SmokeSound

This is the last day of the year.  People everywhere, who do not care whether or not they miss the winter solstice by a few days, are buying root beer and ginger ale to celebrate the end of another year.  I really don't care, anymore.  I think it has to do with relative age. I recall thinking, when I was twelve or thirteen, that my father was three times as old as I was.  Eleven or twelve years later, he was only twice as old as I was.  I was catching up fast.  I never quite made it, but I gained the whole time. That explains why I am losing interest in celebrating New Year's Eve. The universe is . . . oh . . . about 13 or 14 billion years old.  It is difficult to know, exactly, because if no one was there when you are born, you have to figure it out, all alone, later, and it is easy to miss a billion years or so.  In any case, I am gaining on it.  I will probably not ever get all the way, but the difference between the age of everything else and me is diminishing, as the r

"Skal vi ta denne fortellingen for god fisk?"  "Should we accept this story as good fish?", that is to say, "as genuine?"  The line was in a story about King Haakon VII, the first of modern Norway's kings, grandfather to the present king.  As you might guess, a Swede said that Haakon had a long-term affair.  The details are beside the point.  Of course he had an affair:  he probably played golf, too.  No!  That is the point! I love the expression, which no golfer or tennis or cricket player could have imagined using.  "Should we accept this story as good fish?" could only have made sense to a nation of fisher-folk. Daniel once told a woman in the Lofoten Islands the the fish drying on racks smelled really bad.  "It smells like money to me," she told Daniel.  The present king of Norway has chosen not to comment on whether his grandfather had an affair.  Anyway, if a Swede accepts it as genuine, we cannot possibly accept it

Doubt is the very essence of the scientific method. Nothing is accepted until it has withstood doubt. Doubt is the corrosion of religious certainties, since pure affirmation without evidence is a shaky scaffold from which to hold off curious and probing minds. We are in the religious part of winter.  There is an enduring blanket of snow on the ground and, day-by-day, more drifts down to rest.  We have no scientific proof that winter will endure. We simply believe it.  Nothing can change our minds. A walk out to the mailbox at the curb is a skating lesson. Pulling out into an open lane is an adventure that requires room and time for unintended geometric maneuvers. "Brrr!" is a greeting.  "Hoowaah! is a figure skating move. A quick return to the house is a response to the effect of cold air crimping up whatever covers one's bladder. We are sturdy, we northerners.   We do not complain.  We hone our snow shovels to a fine edge, and pretend we are im

The last of the dishes used during the party have just now taken their turn in the dishwasher.  A mountain of wine glasses are waiting for someone to store them back into the cupboard.  As you might surmise, we do not stay up all night, after a party, to put the house back into order.  The house does not get re-ordered until just before the next party. It was a Boxing Day party for previous and present neighbors, with a few outliers added for color and confusion, and it was marvelous fun.  People who live near each other met for the first time.  Others, who do not live near each other know the reason why, now.  We manufactured pretend-leftovers, and drank each other's wine, told lies about things we have done and said, and felt good about each other.  I thought you might like to read a part of the invitation; the rationale for Boxing Day: The Day after Christmas became known, in parts of the British Empire, as Boxing Day. There are more dubious explanations for the name than

It could not happen at a worse time, Christmas and all!  Danger, danger, danger! I always thought it a cruel practice, but students at Luther College used to go out at night to dairy farms, where the cows were often found to be dozing while standing upright.  The students would run at the unsuspecting cows from the side, give them a huge bump, and tip the over.  "Cow tipping" they called it. Now someone in Italy, said to be somewhat deranged, probably a former Luther College student, has instuted "Pope tipping". For the second year in a row, she ran at the Pope, about to celebrate Mass, and tipped him over.  Last year she missed. The reports do not indicate whether Benedict XVI was sleeping on his feet, but in his sermon he urged the faithful to be vigilant. Now, out in Colorado, another church assembled the cast for one of those "living creches", including two real donkeys, kept in a pen at night. They ran away.  They wanted not

