Commit thy way unto the Lord

Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.
Psalm 37:5

Help me to fly straight as an arrow,

my focus unflagging and narrow,

when serving thee, Lord --

thy grace my reward --

disdaining the bombast of pharaoh.

Break every yoke

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?
Isaiah 58:6

I saw a man against a wall; he had no place to go.
The wind was sharp; the darkness damp; I did not stop or slow. 
Our eyes met not. He didn't speak. He huddled in a heap
that told of desperation and of things that made him weep.
My errand was a pressing one; I had no cash on me.
And so his yoke remained unbroke as I passed hurriedly.
(Will fasting ever help me be less like the Pharisee?)

Henry David Throckmorton

I asked the man in front of me: "Pardon me, but are you Henry David Throckmorton?"
He turned and gave me a big friendly smile.
"Yes I am" he said. Then we all moved forward in the line.
"I just wanna say I'm a great admirer of your work with displaced dental hygienists" I told him. 
"Not at all" he replied modestly. "It was the only decent thing to do at the time." 
The line had stalled again. And it began to rain. Mr. Throckmorton held out his hand for my ticket.
"Let me have that" he said. "I'll take care of it."
I handed him my ticket and he simply went to the head of the line and brought back a full pound of hemmy for me.
"But I was only slated to receive half a pound" I protested.
"Not a problem" he replied, with a mote in his eye, "sometimes being famous has its advantages. Shall we go  have some iced tea?"
So I sat down with the famous, wonderful Henry David Throckmorton at a tea shop in the middle of a heavy downpour. He drank nothing but distilled water with a lemon slice in it; I had ginger/ginseng herbal tea. His treat, of course. I was so nervous that I put three packets of sugar in my tea, instead of my usual one packet.
"I have to ask you something, sir" I said to him nervously. "I hope you won't take it the wrong way."
"Fire away -- and don't call me sir; only Lieutenant Generals at the Pentagon do that" he replied graciously.
"Well, okay" I gulped. "From what I've noticed, and read, every famous person eventually turns into an obsessed lunatic and becomes at the very least a nuisance and as often as not actually becomes dangerous. Where are you right now on that curve?"
Mr. Throckmorton chuckled deeply and warmly before answering.
"Son" he said, clapping me on the shoulder, "I like you -- you're not afraid to speak your mind. That's very rare in a young man these days."
I began to blush.
"To answer your question" he continued. "Ever since I negotiated that ceasefire in Alaska I've noticed the beginnings of a crazed look in my eyes when I shave in the morning. I also talk to myself when I'm alone at my office in Manhattan. And I now carry a fountain pen filled with white vinegar, in case of an attempt on my life. So I'd say I'm about a four on the Cuckoo Scale. Eccentric, but not yet dangerous."
"Gee" I said, "that's swell of you to tell me."
"Why shouldn't I?" he replied. "The public needs to know their heroes are not supermen or deities; we're subject to all sorts of encumbrances like Tic Douloureux, or a fear of wimples. If you prick us, do we not yell?"
The rain was really coming down hard now outside the tea shop. An elderly couple were trapped inside their car out on the curb by the rushing stream of water roaring past them in the gutter.
"But tell me, my friend" Mr. Throckmorton continued, "what is a handsome young man like you doing standing in line for a measly half a pound of hemmy?"
I flushed up again like a fire hydrant.
"My . . . my mother needs it" I said quietly.
"Oh" he said, understandingly. "It's one of THOSE cases."
He took out a small black notebook and jotted something down in it. An awning collapsed across the street, enveloping several people sheltering under it before it was washed away in the rising flood.
"Would you like another glass of tea?" he asked kindly.
"Could I have a birch beer instead?" I asked.
"Of course. Waiter, make it so." he said confidently.  
As we sat and silently watched the wind outside rise to gale force and shatter several plate glass windows, I couldn't help admiring Mr. Throckmorton's delicate sense of noblesse oblige.
When I had finished my birch beer the great man stood up and shook my hand.
"Young feller" he said earnestly, "I've enjoyed our talk immensely. My gondola is calling for me now, and you are being left behind to most likely drown in this typhoon. Good luck to you!" 
So saying, he stepped out into the lashing rain and into his gondola, which sailed majestically away.
But as everyone knows, Henry David Throckmorton's gondola sank in that storm with all hands. I, on the other hand, managed to survive by clinging to a wooden produce crate. In six month's time I had written his hagiography, entitled "A Glass of Tea with H.D. Throckmorton." It's been a bestseller for months now. I've been on Oprah twice, and she's helping me raise funds for a reindeer sanctuary in Lapland. 
Nowadays I can step to the front of the line myself for hemmy -- and I can get two pounds of it if I want.
Can I tell you something? The hemmy isn't really for my mother -- it's for me.  

The Winter Chives are In.

