ODDS & ENDS-Including house plants & bluetits [M, 3-22-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

ODDS & ENDS-Including house plants & bluetits    [M, 3-22-20]

 

There is a story about the psychiatrist and proctologist who went into practice together and put up a sign on their office that said “Odds and Ends.” An alternate sign was “Rears and Queers,” but it’s the odds and the ends that interest me here. From time to time some little memory arises, or some small event happens, that is intriguing, but not long enough to write a whole column about it. So…

Like the time Judith Unger sat up in bed, completely asleep, and announced, “It was the Discipleship Committee,” and laid back down. She could remember nothing about it the next day, especially what the Discipleship Committee was guilty of, but her proclamation in the night has the feeling of Emile Zola’s “J’Accuse” or Nathan the prophet’s “Thou are the man.”

I recently wrote about how I tell cashiers and waiters that Helen and I qualify for the good-looks discount. Daughter Katie learned her lesson well, and when she and Patrick were buying a car, she told the salesman he should give them a $200 good looks discount. He looked perplexed and said he’d have to run it by the sales manager. He returned and said they could have a $100 discount. They’ve been arguing ever since about which one lost them $100 on that deal.

IU history prof, Rebecca Spang, says that she’s had an increasingly antagonistic relationship with her house plants as the pandemic has worn on. They were just always there. Then she realized that she was the one who had changed. They were just doing what they had always done, being where they had always been. She was the one who had changed, from the one who went away once in a while and then returned, to another one—like the house plants—who was always there.

Speaking of history profs: “He had all the illuminations of wisdom and none of its pedantry.” A statement in the obituary of Keith Hitchens, one of daughter Katie’s doctoral profs at the U of IL. What a wonderful way to be remembered. He was the world’s foremost historian of Eastern Europe. Katie once asked him how many languages he spoke. “Fifteen, if you count Mandarin and ancient Greek, but I need a dictionary for those two,” he said.

When my little sister, Margaret Ann, named for our Grandma Pond, was dying of cancer, her minister called on her often. Margey loved all nature, especially birds, and one day her minister told her that when he was a boy in Africa, the teacher told the class to draw a bluetit, which he did, and was quickly expelled from school. Margey’s daughter, Nicole, says that Margey always looked forward to his visits, because he always made her laugh. Now that’s a good pastor!

As baseball season is upon us, good advice to remember: “The secret to managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided.” Casey Stengel

Freud had his talking cure. Jesus has his walking cure: “Follow me.”

John Robert McFarland