SmokeSound

It took me ten minutes to walk from one end of our vegetable garden to the other.  It is not a large garden--thirty of forty feet long--but the peas are ripe.   Last fall, I very carefully chose the seeds and plants for the garden by what was available.  "O.K.!", I said.  "I will take that."  Peas were available.   I refused to thin the carrots or the onions, because I had grown up thinning carrots and onions in our grandparents' garden.  (If you don't thin the mindlessly ambitious young plants, they will not all have room to grow.  "Tough!", I thought.  "Let them grow up skinny.") The radishes--tough-minded critters--have grown past ripe.  They are going to seed, so I tossed some of the most ambitious of them over the fence.  But then the peas caught my eye.  I shelled a few into my hand, and ate the peas.  "Oh, my!"  I grew up hating to shell peas so that Mom could can them, so eating fresh peas was always count

It is almost the color of summer-scorched desert dirt, and it stands behind the backstop: "Clarence Fieber Memorial Bench", it reads.   It ought to be a milking stool. Clarence was a Wisconsin dairy farmer whose home was always in Wisconsin but who moved to Tucson for Adeline and their daughters and the dry desert air. "Sweet Adeline!", he would sing. What does a young dairy farmer do in Tucson? He milks cows for the University and he plays baseball.  If he is from Wisconsin, he puts a mooing cow horn on his pickup, not for everyday use, but for special occasions when something dairy-barn comes to mind. It should have been a milking stool, not because he did not deserve a bench but for the sheer, surprising sight of it, something like a dairy farmer at the University, or a ninety-year old baseball player who left what he loved forever for those he loved even more. And that is why there is a bench behind the backstop at the Udall Recr

I have never thought of myself as a racist, although it is true that, every once in a while, I discover that I used to be one. I do not think of myself as a religious person, either, but every once in a while I have one of those,  "Oh, my God!" moments.   That is pretty much what has happened every time I have discovered that I used to be a racist, or that I used to be a sexist, or just a general,  all-around pain in the arse.   It is a little like watching the Supreme Court these days. Watching the Supreme Court trying to think its way through the thicket of marriage definitions and sexual designations  is like listening to an entire church choir sing, "Oh, my god!" "Never look back!", Satchel Paige advised:  "Something might be gaining on you." What usually happens when we come to our, "Oh, my god!" moments is that something just caught up with us:  we looked back, and here came our old attitudes, platitudes, and

It is something like tying up a boat. It is an unequal contest:  the logic of mass. You lean back against the line, and if the wind is still and the tide resting, the boat comes like an amused dog, not because is has to, but because it has no reason not to. Jack picks up his bat, clean and jerking it to his shoulder. Jack's bat weighs forty-four ounces, while Jack is only forty-two. Jack took a practice swing once and corkscrewed himself knee deep following his bat around. "Yer out!", the umpire yelled, "fer not leaving the on-deck circle!" "Somebody give me a hand!", Jack replied. "I can't find my shoes!" Hitting, Jack says, is a science. He waits for the wind to die and the tide to take a break. Then Jack leans against the line he has imagined the ball will take; slowly at first, then slower still, easing the bat into the strike zone. It is not hitting the ball that worries Jack: it is missing and havin

They say it is the love of the game-- a way to stay active in a stalagmite world-- a refusal to allow hip surgeons  to define the good life.   If I didn't play baseball, they say,  I would be watching daytime TV, or belching beer on my bib. They take another cut at an imaginary ball, and hide a wince.  Damned arthritis, they think,  is all that stands between them and a Texas line-drive halfway to Texas.    They are TOTs:  Tucson Old Timers. They play baseball:  something like Toys-R-Us with grownup toys.   The By-Laws say you have to be sixty, but their secret is that they are kids playing a grown-up- game when the bat is too heavy and the ball too hard. They are peanut brittle in a caramel world.   They are the tots of summer, boys forever, finally able to afford the time it takes to break into a run.  Nice job, Arnie!, the catcher yelled:  Atta boy!, and Arnie pretended it was nothing, the way men do.  How much pay do we get for chasing th

"You can't legislate morality!" We like to say that, and when we say it we mean that there is no point in passing laws before people agree with the change:  they will undermine it. So if most people are opposed to interracial marriages, or same-sex marriages, or to universal health care, there is no point in putting those things into law:  people won't accept the validity of the law.  "You can't legislate morality!" But you can.   In fact,  if you pass a law specifying that people of different races may marry if they want to, people will, in fact,  gradually come to agree that it is all right, and a good thing.   Why?  Because a good part of why we believe something is good, or true, or beautiful, is because the people around us say so.  Reality is socially constructed. I do not know who said that, "He was a brave man who first et an oyster," but he was.  If everybody you know, or even most people you know, eat oysters, chances

