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.