Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I thought I see what pleasant disturbances are in the environment at the moment.

First, we have a visitor. Actually two visitors. Our youngest, Andrew, fly in yesterday afternoon from Florida, and last night his girlfriend Jessica flew in from North Carolina, despite the best efforts of Delta Airlines to keep her flights from happening. They’re in for a few days, Jessica to meet Andrew’s family, Andrew’s family to meet Jessica. I’ve been making notes to remind me of all the old Andrew stories to tell her.

My reading has become somewhat eclectic – Seamus Heaney’s poetry, Out of a Far Country by Angela Yuan and Christopher Yuan, You Are a Writer by Jeff Goins, some short stories, more poetry, and The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. No pattern here as far as I can see.

The writing, well, the writing is still painful. I’m slowly going through notes from the editor and publisher, revising the manuscript of A Light Shining, and then will rewrite it. Completely. It’s means a publication delay but there’s no getting around it. Enough said.

I haven’t done much biking lately, not with the temperature breaking 100 degrees for so many days. It was 103 when I got home yesterday at 6 p.m. I’m hearing of 105 for Friday, maybe a break into the 90s on the weekend. I’ve been watering the yard and gardens like a fool. We have a voluntary “don’t water your grass and gardens” situation in our little suburb, but the suburbs all around us don’t have one.

I had to choose – be green and sustainable and let our grass and all that new landscaping we put in this spring die or turn on the faucets. All the neighbors look around to see what everyone else is doing, and then we all sneak out in the dark early morning and turn the sprinklers on.

Yesterday morning as I rounded the corn of the house to turn the back sprinkler on, I spotted a small black something in the grass. It was a black field mouse, a very dead black field mouse. I don’t like mice, even dead ones. After turning the sprinkler on, I kept going round the house to turn the front sprinkler on. Then I went inside, got a plastic sandwich bag to dispose of the dead critter, and went back to the scene of the death. The mouse was gone. Puzzled, I walked back toward the door, and saw the neighbor’s cat sitting our front porch, looking very satisfied.

At least it wasn’t a coyote. I haven’t seen the coyotes lately which live in our area, so they may have moved on. Which may explain the chipmunk invasion. I’m still trying to figure out what’s been digging in the garden – three places in the back gardens – just enough digging to dislodge the mulch, but not anything deeper than that. Probably the chipmunks.

We also haven’t seen many squirrels lately. We love the neighbor’s cat.

Because of a project at work I’m involved in, I’ve been paying attention to our yard’s bee population. Bees love the perennial Monarda, and our Monarda became a kind of garden kudzu this year. I’ve seen four kinds of bees buzzing around – big bumblebees, small bumblebees, honey bees, and leafcutter bees, so small they look like gnats. (Did you know that most bees – like 70 percent of them – live in the ground? But I digress.)

And it wouldn’t be a pleasantly disturbed Thursday or Friday with some photos of the grandson.s I’m so glad you asked.

At two months old, Caden weighed in at 16 pounds. We call him Michelin Man.

And here’s a shot of Cameron eating Rice Krispies – and it’s the only real way to eat them – with the spoon used for stirring Rice Krispies Treats.

Photographs by Stephanie Young. Used with Cameron and Caden’s permission.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

My friend Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey shifted Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays to Fridays, and we haven’t had one in a while, so I thought I’d move it back for the moment.

My head is buzzing with words. I think I have too much going on.

I’m editing the sequel to Dancing Priest. There’s no title yet. The working title I’ve been using no longer fits. The editing involves what I might call “soft rewriting.” I’m not doing wholesale cuts and replacements, more like minor cuts and small replacements. It’s work.

Every so often I’m stealing a few minutes to write. This novella that started with some music keeps pulling me back toward it. It’s about 40 percent done, and the rest is outlined. I know how it ends, and I’ve already figured out the ending scene. But it’s work, too.

There are poetry projects, articles for blogs, reviews of books – lots more words. And work.

And I’m enjoying all of it.

I’m reading two books for online discussion groups – The Social Animal by David Brooks for The High Calling and Kisses from Katie for the group led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. We’ll be finished with the Social Animal in early March,

Reading underway for book reviews for various people or sites includes This Morning: Poems by Michael Ryan (to be published March 13) and Joseph Wambaugh’s new novel, Harbor Nocturne, due out in April. I’ve also got four other poetry books waiting patiently.

My personal reading right now is Frantic, Mike Dellosso’s new book. It’s set in Maine. It’s a thriller, as in scary. It’s his fourth novel and I think his best yet.

On the non-word front, I did something rather remarkable this past Sunday. I rode a bike. I rode it for 35 minutes. It was the first time in eight months, since my back problem started last June. It was a great feeling to be back on the bike. My legs, however, did issue a protest on Monday and Tuesday.

My wife and I watched the conclusion of the second season of Downton Abbey on PBS Sunday night. We’re both addicts, although I don’t do go so far as to spend hours online looking at all the sites, interviews, speculation and even paper dolls.

Last Friday night, we saw the movie Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, with Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and a young actor named Thomas Horn. It’s about 9/11, but it’s about a lot more than that. It’s a great movie; the boy is one extraordinary actor. If you haven’t seen it, you should. The trailer is below.

Muses, China, a Birthday and Books

Time for another splendid edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, with our host Marty Duane Scott, who’s been pining away up in Iowa while his better half is visiting in California. On Twitter we would add this hashtag: #separationanxiety.

Someone asked if I were turning this blog into an all-poetry blog, given my posts for the first three days of this week, and the answer is no. What happened is that the poetry muse moved, and I got carried away. Well, the poetry muse really moved, and I even have another already scheduled for next Tuesday.

