The Right to Dry

I note this week the reaction I have every time I stay at a casino hotel in Kansas City: it looks like it was built by someone who has an idea of what Las Vegas must be like, but never's been there.

A feeling something's out of place is one I've never had about the suburbs. According to Paul Akers, the Opinion Page Editor of our local rag, that may be about to change. He reports the existence of suburban foundations, based on 'excessive square footage, short home life cycles and cheap transportation,' in times of economic scarcity, may lead to 'a new appreciation of city-centric life which is more compact and manageable.'

I don't know about that but I do know one thing that drives folks out of suburbs: overbearing Home Owners Associations. According to the Boston Globe, HOA's across New England now ban clothelines "to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values." Once in the land where the cry rang out, 'No taxation without representation,' there rings out, today, far and wide, a new cry: The Right to Dry.

I sat down yesterday and counted 155 business days left in the office. I've long dreamed, upon retirement, of hanging clothes on a wash line. In impatient anticipation, I bought a candle a few weeks ago called 'clean white cotton sheets swaying in the breeze.' In these annoying times, will that now unprofitable scent survive as the only closest experience to the real thing?

If I can't hang wet clothes out to dry, what shall I do? The Norfolk Virginian Pilot reports on a fella who "after retiring from a 20-year career with the FBI is going full circle, back to his first job as a street cop." I started as a typist. I don't reckon there's much future in returning to that profession.

In search of vocation, I return, inevitably, to obituaries, seeking out evidence of other lives well lived. A woman is described in a Kansas City Star obit as a mom, seamstress, executive secretary, a liquor store owner, a china painter, a dollmaker, and a cook whose homemade noodles were perfect.

What real skills has a career paper pusher like myself?

The Dallas Morning News reports on a fella who "armed with high-tech cameras and computers, travels around the world to photograph New Testament manuscripts that are many centuries old - his goal is to photograph 1.3 million pages of Greek manuscripts - a project he expects will take until 2020."

I've just completed a study on where professional baseball teams of Richmond took Spring training. I'd venture to say there are less people interested in that than in reading millions of pages of manuscript of Greek New Testament manuscript, but what if no ones interested in either?

Clive Davis writes of a German scholar, Ernst Robert Curtius, who initially warned his countrymen about the rise of the Nazi's, but later wrote, "when the catastrophe came, I decided to serve the idea of a medievalistic humanism by studying the Latin literature of the Middle Ages."

Here now arises the same qualm I felt when I searched for what the great German theologian, Karl Barth, might have written in the 1950's about the Holocaust. There is nothing. Its absence invalidates his brilliance.

I'm likewise content to study what nobody's interested in most of the time. Friend Mark and I have discussed many times, though, how I can't resist temporarily interupting those fond pursuits to write letters to editors, where, for example, the original author's spin is so outrageous, it insists upon rebuttal. The latest involves a bishop who claims an ethos of radical inclusion for a movement founded upon homophobia. If I don't, no one will, therefore, I must.

Upon publication, the response certainly will generate, as usual, scorching on-line posts from the usual suspects. Is there not a choice to be made of pursuing the seeming futility of 'wrestling with pigs in mud,' according to Mark, or acting, regardless, especially, since at least one well known Episcopal on-line scribe says the responses are noted by at least a few other interested parties, or even if they weren't noticed by anyone at all?

Colleagues of an Oxford professor who died recently agreed to sell the beloved books in his renowned personal library for charity. All was well until those same dealers who mar our local otherwise cozy Friends of the Library used book sale, marched in, greedily tossing any books they grasped into cavernously large boxes; the same malevolent forces at work which transform the environmentally beneficial bucolic wholesomeness of clothes drying on a backyard wash line into an assault on property values.

The achievement of perfect homemade noodles (an ideal the chefs of my family relentlessly pursue) for Christmas dinners, now otherwise individually long forgotten, is indeed apparently a great accomplishment in itself. What counts much more is that Edna Harper of Kansas City will be remembered forever as 'an all-around beautiful lady whom everyone just loved.'

As Jackson Browe sings, "nothing survives but the way we live our lives."