All posts by David Todd

Christmas, memories

A Christmas Memory About A Song

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Christmas music has been filling the airwaves for a month now, though becoming progressively louder and more ubiquitous with each day. I enjoy it, both the sacred and the secular. The Christmas music we had growing up is still pleasant to me. We had the Gene Autry album, the Arthur Godfrey album, and a couple of others I sort of remember. We had primarily albums of secular holiday music. For Christmas hymns we went to church. I don’t believe there was any all-Christian radio in the 50s and 60s, so we didn’t get a steady diet of the songs of the season.

But this memory is about one particular song. I first heard it in 1964 at the Christmas program in our weekly assembly in junior high. I was in 7th grade then. At this assembly, Faith Farnum, a 9th-grader, sang “The Birthday of a King”. Faith was a wonderful singer and regularly sang at assemblies. It was the first time I had ever heard the song, and I’ve never forgotten it. It doesn’t get a lot of airtime at Christmas, and I don’t know why. In fact, I have never, in the 57 Christmases that have passed (including the one that is rapidly passing) since that first time, heard it sung live again.

As beautiful as the song is, and as simple yet rich as the lyrics are, I don’t understand how it remains so obscure. Whenever I mention it to someone, they have never heard it or heard of it. When I do a search for it, I find recordings of it by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, Judy Garland, Kelli O’Hara, and a number of others. It was once in the Baptist hymnal and, for all I know, may still be.

“The Birthday Of A King” was written in 1918 by William Harold Neidlinger. His biography at hymnary.org is as follows.

William Harold Neidlinger USA 1863-1924. Born at New York, NY, he studied with organists Dudley Buck and C C Muller (1880-90) …. He played the organ at St Michael’s Church in New York City. He also conducted the Amphion Male Chorus and the Cecilia Women’s Chorus in Brooklyn, and the Treble Clef Club and Mannheim Glee Club in Philadelphia, PA. He taught in the music department of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences. He went on to study with E Dannreuther in London (1896-98) then worked in Paris as a singing teacher until 1901. In 1897 he married Alice Adelaide Maxwell Sypher, and they had a son, Harold. Returning to American in 1901, he settled in Chicago, IL, where for several years he was one of the prominent singing teachers. He wrote music for a religious mass…published a comic opera…another opera…a cantata…two song books,..[etc.] …He became interested in child psychology and nearly abandoned music. He even established a school for handicapped children in East Orange, NJ, where he taught his theories of musical pedagogy and speech and vocal therapy. He wrote several secular songs and edited a number of vocal songbooks, especially for children. He was a theorist on musical methods and education. He died at Orange, NJ. He was an author, composer, and lyricist.

Quite impressive.

Once I learned that so much music was available on Youtube for just the cost of listening to a few ads, I went looking for this one Christmas, and every Christmas since. I haven’t so far this year but will do so today as I go about my work in The Dungeon. I’m anxious to once again hear that beautiful refrain:

Alleluia, O how the angels sang. Alleluia, how it rang. And the sky was bright with a holy light. ‘Twas the birthday of a King.

Here’s a link to the performance by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. It’s a little different than the arrangement Faith sang to, but still good. Happy listening.

Christianity, miscellaneous

R.I.P. Gary Borchert

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Well done, good and faithful servant. We will miss you, but rejoice at your current status with your heavenly Father.

Death seems to be all around of late. My sister not so long ago. Church friends earlier in the year. Classmates from high school. Something like 80 out of 725 people listed in our senior yearbook are now dead. Just this morning I learned of the death of a former pastor’s daughter, who I was working with as I write a church history. Writing remembrances should be getting easier, but it’s not.

On Dec. 7, our friend from church, Gary Borchert, crossed the river from life to death. Here is his obituary. Only 73 years old, but a life well-spent.

Gary and Sue came into our lives around 1995-96. They visited our church one Sunday. We did not meet them at the service. Lynda and I were at that time part of a ministry that went to the homes of those who visited the church and gave them a small gift, maybe a coffee mug and a jar of jam. We got Gary and Sue. I remember going to their home, then in Rogers, and the time we spent with them. They were very open to our visit and kept us there an hour or so, just talking. They were horse people, having acreage at their house, which back then was at the edge of Rogers. It wouldn’t be long before the city started closing in around them and they did the wise thing of selling their property and moving to a house in Bella Vista.

