Icy Patterns on the Sidewalks

28 December 2020,

The first Monday morning after Christmas and I’m out for my walk. No surprise there.  ‘Tis a little bit tricky for the pedestrian. Yesterday the temperature warmed up a bit and all the snow cover on the roads and sidewalks melted. However, while it did warm up, it didn’t warm up a great deal. Thus, the melt water on the sidewalks did not evaporate. Today the sidewalks, especially the older greyer squares, have a mottled pattern with the darker portions being ice. Slipped a couple of times already. The ice is forcing me to walk on the berms or out in the street where the macadam is sufficiently warm to evaporate off the moisture.

 Christmas decorations are still up everywhere. Me, I’m guessing that they’re going to be up for several weeks after the start of the new year. People desperately need a little joy. Twinkling lights, wreaths, garlands and even inflatable Homer Simpson in a Santa suit covey some joy in this drear year.

 

I plan to do my whole traditional morning walk route this day. Foot after foot hitting the ground will take me up and down all through my neighborhood. Right now, it is taking me past the winter bound fen by the Glencairn school. Browns and grays, the colors of late December, prevail.

 

On an ancillary holiday note I did come up with one winning gift for one of my sons. I ordered heavy down comforters and covers for both my young men. The youngest has taking to using his like a cocoon sleeping bag. When I glance into his room all I can see is a few fingers of one hand curled up outside the top of the comforter. Ah the joy of being enveloped by the warmth of down on a cold winter’s day.

 

Not much on my podcasts this morning that wasn’t news at 8:30 last night. The President signed the relief bill. The man who blew up the RV in Asheville has been identified and looks to have been a lone wolf. Europe is rolling out the vaccines. For the most part these are all good bits of news. Nothing earth shaking in any of the stories but good news anyhow. For the world where it stands today any good news is a win.

Yeah, I have posted this link before but it is a perfect song for a grey Monday.

Boxing Day

 

A Christmas Day drive gone wrong for somebody. 

I saw this happen as I walked.

 

26 December 2020

 

No hangover this morning.  Truth be told I didn’t have a Christmas toast of hard liquor despite Santa’s gift of Lagavulin whiskey. Also, I didn’t eat that gummy I have.  Guess I have gotten too old for raucous Christmastide fun. Sitting at the keyboard on a grey morning listening to Ken Yates (an artist I stumbled across yesterday while sitting outside a Chinese restaurant waiting for takeout).  Hey Chinese food on Christmas, it is our holiday night tradition. Surviving is easy, living is hard.

 

The batteries for my hearing aids are in their warmup phase.  After you peel the backing off the batteries you have to wait two minutes before inserting them, this per the audiologist at Costco.  After I finish this paragraph, I will insert the tiny little buggers in the left and right units and put them on.  I am too old not to wear them.  I am too you to accept that I have to wear them.

 

As I look out the window, I see that all of the fluffy light snow from yesterday remains just where it was as the light of Christmas Day faded. It was good and cold yesterday. Last night was a down comforter up to the nose kind of night.  Still, despite the wind and the cold of yesterday I got my walk in.  261 days in a row now.  As I followed my serpentine path through the neighborhood, I only ran into the people who were walking for obligation. It was just me and the dog owners out there.  

 

Today I feel like making resolutions.  Seems to me if I make my resolutions now, they will have more meaning than if I create them on New Year’s Eve.  To me it seems that NYE resolutions are doomed to failure.  NYE resolutions are just another fleeting tradition like ham hocks and black-eyed peas on New Years Day.  They are transient one offs.  But maybe if I make my resolutions now, they will have more weight and come the 31^stI can check and see if I have even made a start at the changes I want to see.

 

But what should I resolve to do?

 

Eat better and in moderation is a resolution that never disappears.  But what else?  I know they say set goals (resolutions) that can be measured.  The omnipresent “they” also say set realistic goals, that is don’t shoot for the moon but rather for the top of that nearby small hill. I guess on the eating healthy thing I can set my goal to use with precision that weight watcher app on my phone.

 

But what else?

 

I will let you know tomorrow what I have opted for.

 

Christmas 2020

 

25 December 2020

  

Almost ten and neither of my sons is stirring.  There is a one-to-two-centimeter dusting of snow on the ground. My wife is engaging in her Christmas tradition of watching “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.”  The movie is a powerful one but it is really not a “Christmas” movie. But watching it is her tradition and thus I dug the Blu Ray disc out of a box of discs that were stuffed away in one of the great summer cleanings. 

 

Me I am sitting at my desk puttering away on my computer.  In a little bit I may go out and sweep a path through the dusting of snow that lies about outside.  As I remember it today was supposed to be seriously cold.  Going out will require layering, down vest, wind shell and good gloves. Oh yeah, a hat will be needed.

 

[break in writing]

 

Went outside and swept the snow off the circle drive and the sidewalk. Total time involved was about twenty minutes.  The air was crisp and clear and the temperature cold, but not bitterly so. Felt good to be doing work.  While I had no office Christmas gatherings last night (or the week prior), we did do our family traditions of snackies; cheese, crackers, soup, shrimp, smoked oysters and beer. After listening to Christmas carols and watching some TV I crawled up to bed.  Others lingered downstairs for a time.

 

My stomach felt bloated as I lay upon my bed.  Food like that tastes wonderful going down but turns into a rock as the hours pass. This morning I opted not to cook waffles instead going for cereal.  Washing down the cereal with some coffee quieted my stomach.  Working outside made my body feel better in general.

