GETTING BACK UP

  August 29, sixteen years to the day after Katrina dropped in on New Orleans; Ida has Grand Isle (to the west) in the crosshairs. That will put the Big Easy on the ‘Dirty Side’ (more wind/surge/rain). In ’95 the ‘Eye’ went to the Mississippi coast and N.O. dodged that bullet, not that it helped but you never know, maybe it could have been worse. They are predicting landfall this afternoon. I’m afraid it will be flashlights and generators in south ‘Weeziana’ tonight. 
I could spin off on environmental issues but I won’t. Name calling and pointing fingers may vent anxiety but the kind of change required to resolve manmade climate issues will call for much umbrage and and even more time. I watched a two hour episode of the Ken Burns series on World War Two last night. I’ve seen it several times but some of the visuals and their stories bear watching again. He chronicled the war through four towns; in Minnesota, Alabama, Connecticut and California. It began with young men who went off to war and loved ones left behind, it looked at cities with wartime industry, workers who relocated to fill the wartime job slots. Racism softened, at least for a while. The story Burns offered up was complicated and overlapping. I’ll not rehash the program but I was reminded that war is not and has never been a noble endeavor. It is a ruthless, gruesome struggle with young men following orders, killing each other in the name of God or country, and where innocent bystanders die grizzly deaths for simply being in harms way, where human suffering is the rule. Leaders and profiteers would paint it otherwise but their cause is the universal constant; ‘To the winner go the spoils.’

The segue back to hurricanes and Ida in particular is that by war or natural disaster, people are resilient. Whatever horror we encounter, life looks to the future rather than dwell on the past. This is cliché I know and I don’t like clichés but long suffering, partisan bloodshed is not something one gets over, people persevere and go through. Getting over suggests recovery while going through just means you come out the other end. That was true with war and no less, a devastating hurricane. After Katrina in ’05 they salvaged and repaired what they could, replaced what they couldn’t fix and moved on. If we weren’t resilient we would dry up and perish. After Ida leaves her mark, those people will salvage, repair, replace and move on. Concerning the pressure of his job, former President Harry Truman said, “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” You don’t have to  live on a stormy coastline but those who do, they know about getting knocked down and getting back up. Ida is the storm today, between the one before and the next one up the line. The next deadly landfall is out there, on the way, we just can’t say when.

        I have concern for a friend who lives there. We talked earlier today and they are prepared as they can be. They have a permanently installed, industrial grade generator that can meet their (essential) electrical needs for several weeks. With enough elevation (20’) and set back far enough, several miles from Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore, storm surge is not much of a threat. High water (flooding) and wind damage can be. So she prays at the Catholic Church and I simulate Voodo ceremony on the patio with dance (shuffling feet & waving arms) rattle chicken bones in a brown paper sack, chant some gibberish and sprinkle some brandy (not too much) on the ground. My Faith in Voodo is nil but I like the idea of ancestor worship. Between the two of us, I don’t think our collective ritual can change the weather but neither can it do any harm. I know I feel better after I shuffle my feet to some gibberish and sip a little brandy.

THREE WORDS TOGETHER

  At eighteen my parents thought my life trajectory would parallel that of the steam ship Titanic. My high school diploma demonstrated the Peter Principle to perfection. Self absorbed I graduated neither learned, ambitious, reliable nor skilled but I did lack discipline (humor). The thought of working a mundane job for minimum wage was unthinkable. There was a girl who would hold my hand but otherwise, if I did’t have anything then I didn’t want anything. I was the prodigal son, reluctant to leave the nest. The folly of my growing up left me neither ashamed nor proud, it just was.
I start this way, not as a precursor to the rest of the story but as a reminder that all of us live out our own story and it begins somewhere, it has to. I am convinced this life is driven by struggle more than reward. One’s place in time is not negotiable; wherever you thought you were going, when it is that you find yourself, wherever that may be, there you are. Like beads on a string, my years add up to eighty two, something I think about a lot. When your body can’t keep up like you think it should it’s not a choice.
So as much as it feels like (hung out to dry) my plate is full. I earned my pay in another profession but I identify as a writer and storyteller. All the reading, writing, shuffling ideas, I have a lot to work with. I employ words and phrases like my mother did her yarn and knitting needles. So no surprise when I take language to task for what it should convey and how that makes us feel. Storytelling might be dismissed as clowns reciting silly rhymes to preschoolers. If one thinks Story need be childlike and banal then it would seem so. But without Story there would be no history, no tradition, no humor, little more than yes & no. There would be no way to answer the simple question; Why? Human beings are storytellers, all of us, since the day we first put three words together.
The Titanic metaphor was good but I am still afloat. I finally learned to read, how to work and I’ve never been in so deep I couldn’t make my way. In a nutshell, that is my story. Like a fiber in a thread, woven into a fabric, sewn into a tapestry, my little rhyme is a very small part of a larger work. Still, that little rhyme is all I can muster. It began somewhere, somehow, under circumstances not of my choosing. You get what you get and go from there. If we are lucky we grow with experience. Good luck would seem too much to hope for but sometimes we flourish in spite of ourselves. I would agree with Lefty Gomez, New York Yankees’ Hall of Fame pitcher who said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” 