It is supposed to snow here for three days. For that reason, I went out this morning to blow away the first six or eight inches of it. I spent the time thinking about the Obama family jetting off to spend another Christmas vacation where Barack was born, and I wondered whether Michelle and the kids actually enjoyed spending every Christmas in Kenya.  Sarah Palin thought the charge that she had been named as the biggest political liar of the year, earning her "The Pants on Fire" award, so serious that she took the time to say she was not the biggest liar, which, in politics, is irrefutable evidence that her pants are on fire. (I will not say more about that.) The Senate voted, 60 to 39, for their version of health care. Thirty-nine Republicans voted.  Not a single one of them supported even the Senate's lame proposal for reform. It isn't reform.  It is, at best, an extension of what we have, with some regulations that insurance companies can work

Our local public broadcasting station conducted a nonsense poll: something like, "What do you think we should do about health care?" It wasn't really a poll.  It was just a way to get some quotes to fill time on the air, and perhaps to give the radio host an idea he or she could not come up with alone.  One caller said she did not think Congress should pass any health care bill, at all; that our national budget was already too far out of balance.  She did not suggest what to do about the thirty or forty or fifty million people who have no health care. She also did not suggest that she would give up her own health care to help balance the budget.  "I'm OK.  You're OK, but I have health care and you don't.  Maybe someday." Jeff, at coffee, said he did not understand how religious people can reconcile their religion with the obvious selfishness they often show; for instance, that millions of people have no health care, or the ease with

Grumpy Garrison Keillor wrote in Sunday’s Op. Ed. that people who aren’t Christian should leave Christmas alone. He is tired of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Unitarians and people who rewrite, “Silent Night”. In his most astounding comment, he scorned, “. . . all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year”. “Christmas,” he wrote, “does not need any improvements”. It is probably best not to try to figure out the “Jewish guys” comment. I do not know what their religion or ethnic identity has to do with the music they wrote. I thought they were probably just trying to earn a buck, something like writing Op. Ed. pieces. What is really puzzling is the notion that “Christmas”, as Garrison Keillor likes to celebrate it, is something without a history. Not simply Christmas, but every celebration in the Christian Church, and every hymn and doctrine and custom, is something that has taken shape gradually. Christmas, originally, wasn’t even at Christmas time. Jesus

Spencer, Mari, and Sophie.  The grandchildren are the ones on the sides.  Spencer and Sophie Weis, again, before the climate change. The same two cornfed kids in Iowa, sadly missing school for reasons of a dusting of snow.  Iowa kids are not as hardy as Minnesota kids, who think of snow as a chance to sleep in a tent in the back yard. Then there is Marcia, our daughter in Atlanta.  From left to right, Dominick, Walter, Mercedes, Makaila, and Marcia.  Technically, we are not related to Mercedes, even if people do call me an old dog.  Dan is the taller one, visiting San Francisco with Eliza, while he should have been interviewing for a Residency in Emergency Medicine, which will serve him in good stead if Eliza does not get a bike helmet. Susan and our son Michael live in Tucson (the pool is a clue) in Dante's house.  By profession, Dante is a boxer, with a winning record.  We asked even more relatives to send us pictures, but they said they have their reasons

Just today, again, Mari said, “This is a nice house!” She and Annie agree. Annie is our Animal Shelter Cat, brought first to our house in Minneapolis where she liked best to be able to go to the back screened porch, or to a small screened outside window perch, in front. Before we moved here, we lived temporarily in a tiny cottage where Annie hid most of the time. We worried. But the day we moved into this house, Annie looked about, and started to explore, gingerly, curiously, up and down and in and out of everything. She, almost instantly, knew this was a good house; she and Mari, and I knew. (Our Orphan Cat is a bit more opaque. She has her secrets.) It is snowing outside. A blizzard is grazing by. The wind is picking up. Tomorrow I will bundle up and battle the snow to a standoff. We have gotten past the stage at which people ask us where we moved from, when we said, “Tucson”, and they said, “Why?” They raised their voices half an octave and said, again, “Why?” No one said,

