Month: January 2024

And I personally would round up some sackcloth to wear and start in with self-flagellation this very afternoon if I thought that was all there was to the story. But wait … how many Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, or Gen whatevers do you know whose lifestyles and choices are more environmentally sound than those made by the “boomers?” I see little difference between the consumer habits of different generations.

It’s one big boat and we’re all in it, friends. If people want to argue about seat assignments I won’t interfere, as long as they pull on their oars.

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From The New Yorker

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HOPEFUL SIGNS THAT THE APOCALYPSE MAY NOT BE UPON US AFTER ALL

• The noxious censorship battalions traveling under the name of Moms For Liberty may at last be losing ground and influence. School boards and librarians aren’t caving like they used to do. BTW, the name of this group is right-wing newspeak pure and simple.
• E. Jean Carroll’s day in court was a huge win and she gets 83 million dollars from her rapist. Yay for the lady!
• Lauren Boebert’s campaign is having many difficulties which surprisingly don’t involve the fondling of her male companions in public places. The other wolves in the Republican primary pack have tasted blood and are eager for more. Howls of “carpetbagger” fill the air on each full moon.
• The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre is being tried for corruption involving his misuse of millions of dollars of association funds. Other good news on that front is that the NRA itself is losing membership and revenues are dropping. For way too long the NRA has vigorously opposed sane discussion on how to work together to deal with the issue of firearms.

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From The New Yorker

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We’re halfway through winter and I’ve been barely blooded by it. Still have all my fingers and toes, no visits to emergency rooms have been necessary, and my mood is not nearly as sullen as usual by this time of year (I do not have independent confirmation of this last point). It certainly doesn’t hurt that each day has a few minutes more of sunshine in it than the one before.

We’re planning a trip to the Midwest this summer to connect with family, and I’m looking forward to that. Most of our trips are by car, which is my preferred travel mode.

I like air travel less each year. Even before doors started flying off airplanes in mid-flight the problem is that what used to be a pleasant adventure had become a slog involving being bullied by TSA tyrants, bamboozled by airlines, and shoehorned into seating spaces more suited to something the size of a gerbil.

Not to mention that those sleek but self-destructing aircraft are responsible for 3% of carbon emissions worldwide. Not a good thing, that.

Much of the romance of flight has definitely been lost. A favorite genre of old films is those involving the early days of flying. Movies like Wings, for instance, with intrepid men and women all over the place, fluttering about in cloth-covered aircraft .

Never mind that Wings (1927) was made even before my time, and was a silent film as well. It was all about the planes, man, the planes … and the freedom of the skies.

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We’ve not talked much here about mindfulness, but I wanted to alert you all to an opportunity. Sharon Salzberg is offering what she calls a 28 day challenge. Basically an online meditation course, free of charge (although there are instructions as to how to donate if you are so moved).

She’s an excellent teacher, and one of the premier American lecturers in mindfulness meditation and Buddhism.

The link to the series is here: https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/real-happiness-challenge

The course starts on February first, and January 31 is the last day to sign up.

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I mentioned the movie The Holdovers a couple of days back, but neglected to include one of my favorite lines from the film. I was reminded of it this morning as I slogged through CNN online where they were interviewing Cluck voters in New Hampshire.

(This does not mean that I think all Cluck voters can be described in that way. Not my intention at all. I think that there might have been some selection and editing going on because all of those being interviewed on CNN this morning … well … every one of them could have used a boot check.)

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There aren’t too many things that instantly get me riled up. Well, that’s not actually true, there are quite a few of them, come to think of it. One of them is stories about infectious diseases making comebacks, diseases for which we have effective immunizations.

It’s one of the most harmful things that can happen when politics intersects with public health. Politics can be a mindless beast that thrives on controversy and vituperation, and we saw so much of this during the pandemic years that it became an experience painful enough to sear itself into my shrinking brain.

At the onset of the Covid 19 story, I thought there would be a period of fear, confusion, and a lot of deaths at first, but in a year or two a vaccine might be produced that would carry the day for us. I was wrong twice.

First, I did not realize that there was new technology for vaccine production just waiting for such an opportunity to be used, and a vaccine was put into play within months rather than years. (That seemed miraculous to me, who once had waited 25 years for the chickenpox vaccine to come to where pediatricians had access to it for their patients.)

