3:15

 

As alluded to in an earlier post this month, I wake up every night at 3:15 a.m.

 

So did George Lutz of The Amityville Horror fame – or, rather, infamy!

 

So do many experiencing attacks of the demonic or spiritual crises, as a quick Google search will tell you.

 

As for me, well … I kinda agree, hate to say.

 

Now, I don’t always awaken at 3:15. Maybe every ten days I will wake up at 3:15 on the dot. I see it on the microwave I pass as I make my way in the darkness to the bathroom. And let me tell you, I almost know it’s going to display 3:15 before I get there, and when my suspicion in confirmed, I can’t tell you how eerie it is. Goose-bump eerie. If it happens to you, you know. If not, I can’t convey it in words adequately enough.

 

Most of the time I awake around 3:15. Sometimes I come very close – 3:12, 3:20, 3:08. This morning I woke at 3:40. And it doesn’t matter when I fall asleep. Normally I go to bed around 11:30. On the weekends I go to bed later, midnight or 1 a.m. not being uncommon. Last night I was exhausted from a tough work week and some insomnia and went to bed at 10:15. But no matter when I go to sleep, I wake up near or at 3:15, invariably. Only two or three times a month, at best, do I not wake up at the witching hour.

 

Because that’s what it’s called. The witching hour. The dead hour of night when witches covens are most active and dark spells suffuse through the chilly black air on their evil errands. The hour diametrically opposed to the death of Jesus on the Cross, traditionally held to have happened at 3 in the afternoon, the hour when salvation came to mankind. Evil naturally gravitates, accelerates and accentuates its designs at the hour 180 degrees from God’s saving work in history.

 

Perhaps there could be a more mundane explanation. Long ago I’ve read about the “reticular activating system” in our minds – when we learn something or are pointed towards something, we begin to start noticing that something more often. The best example I heard is if you go to a auto dealership and take a fancy to a car model you’ve never seen before. Suddenly, out on the roads over the next few days and weeks, you’ll suddenly see that car model everywhere. It’s not like they haven’t been out on the roads all this time. It was never called to your attention so you never noticed it.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with that. You hear some creepy weird things about 3:15 a.m. You wake up one random night at 3:15 a.m. and remember that spooky thing you heard about it. Then it happens again next month. Then, sooner. And now you’re a 3:15 a.m. junkie like me, getting your fix every night.

 

Something similar happened to me when I was young. I was fascinated with the time 11:11, and would point it out to anyone within earshot when I caught it on the digital clock. Pretty soon every time I look I see 11:11. Later, as an adult, I would see 9:17 on the clock – my birthday – and tease my little ones, especially Patch, whose birthday is September16. Now it seems every time I see a clock on my phone or laptop or on the microwave, if it’s morning or evening, it will show 9:17.

 

What to do?

 

Well, I’ve read some accounts by individuals afflicted with this odd phenomenon. The “spiritual crisis” thing resonates cuz, well, I’ve been undergoing one of varying magnitudes for most of my adult life. Sure, I’m about 90 percent in the traditional Roman Catholic camp, after many years reading, thinking, puzzling out and experiencing, but I still have the urge to explore. Be it philosophy, Eastern religions, or different shades of Christianity, I seem to never feel safely secure in my traditional Roman Catholic camp. Yeah, it might have something to do with that idiot Pope we’re saddled with. Or maybe it’s my habitual sins I’ve struggled with and can never shake. Or maybe it’s a lack of personal supernatural confirmation from the “out there.” I dunno. But I think this 3:15 thing might be a signal to me.

 

What I try to do is follow some advice I read. Specifically, when I find myself up at that hour of the early morning, I say the St. Michael Prayer:

 

St. Michael the Archangel

Defend us in battle

Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

May God rebuke him we humbly pray

And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host

By the power of God

Cast into hell Satan and the evil spirits

Who prowl about the world

Seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

 

And if I can’t remember that or am too befuddled with sleep to get through it, I mutter a Hail Mary under my breath, return to my warm cozy bed, and fall back into my dreams and the darkness.

