Sunday Rerun: "Talitha, cumi" is in the Bible, Mark 5:41. Jesus spoke this when He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

  Note: I post this poem by John Updike every year on the date of Elvis's passing. When I read it in The New Yorker in December, 1999, we were getting ready for the Y2K nonsense, fearing that our computers and water pipes and elevators and clocks were all going to stop at midnight on New Year's Eve. Even so, the words and imagery moved me, then as now.

January 1, 2000 came in as scheduled. We simple believers got up and went to work, still believing in The King. I still do.

From The New Yorker, December 6, 1999

 

JESUS AND ELVIS

Twenty years after the death, St. Paul

was sending the first of his epistles,

and bits of myth or faithful memory -

multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl

told "Talitha, cumi" - were self-assembling

as proto-Gospels.  Twenty years since pills

and chiliburgers did another in,

they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,

the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,

mother and daughter bleached to look alike,

Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,

brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions

of a lovely young man, reckless and cool

as a lily.  He lives. We live. He lives.

                                           John Updike

The Saturday Morning Picture Show, August 15, 2026

 

Sure, you put him in the coat closet on New Year's Day, up with the gloves and scarves and knit hats. But he is ready to come out and keep an eye on the kiddos!

Ease those nagging aches and pains with this simple solution.

It's the 45th Anniversary of Baltimore's White Marsh Mall, and this is the lady, Miss Kitty, who sold balloons all over the mall from opening day in 1981 until not that long ago. Anyway! She will be at the mall today, in full regalia, from 1 until 3, I assume with her merchandise available, so maybe go see her, and let her know you're not the same mall rat who ran around in a Members Only jacket blasting Loverboy tapes real loud.

The epitome of hope is this woman who was late to the airport, and hoped that waving to the plane she missed would help. No.

Baltimore didn't see much of the eclipse this time, but there's always the next one. 

Is this a pelican or an ibis, riding a crocodile or an alligator?

Cool wallpaper for you this week...the seaside is placid and calm, and yet, you can smell the Thrasher's Fries already!

That is one tall sunflower there, sir, way up past the six-foot fence!

Take your banged-up Buick to the ballroom and see who wants to have the next dents.

Here's the crazy thing - they probably found him, just based on this sketch!

How is this any of your beeswax?

My sainted father gave me some good advice over the years. "Never get married until you're ready to act like you're married (I was, still am), never try to win an argument with a police officer (I have tried and rarely succeeded), and never buy a house in a community with a Homeowners' Association (never did, never would.)

But there are websites and Instagram pages that document the ridiculous lengths these HOA people go to in an effort to control the lives of others. I've seen hearings concerning people who were not clergy members performing baptisms in their pool, "There are men visiting Marcie's house for about an hour and then they leave, bless their hearts, I don't want to know what's going on over there, but...," a man singing opera in his outdoor shower at 6 AM, a woman who went through a neighbor's house to get to their deck to forcibly take their leaf blower away because "I told her to stop running it and she ignored me," and my favorite of the day, the HOA lady who ruled that kids in the neighborhood were only allowed to ride bicycles from point A to point B. "There is no point C," she averred, because the neighborhood streets were not designed for aimless recreational bike riding. So kids may use their bikes if they're going to a friend's house or headed for the pool or some other specific destination, but the kids are to be told NOT to just get on those doggone bikes and ride around.

Here she is.

Notice that another member of Most High Exalted Board of Homeowner Association HMFICs is eating a corn dog during her pronouncement.

These people only exist to make a BFD out of every grievance, real or imagined. What's a BFD, you ask?

That's a Barney Fife Deal!

On the ropes

Jory Thomas is my kind of kid...he's not sitting around playing computer games and making fakey Ticky-Tocks all night.

As young men did in my day, 14-year-old Jory, from out of Big Timber, Montana, spends his time perfecting his lassoing skills.

And that came in handy not long ago when Jory and his family were camping out along the Yellowstone River, and Jory saw a small boat and paddleboard that had gone under after hitting a bridge.

Three of the boaters were paddling toward shore, but a fourth was clinging to a gray cooler and drifting away. 

Jory's father called 911 while Jory grabbed his lariat. (Spanish for rope is "la riata," so that's where we came up with lariat for lasso.)

Jory ran across the riverbank and into the chest-deep water. Ten feet from the helpless man, he circled the lariat loop in the air and threw it toward the victim...

And all that practice paid off. He lassoed the man around the head and arm on his first try!

 

As if he had roped a prize steer, Jory tied his end of the lasso to his belt buckle and walked ten feet backward, pulling the man to shore.

And by the time first responders got there, the man was safe on shore.

