I think that I shall never see

...a poem lovely as a tree, wrote poet Joyce Kilmer in 1913. His poem became very popular and soon schoolchildren all over America were reciting its 12 lines ending with "Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree". A few years later, humorist Ogden Nash wrote, "I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all." But I digress.

Atlanta is known far and wide as "a city in a forest". North Georgia had lots of trees until the inexorable advance of civilization removed them to make way for things it deemed more important like multi-lane highways, busy industrial parks, and vast residential subdivisions.

In my neighborhood, however, the opposite occurred. I think of it as Nature's Revenge. After our subdivision was built, the only trees to be seen were single hardwood trees planted in each front yard. One neightbor had a red maple, we had a silver maple, and the neighbor on the other side had a Bradford pear. To my eyes it looked rather devoid of vegetation. Then Mother Nature took over, and on the bare hills behind us to the east and north, trees began to grow of their own accord. Over the past 18 years, without human help, scrub pine trees started their own self-instigated reforestation project, so much so that during the past couple of years, Mrs. RWP and I began to fear that our neighbor's trees might come crashing down on our bedroom in a strong wind or that large, ice-covered branches would damage our roof during an ice storm. Though the trees did afford some privacy, the reality is that they were dangerous to live around.

In the last week of January, that all changed. Our neighbor hired Dave's Tree Service of Talking Rock, Georgia, who came equipped with a big red machine and a big yellow machine and a big noisy wood chipper. In three days time they removed more than 20 trees from our neighbor's back yard (British, garden). The result is not as private as before, but we feel a lot safer when we lay our heads on our pillows each night.

Here are some before, during, and after pictures. My stupid computer (translation: the dummkopf at the keyboard) is not able to rotate some of the photographs, so you will just have to turn your head sideways. You might even try standing on your head. I'm sorry, but it simply can't be helped. It apparently takes a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

The really amazing thing is that three days after the trees were cleared out, our Homeowners Association picked our yard as yard of the month for February (I bloggged about it earlier). My theory is that they could finally see my house as they drove up the street because they were no longer distracted/blinded by all the greenery.

Until next time, I remain....

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P.S. -- You may be scratching your head at this point about the paragraph preceding the photographs in which I mentioned dummkopfs and better men than I am, Gunga Din. I found such a man, or rather he stepped up to the plate voluntarily and sent me copies of my photographs all going in the right direction, and I have now replaced the askew pictures with his kind gifts. Many thanks, and I mean that sincerely, to blogger Adrian Ward of Auchtermuchty, Scotland, for rescuing me from my dilemma. If I were independently wealthy I would send money to him, but since I'm not. I won't.

From the archives: Aunt Faye (November 23, 2009)

In March 1967, Mrs. RWP and I were living in Poughkeepsie, New York, with our two young sons. I had been out of the Air Force for about eighteen months. I was 25 years old, about to turn 26. My mother had died of cancer almost ten years earlier. My dad, who had remarried, lived in Texas and was slowly dying of pancreatic cancer. Mrs. RWP and I had obtained an Eastern Air Lines credit card in November 1966, and we had flown to Texas with our little boys to be with the family at the time of my Dad’s operation. I had not been able to speak with my Dad since January because he had grown gradually weaker and was confined to his bed and no longer able to get to the telephone. Cell phones had not yet been invented; everything was land line in those days. I called every week and spoke with my stepmother, though, and I could hear the weariness in her voice.

At work on a Friday morning I received a call around 8:30 a.m. from my stepbrother Eddie in Texas.

“Bob,” he said, “your Dad is going downhill rapidly. You should probably think about planning to come to Texas soon.”

I thanked him for calling and alerted my supervisor that I might be taking some time off in the near future. At the supper table that night I said to Mrs. RWP, “I wonder how Dad is doing?” and she said, “Why don’t you give them a call?” It was a big deal in 1967 to call long distance, not nearly as common as today, and definitely not inexpensive. I dialed the number and heard my other stepbrother’s voice at the other end of the line. After making small talk for a couple of minutes, I said, “Bobby Gerald, how is Dad doing?”

“Well, Bob,” he said, sounding a little surprised, “he died at nine o’clock this morning. I thought you knew. We thought you were on your way here.”

To say I was in shock is putting it mildly. It really had not registered with me from talking to Eddie earlier that things were that bad. I could say I was busy with my new career and my family, but in reality I was young and stupid. I told Bobby Gerald I would be there the next day. Because our funds were low and the children were small, Mrs. RWP decided not to make the trip.

