Other

George Matheson could’t see with his eyes. He was blind.
But he wasn’t sightless.

When God decided to write His Book, He didn’t begin like a lot of mere men-authors do.
He didn’t begin with “Once upon a time,” not only because that’s a boring way to begin,
But because, well, …when God wrote The Book, ‘time’ hadn’t happened yet, so there was no time to be ‘once upon-ed.’

I will tell you about the day I took Jacob to the doctor.  Just he and I.  A trip from the East Bay where I lived at the time, across the Bay Bridge and into San Francisco. I drove Jacob because he didn’t see too well in those days.  He still drove himself places, occasionally. But, he probably shouldn’t have. His eyes were failing, and so were his reflexes.

I may have prayed for you, today. 
        I thought you should know.

(Sometimes, when people tell me they are praying for me,
        I wonder if they actually remember to pray.
I guess the reason I wonder about such things is because,
        Well, … Sometimes, after I’ve told someone I’ll be praying for them,
                  I forget to pray.
And I wonder if other people are like me?)

I wonder, sometimes.
       I suppose I wonder because I have been known to ‘wander.’
I occasionally catch myself ambling through my day,
       Like a man with nowhere to go, and all day to get there.

 People who are close to me—(I don’t mean close to me relationally, I mean, literally ‘close to me’)— know that I wear hearing aids.  I wear them because, several months ago, my wife told me, in so many words, that I needed to have my hearing checked.  It seemed to her that I wasn’t ‘hearing’ her very well.  I told her I could hear her fine; I just couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Nope. I didn’t misspell the word in the title. I just decided that acknowledging the ‘daze’ of life is often easier than defining or describing what’s going on these ‘days.’ One of the ways I try to stay on track in the midst of so much uncertainty, political rhetoric, slant, spin, news (fake and otherwise) and what can be a frenetic and confusing time is … reading.

I drove along the freeway, this morning, and as I drove,             I watched an azure sky change its mind.I marveled as I watched it dissolve from one color of blue into another, then another, then another.             And the moving scene I watched reminded me of…

We’ve had a fire in our town.
           A terribly destructive conflagration is what it was.
And brave firefighters and first responders ran toward the flames,
                flames that seemed to swallow entire neighborhoods and forests and … lives.

I was raised in Granite City, Illinois, a steel town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. When I was a kid my folks decided to build a two-room addition on the back of our house for our growing family. One of those rooms was a dining room, and the other was a bedroom for my brother Dan and me. Our bedroom had a gray tile floor and gray walls. I don’t remember one single picture on any of those gray walls. We may have had some, but I don’t remember them. And if there were any pictures … I’m sure they were black and white.