And then the second mistake in my prediction. Some of the meanest-spirited and most ignorant mouths in America opened in a collective yawp and instead of having a good chance of throttling this viral invader, we found a large contingent of our “leaders” shouting down the scientific community in the absolutely most witless and venal sort of way, attacking those workers who were doing their best to protect us against this threat.

You know the rest. We are still dealing with Covid and we still have a large number of people who refuse to be vaccinated and that are providing the population needed to keep the disease going.

Meanwhile, those citizens who are not suckered in by the mountebanks and the politicians are still getting their shots and are still doing much better as a result.

When you read the stories of people over these past several years who are literally dying of Covid-related disease but refuse to accept that they even have it because they have been told that the whole thing is a hoax … well … what can I say? The gap here seems almost unbridgeable.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H.L. Mencken

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What got me going on this rant this morning (Thursday) was a story in the Times of New York about measles making a comeback. Vaccination rates have fallen in Europe to the point where it was absolutely possible to predict that an outbreak would happen soon, and it appears to be doing just that. No surprise at all. 

Viruses have no brains, the only thing they seek is to reproduce, and the only thing needed for that to happen is opportunity. Too many parents have listened to the anti-vaxxers and now … the predictable whirlwind is being reaped. It is children who will suffer, children who depended on grownups to do the right thing for them.

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As a child I had measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough, and polio. If you had told my mother that there was a vaccine available for any of these and did she want her child to receive it she would have laughed at you, because the answer was so obvious. OF COURSE I WANT MY CHILD TO BE IMMUNIZED, she would have said, because these diseases were not hypotheticals to be argued about over afternoon coffee, they were potential killers that were right then tearing up the family three houses down from ours.

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Here’s the good news. 

Thanks to vaccines, measles, rubella, and polio have officially been eliminated in the United States. But that could change due to imported cases of these diseases and low vaccination rates. None of these diseases have been eliminated globally, and there have been measles outbreaks and rubella cases in the United States in recent years. Efforts to increase vaccination rates are critical for maintaining elimination of these diseases.

Health.gov

Here’s the worrisome news. Immunization rates for these diseases are below the 95% threshold necessary to eliminate the possibility of epidemics. Which means that should a case be imported from another part of the world, we are becoming a fertile ground for that virus to grow in.

In the political climate of today, where scientific ignorance is not only bliss, but often rewarded by election to public office, I don’t see these numbers changing any time soon. I earnestly hope that I am wrong in this, and that we drop the glorification of nonsense and the lines start to go around the block at the immunization clinics. 

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Drove to Grand Junction to see the movie American Fiction, having decided that although Paradise is 99% perfect, part of that 1% that is missing is in the film department. To make it short, AF was a fine movie, and Jeffrey Wright got his chance to be the lead and really show us what he could do.

Since we hit “Junction” with some time to kill, Robin and I walked over to a strip mall where there was a store she wanted to visit. I forget the name of it, but it was devoted entirely to cosmetics, and to a person like myself – it was a foreign country. Bewildering. Not sure how a real customer could ever navigate such a place.

But I was fascinated by how you could get a cream, balm, ointment, or oil for basically any part of the body. The question I kept asking myself was is this variety really necessary?

My insecurities started to mount, as they always do when I find that I’ve been unaware and ignoring something completely that might be important to my life.

I wondered … do I need some B-Tight? Have time and gravity been doing anything back there that I can’t see but everybody else can and that needs my attention? Am I too late in discovering this product? Are there limits to the power of the unguent and I must now remain un-lifted and un-firmed for the remainder of my days?

It was all too depressing, and I had to leave the store. There are some questions that I am just not brave enough to hear the answers to.

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A piece in the Times of New York entitled Train Yourself To Always Show Up deserves mention, I think. It tells the story of an old Judaic practice. There are many good lessons here, and the author writes so well that I will only quote from it and not thin it out with my scratchings.

A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.

Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

Reading this I became interested in the author, who I found out was a rabbi of a Jewish community named Ikar, located out there in wicked, wicked Los Angeles. Going to Ikar’s website led me to a recorded talk she gave, and I am glad that I took the time in the early morning hours and listened. Really, it is amazing what listening can do for a person … perhaps I should do it more often. But how to do this when I have so many wise things to say … a puzzlement … indeed … when my mouth is open my ears seem to close up.

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The title of George Will’s column in the Washington Post on 1/16/24 really says it all, at least for him:

Iowa nudged the nation closer to a revolting rematch next fall

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While the title of Will’s op/ed is catchy and may be the opinion of scads of folks in both parties, it also raises some questions that perplex a certified moderate and highly sensible individual like myself.

