SmokeSound

What an odd feeling!  Some plumber with an orthopedics degree says I need to replace one of my parts with a pipe joint. No, no, no!  Not that part!  My hip joint. I think that I might have to come to terms with my mortality.  The plumber says that I will not live forever, and that my parts--here and there--(more here than there) might wear out. Then he went on to tell me how happy people are who have a hip replacement--you know, bore out the bone, slip a handy-dandy, metal and plastic socket into the hole, and drive a kind-of-garden-stake thing with a pipe-elbow screwed to the top, down into your leg bone, and there you are:  good as new, after a while, usually, most people say, through clenched teeth. I am no stranger to operations.  Another guy with a degree in waste systems once clipped out part of my stomach which he said was leaking acid here and there, and another time, after I sawed two fingers almost off--they flopped around like wax beans--...

I have been trying to avoid saying that "I have a hitch in my gittyup", because then I will probably go on to saying, "folks", and "someth'n", or maybe even, "sump'n".  I don't want to do that because I have no desire for a political career.  But, truth be told, I have a . . . an intermittent, sharp pain in my right hip or thigh that makes it difficult to walk for exercise, and sometimes just a pain to walk. An X-ray of my entire mid-section (as it turned out), showed that my hip sockets looked like hip sockets, which I found to be odd and comforting.  What was not so comforting is the fact that everything' south of my belt glows in the dark. Today, I had an MRI:  a magnet resonating image.  They led me to a semi-trailer out in back, laid me down on a gurney, and inserted me into a high-tech, sausage-making machine.  They assured me that they would get a splendid picture of all my soft tissues, some of which glow in the dark; ...

Our Belle, Michele Bachmann, from Iowa and Minnesota,  the former Wisconsin Synod Church Lady, who has the fervent support of Real Men who wish she would allow them to be the head of her household--Biblically speaking--has been endorsed by the head pastor of a local mega-church. The Reverend Mister Mac Hammond, who has attracted a profoundly religious congregation of 9,000 members with the gospel message that God wants his faithful followers to get very rich, announced that he was taking a little break from his sacred ministry to follow Our Belle around the country and speak well of her.  The Reverend Mister Mac is Michele's personal pastor; she having resigned from her former church.  I am not sure whether she resigned, or whether she just fired them along with almost every staff member she ever had.  She is, by her own admission, a fool for Christ, but she is a very demanding employer, apparently.  Anyway, I will wager that she is drawn to the gospel a...

Sixty years ago, and a hundred miles west, Mari's grandfather built his grand-daughters a play house on the farm.  It is probably--scarcely--eight by ten feet in size; maybe seven by nine.  Once ago, the lower half of the rear wall rotted out, and was replaced.  Everything else recalls how that rear wall felt.   Inside, Mari, her sister, Bonnie, and a cousin, Jane, wrote their names in pencil on the wall to the right.  Only if you know to look can you find the place where the stilt-like letters have left shadows.   When Mari's dad, Parnell, sold the farm and moved into the town of Lake Mills, he took the playhouse with him, and it became a yard-tool shed, on runners.  And when Parnell died, we drove to Lake Mills, with Per from Lillehammer, and found a way to get the play house up onto a big trailer.   It is a well traveled playhouse.  I gave it new runners, a graveled base to sit upon, and a front deck.  I think it may never travel, ...

"T'were somewhere in the seventies--I have no sense of time; only space--when Gail and I drove south, to the fabled South , to look at colleges.  We looked at Duke, and North Carolina, at the University of Georgia, and the University of the South. I had encouraged all of our kids to think large about themselves as individuals, and certainly not to go to a school only because their parents or siblings had gone there.  Paul had gone to Yale.  Kathryn chose Chapman College, in California.  Later Heidi chose the University of California at Santa Cruz.  But this was Gail's turn.   We weren't a privileged family.  I taught at a small college in Iowa.  I know, and they knew, that if we had what it took, and if we worked hard, we had a chance at almost anything.   There we were--Gail, me, and the car radio--exploring somewhere where no siblings had gone, looking for a place for Gail to become Gail, or more Gail than anyone else.  She di...

Cod liver oil is the curse of Scandinavian immigrants' children.  We grew up fearing a parent with a teaspoon in hand.   "It's good for you!", we were told; an obvious sign that it could not be true.  It was foul stuff!  Nothing that tasted as evil as fish oil could be good for you!  We know what our primordial parents never knew, because they were old, and ate lutefisk, and chewed snuff.  No!  Not snuff!  Snus!  S-n-oo-ss!  Copenhagen.  We knew more about science than they did.  Our parents believed that God had created Adam, and then Eve to be his handmaid, and cod fish for them to eat, and cod liver oil for the kids that inevitably result from sleeping with the handmaid.   We knew that was mythological nonsense!  We knew that God had made taste buds so that people would spit out things that taste awful; things like battery acid and lutefisk, like horse manure and snus, and like asparagus and cod liver oil....

