Lunch with the Carnahans

 At the end of last week we had lunch with Mary and John Carnahan. We took it to their house because they are no longer driving. It was a beautiful day and we met outside in their backyard, using lawn chairs  and side tables. Ellen had made a lovely salad with blueberry muffins and peach turnovers. It was yummy. The Carnahans have been friends for decades -going back to when their children and ours were in high school: e.g., their son, Paul, and our Betsey were on a debate team together. Their daughter, Sarah, like Betsey, also had an untimely death. Back in the old days Shirley and I would go to their house every Friday night to watch Washington Week in Review together. At one point, John, who was a lawyer and then judge, ran for Lt. Governor of Vermont as a Democrat. When Michael Dukakis ran for President, they hosted a house party for his wife, Kitty. When Shirley was introduced to her, she replied, "you're famous!" We were flabbergasted because Shirley had recently been front-page news.  Kitty Dukakis obviously had a very good staff! Shirley had been front-page news because a local fundamentalist minister had refused to allow Shirley to come inside his church and lead a funeral, as the family had requested. (He was opposed to women ministers). It created a local brouhaha! Anyway, we've shared a lot over the years. Dear friends, whom Ellen has come to love as well.

I didn't get any pictures of  our lunch 😢 but here are a couple from the past:

Our two families: front row, l. to r., Paul Carnahan, Susan Carnahan, Sarah Carnahan, Eve (Paul's wife), Shirley. Back row, l. to. r., Mary Carnahan, Betsey, Rob, me, John, John Carnahan

Mary and John Carnahan

Union Service

 Church this morning was a zoom service involving five churches: the Guilford community church, Dummerston Congregational church, West Brattleboro First Congregational church, West Dover Congregational church, and our host church, Centre congregational church. The Rev. Scott Couper was the Host pastor. About 70 households participated, which probably meant at least 100 people. Some of them as far away as South Africa and Ecuador. It was a lovely service, with a beautiful flute and organ  Prelude and postlude. Scott gave an unusual sermon based on a 6th Century Chinese gospel. A text that I was not familiar with.

Centre congregational church

Rev. Scott Couper

65th Wedding Anniversary

Yesterday was a special day. If my late wife, Shirley, were still alive, on August 27th we would have celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary. We were married on Aug. 27, 1955, in the Brighton Heights Reformed Church, St. George, Staten Island, NY. That was an exciting time in other ways also. Hurricane Diane had roared through the Northeast the previous week - causing severe flooding in Pennsylvania especially. It took out all the bridges between Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey -bridges the bus used that I regularly took from Danville, PA (where I was involved in clinical training for seminarians at the Danville State Mental Hospital) to New York City. Thus for this last trip of the summer, the bus had to go from Scranton, PA down to Philadelphia to get across the Susquahanna River, making for a much longer trip. My father was  the officiating minister at our wedding. Little did we know then that a year later, he would be diagnosed with a bi-lateral frontal lobe brain tumor, a cancer that took his life eight months later.  Shirley died on May 24, 1998, and I am blessed to have been married to Ellen for 15 years. But I still honor Shirley's memory, and our 42+ years of marriage. And today I remember that relationship with gratitude. 

 

The receiving line after our wedding: l. to r., my mother, Olga Crockett; my father, Barney Crockett; Shirley; me; Jane Pollock, Shirley's Maid of Honor. Place: the church hall at Brighton Heights Church.

The Harris' front lawn: l. to r., Shirley's Aunt Grace (Grace Langley Hall, her mother's twin sister); her mother (Florence Langley Harris); Shirley; me; my mother; my mother's sister, Julia Winter. 

Lise's afghan

Friday afternoon we met with our departing pastor, Lise Sparrow, in a short face-to-face session (wearing masks and socially distanced) to say our goodbyes and express our appreciation for each other. Tomorrow is her last Guilford Church service alone. She'll be around for a few more weeks orienting the new pastor, and then will officially retire and spend time with her grandchildren, including a newborn boy. 

The climax of our session was the planned appearance of about a dozen members of Ellen's prayer shawl knitting group who had each knit a square for an afghan which Ellen then crocheted together and made a border for. This was presented to Lise, with a prayer of blessing. It was a very moving moment, and the climax of days (weeks?) of work by Ellen.

