Category: family

Places To Go And People To See

jono55

When the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh died this past January, he left behind a treasury of writings that touched on just about every aspect of living I can think of. I’ve read at least a dozen of his books, perhaps more, and his gentle and rational voice came through clearly each time. He had the gift of being able to explain the application of Buddhist teachings to our lives in words that were straightforward and uncomplicated without ever being patronizing or proselytizing.

Robin recently gifted me with his latest book, entitled Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. It is different from the others I have read in two respects. The first is that each of his short chapters is followed by excellent commentary by a Buddhist nun, Sister True Dedication. The second is that he writes as someone who knows how little time remains to him, and wants to leave yet something more for those of us who are still floundering about on the surface of Earth. As a dying father who has his children gathered around him and wishes more than anything that he could do more, could have done more, to ease the suffering of those he loved.

Thay, for that is what his friends called him, was a man who never lost hope for us, for our species. He knew that the answers to the wholesale suffering and chaos that we call daily life were already here, in front of us and inside of us. That life need not be as difficult as we make it. That respect, compassion, and love were the tools needed and that we all possessed them. And that is crucial, I think. He never said Come buy another of my books, absorb what I have to tell you, and all will be well.

What he repeated over and over is You know that person of value, of peacefulness, that the planet needs to survive? It’s you and you don’t have to go anywhere and listen to anyone in particular to become that person. You already are. What is needed is that you learn how you can step out of the stream of confusion you are now walking in and gather your wits. What I offer you free of charge is a method that has worked for millions of people and it won’t cost you a dime.

That is the message he repeats in this last book. That each of us already has the tools we need. They are part of our true natures. What Thay offers us is essentially an owner’s manual for our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and lastly for our conduct here in our home on planet Earth.

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If in our heart we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions, we cannot be free.

Thich Nhat Hanh
Life of Illusion, by Joe Walsh

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I was listening to NPR the other day, and a senior New Yorker cartoonist was being interviewed after a long and successful career. He recounted how when he started out he had submitted dozens of examples of his work to the magazine over and over without a single acceptance. What had to happen was that the magazine’s cartoon editor had to die, which he eventually did, and almost overnight his replacement began publishing this man’s work.

One of those many stories that come to me as revelations, when they really shouldn’t have. Give someone a bit of power and they will by god use it wherever they can, whether ’tis for ill or good.

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From The New Yorker

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Monday promises to be a drizzly day. It’s three a.m. and the decks are awash already. We’re planning a few days getaway in early April, and just found out that our cat sitter for the past eight years was not available, of all things. As if she had a right to a life of her own. So Sunday morning I met with our new sitter, who I will call Howard, since that is his name. He will fill in if our regular person ever again selfishly insists on her freedom.

Howard is a retired real estate broker, and seems to be a very nice guy, indeed. He is quite a talker, being one of those people where everything reminds him of a story, which he will then relate in detail. (I recognize the type immediately because I am one of them) When all an individual really wants to do is say Good Morning and then pass by, dealing with such a person is like being snagged by a gentle but insistent octopus who will only release you when they are finished with you.

So Howard and I chatted for an hour when all that was required was five minutes mutual consultation. I enjoyed it, however, because his tales were interesting and his sincere interest in animal welfare came through. He is a member of a local organization that raises money for the neutering of domestic animals, principally dogs and cats. He suggested that we watch for a special fund-raiser coming up when one of our better local restaurants offers a spay-ghetti dinner for one night, with a silent auction, etc. His advice was to buy our tickets early.

I might go if there isn’t a lot of spay-talk. Not the thing at dinner, you know. Just isn’t done.

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From The New Yorker

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I missed it completely. Sunday was the first day of Spring and I blew right past it. It’s the kind of thing where you can’t go home again, can’t step in the same river twice … you know the drill. It was Monday morning when I realized that it was too late for this year and I’d have to wait till 2023 and try to do better. Mother Nature puts out this stuff and doesn’t care if I keep up or not. I like her attitude, really, except when I am the laggardly one.

When you walk around Paradise, you can see the trees trying to contain themselves and not bud out prematurely. Do that if you’re a tree and then one really cold day comes along and freezes your blossoms off. There you are, damaged and with reduced hopes for the year. It’s a case where the sexual part of the tree blunders off into escapades when the wiser, older part knows better but can’t hold the process back.

Just like people. All of that life experience and knowledge gathered by parts above the waist can be undone in a fevered twinkling by parts below the waist on a Saturday night in a borrowed Buick. A couple of hours later when control has been returned to the brain, there is little it can do but wait and hope for the best.

It’s a rough system, isn’t it? When the biologic plan for making more humans takes over and sensible thinking is put on hold. I can see why Momma Nature would do that, because if we had time to think things through to their conclusions and weigh consequences pro and con there might be fewer takers. And Nature doesn’t want fewer, not at all. It’s always more with that girl.

Here’s how it might go if common sense and real planning were the order of the day.

It’s Saturday night and she is right here in the car with me and she smells wonderful and her eyes are sparkling and … uh, oh I can feel stirrings. Better get my head straight while I still can. I’ve got college to finish and mountains to climb and traveling to be done and I would very much like to trade the old VW in for a new Miata. So let’s take her home early and maybe we can meet again one day for coffee. In the daytime. In public.

Or it could go like it often does in real life.

It’s Saturday night and she is right here in the car with me and she smells wonderful and her eyes are sparkling and what was that baloney Father O’Reilly was spouting about purity and chastity anyway and I wonder if she is feeling the same about me and … wait, here she is snuggling in closer and oh lord where are my hands going and ………………………………………………….. ………………….. whew, what was that? This is one of those times when I wish that I smoked.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light, by Meatloaf

When I was a teenager and clueless about all this I had a friend who was notorious among us for having (gulp) had sex with several girls while the rest of us were still thinking about it as we would about a trip to Mars. He was a good Catholic boy and told his story like this:

“There I was with all sorts of thoughts about how good those girls looked and wondering what they looked like naked and what it might be like to sleep with them. Every Saturday evening I would go to confession and relate these mental wanderings to the priest and one day I asked him:”

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Father, I am sorry to keep confessing the same old stuff week after week. But thinking about having sex is always a sin, right?

Yes, my son, it is.

But it’s much worse to actually do it, isn’t it?

No, my son, thinking bad thoughts is the same as acting on them.

Say again?

It is just as much a sin to think about having sex with a girl as it is to actually lie with her.

……………… Father, could we hurry this up a bit and you give me my penance and all? It’s still early on a Saturday night and since I already know that I can’t stop thinking about it … well, I’ve got places to go and people to see.

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Time Trudges On

jono55

Ahhhhhh, made it to another first day of daylight saving time. That first day, you really notice it. One night you are eating supper in the dark and the next night you have to turn your chair because the sun is in your eyes. Magic.

There are exactly twelve devices keeping time in our house. Six of them change themselves each year at this time and I don’t need to do a thing but keep them plugged in. The others must be changed by hand, with my making the rounds and checking the numbers on my iPhone at each stop. Most years I overlook the wall clock in Robin’s office, until one day in August when she will find herself an hour off-schedule because of my oversight and then there are all those comments on my genetics, moral fiber, and position in the firmament to deal with.

So this year when I not only changed its display but inserted a fresh battery I admit to feeling pretty smug. Such are my circumstances that I can coast for a day or two on just doing one thing right.

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One personal problem I have with the time change is that Robin and I are involved in a slow transition which involves going to bed earlier with each year’s passage. For instance, this past winter there were days when we could hardly make it to supper without flagging just a bit. And when we retired to the living room to watch some program or another on television I would begin to doze off as soon as my posterior hit the sofa cushion. There I would be, sitting frozen in time and space with the remote in my hand, as if placed there by a taxidermist.

This usually resulted in quite a large amount of elbowing on Robin’s part, trying to keep me alert enough that she might avoid repetitive questions like “What happened in the story?,” or “Where am I and who are you?” Or worse, have to deal with my embarrassed denials: “I wasn’t sleeping, I was testing the reaction time of my eyelids,” or “No, we don’t have to rerun the program, I only missed a second or two, if that.”

But DST throws a wrench into everything.

One simply cannot go to bed here at BaseCamp, no matter what one’s untrustworthy nervous system tells them, when you can still get a sunburn if you wander outdoors. For one thing, it is rare to find both of us being that tired at the same moment on any given day. This results in the would-be-sleeper having to contend with the Concerto for Clatter and Bang in A Minor, usually being played in the kitchen by the still conscious member of the partnership.

Nope … DST takes some getting used to each year.

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A comment on the guy in the cartoon above. For all of the times I have seen this motto on a T-shirt in my lifetime, whatever the legend states after “You can have my …. ” has so far never been something that I wanted in the first place. But if it came to that, I have seen quite a few cold dead fingers along my way, and I would have no qualms about prying them apart if they were holding something that I needed or wanted.

For instance, the teddy bear.

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At the recreation center Monday, I noticed this interesting turnaround. An instructor was giving a private pickleball lesson to a member. It says something about the sport, I think, that the student was the young and supple one while the teacher was the graybeard.

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A Dick Guindon Cartoon

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I think I posted some stuff on the shuffle dance before, but YouTube served this up to me unbidden this morning. Apparently the trend started in Melbourne AU in the 1980s, and has since spread around the globe. The first video is of some impossibly talented performers, “hot” young men and women doing what would send me to hospital within seconds.

The second video is from Sven Otten, a young German with a sense of style and humor who apparently is making a partial career of it.

The third video … well … what is the opposite of “hot” and impossibly fit? (Actually, this is Paul Shelnutt, a champion buck dancer .)

Whenever I see one of these they make me smile. Happy dances take me to my happy place.

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Tuesday Robin and I took our first bicycle ride since her surgery, and it went well. We were using the e-bikes, which I am convinced were one of the better investments I’ve ever made. Now you would know that this isn’t saying much if you had the ability to scan everything that I’ve called an investment over a lifetime. Most of them were purchases that rose out of thinly veiled fictions that were dreamed up to cover my buying something that I wanted anyway.

But the true value of these bikes is that you can adjust the effort needed to ride them by pushing a button. When you are trying out a knee that’s been rebuilt this is no small matter, and it was a morale booster for the two of us for sure.

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Do You Feel A Draft?

jono55

After a mostly lah-dee-dah winter, Mother Nature has finally got her thing going now in late February and early March by tossing a bunch of ice and snow at us here in Paradise. It’s not nearly as cold as in Minnesota nor is there nearly as much snow, but hey … enough to count! Last Friday Robin traveled to Durango for their film festival and her original plan was to return on Sunday afternoon. Heavy snowfalls, visibility worries, and icy roads delayed her return so when Monday rolled around she decided that she was going home no matter what.

There are two ways to get to Durango from Montrose. The shortest is across the god-forsaken Million Dollar Highway (three mountain passes to cross) and the longer one through Dolores (one pass to navigate). No one in their right minds chooses the shorter trip when there is ice involved, so Robin wisely chose the safer route home. It’s one that usually takes three hours but took six on that Monday.

<the god-forsaken Million Dollar Highway

Waiting for her to return that day involved much chewing of claws and fingernails (the cats and I) while waiting for text messages at various points along her way, sent whenever she stopped for rests and had cellular service.

Robin and I have very different views on doing this grandparent thing. For instance, hers is that if either of the (undeniably talented) grandkids are in a play she will assume that she will go to see it, no matter what. Blizzards, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis, plagues of locusts and frogs … nothing stands in her way when planning those trips.

My own view is that if it is a sunny day with a zero percent chance of precipitation I might consider it. I have no wish for my tombstone to read: He’d still be alive if it hadn’t been for SpongeBob Squarepants,The Musical.

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From The New Yorker

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From the age of five or six years forward, I was taught that the Russians were the bad guys. Oh, sure, it was officially the Communists, but everybody at Warrington Elementary knew that Communists = Russians so there you were. We were given drills to run where we got under our desks just in case someone decided to drop an atomic bomb on South Minneapolis. Those sturdy desks seemed just the thing to be under to a six year-old, and it wasn’t until I was in my teens and read John Hersey’s book Hiroshima that I thought … wait a minute … what good … ?

There were drills for adults, too, where parents were encouraged to dig holes in the backyards to build bomb shelters whose walls were lined with canned goods just in case … . The Russians, again. In TV show after TV show, the villains had thick accents and wore bad suits and their names all ended in -sky so you would know where they came from even though their origins might not be identified.

And then Nikita Khrushchev came to the United Nations and banged his shoe on the desktop, showing what ill-tempered bullies those Commies were. Next, when we learned that Fidel Castro was a Communist and he was helping the bad guys install some missiles so close to Florida you could almost throw them in, it was a shock. Those Russkies were knocking on our door, so we had to get out there in the back yard and start digging again, we were told. Fortunately for us, President John F. Kennedy, fresh from a successful invasion of Cuba, knew just what to do. Somehow it worked, and we all went back to playing Yahtzee and horseshoes once again, rather than continue digging.

Always there was this vague thing called the Cold War, which few of us completely understood, but it involved being fried to something like chicharrones by nuclear weapons. And who were the culprits? Why, it was our good old constant nemeses, the Russians. So when the USSR fell apart, and all those smaller countries whose location we hadn’t a clue about pulled out of the federation, well, all of us were happy as clams. And just to show there were no hard feelings, we started to get serious about our vodka drinking, eventually inventing all sorts of new flavors to make it even more swell. This, along with the fiction that if you drank vodka no one could smell it on your breath, caused that beverage’s fortunes to soar. It looked like the Russians were on their way to becoming our BFFs.

But that didn’t happen and here we are again. An aging Cold Warrior has decided to inflict more pain and disruption on the world by invading a neighbor. We are told that the Russian media are only telling their public an official line blaming Ukrainian nasties who are being encouraged by worse nasties in The West. For our part, we are being told that Russians are deliberately shelling schools and children’s hospitals and committing atrocities right and left.

Our version seems closer to reality, but being the codger that I am, I try to keep in mind a saying that should be embroidered on every sofa pillow wherever there are sofas in the world: The first casualty in wartime is the truth.

The Russian leaders are being called merciless all over again, and deserve that appellation. It’s sort of strangely reassuring to have them as the heavies once again. But, my friends, when was the last merciful war?

Any war is one bad day after another for all but the guys in the suits who start them. Period.

So, I don’t know about you, but I bought a brand new shovel yesterday at Ace Hardware, and later today I will start digging out in the yard. Eventually my shelter will be well-stocked with canned beans, SPAM and Twinkies (the shelf life of a Twinkie being longer than the lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise). The only thing missing will be a proper desk to get under. Those old-time cast iron and wood beauties are awfully hard to come by.

Wooden Ships, by Crosby Stills Nash & Young

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From The New Yorker

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Prayer flags in the back yard breezes on Thursday

Tibetan prayer flags are rich in symbolic meaning. The practice of stringing them in outdoor areas has spread rapidly in the U.S.. The symbols and mantras on the flags are meant to broadcast blessings to the surrounding countryside. The slightest movement of the wind carries the prayers far and wide, he said, spreading Buddhist teachings on peace and compassion.

The flags are primarily for the benefit of the world, not for the individual who hangs them. It is believed that the sacred texts and symbols printed on them have a vibration that is activated and carried by the wind, so that all who are touched by that wind are blessed.The flags have been described as “blessings spoken on the breath of nature.” Just as a drop of water can permeate the ocean, prayers dissolved in the wind extend to fill all of space.

