Fredrick Douglass On Decoration Day 1871

Andy Hall at Dead Confederates posted a short speech by Fredrick Douglass On Decoration day 1871. That speech is worth pondering and I encourage you to go to Mr. Hall's page and read it...

When a deal goes wrong...

Note to Johnny Blaze: The devil is not to be trusted when it comes to his making promises.

~ footprints

I looked at the picture... I turned it over to see what had been written on the back. The handwriting was neat and precise; easy to read. She had given me this wallet size copy of her high school senior picture forty six years ago; her senior year which had been my junior year. I had forgotten I had it. It was a bittersweet moment in seeing her image on the one side and reading the note on the backside.

She was gone. She died this past February. The last time I saw her was so long ago, just a few years after high school, and then nothing for over 40 years. Some things had happened back then. She had experienced a crushing loss. Then there was no contact. Now she was gone.

I did not realize way back then the footprint she had left in my life. We had worked together on the high school newspaper. We had been casual friends. I thought about that as I read the note she had written to me on the back of that picture. I realized, yes, she had been a casual friend, but she also had been a good friend to me.

She had a part in sharpening my mind; exposing some of my naivete and provincialism. In our own peculiar way we had affirmed one another's existence and worth at an awkward time in each of our lives.

I had thought about her over the years; wondering how she was doing; praying that where ever she was, that she would "live happily ever after."

Now she is gone. As I looked at the picture, I felt a grief and sadness. I don't know if she ever realized the impression for good she had left on my life. In a way, for that time we had known one another, she had been a friend; as a sister.

So as I mourn, I also ask myself a question.

What kind of footprints have I left in the lives of those I have encountered, even ever so briefly,through my life?

Of This & That.

~ "Don't grow old..." said my 97 year old mother in-law.

~ How many Christian women over the past 2,000 years have been in a position to be a "Proverbs 31" woman? The Proverbs 31 woman had servants, and her husband was on the town council. I dare say 95% of the virtuous Christian women over the past 2,000 years were not in the socio-economic class of the Proverbs 31 woman. Commentators and writers need to be VERY careful how they apply that passage to the general population of Christian women around the world.

~ At least I can have some assurance that a Mormon will have some degree of a common sense of decency. That is more then can be said for a cold blooded secular materialist.

~ Has anyone written an opera based on the story of Aeneas and Dido in book 4 of the Aeneid? Lovers torn apart by fate and the gods. The wrath of a woman scorned... Thwarted love and suicide... The answer is yes: Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, Didone abbandonata by Niccolò Piccinni, Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz, among others.

~ Yes, I am becoming a soccer fan. I don't have a favorite MLS team yet, but the Seattle Sounders are in the running. Not having a personal history in the sport, I'm not tied to any of the Midwest teams.