The Daily Cattown News

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Just call me Rocky?

I can't say I am a huge fan of the Rocky movies, but I do know that the time between "Rocky V" and Rocky VI" was sixteen years -- 1990 to 2006. A reaaally older Rocky made a comeback in that 2006 movie. And now I have too.

While the rest of the world was out trick-or-treating or obsessing about the election, I was riding in a horse show: an out-of-town, three-day horse show. Clipper (show name "McDreamy") isn't my horse, but he's a very nice horse, although at times he mistook the show ring for the Fair Grounds race track and we had to have a little discussion about that. Amazingly, on the videos we look very collected and confident, very much on the same page. And every now and then, we actually were.

The upshot of it: we were in four classes over those three days and took ribbons in all of them. And even a little prize money! (Trust me...a very little.)

When I got home, I pulled out my old horse show ribbons from the days that Cinder and I were showing -- and by the way, we always showed at our home barn and never went on the road to a show. (This out-of-town show was a really big deal for me.) With a shock, I discovered that our last show was April 14, 1991. That's seventeen years. Yo, Rocky!

When Cinder died in May 2007, I never thought I'd be showing again, much less just a year and a half later. I had actually stopped riding for six years when his legs and feet got to the point that he was no longer sound to ride. It was hard to go on without my beloved partner of twenty years, but I'm glad I did. It's good to be back in the world of horses and barns and horse shows again.

By the grace of God, I hooked up with an excellent trainer. Couldn't have done it without her. We've been drilling, drilling, drilling in our lessons. She would take away my reins, so I wouldn't balance myself on them. She would take away my stirrups, so I would strengthen my legs and get them in the right place. Two-point. Trot. Canter. Transition. Walk, now! I think I'm as good a rider today as I was way back yonder with all that training -- but my days of flying over fences are over. I'm passionate about riding, but I'm not crazy.

Alas, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get into my tall field boots. Seventeen years and a lot of good South Louisiana cooking have taken their toll. As far as I can tell, no one in this part of the world sells English riding boots, and getting a pair that fits the foot and calf is far too tricky to go the mail order route. So I rode in my short paddock boots, a big no-no that probably cost me some points with the judge, but so it goes. Next trip to Atlanta, I go boot shopping.

When I started riding again as an adult, many years ago, I was an anomaly. Often I had to show against little kids. (Trust me, a judge will never give a blue ribbon to an adult over a child in a horse show. As it should be.) Now there are lots of adult riders and lots of classes for adults at the shows. And, dare I say it, some of those adult riders are even older than me!

It's not as easy as it was when I was a kid. One of my favorite phrases is "Advil. It's not just for breakfast anymore." But I'm having just as much fun now as I was when I first hopped on a school horse at age eight.

Find your passion. Follow it. And remember Rocky!

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

I left my streetcar in San Francisco

Dateline...the City by the Bay.

Playing tourist before going to a meeting in Monterey later in the week. It's a tough gig, but somebody's got to do it. With the world's economy going to hell in a handbag, quite literally, at the moment, this may be my last trip to my favorite city to visit as a tourist for quite awhile.

For the record, I consider San Francisco to be a sister city to New Orleans. I think of it as New Orleans with hills. The same laid-back ambiance, the same love of things maritime, of a melting pot of cultures, of food and music and literature and...well, romance, however you wish to define it. I love this place. We have hurricanes, they have earthquakes, and the chief difference is we get about 48 hours notice and they get none. So it goes.

Yesterday morning I took the California Street cable car down from my hotel to the end of the line at the Embarcadero and took a stroll through the Ferry Building. At ten in the morning, the air was redolent with the scent of sauteed bell peppers and onions and steak, and if you've not been to the Ferry Building, well, the place is foodie heaven. There are all sorts of stalls and shops selling produce and meat and pastries and grocery items and wine and flowers and all sorts of things. A wonderful shop of kitchen thingies called Sur le Table. And all kinds of food-to-go, and I don't mean McDonald's and Burger King. It was Tuesday morning, and I wasn't at my usual haunt, the Crescent City Farmer's Market at Uptown Square, but I was at a kind of farmer's market anyway. And I mourned that I couldn't buy stuff to bring home and cook. Can't do that when you're staying in a hotel. Can't stash those lovely strawberries in a suitcase to take home.

I left the Ferry Building to catch a streetcar to Fisherman's Wharf. Did I just say streetcar? Yes! On my last trip out here four years ago, I discovered that San Francisco had put in a streetcar line along the Embarcadero to Fisherman's Wharf. What a concept! Streetcars! What will they think of next? (For the record, this route is flat. The cable cars still tackle the steep hills of the city.)

The streetcars have been obtained from all over the world. Each one has information inside it on its history and where it came from -- I remember riding one from Milan. Some look like 1950s-era buses, two-tone cream and green, on tracks with overhead wires.

And then, I saw it, down at the end of the line, its profile unmistakable. It was a New Orleans streetcar, circa 1920.

Now, for those of you who don't know, a short time before Katrina, the city purchased 26 (I think) red-and-yellow, custom built, air conditioned streetcars to run on the Canal Street and Riverfront lines. And it lost every one of them in the flood, at a million dollars apiece to replace. The old 1920s-era cars were in a different car barn, probably the Willow Street barn in Carrollton, which didn't flood. So they were saved. But over the years, the owners of the transit lines (first New Orleans Public Service Inc., later the Regional Transit Authority) had sold or otherwise disposed of a lot of the old streetcars. So it didn't have enough streetcars to run all its lines. And the St. Charles line had a lot of damage from oak trees falling on the metal stanchions (technically called catenaries, as I recall) that held up the power lines. So it wasn't until a few months ago that we had the whole St. Charles line up and running again.

I live a block and a half from St. Charles Avenue. I can't begin to describe my sorrow at not having those streetcars running for years after Katrina. Before you-know, if I woke in the middle of the night, I could hear them running, rrrrrrrr-CLACK! And I knew someone else was out there in the night, awake and on the job, literally on track. The silence of the streetcars was a deep grief.

But they are back. And I do hear them late at night. And it is such a comfort to have them again.

So, here I was in San Francisco, outside the Ferry Building with the Oakland Bay Bridge in the distance, and here was number 952, with the RTA emblem on the side. I snapped photos as I walked up, and I got on board and announced myself to some San Francisco Muni employees eating lunch on the old wooden seats: "I'm from New Orleans! What's our streetcar doing here? We lost so many in Katrina -- we need it back!"

