SmokeSound

Long ago, not far away, we dreamed a dream. Almost thirty years ago, Mari and I talked our way up to the third floor of Pracna's, a part of the dining saloon no longer used, where our table looked over the Mississippi toward downtown Minneapolis, and drank margueritas from pint Mason jars:  it was that time in our culture. Pracna's isn't a very elegant saloon, even yet; worn and dark and hopelessly narrow.  The dining room expansion to the side is uninvitingly sterile.  But every once in a pleasant while, we return to Pracna's to celebrate something about what a good thing we did in the early 80s. Yesterday it was a report from a radiologist that said Mari's regular examination for breast cancer was negative. Pracna's first opened in 1890, where it still stands. In 1892, Republicans re-nominated for the Presidency in a great hall nearby, and Pracna's helped them celebrate. He lost to Grover Cleveland:  worth drinking to, also! Frank Prac...

John told us this morning at coffee that Judgment Day would occur on May 21, 2011.  He suggested-- and we all agreed--that on that day, we should invite friends to join us for coffee on the occasion.  This is an invitation! I do not choose to mention John's last name, because if people learned that his name is Teisberg, he would probably be overwhelmed with requests to join us at coffee that day, and The Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe is not large. May 21, 2011 is a Saturday, and many of you will not be at work, and none of us will have jobs ever after, so we do expect a fair and hearty gathering on that day. All questions about savings and retirement accounts will be subjects of good humor after May 21. The source of our confidence for this impending holiday is a radio ministry with a web site named "familyradio.com". You will find amazing offers to save your soul on that site, and perhaps even a chance to enhance their ministry. As it happens, May 21, 2...

When Dylan Thomas was "young and easy under the apple boughs about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green," I was younger, and probably not as easy, under other apple boughs. Dylan Thomas was born not long before my uncle, Harold, was born, who just celebrated his 95th birthday.  In years, Harold's life  more than twice extends beyond the uneasy life of Dylan Thomas. There is great advantage in living long, and remembering.   I have been listening to people tangle themselves, most unpoetically, in trying to explain how absolutely fair and open-minded they are, affirming freedom of religion and ethnic neutrality, and then trying to find an acceptable way to say they absolutely oppose building a community center for Muslims, there where Muslims have lived for longer than Dylan Thomas lived, because it is an offense to their fair and balanced attitude toward all religions. I recall, suddenly, painfully, the argument I heard often when  I was young and e...

We live in a time of great faith in stupid things. All of us have heard that a quarter of all Americans do not believe that Barack Obama is a Christian, but that he is a Muslim, in spite of every bit of evidence to the contrary; plain, lifelong evidence and affirmation. Here are a few other things that at least 20% of Americans believe, and do, or cannot do: They cannot identify the U.S. on a map. They believe witches are real, that the sun revolves around the earth, in alien abductions, and that the apocalypse will happen within their lifetimes. O.K.  Look around in your house! If there are five of you, four of you live with an idiot. Well, maybe it doesn't work quite like that: that is like saying that, since half of all marriages end in divorce, either you or your spouse will divorce. But you get the idea.  Those beliefs, held by 20%, are derived from major, professional surveys. Ignorance is running down our streets; unbelievable, persistent, mind...

"Tea Party, anyone?" Not just anyone.  Oil billionaires. People like David and Charles Koch. Probably $100 million dollars worth of Tea Party support. Free enterprise.  No environmental regulations. Reduced support for the poor and unemployed. Opposition to almost anything Obama does. You know!  The kind of things people wearing those tea bags on their heads stand for. The Tea Party:  a grass-roots movement bankrolled by grass-roots oil billionaires, and courted by right-wing Republicans.

My brother, Stan, and our uncle, Harold, were born precisely thirty years apart. They celebrate their birthdays together; most recently, their 160 birthdays. Just to save you from all the trigonometry and triangulation, Harold is 95. Harold's drivers license expired, so he took the renewal test. His eyesight was fine, but then they asked what medications he was taking. He hesitated, fumbling for an answer. "What medications?" she insisted. "I don't take medications!" Harold replied. "None!  That's how many!  None!" "OK," she told Harold.  "Your next renewal will be in five years." I had to explain to Harold that you cannot get to 100 without a drivers license, but that it was worth the hassle. Harold and Ruth are to wonder at. Ruth's mother lived to be 107, but she had to be hospitalized for several days toward the end. She was probably weakened by the medications Harold doesn't take. Har...

