Skip to main content

The Perfect World

Yesterday, the last of winter's snow melted in our yard.
Today, we are under threat of a tornado.
Tomorrow, out taxes will be filed.

Yesterday, I raked winter's tree waste from the yard.
Today, we put out some pansies, and bird feeders.
Tomorrow, I will try to find where the feeders went in the wind.

On another planet, Bert said his friends had rented a condo in Ft. Myers for the summer.  "Another summer spent inside the house," Dick replied.

The Twins are playing in their first home series.  It might be one of the best new baseball stadiums--in downtown Minneapolis--with two superb Irish bars a short walk away.  So far, the Twins have scored 3/4 of a run--not in the game:  all season.  At Kierans and The Local, there are losers, but the scoring is sky high.

Born in Tacoma, I didn't know there was a sun until I was twelve.
In Berkeley, summers were fog.
The heat snapped all the window frames in my car in Phoenix.
I wore woolen underwear all summer in Alaska.
There were times, in Norway, when the sun never rose.










But there were days, in Norway, when the sun never set.
I played baseball three days a week, year around, in Tucson.
Was ever a day more glorious than a summer ferry ride in Puget Sound?
No one knows what "green" means, who has not been to Iowa,
or what a fine day is, who has not walked a lake in Minneapolis.

Everywhere there are beautiful places, and dismal days, too.

And more than fog and sun and snow, there are restaurants and coffee shops and rivers.  There are attitudes, and kind neighbors, and good groceries.  There are museums, and diversity galore, and good schools.  There are streams and stones and songs and the stone arch bridge.

A good life is a jig-saw puzzle of possibilities that can be put together in a thousand ways.  There has never been a perfect picture, but almost always, there is both loveliness, and occasional despair.

For most of us ordinary mortals, it is economic fantasy to pretend that someday we shall have a house for each season:  one where we were born, one warm, another where we would like to play, and a condo in the city.  Those are the fantasies we have been taught by the people who use our wages to pay for their houses, and by politicians who recite the Preamble to the Constitution because they want our votes, and by ourselves, because we believe there are perfect places, and perfect times, and lots of Gardens of Eden.

"Have you heard about the man who was looking for the perfect woman, and who found her?  But she was looking for the perfect man."

That is how many of us get through life:  pretending.  Maybe a lottery ticket.

Personally, I believe we are very near to achieving a perfect world, because my new gout medicine works really well.

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.  Even when all they wanted to do w
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