I was born in the Deep South. It’s so deep a fart will fly over your head. The Deep South is about five trillion miles closer to the sun, too. If you stand on the roof of the Walmart in Meridian, Mississippi, you can light your cigarette off it. This proximity to the sun makes it harder to think, too. That’s why Southerners speak slower than their Yankee neighbors. Words tend to melt before they get out of the mouth. Even the words that DO manage to survive end up like Velveeta in the microwave. Southerners usually speak their minds, too, because thoughts evaporate quicker than cotton candy in a fish tank. I could go on like this forever, but because I live in the Deep South, my attention span doesn’t make it past the medulla oblongata.

One of the consequences of the Southerner’s brain being deep fat fried…

My left shoulder was so damaged that the Ortho Drs could not repair or replace it conventionally, so they had to do a ‘reverse total shoulder arthroplasty’. I am now in a large, bulky and cumbersome immobilization device designed to keep my shoulder from falling apart until it’s had time to heal. This could take up to two months.

From the instant I awoke in recovery I was in the clutches of pain I’d never known or imagined. At one point I began confessing to every crime committed in the past 1,500 years. Even now, 6 days after surgery and at home, it continues to demand center stage of my consciousness. However, from the instant I awoke in recovery and up to now, the image and presence of Christ has been with me like a lighthouse of love and hope. It has not reduced my pain by one iota, but…

My friends,

As you will soon discover, I’ve got very little energy today to relate the accounts of the past few days, so I’m going to use an edited version of this email to post as a blog article so that those who read my words on a regular basis will know why they haven’t heard from me for awhile.

My sister Marie and I drove to Houston without incident to retrieve our sister Beth’s ashes and to join in grieving our loss and celebrating her gain with her daughter and our niece. Beth’s cremains were to be made available Friday afternoon, so while the women went to the facility to get them, my niece’s husband Jonathan and I went to the theater to see a movie.

When the movie was over both Jonathan and I had to go to the bathroom, so we left the darkened theater with that…