This morning, Woot's got a sale on baseball gloves, not just any gloves--Rawlings gloves.  I will not, again, in my life, have need of one, but I'm sorely tempted to pick one anyway if for no other reason than that longhand trademark spells out the letters of my own first love.

I started sometime around sixth grade and then played organized baseball/softball/slo-pitch until I was 55, which is to say for most of my life.  Still, I have no doubt the sum total of all those years on the basepaths inch up short to the endless tally of hours we spent as kids playing ball on our own on the schoolyard across the street or in the parking lot of First Reformed.  After school, we played nightly.  Come summer, we'd play almost every day, limited only by how many kids showed up--four on four, pitcher's hands, knock up--a dozen games or more created by kids, nary an adult in sight.

Last week I walked the streets of my hometown again and found a soccer field where once there were a pair of ball diamonds.  Those netted goals stood where homemade backstops, hearty steel things pockmarked with spot welds and hung with rugged fencing, once looked over a couple of dusty, baseless diamonds we called home. Soccer seemed somehow foreign intervention, or downright sacrilege.

But it was that Rawlings signature that brought me back this morning. I don't doubt some Dominie might call what I felt for that trademark a deadly sin, so unconditionally did I love it.  I bought an Eddie Matthews signature Rawlings mitt when I was a kid, after stalking that sweetheart in Joe Hauser's Sport Shop, right there on Eighth Street, Sheboygan, time and time again.  I'd go in and look at it, and if I was brave enough I'd ask Hauser himself if I could just pull it over my hand for a couple of heavenly minutes.

I didn't have the bucks to buy it, but I swear I lusted after that thing more than I did for anything female.  It was $27--that price is tagged forever in my memory.  All I remember was it cost a ton, a summer's worth of lawn jobs.  I got a grant from my parents to cover the cost finally, but once upon a time I actually took home that dream, rubbed it lovingly with precious oils to get it loose and supple, wore it around the house to create a pocket, and then, the very next day, took it out and used it as I did every day, until finally, seasons later, it wore out.

Rawlings.  Eddie Matthews.

In high school, I bought a odd-looking, six-fingered Trap-Eze Rawlings to hold down the hot corner on my high school baseball team. It was a new design, an innovation; but no one would have doubted the Rawlings's commitment.  After all, you trusted them with your game, for pete's sake.

This morning, Woot has a Rawlings for $19.95, cheaper than I paid more than a half-century ago. In all likelihood, today they're made in Pakistan or Thailand.  But if you go to their website, the Rawlings winners cost somewhere around $400, which sounds more like it.  Those are the ones Joe would have had in his Eighth Street window if he or it were around today.  Rawlings has been turning out gloves for 125 years and still buy their leather from the same famed Chicago tanners.

Branding it's called.  All I have to do is look at that signature, and I'm head-over-heels. Nowadays the sin is envy not lust, the futile wish I could get up tomorrow morning, head over to the diamond, and hammer out a game of knock up.

As long as I'd have my Rawlings, I'd be okay.

Sin is what it was--sweet, sweet sandlot sin.  No matter.  This morning that bright red Rawlings tag makes me downright thankful for sin.

There was a telephone booth somewhere near the Variety Store back then, a telephone booth I hardly ever used.  There was no need really--I lived just three blocks from school and downtown, even though as a teenager those three blocks seemed like an awfully long walk.

Last night I brought donuts to school, my treat, first donuts all semester, but not the first treat in my teaching life.  I swear I paid more for this batch than I did for any other in 41 years of teaching; but this time, even more than last May when I officially retired, I told myself I would never step into a classroom again, never. To celebrate, I didn't get day-olds.  And they were loved.

The kid who used that pay phone was tall and stringy.  I remember when he'd pitched little league for another team from another town. Our coach told us it was going to be a tough game because Van Stelle was their chucker, and Van Stelle could throw heat because he was big enough to eat a bale of hay.  But Van Stelle was on our team now because he'd come to high school in Oostburg.  Van Stelle needed a ride home after basketball practice.  That's why he used the pay phone. Once upon a time, I was there with him.

I got a note from the administration about teaching evaluations and an official-looking envelope full of them in my campus mail:  "what can the instructor do to improve the course next year?"  You know, that kind of thing. I told my students it was a little ridiculous to make them fill it out because there wasn't going to be a  next time. They said, "chuck 'em."  So I did.  Right then and there they went in the circular file.

