SmokeSound

Let us, even if only for a moment, be honest.  I am not a gardener.  My theory is that, had God intended me to be a gardener, he would have given me green thumbs.   I do not have green thumbs.  I have green jeans.  And a couple of my socks are green, too.   (Were I to be honest for a couple of moments, I would admit that it is not socks that I had in mind.) I have never believed-- Not for a moment! --that there was anything edible inside the bud of an artichoke.  I buy artichoke hearts in quart jars, and eat them like snacks, but an artichoke is just a giant thistle.  The only critter I ever knew who liked to eat thistle flowers was Sally.  Sally was a considerable Percheron who had learned how to nip the flower from a Canadian Thistle, in order to avoid the spines.  I choose to believe that "artichoke hearts" in a jar are genetically modified parts of an entirely different plant. In any case, my occasional care of artichokes in our back yard has begun to pr

Those of you who think that God has gone on vacation in recent centuries had better repent while you have time.  Michele Bachmann assures us that miracles have not ended!  God is going to repeal health care reform!   God used to create walking paths across the Red Sea, and talk to Moses up on Mount Sinai--Biblical reports are that it looked and sounded like thunder and lightning--and occasionally he caused bushes to catch fire, but now he is going to get involved in politics, apparently on the side of Tea Party Republicans.   It bothered me when people like the Reverend Mr. Pat Robertson said that God sent hurricanes as punishment for gay marriage--things like that--but I guess I am old-fashioned:  I really don't like the idea that God is going to sit in Congress and try to override what is certain to be an Obama veto, if it comes to that. Turning water into wine:  I would like that.  Caring for sparrows that fall showed real tenderness.  Honestly, I would rather not walk

"Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain...." It doesn't always just sweep:  sometimes it comes with teeth and a savage tail.  First, the tornado went through Moore, Oklahoma. " And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain." But the wind, right behind the rain, is often just a politician saying something inane, something like arguing that helping God-fearin' Oklahomans after a tornado is nothing like helping yellow-bellied, East Coast Liberals after Hurricane Sandy. Or that maybe Nancy Pelosi and her confounded Climate Change is just a way to take advantage of good, Bible Belt believin' folks who need a hand.   It takes moxie, or a numb skull, to stand before people who have lost their homes and--some--family members and friends, and argue that government aid to tornado or hurricane or flood victims is a bad idea because government is bad.  (That sounds simple-minded, and it is.)

Winslow Homer Breton fisherman's Prayer Larry gave me a space in his steel erection company to build a boat. Early in the construction, one of the workers came to inspect "the boat".   "I would not," the steelworker said to me, "go out in any boat I had built myself."   Anyone who has ever gotten into a boat for the first time, whether a small skiff at the edge of a lake, or aboard a ship as large as a city, thinks about the thin skin of the boat, and how far down is the bottom of the sea.  Even when the sea is flat and the sun is shining.   "I should not want to build a house," Friedrich Nietzsche said, "but were I to do so, I would build it right down into the sea.  I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster." It is not just the sea.  The sea, here, is almost just a metaphor for everything large and awful and lovely that holds our lives.  Try, for a moment, to think what it means

"The Day the Ice Breaks": that's what they call it when the temperature finally gets back up to 100 degrees, again. Today the ice broke, and just in time, too! The Tucson Old Timers, ranging in age from 60 to 87, start their games earlier in Summer, to avoid mid-day heat,  and they shorten their games  by an inning  after the ice breaks. Even Billy, who is so thin that not only neutrinos, but grains of sand, pass through his body unhindered, has been noticeably wilting as the games goes on.   His shorts--he looks fatter in long pants-- flutter like banners on an outfield pole. The Santa Cruz River "Melting" is the wrong term, of course, because the ice does not go from a solid to a liquid state.  It sublimates, bypassing the liquid state altogether, going directly to water vapor, and in normal summer temperatures in Tucson, there is precious little evidence of that, either.   So we are getting back to normal, here.  We have taken off our Al

In the Arizona legislature, the Representatives take turns opening each day's meeting with a prayer.  I suppose that is better than admitting that they do not have a prayer.  A few days ago, it  was the turn for a representative who is not religious to offer the prayer. He didn't bow his head, and he didn't say "God", and he didn't say, "In Jesus name".   It was shameful!  That is what Steve Smith, who represents Maricopa, said, in effect, so Mr. Smith doubled up on prayers the next day, just to catch up.  Mr. Smith apparently has a fierce desire to make things come out even:  a prayer a day keeps the apple away; that sort of thing.   "How do you know that wasn't a prayer?" someone asked.  "Well, he didn't say God!"  Another Representative--a Native American--suggested that in his culture, prayers are not necessarily addressed to Someone.   But Representative Smith admitted that while he couldn't give a really g

