Mother Country Syndrome

Most Americans love Britain. She is, after all, our mother country, and how can you not love your mother? That’s why America ground to a halt when we heard the news about Lady Di, and why we were glued to our satellites when Kate Middleton married Prince What’s-His-Name. I believe the technical term for this is Mother-Country Syndrome (MCS). As unpopular as it may be to say it, perhaps our love for Britain causes us to overlook some important things.

Here in rural Maryland, for example, lots of people have been diagnosed with Lyme disease, which we are told comes from ticks. I’m not so sure. I’ve noticed that some of those who contract it are indoor types who work in offices and live in homes that are generally tick-free. Besides, it’s called Lyme disease, not Tick disease. Surely I’m not the only one to notice that lyme is obviously a British spelling of lime. We don’t need Miss Marple or Inspector Lewis to deduce that America’s outbreak of Lyme disease can be traced to infected British fruit. Was it just coincidental that America’s first reported incidents were in New England?

No doubt Anglophiles in Washington have ordered the CDC to perpetuate the tick narrative, as ticks have no lobbyists or embassies there, while Britain is a close ally, and America’s close ally cupboard is rather bare. But how many people must be sickened by bad British lymes before the truth is exposed? How many yanks are in London pubs this very hour, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the lyme in their pint may result in a debilitating illness? (All right, maybe there are no lymes in pints. Maybe they throw them in yesterday’s Times when they wrap up the fish and chips. I’m an idea guy; not a facts guy. If you’re a facts guy, you can investigate for yourself.)

Before you dismiss this theory, answer me this: Wasn’t it the Brits who gave us Mad Cow Disease? How many American cows, once perfectly normal, have lost all ability to reason simply because we thought British cows could do no wrong? I don’t mean to imply that all American cows that contracted Mad Cow Disease went stark raving mad. Some just went raving mad, with no signs of starkness. Nonetheless, how many years of therapy have those cows endured, and how many remain institutionalized today?

Count Your Children

My parents had piled the kids in the station wagon, and we were on the first leg of a long vacation trip, no doubt headed to a beach, with Dad driving late at night.  The back seats had been folded down, and the five kids were lined up like logs on blankets, trying to sleep.  Somewhere along the line, Dad stopped for gas.  Later, when he came to a toll booth, the attendant said, “Count your children.”

“What?”

“Count your children.”  

Dad turned around.  “Ricky, Russy, Kenny, Dindy…Wait!  Where’s Dougy?”  

At the gas station, my brother Doug (I’m guessing he was 8 or 10 at the time) had awakened and decided to visit the rest room.  I suppose he used the back door (or hatch), or maybe just climbed through the back window.  In any event, his departure was not missed.  At least, it was not noted.  I’d like to think Mom and the rest of us were asleep, and that this was not a Hansel and Gretel, “we can’t keep all these kids” moment; or a cold-hearted sibling survival decision, as in, “If we leave that one behind there will be more food for the rest of us.” 

Dad paid for the gas and took off.  Doug came out of the rest room to discover that his family was on its way to the beach without him.  I suppose he dissolved into tears (I know I always cried when my parents would leave me in strange places).  I would call Doug and ask him for details, but he probably wouldn’t remember them.  This took place in the fifties, and after the fifties we had what we called the sixties, which for those of a certain age, interfered with recollections of anything that happened in the fifties. 

Field of Nightmares

The summer after I completed sixth grade (yes, Pretty Boy, I completed sixth grade, and I resent the question) my family moved from Maryland to central Florida.  (And yes, they brought me with them.  One more question like that and I might just stop answering you.)  The move was exciting, although I was concerned about being so far away from the Orioles. One of the first things that my younger brother Kenny and I did that summer was look for a place to play ball.  Until we found a vacant field, we played catch on the lawn of the Lake Dot Motel in Orlando, where the family stayed until we moved into a rental house in Winter Park. 