The five colors of the flags are symbolic as well. They are always displayed in the same order and each represents a different element: blue for heaven, white for air, red for fire, green for water, and yellow for earth.

The Meaning of Tibetan Prayer Flags: Spiritual Travels.info

We have had strings of these flags flying for a couple of decades now. As each one wears out it is replaced. Even if you don’t believe that everything happens exactly as the legends state, the thoughts behind their display are gentle and positive ones, and the flags themselves are beautiful as they flutter in the slightest movement of air.

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Lastly, I must relate a tale that even now I can scarce credit, even though I was present at the event.

Robin and I were having friends over for supper on Saturday evening. All had gone well and it was so much fun to begin putting the last two years of constant Covid worry aside for an evening. The food turned out well enough to please us all, our conversations picked up right where we had left them off in 2020, and we began catching up on one another’s lives. All in all … it was grand.

And then Robin asked if anyone wanted to play a game. That was a large mistake, it turned out. The second error came right after the first as we all agreed to do it. The game selected was Clue, an old stalwart. All of us knew the game, were familiar with the rules, and were eager to get started.

What I now will tell you will not mean much to anyone who has not played this game, but I will try to set the stage. It starts with someone being murdered, and each of us then tries to guess who the culprit was, what weapon they used, and in what room of the mansion that the dastardly deed occurred. There are six possible villains, six possible weapons, and nine possible rooms.

Through successive rounds of questioning one another, a player discards one possibility after another until they think they know the answer and then they make an accusation which takes the form: “It was Colonel Mustard in the library with the noose.” They then take the answer cards from an envelope and see if they were correct.

One by one we made our accusations until all four of us had done our best and … I still can’t believe it … none of us got it right! That had never happened to us before. We never heard of it happening to anybody else, either. Keep in mind that these were four people who had once held down responsible jobs. Were college graduates. Could still balance their checkbooks and were able to get dressed in the morning without assistance.

Shame gripped our foursome as the enormity of what had happened seeped in. Without actually asking for a pledge, we silently hoped that the secret would never leave that room. That hope was in vain, of course, because it wasn’t long before I knew that I would soon be blabbing it all over the world.

Really, why bother to have a blog if you can’t violate a confidence once in a while?

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Loose Lips Sink Ships

jono55

Once upon a time I had a friend who applied for a position with an intelligence agency. A brilliant person – decisive, thoughtful, athletically gifted … he had it all and was accepted for the job. He was fired within a month. Among his quirks (and who among us doesn’t have them of one kind or another?) was that he couldn’t keep a secret. This was such a part of his personality structure that he didn’t even know it was there.

Of course, if the agency had wanted to know this, they had only to ask me. After being burned a couple of times, and having information of mine broadcast which should have remained “off the record,” I simply adjusted what I would share with this person and we remained friends.

If you spend a professional lifetime keeping things confidential, as all physicians are supposed to do, you become quite sensitive when you bump up against your polar opposites. Working as a doctor in small towns there are quite a few people who would like get into your head, because they already know everybody and would like to know everything as well. So you learn to be cagey, much like a seasoned poker player, and not give away information either by words or by a “tell.”

Now, to be a little Machiavelllian about all this, if you should discover that you are acquainted with such a talebearer, you can use this when you choose. When you have some information you would like to get out there but don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, simply mention it to this friend and swear him to secrecy. Mission accomplished.

I first became aware of the small town gossip chain when I moved to Hancock, Michigan, popuation 4500. One day within my first month working there, I had ordered a laboratory test of a sensitive nature. The next afternoon I was distressed to hear the following conversation in a hospital elevator between a lab technician and another citizen.

Lab Tech: How ya doing, Charlie?

Charlie: Pretty good, a lot better than Fred, from what I hear.

Lab Tech: What do ya mean?

Charlie: That new doctor ordered a test on him for gonorrhea, right?

Lab Tech: Well, yeah.

Charlie: And it came back positive?

Tech: … well, yeah.

Charlie: That’s what I mean. Wonder who gave it to Fred?

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From The New Yorker

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Shortly after beginning my colorful and peripatetic college career, I enrolled in an American history class where the Turner Thesis was an important part of the readings.

The frontier thesis or Turner thesis (also American frontierism) is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 that American democracy was formed by the American frontier. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process. Turner begins the essay by calling to attention the fact that the western frontier line, which had defined the entirety of American history up to the 1880s, had ended.

Wikipedia: Frontier Thesis

Historians and sociologists since then have debated the Thesis but for the most part accept that Turner was onto something, and the fact that there was no more wilderness to invade and subdue (along with the people who were residents thereof) would impact the further development of America in unpredictable ways.

That’s an interesting topic and there’s much material to read on the subject in the libraries if it grabs you. But it strikes me that while the physical frontier might have ended, there are others barely touched.

One frontier, one place to start is for each of us to finally and at long last completely reject violence as a means of resolving debates or disagreements. I know, I know, impossible. But what could almost be called miracles were achieved by the non-violent campaigns of the civil rights era. These heroes offered a complete rejection of the tit-for-tat, the reactivity that has always been our way. And although many of the good things that Gandhi was able to achieve through his sturdy brand of non-violence have been lost or diluted over time there are those which persist, as is our memory of the power of that approach.

So what do we do when a Putin or a Stalin or a Mao or a Tojo or a Mussolini or a Hitler or a Pol Pot or a Duterte comes along? That is where having moved that particular frontier line forward comes into play. When we apply what we already know about living compassionately together we deprive those guys of their oxygen.

The alternative is to do what we have been doing ever since Glog came out of the cave having carved his first war club and gave Blech a resounding rap on the head with it. Of course, Blech’s friends immediately went out and invented the AR-15, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Maybe our species isn’t anywhere near civilizable yet as a whole, but we don’t have to wait for 100% of us to get on board to take steps. Thich Nhat Hanh, that gentle and thoughtful man who recently passed away, said it so well. If you want peace in the world, be peace in your life.

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I’ve set sort of a serious tone so far, but before I leave it behind I wanted to play a song which is definitely in that same melancholy vein. Except that the genius of Bob Dylan and a wonderful arrangement by Daniel Lanois together pose the question: if all is truly hopeless where does a song like this that touches rather than depresses come from?

This morning I watched a video on YouTube of Ed Bradley interviewing Bob Dylan a couple decades ago, and when asked where did songs like Blowing In The Wind or Like A Rolling Stone originate, Dylan admitted that he didn’t know. One day, they were just there.

Not to compare myself with anyone else, especially including Bob Dylan, but there have been many times when I woke in the morning and read over what I had written the night before and thought to myself – where in the hell did that come from? (This happened slightly more often back in the days when I used to play spin the bottle with Mr. Beefeater, but still occurs.) I know that it was me that typed it into the word processor … but where … ?

Occasionally I will take such a piece of writing and run into the next room to show it to poor Robin, who then has to listen to it or to read it. At those times I don’t feel that I am boasting, or saying what a good boy am I. It’s more like I just came across a scrap of paper with these words on it laying there on the sidewalk and I picked it up.

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Looking out the windows in the back of the house I see the planters half-covered with snow that in the spring will contain food growing for our table. A microscopic amount of food compared with the great pile that we need to sustain life throughout the year. But some tomatoes, some greens … more of a reminder of how dependent I am on others. A favorite table prayer of mine is this:

Let us give thanks for the sun and the rain and the earth and someone else’s hard work. Amen.

So even though I tell myself that this year I will give myself a break and not plant anything it will probably not happen that way. Apparently I have not yet suffered the required amount of garden insects, fungi, and pathogenic bacteria that needs to happen to make me abandon the whole enterprise. Not to mention droughts, the blazing suns of global warming, and other pestilences.

So bring on the seed catalogs, the bags of soil guaranteed to grow tomatoes that taste like ambrosia and are the size of basketballs. I will suspend my disbeliefs for one more growing season and give it a shot. Once more unto the breach, dear friends and all that.

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From The New Yorker

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It is already Spring to the meteorologists and Tuesday morning promised a sunny and warm day. I was on laundry detail, so early on I ran the clothes through the washing machine and then chose to hang them outside. Out the door I went in Birkenstocks, pajamas, and a barn coat. The warm wet clothes were steaming in the 24 degree air. Somehow it seemed just the right thing to do today. I know that many of my friends don’t have this option because it is still so cold in the Midwest, although I do remember my mother hanging out laundry on days when the items froze stiff on the line.

We have one of those umbrella-type lines that don’t take up the entire yard. It was installed, believe it or not, by me. And it is still standing, even though setting it up required the actual mixing of a small amount of cement and keeping the center post at a 90 degree vertical while it set.

Who knew? Sometimes I surprise even me.

Mom’s lines were more like those in the photo at right. They would sag in the middle to the point where longer items could touch the ground. When that happened she put a wooden pole in the middle of the line, one with a “Y” on the end to catch the line.

This would all work well unless the wind or a passing dog bumped the pole and it fell down. On rainy days this could cause quite a maternal stir as the clean clothes now swung back and forth through mud puddles.

But we have no dog, it is not raining, and the breezes are gentle ones. Expectations are high that the garments will be warm, dry, and unsullied this afternoon when we come to gather them.

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Tumult

jono55

Some 36 years ago I was let go from a position as husband, and for several years I found myself with quite a bit of free time on my hands. I spent some of it in non-constructive pursuits that don’t need discussion in these pages, but one good idea that I had was to learn how to improve my cooking skills. My first action, and you might have predicted this, was to go out and buy a complete new set of pots and pans. Nothing too exotic, just sturdy Revere Ware which is still going strong. I also purchased a handful of recipe books to replace those that my former employer had taken with her when she departed, and away I went.

(In the past I might have mentioned here some of my kitchen misadventures where the cherry pie never set up, the pineapple upside-down cake refused to be turned over, and the unleavened bread never rose even though I followed Moses’ original recipe to the letter.)

With these failures solidly behind me, I decided to branch out into Asian cooking, and made a trip to Sioux City IA, where there was a good-sized Asian food market. In that store I walked past a thousand eyes in the freezer windows, eyes of various fishes who were all regretting the carelessness that brought them to a cooler in Sioux City, I am sure. I picked up two excellent meat cleavers for a song, and on one shelf I found large bottles of something called “fish sauce.” Those two words were the only ones on the label that were not in Chinese, but hey, this was an adventure so why not try it? I grabbed a bottle and headed for the checkout.

The woman running the cash register was Asian, tiny, and spoke halting English. She picked up the tall bottle (of whatever fish sauce was – I had no clue) and began to interrogate me.

You sure want this?

Why, yes, I do.

Is very strong … very strong! You still want?

More than you can imagine, my good woman.

You sure? Can’t bring back.

Why, dear lady, would I ever want to return it? I feel my kitchen fortunes are about to change, and it is this murky substance that is going to be the catalyst. So ring it up if you please, hand me my cleavers, and I’ll be off.

When I returned home it turned out that I could not find a single recipe that called for fish sauce as an ingredient in any book that I had on hand, so I began adding it willy-nilly in what turned out to be unwise quantities to a few dishes, all of which had to be discarded as inedible. The smell of the brown liquid was pungent enough to revive the dead and the taste could be described as a product born of the union of a bottle of soy sauce and a rag taken from the floor of an auto service bay.

I eventually tossed it out as a bad investment, and didn’t look back.

Flash-forward 33 years, and I am looking for a recipe for green chili sauce to make at home. The local bottled varieties had been disappointing so far, and I had as my lodestar the memory of a wonderful such sauce that I was served on a hamburger in a Montrosian restaurant which had unfortunately gone bottoms up. I found a recipe on the web, cooked it, loved it, and it is now one of my go-to condiments. And if you look carefully at the recipe it calls for a spoonful or two of asian fish sauce as an ingredient.

Today I find that I add fish sauce to many dishes, but in more conservative amounts than on my first go-round. It is a bracing addition to soups and stews and stir-fries, especially. The genie in this bottle swings an interesting umami bat at the plate. Yesterday I brewed up a big pot of minestrone that was anemic in character until I added just one teaspoonful of Red Boat to the cauldron. That made an amazing difference.

I also did some shopping around to get the good stuff, and have settled on this particular brand which is not sold here in Paradise, but is easily available on the web. It does not have that decidedly nasty taste that my previous bottle from at the market in Sioux City did. Red Boat is not inexpensive, but that first bottle lasted me three years.

What is fish sauce, actually? Don’t ask.

(Awright, if you insist – it consists of salted and fermented anchovies … I told you not to ask.)

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While we are on the topics of divorce and fish sauce, I will tell you that I didn’t care for the experience much. Divorce, that is. In my case, I could only describe it as what I imagine having open-chest surgery without anesthesia might be like. There is a verse in Paul Simon’s song Graceland that fits well.

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said, “losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow.”

Those last lines … everybody sees you’re blown apart, everybody sees the wind blow … I so remember that feeling. Of being rootless and directionless as dandelion fluff on the wind.

Back then I coped by going to work, listening to a lot of music, sampling many fermented or distilled beverages, and writing poetry (some not bad, some not so hot). I walled myself up in my home/castle, and was considering having a moat dug around it when Robin burst through my door on a Sunday morning with donuts in her hand and a sparkle in her beautiful blue eyes. She offered to rehire me without the need for references and that, my friends, was the start of a whole ‘nother story, which has been nearly thirty years in the telling and is not done yet.

Graceland, by Paul Simon

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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As my first marriage was coming apart in all of its seams, I sought guidance in the office of a counselor, a woman whose advice was a godsend for me at the time. She had an ability to cut through my verbiage and get to the heart of any number of posers that I tossed her way. One day, when I had said something particularly egregious, she cut me off, drew herself up, and said in the sternest of voices: “Jon, I want you to think of what I am about to say as coming directly from God! Don’t do that!“

I had no way of knowing it, but at that time there was another poor dumpee (in divorce-land you are either a dumper or a dumpee) being gently led through this same particularly confusing forest by the same guide. Time went by and one day my counselor told me that she thought that this client and I might profit by talking with one another, since we shared many experiences and were close to the same age.

So without thinking much about it, I agreed to see him, phone numbers were exchanged, and that is how I met the guy who was to become my BFF. A the time we were two lost souls who had each been dumped by their former wives, wandering about the planet unmoored and mildly to moderately insane (at least I was). It turned out that sharing having been tossed onto a heap of marital rejects was a potent bonding agent, and together we explored the fringes of religion (bizarre), divorce support groups (scary), fast motorcycles (excellent!), and other things too numerous to recount. Out of this randomly assembled and slow-cooked stew came healing for both of us.

Looking back, I always wondered if perhaps my counselor had reached the point where she dreaded listening to my endless whining and tales of woe, and to escape from this fresh hell tried to steer me elsewhere, hoping that I might not find my way back to her office. Whether that was her plan or not, it is what happened and I couldn’t be more grateful that she succeeded.

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Bravo to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell for telling Spotify adios as their protest against that music service doing nothing about the misinformation being promulgated by a fellow named Joe Rogan on his Spotify podcasts. We are surrounded by untruths being broadcast every minute of every day with most of it being fairly harmless claptrap. But when the public health is at risk we have now entered one of those shouting fire in a crowded theater arenas, and there is a need to find ways of holding guilty feet to the fire when their lies contribute to unnecessary suffering.

The first amendment to our Constitution is a grand thing, one of the stars in our national crown. So let the Rogans of the world spout their distortions hoping to profit from it, then let them find out that that same amendment doesn’t say anything about possible consequences. Tell enough falsehoods and you may suffer for it. This is as true for millionaire performers as it is for you and I.

