The USPS “Undelivered Package” scam

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Public service announcement: If you get a text like this, ignore it:

The Post Office will never send out text messages like this. But if you happen to be unaware enough to click the link, you will get something like this:

The bad URL (the legitimate post office site is https://www.usps.com/, and nothing else) and the bad grammar are red flags that this is a scam website.

Again, bad English (to ensure the successful delivery).

“Lump sum: 3¢”… right. Give these scummy drones your credit card number and they’ll use it or sell it and at the very least you’ll have to get that card cancelled and get a new one. At worst, you might be on the hook for fraudulent charges.

Be careful out there, and protect your vulnerable loved ones.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

If you’ve ever worked retail

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Barking, unreasonable, terrible managers. Mind-clenching Corporate stupidity. Unpredictable schedules. Lazy or arrogant or brown-nosing co-workers. And, of course, the ubiquitous customers: arrogant, entitled, insouciant, demeaning, demanding, illogical customers… with the occasional gem of a human being hidden in the regular flow. All these are things that the average retail worker has to put up with on a daily basis.

The worst and most outrage-generating stories can be found at Not Always Right, but there’s one place a retail worker should go – if you haven’t already – to smile, cringe, laugh, and find kindred spirits: Retail, by Norm Feuti.

Retail, Strip One, by Norm Feuti, January 1, 2006.

Anyone who has ever worked in retail or still does owes it to themselves to be familiar with this lovely, long-running comic strip. It sadly came to an end after 14 years when the artist wanted to move on to a different career in illustrating children’s books, but the entire thing is available online as an archive. I greedily devoured every one, because it so perfectly captures every aspect of the retail experience, from managers, to co-workers, to the most horrible customers… all of which have to be dealt with in a day’s work if you’re interested in keeping your job.

But it’s not just about the horrors; along the way you will get to know and fall in love with a delightful cast of characters who grow, and learn, and survive the journey. Of course there are the ones you love to hate, but that only adds Tabasco sauce to the chimichanga, as it were.

Only the first year was captured in hard copy, but if Norm were ever to think about publishing the other 13 years in dead-tree edition, I would be first in line to buy them.

There was also a companion volume, “Pretending you Care,” which included many strips from year one along with wonderful expositions about what it’s like to work in the retail world.

Both are available on Amazon, but neither one is cheap, sadly – I was fortunate to score a copy of each through AbeBooks, my go-to source for difficult-to-find books, at much more affordable prices. They occupy honored places on my bookshelf.

While I never actually worked a retail floor, I did work in pizza shops for 3 years, and spent 6 months in a customer-service chair for a software company – essentially the same as retail work without the face-to-face interactions with customers. It was, to be very honest, the most soul-sucking job I ever did in my entire career, and would never again repeat the experience even if I had to. Thank Ṣiva H. Viṣṇu for retirement.

That said, I undertand. And I have always done my best to be a bit extra kind and appreciative to those people on the floor or behind the register who serve my needs, who endure the daily horror, and who long for nothing more than the end of their shift.

To all retail or customer-service workers out there, thank you.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

American Food Culture and the Joy of Leftovers

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Reposting this from… well, I’m not sure where, but it looks like Tumblr. Anyway, it’s 100% on-target. Very slightly bowdlerized.

My wife and I have started taking our own re-usable plastic containers when we eat out, to bring our leftovers home without adding to the landfill.

Pervocracy

Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”

If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.

nettlepatchwork

Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)

xenoqueer

Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.

From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.

jumpingjacktrash

The portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.

Volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.

So in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.

Of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of American hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.

it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.

theunnamedstranger

atreefullofstars

Reblogging because I honestly never thought about it but yeah, this lines up.

This is also why the idea of “pay a lot for fancy food on tiny plates” pisses so many Americans off. Unless you are rich enough not to care about throwing your money away, it’s not just a ridiculous ripoff in terms of not filling you up, it’s stingy. Restaurants are places of hospitality. If I pay that much for a plate it had better be damn good and it had better be generous. Otherwise they are just trying to fleece me out of my money AND saying they don’t value me as a customer.

If I go to IHOP or Olive Garden or whatnot, I absolutely don’t need to eat again until evening if I had leftovers, and until the next day if I did eat everything (you can’t really take pancakes home as leftovers).

But EVEN IF I DID EAT EVERYTHING and then ate a full meal on top of that, later, it’s really not anyone’s place to criticize what other people eat. It just isn’t. Let it go. It’s old.

