FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

One of the topics that arise during this season is “whom do we thank?” That wasn’t a problem in previous generations, but this is the twenty first century and you can’t stop progress; so the question looms large. It wouldn’t even arise if we weren’t inheritors of the Western Christian tradition, which gives us Christmas, Easter, and other nagging little vestigial organs that have to be redefined by the guardians of civil liberty.

One cute suggestion appeared on National Public Radio quite a few years ago. The commentator concluded “we thank ourselves!” Imagine that, a holiday to thank ourselves. I suppose that we could have a holiday to thank one another, but that seems to be what Christmas has become among the revisionists. No, that definition of Thanksgiving will never do.

Another popular choice is that we thank the Indians. Of course, since they weren’t from India, we really should be more accurate and refer to them as aborigines. The easy word was “natives,” but that conjures up the image of semi-naked, spear carrying savages–so we can’t use it any more. Anyway, some of the aborigines helped the Pilgrims, so the mythology behind this choice says that the Pilgrims owed their prosperity to them and threw them a multi-culti party.

The truth is, of course, that this is a holiday for thanking God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, “the God that hath made and preserved us a nation.” The Bible says that every good and perfect gift comes down from Him.

But not all of God’s gifts come directly from him. Many are delivered through secondary means. In the first years of the Pilgrim efforts here, they were devout worshippers of God, but nevertheless nearly died of starvation. God did not intervene on their behalf and provide food. Instead, he allowed them to consider, believe, and implement the system of private property taught in the Scriptures, which they had foolishly set aside in favor of a communistic system imposed by their colony’s sponsors in England. Under the communistic sysem, as reported in a diary,

the young men . . . did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong . . . had not more in division . . . than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes, etc . . . thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And the men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. . . . For this community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontentment and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

They decided to adopt a free-enterprise system of society:

All their victuals were spent . . . no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length . . . the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. . . . And so assigned to every family a parcel of land . . . . This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The diary went on to say that there was never any food shortage once the private property system was implemented.

There’s a time to pray and there’s a time to act. Had they continued to languish in their socialistic lagoon, they would have prayed themselves into early graves. Freedom made the difference for this nation. May God help us to preserve and extend the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Man bitten while trying to convert lions to Christ. I don’t think he got this from the Bible . . .

I predict that my fortune does not lie in political forecasting.

All of the experts thought that the race would be close; I did not. Is it stupid to disagree with the experts? Yes, most of the time, it is. It goes against my grain to say so, but it’s true. It sure was true last night.

We live in a time where it’s difficult to trust anyone. Not only is there the age-old tendency for people to lie in such a way as to serve their own agendas, but we now have the problem of people having to cover their backsides legally or professionally. Hypothetical example: suppose Asians outscore Caucasians on an intelligence test (which, so far as I know, they do). You simply cannot express an opinion that they are genetically superior. If you want to keep your status as an expert and retain whatever professional employment you have, you simply must attribute the high scores to something cultural, even if you believe the opposite of what you’re forced to say. Onlookers learn not to trust experts when they see that going on.

On election eve, 1980, I was selling encyclopedias for a living in Greenville, South Carolina. As I drove out to a home, I heard All Things Considered on NPR (National Public Radio). The reporter was interviewing an expert. “What’s going to happen tomorrow, Buzz?” The expert replied, “Beulah, it’s just too close to call.” Yeah, right. The next day Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes compared to Jimmy Carter’s 49.

What was that expert’s problem? I suspect, but cannot prove, that he was a ’70s lefty and simply couldn’t go on NPR and say Beulah, the nation has abandoned us wholesale and the election is over before it even begins tomorrow. That right-wing demagogue Reagan represents a huge majority of America now; he’ll win by a landslide. What’s worse, in a mere 24 hours the Republicans are gonna control of the Senate for the first time since 1955. I could just puke! No, integrity be danged, he was going to swallow hard, keep a straight face, and say what he had to in order to keep his standing: “It’s just too close to call.”

Well, I knew last night that the expert opinions had been against me. I also knew that, apparently, polling has become a fine art and the results are accurate. But I decided to bet it all on a long shot anyway. Kerry seemed like such a poor candidate, I expected the table to tilt Bush’s direction at the last hour and all of the dishes to come sliding his way.

