Category: weather

Hey, Listen To What I Say … Not What I Said

jono55

Joe Biden has been around American politics a long, long time. He is famous for making gaffes, sometimes talks like he’s eating a peanut butter sandwich at the same time, and no one has ever (to my knowledge) referred to him as an intellectual or a scholar. But the other day when he declared that Putin must not remain in power … I understood him clearly. No matter what disclaimers are coming out of Washington DC trying to explain those words away. He now says “I didn’t mean regime change, folks, really I didn’t.” I don’t buy it.

Of course my own understanding is that of a know-nothing yahoo from the prairies without a political credential to his name. And of course world leaders don’t want anyone suggesting that forcibly removing world leaders from office is a good habit to develop. But when Biden said For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power, I heard – take him out. Period.

There were moments in history when disagreements between tribes were settled by having the leader of each group square off in combat. If your guy won, that was a great day, but even if he lost … at least both villages were still standing and there was always hope for a better result down the road.

The evolution of warfare that we see on display in Ukraine finds instead the Russian armies destroying cities, non-combatants, and children. It’s not new, just the latest iteration of the horror that is war. All this to achieve goals that are not completely obvious to those of us in the yokel-universe. Reverting to having one-on-one combat would be so much better than this.

Perhaps Russia would put up Putin as their champion, perhaps not, but I definitely wouldn’t use President Joe to carry our colors. Why, the man’s almost as old as I am! And I wouldn’t suggest having any warrior that superannuated defending anyone’s honor or any country’s borders. Nope. Who I would want as our champion would be someone who was strong, unscrupulous, dumb as a bunch of rocks, and who could hold only one thought at a time in their head and that was winning the duel.

I would send Marjorie Taylor-Greene. If she won we could give her a pat on the back, a medal, a pension, and send her back to to where she came from. A win.

If she lost, at least we wouldn’t have to deal with her particular brand of idiocy any longer. A win.

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We didn’t watch the Oscar ceremonies this year. Our television usage is strictly streaming and non-cable, and all of the choices available to us involved signing up for a free introductory week on some service and then dropping out later in the week. It’s legitimate but a tiresome dodge.

Last year I tried to do this end-around with Hulu Plus but their computer found me out and I received the message “Hey, you did this last year and what good did it do us? So get on out of here, you deadbeat. No more free lunches at this bar.”

I read, though, that I missed something a bit out of the ordinary Sunday night, when Will Smith punched Chris Rock onstage. Usually the attacks in situations like this are verbal ones, small daggers slipped so deftly between the ribs that hours might pass before you even knew you were dead. To have a direct physical confrontation so publicly … .

Rock may have made a thoughtless joke at Smith’s wife’s expense (after all, he makes his living as a smart-ass) but Will Smith … for cripes sake – use your words! And aren’t we past the time when powerful women need men to protect them from comedians at the Oscars? Jada Pinkett Smith is smart, not socially inhibited, and could have spoken up very well for herself.

It was a thug move on Smith’s part.

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Parker Palmer is an educator, lecturer, activist, author of several books, and a Quaker. Every once in a while I will come across a snippet taken from one of his books, or a short video on YouTube and I think “That is one thoughtful man, I should get busy and learn more about what he has to say.”

And then I am distracted, forget all about him, and go on with life in the maelstrom.

So I have no idea why I picked up his book A Hidden Wholeness this morning and started in reading it. In fact, I had no idea we owned the darn thing in the first place. But I ran into these paragraphs right there in the preface and I was hooked.

This seems such a great analogy, to me. The deadly confusion of a blizzard. The sometimes fatal consequences of being lost in one. I will admit to letting go of the rope at moments in my life, and to not always doing proper maintenance on those good old moral bearings.

This time … I will read Palmer’s book. Maybe there’s more good stuff on the inside. But, you know, at least I’ve read the preface.

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I have joined the Carhartt Universe. In fourscore plus years I have not owned so much as a bandanna manufactured by this venerable manufacturer of clothing for working men and women. Oh there were reasons … everything was this red dirt color, was constructed of the same material that they make heavy duty tarps with, and when wet the garments weighed enough to cause profusions of hernias to bloom.

Then there was always the potential for ridicule by people who actually worked with their hands and who might murmur “Impostor” under their breath as I walked by.

But Carhartt has broadened their lineup of products quite a bit in recent years – more colors, more styles, more sizes. So when we were at Murdoch’s yesterday I took the plunge and bought a T-shirt. It is sturdy, seems durable, and there is not one red-dirt thread in it. One small step for man … .

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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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Madness

jono55

A couple of definitions here. Paradise is the land, the waters, the mountains … the amazing natural wonders citizens see every day they walk out their front door here in the Grand Valley. But Paradise is presently suffering from an under-abundance of rainfall, and while the natural scientists reassure us that this drought probably won’t last more than another several hundred years, it is easy to worry a bit, especially if your occupation is water-dependent.

I will introduce a new word here today, Pandemia. That is the community of people inhabiting Paradise. A community of which I am, willy-nilly, a member. We are a problematic bunch of citizenry indeed. Pandemia was largely brought into focus by a mischievous virus whose name I will not dignify by mentioning it here, but I will call it La Peste. It passes easily from person to person if you let it, but any sensible person would try to limit their exposure. Because you could just die from it.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

H.L. Mencken

There are four basic principles involved in protecting yourself against La Peste. Principles that under normal circumstances would not even be argued because they are based on facts, science, common sense, and our accumulated knowledge of the behavior of infectious diseases. These four are:

  • Wear a mask
  • Keep a respectable distance between you and your neighbor
  • Don’t go out into large crowds
  • Get vaccinated

Pretty simple, no? Half of the citizens of Pandemia followed these guidelines and have done so from the beginning of this story. When the vaccines became available, they lined up in droves, glad to finally have a material way to strike back against La Peste. The other half of our neighbors have ignored all of the principles from Day 1 right up to the present, with a variety of reasons given that are sometimes laughable and sometimes just make you want to tear your hair out … or their hair, even better.

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

H.L. Mencken

Part of the problem was our leadership. We had very little of it, at least at the local level. Not from the mayor, nor the city council, nor our medical community. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, trying to educate these folks, many of whom believe that Hilary Clinton runs a chain of pizza parlors where children are captured and farmed out to pedophiles around the nation. Or who are breathlessly waiting for the day that ex-POTUS Cluck will rise from the politically dead in (3, 7, 30, 100, ???? days) and go on to lead the faithful to victory over gays and godless Democrats.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. 

H.L. Mencken

It appears that there are a substantial number of people who are unreachable through information. Many refuse to learn even from the most powerful experience, as in the case of those who perish from La Peste while denying its existence with their last breaths.

I will work in a word or two about myself here. I can speak with the authority of age, which along with a dollar and a half might get you a cup of coffee from a convenience store. Over time I have succumbed to self-delusion more than once. There was my infatuation with Marjorie Heath in the second grade and my abject misery when I learned that not only did she not return my affections, but didn’t even know I was in her class.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

H.L. Mencken

Then there was the hope that sprung in my breast when John Kennedy was elected president. Because I knew that he would bring our country further along the highway to perfection. And it didn’t hurt that he and his wife were the perfect handsome fronts for our ever- renewing and shining democracy. Learning after his passing that he might have achieved a lot more had he spent less time in the intimate company of women other than his wife and more time at the conference tables was not a tonic for yours truly. Not a tonic at all.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

H.L. Mencken

More recently, there was my derisive laughter when a certain Mr. Cluck was nominated to run for the office of president the first time. I thought “Well, here’s a gift for the Democrats, with Cluck running they could nominate an armadillo and win in a landslide.” That delusion lasted right up to late in the evening of election day.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

As you can see, I have had my problems with keeping my feet on the ground from time to time, and I have swallowed a version of The Kool-Aid more than once. Trying to keep your wits together when so many around you have lost theirs is a full-time job. A person can only hope that they are up to the task.

[My thanks to H.L. Mencken, a delightfully sarcastic dude if there ever was one, for his help in writing this post. He is hands down my favorite codger.]

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On Thursday the NYTimes did a really interesting piece on the movie “The Godfather.” Apparently the original prints are decaying and the costly restoration process is well underway. The article includes an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, the movie’s director. Although I have seen the film several times, what I still remember most is the feeling when I walked out of the theater after that first viewing. That the makers of that film had taken characters who were very, very bad men indeed and made me care about what happened to them. Had made them sympathetic. It was an epiphany of sorts.

I realized that I had been hornswoggled and gained more respect for what a powerful tool movies could be, both for good and not so good.

I also realized that I was definitely a susceptible and had better watch myself in the future, lest I be led seriously astray one day.

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This past Tuesday we finally received a welcome dose of moisture in the form of beautiful snow. Several inches in the valley … much more in the mountains.

South of Montrose about 40 miles, the DOT had to close Red Mountain Pass because of what you see in the photograph. Now this is the road that I wouldn’t drive on for the first year we lived in Paradise because of its hazards (and my acrophobia).

What is not obvious in the picture’s frame is that about ten feet to the right of what you see here is a cliff that goes straight down with your eternal reward waiting for you at the bottom. Looking at pictures like this, I ask myself: for all the money in the world, would I pilot that snowplow?

It’s a rhetorical question.

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Former pres. Cluck thinks that Mr. Putin, Russia’s psychopath-in-chief, is a hell of a guy and wouldn’t it be nice if more countries had such strong leadership?

He is “pretty smart,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fund-raiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” he said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.”

NYTImes February 24, 2022

Whatta guy. Just when you think he’s already at the bottom of history’s latrine trench, Putin hands him a fresh shovel and he goes right to work and digs even deeper.

So we have another example of political failures in front of us in the present invasion of the Ukraine. The world’s leaders puff and strut, armies are set in motion, and the suffering begins in a new location. That old African proverb about the elephants fighting has unfortunately never ceased to be relevant.

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. This ancient proverb of the Kikuyu people, a tribal group in Kenya, Africa, is as true today as when the words were first spoken, perhaps thousands of years ago. Its essence is simplicity—when the large fight, it is the small who suffer most. And when it comes to war, the smallest, the most vulnerable, are the children.

Orca Books.com

It’s all madness.

War, by Edwin Starr
And I Am Still Searching, by Pete Seeger

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Tonsorial Fables

jono55

When the pandemic first came to town, we had no idea where this was all going. For all I knew, within days we were all going to be boarded up in our homes, while the sheriff’s men patrolled the streets, shooting anyone who ventured out. I laid in a few sacks of beans and rice and hoped for the best.

Within short weeks, however, two problems emerged that I hadn’t counted on. One was that I couldn’t get my hair cut, and the other was that there was no toilet paper left in the grocery stores. The first could have conceivably been solved by simply letting my thinning hair grow out to my shoulders and beyond. But there was no simple remedy for the other.

Having spent months on my grandfather’s farm as a lad, I knew that if one was away from the house when Nature called, you could use a variety of plants to accomplish a clean-up. With time you learned which plants scratched, which were fragile, which caused intolerable rashes, etc. Highly unpopular was any plant that had the word “thistle” as part of its name. Each child was an amateur botanist because they had to be. In the outdoor privies back at the homestead they used magazines, catalogs, telephone directories and other printed materials to fill in for TP shortages. So no big deal in the early pandemic days. After all it was springtime and foliage was coming on plentiful. But the prospect of an autumn and (God forbid) a winter without proper paper products was not a comforting one. That, however is another story.

Upon learning that the salons of the area were shutdown, I made some enquiries. I found that a brisk black market business in men’s haircuts had sprung up under a bridge outside of town where an enterprising and sturdily-built woman named Gertrudis brought her tools, expertise, and a pair of Carhartt overalls . The lady accepted any customer with a $20.00 bill in their hand. There was no choice of styles, however, you had to take what Gertrudis had to sell or be off with you and bother her no more.

This is where I might mention that this enterprising woman’s day job was as a sheep-shearer. What with the Honda generator to power her clippers, and a leaf blower to blast away the severed hairs from your clothing, it was all very intimidating. Many customers might have bolted at the last minute, but they found that those strong forearms that Gertrudis had developed from years of restraining Shropshires were a match for most men, and you were restrained as in a vise by one arm while the other did the necessary work on your locks.

I don’t have any photos of actual customers, as they were quite alarmed at the prospect of having their picture taken in such challenging circumstances. I did find, however, a pic of a newly shorn Shropshire, and I can tell you that the human clients looked pretty much the same.

As for me, I couldn’t handle the situation. I was standing in line waiting for my first Gertrudis haircut when the customer in the chair let out a scream and ran away bleeding profusely. He had moved at exactly the wrong time, the big clipper had its way, and he now had only half a right earlobe as a result. That was all it took for me to reconsider my options, which I did while doing a full-tilt boogie away from the bridge and back into the sunlight.