At Weyerhaeuser Grade School, eight grades of pupils were arranged in columns in two classrooms.  We moved from right to left, year by year.  The "Old Schoolhouse" was our "gymnasium" and auditorium, in a manner of speaking.  I recall--sometime during my first years there--what it was like to be caught at the Old Schoolhouse during a thunderstorm.  We watched lightning strike the trees a few yards away, smelled the sulpherous air, and dared not make a run for our classroom, across the ballfield.   We were very small, and the sky was savage.   Decades later, on an endless drive across Nebraska, I calculated how far away, and how huge was a thunderstorm that seemed to haunt us.  It occupied everything, making our car, and even the Counties we crossed, seem insignificant, and scared.   Like thousands of other travelers, we have been through Oklahoma in the summer time, turning north onto Interstate 35 in Oklahoma City, pursued by tornado warnings, and winds t

The backstop, where the Tucson Old Timers play baseball about 150 times a year, is made of cyclone fence material, and it is evidence that while the Old Timers rarely hit the long ball--those fences are out the other way--they still have intentions gone awry.   The fences bulge out over their beltlines, as if in concert with the Old Timers themselves.  It takes at least sixty years to develop a backstop paunch like that, but nobody--Absolutely nobody!--suggests that paunch has anything to do with the Tucson Old Timers minimum age requirement.  After all, even if you have a good-sized backstop bulge at fifty, the Old Timers will make you wait ten years to apply for membership.   A baseball weighs about five ounces.  The first time a baseball hits a cyclone fence like that, nothing much happens.  That is no chicken wire fence!  Sometimes, while watching a game, I grab the fence for balance and to get a wire-free view.  Then I think about all the foul balls that have hammered that

I do love Pat Robertson!   If, ever, you have had any doubts about famously religiously people, then you should consider Pat Robertson, and all your doubts will dissolve:  he is . . . he is like St. Peter:  a rock upon which a church can be built.  He never  fails to deliver the goods:  rock solid insight into the hearts of men. Now, I do not know about you, but the Rev. Mr. Pat has said some things about marriage and the family that simply warm my heart.  He said, for instance, that married men have a tendency to wander, and that it is the wife's job to create a home so enticing that her husband will not want to stray.   The Pat Mr. Rev got right to the point:  "Stop talking about the cheating.  He cheated on you, well, he's a man." There you are!  Stop talking about his cheating!  He's a man!  Does he provide a home?  Does he bring home the bacon?  Is he nice to the children?  Is he handsome?  Let's just be a little realistic, here!  "Males ha

The name of the law firm is painted on the wall of the office:   The Hammeroff Law Firm I wonder if his first name is Jack.  Probably not.

"That way,  if I make anybody happy it won't be my fault." (Overheard at an Old Timers' game)

They have worked out a deal:  the small birds hop into the globe feeder, free to eat as much on the job as they wish, but they have to kick seeds out onto the ground. I do not know what they get in return from the doves and quail: perhaps just protection insurance:  "You have a nest and family, don't you?".   If I had the means to do so, and the inclination, I could fill that feeder every day, and still fall behind in my contributions.   I cannot believe that it is the Gambel's quail that are doing the extortion.  They are so upright; almost Republican in appearance.   And in spite of their reputation, I do suspect the  doves:  heads down, low to the ground:  Liberals!  I am not even sure the doves are really married:  probably just living together; maybe planning to fly to a State that permits Odd Marriages--a Nancy Pelosi kind of place. We have hummingbird feeders--even an owl house--but few hummingbirds, and no owls.  Just extortionists and banker

Our Belle, Michele, was elected to Congress, but she thinks she is there to make straight--especially straight--the way of the Lord.   Ms. Bachmann reports that the Lord has passed judgment on these United States twice, precisely on the National Day of Prayer and Fasting, in 2001 and in 2012.  I will admit that I am a little reluctant to blame the attacks on 9/11 and the attack on our embassy in Benghazi on God, but Michele says it is no coincidence.  God knows that she is closer to the mind of God than I am!  And you, too, I expect. In the spirit of not messing with the Will of God, we need to be clear just which God-awful sins have provoked the Almighty to kill so many people and destroy so much real estate.   Michele knows:  she agrees--first speaking generally, and then more to the point--that we are "sliding from moral malaise to cultural hedonism", which is to say, we are supporting "gay marriage and equal rights", and that irritates God just somethi

