DREAMS

ALL THE NIGHTS I SPEND ALONE
WRITING ABOUT MY LIFE
THE QUIET THAT MAKES ME GROW DIM
AND LATELY I'M ALWAYS COLD

I SAY TO MYSELF
ONE DAY I WILL WRITE A POEM
A POEM THAT WILL RAISE MY SOUL AND FLY

ONE THAT WILL WASH AWAY
ALL THE MADNESS
THE FLOWS FROM ONE RIVER TO ANOTHER
FOR THE MAN THAT WILL
NEVER BE MY LOVER

ANGERS EATS AT MY LINING
CAUSING ME TO VOMIT UP
ANOTHER DREAM
WHO WILL BE MY SAVIOR?

CROWNED THORNS AND MIDNIGHT GLORY
BRUISED VIOLENT NIGHTS
STARS WILL NEVER SHINE
IN YOUR MIDST

AND I CALLED TO YOU BUT YOU DID NOT COME
SO THE RAIN BEAT UPON
MY NECK AND MY SHOULDERS
DROPS OF YOU RECEDED
AND THEN ROSE AGAIN

YOU COME TO MY SHORES
ENGULF ME ONLY TO RAPE AND PILLAGE
LEAVE ME FROZEN IN YOUR WINTER
TRAPPED IN ICE WAITING FOR THE THAW

TAKE ALL YOU CAN FROM ME
LEAVE NO TRACE
OTHER THAN ALGAE
STAINED SHORES

Demetria Wilson, 1999

(Painting is "Ophelia" by Arthur Hughes)

Untitled

My muse is a house older
than liniment and icebergs.
Covered in cobwebs, someone distant hands me some drink.
And I read some book.
And wait for the boy in the paisley shirt to come rushing back,

"I never should have left."
"You never did actually leave", I say.

Stop torturing me, muse!
(I retrace a little, after all, the muse has been mostly kind;
It is Eros who remains distinctly anonymous).
My own house is my prison,
A flagship of apathy.

Dammit. I can't think straight anymore.
I remember when I first heard about the place.
My Mother described how the old woman kept
two grand pianos in her living room.
It isn't frivolity to want,
to need
two of the best things.

Darla Nunnery 1999
(The painting is "Mariana", by John Everett Millais

Daddy's Coal Lessons

I am a coal miner’s daughter. Like Loretta Lynn, I started my life in the sooty shadow of a coalmine. I lived farther up river from Loretta’s Carolina home. It was at the northern head of the Appalachian Mountains in the Shenandoah River Valley where my parents spawned my sister and me.

An aunt tells me there were three of us but my mother refuses or forgets to acknowledge the loss of an infant boy before me. I am the oldest by succession then.

Daddy met mama at the Sweethearts Skating Rink on East Broadway when he was stationed at Macdill Air Force Base in Florida during the War. He married her two weeks later in the frenzy of joy and enthusiasm that often follows conflict once the Germans were defeated. Sweethearts is on the east side of Tampa, but we always called our part of town Six Mile Creek.

Mama was skate instructor and official peacekeeper for Uncle Benny, the affable Italian who owned the rink. It didn’t have anything to do with kung fu. She was simply fearless. She would tackle anything and anybody. Mama went after the bullies with her mouth and the toughs with an RC Cola bottle. Both got results. Like the rest of the women in my bloodline, I have inherited this mouth and arm response when the thugs in the world beset me.

I often imagine my parents meeting each other for the first time. I see pictures of them as they looked then. They were beauties. Mama smiles at the camera looking like a young Ava Gardner. My dad looks like a dark and rakish Clark Gable. His teeth glisten from under the stylish moustache he was to keep all of his life. They were movie star handsome.

Mama swears I was conceived on Southern soil, but they moved back to daddy’s home town in Pennsylvania after the war so he could go back to work in the mines. The post-war boom was slow to start up in our part of Florida. When we moved back to Florida, he became a fisherman. But that’s another story. There was water for daddy to fish in Pennsylvania, too.

We lived right on the banks of the Monongahela River in Fredericktown. I watched the paddle wheelers pushing the groaning barges loaded with coal and riding low in the water up river. They hauled them down river empty and spent. The paddle wheelers looked like giant mechanized toys. You know those ducks where the wooden feet go round and round as you pull it along on a string? They were like that except they shalooshed instead of quacked. I can hear the sound of the big wheels sluicing the water even now if I shut my eyes. It echoed off of the hills across from our house.

I dragged a big metal tub to the steps leading to the water once. My sister Lynda and I wanted to float out to the paddle wheelers to get a closer look. Mama caught us so we didn’t get to go out very far.

We lived in a two story duplex with a basement built into a hill on our side of the river. The Bartoshes owned it. They were the Ukrainian family who lived in one half of the house. They rented us the other half.

I see very little color in these memories. They are sepia-toned photos and grainy black and white home movies someone has taken colored pencils to in my mind. You know the ones where everyone’s lips are the color of brandied cherries no matter how pale their skin is? The color is never quite right.

My mother labored with me for sixty hours. It was touch and go. I fought her insistence I be born by kicking and pushing back at every contraction. Mama often reminded me of how horrible her labor was with me so I should be grateful. My punishment is these skinny arms and legs that refuse to put on much weight no matter how much the rest of me gains. The excess clings in odd clumps and packages of flesh wherever they can. It looks like they’re forever threatening to fall off as I bounce over the rough roads of life.