Next day I studied a few YouTube instructional videos, dropped by a local emporium, and was soon the proud owner of a Wahl hair cutting set for the amazingly low price of $24.99. Combs, a clipper, a tiny booklet … everything I needed. That same day I gave myself my first haircut and have been doing so ever since. As opposed to what happened when I used to go to that exclusive salon called Great Clips where my appearance would swing back and forth between shorn and shaggy, I now give myself a trim every week and always look the same. Mediocre, perhaps, but the same.

The price has gone up a bit, but just for interest, the kit looks like this. Bulletproof, cheap, and my own earlobes are still intact. (Notice that the box claims that the guards provide “goof-proof haircuts.” This is not exactly the case. Any goof worth their salt can still mess things up)

There was a learning curve, however, I will admit to that. The front always looked okay, but the back was another matter for quite a while. Not being able to see what I was doing behind me, the rear of my head looked pretty much like I was recovering from various sorts of haphazard neurosurgery for about two months as I acquired necessary skills.

When the rules loosened up and salons began to open up once again, Gertrudis packed up her equipment and disappeared. I hear that she is still working sheep ranches in our area, living in a caravan with one of her old customers, a man called Harry Feldenfelden. Harry was a man of rare temperament who found that he enjoyed being handled roughly by Gertrudis, had several repeat shearings from her over that first spring and summer of the pandemic, and eventually joined her on her travels.

Harry took up the fiddle as a pastime, as you can see from the picture at left. ‘Tis a couple well met.

Get A Haircut, by George Thorogood and the Destroyers

(The story told above is 50% falsehoods, 20% true, and 30% polyester.)

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From The New Yorker

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Yesterday Robin and I were out for a constitutional, walking on the path along the Uncompahgre River, and I was paying particular attention to the human/dog combinations who were sharing the path with us. Somewhere there must have been a class named How To Be A Proper Coloradan which I missed attending when I first came to this fine state. Dog ownership must have been stressed in that class, because I swear there were 2.4 dogs per human on the walkway today.

Most of the canines were very small breeds of the sort that you must often remove from your ankles where they have attached their tiny teeth in a vain attempt to appear ferocious. This afternoon they were on their best behavior, however, and there were no such incidents. I have owned several dogs in my life, but was never tempted to acquire one of the “toy” breeds. There was just not enough dog there to be attractive to me.

Let me tell you about Lady, a sweet creature who lived with us when my kids were quite young. One fine Sunday morning during my stint in the Air Force, my former wife and children returned from attending Unitarian services in Omaha (I was on call) with a largish cardboard box. A parishioner with a devious mindset had brought a bunch of mixed-breed puppies to church to share with anyone who wished to complicate their life, and he caught my wife at a weak moment.

Lady was so fluffy that it was difficult to tell which end was which, you had to keep turning her until you saw the eyes to know for sure. She had a fine temperament, the kids loved her, and she instantly became the seventh member of the family. She eventually grew to be a medium-sized animal, long-haired and with one of those curly Siberian Husky sort of tails.

She was not a biter, tolerated the good-hearted abuse that young children always dish out to pets, and except for one quirk, was pretty easy to have around. The quirk was that Lady became furious when in the presence of anyone of color. When the black meter-reader would come by our house in Buffalo NY, there was so much savage growling and tooth-baring that we had to restrain her and shove her into a room until he left the premises. A youngster named Peter who lived just down the street was unfortunate enough to have a disease that made him perpetually jaundiced, with a pronounced gray-green color to his skin. Lady could not be in the back yard playing with the kids whenever Peter was around.

One day we had gone to a nearby state park for an outing and were returning home. We were all tooling along in our VW microbus, with me driving and Lady riding shotgun with her window nearly all the way down due to it being a hot day and the fact that VW microbuses were not air conditioned. We were cruising at around sixty mph when Lady saw a large butterfly going by and out the window she flew to try to catch it. We were all horrified when we saw her leave the car, and in the rearview mirror I saw her hit the ground tumbling over and over in a cloud of dust.

I pulled the bus to a quick stop and ran back to where Lady was lying on the side of the road, fearing the worst and hoping to avoid having the kids see their friend all bloody and awful. But by the time I reached her she was sitting up looking a bit dazed and except for missing a patch of fur under her chin, she seemed none the worse for her vain attempt at flight. No broken bones … no bloody hide … nothing, although she was very quiet for an hour or so. By the time we had reached home she seemed completely back to her old self.

Lady was never allowed to use that seat again. From then on she was banished to the back of the bus whenever it was moving. Once was enough.

Old Blue, by Joan Baez

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A Dick Guindon cartoon.

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The Doonesbury cartoon this week was particularly informative, I think. A no-nonsense guide to becoming involved in social media.

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We finally have some wintry weather this week. Oh, nothing really to complain about, compared with what our Midwestern friends have suffered, but when it’s cold, damp, windy, and the sleet is flying by … that counts for something. It merits at least a four on the nasty scale, I think.

What would a ten be? I think that an Old Testament-style blizzard* would fit the bill. Heavy snowfall, wind over 45 mph, visibility down to a few feet in front of you. The kind where farmers would leave the house to go to the barn and lose their way, their bodies found days later when the skies finally cleared. Where children in one-room prairie schoolhouses were marooned with their teachers, burning the furniture for warmth until help arrived. Where livestock might freeze to death standing up in the snowdrifts. Those would be a ten.

On reflection … maybe today’s is just a three.

*I know, I know, there are no blizzards in the Old Testament. There’s not even any snow. But given the rest of what’s in those stories, if it did snow it’d be a blizzard. And a doozie at that.

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Dally Ho!

jono55

I’ve decided that if I can’t live under a patriarchy, I don’t want to live under any system whose title has the letters “-archy” in it at all. Certainly not a matriarchy, although that may be what is coming soon. I am afraid that the paybacks that would follow such a seismic turnover would consume the remainder of my time on earth, ending up with my spending my last days wearing a babushka and disguised as a woman while hiding in bombed-out basements and supporting myself by selling baked potatoes on street corners. “Get your nice hot Murphys here.”

I’d rather not have an oligarchy, either, although it’s possible that we may be there already and I’m just too oblivious to notice. Nope … no “archies” at all, thank you very much. Here is a short list of some others I would rather avoid at all costs:

  • Ecclestiarchy
  • Heresiarchy
  • Plutarchy
  • Anarchy
  • Monarchy
  • Nanarchy
  • Futarchy
  • et al

I don’t trust the –archies because there isn’t a single one of them other than patriarchy that would have me as a member, and I am highly suspect even there because I don’t hunt, drink, or watch football. The ecclesiasts would be after me because I wasn’t religious enough, the heretics because I hid Easter eggs for my kids when they were very young, the monarchists wouldn’t take my plebeian calls at all, and the plutarchists couldn’t be bothered with anyone driving such a modest car as a Subaru.

So how many uninhabited islands are there on the planet? I wouldn’t need much. A clean and abundant fresh water supply, pleasant climate, good soil for growing things, no Komodo dragons, and high-speed internet. That would do it for me. Oh, and regular visits by a supply boat for incidentals.

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The latest news from CNN has been awkward, to say the least. Apparently a couple of years ago, responding to rumors of hanky and panky among upper echelon management, investigators placed spy/janitors on each floor of the headquarters building in Atlanta. These men and women worked in shifts round the clock and were instructed to watch for anything suspicious. They were equipped with camera mops, periscopes, poison pills to swallow should they be detected, guns disguised as cans of Lemon Pledge, and devices that were sensitive to traces of latex and lubricants in the air. Turns out that most of these janitors were former Mafia in a witness protection program operating out of Bayonne, New Jersey.

Almost immediately the alarms started going off, the cameras started clicking, and before long massive dossiers were collected on basically everyone above the level of the runners who rounded up the coffees for morning staff meetings.

So far there have been only a couple of resignations, but it is anticipated that before long all of the occupants of the 23rd and 24th floors will have to be let go. The official line is that there has been a sharp drop in rectitude and a drastic increase in turpitude among these personnel.

There is a problem which surfaces in situations like these, and that is determining the acceptable level of adultery and other sexual wanderings in the journalistic professions. Purists say that the level should be zero, but there is a sense that this stringent standard would severely impact future hirings and a more moderate position will have to be taken.

It’s all reminiscent of the FDA deciding what levels of rodent hairs and insect parts were acceptable in cereals. There was no way to get the level down to zero, not when dealing with natural products such as grains, so they had to make choices. How much was okay, and what was just too ugly? It’s a reality I choose to ignore each day at breakfast, and I take the same approach with who is dallying with who at CNN.

Look At Miss Ohio, by Gillian Welch

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Well, we did it. On Wednesday we experienced on of our rare snowfalls of the season. One of those beauties with flakes as big as dinner plates slipping toward earth and covering everything you see while clinging to the branches of the plants and trees making the world magical. Robin and I turned to one another and said as one: Zhivago.

Such an evening was perfect for our triennial re-watching of a movie that features snow and ice and visible breath at least half the time. And the running time is a generous 200 minutes. So if you pick the right moment you can get a snowfall looking out the window and the same thing on the screen in the living room. This double dose could conceivably give you hypothermia even while sitting on your own couch.

There is this, however. We can’t stay up late enough to watch the whole thing at one sitting. To attempt this would be to miss most of the second half, even if our eyelids were propped open with toothpicks. So Wednesday night our viewing took us to the intermission, and Thursday evening we finished it off.

The interesting thing for me was that I remembered nearly everything that happened on screen. But then I thought … well, sure … I first saw it when I still had a memory worthy of the name. Back when what my eyes took in was actually recorded in those little electrochemical packets somewhere in my nervous system. If I saw it for the first time today, in two months if anyone asked me if I’d seen the film, I would have to turn to Robin and ask her if we had. And her response would be – “was that the one with the Russians?”

But oh … the movie, you ask … what about the movie? It was splendid, as usual.

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Here’s a Sunday morning treat. thirty photographs from around the world of children playing. Different photographers coming up with expressions of the joy that children are fully able to find for themselves. Often the best gift we adults can give our kids is to stand back, take our hands off, and let them do their very own thing.

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Have You Seen My Castanets?

jono55

A good friend stopped by the other day and as we were sharing opinions about the weather I realized that the two of us were clearly not of one mind on the subject. She was bemoaning the fact that we have had very little snow so far this year, and that the days had been too warm for what snow did fall to last long enough to be enjoyed. As for myself, I was glad that this winter has been a mild one, with few of winter’s inconveniences.

For most of my life I lived in parts of the US where dealing with the harsher aspects of winter was just a part of the deal. Minnesota was my training ground for thirty years, with enough nasty temperatures and precipitation to make the sport of ice skating in cars a regular happening from December through March.

We did all sorts of things to keep the insides of our car motors warm enough to permit starting in the morning – plugging in heaters of various sorts to keep the engine oil or the radiator coolant warm. In the bitterest weather I recall carrying a spray can of ether for use when and if the carburetor “iced up” while I was driving to work or school. The scenario then was to pop the hood, take off the air cleaner, and spray this explosive material into the yawning mouth of the carb and then try to restart the vehicle. I should add that this playlet was often enacted in the middle of intersections and other highly inconvenient locations.

The high point with regard to snow was during my six years living in the Keweenaw Peninsula of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. During that period the area set its local record for snowfall … 360 inches. What this translates into is that by the month of February the following had happened:

  • The snow surrounded our one-story house to a depth where when you looked out any of the windows, it was all you saw.
  • Leaving home through the front door you walked through a narrow snow canyon that you had created, to get to the driveway
  • The roof had to be shoveled off regularly so that the outside would not one day fall through to the inside of our home. By February, in the rear of the house, when you did that shoveling you were standing on the roof and throwing the snow UP onto a pile that was now taller than the building
  • The city and country would plow the streets and local highways only once a day, and that was early in the morning. After that, you were on your own until the next day, no matter how much snow had fallen. This meant that while you might get to work fairly easily, getting back home was another matter. This led to the purchase of my first four-wheel drive vehicle, which was a Jeep Wagoneer. I remember the salesman’s comment just before I drove that beast away from the dealership: “Now you can get stuck in places you couldn’t even get to before.”

Here is an Upper Peninsula gallery, just to see what I might be talking about.

Perhaps one high/low point of winter nastiness arrived one day when Robin and I were driving in southern Minnesota when the air temperature was well below zero. Something occurred that frigid day that I would have believed impossible until that morning – it rained. The rain, of course turned to ice the moment it hit the car, and the window defrosters could not keep up with the icing while you were driving. So every few hundred yards or so you and every other driver on that road would pull over to the side and sit there until the ice melted from the windshield. Then you would get back on the highway which was now one big hockey rink and try to proceed slowly in a straight line until finally you couldn’t see any more, whereupon you would pull over and repeat the ritual. This went on for perhaps an hour and a half.

So when my friend was wishing for a more vigorous winter I nodded in agreement. I get it. But for me the charm of living here in Paradise is that while the snow is typically scanty in the valley, within twenty minutes I can drive to where it is plentiful. I can have my snowcake without having to eat it every day.

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From The New Yorker

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On some of my trips to the recreation center I have the opportunity to observe people playing something called pickleball. Nearly all of the players are elderly, some are past the point where swift movement is a possibility … and yet they can all play and seem to be enjoying it.

