SmokeSound

I left  home without my cell phone. There was a pay phone outside the grocery, but it did not work. As if I had been magically time-transported to a distant past, I found I could speak only to those within voice-range. I thought of a prof. at a college I attended, who took pride in never using a microphone: he bellowed, instead. I did not want to bellow. At the service counter, they listened to my sad tale-- the story of a man without a cell phone-- and turned a desk phone my way, saying to press 9. Mari, at home, was outside with Jao and without a phone, so no one answered, even after five tries. I wanted to bellow.

Our son, Michael, has two dogs: one a marvelous Boxer, and the other a blind and deaf Shitzu. Her name is Saki, but we call her Helen Keller. Because his work makes it difficult for Michael to leave his office, Mari or I often go to Michael's house and let the dogs out at noon. Sometimes we say that we are going up to let Helen Keller out to pee in the yard, or more generally, more commonly, that we are going to the dogs. People agree with that, and nod. I looked up the phrase: its general meaning is that the subject is deteriorating; not what it used to be. We are going to the dogs. The expression has its roots in China, at a time when dogs and trash were thrown outside the wall of the city; dogs because they were scorned, and belonged with the trash. To go to the dogs was to become trash. I do not know why we continue to say what we do, except that . . . well, Helen hasn't given up.   

If we encounter alien life beyond whatever has crept under a rock on Mars or the Moon; that is to say, if we encounter advanced alien life, it will not be because we found it, but because it found us.  We can barely get to the Moon or Mars.  The places where other intelligent life has its best chances are incredibly far away.  Bridging those spaces is far beyond what we can do now.  Maybe something that began long, long before we did has come to the stage at which it can come here. I am at the age at which funerals are common events.  To be eligible to join the Tucson Old Timers baseball club, you have to be 60.  One comes to expect that one or the other of us will die, and that death will come to all of us, eventually.  "Eventually" may or may not be far away. Because we have come to intelligence and awareness, even to self-awareness, we know and think about dying.  It saddens us.  We have invented lots of ways of thinking about how it might not be true.  Sometimes it i

I think his name was Larson. He had come to meet me, because I lived in the Midwest now,  teaching, and he knew Gus had a son in Iowa. When Gus and Jennie celebrated 50 years together, I wrote, "Where the Wind Blows West," and in it I recalled what he had said: "Oh ja, he said, we came together Oh the boat.  I don't remember. I think Gus stopped in Sandstone But I went direct to Duluth. Du-lute, he said:  Du-lute.  We did Everything, mostly construction.  I don't Know.  Gus went to the west coast, To smell the sea again, I guess." He caused me to realize that my father, in his migration from Norway, through Chicago, had come up somewhere near on his way through Sandstone, to Du-lute, and on to Tacoma, where I had been born. Mari and I drove up to Duluth, stopping in Sandstone, looking for tracks. One day Jane Rundquist said that her son, Tim, was going to edit The Otter Tail Review,  and that I should send him so

Quite by accident, fondue has become a Christmas Eve habit at our home.  But that is how religions are born, so we do not fight it. This year, we have placed a fondue set we bought in Germany forty-seven years ago, if not on the disabled list, then into retirement.  It was a liquid-fueled contraption, and it tended to crisp the cheese in the middle of the pot, so this time we bought an electric pot.  Personally, I find extension cords romantic by candlelight. The cord on the pot is two feet long, and affixed to it is a stern warning that extension cords should not be used with the device. I make two assumptions about the manufacturer's orders:   1)  They think we will use too frail and delicate a cord.  Melt the cord.  Start a fire.  Back to the old pot.   2)  That we will put the electric pot on the floor by the outlet.  Maybe sit cross-legged and sing "Cum by heah".  

