Skip to main content

How I Saved Tom's Life

Not our chair.  Don't know her!
We have a hanging chair that has spent most of its life lying down.  I brought it home from the log house when we put the property up for sale, but the hanging chair has been lying down in the garage ever since.  Until today.


Today I decided to hang the chair from a tree in our front yard.


The 16' ladder wasn't tall enough, so I dragged up the big one.  It is so long that the bottom end has to be propped up against something to keep it from kicking out when I try to "walk it up".  The "something" was a tree.  It kicked out, anyway, and clanked back down to earth.  


Just as I was about to persist, I saw Tom come out of his house, across the street.  "Oh, God!", I thought. "He heard the ladder, felt the earth shake, and looked out the window, and now he is going to help me!  I am going to kill Tom, and even if it is accidental, which it surely will be, they will put me in jail, and there won't be anyone to change the cat litter!"


I pretended not to see Tom, and slipped into the garage, as if I had a reason to.  


Tom just came out to mail a letter.


Mari came out of the house later, and watched me, up the ladder, rig a chain to a tree branch.  "How old are you?", she asked.  


"Seveny-nine," I said, "but Tom is older.  "Tom could have been hurt!"



Comments

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

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

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