I admit that when I first heard the name of the game, it sounded way too stupid for someone as cool as I am. But watching these people I find myself thinking that I might just give it a try. If you don’t know what it is, the game is like the offspring of a ping-pong father and a badminton mother. The paddles are similar to those used in table tennis and what you hit is a clone of a wiffle ball, so you don’t have to chase it very far if you miss a return.

It seems a simple enough game that a person with my athletic talents has a chance of succeeding (at a low level), all you need being a paddle, a ball, and a net. As usual, this being America and all, an industry has spring up to sell us stuff beyond the necessaries. The photograph below was provided by a company that sells attire deemed suitable for female players.

I hasten to add that none of these twenty-somethings are to be found on the courts at our recreation center. There is not a single varicose vein in this photograph. Our local afficionados, male and female, tend toward a more seasoned variety of beautiful.

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From The New Yorker

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Robin and I are mining the past for some of our TV watching this winter. As a pilot project we have taken up NYPD Blue. As a cop show it is as good as we remembered, and a couple of levels above many of the present-day similar series. I do recall that one of its controversial hallmarks when it ran back in the years 1993-2005 was some freeness with nudity, and so we have had the chance to see the backs and butts of many of the principal players already. These are of varying degrees of comeliness, just like in real life.

The show is set in one of the non-glittering areas of New York City, and each episode has several story lines running simultaneously. All in all it’s a good watch, with a broad slice of human behavior on display.

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An oversimplified but reasonably accurate summary of my political feelings at this moment in time.

Synonyms for disgusting

abhorrent, abominable, appalling, awful, distasteful, dreadful, nauseous, evil, foul, fulsome, gross, hideous, horrendous, horrid, loathsome, nasty, nauseating, noxious, obscene, odious, offensive, rancid, repellant, republican party leadership,repugnant, revolting, scandalous, shocking, sickening, ugly

Synonyms for feckless

abortive, bootless, counterproductive, democratic party leadership, fruitless, futile, ineffective, unproductive, unsuccessful, pointless, unavailing, plotless

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Compañeros

jono55

This was our cat Poco’s fourteenth Christmas. I checked and this makes him somewhere around 72 in human years. Not so old, I thought, but the recent years haven’t been kind to him. Arthritis holds him back in many ways from being the active guy he was. But you don’t need good hips to be a good companion, and when he joins me on the futon in the early morning hours as I type these things we are both ageless. When no one is asking us to leap over hedges or scramble over tall fences we are as we have always been.

I have an affection for the word “companion.” It means someone or something that you spend time with or travel with. In general it exists in the same universe as the word “friendship.” To some, friendship implies mutual obligations. If that is true, companionship is the easier pair of shoes to wear. You just hang out together because you like to do so.

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There was a repeated phrase in the historical novel Lord Grizzly, by Frederick Manfred, that has stuck with me in the fifty years that have passed since I first read the book. It is the story of Hugh Glass, a mountain man who was savaged by a grizzly while on a wilderness trek. When the two men he was traveling with found him, they thought him a dead man, and left him behind. He did not die, however, but dragged himself forward on an epic journey to seek vengeance against the two people he believed to have abandoned him. The phrase he kept repeating in his mind was: Oh, them haunt compañeros. Basically, Oh, what poor companions.

As I look back, I can see times where I was both a good and an indifferent companion to others. Maybe even a haunt one a time or two. There is room for a lot of improvement.

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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Grandson Ethan and his friend Sian spent Sunday night with us on their trip back home after a visit to Durango. Nasty weather in the mountains (heavy snow, limited visibility, icy roads, and wind gusts up to 80 mph) had driven them to us. (It’s an ill wind that blows no good … and all that.) To avoid the passes they had first driven west from Durango and then up through eastern Utah. It made the trip way longer, but safer.

They still had to get to Steamboat Springs from here, and weather in that direction wasn’t much more attractive. More drifting snow and ice. All of this activity around us and not a flake on the ground here in the Grand Valley.

Colorado is really two states – one below 7000-8000 feet and the other one above that. Trouble is, you often have to drive through both of them to get anywhere. Our home is at 5900 feet, and it is no accident that we live here, rather than at those more picturesque altitudes. Choosing where to put down our roots nearly eight years ago involved considering a lot of things. Since we moved to be closer to Robin’s kids and their offspring, being somewhere central to them was our premier criterion. After that it was cost of living, real estate climate, nearness to recreation, and finally – weather patterns.

For instance we were exploring the town of Gunnison which seemed charming and a really good place for us until we learned that through some meteorologic/topographical quirk it was consistently the coldest town in the entire state. Scratch Gunnison, we thought to ourselves. No way. It might seem that we made the wimpier choice, but whenever we choose to experience something other than our moderate climate here in Paradise, we don’t have to go very far. In minutes we can be as miserable as we want to be.

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Colorado’s first avalanche death of the season occurred this past weekend. It occurred in the Front Range, not far from Fort Collins. A backcountry skier was completely buried, and even though his locator beacon was working and his companion dug him out as quickly as possible … it wasn’t quick enough. Chasing those “I am the only one in the world and I have all this to myself” moments has its hazards. The avalanche casualty lists each year are not all composed of only the ignorant and incautious. Even very knowledgeable and careful people perish this way. It seems impossible to get the risks down to zero.

I will never be buried in an avalanche. Let it be a comfort to you knowing that you are never going to have to come into the wilderness to find my frozen corpus. My personal physician, Dr. Amarilla Quarterpounder, has put it quite bluntly: “Unless you are more foolish than I think you are, and you are already at nine on a scale of ten, in wintertime Colorado you should never go near anywhere whose name begins or ends with the letters b.a.c.k.c.o.u.n.t.r.y. If you do, please do not call me as I am not professionally available to nitwits of that degree.”

I trust her judgement in this and plan to follow her advice to the letter.

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Some people have sports heroes … I don’t . I have photography heroes. One man has occupied my personal top spot for decades now, and that is Jim Brandenburg. He takes the kind of pictures that you can stand in front of and marvel, both at content and technique. He took today’s header photograph of the Boundary Waters, for instance. If you turn loose the romance monster in your soul you can look at it and feel the call and wish for spring, a paddle, and a good boat gliding under you.

There are big and little adventures possible in this place called the “BW.” I have had some of both and treasure them all equally.

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Debriefing

jono55

We had the quietest of Christmases this year. Our plans to travel to Durango had to be shelved. Turns out that we had been overly optimistic about how quickly Robin’s recovery from surgery would go. So we stayed put in Montrose. It’s not the first Christmas Eve that we spent completely on our own.

In 2015 we had traveled to Yankton to spend the holiday with Robin’s mother and family but were marooned by a blizzard that shut the town solidly down and made even local travel too hazardous to contemplate. We did what we could to maintain a holiday frame of mind while trapped in a small motel room looking out this window at a snowstorm in a parking lot.

We were able to find a few small bags of travel food at a convenience store that was within walkable distance which we brought back to our safe space to nibble on. It was a case of either poor nutrition or no nutrition at all that night. Christmas Eve dinner consisted of a pretzel entrée and a Diet Coke. By the next morning the weather had cleared, the plows were out, and we went on with our original plans.

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On one other Christmas past the weather played a significant role. I would have been perhaps five years old. Dad and Mom loaded my brother and I into our 1937 Chevrolet and struck out for my grandfather’s farm on a snowy night we really should have stayed at home. The trip to the farm was an hour’s drive on a summer day, but much longer in bad weather and when we reached a country church Dad pulled the car into the parking lot and there we sat. The next segment of the trip was two miles on a small gravel road, and that road had not been plowed and was impassable by car.

Dad trudged over to the parsonage and was able to call ahead and tell folks that we were stranded. My uncle Buddy must have said something like “No problem, Joe,” because the next thing I knew he showed up in a sleigh pulled by the two draft horses that were still doing regular work on the farm.

Now this was a working sleigh, like the one in the “borrowed” photograph at right, not one of those beautiful and artistic things with the curvy runners.

This one hauled hay and feed and equipment and whatever needed to be toted on the farm on snowy winter days. But he had brought along some warm robes ( I remember a bearskin model) to snuggle under and that’s what we all did as he hauled us the rest of the way to the Jacobson farm.

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From The New Yorker

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Looking back on my years as an imbiber of fermented and distilled beverages it is some of the New Year’s Eve get-togethers that stand out the clearest. As examples of what not to do with one’s body, that is. The poor defenseless thing had to cope in whatever way it could with what my stomach was sending down the pipe. This would go on until the stomach itself finally revolted, and I would have one of those intensely religious experiences that come with praying to the porcelain god while prostrate on the bathroom floor.

The video below is one of the best personal stories about drinking and sobriety that I have come across so far in my brief life, and I am grateful to Craig Ferguson for this twelve minutes of bare-bones honesty as he tells his tale on national television. It has helped to give me the courage to share my own in snippets here and there. Unlike Ferguson, I have to do short snippets because I can only go so far in emulating him, he is just so damned entertaining about it all.

In the middle of the monologue there is a line … where he wakes up hung over in a strange place, is overcome with confusion and hopelessness and decides to commit suicide. On the way to jumping from the Tower Bridge in London he is offered a drink, and “one thing led to another and I forgot to kill myself that day.”

There are many people in AA who have anecdotes like this, and who realize that while drinking, for them, was ultimately self-defeating, at one particular moment being intoxicated saved their life and bought them the time it took to make it to recovery.

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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So here we are at the end of another year, where we try to tot up what the past twelve months have meant to us. At present, we are all singing the same tune here in Paradise:

You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I’m telling you why
Omicron is coming to town.

Who would think that being in a pandemic would be so boring? (At least for those of us who don’t work in hospitals, where it is a nightmare. Or for those who have had loved ones die of the disease, where it is a terrible grief to bear.) It’s all the seemingly endless waiting. Yesterday I read the latest update on the sort of mask I should be wearing and I could hardly get through it. I’ve already read so many updates in the past couple of years. Sooo many updates.

Now the Black Death of the middle ages was much worse, I grant you. No comparison. But at least they didn’t have to read about it every day or hear about it constantly on CNN. And they were spared the spectacle of half the country telling them that the idea of killing off the rats being the way out of the plague was nonsense, and what we should be doing is swallowing the potion they are concocting in the next village. Which is largely made of boiled horse urine and pigweed.

Ah, me, what to do? I’m not crazy about the life we are leading, but it is our life and I suppose that I’d better make the best of it that I can. I think I’ll cook something. It makes the whole house smell good while I’m doing it, and then I get to eat what I’ve made.

(Unless I’m cooking cabbage, that is. In that case it makes the whole house smell like I’m serving compost for dinner.)

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The Bar Keeps Gettin’ Lower

jono55

I don’t know if Lauren Boebert is the dumbest Representative in Congress, but If there is someone less capable, I’d hate to think about who that might be. She is from western Colorado and makes my head ache whenever I think about her at all, so I had to take a couple of ibuprofen this past week when the two videos started being news. You know, the videos where she tells a bigoted and racist story involving Representative Ilhan Omar to two different small groups of people. In both of them she all but directly accuses Omar of being a terrorist. The thing is, the two stories don’t agree with one another, and apparently describe a meeting that never happened. So she is not only a racist and a bigot and a dumbass, but a liar as well.

It reminds me of an old saying (I am paraphrasing Mark Twain here): If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember what you say. I would say that she is an embarrassment to the Republican Party, but we all know that this isn’t presently possible. To embarrass that party, that is. It is at a very low ebb indeed. But in another few months we’ll get to see if the GOP can find somebody less offensive and more credible to run in that district. You are free to use Boebert as a sign of the health of the party if you want to. It would be like taking its temperature. If they run her again, shame on them. If she is elected again, shame on us.

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From The New Yorker

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When will these golden days of Fall ever end, and we can get down to the business of shivering and scraping the sleet from our faces? If the trials posed by Winter are good for me because they build character, I am afraid that my character is probably slipping quite a bit this year.

I have become too used to this soft life where my choice of coat to wear when I leave the house doesn’t determine my survival. Why, just this past Wednesday I accompanied Robin to her physical therapy appointment wearing only a pair of shorts (cargo) and a light fleece sweater. And I was fine. And it was December.

I know in my heart that this blissful weather won’t last forever, and that I can once again begin my annual period of kvetching about how cold it is and won’t the wind ever stop blowing and how my back aches when I have to shovel snow. But right now, daily life is no trial at all.

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From The New Yorker

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Since I am definitely in a reverie frame of mind, another medical student story. When I rotated as a junior student to Ramsey County Hospital in St. Paul for the internal medicine clerkship, our group was oriented by the assistant chief of medicine. His speech started out like this:

“In the last group of students we had some problems with a couple of your classmates who were rude and arrogant in their behavior toward members of our nursing staff. Let me be clear on this point. We work hard to attract and retain excellent nurses here on the medicine wards. We have no trouble at all getting medical students. Do you catch my drift?”

