabin way back when.

Well, most anything.

Once, back during the Depression, this lady came trudging down the dirt road to Granddaddy’s house. She pushed a wheelbarrow with a cripple boy in it. In the front yard she tipped the barrow dumping the kid out into the dirt—Like all cracker farmers, Granddaddy hoed out every blade of grass around the house to make snakes visible when they came into the yard. At the turn of the previous century, even in metropolitan Jacksonville people kept grass down using the dirt-yard as a barrier against snakes. Green lawns are a modern innovation in Florida.

Anyhow, this woman said, “Mr. Moody, I caint raise no cripple youngun. Just caint take it no mo. I’m leaving him here. I hears you’s good Christian people. You can take him in or leave him to starve in the dirt. Makes me no nevermind”.

With that, she hefted her barrow and walked away.

Granddaddy and Grandma added that crippled boy to their own 16 or 18 kids and raised him up to adulthood as one of their own. That’s all the adoption there was in those days.

I don’t see that happening often around a highrise condo.

Maybe there’s something to be said for log cabin days.

But, of course there was the time a panther got into the house, attracted by a crying baby, and my great-grandmother Effie swacked it with her broom and chased it out of her cabin.

Our rented vacation cabin in Lafayette Blue Springs State Park hardly resembled the pioneer cabin of my Cracker ancestors.

Yes, in true pioneer spirit Ginny and I know how to camp in the rough. For instance, heavy rain from Hurricane Ida confined us to our cabin for two days—two days in which we spent in wonderful conversations and in reading.

Ginny read a biography of mathematician and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, and she enjoyed reading an armload of murder mysteries. For fun, I read four books on archaeology; and for work I read….

I hesitate to talk about this. But one of the things I took a vacation from was the book I’ve been writing for years about finding and doing the will of God. Yet, to keep my mind focused while in the woods, I read a book by an imminent preacher and internationally acclaimed author and speaker. His 1971 book is about divine guidance.

Reading it was like getting swacked on the head by great-grandma’s broomstick.

Right off, the author starts telling me about the nine symptoms which prove I am out of God’s will. By his criteria, I have never been in God’s will and I hardly even qualify as being a Christian.

I contrast the harsh way the author addresses my confused life with the words of Jesus Christ:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest .
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

I hope the books I write make life and godliness easier and lighter for readers. I hope my work reflects the attractiveness of Jesus Christ.

Yes, the Cross is hard and heavy. No doubting that. But I feel the preacher whose book I read on vacation seems to make life harder and heavier than it needs to be.

I’m thinking about this.

Oh, that reminds me—Today, I promised to tell a great preacher joke from our vacation:

Way out in the deep piney woods of panhandle Florida was this little town with a Bible college where young preachers learned their trade. To give the boys experience, sometimes the local undertaker would let a student preacher conduct a funeral.

One inexperienced young man faced giving his first funeral.

The undertaker explained that the deceased was an old farmer being buried far out of town on his own farm land; because the farmer had no family and because he was so elderly all his kin had already died, no one would be at the burial.

Only two gravediggers would be there.

The undertaker gave complicated directions to the young man.

The young preacher drove down the state road to the county road and turned off on the shell road, then turned onto the dirt road and finally drove along two ruts through the forest.

He got lost and had to backtrack again and again.

He was over an hour late when he saw a weathered farm house where two workmen leaned on shovels over a hole in the ground and a pile of dirt.

The preacher braked to a stop, grabbed his Bible and ran to the hole. Looking down he saw the cement lid of a vault already in place. Hating to keep those gruff workmen waiting any longer, he began to pray and read Scripture as quickly as he could.

Finally finished, he moped hid forehead with a red bandanna, breathed a sigh of relief, and drove off in his car.

As he pulled out of sight one workman said, “That preacher boy sure gives a good funeral, don’t he”?

“That he does. That he does. But I think we might ought to have told him that we’re here putting in a new septic tank”.

After 41 years of marriage Ginny still laughs at my jokes.

I love her so!

She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tomorrow, God willing, I plan to write about sex.

Readers with tender sensibilities about explicit sex may want to skip that posting.

Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part Two

Heard the one about the Florida sinkhole?