They became faithful attenders at and members of our church. They formed the nucleus of the “Amen Corner” from a row up front, always worshiping with abandon, not worrying about who was behind them, watching them. At one point the pastor asked them to attend the start of the second worship service (after they had been in the first), for it was a little dead and they were an example to others on how to praise God without concern of what people thought of you. In our adult Sunday school class, he was always ready with a comment or question.

Gary’s life was one of accomplishment. He served his country in the Air Force and was in Vietnam. I remember a Sunday School class I taught around Christmastime one year. Gary and Sue were in it. Dealing with Christmas memories, I asked, “So where were you at Christmas 1969?” (or a year either side of that) Most of us were in high school or younger. Gary answered that with one word: Danang. What a way to spend Christmas.

Gary had a voice for radio, and he worked in that industry for many years. He took part in dramas at church, and, if I remember correctly, narrated from time to time. His most famous role in a church drama was as Dr. No, even shaving his head for the part. Another role he played was being father to his grandson after their daughter’s untimely death. This would prove to be a challenge, one that Gary and Sue met with grace, and, when called for, tough love.

Somewhere along the way, after we met them, Gary became involved in a workplace accident. I don’t remember the particulars, but it injured his back. He struggled with this the rest of his life. The first struggle was with the insurance company, or maybe it was with workers’ compensation. I played an unwitting part in that. While he hobbled on foot as much as he could, Gary was trying to get a motorized cart to help him get around. We had a Sunday school class blog at the time, and after seeing Gary struggle to walk one Sunday, I posted that it was good to see him walking. I meant it as an encouragement to him. The insurance company saw it and said, “Ah ha! He doesn’t need a motorized cart.” They eventually straightened it out and he got the cart, but the bureaucratic struggle added to the physical struggles.

An example of Gary’s willingness to serve, and his desire to be of use even with his limited mobility, was Easter Sunday 2010. We were in the midst of a parking lot renovation. Who does that when Easter Sunday is upon you, right? But that’s the way it happened. I was in charge of getting those improvements done and, knowing the condition it would be in that day, worked with our pastoral staff and the men’s ministry to have at least five parking attendants for each service, helping people to navigate to the parts of the lot that were usable. Gary responded to the request for volunteers and showed up early that day, in his motorized cart, and waved cars to a certain row until it was full. Then he pulled forward and waved them to the next row. He showed us all what Christian service was all about.

A great couple, lovers of Jesus, servants in the church.

Over the years, Gary dealt with health issues and had operations and times in the hospital with severe infections. The pain from his injuries, complications from them, and loss of mobility made life difficult for him. He met the challenges. Though, he wasn’t always the best patient. He would resist going to the hospital when Sue thought he needed to and wanted to be discharged before it was wise. I remember a talk I had with him about that, reminding him that his wife was a registered nurse and had a better understanding of his health than he did. He did much better after that.

On one screen, I have Gary’s picture up. On this screen what I type. Gary, we will miss you. Sue and Kody will miss you. But we rejoice that you are now pain free, infection free, and that your radio voice is competing with the choir of angels as you narrate the stories of God and His Son Jesus. You have now heard the words that the rest of us will someday hear, a day that gets closer for all of us: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come share in your Master’s happiness.”

family, The Forest Throne

The Forest Throne

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I keep making mention of my novel-in-progress. Tentatively titled The Forest Throne, it will be a young adult novel—meaning it is for teenagers. And I’ve been meaning to say more about it, but seemed to have too much on my mind to concentrate on a post about it.

In this post, I’ll talk mainly about the genesis of the book. In a future post I’ll talk a little about the story.

Before they constructed trails near our house, if, when the grandchildren came to visit, you wanted to go deep into the woods, the only way to do so was down the hill behind our house into the valley, called a “holler” around here. I think Ephraim, our oldest grandchild, was 3 or 4 when we did that for the first time. As the other kids got older, several of us would do this. Once you go down the hill, there’s no going back up. Or, should I say going back up is much too difficult. So we would hike down the channel of the hollow until we hit a road and take the road back to the house. While that meant a longer uphill leg, the road is definitely easier than the rocky, leaf-strewn hill. Once the trail construction began in late 2019 and was completed in early 2020, we never go down the hill anymore.