 

If I were to guess, my thought is that my sons will be up at just about noon.  The days of rabid excitement for Christmas morning have long since passed.  However, they will be giddy as they rip into the stuff they have received.  Me and Amazon worked our collective fingers off amassing the piles beneath the tree.  I note that there is very little in the way of frivolity nestled there beneath the boughs.  Coats and socks and a stocking with candies, these are the gifts of 2020.  Experiential things are missing.  Things like movie passes and pictures of places where we will be traveling are absent. We will be long into 2020 before experiences as a gift will be a meaningful possibility.

 

No great things to say today.  The key will be to just experience Christmas with some joy. We all need to try to muster it up. Live your traditions as best you can.  Remember the bottom line of what Christmas is about, the celebration of the birth of a man who according to Saint Paul conveyed perfect patience. This is the day when we raise our voices in song to honor the man who said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The world is hurting so let us show compassionate patience and overwhelming love for our neighbors.

Have Faith

18 December 2020

Faith.  Being only five letters long, faith is a relatively small word in the English language.  Faith’s definition isn’t that complex.  Faith, according to a smart lookup in Word is, “… derived from the Latin fides, meaning confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept.” Trust is also a short word and again the smart lookup is not overly complicated, “...the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something.” Faith can also mean a religion or a series of spiritual or ethical constructs.  This of course draws from the requirement that one who adheres to a Faith trusts or relies on the constructs of the particular doctrine espoused.

 

For millennia in western civilization the drawing of fall into winter has been a heightened time of faith.  The Romans, the pagans, the Christians and others have seen the time around the winter solstice as a time for a focus on faith. Be it riotous debauchery or the quiet contemplation of a plan of spiritual salvation, the opening of the door to cold winter has been marked with rites of faith. Standing in a darkened church on December 24^thholding up a small lit wax candle singing the words, “Sleep in heavenly peace,” is one way to calm a troubled soul and heighten a sense of faith.

 

Faith seems hard to come by in the waning days of 2020.  If you are one of the 74, 000,000 people who voted for Donald Trump, and who has listened to his narrative of claimed misdeeds by the opposition, you have little faith in the integrity of the electoral process. If you are one of the members of the families of the 300,000 souls who have lost their life to Covid-19 you have lost faith in both government and medicine.  Having lost jobs and savings as a result of the varied attempts to corral the contagion you may have even lost faith in the holy or the divine if you prefer that term. Locked down and in isolation so many have lost faith in the integrity and resilience of our institutions and systems from education to food production and delivery.

 

Don’t lose faith for we need faith.  We need to trust and rely on something.  Having faith aids us in living with confidence, in living with meaning.  Living with faith can strip away unnecessary fear and hesitation in the conduct of our affairs. A strong faith can provide a balm to our anxieties. Whether you are a secular humanist or a devout Catholic a faith in something better, a faith in the possibility of a tomorrow with less pain and fewer struggles, can lift us up into a special place where hope lightens our load.

 

We do have reasons for faith.  The acts of good people in our society give us something to trust in, something to rely on.  There are clearly good people among us. We have doctors and nurses who are working around the clock to minister to the grievously ill. We have specialists in logistics who are working busily in getting the vaccines out to us as quickly and efficiently as is possible. We have neighbors who are helping coordinate grocery shopping for those in high-risk groups so that the old and the immunity compromised have as little potential exposure to the virus as possible. From the fevered work of scientists and clinicians there are at least two vaccines with 94% or better effectiveness against the coronavirus. We have mental health specialists that are ready, willing and able to assist those suffering with isolation, depression and anxiety.  We have pastors and pastoral assistants willing to aid those who need something beyond this world to believe in.

 

As winter sets in here in the northern hemisphere we have many reasons to have faith in something better coming soon. Take a moment to stop doom scrolling and look at the positive things present in the world right now.  You may have to lift you face away from the screens to look and see the actions of your neighbors and people in your community working for the betterment of all. If you are on your screens the stories showing what good there is to believe in will not be on the front page so dig deep for it. If the menorah or the cross or the garlands of holly and laurel give you a lighter heart than embrace those symbols.  Have faith my friends things will get better. Have faith my friends that we can and we will make it through this.

 

 

A Dusting of Powder Before Christmas

Demento Claus 

One week’s time and it will be Christmas Eve. This will mark the end of years of Christmas Eve tradition, we will not be going to the chapel to light candles as we have done every year since John Lee and Loren were born. Pandemic. ‘Nuff said.

 

I may try to get Loren to record an acapella take on one of the Christmas carols. If he does, I will post it.  So much of what is the Christmas experience is not happening.  Still, we are trying to make it seem like it should.  We cut down a tree.  It got decorated.  Gifts have been bought.  All hail Amazon. Some gifts have been mailed.

Dashed to the U.S. Post Office this morning at 8:25 AM.  The windows open at 8:30. I was first in line and there was nobody else in the lobby.  Mask on I went inside and got six packages off.  Whereas in years past the clerk would give some estimate on when the Priority Mail© packages would arrive there was no hint of such a date today.  Having heard how completely befouled the delivery system is based on the “improvements in efficiency” rolled out this fall, I didn’t bother to follow up and ask. 

