Skip to main content

How it Happened


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 absolutely endless array
of things he has not yet smelled or seen or heard.

"Would you like me to take a picture of both of you?"
another Home Depot pilgrim asked Mari.  
"The woman who is now my wife told me
that I should take the baby with me when I went to the store
because it would inevitably result
in a conversation with young women.
And now I am just trying to show my appreciation, 
and I have a camera like that, anyway."

click!

And that is how it happened.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon.  I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was.  I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise.  I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom.   It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars.  It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally. Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ...
Post a Comment
Read more