We live in hard and uncertain times … there is a need to call out and walk away from those who attempt to make them more difficult or dangerous than they already are.

Hard Times by Ian Siegal

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Good News Department

Robin has finished her long stretch of physical therapy appointments and graduated summa cum patella. She still has work to do but the Physical Therapy staff are confident that she can reach her goals from here on in by working at home with her personal trainer and nurse.**

Here is Robin on the day of graduation wearing her PT uniform. It consists of stockings that squeeze the bejesus out of one’s legs, a t-shirt that says “Ask me about joint replacement” on the back, and a pair of shorts made extra loose-fitting so that the therapist can do whatever they need to do without impediment.

** I have to say that no one on the staff asked the personal trainer/nurse if he felt up to the task. Nor did they ask Robin, who has her own set of misgivings about my skills. After all, you don’t hang around with a bumbler for thirty years without forming an opinion or two.

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If We Make It Through December …

jono55

I’ve left that song by Phoebe Bridgers up for another few days. It moves me each time and I’m not quite sure why, but I suspect that it’s that the theme, of barely making it from month to month, was a recurrent one in my own childhood. “If we make it through December “… what a world of hurt and worry a phrase like that holds.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to play the poverty card here. I was never hungry, always clothed decently, always had a roof over my head. But the level of luxury in our family was often too thin to measure.

Dad was what sociologists of the time called an unskilled laborer. I checked this morning to see if there was some new euphemism that had replaced that unflattering term and found none, though I did come across these entries in a thesaurus which were interesting.

It wasn’t that the man didn’t have skills, it was that they weren’t marketable ones. He worked for most of his adult life at Archer-Daniels, a huge conglomerate, at one of their plants that processed linseed oil from flax. (A while back I purchased some linseed oil to do a bit of wood refinishing, and when I opened the tin I was instantly transported back to childhood, because that was what Dad’s work clothing always smelled like, and you know that the brain never forgets a scent.)

He had the kind of job you don’t hear much about any more, one with swing shifts. That meant that the plant never closed, that the 24 hours of any day was divided into three shifts, and you could be assigned to any of the three, in rotation. You might work days for a week, afternoons for another, nights for yet another. This sort of messing with the bodies’ wake/sleep cycles was not taken much into consideration back then. You never worked any shift for enough days in a row to ever become accustomed to the changes. Your body was expected to “handle it.”

Dad was a union man, a member of the United Mine Workers. Which was a part of the AFL/CIO. Which in the forties and fifties meant that periodically there would be a strike, and each strike was a severe family economic stressor. Usually Mom would take some job to fill in during these uncertain times. Sewing stuffed toys at home, selling custom-made foundation garments to overweight women, working in the sausage department at a meat-packing plant, etc. I honestly don’t recall if there was anything like “strike pay” back then, but if there was, it was miniscule at best.

So when my brother and I got our first bicycles one Christmas, they were used ones that Dad had reconditioned. There were homemade gifts in other years as well. But unlike in the song, there was never a year without a Christmas.

BTW, I hadn’t heard this tune before Ms. Bridgers brought it out, but I learned that her version is a cover of a Merle Haggard song. Just in case you’re interested, here is ol’ Merle doing his own thing.

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From The New Yorker

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An elderly gentleman like myself has had the opportunity to adjust to a passel of changes. Some of them represented progress, some absolutely didn’t, and there are some that I haven’t made up my mind about as yet. This category includes times when to adopt the new you had to give up something. Perhaps something that you liked or felt was important.

One item on this list is indoor plumbing. Being able to access drinking water safely and comfortably was a definite plus, and trading the privy for a set of well-designed porcelain fixtures seemed a no-brainer. But my spiritual life suffered because of indoor bathrooms. One of the first teachings of Buddhism is that there is suffering in life, and what we can do about it as travelers on this earth. This teaching used to be brought home on each visit to the outhouse in the wintertime. Several times each day I would be forcefully reminded – suffering exists.

Television is another item. What a resource it has been and continues to be as a doorway to learning and entertainment. The problem is that while that door is open quite a bit of swill washes in. Reference the entire Kardashian family saga, or the id-driven and air-headed Real Wives of various places, or one of the most unsavory of all, The Bachelor. Either they have had a negative effect on our collective intellect or they have revealed that our intellects weren’t so great in the first place. Lose-lose on this one.

A third example would be the plethora of appliances available that are designed to make life in the kitchen easier and more enjoyable, and they do all that until they don’t work. At that point you find that the manual for the appliance clearly states that “There are no user-serviceable parts.” That means either you mail it back to the company for repair or you throw it away. Typically a toaster that cost $39.95 initially will cost you $25.00 for postage to that service department plus another $35.00 for the repair. So economics dictates that you toss it out.

What you’ve lost is the feeling of accomplishment that came from getting out one’s tools and doing the repair. In the case of a toaster, for instance, after you tinkered with it you could hardly wait to test it out by loading it with a couple of slices of bread. You plugged it in and then had the chance to see a shower of sparks followed quickly by flames shooting out of the device as the innocent bread was converted to pure carbon. Those were the days.

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This year Robin and I have made the move to non-gifting one another. At least not a big deal gift. There will be “stocking stuffers,” of course, we are not Communists after all. We’re taking that money and making donations with it to favorite charities. Maybe some charities that we always wanted to help, but never got around to it.

We can do that because we really don’t need anything. There are lots of things we might want, but need … nope. We are roofed-over, fed, and clothed. We have luxuries, like this computer I am typing upon, but having a smaller home means you look carefully before adding to the pile of possessions already stacked there. Stuff in the garage or shed that you haven’t quite the heart to throw away yet, but that will remain warehoused until molds or insects take care of the problem.

If we decide to buy a new framed photograph or painting for our walls, for instance, something will have to go away to make room for it. A new shirt or sweater … same thing, because closet space is all taken up. If I ever start to feel sorry for myself, in that I would like to go back to bigger and better, I remind myself of a story told by a raconteur on the old (really old) Jack Paar television show. It went like this:

There was a holy man who lived in a small village and who lived so simply that he had only one treasured possession, a jar that he carried each morning to the village well to collect water for the day. The man was loved by all, so it was with horror that villagers saw him trip one morning and fall to the ground, shattering the water jar on the cobblestones.

As others moved to comfort the man, he raised his head from the ground and they were amazed to see the most blissful expression on his face. Seeing that their old friend was about to speak they crowded closer so as not to miss a single word. And this is what they heard him say:

“At last … I am free.”

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[I’ve told the above story before, I know, but this time I told it better.]

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A Very Merry Christmas to Everyone. May you and all those you love be happy and safe.

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Do It Thyself

jono55

A week or so ago I did what I know better not to do. Something that has been proven to be a bad idea for several decades now. I decided to fix something that was awry with the house, on my own, with nothing but YouTube as my instructor.

The drain on the left side of the kitchen sink had developed some rust, as do many old things, and I deemed it unsightly enough to warrant replacement. So I did my “research,” bought the parts needed, and set to the project

I first unscrewed several things under the sink, and loosening one of them unleashed a small torrent of water from something called the “trap.” Apparently I should have known about this water, but I had missed that on the video. I pulled out the rusty drain and installed the shiny new one. YouTube had suggested using a particular goo around the device, which I applied liberally. I then reconnected all of the plastic pipes, bumped my head on the door frame, and exited the workspace cursing only lightly and under my breath.

Now I filled the sink … no leaking. Later I ran the dishwasher … no leaking. But my joy was short-lived because over the next few days it began to leak – somewhere – I just couldn’t find where the water was coming from. So I finally gave up and called a plumber. Within two minutes after arrival at our home he made the diagnosis, and asked me:

Plumber: What did you do with the conical washer that came from here (he pointed at a joint)?

Me: There was no conical washer.

Plumber: Of course there was. It hadn’t leaked for the seven years you have been living here, and didn’t start leaking until you messed about with the pipes. There had to have been a washer at that position, or it would have leaked every day you have lived in the house. You just missed it while you were clumsily tearing apart the fixture.

Me: I tell you that there was no such washer, and what you call “clumsily tearing apart” was in my case careful attention to detail.

Plumber: Sure, sure, have it your way. But that washer was as big as a golf ball and you never saw it.

Me: Look here, I am tiring of arguing with a plumber, something which I long ago vowed never to do, and would like you to take your wrenches and cements and opinions and leave my home immediately. My last word on the subject is that there never was a washer.

Plumber: Had to be there

Me: Never was

Plumber: You are a fool!

Me: Imbecile!

(The plumber picks up a hefty wrench for himself, and holds out another to me.)

Plumber: Defend yourself, Sir!

(I grab a can from the pantry behind me which turns out to be PAM. I point the nozzle at the miscreant.)

Me: Drop that hardware, you dimwit, or I will lubricate you within an inch of your life!

At this point I am not sure what would have happened had not Robin entered the room with a look on her face that caused a quick exit by the tradesman. I too slunk away, hoping to avoid a conversation for as long as possible. In this I was to be disappointed, but I won’t bore you with all of the details of what Robin said as she held me by the scruff of my neck. I can, however, say that much of her monologue touched on various sorts of incompetency to be found in certain people who lived at her address.

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From The New Yorker

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From The New Yorker

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Last night we watched a movie called “The Boy Called Christmas.” You never know with modern films created for the yuletide market. Most of them are losers. This one isn’t. It’s a smart fable, with elves, woodcutters, kidnappings, blizzards, and enough beautiful winter photography to make you pull your afghan up around your neck.

There is also excellent CGI stuff throughout the movie, especially a gorgeous reindeer who goes by the name of Blitzen. You get to watch Maggie Smith and Kristen Wiig do their thing, and the kid who plays the title role … where do they get these excellent child actors? He doesn’t miss a beat.

There is some serious stuff in the story, like the loss of a parent, that are dealt with without drowning in either grief or platitudes. There are also some mildly scary episodes that might be better skipped by kids under five. One of them involves a famished troll who comes to a bad end (really, do you recall any time that a troll in a story doesn’t come to a bad end?).

And did I mention the mouse? There is a right smart CGI rodent in this one.

So this movie was a winner for us. And frankly, any film that stars Maggie Smith is granted four stars before we even see it. She is one of those people that dominate the camera’s frame. When I grow up I would love to be able to speak the King’s English like Maggie does. Some of the photography was shot in Lapland and Finland, and as I mentioned before, is outstanding … the ability to use drones in camera work has provided us such beautiful perspectives.

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Friday was the day that Robin and I decided to call the first real day of winter. It snowed about an inch of those tiny icy flakes that as they pile up become instant hazards to walking. A blustery wind blew all day long and the temperature never got above 25 degrees. The sun didn’t make its brief appearance until suppertime. A cloudy day, dark and dank, with substantial wind chills.

So we are finally here in that period of the year that nearly everybody wishes was shorter. We are a spoiled bunch, we humans of the temperate zones. We want four seasons, but we don’t want them to be of equal length. If I were doing the planning, I would grant winter no more than a month before it would be expected to be on it way. In that way I could actually look at it fondly, treasuring each frosty day because I knew that too soon they would be replaced by sunny and warm ones.

For moi, there is really nothing wrong with winter that a little editing wouldn’t fix.

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I haven’t begun my Christmas shopping yet. It’s something that I am usually slow to finish, but this year is setting new records. There has been no shortage of reminders sent to me to get going and get it done. Catalogs fall out of our mailbox as soon as we turn the key, and this has been going on for weeks.

What do you call such procrastination when it reaches heights never achieved before? Hyper-procrastination? Acute procrastination syndrome? Shop-o-phobia? Whatever you want to call it, I’ve got it bad. When you can’t even pick up your laptop and one-click your way to doing what needs to be done, is there any hope at all? Is it an early sign of something coming that is even worse, like trench foot or trichotillomania? Should I be consulting somebody?

Wait a moment. I could turn this whole anxiety-ridden business around right now, because here I sit with the tool I need in my hands. Excuse me, if you will, but I’m going leave off writing and give it a try. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean I love you less.

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Postscript: the children in the header photo are (from left to right) Maja, Kari, & Sarah Flom. No fair calculating how old they would be now.

Dune

jono55

We went to our first movie in a theater in two years this past week. The film was “Dune,” and it did not disappoint. Well, it would have if we hadn’t been forewarned that the story sort of stops in mid-sentence and where we are promised a second episode. That’s a good thing, because the good guys are certainly having a rough time of it in the first go-round. I wasn’t sure how Timothée Chalamet would do as an action hero, but he is better than I thought he’d be. And there is something very hopeful in his performance for people like myself.

In recent years the heroes in movies have all been impossibly buff, possessing pectorals the size of watermelons and twelve-pack abs. This contrasted with actors in the more distant past, who had regular physiques. They were good strong bodies, but nothing dramatically different from yours or mine.

Timothée is a throwback to those lovely days of yore. He is shirtless in one scene, and is shown to be a pleasantly skinny young man. My earnest hope is that this will catch on, and I can once again leave the theater without feeling that somewhere along the physical development road I went completely astray. There are days when I’m not entirely sure where my abs are to be found, and it’s pretty certain that I have less than six in my pack.

In this movie one has no trouble telling the bad guys from the good. All of the evil people are ugly, I mean break-the-mirror sort of ugly. At the opposite pole, everyone is handsome and beautiful. This is not quite like real life, but the movie’s story line is pretty complex, and anything that simplifies even a small part is welcome. Oh, and you will definitely have an easier time understanding what the film all about if you have read the book, and I highly recommend doing just that. But here’s a word to the wise – you’d best get a move on because the paperback edition is 740 pages long.

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‘Twas a mild Halloween this year. Outdoor temperatures were compatible with life and there was no sleet pelting the small petitioners as they dragged their bags of non-nutritious substances from house to house. Most of the kids came by before dark, but the last ones arrived around 7:30. All in all it was a pleasant evening for the little pagans and the parents who accompanied them.

Robin held court in a chair early on, but had to leave for a meeting, and after that it was my turn to face the horde. I was impressed by one kid who was about 10 years old and who was wearing a mask based on Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream and knew its origins. I doubled his handful of candy as a reward.

As the kids came through and I looked into their bags of stuff, I could see that every single item was securely wrapped or boxed and I thought how much work it was going to be to get the tiny candy morsels out of their coverings later on. And I recalled how much easier it had been in 1949 when everything was loose and unpackaged and you could actually eat some of what you’d collected as you walked along. There were people that gave out actual apples with no razor blades in them. Some (gasp) doled out cookies or brownies that they had made in their own kitchens and who knows what awfulness was baked into those things. Cookies that their fingers had touched … it makes me shiver all over to think about it.

Halloween 1949

Somehow we all survived back then. If there were rumors of evil people doing evil things in dispensing their “treats,” parents of the time had the good sense not to believe the stories. They just sent their kids out into the night with empty pillowcases and kept the porch light on. Each year all the children returned and were perfectly fine until they started eating what they’d collected and epidemic nausea set in.

So we’re safer now and everyone is protected from mostly non-existent horribleness and it’s a much better world, isn’t it … ? But our collective anxieties are on full display each Halloween. Kids pile out of and back into cars, parents walk them all the way to our doors, everything is super-sanitized. But there was something missing from the evening. There was nothing scary – anywhere … .

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Today, November 3, is Robin’s birthday. Of course I will not disclose the number involved … what gentleman would? Last night at supper I asked for details of her birth (which she does know!). This is quite unlike my own case, that of a dullard who knows only the date and the place of his own emergence.