It was early Friday evening and the banks were closed until Monday. There were no automatic teller machines in 1967, so I drove to four different supermarkets in Poughkeepsie and wrote a check at each one for $25.00, the maximum. I called Eastern Air Lines and made a reservation for a flight out of Newark, New Jersey, ninety miles away, on Saturday morning.

After a two-hour drive to the airport, I handed the Eastern agent my credit card to pay for the round-trip ticket I had reserved. The charge was denied. A mixup in credit card processing had occurred, which eventually was straightened out a couple of weeks later, but at that moment, standing at the ticket desk at Newark airport, the only thing I could do was pay $88.00 cash for a one-way ticket to Dallas, Texas. I got on the plane with $12.00 in my pocket, not knowing how I was going to get back to New York after my Dad’s funeral.

My stepbrother met me at the Dallas airport in mid-afternoon and took me to my stepmother’s house. There seemed to be a party in progress. Everyone was laughing and talking, eating and drinking. It seemed out of place to me at the time, inappropriate, but in retrospect it was understandable; the tension of the previous couple of months had been broken and people were just relieved that the ordeal was over. It was a natural response to what had been a very stressful situation. I just couldn’t see it at the time.

After supper I asked when we were going to the funeral home. The laughter and talking stopped and everyone looked at me. “We went last night,” someone finally said. “We weren’t planning to go back tonight.” My oldest stepbrother said “I’ll take you” and he did.

Since I was the only one coming from a distance, the funeral had been planned for 3:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon at Coppell Methodist Church. I was very glad I had made that phone call on Friday night; otherwise, I would not have been there for my Dad’s funeral.

No one went to church on Sunday morning, and family members began to arrive at the house before noon. My stepmother had five brothers and four sisters and most of them lived in Dallas County. She was putting food on the table when she turned to me and said, “Bob, I think your Dad would like it if you sang ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ at the service.”

I was receiving shocks on a daily basis, it seemed. I had played the organ at funerals before and I had sung at funerals before, but never for someone in my immediate family. I walked out into the back yard to get some fresh air and to clear my head. Aunt Faye, who was thirteen years younger than my stepmother, was there. She took one look at me and asked me what was wrong.

“She wants me to sing at Dad’s funeral,” I said.

“Oh, my. Can you do it?” asked Aunt Faye.

“I don’t know,” I said, "but if I’m going to sing I need to go over to the church and familiarize myself with the organ and rehearse.”

Faye said, “I’ll take you.” We arrived at the church a few minutes after the morning service had ended. A Hammond organ sat at the right front corner of the sanctuary, facing the pulpit and perpendicular to the pews. I broke down twice while rehearsing.

On the drive back to the house, Faye said, “When will you be going back to New York?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” I said. “I have no idea.” I told her what had happened at the Newark Airport and said I was taking one thing at a time and right now I was just trying to get through the day of the funeral.

As we got out of the car Faye said, “I want to lend you the money,” and handed me one hundred dollars.

I thanked her and said, “I will have to pay it back to you a little each month.”

“That will be fine,” she said.

After the funeral, one more shock remained. One of my stepmother’s brothers came up to me and said, “That was great! It was just like in a Hollywood movie!”

He meant it as a compliment, I suppose, but it wasn’t really what I needed to hear at that moment.

I flew back to New York on Tuesday and began mailing a check to Aunt Faye each month for ten dollars. I mentioned that we were expecting another child. After the third month, I received a letter from her. In it were my three checks, uncashed, and a note saying she wanted me to consider the entire one hundred dollars as a gift from her for the new baby.

Aunt Faye died this week in California, where she lived with her son Danny. Her children Libby, Danny, and Larry, and her niece Janice accompanied her body back to Texas for burial there. She was in her eighties.

Shakespeare said, “The evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.” It may have been so with Caesar, but I have written this post to honor Aunt Faye and to make sure the good in her is not going to be interred with her bones. The good in her became a part of my story and helped me when I needed it most. I will never forget her kindness.

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Back to the present day (February 17, 2022). I neglected to say that not only did Aunt Faye's generosity enable me to buy a one-way plane ticket from Dallas back to Newark, New Jersey, it also (and this is no small thing) enabled me to pay for having parked my car at the Newark airport from Saturday until Tuesday and, having retrieved it, to drive all the way back to Poughkeepsie.

When is a photograph not a photograph?