We bought a filing cabinet at an office supply store today. It is one of those secular office supply stores that is open on Sundays. A store like that could never become our Official National Office Supply Store. In a crisis, we rename French Fries, and we certainly don't allow no secular filing cabinets. While waiting, I watched a mother and her daughter go through the registry line. "If that young girl want to know what she is going to look like twenty-five years from now," I thought, "she should look at her mother." Something in that young girl's construction plans came through, remarkably unscathed, from her mother. The Rev. Franklin Graham is the Rev. Billy Graham's son. Billy was "the Pastor to Presidents". Franklin is Our National Seed Saver. He told John King, at CNN: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is pas...

I love that woman! The Angle of God, Sharron, is a woman of conviction! As you know, God himself picked Sharron to run against Harry Reid, out in Nevada. Jesus helped her with the re-design of her web site. Harry doesn't have a chance, unless there is more sin in Sin City than God and his Angle have estimated. Now we have learned that The Angle of God once participated in a protest against Tonopah High School's football team.  The Muckers--that's the football team-- whose win-loss record was something of an embarrassment, thought, quite logically and scientifically, that changing the colors of their jerseys might reverse their fortunes. So away with the old red and white!  They chose black! Evil is as evil looks! Bill Roberts, writing for the Pahrump Valley Times-- that's the paper that covers the Muckers-- . . . .  (Sorry!) We have to pause here for a moment and wonder what the Tonopah High School cheers were like: "Go, you Muckers!",...

After Brett Favre (pronounced "Farrvv":   Sorry!) retired from the Green Bay Packers team, because he was almost forty, and couldn't make up his mind whether it was time to retire (The Packers helped him decide), the Minnesota Vikings hired him to be their quarterback.  What a year he had! Even Favre says it was his best year, ever! We have just gone through another off-season of maddening speculation about whether Brett wanted to play another year, and get the stuffing shoulder-punched out of him, again.  He is back! I listened to his news conference. It was a most interesting muddle in a huddle. When asked a question, Favre started talking, all around the subject, rather like a rag picker pulling scraps of things into a heap. Brett Favre is not a lineal thinker. While attending to the task of answering a question, he mentioned everything he noticed around the subject. Finally, not because he was finished--there were still other factors he noticed, ...

Once upon a medieval adventure, I was a clergyman. How that happened is complex.  I believed, early on, that the task of a pastor was to interpret what happened, a couple of thousand years ago, into terms that made sense to someone living in the 20th century, it being the 20th century. After all, to take the religious stories literally would demand that one take the miracles literally, for instance, that people could rise from the dead, or fly off into heaven, or walk on water.  No one, I thought, could take that literally. I was wrong. While I was trying to talk about what it meant for Joseph to wrestle with God all night about his devious life, many of the parishioners wondered why God did not pin Joseph right away.  Or while I was trying to understand what those first, discouraged followers of Jesus were thinking after he had been killed, and how they came to believe that his death was not the end of everything they believed, and how resurrecti...

His name is Joseph Terry. He is my eye doctor, who has excavated my right eye six or seven times (I have lost count). He told me, just this morning, that I can hold my head up, again. He is the same guy who told me, six or seven times, earlier, that I should assume the shape of a pretzel, and position an air or silicone bubble just so, something like a compress, to allow my pieces to re-knit. "Stay upright, now, as much as you can", he said.  "The bubble should be at the top." He is lending credence to what many have long whispered to each other regarding the air in my head.  No matter! I can give credence to the fact that nothing can induce old age faster than being confined to lying still. I have come this close to decrepitude, and Joseph Terry saved my life by putting the air in my head to good use!

When I was a mere tad, surrounded by Protestants, people used to joke, unconvincingly, about Catholics who had guns stored in their basements.  Catholics, you see, were beholden to the Pope, who was worse than Italian, having his own state:  The Vatican. We all knew that, in a pinch, or panic, the allegiance of Catholics was more to their church than to USA. "How," people used to say to convince themselves, "can people have allegiance to two nations?" We all knew the answer to that:  we weren't stupid! In 1960, I watched my father,who had an admirable distrust of Catholics, almost as strong as his dislike for everything else except snus and pickled herring, go through a personal civil war, having to choose between a Catholic and a Republican for the Presidency. I don't know who he finally voted for:  he was principled to the core when his prejudices were at stake. We have since learned that it was not the Catholics who had guns in their ...

I have been sitting here, looking aslant at the monitor, not so much because it is crooked, but because I am.  I have had another eye operation. I think it is about number six. The same eye.  Same problem.  Torn retina.  The solution has become this: tack those scar tissues to each other, and glue them back into place! Pump in gas to hold them there! Spend a week holding your head so the gas can do its work! Then, don't get on an airplane for two months!  The gas will expand! After a few days of learning to be a pretzel, I would promise to travel by wheelbarrow! If it makes sense to you, you can attribute my opinions to the angle of the gas in my eye. This is not a complaint. My complaint will come when I am stone cold.  This is in praise of health care. For everybody.

