Why can’t we be better attended to the needs of pedestrians? Voices from the television keep telling me I should walk more. Dr. This and Dr. That say walk, walk, walk. But then....

About a year ago I sat in a restaurant overlooked a corner with a stoplight (does any one call them semi-fours anymore?). The light came with a WALK - DON’T WALK sign - actually symbols of a stick figure walking and an upraised hand.

It was a drizzly sort of gray day when I watched an elderly gentleman shuffle up to the crosswalk. In order to get a WALK sign he needed to push a button, However, the sign cycle had already excluded his button pushing so when it turned green he still had that reddish-orange hand keeping him in his drenched place.

The next cycle signaled for him to walk, but he was so slow that when he reached the other side and pushed the button to cross the timer locked him out. All in all it took this soggy sap over five minutes to cross the two streets because the lights were not pedestrian friendly.

As an aside here, I witnessed at this same corner some weeks later three middle school aged kids push the button for a WALK sign and not get it when the light turned green. They scampered across anyway thereby endangering themselves and breaking the law.

Question. Why can’t the "WALK" light come on whenever the light turns green? That seems so simple. My dad always said the "DON’T WALK" sign was an advance warning that the light was about to go yellow. I think it might even cut down on those who sneak through on the red.

Another aside. The symbols have replaced the words on the sign, I suppose, so that those who don’t speak English can understand. Then I noticed at one crossing a placard that explained the meaning of the symbols. The explanation was written in English. Go figure.

Anyway, for all the talk about how we need to be walking more and driving less, the way we order our pathways, highways, and sidewalks seems to be working against those who are on foot.

Pastor B.

I came across the following article on the Minnesota Public Radio Web site. It’s by a Greg Schiller who is a regular contributor to that site. I hope you enjoy it.

Pastor B.

Why Do I Have to Go to Church?

I almost made it out the door Sunday morning.

I woke early and dressed quietly in the dark. Tiptoeing barefoot across the carpet, I took care, least the slightest sound wake my wife. The cat knew what I was up to. He blocked the hall, eyes larger than soccer balls, demanding an extra handful of chow for his silence.

Despite my best efforts, I only made it to the screen door.

As my hand gripped the latch, my wife called out in a voice without the slightest trace of sleep....

"Are you going to church today?"

"Not sure," I mumbled, "Thought I'd walk along the river."

"Okay," she said in a tone that said it was not okay.

"You sure?" I asked.

"It's entirely up to you," she said.

In a pig's eye, it is.

Church has not been high on my priority list since the fifth grade when I first skipped Sunday services

I remember the day perfectly.

My gang used to hang out on a concrete retaining wall behind the church. We were a tight group and before mass was our time together. After that life was hell.

Sunday was a day of ritual. First there was mass, followed by family breakfast then at least one of us got hauled off to spend an afternoon choking on stale potpourri fumes while an aunt droned on endlessly about her surgeries.

So on Sundays we lingered in the looming shadow of the rest of the day. We would wait on the retaining wall for the audible click of the priest's microphone that followed the last note of the opening hymn.

This day, on signal, my friend Walt shrugged in resignation and slid off the wall, but instead of going into church, he headed across the parking lot.

You have to understand we were raised Catholic and to miss mass was a mortal sin. For those of you not familiar with the rules, mortal means really bad, like something between a three day weekend in Las Vegas and homicide.

Walt's little brother yelled after him, "You're going to hell!!"

"Yeah," Walt yelled back, "but am I going alone?"

We had never been struck by anything as hard as that question.

Like I said, we were tight, if one of us was going to hell, we were all going together. That's just the way it worked. But when you think about it, going to hell really wasn't that bad, in fact mortal sins are kind of liberating. After the first one you're screwed for eternity and that means you're pretty much free to do anything you want for the rest of your life.

So we headed for the tracks to hop trains.

If you've never hopped a train, trust me, there is no greater rush than being ten years old and grabbing onto the brutal indifference of a speeding boxcar.

