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.