be joyful in hope, patient in affliction and faithful in prayer
When you start your day with your tablet on the online Bible Gateway and the verse of the day is Romans 12:12, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” and all I have to do is add the word ‘and’ to get to a 5 – 7- 5 syllable ratio (which I know is not the true definition of a haiku – see my section on ‘What is …’ ) it was too good to not use.
Be joyful in hope.
Patient in affliction.
Faithful in prayer.
In a time of oh-what-can-i-do-oh-what-can-i-do, it kind of sums it up.
As I already added an ‘and’ might I suggest to add a snippet from the Psalms?
what gets me going what wakes me up and alert trigger frustration
Anyone who reads these posts will know that I do not like getting up in the morning.
Of late it isn’t the getting up anymore that gets me.
I live in the low country of South Carolina where I found that I am sensitive to the spring pollen that coats the landscape for months down here and after a night of being vertical in bed, trying to sleep, it is with some relief that I get up in the morning so my sinuses will drain and I can breathe.
This morning, up early to breathe, I got to think’in.
My Dad was always bringing home odd things.
He was a dentist and he filled his waiting room with good magazines like Smithsonian, The New Yorker and American Heritage along with the usual waiting room magazines.
Famously one of us kids once left a copy of Mad Magazine in the waiting room once while waiting for Dad for something.
The next day Dad’s patients ripped out all the subscription blanks and one old guy telling Dad, it was the best magazine he had ever read.
In off hours Dad would page though these magazines and these odd ads would catch his eye and he would tear out these odd offers and send off checks and later come home with these odd things.
In my desk drawer I have a little telescope that is also a microscope which I always thought was some little toy thing until I used The Google and found that it was a MULTIFUNKTIONALE KLEINOPTIK EMOSKOP or a combined telescope, magnifier and microscope made by Seibert-Wetzlar, one of the finest optical manufactures in history.
I had to read the Google page to learn how to use it.
But where Dad found it and bought it, I have no idea.
Dad loved bird calls and had a drawer full.
One was the little red spool with a turn key that when turned, made different squeaking squawking noises which were supposed to call birds.
Not sure it worked but he carried one every where.
One time Dad came up with a skull.
Not just any skull mind you.
But a completely prepared medical training skull.
The jaw was spring loaded and on one side of the face the top layer of bone was removed to reveal what was below and on the other the surface bone was in place, but sections were hinged so they could lifted to show what was underneath.
The skull cap could be removed and all arteries, veins and nerve connections were marked out.
Why?
Why did Dad order this and bring it home?
I mean who looks through a magazine, there was no online shopping, and sees an ad for a prepared human skull and says, “I want that” or “My wife would love that”?
The skull didn’t sit out on the table or shelf like a lot of his stuff, but we would get it out to amaze our friends or to bring to school for show and tell.
You never knew what Dad might bring home.
There was this time I was watching TV with my brothers and Dad came in through the front door of the house, not the back door off the garage.
He noticed Mom was upstairs.
He left the door open, walked over and uplugged the TV in front of us and took it away to his car.
Dad came back in struggling to carry a much bigger TV, which he put in place and reconnected and turned on.
He looked at us and said, “Don’t say anything” and went back out the front door.
We had a new big TV and we didn’t say anything.
Dad came back after parking his car in the garage and sat down as if nothing had happened and enjoyed his new TV and didn’t say anything.
No one would have noticed but the next morning my baby brother Al looked at the TV for bit then found Mom and asked, “How do you turn the new TV on?”
You never knew what Dad might bring home.
He would have loved Amazon.
So why am I telling you all this.
I was thinking about that skull.
From this skull, I learned where the sinuses are in my head.
On bad pollen days down here in the low country, I could take a sharpie pen and outline on my face where it hurts and in my mind, I can see that skull, and I am outlining my sinuses.
Under my eyes, right under my cheek bones and above my eyes in my forehead, right under my eyebrows.