The winter chives are in, at last. It was a close run thing, what with the plastic rain that smothered most of the fields for a week and then the hopscotch blight. But, praise be, we managed a good haul before the Winter Wanderers arrived. 
This is pretty good country around here, despite drawbacks like the Tickling Frenzy that takes some of the old folks each year, or the Bat Beast up on Craggy Ridge -- although he hasn't been seen in a number of years. Granny Holstein insists that the creature is hibernating, gaining strength for another swooping reign of terror. But we all just kind of laugh at her and throw her in the yeast trough when she gets like that.
Yessir, there's some mighty good country around here -- like up in the Woolly Hills, where the tree moss grows so thick and sweet you can gather enough for a mattress in a few hours, if the moss spiders don't get you first. Or over by the Dingle Dells, where the water crickets spring at your throat with such melodious sounds that it's  sheer pleasure to beat them off. And of course the River Musty is a great place for fishing, and hunting dew finches. You ever had a dew finch pie? Some of the best eating this side of the Ptomaine Mountains! It melts down your chin like cold lava.
Now some folks don't cotton much to the Winter Wanderers that come through here every year like rusty clockwork, but I say live and let live. Sure, they like to steal our potted ferns and rip up fence posts for their bonfires -- but who among us hasn't at some point enjoyed the roasted leaf sludge they so generously share? And their communal snoring is unsurpassed by anything even our trained musicians can produce -- no one denies that.
So what if they comb their beards in public and like to chew tin foil balls? Folks ought to remember that if the Bat Beast ever does come back, he always eats the Winter Wanderers first!
I hear tell that some of the young people are starting to complain that all we have to eat anymore is winter chives, and nothing else. Well, I can tell you that there's not an ounce of truth to that! Of course we live mostly on our winter chives -- it's the only thing that grows well around here after they set off that Nitrogen Bomb during the Alexa War. But once the noxious green clouds are swept out of the sky by the spring hurricanes and the Winter Wanderers are stampeded back across the Ashy Wastes there's God's own plenty to be gleaned and enjoyed by the industrious. Weevil nests make excellent soup. Spice rocks taste just like cinnamon and sugar, if you close your eyes and think about cinnamon and sugar real hard. A steaming bowl of warm yeast stew in the morning is just the thing to set you up for the rest of the day. And someday pretty soon someone will figure out how to pluck wieners off the wiener trees without getting impaled by the darting vicious roots. 
Life around here is getting better all the time, that's what I think. Why just the other day I heard tell that moths are returning to the county to the south of us. Such beautiful things, moths -- some of 'em have real intricate designs on their wings and when they float and hover around an oil lamp at night they seem to be dancing and you can almost hear 'em gently laughing at all our human problems that get us down. My maw remembers 'em from the Old Times. She's told me all about them. Even Granny Holstein starts grinning when she hears about the moths coming back. 
"If moths are here" she says, "can butterflies be far behind?"

For the poor shall never cease out of the land.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.
Deuteronomy 15:11

An open handed spirit is commanded by the Lord;

a cheerful giver will be blessed for sharing what he's stored.

Poverty and want are never far from any door;

fatness in an instant can become a lean eyesore.

While I've got to give, O Lord, please help me not to judge,

but share with those whose painful road I someday too may trudge!

And they shall be my people

 I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Jeremiah 31:33

Place thy law into my heart and fill it full of zeal.

Emblazon it upon my bowels that I may learn to heal.

For strangers have I in the past allowed to squat inside

my innermost resolvings, who then left behind blind pride.

What though the world should be my pet or want me to conform;

thy word alone from this time forth shall shelter me from storm!

Bunyips

"I had a plant-based steak for dinner. It was okay, once I covered it with A.1. Sauce.
Then I sat in my bamboo chair and fanned myself with a palm leaf until my shift started with the succulents.
When my shift was over I went to The Club.
But they were closed for repairs, so I took a banana peel home and slept a few hours.
When I awoke I discovered my roof thatch was on fire, so I called Animal Control and they sent over a mail order bride. We honeymooned in La Crosse, Wisconsin. 
After the kids were grown and gone, we decided to pull up stakes and move to Tasmania so we could raise bunyips. 
But after my wife died I lost heart and sold the whole kit and kaboodle to Standard Oil for a pittance and took passage on a refurbished dreadnought headed for the Spanish Lakes. 
The ship sank just off the coast of Bulgaria, and when I got to shore the natives shut me in a hut and forced me to spin kapok into watch caps for their fishermen. This was cruel and harsh work, so I escaped one night and managed to get to Bucharest, where the Embassy took me in, fed me, clothed me, and let me stay on as a supernumerary. 
But eventually I missed my old shift with the succulents, so the Embassy kindly let me go back to the States in a green baize diplomatic pouch, and I have been sleeping in this broom closet ever since."

