SmokeSound

If you owned a real estate company, would you want the medium for your message to be a bag of hot air?  Or a contraption over which you had almost no control?  That what goes up must come down?   I phoned Mari, because she was home entertaining Jao, to look up into the sky.  But it soon became evident that the hot air balloon was coming down near Sweetwater and Silverbell.  Principal and interest:  it all came down. It is not only real estate that goes up and then comes thumping down.  Consider the program to buy unwanted guns from people and then destroy them.  We tried that here in Tucson.  Just over 200 people turned in guns they did not want in their homes, and each was given a $50. Safeway gift card to buy groceries. Gun advocates howled--about twenty-five of them according to reports, and the legislature passed a law making it illegal for the police to destroy the guns.  The guns have to go back into the market, except may...

Earlier today, I posted, "In a Hardly-Ever Land", a somewhat oblique reference to our morning adventure.  Someone moving into the neighborhood wanted to clean the carpets in his house, but the water had not been turned on yet. He asked a neighbor if he might hook up a hose, but the neighbor said, "No".  I was trying not to be too direct about what happened.   Mari was trolling through the neighborhood (actually just posting a letter in our mailbox), met the people, and heard about the dilemma, so we hooked up a fair number of hoses to prime the carpet cleaning machine.  In probably less than an hour, the job was done, the new almost-resident followed the hoses to our house, and thanked us.   You might very well guess what happened next!  Our water was cut off!  No water!  We had visions of being on a cruise ship at sea, with . . . well, you probably read the stories about what happened! I called the city water service.  "Have you no...

Once upon a time, in a never-never tale in a hardly-ever land, a lost pilgrim about to move into the neighborhood asked if he might attach a hose to the neighbor's bib in order to get water for his carpet cleaner. Nope, the never-never neighbor said. Nope? Nope. But there is more than one neighbor, even in  a hard land.   Plants that do not need hose bibs--although an occasional hardly-ever shower is helpful, are the descendents of those plants that crusted on the outside to conserve water.  Apparently, some of the peripatetic desert residents develop crusts, too, to conserve water.   But when the sometime rains do come, they loosen almost-forgotten habits of almost everything dry, and burst into bloom.  When that happens, as it is happening now, hard things become incredibly beautiful.  

When Tim swings his bat, the fences inhale.   If the ball has loft, the fences duck their heads,  and breathe out. Today Tim swung his bat, the first baseman said his prayers, and Tim ducked at the end of his swing as if he had been hit.  Then At the game today the rest of us said our prayers. Something snapped. Something tore. Something happened. The catcher stood there  with the ball in his hand not understanding. Then the first baseman breathed out,  Tim cradled one arm in the other and walked toward the dugout. We all rehearsed, without words, not just dents in the fences, but those throws from short to first. It wasn't fair that Tim was that strong. It wasn't fair that someone that strong just swung his bat; and we all held our breath. Everyone knew it was the chance they took because everyone was there to take that chance. When Old Timers play ball, they do not always hurt, but they know what it is to push against the ...

I know what religion was for me as a child.  It meant that we put on clean clothes and went to Sunday School in the morning--and quite probably to adult services later in the day--to a white wooden church with a wood stove.  It was a ragged experience.  Sometimes, early on, mostly in the summer, we met at another wooden church by an old cemetery.  Once a year, plus funerals.  There was a summer picnic.  Grandpa Jacobson boiled the coffee in a five-gallon can over a fire.  There was, always, a walk through the cemetery, to learn again where our relatives were buried.  "Church" was a know-nothing recitation of Bible stories.  It was miracles.  It was walking on water, feeding 5,000 people on a few fish, turning water into wine at Cana, and learning that drinking wine was sinful.  It was rising from the dead.   It was a kind of madness.  It was like trying to think 2,000 years ago.   I know what religion was f...

I sat there all alone in a spartan little room, waiting for the doctor to come and tell me that I do not see very well.  But, of course, that is why I came to the little room in the first place.  First, they sat me down before one of those Put-your-chin-here-and-look-at-the-little-light-machines, and they took pictures that look like those you see here, although there were a lot more of them.  In the little room, in what surely was a chair rejected from a discount dental supply store, I stared at two rows of my eyeball.   "My eyeball," I thought, "looks like an abacus."  Maybe your eyesight is keen enough to see the wire. There is a doctor at the University of Minnesota who has trained several interns by using my right eyeball.  What scares me is that those interns are loose in the world, now, doing unto others what they first saw undone to me.   I am not sure that my eyeball is really that color.  A very nice woman with a weapon designed ...

Anyone who ever used a manual crosscut saw to cut off a large log--a brutal exercise involving hours of exhausting work, especially if firewood was the objective, requiring a cut every sixteen inches along the length of the log--dreamed of having a one-cylinder, crude and finicky dragsaw.  The blades were much heavier than human-powered crosscut saws, and when the greasy and contrary engine ran right, cut through a log much faster than any mere mortal could.   When the engine finally started, it spun a wheel, geared down as a motorcycle engine still often is, by a chain connected to another wheel, to which a very stout saw blade was connected, causing the saw blade to be pushed forward and pulled back; imitating what happens manually when a person cuts across the log.  Sickle bars for cutting grass, and pistons in a motor, work in a similar way.   Dragsaws were portable in the same way that a rock is portable.   They weighed about 300 pounds, so a man wit...

