Good morning, my dear friend. Did I mention that I hate the transition to DST?? The dark and cold and wind whipping around send me straight into winter doldrums again. Wait. I don’t think I ever pulled out.

Anyway, I’m far from the saddest, maddest person on the planet today. As little as I know about basketball “brackets,” I’m pretty sure that about 99% of them were blown to smithereens yesterday when 16th seeded Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue. Now can we all get our heads back into important things like saving democracy??

I’ve been reading a book about saving the poor from disease and death. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder details the efforts of Partners in Health (founded by the astounding Dr. Paul Farmer and others) to provide life-saving medicines for TB (especially multiple-drug resistant strains) and HIV/AIDS to poor countries around the world, beginning in Haiti in the 1990s and continuing now. I read books like this mainly because someone brings them up for the church book club. This one is more easily absorbed via the documentary film Bending the Arc on Netflix. It’s truly appalling to watch money sources in international forums (mostly white of course) solemnly intone there’s not enough money to buy those drugs. For poor people, that is.

A new church friend and I attended The Lyric Opera last night. Her husband doesn’t like opera, and Bill knew he wouldn’t like this one. (He was right about that.) The Shining is an opera premiered in 2016, based on the Stephen King thriller. The composer and librettist hasten to point out that they used the book, not the grisly movie, to frame their opera. Gina deadpanned as we were leaving, “I’m not humming anything.” Indeed, this was an opera interesting to me only for the fascinating stagecraft–lighting, scenery. and a chorus of “ghosts” in party costumes–including drag. Since the cast included a little boy, I suppose the Missouri legislature would have banned this opera for corrupting his innocent little consciousness.

Bill attended the members’ reception at the Nelson-Atkins for the opening of the featured exhibition of Giacometti sculptures and paintings. He’s the guy famous mostly for tall, extremely skinny figures in bronze. In Bill’s view, over-praised. And no doubt WAY over-priced on the art market. People who have tons of money know better than to spend it on life-saving drugs for poor folks. (Except for one very wealthy couple in that documentary who literally sold everything they owned before they died so as use it all for good deeds beyond themselves.)

This morning I’m headed back to the food pantry to help hand out the bags of groceries we packed on Wednesday. In our visits there, we rarely encounter the actual recipients of such handouts. I wish I could say there was more “real food” in those bags. But I suppose boxes of mac-and-cheese, Ramen noodles, a couple of cans of tuna, and the usual assortment of snacks stave off hunger (if not malnutrition) for a few days. The pantry adds frozen meat products, fresh bread (fresh-ish, that is), a few perishable items, and some cleaning products to the handouts.

Our church has a leadership group named Matthew 25. This is a denomination-wide movement to do what Jesus said to do: love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself–help the widows and orphans and immigrants among you.

Looks like there’s plenty of opportunity to participate in that, right?

I’ve just decided to put this letter on my blog, unfiltered. These are the things I’m thinking and doing, without a lot of editing. Why not??

Be well.
Love,
B