Buster

This may be the last Thanksgiving with blind Steve, to whom I showed February's lunar eclipse.

Named "Easter" lily by Colonial Era settlers, this flower's Latin name is Zephyranthes atamasco.

It blooms from March until May.

Copyright Claude W. Rankin and Southern Connections Inc.

Often called "rain lily," it is a North Carolna native found in sunny, moist (boggy), wild areas from the coast to the mountains.

I first saw them down by the Cape Fear River near Fayetteville.

They had a pale pink cast, as is often the case, and took on a red color as the flower matured.

Hence the name "Atamasco," which means "red."

This photograph was made by the late Claude W. Rankin Jr. of Fayetteville, whom my sons George and Jack grew up calling "Uncle Claude" -- altogether appropriate for their loving great uncle.

Four decades have passed since my maternal grandfather, B.L. Hinnant, used his favorite target pistol on himself. That was a couple of years after my maternal grandmother. Ruth Hinnant, was killed in a car/train accident.

I have often wished for a worthwhile support newsletter.

Unable to find one which meets my needs, I have accumulated a short list of potentially useful links this morning.

Resources offered by the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo (NY) struck me as useful and a constructive place to start. Two from their collection are:

• Surviving the First Year
• What Others Can Do is a part of that collection addresses some of my concerns.

Catherine Skidmore is a daring woman who left a dull, Web-pioneering Associated Press job in April, 1997, to work for Arcus Inc.

She reported that transition in her Web journal, Suck-My-Big.org: A more-than-intimate look at my life.

Visitors were required to fill in a "What is your name" form upon arrival, and then served the personalized greeting, "Bite me, [name you gave]".

By current standards, she was quite modest in her self-revelation, concluding each entry with a piquant -Bite me.

Her choice of domain names rankled the AP executive hierarchy, as did the Webcam pictures of her working studiously and in untraditional garb at home on her Macintosh. AP managers up the chain of command from her had, as she correctly summed it up in a conversation with me after leaving the AP, "an underdeveloped sense of humor."

Because she was deeply involved in the AP's move toward online publication and specifically in putting stock market information online, I had the good fortune to talk with her from time to time while I was still with the Fayetteville Observer.

From the first entry I read from her Web journal I still recall the words, "I've been compared to Dorothy Parker all my life (is it the biting wit? the sassy sarcasm?), and I maintain the Dorothy Parker Poetry Archive online. It's all of her poetry. It kicks ass."

Those words were written more than a decade ago.

She describes herself now as a "nurse," and went back to school to earn that right.

Today the daring of her largely unformatted, almost photograph-free Web journal lies in its recourse to the puristic austerity of text on the screen.

When I read her Web journal now, I still hear in her words the voice of a writer who has penned "a play in 1991 that won the NJ Young Playwrights Award," still reads constantly and loves baseball.

To my nostalgic eye her Web journal still "kicks ass" because it still speaks with a clear, true voice, about her life as she lives it.

Although the Sunday sun has begun to drop toward the horizon, the back office temperature with air conditioners blasting and ceiling fans running hard is just over 90 Fahrenheit.

That's about 8°F below the external temperature.

With the air conditioners going full blast at 8 Saint Marys' Street, #9, in downtown Raleigh, N.C., the indoor temperature is 86°F.

All of the blinds are closed.

All of the ceiling fans are twirling.

That's 11 degrees Fahrenheit below the current 97°F outdoor temperature.

This is a good father's message to his young children (and all of us).

One need not be blessed with parents like his. One can indeed grow up with a mother who tries from time to time to dispatch you and a father who fails to defend you, yet still embrance a similar attitude toward every step, every breath.

As my Grandfather George Frink said to me so often and in so many different ways when I yearned to pursue some challenge someone else had tried to persuade me was impossible for a crew-cut farmboy:

"You are alive yet Son, and you can."

My next-door neighbor, Steve, and I watched the total lunar eclipse together last night.

Actually, I was peering at the sky when Steve came tapping up the sidewalk with his red-and-white-striped cane, and we just naturally started talking about why I was out there in the cold darkness.

