dirty fingers, holes in gloves
stubborn roots
and aching back
rows of plants in pots

I can still swing an axe
if not remember appointments
I found some wine

and warm sun to calm
the aches of conscience

Hope you did OK without me.

I sure wish you would make me a whole lot smarter, or at least a bit more certain that my self-righteous opinions were absolutely correct. I’d like to be more like my friends who send me emails every day. They sure know what they are talking about, even if the greater half of their facts are really just opinions.

The problem is that a lot of my friends are starting to sound just as willing to impose their beliefs on the rest of America as the radical Muslims they despise and fear so much. They do seem to be a bit more fearful than I am that somebody is already forcing them to follow Sharia law or have sex with another gay man. Whoops, I mean a gay man. Not another one.

Personally, I would not want to watch the kind of porno flicks my friends watched when we were in the army together forty-some years ago. What little I saw when I took my mind off of getting drunk back then looked pretty gross, so I am sure I would not want to watch any modern, politically-correct porno flicks. I sure hope nobody really forces my friends or their children to watch them.

Now the most recent thing they seem to be concerned about is being forced to give up their religion and pay for someone else’s insurance plan to cover contraceptive prescriptions. I presume that means women. Me, I kind of get disgusted thinking about how most of those guys are asking for the insurance company to cover the cost of Viagra. Most of them are just plain too old, fat, and ugly to get any anyway. (Any you know what, not the medicine.) The Viagra seems like a waste to me.

Speaking of fat, I am really disgusted that these butt-heads have fallen to the sin of gluttony all their lives, not to speak of consumption of vile spirits that pollutes their minds and corrodes their livers and stomachs. We will not speak of delusions of sexual potency or attractiveness.

Given my own beliefs in following your word, God, I do not feel it right that people like me must help pay for their quadruple bypasses, liver transplants, and heart transplants for those who smoke. They have failed to follow your advice and corrupted the temple of their bodies. Let them die. Screw them. Oh! Wait a minute. No, that might be what they want. Don’t screw them. Just make them pay for their own damned heart operation. Serve them right for screwing around if you know what I mean.

You see, it is getting a lot more complicated to be an old, white, male Pee-rublican. It used to be all about money and responsibility. Today, it is all about who is screwing around and doing bad things I disapprove of.   Please do not look too closely at my own habits, just give me a shot of holy certainty.

Thanks. Your humble servant,

Me.

The space engineers and mathematical whizzes that fired that junk into the cosmos have no idea where this trash will plunk into the planet.  You may know that 2/3 of the Earth’s surface is water.  If the junk splashes in the Pacific, will that be the trigger for the tsunami/earthquake/ volcanic eruption that wipes out Seattle and Tacoma?  If so, would that event be a natural disaster, or a man-made one?

Can you guess where the buses will land, and try to hide?  Is there time to build a shelter and stock it with cigarettes and beer and prescription drugs?  How do you dodge a falling bus?  Maybe you fake right and go left, like the Republicans.  Is there a siren to signal us of the upcoming crash?  Can we sue the government for failing to protect us from objects falling from the sky?
Can we tell whether this is actually our own garbage coming out of the sky, or is it actually the long-awaited attack by the little green men of far away galaxies?

There are so very many unanswered questions.  The only people who truly know the answers are those who find every big event to be a conspiracy.  The conspiracy experts have the inside scoop on every happening.  There are people in Roswell, New Mexico who have known this event was imminent for decades.  Those Roswellians are first cousins to the fundamentalist minister who predicted the end of the earth (he called it the rapture) for May of this year and then discovered in June that his calculations may have contained an error.  Is this his prediction coming true?  It could be.  It is possible, so it seems prudent (and thrifty!) for us to hold off on any early Christmas shopping expeditions.

If you don’t hear from me again, please consider this my attempt at a heads up.

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU!!
Dave Rama

It is the cool of the evening in the first week of July. It was nearly 90 degrees in the late afternoon, but now, at an eight o’clock dusk, with the brightness of the sun having long descended westerly over the ridge, the cool greens of the varied tree leaves, the bushes, and the watered lengths of grass create a softening in the quiet.

Where are the evening birds? The drops from the upward cascade of the sprinkler in the strawberry bed also dowse the nearby maple, its bottom leaves bobbing under every hit, while the plaza of a thousand blades of grass are silently drenched. Each small activity is noticeable in the great pause of day’s decline. A single wingéd thing darts through the yard’s low cathedral and is quickly gone.