Making fun of American food culture and food habits isn’t original or surprising or witty or funny or getting one over on us or crafting a clever retort or whatever. It’s lazy and petty and childish.

Yeah, we eat a lot of hamburgers. They’re delicious. Cope.

“Recently I’ve become very much aware that there are fewer days ahead than there are behind.”

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Attending a funeral yesterday brought this quote by Jean-Luc Picard (from Star Trek Generations) powerfully to mind, and made me ruminate once again about certain realities. The first of which is, “Tomorrow is never given.”

We never know when the bus will come to get us.¹

What is the measure of a person’s life? The funeral I attended was for a young husband and father, a well-beloved endodontist, who was taken too early in an automobile accident precipitated by a drunken driver. Many people turned out to send him off to his next life; many tears were shed, many good words spoken. He had a large family, his wife had a large family, and he will certainly be long remembered for his goodness.

But as memories fade and those who knew the person also move ahead, all that remains of a person’s life is often a gravestone with two dates: birth, death, and that little dash in the middle, which stands for everything that person did, thought, and was during their walk on this green earth.

Linda Ellis wrote a famous poem, “The Dash,” which begins thusly:

I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning to the end.

He noted first came the date of the birth and spoke the following date with tears.
But he said what mattered most of all was the dash between the years.

For that dash represents all the time that they spent life on Earth.
And now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

But nothing lasts forever, not even stone. The natural processes that can wear down mountains or create the grand canyon over the course of millions of years will inexorably erase even the most beautifully-carved memorials, and then there is nothing to mark that person’s passage through mortality.

But I believe in giving everyone a shot at being remembered. My mother had a younger sister who lived less than two months. She was loved, and cherished, but for some unknown reason failed to thrive. She was buried in the same plot as her grandmother, with nothing there to indicate that she had even existed. While it’s the sad truth that countless individuals upon the earth have no graves or are buried in unmarked locations, I found myself in a position to do something for my little aunt, and had a marker prepared and set in the appropriate location.

Someday it, too, will be nothing but dust, but in the meantime those who wander Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park in Salt Lake City will be able to see and take note of her passage. And to me, that’s important.

As the title of this essay intimates, at some point – hopefully a while in the future yet – the bus will come for me. I wonder how I will be remembered? I’m an only child, and so is my wife. We have 7 kids between us, but only one remains active in our community of faith, and all are scattered around the country. It’s my intention to give my body to science² – I can see no point in paying thousands of dollars to have an old shell preserved when it might still do some good somewhere – so I don’t think I’ll have a grave anywhere, but I’d like to be memorialized in some way. A cenotaph³, perhaps? An entry over at FindAGrave? My Facebook site will hopefully be memorialized, but as we have seen, even the biggest entities don’t last forever. Even this blog, which contains many of my thoughts about the world around us, will someday go away, when the domain name is no longer renewed and WordPress is no longer paid.

Ultimately, all we are and all we did are known only to God, but our deeds in this life, like ripples in a pond, will continue to continue onwards in time through the effects of how we treated others, both for good and for ill. I can only hope that when the time comes for me to cross the river Styx and my heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at, that I will not be found wanting.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹This is a reference to a lovely and under-appreciated film starring a young Robert Downey, Jr., “Heart and Souls.”

² Unless this happens:

³A monument to someone whose remains are elsewhere

A rant against racism

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A Twitter Thread by VoteHeaux™; A creole banjee bitch from ⚜.

In the interest of keeping my blog relatively family-friendly, I have lightly bowdlerized (and edited for readability) the thread below, with full respect to the author, but if you are not offended by salty language, the effect is much more powerful. The full thread is here, with lots of additional images and links: https://x.com/voteheaux/status/1809893232416825675

Also, she has read her entire thread in a YouTube video, which brings the full impact of her outrage and disgust with the crusty, old, white guys in our government who are all hot and bothered by the fact that maybe another Black person might actually be in charge of our government. View it here: https://youtu.be/l1xP-qBf-C4

Transcript begins:

“How insane is the hate for Black people, that non-Blacks would sacrifice their daughters and sisters in order to keep power over the country out of Black hands? Sacrificing *women* isn’t that surprising, but risking fascism just to avoid a Black woman as president? My God.

A lot of these political pundits cannot be trusted to have unbiased, community or country-minded motivations nor opinions when it comes to our legislature. Neither can men of other races who clamor to be white-adjacent.

