Author Archives: Mark P

55 years ago today

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My brother Henry was pretty smart.

This is a photograph from the June 6, 1965, Rome News-Tribune, our local newspaper. Henry is receiving his National Merit scholarship. The presentation was made at the local country club, where all the rich folks met to play tennis and drink. My family were not members.

It’s Henry G. Paris, not Henry E. Paris. Reporters. What a bunch of idiots.

The photograph appeared in the paper on Sunday, June 6, but the actual award was on the previous Thursday. Henry graduated on the 6th. Very soon after graduation, he left to start the summer quarter at Georgia Tech. After that time, he only came home for short visits.

After his freshman year he started in the co-op program, where he alternated quarters working and attending school. After he got his BS, he immediately started graduate school. When he got his PhD, he went to a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. From there he went to the Alcoa research center near New Kensington. From there to San Diego, where he worked at a company that Alcoa bought. From there back to Atlanta, at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Then to Chattanooga, where he worked as the primary scientist for a company that wanted to get into materials.

Henry never slowed down, not once in his life.

And he was pretty smart. I might have mentioned that before.

There will be grapes

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I have mentioned before that we have muscadine vines all over the mountain. They grow up in the tops of the pines, and they grow on the ground. They are also growing on a small oak tree just beside our driveway, where we put cat cages to acclimate our cats to their new home when we moved back in 2016.

They are small. Very small. Here is my hand to give some scale. My hands are appropriately sized for my height.

Muscadines provide food for birds and, I assume, squirrels, of which we have quite a few. I don’t know whether these will survive to maturity, and, if they do, how many might be available for us to eat. I doubt that all in the bunch will survive. I have never seen that many grapes in a bunch on any of the vines around here.

Muscadines are sweet, but the skins are thick and tough, and the seeds are large compared to the meat of the grape. All that makes it hard to eat a muscadine, especially wild muscadines. Apparently some varieties are grown commercially, but they are seldom at any of the grocery stores where we shop.

I’m not sure whether these will be the deep red, almost black grapes known as muscadines, or the green or bronze variety called scuppernongs. We’ll see around August or September, when they are supposed to be ripe.

This won’t end well

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We have been seeing some small birds flying around our front steps for a while, and then we saw them flying up under the porch. They are building a nest on an electrical box from which a light hangs. It seems like a great spot, sheltered from the weather and well up off the ground. Unfortunately, two or three cats frequent that area, and one of them is a killer.

This is Chloe watching the bird perched on the bottom post of the stairs. Chloe is very interested. When the bird flew to the other side of the steps, Chloe’s head followed.

Chloe is not the real threat to the adult birds. That would be Sylvester. He is a natural born killer.

I had intended to check the nest, and tear it down if there were no eggs or baby birds, but I’m afraid I’ve waited too long. We know what is going to happen. If the adults escape Sylvester’s bloody mouth, the baby birds will fall prey to him, or Chloe or Dusty. Chloe and Dusty are not the killers that Sylvester is, but I don’t know a cat that can resist killing a baby bird on the ground. The killer might even end up being Mollie, since she goes out for a while every day. She has already brought one bird in, apparently to play with it. It was still alive. We opened a window and it flew out.

This is apparently a pair of white-breasted nuthatches. They are fairly common throughout almost the entire United States.

Lilies of the mountain

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Our lilies have come up and are in bloom. They seem bigger, healthier and more numerous this year. Here’s Leah, doing her Vanna White impression.

The tallest are over five feet.

We have a nice variety of colors.

Some of our other bulbs have bloomed and faded. The lilies and the other bulbs have multiplied. We’re going to have to thin them this fall and plant in some other places in the yard. Maybe where all the vinca that I planted last year showed that they were actually annuals in this climate.

Down in Mississippi

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Some time last week Leah asked me how old my grandparents were when they died. I couldn’t remember, so I searched for their obituaries. What I found was not my maternal grandmother’s obituary, but a version of my mother’s that my brother Henry had posted on his blog. I didn’t often read his blog, so I started checking it out. That led me to actually look at the name of the blog, The Narrow Gate*. The subtitle was “A continuation of the blog ‘Down in Mississippi’.”

What? Henry had a blog called “Down in Mississippi”? Why didn’t I know that? The blog recounts his experiences when he took a week’s vacation to go down to Pearlington, MS. His blog starts on the first day of his vacation (dated November 2006 in his blog, but described as covering events in 2008 and 2009).

In this case, Henry’s idea of a vacation was to work all the livelong day with a group from the Presbyterian Disaster Agency (PDA) trying to help people rebuild homes that were destroyed or almost destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many people whose lives and homes were damaged by Katrina were still trying to rebuild three years later, down in Mississippi.

I’m not going to try to retell Henry’s stories. They are still there for anyone to read, down at the bottom of his Narrow Gate blog.

Henry’s work in Pearlington changed his life. At that time he was working as a materials scientist for a company called Steward in Chattanooga. He was not particularly happy. The company ownership had treated him poorly considering all he had done for them. It was a materials business, and he was the only materials scientist there. So he decided to quit and go to work full time for PDA in Mississippi, continuing the work he had done on his vacation. He lived at the PDA facility in Pearlington for a couple of years, until the agency decided that they had to close that operation and move to Texas to try to help with another disaster. 

It wasn’t long after he left PDA that he decided to find a seminary school and become an ordained Presbyterian minister.

I wonder if he ever wrote anything about his experiences at seminary school.

Henry was always argumentative, with me, with my parents, with his classmates, and, I suspect, with his instructors. It might have been uncomfortable for some of them to deal with someone as intelligent and educated as him. He was certainly not the typical ministerial student.

After he completed seminary and was ordained, he worked with a Presbyterian church in Chattanooga. One of his projects was working with homeless people. Some of them attended his memorial service. He also started a huge garden to try to grow food for people who couldn’t afford groceries.

He eventually ended up as the minister at a little church in Spring City, Tn. It was an old church with a small congregation consisting mostly of the type of conservatives you might expect in a small Tennessee town. There had been a split in that church, as well as the Presbyterian Church as a whole, over gay marriage. The majority of the members were in the anti-gay faction, and they wanted the church for themselves. However, the Presbyterian Church (USA) owned the church, and the Presbyterian Church gave it to the smaller faction that supported the church’s new stand allowing same-sex marriage.

That was the type of church where Henry would have felt at home.

The last post on Henry’s blog is dated February 6, 2018. It was a sermon he had prepared for a Sunday service at the Spring City church. He died two months after that.

Henry and I were alike in many ways, but very different in some ways. As a scientist, I can’t find any reason to believe in any god. Henry apparently felt no conflict. All I can say about that is that he lived the underlying Christian message better than most people who call themselves Christians

*”Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.”