SmokeSound

I suspect that the General who stands outside our door--who moved here with us--is rather surprised at where he is, and how hot it is.  His ancestry is from Xi'an, but he is uncomplaining and steadfast, and I am glad he is here. Xi'an is an ancient Chinese city, and the "Terracotta Army" was assembled to provide its first emperor protection and conversation when he died.  It was no small company.  There appear to be about 8000 soldiers and 500 horses in the standing army.   In our case, our copy-cat guardian is more eye-pleasing than defensive:  we have an alarm system for invaders.   I like to think of him, rather, as a kind of Mitt Romney on ceremonial guard duty.  Every once in a while, I rap on him to determine whether he is real, or not.  Pretty stiff!

It was a wicked, little thing!  Sharp, sharp teeth, something like needles.  Six inches long.  It looked like it might belong to a mandoline, but my mandoline had no place to accomodate it. Then I found the plastic cover, which had slipped to the bottom of the box of kitchen tools.  It said, "After use, wash, and store in a han' ging position". Han' ging?  That sounds like a martial arts move, probably involving a foot kick, and a brittle board lying across two concrete blocks:  something to bruise the hand all the way to the bone. As Thomas Paine said, "If we do not han' g together, we shall surely han' g separately". But there I am:  back to the Republican Convention, again!  (When does Sarah Palin speak?)

"It didn't look like a banana, but, by God, it tastes like a banana!"  None of us springs newborn from the head of Zeus:  we inherit what worked for our parents--and sometimes what didn't work--but this time the banana genes made it all the way to Nathaniel.   The kid will probably have a taste for Blackcod, and Halibut, and Prime Rib and Sea Scallops, and we will wonder what happened to the Peanut Butter and Jam genes.   But for now, it is all canned banana, and the beginning of a whole, new world of really good things.  

We do, unfortunately, like simple answers, even to complex questions.   This morning I drove to the east side of town to watch the Tucson Old Timers play baseball:  "The Oldest Baseball Team in the World".  The TOTs have been playing baseball for forty years, but the "Oldest" part refers to the age of the team members, not the team itself.  You have to be at least sixty years old to join the team.   I thought about one of the guys who died several years ago.  We were preparing a temporary field for a game, and while we waited for the team members to arrive, he explained to me that he knew exactly how the world was going to end.  It had something mysterious to do with Israel, and godless Democrats, and Palestine, and the Wicked Witch of the West.  I remember thinking of Liberal, Kansas, and the Yellow Brick Road.   He knew exactly how the world was going to end!   Part of the convincing power of religions is the dismal belief ...

The founders of this nation had not forgotten that many of the original settlers had come here in order to be free to practice whatever religion they pleased.  The notion of an official religion, sponsored, or required, by the government was abhorrent.  So our Constitution states that people in this nation will be free to be religious, as they please, and that government will not deny them that right.  And, second, government itself will not sponsor any of those religions.   That, of course, works only fairly well.  Mitt Romney, for instance, belongs to a religious group that once practiced polygamy:  lots of religious groups practice polygamy.  But when Utah wanted to become a State, our government did not hesitate to require that polygamy be denied.  Some of Mitt Romney's ancestors moved to Mexico, in protest. The real fact--whatever we say--is that we are a Constitutional Democracy, and that our most important values are embedded in our C...

These must be agonizing days for what used to be the Republican Party.  Everything has turned on its head.   After the Civil War--everything in this nation has a deep root in the Civil War--it was the Republican Party that represented what the Party of Abraham Lincoln was.  The war was at least as much about the economics of the North and South as it was about slavery, but the Republicans inherited at least the raggedy honor of racial equality.   They screwed it up, of course, because we often manage to do that.  The Democrats were the Old Southerners.   Today all that is on its head.  When Martin Luther King and the  Kennedys  and  Lyndon Johnson managed to ignore our own Northern racism and passed the Civil Rights act--they were all Democrats--the Southerners who continued to represent the profoundly deep attitudes that persisted long after the war, became Republicans:  the other side.   Today, the people who have th...

"Are you going to rejoin the team?" "No.  No, I'm just enjoying being here.  But I am getting a fierce urge to hold a baseball for the first time in ten years." Ed brought me three baseballs.  "Here!", he said.  "Use these!" On the way home, I stopped at a neighborhood park, where I knew there was a large, grassy field, almost unused.  I aimed for a spot in the grass, not so much to hit the spot, but to discover whether, like a golfer with the yips, I could not even make a throwing motion.  I can remember having done that.  Up ahead, I threw at a mushroom, then a tree, working my way all around the field.   I felt like a goofy, eighty-year-old boy, throwing baseballs at nothing.   

