Skip to main content

The Light of Sun on Snow

Minnesota is a remarkably sunny place, even in the winter.  However, these last few days, we have had foggy weather, as if we had caught a cold.  In fact, I, if not the whole state, have had a cold.  I think I caught it in Arizona, on a recent visit.  I have become acutely aware of what a sore diaphagm is, and have taken to hugging myself as I cough.  It does not work.

Minnesota and I are fog-bound. 


I was born fog-bound.  I was born in Tacoma.  We lived twenty miles south of Puget Sound, so a visit to Tacoma required a drive, and a descent on Pacific Avenue to the level of the Sound, which caused one to realize, even without having read it, that Dante was wrong about the descent into Hades.  It is not through fire, down to ice:  it is fog all the way!  I remember walking in front of a car, with a flashlight, trying to find lane markers. 

(I can also recall packing our whole neighborhood basketball team into a Ford coupe, and driving down Pacific Avenue to play games in Tacoma; a Ford coupe with almost no brakes, requiring that we put the car in reverse on the top of the hill, and ride the clutch all the way down.  We were not in a state of fog:  we were in a suicidal state.  Sixteen-year-olds should not be permitted to drive; not even bicycles!)

This fog, while hiding the river floor and the cities beyond, is a mere gauze applied to a cold cut:  snow below, fog beyond. 

We know cold and snow.  Fog allows us to stay home on Sunday morning, coffee in hand, three newspapers around, and pretend that we have the resolve and character, not only to meet these conditions, but to endure them with good humor. 

We do not know how Tacomans endure, without the light of sun on snow.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more