Where does the love of God go?

A day or two after the news of the devastating earthquake in Turkey back on Feb. 6, I posted on Facebook that the then estimated death toll of the natural disaster had surpassed 21,000 people – human beings – and that that unfathomable number was already larger by thousands than the population of our cozy little town of Lexington (19,094 in 2019).

That number was almost inconceivable to me. In just a few seconds, tens of thousands of people had perished. Living, breathing, thinking entities in one moment doing common, everyday, routine human things, then gone the next.

In my own head, I thought the death toll perhaps would reach into the 30,000 range. But no, as of today, it's estimated that an astounding 47,000 people have died. I suppose, in the end, it could reach 50,000 or 60,000. Maybe higher.

Incredibly, three weeks later, a few survivors are still being pulled from the weight and debris of fallen buildings.

Then, the other day, I received a text from one of my friends, writing that the climbing death toll "Wouldn't seem to qualify as an act of God."

That one hit me square, and got me to thinking as I am sometimes wont to do.

Although that particular phrase is mostly used for insurance purposes, I think I know what he meant: if God is a loving God, how could He allow a natural disaster like this to happen? If we are His creation, why destroy us? Would destroying us be suggesting He made a mistake in our creation? So then He's not omniscient if he made a mistake? Do people die in natural disasters because they are bad people and this is their punishment? If that's true, then how can He be a loving God, as most of us are taught, and not a wrathful one? Is He both?

Side note: if 50,000 people are killed in a natural disaster, does that mean any survivors were blessed by the grace of God? Is God that selective? What's his criteria for us surviving disasters?

I'm no theologian. I'm simply thinking out loud here.

There are a plethora of natural disasters that plague us: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, fires that cost lives. What about wars? Just a few hundred miles across the Black Sea from Turkey is Ukraine, fighting for its very life in an unjust and illegal war started by Russia. Thousands have died there, and no doubt more will. Where is God?

I read somewhere that natural disasters (and thus evil) are the work of the devil. So why is there a devil? If God is omnipotent, why can't He eliminate the devil? Or was that another mistake?

Or are natural disasters – or wars, or disease, or plane or car crashes, or Jan. 6 or Adolf Hitler – God's own free will, where after creation He set the whole thing into motion and then sat back to see how it all plays out?

Since we die anyway, what does all of this mean? That natural disasters get us to death sooner?

I'm not sure I can find many answers in the Bible. The Bible is said to be the word of God, but wasn't the Bible written by humans who may or may not have misinterpreted the word? Isn't most of the Bible allegorical history, designed to teach and set guidelines to help us make society work? And isn't the Bible mostly a Christian tool that we use to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? What about other religions? What about Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, or even Deism and others? Is anybody right? Is anybody wrong?

Where does the love of God go?

 

Super anxiety, part II

Well, here we are, less than 10 hours before kickoff to Super Bowl LVII (that's 57 in case your Roman numerals are a little rusty), and I'm already a mess.

That's because I have something of a vested interest in this game today as the Philadelphia Eagles take on the Kansas City Chiefs for the Lombardi Trophy.

 I was born an hour north of Philadelphia 72 years ago today – in Allentown, to be precise – and I've been a sports fan of anything Philly since I was a pre-teenager. I've been an Eagles fan for almost 60 years and I guess a Phillies fan for longer than that. I often have genetically induced cravings for cheese steaks, hoagies, Tastykakes and A-Treat sodas. I just can't help it.

So I'm pulling for the Eagles today, although you already knew that.

But being a fan from Philly also means you bring a little extra baggage to the game. You hope for the best while expecting the worst. It's in our DNA.

That's where I am today.

This is only the fourth Super Bowl appearance in 57 years for the Eagles. Many of us Eaglers are still living off 2018 when the Eagles unveiled the cherished and perfectly executed Philly Special to defeat Tom Brady – the best quarterback of all time – and the New England Patriots 41-33.

Now we're facing the Chiefs, and I like to think that the two best teams in the NFL are going against each other.