 

The one aspect of Christmas that is much more noticeable in my neighborhood is the presence of lights on houses that never had lights before, and an amped up presence of illumination on people who usually offered Christmas displays.  Early on I heard rumors of a Christmas decoration shortage.  On dingy Saturday I went checking on decorations on Amazon, Costco, Sam’s and Home Depot.  Sure enough, unless you wanted fuggly overpriced Simpson’s nativity scenes the pickings were really very, very slim.

 

I get it.  In a world where so little of what is occurring is under our control making sure that at least one aspect of our normal Christmas shines is really important.  Going Clark Griswold big on the outside lights is a way of saying clearly and emphatically I am celebrating Christmas well and ups yours Covid-19.  Hey, I went for festive banners that now hang outside the front door to show I am celebrating Christmas well.

Last night as my family and friends on the east coast of America were getting pounding by a miserable storm with feet of snow and nasty ice, we got a mild dusting of light white powder.  Our snow did what a first snow is supposed to do, it covered the imperfections of a grey and brown world. Our snow was gentle and wispy and danced in circles as it came down. Our snow created a landscape that said Christmas is almost here so lift up your hearts.

 

One closing comment is this.  Cards. With people at home, it seems they are digging out the cards, the stamps and the pens to craft Christmas messages. I am going to try and respond to each one I receive.  Not so big on creating cards in the past few years but I will try.

And for this piece's musical coda I offer something that is off the beaten track.  It is lovely though.

Light and Silence

2 December 2020

 

Gorgeous day today.  Sunlight pouring down and not a cloud to be seen.  Enough of a breeze the keep the air clean as it blows from west to east.  The fires that mottled the color of the sky this summer have subsided and are having no impact on the beauty of this day.  Sunlight, warm sunlight makes this early December day quite tolerable.

 

I picked up one of Thomas Merton’s books today.  It is called No Man is an Island.  Have had this trade paperback copy for at least 35 years.  The pages that were read at my wedding are underlined and still have Post-it notes marking the relevant sections.  

 

As I flipped through the volume looking for something to inspire my day, I came to a passage that talked about the noise we make on a day-to-day basis. Merton believed too much noise, noise like our society’s endless commentary on things and our personally propounded propositions injected into the common discourse, take the edge off our experience of reality. He believed that the constant noise level civilization imposes on our lives blurs the truths of life. Merton says, “There must be a time of day when the man who speak falls very silent.  And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: did they have a meaning?”

 

A sunny day walk with no headphones on, and no direction or path in mind as one sets out can bring a soul to that empty place where all that exists is the reality of nature. The natural world is one of the Divine’s most beautiful gift to humanity. A walk can center us in nature. Like walking a labyrinth, when we ramble without direction, we can set aside the hurts, the desires and the to do lists that clutter our mind.  We can get empty.  When we get empty of the noise, we get open to the possibilities and the realities of our lives.

The Season of Light

 

1 December 2020

 Each year around this time I pull out a small volume from the bookshelf in my bedroom.  The book is called, Season of Light. The book is a series of short essays on, or at least peripherally related to, the season of Advent.  This tome is one of three or four books I regularly go back to over the course of the year, the others being works by Thomas Merton a hermit monk and the other by Simon Blackburn a devoutly atheistic philosopher. My reading, much like my soul, is a jumble at this time of year.

 

I will pick a couple of the writings contained in Season, and there is a writing for each day of advent, and read them. There are theological essays, possibly apocryphal stories and personal remembrances. But what I find most compelling are the essays that call us to individual action. These writings focus on us as messengers of hope, compassion and love. Living here in the north country with a fire in the Franklin stove, a cat under the tree and some coffee in hand I find the writers’ various urging for us to bridge divides and live love quite compelling.

 

There is a song that captures my feeling about this season.  It was written by the son of a Jewish mobster and an aboriginal woman.  The key lyrics go…

 

 

A shepherd on the hillside, over my flock I bide

On a cold winter night, a band of Angels sing

In a dream I heard a voice say, "Fear not, come rejoice

It's the end of the beginning, praise the new born King"

 

How a little baby boy could bring the people so much joy.

Son of a carpenter, Mary carried the light.

This must be Christmas, must be tonight.

 

Robbie Robertson- Christmas Must Be Tonight.

 

The promise of hope, the promise of peace, both captured in the Christmas story, are promises we all wish for on some level.  You could say we want other things, material things, relational things, but aren’t they all just parts of a puzzle we are trying to cobble together to bring some form of a peaceful joy to our soul?

 

I don’t worry about the war on Christmas.  Christmas has long been secular in America, divorced for most people from the arc of the story that runs from the manger to a horrific Roman execution to a heavenly ascension. Did it happen, that is something to be found in individual hearts because the historical record will never be clear. But the hopes and desires of men and women for forgiving love and balm upon our wounds and fellowship and friendship are universal. Each of us can carry a little bit of the light by listening more, loving more and overlooking the small stuff.

 

Over the next few weeks, it will be ancient music for me coupled with hot cocoa as I watch the lights on our Christmas tree.  2020 was not the year I wanted.  2020 was not the year any of us needed.  But with compassion in our hearts, we can reach out and make the holiday season better for ourselves and others. Peace.

 

 

Oyster Love

 Because FB will not let me post a direct link to this https://onetruenorthspace.blogspot.com/2008/09/moist-food-and-memory-or-should-it-be.html

On Reading Porn in Public (A Diversion for Pandemic Battered Minds)

 

18 November 2020

When I attended the Michigan State Universe in the mid-1970s the world was a different place.  We still had hope in the future.  We still held the notion dear that we as a people were evolving toward a nation where gender and race would no longer be limiting conditions.  We fully believed that literature’s best moments were still ahead. Clearly this was evidenced by the high quality shown by the writers of letters to Penthousemagazine. 

