Little Home In The Valley

Finished trimming the tree, a fragrant little spruce of nearly perfect symmetry. It’s only six feet high, which suits the room just fine.

After this many years Robin and I no longer have any tree decorations that can break. All of those were swept into the trash long ago and gradually replaced with sturdier ones that are equally pretty. Tree trimming is so much easier now than when my dad would struggle and mutter each Christmas. The only things that are the same are the tree and the stand that it sits in.

Lights: our tiny but very bright light-strings never seem to wear out. Just put them away and take them out again next year. Dad had to deal with larger glass incandescent bulbs where if one burned out the whole string went dark. Which meant laboriously trying a new bulb in each socket until you found the right one. And each year several bulbs would go dead during the season. Which was where much of the aforementioned muttering came in.

Ornaments: nearly all were made of a sort of glass that if you even looked at one sideways it would break into exactly one thousand tiny particles. Each one somehow became invisible until the opportunity arose to stick itself into the foot of a passing barefoot child.

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From The New Yorker

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Driving around town one day this week I heard such a heartening story, and it was all about the fact that labor unions have removed themselves from life support and raised their banners once again.

I could not be happier. Ever since the handlers of Ronald Reagan told him to fire all the air traffic controllers back in 1981, large corporations have had things their own way, using the Republican Party as a vise to crush the unions in order to be able to treat their workers as disposable industrial fodder. I am not faulting the corporations here, it is what we should expect them to do when there are no constraints. They are not moral or beneficent entities.

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If we are going to reverse the race to the bottom, workers must have the right to engage in collective bargaining.

Bernie Sanders

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“Lili Marleen” is a German love song that gained immense popularity during World War II. The song’s history is intertwined with the experiences of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

The lyrics were written in 1915 by Hans Leip, a German school teacher and poet. Leip wrote the poem as a love letter to his girlfriend Lili, who was waiting for him at home. The poem was published in 1937 in the poetry collection “Die kleine Hafenorgel” (“The Little Harbor Organ”).

In 1938, Norbert Schultze, a German composer, discovered Leip’s poem and decided to set it to music. The song was first recorded by Lale Andersen, a German singer, in 1939. However, it initially received little attention.

The turning point for “Lili Marleen” came when German soldiers stationed in North Africa heard the song on the radio. It struck a chord with them, and they began requesting it frequently. The song’s popularity spread rapidly among German troops, and it became an unofficial anthem for the soldiers on the front lines.

Simultaneously, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) picked up on the song’s popularity among German troops and began broadcasting it as part of their “Soldiers’ Request” program. This ironic turn of events led to the song becoming famous among both Allied and Axis forces.

“Lili Marleen” became a symbol of the universal experience of soldiers longing for their loved ones during wartime. The song’s melancholic melody and poignant lyrics resonated with the emotions of separation and yearning. It transcended national boundaries and became a shared cultural phenomenon.

After the war, the song continued to be popular, and numerous artists recorded their versions in various languages. Lale Andersen, the original singer, continued to perform the song throughout her career. Over the years, “Lili Marleen” has become a classic and is considered one of the most famous and enduring songs associated with World War II.

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That’s pretty interesting, right? Love the story of how both sides adopted the song, and love the wistful melody as well.

Underneath the lantern,
By the barrack gate
Darling I remember
The way you used to wait
T’was there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me,
You’d always be,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Time would come for roll call,
Time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you
And press you to my heart,
And there ‘neath that far-off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight ,
We’d kiss good night,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Orders came for sailing,
Somewhere over there
All confined to barracks
was more than I could bear
I knew you were waiting in the street
I heard your feet,
But could not meet,
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
my own Lilly Marlene

Resting in our billets,
Just behind the lines
Even tho’ we’re parted,
Your lips are close to mine
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems
To haunt my dreams
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
My own Lilly Marlene

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BTW, if you want to play with ChatGPT, you start at the address https://chat.openai.com. It’s free.

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From The New Yorker

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Dressing for winter here in Paradise is not difficult. Your wardrobe need contain only a single light jacket and a rain shell. There is no need for feather-stuffed clothing of any kind. Our stores don’t even sell long-sleeved garments because there is so little use for them. Pajama bottoms? Boxer-style will do the trick nicely the year around.

I was lounging in shorts and a t-shirt on a chaise in the back yard last February when I was turned in my neighbor for violating a Stoney Creek HOA rule against indecent exposure. When I appealed the decision, the board informed me that in my particular case, any exposure was considered indecent, no matter how minuscule. But, I sputtered, I was not even close to being nude.

A visible shudder rippled through the members of the HOA board as they put together the concepts of me and being nude in their minds. Chairperson Parsnip Lively (bless her heart) turned mint green and Secretary Abner Thrushfinger looked positively apoplectic.

But that is life here in Stoney Creek. A little give, a little take, some indigestion.

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From The New Yorker

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Christmas approacheth. We prepareth. The fake tree is up on the patio, and the colored overhead lights are strung out there as well. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are in their places on a flat rock on the berm in front, having replaced Buddha, who spends the Yuletide in the garage.

We have a few items in the Christmas Village series that are on the sofa table. We used to have maybe twenty of those buildings but as our homes grew smaller and smaller we doled them out to family members.

Robin thinks we ought to put up stockings for the cats. I chimed in that those would really be for we humans, because the kitties care not a farthing for them. Cats not being impressed by surfaces, but only by what’s inside.

Nevertheless, it’s very possible that there are pet stockings in our future.

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Every once in a great while surprises pop up where you least expect them. For instance, earlier today there were four salted almonds left in a bag in the pantry. Now the foursome and the bag they were in is gone. Robin has eaten them all.

You know about the principle of choosing which battles to fight? In this case I chose to remain silent, even though I was down one almond that I was probably never going to get back.

Takes a big man to let stuff like this go, but …

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From The New Yorker

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Friday the House of Representatives was going to vote to expel a Big Liar. Panic set in when the Republicans discovered that they had forgotten which one of their number was going to get the boot. The problem being that there were so many potential candidates.

After hours of rending of garments and tearing of hair they had still come to no conclusion when George Santos walked through the door of their caucus room.

When asked where he had been he answered: “I’ve been doing the people’s work, meeting with the Democrats on climate change, immigration, and trying to find a way to reduce deaths from firearms.”

You could hear a sigh of relief pass thru the assembled GOP members. They had their man.

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Time marches on, goes the saying. The imputation is that it is somehow something that is relentless, unchanging, doesn’t give a damn how we feel about what its passage does to us.

But it doesn’t always march, sometimes it creeps imperceptibly, glacially, as back when I had suffered a broken rib for the third time. Through past experience I knew it would feel less painful in a couple of weeks, but right then it hurt when I moved, when I laughed, when I coughed … when I breathed.

And then there are times when it simply hurtles. There was a day in summer on a rural highway in western Nebraska when I wound my motorcycle up to its limit, which turned out to be 116 mph. I glanced down at the highway below my feet and saw a complete blur that (sensibly) freaked me out and I slowed to a more reasonable rate of travel. That was how this past summer flew by.

I bent over the raised bed to plant a tomato in June and when I straightened up it was September. By the time I had absorbed this fact it was the end of November. That, my friends, is life winding up the motorbike for me, without my touching the throttle. No matter how rational I am on my good days – no matter how much I accept the natural order of being born, of living a life, and then passing away – there are moments when I look down below my feet and see the blur and feel a twinge.

That happened last night just before I fell asleep. Our elder cat, Poco, joins us when we read in bed. After we turn out the light he takes off for his preferred sleeping place, wherever that is. I was looking at him, at his scruffy fur, his thinness, his irregular breathing, and remembering the sleek and powerful creature that he had been and now he was at the point where I was checking on his breathing.

At that moment, I was feeling rather scruffy myself. And I know that Robin checks my breathing occasionally. I thought … hmmmm … this is what amigos do for one another. I smiled to myself, rolled over, and went to sleep.

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Since I am on the subject of time, I thought I’d bring in the observations of some of the great philosophers to give us their take. They are much more interesting than my own. Some of them you can even dance to.

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The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Albert Einstein

I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Steven Wright

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Henry David Thoreau

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

Pericles

Time is bunk.

Douglas Adams

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Heading into winter with a fraction of an inch of snow on the ground and the chill is definitely in the air. Winter here in Paradise is never a hardship, not really. Not for an old Minnesota boy and a South Dakota girl. We’ve been here a decade now and the worst thing that Winter has thrown at us is to close the mountain passes once in a while. But since we’ve really scaled back on even thinking about traveling in the sketchy-road season … even that is not much of an inconvenience.

In South Dakota there was always less certainty. You’d read the weather report suggesting that a frozen calamity was en route to where you were or wanted to go while you looked out the window at a sunny day. And you’d take that chance. And sometimes … sometimes … this attitude and practice left you spending the night in the Bide-A-Wee Motel in Last Chance SD, population 12. Watching the wallpaper peel, listening to the bathroom faucet drip, and being glad to be anywhere with the blizzard on the outside and you within. What a difference a door makes.

There was that one day that I still don’t understand completely. We started out from Minneapolis on a return trip to Yankton SD. The air temperature was minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. We were maybe one hour into the trip when it started to rain. Rain! How does that even happen when it’s 15 degrees below zero?

Everything, the car, the highway, the trees, became instant ice. All of the cars had to pull over to the shoulder because there was no way that defrosters could clear the windshield under those conditions. And, of course, even if you could see ahead, the road was an ice rink. Days like that it’s good to have enough gas in the tank to run the engine and keep you warm until travel is once again possible. (Update: Or enough juice in the battery for EV drivers)

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(The header image today is not a photo that I took myself. I rarely do this, but Saturday morning’s
Montrose Daily Press had printed this image, and I thought it too pretty not to share it.)

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For some reason, I was thinking about my wife Robin the other day. Actually, I think about her pretty much every day. It’s hard not to, when there are only two people living in a smallish house. There is a definite tendency to bump into one another in such a situation. So how did we end up together? I will tell you.

It had been several years since my first wife had walked out the front door and off to better things. During those years I had become a sort of hermit, living alone in the house I had previously shared with five other people. To help fill the big hole I now had in my spare time, I was becoming a self-taught expert on the preparation and consumption of gin and tonics and the sampling of expensive scotch whiskies. I was very successful at that enterprise.

My day job was that of a pediatrician in a small South Dakota town. In that capacity I provided pediatric care to the three children of a very lovely lady named Robin. Robin had also been divorced, by a man who was an idiot to have left her. Actually, from what I hear, he still is an idiot.

At any rate, in small towns the married women abhor a vacuum, and having single adults around in society was considered a hazard to peace and social stability. So they began placing the two of us in proximity to one another to see if anything came of it.

For a time, nothing was happening, primarily because of my intractability. I was averse to any significant change in my life, and the very idea of entering into a new relationship was:

• frightening
• disturbing
• incomprehensible
• never gonna happen
• irrational, considering that I was not even sure how I’d become a single person in the first place

That last point was a biggie. The divorce that ended my first marriage was like I had been taking flight instruction but on one memorable solo lesson I flew through a barn, under a footbridge, and into an oak tree. I had little incentive for trying something again in that direction.

That was in 1991, and we were married the following year. I gave up my hobby of exploring fermented beverages and signed up for “How To Be A Better Husband Than You Were The First Time,” which is an ongoing post-graduate work-study program. (I think that Robin has graded me a C plus so far, which is way better than the D minus I got on my first time out.)

As an aside, a counselor that Robin was seeing in 1991 told her that her relationship with me was a transitional one, and not to get too serious about it. That was 31 years ago, which means that he was either really poor at predictions or that we are really, really slow at transitioning.

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From The New Yorker

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The sharper-eyed among you might have noted my use of the term fascism here and there recently. I had resisted doing so in the past because any reading on the subject reveals that defining this particular political set of beliefs is a slippery pursuit.

Fascism may be amorphous, but it does have some definite free-floating characteristics. So far, the best short dissertation on that subject that I have come across was in Wikipedia. (I say “short,” but even that one goes on for quite a few pages.)

So I will try to be specific if I use the term in the future, even though I freely admit that no one in their right mind should be taking political instruction from me. I have very little to offer in that sphere, other than to join H.L. Mencken in rejoicing that I am not a Republican.

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Now that I’ve published a disclaimer and all, let me say that I believe former president Cluck and his gang of thugs, miscreants, and generally bad actors are as close to fascists as you are going to find in the United States in our present day.

All they need to do to complete the picture is to adopt a uniform and come up with a name. Let’s see … brownshirts taken by the Nazis, blackshirts taken by Mussolini … how about orangeshirts to match Cluck’s coiffure, or yellowshirts to match his courage under fire during the Viet Nam years?

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From The New Yorker

Robin and I spent Thanksgiving with the Hurley family in Durango this year. Driving there on the Nasty Highway was a breeze, and totally on dry pavement. The mountains had a light dusting of snow on them which rendered them newly spectacular. It was a case of one mountainous Currier and Ives print after another.

Grandson Aiden is home for the holiday and so far he has not been obviously damaged by spending the past several months at the University of Texas in Austin. Apparently the university’s liberal attitudes have offset the poisonous ones emanating from the state capitol building.

Thanksgiving afternoon, we watched the classic movie Stand By Me. It’s a favorite in our clan, and my personal #2 Best Movie. It hits so many right notes about being a twelve year-old boy that it is uncanny. One of author Stephen King’s best traits is that he has such a clear memory of how it was to be a kid. (It is possible that he still is, actually, and that’s his trick.)

Robin and I had to cut our stay short due to a winter storm that was heading that way, so returned Friday evening instead of Saturday. Our thesis being that if you’re going to be trapped on one side of a mountain pass, it was better to be trapped on the side where home is.

