Paradigms...where shift happens!

The River's Story

Summer started suddenly here in central Virginia as if someone had simply flipped a switch. After moderate daytimes and cool nights in Murrieta California I found 95 degrees and significant humidity in Washington on Monday afternoon. The jet way at Dulles Airport was stifling and my cheap self even turned on the air conditioning in the car on the way home.

Yesterday and today it’s been in the mid to upper 90’s and the humidity has peaked in the mid 80’s. That’s summer in the South.  Just upstream of the Falmouth bridge, a dozen herons gather at sunset to feed in the last rapids of the Rappahannock River, standing among the wet rocks as old men might stand by a lake in a park except they do not shuffle about. Instead they are immobile, like sculptures, immobile that is until a silver sided bit of dinner flashes in the water and brings them to life. 

Below Falmouth, The River is low and slow, the water a deep olive color.  It murmurs its story as it slowly glides between the river banks of Stafford County and Fredericksburg. This year I’m going to listen for that River Murmur and the story it tells me. There will be plenty of time to gripe about the heat and humidity in August but for now, I’m going to listen to the news from upstream.

It's like a...

...different country here is Southern California. I want to move here...all I need is a source of independent wealth, idependent of my work product, that is. I'm thinking maybe finding a way to corner the market on some essential product out here is the way to an easy California life. Maybe twine for weed whackers or some coupe de commerce that gives me a stranglehold on the world's supply of flip flops....

The lady next door has a lemon tree in her back yard with lemons on it the size of...well...big lemons I guess. (Another opprtunity for hyperbolic excess is lost...alas, I am the victim and you are the beneficiary of a totally unexpected attack of restraint.)

Had a nice Viet Namese lunch of pho noodle soup...some of the best tripe and tendon I have ever slurped down.

If you look around, you get the impression that they spend all their time washing their cars...haven't seen a dirty car yet and as for the pick up trucks, apparently no one out here is interested in "Cruisin' in memory of fill in the blank" anybody.

Met someone last night who once lived in someplace called "Rancho Cucamunga". How can anyone say that with a straight face? Or Pismo Beach either for that matter.

It's really intimidating for a reformed redneck from Virginia...

Reunions

It’s been about a year since my first trip to California. Tomorrow afternoon I’m heading out again for another visit with Alain, "She" and "Duck Boy" in Southern California. Last year I went for two reunions, one was with Alain whom I had not seen for 20 years. Our life paths simply diverged and neither of us, I suppose, had the will to do anything about it. The reunion was sweet with multiple passes down Memory Lane and we both learned that maintaining a relationship takes effort.

The second reunion was after only a 5 month separation. I gave that one everything I had; more perhaps than I should have since it died. I think she had too many scars from too many decisions that didn’t turn out well and now, as it turns out, I have one as well. But still, we both did the best we could with the light we had to see by.

Another Time, Another Place

AnotherTime, Another Place

 

Could we bend time to see behind,

Shift space from far apart;

How might have lives like yours and mine,

Touched shoulders, hands, or heart?

 

Repeated dreams by hope are sired,

Spin brief and fleeting bliss;

Dawn nudges light where none's desired,

Dream smoke conceals the kiss.

 

We speak in hints of shadowed care,

Of thoughts we must deny;

Muted voices in the night,

Speak quickly then they fly.

 

Within my sight yet in a place,

I cannot reach or go;

What might have been a lifetime's face,

Escapes on ebbtide's flow.

September, 2005   

I am a no-fly zone!

Every time I look in the mirror and see that there’s still no propeller on my nose and only two landing gear, my belief that God did not intend us to fly is re-enforced.  Although I can’t recall when I decided riding in airplanes was a gratuitous flirtation with a fiery demise, I can recall at least one image from my first trip by air. When I was in elementary school I flew from Roanoke, Virginia to Allentown,Pennsylvania to visit my aunt. The aircraft was a two engine propeller job of some sort and I actually climbed a rolling set of steps to board it. With two main landing gear, no nose wheel and the little training wheel at the back it sat at a definite nose up angle which I suppose ought to be looked at as a positive thing.