The punditry during this presidential election cycle is proof positive. White men have taken a 3 year age gap between 2 old-azz men – which has NEVER CONCERNED THEM LIKE THIS BEFORE (i.e.: Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell) and exacerbated the issue into something akin to a nuclear war threat.

(NEVER MIND THAT THE “YOUNGER” ONE OF THE 2 OLD-🤬 MEN IS AN *ACTUAL* *FACTUAL* *PROVEN* NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT, THAT SHOULD NEVER BE WITHIN 1000 FT OF THE NATION’S CAPITOL AGAIN)

The whole entire reason we have a VICE PRESIDENT is to have someone capable to step into the role of President if something, God forbid, happens to the President, or if they decide they’re done with dealing with the duties of the executive branch and wanna leave the job.

That’s the thing: IT’S A 🤬 JOB. Not a  knighthood, not a coronation, not a canonization; A 🤬🤬 JOB. Experience should count A LOT. And Joe Biden has worked in this field his entire life, through every trial life tossed his way. But here’s where Joe messed up:

After all his years on the hill, and actually applying for the top job a few times himself, he helped a Black dude get it. They punished him by being uncooperative, but he was retiring anyway and leaving public service on a high in 2016.

*sigh*

No good deed goes unpunished.

Allow me a tangent here to tell you what I know about grief: it can break you like nothing else in this world and, concurrently, it can put a battery in your back. It can make you hyper-focus and get 🤬 DONE on the days you aren’t inconsolable or in a useless crippling fog.

I have never lost my spouse. I’ve never lost a living child, let alone two. I have lost people I loved though. And when those people leave, if they ever expressed potential they see in you, it replays in your mind over and over. It compels you to want to live up to their vision.

I honestly believe that’s why  Joe Biden came back to politics. His son Beau believed he could help keep the country from falling to fascism. The country he fought for, quite possibly contracted brain cancer protecting, and died for.

Grief isn’t exclusive to death.

Biden’s living son, Hunter, has had his personal addiction struggles and bad decisions paraded across the country by bad political actors and is facing jail time all because Joe decided to take this job. NO ONE would give a flying 🤬 about Hunter’s gallivanting if Joe wasn’t Pres.

That is a grief he carries too, along with the caskets of his wife, daughter, and son. So it irks my last nerve when people harp on his age, because I have never had anything half as important to do as Joe Biden, but I know how grief has had me in a bed ridden chokehold before.

Joe Biden was born the same year as my daddy, who died in 2017. The fact that he gets up every day to run this dumpster fire; deal with idiot press; deal with insolent former coworkers on the hill; deal with the machinations of SCOTUS; deal with foreign leaders; deal with 🤬’s criticizing him, thinking he has powers he DOESN’T; deal with the damn dog-biting people, like—YOU’RE CRAZY IF YOU THINK THAT MAN IS COMPLETELY SENILE. Slower? Sure. But incapable of running the country? 🤬, get BENT. Your 🤬 couldn’t even do it WITHOUT the grief.

I’m half  Joe Biden’s age and in my grief would have probably sent drones to nuke various states by now, ON G.P. *stares at FL, MS, TX, KY, TN*

Or at the very least, I’d be punching Senators and House members who played in my face daily *stares at Joe Manchin and Lindsey Graham*

All that to say: if you think Joe Biden is incapable of doing the job, your opinion is misguided, unintelligent, not comprehensive, and quite frankly, INVALID. You are not taking the full extent of what this man deals with and has accomplished so far, into consideration. Therefore and thereto, it would behoove you to either reevaluate your opinion, or SHUT YOUR STUPID 🤬 THE ENTIRE 🤬 UP BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW WTH YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT 🤬.

But back to the point: hatred of Black people and refusing them power.

These white dudes and trash pandas have decided that Joe Biden runs the country on an island. That he couldn’t POSSIBLY have a competent staff and cabinet, let alone a whole-azz highly qualified and capable VP, so now it’s time to PANIC AND REPLACE HIM WITH ANOTHER WHITE DUDE, STAT.🙄

Because 🤬 the Black woman who is his literal, rightful successor. They would rather roll the dice on Gavin Newsom, who is hated by half his state…which would then make California, the most weighty state in the Electoral College-a swing state.

Then, they trotted out Pete Buttigieg, even though Ohio—a current swing state—incorrectly blames him for the East Palestine train derailment. Then they threw out Big Gretch from Michigan—which wouldn’t fly, but ESPECIALLY NOT OVER Kamala Harris w/the base of the party.