ALL THERE IS

  Sometimes I come to the journal page with a purpose and other times I come empty handed. There was a time (I think all writers go through this) I felt protective, as if my words on the page were precious eggs in the nest. Someone need nurture them or they never hatch, never fly. That feeling wore thin a long time ago and went away. Now that page is more like dirty footprints on the carpet begging, “fix me.” You either breathe new life into the idea or abandon it.  Maybe that says something about my politics. If I think a twelve week human fetus is expendable, why trouble myself over questionable writing. It was also conceived by giving in to a natural urge. I am playing God with words again, OMG. 
Processing casual thought on the page, you can redact or delete as you please. When the same package shows up again with predictable frequency it becomes a pattern. My journaling is starting to follow a pattern and I need to make a disclaimer. My long measure of human experience (old age) is an asset but also a hinderance. When you have sky dived from enough airplanes the excitement ebbs dramatically. I stopped recording my free fall jumps sometime after #200. The leap was still worth the ride up but more like getting a nibble, nothing like catching your first fish. It holds your attention, you focus and you’r pulse rate may gain a few ticks but excitement no, not really. 
In the twilight of her career, singer Peggy Lee recorded, Is That All There Is, a bitter-sweet reflection. It seemed to say, life has been sweet at times but short as well and I would like to know, is that all there is? I suppose that should be my disclaimer as well. I remember the Cold War in the 1960’s when Soviet and American bombers flew 24/7 armed with hydrogen bombs enough to destroy civilization. They flew nonstop, around the clock, waiting for the command to destroy the wold. It went on for years. We made it through that crisis but even if they know the story, people born after that seldom give it a thought. In 2001 a group of angry, disillusioned martyrs hijacked four airliners but that crisis is still festering. Over the next two decades we would spend trillions of dollars, sacrifice nearly four thousand American lives and many thousands of devastating, life altering injuries. It was all metered out as justice but it reeked of revenge. My culture has difficulty distinguishing between the two. Yes, we killed BinLaden but as of this week it seems our righteous response has gone to seed a dismal failure.
I am old and my conscience has hardened. I try to diffuse crises, whatever they may be. Balance comes from watching the bubble, not from how it feels in the gut. My cohorts (by race & generation) are predominantly conservative. I think it comes with White Privilege, as if blessed by our white, conservative God, the one that authorized misogyny and slavery. I love us but our sins are such that I can neither dismiss nor ignore them. I feel like a whistle-blower, an insult to the myth that my cohorts venerate and I can feel them pushing back. I care, I really do but then it doesn’t matter; just words. They can dismiss me as easily as they would any other renegade and they do. Is that all there is? I know better, not that naïve. I was just hoping for more, something better.
Anthropologists study human history, civilization in general and they concur for the most part. Over the long stretch of recorded history the quality of human life gets better and continues to improve. Depending on how you group populations and break time down into units, there is less war, less slavery, better food, better health and less violence against vulnerable populations. But that takes in every culture, every beating heart. Here in my culture, with the most powerful economy and military on the planet, we agonize over losing hegemony and sustaining a tunnel vision, self serving morality. Being Number #1 has an ego stroking effect as well as a sobering responsibility but the latter is more lip service than practice.
If this has downgraded into a Rant, that wasn’t the intent. I’m never sure for sure where the muse will take me and I don’t know how this story should end. Thursday afternoons we (the team I’m on) make ham and cheese sandwiches for the homeless and the hungry. A few hours later I watch desperate, grateful people, struggling with their burdens just not on empty stomachs. It is something I can do and maybe that is all there is. 

