In my high-country backpacking days, we would use topographical maps and a compass to try figure out exactly where we were and how we might get to where we wanted to go. Using the compass to orient the map, we’d determine a couple of distant peaks or landmarks indicated by the contour lines on the map and shoot the bearing of each of them. The theory is that your location is where the two lines drawn on those bearings intersect.

Of course, ask anyone who’s done much high-country backpacking about the time they got lost.  I remember when my friend Norm and I had taken some of the middle school boys from the youth group at church on a Memorial Day weekend trip into the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada. We were still below timberline, but patchy snow covered the ground and it was not always easy to stay on the trail. A thick overcast filled the sky, so not even the sun could tell us the direction we were headed. Continue reading →

Christmas lights are a big deal in our neighborhood. Becky and I went for a subtle and tasteful string of multiple colors across the railing on the front porch. We think it looks really nice. But subtle is not necessarily the name of the game, so we may have to do something different next year.

Some of our neighbors have displays with thousands of lights and one isn’t even a display. It is a show, and a very impressive show at that. Auburn friends, you should drive by. We are in Bear Creek – off of County Road 52 between County Roads 31 and 35 (that’s how we name the roads between the cornfields here in Indiana – what it lacks in imagination, it makes up in pretty much always knowing where you are).

The word wonderland is much overused this time of year, but a nighttime drive or a walk through our neighborhood is worth the time it takes.

When the sun goes down, our neighborhood becomes something of, well, a wonderland of lights and displays.  I love it. Continue reading →

The first Sunday of Advent.

I have been thinking about Advent. Our pastor here in Auburn graciously asked if I might be willing to create the readings for the lighting of the Advent candles on the four Sundays of Advent and Christmas Eve.  It was a generous offer, and I gladly accepted.

I’ve also been talking with a friend whose background is in a non-liturgical church, but who has a new position this year and must lead his church, like Saint Andrew, an otherwise low church, through an observance of Advent.

Traditionally, Advent is the season that begins with the fourth Sunday before Christmas and continues through Christmas Eve.  The old readings and prayers have a double focus on Christ’s first Advent at his nativity in Bethlehem and on his second Advent at the end of time, coming as judge of the living and the dead and bringing with him a new heaven and a new earth. Continue reading →

For many of us, Thanksgiving Day is the best holiday of the year.  Family. Food. A time to pause and remember and give thanks.  But Thanksgiving 2020 is not going to be a traditional Thanksgiving. The family circle will be smaller. Sure, there will be food, but the family members who always bring the pumpkin pie or the cranberry salad won’t be with us this year. No other pumpkin pie will be quite as good and, frankly, we might as well pass on cranberry salad if it’s not that cranberry salad.

As for thanks, we’ll be tempted to cast blame rather than to offer thanks. We’ll blame a heavy-handed government or fate or maybe even God for a Thanksgiving that is not going to be what we planned. If we’d been given a choice, we would have skipped all that 2020 has brought to our favorite holiday and so much more.

We cast blame rather than offer thanks at our own peril. Continue reading →

I’ve always been a stick shift person.  Seven of the ten cars I have owned in my lifetime have had manual transmissions, beginning with a three-on-the-tree 1966 Mercury Comet.  I like a stick shift. But they are hard to come by these days. While 13% of all car models sold in the U.S. offer a manual transmission, only 2.4% of all cars sold in the United States actually have a stick shift. None offer three on the tree. And, to do a little generation bashing, few millennials or gen-Zers know how to drive a car with a manual transmission. Of course, it’s not the stick shift, it’s the clutch that gets them into trouble.

All that is to say I was sad when I saw the headline in the paper saying they were closing the local clutch factory.  They made clutches for big-rig trucks at the Auburn plant. It turns out that neither the politicians nor the shareholder capitalists, neither government regulation nor woke sensitivities are responsible for the shuttering of the clutch plant.

Blame change. Or maybe blame the millennials.

More and more semis are being sold with automatic transmissions mostly because they are more efficient and partly because too many young drivers have no idea how to drive with a stick shift. It’s the clutch that gets them into trouble. Or maybe it’s the double clutch.

Clutch factories are going the way of buggy whip factories a hundred years ago or more. Blame change. Continue reading →