August 4, 2006

Travel

CP and I are off to Houston this weekend for the “coronation” of my late boss to install her on Sunday as the new rector of a big church over there.

CP’s an inveterate midwesterner and never has had much use for Texas. Actually, she has next to none now for some of the same reasons as the Dixie Chicks, or whatever. And I’d say even as a native that the current malaise makes it pretty hard for me, too, except that we parsons are supposed to stay out of politics and all the while keep wary of the IRS, even though they haven’t done me any special personal favors that I know of.

Looking for some redemption, I asked my friend Jim Cullum of jazz band and NPR fame over at The Landing on Riverwalk in San Antonio if there is any good jazz in Houston. I thought if anybody knows, he would. He said was I kidding, that all the good jazz is in San Antonio, and didn’t I know that Jack Teagarden and Garner Clark [a great Texas jazz cornetist with whom we both used to play] had been dead for longer than he could remember. That said, we’ll just have to tough it, hope the church’s air-conditioning holds up throughout the celebration, and settle for a bit of good TexMex food somewhere in an ambiance of Mexican bluegrass [aka mariachi], of all things.

It is the way with us preachers. The world never owed us a living, anyhow, and it’s probably time we started paying it back. I tried for several decades to grow up in Texas and am still trying to in Tennessee, but I just can’t seem to get CP to understand that it’s not all that easy as it might be in Iowa.

Like the Big T used to sing, “I’ve Got A Right to Sing the Blues.”

August 3, 2006

Brighttime

Transfiguration (Lk 9.28-43)

One might say that Weight Watchers is in the transfiguration business. But so are the shape shifters in Star Trek and tragically, the suicide bombers everywhere. Depending on how you look at it, transfiguration is not all that uncommon.

What is uncommon is how you look at it. Peter, James, and John had got out of the fishing business and gone to transfiguring themselves, themselves. So much so, that they began to wonder about their recent compulsive career change and were getting distracted from the business at hand.

This was just one more mountain (real and parabolic) they’d had to climb with Jesus, and maybe they were getting tired of it all. No wonder they drifted off only to be awakened by a brilliance greater than left field in nighttime at Yankee Stadium. But what they saw rather made it worth the trip, Jesus passing the time with, of all people, Moses and Elijah. So they thought maybe this was it and that it would be worth their while to stick around permanently, so they suggested precisely that.

Not so. Pay attention and listen, said a James Earl Jones sound-alike. As it turned out, there was a lot more work to do back down the mountain where the world was having another of its seizures and probably not its last if all the short-memory nuclear swaggering in our time has anything to do with it.

Go transfigure.

August 2, 2006

Community

I’ve got good friends who drive SUVs and other trucks, but I wish they wouldn’t. Just finding a place to park these days is taxing enough, but when it’s by one of these monsters, backing out is taking your rear in your own hands. Given the fact that the streets are public property and have certain ordinances about their use, shouldn’t also the machines we drive on them, as well? Not just insurance and emissions [and the SUVs around here don’t even have that], but size, for heaven’s sake.

And speaking of the public, I think landscaping ought to be getting more attention from the town mothers [why not?]. There’s a lot of what’s called “scraping” going on in our neighborhoods. It used to be called razing, but we seem to be reserving that word for Middle East real estate these days.

Developers are buying one-family bungalows, tearing them down and pretty well abolishing anything else that might be in the way of the new multistoried, obviously architect-less multifamily obtrusion they put in its place. There’re three of those underway in our own neighborhood at this very moment. It’s bad enough when some folks must think a yard full of weeds makes for attractive, but when the developers apparently at random cut down elegant and altogether healthy seventy- and eighty-foot oaks on what used to be a lovely piece of property, there oughta be a law. And it should make clear that the environment belongs to the community, and that means not just the air the SUVs pollute while we’re gasping, but also the trees, at least the trees.

It was trees that once inspired somebody to write about them as even lovelier than poetry. Can’t we find a way to grant them a community-wide reprieve from the herbicidal maniacs?

August 1, 2006

Sports

Coincidentally enough, our town’s AAA baseball team is called the Nashville Sounds. It’s the farm club for the Milwaukee Brewers. Just as a matter of convenience and with geography being of little consequence these days, they’re also members of the Pacific Coast League. Some of us would rather have major league ball, of course, and would readily trade both our professional football [Titans] and hockey [Predators] leagues together with their big, fatcat, drain-on-the-taxpayers venues. But you take what you can get. 

At least, we’ve got a new class-act public library. It wasn’t easy selling book-reading as a major league sport. But we’ve also got an opera company, a ballet troupe, a pretty good symphony, and a jazz workshop, all ideal places for folk to hear tunes with more than three chord changes played on something other than a dobro. 

Our town is home to the Southern Baptist Covention [AKA Baptist Vatican] and has some kind of a church if not a bank on just about every other downtown corner plus a scattering of religious publishing houses here and there. It’s not without reason that along with the Athens of the South, we’re also called the buckle on the Bible Belt. There’re some images you just can’t shake. 

So, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that to pep up attendance at the baseball games, the latest evangel angle is Faith Night. The entrepreneurs say that free Bibles are a better draught than free beer when it comes to getting folk out to the ball game. My research on this is negligible and will probably stay that way, but I wouldn’t be surprised that before long, baseball may probably join all those other faith-based organizations.