Oh, well; hopefully it’s over now. I apologize to the thousands of readers whom I misled. And I send my condolences to Osama bin Bedsheet, holed up somewhere in Sandyland, scanning the horizon daily for the American messenger that’s going to usher him into the presence of Allah. So long, big guy. I know you tried.

It’s 6:42 as I write. I will again go on record as predicting a landslide for Bush. Currently all I’ve heard is that Georgia, Indiana, and some third state (Virginia?) had gone for Bush and Vermont had gone for Kerry (of course).

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Let’s see what happens.

The Bewhiskered One himself appeared on videotape this week urging Americans to elect John Kerry as president. Well, that wasn’t exactly what he said, but you get the point.

He uttered that Michael Moore nonsense about Bush continuing to listen to the children reading their book after he heard of the attacks, and had the gall to claim that those minutes enabled his goons to successfully finish their murders. People who know how leadership functions know that this claim is ludicrous.

Sammy also made the remark that Americans, four years later, still didn’t understand what it would take to make him quit murdering us. All we have to do is the opposite of what Bush has done.

It reminds me of junior high school when the bullies offered terms of surrender to those of us who were weak and wimpy. If we let the Muslims take over the world, impose Islamic law on us, and saw off the heads of whoever they think needs it, then they’ll not fly airplanes into our skyscrapers.

Sounds like a deal to me. Vote for Kerry!

I’m a member of the American Academy of Religion, the preeminent association of teachers of religion in colleges and graduate schools. There’s almost no prestige in this status; I paid my money and signed up. Nevertheless, as a member, I’m in contact with what goes on in the field.

Something came in the mail today that is so typical of AAR-type mindsets, I thought it might be good to record it for posterity. It’s a catalog of new books, and one of the blurbs seemed worthy of comment:

[John Doe] argues that church Christianity is handicapped by two great errors–an interpretation of Jesus the co-equally divine Son of God incarnate and the belief that there is a controlling supernatural world beyond this world. We need to go back and start again from the historical Jesus and his message and create a modern version of his kingdom religion–a religion that is immediate, beliefless, and entirely focussed upon the here and now.

The “two great errors” that this author dislikes are, of course, historic Christianity. It’s what the apostles believed, what the Church Fathers believed, and what Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have always believed. If you’re an average American, you believe it, too.

If you do believe it, I ask you this: do you want to feed your kids to teachers like this at the local Hellhole University, and pay money for the privilege to boot? Let me assure you, I live and work in this field and this guy is nothing strange. Send a kid to a college that isn’t expressly evangelical in its beliefs and you can expect such things to be pumped into his head vigorously.

Adam Young has written a masterful essay on what’s wrong with the modern concept of an American president. Join the revolution; check out the Constitution Party.

I tend to stay on the trailing edge of technological development. I figure that the latest and greatest will always have bugs that need to be worked out, and I don’t care to be the exterminator. I stick with the old methods until the new ones become old. That way, I know that whatever I’m doing has already proved itself.

I have a house full of computers. Most of them were manufactured in the 1980s. They do a great job. For instance, the main machine in my office, with which I run my plumbing business, is a TRS-80 Model 4, slightly upgraded. It boasts 128K of RAM, a blinding clock speed of 4 MHz, two 720K floppies and two 360K floppies. I can dial up and connect to the university where I sometimes teach and, from there, access the Internet (text only). With that machine and others just like it, I produced all of my Ph.D. work in the ’90s.

I’m never one to stay in a rut, though, so I’ve made a recent breakthrough. I acquired a refurbished Palm IIIxe this week. Postage and all, it cost $35, which is about 10% of what the latest and greatest handhelds are running.

This quantum leap in equipment was occasioned by my recent addition of fifty blank 4×6 cards into the file drawer where I keep my job records. My original attitude, when I opened this business three years ago, was “Technology? We don’t need no stinkin’ technology.” I opted to implement the KISS system wherever possible: Keep It Simple, Sewerman. My to-do list was kept on a scrap of note paper in my shirt pocket and discarded at the end of the day. Shopping lists, reminders, notes from phone calls or conversations were all entered into a little notebook I kept in my hip or shirt pocket at all times. Jobs were written on 4×6 cards and tagged with a colored paper clip to signify status: scheduled, awaiting payment, postponed. Completed cards were filed by address and contained a record of what I did at that job, complete with any necessary drawings on the card. Plans for life in general went into a calendar made of blank 3-ring forms bought at the office supply store.