My other birthmark is a spine that is crooked and misshapen. It is curled in upon itself as if wishing to hide in the fetal position of my womb self. My spine is shaped like a sideways question mark; the ess of a burrowing snake trying always to twist away from the rigors of life and asking major questions as it goes. My spine gives me good posture by default. I stand sort of defiant, militant. My chest leads. My head and shoulders are ramrod straight and squared, my face pointed straight on and chin up to the world.

Daddy’s spine was like that. He must have fought his birth, too. His body reflected his Siberian ancestry by remaining true to the ground. His spine was only slightly more crooked than mine. He didn’t blame it on his birth fight. He said it was from the Great Depression days of digging through the garbage behind the A & P in Fredericktown when he was a kid.

The neighborhood children would go back there to find the edible parts of the fruit heir parents couldn’t afford on coal wages. The market casually threw away the fruit that sat rotten in the bins rather than lower their prices to the miners’ families. Don’t let politicians fool you. This is what they really mean by ‘market economy’.

Daddy’s crooked spine could also have come from bending over to climb the steep Pennsylvania hillsides in search of wild garlic. His mother would crush and rub the cloves on lard she spread their homemade bread with. It gives the grease some flavor. Her folklore told her it would keep her children from getting worms. It suppose it worked because my Dad never looked wormy.

Daddy also bent down when he looked along the railroad tracks for anthracite coal. Anthracite coal is better for heating than the softer bituminous coal. Both were formed in peat bogs like the Dismal Swamp that doesn’t pay any attention to state lines and government jurisdictions. The Dismal straddles Virginia and South Carolina.

Mud and sand and mountains fell over the peat bogs way back in the Devonian and Carboniferous ages. That slowly put the squeeze to the partly decomposed peat, which converted it to combustible coal. The mud and sand became shale and sandstone.

The mountains remained for the miners to have something to dig down through to get to the coal. Anthracite coal has most of the impurities driven out so it burns better after you manage to get it lit. Some of the choice chunks fell off the trains that hauled the coal cars to and from the mines.

My dad and all my uncles and aunts would scour the railroad berm for lumps of coal to heat their row house with. It doesn’t make sense. The miners back then often didn’t have the money to buy enough coal to stay warm with even though they were the ones who dug it out of the ground with a pick and shovel in the first place.

Maybe the bend in his spine was because daddy lied about his age and went into the mines to work beside his pap when he was fourteen and his bones where still trying to grow. Miners forever duck their heads even when they’re not down in the Hole. It’s a learned response to keep from being beaned on the low ceilings of the rooms they gouge in the coal. This is their penitence for digging around in the body of the Earth like boys going through their mother’s pockets looking for loose change.

Daddy showed me their peculiar bobbing and hunched over walk. It took him a long time to straighten up when he walked, but his shoulders humbled over whenever he forgot to pay attention to his step.

The miners have to dig because there are bigger boys who own the mines. Those Owner Boys never have to dig the coal out themselves. They demand the black treasure from the Earth they lay claim on. It is blasted out of the synclines where the miners work miles below the Earth’s surface and the sun. The Owner Boys will trade the coal dug out for them by others for coins and bills. The coins and bills will carry the Owner Boys far, far away from the hills they strip bare and scatter with their middens of overburden and inferior lignite coal and pollution to the streams and groundwater around the mines where the miners live.

So the Eath beans the heads of the miners they hire for low wages because they are the ones most handy to Her touch. She’ll squash them like ants on occasion when She’s really had enough of the gouging. Daddy told me that this usually happens when the miners are back-mining the supporting columns of the rooms they’ve stripped of coal.

Now. THERE is a swat for you! Coal dust blowing everywhere as the Earth’s body collapses over the miner’s heads to mash them flat in their boring tunnels. Since the mine shafts are so deep beneath the surface of the ground, you can feel the shake and hear the rumble for a long time before coal dust blows out of the mine entry like a whale blowing water as it surfaces. The dust is the backdrop for the vigil kept at the mine entrance by the families of unaccounted for miners until they’re found alive. Or otherwise.

The Owner Boys never show up at these vigils. It’s just a glitch in the flow of money from the coal for them - an inconvenience in the production schedule that will mean a few less stock purchases and a bottle less of champagne for the day or until the insurance pays off. Usually, there is some Suit who acts as the public face of the Owner Boys standing in front of the reporters and radio mikes trying to convince the public that theirs was a safe mine and all precautions are always taken. Times haven't changed much.

I remember daddy coming off shift from the mines. He was totally black except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes. Daddy was dark skinned to begin with. Not the rich coffee and tea of Africa, but the swarthy, dark ocher and olive of Siberian stock.

My sister inherited his straight blue-black hair and black eyes with their picanthropic fold. It gave them an odd, Oriental look. Lynn was dark skinned too, but the admix of one or another of my mother’s more colorful relatives blended the best of all worlds on her palette. I guess coal was in daddy’s blood since anthropologists have found evidence of ancient coal mining operations where his ancestors hailed from. Maybe the coal helped stain the skin of his people dark in that part of the world.

