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About jparquette

Fortunate and blessed in companionship with my wife of fifty seven years, in health and in modest, but more than adequate circumstances. Life is good.
July 22, 2012 · 8:43 am

Lumpenproletariat

Making a Move

The scream of Wes’s customized Sach’s 250 dirt bike coming out of the foothills, and then kicking up a great cloud of dust on the long dirt driveway, signaled the beginning of our work day.  He was rarely late, but never early; his avocation was motocross racing, which he did professionally, but not lucratively.  His daily bread was earned, like the rest of us, cutting trees for EZ Tree Service in 1969 Colorado.  Our fenced in staging area on the plateau north of Boulder and just east of the beginning of the Rockies was where Ed Zemekis stored and split his for-sale firewood. The lot provided parking for the various bucket trucks, chip trucks, log trucks, trailered large wood chippers, pickup trucks and stump grinders with which we plied our trade.

Ed was a self taught genius mechanic who could fix, weld or fabricate almost anything.  He weighed in at over two thirty and couldn’t get up a tree if a grizzly was chasing him, but he could run an organized and effective business.  My interview for a job was typical of skills based hiring methods at the tail end of the post war boom.  I drove into the yard between his house and barn for our appointment, and as I walked toward the front door past an eight yard dump truck, I heard a grunt, then a “put the pin in for me, will ya?”  Looking around, I saw a hefty set of legs protruding from under the truck.  Ed was bench pressing a drive shaft back up to the transmission and needed someone to jam in the bolt to secure it.  What he would have done had I been late was never made clear.  Perhaps he was waiting to show me how strong he was.

He slid out from under the truck and asked me if I had my rope and saddle with me.  Of course I did, and he gestured towards a large cottonwood in his side yard.  I threw the rope into it with one cast; foot locked up to a low branch and scrambled to the top, tying in when I got there.  “Can you start Monday?”  “Sure.”  His Prairie Home Companion pleasant, pretty, fiftyish wife brought out some lemonade, and I had a job.  Both of us knew that should Monday prove that I was good at a climbing interview, but fell short in cutting or pruning skills, there wouldn’t be a Tuesday.

“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”  Henry David Thoreau

Two of the crew worked in the lot full time cutting and splitting the hardwood we brought back with Ed’s homemade, vertical log splitter, which was powered by a barely mufflered Ford industrial strength engine and his own concoction of foot pedal and hydraulics.  The terrifying monster functioned as a guillotine for logs, could easily blow apart 18” oak and would have horrified any hapless OSHA inspector who stopped by – not that one ever did.  Load the log between the channel iron guides, step back, step on the foot pedal and the blade would slash downward with the inexorable slam of a pile driver.  No safety lock out (not even shutting off the motor, because the hydraulics held enormous pent up force), no cage, no emergency shut off – just drop in the wood and get the hell out of the way.  The rest of us mounted up in whatever configuration of equipment the assigned work required, and off we went.  The good old days.

The climbers were Wes, who had a degree in History, Ted, the handlebar mustached lead foreman and quintessential Westerner, Hatch, originally from Boston, who we later discovered stole high performance cars as a side business, a multi degreed (Math and Physics) Rocky Mountain Rescue Group mountaineer named Bob Cormack and I, newly hired. Ron, who supplemented his income as a part time marijuana dealer, and Stan from Chicago, a former Oakland Branch Hell’s Angel, were the bucket truck operators.  The rest of the crew worked on the ground, running lowering lines, chain sawing up fallen trees, chipping, dragging, loading and raking up chips in the yards of our customers.

Young and fit men all, but the alchemy of the late sixties, especially in a place like Boulder, melded a disparate cast of characters into a crew, a team, who worked, played and took considered risks together.  Men of quite different backgrounds and education, but mutually respectful and sharing a common, fundamentally American, understanding of how the world worked.  Some of us challenged that understanding, but we all had no doubt that it was how things were.

We were brought up to share the principles and promise of capitalism:  success and opportunity if we “worked hard and played by the rules.”  The differences among us regarding the “playing by the rules” part were legion, but everyone fully integrated, indeed never thought to question, that every day we got up and worked hard at rough physical labor.  We all simply expected it of ourselves as a given.

Karl Marx ridiculously postulated in The Communist Manifesto that there were only two classes, the owners and the workers – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the resolution of that “exploitation” would create a utopia.  As it turns out, Marx soon contradicted his premise by parsing his dichotomy into many subsets.  The lowest of the low was the lumpenproletariat, that “dangerous class”, and there were elements of that outlaw self perception among the well educated, countercultural and underemployed tree guys.  Set apart – sweaty, dirty, brawny, laughing, profane and derisive of those outsiders who were condescending towards those of us who did for a living what most of them would never attempt.

Take Down

With the foolish vanity of youth, we saw our motley band as made up of the kind of guys recruited by Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles: “rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists.”  And proud of it.

After an additional forty more years, I now recognize the naïveté, narcissism and vainglory of such posturing, but at the time, invulnerable young men held it dear.

I have stories to relate – both of the work and the men who did it.  We can go down that road together, if you like, in future posts.

“If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”  Vincent Van Gogh

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July 15, 2012 · 3:13 pm

Threads, Calculations and Tinkering

                      Leon Black was revealed this week as the buyer in May of “The Scream”, the Edvard Munch masterpiece of terror and despair, for nearly $120 million, the largest amount ever paid for a work of art.  After leaving as head of Mergers and Acquisitions for Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, Mr. Black founded Apollo Global Management, a private equity, alternative investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts and restructuring of distressed corporations.  He is widely respected as a knowledgeable collector of art, sitting on the board of both New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, setting up a potential rivalry for display of the pastel on board version of the image.

Munch painted four iterations of “The Scream” as well as creating a lithograph stone; the other two painted renditions and one pastel already reside in Norway museums.  He wrote a poem describing his vision as “an infinite scream passing through nature” amid blood-red clouds. The scene was painted in Oslofjord, a “popular” site for Norwegian jumper suicides and in 1895 was near both a slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum.  The overused and clichéd adjective “iconic”, which I have come to despise, may, in this case, truly apply.

Mr. Black’s mother was an artist; his father, Eli, controlled United Brands Company, which owned Chiquita Bananas of gunboat diplomacy infamy.  Eli jumped from the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building while under investigation by Federal regulators for bribing a Honduras official. The Pan Am Building, now the Met Life Building, is over 800’ tall, and from the 44th floor, in 1975, Mr. Black senior leapt from about 600 feet after breaking a window with his briefcase.  At the universal acceleration constant, it would have taken him around six seconds to hit Park Avenue like a water balloon at over 130 MPH.  One, one thousand….  Two, one thousand…. Seems like a long time to scream.