WE IMPROVISED EVERYTHING

     Our house was a two bedroom cottage on Tracy Street in Kansas City, so close to the house next door that we could see what they were having for breakfast from the bedroom window. Then we moved out of town to an old, dilapidated, two story farm house. That was back in early summer of 1945. Our growing family, five of us, we needed more space and they (Mom & Dad) wanted a place where they could grow a garden, have animals, a barn, a place without sidewalks where kids could roam without leaving the yard. I turned six the first week of August. A week later the ‘atomic bomb’ ended World War 2. Three weeks after that I began the 1st Grade in an 8 grade school with 3 teachers and as many classrooms.

Most of what I remember about the house on Tracy Street has been drawn from old snapshots and posed photographs. Still I do recall the icebox on the back porch. The ice man came in a horse drawn wagon every second or third day to deliver a block of ice. The icebox itself had a drain that dripped melt water into a pan beneath it. The living room’s centerpiece (the radio) was warm colored, polished wood with a wide base and an arched top. It sat on a small table that must have been made for that purpose. There was a single, on-off/volume switch and a round tuning-dial for changing stations. It looked like the speedometer in our car. Its knob was the center of the dial, geared so you had to turn it a lot just to make the needle move a little. It was our source of information and entertainment and we sat around it like kids at the feet of a magical storyteller. 

At our (old) new house the radio was still the living room’s main feature. From WW2 to the early 1950’s the program we never missed, the one I remember best was Grand Central Station. Its introduction was irresistible with the sound of hissing steam engines and the hollow sounds of many people scurrying through a crowded railroad terminal. The narrater, with his deep voice and resonant echo announced; “Grand Central Station, the crossroads of a million private lives, a gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily.” Then, one particular person either coming or going, maybe meeting someone, their story unfolded perfectly. Funny, romantic, serious or dramatic their stories kept us glued to the spot. I can imagine now the chuffing locomotives and the baritone voice reverberating: “. . . a thousand dramas daily.” 

I remember being a child and that imagery has not dimmed or dulled a bit. The serious side of growing up was necessary, the freedom and the responsibility that came with it might have swept childhood under the rug in some cases but not this one. The five year-old who sipped cold water from the icebox drip pan is still in there and we’ve been best of friends all along. I’ve grown old but he is still sitting cross-legged in front of the radio.

Growing old is not so bad, not considering the alternative. From that end, long life would seem a blessing. Maybe that’s what this little piece should be about, blessings, unmerited gifts. The word is usually cast in religious context but it need not be. I can offer my blessing any time, for any reason. With it comes my approval and at least the pretense of privilege. Nobody with right mind would think me religious but I do like the Bible. I like the sermon on the mount in particular, not only for what he said but also what he didn’t say. He blessed the poor, the meek and the merciful but not the mighty or the greedy. Nowhere can I find, ‘Blessed are the powerful for they shall kick ass.’ 

I am blessed to find myself both old and healthy in the same breath. My children are well on their way to old age but still, they don’t see it coming. My grandchildren think their electronic device is a portal to the future, and who am I to say it isn’t? In the movie, Grumpy Old Men, 80 year-old Burgess Meredith scolded Jack Lemon, his 50-something son for not pursuing the beautiful widow, Ann Margaret. He told him; “. . . when your time comes, all you get to take with you is your experience. So get busy.” With a movie you can write cool stuff like that into the script. The best actors get the best, most unforgettable lines but my dad was nothing at all like Burgess Meredith and my experience came with melt water, the radio, baseball and bicycles. We never followed a script, improvised everything and that turned out alright. 

