Tuesday, September 30, 2008

High Jinks at Veterans Hospital

Amidst the worry over the financial crisis on Wall Street, I am glad to have John Barge around for comic relief. He told me that when he was discharged from the Air Force he worked for a time as an aide in a veterans' hospital. He helped take care of a veteran who was in the hospital for complications from diabetes. One of the hospital nurses would collect a urine sample from this gentleman each morning to monitor his sugar level. He was so used to this procedure that he would leave the specimen cup on his bed table every morning. He did not have to be asked for it.

A new student nurse came on duty one day. John and the veteran had colluded to play a joke on her. John had hidden the real urine sample and replaced it with a specimen cup full of apple juice. The student nurse came in, bid the veteran a cheery good morning, and picked up the cup. Her eyebrows knitted in a puzzled expression. "This doesn't look right," she said.

"Let me see that," the veteran requested. She handed him the cup. He looked it over for a few seconds and then nodded. "You're right. I'll run it through again." And he drank it down in a single gulp. John said you could have picked the nurse's jaw up off the floor.

Monday, September 29, 2008

John Barge's Practical Joke

I've seen more of John Barge this week than I have in a while. He stays busy. He tells me he is trying to get a key candidate elected to Commissioners' Court in November. But that did not keep him from performing a prank on his granddaughter.

He was driving around in an old pickup truck on his ranch with his granddaughter McKayla last Saturday. That truck has paint on the back, but almost none on the cab in the front. Ten-year-old McKayla asked him why only the back of the truck was painted.

With a solemn face, John told her, "My paint slipped."
"What do you mean, Grandpa?" asked McKayla.
"I made a mistake. I came to a stop sign and didn't see it right away. I slammed on the brakes and came to a sudden stop, and...my paint slipped. All the way to the back of the truck."

He spoke so seriously that McKayla's eyes widened and she answered, "Ooh."

Sunday, September 28, 2008

RIP Paul Newman

I'll miss that old guy. When he was a younger guy my mother met him in London where we were living at the time. She said his blue eyes were just as gorgeous and stunning as they were on the big screen. Who can forget the "Cool Hand Luke" song about the plastic Jesus on the dashboard of his car! See YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYqwYrbwHeM to relive that memory. Then there was The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Color of Money, The Towering Inferno...You probably have your favorite Newman movie if you've been around any length of time. I may watch one of those movies soon, while eating a salad with Newman's Own dressing on it. He donated all the profits from his food products to charity.

I saw the video of his daughter where she said that her father was forever doing good deeds for others. So if you want to honor him, go help someone!

If you want to honor Jesus, do the same thing.

Random Sunday Night Thoughts

I recently talked with a colleague about the pros and cons of a paid versus volunteer fire department. I do not recall how we got on that subject. It was an occasion where "we got to talkin'" and it emerged. My colleague, Steve, asked me if Smalltown had paid or volunteer fire fighters. We have mostly volunteers. Steve told me that his town, which is larger than Smalltown, had paid firefighters. He asked if I was in favor of a standing fire department. I told him no. I think they should be allowed to sit down once in a while.

In other news, I found out:

The most expensive vehicle to operate per mile is the shopping cart.

The most profitable form of writing is the ransom note.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Evangelism Outside the Box

Today I attended the SeaFest extravaganza held annually in Sea City. I knew it was my responsibility to learn more about this seafront culture of which I am now a part, so I took myself to SeaFest for total cultural immersion. I not only want to become part of this culture but also its youth subculture. That made it imperative for me to ride some of the wilder rides that the youth enjoy, in between drinking lemonade and munching a turkey drumstick.

I like this culture very much.

After a few turns on the rides I caught part of a hip-hop concert and admired the young people in gold chains and denim capris with pockets near their ankles. Then I went back to the StormTrooper ride again. The young man running it gave me a funny look when I came back for the third time. He was even more surprised when I told him I was not riding the StormTrooper again, but I did want to give him my business card. It gives my name and says "pastor" and has the Smalltown Church address and phone number on it. I added a big smiley face and wrote, "Come See Me Sometime!"

