7.17.2024 – will you still need me?

will you still need me?
feed me? Who could ask for more?
when I’m sixty-four

Not sure how this happened, which seems to be a common feeling, but I start my 64th year today.

Because of family history and often told family stories, I know that was I born around noon so as I write this, I still have 5 hours to go.

I know it was around noon because I was born on a Sunday and my Mom planned a family dinner after church and while I interrupted her day, my Aunt Marion came over and pulled the dinner together so all my brothers and sisters were sitting around the table when my Dad came home from the hospital to announce it was a boy.

All the boys cheered and my sisters all cried as it would have been a tie game had I been a girl.

I was 8th in what would be a family of 11 kids.

When I was 4, my Dad got a place on the shore of Lake Michigan just south of Grand Haven where we spent out summers so my birthday was almost always celebrated out at the lake.

In 1966, my Mom and Dad took me into Grand Haven to WT Grants and said I could pick out anything I wanted for my birthday.

In my mind the toy aisle stretched out sight to the left and right and towered over me.

I am not sure how long it took as my Father was generous but not real patient, a buyer not a shopper, and I selected an orange truck with a working steam shovel type crane that I could raise and lower and scoop up sand.

I am sure I had Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel in mind when I picked out as I always liked Mike as we shared a first name.

Which, as I am sure I have mentioned before, brings me to the topic of my name.

See, Mike had already been used as a first name in my family.

My brother Tim was born back in 1956 and was named Mike … for about 3 days.

Then my Dad said, ‘Nope, he doesn’t look like a Mike‘ and when the paper work was filled, he became Timothy John.

4 years later when I showed up, my Dad decided I did look like a Mike and Michael James Hoffman was listed on my paperwork.

Not sure what that says or means, but it had to have messed up paperwork in the global accounting of life somewhere.

The moment I got my truck home was captured on film by my Dad with his Nikon camera.

I posed with an army shovel and my new truck, ready to take on the world and all the dirt and sand I could find.

Scrapes and bruises that any 6 year old would have acquired over a summer and one shoe untied, that’s me.

Behind me in the picture are my three sisters, Mary, Lisa and Janet, who are plainly thrilled by my new truck and that it was my birthday.

That was 58 years ago and with the help of the photos, I can feel it, I can smell it.

As Jim Harrison writes in his book, Sundog, “So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty … “

Now I am 64.

And by chance as I type this out at my desk near the ocean, the 3rd movement of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2 starts playing on the radio and it is one of my favorites.

A piece of music impossible to listen to and not feel light and light hearted.

I will take it as a good omen for things yet to come.

It is my birthday.

What can I do but, and when will I ever get the chance again, to quote Sir Paul?

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine

If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

You’ll be older too
And if you say the word
I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride

Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck and Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away

Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

will you still need me?
feed me? Who could ask for more?
When I’m sixty-four

7.16.2024 – as at the moment

as at the moment
one is sure that all is lost,
look at what is gained!

… he had barely started to turn away from the house when Roxane Coss closed her eyes and opened her mouth. In retrospect, it was a risky thing to do, both from the perspective of General Alfredo, who might have seen it as an act of insurrection, and from the care of the instrument of the voice itself. She had not sung in two weeks, nor did she go through a single scale to warm up. Roxane Coss, wearing Mrs. Iglesias’s slacks and a white dress shirt belonging to the Vice President, stood in the middle of the vast living room and began to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. There should have been an orchestra behind her but no one noticed its absence. No one would have said her voice sounded better with an orchestra, or that it was better when the room was immaculately clean and lit by candles. They did not notice the absence of flowers or champagne, in fact, they knew now that flowers and champagne were unnecessary embellishments. Had she really not been singing all along? The sound was no more beautiful when her voice was limber and warm. Their eyes clouded over with tears for so many reasons it would be impossible to list them all. They cried for the beauty of the music, certainly, but also for the failure of their plans. They were thinking of the last time they had heard her sing and longed for the women who had been beside them then. All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear. When she was finished, the people around her stood in stunned and shivering silence. Messner leaned into the wall as if struck. He had not been invited to the party. Unlike the others, he had never heard her sing before.

The priest knew he committed the sin of pride and still he was overjoyed at having been able to play a role in bringing in the music. He was still too dizzy from the sound of Roxane’s voice to express himself properly. He looked to see if the windows were open. He hoped that Manuel had been able to hear a line, a note, from where he stood on the sidewalk. What a blessing he had received in his captivity. The mysteries of Christ’s love had never been closer to him, not when he said the mass or received communion, not even on the day he took holy orders. He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one’s heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!

From the book Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. New York, Harper Collins, 2001.

What a blessing he had received in his captivity.

The mysteries of Christ’s love had never been closer to him, not when he said the mass or received communion, not even on the day he took holy orders.

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand.

In fate there was reward, in turning over one’s heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description.

At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!

What words about music have been more true?

I loved this book.

I don’t know that I could have ended it the way it ended but I can’t imagine it could have ended any other way.

