The Song of Ruth

 In my extensive travels in the Middle East, I met many unusual characters, but none more so than the old mystic I befriended in the desert region south of D'Kabeer. At our parting, he thrust an ancient manuscript in my hand and urged me to see that the story it contained came to light. It took me many years to translate the document, as it was written in the lost Q'ab language, which uses only 7 letters and 4 symbols, but I'm certain that I have captured the spirit, if not the essence of the document. Interestingly, it appears to be a fragment that retells the story of Ruth. It begins in mid-sentence.

...day Naomi says to Ruth, “Desperate times call for desperate measures; here’s what we’re going to do. You get all spiffed up – wear that little black number you wore at the wedding rehearsal. Oh, and use the good frankincense. Tonight I want you to go down to the threshing floor – it’s been a good year for Boaz and the party has been going on for a week. But being a respectable woman and all, don’t do what the saloon-hall girls from town do and show up when the party is first getting started. You wait until Boaz has had a lot to drink and can’t stay on his feet anymore, and when he sacks out on the cold, hard threshing floor you make your move.”

And Ruth, being the upright and honorable girl she is does what her mother-in-law tells her to, and when the lights are out, slips under the covers at Boaz’s feet. In the middle of the night, she says “Knock Knock.”
    Boaz is startled awake and he says, “Who’s there?”
    “Ruth.”
    “Ruth who?”
    “Ruth who is willing to marry you if you like what you see. I mean, if you think that’s a good idea.”
    Boaz says, “Halleluiah, my prayers have been answered. Look what I found in my bed!”
    And Ruth says, “You know, it’s a little chilly down here, Boaz. Mind sharing some of that blanket?”
    And Boaz, says, “Sure. You being a respectable woman and all that, just crawl under the covers here. We’ll have a prayer session and discuss improving local outreach, or what we can do to help community relations.”
 
So this respectable pair spends the night in chaste prayer and meditation, and just before it gets light, Boaz says, “Being a respectable woman and all that, you might want to slip out the back so no one sees you and gets the wrong idea about what we’ve been doing here. Oh, and before you go, here’s six measures of barley for your mother-in-law and tell her, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” So Ruth, being a respectable woman and all, slips out the back and pretends she’s coming home from an all-night Tupperware party.

Meanwhile, Boaz is thinking, “I’m in a bit of a pickle here. What if Achmed the Closest Relative wants to marry Ruth, and seeing as how I just spent the night with her in prayer and meditation, I might have some ‘splainin to do. Let’s see, I think I’ve got an idea.”
 
So Boaz beats it to the city gate and he’s there waiting for Achmed the Closest Relative when he comes into town for his morning Latte.
    “Achmed, old pal, old, buddy, old relative of mine! Take a load off and let me tell you what’s up. You know that land that belonged to Elimalech and his boys, may they rest in peace? You know, the creek-front property overlooking the community wine press? Well, Naomi wants to liquidate and she sent me to tell you, seeing as how you are the Closest Relative and all.”
    “Naomi wants to sell? She hasn’t said anything to me about it. I didn’t see a ‘For Sale’ sign when I passed by there this morning.”
    “No, no. This just came up last night. So she sent me to tell you, being the Closest Relative and all.”
    Achmed is thinking to himself, You know, I could subdivide that, or better yet, wait a few years and flip it for 10 times what I paid.  “I’ll buy it!” he says.
    “Good,” says Boaz. “Naomi will be happy to hear that. Oh, and there is one other thing, but of course I don’t have to tell you about the Law and that Moabite woman.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You know. If you buy the land then the Moabite woman comes with it. You know, the woman who grew up worshiping strange gods and has allegiances to who knows who? But that shouldn’t be a problem for you. And there is that matter of course, of her sons becoming your heirs.”
    “Uh, you know Bo, the truth of the matter is I’ve already got my will made out, and you know how expensive those suckers are to change. Plus, there’s likely to squabbling among the kids when I’m gone, what with some of them being half – well, you know. Now that I think about it, I think this might be a better deal for you than me.”
    “Really? You think so?”
    “Yeah, you go ahead and make the deal.”
    “Well, if you really think that’s what you want to do. Let me just ask these ten elders I conveniently have standing around here. Help me out guys. Did you hear what he said?”
    And all the elders said, “He said, no, Bo.”

At that Achmed has his shoe off so fast that he nearly lost a fingernail and slapped the shoe in Boaz ’s hand and shouted, “Deal!” And off goes Achmid, hippity-hop, one shoe on and one shoe off thinking what a close call that was! Meanwhile Boaz sets off to find his blushing bride-to-be, and in due time the happy couple named their first-born son Obed, which has no relationship to where his Daddy first got to know his Mommy really well, and Naomi got a tee-shirt that said “Ask me about my grandbaby” and started carrying a pocket full of photos, and all the neighbors said, “You know, somehow this reminds me of Tamar and Judah, but that all turned out well, and we hope this does too. Mozeltov, you guys. Mozeltov.”