Another person asked where the poem “The Angle of the Chinese Shadow” came from. It started last Sunday in church. During one of the hymns, I happened to look toward the stained glass windows and the sunlight coming through and the phrase “angle of light” came into my head. Then I was reminded of the bedroom I occupied as a child; the hallway light was right outside my door and it cast a triangular shaped shadow on the door. I likely fell asleep at least 1800 times watching that shadow, which seemed to resemble what we would call a Chinese “coolie” hat. Then I recalled reading the Hardy Boys novel The Mystery of the Chinese Junk (I think I’ve read every Hardy Boys novel ever written.) Then many of the other references starting coming to mind spontaneously, and some I deliberately added.

A side note: I was in college when President Nixon established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. My senior year, for the first time since 1949 (the fall of the Nationalist government), LSU offered two semesters of Chinese history, and I took both courses. I was more diligent about going to class during the first course. The mid-term exam was a take-home research paper, and in keeping with how Chinese government officials were tested and selected for offices, I wrote a play. And got an A. And a special class presentation of a Chinese calendar. During the second course, part of the required reading was Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China.

Last Saturday, we celebrated my oldest son’s birthday at a Bosnian restaurant in south St. Louis called Grbic (pronounced gribick). It actually services continental European food with a tilt toward Central European and Bosnian fare. I’ve had the sarma several times (cabbage rolls stuffed with ground meat and topped with a red sauce) and the goulash. This time I had strips of chicken baked with spaetzle (egg noodles common in Central Europe). We were kept entertained at dinner by my grandson, who has discovered that if he yells, adults frantically do things. I suppose I didn’t help by laughing every time he did it.

I’ve been reading a new fantasy novel called The Canticles of Andurun: Dragonsong by Ian Thomas Curtis. I’m about halfway through it, and I’m completely enthralled with the world Curtis has created. The sheer imagination involved boggles the mind. A big story like this also requires a very tight control of the fictional world that’s been created, or otherwise the story will get away from the author and the reader. Curtis has pulled it off; it’s an amazing novel. The author blogs at What’s in a Name.

Next on the reading list: The Faithful by Jonathan Weyer; Resurrection by Mike Duran; and Paradise Valley by Dale Cramer. And my copy of The Four Holy Gospels, illustrated by Makoto Fujimura, finally arrived, and it’s spectacular. Here’s a sneak peak.

Thursday, Pleasantly Disturbed

It’s time for another edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the totally fearless Marty Duane Scott, who, oddly enough, has been off sitting in some chair lately (or, more precisely, not sitting in a chair).

Most of my family and friends would tell you that I am not the outdoorsman type. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish (my father hated fishing so we never went). I do remember camping – I believe it was right after I graduated from high school. I do like to hike and bike (a rhyme!), but I’m not one for an extended stay in the wilderness or woods. Say, longer than three or four hours.

So I’m surprised that I’ve enjoyed reading Cynthia Ruchti’s They Almost Always Come Home. Virtually the entire novel is set in the Canadian wilderness, where bathrooms are holes behind logs and you can take a bath in the stream or lake. It’s a story about a husband who disappears on a solo trip in the wilderness, and his father, his wife and her best friend go looking for him. It’s a great story, and I’m hoping to have the review posted tomorrow.

My current reading is Sam Batterman’s new novel Maximal Reserve. His first novel, Wayback, is a great read, and this one is turning out to be just as good if not better. I’m amazed at the science and technology details he uses in his books – and how he doesn’t choke you with them. I can barely put the book down.

Late last year, I read The Apple Trees at Olema, a new book of poetry by Robert Hass. Hass has some considerable standing the poetry community. He’s won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, among a lot of other awards. He’s helped Czeslaw Milosz translate numerous volumes of poetry from the Czech. He is a name.

I liked it, although I have a tendency to get uncomfortable when profanity is used a lot, which it was in a few of the poems. But Hass is a great storyteller in his poems, and there were many fine ones and lots of good ones, and overall the collection is well worth one’s time (and money). Just as I finished, the new issue of Poetry arrived. Included it in was a scathing review of the Hass book. And I mean scathing. It was so ugly that I wondered if I had read an entirely different book. The next issue of Poetry contained a number of letters attacking the reviewer. And then the following issue had a letter attacking the attackers.

Yawn.

I stopped reading at that point. So a little literary controversy spices things up. But whatever else you want to call it, cruelty is ugly. So is meanness, especially when it’s cloaked in literary criticism.

On a happier note, plans are well underway for my grandson’s first birthday next month. Yes, he will be one year old. He was a late crawler (he could crawl backward just fine), but learn to crawl he did, and the next day crawled up the stairs in our house (supervised). We’re all battening down the hatches.

To see more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, please visit Helen over at Random Musings. Marty Duane Scott is either on vacation or still trying to sit in that chair.

Photograph: Cameron and his dad Travis by his mother Stephanie. Swiped shamelessly off of Facebook. Oh, wait, I mean used with permission.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday: Digging Out

It that's time again: another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday, hosted by our fearless leader Marty Duane Scott, who lives somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Iowa).

This past week has been all about – digging out.

The big winter storm that started Monday night and concluded Wednesday turned out not to be the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” it was predicted to be – for St. Louis. Actually, the snowpocalypse was farther to the north – I saw the pictures of Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, and Interstate 70 was closed from just west of St. Louis to Kansas City – that’s some 200 miles of highway. My youngest son reported a foot of snow in Kansas City.

We had about two inches of sleet on Tuesday (which was an absolute blast to remove from the driveway; yes, it was frozen solid) and about three inches of snow that finally ended late Wednesday afternoon. And, since you asked, that is indeed a picture of yours truly, victorious at having just finished shoveling on Wednesday, at least until the predicted snow for this weekend.