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I would place myself somewhere between a technophile and a technophobe. I’m not sure what that should be called … perhaps a technodilettante would be closest. If a tool comes along that I think would improve my life and that of those around me, I try to learn how to use it.

Occasionally the motive isn’t quite as high-minded. Sometimes If it just looks like fun, I might be off and running with it as well.

For instance, I had a friend who was into personal computers before they were even called that. He would puzzle over a dark screen with bright green letters on it, trying to get the device to do something fairly simple, like transmit a page of text. Problem for this guy was, he didn’t know very many people who wanted to (or were able to) receive that page of text. Watching him sitting at a console with his furrowed brow I put his efforts down as harmless enough, but an electrified waste of time.

Within five minutes I had figured out what that little thing to the right in the photo was for (the mouse), and what the menus on the screen were for. Within ten minutes I had typed a paragraph and discovered the revolution that the commands “Cut” and “Paste” were for anyone who wanted to or needed to write.

And I was off. I joined a local Macintosh User’s Group, which was a bunch of bozos like myself who were excited by the machine and were eager to share every little new bit of information about it. We were fans in the truest sense, meaning fanatics.

One of the members of our little group was the local states attorney, and he was able to obtain copies of the few pieces of Macintosh software that were available to demonstrate for us. He had all of them because he had stolen them. I made a mental note never to trust this guy and then joined the rest of the group in learning what the software had to offer, which made me an accessory to piracy, I suppose.

My curiosity and sense of fun have carried me along for 39 years now, and I have owned quite a few Macintosh computers in that time. The Mac laptop I am typing this blog post on today cost half of what that first one set me back, and it is a gazillion times more powerful. I mean … a gazillion!

So those of you who regard these blog posts as a blight upon mankind, and cannot read what I just wrote without being nearly overcome with regrets that I am able to do so, may blame two things for this miserable state of affairs. They are the invention of the Apple Macintosh computer and my odd personality.

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For those who think that it couldn’t happen here, it already nearly did. There were many Americans who wanted us to enter World War II much earlier than we did, but on the side of the Nazis. Yes, friends, they wanted us to support the people responsible for the greatest horrorshow of the twentieth century. Which makes this video a sobering watch.

Fascists were out in large numbers in America in 1939 and they are out there now in numbers too large to ignore. The problem for you and me is that we can’t use the excuse that we don’t know what’s going on. This modern variant of the brownshirts/blackshirts consists of a group of people exhibiting the worst impulses of our species and which takes its energy from fear.

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Those of you who have younger children might have to explain the above cartoon to them. Not the carton of Asian takeout but the darker flat thing.

Watch their eyes go out of focus as you try to explain what a VCR and a cassette tape were and how people used to have to actually go to a Blockbuster store to pick out a movie rather than click on a streaming channel. It’s not that they don’t love and respect you but they might see your explanation about as relevant to them as how to churn butter or trim the wick of an oil lamp.

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We are told that artificial intelligence holds many dangers and that we might be made extinct once the bots of AI know everything there is to know about everything. After this past week, I think that those hazards might be preferable to what passes for intelligence now, in a world where in a single week:

• A senator who is angry with another senator jabs him hard in the back as he passes him in a hallway
• Another senator who is a panel member at a hearing threatens to vault over the table and attack a witness and must be verbally restrained
• A congressman is revealed to have used campaign contributions for Botox treatments and a porn channel subscription.
• University presidents are besieged by donors who are taking their money back because they aren’t doing enough to support Israel. On the other hand, they are also besieged by student groups who are threatening mayhem if they don’t do more to support the Palestinians.
• Every in-breath and out-breath of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is being recorded even as the oceans rise and the glaciers disappear.
• An ultramarathoner admits she took a car ride for part of her route.
• A sports newscaster admitted that sometimes she just made s**t up.

Nope, I think I’d like to take my chances with artificial intelligence as opposed to the limited form we are presently dealing with.

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Rosalynn Carter’s most lasting individual legacy will be her efforts to diminish the stigma attached to people with mental illnesses and her fight for parity and access for mental health treatment. She also devoted her time to the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at her alma mater, Georgia Southwestern State University, to help families and professional caregivers living with disabilities and illnesses.

In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton presented both Carters with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He said they had “done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on Earth.”

CNN Online

It’s nice to be able to talk about decent people once in a while. We all know people like that, and thinking about them can brighten a gloomy day. Most of the time they don’t get to be President and First Lady of the United States.

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The Uncompahgre River that flows through Montrose varies greatly in flow rates. Much of this variation is due to releases from a dam twenty miles upstream. So far this fall the level has been too high for me to feel comfortable. I had visions of myself tumbling downstream like a large chunk of flotsam with my head underwater and my posterior pointed toward the heavens.

It’s an undignified prospect and not a thought to be entertained for long.

But Wednesday I checked and the river was perfect. Pools and eddies and pockets galore. Unfortunately this didn’t translate into fish caught because I lost two due to my inexperience with barbless hooks.

Later that same day I once more tried my luck, again on the Uncompahgre River, but 22 miles upstream, at Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park. It was almost full dark when I caught a beautiful 16 inch rainbow trout. There was so little light left in the day that I could barely see well enough to release it properly.

Of course when I returned home and announced my success to the assembled members of Robin’s book club, not one person believed me. It is possible that I might, perhaps, maybe, possibly have stretched the truth a time or two in their presence in the past, but still … .

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From The New Yorker

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Many of the people who write about things political keep telling us that the Democrats are losing ground with persons of color and the blue collar world. That the party has become enthralled with hanging out with celebrities and those who own boats longer than 100 feet. That they have forgotten where they came from.

(Growing up in the Midwest I became well acquainted with the DFL, or the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, which was the local branch of the national Democratic party. You had to look no further than the name to see their roots.)

The pundits could be right. Think back on Mr. Obama who so obviously loved the galas and the balls and the White House musical performances and being a guest on talk shows … the man liked to dress up and looked good when he did.

But he might have done more for his party (and his country) if he’d gone to fewer soirées and more barbecues. And perhaps a quinceañera or two.

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From The New Yorker

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By now you have almost surely read the story of the old man who went hiking with his dog in August, and for whatever reason died out there on the trail. Just this week his body was discovered, and the dog was still with him, and alive.

The animal was malnourished and had lost half its weight after so long a time, but had not abandoned its owner. An amazing and very touching story.

I suspect that if I were hiking with one of our cats and keeled over that the scenario would be quite different. Poco might watch over me until the 5:00 P.M. feeding time came and went, but then he would quite sensibly take his leave and find his way home.

Cats are much more practical than dogs in these matters.

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I am having a little trouble bringing my usual smarmy self to the enterprise this morning. So I will fill in the spaces where my mordant wit would have been with stuff that might be more useful to you.

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The first thing is a movie review. The movie: The Half Of It. Let’s see … it’s a coming of age movie that doesn’t make you want to puke and an interesting re-working of Cyrano de Bergerac done in small-town teenage style. It is thoughtful, never condescending, and sweet without a hint of saccharine-ness.

Okay, enough. Here’s a trailer. If it looks like your kind of movie, watch it on Netflix. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 97%. And they know everything.

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Everyone has problems. Mine are truly no more severe nor interesting than anyone else’s (even if they might seem so to me). When these issues come along one at a time I can usually deal with them, even some pretty big ones. It is when they come in bunches that the water starts to come in over the side of the boat, and there is nothing for it then but furious bailing. I reach for a bucket and if I can find a big enough one I stay afloat.

That’s what I learned to pray for a few years ago, neither for relief nor for release but for a big enough bucket to see me through. And here I am and here you are. Works okay.

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From The New Yorker

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I used to blame God when the world turned sour for me. In fact, I can recall a particular one-sided shouting match as I loudly listed the ways that I thought God had let me down. I had taken it really personally and wanted to make that clear.

I don’t do that any more. I know much less about God’s nature now than I did then, but I am pretty sure that my problems are of little concern to the Master of the Universe, who is now off the hook as far as I’m concerned.

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The concept of “fairness” has been a hard one for me to shake. If your ears are open at all you will occasionally hear a child on the playground say to another “That’s not fair!” I was one of those kids, believing that a guiding principle of the Universe was fairness. In our games we would be fair with one another. My parents would treat me fairly, and my portion of our family’s resources would be exactly the same as my brother’s or sister’s.

If I followed certain moral admonitions, I just knew that my life would be a necessarily happy one, because it was only fair that this should happen. When my first marriage was coming apart, I recall thinking that it was unfair to the extreme. Hadn’t I done my best? (Probably not) Wasn’t I therefore entitled to the fruits of my labors? (Certainly not) Unfair, thought my inner child, unfair!

Finally the message got through to me. I had been trying to impose my personal standards upon the Universe at large, and it wisely ignored me and went rolling implacably along. The only “fairness” that existed was what I or somebody else inserted there. It was me nailing my theses upon the door of some ancient cathedral on a cold morning. Theses that said “I basically disagree with the way things are, and you know why … because they are unfair, that’s why.”

Some of us never learn. That woodpeckery knocking sound that you hear out there in the distance is that of my head repeatedly banging into reality.

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From The New Yorker

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Finally, about the title of today’s post. Doldrums can have different meanings, although if you read them through they are certainly related.

• a spell of listlessness or despondency
• a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or slump
• a part of the ocean near the equator abounding in calms, squalls, and light shifting winds

The “Doldrums” is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.

National Ocean Service

The Doldrums holds a distinct place in maritime history, having developed a reputation as a potentially deadly zone which could strand sailing ships for weeks on end, causing them to run out of food and drinking water.

National Ocean Service

So, I’m only temporarily becalmed and before you know it I’ll be back to full-bore irritating once again. Anything else would be totally unfair.

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President Biden continues to soldier on even though the most recent polls suggest that the only man in America less popular than him is the Boston Strangler. This in spite of the fact that he goes to work every day with shoes shined and suit pressed, and his job performance has been a mixture of mistakes and things well done, mostly well done. Pretty good for a man who is almost as old as I am.

But neither of us is in our prime, and both of us have a somewhat smallish chance of making it through the next five years. Robin is unsure enough about me that during the night she sometimes checks to see if I am still breathing. Can’t help but wonder if Jill Biden does the same thing.

(I’ve never asked Robin but always assumed that when she finds signs of life she is relieved, not disappointed)

So who knows what will happen between now and the first Tuesday in November 2024? If Mr. Biden turns out to be the nominee of the Democratic Party of course I will support him, even with my misgivings. Because on the other side, barring some completely unforeseeable and miraculous transformations in the next year, we will be presented with a person whose candidacy can only provoke nausea in a thoughtful person.

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I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.

Mark Twain

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From The New Yorker

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This piece of music gets around quite a bit. We’ve all heard it played in venues from concert halls to when a pro hockey team comes onto the ice. It’s the Fanfare for the Common Man, written by Aaron Copland.

In 1942, Copland was commissioned by the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to write a fanfare. The U.S. had entered World War II, and then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace was trying to rally Americans against imperialism. Copland was inspired by a speech Wallace gave that spring at the Free World Association in New York City.

“Some have spoken of the American Century,” Wallace proclaimed. “I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.” Copland would later echo that sentiment himself, saying, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”

NPR: American Anthem

It’s a fanfare for the ordinary man or woman, the GI, the “grunt,”the hoi polloi, for those on whose broad shoulders our idea of America has always truly rested. A strong piece, inspired in its origins.

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From The New Yorker

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I am not a huge fan of awards shows, at least not to the point where I think you can really pick out the best one of any group of artists or works in any given year. But this year something unusual happened Wednesday evening at the Country Music Awards.

Tracy Chapman continues to make history with her 1988 hit “Fast Car” after winning song of the year at Wednesday’s Country Music Awards  …The CMA win is a remarkable achievement given “Fast Car” debuted 35 years ago, and saw a resurgence in popularity in July after country star Luke Combs released a cover of the hit single. Combs’ cover went on to reach No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart, making Chapman the first Black woman to top the chart since it came into existence in 1990.

CNN Online

Fast Car is a great song from Chapman’s first album, written by an artist who was very wise at 24 years of age. It is a ballad, a story song. And if we are not the protagonist in the story, we probably know somebody who is.

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In keeping with the theme of this post, which is ducks of various stripes, I searched the cartoon archives of the New Yorker for “ducks,” and one of those that came up in the search was this one. Now a staple of the thinking of New Yorkers is that the rest of the country, especially the Midwest, consists of a population of buffoons residing in a land that nobody important wants to live in.

But even the buffoon-est of those of us who grew up in the Midwest knows that this is not a cartoon of a duck at all, but of a loon. And loons are their own category of waterfowl. Remembering that old saying “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck” should have informed the staff at the New Yorker. Loons simply do not quack.

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Robin was out of town for a couple of days, so I had to come up with some constructive things to do while she was away. Therefore, and with much thought given to the matter, I went fishing.

It’s a very scenic hour’s drive from Montrose to Silver Jack Reservoir, and the last fifteen miles you are on a decent gravel road. At this time of year the reservoir is at a low level, and it’s a bit of work to get down to it, but it wasn’t my destination, anyway. What I was interested in was nearby Beaver Lake and the Big Cimarron River.

Beaver Lake is a little thing, with a campground along one side. The morning I arrived there were no humans present, but there was a single black steer grazing beside the fisherman’s path that encircled the lake. We ignored one another as I walked past him. I fished all along the bank without experiencing so much as a nibble, but the views in all directions had begun the work of restoring my soul by the time I gave it up.

