Stray Thoughts & Observations

Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” but I think he was wrong. You can go home again, but then you get the hell out as soon as possible, just like I did when I was eighteen.

Last night a thought struck me: the similarity of the words martial and marital, I mean, just the placement of the “i.” So I came up with this: “If the eye wanders, marital blisses might become martial hisses.”

It was still dark when I drove to work this morning and the new moon was just up in the eastern sky, a tiny sliver of a jack-o-lantern smile right on the bottom of the gray-tinted full moon. Arizona is the only place I’ve ever been where you can see night skies and moons that look totally phony. Phony but beautiful.

A linguistic prude: “She was the kind of woman who’d call a mystery novel a whodidit.”

A thought I had about my writing and trying to sell what I’ve written: “It's like dropping stones in a pool of oil—not even a ripple as they sink into the depths, nothing to indicate they’ve ever been dropped.”

Two of the biggest coyotes we’ve ever seen wandered through our backyard this morning, sort of going through the back hedges, trying to scare up something edible. No luck in our yard, so they wandered down the property lines to the north. They certainly didn’t look very hungry. And that leads to the other side of the subject: residents who are so afraid of coyotes they call the State Wildlife to have them removed or trapped and killed. A few years ago there was an old Snow Bird who was walking her dog near Grand View, and she swears she and her dog were attacked by three young coyotes. So Fish and Game hired a private contractor to come in, trap the three, and kill them. How stupid. The coyotes in our city limits are part of the charm of SCW, and none of them would even bother to attack a resident. Now, tiny pets running loose are another matter. But they have an unlimited supply of natural game here, like millions of rabbits. Without the coyotes, owls, and hawks, we’d be up to our butts in rabbits. We need the coyotes, and we need to keep them here.

Another month nearly gone, like an arrow zipped toward Eternity (to borrow from Emily Dickinson), and the quiver is getting light.