French Lit > Russian Lit

 

There, I said it.

 

In my humble, genuine, gentle, and amateur-in-the-original-sense-of-the-word way (as in “a lover of the thing for the sake of the thing itself,” in this case, “literature”), I do believe the French lit I’ve read is better than the Russian lit I’ve read.

 

Let me preface to say this is a low-volume sample. In one corner, we have

 

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, also by Victor Hugo

 

representing the French contribution to Hopper’s literary experience.

 

In the opposite corner, representing that Great Bear of Literature, Mother Russia, we have

 

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov, also by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

though in all honesty I only conquered a third of the Karamazov book (of which I will finish one day).

 

So my experience with the French was “better” than with the Russian.

 

French Literature > Russian Literature

 

Hopper, define “better”. Okay. For me, I enjoyed more the reading of the one set of novels opposed to the other. All are deeply philosophical works, of a kind that probably hasn’t been written in English in at least a half a century, if not longer. All feature large casts of characters, and all of those characters spring to life. All kept me guessing, at one point or another or several. All in all, all were worthy reads, and I am grateful for reading them all and probably, in some small way, am a better man for doing so.

 

But, French > Russian.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with translation. I recall reading two books by the Frenchman Jules Verne twenty-plus years ago: From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the Earth. The first was whimsical, LOL-ish, and very joyous to read. The second was the exact opposite: it was only through grim gritty and teeth-grinding determination I finished it.

 

In the case of the six abovementioned classics, however, I discerned no translator creep – er, translation creep. Not creep as in “creepy,” but creep as in a translator inserting his own editorializing instead of staying faithful to the original source material. Probably has something to do with each work’s translation completed in 1992 or earlier, as I do not trust much literature after 2000 or anything after 2015.

 

To ascertain why, I came up with a couple of images.

 

First, I felt the French works more a “right brain” piece of writing and the Russian a “left brain” exercise. That is, the French seemed more artistic, visual, holistic, free-form, to use some hippyisms. The Russian works I found more analytical, more “by the numbers,” logical. This is just a feeling, just a sense of mine.

 

Second, this led me to think that perhaps one can view the French as books written from start to finish, whereas the Russian seemed written end to beginning. What do I mean? Well, the French works seemed to meander along to their conclusions, winding this way and that, seeming to derail but never doing so, inexorably plunging towards their natural climaxes, almost as if discovering their endings. I had the sense that the Russian novels knew exactly what the final page would read, and everything was meticulously outlined and constructed to form logical patterns to fit in to what the authors wanted to say of history or society or the human soul. (This latter way is the way I wrote my two “novels,” or rather, “manuscripts.”)

 

This is not to disparage Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. All three novels were incredible journeys, me some third wheel breaking the fourth wall vicariously and voyeuristically and participating in transcendent and or historic events. I enjoyed them all.

 

But I enjoyed the French style better. Which leads to my third simple point: You bring yourself at your stage of your life to the book you are reading. I think at my age and station in life what I am craving is a little adventure, a little bit of participation in the great threads of history, in that French meandering, winding way. Perhaps I spent too long in too logical a frame of mind, and the right hemisphere is demanding a say in steering the bus (to confuse a couple of brain/personality images).

 

Whatever the true case may be, and to convince you I am really nitpicking here, were I given godlike powers and had to judge these French and Russian writers standing before me novels-in-hand, I’d grade Hugo and Dumas easy 98’s.

 

And I’d give Tolstoy and Dostoevsky solid 95’s.

 

Fantastique

 

So I fell asleep with Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un artiste … en cinq parties on the turntable, the 1830 excursion into psychedelia by the maestro Hector Berlioz and dreamt – of all things – that I coached basketball.

 

Now I know nothing of basketball, and basketball knows nothing of me. We had a brutal breakup sometime in the late 70s when I was unceremoniously cut at CYO tryouts. Right off the bat my dreamself felt trapped, triggered, threatened, and soaked in sweat.

