Journey to 1922

This was written on November11, 2021. Forgot to post it until today, August 27, 2026. 

During the past week I have taken a stroll to an earlier time. 1922. November. The time of the birth of my father. Questions have been answered. Answers I thought I had have become questions. 

I thought I knew where my father was born. I don't. I only know that he was born in Texas. My father's birth mother, Josephine, said that he was born in Eastland, Texas on November 25, 1922. The records of the adoption agency state this. The Texas Department of Vital Statistics states he was born in Dallas, but only because that is the location of the orphanage. His certificate of adoption from the Goliad County, TX Courthouse, says the same. All are wrong. 

An anonymous letter in the files of the adoption agency hints that the mother was with a sister in Amarillo during the pregnancy. Possibly he was born there. Today I was at the Eastland County Courthouse and found there is no record of any child being born in that county on that date. From meetings with newly found relatives I know that Josephine had an older sister, Louise, who was married and lived in Amarillo.

I have learned new things about his abandonment. His mother left him in the back seat of a doctor's car in downtown Dallas on Saturday night, December 16th of 1922. Earlier in the day she had visited Hope Cottage Orphanage, but did not leave him there. Until this weekend that was all I knew. But an 80 year old cousin told the story as she heard it from her mother, another one of the eight sisters of Josephine.  Another sister, L.E., was with Josephine when my dad was placed in the seat of the car, and waited with her to make sure the child was discovered. And L.E. must shared with others the story which has been passed down, of Josephine beating her head against a telephone pole and crying after leaving him behind. When I was told this story by my cousin I almost cried, and hugged her, for now the abandonment made sense. She must have thought, "If I leave my child at the orphanage, and he is adopted, I'll never know who has him, where he is, or if he is in a good home. But if I leave him in the back of this doctor's car, I'll know who has him. Perhaps he'll adopt him. I'll know where he is. Maybe someday I can see him. Maybe. Just Maybe. A little bit of hope on a chilly November night. 

When she returned home to Roxton, she read the report in a Dallas newspaper of the child she left there. She learned that the doctor had not kept my father., but had taken him to where he had been earlier that day, to Hope Cottage Orphanage. The Orphanage eventually located Josephine, though she gave false information about where she was from. Someone in Roxton must have also seen the article, for an anonymous letter in the orphanage files told them about a pregnant girl who left town for Amarillo and where they could find her. 

Find her they did. The records hold a series of letters between a caring orphanage director and a distraught and troubled young woman. There are letters from Josephine's mother as well, a woman overwhelmed with the care of eight daughters and one son, most of these still at home. Josephine tried to figure a way out of the situation, a way to keep the baby, or postpone an adoption, but in the end there was no way. The orphanage saw that long before she did and placed my father in a most loving home. That is another story.   

I went to the town of Roxton, on Monday of this week. I walked the streets. Poked my head in the abandoned stores downtown. Peeked in the window of the old drugstore. Had lunch in a building that once housed a gas station. Drove by their church. Walked the grounds of the vacant lot where the family home once stood. Saw the creek Josephine played in, trees she might have climbed, the school she attended. Walked where she walked. Hugged people she had hugged. I stood where she stood and thought about the same person she did. She thought of a baby, I thought of a man who was my dad. 

I visited the grave of Josephine yesterday. It is in Fort Worth, where she lived most of her life. Where my dad lived while in seminary. 

In May of this year I was at his grave. I filled a coke bottle with dirt from his grave and brought it home. It's been in my sock drawer until this week, when dirt from his grave was place on the graves of his biological father and mother. Weird perhaps. But a little token that means something to me. 

I love my dad's mom. Both of them. 

about Dad's ring

 When i was young, my dad had a gold ring. one with his initials on it. I thought it was beautiful. Strong, understated, elegance. His initials, TBW, graced the head. 

Its beauty appealed to me, as did the design. As his namesake my initials were the same. 

When I was about 14, I asked if I could have it. "No, not yet, but you can wear it for a few days." But it was a man's ring, for a man's hand, something I did not yet have. I wrapped scotch tape around the shank to make it a little tighter and proudly showed it off to friends. 