• Is this the best that a country of 300 million can come up with as choices, or is it finally revealing that both parties have become little more than shiny but vacant shells of what they portray themselves to be?
• What if President Biden had spent time finding a good and solid replacement for himself, and then began working for the election of that person? Think what a service he would have done for his country, instead of dragging us kicking and nauseous and screaming into a Who’s more senile, you or me? contest.

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At long last our local theatre was showing a film that was not based on a comic book. So of course we went to the movies.

The film was “The Holdovers.” The action took place at a posh prep school in Massachusetts during the Christmas break. Held over at the school are a cook who is grieving her loss of a son, a curmudgeon of a professor, and a snotty and over-privileged kid.

It’s a story you’ve seen parts of before, but a story is all in the telling, and here the telling is very good.

In fact, Paul Giammati’s pipe-smoking professor was done so well that I began to get the itch to go pipe shopping, after quitting smoking thirty-plus years ago.

I thought … seriously … if I added a major vice at this age … wouldn’t be much of a big deal at all, would it? Of course I’d have to puff away outdoors, and not in my comfortable den like the professor did. Nahhh. I forgot about the coughing and the stained teeth and the burned tongues.

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Sometimes like this morning I am overcome. Images, regrets, confusions of the past wash over me like a monstrous wave as when the Atlantic Ocean shows its truest face, black and cold and green and terrible. I am drowning before I know what is happening and can get my defenses up. There is sand in my hair and tears and saltwater in my mouth and I am swept from my chair with time to take only one long breath before I wash up against the wall and then the wave recedes, leaving me gasping and shivering.

I think … what a small thing I am to have worn so completely through my welcome here on earth. 

And then I wonder, what’s for breakfast?

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[As I post this it is one o’clock on a Sunday morning and my refrigerator just sent me a message that it is quitting as of
right this minute, and immediately after I read the manual in order to interpret the error code on the appliance’s door,
our older cat walked over to where I was sitting and threw a couple of ounces of his last meal onto the rug in my office. 
Things come in threes … right?]

Finally we have some snow that will last a while. Just a couple of inches fell but the weather has turned colder. Single digits recently. Nothing remarkable. Winter.

Not enough on the ground yet for XC skiing here in the valley. There are more reliable conditions up at Black Canyon National Park and on the Grand Mesa. Because of knee surgeries we’ve skipped skiing for two winters in a row now, so we’re way rustier than usual.

The snow conditions on the Grand Mesa are uniformly as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been. You ski in mixed evergreen/deciduous forests in areas where the nearest snowmobiles are miles away. A local club maintains excellent groomed trails, and they accept free will donations from non-members.

There are hundreds of lakes on the Grand Mesa, but Robin and I generally steer clear of them unless we’ve been assured by a panel of at least three people that there is adequate ice thickness. In 2019 there were two drownings in lakes on the Mesa when incautious people went through the ice.

One of the nicest things about winter on the Grand Mesa is that it keeps the mosquitoes down. There are still a few around, but only the biggest and the strongest can handle the cold weather. These hardy bloodsuckers are about the size of robins, and make a sound like a Stuka dive bomber as they come at you. Fortunately they are slow and awkward fliers that can fairly easily be stabbed with one’s ski poles.

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A pathetic thing to watch is the belief of the Cluckists that they are following in the train of the Glorious Orange One, and when he comes to power they and theirs will be well cared for as The Second Coming starts to roll.

The thing is that there is no train, but only a heap of bodies, including theirs, that he is treading on to get what he wants.

If they would only take a step back and look at the damaged followers he has already left behind, licking wounds and mourning damaged careers … but they don’t, or won’t, do this. It couldn’t happen to them, they think, as they mortgage their integrity, common sense, and occasionally the family farm.

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I have been told that I sorely neglect whole genres of music in what I post here on the blog. I freely admit it. Actually there are musicians and types of music that I don’t like at all, some that I dip into and take what I admire, and some that I fully enjoy. The latter variety is what I usually post.

This day I am going to share a piece of classical music by a guy named Vivaldi. It’s the violin concerto Winter, from his larger work The Four Seasons. To introduce it I have invited a guest post-er named Chad Griffin-Porter-Theroux to describe the chosen piece. Take it away, amigo.

