Opinions

At our local golf course, there is a cordoned-off area for a bird which annually nests on the grounds underneath the towering pine trees. Even within the ropes, a person must look very closely to find this bird. With variegated plumage in gray and black, she looks like a pinecone, or simply a furrow in the earth upon which she sits.

As you have seen in the articles written by Mark Warde over the past couple of weeks, the First Methodist Church of Ennis has disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. Our church has done so as have over 40 percent of the churches of our conference. If you read most of the popular publications in circulation, you are led to believe that it is all about the ordination of LGBTQ pastors or the marriage of homosexual couples in the church. While this has become the flash-point that has made worldwide news and brought denominational schism (division or disunion) to an abrupt reality, it by no means is the reason for my own disaffiliation.

After playing in softball games at Howard Park, one of the best friends I’ve ever had, along with a few teammates, would meet at an old A&W Root Beer stand. The fun we had reliving the games we just played, win or lose, usually consisted of making light of errors.

As my trip to Alabama for a high school reunion neared, I was assured: “Your 50th class reunion is much more fun than the 10th, 15th or 25th.” I looked skeptically, and then heard this explanation: “At the early reunions, everybody is trying to prove how successful they are, impress you with how much money they’ve made, or drive the best car.

It’s not the lie that bothers me. It’s the insult to my intelligence that I find offensive.

I spent the week visiting my parents at their retirement home “up north,” and so I got to see them and my mother’s outside pet, Stubby, the red squirrel. I hadn’t seen Stubby since last winter, when he had made an elaborate network of tunnels in the deep snow outside my parents’ window facing the lake. My mother fed him on the ground beneath the bird feeder, and Stubby would pop out of one of his several tunnel entrances to eat, then pop into his tunnel and emerge on the other side. He occasionally had some red squirrel visitors. I named one Evald, after a great-uncle, and my mother named the second one Sigfrid, after another of her uncles. But the squirrel visitors were just that -- they stayed for a short time, enjoyed Stubby’s handouts and left, leaving Stubby alone with my parents.

We have definitely entered an interesting time in American culture. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, recently decided not to publish her upcoming novel because it was set in Russia. She stated in a video that she knew having Russian protagonists would be too hurtful for Ukrainian people because of the ongoing war.

The bird’s name was Perry Como. He belonged to a little red-headed girl in Central Florida who loved him dearly. When she was eight years old, however, he flew the coop.