SOPHIE'S TEETH

It’s strange how a word or a random coincidence can trip memory’s trigger. One’s mental plate is only so big and when it’s full, everything else gets put in a folder and filed away somewhere. Then something shakes loose and comes to the top like a bubble rising and it leaves me standing on top of the world. 

In 1972 I lived with my family on the west slope of Colorado. My little brother Wes lived with his family in south central Missouri. We were both teachers and it was summer. He was working toward a commercial pilot’s license and needed as many hours in the air as he could manage. His father in law was a commercial pilot and bought a Cessna 152 for him to fly, accumulate hours in his log book. The 152 is a two place, high wing plane with tricycle landing gear, designed as a student-trainer for low altitudes. We hatched a plan. They would bring only a change of clothes in a grocery sack and their two girls, 6 & 2 and fly from Missouri to Pueblo, Colorado, on the east slope. Heavily loaded, the little 152 didn’t have enough power to clear the mountains in the summer heat so I would drive over, pick them up, drive back . We would reverse the shuttle service when it was time for them to go home. 

I had a 1953 Willys Jeep station wagon that was powered by a Chevy V8, plenty of room for everyone. On our side we had 3 boys, 5, 1 & 1 (twins). It was a great vacation. One day in particular stands out. We packed for a picnic, put a small play pen in the back, loaded kids and drove 40 minutes to Ouray, Colorado, gateway to the San Juan Mountains. We were headed to a high meadow, west and several thousand feet vertical from Ouray. The first few miles were carved out of solid rock. Ore trucks from the Camp Bird mine drove that part regularly. After that it was a 4 WD two-track with switch-backs and steep grades. Slow going, the terrane opened up into an open basin, surrounded by high peaks. Yankee Boy Basin was a popular destination for tourists. Heavily mined in the late 1800’s, old portals with tailing dumps dotted every hillside, gully and outcropping. Wild flowers were everywhere, blue columbine, red and yellow Indian paintbrush, where springs bubbled up and spilled down everywhere. We stopped frequently, the kids played in the meadow and we took our lunch there. 

Rather than calling it a day we decided to take the road up the south mountainside to a smaller basin, higher elevation, Governor Basin. Above Governor Basin, St. Sophia Ridge stretches south from Mt. Ema to Chicago Peak. Above us maybe 500 feet vertical and a quarter mile distant, the ridge was eroded, leaving columns of black rock with narrow gaps between them, known as “Sophie’s Teeth”. 

We had run out of road but you can climb up to Sophie’s Teeth and look down on the town of Telluride on the other side. Wes and I left our families to entertain themselves and we set about to climb. At first it was a walk across loose, unsettled rock but the grade went steep. The loose rock gave way to boulders. We were climbing over rocks, up the steep face to the gaps between Sophie’s teeth. It took longer than we thought it would. I was better acclimated to the altitude than Wes but I had to stop often to catch my breath as well. The view was spectacular, literally on top of the world. You could see a hundred miles in 3 directions. We both felt awe and wonder, how insignificant we must be. It was time to head back.

The climb down was surprisingly difficult. It required you look carefully at each foot placement and hand hold. You had to test each move before letting go and shifting weight. An easy stretch put us out of sight from below but much closer to the jeep. When they came into view we were still above them, maybe 300 feet away. We waved and they waved back. We shouted but had no way to know if they could hear us. I had a great idea. Let’s sing them a song. Everything there made me think of the movie, “The Sound Of Music”, the mountains, the sky-so-close, the wives and little kids below. 

I coached him on the lyrics, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung, for a thousand years.’ And, we sang, actually more like screaming with a thin hint of melody. When we got to the end we started over. Thin air, screaming out the song, we soon winded and had to catch our breath. We were laughing, ‘One more time!’ “To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way, to sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.” Stop again for a gulp of air but we knew the song had to finish at the end. “My heart will be blessed with the sound of music, and I’ll sing once more.” The heard us, couldn’t make out the words but recognized the melody. 

The ride home was interrupted by a stop for ice cream in Ouray. I can’t remember another outing with 9 people that nobody complained about anything, everybody slept well that night. Here it is 2019, all of the kids have grown up, moved on. I am on the cusp of turning 80. A friend in my coffee group once asked a hypothetical question, can you remember a time when you had a great experience with one of your siblings, as if it would be a difficult task. Without a thought I defaulted to Sophie’s Teeth and The Sound of Music. 

I love Google Earth. As I began this journal entry I went to my computer, booted up the satellite image, zoomed in and plotted our outing that day in 1972. I clicked on the spot as best I could remember, dropped a marker for the coordinates. (37.966671  -107.779853) You can see the shadows of Sophie’s Teeth. 