But I prate.

Sometime around 2017 (I think it was), Ephraim, by then 9-years-old, and I went down the hill. For some reason his two siblings then old enough to be with us stayed at the house.  We usually have to hunt around to find a place to get down into the channel of the holler. One time we were working our way upstream on the bank, looking for that place to drop down to the channel, when we passed a depression in the hillside that looked a bit like a chair. One of us, I don’t remember if it was Ephraim or me, said it looked like a throne, a throne in the woods, or the forest.

That’s where the name came from. We mused about whether it was natural or manmade. And I began musing about how it could be worked into a book. A plot came to mind. I ran that plot by Ephraim. He said it sounded good, and so I put it in the writing queue. It finally came to the top of the queue last June.

That’s the genesis. The rest will have to wait for another post. I took a photo of the throne when we went back one time, but I’m not sure I can find it on my phone. Thus, I have no illustration for this post. You’ll just have to wait a while for it.

goals, The Forest Throne

November Progress, December Goals

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I’m writing this on December 1st, for publishing on December 3rd. November wasn’t too bad of a month for writing progress, despite the time off for Thanksgiving activities with the family. Here’s how I did compared to the goals I set on November 1st.

  1. Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. I believe I accomplished this without missing a regular posting day.
  2. Attend my writers groups this month. That will be about six meetings if I make all of them. I attended all these meetings, a total of 5, two of which were on-line. 
  3. Continue formatting work on the church Centennial book. With luck, and a few good hours, it will be finished when Dec 1 rolls around. I made progress on this. The essential formatting is done, though I’m still waiting on two outside contributions and a few more photos. Final formatting is impossible until I get those.
  4. More work on The Forest Throne. I’ll even set a word goal on this: 10,000 words more than I have now. I had several good sessions of working on this. I didn’t quite make may word goal, however, adding 9,400 for the month. Still, that’s not bad.
  5. Begin the process of revamping my website. I don’t really have that much to do on it, mainly have a new landing page and move my bio to its own page. I ought to be able to achieve that. This I also did. I spent a day or two on this: refamiliarizing myself with the menus for making changes; adding photos; moving and adding text. I now have a proper landing page, a proper bio page, and have updated almost everything on the site to be current. I still want to make a couple of changes to some of the pages but see no hurry in doing so.

So, what about December? It actually looks like a quiet month in the Todd household, so I hope to achieve much with my writing.

  1. As always, blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays.
  2. As always, attend meetings (in person and on-line) of my writing groups. I’m going to drop one group, as I don’t think I’m contributing much to it and am not sure I agree with the direction they are going. I also suspect some meetings of the groups may be cancelled around Christmas.
  3. Publish the short story I finished in September. Busyness has kept me from applying my mind to creating the cover and doing the publishing tasks. I’ve waited long enough; time to get it done.
  4. Continue work on The Forest Throne. I’m at a point in the book where the writing is more difficult, since I’m dealing with speech and mannerisms spanning three different time eras. So I’m not going to set any word goal. Let me instead set a working-sessions goal. I want to work on it no less than 15 times by the end of the month.
  5. Assuming I receive the two outside contributions I’m waiting on, and find the last photo or two I feel I’m missing, I’ll set a goal of completely finishing the formatting of this, 100 percent finish. That will mean that publishing tasks will happen in January.
  6. Work on two Bible studies—or maybe three.  One I started back in February or March this year, and I have quite a bit done on it. I’d like to get that into publishing shape. Maybe this month I can dust it off, read where I left off and add some words. The other two are new, ones that I anticipate teaching next year. One I have outlined but not really developed. My goal for it is to get it fully developed and in teachable condition. The other is a “sequel” to the one from earlier this year. It’s not yet outlined, however. My goal for it for it for December is to get it fully outlined, and maybe start developing it a little.

I think I will leave it at that. That’s quite a bit to get done. Let’s see how I do on it.

