Hey Rod welcome home! Wow you really look great man very peaceful. It's amazing how what's going on with you can show up so much on your face, you know? I was a psych RN in a busy Trauma Center/ER for a long time- it was superstressful but I was really good at it and part of an amazing team so I thought I had a handle on it, plus I had good spiritual practices- a rosary on my knees at home every morning then a half hour meditation daily in the hospital Zen Den right before work. Well two years ago when I turned sixty I finally decided I had enough of all the violence (plus I now have visible GI Joe-Doc-Savage scars on my forehead from a 380lb schizophrenic woman who clawed me right before I left) and I became a home hospice nurse for Catholic charities. Now whenever I go back to visit that ER everyone tells me I look ten years younger even though I now have a long white unruly beard! Onward and upward Rod!
You are doing important work, Rick. I'm glad it has had a beneficial psychospiritual effect on you too! Thank you for the care you give to segment of the population that is so often forgotten.
My local hospice has expanded from terminal care to walking along with any elderly person who has long term issues (they serve my mother-in-law with non-Alzheimer's dementia). Terrific plan, terrific staff. Wish others were able to do that, too.
Here in Virginia we usually call them crawdads. Does that pass muster? They are fresh water. My brother in law shot a deer once and after field dressing it, put it in a creek to cool (yes we are rednecks). He found a crawdad in the carcass & our girls kept it as a pet for awhile. This being the 90’s, they named him Gnarly Dude. Unfortunately we weren’t good at feeding Gnarly Dude, I guess, I guess fish flakes from the pet store were not his thing so he passed on to the Great Mountain Creek in the Sky.
We got one in Tampa. Just about five miles east towards Ybor City, there is pure Spanish restaurant there, the Columbia. Castilian. Order the Paella Valencia there on a weekend, and later on comes the Flamenco dancers from the Andalusia. Amazing.
My theory is that in Budapest you were semi-forced to spend much more of your mental life online, and despite you knowing this explicitly and warning constantly about it … the abyss stared into you.
Right now in ‘Bama you can simply live life in reality, incorporated, and realize that despite all of the really bad things going on somewhere … most people in most places (especially in the South) are just kind of living and having fun.
I am a loyal reader and won’t stop, but I always feel better on days when I just interact with my neighbors vs when I read about the terrible things going on “somewhere”
In the immortal words of that nameless dude at the beginning of The Matrix, “you gotta unplug, dude”
I don't even want to think what it would be like to spend four years in a city where I don't understand the language and can't speak it. That alone would stress me out.
Bill Tighe, one of the great pleasures of my first months in Italy was keeping my ears open to idiom and filing for reference. "So that's how you say, 'Does this bother you?'--'Lei da fastidio?', and that how you say, 'Imagine!' 'Figurati'"
Siamo sulla stessa lunghezza d'onda - I was fortunate enough to have spent about 6 months in northern Italy for work some decades ago. Loved the country, the people, the musical language. Fortunately I had enough French to bootstrap up to a semi-functional level reasonably quickly. But that's one of the crucial differences - in any country with either a Romance or a Germanic languages, one's school French/Spanish/German can be enough of a starting point to allow on the ground progress possible, and most of the time Americans are applauded for their making an effort, no matter how rudimentary. Hungarian has virtually no overlap with anything else, being not even Indo European. Unless you are a stubborn linguist, e una causa persa,
In my short time in Hungary, I was able to get by with German - in the '70s anyway, lots of people spoke it, even haltingly. On the train across the Hungarian Plain headed toward Budapest, I had a conversation in broken German with a man in his late 50s, a charmingly boastful sort, who claimed Hungary was the best and most beautiful at everything.
Rod has only French in his pocket, helpful in Italy, yes, but probably not in Hungary.
I remember reading an esoteric theory about people having a mystical connection to certain regions - that some people have a patch of ground on the Earth that recharges them. I could see this being the case for Rod and the South.
I think it's more the case that there's no place like home. You'll feel more comfortable in a region that's similar to home than a country where you don't speak the language.
I've thought for a while and even said similar in the comments section here. He has a talent writing about his family and what he did as a kid. I would recommend that he take elements of his life or someone else's and fictionalize them to a degree and write an excellent novel set in the South.
