My father’s posthumous medical journey comes to an end, with a final diagnosis of “chronic sensory motor polyneuropathy with both axonal and demyelinating features,” as detailed below.
Thanks to the VA for processing the medical claim forms. Unfortunately for my mother, the claim was denied because Dad’s medical condition was not directly military service-connected.
To one of the greatest stop-action filmmakers — may you have an eternity to create the next classic!
A previous blog entry with stop-action animation in honour of Harryhausen.
Up next, entertainment news…
In a recent off-camera, post-interview, ad hoc hominem about his career, Will Smith admitted his dream would be to remake “Six Degrees of Separation” with his son and introduce the ultimate taboo, a “banned in 100 countries” topic into mainstream cinema.
Upon hinting of this, the ultraconservative watchdogs of mass media added “After Earth” and any other film starring Will Smith to its boycott list without caring what the films are about, even if they’ll be more cotton-candy sequels quickly forgotten by absent-minded filmgoers who can’t tell you the plot of the last movie they just watched five minutes ago, let alone who starred in them.
Up next, a review of the animated short film about a young child chained to a table making New Balance shoes just so a comedy troupe can make fun of the people who buy them without knowing they’re directly funding child enslavement, entitled, “Atlas shrugs at his weight on the New Balance scales.”
Up next, down the elevator to the NeXT computer museum…where a computerised labyrinth traps the human population and manipulates their lives for our entertainment news “up next” segments.
Guinevere wants me to write about her.
Other characters wait their turn.
Words fail me today, my fast-food-sized menu of a vocabulary and grammaticalarianiamistically-challenged phrases.
The hallowed echoes of a hollow hall, where eight enthusiastic faces sang dressed in black not madrigals, regaled us with their ringing voices last night.
The sanctuary of church has only one purpose for me — meditation upon the infinite.
How you anthropomorphise the infinite is your concern, not mine.
Rather, your concern interferes with my meditation.
A cathedral ceiling should reflect the echoes of pipe organs and windpipes.
Sermons are for those without a voice of their own.
Church was once the social sewing machine that stitched subcultures together at the family and community levels.
Now that recorded music and other aspects of church life are available on a pick-and-choose-at-your-convenience at your local convenience store where wafers (leavened and unblessed) meet your bodily needs, the reasons that some went to church are met away from the edifice.
My thoughts are my sanctuary, my heaven and hell. An author is quoted as saying, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.,” allegedly C.S. Lewis the entertainer.
Last night, the Huntsville Collegium Musicum invited the community to hear early choral music in Covenant Presbyterian Church at 7:30 p.m., an invitation I found at 6:30 p.m. while looking online at al.com for events to attend and get me out of a house whose cathedral ceiling echoed with the sounds of recorded television shows.
Grumpily, my wife agreed to go with me, sans (le) dîner.
Happily, I drove her there.
The program consisted of religious and secular music.
There were no church social calendar announcements, no children’s Bible lesson, no Karaoke Jesus, no cappuccino and Christ, and no sermon.
It was heaven on Earth!
I closed my eyes and felt the soundwaves bounce against me (my wife saw colours and emotions dancing when her eyes were closed).
I opened my eyes and watched the physical manifestation of joy on the singers’ faces flow through their bodies and out of their mouths which changed shape to shape musical notes and sung words.
This is the one and only purpose for a church. All the rest — the Sunday school lessons, the social outreach, the weekend retreats — has no meaning to me.
[Except for the one small detail that my wife of 26+ years I met at summer camp (Holston Presbytery Camp in Banner Elk, NC) when we were 12 years old so, yeah, I owe a debt of gratitude to the whole social environment of religion (co-ed summer campers in the woods reading the Bible and sharing sleeping bags? how disgraceful!) that put us two together (but don’t worry, Church Lady, we didn’t kiss until after my wife turned 19).]
After my wife and I ate at a VERY LOUD restaurant called Drake’s, which killed any reverent mood we were in but filled our bellies, we returned home, suffered through many a lame skit on SNL for a few good laughs and turned on the main computer in the living room to play early choral music and listen to the echoes bouncing off the cathedral ceiling.
Some of my neighbours still get up on Sunday mornings to gather socially at whatever version of church they prefer.
This here, in front of a computer screen, is my church, the litanies composed in my thoughts rolled out in the holy text of a limited vocabulary, my wife sleeping with our cats at the other end of our country cabin of a house in the woods, within miles of native American burial mounds and hallowed cemeteries.
To last night’s singers, I salute you.
You make the long, lonely, expensive trip to celestial bodies worth the effort.
Which reminds me, if killing eliminating others cleanses my soul, what am I going to do if I’m the only living soul on Mars whose zest for living — his savoir–faire, his je ne sais quoi, his fly in the coffee of his petit dejeuner — is so strong that snuffing out Earth-based lifeforms will be his only salvation?
Will you survive to read the next blog entry?
And if you do, will you serve as a humorous aside, hero amidst tragedy, lone wolf , space pioneer, Bright, ascetic, or salt of the earth?
Instructions from my grandfather included a coded message about the following image, which, if I have figured the code out, refers to the unknown animal in the background as something related to the strange light in New Hampshire. Is that a fist or an alien blob floating on the right????
More as it develops as I try to interpret the 3D map!