Christianity, family

R.I.P. Norma Lilly Todd

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Christmas at the Outlet store in downtown Providence, probably 1953. Edward came along in January 1954.

On Saturday, November 27, 2021, my sister, Norma Lilly Todd, left this world for the next, the heavenly one, after a long, long illness. You may find her obituary here.

She was 16 months older than me, two years ahead of me in school. Born Sept 5, 1950 in Providence, RI, she was a premie by at least a month, maybe more. This would show up years later in her health problems.

Four maternal generations at Norma’s christening, winter of 1950-51

We were raised in Cranston, RI, joined two years after my birth by our brother Edward. Norma, as the oldest, was the one to one supply childhood names for our grandparents, Gar and Grime—names that stuck forever. She established the pattern of the Todd children being scholars (a pattern Edward broke, not because he lacked smarts, but because he had to carve out a different territory for himself).

When Mom died in 1965, Norma was 14, I was 13, and Edward was 11. A lot of the burden of the family duties fell on her. Of course, Mom was so sick leading up to her death that we all were already doing most of the chores a mother would do, including Dad taking on much of the cooking. But Norma probably had a greater burden than Edward and me.

Norma graduated with honors along the way, from Cranston High School East in 1968. She went on to Rhode Island College, graduating in 1972 with a B.S. in Elementary Education.

The family, one Sunday about to embark for church.

She discovered that teaching young children really wasn’t her calling, and instead went into retail, working at a Pier One Imports close to our house. They offered her a management position in Evansville, Indiana. So she became the first of the fledglings to fly the coop in, if I remember correctly, November 1973. I did the same in June 1974, moving to Kansas City.

Daddy’s little girl

Once we moved away from each other, and in the age back when long-distance telephone was still expensive, communications became infrequent and visits even more so. I drove from KC to Evansville to visit her twice before I married, and she flew to KC twice to visit Lynda and me after we married. Since, over the years, we made many trips from KC or Arkansas to Rhode Island, we stopped often in Evansville to see her.

At Mom’s grave, 1965

Norma’s health was never good, and she didn’t have a lot of strength. At some point, maybe around 1990-91, she left her retail management position—which involved her unloading delivery trucks—and went to work as a receptionist at her church, a job she held until her retirement around three or four years ago. Her connection to that is an interesting story, one that I had a part in. When I visited her in October, 1974, I witnessed to her about my conversion experience (from being a nominal, Christian-in-name-only to being born again). After my trip, she wrote me a letter saying thanks but no thanks. It was less than a year later that she sent me a card, saying something on front like, “I meant to call, I meant to write, I meant to visit, but I didn’t so…” and then, inside, “…I’m praying for you.” In that card she wrote about her conversion. Needless to say, I hopped in the car as soon as I could and visited her over the weekend, including Sunday morning service at Bethel Temple.

Norma’s high school graduation photo, 1968, Cranston High School East

Norma was a girl scout growing up, active in that throughout her school years. As an adult, her interests outside of work and church included crafts, especially making greeting cards. Each birthday and holiday we received a homemade, personalized card from her.

Norma never married. If she had boyfriends along the way she didn’t tell me about them.

About 10-15 years ago, she called to say she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. In the course of the examinations, they discovered she had only 40 percent lung capacity, most likely as a result of her premature birth. Due to her general health condition, they would not operate for her cancer. They treated it by radiation, and she was considered a cancer survivor.

A more recent photo, probably from the early 2000s.

But her health deteriorated over the years as her knees wore out and she battled the bulge, like everyone in our family did. She had been confined to a wheelchair, though still living at home. Various friends looked in on her.  It was August this year that she took a turn for the worse, spending the rest of her time in hospitals, rehab, and a nursing home. When we last talked by phone, she requested that we not come out and see her. “We went our separate ways long ago,” she said. We reluctantly honored her wish. She had her after-death arrangements made, which included cremation and no services.

Norma is survived by me, our half-sister Deb Harris, six nephews and nieces, many cousins, and a host of friends, mainly in Evansville. I want to give special recognition to Bob and Ellan, the friends who have given her much help and lots of time over the years, especially lately.