The first day I wore it to school, I lost it. Playing football during PE. Walking toward the locker room I realized it had come off my hand. There was that pass, when I reached high for the spiral, was that when? Or was it when Randy knocked me on my butt. 

I went back to the field but knew it was a lost cause. Where we played was a mosaic of sod and clods and mounds and divots, clete prints and shoelaces, mouthguards and soda straws. Nothing orderly about it. 

I think I waited a day or two before telling dad. Maybe a year. It was so long ago. But what I remember is that he did not get angry. Just a look of sadness and disappointment, the details of which he kept to himself. He was hoping, really hoping, that his teenage son would start to show signs of responsibility. That I would sense importance without having to be told, or lectured, as a child. Nope. Not yet. Not this year. Not this guy. 

I don't even remember what he said. I'm sure there was a story about the ring that he had waited to tell me. How he got it. Gift? Purchase? Was it his Dad's? (we all had the same initials). That story is lost to time. All I know is that the ring was very very important to him and the moment I was entrusted with it, I let him down. 

I learned a lesson about Dads and sons and the highs and lows of parenting. I thought about this ring often during my parenting years. There are times to let emotions show and times to keep them buried. Times when they do good and times when they don't. Some times you just keep the hurt or the joy inside, locked up, to be released in another time. 

Later, somebody found a gold ring in a field at Everitt Junior High in Panama City, Florida. 

My ranking of Presidents, revisited

 On January 20, 2009, while the country was inauguating another President, I wrote the following (updated, rearranged, recast to include Biden, Obama, Trump): 

Presidents of my lifetime, ranked in terms of which ones I would most like to have dinner with: Biden, Nixon, Reagan, Bush II, Ford, Johnson, Bush I, Obama, Carter, Kennedy, Clinton, Eisenhower, Trump.
Vice Presidents that did not become President, ranked same way: Pence, Rockefeller, Cheney, Gore, Quayle, Humphrey, Harris, Mondale, Agnew.

President I would most expect to:
Leave a fat tip: Bush I
Leave no tip: Johnson
Understand Atlas Shrugged: Reagan
Misunderstand Atlas Shrugged: Trump
Have read the Bible: Kennedy
Have a well worn and tattered Bible on their desk: Ford
Write a hot check: Trump
Have a bad drug habit: Carter
Change his own oil: Bush II
Be a closet Communist: Eisenhower or Obama - tie
Have a glass of grape koolaid in his hand: Bush II
Have a gun in the glove box: Obama
Pass gas and blame his VP: Kennedy
Pass time as a short order cook at Denny’s: Ford
Cut me off in traffic: Eisenhower
Cut in line at Disney World: Clinton
Leave Denny’s with a pocketful of Sweet N Lo: Nixon

Best and Worst Presidents of my lifetime: Ford and Trump

Second Best and Worst Presidents of my lifetime Reagan and Carter

Best and Worst Vice Presidents of my lifetime: Pence and Agnew.

Some of these were close calls. Both Bushes had some wonderful accomplishments, as certainly did Clinton, Johnson and others. As for the dinner list, it had nothing to do with who I liked the most, more of who would I learn the most from and/or change my perspective on things. No one has seen more than President Biden. 

I am writing/revising this on day 51 of the war with Iran, so my perspective on the Trump Administration is tainted by a series of negative events. He has mocked my Saviour. Killed people in the Middle East. He has ridiculed the Church that Christ founded, the Catholic Church. 

On the other hand, the stock market has reacted favorably to all this calamity and my personal wealth has increased a bit, which cannot help but tilt my greedy human view favorably his way. 24 hours from now this can all change, the tenor of the market is always unpredictable. The word of the President is also quite unreliable. While I am ashamed of this president as you likely are as well, I also feel sorry for him. A man deep in quicksand that he seems to like. So unhappy. No friends, isolated, without love. A miserable existence. My America is much better. 

Some of my friends become better people as they age and some become worse. Surely he was a better man at age 7 and age 9 than at 79. May the Lord have mercy on us both. 

That time I described my life history to an alien being

 Today  I am in Little Rock, America and am pondering how to describe my existence should an alien being approach me and ask about my life. 