Memommy was the name I gave my Grandmother Frink, the way all little children name their grandparents. My First Cousin Betsy Frink Adams and I always called her Memommy and she wore the name like a crown, for she knew it was the gift of love.

From Memommy, with Betsy on one side of her lap and me on the other, I learned my first Bible verses.

They were all King James version, as carefully revised by Memommy.

She did not speak or read Hebrew, Latin or Greek and was nonetheless gently undeterred from revision. She was, after all, a Jackson by birth and her family is not known for being easily intimidated by anything.

In I Corinthians 13, she said the right word was "Love," not the King James Version's "Charity."

"Charity," she said, was the English king looking down his nose, not the word of God, and the passage as I learned it in Memommy's lap is:

1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.

4 Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8 Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13 And now abideth faith, hope, Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love.

Correction: Memommy tried to teach me to say "remove mountains" not "move mountains."

I can still hear my little cousin Betsy saying "Say re-move, Buster, not move!"

She was right.

I was wrong and knew it.

I still say "move." ... <tndr>thunder</tndr> ... <ltng>lightning</ltng> ...

As long as the man remains true to his values, dreams may be unfulfilled and yet still sustain.

The lyrics of "Do Not Forsake Me" are as follows:

Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin',
On this, our wedding day.
Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin',
Wait; wait alone.
I do not know what fate awaits me.
I only know I must be brave.
For I must face a man who hates me,
Or lie a coward, a craven coward; Or lie a coward in my grave.


Oh, to be torn 'twixt love an' duty.
S'posin' I lose my fair-haired beauty.
Look at that big hand move along,
Nearing high noon.


He made a vow while in state prison:
Vowed it would be my life for his an',
I'm not afraid of death but, oh, what shall I do,
If you leave me?


Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin':
You made that promise as a bride.
Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin'. Although you're grievin', don't think of leavin',
Now that I need you by my side.


Wait along, (Wait along.)
Wait along.
Wait along. (Wait along, wait along, wait along, wait along.)

There will be a January 11 gathering at the White House when next I celebrate my birthday.

Amnesty International and I will seek to voice our objections to the torture center, er, place of detention at Guantanimo Bay, Cuba.

Certainly the Resident will be content to let us eat cake.

Please make plans to attend.

For a time, driven by an abiding desire to work with my father and to restore the heritage my Grandfather Frink strove to create, I worked as a livestock farmer. It was one of the agribusinesses in which I was trained from early youth.

My migration to a vegetarian way of life emerged from that experience.

In a forcused attempt to be a surpassingly good livestock farmer, I learned about the intelligence and emotional range of our principal crop: pigs.

I learned that our breeding stock saw me as a good and trusted friend.

My study and their behavior taught me, slowly and unwillingly, that they aren't just animals. Or if they are, so are we.

Years passed and that insight somehow made its way back to the surface of my consciousness again and again, until at length I understood what troubled me most about it: One does not kill and eat the children of those who trust you.

All that remained was for my elder son to pique my conscience by suggesting the entire family stop eating meat.

Certainly this video is a little exaggerated.

Only a little.

The essential truth is, absent prevarication, undeniable.

This is the day to count my blessings, and there are so very many of them.

As I write, I am glad for the memory Grandmother Ruth Hinnant and a book she brought to me after one of my childhood stays in the hospital.

Entitled simply "Curious George," it was the first in that long series.

I was not at all disconcerted when the bright little monkey was kidnapped by the "Man in the Yellow Hat" and taken by ship from his jungle home to what I always thought of as New York.

Someone in the family referred to me affectionately from time to time as "a little monkey," and as a result I saw Curious George's extraction from the jungle as a kind of outing with his father.

My grandmother, whom I called Mommy Ruth, talked about how the manuscript was smuggled out of Germany by its Jewish authors, H.A. Rey and Margret Rey, as they fled Hitler's regime.

That is to me the "other" Curious George story, and made no sense to me at the time.

But as I believe she intended, I remembered, eventually understood and have sought with every step to live the world for which she and I both yearned.