SmokeSound

We thought it about time that the little tad came to terms with the natural world; not the snikes in our yard, nor the cacti, but the  real natural world, red in tooth and claw, and stuffed to the gills with straw or styrofoam or whatever big game hunters and stuffers use to display their hormones.  There is a concrete-block castle full of such critters on the outskirts of Tucson. "That big cat up there," Someone said, "was given to us by General George Washington, or Henrik Ibsen, or Somebody, who was just happy to get rid of it."  That is not quite what Someone said, but it was what I was thinking. We did want Jao to get used to the size of some of the beasts he reads about, remembering how surprised he was at his first visit to the zoo, and how, when a chimpanzee howled, Jao headed for the next county.  The giraffe was his first test.  Even though the giraffe stood very still, it took a braver hunter than Jao to go first, but finally he scooted where he...

Almost fifteen years ago, while returning  to Washington State for my first foray into High School class reunions, which, so far as I know, was the last time our class ever reunited:  it is quite possible that all of us have died and gone to . . . heaven, I suppose.  That seems to have been a curious but common supposition.  (But I am losing my way, here.) A logging truck, piled high with Douglas fir, suddenly appeared somewhere in Oregon.  The sight of it surprised me, although once it had been as common as rain or rocky soil.  I had been years away from such logs and trucks. This time, after flying--almost incongruously on Alaska Airlines from Tucson to Seattle; something like seeing an umiak in the desert--I was struck by what had once been a common sight:  long paved roads at the bottom of a fir canyon; almost always second- or third-growth fir trees just learning how to stand tall.  (But I am losing my way, here, getting farther and fart...

Having cheered Harold on as he passed 99, and since I had the next day free, Daniel invited me to join him in exploring what for both of us had been a mere rumor:  that Olympia was, in fact, connected to the rest of the world by water.  Other than that fingers of brackish water slosh back and forth nearly up to the capitol building, there is no evidence, no   convincing evidence, that French trappers or ships from anyone's navy have ever had a clue that Olympia shares a connection with Tacoma or Seattle or the bounding main.  That is what drove Daniel to rent a runabout with a fierce Yamaha engine, and for us to set out from Olympia. We pushed out, at a moderate pace, on a perfectly peaceful and warm day, threading between Anderson Island and McNeil Island, up past Fox Island and under the Narrows Bridge, keeping an eye on it, since both of us remembered that once before it had whipped around and fallen into the Sound.  We were in luck.  We were relie...

[Harold celebrated his 99th birthday.  Harold is my mother's brother; thus my uncle.  His daughters, Judith and Vicki, invited all the Hansen and Jacobsons they could think of--after all, Ruth is 95!--so a veritable herd of friends and relatives to Olympia, Washington,  to wish them well.   In the days prior to flying to Puget Sound, I found myself composing a toast to Harold, and since the gathering in Olympia was not the kind that raises a glass and toasts, I shall raise it here:] *    *    * Wallace Stevens has a poem titled, “A Postcard from the Volcano”   It begins like this: Children picking up our bones  Will never know that these were once  As quick as foxes on the hill;  And that in autumn, when the grapes  Made sharp air sharper by their smell  These had a being, breathing frost;  And least will guess that with our bones  We left much more, left what still is...

There you have him, the youngest freshman in the history of the University of Arizona, at the fountain in front of Old Main!  He is not formally enrolled at the University, of course, because he is only two years old, and not enrolled anywhere, much less at the University. He is not entirely  unlike the first class of students who tried to enroll at the University.  There were thirty-two applicants then, in 1891, but only six of them were admitted as freshmen.  The rest were sent to prep classes.  It was more difficult then.  Arizona was still a territory, and there were no high schools in the territory. Anyway, as proud as Arizonans are now about the University, they were not overjoyed back then.  The Territorial Legislature, which came to be known as "The Thieving Thirteenth" Legislature of 1885, had decided to allocate funds to establish needed territorial services.  They had $100,000., for instance, to build a mental hospital, and $...

We got off the streetcar on University Avenue--just for a few minutes--so I could stop into the arts supply store and pick up a carrying case for Mari's sewing cutting boards:  they have to be carried flat.  Thus:  an artists' portfolio case. "Are you having a pleasant day?", the clerk asked; it being a pleasant day. "Oh, yes!," I replied, and explained, "We are taking our grandson for his first streetcar ride."  Tucson has just opened it first light rail system from the downtown to the university. "Is your grandson a freshman?" the clerk asked. "No, he is a two-year-old."