The moment feels like a whole trail of seasons in a single day. While the slow hours of a distant winter, in memory, would have dragged its long gray drape – occasionally freshened in whiteness – and dulled by the constant cold - here, in summer, a day evolves through many incredible changes.

Long before dawn, when the first solitary bird sounded a meek minor key announcement shyly, and the un-darkness began in the northeast casting change upon the highest places, day moved in. It will be a slow April-almost-May series of moments in these early hours as the sun sends brushstrokes of light to touch further and further down toward the bottom of the hillsides, bringing brightness, cow calls, the slow waking day sounds. Had one looked at the mountains earlier there may have been that glow of pink upon the last snow tops when the un-awakened valley was still in old night’s shadow.

Remnants of spring stand as spent bloomed irises, their now-shabby tops upon still-strong stems; as the decadent poppy leaves, bleached and fallen over; as violet leaves (once the first tiny green when still there was snow), but now like enlarged green hearts thrilled with the early summer moments. Potato plants in rows are vibrant and thirsty; cucurbits are gaining in health, vigor, and size by the hour. The peas are crowding themselves and pendulous, all of white blossoms gone, tendrils reaching, in silence asking, ‘Where’s the string? Oh, I’ll grab hold of you! Upward we go!’ They dangle their pods so they won’t be forgotten, for their peak moments are so very near.

The basil impossibly gets greener in their scant gloss, its leaf edges curling slightly down from their rims so they can thrust their surfaces ever more so toward the sun. The tomatoes are surely deciding this very day if they can proceed upward and bush out now, or if they cannot possibly recover from that earlier weakness, and will look sad or hang low, unexcited by the season….

It is only mid-morning and dawn was such a long time ago. When the dew is fully surrendered away to the burden of the heated and breathtaking air, and the sky is the bluest blue, and the sun shines down upon it all like a great blessing of life, it is without doubt a summer day.

The heat builds up in the great surround of the valley, lying still to the utmost in some places, shimmering in others. Were we idle enough, we could patiently watch to see the grass blades heighten, or measure the amazing rapid changes in the corn.

It takes nearly a full summer of light for the day to go on toward its end, to the banter of the birds as the radiant light begins to fall from its angle, dwindling ever so slowly into little shadows in the other direction, inching up then dissolving to non-existence.

There is a quiet, and a change of activity. It has been like an evolution of seasons in but 15 hours, as darkness moves closer in, and the cool returns. Indeed, a summer day.

Originally published in Hells Canyon Journal, July 27, 2011

The initial impetus for the Patriot Guard’s existence came from the members of a half-baked organization called the Westboro Baptist Church.  The members of the WBC apparently have only one belief, and that belief is that homosexual activity is sinful.  Since the majority of Americans disagree with that philosophy, the WBC has a problem.  They gain attention for their beliefs by picketing military and firefighter and police funerals.   Their expressed theory is that America is wrong to support gay rights, and these soldiers, cops and firefighters have died because of God’s anger with America.  How this tiny group of simple folk got a direct line to the opinions of God remains a puzzle to me.  If there is a difference between this highly limited group and right wing fundamentalist Muslims, I fail to discern that difference.

Westboro was sued by the family of a serviceman who was killed in Iraq.  The protesters disrupted the soldier’s funeral, and refused to allow the soldier’s family to have the dignity of a solemn funeral.  The lawsuit reached the United States Supreme Court.  The Court upheld the right of freedom of speech for the protesters of the Westboro Baptist Church.  I agree with the court’s interpretation.  Voltaire said “I do not agree with a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  That soldier had carried out Voltaire’s very thought.  The very best response to the issue of freedom of speech comes from former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey who explained that “The right to free speech does not include the right to be taken seriously”.

My wife and I are parents of a fallen firefighter.  Each year we get together with other surviving family members.  The past two or three years, the Patriot Guard has provided an honor guard to defend our right to honor our firefighters in peace.  I am grateful for their presence for assorted reasons.    They are everyday folks who are willing to help others keep their dignity and pride of family.  They provide their presence for no charge to do something for others.