 

On one occasion several of my fellow MSU students and I pursued a public reading of one of these great works of art.  We did this on a warm and sunny fall afternoon in the public lounge area of our dormitory.  Our simple goal was to promote this uniquely evolving form of great literature.  We just didn’t understand how the Pulitzer literary prize committee failed to acknowledge the talent of these great writers year after year.

 

On one sunny Saturday afternoon we picked a story at random from the September 1976 issue of Penthouse magazine. The particular topic involved was stacks assignation.  Penthouse letters had a number of recurring themes, trysts with a friend’s fiancée’ (or mother), couplings in elevators, and finally encounters with persons with differing personal attributes.

 

Letters on library stacks assignations were particularly interesting to us because we undergraduates were for the most part were barred from the research stacks.  At the Michigan State Universe undergraduates were expressly forbidden to be in the ‘research stacks’, the place where scholarly journals and quarterly publications were all neatly arranged in university bound color coded volumes.  Titles like The University of Alberta Journal of Hydrological Data Assessment were arranged neatly in row after row floor after floor.  Only serious scholars were allowed to wander there among that mixture of thickly bound material and dust, each title having its own unique smell.  

 

Because of the serious reverence for the knowledge in these books very few undergraduate students got there.  (There was a back way in but that is for a different story).  Master and doctoral degree candidates were allowed to roam these oft vacant realms. Decrepit professors could cruise up and down these aisles.  Their numbers were sparse and the stacks remained very quiet day after day, week after week.  A pencil left on the floor in an aisle separating journals could remain there untouched for days. 

 

It was the near vacant nature of the storage space for these learned treatises that gave rise to the stack assignation stories.  These stories followed a pattern.  First, the narrator would specify why they would be in the stacks, always stated to be a deep and scholarly interest.  Next the teller of the tale (always a male) would find out that someone else was in the nearly deserted area. Given it was Penthouse the writer would find a comely member of the opposite sex lingering between the rows of books.  Of course, the person discovered would be observed doing something suggestive. I won’t dwell on the wild variations of the suggestive activities but assume it something like leaning over a sorting cart in a short skirt exposing lace fringed silk undergarments.  Invariably this would lead to a discussion of gymnastic sex worthy of the pliable nature of Olga Korbut’s limbs.

 

Well, there we were in our mixed gender, mixed race group, sitting around the western lounge of Mayo Hall. As I have said we decided to promote public awareness of this great literary form through a public reading. We would accomplish this by handing around an open Penthouse neatly concealed in another mass market publication like Time. Each of the 12 or so of us would read a single paragraph out loud continuing to hand the magazine to the person to our right until the letter concluded.  

 

The first people to read got off relatively unscathed in the endeavor. The first two or three paragraph of these letters, and they were long missives, were ones describing the writer’s work assignment, the locale of the action within the rows of dusty cobweb covered books, and the pink silk underwear of the soon to be member of Olympic fornication squad.  

 

Readers four through ten got the yeoman’s task of reading the descriptions of the sexual athleticism of the writer and his brave cohort. Readers four through ten also got to use the wild and varied adjectives and adverbs contained in the tale.  Moist, sweaty and wildly are about the safest of those words to recount here.  These determined orators also got to use the action verbs like thrust, and all its variants, voicing them in stage voices that would have made Sir John Gielgud proud.  Hand gestures would accompany the narration, mostly staging directions (although sometimes they would be graphic representations of particularly difficult to understand maneuvers outlined in the text of the letter). 

 

I did mention that this was a public reading.  I did mention this was in a ground floor lounge of a dormitory.  What I did not mention was that this ground floor’s suites of rooms had been occupied that year by a bunch of clean-shaven, short haired young men whose purpose, at that moment in their collective lives, was to proselytize to the world at large what they believed was the proper route to salvation.  To those who went to university in the 1970s these were the gents who stood out on the corners in center campus handing out small green copies of their sacred religious texts one day a term.  These were folks who did not drink, dance or smoke.  They also did not believe in having sex standing up because it could lead to dancing.

 

Now as reader seven was in a grave and serious tone describing a sexual maneuver that had about the same difficulty as a gymnast performing a double salto tucked with two full twists, a stranger approached the circle unnoticed by most. The listeners were really engaged in listening to the reading, enrapt perhaps.  The telling had captured their late teen/early twenties minds.  Their heart rates were elevated and there may have been stirrings in their loins.  The listeners were hanging on every word that was spoken with faster and shorter breaths.

 

At this moment, when the narrator was describing two people hanging nude from what must have been an industrial grade light fixture, a young clean-cut gentleman continued his approach from the monasterial region of the dormitory.  The reader having seen the approaching stranger stopped his reading midsentence and closed the Time magazine thus hiding the Penthouse and its racy cover.  The excited listeners looked confused but then they saw the approaching stranger too.

 

Coming to a halt dead center in the half circle of literary enthusiasts, this gentleman (let us call him Barry) produced a religious text from under his arm.  Barry opened his sacred book and asked if the listeners if they would mind if he read what he believed were the holy words related directly to what he saw as a universal plan of salvation.  All twelve pairs of eyes focused on the floor.  Indistinct mummers were heard but there was no overt or unambiguous refusal to Barry’s proposal.  Taking this as acquiescence, Barry spoke with passion. As he spoke the blood that had been pooling in specific places among the twelve listeners dissipated.  Pulses slowed and breathing returned to regular rates. Barry’s stump speech was short and sweet, maybe 3 minutes maximum.  At the end he gently closed his book, thanked the listeners and walked off with a strong steady stride away heading for the lounge of the east side.

