after rooster crowed
he remembered, went outside
and wept bitterly

Scout Finch telling the story of her father says, “One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.“

Thinking about shoes and the time of year, the phrase, ‘Shoes of the Fisherman’ came to mind.

In memory, it always seemed to have something to do with the Pope and how the Pope wore the Shoes of the Fisherman, the Shoes of Peter the Fisherman, when a new guy took on job.

Surprised to learn that Shoes of the Fisherman is not a phrase with deep roots in history but a book and movie title from the the ’60s.

I remembered the movie but thought the title had those deep roots.

More surprised to learn from Wikipedia that the movie was not a bio-pic on the life of John XXIII staring Anthony Quinn (not sure how I got that idea but there it is in my memory) but a fictional-world-stage-political-drama.

But for today taking on the phrase, “Shoes of the Fisherman”, and the phrase, “stand in his shoes and walk around in them,” a moment in the Easter week was on my mind.

The moment is captured by the artist mononymously known as Rembrandt or Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

The painting is of the moment when Peter is waiting outside the house of the High Priest.

A ‘crowd’ made up of chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders had grabbed Jesus and took him before the High Priest.

Peter found a place to wait near a fire with other gawkers.

See, earlier that day, Jesus had told Peter that he, Peter was going to sell Jesus out.

Not in the manner of Mr. Judas but that Peter would deny never ever ever knowing who Jesus or what he done or what Peter had witnessed Jesus doing.

Not only would Peter do this, said Jesus, but he would do it THREE TIMES.

Solid as a rock Peter according one Gospel says that not on his life would this never ever ever happen.

And a couple of hours later, it did.

In the painting, Mr. Rembrandt depicts the point in the story where “servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, ‘This man was with him.‘”

Rembrandt shows a man saying emphatically with his eyes, his face, his posture, his gestures, “Who, Me? Nope, Not me. Nope, y’all thinking of someone else.”

This painting was included in the Gods Saints and Heroes exhibition and I was lucky to see the original at the Detroit Institute of Art in the spring of 1981.

And I was blown away.

Like any painting you see in person, the definition, the light, everything is so much more.

There is a detail in this painting that sadly does not make it in any online or printed reproduction that I have seen.

Over Peter’s shoulder you can just make out Jesus.

Jesus is looking back at the scene.

Seeing this construction of the events it hit me that when Peter said, “Who, Me?”, Jesus heard.

The Gospel of Luke says that when Peter said this, he looked up and Jesus looked right at him.

I knew that part of the story, but for some reason the idea that Jesus also heard Peter was a new angle for me.

In the painting, the face of Jesus is clear, much clearer than anything you can see in anything online.

It is the face of resignation.

Not an ‘I told you so’ resigination.

But a sad, sorrow filled, ‘yep’ moment for Jesus.

A sad sorrow filled ‘yep’ moment for Peter when it sunk in a moment later.

Stand and walk around in his shoes, in Peter’s shoes for a while.

In the Shoes of the Fisherman.

I can’t imagine.

facial expressions
are truly important how
we communicate

“Her lips said ‘No Way’, but her eyes said, ‘Read my lips.’

So went a line from the old TV show Frazier.

I don’t like and rarely accept any finding based on a ‘recent study’.

Yesterday my boss told me that with his boss in town, to be ready to make a presentation with numbers based on website traffic.

“No problem”, I said.

“What do you want the numbers to show?”

Still I came across a story about a study where I said “YES, THAT’S IT.”

The headline was, ‘Can you hear me now?’ Study reveals why voices are raised on video calls.

The key statement is that Scientists find that as video quality deteriorates, people speak louder.

Anytime I am on a video chat, zoom, teams or facebook face time and the video goes bad I find myself speaking both S L O W E R and LOUDER and now I know why.

How can speaking S L O W E R and LOUDER improve the video?

The article says:

Although speaking louder probably doesn’t help, the fact that people do it shows how integrated these systems are, particularly since people only speak louder when gestures are present, Trujillo added. “They know that the gestures being produced are vital to their communication, but their partner is going to have a harder time seeing them. So they increase the strength of the other signal – speech.”

While I question any study, this one was done at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

You have to trust the Dutch and I think my family roots at back in Nijmegen so its all in the family.

I also think it has to do with the how you grew up.

When I was a kid everyone had a cutting edge transistor radio and you could control the audio quality by changing hands from left to right or standing the radio on its side or on its back or upside down or turning off a fluorescent light or turning on the toaster.

When you went to other peoples homes, TVs had an assortment of wire coat hangers, odd angled antennas and strange strips or wads of tin foil attached to the back to ‘improve reception.’

What I am saying is that you had things you could do on your own.

I worked for many years at a TV Station in Grand Rapids Michigan and there was one of those orange and white towers on the property that dominated the skyline of Grand Rapids.

Anyone who wanted improved TV reception of ABC would point their antenna’s at this tower.

The funny thing was it wasn’t a broadcast tower, it was a repeater tower that sent the station’s broadcast signal to the broadcast tower 40 miles to the north.

It was (and maybe is) that TV broadcast towers had to be 120 miles or something like from any other tower with the same channel.

To get to the required distance from WTVG 13 in Toledo, Ohio, WZZM TV13 in Grand Rapids, Michigan had to set up their tower 40 miles further north in the town of Grant.

I am not sure how I got into Grant, Michigan but there I am.

Next time you are on a video call and the video goes fuzzy remember to SPEAK UP, they can’t see you.

in my beginning
is my end, across the field
now the light falls

Adapted from Four Quartets Part II: East Coker by T.S. Eliot.

The passage seemed to fit my day.

I got up to start my day and I was thinking how much I hate having to wait for things to boot up.

Turn on a light and its on.

Turn on the TV and its on (well mostly)

Open a book and start to read.

But tablets?

Laptops?

Turn them on and … wait.

I used to have a routine when I worked in an office where I turned on all my machines then went and got water or coffee or something and when I came back, everything on.

Today I turned on my laptop and got my tablet and a cup of coffee and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I started working the problem to arrive at wi-fi was out.

So stated that process.

Technical issue with our account caused it be turned off by accident.

No worries.

No problems.

They could turn it back on from there.

I would have to wait though.

And here I am.

Waiting.

You know what you call a web designer who works from home but has no connectivity?

Really frustrated is what you call that person.

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes for sure.

The digital age my butt.

As Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright might say, “there you are.”

Here is the complete 1st part of East Croker, which is the 2nd part of Four Quartets.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.