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I accompanied Robin on her visit this week to see Dr. Judkins, the orthopedic surgeon who did her knee reconstruction. He took several X-rays to check on things, and as soon as I saw them I asked for copies, which he kindly provided. I thought you might be interested in what a total knee replacement looks like on X-ray.

The first picture is taken from the front, and compares the operated knee with its mate on the left. The second view is from the side.

NB: I had the patient’s permission to share these images with you, of course. To do otherwise would be to court havoc.

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Christmas is upon us. The first flakes of it start falling these days a little before Halloween, followed by flurries leading up to Thanksgiving, but after that … the gloves are off and it’s a by-god blizzard from then on. There are days when I get two different catalogs from the same company.

Our home decorating for the holiday has gradually simplified over the years to where now we purchase a red candle and a green candle and put them on the dining room table and call it a job well done. (Well, maybe just a bit more than that). Gone are the days when one agonized over garlands and which Christmas Village building to add this year and what box did we put those Fitz and Floyd pieces into last year anyway? I don’t miss them much.

My grandparents Jacobson, whose way of life still informs my own in so many ways, decorated for Christmas by bringing out a box from the attic that contained perhaps a dozen small items. Ida would distribute them around her little home each year, never adding new ones, always caring carefully for the old. Each piece had some meaning to her and Nels, and a story that went with it.

There was only one thing that was electrified, nothing that blew up into monstrous size to be maintained by a roaring air pump, nothing that had a famous maker’s label, nothing that said “Look at what special things I have done with my house.”

I remember two garlands, each six feet long, one red and one green, a very small créche, a ceramic wall plaque of Santa’s smiling face, and a pair of candlesticks representing angels. There was only a handful of other treasures, but when you walked in their door and saw these few items out in the living room, it was instantly Christmas.

I almost forgot the tree.

Since their home was too small for a real tree, there was an inexpensive plastic one about a foot and a half high, that stood on an end table and was in no way trying to look realistic.

A placeholder is what it was, indicating where a dramatic Fraser fir or a luxurious Colorado spruce might have stood if there was room for it. Or if Nels and Ida felt it was needed.

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First Flake

jono55

We’ve had our first snow, a few flakes mixed into the light rain that was falling on a 34 degree morning. They hit the ground and melted instantly. But the San Juans got a more extensive covering at the higher altitudes. We can follow the progress from here in Paradise as the white creeps down from the peaks to the shoulders over the next several weeks. Just put your car on Townsend Avenue facing south and it’s all there in front of you even though they are 50 miles away.

Whether they come rapidly or slowly, changes are on their way that involve long sleeves, long underwear, and the occasional short temper. I am often heard to say that I prefer living in a part of the country that has four seasons. However, I almost never say this in February, when my conversations on the subject usually consist of a series of sighs and grunts.

But the fellow in the purloined cartoon above is happy as a clam with his wagon and his wood, as is evident from the big smile on his beak. Possibly that’s because there is no wind to whip those flakes up his feathers and against his tender skin. Snow falling straight down can be a beautiful thing … walking about on a moonlit night at such times can be almost a spiritual experience. Snow falling sideways, on the other hand, is quite another matter, and it is best viewed through a window when one is safely indoors.

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This whole business of sending billionaires into space for a few minutes is drawing a bit of comment from the media. It is an obvious distraction from the awkward aspects of life here on planet Earth, and … let’s just say it is a bit of showing off by people who simply are so wealthy that they don’t know what to to with their fortunes. My only real complaint about these self-congratulatory performances is that the spacecraft eventually returns.

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On Monday morning I found something on CNN that made me smile. This is unique, since CNN usually makes me frown, occasionally nauseous. Spencer Tunick is at it again. He’s the guy who has been doing mass nude photo shoots in famous places for more than a quarter-century now. He always has an artistic explanation to offer for what he is doing but for me it is the amazing playfulness of the entire enterprise.

For instance, this time he took around 200 Israelis to the Dead Sea, which is disappearing (who knew?). He painted them white and then posed them variously. You might, upon hearing about the project, think that eroticism is part of his plan, but take a look at this photo and tell me, does it stir you in that way? Or does it make you wonder instead how they all avoided colossal sunburns?

Look again for a moment – over on the right there’s even a stooped-over guy who is using a hiking staff to get around in that desert, just so he can participate. Giving it his all, for art. While just looking at the picture is giving me a rash.

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Ran across an interesting article in the Times of New York about aging drivers. New research showing that they are safer in their driving habits than people much younger than themselves is slightly reassuring.  

Although there are now more older drivers than ever before on American roads, it seems there’s never been a safer time for those in the upper decades of life to drive a car. A recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that drivers aged 70 and older were less likely to be involved in a fatal car accident than those 35 to 54.

Jane Brody: Keeping Older Drivers Protected On The Road, NYT October 19, 2021

I say “slightly reassuring” because we superannuated operators of automobiles still have to share the roads with those multitasking, distracted, overreacting, and overconfident younger drivers. They, as we already really knew, are the dangerous ones. We, on the other hand, are merely annoying as we chug along at legal speed limits and wait interminably at roundabouts for our turn to come.

Yesterday I was behind a Buick at a roundabout and I swear that the driver had time to knit a small sweater before the stars and planets were enough in alignment to for them to move forward. Everyone knows that there are certain vehicles that are notorious for being piloted by older folks, and Buicks are right at the top of the list. I will go blocks out of my way to avoid being behind one of those cars whenever I have a choice of doing so.

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But, I digress.

We never really had to “take the keys away” from my own parents, who had become so infirm in their later years that the question really didn’t come up. Illness sidelined them before we even had to think about it. And I am living so far away from my own children that they have no idea what my driving habits are and are insulated from the decision.

Robin is the one that I have to worry about, and I have hidden a set of keys away just in case she gets any ideas in that direction. Of course, the chance that I will remember where I have hidden those keys should I ever need them is completely another matter.

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Header Photo

Grandmothering in Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 2005

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Some Days Are Diamonds …

jono55

It’s nearly 5 AM and it has been raining lightly all night. The cats are wandering aimlessly around the rooms, occasionally stopping by my chair and looking straight into my face with a “Make it Stop” expression on their kitty countenances. They are impatient creatures about some things, accepting about others. But whatever keeps them from going outdoors when that’s where they want to go fits into the intolerable category.

Robin’s sister Jill is staying with us for a few days. She flew in on Tuesday evening and will be here until next Tuesday. That’s a nice-sized visit, I think, especially since years pass between her trips out here to the Western Slope.

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This has been an interesting summer here in Paradise, one where we are glad to not have had travel plans. I’ve mentioned before how the mountains figure heavily into when and where you can take a trip. The problem is the paucity of highways going east/west. Mountain ridges basically are north/south things, so there you have the set-up for snafus of every stripe.

Last year there was a fire along I-70 near Glenwood Springs which messed with travel somewhat at the time but eventually burned out. However, all it took was a heavy rain or two this summer to cause a gigantic mudslide in the burned area, and all of that mud landed on I-70, completely cutting Colorado’s main artery in two. The debris on the road was 8-10 feet deep in places. This all happened two weeks ago, and only just recently a single lane in each direction was tentatively opened, allowing cars and trucks to begin to flow once again.

The real nightmare behind the nightmare is that when this is finally cleared away and the highway repaired, nothing stands in the way of a repeat but the fickle finger of fate. Those steep and barren hillsides are accidents waiting to happen.

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From The New Yorker

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I missed my own deadline this morning, when I didn’t get this rag out on time. Ever have days when nothing gets started, when putting the old one foot in front of the other mantra isn’t working? This morning I couldn’t get my sense of humor started, and without it at my side I really hesitate to get out of bed. It is my shield against the thousand idiocies and stories of cruelty that greet me when I open any page on any of the online news outlets.

So this morning I had to dig into my chest of armaments for my secondary protection. And what is that, you say? Why, rock and roll, I answer.

I found two cuts from the live album Rock N’ Roll Animal, by Lou Reed. The “Introduction” goes along in a wandering way until 3:20, when the band gives us a handful of power chords to wake us up, and then Reed walks on stage to grand applause.

I swear, if I ever strayed from the true faith of R & R, this is the tune that would bring me back.

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Goin’ Once, Goin’ Twice, Goin’ Gone

jono55

Darker skies are still the order of the day here in Paradise. The smoke blanket is less dense or more dense but never absent. Hard to imagine what it must be like around where it all originates. Awful, I imagine. Our local air quality is poor, and we’re at least a thousand miles away from the fires.

There is one benefit to having this layer between us and the sun, and that is to make the heat more tolerable. It’s like 95 degrees in the shade compared with being out in the open. A couple of days ago I realized that with the high temperatures, low humidity, and woodsmoke we are all being slowly converted into jerky. I judge that I should be ready for packaging in another month, I think.

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The midpoint of one of our regular bicycle rides is at a small bridge across an irrigation canal that draws its water from the Gunnison River. We stop, refresh ourselves from the water we carry in our packs, and take a minute to gather it all in. On the morning of August 11, this is what the view was from the bridge.

There were a few waterfowl swimming way upstream, and behind us a large fish jumped and made a splash. All that was left behind were the widening circles in the water. What the picture doesn’t show was a chorale of roosters at some coop in the distance letting us know in unmistakable terms that it was morning. As if a person couldn’t see that for themselves.

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One evening Robin and I talked about how as a couple we have always lived by a river. The Big Sioux, the Missouri, and now the Uncompahgre. Our home is not right on it, but it’s a very short drive from BaseCamp. I’ve never quizzed myself to see if I liked lakes or rivers better … what would the point be of that? Both have hooked me hard at different times, and then released me to the land, different from what I had been.

In the mountains the water is mostly very busy and in a hurry. A reservoir may interrupt it for a time, but once beyond each dam it hitches up its belt and takes off once again at a run. Along its route it makes those sounds that we all recognize as special. Whenever Robin and I are given the choice of sleeping near a stream we take it.

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A man named Cuomo has resigned his post this week, after the queue of women who claimed he sexually harassed them kept getting longer and longer. When it finally reached all the way from Times Square to Greenwich Village he gave in. On Tuesday he said that he never crossed an important line with women, but that when he wasn’t looking somebody moved the line and didn’t tell him. That’s at least a try at a defense. Not a very good one, but a try.

Of course his personal line was a pretty rancid one, and convincing himself that giving any breast or buttock within reach a good squeeze was not only okay, but welcome … what can you say?

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BTW, one of our younger grandchildren has decided that the word “breast” is too loaded and sensitive for daily use. She has substituted “chest,” as in “We’re having baked chicken chests for supper.”

I haven’t yet, but the next time I see her I plan to ask how she deals with the term pork butt.

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Notes From A Backyard Deck

Neighbor Ed has nearly finished laying out the simple paver patio for us. The weather for construction has been abysmally hot, so when he and his helper quit early on Friday I wasn’t surprised or perturbed. Instead, we are pleased at how it is coming along. ‘Tis a simple rectangle which to we will add … what, I don’t know … but I’m sure it will all turn out to be snazzy, swell, and neat-o. How could it not be so? Robin and I bleed an artistic shade of red, and our decorating choices are impeccable.

Sometimes a visitor will look at something I have added to the house furnishings and particularly like, and they will say “Ewwwwww.” I forgive them and say “Come back in 25 years or so and you will find that what you despise today is utterly au courant. People will be scouring attics and barns for such things one day, just wait and see.”

I am so ahead of my time, whenever that is, that is.

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My very good friend who I never met, Nanci Griffith, has stepped out of the room. She was 68 at the time of her passing … a baby’s years. I don’t recall exactly when I first became aware of her music, but it captivated me then and there. Something about that child-like voice saying very grown-up things, I guess.

Listening to her songs today is a mixed thing. The music is just as special as ever, but the songs are tied to a period of my life that I don’t re-visit often. This heart that serves me so well has a few scars (and whose does not?), and Nanci’s tunes can pull uncomfortably at those.

Ms. Griffith also introduced me to Larry McMurtry and his book Lonesome Dove. There is no writer who has given me more pleasure, and no book that I have re-read more often.

Perhaps you can see why this particular obituary in the NYTimes on Saturday morning might have given me pause to reflect. But then, listening to a good song has always been worth a pang or two.

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It’s all just life, and this comes through in Griffith’s music. Life as defined by John Lennon: “What happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

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Simple Tools

jono55

One of the most common misconceptions about electric bicycling that I run into is that the cyclist sits there and the motor does all the work. Many people are surprised that I pedal at all. What they have missed along the way is that the point of e-biking is to assist, rather than replace, the effort you make in getting from Point A to Point B.

The best description that I’ve come up with so far is that I do the same amount of work in a given amount of time but go faster and further with the electrical assistance. Now, it is true that if I dialed the assist level up to 5 that I wouldn’t be getting much exercise at all. It’s all in what you want out of it. It’s only a simple machine, after all. One simple tool riding upon another.

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I ran across this music video recently that I found intriguing. It’s of a song by the Chemical Brothers collaborating with Beck. Once you start watching you can’t stop until the end, just to see how it all comes out.