Yes, I fully understand that weather does not equal climate, but forgive me for what I think and mutter under my breath when I hear former vice presidents and various scientists try to explain that all this snow is happening because of global warming. I would like to invite the former vice president to come to my driveway and shovel all the global warming off of it. I’ll make him a cup of global warming tea while he shovels. Green tea, too.

Our offices at work have been closed for two days, which means working at home. It’s no surprise, but I get more work done at home. We’ve still had some of our scheduled meetings via phone, but they don’t last as long. Since a great deal of my work happens online, I’m good to go as long as we don’t lose power. Four years ago, we lost power during an ice storm, and we lost it for four days.

I’m almost finished One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Oh, what a book this is. It’s mediation, rumination, reflection, devotional – all these things and more wrapped up in simple, plain language straight from the heart. She takes the everyday and finds the beauty and the thankfulness in it. But then she takes it to another level altogether. It’s a wonderful book. (A lot of other people think it’s a wonderful book, too. It was just published in January, has more than 200 reviews at Amazon, and hit #10 or #11 in its category on Amazon’s best-sellers list.)

I met Ann at Laity Lodge in Texas last fall. She’s from even farther north that Marty Duane – she lives in Canada. Her husband Darryl is a farmer. To read her book now is like talking with her then – she is exactly like the book she’s written.

Another good thing this week – the long-awaited DVD set of series eight of the British spy drama M1-5 arrived in our mailbox. Since last spring, we have watched seven seasons (via Netflix, mostly). We had a real problem with Season 5 – Netflix didn’t have enough copies, and someone was keeping the first disk set forever. We were such fans that I finally said phooey on Netflix and ordered series 5 from Amazon. It was buy it or wait six months. We bought it. It’s one of the best written, best produced television series we’ve ever seen, even if the Americans (the CIA) end up being the stereotyped bad guys most of the time (or, if not the bad guys, at least Machiavellian and untrustworthy). We’ve seen two of the 10 episodes, and we’re torn between wanting to watch them all now and pacing them out.

That’s plenty pleasant disturbances for one week.


To see more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, visit Marty Duane Scott at Scribing the Journey.

Photograph: Husband Freezing by Janet Young, taken from the doorway of the nice warm house while husband shoveled in the freezing cold. Used with laughing permission.

Reading and Traveling

It’s time again for another edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by our pleasantly disturbed leader Marty Duane Scott. I have it on good authority that Marty is something of a cretin when it comes to Southern sweet tea (his wife told me that, therefore it’s true). She has dedicated her life to helping him see the light. Civilization must eventually come to all men.

I’ve been traveling recently, and when you travel by airplane, you always have lots of time for reading. (I had so much time on this last trip that I ran out of things to read.) (That sounds like a good title for an article or even a book: “Running Out of Things to Read While Traveling and Other Disasters.”)

The current issue of Christianity Today Magazine has a number of good stories and features: how exercise, diet and technology are helping us life longer and should we care; an interview with Jeff Van Duzer (Why Business Matters to God) on business as ministry – with a trademark alert – he says that there’s growing sentiment to refer to work as a high calling; an interview with Roberta Ahmanson on the support she and her husband Howard have given to Christian art; and a review of Bo Caldwell’s City of Tranquil Light, which I reviewed here in December (I don’t read what other reviewers say about books I’m reviewing until I finish and post my review).

Then there’s Radix Magazine (subtitled "Where Christian Faith Meets Contemporary Culture"). In addition to some really fine poems, this issue includes an interview with William Rankin, president of the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance; two stories on unusual Bible studies; an article on the 11th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen; and a review of a biography of Julian of Norwich by Amy Frykholm – and the reviewer is the Radix poetry editor, Luci Shaw.

I’ve recently read three of Shaw’s poetry books, and I’m working on another work by her. I’m thinking about doing on a article on her and her poetry.

And in the current issue of Poets & Writers (which always has good articles), I was attracted to a small ad (page 45, Jan/Feb 2011 issue if you’re interested) for a book of poems by Mark Jarman. It was the blurb by Edward Hirsch for the Washington Post that caught my attention: “Jarman’s poetry is God-haunted. He writes as an unorthodox but essentially Christian poet who embraces paradox and treats contradiction, to use Simone Weil’s phrase, as a lever of transcendence.”

I finished reading The Wolf of Tebron by C.S. Lakin. It's a wonderful story, part of Lakin's Gates of Heaven series. I'll be doing a two-part post on it and the seocnd book in the series, The Map Across Time, which is scheduled to be published March 4. I'm still surprised that I (1) voluntarily read two fairy tales and (2) thoroughly enjoyed both. Lakin is an imaginative, gripping writer.

Speaking of traveling, I had my first experience with TSA. I was standing in the security line (shoes - off, belt - off, pockets – empty, laptop – out, bag of toiletries – out; coat – off) when I noticed a security guard watching the line and counting off silently. He stopped two in front of me – it was a girl about 10 years old traveling with her mother and sister. The guard’s face fell. His glance then landed on me.

Yes, he called me out of the line. So I got the full body scan treatment (I’m sure that excited the people watching). My arm was then patted down rather extensively (I had neglected to remove my watch) and then my chest was – patted down (I wear a chained cross). And then he patted down my wallet. Yes, he patted down my wallet.

Actually, in this case, I didn’t mind. Better me than a 10-year-old girl.


Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays runs every two weeks over at Marty Duane Scott’s place at Scribing the Journey. This is an off week, but I was pleasantly disturbed enough to write a post anyway.

January Grouse

After something of a hiatus, our fearless leader Marty Duane Scott has resurrected and reinvigorated Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, those blog posts with no particular purpose or point unless you want to have one.

I have a bunch. Well, at least two.

