SmokeSound

I have a boat and a lawn mower. The lawn mower is used, but I absolutely need one. The boat is fairly new. I built it myself. It is optional. Nobody really gives a damn whether I have a boat, or not. They really do care that I mow my lawn because, if I don't, the neighborhood starts to go to hell, and if that happens, their well-being is at stake. In our Declaration of Independence, we affirm that there is a kind of equality among us, that we have certain unquestionable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the Preamble to the Constitution of our nation, we state that we intend to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for a common defense, promote the general welfare of all of us, and secure liberty. Life. Liberty. A chance for happiness. A common cause. Justice. A peaceful life. A secure life. Our general well-being. Freedom. That is what we say our nation is about. Whether I have a boat or...

Once upon a wondrous time, I taught ethics in a college. Among the series of 10-20 page papers required, I received a paper on Midwifery. Yowzer, I thought! Where did this come from? It was a fine paper, filled with facts and an understanding of the process of birthing that caught my attention. The Biology Department, which produced most of the pre-med students, did not recognize the name. Neither did the Nursing Department. Whoa! Whoa!, I thought. How did this happen? I wrote a ten question true-false exam based on the major points in the paper, including the name of it; nothing tricky, just the main arguments of the paper. I asked the student to take a few minutes after the next class and take the exam. He got one question right: the name of the paper. “We have a problem, here,” I suggested. “I guess we do,” he hesitated. He had bought the paper online. He had not even read it. He was a . . . oh, I guess I should not tell you his major. The kid made a career for himself, start...

Have you ever seen Colin Powell’s birth certificate? Well? Do you believe, as some of us do, that Rush Limbaugh never had a mother? I know, as a heartfelt, if not fact-filled, fact, that Richard Nixon was a born-again Quaker! He really believed something, probably. Do you not have to admire conspiracy theorists? Here is how it goes: Barack Obama’s daddy, who had very dark skin, conspired, when Barack was born, to have a Hawaiian newspaper report that Barack was born in Hawaii, and somehow got a birth certificate that said the same thing, except that Barack really wasn’t born in Hawaii: he was born in Bulgaria! Then, knowing exactly how things would turn out, when Barack Obama was elected President, last November, people like us would never think that Barack really wasn’t American, but a Bulgarian! At the same time, instead of having to run for the presidency against someone who might be a viable candidate, Barack Obama’s daddy, who had died a long time ago in a car accident probabl...

There is something silly about wiring an outhouse for electricity. Old enough to have grown up with outhouses, I find the exercise absurd, but I am making a mental list of the materials I will need, including a gas mask. Our log house, in Iowa, is a two-story building, set down into a hillside. The main entry is on the upper floor, and a long walkway connects to the top floor of the outhouse, which itself has two floors. Suffice it to say that a long plastic water-main tube reaches down to a chamber below the ground-floor level of the elegant facility. It has been my intention to carve on a plaque the formula for calculating the acceleration of falling objects through the atmosphere, next to a modest little stopwatch, just to give the customers something to keep them interested; something like deriving the distance traveled, but sheer sloth has made the project wait. Life in the country moves slower. Some day, if I live longer than Methusela, I will convert the upper floor of that igno...

One house ago, when preparing to move to St. Paul where Mari had taken a job at the University of St. Thomas (The university, not the island!), during a seller's market, I began to understand that we had an aesthetic measuring stick: it was the farm house Mari grew up in, near Lake Mills, Iowa. I am not sure what the style is called; Craftsman, perhaps. It had to do with a fireplace-like mantle, the kind of woodwork, and maybe even the size and layout of the rooms; two-story, a basement, built a long time ago. Last night, we drove to Lake Mills, where Mari and about half of her high school graduating class met for a reunion,. Lake Mills was probably once a thriving little agricultural town. Today it is hanging on as a town. The farmland around the town was once a lake. Today it is rich, rich farm land, drained. There is a Country Club, and a casino out at Interstate 35. As one of the spouses, I could see that the reunion was a homecoming. Lake Mills, and the schoolbus-net of land...

Hearing, by a fetus, apparently starts by the 8th month of pregnancy. Some scientists surmise that the mother’s voice may have something to do with a child’s later sense for language; maybe. Other people play Mozart, loud, hoping that the little tad will prefer it to acid rock, or rap music. A few entrepreneurs have even wondered if there might be a market for a “Fetal University”, a device that could be strapped, something like an electronic bumper, out in front of pregnant women, reciting the Periodic Table, conversing in French, or playing Schubert. Joel, the Nokomis Beach Coffee Café customer in charge of Parking and Random Thought, says he realized when he read about these things that his mother—who had a house full of kids—ran the vacuum cleaner a lot, and that explained why he so often found himself snuggling up to the vacuum in the same way that more normal children snuggled with the dog. As any normal person would do, I immediately wondered what Sarah Palin heard when her moth...

I hear always the sea, never far, never still in my mind. A thousand miles of grass and stone prohibit my return; deep grass, dry grass and stone. My conch-shell mind torments me with rhythms of the sea; with whispered memories of our beginnings in the sea; the warm red tide within me imitates every surge of salty sea; a memory of our birth. We climbed these hills, these dry, hard hills; children at play following curiosity and grass. I know where these waters and this life must go.

Lake Superior could contain all the other Great Lakes plus three more the size of Lake Erie. That is where we went with our boat. . Lake Superior is about the same size as Maine, or Indiana, or Iceland. It is bigger than the Edmund Fitzgerald. Or Second Mate. Most of the lakes in this Land of 10,000 lakes are about the size of your Granddad's farm, but shallower. Wikipedia sanguinely announces that the size of Lake Superior means that it has the same kind of behavior as the Atlantic off Nova Scotia. Oh, . . . boy! It wasn't like that when we were there. The sky was a comfortably soft blue, and the water was a deep, deep blue. We arranged for a slip at the Yacht Club on Madeline Island because the weather report, which originally had predicted as modest thunderstorm earlier in the day, said it would come at night. Things seemed to scatter around us, and in the morning we set out for Stockton Island, northeast of Madeline, where there was a pier and a Ranger Station. The Ranger S...

Let us imagine that, since the founding of the nation, the Supreme Court had been almost exclusively represented by female Latin judges, with possibly only two white male members in recent years. Let us imagine that the President of the United States had decided to appoint a white male judge to the Court and, in explaining why a white male on the Court might be a good thing, the nominee had said that he hoped that a wise male judge might make better decisions than a female Latin judge without his experience as a white male. How many frustrated white male judges do we need, anyway? It is quite likely that, under those circumstances, the white male nominee would quickly learn how to duck.

Divided By Eleven When I Was Eleven I was eleven, when last I saw Henrik Olson Little Grandpa Smaller like Little Grandma Than the next generation that followed them I was eleven, when last anyone saw Henrik Olson Because he died in his bed in the little house Behind the big house Not very big, either I see him only at the corner of my eye I was eleven And nothing remains of what I saw then Plainly, because of years As when someone came to say So I should not understand That Little Grandpa was in his bed Ever so quietly When he was eighty-six In from the corner of my eye I see two things That have never faded Henrik and Anna walking From the little house to the big one Talking together about something I did not know And could not understand With words they had carried From Norway When they came with their daughter Olina And her daughter Magna To make a sand and peat life In the woods of Washington And Henrik, in the summer On the long peat fi...