The Lord's Day

I'm at the Presque Isle Harbor Association clubhouse using their internet connection.  Cabin Creek Coffee in Alpena is closed for the weekend.  This morning I attended the early service at Trinity Episcopal Church in Alpena.  Bruce and Maggie, for whom I stood in last Sunday, said they had a good time in the U.P. on their annual reunion with Bruce's high school friends and their spouses.

Bruce and Maggie keep Trinity humming.  Theirs is a very friendly parish!  Sometimes we Episcopalians forget that hospitality is an essential element of faith.

Friday night's wind, gusting up to 40 mph, pulled a neighbor's pontoon boat from its moorings and blew it across the lake.  The boat is now beached at the south end of Lake Esau, and its owners are downstate, blissfully unaware.  The blustery weather continued most of yesterday, forcing the picnic at the New Lighthouse indoors and cutting into the lunch trade.

Rain kept picnic-goers away until after 1:00.  Proceeds from the event support the museum at the New Light.

Floyd and Shari, my neighbors on Kauffman, came in as I was finishing my hotdog.  Floyd keeps a close eye on my house project.  On Friday afternoon he saw the electrical inspector give his blessing to the rack, and also supervised the delivery of cement blocks.  The delivery truck has an arm, similar to that on a Sky Lift, which can extend nearly 70 feet.  The arm's forks slip into the holes in the block, and then the operator gently moves the blocks where needed — in this case stacked high on my basement floor, ready to be laid up on Tuesday.

Stacks of concrete blocks await the masons on Tuesday, assuming the weather cooperates.

The inspector's approval means PIEandG can run power to the site.  Electricity is essential for the framers, who will start soon after the basement walls are finished.

Other Kauffman neighbors joined us, reporting that someone tried to pilfer an outboard motor from a boat down the road.  The thieves gave up when they found the motor bolted tightly to the boat.  "Someone" was probably the same low-lifer(s) who pilfered Jim's tools early Monday morning.  Jim's loss is now estimated at about $15,000.  Kauffman Blvd. is buzzing: "This just never happens here...."

With the job site shut down for the holiday weekend, I have lots of time to read.  Just for the record, I have finished Susan Howatch's Glittering Images (1987), warmly recommended by Kathryn Roberts.  This is the first of Howatch's six Starbridge novels on the Church of England — Mother Church for us Episcopalians.  The protagonist's heavy drinking put me off initially, but this ended up a good tale of an all-too-human institution populated by all-too-humans.  I'm also nearly 400 pages into Truman, David McCullough's well-written and highly readable 1,000-page biography of Harry. What a remarkable man!  My to-do list now includes the Truman Presidential Library at Independence, MO.

I have also started Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves (2009).  I think a lot of folks are in denial about the situation we faced a couple years ago.  Should we have stood aside, as so many recommended, and simply allowed the invisible hand of the markets to straighten this problem out?  Problem is, people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.  Herbert Hoover believed the markets would reverse the Great Depression.  He stood by, waiting for the markets to do their thing.  They didn't.  Hoover left office the most reviled man in America.  And he left behind him not just millions of unemployed, but many millions more who kept their jobs, yet earned so little that their children suffered lifelong damage resulting from malnutrition.  In a few weeks voters may punish the Democrats for bailouts and stimulus spending, but the alternative would have been so much worse. •••