There are some interesting story lines for this game, which no doubt will be explored in depth during all the pre-game hoopla today. For one, it's the first time the opposing quarterbacks – Patrick Mahones of KC and Jalen Hurts of Philly – happen to be men of color. It's kind of hard for me to believe it's taken 57 years for that to happen, but, hey, ain't this America?

It's also the first time two brothers – tight end Travis Kelce of KC and center Jason Kelce of Philly – will face each other. The neat thing here is that both siblings already own Super Bowl rings.

And, of course, KC head coach Andy Reid once coached the Eagles himself, taking them to the Super Bowl in 2005, where they lost to Brady and the Patriots 24-21. (This feels like some kind of a Brady loop). From what I can gather, there's a ton of respect from Eagles fans toward Reid, who is still held in high regard along the Schuylkill River.

So what is my take on the game?

It's a tough call. Both teams can be explosive offensively and both teams are tight defensively, with maybe a slight edge to the Eagles and their league-leading 70 regular-season sacks.  It's at quarterback where the game will be decided, and KC might have the edge here. Mahones already has Super Bowl experience, as well as a ring. Hurts, for as good as he's been this year, needs to show he's ready for prime time when it counts. We'll see.

My pick, of course, will be the Eagles. 28-25.

Now where's that cheese steak?

GOP glossary

There's an old adage or axiom or old wives tale floating around out there that says we get the government that we deserve. Even if that's true, I'm not sure that we deserve the Republican Caucus of the newly-installed 118th Congress, which features a slew of election deniers, incompetents, hypocrites, crazies and idiots. Most of them have single-handedly lowered the collective IQ of the House of Representatives.

Here's my abbreviated list (or glossary, if you will) of the absurdists in government:

Lauren Boebert, 3rd District of Colorado: The other day, while pointing out that the United States owns 46 percent of the world's firearms, this election denier told Congress that she thinks we need to own even more. In a country that sees mass shootings almost every day, where is her logic? She serves on the Natural Resources and Oversight committees in Congress. She also owns a bar called Shooters in a place called Rifle, CO. Enough said.

Matt Gaetz, 1st District of Florida: An election denier, he is currently under investigation for sex trafficking involving a 17-year-old female. Admittedly, the case has stalled for witness credibility issues, but Gaetz, with a 9 percent approval rating, is close enough to the case to draw interest. Anyway, Gaetz serves on the Armed Services (he's never served in the military) and Judiciary (he is a lawyer) committees. Perfect.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, 14th District of Georgia: Perhaps the nuttiest of them all, this election denier claimed Jewish space lasers caused the rash of fires in California last summer. She claims 9-11 was an inside job. She stalks survivors of the Parkland school shooting. She asked for the common man in the street to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon, 10 miles in the sky. My favorite, though, is when she compared the Biden administration to the Gazpacho police. She meant the Nazi's Gestapo, of course, not cold soup. Maybe she was referring to the soup Nazi, who knows? She serves on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees. God help us.

Paul Gosar, 4th District of Arizona: A dentist by profession, and an election denier by choice, he once posted a cartoon of himself shooting Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden. He is so right-wing extreme even his siblings have called for his removal from office. He serves on the Natural Resources and Oversight committees. Indeed.

Jim Jordan, 4th District of Ohio: Flamboyant, often without a sport coat to show how hard working he is, Jordan recently took his position as chairman of the Judiciary committee. This is rich: he is currently issuing subpoenas to the Department of Justice to investigate anything the Democrats have done while ignoring subpoenas served to him by the Jan. 6 Committee for his alleged involvement and support of the insurrection riot. And don't even ask him about his days as an assistant wrestling coach at The Ohio State during those sex scandal allegations. He didn't know a thing about it. What a joke. He is promoting government by retribution, and not for the people.

George Santos, 3rd District of New York: This guy, a pathological liar, at least voluntarily gave up his committee posts. Which means all he does now is walk the halls of Congress happily telling the media more lies. Sheesh.