Next stop was Big Cimarron Campground, which was right on the river of the same name, and only a mile or so from Beaver Lake. Beautiful river, fast flowing. The water wasn’t too deep this time of year, but wading it was challenging. The riverbed consisted of stones the size of footballs that were slippery with moss. After struggling for an hour to go only a relatively few yards, I gave it up and from then on chose spots where I could fish from shore. At one point I came across this pool. You can see that the water is a bit murky with runoff from last weekend’s snowfall, but otherwise … .

https://videopress.com/v/JDl73MRU?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

It might have been better if I had caught a fish, but only marginally so. To be lucky enough to be have the opportunity to scramble along this trail and see places like this was my reward. As the author Robert Traver once said when asked why he fished for trout, “Because you can only do it in beautiful places.”

I ate the simple lunch I had brought along, which had been prepared for me by the highly tattooed and very pleasant man at Subway a few hours earlier. It was an Italian-style sandwich that might have been easier to eat with half the amount of olive oil he had applied to it, but I simply waded through to the end before even trying to clean up. The provided napkins were not enough to clean up the oil slick I had become, and I had to fall back on some paper towels we carry in the car.

Smelling a bit like an oregano-scented air freshener, I moved on to my next destination, a part of the Gunnison River located within Black Canyon National Park. You get there by turning right just after passing the park’s guard station and driving down the East Portal road. When I say “down the road,” that is an accurate description, because portions of it are on a 16% grade.

There were a few other fishermen working the river, which was low enough to make wading possible. We did not need to get too close to one another, but were well spread out. For the first hour nothing was happening, when suddenly I could see fish rising everywhere on the river. Over the next couple of minutes I caught two small rainbows before the excitement turned off as quickly as it had begun, and the water’s surface was once again quiet. That was something I had never experienced before.

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Daughter Sarah sent along this video taken near her home in Mankato MN. I’ve seen only two of these in my lifetime, and never two at one time.

https://videopress.com/v/EbUMjtKz?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Oh, you ask, what are they? Why, pileated woodpeckers! They are big birds, nearly the size of chickens, so are not easily confused with other species.

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I am on my second day of grumbling all because of DST being snatched away. I didn’t want it in the first place, but you know, you kinda get used to it and then BAM! it’s gone. There’s no hope of a change in this annual charade as long as the members of Congress remain unable to perform even the itsiest bit of governing.

Why, that would require that they actually sit in their chairs and vote on something, as opposed to what they do now which is flit from TV camera to TV camera in full prance.

In a week the federal government will be out of money, unless our misfit congresspersons pull their heads out of their nether regions and do the country’s work. I don’t know who paid for the curse on us to live in such interesting times, but they are certainly getting their money’s worth.

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Now this, my friends, is something interesting. An electric airplane. Take a look.

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Well, there was one drawback in that I had no rifle, for one thing. And there was not enough cash lying around to get a new one, so I went to the classified ads in the newspaper and soon became the proud owner of a Winchester Model 94 carbine, one of those storied firearms. Unfortunately I knew nearly nothing about calibers, and this particular rifle was a .25-35. Ammunition for this relic was difficult to find, and when I did locate some the guy who sold it to me suggested that while this was a good gun for shooting rats at a dump, it was far from a first choice for deer hunting. But at least, I thought, I was now armed.

We drove three hours due north before we took a right and turned down a small gravel road leading into the forest. Going toward some place Bob had heard about. It was a cold night, and there was about two feet of snow on the ground. On the way in we passed a hunting camp where a dozen men were seated in a circle around a huge campfire, the ground around them littered with empty beer cans.

Bob turned off the gravel road onto a level spot, and we slept in the wagon, starting it up periodically during the night to keep from freezing. Around four in the morning we gave up on sleep and went into the nearest small town where Bob had heard there was a Catholic church that offered an early “hunter’s mass.” It was interesting attending church services where all the attendees wore the same red clothing (hunter’s orange had not yet become the standard).

Then it was back to the forest to park the car and wander separately into the woods to find each a place to conceal ourselves and wait for the legions of deer that would surely pass by us. The season would legally begin at dawn.

An hour before dawn the firing began. It was at first sporadic, but by the time the sun came up it seemed that I was surrounded by nearly continuous rifle fire. My mind was now fully awake and alarmed, and it arrived at two clear thoughts. One was the memory of those drunken hunters sitting around that campfire who were now out there in the same forest someplace. The other is that there were not enough deer in the entire state of Minnesota to warrant the number of gunshots that I was hearing, so what was everybody shooting at?

At that point I heard a rifle report and a small branch was clipped from high up on a very tall pine tree, the one I happened to be sitting against at the time. Before that branch hit the ground I was on my feet. I took that rat-killer of a carbine, my half-filled Thermos of coffee, and I walked the few hundred yards back to the road. There I found a stump and sat on it for the rest of the day, trying as much as possible not to look like a deer. On that stump was where Bob found me toward dusk.

I never returned to that war zone laced with beer-filled bozos. Each year thereafter I would read about some poor shot-dead sod who had somehow been mistaken for a 300 pound, four-legged, antlered woodland creature, and I would think, Yep, I made the right choice once again.

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From The New Yorker

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This past year is going down with Robin and I as the Year of the Praying Mantis. While we see a couple of these fascinating bugs in our back yard every year, this summer they were present down by the river in greater numbers than ever. On a single walk in September we probably encountered 7 or 8 of them. All were of the same bright green color.

These guys have powerful arms, powerful jaws, and can strike in a fraction of a second. While it was not fearing for my life that caused me to drop the bug, there was always the possibility of being nipped slightly, which has less appeal than you might think to a tender soul like myself.

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From The New Yorker

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We finished the last season of Reservation Dogs, which is only the third one. No more are planned, and that’s a lovely idea.

This makes this series even more special, their quitting on top, so to speak. Of course you can’t make a ten season-long series about Native American teenagers because at some point they aren’t any more. Teenagers, that is. They are adults and let’s face it, films about adults have to be spiced up somehow because we aren’t nearly as interesting when we start to mold.

And Reservation Dogs is right up there with the best of all the television series about Native teenagers. In fact, as far as I know, it’s the only television series about them. As a taste, here’s an introduction to a spirit warrior who appears at various moments in the series. His name is William Knifeman, and he almost fought at the Little Big Horn. He’s special.

Even if you don’t have access to Hulu, it’s worth signing up for the free trial and then watching the hell out of that week or so. There is much to learn here, young warrior (of any age), much to learn.

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A song from the musical The Most Happy Fella, done by the great Peggy Lee. I think it’s just the right song for November, as the last leaves flutter down from the trees and delicate ice forms overnight on the ponds in the mountains. If there was ever a time for moving on, this is it.

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Take that, France! Take that, Holland! Take that, England! The new #1 cheese in the world is from … (let’s let the drum roll fade completely out) … NORWAY!

And there it is in the photograph below. Ignore the humans, they are only the cheese makers, Ole and Maren Gangstad. It’s that speckled green and white thing on the cutting board you should be looking at. This cheese has a name, and it is Nidelven Blå . There’s an entire article about the competition that is required reading for cheese admirers everywhere.

Even better, this is a blue cheese, one of my personal favorites. I learned to love the blues at my grandfather’s table, where my palate was broadened mightily in the area of cheeses. There were hits and misses there, but many more hits.

Now all I have to do is to figure out how to get an invitation to the next competition, one where I am not a judge but would be allowed to wander around the tables sampling each and every one I could get my hands on. I would do this until I was either comatose or had perished in the effort.

• Blue cheese: loved
• Cheddar: loved
• Primost: didn’t love, like eating sand that had gone off
• Limburger: loved, but must be eaten with clothespin on nose
• Gammelost: ehhhhh
• Roquefort: loved
• And so on and so on

This success story should also put to rest the discouraging myth that the only thing Norwegians can cook is pickled herring and salt cod.

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What a godawful mess is Gaza. A truly horrific attack on October 6, followed by a savage reply which continues unabated.

Only two things seem clear to me. One is that Hamas has declared itself to be an enemy of humanity. Not just Jews, but all of us. Its existence is an ongoing threat to any chance of Middle East peace in our lifetime. The second thing is that Israel could not do anything else but respond to the attack. It was too big, too many dead, too ugly.

That’s it. The last bit of clarity. Without having any special knowledge or insights, I find myself appalled by the Israeli government’s response so far. My mind says STOP, ENOUGH! But the Netanyahu government shows no signs of stopping, instead they are continuing to stack new horrors that they create upon the ones committed by Hamas and in so doing diluting the support that was theirs when Israel was clearly the victim.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Mahatma Gandhi

Thomas Friedman wrote something worth reading, published in Tuesday’s New York Times. The title is a bit long, but the piece itself comes to the point very quickly: The Israeli Officials I Speak With Tell Me They Know Two Things for Sure.

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Baked something new yesterday, at least new to me. YouTube had served up a video on making bannock. For those of you who are as ignorant as I was 24 hours ago, bannock is a non-yeasted bread that any number of people get credit for having invented, either the Scots or the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas or I don’t know who else.

Easily baked in a heavy frying pan, Dutch oven, or even wrapped around a stout stick, it is usually consumed out-of-doors. The loaf I created had a simple recipe using only water, baking powder, oil, salt, and flour. It tasted pretty good, actually. but mine was baked in a convenient LG range, which was blatant cheating. So I’ll have to try it again, this time over a campfire.

There are a bazillion different recipes out there, adding fruit or cheese or anything your heart desires. Some recipes even allow the bread to rise a bit, as in the video. It seems almost foolproof … let’s see … how to screw this up down the road … it will be difficult.

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So far, the best things about this new holder of the office are that (1) he isn’t Lauren Boebert, and (2) I never heard of him until yesterday. Which to me means that maybe he isn’t one of the worst of the certifiable loonies in that august body. I know that it’s a waste of my time to mention Boebert except that whenever I start to think of Colorado as a sensible state she cops a feel in a Denver theater, blows smoke in a pregnant woman’s face, and behaves in general more like a trollop than a congresswoman.

(Even as I typed that last line I realized that I was insulting trollops by including her in that group, and it was unfair of me to do so. Shame on me.)

As regards this new guy, I have only this to say.

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From The New Yorker

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We went out to the movies with friend Rod a couple of nights ago, to see Killers of the Flower Moon. We were completely prepared to find a “masterpiece,” another feather in Martin Scorsese’s very large headdress, a film for the ages. We were disappointed.

I don’t regret the time spent in the theater. The cinematography was brilliant. The grim story was there on the screen to be seen, I just wish that it had been presented more clearly than it was. I think the tale deserved a better telling.

But you know what? Even imperfect Scorsese is better than much of what the movie industry offers us these days. I’d rather watch a three hour misfire of his than any ten superhero films. Make that twenty.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 92 rating. It would not have scored quite as well if they had asked the three of us.

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This weekend we have been promised our first real chill, and perhaps our first snowfall here in the valley. Nothing epic in the works, just a drifting away from a nearly perfect autumn.

Going through a small shed the other day I found that I own three snow shovels. Which is one, perhaps two, more than I need or want. Of course they aren’t the sturdy sort that I was given to use when I was a kid pressed into sidewalk duty. No lightweight plastics then, since plastic hadn’t hit the streets yet. No aluminum either, until well after WW II was over.

No, these were heavy steel contraptions that were difficult for a child to move even when empty. I have no fond memories of pushing those beasts around.

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From The New Yorker

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Thursday evening we traveled to Ridgway for an outing, and ended up at that small town’s Thai Paradise restaurant. There we hit a trifecta of cheerful service, modest prices, and excellent food. After dinner we cruised Ridgway’s streets admiring the architecture of its homes. There is a bit of money in that village, and one of the places it shows up is in very interesting houses. Not blatantly showy or over-large, but interesting.

It was the time of day when the sun has set but there is still enough light to see well, and we noticed a couple of deer in one yard. I happened to muse that I’d wager that deer might sometimes move into town in sizable numbers when we rounded a corner and came across three, then five, then twelve of them. Before we left town we had seen about forty deer without even trying.

Unfortunately, this bounty in the village meant that the trip home was a watchful motoring past many more herds of deer between Ridgway and Montrose, a stretch of road notorious for deer/auto collisions.

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We’ve all dealt with the earworms of life, where a bit of music gets stuck on repeat play in our heads until we want never to hear it again. There is a complementary thing in my head where a non-musical phrase gets into the same sort of loop. This morning it is this quote, which I have mentioned before. Can’t imagine why I might be thinking this way.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

H.L. Mencken

I think I need another cup of coffee, to tide me over until the danger is past. That, or visit a cutlass shop and examine their offerings.

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Robin and I have a good friend who is critically ill and in hospital. A generous but greatly weakened heart is unable to do the work it needs to do, even with the best of what medicine has to offer as assistance, and she has bravely chosen what is called comfort care, where her therapies are being reduced.

More than once over the years she has gently rebuked me because I rarely append pieces from her favorite genre of music to this journal. That would be classical music, especially opera. Yet there was at least one song that we shared affection for, and it seems especially right for today.

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This past week I took my e-bike in for a tuneup. The gears weren’t shifting smoothly, and while I know that there are some sorts of routine maintenance that I might learn, the manual that I did purchase on the topic has so far turned out to be useless. So down to the shop I went.

A few hours later they called me to tell me that my chain was senescent. The bike is at 1600 miles on the odometer, and apparently because of the power of those electric motors, needing replacement at about 1000 miles is about the average lifespan of a chain. I did get a left-handed compliment from the mechanic. On the one hand he praised my driving style in that the chain had already lasted so long, but the unspoken flip side of that statement was that I was a timid rider, and perhaps not using that available power the way that I might.

If I wanted to have the bike spirit me away and free me from having to expend any effort at all, I would rather have a motorcycle as I once did. Of course, in those days I used to have quick reflexes and good balance as well, which is what kept me from ending up face-planted against an oak tree or in a drainage ditch.

