SmokeSound

Moving means leaving some things behind.  Moving also means rediscovering things. Thirty-seven years ago, Dean asked me to rebuild an old log cabin that was tilting toward eternal rest.  While I was doing that, I wrote poems about the lady with the bonnet, tilted off, like that!  And more.  Dean threw as many pots, with words and images from the poems, from the cabin, and from wherever Dean finds and invents things. One day he gave me the drawing, above, and on another day, Loyal and Marilyn stopped by and gave me the second drawing, which had belonged to Joseph Langland, which they found at a sale after Joe's death.  The frame and the glass were broken, but I have been harboring it, waiting. We had to leave a lot of things behind, but not these treasures, and now they have new frames and mounting. The memories are fresh.  The friendships are firm.  The cabin stands, still, tilted off, like that.

A lovable duck Lord, love a duck! Mari had a fender-bender. I had a frame-bender. We rented a car, for temporary transportation. Yesterday the brakes in Mari's car went out:  a hole in a vacuum line.  Tow job.  New hose.   Today the battery in the rental car was dead. I bought a jumper cable, but it was so short I had to drive over a cactus to get within jumper-range.   And now-- Now! --I am paying bills; just ordinary bills. Do not speak to me about all things working together for good  for those who love the Lord!  The Lord never had to deal with short jumper cables.  Never paid a bill in his life, on line.   Although he might have been married, according to the news.   (Anyway, all  jumper cables are too short.   Jumper cables that are long enough are called  trunk transmission lines.) And worse than that-- worse than that! --the temporary referees who stole--I say, stole a game from the ...

He struck out. He didn't just strike out. He struck out against a 22 mph fastball. "There are days like that!", Den said. "There are days when you can't piss a drop, and there are days when you can piss a whole thimbleful."

From Arizona Daily Star The Space Shuttles, now discontinued, are being parceled out to a few museums and places significant to their history and development. One of them, having been piloted by Gabrielle  Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, agreed to fly low over Tucson, on its journey to California. Gabby Giffords is the Representative who was shot at a public gathering, together with several other people, just because a man with a screw loose wanted to do it, and had a gun with a magazine large enough to kill a football team. Mari and I were not, by far, the only Tucsonans who were surprised at how deeply we were moved by the sight of that brick of a space plane, on the back of a huge 747, dipping down low over town, where Giffords and Kelly waited atop a parking garage at the University.  It was, I think, something about the fragile beauty of Giffords and the audacity of a nation able to probe a short way into space coming together.  In its own way, the space pr...

In an article in the Huffington Post, Ann Romney is cited, explaining how the Romneys know what hard times are: "They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at [Brigham Young University], we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income ... Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time," Ann Romney told the  Boston Globe  in 1994. "We had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining." There is nothing wrong with that.   There is something wrong with believing that constitutes hard times and ordinary life.  

This Presidential Campaign is causing me to think about Lyle Cary.  A lot. Lyle owned a machine shop in Decorah, Iowa, where I taught at Luther College.  The Shop occupied a lovely, old-fashioned building, alongside of which Lyle had built a utilitarian block building separated by an "alley" just wide enough so that he could drive his pickup in from the back, and leave it, near the street, ready for whatever it never needed to be ready for.   The Norwegian American Museum owned the buildings on both sides of Lyle's shop, and Lyle seemed to own most of the buildings across the street.  Lyle did well, doing superb machine shop work; not just monster machinery, and farm machinery, but the small kinds of things kids brought in, hoping for, and finding, a friend who knew how to fix things.  Lyle was testy, and he had good reason.  He was a very successful business man, and he had traveled far, learning things, and enjoying things.  Lyle's problem,...

I cannot see it as I am composing this post, but there is a picture of me on the blog that Loyal refers to as "a death mask", and he hassles me to change it.   I cannot change it because nothing I do works.  I think it has something to do with the handy-dandy formatting system.  No matter!   But I thought you should see the only alternative photo I have.  You might think of it as a kind of "post-partum mask".  And you might note, also, that bowed legs might not be an acquired trait.  They were there, pretty early on.  Having been born in December of 1931, I should guess that the photo was taken in early 1933, using one of those cameras that consisted of a paper box with a pin hole in it.  Let me help you:  that would be almost 80 years ago.  

You know Grover Norquist.  He is the guy who owns your Republican congressman's soul. Mr. Norquist has devised a pledge that "opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle," and he has gotten almost all Republican Senators and member of Congress to sign it, as well as all but one Republican aspirant for the Presidency.   Norquist has said: "When I became 21, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of 21." [Wikipedia]  That may explain something about Grover Norquist.   "Our goal," Norquist also said, "is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."  Is that where you want to live?  You shouldn't have to have gates to keep people out of that community.  