There are people whose reputations are trails of light across the sky. I do not know them. I am a pack rat.  That is no trail of light behind me.  There are only scuff marks left by the things I drag along. That is about to change:  I am certain about it.  Just this month . . . or rather earlier this year . . . a while back . . . I almost decided to throw something away, but since it was not a Monday--when the trash man comes by--I put the urge aside, congratulating myself on having come to a new phase in my life.  I promised to become lean and spare. But then I look around.  There are stories everywhere!  There are the masks we bought from the couple who had lived in West Africa for years.  There are more pots from Dean Schwarz than there are pictures of our kids. There are glass urns, and old wooden dough troughs. There are chairs from Tennessee and tables from a bakery in Decorah that was closed for insanitation.  We have detrius from Mari's family and a

It is brittle cold, after a storm. The sun is sharp, and the snow traces hard shadows across the yard. The house thermostat is not so much to control the temperature as it is to indicate our preferences: something on our wish list. We bought a snow blower attachment for our lawn tractor. Even with wheel weights and tire chains, all that weight hanging out in front makes traction something else on our wish list. More weights for the back end are coming. Since it is the season for wishing, I wish the temperature, politically, were cooler, too. I don’t know what they have hanging out front, but most of our politicians have no traction, either. You know that cool analysis is in short supply when right-wing advocates are unembarrassed to call themselves, “tea baggers”. Tea Baggers and Birthers and Screamers and Proclaimers of Treason! Buy guns, move to Idaho, talk about revolution. We have people in public office who think the President is plotting to turn us into a Muslim

We walked to school, mostly.  Weyerhauser School District #303.  It was a three-room schoolhouse, two of which were classrooms, four grades in each, and a third room that we called a lunchroom.  I do not remember how that worked. I think someone prepared food. About a quarter of a mile south of the school, on our way home, there was an almost unimportant bridge across South Creek, an unimportant little stream that once had wandered through the woods, going somewhere, and that later wandered through the brush and uncultivated land that even hardscrabble farming avoided.  Perhaps only two or three times in all of the eight years I went to Weyerhauser Grade School, when the weather was warm, and the water was high enough, in a little pool on the downstream side, we stopped, peeled halfway down, and jumped into the pool.  Those were rare moments. I recall, on one of those rare times, thinking about how old I was, and calculating how many years it would be until the

"Oh, yes!" Phil used to tell his students. "A vegetarian diet is very good for you, especially if you take a little meat with it, now and then." I baked a vegetarian lasagna I had bought at Buon Giorno.  I saved the two-thirds left over.  Today I browned some hamburger, together with a shallot, adding a little tomato paste. It is amazing how much better vegetarian lasagna is if you take a little meat with it, now and then.

Our Very Own Governor, Tiny Tim Pawlenty, wants to be President. He is taking time off from the State of Minnesota and traveling all around this fine country, telling everybody what a fine country it is, and how it could be even finer if more people noticed him. He has made a reputation for himself as opposing taxes.  Just cut taxes!  Institute a few user fees, but cut taxes! Tiny is positioning himself to be the Clean Cut Leader for all those people who hate taxes, who think that taxes are unamerican.  Our Very Own Governor has vetoed every proposal to raise taxes because, while some government services are good, paying for them is not good.  The result is that it looks like Minnesota is going to be billions of dollars in debt very soon now.  At the same time, Our Tim is running on his record of cutting taxes.  He thinks it will make him presidential:  Tim Pawlenty, the guy who opposes taxes.  He isn't really opposed to health care for the poor, or aid to the pu

