A Friend is Gone . . .

My friend Kent Davy died of cancer this week on the 29th of July, just 8 minutes past midnight. He was only 69, too young for a man to die these days.

Rest in peace, Kent. As I once quipped, you were my best friend in this Seoul world . . .

Pat Young, Fellow NoZe Brother

A NoZe was blown "up yonder" on June 24, 2019 for Pat Young, one of my fellow NoZe Brothers from way back in my Baylor days. Several of us Brothers signed tributes to an email sent around. I posted these words:

"I'm very sorry to hear this. I think I last saw Pat in 1984. He was one of the naturally funniest guys I've ever known, and he was anti-PC before it was PC to be anti-PC."

Pat's death was unexpected, and he was still young, only a year older than I am.

Here's one obituary I've found.

To sleep, perchance to dream . . .

Our cat Ankgie, one of three, died early Sunday morning.

He'd been ill with some kind of infection for a couple of weeks, and we'd visited the vet several times. A few shots, and he'd be better for another day, but then relapse. Saturday night, I could see that he wouldn't outlive these increasingly close brushes with death. Sure enough, at two in the morning, my younger son En-Uk - who was staying up and keeping watch - woke us to say that Angkie was breathing shallow breaths in a 'strange' way. I got up and saw Angkie gasp his last breath. We had him cremated, and we will scatter his ashes somewhere in this part of Korea.

We have two cats remaining . . .

Revisiting Visitations Revisited

Word-Smith
Smiter of Words

I had some insight on how to improve the poem. Here is the original:

Visitations [1]

We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.

Here's the poem with stanza 2 re-worked:

Visitations [4?]

We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct they seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.

Is this latter version better? Clearer? More intelligible? Nobel Prize material? I believe it's version number four. Anyway, it's the most recent rewriting.

Visitations Revisited

Wordsmith: The Work is the Word

Actually, Blacksmith

My main critic, a man I've known for 40 years, suggested that stanza 2 needed different punctuation. Here is the original poem:

Visitations [1]

We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.

Here's the poem with stanza 2 re-punctuated:

Visitations [2]

We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize,
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.

Is this latter version better? Clearer? More intelligible?

Lines of Significance

Geoff Manaugh

I read an article the other day about one of my Berkeley professors, John Heilbron. I should say that I stumbled upon the article because I was not looking for anything remotely like it. The article, by Geoff Manaugh, concerned Heilbron's discovery that the great cathedrals of Europe had served as observatories. Manaugh titled his article "Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls: After centuries of war, Catholicism and science reconciled over meridian lines." I suspect that Manaugh missed one of Heilbron's points, namely, that the warfare-between-science-and-religion motif is much overdone. I was also amused that Manaugh initially thought that the Church had executed Galileo. Other than these misunderstandings, the article is pretty good.

My Father's Headstone

My Father's Grave

He died nearly 20 years ago, but I guess we're supposed to speak well of the dead anyway - no statute of limitations applies to them - so allow me to say a few good things about Bradley:

1. He was a hard worker, the sort who could work long hours of physical labor and never get tired.

2. He taught himself to swim well, and he once or twice rescued some drowning individuals.

3. He saw I was starving because I couldn't digest baby formula, so he switched me to scrambled eggs.

4. His wife Dorothy once told me that he had taught her what love meant, and that means something.

If I thought long enough, I'd be able to come up with a few more, probably, and other people may want to chime in on this post, but be nice, okay?

Maternal Grandparents

Maternal Grandparents' Headstone

Salem Arkansas

I was looking for this headstone yesterday, but found the headstone of my maternal great-grandparents instead, which accompanied my poem Visitations.

I stand amazed at what one can find on the Internet. Maybe I could even find my own grave!

Almost . . .

Visitations: A Poem

Visitations

Visitations

We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.

Terrorists' god is an Evil god

Mark Nicol

Mark Nicol, writing for The Mail on Sunday, February 24, 2019, informs us that "SAS troops found the severed heads of 50 Yazidi sex slaves":

"In their hour of defeat, the jihadis' cruelty knew no bounds. They conducted a cowardly slaughter of these desperately unfortunate women as a final act of depravity and left their severed heads behind for us to find."

A soldier in the British SAS (Special Air Service) related this ghastly report to Mr. Nicol. And I say that the truth sometimes just forces itself to be expressed:

The terrorists' god is an evil god.

Make of it what you will, but can you read it right and yet disagree?

In Spirit and in Truth

Bishop Berkeley
Portrait by
John Smybert,1727

In a refute 'Beasley' moment, Bons fell through rock as though through water, despite Johnson.

In Spirit and in Truth

Stay active now, the hour is late,
such little time to love, or hate,
and worn down with the years that pass,
we scarcely think to raise a glass
for those gone on ahead of us
by the celestial omnibus.

Toward death, be not proud. Its scythe is the great leveler.

Homework: Find the various allusions in today's blogpost.

NYT Error? - Neil Simon, 1927-1918

NYT Error?

My wife took this photo of the NYT's lower left-hand quarter section, which gives Neil Simon's birth and death dates as 1927 and 1918, respectively, of which the latter figure would appear to be possibly wrong, but who am I to argue with the NYT?