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Thanks, Jon, this is an easy one to talk about because so many people know these works of Vivaldi that they are almost classical pop. His “The Four Seasons” is a set of violin concertos, each representing a season. It is renowned for its vivid musical depictions of nature and is a baroque masterpiece.

“Winter” is captivating with its brisk, icy atmosphere. The violin’s depiction of cold winds and the warmth of the fireplace creates a vivid musical experience. Vivaldi skillfully captures the essence of darkness in “Winter.” The haunting melodies and intense passages evoke a sense of cold and solitude.

The opening movement resembles a shivering person, stamping his feet in rhythm to stay warm. The middle movement portrays the pleasure of getting warm inside through a crackling fire. The final movement offers people outdoors walking down icy paths, while people inside houses feeling the relentless chill finding its way inside. 

ChadGPT 1/10/2024

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(BTW – if I remember to do it, I plan to play the other seasons when their time comes around.)

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Bradley Cooper starred, directed, produced, and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie. This guy is moving up to be one of the more creative ones in this industry. A couple of years back he remade the movie A Star Is Born, and darned if that wasn’t awfully good as well.

There was some mild controversy a few months ago because his makeup preparation for his scenes included a bigger nose. Its purpose – to make him look more like the composer, and it did its job. The problem was that quite a bit of antisemitic cartooning over the years Jews has portrayed them as people with exaggeratedly big noses. 

There’s a particularly good review in The Saturday Evening Post that you could check out if you’re interested. As the quote below indicates, there is one scene that is like nothing I’ve seen before. Outstanding.

As memorable as Maestro is as a whole, the sequence that will follow you for weeks is one that comes near the end of the film, as Lenny conducts Mahler’s Resurrection at Ely Cathedral. It’s a legendary moment in 20^th century music history: You’ll find the entire original concert on YouTube, and it is clear Cooper studied every frame of Bernstein’s performance: that great head of hair flying, the rivulets of sweat on his brow, the conductor nearly bursting from his tuxedo, the Incredible Hulk of classical music.

Bill Newcott, Saturday Evening Post, December 21,2023.

Actually, if every movie were as engrossing and took as much energy to watch as this one did, I would soon be exhausted, depleted. So it’s good, I guess, that there are so many lesser films out there to act as diversions.

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This morning, like a burst of lightning, a plan came to me for dealing with the ongoing mess at our southern border. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t occurred to anybody before. We need to take a cue from Vladimir Putin (an unsavory source of inspiration, I’ll give you that) and annex Mexico.

There is ample precedent in that we already took 55% of that country back in 1854, and then just for good measure we invaded them one more time in 1914. So after the annexation – presto! Our present way-too-long border becomes history, and the much more manageable one with Belize and Guatemala on the other end appears.

Mexico could become our fifty-first state, instantly reducing Texas to an also-ran in the size department, and we all know that Texas needs some serious shaking up. Oh sure, there would be commentaries in the world’s media, but the attention span of humans has become so short that within a week the globe’s attention would turn somewhere else.  In fact, if we could time the annexation to the opening ceremonies of the World Soccer Cup Finals it might not be noticed at all.

Just think how happy we would make the FBI. They’ve not had a solid enemy they could get their teeth into since the Mafia became a television series. We’d be giving them the Christmas present that keeps on giving with the newly-opened opportunity to work on taking down the cartels. 

All those presently seamy and troubled towns like Tijuana, Matamoros, and Ciudad Juarez would have the chance now to become gentrified. It shouldn’t take too long to push out the present impoverished residents and replace them with a more affluent population looking for sunny places for their third home.

I think I’ll collect my thoughts and put them in a letter to our senators and representatives in Congress. I probably won’t send a copy to Rep. Boebert who I understand still can’t find Mexico on a map.

And then I’m signing up for Spanish classes.

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From The New Yorker Archives

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This is not unusual, since I have long ago discovered that my education has been truly a hit and miss affair. The number of worthy books that I not only haven’t read but am not even aware of must be awfully long since hardly a week goes by that I am not put on notice of my deficiencies.

But why be excited about Pedro Paramo? Because it was the novel that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write his beautiful One Hundred Years of Solitude, that’s why. And One Hundred Years of Solitude has two distinctions for me personally. It opened my eyes to the wonders of magical realism, and is the only book that no one I recommended it to ever finished. Most of them grumble and turn away whenever I ask how they are coming with their reading. Some of them have stopped returning my calls.

The world continually surprises me.

