Good Morning Friends & Digital neighbors! I hope you all had a good week end. How about looking at friendship today, maybe for a few if I have too much for the morning babble & ramble. We don't need many friends in life, in fact it often happens that life only affords of a few lifelong loyal friends who can accept us warts and all. New friends come along to those willing to listen and connect, but as we get older than often seems more difficult. "I tried friendship, I got burned" is a hard experience to overcome. Almost as difficult is to have a friend of perpetual disappointment, sooner or later we get tired of disappointment and stop investing in the relationship.
In the Age of the Disposable, few things are more readily disposed of than relationships. In our fascination and addiction to the new, it is too tempting and easy to discard the familiar to make room for the new with improved features. While it might be great to upgrade your latest phone, to discard an old friend to be replaced with a new one can be a terrible misjudgment. Nothing wrong with new friends, I appreciate what they bring into my life, and so hope they may join the roll of old friends.
Old friends know the stories, they lived them with you. Old friends have seen the development of your person, the joys and sorrows, successes and failures that brought you to the current chapter. They are the polished gems among your friends. Losing them, letting them go prematurely because of an offense is often a terrible mistake in our current age. Our current culture in the US does not encourage nor does it desire reconciliation, division is the preferred reality. Reconciliation is requires too much effort, the results are not guaranteed and it could prove to be an effort made in vain in the end. So why bother? If is it a good, lifelong friend, it is worth the bother.
However, one of the real sorrows of adulthood are the crossroads that lead to a parting of ways. When we come to those crossroads, fundamental differences in habit & attitude should be the reason for the departure, not some emotional flash in the pan which is the way of current culture. Why does current culture encourage so many choices that lead to empty and barren lives? It seems like the last 6 years in the US has been a heighten period of fraying of relationships among family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. More on this later, I am sure.
New friends that come along later in life get to share all the stories of the past to a new audience, it is one of the real joys of cultivating and forming new friendships. Depending on where you are with time & health left on the clock, those new friends get to share new chapters of life. It is never too late to connect with another, and it may change your life. Again we don't need many actual friends, but to have zero is to never discover part of yourself than a potential friend may have brought to light and life. More on this tomorrow - babble & ramble already too long for my morning typos.
Off to Sam Walter Foss and one of my favorite poems of all time.
There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the peace of their self-content;
There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran;—
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by—
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban;—
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
I see from my house by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears—
Both parts of an infinite plan;—
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
I know there are brook-gladdened meadows ahead
And mountains of wearisome height;
That the road passes on through the long afternoon
And stretches away to the night.
But still I rejoice when the travelers rejoice,
And weep with the strangers that moan,
Nor live in my house by the side of the road
Like a man who dwells alone.
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by—
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish— so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner’s seat
Or hurl the cynic’s ban?—
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
A winter house by the side of the road - Not sure who took it Happy Monday my friends!
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
Padre - Tom Miller invites you to a Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.
https://teams.live.com/meet/93792382189049?p=DiBHsYfuECPgDrG7vO
2026 Coffee Talk with the ADD Irregulars
Thursday, January 1, 2026
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31/2027
Coffee Talk - Daily beginning at 6:00 AM Central Time Zone - USA
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Other chats as posted in the community.
I have a large number of blue Ball jars that I inherited along the way.
I know a number of people who have collections of the blue telegraph/telephone insulators.
Indiana's most famous natural landmark doesn't exist anymore. We sold it, one shovelful at a time.
The Hoosier Slide was a sand dune about 200 feet tall, standing where Trail Creek meets Lake Michigan at Michigan City. People took trains from Chicago just to climb it. There were picnics and weddings on top of it. Ship captains used it to find the harbor.
Then glassmakers figured out the iron in that sand turned molten glass a unique blue color.
From roughly 1890 to 1920, about 13.5 million tons of the Hoosier Slide left town. Wheelbarrows first, then steam shovels and railcars. Much of it went to Ball Brothers in Muncie and to Hemingray for telegraph insulators.
By 1920 the dune was flat. A power plant sits on the site today. Mount Baldy, now the tallest dune on our stretch of the lake, is about 126 feet.
If you've ...
XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