In the mid-1600s, a good number of witches happened along in Salem, Massachusetts, but the good people of Massachusetts were not without wit and wisdom.  They devised a fair and balanced trial to determine whether the woman in question was a witch, or whether she was not.   They put the woman to a trial.  This is how it went:  they tied her to a kind of balance beam, and dunked her into a "pure" pond, while a deacon of the church slowly recited the Lord's Prayer three times.  If the accused did not survive the dunking--that is to say, came out dead--they announced that she was not a witch after all.  If she survived--that is to say, if she were still alive--she was proclaimed to be a witch, and they pronounced a sentence over her.  After all, only a witch could survive an ordeal like that! No one ever recalled any acquittals.  Every one they tried died:  the innocent drowned, and the guilty got what witches deserve. Now we have so...

Ten years later, the same people were still sitting where they were, not really talking to each other so much as reconvening the neighborhood at the Market, just to remind each other that they are a community.   At our side, one of those helicopter mothers had gathered other like-minded people to explain to them what was wrong with Pima Community College.  The other four nodded agreement.  "God help Pima College!" I thought.  "The Taliban are coming!"  No.  She was just trying to ease her son, at her side, into and through an education.  It probably was a process that needed lubrication.   The University volleyball team had made a deal, so they were siphoning omelets down into their long, lean bodies, and at the outside tables, lone wolves were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper at their iron grate tables:  weather-proof, wear-proof, and theft-proof.   The Rincon Market is a combination of grocery, delicatessan, fruit m...

Not so long ago, we grew up thinking of ourselves as apart, living on a huge continent with enormous oceans on both sides of us.  Canada was north of us, benign, a place between us and Alaska, but not a way to Alaska.  The coastal passage was the way to Alaska.  Only during World War II, did it seem to finally occur to us that we might want to be able to drive to Alaska, so the ALCAN Highway fumbled its way across frozen ground and frozen lakes northward.  It was the Japanese, probing their way into the Aleutians that spurred us.   South, Mexico waited for something, just there; a place for rich and adventurous Californians to visit and drink margaritas.  We vaguely recalled school-book stories about the Alamo, and the Gadsden Purchase, and Spanish riders probing north, long ago, but Davy Crocket and the Alamo and Texas seemed like vague buffers to whatever was south of us.  In California, early Spanish missions reminded us of what seemed to be dist...

Ten years ago we moved from Tucson to the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  Ten years ago I quit playing baseball with the TOTS:  the Tucson Old Timers. You had to be at least sixty to be voted into the Club.  When I left, Clarence was already eighty-two, and as I was told, had been one of the founders of the team, years earlier.  A Wisconsin dairy farmer, he had been told to move to the desert, somewhere, for the sake of his daughters' asthma, and had done so, getting a job with the University agriculture department's dairy farm.  But whenever Clarence said "home", he still meant Wisconsin.   Today I drove out to Udall Park, to see the team on one of its three days of baseball a week.   There is a new bench outside the backstop.  Clarence Fieber died a year or so ago, having gotten to ninety, and more, still catching a baseball.   I sat on his bench, and fell in love with Clarence all over again, and with playing baseball in the summer...

I read that Paul Ryan had authored just two successful bills during his more-than-ten years in the US House.  I said to Mari, "I'll bet they were about naming Post Offices."  In fact, one of them was.  The other had something to do with bows and arrows.   So Paul Ryan knows something about government work, and national defense.  I suppose we should be grateful.  What if some of his more considerable ideas had been put into law:  do-it-yourself investment of your retirement money in the stock market, giving us a voucher to buy our own health care policy (and good luck with the price!).     Mr. Ryan says he sleeps well at night, while considering our future.  It is odd, but a lot of people who have inherited a lot of money do not seem to worry as much about Social Security or access to health care as working stiffs do.  Mitt Romney worries even less than Paul Ryan does, perhaps because he has squirreled away more money for his...

It was inevitable.  Paul Ryan--Mitt Romney's choice as a running mate--"is the kind of guy you would like to have a beer with".   By Neddy Dingo, I am Vice Presidential material!  I am the kind of guy who would like to have a beer, and I am , for that matter.  Well, for pity's sake, it is 107 degrees outside!    Paul Ryan has proposed to cut Social Security, to get rid of "Obamacare"; that is to say, our medical insurance, to raise most people's taxes, but to cut taxes on the people who are making the most money, and so forth.  Is that not the kind of guy you enjoy having a beer with?   Even Uncle Mitt seems ambiguous about Paul Ryan's budget proposals.  Before he selected Ryan to be his Vice Presential running mate, he praised Ryan's budget and said he was ready to sign it into law.  Now, he says he wants to put his own budget proposal together, and that he is going to do that as soon as he can figure out how to make one that w...

