Articles in "Spiritual Smart Aleck "

My Cousin Nancy and I went to the Quinault Resort and Casino ("$89 rooms!"), out by Ocean Shores. It was a good trip for both of us, getting away from our regular lives for a couple of days and doing pretty much nothing. Nancy and I are skilled at doing nothing, especially together. Oh, we talked a lot about our lives, "solved the world," as Nancy likes to say, and we also napped, watched TV, gambled a little, and walked on the beach.

Here follows part of an email written by my friend Susan Bardwell some years ago. Susan passed away last November after a brief fight with lung cancer. We miss her terribly. I must have written to her complaining that some religious proselytizers had come by the house and she responded:

First of all, an apology to Narcissa Whitman, who has suffered enough. After I sent out my last column I was informed right smartly by several people that the person who brought the dandelion to Seattle was in fact Catherine Maynard, second wife of "Doc" Maynard, Seattle’s first doctor.

Our dog, Jive, passed on about a month ago. I’m sorry if I forgot to tell you. I thought I’d told everyone, but I was talking with Sonya yesterday and said in passing, "Now that the dog’s dead..." and she shrieked, "WHAT?"

My cousins Charlotte, Nancy, and I made a cemetery tour. My father and their mother were brother and sister, so we share grandparents and great-grandparents. Charlotte has become more intrigued by genealogy the last couple of years, and she wanted photos of family headstones to put up on the internet.

In a recent column I spoke of a VW van in less than flattering terms. Those remarks prompted a friend, Alan Blue Heron Milinazzo Barnett, to write in praise of the VW bus. I asked him if I could run his letter as a guest column. He said yes. Here it is:

Last week our big projection television lost its electronic mind and began showing pictures in strange colors, and also breaking the images into streaks and blotches, while making a noise like something inside was whirling around furiously losing pieces, and getting ready to explode. We turned it off and moved a back-up television from my office into the living room. We seldom leave the house and television is our main form of entertainment, and I didn’t really need to watch TV while working on the computer, did I?

Three mighty warriors gathered to go hunting. These were their names: She Who Argues; Makes Many Plans; and Straight Arrow, so called by the other two because she tended to drive the car straight through curves instead of around them.

They wanted to begin early in the morning, so they caught a ferry to Southworth a few minutes after noon and headed for the fabled hunting grounds of East Bremerton,

Micheal, the husband of my friend Susan who recently passed, writes that their four year old grandson Ian asked if MaMa was dead. Yes, Micheal told him, and the boy went off to play. But now, a couple of weeks later, Ian wants to know when MaMa is going to come back alive again.

Hallowe’en is past, and the next day the Christmas products appeared, at least on the shelves that weren’t already decked with Christmas products. That stuff has been in the big stores on the mainland since August.

All my life the Christmas shopping season has left me feeling inadequate and disorganized about Christmas shopping and gift giving. There is a reason for that feeling: I am inadequate and disorganized when it comes to Christmas shopping and gift giving. I’m the one waiting to mail packages at the post office on December 23rd, for example. 

Once upon a time, a friend’s heart stopped. It was 4:30 in the morning. His wife awoke, there was a 911 call, there was CPR. The EMTs got his heart going again, and he was transported to the hospital, but a doctor told his wife that her husband was not expected to live.She called the priest to come and give her husband last rites. She called their children to come and say good-bye. All who knew him prayed for him, hoped for the best and feared the worst. 

I was asked to write a blurb about the island Labyrinth Tour that is coming up, and I realized that the blurb needed a picture.

I mentioned this in an email to my friend Susan, who is a retired journalist, and told her that it would be hard to get a good picture of a labyrinth because a labyrinth is a pattern on the ground, and I wasn’t sure how I could get a picture that looked like anything more than a lumpy bit of lawn with some rocks set in. I mentioned that perhaps I could climb up on a bench that sits at the edge of the lawn where the labyrinth is located, and from that height I could get a better picture.