By the way, the Lake Dot Motel was (and perhaps is again) a lovely peaceful oasis.  But it wasn't very peaceful when the Sukhia boys arrived with bags of firecrackers and cherry bombs.  We had finagled them from a fellow named Pedro a few days before at his establishment that he called South of the Border, by shrewdly trading for them American paper money.  If he knew that cherry bombs exploded even under water, Pedro would never have parted with them for a few gringo dollars.  Let's hope the fish population in Lake Dot has recovered from the Disaster of '62.

Getting back to baseball---as it happened, the Lutheran church our family began to attend in Winter Park had a pastor who had once been a Minor League player (in the Pirate organization, as I recall) and he conducted a baseball camp in South Carolina.  I spent two glorious weeks there---sliding pits, batting cages, individualized instruction, movies of old World Series games at night, and grits at every meal.  I think Kenny got homesick and left after the first week, or else he came up just for the second week.  For the facts, you’ll have to consult his future blog, Littler Loaves.   

That camp was the scene of one of the greatest embarrassments that a 12 year old could endure.  On the final day, when the parents came to pick up their kids, there was a father-son game. 

Guess Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but when I was about ten years old, a wolf would come to my bedside at night.  He wasn’t the sort of wolf that howls at the moon and travels in packs.  He was the sort of wolf that walks upright on his hind legs, with a long snout and a dangling tongue dripping saliva.  In other words, he was the type that would occasionally get bit parts in Disney cartoons.   He didn’t watch me from my closet, or from across the room.  He would come right up to my head, sit on his haunches so he was at eye-level, and stare at me.  What particular interest he had in me, I did not know, and he would not say; but I guessed it was the same interest that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother with the big teeth had in her; which happened to be the same interest that the huffing puffing pursuer of the three little pigs had in them. 

I suspect that not long before the wolf began to visit me, I had seen him in a movie, or I had come face to face with him on a visit to The Enchanted Forest (a park near Baltimore that had life-size displays of fairy tales).  Maybe one of my brothers planted the wolf thought by calling me a little pig.  I was what we used to call pudgy, or chunky, or roly-poly, as a school photo of me rounding out an official Davy Crockett shirt will attest.  In hindsight, my roly-polyness may be somehow related to the fact that Mom had officially anointed me the Dessert-King.  Perhaps it was one evening as I was exercising my royal prerogative over the family’s last piece of pie that the scurrilous little pig charge was made. 

One would think that the appropriate age for a child to receive a nighttime visit from a wolf would be about four or five.  Why this wolf waited until I was in 5^th or 6^th grade remains a mystery.  Either he was seriously late or I was seriously behind in my terror development, perhaps to the point of being terror-challenged.  I tend to think it was the wolf’s fault, because I have a distinct recollection of being terrified of Godzilla several years before.  

Dougy's Big Adventure

When we were kids, in the fifties (yes, I mean the nineteen-fifties) our parents used to say that my brother Doug was accident-prone.   What they meant was, he had a defective warning light.   In normal children, as you know, that light blinks in their brain just before they do something like jump from a moving vehicle, dive in an unfamiliar body of water, climb a rusty water tower, or otherwise endanger life or limb.  Doug’s warning light had evidently shorted-out in some dirty pond.

Our home in the NE Baltimore area called Overlea was on Powell Avenue, a dead-end street, and we lived at the end of the dead part.  I know it sounds weird that a dead-end street would be called an avenue, but I don’t make the rules, although, of course, I should.   Today our street would be described as a cul-de-sac, but this was back before America purchased the word cul-de-sac from the people of France.  I understand we got it for just $300 billion and Euro-Disney.  This is a lot more than we paid for the word chauffeur, picked up just before the war for next to nothing; but it’s quite a bit less than we paid for the word carte blanche, for which, I was told, we gave the French a veritable blank check. 

