SmokeSound

Let us, even if only for a moment, be honest.  I am not a gardener.  My theory is that, had God intended me to be a gardener, he would have given me green thumbs.   I do not have green thumbs.  I have green jeans.  And a couple of my socks are green, too.   (Were I to be honest for a couple of moments, I would admit that it is not socks that I had in mind.) I have never believed-- Not for a moment! --that there was anything edible inside the bud of an artichoke.  I buy artichoke hearts in quart jars, and eat them like snacks, but an artichoke is just a giant thistle.  The only critter I ever knew who liked to eat thistle flowers was Sally.  Sally was a considerable Percheron who had learned how to nip the flower from a Canadian Thistle, in order to avoid the spines.  I choose to believe that "artichoke hearts" in a jar are genetically modified parts of an entirely different plant. In any case, my occasional care of arti...

Those of you who think that God has gone on vacation in recent centuries had better repent while you have time.  Michele Bachmann assures us that miracles have not ended!  God is going to repeal health care reform!   God used to create walking paths across the Red Sea, and talk to Moses up on Mount Sinai--Biblical reports are that it looked and sounded like thunder and lightning--and occasionally he caused bushes to catch fire, but now he is going to get involved in politics, apparently on the side of Tea Party Republicans.   It bothered me when people like the Reverend Mr. Pat Robertson said that God sent hurricanes as punishment for gay marriage--things like that--but I guess I am old-fashioned:  I really don't like the idea that God is going to sit in Congress and try to override what is certain to be an Obama veto, if it comes to that. Turning water into wine:  I would like that.  Caring for sparrows that fall showed real tenderness. ...

"Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain...." It doesn't always just sweep:  sometimes it comes with teeth and a savage tail.  First, the tornado went through Moore, Oklahoma. " And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain." But the wind, right behind the rain, is often just a politician saying something inane, something like arguing that helping God-fearin' Oklahomans after a tornado is nothing like helping yellow-bellied, East Coast Liberals after Hurricane Sandy. Or that maybe Nancy Pelosi and her confounded Climate Change is just a way to take advantage of good, Bible Belt believin' folks who need a hand.   It takes moxie, or a numb skull, to stand before people who have lost their homes and--some--family members and friends, and argue that government aid to tornado or hurricane or flood victims is a bad idea because government is bad.  (That sounds simple-minded, and it is.)...

Winslow Homer Breton fisherman's Prayer Larry gave me a space in his steel erection company to build a boat. Early in the construction, one of the workers came to inspect "the boat".   "I would not," the steelworker said to me, "go out in any boat I had built myself."   Anyone who has ever gotten into a boat for the first time, whether a small skiff at the edge of a lake, or aboard a ship as large as a city, thinks about the thin skin of the boat, and how far down is the bottom of the sea.  Even when the sea is flat and the sun is shining.   "I should not want to build a house," Friedrich Nietzsche said, "but were I to do so, I would build it right down into the sea.  I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster." It is not just the sea.  The sea, here, is almost just a metaphor for everything large and awful and lovely that holds our lives.  Try, for a moment, to think what it means ...

"The Day the Ice Breaks": that's what they call it when the temperature finally gets back up to 100 degrees, again. Today the ice broke, and just in time, too! The Tucson Old Timers, ranging in age from 60 to 87, start their games earlier in Summer, to avoid mid-day heat,  and they shorten their games  by an inning  after the ice breaks. Even Billy, who is so thin that not only neutrinos, but grains of sand, pass through his body unhindered, has been noticeably wilting as the games goes on.   His shorts--he looks fatter in long pants-- flutter like banners on an outfield pole. The Santa Cruz River "Melting" is the wrong term, of course, because the ice does not go from a solid to a liquid state.  It sublimates, bypassing the liquid state altogether, going directly to water vapor, and in normal summer temperatures in Tucson, there is precious little evidence of that, either.   So we are getting back to normal, here.  We have taken ...

In the Arizona legislature, the Representatives take turns opening each day's meeting with a prayer.  I suppose that is better than admitting that they do not have a prayer.  A few days ago, it  was the turn for a representative who is not religious to offer the prayer. He didn't bow his head, and he didn't say "God", and he didn't say, "In Jesus name".   It was shameful!  That is what Steve Smith, who represents Maricopa, said, in effect, so Mr. Smith doubled up on prayers the next day, just to catch up.  Mr. Smith apparently has a fierce desire to make things come out even:  a prayer a day keeps the apple away; that sort of thing.   "How do you know that wasn't a prayer?" someone asked.  "Well, he didn't say God!"  Another Representative--a Native American--suggested that in his culture, prayers are not necessarily addressed to Someone.   But Representative Smith admitted that while he couldn't give a really g...

At Weyerhaeuser Grade School, eight grades of pupils were arranged in columns in two classrooms.  We moved from right to left, year by year.  The "Old Schoolhouse" was our "gymnasium" and auditorium, in a manner of speaking.  I recall--sometime during my first years there--what it was like to be caught at the Old Schoolhouse during a thunderstorm.  We watched lightning strike the trees a few yards away, smelled the sulpherous air, and dared not make a run for our classroom, across the ballfield.   We were very small, and the sky was savage.   Decades later, on an endless drive across Nebraska, I calculated how far away, and how huge was a thunderstorm that seemed to haunt us.  It occupied everything, making our car, and even the Counties we crossed, seem insignificant, and scared.   Like thousands of other travelers, we have been through Oklahoma in the summer time, turning north onto Interstate 35 in Oklahoma City, pursued by tornado wa...