Until the fourteenth of never

How was your Valentine's Day?

Mine was delicious. In fact the entire week was extra-special.

You may remember that my beloved Uncle Sherrill died on October 25, 2012, in Louisiana where he lived his whole life.

His widow, my Aunt Judy, flew to Atlanta on Monday, where she joined my Aunt Linda and they both drove to Greenville, where my mom lives.

TG and I went to my mother's house on Tuesday for lunch and a wonderful visit with my aunties.

I used to have three uncles; now I have only one. Uncle Dody, you're it.

I've always had three aunts -- four if you count Aunt Jenny, who was actually my mother's aunt -- and they've always been among my favorite people in the world. 

By the way, my Uncle Dody and Aunt Leslee are going to be in a show on Animal Planet in March. I'll keep you posted.

It's a "reality" show about a bait shop on the bayou. I know you can't wait.

Meanwhile here is a picture of my beloved Aunt Judy (in the middle) with my Aunt Linda and my mother.

Aren't they pretty? Sweet too. But not too sweet! The ladies on my mother's side of the family fairly ooze more or less equal amounts of sugar and spice.

On Wednesday night after church TG and I went to the store to pick out our valentine cards.

Shouldn't you do that separately, so as to surprise one another? You may be thinking.

Normally yes. But some years, we do it differently.

As in, we go to the card aisle and we start browsing and we may pick up a mushy one or a funny one but most likely it ends up being several of each kind.

Then, surrounded by shoppers trying to concentrate on which card to get for their valentine, we exchange our selections and commence alternately guffawing and gazing adoringly into one another's eyes.

We have a fantastic time. We don't buy anything from the card aisle. I will not pay six dollars for a greeting card.

Yes I know they've got one-dollar greeting cards at Dollar General but I didn't have a chance to get over there so step off.

This time TG and I enhanced the experience by wading into the shiny cloud of heart-shaped mylar balloons and, reaching into the ribbony forest hanging from the helium-filled love messages, we each chose one and "gave" it to the other.

We held onto "our" balloons for a few moments and that was enough. No need to bring them home; one of TG's birthday balloons is still alive.

Every time I walk into the office we share, I think it's a head bobbing around.

From there we could have gone to the stuffed animals and cradled a few but instead we cut to the chase: Candy.

For me, TG picked a fancy tin heart filled with Dove Silky Smooth Select Chocolates.

For TG, I picked two bags of Lindt Lindor Truffles: one dark chocolate and one regular.

And yes, you'd better believe we bought the candy.

Valentine's Day is one of the few days in the year I allow myself to eat candy, which I'd like to eat every day. Even so this chocolate is ultra-rich and so far I've made scarcely a dent in my scrumptious stash.

So I figure as long as it's valentine week, we're good. I think I'll have a piece right now.

Recently when I was rustling up pictures of my son to go in my post about his new Air Force career, I found some pictures of TG taken in February of 1988.

We were at a banquet with our church's youth group. These guys formed a quartet and regaled us with some love songs, all in good fun.

I don't know whose idea it was for TG to wield a trumpet; he doesn't play.

But wasn't he handsome. Still is.

Speaking of still, I'm a romantic so I think about love more or less all of the time, but especially on Valentine's Day.

And today I thought of a song that was sung during our wedding: The Twelfth of Never.

I love that song. I remember TG's brother mocking it, saying the lyrics were stupid. But they're not.

One must consider the source: my brother-in-law likes to tell about how, in 1970 while sitting in a darkened movie theater watching Love Story, he laughed out loud when Ali MacGraw/Jennifer Cavalleri Barrett died of leukemia.

?????

Enough said.

That supremely sappy example of syrupy seventies celluloid sentimentality still makes me cry. And so does this song.

I suspect it will until the fourteenth of never. At least.

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Happy Weekend

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A call to greatness

One hundred eighty-seven breeds and varieties of dogs competed in the 137th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show held at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 11th and 12th.

I'm so grateful to my daughter Erica for calling on Monday night to tell me it was on TV.

Last night, after all tails had wagged and all strangely-dressed handlers had trotted around the ring for the last time, a five-year-old Affenpinscher named Banana Joe took Best in Show.