My negative outlook on air travel may have started in college. Our Air Force ROTC unit took a weekend trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton,Ohio. The trip was on a DC-1 or some such primitive plane. Shortly before we landed in Ohio, a crew member walked back to my seat and asked me to look out the window and tell him whether or not the landing gear was down. I’m pretty sure that was when it began.

Last year I went out to California to visit a friend I had not seen in 20 years. It was, I think, a measure of the value I placed on this friendship that I paid so much money to experience a 6 hour sphincter seizure.

On a cloudy morning in June, at an absolutely heathen hour, I somehow found my way to the long term parking lot at BWI Airport After standing in the rain for about twenty minutes a shuttle bus came by and carried me off to what I considered to be the gates of Hell itself.  Check in was deceptively easy but I think that was just the airplane gods trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I’m an air travel wimp but a wimp with attitude. Only in the last couple of years have I begun to accept that God, while not intending for us to fly really doesn’t mind if we do.  Because of this reactionary point of view I find myself assuming a peculiar mindset when traveling by air. I think it is equal parts fear, humor and anticipation against a background of deeply ingrained annoyance, all hopefully hidden behind a façade of being an experienced traveler.

I do not fly well. It's not just 360 minutes of forced immobility inside a germ laden flying Petri dish with 90 of my closest friends, traveling six miles above the earth at barely sub-sonic speeds in air cold enough to cryogenically preserve Ted Williams head. It's not even the prospect of surviving for 6 hours on a small bag of dime sized pretzels left over from the Cretaceous era and a sawed off plastic cup of diet Coke. It's all the rest of the dumb stuff that goes with the experience. We don't even have to be in the air for me to get pissed off.

It starts with the boarding experience. Everyone gathers around at the gate, poised in their starting blocks for the mad dash to the boarding ramp. Up front, of course, are the people in Boarding Group 5, oblivious to the order and discipline imposed by their boarding passes. Behind them are the lame, the halt and the blind along with those "boarding with small children." I saw one family on this trip with 3 small children; they should have just given them the plane for crying out loud.

Now, I assume that all this regimentation of the boarding process is intended to either speed things up or at least define the pecking order that will prevail once we are airborne and our miserable destiny is in the hands of Carol, Tiffany, Gina and Captain Somebody. If speeding up the boarding is the intent, what happens is quite the opposite. Once on the plane I find a line of people looking first at their boarding passes and then up at every bloody row number while struggling with the concept that rows are numbered in rational sequence, not at random. If you are at row five and your assigned row is seventeen, move the hell on! You are perfectly safe not looking at the numbers again for at least a few rows. You’ll get a hint when you're in the area; it's called row sixteen.

There is also a mysterious process that goes on during boarding. The person in the window seat always gets to their seat after the aisle and middle seats are occupied. If anyone knows why this happens please let me know.

Finally on the subject of boarding, to the folks at Southwest Airlines, God invented seat rows for a reason! Lose the colored cards and use row numbers. An airplane with a center aisle the width of Lance Armstrong’s bicycle seat is not the place to use "general admission" seating.

Airlines have rules about carry on luggage that supposedly limit us to one personal style item and a small bag which will fit in the overhead. They even have a little box thing at the boarding gate as a kind of a template for carry-on bags, the airline equivalent of the "you must be this tall" bar at an amusement park. The bar at the "Tilt-N-Hurl" ride seems to work because you almost never get puked on by a toddler there. The baggage box is a totally different story; it's there for no apparent reason other than perhaps intimidation.

Look at the bags people drag down that aisle; I've seen smaller apartments. The bigger the bag the smaller the person dragging it. Instead of that luggage box at the gate, they should have a person who makes sure that  passengers can bench press at least twice the weight of their bag. That would put a stop to anorexic waifs dragging bags so heavy they come equipped with dual rear axles and radial tires and then wait helplessly for some chivalrous soul to hoist all their earthly possessions into the already overstuffed overhead.