I get out of bed in the morning, and in my mind I can see my sinuses in my face tip as if I was tipping a sand glass, and feel the pollen drain away and air start to seep through.
So I get up.
I get up though I don’t want to, so I can breathe.
That is not to say, I wake up.
That takes some doing.
It takes coffee and a lot of coffee.
Since getting a new coffee maker with a bigger pot, I am back to 4 or 5 mugs of coffee, not sipped, but poured into my body.
And it takes my morning reading which takes less time than it did as I now gloss over any headline with the current president’s name in it.
After The Google News, the Guardian and the New York Times, I am starting to feel awake and more alert.
Time for the games and I start with the New York Times Connections.
It is 16 random words that you have to fit into 4 groups of 4 words over something they have in common in four guesses.
How the words are connected are rated into 4 categories.
The yellow grouping is easy.
The green grouping is less easy.
The blue grouping is hard.
And the purple grouping rarely makes any sense and you assemble these words because they are the only ones left.
I find that when I finish with Connections I am pretty much awake and alert.
I was thinking about this this morning after playing Connections as I was very much awake.
I had been thinking that this game had to be stimulating and really got my brain working.
I had been thinking that this game got me to think and to wake up.
This morning it hit.
All 16 words started with T.
I used up all my guesses quickly.
I lost and lost fast.
The answers were revealed and I read them over saying OH COME ON again and again.
sunlight and death were upon the earth – no one was wholly rational
All the way through there were two lines of action going on: the visible one, out in the open, where there were flags and rumbling guns and marching men to be seen, and the invisible one which affected and colored all the rest. Sunlight and death were upon the earth in the spring of 1862, and no one was wholly rational.
On the surface, everything was fine. Nearly two hundred thousand young men had been drilled, disciplined, clothed, armed, and equipped. They innocently thought themselves veterans. They had roughed it for a whole autumn and winter under canvas, knew what it was like to sleep on bare ground in the rain, had learned the intricate, formalized routines by which marching columns transformed themselves into battle lines, and they had been brought to a razor edge of keenness. The great unpredictable that lay ahead of them seemed a bright adventure, for in the 1860s cynicism was not a gift which came to youth free, in advance; it had to be earned, and all illusions had to be lost the hard way.
From Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton (Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, 1951).
I got my first Bruce Catton book, Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the book this excerpt comes from when I was around 10 years old.
My Grand father found a pile of books that were being thrown out by the Church Library and he snatched it, telling the folks in charge that he had a grand son who wanted it.
And I did.
I did want it.
Even though I had never heard of it, I knew I wanted it.
I know I read and I have read it several times since, but I cannot imagine what this passage meant to me when I was 10.
Everything, to me, about the Civil War was a bright adventure and maybe still is today.
It remains a bright adventure even after reading the best description of serving in a war, the speech of the deaf old gentleman from Fayetteville, Mr. McRae at the Wilkes’ barbeque in Gone with the Wind when he said, “You fire-eating young bucks, listen to me. You don’t want to fight. I fought and I know. Went out in the Seminole War and was a big enough fool to go to the Mexican War, too. You all don’t know what war is. You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having the girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero. Well, it ain’t. No, sir! It’s going hungry, and getting the measles and pneumonia from sleeping in the wet. And if it ain’t measles and pneumonia, it’s your bowels. Yes sir, what war does to a man’s bowels—dysentery and things like that—”
But I digress.
What I wonder about today is what would Bruce Catton made of the current state of affairs in the politics of the United States.
After decades of studying and writing about the Civil War Catton wrote, “The dismaying world we confront was given its vast intricacy and its perilous speed by human beings for the benefit of human beings. The one basic resource we have always had to rely on is the innate intelligence, energy and good will of the human race. It is facing an enormous challenge, but then it always has; and it meets each one only to confront another. If now we give way to the gloom of the apostles of catastrophe we are of course in the deepest sort of trouble. The old reliance is at our service. It can bear us up if we put our full weight on it.”
Right now, at this point, it seems that sunlight and death are upon the earth and no one is wholly rational.