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.”  Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

**************************************

To put things into a bit of perspective, $120,000,000 would buy Mr. Black about 3 ¾ seasons of Alex Rodrigues’ services at third base for the NY Yankees, OR salvage about 1/5 of what the Obama administration drained into the Solyndra bankruptcy and 1,100 laid off green jobs, OR cover just 17 minutes of 24-7-365 Federal spending. Then again, if we add up the nearly $16 trillion in Federal debt and the nearly $120 trillion in unfunded Federal entitlement programs, Mr. Black’s $120 million covers the Federal liability of only 69 of us 313 million of U.S. citizens.  Every American man, woman and child owes just over $1.7 million of liabilities as our share of the debt and unfunded entitlements.  See National Debt Clock.  Plug that into your personal balance sheet, per person in your family, and see how it looks.  Thank goodness my four children are grown and gone, so they are on their own – only $3.4 million in additional debt for Rita and me now.  Just kidding, kids.   For Mr. Black, reputedly worth over $3.5 billion after Apollo Global went public last year, the $3.4 million for him and his wife of layered on Federal debt represents less than 1/10 of a percent of his net worth, but for most of us, it’s far more than we will ever accumulate or earn in this lifetime.  Perhaps a primal scream or two wouldn’t hurt.

*********************************

Since money seems to be weaving threads together in a barter equivalency, recently Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation pledged $560 million, somewhat less than five “Screams”, to promote, disseminate and spread the “gospel” about contraceptives to the third world.  “That’s universal – we want to bring every good thing to our children,” she says. “But what’s not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.”  Material success and the aggregation of possessions are therefore the raison d’être of our 70 or 80 spins around the sun and how we are to keep score –   presumably not a problem for Bill and Melinda’s kids.  The Gates solution for the rest of the world is to not have children, or at least to have a lot fewer of them.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

This is a solution that is working out well in all of Western Europe, Japan and more recently the United States, where the population growth has fallen below a replacement rate, resulting in an increasingly aging population wherein it will become ever more unsustainable for the young to support the needs of the old.

Certainly, contraception is not a cause, but merely a symptom and enabler of the trend in Western culture as we persist in deracinating marriage by the cultivation of the utilitarian ethic of the “progressive” and devolve in viewing sex as less a function of commitment, family, children and intimate bonding between human beings and more as solely a function of hedonism and unhindered pleasure.  Since widespread use of contraception and sterilization has taken root in our culture, our divorce rate has exploded to 50%, we’ve progressed from three or four sexually transmitted diseases to over a hundred, pornography grows more graphic and dehumanizing as it saturates our cyberspace and all manner of spousal abuse abounds: the objectification of women on steroids, as it were.

Medical side effects of the Pill include decreased libido (some minor irony there), high blood pressure, weight gain, blood clots, more strokes and heart attacks, increased risk of depression and breast cancer (up to 70% higher), especially if taken before a woman’s first child, and twice the aging rate of the uterine lining, which can contribute or cause future infertility.  This magic potion (“Just take this, honey, and we won’t have any worries!”) causes on average at least one early term abortion a year per woman, since the Pill, not just the “morning after” version, indisputably is an abortifacient because it inhibits the ability of the uterine lining to implant and sustain the life of the conceived tiny baby.

But it gets even better.   A Time Magazine article on The Pill cites recent studies proving that progestin from The Pill, (artificial chemicals that mimic the action of the progesterone hormone) are excreted in the urine of millions of women taking the stuff, and it inevitably flows into our water supply.

Early studies show (perhaps like the canary in the coalmine) that aquatic life (fish and frogs) and a few mammalian studies (rats and mice) show degradation of ovaries resulting in infertility from the ingestion of this water.  Women, who take the pill after childbirth, have lower milk producing capability.  A French funded study showed that progestin and other artificial steroids that make their way into our water supply are cumulative and are much more difficult to purify out than other contaminants.  As we travel down this road, even those not taking these potent chemicals will suffer some of the consequences.

Progress, indeed, providing a windfall from which the rest of the world surely will benefit.  Perhaps Bill and Me Lady should stick with malaria.  Perhaps Edvard Munch had something there after all.

“This is the dead land

This is the cactus land….

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow….

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang, but a whimper..”

The Hollow Men, T.S.  Eliot

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July 8, 2012 · 11:15 am

Jobs and Dignity

Still cutting at 65

The young lions roar for their prey and ask their food from God.

At the rising of the sun they steal away and go to rest in their dens.

Man goes forth to his work, to labor till evening falls.  Psalm 104

Propriety and neighbors always proscribed starting up chainsaws before 7:30 in the morning, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty to do in the cool of the morning.  We would set up ropes, sharpen and fuel saws and throw a climbing line into the tree.  After whipping the thrown end back down to the ground I’d foot lock up the rope to a lower branch by holding the two ends together, then free climb to the top of my first assignment.   I would tie off with a taut line hitch between both sides of the rope on either side of the “highest, safe, center” crotch I could find.  Fasten the safety clip into my climbing saddle, pull up a pole saw or chainsaw to go with the curved pruning saw I carried in a scabbard clipped to my saddle, and I was ready to start work.

We wore high topped boots, for me the light and strong Dunham Duraflex, but some preferred Chippewa or Timberline or Herman Survivors.  Like everything else in a crew of working men, debate over the best boots or ropes or saws were forever unresolved, and their advocates were adamant and impassioned.  Dissenters were viewed as at best, ignorant and at worst, heretic.  Prior to their first use, every pair of boots I bought went to a cobbler for protective Naugahyde patches to protect the inner seams.  Constant climbing and scrapping against rough bark would tear out the seam in a month.  Even with the patches, climbers were lucky to get a year out of a $125 pair of boots, which cost us half a week’s pay in the sixties.

If we were taking down a tree, we would wear ‘hooks’ or gaffs fastened with three straps to each leg.  Pole spikes are about 1 ½”, but tree gaffs ran closer to 3” to penetrate sometimes loose or rotten bark into solid wood.  Pruning a tree takes balance and excellent climbing skills without hooking the tree because gaffs can spread disease or injure healthy bark.  Taking down a tree took climbing skills, but was more a matter of planning and rigging.  Locate a good lowering crotch (not our climbing crotch), tie off as large a limb or leader as was prudent with a second, larger ‘bull’ line and throw down the other end of the line to my “ground guy” for each cut.

The partner on the ground would ‘take a wrap’ or several wraps around the tree depending on the perceived weight of the piece being cut.  I’d usually use a clove hitch with a half hitch or two to stabilize the knot, but sometimes due to the circumstances a running bowline would be easier and safer to tie.  The placement of the tie off varied with the necessity of the cut:  balanced, butt end first, brush first.   A few climbers preferred the timber hitch, but I judged that while that knot was useful and quick to secure a log on the ground to a drag line, I never trusted it not to come undone at a critical juncture on an twelve inch by eight foot piece of beech protruding out over someone’s chimney, slate roof or power line, unraveling at the worst possible moment and spinning the piece like an out of control spindle through the roof.  I didn’t need the extra adrenaline.  Knots were another topic of continual dispute among the crew.