One of the great virtues and strengths of the way science works is its willingness--no, its  demand, its  expectation-- everything will be questioned.  It is to ask, whatever seems to be the case, what would show the idea to be false.  And if you can think of any possibility that the idea might be false, you give it a try.  Only when nothing seems to call the idea into question, might one call it "true", and even then, one never, never bars the possibility that there might be a better idea.  It is called, "falsifiability".  If it can be shown to be false, let it go! No other enterprise is so open to the possibility that what seems to be true might be false, as is science.  People turn to religion with the conviction that one will find truth there, absolute truth.  Doubt is scorned in religious thinking.  In science, doubting is the way one moves forward to a better idea.  In religion, doubting might get you tossed out of the co...

Perhaps it is not insane to think that Muslim fundamentalists are savagely dangerous, while Christian fundamentalists are just good patriotic Americans, but it certainly is ignorant.  And in many ways, ignorance is harder to deal with than ideology.  People with an ideology have invested some thought into what they believe:  ignorant people don't have to think.  They just assert. In Syria and Iraq today--but certainly not just there--profoundly religious zealots are engaging in brutal attacks on anybody who does not agree with them religiously.  They believe they have the truth.  They believe God is on their side.  They believe, as medieval Christians used to assert, that people who do not agree with them have no right to live.  That is what happens when people believe God is on their side, or that they are on God's side.  If you aren't on God's side, whose side are you on? What astounds me are the ordinary people--the perfectly normal n...

Three weeks and 4,000 miles later, I drove the pickup onto our driveway, and let it sit there. I used to enjoy that pickup.

Well, of course we went to our son's wedding, and reclaimed our table and resumed our  debates at the Coffee Shop, and cozied up to our friends and relatives.  We bumped into people, and we remarked how nothing had changed and everything had.  We admired how the graduates of Lake Mills High School, class of 1964, were handsome and even more fun than the last time, but we did not forget our roots.  While in Minneapolis, we went to Engebretson's so I could buy Norwegian fish balls. Engebretson's Scandinavian Refugee Pantry does not take credit cards, you know, so I went to the bank up Lake Street to cash in my IRA so I could buy fish balls.  What good is it to go into retirement with even a most modest retirement plan if your soul shrivels for lack of fish balls? Perhaps I ought to be quick here to say that fish balls are not part of a fish; not an identifiable zone.  They are scarcely identifiable, at all.  About the size of cocktail meat balls, ...

Ellie Chen and Daniel Hubbard celebrated their marriage in the High Noon Saloon in Madison, Wisconsin!  The bride wore cowboy boots, and the groom stood slim and tall and not-at-all horizontal, as most of us are getting.  Ellie is no cowgirl, and Daniel is no rancher.  On the wall of their house there is a fine, old Stag's head, which Ellie bagged on a hunting expedition to an antique store of the more ordinary sort.  They do have two shelter dogs, and a delightful sense of just how solemn it is to marry. The High Noon is no storefront on a dusty street.  It is a brick building on a major Madison street, and Madison is no dusty cowtown, either.  It is a large, small city cradled by larger lakes and a determined land bridge between them.  It is a capital city, a university city, a city with restaurants by the side of the lakes, and the capital square wears a necklace of hand-picked produce and flowers.  It is a rowdy and civilized city, where ...

People have lived in the Americas for . . . what? . . . fifteen or twenty thousand years.  It is a relatively short time, even for human beings, and in the large scheme of things, human life is a suddenly recent thing:  a few million years.  Human life came lately to the Americas because it is a long walk from Africa, across where the continents used to crowd each other, and provide, not so much a pathway as a horizon; a ridge, or a woods, or a sea of grass beyond. There are places, perhaps most places, with a keener sense for history than here, nearly at the end of the long walk.  Even so, this week Mari and I stood at the Taos Pueblo, and tried to comprehend that people had lived in that place, in that little, lovely space inside an arc of small peaks, with a stream running down through the village, where it had run for more than thousands of years, where the small town that is the Pueblo had harbored human beings for a thousand years.  There.  In...

We have come home again! While away, we gathered with family and friends and with another family and their friends to laugh and love what happens when our son and their daughter asked us to be glad for them, and even as good and bright as they are, they cannot possibly know how fine it was to be there as they married.  Madison, Wisconsin is a glorious bridge between two lakes, a rhythm of June and January, as happy as a farmer's market on the capital steps, as ambiguous in its urges as our nation is politically, something like a marriage, itself, and when Ellie and Daniel came to tell us that they did, and do, and will love each other, we forgave the mad genius who had imposed a diamond pattern of streets and necessities upon the land between the lakes. We drove to Minneapolis, to help pack the sweet patterns of lives curving together into rectangular boxes, so that the boxes and Daniel and Ellie and their irregularly-definable dogs and the Stag upon the wall might move back...