FALLING OUT OF FAVOR

Last night my smart phone died, or at least it’s playing dead. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a luddite. Remember the Luddites, workers back in England during the industrial revolution, (early 1800’s) who lost their jobs to machines. They organized, marched, protesting in the streets. It took roots in London, in the textile factories but it spread like a disease through the manufacturing industry. Since then, the trend has been for more efficient, more reliable machines and fewer temperamental, unreliable people. Since 1811 the name Luddite has referred to anyone who pushes back against loss of hands-on jobs to machines. Two hundred years up the line (2019), anyone who dislikes, fears or avoids advanced technology (technophobes), they are yesteryear’s Luddites with 21st Century updates. I’m not one of them.  

So my I-Phone is dead. Last night I made a call and left a message. Shortly, my ringer setting (ahuuuga) snapped me back to the reason for my call but when I went to tap the button, there was no button to tap. It was ringing but the wrong screen was up, the one to enter a pass code. As it continued, ‘ahuuuga’ after ‘ahuuuga’ I kept pushing buttons and tapping the screen to no avail. Nothing worked so I resorted to curse words I reserve for frustrating situations. The phone defaulted to its recorded message and the screen went dark, all was silent.

I’ve been in conversations where smart phones have been scorned and maligned but those critics haven’t abandoned their Twitter or FaceBook feed yet. By now the smart phone is literally a pocket computer. You can do anything on the phone you can do on a tablet or laptop. I haven’t succumbed to smart phone addiction but I use several of its apps more than I thought I would. I check doppler radar to see where rain clouds are and I use the calculator in the grocery store to compare prices per ounce or pound, use the calendar and clock functions. In a pinch, I take pictures and send text messages not to mention several other apps that I fall back on. But I can go to town without it and shut it off when I don’t want to deal with it. I know people who can’t wait until they implant computer chips in their foreheads. Then they can up and download data by just thinking about it. I’m not one of them either.

This kind of internal dialogue, if you let it keep unfolding results in big, loaded questions. How would we fare without our smart phones? I leapfrog that scenario to an even bigger dilemma; what if electricity goes away? A year on the planet without electricity, how about that? There would be a myriad of short range solutions but in the end (1 year) no transportation, no batteries, no ATMs, no fresh water;I don’t even want to think about it. 

This kind of navel gazing is good mental exercise but it doesn’t fix my I-Phone. I have an appointment with my Apple mechanic in a few hours and I go there with great expectations. I understand that my device is just a short lived machine. Whether it became obsolete or died of a hacked motherboard, I will be reaching for my check book. But the check book is outdated, or nearly so. Even my credit card is falling out of favor. Yesterday I was in a carry out restaurant, waiting for my lentil soup and falafel. A dude at the register passed his smart phone over the scanner and transacted business. I can’t do that, don’t know if I want to. I may have to cough up a ton of money this afternoon for a new smart phone. How about a phone app that gives you 20/20 vision. Being able to read text on a 4” screen would be so cool. 

WITHOUT A HOOK

I play with words, have been for so long I can’t put my finger on when it began. I play with words like my kids used to play with matchbox cars. One car was not enough, they needed a tool box full of little toy cars, trucks, busses, ambulances, tractors and wagons that fit their little hands. They needed them all. It if wasn’t in hand it was parked strategically in a special spot on the carpet or the hard wood floor. On the floor between beds in the twins room I put down roads with masking tape, used wooden blocks for houses and barns. In the kitchen you could hear motors and highway sounds coming down the hall from upstairs. Then there was a cookie tin full of matchbox cars for outside in the dirt. The standard posture for playing their game was lying on your side, one arm propping up your head leaving the other to move the cars. Those motor sounds were wonderful. It meant they were not drawing on the walls with magic markers or any number of other cute but dire diversions. 

I don’t have to keep my toys in a cookie tin. They are part of my operating system, inside my head. My vocabulary isn’t all that grand but as a writer, it is adequate for my need and I default to the thesaurus when the cupboard is bare. Therein; my vocabulary has grown slowly over half a century. But: . . . always the ‘But’. I read once that ‘But’ is not the conjunction as we’ve been led to believe, rather it is an acronym. The letters B, U & T stand for, “Behold the Underlying Truth”. So if you ask to borrow money and I say, “I would like to, but: (behold the underlying truth) you won’t get any money from me.” But with age, cutting straight to the truth, comes memory issues. The inability to come up with the right word or expression compounds with age. Sooner or later the words or phrase they do come to you but just the same, if you can’t have the word you want, the word you own, when you want it, it’s like fishing without a hook and it certainly does make one feel like you’re losing your edge.