Nations are our largest, stable social structures.  We have formed empires, and alliances, but (so far, at least) all of them have unraveled back to nations.  It isn't quite that simple, of course.  Some nations are huge and diverse, and some are small and fragile, but when we think of our allegiences, we think of "nation" more than--let us say--the European Economic Union, or than the United Nations.  To become a stable nation, there has to be a lot in common.  Nations are of many kinds.  Sometimes ethnic groups are the creators of states.  What probably began as very small family groups, usually expand to extended families, or clans, or tribes, which recognize that they have merged genetics at their hearts.  They are Cherokee, or Germanic, or Swedish, or English.  Even when they are that large, it has been common to extend the nation's ties by strategic marriages, a signal of the power of that identity.  "We are not like other p...

Religions are not the sources of virtue and ethical conduct. Religions, all religions, adopt what is around them; good and evil. To begin somewhere in the middle of the story, Christianity began as a sect of Judaism.  Jesus was a Jew, as were almost all of his earliers followers.  Most of the ethics of Christians were Jewish.  And where did the Jews find their value systems? From being an exiled people, in Egypt, and in what is now Iraq. They were a desert people, despising pork, afraid of the sea, reading messages in mountain storms, defending their particular god, or gods, sticking together, afraid of strangers, protecting their families, keeping women in their places.  When Christianity spread, it took on the character of the places and people and ethics of the people it spread to. The Christians of northern Africa are hardly recognizable to Christians from Constantinople or Russia or Rome. When St. Paul followed Jewish settlements into what is no...

What are we going to do about losing the English language? All over the world, people who talk other languages, as well, are learning English and making it their own!  It isn't just overseas that the threat of multilingualism is happening. Oh, no!  Right here in the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free people who want to become part of what we are, to become Americans, take jobs nobody else wants, and learn English. At first, naturally, things go a little slowly, and sometimes, as was the case with my own ancestors, they were too old ever to learn English very well, but they managed to do well enough, and never, ever, went back to the Old Country to stay. And it is true that the kids of those newer immigrants learn English as well, and often better, than the people who grew up here but who did not really take well to gerunds and adjectives and adverbs-- people like my own favorite, Bert Blyleven, an announcer for the Twins--but all of that asi...

It is election time.  Here, in Minnesota, our primaries are tomorrow.  It is time for Democrats to be Democrats, to exercise their skewed Second Amendment rights, bring out Ol' Betsy and shoot themselves in the foot!  Nobody is better than Democrats at starting a civil war.  They are to be counted on to take aim at each other.  For reasons not even a drill sergeant could explain, when Democrats take aim at each other, they rarely miss.  Democrats are uncomfortable taking aim at Republicans, so when Republicans elect an amiable dolt to office, Democrats tend to like to want to support him.  "O.K., the war is an awful mistake, and gutting the middle class is lamentable, and putting enormous power in the hands of financial charlatans is criminal, but he is our president!"  But now the Democrats are in the majority, and it makes them uneasy.  It is time to start distancing themselves from the president.  Well, look at what Obama has do...

They were members of the "German Lutheran Church" in Postville. The Königs.  Or, if you do not have a German "ö" at hand, Koenig. As second and third generation Americans, they had learned to say, "Kay-nig".  It pained my immigrant ear to say it. During World War I, the anger against Germans, even in Postville, Iowa, was so strong that they changed their name. King.  They said their name was King.  And after the war, after people realized the King's sons had fought in the war, too, on our side, against Germany, they changed their names again. Today there are Koenigs, again, in Postville, Iowa. Today, the Governor of Minnesota, Tiny Tim Pawlenty, whom everyone knows is a devout and good-looking church member in one of those mini-mega-churches, is arguing that American Muslims in New York City should not be allowed to build a Mosque two or three blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood, where some of the members of the Mosque have ...

Too many large corporations have become nothing more than cash cows to be milked by management.  When, for instance, one person retires from a health care organization with $1.7 billion dollars, it is obvious that his management was not about providing health insurance, but about amassing monstrous personal wealth.  Nobody is worth 1.7 billion dollars.  We used to speak of a ratio of income between a factory-floor worker, and top management.  We had become used to thinking that if a worker earned $40,000. a year, perhaps the CEO might be worth--let us say--ten times that:  $400,000.  In some countries, even six times an average worker's salary is considered excessive.  We have gotten to the place at which the ratio are themselves so large that they can scarcely be comprehended.  It is worse than that.  It is that management siphons off hundreds of millions a year, and ordinary workers are being laid off, or having their wages cut.  W...

