QUARANTINE BLOG # 539

September 20, 2021

This weekend was Arts in the Heart of Augusta, an annual shindig (except for last year with the Chinese Virus) featuring performers, food from around the world, and arts and crafts.  One of the performing groups featured our granddaughters, Rachel and Maggie Eastman and the rest of Augusta School of Dance.  Dancing is something the girls have been doing for years and they do it enthusiasm and a lot of joy.  In the photo below – taken from too far away – Rachel is third from the left and Maggie is fourth.

👉  The Food and Drug Administration is likely to authorize Pfizer booster shots this week for many Americans at high risk of falling seriously ill from the coronavirus.  On Friday, a panel of experts endorsed offering Pfizer booster shots for ages 65 and older, and people 16 and over who are at high risk of getting severe COVID-19 or who work in settings that make them more likely to get infected.  The agency is expected to decide early this week.  My sleeve is rolled up.  If you haven’t gotten your vaccination, what are you waiting for?  They are safe and effective!

👉  QB has featured monuments and memorials among these 539 issues: Vietnam Veterans Memorial, World War II Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Memorial, and more.

Just as a reminder, there are 58,282 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – names of the men and women who were killed or are still missing in action.  

What would you say about a memorial commemorating 670,000 dead Americans?  The first time that memorial was installed – last fall – the number of the dead was 267,000.  Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg – in the picture below – planted 267,000 flags in Washington last fall to recognize what was then the death toll of the coronavirus in the United States.  

This past Friday, “In America: Remember,” an art installation of hundreds of thousands of flags was planted along the National Mall, honoring the more than 670,000 people in the United States who have died from the coronavirus opened (and will remain on the Mall in Washington, DC until October 3).

Rows of white flags cover 20 acres of federal park land bordering the White House, the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the World War II Memorial.  Many of them are personalized.

The 267,000 flags last fall recognized what was then the death toll of the coronavirus in the United States.  Almost a year later, that figure has more than doubled.  In the last week alone, more than 13,000 Americans have died – more than four times the number of people who died during the September 11, 2001, attacks.  And still we don’t get vaccinated.  And still we don’t wear masks.

👉  In its 1,600-odd years, any number of strange, unusual, or just plain quirky vessels have floated down Venice’s Grand Canal.  On Saturday morning, a decidedly unusual craft took a spin: a gigantic violin.  The craft, called “Noah’s Violin,” set sail accompanied by an escort of gondolas, and in no time a small flotilla joined the violin as it on its hour ride.  To keep from falling in the Canal, a string quartet playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" played barefooted.

The vessel is a faithful, large-scale replica of a real violin, made from about a dozen different kinds of wood, with nuts and bolts inside, as well as space for a motor.  Livio De Marchi, a Venetian artist, who conceived the idea during last year’s lockdown said, “The violin is a sign of Venice restarting.”  De Marchi named the work “Noah’s Violin,” because like the ark, it was meant to bring a message of hope after a storm, in this case a message that promoted “art, culture and music.”

👉  Some word-play comic strips:

👉  “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5).

In his book The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence claimed to be as close to God while working in the kitchen as when praying in the chapel.  The Lord, after all, is always near us; thus, wherever we are is holy ground.  That was the experience of Annie Hawks, a housewife and mother of three in Brooklyn, New  York.

As a child, Annie Sherwood had dabbled in poetry, her first verse being published when she was fourteen.  In 1857, she married Charles Hawks, and they established their home in Brooklyn, joining Dr. Robert Lowry’s Hanson Place Baptist Church.  With the good doctor’s encouragement, she began writing Sunday school songs for children, and he set many of them to music.

“I Need Thee Every Hour” was written on a bright June morning in 1872.  Annie later wrote, “One day as a young wife and mother of 37 years of age, I was busy with my regular household tasks.  Suddenly, I became so filled with the sense of nearness to the Master that, wondering how one could live without Him, either in joy or pain, these words, ‘I Need Thee Every Hour,’ were ushered into my mind, the thought at once taking full possession of me.”

The next Sunday, Annie handed these words to Dr. Lowry, who wrote the tune and chorus while seated at the little organ in the living room of his Brooklyn parsonage.  Later that year, it was sung for the first time at the National Baptist Sunday School Association meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, and published in a hymnbook the following year.

When Annie’s husband died sixteen years later, she found that her own hymn was among her greatest comforts.  “I did not understand at first why this hymn had touched the great throbbing heart of humanity,” Annie wrote.  “It was not until long after, when the shadow fell over my way, the shadow of a great loss, that I understood something of the comforting power in the words which I had been permitted to give out to others in my hour of sweet serenity and peace.”

Some time after Charles’s death, Annie moved to Bennington, Vermont, to live with her daughter and son-in-law.  All in all, she wrote more than four hundred hymns during her eighty-three years, though only this one is still widely sung.

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