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I looked up at the clock tower that rises above this district and discovered it said Bromo-Seltzer. Hence the name Bromo Arts District.
It also seems to be the Erstwhile Banks District. My hotel and several other nearby buildings are old banks, with the stately architecture of 19th century capitalism: no first-floor windows, Corinthian columns, high and sculpted ceilings, the bank’s name carved above the entrance like Ozymandias’. Oh, and the art is about money and wanted bank robbers.
In the convention center hotel–not the one I’m staying in–I saw this poster of a writer I love. Makes sense, as Poe is one of Baltimore’s most famous children, but it turned out it was marking the door to the Poe Room. Can you imagine: a meeting in the Poe Room?! I’d be afraid the door would be bricked up and we’d never escape.
The Calloway Room looks like much more fun.
As far as I can tell, there is no John Waters room. Regrettable.
I helped staff Harvard Divinity School’s booth for a couple of hours. About half of the people who swung by were interested in seminary, and half wanted to say “Stay strong, Harvard!” Amen. I think Harvard learned from Columbia’s experience what Columbia should have known: the only reward for giving a shakedown artist what he wants is to be shaken down more.
After dinner with West Chester, PA’s minister, Dan Schatz–he’s my bestie from seminary, and with our birthdays a week apart in June, whenever we’re both at GA we have a birthday dinner in between–we came outside to light rain and bright sun. The building we’d just exited blocked our sight of any rainbow, but we walked around it and there it was!
People congratulate me wherever I go, and it takes a few minutes of conversation to discover whether I’m being congratulated for 25 years in ministry (the ministers have a service celebrating 25- and 50-year anniversaries, so people know), my retirement from FT work, my completion of a long ministry in Palo Alto, or Indigo’s graduation and college plans. This is how lucky I am.
I sang in the choir for the Service of the Living Tradition (celebrating milestones for religious professionals), something I’ve done only once before. It was an utter joy, and also I now have an india.arie earworm.
I have taken almost no selfies despite running into a zillion dear friends and colleagues. I rush over and hug, but it doesn’t occur to me to snap a picture. Sorry, y’all. I hope you know I love you.
You cannot open more than one lateral file drawer at a time, of course. So I can’t take a picture of the three drawers of this four-drawer lateral file that are empty. But I’m sure you believe me.
In case I failed to post it here before, June 30 is my last day at UUCPA. I promised myself I’d have the lateral file, which was quite full, cleared out before leaving for our General Assembly (and the ministers’ conference that precedes it), which I do on Monday. The first three drawers took a couple of months, but I’m on a roll and confident that I’ll clear out the last one tomorrow. That will be awesome, even though the bummer of file cabinets is that the office looks the same whether they are full or empty. I don’t care. I will know they’re empty, and that a dreaded task got easier and easier until I was done with it.
I have accumulated a lot of paper in 22 years. I should plant several trees in compensation. Between meetings today, I took boxload after boxload to the recycling dumpster, feeling lighter each time. And I did a few rounds of distributing Stuff from my office to its former and future homes, such as the office-supplies cabinet in the main office, the kitchen, and the art-supplies shelves. Lighter! Lighter! By the way, no one at UUCPA need ever buy file folders, hanging files, index cards, three-ring binders, or paper clips again. I’m not sure anyone, anywhere need ever buy paper clips again, since I have never bought any and yet I never run short at either home or work, but that’s a mystery I don’t need to solve.
We’ll have lots of both members and guests at the service on Sunday, so my goal is to have the files cleared out and the office looking tidy by the end of tomorrow, Friday. (It was tidy before the last few whirlwind weeks of clearing stuff out. Things get so messy as they’re being reorganized.) I am dearly fond of my beautiful, orderly office–in the last several months, I’ve repeatedly thought of an old Onion headline, “Nine-month Fetus Finally Has Womb Just the Way He Likes It”–and I want it to look good, even if very few people pop in. A few will, for sure, because they are giving new homes to a bunch of my books, which are waiting for them in boxes and bags along one wall.
The desk is almost empty or, in the case of some supplies and files that our interim minister will need, neatly organized. The surface of the desk, though, not so much. So that’s tomorrow’s task, after drawer number four, and between some more key meetings.
Sermons in Stones 
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