One of the Muni employees told me he had once lived in New Orleans and in fact had a sister who lives in Marrero. Yes, he knew we had gotten torn up badly. (For the record, I've seen some red-and-yellow streetcars out there, so we must have been able to replace at least some of the ones we lost; I gather the federal government has funds to pay for public transit, especially transit that doesn't pollute -- and streetcars run on clean electricity. On the other hand, the money may have come from FEMA. I'm not really that up on it.) But the folks in San Francisco are honoring our streetcar. The inside has the area for ad placards filled with stories about us and our streetcars. It was heartening. I took pictures.

And when I saw the photos later, I was astonished. If I showed them to someone from New Orleans, they'd probably think I took them on Canal Street, somewhere between Carondelet and St. Charles. Concrete pavement, palm trees in the background. Only the Oakland Bay Bridge in the background tips you off that you're not where you think you are. That and the sign on the front of the streetcar that says it's going to Fisherman's Wharf by way of the Embarcadero.

We are, indeed, sister cities. New Orleans and San Francisco. I'll take French bread over sourdough any day, but I do love this City by the Bay.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Not quite deja vu all over again

We survived Gustav. The city pretty much cleared out this time. No Superdome or Convention Center full of trapped people waiting in the heat to get out, waiting for the buses that never came -- or came too late. No levee breaches in New Orleans, although at least one (private) levee in a coastal area did breach. The coastal areas, of course, caught the brunt of it: Morgan City, Thibodaux, Grand Isle, to name a few. Baton Rouge got hammered: the storm passed right over the city and there's quite a bit of damage there. Now we're just waiting for services to be restored so we can get back to what passes for normal in South Louisiana. And watching the three storms still parading across the Atlantic: Hannah, Ike, and Josephine.

This time, I got out with the cats. It was a hellacious 17 1/2 hour trip to Atlanta, but we made it with only minimal kitty opera coming from the cat carriers in the back of the air-conditioned Evacumobile. I am over my guilt trip about owning a gas guzzler -- an eight-cylinder Tahoe that gets 15 miles to the gallon. I saw lots and lots of people towing/driving RVs in that crawl-and-stop traffic jam up Interstate 59. Makes my Evacumobile look like an economy car.

Suburban Atlanta is a shock to the system when you've been living in New Orleans. Where do people get all that money? The locals must be quite prosperous, or the retailers wouldn't come in and build all these stores. (Yesterday I spent a substantial sum in an electronics store in Alpharetta that didn't exist two years ago. We don't have any stores in that chain in Louisiana.) One shopping center after another, some built since I was last here the week after Christmas last year. Many rural roads I no longer recognize, because they aren't rural any more. That part is very sad to me. So many of the beautiful country roads I used to drive on my way to the farms where Cinder lived are now clogged with strip malls and walled subdivisions, er, communities, I guess they call them now.

It is quite an eye opener to see how the rest of the world lives. When your part of the world is still obsessing over whether the rebuilt levees will hold and fretting about crime and corruption, not to mention the issue of people leaving or just not returning after Katrina, it's a bit of a shock to discover that there are other places where the rate of growth is exponential, even in a supposedly poor economy.

But it is good to be here. I am so grateful for kind friends here, especially the friend who took us all in. The cats are still spooked out to be in this strange place, but they're well and getting everything they need. As soon as the word comes that the power is back on at my house, we'll head home. And hope that we're not evacuating again a week from now.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

On a summer evening...

On a summer evening in late July, we gathered upstairs to share a meal and to share memories. As the twilight faded into night outside the tall, narrow windows of the fellowship hall, we got up from the table, one by one, and told our favorite stories of Cliff. It could have been his retirement dinner. It should have been his retirement dinner. Nieta had arranged a collection of photos from his life and career up on the stage. His son Bruce came from Dallas to hear all the tributes. A longtime church member returned from Arkansas to be there with us.

Some of the memories were funny. Some were poignant. Most of them were post-Katrina stories, or, as we like to say around here these days, after the Federal flood. (New friends in Iowa are starting to understand what that's like this summer, as we trade stories of FEMA and other disaster assistance. But that's another blog.) There was a great one about Cliff and another man heaving a huge flooded desk through a bay window somewhere in Lakeview. Another great one about his test drive of a new riding lawnmower for the church that nearly took out the salesman's truck. My story about Cliff and I (me?) taking one of my seminary professors to lunch at a local bar, which so delighted the professor that he bought us all Powerball tickets, and we all vowed that if we won the Powerball, we would give the money to the church. (None of us won the Powerball jackpot, so we never got to put those vows to the test.)

At the end of the evening, the jazz pianist Peter Cho and one of our former organists, Greg Nussel, went downstairs to the sanctuary to see the ultimate tribute to Cliff. Yes, we got the grand piano. It arrived early in July. It's a Yamaha and it's gorgeous. It belonged to a professional musician who clearly took very, very good care of it, and according to Peter, it's probably no more than ten years old. (The beloved Steinway grand that we lost in the flood was a historic piano from the estate of Mrs. Katie Patterson, dating from sometime around 1909.) Both Peter and Greg took turns trying out the Yamaha. Oh my. Words fail me. I'll just say the acoustics in the sanctuary are wonderful, and in the evening dusk, with the beautiful old chandeliers glowing gold in that Gothic room, it felt as if we were somewhere in England, if England were hot and humid (the a/c was off).

Doggone it, I wish Cliff had been there. He would have loved the whole evening. And with his great love for music and singing, he really would have loved the piano.

Above all else, Cliff loved life. That was the quality in him that came out in all the stories: his boundless energy when it came to doing something for someone else, his childlike curiosity and eagerness to explore, his genuine sense of happiness in life.

When I worked with him as a seminary intern ten years ago, I remember that the homeless people who used to come by the church to see Cliff would ask for "Father Nunn." This is a Catholic city, and I suppose if you are a male religious figure, people will address you as "Father." But as I listened to all those stories last night, I realized that in many ways Cliff was like a father to all of us -- always there, always ready to help, always ready to listen and to give you advice if you needed it. God blessed all of us who had the great privilege of knowing him.