Occasionally in a tricky spot, a second line would be tied off on the butt of the cut to control both ends.  The ‘butt line’ would usually be mine to control from the tree after the branch swung loose and I cut the power to the saw.  A single cut could take ten minutes or more to set up.  All manner of other rigging tricks were employed, including a zip line to run a series of smaller pieces from the tree to the ground.  Each cut required close control of the saw and employed a variety of undercuts and notches to send the piece where I wanted it.  A ‘take down’ required tying in at the top, then coming back down and working from the bottom up, so that lower branches didn’t hang up the pieces above them.  A typical tree for such a planning process might be in the 40 to 50’ range and extend out over various hazards such as houses, garages, swimming pools and valued shrubbery.  Large ones could run over 100’ tall with the canopy spread out half of that or more, four or even five feet in diameter at the base and take all day to get safely on the ground.

Rarely a cut would go wrong; I once blew out the power for several blocks in Denver when my ground guy mistimed roping down a large piece.  We were working off a service alley behind a large 18th century home in an upscale neighborhood.  The old cottonwood hung way out over the house, and there was a tiny backyard into which to lower the branches.  After successfully lowering several safely down, we ran into a problem.

The nature of the location meant the ground person had to let the rope run through heavy gloves after the branch cleared the roof in order to get it down before it swung back into the house or out over the power lines.  On the fourth cut, he held the rope a bit too long, perhaps paying too much attention to the coed sunning herself on the neighbor’s deck.  The piece swung from the roof perfectly, I made a jump back for safety into the trunk of the tree, but the large branch continued out over the wires and got hung up on two primary lines.  The power arced through the branch, blew the transformer spectacularly and it was lights out.  Neither neighbors nor my boss were amused; the local electric company even less so.  An afternoon without lights in the middle of summer in Denver wasn’t much of an inconvenience, but missing episodes of two or three favorite soaps was near catastrophic, and it was always the fault of the guy up in the air, who ran the crew, was conspicuous and had no place to hide.

The camaraderie of working crews, whether tree climbers, carpenters or masons, is difficult to understand if one hasn’t experienced it.  Teasing, laughing, sometimes bursts of temper and competition.  A gamut of personalities, intellects, education, marital status and financial conditions melded into a team that trusted one other, shared all manner of self revelation at lunch and in the trucks.  For climbers, even their coffee breaks were sometimes taken fifty feet up depending on how big the tree was and how long it would take to descend and reascend.  Someone on the crew drove to the donut shop, and the best knot man on the ground would tie a bag with a coffee and snack onto the climbing line.  Woe to him who dropped a morning break.  We would compete at lunch and sometimes after work on almost anything: foot locking, pushups, axe throwing, pull ups, rock throwing, log lifting and arm wrestling were regular fields of play.

There is dignity in physical work that again is not understood by those who have never done it forty five hours a week, fifty weeks a year.  I’ve worked in management now for twenty five years, sales for a decade, and as a fence installer, carpenter, truck driver, newspaper reporter, landscaper and CEO of a couple of small companies (one my own), but nothing ever replicated the easy friendships forged on those tree crews of my youth.

Occasionally I reflect that it was no accident that Jesus was a carpenter, St. Paul a sail or tent maker and St. Peter a fisherman.  The inherent worth of earning one’s way with strength, physical skills and thoughtful application of hard work and sweat cannot be replaced by any other sphere of human endeavor.

 “No living man will see again the virgin pineries of the Lake States, or the flat woods of the coastal plain, or the giant hardwoods…..”  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1948

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July 1, 2012 · 4:27 pm

Compromise and Ideology

Blind Lady Justice

Are there two less understood concepts in the lexicon?  “Ideology” derives from the “science of ideas” and “philosophy of the mind”.  “Compromise” derives from “a mutual promise”.  In our post modern usage, ideology is usually depicted as bad and compromise as good.  The current media blockbuster of the Supreme Court’s narrow 5 to 4 decision to uphold Obamacare is a case in point.  Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, a hybrid compromise of sorts allowed the ill advised, cumbersome law to stand.  At least temporarily.

Some conservatives took some consolation in the Court ruling definitively that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution could not justify Congress passing legislation that coerced  a private commerce transaction (i.e. purchasing health insurance).  This is a tinny and Pyrrhic small victory.  However, the Court decreed, Congress, under its constitutional powers, could tax those not buying insurance.  As Justice Antonin Scalia scathingly noted during the hearings on the bill, if a law citing the Commerce Clause could order a citizen to buy health insurance, what would prevent a law being passed under similar rationale to order us to buy broccoli?  Or, I suppose, to not buy sugary drinks, eight cylinder cars or microwave ovens.

Under this ruling, the Commerce Clause cannot be used to order us to not buy microwaves, but it could tax us into impecuniousness for doing it.  The Supreme Court put its imprimatur on all such future laws and widely exposed us to incursions through the tax code on any liberty inconvenient to a social agenda.  The Supreme Court rewrote what the legislature did by declaring the mandate a tax, which the legislators and the President explicitly denied that it was  on many occasions during its debate.  We haven’t seen such blatant judicial legislating and constitutional rework since Roe v Wade.  Charles Krauthammer called the Court’s tortured reasoning a “great finesse”.

This convoluted compromise performed a Heimlich maneuver on bloated legislation, but it left proponents with all the unresolved problems of the bill.  Obamacare now has been deemed by the highest court in the land as the biggest tax increase in our lifetimes, again something the President promised over and over he would not do to anyone making under $250,000.  Obamacare, even with the huge tax increase, will still add to our deficit a staggering one trillion dollars over its first ten years.  Obamacare will add millions to the lists of the insured through its provisions, and according to an exhaustive Price Waterhouse study, raise insurance premiums for the average family by 40%.  Since it will be far cheaper for the young and healthy to pay the tax than to buy insurance, and because they now can sign up for insurance at any time irrespective of their health and previous conditions, what will prevent them from waiting to buy it until insurance is a desperate and expensive necessity?  Nothing.

The economic underpinning of the bill relies on the assumption that younger, healthy people will buy policies and support the expenses of the old and sick.  Of course, the solution would be to raise the penalty tax even higher, and the authors of the new bastardized system clearly love taxes.

Occasionally compromise is not possible without splitting the baby in two in some Solomonic solution.  How, for instance, is it possible to reconcile a fundamental divide on an idea such as “fairness”?  For many, fairness involves a person getting to keep, spend and reinvest the gains earned by their hard work, risk, intellect and talent.  When President Obama was asked by Charlie Gibson of ABC News in 2008, “If you knew – not believed, but knew — that lowering the capital gains tax rate would raise more (tax) revenue (through increased economic activity), would you still favor raising them?”  Obama answered that he would because of “fairness”.  OK, then.  Explain, please, how a “moderate independent” would find a principled compromise for this gap in the very understanding of the concept of fairness.  Or abortion (a baby is a baby only some of the time)?  Or racist policies such as ‘affirmative action’ (it’s ok to discriminate in favor of some minorities, but not in favor of others)?