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I had suspected for a long time that I might be underestimating the level of thick-headedness in the good old US of A, but today’s situation … what the hell! To have nearly half the country, including many people who should definitely know better, abandon their wits en masse and refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 is a situation that a year ago I would not have thought possible. C’est incroyable!

Here are some quotes from my favorite cranky S.O.B., H.L. Mencken. He would have loved the opportunity to comment on today’s news. I think that even he might be amazed at today’s goings-on. It’s all I can do to keep my inner cynic in check, and it causes me to wonder anew about the long-term future of the species homo sapiens.

H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

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

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

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My friend Joe sent these along to me. I don’t know who to credit, but to whoever painted these … Bravo! There is a great deal of obvious skill involved in doing the painting, but what is even more impressive is the imagination that saw the possibilities present in an ordinary hand.

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Tuesday afternoon was one of those perfect times to be out on the deck with an iced tea in one hand and a word processor in the other. I listened to new music on Apple and to some old music from my library, all the while being caressed lightly by a breeze that never got too rowdy. The contrast between sitting here under a shady ash tree and doing any kind of work out there twenty feet away in the brilliant sunshine is striking. I can do the ash-tree bit for hours. I can do working in the sun for perhaps 20 minutes before I fade. Kinda pathetic, actually, this weather-wimpiness. When, exactly, did that happen?

Oh, well.

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There are some musical groups that stand out for me, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young is one of them. Maybe the premier one, actually. My appreciation of their music began when I was wearing a USAF uniform and listening to a San Francisco radio station playing “Four Way Street.” I wore out the original vinyl of that album decades ago. Their musical and social sensibilities meshed with my own in a way that has withstood multiple breakups and reunions of the group without flinching. At present it doesn’t exist as a functioning and touring unit, but no matter. Over these forty-plus years they have created a body of music that I can turn to whenever.

So when I ran across this album named CSNY 1974 (Live), what could I do? The album was put together recently, culled from many concerts played in that year, when they were young men and their future unclear.

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Snap.

jono55

I have been an admirer of photography since the Civil War, which occurred during my formative years. I remember as a child listening to men newly furloughed from the front sitting on the porch on a summer’s evening and singing “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground.” Very moving.

But I digress already.

Matthew Brady’s photographs brought to life that dusty and bloody time in a way that reams of written words could not. They were all stills, of course, and the pix could be divided into basically two sets. The living were in one group of photographs, and the dead in another. There were lots of dead, as it turned out, to serve as subjects. Somewhere between 620,000 to 750,000 of them.

The dead at Antietam

But I’m not talking about that war, as important as it was, I’m talking about taking pictures. Now I am going to divide (we anal-compulsives do so love to organize) the photographic universe into two groups for this purpose. One huge group is People With Cameras, the other much smaller contingent is True Photographers. True Photographers are folks like Jim Brandenburg, a personal favorite of mine. These men and women are artists who fully understand their instrument and what the interplay of light and darkness and color can do. They know in advance what they want in a particular photograph, and then arrange the world (or wait for the world to arrange itself) to take the pic.

Brandenburg had been so successful in his work that a few years ago he set himself a challenge. For ninety days he would allow himself to take only one picture per day. At the end of that time he would collect those photos and publish them in a book. The book was Chased By The Light.

It contains ninety photographs of such beauty and artistry that if I had taken any one of them I would be showing it off to every person I met from that day forward. I would have it blown up as big as it could reasonably get and plant it over the fireplace. I would use it as my Christmas card picture. There would be T-shirts.

Jim Brandenburg

I would do all these things because I am in that larger bunch, that of People With Cameras. Every once in a great while I take a photo that is special, at least to me. But between these rarities there are a whole lot of not-so-special ones. My talent, if you can call it that, is to at least recognize those moments when quite by accident I am standing in a place where if I can just get my camera out there is a worthwhile picture to be taken right there in front of me. It’s the stumble across school of photography rather than a planned and/or truly creative one.

The digital camera has been a boon to people in my category. We can snap away like the bozos that we are and later sort through the resultant mess for one that has value, at least in our own eyes. It’s like panning for gold, where you can go many days without finding a single small nugget. The cost of all this “wasteful” snapping is minimal, since we are freed by technology from the need to pay for photographic film and its processing.

(We can also check each bunch of pics instantly if we so choose, and go on to take another hundred if we don’t find one we like. It ain’t an elegant or uplifting approach, and that’s a fact, Jack.)

One of those nuggets was today’s header photograph. Robin and I had traveled to Lima, Peru to visit daughter Maja, and we were staying with her at her apartment, along with granddaughter Elsa. One evening toward sunset Elsa and Robin were standing at the apartment window and looking out at the Pacific Ocean while they talked quietly together. Where they were standing was in front of a bamboo curtain, with part of the window completely open to view and part obscured. It was those silhouettes that caught my eye. Later when I studied the pic I liked it because while I knew both of the people in the photo, it could also have been of any two persons on the planet, as there were no faces seen. So what appealed to me was that the photo was both specific and universal at the same time.

A greatest boon to People With Cameras has been the smartphone. Since millions upon millions of us have decided that we are so important that we must be in constant contact with the rest of the world and carry a communications device with us wherever we go, and since the manufacturers of these tools have developed surprisingly good “cameras” to add to these phones as apps, the sound of snapping pics is now the background white noise of our times.

Selfie, anyone?

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From The New Yorker

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I’ve been thinking deep thoughts lately, and have come to sort of a plan. I have embraced Buddhism, as I may have mentioned, but there is that nagging little thing going on in my head … what if any of those other guys were right? Guys like Jesus and Muhammad and Yahweh? What if instead of being one of the wisest people ever, Buddha was really just a guy who came out of the forest after a long fast and was so tired that he sat down under a bodhi tree to rest. A largish branch broke off that tree and as it fell to earth struck him a glancing blow. Not enough to do him in, mind you, but just enough to do some serious work on his thought processes.

So he wakes up and cries “I think I was struck by lightning!” And the other guys in the neighborhood thought he said “I’ve been enlightened!” and decided to go along with him rather than risk a confrontation.

But just in case I picked the wrong horse (wouldn’t be the first time) I have come up with this plan.

  • I will immediately stop doing anything that Christianity considers a sin. No drinking, no smoking, no telling fibs, no watching anything but PBS … nothing but behavior from now on that is so refined that it would give St. Augustine a chill.
  • I will also stop doing anything that Islam considers wrongful, because it appears to me that they have all the same sins that Christianity has and a whole raft of others of their own.
  • When it comes to Judaism, I’m not so sure of what to do. They have a different concept of sin, but I plan to consult both a rabbi and a yenta. Between the two of them we should be able to come up with something.

I think that in being proactive I will have my cosmologic bases covered and be squared away with a good shot at a comfortable eternity. I welcome suggestions for betterment of my plan.

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From The New Yorker

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On Friday we hit 100 degrees here in Paradise. Late that afternoon it was like smacking into a physical barrier each time I ventured out of an air-conditioned space, and I began to wilt immediately on each occasion that I did.

I know that others have worse weather than we do.

I don’t care.

I am ready for a whopping dose of moderation. Can we vote on this, or what?

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What would Sunday be without a sermonette? And here is a dandy, written by William Saroyan as the preface to his play “The Time of Your Life.”

In the time of your life, live – so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, nor of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.

In the time of your life, live – so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

William Saroyan: The Time of Your Life

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Note: the music today is all from the Civil War era. John Doe’s voice on “Tenting Tonight” sounds little changed from the time when he fronted the punk band “X.”

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Summahtime

jono55

It isn’t summer yet, as far as the calendar is concerned, but we are completely into the phase where you can no longer go barefoot outdoors in the middle of the day. You know that old business about frying an egg on the sidewalk that keeps coming up (even though I don’t personally know anyone who has tried it)? Well, it applies to feet as well.

You go to the beach and the asphalt parking lot has already passed broil, the sand at the water’s edge is now set at scorch, and after swimming you have severe misgivings about running the twenty yards from the lake to the blanket where your sandals are parked. You are pretty sure that first degree burns on the soles of your feet are a guarantee and wonder why the hell you came out here in the first place.

These are those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Emphasis on the crazy.

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From The New Yorker

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So … sitting out back in the shade of the big ol’ ash tree for which we are eternally grateful I am listening to music that is cool … low key … nothing that encourages effort of any kind. Right this minute that means Riders on the Storm by the Doors, followed by Fade Into You (Mazzy Star), Pink Moon (Nick Drake), and … you get the picture. No tunes that make you want to get up and dance or do anything that might raise a sweat. Music that goes with iced beverages and leaning back and letting the wafting breezes do their thing. I love a good wafting as much as anyone.

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Yesterday I spent more than an hour with advisors on Apple Support. First I had to “talk” to a very junior person in a chat, where I laid out my problem as clearly as I could. After 15 minutes of showing no understanding of what was bothering me, #1 asked if I minded if they sent me along to someone more senior. Please do, I responded and there was a minute or two before #2 junior person came into the chat and asked me what they could do to help.

I said that they could start by reading what had already been covered in the chat history instead of our having to start afresh. Five minutes later they asked if I minded being transferred to a senior advisor. No problem, I repeated.

Minutes passed and I was directed to a third junior staff member who said that the “senior” was coming any day now, that in fact she might be trying to call me on the phone. I mentioned that this might be difficult since I hadn’t given them my phone number as yet, and I proceeded to share it with them.

More minutes elapsed until the phone rang. The lady who was on the line asked “How can I help you today?” Again I suggested that she first review the transcript and the images I had sent along. Ten minutes later she asked if we could bring in someone more senior. By now I am weeping audibly and trying to keep the tears from getting into my keyboard. Finally, a woman with a strong Southern accent named Ambrosia came on the line. From then on we worked together until the problem was solved.

Total time spent in chat and on phone = 80 minutes. Final piece of advice from the woman who actually helped me was that the problem would most likely recur, and if it did I should feel free to call anytime and we’d get it sorted out once again. My verbal response to her was “Yes, yes, I will do that.” My internal and silent responses were along the lines of: “When Hell freezes over ,” or “I’d rather die,” or “Just shoot me.”

It just took so long to get to Ambrosia.

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Jill Biden apparently was charming and did a creditable job of representing the mentally healthier part of America at the G7 this past week. She was able to do this because she is a real person and not the cardboard cutouts of human beings that we’ve sent out in the previous four years.

Ms. Biden has a fan here in Robin, who read at least one of her biographies during the campaign months. When it comes to such things, I trust Robin’s instincts and accept that Dr. Biden is indeed a winner. It can’t be a bad thing to have an educator as First Lady, can it? Our schools need help, our teachers need support and guidance, and to have someone who actually understands the problems in her position … how refreshing and encouraging.

Of course it was Joe who was elected and not Jill, but there is some reason to believe that he actually listens to her.

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Inch by inch we’re adding to our involvement in the local Democratic Party activities. We’ve volunteered to do voter registration at the county fair for a few hours later this summer. Someone called me today looking for a body to be precinct chairperson. She thought that I had all of the qualifications needed to do the job. Apparently this means having a pulse.

I told her that I might not be the right candidate, since my pulse is quite irregular at times. Skips beats quite often. We agreed to put off deciding about this particular task right now.

Being by nature a hermit, moving out into the public sphere in this way is working solidly against that nature. But I want to add my small voice to the multitude that says No More. And if that means being uncomfortable once in a while, doing something that I dread just a little bit, so be it.

The yahoos have had the stage for too long now, and I will be very happy to one day to have a hand on that trusty vaudeville hook as we drag them off into the wings.

******

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.

******

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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Humming Inaudibly In The Rain

jono55

Yesterday was supposed to be a rainy one here in dry and dusty Paradise, but what materialized was little more than a spatter. I think that probably the loneliest job in this part of the world would be that of an umbrella salesperson. You would do a good business ten days out of the year and then nobody needs you or wants to talk to you for the remaining 355.

Robin and I carry two umbrellas in our car, which I don’t believe we’ve unfurled even once in the nearly seven years we’ve lived in Colorado. They are the sort of devices which open just large enough to protect one person. Not the Singing in the Rain sort of parapluie at all, where two people who enjoy each other’s company could easily find shelter together.

But use them or not, we carry the umbrellas wherever we go, just in case … . You never know, do you? Which reminds me of a story.

I was a medical student spending a rotation at the old Hennepin County hospital, a relic of the 19th century which is long gone, but which was a wonderful place for a med student to be. It was a sweltering July afternoon when a very old man wandered into the Emergency Department dressed for January.

He was wearing long underwear, a wool shirt, wool pants, long wool overcoat, a large muffler wrapped around his neck, a “bomber” sort of hat, warm gloves, and overshoes. He was looking, he said, for the King of Poland. Why he thought the King would be hanging around the “General” we never found out, and we didn’t want to break the poor guy’s heart by telling him that Poland hadn’t had a King since 1795. So we changed the subject.

