SmokeSound

Our father, who art in Bethany Lutheran Cemetery, along the highway from Tacoma to Mt. Rainier, was an angry immigrant from Norway, who became an American citizen with an accent. He was angry because, when his mother died at his birth, and he was raised by an aunt, for which there was, in fact, probably no better solution--his father was a sea-faring man-- Dad felt that his family had somehow abandoned him. So, at the age of seventeen, he emigrated to America. He was included, once, in an oral history project conducted by someone at Pacific Lutheran College (or perhaps it was a University by that time). The young student who interviewed him pressed him about his hopes for his children, and whether he wanted them to preserve of his Norwegian heritage. (Dad's Norwegian heritage was as thick as his accent.) He had not intended to teach us Norwegian, for instance. He wanted us to learn English.  We did, of course. That always happens to the children of immigrants...

Today we took down part of the wall that wants its way across the Americas. Today, Miguel became an American citizen. He was already a part of the Americas; part of North America, in fact, as Mexico is, but today he and his wife--I think her name is Elda-- became citizens of the United States. Miguel was not at the Tucson Old Timers' game today.  He has important things to do:  looking his best, for instance, on his first day as a naturalized citizen of the United States. The Old Timers signed a card on the scorer's desk, for Miguel and Elda, so while the game went on, as usual, everyone knew that something wonderfully important was going to happen in downtown Tucson, not long after the game ended. It is a wonderful place--this Tucson, this place with water at the foot of a black hill, where for thousands of years people have left their marks in the soil at the river, and their tracks up toward the hills. Long after it was home to its first immigrants--probably...

aliExpress.com I really dislike bumper stickers and window decals.  I am much more tolerant of dust and grime on my pickup than I am of the auto dealers who electro-weld their dealership names to my bumpers, which are no longer bumpers, either. I have no objection to little lapel pins in red/white-blue, but I do think it is absurd that if politicians decide to appear in public without one that they are sent back to the locker room to get one, and then come back and end their speeches with, ". . . and God bless the United States of America, and all of its colonies and territories and ships at sea." The savage gold feather illustrated above is not what I have in mind.  I don't know what that is:  a Scriveners' Award for Scrivening, I suppose.  Maybe something for a game of lawn darts. I am thinking of this:  there is a deep scar in American history, reaching far back before the founding of the nation itself.  It is White Supremacy.  It is the ...

universityofcalifornia.edu Let us suppose, just to test a hypothesis, that a community of people, farmers mostly, and the people around them who made their living buying and selling farm goods, and providing coffee shops, decided that the farm labor shortage could be solved by buying slaves from Africa, or somewhere. The slaves might be expensive, but the labor would be cheap. That's what they did, in this hypothetical example. Getting slaves with dark skins was helpful. It made the slaves easy to identify. It made it easy to think that people with dark skin were somehow not . . . not quite as "advanced" as others; not quite as human, you could say. Mari and I have been having fun recently deciding to order gene tests from one of the companies that promise to show our genetic heritage. We have decided that we will order from different firms to see what kind of information can be derived from what we assume are similar ethnic heritages. Persona...

 If you are getting up in years, it is nearly impossible to visit a doctor and not be asked, "Have you had any falls lately?" You find yourself calculating the cost and clumsiness of an aluminum walker, and whether your car will accommodate a chair lift. The Tucson Old Timers, who cannot even join the team if they are not at least sixty years old, play hardball, not softball, not slow-pitch:   hard-ball! If you are old enough even to imagine what it is like to be sixty or seventy or ninety-two years old, you still cannot imagine what it is like to run from first to third base, nowhere nearly as fast as you remember having done when you were young and green.  Your cardiologist would stop breathing if he or she knew what you were feeling. If you have not picked up a baseball or a stone for years, and tried to throw it as hard as you can about a hundred feet, then you do not know what it is like to be an Old Timer playing baseball.  Your arm is likely to ...

giphy.com I am the ideal morning coffee companion.  I sit, uncomplaining, across the table, with half a cup of coffee, reading the newspapers, not interfering with Mari's conversation with herself, even though she keeps trying to drag me into an exchange. Sometimes I wonder how she came to be so lucky.  I don't mess with good fortune. She mutters when she cannot find words to express what she feels. This morning, though, she said something that caught my attention. I detected just a little anger at something.  "God knows what that could be!" I thought. It wasn't that. It was this. "That fly always lands on the arm that holds the fly swatter!", she said. I could not think of anything to say. I thought only of what Donald Trump says when he reads what someone wrote for him to read that he has not read before. "So true!"  he says. "Nobody knew how difficult it is to swat flies. So very true." It brough...

We cannot get the Civil War out of our systems. That is to say, even more fundamentally, that we cannot get the issue of White supremacy out of our systems. We keep trying to find more socially acceptable ways to talk about what is tearing at our souls and social fabric--for instance, to try to make it an issue of States' rights, rather than a strong central government-- but that soon boils itself down to White supremacy, too. The notion of a Male dominated, White, Christian America lies beneath almost everything important to us as a nation.  Politicians, we, say "That should be left up to the States!".  And what does that really mean?  It means things like, "Let the States decide whether schools should be segregated!"  "Let the States decide whom should be allowed to vote, or whom should be deported, or whom should be allowed to claim in-State tuition rates! Who are always the real targets of these statements?  Blacks.  Brown-skinned immigran...

