The End of the Line...

It's come to this.

Homeboy Reports have been showing up here just about every Friday for the past two years, and the time has come to take a break. For how long, who knows? I've enjoyed doing these weekly posts, but they seem to be taking more and more of the time and energy which I need to devote to other things (like Law School and home responsibilities). Writing these weekly posts has been a good discipline for me, as well as the exercise of some creativity muscles, but it's beginning to feel like work, like a job I have to do. One of my enduring character faults is biting off more than I can chew, and I tend to take on things like regular blogging until I get an overload and the circuits start to trip. Something has to give, and in this case it will be Friday's Homeboy Reports.

I remember, for another illustration, how excited Ann and I were about helping to build Habitat For Humanity homes around the country. Over the years we've probably left our marks on close to a hundred homes, and it was great fun, we met great people, and we felt like we were participating in a great enterprise. And then one day, out of the blue, it began to feel like work. The tail started wagging the dog. I tried to hold off putting on my tool belt until the last possible minute, and I thought if I had to climb up on one more roof I was going to jump off. It was time to quit.

So it is now: time to quit. Your comments, official and unofficial, have been most appreciated by me (with a couple of forgettable exceptions!) and I'll truly miss that connection. With most of you, of course, we have other ties that will certainly continue, and with others, well, I truly believe in paths crossing. Let's keep in touch.

So with that, Homeboy Reports comes to the end of the line. Thanks for being with me on the journey.

Me and the medics...

A "procedure" is what they called it.

Strange how those medic types talk in code, but I guess that's better than saying "Esophageal Dilatation", which is what it really was. I happened to mentioned, last time I was talking to my tummy doc, that sometimes I ate too fast and got stuff stuck half way down my throat and I'd have those moments when my life flashed before me or at least the last two minutes of it and that's when I'd remember a good friend who died by choking on a PB&J sandwich and I thought, "no, no, no". I don't mind dying, but that's not what I want my last conscious thought to be.

So the doc and I chatted about this "procedure" which stretches and enlarges the esophagus, and my first question, after being sure it was covered by Medicare, is how soon can we get the "procedure" done. Day after tomorrow is how soon, so I signed up for this oral colonoscopy.

Now, I'm not one of those folks who are "physician phobic". I've seen plenty of the White Coat crowd over the years and have come to harbor a great deal of respect for them. Some of them are best of friends. Oh, I do get bent out of shape when I have to cool my heels in their office, having just broken speed limits to get there at the scheduled hour, and I do get a little testy when I have to repeat my raison d'etre for the third time as I wend my way up the various levels of the medical hierarchy, but I get over it. Mostly, I get over it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the "procedure". Anyway, I'd been warned that since I was going to get "conscious sedation" (another euphemism, this one meaning "knocked out") I would need someone to drive me home, and Ann thus became the designated driver. After waiting only 30 minutes past my early morning and coffee-less start time, I was ushered into the inner sanctum, told to strip to my waist, and given an IV.

I have a twinge of a recollection that the nurse said something to the effect of, "Roll over on your left side, please", and the next thing I knew we were in the car driving home.

However long it had been -- probably an hour or so -- I had no memory of it. It was an hour or so deleted from my allotted span and for me doesn't exist. But I do have an enlarged esophagus. I mean I guess I do. My throat was sore, so something must have been going on in there, and I assume it was the doc's fibre optic scope, and that the "procedure" was a success and I now have a comfortably large gullet.




While I'm at it, I'll mention another recent encounter with the medic types. The problem is that I don't have a primary physician, or, as the insurance company says, a health care provider. It drives them nuts when they ask me who it is and I tell them "Medac", our local "doc-in-a-box". So a while back I asked my cardiologist, who despite the fact he went to Duke is also a good friend and a baseball fanatic, if he'd be my "primary". Once or twice a year I go see Bill, we talk baseball for 15 or 20 minutes, I take the "breathe on the mirror" test, and if it fogs I am passed and go home.

Having a cardio as my primary is, for the insurance types, almost as bad as having Medac, so I told him last week that I was going to get another doc, an internist who went to med school at Chapel Hill. Bill understood, as I knew he would, but he sure was upset about my choice of docs.