Pundits are supposed to take all this into consideration when forming their political opinions and offering them to the voting public, no? They’re supposed to be so dialed-in and well-informed that they consider angles laypeople don’t, right? So how’d they miss Kamala Harris?

Here’s how: They know that if  Joe Biden  is reelected and retires, Kamala Harris gets a chance at 10 years in the oval. They know if he stays and the Biden-Harris admin has another successful 4 years, it’s harder to hide their racism/sexism and justify not supporting her in 2028.

So it all boils down to the thought of Black people having power in this country SO MUCH, that they’d WILLINGLY sacrifice their own daughters’ and sisters’ health/safety to a fascist regime to stop it from happening again—ESPECIALLY w/A BLACK *WOMAN*. Vote Heaux!

My God.”

Transcript ends.

The Old Wolf has nothing else to say, she has said it all.

What has President Biden done, anyway?

Posted on by The Old Wolf

In case you were wondering. Courtesy of redditor u/backpackwayne, here is a master list of four years of astonishing accomplishments, (broken down by year) as opposed to a GOP congress’ virtually nothing except obstruction and denial. This probably won’t affect a single MAGA voter, but it’s a fascinating read anyway.

Year One

Year Two

Year Three

Year Four (updated regularly)

Get out and vote. Democrats and progressives need to turn out in Massive Numbers in November. Overwhelmingly massive numbers. Because the MAGA crowd will be voting for the Orange Catastrophe despite everything good President Biden has done, and despite everything horrific and destructive that the other guy did (and has promised more of.) Sixty years of GOP propaganda, amplified by Russian and Chinese disinformation, have turned their hatred for “weakness” into a white-hot firestorm.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Those Facebook “Sponsored” posts

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Ad-blockers and FB Purity or Social Fixer are pretty much “de rigueur” these days if you want any sort of a sane experience on Facebook. Sadly, those conveniences don’t exist for the mobile platform. And since I pretty much use my phone for everything for the most part, I’m assailed with a news feed that is about 10% things I want to see from my friends, family, and groups I like, and the rest is ads (mostly scams), promoted posts (mostly clickbait), and groups that I have no interest in (Facebook’s insane, desperate bid for more engagement – meaning more clicks and eyeballs on advertisements.)

I’ve had one or two good experiences buying things from FB ads, but I’ve been badly stung by Chinese scammers, and so I’ve sworn those transactions off. Facebook does an abominable job vetting their advertisers, and they’ll take money from anyone who has two coppers to rub togrther. Combine that with the facts that far too many Chinese businesses have all the ethics of a starving honey badger and the CCP encourages businesses to take advantage of America, and Facebook’s advertising landscape becomes worse than the lawless Old West.

But leaving the outright criminal scams aside, far too many of Facebook’s promoted posts are designed to serve up as many advertisements as possible. Look at a few examples that I’ve scraped off of Facebook just in the last two days:

Notice first of all that the entity making the post is simply linking to another website, usually one dedicated to serving advertisements and scraping information from visitors. If there’s no direct relationship between the poster and the link site, then these entities are simply functioning as affiliate marketers.

Make no mistake, some of these websites provide some interesting information and visiting them can be very entertaining, but if you do happen to click through to these websites out of curiosity, you will find one or two things that make your experience there a lot less than fun, if you’re trying to find out the story behind the ad.

Many of these sites are broken up into 50 or 60 different sub-page, so that every time you click on “next” you get a whole new crop of ads to look at. The ones that aren’t like this will have you scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until the heat death of the universe, with an advertisement inbetween each factoid. And most annoyingly, many of these lists don’t even contain anything about the image or story that got you to click in the first place, or else the hook is much less intriguing than they make it out to be.

Clickbait has been with us for a couple of decades at least. The term was coined in December 2006 by Jay Geiger in a blog post, and refers to treating internet users as prey, lured into clicking nonsensical content for the purpose of getting eyeballs on advertisements. Sadly, Facebook is one of the largest disseminators of clickbait, and recently they have taken to displaying more and more TikTok reels which, instead of being informative or entertaining, are simply more advertising.