Back then (as I was saying before the French intruded into my story) our street was just a dead end. This made it a great place for baseball.  We would play on summer evenings until we could no longer see the ball; in other words, until it got tres difficile.  Often, in those games, the ball would end up in the sewer, so one of us would have to venture down to retrieve it.  You might be thinking I’m setting things up for a story about Doug risking his life to retrieve a baseball, but actually, I plan to tell you about something that happened up on the surface of the street, so you can get your mind out of the sewer.  The baseball reference was just an old man’s reminiscence.  In fact, I realize now, you can go ahead and skip this paragraph.

Powell Avenue was a great street, not only for baseball, but for riding bikes.  Back then, the street was on a substantial hill which descended toward the dead end.  I’ve gone back there as an adult and discovered that in the five decades since I left, the hill has leveled out considerably; and all the houses have shrunk.   I’m told that scientists refer to the phenomenon as Global Flattening or Global Contraction.  Some contraction experts believe that if the world’s major countries don’t take some sort of concerted action on it very soon, say, by next Thursday, we may reach the point of no return, and eventually, everything will flatten out so much that the Alps will be the size of sand dunes, and sand dunes will be the size of ant hills.  There seems to be no clear consensus on what size ant hills will be in the flat future; some experts believe they won’t be hills at all.  But the important thing for you to remember for the next three minutes is that on the particular day of which I speak (or the day of which I will speak if I just get to the story) the hill that we lived on was prodigious.  

The Impossible Mission

When I was in high school in central Florida in the sixties, the Mission Impossible TV show was popular.   In the unlikely event that you aren’t aware of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), it was (or is) a secret band of government agents---so secret in fact, that if they were killed or captured, “the Secretary” would actually “disavow any knowledge of their actions.”  We were never quite sure who this secretary was, or why it would be such a big deal if she said she didn’t know what these guys were up to.  Now that I have a secretary, I understand how implausible it would be for one to claim no knowledge of her boss’ actions.  The secretary normally gets blamed for her boss’ screw ups.

 

Each member of the IMF was picked for his expertise in deactivating bombs, breaking into impregnable fortresses, or changing his appearance and voice so dramatically that he could trick a bad guy into thinking he was the bad guy’s mother.  This one came in handy.  Whenever they were out of ideas for how to stop a nasty foreign agent from detonating a nuclear weapon and starting the war to end all worlds, his mother would pop into his apartment, and he would casually mention to her, over lasagna, where he hid the bomb.  Then Mom would pull off her mask, the walls of his apartment would fall down, and the bad guy would discover that he was actually in the back of a truck on the way to a federal prison. 

Is God Sovereign?

Did God, who created all things, simply set His creation in motion through the use of natural laws, or has he been actively and sovereignly engaged in the outcome of all events great and small?

Ica-russ Epilogue

I know some of you have been waiting with bated breath for this third and final installment of the Ica-Russ saga.  I’m not clear about just what bated breath is, but I’m pretty sure the phrase refers to the sort of breathing one does when in high anxiety in anticipation of something.  Give me a second to see if my computer can clarify this...Well, that’s what I thought: “with bated breath--in anxious or excited anticipation.”  But I still don’t know why those words mean that.  Breath I get, but bated?  Here’s something, “Bate (intransitive verb), beat wings…to beat the wings wildly or impatiently in an attempt to fly off a perch or a falconer’s fist when still attached by a leash.”   That helps a little, but I would still not use bated in any sentence in which it is not immediately followed by the word breath. Yes, technically, I just did.  See the last sentence.  Wait, it was two sentences back.  I mean three.   I can’t seem to catch up to it.  Let me try it this way, it was the sentence that started with “That helps a little.” My point, back then, when I had a point, was that bated is a useless word without breath.  The only thing that is ever bated seems to be breath.  Try it: “After he baited the hook, and tossed in the line, he waited with bated (arms?)”   Try this: “With bated (thoughts?) Kate awaited the outcome of the debate and the arrival of her rebate.”  You probably noticed that I slipped in a couple other bate words.  Don’t ask me why.  It just seemed to be the thing to do at the time, and the time was about twenty seconds ago, in case you are wondering. 

