The Character of a Man

That's what happen when you start every pot of soup with one diced onion. There is no point in making a fractional soup: half an onion, three-quarters of a carrot, maybe one parsnipette. . . .

Winter demands soup. Summer can get by on a salad or a sandwich, but winter, even in Tucson, requires a pot of soup. The whole problem is that there are only two of us. The other part of the problem is that the refrigerator is not amenable to a large pot of soup. Life was simpler in Minnesota. In winter--that is to say, in months that are not spelled "July" or "August"--I just put the soup pot out on the north deck. The lid snapped into place as if it were frozen there, the pot scrunched itself up around the contents, and the whole pot welded itself to the snow-covered deck. When I wanted soup, all I had to do was find the crow bar, and bring the pot in for thawing.

There is a 9,000 foot mountain defining the north edge of Tucson, but the truth is that freezing nights, in town, are a sometime thing, so sometimes when it freezes, or even comes close, I put the soup pot out on the patio.

Traditions are important. They define a style of life. Some traditions make it possible to begin a pot of soup with a whole onion. A man's character shows through the traditions he observes. Fortunately, there is a fence around our back yard, or the javelinas would eat my tradition and my character and my onion.

A man with character never forgets where and how he used to live, even when he moves to a desert.

Comments

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

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog