America! America! God shed His grace on thee...

The photographs on Ree Drummond’s post yesterday say it all.

A different kind of Memorial Day tribute.

My backyard neighbors -- not the ones in their eighties -- have decided to shoot off fireworks this Memorial Day evening. They mean well, I suppose, but it seems a little bizarre to be celebrating the deaths of American military men and women with fireworks as though it were the 4th of July.

But since the ice has been broken, so to speak, my Memorial Day post this year will be in honor of all the children who played soldier and grew up to fight real enemies, some in the flesh, some in the spiritual realm. Wickedness in high places takes many forms. And the battle still rages.

Here, from years ago, is one of my all-time favorite songs by the Christian trio known as the Sharrett Brothers. You may not know it, but after hearing it you will not soon forget it.

"Soldiers Again" (6:32) by the Sharrett Brothers, when it was still a work in progress back in their college days. The best acoustics around were apparently in their dormitory’s showers.

In case you had trouble understanding the lyrics, here they are:

Backyard soldiers, little boys,
We fought the enemy with little toys.
Sticks for swords, hands for guns,
Every battle always won.

But as we grew and went our way
We forgot about our soldier days.
No more swords, no more guns,
No more battles to be won.

But we were wrong.
We did not see we still had an enemy.
So now we stand, Friend with friend,
We are soldiers once again.

We are soldiers again
In the army of the Lord.
We are soldiers again
And His Word is our sword.
We will not be denied; with Him by our side
We know the victory we’ll win.
We will fight till the end,
Soldiers again.

And we still can’t even see the one we are fighting,
But we stand with One who can, the Lord God Almighty.

We are soldiers again
In the army of the Lord.
We are soldiers again
And His Word is our sword.
We will not be denied; with Him by our side
We know the victory we’ll win.
We will fight till the end,
Soldiers again.

We will not be denied; with Him by our side
We know the victory we’ll win.
We will fight till the end,
Soldiers again.

Life lesson #17,643: Some people are oblivious.

During a portion of my corporate career, I commuted to work as part of a four-person car pool. Every morning each of us would drive a mile or so from our homes to the local Target parking lot, arriving from four different directions. Then three of us would park our cars and pile into the fourth car for the rest of the 26-mile trip. Each week, we rotated the lucky car and driver for “the rest of the trip” so as a group we managed to cut gas consumption by 75%.

The members of the car pool were George, John, Diane, and moi (not Paul and Ringo). Although we all worked on the same floor of the same building for the same company, basically we discovered that we couldn’t stand each other. We disagreed and argued from the time we entered the car until we reached our destination -- Diane began referring to our little group as “the killer car pool” to the amusement of the rest of the floor -- until we reached a truce of sorts when someone suggested that instead of talking we listen to music on the way to work so that we would arrive calm, cool, and collected instead of stressed out before the workday even started.

We no longer argued as much, but we had completely different tastes in music, and it was always driver’s choice. But a deal was a deal, so it worked after a fashion. We even began to like each other a little.

One day, George (who was Japanese-Hawaiian and a graduate of the University of Oregon, had a wife and two children, attended church every Sunday, sang in the choir, and saw no conflict in the fact that he was also the proud owner of a large collection of porn-video) had the radio turned on to a Golden Oldies station. The following song filled George’s Volkswagen Beetle:

“Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds (3:22)

We all listened in silence, remembering the days of our own youth. When the selection ended, I said, “That’s in the Bible.”

George said, “What’s in the Bible?”

“That song,” I said. “Except for the title, the lyrics are from the third chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament.”

“Really?” said George. “I never listened to the words. I just thought it was good to dance to.”

Thus the education of Rhymeswithplague continued long after school days were finished.

Perhaps if George had driven a Lincoln Town Car instead of a Volkswagen Beetle our car pool would have lasted longer. Proximity does strange things to people.

As Gomer Pyle used to say...

“Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”

You’ll never guess who attended the wedding rehearsal this afternoon. (You do remember that I had to go to a wedding rehearsal, don’t you? I told you in the previous post that the groom is 82 and the bride is 80, their names are Andy and Ann, their last name is not Raggedy, and the wedding will take place tomorrow.)

Well, the bride and groom were there, of course, and the attendants and the minister and the singer and the accompanist (me), but there was someone else.

Give up?

THE BRIDE’S MOTHER!!!

I am not making this up.

As Gomer Pyle also used to say, “Gah-ah-ah-LEE!”

I think that says it all.

Snippets of life in the fast lane

On my bedroom dresser sits a little bank that knows how to keep track of the loose change I occasionally deposit in it, and it displays the amount it contains for all to see. Yesterday one coin dropped through the slot but the number on the display didn’t change. I had not been paying attention up to that point, so I dumped everything out to investigate. Eventually I got to the root of the problem; I discovered a coin the size of a dime but the color of a penny that wasn’t one of ours at all. Probably Canadian or British, I thought, but no -- the woman’s head on one side was definitely not Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor-Mountbatten. Taking off my glasses to have a better look (doesn’t everybody do that?), I saw that one side of the coin read “1 cent 1967” and the other side had the words “Juliana Koningen der Nederlanden” -- a Dutch coin! Perhaps Carolina was just passing through on her way to feed Evie and Naloma and Willem? Perhaps Joran van der Sloot escaped from his Peruvian prison and ate lunch at our local Subway? Perhaps I have too vivid an imagination? Anyway, finding a coin from Holland in my change was a first for me.