The Seed of the Church

Can the enemies of the Gospel prevent it from spreading by the sword?  How has persecution affected the Church of Christ over the centuries?

To view the entire sermon click on this link- http://youtu.be/CVRHT3cFXjE

God Overrules

Where was God when ...? Why did God permit this horrible tragedy? God has wise and holy ends to accomplish by allowing evil to take place. When bad things happen as a result of man's sin (sin for which man is responsible) God overrules them for his own purposes.

Ica-russ Falls (or Ica-russ Rises,The Sequel)

We were on the ground, but we were still flying high.  We had soared over our school, dropped our cargo, and at least one of the precious Sukhia for President pillows had been found and retrieved (ironically, by the one classmate of whose vote I felt assured, the one who is sitting next to me as I type this, 45 years later). The mission had been a success.  It would be the talk of the school the next day; now, if we could just get through the next 48 hours or so without any nasty consequences...

It was History class, on the morning after our triumph; a fitting class for an event to occur that would put an end to what might have been a historic political career.  It was a day that will live in infamy in the annals of-----that will go down in the record of------a day that will forever be memorialized in-----well, in point of fact, there are no annals or records of such things, but if there were, then what I’m about to tell you would be in them. Oh yes, it would assuredly be in them.  

History was a large group class which met in a room which must have been the school’s original auditorium.  There were probably at least 150 of us in the class, which would have represented about half of all the juniors.  (Remind me to tell you about our History homework sometime.)  We sat in alphabetical order, from the front to the rear, so I was near the back of the class, far from the teacher, and close to an open doorway.  I was basking in the glory of our momentous flight, which, in my mind, marked us pioneers of aviation.  It’s not as if I was expecting the same ticker-tape parade that Lindbergh received, but some sort of ceremony would be-----my musings were rudely interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, and I turned to see a stomach-churning sight. It was someone I immediately recognized as an emissary from the school office.  Then, as if in slow-motion, I heard the words that have replayed in my mind countless times, “Principal Henley would like to see you.”

Legalism or Liberty?

There are many ways we can fall into bondage when we've been granted liberty. We can fall into the trap of trying to earn our salvation by our good performance. We can follow unfairly imposed, extra-biblical rules, out of fear that if we don't, we will be judged a bad Christian, or no Christian. In this video clip, Pastor Russ discusses the bondage of legalism and the liberty of conscience.

6 minutes 29 seconds

To watch "Blinded But Seeing," the entire sermon from which this video was extracted, 

click here!

To hear the entire sermon click here

________________________________________________________________

From Little Loaves, the blogging fellowship of Pastor Russ Sukhia. All rights reserved. Website:http://littleloaves.blogspot.com/ | Phone: 410.655.5466

Flying High: Ica-russ Rises

It has occurred to me that I may have an inexhaustible supply of material for Wry Bread, as pandas can wander into my mind’s kitchen anytime they wish.  But as far as the things which actually happened to me are concerned, I have only limited time to recount them before my neurons, which are already slowing down, stop firing altogether. (Maybe if I had been using high test gas in my various Speck-mobiles all these years, my brain would be running cleaner). So while I still can, I will attempt to recount the story that was, as a sixteen-year-old, my brief claim to fame. This much I remember:

The year was 1967.  I was a junior at Lyman High School in Longwood, Florida, and it was time to elect class officers for our senior year.  “Who better than I to be class president?” I thought (and I tended to put my thoughts in quotations back then).  “If not me---who?  If not now---when?”  The reason I decided to throw my proverbial hat into the proverbial ring, was not because I had any serious thoughts about how to improve our proverbial school or benefit my proverbial classmates.  My sole thought was decidedly non-serious and un-proverbial.  “Wouldn’t it be cool to be class president?” 

So, I filed the proper paperwork, no doubt to the chagrin of the powers-that-were, and posters reading Sukhia for President, Class of ’68, began appearing in appropriate and inappropriate places.  My friend and classmate Tim Layman, not to be confused with the aforementioned name of our high school, Lyman (Hey, it just occurred to me; why didn’t Tim run for president?  “Lyman needs a Layman.”  “Choose Layman for Lyman.” “It’s no Lie, Man, It’s Lay Man for President.”  (I could go on like this until I’ve lost the remaining 4 readers.)  Anyhoo…my friend Tim had a pilot’s license and was a member of some version of the Civil Air Patrol.  He was one of those guys in high school who actually learned and did stuff, as opposed to the ones who sat around dreaming of the potential coolness of high office. 

One of us (I suspect it was me) had the following bright idea.  “Suppose we fly over the school one afternoon at the end of the school day, and drop flyers printed with the words, ‘Sukhia for President’ as everyone leaves for home?”  That sounded quite reasonable to me. Now here’s the most amazing part of the story:  First you must understand that as Frodo, not Sam, was the keeper of the ring; even so, among the two of us, Tim, not Russ, was the keeper of the brain----National Honor Society, four point-something GPA, etc.  Yet somehow, for some reason, Tim did not immediately reject this idea.  Now that I think about it, I suspect that he realized that even though he might get into some trouble, this would be one sure way to ensure that an idiot like me would never hold any public office.  In a sense, you could say he took one for the team----the smart people team. I don’t remember how much time elapsed between the hatching of the plot and the perpetration, but over the next few weeks, as all plots tend to do, ours thickened.

The Indestructible World Trade Center

On the hill of Calvary stands an everlasting exchange. The Gospel proclaimed by Pastor Russ on 9/11/2011.

3 minutes 49 seconds

To watch "Who's in Charge Here?," the entire sermon from which this video was extracted, 

click here!

To hear the entire sermon click here

________________________________________________________________

From Little Loaves, the blogging fellowship of Pastor Russ Sukhia. All rights reserved. Website:http://littleloaves.blogspot.com/ | Phone: 410.655.5466

Tater Tales

My first conversation with Tater was by phone.  I can’t say for sure that there was a piece of straw in his teeth, or a wad of tobacco in his mouth, but I’m pretty sure he was in a rocker on his front porch, and there was a lazy hound dog close enough to hit with a projectile.  

We had just moved from Florida to the lovely town of Maryville, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smokies, with our son Nathan, 13, and daughter Grace, almost 12.  I had spotted a cute little log home nestled in some trees, within a mile of the church grounds.  My thinking was, “We’re in Tennessee now.  We should live in a log home, as Lincoln would have done, if he had lived in Tennessee.”  The family could hardly argue with that logic.  The house I liked was vacant, so I left a note, asking if I could have it.  The owners, Kirk and Gail (to protect their identity, we’ll call them Dirk and Dale) who became friends and members of our church, called several weeks later to say they were planning on moving into the home soon; so no, I couldn’t have it, but they would put us in touch with the builder, a fellow named Tater.

“Sure, Bud.  I kin bild you a house.  You find yerself a lot, I’ll buy the lot an build the house an you kin git a loan from the bank fer the hole amownt and buy it from me.”  

A word to the cynic: If you had been an English Major, as I have been, you too would be able to detect when others misspell words in conversations.  For example, a lot of people, verbalizing the last sentence, would say, “you to would be able to detect…“---forgetting to add the second o in too that would have made it correct.  (The lesson is, if you’re speaking to a former English Major, and a “you too” is called for, you’d be safer to say, “you also.”)  The question of how an English Major can discern that a lazy hound dog is within throwing distance of a phone correspondent will not be addressed here, as it might get me off the subject.