Van Stelle picked up that pay phone, dialed his number, waited for the bleating to stop and someone on the other side to pick up the phone, and then yelled--seriously, yelled, "Come get," into the receiver, thereby saving the dime it would have cost to make the call.  Something in the phone went out if you didn't jam a dime in once your party answered.  "Come get," he yelled, and the call quit just like that, but he'd got the message to his folks out in the country and soon enough they'd show up.  "Come get," he'd yell.  Saved a dime.

After the students departed, a quarter of a donut was left, along with one wonderful donut hole.  I don't know if they were being considerate--I doubt it; but it was nice of them to leave me just that much. I'm supposed to be on a diet, self-imposed.  I went in to get my blood checked last week and tipped the scales ridiculously high. Still, it was my last night in a classroom.  I couldn't break open a bottle, so a couple of donut holes felt like a Calvinist bacchanalia.

Whether or not Van Stelle ever got home wasn't the exact memory my brain had somehow tethered to that Variety Store phone booth. That's not what came to mind when the words, strikingly, came into my head. There was another visit, and I was there for a long time, I remember.

My wife was in town, waiting for me to call.  I swept up the papers, walked around the room and grabbed what was left from a semester's worth of refuse, and tossed it all in the can, right there with the student evaluations. Then I pulled on my vest, took my cell out of my pocket, held it just a minute, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there came into my head this odd un-beckoned mantra:  "Come get!"

I was a junior in high school and I'd never gone on a real date.  A kid named Bob had told me in no uncertain terms that this girl from another high school, not far away, had made it perfectly clear that if I called her and asked, she'd say yes.  My people had talked to her people--that kind of thing.  It was a foregone conclusion, is what I remember.  I had every indication that if I had the courage to pick up that pay phone, get this girl on the other end, and talk to her, a cheerleader in fact, she would for certain say yes.  Slam dunk.

"Come get," my brain said when I stood there in that empty classroom, cell in hand.  "Come get."

Back then I was 16 years old, and everything had been arranged. Supposedly there was no drama, but I'll never, ever forget standing with Bob outside that phone booth, that same Variety Store phone booth, my nerves running so much power I could have grabbed a snapped power line and never missed a beat.  "Go on," Bob said.  "Want me to dial the number?"

I did it myself, right then and there.

I stood alone in a classroom on the last night I ever will, stood there with my cell phone, and for some dumb reason my weary brain threw "Come get" at me, out of nowhere, a hard, high one with as much velocity as Van Stelle throwing heat on the Gibbsville sandlot diamond.  I punched in the numbers, and for some unknown reason was flung back to a night on Main Street, standing just outside a phone booth, my nerves running sprints.

Forty years ago I married a different cheerleader, and all of that high school drama is so far back it could have happened sometime before the glacier melted and left field stones buried in the river bottom sand beneath our new house, I swear.  So long ago, you'd think that ancient story would have simply flattened into nothing at all beneath the sheer weight of a lifetime's experience.

But there it was.  "Come get," freed from the recesses of a brain whose operation, just like yours, is somehow beyond our ken. 

Who knows what lurks in those synapses?  And who knows why?

But last night, for just a moment at which it had no business reappearing, a goofy echo from the ancient past offered me an unscheduled trip back to Main Street, Oostburg, an entire half century ago. For no reason at all.  It was just there, like a vision. Bedazzling brain choreography.

So when I hit the light and shut a classroom door for the very last time, I couldn't help but giggle. 

 There's just so much about what happened in Boston on Monday that's going to happen again. 

Will people hate?  Yes.  For a dozen reasons or a thousand. There will be more.  They're already are, and some, I'm sure, are already planning.

In this country, everyone, even the haters, have access to hardware--from guns to fertilizer--sufficient to turn their poison into horror.  We treasure our freedom so highly that we rarely, save in airports, give it away.  I'm for doing something about guns in this country, but no one truly believes that new legislation will stop the madmen.  It may stop something, and something is better than nothing, which is the reasoning that we all use in airports.  

It wasn't a gun in Boston, it was the fixin's of a bomb or two or three or four or whoever many authorities did, in fact, locate. It was the mad genius of some demented killers with an agenda of pure hate, a few kids whose cause or hurt was so great that others had to die--men and women and at least one eight-year-old third grade boy.  Right now, several are dead (including one of the bombers), hundreds injured, and, once again, millions grieve at senseless carnage we  suffer far too often.

