4 years apart

The top drawing is from a work I did in the summer of 1978 and the bottom image is from a sketchbook I was working on in 1982.

Reading Rabelais

What have I been doing all this time? A few months ago I did almost three posts a day; now I'm closing in on three posts a month. Can it be that the rigors of chaplaincy, moving, painting, scheduling, cooking, devising intricate anecdotes salutary for humor and incisiveness have held me back from developing further my time folded upon blog blog blogging bloggidly? Can it be such a state of affairs that ensues and entails rigors and chaplaincy and chaplincy - and the Champlain See - take so much from me that when the time comes to write, I writhe.
Several times in the last few weeks I've had conversations where Jami or Bob or Cheryl or some one will say, "see here, this conversation we're having right now here now - this is what you need to be writing in your blog, this is what you need to be blogging." And I won't have time. I'll sit down to write and sleep, with its needs and demands, its soothing promise of eyes closed and warm covers and deep dreams, dreams of lands of warm dreams and oceans of sleep, or rest, will converge on me and remove me from this task, this writing task.
I think something similar happened to the Apostle Paul, when he was living in Spain, the lovely Thecla at his side, as he looked out over his vineyards, and read Horace, while sitting under a cork tree, while he composed songs and taught his sons Latin and Greek and the stories of his Greco-Hebrew childhood, that things just slipped his mind. He didn't write further letters telling believers to not dis the leadership of women; to not get carried away by end time predictions, but instead do some good in the here and now.
What a time to have lived. Still I would not depart this present moment to live there and then - no matter how many questions might be answered - and all sorts of form critical and redactional and canonical questions abound. But at some point the past has nothing for us. What is past is so far removed from our concerns that our will, much less our emotional strength, is lacking. We are eventually thrown back to the present, and as Ecclesiastes counseled: living in the present is our appointed task - not piling resources away for the future, nor pining away for a golden age. In the present we meet all our pertinent challenges. About each moment of the present we can only ask: Am I savoring enough of this? Am I seeing clearly? Am I drinking fully and recognizing the content of the air - such that were I to breathe it again, I would know it and relish it? am I l0ving fully or do I love absentmindedly?

I can't wait to see Jami this weekend

Here's Jami last May at the Decatur arts festival. It is possible that she will write and complain that this picture is a bad one; I agree that this picture (like any picture) fails to give the full sense of wit and insight. I think that the one in front of Keat's house does that well. I do like this photo. What a wonderful smile.
After 19 days of living apart, I'm flying back to Durham.

A very happy day

I was looking through my photos, and this photo appealed to me: there's my dad - how incredible it is getting him out of the house; there I am, on my graduation day back in May 2006; and there's Jami, her beautiful smile radiating happiness. I look at this photograph and joy floods my soul.

Figures

I went and saw my great uncle, Frank, at the Home. He's in the same place that my grandmother spent her last six months at, but he still has his senses. Sure, each time he sees me he calls me by my dad's name, Jerry. He says, Jerry, glad to see you. And I go along with it. His twins brother's name was Fred. Fred died in a mill accident, his arm was ripped off by a machine and he bled to death, four years before I was born. I'm named after him. So if I say that I'm Fred too early in our conversation uncle Frank will say, "you look well. I haven't seen you in years. " I'm afraid at those moments he might think I'm a ghost. So at the beginning of our time together I accept the fact that I'm Jerry. Even though I'm not.
Over the course of our conversation uncle Frank will piece it together and blurt out, "you're not Jerry you're Fred."
Instead I listen to my uncle talk about his life. He'll repeat the phrase, "life's a teacher" several times, and I can't help wondering what he's learned over 98 years. I consider that in 47 years I've learned that things work out. I can anxiously buy the best seller now or I can check it out at the library in a few weeks or buy it in the remainder bin for a dollar in a month. That all I was anxious about at 20 or 22 or 26 or 30 has had a way of working out and that if I'd been less impulsive I'd have saved myself some grief as well as some money.
Frank talks about being in the Masons. He talks about teaching Sunday school for 30 years. He talks about his wife and his brother and his mother (the Victoria I'd posted on previously here). He wants to know that I'm right with the Lord - though he's less prone to preach now. His faith seems more declarative now than imperative. More about what he believes than what I should believe.
I used to pester him for information about his father and grandfather. But I've not these last two times. Still he tells me that I remember things better than he does. As much as I want to turn over some long fallow piece of family lore, some secret that will unravel the mystery like a massive knot, I realize that such a thing is not worth it here. I have started to simply enjoy being in uncle Frank's presence. Here is a man who is 98 this November. He has lived a life. Now he is tucked under his blanket in his room on a day after Independence day and it's 93 degrees outside. Just a few years ago he would have been sitting on the front porch at this place: now he's in his room. He lives outside of time.
When I leave I don't play the radio in my car. I want to retain the feel of being with him and hearing him as far down the road as I can.