Presentation 

Another view

Lise's grandkids, surrounded by knitted love

 

 

A quick trip to Maine

Tuesday, we made a quick, one-day trip to Maine, with no overnight. We left our house at about 8a.m. and got back at about 1:15 a.m. the next morning! A lot of driving for a short visit, but we felt it was worth it to see Katie and Savanna, Brendon, Jim and Mary, all at once. Without the pandemic we would have stayed a few days at Jim and Mary's. The first thing I had to do when we got there was to record a bass line for an anthem  for Peter Amidon for the Guilford service this coming Sunday. It was due on Tuesday and I had no chance to do it before we left. So I found an isolated picnic table and did it there, and was able to send it to Peter from there. Soon after that we got hit with a violent thunderstorm, with wind and heavy rain, that just came out of nowhere. We gathered in Jim and Mary's garage to wait that out.It was very short-lived and soon the sun was out again! Then it was time for dinner! Savanna had made a delicious chicken dumpling stew, and Mary had made a blueberry pie - Yum! So we did well. And then we headed back. I kept Ellen alert in the car by feeding her cheese and crackers and playing music through the radio. So the trip back was sort of enjoyable, though Ellen got pretty tired. But she handles it like the trooper that she is!

Enjoying the view from K&S's cottage 

A curious gull, no doubt hoping for some food

These beautiful late-summer flowers were near where we ate

A beautiful site for a lovely meal

Let's face it - you can't beat Maine! We are so lucky to have a place there to visit! Even for just a day. 

Later this afternoon we are meeting Lise Sparrow for our "good-bye" session. The 23rd will be her last Sunday leading the service alone. The 30th is a Union Service with three other churches and Sept. will see the arrival of Elissa Lucozzi, our new pastor. Lise is meeting individually with people to say goodbye. 

A little mystery solved.

In my previous post I labeled a photo "The May, 1945 meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales in Westminster Chapel." This is what was written on the back side of the photo in my father's hand. But I wrote it with bewilderment because I didn't think my father could have been in London in May of 1945. He was stationed in France at that time. He had gone to London in June of 1944, when he was first sent overseas by the army, and before he was assigned to 1314 Engineers and sent to France. But that couldn't explain a photo taken in May of 1945. I puzzled over this for quite a while until I thought to look at his Chaplain's Journal for that time. There, on the page for "May, 1945," he had listed a few items in a small hand that I had never noticed before, and one of them was "attended the meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales." A couple of other items indicated that he had held a shipboard service of worship, and had visited another church in London. So he had gone to London from France. That seemed so unlikely - how could he just take off and go to London with a war going on? But then I thought to check his letters written at about that time, and in one written in April, I found a line in which he says that there was to be a. Chaplain's meeting in London in May. That made it all feasible. He didn't go on his own - it was official army business and he undoubtedly traveled in a group of Chaplains. My guess is that the Army command was anticipating the end of the war in Europe (VE Day was in fact May 8, 1945, so the European war ended just as this trip was getting underway) and they needed to gather the chaplains and tell them what to expect. So that was a big "A-Ha" moment for me. 

A page from my father's Chaplain's Journal: May, 1945

"Participated in service on ship   50 (com. = 30)

Addressed civ. go meeting at Essômes, 125.

Visited civilian service - Presby Wimbledon

        "   "            "            Cong'l - City Temple, London

Attended Cong'l. Union of Eng and Wales

Com (civ.) =. (26) - Monneaux"

There is a fair amount of information in these chaplain journals that I understand, but some I don't. Essômes and Monneaux seem to be villages near Chateaux-Thierry, where dad was based. What is bewildering is that the reference to a service on the ship seems to be out of chronological order. The other thing I am bewildered by is that the City Temple dad refers to was destroyed by incendiary bombs in the 1942 Blitz on London, so services could not have been held there in 1945. 

75 years ago with Dad in London

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I have been posting letters that my brother Stewart wrote my dad 75 years ago when Stewart entered the ASTRP at age 17, went to college at the army's expense in Lincoln, NE and Brookings, SD, and then when he turned 18, went off to Basic Training in Texas.  Stewart was writing dad in Europe where he was serving as a Chaplain in the army.  I haven't said much about what dad was doing during this time Stewart was writing him. Unfortunately we do not have the letters that he wrote back to Stewart. ButI do have a lot of other sources of information about what he was doing. He kept a journal as a chaplain, and it in he recorded a lot of detailed information. I have those journals. We also have a lot of photographs. When he went abroad, he bought a very compact camera called a Kodak Bantam, which took a very unusual film - 828.  It was very similar in size to 35mm, but it utilized more of the film for the actual picture as opposed to sprocket-holes, and consequently it had slightly larger negatives than 35mm. and thus somewhat higher quality prints, which did not require quite as much enlargement from the negatives. 

