SmokeSound

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 thing...

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, an...

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...

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 Minneso...

"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. ...

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.  S...

"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 ...

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...

     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 th...