SmokeSound

Coyote comes to our yard Not easily, not commonly, But gently, preferring anonymity. He is on springs--Coyote-- Having learned, perhaps outside Of town, that we two-legged ones Are not to be trusted So his trust is not to be earned. His house is without windows So he does not see me Through our window and my lens If I do not make a noise Or lumber like the lout I am. He says nothing daytimes. Sometimes at night, rabbit hunting, He comes in a pack Like teenagers loose in the world Crying to each other in chase, Safely cloaked in the dark. Although one never knows What might lie at the bird feeder Or what has brushed the cactus So sometimes in the day he comes Quietly, uneasily, gently.

One might say that the shoes themselves are ugly enough, but a more careful look at the laces will show what it is like to have a two-year-old grandson, and why his ancient grandfather is learning to do without shoes. We moved back to Tucson two years ago, but I still cannot locate the shears I recall so that I can cut the laces.  There is not a chance that I can untie them.  Cogito, ergo I walk in my socks.

Forget that the tectonic plates shift and shove the sea high up the hillside!  Pay no attention to murder rates in our major cities, which sound like a badly directed Fourth of July firecracker fusilade!  If you want correctly to gauge the temperature of crime in this country, you need to know what is happening in our small, ordinary towns; towns like Bisbee, Arizona.  To provide what we all need to know about mayhem and lawlessness in America, let me report to you, second hand, what appeared in just one, perfectly ordinary edition of The Bisbee Observer, in its Police Beat column, last month. A resident of Garden Avenue asked extra police patrol because someone was dumping garbage in her yard.  She said it usually happened early in the morning, about 5:30 A.M. At Circle K, an older man hit someone's car, a second car, and a Frito Lay truck, shrugged, and left for downtown Old Bisbee. A heater caught fire on Arizona Street, but the owner was able to put out the fire. On Br

The Burma Road was a 700 mile way, hacked from terrible terrain, from what was then called Burma--now Myanmar--to a destination in China, built mostly by Chinese laborers, but later assisted by the U.S., to provide supplies to the Chinese to enable them to resist the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War.   To be honest, I know very little about the Burma Road, but thanks to Marilynn Larson, I know quite a lot about the Pegu Club Cocktail, named after the Pegu Club in colonial Burma. Marilynn sent us a recipe:  6 parts gin, 2 parts  orange liquor, 3 parts lime juice, and a few dashes of bitters. By nature cautious, I tried to make a very small version of the Pegu Club Cocktail but, having no liquid measuring instruments capable of such minute amounts, I tried using a kitchen scale, thinking that the exchange from volume to weight could not be important with the ingredients. The first try was minute, although I had to switch from grams to ounces in midcourse.  T

It was not long ago he first discovered rain, on this same sidewalk, looking up, hands out as if to say what he was still incapable of saying:  "What in hell is this?" Now he has conquered rain, if not by inventing the umbrella, then by discovering it.  "Let the sky fall!  Let there be downpours in the desert!   Let there be a way to see where I am going!" Raindrops keep falling on his head, just like the man whose feet were too bare to walk on the gravel!  Crying's not for him, cause he ain't gonna stop the rain by complaining.  He's free, nothing's bothering him because he's free!  Nothing's bothering him! B. J. Thomas would be pleased.

My conscience is prodding me to admit that I did not, after all, find  a cure for bone cancer. I am referring to an earlier post in which I described having been attacked by needles down my legs. As it turned out, I contracted shingles. "But, but . . . !" I sputtered to the doctor, "Last year I had a very expensive shingles shot!" "Oh, yes," he said, "that should make it less severe." "Less severe" isn't. It began with a nasty rash. I did not go to the doctor soon enough for the medicine to be effective, so I daubed something on whatever appeared, while my nervous system fired shots at the enemy so effectively that my nervous system became the enemy. At the end of each day, I felt that someone, softening me up for a knockout punch somewhat later, had beaten my midsection to submission. People who call themselves my friends tell me that they have had shingles, too, and that in two or three months I will be O

Mari is concerned. She read an article about Alzheimer's, and has been looking for signs of increasing forgetfulness and things like that, and realized she might have a problem. She has never been able to remember where she put her keys or her phone: what would getting worse mean? Just . . . oh . . . maybe to move things in a new direction . . . she thought a key rack-- a gift from Patti, where she could always, just automatically, hang her keys, and find them, might put an end to a perennial problem, thereby doing an end run around Alzheimer's. It didn't work. She can't find the rack.

I wonder if other people just go to bed and sleep. I don't. Last night I saved a dog's life, and hurt my hand. When I told Mari about it, this morning, she just laughed, even when I showed her that I had bled. I am going to assume that you might understand. As you might understand, I found myself in a dairy barn--an old-fashioned dairy barn with wood stanchions and mangers, and old fashioned cows and a short-haired collie.  All of that has something to do with what is becoming a rather old-fashioned memory of Christmases Past; maybe even with swaddling cloths and Magi, and how I grew up. In any case, the dog was young, and oddly contrary.  I was told to put her into the manger between two cows because that might quiet things. When I did, the cow on the right reached her head over into the dog-in-the-manger, not so much to bring an old fable to mind, but to beat the dog to death.  Now you will understand that was impossible:  mangers are not built like that--to t

Jao has discovered bubble wrap. From a neighboring room, it sounds like World War III has broken out with small arms fire. He is being supplied with ammunition by Mari, who keeps finding Christmas shipping materiel. We have taken down the tree and stuffed it into a very tall, custom-made, tape-fortified box, every step of which was described in a foreign language by a kid who has learned to talk before he discovered the English language. That was after we filled the hummingbird feeders, and after he found a bird nest in the Christmas tree. He is a caring kid, so he insisted that a plastic bird sit on the plastic eggs.  I fear that we soon will become great-grandparents.  I had hoped for a dog or a cat, but I suppose mockingbirds will do. The sniper fire has slowed down, next door: Jao is running out of ammunition. Peace may break out for lack of bubbles.