Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Last evening after dinner I was working on my lawn again.  The shrub hedges around my backyard can now be properly called trees.  I am no arborist but I know if I am to ask a little child she'll point at them and call them "big trees." Well, it's too late now.  I know I will need to hire someone to do the cutting.  My Green Bin can't contain the fell of even one cut and my green thumbs are getting old. Yeah, I felt old last night.  When a heart is tender the limbs go with it. This past weekend God broke my family down so to grant us a breakthrough.  Now we are entering, opening up a new field that is strangely familiar, if we have only taken a glimpse of it in our dream individual and collective, to recover a lost memory.  Things are righted but there will still be wrongs.  It got easier and it will get harder. You, Jesus , I said, the Master of everything .  Even of irony. Cynicism and stoicism are the two main r...

Dear Eugene, I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again. I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden. Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted. Even my toil. I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke .  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by tw...

Dear Eugene, What a fabulous night it was only 12 hours ago!  God sent angels my way, certainly not because I am holy, but because I am in bad need to see, to be kicked out of my WYSIWYG. Easter Monday was, strangely, a work day for me.  I climbed up the roof of my garden shack early in the morning to touch up on some unfinished business, a constant state of disrepair as steadfast as the possibility of rain and wind in our many tomorrows. Then I prepared some Sunday School material and worked an 8-hour shift, chewing my nails through it, as a symphony of roaring mowers outside kept me alert to my dread that I too need to engage my lawn in a first spring tussle, anxiety exacerbated by up-to-the-minute weather app updates prophesying what I could plainly see in the sky with my naked eyes.  The rain would stay for more than a week after tonight, a pathetic news broken to me apathetically. "Don't let the sun go down on me..." I moaned. My shift would end at 7, ...