Trust me, this post will hang together. Eventually.  More or less. My genre is stream of consciousness.

Been watching the Giants and some other team in the World Series in PG & E Park.  Beautiful, but pretty much everyone mourns for Candlestick.

I was remembering what was supposed to be the most exciting Series ever in the Bay Area when it was A’s v. Giants, and, at the exact moment of the first pitch, 3rd game, the earth moved.

Now, by 1989, I had lived in the Bay Area for about thirty years.  We really didn’t even flinch at these things, but with this one, when the TV screen scrambled and the house creaked, I knew.  I went into automatic and crawled under a sturdy table.

And this is where my heritage of hymns also automatically clicked in.  Without even realizing what I was doing, I sang the entire first verse of “Oh, God, our Help in Ages Past.”  Where that came from, I do not know.  Actually I do know.  It came from a lifetime of hymn singing. A shelf in my bookcase bears evidence.

On another occasion, I was having an MRI.  You know.  You’re in that enclosed capsule keeping perfectly still.  You can’t sing, of course, but amazingly and unexpectedly, my soul began silently to sing.  The great body of Psalms I knew from years of singing Morning Prayer.  Venite, Te Deum, Benedictus,  Jubilate.  “O Lord, in thee have I trusted; never let me be confounded.”

All this is miraculously stored away somewhere in my brain.  That’s the same brain that can’t seem to recall where I put my sunglasses.  I think this old brain has its priorities right.

What a heritage!