What we did ask was why he was wearing so much clothing on such a hot day. His answer was that he was indeed a bit warm, but “when you leave the house in the morning, you never know what’ll happen before you get back there.” We all agreed that his logic was unassailable, and we directed him toward the welcoming arms of our social services department.

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Mr. Biden seems to be pleasing about half the people, and displeasing the other half. Which means he’s probably right where he should be. Conversations on television often talk about our nation’s leaders, but in actuality they rarely do. Lead, that is. Most of the time they are running about trying to find out what it is we want, and then attempting to get in front of that movement.

The hard part, for them, is discerning what our wishes really are and where we’re going. Because finding consensus in a flock of more than 300 million critters is not an easy thing to do.

What has happened is that the character of the herd has changed. We used to resemble sheep, but now we’re definitely more like cats. Nearly un-herdable, we are.

******

This past week Robin and I watched a two-part series about Mark Twain’s life, on PBS. It was excellent, and (against all odds) I learned quite a bit about his life and his work. It wasn’t hard to teach me, more like writing on a blank slate, but that’s another matter entirely.

Mr. Twain was the kind of guy I wanted to grow up to be, but instead I became me, and now I am stuck with myself. He was a brilliant writer, humorist, family man, stage performer, and sharp observer of the American scene. I think my eyes were first opened to the depth of the man when I ran across the short piece of writing entitled The War Prayer. Up until then for me he was represented in my head by the indelible characters of Tom and Huck and their friends. Which is already pretty awesome, when you come to think of it.

But The War Prayer, which came into my field of view during the era of the Viet Nam conflict, was a surprise. A passionate antiwar piece if there ever was one.

You know, PBS is like those places in the U.S. where you can pay to wander around and sometimes stumble across a diamond. Not everything archived at PBS is such a treasure, but I’m going to spend more time in there, because there are those occasional gems … .

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Something of Value

jono55

In 1955 I was sixteen and OMG was I impressionable. There were many things that made dents in my psyche that year, dents which still show if the light is right and if I turn my head just so … . One of them was the book Something of Value, by Robert Ruark.

It was a novel about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, which was very much in the headlines in the middle 50s. Lots of killing. More atrocities than you could shake a lion’s tail at. Colonials versus natives and all that. A very juicy set of horrors better viewed safely from several thousand miles away, which is exactly where I was.

Mr. Ruark was a White Hunter. Which means he was a member of a highly privileged group who traveled regularly to Africa to kill large animals for the fun of it. They would then take the heads, bring them back to the U.S. and build rooms in their homes to display them in, as evidence of their prowess. Ruark would write about his exploits, and publish these stories in magazines like Sports Afield and such. He was quite a good writer, actually.

When he decided to write about the Mau Mau, his informants were most often white people like himself. In spite of this handicap, he wrote a compelling novel that was very popular and which was my first little peek into the joys of colonialism. I learned that those brave and stiff upper-lipped British settlers could be quite awful at times in the way they treated indigenous populations. I learned that cruelty begets more cruelty, and that there seems to be no end to the creativity that can be brought to beat when doing harm to others.

It was a grim book, but had to be so if it were to accurately report the time and the events. The title comes from an African proverb which translates into something like: When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, his religion, we had better make certain to replace it with
something of value.”

It was that thought that stuck with me from then on. I remembered it when I began to be more aware, as a young man, of the true history in my own country of European settlers and Native Americans. (I say true as opposed to the heavily laundered version found in movies, which were my first source of information on the subject.) More cruelty, more horrors, more taking away without replacing.

They made a so-so movie out of the book which starred Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier as the friends turned antagonists. If you think it might be hard to imagine the dignified and righteous Poitier doing very bad things, you are right. It was.

*

Which brings me to Easter Sunday. I can almost hear you saying “Huh? What fool sort of segue was that?”

My personal spiritual journeys have taken me on a zig-zag sort of route, and some of those directions have disappointed people I loved. So far I have caromed from Lutheran to Catholic to Lutheran to agnostic to Lutheran to Buddhist. If I live long enough, I might add yet another category to the list. Two things stand out for me. One is that you never know where your studies and thinking might be going until you find yourself there, and then what do you do?

The second is that I have never felt so rock-steady at any of these stages that I was tempted to proselytize. When I would leave one tradition behind for another, I have always been cognizant of the fact that … well … I could be wrong. That what I was leaving behind could be closer to the truth than where I was going. To debate with friends about religions has been something that I have avoided for these reasons. And to a large degree, it went back to that phrase from the book long ago:

When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, his religion, we had better make certain to replace it with something of value.

Something of Value, by Robert Ruark

So … if I were to argue religion with another person, and if I were successful in converting that person to my belief system, and if it turned out that my beliefs were wrong, what would that make me? What sort of friend would I have been?

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From The New Yorker

*

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All of the predictions are in place, the stars are aligned, and this Easter Sunday promises to be one of purely gorgeous Spring weather. It will be in the 70s here in Paradise, and there will be sunshine all over the place. Nor any drop of rain to fall. What will we do with this fine day?

We will have friends for brunch later this morning, for one thing. It will be our first indoor socializing since the onset of The Plague. Hopefully this is a true turning point in this disease’s dreary history, and a good first step back toward whatever normalcy will be.

I see myself lying back in the grass by a riverbank somewhere later on today, listening to the water and letting the unquiet air pass me by as I do the water in the river. I can almost feel the warmth of the sun on the aching places that I seem to have accumulated over time. And all of this in the company of my good and tolerant friend, Robin.

What a lucky man am I.

******

Wheels

jono55

I pity the populace of Paradise. Spring is starting to peep out, the air is becoming warmer, and the days noticeably longer and brighter. Vaccinations for Covid have proceeded at a very good and non-scandalous clip here in Colorado, making the streets not only sunnier and more attractive, but safer than they have been during the entire past year.

But now comes this bad news for these hopeful souls emerging blinking from their caves – Robin and I are now electrified. Tuesday we picked up our electric bicycles in Grand Junction, and we are about to hit the streets mounted as never before. Rest assured that as long as everyone on the sidewalks and pathways is prepared to leap out of our way and into the shrubbery at the sound of the warning bells mounted on our handlebars that they are safe, as we will not go out of our way to hit them.

The question becomes … why did we take this particular plunge? The answers can be found midway between our hips and feet. The knees are slowly going the ways that knees can go with time. Aches and pains and catchings and lockings and all of these many knee-type delights are becoming part of everyday life. So what is someone who loves bicycling to do but add an electric motor to assist in pedaling? It seems a logical response to Mother Nature’s plans, which are obviously meant to make life more difficult.

These vehicles are not like motor scooters, nor are they mopeds. The power kicks in only when you pedal, providing five different levels of boost, from just a tish to wow. With a modest effort on our part, that small engine can take us right up to twenty miles an hour and give us an assist for up to forty miles before the battery needs recharging.

I’ve also bought a new helmet to go with the new ride. I dunno, the vibe seems about right to me. This may be the time for some tats as well. What would you think of “Born To Be Wild” spread across my back?

(Naw, I didn’t think so either. It’s been done to death, and I doubt anyone would find me believable while I’m wearing my octogenarian disguise.)

******

When you go to YouTube these days you find a viewing salad that the site has thrown together for you based on what you’ve looked at in the past. Often these suggested videos are of the WTF variety. But recently they started sending me a series called “Old Jews Telling Jokes.” The first one starred this guy, Lou Charloff. Loved it.

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The past couple of days we’ve had some serious winds here in the valley. On Tuesday night what sounded like a car hitting our house woke me, but it was just a blast of wind heralding a weather front moving in. But what a sound it had made.

Now I am not usually wakened by the weather outside our home. Often at breakfast Robin will ask “Dear, did you hear that tornado go through the back yard last night?” and my answer is always the same – “Tornado?” followed by “I didn’t hear a thing.” So this last episode was a role reversal of major proportions, where I woke and Robin didn’t. And not only did it rouse me from a sound sleep, but I found myself so completely awake that I had to get up and read for a while to quiet my mind.

The gale continued for an hour or so before it settled down to a milder whooshing. Poco was out there in the kitchen with me, because he doesn’t like weather dramas at all. His least favorite kind of day is a windy one. Snow, cold, light rains, blistering sun, he tolerates all of these. But let the breezes get above 20 mph and he stays indoors.

Maybe it has something with having one’s face only three inches from the ground that turns him into such a homebody, I don’t know. Cats are puzzles.

******

A small glitch occurred in our bathroom remodel. The contractor called out to me yesterday when he found himself in the middle of a dilemma. Here is the story.

I believed that I had purchased a new toilet with what is called a round bowl, as opposed to the other choice, which was an elongated bowl. The exterior of the box clearly stated “round.” But what came out of that box and that the honorable workman had just installed and seated was just as clearly “elongated.” The plastic seat itself was resolutely round, however, so we had a mismatch that a very small person could fall through.

Now these devices when still boxed weigh 100 pounds, and the idea of ripping out what had been done, trucking it back to the Home Depot, and then bringing home another god-awfully heavy box had little appeal for me. Also, I had no emotional investment in roundness vs. elongation. So I told Robin that longer was much better for the older male, and she went along with my admittedly weak story, although the look on her face was one of I know what you’re doing and not of happy acceptance.

Home Depot, however, was glad to provide gratis a new plastic seat that fit so much better, and now it’s on to better things. I doubt that when you come for a visit you will be much troubled by this new accommodation. But if you are, I apologize in advance.

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Spring Beginning To Spring

jono55

Holy Cow, Batman, it was 65 degrees outside on Sunday. Robin and I went down to the river for our walk and there were people all over the place, acting as if they had as much right to be there as we did. Two small girls whizzed past us on electrified Razor scooters. These were not silent devices, sounding much as a hiveful of metal bees would buzzing inside a tin pail, which was a good thing since the girls’ control of the scooters was marginal and the noise at least gave one a chance to get out of the way.

Right in the middle of the park, surrounded by hundreds of unquiet folk, was a lone fly fisherman. He looked very serious about the whole thing, even though with all the clamor and movement above the water there was only a nano-chance that any trout would bother his fly at all. Any fish with half a brain would be hiding behind rocks and in watery crevices until we all left the area.

There was a small group of women on the softball diamond just tossing the ball around and hitting fungoes. They left and were immediately replaced by a dozen children going slightly nuts with all that room to maneuver in. There is something about an empty first base line that inspires people of all ages to run amok.

We found that over the winter a chunk of our hiking path along the riverside bluff had simply fallen away. Perhaps fifteen feet of the path along the edge of the cliff no longer existed. Had we been walking on it when it fell off, we would likely not have perished, but would have come to a stop a hundred feet down with more scratches and bruises than a person could ever want. The good news is that we were nowhere near the place when it happened.

Remember this aphorism, even if it doesn’t apply to you today: When you are a senior citizen you bruise faster and heal slower. Keeping this in mind will prevent scores of grunts and moans in the future.

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An article in The New Yorker caught my eye this morning. It was discussing the possibility of a Civilian Climate Corps, modeled after the CCC of the Great Depression era. I think it sounds like a great idea, and this time it would not be just for men, but for women as well.

The Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, according to a paragraph buried in Joe Biden’s long executive order on climate change, had been directed to make plans for a Civilian Climate Corps, modelled on the Civilian Conservation Corps—the C.C.C.—of the nineteen-thirties. It would put underemployed Americans to work on projects intended “to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”

The New Yorker, March 2021.

One of the reasons that the Republicans of another time hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal so much is that it was an example of big government that worked, and there were several great ideas that came out of this administration. One of them was the CCC.

The C.C.C. left a legacy of trees, trails, shelters, footbridges, picnic areas, and campgrounds in local, state, and national parks across the country. It had equally notable effects on the health and outlook of the men who served. Most were undernourished as well as unemployed when they signed up. They came home with muscles, tans, and, according to a letter sent to corps headquarters, in Washington, by a resident of Romeo, Colorado, an “erect carriage” that made them easy to pick out from the rest of the young male population.

The New Yorker, March 2021.

So when it comes time to sign up, I plan on being at the head of the line. That is, unless there is some sort of age-ist agenda in the proposals. While it is true that I can no longer shovel with the speed of a twenty year-old, once I have scooped up my ten pounds of dirt I am much smarter about where to put it. (An untested hypothesis, I admit)

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t know exactly when I began to harbor racist thoughts, but it was some time after I was nine years old. Because recently I was reminiscing about my ninth summer, when I would try to emulate my baseball heroes, and three of those heroes were Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, and Don Newcombe. I even had comic books starring those guys.

FILE – In this Aug. 2, 1942, file photo, Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Leroy Satchel Paige warms up at New York’s Yankee Stadium before a Negro League game between the Monarchs and the New York Cuban Stars. Major League Baseball has reclassified the Negro Leagues as a major league and will count the statistics and records of its 3,400 players as part of its history. The league said Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020, it was “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history” by elevating the Negro Leagues on the centennial of its founding. (AP Photo/Matty Zimmerman, File)

Of course I knew that they were black men, since I was not blind, but I didn’t care. The only important thing was that they played baseball and they were pros. Nothing else mattered. The racist societal poisons hadn’t filtered down to me as yet, to interfere with my dream of being able to grow up to pitch like Satchel Paige.