A compromise trying to gap that deep a divide of standards is like both camps starting from either side of a ten mile ravine to build a bridge.  Each builds five miles and stops, waiting for the other.  The complication is that they started fifty miles apart on their side of the abyss.  Both get to the end of their side of the bridge with nowhere to go and no plan to complete the span. (Thanks to Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “The Tyranny of Cliché’s” for the metaphor.)

If compromise is not always good, how about ideology?  Ideology is often depicted as akin to some unidentified sticky substance under our shoes in a discount movie theater.  Originally the word connoted a worldview: a set of learned suppositions and principles based on experience and observation that informs our decisions and understanding.  Edmund Burke, the Irish born long serving British House of Commons member, is remembered as a strong supporter of the American Revolution and passionate opponent of the French version.  He decried the blood-spattered extremes of Jacobin ideology and was the intellectual father of modern conservatism.  Burke perceived all “ideology” as the province of Utopian madness determined to create a man made Heaven on earth, sort of a political religion based on the fallacy of the perfectibility of man.  Not really dissimilar to how many conservatives view leftish ideology even today.
A radical ideology renders a left leaning partisan obviously incapable of holding a reasonable idea not based on totalitarian impulse.

More recently, it is the left that decries the ideology of conservatives as bigoted, if not actually racist, small minded and reactionary – certainly not “progressive” or “pragmatic”, which is a code word for utilitarian ethics.   A benighted ideology renders a conservative obviously incapable of holding a reasonable idea not based on “clutching their guns and Bibles”.

Just as some ideas are bad and some are good, so similarly are ideologies.  Is it reasonable to conjure up ghosts of Himmler and Hitler when debating those who expound a worldview that favors smaller government, personal responsibility and fewer subsidies based on race?  (The dogmatic error that Nazism was other than a movement of the Left notwithstanding.)   Is it reasonable to allude to Lenin or Mao when debating those who insist that government should solve complex problems with higher taxes, deficit budgets and bureaucratic mandates?    Would it not be a step up for all to take a step back, articulate our ideas without invective and do the best we can in good faith to understand other American’s ideas with the assumption that the loyal opposition is just that?  Perhaps we can find no compromises without abrogating our principles, but we can treat each other with civility and respect.

“Every social order rests on an ideology.”  Friedrich Hayek

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June 23, 2012 · 1:17 pm

The Fourth Greatest President in American History – Part 3

Barry and Genevieve, high school sweethearts

Barack Obama’s well written autobiographical, “Dreams From My Father” portrayed his youth as a series of permanently mind altering revelations at Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard that formed his belief system and character.  His high school career was commonplace.  He drank beer, smoked dope, dated and hung out with friends, mostly white.  In Hawaii with so many of mixed race, there was no stigma and he experienced rare, if any, discrimination.

At Occidental College and Columbia Barry Obama transformed to “Barack”, became radicalized, and it was a journey he avidly sought out – he found his mission; he found his role.  Adolescent insecurities were morphed or sublimated, as with us all.  The narcissism and hubris so evident today took root and blossomed.  In “Dreams” he described incidents and conversations that led to these epiphanies; the troubling element is that some of the characters in the book were composites or didn’t exist at all according to the newly released biography, “Barack Obama: The Story”.  David Maraniss, the author, is a Washington Post reporter and an Obama supporter, so one expects a positive perspective, which it presents for the most part.

In “Dreams”, Mr. Obama writes of how he reinvented himself.  In reality, he was “inventing himself inventing himself.”  Andrew Ferguson’s review of Maraniss’ “The Story” (“meticulously researched, well footnoted, carefully written”) wrote this, “What’s dispiriting is that throughout Dreams, the moments that Obama has invented are precisely the occasions of his epiphanies – precisely those periodic “aha!” moments that carry the book and bring its author closer to self-discovery.  Without them not much is left: a lot of lovely writing, some unoriginal social observations, a handful of precocious literary turns….  As Obama’s best biographer, David Remnick, observed, this wasn’t the stuff of Manchild in the Promised Land; you couldn’t use it to make … the Autobiography of Malcolm X.  So Obama used the drama inside himself, and said he’d found there an experience both singular and universal, and he brought along nonexistent friends like Regina and Ray to goose the story along. He did in effect what so many of us have done with him.  He created a fable about an Obama far bigger and more consequential than the unremarkable man at its center.”

From “Barack Obama: The Story”: The character creations and rearrangements of the book (“Dreams from My Father”) are not merely a matter of style, devises of compression, but are also substantive.  The themes of the book control character and chronology.  Time and again the narrative accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white.

 Oh yes, I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own..’  “The Great Pretender” (The Platters)

It appears President Obama may persist in his self absorbed attempts to reinvent himself as he would prefer to be. Or his publicity flacks, campaign staff and even his national security advisors are doing it for him.  Peggy Noonan’s editorial in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal asks the question, “Who Benefits From the ‘Avalanche of Leaks’?”   In the article, she writes about David Sanger’s new book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power”, as well as the sensational New York Times articles that expose sensitive and ongoing American covert intelligence operations, putting our own operatives and those of our allies at great risk.   Who benefited from these revelations was a president perceived as “weak, a one man apology tour whose foreign policy is unclear, unsure, and lacking in strategic depth”.   President Obama would rather reinvent a warrior and a “do over” from a walking, inept, act of contrition.  No lesser light from the Left than Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called these an “avalanche of leaks” and said that her “heart stopped” reading the stories:

  • A Pakistani physician, Dr. Shakil Afridi, who assisted the CIA by taking DNA samples trying to locate Osama Bin Laden’s lair was exposed by the stories, arrested within days by Pakistan agents, tortured and convicted of spying for America.  He was sentenced to 33 years in prison.
  • A sophisticated infusion of trackable video cameras was inserted into Pakistan to enable satellites to identify and find terrorist leaders hiding there.
  •  The double agent in Yemen planted deep in Al Qaeda who provided key information about the new, more deadly, airline destroying underwear explosives.
  •  The joint Israeli American covert Stuxnet virus, a cyber attack, which disrupted the operation of Iranian centrifuges – a cyber attack that could easily be construed as an act of war and used to justify all manner of retribution.
  • And others, most of which could only have come from the recesses of the White House situation room.  Indeed, unnamed White House officials were quoted liberally in the stories.

Before he left the administration, former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, originally a holdover from the Bush White House, visited Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon’s office.  “I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,” he said.  “What?” asked Mr. Donilon.  “Shut the f*%$ up!” replied Mr. Gates.

Two choices: either the President inexplicably declassified these ongoing operations, which put covert intelligence operatives in mortal danger, betrayed our allies and authorized their leaking to the press OR someone very close to him should be prosecuted for treason.