We had snow almost a month ago, but that time we all knew that patience would make it go away, and it did.  Now, though, earth has become gray, from street to sky, and the persistence of things north are moving in to stay. A small jay, not usually seen here, has come to scout the locations of our bird feeders, and to poke about in the evergreens, gauging their protection from the northwest wind. Audun sent a text message this morning, and I assume that he would laugh at our version of winter, but that is his problem: his house is located just north of the polar circle.  I picture him, parka-protected, ear flaps down, sitting in a lawn chair in his back yard, hunting rifle at hand, ready to shoot the first fat reindeer that wanders into town. When spring comes, in July, he will get up from his chair, and go inside where Jorun will have steaming soup ready. I engaged the hub locks on the front wheels of the pickup this morning.  It is simple things like that tha

If you give a young kid about a billion dollars just because he is handsome and very good at golf, he is likely to do something predictable.  And he did. Somebody explained to me that the life of a professional golfer is a terrible kind of existence:  on the road for months, staying in motels and hotels, hoping to be one of the few who make a lot of money, or even being one of the real money-makers living out of an expensive suitcase.  Tiger, of course, has made so much money, that he leases real houses.  Then Somebody explained to me that he would like, very much, to be good enough to be a golf pro.  Isn't it nice to know, that if you or I earned that kind of money, and were that handsome and famous, that we would be the first people in the whole world not to do something stupid? There is virtue in not being able to afford to scratch where it itches.

Al Franken ran against Norm Coleman for Senator from Minnesota. Three million votes were cast.  Franken won by about 300 votes. That is to say, for every 5000 votes Coleman received, Franken received 5001.  So now Al Franken is a United States Senator. Democracy--the idea that a majority is enough to determine what will be the case for everybody--is an article of faith. There is nothing in the entire universe that suggests that when 10,001 people vote, that what a simple majority want will be best. But that is our agreement.  (And in this case, of course, it is! See?  Wait until next time!  Every vote counts!  All that.) It wasn't easy, at the end of World War II, to convince the Japanese that they should adopt democratic governance. "Why," they asked, "should 49 of us have to do what only 51 people want to do?"  Right!  It is not written in the stars. It is purely and simply an agreement:  an article of faith that things will work out for the b

I change screensavers on whim. Right now it is a picture from National Geographic of three Siberian Tigers: a mother and two half-grown cubs. I fall in love with them every time I log on! There is something wonderful about a species that can love the survival of another that probably would kill it if ever they met, and both were hungry. Nothing has shaped the course of evolution that we can see, except chance and necessity.  Things just happen.  Things just work.  So here we are:  workable!  We are here! It is not to be debated.  Siberian Tigers are here, as are we. Siberian Tibers are barely here.  That might also be true for us, but we do have the advantage of accidental brain changes that make us really formidable contestants, except of course, for members of the US Senate.  Something has gone right, if we can love tigers, who would eat us if they needed to, and us, who would set our own ideals aside, if we needed to, and eat tigers, if we had to. There is

I am a battery-powered bobblehead! I have had two cordless drills:  one an 18V. Milwaukee for heavy duty jobs, and the other a 12V. Ryobi, which I bought for small screws and pilot holes. I lost the Milwaukee.  I must have put it on a bumper and driven off, just to test its balance and homing sense. So I have been trying to make do with the cheap Ryobi, and with an even older corded Milwaukee, which is powerful, but does not have an ounce of sense. Touching the trigger makes it jump, and it coasts until the screws are all the way through the board, or until I have bored a hole in my shoe tops. Money!  Money!  I know just the drill I want, but it costs too much, so I have been encouraging the Ryobi with frequent chargings.  I finally gave up on the two old batteries. They simply would no longer take charges. I bought a new battery; just one; you know, I really don't want to make it a full partner.  I plugged the new battery in, but the charger light did not c