I could not help recalling a woman friend who told me that she realized she was too old to go trick-or-treating when her Visa card fell out of her candy bag. That may apply to me, but I'm not sure how. I did not lose my Visa card on the StormTrooper anyway. After I was breathless and a little giddy, I caught part of a hip-hop concert by a group called Varcity. They danced cool, man.

Maybe the ride operator was intrigued by a pastor crazy enough to ride the StormTrooper. I'm just glad that at almost a half century old, I can still do it. I'm waiting for the day I faint or cannot walk after I get off the ride, but that has not happened yet. So I still hang out in kid places, even at my age. What the kids don't realize is that inside me, I'm every age I've ever been -- including theirs.

Friday Football Freakin Frenzy

Ecstasy hit Smalltown last night as the Smalltown SuccessMachine won their first football game against East Bear High. As Smalltown lost its previous three games, it was high time for them to rev up the SuccessMachine, but they did. Friday night football is as big here as anywhere and the Friday night lights beamed, along with the crowd, as the Smalltown SM crunched the East Bears. I went to meet people mostly, and it worked. I met our local state representative's wife at the concession stand.

Note to self: Hang out at concession stands more often.

It was a happy coincidence. I had no idea that Monica was our state rep's wife. We were chatting in the long line to get our sausage wraps and candy. She was telling me about being a first grade teacher until she started having kids. Now her husband Juan does his representing thing in Austin and Monica stays here where she has her roots. Little Juan Junior swung on the railings while his slightly older sister Adrianna poked him, in the way children do. When Monica told me who she was, I truthfully told her that one of our members, Mary, knows her well,. At a recent women's meeting Mary had urged us all to vote for Juan (Senior not Junior) in the upcoming election. I told her that I was planning to do so.

The game was exciting. Our quarterback was fast and accurate. The red-uniformed team moved in smooth unity. Feet stomped the bleachers hundreds of times. The smell of nachos and tangy jalapenos was in the air. East Bear lost the game, but they won for best band performance. They had a group of ten girls dressed in tuxedos. Some of them were classically slender and pretty, but about half of them were chunky or more. But they all grinned, strutted their stuff, and wowed the crowd with a foot-tapping, jumping, stamping, swirling routine. I loved it. When I was in school, the females who didn't have a classically pretty figure were sidelined. These girls were out there showing off and getting vigorous exercise! God loves diversity and so do I.

I will close by giving wise counsel to the entire family regarding the car.

Advice to Parents: Kids in the backseat cause accidents.
Advice to Teenagers: Accidents in the backseat cause kids.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Micro-Thought

Rodney Daingerfield said that as a kid he was so short, he had to blow his nose through his fly.

Balloon Fiesta Memories

I'm still enjoying recalling my visit with Gail Elliott. I would like to know her better. She's tough, she drives a cool pickup truck, and she attends the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta every year. I went one year and watched in wide-eyed wonder as the Burger King Whopper balloon took off. There was also a Dr. Pepper balloon and a Jack Daniels balloon and multicolored nameless balloons littering the fairgrounds until they took off.

The day my friends and I attended the Fiesta, we got up at three o'clock in the morning. We wanted to arrive before dawn as that is when balloons rise. Balloons may rise then, but I usually don't. I am a night person through and through. But somehow I got my straggling body out of bed for a 4 AM departure to the Fiesta grounds. I did not talk much on the way there.

When we arrived, it was surreal. The festival was in full swing. In pitch darkness, booths lined the grounds and vendors were hawking T-shirts, souvenirs, and food. I marched straight to the java booth and bought a cup of good strong Joe to open the eyeballs wider. Before long, I urgently needed to let the coffee flow on through. So I searched for the restrooms. My heart sank. There were about 20 Port-O-Potties about a quarter of a mile across a field.

I jogged over there and waited in the prodigiously long lines. Everyone else seemed to have had the same idea I did and paid the same price. When at last I had my turn and emerged, dawn had arrived and balloons were already rising into the atmosphere. I rejoined my friends. One of them, a sixty-year-old woman who taught English at Amarillo College, rolled her eyes as she greeted me. She grunted, "Ann, you'll miss the Second Coming because when it happens you'll be in the privy."