The address on my birth certificate

The address on my birth certificate is next door to Susan's place. In the last week I've gone through slides my dad took between 1956 and 1967, and I discovered this slide of my mother standing in front of the door on the stoop. I took a photo of the slide through the slide viewer twice: one photo has good detail, the other is aligned with my posture in the bottom photo. From the photographs I can tell that the mailboxes have changed and different screen doors were installed. The front door is the same though painted white now. Shutters have been added to the windows.
My mom, as the middle images give some hint, is pregnant with me.
And so there's a repetition to Jami and me standing together on the stoop in the top picture.
This place is not far from the seminary and over the last four years I've thought how intriguing it is that my life is bracketed, beginning and middle, by this place: how I've gone to seminary almost at my mother's suggestion on a car ride through Decatur 37 years ago, where she pointed out the seminary and we drove by where we used to live.
For dad staying in Decatur would have been helpful. Driving 5 miles into downtown every day for thirty years is very different from driving 35 miles into Atlanta from the country and back again for thirty years.

Five Years Ago

Five years ago I painted this painting before I went to seminary. It's a 15 by 20 inch painting in oil of some trees and the paint is laid on thickly. I remember when I painted it. I was using the carport at my dad's house as my studio and I was painting during the Summer. I painted at night, when the air cooled down. An owl screeched overhead and tree frogs made a steady pulse of sound. I've thought that this painting isn't quite finished, but so many people react positively to it, I think it would be a shame to do anything to it. Someday I'll get back to oils. Acrylics offer immediate results, but oils offer an elasticity of approach. I can lay my brushes down and come back hours later and the paint's still alive. Sometimes I feel that oil paint is more real. Acrylic is plastic and no matter how good a painting is, the surface doesn't feel hard enough. Still acrylic is great for using in poorly ventilated spaces - which is what I've had for some time. Acrylic is also portable in a way that oil isn't.

a detail from a large painting

Here's the central area of a painting that I began in 2002. It's hung in other people's homes, been rolled up in a closet, and finally finished - as far as I was concerned, last Summer. Sometimes the process of painting can be lengthy. Often what gets in the way is some preconceived idea of what I want to happen. At some point I have to understand when that that I want is not what the painting will do, and then try to understand what can be done. In this case, as in most cases, the solution was more satisfying than what I was trying to do. I suppose that often I am trying to something very conventional, and for a while I'm able to be conventional, but then a point arrives where conventionality doesn't work. That's what imagination is for: to give us the resources to overcome the limitations or live with the limitations of the conventional. Perhaps that is where beauty, before unsuspected in life, waits for us, in that liminal space where we are forced by limit experiences to eschew conventional solutions. Is there a scripture for this? Perhaps Jesus is a liminal space.

More is coming

More is coming. I know that it's been several months, but I've been busy. Well, I've not really cared enough, and I find this whole blog process daunting. I lost my password and recovering it today took some time. But more is coming. I may post some of my writing, some sermons, some vignettes, anecdotes, adumbrations of stories, narratives, speculations, conspiratorial rants, plottings, schemings.

Let's see if I can add an image:

I can, and it's an image of my wife, Jami. We married this last December 30th. I love her.