A couple nights ago, driving home, we couldn't help but see the blazing lights of the athletic stadium just down the road--a track meet in 30-degree weather.  The stands probably weren't as full as they might have been if the temps were forty degrees warmer, but tons of family were there, I'm sure, wrapped up as if in Green Bay for the Vikings. No one was thinking massacre at college athletic field, even if what happened in Boston was on everyone's mind.  If some mad man wanted, we could have experienced carnage just up the road.

We'd been at a musical put on by our grandson's grade school, a delight.  Wall-to-wall people, a thousand smiling grandparents like us, gawkers with smart phone cameras, and a couple hundred kids up front singing their hearts out. If some mad man wanted, he could make a bloody statement in a flash.

We're not about to change, and neither are the lunatics.

Crowds gather every day and every night in this country.  No law enforcement units could possibly cover the gadzillion public events we all attend.  Opportunity will forever exist here, and there will always be hardware, just as there will always be madness.  What happened in Boston yesterday won't be the end of it, and everyone knows it.

On Sunday, in church, we prayed for a family who'd gone off to be with their loved ones to grieve the death of a sister who was murdered, as was her adult son, by her husband, a man who then turned the gun on himself--three deaths, as many as Boston, maybe even more inexplicable.  We have, after all, become accustomed to terrorism. We may never understand the will to slaughter innocents, but that madness is not strange.

Sometimes, on days after such horrors, we all feel like Mother Teresa: "I know God won't give me anything I can't handle.  I just wish he didn't trust me so much." 

And all of us know that things will not change. Tomorrow will bring its own horrors. 

How then shall we live?

This is Mother Teresa too:  "We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love."

An hour ago the world outside was dark as night, but some robin was piping a song, a song in the darkness, singing her own small things with great love. Right now the sun is rising, burnishing the pines in heavenly bronze. 

Small things with great love.

Hey, I'm no purist.  Maybe I should be--after all, I've been a classroom teacher for my whole life, an English teacher too.  I've every right to be schoolmarmish.  Come to think of it, maybe I should shudder when some idiot, like talks like an idiot. Maybe I should wince at lie/lay indiscretions, or when, in a perfectly public way, someone's participles dangle shamelessly. After all these years of teaching writing, I should be a grammar Nazi, but I'm not. So there.

What gets my frickin' goat these days is not bad grammar, but that I'm the guy who walks into class with no trousers.  It happens far too often when you're forty years older than your students. What tees me off is not knowing what's going on when everybody else and the horse they rode in on seem to get it and I don't.  What I can't stand is being clueless when it comes to language, and, doggone it!--I'm the writer.

I know what a creep is--it's some disdainful person, someone who leers or smells or won't leave, someone with just enough meat on his shoulders to be, well, scary.  A creep is not an idiot or a buffoon because he's scarier than that.  A creep is someone whose smile is too hungry, or whose eyes don't stay at home.  Creeps violate personal space--and with seeming impunity.  A creep is rarely female.  I can't think of a female creep, in fact.  I'll even go this far--women see creeps far easier than men do--am I right?  There's a less-than-hidden danger factor in a creep, or at least the fear that this guy is not going to go away. Hannibal Lector goes way beyond creepiness, but Norman Bates? well, look at him--now there's the king of creeps.

Webster says "an unpleasant or obnoxious person," but kids know better.

The thing is, my students' generation has turned the noun into a verb, as in "Norman Bates creeps me out."  I get that.  That creep has nothing to do with what a crab does across the floor, and everything to do with what Bates does to the skin on the back of your neck.  That usage has become standard, and it works.  In some ways it turns the noun into instant metaphor. "Percy stands there with that awful smile across his chops--sheesh! creeps me out."  Okay, it makes sense, and it's even sort of cute. So what if Webster doesn't have it?  I get that.

But my students' generation insists on messing with creep even more by institutionalizing that metaphorical usage.  So last night, in a script, some kid is writing about a classroom where some college prof (at Dordt College in fact!) gets all snarky because some girl hasn't finished her homework.  Really irritated, he says to her: "Maybe if you would spend a little more time with your homework and a little less time creeping on your fellow student. . ." 

I read the script.  It's my job to critique it, I'm the prof, and I have no idea what the prof in the screenplay means when he says "creeping on."  I am lost.

So I go to class, and like a holy fool I confess the truth to a room full of kids almost two full generations younger than I am, a colossal mistake:  "I have no idea what that prof means," I tell them.