But when I added the last fifty cards into my file drawer, I began to face an ugly fact: that 12″ drawer is now full. I began three years ago with a small box for the job cards. Eventually I went to two boxes: A-L and M-Z. Then I moved to this big “recipe” file drawer. It works really well, especially since I drilled a hole in it and inserted a bolt which I can use as a lock to keep the drawer from sliding out of its case accidentally. But in a few weeks, that box will be obsolete.

You see, I have to take my job records into the house at night and back to the truck in the morning. If I left them in the truck and “something happened,” I’d lose a major feature in my customized, personalized customer service strategy: I know my customers and what I did at their homes. Lugging the big box isn’t too hard, once you learn how and where to grip it (along with the attache case, etc.) But two big boxes? It ain’t gonna happen.

To remain a one-man operation and to maintain close contact with my records, I figure I have to digitize. *sigh*

At first I tried to find a way to do it with the cell phone, but my phones just aren’t that sophisticated and I didn’t want to buy $500 worth of smartphone and accessories along with a big bill every month. So the $35 Palm IIIxe looked like a good place to start experimenting. With 8 megs of memory it can easily hold all of my job records, my customer database, and whatever accounting apps I might decide to run.

This model became passe over two years ago, so it’s just about my speed.

Yeah, one day I’ll rear back in my rocking chair and tell my great grandkids “back in ought-4, I got me my first handheld. You couldn’t talk to ’em; no sir; you had to poke ’em with a little plastic stick and write what you wanted ’em to do. And they didn’t know anything unless you wrote it in first. Had to put batteries in ’em every few weeks. Times were hard back then, yes sir . . . ”

Cats are strange. I’m not a cat lover, but some people are. They’re strange, too.

When I came home from work tonight, I parked my truck so that its headlights were shining on the curb across the street. I saw a cat playing with a mouse. He’d let it run in the gutter for a while, then chase and catch it.

Mouse didn’t seem to like it and ran out into the path of an oncoming car. Attempted suicide, I suppose. The front tire struck the mouse, it flipped up under the body of the car, then the rear tire struck it. I thought that the cat’s fun was over, but somehow the little mouse survived and the entertainment resumed. And you thought that you had a bad day?

Does any other animal kill and eat its playmates? If your dog did that, what would you think? Cat lovers, take heed.

“Is this Kevan Barley? Yes sir, Mr. Barley, I got your name from John Shelton. I’ve heard that you’re the finest plumber in Memphis and I need your help.” The voice on the telephone fairly danced with dynamism and enthusiasm. After a few minutes I said “You’re Ed McAteer, aren’t you?” He seemed a little taken aback and asked if we’d done business before. After all, at his age, memory isn’t what it used to be. I answered “No, sir, it’s just that you are a public figure and nobody else I’ve ever heard speaks with such leadership in his voice. It’s hard NOT to know that it’s Ed McAteer.”

That’s how I met him: I cleaned out his sewer line. As time passed, I’d do several other plumbing jobs at his house. He called once and began by saying “I told someone just the other day that Kevan Barley cannot quite walk on water, but I’ve never seen him more than two inches deep, and he knows where all the rocks are!” I could tell that it was a line he’d used many times before, but I still appreciated the compliment.

Ed was famous for the coalitions he built. He was a “natural salesman” who believed deeply in the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the literal interpretation of Bible prophecy, particularly the prophecies about the nation Israel. He therefore created and led organizations dedicated to advancing those beliefs. I never heard anyone question his integrity, and I never saw anything in him that fell short of absolute commitment to truth. From where I sat, I believe that he had one passion: Jesus Christ as savior of the world.

The Left despised him, called him “the godfather of the religious right.” Who knows what dreams passed through their minds of how beneficial he’d be if only he were on their side instead of on ours? Ed was a man of rare abilities and rare commitment. He made a powerful impact upon his generation.

He collapsed at his home here in Memphis this past Tuesday; died “all at once,” as it were. He was only 78, but at the speed at which he thought and talked and worked, he probably got 120 years of living crammed into those 78.

His funeral is Friday, 10 AM, at the 28,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church, which is in sight of my home. I won’t make it, though. I’ve made too many promises to customers and will be gone plumbing.