Now I'm going to give the local medical fraternity a rest for a while, and let the copies of the National Geographic accumulate until my next visit, errrr "procedure".

Lambeth Conference

I frequently hear people fussing about organized religion. "Organized religion does this, doesn't do that, etc." I don't worry about all these rants against organized religion since (to paraphrase Will Rogers) I'm not a member of an organized religion.

I'm an Episcopalian.

The Episcopal Church gives Chinese fire drills a good name. It's exciting, if excitement is one of your criteria for a church, because we're never quite sure what's coming next. But it's never dull. Churches everywhere have a rightly deserved reputation for being rather stodgy and sedate, even boring, but not so with Episcopalians. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.

It's strange that this is true since we're the offspring of the famously prim and proper British religious establishment, the Church of England, the home of deservedly irrelevant prelates who wear jodhpurs with vests and sip tea and/or sherry. Sure, that's a caricature of their extremes far removed from reality, but it's the image many folks have of the Mother Church.

All this comes to mind because right now there's a gathering in London, the Lambeth Conference, wherein all the bishops (900 or so, give or take an archbishop or two) of the Anglican Communion come together to discuss common problems, parade around in medieval garments, worship and talk together, and go to a garden party with the queen. They hold no formal plenary debates nor vote on any resolutions. It's a family reunion, ecclesiastical style, and you know what often happens at many family reunions. Here's a picture of the first one, back in 1867:



A thumbnail explanation: the Anglican Communion is the name given to all those churches around the world who have ties to the Church of England. Our Episcopal Church is one of them, so is the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil and the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui and the Anglican Church of Kenya. You get the idea. Altogether there are close to 40 churches in the Anglican Communion, and the total membership is about 80 million.

Each of these churches is autonomous and independent, tied together by a historical (and sometimes hysterical) link to the Church of England and a (generally) common form of worship. We're the little guy in this crowd, with only about two and a half million. The big guys, mostly from the African continent, far, far outnumber of us. Numbers don't count for much, though, since each church can pretty much call its own shots.



And therein lies the rub. Our Episcopal Church has done some things that really perturb others in the family. Things like contemporizing the language of worship, and allowing women to become priests/ministers, and ordaining an openly gay man as a bishop in the Church. (Some of us wonder if what we should have done is what we and other churches have been doing for years: ordain gays and lesbians, but keep quiet about it!) It's a saga worthy of Ken Burns' attention.

All this drives some of the member churches in the Anglican communion absolutely nuts. Although hundreds (hundreds!) of people with AIDS die every day in Africa, those church folks (some of them, at any rate) get their chasubles in a knot because a gay man is bishop of New Hampshire. Go figure. Anyway, their response is that the best thing they can do is to boycott the family reunion in London and set up their own gathering in Jerusalem, of all places, where they can talk about the speck of dust in the other's eye and...well, you get the idea. The irony, I'm sure, is not lost on anyone.

My take on all this is that there are people who for a variety of reasons (religious, cultural, emotional, historical, and such) just can't survive in a world that's neither black nor white but varying shades of gray. They are "either/or" folks, not "both/and". But one of the pillars of Anglican spirituality over the years has been the willingness to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, at least for the time being, and leave the truth to God's wisdom. As Stephen Neill, one of our wiser bishops of a generation ago said, that's the genius of Anglicanism.

Well, you get my drift, but don't be expecting any clear-cut resolution from the purple clad clerics in Lambeth. As my mother might have said, "We Episcopalians just don't do that." Or as some of my friends in AA would say, "Hang in there; more will be revealed!" [gulp]

Hurricane Season

Although the official hurricane season began a couple of months back, June 1st, I think, it was only this past week that folks around here began to really get in the mood. The slow march up the coast of a mild-mannered storm that came to be known as Tropical Storm Cristobal caught the attention of the media and other hurricane watchers, but other than some much needed rain it didn't impact our lives at all. (The picture above is the famous one of Hurricane Katrina, just before it slammed into the Gulf Coast. It looks so benign and peaceful, too.)

