Bits and Pieces

On one of our frequent visits to Red Lobster, I noticed a framed saying on the bathroom wall: “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist believes it will change; the realist resets his sails.” I think I’d like to add, “And the dreamer spreads his wings and rides on it.”

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.”

I described a round of golf I’d played a while back as “quicksand slow.” I wonder why they call it quicksand when one sinks into such a place at such a slow rate. I’ll have to look it up. I did and was unable to discover anything. But the more I think of “quick” the more I think it means “alive” (as in “the quick and the dead”) instead of “fast.” When one is sinking into quicksand, it would almost seem alive as it swallows you up. Yeah, that must be it.

James Lee Burke quote: “I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, I thought, we treat it as a decaying memory. At the same time, it’s the only measure of identity we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are.” I think that’s why I’m so preoccupied with my past, having to look back on it over and over, then write about it. I want to “keep it alive in order to remember” who I am. Thank you, James Lee Burke, for that thought.

I was up early early this morning, having to obey Charlie’s need to go out on the back patio. It was still dark when I went out to get the paper, and the new moon was just up in the eastern sky, a tiny sliver of a jack-oh-lantern smile of a new moon right on the bottom of the gray-tinted full moon. This is the only place I’ve ever been where one can see night skies and moons that look totally phony. Phony but beautiful.

Axioms & Parker's Spenser

“Axioms to Live By.” I found these in a little coffeeshop paper at the grocery store: 1. Going to a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. 2. My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance. 3. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. 4. For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program. 5. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks. 6. A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand. 7. Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places. 8. Opportunities always look bigger going than coming. 9. By the time you can make the ends meet, they move the ends. I love that first one about pseudo Christians and the last one about our inability to keep up with inflation.

Parker’s first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, was written in 1973 and the style was young and hardboiled, sort of like the stuff that McBain and MacDonald were writing in that era. Spenser was just as smart-mouthed then as he is now. And he loved to cook just as he does now. He mentioned that he was thirty-seven then. Thirty-nine years later he’d be seventy-six but he was depicted in the last novel as in his mid-forties. So I guess for the last thirty-nine years Spenser and the ageless Susan Silverman have been in a chronos crawl, aging about two months for every year. But the world they pass through has kept up with the times. In this first novel we meet Joe Broz, the gangster boss who shows up in quite a few books down the line. And we're introduced to Lt. Quirk and Belson, both of whom don’t have much time or fondness for Spenser. That would come later. What a good series that was . . . is, despite the untimeliness of the plot movement.

The Dogs of Babel

I was looking through my journals and found this I’d written about a novel I’d read eight years ago, The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst, a remarkably well-written book about a man whose wife has just been killed by falling from a high apple tree, the only witness to the tragedy being their dog Lorelei. So the man embarks on a project in which he will teach his dog how to talk, to let him know what he needs to know about his wife’s death.

But as to the writing, here are some quotes that just leaped out at me for their beauty and truth: “I was thirty-nine when I met Lexy. Before that, I was married for many years to a woman whose voice filled our house like a thick mortar, sealing every crack and corner. Maura, this first wife of mine, spoke so much while saying so little that I sometimes felt as if I were drowning in the heavy paste of her words.”

“All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. ‘When I get to Heaven,’ my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, ‘your grandfather won't even recognize me.’ ”

“How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it.”

“I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him. This is the true beginning.”

Through a series of flashbacks we learn more about the woman he married, this Lexy who made fabulous papier-mache masks in her basement. I can feel the depth of the man’s despair, trying to piece out the puzzle of his wife’s odd fall from the apple tree. I can empathize with his feeling for his dear sweet Lorelei, the dog who had to have his larynx removed in order to tell his master exactly what had happened to his wife.

What an unusual story and one that I’d recommend highly, now that I’ve remembered what it was like from eight years ago.

September 11

Tuesday, September 11, 2012. The eleventh anniversary of that awful event in New York when the Twin Towers went down. The new World Trade Center has one tower completed and the second, the Freedom Tower, scheduled to be completed in 2014. Our resilience after the attack in 2001 amazes me. Our dedication to see that nothing like it ever again happens amazes me. I hope most of the rest of the world notes our resilience and dedication and applauds us. And how do we stand with terrorists now? It seems to me that we’re much more alert and that the terrorist groups are much weaker. Can we afford to sit back and relax? Not on your life, not on all our lives. The world economy is about the only thing we need to worry about, and the next decade will probably show our economy and the world’s economy springing back. I hope so. I hope I live long enough to see peace in the world. I hope the world allows that to happen.

Love, Jerry

With the current rage for tweets and instant messages and texts and short notes on Facebook, there seems to be a trend away from the old niceties in letter writing. No one seems to have time to go into any detail in their correspondence, feeling obligated to use a minimum of characters and the annoying text shorthand ("LOL" especially annoying). And the old salutations and closures are now long gone. I was raised in a time when it was automatic to open any letter with a “Dear,” and close it with a “Yours truly” or a “Sincerely” or, when it was to a friend or relative, a “Love.” Now people are too uncomfortable to use that closure, instead opting for nothing but a name. People think I really mean I love them when I close with a “Love.” In many cases I do, but I don’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable when I say it at the end of a letter. It’s just the way I was taught in my youth. The “Dear” in the salutation doesn’t really mean I hold the recipient “dear” in my heart. The “Love” in the closing doesn’t mean I’m hot for the recipient. It’s just a nice way to open and close a letter. So, dear readers out there, I’ll close this blog with a “Love, Jerry.”

Show Time

I saw three movies this week, two recent flicks in a theater and one oldie on the tube. I’m not quite sure what I saw in Branded. I know it was satirizing our gluttony for fast foods (especially huge burgers) and our alarming increase in obesity, our falling like druggies under the influence of advertising agencies. I know it was set mainly in Moscow although I’m not sure why it needed to be. I know Leelee Sobieski looks and sounds enough like Helen Hunt to be her twin (except for a rather prominent nose). There. That’s all I know about this extremely puzzling film.

Earlier, I saw Celeste and Jesse Forever, and I understood this one although it also saddened me with its portrayal of found and lost love. I kept seeing parallels to (500) Days of Summer, especially in Rashida Jones’ physical similarity to Zooey Deschanel from (500) Days. But the two flipflop as losers and winners. Celeste (Rashida Jones) is like Joseph Gordon-Levitt from (500) Days, both of whom have lost love and then find love. Celeste too must accept the loss of the husband/friend/lover Jesse (Andy Samberg) when they finally divorce and get on with their lives. I thought Celeste and Jesse Forever was well worth seeing, though not quite as good as (500) Days.