So I wear my badge of timidity proudly. I will continue to use Level One as I do and learn to live with the gentle scorn of my more adventurous cycling colleagues.

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Last evening I went out for dinner with friend Rod, and we rendezvoused downtown at one of the cooler pizza joints in the area. (The place may be cool, but they do allow un-cool people to eat there as well, which explains how I got in). I had biked to the restaurant in daylight, but after our meal it was full dark, and I got to use those lights I’d purchased a couple of years ago for the first time. They are LEDs, and lord, don’t they put out the power! I almost felt that I needed a dimmer switch for the benefit of approaching cars. Flashing brilliant white light in front and a sturdy red in the back I had confidence that if someone should hit me with their automobile it would be because they wanted to, and not because they couldn’t see me. I was okay with that.

When we were walking around downtown after supper just to wear off a bit of that pizza, Rod was musing about bike locks and their utility. He made the observation that “such locks are useful only to ward off the inept and the half-hearted. Fortunately, this describes the majority of bicycle thieves.”

Nice turn of phrase, that.

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A friend recently asked me what I thought about Taylor Swift. I had to pause, because I really don’t think about that artist very often, and the last bit of music that I heard her perform was way back when she was still considered a teenaged country artist and was prancing the stage in her cowgirl boots.

So I went to Apple Music and listened to a handful of more recent cuts from “Taylor Swift Essentials,” and found that I didn’t really care much for any of them. Her voice and style of music are just not my thing, I guess.

According to a 2023 survey by Morning Consult, in the U.S., 53% of adults said they were fans of Swift, of whom 44% identified as Swifties and 16% as her “avid” fans. Of the fans, 52% were women while 48% were men. Racially, the 74% of the fans were white, 13% were Black, 9% were Asian and 4% from other races. Politically, 55% of the fans were Democratic, 23% were Republican, and 23% were independent. In terms of generations, 45% are millennials, 23% are baby boomers, 21% are Generation X, and 11% are Generation Z. Journalists have also noted an increase in Swift’s boomer and Generation X fans, known as ” senior Swifties”.

Wikipedia: Swifties

I realize that she is a phenomenon, and has crafted her public image and interactions very intelligently from the beginning. I applaud her being able to wrest control of her music from the evil empire of the record companies by re-recording all of her first albums, note for note. Smart woman, that. But although it hurts a people-pleaser like myself to admit it, I am not a “senior Swifty.” It’s just one more loop that I’m okay with being out of.

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As part of watching as many horror movies as we can leading up to Halloween, I sought out the original Frankenstein, from 1931. Expecting something that I could make fun of, I found instead that it was a pretty good film. The acting and the costumes were mannered, of course, but the plot was solid, the special effects were done well, and it followed its own logic, which a movie about putting a human together out of spare part has to do.

There were a couple of oddities that I noted even before the story began.

And then there was this one-minute introduction. Cute. Notice how his face is lit from below to get it to look spookier.

Anyway, it was well worth the four bucks to rent it, and now we’ve seen the classic Dracula and the classic Frankenstein. And still a few days to go until the Hallowed Eve itself.

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The last leaf has fallen from our backyard trees and been encouraged to take up residence over the fence with thousands of its compadres, where it will compost and continue the process of improving the soil back there. The leaf blower was a great help in doing this, even though it is far from a precision instrument. It is an electric model, so my stints blasting leaves were automatically limited to how long the two batteries lasted. That amount of time was just about right for me, and my decision not to buy bigger and longer-lasting batteries turned out to be genius.

I’ve been happy with my electric leaf blower, lawn mower, and weed-whacker. Even though they are not entirely silent, they make less noise than gas-powered models do, and enable me to keep BaseCamp looking like someone actually lives here, rather than taking on the appearance of an abandoned property (my outdoor-housekeeping goals are quite modest).

I’ve started looking for an electric snow shovel, but have had no luck so far. I don’t need a full-fledged big-time snow blowing machine, not with the small amount that falls here in Paradise. What would be perfect would be an outdoor equivalent of the robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba that would scamper up and down the sidewalks removing what snow did fall without any help needed from me. I could then stand at my living room window, coffee cup in hand and pajama-clad, watching while the device did the work and glorying in the wonderfulness of technology.

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We voted yesterday. An election with a couple of tax issues and local school board members on the ballot. The ballot itself had arrived in the mail only last evening.

We sat down at the table, filled in the proper circles with ballpoint pens, then put the ballots into the envelopes and mailed them off. That’s an election, Colorado-style. No sweat. No controversy. No scandal.

Another woman was concerned that there might be something LGBTQ+ going on already in the schools and was perfectly willing to root it out if elected. (It’s harder for LGBTQ+ issues to get as much traction in a state with a competent and thoughtful gay governor.)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

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Jason Isbell had some problems with chemicals. He met someone who he was drawn to but he also knew that she would have nothing to do with an addict, so he got sober and eventually married that person. Later on he told this story in a song, and I offer you a particularly good version. The tale is not completely different from my own, although it sounds better when he tells it.

My, oh my. How sweet it is.

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Because they need professional help and that doesn’t come cheap. Costs will include mandatory class attendance in Democracy 101 at historically black Howard University. Those white boys and girls need a little leavening.

I believe I’ll call it the Congressional Republican Assistance Plan, or C.R.A.P., for short. Fits the situation pretty well.

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I had the worst nightmare last night. I dreamed that hordes of Gay Trans Black Latino Asian Native American Islamic Socialists were streaming across the border to take my job, enslave my family, and force me to do recreational drugs. Everything the Republicans have been saying all along was being proved true.

But it got worse. A troop of horse-mounted knights rode into town to save us from the invaders, led by Sainte Lauren of Boebert who was vaping like a brushfire and groping everything in pants.

I hid behind a ficus plant but was soon discovered cowering there. I could see Boebert‘s fingers reaching for me, just as I (praise God) awakened.

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Let’s finish up with a little Sunday Mornin’ spiritual by Josh White, one of the best ever at what he does.

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Well, a solar eclipse came and went without us. Robin and I were distracted by an upcoming visit by the Hurley family, and by the time we realized that the event was underway, we had nothing available with which to look directly at the sun, and had to settle for the old pinhole camera trick.

For those of you who have not tried it, using a pinhole camera is about as exciting as watching paint dry … no … it’s less exciting by half. You take a cosmic happening and reduce it to a black and white squibble of an image on a white sheet of paper that’s the size of a pencil eraser. Wow. Be still, my heart.

So that was a fizzle. But the visit went well. I had talked Neil into bringing his fly fishing hardware and we went down to the river for a couple of hours to do absolutely no harm to the fish population. The thing about fishing is that when you start off on an outing that will get you nothing, you don’t know it. So all the hope and anticipation is there each time. It’s only toward the end that you get the idea that supper will be PB&J sandwiches once more, and not trout almandine.

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From The New Yorker

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Our cat Willow has developed a new habit. Formerly she would bring in a mouse, toss it around, and eventually get around to making a meal of it. That was yesterday. Now she brings in a mouse, gives it a couple of pats, and then watches it to see what it will do. Will it go behind the refrigerator? That’s interesting. Will it go into the master bedroom? How fun! How about under the sofa in the living room? Très amusant, she apparently thinks, as she makes no attempt at all to recapture it.

Her human companions are not amused. While the occasional episode of stepping on a leftover rodent part barefoot in the mornings was gross, this is worse. We are going to have to learn to be good at catching mice, because Willow seems to have lost interest in what to do with them once she nabs them and brings them indoors. Other than watching them, that is.

Last evening an attractive little critter ran under the washer and dryer. It may still be there, although I left a door open for it to escape to the garage. But this really can’t go on, or Robin will be leaving me the house and all of its occupants in the divorce settlement and taking everything else.

This song is by Brennen Leigh, from her album “Too Thin To Plow,” which title is borrowed from Mark Twain’s delightful comment about the Missouri River – It’s too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

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Yesterday we went for a drive up on the Grand Mesa, where we found some new snow scattered about. There were very few others up there except for workers at the resorts. It was a blue sky day and the air was clear and crisp. Trout were rising in every lake we passed, of course, since I’d taken no fishing gear along.

BTW, when it comes to angling, I have realized that all of my life I’ve been hearing one of these two phrases:

1. You should have been here yesterday, they were jumping into the boat.

2. The day after you left the fish went absolutely crazy.

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From The New Yorker

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I recently watched the series The Pacific, a Tom Hanks/Stephen Spielberg production.

Robin started out watching with me but the gore became too strong for her. The battle sequences were much like those in Saving Private Ryan, and if anything these were even harder to watch.

I had uncles in this theater of war, but never heard a word from them about their experiences. I can see why. What comes across clearly in this series is both the bravery exhibited and the extreme viciousness of the fighting. Fighting on the islands of Peleliu, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima seems to have been truly the nightmare of nightmares.

The series became even more interesting to me when I realized that all the characters were based on real people, and that one of those boys portrayed out there in that Pacific hell wrote a book about it years later. A book that I read three years ago. His name was Eugene Sledge, and the book was With The Old Breed.

When the military draft was discontinued I worried that having an all-volunteer army would make it more likely that leaders who were weaker men would use it. Which is what has happened. Iraq … Afghanistan … anyone?

More people need to see films like this series, which should be mandatory viewing for anyone who has anything to do with sending men and women into battle.

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There’s an early morning light rain falling, the first in a couple of weeks. It seems to have dampened the wish to hoot on the part of our local great horned owl, who is usually doing just that at this time of day. The ash trees in the back yard have released half their leaves, which means I can’t see the grass any longer. For whatever reason all of the houses in our area have five foot fences out back, including ours, which means that any leaf that falls in our yard stays in our yard.

In the past, I used to enjoy it when a windy day would carry my leaves over to a neighbor’s yard. It relieved me of one of the chores I like the least, which is raking. Two strokes of a rake and my lower back is already sending distress calls to my brain which go something like this: CONTINUE AT YOUR PERIL! If said neighbor were to complain I would shrug my shoulders and say It’s only natural, Bubba, the leaves fall and the wind blows. Not my fault.

But don’t get me started on Coloradans and their dogs. The average number of dogs per capita here in Paradise is 3.7. In our part of town, where many residents are senior citizens, the dogs are mostly of the miniature variety.

So the community walking path out back is filled with older folks with leashes in their hands. If you follow those leashes down and the light is just right, you can often actually see a dog on the other end. Should you also happen to be taking a walk at those times, the first inkling that a dog is present might be a sharp pain in your Achilles tendon and when you turn around there is what appears to be an empty leash racing away from you.

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From The New Yorker

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Let’s see now. Russia is still trying to devour Ukraine, the Israelis are about to erase Hamas and much of the Gaza strip from the face of the earth, and we are once again heading for a government shutdown. Surely these upheavals alone would demand the best effort by our elected officials. But wait … nothing is happening. At least, nothing that requires the House of Representatives’ participation. I am no political scholar, but the problem seems to be that the majority party in the House is headless.

There was a famous chicken in Fruita, Colorado, back in 1945, which survived 18 months without a head, but I think we should regard this as the exception rather than the rule, and begin looking for a replacement for the Elephantine Party or at the very least a new symbol for the tattered remnant of the existing one. I submit the graphic above as candidate for that new symbol.

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

Never more true than today.

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In Thursday morning’s Times of New York I discovered a reason to visit the state of Alabama. It is the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery. At a time when political revisionists are doing their level best to make it seem that slavery was not such a bad thing, really, to find that there is a place where this part of our history is faced straight on I think is hopeful for America’s future.

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Yesterday noon I received a couple of immunizations, one against the flu and the second was a version of the anti-Covid vaccine. This morning I feel moderately unwell, with two very sore arms, a slight fever, and a rather whiny outlook on life. For whatever reason the woman administering the flu shot couldn’t get the needle in deep enough on the first two tries. She asked me if I had scar tissue at that place on my arm, because that had never happened to her before. I assured her that there was nothing there but normal flesh, and it had never happened to me, either. I did share that I go to the gym regularly and it is possible that the culprit is my amazing muscle tone. She looked doubtful. On the third poke in it went.

My courage when dealing with medical procedures is just enough to cover one try at an intramuscular injection. Two is off into the moderate unknown, and three contains the possibility of my total mental collapse within it. I had resolved that if the third time was not the charm she would have to wrestle me to the floor to do a fourth attempt, and although she was a sturdy young person and would probably have won the contest, the whole business would have looked pretty unseemly there in the pharmacy area at City Market, what with a geezer being carted off in a straight jacket, clothes askew and sweating and all.

But … no drama, ultimately. A lost opportunity to make the local news and be briefly famous. At this age I am almost immune to embarrassment, so I fear not the press.

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From The New Yorker

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During my residency in pediatrics, I inhabited three very different worlds. One of them was at the university, where I breathed rarefied air, talked endlessly about uncommon metabolic and genetic diseases, some of whose names I had learned only before breakfast that very day.

The second world was at the private children’s hospital in St. Paul, where I was introduced to a whole new array of pathologic processes that were much more common and more likely by far to be those that I was going to encounter when I left the training programs. The air was more … normal … there. Discussions were practical and the topics of discussion were the child right in front of us, rather than children in general.

The third world was at Hennepin County Hospital, in Minneapolis. Take everything you might see at #2, and add the heavy weight of poverty. More diagnoses of failure to thrive, less support for families. One of the staff members at HCH was Dr. Bob ten Bensel, a very bright guy who somehow had got himself involved in a newly developing area of pediatrics that few of us residents really believed was important , much less wanted to pursue as a career – child abuse – physical and sexual.

Bob eventually authored one of the early textbooks on the subject, and by the time it was published all of us trainees had become believers. The change this knowledge made in our views of what it meant to be human was enormous. To truly confront the commonplace horror of severely pathologic child/parent relationships made you a different person from that moment forward.

