Saturday, August 25, 2012

Another postscript, Bob Uchner's rites last evening


CLOSE-UP SNAPSHOT TAKEN AT MEMORIAL TABLE.  PHOTOS WERE ON DISPLAY FOR RITE ATTENDERS


FRONT OF BULLETIN
THE GOOD SAMARITAN WINDOW AT THE E&R UCC, WIS. AVE, WAUKESHA



SOME ATTENDERS ASSEMBLED IN VESTIBULE, THROUGH GLASS
SORT OF LIKE A UCHNER CHURCH WINDOW







EXAMPLES OF BOB'S WORK WERE SHOWN BEFORE THE SERVICE ON A POWER-POINT SCREEN



WAUKESHA MASONIC LODGE NO. 37 RITUAL AT BEGINNING OF SERVICE
BOB'S ASHES IN A POTTERY URN TO THE LEFT OF THE GRAY HAIRED LADY



PYTHIAN BROTHER BART LOHMAN DELIVERS KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS FAREWELL



PHOTO FROM THE CHURCH DISPLAY TABLE
SNAPPED BY THE SRN.  PIN ON CAP DATED 2000.
BOB ORGANIZED THE SAYLEVILLE MILL POND POLAR BEAR CLUB
SEVERAL YEARS AGO.
HE WORE THIS CAP AND THE SHIRT HE DESIGNED FOR THE NEW YEARS DAY
SWIM IN THE ICY WATER





SAYLESVILLE POLAR BEARS SPLASH, 1998.
THE SRN EDITOR ATTENDED THIS EVENT 
AND WATCHED THIS PICTURE BEING TAKEN BY SOMEONE..
VOWED TO DO THE NEXT ONE.
(DID NOT.)








SCENE OF SANCTUARY OF CHRIST THE SERVANT LUTHERAN CHURCH
EARLY, BEFORE THE PLACE FILLED UP.
A FITTING EDIFICE FOR THE THOUGHTS EXPRESSED ABOUT BOB UCHNER,
 WORDS THAT WERE SPOKEN BY MANY, TO SOAR.  BOB WAS A MEMBER OF THIS CHURCH

HIS PASTOR, THE REV. DAVID ZANDT, BEAUTIFULLY, POWERFULLY -DELIVERED 
THE FUNERAL GOODS.

BOB, OLD FRIEND, REST IN PEACE.

IF I MADE TOO MUCH OF A FUSS ABOUT YOUR PASSING
JUST KNOW I WANTED TO DO IT, FELT COMPELLED.....



From the heirloom vegetable booth; A small Siamese cat; Folding things; Fuschia; A hug



FROM THE HEIRLOOM VEGETABLE BOOTH
delicious-tasting off-color and shape vegetables last Saturday.
They cost a little more but are worth it!  Tomatoes, egg-plant.....
Stand usually situated to the left of Friedman Street and river lot.
on north side of shopping lane just before or after the honey guy.
...


A SMALL DOWNTOWN SIAMESE CAT
OBSERVES, WATCHES ME
as I walk across the street from him
- or her - on South Street.
It hides on a sill behind a rusty screen
and takes up just a small corner
or the window.
Today I had my inexpensive
Lower Crustacean cell cam
and tried for a picture.
I did not get a satisfactory result,
the unsuccessful try is shown above.
I resort to a red arrow and
circle to show the vigilant cat.
With the LVD memorial Nikon Digital
on zoom, I would have captured it. 

This cat lives perhaps a daytime solitary life
in its second floor flat
above a music store.
When I go by I look for it each time
and it's almost always there.
Watches me moving on his-or-her street
moving from-or-to my own downtown upper sill
not far away.

...


A small swamp cat,
maybe nittier, grittier


Play:  http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/tv/Bad-Dog!-/142030/2258005751/The-Cat-Who-Slaps-Gators/videos?cmpid=FCST_hero_tv


...


An ounces-light folding chair
made in England
hangs from Odd Fellows 
bedroom wall.





...




Fuchsia

[from THE WRITERS ALMANAC, Garrison Keillor, 8-23-12]


That summer in the west I walked sunrise
to dusk, narrow twisted highways without shoulders,
low stone walls on both sides. Hedgerows
of fuchsia hemmed me in, the tropical plant
now wild, centuries after nobles imported it
for their gardens. I was unafraid,
did not cross to the outsides of curves, did not
look behind me for what might be coming.
For weeks in counties Kerry and Cork, I walked
through the red blooms the Irish call
the Tears of God, blazing from the brush
like lanterns. Who would have thought
a warm current touching the shore
of that stone-cold country could make
lemon trees, bananas, and palms not just take,
but thrive? Wild as the jungles they came from,
where boas flexed around their trunks —
like my other brushes with miracles,
the men who love you back, how they come
to you, gorgeous and invasive, improbable,
hemming you in. And you walk that road
blazing, some days not even afraid to die.