You ought to meet my friend Johnny (He and his wife lost two firefighters, a son and a daughter).  Johnny is not a large man, but he has a presence that says “I really am not to be messed with”.  On the occasions that we’ve met he has worn a hat with USMC, or Semper Fi, or some indication that he was at one point, and forever after, a Marine.  When we talked about the Patriot Guard, his response was:  “Why do we need these people to protect us?  I would kind of like to have those idiots show up here without the Patriot Guard to protect them.”  I laughed, and I understood completely.  That’s another reason for my appreciation of the Patriot guard.  I thank the members of the Patriot Guard, not so much for the protection, but for their goodhearted actions and intentions.  You folks help keep people like Johnny and me out of hot water.  Thank you!  Blessings on your house!

talking, tables and their parted chairs, long mirrors
making a so-wide panorama of faces and heads,
tall Carnegie windows opening the walls,
heightening everything, as they do

looking North, the gray spring evening sky glooms
a neutral background, a rustic alleyway fronts red brick,
three-storied and thinly armed in wrought-iron;
a saturation of art awashes the gray
in color, sound, voice, music – and surrounds
like an old shawl that people have worn for ages together,
in the most ancient of practices, as both preamble and stage
for comfortable talk, insightful comment, smiles, retreats,
little shards of deep friendliness, renewed acquaintance

from the East, the distant silent tower,
a fellow building close and eminent,
thick with great stone of other generations, holding
arched windows almost like half-circle starbursts
but dull, staid, and beautifully old

from a long South room - shininess, bright color,
reflections bouncing, capturing, relaying, dancing
all the possibilities: voice and tone,
the dialogues of friends; entries, exits,
stairs to all those other places, where stowed
workshop cupboards await the hands
to paint and paste and pot

in the West, a wall of pebble rock worked, and
finished! and hung in color, textural detail, while
voyeurs’ fingers are stilled against the desire to touch;
the variety of landscapes of color - as light as fog, as potent
as arrays of rock, or ripples of water near autumn grass,
vast intimacies of color, dimension and contrast,
alive with suggestion, and delayed to a pause,
that after silent thoughtfulness before each frame and form
there is the moment’s invitation to be there, really there

The Bible is somewhere north of a thousand pages, and I’m a slow reader.  I can’t remember all of what I read, except the racy and gory parts.  One of the instructions I try to follow is to make a “joyful noise to the Lord” every day.  God and I talk on a regular basis.  I am polite and say please and thank you.  Good manners coupled with a daily dose of joyful noise may help my cause as a size 42 extra long sinner.  I have been an irregular churchgoer in my life but I suspect that God will let that slide.

While millions of devout folks find church to be a delightful place, the worst experience of my life happened in a Methodist building after I was grown.  I had been there a number of times before, and tried to always sit in about the same spot, so I could find my way out nice and easy.  The seats were close to the door, but in a spot where I hoped I could blend in with other sinners, and not draw any attention.  Well, on this particular Sunday, those seats were taken, and the place was full.  I don’t recall why it was so full that day.  Perhaps they were having their annual sale on redemption that week.   We sat across the church from our usual comfortable seats, and wound up in a nest of old people.  I learned this was a corner called the “Amen section.”

Methodists stand up to sing.  In earlier experiences singing hymns, I would open my mouth and mumble, and then the real singers would drown me out.  If you ever sit in the Amen corner, that strategy will not work.  The amen corner is just where they park the old people who do sing.  They continue to ignore the line from Psalms that says:  “Make a Joyful noise unto the Lord”.   Nobody in that group sings a lick.  It was so dang quiet in that part of the church I could hear myself sing.  My voice awakened numerous people in the Amen section, and a near riot ensued before order was restored.  Nice-looking, gray-haired, well-dressed Christian women were climbing over pews to get to me and shouts of “Sit Down and Shut Up” were heard.  Some of the old men were more radical and called for the younger men to “Bring a Rope!  We mean to hang this man!”

That was a lot of excitement for the Methodists.   Some of them actually put more than a buck in the plate that day because they were so worked up, so my singing actually helped the congregation.  Still, I agreed with the minister when he said he didn’t think it would work twice.  It was a crossroads for me as it was the last time I heard myself sing.  Hearing that noise was the worst experience of my life.  I had no idea beforehand how dreadful  that sound was, but there was no lack of people willing to tell me the truth as they heard it.

The charges were dropped.  There is no law against attempted singing.   However, the next time I tried to enter the Methodist domain I was met by security forces at the door and turned away.

