JIMMY CARTER [Su, 1-5-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—JIMMY CARTER [Su, 1-5-25]

 

Jimmy Carter was not a great president. In most surveys of historians, he ranks 26^th out of 44, a bit below the middle. There seems to be little doubt, though, that he ranks first as a post-president citizen.

Ever since his death, at a remarkable 100, I have thought I should write about him, but there is nothing I can say that others have not already said better.

I can, though, tell about our trip to Plains, Georgia while he was president.

I had voted for Carter, but not with great enthusiasm. It was more a vote against Gerald Ford. I was not really opposed to Ford, and I admired his wife, Betty for the courage she showed in using her own breast cancer as a means of gaining support for cancer patients, and supporting the ERA, and later admitting her alcohol addiction and publicly getting help for it, and founding her own eponymous rehab clinic. I felt that Ford was a good man and an honorable politician, even though Lyndon Johnson famously said that Ford had played too much football before the helmet had been invented. [Ford had been a football star at the U of MI, which was another good reason for an IU fan to vote against him.]

I voted against Ford, primarily, though, because he pardoned Nixon. I wasn’t particularly interested in punishing Nixon, but I thought that pardoning him was a bad precedent and would lead to other bad consequences. I think that the time since has proved me right on that.

Anyway, my wife and teen daughters and I were on our way to a winter’s week in Florida, because a nice layperson had given us a free week in her cottage there, and we decided to go through Plains.

 

The highlight of the trip was getting cokes out of a machine at Billy Carter’s service station. It reminded me a lot of the service station part of Moe’s convenience store where I worked during high school. It was basically a greasy hangout for chubby, overalled rednecks like Billy, who was not really happy to have tourists coming to gawk at him.

We were planning to use Billy’s rest rooms, but Billy wasn’t very hospitable, and once our teen daughters saw them, that plan went south…to the Plains Baptist Church. It was open, as church buildings usually were in those days, especially in small towns. No one else was there. We used the rest rooms, went to the Sunday School room where Jimmy taught a class when he was in town, sat for a while in the sanctuary. I stood in the pulpit, getting a feel for what it would be like to preach to the president in his home church.

 

The thing about Jimmy Carter, I think… he tried to do the right thing, even when he didn’t know how. I think that always deserves a number one ranking.

 

John Robert McFarland

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FIRST [F, 1-3-25[

 \BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man--THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FIRST [F, 1-3-25[

 [Not really a repeat, but very similar to a previous column.]

I have seen a lot of PSAs on TV recently about women, especially Black women, who were firsts—the first woman to command a navy ship, the first woman in space, the first woman who never considered murdering her husband, etc. The tag line is something like, “They were the first to make it possible for those who came after.”

The importance of the first one, the one who broke the barrier…not a bad idea to explore at the first of the year…

I used that idea in sermons from early on because it helped me to understand the place and point of Jesus. [Sermons almost always come from some theological life problem the preacher is trying to figure out for himherself.] When I started, I used Roger Bannister as my first. He was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, a barrier that had been considered unbreakable until Roger came along.

The triumph of life over death, of love over hate… those were unbreakable barriers, until Jesus came along. Forgiveness for everybody? Not until Jesus came along. Companionship with God instead of just fear of God? Not until Jesus came along.

Like any metaphor or symbol to try to explain Christ and God, this one is not sufficient. There were others who preached and practiced self-sacrificial love before and after Jesus. The “firstness” of Jesus is, however, a window to understanding, a window to seeing into a mystery, however dimly, “…like in a mirror, darkly.”

The helpful point, to me, was that there has to be a first, before anyone else can do it. Hardly anyone, even runners, know now who Roger Bannister was, but he was first. A lot of people now who talk psycho jargon about forgiveness and love-conquering-all don’t know who Jesus of Nazareth was, either, but he was first. Like Jackie Robinson in major league baseball, and those women firsts in the TV notices, Jesus was first to make a life of wholeness possible for those who come after.

Yes, the resurrection, the first to show the total inability of death to conquer love…

John Robert McFarland

Irrelevant tidbit: One of my favs: Long before internet days, a reporter needed to know Cary Grant’s age for an article. He wired Grant’s publicist, “How old Cary Grant?” Grant himself wired back. “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

 

NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

 

[I came across this column that I started on the first day of 2014. I didn’t post it then, though, because I didn’t finish it...]

I know of a man, a Quaker, 90 years old, who, when he awakes in the morning, lies in bed a while “getting in sync with the universe.” I would like to do that, but when I awake in the morning, I need to get in sync with the bathroom, without waiting for the universe to come around. Maybe that’s the difference between Quakers and Methodists.

I’m not very often in sync with the universe, and it’s usually my body, or some part of my body, that is the cause of my dis-synchronicity.

It is the first morning of the new year, 2014, as I write this. I grew up with the understanding that what happens the first day of the year will be the agenda for the rest of the year. Grandma Pond always served cabbage on New Year’s Day, for that meant one would have money the rest of the year. If gaseous emissions are money, then she was right; otherwise, not so much.

What I most need to do in this new year of my winter season is to get rid of stuff I don’t need for the future. [And perhaps work on making my sentences less convoluted and obfuscatory.] Maybe that is how one who cannot lie in bed in the morning gets in sync with the universe, by getting rid of stuff the universe doesn’t need.

 

Since the Salvation Army and the recycling center are not open today to receive my excess t-shirts and newspapers, I am looking through file folders, the kind that hold papers, those things that only old people remember, those thin sheets of stuff on which we wrote great ideas in the days of yore, with a thing called a pen, and putting into the “office paper only” basket those paper sheets on which are written literally thousands of wonderful ideas for stories and books and poems and sermons that will never come to screen, and which now do not look nearly as insightful or necessary to share as they did at the time I wrote them down.

Here is where I stopped writing on 1-1-14.

So, has anything changed in these last 11 years? What was the point I was going to make in this column?

Well, in addition to moving from Iron Mountain, Michigan to Bloomington, Indiana, I really have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. You have to do that when you move all your stuff from a seven-room house with a full basement and a three-car garage into a six-room condo with no basement and a shimmy garage. [It’s so narrow you have to shimmy sideways to get past it. We’ve got to get a Morris Minor!] And we’ve continued to winnow. I follow the rule of one in, two out, whether it’s a book or a piece of paper or anything else.

I think I’ll just go back to Grandma Pond’s belief. Well, not cabbage. But I’ll get this day in sync with the rest of the year. I’ll do today what I want to do all the other days. I think that pie for breakfast makes perfectly good sense…

 

John Robert McFarland

Bonus Folk Music Note—An Irregular and Irrelevant Series: Odetta. 

MLK called Odetta “The Queen of American Folk Music.” From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanack I learned that a reviewer once said of her: “She really can’t sing folk, because she doesn’t sound like a person singing. She sounds like The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” In the 1960s, she often appeared with our friends, The Chad Mitchell Trio, both in concert and at Civil Rights events.