Cristobal did, however, become the trigger for the unofficial beginning of hurricane season. For one thing, there's a sudden increase in newspaper and TV ads for a variety of allegedly "hurricane-proof" shutters and other gadgets. For another, all the drug stores, convenience shops, and groceries suddenly have greatly supplemented their usual display of theoretically indispensable items such as batteries, water bottles, flashlights, and so forth, essentials that will never be used.

But my very favorite additions during hurricane season are a couple of web sites that give us the official and unofficial news of impending storms. For the official word I go to the National Hurricane Center site, which has a good selection of maps, charts, and predictions. Plus, those guys are really cool. Reading their stuff is like listening to Mission Control at a shuttle launch. And they're just as good.

For my unofficial news, I turn to two sites. One is a section of my favorite weather site, Wunderground, where you can get all kinds of goodies, many of them directly from NHC, plus a very knowledgeable blog from one of their professional gurus. It has more than you really need to know, but it's fun, anyway.

My other unofficial site is run by a friend, Mark Sudduth, who's a pretty savvy hurricane guru himself and is the founder of the Hurricane Research Intercept Team. In addition to this website, Mark also has a fancy Chevy Tahoe so loaded down with hi-tech electronics that it must need several extra batteries to run them all. He drives his Tahoe to wherever he thinks the storm is going to come in, sets up his cameras and other gadgets, and puts on quite a show that we can follow on the 'Net. He also writes a "commentary" that reflects his storm knowledge and experience. Anyway, as we progress through the hurricane season this summer you might want to have these or some others bookmarked.

My fascination with these storms really went into high gear during the years we spent living on the barrier island of Wrightsville Beach. For a while there, during the '90s, we were on Hurricane Alley, and it seemed as though we were always having to evacuate the island. We were the bullseye. The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore decided to buy a house here. I even had our own set of storm warning flags to fly! As a storm approached and seemed likely to hit us, everyone was told to evacuate, for as a safety measure all the power on the beach would be turned off. There were always a few hardy (or foolish) souls who ignored the evacuation order and, sans air conditioning and lights and refrigeration and TV news and all the other conveniences of modern life, they experienced a few moments of terror. Lots of fun. No ice for their drinks, either.

As for us, we were not so heroic. In fact, I had my own test for when we were going to leave: when there were whitecaps in the commode, it was time to go. And for a few years it happened enough so that it became a serious bother. Five times in three years, in fact, we loaded the valuables such as family pictures and scrapbooks into the car, took enough clothes for a few days, and after rolling up the rugs and moving furniture to a safe spot we'd close up the house and head off the beach.

Fortunately we had the motorhome as our "hurricane hole", so we'd drive up to the little parish in Burgaw (about 30 miles inland) where those nice people had even put in an exterior 30 amp plug so we would have water and power. One year (it was during Bonnie or Floyd, I've forgotten which), the storm hit Burgaw, too, knocking out the town's power, so we turned on the RV's generator and lived in relative luxury!



As far as damage to our home, we were usually fairly lucky, with one major exception. Hurricane Fran, in '96, did major damage to the house, and a picture is above. There were holes in the roof, and water poured in all over everything. It was a mess. We spent more money on repairs from that storm than we had originally spent in buying the house! With that one exception, though, we fared rather well during our 28 years on the island. We always had a major mess to clean up, including some fragrant dead fish and other debris in the front yard, but that just came with the territory.

Those days are gone now, praise be, and we'll not have to evacuate the new house in town. But when the red flags with the black squares start flying, we'll remember those days and watch the progress of the next storm.

"Julius Caesar"

Mom was a Latin teacher. When she and Dad didn't want "little pitchers with big ears" (such as my brother and me) to hear their conversation, they would talk to each other in Latin. Which will explain why, among other reasons, I took Latin as my language study in high school. My eavesdropping plans, however, never worked, because they spoke it a lot faster than I ever translated it.