If life is a competition with each other then, like the NFL, we will be divided into winners and losers.  Like the NCAA, half of us will go to bowl games, and the other half will be branded, "losers".   "Our first goal", the Minnesota Twins have said all year, "is to reach .500".  Well, they still haven't reached .500.  In fact, they have reached .408.  They have won 40.8% of their games.   By definition, or necessity, half of the games played produce precisely as many losers as they do winners.  Fans who demand winning teams are, at the same time, demanding that somebody else be a loser.   Baseball can be a lot of fun, even when the team loses but, admittedly, it is more fun, most of the time, when it wins.  But the plain fact is that, in a competition, there are as many losers as winners.   If life together, as in American life, is a competition, and only a competition, then half of us, of necessity, will be losers.  Wi...

The Los Angeles Times investigated the records of the Boy Scouts of America, and their report suggests that the Boy Scouts have an altar boy problem, or more properly, a priestly problem.  Or perhaps it is that the Catholic Church has a Scoutmaster problem. I have told, before, of learning of a rogue Lutheran minister in San Francisco who left his wife to make music with the female organist, that it was not uncommon for Lutheran Synodical leaders (or Bishops) on the East Coast, or the Midwest, to ship clergymen--they were all men, at that time--out west "for a new start". Everyone knows what a shameful history the Catholic Church has with priests who were not skilled enough to get a job coaching at Penn State, who systematically sexually abused young boys, and how the hierarchy of the Church covered up for them.  Just paying reparations for a small fraction of the abusers has nearly bankrupted several dioceses. To compound the outrage of the way the Boy Scouts has hi...

"I will be right back," he said to the young woman.  "I am going to measure your bed." Something specific in mind, I guess.  

We are still unpacking boxes. As evidence that my whole life has taken a kind of Mitt Romney turn to the right, consider the back saw I just unpacked.   As evidence that Mitt Romney is my model, expect me to show a similar picture next week with the blade veering off to the left.  Do not expect the blade to settle down in the middle.   That is not exactly spring steel, is it?  The saw, I mean.  Either.   I can hardly wait to find the box with my level.  Or our food processor.  I found the box with two left shoes.  

I am never going to make another left turn.   Second in line, I followed a van out into the intersection, and then discovered that the van was intent on beating the light:  a green light, but no green left-turn arrow, yet.   The van made it.   Do you see me, in the picture, standing next to the pickup?  I don't, either.  That is how small I feel.   Don't cry for me, Argentina!  Cry for my insurance company.  They are going to repair the truck, because they have found a replacement cab, and will buy a whole new frame.  Do you know how much enthusiasm it takes to bend the frame of a 250/350?   The airbag went off.  "Really?", I thought, at the time, or a second after the time.  I am as good as new, because of the air bag, with a cracked sternum, which only hurts when I breathe.  After the fact, I realized what a whack an air bag must deliver.  Most of the things I thought about were collages of the bro...

Rick Santorum says that the smart people will never be on his side.   He didn't exactly say it that way:  he said, "our side", because he believes that he is America.  Then he said something that is either purely ignorant, or scrambled-egg stupid.   "The basic premise of America and American values will always be sustained through two institutions -- the church and the family."  Imagine what America would be like if it were shaped purely by family and church.  I don't know why the Hatfields and the McCoys come immediately to mind.  Perhaps because I come from a family, myself.  But, worse than that, I cannot imagine what it means to think of a nation as a family; even an extended family.  I can somewhat imagine a clan, even a large clan, but a nation is not a clan.  A nation is neither Hatfields nor McCoys, extended.   And as for pretending that a nation is a religious community, we have tried that throughout human history...

Doug Kreuz photo, AZ Daily Star 9/10/2012 Autumn! , it says.   There it is:  autumn, in all its grandeur! Well, it did not actually say that, in so many words, but it would be foolhardy to ignore a yellow leaf when you see one, or three. First a yellow leaf, and then . . . a couple more, I suppose. The temperature will be almost a hundred, again, today, as it is almost every day, which is evidence that falling temperatures have something to do with . . . No, I don't get it, either! Oh, heck!  I do get it.  What I get is that autumn in the desert is not the same as autumn in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  Autumn in Grand Marais is like a landslide of leaves, as if something descended from somewhere even farther north--that would be Canada and the Bering Sea, maybe--sweeping down to set a cold fire to tree tops, tumbling broken rainbows of color to the ground, and continuing on south to Duluth, and Minneapolis, and probably to Arkansas. There are such gl...