So some might ask, in the voice of Tevye, “If it’s so annoying, why do you stay on Facebook?” Well, I stay because Facebook is my Internet home, where many of my family and friends from all over the world are found, and it’s the most convenient way of keeping in touch with them until something better comes along. Like Anatevka, it’s not much… but it’s better than nothing. That said, if there ever happens to be a better platform that doesn’t treat its user base as product to be sold, I’ll be “off like a jug handle.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

First world problems – The Progress Bar

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This is just what it says – a first-world rant. There are so many other problems in the world to worry about, but just this morning I encountered it again, and it made me realize that it’s been a burr under my saddle since the days of Windows 1.0 (and possibly even earlier, since DOS-based programs may have had earlier versions of the same thing.

So today, I just need to “reeeeee into the void,” as we say at Imgur, and then I can put the annoyance to bed and not think about it any longer.

I’m talking about the Progress Bar… you know, “a graphical user interface element that shows the progression of a task, such as a download, file transfer, or installation. It may also include a textual representation of the progress percentage.”

Like this:

Sometimes it even gives you the percent of the task completed as a number, and the better ones give you an idea of how much time is left for completion.

The idea of this is to show the user how much of the task has been done, so they have an idea of how long they have to wait, or whether they can do something else in the meantime, or go out for coffee, or whatever.

Sometimes, however, a process has several parts, and some designers like to show the completion of individual steps; there is debate out there among software designers as to whether it’s better to have one progress bar or two, like this:

Either way, really, is fine with me, as long as I have an idea of what the total job completion percentage is like.

But what really torques my cork is when a single progress bar goes all the way to the end, and then goes back to the beginning and repeats… over, and over, and over, and over again in the case of complex packages, giving the poor user absolutely no idea of when the flaming job will be done!

  • Initializing installation
  • Deleting Old Files
  • Extracting zip files
  • Installing…
  • Installing…
  • Installing…
  • Adding registry entries
  • Finishing up…

And that’s just an example. I’ve seen even more complex processes, with that blistering progress bar starting over each time, and no indication of how much is left to do!

(Image gacked from a Kaspersky website)

So the end of my rant is more of a plea than anything else: If you’re a software developer, please don’t do this! The best option is one progress bar, showing the percentage of the total job that’s complete, and (if possible), how much time is left for completion. Most users don’t care about how many steps there are, or what the installation is doing… they just want it done!

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I will not be taking question.

Another scam to watch out for

Posted on by The Old Wolf

As the internet becomes ever more complex, scammers become ever more creative. I hear far too many stories of even computer-savvy people being taken in by fraudsters, and losing substantial sums of money to these jimakplons.¹

Here’s one that I encountered recently and dove down the rabbit hole to see where it would lead.

This was a Facebook post that appeared on someone’s company page. It looks pretty realistic, as though it actually could have come from Meta. I was intrigued enough to follow that link (Kids, don’t try this at home).

I did this on my mobile device, which is less susceptible to desktop viruses. (Not totally immune, but safer.) This landing page looks OK on the surface, other than that Meta – or any other legitimate company – would not use “linkup . top” as a domain name, seen at the top of the screen.

Not sure? This is what I got when I visited that website from my home computer:

Hmm… that’s a pretty good indicator that you don’t want to be anywhere near this website, because you are likely to get bad software (ransomware, trojans, key-loggers, etc) injected onto your computer. But for the sake of public education, here we go:

Also claims to be from Meta, but again the URL at the top of the screen is “old . ruvix . com,” which Malwarebytes blocks as a Phishing site.

Second screen, where they scammers begin to gather your information, starting with that highly-coveted birthdate, and a phone number.

No matter what the victim enters, they get this screen, ostensibly to obtain their Facebook UserID and Password. No matter what is typed, an error message is given saying that the password was incorrect, and asks for the same information again. It does not matter what is entered – the second try will always succeed.

This is a fairly new one on me. Unless I’m dealing with a Nigerian scammer, I’ve never had a phishing website ask for a picture of my ID. OK, I’m game:

I’m sure the scammers had fun with this one. (I obscured the SS Number just in case it was real – scammers can use the Social Security Numbers of dead people just as easily as living ones for their nefarious purposes.)

At this point, the page actually returns you to a real Meta page, and the scammers trot off happily into the sunset to use the victim’s information for whatever evil they have planned.

