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.

 

Page Mileage

 

For the past dozen or more years, reading has been my primary hobby. It’s my main form of relaxation, escapism, mental stimulation. To experience different times, to live vicariously through characters sometimes alike and sometimes quite dissimilar from myself, to be physically moved by an exercise of the mind – this and more is the pleasure of what reading does for me.

What have I read these past six, seven months of radio silence? Well, quite a lot, apparently, reflecting upon this.

I revisited many old friends – Tom Clancy with The Bear and the Dragon, Richard Adams with one of perhaps a dozen definitive books of my youth, Watership Down, and the Arthurian world in The Once and Future King.

The latter two promoted a journey, or perhaps continued one, into the classics. I notched another bucket list item in Crime and Punishment. More Arthuriana with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (this on behest of collegian Little One). East of Eden, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wuthering Heights – wrestled with each, for better or worse, though usually for the better.

I renewed acquaintance with Shakespeare, too. Per my high schooler, Patch, I re-read and re-lived Romeo and Juliet, something I hadn’t touched or thought of since sophomore year of high school in the early 80s. And in the same vein, under a similar whim, I borrowed two lesser known plays and read though them outdoors in the sweltering Texas heat: Titus Andronicus and Pericles. Suffice it to say that I now know why they are labeled “lesser-known.”

Mid-summer, all alone with the wife at sales conferences and the little ones in Pennsylvania with their grandparents, my reading took curved off to the weird. I found two old classic books on Nostradamus and read both his prophecies and an exacting and overly exhaustive biography of the publication of his works. Speculation on the quatrains I left for later this winter. And I hung out with my old pal, PKD, and read The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, a brilliantly written but somewhat punch-lacking 70s novel of, well, soul transmigration, I guess.

For Halloween, I found an old classic a high school friend lent me as a senior in mid-1985: Floating Dragon by Peter Straub. That novel hit me with a barrowful of nostalgia. Some scenes gross and horrible as I remembered, others a little off and not as creepy or disgusting as the old RAM between the ears recalled. This I chased with H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, found in Patch’s backpack. I remember purchasing this nearly half-a-century ago from the Bookmobile. I read it in a few days and was surprised at how much of it Spielberg put into the 2005 film version (or, rather, how bold Wells was to include such horrifying aspects of the Martian total war technique – and what they did to innocents fleeing them on foot).

The only real disappointment was another novel I re-read based on fond youthful memories. Wolfen, by Whitley Strieber, a late-70s novel about urban werewolves. I loved it as a kid, having to read it stealthily (it was on a relative’s shelf and probably was a little too mature for me at the age I read it). It brought some nostalgia, but cynical, mature me found too much to criticize and that cut into the enjoyment.

Anyway, I have an epic to finish my year’s end, which will be a subject of a later post.

Happy reading, all!

 

Technical Difficulties ... Fixed?

 

Well, the trusty laptop I purchased in 2015 finally died. Six months ago.

Truth be told, the damnable thing gave me nothing but problems from nearly day one. Out of charity I won’t name the manufacturer, because when it did work I was more than happy with it. But soon issues overwhelmed it. First, it would go black when I typed too hard on the keyboard. Had to reboot and would lose any data. Then it would go black when I raised or lowered the screen. I had to treat it as if it was made of fine china or I was typing on a house of cards. Lastly, the random freezing. Which resulted in many wasted hours cleaning and defragging hard drives and uninstalling any unfamiliar programs. A buddy tried swapping out the motherboard. But nothing seemed to fix the 2015 laptop.

Then, on April 10th, it powered on but refused to boot up to the startup desktop.

(Forgive me if I’m abusing computer terminology. I’ve been out of the game for 23 years.)

Took it to a PC Doctor and was told the laptop was shot. He was able to put all my files – word docs, excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and pictures – onto a flash drive and charged me $100 for my trouble. And that was that.

Hopper purchased a new laptop on Amazon Day back in July. It was a different manufacturer from the one who built the 2015 laptop. Contrary to the 2015 laptop, however, it was a B-I-O-T-C-H to set up. I resorted to paying my daughter to get it up and running, get my McAfee switched over, and get my MS Office suite set up. The latter of which is still not working hitch-free. I’m waiting for her Thanksgiving break where I’ll toss a few more $ her way to get it all straightened out.

In the meantime, over the past 180 days or so, I’ve done many things and read many books and watched many movies which I’ve longed to blog about. Some weird encounters, some jaw-dropping literary reads, some phenomenal – and crappy – flicks. Most of which I’ll get to, soon, when the spirit moves me.

But be it known that I am back.

More posts in the next couple of days.