SmokeSound

For the moment, put aside what the Bible says. Consider when the material was written. It is not necessary to agree precisely when oral traditions were written down, and became fixed written texts. One can generously say that the Biblical materials are two or three thousand years old.  Nothing is newer that about 1900 years ago.  That is quite a while ago. Does it make any sense to say that our lives should be governed by what was known 2000 years ago? I would hate to have the family life of ancient patriarchy, even if I am male, and damned near old enough to be a patriarch.  Women were almost second-class citizens, after rulers, and religious leaders, and all other males. There was no democracy.  There were slaves. The king was considered to be somewhat divine. No cell phones.  No scientists.  No antibiotics. No social security.  No public school systems. It would be insane to want to live without medicines, to believe that demon...

People like to say that they are "cat people", or "dog people", but I am neither:  I am both a cat person and a dog person. I love animals, and I think I know why:  I am fascinated with our evolution; with how all of us critters are related. It irritates me every time I hear, or read, about the relationship between "humans and animals".  Lord, love a duck! What are we if we are not one of the animals?  A rock? Long ago, long before we know what we know now, I read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was both a paleontologist and a French Catholic priest, whose scientific curiosity saved him, and whose religion damned him.  He had a view of evolution that helped me to understand that when we observe something in ourselves that we like to think of as uniquely human, whether that uniqueness is intelligence, or shape, or feelings, that there are precursors in our family tree, and that our family was the emergence of life itself.  Our dogs and cat...

Perversely, I wish I could say this was at our house, but it isn't.  It is at the parking lot of the grocery store.  I know that there are places on God's Bleached Earth where winter is fierce; much fiercer than here, but the urge to be long-suffering is too pleasant to dwell on that irritating fact. Can you imagine the pennies that some enterprising child capitalist is going to find under that pile next April? It is very much Minnesota to have sun in winter; sun on snow, as a kind of glorious consolation for finger-frost and foot-frigidity. We are not all that tough:  we keep the motor running and the heater turned on.  The back seats always have extra caps, coats, and gloves. Everything is always a trade-off.  Portland, Oregon trades interminable rain for proximity, restaurants, and neighborhoods.  Tucson trades stolen water and summer sear for sun in winter.  There is enough rain in Seattle to lubricate the entire tectonic plate boundary that ...

The United States of America. Right wing politicians speak as if America (the USA, in this case) were something that is just there , and as if all we had to do was to get out of the way and enjoy it, for free. A nation is not just land.  It is not just owning a pickup and a gun. A nation is a covenant.  It is an agreement.  A nation is to share something in common.  It is to say, "we, the people". It is impossible to say, "I hate to pay taxes", and to be a nation. It costs something to be a nation.  Nationhood is the affirmation that we have something in common, that it is ours, that we are it, and that we will make it as good, and strong, and fair, as we believe it is, and ought, to be.  We, the people, are the United States of America! We want to educate our children, and we want parks and lakes. We need roads, and airports, and clean water, and good food. Our nation needs good order, and to be able to defend itself, because we are a pe...

The mountains could not come to Muhammad, so Muhammad went to the mountains. Daniel had just had an ear operation, and could not travel, and Michael's business was too young to survive on its own, so Mari and I flew to Portland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona, to see them in their native habitats.  They are the yin and yang of climate differences:  coastal moss and mountain desert. Add caption It was raining in Portland.  Of course.  And it was raining in Tucson, too.  It does that from time to time.  The difference is . . . the difference.  It is woodsmen's lore that, in a forest, one can tell north from the moss growing on the north side of the tree.  It is impossible to tell north in either Portland or Tucson, because in Portland the tree is ringed with moss, and in Tucson there are no trees, and no moss. People do not live in Portland for the climate.  They live there for its civility, for its tightly packed neighborhoods, pepp...

I think "foolproof" is not the right word. Or maybe it is.  It is too complex for me. Mari and I have been visiting kids for a few days. I stopped the mail and the newspapers, lowered the thermostats far enough to save a couple of bucks, but not so far that the cats or the pipes froze:  down 3 degrees. Saved 47 cents; saved the cats; saved the planet! I took one key on the trip:  a house key. I semi-hid my regular key ring--the one with the keys to the kingdom, and the car, and the trailers-- in a place where I could not miss it upon return, and where only a really serious burglar would find it. When we got home, I could not find it, demonstrating something about my burglary aptitude. (It happens every time!) I tried every remotely conceivable drawer in the house, and Mari suggested pottery, and filing cabinets, and shoes. Finally, I put my hand in my pocket:  there they were! I knew that, after a week away, I would put on my denims and get th...

