SmokeSound

Grandfather! I will say, "Grandfather", maybe because I am old, too, or maybe because I read it once in a Native American prayer!  "Grandfather!" No, I will call you, "Grandfather" because I want to remind myself, and others who listen, that sometimes I want to call up something old, and something wise; something longer and larger than I am, standing here, thinking, fumbling my way through a thicket.  I will imagine you as something very old and very wise, Grandfather, because I need something older and wiser right now.   I imagine that a lot of people might rather say, "Grandmother", or "Mother", as I do, sometimes, too, especially when I know I need something kinder; something warmer and wiser.  Maybe, when I was very small, had I ever called my mother, "Jenny",  I might have said, "Jenny".  I think that is why I stop, somewhere inside, when a woman says her name is "Jenny".   I shall say, "Grand...

I don't know why more people don't study science.  I know why I didn't.  I wasn't smart enough.  I came to that realization while getting a minor in chemistry.  At the time I studied chemistry, people were still inventing the periodic table, and kids played with mercury at the kitchen table.   Now, though, there are really interesting scientific developments to lure students to the sciences, not least of which is the claim that farting dinosaurs may have warmed the whole earth 150 million years ago.  If that  possibility cannot draw kids into the sciences, nothing will! Cows and sheep, today, do their best to melt the ice, but compared to sauropods they are mere windbags.  The amount of methane produced by those Mesozoic, long-necked, overgrown cows might have been more than all of our natural and artificial flatulence, put together.   And methane is a far, far better gas for warming the climate than carbon dioxide.  Already, we...

Two young men.  Mid-twenties.  Talking about a "loser" friend.  Not too bright.  Working in a deli.  Not going anywhere.  Just earning the best living he can.  You know the type:  not like us winners. "There is a verse in the Old Testament," one said, "that says that if a child is born out of wedlock, it will never see the kingdom of heaven". I wonder whether there is such a verse.  Sounds awful.  A damnable thing to say, if it is there.  I don't want to look it up.  I do know the Bible says you can stone a woman to death if she wears two different kinds of cloth clothing.  Lots of other ignorant, purely damnable stuff.  So I half-believe it is there. The point is not whether primitive people were savages:  they were.  And the point is not that some of the savages live on, and work at Lockheed, or Unisys, or at Thompson Reuters.  But in what universe should a child go to hell because its parents w...

"If Mitt Romney should do it, then I should do it, too!", I thought. Mitt Romney had the opportunity to come clean about his past as a Schoolyard Bully, about the time he and several of his friends took down a smaller kid whom they seemed to think was gay, and cut off his long hair.  Ol' Mitt did not seem to remember what all his friends remembered, but to the extent that he might have remembered, had he remembered, he did admit that he was a fun-loving guy, full of pranks and other savage behavior. We are sorting through our belongings, getting ready to move, and in the course of unearthing old memories, we found a picture of me as a clergyman in California.  Clues suggest that I was about 32, absolutely clean-shaven, and wearing a cassock, surplice, and stole. Most of the coffee gang laughed, quite as one might at the sight of a dog playing poker, not so much because the dog was good at it, but because the dog could do it, at all.  Joel sputte...

It is painful to read and listen to all the nonsense about sexual orientation.  Now a Representative from Oklahoma, James Lankford, thinks it ought to be legal to fire people from their jobs because people, he believes, choose to be gay or lesbian. Obviously, if people can choose to be gay or lesbian, people also must choose to be heterosexual.  I do not remember ever choosing to be sexually attracted to women.  It is only the "choosing" part I do not recall.  The attraction itself was never in doubt. I do not know anyone who chooses to be attracted to another person, like the little train that thought it could.  To the contrary, the attractions that we feel are often so powerful that we have trouble managing them. In a similar way, the lack of attraction that we feel is just as automatic, and often just as powerful. And what is this baloney about firing people because they are gay?  Should we--just to be fair--fire people because they are straight...

Then Michele Bachmann looked around and discovered that her friends at the Tea Party weren't as enthusiastic as she was about her being a conscious agent of a foreign power; that is to say, that by virtue of her marriage to Marcus, of Swiss descent, that she held dual citizenship, there and here. "How," her Tea Sipping friends wanted to know, "is it possible to be a loyal American and go to church picnics and pledge the allegiance to the Stars and Stripes if you came from somewhere else?" "But I didn't!", she protested, "Marcus' family came from there!  We are just going along for the ride!" But no amount of protesting that her real name was something else, and that she really loved Jesus and Our Founding Fathers much more than she loved Marcus or Switzerland and universal health care, mattered.  Finally, she recanted being a citizen of the world, and went back into her house in Stillwater, Minnesota, which is not in her congres...

I am beginning to detect a pattern. Recently it was, "Sir, are you perusing the news?" Today it was, "Sir, are you partaking of any of these?" I believe I know what triggers these deferential inquiries.  It is the bib.  I believe that I should not wear a bib when I eat.  Especially at a bar. I do not believe it is the dodder.