It would have tp pass the Sensitivity Reader barrier that has rendered modern fiction virtually unreadable if you are a male. Like HR, book publishing is in the grip of feminists with a misandry itch.
I've read some more recent fiction books that have bypassed this problem by being independently published. Some reviewers didn't like the tone of the books but it wasn't written for them. One of them was a science fiction book.
I get that. I have lived most of my life in the driftless region of southeast MN, southwest WI Northeast IA. When I leave for awhile I get anxious to return to it.
Heileman’s Old Style was originally brewed in LaCrosse WI (it is again but it is not the same.) I still fondly remember the old Old Style Tv ads that always end with “Brewed in God’s country.” I didn’t need a beer ad to tell me that though.
What event was it commemorating?: "a Buc-ee’s commemorative t-shirt." Or is every visit to any Buc-ee's an affair to remember? Asking from an apparently benighted non-Buc-ee's locale.
They're opening one or two in Wisconsin. They picked good locations, but I don't think in most of the state they'll be competition for Quik Trip. QT is more navigable, more personal service, and really good quality food for a gas station/store combo. Love the turkey on cranberry bread sandwiches, and their brownies.
A couple months ago at our monthly Good News & Brews program, we had an “Ask the Padres” night. One of the questions posed to the four of us clerics present was “what kind of music do you listen to to unwind?” My brother priests ticked off things like Antonio Vivaldi, Beethoven, jazz, and Russian Orthodox chant (which are all great, except jazz - I hate jazz). When it finally got down to me, I sort of sheepishly said, “Well, I’m an 80s kid, so that means Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Metallica…..,” which didn’t earn any scorn from this particular group of brother priests, and got a rousing round of applause from the other 80s kids in the audience. Glad to know I’m not the only “unreformed metalhead” with a collar ‘round his neck (though I will add thatI don’t listen to all of their music anymore; some of it is certainly worth avoiding). Rock on, Fr Matt! 🤟🏻
If you don't care for jazz, I could recommend listening to some jazz fusion and if you like it, then you could try jazz. Fusion mixes jazz with other styles of music including rock.
Nothing good came out in the 80s. I show my age by my taste for Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Byrds, Joy of Cooking (never famous but good music). I can update that with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which actually emerged in the 21st century.
Southern heat: I remember Texas before air conditioning -- attic fans, sleeping on a screened in porch, or staying with relatives and sleeping on cots in the back yard, flit gun handy against mosquitoes. After real air conditioning (swamp-cooler interregnum really doesn't count) even Texas is bearable. (And then I think of great-great-grandfather coming to Texas from Mississippi in 1840 -- and probably not wearing shorts and a polo shirt.) Those born more recently really don't have that much to complain about.
First time I visited Dallas it was over Fourth of July. I went out to the Dallas botanical gardens on a scorcher of a day. There's a fountain near the entrance with a big sign: "Do not wade in fountain!" On that day I can understand why they had to admonish people to keep out.
"...how serene, even happy, I look in it." You also look crazy jet-lagged. Take it easy.
In the summer of 1990 I was visiting a company in Little Rock. They didn't have offices they had a campus, which included a guest house featuring an admirably stocked bar and a grand piano. I had the place to myself. I decided to drive to Atlanta and fly back to New York from there.
The weather glorious, hot and dry and clear. For the first time in my life I saw biplane flying. It was a crop duster. For some reason it was thrilling. This was the run-up to Desert Storm and there was a lot of military activity on and just off the roads.
I broke the trip in Birmingham. I don't remember much about it except that it seemed a very handsome city.
Just so there are any doom addicts out there, yes yes AI, yes yes Paris. But this morning Central Command says Iran fired missiles at Kuwait (which is a lot closer than Diego Garcia). What all this peek-a-boo with death means is that mullahs are running the table. All Trump has done in following Bibi's guidance, if that's what you want to call it, is demonstrate to the Iranians that it is they who control the straits short of a full-scale invasion the prospect of which obviously terrifies Trump, as it should.
