Friday, July 4, I drove to Nauvoo, Alabama to spend 48 hours with my Mom. The 14th is her 92nd birthday. Thank you to those of our readers who have sent (or are sending) her birthday cards. She got three in Saturday’s mail while I was there. They go into the basket on the dining room table and will a) be read again and again and b) never be thrown away!

The farm hasn’t looked this green in a generation. Patricia and her husband James always have a nice garden and this year they’ve outdone themselves. Carolyn and her husband Van–they’re buying Mom’s place and beginning to farm it–have turned the land around the farmhouse into a lovely garden also. Sunflowers in the field just beyond the pear orchard. Scarecrows hanging from trees to scare off the deer. “The deer love okra,” said Van. Who knew? Maybe they’re making gumbo.

I timed my visit just right for the blueberries. Patricia has some 20 or 30 bushes in two fields, and they’re loaded. I brought back what probably amounted to four gallons. James works in Birmingham and co-workers buy all he can bring to town. He sells them for $8/gallon which we’ve told him is much too low. Anyone who has spent 30 minutes picking a gallon will tell you that 50 dollars ought to be the minimum.

I’m by blueberries the way I have always been by peanuts. Whether they’re good for you or not, we’ll let the experts decide. But I eat them almost every day of my life just because I love them.

When you leave our house and head down Poplar Springs Road toward Nauvoo, where you intersect with Highway 5 (which runs from Jasper to Haleyville), just in front of you in that big barren space is where our family lived in the early 1940s. My earliest memories of life on this planet date back to that house owned by the coal company. I recall when the state paved that highway in 1946 and electricity came through about the same time.

Patricia and I would sometimes go into the woods behind the house picking blueberries. They grew wild, the plants no higher than your knee, only a few berries per bush. To me, they were like blue jewels. Patricia showed me how to crush them in a pint jar, and add water and sugar. The result was the sweetest, most wonderful taste I’d ever experienced. It was so special that I decided to save some for later. I stuck that jar half-filled with the nectar of the gods in the back of the pantry and checked on it from time to time. For a six-year-old, this was better than money in the bank. Then one day, I pulled out the jar and found myself staring at an inch of mold on top. I was broken-hearted to learn we had to throw the whole thing away.

Thus I began to learn about this fallen world we live in.

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“Kit Kittredge, An American Girl.” The movie, not the doll. It opened this week, and the reviews are enough to make one gag. “Saccharine.” “Hokiness.” “Relentless sweetness.” “Flimsy plot.”

What I wonder is what in the sam hill are newspapers doing sending 40 year old men to cover movies for 10-year-old girls? In the movie, Kit is trying to get the Cincinnati newspaper to run her writings. So, why–this is such a no-brainer that even editors should have thought of it–why not get a 10 year old girl to review this movie?

Who wants to know what the local drama expert thinks of a children’s movie? I for one don’t.

Friday afternoon, I took our 11-year-old granddaughters, Abby and Erin, to see this movie. Until a few days ago, I had no inkling that a series of dolls exist in the name of this little girl or that to pre-teens, Kit Kittredge is as big as Nancy Drew (or maybe Barbie is a better comparison) was to earlier generations.

I was unable to take JoAnne, 10, who lives in New Hampshire or Darilyn, 10, but 11 later this month, who lives in North Carolina, with us. But wouldn’t that have been a hoot, taking all four granddaughters of that age! Anyway, I did the best I could and took the two who are nearby. It was a fun two hours.

Okay, being your typical grandpa, I would have enjoyed sitting on a park bench for two hours with those two (and moreso, those four). So the fact that I had a good time tells you nothing about the movie.

Okay, the movie. I did what you do before choosing a movie, and checked it out on some of the internet rating places. Today, after seeing “Kit Kittredge,” I’d like to go back to some of the reviewers who called it “simplistic” or “formulaic” and say to them, “Hey–it’s a child’s movie! It’s not for grownups and certainly not for movie critics.”

The truth is that “Kit Kittredge” is more purely a child’s movie than most that claim that for themselves. So many cinematic offerings in that category–whether from Disney or Pixar or other well-respected houses–are fakes. The parents are sitting there enjoying the movie along with their young-uns, and getting all the little innuendos and inside jokes that were inserted for big people and no one else. Meanwhile, the kids are wondering what all the laughter is about.

In this movie, if a kid doesn’t get the joke, it was thrown out. Movie critics don’t know what to do with that.