I inherited my mama’s sea green and turquoise eyes and just enough of her auburn highlights to keep my thin hair from being a nondescript mousy brown. I have olive skin. Not olive enough to look truly exotic even though I am euphemistically called 'Eurasian.' I’m neither East nor West but stuck somewhere in between like avacado in a sandwich. My coloring makes me look like the outside of a hard-boiled egg yolk when the white comes away with the shell. You can really tell it when I dare to wear yellow.

I’ve taken to fading as I age like an old rose that’s kept around in water too long. I see pictures of me in the seventh grade class of Ben Franklin Junior High, Section Seven. I’m the dark little being who would look more at home on the streets of Bangalore instead of the Six Mile Creek girl I am. I was the darkest one in my seventh grade class, but not as dark as daddy.

One time daddy came home after sunset while I was at the window waiting for him. I could see him walking down the lane, a darker shadow in the gloom swinging his lunch pail. He saw me looking at him through the window and grinned at me. The effect was not unlike the Cheshire Cat that appeared in the Wonderland tree above Alice’s head. Maybe mama anticipated this scene when she gave me my middle name. I’m called Alice, too.

I could also smell the coal dust on daddy when he came home from the mines. I wanted to hug him. He made me wait until he’d had a bath. The coal on daddy smelled like rock and earth and something a step down from sulphur. Kind of like when the teacher used to put your nose on the chalkboard ring when you were a bad kid in school.

I always got my nose in the chalk-drawn ring because I was a daydreamer. I didn’t mean to. I just forgot and got caught because I couldn’t help myself from following the stories that would just appear in my head. The teacher said it was daydreaming and daydreaming was NOT allowed for little girls in grade school. So the teacher drew a circle high up on the blackboard so I had to stand on my toes to reach it and stretch to put my nose in the circle. That’s how I know that the blackboard smells like. Daddy told me that the blackboard is slate and slate is a close step to coal.

Daddy earned good money working in the mines. The Almanac says these were boom years after World War II and a good miner could take home good wages for the day. Daddy was the best. He could easily load several boxcars of coal with just a pick and shovel and a mule. He held the record of loads at Bailey Mine for a long time.

Daddy bought one of the hard to come by post war cars that were rationed out with some of his mine money. There’s a picture of toddler me standing at the back bumper of a shiny new, coal black 1950 Oldsmobile squinting up through the sunlight at the camera. I’m squinting because the directions on the Kodak Brownie camera said the subject should always face into the sun. There’s another one of me in the same pose at the bumper of an old Model “A” Ford. I don’t know if coal money bought that but it was my mama’s car. I remember waking up once in the back seat of the old Model “A” with mama and Aunt Betsy singing, ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ as they drove into the night. I added the dog’s part and they laughed.

My other dog story concerns Baba Bartoshes’ dog, Lady. Remember, the Bartoshes owned the duplex we lived in? I used to love to pet Lady’s soft, gray muzzle and long ears. She was always so slow and gentle with me and wagged her tail when I would pop around the corner squealing with delight when I saw her. One morning when I was three or four, Daddy put Lady in the back seat of the shiny new Oldsmobile for Baba. Baba cried as she shut the door and went back inside her part of the house. Lady just lay there with her head down on the seat. We drove out to the country with her and stopped at this shallow stream where it ran over some rocks. Lady used to come with us to wash the cars out there sometimes and she loved splashing in the water and chasing the drops.

Daddy carried Lady out and laid her next to the stream because she wouldn’t walk. She looked very sleepy. Daddy sat next to her talking to her and petting her ears and head like I did. He even sang this lullaby to her in his deep voice.

Go to sleep, Lady girl,
There are angels around you,
Go to sleep, Lady girl,
You’ve been a good friend, too.

I thought that was real nice the way he made the words for Lady. I played by the stream with the rocks. We left a long time later without Lady. I asked daddy why we were leaving her and he said because she was very, very tired and had to go to sleep. She must have been really sleepy because she didn’t jump up or even move when we got her out of the car like she usually did when she saw me and was all wiggles.

When I got a little older, I remembered daddy singing to Lady. I thought that he had sung her into the long sleep. It is natural for me to think that the woods are some place you go when you are very tired and need a long sleep yourself.

I have other memories of Fredericktown. I remember winning a silver dollar for my Little Red Riding Hood costume one Halloween. My sister was a clown and she won a silver dollar, too. Mama made our costumes. My love of thread comes from her. I used to sled down the hill by the Moose Hall. One time, Ina Rae and I danced the polka. Everyone cleared the floor. They thought we were cute but I got really self-conscious because I just wanted to dance the Polka with Ina Rae.

My grandmother bought a clown doll for my third birthday. I wouldn’t pick it up and love it because she wouldn’t let me touch the beautiful Victorian doll she had on her bed that was all green and blue satin. She must not have thought much of the clown doll because she tossed it to me from across the kitchen when she came in. I couldn’t catch it and it landed on the floor. I guess I didn’t think much of it either after that because I went back to toting around my ratty little rag dog mama made me while the clown doll stayed on my bed. Mama said Grandma Kerik didn’t know how to give things to people because she had grown up hard and had to help raise her eight brothers and sisters and didn’t have time to learn such things as tenderness.