Robin was born prematurely at under five pounds, and in the wee hours of the morning. She must have been a tough little thing, though, because she went home from the hospital with her mom at the regular time and was promptly installed in a dresser drawer that served for a while as her bed and bassinet.

So we will celebrate her birthday by doing whatever she desires … within reason. No arrests are to be expected, no front page bits of notorious behavior to be published in the local paper. It’s a simple case of everybody who knows her being glad that they do. She’s that kind of girl.

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Gourds

jono55

I have found Garrison Keillor. I had thought that he was done for when he was accused of allowing his fingers to play along the bare back of a woman on his show and when confronted he exited stage left rather than argue about it in public, with cowardly PBS kicking him in the seat of his pants as he walked off. I don’t know whether he actually did what he was accused of or not, nor do I know what the surrounding circumstances were, we never got the chance to fully hear the parties out who were involved. But at that time in our recent history he was not the only man in public life who was being similarly drummed out of the corps without what one might call a proper courts-martial.

I assumed that this might be the end of his humor, insights, and general drollery, so I never looked for it anywhere. Today I stumbled across not one but two web locations where his voice can be heard. If anyone is interested, that is.

The web addresses are:

Please know that my delight in being able to read more of Mr. Keillor’s writing in no way endorses letting one’s hands go roaming around anyone’s back who does not welcome it. That is definitely not okay. So is roaming around their front, for that matter. I just wish there were a better way to deal with these accusations of impropriety, and that when called for we could find penalties that are appropriate to the offenses.

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Yesterday afternoon Poco was overdue for the afternoon meal. He always comes back from his roaming around three o’clock, and now it was four-thirty and there was no sign of him. He’s an old guy, you know, and we worry sometimes. So I went out walking along some of his favorite territory down the irrigation canal that runs behind our home, calling out his name.

I looked back and trotting about thirty yards behind me there was Willow, who had now joined me in the search. As we reached the point where Poco finally answered my call, Willow ran ahead into the thicket and in a very short time out the two of them came. No longer worried, I started back for home, only to find that the two cats had lined up and were now trailing me, and they did so all the way back into our yard.

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The cartoon above is one of those that delight me when I run across them. Just the right amount of surrealism coupled with imagination to brighten a person’s day. And really, where do those damned things come from? Do you personally know anybody who has a gourd garden? I know that I don’t. And yet every autumn … .

There are times when I have a thought that I believe would make into a great cartoon. But we will never know because I can’t draw to save my soul, and whatever illustration I created would only distract from the the caption. Perhaps if I applied myself and got some serious instruction I could remedy this with years and years of practice, but would it be worth the time and trouble? I have my doubts.

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On Monday grandson Tanner joined our growing Colorado family for a few days. Dakota had picked him up at the Denver airport, and they were making their way back to Montrose when they got held up with the ongoing highway construction on Highway 50 for nearly two hours. So they arrived hungry and tired, and after Robin and I finally let them off the hook, they went immediately to their rooms.

Early on Tuesday morning a light rain came through, accompanied by the forceful whooshing sound that the ash tree in the back yard makes whenever a stiff breeze blows. Lovely to listen to, and it’s not unlike that feeling you get when camping by a stream. For the most part, natural sounds like these don’t keep one awake, but have the opposite effect. There are exceptions, however, and one that comes to mind is the freight-train-like announcement of an approaching tornado. That one wakes you up, hopefully before you are airborne.

A hailstorm is another waker-upper. There’s nothing quite like the symphony produced by tens of thousands of missiles of varying sizes pummeling your roof, your car, and anything else you forgot to bring into the house last night. I will share only one hailstorm story.

Robin and I were bicycling out in the Colorado rural several years ago, when hailstones began smacking us on our helmets and shoulders. We were miles from our car, but started pedaling like crazy to get there as quickly as we could. There was no shelter available anywhere in sight until we came around a corner and – unbelievable – there was a Porta-P0tti a quarter of a mile away, in the middle of nowhere. The storm, seeing we had an option to escape it, now began in earnest to try to kill us off by increasing the size of the hailstones and their numbers as well. (Lord, that was a painful moment). When we reached the little structure we threw our bikes to the ground and rushed inside.

What a din there was in that malodorous space! But it was so much better than the death of a thousand pebbles that we had left behind. When the hail stopped we emerged from our plastic cocoon as two bruised and grateful souls.

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Lastly for today, I will address a topic that is daily on all of our minds, I know. One that has occasionally kept me awake at night, unable to sleep because the answer to the question is so elusive. What is the question, you ask?

Why don’t we have tails?

Researchers think they may have discovered the gene mutation that lopped off the tails that our ancestors surely had, and this has them all a-twitter. I am happy for them, people looking for gene mutations on tail-less animals must live a lonely life. I do not in any way begrudge them this success.

But although this might throw some light on how we became tail-challenged, it does nothing to tell us why. Usually a successful mutation confers some advantage on those who have it. But why in the world did those ancestors of ours do better when what might have been a perfectly beautiful and useful tail suddenly went missing from Cousin Norma?

There are so many times that I have leaned back to rest on that tail before I remember that I don’t have one. And when swinging through the forest canopy I can see where my balance would be better with a good sized prehensile member to employ. So I will follow this research with interest, while I grieve my loss and wonder what life would have been like had this genetic accident not occurred?

It’s all I can do not to take it personally.

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How To Get Drunker And Poorer Extremely Fast

jono55

I don’t write much about the world of ingestable ethanol, as found in wines, beers, and the like, because I am out of that game. My alcohol dance card was filled up way back when, and I am not likely to pick up at the unhappy place where I left off. But that doesn’t mean that occasionally I don’t come across an article on the subject that is interesting.

Such a piece was on the CNN website Monday morning, dealing with a limited edition of a Samuel Adams beer that reaches 28% alcohol, and that costs $240 for a 25 ounce bottle. Both numbers are outrageous in their own way, don’t you think? For one thing, who really needs a beer that will get you drunk 5 times faster than normal? And when you get home and you are asked what you did all evening with your buddies, your saying that you “just had a couple of beers” takes on a whole new meaning. Physically and economically.

Now, in another lifetime and before I decided to hang up my drinking shoes, there were several years when I made my own beers and ales. I thought it was a fine hobby, and unlike someone who made birdhouses, when I was done … well … I could drink the product. And they were excellent brews if I do say so myself, ranging from pale ales to near-stouts. I can say with pride that I never made anything approaching a “lite” beer, a beverage that I put in the category with “lite” coffee and insipid tea. (I was, and am, a beer snob, even if no longer a practicing one).

What I never knew, because I never ran the tests that would have given me the answer, is what the alcohol content of my beers and ales were. I know that they were nowhere close to 28%, but I suspect that they were well north of 6% by the effect that they had upon those who were courageous enough to sample them.

There was one other effect that some of my homemade beverages had on people. They were cathartic in a very real sense of the word. Calls back the next day from friends who had tried them frequently relayed the information that their problems with constipation were at least temporarily over.

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I was out on the backyard deck blaring away with my music, and hoping that if my neighbors were troubled by it that they would let me know. But until that happened, better to apologize later than to ask permission is my mantra. Anyway, I was playing songs by a group that is presently one of my favorites, one that goes by the name of Lord Huron. Suddenly grandson Dakota pops out and says that this is his favorite group, and that he has seen them live on more than one occasion.

Lord Huron

What are the odds? Two generations and a world of experiences apart, and we are presently in synch with each other musically, at least at this single point. After giving it a bit of thought, and without a shred of evidence to prove it, we concluded that our musical tastes must be genetic in origin. Happy with this unscientific answer that we provided ourselves, we went on to talk about other things.

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There are too many of us, and we do too many things to the planet that don’t give it time to recover. Which is something that it will do, when and if our numbers are reduced. We need to stop applauding when anyone admits that they have produced a family of twelve children. That is neither a good thing nor an amusing thing. It is completely selfish procreation. For being the parents of such a sad bunch is like carrying a tote bag that says to all you meet: “I care not at all that the brood I have produced is using up way more than its share of the earth’s resources. BTW, the rest of you can go jump.”

Comedian Bill Burr has a plan that features the sinking of cruise ships. According to him there are two good things that would come out of this – you reduce the population by 3500 at a time, and they are the sort of people that nobody will miss.

My own plan, which I have advanced over several decades now without picking up a single follower, is to put contraceptives in the public drinking water. If someone wants to have a child, they would have to apply to get their water from another source in order for that to happen. There is a problem with this idea, I admit, because it clearly benefits those who are good at filling out forms, and penalizes those who are not.

Thinking it through, should this plan become the modus operandi in the U.S., we might in a couple of generations become a nation consisting entirely of bureaucrats.

I retract my plan. Never mind.

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Our weather has shifted a bit, with high temperatures suddenly no more than 75 degrees or so. Nights are sometimes dropping into the thirties. It’s a welcome relief from those wok-like 90 plus days of this past summer, but could we please have something more gradual in our weather patterns, please? Would that be too much to ask? I know that I am from the generations that have caused all of the upheaval in climate and everything else bad that has ever happened since the Garden of Eden closed its doors, up to and including the development of those plastic tomatoes (had to get my annual tomato rant in somewhere) you see in the grocery stores. So I have no right to hope for better days? Is that it?

Funny, but I don’t think that way. Human history is a series of wonderful discoveries and awful blunders and there has not been a generation so far that didn’t participate in both. Maybe the present youngest group will turn out to be carbon neutral and lead so pure a life that they can tsk tsk the rest of us to death and beyond. We’ll see. In the meantime I am just happy to be cooler for a few days, and living in a place where if I touch the outside of my car I don’t have to go to the emergency room for burn treatment.

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Family Blotter

jono55

Justin and Jenny and their kids are making their first long eastern tour to touch family bases since their move to California earlier this year. First they spend a few days here in Montrose, then on to Steamboat Springs, Durango, Denver, and Sioux Falls. Lots of miles to cover with two children, although the kids do have movies to watch in the back seat of the family SUV.

Yesterday the six of us drove down to Lake Ridgway to hang out at the beach for a few hours, and the weather cooperated by not being so beastly hot, with good cloud cover and light breezes. Since Kaia and Leina had never been to a drive-in movie, we all trooped to the Star Drive-in towards evening and set up camp there for a couple of hours.

By then a light rain had started and the temp cooled down quickly. Our group huddled together on camp chairs set between our two vehicles to watch the show. There we were, layered up with hoodies on and car blankets wrapped around our bodies, slowly becoming hypothermic. After a while Robin and I noticed that everybody but us had moved into their vehicle, and we did the same. “Twas an adventure of sorts for the kids, it was.

There was an amusing happening during the day. After soaking at the beach, we decided to go for ice cream in the town of Ridgway at a fine little shop where the owner occasionally would create his own product using unusual flavors. Unfortunately we found the shop was closed for the day. Robin offered that we could instead to to Dunkin Donuts/Baskin-Robbins in Montrose, and off we went confident in our choice of Plan B.

But when we got there we found the store locked and this interesting sign in the window. We’re no experts on the subject, but it seemed to us that there was room for improvement in employee-management relations. We also agreed that it must have been a fresh action because if management had found the posted sign we wouldn’t have been reading it.

At that point we went to Plan C, where we returned home, dug a partially consumed container of ice cream out of the freezer, and were happy as clams.

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The Hurley family joined us for supper Thursday night, so we were ten at table. The table seats eight. So Robin and I took on the roles of our Norwegian grandmothers who never sat and ate with their guests, but sat in chairs away from the rest of the group and met those people’s needs as they arose.

More coffee?

More soup?

Here, I’ll get that.

No, I’m fine. I’ll eat later.

The three girl cousins (Claire, Kaia, Leina) went right at it and got into a gigglefest in Robin’s office area that never seemed to stop, except when they came out to chew on strawberry shortcake. Aiden has become a processing machine for food that requires constant stoking and he never strayed too far, basically locating his body between the table and the refrigerator for most of the night.

All in all the evening was delightful for all concerned except for our two cats, who had problems finding their space between the horde in the house and the canines in the backyard. They survived, however, and Poco got quite a bit of extra attention from Leina, who basically adopted him.

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Daughter Maja will be back on U.S. soil on July 7, to continue her recuperation. For a time she will be staying at her mother’s home, until she is ready to be completely independent. There will be no returning to Peru, a country that right now is up to its nostrils in Covid cases and some serious political unrest.

From her family’s standpoint, we’re glad that she will be at least reachable. Her medical journey is not over, but some speed bumps will now have been removed.

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Elsa and Marc arrive early Saturday afternoon to spend several days with us. We have planned to camp out for three nights starting Sunday, but wonder of wonders … it has been raining now for three days. No downpours, but short rains off and on all day, which can definitely affect the enjoyment one can derive from sitting outdoors in a camp chair in the mountains. Suddenly what was lovely to experience becomes something to be endured.

But, hey! That’s a problem for a day yet to be born. We could also be covered in sunshine the whole trip.

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Had a discussion late Saturday evening with Elsa and Mark. The basic question was: we know that Earth will survive the catastrophes that seem to be rolling down the road toward us, but how long will our species, homo sapiens, be a factor on this planet? We have created some amazing things but destroyed far too much. My own guess was less than a thousand years, maybe way less than half of that.

Once we humans are down to an insignificant number, the planet can get to the job of repair and renewal. A grim before-bedtime talk for sure. But the possibility of a different scenario rests, I think, on a serious and precipitous decrease in the level of dumbass in this beautiful world of ours. It could happen if we might be helped to see that our ‘enemy’ is not some other guy or group, but our collective behaviors. We need to give up the luxury of attacking one another and form a new “band of brothers” once again, as we did in 1941.

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Juneteenth

jono55

Today is Juneteenth, and I’m not even going to tell you when my ignorance about this topic ended, except that it was last year. Yes, I know that it’s hard to believe but I hadn’t heard of Black Independence Day, the Black National Anthem … or many similar important things, and even though I could blame others for those gaps in my knowledge base (blaming others being my go-to move), for a change I’m not going to do that. It’s a case of mea culpa all over the place, I’m afraid. Whenever Black History Month rolled around each year I skipped past most of those stories that were being told. Stories that I realize now that I needed to hear.

Way too often I was just another clueless white boy living in white boy la la land, untouched. So now I’m playing catch-up, and while I know that time is too short to make up for all that I might have learned and done in the past … you gotta start where you are, non?

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From The New Yorker

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In honor of the day here are six fine songs by a group called Our Native Daughters. Songs that touch on the experience of being black, played and sung by four excellent musicians, including (left to right) Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah.

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Moon Meets the Sun

When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing
When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing

You put the shackles on our feet
But we’re dancing
You steal our very tongue
But we’re dancing

Brown girl in the ring
Raise your voice and sing
Sing us solace
Sing us freedom
Hold us steady
Keep us breathing
We’ll endure this
You can’t stop us
And we’re dancing

You steal our children
But we’re dancing
You make us hate our very skin
But we’re dancing
We’re your sons
We’re your daughters
But you sell us
Down the river
May the God
That you gave us
Forgive you
Your trespasses
We’re survivors
You can’t stop us
And we’re dancing

When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing
When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing

Like the rabbit
We won’t bend to your will
Like the spider
The smallest will still prevail
The stories of our elders
We find comfort in these
We smile to the sky
We move to stay alive
And we’re dancing
You steal our work for your profit
But we’re dancing
You think our home we have forgotten
But we’re dancing

Step into the circle
Step into the ring
Raise your voice and sing
Sing freedom
Sing freedom
You can’t stop us now
You can’t keep us down
We’ll be dancing

When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing
When the day is done
The moon meets the sun
We’ll be dancing

You can’t stop us now (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t stop us now (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t stop us now (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t stop us now
You can’t keep us down
You can’t stop us now (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t stop us now (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)
You can’t keep us down (We’ll be dancing)

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Here’s Rhiannon Giddens telling the story behind one of the songs. The tale and the tune are both harrowing and moving.