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  On hot summer nights I slept in the yard on a lawn chair. That was when I was eight or nine. One night in the lawn chair I had a dream. A UFO came to rescue me in the middle of the night; I had been left on the earth by mistake and they had come to take me home. They left without me but It felt so real I’ve never forgotten. Over seventy years later that memory is still fixed, real or imagined, it is part of my life story. 
For decades I’ve slept straight through without interruption, waking up recharged like my iPhone. But everything changes so I shouldn’t be surprised. Nowadays, dreams and getting up to pee are the norm. They say (whoever they are) that any lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. The same said (I would think) for anyone who tries to interpret their own dreams, as if they had access to the ‘what it means’ file. If there is a message or a lesson there it would be, don’t take yourself too seriously. We learn by trial and error, the brain does not have an owners manual. The fact that I remember the dream is probably just a speed bump on the memory disc and certainly not a riddle to be solved. 
With run-amok Conspiracy Theory at every turn, the urge here is to risk being the ‘fool’ thing with another pass at my UFO dream. By their nature, conspiracy theories more than suggest, they dictate that  the greater the odds against any one thing, the more compelling the argument to believe it. Actually, I believe that disciples of conspiracy (feel like) they gain a leg up on experts who have made a career of separating fact from fiction. If you know better than the experts, you must be brilliant and you didn’t need to waste ten years on a PhD. If one out of a hundred proves true then you have proved your point, like a baseball player with a batting average of .001. Out of a thousand times at bat he finally got a hit, proof that he can hit MLB pitching. So I’m flip-flopping, not going with the summer night dream. Still, the dream part was real, it takes me (makes me think about) places and invites ideas I never would have imagined without it. 
Every time I dive down the (self analysis) rabbit hole it just reaffirms what I came away with the first time. I am in a fragile, Love/Hurt relationship with my own kind (Humanity). I am really disappointed with Homo sapiens, the species. For a while I thought is was a mild case of misanthropy (love/hate) but the animosity has never been there. Yes I love people in the same way you love the home team when they lose, even when they lose poorly. But that doesn’t ease the disappointment (the hurt) of the ugly duckling disconnect. Truth is you were right to begin with, we are ugly ducks and all the swan talk is just a lot of denial and vain ego. We are animals with a remarkable brain, hard to control (the brain) but remarkable none the less. Is that what the UFO dream was all about? Maybe I was supposed to go to another world where human emotion informs but it is reason that prevails. Wouldn’t that be something!
I’ve been told that I am overreacting. Sure people do stupid things but we are the captains of our own destiny (Right!). With good judgment and good decisions life is good. Still, you can’t know if the judgment and decision that felt so good at the time were all that good. You have to wait for the judges score you. You can always trust what you were taught (good enough for good old dad) but success and failure are both peopled by folks who went with what they learned. Can you believe: The 30 yr-old guy who went to a Covid-19 party to prove it was a hoax and caught the virus. Just before he died (dead) he told his doctor, Jan Appleby at San Antonio Methodist Hospital “I think I made a mistake.” I’m afraid that ‘Free Will/Destiny’ thing is more Swan/Ugly Duck propaganda. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, they would have to be crazy. But they were not left behind on a planet full of ugly ducks. They were already here.