“It’s a really good possibility that search and rescue would’ve been looking for a body by that time,” Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg said.

No one was badly injured, and Jory is home now getting ready for ninth grade.

So please, everyone, encourage your children to learn basic water rescue skills. The only way Jory could have been cooler with this would have been to do the whole rescue on horseback!

Jory learned his roping skills as he and his brothers took turns snaring each other's legs on their ranch.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said that part. Don't tell your kids.

 

 

We need more Autumns

 If you didn't see CBS Sunday Morning the other day, and see the story about Autumn Mowery, the young woman who owns a candlepin bowling alley in Ellsworth, Maine, you should watch this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKObxUjrgn0

Autumn bought the bowling alley and took it over, rescuing it from demolition, and now she does everything from repairing the gears of the pin-setting equipment to wiping down the tables after people have eaten a pizza made by her boyfriend, who also runs a shop next door.

So now she is working 7 days a week to keep the place open, and if you watch the story you can't help but think she will succeed marvelously. She is just one of those special people.

Other people recognize that. Since Sunday, the GoFundMe Autumn started to bankroll her renovations has brought in over a quarter million dollars, and you have to feel that if there were more people like her scattered over the land we love, there would be more good feelings all over.

Watch the story and feel better!

Say your name again

As someone christened with a famous name, I pay close attention to people like Ty Cobb, the ornately-mustachioed attorney whose real name is Ty Cobb. You have to figure his parents were paying homage to baseball immortal Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb when they named him that.

Last night when the Orioles were playing the Minnesota Twins, the Twins trotted out a shortstop named Bruce Lee. He hit and fielded the usual way, not with karate chops.

And then there was the time I met a woman named Linzy Buckingham and asked her if her parents were Fleetwood Mac friends. She looked at me as so many woman have over the years, with quizzical stupefaction: "Why would they be?"

We Social Security types hear "Steve McQueen," and we think of the old actor who played in "Bullitt" and "Wanted: Dead or Alive." Today's with-it young folks think of the movie director of the same name.

Or mention Michael Douglas, and we think of Mike Douglas, the glib former talk show host, or the actor by that name who was the son of Kirk Douglas. And all along, that is Michael Keaton's real name (he took Buster Keaton's name so no one would confuse him with Michael Douglas, if you can still follow all this.)

Or think of Anne Hathaway, who is either Wm. Shakespeare's wife or the Oscar-winning actress who frequents the same ice cream place we used to go to in Cape May, New Jersey.

And I love telling Peggy that Jerry Lee Lewis never used his middle name as a child growing up in beautiful Ferriday, Louisiana until he started making records in Memphis, and someone pointed out that there was already a famous "Jerry Lewis," so he started billing himself with the Lee in the middle. Peggy didn't really care for either of them, but she was crazy about Andy Taylor from Duran Duran.

And I know him only as a sheriff!

Andy's mints.

We need to feel loved

Lt. Mike Hotz of the Nashville Metro Polilce responded to a bridge in that city on July 23. A man was standing on the edge, literally and figuratively.

“Stay back,” the man told him. “Don’t come any closer.”

Hotz, a 16-year police veteran, knew that the man was livestreaming on social media and planned to make a spectacle of his suicide.

“I was the first vehicle that arrived,” Hotz told The Washington Post. “I just stopped and got out and attempted to speak to him.”

He knows how to relate to people in crisis, having served as a leader on his department's crisis negotiation team. He spent 45 minutes talking to the man while other officers stopped traffic in both lanes on the bridge.

He told the Post, “It was emotional. This was an individual who had reached a level of frustration where he was having the worst day of his life. I just wanted to be able to develop trust with him and help him realize that tomorrow is another day and it will get better.”

And after a while, after a patient rapport-building, the man began to open his feelings. “It was a combination of life circumstances that happened that brought him to a level of ultimate frustration and desperation,” Hotz said.

Still, the man leaned over several times, and Hotz remained worried about what might happen.

Hotz served two terms in the Army, and while the man on the bridge was not a veteran, the stories Hotz shared about his service days seemed to help the man feel less alone.

“I just let him know that we love him and we are there to help him and he wasn’t in any kind of trouble,” Hotz said.

Having built a level of trust, Hotz eventually walked up to the man and extended his hand...

“He stepped forward from the bridge and he just kept walking toward me while I had my hand extended, and I could tell he was going to go in for a hug,” Hotz said. “He just kind of broke down.”

Hotz's bodycam footage shows the man weeping in the lieutenant's arms as Hotz told him he loved him.

“This guy needed to know that people cared about him,” Hotz said. “When I was thinking about how to communicate with this individual, that is what I felt, and it is what I meant.”

In a way, love built a bridge to save a man on a bridge.