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Juneteenth. I don’t think I’ll forget that date now. In case I need a reminder, just this week it has become a federal holiday.

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No one ever inquires of me – how it is to get old? Either they are my age and know all about it already, or they aren’t my age and are afraid that I’m going to bore them with a litany of stuff they have no interest in and certainly don’t want to hear about. I understand. One of the cool things about being the hyperannuated guy in the room is that you’ve played on all those other stages during your life. This does provide some perspective.

The teenager can’t even imagine how it is to be seventy while I can remember clearly how it was to be eighteen. Gives you an edge, if you care to use it. What the geezer lacks in energy and flexibility he often makes up for in craftiness. And crafty can often be enough to win the day. (Now, that rare person who is a crafty eighteen year-old, there’s someone that’s scary and nearly unstoppable).

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Oh Canada!

jono55

Robin took off for Durango on Wednesday to attend Claire’s 5th grade graduation. I took a pass on this one. I am not quite sure where all these micro-ceremonies have come from. Nursery school graduation, kindergarten graduation, fifth grade graduation, being able to drink from the corridor water fountain without dribbling all down your front certification, having the cleanest shoes in home room awards. I don’t get them and whenever possible I try not to attend them.

Call me a grouch, Scrooge, misanthrope … I don’t care. Any hour that a kid spends in these ceremonies is an hour that they could have been playing or creating some wonderful piece of ephemera that made use of their imagination. (The same is true for the adults present.)

Here is a child who decided not to go to his 5th grade graduation, and do something way more creative.

As you can see, it’s only a short step from what seems to be aimless swinging to understanding both the principles behind Foucault’s pendulum and the best way of dealing with an annoying cowlick.

As far as I can see, these rites serve mostly as a moment for the teachers to congratulate themselves and say: “Look what wonders that I have been able to achieve with the rough clay that you sent me.”

Like I said … grouch, Scrooge, misanthrope.

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Arthur Staats passed away this week. I didn’t know his name until I read the obituary in the Times of New York, but I have made frequent use of his work for many years. He was the guy who popularized what we know as the “time-out” as an aid to raising children. You know, what to do in the situation where your kid has just dumped his porridge on the floor for the fifth time and you are beginning to have thoughts that rise perilously close to the level of manslaughter.

The time-out gave us an alternative, a structured moment when we could separate ourselves and our child from the scene of confrontation and allow us all, parents and progeny, time to collect ourselves and start that part of the day anew. There is a large body of research that has supported its use and established its effectiveness in training and education. Especially when compared with what parents might have previously been employing in their discipline, some of which involved willow switches and dark closets.

Thanks to Arthur S. for handing us that gentler tool, something to use while we continue to search for the perfect way to parent.

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From The New Yorker

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At an AA meeting Thursday morning, a friend and I were musing on the irony of now being offered free beer for getting our Covid vaccinations. Where were these programs when we could have made use of them? Drat.

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Friday the temperature hit 90 degrees, with more of such days promised. Zero percent chance of precipitation. The saving grace here is the low humidity. And as my mother always said, it’s not the heat it’s the … oh, you’ve heard that too, eh? Sitting out on the backyard deck Friday afternoon was still a very pleasant thing to do, as long as you had some shade and a glass of cool water handy. In fact, it was so mellow and comfortable doing nothing in that way that the only thing missing was having someone to refresh my beverage once in a while. Had to do that myself.

Looking at the national meteorological map there aren’t many who will escape this early hot spell. In fact, for a change we’re apparently sending some of our steaming weather all the way up to Canada. There is no need for us to feel guilty about this. They have been sending us nasty cold waves for-ever. Think of it as payback for those polar vortexes of last winter.

And while we’re on the subject of Canada, they still won’t let Americans into their fine country. Bully for them. Why would they want a bunch of clodhoppers wandering about their cities and forests who are too chuckleheaded to protect themselves (and others) against the Covid-19 virus? I’m a little surprised that the Canadians aren’t openly discussing building a wall to keep the U.S. citizens out on a more permanent basis.

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And I saved the best for last. Architects with nothing better to do created a masterpiece called the sky pool, which is certainly eye-catching.

Especially when you realize that it is suspended more than 100 feet in the air, stretching between two apartment buildings. Never mind that the first question that pops into the inquiring mind is “WHY?” Here’s a short video giving you the grand tour, just in case you were moving to London and hadn’t settled on living quarters as yet.

At first I thought about the view from the pool as a swimmer looks down through the water. I’m not sure whether that would rattle an acrophobe like myself or not. But it would seem that the view from the street below would be nothing but soles of feet and bottoms. This might appeal to certain categories of fetishists, who would then make nuisances of themselves by blocking sidewalks and streets as they gaze raptly upward.

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Ground Control

jono55

Wednesday Robin had to drive all the way to Grand Junction by herself, even though I was available as traveling companion. It’s an hour’s drive to get there, and her goal is to shop, but she’s given up on taking me along when we are not looking for a particular something and have a focus.

She says that I get a look on my face, in spite of myself, when shopping itself is the intent. I had her describe what I look like to a police portrait artist, and at left is what he came up with. It’s a look usually associated with traumatic wartime experiences, and is called the thousand yard stare.

It seems that watching me spoils the day for her in these instances. “It’s not personal,” she says, “we’re just different.” I do try, and I put on my best smiley face and attitude when I know she’s looking, but as soon as I relax I apparently revert to what you see in the drawing. I guess I’ll have to accept that there is one more thing in this world of which I am incapable.

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E-bike Report:

We’ve now got 150 miles on our machines, not any epic amount, but these are mostly short trips around town. These beasts work really well, and no spot in town is safe from us any longer. I do most of my grocery shopping using the bike with either a rear pannier or the Burley Nomad trailer we’ve had for a dozen years or more. It’s a seven mile trip to City Market and back, without ever having to hit serious automobile traffic.

Did I mention that they are not only practical but fun? When you press that button for pedaling assistance, it’s hard not to smile every time.

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From The New Yorker

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Colorado has a brand new law, making us the second state after Washington to allow composting of human remains. My first reaction was “Whaaaat?” But after reading a bit further I found that it is just another way of breaking down the body, to be added to the already common practices of cremation and chemical dissolution.

Actually, it mimics the process that would occur if we simply buried bodies in the ground without elaborate vaults and hermetically sealed coffins.

Composting a human body means placing the body in a closed container along with natural materials such as wood chips, alfalfa, and straw grass. The body is slowly rotated to induce microbial breakdown of the body’s tissues

Montrose Daily Press, May 19, 2021.

Since there is no corner of American life that can avoid rampant commercialization, I can see the brochures now for this new/old choice that families will have:

“Your loved one’s body will be placed upon a bed of roses, surrounded by sandalwood chips that were harvested in a sustainable manner in the highlands of Nepal. You then have your choice of Dakota buffalograss or Carolina switchgrass as the last component of the composting nest. When this gentle and natural process is finished, the resultant soil will be sent to you by UPS in a tasteful container, with a complimentary packet of flower seeds.”

I am totally down with the idea, and would carry it even further by having additives put into the soil produced that would allow special usage. Potting soils, peony mixes … the mind boggles at the possibilities.

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The Old Testament has come to Paradise in the form of a plague of flies. Small houseflies that can apparently pass through walls unimpeded, like ghosts. They showed up Wednesday evening, when they drove Robin and I back indoors from our al fresco dining on the backyard deck. Unfortunately, by the time we gave up and went back inside, there were scores of them to greet us in the dining room. They don’t bite you, but they walk all over your food with their dirty shoes.

They are smallish creatures, stupid and clumsy to boot. So swatting them is no problem, except that I have the definite feeling that for every one I swat, three more have squeezed in somewhere. I made an emergency run to Ace Hardware after supper, and now we have sticky traps in all of the windows. Clear plastic panels with some sort of tanglefoot on them. These devices are working, but they are soooo passive, and at this point I am in favor of something quicker and more murderous.

Patience, patience. All in due time, one of my better angels is whispering.

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While we are talking about such creatures, I offer you a recurring mini-grossout. You are eating outdoors when a small piece of organic stuff floats down from the tree above you onto your food. Just as you are about to pick out the offensive material and flick it away, it wriggles off under its own power. You know that if you hadn’t seen it arrive, it would have been on your next forkful.

Bon appetit.

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No Way

jono55

Today is Mother’s Day. I support this holiday 100%. Mothers deserve the recognition, completely. And more.

If the situations were reversed, and I were presented with the option to navigate a pregnancy and go through labor, there wouldn’t have been any kids in my family pictures at all. No way. I simply wouldn’t have put up with the whole business. The nine months of progressive body distortion, the hours and hours of tortuous labor pains, the endless mountains of diapers and of clothing covered with spit-up. Wouldn’t do it. The species could stop right there, as far as I was concerned.

So anyone who is perusing this, it was because you had a mom. If you had depended on good old dad, chances are you would have ended up as simply a disappointed ovum with poor reading skills.

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Thought I’d add a few pictures of my own mother. My tendency has been to forget that she was a girl before her mom-ship took over. She was, of course. Eleanor Ruth Flom (nee Jacobson) was only twenty years old when I came along. How could she have been ready for that?

That’s me in the 1943 photo, the absolutely darling blond boy at Mom’s right side. I think I was a fairly good son to raise until adolescence, but at that point no one could do anything with me at all, because I became omniscient.

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From The New Yorker

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Our friend Poco has done it again. Somewhere in the past week or so, he tangled with another cat, and this week he developed an abscess above his right eye. When the vet saw him he said : “Darn, Poco, we’re going to have to get you an abscess punch card, so you get a free one once in a while.”

What this all meant was anesthesia, surgery, antibiotics, and a sad-looking cat with a bad shave. He does look pathetic. But … it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve had the talk. Over and over.

Our cat Willow never gets into fights. Never needs surgery. She simply turns around when confronted and runs away at just the right speed. But Poco forgets that he’s 100 years old, has fewer teeth than he once did, and charges right at any and all cat intruders into our yard. I would admire his pluck if it weren’t for the veterinary visits and the periods of illness. Sheesh.

It’s like living with Feline Rambo, The Perpetual Sequel.

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Saturday night and I’m holding court on the little front patio in front of our home, Willow the cat is lying nearby as my support animal. Our part of the neighborhood is sleepy and still sunny at nearly 8 PM. Nick Drake is singing from the Great Beyond, his Pink Moon album. He is in remarkably good voice for a guy who passed away in 1974. Couldn’t tell, really, by listening.

It is 56 degrees and windless. Robin is off to Durango while I mind the feline outpatient department. The report is that all are doing well there, and that the mothers are being treated with the respect due them.

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Say What? … She What? … But I Just Talked To Her …

jono55

On Monday a friend of Robin’s, a lady of 87 years, was perky and going through her regular routines and looking forward to Zoom Bible Study on Tuesday, but that evening she passed away. Quietly, no fuss, no drawn-out or painful rite of passage. Two eyes closed in the evening and the last chapter in her personal story on Earth was written.

As always the finality of death was shocking, even when it comes to someone at that stage of her life. You can’t shuffle off this mortal coil at 87 without disturbing everybody you know, not even then. Her friends weren’t yet ready to say goodbye. For me it has always been that irreversibility, that complete resistance to petitioning, that refusal to listen to reason that has sometimes greatly pissed me off about death. The absolute lack of recourse.

Along came this piece by Margaret Renkl in Wednesday’s NYTimes, describing the role of poetry in helping people deal with hard places in life. This help comes at those times when we have run out of words to describe what is happening to us or how we feel. It comes when our own store of language fails us. Knowing that the poet could not have written what they did if they hadn’t seen what we are seeing. And if they survived, why, so might we.

I recall as a very young child overhearing my parents having a serious disagreement. Voices were raised and harsh words were exchanged. There were two things that were my takeaway that night. One was the terminally scary thought that mom and dad might separate and then where would I be? The other was that even while I was feeling so small and terrified, the people I could see through my window out there on the street were going about their own busy-ness, without a care for my troubles. How unfeeling they were! How unfair it all was.

If I’d had someone else’s words to lean on, I might not have felt so alone and powerless on that turbulent night. But hey, I was just a kid. Who writes tragic or even thoughtful poetry for six year-olds? Here is the huge advantage in being an adult. There are places to which we can turn for support, if we will. Poetry is one of those.

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From The New Yorker

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The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

***

Musée des Beaux Arts

by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

***

Icarus

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We are off later this morning for a four-hour drive to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Camping there with the Hurley family. I’ve dusted off the camper, put the proper amount of air in its tires, and checked the supply boxes. The daytime weather is predicted to be good, but the nights are all scheduled to be below freezing so we’ll be wearing our socks to bed and bringing out Mr. Heater for those nights. I look forward to rolling up like a hedgehog in the bottom of my sleeping bag and wearing all of the clothes I brought. It’s one of those recurring situations in life that go like this –

“Why do you keep hitting yourself?”

“Because it feels so good when I stop.”

We’ve been to this park a couple of times, and if you’ve never been, it is pretty amazing. You drive along the highway and it is nothing but mountains and the lovely San Luis Valley and then all of a sudden – what the hey? – gigantic sand dunes, hundreds of feet high, piled up against those Sangre de Cristo mountains.

Be prepared … we may take photos.

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Things That Are Better Now

jono55

I have a tendency, as curmudgeons often do, to complain about aspects of modern life, comparing them to life in the golden years of the past (which I’ve often polished up a bit in my mind). So I thought I’d try to balance things out by listing a few things that are definitely better than in the “good old days.” A change of pace, if you will, and then I can get back to complaining, which is a much more natural posture for me.

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Milk. Milk is better. I don’t know exactly when homogenization of milk became the everyday reality that it is now, but it hadn’t hit my family of origin until I was of middle-school age. Before that, milk was not one thing, but two. Each bottle had a two-inch layer of cream on top that had separated from the skim milk below. You would shake the bottle to try to mix them together, which was more or less an effort that was doomed to failure, because they never really combined completely. (Like oil and water) In addition, the cream layer was a little gloppy, and those lumps of glop were now distributed throughout the milk after shaking. I hated those glops with a passion. Still do.

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Refrigeration. When I was a very small child, the cold food preservation system in our house was fairly primitive. It was called an icebox. Think of it as a picnic cooler that was too big to lug around. In one area you would put a large chunk of ice, and food was stacked in the other part.

Just like in a picnic cooler, there were colder and warmer areas of the box, you had to buy more ice almost on a daily basis in summer, and what happens when the ice melts? That water had to be hauled away.

ANY modern refrigerator is better than that.

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Car Tires. The modern automobile tire is a marvel. Its durability and reliability are in a completely different league when compared to those I had on my first car, which was a 1950 Ford two-door coupe. I recall shopping for Allstate Tires in Sears catalog and finding that I had three choices, and the best available was guaranteed for 15,ooo miles. My Subaru’s tires now routinely get 65,000 miles or more.

And in those 15,000 miles you could expect to have a flat at anytime. Because the weak link was the tube inside. Punctures, slow leaks, fast leaks, blowouts – all were part of a driver’s experience, as was having a patching kit along to fix a flat on the highway. If you ask me today where my car’s jack is, I couldn’t exactly tell you, but I would point vaguely toward the back of the car. In 1956 you knew exactly where that jack was, because you used it just last week.