"Fuchsia" by Katrina Vandenberg, from The Alphabet Not Unlike the World. © Milkweed Editions, 2012.





LVD, flowering tree, Fairvax VA ...




Erin, Denise's daughter, practices her hugging
...

OFF THE GRID IN ALASKA
another daughter in Wasilla sends Zeppelin news
http://www.adn.com/2012/08/22/2597092/nasa-alaska-officials-see-new.html 
 (Background:  http://raccoonnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/zep-origin-of.html )


...

on slowing down



Stillspeaking Daily Devotional
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The Monks Who Take Long Pauses

Psalm 69:7

"Because of you, I look like an idiot."  (The Message)

Reflection by Lillian Daniel

I had the chance to join some Benedictine monks for evening worship with a group of pastor writers at the Collegeville Institute. The Benedictines, well known for their hospitality to the stranger, asked our mostly Protestant group to meet with Brother John outside the chapel fifteen minutes before worship for an orientation. He spoke to us a bit about the striking modern abbey church, and then took us inside to our seats in the section next to the monks. There he explained which book we were to open and when. It was complicated and we needed all the help we could get. There were going to be all kinds of responsive readings where the leader would speak, and then the monks on one side of the church would respond as "choir one" and then the other side would respond as "choir two." "You're choir two," he told us, and then added this as an afterthought:

"The pace here at the abbey is slower than what you are used to," he explained. "The monks take pauses in the responsive readings, pauses that will seem long to you. So you might want to hold back at first and really listen to them, to get their pace before you join in."

I had no idea what he meant until the service began. Then, when it was choir two's turn to read several lines of a psalm, I heard my own voice and a few others from the visitor's section bleating out alone, as the monks took a long silent breath after each line. I am so used to finding my place and quickly saying my lines in a rush. But the monks said a line or a phrase and then all stopped to pause, as if to really listen to it, to take it in.

I was struck by how often I just barrel through readings in worship and how often I barrel through conversations in life. What a difference a few quiet pauses might make.

Prayer

Listening Lord, help me to listen too. Amen.
Lillian Daniel
About the Author
Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She is the author, with Martin Copenhaver, of This Odd and Wondrous Calling: the Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers.



Old picture from NY Times Book Review
still hangs at the raccoon abode, this time
at the Odd Fellows...



Heirloom tomatoes from top photo
sliced and eaten 8-23-12

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Brian the doorman; Intersections; The Right has their man; Another PS



Odd Fellow resident,
Doorman Brian

When we've referred to our residence and office site as the Odd Fellows Hall, -also known as '~THE PUTNEY~' -
along with referring to the actual ghosts who reside up here on the 3rd floor (top floor, top drawer)  where the long-deceased members of the Odd Fellows lodge used to cavort,  WE ALLUDE ADDITIONALLY to the odder present day co-inhabitants.

Shown here, the real, present-day Brian hangs out in front of the building per custom, sometimes without a shirt.
But because we've put the reputation of ODD FELLOWS on where we are, everything is copasetic.



Earlier,
we Odd Fellows residents had a different doorman,
also named Brian as it happened,
a Russian who wore a uniform.
We have thought of asking Berg Management (the Huelsmans) to outfit 
present day Brian with a similar uniform
if only to keep him from catching pneumonia..


and




..................

INTERSECTION OF OTHER PERSONAGES
AT THE ODD FELLOWS
last weekend:


We celebrated the happenstance coming together of our immediate family:


Son Lee, daughter Erin and friend Ben were in Waukesha for two separate weddings.  Lee flew in from NYC, and Erin and Ben drove down from Appleton.  Lee's college friend's wedding was in Sussex.  Erin's HS friend's was in Waukesha, with the reception at The Rotunda one block from the Odd Fellows.


Erin
life-long plague-ee
until lately of odd manifestations
into who's midst
she's been thrust......



Lee
juggles heavy moose femur......


Lee bids adieu to Mother Denise at Mitchell Airport, Milw.
to return to Harlem where he will be a charter school kindergarten teacher.


Up at 5 AM Monday
Lee showers in bath above.
Unit 311 Odd Fellows prepares to fall silenter.
.................


Oh really?
A small article in the Waukesha Freeman last week told of  proof of the existence of sewer raccoons.