Walt took the point position.

He flew along the gravel with the rest of us angled out behind him like an echelon of geese. If he made it, we would too.

As he ran, he kept checking over his shoulder, picking out a car and pacing himself for it. He timed one about three cars back, then with it pounding up behind him he grabbed hold a rung and swung up on the ladder. Steve followed, then I, but the train was too much for me. I lost hold with one hand and flapped like a flag in a high wind.

Then we all heard a scream.

For a second I thought it was me.

But it was Walt's little brother vanishing under the train. An instant later he shot out, spinning somersaults onto the gravel.

One by one we bailed off the train and ran back up the grade. By the time we got to him, the kid was screaming, hyper-ventilated with fear, but he was okay.

Walt told him to shut-up but the kid just kept yelling louder.

Finally he got out what he was really scared of. Holding out the arms of his white shirt, he cried, "I'm all dirty."

That was an inescapable truth. One impossible to explain to parents who figured we would be in church.

Walt just looked at his brother and told the rest of us, "You guys weren't here, remember that."

That's the kind of group we were. We did things like that for each other, like the little obligations of covering for your friends. It's what bound us together, and kept us so tight that decades later we still called each other for a beer or a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters.

Things are not quite like that with me and my wife. She wouldn't hop a train or ditch church. She attends regularly - out of obligation.

She does a lot of things out of obligation.

She never forgets to celebrate a birthday and always has a card. The card is always signed and slipped into a matching envelope. The envelope is always signed too.

She never forgets to get a present, often purchasing them months in advance. The gifts are always wrapped and presented in special bags from Hallmark stuffed to the brim with foo-foo paper.

She even visits aunts who drone on about their surgeries in homes that smell of stale potpourri.

And she does all these things out of obligation for much the same reason why we wouldn't let Walt go to hell alone and why he and his brother took their lumps to protect us.

Obligations are the things that we do to bind ourselves to each other.

I figure if I could go to hell for a childhood friend, I sure as hell could go to church for the best friend I ever had.

And so as I stepped out onto the porch, I turned and called back through the screen, "Alright, I'll be back in time."

"Time enough to shave and shower?", she adds as a little dig.

"Yeah, that too."

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977457351&nav=Groupspace&grpId=3659174697238557&memberId=}

Here’s the newest innovation in keeping track of your teenager’s driving abilities. An in car camera.

It works like this. A camera above the rearview mirror with a wide angle lens can see everything that goes on inside the car. Another camera mounted in the front of the car records what’s going on in front of the car. The cameras are synchronized to each other. A computer chip keeps a running 20 second record of all this unless there is a sudden stop, bump, or swerve. In that case the computer sends the last 20 seconds and several minutes after the "bump" to some training instructor dude who can, at his or her discretion, decide to send it to the teen's parents.

Got‘cha, kid!

This scheme of tracking your kids is being touted by insurance companies to help youthful drivers have fewer accidents. In the long run, we’re told, it will help to lower rates (i.e. save money). It will, when all is said and done, be good for you. It seems to me that every society on its way to demise has fallen over and over for that line. It will be good for you. When privacy is invaded and rights are diminished there’s always someone there to say it’s good for you

The year 1984 floated through time nearly 25 years ago, so I don’t know if George Orwell’s book, 1984, still makes it onto many high school reading lists. The novel eerily prognosticated the technological state of affairs that we experience today where cameras pervade our lives in every retail store, parking lot, and bank. In 1984 cameras hooked to the central government, also know as Big Brother, were in almost every room of the house. Like today, the people were told how good it was for them.

Back to teenage drivers. I guess in the angst of having a young driver the magnetism of a camera in the car could be almost more than a parent could resist. I’m glad I’m beyond that decision. But I also wonder where it ends. At what point do we proclaim that my privacy and my teen's privacy is of greater value that what Big Brother says is good for me.

Pastor B.