SmokeSound

Once upon a news conference at the White House when Harry Truman was the President, the President led the reporters to the rose garden. His pride was as plain as he, himself. The secret, he told the reporters, was manure, lots of manure. He waxed Missouri eloquent about the virtues of manure. One of the reporters asked Bess Truman whether she might be able to get the President to say "fertilizer". "Do you know," Bess Truman replied, "how long it took me to get him to say manure?" Mari is converting our spare bedroom into a quilting workshop. That is my term, not hers. There are two sewing machines, cutting boards, bobbins, and a mountain of material. "I have been watching you work," she said, "so I am just sticking to it." It brought to mind how I first learned how to proceed when faced with a numbingly large task. I was probably about fifteen, on the small farm in Washington where our father had planted us, ...

Whoever said that there no straight lines in nature owned a lot of clamps and ignored a lot of data. It may be true that, cut loose from sidewalks and painted lines, wandering and wondering where we are, we walk in circles, not straight lines. I do that but my hypothesis is that replacing my other hip joint will make the circles larger. I have been trying, again, to bend thin boards into hoops around the perimeter of a conical roof, in order to accommodate an aluminum drip edge that is now as straight and true as the curvature of space will allow. I will brutalize the drip edge into a loop of local space by snipping the horizontal plane into three-inch feathers. That is how I compromise with cliches:  halfway. I cannot do that with the underlying facia and spacer. I could make a thousand kerfs cut on the inner side if I had the right saw and more patience than Job.  I do not. Even Job finally had had too much, and blew his cork. At best, I...

They cannot hide it, even when they nap:  javelinas are cranky little buggers.  But give them credit:  snuggling is warmer. They tour the neighborhood on familiar paths around the back yard fences. You may call them collared peccaries, if you prefer, but in Arizona that is a bit like calling a tie a cravat, and in Arizona neither ties nor cravats are common for people who do not have a law degree or a license to plunder. Javelinas eat cacti, succulents, bulbs and tubers, and just about any plants that drop fruits or nuts.  They love seed pods, and most tender new plants.  That is why most houses here have fenced-in back yards.  It is a rare seed from the bird feeder above where they are lying that escapes the doves and quail that patrol the area, but sometimes sniffing about will find something, and stale bread is never left behind. Scavenging is hard work.  Sometimes, when it is successful, a nap seems like a good idea.

"What celebration is this?", we asked ourselves as we came to Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. "No matter!", I thought. The sign says it is Margarita Day. It was Andrew Zimmern Day; he of the Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods. Nothing bizarre there is about Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. It is purely delicious food, purely delicious margaritas and--more often--beer, where we count ourselves as regulars. The best of Tucson is how Mexico and the US meet in the Sonora Desert. Only a bombastic dolt might propose to build a wall there where two cultures make each other better over margaritas, at Teresa's Mosaic Cafe. If Andrew Zimmern wants something bizarre, he should find a wall to film. Or a wall builder; catch the wind blowing on a bad hair day.

I, the bionic man,   already outfitted with one artificial hip, have scheduled a replacement for the other hip, too.  It is not that I enjoyed the right-hip operation so much--it was a real pain in the . . . hip . . . but that the grinding noises in my other hip make it hard to walk and talk at the same time.   I recall telling someone, who had asked soon after the first operation what it was like, saying that every step I took was intentional; there was no strolling about mindlessly while the apparatus settled into place.  Ever since, I have been curious about the relationship between a body used to working pretty well, but that no longer does so, and one's mental attitude.  It is something like this:  age is not very significant while one's parts work pretty well, requiring only ordinary oil changes, and the like;  physical disability suddenly makes one feel old.   Something similar happened when the doctor proposed to operate on my ...

 We asked him to stay inside because he is just now exiting from a case of the flu, but the sun was shining, so when he asked if he could get his chair from the patio, I said yes. Perhaps it was the small folding chair he had in mind because when he did come back he had it with him, but first he sat in the Whole Earth Chair where first he saw the whole earth, and even the whole blue sky. I asked if he could still see it and he said he could, pointing out some of the features. It is a fine thing to be a boy discovering how large is the earth, how small his chair.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia just died. Now it is the duty of the President to nominate a successor to his place on the Court. The Senate has to confirm the President's nomination, or deny it. The President has not yet announced anything about whom he will nominate, except that he will nominate someone, in good time. Republican members of the Senate have already announced that they will not confirm whomever the President nominates. But that is what is wrong with government, isn't it? The President is not willing to work with Republicans.