And finally, we sat through the three hours of The Green Mile, with Tom Hanks, David Morse and Michael Clarke Duncan and enjoyed it despite the length and the too typically Stephen King reliance on supernatural elements (the cloud of flies from John Coffey's mouth). The news of Duncan’s death this week saddened us as we watched his performance as the giant John Coffey. But Hanks (as Paul Edgecomb, the humane head guard in Block E), Morse (as Brutus Howell, another prison guard), Sam Rockwell (as the completely disgusting Wild Bill Wharton), Doug Hutchinson (as the hateful psycho Percy Wetmore), and Mr. Jingles (as himself) were a delight. We liked it so much we’re now going to find and see another King story about life in prison, The Shawshank Redemption with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.

Trumpets

Trumpets have been a part of our lives for all of our lives. Rosalie’s family all played trumpet, and all very well. Her dad played in a band for most of his life, son Bill played well into adulthood, daughters Kaye and Rosalie played trumpet in the high school band and the Mobridge city band, and son Gene played trumpet and French horn in high school. Then there’s me. I took up the instrument when I was in seventh or eighth grade, a cornet instead of a trumpet, and I wasn’t very good at it. I just didn’t want to practice enough to get better than mediocre. I even quit the high school band at the end of my junior year. I was more into listening to people who played the trumpet than doing it myself. Harry James was the preeminent player in the Thirties and Forties, with a cool style that fit the big bands of that era. But I was also a fan of Bobby Hackett and his fat little trumpet, with his oh so sweet sound when he played with several prominent bands back then, the best-known of which were Glenn Miller and Jackie Gleason. I could always tell it was Bobby when I heard him on the radio, recognizing that fluid, vibratoless sound. But I was also into jazz, especially the progressive jazz of Stan Kenton, who had any number of great trumpet players—Pete Condoli, Conte Condoli, and Maynard Ferguson with his soaring, stratospheric notes. I once owned a Kenton album that featured several members of the band, tracks written solely for the individual. Ferguson had one that I can still hear in my inner ear, a slow beginning that wound up with unbelievable notes so high they almost squealed. I’ve tried to find that track just to listen to it again and see if it went the way I remembered, but it’s nowhere to be found. I was never a big fan of the muted trumpet of Chet Baker, although I could recognize him every time, especially when he also sang in that quiet little voice of his. Only two trumpeters come to mind in the last thirty or forty years—Doc Severinson, with The Johnny Carson Tonight Show, and Chris Botti with his quiet, silky commercial style. A few years ago I dug my old cornet out from under the bed, had it refurbished, and gave it to Mike’s son William, so he could play it in his school band. William will be the trumpet standard bearer for the Travis/Zimmer family. And we wish him luck.

Song Intro & Men of a Certain Age

Sorry about beating this old dead horse, but how could I have forgotten this long intro when I was writing about the lost art of musical intros? Ira Gershwin did it again:

There's a saying old, says that love is blind.
Still we're often told, "seek and ye shall find."
So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind.
Looking everywhere, haven't found him yet.
He's the big affair I cannot forget.
Only man I ever think of with regret.
I'd like to add his initial to my monogram.
Tell me, where is the shepherd for this lost lamb?

And then, of course:
There's a somebody I'm longin' to see . . .

Another dead horse, Men of a Certain Age, but I think this one should be resuscitated. I bought the first season of this show because I wanted to have it to see now and again what real television drama is all about. Ray Romano, how could you have let them cancel your show? This series had the most complex plot lines and the fullest, richest set of characters of anything on the tube. Each hour segment examined the three “men”— the love life of Terry (Scott Bakula), the aging Lothario, sometime actor; Owen (Andre Braugher), the overweight, put-upon car salesman at his father’s dealership; and Joe (Ray Romano), the owner of a party supply store who dreams of making it on the senior golf tour but who is still fighting a compulsion to gamble. Talk about intricate plot lines. My next question, when TNT cancelled the show, why didn’t one of the other networks pick it up? Instead, we’re treated to stupid reality show after stupid reality show. Come on, Ray, push it at NBC or CBS until one of them brings it back.

Cell Phone Throw & Election

I just saw that a young Finn, Ere Karjalainen, had won the world mobile-phone throw with a record- setting 332’ 9” toss. I didn’t know there was such an event, but I applaud it. I think it should be included in the Olympics in Rio in 2016. I wonder if there’s more than one category, like one for the old-fashioned cell phone and one for the larger, flatter I-phone. I can just see the flat one being launched across water to see how many times it would skip. Maybe that could be a separate event, counting the water skips. Maybe there should be one to see how far contestants can throw compulsive texters and automobile cell phone users. I’d really applaud that one.

The Democrats converge in Charlotte tomorrow to cheer on their presidential hopeful. According to recent polls, Romney and Obama are tied at 45%. But there should be a modest bump in Obama’s camp after the convention. I really believe that he’ll win in November because of Michelle Obama. Nearly as much as her husband, she is a great speaker and a very charming person. She’ll be the one who will sway the women voters still on the fence. Two months to go. I’m weary of this long, drawn out process and can’t wait for it to be over. I’m sure most of us are. Of all rest of this campaign, I’m looking forward to the debates. I don’t see how Romney can win any points in a faceoff with Obama. That shouldn’t be what we use to decide our vote, but it often is. In a past before up-close-and-personal television, we had to make up our minds on what we knew or what the newspapers told us, but almost never until JFK did we cast our vote on how the candidates looked or spoke. We live in a new world where money and appearance count for more than substance.

Presidential Politics Redux

I wrote the following last January, but in light of where we are now, GOP Convention ending and Democratic Convention about to begin,I think it bears repeating.

Couple of stats I find interesting. MSNBC reports that thus far $160 million has been spent on negative campaign ads, and $17 million on positive ads [and this number waaaay higher now than then]. Hmmm, seems a little disproportionate to me. And this regarding the numbers who question Barack Obama’s citizenship (You remember the Trumpster’s claim?): 17% of the American people, 23% of registered Republicans. I wouldn’t have thought we had that many truly stupid people living here.

And as long as I’m being politically offensive, I might as well repeat what I said a few months ago. If Obama loses this year and is a one-term president, then whichever GOP nominee wins [and I can now say Mitt Romney is the one], he too will be a one-termer because he too won’t have fixed our nation’s ills. And guess what will happen in 2016: Hillary Clinton will become the first female president in U.S. history. There, write it down.