January has been something of a grouse month around the homestead. Winter has gotten very old, with more snow – and lots of it – coming down as I’m writing this at 11:05 on Wednesday night; even more is due tomorrow. With a temperature plunge to below 10. Shoveling the driveway is always more fun when the temperature pushes down toward zero with a nice stiff wind to punch the point home that it’s cold.

I was born and raised in New Orleans. I remember once (once!) when the temperature went below 32 and the water pipes in the attic burst. I also remember when it snowed – I was seven and the half-inch snowfall paralyzed the city.

OK, so winter will pass, eventually. Then we have the YMCA.

I’ve been a member of our local Y since 1998. We’ve had something of a ritual for years – hit the Y in the evening on Sundays for our workouts. It worked fine -- we could do things (or nap) in the afternoon and then head to the Y.

They changed the Sunday hours, wrecking the ritual. And they did it precisely when attendance explodes – in January when the New Year’s resolutions crowd shows up (they always arrive by the beginning of the second week of January and are gone sometime in early March – you can set your watch by the immigration and emigration). So the hours are shortened, our entire Sunday afternoon now has to be managed to accommodate the Y, and the crowds are awful.

We complained. Loudly. We pointed out that the place is deserted on Friday nights and that would be the perfect time to shorten hours. We filled out complaint cards. We made remarks to the staff. My wife has now had phone calls from three staff managers, all commiserating but none promising any change. So we’re starting to look at alternatives.

Grouse. Grouse. Grouse. I feel like I’m learning how to be an irritated (irritating), crotchety old man.

The snow and the cold has meant one good thing – lots of reading this month. I just finished Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon. It is not an Inspector Maigret mystery novel; it is something more akin to Albert Camus’ The Stranger or something Jean Paul Sartre would have written (and the novel is roughly contemporary with them). It is very – French, early 1950s French, when plot tended to be overlooked or considered unimportant in books and movies.

Simenon was born in Belgium in 1903. He became famous as a hack writer who had an affair with Josephine Baker, invented Inspector Maigret and became famous all over Europe and the world, stayed in Paris during the German occupation, was said to have been a collaborator (he wasn’t but left Paris after the war and lived in the United States), moved back to France, and by the time he died in 1989 had written more than 400 books. I suppose he didn’t need much plot in his books; he had plenty in his real life.

Next up on the reading list: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp and The Wolf of Tebron by C.S. Lakin. I’ve read an advance copy of Lakin’s The Map Across Time, the second novel in her Gates of Heaven series. It’s due to be published in March. I don’t read fairy tales or fantasy, but these novels of Lakin’s are something else again. I was mesmerized by The Map Across Time, so much so that I bought the first book in the series to read.

One additional benefit to reading: it keeps the grousing from getting out of hand.


To read more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday posts, please visit Marty Duane Scott’s site, Scribing the Journey.

Thursdays - Pleasantly Disturbed

It’s another stupendous edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, with our leader Duane Scott in command and leading the way through the darkness.

Speaking of Duane, he’s getting married Nov. 6. You might want to tell him congratulations at his blog or on Twitter -- @duane_scott .

I’ve been reading David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Add that to Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity, and I’m going to turn into a bomb thrower.

I didn’t post anything about when it was announced a couple of weeks ago, but I think the Nobel Committee did a remarkable thing when it gave the prize for literature to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I was introduced to his writing in 1986 when I took a seminar on the Latin American Novel for my master’s program.

The first of his novels I read was The War of the End of World, which was based on a true story. And then The Green House, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. I did my seminar paper and presentation on Conversations in the Cathedral, which is simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding novels I’ve ever read. (William Faulkner is easy compared to that book – I thought I was going to lose my mind reading it until I realized how it was structured, and then I started it over again.) I’ve read virtually everything he’s written.

I’ve been mostly off the grid (i.e. Twitter and Facebook) this week, and there’s a reason, which I’ll explain in a few days. Because of that, I'll have a shorter edition of Saturday Good Reads this weekend.

And, last, but not least, what everyone’s been waiting for – a photo of Cameron Young and his grandfather. (I’m the one on the right.)

Another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

Once more, it’s that time of the week, when our intrepid leader Duane Scott officiates at Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays.

Yesterday, page visits to a blog post I did earlier this month skyrocketed (well, “skyrocketed” may be too strong a term, but my normal number of page visits quadrupled in a day). I couldn’t figure out why – there didn’t appear to be a single source. And then I found out that High Calling Editor Marcus Goodyear had included that post of mine in a Faith in the Workplace newsletter he does for Christianity Today Magazine (online).

Thank you, Marcus. That was an awfully nice thing to do.

In August, something similar (but smaller) happened when someone took a poem I’d posted and linked it in StumbleUpon. Whoosh went the page visits. Thank you, Someone.

I’m familiar with this stuff, and I know this online stuff, but I still get amazed when it happens.

It’s been two weeks since I went to the High Calling editorial team to Laity Lodge near San Antonio (that’s “near” in Texas terms; it was actually about 140 miles away). Since then, the High Calling web site has merged with the High Calling Blogs web site; the combined site is simply The High Calling. I really like the design; and I’ve successfully maneuvered the Drupal platform and actually posted an article this week: Is God More Pleased with My Work than I Am?

Ann Kroeker, one of our number at Laity Lodge, did a blog post this week on the experiences they had at their lodge house (Lodestar) with scorpions. We didn’t have scorpions at our lodge house (Song Bluff). I did have to get rid of a wandering cricket in my bedroom, though. A couple of people closer to the main lodge had experiences with tarantulas. And I was followed by a couple of vultures while hiking one of the trails. (That was a little unnerving; I think I’m on a hike and they think they’re looking at dinner).

I’ve been reading a lot of good stuff lately:


• Billy Coffey’s novel Snow Day was officially published on Monday. It’s storytelling like only Billy Coffey can do it.