...........................



In Paul Ryan, The Right at Last Has Their Man

By Bill Moyers, Reader Supported News14 August 12

ver since Barry Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency in 1964, the conservative movement has been looking for a choice, not an echo (Goldwater's mantra). Reagan came close, but compromised too often on taxes and back-slapped with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill too often to give them total satisfaction. George W. was almost the putty-in-their-hands they'd craved, but the vast corruption he tolerated left a record they couldn't boast of, and his wild deficit spending (including two wars they allowed him to put on the credit card and the budget-busting Medicare prescription bill) frustrated their aim of reducing the government until it could be drowned in the bathtub.
Mitt Romney hasn't won their hearts either. He has shed so many of his previous positions in order to appease the Tea Party that he sounds as if he is reciting by rote Conscience of a Conservative - Goldwater's declaration of principles - and just might forget it all the morning after his inauguration.
This was never Romney's party, and without Karl Rove's shadowy money behind him, he would not have survived the primaries. So shape-shifting a figure was unlikely ever to inspire the front line troops in an election the Right sees as a showdown with the Anti-Christ at Armageddon. In this campaign, Romney is now the "the man who isn't there" - the dispensable one.
But in Paul Ryan, the Golden Boy from Janesville who schooled himself in the ideology of right-wing think tanks inside the Beltway, they finally have one of their own - a true believer for the new Gilded Age.
The country, too, now has a choice, not an echo. And that should add up to a definitive election in November.
Watch Moyers & Company weekly on public television, and explore more atBillMoyers.com.


14 August 12

ver since Barry Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency in 1964, the conservative movement has been looking for a choice, not an echo (Goldwater's mantra). Reagan came close, but compromised too often on taxes and back-slapped with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill too often to give them total satisfaction. George W. was almost the putty-in-their-hands they'd craved, but the vast corruption he tolerated left a record they couldn't boast of, and his wild deficit spending (including two wars they allowed him to put on the credit card and the budget-busting Medicare prescription bill) frustrated their aim of reducing the government until it could be drowned in the bathtub.
Mitt Romney hasn't won their hearts either. He has shed so many of his previous positions in order to appease the Tea Party that he sounds as if he is reciting by rote Conscience of a Conservative - Goldwater's declaration of principles - and just might forget it all the morning after his inauguration.
This was never Romney's party, and without Karl Rove's shadowy money behind him, he would not have survived the primaries. So shape-shifting a figure was unlikely ever to inspire the front line troops in an election the Right sees as a showdown with the Anti-Christ at Armageddon. In this campaign, Romney is now the "the man who isn't there" - the dispensable one.
But in Paul Ryan, the Golden Boy from Janesville who schooled himself in the ideology of right-wing think tanks inside the Beltway, they finally have one of their own - a true believer for the new Gilded Age.
The country, too, now has a choice, not an echo. And that should add up to a definitive election in November.
Watch Moyers & Company weekly on public television, and explore more atBillMoyers.com.

BOB UCHNER, RIP


Robert Uchner
has scabbarded his Knights of Pythias sword
for the final time in this world
and has parted company with his brothers
of Juneau Lodge No. 21
joining a host of passed and past
members of that noble fraternity.
Uchie's gone on to what we presume to be 
eternal rest and reward.

As long-time Sergeant-at-Arms
Bob held his Pythian sword straight
up and down against his shoulder
and paraded the lodge hall
with due respect, observing the letters
of the Pythian laws
as best he could, with prescribed rigidities
and incumbent honor.

Bywords: Friendship Charity, Benevolence.

......

AIRBORNE Bob visited me in January 10th, 2012 here at the Odd Fellows, with Pythian brother
Walt Lohman:

SEE 
http://raccoonnews.blogspot.com/2012/01/uchie.html


BOB AND WALT AT THE ODD FELLOWS No. 311 



'Uchie' breakfasted with Walt Lohman, Joe Beringer and me at Dave's,  on 4.20.12.

By then, his presumed lead poisoning had done its work, and Bob was much slowed down.

I knew Bob since 1964 when I bought the stained glass windows out of the Arcadian Spring mansion that was being razed.  I rescued the lovely windows in that Victorian manse that were being broken by a wrecking crew, apparently unmindful of their value. Bob helped me dispose of the badly damaged ones.  Originally, I found his name in the Yellow Pages in that time before the internet.

We still have the one we kept, here at the Odd Fellows.  The windows had a picaresque life of their own.