To argue or not to argue. That is the question . . .

Shouldn't one express some skepticism at a report that a man passed away about nine years before he was born, especially if that same man is shown in fine fettle in an accompanying photo dating to the year 2000, when he would already have been dead for about eighty-two years?

There must be some error here, but I can't quite figure out what it is . . .

About Time?

Der Toad

Google Images

Time squats in our present, devouring our future and excreting our past.

Postmodern Proverbs: Prey for Death

Paw-Maw

"Better a cat's paw than a cat's maw."

Death of an Old Friend

Jack McCollum

Photo

from

Baker Funeral Home

Salem, Arkansas

My brother Shan emailed me the sad news that my old friend Jack McCollum had died:

Sad news: Jack McCollum died a few days ago. He had been in bad health for a long time. I knew you would want to know. He was a good guy with a bad problem with alcohol.

Sad indeed, but even back in high school, I had expected Jack to develop an alcohol problem. I recall him driving around town with me in the passenger seat and him so drunk that he imagined the cops were tailing him when there wasn't a policeman anywhere to be seen.

Shan had it right, though. Jack was a good guy with a bad problem. Excessive drinking was his only flaw, and even then, he was a friendly drunk. Nobody ever had anything bad to say about Jack.

I knew him well. We not only went to school together, we even worked together in the hay fields, and that was the kind of work that bonds young men to one another in friendship.

Jack was the kind of guy you could call on at three in the morning on a cold snowy night to come help you get your car out of a ditch, and he'd get up out of bed and drive over to help you.

He was that kind of good guy. You can read his obituary here.

Difficult Proverbial Sayings

Dead Burying Dead

Google Images

Let the dead bury the dead - and the dead won't get buried!

Nat Hentoff Passes . . .

Nat Hentoff

(June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017)

RIP

Wikipedia

Nat Hentoff died a few days ago at the no longer advanced age of 91. I first read Hentoff in his column for the Village Voice back in the late 1980s, mostly for his varied and various defenses of free speech. But I saw that he also penned articles on the right to life, and I began reading those. Here is a passage from his talk, The Indivisible Fight for Life (Presented at AUL Forum, 19 October 1986, Chicago), in which he speaks on why he came to oppose abortion:

For me, this transformation started with the reporting I did on the Babies Doe. While covering the story, I came across a number of physicians, medical writers, staff people in Congress and some members of the House and Senate who were convinced that making it possible for a spina bifida or a Down syndrome infant to die was the equivalent of what they called a "late abortion." And surely, they felt, there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, I had not been thinking about abortion at all. I had not thought about it for years. I had what W. H. Auden called in another context a "rehearsed response." You mentioned abortion and I would say, "Oh yeah, that's a fundamental part of women's liberation," and that was the end of it.

But then I started hearing about "late abortion." The simple "fact" that the infant had been born, proponents suggest, should not get in the way of mercifully saving him or her from a life hardly worth living. At the same time, the parents are saved from the financial and emotional burden of caring for an imperfect child.

And then I heard the head of the Reproductive Freedom Rights unit of the ACLU saying - this was at the same time as the Baby Jane Doe story was developing on Long Island - at a forum, "I don't know what all this fuss is about. Dealing with these handicapped infants is really an extension of women's reproductive freedom rights, women's right to control their own bodies."

That stopped me. It seemed to me we were not talking about Roe v. Wade. These infants were born. And having been born, as persons under the Constitution, they were entitled to at least the same rights as people on death row - due process, equal protection of the law. So for the first time, I began to pay attention to the "slippery slope" warnings of pro-lifers I read about or had seen on television. Because abortion had become legal and easily available, that argument ran - as you well know - infanticide would eventually become openly permissible, to be followed by euthanasia for infirm, expensive senior citizens.

For those readers who wish to read more, go here.

And I can still recall . . .

Old Ads

. . .  how Grandpa loved Pall Mall cigarettes. He smoked them for many, many years - till the habit finally caught up with him. I once told a friend, "Smoking's bad for you. My Grandpa smoked a pack a day all his adult life, and it finally killed him at 87."

Aggressive Blast From The Past

Google Images

In the past, Americans did some rather weird things for their favorite cigarettes.

This man has sworn his fealty to Tareyton, as had also many other Americans at the time - if we can believe the Tareyton ads.

One sees why cigarettes were so dangerous, given that people would fight for them, but who were the opponents trying to force Tareyton smokers to switch?

And whatever happened to all those Tareyton smokers?

God's Own Waterboard

God's Waterboarding

My old cyber friend Bill Vallicella has an interesting post on death in which he divides the process into three parts:

There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.

I think of a similar three-stage process:

There is living, there is being dead, and there is the transition from the one to the other.

Bill's threefold division is doubtless superior to mine, but I want to be honest about how I've long thought because I do have a fear of dying, and that fear is a fear that the process from living to being dead might be painful.

Specifically, I worry that I might choke to death from fluid in my lungs.

That might sound like a weird thing to worry about, but there it is, like God's own waterboard, awaiting me at my time of demise . . .