December 2010 Dear Friends, Once upon a summer’s day, on an island in northern Minnesota , I wrote letters on birch bark to my grandchildren.  It seemed somehow ancient; almost clay-tablet old.  A piece of bark.  A tube of stain.  Shared symbols. I am doing something like that now, making words appear on paper, connecting what we are thinking here, in our house, with what you are doing in yours.  If we want to, we can make little perturbations electronically, and send the signals, almost instantaneously, almost anywhere, a world away.  The signals become words again, and the words tie us together.  This summer Mari and I drove through Canada , west to Seattle and Portland , befriended by strangers, tasting the sweet wines of early frost, to stand at the edge of the slowly drifting continent, catching and savoring Dungeness crab, laughing with friends, reading books.  We came back through Montana and North Dakota , driving through the grasslan...

"My snowblower has trouble starting, too," Mark said.  "I just unscrew the plug and shoot in some starting fluid." Mark doesn't know that starting fluid is the stuff religious people use to set themselves on fire and blow up their underwear in public, but he says it works, so I bought some starter fluid. It worked.  My underwear caught on fire. "That," I thought, "is not a good way to move snow", although if your underwear is on fire, you do move snow. I decided to replace the spark plug. I couldn't even find it.  With the snow blower hitched up to the lawn tractor, the hood will not open far enough to see where a spark plug might be. As it turns out, it is up there where you have to have the hood open wide to see it.  I know, from having spent a couple of days on the floor of the garage, trying to get the mower off and the snow blower on, that taking the blower off was not an option. I removed an offending dischar...

He is my new hero.  I don't know his name. He is the head of a machinists' union, I think. With regard to paying taxes, he said: "You're doing your part for your country. You are paying your way." I am saddened by friends who say they hate to pay taxes. They are good people.  They care about a lot of things worth caring for.  But they hate paying taxes. We have just had a rather heavy snowstorm, and there is another, lighter storm, on the way. The taxes we pay cleared the street in front of our house, and the roads to almost everywhere.  There were fires in St. Paul, as there were in many places, and our taxes paid for the fire department to come and chip the hydrants from the plowed snow, and to put out the fires. Our taxes pay to educate our children, and to keep the planes at the airport from colliding.  They pay for the runways, too, and for a part of the cost of the planes. It is the taxes we pay that forces chicken farms to provide s...

Not Really It Somebody dragged the little white church from a pocket in the farmer's field, alongside the highway, to a spot across from Fogel's Store.  What had been a Mennonite Church became a Lutheran Church of sorts.  I say, "of sorts" because the pastor--"Parson"--was always uncomfortable with genuine Lutheran churches, as they were with him. It was there, in that uncomfortable little Lutheran church with a wood stove and an attitude that I became what I am today:  confused and contrary.  Parson didn't like regular Lutheran Sunday School materials, so he found something safely to the right of Philadelphia.  I recall that someone would occasionally distribute religious pamphlets from the American Tract Society.  Even as a child, I knew they were sanitized of liberal thought and centrist drivel:  they were safely situated on God's right hand. Just today, I read a list of what I suppose one might call the biggest rip-offs among charitable or...

That is precisely how I feel! The electric company meter reader just slogged across the . . . I was going to say, "lawn", but that would not accurately describe the glacier outside window.  Before the day is done, he is going to have a cold one, too.

The city of Minneapolis is out there, a third of the way down in the center of the picture.  Off to the left, you cannot see the airport, either. It was not our first snow of the season, but it was our most determined.  It has been difficult to measure, because of the wind-drifts, but it was adequate. Neighborhood birds knew that the only food was in the trees, or in feeders, and they were ready for a little socialism.  "Those who has extra in the garage should share with those who is hungry", so we did.  They aren't lazy birds.  They are willing to work, but sometimes circumstances work against you!  You know? The plants are gone from our west-facing deck (looking down the hill, toward where the airport used to be, before the storm) so in winter we hang painted wooden decorations which I found at Nordstrom's, or Bloomingdale's (or maybe it was TJMaxx).    "I love your big, wooden balls!", Mari said, before she thought better of it. On the...