Monday Meanderings - Aug 9

A bald headed Red Bird comes to our feeder. This is a male, and male Cardinals are supposed to look like this:

Imagine, if you will this Red Bird with no feathers on its head. The head is completely black with just a very few tufts of  feathers; no top notch.  I tried to create that image for you with a paint program, but I'm not that skillful. To be sure, Mr Cardinal is rather embarrassed about being bald; he's not a frequent visitor and he stays only long enough to grab a seed and leave. I keep trying to tell him that getting old is nothing to be ashamed of, but I think he needs hearing aids too. Then again, perhaps it's domestic. Does the term "snatched him bald headed" mean anything to you.?

Here's a little something to casually drop into a conversation. This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, and 5 Tuesdays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years!

This piece of flotsam floated by on the Internet. It is interesting.

How many words do you know that are listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v]? Especially 2-letter words?

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and  fix UP the old   car.

At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.  To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. And this UP is confusing:  A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped  UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP !

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary.. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it is soaked UP by the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now  ........my time is UP, so I'll shut UP.

Inscribed on the chalk board at Poke Jo's BBQ --- "Sleep until you are hungry; eat until you are sleepy." I think I just found a new philosophy of life.

And I leave you with what appears to be an ordinary snapshot. But I remind you that this is Austin. Look again.

Eureka!

I have mentioned before that if you are a true Texan, you should be in the oil bidness - even if it is only a .00084151 percent share. But every time I received a royalty check I wondered just where my well was physically located. I tried calling Ridge Oil, being such an important lease holder of theirs and such, to ask if they could help me locate the well. The nice lady who answered the phone must have been in awe of an important lease holder calling, because she just sort of didn't have much to say, except that "it was in Stephens County somewhere."

Well, I knew that Ma'am, but just where in Stephens County? A lot of holes have been punched in that county, starting with the big boom back in 1916, and there are pump jacks all over the place! Where was mine?

Then, in the great picture search, I uncovered this photo:

On the back, in my father's handwriting is "Oil well at Breckenridge." I know of no other reason for a picture of a drilling rig to be in the family pictures unless it is the oil well that was poised to bring untold wealth to the family. At last, there was visual evidence of where the well was. But just where was that picture taken?

I spent several hours virtually driving up and down the streets of Breckinridge by way of Google Street maps, and never located it. It had to be somewhat close to the homestead, but for the life of me I could not find those buildings. For good reason, it turns out. Because they are no longer there! I sent a copy of the picture to a friend who still lives in Breckenridge, and he circulated it among his family, and finally his wife figured out that the L & L Family Restaurant now occupies this land, at the northwest corner of the intersection of West Walker and North Live Oak Street. Originally, the building with the tall column in the picture is where Polly's Flower Shop used to be.  The building on the left had the Cabbage Patch, The Dandelion and Dolores's Hair Fashion; it was called the Corner Village - none of which stands today. Thank you Houston and Sally!

Sure enough, back to Google Street View, jog up Live Oak and turn west at the corner of West Elm, and there - in plain sight - is my oil well! Eureka!

I feel so much better now that I know I can go look at my well anytime I want to bask in the glow of being in the oil bidness. Keep on pumping.

I once dated a girl...

... named Amala Knight. Well, perhaps date is too strong a term. I once was acquainted with a girl named Amala Knight and we had a short social relationship one summer. This was about my sophomore year in high school; Amala lived in Fort Worth, but she visited her grandmother, who lived in Breckenridge. Her grandmother lived close to friends from church, and that's how I met Amala, as I recall.

Our social relationship consisted of sitting on her grandmother's porch and meeting a few times at Miller Park at the swimming pool. One Sunday afternoon, when I was in Fort Worth with my parents, I persuaded my father to let me take the car and drive to Amala's house on the west side of Fort Worth and I took her to a movie. Thinking back, I am amazed that my father actually let me do that. I think that they had to keep my mother wrapped in a wet sheet until I got back.

Oh, and we also corresponded. I've mentioned before that it used to be expensive to call long distance, and there was no Internet, texting, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc., etc. We wrote letters! Mother couldn't figure it out. She thought I was receiving mail from a motel chain named Alamo Nights.

And Amala honey, if you are still out there and wander by this blog, I'm sorry that I didn't write back after school started, but you know how busy it can get, yada, yada, yada. Or maybe it was you that stopped writing me, in which case I forgive you, but you really broke my heart. Just saying.

OK that's it. That's the whole story of my semi-dating Amala Knight. Not much of a blog post. In fact, Barb cautioned, "Don't expect many links to this post."