This is a radish, garden grown: This is a radish, too: Joe Biden says, that in situations like this, a 12-gauge shotgun is adequate protection.   If you didn't want to admit it before, you can surely see now that the gubbamint is messing with our food supply.  I haven't seen anyone in the garden during the day except a roadrunner, so that means they must be coming at night.  Unless, of course, the roadrunner has been trained, like those Navy dolphins, to seek out and destroy radishes. In any case, Joe Biden is probably right. I am up often enough at night, so maybe I ought to do double-duty, and do a tour through the garden.    

"Judges can award 10 points for taste, 5 points for presentation and 5 points for originality in the use of today's ingredients." That is what we are told about the Iron Chef competition. The Republican Party says it lost the last election, and the one before that, not because they did not present something tasty, and not because they did not show originality in the use of Party issues, but because they did not get the presentation right. They shat upon women, Hispanics, Asians, the poor and the unemployed, veterans, the elderly, those in need of health care, Blacks, Brown, and the Dappled Gray and the aspiring young, and most ordinary citizens.   But they are going to change all that by presenting everything better; spend about ten million dollars getting the message out:  you know, presentation!  Something on a stick, I should judge. Oh, Lord love a duck!

The term, "urbane", has its roots in the word "urban". City-like, I suppose, as opposed to country-like. Nothing in my life or heritage is urbane:  nothing! On my father's side of the family, there are fishermen. My brothers and I went fishing with our father; not trout fishing in a Scottish stream, or Colorado, with flies. We went to Alaska on wooden fishing boats. Maternally, we inherited hard-scrabble farming. All of us, brothers and sisters, milked cows by hand. I have never been an urban person, although I have lived in Berkeley, Phoenix, Chicago, Oslo, the Twin Cities, and now Tucson, again. The hardest years were those I spent in a small town in Iowa, not because it was Iowa, except that Iowa is itself small town. I built a log house out in the woods outside of that small town in order to escape from what makes small towns small: gossip, conformity, the notion that being religious was what made good people good, that god was in hi

It was my maiden voyage as a walker in the Tucson Mall.  My fairly-new  titanium hip joint survived the trip without a creak or complaint.   It was what I used to call my muscles  that frayed from the unaccustomed tedium. After walking, I found the Burger King in the Food Court, open especially  for morning shufflers like me and asked for a cup of coffee. "Twenty-seven cents!", she said. "Twenty-seven cents?", I echoed. I dug deep,  hauling up a fistful of coins, and left them all. The Tucson Mall is large, but unlike the Mall of America in Minnesota where I winter-walked,  which is a rectangular heap,  the Tucson Mall is an octopus shaking hands with itself, randomly.   My phone, which knows nothing about freeway access roads,  said I was sixteen minutes from home, but it took twice that to get to the Mall, having to cross under I-10.   A small bird had discovered that Food Court crumbs are her only chance. The surgeon who repl

115 of the Cardinals of the Catholic Church are still under eighty years of age, to they are eligible to vote for a new pope.  They were last seen sprinting for the Sistine Chapel where they will consult with God and each other, and elect a new Prince of the Church on Earth. One can only hope they continue to move with alacrity. They have a lot of work to do.  They cannot afford to fiddle while Rome burns. For instance, while the Cardinals have been gathering strength to do the work set before them, women everywhere have been taking advantage of their bowed heads and folded hands to foment revolution against the Divine Scheme of Things:  that is to say, women have been getting uppity. At the United Nation, the Commission on the Status of Women has been trying to agree on a way to say that violence against women has to end.  Well, everybody agrees to that, don't they?  Almost.  Not quite.  More or less.   Or, they could agree if they were not trying to say that religion, an

I have been reading some of Cormac McCarthy's books:  "All the Pretty Horses", and so on.  The first section of "The Crossing" nearly tore my heart apart.   (I had read it before but, mercifully, I had forgotten.  There are advantages to our disadvantages!) It has been tough slogging.  It is some of the best writing I know, and some of the hardest.  Hardest are the long Graham Greene-like passages where, as John Milton said he was trying to do in "Paradise Lost"--"to justify the ways of God to man", McCarthy's characters slog through their own muddy tracks, half in Spanish, half in English, half in oblique punditry something like the logic of "A Hundred Years of Solitude".  (I know:  three halves.) But, oh my god, how he can tear the heart apart, telling the truth about human savagery and kindness and irrational thought!  How he loves the terrible beauty of these hard, dry places!  How he mangles the language into beaut