Sucker Traps

You can’t get something for nothing unless you bought a lottery ticket and defied the billion to one odds to win $347 million. It’s taken me a lifetime of lessons before I learned that nothing is free. For example, at least three times I’ve been suckered by an e-mail that tells me I’ve won a 50-inch tv set or a laptop computer or a $500 meal voucher at Red Lobster or Olive Garden. I’d go to the website, ever the naïve optimist, and all I had to do was answer a few questions and then the prize would be mine. Actually, the questions were a poll of my preferences, followed by the offer to buy something or subscribe to one or more magazines. I’d politely decline all the offers and a message would coax me onward with just a few more questions before I could claim my prize. Each time I’d decline and click the “continue” button, only to discover that there was another page of questions and requests to buy. After going through this process five or six times, I’d realize I’d been scammed. I was never going to get what they were offering. But I fell for it three times. Another example. We got a flier from Arrowhead Honda in the mail, with three scratch-off boxes. If any of the boxes matched the magic number, we were winners. Naturally, one of the boxes matched up with the winning numbers. The prizes were a new car, $5,000, a 55” Sony 3-D tv, a Sony Vaio touch screen pc, a 64 gigabyte iPad, or a $500 Target gift card. Hey! Okay, we won at least $500! Right? Wrong. In looking more carefully at the prize description, I noticed that the Target gift card was “up to $500.” It’s the “up to” that gets you. Guess what, every one of the fliers would have the wining number, and when some poor sucker like me, who didn’t read the fine print, went to Arrowhead Hondo for his prize, he’d find that after a typical hard-sell from one of the salesmen, he’d won a $10 Target gift card. See, even though you got ten bucks, you had to pay for it with your precious time listening to the hard sell. You can’t get something for nothing. Lesson learned. Pass it on.

Obesity Again

Obesity again. I had breakfast this morning and ordered two eggs, home fries, sausage patty, and one pancake. It was enough for two of me. Yet, good little pig that I am, I managed to eat most of it. What I really needed was one egg, half a helping of potatoes, half a sausage patty, and a very small pancake. But is that on the menu? No. The same thing holds true of nearly every restaurant in this country. We need a menu that gives us the option of half portions of everything. We go out to Black Angus or Outback or Red Lobster and get a huge salad, buttered dinner rolls, and a chicken pasta something or a steak and baked potato, and by the time we get to the end of it, we’re stuffed . . . just like the many obese pigs we see around us. The U.S. is now 25% obese with the Southern states weighing in at 30% to 35% obese. Fat folks just everywhere, waddling along with the help of walkers or riding in a store-supplied motor cart, fat butts just barely fitting in the seat. And they’re usually followed by fat balls of children waddling along behind. I realize that many restaurants have what’s called a senior menu, with slightly smaller portions, but we need all restaurants to offer half-size portions, maybe even quarter-size portions. We need to lose some national weight. We need to get that percentage of obeasties (no, that's not a misspelling) down to 10% or lower.

Mitt Romney

Okay, Mitt, so no one’s ever asked to see your birth certificate. But what about your tax returns? It seems to me that when I pay a far greater portion of my annual income than you do, I deserve to see if it’s really 13% or something far smaller. The man is worth a quarter of a billion dollars, and he speaks of his 13% with disdainful pride. Come on, Mitt, show me the money. I want to see if you’re telling the truth or simply lying out of ignorance. And speaking of ignorance, are you really aligning yourself with people like Joe Arpaio on the birther issue? That takes a degree of ignorance that frightens me. Two other issues that this election raises: the argument for limiting campaign funds spent, especially on the presidential level; and the argument for a popular vote instead of the Electoral College for deciding our next president. Anyone in an undecided state can feel comfort that their vote will actually count, but those of us in states that are already in one camp or the other feel that our vote is useless if we’re not on the state’s side. I want my vote to have some value no matter where I live.

Old Joke

Here's a long version of a very old joke, but even lengthened it's funny as hell. Thanks, Larry.

One day a man decided to retire...

He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.

He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.

In disbelief, he asks,"Where did you come from? How did you get here?"

She replies, "I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank."

"Amazing," he notes. "You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you."
"Oh, this thing?" explains the woman."I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree."

"But, where did you get the tools?"

"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. "On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron and I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware."

The guy is stunned.

"Let's row over to my place," she says "and I'll give you a tour." So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat. Before him is a long stone walk leading to a cabin and tree house.

While the woman ties up the row boat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Please sit down. Would you like a drink?"

"No! No thank you," the man blurts out, still dazed. "I can't take another drop of coconut juice."

"Oh it's not coconut juice," winks the woman. "I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There's a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs."

No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.

"This woman is amazing," he muses. "What's next?" When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias. She then beckons for him to sit down next to her.

"Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, "We've both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely. When was the last time you played around? She stares into his eyes.

He can't believe what he's hearing."You mean . . ." he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes, "you've built a GOLF COURSE?"

The Odd Life of Timothy Green

The Odd Life of Timothy Green was indeed odd. Odd, but satisfying in a “what-to-do-this-afternoon” way. In some ways it was a cousin to Moonrise Kingdom, more fairy tale than realistic look at life. But where Moonlight Kingdom never varied from its unreality, Odd Life mixed the two unsuccessfully. It’s the story of a little boy digging out of a garden to fulfill the dreams of a couple unable to have children of their own. And what a cute little boy he is. C. J. Adams arrives complete with a sharp 10-year-old intelligence, a charm that wins over nearly everyone, and lovely green leaves sprouting from his ankles. And leaves seem to be the predominant image, New England fall colors almost overpowering the viewer. A charming story, a charming boy. And, of course, there’s Jennifer Garner, whom I fell in love with for her kick-ass Alias role. But even my love for her couldn’t make up for the silliness of some of the scenes—the totally unrealistic soccer match, the “never gonna happen” music recital in the home of Jennifer’s sister, the gorgeous but silly leaf cathedral Timothy and Joni create in the forest. The rest is teary and predictable, but that’s okay for a “nothing-else-to-do” afternoon. I’ll remember Moonrise Kingdom far longer than Odd Life.

