SmokeSound

Our uncle, Hans, died.  He was 91. Now only his older brother, Harold, lives to represent our mother's siblings. He is 95.  I wish him a long life. It must have been nearly a hundred years ago that our Norwegian immigrant grandparents created a farm middle in the forested lands that are western Washington.  I do not know exactly when they built the house that seems to me to have been there forever, although it cannot have been; the house that Hans almost never left; and never far.  I remember how electricity came to that house. Carl Larson tore up the floorboards in the rooms where the family slept, and ran wires through ceramic tubes, and anchored them taut with nailed insulators.  I suppose, if the house is still there, and if the floors are still there, that the wiring and the insulators are there, too.  Carl Larson let me squat and watch, and tried to explain to me what electricity was.  I still do not know. Later, when...

There is something awful about an old man with a limp shuffling out into a tree farm, saw in hand, intent on cutting down a young tree. There is something particularly awful about being that old man. I grew up in a small clearing where once there had been almost nothing but fir trees.  Western Washington is a temperate jungle of evergreens.  It wasn't a tree farm.  It was a forest.  The timber companies, and the hard-scrabble farmers who followed them, did not steal the land from the First People; from the Native Americans who came first thousands of years ago.  The land was stolen from the forests of trees; the real natives on those rocky slopes. All my long life I have cleared small patches of land, usually just to beat back the trees that edged forward to where they used to be, more at home on those graveled fields than any apple tree or oat patch.  The fields just survived:  the trees thrived.   Never have I cut down a tree without sad...

Emma Sullivan is 19, and in a Kansas high school.  As she listened to governor Sam Brownback, she tweeted to her friends that the Governor "blows a lot".  Imagine that!  She is only 19, but already she recognizes a governor when she sees one! The Governor's office was not amused.  Her school was not amused, either, and demanded that she write an apology.  She refused, reportedly suggesting that it would not be an honest apology, if she wrote one. Our world is changing.  Ol' Sam cannot get away with spewing gas without some kid tweeting the truth about it.  You cannot start a revolution without it showing up on Facebook, and having all of your befriends join in.  Spray pepper spray into the face of students sitting on the ground, and the movie shows up on UTube. I am beginning to wonder what we old-timers used to do.  Did we not know that Sam Politician blew a lot?

Photo by Jim Gertz, Star-Tribune Years ago, when we lived in a small town in Iowa, a relatively large number of Hmong people tried our small town on for size and fit.  Almost all of them moved to the Twin Cities, 150 miles north, because they needed more than a town:  they needed each other.  It has been Minnesota's gain.   Every once in a while, I think that our part of the Americas was a plain place, when I grew up.  I was part of a Scandinavian immigration, but we Norwegians were too anxious to become Americans to add color to the culture.  We wanted to belong.  I recall that, in our family, where our father was a first generation immigrant, we tried to get him to speak Norwegian to us, one day a week.  It lasted about ten minutes.  "No!  No!", we said to him.  "That isn't a Norwegian word!  That's just an English word pronounced wrong!"  Dad gave up.  Blending in had begun to happen to him, too. The Hmo...

I have just had a horrible thought! It is probably Ron Paul's turn to become the next favorite  Republican candidate for the presidency.  That is not my horrible thought.   Ron Paul is a decent, albeit hopeless politician, representing  the Libertarian urge of the Republican Party:  you know,  as little government as possible; as much "you are on your own" as possible.   People probably deserve what they get, or don't get.   He deserves a turn.  Donald Trump had a turn, hair and all.  He said Barack Obama  was from Kenya, and that the facts of Obama's birth in Hawaii were a lie. That is pretty thin stuff to shape a free world on. Michele Bachmann had a turn.  Michele is a church lady from Minnesota who has heard from God, personally, that she would make a great president. She also heard that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson  did not own slaves, but you can't believe everything you hear!! Can you? Ric...

Who are these people who are choosing a Republican Presidential candidate?   They have Willard Romney, but they don't want him, so they review the rest of the field, one by one.   "How about the guy with the combover?", they said:  "You know, Donald Trump!"  Donald rose to number one in their estimation, but not for long.  Donald was convinced that Barack Obama wasn't an American.   And there was Michele Bachmann.  Michele won the straw poll in Iowa, which means that she paid for more delegates to come to the voting barn than anyone else; not a lot more, but some.  "Michele is our leader!" the Republican primary voters said:  "Michele and Marcus and Jesus and our preacher really like Michele!"  But Michele keeps saying crazy things, as if she occasionally came in from another reality.   Then someone started singing, "The Eyes of the Tea Party are upon you!", and Rick Perry came up from Texas.  "A'm reddy,...