• I finished Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the book we’ve been discussing for The High Calling; my last post on it will be Sunday afternoon.

• I read Three Roads Home, a group of three love story novellas by Travis Thrasher published in 2003.

• I’ve started reading Another Hotel Room: Selected Poems 1988-2008 by Steven Marty Grant.

Thanks to all you who commented on my post yesterday – the one about approaching a tough decision on what to do with our elderly dog. I talked with the vet Wednesday, and we’ve worked out a process for sometime in the next two weeks or so. I was so cool, calm and totally professional with the vet on the phone. I only lost it twice.

Finally, it wouldn't be an official Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday without a new photo of the world’s greatest grandson. My daughter-in-law Stephanie took this picture while trying to fit him for clothes – and she found this hat. So, here’s Cameron in a bear hat.

What I found at the festival

It’s time for another edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the intrepid Duane Scott.

I live in the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis, a small city of 27,000. We have our own police and fire departments; we have a mix of housing (from about 1857 to 2010) and incomes; our Kirkwood School District also includes a couple of neighboring municipalities. Our downtown is charming (mostly two-story buildings) and we have the oldest farmers’ market outside the granddaddy of them all in the city, Soulard Market.

We also have had more than our fair share of troubles. Two years ago, a disgruntled resident walked into a meeting of the city council, shooting and killing two policemen, two council members and the director of Public Works. He gravely wounded the mayor before being killed himself in a burst of police gunfire. The year before that, Shawn Hornbeck, a boy missing from his home in rural Missouri, was found during a massive police hunt for another kidnapped boy. Both were in the Kirkwood apartment of Michael Devlin, who is now serving numerous lives terms for kidnapping, abuse, and all kinds of awful crimes.

But in Kirkwood, in spite of it all, we persist.

Each year, usually around the second weekend in September, we have the Greentree Festival. It’s a fairly typical slice of small town in the big city Americana. We have a parade on Saturday morning. Then you head for Kirkwood Park, where you find craft booths, food of all kinds, and free music (our favorite this year was a group from the Missouri Fiddlers Association playing “I’ll Fly Away”).

And there’s a small used book fair. Which I had to check out. After all, all paperbacks are a buck, and when was the last time you paid a dollar for a paperback book?

It wasn’t a huge collection of books, but it was fine. I wandered around until I found the poetry, which was contained in all of about two small boxes.

And what did I find?

The first thing was a palm-sized volume, published in 1961, of an essay entitled “Story Telling New and Old” by the Irish novelist, playwright, essayist and poet Padraic Colum. The essay was first published in a 1927 collection called The Fountain of Youth. What a cool little volume, I thought. When I got home and looked through, I discovered it was autographed by the author.

Second was Early Poems by William Butler Yeats, which was placed right next to Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) by Richard Ellman.

Then I picked up a rather ratty looking uncorrected proof of Nikki Giovanni's Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems & Not Quite Poems. It was prominently stamped “Not for Resale.” Tell that to the cashier.

And then I see 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, a 1986 edition of a 1959 collection of poems published the University of Texas Press. In both Spanish and English, no less.

And then there were two books of poetry by Richard Beban, What the Heart Weighs and Young Girl Eating a Bird. Both were autographed with the inscription “To Beth - April 19, 2007. Thanks for you’re your h help with the SLWG. I figured the acronym out -- Beban had spoken or done a poetry reading at at a meeting of the St. Louis Writer's Guild.

Seven books, seven buck, and “I’ll Fly Away.” Not bad for a Saturday afternoon.

A birthday

Rather than do the usual Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday (led by our fearless leader Duane Scott) with random thoughts, I’m devoting this one to a birthday.

I was 10 years old when he was born. I know it was a Saturday morning because a friend had spent the night, and when we woke up we headed to the kitchen to fix cereal. Usually on a Saturday morning, my father would have already gone to his office and my mother would be resting; she had had a difficult time with the pregnancy.

My friend and I are watching television when the phone rings. It’s my father; he says they’re at the hospital and my mother is having the baby. Total excitement. We get dressed and go flying around the neighborhood with the news. An hour later, my father calls again. It’s a boy. And we go flying around the neighborhood once again (the neighbors thought this was very cute, by the way).

My parents often said we looked like twins born 10 years apart. We both look my father; now that we are older, I’m amazed at how much my brother looks like my father as I mostly remember him – in his 40s.

One event that dates us both: One Christmas Day, I believe it was 1972, I took him to see the Poseidon Adventure. It opened on that day (I think 1972) and the lines were expected to be huge; we went at the 5 p.m. showing and nearly had the theater to ourselves (and I remember the theater – the Robert E. Lee Cinema in the West End of New Orleans; it would get about six feet of water when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina).

My mother tells the story of what happened when I graduated from college. The family had gone to Baton Rouge for the ceremony, and the next day I left for my first day of work in Texas. When they got home to New Orleans, my 11-year-old brother was very quiet. When my mother asked him what was wrong, he said to her, “He’s really gone this time?” And then he cried.

He lives in the Houston area and works in the oil industry. He and his wife Terri have three boys – Chris, John and Sam. That’s all we manage to have in our family – boys. My older brother has two boys, I have two boys and my younger brother with his three. I have three great-nephews, one grandson and – we don’t know how this happened – one great-niece.

My brother has spent a lot of time in the last several years in Peru, with mission teams from his church. I’ve seen the pictures on Facebook, and I’m amazed to see my brother painting village walls and trying not to sway and dance to the local music. You know which one he is because he’s blond and he has a big nose. (That’s a standing family joke; we argue over which one of us most inherited my father’s nose. From pictures it’s more than obvious; my brother wins hands down. I can say this with authority because he doesn’t blog.)