A Blinding Enemy

If you were walking along a beach and you saw the words, "Earl loves Joann," written in the sand, it would be possible for you to conclude that the writing was caused, not by an intelligent being, but by the natural forces of wind and waves, snails and crabs.  But would that be a reasonable conclusion from the evidence?

6 minutes 31 seconds
To watch "Blinded But Seeing," the entire sermon from which this video was extracted, 
click here!

To hear the entire sermon click here

________________________________________________________________

From Little Loaves, the blogging fellowship of Pastor Russ Sukhia. All rights reserved. Website:http://littleloaves.blogspot.com/ | Phone: 410.655.5466

Intelligent Design

This clip describes a process that is presently underway to simulate, with an IBM super-computer, the functions of a human brain.  [Note: The IEEE to which Russ refers is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers]

To hear the entire sermon click here ________________________________________________________________

From Little Loaves, the blogging fellowship of Pastor Russ Sukhia. All rights reserved. Website:http://littleloaves.blogspot.com/ | Phone: 410.655.5466

Luther's Prayer

Are there times when you feel like a failure as a Christian because you doubt, fear, you are weary, or even feel as if God is not listening and has abandoned you? You aren't alone. On occasion, even heroes of the faith have felt this way. Listen to Luther's prayer the night before he refused to recant his writings before the leaders of church and state.

What, More Bears?

OK, full disclosure:  There is a sense in which it could be said that not everything in the story Panda-Monium happened precisely as I described it; in the sense that maybe I didn’t find a panda chewing on our kitchen’s bamboo floor, and in the sense that maybe our kitchen doesn’t have a bamboo floor.  But I steadfastly stand by my account of our having a kitchen, and the rest of the story happened pretty much just the way I imagined it.  The following bear story however, has some basis in fact.

When we lived in east Tennessee, my brother Doug and his wife Nancy came to visit us. (That we once lived in east Tennessee, that I have a brother, Doug, and that he has a wife, Nancy, could all be independently verified by a reliable source, if you could find one; so far so good.)  When out-of-staters come to the Smokies, locals often take them on the Cades Cove Loop, a long slow drive past the remains of the original homesteads of mountain settlers, situated in the southwestern stretches of the Smoky Mountain National Park.   Before their land was purchased (or confiscated) so we could drive through it and admire it, folks used to farm, worship, get wed and get buried in those parts, often in that order.  (I noticed, walking through their preserved log homes, that those early settlers were also accomplished graffiti artists.) 

One of the attractions of the cove is the wildlife, much of which would be better called tame-life, because they’ve grown accustomed to being photographed by Yankees wearing Red Sox caps. I suppose someone, at some point, may have driven along the loop road without seeing any deer, but that person would have to be legally blind, and shouldn’t be driving. 

From time to time, however, black bears are sighted along the loop, and when it happens, people tend to pull over to watch them.  On this particular day, as I recall, Doug and Nancy were in the front seat and Donna and I were in the back.  Presumably we took Doug’s car because he and Nancy didn’t want to be crammed into the back of whatever miniature car we owned at the time (the youth at our church christened one of my fifty-mpg cars The Speck.  Sometimes they would move it from my parking spot without bothering to start it.  I think I found it once in a church closet).  The cars ahead of us had pulled over, and I knew this probably meant that there was a black bear ahead.  I asked Nancy to hand me her camera, and I hopped out of the car and hurried to the spot where some tourists had gathered in the nearby woods.

Arminians in Heaven?

 

You may be surprised to find, in heaven, positions of honor occupied by Christians who on earth were members of denominations whose doctrine was lightly esteemed by you.

Panda-monium

I wouldn’t call myself a coward, necessarily. Let’s just say I’m careful.  For example, even though I’ve spent a good portion of my life in Florida, I’ve never been scuba-diving, because I have O-positive blood, which means, as I understand it, I can be eaten by a shark of any blood type. 

