SmokeSound

I have been thinking about family, lately. Once, I thought of family in the same way I thought about a potato patch:  somebody planted it, and you got more potatoes.  When you grew up, and it was your turn, you planted a few potatoes, yourself.  All of us potatoes looked pretty much alike, acted alike, and had the same dimples and wrinkles.  Other people recognized us as having come from the same patch. Dad's oldest brother, Ola, from Norway, was impressed with our potatoes; not the family, so much, but with the Idaho potatoes.  He smuggled a few back to Norway, and planted them.  In the thin, cold soil on the island, they looked pretty much like Norwegian potatoes.  It had something to do, I guess, with the nutrients of that soil, and the lack of sun. Those were not the only potatoes in our family to go traveling.  I am one of them.  The potato patch I am in now does not look so much like what I remember.  A lot of my family does ...

The Supreme Court is debating whether it is legal to require people to have health insurance.  That is a Republican idea that the Democrats finally agreed with, so now the Republicans are arguing that it must be a bad idea because the Democrats support it. I have been wondering whether it is constitutional to require people to pay taxes for . . . a defense department, for instance, if you are willing to take your chances at not having one, or if you don't want to serve in the military, anyway. How about paying school taxes?  Should people who do not have children have to pay to educate other people's children?  I know parents who have good reason to argue that educating their own children is a bad idea.  And have you not resented, your whole life, that some idiot required you to memorize the State Capitals?  Whose idea was that? What if you do not want to walk around Lake Nokomis?  What if you do not intend to slip into, or slip on, your Speedo, and...

Now we know!  People are gay because of a "demonic possession".  Pat Robertson says so.  That is how we know.  Pat also occasionally explains that if we prayed we could steer tornados and hurricanes over onto someone else's property.  The problem is, it is difficult to know whether the hurricane hit New Orleans because good Christian people prayed it that way, or because nobody bothered and it sort of wandered into town on its own. There is something comforting in believing in the power of prayer.  It would be terrible to think that we live in a universe in which nature was perverse, sending death and destruction and spring flowers here and there without a plan.  That would be a scary place.  It is much more heartwarming to believe that tornadoes came through our town because a good Christian, like Pat Robertson, prayed that it would skip his town and head our way.  At least then we would know who to blame. I will admit that I am a bit mo...

Have you heard about the Norwegian who loved his wife so much that he almost told her? Do you know how to recognize a Norwegian extrovert?  He stares at someone else's shoes. And here I am, being Norwegian!  Sometime this summer, Mari and I shall move back to Tucson.  In 2002, we moved from Tucson to the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe.  At first, our furniture was stored in a house in Minneapolis, six blocks from the Coffee Shop.  After a few years, we moved our stuff to Eagan, across the river.  Our life, though, has been at the Coffee Shop, not because we spent so much time there, but because when we do go there--most mornings, for an hour--we see people whom we love. We shall never say that, of course.  We have not dribbled so far from our Scandinavian wellspring that we talk about our feelings.  It is just that--you know--some of the best people we have ever known simply happen to be there at about the same time, and if we were not staring ...

There are few things sadder than listening to sports announcers talk about anything except sports.  "No question about it!"  In fact, even when they do talk about sports, it is not always terribly profound. For example, two of our local sports show regulars recently explained why the University of Minnesota, whose team results have been something less and average, lately, ought to quit supporting minor sports and women's sports, and concentrate on football, and basketball, and hockey.  I cannot recall whether they counted baseball as of major or minor consequence. They were perfectly happy to get rid of all "non-revenue-producing" sports.  Women don't matter.  Soccer players don't matter.  Volleyball teams don't matter.  Intramural sports don't matter.  What matters are football, basketball, and hockey.  Men's football, basketball, and hockey.  The U. has excellent women's programs in hockey, and basketball, and a lot of other "i...