"What are they talking about?" I remember having had that thought often,  in the 1960s, a lready in my mid-thirties,  already with a large family. There were war protests:   everyone could understand that,  even if one disagreed with them.   Young people seldom choose war,  especially if they do not understand  why only they must die. The young are seldom as racist as their parents. They are less insulated from the neighborhood, and from what is new.  We understood racial integration, even when our logic and feelings did not coincide. But the sixties was more than that.  It was generational. One of the reasons the students of the sixties were non-violent is because it was their parents they were resisting.   They were resisting the unthinking assumption of their parents: that war was necessary and good; that America was good; that whatever government did was good, and necessary. It wasn't.   We undermin...

Forty-eight years ago today, John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas.  1963.  He had been urged not to go there.  The country was too divided.  People were saying crazy and dangerous things. Thirty-eight years ago, I had already decided that I was going to leave the parish I had in California, and go to graduate school in Chicago, to think through what was going on in my head, my life, and our country.  I never went back. This week, when the campus police at the University of California at Davis sprayed pepper spray into the faces of students quietly protesting about what is happening in their heads, their lives, and their country, I remember. My life changed forever at the University of Chicago.  I entered as a 32-year-old father of four, wondering what all the things I had been trained to say meant , and I left there, five years later, profoundly altered.  I learned that our own government had been lying to us, that Americans not only were willi...

Our conversation began agreeably enough.  I had stopped at the hardware store to pick up a couple of chains for the chain saw that I had left to be sharpened.  He saw my dandy aluminum cane. "I know all about that!", he said.  "I have one just like it at home!" We showed each other our scars, almost, and swapped war stories. Then, as often happens while making innocuous conversation, things turned ugly. We speculated about the snow that was due to arrive that evening:  last night.  It arrived.  Just a couple of inches, but good substantial, wet stuff.  I said that my snow blower was still at the shop, being installed, and that it would probably not be home until well after the snow; maybe not until our second snowfall. I joked about sharpening my snow shovel.  He said that I should bring it in; that he would do it:  he had just sharpened his. "Huh?", I thought.  "Sharpen a snow shovel?  Why?" "Yep!", he said, Minnesota...

It was time, I thought, to take control of my life, after a medical fiend sawed off my hip bone and inserted a death-defying, vacation-providing metal and plastic substitute.  So after a trip to the lawn tractor repair shop,  I took control of my life and went to Granite City, our nearest brew pub and restaurant.  There is nothing quite like an Indian Pale Ale and some buffalo shrimp to pull a shredded life together and give it eternal hope! While I was restoring my soul, I listened to the two guys to my left, at the bar.  They ate soup, and salad, and sandwiches, and then decided to have another order of soup, and salad, and sandwiches, all the while entertaining the very professional and attractive bartender.  (I don't know how professional and attractive bartenders  endure it, and smile!) One of the guys owned a business of some sort, and he was irate about his new tax bill.  His business was on the edge, he said, and his taxes were going up 5%....

Sister Sarah, Former Half-Governor What in hell is going on here, politically? The Republican field of presidential aspirants looks like a cartoon series:  Donald "The Hair" Trump:  the President wasn't born; Our Belle Michele Bachmann:  Jesus wants her and Marcus to be sunbeams; Rick Panhandle Parry:  the neighs of Texas are upon you; Herman Pizza Cain:  there are a lot of women looking for jobs out there, and I feel their pain whenever I can; Newton Leroy Gingrich:  I am now a Catholic and sell books for Tiffany's and Callista;  Willard Mitt Romney:  everybody loves me about 25%!  And there are more. The Tea Party Regulars cheer for executions, the candidates cheer for water boarding, they hate health care and want to make social security something you underwear!  It is good to be king and to be rich, especially if you aren't, but know you will someday! Democrats cannot get anything done because there still are Republicans who...