The same goes for bears, so I see no reason to attract them, which is why I’d rather not live in a house with a den, and I refuse to grill salmon outside. Why live dangerously? 

Unfortunately, these precautions have not succeeded in keeping our home entirely bear-free. Trying to do our part for the planet, when we needed a new kitchen floor, we chose bamboo, because it grows so fast. It was fast growing all right; within a week it had spread into our dining room.  It got worse.  I came into the kitchen one morning to find a panda gnawing on my floor (at that moment I regretted not reading the small print that came with the flooring). 

My first instinct was to try to chase it away with loud noises---banging pans, for instance.  Unfortunately, all the pans were in the kitchen, with the panda. Then it occurred to me that chasing it away might be a bad idea. I had a vague recollection that the Chinese claim ownership of all pandas, and I didn’t want to cause an international incident, and single-handedly bring on (or should I say, accelerate) the collapse of the US economy, which Congress seems quite capable of doing through deficit spending, so I called the Chinese embassy in Washington and spoke to a man who called himself Cho.

“One of your pandas is in our kitchen.”

“Which one?” 

“The upstairs kitchen---off the dining room. Why do you ask?”

“No, no. Which Panda?”

“How should I know?  He’s black and white.”

“All pandas are black and white.”

“That’s my point.” 

“Does he respond to Tsing Tsing or Ling Ling?”

“He responds to bamboo.  He’s eating my floor.” 

“You are not supposed to feed him.” 

Cho seemed to be getting frustrated with me, and I was the one being eaten out of house, if not home.  I protested, “I’m not intentionally feeding him.” 

“Send me a photo,” he said, giving me his private cell number.

I sent him one of my best---the one of me sitting and smiling in a suit jacket. 

           Cho texted me back.  “Send photo of panda.”  That made sense.  I did, then he called me back.

“That’s Tsing Tsing. Can you put him on the phone?”

“How would I go about doing that? He doesn’t seem inclined to talk. He’s eating.”

“Just let me talk to him.”

I called to Tsing Tsing. (We were now on a first and second name basis.) I brought the phone close enough for him to hear, and I put it on speaker.  As I recall, the conversation went something like this: 

Cho: Unintelligible, animated Chinese.

Tsing Tsing: Pauses his chomping on bamboo.

Cho: Unintelligible animated Chinese.

Tsing Tsing: Resumes his chomping on bamboo.  

I perceived this was going nowhere (not unlike this story).  So I got back on the phone. 

“Can you just send someone to pick up your bear please?  He has eaten half my kitchen floor.”

“This is not good,” Cho said.  “Bamboo flooring is not fresh.  No nutrition.  We forbid it. Pandas are endangered.”

“This one certainly is,” I said.  “If he keeps eating the floor he’s in danger of falling into my basement.  Anyway, you need to get him out of my story so I can try to draw some spiritual lesson from all this while I still have a reader or two.  You’re not giving me much to work with.”

“Why don’t you write about your inordinate fear of sharks and bears, and your fear that a wolf sits at your bed and watches you while you’re sleeping?”

“How in the world do you know about that?”

“Facial recognition,” Cho said. “If we can monitor a billion Chinese, you don’t think we can keep track of a few hundred million Americans?  We know more about you than Google™ does.  I suggest you address your fears with a Bible verse like,

‘Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God that passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’”

“Wow, you even quoted it in the New King James Version, the translation I use in preaching.  So that’s my story, a panda and one verse?  That seems kind of lame.”

“Yes.  We would say it’s heavier on the wry and lighter on the bread than your typical story.  But the good news is, very few people read what you write.” 

“Well, you have a point there,” I said. “Maybe you can find me some readers in China.  Wry Bread might take off there.  It could give your people something to read to improve their English during your next pandemic.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s a good idea. We’ll put it on their English reading list: Hamlet, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost and Wry Bread.”

That made me feel good, until it occurred to me that advanced ESL classes must teach sarcasm.  Say it ain’t so, Cho.