On our last visit, in Evansville in October 2015

A popular response to the death of a loved one is to say they have joined so and so in heaven and is now looking down on us. I’m not sure that’s biblical, though it may be comforting. But I do know that’s where Norma is now, because of her faith in Jesus. She fought the good fight; she finished the race; she kept the faith. She has now heard those words that all who love Jesus want to hear: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter now into the joy of the Lord.”

family

A Good Thanksgiving

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Dateline: 25 November 2021, Thanksgiving day

Eliajah and me. Loves to jump on me or have me read books to him.

On Sunday, we picked up our son and his husband at the airport. On Monday our daughter and husband and their four children drove in. So we have had a houseful. But it all ends tomorrow.

Because of them all leaving the day after Thanksgiving, we decided to make our Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday. Otherwise, there would have been too many leftovers for the wife and I to finish on our own. It was a great feast, even with leaving out the corn. On Monday our son prepared a nice meal of chicken breasts, pasta, and broccoli. Tuesday the four younger adults (I don’t think I can call them “young” any more as they are now at the lower end of middle-aged), and I prepared Grandpa’s Mythical Sandwich along with cabbage and carrots. That, along with a nice breakfast casserole and some blueberry muffins our daughter brought and a fruit salad Lynda made, and we have eaten very well.

Morning reading time worked very well.

I instituted a new rule for this visit: No screens in the morning until they had read 30 minutes in a physical book. They could pick any book(s) in the house. Ephraim chose a Dickens book off our shelves, the one with the Christmas stories. Ezra grabbed the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Elise picked a Chronicles of Narnia book, but then changed her mind when her uncles gave her a book as an early Christmas present, a book with famous women’s stories, I think. I actually haven’t been able to look at it much. She read it in the first two days and began re-reading it today. It was kind of hard to get the youngest, Elijah, to participate.

With more work after this photo was taken, the fort is 3 posts short of being done, including this year’s repairs and modifications.
Ezra worked hard on the fort and the path leading to it.

We worked on the fort in the nearby woods, and it is done, all but three posts. That included finishing one wall destroyed when a tree fell on it and moving one entrance and closing another. Ezra and I also worked on the path to the fort, marking it with logs. They didn’t play much it in, but I have come to realize that the fun is in the building.

Lots of board games were played, the grandparents not really participating. But the grandkids had fun at it. Little Elijah let me read to him several times.

Thanksgiving is in the books for 2021. It was the first time for the whole family to be together since Thanksgiving 2019. May there be many more such times.

Board games resulted in much fun, cutthroat as it was.
America, book reviews

Book Review: Along The Edge Of America

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An enjoyable read. Well written, easy reading, engaging subject. I must search for his other book somewhere on my shelves.

Peter Jenkins is famous for his walk across America, which he did around 1974 and turned into a bestseller book of that name. I have that book, somewhere on a shelf or in a box, and will someday read it. Meanwhile, I had another of his books conveniently at hand, Along The Edge Of America, so a couple of months ago the wife and I read it aloud. We picked this up as a used copy somewhere along the line, and it has been waiting quite a few years for us to read it.

It wasn’t what I expected. By “the edge of America” he means our southern water border, the Gulf of Mexico. After much planning, Jenkins went by boat solo from the tip of the Florida Keys to the Texas border with Mexico at the Gulf. While it was something I didn’t expect—and don’t ask me what I did expect—it did not disappoint.

Jenkins started by telling about his divorce, from the woman he met (I think in New Orleans) on his walk across America, who he married and who finished the walk with him. He made his money off the first book, bought land in the hills of Tennessee, and went there to live rather than back to his native Connecticut. He married again. But his feet became restless, and decided to do something else. Meanwhile, since his first, famous walk, he had done others and published the stories.

He decided to follow our southern coast. Buying a boat, he engaged teachers of boatsmanship (that may not be a word), navigation, survival, and whatever else he needed. He went to the coast and, after shakedown, he was off. His starting point wasn’t Key West, but  uninhabited American islands beyond Key West named the Dry Tortugas. Thence to the better known keys. Thence up the west coast of Florida, thence along the Florida panhandle, thence across the Alabama coast…well, you know your geography and get the picture.