I ran across an article at publicdomainreview.org that I found more than merely interesting. Interesting doesn't begin to describe it. It was bizarre, unique, fascinating, and horrifying all at the same time. It was a glimpse into America's past during the Great Depression of the 1930s and also a glimpse into ourselves, an example of our better angels and our worst demons on display. It should act as an object lesson for the "cancel culture" mindset of the current generation, and a warning flag to us all that it could happen again, eternal vigilance being the price of liberty after all. This man was not a Nazi with a swastika, he was a well-meaning and loyal bureaucrat just doing his job.

I have teased you enough. Read the article, even the comments at the end, and form your own opinion. Perhaps you will think I am over-reacting and that it was no big deal, but I hope you do not.

"The Kept and The Killed"

You think Hebrew is hard? Try Cherokee.

Many of you know, and you're probably getting tired of hearing about it, that I am trying to learn to read Hebrew. I have now completed eight of the 11 lessons. The goal is that when I finish I will be able to read the Old Testament in Hebrew out loud (or even silently) and be confident that I am pronouncing everything correctly. Of course, this is quite a different skill from knowing what I am saying. I will still need to refer to the English version for that. I will not understand Old Testament Hebrew any more than I understand New Testament Greek but I want to be able to read them both. I hope this makes sense to you. If it doesn't, it simply can't be helped. I think it must be satisfying some deep inner need.

Learning to read Hebrew proved very interesting because we didn't learn the alphabet in alphabetic order. To be exact, we tackled N first, moved on to H, and jumped around in what seemed like random fashion.

I am fascinated by languages. For example, the Cherokee Indians' language had no written form until an illiterate Cherokee man named Sequoyah captured its sounds painstakingly syllable by syllable. He began his work during the 1810s and completed it in 1821. Literacy then spread so rapidly among the Cherokee nation that by 1825 a newspaper in the Cherokee language was being published. Sequoyah had come up with a "syllabary" consisting of not letters but syllables using characters of his own invention as well as some of the conventional letters used by his English-speaking neighbors even though he did not retain their original sound. The word "Cherokee" itself, for example, which in the Cherokee language is not "Che-ro-kee" but "tsa-la-gi", looks like this using Sequoyah's characters:

Here is the entire Syllabary of Sequoyah in the order he originally put it:

One word comes to mind. Mind-boggling. Another word comes to mind. Indecipherable.

Someone came along and lent some order to Sequoyah's work, which was very helpful. The result is a grid with consonants down the left side and vowels across the top. Every syllable in Cherokee consists of a consonant followed by a vowel. The first row displays the six Cherokee vowels a, e, i, o, u,, and the unaccented "schwa e" sound (nasalized) represented by the character v. Down the left side of the Syllabary are the Cherokee consonants. The grid shows the characters for every combination of every consonant with every vowel.

Can you find "tsa-la-gi" (Cherokee) in the more organized Syllabary?

The more anal among you may notice that Sequoyah's original list had 86 symbols and the later organized one has 85. One syllable became obsolete.

Thank God for small favors (British, favours).

Finally (and I can hear you breathing a sigh of relief), did you notice that every syllable in Cherokee ends in a vowel? Well, so does Japanese! So you should say "sa-yo-na-ra" instead of "sy-o-nar-a", "To-yo-ta" instead of "Toy-o-ta", and "Mi-tsu-bi-shi" (which means "three diamonds", by the way) instead of "Mit-su-bish-i".

You have made it all the way through another post by rhymeswithplague.

I wonder what Tasker Dunham will make of it?

Decisions, decisions

The poem below was either written by Eric Metaxas or co-written by Victoria Jackson and Eric Metacas. I'm not sure. You can look them up if you like but I will save you the trouble by telling you that Eric Metaxas is the author of two weii-received biographies about Dietrich Bonhoffer and William Wilburforce whilst (American, while) Victoria Jackson spent six seasons on Saturday Night Live! back in the 1980s and 1990s as one of that program's quirkier characters.

Why Bother?

Why bother?
Butterflies die.
Balloons pop.
People leave.

I think you will agree with me that that poem is dark. It is very dark. It is one of the darkest poems I have ever read.

The odd thing is that Victoria Jackson's whole career has been in comedy, and Eric Metaxas, while a serious biographer, has a strong comedic streak that is often in evidence on his weekly television program, The Eric Metaxas Radio Show. When it comes to world view, both of them are conservative, evangelical, born-again Christians.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

A progress report, or dots and dashes are not always Morse code

In a post last month entitled "I, polyglot" I reported that I had begun trying to learn to read Hebrew. At that time I had completed four video lessons out of a total of 11 in an online course. Today I'm going to give you a progress report.