I was created 69.5 years ago. I do not recall this nor how it was that I came to be. The ones who created me cared for me until I was of the approximate size and intellect that you see today. This took about 20 years. 

After this period my human creators (not my divine or ultimate creators, that is another story) bid me farewell. I traveled a far distance from where I lived to come to this same city. I walked into an old building and met a female human (we have two kinds. I am male). We met many times. As I write this I am standing on a sidewalk outside that same building. 

I told her I had amassed powers of persuasion and could bend other humans to my will, particularly in commercial transactions. She told me she had the power to create small humans. My assistance would be required, which she would allow in exchange for an extended period of support in the form of shelter, food, money and other materials that she might require. 

I was skeptical but agreed, having difficulty shaking a spell she had cast upon me. She employed her creation power three times over the following twelve years. As these small humans grew larger she required greater support in the form of material goods. I provided this by exchanging knowledge I had acquired into money. This I then converted to cars, clothing, baseballs, bandaids, and larger shelters. This project took over 30 years until we finally bid the youngest human farewell. (Over time these created even more humans, five so far.)

We have now rested from this work and spend our days in play with the newer humans and traveling to distant lands sharing our story. No one believes us. 

Everything I know about The Brothers Karamazov

 Just finished this the 718 page paperback version of this famous novel by Dostoyevsky. 

The Russians have several names and include a surname, patronymic and diminuitive. Thus keeping track of all the characters is hard, as everyone is refered to by at least two names. 

Once upon a time there were these three brothers. One was a monk, or studied to be. One of the brothers was Alyosha not to be confused with another character Ilyusha. 

The brothers sometimes got along and sometimes didn't. A priest that one of the brothers admired died. 

They didn't like their dad. Bad guy. One was accused of killing him and found guilty. The defense tried to pin the murder on a servant who had committed suicide. There was some stolen money involved. The dad and one of the sons were in love with the same woman. 

After the trial the convicted brother planned an escape from jail. Not clear if that happened. 

The youngest brother runs into some old childhood friends at the end of the book. They promise to stay in touch. 

The end. 

I still write letters on paper and pen

 I have something at my house that the current generation will not have. Love letters. Specifically the ones from my wife. The generation of marrying age, late teens to late twenties, have abandoned marriage and have abandoned writing love on paper. 

I have something at my house that the current generation will not have. Letters from their grandparents. My grandchildren are an exception of course. Children have stopped writing to their grandparents the big news of their lives, and perhaps they never did it much. In college I wrote letters to my grandmother and grandfather. They wrote me back. My grandfather only made it to third grade, my grandmother to the eighth. My grandmother wrote letters quite often, especially to far flung loved ones, like her daughter Audrey, my mother. My grandfather almost never wrote to anyone, thus the two letters I have from him are particularly treasured. 

A hundred years from now your great -grandchildren may have an old email or two that someone told them was from you. How will they really know. My grandchildren, ages 4-11, five of them, all have a lot of letters from granddad. The ones who live close and the ones that are far away. So do my grown children.  

One of the failings of this age is the depersonalization and coding of our communication into an electronic form. Go ahead, send your grandkids or kids a nice email. It will look just like the ones I have sent. Exactly. Identical. But my letters are known. They recognize the handwriting. How it is folded, The coffee cup stains that show up from time to time. How I switch from  print to cursive as they get older. A lot of them will survive this century. 

Recently my wife and I read some of those old love letters, From 1978 and 1979 I kept most of hers and she kept a few of mine. Dozens of them. They speak of events and family and a wedding and money and jobs and car repairs and babies yet to draw a breath. They dream of a future that turned out in a way that would would have amazed them. The real was better than the imagined, in many ways. I know this because I have a written record. 

I also have letters from my brothers in their teens, when I was away at college. One is dead and the other very much alive and well. It is good to revisit our lives back then. The things brothers share only with each other. I have letters from my parents and they are the type of letters a parent should send. Mom chiding me about bad grades and Dad giving me some practical advice about job hunting. One was task oriented, the other more forward looking. Mom and Dad. 

I have a letter from my Dad. He was responding to the news that I was engaged. "Please send me her home address, I want to write her a letter". 