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Kinda Having Fun, Sort of

I had coffee with Gail Elliott today. She's a frequent visitor at the church and a barrel of fun. She wears heaps of gold jewelry and loves books as much as I do. We both read Stolen Innocence, a tale of a young woman in a polygamous Mormon settlement who sued her religious leader, Warren Jeffs, and her ex-husband Allen whom she was forced to marry at age 14. Gail and I both had a lot to say about how that could occur in 21st-century North America. Gail is also a big fan of the Indianapolis 500 auto race. That got me thinking about my father again. He died last August and, I swear, sometimes when I tell stories about him I feel him sitting next to me. He's appreciating the fact that his stories are going online where they won't be forgotten.

Dad liked the Indy 500 too and never missed out watching it on TV. Until one year when we were taking an eight-hour car trip during the race, from Ohio to our grandparents' home in Indiana. Now my father had a way of taking fun things and doing them in a cockeyed way. He decided that, as he was driving, we would listen to the Indy 500 on the radio. I still recall several hours of hearing car motors doing that Doppler effect. "RRRREEEEOOOOOOEEEERRRR." Over and over again, punctuated by commentary. I arrived in Indiana with a headache.

I won't even start to describe that Fourth of July when Dad persuaded us all to watch the fireworks on black and white television.

More recently in my travels I saw a sign inside a unisex restroom:

Our aim is to keep this place clean.
Gentlemen: Your aim will help.
Ladies: Please remain seated for the entire performance.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Fur, Fleas, and Funny Relief

Dogs have fleas and Luis brought me his as a gift. There's nothing like feeling nips at the ankles and looking down to see black dots. I do not like using chemical pesticides but I compromised by spraying my closet and bedroom with insect repellent. It may not kill the fleas, but I hope it makes them mildly nauseous.

I cheered myself up after spraying the fleas by calling Mike again in Central City. He is entertaining an old college friend this week from South Africa named Steve Krueger. It is Steve's first trip to North America. Steve likes to gamble and was very interested in the Texas state lottery. Mike brought Steve home after they stopped at a Valero gas station and ice house, where Steve bought several lottery tickets. He also picked up every flyer they had describing how the different lottery games worked. Mike saw Steve poring over the flyers and asked him if something was bothering him. Steve answered, "I'm just trying to figure out which game that woman was playing when she came into the store. I was paying for my lottery tickets and she said, 'I've got thirty dollars on Number Six.' Mike cracked up. "She wasn't playing the lottery, Steve. She was buying gasoline!"

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Directional Dilemmas

I am directionally dyslexic. This label appears much finer than saying I get lost a lot. I may someday be eligible for a federal grant to study this handicap.

I went to a nursing home today to visit three church members and managed to take a wrong turn even though the establishment is only 10 miles away. I come by this honestly as I am sure it is inherited. My paternal grandfather once turned the wrong way on a one-way street in his Indiana hometown after living there for 40 years. He saw three lanes of oncoming cars and in his alarm he swerved into the "out" lane of a fast food restaurant, almost smashing a departing customer. I have never caused a traffic accident and pride myself on no tickets for 18 years. I just get lost more often than most. It is annoying, but I keep it in perspective. I could be quadriplegic or have cancer. Instead, all I have is constant new scenery out my car window.

Besides my grandfather's directional genetics, I also have my father's. In the late 1970s my father bought his dream car. It was an Oldsmobile 98 Regency with a built-in CB, which were all the rage back then. He adored the CB culture, the slang, talking with the truckers, and hearing where the police were. After driving home from work, he still wanted to talk on that CB. So he sat in the car out in the garage and practiced saying, "Breaker one-nine, Breaker one-nine, any Smokies there over your shoulder?" He pretended he was driving and asked if police were around. One night, however, he gave himself away. Out in the driveway under the stars, he held the CB microphone and called out, "Breaker one-nine, Breaker one-nine, can I have an eastbound seven-one?" This was his way of asking for someone traveling east on nearby I-71. There was a silence, and then a trucker growled, "That guy must be smoking something: 71 runs north and south!"