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A couple of days ago I went down to the Uncompahgre River and caught two small trout. It was a lovely day and there were few other fishermen around as competition. Add the two trout up and you might have enough fish for a single canapé, but I released them so not to worry.

To add to the method’s simplicity, you need use very few flies, with some of its practitioners using a single fly in all situations. I have therefore left the world of matching the hatch and all its intricacies. But how easy it is to carry the gear I need! The twelve-foot carbon fiber rod telescopes to 24 inches long which stores in a sturdy metal tube, and a handful of flies rounds out my kit. The equipment is perfectly suited to fishing the many smaller streams which are scattered about the San Juan mountains, and can easily be tossed into the back of my car on trips.

Like any recent convert I am enthusiastic about my new “religion”so should we meet you would do yourself a favor to not ask me about it at all, or be prepared to be buried under an avalanche of verbiage.

(If you have any interest in the method, there is a wealth of information and instruction on YouTube, a true embarrassment of riches)

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Six days now and no sign of our hummingbirds at the feeders. I think it’s safe to conclude that they are off on their journey southward with other avian migrants. Although I did get a mild surprise two days ago when a great blue heron rose out of a small marsh as I pedaled by. I thought they’d all left by now.

As I wondered at the hardships that must be associated with migration – the physical tolls, the searching for food in unfamiliar territories, the new threats from new predators, I mused. If birds were capable of thought, they might look at us, the creatures who remain behind, and think: Fools! Don’t they know what’s coming? Plunging temperatures, snow, ice, howling winds enough to freeze their marrows? Why aren’t they coming with us?

At least that’s what I think a bird would think if a bird thought.

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It’s funny what sticks with you from a given moment in time. Nearly twenty years ago I was listening to a rehab counselor go on at length about one thing or another when he unloaded a quote on me:

Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having a different past.

Anonymous

Hmmmmmmm. I chewed on that for a while and as I was doing so its message became embedded. It is now a permanent part of my mental makeup/tools.

If you hang around me long enough I may very well spring it on you one day and then it may become your problem as well. I don’t know about you, but for me it is painful being forced to think, what with the furrowing of the forehead and all.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

I think I’m gonna stop this segment for now. After this one. But you get the idea. It’s just that the c**p that comes on country radio when you are traveling and bored would make you think that mindless jingoistic nonsense is all that there was to the genre.

But there are thoughtful, intelligent people telling their stories all over country music, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, we just have to look for them. Jason Isbell is one such person. He can, on the fly, construct an entire sentence that contains no references to pickup trucks or beer.

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Reading about the college president who was ousted when he sexted a student, I realized that I have never considered indulging in this peculiar avenue of self expression. Sexting came along too late in life for me to reasonably take part.

However, the other day I happened to muse out loud on the subject and within minutes the police had come to my house and confiscated my phone. When I went before the judge to get it back, I had to make her a promise never to even mention the subject again, because the very idea of me sending out politically incorrect selfies was making my neighbors nauseous.

A medical photographer was then called in to take whole body nude photographs of me which were fed into the FBI’s facial recognition software. Apparently it’s not only faces this equipment can identify.

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The weather in Paradise is sooo sweet these days, for everybody except those who like to lay out in the sun and incubate the baby melanomas in their skin. Temps are in the 70s in the daytime, 40s at night. Excellent. Neither air conditioning nor furnaces are required to be comfortable. It does mean that on my bicycle trips around town I wear an extra layer. Wind chill and all that, you know.

The color change of the leaves is continuing at a measured pace. We haven’t had one of those storms that have the power to bring them all down overnight. So we are surrounded by all shades of yellow. Looking at the San Juan mountains south of town you see gold on their shoulders and new snow on their caps.

What those mountain views are telling me is not that I need to get out all of my winter clothing, but that I should at least check to see that it is within easy reach. While doing this I moved my favorite shirt of all time to the front of the closet rack. For my entire adult life I have had one of these, replacing one only when time and frequent wear have their way with it. But there is always one in my closet.

Several years ago Allyson asked me one day as I came out wearing the latest iteration of this paragon of garments: “How old is this shirt, Jon, that you wear all the time?” She didn’t realize that she was looking at the grandchild of the one she had first seen me in.

But even as I am putting this forth as a quintessential male shirt, I have to admit that women look quite fetching in it as well. In fact, I clearly remember having a serious crush on the nurse at 5th grade summer camp, and she frequently wore a red/black buffalo plaid shirt. Her camp nickname was “Huckleberry,” and I never got over the rejection when she wouldn’t run off with me to Canada. At the time I wasn’t entirely sure where Canada was, but I had read about it and it seemed a swell place to go.

I thought we made a great looking couple, she at 5 ft 2 in, and me at 4 ft 4 in. When you are truly in love, those height differences don’t mean nearly as much.

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Finishing up on a serious note, there was a piece in the New Yorker this week that summarized where we are with Mr. Cluck very well. The title was Trump’s Bloody Campaign Promises. There’s a lot at stake in politics during the next year. Definitely not a Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum situation at all.

In the new edition of the Great Big Dictionary you can find this man’s picture under ugly, traitor, fascist, narcissist, agent provacateur, braggart, bloated, and sexual predator. Quite a resumé, taken altogether.

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Naw, can’t finish on that downer. Here’s an upper, and it’s about Joan Baez. There’s a new documentary film just released in theaters, called Joan Baez: I Am A Noise. One way or another, I will be seeing it. She is not only one of my favorite singers since forever, but over the last sixty years, if there was a righteous cause out there she was marching for it or singing about it or supporting it in some other way. Want to track the right side of American social history since 1960? Just check her itinerary during that time.

I went to see her around 1960, when it was still early in her career and folk music was still on top of the heap at universities. She gave a concert at the U. of Minnesota at Coffman Union. There she was dressed in peasant garb and barefoot, holding a large audience spellbound. Just a girl and a guitar. Splendid performance. Splendid memory.

Nope, although she ain’t marchin’ anymore, nor is she doing concerts, I am still a fan and always will be. We are simpatico.

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I was recalling a few things from the days after I had a stroke, in October 2020. First of all, I was rescued principally by the quick actions taken by Robin. She got a babbling and confused dude from the periphery of Grand Junction to St. Mary’s Hospital, where a bunch of skilled people did for me exactly what I needed and dissolved the clot that was causing all of the mischief.

A short time after discharge from the hospital, I returned for followup to see my neurologist, who talked with me for a short time, and then couldn’t wait to show me the radiologic images of what had gone on inside my head. He pointed out where the occlusion was before I was given the miraculous medication, and what it looked like afterward. As he was describing that interior landscape I was struck by two things.

First of all, there were seemingly hundreds of narrowed little vessels sprinkled around in there, like stars in a summer sky, and all susceptible to blockage at some unknown future date. And the size of the vessel that had been occluded was quite small when you realized how much trouble it had caused. That was sobering indeed.

But this was my brain, my cranium, and my bigger pool of cerebrospinal fluid, and I didn’t like looking at it one bit. No wonder I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys, or the name of that movie that starred what’s his name. It seemed amazing that I could still tie my shoes with that remnant of my younger brain hanging out in there like a dried-up tangerine.

So while the neurologist was gleefully pointing here and there I was becoming less and less intrigued. What I really wanted to do was to get the hell out of there and go get some ice cream with Robin before the next stroke came along. If we hurried, maybe we could get in a sundae or a massive chocolate shake before the body bags had to be brought out … .

Of course, here I am three years later and I’m fine. Fone, I tell you, just fane.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Amanda Shires came across my radar a few years back when she did a duet on Dave Letterman’s show, singing a Warren Zevon song. Zevon was a favorite of Letterman’s and had passed not long before this appearance. Her duet partner was her husband Jason Isbell. It’s a beautiful song, beautifully done.

Shires writes and sings songs that are generally far enough away from the dispiriting country mainstream that they might inhabit alternative universes. Thoughtful, sometimes quite raw, they are story-songs worthy of taking the time to listen to the lyrics. One reason might be that in the past few years, along with singing, playing the fiddle, touring, recording, and raising a child, she managed to obtain a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

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Robin and I met up with Amy and Claire at Little Molas Lake, which is a few miles south of Silverton. It’s a convenient and beautiful midpoint between Durango and Montrose. On the way to Little Molas there were two things of significance to be seen, the first being the colors of the leaves which were not quite at peak, but pretty close. The second was that above 11,000 feet we saw the first new snow of the year on the northern faces of some of the peaks.

Robin was not feeling at her peak due to a cold, so it was not a day for epic walking. At 11,000 feet, Robin and I could definitely feel the altitude when out on the hike. You sort of wheeze your way from one oxygen molecule to the next.

There was a campground at Little Molas Lake, a primitive affair that offered places to park your car, a privy, and little else in the way of amenities. Bring your own water, carry away your own trash. But the views in all directions … wonderful.

(There was one oddity. The weather was beautiful, the trails and camping areas around the lake were well occupied, but the privy was already “Closed for the season.” You can imagine the disappointed faces as one person after another read the notice in disbelief, then headed for the forest to answer the call of nature, which knows no time nor season.)

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Last night we watched the original Dracula movie, which was entitled … of course … Dracula. (I know I know there was an earlier film about vampires called Nosferatu, but that was the first Nosferatu movie)

The film starred Bela Lugosi, and the rest of the cast I never heard of. It was made in 1931, and had surprisingly good production values. Most of the acting seemed dated compared with today, but I’ll bet it creeped them out in 1931!

Here’s the basic story. A young man named Renfield is traveling by coach in Transylvania, and in spite of all the eye-rolling and crossing themselves a group of villagers can do, is determined to go on to Borgo Pass, where he is to meet another coach at midnight which will carry him to Castle Dracula. He doesn’t give much credibility to the villagers’ talk of bats and wolves, but seems to think that a midnight rendezvous in the Carpathian Mountains is a reasonable thing.

At any rate, he eventually gets to the castle, where he meets the Count, a man who is always dressed for dinner, and who speaks and walks at about half the speed of the rest of the people in the movie. A very deliberate fellow, this Count Dracula. Renfield is a sort of real estate agent who has purchased an old abbey in London for Dracula, and is there to get the papers signed. Next step is to haul a bunch of coffins on a ship to London. We never see it, but quite a bit of nastiness happens on that boat because when it get to London only Renfield has survived, and he is definitely not the same young man we met before.

I’ll abbreviate things a bit. There is a stuffy house in London where we find a doctor, a scientist, a young dolt, and two women of the sort who lounge about in floor-length silk outfits all day long. Dracula meets the women, named Lucy and Mina, and before you know it Lucy hasn’t enough blood in her to sustain life, perishes, and now is suspected of midnight nibbling on schoolchildren in the neighborhood. Dracula then turns his attentions to Mina, and a pair of suspicious-looking puncture wounds appear on that girl’s neck while her energies are being gradually sapped.

Well, the scientist knows exactly what is going on, finds Dracula’s coffin at the abbey, and drives a piece of scrap lumber through his heart, saving Mina from a fate worse than death, which is never dying at all. End of story.

My favorite character was actually Renfield, the human who was Dracula’s helper. And here is his best scene, when he is discovered on that doomed ship in London harbor. A laugh for the ages.

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I’ve read about people describing their memories as a steel trap. God bless them. While it sounds like an altogether positive thing to have, the truth is that there are quite a few things that come up each year that I am happy to forget. Of course, I can’t tell you what they are because … you know …. I forgot.

My own memory power at this time of life I would describe as more of an aluminum colander. The sort that has large holes just big enough to contain something the size of a blueberry being washed. If I have a good idea, let’s say, when I am brushing my teeth, it has usually vanished by the time I can get to a computer to write it down. When I was eight years old and went off to summer camp, Mom would write my name inside my clothing. It is no trouble at all to imagine a future where when I am asked my name I turn my head to the side, stretch out the neck of my tee shirt to read the label, and answer “Fruit of the Loom.”

The other day at the gym I saw an attractive tattoo on the arm of a woman. It was of a flight of swallows soaring up one of her arms. I think I may have mentioned this in a previous post. If I were to get a personal tattoo today, it would be much more useful to get some identifier inked on my forearm, perhaps the username and password to my nytimes.com account, making it easier to look myself up and return myself to the right place.

Interesting that people have termed our mobile phones as “smart” phones. I am now codependent with mine because it allows me to access important data that I used to be able to recall, like my daily schedule, my phone number and address, the names of my children … stuff like that. In recovery meetings, much is made of one’s sobriety date, which is the day you took your last drink. If you were to torture me you could not get that information, because I recurrently forget it. What I do remember is that it was on the day that Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Soooo … look up Katrina and I’ve got it!

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Brandi Carlile doesn’t sweat the small stuff, I guess. She came out as gay in 2002 at the age of 15 with a no-nonsense statement that it was no big deal, others had already paved the way for her.

She started out her career backed up by the Hanseroth twins, and they are still the nucleus of her band. No dumping old friends when you make the grade, not for Brandi. I am suspicious that she may be a genuine person.

Here’s a music video of hers where you only see silhouettes of Carlile and her band. Cleverly done, that. The music is allowed to speak for itself.

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Why fear women? It may have escaped your notice, bro, but they are poised to take over completely any day now, and when the patriarchy goes away, amigo, it ain’t a-comin’ back. Check out those college entry and graduation stats, those life expectancies, those supernatural skills at networking … can you not feel the rumble of a steamroller coming your way?

And their skillset completely trumps our puny male counterpart … for one thing, they have a “killer app” … they can make new human beings. And they don’t need very many of us males to do a good job of this, thank you very much. The dustups in a couple of fertility clinics in the last couple of years where a seriously disturbed doctor used only his own sperm to produce scads of children illustrate this point quite clearly.