As I told my pal, a retired journalist, in fact the former managing editor of the Paris Tribune, who came up with this analysis, if true, and it is, it's a world-historical event and could be the beginning of something like Suez for this country. The best to you each morning.
I'm not actually jet-lagged, though. It's easy-peasy flying west to the US from Europe. But going back, hoo-wee, it takes a couple of weeks to get my chakras re-aligned. I don't know why that is, but others report the same thing.
I've found the same thing on visits to the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii. I can reset my internal clock easily going west. But coming back east leave me discombobulated.
Last summer when my boy was at hockey camp, one of the kids skated in a full Buc-ee-s suit for the final game where they were all just mostly messing around.
Hey Rod welcome home! Wow you really look great man very peaceful. It's amazing how what's going on with you can show up so much on your face, you know? I was a psych RN in a busy Trauma Center/ER for a long time- it was superstressful but I was really good at it and part of an amazing team so I thought I had a handle on it, plus I had good spiritual practices- a rosary on my knees at home every morning then a half hour meditation daily in the hospital Zen Den right before work. Well two years ago when I turned sixty I finally decided I had enough of all the violence (plus I now have visible GI Joe-Doc-Savage scars on my forehead from a 380lb schizophrenic woman who clawed me right before I left) and I became a home hospice nurse for Catholic charities. Now whenever I go back to visit that ER everyone tells me I look ten years younger even though I now have a long white unruly beard! Onward and upward Rod!
You are doing important work, Rick. I'm glad it has had a beneficial psychospiritual effect on you too! Thank you for the care you give to segment of the population that is so often forgotten.
My local hospice has expanded from terminal care to walking along with any elderly person who has long term issues (they serve my mother-in-law with non-Alzheimer's dementia). Terrific plan, terrific staff. Wish others were able to do that, too.
Dana
Thanks Dana!
Welcome home - and your first Sunday in your new parish having been Pentecost seems like an auspicious start.
So glad to know all that kingsnake PR from my childhood was true! Welcome home!
Yes, but the rattlers are beneficial too.
Yes, they feed the king snakes.
I don't know about crawfish at the last supper. Crawfish are not kosher. But they sure are good. Welcome home.
I once referred to them in these boxes as "crayfish" and Dreher accused me of the love that dare not speak its name.
I commited the same offense of shellfishness but got off with mere gentle correction.
Cajuns would have thrown you to the alligators, cher!
Here in Virginia we usually call them crawdads. Does that pass muster? They are fresh water. My brother in law shot a deer once and after field dressing it, put it in a creek to cool (yes we are rednecks). He found a crawdad in the carcass & our girls kept it as a pet for awhile. This being the 90’s, they named him Gnarly Dude. Unfortunately we weren’t good at feeding Gnarly Dude, I guess, I guess fish flakes from the pet store were not his thing so he passed on to the Great Mountain Creek in the Sky.
Yeah I thought they were crawdads too.
As a kid in Mississippi, I heard crawdads and crawfish. Sometimes crawdaddies. Most people usually say crawfish though.
As a kid on Long Island, I only knew them as crawfish because my father liked Hank Williams. I had no idea what they actually were!
Son of a gun, we'll have some fun on the bayou. Jambalaya, and a crawfish pie and a file gumbo
For people in the South, they are referred to as crawfish, crawdads or crawdaddies.
In Milwaukee, there's a restaurant called Crawdaddies.
From New Orleans. They also have Landry’s movin out too. Great seafood.
So advertised.
We got one in Tampa. Just about five miles east towards Ybor City, there is pure Spanish restaurant there, the Columbia. Castilian. Order the Paella Valencia there on a weekend, and later on comes the Flamenco dancers from the Andalusia. Amazing.
Hhhaaaaa that’s funny.
I’m also so happy for you :-)
My theory is that in Budapest you were semi-forced to spend much more of your mental life online, and despite you knowing this explicitly and warning constantly about it … the abyss stared into you.
Right now in ‘Bama you can simply live life in reality, incorporated, and realize that despite all of the really bad things going on somewhere … most people in most places (especially in the South) are just kind of living and having fun.