 

That grating air horn buzzer signaled the start of the first game of the season. I slowly examined the ensemble of broken downs sulking on the bench, each studying the floor, walls, and ceiling for inspiration. And how was I to inspire a crew like this – ?

 

Ludwig van Beethoven – 5’ 4”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – 5’ 4”

Franz Schubert – 5’ 2”

Richard Wagner – 5’ 5”

Arnold Schoenberg – 5’ 4”

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky – 5’ 3”

 

Have you ever seen such a bunch of sickly sad sacks?

 

Well, just then the record skipped at the fourth movement – Marche au supplice (“March to the Scaffold”) – and I realized I was dreaming, dreaming last night. And as the fog and purple haze dissipated I ordered the boys back into the locker room to change, promise they’d quit hoops forever, and through themselves two hundred percent back into the compositional studies.

 

My arm lurched out for my phone in the early morning darkness, and the numbers “3:15” mocked me, yet again. But that’s the subject of a future post …

Tolkien ’24

 

Well, I’m starting to feel that itch again. Periodically, every couple of years or a decade or two, I run out of things of interest to read about. It’s been happening to me since the end of summer. And when that happens, I eventually (re)turn to Tolkien. It’s the perfect antidote for what ails me.

 

I have a box of Tolkien’s works still in the storage closet, unpacked since our move to Texas in the summer of 2021. It contains: Two sets of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Two versions of The Silmarillion, one a hardcover and the other a paperback. One copy of The Hobbit and one of Unfinished Tales, both paperback, and one hardcopy each of The Children of Hurin and The Fall of Gondolin. Excluding duplicates, that’s something just a bit over 3,000 pages, if I had to guesstimate.

 

My most recent re-reading of Tolkien was The Lord of the Rings in the Spring of 2021, two-and-a-half years ago, just before we learned we had to sell the house and move down south. It was my fifth journey with Frodo et. al. A little over a year before that I voyaged with Bilbo in The Hobbit, my third time to Erebor. I’ve read Children of Hurin twice, in August of 2010 and June of 2017, and reviewed both reads somewhere in these here electronic pages. The Silmarillion was a three-peat, the first time down the Jersey shore in Lavallette as a middle-schooler (I understood little of it back then), then as a recuperating heart patient in 2008, and finally listening to it on audio CD and reading along in 2017. The Fall of Gondolin was a birthday gift that I haven’t yet  read.

 

So every fiber of my being feels it’s time. Time. Time to re-read the Professor again. But this time to do it right, because, hey, I’m not exactly a spring chicken anymore and can realistically hope for another quarter century, which still can hold plenty of re-reads, but I want to do it right, right now.

My plan is to read through the oeuvre according to Tolkien’s internal chronology:

 

January 1, 2024: One month to read The Silmarillion.

February 1: Continue on with The Children of Hurin.

February 15: Move on to The Fall of Gondolin.

March 1: Read the first 2/3 of Unfinished Tales, which deals with First and Second Age events.

March 15: Start The Hobbit.

April 15: Commence with the magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings.

Finish by June 1 with a re-read of The Quest of Erebor, the third part of Unfinished Tales.

 

[Dates approximate]

 

To help out my reading and cement my mastery of all things Middle-earth, I have J.E.A. Tyler’s The Complete Tolkien Companion, and have given myself permission to look up anything, anytime during my reader, even in the middle of a sentence. Some of my favorite memories learning about this world were the endless hours I pored over my Uncle’s copy of this encyclopedia, researching this and that and piecing together the history through the Ages.

And if I wish to further nerd out, I picked up the 500-page Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, excellent for trivia and insight into how he thought, wrote, and created. I bought it back in 2019 and clocked 76 pages, but never finished it.

I am also allowing myself to pick up anything else Tolkien I come across in the used book shops, such as Unfinished Tales II, and Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth series. I would also love to read Leaf by Niggle, Father Giles of Ham, and Smith of Wootton Major, which I haven’t seen in print in decades.