And every time I hear that Yamaha grand piano, I'll think of him.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Agents and Editors Day

This morning the men in black were gone, and so were the big black SUVs parked at the side of the lobby entrance. So I guess the McCain entourage is on its way to its next stop. They were here not much more than 12 hours. Such is life on the campaign trail, I guess.

Today is Agents and Editors Day at the writers' conference. We were invited to sign up online for meetings with up to three agents, for a modest fee. I figured if I was spending this much money to come all the way to California, might as well. It was worth it. I met with three agents. I pitched a nonfiction spiritual memoir about Katrina to two of them, and it received mixed reactions. To a third agent I pitched a fiction proposal for a quirky love story, and she received it favorably. All of them gave me their cards and invited me to email them and send them proposals and sample chapters. I was quite pleased.

Mind you, all three of them are "hungry" for new business. One started her business this year; she is more into helping writers in the editing and packaging of their work and recommending them to other agents. Another has been in business 15 months. The third just changed jobs in the last couple of months, but she has gone from one established agency to another, which is a good thing as far as stability of the agency is concerned.

There are a lot of good writers here, mostly women in the workshops I've attended. I've been favorably impressed with the quality of the writing they are reading in these sessions. There are probably 200 or 300 people here, and just about every one I've heard has material that is good enough for publication. I don't find that intimidating; I find it affirming. This is a place for people who are serious about their craft. I know quite a few of them will, indeed, get published. I hope one of them is me.

Want to know more about this conference? www.sbwriters.com.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Santa Barbara, again

After an absence of ten years, I've returned to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference this week to learn what's new in the publishing industry and to pitch an idea for a book that's been percolating in me for the last, oh, two years, ten months, don't know how many days. (You guessed it, it's a Katrina book.) Tomorrow I have three ten-minute interviews with three agents to pitch, yes, just like writers in Hollywood pitch screenplays for movies. I keep telling myself this is just to get my feet wet, as I've never done this before. Kind of like preaching those first sermons.

Santa Barbara, in case you didn't know, is one of the country's top writers' conferences. For the last 36 years, Ray Bradbury has been the keynote speaker. He was here Saturday night, opening the conference. He is 88 now and partially paralyzed from a stroke he had some years ago, and his speech is a little slurred. But he's still the master, and we gave him a standing ovation. His message, applicable to more than just writers: "Do what you love, and love what you do." Amen!

You may think this is a strange place for a minister to be, but this morning I was in a nonfiction workshop with about 20 participants, and three of us were pastors. We who preach, write. I love to tell people from my former profession, the magazine industry, "When you're the preacher, you can't tell the congregation, "The sermon's not quite done yet, but I'll get it to you tomorrow." The editors all laugh. There is no winging it on Sunday morning. Whether it's good or bad, the sermon's got to be done, and you get up there with a smile and preach it, even if you think it's a dog. One of my seminary professors told us in preaching class, "Sometimes you have to walk the dog." Yeah, but don't do it too often. But I digress.

This week many of my Presbyterian colleagues are at the denominational General Assembly in San Jose. If you're geographically challenged as far as California is concerned, San Jose is just south of San Francisco in the northern part of the state. Santa Barbara is 90 miles north of the Los Angeles airport in the southern part of the state. Thoroughly confused? Just remember, San Jose and Santa Barbara are probably close to 400 miles apart. Have fun at the General Assembly, friends.

I spent a little time reading the local Sunday paper yesterday, the Santa Barbara News-Press. I had been told that Santa Barbara is fairly conservative, and every column I read in the paper seemed to support that view. This afternoon as I walked across the grounds of my hotel -- it's actually a resort, Fess Parker's Doubletree Resort, just across the road from the ocean, and yes, I was tempted to sing the Davy Crockett theme song when I walked in the lobby but didn't -- at any rate, I noticed a couple of California Highway Patrol cars (wasn't there a TV show once called CHiPS about them? The patrol, not the cars) parked in the driveway by the lobby and some guys in black suits and dark sunglasses standing around -- yes, it really looked like Men in Black. Hmm, well, when you're only 90 miles from L.A. and you're at a resort, it's not unusual to get a celebrity or two in the area. This evening I asked someone if they knew who it was. I was told it was John McCain. This person seemed to think that he and his entourage probably had a block of about 100 rooms in the main part of the hotel. (I am staying in a building at the far end of the property. I am nowhere near the action. I actually find this comforting. If somebody starts shooting around here, I want to be as far away as possible.)

Well, conservative Santa Barbara would probably welcome John McCain. We in New Orleans aren't particularly happy with Republicans since Katrina, but that's a long story and I really, really don't want to write a political blog. My friend Ethel says if I get to meet McCain (not likely!), to tell him on behalf of her and all the other mothers of our service people that if he gets elected president, he should bring our children home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Me, I'm here to learn more about writing. So far I've learned that I need to keep this blog going and get more people to read it. If you are one of my three readers, please tell a friend about it. As the Gallo wine guys used to say, thank you for your support.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Summer evening

Dare I say it? It's a sultry summer evening in New Orleans. I mean hot and humid. Just like all those bad pulp novels describe it. I've been sitting on the front porch with the cats (this IS Cattown, after all). Somewhere down the block, someone is playing a clarinet. Slow, easy blues.

Would this have happened in my old neighborhood in suburban Atlanta? I think not.

I love this town. Hurricane season and all.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Celebration of a Life

We said goodbye to Cliff yesterday in a service that packed the sanctuary and balcony of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans...restored after Katrina in no small part thanks to Cliff's tireless efforts. Many tributes were made, many words were said. But the most eloquent tribute to Cliff was not in words. It was in music.

There is an elder in the church named Peter Cho who is a jazz musician. He's seldom in church on Sundays because he plays with a group called James Rivers at the jazz brunch at the Hilton downtown. After Katrina, of course, there was no jazz brunch for quite awhile, and we had the joy of hearing Peter sit down at the piano in the upstairs fellowship hall (because the church had been flooded with almost three feet of water) and play to the glory of God. People are still talking about the morning he did a jazz rendition of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," which at that point in our lives, as we were all returning from exile, was about as sacred a piece of music as you can imagine. Grown men wept.