President Obama has shown himself to be defined by a self reinvented narrative to suit his ambitions.  He has proven to be a gifted campaigner and an inexperienced, ideologically hidebound, manipulative chief executive.  It is not a far stretch of the imagination to envision him as again up to what he’s best at.

“There is something childish in it: Knowing secrets is cool, and telling them is cooler.”  Peggy Noonan

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June 10, 2012 · 6:41 pm

Divided Nation

1970 with Amy

Winston Churchill most famously decreed, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.”  The journey we’ve made in the last forty years follows that well worn path.  Much is written about current gridlock and which political leader is most divisive, but even a cursory look at the United States demonstrates deep divisions for our whole history.  The early Republican party led by Abraham Lincoln carefully negotiated extremely tricky political waters to the Emancipation Proclamation, followed later, after his death, to amendments to our Constitution to first free, then enfranchise (at least the men) 3 ½ million Americans of African descent.

During the time both before and during a Civil War, emotions ran rampant; a pro slavery South Carolina Democrat Congressman, Preston Brooks, severely beat and nearly killed Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner with a metal headed cane on the floor of the Senate after Sumner delivered an impassioned Abolitionist speech likening slave owners to pimps.  Sumner took three years to recover sufficiently to return to the Senate.  Brooks was fined $300 and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress by his constituents. We haven’t yet seen physical violence in Congress yet, although a few like former Senator John Edwards almost certainly would benefit from a sound thrashing.

The leaders on the liberal side of the current schism were produced through the Vietnam War and post Vietnam War periods, during which few compromises were countenanced.  In 1969, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered martyrs to the anti war and civil rights movements. The eventually disgraced Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, and from the perspective of early twenties dilettante radicals like Rita and me, prospects seemed bleak.  We read rags like “Ramparts” Magazine, books by Eldridge Cleaver and tracts about the Chicago Seven. There was Cambridge, Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury, Ann Arbor and Boulder.  Because we wanted to see the Rockies, we put our few pieces of furniture in storage over Rita’s father’s garage and headed to Boulder, Colorado. “Power to the people.”

In retrospect, we were remarkably uninformed, entitled by the sacrifice of our parents, naïvely idealistic and determined to make a difference – whatever that meant.  A couple of years before, after graduating from college, my military career turned out to be a one day adventure for a physical that I failed when the Army doctors discovered I take an anti-convulsion medication due to a severe head injury from a high school car accident.  I have never had a day time incident, so it didn’t seem crucial, but it was one and out for me.  Things went Left after that.  An arm chair psychoanalyst may discern that my early job choices for dangerous work were possibly compensatory for a young man.  I was a skilled tree worker; Rita was a Boston hospitals trained RN.  Neither one of us had a moment’s doubt that we would find work out West, which turned out to be a problem solved the third day after we arrived.

Our revolutionary efforts were pedestrian and embarrassingly feckless.  One demonstration at the University of Denver; a Joan Baez concert at Red Rocks the same month she performed at a farm in Woodstock, NY (she spoke amusingly of the then Governor of California, Ronald Ray-Gun); a few joints around campfires under the black night of a billion stars on back packing trips into the mountains; a visit or two to the American Friends Service Committee (an offshoot of the non violent Quaker center for conscientious objection), and small gatherings in friend’s apartments to cavil about “the cause” and tell stories about Cam Bishop, whom I once met, a living off the land FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitive, who blew up the power station that fed Fort Carson.

With David and Kris Levin, our upstairs neighbors, we decided to take a week’s vacation and drive to San Francisco over Loveland Pass.  David was my chess partner at the University of Colorado Chess Club, until they threw us out when they asked us both to join their chess team, and we confessed to not being students.  He worked for the American Friend’s along with a Catholic priest, whose name escapes me.  David had been a wilderness guide in Talkeetna, Alaska, and they had lived for a while in Mexico City.  Their wanderings were not uncommon.

Driving through eastern Utah, we stopped in Vernal around midnight for fuel at an all night, coin operated gas station – two long haired couples in a worn out station wagon with a mattress in the back, so we could drive straight through to Frisco.  While there, a Camaro SS with a hood scoop pulled in with five twenty something well trimmed guys looking for something to do on a Saturday night.  We qualified as the entertainment, especially after a few beers.  As we pulled out of the station, they followed us.

What followed included huddling in the back seat with a tire iron in my hand while we held the mattress up to the window to protect ourselves from flying glass as they threw full beer bottles at the car and almost running them over when they raced ahead to block the road.  On either side of the road, there was a hundred miles of desolate nothing.

Finally they joined up with another car of their friends, and we knew it was a matter of time before they trapped our old beater.  It took three hours to drive the thirty miles to the next town; David pulled into the yard of a house with the lights still on.  David and I stayed at the car as our tormentors pulled up near us.  Kris and Rita pounded on the door of the home; the owner answered the door for our terrified wives with a lever action 30-30 Winchester at port arms.

The young couple in the house was up with an ill child, so Rita’s pediatric nurse experience was welcomed.  Once he sorted us out, the father recognized the cars parked out front with one belonging to the county sheriff’s son, who had been implicated the summer before in the disappearance of a hitchhiking couple.  We called the state police, who were at first reluctant to come, but after my non violent friend, David, threatened to shoot a few of them, they sent the cavalry.  When the police car approached with lights blaring from a long distance, both cars left back towards Vernal.  After we assured the trooper that it wasn’t just (in his words) “drunk Indians”, he agreed to look for them.  We rode in his car back to Vernal and identified the Camaro in the parking lot of an all night diner.  The trooper dropped us at the courthouse, then went and arrested five of them.

Couples and five harassers then sat in a waiting room at the courthouse for another hour and a half waiting for a judge to show up.  The ensuing conversation confirmed the implacable nature of our differences.   The smooth one was conciliatory after Rita’s pregnancy became obvious.  Another was headed to Vietnam in the Army the following Monday, which had prompted their partying.  They despised us; the hatred was palpable at first, but by the end of the hour and a half, most began to see one another as human beings.  Discussion softened, except for the departing soldier, who kept trying to start a fight, but who could blame him?

We found out a bit about life for young men in rural Utah with fast cars being the extent of available distraction; we all learned to reify the other side’s point of view through discussion held in neutral territory.   No permanent bridges, and conciliation was nearly impossible given the polarity, however all of us became more than caricatures to the other.

When the judge finally came, we filled out complaint forms.  The judge assured us we would be called back to testify when the trial came up in a month or so.  Even though it meant several hundred miles of driving through the mountains, we agreed to come back.  Exhausted, we never made it past Salt Lake City, where we rested and turned around, carefully avoiding Vernal on the way back.

Of course, from the courts of Vernal, we never heard a word.

Still dancing after all these years

For myself, I am an optimist – it doesn’t seem of much use to be anything else.  Winston Churchill.