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Yesterday a small amount of snow fell, just enough to cover the ground completely and put our cats into a funk. They hate stepping into anything that gets their paws wet. At such times the usage of the litter-box increases greatly, as does the chore (for me) of keeping it presentable.

I haven’t been keeping up with how the ski areas in Colorado are doing regarding snow depths. My interest in this sport fell off years ago when the rituals of wearing those uncomfortable boots and standing in lift lines began to tip the scales toward “What am I doing here?”

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From The New Yorker Archives

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It’s always hazardous to have litmus tests for voting, and letting them be the kicker in one’s decision. It’s a closed-minded thing to do. But here I am suggesting one for you to consider. Any candidate who doesn’t promise to wear themselves to a nubbin through working on climate change from the day they take office should not be considered, no matter what other opinions or positions they hold. If we don’t solve the big one, arguing about the others becomes sort of moot.

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Cooking rice should be easy, right? It’s only a smidge more complicated than boiling water. You put dry rice in a pot, add the suggested amount of water, and turn on the burner. One problem is that you are sort of locked into the area near the stove to watch for spillovers, scorching, and other minor kitchen catastrophes. You also have to watch to see when the rice is at the point of tenderness that you wanted in the first place and has not moved into the area of unattractive mush. 

Enter rice cookers. You add rice and water, push START, and off you go to take a nap while it creates a perfect mound of fluffy grains ready for whatever you want to do with them. More than a decade ago, when I decided that such a cooker was worth having around and taking up space in the pantry, I scorned the cheapest versions and went with an upscale model. More expensive means better, more sophisticated, bigger smiles on the cook’s face … right?

Wrong. Although the internet suggested that the higher-end machine would be a much better choice, when it was delivered I discovered that the English portion of the owner’s manual was written by someone who was obviously an extraterrestrial. It was less than useless, because whenever I tried to read it I ended up irritated and unhappy. Through trial and error I figured out how to turn the device on and cook some rice, but I never discovered what all that extra money I’d paid would do for me because one day in a fury I took it out into the driveway and reduced it to rubble it with a sixteen pound sledge. Then I started a campfire with the manual. 

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From The New Yorker archives

As I wrote the above entry I was reminded of Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the topics touched on was the art of writing technical manuals, and how important (and rare) it was to find really excellent ones as you journeyed through life. Many of these were opaque, some were foolish, some were actually dangerous. 

When I was involved in teaching medical students, I structured my lectures and discussions along lines similar lines to what he had suggested. Instead of taking everything I knew about a subject and compressing it into a sixty-minute diatribe, I took a step back and asked the questions:

• What did I want the student to take away from spending that hour with me? 
• How could I communicate this in the clearest way? 
• Since I wasn’t really an “expert” but a generalist, what was worthwhile about my perspective?

 Once I had answered these questions for myself, I could then work backward and build that hour of educational interaction. I used much the same approach to patient care in my office. For example if the child had an ear infection, and required medication as therapy, what did the parent need to know to feel competent and to follow my instructions?

• How to store the medication I’d prescribed
• How and when to give the medication
• What and when to look for in improvement
• When to call back if things didn’t seem to be getting better
• Why followup was a good idea

Unfortunately I had to learn the value of such a list piecemeal, often by making the error of thinking that somehow the parent would absorb everything I said and remember it entirely when they got home, and had also spent two years in a medical education setting before becoming a mom or a dad.

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I have become a winter wimp. I’ve reached the point where temperature, wind velocity, humidity, and depth of snow cover are all fit into a formula that decides whether I will go out for a romp. Most of the time my formula tells me to sit in my recliner, pull an afghan up around my neck, and stare out the window in the most creative manner that I can muster.

I don’t know when or how this happened. I tried to look up the subject in Egregious. P. Gallbladder’s immense book, How To Explain Everything That Ever Happens To You. Although the book is 2100 pages long and can give you a hernia just moving it from place to place, there is a common thread that runs through the entire tome. 

Everything nasty, painful, awkward, troublesome, messy, and embarrassing happens to a person exactly one hundred times more often when they become a senior citizen. The term “senior citizen” is actually a euphemism for Dartboard of the Universe.

Therefore, I’ve given Robin a large pointed stick and permission to jab me with it whenever I pause at the open front door and start to claim an infirmity of any sort at all as a reason to stay indoors. I do have one small concern, and that is the gleam that came into that worthy woman’s eyes when I mentioned the word “jab.”