What Peter did yesterday morning -- wittingly or unwittingly -- was set Cliff's life to music. He started out slowly, doodling a little bit here and a little bit there, until I wondered if he was playing his own original composition. And then a recognizable melody began to emergy. It was the old gospel song "Amen, Amen." But he wasn't playing it as gospel. He was playing it as jazz. It was energized. It was like fireworks. It was joyous. It was an "Amen!" of thanks to God for Cliff's life. For his energy and his passion and his joy in living, his curiosity and his willingness to explore new ideas...and his complete lack of any need to control situations (that's a big part of jazz -- it goes all over the place!). It was all there, in that piece of music.

Cliff's life started out with a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a degree in this area, a degree in that area, and then he focused in on ministry. And it was in the days, months, and years after Katrina that Cliff's ministry came into its own, as he tirelessly worked for the rebuilding of the church, the neighborhood, and the city.

And then slowly Peter wound it down, ending with a few notes that might have been a little sad, and then it was quiet. Like Cliff's end. Not a lot of fuss, just a slowing and a stop.

For someone who has always lived by the power of words, this summation of a life in a piece of music took my breath away. Thank you, Peter! Thank you, God, for Cliff's life and for Peter's great gift of music!

The church lost its 1909 Steinway grand piano in the flood. Peter did this awesome piece of music on a secondhand upright the church got for the sanctuary after the storm. (I had no idea that old piano had that kind of music in it!) Before Cliff died, the church had established a fund to purchase a new grand piano. It is now Cliff's memorial fund. If you love music and would like to contribute, you can send a check to First Presbyterian Church, 5401 S. Claiborne Ave., New Orleans, LA 70125 and mark it "piano fund."

And if you're ever visiting New Orleans on a Sunday, you can go (after church!) to the jazz brunch at the Hilton and hear Peter play.

Amen!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Aslan's Country

"And what happened then?" said Jill.

"Well, it's not very easy to describe, is it, Edmund?" said the High King.

"Not very," said Edmund. "It wasn't at all like that other time when we were pulled out of our own world by Magic. There was a frightful roar and something hit me with a bang, but it didn't hurt. And I felt not so much scared as -- well, excited. Oh -- and this is one queer thing. I'd had a rather sore knee, from a hack at rugger. I noticed it had suddenly gone. And I felt very light. And then -- here we were."

(From The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis, Book Seven in the Chronicles of Narnia.)

And a few pages later, a Talking Mouse says:
"Welcome, in the Lion's name. Come further up and further in."

And finally, the great Lion Aslan, the son of the Emperor-over-Sea, says:
"The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning."

Early Sunday morning, my friend, colleague and mentor, Cliff Nunn, was taken to Aslan's country, quite unexpectedly. I'd like to think it was a little bit like C.S. Lewis' description of the railway accident that took the human characters from the series into the new Narnia: something hit him, but it didn't hurt. And he has been welcomed in the Lion's name to this wonderful place where mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. (Okay, I just shifted to another book. Revelation 21:4b, if you'd like to look it up.)

We who are still on this side of the door are filled with grief at losing him so suddenly. There were so many things we still wanted to say to him, so many things we wanted to share with him. But we trust that he is safe, and one day we will be with him...in Aslan's country.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Winter wonderland

I see by the news today that there is an ice storm that has shut down travel from Texas to New Hampshire. 12 people dead in traffic accidents attributed to the weather. Airports shut down in Chicago and Oklahoma City. I guess it's really winter.

Way down yonder in New Orleans, it has been in the 80s for the last several days. I had a Christmas open house on Saturday and had to keep the a/c blasting so people who had come in their Christmas clothes wouldn't die of heat stroke. Mind you, we are breaking records for high temperatures right now. This is not your typical December weather.

But it is incredible that you don't have to go too far north to hit a massive ice storm.

And you wonder why we crazy people continue to live here. August is the pits, but we love winter.

Y'all come down. Mardi Gras is the first Tuesday in February.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Alternative universes, explained

I have done something that Alfred Hughes, the Archbishop of New Orleans, hasn't done. I have actually READ Philip Pullman's book, The Golden Compass. Just finished it a week or so ago, in fact. According to Sunday's Times-Picayune, the archbishop hasn't read the book, and he encourages Catholics not to read it either -- or to go see the movie based on the book, which opens this Friday.

And while I admit I'm not Catholic, I also admit that, as a Protestant pastor, I haven't lost my faith over this book. Not even close. But I certainly am amused at the handwringing agonizing that's been going on over it.

"All our children are going to lose their faith if they read this book." Oh, please. There are a lot of things in this world that might cause a person to "doubt," but The Golden Compass isn't one of them.

I am a big fan of fantasy and science fiction. I've been reading it since I was oh, eight or ten years old and going through the Milton Latter Library's entire collection of juvenile science fiction and fantasy (Robert Heinlein's Red Planet and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles were two favorites.) As you may have noticed by my present occupation, I didn't lose my faith reading them. BTW, the very copies I read of some of those books are STILL on the shelves at Latter. I checked.

One theme in science fiction and fantasy is that of the "alternate" or "alternative" universe, a world that looks a lot like ours but isn't. Classic Star Trek had an episode featuring an alternative universe, where Kirk and Spock were very different from their counterparts in this universe. The television series "Sliders" featured a group of characters who "slid" into alternative, or parallel, universes every week, and history had taken a different turn in each universe. And Doctor Who left Rose Tyler behind in a parallel universe at the end of last season -- if you need a good cry, watch that last scene between the two of them as they part.

Warning: "spoilers" follow. If you really want to read The Golden Compass, be aware that what follows will give away some plot details.

Well, the first sentence of the book begins "Lyra and her daemon..." As the story progresses, we figure out that a "daemon" (pronounced "demon") is an animal spirit that accompanies the humans in this book, and that the two are inseparably linked. There is no indication that these "daemons" are evil spirits. They are a part of who these people are. So right there, you know that this is a fantasy world.

And then, if you had any doubt that you were in a parallel universe, turn to page 27 (I am quoting from the mass market paperback edition): "Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church's power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin's death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place."

Pope John Calvin -- did you get that? (Now we're in MY -- or our -- territory, Presbyterian and Reformed fans!) Clearly, this is an alternative universe! (Maybe that's why the Roman Catholic Church is upset -- in this universe, Calvin became pope!)

Yes, the Church (aka the Magisterium) does some terrible things in this universe. Please note, however, that this is not the Roman Catholic Church of this universe. And even if it was, well, I have some books of church history on my shelf that detail some pretty awful things the Roman Catholic Church -- and the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, for that matter -- did in the name of Jesus Christ. But maybe we don't want our children to know about them?