Just because I favor happy endings, I want you to know I do make a joyful noise to the Lord every day.  That joyful noise has nothing to do with singing.  I offer the melody of laughter.

Dave Rama, though he recently got lost Nebraska and has not found his way back, is a regular contributor to WGEO.

While many people have simply given up on gambling in the stock market, those of us who think of ourselves as the old coyotes of the financial world look for opportunities to pick off dazed rodents stunned by financial explosions (or maybe implosions is a more appropriate word.)

Take the financial news of the day. Sprint, the cellular phone company whose stock value on paper approaches 15 Billion dollars at nearly $4.5 per share, has been steadily losing money for years.  According to my stock-watching software, this year it’s estimated losses are $1.19 per share, over one quarter the value of each share.  Losses narrowed slightly on reports that the company had added contract customers to it’s rolls for the first time in three years, so the stock rose 3.2% in one day.  Clearly, investors believe it is a good idea to lose less money each year rather than lose more money. Investors put 480 Million dollars to work losing less money.

On the other hand, Cisco Systems, another technology company, with stock “value” somewhere between 110 to 115 Billion dollars at $20 per share dropped over 12% of its value in one morning on news that it had only beat analysts’ expectations of quarterly profit by 2 cents.  The company is estimated to earn $1.36 per share for the year. Conservative money managers at the company have so much cash on hand, they are buying back company stock. However, “Investors” threw away 13 Billion dollars selling off stock on the disappointing news.

No doubt some of them invested in Sprint, so they could lose less money rather than make more money.

Now, if you understand the rationale of those kinds of decisions, you could be getting fat on lemmings.

The word “con” has an assortment of “con”notations in the English language.  A con may be a convict serving a prison term, or if the con has completed his sentence, he might be an ex-con.  If you cheat someone out of money, it is sometimes said that you have run a “con game” on the victim.  It may also be said that a cheater will “con” you out of money, goods, or speeding tickets.  Webster’s dictionary tells us that con means to commit to memory.  If you weigh the pros and cons of an issue, and you decide the negative factors outweigh the positive factors, you are taking a negative or con position.  Ship handlers will tell each other you have the con, which I assume means control of steering the ship

For purposes of clarity, this word is spelled c-o-n.  It should not be confused with James Caan, the actor, or with Madeleine Kahn, the actress.  Cohn is another surname that is very similar, but is frequently pronounced cone.  In the 1940’s, there was a tough Irish kid named Billy Conn who was one of the best boxers in the world.  There was a Turkish leader known as Aga Khan, and of course the Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan and his descendants.  Anyone who has ever watched the movie, “Jungle Book” will recall the villainous Shere Khan, the Tiger.  I once had a friend named Con Sanchez whose first name was shortened from Concepcion.  I suppose there are Anglo-Saxon men who use Con as a diminutive for Conrad, and women who shortened the name Connie to Con.  These are logical reductions and nicknames that have character. 

I have expressed before the thought that English must be the zaniest of all languages with its multiple meanings of so many words like con and multiple spellings of words that sound alike.  Let us briefly consider what happens when English incorporates words from other languages, like con, into the English usage of the moment.   A common example lies in the world of food.  Restaurants may wish to disguise what a product really is by calling it a French or Spanish name.  For example, the French word escargot sounds much more delicious than snails.  In Spanish, con is a word that usually means with.  So if you order Chile Con Carne, you are expecting chili with meat.  If you order chili con frijoles, you will anticipate chili with beans.  If you ask for salsa con queso, you are going to get salsa with cheese. 

If your dentist says your teeth are suffering concavity, there will follow a period of drilling and filling because you will be with cavity.  If you hire someone to do building work, you will likely call a contractor, or someone with tractor.  The highest rank of this occupation will be general contractor, who will provide more services than a private contractor, and will likely have a larger tractor with which to work.  From this information, you can safely assume that concurrent (with current) means traveling downstream and the community of El Paso, TX can be said to be concave (with cave) due to the existence of Carlsbad Caverns.  Presumably, a constable (with stable) would be the fellow in charge of renting out horses, and a conscience (with science) will be someone working in biology or chemistry and content (with tent) will refer to someone who enjoys camping.  If you have been to a concert to hear Mr. Gill sing, you may have been conVinced. 

We could cite a good many other examples of this phenomenon, but I believe the safe course of action in this case is to conclude.