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From The New Yorker archives

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In a well-written article on owls in our local paper today, the writer used the phrase “ethical hunter” when referring to himself. These words appear to be used by hunters as a salve for their consciences when at some level they sense that killing another sentient being for fun says something about who they are that needs defending.

I googled the phrase and found this interesting piece on the subject, written from a philosopher’s perspective.

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Ally and Kyle were guests at Basecamp this week. Entertaining in January does not play to the strengths of life here in Paradise, but they operate a small farm, and winter is their “free” time. In spite of cloudy skies and chilly temperatures, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. 

Their farm grows vegetables for market and local restaurants, and if you want to see how beautiful a well-tended garlic plant can look like, schedule a visit. 

During one conversation, the subject of the “Barbie” movie came up, and when I learned they hadn’t seen it, I wished that somehow we could have set it up. Because it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been to accept that that there was so much meat there in what could have been only a superficial film comedy. This clip is part of what I am talking about.

I find myself wishing there was such a movie for men. Not to take away anything from the struggles that women go through, but they are not the only ones living with unreasonable expectations and impossible contradictions. When Buddhists talk about suffering that we cause for ourselves, this is some of what they mean. 

Knowing how difficult life can be, why are we not more supportive of one another? Why should anyone have to deal with low self-esteem when this is a concept created entirely from whole cloth? On a ferociously crowded planet, why is loneliness so pervasive? 

You can play life as a zero-sum game, but you only have to take a glance at this morning’s newspaper to see where this approach has gotten us. There are other ways to live. 

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It’s January of 1970. I’m stationed in Omaha, Nebraska with the US Air Force. When I arrived at Offutt AFB in late July, I replaced a man who had been only a year ahead of me in my pediatric residency. We seemed about the same size, so I bought all of his uniforms. Turned out that I was a teensy bit taller than he was, but the USAF didn’t care if my pants were slightly of what used to be called the “high-water” variety.

The war in Viet Nam was still cooking awfully well, and although I seemed relatively safe in Nebraska, where no Viet Cong had been seen in months, there were never any guarantees in the armed forces in wartime. There were 37 draftee physicians at that hospital, and we knew that any one of us could be picked up and deposited in Southeast Asia if a need was felt. It happened twice to guys who were serving there with me.

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Earlier in the week I had read about a new album done by Simon and Garfunkel. Up to that time, I knew them only for the tune Sounds of Silence. But this new effort of theirs was getting raves, so I bought the album, and one icy afternoon I finally had time to put it on a turntable for a listen. The album title was Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I positively loved it.

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For the next couple of years it was in constant rotation at our casa. It has held up well, and when I put it on yesterday I felt that old connection. I remembered how it had cut through the gloom I had felt in 1970, serving during a war I knew was the result of a series of bad choices by our government. Lethally bad choices. 

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Of all the ballads I’ve listened to in my life, there is none that I have liked better than Simon and Garfunkel’s version of The Boxer. Its durability is revealed by the scores of covers out there, and that they each reveal the core of truth in the lyrics in their own way. A song of the human spirit, and a view that I happen to hold. We are a mongrel lot, we humans, but we are an absolute bugger to completely beat down.

… Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his pain
I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains …

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Here’s an a cappella version from England.

A version done by Portuguese musicians.

Waylon Jennings does a fine country-western version.

It’s all in how you tell the story, non?

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One Sunday morning at the Unitarian Church in Omaha NE, there was a part of the service where members of the congregation were given the opportunity to share. I had to miss that particular meeting because of being on call, but when a fellow stood up and said he had puppies to share, my family voted to accept his offer.

She turned out to be an excellent and well-behaved member of the family. Maybe the best-behaved of all of us, actually. She had one quirk, and we have no idea why this was so, but she only tolerated people with fair skins. There was a dark-skinned meter reader who came to the house periodically and we had to bring the dog in and put her in a room until he had left because she would go into a fury. 

And a young boy in the neighborhood had a hereditary liver disease which made him perpetually jaundiced, which also put him on Lady’s short list of people I might very well bite. Whenever Peter was nearby we were especially watchful.

When we lived in Buffalo NY there was a power line that reached from the alley to our home, and which passed through the branches of a huge butternut tree. A squirrel would regularly traverse that line from the alley as far as the tree to gather nuts, and Lady would run back and forth beneath the line, barking as the rodent made its rounds. She was frustrated every day that this happened, until about a week before we moved out of that house. When the squirrel made a misstep and fell to the ground, where Lady waited. 

End of story.

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