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Following the last article on fellowship in our churches, the one about shy people, my son Marty connected me with a website in which a college professor was sounding forth on the difficulty he and his wife–both shy people–are having locating a church in their new city on the West Coast. They’re looking for one of their denomination, one of the old-line liberal churches, and are quite specific as to what they like and cannot stand.

Below are the eight points he makes. Rather than posting my comments on his website, the way bloggers invite readers to do–in fact, we treasure those comments and invite them here–I’ll leave my conclusions here. I’m confident the professor would not appreciate much I have to say, my being Southern Baptist and no doubt a fundamentalist Bible-thumper to his way of thinking. Besides, he’d probably tell me if I’m going to write this much about what he said, I should get my own website. (I told a writer that recently. He/she came back and said, “Sorry. I don’t keep up with all the places I blog.”)

Well, since I have my own website, here we go…. Let’s call the professor Henry and his wife Hankette.

1. Please, please keep your hands off my wife and off me.

Henry doesn’t like hugging, and worse, he abhors people he has just met who stand there stroking his arm, shoulder, or back. Hankette is worse about this than he.

2. Do not call us out by name in front of the entire congregation.

Hank writes, “Our modus operandi when we’re trying out a new place is to take in the full service, then decide whether to fill out the visitors’ card.” He says, “Handshakes? Smiles? Absolutely. But if we tell you our names, don’t say to the whole congregation, ‘Be sure to welcome Henry and Hankette who are sitting on the back row!'”

3. We’ll come to the post-service potluck if we want to.

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Sunday mornings, my conversations with my mom are always pretty much the same. I’ll call her around 10 o’clock, as I’m on my way to a church somewhere in metro New Orleans, and she’ll tell me she’s dressed, sitting there waiting for her ride. My sister Patricia lives across the road and will be picking Mom up in a few minutes. Church starts at 11, but Mom likes to get there early to greet friends.

Invariably, Mom will say, “I don’t feel like going. Every bone in my body hurts.” This Sunday, it was her feet that were giving her trouble.

Also invariably, at church, people will come up and hug her and say, “You look so pretty. I hope I look that good when I get your age.” Pastor Mickey Crane will brag on her–she’s both the oldest member and the one with the longest continuous membership–and tell her what a reward she has waiting in Heaven.

Across the road from the church is the cemetery where Mom’s husband of nearly 74 years lies buried. Twenty feet away, her youngest son, Charlie, is buried.

I said to her Sunday, “Mom, back in the 1940’s, when you had six small children to deal with every day, if you had only gone to church when you felt like it, you would never have gone. But you learned to make yourself get up and get ready and go on. And look at the payoff.”

I said, “So, today, you’re just continuing to practice a habit you’ve kept all your life.”

What she ended up with is a family of church-going children, with two of her four sons being preachers with nearly 90 years of ministry combined.

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Some of our readers are New Orleans-lovers and others are displaced citizens who yearn for home, while a few just find the doings of this banana republic fascinating. This one is for you.

Today, Sunday, the Times-Picayune ran a feature on Dr. Ed Renwick who is retiring from Loyola University’s Institute of Politics after four decades of commenting on the local political scene. In 1967, Ed came to New Orleans to work on his doctorate–on the “Long” dynasty, which covers Huey, Earl, and Russell–and ended up staying.

For a political junkie, he says, Louisiana is Heaven. “We’re so divided in Louisiana–by ethnicity, by race, by religion, by language, by geography. You have the French and the non-French, the Catholics and the Protestants, North and South, black and white, liberal and conservative. Having all these different forces makes the politics lively. It’s never boring here.”

Most state governments, Renwick points out, are rather weak. But not us. “We come out of the French and Spanish traditions of absolute monarchy, and on top of that, we’re Catholic.”

The state collects royalties from the oil and gas produced in the state and that adds up to a neat sum. Renwick says it’s like a fountain of money pouring in.

“We have a very strong governor. The whole system is kind of monarchical. We elect kings.”

Or popes.

Staff writer Elizabeth Mullener played a little game with Dr. Renwick, tossing names of various state political leaders to him for his take. The result was memorable. In fact, my hunch is only the fact that he is retiring liberated him to go on record with some of these blunt comments.

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Early Saturday morning, working at my computer, I suddenly became aware of a new floater or two in my right eye. Since I’ve lived with floaters all my adult life, I knew what this was, but also know what a distraction they can be until you adjust to their ever-presence. These are like black strings hanging on the right lens of my glasses, or sometimes like a water bug skittering across the surface of a pond. Not painful, just distracting.

