SmokeSound

"A potpourri:  a stew made of different kinds of meat." "From French:  literally, "rotten pot".   A mixture of things.  A medley. Thus: We had a dinner, recently, a most pleasant dinner.  We had a bit of a ragged time getting started, but our company--all of us there, composed of family and family-friends and friends of friends--settled into a most agreeable bond around food and talk and the season. The wind howled outside, in a most unusual way. Things blew, and went bump in the night. The wind picked up the rain and threw it at the windows up under the eaves. In the morning, I picked up the potted plants blown over onto their sides. It was just punctuation for our pleasantries. *     *     * Our table is a foundation in my life. It was, once, a bakery table, hammered together on the diagonal by carpenters as if laying a maple floor at waist level, layers thick, standing first on heavy pipe legs, and worn down to tell a sto...

Cooper thinks he is a big dog. He keeps boasting about the size of his paws. Boasting aside, the vet assures us that his small paws are appropriate to the amended state of his . . .                            to his amended state. We have a big beautiful wall between us the herds of javelinas who pass this way more than daily: the big beautiful wall--truth be told-- is not really a wall, at all.  It is a fence, but it keeps the javelinas out. It cannot keep bobcats out, nor coyotes, but Cooper does not know that. He charges to the wall, threatening to escalate hostilities to a nuclear point. I have tried to explain to him that there is more than one way to get past a wall, or a fence, but he won't listen.  He says he is a bright dog, a very bright dog, the brightest dog in his class, that he is a graduate of the best obedience and business-trick school, and that we could not be...

It is, after all, the dead of winter, and a tough one it has been, too, with the election of Our Glorious New Leader, which brings to mind the fact that our new guard dog still pees on the floor whenever he get a chance, and that he (Cooper) still refuses to attend daily briefings since he says he is a smart dog, and smart dogs don't need no stinking briefings. We took the Cooper with us when we drove to the southeast part of town to Saguaro East. "Hey, there!", somebody said to me as we walked up to the Visitor's Center--Cooper at one end of the leash and I on the other--"You should go home and get the rest of the dog!" OK.  He is not very big. The Park is big, climbing easily up the side of the Rincons:  the mountains bending around to form the east side of the city.  Together with the Santa Catalinas north of them, they funnel every stray cloud into a corner--an elbow--and squeeze out whatever humidity can be intimidated to nurture the...

How strange it is-- this marriage between religion and sports! How strange it is that almost no one thinks it strange to drive to the high school stadium to watch the kids play football, knowing that someone prayed with the team for . . . well, not that we beat the snot out of the kids from Left Elbow High School, but for . . . maybe . . . just a good clean game with as few injuries as it will take to beat the snot out of the Left Elbow Bluebonnets. The game cannot start, of course, until we sing the national anthem, or until someone with musical aspirations sings the national anthem for us. Everybody hopes that Colin Kaepernick does not show up and sit through the rockets red glare, which would put lives in danger at the suggestion that racism is still real right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is as if religion, and sports, and patriotism were a seamless blend of everything worth believing: god is on everybody's side--the Lef...

There you have it:  proof! The dime is gone! If that does not prove, conclusively , that the Gubbamint is invading our privacies and back yards, then nothing does! As you undoubtedly know, because you undoubtedly read my earlier post, "Just an ordinary guy, thinking it through" (a couple back), I became concerned that the Gubbamint was using the Hubble telescope, built with our money, not to look back in time and space at what things were like billions of years ago--that was just a ruse--but to spy on things happening in our back yard.  And when I read that, should they do that, they could read the print on a dime, it all became clear to me:   the Gubbamint was going to confiscate our money; especially our dimes!   Anyway, as every fool knows, the Creation from Intelligent Design happened no more than ten thousand years ago, and probably less:  there wasn't a Garden of Eden billions of years ago because even god is not that old, not measured in ...

I just took our dog, Cooper, for a walk around Silverbell Lake. Cooper hopped out of the pickup before I could leash him. He had no long-range plans:  he was just happy to be somewhere new. He ran in tight circles fast enough to generate a dustdevil, then came to be tethered.  Just wayward youth, I thought, practicing for the day he would give it a serious try. I blue-bagged what we had come to encourage, and then we dogged it around the whole lake. A great blue heron measured him for size, but decided to fly out to the tiny island supporting their nest, instead. Every tuft of dried grass-- and year-end in Tucson has a lot of dried grass-- required a territorial marker. Cooper is young, and I am old, but we understand each other. We live symbolically, not actually, in bursts. We stopped to talk to a man curious about what a Mini-Doberman and Chihuahua dog look like, and traded coyote tales. He used to have three dogs, but now he has one:...

Someone explained to me recently that the optics of the Hubbel telescope, purportedly kept busy looking at galaxies and planets and other light-hearted things, were so keen that if it were turned around to view us, it could read a dime in our backyard. I am not sure why it would do that but, then again, I am careless about conspiracies. But just to test the theory, I put a dime out in our backyard, in good light. I suppose I should not be surprised if I receive a post card from the F.B.I., or maybe Donald Trump, in case our backyard is not early on the list of backyard dimes the government in interested in, that explains that we owe tax on that dime. Stranger things have happened, I guess, if one is to believe the baloney that people want to believe about us being in a struggle against the wickedness of our own government. As I see it--and I am probably not complicated enough to understand just how evil government is:  I am one of those guys who grew up t...

That is what I had hoped for when I built the platform for the quail block:  quail!  Gambel's Quail, and other small birds, or even other large birds. But we have a surfeit of critters around our yard.  Javelinas, especially, come by wishing for a garden patch, but content to insure that not a single seed kicked out of the bird feeder goes to waste.  Once they had found a way to worry my first quail block to the ground--where a scene ensued reminiscent of football fans who had watched the game from the bar--very quickly demolished the whole block in about four minutes, I built the present platform, higher up, on posts driven into the ground.  Then our resident gray squirrel, who noticed the "q" in quail block, quite like the "q" in squirrel, claimed it for his own, as much as he could. I do not "q"uite resent him, or her.  Squirrels have to survive, too, a task complicated by the need of coyotes to make a living.   And it keeps her, or him, a...

Two Dogs and Mari and Elliot "There are worse things than losing an election; the worst thing is to lose one's convictions. . . ."   Adlai Stevenson said that, in 1952, sixty-four years ago. My life is lived on a much more ordinary scale than that of people who run for the Presidency, but even here, in a small house in Tucson, elections matter, where it hurts.   It has been a good year, even though gravity has become a more powerful force than when we were young.  More often, I decide not to follow things dropped to the floor, lest we stay there, both.  I mentally map their coordinates.  Of course I exaggerate!  A little.  We shall visit our newest grand-daughter again, soon.  Elliot is evidence that life—just life itself—is a glory.  Jao is almost enough for us to wish life were endless, just to see what else shall be.  Spencer is going to graduate from high school, and Sophie has a driver’s license.  But the list...

David Duke is a white nationalist, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who denies the Holocaust, and is a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  That ought to be enough to embarrass anyone to silence, but it isn't.  David Duke said, recently: "We are losing our country. . . . We are being outnumbered and outvoted in our own country." Obviously, David Duke (I am reluctant to call him, "Mister" Duke.  It sounds honorable.) is worried about the time when white people will not, alone, constitute a majority of American citizens, and American voters.  We white people, while still constituting almost half of the population, will be slightly outnumbered by the mix of black people, brown people, and indigo blue people who constitute America.  We will, in other words, while still having a white population that is proportionately larger than our numbers in the whole world, not be quite so disproportionately in charge. There is no consensus about who is whit...