I have been lucky.  I am just the right age to have read more Zane Grey novels than he wrote, and for years I watched Matt Dillon tame Dodge City.  So I am not the least astonished or alarmed by the fierce urge of all these good ranchers and coyote hunters around me to buy a gun and bring law and order to the West. Those of you who live in the Far East--that is to say, on the other side of the Mississippi River--probably do not understand what it is like out here where men are men, and women are, too.  We have never had the privilege of all those New England religious Awakenings, nor the cleansing rituals of Salem Witch Trials.  We have not been raised on Southern Comfort and grits.  We have had to subdue mountains and raise up the flat places.  We, Out West, have had to convince the people who lived here for thousands of years that their land was our land, from the Great River to the Pacific Ocean, and from Sitka to Mexico, that God gave us Dominion over...

There is something glorious about a hot air balloon. There is something stupid about going up in one. The stupid part is getting back down. "Maybe," the pilot said, "I can get up over this thunderstorm." He got up to about two or three miles high. The thunderstorm was two or three times that high. The pilot came down, of course, for the last time. Two or three days after the storm had slammed the balloon and basket back to earth, the basket was still filled with golf ball sized hail stones. Something there is in a thunderstorm that does not love a hot air balloon. Almost everything there is on the ground does not love a hot air balloon. I hate to admit this, because it is pure nonsense, but John 3:8 had it right:  " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth:  so is every one that is borne by a hot air balloon." (Well, something like that.)   I can unde...

We are stuffing our lives into boxes, again.  It is an odd exercise.  The boxes are all cubes, and our lives are rounded. I counted the number of cities I have lived in for at least a year's time;  almost twenty.  All of those moves were within the context of living an ordinary life.:  school and jobs, all of them.  Nothing unusual.  This might be the first time we have chosen, without the nudges of work or prospective work, to move somewhere. Drawn on a map, our travels look like an old-fashioned exercise in penmanship; a sense of wandering circles, something like a slinky following the part of least resistance. The boxes are well-used, pulled from a stack in the garage..  They are almost a history.  Some of the boxes have other people's histories on them, used by other people.  I cross out the most recent lists of contents, and intended destinations (cities, storage, sales, kitchen, bedroom, Room 214) and look for an open space, ...

Religion and politics do  mix; not always well, but they are about the same thing. Religion is a way to specify what our lives, together, should be.  "Don't kill, usually.  Don't lie, usually.  Keep our hands off your neighbor's wife, usually."  That sort of thing.  Holy men--usually men--talk to the community about what a good life is.  Sometimes they write catechisms.  Sometimes--usually the women--organize classes for the kids. Every religious group is potentially the core of a community, or a society, with clearly articulated principles:  Don't lie, don't steal, don't smoke dope, don't play with yourself.  You can only have one wife, or maybe four, or maybe more:  it depends. Commonly, religious groups defend their ideas about what a society should be like by appealing to God.  "God says, 'Thou shalt not commit bigamy, or drink coffee, or eat pork.'" And that is what politics is about, too.  Pay your taxes, ser...

Today I met an honest man. I meet a lot of honest people, but honestly, I cannot alway tell. "How are you?" the clerk at Home Depot said. "Pooped," I replied.  (Let us  be honest, too:  my language may have revealed my age.) "So am I!", he replied.  "We are about the same age, aren't we?  Eighty?" I rose up from my pooped position, looked him in the eye, and agreed:  "Eighty!" Some day I might cast stones or aspersions at the next person who calls me, "Young Fella".  I might heap scorn on people who say that I do not look "a day over . . . Let's see . . . 57 (with a grin)?" I am eighty.  I look eighty.  I feel eighty.  I am pooped.