So read the statement of the old man the police had brought to my court that night for exhibiting a vacant stare without means of support. 
I dealt with many such cases in my job at the Judgery. People who had outlived their usefulness, of course, had to be dealt with harshly -- otherwise the city would be overrun with derelict squatters taking over the mops and pails of our hardworking janitors. These destitute creatures also drank up all the Zep high traffic floor polish they could get their hands on.
The man refused to identify himself, referring to himself only as Theodore Brandon McWilliams the Third. So I had no choice but to have the court clerk write 'John Doe' across his forehead with a black magic marker. Then I lectured him for a half hour on subject-verb agreement errors before remanding him into the custody of the geriatric ward at Sears-Roebuck. I think the old man understood very well what that meant, because he asked for permission to approach the bench -- where he handed me a small plastic bottle of hand sanitizer while whispering "Et tu, Brute?" 
When my shift was done, I had a plant-based steak for dinner. It was okay, once I covered it with A.1. Sauce. 

The Man on the Ceiling

"Who are you?" I asked the man on my ceiling.
"I come with a very important message . . . " the man on my ceiling began.
"Yeah, yeah" I interrupted him impatiently. "You're the third one this month with an important message. Just hold on a minute."
I went and got the broom from the closet and swatted him down off my ceiling. He floated down gently, not at all defensive or threatening.
"C'mon" I said to him as I went out the front door. I took him to the pawn shop over on Elm Street.
"How much for another ceiling man?" I asked the guy behind the counter.
"Hmmm" he looked my ceiling man up and down. "We've been getting a lot of them lately, but I can still give you twenty dollars for him."
"Deal" I said shortly. "You, go stand over there" I said to my ceiling man, who meekly went over to a group of men quietly standing in the corner.
It's a good feeling to have a crisp twenty dollar bill in your wallet from an honest business transaction.
At home I started to make a sandwich with pimento loaf, but somehow the thought of Kraft mayonnaise on bread sickened me. I rummaged through the fridge, looking for something to tantalize me. But all I saw were banal brands -- Vlasic pickles; Heinz Ketchup; a bag of Dole shredded lettuce; Sargento string cheese sticks; and a six pack of Shasta club soda. I couldn't stand the sight of any of it, which convinced me I was now an aesthete. This in turn depressed me so much I just went to bed hungry, and slept soundly through the night.
The next morning I worked in my home office for a few hours, mostly emailing invoices and setting up a boondoggle in West Virginia for Elizabeth Warren. She pays well.
When my stomach kept fluttering without stop I knew I had to give in and fill it with something, so I went over to Schmutz's for hard boiled eggs and buttered whole wheat toast. This helped, but I still felt an existential crisis was brewing -- so I took a long walk in the park on the trail along the river. The exercise did me good, and I made up my mind to change things around, to shake up my world and color outside the box. So I went back to the Elm Street pawn shop to buy back my ceiling man. The place was jam packed with ceiling men now, and I couldn't find mine anywhere. The guy behind the counter was no help; when I asked him if he could point mine out he just shrugged his shoulders and said they all looked alike to him. 
"Well then, gimme that one" I said, pointing to a dwarfish man in tan slacks and a brown cardigan. "He looks okay. I'll give you five for him."
"That's my brother -- he's not for sale. Not yet" said the man behind the counter. So I just took the nearest one handy, for six dollars. 
I took my new ceiling man home and he promptly floated up to the living room ceiling and sat cross legged next to the smoke alarm.
"What important message do you have for me?" I asked him.
"I have no message for you." he replied quietly.
"Nothing?" I asked.
"Nothing" he said.
So I left him there and went into my office to play solitaire on my pc. 
When I came back out he hadn't moved an inch.
"Do you want something to eat?" I asked him.
"No thank you" he said.
"And still no message for me, is that right?" I asked him.
"Correct" he said.
Now I was getting peeved. 
"Well" I told him, "I have a message for YOU."
He didn't react at all. 
"My message is this" I began. "The only thing certain in life is death in Texas."
"You mean 'death and taxes'" he replied, as he began shrinking.
"I mean never look a dentist in the teeth!" I said heatedly.
"That would be 'never look a gift horse in the mouth,'" he said in a squeaky voice. He was the size of a Barbie doll.
"Don't cut off your hair to spite your barber" I warned him. He was now no bigger than a hairpin. And still shrinking.
"Good-bye, cruel world" he said, and then vanished.
Our little talk had invigorated me so much that I went back to the pawn shop for another ceiling man. But they were all gone.
"Yeah" said the guy behind the counter. "They all just shrank away to nothing. But they did leave behind some nice belt buckles, so it wasn't a total loss."
I wasn't interested in belt buckles at all, but I did buy a miniature samurai sword in a black lacquered case that looks good on my desk.