Sharron, The Angle of God, who told her supporters that God is behind her candidacy which, while it may not provide much cash, certainly has a certain caché to it, now says that Barack Obama and Harry Reid (whose Senate seat she wants), and Nancy Pelosi are violating the First Commandment by supporting entitlement programs.  They--get this straight-- are trying to make our government God!   She said, "We're supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for (sic) our government."  I wish she were right.  We could fire police and firemen, and the Army and Navy, too, and quit our jobs, I guess, if God were on the job, providing protection and provisions and daily bread.  As you know, the Angle of God is opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, even when God is not on the job providing protection and provisions and daily bread. The Angle has a brand new communications director, and he...

Oh, damn, damn! I have been trying not to come to some conclusions, not because they do not make sense, but because they seem arrogant.  Let me put some things together. Was it William Stern, or Alfred Binet, or Louisiana Beignet-- somebody or thing like that--who created a scale in which 100 represented a level of intelligence in which half of the population was less intelligent, and half more intelligent.  Most of us hover around 100.  Truman Capote flew in the intelligence atmosphere.  Everybody believes he or she has relatives who trudge along at the other end of the line.  What is the moral to this fascinating story? Some people are smarter, some dumber, than others. I find things more easily than Mari does. I think the reason is that spatial, not temporal, things come easily to me.  Mari remembers dates, times, events, anniversaries, birthdays, and when we traveled where. I often hear myself saying something li...

Right now, the Bush tax cuts for the rich are the biggest contributer to the budget deficit; twice as much as the cost of war.  That ratio will get even worse in the next few years, rising to about three times as much as the cost of those God-awful wars. Out in Nevada, Sharron, the Angle of God, the Tea Party's candidate to run against Harry Reid for his seat in the Senate, is all upset because the press does not ask her the questions she has answers for or, at least, that she wants to answer. She is not alone.  When Republican Senators and Representatives are asked whether extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will add to the budget deficit--which seems not to be too complex a question, even for a Congressman:  after all, reducing government income needed to pay bills does seem to make solvency difficult-- they respond as if they had been asked an unfair question.  As the Angle of God put it, the press should "ask the questions we want to ans...

Unless you were born in North Dakota, or have had the bad luck to break down there, you have never head of Medora.  Medora is the gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, perched on that part of the Badlands.  Under Teddy Roosevelt's determined leadership, huge sections of this country were set aside as parks. Anyone with the vision and determination to do that, today, would be called a socialist, an enemy of private ownership and oil development, and probably also a budget-breaking, capitalist-hating, left-wing, wrong-minded, foreign-born, gun-hating, fascist! It is the kind of country that a Half-Governor of Alaska would want to fly over just to hunt coyotes.  But there it is!  Prairie dogs, and scrub-treed, and rock-ribbed, and absolutely beautiful!  We stayed in the only motel we could find space in, right in Medora.  They had space in the "Bunkhouse", across the street, we were told.  The room in the Bunkhouse was a ...

Since we had driven directly to Seattle by what the Canadian customs officer described as "the long way around", we drove directly home by going through Portland, Oregon, where Daniel is in his first year of residency in emergency medicine. It just happened that Daniel had a contraption of 12 Volt lights that needed to be strung.  As it happened. First, I installed a small air conditioner in a window with an impossibly ill-fitting aluminum-framed screen, just to make it bearable while working on the lights.  We met Eliza, again, who is much prettier than Daniel is, and shorter, too.  Good food, and fine kids, and sweat-equity aside, Portland is worth visiting just for Powell's Book Store; a full block large, several stories tall, and with just about every new and used book God ever intended anyone to want.  I have more cook books. But then it was off, up the Columbia River, toward Missoula, Montana, and across I-94 through more beautiful Montana than a bod...

"The safest place to hold the Dungeness crab is its back. Although the hind part of the crab is commonly used to pick up the crab, their claws can sometimes reach the holder's hand." Wikipedia is absolutely right about that.  One mean little vixen, whom had been lured to latch onto a piece of chicken leg until it reached the surface--it having no business, except hunger, for doing so; it not otherwise supposed to be caught with a pole--resented my trickery and nipped my finger.  Dungeness crabs--perhaps crabs in general--are very quick to take exception, and even quicker to strike out.  My brother, Stan, has a C-Dory, and ever since he first proposed it, I had been looking forward to going with him into Puget Sound, north of Everett, to set crab pots.  Unfortunately, the daily limit for crabbing is five crabs, and since I did not have a license, we could not legally catch more than ten crabs in the two days we went out.  I can assure you that the first five ...