Anyway, here’s to a great 2024! Can’t wait …

 

It Asks, I Answer

 

This randomly popped up online a few days back and I replied, “OK, Universe. You asked.”

 

 

1) Bobcat. We have bobcats around here. I saw one down an alley on my early morning walks (it was down the alley, I was on a main street). Patch saw one, twice. One of those times it came right up to her. They’re about the size of an average dog, with long, lanky legs. And sharp claws at the ends of those long, lanky legs. I think it’s not too boastful to think I could punch one into submission if it attacked me, so long as I can keep those sharp claws away from my major arterial systems.

 

2) Three times. Half a century ago Ian Fleming wrote, “Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” I believe it. Though we have some diverse avian wildlife down here (egrets, herons, grackles, and deep-sky hovering hawks), have yet to see an owl. Though I think that would be cool. Two owls in one day might be a little eerie. Three, and I’d be searching the indices of my Matthew Henry bible commentary for “owl.”

 

3) Buy a house for the equity. Don’t think I’ve had a decent night’s sleep since I first became a homeowner, nineteen-and-a-half years ago.

 

Some literature on deck in a few days!

 

Spooky November

 

In November of 1697, two glowing wheels are seen in the skies over Hamburg, Germany.

 

In November of 1896, a wave of mysterious “airship” sightings wash over 19 western US states, the first originating in Sacramento, California.

 

Also, one Colonel Shaw and his companions ae approached by “strange beings” who attempt to abscond with them in an awaiting airship.

 

In November of 1930, the mass disappearance of the inhabitants of the Inuit village of Angikuni is discovered.

 

In November of 1944, military brass coin the term “foo fighters” to describe otherworldly glowing orbs which closely followed and often dog-fought Allied fighters over Europe.

 

Four years later, in November of 1948, the “green fireball” phenomena, observed by hundreds of civilians and scientists, spreads throughout the American southwest, particularly Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 

In November of 1952, prophet or huckster George Adamski encounters his first Venusian, or so he claims.

 

A year later, in November of 1953, Air Force pilot Felix Moncla dies in a crash flying after what he believes to be a UFO.

 

For three straight days in November of 1957, observers, including police officers, track and chase cigar- and egg-shaped objects in the sky, from Levelland, Texas to White Sands, New Mexico, objects which cause vehicles on the ground to stall.

 

In November of 1961, Michael Rockefeller, heir to the vast Rockefeller fortune, vanishes in New Guinea, perhaps a victim to cannibalistic tribes he was studying in the region or perhaps in the crocodile-infested waters.

 

In November of 1965, over the long night of the 9th to the 10th¸ the “Great Blackout” blankets the vast majority of the United States.

 

A year later, in November of 1966, the “Mothman” of West Virginia first shows up in the town of Point Pleasant. In November of 1967, four individuals claim to spot the winged otherworldly creature.

 

In November of 1975, Travis Walton is abducted by a UFO within Sitgreaves National Forst in eastern Arizona and “returns” after six days missing.

 

In November of 1986, passengers and pilots of Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 sight and track a huge UFO “the size of an aircraft carrier.” Radar hits from the ground lend credence to the fact that something in addition to the aircraft was up there.

 

In November of 1989, a wave of triangular UFO sightings create havoc in Belgium, lasting off and on until 1991. When photographed, and photographed by many, only blurs show up on film.

 

In November of 2004, US Navy aircraft from the USS carrier Nimitz encounter the “tic tac” UFO – excuse me, the term now is UAP – off the coast of Florida.

 

Two years later, in November of 2006, United Airlines personnel at Chicago O’Hare Airport are stunned to watch a disc-shaped object shoot straight up off the tarmac, cutting a hole in the overhead cloud cover.

 

That’s just a sampling. Man, what a spooky month November is!

 

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

 

So I was genuinely excited a few months back when I first learned that a major motion picture of the life and career of Napoleon Bonaparte would be released in November. This was completely under the radar for me; I hadn’t read or saw anything about it on the webs until I saw the trailer while watching Oppenheimer in the theater with the wife last summer.

