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Day’s Verse:
What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source of your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel.
James 4:1-2
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What is the smallest-sized purchase are you ashamed to use a credit card on? In London I used a credit card for a £1 purchase. Here in Worcester I once paid $1.26 at a drug store with a credit card. Have you stooped that low, or lower?

Yesterday Ian and I perambulated around Worcester in the deliciously 50° weather. The sun shone, the breeze blew, I dusted off my much neglected camera, and we set off. We walked in the opposite direction of WPI, being tired of crossing Highland Street (an awkward proposition except on Sundays, when no cars seem to venture out before noon). This led us to a part of Worcester we had never walked through before and we found ourselves amazed to be walking by the residence of somebody we knew from First Alliance Church. We hurried by but did not fail to marvel at the maintenance of the homes nearby—it looked almost as if residents of the area cared about their living conditions.

Then, a few steps on, we found ourselves back in the squalor of WPI. Plastic bags scuttled across the street in wind that shook dead, bare bushes. Piles of last autumn’s leaves mingled with this year’s garbage. We experienced dead cars and squirrels and screaming children and booming Latino music and paint-peeling eight-family hovels and highly questionable used car dealerships and crumbling brick walls and boarded-over front doors and packed-hard dirt and windblown road sand and filth-covered melting snow piles and dead, faded cloth flowers and cracked pots and broken whiskey bottles and derelict mail advertisements.

And then we were back on Park Ave, walking across a swarming Elm Park—every low-income parent with children seemed to come out into the sunshine and goose poop and mucky mud—and up William Street to Lancaster Street. Thence to our rather cluttered apartment. It felt good to perambulate once again, breathing free air without freezing our ears and noses in the process.