Frank Sinatra

Last night we watched an old Sinatra concert on PBS, Concert for the Americas in Guatemala in 1982 with fourth wife Barbara in attendance (first Nancy, then Ava Gardner, then Mia Farrow). It was wonderful although shortened from the original so the PBS hucksters could get in their annoying plugs to get us to donate to the network or buy overpriced cd’s and dvd’s. I’m a huge Sinatra fan, almost compulsively so. For example, I own 63 albums with over a thousand tracks (not counting the many different versions of one song on various cd’s). I even put together a booklet listing alphabetically all the songs, listing all the albums with dates and orchestras and arrangers. He was 67 when he did this concert in Guatemala, just past his vocal prime but still very very good. His voice changed over the years. When he was with Dorsey and a bobbysoxer sensation in the Forties, his voice was reedy, good but not as good as it would become. There were a bunch of silly musical films until he dropped out of sight for a while. Then along came From Here to Eternity in 1953 when he played Pvt. Angelo Maggio, a role for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor. Lots of films followed, most notably The Man with the Golden Arm, The Manchurian Candidate, and Guys and Dolls. I remember him most vividly when I was in New York in 1955 and went to see him star opposite Doris Day in Young at Heart. There he was, this skinny, hollow-cheeked singer, making me a believer with “One More for the Road.” As with a bunch of movies, I saw Young at Heart at least three times, watched him sing for the road three times, watched him try to kill himself in a car wreck three times. Compulsive, you say? I guess.

Sinatra’s career as actor and singer took off again, only this time with a no longer reedy-thin voice. The booze and cigarettes and advancing years deepened it, enriched it. He made a string of successful albums with Capitol Records before going on his own in 1961 with Reprise Records. He was probably best from about 1954 to 1975. After that the cigarettes did their thing and his voice rattled a bit. But the style and the timing were still there. No other singer I can think of has such impeccable timing. He might take a phrase and draw it out and then catch up with the orchestra. The band for other singers who try this stalling device, either deliberately or not deliberately, have to slow down to wait for the singer. Not with Sinatra. He always knows where the band is. He knows every orchestral nuance of every arrangement. Barbra might be the only other one who can do what he does. Maybe that’s why these two are my favorite singers of all time.

One-Room Schoolhouses

This is from the last issue of the Mobridge Tribune in a section about one-room schoolhouses of the past. A smattering of questions from an eighth-grade final exam given to students in Kansas in 1895: 1. Give rules for the principal marks of punctuation. 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 ft long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 3. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. of coal at $6 per ton. 4. Name important events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865. 5. What are the following and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals. 6. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers. 7. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Eighth-graders, 1895. Granted, students today have much more to learn than those back in 1895, but I wonder what these test questions say about expectations back then compared to expectations today. Interesting, yes?

Some other interesting facts about these little prairie schools in the Midwest.
In Memoirs of South Dakota Retired Teachers, Floyd Cocking recalled his first year at Pringle School in Custer County, South Dakota: "It seems we were to teach about six or eight subjects to each grade level. . . . That would make twenty-five or thirty classes a day during a period from eight till three. Could you believe our shortest class was only five minutes? That was spelling. And our longest was twenty minutes. That was because I believe in a good math background. Some other doubling up had to be done so I put the fifth and sixth grades together in the same class for history the first semester and covered the fifth grade work. The second semester we did the sixth grade work."

How in the world did these teachers manage to get everything done? How did they manage to make out as many lessons plans as they'd need every day for eight different grade levels all in the same room? I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must have been.

Hope Springs

I thought Hope Springs would be a romantic comedy, especially with Steve Carell in the cast. It was a dramedy with occasional chuckles but no laughs, nor were any laughs intended. It was a movie about a marriage on the brink of disaster, a quiet disaster, yes, but even though the fall wouldn’t be more than ten feet, it would result in death for both occupants. The marriage gets saved by Carell, a well-known sex therapist in Great Hope Springs, Maine, a charming village on the Atlantic coast. Meryl Streep, who looks like she put on about twenty pounds for the role, is the unhappy wife, and she’s excellent with her confused smiles and eye flickers. Tommy Lee Jones may have been miscast as the uncaring, unfeeling husband. His bloodhound ugliness seemed too much for him to be married to the still lovely Streep. I could more easily see Liam Neeson or Bruce Willis, or even Steeep’s old co-star in It’s Complicated, Alec Baldwin. But Baldwin would have been too recently paired with Streep for the audience to accept him. I found some of the sex therapy exercises uncomfortable for me as well as Streep and Jones. Thus, the few chuckles. But compared to too many modern films with explicit sex scenes, both comedic as well as dramatic, this one was acceptable. The rift between the couple, after thirty-one years of marriage, may have been too wide to be believed. They no longer touched, kissed, or slept together. Each morning she would dutifully get up ahead of her husband and cook exactly one egg and one slice of bacon before he got up to go to work. No kiss, hardly a goodbye. He returned each evening to a silent dinner before retiring to the den to watch golf instruction. Then they would go to bed, each to a separate room, each with door closed. No kiss, no goodnight. She finally took it in her hands (the plan, not his phallus) and booked a trip to Maine for both of them to see Carell. The rest is history.

Olympics Close

The London Olympics are over and we’re having withdrawal symptoms. Next stop Rio. I hope I make it another four years. Looking back on these games, despite my reservations about the opening ceremonies (reservations apparently not shared by most of the other viewers), these games were the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a bunch. London and all you people of the UK should be very proud of what a show you put on. The security forces we were all so afraid might be needed were totally inconspicuous. London was beautiful. All the venues for the various events were beautiful. The weather was untypically beautiful. All the participants were beautiful—friendly, well-spoken, gracious in defeat as well as victory, open-minded across divisive national boundaries. My only wish is that the media would stop reporting the medal count by nation. No nation needs to rub it in to the other, less medaling nations. Maybe in four years they’ll stop doing it for the Rio Games.

Jared Loughner et al

Steve Benson, now you’ve done it. Now you’ll have every Arizona gun nut taking a long hard look at you. And they’ll all be totin' guns. Their argument goes like this: If everyone in that crowd listening to Gabby Giffords had been carrying, Jared Loughner would have been toast after his first shot. Of course, there may have been fifteen or twenty dead from collateral damage, but that’s the price we have to pay to put an end to the M-15 crazies.

Loughner’s guilty plea comes after twenty months of legal maneuvering and courtroom antics. He’ll serve life with no probation. Free room and board, clothing, medical treatment, television, movies, books—all the amenities of lazy living. Granted, he won’t have his freedom, but life for him will be mainly carefree. And the cost to the public for keeping him? Depending on the state, the annual cost varies from around $50,000 (California) to $13,000 (Louisiana) for an average around $30,000. Arizona averages $25,000. Assuming Loughner will live into his eighties, that’s around sixty years at $25,000 a year, a total of about a million and a half bucks for a man described at his early booking as "smirking and creepy, with hollow eyes ablaze." In most cases, I’m not a proponent of the death penalty. I know the threat of execution doesn’t deter people from committing murder. But some murders are more heinous than others. And Jared Loughner in Tucson and James Holmes in Aurora and Wade Michael Page in Wisconsin and Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and all the others who commit such senseless acts all fit the heinous label. I say, just kill them. I don’t think that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Storing them in tiny, cold, windowless cells would be cruel. Daily waterboarding would be cruel and spiteful. Stretching them daily on a rack would be cruel and barbaric. Bamboo spikes under the nails would be cruel and silly. But a lethal injection would be just and satisfying. One eye for the numerous eyes each took. That would be Biblically just.