By the way, when you land the flight attendant always warns you to be careful when opening the overhead compartment doors because "stored items can shift during the flight." Yeah, right! By the time everyone is aboard any plane I have ever ridden, those compartments are so full, sand couldn't shift up there. They will also remind you that anything not stored above must fit underneath the seat in front of you. Dust was the only thing that would have fit under the seat in front of me.

With such bad air travel attitude, you might think I would be somewhat of a rebel once on board the plane. Quite to the contrary, I become peculiarly submissive; I grovel in fact. The flight attendants are the "alpha wolves" and I am but a mewling, freshly whelped cub. My theory on this compliant attitude is that somewhere up there, behind the clouds there are airplane spirits and I do not want to annoy them. If I’m a good airplane citizen, my good manners will somehow magically insure that my particular plane will have an equal number of take-offs and landings and I think we'll all agree that is a good thing.

Furthermore I wouldn't think of leaving my seatback in anything other than its full upright position when landing and taking off. It's unclear to me why that's required but if the flight attendant says do it then consider it done. Likewise with my table, it's fully in the up position and locked just the way they tell me. Seat belts? Forget about me because I have that puppy cinched down so tight my knees turn blue. I can drink two venti coffees from Starbucks and still cross the continent without needing to use the bathroom. Without the seat belt of course, Mother Nature would have her way and the phrase “holding  pattern” would take on a whole new meaning. I really hate it when my coffee finishes its trip before I do.

Moreover, that seat belt stays cinched down not just until the plane comes to a stop at the gate but until the ground crew has washed out the holding tanks and all the empty toasted almond bags have been dug out of the nooks and crannies underneath the seats. Then and only then will I arise from the seat, drag my belongings (ever so carefully of course) from the overhead compartments and lurch up the passenger way  into the terminal, chanting my post-flight mantra, "Aaaah, cheated death again!!!"

The flight itself was comfortable but the view from my window seat was pretty tedious. Two hours in the air had put us over one of those really flat states; the ones this Easterner can never seem to keep sorted out….Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas…somewhere with corn, cows and presumably combines. It was a delightfully clear day and I could see all the way to the ground where presumably my plunge would stop if I opened the wrong door when trying to go to the can.

After a while even my wide-eyed wonderment began to fade. They showed a movie but I passed on America West's kind offer of a headset for the paltry sum of $5 so I could hear the sound on a movie I had already seen. They wanted to sell me something they called a 'SkyBox' as well, a little cardboard treasure chest intended to fend off starvation. This time I saved $2.00 and so between the head set and the 'SkyBox', the unspent $7.00 offset the cost of the “Sandwich From Hell” which I had bought in the terminal to bring with me. Aren't I clever…that's a rhetorical question, OK?

I had to change planes in Phoenix where America West would hand me off to something called Mesa West for the one hour final leg to Long Beach Municipal Airport.  According to the schedule I would have about 90 minutes between planes to get a drink and enjoy the sandwich I had bought in Washington. I was wrong on so many levels.

Traffic at the Phoenix airport seemed gridlocked as we waited to cross a runway until what seemed like several dozen planes landed. Not waiting would have resulted in our being the lead story on the eleven o'clock news (10:00 PM Pacific Time) and that didn't seem like a particularly good thing especially since I knew I wouldn't get to see it. So, I was content to wait…and wait…and wait…  Finally, a break in the flow and we 'darted' across the main drag onto a taxiway where we again came to a stop that consumed another 15 minutes of my sandwich time. Since this delay was due to no available gates, I couldn’t help but zone on this as the airport equivalent of a mall parking lot at Christmas…parking buzzards, cruising the lanes of the parking lot, watching for signs of an imminent opening, going into hover mode when one appears.

Once inside the terminal I had only about 20 minutes until my flight began boarding. That left just enough time to grab a fifty cent drink for which I was charged three times that. By the time I got to the gate the flight was already boarding and I had just enough time to discover that I would have been better off checking my sandwich through so maybe the airline would have had the opportunity to lose it for me.