NO BRAIN AT ALL

  Yesterday I discovered that an ant colony has been mining the peanuts I use to bait my squirrel trap. With a cursory visual check from the kitchen window it seemed nothing had been going on there. After several days, all that remained was a thin film of peanut dust on the trigger plate. So I cleaned the trap, moved it from under the cypress tree to a spot on the patio. This morning while checking my garden I checked out the the squirrel trap. It was an (ah ha) gestalt moment, like scientists in Africa, flying over great herds of migrating wildebeest and zebras. Too far down to single out one animal from another but certainly many, many thousands of them all strung out like gridlock on the freeway, as far as you could see. 
I got down on my hands and knees for a closer look. Too small to distinguish one from another there must have been thousands of ants so tiny, brown pinpoints with legs too small to see, I wouldn’t notice one if it were on my countertop in front of my face. The stream of living creatures, maybe a half inch wide, crawling all over each other, it stretched from the wire/cage into the grass a foot away at the patio’s edge. Some ants were carrying their microscopic morsel back to the colony while others were moving up to collect their portion and follow the leader home. The idea that such complicated creatures exist, so small, so many and they cooperate so remarkably; that kind of stuff blows my mind.   
I have been watching the Olympics, gymnastics in particular. Watching young women twist and spin, leaping, somersaulting their way along a four inch balance beam from end to end then launch airborne, still twisting/somersaulting, off the beam without missing a beat and stick the landing, that’s mind blowing too. But I understand how that works. From many thousands of little girls around the world who want to be olympic gymnasts, only a few have what it takes and of those, you can count them on your fingers, they do their routines while (not falling off) a four inch beam, then fly like a bird and with a cloud of chalk dust, stick their landing. I understand how it works. What I don’t understand is how tiny ants, crowded together by the thousands, cooperate without incident. They do it without a brain, no brain at all. All an ant has is a few (ganglion) small clumps of nerve cells that control and regulate the ant’s life. Considering their size, how big can a ganglion be, and it works just like it’s supposed to! 
I cleaned and moved the trap again. I don’t think that ant colony will suffer from the loss of my feeding station. I put the trap on a hard-pack gravel pad where I park my utility trailer. I have no idea how long it would take those ants to relocate my trap again. It’s about a hundred feet from the patio and the same from the cypress tree. That would seem far enough but then again, why should I believe the other ants in the far corner of the yard didn’t wake up to a peanut buffet on top of their hill? All I want is to relocate a pesky squirrel.
I wasn’t completely truthful when I said I didn’t understand the ants, they just leave me slack jawed with wonder. I am not an authority but I do read their books. Ants, like humans, are a super-social species. E.O. Wilson is one of, if not the world’s authority on ants. His book, ‘Sociobiology’ was controversial in 1978, the idea that he could correlate human behavior with ant activity. But after 40 years his then-critics have all come around to embrace Sociobiology and super-social species. 
Wilson identified a dozen or more species that have a much more demanding social requirement in their nature than other similar animals. Most of them were insects, ants and bees in particular. They must be able to cooperate in very large numbers (ants farming food, waging war, attending the queen, etc)  Like the proverbial coin, the thing has two sides. The 'tails' side, drawback, is that they cannot adapt to change. They can’t change the rules. If Something happens that interrupts their continuity, the colony dies, all of them. A few dozen free thinking ants can not sail off like the Pilgrims and start a new colony. 
Making it more complicated, there are other super-social species that cannot cooperate in large numbers the way ants and bees do but what they can do is, they can (flip the coin) be creative, manipulate the situation to meet the need and they can change the rules, create and use tools. Chimpanzees are good examples. They cooperate with puzzles that require teamwork getting to the food. One pulls the tree limb down, another gives a third chimp a leg up to reach the low hanging fruit and they share the food. They are clever, smart, creative and cooperative as long as it is with familiar (usually related) friends. The number of individuals a chimp can know and trust is about 20-25. Beyond that they can’t deal with belonging, authority, proximity and identity issues, too much to overcome and turn into a bunch of frustrated, dysfunctional, fight-or-flight monkeys. 
Now comes the revelation: only one super-social species is capable of both cooperating in large numbers and creative, rule changing diversity. No surprise, they are us. What other species could send hundreds of students (strangers to each other) to fly on airplanes flown by strangers to study under dozens of other strangers, learn multiple new, different skills, then trusting each other to do what they are supposed to do, cooperate in teams and apply the new skillset to address needs that had never been satisfied? Only Humans can do that. 
This super-social  capability isn’t perfect. Humans have problems that have gone unresolved since pre history. The rational, logical part of the brain that gives us unparalleled diversity does not (no it doesn’t) control the primitive, stone age emotional part that tells us how we feel. Not surprising, humans would much rather feel good than be right even though they believe the opposite. There is an ongoing struggle between ‘reason’ and emotions, in all humans, all of the time. Sadly, the stronger the emotion the less likely ‘reason’ can set aside the feeling and prevail. What usually happens when feelings overrule logic, the human subconsciously creates an alternate story (we are really great at creating story, even if it isn’t true) that feels better and, in a convoluted way, satisfies the perceived need. The conscious part is in the believing as it feels perfectly reasonable and if that’s not an oxymoron I give up. Those two parts of the brain are in constant negotiations with each other without either our knowledge or permission. So being doubly super-social has its up side that we wear like a crown, grant diplomas: and there is a down & dirty side that we haven’t learned how to manage yet. We are born selfish/greedy, and we never get over it. We covet more than we need and that makes material gluttony feel really, really good. I will take on Selfish/Greedy another day. It is time I checked my squirrel trap. 