Heat Wave, Uff Da, & Olympics

Uff da! It’s really hot here in the Valley. Not that it isn’t always hot in the Valley in August, but this is hot even for Arizona. Soon, though, it will be September and the days will cool off a bit. The rest of the country is still baking, still without rain and still with temps way above average. I heard a weatherperson state that this year the U.S. averaged 3.3 degrees higher than normal. Now that’s a huge difference between 2012 and the average. No wonder the ice is melting north and south. I hope this doesn’t foreshadow the beginning of the end. Uff da! Not a pleasant thought. Which leads me to that curious Norwegian expression that was part of my upbringing in South Dakota. Anyone from North or South Dakota, Minnesota or Wisconsin knows what uff da means. Sort of a nice Norse way of saying “Oh shit!” These examples are from a website about this expression: Uff da is . . . discovering that your male dog is pregnant, forgetting your mother-in-law's first name, dropping your only egg on the floor, or eating hot soup when you've got a runny nose. Uff da!

The Olympics is winding down and I must confess I’m looking forward to the closing ceremonies. I’ve been watching the synchronized swimming, both pairs and teams, and the team rhythmic gymnastics, and couldn’t help but wonder what an alien observer would say about these curious activities. Probably something like this: “What in the world are these humans doing? Are these tributes to their gods, the twirling ribbons, the tossed pink balls?” And if we were to make it to an inhabited planet and observe the aliens, would they be doing equally strange things? Actually, I guess they’d be the inhabitants and we’d be the aliens.

Olympic Observations

After the women's gymnastics were over, Bob Costas interviewed Bela Kurolyi about what Kurolyi thought of the Fab Five compared to the Magnificent Seven from the 1996 Games in Atlanta. He spoke so fast and in that heavy Romanian accent that I could barely understand what he said. The man has been in this country for over thirty years and yet he speaks English like a recent arrival. That's unforgivable. I'd be willing to bet that with total linguistic immersion I could speak Romanian almost like a native. So why can't he? Because he's either lazy or he's inconsiderate.

I'm watching water polo and wondering why all the men have to wear those tiny suits that dispaly half their butts. And why do the women have to wear those suits that look like they're giving them water wedgies? 'Tis a mystery.

South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius, nicknamed "Blade Runner," made it through his first prelimary race in the 400 meters but placed last in the semi-finals. How odd to see him racing along on those metal feet. How odd that some of his competitors thought they gave him an unfair advantage over biological legs. How much he's to be commended for his efforts.

Stand on Zanzibar

Last week's Time had an article on Mormon polygamy, featuring a man who looked like he was in his early forties, with three comely wives a bit younger than he. The article was questioning the practice of having more than one wife at a time. I have no problem with a man or woman having more than one wife or husband. I have no problem with same-sex marriages. The man's wives all said they were happy with the arrangement. Then, the article went on to say, 18 of his 23 children were living with him. That raises two questions: Why were five of his children living apart from him and what could possess anyone to breed just for the sake of multiplying? How selfish. How thoughtless. The world now has over seven billion people, and we're still marching toward John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, where Brunner envisioned a world with too many inhabitants to find a place to stand on the island of Zanzibar. Shoulder to shoulder, squeezed together and yet some would still be standing in the water offshore. If we continue to breed like rabbits, or like the man and his three wives, the current novel might be called Stand on Africa. There may have been a time in the distant past when it was necessary to "go forth and multiply," just to preserve humanity. That need is long past, yet we still have people who selfishly procreate just because it feels so good, or because their religion tells them to do it. I say, Bah!

London Olympics

National pride in winning individual medals in the Olympics is good. Thumping chests regarding total medals won is not. The rest of the world doesn’t want to see daily how China and the U.S. are winning more medals than anyone else. I can’t help but think that such news creates resentment instead of admiration. Why not lay off the national totals and concentrate on individual accomplishments instead. That’s what the games are all about.

Higher, faster, stronger . . . and taller. Have you noticed how tall so many of the Olympic participants are? With the possible exception of the gymnasts, everyone else seems to be gargantuan. How big will the contestants be in the 2052 Games? Or, in the 2100 Games? I can’t begin to imagine.

Richard Engel & D-Backs BB

Richard Engel, get your butt out of Syria! You’ll probably be the next major newscaster for NBC and we don’t want you getting killed in that awful place being devastated by rebel forces and Assad’s military forces. It’s incomprehensible what’s happening in that country. How can the two sides continue to kill each other and destroy their cities? For that matter, where have all the citizens of those bombed out cities gone and how are they now existing? The world is watching. We all want to know when this madness will end.

I went to Chase Field Sunday to see the DBacks/Mets game on a tour bus with almost fifty others from Sun City West and Sun City. The bus was brand new and gorgeous and the ride was quick and easy. I’d been to Chase only once back when it was Bank One Ballpark, so this was nearly a new experience for me. I thought my seat was going to be reasonably close to the action but I was wrong. I was on the right field side far enough away that I couldn’t tell what was going on until a batter hit it somewhere. And even then, I had a hard time picking up the ball in the air until one of the outfielders caught it. Not a good way to watch baseball. My impressions of Chase? It’s a beautiful facility with natural turf, air-conditioning, a swimming pool, lights everywhere, big screen in center field to let us know what was going on. More impressions: It was almost too chilly at 76°; the seats were very close together, making it a toe-stepping chore to get out to an aisle; at least 4 out of 5 people didn’t have a clue what was going on, which leads me to the question, Why would anyone pay an average of $30-40 to go sit and chat, eat and drink, and not pay any attention to the baseball game? There was too much commotion up and down the aisles of people selling stuff, people carrying trays of purchased stuff to stuff themselves with. I think this will be the last game I attend at Chase. Much easier to enjoy the game on tv.

London Opening Ceremonies

At best the London Olympics opening ceremonies were underwhelming, and that’s an understatement. At worst, they were sort of boring and inconsequential. Most reviewers said they thought it was a great opening, certainly not as spectacular as the opening in Beijing, but a credit to Danny Boyle, who put it all together. I kept wondering how the people in the stadium would have reacted to the chaos below. If they didn’t have large tv screens to watch, they’d have been lost. The segment with all the nurses and beds, the children dreaming about their favorite literary heroes, was jumbled and hard to follow. I love the theme from Chariots of Fire, but I hated what the opening did with it, a mockery of the Olympians’ run on the beach with comic actor Rowan Atkinson doing the mocking. Then there was that strange musical love story with multicolored dancers going crazy to the music of assorted British rock groups, with the girl and boy sort of wandering around among the dancing and fireworks. How would the stadium viewers have made any sense of it? The people of Great Britain would hate what I’ve just said about their opening ceremonies, but so be it. I wasn’t impressed.