I was in the hospital once for malnutrition or pneumonia – I don’t know which is fact. The room was green and the bed was made out of iron. My dad was not there.

My parents won the first television set in Fredericktown at a raffle. The screen was round and it didn’t have color. I talked to the television screen when Howdy Doody asked which toothpaste us kids used. I thought that he lived in the back of the television set.

I also remember eating green grapes that made me sick from the coal shed next to the driveway and red cherries from the tree out front by the river. They were sweet until you got to the pit. Then they were a little tart. I have good memories of the little log cabin daddy built us to play in. He cut the logs from the forest along the river and dragged them home one by one until he had enough. He put a swing in the tree for us, too. Most of all, I remember how hard daddy worked.

My grand pap taught daddy about the ways of the mines. He called my dad ‘Yonco’ even though daddy’s name was really John. Pap would ‘blow the hole’ like a crazy man. Preparations were always the same.

Daddy and pap would bore a hole into the coal vein and then they would tamp dynamite sticks down in there. Pap attached the fuse and sent daddy back down the tunnel to wait. Instead of regulation lengths of the gunpowder-permeated line, pap gave new meaning to the term “short fuse”. He lit the fuse and ran like hell laughing like a madman back to where daddy waited. Pap always timed it so the concussion wave lifted him and threw him flying out in front of the blast. Most of the time, he would land at daddy’s feet. I guess he missed the excitement of bear baiting, riding horses, and fleeing the Pogrom in Russia and needed the edge of danger to make him feel alive in the darkness and monotony of the mines.

I once heard daddy say that the only time that his pap showed him affection was when he was drunk on vodka. Since this was also the time that pap chose to belt them around, daddy, his brothers and sisters, and my grandmother had to lay low until they saw which way the wind was blowing.

Papa took a bottle of homemade vodka in his lunch pail to wash down the hard bread and meat he and daddy brought for lunch. The doctors told him he’d have to give up the hand rolled cigarettes with Turkish tobacco he favored and the daily bottle of vodka if he wanted to best the black lung and live a long life. Pap said, “The hell with you!” and kept drinking his vodka. He lived until he was nine-two. I guess he was willing to give up the long life for some quality time.

When pap made his own vodka down in their basement, he flavored it with cherry pits or fennel seeds. He also baked his own bread. Both my parents have passed that catechism of diverse talents on to me, a ‘Renaissance Woman’ as a white haired storyteller once called me.

Daddy could tell a good story. He told me about his sister, Lara who was born with a veil of embryonic skin over her face. According to daddy’s people, that gave her the gift of seeing the future. She foretold her own death under the wheels of a hit-and-run driver when she was a tender six years old. Daddy told me of being sent to find her with his brothers and discovering her crumpled body and little wagon on the railroad tracks below the road. He would find himself laying on the same tracks for two days in a twilight sleep after being hit by a car close to the same spot where they found Lara. They put a steel plate in Daddy’s head. He was forever sensitive to the heat of the sun on it after that. His sister was beyond steel patches and help when they found her along the tracks lying like the coal they scavenged for to heat their house.

I guess kids were expendable then because the two men who hit daddy and his sister had something or other to do with Owner Boys mine management and weren’t any help with the hospital or the undertaker.

I also think the plate in daddy’s head helped him tell me such good stories. It was hot in the mines because it was deep in the earth. But at least the sun wasn’t shining on the top of his head to distract him so he could remember what he heard and saw.

Daddy worked the mines until he was sixteen. He lied about his age again and joined the C.C.C. Camps set up by President Roosevelt under the New Deal. The conservation camps were set up to deliver some relief to poor people in the way of jobs and to keep groups of hungry young men from attacking and eating the wealthy and the government. They built dams and cleared brush from the roads for room and board and a small wage.

At the Company Store, things did not come cheap even though the mine wages were, so all daddy’s brothers and sisters had to contribute in some way. Daddy gave his mine check and C.C.C. wages to grandma Kerik to feed his brothers and sisters so they never went looking for politicians to eat.

Daddy explained to me the difference between anthracite and lignite coal. And I loved hearing about pap and the dynamite. I even liked the stories about the company row houses that he grew up in that were covered with tarpaper that blistered in the summer heat. Most of all, I liked daddy’s rich, baritone voice that he sang Lady into the long sleep with. He taught me another song he learned from the other miners. He said they would sing it while they worked the coal down in the mines.

Come all you young fellas
So young and so fine
And seek not you fortune
Way down in the mines.

It will form as a habit
And seep in you soul,
‘Til the streams of your blood are,
As black as the coal.

For it’s dark as a dungeon
And damp as the dew,
Where the dangers are doubled,
And the pleasures are few.

Where the rain never falls
And the sun never shines,
It’s dark as a dungeon
Way down in the mines.

When my life it is spent and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken and turn into coal
When I look from the doors of my heavenly home,
I’ll pity the miner that’s digging my bones.

Daddy died in 1984, his mustache still as dapper as it had been as when he was a young man. He’s forming coal of his own.