I don't know who these Republicans are! Fifty-two percent of Republican voters believe that Acorn stole 9,500,000 votes to give Barack Obama the Presidency! Acorn registered poor voters, on the curious belief that poor people should be allowed to vote.  When Acorn discovered that some of its workers, who were being paid piecemeal, concocted goofy names they claim to have registered--none of whom every voted, of course:  it was just a way to get paid--Acorn reported the idiots.  The few fools reported the Dallas Cowboy football team, dead people, and Mickey Mouse. Maybe the Dallas Cowboy football team voted, once, in the normal Texas way, but it was more likely for steroid supplements than for Obama and health care. But a majority of Republican voters believe that Mickey Mouse and nine million cemetery residents put Barack Obama into office!  Yowser!  Who said that amazing religious belief is no longer to be found among us? Here in Minnesota, our Very Own Mic

"Remember it!  I still have it!  Right on my pillow! I love that Teddy Bear!"

John was a roofer.  Cancer finally got him. The retired pastor who visited him pinned John to his hospital pillow and asked him what he was going to say, at the Pearly Gates, about why they should let him in.  At the memorial service, he reported that John had said something about knowing that Jesus had died for his sins, for the Bible told him so. I think not.  I think John said, "This place needs a new roof!" The only reason I would let a roofer in.

Two or three years ago, Tony Alamo appeared at a local church.  He was going to tell us what the secret of life was, I think, but years earlier, John Fairweather had told me a story with a one-word answer:  it started with an "F".  So I didn't go to hear Tony Alamo.  Funny thing!  Tony Alamo was just sentenced to 175 years in prison for coercing five young girls to be his wives; really young girls! This morning I went to a memorial service.  A very old preacher concluded the service by reciting a patchwork quilt of Bible verses-- the kind that inspired us to recognize our wretchedness-- and then singing two verses of "Jesus loves me, this I know", in several keys, all at once. This afternoon Dan and Mari coerced me into seeing the movie, "A Serious Man", by the Coen brothers.  That was uplifting! So now I am settling down for some serious drinking. If the doorbell rings, I am not going to answer it.

I want to say something about John by first telling you something about two other people, whom John never knew, and in whose company John belongs. Bernadine was the proprietor of a bar in Decorah, Iowa, for fifty-five years.  She was the most outspoken, opinionated woman I ever met, and perhaps the strongest.  Her bar, the Highlife Inn, was anything but that.  If Bernadine thought you had had too much to drink, either before you came in, or while you were there, she threw you out.  "There's nothing in here for you!" she would say, and she said it again the next time you tried to come in through the door.  The little bar was spotless.  Families brought their children with them for lunch at Bernadine's, and let them crawl on the spotless floor.  Bernadine herself was elegant. When she needed a new dress, the shop owner brought dresses to her home to choose from.  Bernadine could have bought the shop, had she wanted to.  She did not drink beer, hers

Religions are, essentially, symbolic and ceremonial ways of depicting what an ideal society might be like.  Most religions have come down through history to us from the time when people found it easy to think of the universe as having gods and ghosts and demons and angels and imps. In order to actually perceive the universe that way today, one has to send one's brain on a vacation, and imagine a world with leprechauns and tooth fairies and fiery chariots; one with evils spells and miracles and hellfire and resurrections. We know the world does not work that way, but once people did, and most religions preserve the trappings. But if you set aside the furniture of worldviews that are millenia old, it is obvious that a religion is a way to think about what an ideal society might be, and to try to achieve it. Sometimes it is about absolute justice, or an absolute moral code.  Sometimes it is about achieving serenity and balance with everything else.  Sometimes it is

"I pretended it didn't matter, but inside, it was all I could do to hold myself together.  I really loved that convertible."

