SmokeSound

Her grief was twice-born. Her daughter's husband The father of her grandchildren Had been killed in Afghanistan. She looked at something far. Oh, god, she said. She does not earn enough For a family of three. Then the grief came again. She will have to get back Into the dating scene.  It's awful. Age, Tom Stoppard wrote, Is a high price to pay for maturity. Maturity is twice-born, too, of pain: The pain of achieving it, And the pain of having to deny it. Her daughter will play games again, Covering her desperation in smiles.  She will measure her empty space, Laughing at nothing to hide something, Trying not to remember integrity. She will die twice, too, Staring--first--without hope At her closet door.

"They have such good cooks and bakers here, it's terrible." And that is probably why no one goes there, anymore. It's too crowded. 

A headline caught my eye, recently:  "Consciousness and the End of the War Between Science and Religion".  I tried to read the article, but it wore me out.  I suppose one might call the difference between science and religion a "war", but that would be misleading.  The difference is ways of understanding the world, not a battlefield.  There are no territories or trade routes at stake; just minds.  Understanding.  Fistfights change few minds.  One cannot be forced to think in certain ways, although one can be trained.  Brainwashed.  Coerced by kind folk.  But even then, the truce is fragile.  Thought continues.  Given time to think, we usually follow our brains.  All religions that I can think of at the moment--my experience is almost entirely western--are built on a way of seeing the world.  Religious worlds are filled with invisible critters.  There are gods, angels, demons, imps, and sometimes sp...

There is a Lutheran pastor, here in the Twin Cities, who has been railing against gays.  As it turns out, he is gay.  There is neither virtue nor vice in being gay, or in being straight, just as there being neither virtue nor vice in being male or female, tall or short, brown-skinned or pink-skinned.  We find ourselves where we are; what we are.  There is scorn for being a hypocrite, though, even if being a hypocrite is just a way to hide.  What is worse is some of the other things the same bellicose Lutheran pastor says and believes.  When the organization of Lutherans the pastor used to belong to (he apparently opted out about nine years ago) voted to accept gay people to be pastors, and when a storm did some damage to a large Lutheran church of that synod, our hero announced that God was striking them down for their decision to accept gay and lesbian pastors.  I am still trying to understand how granting legal marital status to gays is a t...

Over there at the Solid Rock Non-denominational, Tending-toward-Immersion Church in Monroe, Ohio, Self-appointed Bishop Lawrence and his Ministerial Wife built a giant statue of part of Jesus.  They left off the whole lower half of Jesus because they wanted it to look as if Jesus were just coming up out of a water baptism, with his arms reaching up to heaven, signalling a touchdown.  That is why people called it, "Touchdown Jesus".  The top part of Jesus, above the Plimsoll Line was sixty-two feet tall.  Then a terrible thing happened!  God struck Jesus down with a bolt of lightning and a terrible fire from heaven, burning Jesus right down to the water line.  There was, of course, no one else to blame.  The Good Bishop and His Ministerial Wife had did their best and finest.  People stopped their cars and came to admire the touchdown before it was torched down by the Almighty.  It brought to mind the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755; anothe...

I started to walk around Lake Nokomis.  I wanted to see, close-up, the deer that has been sighted on the east side.  It has been assembled from motorcycle parts  and has, appropriately, a small granite stone for a brain.  But then it started to rain; not hard, but enough to allow me to calculate the shortest way back to the pickup.  I reversed direction and, since it was early, drove ten minutes to the Mall of America, where I walk when the weather is bad.  There are no Motorcycle Deer at the Mall, but there is a lot of remodeling, and someone needs to watch it.  I know only one person, by name, at the Mall:  Chuck.  We met because Chuck, who walks only far enough to get to a gathering of coffee friends, persistently asked me about my pickups; both the old one and the newer one.  Chuck is subtle, and always slips in a good word about going to church.  He was especially subtle this morning. "I know why you bought that big pickup...

O.K.!  Fair enough! Where are we wasting our tax dollars? On two wars.

It is a fine madhouse we live in! The mindless hatred of taxes is a religion.  The notion that privately-owned business can do no evil, and that government can do no good, is credal.  So let us pretend. Let us pretend that we could, indeed, cut our tax rates in half.  There would be half as much money for public services: half as much for Social Security payments, half as much for schools, half as much for public parks, and fire departments, and police protection, and the military, and health care and bridges and pothole repair and interstate highways and air traffic control and scientific research. At the same time, there would be more poverty for seniors, more unemployment, more untreated health problems, more uncontrolled crime, and more runaway fires down the block. There would be fewer customers in the stores, lower prices for agricultural output, fewer cars sold, less eating out, more bankruptcies, more squatters, and sewage treatment ...