Dina Kerik, 1999

Not Your Mother's Disiderata

I shamelessly stole this off of Lesly Finn's Art Blog because I almost peed myself when I read it. Anything that gets a rise of emotion from me these days deserves to be tucked under the arm and absconded with like a fat goose before Christmas. Enjoy. - Love, Dina

DETRITUS

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
And remember what peace there may be in silence.
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead,
Do not walk in front, for I may not follow
Go over there somewhere.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly.
Be open minded,
but do not lean forward or your brain may fall out.

Know that there will be good days and bad days
And this is one of them.

Always dismantle and clean the dog before going to bed,
But avoid the use of spot remover or you may never see him again.

You are a child of the universe.
It is only a small world if you don't have to paint it,
So do not wish for everything unless you have a really big cupboard.

Do not worry about the pace of life,
concern yourself only with its sudden ending.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons.
Sleep well.
If you cannot sleep well, practice more often.

Borrow from pessimists, they don’t expect it back.

Remember, if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day,
Teach him to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink himself stupid.

It is always darkest before the dawn.
That is the time to steal your neighbour's newspapers.

Be gentle with yourself.
Bear in mind that depression is anger without enthusiasm
And good health merely the slowest way to die.

Never argue with a fool for he is doing the same.

Know that if at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not a good idea
And that timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

Always remember that all is not lost, though I haven’t seen it for some time.

Be yourself.
If you cannot become wiser, try to be older.
Aim as I do, to live forever;
so far I am doing all right.

Never stand between a dog and a lamp post
And never hit a man with glasses, always use something larger and heavier.

Remember that some people are only alive because it is illegal to kill them,
A closed mouth gathers no feet and nature abhors a vacuum cleaner.

Be cheerful, strive to be happy
And remember that your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

Go far ...... and start as soon as possible.
Adieu.
----oooOooo----
For the original see Max Ehrmann

Balance

we struggle to
find the balance between
fault lines and forgiveness

by C. Robin Janning

Silk Scarves

she ties back her hair
and leaning over the table
cuts ribbons of color, of pattern
making silk scarves
to flutter like flags
above a landscape
of hopeful hearts

she thinks
she believes
she will change
the world with beauty

by C. Robin Janning, 2006

Lost In The Sky

by C. Robin Janning

this evening
my meditation is
lost in the sky

Cricket

A bluesy wind is blowing through my life tonight. I felt it coming off the smooth waters of the huge canal I live on when I let the cat out for her evening patrol. There was exactly twelve blissful seconds of absolute pure night sounds - wind soughing through huge oaks around the house and just the crickets - before the incessant thrum of traffic pounding up and down I-4 up river and the sounds of arguments from the trailer park across the defensive spanse of water came back as the drone of background white noise particular to my house.

It started me thinking about the days and nights of absolute pure night sounds that I lived with at the ranch in Indianola Valley, Utah. The closest neighbor was a mile and a half down the grade that snaked through the valley. You had to drive 4.58 miles to see black top and 13.7 miles to see a town. The closest one was Fairview. This is where we went for groceries, to mail a package, get molasses coated oats when we ran low.

Willie Nelson owned a ranch on US highway 6. The highway ran to Fairview from what used to be the town of Thistle, which is now underwater from a huge land slide courtesy of the mountain the Denver and Rio Grande railway tunnel went through. We went to watch local kids practice their ranching skills via the venerable art of goat roping at Willie's. Yes. There is such a thing as a goat roping. The goats were good sports about it with most of the hoary veterans simply running across the indoor arena and laying down for the efforts of a lip-biting 8 to 10 year old dressed in miniature Midnight Cowboy garb.

Legs splayed out to the side well above the normal level for stirrups, rope lasso twirling furiously, if not quite in a perfect oval, the youngsters would pelt across the arena after said goat, slide their pony up to the supine form in a mixture of hay chaff and dust, and fling a tangle of rope and knots in the general direction of the animal. Jumping off the pony, the young cowboy would throw themselves on the unprotesting goat, whip a few loops around the horns and hold up a hand, fingers clenched in a fist - cowboy catcher to pitcher parlance for a done deal - to the applause of the crowd hanging on the fences.

I learned the nuances of the Cowgirl Barrel Wave here - a short, choppy slashing of the air with an open free hand as she came pell-mell out of the shute to weave the karick knot in the ground around barrels spaced just so to the rythym of the horse's hooves pounding the ground. The Cowgirl Barrel Wave is very different than the Cowgirl Parade Wave.

Many of the competitors in the local rodeos were expected to try their hand at competition for local beauty queens and rode the circuit of parades for whatever needed celebrating: Fourth of July, Labor Day, Harvest, Hog Days. There is a corresponding beauty title and pageant to go with each celebration, of course and you have to know the Cowgirl Parade Wave if you want to be taken as a serious competitor. This would be the obligatory signal from atop a crepe paper decorated float if you won a spot in the court.

The Cowgirl Parade (and Beauty Queen) wave is a cupped hand affair that nods back and forth from a stiff elbow held aloft like one of those bobble heads on the dash board of pick up trucks. With it should come a smile, genuine if you espy someone you know out in the crowd standing two deep on the side of the road, pasted on but gracious if a rival's cousins or friends were shouting uglies at you in good natured side taking.