Back to that issue of "children" reading this book. I am not a reading specialist (just a reader), but on the basis of the complexity of the language, I would put the reading level of this book at somewhere around adolescence. Maybe eighth grade or high school. This is not a little kids' book. It contains words that younger children would balk over: "naptha," "anbaric," "alethiometer," to name a few. So a child who would sit down and read this book would be of an age to start making reasoned judgments for him- or herself.

If I were a concerned parent, what I would really worry about are some of the themes in this book. Who are Lyra's parents? The ones we are told about? Or are they not her real parents? And do they love her? Or do they want her only to suit their own purposes? Are they good people, or are they evil? I would worry a LOT more about these issues than the alternative universe depiction of something called "the church" which clearly bears no resemblance to church organizations as they exist in our world.

And just to make a book review out of this, Philip Pullman is a good and imaginative writer, but he is no J.K. Rowling. Lyra Belacqua is no Harry Potter. But he writes an interesting tale.

Alas, I won't have time to see the movie during the first few days it's on, but I will see it. And books two and three in the trilogy are in the mail to me even as I write this. If they turn out to be truly awful, I will let you know. If they're pretty good, I'll let you know that, too.

In the meantime, I would be happy to discuss this book with anyone who would like to join me in conversation. I only have one requirement: you actually have to READ the book first.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Another anniversary

A few days after the Katrina anniversary is another anniversary, a more personal one. It is the anniversary of my father's death, nearly 25 years ago now. The years have softened the pain of the memories of those last years of his life, and I can now think farther back, to earlier, happier memories from my childhood.

In pondering those days, I wonder if other fathers did the same sorts of things with their children that my father did with me. You see, I was the child of the second marriage, the child of my father's old age. He was 57 when I was born, and as I grew up, I sometimes had to explain to strangers that he wasn't my grandfather, he was my father. He turned 65 when I was eight, so for many of my growing-up years he was semi-retired, selling real estate part time. And I wonder if the things we did together were more the sorts of things children did with their grandfathers, not their fathers.

I remember going for walks with him in our neighborhood in the early evenings when I was around six or seven. I was fascinated by the stars and pored over the children's astronomy books I got from the library. My father, who had been a sea captain in his early years, and whose own father had run a navigation school in the Cayman Islands, introduced me to Sirius and Orion's belt and the Pleiades. The bright streetlights of a major road to our north pretty much blotted out the northern sky. So it wasn't until years later, when I went to summer camp, that I finally got to see that great mystery, the Big Dipper and the North Star, Polaris, that I had read about in the astronomy books.

When I was perhaps seven or eight, we spent our summer vacations at that grand old resort, the Edgewater Gulf Hotel on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I remember going to the coffee shop with him and being fascinated with the display at the soda fountain. Parfaits -- layers of chocolate and vanilla, strawberry and vanilla, pineapple and vanilla -- in tall glasses sat on glass shelves in a mirrored case under bright lights and slowly turned round and round. They looked so real to me! (But they obviously weren't, or they would have melted.) They were so tantalizing!

My father, however, wanted to order the chicken and dumplings that were on the menu. He wanted me to try them to see what they were like. But for some reason, whenever he asked, they didn't have any that day. So, like the Big Dipper, chicken and dumplings were one of those mysteries that I didn't get to discover until I was older.

At the Edgewater, he and I would go out on the front lawn in the afternoons and sit in the pastel colored Adirondack chairs, pink and blue and yellow and green, under the live oaks, high on a bluff overlooking the Gulf. He would give me little bags of roasted peanuts and I would feed them to the squirrels. One, whom I named Chubby Squirrel, actually came right up to me a couple of times and took the peanuts from my fingers, to my great delight.

(A historical note. The Edgewater Gulf Hotel actually survived Hurricane Camille in 1969. But it didn't survive its economic troubles, and some years later the hotel was dynamited to make way for an expansion of the Edgewater Mall shopping complex. They had to dynamite the building twice before it finally came down. In the summer of 2004, I had lunch one day at a Gumbo Shop restaurant (the original is in the French Quarter) that, if my calculations were correct, sat roughly on the site of the front lawn of the Edgewater. I based my calculations on location by the few remaining oak trees edging the parking lot. I have no idea what happened to the property in Katrina.)

On the anniversary of the weekend of my father's death, I celebrated his memory with food. In the summers of my childhood, he would go down to a neighborhood I recall vaguely as being somewhere near the Fair Grounds Race Course, to the local Cuban market, and buy mangoes. With his pocket knife he would peel them (when they are peeled, they are slippery things!) and slice off pieces of the sweet, yellow-orange fruit. And he would tell me how mangoes grew wild in his childhood home in the Cayman Islands.

Today mangoes are not quite as exotic a delicacy as they were back then, and you can buy them in the local supermarket. But thanks to my father, I know how to pick out a good one, looking for that blush of red and just that certain texture, not too hard, not mushy. This week I found a good one at the grocery store. In memory of my father I peeled it very carefully (with a good paring knife, not a pocket knife!) and sliced it up. It was the sweetest, juciest mango I had eaten in years. Just like the kind my father used to bring home from the Cuban market years ago.

By the time I came along, both my grandfathers were deceased. So perhaps I had the best of both worlds: a father who filled the roles of grandfather and father to me. I am grateful for his life and the years I had with him. And oh, yes, he did live to see me grow up. He lived to lay hands on my head when I was ordained as an elder in the Presbyterian church. It's a memory I'll treasure always.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

An anniversary

August 29, 2007. At 9:38 a.m. I walked around the church grounds and stopped, facing the direction of the 17th Street Canal levee breach, roughly a couple of miles northeast of where I stood. It was a late summer morning, sunny, a little cooler than it has been the past few weeks, thanks to the showers we've been having the last few days. So I stood there, wondering what people in passing cars thought I was doing, or if they even cared that I was standing in front of the church, looking at who knows what.

It's been a banner summer for cicadas, and they chirred soothingly in the oak trees planted along the curb and on the median (we call medians "neutral grounds" hereabouts for ancient obscure reasons). My kindergarten class here at the church preschool "helped" to plant those very oak trees fifty years ago. The church gardens are still in bloom in late August, with pink and white pentas, lavender periwinkle and a sunny yellow hibiscus showing off for visitors.