Bob and I became closer when he enlisted me into the Knights of Pythias In April 1993.  Bob was a member of that lodge, and the Waukesha Masons No. 137, AND The Odd Fellows.



CERTIFICATE OF MEMBERSHIP

We attended Pythian lodge meetings together twice a month at Juneau No 21 in Wauwatosa.
PRELATE HAT, KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS


I came to know Bob as a generous person, who encouraged my Pythianism - ancillarily - with unique gifts, such as a Prelate's hat (above), a Dramatic Order of the Knights of Khorrason fez  -  he knew of my penchant for hats  -  a burlap  Pythian tote bag, and many other things that he gave me, including my non-lodge-related  zeppelin Graf Lakehurst Landing Crew pin. They all repose here at the Odd Fellows 311.

I wear the pin as I type this.






UCHNER AND I WERE ZEPPELIN AFICIONADOS.
http://www.airships.net/lz127-graf-zeppelin/history
THIS ANTIQUE PIN FROM BOB IS COVETED BY MY SOMETIMES CHURCH PEW-MATE,
DIRIGIBLE STUDENT + , WILLIAM REDDING, CIRCA 11 YRS OLD



...




  My limited knowledge of Bob Uchner allows only a slice or snapshot here of all that he was.  Additional tribute-payers will add to Bob's life picture, fill it in further at his memorial rites.  (See text below.)  

He transported infirm members of Juneau 21 to lodge meetings regularly.  He shopped assiduously for cold cuts ahead of Pythian meetings and laid out a fine smorgasbord. Many Pythian men unlatched their jaws for giant Dagwood sandwiches in the lodge basement.

 Once when my 26 year old daughter as a child accidently broke a stained glass window at  church, Bob repaired it with closely-matching pieces of glass he had at his studio inventory on Saylesville Road.

He refused payment for his work.  

In the course of that repair, and so many other glass constructions in his studio on Saylesville Road, he leaded the cut and fitted panes with a red-hot iron brazer and so doing, breathed toxic fumes. Time after time, endlessly, and that cumulatively finally did him in.  ( Per his doctors at Woods veterans' hospital.)

One of the most friendly significant things he did for me was Biblical.  
He visited me when I was sick.  - Matt. 25
In 2005 I sustained heart trouble requiring by-pass surgery and internal parts repair.
 Bob came to my bedside several times to cheer me.  At first, I was not conscious; brain damage was suspected.  Not thoroughly founded.
Bob was one of a significant group who kept me going
through a nearly year-long recovery, and thus this becomes part of my Uchner story.

...

Bob was a gifted artist.  Educated in glass art in Germany, his talent manifested itself in drawings of various sorts, paintings, and glass designs.  

~ His Christmas cards were one of a kind ~

...

I have a leaded piece that he designed and made:




A UCHNER HANGING PANEL HERE AT THE ODD FELLOWS UNIT 311
SEAL OF THE CITY OF WAUKESHA
SIGNED 'UCHNER' (AT GREEN ARROW)
NFS

...

Many are the churches for which he planned, constructed and installed beautiful leaded glass windows throughout his long career.


In 2005, while I lay abed in Waukesha Hospital, the E and R UCC church on Wisconsin Ave  burned down.  Bob had a window in that destroyed edifice.  It was The Good Samaritan window, dedicated to an E and R friend of his.

On a morning following the fire, Bob went to the site and dug through the tumbled church rubble for The Good Samaritan window.  Ironically/miraculously, it was the one (1) window of the various windows in the church that was not destroyed.  Where it was sited outside the hottest fire zone was declared the reason it wasn't burned beyond saving.

Bob gathered up the pieces, cleaned them - a tremendous job that must have been - and rebuilt that window.  When the church was renewed, the members of the congregation had Bob's Good Samaritan window mounted in their fellowship area, just outside the redesigned sanctuary. (Above photo.)   It was the one window they had. They went temporarily with all clear glass to illuminate the high-ceilinged sanctuary.

Because of the fire damage to the Good Samaritan window, Bob had to plan and justify wooden cross members in the middle of the scene, but the result seems poetic, under the circumstances.



Worshippers at the E and R proceed into the sanctuary past this example of Bob's artistry and determination, the latter being also the members'.

Inscribed in tiny letters at the very bottom, the following: 



...


A memorial service will be held for Bob Uchner
at Christ the Servant Lutheran Church
2016 S. Center Road, Waukesha WI 53189
262.542.7100
Friday, Aug. 24th 4 -7 pm
with visitation, then a Knights of Pythias memorial
and a Masonic memorial, followed by a regular public service.
Full military honors.
Come for all are welcome.