SmokeSound

      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,...

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, ...

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 ...

At the Roosevelt Memorial Ken Burns is a national treasure. It ought to be possible for Congress to designate him just that. "That's Ken Burns," the Guide might say.  "He saw things we only looked at." For instance, everyone in America past the age of ignorance knows that Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt were part of the same family, but for most of us, that was a bit like saying that Rockefeller Center and John D. Rockefeller and  Standard Oil are all members of the same family.  Ken Burns really saw what we had been looking at.  He told us about Teddy and FDR and Eleanor, and we saw America.  We saw ourselves. I have told, before, that my earliest memory was of standing on a tree stump, looking at the little never-painted brown wooden house where the Great Depression had deposited us, as glaciers leave evidence of things ground down, thinking of the almost hopeless radio from which sometimes a voice could be heard....

 You might think of it as a way to test the proposition that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. First he took everything out of the sideboard.  There was purpose and careful planning in his every action.  He did not toss things out onto the floor:  he stacked them, in line, in order, along the edge of the table. Then he crawled into the cupboard, just to see if he fit.  He did. More than that, he wondered what it was like for groceries to sit in darkness the whole day.  By fingertip, he managed to swing the door shut hard enough to shut himself in.  He was satisfied.  He stayed there.  Until we did our part and asked each other, "Where's Jao?  Where did Jao go?" And that demonstrated something else:  science can be fun as well as informative.  

The tide is turning on linguistic exaggeration! You know what I refer to:  "Fantastic!  Incredible! Unbelievable!" Sometimes it seems that the whole linguistic world is an offspring of Lake Woebegon, where all the men are good looking, all the women are strong, and all the children are above average. The turning of a tide is hard to see. It begins almost imperceptibly, something like water leaning the other way, but I overheard what I fully expect will be a tidal rush to a recognition of what average means, of maybe just how Sears used to sell tools: Good, Better, Best, not Amazing, Fantastic, Unbelievable. Two completely non-heroic men met at Costco, recognized each other, and traded news. One of them asked, in turn, "How is your son doing?" "Great!", said the other. "Good!", said the first guy, "Great is good."

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. That is a kind of liturgical recitation of how it began, in what is now Iraq, Syria, and Turkey:  Mesopotomia. That is where it is still going on:  in Iraq and Syria, and Turkey, and all of the places that claim Abraham as their own. If you want to know what is going on in those places today, you need to remember Abraham, and Moses and Aaron, and Jesus and Peter and Paul.  You need to remember Israel and the Caananites, Mohammed, Catholics and Protestants, other Hundred Years Wars, and what religion has to do with what it means to be a society. It is too simple to say that religion is the root of much of the butchery of human history, but whether it is at the root, or is the root, or is just there, it seems altogether too eager to be a participant, too involved to be granted pardon. Religion is the way people celebrate and solidify what they think society should be.  It is the way children are taught what it is to ...

John  Sieber died last night. A long time ago, John worked with Upward Bound, helping kids with small chances to make college a plan. Kyle tried to help all of us to dance; really dance, as if we could do what we wished we could do. "Look at that!", Kyle said. "John is dancing! He can't walk, but he is dancing!" John, finally, has stopped dancing.

          AFTERNOON DELIGHT He stands in front of his locker Head down like a bull tired of charging Red-flagged ideas and gray provocations. He holds the lock cradled forgotten In his hand.  Oh crap, he says.  Oh crap. It is the forty-four year old jogger's Stomach-dull, leg-weary apprehension Of pain.  John says it again:  Oh crap. He does not hear himself. We layer ourselves against the ice- Sharp west wind, debating where to run Turning finally north, hunching up Beneath Tower Dorms, sorry already Swinging left toward Silvercrest. We run the road like mortar against pestle Talking the day into retrospective calm Rehearsing the ordinary irritations Pulverizing administrative grit. The road wanders ticky-tacky up the hill Demanding incremental attention Pickup and school bus busy. We lament leg and breath and hill Calculating both summit and strength Glad finally for the impartial leveling Of millennial ic...