Mari and I shall soon be moving to Tucson, to a lovely house on the West Side, halfway up a hill.  Because the house is less than half the size of the one we are in, we are seriously paring down.  We have been packrats, filling all the available space with sticks and stones and ancient bones, but they have been our sticks and stones, and we have loved them!  Some have been with us for decades; some we love because of the people associated with them, or because they remind us of places we have known.  "Vidar gave us that cup!"  "We watched them blow this wine glass in Lillehammer!"  "Mom gave this to me!", or "I gave this to Mom."  "Dad used that!" We are moving to a city, to a place on earth, that we love.  It is a desert filled with life:  the Sonoran Desert.  It is Tucson!  This time, both of us are retired.  It is a time to change, so we are sorting:  "Sell this, toss that, give these away!  Keep these!" It is ...

"Speak English," Rick Santorum advised the people of Puerto Rico, "if you want Statehood!" Completely aside from whether the people of Puerto Rico want  Statehood, that is an arrogant, ignorant thing for Santorum to say. I am a second- or third-generation American.  My mother was born in Washington State.  My father, and all of my other immediate ancestors that I am aware of, were born in Norway.  My Norwegian-born grandfather, Jonas, once told me that once, long ago, a German had married into the family. In Washington State, my great-grandparents, Hendrik and Anna, spoke almost only Norwegian, or at most, a few "Hello!, Thank you!" words in English.  In 1966, I visited the place where my father had been born, and that he left when he was seventeen or eighteen (I think it was), to become an American.  Several of those Norwegian relatives spoke English; some of them at least as well as my father ever did. I do not know how many languages Rick Santor...

Mari and I went to see Shen Yun, partly because of the rave reviews purported to have come from the New York performance.  We, of course, saw the performance in Minneapolis.  It was Sunday School with scarves.  That is to say, the battle for good against evil, and the need to choose sides now, before the inevitable victory of ultimate good, up in the sky, was all dressed up in asian costumes and flying saints. The dancing was beautiful!  The costumes were lovely, and dramatic.  But it was a morality play in which it was clear that the forces of evil wore black, emblazoned with red Chinese characters, or something. "Our cultures have much in common!", I thought.  Moses climbed up on Mt. Sinai during a thunderstorm, and reported that he had heard the voice of God.  Somewhere in Asia, a nearsighted monk stared at the sun  and reported that he had seen the golden face of Buddha.  My Scandinavian ancestors heard the hammer and anvil of Thor, a...

Yesterday, after coffee, I drove to Decorah, Iowa to get our trailer:  16 feet of battered, old, moving machine.  It is a lovely old friend, having moved us across the country before.  Harley Refsal once said that my Indian name was, "Drives With Trailer". Not our trailer, but you get the idea. The poor thing its almost thirty years old, and it has moved, not only us, but a number of trailerless friends.  All over the western half of the United States, there are keen, perceptive, and tidy people who lie sleepless, and rise up fearful, that they they will see our trailer in the driveway next door. Imagine what it must be be like to see an octogenarian in Levis back an ugly trailer up the driveway next door!  "Are those chicken coops up on the roof?", you might very well ask.  "Are those mattresses under the chicken coops?"  "Is this, 'The Grapes of Wrath", all over again?" It is not that I am completely insensitive.  I try to fin...

"How long have you had that belt?" the salesman said.  "Since high school?" I am sure he was complimenting me on the endurance of the belt, and not on my style sense.  I bought another.  "Bridle leather", it said.  The stitching along the edges sewed the two layers together. The salesman assured me that the belt would hold me in and my pants up. Oh, my!  About seventy years ago, I sat next to my grandfather, Jonas Jacobson, while he stitched together layers of heavy leather to make, not a bridle, but a tug for a horse's harness.  I think there were three layers of heavy cowhide in those tugs, intended to reach from the horse's collar back to the singletree; one on each side of the horse.  Grandpa is long-since gone, and his youngest son just died, too; more than ninety years old.  But I suspect that somewhere on what remains of his farm, if the roof did not leak, there are probably still some bridles, or tugs with hand  stitches al...

. I.  On radio, advertising a place where you can donate your old car for a tax deduction: "I've had family members who have donated vehicles and friends." II.  A grizzled, scrabby guy with bad teeth, flirting with the bartender: "No, I guess I have been just too  choosy." III.  There are few things sadder than choosy old losers at a bar trying to flirt with young bartenders.