You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late,  Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught! [Rodgers and Hammerstein:  South Pacific] We have been carefully taught. All of us have been carefully taught to hate and to fear; to be afraid. If we learned it, we can unlearn it. It was a god-damned lie, so if we learned it, we can learn the truth, first about the fact that we have learned a lie, and then we can learn the truth about being human. Part of what we have learned, without knowing it, is how to delu...

Ignoramus:  a person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds you know nothing about.   --Ambrose Bierce What Donald Trump does not know about government is more-or-less equal to what he knows about how to make money.  I am not sure he is a good businessman, given his record of bankruptcies and unpaid bills, but he does know how to acquire money. What Mr. Trump does not know about being President of the United States is astounding, and it seems to be indelible.  That part of his brain where "We the People" is stored is a very small place.  It does not have many connections. Although sometimes he seems to want some version of a "strong man" presidency--and that ought to scare the socks off us--it is probably more accurate to say that he sees being President as an opportunity for him to arrange things so that he can make more money.  It isn't about health care, or national parks, or bur...

I get a lot of medical reports, and they are not of interest, even to me, so this is not a medical report. Even if it were, it would be awkward to find the right words.  I have been, if not felled by, at least brutalized by what happens when the whole digestive tract adopts the capabilities of a serial bazooka. We had been on a trip to Northern California and Southern Oregon, and my first supposition-- that I had eaten something unfamiliar--proved itself to be an inadequate analysis.  I may indeed have done that:  that was one of the intentions of making the trip in the first place. This most recent Monday, I spent six or seven hours in what might be called a very calm and unhurried emergency room.  Finally, after what I think was called, "a battering of tests", as day and I were dying in the west, a doctor handed me a stack of test results and medical commandments:  I cannot spell "diverticulitis", but he said I was guilty of it. Now y...

On our way home, I was overcome by intestinal distress. Daniel and Ellie, who are doctors, might have said that I was forced to liquidate my assets. We always discover, on every trip away, that going home is a pleasure beyond whatever other joy. We drove home in two days--nearly 1200 miles, in two frequent-stop days. Home again, what seemed to have returned to normal, wasn't. I spent two nights and a day in bed--well, actually hopping in and out of bed-- until this morning, when the trash and recycling cans had to be put out. This posting, for reasons of discretion, has no photographs. No more, please!

Framepool stock footage Hudson Bay trappers and hunters came to what is now Ashland, Oregon, in about 1820, in landscape reminiscent of much of Northern California, where--it is now grudgingly asserted, Californians have driven up housing prices by moving there.  Well, somebody drove them up! Immigrant settlers came to the Rogue Valley in the 1850, driving up prices and driving out Native Americans.  Damn the immigrants!  They have always been a problem, until they begin to be accepted.  Being a white majority is O.K., until it looks like the majority may only be a plurality.  That is what someone of Native American descent, who looked just like lots of other people, told me.  He wanted America to be great again; asked how long I was going to stay in town. In 1935, Angus Bowmer arranged a Shakespeare performance for a Fourth of July celebration, which has grown into an internationally renowned theater company with splendid facilities.  We saw ...

 Having raised the population of Westport by ten percent, one could feel the seams relax as we left; no one lives in Westport for the urban rush. Our next stop was the Benbow Inn, said to be in Garberville, California, just a short, wriggly drive north.  Daniel had reserved a room for the three of them at the Inn, and our intention had been to stay at their RV park, just a couple of hundred yards away, but when we saw the Inn, and they offered a discount because of our RV reservation, we parked the Casita, facetiously arguing that it needed a rest, and moved into the comforting, historic atmosphere of the old hotel, built in the 1920s, I think, by the Benbows for people like the Benbows. The hotel was renovating and expanding, adding more modern rooms for people who prefer everything up to date like Kansas City, and even an elevator.  (Let us hear and "Amen!" for the elevator.)  The hotel says of itself that it was built in a time "when ladies and gentlemen se...

 Before scarce we knew it, we were on the edge of the continent, in one of the most beautiful and port-less parts of America.  Westport may once have called itself the largest port south of San Francisco, but the Largest Port south of San Francisco never had a port:  it had a contraption of poles balanced on rocks not-yet-worn-down to sand, under which gangways might be lowered to deck level, but even they were long-gone. There was the land, and the sea, irritating each other, as they have always done, each wanting only what it knew how to do.  Westport is a tiny place, even with a street called, "Omega", and a highway north and south, only, and a store with sandwiches and necessities and a gas pump on the porch. Daniel had found a fine house, from which we could see--far out, but not so far--migrating whales, pausing as we were doing, because there was food out there, down there.  We could scarce see them blow when they came up for air, and their backs a...