Detention Center Meeting

We just had a community meeting at the Smalltown church. Myra MacDonald and I invited the warden of the new Smalltown Vicinity Detention Center to bring his team and speak to us about the new jail outside of town. It is due to open in late October. It has caused a storm of controversy, courtesy of the previously mentioned Pedro Perez. After all the ruckus he raised, the jail staff agreed to install a siren in case of escapes. They were going to install one anyway, but it made a good platform for Pedro.

We decided to have the jail staff come to show a video and pictures of the detention center, and to answer questions. It was a productive meeting. About 30 people from the church and community showed up. They asked many good questions. One question was how far the stun fence was from adjoining farmers' land. Answer: Pretty far, so no crops would be jeopardized.

Billy-John was there too, along with his grown daughter Teresa. He had the misfortune to sit behind an enormously round woman who almost completely blocked his view. Billy-John looked at the woman's curves and billows and whispered to Teresa, "I think she has an extra boob."

Musing about Meditation

It has been a stressful week so far. The hurricane blew away the job of one of Smalltown's church members. Others have friends or family in the cities hit by the hurricane and are worried about them. The rest of us are worried about the worst meltdown on Wall Street since the Great Depression. On top of all that, the church annual meeting with its reports to prepare looms ahead. Everyone seems a little edgy and stressed out. All this caused me to recall my fling with Transcendental Meditation in the 1970s.

This came about courtesy of my father who was trying to manage his work stress as a steel company executive in Cleveland, Ohio. The steel companies were in some trouble which only got worse as time went on. But my father decided that Transcendental Meditation (TM) would be a dandy way to deal with steel-related anxiety. And by golly he was going to take his whole family with him.

We had to bring a handkerchief, two pieces of fruit, and $300 to the TM center. The $300 was the part we were urged not to forget. When we got there, our "teacher" first performed a tribute ceremony to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of TM. At the age of sixteen I found the incense, candles, Sanskrit chanting, and offering of fruit to the picture of the bearded Maharishi quite intriguing. When the ceremony was over, the teacher taught me how to do TM. He gave me a mantra, a secret word in Sanskrit, to recite over and over again as I "transcended" into meditation to make my journey toward "cosmic consciousness." The mantra, which I was told never to reveal to anyone, was pronounced "Eye-Ing." If I revealed it, I would have not only bad karma, but also frequent car breakdowns. I have since found that saying the name of Jesus works just as well or better, but "Eye-Ing" was fine at the time.

Although the teacher told me that TM would help my grade in high school chemistry, that did not happen. Still, the experience had benefits. My father was meditating on the bus on his way home from work one night. It had been a long day, and he fell asleep and drooled all over his tie. Later he wondered if he should contact the teacher and ask what they did about guys who "slopped their mantras."

Point Oh Oh One (.001) Degrees of Separation

Recently I joined Facebook. Facebook, along with MySpace, is an online networking tool. That looks boring. It is not. Facebook now has 100 million members worldwide and it is growing. It is like a living, breathing three-dimensional high school yearbook. But instead of photos and text from the past, Facebook has pictures and narrative describing people here and now. When I joined Facebook, it was by invitation to become someone's online "friend" there. Now that I have been on Facebook a while, I have fifteen friends and counting. As I understand it, there is great status among teenagers and twentysomethings in having hundreds or even thousands of friends on Facebook.

Once I have established virtual friendships there, I get to see who my friends' friends are. If I know them, I can invite them to become my friends too. And so it goes and so it grows. Through Facebook I am now so networked that all my networks are out networking with my other networks with the goal of creating one giant worldwide Network.

One day I will realize that I have, as a friend of a friend of a friend, Hassad Habib of Jordan, Seung-Kew Choi of Korea, and Akin Ojumu of Nigeria. What a great tool to discourage war and promote peace. "We can't attack the Middle East. My friends Muhammad Al-Fayed, Utsa Mitra, and Aratish Sikh live there." Not only are they my friends but I want to do business with some of them; a war would disrupt the supply lines.