I did something important yesterday. I took my boat to a marina and put it up for sale. A few years ago, when I was a mere seventy-something years old,  Sture asked whether I had been serious when I said I wanted to build a boat. If so, he said, he thought he knew of a space to build it. My most important reason for wanting to build a boat had to do, not so much with the fact that it was a boat, but that I was beginning to think of myself as getting old; too old to do new things. I was old, and getting older.  The evidence was obvious. When I walked, I made sounds like a door needing oil on it hinges. I could no longer go as long between oil and filter changes:   the doctor explained that my moving parts were suffering from fatigue. My right eyeball sprang a leak that required multiple repairs.   But I built the boat!   I even went to a diesel engine workshop.   I learned to do things I had never done before.   Boats, I learned...

Barach Obama says that he, personally, supports the right of other people to get married if they want to.  Apparently, like many of us, once he thought marriages should be arranged by matchmakers, or busybodies, or Congress. Now, I ask you, what business is it of President Obama to have an opinion about whom other people want to marry?  Presidents have more important things to worry about!  For instance, should he not be worrying about dual citizenship in Switzerland, possibly on a nice, little place right next to Michele Bachmann on Lake Zurich?   I will tell you who ought to be worrying about the right of other people to marry whomever they want!  Marcus Bachmann has a right to worry!  Is he not married to Michele?  How did that happen?  There should be a law!   No, look!  When Michele is not hollering at us about how slavery ended when Abraham married his maidservant or whomever it was, or that everybody else in government is...

Even though we all know that providing competent and adequate health care to everyone who needs it is a dirty, rotten socialist, character-eroding activity, Sarah Palin admitted that her family had gone to a nearby Canadian city for health care. Now, our very own Belle, Michele Bachmann, has applied for and received dual citizenship in Switzerland.  Her husband, Marcus, is apparently Swiss, and their marriage makes Michele eligible for citizenship.  Anyway, she said, "I t's tough to find a place not to like in Switzerland!".   And, Switzerland has universal health care.   But Michele probably will not need health care.  Over there.  Or anywhere where everybody has access to it.  Dripping of socialism!   I think dual citizenship is fine.  I suspect that liking to be a part of two places is far better than thinking it is "us against them".  But is Switzerland the best place for Michele?  Does she speak French?  German? ...

Since we are moving to a much smaller house, we are calculating what we can take, and what we must dispose of.  At the moment, we are sorting books.  Most of them are not coming with us.  It is not just that books take a lot of space.  And it is not that we can read many books on electronic devices.  We do that, too.  It is not so much the books as it is the separation of books from information.  Much of the information in books can be gotten electronically.  Even Encyclopedia Britannica is discontinuing it paper versions.   And since much, although not all, of the information we want can be gotten electronically, we are much quicker to go to the local library for the books we need.  Minnesota has some fine local libraries!   (Minnesota also has Michele Bachmann, so we know that Jesus will not be returning soon.  She is evidence that there is much to be done, first.)   A second, large trailer load of furniture...

"Sir," he said, "are you perusing the news?" It took me a second to understand what he was asking. I was having lunch at a local brewery.  It is a good place to have lunch, because they have good beer and good food.  (I am a man of simple and elementary wants.)  Next to me on the bar there was a newspaper.  He wanted to read it, and did not want to take it if I were reading it.  I sent him off happy. I am never going to read a newspaper, again.  I am going to peruse the news. One of the advantages of being old is that people often speak more politely to you than they do to ordinary, obviously immature people.  I had no delusions about being an ordinary person.  In fact, I had just taken three old TV sets to the recycling center.  No ordinary, new-fangled, flat-screened sets were they, either!  They were massive, cathode ray tubes, more-or-less in the shape of a hot air balloon, or a manatee.  It was all I could manage to get...

What are little boys made of? "Snips and snails, and puppy dogs' tails That's what little boys are made of!" What are little girls made of? "Sugar and spice and all things nice That's what little girls are made of!" One of the strangest experiences of my life was auditing a course in the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona, because I had been reading about a goofy idea called, "The Anthropic Principle".  It goes something like this:   In order to observe the world around us, the world must be somehow compatible with the conscious life that is observing it.  Or, to put it another way, the world around us has to be such that it can accomodate conscious life.   To put it in a somewhat more tangled way, it is to say that if we can observe anything, that thing has to be somewhat compatible with a life that can observe.  Or, conditions that can be observed in a universe must allow for an observer to exist.   Whoof!   Diddling arou...

"What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us?"   --from Downton Abbey  If you want eternity, and eternal truth, and rest, and certainty, death is the place to be.  To be alive is to change.  To be alive is to become something we have not been, from the moment of conception on.  Perhaps even before that, all the way back to that thunderous explosion of something from nothing:  the Big Bang! What is sadder than a person who almost stops learning?  Who almost stops changing?  To really be set in one's ways is to lie in a box.   Sometimes we do not like the changes that are inevitable in the course of life:  getting old, getting wrinkles, getting a little forgetful, getting gray, getting rheumatism.  But that is what happens to living things.  We change.   We also learn, and begin to understand things.  "Aha!", we say, "Now I understand!"  That is to live, and to change.  To change is t...

Ann Romney says of her husband, Mitt, that "there is a wild and crazy guy in there" with a great sense of humor. Yep.  And Bert Blyleven, former major league pitcher, and Minnesota Twins commentator (although not so often now that he no longer needs to lobby for inclusion in the Hall of Fame), has a great sense of humor, too:  crawling under the bench to give teammates a hotfoot; peanut butter in their shorts; that sort of thing. I wonder if Bert has a dog, or is interested in running for office.