Huge frolicsome laughter.  Painful laughter.  Pitiful laughter.  Condescending laughter.

What's more, they seem to agree that the kid who wrote it has it wrong, really, because no college prof would say something like that to a student, whatever it means.  Some high school teacher?--maybe; but no college prof and certainly not a Dordt College prof.

Now I'm even more lost.

What I see is this young student laying her(!) body on the guy who's beside her--she's creeping on him.  Weird. Well, creepy.  

But that's nuts, I learn from the experts.

The usage, you see, is still Norman Bates.  So they've taken a noun, made it a verb, then extended it into whole new realms so that it's possible for someone to creep on someone else--not to creep up on or to stalk someone, which would be creepy, but to Norman Bates them, if that makes sense.  Here's the way I understand it:  if you creep on someone, it means, I think, that you become like a creep to someone who doesn't necessarily see you as Norman Bates, as in "Geez, Harlan, don't get all Norman Bates on me." I think that's it. And it's got some kind of Facebook dimension, too.  I guess you can creep on people on Facebook. At least that's what I'm told.

I admit it.  What really tested my soul last night is becoming the village idiot, not knowing what every other human being in the room--all of them ridiculously young--thought everyone on earth understood.

So here's what I said:  "Okay, okay. Listen, you don't have sweat it--after all, this is my last class ever."

To which, the bright young lady, sweet kid, right beside me says, "Sure, Dr. Schaap, that's what you said last year.

"Right about then, I was the one feeling really creepy.  No italics.

On a plane, I'm a reader not a talker. In fact, I rather resent jabberers, warm-hearted folks, I'm sure, who make it their mission to discover wheres and whys about the bald man buckled uncomfortably into the seat belt beside them.  I know preachers who claim they do great evangelism on planes.  

Me?--I'm a reader with earphones, and I had a book I loved this time, Kent Haruf's new novel Benediction.  It's terrific.

But I never really got it out on that flight because the computer determined to make clear just exactly how much I need to lose weight by sending yet another meaty male, a guy in a Packer cap, into a skimpy seat designed for 160-pounders, both of us lugging along about a hundred more.  There we sat, a couple of tubs strapped in seats meant for the svelte.  

You got to laugh about that, so I did.  "It's a conspiracy," I said to the guy in the Packer cap.   The only way I could avoid rubbing shoulders with the guy was to lean halfway into the aisle.  You know.  There we sat, a couple of aging linebackers, packed-in Packers.

Mutual suffering brought us uncomfortably close, so I asked him about life up north. He loved hunting.  His family had lived up there for generations, he said, but he'd been born and reared elsewhere, then gone back up to his family's home place because he wanted to live in the woods, wanted to hunt and fish.  He was Irish Catholic, traced his lineage with a kind of glee, all the way back to immigration, when his great-grandparents were loggers.  He was a lawyer himself, a judge, in fact.

I liked him--he was ten years, maybe more, younger than me--and the jabber continued, painlessly.  I don't normally say much, but the guy was pleasant.

"Whatcha' doing down here?" I asked him after all the genealogy.

When he responded, it was somewhat grudgingly, something precious to his tone.  "My daughter's in treatment," he told me, in a tempered voice that was meant to say he wasn't going to lie.

I know something about treatment, I told him.  "I'm told we've got some of the finest programs in the country."  We do. 

He nodded.  

"One day at a time," I told him.  I made it clear that I know something about treatment.

"She's 21," he told me, "and this is not the first time."

The story didn't tumble out, but neither did it come out grudgingly. He started talking, not loud, but with some clear measure of relief, I thought.

His daughter's a mom, and he and his wife have her son because they don't know where the father is and they don't really care either.  Nor does he.  The judge in the Packer hat whirred through images on his smart phone--a cute kid, bundled up in a snow suit, not quite two.  Grandpa and Grandma have had him at their place for a long time already, this treatment business part of their daughter's court-ordered sentence, the place she was sent after jail time for theft, felonies, several of them--and more.  Among other things, she was stealing checks from her parents' checkbooks, forging them to herself--a felony, he said--then endorsing them--yet another felony, he told me.  Among other things, she was stealing from her parents, those who loved her most. 

The drugs she was taking alter the brain, he said, make her think only of what she needs now and not a thing about consequence.   

