20190613.0430

As I continue to look back at this webspace, I note writing in it on 13 June in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2010 was the text of a sermon I delivered--yes, I have done such things, and I am still struck by the similarities between that genre and the conference paper, though it has been long enough since I was a regular attendee of a church that I have forgotten how long sermons tend to run. (I do recall, though, that they tend to restrict their sourcing more than many conference papers--at least those I am prone to writing. Then again, I am not at all certain my conference papers are "normal" by the standards of the genre; given my professional circumstances, I have to think they are generally substandard. But that's as it is.)
The 2014 and 2015 pieces both note family coming to visit at Sherwood Cottage. They are largely expository posts, noting then-current circumstances and my reactions to them. I know I make much in one of them about adjusting to having company, and I'm better about it anymore, though I still prefer to meet people at other locations than my home--or theirs, to be fair. I do still put on a mean cookout, weather and resources permitting, and I largely enjoy doing so. (I need to do one again soon, actually; it's been too long.) I know, too, that it's an easier thing for my wife and daughter to see much of our families now than it was then. We live closer to more of them in the Hill Country than we did in Sherwood Cottage, and we have happier lives that allow us more flexibility. So that much is good.
The last three years have each been taken up with poetry on this date. I seem to write quite a bit of it in this webspace, though I know better anymore than to flatter myself that much of it is any good--if any is. Much of it is occasional or introspective, and I have to think that the work in the former line loses its import with the repeated incidence of what occasions the comments in verse. The 2016 piece was a comment on the Pulse shooting, but there is not enough in the poem itself to confirm that; only the dating makes it obvious, and there have been so many such at this point that they threaten to blend together for those fortunately spared their direct effects. That is a failing of mine and of the cultures in which I am enmeshed, not of the victims of such events. I remain the wrong kind of doctor to prescribe a solution, though, or one that might actually be taken up...