Be oh, so careful out there. Practice safe computing, and protect your vulnerable loved ones.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ To call someone a “jimakplon” in Benin is a terrible insult to one’s parents. It was defined thusly over at “Friends of Bonou”:

Question: Actually this reminds me: it is also true about an insult that Europeans would find laughably mild and that is really serious in Benin: it is when you are accused of being impolite: You loose face totally if you are insulted like that, apparently: Why?
Answer: Ah. It is because “Impolite” is a translation of a Fon word, “jimakplon.” = “Ji” means “born,” “ma” means “not,” and “kplon” means “teach.” So what “jimakplon” really means is “born but not taught.” You were born into this world but didn’t receive any social education. So this is serious because it is an insult against the parents of the person you’re talking to: “Impolite” is a slur on the parents of the person you’re insulting, who didn’t give them a social education, and this is a BIG face loss!

It’s a term I find entirely appropriate to describe these ignorant scammers.

Mission Triumphant

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Mission Triumphant
by Joan Bills

At a council assembled in Heaven,
Where presided the great magistrate,
Came the spirits in anticipation
To make plans for their second estate.
Each was given his own special mission,
And a talent to use and display;
And with joy each received his assignment
With instructions to keep faith and pray.

Now one spirit transcended the others
So outstanding in talent and grace;
So majestic in stature and bearing
With a light in his angelic face.
And the magistrate turned to address him:
“Lo, your mission is unlike the rest;
They are going to earth to be tested,
But, my son, you are going to test.

You will sift out the hearts of my people,
You will test them for true charity;
What is done to the least of my Children,
That is the measure they mete out to me.
You will challenge the faith of your loved ones,
And the stranger you meet on life’s way;
You will undergo great tribulation,
And your spirit will feel deep dismay.

When your sojourn on earth is completed,
And your message imparted to men,
Then, as humble and pure as you left Me,
You’ll return to my presence again.”
For a moment the spirit was troubled,
Ere the conflict within him had won,
Then he spoke, “I am willing, Dear Master,
For Thy will and not mine shall be done.”

Now the time had arrived for departure,
And the spirits were ready to go;
But one paused at the throne of the Father
And spoke in a voice sweet and low,
“Hold my hand so I won’t be afraid, Lord,
I am eager to go down to earth.”
So, with God’s hand in his, he departed,
And entered the channels of birth.

On a bright golden day in October
All our family was radiant with joy,
For heaven had sent a choice spirit
In the form of dear baby boy.
How excited I was on that morning
As I ran to my schoolmates and cried,
“Oh, guess what, I’ve a new baby brother!”
And my small heart was bursting with pride.

How his hair was the color of Autumn,
He had brown eyes and rose-petal skin;
Through those eyes we were often permitted
A quick glimpse of the angel within.
Thus, joy lingered awhile in our cottage,
And my father would whistle a tune.
My mother would scour and polish
And would smile at her baby and croon.

Happiness was short-lived in our household,
For grave sorrow stole in at the door.
My father’s gay whistling faltered,
And my mother’s sweet voice sang no more.
Our baby was entering boyhood,
And his strong body grew as it should,
But the mind did not function correctly,
And we soon knew that it never would.

For the rest of his life he was destined
To remain a perpetual child;
He would laugh and then cry like a baby,
With emotions subdued, and then wild.
My dear parents dreams were now shattered,
And their fond hopes reverted to grief;
They discarded the plans for his future,
And their heartache could find no relief.

But as time passed we learned to accept it;
We would all laugh together and play;
And my brother was petted and pampered,
And usually given his way.
And his physical growth still continued
All according to natural plan,
And his body received strength and passion
While developing into a man.

And society must have its way now,
So our darling was taken away.
He was placed in a state institution
Where the rest of his life he must stay.
I prayed day and night for my brother,
And in mercy, God answered my prayer,
For one evening I knelt at my bedside
And received inspiration while there.

My dear brother and those who live with him
Are fulfilling a mission sublime,
And they will return to the Father
To receive crowns of glory, in time.
In the meantime, they’re not being tested–
It is WE who are taking the test;
And in serving the least of God’s Children
We truly are serving the best.

How dare we presume to neglect them,
And leave them alone to their fate.
Those Children should dwell in a palace,
To be served by mankind while they wait.
We should deem it an honor to know them,
And to do everything that we can
To comfort, to love and protect them,
They should not be forgotten by man.

Even though there are those who will shun them,
There are those who will bless them with love;
And I, somehow, am sure that our actions
Are now being recorded above.
So I no longer fear for my brother,
For I know, though I don’t understand,
That he’ll travel life’s highway in safety,
For his God is still holding his hand.

The Old Wolf has spoken