Travels of 2025

Nice year to get out and about. Places where I spent the night in 2025. : Victoria, MN, Webster Groves, MO, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Montego Bay, Jamaica, Colon, Panama, Roatan, Honduras, Belize City, Belize, Cozumel, Mexico Minneapolis, MN Chattanooga, TN, Anchorage, AK, Skagway, AK, Juneau, AK, Buffalo, NY, Steubenville, OH, Danville, IL, New Albany, IN, Johnson City, TN, Roan Mountain, TN.

Books read in 2025

Listed below are the books I read last year, in the order that I read them. All of those marked with an asterisk I would read again. The others were good, just not worth a second reading. 

Unlike other years, there were no bad books. None that were a waste of time in reading. The Great Gatsby was the most disappointing. It is considered one of the great novels of the last century but I just did not see what was so compelling about it. Nice story but one I will not pick up again and is already on it's way to Goodwill. 

The Executioner's Song was among the best. A long book that I could not put down. A thousand pages that passed like a couple of hundred. The Caretaker and Fight are also in the pageturner class. 

Gone with the Wind - Mitchell*
The Evangelicals - Fitzgerald
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 - McCullough
A Wrinkle in Time - L'Engle*
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant - Grant*
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy*
Sonny Boy - Pacino
Three Nights in August (2nd reading) - Bissinger
Footfall - Niven and Pournelle
A Gentleman in Moscow - Towles*
The Victorian Internet - Standage
King's Row - Bellaman*
What It Takes - Cramer*
Winston Churchill: The Last Lion Vol 1: Visions of Glory 1874 to 1932 - Manchester*
Executioner's Song - Mailer*
The Saint Monica Club - Green (5th reading)*
Winston Churchill: The Last Lion Vol 2: Alone 1932 to 1940 - Manchester*
Winston Churchill: The Last Lion Vol 3: Defender of the Realm 1940-1965 - Manchester and Reid*
Old Mother West Wind - Burgess
Paris Mitchell of King's Row - Bellaman and Bellaman
Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore - Yeats
The Life of St. Gemma Galgani - Germanus*
The Turmoil - Tarkington
The Magnificent Ambersons - Tarkington
The Midlander - Tarkington
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
The Caretaker - Rash*
The Return of the Prodigal Son - Nouwen
Jesus and the Jubilee - Bergsma
Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma - Ott
Roses - Meacham*
Zbig: The life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet - Luce*
Purgatory is for Real - Broussard
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House - Allen and Parnes*
Last Call - Powers
Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor - Hunt
The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume I - Caro (2nd reading)*
The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume II - Caro (2nd reading)*
The Long Loneliness - Day

Handel's Messiah 2025

 Each Christmas I try and attend the Messiah Community sing at St. Olaf's Catholic Church in downtowm Minneapolis. I begin thinking about it in fall, when the first chill is in the air, and thoughts turn to the coming winter and Christmas. 

It's always on a Sunday night downtown. If the weather is bad, or really cold, I think about backing out. That happened this year. It was around 8 or 9F when the concert started. But for the 8th year in a row, excluding the covid cancellations, we went, my wife and I. 

While I am not a singer there is this really good sense of Christmasing that comes over me when the music starts. I let go with my permanently off key rendition of the masterpiece. The crowd is a mix. Many like me, who welcome the large crowd to drown out their mistakes. Others, professional or semi-so, lift high their beautiful voices to proclaim "unto to us a child is born" "speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem" 'they have turn-ed every one to his own way" "He shall reign for ever and ever" "by his stripes we are healed". 

They are dressed in suits, smart Christmas dresses, elf costumes, Santa hats, buffalo plaid shirts and dresses. A gathering of devout followers of the true Messiah and a few, perhaps, non-believers. All drawn by the spell of Christmas into something deeper than elf on the shelf and Christmas cookies. 

Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. 

It is well that we cannot see the future

 Today my wife busted the mailbox door when she got out of the car to check the mail. In closing the car door it hit the mailbox door and broke one of the plastic hinges. Clearly an accident. (Perhaps.) It could have been me. (But not likely). 