I was cautiously optimistic. Why? I’ll get into that in a moment.

I’ve written elsewhere here about my obscure interest in the French Emperor. The “First Antichrist” if Orson Welles and Nostradamus are to be believed. Might have something to do with the old rags-to-riches story. Or military genius. Boldness. Or the influence of a favorite history teacher at college.

I’ve read two thick biographies of the man (one around 1995 and the other in 2017) and a detailed manual on his military campaigns. I’ve also been moseying my way through Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series. Sharpe is an English rifleman who fights his way through life and primarily against the Emperor’s French over the course of 15 years, in India, Spain, Holland, and, later I guess, St. Helena. Haven’t read the last novel as I’m only 8 books through the 13 Santa bought me two years ago, but I think Sharpe meets Bonaparte at the end of the General’s short life, in exile in the middle of the Atlantic.

Hence the excitement of a legitimate big screen adaptation of the Napoleonic era.

However … (and it’s a big however …)

This is Hollywood we’re talking about here. 2023 Hollywood.

And it’s Ridley Scott, as director.

Neither have been known to scrupulously adhere to reality in their historical epics. Much has to be sacrificed at the altar of Agenda. I am fearful that what thousands of people will see on the big screen will be some ignoramus’s idea of what Napoleon should have been like.

I am worried about –

The casting of Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon. Too old and probably too tall, and rockin’ an American accent. I like him and his movies, but I’m on the fence about this.

The irresistible temptation to make Josephine a girlboss, the real “power” behind the throne.

The other irresistible temptation to make Napoleon, a white man, a brutish, stupid neanderthal. (I do recognize the arguments against his life’s actions and works, but by no means could he be called a brutish, stupid neanderthal.)

The inaccuracies in battle tactics. I already read that the “squares” the infantry form in the flick to defend against cavalry attacks do not align with how they formed in the real world; indeed, in the movie they’d probably wind up shooting each other rather than the attacking enemy.

The dreary color saturation and dirtiness of the film. I realize that the battlefield is not the optimal place for cleanliness, but I gather everyone in the palaces and in the towns will look grimy, stinky and unhygienic.

(Plus, I heard an interesting theory that filmmakers tint their movies in different colors to psychologically affect the way the viewer interprets what’s happening on the screen, or the “message” they want to convey, and some movies are tinted differently depending on which country the film is being marketed to. Don’t know much about this, but it is interesting enough for me to look into the phenomenon.)

We’ll see. I may have to sneak into a movie theater myself on the second weekend of release to check it out, before seeing it with the Mrs. or the not-so-little Little Ones.

Books on the Seine

 

So I was scrolling randomly through my Twitter feed the other day and this image pops up:

 

 

I was actually in this bookstore! Eleven and a half years ago! I walked those painted stone floors and perused those dusty, wonderful shelves!

Back in the spring of 2012, my wife won a trip to Paris at her annual sales meeting. I blogged about it extensively here all those years ago. One evening, a Thursday I think, we booked a restaurant overlooking the river Seine with the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the far side just off to the left (we already visited that magnificent church). It was within walking distance of our hotel, and as we meandered along the riverbank to the eatery my wife noticed Shakespeare and Company and urged me to venture inside.

Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, the vast majority of the books were in French. Oh, if I had a magic genie, I’d ask to be literate in that language. I tackled it back then but just had no aptitude for the phonetics and linguistics. The wife did all my speaking and translating that week.

But inside this fresh-out-of-the-nineteenth-century bookstore there was an English section, and in that section appeared an entire “vertical” shelf devoted to – science fiction master Philip K. Dick!

I was a huge devotee of PKD back from, say, 2004 to 2012, and devoured his books and short stories, his nonfiction essays, and even a biography. It hardly made any sense, but it was fun and intriguing. However, all these books – and there were about two dozen of them – all were of the oversized paperback variety. Basically hardcover size with a flimsy cover. (These are my least favorite type of book, design-wise.) And they were all priced around 20 euros a piece – around $26 each at the going exchange back then. Too pricey and too ugly for a souvenir, but in a weird way I appreciated their presence at this venerable bookseller. I left after a half hour, purchaseless.

