:: Just trying to make sense of it all..... ::

:: Sunday, May 11, 2003 ::

It's Mother's Day. It's been a while. I spent a week in France with my wife - more on that later. I have been catching up at work. But I want to propose a little toast to my mother. I believe it is from her that I got my irrepressible curiousity. She always wanted to know how things worked, but always accepted the fact that she would probably never understand some of it. She is almost 88 years old. Until very recently, she was able to use a computer to retrieve email, go surfing and find things on the web about her medicines and various other things. Mom, I am real proud of you for that. You were always the one who showed some intellectual prowess. You have read a million books in your lifetime, I hope you don't give that up. You have seen the depression, Pearl Harbor, WWII, Korea, Kennedy/King assassinations, Vietnam, Gulf War I and now Gulf War II. You have seen it all.
You have never said much to me, but you have always been there for me, and you have loved me. I guess I turned out more or less OK. That is saying quite a bit in this day and age.
I would love to hear some stories from you sometime about your childhood and about your father. He was a minister of course, so he must have had some leanings about understanding it all. He must have come to a different conclusion back then. I have always wondered why I was never baptized. You must have had some falling out with your father back in those days I guess. It wasn't until I wanted to marry a catholic girl that I found out about this. Of course back in those days (1973) if you wanted a catholic marriage, you had to be baptized. So I dutifully trudged over to the Methodist church, in which I had never before set foot, with two witnesses, and got myself baptized. The minister thot it interesting, but he acted as if it were a common occurrence. And he seemed to have a smile on his face. And of course I went to the little weekly meetings with the catholic priest where I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about sex and marriage, this from a priest, who supposedly had not the slightest experience with any of it. I predict that Catholics will sanction marriage among the priests when Pope John Paul passes on and they get a new pope. I'll bet they even sanction women priests! Hell, that church is going to die out unless they do something. But of course they are being revitalized by all the third world countries coming into the catholic fold, and completely changing the character of that church. History is fascinating.
I would love to learn more about your father. Of course, there wasn't too much you could do if you were a bookish type in the old days, except to go into the ministry. The Jewish culture is the prime example of that. That culture reveres its bookish types. I would love to know his story.
You were always very good at words and numbers. You were an accountant, bookkeeper at several companies, although I believe you never had formal training in this. This was all in the time when bookkeeping was done by hand of course. Your vast reading enhanced your word skills. You are proficient in cross word puzzles to this day. I can't hold a candle to you. I hope you don't give this up.
So I owe whatever curiousity about the world I have, along with my number and word skills all to you. I probably owe my skepticism to you as well, but that is not quite so obvious. You always professed a belief in the church and its teaching, though you never tried to convince me, or hold me hostage to its beliefs. I am eternally grateful to you for this. I believe it is how I have come to be a universal person, and not steeped and smothered in one particular religious tradition. I have chosen to rear my children similarly. My youngest child seems to have followed in our footsteps. Although he does not profess skills in numbers, he demonstrates obvious skills in words and skeptical inquiry. ...Just hope he doesn't go to university school and get swallowed in all their liberal hogwash. Story for another day.
[Just this morning I tuned in and saw some of the Danz lecture at Univ Washington, where some "scholar" was trying to tell these students in the audience that America was not justified in dropping the Atom bomb on Hiroshima. OK, OK, America is evil. It dropped the bomb. It probably saved more Japanese lives [not to mention American] by doing that than by invading the island. I will never hear that from him however, just how evil America was in doing that. Oh well, story for another day. And it has only been about 60 years for God's sake.
I pray for you (figure of speech you understand) to keep up your fortitude and your curiousity until the very end. I know it must be very difficult. You have had some life altering events in the past 6 months. You are coming to the end of your life. But please try to avoid bitterness. There is just as much beautiful in the world as there is horrendous. Try to remember the beauty, and rmember that your children love you and remember you and look up to you. They are coming to the later stages of their very own lives, so they can genuflect as well.
Here's to you, Mom!!

:: John Sunday, May 11, 2003 [+] ::
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