Those were some of the social noises to be had in town. The noises I ate, slept and worked with daily at home involved the whinering and chuffing of horses as they restlessly paced a corral waiting for a daily coffee can sized ration of sweet feed on hay, gathering thunder coming over the mountains from Spanish Fork, snow falling off of overloaded cedar branches to pol-lop onto the pile of snow below, the low of cows, blatting of sheep, and at night, bracketed by the busy click of crickets, the mellifluous harmony of coyotes or wolves under a moon bright night sky . It ain't nothing like the canned sound of it coming out of your t.v. or the movie screen. Believe me. It gets in your bones and travels up to your inner ear through your spine and sets off harmonics in your soul when you're THERE.

Other sounds were the chunk of logs that were stacked up in the silo for winter (and summer) burning. You see. I lived without running water and electric for over five years out there. I'd like to say it was because I chose to but the fact was that the economics of running electrical wire out from the main road five miles was cost prohibitive. You learn to cope just like our ancestors did. I cooked on wood, both baking and top stove, learned to bank a fire under a pot of stew simmering in a big kettle on the back of a wood-burning stove to be ready at dinner time late in the day, and could turn out a fair stream-caught trout over an open camp fire with just a spit or a skillet.

Much of the year was spent gathering dead wood and snaking it off the side of the mountains tied with a rope to the pommel of your saddle. The horses loved this work and vied with one another to see who could step proud with the prettiest curl in their neck as they traveled sideways with just the right amount of tension to keep the logs from rolling ramshod down the grade. Down on the road, the logs were cut into handleable portions and loaded onto a stone boat - the flat, low sled with curved ironshod runners that we used to haul anything behind the horses.

Back at the house, the logs were cut into neat lengths to the accompanying chur and brupt-buzz of the chain saws and we began the arduous chore of splitting the wood with an awl and mallet. I got quite good at this, too. There's a particular 'schunk' when you've placed the wedge just right and applied just the right amount of swing with the sledge hammer. Wood was stacked with a satisfying thunk in sorted piles in which it would be used: in a box with small chips and twigs to start one, resinous kindling sticks once you got a little spark and smoke, next size up sticks for building a hot fire, split wood for a sustained burn and big round logs for a slow burn. That took care of fire.

For water,we went up to the big corral and waited patiently for the two 100 gallon tanks on the back of the old 1966 Dodge truck filled up, carted one load up to the corral to replenish the water tanks greeted by the hoof sounds and nickers of between 22 and 30 something head of mares in various stages of gestation for the Wyoming racing and show circuit, or with their colts and foals running hip to shoulder to us and went back for a second load. This one snaked it's way up the hill chugging in second gear past the log house I lived in and fed a cement tank for the gravity flow water system we used to water our own horses, bathe, flush the toilets, and wash our asses and our dishes. We made this trek every three days, rain or shine. I used the time listening to the crickle and pollup of water splashing and gurgling into and out of the metal tanks to read, work on some needle project that was current or to write.

I worked in Pleasant Grove just north of American Fork five days a week keeping the books for a big truck parts store and driveline service. Those sounds were clunking, screeding, the huffing of big diesel tractors as they pulled into the lot next door at the trucking company with their 40 foot trailer loads of potatoes for Thunder Bay, Canada and paper or cardboard bound for Corvalis and Redding, California. My husband drove a truck for them.

I sometimes went along on runs learning how to drive a five and a four, brownie and a main - the two gearshifts used to coerce a fleshy old Kenworth conventional tractor pulling a loaded trailer down the road. You have to learn to listen for the gears in the dog box to chortle at about the same speed to slip the gears into place with the spining flywheel of the manual transmission, around 18 rpms. You also listen for the baugh-uck-uck-uck-ah of the jake brake slowing down the engine until the last 'uck' told you to shift to a lower gear. I got okay at backing in to a loading dock and pulled the toggle to the accompanying shush of the airbrake.

There were also the dropped tool sounds followed by mechanic's colorful curses, the ringing of phones and the bell on the shop door. Those were the job sounds, half my life. Getting from half one to half two involved an hours drive to and from each day. I used that time to meditate, think, sing, plan, listen to the whir of the car's engine and look out for deer that inevitably need to gallop across the road on a mission, no matter who's coming.

I liked my home half noises better than my work half life noises. I love hearing the saddle leather creeched as it shifted and the way horse's hooves chumped on the rock and dirt of the paths we rode over the mountains on our way past Horse Dick Canyon to get breakfast next morning just under the Uinta mountain range at a little restaurant there. It was our destination and soul reason for the all day ride. A bedroll, skillet, coffee pot containing coffee, some salt and pepper and a dab of lard to cook whatever we had for dinner in camp that night were unloaded while a fire was being built next to a little creek. The horses were always nosey. We would wake up with them standing over us in our blankets, velvety noses with their noisy breathing and teeth grinding in our face. This was to remind us to bring out their sweet feed while we made coffee with the water from the creek.

There were the sharp claps of concussion from the bullets I made when we went target practicing our quick draw and when I was forced to put down someone's small dog who had argued with a cougar and was beyond the ministrations of any vet. I hated those noises from the little dogs and the gun that ended it then. I was the understood sheriff of Hideaway Valley - the name of the settlement in the valley behind Indianola. This was one of the chores I had besides keeping eyes out for stupid hunters who shot at horses during season unless we painted day-glo X's or wrote 'HORSE' on their sides.