There was more, too, some that I didn't hear because no matter how uncomfortably close you're seated, intimacy goes at a premium on a plane and I just couldn't ask him to repeat it.  Still, the story lasted the whole flight; and by the end, by the time we were coasting in for landing, I asked him what he was thinking now about the weekend, how he thought things were going for her, this time, this treatment.  He'd been there with her for family stuff, therapy, part of the program, he said.

Back home, there'd been some kind of accident when she was high.  She'd wrecked her car, just like she'd been wrecking her life, ever since she was 16, he told me, addicted as she was to booze and whatever prescription drugs she could buy on the street. 

"You got reason to hope?" I asked him again.

"She told me it was her fault she wrecked the car," he said, and then he cried.  For the first time in that long recitation, tears fell from the linebacker in the Packer hat, the district judge.  "She's never ever talked to me like that before.  Never took any blame."

One day at a time, which is its own kind of benediction.

He's Irish Catholic, a "domer," he said, a graduate of Notre Dame.  Pious talk didn't come easily, but I told him I'd be praying for him come Wednesday, which was yesterday, the day he and his wife would meet their prodigal daughter at the airport, her own cute little boy in their arms.  "She misses her son," he told me, "misses him badly."

When I left him at the gate outside the plane, I told him we'd be praying--and we have. 

 The next day, in Sunnyside, Washington, I spoke to a whole pack of middle-schoolers about writing, about stories, and about a man in Packer cap whose daughter is coming home to her son and her parents on Wednesday, and I told them they should pray too, and they promised they would.

One day at a time.

She signed on to a promise of 99 straight days of AA, 99 days in a row, he told me.  They'll have to bring her there, an hour-and-a-half away, but, he said, they'll find a way.

One day at a time.

We've been praying.  You may too.  I know he'd be pleased, and all of them in that family--grandpa and grandma, darling grandson, and prodigal daughter--all of them need the love of God, one day at a time.

As all of us do.

I don't believe I will ever sing "Blessed Assurance" without thinking of my father.  He never mentioned that hymn as being among his top ten or certainly his all-time favorite.  I don't know that he ever raised his hand to pick it from the Psalter in a hymn sing, and the fact is that I don't even know that he liked it. But to my mind--and even to my senses--that hymn will always conjure him.  We sing it, and I see him.

I like that.  I like rich associations, which is probably one of the reasons--plus ordinary old- age orneriness -that I  sometimes roll my eyes at 17-year-old troubadours mouthing a microphone and telling us we're all going to try another new song this week because, golly-gee, we like it. 

I watched my father sing "Blessed Assurance" once upon a time when his singing that old hymn, lovingly, simply taught me grace.  I can explain it in no other way.  Those two words are on his gravestone as a matter of fact.  My mother must have had it carved there.  We sang it at his funeral.  My sisters and I all wanted it sung.

So when I sing it, I think of him and his legacy of faith. The hymn is a medium, an avenue to a long and treasured story.

Others hymns have similar resonance.  None are quite so personal, but images arise every time I turn the hymnal to  "Nearer my God to Thee" because I was just a little boy when I saw some old rendition of the Titanic story.  It's hardly among anyone's favorites anymore, but all I need is a mention the title and my mind plays the scene on deck when passengers ready themselves for their Maker, an effect revisited, in fact, by a solo violin in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster.

"Now Thank We All Our God" was written from the bloody mess of the Thirty Years War by a Lutheran pastor who conducted as many as 50 funerals a day because of the horrors within the walls of a besieged city in which he was the only pastor to survive.  I swear that hymn makes my own Thanksgivings more meaningful.

"Peace Like a River" makes me cry every last time it's sung.  The man who wrote it was doing what he thought to be God's work, when he lost his daughters and his wife at sea, on their way to help Dwight Moody with his evangelistic outreach.  That he could wrote those words--"it is well with my soul"--is to me as unthinkable as it is unforgettable.

Reciting the first q and a of the Heidelberg Catechism has similarly eternal echoes.  I can't do it without half my life replaying.

I see Martin Luther on his bloody knees or hurling his ink well at the devil when, sometime in late October, we often sing "A Mighty Fortress."  Once, years ago, when our entire community worshiped together on Reformation Day and the Lutherans were in charge, I felt like a rich man, not only because I loved that old hymn, but also because I was in the presence of two Lutheran congregations who almost had to love it even more than I did.  What a treasure.

