SmokeSound

It was my good fortune to return to graduate school in 1964, to the University of Chicago, when I was in my early thirties. I was not to be trusted:  remember, "Never trust anyone over thirty!"? It was the undergraduates who set the agenda. We graduate students--old men like me, and a few women-- learned from those who were prime military fodder. We learned what really rotten wars were about. We learned how the government lied to us and how our learned, principled universities helped them lie, and how genuinely perverse our own government could be. What in grade school I had been taught that "The Monroe Doctrine" really meant not just that Europeans should stay out of the Americas but that the United States would do all the meddling, and we did, all through, but not only in Latin America. All the hell of hundreds of years of racism and slavery came down on our heads in the Sixties and even our naive good intentions burned like fire and brimsto...

John and Virginia came to Tucson as part of a larger and more important family gathering and we had just enough time to visit Tohono Chul, which is, in the Tohono O'odham language, "Desert Corner". We were provided with secret service surveilance by a Phainopepla who reported our location to every plant and animal so that they should not be surprised at our being there. The crested saguaro was probably not as surprised as he seemed to be, and lizard, in camouflage, seemed to think he was invisible. On the last evening of their visit we had dinner with Stan and Becky at the old train station, part of which is still station, but which also harbors a lovely restaurant with patio seating; perfect for welcoming spring and good friends. Early the next morning, before Virginia and John set off for their foray to places never explored before, I had a chance to stop at a small Sweetwater lake where a goose was giving dancing lessons to ...

I believe, not only that age is catching up with me, but that it passed me by, and that is it, far ahead. I will tell you why:  Jao is having his fourth birthday, and we took him to the toy store to choose a present. I have never been so tired in my life. Toys-R-Him That's the bin, all right! Ahh, out of stock! Maybe. Posture, or pregnant? Isn't this fun? Round and round we went. Not a stick shift! No GPS! Improvised Explosive Device Store Security Guards This place is a zoo!  Look at those customers! Can you see me now? Is that you? Is it your birthday, too?

Sometimes life must be lived an inch at a time.  You take your turn, and inch forward. At the side of our house there is an electrical outlet, probably put there for vaguely useful purposes, but which has served, in recent years, to power the drip irrigation controller. As I have been building the rondavel in the expanded back yard, and as bringing electricity to it seemed useful, I decided to extend its reach to the rondavel by burying a conduit along the new back fence to the new building.  That was the easy part.  The harder part was pulling an electrical line through the conduit. First, I hooked up a shop vac to one end of the conduit, then fed a light line with a small wad of plastic bag attached into the other end.  There!  Like magic, the atmosphere shoved the plastic bubble down the line, pulling the light line behind it! Then I used that line to pull a parachute cord through the conduit. The somewhat heavy electical cab...

Old Cattail:  Same Hair Nag, nag! Do I need to explain? A cactus that thinks it's a bird.

 "It's a Thursday!" we said as if that explained anything. "Let's go out to the Desert Museum!" And since it was a Thursday, and Jao was going visit us as he does on most Thursdays, we drove west across the Mighty Tucson Mountains, which are mountains only in contrast to the Sonoran Desert all around. Hardly had we entered the grounds when a docent came armed with a barn owl who had likely been injured in such a way that it could not be set loose upon the world. Just to even things out, we turned Jao loose upon the Museum, which did not last long. He preferred the push cart seat until we came to the tortoise exhibit. He won a protracted Republican-style debate about whether they were tortoises or turtles, and we finally conceded that all the signs were wrong and that they were turtles. He demonstrated that the path of evolution may have been more variable that even Darwin imagined.   Jao marveled at th...

"I do believe," I said to Mari, "that since you are committed  to quilting every piece of cloth in the house, I will drive over to Sweetwater Swamp with my camera." A raft of ducks, ducking. Who knows?  I am no birder!  A bird.  And a tree. In spring. On a moonlit night, this would be a lair; a fearsome critter's seclusion. A cattail as old as I:  same hair. A natural satellite disk tuned to the Nature Channel. Heron, thinking of frogs and crayfish, between sessions on the nest in the eucalyptus tree. "If you send the picture to the newspaper," the couple from Iowa told me, "we can give you their names. They are our grandchildren." "Oh," I replied, "I am not from a newspaper. I was just thinking of the St. Croix River, at Stillwater, Minnesota, where the ice is about to break up."