Whatever my motivation back then, I have to confess today that it was a good decision to take the so-called "dead language" and to be immersed in Edith Hamilton and the classics. For one thing, it's certainly enhanced my appreciation for words and the English language, and for another it's probably the reason that as soon as I saw it I grabbed this new biography of Julius Ceasar.

It's a great book, which in my lexicon means that I want to read it again. For one thing, you certainly don't have to understand Latin or be a classics buff to appreciate it. The author, Phillip Freeman, I've never heard of before, but he's obviously a brilliant classics scholar as well as a crackerjack story teller. The story he weaves has as many dizzying twists and turns and subplots as a soap opera, and the end of one chapter made me anxious to start the next one.

No matter how much we might try to sugarcoat it, the truth is that people back then (the 1st century B.C.) were just not very nice people, at least not by our standards. They had the sexual morals of rabbits, and would just as soon as not lop the head off anyone of a lower class, sometimes to show others an example and sometimes just to get rid of the poor guy.

There was, for instance, a custom among the Celtic tribes that whenever they met in council, to execute the tribal chieftain who got there last, a practice which may have been at least considered in today's culture. Life was tough, brutal, and short back then. Freeman doesn't dwell on all this, but he doesn't bury it, either. He just tells the story.

And a heck of a story it is. Born into a noble family that had seen better days and was now in decline, Caesar used his genius to rise and become the synonym for "emperor". He was at once an unscrupulous villan and a near-mythological hero, making his story a difficult one to tell and read. Just about the time I was cheering him on ("Hail, Caesar") he would do something incredibly stupid, even evil ("Off with his head"). But I kept turning pages.

Which is another reason I call it a great book: it was a well-told story with issues as contemporary as today's news. You could weave the names Bush, Cheney, Obama, and McCain into the narrative without loosing a stitch. Back then there was the pre-cursor to "public financing", although they just called it "bribes". And Caesar's military exploits were defined as "shock and awe" as well as a "surge". It would take a whole other book to identify all the similarities between politics then and now.

I hope you get the idea that I liked the book. It's a dandy, both in the subject of Caesar and the story of his rise and fall; he was one of history's greatest and most terrible figures. Take a look at it. My Mom would have approved.

Toys I haven't gotten yet:

I've never met a gadget I didn't like. So much the better if it runs on batteries or has a cord and plug coming out of its backside. In my list of life's priorities, there's more than a grain of truth in the old bumper sticker about the one who dies with the most toys. You can't have too many, and I've managed to collect at least my share of them over the years. Many of them are now dust collectors in some dim recess of the house, even more soon lost their gimmick appeal and were consigned to the trash, but I yet remain on the lookout for more and better gadgets.

There are a couple I have in my sights, one being the newly released model of the iPhone, the G3.




I'm a confirmed Mac guy, now operating on my fourth or fifth Apple 'puter, and I looked longingly at the original iPhone, now in its second iteration as the G3. (The G3 stuff is about it being the third-generation, after the first cell phone like the one you've got in your pocket and the second being the original iPhone.) This little beauty does everything but brush your teeth. Such as?, you may ask.

Well, with the G3 you can talk on the phone and surf the 'Net simultaneously. It brings Web pages into your hand in less than half the time it takes the old phones. It is reported to have a crystal clear audio quality. It has a built in G.P.S. The list goes on and on, all important to the confirmed gadgetholic. But there are a couple of hitches, you might say.

For one thing, it's not cheap. Although billed at being under 200 bucks, it's actually going to cost you nearly $600 to get out of the bargain basement, and that's only the beginning. It only works on the AT&T cellular network, and that adds another $70 or so a month, which leads into the real deal-breaker.

The G3 part of this neat little gadget only works if you're in one of AT&T's G3 area networks, and there aren't very many of them. Needless to say, Wilmington doesn't make the cut, so the new iPhone will go to the bottom of my "need-to-have" list.

Coming to the top, to replace it, is something lots of folks already have, a Global Positioning Satellite system.