When the U.S. political party known as the GOP recently moved to the far-right on the political spectrum, it moved the Democratic Party to the moderate right right where the GOP wanted the U.S. government to be, did it not?
After all, I see little in the way of protests about the latest appointments to the Obama presidential Cabinet, which means that the so-called left has no grounds for complaining and neither does the so-called right.
Stalemate.
Now, back to my reading the original issues of the exciting comic book series, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents!
Only 13,519 days to go. Is that still the 6th of May 2050?
The backward science on this planet in the the second decade of what some call their 21st century frequently tries my patience.
Just like this momentary search for a map (found it!) and what it means (yet to be found) but tying it to the date given to me, the 6th of May 2050, makes some if not more sense. Does the camel saddle in the bottom of the sea chest have a meaning?
Living in the zeitgeist is all we have, isn’t it, because somehow, some way, we are attached to the local environment in which our sets of states of energy prove the concept of the conservation of mass.
I borrowed six books from the library and have need to spend time reading them. I will list their titles later today or in the week.
I am floating in the artificial cloud of happiness, content that, no matter the habits of fellow writers, I am me, having written well, poorly, or not at all.
Will it truly be 20-year old proven technology that ends up on the Moon and Mars for risktaking, adventurous pioneers and settlers to survive with/upon? If not, what is the ultimate “firmware” that can be reprogrammed in realtime like Transformer bots that have no final, definite shape, form and function(s)?
My grandfather was a man of more happiness than monetary wealth.
He reasoned, my father told me, that knowledge is the heated, padded seat in the outhouse of life — you can’t find the swallowed diamond until you sift through a lot of BS.
Granddaddy kept a lot of secrets along the way of gathering facts.
One day, while standing the backyard, looking at the canal but, in his thoughts, staring out at the sea, a fellow old seaman walked up to Granddaddy and told him a wild tale about a plot of land up in New Hampshire owned by a family named Winthrop something or other.
The land itself was not remarkable except for one small fact — every 100 years, a bright light appeared on the horizon, rose into the sky and shone down on a certain spot of the family plot.
My grandfather, ever the realist, asked why the seaman was sharing this information with a sailor and not someone more authoritative.
Well, this seaman, he was known in those parts for his notorious behaviour, having crossed paths with the law a few too many times, but he didn’t mind sharing this information with my grandfather, a nice man who had only beaten this fellow a few times in acey-deucey.
My grandfather asked what the man knew about the farm.
“It’s not exactly a farm. Not anymore. A few years ago, they converted it to a golf course.”
My grandfather had a soft place in his fact-filled thoughts for the irrational sport of golf. “Okay, so tell me what you know about this light. Anything you know for a fact?”
The man shared a document with my grandfather.
Yellowed and torn, the document described a treasure that was like no treasure that had been seen before — not only a map of the stars but instructions for how to travel through space from one planet to another.
My grandfather was a loving, trusting man but he had his skeptical side, too.
What proof did the man have that the document was authentic?
The man said that his grandfather had worked on the farm and found the document buried in the wall of an old, abandoned well, long since dug up and removed from history. No one living knew about its existence.
The man said that the next 100-year visit was fast approaching. All the man asked was that my grandfather visit the golf course, take pictures and share whatever information he gleaned.
Granddaddy was also a curious man, having learned that behind every legend or myth is a nugget of truth.
He had already accumulated enough material wealth to last the rest of his lifetime, but what about the lifetimes of his son and his grandchildren?
He accepted the document, bid the man goodbye and, when my grandmother returned from her garden club meeting, suggested they consider taking a vacation to New England in the next year.
My father had heard this story only a few times from my grandfather, assuming it was more parable or metaphorical tale than anything real.
Dad told me that in every life we’ll encounter people who belief wholeheartedly in family lore. We are not to disapprove or discourage these people from holding their stories on the highest pole, flying them as flags of faith and family honour.
Dad said that Granddaddy promised the story would have a happy ending but he wouldn’t tell my father what was discovered one night in New Hampshire, only that a few photographs he took barely document the event which cemented my grandfather’s belief in one fellow sailor’s tall tale.
Dad didn’t have an ending to share with me.
However, he did said that Granddaddy hinted the answer would be found on his property in south Florida.
Lo and behold, I think I have the first evidence of that fateful, faith-filled evening.
I present to you, dear reader, the images to which my grandfather eluded:
I have more to go through to determine if the map and other information are in the chest and I’m just not seeing it.
While my wife unexpectedly had the afternoon off to go shopping with a 41-year old friend who looks like she’s still 31, hours after eating with friends, one who’s 24 and looks 24, with her father, 57 going on 58, I dug through the material my grandfather left behind, including a box of slides.
Thanks to a simple return policy by Wolverine Data, I received a working F2D14 scanner in the mail this afternoon.
Pulling a few sample slides, I scanned them and provide them here as samples that have sat for decades in a US Navy sea chest tucked in the back of an outdoor utility closet in south Florida:
My grandfather, the pirate
My mother, me and my father
Four generations of the Eldridge clan – Dad, his mother, me and Great-Granddad
My grandmother at a hotel swimming pool, elegantly dressed as usual
An artistic photo by my grandfather
Monticello, when women and girls wore skirts, sweaters and pretty smiles.
treetrunkdings 