Yellow Hat

The cloudless blue sky and blossoming plum trees belie the fact that it was freezing. I caught the fellow in the yellow hat as he was running across the street from the Green Music Center and I was running to my car in the Sonoma State University parking lot...or I should say one of about twelve parking lots that ring the periphery of the campus.

I am really enjoying Bruce Elliott's class on religion...a subject which has never interested me. One of the reasons I find this class fascinating is his take on the development of Protestantism out of Catholicism. The Reformation was where it began and Martin Luther made it happen in Germany.  John Knox folllowed in Scotland and John Calvin in Britain.  My great-grandfather was John Calvin Eastman and he came by his name honestly as he was a Presbyterian and, by the look of his photograph in the family archives, rather grim faced. HIs wife, Mary Plum was downright scary. 

Professor Elliott always stands outside the door and speaks to people as they leave the room (rather like the rector in those British mysteries) so I stopped and told him about my great-grandfather. He said that he always tried to make his lectures about how ordinary people saw the world and went about their lives, and I think he does a very good job of that. His use of art to illustrate his points is especially effective.

As I drove home, I heard the news from New Zealand. I have put a picture in extras of my  Hellebores seeming to  bow their heads in grief and shame that the world has come to this kind of senseless hatred and violence. So many lives lost, so many families ripped apart and so many hopes and dreams cut short.  And for what? There are too many terrible things happening in this world, including the destruction of the climate itself, that we seem to have no will or ability to stop. That's why I posted the flowering trees and the boy in the yellow hat as my main picture today. We mustn't lose our ability to find ways to help the stricken and hope for ourselves....