SmokeSound

People are not computers, but if people were something like computers, it would be the way in which our genetic code resembles the coding that makes computers work. Half of the instructions for how to make a human being are copied from the mother, and half from the father. Combining them is not only our greatest pleasure, but provides important possibilities for variety. Some of the variants do not work very well, and some of them are real advantages, and the advantages tend to survive better: natural selection. The ability to map that code makes it possible to understand our ancestry in astounding ways. For instance, because scientists have been able to map the genetic code of Neanderthals--early human variants first found in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf-- we now know that a very small part of the genetic code of most of us is inherited from those Neanderthals. [This is where you can insert brother-in-law jokes, bad date jokes, political party and Supreme...

Is that a bird bath over there? There is a bird bath over here !  Fake birds! OK.   You go first! I went first.  Air drying. Hey Maude!  There's a new birdbath in town.

Fashion Statement Is there a ball here somewhere? There is  a ball here, somewhere. Hey!  You out there, somewhere! Three guys, one ball, no force. Next week we work on throwing. Former Marine, holding his. . . . Former Marine. Gravity:  the most powerful force in Udall Park.

I suppose that, with practice. . . .

They are called the Tucson Old Timers--you have to be at least sixty to play--and they play baseball even while well over 100; not years:  degrees.  It will reach 114 or so, today, and although the Old Timers start rather early in the day, they cannot avoid getting hot under the collar. Even the birds return to their perches, after chasing down flies, and pant with their mouths open. They don't wear short pants because they think they have lovely legs.  They wear short pants because that is how they live their lives, at seventy-something, at over 110 or something:  in short pants.  "Huhh, huhh, huhh.  My god, it is a long way from first to third!  Huhh, huhh.  I'll be all right!" Some of the guys have a little Bible-study group after the games:  in June they concentrate mostly on hellfire and brimstone.  Some of the other guys go and have a beer together:  they are thinking about streams in t...

Civilization demands that it be possible to take your coffee outside to the sidewalk, and watch people go by.   The bread in the window might be varnished, but the pleasure is not.   That is Mari, in San Francisco.

We drove westover, to the ocean, and up the coastline to and past San Francisco.  And then we returned to Tucson. Today, it is 106 F. degree.  So far.  But we have been advised not to despair.  In a day or two, it will reach 111 F., and stay there for nearly a week.  Then it will plunge, again, to 109 F. June, I say, redundantly, is our hottest month, but with the slimmest of margins of luck, the Summer monsoon will come, if The Boy Child--El Nino--rolls this way across the Pacific.  The other child--The Girl Child:  La Nina--is the name for the current when it runs the other way:  no water for us, then.  Just a really long June. On the other hand, my pickup is in the shop for plugs and brake linings.  Really expensive platinum plugs, and incredibly fine brake linings, logic drives me to conclude.  

When we conceded that there were too many delights and not enough time to enjoy them, we skipped the redwood forest on the coast, and turned toward the giant sequoias up in the mountains; in King's Canyon. No one ever had wanted to go directly from Santa Cruz to King's Canyon, so there are no roads that go directly from one to the other.  Perhaps it is that Fresno is in between.  At any rate, one zig-zags to go there. One does not zig-zag around a Giant Sequoia.  You stop for it, stare at it, and try to comprehend what it means to say that a tree is two thousand years old.  Or more.  More. I know that Bristlecone pines are older, and I try to credit them for that, but I do not have to stop breathing to look at a Bristlecone.  I do not become convinced, when looking at a Bristlecone that I am looking at a tree that knows something.  When they look down, sometimes the Giant Sequoias notice us.  Sometimes. It may be global warming that ...

We had thought to visit Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco, but events multiplied and time dribbled off into unplanned pleasures, and we dearly wanted to visit Heidi and Jack on the coast below Santa Cruz, so we took command of our nostalgia and road maps and went to San Francisco. Not all of San Francisco; just the part we love most:  Fisherman's Wharf.  Ahhh! I wrote one of our earlier visits there into a poem by which we told our friends we were going to marry:  "Like Daisies in the Summer Sun". I remembered that it had been with George and Jean Miller that I first ate at Fisherman's Grotto #9; the first sit-down restaurant on the Wharf, which had opened in 1935.  My first visit had been about 55 years ago.  We ate there. "City Lights bookstore is up that way," Mari said.  I agreed that it was, and that she was multiplying events.  We both knew that.  We both knew that Muir Woods was across the Bridge that w...