A Lazy Afternoon, While Mari Went on an Expedition with Francisco Coronado, to get Supplies at Albertson's

I had just one bottle of Stella Artois, and nothing to do with it, nor to share it with, so I took it out into the back yard to see what it could see.

I am not very good at identifying birds, but I do know a Palo Verde tree when I see something that I think is one.

I do believe that the dove is a White Winged dove, and there is at least a fair chance that the bird to the right is a House Finch, but there is an equally good chance that it is a Duck-footed Polywarb. If it is the latter, it is the first one sighted in Tucson since Francisco Coronado did not come through town, either.

It was a quiet afternoon, while waiting for Mari to return from the grocery without groceries, so the same or another dove, who looks best from the left side, posed again.

Up the hill, to the southeast, an ocotillo cactus signaled that Spring had offered a little rain, and the Summer had brought out the best in it.

I have not a clue what it is, but a prickly white-blossomed thing, whose primary duty is to try to grow across the gate in the back fence, has been spitting blossoms at everyone who has a single-minded opinion of what beauty is.

And up closer, an absurd
conical plastic hat, bought at a garden shop south of St. Paul, Minnesota (the imprecision is due to the fact that I cannot remember the name of Gerten's in Inver Grove Heights), is now put to use over a humming bird feeder.

I trimmed the roses a little too late, so the plant is readjusting itself to the Mad Hacker whose shingles finally quit twitching. It is doing a fine job.

I have not a clue what the purple thing is. It might be a Purple Finch.

It isn't, of course.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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