Along the way, he met lots of interesting people. Let’s see, there were commercial fishermen in southern Florida; marijuana trans-shippers further north, old friends in New Orleans, victims of repeated hurricanes in western Louisiana, and modern pirates in Texas. He made a trip up a river into Alabama, a hundred miles inland, and met interesting people there.

While often he was solo, he had his new wife and baby come for a while, as well as his older children. When he stopped, it wasn’t for a night, but for months at a time. The book describes many interactions with local people he encountered along the way. This is as much a part of the book as his time on the water.

Jenkins talked about how he quickly picked up the knack of operating the boat, how he built relationships with people. Sampling of various native foods was part of it.

This is a good book, easily read. My wife and I read it aloud in the evenings. Seldom were we bored, and never did we want to skip a day. I give this book 5 stars.

But is it a keeper? Alas, no. Too many books in the house already, and, my criteria for keepers nowadays is two-fold: 1) will I ever want to read this again? and 2) is it part of a larger collection I want to keep intact? The answer is no to both of these. So it has gone into the donation/sale pile. A trip to a thrift store is likely to happen this week, and this will go. Now, where did I put that other Jenkins book?

family, fiction, Writing

The Time Crunch Has Started

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Every year, in November, tens of thousands of writers, at the start of November, sign pledges, set goals, and sit their rear ends in seats in front of computers and begin a novel. Yes, it’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Internet groups have formed for it. Some in-person meet-ups are probably happening. The goal is 50,000 words for the month. That’s not quite a novel for most genres, but it’s more than just a good start. It’s well on it’s way to writing a novel.

But I am not participating. I never participate in NaNoWriMo. The main reason is the busyness of November. Our main annual family celebration is at Thanksgiving. Preparations for this normally consume much time and energy, leaving little for writing and certainly not enough to complete a novel or even 50,000 words of one. I am working on a novel, and today hope to carve out enough time to add 1,000 words to it. But I can’t commit to NaNoWriMo goals.

This year the time crunch is made worse because of decluttering. Two bedrooms have been in use as decluttering staging areas. They are cluttered. The dining room and our large dining table has also been a site of staging. Boxes and piles, boxes and piles, seemingly everywhere. They grow a little and shrink a little, depending on whether we are finishing with something or starting something new.

Saturday we made some good progress, so naturally the dining room looks much worse than it did on Friday. I said progress because we finally, after nine months, dug into boxes of linens left behind in our house when my mother-in-law died three years ago. We sorted. Somethings we discarded (which means put them aside to go to Goodwill, which takes odd cloths and makes things out of them). Today, Monday, with a little extra effort, might have all this sorted out and put either in the garage for storage/donation or in smaller boxes for storage. I hope.

Writing will continue, even as I work on both physical and digital decluttering. But I have no real goals for output until after Thanksgiving. Then, maybe by the end of December, the first draft of that novel will be done. Meanwhile, I will say with Emerson, there is time enough…for all that I must do.

Christianity, Politics, rant

The War on the Individual

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What would you do if you were reading a book and came across this  in it:

bowing at the altar of individualism, including individualist spirituality 

I encountered it in a book I recently read. I won’t say what the book is, nor why I was reading it.

Let’s just say that I’ve run across this concept time and time again recently. Individualism is bad. Rugged individualism is a sin. We need to expunge individualism from society and the church. You can’t do discipleship solo. I don’t understand this concept. But perhaps we need to take a moment and define what individualism is. A modern dictionary definition is:

1. the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant.

2. a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.

Wikipedia has the following “executive summary” for their article on individualism:

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology and social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one’s goals and desires and to  value independence and self-reliance and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group while opposing external interference upon one’s own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Individualism is often defined in contrast to totalitarianism, collectivism and more corporate social forms.

Individualism makes the individual its focus and so starts “with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation”.  Anarchism, existentialism, liberalism and libertarianism are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis. Individualism involves “the right of the individual to freedom and self-realization”.

Individualism has been used as a term denoting “[t]he quality of being an individual; individuality”, related to possessing “[a]n individual characteristic; a quirk”. Individualism is also associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles where there is a tendency towards self-creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors such as with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.