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From The New Yorker

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Cars. While we’re on the subject of cars, their overall reliability today is wayyy superior to what I experienced with that revered 1950 Ford. In that era, if anyone claimed that their automobile had crossed the hallowed 100,000 mile mileage mark, we would all gather round the speaker worshipfully, to hear what pearls of wisdom he had to share. How often did he change the oil, what kind of oil, what kind of gas, was the car mostly driven in town or mostly on the highway, and what were his traveling speeds, etc. That kind of mileage was the Holy Grail at one time, now it’s barely worth a sniff.

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Socks. Socks used to get holes in them. Your choices then were to have them darned (sew the hole closed) or throw them away. That never happens today. What does occur is that all of the soft stuff that is in a sock wears off the bottom, leaving a nylon grid behind that is uncomfortable and eventually blister-producing. So it’s sort of a wash, I guess. The real improvement comes in the elastic material that holds a sock up. They used to fall down after a few washings, as the elastic material rapidly deteriorated. This meant that you would be tugging at them all day long to keep up appearances. Today they never, ever fall, but they cost fifty times as much as they did.

Worth every penny.

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Shoes. In families of modest means, or sub-modest means like the one I grew up in, buying a pair of shoes was just the first step in that shoe’s life. When the sole or heel wore down, your father would take them to the basement and do a repair. There were tools available with which to do this. Hammers and nails and cast-iron forms.

Because an ordinary family would never own a sewing machine capable of stitching that new leather sole onto the shoe, my dad would use a bunch of small nails to fasten it. At first these nails would not touch your foot, but as the new sole wore down the nails did not wear correspondingly, and eventually flesh and iron met in painful and bloody congress. But not to worry, you gave the shoes to your dad and he’d start the whole process over once again. You tossed out a pair of shoes only when your feet had grown to the point where they couldn’t be shoved into them any longer, or when the leather of the upper itself became too thin to hold things together.

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Hot sauces. In my family of origin, there was nothing hotter imaginable than Tabasco sauce. Not that anyone in my family actually owned a bottle, but they would sit around the table after supper and talk about people who they had heard about, people who had ingested the stuff and what horrible things had happened to them as a result … a stomach that never worked well again, bowels that became completely unreliable, et al.

Imagine my surprise when I started buying my own groceries and I first tried Tabasco sauce. It was certainly flavorful, but hot … what a disappointment. The era of jalapeños, serranos, habaneros, ghost peppers, etc. was still ahead for me. Also, for the longest time there was little availability of the interesting traditional pepper sauces from other countries around the world. Today I think you would never have to buy the same condiment twice if you didn’t want to, there are that many to choose from. And those international specimens have flavors that can be simultaneously flame-throwing and exotic.

(Keep in mind that this is being written by a Norwegian-American, which is a race born without the ability to metabolize or appreciate pepper in any of its many forms. I am obviously a hybrid of some sort, perhaps as a result of hanky-panky on the boat coming over to America, or to some serious “bundling” on a frosty January night back in the mid- 1800s in one of those lonely pioneer cabins).

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Indoor Plumbing. My family of origin never actually lived in a house without it, but as a child one of my favorite places on the planet was my grandfather’s farm, which had neither electricity nor bathrooms on the inside until I was about eight or nine years old. Now an outhouse is tolerable in good weather, but in the dead of winter … my, oh my … you gave a lot of thought to the phrase – is this trip really necessary?

The water in Grandpa Jacobson’s house was accessed with a small hand pump at the sink in the kitchen. That was it. If you wanted to take that Saturday night bath, you pumped as much water as you needed and warmed it on the wood stove. You then climbed into the big circular galvanized tub brought out for that purpose and you scrubbed away. It was pretty much Little House on the Prairie kind of stuff.

I am not nostalgic for those baths or those trips to the privy. Means to an end, my friends, means to an end.

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With the trial of the officer involved in the killing of George Floyd now underway, articles are appearing everywhere on what the scene of the crime looks like today. It has become a sacred space on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue … that intersection where I used to walk by on my way to Saturday morning movie matinees.

I moved away from that city in 1969, when the Air Force decided that my assistance was urgently required in Omaha NE if our country was to survive, and I never went back after that but for brief visits. One by one my personal ties to the town have gone away, but I still can be moved by its stories, even dreadful stories such as this one. After all, it was home for thirty years.

Robin and I are both wondering what the officer’s lawyers can possibly come up with as his defense. When you are photographed kneeling on the neck of a man for nine minutes … I’m sure that they will be as creative and imaginative as possible. When the evidence is so clearly damning, heavy legal smoke is definitely called for.

I also wonder is what is ahead for my old hometown, when the trial is over. No matter what the verdict turns out to be, it will create waves that wash through the entire country. Minneapolis has unfortunately become almost a metaphor for urban police violence.

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The Old Testament

jono55

My son had returned home from college for a few days, and on the second morning of his too-brief stay he came up from his basement bedroom and declared: “And to think that this was a home where rock and roll was once played.”

I blinked like a deer in the headlights, because I had no response. He was right. In my as yet unfamiliar-to-me life as a divorcée, I had drifted waaaay too far from the real stuff, and into New Age music. Without thinking, really, over a period of several months I had effectively replaced Led Zeppelin and Neil Young with the tunes from folks like David Arkenstone and Enya, and that’s what I had playing in the background since the young man’s arrival. Oh, the shame of it all!

No Mas! I cried, as I flew to the turntable with an album by the J.Geils Band in my hand, and tossed whatever dreck was already on there over the loft railing. As the opening notes of “Hard Drivin’ Man” began to fill the room, I felt renewed, cleansed, and oh-so-repentant. I thanked Jonnie for reminding me of who I was and pledged right then and there to never again fall away from the true faith.

He looked over at me and said something like “Rise, father … go and sin no more.” (I think he borrowed that line from somewhere, for it sounded very familiar but it was highly righteous and very much to the point on that special day.)

I have been the truest of disciples since then. I carry a large staff with me everywhere I go and whenever I find a New Age adherent I ply that stick about their head and shoulders until they see the light. It’s a thankless job … but someone’s got to do it. We’re saving souls here!

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I have had so many very wise and urgent things to say recently that I have sorely neglected what it probably the best part of this blog, and that is when I don’t write anything at all but only share a few cartoons from the New Yorker magazine. I do this whenever my personal thoughts are an undecipherable clutter. Today I am going to pass along a murder of cartoons. It’s a lot like a murder of crows, but more fun.

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As I read the headlines for the past two months, and think about the office of POTUS, I wonder all over again – who in hell would want the job? President Cluck left things in an unusually messy state, to be sure, but even if he hadn’t totally mucked things up the world is a certified perpetual bucket o’disorder.

Let’s see … take a sample of the problems that the U.S. faces domestically, for instance. What shall we choose … how about racism, income inequality, gun violence, immigration, and the large number of special interest groups, which at last count was equal to the population? And to accomplish anything in any of these areas POTUS must do something that is much harder than herding cats, he must herd politicians. At least with cats you can fairly easily understand their motives and behavior. They like to be fed, they don’t like to get wet, and they sleep most of the day.

Unfortunately, politicians don’t sleep nearly enough, so that when we go to bed there is always the chance that they will do something so bad during the night that it takes us years to get over it. I refer you to the quotation by Gideon J. Tucker: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”

Who wants that job? Not a normal person.

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Report From The Front Lines 2

jono55

There are many differences between the adults and young of most species, including humans. Some of those differences allow archeologists to dig up a bone or two and tell us that it was that of the forearm of a twelve year-old girl who was helping make succotash when she temporarily lost her focus and became dinner for a passing predator. However, even if you are not an archeologist, or a scientist of any kind, when you have living examples of both groups in front of you, it is much easier.

For instance, children are often found at the top of things, where they dance and play and take great delight in the simple pleasures of climbing up there.

Adults, on the other hand, are often found at the bottom of things, looking up at those same children. They are quite content with having a more restricted view of the world as the tradeoff for not needing to gasp for breath, nurse a twisted ankle, or otherwise discommode themselves.

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As we began one of our hikes in Goblin Valley , someone mentioned rattlesnakes and I told them not to worry as long as they had me with them on the walk. I had never ever seen a rattlesnake in the wild, I told them, so they could relax because the odds against such an encounter on our present hike were astronomical.

Until Tuesday, that is.

Right in the middle of the path where I positively could not miss it was a small rattlesnake, estimated to be around 15 inches in length, and on a sunny 50 degree day. Why it was not still in its burrow sleeping like a sensible snake should be at this time of year I don’t know, but there it was, shaking its few rattles and looking as menacing as anything can look when it is only a little over a foot long.

I am indebted to Neil Hurley for this photograph of the snake. I took one myself, but since mine was snapped only after I stopped running and was more than 200 yards away, there was some unfortunate loss of detail .

So I was very grateful that Neil kindly allowed me to use his pic here on the blog.

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We treated the creature with the respect that it deserved, warned a group of Asian tourists behind us not to step on it, and went on our way. I can no longer say “never” when it comes to rattlesnakes in the wild. I am not a Crotalo–virginal hiker any more.

(Addendum: we identified this as a Hopi Rattlesnake. Are we correct?)

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From The New Yorker

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Rep. Lauren Boebert came to town and addressed a group at a local bar. Apparently when your supporters invite you to come talk to them it pretty much goes well, so the evening was a modest success. Of course she was packing a firearm, that is her raison d’être. If it were not for the imaginary issue of people trying to take all guns away from ordinary citizens she would still be slathering mayonnaise onto BLT sandwiches in her Rifle CO restaurant. (Which to my mind is a perfectly honorable job. I love BLTs.)

Rep. Boebert is an excellent example of why it was wrong to give women the vote and allow them to run for public office. She is a boob, and I am being generous here. I apologize to boobs in general if they feel slighted by my adding her name to their ranks. But, really, she is one of you.

Before anyone gets all fired up and writes me a letter or starts warming up a cauldron of tar, I believe that it was wrong to give men the vote as well. Everything has pretty much gone downhill since the Magna Carta, in my opinion. Back in the day a country might very well find itself with a stupid king, but everybody knew that and kept their counsel (and their heads) by being quiet about it and waiting for the next king down the line for things to get better. Sometimes it might take more than one change of sovereigns for improvement to come about, but being a serf was such a time-consuming and back-breaking sort of life that one barely noticed.

However, embarrassing as Boebert is, we are stuck with her at least until the 2022 elections, and perhaps beyond. After all, we are living in the same part of the world that went for Cluck 2:1 in the last election. And such a sad number, my friends, requires that a gigantic amount of poor judgment be present in a population.

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Finally, a few more photos of people playing in a red desert. It is a spectacular place. It is a wilderness composed entirely of non-fluffy. There is an abundant shortage of soft places. There are few stumps of trees to sit on, but mostly rock to cradle one’s posterior. To a person like myself who grew up in Minnesota, a water-rich and green state if there ever was one, this is another planet. This is Mars. As Peter O’Toole’s character said in Lawrence of Arabia when asked what he liked about the desert: “It’s clean.”

The author Terry Tempest Williams has written beautifully about the Utah desert. She lives a couple of stone’s throws away from where we were.

In 1995, when the United States Congress was debating issues related to the Utah wilderness, Williams and writer Stephen Trimble edited the collection, Testimony: Writers Speak On Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an effort by twenty American writers to sway public policy. A copy of the book was given to every member of Congress. On 18 September 1996, President Bill Clinton at the dedication of the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, held up this book and said, “This made a difference.“

Wikipedia: Terry Tempest Williams

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Report From The Front Lines

jono55

We’re on our first official “outing” of the year, spending a couple of days with Amy, Neil and family in southeastern Utah. Believe me when I tell you that there is ample room for humans to social distance in this part of the world. When we arrived on Sunday afternoon our families rendezvoused in Goblin Valley State Park, a surreal landscape if there ever was one. A world of red sandstone carved into fantastic shapes by wind and time. By the end of the day our (Robin’s and mine) feet were sore, our arms and legs were sore, our knees were well-scraped, and our hands and fingers were tired from grasping at the abrasive rock.

But our spirits were in good shape, so there was definitely that.

On Monday we took on exploring two of the many famous slot canyons of the San Rafael Swell nearby. These are new experiences for me, best described as a claustrophobic’s idea of a bassackwards way of spending a vacation. You walk into a maze where the visibility is mostly up and the walls keep crowding in on you until in places you can barely pass through. More red sandstone, more (very) close encounters with the earth. By the end of the day our (Robin’s and mine) feet were sore, our arms and legs were sore, our knees were well-scraped, and our hands and fingers were tired from grasping at the abrasive rock.

Wait … did I just repeat myself?

When we finally exited this bit of amazingness we had been scraping and clambering and trudging over some of the planet’s more interesting and bizarre landscape for about 9 miles. Every movement in any direction was now uncomfortable. Getting into the car required planning. Sitting in one position for more than 5 minutes produced a body that could not be restarted without earnest prodding. But those spirits … somehow, they never flagged.

Our basecamp for these modest expeditions was the hamlet of Hanksville, Utah. Population 219, elevation 4295 feet. It was a half hour’s drive south from Goblin Valley and the other activities described above. If you continued on in a southerly direction further down Highway 24 you would end up in less than an hour in the Lake Powell recreation area.

Hanksville has a couple of places to stay, including our residence which was named the Whispering Sands Motel. It is a basic sort of place, short on frills, definitely not an all-inclusive resort. But the rooms are clean, the beds were comfortable, everything that we needed worked, and the managers were the kind of people you are glad are in charge of your lodging. That is, there are strict and enforced rules about how a guest should behave. For instance, quiet hours start at 9:30, and if you make a nuisance of yourself you will be asked to leave and you will not get your money back, says the little sign on the door. Since Robin and I have mutually agreed to leave behind our days of trashing hotel rooms, we appreciated this concern for our present-day welfare.

The Whispering Sands

Down the road from the Whispering Sands is Duke’s Slickrock Grill, which has some decent food to offer. The cafe is also a shrine to the actor John Wayne, with nearly everything on the menu either carrying the title of one of his movies, or something related. There are a few books for sale in the lobby, all related to Mr. Wayne as well.

A life-sized cutout of the man stands behind the bar.

It was the sort of place where you didn’t feel like mentioning that in general the official ‘Trinity’ was not Father, the “Duke,” and Holy Ghost.

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Here are a handful of representative photos of the footsore survivors. There are many more of these pictures, and I feel that I must warn you that even the slightest evidence on your part of any interest in them may bring on the dreaded: “Here is every single picture that I took on my vacation, including double exposures, out-of-focus pics, stunningly boring repeats of the same scene with only the slightest of differences, et al.”

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At The Store

jono55

Yesterday Robin and I went out for lunch. Together. To a local BBQ joint. Both of us ordered a hamburger. It was delicious. But it had been … I don’t know … more than a year since we had done that? Without even trying, our consumption of red meat has fallen so far off that we are no longer even counted by the Beef Producers of America as existing humans. Purged from the rolls we have been.

Cutting down on ingestion of this product line has been made easier by the fact that this genre of foodstuffs is in the most expensive section of the grocery store. Our local City Market has two uniformed officers stationed at the “Beef” section, wearing full riot gear, intimidating dark glasses, and carrying AR-15s with the safety off. They have been trained not to answer questions from customers, much like the guards at Buckingham Palace. One of our pair of guards was recently indicted by the FBI for having played a role in the insurrection in Washington DC on January 6 of this year. He was seen clearly on video to be selling street tacos on the steps of the US Capitol. Apparently he has been charged with nourishing rioters who were engaged in the performance of a felony. It’s a test case and he is being represented by the ACLU on first amendment grounds.