One other memory of Paris, re: books. As you walked along the Seine, there’d be these mobile stands that sold traditional-sized paperbacks and magazines every block or so. I was fascinated with the type of literature being sold here, for it was a window into the mind of these sellers as what the typical tourist would want to buy, and indeed must have bought in the past. I recall the most insane book I saw at one of these stands – a novelization of the 1980s American TV show Dallas … in French! Qui a tiré sur JR? (if my Google translate is being faithful to the idiom).

Anyway, today is for me a mental health PTO day from work. I plan to read, watch a classic 50s sci-fi flick, drive out for a sandwich at lunch and maybe pick up a record. Happy Friday!

The Collection Grows

 

During the Great Inadvertent Hopper Hiatus of 2023 I continued my record collecting hobby. It brings me a surprising amount of joy – seeking out quality records of desired works of favorite composers for that sweet spot of price, $6, give or take a few bucks. To date my collection has grown to 30 albums in 13 months, or about a purchase every 13 days. I’m “leasing” Little One’s record player for 25 cents a day and I tend to listen to a record in the evening a couple times a week up in my office after the family’s gone to bed.

In the past six months my collection doubled. Most I’ve picked up myself but a few were gifted to me. All in, I spent $58, or $5.25 a record, on those that I purchased.

What a bargain!

So what were these additions?

Well, Patch bought me four – four! – records for my birthday. Although she knows very little about classical music (just the bare amount she learned from four years playing saxophone in school band), she seems very confident in the albums she selected for me:

 

   Tchaikosky (her favorite composer) – Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35 (this is actually the second Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35 she bought me, the other being a Christmas gift!)

   Tchaikovsky – 1812 Overture, Hamlet Overture, and two lesser-known overtures

   Brahms – Symphony No. 1 in Dm, Op. 68 (perhaps my favorite classical work)

   Mozart – “obras para piano a cuarto manos”, very nice background music for hard mental work

 

I also picked up album versions of some favorites that I first collected twenty years ago on CD:

 

   Holst – The Planets

   Sibelius – Finlandia, Swan of Tuonela, Valse Triste, two other lesser works

   Grieg – Peer Gynt Suite

   Rodrigo – Concerierto de Aranjuez, Fantasía Para un Gentilhombre (classical guitar!)

   Handel – Water Music

 

Purchased a couple of symphonies on a whim:

  

   Haydn – Symphony No. 88 in G, Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”) (I like Haydn.)

   Mahler – Symphony No. 1 in D (I just don’t get Mahler. Believe me, I’ve tried. I have Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” on CD, “Das Lied von der Erde” on CD, and have borrowed Symphonies 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 from local libraries back in the day, to no avail. I think I’m done with Gustav.)

 

And found a record shop in McKinney, Texas, where I took advantage of this sweet deal: one classical record at regular price, the others at 25 cents apiece!

 

   Brahms – Symphony No. 4 in EM, Op. 98

   Dvorak – Symphony No. 5 in Em, Op. 95 (also known as Symphony No. 9)

   Schumann – Symphony No. 3 “Rhenish” in Eb, Op. 97

   Schumann – Symhony No. 4 in Dm, Op. 120

 

Hm. Tonight’s a good night, I think, to put my collection in alphabetical order. Or should it be purchase order? Or compositional chronological order? Decisions, decisions …

Philosophy with Patch

 

SCENE: The Honda Accord this morning, doing errands, to culminate in dropping off Patch, age 15, at the soccer field for her reffing gig.

ME: I can prove to you that the universe HAS to exist.

PATCH: (groaning) Not more philosophy, Dad.

ME: Listen, this is cool. I’ll try to say it slowly. It took me a little while to get it down myself.

PATCH: Do I have to?

ME: Yes, if you want me to continue my duties as chauffeur.

PATCH: Ugh. Alright.