The names we give things train us how to think about them. I have been thinking about family. Maybe because life is dangerous,  maybe because human childhood is so vulnerable  and lasts so long, maybe because long-term mating is so advantageous, physically dominant males dominated family. Sometimes the domination was brutal. Sometimes it was just a name. In the Scandinavian tradition I come from, families often were identified by their father's name: Johnson, or Ericsen, or Magnusson. I was a Simonson, although my father was Gustav: his  father was Simon. I grew up with my mother's family: they were Jacobsons.  Like my father's family, the name had gotten stuck in an earlier generation: my grandfather was Jonas Jacobson. Jonas was married to an Olson--Olina Olson-- but they weren't the Jacobson-Olson family: they were Jacobsons. I have visited my Dad's family in Norway. Today they aren't so much Simonsons as they are Røksunds.   They

Representative Steve King, from Iowa, says that President Obama has a little software switch in him that causes him to support Black people automatically.  And worse, that the President is undermining religion in America--"lowering American values"--by supporting the first openly gay male basketball player.   Look, Mr. King said, when people got a little antsy by Tim Tebow's on-field football prayers, and Bible verses painted on his face, Obama did not reach out to him.  Silence.  Not a Bible verse, not a little hymn:  nothing!  But when Jason Collins announced he was gay, Obama phoned him. There you are:  the Undermining of American Values! Our President openly supported Jason Collins' right to say he was gay, but would not openly support the injection of a little religion into a football game.  Everyone knows that it was those Bible verses that made Tim Tebow the quarterback he is, and that without a faceful of Bible verses, Tim Tebow would be cut by the New Yo

Ol' Pat has a genius for smelling sin and degradation in all around he see.   You will remember Ol' Pat.  He ran for the Presidency onc't, but he los't.  It is hard to explain how that could happen, insofar as Ol' Pat is a deep, deep thinker who sees very deep into ordinary things, finding the work of the devil in every hot dog and hidden camera.   "What we're coming to now, it's not a pleasant situation!", Pat announced.  Pat was thinking about surveillance cameras--the kind used to identify the guys who blew up the Boston Marathon.  "Right now," the Reverend Mr. Pat said, "they can go down into the bush in the darkest Africa and hunt you down." Let us leave aside, for the moment, that bush in the darkest Africa where backpack bombers and sinners and other dark people hide:  I do not for a moment think that Ol' Pat was being just a tad racist, there.  He was just incidentally thinking about deepest, darkest Africa

Planning Your Vacation? Mari said she did not have time to get a picture of the whole snake, so you will have to guess how much of the snake's hips are around behind the palm tree.  Mari was, in fact, running at 37 m.p.h. when when she hit the front door, which was shut, but not for long.   I have repaired the hole Mari made in the front door, but the little critter is still loose in the neighborhood, so if you are planning a visit, be sure to wear your hip boots.   I am serene.  Mari called while I was at Costco, so I bought a large bottle of vodka, and I am inoculating myself against snake bite.  It is always better to prepare at leisure than to have to play catch-up.   

Almost fifty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,  students at a  high school in Georgia said, "Enough!", and organized a non-racially segregated prom.   Good for those students!  But how would you like to live in a town that discovered that "separate but equal" is inherently unequal fifty years after almost everybody else?   *   *   * Now let us consider the Republican Congress.  The Republican Party in Congress--I do not know if it applies to Republicans at loose in the real world--has made it clear that they will oppose anything the President wants to do.  It is not because the President is a Democrat, nor because what the President would like to do is so awful:  even when the President proposes things the Republicans proposed first, they oppose him.  The President is Black.  He has been elected to the Presidency twice, but he is Black.  He has no right to go to a White prom. *   *   * I am every-time-startled at the sight of the

So the old guy walks into the coffee shop  and comes over to my table where I'm always sitting and for the first time talks to me and asks me what ever happened to the older guy that used to come in here every morning.   I look up at him and I'm thinking,   he is the only old guy I know who always come in here.  But then I figure maybe Teisberg.  No. Morrie the preacher?  Naw.  Not Dale.  He ain't that old. It dawns on me he might be thinking of you. You must have made a impression on him because I described you as  the loudmouth of the group and he said yep, that guy.   Just then it occurred to me that you must be older than him even though he looks and acts some older maybe. You would know him as the guy with the sun glasses and likes to carry the basketball and sits at the table next to the door.  I look up at him and after a long pause  and told  him that you and and your wife moved to Arizona so you could play baseball .   He looks straight ahea