In short, it was a normal morning. I didn't hear any church bells ringing at 9:38 a.m., although I know churches were asked to ring their bells. (As far as I know, this church doesn't have a bell. At least, I've never heard one.) I stood in the peaceful church garden and thought of Lake Pontchartrain exploding through the 17th Street Canal levee at 9:38 a.m., that terrible morning two years ago. It hardly seems possible now, in this peaceful place. But it happened.

Earlier in the month I took a week of vacation. I went to my favorite vacation place, Pensacola Beach, Florida, and stayed at a friend's condo not far from the federally protected area that is the Gulf Islands National Seashore. In Pensacola they are still recovering from Ivan, which struck the year before Katrina and darn near wiped them off the map. Ivan was headed straight for New Orleans, but at the last minute it turned and slammed into Gulf Shores, Alabama, just west of Pensacola. My friend's condo had the side ripped off and the beach sand was feet deep all over the complex. The condo has been completely redone, and while we were there, the landscapers were installing new sod.

In the mornings and at sunset I would walk the beach and ponder the transitory nature of life. I have been visiting Pensacola for thirty years, and roughly every five years or so they get slammed by a hurricane, and Santa Rosa Island, the barrier island where Pensacola Beach is located, undergoes major urban renewal. Hotels have come and gone over the years. Most of the cinderblock roach motels are gone now. The midpriced chains (Howard Johnson's, Holiday Inn) are gone. Every time the beach is rebuilt after a storm, fancier accommodations go up. And so do the prices.

Why do people rebuild, knowing that sooner or later they are going to get wiped out again? Because this place is beautiful. Because when there are no hurricanes out there, it's a wonderful place to be, a delight to the eyes and a comfort to the spirit. And oh, yes, it's a fun place, too, with lots of restaurants and nightlife. Me, I like to walk the beach at sunrise. But your mileage may vary.

On the way home I made a side trip to Waveland, Mississippi, where my family once had a summer home on the beach. Ah, Waveland. Yes, there are parts of New Orleans
where things haven't come back. But Waveland, wow. Waveland was a tiny town no one outside of this local area had ever heard of B.K. (Before Katrina). A.K., After Katrina, it made the national news. Just east of Ground Zero, where Katrina made landfall on the Pearl River, Waveland had hardly anything left standing after the storm. And frankly, it's still devastated. The shopping center at U.S. Hwy. 90 and Waveland Avenue, where the supermarket and the dollar store and other shopping were located, is boarded up. Driving Waveland Avenue (which connects Hwy. 90 with the beach), you find few houses left and lots of piles of debris...two years later. But as I got near the beach, I saw a couple of large homes going up. Not much else around, but people are rebuilding. I shook my head and marveled at the indomitability of the human spirit. In spite of everything, these folks are rebuilding their homes in devastated Waveland, Mississippi.

Down the beach road at the site of St. Clare's Catholic Church, there are quonset huts where the church once was. The church grounds have become a tent city for volunteer work groups coming down to help rebuild the area. A sign in front reads, "Katrina was big, but God is bigger." Amen.

Here in hurricane land, we live in the tension between two realities: the transitory nature of all life epitomized by the destruction of the hurricanes, and the indomitabiity of the human spirit, the refusal to give up in the face of that destruction. Some people think we all are insane to continue to live here. I say we are brave. We know the cost, yet we persevere. There are no guarantees in life. Perhaps we who live here in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast are just a little bit more aware of this than those who live inland, under the illusion of security.

This is our home. We are staying.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

God's newness

One of my seminary professors, Walter Brueggemann, likes to talk about "God's newness." Isaiah 43:19 says, "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." God has made a way in the wilderness for me. I have a new call to ministry. I am back in a parish again. After a long, long time of wandering and wondering, of searching and praying, I have been called to a church in the metro New Orleans area. Not just any church, but the church where I was baptized as an infant and where I went to preschool. God must be laughing. My parents must be laughing. Shoot, I'm laughing too.

We held my installation service on Sunday. It was truly a celebration, for the congregation and for me. Everyone who took part in the service was a friend -- some for many years, some recent. Friends and family members came. The elders of the church were there. The congregation was there. We had a great reception afterward and everybody had a wonderful time.

A couple came in during the service. They were strangers. They needed financial assistance. After the service, I was able to give them some help. Their presence in the service was a reminder to me -- to all of us -- that the work of ministry is beyond the doors of the church, out in the community.

I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said, "The end of all our explorations will be to come back to where we began, and discover the place for the first time." And here I am, back where my faith story began so many years ago. A new adventure begins.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

The elusiveness of now

I walk across a pasture in the foothills of the North Georgia mountains. The grass has been mowed, maybe a week or more ago, for it is thick under my feet. The yellowed cuttings lie across the green grass below. Fescue, mostly, with some clover and bermuda mixed in.

It's about one o'clock in the afternoon. A warm sun heats my arms, my face, as I climb up a hill, unlock a gate, then make my way carefully down the hill on the other side of the fence. In spite of a light breeze, I begin to perspire. And as I walk, I ponder the elusiveness of "now." It's here for a moment, and then it's gone. I anticipate, then it's now, then it's past. Step after step. At the bottom of the hill, I turn left and begin walking across the pasture toward a stand of trees that mark the distant fenceline. I can see a spot of freshly turned red clay. It's dry, thanks to a long drought in this part of the state.

When I reach the fresh red clay, I stop. I put down the tote bag I've been carrying. It contains a small leatherbound book and a box of Kleenex.

There are three separate parts to this bare ground. One is hard packed. It's been here awhile. One is fresher. But the one closest to me is new, fresh crumbling earth. The tears roll down my face. I have an insane urge to dig in the clay with my hands until I find what is underneath it. But I don't.

Cinder, my beloved companion on life's trail for the last twenty years, almost twenty-one, is buried here, in this freshly turned North Georgia red clay. And a part of me is buried with him. A huge chunk of who I am is gone. The elusiveness of now. Where did those twenty years go?

And how many hours did I spend brushing that Georgia red clay out of his coat and shampooing it off him when brushes failed? He did so love to roll in it!

I am glad I brought him back here to spend his last years, and I am glad that he is buried here, where he spent so much of his life. He never grazed in this pasture, but he would have enjoyed it. It's a lovely spot, a place where a human being wouldn't mind being buried. He lies next to Sweet Talk, a mare from the farm who died about seven weeks before he did, and Chrissy, a fifty-year-old pony who died around Easter a year ago.