 

When Barry was gone the then reader, who had quietly closed the Time/Penthouse combination left the magazines closed.  Giggles came gently at first.  Then came sheepish and guilty laughter.  Then people began falling out of their chairs with guttural laughter and flushed red faces.  I think Barry’s departing comment that the part that burns most in hell is the part that you sin with struck a chord with us.  

 

We did not return to our public promotion of literary talent on this particular day.  Maybe it was shame, maybe it was guilt, but we just didn't pick up where we left off. Instead, we wandered on to other activities like campus movies and cruising through the local downtown looking for posters to decorate our rooms.  Some people might have picked up incense or market spice tea.  Others wandered down to the river to feed the ducks. 

 

Penthouse’s letters never received the literary plaudits we felt they truly deserved.  I think we can only blame ourselves for not further promoting public awareness through additional public readings.

Fall Has Turned Cold; Winter Approaches

 

16 November 2020

As I start this it is about 10:15 AM.  I have had breakfast, oatmeal with blueberry compote and coffee.  Further I have walked 2.4 miles.  Turning my attention to household needs I have ordered several things online.  Within a minute or two I will refill my cup with a warm beverage.  

 

Today the trees were bare along my route.  Also, the wind whipped down the broad highway just north of my home strongly enough to make 35 F feel like 24 F.  Layer upon layer of outerwear was buttoned up and zippered up.  Cold and walking at a brisk pace I got my full walk in.  Over the past week I have been averaging a total of 6.2 miles a day walked. I have met all three of my move/exercise/stand goals for 221 days in a row (7+ months). 

 

Walking out I listened to three podcasts, Up First (Today’s edition), Consider This (Friday’s edition) and Politico Dispatch (Friday also).  The majority of the news focused in equal parts on the drastically increasing Covid-19 numbers and the failure of the Trump Administration to engage in the transition process. There were two others short squib stories.  These touched on a growing war in Ethiopia and the failure of the House and Senate to come up with a plan for, and to engage in distance voting. By the time the walk was over I was craving an SSRI.  I settled for a homemade apple pie bar.

 

A friend recently said that this year was so messed up that she didn’t mind the merging of the holidays.  Her comments indicated that in most years this is something she fought with a passion. Me too. Back to my friend, I believe her comment was something like, “If wearing a Santa Claus hat and listening to carols, while sitting in a bathtub filled with Halloween candy all the while eating a turkey leg makes 2020 more bearable, do it.” As I sit here eating one of the last Rollo candies from Halloween, not a big mover among the East Lansing grade school set, I note I brought up our three Rubbermaid tubs of Christmas decorations. Concurrently I put away two boxes of Halloween decorations. My wife is ordering a turkey online to be delivered to the trunk of our car today or tomorrow.

 

The weekend was cold and wet and miserable.  With Covid on the rise walking in the malls remains off limits.  I read two novels, a Bosch thriller I had missed and the newest Dresden Files.  Both were quick reads and fluffy fun. I also watched a bunch of episodes of a trashy British police procedural called New Tricks.  Elevator description, crusty retired coppers solving cold cases with humor. I can recommend the series as fun if you like all things Brit.

 

At one point yesterday I could no longer bear to stay in the house.  I went out for a twenty-minute walk.  Before I had finished my mile, the wind was blowing hail into me sideways.  Yeah, the high wind warnings were justified. In honor of this weekend’s nasty weather I offer the following song by the irascible Van Morrison.  Great singer, great writer, grouchy old bastard.

 

 

Heavy Frost and Mental Focus

 

14 November 2020

 

Bright day outside but cold.  Freezing is still a few degrees up the thermometer from where things stand right now. Few trees retain any leaves.  Few yards retain any leaves.  Because of the pandemic most of my neighbors have been working from home.  Every day during this week I have heard leaf blowers and raking up and down the blocks surrounding my home. I assume this is my neighbors making use of their lunch hours and break times. Deadlines motivate action. Our local government picks the leaves up and so we must all get our leaves piled out along the curb before November 16, the last day for leaf pickup up.

 

Me, the person who despises yard work, I have been out there too.  I have two lightweight rakes with broad reaches.  I have a device from Toro that both blows the leaves into a pile, but with a snap on/snap off action will suck these little photosynthesis factories up and grind them into a more compact form in a canvas sack. With a number of maples, one elm and one walnut tree I have a fair bit of labor to get the leaves to the curb on time.

 

As I look outside the sun has not warmed up the metal body of the car enough yet to melt the heavy frost from its roof. ‘Tis a sure sign of visible breath cold still abounding. Being retired I don’t have the time pressures my working days imposed on me.  I don’t have to get my walk done at a certain time because I have to be somewhere to do something at a specific hour. Today and most days and I can wait for the warmup. At this juncture of my life I don’t have to face the coldest part of the day.

 

The cold weather is not my friend.  Cold weather is a captor. Cold weather is a prison guard.  While the news of the plague contains some hope, a vaccine within a year, it also contains some despair.  The nation is incurring the highest number of infections per day it has ever had.  Deaths are again rising. Cold weather which forces people inside forces a higher risk of transmission and infection onto all of us.  Trips to the grocery stores during those special hours for the old and the infirm are just not as inviting. Activities in communal spaces are just not attractive.

