Tag: a personal note

My Day Off

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’m taking a day off from “ranting,” as my critics call it, to work on my new book, The Temple. The sun has finally come back out, it’s nice and cool, but not too cool, I’m surrounded by greenery, and the birds are singing to beat the band. A couple of squirrels, playing squirrel-tag, ran right around my chair as I was writing.

The Temple is No. 8 in my Bell Mountain series, so I can tell you what it’s about without spoiling anything: God continues to change the world, often in ways the characters don’t expect. There’s still plenty of evil to be dealt with, and plenty of foolishness, too. The fantasy world isn’t so much different from our own.

Meanwhile, I’ve been invited to return to Rob Schilling’s radio show on Monday, June 9, to talk about the flaming obvious need for Christians to get their children out of the public schools. Do that, people, and leftism in America will die for want of nourishment.

But that’s for later. For the time being, I’m content to explore my imaginary world of Obann and see what the Lord has in store for its people.

I hope some of you will want to see that, too.

God is Nigh

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One of the things God has done with my neighborhood, in just the past two weeks or so, is to turn it riotously green–with plenty of colorful punctuation by all kinds of flowers, wild and domestic. He does it right in front of us, and yet I can’t see it happening. Time-lapse photography would show it as it goes, but it’s too subtle for the unaided human eye to follow.

Yes, Very Wise Individuals–the kind who think that they themselves would make pretty respectable gods, much better than the real God–would say, “What do you mean, God? It’s just the mindless, mechanical functioning of nature, the working out of chance events over vast quantities of time,” blah-blah. I am convinced that what they’re really saying is, “Give us your money, and give us power over you.”

The bees know better.

An old hymn concludes, “This is my Father’s world, and let me ne’er forget/ That though the wrong seems oft so strong,/ He is the ruler yet.”

God’s own handiwork bears witness to him constantly, and is a source of comfort. The green leaves, the flowers, the infinite moods of the sky, the dance of bees in the hive–they all tell us, always, the same message:

“God is nigh.”

All the time.

A Parable for Our Time

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This is a true story; but to me it seems more like a parable.

A single man moved into the apartment next to ours, and he and his mother and his sister furnished and decorated it so that it looked like something out of House Beautiful. It was exquisite: not just the whole ensemble, but each individual piece of it.

But this man had a drinking problem.

One night, my wife and I went to bed early because we were to go off on vacation the next day, and that’d mean a lot of work loading and unloading, driving, etc. At some undetermined hour of darkness, we were awakened by a great CRASH! next door, followed by another, and another, and another. We heard glass shattering. We heard heavy objects being hurled down the stairs and snapping into splinters. And we heard a man cursing. We knew it was the man who lived there, and that he was in a drunken rage.

This went on for quite a while. You’ve never heard anything like it.

The next day, as I was taking suitcases out to the car, the door to that apartment swung open. There stood the tenant, bleary-eyed and half-dressed. Behind him lay a total shambles. All those beautiful pieces of furniture lay strewn across the floor like firewood.Every single thing was broken.

And of course I knew what happened, because I’d heard him pitching his furniture down the stairs, hurling it against the walls, and stomping it.

He greeted me, and with a profoundly sad expression on his face, stepped aside to give me a better view of the ruin of his apartment. And do you know what he said?

He said, “Look what happened!”

Not “Look what I did in my drunken frenzy!” No: it just “happened.” As if he’d had nothing to do with it.

Someday we will point to what’s left of America and say, “Look what happened.”

Can I Wake Up Now, Please?

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So it was back to the dentist’s office first thing this morning, to have my stitches out. I sit down in the waiting room. The TV is on. It compels me to look at the screen. And the first thing I see is two guys smooching–it’s an ad for a new sod show on Broadway.

Then the celebrity idiot talk show kicks in. The audience goes wild. By “wild” I mean all but tearing off their clothes and levitating. I know the studio audience is coached to do that, but I still find it a daunting sight. I would rather not see it.

I drive home. Because I’ve lived here all my life, I know I’m passing through a landscape full of ghosts–the ghosts of farms and villages, woodlands and fields that I remember, that I saw. Or did I? Did I only dream them? But the Protectors of The Environment, whom we have been electing and re-electing without interruption since the 1960s, have paved over everything. No one would ever guess that this was once a country road, or that there was ever any such thing as “country” anywhere around here.

Somehow I cannot see any of this as being what God intended for His people.

 

Almost Forgot to Tell Ya…

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve got another little radio gig tomorrow–The Rob Schilling Show, Radio 1071 WINA out of Charlottesville, VA, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time. We’re going to be talking about my Newswithviews column about the Pope and redistribution of wealth.

I say the Pope’s fantasies are wackier than mine. But I get paid for producing fantasy, and the Pope is just a gifted amateur.

P.S…. (Ugh)

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I’m going to the dentist now, and I know he wants to yank a bunch of teeth.

I am frankly terrified.

If you don’t see me tomorrow, you’ll know why.