There are others Republicans of concern: Kevin McCarthy, the wishy-washy House speaker who made impossible promises to get his speakership on the 15th ballot; Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff; Scott Perry, a Representative from Pennsylvania who is so deep into Jan. 6 that he asked Trump for a presidential pardon; Florida governor Ron Desantis, who is such a racist it borders on the criminal. You could go on and on: Donald Trump, Rudy Guiliani, and two-thirds of the Supreme Court who have lost most of their credibility among Americans, especially after reversing Roe v. Wade.

I don't think this is what James Madison had in mind for us 234 years ago.

 

A Man Called Otto

The thing that first caught my attention was the cat.

We'd gone to see "The Fabelmans" a few weeks ago, and in the trailers for upcoming movies there was a snippet from Tom Hanks' latest release, "A Man Called Otto." I wasn't even aware at the time that Hanks had a new movie coming out, but there certainly was a cat involved. Kim and I were determined to see it.

So we did. Yesterday.

I didn't know much about the flick going in, other than it was supposedly about a curmudgeonly old man who'd recently lost his wife, which is what made him a curmudgeon.

I'd taken a quick look at Rotten Tomatoes, the online movie review site, and the critics had given "Otto" a so-so 69 percent rating on the Tomatometer. But what really caught my attention was the audience score of 97 percent. That's a pretty amazing disparity between the professional movie goer and the nonprofessional movie goer, if you follow the numbers. Plus, I'd heard that "Otto" was kind of surprising in how well it was doing at the box office. Better than expected, it seems.

Makes you wonder what do critics know anyhow?

So we bought our popcorn and soft drink and for the next two hours rode the emotional roller coaster that was Otto.

It's humorous in some spots, smaltzy in others. It's pretty predictable, often sentimental, maybe even cheesy at times. So what? I like cheese.

And we both loved it. Add us to the 97 percent. Maybe the 97.1 percent by now.

The movie is yet another serviceable vehicle for Hanks, even though I don't think the role stretches the two-time Oscar winner's talents in any meaningful way. No weird Colonel Parker accents. No out of body experiences like in "Big." No saving Private Ryans. No exceptional Forrest Gumps. Just good ol' steady Tom Hanks, thank you. That's usually more than enough.

I've said more than once that Hanks is our generation's Jimmy Stewart. I stand by that.

There were a couple of other notable performances as well. Mariana Trevino is compassionate and smart as the neighbor who eventually peels away Otto's gruff veneer. And Truman Hanks – one of Tom's three sons in real life – plays the younger version of Otto in lookbacks (not flashbacks). He gets a surprising amount of camera time and is very capable. Must be the family DNA.

It is not a story about redemption, as I've read. More like resurrection. Some people are suggesting this is the movie we need right now, in the midst of our current national dissonance, despair and divide, because of its understated message of hope and healing.

Kim pointed out that the movie, to her, is a love story, and she's not wrong. But I saw it as a love story on many levels: a man and his wife; a man and his neighbors; a man and his neighborhood. Even a man and his cat.

Ah, yes. The cat. The feline, feral in the flick, is unnamed in the movie. In real life, the cat is called Schmagel. Don't ask me why. But I was amazed that you could get a cat to respond as he did for his role in the movie. How do you train cats to perform without them running off somewhere when the director shouts "Action!"

In the end, the movie will tug at your heartstrings. I guarantee it. I didn't know I had that many heartstrings. 

And sometimes, they need to be pulled.

 

 

 

 

A world of (health) care

I discovered that while spending a few days in the hospital, as I did recently for a troublesome bile duct blockage and infection, your world is suddenly condensed.

There's plenty of time for television, of course. And reading.

And pondering.

But beyond that, you'll probably see immediate family members, the occasional doctor or PA making the rounds, and plenty of nurses.

Oh, my. The nurses. It seemed as if I had an entire platoon of RNs looking after me, all of them attentive, all of them pleasant. I'll never remember all of their names.