These two guys were out hunting in central Florida’s sinkhole country. In the woods near the edge of a field they came across a deep hole in the ground.

It was so deep they could not see the bottom, so they threw in a rock and listened to hear it hit… Not a sound.

They tried a bigger rock.

Over the edge. It disappeared in the darkness without a sound.

They wanted to try something bigger, so they lugged over an old railroad tie from the edge of the field and toppled it into the deep hole. Down it went. They still could not hear it hit bottom.

But, as they stood on the edge looking down, they heard a crashing noise in the woods behind them. This goat came dashing through the bushes. Lickety-split, it ran to the edge of the deep hole and leaped.

Down, down, down it sailed and disappeared out of sight.

This behavior amazed the hunters. They’d never seen an animal act like that before. They picked up their rifles and headed back to where their pickup was parked.

As they crossed the field they met the farmer who said, “You fellows seen my goat back there in the woods? I know he cain’t have got very far ‘cause I had him just over yonder tethered on a long chain hooked to a railroad tie”.

During our 41^st anniversary vacation, Ginny and I explored a sinkhole.

While other people hunted deer, wild turkey, and bear, Ginny and I hunted Indian arrowheads and fossils around the Lafayette Blue Spring.

Sinkholes make a good place to seek such treasures. Spring waters flowing through subterranean caverns for years and years, wear away the living rock forming larger and larger underground rooms. Eventually the roof wears too thin to support the weight of the ground above and the whole thing falls in creating a sinkhole.

Hardly a year goes by without news reports of houses or even sections of interstate highway being swallowed by a sinkhole.

The sides of the sinkholes abound in fossils. The exposed rock sometimes reveals giant shark teeth over six inches long. The saber-toothed tiger, extinct bison, the ground sloth, and even mastodons once roamed Florida and the paleoIndians hunted such creatures.

Here’s a photo of me half-way down a sinkhole near the springs:

I found a few fossil bone splinters and shells. Ginny found a bit of Indian potsherd; but she was more interested in plants we found in a gully:

She took photos of this Resurrection Fern growing on an oak in the sinkhole:

When we reached the bottom of the sinkhole, we found deer tracks and an otter’s slide. Certified cave divers explore the depths of Florida sinkholes and springs; they say the underground, underwater caverns extend for miles under the earth.

One day, our radio told about the old farmer who asked his little boy if he wanted to grow up strong and healthy and live for a long time.

The old man told the boy the way to live long, is for everyday at breakfast, to open a shotgun shell and pour the gunpowder on your oatmeal.

The boy did this.

Must have worked. That boy lived to be 96 years-old and when he died he left 14 children, 43 grand children, and a 15-foot hole in the ground at the crematorium.

Enough about holes in the ground.

One day of our anniversary trip, Ginny and I drove over to Troy Springs about 20 miles from our cabin. The overcast day and glare on the water stopped me from taking photos at Troy Spring, but I found some others with a Bing search.

Before The War, in 1854, Capt. James M. Tucker build a steamboat which he used as a floating general store servicing towns along the Suwannee River. When the invaders came, Capt. Tucker outfitted his steamboat with cannon, and his CSS Madison joined the Confederate navy.

Here’s a 100-year-old photo of the Madison:

Four times, the Madison darted out the mouth of the Suwannee into the Gulf to successfully attack enemy ships. The enemy wanted to capture the Madison and turn her guns against the South. But in 1863, as the enemy chased, Capt. Tucker scuttled the Madison in the mouth of Troy Springs. And there she sits today.

Here is a recent photo of the ship’s remains on the sand bottom in shallow water at the juncture of Troy Spring run and the Suwannee River:

When I was a Boy Scout during the 1950s, I dove on the wreck and plundered some iron spikes and boiler plate for our troop museum. (This was years before Troy Spring became a state park). So I particularly wanted to show the site to Ginny because of my happy memories of that place.

Here’s a recent photo of a diver on the Madison: wreck

Scuttled.

Deliberately sunk to keep the valuable ship out of enemy hands.

The thought occurs to me that sometimes God scuttles my perfectly good plans… He even scuttles perfectly good people. Perfectly good organizations and churches… Sunk. Vanished beneath the waters.