Other than the 30 yard stroll through the pizza oven they called a passenger walkway to the commuter plane and the fact that the seats on the commuter plane were padded with a single layer of 'Charmin' the next to last leg of my trip was uneventful. We landed at Long Beach more or less on time and the luggage appeared on the carousel so quickly nobody even had a chance to gripe about how long it was taking. In fact, the Long Beach airport terminal was small enough that I could peek around the edge of the outdoor carousel and see the luggage actually coming off the plane.  I almost expected to see  a very very small man in a white suit  crying out, "De plane, de plane!"

A short luggage lug across the street to the Enterprise Car Rental office where my reservation was actually in their computer at the correct price and I was on my way. The final leg would be my introduction to driving in California, an hour and a half of trying to survive on a series of roads, all of which were referred to as "The" as in "The 15" and "The 415" and so on.

A note here about California highways and driving: apparently since Erik Estrada hung up his mirrored sunglasses and knee-high CHIPS boots anything goes out there speed-wise. At one point as my foster car was rocked in the backwash of yet another barely sub-orbital SUV I thought I must have been crawling along at way below the speed limit. I looked down at my speedometer to find I was doing 85 mile per hour. I haven't driven that fast since I reached voting age. Although I was the three legged coyote in my traffic wolf pack, at least there weren’t all that many people telling me I was Number One so I must not have been doing that badly. It is nevertheless highly intimidating to be a freshly whelped highway cub in a pack of 3000 pound automotive alpha wolves.  Each of the cars that passed me must have had a steering wheel and a driver with at least one finger on that wheel but there was something subtly different about the way they moved down the highway, a sort of ballistic quality to their guidance, like a SCUD missile.

I had been given many ominous predictions about California traffic. To the contrary, I was happy to find myself actually moving on the highway. Every comment I had heard up to that point was that the difference between rush hour and non-rush traffic was that non-rush traffic actually has movement even though it may be like riding the leading edge of a glacier. In contrast the cars emerging from the morning and evening Cal-Lock have on occasion been reported to be covered with something looking oddly lichen or moss like.

So as I rocketed down "The 15" or "The Whatever" I found myself beginning to relax a bit. I had made it through a couple of fairly risky multi-lane changes without becoming a statistic and the miles were ticking off on "The whatever-the-hell-road-number" I was on. I was seeing the same town and exit names on succeeding signs with shorter and shorter distances to the points they marked. That was a good thing it seemed and so I let my mind wander a bit and began to ponder why Californians refer to the state and interstate highways as "The ###"…The 15 or The 415.

Back East we refer to Interstates 95 and 64 as "95" and "64". Adding that extra word, "The" changes it somehow, elevating the status of highways to a sort of imperial level akin in a way to the royal "we". We don't revere them here like they do on the Left Coast. Since Californians' fondness for the cult of the car is well known; perhaps this little colloquialism is consistent with that.

By the time I headed back to Virginia I was prefacing every highway number with “the” but I got over that as soon as I pulled on to Interstate 95 on my way home from the airport. I also left behind my speed demon alter-ego and became once again, a good citizen of the highways. I drove home at a reasonable enough rate that a couple of passing cars even gestured to me that they thought I was the #1 citizen of the highways…that is what they meant, right

After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…”laissez les bon temps roullez!” I had cheated death yet again.

 

Strawberry season is here - Part 2

"Pickers, on your marks!"

Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

That's my story and, yeah, I'm stickin' to it....

Strawberry season is here!

It's a short season as seasons go, just a few weeks for the fruit and a few years for the pickers. If the weather cooperates, I'm going strawberry picking today with my daughter and my grandchildren.

The strawberries come back every year. Not so, the pickers, Ginny, Rachael and Abbie.  The wonderment of dribbling juice from fresh fruit down the chin and all over your "Winnie The Pooh" shirt lasts only a year or two. This is Abbie's year for that.
She is two now and mobile enough to hunker down in the impossibly emerald foliage and chomp a bright red juice-dribbling berry right there in the field for the first time.

My camera and I will have to watch closely because that first reaction is a micro-slice of her life that will never run down my chin again.

Yeah, it's a short season for the fruit, for the pickers...and for the grandfather.

AT&T, Verizon and Bell South...