I’m really having trouble finding anything wrong with individualism, based on these definitions. I don’t find the necessity of such extreme manifestations of individualism as anarchism or bohemianism.  For all conditions in society, you will find extreme examples, be that for individualism or the opposite. And, what is the opposite of individualism? Is it collectivism? Is it tribalism? Is it state-ism? Enquiring minds want to know.

The concept of self-reliance seems good to me. Don’t burden family or society any more than you have to. Can someone explain to me what’s wrong with doing for yourself to the greatest extent possible rather than burdening society?

Sometimes I think the war on people wanting to be unique individuals is an extrovert vs. introvert thing. Neither one fully understands the other, but I think extroverts tend to be more aggressive in trying to make the introvert be more extroverted than the other way around. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but as one who leans more to the introverted end of the spectrum, that’s what it seems to me. Sometimes people just want to be left alone, to do for themselves—to be an individual rather than one of the herd.

When I encountered “bowing to the altar of individualism” in that book, a clear case of over-the-top rhetoric in my not so humble opinion, I came close to throwing it in the trash. But I never throw any book in the trash, not even those I disagree strongly with. I have thrown out a couple that were cheaply made and had fallen apart, but not for disagreement.

Complete self-reliance is, or course, impossible unless one can live in a remote cabin somewhere and have the skills necessary to live alone. If someone can do that and maintain their Christian faith, God bless them, let them do that. But the world’s population is too large to allow many people to do that. Mankind has to mix in society nowadays and has had to for a long time. But why not live as self-reliantly as possible? Why not, when encountered with a task that needs to be done, say “How can I accomplish this on my own?” rather than to say “Who can I get to do this with me?” Why burden society if I can do it myself?

I’m no hermit. I’m not fully self-sufficient, nor do I want to be. But I don’t bow at any altar of individualism and I resent that statement. I see the moral worth of the individual. I believe each individual needs to do his best to take care of himself first before seeking help from society. And I don’t see that changing.

One more book like the last one coming being suggested for me and…I won’t be buying any more from it.

miscellaneous, writer's platform

Updating Website

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My new landing page. I hope you’ll check it out before leaving today.

Those who read this blog regularly know that it has been a goal of mine for a long time to do some updates on the site. What specifically? A writer friend said having my bio on the landing page wasn’t best. It should be on a page by itself and have the landing page for notices. After thinking about it, and seeing what some other writers did, I decided she was right. Also, my works-in-progress page is forever behind times. I looked at it on Thursday and saw I hadn’t updated it in a year.

As I say, it has been a goal to do some updates, but I kept putting it off. Why? The short answer is: technophobia. Yep, I’m scared that I will mess up and will see my website go poof into the ether. My security program supposedly backs up my site, so in theory I could restore it, but that’s something I wouldn’t look forward to or have confidence in. So, for months, I’ve had updates as a goal but have put off working on it.

Last Wednesday I finished a certain milestone on a different project, and had to decide what to do next. I have my novel-in-progress to work on, but before I got back on that I took a look at my writing goals for the month. And there it was: Begin the process of revamping my website.

That’s a good thing to do today, I thought. So I did it. With WordPress, everything is menu driven. You don’t really need to know html for the simple things. It took me a little while to orient myself to the menu system, as it’s been that year since I last looked at it. But I finally did. I created a bio page, moved the bio from the landing page to the bio page, and saved. Then I put some new text and photos on the landing page. I saved and…I couldn’t find the bio page. What happened?

The top part of my new bio page. I probably should re-read it for typos. You can find it through the Menu.

I discovered that you have to manually change the menu to have a new page show up on it. I’d done that twice before, at least eight years ago. So I dug into the menu on menus and got that changed. I hit save, and there was the Bio listed in the revised menu. That was enough change for a day.

On Friday, I looked at everything again. I realized that the Bio page needed some photos. So I searched my photos, selected a few (including the embarrassing 4th grade photo with the lock of hair sticking up), loaded them to the Bio page, saved. I think it looks fairly good. For good measure I added a couple of photos to other pages.

No, my website isn’t splashy like many peoples’. It never will be unless I learn html and grow an artistic bone. The best I can hope for is to do no harm with it, and I think I’m about there. This week I’ll update my works-in-progress page. I’ll also put a reminder on my calendar to update that page monthly

Think I’ll do it? Check back and see.