When the snow falls as it is doing now Not ferociously but keeping us in, nevertheless Perhaps a foot or a foot-and-a-half After we have warmed up the pot of yesterday's soup and tended to the laundry After Mari has organized year-end-notes and news and the cats have purred themselves to sleep It is time to take a glass of Gammel Aquivit A gift from a friend in Norway And praise what a potato can do to make a good life grand Skål!

The loudest noise in our house is the ink jet, printing letters. The loudest noise in our neighborhood is the sound of snow falling. There are no cars going down the street. Earlier, Mari reports, she saw a city snow plow (you know, government plow; tax money plow) clear the street, but right now, it is difficult to see that there even is a street between our house and the neighbors across the way. Squadrons of goldfinches, downy woodpeckers, chicadees, and what I assume are sparrows, attack our hanging bird feeders. A single oak leaf, caught by the wind, tumbles aimlessly across our yard, orphaned by relentless snow. On TV, giddy reporters are celebrating what they say will be one of the heaviest snowfalls in Minnesota history. Even though only a foot or two will fall, the wind is stiff, and the temperature is falling to minus Fahrenheit numbers. None of this is malicious, but it is relentless.  And quiet. There will be flurries of pointless snowfall meas...

We have two political parties. You might think one would be on the left and the other on the right, as such things are measured. One liberal, one conservative. That isn't the case. The Republicans are on the far right, with their Tea Party members pulling them out to where the right becomes divine right. The Democrats have been pulled right, too. We have only one socialist member of Congress-- Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  The most liberal Democrat is over there where the Republicans used to be, and some of them are righter than rain and the Pope. We can't even call socialized medicine, "socialized medicine". We have to call it, "a single payer system". We dare not admit that public education is socialistic, that police and fire and military are governmental. We say they are "public", as in "vs. private". We aren't even sure we ought to have public education. There are efforts to "privatize" schools, soc...

Our friends, the Republicans in Congress, are standing on principle. Their principle is to do anything that will destroy Barack Obama. Toward that end, they are acting as follows: They have voted against ending sexual discrimination in the military. They are against allowing the tax rate on the richest people in the country to go back to what it was before a temporary cut was made under George Bush. They are opposed to extending unemployment payments without cutting something of equal value from the budget elsewhere. However, they are eager to end the tax cuts to the rich, which will cost the government billions of dollars, without finding the funds elsewhere.  They argue that making rich people richer creates jobs. The fact is that it does not, except marginally, while payments to the unemployed go directly back into the economy, creating and saving jobs. They want to cut Social Security, medical care, and social programs, because they are expensive, but they ar...

Most of what we say is intended to maintain relationships.   Very little is the actual conveying of information.   Some of our conversations are designed to convince people of something; that is what we call rhetoric, but mostly we chatter about the weather, and what happened today, and other such socially lubricating matters. I know all that. It still drives me mad. I used to teach at a school whose team colors were blue and white. An enthusiastic athletic director put a blue roof on the fieldhouse, a blue surface on the track around the football field,  and spongy blue surfacing on the tennis courts.  It was awful! The people who liked it most moved to Boise and painted  the football field blue, too.  And put blue uniforms on the team. People loved to say they "bled blue".   I know I didn't.  I was a commoner. Jargon.  We love jargon.   Do you have too much on your plate? Is it really what it is?   Can you walk the walk a...

Our belle, Michele (Bachmann), and her friends on the Congressional Prayer Caucus have sent a letter to Barack Obama chastising him for not saying "God" and "Creator" enough.  One skip can be forgiven, they say, but not saying it often enough jeopardizes our freedom.  They point out that it says, right in our Pledge of Allegiance, "one nation, under God".  So it does!  I can remember when, at the height of our post-WWII frenzy about there being godless Communists under every bush and bedcover, that Congress added that phrase to the Pledge.  I still have trouble remembering it is there.  My school-days rhythm of recitation has trouble adjusting.  I still think, "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice". He doesn't say God and Creator enough?  Where do these buffoons come from?  Do our representatives not have any work to do?  Did they already pass a budget?  Has the job situation already improved, so that they can turn, ...

When first I moved to Chicago, as a graduate student, the winters were an amazement.  Frozen air from the north, lake moisture from the east, and warm, humid air from the south met on Michigan Avenue, just south of the river.  Sometimes the snow was as soggy as a swamp, and it froze glacier still. "Native peoples used to live here!", I often thought.  "Why?" I imagined shelters, partially dug into the ground, covered with whatever Illinois offered.  Had they never heard of Miami Beach? There were, in fact, Miami Indians living in Illinois: that is my idea of what it is to be a Lost Tribe of Israel. So here I am in Minnesota!  The garage heater in our garage has died an ignominious death, sputtering and coughing, and our pipes are in danger of freezing.  The assumption, when this house was built, was that the water pipes could go out there to a washing machine, because there would be a gas heater, hanging from the ceiling, th...