Am I the only one who was more interested in this than in the State of the Union Address, which it only occurred to me to diligently avoid watching?

I know the state of the union. It's bad and getting worse.

But we can still be great.

If you have a few more minutes, watch this hysterical tribute to The Real Dog.

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Happy Wednesdog

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If evil had a face

LeRoy CarhartSorry to be Debbie Downer on a Monday but this is all I've got: what's been on my mind for two days.

My daughter Audrey called me on Saturday and during the conversation we both shed tears and this was the subject: abortion.

The reason we were discussing such a frustrating and depressing subject is that she asked me if I was aware of late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, who uses his God-given talents and abilities to end the lives of children up to and including the day before they are due to be born.

If you have ever held a newborn baby in your arms, just think about that for a moment.

Last week Carhart carried out a hit on Baby Madison Leigh at thirty-three weeks gestation, killing her in the womb of her twenty-nine-year-old mother, Jennifer Leigh McKenna Morbelli.

The next day -- that would be last Thursday -- Jennifer Morbelli died. Her family's attempts to contact the doctor late-term abortionist in the hours leading up to her death were unsuccessful.

By the way, Jennifer Morbelli was a married woman and a kindergarten teacher. It is believed she died of massive internal hemorrhaging.

In other words, a botched abortion.

At any rate I doubt you've heard about this incident because the lamestream media, whose dark sacrament is "safe and legal" abortion all the way to term, are ignoring it. 

The only news outlets reporting the story so far are conservative, faith-based online sites.

I was not surprised to learn from my daughter that Carhart was friends with the late George Tiller -- who pioneered the process of injecting the tiny beating heart of a full-term baby with digoxin, bringing about "fetal demise" -- and feels it is his mission in life to carry on Tiller's work.

Because he cares about women there's a whole lot of money in it.

This is where I get stuck, and this is why I was crying when I talked about it to my daughter, who when she was born weighed eight pounds and was the most beautiful baby anyone ever saw.

When a pregnant woman presents herself to one of these monsters for a late-term abortion, her baby -- the one that's been kicking at her insides for months -- is first killed with the shot to the heart.

Then the woman is put through two more days of things that sound like torture -- follow the link provided if you have the stomach to read about the MOLD technique, explained on the Operation Rescue website -- before having to endure labor and delivery.

This is my question: Why in the name of all that makes sense would a woman go through an entire pregnancy, with all of the discomfort and inconvenience thereto appertaining, then go through the physical and emotional agony of labor, only to deliver a dead child?

When tens of thousands of couples who cannot have children, wait years to adopt a baby?

In this case, according to what I have read, it was because the as-yet-unborn Baby Madison had been "diagnosed" with a seizure disorder.

And of course we know doctors are never wrong.

I am not here to judge Jennifer Leigh Morbelli. She paid with her life and she will stand before her Creator someday, just as I will and just as you will.

But waiting to give birth to a perfect person is like waiting for all traffic lights to turn green -- and stay green -- before getting into your car and going anywhere.

If that was what my mother was waiting for, I certainly would never have been born.

And what a tragedy that would have been. Thanks, Mom, for choosing life (and for never even considering anything else). I love you. See you tomorrow.

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Happy Monday

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He should have said something and he did

Have you heard about the phenomenal speech delivered by Dr. Benjamin Carson at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC on Thursday morning?

The erudite but affable doctor prescribed some good old homespun medicine for President Obama and his liberal ilk, and for all Americans, particularly the low-information voters who plague our existence.

The president's stony face from the nineteen to twenty-three minute mark is worth the price of admission.

Forget that. His face during the whole thing is priceless. I only regret that the FLOTUS wasn't on camera.

I wish you'd watch and listen to Dr. Carson's speech in its entirety -- you can find it here -- but if you don't have twenty-seven minutes to invest, at least hear this snippet:

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. John 8:32

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Happy Weekend

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Water for thought

February is Black History Month.

I'm about to make some comments about that and some may read them as flippant or disrespectful, but I promise you that's not the spirit in which they're offered.

My remarks are prompted by several pictures I saw online last week, all of which I'd seen before.

