For many years, until they changed the closing time, my wife and I could be found most Sunday afternoons at the YMCA in out suburb of St. Louis. I had a routine – start with cardio like the treadmill or stationary bike and find in the Cybex machine room. There was a fairly regular crowd there each Sunday, working out from about 5 to 6 p.m. One of those regulars was an older man, about six-foot-five. We knew him as Paul.
My wife started chatting with him first. And then he spoke to me one Sunday, saying he’d heard I was from New Orleans. He had relatives there, too, even though he was from St. Louis. We’d talk while on the Cybex machines, and he didn’t say much about his own life, other than he liked poetry as much as I did and he loved to visit New Orleans.
The winter issue of Cultivating Oaks Press is live, and the theme is renewing gratitude. This issue includes some wonderful essays, articles, and stories by Rob Jones, Annie Nardone, Sheila Underwood Vamplin, Adam Nettesheim, Christina Brown, Lara d'Entremont, Kelly Keller, Maribeth Barber, and many more. I have a short story, "Grateful for the War."
Back in 2007, spent a week in Williamsburg. I was biking a lot at that time, and I was able to rent a bike at a local shop. I biked the historic triangle – Williamsburg to Yorktown, and Williamsburg to Jamestown. The parkways connecting them had little car traffic and were generally flat. We visited all three by car as well; 2007 was the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. If you can’t go, Christopher Klein at History.com explains how the three towns shaped the course of American history.
It’s been less than week (it seems like months) since the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., experienced a serious disruption in its worship service by protestors looking for a pastor supposedly involved with ICE. We learned a lot of things from that disruption, including protestors were unaware of the FACE Act and former CNN anchor Don Lemon didn’t understand the First Amendment. Several people had some thoughtful responses. Samuel D. James at Digital liturgies wrote that we have to let the church be the church. Jesse Johnson explained that the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to disrupt a worship service. And Al Mohler, often controversial across the evangelical spectrum, wrote in World Magazine that the disruption should be a wake-up call for the church.
While we wait to see what happens next in Iran, reporter Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press took an unexpected look, not at Iran but in her own media world. And she discovered that, for the past year, Wikipedia editors have been helping Iran rewrite its record on human rights.
I have to admit that I was not only unfamiliar with the poetry of Gregory Corso (1930-2001) but I also had never heard of him. That is, until I walked into an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum and saw a monumental painting (roughly 30 feet tall), with its title written into the top of the painting: “For Gregory Corso.”
I pulled out my phone and Googled him. A Beat poet, an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,Frank O’Hara, Neil Cassady, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, among several others. That clicked; it placed him in the 1950s in counter-culture San Francisco, a decade before the hippies. Allen Ginsburg’s famous Howl. Beatniks. Cool, man.
DI Gareth Benedict and his team are assigned to help police the Island Games, a sports event held every two years and attracting teams in some 13 sports from various islands, and not only those around the United Kingdom. This year, the island of Anglesey off the coast of Wales is the host, and teams are coming from as far away as the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
The reader knows, before the police forces do, that the games have also attracted two assassins. We don’t know yet their intended targets, but we will.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