I'm still trying, but my learning rate has slowed a bit. It has not become moribund yet; it is just moving along at the pace of molasses (British, treacle). Specifically, I have now completed six of the 11 video lessons. I know, pathetic, isn't it? I will get there eventually, or it may be more accurate to say that I intend to.

In my defense, I have gone back and reviewed the first six videos several times to make sure the information is emblazoned in my brain. I tend to go a little too fast because I am eager to get on with it, and instead of the new knowledge sinking in I find that what I thought I had learned has gone with the wind.

There is a famous movie title hidden in the preceding paragraph. Finding it ensures your continued eligibility to be our grand prize winner. No purchase is necessary.

I shall now go on at length about why Hebrew is so difficult. For one thing, the letters look nothing like ours, and many of them look like one another. For another thing, Hebrew is read from right to left instead of from left to right, so the back of the book will be in the front and the front of the book will be in the back. If you can't comprehend what I'm trying to say, it doesn't matter. Just keep reading.

You may remember that I ended a recent post with the phrase "I remain yr obdt svt" in the same way people ended business letters in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. If you managed to interpret the last part as "your obedient servant" you begin to understand the biggest problem involved with learning Hebrew. In written Hebrew, both ancient and modern, there are no vowels. It's hard to know how to pronounce words, or even to know what the words are, when there are no vowels UNLESS you already speak the language.

That's why native speakers of English can see that "yr obdt svt" is "your obedient servant" but non-native speakers might scratch their heads. Little boys in Christian Sunday Schools often choose the shortest verse in the New Testament, John 11:35, to fulfill their assignment to memorize a Scripture verse each week. Here is what that verse would look like if English had no vowels:

JSS WPT
Here's another verse with which you may be familiar. Can you read it without the vowels?

N TH BGNNNG GD CRTD TH HVN ND TH RTH

Wouldn't it be helpful if there were some way to indicate vowels? Of course it would!

J_eS_uS W_ePT
_iN TH_e B_eG_iNN_iNG G_oD CR_eaT_eD TH_e H_eaV_eN _aND TH_{e ea}RTH

Between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago, a group of Hebrew scholars in the Palestinian city of Tiberias -- they are known as Masoretes -- devised a way to show non-speakers of Hebrew how to pronounce the Hebrew words in the Old Testament by adding a system of dots and dashes (mostly dots) placed strategically over, under, and near the consonants of the Hebrew Bible.

Here is what a passage from the Hebrew Old Testament (Tanakh) looks like with the Masoretic vowel indicators added:

The first sentence (first two lines) translated into English is "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one". One of the most well-known passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is found in the sixth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy.

A transliteration of the Hebrew line is "shema yisrael (adonai) eloheinu (adonai) echad" but that is a little misleading. The word adonai does not appear in the text. Adonai means "the LORD" and is always used as a substitute for the four-letter word יְהוָה (YHWH), which is really unpronounceable because it is more like the sound of inhaling and exhaling (the living God, remember?). You can see, then, how a word like YHWH became YaHWeH by others even though it is never spoken in Judaism. And that word morphed into the English word Jehovah after the letters J and V were added to our alphabet in the Middle Ages.

A historical note: When Moses asked the voice speaking to him from the bush that burned but was not consumed what its name was (so that he could tell it to the Israelites) the voice said יְהוָה (YHWH) which has always been translated as "I am that I am". As I said, observant Jews never utter this name because it is considered too holy; they say adonai (LORD) instead. In an English sentence they write G-d instead of God.

Things get complicated very rapidly when a person is trying to learn Hebrew.

I'm just saying.

A very pleasant surprise

A ring of the doorbell, a bark of the dog, and a hearty "Heigh-Ho, Silver!" and there stood Jen and Dave from the Homeowners Association on Tuesday around noon. When they told me they were from the HOA, I thought they had come to tell me I needed to add pinestraw to all of my shrubbery beds, but that wasn't why they had come. Instead, they told me that our yard had been selected as Yard of the Month for February! They placed a sign in my yard for all to see and said it would stay there for the entire month.

We have lived here since 2003 and this is the first time our yard has ever been selected.

A feature added to the program this year is that at the end of the year a drawing will be held from all the monthly winners names and the person whose name is drawn will receive 50% off the annual HOA dues for 2023! That would be worth several hundred dollars, so it would be very nice but I'm not holding my breath.

Tuesday was a very pleasant surprise. Yes, it was.