I pray and act for world peace for many reasons. One of them is that, in the end, it's profitable.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Off-the-Wall Opinion

After resolving issues at the church office today, I headed home and called my pastor friend Mike in Central City. I was in the mood for humorous sarcasm and he never fails to deliver. He said that the traffic in Central City is unbelievable and getting more so every day. He noted that in the old-fashioned language of the church's creed, Jesus Christ will "come to judge the quick and the dead." Mike said that fit Central City perfectly because in Central City you are either quick or you are dead. He added that Central City "may not be the land of the free, but it's the home of the brave. "

He also told me his newly-divorced buddy, Rick, had gone to a strip joint the night before to distract himself. Mike said, "Okay, I see why he might do that. But it makes no sense to me that a guy who's in the mood for love goes to a strip joint. That's like a guy who has to crap really bad going to Home Depot to look at toilets."

Saturday, September 20, 2008

A Pivotal Place for Politics

It is election season and I will not tell you for whom to vote. I hope you are relieved to hear that. As a pastor and a Christian, however, I will attempt to be helpful in cleaning the lens through which one sees the election. There is a way to cut down the noise and static to make the fast-paced, confusing communications sound clearer.

There is one moral issue that trumps all the others, because if we do not resolve this one, it renders the others irrelevant. I am speaking of global warming. We may all have strong opinions on the economy, abortion, taxes, the war in Iraq, gay marriage, and health care. But if we do not give priority to global climate change in our thoughts and actions, other issues will matter not at all. All political issues are about people. If we do not deal with the greenhouse gas emissions fueling global warming, the continued existence of people on planet Earth is in serious doubt. That will render the other issues meaningless.

Here are two true statements about global climate change.

Statement One: Global warming is real. Scientists are as unanimous on this as scientists ever get.

Statement Two: Human activity is largely responsible for global warming.

I encourage you not to take my word for this. Be a critical thinker. Do some detective work. Use websites that are neither Democrat nor Republican. The magazine Scientific American, at http://www.sciam.com/ is a good place to start as these authors have been publishing science since 1845. If you're serious about science and enjoy complexity, you can check out Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at http://www.sciencemag.org/. For easier reading try Popular Science at http://www.popsci.com/. Any of these or other nonpartisan science periodicals will aid a reasonable person to understand climate change.

Having viewed what magazines like this have to say, and assuming you agree with my statements after checking them out, discover what are the positions of all four presidential and vice-presidential candates on the issue. A reliable place to do this is with the article by the Council on Foreign Relations at http://www.cfr.org/publication/14765/, which states the candidates' positions on the issue, quoted from the candidates themselves in various news media. It is also possible to obtain literature from the League of Women Voters and other nonpartisan sources that collect information about candidates' positions on issues.

Then search your own mind and heart. As a Christian, global warming is a moral question of the highest importance. The First Commandment in Genesis, appearing even before the Ten Commandments, is "Tend the garden." The planet called Earth is our garden home and it is our responsibility to care for it. There is room for improvement here, to say the least, and we need leadership to accomplish that. Which of these candidates seems to have the clearest insight into global climate change? Who appears to have the best understanding of its dimensions? Who is best prepared to lead us in confronting this issue and the major economic and lifestyle changes it necessitates?

The rest is up to you.

Weather On My Mind

I am a wimp about wild weather. Unashamedly I admit it. But I have my reasons. I seem to be a magnet for lightning strikes. I have never been struck by lightning, but there is something about my leaving a car and running for cover that causes lightning to zap and thunder to explode. Recently I was in Sea City at the tail end of a thunderstorm. I was parked outside Half Price Books waiting for the tumult to ease or cease. Half Price Books for me is like San Francisco for hippies. My spiritual home. Some guys run a tab at their local saloon. I run a tab at the Half Price Books coffee shop. Such decadence.

At last things calmed down somewhat. The bookstore was calling me to come in while the storm was warning me to stay put. I had a mental struggle.