It is not only love that is lovelier the second time around.  Almost everything is.  I have just finished installing a tonneau cover on my pickup.  Memory may be fading, at this ripe time of my life, but I have replenished my vocabulary, doing everything wrong the first time.  Or is not wrong, by solving puzzles for which there were no clues.  The installation manual had black and white photos taken in broad delight by a child with a cell-phone.  Had I not been intent on saving money, I could have paid twice as much for the cover, and had it installed for $25.  I did it myself, and even if my time--in retirement--is discounted, I could easily make a living installing those tonneaus for $1327. each.  It is for good and satisfying reason that, when I built a boat recently, we named it, "Second Mate".  It was not our first time, nor our first boat.  It only took three years, six eye operations, two house moves, and a big argument a...

Outside our kitchen window, we have a bird feeder hanging high in the air in order to frustrate the red squirrel who manages to squeeze himself through the outside screen, in order to reach the feeding tube in the center.  Last week we saw that the feeder was stuffed with twigs.  "Damn tht little bugger!", I thought, "He found a way!"  We emptied the twigs. Then the next morning, we saw a small bird rebuilding her intended nest.  "This," she was humming to herself, "is an ideal location.  Good food, a tight roof, and safe from raccoons."  We condeded to her, and wish her well.

I do not know if the month of June has its Ides, but if it does--and even if it does not--we are just past the middle of the month.  Events and weather beyond our control have made it impossible to get to our log house in Northeast Iowa, not far from where we used to live.  Over the years, we have pieced together about seven acres of the most useless, and perhaps therefore, a most lovely piece of hillside and gully, tree and grassland.  Because it is a hillside, the two-story log house is entered on the second story, with what used to be the flat-land, first-story now our downstairs.  Everything has been "placed" at Saetre.  Everything has to fit the hillside and the trees.  What used to be a small knoll of a rocky field, now is perpetual grass, which the trees eyes greedily, trying to move in.  Canadian thistles leapfrog Minnesota to encamp where they are safest from herbicides.  Saetre is a contrast of the cultivated with the wild:  that ...

I have a fine pair of lightweight eyeglasses, old enough to qualify as a family heirloom. They do not brutalize the bridge of my nose, as all earlier glasses did, causing me to become a nose-massager, as if pondering great ideas. Unfortunately, they rest close enough to my eyes so that my eyelashes smear oil on the inner side.  After a while, the Milky Way turns milky, and most of what I see is eyelash smear. The long view is denied me.  I am not alone. People demand that the Border Patrol stop the smuggling of drugs into the country; they do not admit who the paying customers are. My neighbor says we have to stop Mexicans from coming up here for work for cheap wages: he doesn't ask who it is who wants to hire them. Baby boomers are retiring, without young workers to work and pay taxes, but they don't want to allow young, hard-working immigrants into the country. People hate paying taxes, because government is evil and awful, and then complain that th...

Ah!  Civilization is hard gained!  Humanity is an accomplishment. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom I once read for the fascination of the breadth of his vision--a task not easily accomplished-- said that what was happening to us as a human species, was that we were looking up at and seeing ourselves come over the horizon.  Human beings were spreading everywhere, and we looked like invaders to ourselves.  Right now, in Uzbekistan, one of those far places the Soviet Union once held together with sheer muscle-power, there are human beings killing other human beings because they are not precisely the kind of human beings we are, or think we are.  Except that they are.  The most important thing that has happened to me in my lifetime-- now a long one--is that I grew up, as we all do, thinking of myself as a Something Human Being.  In my case, I was an immigrant Norwegian Human Being.  My great-grandparents--some of them-- were immigran...

The Tea Party is sponsored by Dick Armey and his corporate backers.  It is an attempt to rally the disaffected right wing to support what corporations want:  as little government control as possible, low taxes on the rich and sales taxes on ordinary people, no Social Security, private health care for those who can afford it, free oil for British Petroleum and Exxon and Shell, and so forth.  They support what the fools who come to rallies want because they don't care about those things:  guns everywhere, blind patriotism, Christian nation slogans, White America, and fear of people with brown skin, and all that crap.  It is about what corporations want, and slogans that cost them nothing.  The Tea Party isn't a populist uprising.  It is a carefully manipulated push by corporate power to get what corporations want.  They use the fear and insecurity of the people with signs and stupid slogans about Obama being a Nazi, or being born in Kenya, immigra...

I don't know what consciousness is, or what self-consciousness is. It is not evident that we have always been self-conscious.  Some scholars think it was hard work for human beings to learn to differentiate themselves from the herd, or school; that individual responsibility is a hard-gained attribute.  We give ourselves easily to authority:  parents, kings, community, race, religion, easily accept the wisdom of the pack, or leader.  We are quick to cite authority.  We want something outside ourselves to lean on, to blame, to decide the hard choices.  In the military, a good part of the training is to bring recruits to the point where they will not think for themselves, but will react, first, to orders, for the good of the whole group. If the Lieutenant says, "Charge!", you charge.  Hesitating, debating the issue for yourself, will result in disaster.  Religions--western religions, at least--are built around the belief that what i...

