SmokeSound

Mari has a new app. "What do you do in retirement?", my friends ask, and I tell them that I follow social and political debates closely.   "Is that," I ask myself, "an egg or a full grown chicken I am messing with?  Do I need to get an egg-over-easy up to 180 degrees F.?" "The Old Man and the Egg."  I should have a pair of oars leaning up against the corner of the kitchen.  If I were Betty MacDonald, I might call it, "The Egg and I", but I am not she.   So, instead, I ponder development; that what was once an egg, purely and simply, might--if I do not fry it, and a hundred other ifs--someday become a pure and simple chicken, and then I should have to treat it differently.   And there you have it!  That is why I am not a politician.  That and a hundred other whys!  Call me too complex, if you will, but I cannot help but think there is a difference between an egg and a chicken. Neither the egg nor the chicken were created fro...

The debate about changing the Tucson Old Timer's baseball cap has reached continental proportions.   I received a note from John, a friend who lives in Minneapolis:   "I saw a TOTs cap on our free table.  I suppose that it was placed there by Denny Heath.  I don't know if that means he isn't coming back to Tucson or just that his cap doesn't fit anymore." John has heard about the TOTs; even more than he wants to know.  He knows me, and Denny Heath, too.  He and Denny live in the same housing complex.   John does not know that the TOTs have been debating whether or not to change from a white cap with a blue bill, to a blue cap with a blue bill, or to a blue cap with a white bill and tail feathers.  The TOTs have modernized their game--that is to say, they use both aluminum bats and the Internet--so Denny must have heard:  his hat is on the Free Table.   Whether that is an economic judgment or a fashion statement is not known. ...

A good lookin' man  look good in anything he put on. That's right:  two home plates. One for the batter, the other for the ump. The thrill of victory,  the agony of defeat.

There are lone wolves, but  there are not many. Wolves prefer to run in packs. I heard a radio interview with a Southern Baptist spokesman.  He said (in a manner of speaking) that there were 14- or 15,000 Southern Baptist congregations in the United States.  They are outnumbered only by Roman Catholics, who not only have more parishes, but they run in larger packs.   He--the Southern Baptist spokesman--said that the home territory of most Southern Baptists was coming unglued.  The South is changing.  As an example, he referred to the number of congregations in the South who were admitting divorced and remarried members, and ( Gasp!) maybe even gay members.  (As a matter of fact, the divorce rate in the South is higher than the national average.)  That, the spokesman said, was not Biblical.  Real Christians, he said, do not put marriage to a popular vote.   Let us overlook what a Biblical marriage would be like.  It, indeed, w...

He calls me Bob.  I do not know where "Bob" came from, but I am becoming Bob.  It is not a case of simple failing memory, because he calls me Bob every time we meet.  "Hi, Bob!"   I am trying to think of it as a Second Chance.   Today, I learned something else about Bob.  "I recall that once you told me you fought in World War II," he began.  "Have you ever been in a V.A. hospital?" Bob has never been in a V.A. hospital.   Senior baseball--you have to be at least sixty years old--is not just about baseball.  It is a way to learn something about yourself just at the time when some of the things you knew, and were, are dribbling off into the sand; when you need to discover something new about yourself.   Bob doesn't recall ever having fought in World War II.  I do recall marital strife, but that came later, after the War. I am trying to be open to my new identity. We all need second chances.  It is pretty sketchy...

  The largest Indian reservation in the world is in northern Arizona.  If the rest of the nation were called a reservation, it would be the White Reservation, and it would be even larger.  It could not be more beautiful than the Navajo Nation, except for those parts that show how generous the White Reservation has been with its mobile homes.  But for now, let that be.  Just for now.   One glance at shelves bursting with what Navajo people see when they look at sheep is enough to cause even a Second Generation Norwegian Immigrant to think twice about the Sami people.  Most of us come from arrogant traditions.  We, here, are a collision of such traditions, such arrogance, and perhaps it requires something absolutely beautiful to awaken us: a Navajo blanket, a Hopi ring, an African mask, an Olmec face, a Sami knife.   On the way home, we stopped in Gallup, New Mexico, and at a trading post where hundreds and perhaps thousands of people pa...