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May 28, 2012 · 9:40 am

Maine Tales IV – The Road Not Taken

For all its idyllic vistas and community spirit, rural Maine can be harsh, isolating and lonely, most especially in the winter.  Maine winters hold a stark beauty that shines an unforgiving light on the soul.  We soon found ourselves unable to escape our own frailty and foibles. At the end of our third winter, a singularly snowy and cold one, Rita and I were succumbing to a confluence of secularism, bad advice and the detritus of the Cultural Revolution by which we all are still afflicted. Our young, bright love was threadbare; ten years into our marriage, we were ready to move on.  Virtually all of our friends were counseling a fresh start.  “Time to hang it up,” we were told.  “Why hold on to a dead thing?”  “There are plenty of other opportunities,” and indeed there were for us both.

Rita and the kids

I  fought a separation for the whole long winter, but by spring had hardened myself to leave behind nine lovely years and one difficult, complicated one.  Not much anger, not even a lot of bitterness: after a few brief, generally desultory skirmishes about who got the Bob Dylan albums and other prosaic living arrangement matters, we settled on a Saturday in early May for move out day.  Two separate incidents led us to the other fork in the road.

The first was a coffee Rita shared with our friend, Pam, during the week prior to moving day.  Pam, a gifted artist and painter, lived a rough life; her ne’er do well husband had deserted her a dozen years before with six children.  An earth mother type, Pam soldiered on, tolerating occasional visits from her husband – no divorce and rare support.  She was much liked and admired in town, especially by Rita.  Pam took a chance and defied the common “wisdom” amongst our circle of friends; Pam told Rita that we were a good match wading through some confusion and pain, but that separating was a mistake – a big mistake.

When I came home from work on Friday, Rita asked if we could give it one more effort.  My resolve was hard earned, and my initial internal reaction was “hell, no!”  With my game face on, I looked at our two young children, the vulnerable hope on Rita’s beautiful face and could not, would not smash our one last attempt.  Although I held meager expectations, I thought perhaps, just perhaps, we could raise our children together and restore a semblance of the friendship that had always come so easily and that would allow us to do the right thing.  This was my best hope, but far short of what we would become. I agreed to try again – all in.  I quit my job with all its traveling and worked part time pruning and taking down trees to spend more time on our marriage.  We lived frugally and got by.  But there was no miracle cure.

The next few weeks in retrospect we likened to living in a bombed out, post apocalyptic city among sterile ruins.  There was no healing, no fighting, no feeling, no animus, no forgiveness, not much of anything.  I remember vividly one striking mid spring day of bright sun and burgeoning green, we drove up to the Orono campus of the University of Maine about an hour and a half north.  I had been invited to join the board of a state wide non-profit and thought it would be good to be together for the day.  On the silent ride home, the juxtaposition of vernal splendor, new life and our hollowed out spirits almost brought me to tears.

 The second incident that permanently altered our lives for the good occurred a week or so later.  Rita found an old set of rosary beads given to her by her late aunt, Rose, and awkwardly prayed with no confidence Anyone was listening, a desperation move if ever there was one.  On Saturday, she asked me if we could go to Mass.  Cradle Catholics, we hadn’t set foot in a church for a decade; I wouldn’t have been more surprised if she suggested we move to Zambia.

Rita has always acted as the emotional and spiritual catalyst in our marriage; I tend to be the implementer, who thinks through the how and the why.  It is our defining character and the personality of our relationship.  I didn’t fight the suggestion, but told her that if God existed, if we found any truth in our attendance at Mass, our lives would change profoundly: our activities, our friendships, how we spent our time.  She cautioned me not to get all “cosmic” on her, that she merely sought the solace of a childhood faith for a Sunday morning.  “We’ll see,” I said.

We looked up Catholic Churches in the Yellow Pages (an anachronism now).  Mount Vernon was at the center of a fifty mile circle roughly encompassing Augusta, Waterville and Farmington.  Rita worked part time as an RN in Augusta, but Farmington for some reason attracted us.  I called St. Joseph’s Church in Farmington; a friendly voice picked up with a lively, “St. Joe’s!”  Father Joe McKenna answered his own phone calls and was nearly perfect for hurting children of the sixties — an admixture of intellectual, poet, faith filled priest and wonderfully warm and funny human being with holes in the elbows of his sweaters. We entered the little, wood framed church on a side street, far smaller than the Baptist, Episcopalian and Congregationalist stone and brick edifices on Main Street.  It was Pentecost Sunday, no happenstance, and Father Joe was alive with the Spirit.

St. Paul on the road to Damascus – Caravaggio

We began an utterly surprising and unexpected faith journey that fills our lives and has never disappointed.  The human mind is immured by limitations of intellect, knowledge and imagination; the soul is unencumbered.  We asked and continue to deepen our understanding of three questions, perhaps the three questions, trinitarian in nature, an inexhaustible wellspring.  To me, no person addresses our existential human loneliness without asking them.

Saint Bede on his deathbed in 735 is known to have said, “If it so please my Maker, it is time for me to return to Him Who created me and formed me out of nothing when I did not exist.”  From whence do we come? Why?

Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian and commentator, said, “Christian faith stands or falls on the proposition that a character named Jesus, in a particular place at a particular time in history, is more than a man in history, but is a revelation of the mystery of self and of the ultimate mystery of existence.” Is there a bridge to the eternal, a gateway?  If so, Who?

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem wrote, “Water comes down from heaven as rain, and although it is always the same in itself, it produces many different effects… It does not come down now as one thing, now as another, but while remaining essentially the same, it adapts itself to the needs of every creature… In the same way the Holy Spirit, whose nature is always the same, simple and indivisible, apportions grace to each..  Like a dry tree which puts forth shoots when watered, the soul bears the fruit of holiness when repentance has made it worthy of receiving the Holy Spirit.” If the gap is so bridged, where do we go from here?  How?

Nearly two millennia ago on Pentecost, the Church was born with a visitation of the Holy Spirit; thirty five years ago on Pentecost this weekend, our marriage, our faith, our lives and our souls were reborn.  Happy Anniversary, sweetheart.

“Only the Christian thinker is compelled to examine all his premises, and try to start from the fundamental terms and propositions.”  T.S. Eliot

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Filed under Faith and Reason, Maine Tales

May 20, 2012 · 12:07 pm

The Mick

Effortless grace

“I could never be a manager.  All I have is natural ability.”  Mickey Mantle in Great Sports Reporting.

In 1968 Tim was ten when his Dad, Bob, was given tickets to a Red Sox/Yankees game at Fenway.  Like many in Rhode Island Tim grew up a Yankees fan and Mickey Mantle was his hero.  “The Mick” was taking a farewell tour in his retirement year, and it was to be his last series in Fenway Park.  Bob managed a district for Suburban Propane, but with a wife and four boys, they had little money to spare for entertainment.  A family Sunday afternoon at Scarborough Beach was as close as Tim had been to a vacation.  Yankees games were a world of imaginings he heard on the radio; Tim had never been to a major league baseball game.