I am a loyal reader and won’t stop, but I always feel better on days when I just interact with my neighbors vs when I read about the terrible things going on “somewhere”
In the immortal words of that nameless dude at the beginning of The Matrix, “you gotta unplug, dude”
I don't even want to think what it would be like to spend four years in a city where I don't understand the language and can't speak it. That alone would stress me out.
Bill Tighe, one of the great pleasures of my first months in Italy was keeping my ears open to idiom and filing for reference. "So that's how you say, 'Does this bother you?'--'Lei da fastidio?', and that how you say, 'Imagine!' 'Figurati'"
Siamo sulla stessa lunghezza d'onda - I was fortunate enough to have spent about 6 months in northern Italy for work some decades ago. Loved the country, the people, the musical language. Fortunately I had enough French to bootstrap up to a semi-functional level reasonably quickly. But that's one of the crucial differences - in any country with either a Romance or a Germanic languages, one's school French/Spanish/German can be enough of a starting point to allow on the ground progress possible, and most of the time Americans are applauded for their making an effort, no matter how rudimentary. Hungarian has virtually no overlap with anything else, being not even Indo European. Unless you are a stubborn linguist, e una causa persa,
I’m the opposite. Living abroad meant immunity to small talk.
In my short time in Hungary, I was able to get by with German - in the '70s anyway, lots of people spoke it, even haltingly. On the train across the Hungarian Plain headed toward Budapest, I had a conversation in broken German with a man in his late 50s, a charmingly boastful sort, who claimed Hungary was the best and most beautiful at everything.
Rod has only French in his pocket, helpful in Italy, yes, but probably not in Hungary.
Dana
I think that on some level, our host also knew that he was a stranger in a strange land.
I remember reading an esoteric theory about people having a mystical connection to certain regions - that some people have a patch of ground on the Earth that recharges them. I could see this being the case for Rod and the South.
I actually think this is true. Human terroir!
I think it's more the case that there's no place like home. You'll feel more comfortable in a region that's similar to home than a country where you don't speak the language.
Rod should totally write a Southern-themed magical realism novel. I bet he has a hidden talent for it.
I've thought for a while and even said similar in the comments section here. He has a talent writing about his family and what he did as a kid. I would recommend that he take elements of his life or someone else's and fictionalize them to a degree and write an excellent novel set in the South.
Maybe that could be his retirement/sabbatical project.
It would have tp pass the Sensitivity Reader barrier that has rendered modern fiction virtually unreadable if you are a male. Like HR, book publishing is in the grip of feminists with a misandry itch.
I've read some more recent fiction books that have bypassed this problem by being independently published. Some reviewers didn't like the tone of the books but it wasn't written for them. One of them was a science fiction book.
It's possible to self publish
I get that. I have lived most of my life in the driftless region of southeast MN, southwest WI Northeast IA. When I leave for awhile I get anxious to return to it.
AKA God's Country.
Heileman’s Old Style was originally brewed in LaCrosse WI (it is again but it is not the same.) I still fondly remember the old Old Style Tv ads that always end with “Brewed in God’s country.” I didn’t need a beer ad to tell me that though.
I did some audit work in Darlington, WI in Autumn. The driftless landscape is beautiful.
Who'd be a modern day Myrna Minkoff? A TERF, maybe? 🤔
What event was it commemorating?: "a Buc-ee’s commemorative t-shirt." Or is every visit to any Buc-ee's an affair to remember? Asking from an apparently benighted non-Buc-ee's locale.
America's 250th -- but yeah, every visit to a Buc-ee's is an Event
They're opening one or two in Wisconsin. They picked good locations, but I don't think in most of the state they'll be competition for Quik Trip. QT is more navigable, more personal service, and really good quality food for a gas station/store combo. Love the turkey on cranberry bread sandwiches, and their brownies.
Every visit to Buc-ee's is an event. They are enormous with tons of gas pumps, car wash, large convenience with food, merchandise, etc.
So happy for you, Rod! Welcome back! Love your stories and the descriptions of the food you’re eating.
The story of the king story eating the rattlesnake is epic!