These wonderful little gadgets are approaching the "required" category, and the way things are going they'll soon be available in your local CVS and Kroger. They will not only show you detailed directions to get where you're going, they also provide a voice (his or hers) so you don't have to look at the map on the screen. (I'm personally waiting for Susan Sarandon's voice to cinch the deal for me.) I'm also impressed by the fact that their built-in maps, usually downloaded automatically, have all the brand new streets and subdivisions identified.

But, as always, here are a couple of speed bumps on the highway to G.P.S. The big one is that most of the time I already know where I want to go. Who needs directions to the grocery store or the post office? Traveling to exotic locales doesn't happen to me very often these days. In fact, it doesn't happen, period.

The other negative is that it's rapidly becoming yesterday's toy. The novelty has worn off. A big part of the fun of gadgeting is to be the first on the block to get one. Now the G.P.S. is built into a Chevrolet, for pete's sake. So we'll put that one on Hold.

There's one more on my list which definitely meets the "first-on-the-block" criteria. It's Amazon's electronic book, the Kindle.



Reading has always been one of the great pleasures in my life. Newspapers, magazines, books (both paperback and hardcover), Web sites, cereal boxes...I read 'em all. I'm an Equal Opportunity Reader, and will try any new venue for a while. So along comes this handy little gadget, the Kindle, wherein I can, with just a couple of key strokes, get immediate wireless delivery of any one of thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, you name it. The Kindle is simple to use, has a sharp high-resolution screen, is lighter than a typical paper back, and you can store the good books to read again and again.

One problem, a major one: the Kindle is not a book. It doesn't feel like a book, I can't make a note in the margin, it won't go on my bookshelves. Reading a book is, for me, an intimate experience, not a one night stand. I like to put my name on the frontispiece and feel the paper as I turn the pages. It's the difference between reading recipes and eating the meal. So I'm going to have to say, "No thanks", to this newest addition to my most-wanted gadget list.

The the search continues, however, and if you know of any new gadgets that you think I just MUST have, please let me know. Immediately.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

I begin with a confession: I must not be much of a patriot, because I do not wear and do not even have an American flag lapel pin. A lapel pin of any sort just never occurred to me, which is not an excuse but a statement of fact. But it gets worse.

My patriotism might also be questioned because although we fly the American flag from the front porch of our home 24/7, it's in violation of the principles taught me in my Boy Scout Handbook requiring that the flag be lighted at night. Oops! That never occurred to me, either.

My slide down the slippery slope of patriotism continues, for I don't have any magnetic ribbons, bumper stickers, or plastic decals on my car indicating that I support our troops.

To compound the felony, I harbor the mostly quiet belief that Jeremiah Wright was on to something when he was so bold as to preach that perhaps God might stand in judgment of our country.

But when the National anthem is played I always stand at attention, bareheaded, hand over my heart, and I did serve in the Marine Corps during the Korean conflict (though admittedly not getting any closer to Korea than the bars of Oceanside, California). I hope those two facts will cancel out all my other failures.

Patriotism (or the lack of it) is kind of a hot-button item these days. I can almost hear some eight year olds arguing on the playground, "I'm more patriotic than you are", "Ya are not", "Am too", "Are not", and on and on. The current flap over patriotism is made even sadder by the fact that the antagonists are grown-ups. Thomas Jefferson weeps.

All this is bustling around in my brain today because later this morning we'll have our annual Fourth of July parade here in our small slice of Americana. It's not quite the extravaganza that goes on down in Southport, or in larger locales, but in our quiet little neighborhood it's a big enough deal. There'll be 50 or 60 or more of us, Christians, Jews, Muslims, nonbelievers, black, white, oriental, Americans all, pushing strollers or riding bikes festooned with the red-white-and-blue, walking around the neighborhood behind Uncle Sam. Who knows? We may even sing "God Bless America" or somesuch. (I'll post a picture or two afterwards.)



Then we'll have lemonade and cookies before going home to get ready for the (mostly) illegal fireworks in the evening.



It's a grand occasion, and it serves to silence the quibbles over the legitimacy of anyone's patriotism. So join a parade on the Fourth of July if you can, or watch one, or if you can't, wave a flag or hum a few bars of "America" or just remember, remember. Happy Fourth of July!