Someone, probably Sweet Talk's owner, laid a stone on top of her grave with words engraved on it that went something like this: "If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I'd go right up to heaven, and bring you back again." Sweet Talk's owner couldn't bear to come out when the vet came to put her down. I was in New Orleans when Cinder died, but I don't think I could have watched it either.

I pulled out the slim black leather book. "I lift up my eyes to the hills -- from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." Psalm 121.

Accept, O Lord, I humbly pray, a foal of your own herd, a horse of your own barn, a creature of your own creation.

Friday, May 04, 2007

For the birds

They say it is bad luck to have a bird get loose in the house. In Cattown, it IS bad luck -- for the bird. This week, not one but two birds, sparrows, probably, fell down my ancient chimney. I begged the guys who did the roof, I begged the guys who painted the house, to put some chicken wire on top of the two chimneys to cap them so birds wouldn't fall down, but they mustn't have taken me seriously, because they never did it. Every now and then, one of the local birds decides to go for a spin down the chimney, and it usually ends badly.

Years ago, when my uncle was a boy, these chimneys vented coal-burning fireplaces, two upstairs and two downstairs, and the fireplaces and the stove were the only heat in the house. My uncle's job was to fill them with coal in the mornings. I still have two of the non-polished aluminum (?) scoop-like shovels he used for this task. At any rate, those old chimneys are still full of coal soot. And this week, when the birds fell, they got covered in it, which is why I'm not sure they were sparrows, because they were quite black when they ended up in the living room.

They fell one at a time. I found the first one in the dining room when I came home one afternoon -- and it was surrounded by three cats. 'Teebie, the hunter, was holding it down with a paw. Then he picked it up in his mouth and carried it around. When I realized it was alive, I managed to scoop it up with paper towels and carried it outside. As soon as I loosed my delicate grip on it, it took off.

But there was another one still in the chimney. I could hear it fluttering around in there, and so could the cats, who kept watch around the living room fireplace for quite some time. I was hoping it would find its way out.

Unfortunately, when I got home the next afternoon, I found the second bird upside down on the living room floor, quite dead. The cats weren't even playing with it. I suspect 'Teebie snapped its neck, because there were no signs of injury to its body. This one I took outside and buried.

Jesus said, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father." [Matthew 10:29] Even the death of a little sparrow that wandered into the wrong place is known to God.

On a lighter note, the green parrots of Uptown New Orleans are back. One of them has been happily dining on the drying, fermenting remnants of the Japanese plums still on the tree. (We are moving into the hot weather season now that it's May.) I can watch him from an upstairs window (joined by excited cats) as he picks a fruit from the tree with one clawed foot and holds it as he eats, using the other foot to hang on to the tree branch. He is bright green with a white underbody and a bright yellow beak. Some say these are wild parakeets, but he's awfully big for a parakeet, in my humble opinion. And gorgeous.

The tiny soot-covered sparrows and the magnificent green parrot both are part of God's awesome creation. How humble I feel to also be a part of that creation!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The persistence of evil

A well-read book on my theological bookshelf is titled Creation and the Persistence of Evil by Daniel Levinson. The Bible doesn't tell us where evil came from -- it just turned up in the Garden of Eden in the personage of the serpent. (The business about fallen angels, Adam's other wife Lilith, etc., come from sources outside the Bible.) Human beings got kicked out of Eden, and evil went with us. We've been dealing with it ever since.

And what happened on Monday morning at Virginia Tech was, unquestionably, evil exploding into our world in the personage of a deeply disturbed young man. I have read his plays that were posted on AOL. They were frightening enough to have his professors refer him for counseling, but really, you can't arrest someone for writing a purported work of fiction. (Well, okay, you can, but that's the subject of another blog.) The play about a young man and his stepfather could well have been his modern day take on Hamlet, for all we know: Hamlet's father was murdered by his stepfather. As for the language, well, consider the stuff Allen Ginsburg wrote. I've been in critique groups where some of the writings some group members submitted had me feeling very uncomfortable. But so far none of the authors has lost it and killed more than thirty people.

There was simply no way to predict this was going to happen. The media have listed a number of deadly shootings over the years: the Amish school shooting in Pennsylvania, Columbine High School in Colorado, the Texas Tower shooter in 1966. I can think of some non-school-related shootings that terrorized communities where I lived: a mentally ill man who opened fire in the food court at Perimeter Mall in Atlanta some 15 years ago; a shooter on the roof of the Downtown Howard Johnson's in New Orleans in the early 1970s. And a shooting in the gym of a New Orleans high school a few years ago that was either drug or gang related. We all wring our hands and try to reimagine the scene "if only" someone had seen it coming. But there's just no way to predict what someone will do. If we locked up every student in school who acted "weird," there wouldn't be enough room for them all -- not to mention the terrible injustice that would be done to young people whose only "crime" is to be different. (A lot of books have been written on that subject too.)

My heart and my prayers go out to everyone who grieves over what happened at Virginia Tech. You didn't have to be there to be part of that community. The whole nation is in mourning for the lives lost.

My undergraduate degree is from Syracuse University. December 21, 1988 is a day the Syracuse family will remember forever. On that day, terrorists blew up Pam Am Flight 103 in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the dead were 35 students from Syracuse who were returning from a semester of study abroad. It was many years after my graduation, yet I wept too for these young people. On the campus today is a memorial to them, and every year 35 Remembrance Scholarships are awarded in their memory. In addition, there are two scholarships offered every year for students from Lockerbie to attend Syracuse for a year. When the chancellor of Syracuse, Nancy Cantor, wrote a note of condolence to the president of Virgina Tech, she recalled the grief of Syracuse over the loss of its students nearly 20 years ago.

The young people and their professors who died in a hail of gunfire on Monday morning will never be forgotten. The Virigina Tech community, like the Syracuse community, will find a suitable way to honor their memories and try to bring some good out of this tragedy.

In the meantime, we grieve.

Friday, March 09, 2007

It's that time of year again...

Yup, it's that time of year again: Lent. And in the words of one of my favorite philosophers, Frank Davis of Natcher'ly N'Awlins fame, you know what that means: crawfish season!