 

Me, I am going to keep walking for as long as I can.  Layers, I will be wearing lots of layers.  However, I will be continuing my mostly monastic lifestyle. Guess I had better make peace with my active rambling mind. 

 

Life is imperfect.  We are not promised to fully understand all that surrounds us in this world, including the new plague. Yet if we are open to it, deprivations like those Covid-19 has imposed can focus us on what really matters, on what is really core to making the most of our lives. These months of isolation need not be wasted time. Looks like the frost has fled and I must now go.

 

 

Memories

 6 November 2020

 My Uncle Bill

 

My Uncle Bill Huber passed this week.  I have been digging deep into my memories of the man to see what is there.  Inside my head’s vault of the past there are three distinct groups of memories.  One group predates 1960, this was the period when my Mom was teaching and my Aunt Sugar was providing daycare for me.  Back then it was Billy and Jimmy and me. Dot, Mel and John would come later.

 

Most of my memories of that time were of Aunt Sugar, Bill’s wife.  But there are some distinct memories I have of Uncle Bill.  Mostly they are of a man with a measured tone.  I think his role as a mortician imposed a calm demeanor for his dealings with the public in general. His quiet demeanor carried over to his dealings with me.  I know I was confused about his outfits.  He wore dark suits and ties on day that were not Sundays.  What was that about thought my four-year-old brain.  Most men in my life were blue collar factory rats. They were suits on Sunday.  But Uncle Bill would have to put on the dark suit and subdued tie uniform during the week. This aberration from the norm of men in my world that flummoxed my thinking.  Again, he was always a genial man and a calm force during these years.

 

The second group of memories come from a period of time involved the years after the Hubers had moved to Bordentown but before I spent my summers in Ocean City, NJ.  Bill would on major family occasions such as Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day would drive down in a big black Cadillac that he had because of his funeral home business.  His growing family would spill out at my Grandmother’s house or the houses of my aunts and uncles’. The arrival was cacophonous. He was always laughing and he always had a smile. And he would come prepared and would make homemade ice cream. If you want to win hearts and minds of the preteen set, make homemade ice cream.  

 

My final group of memories come from the years when I was in my early teens. Yes, I know my Uncle Bill was a Mason and a semi-professional clown, but I really didn’t know much about those parts of his life.  What I did know was that on those days he could steal away from the funeral home he loved being at the beach, by and in the water.  I am pretty sure it was my Uncle Bill and Aunt Sugar who convinced my parents that Ocean City was a great place to rent an apartment for the summer.  Good God, I wish I could thank him for that bit of persuasion.  The beach changed my life, my mind, my values and my world view.  I remember well my Uncle Bill sitting in a beach chair down by the water just reveling in the warmth of summertime. Me, I am pretty sure he would not mind being remembered that way.  There is some joy of a vision of a man in his prime letting the sea breeze tousle his hair as he sat by the never changing, but always changeable, Atlantic. 

 

 

Finding Peace on a Late Fall Day in a Leap Year

 

28 October 2020

 

"When we look at the ocean, we see that each wave has a beginning and an end. A wave can be compared with other waves, and we can call it more or less beautiful, higher or lower, longer lasting or less long lasting. But if we look more deeply, we see that a wave is made of water. While living the life of a wave, the wave also lives the life of water. It would be sad if the wave did not know that it is water. It would think, 'Someday I will have to die. This period of time is my life span, and when I arrive at the shore, I will return to nonbeing.'

 

These notions will cause the wave fear and anguish. A wave can be recognized by signs -- beginning or ending, high or low, beautiful or ugly. In the world of the wave, the world of relative truth, the wave feels happy as she swells, and she feels sad as she falls. She may think, 'I am high!' or 'I am low!' and develop superiority or inferiority complexes, but in the world of the water there are no signs, and when the wave touches her true nature -- which is water -- all of her complexes will cease, and she will transcend birth and death," 

 

- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. New York: Broadway Books, 1999, pp. 124-125.

 

Temperature today stands at 52 degrees F.  The sky is clear and there is but a light breeze blowing.  I have thrown on a sweat shirt and a down vest and I am sitting outside at the outdoor table.  It is covered in a blue tarp in anticipation of a harsh winter. The cat stands at the glass slider looking wistfully at the outside that she is so sure she wants to explore.

 

These days the world is agog, mad with news of potential political change.  Signs festoon every lawn in the neighborhoods I traverse, mostly saying hooray and vote for our side.  The airwaves are filled with the latest bon mots from various candidates and their surrogates.  So much of what is being said really hasn’t much to do with the harshness of life encountered by the average person living through the throes of this pandemic.

 

Some days we have to stop focusing on our lives as waves.  Some days when the ginned-up madness proves too much we much refocus our mind to an acceptance of our being an integral and inseparable part of the ocean. Today it was eight birds sitting out on and in my fountain that returned my focus to the whole cloth of this short span we have here. A walk out among the multi-colored leaf quilted lawns of my neighborhood drew me away from the cacophony of the moment.

 

Make a moment of peace for yourself today. Make it a moment of unconditional peace. Feel the air around you.  See the things that nature is presenting right now.  Unplug from the demands of modern electronic and get focused on an hour in the natural world.  Life is short and the world does not wait for us.