So You Think You Can Dance

I keep waving the flag for So You Think You Can Dance, and here I go again. The format for this season is much simpler than in past seasons—only one two-hour show a week without the cumbersomeness of the one-hour results show the next night, as American Idol has done and continues to do. All dancers perform and at the conclusion, we hear the result of the voting from the preceding week with three males and three females announced as the bottom three in the voting. The judges, with input from the choreographers, then tell us which four are saved and which two are dropped. If they’re not yet sure, the judges can ask one or more of the dancers to dance solos. This method is so much superior to what Idol does. And the judges for SYTYCD know so much more about what they’re judging than the odd bunch on Idol (and yes, Randy, I mean you). Nigel Lythgo, executive producer of both Dance and Idol, and Mary Murphy are the two regulars with a guest judge from theater or television to fill out the three. And all three invariably speak from their extensive knowledge of dance. If you haven’t yet tuned in to SYTYCD, you should give it a try. You’ll be blown away by the skill and beauty of the dancers, the beauty of the choreography and lighting and music. Check out this video to see what I mean.

SiriusXM

We bought a new KIA Optima a month ago and only yesterday did I discover that one of the perks for the purchase was a three-month trial subscription to SiriusXM, the satellite radio signal that goes directly to your car or I-phone or computer, 130 different stations ranging from all genres of music to sports talk to comedy to national and world news. It’s intriguing but what am I going to do with another way to access music and news? I finally got a car that plays mp3 cd’s, so I can now load about 150 tracks and listen to them on shuffle. I already watch more tv sports than I can handle. And I have an I-Pod that holds 1500 tracks. In order to make the automobile SiriusXM worthwhile, I’d have to spend most of my days traveling to and from work or taking extensive cross-country trips. I no longer go to work and we’re both done with long trips. How can people keep up with the barrage of sights and sounds that television and I-Pods and cell phones and texting and instant messaging throw at them? I have over 13,000 music tracks on my computer. I have thousands of read and unread books in my library. I have well over a hundred tv channels to watch. Do I really need another device that adds to that barrage of things to see and listen to? I don’t think so.

Jewel Guns & Negative Ads

In the wake of the shooting in Aurora, gun sales are spiking, not only in Colorado but all over the country. I guess OK Corral isn’t that far off. Are those now buying guns first-time gun owners or are they just building up their arsenals? If they’re first-timers, what do they plan to do with their new purchases? Carry them all the time, keeping a wary eye over shoulders in case some gun-wielding bad guy is creeping up on them? That’s a scary scenario. Are those who already own guns simply adding more in case they have to flee to some deep-woods hideaway? I agree with Baby Blues, “A jewel gun is the only good kind of gun.”

The nightly news last night reported that all the negative ads coming out from both Obama and Romney are having a negative effect on popularity polls. I think that if either of them simply came out with a national statement that he would no longer engage in negative campaigning, a huge chunk of voters would be so happy to hear it that they’d pledge their votes to that candidate. I know I would.

Caterwaul

Why am I so compelled to put words on paper? Or in this case, put words on a blog? I can’t stop thinking in potential sentences. Even my dreams have begun to be long dramatic scenes and stories. Blog readers, whoever you are, have you noticed all the links I’ve sprinkled here and there? I now have twenty separate blog sites, all linked in a chain of titles. At the top of my blog description for Doggy-Dog World, you can click on “My Stories” and it will direct you to the story sites. Or you can click on my latest blog, “The Caterwaul,” in which I speak stream-of-consciousnessly about anything that strikes my fancy without worrying too much about how well I’ve said it or whether anyone would be interested in my wanderings. Words, words, and more words. The writing and the novel reading are what keep me sane. Some would argue that last word might better be insane.

Nutcase Two & Olympics

Well, we now have another Arizona nutcase embarrassing us Arizonans with silly statements. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his continued attempts to prove that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen is nutcase number one. And now, nutcase number two. Former Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce spoke out after the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, suggesting that if we didn’t have gun laws prohibiting people from carrying defensive weapons, the shooter in the theater might have been stopped before many people were killed. Can’t you just see it? A masked man in full body armor appears, throws a canister of tear gas, then starts firing into the crowd. Suddenly, three hundred members of the audience stand with guns drawn, firing at the bad guy in a kind of lunatic OK Corral scenario. Bullets flying everywhere. No one knowing any longer who the bad guys are. Cops arrive and also don’t know who’s good and who’s bad and start shooting at anyone with a gun. Instead of twelve dead, we might have had hundreds. Russell Pearce, you’re an idiot.

The London Olympics begin this weekend . . . with thousands of police and soldiers for security. Isn’t it sad that events like the Olympics, doing what it does to promote peace and understanding between nations and people, should be held captive by terrorists whose only motive is to kill anyone who doesn’t believe as they do? More people have died from religion than from all other causes combined. I look forward to the events, especially the swimming and gymnastics. Can Michael Phelps win more gold or will his rival Ryan Lochte beat him out? Can’t wait to find out. I also want to watch Lolo Jones run the hurdles. Am I interested in the women's hurdles? No. I'm just interested in watching Lolo Jones.

Aurora Shooting & Open III

Why does anyone need a rifle designed to fire 100 rounds per minute? Why do we still allow people to buy such a weapon? What are the NRA gun nuts thinking? Do they really feel the need to go hunting with this thing and what kind of game would require that sort of firepower? Or do they feel the need to have one for self-defense? If the latter, then please don't let me get anywhere near such a self-defensive crackpot. Why don't our laws prevent anyone from buying 6,000 rounds of amunition? Or at least have such a purchase send out a red flag to law enforcement? Too many questions, too few answers.

Saturday at the Open. Tiger looked like he was going to have a repeat of what he did in the third round of the U.S. Open, blow it bigtime. He bogeyed two of his first four holes, but then righted the ship to finish five back of Adam Scott, still within range, especially if the wind gets up on Sunday. His putter is just not Tiger-like. He missed at least three putts that he'd have made in the old days. But that's what happens when the years start piling up: the hands just aren't as confident as they were in our optimistic youth. I hope he can still win it, but he's never come back from five behind and I doubt he'll do it this time either.