Last night I cured bone cancer. Today, so far, I have done the dishes. Let me tell you about the bone cancer. A couple of days ago, I began to notice an ache in my legs; particularly my right leg.  That is the one sent through a medical meat grinder so that the doctor could implant a replacement hip.  His assistant told me what a chore it is to saw everything up and put in replacement pieces from Ace Hardware.  I have come to believe her:  ever since I have had the sense that small pieces of what I used to call muscle have been trying to find each other and glue themselves together somehow, in a kind of trial and error process. It had come to this:  everywhere I touched my leg, in front, it hurt.  Lying in bed was not a comfort.  Wriggling my toes induced a process something like Northern Lights on my legs, without the light.  Just for fun, I would poke myself tentatively, just to ascertain that the end was near.  I finally settled on bone cancer, rationally aware that it would

In spite of what Michele Bachmann believes, our Founders did not "work tirelessly" to abolish slavery.  Slavery was recognized in the American Colonies before the Revolutionary War, and was not formally abolished until the Civil War in 1861-1865. At first, slavery seemed to be largely a north-south issue.  Politicians agreed to a Mason-Dixon line, deliberately adding similar numbers of free- and slave-States to maintain a kind of equity in Congress.  It might not have been so much virtue as cheap labor that made slavery synonymous with the South, where cotton was king. At the time of the Civil War, Southerners were largely Democrats, and Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.  Southerners argued for States Rights, a weak Federal government, so that southern States could manage their own affairs, and attitudes. It is probably not possible for a society to practice slavery unless it convinces itself that the slaves are somehow inferior beings.  During protracted wars, it seem

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we! After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor. At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new. It is Jao we are thinking of. This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he is.  We have not done t

It is enough to reach one's 83rd birthday, even if all else is quiet on the western front.  But this day, already, I have heard from Per in Lillehammer, Dean in Schwarz-land, Iowa, and most touchingly, from the Improv Theater School of Remedial and Punitive Drivers' Retraining Course.  Two years ago, I followed a truck into a turn at an intersection and discovered that the truck was making an illegal left turn.  The truck made it through.  I did not.  I was required to pay a substantial fine to the City, and to take a Drivers' Training Course.  Today, two years later, they are still thinking of me and my checkbook. I have not heard from the truck.

It is pouring down rain:  the sidewalk is nearly wet! All the headlines are about rain in California; how the hillsides are sliding down to the sea, and that if this keeps up for several years, there may be water in the reservoir, again. Here in Tucson, cacti are hoping that the top layer of gravel and sand will allow enough water to pass to reach the fine web of roots waiting for even a rise in humidity:  cacti are conservators. Jao is visiting us today and, like the cacti, he is enthusiastic for anything that will make mud and mischief.  Like the cacti, he does not hope for wild rivers and flowing hillsides so much as he does for something to stir around in, or to pour out onto a chair seat.  I suppose that is why Mari is trying to potty-train him, too.  But Jao knows that Big Boys do not sit on little plastic toy-lets:  they run out into the drizzle-mist and get wet, and then scheme not  to put on a dry pamper; in fact, not to put anything  on. Today we are working on thing

As I reported earlier, I spent a day leaning against the hall wall on the 8th floor of the Justice Building, available for jury duty, but finally dismissed in late afternoon. I received a check for my civic duty:  mileage and lunch, lost opportunities and the cost of reading matter while waiting. $5.79. That's right.  A jury of my peers has determined that I am worth $5.79 a day.  I hate to admit, but I think they have nailed it! On the other hand, consider the defendant:  he is being--or has been--judged by $69.48 worth of citizenry a day.  

Once, when the world was young, we stopped somewhere in Wyoming (I believe it was:  perhaps elsewhere) and hiked a short ways to see old ruts in the grass which were part of the Oregon Trail.  It was easy to imagine wagon after wagon, time and again, following and creating those ruts, still there. Sometimes "going west, young man" meant leaving from Independence, Missouri, and driving a team of horses or oxen pulling a conestoga wagon, or something, all the way to Oregon City, Oregon.  Here and there, one can still see the tracks in the grass, as unplowed yet as they were then, neglected by every kind of subsequent machinery. Earlier this month, Daniel and Ellie drove Mari and me to Oregon City, where Daniel sometimes works, and where we had lunch.  There is a monument to the terminus of the Oregon Trail, if monument it is to be called.  It is supposed to be a Conestoga wagon train, but it looks like boxcars with great pipe hoops arching overhead, resting on the ground

Daniel and Ellie invited Mari and me to visit them for several days, and we think we did. The way to Portland, if you live in Tucson, sometimes goes through Salt Lake City, probably because Delta believes in full airplanes, or maybe because no one should too suddenly turn from desert to the bottom of the sea.  On the first leg of the trip, we met the most beautiful dog in the world.  He was an Akita, of amazing good humor, whose duties consisted of keeping his owner in good humor, too. Ellie and Daniel live in Portland, Oregon, where the nights and days strive for equal light levels.  I exaggerate, or course, else what is the point of telling the truth?  As a person who orients himself by the position of the sun in the sky, I had to wait what I think was three nights and two days to catch sight of it, and then it was diffused beyond position. My phone kept posting messages to me that as soon as it could distinguish up from down, it was going to send me my location.  In the me