Couldn’t God preserve them?

Sure. But He chooses to scuttle good parts of my life to keep them out of enemy hands.

Things I once felt proud of, effective ministries, good jobs, happy relationships—you know the drill—are now only curios.

And tourists take pictures—if they even care.

But, and this is the important part, the enemy never got his filthy hands on them to turn them against God.

I’ve seen a lot of my dreams sink. If I regard them as senseless, arbitrary loss, regret overwhelms me. But if I think of them as scuttled, I still feel loss, but it’s an understandable loss.

Even an acceptable loss.

Tomorrow, God willing, I plan to write about more adventures of John and Ginny in still love and still exploring eachother and the beautiful world around us..

And I’ve got the best preacher joke ever.

Stay tuned to this station.

Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part One

For our vacation observing our 41^st anniversary, Ginny and I traveled to a cabin at Lafayette Blue Springs, a Florida state park about ten miles southwest of Luraville, a place so far out in the deep woods there was no cell phone service and our radio could only pick up one station.

Locals pronounce the county name as Lafate.

The radio station played country western music and told jokes, but never did say where they were broadcasting from. I recon they figure if you can hear them, you know where they are.

One guy says, “Shot my dog yesterday”
“Was he mad”?
“He sure weren’t too happy about it”.

As we drove over there, we passed through one small town where we saw a bunch of people standing around a shade tree beside the road. Getting closer we read the sign announcing it was a site for swine flue shots being given in the open air clinic.

We’d never been to Lafayette Blue Springs before; we’d reserved our cabin back in March or April, so in this rural area we expected to see a cabin like this:

But that was not our cabin; that’s an old cracker house beside the road. It looks a lot like the homeplace—the house where my grandparents lived.

On arriving in the state park, we found that our cabin to looks like this:

It’s built up on stilts because of the nearby Suwannee River’s frequent flooding. (Stephen Foster misspelled the name in his famous song). Ginny and I really rough it when we go camping. Here are three photos of the cabin’s interior

Hunting season opens in November, so a car dealer advertising on the radio offered this incentive—This month, if you buy a pickup truck from him and go hunting and shoot a deer, then tie it on the hood and bring it by the dealer so he can take a picture of it, then he will pay a taxidermist to mount your deer head so you can hang it on your wall at home.

If the big auto makers in Detroit offered buyers that kind of incentive, they would not need government bail out money.

Ginny and I did not go hunting, but we did swim in LafayetteBlue Spring, one of Florida’s first magnitude springs. Because the water flows from underground caverns at a constant temperature of 72 degrees year round, and because the air temperature was only a little below that, November swimming in Florida is a joy.

Here is a photo of a water nymph posed to dive from a limestone outcropping above one spring pool:

She chickened out.

Here is a photo of me wearing my form-fitting Senior Citizen Speedo on that same outcropping:

Hey, it fits my form.

Blue Springs flow directly into the Suwannee through a series of pools. In places, the spring run undercuts the limestone forming a natural stone bridge. Here’s a photo of my beautiful Ginny standing on such a natural bridge:

A stone ridge at the mouth of the spring run creates boiling rapids:

The rapids foam. The spring’s current flows swiftly into the Suwannee. The rocks are slippery. Be careful or… Never mind.

The radio announcer told about this guy who takes his wife deer hunting for the first time.

They are still-hunting so he sets her up in one spot while he climbs a tree-stand a few hundred yards away. BOOM. He hears a shot and thinks his wife has bagged one.

He goes over to find her holding her rifle on this man with his hands in the air.

“What’s going on”?

Irate, she said, “This guy wants to steal my deer”.

The guy said, “Lady, you can have it, just let me get my saddle off first”.

God willing, I hope to write more about our wonderful anniversary adventures, relay more radio jokes, talk about spiritual implications, and post more photos tomorrow and Wednesday.

Stay tuned to this station.

The First Day Of November

Were she still alive, my mother would be 93 years plus one day today.

Yes, she always lied about her birthday.

She said it was November First.

But in going through her papers after she died in 1985, we found her birth certificate showing that she was actually born on Halloween. Not even her sisters knew this. We figure she was ashamed of her birthday because people might think she was a witch or something evil.

I refrain from further comment.

During the day yesterday, Ginny and I divided forces in preparations for our anniversary trip. She took the car to the mechanic for a checkup—which ate grievously into our vacation cash—while I blew accumulated leaves off the roof and cleaned the rain gutters.

We met for lunch at a BBQ place where our waitress wore a skimpy devil costume. Her cleavage was so deep you could loose a whole side of ribs down there.

I noticed.

Then, in the evening Ginny and I set out our Halloween display and prepared huge packets for trick-or-treaters. I didn’t take photos this year; pretty much the same set up display as for previous years except we included more candy in the packets this year. (See October 30, 2005 for photos).

I wonder if this is worth the effort but we do what we can and give the best we’ve got.

You can never tell what counts and what doesn’t.

For instance, a neighbor came over to sit outside with me to talk seriously for a time last night as we handed out the candy, tracts, and toys. He’s seen something or another that made him want to talk with me.

Funny thing that because Friday night Ginny and I ran into a young couple we haven’t seen in ten or 12 years and they went on and on about how much of a testimony we were to them. In fact they’d been talking about us on Thursday…. Funny thing, is how I see this “Young” couple as young when they were out with their grandbaby!

I’m really getting over the hill when I think of grandparents as young.

A happy encounter.

All day Ginny and I have enjoyed happy, serious conversations ourselves—talking about our vacation plans and sex and history and art and joy and Christian witness.

Last week my friends Barbara and Wes treated me to breakfast as someplace that wasn’t Dave’s and we talked about these same sort of issues. Odd, Barbara is in her 80s and has just finished chemo treatments for ovarian cancer, yet she’s planning an evangelist/Christian growth outreach at the retirement home where she lives. She’s forming a discussion group to think about basic Christian living issues.

And here I am, ten years younger and in good health—doing nothing to advance the Kingdom of Christ… Ginny and I talked about this quite a bit yesterday.

I’d like to think that writing this book I’m working on about finding and following the will of God may be a bit of a witness. But judging from the way my books have circulated in the past, I don’t have much hope for this one making much of an impact either.

Here’s an interesting note about that:

Martin Luther wrote a book named, The Bondage Of The Will; Jonathan Edwards wrote a book named, The Freedom Of The Will. I’ve been reading excerpts from both books as I research my own tome… Any wonder that the more I research the subject, the less I know about it.

I’m examining the thoughts and lives of great thinkers and Christians of the past to see how they found the will of God in their own lives.

I’m looking at Scripture to see how God leads. The one passage just about everyone knows begins, “The Lord is my Shepherd…He leadeth me…”.

And I also look at various pagan practices from hepatoscopy to oneiromancy to see how people have sought the voice of God (Hepatoscopy is seeking the will of the gods in the liver of a sacrifice; oneiromancy is seeking the will of gods in your sleep). I even examine the practice of listening for the voice of a god by holding a sea shell to your ear.

But besides looking at Scripture and the lives and thoughts of other Christians, I’m also going back through some of my old diaries to detail how I think God may have led me in various practical situations such as buying a car, home repairs, treatment for my prostate cancer, Everyday stuff like that.

One thing I find in all this study is that God often leads us by applying the pressure of circumstance.

He places us under tremendous tension and stress to bring about His will.

Think of God as an archer.

Think of His message as an arrow.

You are the bow.

The more strain on the bow, the more power of the arrow’s impact.

No archer wants to break His bow; he wants it to function under maximum stress.

That might explain a lot of stuff that happens in life.

Barbara tells me that when she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she thought that just might be her ticket out, but as her body responded positively to the chemo, there came a point when she said, “Looks like I’m going to live. What does the Lord want me to do with the rest of my life?”.

So she bought the video tapes and began setting up the life-issues discussion group.

We all want to know God’s will—even if we only want to know it so we can perhaps consider it one of our options.

We’d like to see a big bush that talks and burns at the same time—but that’s only happened to one guy.

God’s guidance for most of us is a bit more subtle.

For instance, as I think back about how 42 years ago Ginny and I decided to get married, it boils down to this:

She was horny.

I was horny.

That settled the matter.

You mean God can lead by purely human appetites of the flesh?

Worked for us.