The Kodak Bantam camera

Dad used both b&w film and Kodachrome film, with which he produced  b&w prints and color slides. We have a lot of both.  I just ran across a bundle of b&w prints, and - thank you, dad - they have inscriptions on the back identifying that subject of the picture. This is a huge help, to say the least. They cover his time both in London and in France. In May, 1945, he was in London and visited two centers of English Congregationalism: Westminster Chapel, which at that time was the Congregational church in London, and every May was the site of the annual meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. It seated 1500, and dad attended that meeting and took a photo of that assembly, as well as a shot of the exterior.  He also visited Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street, which housed the offices of the CUEW and the Congregational Library.  That building . . . 

" . . .  was built to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Great Ejection of Black Bartholomew's Day, resulting from the 1662 Act of Uniformity which restored the Anglican Church. The two thousand Puritan ministers who refused to take the oath of conformity thereby established non-conformism."

 Here are his three photos:

The May, 1945 meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales in Westminster Chapel

Westminster Chapel facade

Memorial Hall

What has been the fate of these two buildings in the intervening 75 years? Westminster Chapel still stands, but today it houses what I guess you could call an evangelical megachurch. In the 1960's. the pastor decried the liberalism of the Congregational Union and pulled the congregation out The Memorial hall was torn down in 1968. A new building was erected on the site and houses business offices.

Westminster Chapel Interior

An older postcard of Memorial Hall, no longer standing

A little treat

We just went to the Chelsea Diner and got ice cream cones at the take-out window. I got my favorite - Maple Walnut. It is loaded with walnuts, which I love. It was warm even in the shade under the apple trees, so it was fast and furious licking. Well, maybe not furious, just fast. 

My Maple Walnut cone

In the shade of the old apple tree . . . 

. . . there is something for you and for me  . . .

Wednesday, we drove down to Northhamptom to say goodbye to Max who is off to college - University of Colorado, Boulder, He and his parents and sister were flying out on Thursday, and they will meet Paul and little Max this weekend. My Katie is leaving tomorrow to drive a truck with her stuff from Brooklyn to Boulder - she will probably. just miss them. But there will be opportunities later. 

On the way back we were treated to a spectacular sunset which this photo does not do justice to. It filled the western and northern horizon and was very intense.

Frustration with devices

All of a sudden we're having problems with our devices. Our iPhone has maxed out the storage and it says I have 12GB of photos, but I don't. I just have a half-dozen and no videos. So what's that all about? Then Firefox has done some kind of upgrade which has made it unusable on my MacBook Air laptop. So after years of using Firefox, I'm using Safari. Then on top of that, my MacBookPro can no longer access any web browser - Firefox or Safari. They have a new network at the Dummerston church (Plume) and it says these sites are blocked. Not sure why this is happening. Maybe a bunch of geeks  are home all day now and getting bored, and playing around with my stuff! Grrrr!

Boasting rights

 Tonight Ellen and I played Scrabble. I was getting lots of vowels and one point tiles - as usual - and Ellen was way ahead, but late in the game I got lucky. I got a “Q” and an “X” and was able to take full advantage of both. I played “Queen” with the "Q” on a double-letter square and a double-word score, and followed up with “Quad” on triple word score - so I got 70 points from that one “Q!” Then I played the “X” on a double-letter square with “Ax” in one direction and “Xi” in the other, so I got 36 points from that one tile. I ended up winning 358-308. Good game! Ellen was happy for me!

Sorry, can’t get this to upload right side up!

Rain = Mushrooms

The news here of late has been rain. Isaias came up the coast and we didn’t get the wind but we got the rain. And now we have quite a crop of mushrooms.

If these were edible we could have quite a meal, but I don’t think they are. They might be fly agaric. Or more likely Sickener. Both are poisonous.

More from Benson Place

Benson Place, where we picked blueberries yesterday, was very interesting and quite a lovely spot. Here are more photos. 

Blueberry fields forever!

The blueberry rake rack

The Conveyor belt where you clean the berries

People waiting for carts 

I have more photos but they are vertical and this blog format seems to only accept horizontal, at least from the phone, so they are all sideways. I’ll try using the computer later at a WiFi spot.

Another family cleaning blueberries

Katie loading our blueberries into the hopper which feeds into the conveyor belt

A lovely unidentified yellow composite by the parking lot