People & Open II

My apologies to anyone who may have read any of my movie reviews that included spoilers, especially to Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, who let me know my error right between the eyes. In the case of People Like Us, there really wasn’t a spoiler about the two main characters being half-siblings. That was revealed almost from the beginning of the movie. It was only I and my hopeless romanticism that wanted them somehow to find a romantic connection. The film would have been worth it if only for the Six Rules that Sam had gotten from his father and then passed on to Josh, Frankie’s son. And without spoiling anything, the way it was all resolved was special, and jerked a tear or two. Two aspects of the plot bother me, though: Can a recovering alcoholic work as a bar tender without falling off the wagon over and over? And why is it that so many young actors have a perennial two-day beard? Do women actually find that attractive? In my youth, girls were always complaining about whisker burn after some serious necking. Yet today, nearly all leading men and nearly all male sports figures have that same two-day beard. They must all shave with an electric razor set for that length. Please, someone, enlighten me. Enough about People Like Us. Go see it

Day Two of the Open. Tiger shot another tactically efficient round, a 67 highlighted by his hole-out from the bunker on 18. None of the announcers has even mentioned that of the four par-5’s he’s played, he’s birdied one, parred two, and bogeyed the par-5 eleventh in his round today. That’s most unusual. He’ll get back on his par-5 track tomorrow. He’ll be in the penultimate group with a young man from Denmark, Thorbjorn Olesen, who’ll get a taste of Tiger heat and Tiger gallery feeding frenzy. Good luck with that, young Mr. Olesen. Brandt Snedeker is leading at minus 10 with Adam Scott right behind at minus 9. But Tiger is there, waiting to pounce. And if the wind picks up as is forecast, almost anything can happen to scores on the weekend. Here’s a list of prominent players who didn’t make the cut: Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose, Charl Schwartzel, Stewart Cink, Martin Kaymer, Robert Allenby, Darren Clarke, Lucas Glover Angel Cabrera, and Phil Mickleson. And just look at who made the cut: a 62-year-old Tom Watson. Take that, all you young guns.

People Like Us & The Open

We decided to see People Like Us despite the luke-warm reviews, and we both liked it, just as we so often do when we see films with critically luke-warm reviews. Most reviewers took issue with the sort of sleazy character Chris Pine portrayed for the first half of the movie, sort of a fast-talking loser who didn’t want to return to California for his father’s funeral. But he turned it around by the end. I, like a lot of viewers, were wondering how they could possibly resolve the seeming romantic attachment Sam (Chris Pine) had with someone he knew to be his half-sister. I kept thinking that somehow it would be revealed that Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) wasn’t really Jerry Harper’s daughter, that they would surprisingly come together like Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember. Not to be. But that would have been too trite a solution anyway. We both thought it was quite a bit better than Roger Ebert and others had suggested.

Eleven hours of British Open coverage, beginning at 1:30 a.m. That’s early. And that’s a lot of coverage. So I had my dvr record the first four hours, than got up at 5:30 to watch what I’d saved. Good. Tiger was just teeing off when I started watching. And the day was much better than any forecasters were predicting. Tiger played a workmanlike round, following a game plan to the letter, shooting a three under 67 in an almost robotically technical round. As he said in the post interview, he just wanted to be in position, that there was a lot of golf to go, that the typical links wind would probably start blowing and the greens would speed up in the next three days. I think he’s right. And I think he’ll probably shoot three more technically good rounds to win by three.

The Klein Museum

A week in South Dakota, although a nice annual trip we make, a necessary trip, can be a tad too long . . . like three or four days too long. Time certainly is relative because the year between last year's visit and this year's seemed like only six months. But this week seemed like an eternity. One of the highlights was our annual visit to the Klein Museum.

Every year when we go back to our South Dakota hometown to visit relatives or engage in one class reunion or another, we make it a point to go to the Klein Museum, and every year we see more and more exhibits, more and more artifacts and memorabilia donated by Mobridge residents. This time we explored the Arikara Earth Lodge and teepee that had been recently added. Remarkable, especially the lodge. It didn’t look as large from the outside as it was after we entered it. Cool in the heat of the summer day and probably quite warm even on the coldest of South Dakota winter days. Three Sioux men built it in eleven days. It was constructed of timber from Montana, vertical logs set in the earth, then brought together without the use of nails. The sides were then made of timber slats placed side by side at a 45° angles, leaning on the interior logs. Then willow branches covered all before laying sod on sides and top. Inside, there were log seats, packed earth floor, a central fire pit beneath an open smoke hole in the ceiling. It looked like it could easily house a family of four or five. We’re assuming that a buffalo skin could be used as a door to keep out heat or cold and any pesky flies that might be around.

This museum is quite remarkable for the amount and diversity of the exhibits, all of which are devoted to the history of the town and surrounding area from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included are a complete dentist office, doctor’s office, telephone office, beauty shop, grocery, millinery shop, barber shop, law office, optometrist office, a trapper’s shack, a large section devoted to saddles and horse gear, a central room with photos and information about Sitting Bull and other Sioux leaders, Sioux artifacts like head dresses, beaded jackets and shoes, peace pipes and tomahawks. Outside the main building visitors can find a complete furnished house dating back to 1919, a tiny post office built around 1920, a schoolhouse complete with desks, books, maps, pot bellied stove—all the furnishings of a country one-room school, a building devoted to early machinery and tools, a log cabin housing farm toys and scale models of farm machinery. For a town the size of Mobridge, this is a place of which they can be especially proud.

Korean Golf

I watched the USGA’s U.S. Women’s Open this weekend at Black Wolf Run golf course in Wisconsin, and was again impressed with the beauty and athleticism of most of the players. Obviously, I was more interested in their golf sots than in their looks. Obviously. The other thing that was noteworthy: the number of South Koreans who play so well. There are forty ladies from South Korea who play regularly on the American tour, many of them ranking in the top twenty. I find it remarkable that this tiny nation I visited in 1953 could become an industrial giant and the home of some of the best golfers in the world, women as well as men. In 1953 I remember looking out over a Korean valley green with rice paddies, dreaming about the chocolate shake I’d have when I got back home, imagining the golf holes I could create in that Korean valley. Nearly sixty years ago, the South Korea I experienced was war-torn and impoverished—most of the hills brown and desolated from the nearly constant shelling. And just look at it now. There very well might be a golf course right there where I envisioned it almost sixty years ago. Two Korean ladies, Amy Yang and Na Yeon Choi, battled down the back nine at Black Wolf Run, both well ahead of the rest of the field, although Na Yeon Choi easily won the battle with great shot after great shot to win by four over Yang, by eight over the third-place finisher Sandra Gal. Na Yeon Choi is twenty-four but looks fifteen, cute as a soaking-wet hundred-pound bug. I look forward to seeing more of her in the future.