I was the one who got to go out in the snow with the temp a balmy 19F. Back and forth I went. To the tool shed, to the mail box, to the tool shed, to the garage, to the house for gloves. Dropped a screw in the snow, which can only be retrieved barehanded. Dropped it again. Dropped a wingnut. Finally I reverted to my first thought, wire. Drilled a couple of holes and macgyvered a solution. Hopefully will last til spring. Gotta get back in the house. 

With a big mug of hot chocolate I start working on this blog entry. My phone rings. My wife it is. "I'm at the mall. The dash says one of my tires only has 14 lbs". Gee, same as the air temp now. "Which mall?" "OK. I'm on my way"

Back to the title of this post. In the summer of 1979 had I known that this day was coming, especially the mailbox part, I might not have married her. It is well that I cannot see the future. 

We never see market bubbles coming, only over our shoulder

 There is much ado in the financial press about the "AI bubble". Pundits wax on and on about the coming and going, the pop prick of this thing "we all know" is happening. 

The majority fall into the camp that reflects their imbedded conflict of interest, the idea that "a bubble is coming but it is not here yet". This view they will hold until after a bubble has past, for it 1) keeps them in the majority and avoids (shudder) standing out in full sunlight with an actual well-reasoned adult opinion 2) it keeps their clients in the market, in the pundits' strategy/fund/etf/etc. 

As I see it, bubbles are rarely called in advance. It always looks like things could get crazier, prices more elevated. There is always some past mania where prices were pushed to an even greater extreme, on such as basis, we are still at a reasonable valuation. 

It's always easier to tell when things are really cheap than when they are really expensive. At least it always was for me, when I did this stuff for a living. 

Your broker/advisor/manager will not get you out of this. Neither will the guy on the radio and his coop of financial bucket masters. This is good, because they don't know where the top is. They don't know where the bottom is. They only know this mantra that they repeat at the break of each new year... this thing the market is doing today we believe will continue for a while, later on we think prices will change. Yellow. Worthless. Where they will add value is keeping you out of the ditch, keeping you in the market when your impulse is to run, keeping you out of expensive strategies/funds/partnerships/pools/private this/private that.  

When the dust settles and the things in that bubbble have fallen a bunch, and then a bunch again, then we'll look back at the mess and read the wisdom of pundits who will tell us of the fools like us who never learned from the past.  

I am a fan of the New York Jets

As I left mass this morning, I caught that second half of the Jets-Broncos game. It was one of those London games of the 2025 season, with a kickoff just as mass was starting. 

I have been following the Jets since Joe Namath took them to the Super Bowl so many years ago. They have never been my main team. That loyalty has belonged mainly to the Buccaneers, Rams and Vikings, when I lived in the same city as those teams. But for over 50 years, the Jets have been my second team, the team I always wanted to do well, and to someday return to Superbowl glory. 

If you dig around my house, you'll find some Rams stuff and a few Vikings things. but much more Jets. Jets hat, sweatshirt and coffee mug are the things seen most often. In 2023 I went to the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton. First stop, Kurt Warner's bust. Second stop, Joe Namath's bust. Rubbed Joe's nose for good luck like thousands of others. Didn't rub Kurt's nose. 

When my son was 12 his approach to the baseball plate mimicked the stance of Mark McGwire. Mark and my son lived for a while in the same city and were baseball players at the same time, though at different levels. 

When I was 12 and playing quarterback in my front yard with my friends, my stance as I dropped back to pass, mimicked that of Joe Namath. It was intentional, I really tried to hold the ball the way I thought he did, and release it as he did. In reality I was a poor imitation but in my mind I was pretty close. 

With today's result, Jets lost and are now 0-6, the season is likely over. I get to be one of the first fans to start thinking hard about the 2026 draft and what it means for my team. Perhas there is another Namath in next year's class. One who is a true student of the game, who has watched the old film footage from the 60s and marveled at the moves of Broadway Joe. Maybe. 

As I left Mass I did not have the Jets on my mind. But when I turned on the game on the radio, I no longer had the miracle of the Mass on my mind. What does that say about me. Perhaps nothing, just a normal human whose mind moves from one thing to another. Or, am I just a passing fan of both? I hope not. Christ has many fans, but very few fully devoted followers.