Dear readers,
 
I hope this Thanksgiving weekend finds you well, on good terms with friends and family, and unblemished by a Black Friday black eye delivered while shopping at WalMart.

Recently, an editor at an online site to which I regularly contribute put me in touch with a television host interested in interviewing me about a piece I’d written. I wrote to the television station, and when I didn’t hear back after three or four days, asked the editor whether I should shoot out a second inquiry. The editor replied immediately, telling me that I should again make contact with the station. Later that day, as a follow-up, the editor sent me this email: “Promote yourself. It’s the American way.”
           
Well, far be it from me to appear unpatriotic. Hence, this solicitation.

Silence.

Silence is what Pope Francis promised in the face of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s accusations that officials at the Vatican had covered up Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s active homosexuality and his molestation of adolescents and seminarians.

Silence is what the pope has delivered.

On October 7, 2018, Archbishop Vigano issued a third public letter of testimony, stating at one point “It is no exaggeration to say that homosexuality has become a plague in the clergy, and it can only be eradicated with spiritual weapons.  It is an enormous hypocrisy to condemn the abuse, claim to weep for the victims, and yet refuse to denounce the root cause of so much sexual abuse: homosexuality.”

​Again silence. (Given Rome’s clandestine ways, the pope’s refusal to rebut Vigano’s charges is not extraordinary.)

Recently, the media and certain commentators have made much about white women voting for the likes of Trump and others of his ilk. Why do they do it? They ask. Why? Why? Why?
           
​Let me introduce you to three women. Because of the ugly political times in which we live, I have changed their names, but these are women, all of them white, I know well. 

Thank you for the world so sweet,
Thank you for the food we eat,
Thank you for the birds that sing,
Thank you, God, for everything.
                                    Child’s Mealtime Blessing

Thanksgiving is a day set aside, as Abraham Lincoln wrote in his 1863 Proclamation, to remember “the gracious gifts of the Most High God.” On that fourth Thursday of November, whatever the nature of our religious beliefs, many of us do indeed pause, often in the presence of family and friends, to give thanks for the year’s gifts and blessings.
           
​But what about the rest of the year? How often in our daily routine do we offer thoughts of gratitude simply for being alive, weird, fascinating creatures inhabiting this spinning miracle of a globe? 

The week after Halloween, my first-grade grandson asked if I was afraid of monsters.
           
“Only human ones,” I said. The confusion on his face alerted me to shift gears. “No, I’m not afraid of monsters. The older you get, the less you are afraid of monsters.”
           
He paused, then asked: “Are you afraid of tomatoes?”
           
That one sent me into a tailspin of laughter. “Tomatoes?”
           
“Un-huh.”
           
“No, I’m not afraid of tomatoes.”
           
​Where did that question come from? Had my grandson seen some zombie tomatoes on Veggie Tales hunting down innocent carrots and terrified squash?

Six days ago, I finished Volume X, Rousseau and Revolution, in The Story of Civilization, and am now up to page 250 in the last volume, The Age of Napoleon, of Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus. I shall, Deo volente, finish my self-appointed project of reading this set before the end of the year.

When I was a boy in Boonville, North Carolina, population 600 in the early 1960s, my mom used to take us shopping a couple of times a year in nearby Winston-Salem. Once I asked her why we didn’t shop there more often. The stores offered far more variety, and Winston was less than forty-five minutes away.
           
​“Boonville is our town,” Mom said. "We shop in Winston when we can’t find what we want here. These are our friends and neighbors, and your dad’s patients. They need us, and we need them. So we shop here first.”

In January of 2018, I resolved to read my way through Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus The Story Of Civilization before the end of the year. It is now early November, and I am nearing the end of Volume X of this series, Rousseau and Revolution, meaning that if all goes according to plan, I will have completed the eleven volumes around Christmas.
           
The Durants—Will began sharing credit with his wife Ariel in Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins—devoted the last three volumes of their epic history to the period 1715-1815. A casual observer of The Story Of Civilization might well wonder why these chroniclers of world civilization exhausted so much ink and energy on so limited a spectrum of time and place. Were they simply enamored with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the age of Napoleon?
           
​Not at all.

1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

That hour, that day, and that month brought an armistice to the First World War, a conflict that proved just the prelude to the bloodiest century in the history of humankind.

​November 11, 2018 will mark the centennial of that armistice.

A Failure To Communicate

​​Young Lucy Clark got drunk last night
on Wild Turkey splashed with Sprite;
she grabbed her cell and hit the keys,
“It’s me. Just leave a message, please.”
           
“Look here, you bastard, at what you’ve done.
  You offer love and then you run.
  You stole my soul, you stole my heart,
  but you ain’t worth a skeeter’s fart.