Introducing Our New Toilet

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I’ve still got a toothache, the dentist can’t see me till Thursday, and right now the plumber is here, about to install our new toilet. The old one has been sent on to the Smithsonian Institution as one of the few surviving examples of Babylonian  bathroom fixtures.

The new toilet is sitting in its box on the sidewalk, waiting to be carried up the stairs. I could not help laughing sardonically at the legend on the box: “Simple, Do-It-Yourself Installation, No Tools Necessary.” Like you could just set it on the floor and take a dump.

I am no one’s idea of a handyman, but even I know you do need tools to install a toilet properly. Why do manufacturers even say things like “No Tools Necessary”? It reminds me of the video cabinet we got some years ago. The instructions were in pseudo-English, making no sense whatsoever, and the “tool” provided–which, according to the claim on the carton, was the only tool you’d need to put the thing together–was this tiny little metal L-shaped thing. Twelve hours later, with my friend’s full complement of power tools, we finally had something that would stand up. That is, it stood like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, except it could lean first one way and then another.

I hope the new toilet turns out better than that.

Progress on ‘The Temple’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve written half a dozen chapters of my new book, The Temple (No. 8 of my Bell Mountain series) and so far, so good. My wife and my editor think so, at least.

It’s so much more pleasant and fulfilling, doing this, than writing about the slow murder of my country at the hands of her ruling class. I sit outside in the springtime, with my pen and my legal pad, birds singing, flowers blooming: say a prayer, get to work, and before long, I’m in the land of Obann. Later my wife will ask me, “Didn’t you see, didn’t you hear” this or that–and I’ll have to admit I missed it. I was riding with Lord Chutt’s wagon-train full of gold, or following Helki as he spied on it.

Now, if only people would buy and read these books! Books can’t accomplish anything without readers.

Let me take this opportunity to angle tastelessly and vulgarly for readers’ comments on my books. Have they done anything for you at all–the few, the proud, who’ve actually read them?

I know–I sound like John D. MacDonald. Hundreds of thousands of readers loved his Travis McGee books; but at one point in his career, MacDonald didn’t know that, and went to the trouble of setting up a special post office box in hopes that his readers would write letters to him. His career turned out all right, didn’t it? But he was some time waiting for it–time which surely seemed a lot longer, to him and his wife, than it really was.

Minds Set in Cement?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I wonder if it’s possible to convince anyone of anything that he doesn’t already want to believe.

I go on and on here about bogus Global Warming, creeping statism, and the defects of public education, among other things–but have I ever written anything that changed anybody’s mind? Probably not.

So how do minds get changed? I don’t know; but I’ll tell you about something that changed my mind in a big way, long ago.

Like most of who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, I came to view Science as an unadulterated blessing–minus the contributions of mad scientists you see in horror movies–and scientists as the most trustworthy people in America. The moon landing in 1969 seemed to confirm the faith we had in science.

Then I took a biology course in college.

Toward the end of the semester, after they’d covered everything else, the lecturers in the Rutgers Biology Dept. took some weeks to present their vision for the future–which to me looked like some kind of human ant-hill in which we would all be micro-managed by Experts in every sphere of life.

I wasn’t the only one in the class who didn’t like that vision. Boy, I wish I had those lectures on tape! Finally someone was moved to ask, “But what about freedom and individuality?”

To which the lecturer replied, “Those are obsolete concepts that must be engineered out of the system.”

That changed my mind about science. To this day I continue to suspect them of trying to make their vision a reality, with a little help from their friends in politics.

No one argued me out of my view of science. All I had to do was hear the lectures.

So maybe I haven’t convinced anyone of anything. All I can say is, I’ve given it a try. Also, I just have to protest some of this stuff or my head will explode.

My advice is simply this. Listen to what the big shots say, and watch what they do. Sooner or later some of you will realize what they’re up to.

Drinking from the Springs

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When I was a boy, we all used to drink from a spring that came bubbling out of the ground, a couple hundred yards from my house. People around the neighborhood used to come and fill bottles with the water. No one ever got sick.

The spring has been paved over. Gotta expand the school parking lot.

A little farther away there was another spring, a bigger one, in Roosevelt Park, a county park. My father used to send me there with half a dozen bottles at a time, in the 1970s. There would always be a crowd of people there. The water was pure and cold and delicious, and free.

I went to visit that spring yesterday. It’s still there; but for the first time ever, I found myself alone there. No one was getting any water. Maybe that’s because the County Water Dept. had posted signs all over the place, warning people “consume at your own risk: the source of this water is unknown and unprotected. We recommend boiling for a full two minutes before consuming.” In other words, they don’t know where the water originates from or how it gets to that precise spot in Roosevelt Park, and they don’t know whether it’s been tainted by pesticides or germs along the way.

The warning is certainly justified, but it’s a shame nonetheless. God gave the people in my neighborhood two springs of lovely drinking water, and one we’ve paved over and the other might be poisoned.

I know what actually happens when lib politicians–we don’t have any other kind, where I live–promise “to protect the environment.”

You’d better develop a taste for asphalt.