But he’ll do fine without me. I suspect that the huge auditorium will be packed with his other friends. I’ll just wait and catch up with him later.

Shalom, Ed.

Terri Schiavo, severely disabled, has been in the news for months and months. Her poor husband Michael wants to kill her and mean people like Gov. Jeb Bush won’t let him.

The courts have now struck down “Terri’s Law,” the Florida measure that tried to restrict a husband’s right to terminate an unwanted marriage. With a little luck, she’ll be dead in no time.

My concern here, though, is not with Michael’s right to bump off his wife. I think more attention needs to be paid to the humanitarian side of things. The executioners intend to withold water until she dies of thirst. This just isn’t right. Dying of thirst is a slow and tortuous way to go. Terri is fully conscious and aware of what’s going on.

The Muslims have a much better method: saw her head off! She’ll be gone in seconds, almost no pain at all, and Michael can get on with his life. Of course, he should be awarded the privilege of dispatching her with his own hands, since he’s had to work so hard for so long to protect his rights as a husband.

The first debate of this presidential race took place last night. Pundits are unanimous that one candidate totally ran away with the victory and left the other in the dust. They just can’t agree on which candidate that was.

I don’t own a T.V., so I listened to the debate via streaming media on my computer. I didn’t get the visual effects–the expressions, etc.–so I had to concentrate on what was said.

Kerry is a better debater than Bush is. That’s really all you can learn from these events. Bush isn’t glib; he doesn’t “think on his feet” well. None of that has anything to do with running the executive branch of the federal government.

There’s a superstition that is nearly universal: debates show who’s correct. I call it a superstition because there’s no evidence for it. A person can be categorically wrong and know he’s wrong and still whip the stuffing out of his opponent if he holds all of the debating talent. Something like that goes on in courtrooms thousands of times a day right here in the land of justice for all. Have you ever been in a courtroom trial? Heh heh, I rest my case. You know I’m right.

Bush will carry Tennessee handily, barring some upheaving catastrophe between now and Nov. 2d. In fact, I expect him to win by a landslide across the country, and I’ve been saying it all year. That means I’m hardly a hero for putting a Peroutka sign in my yard today. Michael Peroutka is the Constitution Party presidential candidate. In not supporting Bush, I’m really taking no risks. If any fellow conservative attacks me, I have an easy dodge: “Hey, Kerry can’t win Tennessee.” Not every Peroutka supporter has it so easy.

9/11 seems to have changed everything. Among my friends, Bush can do no wrong. A “third party” is unthinkable, almost like supporting a different god than the one in the Bible. But there are some serious issues that we need to come to grips with. I’ll name one: abortion. We antiabortion folks get the Republicans’ rhetoric, the kids get the garbage disposal. Eight years of Reagan, four years of Poppa Bush, four years of little Bush, and where are we in the battle, hmm? And there are many other important issues where, despite the image which the Republicans project to us, they can be counted on to split the difference with the left when the radials meet the road.

But most conservatives begin shaking in rage when they see another conservative not supporting Bush. Hopefully better times and deeper thinking will return soon.

Three years ago, when I opened my plumbing business, I needed a cell phone. (Now, since the technology isn’t necessarily cellular, they’re called “mobile” phones.) Choosing a provider was like exploring an uncharted jungle. It required great powers of analysis to construct an apples-to-apples comparison of what was being offered. Most irritating was the fact that the various companies were obscure deliberately.

I was equal to the task, though, and I ultimately went with SunCom, a fancy name for AT&T, which was just about the biggest and most reliable option I found. I got 1,000 anytime minutes for $55/month, plus all the little add-on fees.

It’s been okay. I have discovered on the Internet that everyone has gripes against his mobile phone company, and mine are no different from others, except for one annoying point: roaming!

I can be in the middle of Memphis and unable to hit an AT&T tower. Wham: sixty cents a minute. Being in the plumbing business, I have little choice as to whether or not I’m going to talk on that phone. End of the month, another $5 or so tacked onto the bill. But what’s money to a plumber, right?

It’s the principle of the thing. :rolleyes:

Last November a law was passed that makes your number portable; that is, you can go to another company and take your same phone number with you. I was promising to do exactly that last year, but I waited a month or two to let them iron the bugs out of the transferral system, then I had a month or two with no roaming, then I got busy — ah, you know the drill. I just let it go.

