A confession (before I head out to the used-vinyl store).

The Melancholy Music Man... but filled with Joy.

Let there be light!

A generic response

Dear friend,

I received your email with the attachment about Sarah Palin. While this report might be scary and threatening to some, to me it sounds like the same the kind of trash written about Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama. However, since the Clintons are no longer in the race we can leave them out. But what I wonder is why it’s okay to say that Palin is a fundamentalist Christian but not okay to ask why Obama spent twenty years in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s intolerant church? And why is it okay to allege that Palin wants to destroy Alaska’s wildlife but not okay to ask if Obama plans to support Hamas instead of Israel? And people can accuse Palin of racism based on rumor and hearsay but not hold Obama accountable for playing the race card, quoting Malcolm X and accusing good people, particularly the Clintons, of racism.

While I may not agree with Palin’s politics, I am unmoved by the smear campaign launched against her. Please do not send me any more political emails. While this e-mail goes to great lengths to appear to be politically correct and to be doing me a favor, it’s actually savaging someone’s reputation based on shoddy evidence or outright lies. After forty years of voting for the Democratic candidate for president, I want you to know that these sexist and hateful lies against Sarah Palin you forwarded go against the reason I am a Democrat. Therefore, under no circumstance will I be voting for Obama.

Best Regards,

Proud Pop.

Twenty years ago, I told my oldest daughter, Anna, she couldn't ride her bike unless she wore a helmet. I had given her a girl's Raleigh Capri drop-bar bike, and had set her loose on the neighborhood (she already knew how to ride). But the helmet edict came from me sometime later. I believed what I was reading without investigating the claims, that death lurked, waiting to pounce on America's children (why would researchers lie about safety? not for "grants", surely?).

Faced with my edict, she chose to quit riding. I won. My will triumphed.

Twenty years later, now living in a small town south of Austin, with a house and a husband, and two small boys, she is in school again at Texas State University in San Marcos (the university formerly known as Southwest Texas State University). She lives 13 miles from campus, and wants to start riding her bike to school, and to town for grocery items. She asked me to keep an eye open for a good used drop-bar bike for under $150 (Austin's not a good place to look for such).

I found, and bought for her ("Happy Birthday!"), a nice aluminum Trek 1220 from about 1998... with Bar-Cons! I ride an old Trek 1500 (1996? time flies), using the same geometry and cast lugs (carbon fibre main tubes), back from when Trek was an American-made Bicycle Company. We'll get a good rack, a lock, some other small items (maybe a crash hat), and away she goes.

I hope she'll take LAB's Road 1 course, but I'm not pushing it, or her. And not a word about you know what.


(This has been cross-posted from CycleDallas.org. The power of pride... in your kids.)

iFamily 3G

Three generations of girls I love.

Catherine (daughter), June Anne (granddaughter), Linden (wife).

Stiff-necked Germans at it again.

Where's Waldo?

You say it's your birthday!

June Anne LaGrone (with a little prompting from her mother).

August 19, 2008

Heavenly Father,

Thank you for giving me your Gift of Life.

Thank you for my mother and father, June and Harry Summer, who not only shared their physical being with me, but also their spiritual being, as well as their love for each other (even in hard times), and their love for you. Thank you for having them show me that love isn’t easy, and it isn’t cheap, but that it is worth the cost.

Thank you for the pain you have carried me through, which softened my heart to feel the pain of others.

Thank you for my wife, Linden, a true child of yours who has helped me to be faithful to you.

Thank you, Lord, for my daughters Anna and Catherine. Lord, you have blessed me beyond my imagination by allowing me to participate in some small way in their lives. Again and again I see your hand in their lives, and I marvel at your works. In them, I can see you, and I can see how you planned and prepared my life to be in theirs. Thank you, Lord, for showing me what being a father is all about.

Lord, thank you for Hosea, for June Anne, and for Jesse, for the opportunity to see life continue and thrive, as you have planned it to.

Thank you for their fathers, David and Riley. Thank you, dear Father, for allowing me to be a part of their lives, too. To be a friend when possible, and a model when needed.