An equipment supplier offered to take Bob and their top salesperson to the game along with a night of extravagant dining in Boston.  Bob asked first the salesperson and then the benefactor if he could take his sons to the game instead.  Everyone agreed.  When Bob came home, he told Tim and his brother Chuck the news, and it was all Tim thought about until game night.

Every kid remembers his first trip to the ballpark, whether it’s Fenway or Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field, but Fenway, the grand old “bandbox” is surely special.

Fenway at twilight

“Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.  Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”  John Updike in the New Yorker on the occasion of Ted William’s retirement.  1960

Coming past the fortress front of Fenway, the boys and their father entered into the catacombs underneath the stands.  Dirty, noisy, crowded, a bewildering array of young and old, more male than female, pushing, bumping, looking at tickets and anxiously following signs to the right section.  Finally they found their ramp, ascended with the crowd, at first seeing only the twilight, the blinding high arrays of lights just coming to life, and then emerging into the aisle to encounter a breath stopping, beatific vision of green, The Wall, natural grass, base paths with freshly limed lines, dugouts full of champions and players stretching and throwing the ball around.  The boys, as all boys, were wide eyed, open mouthed, trying in vain to see it all at once.  Fenway is intimate; they felt on the field, yet it seemed immense; they were flabbergasted just how far their heroes had to bat and throw.  How high the ball went and how amazingly quickly the ball traveled from one end of the field to the other.  Untainted wonder.

Their dad led them down, down until they were four or five rows behind the visitor’s dugout. One further thrill when Dad bought hot dogs wrapped in napkins passed hand to hand down the row while the money went the other way; maybe a bag of peanuts later, thrown twenty feet by another vendor?  “Don’t drop them, Dad, they’ll boo ya!” They were close enough to hear the players shout back and forth and laugh.  Oh my, there was Mickey.

When Mantle first came up in 1951, he made $7,500 and played in the outfield with a guy named DiMaggio.  The Yankees took the World Series in four over the Giants in a subway series. Phil Rizzuto was the shortstop; Bobby Cox played third.  Mickey was an almost mythical farm boy from Oklahoma; he moved with astonishing grace and speed, a god even among all the other amazing athletes.  There was nothing he couldn’t do with bat, ball, glove or legs.  Mickey Mantle was arguably the greatest switch hitter in baseball history and a lock for a first ballot trip to the Hall of Fame with 536 home runs by the time his career wound down. In 1968 he made the kingly salary of $100,000 in the last year of his contract, and played part time first base on worn out wheels.

“I can’t play anymore.  I can’t hit the ball when I need to.  I can’t steal second when I need to.  I can’t go from first to third when I need to.  I have to quit.”  Mickey Mantle in 1968

Neither the Yanks nor the Sox were going anywhere that summer; they finished 4th and 5th in the American League the season Denny McLain pitched 31 wins  with a 1.99 ERA, and the Tigers won the World Series.  It was a tired game in a tired year, but Mickey was there, and both the Sox and Yankee fans loved him.  It was enough. Mick sat on the bench early in the game, but came in later under fan pressure.  He got a standing ovation the first time he got up.  He struck out awkwardly – a gimpy, sore guy, just a vestige of when he owned the game.  Mickey came to the plate one more time late in the game.  The crowd stood again and lifted the roof.  Tim doesn’t remember the score or the outcome, but he remembers this.

“…if I had played my career hitting singles like Pete, I’d wear a dress.”  Mickey on Pete Rose, in The Mick

The Mick fouled the first pitch back.  The second bounced in for a ball.  At the third pitch, he swung with a brief, magnificent flash of his youthful strength, balance and speed; the ball exploded towards left field.  It hit the tin of The Wall with a bang heard throughout the park, an unforgettable sound unique to Fenway Park.  Mick grimaced as he headed towards first, barely able to imitate anything near running.  A young, future Hall of Famer, Carl Yastrzemski, roamed left field like a lion and already had learned like an art form how to play balls hit off The Wall.  He positioned himself perfectly and plucked the ball in the air off the wall.  He spun to throw it in and Mickey was barely halfway to second.  Yaz pumped with the ball towards the infield.  He pumped again, and yet a third time as Mickey pulled into second base; only then did Yaz throw a rope to a grinning Rico Petrocelli covering the bag.  The fans rose as one to applaud this tribute to greatness back before baseball became “Moneyball” spreadsheets of stats and millionaire salaries.  When baseball was still America’s game.

“I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer.  Baseball is the belly-button of our society.  Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.”  Bill Lee in an interview with a sports writer about the state of the game he loved.

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May 6, 2012 · 1:28 pm

Maine Tales III – Swordfight on the Lake

The red pumper bounced onto the driveway of the large ante bellum colonial with siren blaring.  The house had once served as an inn, and currently was occupied by a half dozen mostly benign refugees from other late sixties communes.  The flames fully engaged the structure and were seen through the windows.  Everyone got out. The source of the fire was a fifty gallon drum woodstove laid on its side with a fire door kit cut in one end and a stove pipe emerging from the top, not an unusual heating system for rural Maine that can be assembled from a kit for under $100.  If it was a typical set up, sand would cover the bottom to keep the coals from burning through.  Overheated, it could glow cherry red.  Something had gone amiss.

A small fleet of private pickup trucks driven by the rest of the fire department followed the pumper.  The chief’s truck had a prominent flashing light bar on the roof.  A 3” hose with a nozzle was quickly deployed, but the tank rapidly depleted and the stream of water dwindled to a dribble.  An intake hose was unfurled and several fire fighters started rolling it out towards a source of supplementary water, coupling on more hoses as they went.  Back at the truck end, the chief, Dana, bent to hook up to the intake valve and discovered the others were approaching the lake 500 yards away with the wrong end of the hose.  By the time things were reversed, the fire broke through the roof, which fell into the basement a half hour later.  These men were dedicated and courageous; they had saved lives, but all were volunteers, and practiced as they could.  Practice was customarily followed by much truck polishing, hose rolling and beer drinking at the station. Occasionally, they got to burn down a condemned barn to work on their skills. Common wisdom was to get out of the house, and then call your insurance agent and the fire department from a neighbor’s house – in that order. Town residents were fond of saying that the Mount Vernon Fire Department had never lost a foundation.

Official authority and municipal services in a small rural town are a unique experience.  In Mount Vernon circa 1976, there was no police department.  A local constable appointed by the court would serve subpoenas and divorce papers.  The nearest law enforcement was a Maine State Police trooper, who lived 15 miles away in the next town, Readfield.  Once when Rita was involved in a car accident, he came to our house the next evening dressed in jeans to help us fill out the paperwork.  Things were casual.  Only the game warden had true authority.  He was known to shoot a dog if they packed up with others and ran deer.  No appeal, no live trap, no deliberation whether it was a mutt or a Golden Retriever with papers: justice was swift, administered uniformly and accurate.