A small stud farm maintained in a nice warm state could make the rest of the male population as useful as a pile of carpet remnants. Those selected for this chore would gambol about the farm as fat, oblivious, and happy as clams, perhaps occasionally wondering what happened to the rest of the guys.

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My preferred way of traveling, which I admit has it practical limits, is to get in my car and drive. The present state of airline travel is so fraught, perhaps terminally fraught, that it’s like playing a lottery rather than dealing with a coherent operation. Cancellations, computer meltdowns, blown tires, short-staffing, tiny seats without room for regular inhalations … all are regular features today.

In addition, any flight may contain someone who goes ballistic for any reason and endangers the rest of the passengers. It was better in the good old hijack days of 1970. You might end up in Cuba, but at least the actions of the hijacker were predictable. Today’s bozos who won’t observe the airline’s rules which the rest of us accept with something like grudging good grace … what can I say? They are the loose ends of humanity.

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Perhaps Dianne Feinstein should have retired a year ago. Perhaps two years. It’s no longer important. Eventually those criticisms left over from last week’s news will fade away, and what will be remembered is the legacy of a woman who managed to do something amazing in today’s world. In most of her actions in public life, she was on the right side. Consistent, honest, untainted by today’s rampant corruption.

One of those right places to be was her part in laying out the use of torture by our government, principally by the CIA. That American leaders were not only ordering “enhanced methods” of interrogation, but defending their use. At that point I realized that perhaps I had already lived too long … seen one too many bad things. At least in this instance, America was no better than the “bad guys” of the world.

She was also on the side of women’s reproductive rights, children’s welfare, marriage equality, sane gun regulation – if you spend thirty years in Congress you can pile up quite a list of achievements. There are always too few of her sort in politics, people of principle. People that one can trust. We can ill afford to lose even one of them.

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Appalling Numbers Department

Firearms are now the No. 1 killer of children and teens in America, having surpassed motor vehicles, which had been the leading cause of death among America’s youth until 2020.

CNN

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Took a long drive on Sunday morning, going up and over the Uncompahgre Plateau and down on the far side, ending up in Naturita. The ride goes roughly like this: Ten miles of asphalt, ten miles of good gravel road, ten miles of single-track rutted cowpath, ten miles of good gravel, and finally ten miles of asphalt.

On the cowpath part the scenery was outstanding. Broad valleys, cliffs you could just drive right off of, little rivers winding here and there … made driving the narrow road and all the rut-straddling worth the trouble. I circled back home on comfortable and undemanding asphalt.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Maren Morris has never been a comfortable fit in Nashville. Part of the problem is that she has a mind and uses it. That hasn’t always worked well for women in this genre in the last couple of decades, where sitting on a tailgate in a pair of cutoffs was more the model. You may recall the time that the Dixie Chicks were immediately consigned to the country-western sub-cellar when they had the audacity to criticize George W. and his war in Iraq during one of their concerts.

The example I’ve chosen for this morning is from her latest EP, which some regard as her swan song as she drives off with corporate Nashville in the rearview mirror. I hope not, but like I said, she has her own mind.

(You could ask Where is Willie Nelson in all this? Isn’t he one of the good guys? And my answer would be that of course he is. But at 90 years old, he’s from two generations of artists ago, when things weren’t deplorable yet.)

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Robin has been off visiting her sister in Sioux Falls SD for the past several days. From her telephone reports they have left a trail through some of the most rugged shopping destinations, knocked off at least one decadent pastry shop, and in general behaved about as well as one could expect from a pair of country girls on a rampage.

My problem has always been that my idea of tidiness and Robin’s are not precisely the same. So I never quite pull off that con job of being the well-behaved husband that I strive for.

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Ran across this very thoughtful piece on the NYTimes opinion page entitled “Being There.” It hit a nerve, a raw one in me, touching on an area where I have so often felt myself to be sadly lacking. Of feeling sort of paralyzed by someone’s need when they are going through a particularly rough patch. Recurrently having the idea that I should have done more, should have said this or that, should have been a better friend. Ultimately wondering if I really am that good friend that I thought I was.

The author describes what he regards as one of his own worst failures, not “being there” for a friend whose mother had passed away. I’m not going to list them, but I have my own tawdry compilation of inactions to regret.

When I was still a working stiff in the halls of medicine, I had opportunities galore to “be there.” And sometimes I was. Sometimes a phrase would pop out of my mouth that obviously gave comfort, and I tried to learn from that. But often I was mute, could not think for a moment of what I might say that would be just right, and so said nothing.

But, and here comes my point, there were times when I did step up. How? By literally being there, physically in the room with that person, saying nothing out loud but using the act of putting my body quietly in a chair to offer myself in whatever way was needed. Looking back, I realize that I was saying … tell me what I can do.

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Good article in the NYTimes about aging, strongly suggesting that having a positive attitude is a good thing, and may add a couple of years to your existence schedule. I spend quite a bit of time in this blog dissing getting old, primarily because my basic posture has been to whine about my life situation at every stage. Another aspect is that I am amused by the ridiculous in life, and aging certainly provides material for that conversation.

Yesterday I had lunch with friend Rod, chomping down on a couple of chile rellenos at a local restaurant. Our chat ranged widely, but it was inevitable that age was on the table, if only briefly, several times. That somewhat hoary adage, “getting old is not for sissies” came up, and both the truth of it and the humor in it were noted. He mentioned that a drawback of having his cataract surgery was that once his vision had been surgically improved, he was unprepared for the face he now saw clearly in the mirror. My response was to describe my typical morning visit to the same mirror in the mornings. I rub my eyes, put on my glasses, throw out my arms to the side and declare to my image “Well, what fresh hell have you got for me today?”

(I’m sorry, I so love that phrase of Dorothy Parker’s, What fresh hell is this?, that I keep using it in almost any kind of situation. If repeating myself is a sin, I am doubly doomed.)

One of my children, bless her heart, has been making fun of my addiction to Metamucil for decades, ever since on a long-ago visit to her home I had to make a late night trip to a grocery store to refresh my supply. I assured her that she didn’t want to be around me if I was forced to go into withdrawal, so would she please get out of my way and tell me the shortest route to the store.

The husks of the seeds of this plant have magical properties, some proven and others claimed but which fall more into the area of faith than of science. I am satisfied with science once again and will leave the rest of the discussion to others. And that’s all I am going to say about that.

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While this might not have been the best year to grow tomatoes in my backyard, it was a banner year for growing peaches on the Western Slope in Colorado. I’m serious, you had to eat them leaning over the sink to avoid dripping juice on your floor and clothing. And flavorful? My oh my!

This time it was two friends who each gave us a grocery sack full of peaches, way more than we could eat without doing ourselves harm, so we’ve preserved them, after a fashion. Following a recommendation found on the web, we cut them in half, brushed the cut side with diluted lemon juice, then flash froze them.

Now all we have to do this fall and winter is thaw out a few, enough to make a cobbler, and indulge!

Growing up, having fresh fruit was a luxury, and I never got over feeling that way. So to be buried in freestones too many to eat at once … I do believe I’ve died and gone to heaven.

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On January 23, 2016, candidate Donald Cluck said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

He was possibly correct in this assumption.

And that’s what I think he did this past weekend on Meet the Press, when he basically said Yep, trying to overthrow the results of a democratic election and continue as president was my idea. He fired that gun down Fifth Avenue, and he is challenging us to do something about it by putting the ugly deed out there where we can’t mistake the who and the what. My own feeling is that we take up his challenge as the bit of high unpleasantness that it is and beat the living s**t out of him at the polls in 2024.

Our problem is that it looks like we’ll be trying to use an 80 year-old warrior to do it with. Ah weel, laddies and lassies, it’s a poor workman who blames his tools, eh? We’ll just need to put a bit of extra starch in Uncle Joe’s boxer shorts when we send him out to do battle.

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Recently I ran across an article that made my gray hair stand on end. It was about the apparently incontrovertible fact that old people have their own smell. And that everybody who ever walked into a nursing home knows it. That faint but slightly suffocating aroma is the accumulation of the scents of all the residents, and not the result of poor housekeeping.

I am of a certain age. In addition to looking old, walking old, thinking old, and being unable to vertically jump more than a few centimeters (thus taking dunking a basketball forever out of my grasp), do I (gasp, wheeze, urk) smell that way?

Gaaaaaccck! How would I know? The affected persons probably don’t have a clue that they are walking around with a heady cloud of Eau de Dotage trailing behind them.

Anecdotally, the unique scent of the elderly lingers wherever they live and in any confined spaces they have recently occupied, such as taxis and elevators. 

Scientific American

And who would you ask? Certainly not young persons, who already hate the boomers for all sorts of things and don’t need another reason to have them put away. Another senior citizen? Can they discern something in others that they, too, are carrying along with them? The only reassurance is that even though we stand out with our own special bouquets, they apparently aren’t as revolting as the armpits of the middle-aged.

Contrary to common complaints about “old people smell,” the volunteers’ blind ratings revealed that they found elderly people’s odors both less intense and less unpleasant than odors from young and middle-aged people. Middle-aged man musk took top prize for intensity and unpleasantness, whereas volunteers rated the odors of middle-aged women most pleasant and whiffs of old man as least intense.

Scientific American

But I am taking no chances. I take four showers a day, tape floral arrangements under my arms, and eat at least one cup of alfalfa at every meal. In addition, my clothes are washed twice in cider vinegar and not rinsed. I’d rather smell like a gherkin than you know what.

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From The New Yorker

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The New Yorker magazine had two articles that caught my eye this week. The first one was about Larry McMurtry, who is the author of Lonesome Dove, one of my favorite novels. I’ve read it several times, and here’s the crazy part, I believe that it represents a truer view of good old late 19th century Texas than any other book. Why crazy? How would I know? I’ve spent a few weeks of my life in that politically benighted state, but was never a cowboy nor did I know one personally, and certainly I have no cred when it comes to knowing the minds of the state’s early residents, white, brown, or red.

But the words of the book … truth ringing like bells on every page for me.

The second article dealt with something more recent, a little movie about yet another world I’ve never inhabited, Theater Camp. Again, I have no trouble believing that anything on the screen couldn’t have happened in real life. My only window onto this world has been through the eyes and actions of grandson Aiden, whose dedication to his acting and singing craft in high school paralleled that of the characters in the movie. He’s an impressive young man, and one of the good people of this world.

Worth a watch, I think. On Hulu.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Emmy Lou Harris is the reigning queen of country, at least for me. A class act with impeccable musicianship. I first ran across her music in 1975, when her second album Pieces of the Sky was released and I was laid low by the song Boulder to Birmingham. Here is a sampler from her extensive (and eclectic) catalog. For instance, May This Be Love is her cover of a Jimi Hendrix tune.

The lady simply does not put out anything second-rate.

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I am accustomed to brook trout being pretty and small, but on Saturday morning I went fishing down at the East Portal in the Black Canyon N.P. and saw one do a slow roll out in the water in front of me that was perhaps 16 inches long. It had that unmistakable and striking red belly coloration that made it stand out from all of the other fish I sighted that morning.

Sighted, but didn’t catch. Although there was one very young, very foolish, and very small brown trout that managed to embarrass itself by letting me hook it. Poor thing must be the laughingstock of the Gunnison River even as I write this down.

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SOME REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

These days when I accidentally tune in to a country station while driving, I am nearly driven to tears and occasional nausea. So much of it is … actually, crap would be a euphemistic way of describing it. But then I catch myself and think, hey, there are real country singers singing real songs out there, they just aren’t being played as much. Songs by Patti Griffin, Amanda Shires, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Brandi Carlile, and Emmylou Harris. For whatever reason, only female names occur to me this morning.

Way too many of the guy singers are of the sleeveless shirt, pickup truck, flag-waving, and let’s get blitzed variety. They also tend to reduce women to objects, but hey, that’s what guys do when they are drunk, don’t they? You know, “locker-room talk” and all that.

So today we are dropping in a couple of tunes by one of the most thoughtful singer/songwriters out there – Mary Chapin Carpenter.

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Our leaves are beginning to turn color now, here in the valley. The Canada geese are getting together in small groups and practicing flying from field to field and pond to pond. Judging by the amount of honking they’re doing, they are pretty excited about the whole process.

Each fall for the past several years we’ve had a two-day “Salute to Aviation” at our local airport. The armed forces fly in a handful of planes, park them near the terminal, and allow the public to come by and walk around the aircraft.

Of course at this point in life I don’t need to experience those big-time G-forces while pulling out of a dive in a fighter jet. All I need to do to lose consciousness is stand up.

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t know if I’ve ever described my morning routine to you. Once I’ve had my first cup of coffee and am almost fully awake, I walk to the bathroom and turn toward the mirror. I plant my feet firmly about 24 inches apart and square my shoulders.

Only then do I raise my eyes to regard my reflected image and say: “Okay, what you got for me today? A new bump or lump? Something else will stop working? Breaking new ground in the sagging department?”

If I can’t see any new damages I count myself lucky and go on with the business of tidying up the ruins of the Adonis-like creature that I once was. Who knew how important gravity would become? I suspect that if I woke up in the International Space Station I wouldn’t recognize myself in the mirror at all, absent the wrinkles and bags.

Tempus seems to fugit faster and faster every day.

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A couple of days ago I was taking off on my e-bike to ride to the gym when I made some error and ended up dumping my self and the bike on the ground. A quick damage assessment showed only a scraped left knee and a sore spot on the opposite quad.

That wasn’t what was most bothersome . It was when the bike righted itself, backed up a few feet, and took another run at me. Like a toreador, I dodged to the right and grabbed the handlebars as it passed, avoiding further injury.