We are facing an enormous challenge, but then we always have; and we meet each one only to confront another.
If now we give way to the gloom of the apostles of catastrophe we are of course in the deepest sort of trouble.
The old reliance is at our service.
It can bear us up if we put our full weight on it.
waking, more awake awaker, mostly awake ready for the day
Beeping, buzzing from the clock wakes me up.
I sit on the edge of the bed, feet on the cold floor, ands on either side of me on the bed and I say to myself I’m awake.
I stumble out to the kitchen as quiet as I can be and get the coffee going.
The night before I get ready for making coffee by fitting a coffee filter into the basket of the percolator.
I don’t fill it with water or coffee since moving back to a old fashioned metal percolator.
I fill the pot with water and then spoon coffee into the basket, reassemble everything, get the lid on and plug it in.
If I am going into the office which I do three days a week, I then make my lunch and once that it is packed away, more awake I am into the shower.
I hope I never lose the appreciation for the truly luxurious expectation that a shower of of fresh, clean, steaming hot water is available to me.
An expectation that is so confirmed that if this shower of fresh, clean, streaming hot water is NOT available, it is considered a maintenance emergency.
Out of the shower and in my robe, coffee mug in hand, again steaming hot, I sit with my tablet and read my newspapers I feel awaker.
Growing more and more alert as I page through the news.
I page faster than I used to as I pretty much ignore any story about the incoming Presidential Administration as there are all the different story.
Every since this feller has come on the scene, so much of the news has been of a nature that says …. ooooooooooh now he has crossed the line and he is going to get it when Mom comes home.
But Mom never comes home and no matter what the former game show host does, he never gets it.
People have been pointing out for years, he as no clothes on and no one cares so I am starting to not care as well.
Maybe if I ignore him, he will just go away.
I am reminded of the old movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen where the ‘elected official of the people’ tells everyone not to go outside the city walls because ‘The turk is out there” so no one leaves.
The Baron finally goes outside the walls and looks … and no one is there.
Is Trump the problem?
It worrying about Trump, regardless, the problem?
Anyway it sure made reading the papers faster.
Done with the papers, I am mostly awake.
It is time for wordle and connections.
Sure sure sure but it gets my brain going and I fill like the guy on the bicycle inside my head is getting into a rhythm and up to speed.
Got another long streak of wordle going.
Engaging my brain a little bit more and finally … finally … I am ready for the day.
PS Today on the way into work, I stopped by the beach and walked down to the ocean to see the sunrise. If I had checked to see that sunrise was still 10 minutes away I might have gone on straight to work but here is what it looked liked today, the 9 day of January just before sunrise on Hilton Head Island.
blurry, unfocused hard to read and hard to see … whole world out of whack
I am not now nor ever have been a ‘morning person’.
I don’t like to get up but I do it anyway and I am here to tell you there are some mornings worse than others.
Much worse.
It usually takes some time for my eyes to regain focus and that’s the time I make the coffee and shower.
By the time I am sitting down with my tablet and a coffee mug, I can read without any difficulty.
Most mornings that is.
But sometimes, like this morning, I look at my tablet and a twist my head left and right and up and down, trying to find that angle when my eyes, my retinas, the lenses in my eyes and my brain all line up so I can read.
This morning was a no go.
No matter how I held my head or my tablet, everything was blurry and unfocesed.
It was hard to read.
It was hard to see.
Without my morning reading, my whole world is out of whack.
Starting the day with one boot off.
So I changed my outlook on life.
I changed my focus.
Being nearsighted, I made my right eye focus on the glass in my glasses.
…
Seems that this morning, when I reached for my glasses, I had grabbed them by my thumb and forefinger.
By thumb and forefinger … on my the glass.
I had my finger prints to prove it.
Feel like I found my other boot and now, ready to face my day.
Been wearing glasses since I was 9.
I appreciate the simple miracle of adjusted site but … geee whiz.
No Haiku For You 