The one nurse that I will remember, though, is Thomisha. Her 12-hour shifts during my stay seemed to cover me more than the others, including deep into the nights.

One night, probably her last full shift with me before my discharge, I apologized for calling her to my room to unhook me from my IV tree so I could pad my way into the restroom and pee. You pee a lot when taking IVs. You also pee a lot when you are a man in your 70s. I think it's God's little joke on men.

"You're no trouble at all," said Thomisha, an African-American woman who said she has three other jobs besides this one. "I'm lucky because I have good patients on my shift now."

That got me to thinking...

"So does that mean you have some patients who resist everything you try to do for them?"

She stopped what she was doing. She looked at me.

"You have no idea."

Then came a quiet moment that lasted just seconds but was profoundly heavy by what was not spoken. I don't think I was misconstruing her intent. I know nurses sometimes have problem patients. But this, this was very different. She was coming from a world I'll never know. A world I might never understand, or even could.

"You have no idea," she repeated. "Sometimes it makes me wonder why I even do this job."

A few hours later, I was ready to be discharged. All of my nurses have been great, even going back a few years ago to when I had colon surgery, and then later when I had gall bladder surgery. They do jobs I can't comprehend doing. They do grunt work that can be repulsive or uplifting. They deal with the obnoxious and the obvious, as well as the helpless and the needy and the confused. They deal with blood, feces and urine.

They don't need to carry anybody's extra baggage. I'll let you make your own way through my otherwise unspoken moment here.

Thank you, Thomisha. Thank you so much. You'll just never know how much.

•   •   •

My entire hospital stay turned out to be universal. I guess it's because hospitals are universal.

In addition to African-Americans and Caucasians attending to little ol' me, there was an Asian helping with my MRI, an Hispanic with my procedure to remove the stones, with the actual endoscopy performed by a person of Mediterranean descent. I thought my radiologist came from Germany because of her accent, but then she told me she was from Ukraine. Oh, my. And my CT scan was conducted by a hippie with wild, long hair and laid-back personality. We hit it off immediately.

Look, I'll still do anything to avoid going to the hospital. But my world of health care has been phenomenal.

 And I am eternally grateful.

Well, that was different

For the first time in what I can't remember when, we didn't go to a New Year's Eve party.

We weren't invited to any. And, ta da, we weren't devastated.

Actually, it was quite nice.

I figured our New Year's Eve would be a quiet one when, by Wednesday, none of our neighbors talked about having a get-together, as we usually do at somebody's house for this particular moment. Thursday came, and not one word. Then New Year's Eve day, and nothing.

We didn't have to prepare an appetizer. Or come up with a side dish. We didn't have to buy a bottle of champagne, although we had one on hand from a week or so ago, just in case.

That was fine with me. I ended up watching one college bowl game after another, content as a clam in its shell in the sea, snacking on Cheez-its and soft drinks.

There was an added bonus. The weather was lousy, with a light rain falling most of the day and into the early evening. That meant no fireworks going off to annoy us or send my cat into bewildered hiding.

It was kind of neat. The Ohio State-Georgia semifinal College Football Playoff game turned out to be a thriller that went almost right up to the midnight hour. With just a few minutes to go, I looked out our front window and noticed most of our neighbors' house lights were off. Everybody, it seemed, was home or off to a separate non-neighborhood party.

I turned the TV to ABC and we watched the crystal ball at Times Square slowly drop in its awkward countdown. When the New Year arrived, prompt and on time as usual, we shared an old married couple's kiss and klinked together our week-old champagne from heavy iced tea glasses. 

I don't know if all of this was a symptom of our advancing years, but it all seemed somehow appropriate.

And, surprisingly, we both managed to stay up for the ball drop. We were wide awake at midnight, which almost never happens. It must have been that nap we took at 3:30.

•   •   •

I don't know what Kim has in mind for our New Year's Day meal, if she has any plans at all.

