Quite a day

Well, today was some day! This morning at church, in  Guilford, it was "Shirley Crockett" day. We gave out two Shirley Harris Crockett Awards, one to a young woman, Mollie, to make it possible for her to go to Green Mountain Camp this summer, and the second to help Jeremy, who is a "minister in discernment" - I.e., a candidate for ordination, to partially cover the cost of a psychological evaluation which is now required of all would-be pastors and costs $1800!  We sang Shirley of Guilford, a song written by Tony Barrand decades ago to honor Shirley, for which he had written a new verse. Lise talked extensiveiy about Shirley in her sermon. The choir sang anthems that were favorites when Shirley was pastor. So that was an emotional morning. It helped to know that Betsey made it to Wellesley this weekend for her class's 35th reunion.

Ellen had a sore throat and stayed home this morning so I came home to check on her and get a bite to eat. John was here continuing to salvage materials from the shed and I helped him to carry 4x8' sheets of OSB down to a place where he will pick them up later. Then I went to an afternoon meeting of the Windham-Union Association at the Dummerston church. The program was on dramatic re-telling of biblical stories. Very informative and entertaining! Now, within an hour, I have a rehearsal of the St. John Passion. A full day !

I am temporarily handicapped by having inadvertently, accidently and unintentionally deleted the camera icon from my iPhone. I hope to fix it, but no photos for a while.

A day in Maine

We had a leisurely morning. I made myself eggs over easy with two duck eggs Mary had gotten at a contra dance. I did some work on the computer. Eventually we were ready to go to Rockland to meet a couple who had been bike friends of Mary's 20 years earlier  - Rolla and Phyllis. They were returning to Tennessee from Nova Scotia.  We met them at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and then went to lunch at the Home Kitchen at the other end of the street. My haddock sandwich was delicious, as was Ellen's fish chowder. Then we all went to look at Jim and Mary's new house-in-progress in Owl's Head, maybe a fifteen minute drive from Rockland. It is a Bright Built  modular house. It is going to be a net-zero energy-efficient home when it is all finished with solar panels, heat pump, etc. It is much smaller than their current house, but has a bright and spacious feel. We all liked it a lot.

                   Lunch at the Home Kitchen

   L. to r., counter-clockwise: Rolla, Phyllis, Mary, Ellen, Jim

           The new house-in-progress, south face. 

    The "studio" interior, which looks south. Jim will paint and 

                    give music lessons here

            The kitchen, viewed from the LR/DR area

                  Rolla, Jim, Mary, and Phyllis 

           The north face viewed over the garage slab

The house is about 200 paces from the ocean, with a deeded right of way.

Here are some scenes:

        The road down to the cove

              The cove at the end of the road

Rolla and Phyllis went back to the Farnsworth and we stopped at Jess's for fish for dinner: 

                      The fish display at Jess's

Rhododendron glory

Our rhododendron bushes are at their peak at the house. They will probably be a bit gone by when we get back. Here is how they looked this morning:

Going over to Maine

This morning we had a fairly leisurely morning getting ready to go to Maine to visit Jim and Mary. We left at about 11a.m. It was a beautiful day and we just had a lovely time driving over. We had lunch at Bob's Clam Hut -  chowder, cole slaw and onion rings, got bread at When Pigs Fly bakery, ice cream at the Scoop Deck in Wells, and a light supper at Moody's Diner in Waldoboro. Got to Jim's at about 8pm. Oh, we also had a nice walk on Ogunquit beach.

       Bob's Clam's Hut order window

                         Ogunquit Beach

                  Maine Tourist Information Center

                               Moody's  Diner

More shed work

I did more shed deconstruction yesterday. It was sort of a rainy day but that didn't prevent me from working inside the shed, dismantling the workbench and salvaging a bit more lumber. We left for Maine this morning but John is going to come over and see if he can salvage any more lumber. It may be just too hard to do.

             Stripping down the shed

"Rabbi" Tom Lindeman

Tom Lindeman is a great teacher of the Bible who has been holding a class called "Exploring Scripture" at First Congregational Church in Amherst, MA on Monday evenings for 20 years. Ellen and I attended it pretty regularly for at least two years or more back in the 2004-2006 era and really enjoyed it. Then we got busy and stopped going, but missed it very much.

Tom is not Jewish; I think he's a Methodist. But his approach to the Bible is very rabbinic - taking time to explore all the nuances of meaning in a word or phrase, tracing the links to other texts, understanding the larger context. I take a similar approach, and i very much appreciated these classes. They were studying the book of Genesis when we started going, and the class spent 8 years going through Genesis verse by verse. That gives you an idea of the thoroughness of Tom's approach.

Well, he's hanging it up after 20 years, and there was a farewell party last night for everyone who had participated in the class over the years. It was held at Katie and Savanna's house - Savanna has been a regular pretty much all 20 years! 

We saw quite a few folks we haven 't seen for a while and others we didn't know who had come before we started (or after we left). It was a very lovely event  with good food, a commemorative cake, and even some substantive discussion on the question: who is the historical Jesus for you? (The group has been most recently studying the Gospel of  Matthew ). 

Tom Lindeman cutting his cake which says "Thank You, Tom"

Indeed - thank you, Tom, and all good wishes in this most recent retirement. 

Sunday things

Sunday morning I had a Dummerston church choir rehearsal at 8:30. We had awakened earlier at 7a.m., as we usually do, to listen to Krista Tippett and On Being. The guest was Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arch - an international network of safe and compassionate houses for persons who have some sort of cognitive disability. What he had to say got me thinking in some new ways about "embodied spirituality." 

Rehearsal went well and was followed by the church service where we had a guest speaker also, Lucy Fortier (a little coincidence of final letters there) who is director of our local homeless shelter. She talked about how she came to be called into that work, and what she said just fit perfectly with the music I had chosen for the choir. Sometimes that happens! 

After coffee hour we came home. The house was cold because the temperature had dropped outside, and I was feeling exhausted and decided to just go to bed and get warm, and that's pretty much what I did all afternoon! Ellen brought our lunch in and I ate, dozed, read, worked on the computer -  a perfect "sabbath" afternoon. 

About 5 p.m. I roused myself to prepare for a St. John rehearsal. I had written an essay years ago about the St. John Passion that I wanted our director, Mary W-G, to see, so I printed it out and took it. She was glad to see it because she had been thinking quite a bit about the issue of anti-Semitism in the  Passion, which is a controversial topic which I discuss in the essay. E.g., should one  change every occurance of "Juden" in the libretto to "Leute" ("people") as some conductors have done, notably  Lukas  Foss? Or should one leave the text as Bach intended it, but contextualize it through a panel and discussion? We'll see how that plays out.