Because we are just down the highway from the ski town of Telluride, our food markets get a lot of trade from that economically advantaged population. Ergo, we actually have a small Wagyu beef section in our local store. Thus, although we live in the middle of ranch country we must import a proportion of our beef from Japan to feed those Tellurideans, whose palates are so refined that they cannot handle the Angus beef that is served to the hoi polloi here in Paradise. And who can blame them, really? Living among the ordinary folk is already quite a burden.

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From The New Yorker

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The entire national Republican Party has been rounded up this week and shipped off to a reeducation camp for group instruction and psychotherapy. In its present form the party has been declared a national menace by the Surgeon General, Dr. Windsock Carapace. Their symptoms include extreme moral turpitude, stage 4 mendacity, complete susceptibility to any and all conspiracy theories, and just plain being dumb as a load of fenceposts.

Dr. Carapace admits that this is a drastic measure: “But it was either that or have them put down. The nation can’t function with so many incompetents in the mix. Generally speaking, Congress will still work as long as the completely useless category does not get too high, but within the present-day Republican party we are at 96% and that is an unacceptable level.”

The nation’s chief doctor then added that once they have been rehabilitated, they will be neutered before being released. “Can’t be too careful where the national interest is concerned, we don’t want to be right back here in another generation,” said the esteemed physician.

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Have I mentioned that we are in the throes of a small home remodeling? The bathroom off the master bedroom just wasn’t making us happy anymore, so we called upon our neighbor Ed to come to our rescue. Ed is a contractor who does this sort of thing, and is an interesting mix of characteristics that is rarely found in modern humans. He is reliable, honest, and highly skilled. Almost takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

It took a while to get the project started, but once Ed showed up it was get out of my way and let me work. We should be able to use the room in another four or five days, and until then Robin and I are sharing the small bathroom on the other side of the house that I normally employ. This is quite a small space, not the palatial one that Robin is accustomed to, being about the size of the typical phone booth (you remember those, n’est-ce pas?). It is so small that I cannot have a full bar of soap in the shower, but must cut them in half.

But Robin is nothing if not a game gal, and the only complaint that I have heard from her in this whole affair was one day earlier this week when a plaintive cry of “Why me, Lord?” could be heard through the bathroom door. I wasn’t quite sure which of many possible calamities she was bemoaning, and did not have the courage to ask.

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Discontent

jono55

Now is the winter of our discontent.

What? Plagiarism? Moi? Just as I was congratulating myself on appropriating this well-turned phrase and putting it out there as my very own, people began mentioning Mr. Shakespeare and his play Richard III, and so I guess that particular jig is presently up.

But doesn’t it apply well to today’s headlines? Is there anyone reading this, right now, that is content? Take away the pandemic and we still have a historic chill seemingly everywhere at once. Even worse, when you find that your furnace has died and you turn on your electric space heater the darned thing doesn’t work because when you look out your window the wind turbines on your back forty have frozen up. Who knew that could even happen?

And the Whack-A-Mole character of American racism and bigotry has never been more obvious and blatant. Right now it is Asian-Americans who are being singled out (at least in the headlines) for violence perpetrated by drive-by thugs. Which was preceded by last summer’s rash of violence against black Americans, which was preceded by a serious uptick in anti-semitic nastiness. Of course, brutality leveled against these groups never goes away. Not even close.

There are moments when it seems as if the Ten Plagues of Egypt were happening all over again, but simultaneously rather than sequentially.

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Just in case you’ve forgotten what those plagues were, I list them for your enjoyment and edification:

  • Water turns to blood
  • Frogs everywhere
  • Lice or gnats everywhere
  • Wild animals everywhere
  • A pestilence in one’s domestic animals
  • Boils
  • Thunderstorm of hail and fire
  • Locusts
  • Darkness for three days
  • Deaths of the firstborn

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From The New Yorker

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I’ve been a voracious reader since tot-hood. Books, newspapers, Sears catalogs, milk cartons … anything with print on it was fair game. Usually it was a quiet and personal vice, and the grownups pretty much left me alone in my literary wanderings. They had no idea what was streaming through my eyes and into my little brain. Mostly that worked out well … they got to be left alone and I got to read what I wanted.

But occasionally there were brief dustups, like this one.

I was probably about six or seven years old, and it was evening on my grandparents’ farm. Grandma Ida and Aunt Norma were in the kitchen chatting, and I was alone in the living room which was just off the kitchen. We were out of sight of one another. I don’t know what I was reading, but I came across a word that I didn’t recognize. There was no dictionary handy, so I called out to the adults in the next room:

Grandma, what does rape mean?

My question was met with total silence.

Now kids are pretty good at reading adults. And so I knew that this unnatural and pregnant pause meant that I had wandered into a taboo area, and I instantly wished to God that I hadn’t brought it up. Because now the adults had a window into my activities and that was not always a good thing. Better to be ignored and left alone was my motto. I could just have waited until I found that absent dictionary and everything would have been fine. But noooooo, I couldn’t wait, I had to know now.

Finally there was a response and it was Aunt Norma’s voice asking “What are you reading?” OMG, I thought, it’s even worse than I imagined. They have answered my question with a question. What sort of can of worms have I opened? And suddenly there was Norma, standing in front of me, with her hand out. “It means hurting someone,” she said. I dutifully passed whatever the written material was along to her, and she disappeared back into the kitchen with it firmly in hand. No more questions tonight, I thought.

That was it. Days later I got my answer, after I had returned home and through a much safer method of research. I looked it up. Sometimes it was just plain awkward being a curious kid. There were minefields everywhere.

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Wrinkles In Time

jono55

I admit to having been practicing active denial in a variety of ways. One of these is aging. Whenever I can, I pretend that in spite of the fact that the number of candles on my birthday cake keeps increasing, perhaps I was like Mr. Dorian Gray. Somewhere in a closet there might be a portrait of me that was moldering away, while my actual face and body remained irresistibly attractive (poetic license taken here).

I have maintained this fiction by avoiding confrontation with any mirrors. I dress in the dark, brush my teeth with my eyes closed, and shower in a corner where there are no reflective surfaces. All was going well until this morning, when I rose a little later than I intended and hit the bathroom after the sun was up. My guard was down as I glanced up at myself in the mirror just before climbing into the shower and …. OMG … I saw that the wrinkle fairy has paid me a whole lot of visits.

So many that while I had foolishly hoped to see a plum, what I found in my reflection was decidedly a prune. Maybe all the good stuff was still in there behind the corrugations, but my packaging had definitely made a shift.

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I need to share something with you. Many of you have met my daughter Maja, and may know that she had been working in Lima, Peru for the past several years. After spending much of this past summer here in the States because of Covid problems in that country, she was returning to her South American home last weekend. Unfortunately she became very ill en route, and had to be admitted to hospital the very next morning with what were puzzling symptoms.

She has been in hospital in Lima now for five days, and has been diagnosed as having Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Some of her physical problems involve severe weakness, and it is so pronounced in her arms and hands at the moment that she cannot text or send emails. She can, however, receive both of these communications, and the nursing staff makes sure they get to her.

If you are moved to send something off to her, please keep in mind that there can be no replies until she is stronger.

Her phone number for text messaging is: +51 922 337 994

Her email address is: majaellenflom@gmail.com

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Today’s meteorological menu here in Paradise includes rain and snow. Outdoor activities will be limited due to the damp and dreariness. Hallelujah! Water in any and all forms (except steam, which would be awkward) is welcome in our parched land. Since Robin and I have no travel plans, we can huddle indoors and stare comfortably out the window at whatever happens. We might just stay in our pajamas all day … who knows?

It’s one of those delicious times when you are warm and dry and can look out safely at the contrasts just beyond the windowpane. Another such time is when you are camping and you couldn’t be more snug in your sleeping bag but you know that on the other side of those feathers or fiberfill is a chilly morning indeed. It’s a great feeling.

Which reminds me. One of our family homes, when I was a sprout, had a heating system that consisted of a coal-burner in the kitchen, and the warm air had to get itself around to the rest of the rooms in whatever way it could. My bedroom was above the kitchen, and had a register in the floor to allow the warmth to rise to the second level. Now my father was a practical man, and he knew that young human beings could survive quite a bit of chilling without permanent damage, so in winter he closed off that register to keep the ground floor of the house warmer and to conserve fuel.

All of this meant that from December to March I could see my breath in the air of my bedroom nearly every morning. I would take my clothes into bed with me and dress under the covers as best I could, only emerging when I felt protected against the elements. Every child has to develop his or her own coping strategies to survive, n’est-ce pas?

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Silver Linings

jono55

Robin and I consider ourselves among the lucky ones, riding out the pandemic here on the Western Slope of Colorado. We, like so many others, have given up socializing, mingling with friends, and the simple pleasure of just going out for an evening. Robin has had her church involvement and contact with fellow parishioners severely cut back, and it has mostly consisted of Zoom meetings. It’s an arid environment for people who are nourished by the company of other human beings.

But we have been able to double down on our time in the outdoors, and Colorado has a lot of that to offer. It’s only minutes away to walks along the beautiful little Uncompahgre River, an hour away to hiking in the San Juan Mountains or on the Grand Mesa. Spectacular Black Canyon National Park is a twenty-minute drive from our home. Forty minutes from us are Dominguez and Escalante Canyons, where the red desert begins.

There are camping opportunities in every direction. And although these places are more in demand now, we’ve been able to go pretty much where we want so far without being crowded out.

So don’t cry for us, Argentina, we’re doing fine. And while the location of the exact end to all of this coronavirus horsedoodle is not yet clear, our confidence that there will be an end has been increased by the prospect of putting real people in charge in just a few days. Perhaps we can go out to a movie (if there is still a theater to go to) this Fall, without considering it a potential descent into viral hell.

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Ohhhhhhhh man, do I look forward to a post-cluck universe. Tomorrow we move on. At least, most of us will, and for those who don’t? I’ll try to live up to this famous admonition: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

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From The New Yorker

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Robin is the most amazing person in many ways, and one of those is her networking with family. Nearly every week she will talk with her kids, the grandchildren on that side of the family, and a slew of others. And many of these calls last close to an hour. And then she joins me on those rare calls that I make to my own children.

I have watched this behavior week after week for more than 25 years, and she flaggeth never in her self-assigned duties.

Part of my amazement is the fact that I can’t talk on the telephone for more than three minutes without wondering how to diplomatically end the conversation. No matter how much I love the person on the other end of the call. It’s just that unsatisfying for me. To really enjoy talking to someone, I need to see their face and watch what their hands are doing. Anything else is at best a halfway measure.

This is off-putting to people who enjoy telephoning, and they find me boorish or rude (which I suppose I am) in this regard. I sometimes lamely try to explain how I feel, but … . If any of you have been on the other end of the line in one of my trademark abbreviated calls, think about this. The last time we were together in the same room, wasn’t there at least one moment when you wished that – dear God – would I please shut up? Of course there was.

Think about this when we next speak on the phone:

Hi, how ya doing?
Are you both well?
That’s good, what’s the weather doing there?
……….
……….
……….
I think there’s someone at the front door, and they appear to be on fire. Gotta go. Talk to ya later. Bye.

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On May 4, 1970 which was … like … only a month ago, there was an antiwar demonstration on the campus of Kent State University, in Ohio. National Guardsmen were there to maintain order, and suddenly shots rang out and four students were dead and nine were wounded. The photograph below was a very well-known one at the time. It was everywhere.

Mary Ann Vecchio gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, Kent, Ohio on May 4, 1970. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four.

*

The above photo of the young man waving the flag was also published widely, and the student doing the waving was a man named Alan Canfora, who died this week. When those shots were fired, he was wounded.

That event was a major milestone in the movement against the war in Viet Nam. It even had its own song, Ohio, written by Neil Young.

Graham Nash vividly recounted the circumstances surrounding the creation of “Ohio.” David Crosby, his band mate in CSNY, excitedly called Nash and made an urgent request, which stunned Nash at the time: “Book the (recording) studio right now!” Nash recalled Crosby telling him. “I’m coming down tomorrow. Wait until you hear this song!”
Crosby had shown Young the famous photo of a young woman named Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over a fallen student named Jeffrey Miller during Vietnam War protests on the campus of Kent State University. Miller had been killed by a bullet fired by a member of the Ohio National Guard and the photo ran on the cover of Life magazine. Young saw the picture, and as Crosby told Nash, “I saw Neil walk off with his guitar into the woods. And he comes back an hour later with this song.”

Jon Friedman, Esquire Magazine, June 2020

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There’s A Man Goin’ Round Takin’ Names

jono55

Let’s do this. Let’s get rid of the electoral college once and for all. Let’s shrink the time between the election and the swearing-in of the new President. Let’s make sure we write down the names of everyone who has supported this Frankenstein of a POTUS. We don’t want to forget even one of them. Let’s remember the names of that handful of Republicans who have spoken up along the way and been driven out or into silence by the jeers and threats of today’s modern equivalent of Italy’s good ol’ Black Shirts. They were the good ol’ thugs of their time, waving flags while running around and clubbing people who disagreed with them.

Italian blackshirts, circa 1920

Let’s get a copy of the Constitution and read it, along with its amendments, to embed into our hearts those words that help us all to remain safe. That should keep us busy for at least a couple of days, and it’s something constructive to do during the Great National Confinement , otherwise known as the coronavirus pandemic.

[It might help to remember that the Constitution was not created as the rules for a club consisting entirely of thoughtful gentlepersons. It was designed to help keep a bunch of unruly and often unsavory bastards from killing one another. Ir provided the set of generally agreed-upon rules which enable us to live together as Americans and that is no small thing.]

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I have reached that point in the year when I have the conversation with myself that goes something like this: I am now officially tired of winter and would like it to go away, please. A month of it is really long enough to learn all that one needs to learn about self-discipline, tolerance for meteorologic adversity, and fortifying one’s soul by inserting enforced self-denial into spaces that used to contain pleasures.

Yep, a month of it would really be enough. After all, that would be 8.33333333% of the year. Do we really need more?

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From The New Yorker

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Yesterday the temperature soared to 43 degrees here in Paradise, so of course I went fishing. I rounded up the necessaries and trucked myself down the hill to the Uncompahgre River. I was dressed in more layers than I needed, expecting to feel chilled walking around in that icy water. But I didn’t, not at all. It was an altogether excellent couple of hours that I passed, flailing the bejabbers out of the poor fly I’d selected.

With my Tenkara equipment I found out two things right away. When you are a beginner, and the rod is twelve feet long, it is very easy to hit things overhead, like trees and bushes. It is also quite easy to hit one’s target in the stream, as long as the target is at least six feet in diameter.

The sun was shining and the water was clear and fast. A group of four mallard ducks was dabbling away just twenty yards from me, apparently not too concerned about the clumsy beast upstream with the stick in his hand.

I was far from alone out there, I counted three other men who were similarly engaged on that stretch of the river. I also counted the number of fish that the four of us hauled in, cumulatively. None. But the number of contented faces was the true measure of the day. And there were four of those.

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For those of you who fish, the Davy knot may be a new one for you, as it was for me. I can attest that it holds very well, and is as easy to tie as any of them. I like the lack of bulk in the finished knot, which should be helpful in other types of fishing as well when deception is especially important.

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This gallery may be of no interest to any but my kids, but here are a few scenes from a trip to Cape Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which took place in 1972.