She's a girl who is sometimes rooted in tradition, which usually means black-eyed peas and collard greens are somewhere on today's menu. Yuck. I've never been a fan of unappealing New Year's meals. Back in Pennsylvania Dutch country, from where I can draw my roots, the traditional meal was German-based, featuring pork chops and sauerkraut.

I think all this is built around wishes for good health and good fortune for the coming year, but eating something you're not crazy about seems a bit counter-productive to me. Why start the year off with a belly purge?

I guess if worst comes to worst, we can have a Chinese meal, or perhaps Mexican.

Or, if nothing else, I think I still have some Cheez-its and champagne left over.

Here's wishing you all a Happy New Year. I think we deserve it.

It's a wonderful movie

The other day Kim came up to me and said, "Let's go see 'It's a Wonderful Life.' It's going to play Thursday night at the Lexington theater. It's an old movie and it was meant to be seen on the big screen. I think it'll be a lot of fun and it'll be free.

"Besides, I've never seen the whole movie. I've only seen bits and pieces of it here and there. C'mon, let's go. Pleeeeez."

Say whut?

I tried to process this request on several different levels. I mean, gee whiz, I've seen this move about a thousand times. I can quote dialogue from it before Jimmy Stewart does. The denouement, where the grateful population of Bedford Falls comes out to lift George Baily, is one of the best cinema endings in moviedom. I start to tear up about an hour before Clarence gets his wings, even though I know what's coming. I actually look forward to my tears.

So there's that.

Plus, the theater is old, drafty and could use some serious upgrades. I still wasn't sure, but then, what the heck. It was free. Anyway, even in spite of the theater's shortcomings, this was a thoughtful holiday treat by the staff. They were showing a different classic Christmas movie each night ("Polar Express", "Miracle on 34th Street", "Home Alone", "A Christmas Story", for example). So we went.

And guess what? Kim was right. This movie (like all movies) was meant to be seen on the big screen. I found myself chuckling at little bits of humor and nuance that I miss when I watch it on television. There were about 20 other people in the theater (a bigger audience than I expected), so when somebody laughed or giggled, we all did. Psychologically, I guess it's like some kind of mass contagious dissociative behavior. Or maybe it was just funny, I don't know. But it added to our big screen experience.

I also looked for the little stuff that is now movie trivia. The phone kiss between Stewart and Donna Reed was Stewart's first movie kiss since returning from World War II, where he flew 20 harrowing missions as a B-24 pilot. The passionate one-take kiss he gives Reed barely passed the censors of the time. Understandable, I guess. Reed was a 25-year-old beauty and Stewart was suffering from PTSD for the hell he'd just been through.

I also look for Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies. Switzer is the wiseguy who opens the swimming pool floor during the dance scene. Stuff like that.

So we stayed to the very end. When Clarence got his wings, the audience clapped, like they sometimes do in movie houses. And I brushed away a tear.

Merry Christmas.

•  •  •

There's one other Christmas moment I want to mention.

Kim and I have been to several Christmas parties this year, and the one treat I'm yearning for – and have been for years – is toll house cookies.

Nobody, it seems, makes toll house cookies anymore. I think I know why. It's a pretty labor intensive project to make these things. 

"If you want them so badly, you can make 'em yourself," said Kim. "You're home all day."

Well, the last time I made them, about 30 years ago, it nearly killed me. And I was a young man then. The recipe I used made three dozen cookies, I think. Mmmm. Gooey oatmeal dough drenched in butter and brown sugar. Chocolate Nestle morsels. Walnuts. Mmmm. Try mixing those together by hand. It's like mixing quick-dry concrete. Like I said, labor intensive.

Anyway, Kim's already tied up making Moravian sugar cakes, so I'm not asking her to make cookies, too, if I want to stay married. It's either one or the other. If given an ultimatum, it'll always be the sugar cakes. Soooo good.

I am contemplating making some toll house cookies next Christmas, though. We'll see. 

But if I do make some, don't expect me to bring them to your party. They're that good. They might get gone before I get there.

I guess that's why I don't see any at the parties I do go to.

Mmmm. Toll house cookies.

Merry Christmas.