Now this episode will come as no surprise to long-term readers of this blog, who are familiar with my belief that inanimate objects are not. Inanimate, that is. How else to explain so many oddnesses?

For instance, the car keys that you know you put in the drawer where they belong but are now in the pocket of the jeans that just came out of the washing machine.

Or the jar lid that simply will not come off even with the proper cursing and sweating, but then twirls off like a ballerina when your wife takes her shot at it.

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From The New Yorker

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Let me take a moment to praise the homely apple. Available in scads of varieties, the number of which is added to every year, delicious eaten raw or baked into some of the best comfort food in the universe, and handsome to look at, I think it may not be getting the respect it deserves.

Our local market tries to interest us in dragonfruit, papayas, and kiwis, which are all commendable fruits. But they ain’t from here. Apples don’t like the tropics, requiring colder climates to do their thing. If you’re looking hard to find a blessing in cold country living, the apple is one you might consider.

Yesterday a friend who has a small orchard gave us a large bag of Honeycrisp apples, and we are presently gorging ourselves on them (at least I am). it is also entirely possible that there is an apple crisp in my future.

And no matter which variety you choose to eat, you are almost guaranteed to be happy and satisfied. Almost. We need to be warned that there exists that paradox of fruits. The only apple variety which has none of the attributes we cherish. With its thick skin, mushy interior, and uninteresting flavor, the only thing it has going for itself is that it looks good. But its name itself is a lie.

So how did we get stuck with this loser? Here’s a young man who seems to know the answer. You don’t have to watch the video if you aren’t curious. Just don’t buy the dratted apple.

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If there was ever a time to hope that we Americans will collectively keep our heads, it will be the next twelve months. And I’m talking to both sides of the so-called culture wars, to lefties and righties and even those political agnostics, the independents. It’s likely that there will be a fire or two set during this time, with some well-known blowhards puffing on the flames like strutting blacksmith’s bellows.

I am also talking to the “media,” who have been known to fan a flame or two themselves whenever it helped their circulation. No one should feel that they need to give up any firmly held political principle, but we need a safe space where such things can be debated, and some of the actors in our national drama would take this space away from us and use it only for themselves.

There are moments when I get all tensed up as il fascisti strike their poses and do their acting out in the public square, and I see those puffed-up warriors wearing their camo outfits and brandishing their AR 15s. Do we need a clearer picture as to their intent? They are made of the same clay as the blackshirts and the storm troopers from another time.

As boring and tedious and mind-numbing as our political debates can be, they are essential to keeping the best of what we have and offering a better future for us all. When the scales finally fell from Italian eyes back in 1945 and they threw off fascist rule, they did it with some grisly fluorishes, including hanging a bunch of them from a girder, Mussolini included.

But it had taken nearly thirty years for enough of them to come to their senses. We need to do that before November 2024, and reject authoritarianism and its ugly buddies – power cults, looking for the strongman, threats of violence, rejection of the very ideas that have made the ideals of America worth supporting. Authoritarianism tends to carry the seeds of its own destruction along with it, but there can be so much harm done along the way.

In our past, a respect for fair-mindedness and decency have kept us strong and united even in our fractiousness. Taken together they are a heady blend, something to get quietly high on.

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We’ve had the pleasure of having Cynthia, a good friend of Robin’s from South Dakota, stay with us for several days. She is a delightful person, and from my standpoint it was great fun to watch these old buddies get a chance to chat and laugh and flat out enjoy one another’s company.

On the other hand, being caught in a small house with two intelligent and fast-talking women at the same time is a harrowing experience for me. I simply could not keep up, and had to keep inventing excuses to go off to my room to catch a breath.

(I am much more at my ease in the company of a bunch of typical male louts, scratching and farting together and dealing with the deeper questions of life like “How ‘bout dem Broncos, eh?”)

Of course, having a guest means we got a chance to show off this part of Colorado, which offers much to show off. The weather wasn’t perfectly cooperative, with some rains here and there, but there was just enough sunshine to keep our plans on track and our mood light.

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In our conversations I was reminded of the first time I took Robin canoeing in the Boundary Waters. We put in at an entry point that I had used several times before and headed for a portage a few miles ahead. An hour or so later I realized that I was seeing a shoreline I had never seen before, which meant that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere and we were now in unfamiliar territory.

As I was fuming at myself for my chuckleheadedness, Robin spoke up and suggested that we return to where we had started out and begin the journey anew. I stared at her for the longest time before I came up with this response:

Robin, dear, if I knew how to get to where we started out, we wouldn’t be lost.

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I am a sucker for signs that bring a laugh or even a grimace if they are bad enough. Collected these this week. I especially appreciate the desperation of the one covering the urinal in the men’s room in a restaurant in Silverton CO.

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The number of people who follow this blog puts me somewhat short of enough to qualify as a macro-influencer. I am definitely in the “nano” category.

People with followers in the range between 500,000 and 1 million followers on a social network are macro-influencers. Most influencers are micro-influencers with between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. In really specialist niches, you have nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers.

Influence Marketing Hub.com

Which brings me to acknowledging the latest follower to sign on to the blog, who is from Nigeria. I am delighted to welcome them as my first followers from Africa.

Amazing, isn’t it? The ease of communicating with people thousands of miles away, separated from us by vast oceans. There is certainly a darker side to what the internet can be used for, but I believe it is far outweighed by the positives. So I will return the favor and follow this new blog from the folks in Nigeria with hope that I will learn something about a country other than my own, from the people who live there.

It serves as a reminder that what we now refer to as the internet was once commonly called the world-wide web. We no longer need to type in the “www” on a web address, our computers make that assumption for us, but it’s still true.

[Now would be the time, I think to admit that I am not any sort of influencer at all. Just a rambling sort of writer. I just wanted to talk about it as if I were, for a moment. If you need corroboration of this, you need only contact my children, who will tell you straight up that I have never influenced them in the slightest.]

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One of the table conversations with Robin and Cynthia was about early rock and rollers, including Elvis Presley. I consider myself a fan of his, but only of the too-short period before he was drafted. After that he was mistakenly guided toward turning out some sort of canned pop-rock that had obvious appeal because he sold a gazillion records. But I didn’t buy any of them.

Following up on our discussion I have included three tunes today from that golden time when he was young and fresh and thought to present a clear and present danger to public morals.

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I had it on continuous, repeated headphone play during my routine at the rec center, as I sang silently along, the words “Black Myself “ ringing inside my cranium.

But, dear hearts, I am not black, but of Norwegian ancestry, which makes me a poster boy for pallid. No matter. A good soul-stirring anthem is what I needed today at the gym and that is exactly what I got. Cultural appropriation … possibly. But I don’t know any Norse exercise songs that can carry one through the paces like this tune does.

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From The New Yorker

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I admit to having taken cheap shots from time to time at the world of fashion. It is a world beyond my understanding or caring, but obviously means a great deal to some people, and it is unkind of me to be so dismissive. It is, after all, art of a sort and I have no qualifications to judge art.

But I will remain silent and let the picture speak for itself.

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Life has offered me opportunities too many to mention, to be a good example. I have taken advantage of so few of them … . For instance:

A. I was given a substantial four year scholarship upon graduation from high school. After two years of spending more time wandering the bluffs of the Mississippi River than I did in class, the scholarship committee cut off the last two years.

B. When seat belts were first offered in cars, I ignored them entirely. It wasn’t until going without a belt was against the law that I finally gave in and put the blasted things on.

C. I was repeatedly told that going bareheaded while bicycling was a poor example to set before children in our small town. I cared not a fig. I was already working overtime with those same children in other venues, what @&&$$#%^*% claim did they have on my free time? But the incessant badgering finally wore me down.

D. Motorcycling? Helmets? Take away my freedom to ride the way I wanted? I grudgingly relented, but with much pouting. I’m still pouting and I don’t even have the motorcycle anymore.

And so on.

But that was the old me. The new man that I am sits up straight at the table, uses his knife and fork properly, and closes his mouth when he chews. I keep my lawn trimmed and follow the recommended schedule for maintaining my automobile. I try to be a good listener even when the speaker is spewing pure bilgewater. I pat the errant children of others on the head, even when their hygiene is questionable.

At long last I am making an effort to become a grownup, and leave those bad behaviors behind. What are the odds in my favor? I would guess about 10%.

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From The New Yorker

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I like to point out the hypocrisy of others. It helps me to avoid dealing with my own. But there has been quite a hoorah about women over the past several years about their right to wear whatever they want and wherever they might be. Appeals to caution generally fall on deaf ears.

No matter. Their theme is wear what they want and any adverse consequences are somebody else’s fault.

Now the hypocrisy I mentioned comes in at exactly the speedo point. This is where these same people do not granted males the same freedom of clothing expression . To refresh your memory, the speedo is a garment which is the male equivalent of the bikini, but one that has almost no defenders.

If I were to go to a beach wearing this patch of material, I imagine it would be a very short while before the beach police covered me with a horse blanket and hauled me off for fashion counseling. If I were stubborn about it I might even be charged with creating a public nuisance, and brought before a jury that would consist of twelve persons good and true wearing identical expressions of disgust.

The only people who are allowed to wear a speedo without becoming targets of derision and hurled tomatoes are the young and extremely fit. And even for them it is a chancy thing to wear one in public in America.

The last time I ever put on a Speedo was in Mexico, when I was eons younger and a good deal more fit. Today I have enough respect for the public’s sensitivities to not want to provoke their horror by wearing this abbreviated bit of cloth.

So, where we are at present it is women – wear what you please. Men – don’t even think about it.

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When I was a little kid, staying on grandpa’s farm, I would occasionally be sent to the cornfield to select a few ears for supper. Grandpa never planted sweet corn for the table, but thought that if field corn was good enough for his hogs, it was good enough for us. So off I’d go to do my duty. Somewhere along in life I was taught to examine the cobs for worms, which was a gross thing to do and therefore interesting to a kid.

I was reminded of this childhood process when this summer an infestation of corn earworm developed in the fields of Olathe, about ten miles from us. Olathe is a very small town, almost completely dependent on sweet corn for its livelihood so the local effects were, if not disastrous, certainly harmful to the local economy.

But all this ado and fuss has made me paranoid enough that today when I shopped for corn, I peeled back the husk just enough to check for unwanted travelers. Call me fussy, but I don’t like it when my meat moves on my plate.

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There’s been a boatload of information in recent years on how bowel flora can influence behavior in creatures who we think are far beneath us on the scale of how living things are ranked on this planet. Of course that’s our ranking, and we have no idea what theirs would be, since we ascribe little importance to the mental life of anything but our own species.

The idea that microorganisms could be doing the same thing to us, the ultimate in evolution’s grand progression, is not worth considering and can easily dismissed with a haughty sniff.

Perhaps rather too easily.

Here are a few recurring situations that are possibilities, perhaps you have noticed some as well.

• A person who has everything to lose has an overnight sexual dalliance when thinge chance of discovery is nearly guaranteed
• A person has already eaten way more than they should have and feels a bit ill as a result, their waistline is straining at their belt, and then they reach for one more shrimp. Or two.
• A person reads an article about someone using high colonics in a wackadoo health regimen and finds that they have a low opinion on such maneuvers even though they really don’t know what one is.

I think that we should look into the off chance that we are being pushed around on a regular basis by our bowel flora, just like those “lower” organisms are. I can tell you for certain that in my own case, and this has happened many, many times, a touch of diarrhea will routinely make me move toward the loo much faster than I had believed possible.

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From The New Yorker

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Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? And it was so early one morning at the South Fork Campground until a couple of small bits of burning pine jumped onto my fleece pajama bottoms and quickly burned two holes in the garment and one in my anterior thigh. Some, but not all of the magic went out of the moment as I flapped my hands to put myself out.

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Of all the Colorado rivers I’ve seen so far in this state which is filled with beautiful rivers and streams, the White River is my present favorite. I’ve spent a little time on both the north and south forks which join up to create the main river and brother, gorgeous just don’t do them justice. Here’s a couple of pix along the South Fork taken this past week.

We camped one night at the South Fork Campground, which is at the end of Highway 10. It’s a “primitive” location, which means fewer amenities. But the restrooms were well maintained, the sites were far enough apart, and it was right on the river.

We were using a two-person backpacking tent and I have to tell you that getting into that thing in the evening, with all of our senior citizen creakings and groanings, was hilarious. Once installed we were quite comfortable and slept well in 40 degree temperatures.

In the morning, as we sipped our coffees, two trains of pack horses passed through the campground carrying elk hunters and their gear up into the Flattop Mountains. Each train was about ten horses long. You could tell the outfitters from the hunters pretty easily, they were the ones who looked like they knew what they were doing. The others were dressed in brand-new camouflage clothing and did not appear to have been born to the saddle.

As they passed I sent out all the good wishes and karma that I could muster – to the elk. Essentially these guys were going to all this trouble to have a chance to shoot at a peaceful herbivore bigger than a cow while it was grazing and standing perfectly still.

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Today, while I was waiting at the pharmacy I saw a man wearing a cap with an inscription I hadn’t seen before – “I Miss The America I Grew Up In.“ At first I thought that it might be code for MAGA, but there is a wistful quality to this new one that is lacking in the Cluck slogan.

I miss the world I grew up in, too, but that was because I had it pretty good, while so many others did not. Some of the things I was lucky enough to enjoy back then:

• Riding bikes up and down the streets of my home neighborhood in Minneapolis where the elms formed a complete arch
• Walking a mile to attend Saturday matinees at the Nokomis theater without parents hovering over my every step
• Every boy I knew played baseball, owned his own glove and bat, and could be counted on to help get up a game at a moment’s notice
• Adults in my family who were adults, and we could take for granted that they had our back, every day
• Never going to bed hungry

Although I “miss” these things, I don’t really want to go back and relive those times. The charms of sketchy electrical wiring, unreliable indoor plumbing, no antibiotics, and car tires that went flat on every other trip would wear thin very quickly for modern me, I think.