We had this huge line-back dun with size 2 shoes and feathered feet named Loco Poco. He was pretty close to being a Percheron in size. He was a dough-ball, scared of almost anything and fearsome as leader of our small stable. When it would rain or hail, he'd heard the rest of the horses up under the roof next to the barn and huddle against them mostly exposed and taking the brunt of the storm on his flanks as the hail rattled against the steel roof. But a garbage bag on the side of the road would set him off in paroxisms of a horse's rendition of the high step dance as if it had been a rattler. He finally conquered his fear of plastic garbage bags and delighted in dumpster diving into the recyle trash barrel next to the barn to haul them out. He would hold them in his mouth, shake them and then run from the noise, repeat this a few times, drop the bag and stomp it furiously. He was boss!

Every morning for quite awhile, we heard this loud scra-da-dap, scra-da-da-dap, scra-da-dap that would wake us up. If you went outside, all you could see was a line of horses standing at the fence looking at you. Couldn't figure out what it was so we'd just get up earlier than the alarm, go out, feed the horses and get ready for the rest of our chores. One morning, I happen to get up a bit earlier and was in the kitchen making sheepherders coffee (handful of coffee grounds in a pot of boiling water, grounds settled with cold water or eggshells), when the scra-da-dap starts up. I look out at the window and here's Poco dragging his hoof across the ribs of a piece of corrugated tin used to cover old fence posts. The other horses look expectantly from Poco's music to the house. Sure enough, when I walk out, there they are standing innocently at the fence nickering for their morning feed, end result attained.

The horses loved swimming. On the very hottest days when there wasn't a breath of air blowing, we would ride the horses up to the big corral and unsadle them. Bareback, we'd ride into the big pond to the horse's delight. We played a form of splashy water polo with a beachball and the horses loved it! Lightfoots had a mustang that one of their daughter's rode who's spiked mane reminded me of Cindy Lauper. The little mustang loved snorkeling under water and then spraying the results on whoever was closest. I ended up with gallons of water and horse snot on my leg from her. No one got out of the water until we were cold and teeth chattered. Then we would loll around the bank drying off before saddling up and riding back home. Pond sounds were: Nicker, whinny, splash-sploosh, schuck-cha, snortle, giggle, laugh, plop.

Horses like snow, too. Christmas time, we would hook up the stone boat to a pair of horses in their winter blankets, bundle ourselves up and make the rounds of the valley carrolling. Horses hooves in snow sound like a muffle plup-clup and the iron skids on the ice sounds almost like metal being rubbed together.

We had chickens. They're obligatory on any ranch or farm and their cluck and pick-pick-pick words blend in with ranch music. One day, we're standing out by the corral where our horses stayed when we hear this garble-garble-scree coming from deep in the pines above the house. It gets closer and closer, then this guinea hen barrels out of the woods in a flurry of feathers and dust and charges down on us. Now. A guinea is ugly. It looks like the after pictures of a turkey someone has taken a hammer and tongs to. He stops short of us, quarrels at us a bit and then and begins herding those chickens together. He fussed over them, watched after the chicks and went after a rooster he thought was too big for his britches. At dusk, he would herd them into the trees so they were safe from coyotes and foxes. If he set up a racket, you came out of the house in your unders with a shotgun and flashlight. We never knew where he came from so far away from civilization. And no one was reporting him missing.

One night, there was the sound of about 100 drunk cowboys and their women in the sweetest, harmonic accapella rendition of Amazing Grace you've ever heard. We were up at Baker's ranch at a fireside - our rendition of Saturday Night Out socializing up in the valley. Each family would take turns hosting it every few weeks until we made the rounds of the valley. Then we started the rounds again. A fireside takes place around a big bonfire at your ranch. The host usually provides the main course - turkey, ham, deer, beef, fish - and everyone brings a dish and a bottle or six-pack of whatever. You play music, talk the latest valley news, dance, laugh and then leave.

I was the entertainment at Rick and Jane Baker's that night. I brought my 12-string and led the troops in various 50s and 60s rock and roll and country tunes throughout the evening. It was a beautiful full moon in the first fringe of Autumn. Baker had this huge native flagstone patio down some stairs from the house surrounding an equally impressive iron ringed fireplace. He'd built flat seats atop the rails surrounding the patio that kept drunks from stumbling off the edge and rolling the rest of the way down the hill through the sage scrub to the gravel road.
It was getting very late/early and I set my guitar back in the case. Someone called out for 'one more for the road' having wowed every one with his Phil to my Don Everly 'Dream'. So. I let everyone get settled and started out in silence, 'Ah-may-zing Grace! How sw-eet the sounds, that saved a wretch like me-eee..."

As if directed by a master conductor, every throat took up the next line and sang along. We rivaled the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that night. I don't know where those perfect voices came from because they were all around us, each one swearing later that there was an angel singing next to them. We sang the words, miraculously remembering all the lyrics.


Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.


T'was Grace that taught...my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear...
the hour I first believed.


Through many dangers, toils and snares...
we have already come.
T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far...
and Grace will lead us home.


The Lord has promised good to me...
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be...
as long as life endures.


When we've been here ten thousand years...
bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise...
then when we've first begun.


Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.