Thank you, Father, for giving me your Gift of Life here, and thanks to your sacrifice on the Cross, your Gift of Life Eternal.

Amen and Hallelujah!

The Final Moments of a Penitent Thief

Within minutes, officials would give a lethal injection to Michael Rodriguez, the first of the Texas Seven to be executed for their infamous killing of an Irving police officer on Christmas Eve 2000.

Final moments

At 6:02, Mr. Rodriguez was led to the execution chamber.

"May I speak now?" he asked.

"No, not yet," a prison official answered.

He was strapped to the gurney, and then his executioners pierced his arms with the needles, first the left, then the right.

At 6:10, he began his final words.

"I know this in no way makes up for all the pain and suffering I gave you," he began. "I am so, so sorry."

He looked directly at Ms. Dalmolin and Ms. Hawkins-Acosta.

"My punishment is nothing compared to the pain and sorrow I have caused. ... I am not strong enough to ask for forgiveness because I don't know if I am worthy," he continued.

"I ask the Lord to please forgive me. I have gained nothing, but just brought sorrow and pain to these wonderful people."

He kept apologizing, calling the families by name. He thanked a couple, Irene and Jack, for "helping me find Christ's love." His words turned to song.

"My Jesus, my Savior, there is none like you," he sang softly. "All of my days I want to praise, let every breath. Shout to the Lord, let us sing ...."

His song trailed off and turned to a sound like snoring. It was 6:13, and his lethal dose had begun. He was pronounced dead at 6:20.

They pulled a white sheet over his face.

By STEVE THOMPSON / The Dallas Morning News

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

If you want to live...

On a typical sunday morning at church in America.

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?" "They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).

From the Gospel According to John

And so it is in most churches in America. They have taken my Lord, and I don't know what they have done with him.

Revisionist theologian John Spong says that after Jesus died, they took his body and threw it in the garbage pit, where the wild dogs ate him. Clearly, Spong was speaking for himself and his cohorts in the Episcopal Church.

But what about the "good" churches? What have they done with Jesus? Locked him up between the heavy covers of a book as "The Word", only to be freed for brief moments at the pastors command? Placed under lock and key in a tabernacle built to imitate Hebrew Temple worship? Memorialized him? Forgotten him altogether? Banned him?

Mary didn't find Jesus where she expected to (tomb = church). Not only did she find him outside of the church building, she didn't even recognize him, mistaking him for "Hey-suess" the gardener. But he called her name. He calls yours and mine.

Shall we exit the tomb and enter The Church?

Why it isn't working.

"In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise."

-- Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United States Senate

Comfortably numb.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

-- Orson Welles

Is this how we sit through church and listen to Scripture? To recognize the quotations?

Probably more than we'd like to admit.

Some things are too important to go uncommented upon.

Editor
The Dallas Morning News
Dallas, Texas 75201

July 27, 2008


Dear Sirs and Madams,

As a native Dallasite, I have had to put up with my fellow Texan's taunts that Dallas was really a carpet-bagging Yankee city all my life. While I would often agree that Dallas' northern suburbs certainly had an Eastern tinge to them, I nonetheless defended the honor of my native city as a truly Texian enterprise.

Alas, I fear that I can no longer make that defense for the Dallas Morning News. Looking in the restaurant section of the Week-End Guide, I couldn't help but notice you have dropped the entries for barbecue restaurants. I saw listings for any number of cuisines that would be comfortable in, and native to, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but nothing for Texas' best and most popular native dish.

Even poor bbq is better than no bbq.


Sincerely yours,

P.M. Summer

Hoodlum fishers.

June Ann Summer, Harry Craig Summer, Paul Michael Summer (with the open mouth), and a string of sand bass and stripers from Lake Texoma, shown in "The Cabin" in 1956.

"The revelation of God denies that any religion is true. No religion can stand before the grace of God as true religion."

-- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I

Straightened Priorities

Humor I approve of.

Preview of coming attractions (a placeholder for thoughts).

1. Empty medicine bottles.
2. Flashlights.