{"id":19234,"date":"2016-09-02T09:14:42","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T16:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19234"},"modified":"2016-09-02T13:52:34","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T20:52:34","slug":"expanding-the-ministry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=19234","title":{"rendered":"Expanding the Ministry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2013-10-12<\/a>Aye, I do some ministerin’. I signed up for a mail-order\u00a0Universal Life Church ordination about 15 years ago in order perform\u00a0weddings for Hash House Harrier<\/a>\u00a0friends. Word spread, and before I knew it I was also marrying\u00a0non-hashing friends and relatives, then random couples (no disrespect intended, if any of them are reading this) off the street.<\/p>\n

Last year I was asked, for the first time, to officiate at a memorial service. At the time\u00a0I thought well, that<\/em>\u00a0circle’s now complete.\u00a0I knew the young lady who died, and maybe that made writing and performing her\u00a0memorial service harder. I don’t know. Maybe it’s always hard.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0few days ago our\u00a0friend Ann asked me to officiate at a memorial for her father, who died last week. I didn’t hesitate. I can’t say I knew Ann’s dad, but we\u00a0had met and he’d made an impression on me. Ann\u00a0already had some readings in mind, and\u00a0the two of us worked together on the ceremony.<\/p>\n

Donna and I met everyone\u00a0in the library of the historic Arizona Inn yesterday morning: Ann\u00a0and her husband Ross, her sister Susan from Montana, the deceased’s spouse Kenneth, and Robin, an old friend of Ann’s dad.\u00a0I managed to get through the ceremony and the readings without tripping over too many words. The seven of us\u00a0had a long lunch at the Inn afterward, and if things work out Ann and Ross might drop by\u00a0this weekend, maybe even visit the air museum<\/a> on Labor Day to ride on\u00a0one of my tram tours.<\/p>\n

Ann and Ross live far away, in Melbourne, Australia. They came\u00a0to Tucson every year to visit Ann’s dad, and we’d catch up with them. I don’t expect they’ll be back after this. A trip to\u00a0Australia’s not in the cards for\u00a0us. This’ll probably be our last time\u00a0together. We’ll remain\u00a0friends, of course, staying in touch by mail and Facebook and all that, but still. It’s a sad time for many reasons.<\/p>\n

I mentioned working at the\u00a0air museum Monday. I forgot Labor Day is also a volunteer day, and was making\u00a0plans to do some smoking and grilling before the light clicked. Maybe I’ll pick up some ribs later today and fire up the Fortress of Smoke\u2122<\/a> Sunday instead.<\/p>\n

Construction on the air museum’s new exhibit hangar is finally complete. The “soft opening” is Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. There’ll be an\u00a0official public opening early in 2017, after a few newly-acquired WWII aircraft have arrived and been put on display. But there’s some cool stuff in there now, including two aircraft I haven’t gotten a close look at yet,\u00a0a PBY Catalina and a Privateer, and today they’re opening up the new hangar just for us, the\u00a0volunteers. I’ll be there later this morning, armed\u00a0with DSLR camera and tripod, and you can\u00a0expect a new Air-Minded<\/a> photoblog soon.<\/p>\n

Our daughter Polly’s moving out of the\u00a0guest bedroom and into her new boyfriend’s place. She hasn’t slept here for a couple of weeks; in fact we’ve barely seen her at all. Sometime while we were away yesterday she must have come back to fetch her\u00a0cats and some of her clothing. I don’t know what’s next for her, but since you’ve\u00a0shared some of our experiences with her over the past 14 months, I’ll continue to keep you posted.<\/p>\n

Have camera, will travel. Back soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aye, I do some ministerin’. I signed up for a mail-order\u00a0Universal Life Church ordination about 15 years ago in order perform\u00a0weddings for Hash House Harrier\u00a0friends. Word spread, and before I knew it I was also marrying\u00a0non-hashing friends and relatives, then random couples (no disrespect intended, if any of them are reading this) off the street. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2],"tags":[1922,523,2166],"class_list":["post-19234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-personal","tag-memorial","tag-pima-air-space-museum","tag-universal-life-church"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19234"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19246,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19234\/revisions\/19246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}