Election 2020, Let Us Thwart the Will of the People by Claiming Original Intent Rules

We live in a country that is governed by a representational democracy. What that means is that we make no laws directly except through ballot measures for things such as bonds or constitutional amendments and the like.  Instead we vote to choose people to carry out our political will in governing our large and diverse country. They create the laws because we through our Constitution have entrusted them with that task. Our vote in a representational democracy is thus the most critical embodiment of our political voice.  

In a representative democracy the goal should be to encourage and aid all enfranchised citizens to vote. Actions during a health pandemic limiting the ballot collection boxes to one per county in dense urban counties is not consistent with enfranchisement. During a pandemic when the United States Postal Service is having delivery problems, limiting the counting of ballots to only those received by the closing time of the polls on election day, regardless of the postmarked date, also is not in furtherance of voter enfranchisement. Disallowing a ballot from being counted because of the lack of a postmark, when the ballot is unambiguously received before election day is not in the furtherance of enfranchisement. All of these are instead acts of voter suppression, of disenfranchisement. 

 

We are a diverse nation of people of varying intellectual abilities, varying language skills, varying physical infirmities limiting mobility and varying other constraints limiting access to our actively physically voting on election day in a fixed polling station. Given that all American citizens are deemed equal under the law, we, our representatives and our courts should be working to make voting easier. We should not be decrying established mechanisms for voting outside of fixed polling places as tools of fraud. If we believe that each and every citizen should vote, we should make registration up until election day the norm.  If we believe that every citizen should vote we should be counting ballots mailed in by the date of the election day even if they arrive up to three days later. If we believe every citizen should vote, we should be allowing ballot collection boxes be placed in multiple secure locations in urban areas.

 

We are in the midst of a pandemic, a crisis not seen in over a hundred years.  We are in a situation where exposure to the virus, which is spread by aerosolization of viral load in droplets of breath, in confined poorly ventilated places (like many polling stations) raises the specter of death and serious disability to a large portion of the voting public should they enter those spaces. Normal rules need to be varied to protect citizens who have the same right as any other citizen to vote.

 

Courts have always had the power to fashion remedies where the strict text of written laws fails to address anomalous situations, it is called equitable jurisdiction.  In a pandemic many laws and rules as codified are just not adequate to meet the circumstances head on. In a pandemic the respective interpretive tacts of originalism and strict constructionism can’t rise to the immediate reality.  Thus, learned jurists, and panels of jurists are trying their best to fashion remedy impediments to our core Constitutional right, that of voting in a fair and free election. This is not election fraud.  This is not stealing an election.  This is instead protecting the essential of our constitutional rights.

 

I am afraid that with the elevation of Justice Barrett to the high court, she an adherent of the originalism doctrine, the issues of the pandemic will be turned into a political weapon for the right. I believe based on what I have seen so far from her, and from the other Trump justices, we are screwed in terms of promoting voter rights in this election.

 

 

A Short Book Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

 5 October 2020

One of the things about reading e-books from library services is the AI behind the service tracks your interest.  If you are into revenge port such tracking is not your friend is a bad thing and your name might find its way into a file on a police tracking system.  If you are into escapist fiction, while you are probably okay with the police, those in your circle who favor serious literature might look down upon your reading of one more variant of A Year in Provence, albeit set instead in Tuscany or Morocco.   

 

My tastes in books are akin to my tastes in music.  I like authors in translation from the French, the Japanese, and from a wide array of other languages.  I like critical darlings favored by the Booker Prize.  But then again, I like total trash like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden stories. My tastes have followed the trajectory of my life, partly truth and partly fiction.

 

Well the library’s bot, as I was returning an early Dresden book that I had not read before, suggested Piranesi. I didn’t know the book but I did know the author. Susanna Clarke wrote the book and she had previously created one of the greatest fantasy books I think I have ever read, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Given my love of the Jonathon Strange book I decided to give the tome a chance. I downloaded it from the library. 

 

Wow.  Simply Wow.

 

To try and give you a sample of the text of the novel, or a summary of the characters, would ruin the reading experience of anyone actually coming to the book.  Suffice it to say the novel is in the genre of fantasy and for the most part if focused on three characters.  The characters are two men, and the environment they inhabit.  The tale is one of divided desires for awareness and for comfort. Ritual and pattern are preeminent in this tale. 

 

When you begin reading the story you are dropped into a world like none you have known but which you may have imagined when you first heard of lost civilizations, places vanished beneath the dusts of antiquity or the waves of an unforgiving sea. For a substantial part of the book you are an observer in a darkened room where things don’t make sense.  Eventually however someone commences tearing off the papers pasted and taped over the windows.  As light pours in the room you begin to see the reality of the situation bit by bit.  Ah and aha follow.

 

Piranesi is fantasy, but it is a world and perhaps a mindset that you come to understand well by the closing paragraphs of the tale.  Clarke writes in a lyrical style; hers is a stark but gentle style.  Her descriptions leave you with a sense of the feel of Piranesi’s world.  You can see the light of the moon Piranesi watches.  You can smell the waters that surround Piranesi.  When Piranesi’s thoughts get muddled you can empathize.  

 

Once I began this book, I devoured it.  Piranesi is one of those books where the ending, the final paragraphs matter and make the book that much more wonderful.  If you are a fan of Susanna Clarke, or of gentle fantasy, I would urge you to put this on your reading list.  There are wonders awaiting the reader as the dark paper is pulled away and the room where you are standing grows warmly illuminated.

