I’ve got a doctor’s appointment today, but let’s take some time for a hymn.
Beautiful Savior (Fairest Lord Jesus) : I loved to sing this song in Sunday school. Once in a while it made me cry. It doesn’t do that anymore, but I do still love it.
Category: memory lane
The Davy Crockett Craze
Fess Parker: His ship came in.
Born on a mountain-top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…
–The Ballad of Davy Crockett
The height of the craze was in 1954, after which we are told it tapered off (https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-davy-crockett-craze). But you couldn’t prove it be me!
With the fad supposedly over, and me eight or nine years old, it still had scads of momentum. Here are some of the “merch” items that I gave my parents no peace until I owned them:
Davy Crockett marionette, Davy Crockett T-shirts, Sunday color comics, comic books, Davy Crockett plastic figures, Davy Crockett record albums, Davy Crockett moccasins…
Walt Disney had ignited a major cultural movement without intending to. He cried all the way to the bank.
Star Fess Parker got tons of mileage out of his coonskin persona.
Yeesh! If it was this intense in 1957, when I was old enough to get blown away by it, what must it have been like in the middle of 1955? (“Everything was Davy Crockett,” says my wife.
‘Parental Responsibility’ for Under-18 Lawbreakers
Break out the tear gas, boys
As a newspaper reporter way back in the 1970s, one or two of the towns I used to cover came up with “parental responsibility laws,” making parents criminally liable for offenses committed by their children. Did that produce some wild politics!
As I recall it, none of these acts made it into the legal code: too much opposition. But that was then, and now is now. That which failed back then is now succeeding.
Gloucester Township has passed a Parental Responsibility Act. No one has yet been arrested and charged for children’s misdeeds. But it’s early days–plenty of time to drum up bitter courtroom battles.
What goes around comes around.
The press for a parental responsibility law picked up momentum last year, in the wake of a… let’s call it a youth riot… that ruined a municipal celebration that this year couldn’t be held. Whether it’ll ever be held again remains to be seen.
Stuck in the Furniture
Why do dogs and cats do this–get stuck in the furniture? Then they whine or meow until someone figures out how to get them out.
My iguana once got himself stuck on the wrong side of the drop ceiling. I wasn’t home, so my sister got the job of rescuing him. To this day I don’t know how she did it–and had to give him a good bath afterwards, when he came out black instead of green. To all these ministrations he submitted peacefully, and he and Alice were friends from then on.
And then there are cats who get stuck high up a very tall tree…
[PS–As you can see, my computer is now working after being on strike for two hours.]
It’s Our Anniversary Today
It’s our 48th anniversary today–calloo, callay, O frabjous day! Don’t expect too much in the way of writing here today. Gotta celebrate. The associate editor and the bookkeeper of The Bayshore Independent–that was us, once upon a time.
(Dude, do you really want to write nooze on your anniversary day? With your wife right here in the living room? Say it ain’t so!)
So, we have a sunny day with a tolerable temperature, the guy from the Chinese restaurant will deliver our supper, I’ll have a cigar, we’ll watch a movie… I know it’s not much, but neither of us is up to much trapeze work.
Our neighbor, Josh, will take Patty to retrieve her car when he comes home from work. He’s like the nephew that we never had.
Well, I guess I’ll got outside and read. It’s back to the hospital next week so they can mess around with my hip. *Sigh*
‘The Lost River of Eden’ (2015)
I thought I’d re-run this post, because I hadn’t read it in years and when I read it just now, it fascinated me all over again.
The Bible preserves knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Genesis tells us of the rivers of Eden, one of which flowed into Eden after crossing most of what is now Saudi Arabia. There is very solid evidence for this–although the river dried up around 2,000 B.C. at the latest. Satellite technology opened the door of discovery.
How much else is “lost,” but actually preserved in Scripture?
Probably a great deal more than we might think.
Oh, Grandma!
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My grandma died in the mid-1960s: lived just long enough to be a Mets fan. She was wise, she was gentle, she was good. She raised six daughters (including my mother) who grew up to be good. And one night, her family having just watched the Lawrence Welk Show, she announced, “I think I’ll go to bed now.” And that was the end.
I was only a boy when she died, and it was a long time ago. But yesterday, from out of nowhere, it hit me like a truck.
No Grandma! How could that be? Can she have any idea how much I miss her? I had no idea until just then!
Okay, I’m sick and my emotions are brittle. But dammit, where is everybody? I want my grandma. I need for her to know that.
And Then We Had an Earthquake…
New Jersey had an earthquake last night. Patty and I slept through it.
It wasn’t a very big earthquake, but I was surprised that I was able to sleep through anything at all. Nor did it wake my wife. We must’ve been exhausted.
Our state does get an earthquake every now and then. It’s rather alarming when you’re sitting on the pot at work, trying at the same time to organize your day. That happened to me when I was editor of The Bayshore Independent. It felt like a subway going by… only this town didn’t have a subway.
I keep thinking the LORD is trying to tell us something.
‘Praise Ye the Lord the Almighty’
Here’s a hymn we used to sing in Sunday school–Praise Ye the Lord the Almighty, sung here by the Altar of Praise Men’s Chorale. I hear it and I see a summer Sunday, after church… and maybe a family cookout, with horseshoes.
‘Trust and Obey’
I don’t know who’s singing this, I have to hurry because the man is here to perform a checkup on our computers.
But first–here’s a hymn we sang a lot in Sunday school: Trust and Obey. Very nice a capella version.