Books. Lots and lots of books.
Lightning. One single flash is all it takes.
Books.
LIGHTNING.
Books.
Lightning.
BOOKS!

I emerged from my car and began to jog semi-confidently toward Half Price Books and its relaxing coffee shop. You can guess what happened next.

FLAAAAAASH! Blinding light split the sky.
CRACKABOOMBOOMBOOOOOM!

I pulled my arms over my head in the classic "duck and cover" position as I darted for safety. As I pulled open the door to rush in, I saw a teenage boy and girl sitting under the canopy by the door. I glimpsed khaki, tattoos and nose rings. They stared at me sullenly as if wondering what spaceship I'd come in on.

Hurricane Ike Churn Churn Churn

Hurricane Ike provided a study in psychology while it was still churning (great verb!) out in the Gulf of Mexico. On the Tuesday preceding its Saturday landfall, I was trying to decide whether or not to leave the next day. I talked to many Smalltown church members about this dilemma. Everyone had a different take on it.

A list of the perspectives follows.

The hurricane was a Category (Cat) 1 but that could change. The hurricane was a Cat 2 but could not possible get any stronger. The hurricane was not strong at all, but its size was staggering. The hurricane could become a Cat 4 or even a Cat 5. The hurricane will move north and miss us. The hurricane will move south and miss us; my brother, a meteorologist, says so and if he doesn't know who does? Everyone should leave tomorrow at the latest. Nobody should leave because we've been through this before and it's nothing. Do not go to Central City whatever you do as the hurricane will spin off a tornado at you.


Churn churn churn. It was all very confusing. I finally left. Better safe than sorry.

The fact is that nobody knew what that hurricane would do including me. But we humans do not like to say we don't know something. When confronted with uncertainty we usually have a story. If we don't have one, we invent one.

Musings from Major Meeting

It is eye-opening to return to ordained ministry after stints in sales and corporate training at a technology company full of young businesspeople. Talk about a study in contrasts! I went to a Major Meeting for the church women of our area today. These Major Meetings have gotten much better over the years. There's much more laughter as well as even greater passion for serving poor women, youth, and children.

When the program speaker got up to give her excellent program on Native Americans, she handed out a bookmark with three seeds for the major crops in a Native tribe. We also took a quiz to test our knowledge of Native Americans. I learned bunches. The only part of the program that raised my eyebrows was when the leader talked about her faith being based on the Apostles' Creed. She started to recite it. "I believe in God the Father Almighty...". She noted that others were joining in and had it memorized "just like I do."

If someone were between the ages of 30 and 40, she might or might not be able to recite that creed from memory. If she were 29 or less, forget it. Many people in that generation did not grow up knowing the Lord's Prayer let alone the Apostles' Creed. A new and younger woman, seeing and hearing everyone say the Creed, might have concluded that she did not belong at that meeting. I had it memorized, however. I can recite it easily. That says something about my age I guess. Older than Egypt.

The wider church of which I am a part "thinks old" and needs to start "thinking young." This is not to say that most church members act old. Quite the contrary! But the collective message is "This is an old people's church." I would like to help change that. Maybe some of the higher-ups will let me have a crack at it.

Esther Essofigus is a very young-at-heart person, I've found. I sat next to her at the Major Meeting. We were at one point filling out cards describing ourselves. We indicated our gender, race, ethnicity, and other labels. Esther whispered to me, "I'm not sure what to put for 'class'." I told her a good answer would be Plenty Of It. Esther chuckled. She is used to me by now.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Ike Yikes!

I decided to make like a tree and leave...or is that make like a banana and split? At any rate, when Hurricane Ike swirled in the Gulf of Mexico and was pointed barely north of Smalltown, it seemed like a good idea to make myself extremely rare here. So I did the funeral I needed to do and then left town. It was strange indeed to look at my dwelling and ponder what exactly I would find, or not find, upon my return. I was lucky. Others were not. Ike turned north of Smalltown at the last minute and smashed into two cities some distance away. Although this is usually a lighthearted blog, my thoughts and prayers are with the people of those cities who lost so much.