Please Pass The Bucket

jono55

There is a little story behind the header photograph. Robin and I had met up with her kids for a short skiing vacation over the New Year Holiday. We chose a very small town not far from Winter Park CO, and took rooms for a couple of nights. Skiing during the day, enjoying the company in the evening … that was the plan.

But on New Year’s Eve, one member of our party (whose name is withheld to protect the innocent) became ill with gastroenteritis at midday, and her condition progressed to moderate dehydration over the next several hours. At that time we didn’t know much about the medical care available in Tabernash, so our rooms became the E.R.. Late in the evening her vomiting finally quit, and slow improvement began. But by then we had let go of any ideas of joining the party scene that we could see down at the ski lift area. So we stayed in and celebrated quite modestly instead.

But the party was watchable from our window, and this pic was of a moment in time, when the sounds of retching had subsided and our collective worries began to diminish.

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At one time in my life New Year’s Eves were an excuse for getting sozzled to a degree incompatible with having a pleasant New Year’s Day, if you get my drift. Fortunately for me (and others in the room) I no longer try to pickle myself by midnight on this holiday. In fact, I am no longer awake at midnight at all. Robin and I will pick an hour well before that and call out Happy New Year along with Japan, or some such nation well to the East.

And we have found that no matter how she and I celebrate the evening, quietly or uproariously, the year changes right on schedule.

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In the later years of their time together, my Grandpa and Grandma Jacobson lived in a small house across the farm road from the larger one that they had occupied for most of their married life. It was heated by an oil burner in the living room, and a plain metal pipe ran from the device to the chimney. On New Year’s Eve in 1950 I was their guest, and on the stroke of midnight Grandpa performed his routine which involved picking up a piece of blue carpenter’s chalk and writing the number of the year on the pipe. It was his way of marking the turning of the year. Simple and quiet. And then it was off to bed for all of us.

I do have such a piece of chalk somewhere, because hardware stores have no scruples about selling it to anyone whether they have any carpenter-ic skills or not. But I hesitate to start writing on things in our living room. If I should get started there is no telling where it will stop.

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Found this tune, New Year’s Prayer, by Jeff Buckley, in my library. Strange little thing. Lyrics follow.

Oooo
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, fall in light.
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
As you now are in your heart
Fall in light
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel it as a water fall
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, grow in light.
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing.
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing.
Past the sound within the sound
Past the voice within the voice.
Ah. Ah. Ah.
Leave your office, run past your funeral,
Leave your home, car, leave your pulpit.
Join us in the streets where we
Join us in the streets where we
Don’t belong
Don’t belong
You and the stars
Throwing light
Ooo (repeat)
Fall, fall.
Ooo
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, grow in light.

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Oh, and yes, may a Happy New Year be there waiting, for all of us.

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The Best Eve Of Them All

jono55

Ahhhhh, of course it is Christmas Eve of which I speak. There is no other eve quite like it. Compare it with All Hallows Eve, for instance, which has only a handful of songs and the possibility of a mere bag of candy as a prize. Christmas fair knocks it! Some of my clearest childhood memories are associated with this day. I think that I can recall someof those thoughts verbatim, actually, from one of those December 24ths.

Ohhhhhh, yawnnn, it’s cold in here, wish Dad would turn up the dang furnace … I’m not getting out of bed until …wait! It’s Christmas Eve! Presents! Mixed nuts in a bowl! Presents! Special supper! Presents! Singing around the tree! Presents! Perry Como 78 rpm records on the phonograph. Presents!

What time is it? It’s eight o’clock. If we start opening presents at six o’clock that is … ten hours from now. I can’t stand it. How can a person wait that long? Lunchtime … only six hours to go. I’ve got to think about something else. I’ll go outside and play for a while. That’s it! Play outside. Where there are no presents under the tree to stare at. Supper? Why? Can’t we just skip it? I’m not hungry at all. We can eat any day, but this is CHRISTMAS, for God’s sake! What? I can’t believe what you’re saying. You’re going to wash the dishes before we open presents? That is so dumb. Leave them. Cover them with a towel if you can’t stand the sight of them. Even better, toss them out and get new dishes tomorrow! NOOOOOOOOOO! You can’t be serious. We’re going to sing carols? I hate carols. I hate singing. Where did you go to parent school? This is torture. I want a new family.

Ohhhhhhh, everything is just what I wanted. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

And if you see her, thank Aunt Clothilde for those (bo-ring) socks, would you?

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One day, as I was in a particularly idle frame of mind (one of my more common such frames), I wondered: where is the exact opposite, on the globe, of Montrose CO? And through this remarkable thing called the internet I learned where it was, and what it was called … the antipode. Every single spot on the planet has its antipode.

And there is ours. The red dot represents Port-aux-Français, a tiny town on an island in the South Indian Ocean (actually, the true antipode is a spot in the water a bit north of that, but Port-aux-Français is the closest city).

I learned that it may not be one of the great cities of the world, not if the Wikipedia description is accurate.

The port station is located on the Gulf of Morbihan. The station has about 45 inhabitants in winter; the population can rise to more than 120 in summer. The location was selected in 1949 by the chief of mission Pierre Sicaud because of its sheltered position which was suitable for a runway that was never built.

Wikipedia
Port-aux-Français

So planning for a visit to the Port? … maybe in the summertime when it is really bustling at 120 residents? If you were planning on flying in, remember that the runway was never built. I will suggest that as an alternative you could come visit Robin and I here in the antipode of Port-aux-Français.

Much closer. Runway operating. And we are such nice people. Just bring your vaccination certificate along, would you? There’s a dear.

(BTW – do you know where your antipode is?)

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Tuesday morning I spent a couple of hours sitting in the waiting room at our Subaru dealer, getting some repairs done on our car. My guard was down and as I was looking out their showroom windows at the cars lined up in the parking lot, I caught the fever. The ‘I should really have a different car‘ fever.

I was in a vulnerable state for several reasons. Our little Forester has been making an irritating noise whose source is as yet unknown, and it has just under 100,000 miles on its odometer. I am quite sure that the noise represents something that will completely break down in the middle of the desert somewhere near a sign that says “No services in any direction for 100 miles.” I see us hiking through tumbleweed forests on windswept two-lane roads with buzzards circling and we are passing what used to be diners or gas stations but are now abandoned victims of changing tastes and needs.

I see all this so clearly. So it’s really a matter of life and death, isn’t it? Think I’ll amble over to that salesperson and ask a couple of questions. Couldn’t hurt. He looks harmless enough. What’s that? My car’s ready? I’ll be right there.

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From The New Yorker

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Merry Christmas, Friends. We wish you the very best for this holiday season, and for every season that follows. Although we may be physically celebrating apart from one another, in our hearts we are with you all. And one day with care and good fortune we will be able to do all of that corny and necessary stuff that we could before Covid rearranged all of our agendas. We’ll do it right, next year. I believe it.

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It’s The Myth That Matters

jono55

Ok, time for truth-telling. I am totally a Christmas guy. On the outside I’m slightly Bah Humbug, but on the inside I am a gooey tower of sentimentality and memories which reach back before the last ice age. I love the lights, the trees, the carols, the Silver Bells sort of feeling I get when shopping on Main Street in a light snowfall.

A sucker for Yuletide. C’est moi.

A couple of random recollections:

The Christmas Eve two families slept on the Jacobson farm in Grandpa and Grandma’s very small home. I would have been about 4 or 5 years old. Every flat space had a body sleeping on it after gifts had been exchanged and we all bedded down. My brother and I had each been gifted with lambswool slippers a few hours earlier. The floor was filled with dormant bodies. I awoke with the need to use the bathroom. In grandpa’s house the toilet facilities were either the pail under the bed on the second floor bedroom or the out-of-doors. It was cold out there. I was awfully young. I couldn’t face the weather and having to step across all those people on the floor so I did the next best thing (in my mind) and used my brother’s furry slipper. He discovered it right away in the morning, of course, when he found himself sloshing around the farmhouse.

( There is a version of this story where I am the victim instead of the perp. Truthfully, it was so long ago that I don’t know which is the more accurate, but myths will endure)

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I was seventeen and had been nominated to make the trip to buy the Christmas tree, on a Saturday night when I had a date and my mind was completely elsewhere. I bought one and brought it home, then left to pursue my romantic ambitions. When I got back around midnight, I found that a tree had indeed been put up and decorated, but not the one I had purchased. When shown the one I’d selected earlier … a sorrier tree there never was.

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Monday the first doses of Covid vaccine were administered in the US. We’ll be hearing a lot about the ups and downs of the various vaccination programs around the country for a while. We’re a big country, and there’s room for endless variations on the story. It’s huge news, of course, and coming just when a wave of illnesses is still rising up ahead of us like a virologic tsunami – well, let’s just say we needed a morale boost.

I don’t know if President Cluck will ever realize what an opportunity he missed to go down with some measure of greatness attached to his legacy. He seems to be lacking in a lot of normal human reactions and emotions. But if he’d empathized with us instead of lied continuously, if he’d taken rather than opposed the common-sense measures that needed to be adopted, if he’d ever said to us: “This is something extraordinary, folks, it’s way out of politicians’ areas of expertise but we’ve got some of the best minds on the planet working on the problem and you can count on my administration to follow their suggestions.”

If he’d done these things, maybe he still would have lost the election, but how many fewer empty chairs at family tables would there have been this Christmas? I might even feel a bit sorry for him. But he has richly earned every gram of ignominy that will be forever attached to his name.

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“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is a Christmas song  written by the lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent and recorded in 1943 by Bing Crosby, who scored a top ten hit with the song. Originally written to honor soldiers overseas who longed to be home at Christmas time, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” has since gone on to become a Christmas standard.
The song is sung from the point of view of a soldier stationed overseas during World War II, writing a letter to his family. In the message, he tells the family he will be coming home and to prepare the holiday for him, and requests snow, mistletoe, and presents on the tree. The song ends on a melancholy note, with the soldier saying, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”.

Wikipedia

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I’ve read quite a lot about becoming a senior citizen, in order to prepare myself for some future date when that title applies to me. And one of the things that those geezers seem to have trouble with is balance. As a result they fall down way more than it good for them. Things get broken. Sometimes they stay that way.

This article by Jane Brody in the Times of New York is one that I will add to my files labeled: What I Might Need To Know When I Become An Old Person. It’s all about postural training as a way to stay afoot. Good reading.

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Oxymoron Department

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. One that I think appropriate as a monument to a person who does not read.

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Ending on a sweet note. A certain person living in this household follows the evolution of the Oreo Cookie very closely. For myself, I was never able to figure out how these new flavors came and went, nor was I motivated to investigate. This morning that information fell into my lap and I pass it along to you. The answer to the question: why is the Oreo not always the Oreo you knew.

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Sunday Morning

jono55

I don’t know who picks the Poet Laureate, but they did an awfully good job this last time when they selected Joy Harjo. Spirituality, earthiness, magic, and reality have all found a home in her work.
Each one of her poems is like a prose work condensed to its absolute core. The one I reproduce here is a novel in which we already know all of the characters.

.

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Perhaps the World Ends Here

by Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo is the present Poet Laureate of the United States.

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It seems that there is no escaping the fact that Neanderthals and modern humans dated way back when, and occasionally went all the way. DNA archeology has shown some small amount of neanderthal DNA to be present in most of us, and if a person is curious a few dollars spent on a lab test would show them just how much they owe to these folks. For myself, I think I’ll skip that step.

This is a scientific reconstruction of what a neanderthal man looked like, as found in a diorama.

This is a photograph of my great-great-uncle Trygve Einar Flom, taken on his 35th birthday.

It may be my imagination, but there are some subtle similarities here, enough that I don’t think that I need to spend the money on lab work.

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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Hot. Spice. Baby.

jono55

Well, darn if my present favorite hot sauce company hasn’t gone and been acquired, and made the news by doing so. Just as the article in CNN online relates, I began to see Cholula’s distinctive bottles in restaurants several years ago. I tried them there, liked them, then added them to the condiments on our dinner table and never looked back. So far I’ve sampled five of the flavors offered, and they have all been excellent.

But in case you are looking for something to sear your palate and fry your tongue, I suggest that you don’t go to Cholula. It’s spicy but not a blast furnace by any means. What I find attractive are more the subtleties in its flavor, rather than the heat, which is modest. You won’t be able to brag about how many Scoville units you just ingested, not if you ask for the bottle with the wooden top (although I have not tried the “sweet habanero,” so cannot vouch for that one).

(No payment was offered or accepted in return for this endorsement. However, that does not not mean that it wouldn’t have been welcome. I can be bought so easily and cheaply it would make your head swim … )

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Thanksgiving Day arrived and went away on schedule. We entertained a single guest, the gentleman across the street who is a near-shut-in due to health issues. He lives alone and we felt would be a safe person to share a space and a meal with us. We also thought that we would be safe for him. In both cases there was some very small risk, of course, but probably less than we experience when grocery shopping.

The meal was a testament to tradition. No side journeys into the wide world of gastronomy for us, not on T-day. At a time when the rest of life is upside-down, who needs more variety than that?

Our menu was this: a large roasted bird symbolic of a large symbolic Thanksgiving feast hundreds of years ago, mashed white potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, stuffing crammed with the legal limit of butter, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie, and all the while I carried a gigantic can of Reddi-Wip at my side, holstered. I do have a permit to legally carry such a can, and want you all to know that I am a responsible Reddi-Wip owner, and would only use it for nutritional purposes.

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Fighting The Good Fight Department

The Rotting of the Republican Mind by David Brooks

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A little bit about the song “Thanks For The Dance,” from the album of the same name by Leonard Cohen. It is his last album, finished after his death through the efforts of his son.

The songs on the album comprise “sketches” left over from the sessions for Cohen’s last previous studio album You Want It Darker that were finished by Cohen’s son Adam Cohen in a “garage near his father’s old house”.  Regarding the tracks, Cohen noted: “Had we had more time and had [Leonard] been more robust, we would have gotten to them. [We had] conversations about what instrumentation and what feelings he wanted the completed work to evoke – sadly, the fact that I would be completing them without him was a given.”

Wikipedia, Thanks For The Dance

I played the song while Robin and I were preparing dinner yesterday, and Robin said that it made her feel so sweetly sad, and how could it not? The song itself is a meditation on aging and life which is all made even more poignant because Leonard never got to hear the beautiful tune he wrote. At least not in its final form. The man spun gold from the straw of life, and left all of that treasure behind, for us.

Thanks for the dance
I’m sorry you’re tired
The evening has hardly begun
Thanks for the dance
Try to look inspired
One, two, three, one, two, three, one

There’s a rose in your hair
Your shoulders are bare
You’ve been wearing this costume forever

So turn up the music
Pour out the wine
Stop at the surface
The surface is fine
We don’t need to go any deeper

Thanks for the dance
I hear that we’re married
One, two, three, one, two, three, one
Thanks for the dance
And the baby you carried
It was almost a daughter or a son

And there’s nothing to do
But to wonder if you
Are as hopeless as me
And as decent

We’re joined in the spirit
Joined at the hip
Joined in the panic
Wondering
If we’ve come to some sort of agreement

It was fine, it was fast
We were first, we were last
In line at the Temple of Pleasure
But the green was so green
And the blue was so blue
I was so I
And you were so you
The crisis was light
As a feather

Thanks for the dance
It was hell, it was swell
It was fun
Thanks for all the dances
One, two, three, one, two, three, one

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From The New Yorker

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