It is not true that my parents were mean people.There was never any beating, or physical mistreatment in our home.There was food to eat and clothes to wear, and we were allowed to sleep inside. Still, during the middle part of my first childhood, I wondered why I had been placed in their care. Why was I forced into a situation for which I had so little aptitude and zero interest?

In the course of their own childhood experiences, each parent had learned to play a musical instrument. My mother had been a violin player, and also played something called a French horn. My father had played the clarinet in the school band. The cool people called a clarinet a “licorice stick” for its black color. There is or was some divergence of opinion about the quality of my mother’s playing. Her brother, my uncle, remembers her violin practice sessions with something less than admiration.

My own experience at playing music consisted of Grandma’s attempts to interest me in playing the piano. I loved my Grandma, so I was dutiful in learning to play the scale. Given enough time (say, maybe an hour), I could also figure out what note I was supposed to play from the location of the note on the staff. The notes placed in the spaces on the staff spelled out f-a-c-e. The notes placed on the staff lines generated the sentence “every good boy does fine” by using the initials e-g-b-d-f. At this point, I have no idea whether these memory tricks read from top to bottom or vice versa. Music becomes far too complex for me after this basic instruction.

There are notes of all shapes and sizes and different tempos like 4/4, and 3/4 and 6/8. In addition, notes have an assortment of flags to tell you how long to hold that particular note, and this changes with each piece or when the tempo changes. When you have advanced far enough to understand this part of the business, some clever person will start tying two or more notes together with their respective flags. These might be called chords but I am not really clear on that. The other business about notes is that they not only have an identifying letter, but they also have fractional values. It turns out that music is a mathematical function.

I did learn to find middle C on a piano keyboard. I found it the same way I find the book of Psalms in the Bible. Look in the middle. Here is a question: Does a guitar have middle C, or are all the C notes the same? Another question: Is there a middle D or middle A? Where are they? The truth is I have no idea of the difference in sound from one note to the next. If you asked me to find any note other than middle C on a piano, it would be lucky guesswork if I got any of the other 87 keys right. To her credit, my Grandma had long since given up on my imaginary musical ability.

In our school however, there was a musical nimrod who felt there should be a grade school band. There were also a lot of people in our town who could not mind their own business. They shared the gossip about this hypothetical band with my parents. There was an available used clarinet somewhere in the family attic, and it was placed before me with the direction that I would play this creation in the grade school band.

No one bothered to tell me what hole to cover for C or any other letter/fraction, so I was pretty lost. In addition, my fine motor skills are non-existent. I could usually get the reed end of the clarinet in my mouth all right, but that was about the highlight of the day, clarinet-wise. I know at this point in my life that the clarinet and saxophone are my favorite instruments to hear someone else play. When played well, these horns make nice mellow sounds.

In my feeble attempts to blow air through this pipe, I could occasionally make a noise, but I never knew what it was going to sound like. One time it would sound very much like an enraged Rhode Island Red chicken, and the next time, it would sound like a sissified cougar. NEVER did I get a satisfying, finger-snapping, melodious tootle. It was always the sound of an angry Daffy Duck.

Trying to transfer the highly complex information on the sheet music into a rhythmic activity from my fingers and lungs and thumbs and make a pleasant sound was and is simply impossible for me. It might as well be written in Cyrillic. I was always two pages behind every other person in the band.

On the rare occasions when my horn made a noise, people in the room (including me) would stare in bewilderment, wondering if the Russians were about to bomb us to extinction. (Of course that was a silly idea. We were really well protected from that event because we had been trained to hide under our wooden desks so we would be safe). Happily, there will be no reunion of the third and fourth grade band. My career in band was actually quite brief, although at the time, I was sure that I would dwell in the band room forever.

In the intervening years following my attempted tooting, I have had the opportunity to walk through a schoolhouse where a music teacher has been entrapped to teach grade school band. One always wonders whether they were lured into accepting that position by offers of love or money. When I heard the sounds of grade school band in the hall, I promptly broke into a rash, and sprinted outside. Later, after the children were gone, I walked back past the room, and I could hear the soft sobbing of the music teacher.

I have the greatest respect and admiration for anyone who can teach beginning band without turning into a psychopathic sniper. I feel empathy for those men and women, because they, too, have come to a greater understanding of what eternity really entails. The good news is these gentle folks have no fear of dying. They have already been to Hell.

Dave Rama still contributes bits of humor despite the fact that he has been self-exiled to Chadron, Nebraska.