Melons & Motels

Melon rant. Today Robin and I are eating and enjoying a cantaloupe that is supreme. Sweet and so tender you could eat it without teeth. Easily an 8 on a 10 scale … maybe a 9.

It set me off on thinking about melons in general. First of all, when I was a child I ate as a child, and watermelons were not just one thing but the only thing. Canteloupe (whose name I first learned as muskmelon) was a definite number two on the list and I thought of it as grownup food, which meant I couldn’t imagine why anybody would put it in their mouth. Somehow this got reversed and it has been many years since I’ve enjoyed a watermelon. I’ve eaten some, but they seemed pale imitations of the ones that I remember.

Honeydew melons … what can I say? Are they food? Should we be eating them? In all of their appearances in restaurant servings of “fruit” as a menu choice I have never eaten one morsel that made me wonder where the rest of it was so that I could finish it off myself. They seem to be the melon equivalent of a Delicious apple (which of course is not delicious at all and barely an apple to boot).

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From The New Yorker

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Awright now, here’s my Tedeschi/Trucks Band fix for the day. If there is anything that can put a smile on my naturally morose countenance it is seeing excellent musicians obviously having fun playing excellent music. And the audience in this video includes Eric Clapton and Bill Murray, who seem to feel the same way about it all. A day brightener.

If there are any Cluck-ites within hearing distance when you are listening it is possible that they may find the naturally downturned corners of their mouths curling up without their permission. If such happens and they ask you about it, please reassure them that they are not having a stroke, but that it is the deeply suppressed bright part of their souls which came to the fore for a brief instant.

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From The New Yorker

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Writing this early on Monday morning from Room 210 of the Econolodge in Durango. Grandson Aiden’s movie was shown here last night and of course we had to see it. After all, Robin and Jill were extras in the film. The movie was a short one, a double love story, if you will. Aiden’s camera work and editing skills have grown with each new effort.

Here in the pre-dawn darkness I have made some personal discoveries:

• I like rising early and sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a darkened motel room.
• I like the odd cup of coffee that the motel provides with those tiny drip machines and the hard to open foil packages containing the unrecognizable brands of “coffee” that may actually be carpet sweepings.
• I like the game of needing to creep about in a small room in dim light trying not to wake my wife while I attend to my imagined needs.
• I like these mom and pop style motels, most of which are aged well past their prime and are on the brink of seediness but not quite there yet. (True seediness being defined as when the motel features hourly rates and the room clerk sits behind a barred window.)

All of these “defects” were part of my travel experience before moderate affluence corrupted me. Returning to the semi-hobo-ness of it all is strangely rejuvenating.

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The Democratic convention got under way with its message of hope for those citizens who still think that democracy is a good idea, that decency hasn’t gone out of style, and that lying should be reserved for special instances like:

Where did you go?

Out.

What did you do?

Nothing.

Of course there are interminable speeches, endless repetition of slogans, and much scheduled spontaneity. This is politics, after all, not a religious pageant. The speeches routinely include impassioned statements of what the candidate will do once elected, most of which are impossible without the cooperation of a substantial proportion of the hundreds of senators and congresspersons in Washington DC (which is the rub).

Even though at present I consider myself an Independent (which means that I don’t play well with others), my temperament is much closer to the Democrats, so the goings-on this week in Chicago are of interest. There is no drama in who will be the candidate this time, Harris having already sewn that up pretty snappily in the past month, and we already know her choice of running mate. So it’s a party rather than a give and take, at least on that level.

Outside the doors of the convention center are protestors, most of them seem to be asking for changes in our relationship with the state of Israel, and the munitions support we provide for them. The protests so far are mild, nothing approaching the violence and assorted mayhem of 1968 in Chicago, when the police gave themselves carte blanche to beat up or arrest anyone whose looks they didn’t like.

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Robin and I watched Bernie Sanders’ speech last night, at least a part of it. Bernie is still right on message, which is not hard for him to do. He clearly sees the problems, their causes, and some of the solutions, and since the problems have changed little over the past four … or the last eight … or the last twelve years, the message can remain the same and still be unfortunately spot on.

When you think about it, why after all this time do we still have only a small handful of -isms? And why must we feel that our particular one needs to be defended to the last man or woman? Capitalism, socialism, communism … are they the best we can do?

Capitalism has been great at producing shiny things and big buildings, but at its heart is a poisonous and heartless philosophy which greatly benefits a few and pits the rest against one another. And yet our big and successfully capitalist country is not a happy one. Our suicide rate is sobering, our use of drugs and alcohol to numb ourselves has produced an entire genre of workers whose purpose is to serve us yet another plateful or glassful of toxic substances to take us briefly away from the fact that we cannot find purpose or meaning.

So what, at heart, is Bernie Sanders trying to tell us? It is something that each of us knows instinctively, but is very easy to lose sight of. When you lend someone a hand that really needs it, when you give of your time to repair broken things or right wrongs, how good it feels, no? We are truly at our best and our happiest at those moments when we are not working so hard at grabbing our share but when we are serving our fellow creatures, human and non-human.

When we see and accept that the earth is really quite a small lifeboat, and we are all in it, the way becomes a little clearer.

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