You know how it is when you sell a home: new people whom you do not like move in, change the colors, rip out the Canadian thistles, and announce that the basement was such a pit that they decided to clean it out with a front-loader and turn it into something that can be used. I hate it when that happens! It happened to us at the house we owned in Decorah, Iowa. We happened to be in town, recently, to help our grandchildren, Spencer and Sophie, celebrate their birthdays (and just incidentally to ascertain whether a lost Milwaukee drill had been left at our log house), and had a chance to look at the back of the house, where I had built a two-story solarium:  Solhuset, as Per named it. I took a picture.  See for yourself: Well, O.K., my daughter, Gail, and son-in-law, Marty, live there now.  And it is true that a water line burst up on the third floor, taking out old plastered walls all the way down. And they had to put the damned thing somewhere, un

I spent three years, off and on, building a boat (while moving, and having about six eye operations). The guy getting ready to help tie up is Daniel. It is an awful thing to spend that long on a project, and then to discover a more functional design.

Some of the windows in our house are being replaced; better to insulate us from airport flights and, at the same time, to provide better ultraviolet protection for art work.  Most of the cost is borne by the Airport Commission. The airport is visible from our home; down the hill to the Minnesota River and the large marshlands, and across, to Bloomington, where the Minneapolis/ St. Paul Airport actually is located.  Because the doors and whole wall will be open, we were asked to keep our cats penned up somewhere.  I jerry-rigged a barrier at the top of the stairs (a panel, two trailer ball inserts, a crowbar, and some other things) to keep the cats up where their food and litter box is.  Orphan would hide, anyway.  Annie wants to know what is going on, and resents being in jail.

Dick and Lynn Cheney own Picassos but won't hang them on their walls in order to protect their grandchildren from line drawings of nude women. I just mindlessly let the truck radio blather on about how troubling Halloween is for many christians because of something to do with the devil and kids in demonic costumes. That profoundly troubling, soul-searching debate came right after a discussion of how people who serve in restaurants really dislike the Sunday morning shift because church people are such lousy tippers. Anglicans, whose first grand leader was Henry VIII, who had six wives, two of whom he beheaded, two of whom he divorced, and two of whom somehow made it to glory without Henry shoving them into it, are hot and bothered about women priests and homosexuality; probably just glad that Henry preferred females.  The Pope has invited the dissident Anglicans to come home to Rome, wives and all, but they cannot become bishops if they are married. What a fi

     We Count Them All in Rings I am old growth; part of a woods, not a farm. In the woods, the old are not cut down mid-life, leaving flattened evidence of once a tree. In the woods, there are no horizontal abbreviations of life to stand on, and wonder how long it might have gone.  We crowd out, aspiring, and if our days are many, we spread out, reaching for each other. In the woods, there are no stumps. There are old trees, standing still, giving back what they have used, until wind and weakness take them down to earth; the fallen old. Having reached for the light, finally we fall to rest and make home for small things, for the mossy things.  In the old woods there are no stumps:  there are traces. I am old growth, like the old growth I knew when I was a boy, where the forest farmers had not yet come to make stubble of the woods, where the fallen old altered the way to go, and where we followed where deer had gone, where the woods allowed us to go. We did

We live in two neighborhoods. When first we moved to the Twin Cities, to South Minneapolis, which if it were not for the tangled designations the Mississippi River causes for us, would be Southeast Minneapolis. We found the Coffee Shop and stayed there. We made friends there. Dennis said our names louder even than the espresso machine, so people had to learn them. This morning Mari corrupted an article from the newspaper by putting Dennis onto a perfectly appropriate title:  he just celebrated his fortieth, and he is our community organizer.  Three years ago we moved across the Minnesota River, mostly because we wanted to live under an airport flight path, but we never left the Coffee Shop.  Saturdays, especially, the friends we made meet there, and tell lies about things we have done and said.  It is community.  Our community. Our work there is unfinished. We have to convince Mark that he does not need a motorcycle. Sloan is not yet a year old, and we