But wait. There's more.

Amala Knight came to my mind after all these years because I woke up in the middle of the night last night with the words "I ONCE DATED A GIRL NAMED AMALA KNIGHT" screaming in my mind! I do this sometimes. I wake up and I have an entire short story or blog or libretto running through my mind like a train!  There's no more sleep, so most often I get up and write down my story. I call it my "divine inspiration." Barb calls it indigestion. Once I "received" a fragment of an apocryphal book about Ruth of the Old Testament. I called it "Song of Ruth." I'll have to find that and post it; it provides a whole new dimension on the relationship between Ruth and Boaz. But I digress.

When I woke up last night I had the entire first part of this blog mapped out in my mind, just as it is written above. But I couldn't go back to sleep. So I got up and wondered if - with a name that unusual - could I find Amala Knight on the Internet? Yes, I could. And I did. I found an amazing amount of stuff - where she went to High School, where she lived after that, when her father died, that she and her husband are 5K runners, where she lives now, and much more. I even found her on Facebook. Her profile picture is of an attractive woman who married well - she's wearing a diamond as big as Dallas - and she's proudly (?) holding up her Medicare Insurance card - a rite of passage for those of us who have reached a certain age. She's not a big user of Facebook - only one message since she joined back in March.

Hey! I know! I could ask her to be my friend! Let's see, the message to her would be something like, "Amala, you probably don't remember me but we "dated" some in high school - FIFTY YEARS AGO - and I thought you were hot then but WOW your Facebook picture is smokin' and I found a bunch of stuff about you on the Internet and maybe we could like, you know, get together sometime, OR I COULD JUST STALK YOU ON THE INTERNET! Wanna' be my friend? heh-heh-heh." Ummm, no. No way.

So I should stop right here and tell you that Amala Knight is NOT really the name of the girl I knew. Her actual name is very distinctive (and does sound like a motel chain) but I made up an alias because I realized that all of this is just a little weird and a surprising number of hits on my blog come from Google searches on topics that I never would have imagined, and it sort of does sound like I'm stalking an old girlfriend. So just to be safe...

That's all I have to say about this now, except that I really, really do hope I sleep better tonight. And I suspect that you do too.

Monday Meanderings - Aug 2

After a couple of days of rain cooled things down somewhat, I thought last Thursday morning would be a good time to get some of the bushes and vines trimmed back down on the lower 40. Until I walked into a veritable cloud of mosquitoes! Covered head to toe in seconds. I think the bushes can wait til Fall, thank you.

I love this town. One of the TV stations is running a series during newscasts on "How nice are Austinites?"  In one episode, a lady stood waiting for a bus with a long trail of toilet paper hanging from her skirt. Would anyone tell her? Most of the passing women did - guys just ignored her. The other night they had someone in a squirrel suit feigning car trouble, asking for help. Most people responded to his pleas. Now I ask you. In what other town would people on the street think it was normal for someone to be dressed up in a squirrel suit - complete with bushy tail? Weird on, Austin!

Stopped by a McDonalds the other morning. There was a guy there working on some piece of equipment, and as I left, he walked out to his vehicle to get a part or tool or something. You're familiar with the vans that service persons drive - wire cage in the back with racks of tools and parts and such? Only this van was a Cadillac Escalade. The service business is more profitable than I thought.

I recognize that as I get older my hearing loss becomes more pronounced. But I was getting pretty discouraged over not being able to hear my podcasts clearly on my iPod while I exercise. I turned the volume all the way up, I screwed the earbuds in so tight my eyes bulged. Wasn't helping. Finally tried a new set of earphones. WOW, THAT'S LOUD! Nobody told me that you should clean your earbuds from time to time!

Accidentally caught part of a Sports Nation program with coach Herm Miller talking about Dez Bryant, rookie for the Cowboys, refusing to carry a veterans gear - part of the ubiquitous initiation of training camp. Herm said it was no big deal. Veterans have a way of working these things out. He said he would not be surprised to hear that before camp is over Bryant would spend the night duct-taped to the goal post - with the sprinklers on.

The honeymoon is over at Wal-Mart as far as the new carts are concerned. Even the new carts go thump-thump-thump now. They must have a back room where they grind flat spots into the wheels. Sigh.

Saw a woman at church yesterday that looked just a bit goth - black hair, black dress, black (not quite Doc Martins) boots, black handbag. That had white images silk-screened on it. Of automatic rifles. AK-47s, Uzis, etc. I wondered if she had some issues, and if so did I want to be the one to volunteer to help her work through them? I don't think so.

And if you encountered this sign, wouldn't you be just the teeniest bit hesitant to push the button? Sure, it's just a gag. Isn't it?  Me, I think I would just wait for the light to change on its own.