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I don’t know how it is with you, but my spiritual side is a patchwork quilt, with pieces from time spent in churches, in hospitals, reading books, watching films … a basketful of patches retrieved from the ordinary messes of an ordinary life. One of those patches came from a phrase in a middling sort of movie, Beyond Rangoon. Way before I came across Buddhism, I came across this actor reading the line “Suffering is the one promise that life always keeps.”

Apparently I was at that moment fertile ground for this particular teaching, because it stuck, and slowly grew into a sort of acceptance. That this might truly be how life operated. Randomness. No one needed to be blamed, no one was being punished, no tortuous explanations were necessary. When bad things happened, they just happened. As did good things.

I began to appreciate more the varieties of suffering that always been around me, and I saw more clearly what my own path forward should be. To not add, if possible, to the sufferings of this world, and to help reduce it wherever I could.

I see these practices as ordinary tasks for ordinary people like myself. Not saints, not holy men or women. Just regular, everyday, unremarkable folks.

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From The New Yorker

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I am re-reading one of the best books about Native American history that I’ve come across: Empire of the Summer Moon. It is a fascinating story in so many ways. Of course, the overall arc is the same as nearly all of the other stories dealing with what happened to Native American tribes when they encountered the European invasion. The tribe encounters the whites, who lie and cheat and murder their way to driving them out of their home territories.

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From The New Yorker

We are at the Classic Sheepdog Trials, in Meeker CO. They’ve been holding this event for a couple of decades now, and it has become well- known in sheepdog circles. We rendezvoused with Ally and Kyle, who took a day out of their very busy schedule to join us.

Now there are those of you who wonder why a guy who doesn’t own a dog, and who has never shown the slightest interest in sheep would go to such an event, let alone buy a ticket to attend. My answer is the same one given by George Mallory when asked why he climbed Mount Everest: “Because it is there.“

That’s about as far as I care to go in making a comparison because Mallory perished in his attempt in 1924, and if there was any chance that this was a possible outcome of watching a bunch of dogs chase a bunch of not too bright animals around a pasture I wouldn’t be here at all. I may be occasionally unhinged but I’m no fool.

Meeker is one of the towns we pass through on our way to visit Ally and Kyle in Steamboat Springs. I learned about this event a few years ago when I perused a poster in a Meeker cafe. A mental note was made that it might be interesting to come see it some day, and for whatever reason I didn’t instantly forget about it (Forgetting having become one of my major talents).

So here we are. Meeker has a population of 2374 on a good day, but there are quite a few more people here today. You might even say it is bustling.

Ordinarily you wouldn’t travel here in the Fall unless you were one of the brave and intrepid souls who show up with their rifles to shoot at elk grazing in mountain meadows. I wouldn’t drive six feet to watch that sorry sight, but we are assured that nothing of the kind happens at a sheepdog trial.

Ah, but it is Autumn and the air at 6200 feet is bracing and cool, and there is nothing but sunshine promised for the duration of the meet. Life could be a lot worse.

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From The New Yorker

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I was musing this morning about the heyday of MTV when it began in 1981, with its stable of interesting VeeJays and nonstop music videos. When my own children were teenagers MTV was playing in the background all day long (minor exaggeration here), even if no one was watching it. Anytime you passed the television set, you could check out what was current in pop music. It was how a relatively obtuse dude like myself knew a little bit about the popular music of the day.

Sadly, MTV went down the chute into “reality TV” and I never turned it on again. But people still make those videos, and every once in a while I discover one that improves my day. The following offering by Maria BC is one of those.

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August 1947 in Kenyon, Minnesota.

Kenyon, I learned later in life, contained only 900 people when I was a boy. A farm town in the middle of rich farmlands. It had a grain elevator, a dairy, a movie theater, two grocery stores, two restaurants, a drugstore, a farm implement dealer and a hardware store. Most of its residents back then were Scandinavian, and nearly all of them were Lutheran. As you left town taking Highway 60 west toward Faribault, you passed the only “rambler” style home in the community. That was where “the Catholic” lived, according to my grandfather.

My brother and I often spent the summer at grandpa’s farm, which to us was a never-ending source of wonder and intrigue. We ran like ferrets all day long exploring barns and sheds and creeks and valleys. We trapped pocket gophers. We fished for very small fish in the small pond that forty years later would take my cousin’s life, as he and his snowmobile crashed through the ice together. There was just enough water to cover them both.

Bud pitched or played outfield and he was our by-god hero. Just to be able to tell some other kid at the games that look there was our uncle out on the mound with his uniform and everything and did you see that he just struck that guy out! Struck him out cold! When I grow up I’m gonna play softball just like him.

He owned a black 1946 Ford two-seater coupe with a cool V-8 symbol on the hood. Inside the car there was a tiny electric fan on the dash that you could turn to blow in your face on hot days. There was also an AM radio that never played anything but polka music.

Bud didn’t take us home every night. Olaf and Harold were friends of Bud’s and on some evenings they would ferry us safely back to the farm. Apparently there were some team issues that had to be occasionally sorted out at a local tavern after the games. Grown-up stuff. Some of them involved a lady in the community who was nicknamed Moonbeam.

I never met Miss Moonbeam but I’m sure that she was a very nice person because nearly all of the men on the team spoke very highly of her.

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There was a moment when one of the non-idyllic parts of farm life was revealed in the starkest of terms. Uncle Bud was attending the birth of piglets, in the hay-fragrant twilight that was the barn’s interior.

I watched fascinated as each small glistening body was delivered. Then one piglet was born that was half the size of all the rest.Without a word, Bud picked up that tiny animal and flung it, hard, against the barn’s cinderblock wall. The creature dropped, lifeless, to the floor.

To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. I could not believe what I had seen. I couldn’t put my idol’s hands and the killing of that poor creature together in my mind. When Bud then said the word “runt” it didn’t help at all. I had no frame of reference for that word. All I knew was that something completely inexplicable had happened. And I felt like I was an accomplice, somehow, because I hadn’t stepped in on the piglet’s behalf. Even though there actually hadn’t been enough time to do so.

Later someone explained to me what being the runt of the litter meant. That trying to raise one to adulthood was wasting money, something that was always in short supply on a small farm.

Known as runts, the smallest-born pigs often get the short end when it comes to feeding and attention from their mother, two factors that diminish their chance to survive. Runt pigs often weigh 1.1 kilograms — about 2 1/2 pounds — or less at birth. They may die on their own, or may be euthanized because of quality of life or welfare issues.

Kansas State University Bulletin

However logical my uncle’s actions might have been to him, the event was my first brush with cognitive dissonance, and it was a doozy.

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From The New Yorker

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Yesterday at City Market I had just put my purchases into the bike’s panniers when an elderly man came up to ask how I liked riding an e-bicycle.

A little background:

• This happens with some regularity
• I am very enthusiastic about the utility of e-bikes
• I am very enthusiastic about bicycling in general
• I am a consummate bore when it comes to expounding on my favorite topics

I don’t seem to be able to help myself. Robin knows how to deal with these episodes which is by hollering Pedant! Pedant! at me. But some poor sods like this gentleman have no clue what to do but to awkwardly stumble off.

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The summer days here in Paradise have been warmer than I would have chosen if I had been asked, but the nights … they are something else.

Take last night for instance. At 9 PM the temperature was just cool enough to be at the point where you might have put on another layer but are still okay without it. No wind. Just a few stars and the moon only half up. Bugs jamming around the lights (they seem to like LEDs just as well as incandescents).

Those insects reminded me of a camping experience we had. I don’t remember where we were, actually, but I do remember the toad.

It didn’t budge an inch as I walked by, and I wondered … how did it get so big? … but then I saw how. Several feet above its bumpy head the insects were fluttering around the light, and every once in a while one of them would fall to the ground. Where the toad waited patiently. No muss, no fuss, just putting electricity to good use. Every night that light would turn on automatically, and the feast would begin.

On the whole I don’t give toads credit for being very smart, but the one had something going for it.

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t like Mitch McConnell much. I think his partisan power-grabbing shenanigans went way past the point of okay when he refused to allow even a vote on Merrick Garland’s appointment. Basically he’s been an example of the worst sort of behavior in politics.

But I wouldn’t wish what’s in the video below on anyone. Notice how his aides are right there, showing no signs of surprise that their boss just lost it for awhile. Keep in mind that this man is one of the most powerful people in America.

There is a time, friends, when the elders of the tribe should retire to the shade of the great oak tree and spend their time chucking acorns at squirrels and telling stories to small children.

When are we going to get serious about dealing with the fact that human brains do burn out, and that it is neither surprising nor shameful when it happens, but a natural event. At present we are tiptoeing around the subject because it is an awkward one to discuss. Sooner or later those who try to bring it up are shouted down as “ageists”and discussion comes to a halt.

One cannot become U.S. President before attaining a certain age. How about one cannot do so after a certain age?

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I remember the first time I heard the song Rhiannon. It was on a day in 1976, while I was motoring in the UP of Michigan. I had my four kids in the car at the time, and they were all in fine voice that day as they were going through their back-seat arguing and infighting routines. Somehow the song’s melody made its way through the cacophony inside the automobile, grabbed my organs of hearing, and implanted itself in my brain.

On FM airplay the song had a haunting sort of melody, the kind that held up just fine under repeated listening, and caused me to actually spend a few bucks buying the album. It became my song of the month for at least three months.

But then I saw Fleetwood Mac do it on the Midnight Special, and I was never the same. No, I mean really, I wasn’t. This performance was perfect rock n’roll, and we knew it. It blew right past our eyes and ears and into our amygdalas, that strange small place in our brains where emotion and feeling mill around (and often cause us great mischief).

To watch this video is to remember. See for yourself.

Whew. I think I’ll get me a nice cold shower.

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From The New Yorker

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We’ve had some little rains this past week. Nothing of an order to make us wonder where we’d parked the Ark, but still, any rain in a dry country is cause for celebration. And the are some cool things that come along with it.

• the aromas of the plants and the earth are heightened to the point that even our limited human sense of smell can’t miss them
• the cats coming in through the pet entrance highly put out at their fur being wet, and somehow it seems to be our fault
• the thrilling sound of thunder and how tiny it can make us feel
• the gamble of standing out in the rain and watching the spectacle that is lightning (even more fun when somebody is yelling at you to “get in here right this minute, are you crazy?”)

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Cro-Magnon dialog to be read while above video is running

Hey kids, get those wet bearskins off you then go sit by the fire to warm up

Where’s Fluffy?

She’s not in the cave?

Dad, she will get all wet!

If she’s not in here, she is already wet. Go over by the fire and try not to set yourselves ablaze again, like last night.

I’m hungry.

Supper’s just about ready.

What are we having?

Squirrels and gruel

Can I eat over at Yarmik’s?

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I mentioned my friend Rich Kaplan in a previous post. Rich and I traveled to the Boundary Waters together perhaps thirty times over the years. Most of these trips were not the sort of epic journeys that make good story-telling, but they were satisfying in their own low-key way.

The last couple of times we went into the “BW,” we had made a deal with each other. Both of us were getting older, and the probability of injury or other health problems while in the wilderness was slowly but steadily increasing. So we decided that if either of us were stricken in some way, and could not be safely loaded into the canoe for a return trip, the other would leave him and go for help. Anything else, we thought, was Plan B.

Even as we made those terms with ourselves, they sounded rational, but harsh. No one wants to be left behind if they are hurting, no one wants to feel like they are abandoning a friend. But if there is something to be done for the afflicted person, it will more likely be found in a town, and not out in the bush, leaning against a stump.

Of course, once we had made that brave decision, the opportunity to see if we would carry out the plan never came up. One of those rules of life – if you bring your rain gear, it doesn’t rain. The opposite is also true.

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Had friends over for dinner last night, good people we haven’t spent nearly enough time with this past year. I had decided to grill some salmon on a cedar plank, something I’d done before, but it had been quite a while. And lo and behold, it turned out exactly the way I hoped that it would.

When it works, it’s pretty cool and you don’t have to worry about the fish sticking to the bars of the grill and being torn to pieces in the cooking process. After the cooking’s done you haul in a fragrant, charred board with your supper on it and make this beautiful presentation to your guests. It is kind of a cave man moment.

Morg bring meat to friends on burning board because frying pan not invented yet. Eat.

In preparing to cook the fish this way, I had boned up on the process, and in none of the videos I watched did the plank burst into flames. Nor was this potential catastrophe ever mentioned. Of course, you soak the board in water for at least an hour before you put it on the grill to prevent this. But I thought: Surely someone somewhere sometime put one into the cavernous maw of a Weber gas grill, closed the lid, and before you knew it the neighbors had called out the fire department, and the police were writing you a citation for disturbing their peace and creating a public nuisance.

But … apparently … doesn’t happen?

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From The New Yorker

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It’s 2:15 on Wednesday morning, and I stepped out onto the backyard deck where I was assaulted by a full moon so bright it gave me something of the feeling that a criminal must have when those helicopter spotlights pick them up and won’t let go. Amazing.

Terrifying. Our television weather people nationwide do a great job, I think. They have a tendency to overblow a little, their business being to cry “Wolf”whenever there is a chance of real nastiness. Many of those dire predictions don’t develop into anything serious and we begin to say: “Yeah, Yeah, I hear ya” and just keep going about our business.

But this thing called Hurricane Idalia which is roaring up onto Florida’s coast right now … winds of 125 mph and still gaining strength … this looks like the real deal and I hope that the people there have had enough time to get as far away from it as they can. What awesome power.

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