The boy and the wee laddie went to the NASCAR race over in Illinois with his other Papaw on Sunday and had quite a day.
They saw all the cool stuff up close and personal.
The bud, who is, as you know, an experienced driver, even got to drive…
It was super hot, but they had super fun–perfect male bonding time.
On another note, this is a really interesting article/lecture about the cautionary tale of Alexander Hamilton and his late-blooming Christian faith. “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
Well, spring has sprung here in flyover country, it would appear, although the daffodils have been blooming (and blooming) for weeks and weeks. It was warm enough to sit out on the patio this weekend and it was glorious. I am (slowly) cleaning up the Florida Room and am hopeful I will have all my plants out there etc by the end of the week. It is hard work for this creaking old body.
And, look, Don reports that the gnomes are back in his garden!
In other news, on TCM this month they are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Warner Brothers, so you can imagine there are some great movies being shown.
I love a good conversion story. Here is John Piper’s. “All I remember is believing. I’ve always believed, as far as I can remember. I’m sure that’s not true since we come into the world bent out of shape by sin, but whatever God did in my life to make me a believer, he did so early that I don’t remember it happening.”
Also I will note that today is what would have been my father’s 101st birthday. We will toast you tonight, ANC III. From the distance of thirty-one years since your death, I can say, many thanks for being my father.
*From the poem “Prologue of the Earthly Paradise” by William Morris (1834-1896); the painting is “Interior of the Artist” by Léon De Smet (Belgium 1881 – 1966)
So Father’s Day was on Sunday. It did cause me to pause a moment and reflect on my own pater familias, who died almost 30 years ago. The only picture I have of him with his family is this one, taken no doubt to send to his own mother.
I have no photo of him with just me. Although we spent a lot of time together because we went back and forth to school every day, I don’t remember any conversations we had. As relationships go, it was pretty shallow. I have no idea if he was proud of me. He certainly never told me so. I just assumed he loved me. I mean, I didn’t feel unloved, like so many people nowadays seem to feel. I was proud of him. At least until I found out he was an alcoholic at age 11, and then I was embarrassed and probably ashamed. I was an anxious child, and that knowledge didn’t help.
I survived and I am grateful to him for several things. He went to work every day and earned a living and managed to put three children through college. After that, he kind of fell apart. He passed on some pretty good genes. He stayed married to our mother. He did the best he could, considering his own father semi-abandoned him and his mother to go cover the Spanish Civil War or something like that. What did he know? At least I had John Wayne and Ward Cleaver. What kind of role models to kids have today?
Well, maybe I learned something from the way I grew up. It may have been a negative lesson, but the results, I think, have been positive.
Saturday was Juneteenth, which I blogged about back in 2013. Everyone is talking about it now, but of course, we were ahead of everyone.
I watched The Professionals (1966) to celebrate. This has become a personal tradition. (I ❤️ Woody Strode.)
This is worth your time reading. He articulates what I am always trying to say. “Our secular world groans as well but doesn’t know where to find hope. Secular solutions only exacerbate the problem, leaving us wanting.”
The weather has been hot, hot, hot–St. Louis style hot. Whenever I go out to pull some weeds, trim some ivy or plant some annuals, I wilt like arugula and have to retreat inside. C’est la vie. Today is the longest day in the year, but things should be cooling off after the big storms we had over the weekend. I am grateful we did not lose our power like some unfortunate people.
So a belated Happy Fathers Day to all you good fathers out there and grace to you, and peace, from God our Father.
Let’s go, Daddy-o!
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)
“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Today is our father’s birthday. He would have been 97!
I have forgiven my father for a lot and forgotten even more.
I am grateful to him for tying the knot with my mother and for going to work all those years and supporting us when he might have been doing something else. We were a boisterous trio of kids and we annoyed him frequently, if not endlessly. That’s the impression he gave anyway. I wish he could have enjoyed us more. I think all fathers should enjoy their children. They grow up pretty fast and move on and have children of their own.
Well, I know for a fact that the boy enjoys his children.
May it always be so.
4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; 5 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; 7 and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
–Deuteronomy 6:4-9
(Pssst. A frontlet is a decorative band or ornament worn on the forehead.)
dual personalities 