He is like Annie, our cat. Annie stands in front of the mirrored doors to our clothes closets, and tried to figure out who that cat is, and whether I am in front of her or behind her.  It is almost too much for an old cat's head. Nathaniel looks north, through the kitchen window, and the generations of earth and family layer in front of him, like the lightning and downpour over Oro Valley, and like the old people whom he visits regularly.  It is almost too much for a young kid's head.   It isn't too much.  It is being sorted, almost minute by minute, and organized, probably peculiarly at first, but finally with a sophistication that will amaze even himself. Annie is content with another can of cat food.  Nathaniel will have food, too, but he will demand that the whole layered range of mountains and human perception make sense.  They are old, those mountains, older than us all but, at night, the stars do shine, too.   He is like Annie, ou...

It is not just that we have changed addresses;  that we moved 1800 miles to Tucson. It is that it is almost like going back in time. No, no!  Tucson is not a remnant of some distant past. It is that I have been sent back in time. Today I retrieved a letter from our mailbox addressed to the "Parents of Conrad Royksund".   "That," I thought, is a pretty good trick.  Both are dead. "But who," I thought, "has a stronger right to open it?" I have been invited by People to People   to join other seventh graders on a trip to the British Isles.   The letter says the trip will open my eyes:  I feel like a puppy. I have a PIN number, and a personal web site with almost-my-name on it:  "ConradRoyksund2", and some other stuff. I am completely confident that I am ConradRoyksund1, and no other. In fact, if there is a ConradRoyksund2 out there somewhere, I do not want too many people to know about it. If I can get my parent...

Long ago and far away, George Sheitlin drove from New Jersey to Berkeley, California, to go to school.  While I had driven down from Tacoma, and had been doing my best not to fall asleep at the wheel, George had taken pictures of clouds.  Something there is about vast expanses of flatlands that frame huge cloud formations; that enable us to see, not just the clouds, but both sides of them as they stretch from there to there!  George drove across Iowa and Nebraska, but he never pointed his camera down.   It is what makes Montanans to speak of the Big Sky Country, and people like Harley to praise horizons in South Dakota.  In North Dakota, Canada is what lies on the other side of everything you can see, all at once.   It happens here, too, in Tucson, that desert "islands"--the surprisingly tall mountains that rise from the desert like pinnacles rise from the seabed, wrinkle the air with tumbling water, crowding it up against the high places, shoving it ...

The only people for whom Labor Day really means anything are the people who labor.  With the exception of a few years early in life, and summers most of my life, I have not been a laborer.  I worked inside, wearing out books, and talking to students.  Summers were more fun, both physically and mentally, but I have not figured out what that means.   But this is Labor Day weekend, and I have retired, if not from my labors, then from creeping decrepitude, so I decided that it was time to mount a frontal--no, a back-yard-al--attack on the little patio behind our house.   It is hotter than Hades here in Tucson, although not as hot as it is in Phoenix, which we off-and-on-again Tucsonans consider to be only meet, right, and proper.  As a consequence, I have pretended that it is more important to worry-away at the boxes in our garage and house than it is to go outside and discourage the minimally-watered plants that thrive around the drip fittings.  Th...

I have heard enough mindless griping about government being the problem.  Government is not the problem, not if you are talking about our government, and not that of some other country.  I am content to let Canadians be the judge of their government, and the Norwegians of theirs, but if our government has a problem, it is that it has not done enough, not that it has done too much.  Even simply in terms of the number of government employees, our government is smaller than at least back to Ronald Reagan. One of the reasons for the disastrous financial crash that happened under President Bush, which we are still clawing our way back up from, is that government did not provide enough oversight of our critical financial institutions.  Our financial institutions got stupid, and greedy, and irresponsible; perhaps even criminal. Our bridges are falling down, and the roads are crumbling, not because we have too much government, but because we have not invested enough in o...

It is surely an apocryphal story, but no matter.  A tourist, a reporter, someone, observed an old Rabbi praying at the Wailing Wall--the Western Wall--and begged to ask some questions.  "How long have you been coming here, every day?"        "Forty years."   "And what do you pray for?"        "Peace.  Peace everywhere.  Peace between Israel and her neighbors." "What is it like, coming to pray for peace, with all this violence around you?"      "Like talking to a brick wall." *   *   * A woman once asked Barney Frank why he was supporting a Nazi policy. Frank asked her on what planet she spent most of her time, in order to come up with that "vile, contemptible nonsense".  Then, finally, he said, "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table." *   *   * A headline in Dagbladet--a Norwegian newspaper, says that Clint Eastwo...