Had dinner with a friend last night at a restaurant on world famous St. Charles Avenue, which looks a lot like it did B.K. (Before Katrina): Mardi Gras beads dangling from the live oaks (which don't have quite as many branches as they did B.K.), people strolling the sidewalks in the spring twilight, the grand old mansions and newer hotels and condos graciously lining the avenue. The only thing missing, alas, is the St. Charles Avenue streetcar (and I really miss it!). The old 1920s cars survived the flooding, but the new red-and-yellow, air conditioned, cost a million dollars apiece ones, well, guess where THEIR car barn was? Yup, drowned 'em all, 26 of them as I recall. Until they are replaced, the old 1920s cars are being used on the Canal Street line, the Riverfront line, and on the part of St. Charles that is in the Central Business District. The long line uptown and along Carrollton Avenue, where the crashing branches of the oak trees destroyed the crosspieces of the poles that hold up the electric wiring, is still under repair. And until new streetcars arrive to replace the ones destroyed in the flood, there really aren't enough to go around all those streetcar lines, unless you want to wait an hour for a streetcar. In the meantime, we have buses on the St. Charles route, but bouncing over the potholes on a bus just doesn't have the same ambiance as riding the swaying old streetcars with the windows open. The day that streetcars run on St. Charles Avenue again, I am going to be out there on the street waving an American flag to greet them! (Unless I am fortunate enough to get a seat on board.)

At any rate, my friend and I dined at this Mexican restaurant on St. Charles Avenue. And when I opened the menu, the first thing I saw was the insert with the evening's specials. Lenten specials. Seafood dishes.

When was the last time you saw seafood dishes on the menu in a Mexican restaurant? Maybe on your last trip to Cancun? Think about it. Mexico has long coastlines on the Gulf side and the Pacific side, but most Mexican restaurants only have beef and chicken dishes on their menus. There must be a lot of seafood dishes in Mexican cooking, but you never see them on restaurant menus in the U.S. I wonder why not?

So what did we eat, you ask? My friend had shrimp empanada, and I had...crawfish enchiladas. I have no idea if they serve crawfish in Mexico. They sure serve them in New Orleans. Especially during Lent.

And they were good, too! I look forward to having the other half of my dinner for lunch, thanks to the ever popular take-out box!

Lent equals crawfish. Remember that!

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Oops...

The title of the blog below should read "Happy trails," not "Hapy." Where's a good editor when you need one?

Hapy trails

I've been on the road. Took a trip to Georgia two weeks ago to visit Cinder the wonder horse, and I found him not doing so well. Seems he had gotten into another horse's supplement, the dosage of which was one ounce, and he had eaten the entire three-pound tub. Without going into the gory details, he was not a happy camper. It was an emergency call for the vet.

It's been a long road, but he was starting to do better, until this evening, when he choked on his feed -- it got stuck in his throat. Another emergency call to the vet. I can hardly wait to see this month's vet bill. But the vet was able to flush water down his throat and clear the food that was blocked. Now he has to have his feed wetted down before he eats it.

If he gets through all this, he will be thirty-one years old on April 26. I have had him since August, 1986 -- twenty years. And it's been a long, wonderful ride. On this last trip I stayed in Alpharetta, in a place that was pastureland and woods for most of the years that I have had Cinder. In fact, I think the expressway exit didn't even exist back in 1986.

Time flies when you're having fun. In many ways, that summer of 1986 when I found him at a farm in Alpharetta seems like just yesterday. He was ten then, and he was a dapple gray horse with a black mane and tail and black stockings (black legs up to the knees and hocks). Today he is white (when he's clean) with a creamy mane and tail. He still has the dark gray patch on his left shoulder that the Arabian people call a "bloody shoulder" -- his grandfather, the Arabian sire Morafic, had the marking too.

While I was visiting Cinder, I had dinner one evening with a friend who owns a horse that Cinder buddied up with, way back then in the 1980s. She still has her horse -- he's 27 now himself, and his beautiful chestnut coat has gotten darker with age and his back has a definite sway in it. My friend and I had a wonderful time reminiscing about the barns where we'd kept our horses and the people we had met along the way. She and I had moved the two horses to the same barns at least four times so we could keep them together. We would move because the barn was closing because someone was developing the property for a subdivision, or a new barn manager came in that we didn't like, or something along those lines. We have seen a lot of changes since 1986.

Part of the problem with having to acknowledge that your horse is getting old is that it means you, too, are getting old. I have started riding again, at a barn in New Orleans. Before my first lesson I cried like a child for two days. It meant I was going on without Cinder, and it broke my heart. I probably will never ride Cinder again -- long story, but I am afraid he might fall down with me. But I want to keep on riding. And in that first time back on a horse in I don't want to say how many years, I lasted about thirty minutes. Talk about pain. Good pain, as pain goes. But I was hobbling around for two days afterward. You see, like Cinder, I'm getting up there myself. And that, too, is a difficult thing to deal with.

In the early 1990s, when we were at a farm in Forsyth County, Georgia that is now a Jack Nicklaus golf course surrounded by very expensive houses, there was a woman there who had a Morgan mare. I first met this woman when I followed her up the long gravel drive to the barn. She was driving a red LeBaron convertible. Her name was Lavinia. And she was about 70 years old. The rest of the horse owners at this barn, all women, were in their 30s and 40s. We just loved Lavinia. She said to us, "Those old ladies at my church just want to sit around and play cards all day. I can't do that." So Lavinia was out there longeing her Morgan mare, Tessa (longeing, pronounced "lungeing," is putting your horse on a long lead line and exercising it by having it walk, trot, or canter in a circle with you in the center holding the lead line). Then she would put a heavy Australian stock saddle on her and ride her. All us thirty to forty year olds decided then and there that we wanted to be Lavinia when we got to be her age.

Yeah, I want to be Lavinia. I don't know if there is going to be another horse in my life after Cinder is gone. I am afraid if I got another horse and it lived as long as Cinder, I would either be going out there to visit him on a walker or he would outlive me. I wonder what Lavinia did.

I guess if I ever have a broken hip (and my mother had one, and I know just how awful that is), I would rather tell the doctor, "My horse threw me" rather than "I fell down in my house." Although if the horse threw me, I'd probably break more bones than just my hip. But I won't go there for now!

Cinder, it's been a great ride these twenty years. Thank you for all the fun times we've had, all the places we've been, all the people and horses we've met. And I hope we have some good days yet.