SmokeSound

They cannot hide it, even when they nap:  javelinas are cranky little buggers.  But give them credit:  snuggling is warmer. They tour the neighborhood on familiar paths around the back yard fences. You may call them collared peccaries, if you prefer, but in Arizona that is a bit like calling a tie a cravat, and in Arizona neither ties nor cravats are common for people who do not have a law degree or a license to plunder. Javelinas eat cacti, succulents, bulbs and tubers, and just about any plants that drop fruits or nuts.  They love seed pods, and most tender new plants.  That is why most houses here have fenced-in back yards.  It is a rare seed from the bird feeder above where they are lying that escapes the doves and quail that patrol the area, but sometimes sniffing about will find something, and stale bread is never left behind. Scavenging is hard work.  Sometimes, when it is successful, a nap seems like a good idea.

"What celebration is this?", we asked ourselves as we came to Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. "No matter!", I thought. The sign says it is Margarita Day. It was Andrew Zimmern Day; he of the Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods. Nothing bizarre there is about Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. It is purely delicious food, purely delicious margaritas and--more often--beer, where we count ourselves as regulars. The best of Tucson is how Mexico and the US meet in the Sonora Desert. Only a bombastic dolt might propose to build a wall there where two cultures make each other better over margaritas, at Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. If Andrew Zimmern wants something bizarre, he should find a wall to film. Or a wall builder; catch the wind blowing on a bad hair day.

I, the bionic man,   already outfitted with one artificial hip, have scheduled a replacement for the other hip, too.  It is not that I enjoyed the right-hip operation so much--it was a real pain in the . . . hip . . . but that the grinding noises in my other hip make it hard to walk and talk at the same time.   I recall telling someone, who had asked soon after the first operation what it was like, saying that every step I took was intentional; there was no strolling about mindlessly while the apparatus settled into place.  Ever since, I have been curious about the relationship between a body used to working pretty well, but that no longer does so, and one's mental attitude.  It is something like this:  age is not very significant while one's parts work pretty well, requiring only ordinary oil changes, and the like;  physical disability suddenly makes one feel old.   Something similar happened when the doctor proposed to operate on my ...

 We asked him to stay inside because he is just now exiting from a case of the flu, but the sun was shining, so when he asked if he could get his chair from the patio, I said yes. Perhaps it was the small folding chair he had in mind because when he did come back he had it with him, but first he sat in the Whole Earth Chair where first he saw the whole earth, and even the whole blue sky. I asked if he could still see it and he said he could, pointing out some of the features. It is a fine thing to be a boy discovering how large is the earth, how small his chair.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia just died. Now it is the duty of the President to nominate a successor to his place on the Court. The Senate has to confirm the President's nomination, or deny it. The President has not yet announced anything about whom he will nominate, except that he will nominate someone, in good time. Republican members of the Senate have already announced that they will not confirm whomever the President nominates. But that is what is wrong with government, isn't it? The President is not willing to work with Republicans.  

I had read in the newspaper that the Audubon Society planned a tour at Sweetwater Swamp-- or whatever it is called-- but I forgot. Mari said she was going to a sewing class, and I said that I thought I would celebrate Spring by checking out the bird population at the Swamp. I am trying desperately to remember what the real name is. The City or the County or Someone pretends to do magic tricks with sewage water, pouring it into pits and ponds where the reeds grow like weeds, and the ponds become pits. It is a grand place for birds and turtles and birders and reeds. The surplus water--if that is what it still is--is released into the riverbed where it surges like a tiny, tired tidal bore going north where the river once ran untended, but that was hundreds of years ago before the Spanish came, and the cowboys and cattle came, when the river ducked down to the water table, seeking kin. The turtles are sociable folk, clambering up onto the sagging edges of the reeds...

In a year light will travel about six trillion miles or ten trillion kilometers. That is one light year. It takes eight minutes for light to travel from the sun to the earth. About 1.3 billion light years away-- that is far beyond Fresno, California however you choose to look at it-- two black holes circled around each other and finally slammed together. That was 1.3 billion light years away, or ago, if you prefer. It made space and time shiver and the shiver just passed by us. Space and time shivered and scientists heard the noise and saw it jiggle. We live in a very large place a very old place-- actually a much older and larger place than where those two black holes are from us-- We got goose bumps. We don't need Coyote creation stories although they are fun. The facts make us shiver and dance.

Our house is on a hillside; small hills. We cannot see far to the east or south because the top of the hillside we are on rises in those directions. Off to the west, the Tucson Mountains are tall enough to peek over the hills between us.  But north we can see quite a long ways, to the Tortalita Mountains. Mari and one of our grandsons--Jao-- pulled up two chairs, looking out and beyond toward the Tortalitas.  It is a pleasant view over the wash down through our property. Jao is three--almost four now-- so he has been studying cosmology and space science and optics. "Look!", he said to Mari.  "I can see the whole earth, and the whole blue sky!" I am sorry to say that the earth is flat, again, but you probably knew that, if you have been following recent political and religious arguments. I would show him how the curvature of the earth can be deduced from watching a sailing ship, going away, as it seems to sink into the sea until only its ...

New Hampshire voted last night. Bernie Sanders won big, and Donald Trump won, almost as big. John Kasich was the happiest loser. Hillary Clinton was the unhappiest loser. Marco Rubio is trying to figure out what he did wrong, what he did wrong, what he did wrong. Just between you and me and a few other people, I think Donald Trump is a political scoundrel and a shame, so I hope he never becomes the president of anything except Trump Enterprises and Bingo Parlors. I think Bernie Sanders is about as much of a revolutionary as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, but he calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and that causes lots of Americans to soil themselves, even though most of us are democratic socialists about roads and parks and social security and Medicare and financial regulation and lots of other things. We are long overdue to have elected a woman to the presidency, but even as a lifelong Democratic, I freely admit that she is the epitome of what traditional poli...

"Papa", he said--Papa is his name for a grandfather--"how'd ja do that?" You can forgive me, if you want to, for repeating that line from an earlier entry, but ever since he asked, I have been thinking about Jao's question.  He is not yet four years old, but he is getting there as quickly as he can.  I have been thinking about his question because I have so seldom been asked just that. "How did you do that?" I am one of those old geezers who has collected old tools and bins of nuts and bolts.  I bought a Delta table saw from someone's back yard in Waterloo, Iowa about forty years ago.  I finally had to let it go on our last move back to Tucson, so I took it to an auction firm in Decorah, Iowa.  The saw had moved with us, at least once--perhaps twice--to Tucson and back to Iowa, but finally, as was true also for a sleigh from Norway and a long ladder given to me by a neighbor moving to Texas, I had to leave a lot of tools behind:  no spac...

There is, so far as anyone knows, just one jaguar living in nature in the United States.  He was photographed, again, recently, not by an idiot sitting on a log, but by a remote camera.  The jaguar has a name--El Jefe--dubbed by school kids who call themselves "Jaguars", too. There is something magical, something exhilirating, knowing that a gorgeous, very powerful, wild cat lives a few miles outside of town.  It is much more comforting than imagining that he lived here, in town. Also, yesterday, in the course of looking for a lumber store, here in town, I deliberately drove through the Barrio Viejo simply because it, too, is beautiful.  I may have wandered beyond its formal boundaries, but I found the kind of things I had been looking for. In the heart of Tucson--in its real heart--there are very old homes, once the target of urban removal, that have survived and have been given new life; something like El Jefe, southeast of town.  El Jefe has been t...