People who are lucky have a friend like John Sieber. You have to be lucky because you cannot deserve what only can be freely given. Mari and I drove to San Diego, and La Jolla, where John is fighting for his life against cancer. Mari had John as a teacher at the college where she and I met years later, and were married. John came and sat with us, publicly, when other opinion was that we might best be small-shunned. Professionally, John was engaged in deciphering the Nag Hammadi texts, Gnostic documents from Egypt from about the time when early Christians were trying to decide whose fantastic telling of what this is all about should be treasured. John gave his colleagues a translation of what he had been working on, so that we might learn more of it. I recall thinking that madness cannot be far removed from what we believe. Hiding humanity's beliefs in a cave might have been a very good idea. In contrast, John has always been the heart of dependabili...

He is working on his career plans.  He knows how to make it rain, now, and when he has the garden hose, he knows how to produce a downpour. The Rainmaker is considering everything from traveling circuses to becoming a Climate Change Artist, while not overlooking literary or cinematic careers.  It may be just a normal Cowboys and Indians phase, not resulting in becoming a rainmaker, at all. If the truth be told, making it rain, when he has the hose in hand, is less interesting to him than training for Water Cannon duty.  "No, Jao!  Do not spray me!"  is an inherent part of the garden hose routine.  So is, "I told you not to spray me!",  and "If you do that again I am going to turn the hose off!", as well as, "OK, kid!  That's it!  Did you see where my glasses went?".

Today alone, I have seen news articles that ought to scare the bejeezus out of most religious people, but they don't.  I think it is evidence that miracles do exist, or maybe only that thinking is not needed for survival. For instance, somebody with a shovel or a hand trowel dug up a skeleton of an incredibly huge dinosaur in Argentina:  the Dreadnaughtus schrani.  It was described as having a body about the size of a house, and nearly as long as a Boeing 737.  It lived about 77 million years ago, and weighed about 65 tons. Millions of people reading about that believe that the earth is . . . oh . . . 6 or 8 or 10 thousand years old.  That is to say, Dreadnaughtus schrani is 77 thousand times as old as creation.  And if you can digest that without choking on the absurdity of a recent creation, you might try to think about how old the universe actually is:  more than 13,000,000,000 years old.  13 billion . Syria and Iraq are being overru...

Our grandson is staying at our house for a couple of days, while his Dad takes a short trip.  Our granddog is here, too.  Dante is an affectionate Boxer who has always wondered why Jao comes to visit us nearly every week.  It does not seem fair, so this time our Wonder Grandson and our Wonder Granddog came together. From a dog's point of view, staying overnight is not so much a slumber party as it is a new yard with new trees and bushes.  It is where javelinas have been, with a delicate suggestion of coyote and rabbit in the breeze.  It is the vain hope that the rules will be different in a different house, and that he will be invited to dinner.  The habits of home are not transferable, so Dante hides his small anxieties of visiting in a strange house by staying close to us:  by staying underfoot-close to us.  We assure him we love him, and would he please move! Jao sleeps in our guest room, when he stays overnight.  Mari and I eased ...

It is the experience of most of us that some people are just better at doing things than we are.  Ed Rife was like that. He played baseball as if it were a skill as ordinary as walking, and sometimes he wondered why most of us had so much trouble walking. It did not happen often, but sometimes he wondered out loud, and when he did, most of us concentrated on the basics: things like learning how to walk, or maybe paying attention to how many outs there were, and when not to bunt. And to ourselves, we wondered why Ed made it look so easy. He didn't attack a pitched ball. He met it with grace and a swing that was not something added on: it was part of the arc of the line drive, part of how he turned to first; part of how he knew what would happen, and whether it was possible to take two. Maybe Ed was born that way. Maybe he got to Carnegie Hall by practicing. Whatever it was, it was something lovely when Ed picked up a ground ball and turned to first in ...