Well, yesterday I finally did something about it: I moved to T-Mobile. I have the same 1,000 minutes, but at $40 instead of $55. There are NO ROAMING charges and free long distance. I paid a $35 activation fee and got a “free” Nokia 6010 handset, a quantum upgrade from my old Motorola V120c.

This is how the free market works. AT&T tried mightily to keep me, but they just couldn’t do it. T-Mobile simply had a better deal. They got me on a one-year contract. At the end of that year, if they haven’t kept pace with their competition, they’ll lose me the same way that AT&T did.

Technology is becoming cheaper; these companies’ sales volume is increasing all the time; everybody just has to have that mobile phone; and yet, for all that, the prices have only barely come down in three years. AT&T doesn’t have a single offer on their web site that’s any better than the one I got from them three years ago. Among phone users, the pressure is increasing to drive prices down. The high prices cannot be sustained against such pressure (unless the government steps in and forces people to pay higher prices). Step by step, companies that cannot compete will be marginalized in the phone market.

Can you hear me now?

A lady had a big problem and got a big plumbing company to give her a bid on fixing it. They told her $6,200. She called me and I went by and took a look. It looked more like $4,500 to me, and she was greatly relieved. She wanted me to do the work, but felt that she had to honor her invitations to two other contractors who were yet to come by. I encouraged her to do just that, confident that the others couldn’t beat my price. I thought that I had the job in the bag, but she called this week and said that company XYZ had made her an offer so low she couldn’t pass it up, so she was getting them to do the work.

I don’t know XYZ’s price, but it must have been close to $3,500-$4,000. How does this happen? How can contractors have such disparate pricing?

1. GREED. The $6,200 quote was largely greed. The one making that offer was fishing for whales. A big company has many opportunities to make offers on jobs and occasionally some sucker will accept the bid. The men then make $1,000/day. You have to admit, it sure beats driving all over town tinkering with rotten pipes in slummy shacks for a few bucks per job.

2. OVERHEAD. A big company simply cannot work as cheaply as a small one can. The $6,200 company has layers of management all the way up to the home office “up north,” as well as stockholders who “deserve a return on their investment.” (The corporate bigwigs are the biggest stockholders.) Massive levels of insurance coverage, big equipment, lawsuits, office staff and computers, recruiting and training, buildings, etc. all drive their costs through the roof.

3. UNCERTAINTY. On a big job, you never really know just what you might run into. This particular job required sawing 100 feet of concrete, opening a couple of walls, and digging through a yard to an as-yet-unknown depth. Various mishaps could add a day or two to the job. A contractor needs to split the difference between “covering himself” in case of miscalculations and “fishing for whales” with no regard for the customer’s right to a fair price.

4. HUNGER. When a plumber doesn’t have enough business to pay his bills, he become a lot less picky. He’s willing to work at nearly any price. A company that has men sitting around with no work to do is a company that’s willing to cut the price to rock bottom.

5. SKULDUGGERY. I sure hope there’s no skulduggery in this lady’s job. Those who underbid me are certainly a larger company than I am (since I’m a one-man band), so they have greater overhead. I’m not sure how they beat me. Either they are much more confident in their work and figured the price with no elbow room, or they plan to do it in a cheaper way and haven’t revealed that to her. Or maybe they plan to come back in the middle of the job and claim that things are different than what they originally bid on, and now they need to add $X to the price.

It’s a common practice for a contractor to use sly methods of squeezing more profit from a job. He quotes it low in order to get the business, then he makes his money by cutting corners or by manipulating the situation. Hey, if your driveway was unusable and your yard was torn up and your plumbing wouldn’t work, how willing would you be to send a company packing so that you could return to the Yellow Pages and start trying to find a replacement? Many a customer just pays the higher price in order to be done with the skunks and to get them off the property.

I’m not at all certain that there will be anything wrong with the work this company will do. Maybe they just did a better job at estimating and they outbid me fair and square. I sure hope so.

My wife and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary by making a quick getaway to Mountain View, Arkansas. It’s about three hours from Memphis, but it’s like going to another world and another time.

What’s different? It’s like stepping back in time to when people were a community. There’s almost no major crime. There’s not been a murder in five years. You can walk downtown without some dopehead mugging you. In fact, every night people go out to the square around the County Courthouse and sit around picking bluegrass music. You can walk around from group to group and listen, sing along, or sit in on the session.