7.15.2024 – something simple that

something simple that
is also beautiful and
extraordinary

Further north, the environmental claims stack up better. Sited across the roaring A1 from the Stade de France, and connected by a new pedestrian bridge (sadly closed off for the Games due to overcrowding fears), the €175m aquatics centre is a beacon of what this Olympics stands for: lean, green and a little understated. It will be a boon for an area with the lowest swimming proficiency in the country, where half of all 11-year-olds don’t know how to swim.

“It’s about doing better with less,” says Laure Mériaud of Ateliers 2/3/4, architects of the project with Dutch firm VenhoevenCS. “You can do something simple and efficient that is also beautiful and extraordinary.”

From the article, Plastic-bottle seats and wooden pools: can Paris deliver the leanest, greenest Olympics yet? by Oliver Wainwright, the Guardian’s architecture and design critic.

The Métropole du Grand Paris, has been awarded the “Technical Achievement” prize in the Construction Bois 2024 Regional competition.

On the VenhoevenCS website, the firm listed all the members or the design team, made up of folks from both VenhoevenCS and Ateliers 2/3/4/ and they include Cécilia Gross and Laure Meriaud, Ton Venhoeven, Arjen Zaal, Yves de Pommereau, Jos-Willem van Oorschot, Eraldo Brandimarte, Margot Lamazou, Tjeerd Hellinga, Arjan Pot, Louis van Wamel, Maria Boletou, Julie Fuchs, Yann Tregoat, Jeremy Cassin, Ivo Brandes, Rubing Xu, Nicolas Handtschoewercker, Timothée Pignoux, Wai Ming Lam.

I think a lot these people went to high school with me in West Michigan or at least their cousins did.

It’s about doing better with less!

Something simple and efficient that is also beautiful and extraordinary!

7.14.2024 – His final word is

His final word is
not of anger, but of love
rests His case in love

Adapted from the Oxford NIV Schofield Bible Notes for the verse, Zephaniah 3:17.

The verse reads:

The Lord your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.”

The New Schofield Note reads: (3:17) For the Lord’s own, His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.

When it comes to His people, chastised and forgiven, the LORD rests His case in love and rejoicing.

I was early in embracing the online Bible.

I was part of the team that put the NIV Bible online.

I was the web guy for Zondervan Publishing and we were working with an early Web Group that was set to help churches get online.

They named their company Gospelcom.

But they came up with their name a little early in the game so their website ended up being gospelcom.com.

Once we got the NIV text online, the President of Zondervan came to my office in the Corporate Library where I worked and asked just how much of the NIV was available online.

He had been assured that users could see only one chapter of text at a time.

I introduced him to the “*” wildcard search that returned the complete text of the entire Bible.

Then I clicked SELECT ALL and COPY and pasted the text into a Word Document and said, “It’s mine now.”

He ran out yelling something about having to stop this and I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it was too late, internet wise.

Of late I have gone back to bringing a printed Bible to church.

I have a hardcover Oxford NIV Schofield Bible that I picked up when I worked in a bookstore back in the 1980’s.

There was something about using an NIV Bible that wasn’t printed by Zondervan.

My Dad always liked the Schofield notes and he asked me to get him copy as well.

I brought one home and he took it and sat at the dining room table and opened the front cover and on the inside cover, with a strong hand, he signed it Robert P. Hoffman and he used that Bible the rest of his life.

Using a printed Bible, I noticed that I noticed a lot more of the Bible when I read it.

The apps and the NIV Bible Gateway that replaced Gosepelcom shows you the requested text but with a printed Bible open on your lap you get to see two pages worth of verses.

I found I miss that a lot.

This morning, the sermon was out of Haggai.

I was listening to the sermon on Verse 1:5 Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

And my eyes wandered over to the notes at the bottom on the page that read: “His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.”

Then I read the last words of the book of Zephaniah:

… I will bring you home.
I will give you honor and praise
among all the peoples of the earth
when I restore your fortunes
before your very eyes,”
says the Lord.

… when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes.

As the note says, beautiful verses.

7.13.2024 – no more gimmicks, lies

no more gimmicks, lies
self-serving self-obsession …
elected to serve!

From the opinion piece, The arrogant, reckless Tory government left behind a mountain of mess. In one week, we’ve begun to clear it by newly elected Brit PM Keir Starmer where Mr. Starmer writes, “Now is the time for politics as public service.

A government committed not to its self-preservation but to uniting the country in the shared mission of national renewal.

The start of the road back to restoring people’s hope and faith that politics can be a force for good.

No more gimmicks, lies and self-serving self-obsession – this government knows we have a duty to the people we are elected to serve.”

In the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (Crown, New YorK, 2017) Jonathan Allen writes, “Interestingly, both Bill and Hillary were paying attention to British politics. In 2015, when conservatives thrashed the liberal Labour Party, Hillary confided in aides that former prime minister Tony Blair had predicted to her that the left would lose if it ran a “base” election. She appeared to worry about being drawn too far to the left, rather than seeing the conservative takeover as an affirmation of nationalistic populism. Bill believed the push for Brexit—and its eventual approval by voters— showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.”

Maybe once again, our Brit cousins are pointed a path.