Kevin Love plays basketball for the Timberwolves.  He is incredibly good, often scoring more than 30 points, sweeping up 20 or more rebounds, while making his teammates look good. He is 6'11' tall, and has slimmed down to 260 pounds.  You don't have to be a giant to play basketball, but you had better be able to play with giants. Linemen in football often weigh nearly 400 pounds, and now that there are pass receivers nearly Kevin Love's size, the day of smaller defensive backs is in danger.  Hockey used to be about skating.  Now it is about giants skating, and fighting.  Even baseball has discovered that big  and strong and fast is better than smaller and strong and fast. I am having lunch at the bar of a local restaurant.  The coaster under my Irish Red reads, "Hi, I'm Kevin.  I'll be your coaster this evening." It is a big coaster. And I ordered a small salad. When John Wooden was coaching all those magnificent teams at UCLA, he said...

I have just watched a Minnesota Twins pre-season game from Fort Myers, Florida--where they train--and they are a cinch to win it all again!  It is crystal clear! Have I told you how many eye operations I have had? The Twins were magnificent last Summer, managing not to lose 100 games, falling one game short! *   *   * I also just saw a video of Mitt Romney voting in Massachusetts.  When his ballot was ready--it took him longer than it took his wife--he submitted his ballot, dealing with three people.  The third person put out her hand to greet  or congratulate him. "Oh, yeah," you could almost hear him think.  He turned and went back to the first two people, and shook their hands. "The Natural", the movie was called. *  *  * Let us be honest about the Twins.  Last year, they stank.  Or their record did.   It is true that some of their best players were hurt. Justin Morneau had concussions Denard Span had c...

Bismark called politics "the art of the possible".  That is to say, you cannot always get what you want. John Kenneth Galbraith was a little grubbier.  He said, " Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. In either case, the politics is not war, demanding unconditional surrender.  Politics assumes compromise, or the less-than-perfect.  That is why the current rhetoric of our politicians about the evil of compromise is so disastrous.  A knife fight in an alley is not compromise.  Arguing about ideas is.   Ever since Plato--probably long before Plato, but we don't know what we don't know--we have spoken of the good, and the true, and the beautiful.  Today, we might call those things morals and ethics, science or facts, and art.   If we assume that there is an absolute truth, there can be no compromise.  That is equally true of an absolute good.  It would be ...

When you don't pray! Well, we know why an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010.  Pat Robertson told us that the Haitians had made a pact with the Devil a long time ago to get free of the French--You can't blame them for that:  you know the French!--and the Devil said, "Okay, it's a deal.".  And then the Devil remembered the deal in 2010 and shook Haiti like a voodoo doll! And now we know how we could have prevented the tornadoes that ripped through the Midwest last week:  we could have prayed them away!   It's easy, Pat said.  Had enough people been praying, God would have intervened and stilled the storms.   It appears that God has no interest in stilling storms if there are not enough people praying all at the same time, and it obviously was not enough that nearly everybody in Haiti was praying--probably because they were praying in French, and you know the French!  Anyway, they had made a pact with the Devil, a long time ago, and the...

Javelinas "This is a good neighborhood," she said.  But she was the seller's realtor:  I discounted.  The seller agreed, adding details:  I added back. "Maybe," I thought.  I hope so.  But part of good-neighborhooding has to do with what we bring to the neighborhood.  I made a mental list of places where we had lived.  All of them, with the possible exception of two temporary stops, where everyone, including us, knew that we were temporary, were places with good neighbors, but we had little time to discover them. What is this about?  We are going to move, again!  We are going back to Tucson, Arizona where, twice before (and three times for me) Mari and I have lived.  We are returning.  This Spring, Mari will retire from her job.  We will become desert rats, again. "How is it possible," I wondered aloud, "for descendants of Norwegian fisher- and farmer-immigrants, to come to love the desert?" "That's easy!" my b...