Tomorrow we leave for our annual trip to South Dakota. We hope the upper tier heat wave will have passed by the time we get there. I'll try to keep this post going with whatever strikes my fancy while we're there.

Love & Lust

Let’s talk about love. It’s our strongest emotion, stronger than fear or hunger, stronger than hate. But it’s a two-pronged beast made up of emotional love and physical lust, and too often people misunderstand one for the other. How many couples engage in sex and then assume that what they feel is love, feel it enough to spend the rest of their lives together, only to discover soon or late that lust wasn’t enough to bind them. Some live with it; some go separate ways. Otherwise, how can we explain that two out of three marriages end in divorce? That number would be even higher if we added in those who wanted to split but couldn’t, ether because of religion or moral upbringing. Lust is the physical drive to satisfy our sexual appetites. It feels so good at the time, but what follows may not be love or even affection. The simplest solution is to find a fuck buddy: momentary satisfaction, then separation. In marriage, after the sex tapers off or even disappears, we find two people who don’t really know each other or care for each other. They split or they stay together, unhappy. For a lifetime. Then there are extra-marital affairs, lust again. Real love doesn’t require sex. Sex may be part of it, but not necessarily. Real love involves affection for the person, with or without the sex. Real love can be between good friends, parents, siblings, or offspring. Real love can exist with many others, not just the one we live with. It’s important not to mistake lust for love.

The Fourth of July

July Fourth, two hundred and thirty-six years after our first Fourth. What will we be doing on this day? Thinking about what it means to be an American, to be living in freedom, safety, and prosperity; having a steak and potato dinner; watching the fireworks as the Boston Pops plays in Boston Harbor; waiting out the days before our impending trip to South Dakota. “Impending” is such a dark word to describe our trip. Sounds like someone dying, or a dark storm cloud on the horizon. But we’ll go and it will be all right, but I’ll be anxious to return after only two or three days. Need to get back to see the kids, Squeakie and Charlie, need to get back to watch all the Olympic drama in London, need to see if Tiger can win the Open. So much to do, so little time.

Sentence Exams II

James Lee Burke is one of the finest writers of the past forty or fifty years, often following the tradition among Southern writers of emulating Faulknerian prose. In one of the Dave Robicheaux novels he writes:

"The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie's absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind's eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal."

If I were explaining this to one of my English classes, I'd start with the structure, the way he builds on a very simple main clause and then drips the images thereafter. "The truth was . . . something." That's just a basic S-V-S pattern with the second S a noun s-v-o that forgot it's signal word "that." The structure of that noun s-v-o begins with "he could not rise" and then two adverbial 1-o's (prepositional phrases), the 4, "surrounded" (past participle), working with both the subject "he" as well as the verb "could not rise", then the "surrounded" modified by the adverb 1-o-o "by the things," with the "things" modified by the adjective s-v-o "she had touched" with the signal word "that" left out because it was acting simply as the object of the verb "had touched," then the very complicated set of words acting as the second object of "by." All right, we're now up to the sets of words led off by the "wind," which is acting as the s of the 3 (present particple) "blowing" and the object of "blowing" "the curtains." Then another 3 "pressurizing" and its object "emptiness" and the 1-o "of the house" modifying "emptiness." Then another 3 "stressing" and its objects "joists," "studs," crossbeams," and "walls" with the 1-o "against one another" working adverbially with "stressing." Then the final 3 in the series of 3's, all with the subject "wind," "filling" and its object "house," followed by the adverbial 1-o "with a level," then another 1-o "of silence" acting as an adjective to describe "level." And finally, the adjective s-v-o working with "silence" "that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums." Now how to explain the structure of this last thing? I guess I need to create a similar sentence to show it: The silence was similar to (or "like") someone clapping cupped palms on his eardrums. The structure of that sentence is an S-V-S (the silence was similar) and then a 1-o (to someone clapping palms), the object of the 1 being an s-3-o (a gerund with its own subject and its own o), and finally a 1-o "on his eardrums" adverbially modifying "clapping." Whew! Almost no one except for some of my very advanced English students would have any idea what I just said. I'm not sure Burke knew what he was doing when he wrote that sentence, but his ear told him how to do it without needing to know if it was right or wrong. It's very very right.

I’ll demonstrate the structure of the second sentence using my system of symbols. “He could not wake to these things and Rie's absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind's eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal.”

All the words below the top line are working adverbially with the main V (“could not wake”), the first set of 1-0's being "to things, absence, and absence"), the second set a 1 with the object a gerund 3 "concluding" followed by two noun s-v-o's acting as objects of the 3, introduced by the signal words "that" and a final adjective s-v "that would never heal" modifying "lesion." There. Simple, right?

Sentence Exams

Forgive me for going back to sentence examination. I can’t help myself. And I must once again demonstrate how much simpler my system is than a traditional grammatical explanation. One of my main regrets is that when I die, my system will be lost forever except for the few students who understood it and may still be using it in their writing. It's still all available at lulu.com as an e-book.

Here’s a sentence described in my system:

“Few places are more charming than a quiet cocktail lounge in the middle of the day with the ice tinkling in the glasses and the starched look of a bartender’s white shirt and the clarity of the beer in the glass with the bubbles drifting up.” (A Savage Place, Robert B. Parker, p. 125)

See, a simple S - V - S pattern (with the 3 "charming" acting as a predicate adjective, followed by nine prepositional phrases all acting together to modify "charming."

And here’s a sentence explained in traditional terms:

“When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.” (All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy)

It begins with an adverb clause of time, then a simple S-V-O, then a long series of nine nouns and noun clusters in apposition with “them,” all the things you could hear “when the wind was in the north.” Faulkner used this kind of sentence quite often. It is long, but can be untangled if the eye realizes what it is seeing. The only appositive that needs serious examination is the last one, beginning with “the low chant.” The real confusion centers on the present participle “bearing” (which modifies “nation and ghost of nation"). It should be a transitive verbal requiring some object, but what follows are ten words, none of which can act as that object. Then the reader picks up “the sum,” and now he realizes it really reads, “bearing like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives, lost to all history and all remembrance.” There are just too many phrases competing for proximity to bearing. The past participle lost and its prepositional phrase “to all history and all remembrance” is modifying sum as is the prepositional phrase “of their secular and transitory and violent lives.” Maybe it would be clearer if it read, “bearing like a grail, lost to all history and all remembrance, the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.” McCarthy chose to make the reader fight for his meaning, either purposely or accidentally. One always wonders the same about Faulkner: How much confusion did he intend and how much was just poor writing?