He has a dry sense of humor. He loves jokes and stories as much as my father did and he often sends them to me by email. I invariably laugh out loud when I read them because I can hear him tell the joke or story. He sees the idiocy of what passes for contemporary culture and politics.

So happy birthday, little brother. Happy birthday, Jim.

Picture Frames, Page Views and RAP

Time for another exciting edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by the famous traveler and beach aficionado Duane Scott.

For my birthday, my son and daughter-in-law (parents of Cameron!) gave me one of those Kodak digitial picture frames, with a preloaded disk of 200+ photographs. About half of them are photos of Cameron; the rest are photos of their wedding, pictures of my son as a baby and little boy, and family. And there’s one of me dancing with my daughter-in-law at the wedding. We call it the “Dad rocks out” photo, which will not be making an appearance on this blog. The digital frame is totally distracting. I love it.

I stumbled upon Stumble Upon Tuesday. I was vaguely interested in it and knew something about this post-sharing application. But then someone inserted a link to my poem “The brother who loves him” and page visits skyrocketed. When I last checked, it had received almost 500 visits, making it the most visited blog post I’ve ever done. I don’t know who did it or exactly how they linked it – but my thanks to them. (It’s also the most commented-upon post I’ve ever done.)

If you haven’t had a chance to check out One Stop Poetry, you should. Each Wednesday, there’s a “One Shot Wednesday” for linking a poem you’ve posted on your own blog. There’s some remarkable poetry to check out in all the links.

Friday, for the High Calling Blogs, I’m subbing for L.L. Barkat for coordinating the next installment of the Random Act of Poetry (RAP). What happens is that you provide a prompt, people write poems and send you the links, and then you pull together an article that features one or two of them. My prompt is based on something that happened to me last week on Twitter – I tweeted someone’s Poem of the Day (“Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats) and someone whom I never heard of before took me to the tweeting woodshed for publicizing the poems of dead people. I am not making this up. So stop by HCB tomorrow afternoon and check it out.

Finally, I have a new nap partner. At least until he starts walking.

Photograph by Janet Young. Used with permission.

Pleasantly Disturbed: A fond look back at Labor Day weekend

Time for another weekly edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, originated by our recently engaged friend Duane Scott. He’s wandered off somewhere, meeting his fiancée’s parents, so we’ll just have to soldier on without him.

Last Saturday, to kick off Labor Day weekend, my wife and I joined 800,000 other St. Louisans at Forest Park. There wasn’t anything going on in the park; it was just an incredibly beautiful day and St. Louis decided that was a perfect excuse to go to Forest Park. After fighting ridiculous amounts of traffic, we did manage to find a parking place and walked around a bit. We even sat on a bench by the Muny Opera (photo of entrance at left), our outdoor summer theater which is a tradition in a city that thrives on tradition. The tradition is to sit outside on hot summer nights and sweat while you watch musical plays. Yes, I’ve done that. What’s more, I even sat on stage during a live performance of Godspell – a small on-stage audience was one of the props. There were about 20 of us, and we were told to act like an audience. We did. It was fun. I had two hours of no-name fame. And yes, I sweated.

Anyway, after walking around the park, we drove over to the Central West End. My wife found chocolate on sale at Bissinger’s at Maryland Plaza, which not only is a chocolate shop but also a chocolate lounge. She likes their block dark chocolate, and it was on sale for half price. I found something less fattening but more expensive around the corner – Big Sleep Books, a bookstore devoted exclusively to mysteries. I decided an early birthday present was in order. Or actually my wife looked at what I was buying and decided it (a stack of books) was an early birthday present.

One of the books I bought was Pirates of the Levant, the newest translated mystery by Spain’s Arturo Perez-Reverte. These stories are set in 17th century Spain, and detail the exploits of Captain Diego Alcatriste and his young companion and chronicler Inigo Balboa. This is the sixth in the series and I love these books. They’re full of sword fights and shootings with harquebuses and history and intrigue and betrayal and plenty of buckles to swash.

On Sunday after church, we went apple-picking, also with the rest of St. Louis (notice a trend here – St. Louis does things in large groups, like we’re all one big flash mob). We drove to Eckert's Orchards in Belleville, Illinois, and rode the wagons to the orchards. We hauled in about 50 pounds of Jonathan and Golden Delicious apples.

Monday evening, in a fitting conclusion to the weekend, we went to my son’s house for dinner. And I got a Cameron fix. I’m so glad you asked about my grandson.

Some Statistics, Some Books, A Bike Ride

It’s time for another splendid edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, led by our fearless (and now engaged-to-be-married) leader Duane Scott. So here we go.


My five most visited posts for the month of August:

1. The Degrees of Wind (Aug. 10 for One-Shot Poetry). It was the most viewed and most commented upon.

2. Did Jesus Laugh? My post for Bridget Chumbley’s One Word Blog Carnival on laughter (Aug. 9).

3. Saturday Good Reads for Aug. 7.

4. I Fix Mess, my post on L.L. Barkat’s God in the Yard for Aug. 4.

5. Do Church Signs Lie? My post on Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity for Aug. 16.

In the next group down, four of the five were poems. It’s interesting. When I started this blog a year and a half ago, I wasn’t even thinking about writing poetry.

I read Rooms by James Rubart this past weekend. Yep, it was one of those “can’t put it down” kinds of books. And it finally moved me to read The Shack by William Young. I bought it two years ago and let it sit on the shelf, resisting reading it because of all the hoopla over how it got published and all of the hoopla over whether or not it’s theologically correct. But the Rubart book finally convinced me to read it, and I’m almost done. I’ll be writing about the two books together.