I googled “eye floaters” and learned they are normal and to be expected as we age. My wife is rubbing that in. (“Poor thing–he’s getting older like everyone else!” No mercy around here.)

In time, our brains adjust to the point that we won’t notice the floaters. They will still be there, presumably, although one of the internet sources indicated they sometimes diminish.

The brain is a magnificent organ. It filters out the trivial and mundane and alerts the mind to the odd and unusual, anything out of the ordinary so we’re able to function in a world where stimuli fly at us from all directions every minute of the day. This is a protection against overloading the nervous system, for which we thank our Designer and Creator.

This process of culling out the commonplace allows the person living by a railroad track to rarely hear the train go by. It enables animal workers to function in and around horrendous odors.

Evangelist Bill Glass asked a friend at the Fort Worth stockyards how he stood the smell. He said, “What smell?”

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The session of the state legislature that ended in Baton Rouge this week did a hundred great things, a few questionable things, and one truly dumb thing: they gave themselves a massive pay raise. Governor Bobby Jindal had said all along he would veto such a move, and would only support the legislature giving a raise to itself if it kicked in following the next election. The law passed last week, however, becomes effective with this term. Jindal, we hear, plans to sign the legislation.

In the beginning, they proposed tripling their pay to something over $50,000 annually for what is part-time work. When the citizenry howled at that, they cut the figure to $37,500 and that’s what passed. Even so, it’s more than a 100 percent increase over their present salary of $16,800. There’s also a nice per diem allotted each legislator which is rarely mentioned.

Now, whether they deserve that kind of increase or not has been ignored. The fact that they’ve been maybe 20 years without a pay increase should be factored into the discussion. However, once the session adjourned and finally, it appears, our representatives began to pay attention to the clamor from outraged voters, suddenly they got concerned. Too late. The deed was done and the lawmakers had closed up shop and gone home.

So, hearing the frightening sounds of recall-petitions throughout their districts, our state lawmakers started running for cover. Some are announcing they choose not to receive the raise, while others are calling on Governor Jindal to veto it. It’s almost funny.

The recall petitions are for real and are gathering momentum, even the one for Jindal himself, the most popular governor we’ve had in ages.

Saturday morning, I sent this letter to the editor of our Times-Picayune:

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A friend we’ll call Chris has alerted me to a reality about fellowship in church: not everyone likes an all-out full-court press. Some newcomers to our churches prefer to remain anonymous a while and will hang back, then come forward on their own terms, at their own timing–if they do so at all. Not all will.

Not everyone is looking for the same kind of church.

Not everyone is outgoing and friendly and eager to make new friends the first time they walk in the door.

Not everyone responds to the same stimuli, loves the same programs, needs the same kind of spiritual nourishment.

Okay, granted. There are indeed people who will visit our churches and appreciate not receiving a handshake and be delighted no one contacted them the following week.

But they are the exception. Case in point: Last Saturday night, as I write, Scott approached me at a church dinner. He said, “A few years ago when I moved here from Boston, I didn’t know a soul. But you welcomed me to church and from then on, you knew my name. I was impressed by that. I mean, I wasn’t anybody.” He might have said I visited him in his apartment that week, I’m not sure. (Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. So I’m not giving myself an ‘A’ in that department.)

Scott needed the personal touch and appreciated the warm welcome. He ended up meeting the love of his life in our church, was made a deacon, and recently served on the pastor search committee.

Not everyone wants to go where “everybody knows your name.” The shy ones among us need a little space.

I asked Chris to give us her story. She’s a lawyer in a large Northeastern city, educated in the Midwest, raised Catholic. Presently, she is an active member of a good-sized Protestant church in her city, one that has been led by some well-known pastors.

Chris writes, “I want to emphasize that this is not a conversion story. I was a ‘true believer’ as a Catholic…. As a general rule, Catholic churches are much larger than Protestant ones. I always hear (our) church referred to as such a large church. We run 1700-1900 in attendance. In my experience, it is a normal-sized church.”

In her job, she often passed this church on a corner by the subway stop, so she was familiar with its location. She checked out its website and listened to some sermons on-line. Then, one day when she did not have time to get to her Catholic church, she dropped in on the new congregation. For a time, she worshiped with both churches, one on Sunday morning and the other Sunday night. Eventually, she made the move to the new church and became a member two years ago.

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