10 Comments

So many. ♥️

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I noticed you changed the word "was" to "were" in my Satchel Paige quote. Is this the writer in you doing editing? I put his remark in quotation marks...I guess you thought I was being racist? No way!

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What a great bunch of comments and responses!

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Some stray thoughts: the eager members of my 1961 high school class are doing splendid work soliciting our thoughts of the last 60 years or so. As I scroll thru them it occurs to me that they could be condensed and re-matched to form a very fine history of our times. I feel the same about your weekly Host-posts: an array of such minuscule parochial reflections may acquire their own universality. ,If I were a better writer I could have said that better...

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Nonsense songs! I guess, sometimes those ballads have many different sources. At Girl Scout camp, we learned a song: " Sarah the Whale." Basically, it's almost identical with lines nine "In Frisco Bay there lived a whale... to line 16- "And Things To Fierce to mention." In our song, "We fed her oysters by the pail... . "She loves to laugh" becomes "Her name was Sarah" ...and when she smiled... after the tonsil description, our version went on "What would you do with a whale like that? (leaving out breaking the 10 Commandments, and such) What would you do if she sat on your hat, or your mother, or your toothbrush... I used to think the song was rather misogynistic, especially the part about mothers being helpless!

I imagine that many "folk songs" had minor local variations, before standardization by radio, Victrola and TV came along! I wouldn't even be surprised if there might be some books on the evolution of American folk tunes. This is the first time, though, that I've seen Sarah the Whale teamed up with a Horse Named Bill!

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I am 89 and leaning towards 90. I have for a long time, leaned against a night stand when puting on pants. Now I, on occasion, sit down on the bed to get that right leg into the correct pants leg. I do miss sometimes and need to start over. At least I am able to dress myself each day before I head out to my store. I count each day a blessing, each month a wonder and each year a gift from above.

Darel

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Dear "errant son"! When I retired and returned to live with "Pater Familius" I prayed for a group of folks to be with - a congregation. Sure enough, the Lord came through. He put me in a congregation of immigrant Pentecostal Ukrainians. In some ways, at least, they were very similar to the Brethren you grew up with. When you describe yourself as an "errant son," it brings back the pressure to conform, the bowing to church elders, and the blindness of the "Believing Generation" to the realities of the young "Americans." Far from being "errant," it seems to me that you "took a sow's ear and turned it into a silk purse!" Sometimes, in life, we need to have some sort of "base line" to compare our experiences to, in order to find the imagination to move on to something more! Your Brethren family and congregation gave you the opportunity to compare "This" with "That" on many scales. If you had grown up in a "Typical American Family", it's quite possible that Lake Woebegon never would have sprung up on a fold in the Minnesota map!

In the immigrant Pentecostal church I joined, there were a whole crop of "errant" young people. These days they've become a carpenter, a solder, a male nurse and so forth. They're living their lives, not in some sort of New Jerusalem, but in the everyday world. There's no shame, that I can see, in being a "real-world-based individual", rather than some preacher's dream.

Congratulations on your very successful career! You've influenced millions of people, far, far more than you probably would have as a "Good Brethren Boy!" And those values still exist in you, they still shine through and light your intellect! It seems to me there's no apologies necessary - not-so-errant Sun of Keillors! Hooray for you, and your errancy!

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