DEEP RED Oh no, she said, but once when I was younger I did have a wonderful weekend in Warsaw but-- deep red -- I am too sober to tell you about that; and she reached for her glass. Conrad Røyksund May 1978

From blackbiretta.blogspot.com The Princes of the Church are fat old men.  No Bonnie Young Prince Charles there!  Like Phillip and Charles, you risk dying before you reach the top.   There may--here and there--actually be a few slimmer souls but, again, crimson desiccation is scarcely preferable to crimson portliness.   There no women, slim or stout.   There are no women. There is a good deal of attention to women and their proper place in the divine scheme of things, but there are no women.  I don't think there is even a married man in the Crimson Tide.   The Conclave of Cardinals--the Radiance of Cardinals--makes no pretense to be representative of the human community:  they are sort-of-celibate, ceremonially poor, and obedient only to themselves and to the one of themselves they will call, "Papa":  Pope.  It is oddly discordant to hear the Pope call himself "just a humble pilgrim".  The claimants to the Big Fisherman's role do not have callo

From the Decorah Newspapers Another close call!   We had a lot of those in Decorah, Iowa. Got out of town just in time. 470 million years ago, a big chunk of something landed right where the town is located now.   If you look very carefully at the rock crystals here and there around town, you can spot the evidence.  Apparently.  And right after that, geologically speaking, an ocean flooded the whole area.  There was more, of course:  it is a college town.  Ice ages; some that swept the area, and some that missed.  The last one missed:  that is why the town, and around, is so hilly today:  glaciers are hard to steer.  Later, much later, there came people:  farmers and storekeepers and preachers and faculty members, and football games. The river that runs right through the middle of town, more-or-less from west to east, has patiently carried away some of the silt from what was once an ocean floor--way up there in northeast Iowa--down to the Mississippi and back to the ocean.

                                                                                                     8.  MARCH they marched in the gray slop that is the eighth of March Women's Day in Oslo bannered red and burning bright in long street-wide lines Youngstorget past the city hall up Carl Johan puzzling the grand cafeers around Kirkeristen Grensen the university square freedom the signs said freedom and equality six hour work days free nursery schools Palestine  Eritrea  Equality freedom  freedom freedom he read lesbians he said all you lesbians need is a good fuck even drunk he knew that women's liberation had something to do with his testacles freedom he said lesbians cruddy lousy neckdripping smallsnow and long long lines of young all young women and men baby-buggies and banners she cheated oh lovely long woman on crutches and cut across Stortoget with her husband

Finally got him trained to give himself a bath!

He was 81 when she told him that she had always wanted a Screech Owl house. They had been married for 30 years,  which suggested that,  since 30 was a pretty good part of "always", he had not been listening very well.   "Not a Great Horned Owl?", he asked, "or maybe a little Elf Owl?  Didn't we read that a couple of Barn Owls will keep you up all night?" "Nope!" she said.   "My mother loved Screech Owls, and so do I." There it was, again.   She loved her mother  more than she loved Screech Owls. He climbed the tree, anyway. "It should face east," the card in the house said, although it did not say why.   They settled which was was east by downloading a compass app. They lived on a hillside: hillsides ramble.   Even the sun came up oddly over the shoulders of the rambling hills.   "What if she decided that  she has always liked California Condors?", he wondered.  "What if her m

Jao's father needed some sleep because the days are long,  and sometime the nights are even longer. So, today, we had the little Energizer Bunny over for a few hours. "I need to go to the hardware store," I told Mari,  (because Mari dearly wants an owl nest in our backyard--something, you know, to keep us all awake while the rest of the world sleeps). "Let's take Jao!", she said. "It is about time the little tad was introduced to a Big Box Hardware and Lumber store! He should know something about family traditions. " And there he is,  all but in an orange bucket, off to see the mid-winter plants, not so much because we need mid-winter plants, but because he thinks that nothing is more fun than a stroll through a new world. Mari took him to the plants because we know from our own yard experience that he loves the smell, look, and feel of new things, and that the world outside is an absolut

I encourage you to comment, if you wish to do so.  I have deleted a few comments, not to censor opinion, but simply because they were strings of nonsense words.  I do not understand what they were about, if not about pure hassle. I do know that older posts are often reread, so your comments might be of interest to other readers, as well as to me.   Thank you!