GreatRidge Station

There is an old Charlie Brown cartoon, with Linus’s famous line: I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand. (Original strip, here)
Well, it turns out, that idea was not so far from wrong.  There’s something that I had always suspected, and now there’s good documentation to suggest it’s true–people who love mankind (theoretically), tend to despise people (in practice).

I read pretty broadly, and I’ve been challenged and encouraged by some of the material on Orthodoxy Today. Eastern Orthodox Christianity seems to be something one must be born to, but nevertheless, I find their approach to be both faithful and courageous.
Here’s a link to an article they recently reposted. It is taken, verbatim, from the Wall Street Journal. It is by Paul Johnson, and it’s called The Heartless Lovers of Mankind.

One of the gentlemen from my home church, a WWII veteran, just passed away this week. He will be missed.

I wanted to share this here, because he is the only person I have ever met who named himself.
As he told the story, he grew up in poverty in Oklahoma. He had no birth certificate, but plenty of family around him. And if they gave him a name when he was born, no one ever told him what it was. He grew up just simply being called “Boy.”

When World War II broke out, a lot of young men left the farm to go serve, and “Boy” was among them. When he showed up to be enlisted, that name would no longer do. So he chose his own name, filling in his new identity on all the forms.

He never shared why he selected the name he picked, but he chose well. I will always be grateful for Luther H., for his service to our country, for his friendship to my family, and for his faithful example.

I wonder how he was/will be greeted at the gates of heaven. Somehow, I suspect that it might be: “Welcome Home, Boy!”

Sometimes, I’m surprised by the most mundane things. Specifically, in this case, how my brain tends to fill in the blanks, and not always in the most helpful ways.

First, let me point out that I “grew up” in newsrooms. Sure, things were computerized, but there were always those people who kept the old Underwood nearby. I loved those old machines, and I wish I had one today. There was something organic about typing on them; something about their design that made it possible for the typist to become completely comfortable with the machine.

There was a unique, clicking sound that happened when you fed a sheet of paper into the platen and aligned it to receive those first, inspired, characters (I will not be speaking about writers’ block, though I could easily spin off into a tangent. I’ll restrain my ADD for the moment).
From time to time, I’ll call my LCW (Lovely and Charming Wife) at her work. She multi-tasks, so it is not uncommon for her to be working on something as we talk (no, I’m not offended, nor should you be, either). The biggest surprise, though, is when we are talking, and I hear the unmistakable sound of her, feeding paper into the Underwood typewriter at her desk.

Hey, wait a minute! My wife is no Luddite, so why is she feeding paper into a typewriter (and a manual one, at that)?

No, she explains to me, that’s just the scroll-wheel on her mouse.

Stupid brain.