I was doing my usual 20-mile bike ride on Grant’s Trail Tuesday evening, and it was crowded – a lot of walkers, bladers and bikers preparing for the MS 150. At one point, I found myself being followed, then engulfed, then passed by a group of eight bikers, who were blowing past everyone. Group rides can be a problem on a crowded trail – groups like to bike together and they pass you as a group and will often disrupt everyone else’s ride. Sometimes they blow right through stop lights at cross-streets. Sometimes they ignore trail etiquette and pull ahead of everyone else at waiting lights (you’re supposed to line up in the order you arrive). And sometimes, like Tuesday night, they have “Christian Cycling” printed on their biking shorts.

My expectations for behavior, on a bike or otherwise, are higher for Christians, and especially when they advertise who trhey are. This group of Christian bikers left a lot of aggravated people in their wake. And one embarrassed person: me.

If he’s recovered from his recent auto accident (a car accident and and getting engaged in the same week!), you can find links to more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays at Duane’s place.

A Car Accident, An Anniversary, SharePoint and White Cliffs

No, it wasn’t my car accident; our friend and Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday founder Duane Scott is recuperating after a car accident yesterday. There won’t likely be the usual weekly links but Duane would want us to carry on. So here’s to a speedy recovery for him. And please pray for him; his injuries weren’t serious or life-threatening but they were injuries and his car looks totaled (and it wasn't his fault).


Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, and the weather decided to do something totally bizarre for late August in St. Louis – it dramatically cooled off, with a high of around 80. We ditched the plan we had for eating at a local restaurant and instead went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which is open late on Wednesdays. We walked and walked through what has to be one of the most beautiful places in St. Louis. The "gardens," as we call them, are filled with memories for us. We've been members since 1979 and the only photo we have of my wife pregnant with our firstborn was taken there; we also have a photo of our daughter-in-law pregnant (with grandson Cameron) taken in the exact same spot.

After the gardens we ate at a new tapas restaurant in our suburban town of Kirkwood. Splendid evening.

It’s been an intense seven days at work, and we’re beginning to see the end of it. Beginning last Wednesday, our team has been transferring text files, photos and videos from the current company web site to the new site, which is scheduled to launch on Sunday. We’re learning how to use Microsoft’s SharePoint platform at the same time. Very full days, sitting in front of a computer screen all day in a boiler-room like operation, trying to keep your other work going or at least left not far behind, looking at your calendar and realizing you’ve been tripled-booked into meetings and having to skip all three because of the web site project. It’s almost over.

In between days packed with transferring text files, I’ve been reading The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems by Robert Haas. Virtually all the poems in the volume are story poems, and I’m enjoying how he tells them.

Several people asked me about the poem I posted yesterday, “Running Back Roads.” Specifically, they wondered about the little tagline at the end – “From The White Cliff Poems.” Well, it’s a slight conceit of mine. There is no published volume called The White Cliff Poems. It is a group of poems (18 so far) that I’ve written to help me structure and develop this novel I’ve been working on. A few of the others include “The Cemetery Attendant,” “The Silence of the Trees,” “From a Blessing Destroyed,” “Country Store” and “The Solace of the Woods.” I’m not sure if all or any of these will surface in the manuscript, but they are providing considerable help. There are more to come.

And please pray for Duane.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

I like these Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, sponsored by my online friend Duane Scott. It’s actually nice to do a little stream of consciousness and write down whatever crosses your mind. Rhyme and reason need not apply.


Work has been intense this week. We’re launching a redesigned corporate web site, with a new SharePoint platform. This has been underway for many months – and now is the time when it all comes like a tidal wave. On Monday, several of us went through the SharePoint training so (in theory) we would know how to transfer content from the old to the new site. Wednesday, we started doing that. Today we are doing that. Friday we will be doing that. All day. And then next week we’ll be doing that.

So we learn how to load a story, a video, a big photograph, a little photograph, several photographs, a sidebar, a table (although tables are still a problem at this point), different formatting. As Kathy Richards would say, GAAAAA! For this project, I’m reporting to the web team lead, who normally reports to me but she's the one who knows what she's doing. We’re all gophers right now.

Two more full days to go. And we’re already exhausted.

I’m almost finished reading Solitary by Travis Thrasher. It’s a Young Adult novel, and since Young is my last name, I’m qualified to read it. It is a terrific read for any age but it is squarely aimed at the Young Adult market. Fast-paced, clear, suspenseful, a high school love story – it’s got all the right ingredients and deserves to be a hit. And it’as the first in a series of four “Solitary” books.

If you’re looking for good poetry to read, check out this week’s One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry. I'm always amazed at the range, diversity and the downright goodness of what people are contributing.

I’m working with Mrs. Nespy’s Frugal Living (how’s that for the name of a blog?) to give away two copies of God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us by L.L. Barkat. Read the post immediately below this one or go directly to Mrs. Nespy’s place. And even if you don’t enter, you should read this book. It’s provoking, thoughtful and stretching, even if I didn’t do the “lay out in the yard” assignment.

We did a poetry jam Tuesday night over at TweetSpeak Poetry. And it was all about (or mostly about) tea, a kind of poetry jam and tea (I know, bad pun). I’ve got one more set of poems from the previous jam to finish editing (almost done) and then will start on these new ones. We’ve also been talking about TweetSpeak Poetry’s future, and there are some cool things in the works.

And yes, I know I’m shameless, but my grandson Cameron has discovered his feet. Only a grandfather would think that is a stupendous achievement.

To read more Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, go visit Duane Scott’s place.

Another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

It’s that time of the week – another round of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, sponsored by my online friend Duane Scott.


I finished reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and it is remarkable. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and it should have. I’m working on a post about it.

I just started reading Solitary by Travis Thrasher. It is the first of four Young Adult novels in a series that he’s doing for David Cook Publishers. While it’s clearly intended for its audience, it’s a riveting read.