Mine Enemy

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth . . .
Proverbs 24:17

When my enemy has fallen,

when competitors have failed;

when insults have lost their savor,

and my foe's friends all have bailed --

Then, O Lord, lead me to sorrow,

to a humble memory,

that I, too, may be a villain

to those who don't savvy me!

The Ascent.

East of the Marmalade Fields, past the Dulcet Manor of ancient repute, stands the frowning peak of Odor Mountain. Many have tried to ascend its heights; many have failed. But I would not be one of them. Preparing for the climb since I was a boy of twelve, I had trained myself to challenge the sheerest cliff and find a foothold on the slickest ice field. I had faced down the yeti and butted heads with the fiercest mountain goat. So I gathered my crew for the confrontation that lay ahead of us; an eminence wrapped in impenetrable mist and mystery.
There was Big Swede, Limey Bill, Turkey Sue, Slicker, and Bum Fuse the cook. They were a rowdy and frowzy bunch, but I had seen how they reacted to danger and deprivation on a dozen mountainsides; when the chips were down they had each others back and never left a pal behind. I trusted them with everything except my car keys, which I left with the desk clerk at Dulcet Manor.
 On our first day up the rocky slopes we ran into a bubbling spring of natural fusel oil that ran past our campsite like an uncoiling python. Limey Bill rashly took a long drink.
"Blimey!" he exclaimed. "I can smell fish and chips!" 
We tried to stop him, but he ran off a cliff into the void. There was no way to retrieve his mangled corpse from the bottom of the ravine, so we built a stone cairn to his memory and continued on our saddened way.
The next night Big Swede took both our Ruhmkorff coils out into the darkness, claiming he could almost taste the surstromming because the odor was so strong. A herd of nocturnal kayaks got him; we put his shinbone, all that was left, into the hollow of an oak tree, then filled it in with campaign buttons to keep the indigenous bag ladies from defiling it.
My crew were beginning to lose heart. We needed something to cheer us up.
"Bum Fuse" I said to our cook, "whip up something tasty for dinner tonight, and don't spare the cooking sherry!" Rising to the occasion, Bum Fuse made filet mignon, with new potatoes smothered in caper sauce, and a Boston creme cake. I began to chow down heartily, but the rest of the crew looked at me oddly.
"Why are you chewing on that dead squirrel?" Turkey Sue finally asked me.
"Dead squirrel, nonsense!" I replied. "It's the best tasting filet mignon  I ever sank my teeth into . . . " But her question nettled me, so I held up my plate close to the light of the campfire, and sure enough it was a rancid dead squirrel. I immediately spewed the foul carcase out of my mouth. 
"You should have had the deep dish pizza, like me and Slicker" said Turkey Sue smugly. But, in fact, they were both gnawing on pine cones. When I pointed this out to them they roared with laughter, until I snatched their plates away from them to hold in front of the campfire.
"Great Higgly Piggly!" cried Slicker, starting to gag. "The boss is right! Somebody give me a Starburst, quick!" 
I turned to Bum Fuse, intending to give him the beating of his life for serving us such trash -- but the poor beggar was contentedly  slurping up a bowl of gravel.
"Great noodles" he said to me with a smile now marred by several chipped teeth. "I'm gonna get fat if I eat much more!"
"It's the bewitchery of Odor Mountain!" I cried out to them all. "I've read about this -- the minerals in the mountain combine to create a sort of protean pheromone that suffuses the air. We are smelling what we want to smell, and that's making a fool out of our taste buds. Everyone, quick, plug your nostrils with the weeds around the campfire!" 
So saying, I demonstrated how to jam a whole weed, stalk and all, up each nostril. My intrepid crew followed suit, and soon we were safe -- we couldn't smell a thing. I shook hands with each of them, firmly assuring them that the worst was now past and we would soon be setting our gonfalon on the top of this heretofore unconquered mountain. 
Morning came with terrible agony. Turns out the weeds around the campfire were poison ivy. Inflamed and porous like a singed sponge, our noses glowed with torment. Pus dribbled from the enlarged pores in disgusting rivulets.
"Be gotta keeb goink! Cank gib ub!" I yelled at my team mates as they rolled around on the ground, honking like demented geese. I pulled each one up off the ground and led them to a nearby stream to soak their flaming noses in the ice cold water. This helped immensely, and then I dosed them each with quinine and saddle soap. By noon we were ready to resume our climb to fame and fortune. 
Of the many further adventures that happened along the way I'll not say much. We lost Slicker to an avalanche at the Borgo Pass, and Turkey Sue decided to settle down and raise a family when we reached the Folgefonna. So it was just Bum Fuse and I who made it to the summit and planted the colors. We took a few selfies and then started back down. Poor Bum Fuse bought the farm while crossing an unnamed stream when his pantaloons became waterlogged and dragged him under the icy current to a watery grave. 
I alone survived to tell the tale, which now you've heard it can you lend me the price of a Swiss Chalet?