Ellie decorated the apartment. The bicycles on the other wall are so high up that Dan must have lent a hand with the decor in his own, lanky way, but Elliza found and wrestled the antlered trophy to the apartment herself.  She won on points, so the deer is on the wall.   Ellie has started work, now, so the deer population of the Upper Midwest has begun to come back out of the woods, cautiously.  Dan said that Ellie had been looking for the other end of the deer, and wanted to hang it outside, on the wall.  It was time for her to get back to work. They have traded the enduring mists of Portland, Oregon for the edge of the tundra, in Minneapolis.  They are sharpening their skills, and it is a very large world.  In the human tree, the roots do not always grow fastest.   And, anyway, the walls in their apartment will not support what Ellie has in mind.     

Green!  Let it be said:  Iowa is green!  Except in the winter when it is white.   The Broghammer farm, on the way out to our cabin, is a visual milepost.  Down, off the road to the south, looking over a cornfield that feeds greedily on the ridged nutrients shaved by a glacier from rich soils even farther north, and polished by ten thousand years of summer rain, the farmstead occupies itself from the center out.   It is as if the green of Iowa spent winters reading State maplines, determined to assault visitors at the boundaries with green:  the Mississippi River on the east, and the Missouri River on the west, the State of Missouri to the south, and Minnesota up north.   Iowa is not, as a journalist covering a Presidential primary once wrote:  a place with all the geographical interest of a rumpled bedspread.  Where our cabin is, Iowa is hilly, there where the glaciers came, and--the last time--did not come to shave down the l...

The temperature in Minneapolis on July 4, 2012, was 101 degrees F. That was the day we arrived to settle down for Mari's new job in St. Paul.  So when we left Tucson for our recent visit to the Heartland, we were confident that light clothing was all we needed.   We needed to tend to our log house, near town, so the day after Elena and Joe's wedding, or perhaps the day after that, we set to work.  It was not 101 degrees.  It was in the fifties, overnight, so we stopped at the Sattre Store, where everything is for sale.  Rafaela found a work shirt for me, unsold at the last garage sale.  It was what the automotive industry likes to call, "pre-owned".  It cost a dollar.  Perfect!   Duwayne has a new pre-owned tractor with a brush hog, so we arranged for him to teach manners to the driveway and parking areas at the log house.  Mari worked inside the cabin, and I chain-sawed a Chinese elm tree that had come to its final rest over ou...

Midway though our trip, our Annie Cat died.  It was inexorable.  For her, it was an awful wasting away.  For us, it was an awful decision to end what was left of her lovely life.   I remember what I thought the first time I saw her, when she was six, at the Golden Valley Animal Humane Society:  "She is a scared old lady", I thought.  She did not come running to ask for a home.  She tried not to make vibrations when she walked.  She had been abandoned, not to an alley, but to another couple, and by them to the Humane Society.   She never came running.  She always came gently. And while we were away on our trip, Michael, in Tucson, had to take her to the vet. In Minnesota, where we had found Annie, where we had found each other, Mari and I cried like . . . like I am doing now. I know precisely what scared Annie.

The next generation, not having learned a thing from their elders and fumble-bums, continue to commit themselves to the old and mysterious art of marriage.  This time the young couple proposed to cement their vows in a little wooden church at the side of the Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and then amble on down Water Street to the Old Opera House next to the Winneshiek Hotel.   The Hotel and Opera House have been resurrected with 20th century money to a condition they certainly had imagined before, and may or may-not have attained before Mrs. Basler took the job upon herself.  We drove from Tucson to Decorah because we knew that we would have reason to transport a treasure or two.  We did:  a Heltne family chair, a couple of already-tested plastic dump trucks with big tires for Jao (our newest grandson, so far as we know), and a boxfull of treasures for me; things like a marlinspike from days in Alaska on fishing boats, and other tale-generati...