Once, in a silly moment of self-indulgence, I had thought that getting up and walking after having had hip surgery was painful; almost more than I could do.  But then I remembered what it was like to have gout; thinking that I was walking on the rawest splinters of broken bones in my foot.  As you might surmise, I have not had much notable pain in my life.  In fact, the most painful moments in my life have not had to do with surgery or broken bones, at all.  They have been when someone has asked me to dance. And truth be told, the pain of having to dance, when I could not, has been more painful for the other person in closest proximity when I have tried to dance.  But I have not felt overly sorry for them:  they had a choice.  I had none.  I cannot dance. Why can I not dance?  I have taken dancing lessons.  It was like trying to teach a rock to float; like asking a frog to sing a serenade.  It was humiliating. Why can I not dance?  I have the best of credentials for not being

"Garlic in my food!  Garlic!  We are Englishmen, Sarah, not savages!"                                   (From a postcard Mari received from Marilyn.) "You can never have enough garlic.  With enough garlic, you can eat the New York Times."                                   (Morley Safer)                                                  “Shallots are for babies; onions are for men; garlic is for heroes.”                                                              (Unknown)                                        "Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke."                                      (Thomas Nash) "There is no such thing as a little garlic."                                    ( Arthur Baer) "By the way you can be a garlic eater and still benefit f rom believing in Jesus, its not exclusive to the Goths."                                     (Unknown)

I had been looking forward to the Jury Duty assignment, partly because it is an important, although dreaded, part of how we govern ourselves, and partly because I had an unblemished record of never having been selected to serve on a jury.  I wanted to know what it was like. As often happens, the first call of jury duty was postponed about a week, but then the second week came around, and I reported.  Hundreds of us took our places in what was called the Jury Assembly Room, where we completed a questionnaire, and waited.  The "Jury Assembly Room" sounded like a place where juries were constructed from parts, and that was about right.  The actual assembly happened in a courtroom upstairs.  The deconstruction preceded the construction.  We were divided into three groups, something like the medical process of triage:  those in pretty good shape, those who were hopeless, and those who should get first attention, because it would make a real difference.  I was assigned to the

By happenstance, recently, I rediscovered Pendleton Woolen Mills.  I was looking for a vest, and they have some glorious designs. It brought to mind a most curious memory.  Long since, while still a callow youth, I was a callow clergyman in California.  Every year, the congregations in the Synod to which we belonged held meetings.  Like most organizations, there were the Big Shots who ran things.  I do not know whether there is anything smaller than bird shot, but if there is, I was one of them. The name--Pendleton--brought to mind that when the clergy met to do whatever they did, there was always a time when the stiff collars were set aside, and we got casual.  The Big Shots loved Pendleton shirts, and wore them like grouse stamping around in . . . no, I guess that for grouse it is mating season.  The clergy I remember just preened in their expensive plaid shirts, providing what Autumn and aspen trees do in other places. For real color, one needs more than aspens and clergy.  I

I am still thinking about the almost incomprehensible contempt for government that we have all around us.  It stuns me!  How is it possible for any normal person, who has any  understanding of what it is to live in society, to have contempt for what it is to live together?  Government is nothing more than the way we organize our lives together.  It might be a monarchy, or a commune, or a Wild West with pistols and saloons and cattle and sheep, but it has to be something . It occurs to me that what is happening now is almost devoid of sensible debate about what we want our country to be, what we want our cities and neighborhoods to be.  We have so much contempt for what our politicians do when they get into office that we look around for someone running for office who promises to do even less.  We don't debate about kind of health care system would serve the nation best, or how to deliver it:  we ask someone to do less.  We don't talk about what an optimal educational system