The photos were meant to depict life for black people in the Jim Crow South, a period of time spanning around ninety years in which racial segregation was enforced by actual law.

First let me assure you, I have no doubt blacks were discriminated against in the South, and in other places too. I'm not here to argue that or to assert that treatment of black people has always been fair or right.

In fact I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who has ever been or is ever -- at any point in American history, including now -- discriminated against because of their skin color.

What I would like to show you is one of the pictures I looked at last week, and ask you to consider one small aspect of racial segregation.

 I love pictures as you know, and like most people I enjoy studying photographs that offer a window on the past. Even yesterday.

Web sites like Shorpy and Retronaut make much of our fascination with chronicling the human experience in still photography, which is why I and tens of thousands of others visit them often.

So I was surprised when, while scrutinizing this picture, something occurred to me for the first time: Who exactly is being discriminated against here?

Naturally I understand we are to believe that white people made the laws that effectively segregated them from blacks -- and blacks from them -- in daily life.

But the thing is, in the above picture, clearly whites are being discriminated against as much as blacks -- if not more.

Think about it. Today in the United States of America, approximately thirteen percent of the population is black. Pre-1965 I'm not sure what it was, but it certainly was less.

Even if in the town pictured, the percentage of blacks was higher, it wasn't much higher.

And yet that small percentage of folks got their own water fountain so that they didn't have to drink after the whites.

I assume if a thirsty white person approached these two water fountains and found the White Only one out of order, he or she was barred by law from drinking from the Colored Only one less than two feet away, as much as the opposite was true.

Said thirsty white people had to keep walking until they found a working Whites Only fountain.

Much is made of the fact that the black folks had their own separate entrances to places such as movie theaters, and that they had to sit in the balcony.

What is so wrong with having your own special entrance? And what if white folks liked balcony seats, but couldn't sit in them because they were reserved for blacks?

I like sitting in the balcony. You can see better. You know, up high?

When I was a kid I loved sitting in the back of the bus. My friends and I always chose them when riding to school. But in the Jim Crow South, those extra-fun seats were set aside, meant only for the few black riders.

Have we well and truly held the black man down? Consider this bit of black history, courtesy of the Congressional Research Service:

The number of African American Members has steadily increased since the first African Americans entered Congress in 1870. There were fewer than 10 Members until the 91st Congress (1969-1971). In the 98th Congress (1983-1985), the number surpassed 20 for the first time and then jumped to 40 in the 103rd Congress (1993-1995). Since the 106thCongress (1999-2001), the number has remained between 39 and 44 serving at any one time.

The first African American Member of Congress was Hiram Rhodes Revels (R-MS), who served in the Senate in the 41st Congress (served 1870-1871). The first African American Member of the House was Joseph H. Rainey (R-SC), who also served in the 41st Congress.

Notice the first blacks to serve in Congress and the House were Republicans. From Southern states.

Notice too in the picture how beautifully dressed, how feminine and modest, the black ladies are. Notice the chivalry of the black gentleman helping the children get a drink.

Decades after affirmative action -- a diabolically discriminatory policy that to this day defeats its own purpose -- was made the law of the land, and decades after the Civil Rights movement enlightened us all, you don't see much in the way of modesty or chivalry anymore.

Amongst whites or blacks. And everyone is hurt by it.

Segregation is still in full force, usually accomplished by money. Tickets to the Super Bowl last Sunday were over fifteen hundred dollars. To watch black millionaires throw a football around.

I couldn't have afforded that, even if I had wanted to go, which most strenuously I did not. And I didn't watch it on television either.

When TG and I lived in the Chicagoland area, he loved to take me to Chicago Bulls games. We could only afford seats at such a high altitude, Michael Jordan and his teammates -- the black millionaires -- were about an inch high, running back and forth with an orange crumb.

If I put up my little finger in front of my eyes I could block them all out. They couldn't see me either.

White people are vigorously discriminated against in America today. 

It's how the Demoncrats like it; their voter base is made up of bleeding heart white liberals who don't know the facts, and reparation-minded blacks who have been bred to vote for the handout, thinking whites owe them something.

During Black History Month, as in all other months, I plan to do what I always do: Be considerate of everybody, regardless of their color, until they give me a reason not to.