And God Said Unto Herb

God and Herb the Archangel were walking through Heaven’s Gate Park, a pleasant little corner of utopia.

   “This park might be my best idea ever,” God said.

   “How can that be?” Herb asked. “All your ideas are perfect, and there are no degrees of perfection. Something is either perfect, or it’s not. And you, my man, are incapable of an imperfect idea.”

   “You know, Herb, you’ve got to stop hanging around those old English professors,” God said. “Besides, I’m God, and if I want to say this is the best perfect idea I ever had, I’ll say it.”

   “OK, OK. So why’s this park the best perfect idea you ever had?”

   “It’s twenty-five miles from the Pearly Gates,” God said.

   “So?”

   “I don’t have to put up with Pete’s whining. All he does is complain about people who bring their lawyers along, and he whines about having to listen to all the whining of the people who don’t make it in. He says it makes his job hell. If he wants hell, I can arrange it.”

   “I don’t blame him,” Herb said. “To put up with that stuff you’d need the patience of Job.”

   “Well, he’s no Job. But he’s got a job, and I wish he’d stop complaining about it. He can be replaced, and I know just the guy to replace him with.”

   “Who’s that?”

   “You.”

   “That might not be so bad,” Herb said. “I mean, it’s either listening to the damned complain, or listening to you whine. And with them, at least there’s a chance they’ll be wrong. It gets to be a drag having to listen to a know-it-all who knows it all.”

   “Shut up, Herb”

   “Little testy, aren’t we,” Herb said. “Something got you upset?”

   “Yeah,” God said. “Tim Tebow.”

   “Tim Tebow?”

   “That’s what I said. You deaf or something?”

   “No, I’m not deaf,” Herb said. “It’s just that I don’t understand how you could be upset with Tim Tebow.”

   “I’m God; you’re an angel. You’re not supposed to understand what upsets me. Or what pleases me, for that matter.”

   “This doesn’t have anything to do with you being a Steelers fan, does it?” Herb asked.

   “OK, I’m a Steelers fan,” God said. “All the best people are. But that’s not the problem. The problem is I’m tired of all these athletes making a big deal of thanking me when things go their way.”

   “Geez,” Herb said. “When are they supposed to thank you?”

   “If they’re going thank me when they are the heroes, they should also thank me when they screw up.”

   “When they screw up?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Why when they screw up?”

   “You spend Sunday afternoons watching football,” God said. “And you’ve watched thousands of post-game interviews of the players who scored the winning touchdowns. What does the hero always say?”

   “He says, ‘I want to thank God for giving me this opportunity.’”

   “Exactly,” God said. “But what do the same players say when they fumble two yards short of goal line?”

   “They grouse,” Herb said. “And blame the officials for not making a call.”

   “You have been paying attention,” God said. “But if I put the hero on the field and gave him the opportunity to score, who put the goat out there?”

   “You did.”

   “Then he should thank me, too,” God said.

   “Why?”

   “He’s making a million or two a year, for one thing.”

   “That’s true, I guess,” Herb said. “But why should he give thanks for screwing up.”

   “Because he had the same opportunity to win the game as the hero.”

   “If you weren’t so perfect, I’d think you were weird,” Herb said.

   “I can’t be ‘so perfect,’” God said. “I’m either perfect or I’m not. Isn’t that what you said?”

   Herb shrugged and said, “I suppose.”

   “Look at this way,” God said. “If I spend Sundays making heroes of some players and goats of others, that’s going to keep me pretty busy, isn’t it?”

   “Sure it would.”

   “And besides football, there’s baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer and countless other sports. If I’m helping all the athletes who claim I’m helping them, there must be a lot of things I ought to do that I don’t do because there isn’t enough time. Pretty soon, Tebow and all those other guys are going to create an image problem for me.”

   “Huh?”

   “If you had a choice, which you don’t,” God said. “Would you want a God who helps Tim Tebow win football games, or a God who helps families without health insurance get it, who helps starving people get food, and who helps the families in Afghanistan stay out from under the bombs falling from drones?”

   “I get your point,” Herb said. “When you think about it, these athletes are all saying, ‘God likes me more than you.’”

   “You got it. Besides, if I had had anything to do with it, the Steelers would have won.”

   “We can’t have everything,” Herb said.

   “I could. But that’s a topic for another time.”

Snow Job

The snow falling gently, nicely –

A beautiful sight to behold.

But to put it quite precisely,

The snow falling gently, nicely

Turns my mood most awfully icely;

This winter weather leaves me cold.

The snow falling gently, nicely –

A beautiful sight to behold.

Snug beneath a blanket of white,

The world’s quietly snoozing.

OK, the Earth’s a lovely sight,

Snug beneath a blanket of white

But Nature should be quite contrite –

The snow ’sno longer amusing.

Snug beneath a blanket of white,

The world’s quietly snoozing.

Dad at Twilight

Today would have been Dad's 96th birthday.

     On warm summer evenings, Dad would get a folding chair and sit between the house and the willow tree, where it was always shady. But after few minutes, he’d go in the basement and get a ball, a bat and a couple baseball gloves, and yell upstairs for Ed, Jim and me to come out.