I am utterly baffled by the people who claim to hate government. Were they to say that they preferred to have a king to govern them, I could at least know what they were talking about.  I would think them to be hopelessly lost in time, but I would understand what they meant. Were there people who really did not want any government, who really meant it when they said they hated government, and that they thought they would like to move to the panhandle of Idaho, or to an island somewhere--somewhere absolutely cut off from people who did not also hate government--I would hope that they could find such a place, and move there.   I don't want to live there, where there is no law; where there are no limits to what one can do, but maybe people who want that ought to arm themselves, stock up on biscuits and baloney, and go there.  I cannot think of any place in the world where anyone wants that, but maybe it ought to be tried. But people do say they hate government; not simply that

 "How many grandchildren do you have?", somebody asked when Jao showed up at the Old Timers's game.  "About ten," I replied, as if a bit uncertain.  It seemed like a lot more. We have been starting the day with a new routine, lately.  Until recently, Jao and I put on our shoes and went down the driveway to get the newspapers.  Then I sat down at the kitchen table, with coffee and the newspapers, while Jao did things to fascinate his grandmother.   Then Jao discovered that he could build a train by putting his folding chairs in a row.  Now I am finding it easier just to take my assigned seat in the caboose, and make train noises.  Today, Jao noticed how much I missed the newspaper, so he brought it to me, aboard the train.  I continued to make "chugga-chugga" noises, with an occasional train whistle thrown in as we approached crossings, on the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. Our days are busy for me--the octegenarian--and for Jao the Engineer.

A distant time ago, during a discussion of an academic requirement to be able to read German and French, a friend told me he had no trouble reading German, even though he had never studied it.  He said he just didn't understand a word of what he was reading. I have been listening to radio ads for "a Respitory Therapy program" provided by a local, family-owned institute.  I do not know why it irritated me, but I could use a respite from ads like that.  I looked up the firm, online.  It appears they also have a couple of Vetinary programs and--this one takes my breath away--a Phlebotomy program.  I know what "phlebotomy" means, but I will admit that I wonder what the Institute thinks it means.  It makes me pespire just to think about a radio commercial for it. But perhaps it is not my place to admire the pronounciation they hire:  I once thought of becoming a vetinarian myself, but that was before I knew what phlebotomy was, or how to spell vetinary.  

“A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”   A series of operations on my right eye have left it minimally usable.  It serves mostly to inform me that it is most likely daytime, or nighttime, and to monitor my right periphery.   In recent time, my left eye, having learned to become the dominant eye, has developed its own problems; principally cataracts, a film over something-in-there, and an irritated retina.  Doctors decided that the first medical attack should be to replace the cornea, and solve the cataract problem, with the hope that the retina would settle down, and that my sight would be good enough.  Monday--yesterday--I had a cataract operation.  They sent me home with a patch over my left eye, meaning that I had to maneuver about with only what my right eye was showing me, and that was not much!   Today, with orders to report to the Doctor, I brushed my tooth, and pawed about in the closet until I had foun

I am beginning to think that we live in a pretty tough neighborhood.  It is no exaggeration to say that there has not been a day in at least two months when a siren has not gone off.   That is unnerving, especially in the middle of the night. At first I thought it might just be that we could hear the sirens from the fire station about a mile away, but that theory was soon put to test, and to rest.  Stepping outside made it clear that it was not fire trucks.  But it seemed not to be police cars in the neighborhood, either.  As the King in "The King and I" said:  "Is a puzzlement!" No one likes the idea of a neighborhood crime wave, but we recently joined a neighborhood . . . oh, digital group that exchanges useful information about what is going on, and there have been several posts about criminals posing as utility workers, who talk their way, or break their way, into houses; in onc case armed with a knife.  That guy apparently did not get into a house, but wa

Christians and Muslims have been staring at, and shouting at, each other across the Mediterranean for a long time.  Sometimes it has looked like a religious conflict, and sometimes like a conflict between Europeans and Middle-Easterners.  It is both, and the lines are liquid. Under the Ottoman Empire, Muslims extended their reach far into Europe, and Europeans pushed back.  In 1877 and '78, it was the Russians, trying to regain their influence in Eastern Europe, who engaged the Turkish Empire in war.  A couple of Englishmen wrote a song that became popular in pubs, that gave us the term, "jingoism". "We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true The Russians shall not have Constantinople." Once, the city was called, Byzantium.  The Emperor Constantine renamed it after himself.  Today, Constantinople is call