It is mid-April. Today we drove fifty miles south of Tucson to Tubac, a tiny little artsy-kitschy colony almost down to the Mexican border, just for the fun of it, and for lunch. It is the tail-end of the serious season in Tubac, since, before long, the snow birds  will be migrating north for the mosquito season. Believe it or not, summer is the slow time in Tubac. Tubac.   It was originally a Tohono O'odham name which translates into English as "rotten".   Cuwak (rotten) was spelled, Tubaca, in Spanish. Oh, what the hell, people thought:  drop the final "a". Tubac.   Tubac is on the banks of the Santa Cruz River, which is more sand than water,  more memory than fact. Tubac is a fine place. It is an absurd place.  And it is changing. There are more restaurants, fewer unglazed pots, better art at higher prices, and more Spanish words spelled wrong. It is becoming less a fixed street fair, and more an investment opportun...

"Look!", Mari said.  "He is catching butterflies!" It was a small boy, swatting at something with a net.   It did not appear to be producing the results he intended,  and I quietly applauded his ineptitude.  I am on the side of the butterflies. I suppose there are times when catching butterflies is defensible, but I would rather applaud flattening flies with a swatter. There are people whose genius is to catch words--just the right words at the right time--and our President is such a person.  I have heard that, in office, he is not a warm and personable politician.  I think that such comments come from people who want the President to invite them over in the evening, for whiskey and stories.  It is obvious that he is a warm and wonderful father, but it may be that he doesn't schmooze well with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, or even his political allies, but who are we to fault him for good judgment? Barack Obama is at his finest when he ...

There have been people in this place for probably 12,000 years,  and archeologists have located evidence for a village about 4,000 years ago.  People have farmed this land since 1,200 B.C., when nobody, anywhere, thought or said, "B.C.".  In other words, people were farming here before King David was born.   But, of course, if you weren't here yourself, nothing counted until the Spanish got here.  A Jesuit priest, Father Kino, arrived here in 1692 and, in 1700,  founded a mission that still stands just south of Tucson.  In 1775, the Spanish built a walled fortress in what is now called, "downtown" Tucson, except that Tucson does not have a downtown.  Hardly.  Barely.  I do not know whose line it is, but "I visited downtown Tucson once, and it wasn't there".   There are half a million people in the city of Tucson, and about a million people, in all, in the valley, some of whom are descendants of people who lived here thousands ...

Through a Saguaro, Brightly

The Reverend Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson--he of TV-religion and TV-political fame; he who would be President and Probably Pope--is doing us another public service.  He is warning us not to seek a "two-state" solution between Israel and the Palestinians, because God doesn't want it.   God, Mr. Robertson says, gave Palestine to the Jews a long time ago, and the Good Lord will get really pi  irritated if things do not go his way.   Mr. Robertson seems to be uncommonly interested in how the Almighty uses hurricanes and tornadoes and breaches in the dike to punish people for things that irritate both the Almighty and Mr. Robertson, so I expect that if the Israelis and the Palestinians agree to live in peace, God will probably send a heck of a rainstorm, or maybe a tsunami (should the Good Lord understand Japanese).  Or maybe, having already given a great flood a try, this time Jehovah  might send a plague of Jehovah's Witnesses to demonstrate his wrath ...

The notice came by e-mail:  "Bring your blue jerseys to the game on Monday".  Not because they were to be worn during the game, but because the funeral for a TOT--a Tucson Old Timer baseball player--would be soon after the game. That is what they do.  When one of the Old Timers dies, the team tries to be at the funeral, together, wearing their jerseys, to show that playing baseball together is not just about playing baseball:  it is about being together.  It is about not being alone, even when the most lonely time of all has come.   It is not because the TOTs are the closest of friends:  most of the Old Timers who play baseball together see each other only when the come to play ball together.  And sometimes at a lunch together, just so they can see what everybody looks like without a billed cap.  And every once in a while, at a game they have agreed to attend together--maybe a University of Arizona game, and sometimes at a funeral when...

What is this Libertarian nonsense?  Has the whole idea, the whole need, for people to live together in a society suddenly disappeared?  Are traffic lights just for Democrats?  Is the problem with what we call "big banks"--most of which are not banks, at all, but enormous financial investment scams designed to make the people with scams and skimmers rich--merely that they are suffering from too much regulation?   The Preamble to our Constitution says, "We, the People, in order to form a more perfect union. . . ."  The Civil War was about preserving the Union, not hacking it up into a hodge potch of Little Let's Pretend Sovereign States.    The States aren't sovereign: Caesar was.  Ivan the Terrible was.  Genghis Khan was.  South Carolina isn't.  Ron Paul and Rand Paul and Ann Coulter aren't.   It is almost treasonous to call for government to be destroyed; for it to be starved until it is so weak and so small "that it...

It wasn't in a previous lifetime, because I haven't had any of those, but it seems a long time ago, nonetheless, that I studied and graduated from a theological seminary.  (I had been nudged, ever-so-persistently in that direction, and I did not understand myself very well.) I recall the time when I discovered that one of the other students wanted to become a missionary to a foreign country:  somewhere like Ghana, or Uzbekistan, or South Carolina.  "Why?", some of us asked, curious.  His answer was plain:  he thought it was easier for people in less-developed cultures to believe what the Bible had to tell.  It was easier for them to believe that water could be changed into wine, or for people to rise from the dead, or to believe that heaven was overhead and hell underfoot, than it was for people like us.   Pat Robertson agrees with him, as it turns out.  Mr. Robertson, as you know, has wanted to become President of the United States, and th...