ME: This will prove that the universe must exist. Assume there is nothing. No universe, nothing. Then there would be no laws, because laws are something. If there are no laws, then everything is permitted. If everything is permitted, that means that nothing is forbidden. If nothing is forbidden, well, that means that nothing can not be. It can’t exist. Therefore, something must exist. That something is what we call the universe.

PATCH: I hate philosophy! Just a bunch of old nerds living in their parent’s basements trying to make everything more complicated!

ME: What do you mean? They’re trying to explain things.

PATCH: Well, maybe some philosophers are okay. Maybe someone like Socrates was able to figure things out and explain them in new ways.

ME: So would you lump Socrates in with all these old nerds?

PATCH: Dad, I didn’t say Socrates lived in his parent’s basement!

 

I think Socrates would have loved Patch. Whether she’d love him is a different story …

 

Wilfred the Indian

 

The girls and I just finished running some errands a few Saturdays ago – library, dry cleaners, supermarket, and take-home lunch to eat together watching some shlocky TV – when the doorbell rang. I had some delicious wings all primed to go and was changing into some comfy clothes when the one of the girls yelled, “Dad, there’s someone at the front door. I think it’s a neighbor.”

OK, I thought, wondering why they didn’t address whatever was going on. I peeked out the window, saw one man standing on my porch, and went outside.

“Hello,” the man said. “May I pray with you?”

Uh-oh.

I immediately flashed back to early April. Little One and I drove into town to visit a PC repair shop in search of any hope for my malfunctioning laptop. Parking was tough so I found a spot a few blocks down and we hoofed it over. We passed a Baptist church, which had a dozen members milling about outside, some holding a huge banner, others handing out free donuts in their parking lot.

We were assaulted in a hail of requests to pray for us or for us to pray with them. One thing about Christians down South, they are persistent. I’ve lived the vast majority of my life as a Catholic in the northeast US, where religion is kept firmly indoors solely between close friends and relatives. So I was somewhat unused to the head-on guns-blazing proselytization so common below the Mason Dixon line.

Plus it’s a touchy-feely culture down here, and I don’t like to touch other people’s sweaty hands.

Back to my front porch, and the prayerful man on it.

He introduced himself as Wilfred. He lives about four blocks away and first moved into the neighborhood twenty years ago when the vast surroundings were wild and untamed. Apparently he spends his Saturdays walking the streets ringing random doorbells and, uh, asking people to pray with him.

My guard perked up immediately. I was in no mood for a discussion about personal relationships with Jesus, especially how such a relationship is viewed quite differently in Catholic life as opposed to the Protestant view. While I approach my salvation with Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, I am relatively secure in it, and I go to confession on average every two months. I was in no mood to be steamrollered or sparred with.

To my pleasant surprise, Wilfred did neither. Instead, we had a quite pleasant discussion about what brought us to (or back to) the faith. He told me of his younger life in India. Married with a successful business. Then he got involved in drugs, his marriage failed, his business tanked. In an attempt to kill himself he overdosed but someone found him and brought him to a hospital. In the emergency room, he said matter-of-factly, he heard clearly and distinctly the voice of Jesus Christ commanding him to change his life. Then he lapsed into a coma for several days. At one point he came out and announced to the attending doctors and nurses that they were each individually saved, though he has no memory of this. Eventually he left the hospital and gave his life to Christ, and found his way to Texas, USA.

We chatted for about twenty minutes. I mentioned how my hospital stay nearly fifteen years ago fueled my return. Denominations were discussed where I stated my firm beliefs in the teaching, if not the governance, of the Catholic Church. He emphasized he was currently non-denominational – all and everything focused solely on Jesus – but initially he started out as a Methodist on the other side of the globe. We wrapped up talking about the pros and cons of Texas and our children.

My buffalo wings were getting cold. I told him I enjoyed the conversation, shook his hand wishing him good luck, and told him to stop by next time he found himself back on my block.

But we never prayed together, I realized later that day, thinking back on his initial request. Which is okay, because now I pray for Wilfred every night.