While I was gone I had occasion to stroll into a gift shop in Central City to which I had evacuated. Even while worried about the Smalltown people and what Ike would do, I had to laugh at a coffee cup I saw at the gift shop. Do you recall, or have you heard about, what people's mothers in the old days would say when their kid would not eat vegetables at supper? Usually Mom would say something about starving children in Africa who would be thrilled to get that boiled turnip or sauteed spinach. The child's answer would usually be, "So send it to them." The creator of the coffee cup must have had this in his/her mind while affixing the slogan to the cup.

"Drink your coffee. There are people sleeping in India."

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Of Dogs and Women...


...instead of Mice and Men. My dog Luis is growing up. Myra MacDonald noted that he would grow into his huge ears which still dwarf his head. She said she had the same problem with big ears when she was younger. She told me, "It's amazing how much smaller my ears look now that I'm grown up."

Luis has a lot to learn. When I feel devilish, I throw two tennis balls down the hall instead of one. He has the worst time deciding which ball to pick up. He picks one up, notices the other one, drops the first one, chases the second one, spies the first one rolling away, and drops the second one to go after the first one. He hasn't figured out he doesn't have two mouths.

Social Conventions

Here in Smalltown it's after Labor Day. Come to think of it, it's after Labor Day everywhere else too. In cosmopolitan places like New York and Dallas, that means no more white shoes or purses or pastel colored dresses from Macy's. Dark jackets, slacks and pumps appear. Smalltown is near the coast and it's still humid and summer-hot. So we're a little more informal about the after-Labor Day rule. For instance, I only wear black shorts and flip flops now.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

In Search of Bubba

In Sea City for a day off yesterday, I passed a convenience store called Bubba's Quik Stop. It made me stop and reflect on who Bubba is.


Reflecting on Bubba is almost an oxymoron. Bubba does not reflect. Bubba acts. The idea of a philosopher named Bubba is ludicrous. He consumes white bread, never whole wheat. He eats red meat and plenty of it at barbecue restaurants. He goes to Motocross and Nascar events. He hunts and fishes. He drives a pickup truck, never a car. When the Texas legislature briefly considered making an exception to the seat belt law for pickup trucks, it was labeled the Bubba Amendment. Bubba does not like to be told what to do. When not in his pickup truck, Bubba roars across the country on his Harley, hailing the freedom to bike where he likes. Bubba is patriotic, lives in the south, and may or may not attend church. At least in name, he is probably Southern Baptist. Bubba seems to live in small towns and rural communities more than big cities.


Bubba is not a single person, yet he represents many people. He is very real. He is as pervasive as the trees and as little noticed. He is so much a part of this culture that he is taken for granted. Bubba is the myth of manhood in the South writ large.


Bubba is mostly but not exclusively male. Political analysts talk about the "Bubba vote" and include soccer moms as well as farmers and ranchers. The female Bubba character is less well developed than the male, but she exists. I will call her Bubba-Ann. After all, the Dixie Beach Boys had a hit song that went "Bub-bub-bub-bub-Bubba Ann" or something like that. Bubba-Ann has leathery skin from being outdoors in her garden. She can hunt and fish as skillfully as Bubba. Bubba-Ann is equally gifted in the kitchen and with a shotgun. She will use the shotgun on anyone who messes with her "babies." Bubba-Ann's "babies" are like vehicle speeds, with ages ranging from zero to seventy.


Before I moved from up north, I had never heard of Bubba. I now suspect that Bubba lives all over the United States, but with different names in different regions. Researching the origins of the name Bubba, I found that it is derived from the word "brother" and often given to boys to indicate their role in the family, especially the oldest male sibling. If given, the name sticks and often replaces the original name.

So how would Jesus deal with Bubba? He would deal with the person, not the stereotype. He would not assume that just because someone drives a pickup, s/he eats white bread and barbecue, hunts, fishes, and thinks the last line of the National Anthem is "Gentlemen, start your engines." He would look past the myth and relate to the human being in front of him. Not a bad idea.