[BTW, I never did get that far. It turned out that I had an arm like a rubber noodle, my time running to first base was several seconds longer than it needed to be, and my best hits were generally foul balls. I also stayed resolutely white. One more set of dreams dashed … sighhhhhh.]

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Playing In The Freezer

jono55

When Robin and I planned to take a couple of days and go skiing on the Grand Mesa with Ally and Kyle, I did not see that as a challenge to the gods of winter at all. And when I wrote this on a blog post recently, I felt the same way.

The nice thing about Nordic skiing is that you are rarely cold. You generate enough heat that the problem is what to do with all those clothing layers you started out with.

Apparently the gods saw things otherwise.

When Ally and Kyle arrived on the Mesa last Friday it was 35 degrees and blue skies, and they had a fine afternoon XC skiing and exploring. Later in the evening they bunked down in the cabin we had rented together at the Grand Mesa Lodge, Cabin #15 to be exact. Then some sort of bottom fell out of the weather during the night, and when Robin and I showed up at the cabin the next morning (Saturday) the temperature was 8 degrees and a bitter wind was blowing in your face no matter which way you turned.

But we were there to have fun, even if it meant the possible loss of body parts to frostbite in the process. Our first stop was at some sled dog races that were being held just a few miles from the lodge. Cold people, cold canines, red cheeks, white noses, and only one trailer selling hot beverages. We spent an hour or two watching the dogs, all the while stamping our feet in a brave but fruitless attempt to restore circulation. From there we moved to the cross-country ski trail area and set off through the woods.

The snow was perfect. Four inches of powder on six feet of base. Originally I had plotted out a four mile loop, but our quartet voted very quickly to cut that distance in half, “then we’ll see if we want to do any more after that.” We didn’t. At that point it was back to the cabin to warm up, sip a little coffee, and look out the window at the abundance of snow that the Mesa had to offer. Later in the afternoon Ally and Kyle headed back to Steamboat Springs, and at suppertime Robin and I went up to the lodge where the menu in the restaurant was basically pizza. It was an excellent home-made pie, however, and we finished it up and then licked the plate afterward.

Not wanting to brave the weather any more that day, we turned in early. When we awoke Sunday morning, the temp was eight degrees below zero. Now I know that some of you in the Midwest have learned to love those sorts of temperatures, but Robin and I were not emotionally prepared for them, nor had I brought along nearly enough warm clothing to go playing in a freezer. So we scratched our original itinerary and returned home a few hours early.

If it hadn’t been so frigid, though, what a landscape was up there to be explored! More beautiful snow than anyone could ever want. Too brilliantly white to look at in the sunlight without eye protection. Aspens, evergreens, iced-over lakes, and a serious shortage of the scars of civilization. It is true that there were areas where snowmobilers were blasting about with their malodorous machines, but it wan’t too hard to get away from their noise. And left to itself, a snowy landscape is one of the quietest there is.

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Cabin # 15 Review

The cabin had originally been built in the late 1890s, but for some reason the original structure was taken down and a “new” one built with the same logs, in 1939. Its outstanding feature in 2021 was its slanting floor. The footing sloped in several directions making walking about the room interesting. On a shelf in the cabin was one of those notebooks where guests are invited to write a few words about their visit. The last entry was just a week before we arrived, where a gentleman offered these words of caution:

You are advised not to drink alcohol during your stay, because it is hard enough to walk here while sober.

Guest Notebook

There was a metal-framed futon in the main room, whose mattress did not do nearly enough to protect one’s posterior from the metal slats of the frame. The sitting surface was only inches from the floor, which meant that each time you were moved to sit down, there was no contact where you expected it to be, and a moment of panic until you finally crashed onto the thinly covered slats.

We found four chairs at the small table in the kitchen area, of the wobbly and untrustworthy plastic variety often found in tall stacks at Home Depot. However, if one moved slowly and didn’t wiggle excessively, the chairs did not collapse.

Kitchen facilities were more than adequate, with a good refrigerator, nice gas stove, and newer countertop and sink. Heat for the building was a large propane space heater on the front wall of the room. With the miserable outdoor temperatures we found ourselves dealing with, that heater never had a moment’s rest.

To get upstairs to the dormitory area, you climbed a very old-fashioned stairway of the kind that was common in Thomas Jefferson’s day. The angle of the staircase was 60 degrees from horizontal, making it more like a ladder, actually. It wasn’t so hard going up, but coming down you needed to pick your way very carefully to avoid the unpleasantness that could come from a too-rapid descent. The wood of those steps had originally been rough-cut lumber, but 81 years of people going up and down had worn them to a shiny and slightly hazardous slipperiness.

The mattresses on the beds were comfortable, but all guests had been told to bring their own sleeping bags. In Covid times, it was felt safer all around to use one’s own bedding materials, apparently, and so we complied.

I liked the place, of course, in its quaint basic-ness. There was not a trace of elegance to be found. The wind found its way in through scores of cracks and gaps, and many of the furnishings were just barely adequate to their tasks. In this it resembled some fly-in fishing camps where I have stayed in the past. But the views out the windows were serene. All in all, I was glad that Cabin #15 was there for our use, even if I had a few quibbles. We were there only for a few hours, but the cabin had been there in one form or another for more than 100 years.

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We took far fewer photos than we would have if it hadn’t been so cold. Here are the few we have.

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Legislation has been introduced to ban the use of Native American mascot-ery in Colorado. If the bill goes through, our local Montrose Indians will have to find a new name for themselves or face stiff fines. It’s way past time for this, nest-ce pas? Way past. What is one to think of the mental processes of our European forefathers, who first did their best to kill off the Natives and their culture, and then later co-opted their images and names as examples of courage and resourcefulness. A truly amazing and cruel affront.

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Television viewing suggestion: The limited series Pretend It’s A City is a hoot. Fran Lebowitz’ brain runs way faster by far than the average human’s does, and she is a superbly sharp-tongued curmudgeon. The lady is aided in this documentary program by her obvious fan and friend, Martin Scorsese. Each segment is less than half an hour, so take a look. It couldn’t hurt.

Here’s a sampling of the kind of stuff you might see if you tuned in.

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Flight of Ideas

jono55

We are all chattering like actors in Waiting For Godot here in Paradise. Put any two people within earshot of one another and the conversation turns inexorably to Spring. Is it imminent? How close? If a tree foolishly begins to bud in February (like the big maple across the way) is it a stupid tree? Is it showing off and heading for a fall?

If it weren’t such a serious moment in time, it would be more fun watching and listening to my age-contemporaries try to make sense of the planet’s odd weather and climatic happenings, using their life experiences as a guide. I hear phrases all the time like:

  • Did you ever …?
  • Have you ever … ?
  • This is the first time …
  • I can’t make sense of it …
  • When I was a (girl) boy …
  • WTF?

It turns out that when climate change steps in, much of our personal meteorological lore becomes a lot less valuable. Yardsticks have to be continually reset as one after another of those “hundred year events” roars past us.

What yours truly has noted, without ascribing any meaning at all to the observations, is that I no longer look for the peonies to be in full bloom on Memorial Day. In fact, that notable moment keeps inching each year toward April Fool’s Day. While I admit that it still has a ways to go, the direction is pretty clear.

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Here’s an observation about how serious we are as a species about one of the larger issues of our time. The one-percenters are rushing to showrooms to purchase electric vehicles that bear increasingly bigger price tags. And bigger engines. Electric cars of nearly 2000 horsepower are in production that can go from zero to sixty mph in less than two seconds. The planet’s need for cars like these is so obvious that I even hate to bring it up.

But they are zero emission vehicles, correct? Not totally. Not if you live in a country where fossil fuels are still big players in the production of electricity. There are lots of emissions involved in building those cars and in making the batteries for them, and also in producing what comes out of all those shiny new charging stations.

Lotus Evija

A scenario popped into my mind. A geronto-adolescent daydream. Somehow I acquire a couple of million dollars that I really have no special need for and I take myself down to a Lotus dealer and buy one of their 1973 horsepower Evija cars. I drive the vehicle very carefully to a deserted chunk of highway somewhere in rural America and pause the automobile. I look both ways for other cars and for people of the law enforcement persuasion, tighten my seat belt, and then tromp down fully on the accelerator, propelling myself way past my capabilities as an operator and into the nearest boulder, where I produce a mixed carbon-fiber and hemoglobin smear on the rock to mark my passage into eternity.

If that should ever happen, don’t cry for me, Argentina, I will not deserve it.

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The Thursday morning AA meeting at the Anglican church has become really interesting. Four years ago it was a larger group, with average attendance of perhaps 16-20 members. But in this pandemic year it really shrunk, to only four regular members. Other meetings in town have remained unchanged in number, but many of them are seriously flawed in that they ignore Covid precautions.

On our Thursday mornings one is required to be masked and to keep proper distancing in mind. Only four of the original group accepted these restrictions and continued to attend. Two men, two women, all seniors. None of us new to AA. Each week we dutifully follow the prescriptions and proscriptions as to how an AA meeting is to be conducted. Very gradually we have become more comfortable with one another, and new levels of trust have appeared.

It seems that we have done away with many of our pretenses, our usual shape-shifting, and we take part in a leaner and meaner dialog. Cutting to the chase, so to speak. All of this makes the sessions more valuable, at least they do to me.

And it’s not just learning about the others, but about oneself as well. Have you ever had the experience of telling one of your own stories when suddenly a bulb flashes and you your tale in a completely new and different light? An auto-epiphany, if you will. Fascinating when that happens.

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Robin and I are off later this morning for a day’s XC skiing on the Grand Mesa. The snow is good up there (six feet deep), the sun will be shining, and we are rendezvousing with Allyson and Kyle for some pretty safe and much needed socializing. We’ll stay the night in a cabin and come back on Sunday afternoon.

The nice thing about Nordic skiing is that you are rarely cold. You generate enough heat that the problem is what to do with all those clothing layers you started out with. Tie them around your waist? Hang them on bushes and come back for them later? Donate them to passersby? It’s a good problem to have, actually, in a winter activity.

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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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Deep In The Heart Of Texas

jono55

As the latest Texas disaster follows its course, leaving millions of those intrepid folk finding out just how intrepid they are without heat or electricity at a very nasty time weather-wise, I follow the story at a comfortable, warm, and well-lighted distance. In this way I am like Texas senator Ted Cruz, who has been watching his state suffer from the safety of the beaches and hotels of Cancun, where he was vacationing. That is yet another level of comfortable distance from the fray.

And I thought – you know what? Texas needs very badly to bring back Molly Ivins, who was, apparently, the last clear-thinking public figure in that state when she passed away in 2007. It was a serious mistake to let her do so, and I think that Texas ought to see what can be done about resurrecting her.

For those whose memories have even larger black holes in them than mine, Molly was a liberally-inclined columnist from the Lone Star State who found enough targets there for her deadly wit that after a brief flirtation with the New York Times she never felt the need to live anywhere else.

Molly was unusual in many respects. Six feet tall and regularly outrageous in her writing and speeches, she occasionally showed us that beneath a colorful and outsize persona beat a very wise heart. Here is one such moment.

Yep, she is sorely missed in the part of the world that admired her. Which was always way bigger than just Texas.

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My friend Joe spoke an interesting truth yesterday. We hadn’t seen one another much during these pandemic months, and were doing some rapid catching up through an open car window. He had recently gone through some problems with a knee injury, and his observation was that apparently the warranty had expired on some of his body’s parts. We laughed when he said it, and the recollection still brings a smile.

A somewhat rueful smile.

When I was twenty-five I could break a leg, walk home on it, have a serious debate with myself as to whether I should consult a physician about my injury, and no matter what I did within a week the leg would have healed. Such was the wonder of the recuperative powers of a twenty-five year old corpus. But even back then I remember reading (in that era of personal bullet-proofedness) that supposedly most of my body’s parts and systems had peaked, and it was all downhill from that moment on. Of course I scoffed. That is, until the fateful day that I had to admit that my hairline seemed to have receded … so could those prophets of biological doom be right about the rest of the stuff as well?

Turns out they were.

So now I inhabit a body that was never supposed to still be walking around on the planet at this age. Humans evolved at a time when life expectancy was measured as extending to the very day that you forgot how quietly a saber-toothed cat could move as it came up behind you. When being a “senior” probably meant you were twenty-nine years old.

So if there were such a thing as a freshness label on humans, mine would read something like “Best If Used Before 1964.” To put this in perspective, that was the year these four gentlemen landed in New York on their first world tour.

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‘Cross the Border

jono55

I’ve heard that Eskimos have fifty words for snow. I’ve also heard that they don’t. Since I have no Eskimo friends to ask about this important point, I will do what I always do and choose the statement that appeals to me the most and wait for clarification of the matter sometime in the future.

