The Geranium Farm

11/02/2024

Compline will be at 8pm this evening. No Storytime— I have a bad throat.

10/31/2024

HALLOWEEN

A witch. A fairy. A pair of dice. A punk rocker – there were several iterations of that in the tween years. Right now I can’t recall any more of my girls’ Halloween costumes. It’s a little sad that I can’t, because what to be for Halloween was always important to them. And my memories of how excited they were about it are exciting to me even now: I close my eyes and still can see the dark front porches, the shaft of light from a door opening into the night, hear hearty adult voices exclaiming over the little visitors and their attire, feel our feet trudging along through fallen leaves from front yard to front yard as we made the rounds.

Or is it my own childhood Halloween than I am recalling? We were ghosts, usually, using an old sheet with eye holes cut into it. Halloween was not the commercial opportunity then that it is these days. Once I was a ballet dancer for the school party. It was the year of my first pointe shoes, so I must have been ten. I came home and cried because my feet hurt; sometimes Halloween is just too much.

The church had a pumpkin patch again this year, as it has for the last dozen or so. A big truckload of the gorgeous orange orbs arrived on September 28th. People from all over town helped unload them and the pumpkin sale began. As in other years, the Patch seemed limitless. How on earth were we to sell all those pumpkins? And, as always, there are few left today, the very last moment of Jack-o-lantern relevance until next year.

Pumpkin Patch duty is a good thing for old people. You sit outside and visit with the people who come by. You admire their babies and their dogs. You take pictures of the families with your phone and send them to the parents right then and there, so that the whole family can be in a photograph together for or a change. You determine the prices of the pumpkins with a special tape measure the pumpkin farm sends along with the inventory. You ask the little ones if they want a sticker to commemorate their visit. They always do – everybody loves stickers. I have a photograph of Q and me on a stint at the Patch, each of us with one adorning our foreheads. He must have been in his eighties when it was taken.

Halloween begins winter. By now the leaves have lost most of their splendor – most of the brilliant colors have faded to brown. This weekend the darkness will begin to descend upon us in the late afternoons, and it will be months before we see the slanting light of summer evenings again. I don’t mind. I have always enjoyed the hibernation effect of winter darkness. I have loved the squares of black outside the windows, the clanking of the radiators bringing up heat from the basement, the teacup warming my fingers as they close around it. Now begins the time of taking stock, of looking back and looking forward, of feeling the goodness of what we have and who we are.

And, of course, who we have been.

10/30/2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/19/well/move/personal-trainer-aging.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Personal training isn’t just for the young — or the wealthy. Here’s how to make it work for you.

10/27/2024

Today is Sunday, so Compline will be at 8pm, followed by Storytime, in which I read from some if my work.

10/27/2024

CAT TALE

My cat has an interesting arrival story.

Back when we lived in our big old house, if weather permitted, we took most of our meals outside under the dogwood tree. Often the cats, of which there were four, would eat theirs outside with us, their little metal dishes scattered around the patio in an attempt to prevent their stealing food from one another.

We were finishing breakfast out there one morning when a new cat came through the hedge and approached us. She strolled around, took a few bites from one of the little dishes. She sat there for a while staring at us, and then she left. She came back the next day with a kitten in her mouth. She dropped it on the pavement and left. We never saw her again.

Clearly, Mama’s first visit was reconnaissance. She was checking us out. Were we a suitable home for one of her babies?

Evidently, we passed inspection. The new cat’s name was Kitten. When he grew out of that, we called him Kit Carson: I forget why. He got along well with the other cats, especially with What’s-Her-Name, in whom he uncovered a nurturing capacity nobody who knew her even slightly would have suspected she possessed. What’s-Her-Name was a lifelong delinquent.

Cats are funny. Their decisions about whom they will endorse are impossible to predict and make little sense. People are that way, too, I guess.

Our Kit Carson shed his last name after we found out that the real Kit Carson had been, shall we say, morally complex in some extraordinary ways: he participated in the genocidal treatment of native Americans and yet he adopted at least one Native American boy. Wrestling Carson’s ambiguity to the ground seemed to us like a lot of work for the sake of a cat’s name, so he became just plain Kit, and he has been just plain Kit ever since.

On by one, the senior cats departed this life. Jenny first at 21, then Santana at 22. What’s-Her-Name headed out at 19, and Ben made it to 23. I suppose Mama Cat is gone now, too, although I would have no way of knowing, since I only met her twice.

Plain old Kit is 17 now. Q died at 92, four years ago and a bit more. I still sleep on my side of the bed, as if he were about to join me. Kit sleeps on Q’s pillow.

10/23/2024

6pm at St Luke’s:
Beautiful Evening Prayer at 6 pm. According to Rite 1.
The language of Shakespeare.

10/21/2024

Simply put, Christian Nationalism is not Christian. It enshrines and baptizes the worst aspects of human behavior. It ignores the clear teaching of Jesus.

10/19/2024

It’s Saturday, so compline will be at 8pm, followed by Storytime, in which I read from some of my work.

10/17/2024

KNEE DISEASE

I’ve got it. Florence has it. Deb has it – and Deb is a lot younger than either of us. Florence and I are both pretty high mileage.

A complicated joint, the knee. A lot can go wrong: swelling below it,
a tear in the ACL, erosion of the cartilage which gentles the pressure of bending it under weight, a stretching and consequent weakening of the ligaments that sustain the joint. I will be starting some physical therapy to see if I can’t create a sturdy wall of strong muscle around my right knee to keep it in line. I hope so.

But there is also the possibility of surgery. Why not, I think to myself? If my knee is going to get worse anyway, why not get it fixed now, while I can still breathe on my own, rather than waiting until Jesus is about to call me home and surgery will be far riskier? This would be a prophylactic knee replacement, I suppose. There is an elegant simplicity to this idea. Preventive maintenance, as it were – acting first, rather than waiting for orthopedic disaster to strike before giving the matter any thought. If I were a building or an airplane, that’s how we would manage these things. We would fix them before they break down, not after.

But hardly anybody does this about themselves. People may plan ahead about everything else, but let it be something that involves admitting that they won’t always be as they are now and they stop cold.

But I’m fine to drive. Good for you. So is it your plan to wait until you’ve run someone over in your car, so that there is no doubt that you’ve lost that ability? Get yourself to a place in which you don’t have to drive now, while you still can.

But I like my house. Good. I liked mine, too. But is it better to wait until you fall down a flight of stairs and break a hip, after which you will be unable to assist in your own relocation and somebody will have to put you somewhere?

Like it or not, the time to make a momentous change is before you need to. If you don’t do it yourself while you can, someone will have to do it to you when you can’t. This is so tough. But it’s the kindest thing you can do for yourself. And for everyone who cares about you.

10/17/2024

Friday 18 October is the Feast of St Luke.
Fr Michael and I will be offering meditations on Luke at our noon Eucharist.

I will focus on Luke’s traditional identity as a physician. Fr Michael will focus on Luke as patron saint of artists.

NAILS IN THE WALL gallery’s current exhibit, PEACE/CONFLICT will be open for viewing.

It will be live streamed if you can’t make it in person. Go to www.stlukesmetuchen.org or to our YouTube channel.

Come and see. . . (John 1:39)

10/13/2024

Tonight's edition of Storytime deals with the 12th century collection of sacred choral music CODEX CALIXTINUS. Here is a sample.