You Can Take Him Wizard; Harry Dresden vs. Donald Trump

24 September 2020

 

My taste in fiction has two main prongs and two side paths.  Mostly I long to read great fiction, superlative fiction.  Oft I commence my journey by reading what has been publicly judged as high quality as determined by people like the folks who award the Man Booker prize. Some great reads are to be found in the Booker winners and shortlisted titles.  Last Orders was one I really liked.  The Remains of the Day was another incredible read. Give me a tale that will linger in my mind long after the book has been returned.

 

The other main vein of reading for me is novels set strongly in a place.  Think Steinbeck’s Cannery Row or W.O. Mitchell’s stories about the Canadian prairies. Thick books, well developed characters and narratives, these are things I long for. Sometimes the stories take you to where you knew they were going to as soon as you read the first page, but the journey is such a rich tapestry as to make the journey worthwhile. I like substance in my reading 99% of the time.

 

Still, I have always had one main diversion, science fiction.  And when I say science fiction, I mean tales of space exploration and/or of life on earth millennia in the future.  Robert Silverberg, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov stand out as creators of this genre.  If a story is one 50% based on the tech of getting to another galaxy, 35% on the emotions and motivations of a human crew, and 15% or less on shape-shifting, mind reading, translucent alien life forms, I am good with sitting down for a read.  I have never really liked tales with species and sub-species of thinking critters imbued with human motivations.  Don’t know why I don’t like these, I just don’t.  Dune was a jump ball but, in the end, I really liked the novel.  None of the televised or movie adaptations have moved me.

 

The other sub-diversion has been a single series, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels. The Dresden series of books violate all my rules about reading fiction. The writing is pulpy.  There are witches, faeries, and all sort of other supernatural creatures. You are never left with deep and profound musings about the human condition when you put the paperback or the tablet down.  (Thank God for free online library collections, I wouldn’t want to pay for this claptrap.)

 

Harry Dresden, for those who know nothing of him, is a wizard practicing his trade in Chicago. Back when they existed, he advertised in the Yellow Pages. This wizard has been tempted by the dark side, and in Dresden’s world there are clearly evil and good sides, but he struggles and fights to stay on the good side.  

 

In his struggles Dresden is mentally, emotionally and physically battered to the point where his body should fail him but he keeps going because it is the right thing to do. There is a code, a set of rules, to which he must adhere about not killing with magic and similar prohibitions. This is externally created by a body akin to the legislature of the supernatural, and like human laws really, these do not cover all situations that might arise appropriately. Harry’s love life is for shit.  And electrical appliances just don’t like him.

 

When I dwell on it, and trust me it is not something I dwell on much, I am much too focused on my health, my finances, the state of the world, when can I leave this nuts country, etc., I think what attracts me to Harry is that he is ill equipped for the job both in temperament and impliedly in talent. He is an earthy pragmatist in a world of hyper-focused rule enforcers and of hyper duplicitous rule breakers. In the conduct of his affairs Harry isn’t given choices that are clearly good and clearly evil. The choices Harry faces are bad and worse.  These bad and worse decision points come in rapid succession, stacked one atop each other and Harry has to make do after taking hit after hit in the solar plexus both literally and figuratively. And yet he prevails.  

 

In a five-day period in which the news headlines were 200,000 dead from Covid-19, Justice Ginsburg dead, only minor charges issued in the Taylor death and the President refusing to say if he would accept defeat at the polls, I think I/we have taken enough in the way of gut punches. My reaction to the high level of psychic pain was to turn to reading those Dresden books my local library did not have but the online libraries did have.  Some occasions require you to just dive right in and dive deep into fantasy to keep yourself from losing your mind. Stare down those vampires and survive Harry. Take on the werewolves and while bloodied and bruised come out alive, more or less, Harry.  Face down black magic and live Harry.  Yeah, I needed this schlub to win a few in the past few days. His wins has kept me from crying about America’s losses. 

 

If Harry were real, I know he would take on Donald Trump and win.  I just know it. In fantasy stories like these good does triumph over evil. One more novel to go and then I will read the news again.

 

Hints of Coming Attractions

 23 September 2020

Two days of temperatures in the lower 30s tripped the chemical switch within the leaves of the trees here to tell them to put on their fall coats. The fall’s glorious colors of orange reds and yellows are yet to come. But the leaves are moving from deep green to dusty green to orange. Threads of color are present in the number of the maples I as I set out today. We will have more warm days before the snow flies. But the long lingering days of summer are gone. Deep rich saturation of green against the sky will change into a multicolored pastiche. And then there will be bare skeletal fingers spread out toward the grey ceiling of late fall and winter.

Got up before it was light this morning. Held off on setting out until I had read the paper and eaten my oatmeal. Spent a few minutes slowly sipping my coffee as opposed to gulping it down. When I went out the sun was not yet above the treeline. My down vest felt good. There are still many, many beautiful blooms out. Even though it interrupts the flow of my walk, I do have to stop and look at these flowers. They bring peace to a soul in these troubled times.

Have not seen any rabbits this morning. Have seen a squirrel or two. The furry tree rats are moving with such kinetic energy gathering up scraps for the winter. Isn’t that what we’re all doing in this for seven months of the pandemic? Furtive little trips to grocery stores to grab this and that in such quantity that we don’t have to return for a long time. The world is different. The world is so very different these days.

And before Emerson, Lake and Palmer there was the Nice.