CALIPATRIA, Calif. – A small white gull with an ordinary name had bird watchers flocking to the Salton Sea for what they call a “mega-rarity.”
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Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.
It’s a cold night, isn’t it? Sometimes when it’s cold, I like to wear my hooded sweatshirt in the house. I bend over the computer hooded like a monk. Except that a real monk probably wouldn’t have ear buds feeding the Chaconne in D Minor into his brain. Ah, Bach.
Have you been well fed? Have you communicated your thankfulness to the Creator Spirit of your understanding? Good. Don’t worry if some of what you’re thankful for is remembrance and regret. No doubt you have what you need tonight; God has seen to our necessities. And it’s endemic — we make what we made since the world began. Or as my Mom has said to me, “we never miss the water ’til the well runs dry.”
I’m thankful, as I always am, for the loved ones God has blessed me with today, and for those apart and far away. If that means you, know that you were in my thoughts; or if you prefer, that I was with you in spirit.
Charlie’s Brown’s Thanksgiving show was on TV two nights ago. Charlie invites all his friends over for dinner. Snoopy and Woodstock set the table outside, and serve popcorn and toast. This offends Peppermint Patty, who is expecting Tradition. I can relate, and I have a few thoughts on this.
First of all, where are the parents – the ones who always sound like trombones with toilet plungers – “wa wha wa, wha whaa wa wha?” Evidently, they just stay out of the way while Chuck’s dinner goes bad, and they’re late for dinner at his grandma’s condo, then they pile all the kids in the back of the station wagon and head over the river and through the woods. Enigmatic, if you ask me.
I don’t think Thanksgiving has anything to do with national history, Pilgrims or Indians, genocide, manifest destiny or Plymouth Rock. It’s just about family, having a day to be together because life is short and sweet. And you can eat too much pumpkin pie, but you can’t get too much love.
For the past few days, I’ve had a Thanksgiving video running in my head. Not with Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy, but one of my own dubious production value. Independent, maybe low budget compared to some, but a cast of stars. And angels, as it happens.
In my movie, I wake up in a cold November day, 1970s, San Joaquin Valley, California. The house is full of the smell of turkey, which has been cooking for hours. And we are all together again, Papa and Grandma, Mom and Dad & my brother Joe, as the cooking goes on and on. There’s the parade and the football games. My cousins, Aunt and Uncle arrive. (Or maybe it’s 1980s, and my cousin comes with her husband and kids – that’s good too.) We can go outside and play a while, blow off steam. There’s an amazing meal – which you can picture for yourself – with pies as far as the eye can see, all made by Grandma and Mom, by hand.
Somewhere in one of my closets, in a big old binder, is a poem I wrote about Thanksgiving over 20 years ago. I’m not going in search of it for this blog post, but there is one line I remember, “while fathers sneak for final pie/ in shadows blue and still.” That’s the best I could do back then to try and capture that late afternoon, short fall day drowsy overeating wonderment of Thanksgiving Day. College football on the tube. Kids laying around on the rugs with the dogs, aunts and uncles and grandparents all dozing on the sofas and the soft old chairs.
If I imagine myself there, and try to remember how it felt, there’s a strong feeling of safety, of belonging, of life being right and whole. But there’s paradox: I knew it was fleeting; I understood mortality and impermanence earlier than some people. That’s the metaphor of final pie: there has to be a last slice, a final feast, because everyone is on their way to somewhere else.
Very little about tomorrow will be as it was then, and I’m not complaining; I will be with people I love. Others are gone to Heaven, some are simply far away. We have folded away the place and time like a map of the road into sorrow. Or beauty – maybe it’s that – these memories are beautiful.
Life goes on. Things have changed. Which reminds me of another story I wrote a few years ago, called The Guy Who Wanted A Dog. This guy makes a deal with God, and gets to keep his dog for the rest of his life. He gets to keep things the way the are. Sort of. I won’t spoil the ending for you.
So let’s pretend that I have the power, as the Wizard of Final Pie, to let you Be in a time and place of your fondest memory, and you get to keep things the way they were then and there. From now on, until you die. (A Wizard doesn’t have the power of immortality; let’s not get carried away.) You can be back with Gram and Gramps, your Uncle Fred, your dog TaterTot … the good old house with creaky floors, heavy paint on the windowsills, that big fireplace. You get to sleep in Grandma’s soft old bed, and eat pumpkin pie to your little heart’s content.
There’s a catch: You have to give up everything you’ve seen and felt, learned and earned since then. All the exploration and experience of all the years between – it never happened. Everyone you think you’ve met, you never met, never loved, never will. You will trapped in that beautiful time. Is it worth it? Would you do it?
Ponder that while the tryptophane wears off.
Peppermint Patty had to acquiesce, accept life on life’s terms – change as the only constant – that old saw. Wouldn’t you?
I love it. If you can’t them to warm up to your science, sue ’em ’til they can’t sit down.
White House Sued for Not Doing Report on Warming:
“Environmental advocates sued the Bush administration Tuesday for ignoring a 2004 congressional deadline to report to lawmakers and the public on the latest research on global warming.
