SmokeSound

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French priest and paleontologist. Paleontologists are concerned about fossil plants and animals. Maybe priests are, too.  Somewhere in my heap of books, I have highlighted a sentence that said something like this: We human beings, spread all over the earth, looked up  and saw ourselves coming over the horizon. That is where we are. It is not just that we have walked everywhere: even when we have spread out as far as we could, we are almost instantly accessible to each other. Mari and I flew to Atlanta over the weekend to enjoy Marcia's fiftieth birthday celebration. Other people came from other far places. Communications technology is almost instantaneous. Flowers at the florists come from South America. A close look at the food on the grocer's shelves will mirror a map of the world. Cars, phones, tools, steel, oil, fish, and music come to us from everywhere. To watch the evening news is to watch the world coming to us o

The siren song of life in the Sweetwater Swamp called to me, so I told Mari I was going to patch together some errands with some birds. "Is that an egret up there?" I asked the man with the tripod. "It is," he said, "and I am waiting for it to fly, but it won't." I said I would walk obtrusively to the tree, looking dangerous, and the man with the tripod said he would owe me a beer.  No beer. The egret didn't care. It scarcely noticed. I did not look, I supposed, like the tree-climbing kind, and even less like food. Turtle was even more disdainful. Late October sun in Tucson is a slow bake.  Duck, or whatever its biological niche-- I am no birder: I am observer-- cared even less. The last guy who leaped into the second-hand lake is still down there somewhere, holding his nose. Just to be sure, I went back to Egret again, giving him one last chance to let me know how fearsome I looked, and E

 If you are afraid of becoming fifty years old, this is a reason not to fear becoming fifty. Mari and I--both married before, and both having come to our now thirty-four year marriage with children from our first marriages-- discovered one day that Marcia was living with us, and had been doing so for a couple of years. Well, we did know that and, in fact, had proposed it would be a good idea, but we had not realized that one day Marcia would graduate from college and leave us behind, tending house. So we proposed to adopt her, not because she did not have a family, but because a spare relative or two might be a good idea; something like spare tires, I suppose. Marcia drove precariously off to St. Paul to a job and, one day, a marriage to Walter. "Look at all that ice and snow!", Walter said, remembering Atlanta.  "That is a lot of ice and snow!", Marcia said, remembering Guyana, so they moved to Atlanta, where still they are, where the

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.”                                                               ―  Clarence Day Jr.  

Like a believer gripping prayer beads, reciting what I  had learned about AC, DC, propane and plumbing. Mari and I hitched our new/used Casita and, since I was not a young man and already out west,  drove east, heading toward New Mexico, which is only a couple of hours away. More precisely, we went to Las Cruces, straddling the Rio Grande which is not so grande at this time of year. We had reserved a shady spot at a shady RV campground overlooking the river valley. It did not work out that way. We were assigned to a tired tree. South of us, a monster motor home serving as a kennel to about four dogs the size of horses seemed to have nothing to do but to take their dogs down to the dog run. It was a display of enormous doggie bags. Next door, a delightful couple from Connecticut joined us for a drink at the cabana overlooking Las Cruces at sunset, and we discovered commonalities across the continent. They had already visited Mesilla, earlier

This is,  either an owl at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, or a voter,  having heard Donald Trump talk about women, thinking about making America Great Again.

"On the clear understanding that this kind of thing can happen, shall we dance?" The French Connection The Louisville Connection "Is this what they call, 'A-round Dance'?" "Yesterday, when I was young. . . ." "The fence!  It can see the fence! From there." "Does that, or does that not, remind you of The Babe?" "Is that a batting order, or is that a pack rat midden? ". . . do it all the time." ". . . have been a hit, had they not shifted to counteract my power." "Maybe it'll take an arthritic bounce." "Got it!" "Looking good!" "Huh?  Where'd it go?  Huh?" "There it go!"

If there were a political party in America  that is paranoid about other races,  which one would it be? If there were a party in America  paranoid about people born in other countries,  which one would it be? If there were a party in America  that believes big business is almost always right  and that government of the people is almost always wrong,  which would it be? If there were a party in America  that believes men are superior to women,  which one would it be? If there were a party in America that does not believe everyone should have health care, which would would it be? If there were a party in America that does not believe the universe is billions of years old and that all life is the product of evolution, which one would it be? If there were a party in America that has not noticed that the earth is warming as a consequence of human activity, which one would it be? Now, there may not be such a party and, e

Nobody I know has had the temerity to suggest that our most recent grandson is not just about the most talented kid in the West. I have spared our friends the embarrassment of being wrong by not asking them directly what they think about that, and they, in turn, have not brought up the subject. Jao is four-and-a-half years old, and has turned his attention from engineering to art. He has begun decorating our house for Halloween.   Jao call his first oeuvre, "Reflections on Cosmic Debris in Near-Earth Gravity:  Evidence for Intelligent Design".