The State of Texas executes a lot or people.  I don't know why.  I would like to think that there must be something I do not know about, but from the other end of I-35, it looks pretty bloodthirsty.   Tonight, according to reports, authorities in Georgia  are going to kill another prisoner.  I cannot make a certain judgment about his guilt or innocence, but at the very least, his guilt is in doubt.  Serious doubt.  You can read about the details.  If he is put to death tonight, there will be reason for both tears and profound anger at the legal system in Georgia. But what is almost worse, because it is what fuels the kind of cheering one hears from Tea Party  members in support of Rick Perry--cheering for executions--is the kind of sentiment the relatives of the slain policeman express.  Of course they are angry, still, that no one has been punished for the policeman's death!  But the whole, shaky case presented by the Georgia...

I have paid, three times, for one stump to be removed.   The first time, The Wild and Crasy Guys from Nordern Minnesoda offered to trim some trees, and take down another tree, and to remove the stump.  After they picked up the tree branches, I paid them.  They were coming right back to remove the stump.  Instead, they removed themselves from the phone book.   Today, The Stump Guys came and gave me a price to remove the same stump.  I hesitated, swore, damned the Wild and Crasy Guys, and agreed that the Stump Guys should remove it.  "I will get you a check," I said.  Then I said, "How about if I wrote a check after  you remove the stump?"  They agreed.  When they were through, I brought them a check, for a very good job.   "Oh, no, I can't take that check," the woman said.  "We don't have an account for our name, yet.  Can you make it out to me?" Of course!  They had a pickup, a stump grinder, a shovel...

The President's approval rating has fallen to a little less than half of the public.  I rather imagine he worries about that.   When he came into office, we were losing about 75,000 jobs a month.  The banks had become Ponzi schemes, and were bankrupt.  General Motors and Chrysler were going down the tubes.  Enormous government loans saved their arses, but the Congress and the the President-- and the public -- refused to do what really needed to be done:  get out of those enormously expensive wars, and invest heavily in rebuilding this country for a new century:  education, roads, sewers, green energy, trains, bridges, and attracting the best people available, from everywhere, to science, engineering, and the whole educational system. Of course people are dubious about the job the President is doing!  People need jobs!  Our prisons are filled with people wh o smoked pot, and sold it to other people.  We didn't object to huge, hopel...

The student was from Uganda.  He invited "Doctor Mari" to a gathering at the home of the University's President, who has made a substantial personal commitment to Ugandan students.  "Doctor Mari" invited me to go with her. The students all came from a residential Junior High/Senior High school.   "It was hard work!", he said.  "We got up at 4:30 to study, then we went to morning chapel, with classes and study all day.  Then we played soccer for fun, before we studied some more, until about 10:30.  Then we went to bed.  It was hard work!" Almost every student, when asked to introduce himself, said something about hard work, there and here.  Many of them earned two majors.  There were plans for graduate study before they returned home.   They had to work while they studied here.  Every one of them sent $100. a year (or was that per semester?) to their school in Uganda.  The gathering at the President's home was to rai...

In a show of hands, a number of Republican Presidential candidates indicated they did not believe in evolution.  Others waffled. How can this be?  Is this not the 21st century!  It used to be! With only reluctant exception, the candidates also say they do not believe that human activity has anything important to do with climate change.  If every Nobel Prize winner in Economics said that this is the time for governments to borrow a lot of money and provide jobs for millions of people--as FDR once did--the Republican Presidential aspirants would say, "No!"; that governments are the problem, and that government jobs (police, fire, parks, roads, regulations, food safety, the military, etc.) are not real jobs.   The earth is flat.  There was a flood over all the earth.  Jesus is coming on a cloud to drill for oil in the Everglades.  The Bible is a road atlas, and God told Michele Bachmann to run for office, and for Mitt Romney to wear special ...

"I'll be with you in apple blossom time. I'll be with you to change your name to mine. . . ." That, I heard today, was Tip O'Neil's campaign song.  Whether it was, or not, I was struck by the easy assumption that marriage involved changing the woman's name.  Of course it did!  Then.  Not only was the assumption that marriage was between one man and one woman (except in Utah and other places), but that marriage was when a suitor asked the woman (girl)s father if he could have his daughter's hand in marriage, and that the father would "give his daughter away", but that she would--naturally--change her name to that of her new owner.   I suspect that, in this country at least, most women might still "change her name to his", but here I sit, an old turkey indeed, married almost thirty years now to a woman who didn't.  Even people who think marriage is under attack, know that some arguments are about old symbols, and not human ...