...turning over your telephone records to the National Security agency? The National Security Agency tapping phones in violation of the provisions of the FISA act? Google being pressured to turn over net browsing records to the feds? What is next?

What would you have said if someone had presented this to you as a hypothetical scenario 10 years ago? Talk about a paradigm shift.

Footnote: Good on Qwest Communications for not caving in to President Joe Isuzu's efforts (remember the car commercials with the guy with the cheesy smile saying "You have my word on it!") to end run the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

If our mail is next, you can help! Start sending all your correspondence on either post cards or in open envelopes to help the government watch for mail from the "evil doers". If you seal your envelopes, you may soon be considered unpatriotic.

Osama has got to be laughing his ass off!

From Burger King to Einstein's

My secretary used to grab a burger for me at a local Burger King on her way back from her lunch break. This one day when I opened the burger, there it sat in the paper, open faced....no top on the bun at all. How do you do that; how do you wrap up a cheeseburger and not notice that half of the bun is missing?

I've gotten smarter in my choice of lunch spots; now I go to an Einstein's bagel place near my apartment and get something healthy like tuna and it's even on wheat bread with those little pieces of wheat shrapnel in the crust. OK, you would think that there are a limited number of ways to screw up a tuna sandwich, right? I saw a kid working at Einstein's going for the record the other day. He made so many mistakes on my lunch order, I thought I was eating at a Pentagon cafeteria.

 

The order was simple, tuna on toasted whole wheat with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and a side order of jalapeno cream cheese. The very first thing he does is reach for a whole wheat bagel instead of whole wheat bread. Being the eagle-eyed sandwich consumer I am I caught that one right away. I almost never confuse a slice of whole wheat bread with a bagel anymore…that hole in the middle is a dead giveaway.

 

As I'm standing waiting to pay he appears, all too quickly, with my untoasted sandwich. As I glance at it, I'm immediately tempted to go for a Jack Nicholson Easy Rider whole wheat toast, hold the chicken salad moment. Restraint prevailed however and I calmly point out that I had said I wanted it on toast.

 

My sandwich disappears and re-appears a few moments later toasted but without the side of jalapeno cream cheese. After gently and quietly pointing this out, the sandwich once again disappears. When it reappears there is the cream cheese as ordered.

 

Knowing that I'll have to hurry to get back to the office on time, I finally sit down with my food, only to realize that the mayo wasn't there. Back I go and finally my sandwich is complete. Maybe I'm too picky but a tuna sandwich for lunch just shouldn't be that difficult, should it?

 

All of these are small things, I'll grant. What gets my attention is that the sheer number of mistakes tells me that the one thing apparently not covered in the Einstein's training regimen is the need to actually LISTEN to the customer. It's not hard…really, it isn't...it's not rocket surgery....

Why do people blog?

Of course there are pot full of reasons why we do this blogging thing. Those who do not blog often seem to look on us bloggers as eccentrics of some flavor, maybe as ranters who have forgotten to wear their Reynolds Wrap skull caps to deflect the thought sucking ray beams from Alpha Centauri.

Ellie nails it for a lot of us in this post from a few days back. Her blog is one of those which I found so compelling that I went back and read everything she has posted. It was worth the effort.

Censorship, Theocracy and other creepy things!

Senator Bill Frist, R-TN, is increasing his efforts to push a bill through the Senate that would increase the fines levied against broadcasters for violations of decency standards. Quoting from today’s Washington Post, the bill would increase the fine for broadcasting “obscene, indecent or profane material” from $32,500 to $500,000.

Sounds reasonable on the surface of it but consider this; even the Supreme Court has historically been very cautious about defining obscenity. Now with a potentially power shifting mid-term election comes this Senate and this House of Representatives which want to give the authority to decide what broadcast material is “obscene, indecent or profane” to five political appointees of a sitting president who may or may not know their a**  from a hole in the ground about what they are doing.

This bill is nothing but opportunistic pandering to a political faction and pandering at its worst. Think the talk of a creeping theocracy is crazy? Think again…this is just one more step down that slippery slope. I’ll bet James Dobson and Brent Bozell are waltzing with glee to their “Lawrence Welk’s Greatest Hits” CD.