The College declared a moratorium on salt and pepper shaker thieves.  If the students would bring the shakers back to the cafeteria, no one would ask any questions. "Why," I asked the students in my ethics class, do students steal salt and pepper shakers from the cafeteria.  They cost almost nothing!  Why not just buy some for your dorm rooms?" "That's not the point!", they told me.  "The College is ripping us off on tuition and books and housing and parking and instruction.  We are just getting even." At Penn State University, one of their coaches apparently molested children, for years.  He was reported, but it appears nothing was ever done about it.  He is retired now, running a children's sports camp, or some such thing.  Finally, it became public.  Joe Paterno was fired from the head coaching job, apparently for doing almost nothing about it, and so was the University President. "Well, you see the problem!" one of those ...

I arranged, today, for the John Deere dealer to pick up our little lawn tractor, take off the mower, and put on the snow blower. "Monday!" he said. "Great!," I thought, "right after the first snow."  "Fine!", I said.  "Send along some extra shear pins!" I cannot make the changeover myself, this year.  It is a nasty job.  The parts are heavy, and have to be brutalized into place.  Half of the work is done while lying on the floor.  And I have my own changeover to deal with:  my hip replacement is less than a month old. The physical consequences of taking out a natural-born hip joint and substituting metal and plastic parts is damnably irritating, but nothing special.  The psychological effects are much more interesting.  My natural-born parts are wearing out.  Whatever it was my unwitting mother gave birth to is starting to grind down. In the State of Mississippi, voters rejected a proposal to define a fertilized human egg as a...

After having had a hip replacement, I have not allowed principle to interfere with practicality, so I have put off going to the coffee shop in the morning.  But yesterday John called and asked, so this morning I put my practicalities aside and took some Tylenol. Luck provided a parking spot right in front of the cafe. I emptied the three-week-old dregs from my coffee mug, and high-caned it to the door.  As I walked through, the Bailiff, Joel, shouted, "All rise!", and they rose. The life worth living is found in the small things. .

The Giant Sequoias in the High Sierras seem to stand in their own kingdom; as monumental as the mountains themselves.  they are royal family members from an earlier age of earth, forgotten even in lore; unsurprised by their eventual discovery.   At the coast, as dependent on the breath of the ocean air as the sequoias are on the cutting mountain climate, the redwoods have pushed up the hillsides, far beyond ordinary trees as if, once, in that earlier age, they had been princes of earth themselves, sent to the unknown edge of the kingdom.   The small bristlecone pine trees, on the sawtoothed edge of the Sierras, live longer than the magnificent giants on the coast, who, themselves, span centuries.   The sequoias seem solitary, side-by-side in the remainder of their high kingdom, but the coastal redwoods are a virile family of giants, old and tall and strong.   Last week, middle in a circle of helpless humans, all of whom together might have been able to embra...

Jesse Ventura and I are almost joined at the hip.  About three years ago, Jesse had a hip replacement, too, as I did three weeks ago. It is difficult to have more than that in common!  With Jesse. Jesse is rather scary.  Perhaps I should call him Mr. Ventura.  He used to be a Navy walrus, and then he became a professional wrestler, and then--wanting to ease up a bit as he became older--he ran as an independent, and became the Governor of the Great and Good State of Puzzling Minnesota.   Truth be told, Jesse was a pretty good Governor, for a while, but towards the end he got his hip out of joint, and seemed not to be entirely happy with Minnesotans.  I have read that he--at least part-time--"lives off the grid" in Baja California, Mexico.   At the moment, Jesse is in a snit.  Apparently, Jesse's titanium hip set off the airport security alarm as he was proceeding to get on an airplane, and the airport security people took him aside and ...

According to every reputable polling organization in the whole history of the universe, our present Congress has a 9% favorability rating from the American public.  It is not much, but times are not good for fools and knaves. It is tough to do your work when only 9% of the public think you are doing your job.  And--Oh, Lord!--the problems are real:  unemployment, a huge deficit, the rate of the filthy rich getting filthier and richer is approaching warp speed, our bridges are falling down, people are being thrown out of their houses, people can't find jobs, and the cat litter needs changing.   The President has been hounding the Congress to do  something, so finally they did.  With (as Mark Twain once said) all the calm serenity of a Christian holding four aces, Congress  passed a non-binding resolution that affirms that our national motto is, "In God We Trust".  That, in fact, is our national motto.  No one disputes it, because no one ...