Stan suggested we stop at Lake Okanagan because, while Canadian wineries are not on a par with those in Washington and Oregon, they have an impressive reputation for ice wines.  If conditions are right, that is to say, if the grapes are ripe late in the season, and if the weather is cold enough (about -8 degrees C.) the grapes are crushed while frozen, resulting in much of the water in the grape staying frozen, so that it can be removed.  What is left just might become a very sweet and flavored dessert wine.  Stan is a wine expert, having rolled a pickup, partially loaded with wine, into a ditch.  There is very little Stan does not know about upside-down wine.  Lake Okanagan is about a hundred miles long, two or three miles wide, and very deep.  It helps define a micro-climate, even that far north, where vineyards thrive along the sides of the Lake, in what is a kind of Sonoran desert.  Sonoran?  OK!  It is dry, for the Cascades. M...

"I have heard," said I--ever the wit--"that Lake Louise was named after one of Queen Victoria's daughters.  Which one?" "You are quite the wit!", our waitress at the Lodge replied.  We ordered glasses of Blasted Church Hatfield Fuse.  That is pronouned "fyooz", as in a blasting cap. The site of the winery, in the Okanagan Valley, was once a church, which Mr. Hatfield blew up in order to turn it to a more sacred purpose. The wine was elegant, although whimsically named. Among the names of wines, at the winery, are Nothing Sacred, Bible Thumper Pinot Gris, Amen Port-de-Merlot and, of course, Hatfield's Fuse.   I will admit that, at first blush of the wine, without knowing the story, that is might be a "fyew-say", and wondered what in hell that was.  It wasn't.  The hotel--especially the exterior--is magnificent, except in comparison with the Lake and the mountains.  I think that I shall nev...

A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse! Actually, that would not be a bad trade, unless you owned the horse. I loved that horse, who occasionally went for a level walk with a couple of female drivers, and whomever would pay the fare.  But best, every time he came back to the carriage stand, he put both front hooves up on the sidewalk, and looked around to see if anybody noticed how smart he was.  I felt I owed him a stare. Our hotel--the most expensive one we stayed in on our whole trip (for one night, because it was the most expensive one we stayed in on our whole trip) was not the best one:  that was a fine motel in Missoula--was the Royal Something, probably named after Something royal; something like "The Royal Hotel".  It  was not regal, but then we did not ask for one of the $560. rooms.  We were on the middle (class) floor, and even at that, a station or two above our place.  Even so, a little mustiness, combined with a ...

It was lunchtime, and we needed gas for the pickup, too. We were on our way to Calgary, headed toward Banff. After lunch, I saw that the gas gauge indicated that we had eight miles to go before empty. We had remembered to eat, but not to buy gasoline. It was twenty miles to the next town. I tried a roadside farmstead.  No one home.  No gas. At three miles to empty, I drove into the yard of a more prosperous farm.  The garage door was open, but no one answered the bell, or a knock. I looked in the garage, into a very large storage building, and was marching toward a third building when I saw that there was a party on the back deck of the house.  I explained.  "We're having an anniversay celebration!" a man said. "Would you rather have gasoline or some bourbon?" I allowed as I would rather have bourbon, but just this once I would prefer gasoline. He poured in several gallons, refused any payment, and retired to the company of those who pref...

Someone is scalping Saskatchewan, piling up sticky sand to squeeze the oil from it, and leaving the landscape as if it were the sandbox of a violent and angry child.  The drag lines are as big as a hotel, scaled to the enormous horizon of the Province.  They are patient, and awful. In North Dakota, they have an oil shale boom of their own. In British Colombia, commenting on their neighbors to the east, a man said, "I will bet that half the population of Saskatchewan will end up with cancer." Progress has its price:  life and landscape.

We decided to drive out to Seattle, this time, through Canada going west, and then back along I-94 on the return home.  Neither Mari nor I had ever driven through the prairie Provinces, and we wanted to see Banff and Lake Louise, and visit wineries around Lake Okanagan. On the first day, we stopped in Minot, North Dakota, for lunch.  The buffet was just around the corner from our booth. "Would you keep an eye on my purse?", Mari asked the two local men in the adjacent booth.  Their conversation indicated they were local.  "We'll make sure no N-word gits it!", one replied. (He did not say, "N-word".) It took us a moment to deciper what he had said. "What did he say?", I asked Mari. "He said, "I'll make sure no N-word gits it". (She did not say, "N-word".) We had set the fox to guard the chicken coop. That is what happens when you travel at ground-level. You hear people say what they think...