I spent a lot of time Tuesday and Wednesday reading the poems posted at One Stop Poetry for its weekly One Shot Wednesday. You should take a look to see the sheer diversity of the poems linked there.

And that goes ditto for the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Bridget Chumbley. This happens twice a month, and this week the word was laughter. In two weeks, the word will be children.

It’s been almost too hot to ride my bike, but I did manage two rides this past weekend, one to the Mississippi River and one on Grant’s Trail. I’ve actually framed up the sequel to my “Community of the Early Morning Trail” and will be posting soon – “Community of the Early Evening, Weekend and Holiday Trail.” The ride to the Mississippi will likely get its own treatment – there’s no “community” you can really find on this ride but you do bike through some remarkable St. Louis neighborhoods and about 250 years of history.

I’m delving deep into my novel manuscript, essentially ripping it apart and rewriting it in chunkable bits. This is not the most exciting one-sentence grabber ever invented, but this is what the story is about: a young man, imprisoned for 10 years for a crime he didn’t commit, is freed, and his return brings upheaval for himself and the people of his town, with redemption coming through a child (yes, I know I have to work on the one-sentence summary). It tackles a couple of subjects I’ve not found in any of the fiction I’ve read yet, and I’m moving rather cautiously through them.

It feels weird to talk about the manuscript. Small bits and pieces of this story have appeared here, here, and here. The working title is Plain Sam.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

Time for another exciting episode of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday, that random collection of thoughts and musings sponsored our Pleasantly Disturbed leader Duane Scott.


In the past several days, I’ve used a lot of blog space for poetry: “Broken Things,” “An Arc from LaGuardia” and “It All Looks Different” (posted together as 2 Poems Written on an Airplane), “The Fires of Two Lifetimes,” which I posted for the One Stop Poetry page, and “I Didn’t Know the Man,” included at the end of I Fix Mess, which I posted yesterday.

The five poems, along with one additional poem I haven’t posted yet, have a common heritage – they were all written as I recently waited on an airplane delayed for takeoff at LaGuardia Airport in New York or after we were finally airborne. I wrote them by hand in a journal I had with me; even if I had wanted to use my laptop, the plane was so packed that it would have made both me and my neighboring passenger uncomfortable. So I wrote them by hand and then edited them in the ensuing days.

Speaking of One Stop Poetry, you should check it out. When I last looked late last night, there were 70 poems linked from the site.

Duane and a few others have been after me to check out WordPress for my blogging platform, and just as I started to, Blogger send me an email asking if I’d like to be part of their new beta version. So I did, and first changed the blog's design. What’s cooler is that the beta version ("Blogger in Draft") has a bunch of management features (the stuff you can’t see) including a built-in statistics function.

Here’s what the stats told me:

The five most visited posts (in descending order) for the month of July:

• Giving Away Barbies, a giveaway of the book of poetry by Marcus Goodyear.
• On Letters, Spirit and Canoes, the guest post by L.L. Barkat.
• Jacob’s Blessing, the poem I wrote after reading Parting the Waters by Jeanne Damoff.
• Saturday Good Reads (July 31), a list of links for good things to read posted the previous week.
• Ego or Ego Sum, my poem for the One Word Blog Carnival sponsored by Bridge Chumbley.

What surprised me was that two of the five posts were poems. What didn’t surprise me was L.L. Barkat’s guest post – she brings a loyal following along with her.

One odd thing – in the Top 10 list was a review I wrote of Wendell Berry’s collection of short stories, That Distant Land. The review was posted in April but somehow garnered a fair bit of traffic in July.

Top referral sites for my blog posts (in order): Google, Twitter, Blogger, High Calling Blogs and Facebook. The Google and Blogger referrals are coming mostly from RSS readers.

And the people visiting my blog are largely from the United States (no surprise), followed by Canada, South Korea, Germany and Australia.

One thing the statistics won’t show is my own favorite post of the month – the poem “Jacob’s Blessing.”


To see more posts on Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, visit Duane Scott’s place.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

It’s time for another thrilling installment of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, the brainchild of Duane Scott. So here goes.


While I was biking Monday evening on Grant’s Trail, a black snake slithered across my path and into the weeds. It was only about three feet long, unlike the six-foot relative that stopped me abruptly a couple of years ago. The trail cuts through an eclectic landscape of subdivisions, woods, open fields, light industrial and commercial areas, a shopping mall and a small park or two. It offers lots of opportunities to encounter wildlife, but I prefer to avoid the snakes. The live ones, anyway.

At work this week, I had to watch two hours of a live congressional hearing televised from Washington. I thought it would be dull, but it wasn’t. It was mostly posturing by the panel and the people testifying, and it occasionally became fascinating as you watched and tried to figure out which witness was aligned with which member and his or her staff. I think I prefer the black snakes on the biking trail. Black snakes aren’t poisonous, and they don’t look for publicity opps.

I’ve been reading the novel Mending String by Cliff Coon, published in 2004 by Moody Press. Two story lines comprise the novel – a pastor and his teenage daughter who live in the same house but talk past each other, and a power struggle in the pastor’s church to force him out in favor of a more contemporary approach to church. Good story so far.

Tuesday night, my wife and I finished the eight episode of the seventh season of the British spy/suspense series “M1-5.” That means we’ve watched 68 episodes of this absolutely riveting since about mid-April. The eight season isn’t available on DVD or through Netflix yet.

Sitting on my desk at home is a software program for learning Italian. We’re planning a trip next year. The box is sitting there with a rather reproachful expression on its face. It wants to start.

We just did a walk-though for a house my son and daughter-in-law are considering buying. It was a nice home, not too far away to get a regular grandson fix.

Speaking of my grandson, I’m so glad you asked!

To see what others are up to on Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, visit Duane’ Scott’s place.