Greensburg is somewhere in Kansas, and somewhere in Greensburg, there is a very large, scary, hand-dug well, thirty-two feet in diameter, and 109 feet deep.  The Santa Fe and Rock Island Railroads dug it in 1887 to get water for their trains.  It was either to dig a big well, or wait for rain from heaven.  It was cheaper to dig the well, even at a cost of $45,000.  There is a bigger well in Orvieto, Italy; ten feet wider, and almost twice as deep, and 360 years older.   It does not count.  You can take a mule down that well.  It is Sue Lowden, the Chicken Lady in Nevada, who made me think of the well.  She, of course, is the lady who suggested that we have to think creatively about how to provide health care for people who cannot afford it.  She suggested that once people took a chicken to the doctor, in payment.  "You know," she said:  "that sort of thing".  Unfortunately, the Chicken Lady seems not to have won t...

I built a boat just to see if I could.  I could.  It has nothing to do with having a boat for a decoration.  At my "certain stage of life" (Old Turkey, ain't he?) decorations are like sugar roses on dry rye bread.  I built it because the alternative was senility and calcification. Yesterday, after a winter of storage-shed isolation, I opened the cabin and uncovered the little diesel engine. The sensor that reports oil pressure to the dashboard needed replacing.  Might as well replace the oil filter, too! That is why I spent a good share of yesterday lying on my side alongside the engine with metric wrenches like Pick-Up-Sticks alongside, trying for force my fingers to do what had to be done, maintaining my flexibility by forgetting that what I really needed was in the garage. "This," I thought, "is a seriously ludicrous situation! What am I doing here, at this age, lying on my side in the bottom of a boat, pretending to be a diesel mechan...

Never one to be hasty, today I scrubbed last summer's scum off our boat, Second Mate.  The batteries have held their charge over an unheated Minnesota winter--thanks to their gel design--so after I make a couple of mechanical repairs I will rig up an artificial lake in a trash can--water for cooling--and try to start the motor.  Maybe tomorrow.  Today I have ribs to grill:  from a small hog of no close acquaintance.  "You are retired, aren't you?", people politely ask.  I know, as do they, that I look like I retired in 1949.  I do not fault them for their lame attempts to treat the elderly with kindness.  Beyond the courtesy, what they really want to know is whether I do anything, anymore, in my dotage.  They do not understand what it means to have a house that is intent on wearing out before I do, nor a cabin in the woods in Iowa that must brace itself against the sea of grass and invasion of Chinese Elms, intent on reclaiming the earth be...

I shall teach you a lesson: It is not pronounced, "Orreh- gone ". It is pronounced, "Orreh- gun ". Why? Because the people who live in Missouri, who cannot leave Missouri, pronounce it "Miz-oo-ruh", not "Miz-oo-ree". (I am not sure, but I do not believe that the "Arr-KAN-suz River" runs though Miz-oo-ruh".  Probably through "ARR-kan-saw".) It is enough to drive a native Warr-shingtonian nearly mad. Up around Tacoma, we "warshed arr close".  If absolutely necessary. When we were elegant, we went to the "grosh-ree", not the store. When first I moved to Calih-fornya--which I later had to pronounce-- Schwarzenegger-like--"Calee-fornya" (and I think he is right!), I discovered salads, and thought that I had an accent.  Since then, I have discovered that everybody has an accent, except me. I pronounce, "Schwarzenegger", "Arn-old". The Oregonians who live ...

While in Portland, Oregon, we visited the home of the man who was owed back-wages by the founder of The Oregonian newspaper, and who--early on-was given the newspaper to cover the salary.  It became an institution, and a fine house up on top of a hill overlooking the town:  the Pittock Mansion.  It is one of America's smaller castles.  Much is not going to be said about the Pittock house, except that it has a fine kitchen stove!  Everything else is simply decoration!  Oh, to have a place for such a stove!  And a cook and staff to keep it clean, and to stand ready to sweat and coax the old beast to roast another venison haunch and a bunch of chestnuts!   There is a tiny gas burner to warm sauces, gently, perfectly, probably.  Everything that glitters is not gold.  Some of it is porcelain and nickel polish. 

Our children come in several varieties, as all of us do.  We are genetically related to some of them, by one or the other of us.  The genes of some are several million years away.  We are genetically related to our kids in about the same way Mari and I are related:  by choice, chance, accident, or design.  It is the best of all possible worlds.  This last week, Dan graduated from medical school, and was given the official title of "One of the Guys who gets to Wear a Long White Coat (OotGwgtWaLWC).  Nothing else matters very much.  The Medical Profession has a thing about wearing discarded clergy albs.  It is their problem.  We flew out to Portland, Oregon, with Steve (Dan's dad) and Lindy (Dan's stepmother).  I am the other step.  We had thought it would be sweeping through town, wearing our albs, laughing our way from restaurant to event and back though the Japanese Garden, ignoring the rain, laughing, looking for the wine ...