Divisible by One and Myself I am divisible only by one and myself Having achieved the age of nine more than three-score-and-ten By reason of a strength lost in its achievement I am a Pledge of Allegiance One man, indivisible, except by one and himself, With liberty and justice and a 79th inning stretch We who divide history by one and ourselves Stride the centuries almost whole Dividing time with our primeness Seventy-nine ago, in 1931, Georgia O'Keefe painted  Cow Skull And they finished the Empire State Building , while in Tacoma Gus and Jennie wondered at what they had done Two seventy-nines ago, Harriet Beecher Stowed "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and also in Boston Emma Snodgrass was arrested for wearing pants Philadelphians threw British ships out of the harbor and Three seventy-nines later, Tea Partiers are still throwing Things out:  sense and logic, taxes and constitutions All into the harbor!  On three, heave!  Fish it out later! Five long measures ago, He...

Instead of talking about whether we ought to extend the tax cuts initiated under President Bush, a debate in which the whole essence is whether the very richest people in the nation deserve to keep their advantage, we ought to be talking about the tax code itself. Our tax code is a monster created by several decades of screwing around with it.  It is understandable that some people want to toss the whole thing out and initiate a flat tax.  A flat tax--the same rate for everybody--sounds fair, although about ten seconds of thinking about it demonstrate that it is not.  If the flat tax were 20%, let us say, that would mean that a person trying to buy groceries and pay rent on a $2000. a month income would have  to pay $400. in taxes.  Do you want to try to live on $1600. a month?  At the same time, a persons earning $20,000. a month ($120 thousand a year) would pay $4000. a month in taxes, and have $16,000. left for the car payment, and a night out. A Tax...

           When Jennie sent fattigmann to her children She packed them in popcorn, having read once How corn cushions against the slings and arrows Of outrageous postal clerks.   We grew up Norwegian, eating cardamom-flavored brown Popcorn.   Well, Jennie said, do you want Fattigmann or don't you:   logic like cookies Jennie loved to sort through those upstairs Places where she hid the past, finding old Photographs and report cards, surprising us With harbored care for what we were and are, Teaching us to blush.   Well, she said, those Were tender times.   Norwegian sentiment still Surprises us who hide our warmest wants Jennie abhorred a verbal vacuum, tamping us full With reminiscence, following us to our cars Like her father before her, who running-board Hopped his friends goodbye.   John and Jennie Are in our genes, our poetry and talk Jennie hung tight when the times were mean Hiding her tears with ...

December 3, 1905. My father was born on December 3rd, 105 years ago. One hundred and five! That is such an odd thought!  It ought to be so normal, but it seems too long ago to be a real number.  It ought not to be. As a child, I knew my great-grandparents, and they were born in 1852, and in 1857.  So Anna Rønning was born 158 years ago. I am not sure I have personally known anyone born earlier. There are articles in our newspapers, right now, that suggest that there may be three times as many stars as we had thought, and that the universe, already thought to be 13 or 14 billion years old, may be older than we had thought, too.  I am cool with that. I can recall, not too many years ago, when common wisdom was that the universe was 17 billion years old.  Easy come, easy go! Big deal, huh?  The universe is only about 100 million times as old as the time since Anna Rønning was born, before Lincoln was elected as President.  I cannot qu...

All of us of a certain age and level of subsistence can recall how our mothers urged us to clean our plates. "There are people going hungry!", they would say. "Eat your vegetables!  Eat your phosphorous!" Phosphorous is one of the building blocks of life. I don't think my mother knew that, and neither did I, but she urged me to clean my plate, nonetheless. As it turns out, phosphorous is optional. Scientists have discovered that there is a form of life-- not on some distant planet, but right here in California-- that does not use phosphorous.  It uses arsenic. It is a microbe, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake, that uses arsenic instead of phosphorous.  Speculation is that perhaps the microbe can be used to pull arsenic out of those places where it can kill the rest of us. One might have expected that California harbored alien life, but the pleasure of that discovery may be short-lived. It is quite likely that other arsenic-rich sites wil...