When did I turn into my grandfather? No, I haven’t gotten short and bald-headed, nor do I have a desire to come out of retirement and practice dentistry using a foot-pedal drill on relatives in a dimly lit basement, though this may be due to my never having been a dentist.
As we watch the death throes of Western Civilization, certain symptoms manifest prominently. As the electronic mesh expands and thickens, with fatter pipes and richer content, so does the shallowness of each connection within the mesh. We can surely speed up our ability to process incoming data, but it comes at the necessary expense of meaning. We know more, yet understand less.
When I heard didgeridoos, and people saying “G’day, mate,” I realized I’d dug deep enough but in the wrong place.
The Apostle John warned us the world would naturally hate us. It should then be no surprise that, as I have argued in my previous columns, the West’s way of looking at things might be less than ideal for understanding God and his will for us.
Despite the warmth of the day, swinging the maul down on the hunks of black locust wood was satisfying. In every case, the pieces of log had blown apart with that satisfying sound good wood makes when it’s split.
Then came the hidden knot.
While traveling from place to place by car is hardly the glamorous thing it once was, it certainly has grown easier. As I went through Southern Missouri twice this week – once going down the Interstate and once back up via the remains of Route 66, I wondered if easier had any relation to better.
Fame, even great fame, tends to be fleeting. What brings this to mind is last month’s news that Mitch Miller had died. He was 99 years old, so he had a good innings as they say, and that fact must temper our mourning. The chief sadness about his passing is that so little notice was paid to it. Mitch Miller was once as famous as anyone in the country.
Maybe I am a little biased, but writing a review of a George Strait album feels a little like saying, “Water is very good.” Rarely has a man of only 58 years attained such influence. More than this, he is still at the top, churning out hits routinely and consistently as we speak.
It’s been a month, so I suppose there’s a chance it will hold: after several decades, I’ve quit smoking. Indeed, the last time I’d gone this long without a cigarette I was probably 16 years old. There is nothing that would delight me more than to be able to tell you that it has been an heroic struggle, unless maybe it would be to say that I feel oh-so-much better. Neither of those things would be true, though.
Happy surprises are so rare that when one occurs it’s worth passing along. I had been worried that I was running out of propane. It had been a year or more since the big tank got filled and, glancing at the gauge a few weeks ago I saw it was pretty low.