Like most celebrations, Halloween has spawned its own multi-million dollar industry. Today it is the second most consumer driven event of the year behind Christmas. It used to be owned by kids. Now, adults have seized the initiative.

For most of my youngsterhood I dressed as a hobo. I’d wear some old worn out hat of my dad’s and streak my face with charcoal so it would appear that I hadn’t shaved for a while (a precursor to the Don Johnson, Miami Vise look). My mom would sew a variety of patches on to some old shirt, and if it were cold, I’d slip into dad’s oldest, beat up jacket.

(I must add here that my real desire was to be a ghost. I always envisioned myself trick-or-treating up and down the block with a flowing eeriness all the while vocalizing a haunting "Oooooooooo". My spoil-sport, party pooper parents could never see this as a good reason to ruin a perfectly good sheet, however.)

So, as Hobo Joe or whatever I called myself, my buddy Bob Floreck and I scouted the streets of St. Louis Park for candy, the occasional apple, and now-and-then popcorn ball. As we got older (I was still doing the hobo thing), we would meet friends on the street where we would exchange reconnaissance data on where one might get a dime candy bar.

Ah, the nostalgia of it. I think I’ll go find a piece of charcoal. No! Wait! I have a beard. Oh well, nothing ever stays the same.

Pastor B.

I’ve never been very good at spitting. I was a quick elimination during junior high spitting contests, almost as fast as in spelling bees. There was a period of my life when spitting was equated with machoness. Is it macho to have slimy shoes?

I bring this up because we’re nearing the end of the baseball season, and a few of us anyway have watched the dugout pictures of managers, coaches, and players gobbing God-knows-what onto the floor or into the grass. I think some of these guys go to school to become professional spitters. Or, more likely, during the long waits around the batting cage during spring training they compare and learn new techniques to improve distance and volume. It’s good to learn new skills.

Baseball is one of the last bastions of spitting. You don’t see it much in football. I think face guards have something to do with that. Can you envision Brett Favre with a huge gobber dangling from that plastic bar on his helmet?

It’s pretty tough to be a spitter on basketball. I mean, the floor would be a wasteland of slippery phlegm. Although, it might make the pro game more interesting.

I do see hockey players letting it fly now and again, but somehow it seems like they’re just helping to resurface the ice.  Is it easier to spit if you have no teeth?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a professional golfer let fly. I can’t imagine Tiger Woods leaving saliva puddles on every green. What if golfers all spit into the cup as they holed out? You’d see a lot of caddies assigned to retrieving the ball.

So, baseball pretty much has the corner on the spitting market. Old baseball, before the connection of tobacco with cancer, saw almost every player with a square plug of chew bulging from his back pocket. In fact, the saying "biting off more than he can chew" comes from the novice tobacco chewer not realizing that chewing tobacco expands as it is gnawed. The expansion causes the constant need to lessen the size of the wad. Thus the spit.

My grandfather chewed tobacco. He would lay on the couch and watch television while he chewed. When the chew’s volume necessitated expectoration, he would turn on his side, reach for and pull out the morning newspaper from beneath the sofa, spit on it, and slide it back under. When my brother and I played marbles at my grandparent’s house, if a marble should escape beneath the couch we knew it was gone forever.

So here’s to baseball and spitting. You know, I wonder if I could have made it to the big leagues if I had been a better spitter. (Where’s Gaylord Perry when we need him?)

Pastor B.

By now most of you have probably heard about the billboard put up by the Freedom form Religion Foundation. Although some have called it "huge" it is really a pretty standard sized advertisement on the Beltline. The billboard’s message is "Beware of Dogma" which is, I suppose, a parody on "Beware of Dog" signs. Anyway, it gets your attention.

The FFRF likes to pick fights and intimidate people, especially well meaning folk who would like to whimsically allow their Christian faith to shine a little. But, they’re not worth the fight most of the time.

There’s a part of me that sardonically agrees with the FFRF folks. I’d like to add a few billboards on the Beltline outlining the dangers of Christian dogma.

Just think of how dangerous our world would be if people took seriously the dogma of JUSTICE. Wow! If this Christian tenet would somehow escape, hunger might disappear from the earth. So beware!

And what if the dogma of LOVE which oozes from every pore of our Lord God became a practiced reality? No more war. No more killing. No more hate. No more bigotry. Yup, we wouldn’t want that to happen. So, beware!

Can you imagine a world filled with MERCY and FORGIVENESS? Such a thing would totally undo our culture of vengeance and retribution. Nobody would watch most of what’s on television or in movie theaters. Yet, they are part of Christian dogma. So, beware!

Enough already! The FFRF doesn’t need to scare us away from the basics of Christian faith. We’re doing a pretty good job of doing it on our own.

Pastor B.

I’ve been reflecting a little on my two grandsons of late. They are about seven and a half years apart, and they are experiencing their world in wider circles. I got to thinking that we humans experience three levels of ambulation while we grow, and each level brings us face to face with a wider world.

Stage one is crawling and walking. Grandson Summit is at the beginning stages of this. Where once he was content to sit and play in one place crying for people to bring things to him, now he is anxious to go to the things. Suddenly gates have to be erected, latches child-proofed, and small items raised to at least six feet off the ground. The boy has expanded his horizons, and his world will never again be limited to what he can reach.

Stage two of the ambulation evolution I call self-propelled mechanical. Grandson Branden has recently begun riding a bike. It took a while to boost his confidence so I could remove the training wheels, but once he knew he could do it, the home driveway and church parking lot were no longer big enough. He now sees a bigger world, and he wants to ride further off and further away. The boy’s got wheels, and it won’t be long until he wants bigger and better ones.

That brings us to ambulation stage number three - fueled propulsion mechanical. You know, the automobile. I don’t have any grandchildren there yet, but we all know how much wider your world gets with a car beneath you. Folks drive for hundreds of miles to find a place to walk and bike ride.

It’s a wide, wide, world. God made it all, and we have the joy of exploring it.

Pastor B.

Are you old enough to remember the launching of Sputnik? Fifty years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union put this beeping ball of metal into orbit, and the world changed. It was the starting gun for the Space Race.

I was eight years old and just getting used to Mrs. Hopkins and her fourth grade class. I was old enough to hear the news and know the meaning of "orbit" and "satellite," but the politics that exploded around the Sputnik’s technological achievement was a little beyond me.

Life changed. Sputnik gave a new twist to what was later to called the Cold War - a war of threats and saber rattling between the US and the USSR that became a hot war in secondary countries and during the Olympics. A year later thousands of people would be constructing fallout shelters in their backyards. Funding for the sciences would increase dramatically while funding for the arts would take a huge hit. The news and the word around the water cooler was filled with misinformation, disinformation, and lies. Every Russian, we thought, was actually a spy. Russians were Black Bart and we were John Wayne. It was all very black and white.

The Space Race, the contest to see which country would be the first to conquer the vastness of space, became a question of national pride focused on seeing which country could be first to land a man on the moon. The USSR landed the first space ship on the moon, but the US put the first human being on the lunar surface using computers with less power than today’s most simple laptops. We won. And since then we haven’t been able to rally our national thoughts around any single space goal. Maybe we should push for the first woman on the moon.

In these fifty years, the world has seen more changes that the entire previous history of mankind combined. The first space age item to hit the regular market was Tang, the orange drink. Do they even make that anymore? Since then, thousands of mostly technological inventions designed for conquering space have made it into our daily marketplace.

So, happy anniversary, Sputnik! For better or worse, you changed the world.

Pastor B.