Dick and Lynn Cheney own original Picasso sketches. They don't hang them in their home because they do not want their grandchildren to see sketches of nudes.  Isn't that the same Dick Cheney who seems willing to go to war almost anywhere; who is giving Obama hell for not sending more troops to Afghanistan?  Does he plan to invade the Prado Museum, and the Louvre?  Does he take off his clothes when he showers? I did not read the article, recently, but I saw the subject, having to do with people's incredulity that a well-known Hollywood actress actually walked around nude, at home, before her young children.  She wasn't nude, was she, when she gave birth to them?  Now, I will admit to a certain amount of modesty, myself, but it is not because I think a naked body is sinful, or liable to cause excessive amounts of self-stimulation.  It is because we have a mirror, and I caught sight of myself just a year or two ago, and it was not a pretty sight.  I think

I know that Joel puts a paper bag over his head when he goes to the door on Halloween.  He says it scares the kids.  I know that his neighbors have asked him to put the paper bag on his head so that he will not scare the kids.  I did not know that witches have prayed over Halloween candy, putting a curse on it, which will doom all those kids, and Joel, too. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network posted a blog by Kimberly Daniels, recently, reportedly, which explained how nefarious, how damnably defarious, Halloween candy can be! You see, just opening the door allows the demons to implement the witches curses, or something sugar-coated, like that. Pat Robertson ran for President, you know, but we should all be grateful that he did not succeed because without him, and other concerned Christians like him, our kids might be dragging through life with curses on them.  All of my kids, whose ages now range from thirty to fifty-two, used to love to go trick-or

Go ahead!  Tell me you think she is as beautiful as John McCain thought she was! Then tell me how intelligent she is, and how much she knows about . . .  oh . . .  government! Then tell me . . .   no, don't bother!

Garrett Hardin said, "You cannot do only one thing." Everything is connected to something, like Pick-up-Sticks. A Pick-up-Stick lying off to the side is a Pick-up-Stick belonging to some other universe.  In our universe, everything touches other things; depends on other things. I am re-arranging the lower garage to make room for the snow blowers.  So far, I have sharpened the mower blades so they will be ready when Spring comes.  I raised the edges of the rubber mats under the cars in the garage, above, so that water will not drip down onto my tools, there where I intend to put them. I knew that the opened bag of lawn fertilizer would petrify over the Winter if I did not spread it, so I spread it. Mari had asked that I put a blind on the outside door on the lower floor, so when I went to Home Depot to get materials to raise the edges of the rubber mats, I had them cut a blind to fit, then I installed it.  I picked up a bucket in which to break up the lumps

I don't want to get too cheery about a Public Option in health care because every obscenely wealthy insurance company in the whole country knows that a commonly- available Public Option--that is to say, a government- enabled, non-profit plan--is the only way to squeeze their profits.  We can be quite sure, even if we do get a Public Option, that the for-profit insurance companies will maneuver to unload the tough cases onto the public. Even so, the pressure of competition will be there. What is just as intriguing is the maneuvering in Congress. Long ago and far away, almost at the periphery of what I remember, I read novels about medieval court intrigue. The novels were based on real, historical events.  They scared me half to death!  Nothing was as it seemed. Lady Flutterby put poison in her lover's wine.  Bishop Goodface hired mute monks to assassinate Princes, and King Lollipop skewered his wives in bed. I think Washington, D.C., is something like that, o

Shortly after the waters from the Great Flood receded, in about 1966, my family sold its birthright for a mess of suitcases, and followed me to Tübingen, Germany, where I intended to learn German, and to do graduate research for my dissertation. Among the people we met there was another American, who had found religion and became a Baptist minister, who found religion and became an Episcopal priest, who found religion and became a Catholic priest; a married, with-children, Catholic priest.  His parish was a cranky little congregation in a small town just outside of Tübingen.  Small glory, there! There were almost a dozen such married converts in Germany and the Netherlands.  We returned to Chicago after a year, and we heard that the often-converted American parish priest left town, too, with the Italian student at the University who played the organ in his parish (so to speak).  In the grand scheme of things, the incident left almost no scar. Today, Pope Benedict XVI