If I were a doctor, deedle, deedle, deedle, deedle dum!

"The Round House" I am building in our backyard
has been a slow-motion project for two reasons:
it was difficult to find someone to apply flexible roofing
(conical, curves, and rubberized materials),
and I had to wait for a doctor to sharpen his meat saw
in order to replace my hip with scrap parts.

Now, both projects have been done,
and I am easing myself toward real work, again.

There is a small boy, one of whose virtues is
that he keeps getting in the way of other kinds
of serious work, who has been complaining lately
that the round window he likes to look through
is too high off the ground. That is important,
because it is from that window that he is able to see
mountains all around, which reminds him (somehow)
that the earth goes around the sun, so he says so, every time.

That is why, today, I bought a couple of pre-cut porch stringers,
and cut a scrap piece of pine board to make treads and,
in the best tradition of fine craftsmanship, made a bannister
from an old wooden paint roller handle.

All of this for a temporary ascent to a window
through which one can see the whole world,
and mountains all around, and be reminded that
the earth goes around the sun, every time!

Ah, well! There are only two screws holding it in place,
and I have a cordless impact drill charged up and ready to go!

All of this, of course, is for a grandson
who has not yet seen how many steps it is
to get up to where you can see the curvature
of the whole earth, and by the time he does see it
he may very well be into sub-atomic particle physics,
which will involve drilling down through the floor
to where the quarks and quaking aspen are.

The doctor who operated on my hip
had a very easy job. And he got paid.
But I will bet I have more fun!

Comments

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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