SWEET DECEPTION

  This story has come to life after a very long sleep. For whatever reason (how am I supposed to know) something jogs my memory and off we go. I was in the Army with a guy named Jerry Paavola. We weren’t best friends but we worked together and he was a good guy. It was ‘Cold War’ peace time in the late 1950’s, early 60’s and being a G.I. was not the “Thank you for your service” thing it is today. The military was for draftees, out of work or trouble with the law. The (. . . my life if need be) part was crystal clear but at the time nobody was shooting, at 19 the travel and new experience was hard to resist and I needed a job. 
Jerry P. and I met at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in the 82nd Airborne Division. In that first year of service you sense whether or not it feels like something you want to invest in. He didn’t make any pretense, he didn’t like the army and his superiors got the message. I knew enough not to insult the lords of RHIP (rank has its privilege). I fit in alright. They never saw me as another malcontent but I was never tempted to reenlist for a second tour.
I remember Jerry now because his name was different, unusual spelling. All of my adult life I have been remembering people who passed in and out through the revolving door of my life. I wonder where fate and fortune have taken them and how they are doing. By now I have lots of time and the internet lets me track down former amigos and I learn something. I have better luck when their names are unusual in some way, less duplication. Jerry’s last name was Scandinavian, not many Paavola’s in the white pages and I remembered he was from Detroit. 
Everybody has a story, some better than others but I am a sucker for just about any ‘Story’, it doesn’t take much to hold my attention. Jerry and I were both reassigned to a new unit, the 2nd 503/Airborne Battle Group on the island of Okinawa (Japan). We were both parachute riggers which meant we went to work in a shop, packing and repairing parachute equipment rather than chasing around in the bush, playing war games. 
In 1960, young soldiers could be lumped into one of two categories; hard drinking, womanizing, macho men and then there were prudent dudes who could feel good without the booze and testosterone. Jerry was quiet, prudent enough but he did go to the bars, drink some and usually come home sober. I stayed out of the bars, saved my dollar. My memories of being intoxicated were mainly of throwing up and feeling miserable. I didn’t fit the macho profile anyway but this is Jerry’s story, not mine.
The girls who worked the bars sat and drank with you, getting a commission on how many drinks they sold. Any after-hours activity was between the two individuals. Over the next year Jerry fell in love with a bar-girl named Yoshiko and eventually moved in with her. As his ETS (expiration term of service) approached he started making plans to take her home with him to Detroit. He filed paperwork but Military Intelligence considered her a security risk and disapproved everything. It was only 15 years after the end of World War 2 and the hierarchy didn’t want any poor, Okinawan bar-girls contaminating the homeland. The week came, Jerry and Yoshi got married quietly, without permission, in a Buddhist wedding. On the day before Jerry was to fly back to San Francisco, Yoshi flew to Tokyo, changed planes and connected to San Francisco with a Japanese passport. They rejoined in San-Fran before flying together to Detroit. There was a second wedding in Detroit for the record. Jerry P. and Yoshi had simply, quietly outflanked the system and for most of us still on the island, it was a sweet deception. I made the same (ETS) trip to San Francisco a few months later. With no rush to get home I hung out with family in California for a while and then back to Kansas City, to a job I was good at, to college and on into my own story. 
I tried once before to locate Jerry and Yoshi but I gave up too easy. They were there all along. By then I lived in West Michigan near Kalamazoo and could have reconnected. How many Jerry Paavolas in Detroit? Then I tried again last week, who knows what made me think of him again but I hit pay dirt on the first stroke. The down side is that Jerry died in 2006 at age 68. His obituary was brief but detailed enough to know it was the Jerry I knew. He was retired from the Detroit Police Dept. His kids spoke affectionately of him. I don’t know what I might have said to them or to Yoshi, she is still alive. But that story has come full circle back to me. I know I run the risk of sounding like a fool but I love all my stories. Famous actors on the big screen can entertain for a few hours but then it’s like yesterday’s news, old stuff. I have thousands of little stories that keep coming back, my finger prints all over them and I don’t need explaining or interpretation. Having that connection is awesome, no make believe, real people who touched my life, their stories overlapping with mine even for just a few hours or days; in Jerry’s case a couple of years.