Last week I listened to Diet Eman tell her story of the Dutch Resistance again, on tape, after nearly twenty years, a story I wrote for her in Things We Couldn't Say.  It's really amazing what I missed, what I heard as if for the first time.

Hein Seitsma, her fiance, was arrested for underground work.  He didn't come back.  At the end of the war, weeks passed before people could sift through the rubble, make sense of the ledger books of Dachau and a thousand other death camps, before anyone who survived could know which of their loved ones didn't.  She never talked much about that span of months, about what she was feeling when Hein didn't show up. The war had made her a realist, enough of a realist not to fantasize. Even so, she must have held out possibilities; but with every day that passed, the truth became more defiant.

Then she heard. He had died. Starvation or whatever.  Dachau. Mid-winter, 1945. 

Then the stories started.  Survivors who didn't succumb wanted her to know what a witness he'd been in those darkest hours, what a glory he'd spread on their way through the horrors. She heard from those who must have pledged themselves not to forget, to remember, to bring whatever peace they could to those who loved the men and women, the millions, who didn't return.

And one of them told her he loved to sing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."  One of them told her that sometimes in the barracks, hope pretty much gone, he'd lead them in yet another rendition of that fine Lutheran hymn, "a bulwark never failing."

When I listened once again to her tell her story, I hadn't forgotten the way she treasures the stories about him she heard from those survivors.  I remember her great comfort. 

But I didn't remember the story of that particular hymn.  Now, having heard it again, I don't think I will. I don't think I can.

This is yesterday afternoon, a gorgeous February Sabbath, and that's my grandson writing a message in the light snow on the Floyd River with the butt of his Daisy Red Ryder BB gun (it was--I checked--uncocked).

I like this picture because this Calvinist is given to believe that life offers an unending series or moral lessons created for us by a good and loving lord who can be, for our own good, something of a scold.

Yesterday afternoon I was working--yes, on the Sabbath--trying to determine what to say at an after-church study of the history of the denomination, pouring over the book, doing lesson plans.  I'm the fearless leader.

Now it's my wife's idea to allow one grandchild to stay behind when the family leaves after Sunday dinner, and they love it.  Yesterday, it was our grandson, a fourth grader. He wanted to get a favorite old blanket of his fixed, and his grandma has a sewing machine.  Grandma thought Super Bowl Sunday would be a good time to teach him to sew.

Fine.

It was late when they finished and I wasn't done preparing, but I'd told him to bring his boots and the afternoon was beautiful.  His BB gun is here on almost permanent loan, so I told him to bring it along to shoot at stuff.  I was a boy once too.

We tramped through the woods, stopping occasionally to pop a tree or two or a puddle of water on the  frozen river. Grandma and Grandpa had planned on church at night, a series on the Heidelberg Catechism, but twice while we were out there, he or I dropped one of his gloves and twice we had to backtrack into the woods and up the river to find it, both times him muttering, "My mom's going to kill me--my mom's going to kill me."  He's talking about my daughter, and I'm thinking he'd live. And, it was partly his grandpa's fault.

Backtracking cost us time we didn't have, and in my psyche I was still preparing to lead Bible study.  We're out there in the gorgeous late afternoon, and I'm thinking about what needs to be said about the history of the CRC.

On the way back we hiked right up the river, on the river, when and where I took this shot. He said we were going to break through the ice, but last week's temps were awful, even for January.  

When we got back to the house, it was 5:30, and he still had to be brought home.  Church was happening all right, but without us. 

Much, much later, couples club over, I took the card out of the camera and pulled up a couple of pictures of him--and us--along the river.

This is one. This one stopped me.  

I'm too much a Calvinist to make claims for hearing directly from the voice of God. He doesn't speak to me in fervent whispers or midnight dreams. Sometimes I wish he would or I'd hear.

And really, there's no accounting for taste.  But still, this sweet pic just jumped off the screen. It's the kind of image you can't turn away from quickly, line and light and character holding your eyes:  the broad and bright river landscape, the endless mid-winter shadow, the run of my own footprints like something unfinished, and the way the lens turned prism to spread a splashy, bright rainbow over his shoulder.

Here's what I'm thinking.  God the scold was reminding me that this was Sabbath too.  I was worried about getting to church and leading a couple's club--good night, I'm almost a saint.  But at that very moment, I wasn't at all in the moment.  I was out there on the river, but I was busy.

See that iridescence hovering over my grandson's shoulder?--that's God's own voice.  

Go ahead. Call me Pentecostal.