A couple months ago at our monthly Good News & Brews program, we had an “Ask the Padres” night. One of the questions posed to the four of us clerics present was “what kind of music do you listen to to unwind?” My brother priests ticked off things like Antonio Vivaldi, Beethoven, jazz, and Russian Orthodox chant (which are all great, except jazz - I hate jazz). When it finally got down to me, I sort of sheepishly said, “Well, I’m an 80s kid, so that means Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Metallica…..,” which didn’t earn any scorn from this particular group of brother priests, and got a rousing round of applause from the other 80s kids in the audience. Glad to know I’m not the only “unreformed metalhead” with a collar ‘round his neck (though I will add thatI don’t listen to all of their music anymore; some of it is certainly worth avoiding). Rock on, Fr Matt! 🤟🏻
If you don't care for jazz, I could recommend listening to some jazz fusion and if you like it, then you could try jazz. Fusion mixes jazz with other styles of music including rock.
Nothing good came out in the 80s. I show my age by my taste for Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Byrds, Joy of Cooking (never famous but good music). I can update that with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which actually emerged in the 21st century.
Being native to the Dallas area, I consider Dallas/Fort Worth to be on the border between the South and the West, and a blend of both.
When I lived in Dallas, people would say that the borderline between the South and the West begins at the halfway point between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Fort Worth is definitely more western than Dallas.
When you finally get past the western city limit of Fort Worth, you are officially in the West.
Southern heat: I remember Texas before air conditioning -- attic fans, sleeping on a screened in porch, or staying with relatives and sleeping on cots in the back yard, flit gun handy against mosquitoes. After real air conditioning (swamp-cooler interregnum really doesn't count) even Texas is bearable. (And then I think of great-great-grandfather coming to Texas from Mississippi in 1840 -- and probably not wearing shorts and a polo shirt.) Those born more recently really don't have that much to complain about.
First time I visited Dallas it was over Fourth of July. I went out to the Dallas botanical gardens on a scorcher of a day. There's a fountain near the entrance with a big sign: "Do not wade in fountain!" On that day I can understand why they had to admonish people to keep out.
The beard looks great, Rod. Welcome home!
As does the white suit. Serious Tom Wolfe vibes.
When I saw what his hair was getting to, I just couldn't help myself.
I was thinking Colonel Sanders.
"...how serene, even happy, I look in it." You also look crazy jet-lagged. Take it easy.
In the summer of 1990 I was visiting a company in Little Rock. They didn't have offices they had a campus, which included a guest house featuring an admirably stocked bar and a grand piano. I had the place to myself. I decided to drive to Atlanta and fly back to New York from there.
The weather glorious, hot and dry and clear. For the first time in my life I saw biplane flying. It was a crop duster. For some reason it was thrilling. This was the run-up to Desert Storm and there was a lot of military activity on and just off the roads.
I broke the trip in Birmingham. I don't remember much about it except that it seemed a very handsome city.
Just so there are any doom addicts out there, yes yes AI, yes yes Paris. But this morning Central Command says Iran fired missiles at Kuwait (which is a lot closer than Diego Garcia). What all this peek-a-boo with death means is that mullahs are running the table. All Trump has done in following Bibi's guidance, if that's what you want to call it, is demonstrate to the Iranians that it is they who control the straits short of a full-scale invasion the prospect of which obviously terrifies Trump, as it should.
As I told my pal, a retired journalist, in fact the former managing editor of the Paris Tribune, who came up with this analysis, if true, and it is, it's a world-historical event and could be the beginning of something like Suez for this country. The best to you each morning.
I'm not actually jet-lagged, though. It's easy-peasy flying west to the US from Europe. But going back, hoo-wee, it takes a couple of weeks to get my chakras re-aligned. I don't know why that is, but others report the same thing.
I've found the same thing on visits to the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii. I can reset my internal clock easily going west. But coming back east leave me discombobulated.
Truth!
Last summer when my boy was at hockey camp, one of the kids skated in a full Buc-ee-s suit for the final game where they were all just mostly messing around.
You look great!
Good to hear you so happy, Rod! God will bless your joy. 🤩
Let’s have more of this sort of writing! This is you at your best, and I’m so happy that you’ve landed on your feet at last. Long may it continue!