Peder Heltne's Bachelor Bed

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 and tools is almost ready to go to an auction house in Iowa, where we used to live. Every piece represents a calculation that there is not room for it in our next house, so off it goes! It is, truly, an exhilarating process! Bookcases I built the first time we lived in Tucson are on their way to their final reward in Iowa.

We have decided to keep the headboard and footboard of Mari's great grandfather's bachelor bed. If they hang on for a couple more generations, they may become someone's treasure and connection to the immigrants who came to Iowa from far up the Sognefjord. As our families, more and more, interweave with other immigrants from all over the world, we will surely enjoy the tangible symbols of the ways we have come together.

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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. ...

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...

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