Next may be censorship of your e-mails, web sites or blogs. Improbable you say? Maybe but who would have though Janet Jackson’s nipple flash would have been worth a half million dollars. It was indeed unfortunate that children saw that during a sporting program but let’s get a grip on reality here.

Best Dog I Ever Had

It must be twenty years now since I saw the article in Reader's Digest entitled "Worst Dog I Ever Had" about an old man and a dog. This particular old man, according to his granddaughter, would seize on any mention of the dog to give it a blue streak cussin' and passed up no opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what a 'no-account, good for nothing" chow hound this dog was. It was he said, "the worst dog I ever had."

Listening to the old man, one would wonder that he hadn't dragged the dog off into the woods, tied it to a tree and put a bullet between its eyes. The true tale was told though after the dog died. As he shoveled the dirt back into the hole, the old man 's muttered, almost whispered  "Worst damn dog I ever had…" was spoken in a shaky broken voice, quiet enough that it was obvious he spoke only to himself and to the dog. 

I had a dog like that one time. His name was Charlie and he landed in our home direct from some animal rescue shelter out in King George County after a $300 stay at the vet's for heartworm treatment. We lived out in the country then and had a lot of animals already so I was somewhat less than enchanted at the prospect of another mouth to feed especially one the size he was. He was a big guy, weighing well over 100 pounds. We even ended up giving him a nickname, Bear. (Why in the world would a dog need a nick name?) Think of a smallish, almost totally black Great Dane and you'll get the picture of what I saw moving in on our critter food bill. Between the goats, rabbits, chickens, geese, cats and other dogs we were already spending more on animal food than I felt we could afford.   

Charlie turned out to be an OK dog in the brief time he was with us. Other than the time he swallowed my daughter's gerbil whole,  he never hurt anything. Ruth had decided to show Charlie her little pet, holding it out in her hands with appropriate little girl style narrative. I'm guessing she was about half way through her second sentence, holding the critter more or less nose to nose with the a huge dog head which apparently perceived it as a snack. In a flash, he somehow sucked it in and Ruth was left not only with two empty hands but a now unoccupied empty gerbil castle in her room. We were all stunned at how fast it happened and I immediately zoned out on this little unfortunate scurrying around in a very dark dog stomach, looking for the "Exit" sign.

He was fine with all the other animals in the yard and in the house. One day he was stretched out on his side taking a nap when our parrot fluttered off his perch and landed on Charlie's hip. I figured the bird was a goner, headed for where the gerbil had ended up. Charlie slowly lifted his head and kind of looked back towards his rear end. His expression was almost one of "Oh, it's just you". He resumed his nap and the bird lived to scream another day.

One more than one occasion when a stranger showed up at our gate, Charlie placed himself between the stranger and any of us including my kids. As soon as he sensed that we were OK with whoever it was he settled down and all was well.

If you're wondering how I, the pet Scrooge, accepted this dog into our home, here's what happened, exactly as it happened.  The corner was turned the first night he was there. After dinner we were sitting on the couch in the family room watching TV. Charlie walked around to where my wife was sitting and put his head in her lap. (The oldest trick in the book, right?)

She scratched him behind the ears and said, "Don't talk to me; you want to stay, you better talk to him." He immediately picked his head up out of her lap, walked around the coffee table and put his head in my lap. He didn't even look at me, just rested his head there while I scratched him behind the ears.

Folks, there are some messages that are loud and clear without a sound being heard and there are some things you  just don't mess with. Charlie was there to stay for the next seven years. I think he already knew what we would later conclude, that he had been misplaced and wandering for years until our paths finally converged. He was meant to be ours all along. Sometimes things don't quite come together just right at first.

When his kidneys finally began to fail he went downhill quickly. The day he died, when we went down to pick him up, the vet asked if we wanted him to take care of Charlie since he was so large. I managed to say that we would take care of all that. I don't know quite how but I picked up that limp 100 pound dog by myself and carried him to the back of the car.

When we sold that house in 1994, the back flower garden included the stone marker we had made for him. It read "Miss you, Bear" I still do.