Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: Nov. 13, 2004
Good Sabbath
November 13, 2004 "How great are thy deeds, O Lord."
I'm mentally back in New York City, walking many miles to review incomparable Central Park, the new Times-Warner Center overlooking 59th Street, from which all distances to NYC are measured, and the great Central Park, while exploring the uncountable tiny restaurants and food-places that dot Manhattan, where Asian immigrants ply their trades and family-populated markets, polishing fruit until it appears fresh from Eden's Garden, and you can get a cup of home-cooked pea soup, as good as anywhere in the world. Frequenting the famous delis insures heart burn, fresh waiters and waitresses, and incredibly over-salted everything, not approaching the quality, taste or service of Art's Deli in Sherman Oaks. I'm not a deli-person, but mushroom barley soup was invented by a kindly God, post Eden, so that there was some discovery still allowed and enjoyed.
Thank You, O Lord
For the sense of taste and the warmth of appreciation,
For Autumn's colors
And Betty's sweetness
And Bill Wade's safety.
Modern New York City will always return me to my youth, when a kid from New Jersey could walk its streets without fear of muggers or an untasty hot dog. Of course, in those days there was no such thing as cholesterol or too much butter fat; if ice cream didn't coat your taste buds with an after taste, then the ice cream wasn't worth the calories-- and who paid attention to those? Heavy sweet cream was readily beaten by hand into whipped cream. I remember working in the giant walk-in refrigerator/freezer, in Bickford's, and whipping a large bowl of cream into caloric wonder while singing out loud in my baritone noise, not realizing that the entire, large restaurant could hear the ungodly results. They cheered as I alighted from my refrigerated "cave" and I blushed with embarrassment and pride--wiping the evidence of the cream from my lips.
The manager of the store loved to watch this teenager eat and urged me on to more mashed potatoes and eggs. I patrolled my large hot grill, making all-day breakfast pancakes along with short order hamburgers and chicken fried steaks and better, trying desperately to make certain that the fresh eggs did not slip off the grill, as I watched two of them do one night, as if they had legs, making their escape. There was a challenge to young life and I learned until I became a chef, whose skills are long behind me.When I total the number of hot dogs I ate in my youth, along with the eggs (and yolks) I consumed, I wonder how my arteries survived. I am still mystified that I grew into manhood, with a more select and wiser palette, supplied by my dietician Mom, who taught me the content of every food and warned me away from salt and sugar, though her father's Farmland Daries and Mello-Made ice cream were the exceptions to any rule.
Those days were simpler, oh yes they were. The movies featured stars who looked the part, spoke without mumble (except for Marlin) and made love using the audiences' imaginations--and missed nothing precious about romance except the insistent explicitness of modern baredom. Jack Palance and Richard Boone were oh so homely but their manhood overcame that, like San Francisco overcomes the mediocrity of most of its "architecture". Kirk Douglas was built like an Arnold, yet no extra muscles distorted the attractiveness, Gregory Peck became whomever he portrayed or better, and women like Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Mayo, joined the graciousness of Debra Kerr, Greer Garson ,Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, and Olivia De Havilland; Clark Gable, Walter Pigeon, Betty Davis and Myrna Loy helped invent cinema romance; there were so many more I am ashamed to leave their names out.
I've just begun to read Jeff Shaara's "To the Last Man", about WWI. The Shaara's--father and son--write with such brilliance that the reader feels part of a movie as the characters come alive in their historical novels, as Harold Lamb did for me during my university days. WWI took the American Civil War and multiplied its stubborn slaughter degrading human nature and questioning God's intentions. You are at Verdun, aloft with the Red Baron, into Pershing's mind and testimonies to the stupidity of generalship. War is always the unexpected, left to more patient historians to mull over: how did it happen, how could it happen? Americans were nurtured on the old west with black hats and good guys and a six shooter to settle the score. Americans love resolution, which is one reason they do not like psychiatrists and do like the simple language of Tom Mix and George W Bush.
Sometimes I long for the olden times, but with modern medicines and ancient wisdom, when clarity was understood and comprehended, when a liar was recognized for what he was and sagacity was appreciated as the reward for growing older. Yet human nature has never changed. We pray that it does, some day, maybe in our own lifetimes. We cling to the vestiges of reason rather than spinning of excuses. We hope to survive politics and should fear it more than hurricanes or Mother Nature. What does Madam Fate have in store for us and our posterity? Do we really wish to know, or just live our lives so that we assist God in His reasons for creating us in the first place?
Share this Sabbath with your memories of love and better days, and live whatever remains so that Eden might return.
sandy