      It wasn’t often that all three of us immediately answered the call. But one of us would, and Dad tossed him a glove and a game of pepper commenced. Dad hit a ground ball across the driveway, which the son fielded and threw back and Dad stuck the bat out and hit the ball back. This continued without stop until the guy with the glove let one go through his legs or the guy with the bat failed to make contact.

      In time, the other sons came out, sometimes together, sometimes not. We wandered in and out of the game, playing for a while then going off somewhere and perhaps rejoining the game, or maybe not. There were kids in the neighborhood who sometimes joined in and, like us, played for a while and then went and did something else. Four or five kids might be there during an evening, but there were seldom more than two or three at a time. When the driveway got crowded, Dad sent a few kids into the Creen’s backyard and hit pop flies to them.

      By the time the sun got low, Dad was the only one left outside. And as the air cooled and the shadows faded, Dad, in a pair of erstwhile dress slacks, a T-shirt and a decaying black cap with the orange Bessemer logo above the visor, stood at the basement door. He had outlasted the younger generation, and he had outlasted the sun, and now, with a glove in one hand and a bat in the other, he was reluctant to call it a day.

Auld Lang Whine

The people of England and its North American colonies crawled into their beds on the night of Wednesday, September 2, 1752, and a few hours later rubbed the sleep from their eyes on the morning of Thursday, September 14. This was progress. After 170 years of staunch resistance, fearful that the Gregorian calendar was an insidious Catholic plot designed to weaken the morals and faith of the enlightened its Protestant citizens, the United Kingdom finally adopted the “New Style,” bringing it into sync with most European countries. The Gregorian calendar did a better job of keeping the calendar aligned with the seasons than the “Old Style” Julian calendar. Sadly, in the headlong rush to keep up with their European neighbors, the Brits also moved New Year’s Day from March 25^th to January 1^st.

As days go, March 25^th is often less than splendid, but it comes at a time when splendid days are only days away. January 1^st is not always miserably inclement, but in these latitudes an endless string of miserable days is only days away when December gives way to January.

The start of a new year is supposed to be a time of self-examination and the jettisoning of bad habits. And there is supposed to be hope for the future. But north of the Mason and Dixon line, the days of January are short, dreary, cold and overcast. They are neither hopeful nor inspiring. A man must sin with gusto if he hopes to stay warm in the face of an Alberta Clipper. And those short days would last forever if he didn’t have a slew of bad habits to help him pass the time.

March 25^th, on the other hand, comes at a time of hope. The trees are beginning to bud, the crocuses and daffodils – shyly and with trepidation – are sprouting, the birds are singing as the sun rises, and the sun is rising earlier and staying up later. Winter hasn’t quit, but it is on its last legs and will soon give way to spring. Better days are coming, everyone knows it, and men and women, and boys and girls everywhere are frolicsome, optimistic and ready to get on with whatever needs to be gotten on with.

The foolishness of the January New Year became painfully obvious in the first days of 2012. On the last day of 2011, Nancy and I spent the afternoon in Dahlonega, Georgia. Nestled in the mountains, Dahlonega, which is the Cherokee word for gold, owes its existence to the discovery of gold in 1828. Besides being at the center of the ensuing gold rush, Dahlonega became the site of a United States mint, which ceased operation in 1861 when Georgia seceded. The phrase “There’s gold in them thar’ hills,” was first uttered during the Dahlonega gold rush.

It’s a pleasant, touristy town these days, with several unpretentious but very good locally owned restaurants and a horde of shops brimming with antiques and knick-knacks. Nancy and I visited two of those shops before I decided that my luck would soon run out and I was bound to cause havoc with my wheelchair if I went in one more. So, when Nancy browsed, I sat outside and enjoyed the warm, sunny afternoon.  We started our trek home the next day, an overcast and sometimes rainy New Year’s Day, making it as far as the northern suburbs of Cincinnati.

Around six the following morning, Nancy peeked out the window of the motel room and gazed upon the snow-covered parking lot. There wasn’t a lot of snow, no more than an inch, but the temperature was somewhere around seventeen and the wind made it feel much colder. The proof that January is the most inauspicious time to start a new year continued to accumulate as we headed up I-71, and dozens of motorists spent the second day of the year waiting for a tow truck to get their cars out of the median. And they were the fortunate unfortunates. Scores of other motorists bumped into one another and were waiting for a tow to the nearest body shop.

That is no way to start a year. And things will only get worse before they get better. Whiteouts, blizzards, raging winds, arctic temperatures and panicked weathermen will be the salient features of the next three months. Even the most zealous tree huggers will be asking, “Where’s global warming when we need it?”

England’s George II deserves his due. He was the last British sovereign to go into battle with his army. How many useless wars would never have been fought if heads of state were expected to endure the rigors and dangers of armed conflict? But the man was on the throne when the British government moved New Year’s Day from early spring, a time of rebirth and rejuvenation, to the dead of winter. George might have been brave and noble, but when it came to New Year’s Day he would have been well advised to remember, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”