It is odd, the morning after watching  what might be called a storm go by, missing us,  seemingly tugged off-line by the thirsty Catalina Range,  scarcely ten miles east of us,  to see water cross the road,  slipping necessarily to those rambling,  sandy ravines called "rivers" on the map.   It is fugitive water,  having escaped an endless network  of almost invisible, shallow roots  lying in wait for what seldom comes,  surplus water, left over after the sand has sucked what it can,  river-bed-bound water migrating like newborn butterflies that turn north to where they have never been, and like the butterflies,  almost surely destined not to make it all the way, leaving that for the next storm.   In a desert,  even too much water is not enough water. Plants are waxy-shiny, reluctant to let water evaporate, knowing that water-let-go must circle the earth again before the next rain. In the meantime,...

Thirty years ago, today, Mari and I were married at our half-finished log house on a wooded hillside in Northeast Iowa.  We came in, with Michael and Daniel, on a horse drawn buggy, down a sunflower-lined lane, to a fine gathering of friends and relatives, to salmon from Alaska, cooked on planks over wood fires, to a jazz band, to a solemn high picnic, the liturgy of which baffled Mari's Dad for years, until he figured out that it didn't matter, anyway.  He was more interested in the horse, anyway. Both of us had been married before, and neither of us has married again, nor do we plan to.  We were, and are, one of the examples of people who did not get it quite right the first time, and maybe not the second time, either, but glad it happened the way it did.  Thirty years! It was a hot and humid day in Iowa; beastly hot, and humid.  The next day it cooled to perfection.  Soon after, we moved to Tucson for three years, for graduate school, and here we are...

Pat Robertson has explained, not only the tragedy in Wisconsin, where some guy who thought White people were superior to everybody else, killed a half dozen Sikhs who had come to worship.   It was atheism, he said.   "...people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God, and they are angry at the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshipping God..." "Whether it's a Sikh temple, or a Baptist church, or a Catholic church, or a Muslim mosque – whatever it is – I just abhor this kind of violence, and it's the kind of thing that we should do something about," Robertson said on The 700 Club.   And Brother Pat, who can stop hurricanes with a single prayer, but who has not yet put his theory to the test, not only has analyzed the massacre at the Sikh temple, but he has an answer to such violence, too.   Robertson's advice is simple: "Well, you talk about the ...

Mitt Romney--Does that not foster an image of a device to catch a baseball?--says that Barack Obama is fostering a culture of dependency.  (Pay no attention to the charge:  it is pure B.S. and political rhetoric.)   I have been watching a friend who works for one of the richest men in Minnesota.  Being extremely rich is what fosters a culture of dependency.  People with a s**t-load of money are good at fostering dependency.  When they say s**t, people squat.  When they say, "Do it over!", people do it over if they want to be paid.  When they say, "Carry it up the driveway! I don't want trucks up here!", people say, "Yes, sir!", and carry it up the driveway. If you have $1.7 billion dollars, you don't care whether the sub-contractor is happy, or treated fairly, or paid on time.  You don't care.  You don't have to care.  Someone tells you that there will soon be another contract to replace the flooring, and do you want to be consi...

"Chick-fil-A".   I am embarrassed to admit this, but the first time I ever saw a Chick-fil-A restaurant--the last time we lived in Tucson--I could not figure out how to pronounce its name.  It came out, "chick-fill-uh".   "A chick-fill-uh?  What kind of a fill-uh is that?  Stuffed chicken?" "Sump'n Southern, I guess, like grits, or collard greens."   I have never been inside a Chick-fil-A restaurant, which is not a claim to some kind of negative virtue, but an admission that even if you put the young women in T-shirts and have them serve beer, orange is not an appealing restaurant color.  But I was as wrong about that as I was about how to pronounce "chicken fillet".  I found this somewhere: " Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, enco...

Mr. Mitt Romney tried to credit Jared Diamond's book--"Guns, Germs, and Steel"--to explain why the Israeli's are richer than the Palestinians.  Mr. Mitt said it was their culture.  Mr. Mitt did not say that the Israelis have more guns than the Palestinians, and that they control much of what happens in Palestine. I can understand why Mr. Romney had trouble reading Jared Diamond's book:  it is a book filled with big words and bigger ideas.  In fact, Mr. Diamond says he doubts that Mr. Romney actually read the book:   "That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it," he wrote in the New York Times.   Mr. Romney said it was the culture of Israel that was so superior.  Mr. Diamond's book says that what is often attributed to culture rests on the influences of geography; on environmental differences which are amplified by positive feedback loops.  It is obvious that both Israelis and Palestini...

The most naturally graceful member of the Romney family is Rafalca. Do you suppose the reason that Mitt is not naming his running mate until after Rafalca has performed in the Olympics is because they are waiting to see whether she says anything stupid, irnorant, or puzzling?  Or quits halfway through? One cannot be too careful in choosing a Vice Presidential nominee. Can one? What was it the President of the University of Kentucky said when the Board of Regents insisted that Man of War be awarded an honorary degree?  "This is the first time that I have awarded an honorary degree to a whole horse."