I have spent life-changing hours this morning, reading heartwarming and fantasmagorical tales of how things might have been had they not been what we know they are. Michael Laitman is a professor of Ontology, with a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah and an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and he or someone apparently purchased half a page in the New York Times of today.  What caught my eye was the line, "Buying Our Way into Heaven".  "That," I thought, "is my only chance, and I cannot afford it, but I had better pay attention!" I cannot do justice to whatever that cost turns out to be, but I did enjoy the business about Jonah being thrown overboard by the crew of a boat that suspected that he was a Jonah, and how he ended up in the whale of a belly of a whale, and how, after walking around in there for some days, finally agreed to do God's work, which taught him a lesson, I think.  I never did figure out what it would cost me to buy my way into heav

Last night and this morning Coyote and the Sky came by. Coyote was as shy as the Sky was bold. Precisely, we do not live in the city, but in a small  Pima County notch at the corner, probably defined by a fierce urge to be free from the sins of the city across the street; maybe so Coyote would know he could come and go, although tax rates may have occurred also. Coyote created the world, you know,  before the Conquistadores  came marching for gold, and watched them come and go; Someone Else's creation. Someone Else also created  copper miners lusting for land on the other side of town,  where there are trees and water, and where the last Jaguar owns the night. Coyote knows.

" A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. "                                                                                    -- Robert Frost I have not been in such a heavy rain for about two years.  I live in Tucson, and this is October.  There are almost more raindrops than I can count.  My shirt is damp.  Without exaggeration, I can say that I am cold, and I have found a vest to help me stay warm. We have just had lunch with Becky and Stan, at Teresa's Mosaic Cafe--they having just recently returned from a summer stay near Seattle.  Their return is a much more reliable sign of Autumn than is frost on the pumpkin:  no pumpkin, no frost. It is common, but it is odd, still, to look across town at Mt. Lemmon, and know that up there, in what seems to be the backyard of the houses on that side of town, sometimes it snows.  The ski lift up there might indeed be more for show than for snow,

      PUT YOURSELF THERE (Thinking of the game for Ed Rife) There is no one there, today, where Ed played at shortstop, but if the light is right you will see his shadow, at the position he owned, knowing who was up, who was on,  and what to do when the ball came. Ed always knew what to do when the ball came, or wherever it went instead.   Put yourself there today, at shortstop, where Ed played. You don’t need to be a hero; be a shortstop!  How many are out? Who is on?  What’s the count? How are the guys positioned? Who has an arm, and who needs a relay? Be the guy at shortstop! Part of being a ballplayer, part of understanding what made Ed better at baseball than most of us, was that he thought about it first, so that when it came, he already knew what he was going to do. Then it was sure and easy:   Ed already knew what to do, then he did it; easy! Put yourself there today, at shortstop, in Ed’s footsteps, and if

We are prisoners in our own house.  George W. might have said that Jao possessed a weapon of mess destruction (George had a way with words). It matters that it is Tucson on the last day of September, that it is sunny and warm, but even so, a face full of water is not an adult pleasure:  getting soaking wet is something two-year-olds revel in. We barricade ourselves inside, behind a glass door--a door, incidentally, that I had just cleaned of water spots yesterday:  silly me!--while Jao makes it rain from the sky, howling with the kind of pleasure trout find in a summer shower and a sky full of bugs. "No, Jao!" is not an effective teaching method.  Threatening to make him wear his wet jeans seems not to scare him.  Socks that squish and leave puddles on the floor seem not-at-all discouraging. I suppose that, all-in-all, we should be glad that the little hostage-holder takes regular showers, and that we do not have a sandbox.  Sandboxes are for cats, anyway, and our cat

A long time ago--really, a long time ago:  about 1959--two or three young women came to our door in Fremont, California, and tried to convince us that the Kingdom of God was coming down the road.  They were Jehovah's Witnesses.  In those dark, gray flannel days, I was a church member--in fact, a clergyman--but I was not ready to sign up for Armageddon. A couple of weeks ago, two or three other women came to our door here in Tucson, and asked whether was interested in world peace; whether I deplored war.  I assured them I was, and did, and they said, "Good!".  Then they explained that the only way to achieve world peace was to give up our democratic ways and to welcome a king:  Jesus, or God.  It was not clear to me precisely who the new king would be, but they said the time had come to end our warring ways and to let God rule.  That, they said, was the only way we would ever get peace.  And (it was still true, as it always is) that the kingdom was coming soon.  Good