A 1990 federal law requires the government to produce a scientific report every four years on climate change and its effects on the environment, including land, water, air, plant and animal life and human health.
The Clinton administration issued the first report in October 2000, warning of severe effects on different regions. But the Bush administration has not filed a report and has indicated it will not do so, environmentalists said in the suit filed in federal court in San Francisco. “
Whew. My Dell desktop computer died last night.
–I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all ––
I was just surfing around, McAfee antivirus supposedly working, when the system started running funny. Does it all the time. I rebooted, as I have a thousand times. Nuthin. No computer anymore. System 32 is corrupt or missing – major component of Windows. Wouldn’t start in safe mode or even find the BIOS.
Thanks to my brother Joe and the ancient minor miracle of long distance telephone, I’ve reinstalled Windows XP. Joe had the poop on how to do it – which is good because the instructions on the Microsoft Web site are nothing less colorful than complete bullshit. I now have a totally new OS, and of course everything on the computer is gone.
Thanks to me being one of those annoying people who just can’t live in the moment, most of it was backed up. Not all, but most. So if I see you downtown and seem oblivious, it’s not my fault. Data not found. So it goes.
Oh, and by the way, does anyone find it strange that a computer’s spellcheck doesn’t recognize the term BIOS?
It was on this day in 1940 that 75000 men were drafted into involuntary military service, on orders of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was the first peacetime draft in American History. Germany had overrun Poland and controlled much of western Europe. American needed an Army, Roosevelt believed, and the one we had was very small.
A fundamental difference between the 1940 draft and that of the Civil War was that rich men could no longer hire a replacement. This practice had sparked riots protesting the exploitation of the poor in 1863.
The draft ended in 1973, though I remember registering in 1979. And as far as I know, one must still register at age 18.
Today, a person still can’t hire a replacement if there is a draft. But those without the means or the inclination to seek a college education, or enter the private sector, may still find themselves seeking transitional employment in the Armed Forces, and thus subject to being fodder for Bush’s infernal misadventures. I believe this truth was illuminated by Senator Kerry in the recent election. The fact that he botched his “joke,” and that it is a tasteless truth, makes it no less the reality.
Stay in school, kids, or face death in the war on terr’r.
Which reminds me, the very fine poet Phillip Levine was interviewed by The New Yorker a few weeks ago, and said this about his poem Refusing to Serve – Dawn, 1952:
I remember Howard Moss [The New Yorker’s poetry editor from 1950 to 1987] saying to me, “Don’t you think we should call this ‘Conscientious Objector’?” And I said, “No, that would be inaccurate.” I was not a conscientious objector. I refused to serve. I was not a pacifist. And when asked that very question by the draft board, I said, “No, I could kill some people, but they’re all here in Detroit.”
It was a relatively long day; I got up a little early, which is always nice. And on longer days, you expect to see and hear a few more stupid things than usual. Still, when I heard the reason why ostensibly sane citizens killed this bear, I felt like I’d been up a week.
The bear wandered into town, so they tranquilized it. Then they killed him, instead of releasing him or holding him … why? Because they had tranquilized him. See, if they released him into the big woody woods with all those drugs in his system, and somebody shot him and ate him in the next two weeks, they might get sick. So rather than keep the poor thing in a cage for a while, or putting a collar on him saying, “don’t eat this, moron,” they simply committed ursacide. Bear murder.
It bears noting that this happened in Fillmore, where there was recently one of the largest brush fires in California history. Which might explain why the poor creature wandered into the killing fields.
A few lines from a new work in process …
By the way, there is a pitcher on top of the white hutch, where she keeps her dishes. The ones she uses for holidays, for when her sister comes. The pitcher was her mother’s and her grandmother brought it from Ireland wrapped in cheesecloth and stuffed with soft rags, among the quilts in a leathern trunk. She lives in a house too small for memories, so this is all she kept of them. Stoneware pale as milk, and chipped a little at its base.
If you stand at the edge of the field behind her house, at dawn of any fall or winter day, you’ll see the world through leaded glass. The Diablo Range with all that light behind it shifts and weaves. The mountains try to disappear; they hesitate to wake and stand for this. But she is up and moves about the house, forgetting things.
She intends to forget them all, and wait for death as someone might wait for a bus. Patiently, with no concern for time of day, but with an eye on the long road.
Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.
– P.J. O’Rourke
Baghdad’s morgues so full, bodies being turned away – CNN.com
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Baghdad’s morgues are full.With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.
Two thoughts. First, the director of the morgue is worried, the article implies, about whether his computer will "bear up" under the load. I rise and move we buy him a new one.
Second, these lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V:
I come to thee for charitable license,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To book our dead, and then to bury them;
To sort our nobles from our common men.
For many of our princes–woe the while!–
Lie drown’d and soak’d in mercenary blood;
… O, give us leave, great King,
To view the field in safety, and dispose
Of their dead bodies!
Metaphor 