"Moral relativism" has become a way of cursing. And what is moral relativism?  It is the assertion that what is moral is not universally agreed upon; that what is considered moral here is not necessarily moral there.   If that surprises you, you have never looked around.  Morals have never been universal.  Never!  Ever!  Even in the most homogenous, most demanding and repressive societies, there are objectors.   What is the alternative to moral relativism?  It is the claim that there exists, somewhere, an absolute morality.  If there is such a code, or ethic, or morality--anywhere--people have never agreed what it is.  Never!  Ever! What is  almost universal is the belief that our own value system is absolutely right.  Most of us--here--are aghast at female genital mutilation, and infanticide, and totalitarianism, unless (of course) the totalitarianism is ethical  totalitarianism:  an absolute ethic: ...

It's the jobs thing that confuses me: not the Steve Jobs thing; the out-of-work jobs thing. Productivity might be the problem. People who seem to know say we need to raise our productivity, so the people who are making things buy a machine  and lay off the people who used to make things. Without producing any more than the did before, their productivity rises because they are doing it with fewer people, and everybody is happy. Except for the out-0f-work jobs thing. I remember that, once, in Germany, I was amazed that there were people with brooms sweeping the streets and sidewalks clean. "Why," I asked, "don't you buy some street sweepers? You know:  the machines with rotating brushes?" They said something about putting people out of work. I decided the Germans didn't understand productivity. Maybe they have learned something from us, since. We seem to have solved the productivity thing. It is the jobs thing everyone is talki...

Every once in a while, Americans get religion.   Just for the hell of it (I was going to say before I thought better of it), I looked up "Great Awakenings".  Church history books have labelled a series of religious revivals in the U.S. as "awakenings".  The first happened before we became a nation, and two or three later waves of religious enthusiasm seem to have punctuated our history, right up until the present.  It wears me out, trying to get interested.  It always has.  The "last" great awakening may or may not have happened, depending on whether one thinks it was great enough.  I was there.  In the seventies, Billy Graham cruised around the country, blessing presidents and preaching in great gatherings of sinners.  Even in the church I belonged to, the Lutherans, we were nudged into goofy, straight-laced imitations of zeal and conversion.  It was like trying to teach elephants to dance.  Elephants can be taught to si...

Once, all of us were three-and-a-half feet tall, and our grandmother's name was Lucy, or that was what she came to be named. Once, I was an average height male.  It is not unusual, now, to talk to someone who is a foot taller than I.  Once, baby buggies were little flimsy things with wire-spoked wheels, and the whole, folding apparatus weighed about ten pounds.  Now they are only slightly larger than a mini-car.  The kids are bigger, too.   I am amazed, and admire the young women who come to the coffee shop pushing hi-tech transport systems, nosing-in, backing-off, re-positioning the tandem or side-by-side, reaching around to open the heavy door with the hydraulic closer, in order to get into the coffee shop.  We sit there, at our tables, so deeply engrossed in our admiration that we forget to get up and help.  "Who are here new-age women; these cultural Amazons?" They are ordinary women, doing what Lucy has always done, tending the transit...

The newspaper was still in their driveway. "They must be away," I said to Mari. "I think this is the weekend they visit family cemeteries," Mari replied. A few weeks ago, Mari's family held a reunion in the small town in Iowa--not far from here, as reunions go--and they, too, visited family cemeteries.   I do not come from a cemetery culture, or if I did, it did not "take".  I know where my parents and maternal grandparents are buried, and I have visited the very old church and cemetery in Norway where my paternal family members are buried, but visiting any of those places is a seldom event.  Maybe it is because I live far away.   Once it was that we occupied territories; hunted those grounds, cultivated them, married someone nearby, lived and died there.  We visited where we had buried those who came before.   One of the ways we live after death is when those who follow come to visit the place where we were finally laid.  They talk a...

I needed garlic and cocoanut milk, and the grocery is near.  I followed a couple, almost my age, our of the store.  "Almost" allows for ten or fifteen years but, even so, they were in their sixties or seventies. Like all of us who have achieved "a certain age", his posture was less an "!" than a "?".  He wore socks and sandals, and shorts, but what was that under his untucked polo shirt?  Perhaps a back brace? No!  He wore broad suspenders to hold up his shorts, under his shirt. They were parked next to my pickup, but they got into their red Cadillac before I could tell whether he also wore a belt. We are the Heartland, here!  Stylish.  Secure.  A bit secretive.

Mari thought summer might just frazzle away, but it didn't.  It almost came unglued.  It had something to do with Joe Mauer and about half of her faculty experiencing bilateral leg pains or viruses or something, so she has had to find last-minute work-arounds.  She says she understands Ron Gardenhire and the Twins, and what a Disability List is,  much better, now.   She worked late yesterday, but we arranged to ease the disabilities with a nice dinner somewhere in St. Paul before she came home.  We agreed to meet at a restaurant bar, and I strove mightily--I am learning how to talk biblically by listening the Republican presidential candidates--to get to the bar in good time.  I did not want to be rushed into dinner, bone dry!   A peculiar group of locals mingled familiarly at the end of the bar.  One of the minglers gave the impression that she was still at work, and another, perhaps forty years her senior, caressed her arm with one ha...