What prompted this flight of ideas was watching the frozen moisture that fell from the sky on two successive days this week. First there was Tuesday, which featured those large and very beautiful flakes that one could watch falling in slow motion for hours. A beautiful happening, the meteorological equivalent of lyric poetry. On Wednesday the snow was very small and granular, looking for all the world like someone up there was sifting white flour onto the world.

Now if my vocabulary was richer, perhaps I could have used a single word to describe what was happening each time. After all, life is indeed short, and saving a second or two here and there couldn’t be anything but good for a person, could it? Why, in the area of calisthenic exercising, for instance … five or six seconds are all I need for a typical day’s session.

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From The New Yorker

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While I’m on the subject of words and weather-related items, let me congratulate the man or woman who came up with the phrase polar vortex. It doesn’t of itself really tell you what is happening to you, but it certainly sounds like it is important. It seems to have largely replaced the cold-weather language that was used when I was growing up in the Midwest. All of those phrases back then had the word “Canadian” in them. This was a very useful practice, in that we knew both that we were going to be miserable and exactly who we had to blame for it.

Having repeatedly experienced those highly unpleasant Canadian cold fronts as a Minnesotan was certainly one of my subliminal considerations during the Viet Nam war period, when I was trying to decide whether to stay in the U.S. and be drafted or slip across the border into Canada. Suffice it to say that I ended up wearing an Air Force uniform rather than an Everest-expedition-style down parka.

I have always thought of the situation I’ve just described as Canada’s loss and America’s gain, but I am open to the interpretation that the reverse might have been considered true by the respective governments at the time.

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Hearts In Snow

jono55

Valentine’s Day was a memorable one here in Paradise. Around midnight Saturday a very light rain had turned to snow, and by six in the morning on Sunday the pure white stuff was about eight inches deep. Trees and bushes were, how to best say this … festooned. The snowfall itself was a well-mannered one, with big flakes dropping vertically, as is the proper way, I think.

This is unlike what was so often the case when I lived in the Midwest, where the flakes came at you horizontally and with intent to do bodily harm. But eight inches is eight inches, and we couldn’t count on a nice warm day to melt it all away, so out came the shovels. Robin and I cleared the snow from our own walk and driveway fairly handily. But then there was the old gentleman across the street with diabetic neuropathy whose walks I have taken on as a project this year, so I did his.

And since my next-door neighbor has been limping terribly for a month or so because of knee injuries, I helped clear the snow from his property as well. Short walk, long driveway.

By that time I had worked up quite a head of steam, and my shovel was now hot to the touch, so I looked around at the remainder of the homes in our cul de sac only to find that they had already been taken care of by their owners. Reluctantly I put away my equipment and went indoors to clean up and get dressed for the rest of the day.

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Ex-president Cluck wasn’t convicted, of course, but who thought that he would be? That would have required that the Senate Republicans were suddenly able to put country above party, and they had learned the difference between sociopathy and sanity. This was always too much to expect of them.

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From The New Yorker

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When the dream of warm Spring days was suddenly snatched from our cats by the Valentine’s Day snowfall, they went immediately into a depressive-cocoon state. Instead of sleeping 79% of the day, they went to 97%. Poco could be found snoozing behind a recliner chair and up against the baseboard heater. Willow chose a southern-facing bedroom, hopped onto the futon in there, and didn’t leave all day.

I admire their ability to simply say the hell with it and go dormant. This is unlike humans who try to pretend that there is a good side to such happenings, and try to find a way to do something on a day that really calls for doing nothing. To make the best of it is not my watchword. Any excuse for total and complete sloth is gratefully accepted.

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News of the World

jono55

Twenty-four hours after receiving our second dose of Covid vaccine Wednesday forenoon, we felt normal. Twenty-eight hours after receiving the shot we were achy everywhere. At twenty-nine hours we cancelled supper since neither of us were hungry. By thirty hours we were ibuprofenized and in bed, where Robin had an excellent case of chills going. By forty hours post-injection we felt well once again.

Not a bad trip, all in all. Shows that our bodies knew something had happened and were reacting to it.

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Sweet Jesus, it is presently 37 degrees below zero in Eveleth MN, where daughter Kari and her husband Jon reside! That it not a wind chill number!

Oh, my friends in the Midwest … you who are still dealing with that pesky polar vortex and those sub-zero temperatures, I feel your pain. Well, not really … that’s a bit of an exaggeration … but I do wish you well in the version of the third Ice Age you are experiencing. Not that I would trade places or anything. I kind of prefer the thirty degrees Fahrenheit that is outside my window at present.

If I were in your place, I would purchase a small electric heater, take it home, then drop it into my pajamas and turn it on. I would then climb into bed and not come out until life was once again bearable.

What I would not do, if I were a Minnesotan, is to go and stand on any of the bridges over the Mississippi River. January and February were always the months for jumpers. People who took their troubles with them and looked down into those dark waters. Waters that promised oblivion … at moments when oblivion seemed a good choice for the day. The poet John Berryman did just that, on January 7, 1972. He leapt from the old Washington Avenue Bridge, which no longer exists.

So stay home, turn up the heat, and order pizza delivered. Avoid bridges. And remember … this, too, shall pass.

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Finished the novella “The Body,” by Stephen King. Spoiler alert: the kids find the dead boy, have a conflict with some young sociopaths, and then return home. What? You knew?

It was a good short read, especially since the movie has become such a thing. It did add some material, like what occurs in the boys’ lives when they first return home and in their next couple of decades.

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Friday was a darn dank day, damp and drippy. Robin and I were a disconsolate duo, dreaming of drier, dandier summer days.

So she retired to her woman-cave to practice singing French children’s songs, and I made soup while listening to Mozart. It turned out to be just the right thing to do. Making soup is one of the more creative acts that one can do in a kitchen. At its heart is the need to feed oneself with whatever is at hand, and to make a little bit of food go around. But you don’t have to spend too much time in a recipe book to find that soups can also be very complex and decidedly costly, involving ingredients unavailable on the Western Slope except by mail or special courier.

My chosen soup was one of the endless variations using butternut squash. It allows one to whack away at a large assortment of vegetables, bring out the big ol’ dutch oven/soup kettle, and simmer until the house is full of an aroma that makes you healthier just sniffing it.

So where does Mozart come in? He popped into my head for no apparent reason. Perhaps my brain was doing some early spring cleaning and stirred up an old bit of mental lint. Anyway, I reminded myself of the first album of classical music I ever purchased, and that would have been when I was fifteen. I had decided that I was going to become a cultured individual, and learning about classical music was to be the initial step.

So, I knew something of Mozart, and looking around town in 1955 I found a recording in a local music shop of his horn concertos which were touted as being the best ever. The artist was a man called Dennis Brain, an Englishman.

Among members of my family of origin Englishmen in general were not highly prized. For one thing they all drank tea instead of coffee, which everyone knew was God’s beverage. And they were all so utterly posh and spoke the language so intimidatingly well. But I was on a quest, so I bought the album anyway.

If it meant putting on airs I was perfectly ready to do just that.

‘Twas a very good buy, as it turned out, and good accompaniment Friday for fiddling with a soup kettle on a drizzly winter afternoon, to boot.

[BTW: I never did become that cultured personality that I was aiming for. Rock and roll came through town and off I went to join the circus.]

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Nincompoopery

jono55

Robin and I went to the Friendship Hall on Wednesday morning to get our second dose of Covid vaccine. Everybody there was getting their second dose as well, and our age group was well represented. In fact, there was no one there who was not eligible for Social Security, and I suspect there were a few attendees who were actually present when the Social Security Act was signed into law in 1935.

So, this was a seasoned bunch, not generally given to much drama. No one jumped the line, no one indulged in Karen-istic behavior, everyone seemed grateful to be this much closer to being protected against you-know-what. In addition, there was not a single “Owee” uttered all during the time we were in the room. Those of us who were to be of The Greatest Generation tried to behave at least as well as those who were.

I have heard of seniors who have decided not to get the vaccine. To me this is almost unbelievably foolish, but since Covid is no respecter of nincompoopery, it’s all but certain that a year down the road there will be significantly fewer of them around than there are now.

Sadly, since they are well past their breeding years, these turbid-thinking persons will not be eligible for the Darwin Awards.

The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek honor originating in Usenet newsgroup discussions around 1985. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through dying or becoming sterilized via their own actions.

Wikipedia

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From The New Yorker

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We’ve been lucky here in Colorado to have a sensible man for governor, Jared Polis. From the beginning of the pandemic he has steadfastly followed the advice of knowledgeable people and helped us to avoid stepping in the stream of claptrap issuing from the White House. Each week he is on public radio for an hour bringing residents up to date on Covid and other matters. His style is not showy or self-aggrandizing, but informative.

Of course we have our non-masked brigades here in Paradise just like everywhere else, but we have been presented with rational choices if we cared to make them ours. Like I said, lucky.

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A couple of years ago, I was shopping for a new pair of jeans at Murdoch’s, our local farm and home store, and found myself holding a pair of button-fly Levi’s 501’s. I was replacing them on the rack when I had the thought “Why not buy them? It’ll be fun. A direct line back into Levi’s history before those foppish zippers came along and replaced good, honest buttons.”

.

Such was my internal conversation. And that misbegotten idea of getting back to those good ol’ nineteenth century days won out. I am, at heart, a romantic. It does not always work for me.

Ever since then, including yesterday, I have cursed them. It turns out that there was a very good reason that zippers took over way back in the day. They are quick and easy to use. Whenever nature called, it was a case of zip down-zip up and that was that. But with this older-fashioned item of clothing, it was now a matter of button-button-button-button-button down and then button-button-button-button-button up. Every day that I wore them, several minutes of my life flew away from me and were lost forever just unfastening and fastening the things.

So if I feel this way, why haven’t I simply washed them up and donated them to Goodwill or some such agency? This gets us to another of my characteristics. While it is undeniably true that I tend to romanticize things, it is also true that I am almost unbearably cheap. Like the character Joshua Deets in the movie Lonesome Dove, I am “not quick to give up on a garment.”

I do feel a little sorry for the the jeans. They are doomed to be worn by a man who doesn’t appreciate them until they completely fall apart. And I will always begrudge them their existence … they are so sturdy that it is entirely possible that I will be buried in them. Is that irony? I am never sure.

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Peter Piper Picked A Peck … et al

jono55

I tried a new recipe this past week for potato soup, and the soup itself was just okay. What was a pleasant surprise was a sub-recipe for making pickled jalapeños, which you then used as a topping when serving the soup. Those jalapeños were v.e.r.y tasty, and could be used on other soups, sandwiches, scrambled eggs, etc. Here’s how you do it:

Thinly slice two jalapeños, discarding the seeds if you like. Put slices in a bowl and squeeze in enough lime juice (2 limes) to cover them. Add a pinch each of salt and sugar. Let sit at room temperature while you make the soup. (The jalapeños can be prepared up to 5 days ahead of time and stored in the refrigerator; they get softer and more pickle-y as they sit.)

I mean, you can just sit there and eat the darn things right out of the bowl.

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On Saturday I was talking to my brother Bill on the phone as he described how absolutely miserable he was in the sub-zero wind chills of his day there in Faribault MN. Snow was swirling on the highways, discouraging traveling more than necessary distances. Just before we terminated our conversation, he made the mistake of asking how my weather was at that moment.

I told him it was 48 degrees and blue skies here in Paradise, and the closest we ever get to a polar vortex is reading about it in the papers. I swear you could hear his face fall. I wasn’t going to bring it up, not being a man given to gloating, but … he asked.

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Our second dose of Covid vaccine is coming up on Wednesday. Some of the folks who received their first immunization at the same time that we did a month ago are starting to natter about possible side effects of the “booster shot.” Listening to them, it’s like being back in elementary school, where the rumors of what that “booster shot” was going to do to you were rampant. Up to and including your arm falling right off in the classroom, so that you had to pack it home at the close of the school day.

Just to be on the safe side, I’m going to offer my right arm (I’m left-handed) this time as the injection site, just in case … you know … it falls off.

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Our new Subaru has some technological stuff going on that is amusing. It knows when you are crossing a lane divider and beeps at you unless you have clearly signaled a lane change. It also will not allow you to tailgate, but maintains a safe and predetermined distance between you and the car in front of you.

Now if you put these two together, it means that on the highway you can put the car on cruise control, take your hands off the wheel, and it will drive itself. Now it’s not a “self-driving” car in any real sense. It doesn’t know where you’re going, for instance, and will just keep cruising down that traffic lane forever.

However, when you do take your hands completely off the wheel, the car knows it, and sends you a message to put those damned hands back where they belong. But, like I said, it’s amusing.

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One night a long time ago, during my single period, I was up late watching television when an entertainer came on and stole the show with his performance of I Go To Rio. I hadn’t heard of Peter Allen before that night, and after watching his routine I was a fan. I didn’t know that he was gay at the time, but I do remember thinking that this was a guy who really knew how to wear orange.

Here’s a video of a real showman, from 1978. Died in 1992 of AIDS-related cancer.

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