I have a word today I want to play with. I like to think I own it but frequently have trouble pulling it up. Can you imagine Roy Rogers reaching for his six-shooter but it gets stuck in the holster and the bad guys wait for him to finish his draw before they open fire. Right! Maybe I don’t own it after all. Today’s word is ‘Anecdotal’. Great word, maybe even necessary when weighing in on someone’s argument. Anecdotal is an adjective that refers to evidence or the weight of an example with its role in a cause/effect situation. It is what you remember or heard someone say but it only has a frequency of 1. An example would be; someone’s grandmother drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes every day, all of her adult life and lived to be 103. It questions the harmful effects of smoke and drink as they relate to long life. That example is ‘anecdotal’.  Even if the story is true, a single occurrence that has not been tested cannot substantiate a universal truth. I hang out with a small group of pretty heady characters who meet regularly. We watch documentaries and educational programs that deal with history, philosophy, economics and human behavior then discuss the issues that have been stirred up. My unofficial role in the process is the “Gong-master”. When someone defaults to an anecdotal argument; “I am the way I am because I ate worms when I was little . . . .” I raise my hand and everybody knows I’m about to “Gong” the violating anecdote. 

Anecdotes can be simple examples intended to entertain or clarify through story and not as evidence. Retelling how Uncle Al dropped his drawers at Christmas dinner; that’s an entertaining anecdote. Sometimes when I summon one word I get another. I’m reaching for the word, ’anecdotal,’ and what does my brain send down to my mouth; ’coincidental’. I don’t know how that works. Other times I just hit a dead end, like fishing without a hook. I hope this writing exercise will help imprint ‘anecdotal’ in my recall. 

As I’ve been typing, another word came to mind. I didn’t need it, had no use for it, sort of like when the cat brings a dead snake in the house for your approval.  The word is ‘Vroum’. In past years an auto maker, car company used ‘Vroum’ as their buzz word in their advertising campaign. It suggests excitement and high performance, makes sporty cars even more appealing. It was good marketing but I like other cars sounds better. Back in the 1970’s my kids taught me ‘Rrrr-mmm’ and ‘Uummmmmm’ and they were as good as it gets. The underlying truth here is, that I am being anecdotal and it doesn’t prove anything. Still, the other underlying truth is that it's for the sake of story. My 4 year-old twins are in their 40’s now but they would agree; Rrrr-mmm-Rrrr-mmm, Uummmmmm.

SWEET SPOT

         Edna St. Vincent Millay was quoted, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another, it is one damn thing over and over.” It’s a great quote, not only because it takes the familiar axiom and turns it inside out but also her sense of irony redefines a journey most of us take for granted. Are we plunging ahead with our own muscle or being dragged along like puppies on a leash? What appears as a myriad of  vexing problems may be no more than human nature’s tendency to lose its way in the moment.

         If you live long enough you grow old, it doesn’t matter how many years it takes. You can deny and pretend but when you can no longer leap from the back of your pickup truck and hit the ground running, you know. When you accept the world as it is, broken and you're not the one that broke it, and that nobody can fix it, when you accept that you know. Still, there is an up-side. If you get lucky and things go well there is a sweet spot between Edna’s “That Damn thing” and senility. I’m in that sweet spot now. 

         I don’t go to many funerals. I know that people need closure, whatever that is, maybe just more human nature for me to push back against. We function simultaneously on two different levels. First is the shallow, self aware, “I think I think.” This is where you decide to spoon your soup up to your mouth rather than sup it through a straw or choose not to jump off the cliff even though you know someone who did, or you buy a new car, sell the old house. The other is deep, reckless, free flowing, “I feel. . .” In one mode you are the archer’s bow, in the other you are the arrow. If you mellow with age, pray that you do, the feeling of one’s own trajectory surpasses the power rush through the bow. That thoughtless moment, no longer outbound but inbound, if it’s sweet you be grateful and think less of closure. 

        I don’t know a great deal about Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Seventy years after her death we still find her name in print, her poetry is timeless. She was a beauty, red hair in trail, always pushing the envelope, breaking rules, wrestling with that “One damn thing.” she died at age 58. I doubt she ever got to the sweet spot. Again, I don’t know; so many things I care about but don’t know, I don’t know why but I want to put Edna St. Vincent in league with Georgia O’Keeffe, both ahead of their time, both outrageous feminists. One crafted words on a page, the other with pigment and a brush. I am more familiar with the latter, always stop to see her in museums and galleries, visited her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico a few years back. I feel confident she found the sweet spot. At 98 she was still painting, still feeling magic that dwells only in the moment. I don’t think she cared one way or the other about Edna’s, One damn thing. I began this with an Edna quote and I’ll end with Georgia. She said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”