I could write about Mountain View for days. Just go! You’ll see.

On my web site, I posted a link to an outfit called truecatholic.org, which features the real pope, who lives not in Rome, but in Springdale, Washington. Well, I now find that I only scratched the surface. Here’s a site that lists seventeen claimants to the papal chair. And there are a number of others who intend to be pope sometime in the future. :doze:

I haven’t been blogging much of late. My spare time has been taken up with writing on the Catholic Answers Forums. If you have any interest in seeing what I’ve written there, this link will take you to a list of my posts.

These debates are a world all their own. The contestants exhibit a wide range of emotions. They accuse one another of the very errors they, themselves, are committing in logic, research, fairness, and every other topic. They misquote one another and misconstrue perfectly clear sentences. They make authoritative statements about things they’re totally ignorant of. They’re blinded by self-interest.

And that’s just the ones who agree with me! 😛

I’m happy to report that, after about fifteen hours of labor and many trips to and fro, I completed the repainting of the flooded ceiling from last week. It was the most difficult painting I’ve ever done: large room (400 sq. ft.) with gobs of stuff in it and against the walls. It was hard to make the entire surface smooth so that looking at the ceiling from an acute angle didn’t reveal irregularities in the texture of the paint.

Plumbing is easier. If something doesn’t cooperate, you can slam it upside the head with a hammer or pipe wrench. If it looks ugly, you can cover it with drywall or bury it underground or hide it in a cabinet.

But if an attic gets flooded, you can’t hide it, bury it, or beat it into submission. It holds the high ground and you’re at its mercy.

I just read the Associated Press report about the Cassini spacecraft’s cavortings around Saturn’s rings. It’s amazing, just like they say. The engineers who pulled this off are some of the most amazing people on the planet.

One quote from the story really got my attention. The writer said “Saturn and its rings resemble the early solar system, when the sun was surrounded by a disk of dust and gas that eventually formed the planets and turned into scientists and engineers.”

Well, I added that last part. The original quotation stopped at the word “planets.” I just added the last part because it is precisely what atheistic evolutionists teach in college classrooms, although they’re careful not to make it quite that clear. :laugh:

Today’s my birthday. On May 25th I wrote about my spiritual birth in 1969 when God gave me a new heart via faith in Christ. But today is my physical birthday.

I was adopted as a newborn by Evan and Juanita Barley. As I heard the story, the arrangements were made before my birth. Presumably some girl in Houston was carrying an unwanted fetus. At that time, it was illegal for women to hire abortionists to kill their children. I have no idea whether or not my natural mother would have done such a thing if it had been an option. Certainly a “girl in trouble” would experience many conflicting emotions, including fear, and could at least feel a strong temptation to do whatever was necessary to address the situation. This is especially true if older counselors assure her that the baby is not a baby and the beating heart is not beating and that little Kevan would be better off dead–if he were alive, but he really isn’t, so it’s okay to kill him, uh, it. But, I thank God, that’s not how it was in those days, before the slaughter of the forty million began in 1973.

My adoptive parents are both deceased now. They were somewhat older than the average couple that has babies. On the other hand, I assume that my natural mother was somewhat younger than average–perhaps seventeen. That would put her in her mid-to-late sixties now.

I’ve never felt a desire to “connect” with my natural parents. My adoptive parents are my parents, and they’re all the parents I’ll ever need. But I’ve sometimes felt sorry for my natural mother. If she’s still living, this is the 49th time she’s looked out the window, or off into the sky, or maybe back toward downtown Houston, and remembered the Friday night when she passed through the valley of the shadow of death in order to bring me into the world, and wondered what her boy is doing on his birthday. She doesn’t know that he looks just like his “father,” has an IQ in the genius range, earned two masters degrees and a Ph.D., works in six languages, has played in a symphony orchestra, acted in plays, sung in choirs, pastored churches, and repaired toilets. She wonders about his wife and kids. She wonders if it turned out okay.

All she knows is that she’s glad, too, that she gave me life instead of death. She hopes that I know that she’s never missed my birthday. She hopes I understand why she gave me up.

And she probably sings a quiet little “Happy Birthday dear Kevan” when nobody is around.

Thanks, Mom.