The only time I remember talk about engaging the police was on the Fourth of July during the bicentennial celebration in 1976.  Other than a few bottle rockets and cherry bombs from New Hampshire, there were no fireworks.  Jeff Kent, a young twenty something native Mount Vernonite, took to drinking beer with a truck full of buddies and dragging an old car hood behind his pickup up and down the roads.  The hood presented an impressive display of sparks and plenty of noise, augmented by custom horns that sounded like a submarine klaxon dive alarm, mounted on the cab roof.  After three hours or so into the wee hours, some of the more sedate residents had had enough.  No one actually called the cops though; one of the dairy farmers who had to get up in the morning told Jeff he would shoot the engine block of the pickup.  We weren’t sure if he had the firepower or the marksmanship, but neither was Jeff, so he pulled the truck into the fire station and drank some more beer.

 A “domestic disturbance” was treated like this: no police involvement because they were too far away to help.  Bia, a recent resident, had moved into an apartment next to a small store front downtown, where she opened up a sheet metal artisan shop, welding and cutting small decorative pieces sold at craft fairs.  Her boyfriend was an odd, slender, bearded, pony tailed archetype prone to buckskin jackets, cowboy hats, silver buckles and a 14” Bowie knife carried in a sheath on his belt.  Bia’s daughter was my daughter’s age, and they became friends during the few months since Bia arrived in town.  In January, our phone rang about eleven one weeknight, long after our bedtime.  She called because we were one of the few she had gotten to know.  The boyfriend, whose name fades, let’s call him Jim, was drinking, smoking dope and hitting her.  Could I come down to help?  Sure, I agreed, groggily.

 As a twenty nine year old, very fit, tree climber, I had an exaggerated confidence in my own invulnerability; I grabbed a 3 foot hickory handle half whittled down to fix my splitting axe and jumped on my trusty steed, well actually, an F150.  What could be better for a chainsaw guy than getting to play knight errant?  On the way to her place, I practiced some tough threat lines involving emergency rooms, reconstructive dentistry and eating through a straw, all of which turned out quickly to be completely inadequate to the situation.  The denouement was less than noteworthy.  Jim had fled out the back door on the snow over the ice of Lake Minnehonk.  I followed his tracks into the dark, axe handle in hand, and found him seventy yards out on the ice in a tee shirt disconsolately sitting and shivering in the snow, his knife still in its sheath.  I asked him if he had a place to go.  He said he did, in Waterville.  I told him that’s where he would be staying.  He started to cry.  Bia packed a duffle bag into his dented Saab with Boulder County Colorado plates, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.  I went home to bed; Rita was glad to see me.

Thirty years later, we were visiting an old friend, Pam Jones, who still lived near Lou’s store, which was now not Lou’s store.  Bia had long since moved out, but we learned for the first time that a local legend had grown around the “Swordfight On The Lake” with much dramatic license taken. Pam laughed huskily in her smoker’s voice telling us about it.  Entertainment and storytelling are at a premium in a small town.

I hate small towns because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.
Lenny Bruce. (Mr. Bruce obviously never actually lived in a small town. There’s a lot to do.)

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April 29, 2012 · 7:08 pm

Sarah

Sarah was stillborn on Tuesday.  Her heart simply stopped. That certain finality almost causes our own hearts to cease beating like her tiny one: inexplicable, irreversible heartbreak for her parents, Liz and Ray, and her grandparents, my good friend Jim and his beloved wife, Margaret, parents of Liz.  Sarah will never sit in their laps to be sung to sleep or read “Cat in the Hat” or draw with crayons on the kitchen table.  There will be no first steps, no elementary school flute concerts, no graduations, and no walk down the aisle or Sarah’s children.  Her life cut short before she drew breath.  When she emerged twenty three hours after her heartbeat was last detected, her silent, little body was perfect in every way with her father’s eyes; her mother’s nose and mouth and auburn hair.  Her parents and grandparents hugged her, kissed her, held her for a long time and wept over her.

The nurses, midwives and doctors at the Birthing Center of Georgetown University Hospital did whatever could be done, were extraordinarily supportive and grieved with the family for what they could not explain.  Melanie and Sarah, two of the nurses, brought an outfit they picked out for Sarah. She will be laid to rest in a Catholic cemetery in an area reserved for babies.  On May 12th, there will be a memorial Mass at St. Ann Catholic Church in Washington, DC presided over by Monsignor Mosley, Ray and Liz’s pastor.  A second Mass is being planned in Jim and Margaret’s parish in Roswell, Georgia presided over by Father Peter Rau.  These good priests and Father Henry, who married Ray and Liz, help console the family and lovingly minister to their deep faith.

With that faith, there is this:

 Pre born babies have already experienced much. Sarah surely recognized familiar voices and responded to them, especially her mother’s and father’s.  She felt the loving strokes of her mother’s hands through the safe enclosure of her womb.  Sarah reacted and bounced when Liz laughed.  She heard and responded to music. She knew joy. She knew love. She never knew cold or hunger or fear or loneliness, and now never will.  Sarah knew there was wonder and mystery outside her secure, warm world.  She now knows far greater wonder, wisdom and mystery than her family has yet to experience.  Her joy and love are now eternal.

Margaret wrote to her friends and family, “She is now in heaven, a Holy Innocent, powerfully interceding for her family.  We look forward to seeing her again one day, but in the meantime she will remain in our hearts and minds.  It is comforting to know that she is where we all long to be, and that she will never suffer the hardships of this earthly world.”

John Donne wrote, “He that asks me what Heaven is, means not to hear me, but to silence; he knows I cannot tell him: when I meet him there, I shall be able to tell him, and then he will be able to tell me.”  Unity with the Creator is far beyond our limited faculties to comprehend or attempt to explain, yet our faith draws us there to “our own far off country”.

Saint Augustine tells us in “City of God” that “There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise.  Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.” C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory likens us, who still engage in this vale of tears, to a schoolboy striving through hard study to learn the sublime, “Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this… Poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded boat.”

Sarah now knows, truly knows,  what we long for: entirely, effortlessly, within her soul.  The hope of us left behind is that at some joyful, future celebration we will see her perfect and complete.  All guilt, recriminations, self doubt, second guessing will only impede our journey and cause us harm, and in the end slough off.

A close friend once confided to me that his personal belief is that a loving God takes each soul home at the most opportune moment for each person, the moment best suited for our own salvation.  For some that means a long, tough climb.  All of us will come to that moment, of that there is no doubt.  “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” Psalm 90.   Even eighty years is a blink of man’s history, and not even that when measured against eternity.  Our time will come.

The name “Sarah” derives from the Hebrew, meaning “Princess”.  This young Sarah is already royalty.  The time of her homecoming was early on, but her outcome is certain.

Sarah, pray for us.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God.  Matthew 5: 4,8

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