Mrs. RWP and I drove all the way into downtown Atlanta yesterday, a distance of about 40 miles (80 roundtrip, in case anyone is counting) to obtain for our daughter a copy of her marriage certificate. The Fulton County Courthouse is just one block from the State Capitol Building. We drove in on I-75 but came back on surface streets just to be different. Along the way we passed Northside Drive Baptist Church where Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter attended while he was governor of Georgia, and we passed the runway at Dobbins Air Force Base where Air Force One always lands whenever the current occupant of the White House comes to town, and we passed the Big Chicken in Marietta, best-known landmark of all locally. Eventually we got back home after stopping for lunch in Canton. We each had a Roast Chicken Club Sandwich with Curly Fries and a Senior Drink (root beer) at Arby’s because we didn’t want to risk running into Joran van der Sloot at the Subway.

We had a bad thunderstorm last evening, this front being what was left of the one that spawned the terrible tornado in Joplin, Missouri, earlier this week. Once again we were out on the road, headed to a program at our grandson’s school. The sky was black and the winds were high and it was raining too hard to call it cats and dogs, more like horses. I would not have been surprised to see Evie and Naloma and Willem falling out of the sky. Someone reported grapefruit-sized hail north of us and another reported baseball-sized hail, but I think the reports must have been exaggerated. The weather man on the car radio said that the TTI (Tornado Threat Index) was only a 3 out of a possible 10. Our rain gauge, when we returned home, contained more than two inches of water.

My neighbors have gotten a new doggie, a miniature Schnauzer, and have decided to put up a fence so that their pet can have the run of the back yard. The surveyors came and erected three stakes, complete with bright pink ribbons flapping in the breeze, along the property line. Jethro doesn’t know quite what to make of these new additions and is even a little spooked. I’m sure he will follow all ensuing events with interest and report back to us.

Today I have to attend a wedding rehearsal at 1:30 for the wedding tomorrow afternoon of 82-year-old Andy and his 80-year-old bride, Ann, where I will be playing piano. And no, their names are not Raggedy. No modern music for them, thank you. They have requested “O Promise Me,” “Because,” Noel Stookey’s “Wedding Song,” and Albert Hay Malotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Keep your eyes peeled. You never know what you might find.

Oprah Who? (part 2)

Day Two of the Three-Day Extravaganza accompanying Oprah (Harpo spelled backwards) Winfrey’s departure from daytime network television brought us Will Smith, Jamie Fox, Queen Latifah, Maya Angelou, Usher, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and what looked like half the student body of Morehouse College in Atlanta and even Stedman Goodman, Oprah’s long-time live-in significant other. Frank Sinatra would have been there too, but he’s dead.

Did you know that although Oprah may be Harpo spelled backwards it was never intended to be that way? Her name was supposed to be Orpah, same as Naomi’s other daughter-in-law from the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament, but somehow it got spelled wrong on her birth certificate. True story.

It was reported this week that Monday night on The Late Show, David Letterman’s program, Lady Gaga or GaGa or whatever it is tore off part of the page of questions Dave was using to interview her and ate it. Television just gets better and better, doesn’t it?

Mrs. RWP and I watch quite a bit of television but we don’t watch what the hip crowd watches. We watch Antiques Roadshow and reruns of All in the Family and quite a few crime shows (Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, CSI: Miami, NCIS, The First 48, 48 Hours: Hard Evidence, Dateline. Unsolved Mysteries, Cold Case Files, Without a Trace, and probably a few others I can’t think of at the moment). We do have our standards, however. We refuse to watch Nancy Grace.

We used to watch the Home and Garden Network (HGTV) and the Food Network a lot, but eventually we tired of Cake Boss and Chopped and Barefoot Contessa and Paula Deen and Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse and The Iron Chef and that couple that have that barbecue place in Memphis and Property Virgins and Flip This House and House Hunters and even House Hunters International. We stopped watching Jon and Kate Plus Eight when Kate went off the deep end, or maybe it was Jon, or both. We didn’t watch a single weekly episode of Dancing With the Stars or American Idol or The X Factor or Desperate Housewives or Glee. Currently we watch reruns of something called The Glades as a sort of run-up to a second season of it that starts in a few weeks. We have been known to watch an old Bill Gaither and His Homecoming Friends rerun occasionally just to keep our toes in the Southern Country Gospel Music pond, even though half of Bill’s friends are dead now too, including Jake Hess, Eva Mae Lefevre, Vestal and Howard Goodman, Rex Nelon, James Blackwood, Rusty Goodman, J.D. Sumner, Glen Payne, George Younce, Big Chief Weatherington, the list goes on and on. Just like Frank Sinatra.

Oprah probably never heard of any of them.

Eventually all of us will be dead, even Oprah, replaced by upstarts and newcomers and wannabes who, if they look back at all, will probably look back on the people of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with amusement, or disdain, or utter contempt.

Then, in the great cycle of life, they will become has-beens themselves and shuffle off this mortal coil (copyright, Will Shakespeare, circa 1601).

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I’ll tell you something though, I’d rather be a has-been than a never-was.

Oprah Who?

Friends of Oprah (Harpo spelled backwards) are filling a 13,000-seat coliseum in Chicago this week for the last-ever shows of Oprah (Harpo spelled backwards) Winfrey on network television before she goes completely cable at OWN, the Oprah (Harpo spelled backwards) Winfrey Network, which I predict will be watched only by Oprah (Harpo spelled backwards) Winfrey Network gluttons. In the first of her last two coliseum appearances, aired yesterday, we have already been treated to Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Josh Groban, Patti LaBelle, Halle Berry, Diane Sawyer, Madonna, Beyoncé, and The Night Of At Least A Thousand Stars. All it needed was Jerry Lewis singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Only God and possibly Harold Camping know what heights (or depths) her remaining shows might reach.

Call me crazy, but I prefer goodbyes of the quieter, gentler, sweeter, more intimate sort.

Like this one, from 1992, in three parts:

Part 1 (6:44)

Part 2 (7:37)

Part 3 (4:44)

And here is a lagniappe (a little something extra) (2:55).