Hebron Crossroads 7-11-04
By Jeff Gill

Next Saturday, July 17, Licking Baptist Church on Beaver Run Road will hold a “Summer Fun Festival” for the community. From 9 am to 5 pm they plan games, music, food, door prizes, and activities for all ages at their new worship center west of Canyon Road on the south side of Beaver Run Road.
A craft show will be part of the event, says Mark King, and you can call him at 928-4618 for more info. Lonnie Aleshire is pastor, and I’ll bet he’d love to see you at church on Sunday, too! But this “Summer Fun Festival” is simply an event open to all for fun and fellowship.
As you drive out to Licking Baptist, it’s time for my annual note about “corn corners” in the Hebron Crossroads area. “Knee high by the Fourth of July” long ago became a bit of an anachronism in this modern age of hybrids and early planting; knee high on a giraffe, maybe. As high as an elephant’s eye? You got it now, and not just in Oklahoma.
For all of us, farmers and non-farmers particularly, this means that some stretches of road and a number of intersections will suddenly undergo a dramatic change in visual terrain. A spot where you could see for miles can be a blind spot, screened by a thick curtain of corn stalks, even as our mind still thinks “bump the brake and floor the gas.”
Since it happens just a few weeks a year, most of us don’t remember well how this can shape our landscape. Keep it in mind, and be careful out there, OK?

Recuperating from my combo elbow fracture/surgery/ghastly flu bug, coffee has spent some time off my list, an experience normally restricted to alternate Lenten seasons.
What my stomach has more happily tolerated is tea, and Earl Grey in particular has hit what little spot I still had. Twinings Earl Grey (I’m sure the brand Jean-Luc Picard drinks on the Enterprise, lo these many centuries ahead) is still in the dull yellow and dark brown trimmed box I first saw in a college care package decades ago. There was some measure of comfort just in seeing that yellow rectangle and particular typeface.
It got me to thinking about colors and packaging and food, and how we’ve gone from making our mental food associations with particular strong individual colors – rich green corn stalks, deep blue blueberries, bright red tomatoes – to packaging choices of more elaborate color schemes.
Brown wrapping with orange accents says Heath bar from across a room, and makes my tongue think of toffee. Honey yellow and bright yellow on a tall box says Cheerios, and you can almost taste the oats before you open the box, but white background with red says to me, anyhow, Special K.
Particular color pairings have been so effectively conditioned into some of us that. . .well, it doesn’t matter if the ad meant something else or if I’m looking into a toy box for blocks, but if I see turquoise and orange, I think fried clams at HoJo’s: don’t you?
Do you have color/food associations? Is this a quirk of the Gill hardwiring, or do certain flavors leap to mind when you see certain color combos? Zip off your thoughts to disciple@voyager.net, and we’ll print a few.

This Sunday night, on PBS, “A Thief of Time” airs on Mystery. It marks the third time an attempt has been made to film a Tony Hillerman novel. Proof that movie making is an art, not a science, the wonderful mysteries Hillerman has written set in some of America’s most beautiful landscapes, the desert Southwest, and with a central role to two Navajo Tribal Police officers giving a natural conflict between modern and traditional life, have been in their first two movie versions. . .awful. “The Dark Wind” was almost unwatchable, and “Skinwalkers” had to be inexplicable to someone who hadn’t read the book.
The trailer on WOSU looks good, but we’ve all been burned by those, haven’t we? I recommend giving it a chance, though, since the material – book and setting – is so rich and marvelous, and the actors starting with Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn look well cast and intriguing.
Better yet, if you haven’t built up a backlog on your summer reading pile yet, may I recommend a few Tony Hillerman mysteries? If you’ve never read any, I envy your ability to read them for the first time; I can assure you that they reward re-reading, too.

Jeff Gill is pastor of Hebron Christian Church and would love to visit the Colorado Plateau again; if you have other books to recommend as substitutes for vacations away or news of local interest, call 928-4066 or e-mail disciple@voyager.net.