Then. Silence. For long, long moments, no one spoke. No noise except the crackle of the fire. The chirp of crickets started up some minutes into the silence signalling that it was a good time to good night. Then everyone drifted off to jeeps, pickups, cars and some on horseback to head home. It was a long time until the next fireside. No one seemed willing to break that magic.

I eventually moved from the valley at the urging of an Indian in full battle regalia. I also left Utah to come home to Florida for healing. But that's another story for another time.


We are bombarded with noises, sounds every minute. As I write this, I hear the fan blowing on me, the tick of my Lara Croft Tombraider wall clock and the clicking of the keyboard. There is one persistant cricket who remains the key note to all my life noises chirping merrily outside my 3:00 a.m. bedroom window. In the Orient, crickets are a symbol of good luck. He has been with me from childhood, calling out to that special someone by rubbing his wings together just so. Makes me wonder if he ever finds her listening back at him.

I don't know if the grace I find when I listen to the cricket's song is luck so much as good fortune to have lived the life and seen the sights and heard the sounds that I have been blessed with. All of it has been wondrous - the good, bad and hurtful. And througout my life's orchestral arrangement, there has been a cricket up in the string section.

Labor

I love etymology - the study of the history of words - because it tracks our progress as a species with many side trips into history with curious asides about culture. You can click on the etymology link if you're interested. Musing on this, I left Tary and Karole Peace a 'Happy Labia Day' message when I reached out to touch their answering machine this past holiday weekend.

The word Labor gives a nod to the Frenchified word shift that occured when the Normans conquered England in 1086. I was 'there' because I can trace my maternal genetic material and lineage directly back to Sir Drieu of Normandy, a knight in the service of Robert Malet, a top commander in William the Conqueror's army. It pleases me that my ancestral family had something to do with a major language shift and all those lovely words that came through because of King Harold's foolery.

I'm sure that part of my warrior proclivities and stupid fearlessness are hanging somewhere on an allele passed on by Sir Drieu to me over a thousand years ago. You can see Drieu, also known as Drogo in the Roll of Battle Abbey and embroidered running around on the Bayeaux Tapestry. Our family name, Drury, shortened from the French de Rouvray, has played a part in England's history and culture, including run-ins with service to the illustrious Queen Elizabeth I and a theatre named for the family on Drury Lane - which may also explain my love of the dramatic and costume.

This genealogical snobbery has served me well when I've been looked down the long side of someone's nose, lo, those many times. I chortled gleefully to myself that while So-and-so thought themselves vastly superior for whatever reason, their ancestors were probably chasing sheep across some unnamed hillock burning sheep shit for fuel somewhere while mine rode blue. That and the results of a test in the happy hospital that diganosed me in the 99 percentile as part and parcel cause for my madness. It meant I could look at them dressing me down and know that there was only a 1 percent chance that they were smarter than me. Present circumstances told me where the odds were. Cold comfort at times, but still comfort. You have to cling onto twigs sometimes for whatever dab of sanity you can get while clutching the edge of a cliff or Celie stirring a secret ingredient into the lemonade in 'The Color Purple'.

Back to Labor. It comes from the Latin word for hard work - laborum with a side trip through a French coffee filter, labourer: to work, toil, pain, fatigue. Women coined the word labor way back in time with our travails (also another French word for 'work' or 'labor' - travalier). As in LABOR, childbirth, the trip through the Mouth of Creation or labia. Lab-yrinthine, lab-rus, lab-ia, Lab-or. Virginia Sapiro chronicles in 'Women In American Society' that the bulk of the world's entire work mass, something like 70 to 80 percent of it, is performed daily by women cross-culturally and pan-continental. Any gal who's tried to wrestle a man off a couch and pry the remote from his hands to take out the trash can attest to that, no matter how much her dude talks about his hard work compared to her 18 hour days at home and at 'work'. Think about lions if you're prone to argue.

So. It was appropriate that I left the Peace Women a 'Happy Labia Day' message. You did know that I was going somewhere with all this, didn't you? I left it after spending the night at Martha and Jim Marshall's home where I'd gone for pasta Bolognaise. We drank up the remnants of 3 very good bottles of wine and groaned as we pushed ourselves away from the table. I brought hand work to do with me to labor over (I should insert a smiley face here) to justify my night away from doing work at home.

I finished the beading on a reversible corset belt I am making after they went to bed, three dogs and two cats in tow. It must be like Wild Kingdom in there. Martha had tried like a trouper to stay awake to watch the end of an English whodunit with me but finally gave up. I farted about on Martha's computer, checked my image in the hall bathroom and wondered if there were some way to airbrush out the deepening downturn around my mouth and what looks like the beginings of a goiter on my neck (It's fat. And aging). Having sufficiently dinked, I went to bed in the guest room.

A visit to Martha's is like a trip to the MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry). She takes you on tour of her online world, shows you emails from a gallery in England that has sought her out, teaches you some bit of arcane computer technique, and clues you in on progress with the commissioned Project From Hell, or PFH (pu-fuh when said with a LABIAL fricative). This is a large canvas propped up behind the couch. She cusses the dogs for peeing on the new living room rugs then comforts them because of the scolding. She cooks scrambled eggs and cheese with oat toast for me and Jim after having cooked and eaten earlier. This is served with her muscadine jelly preserves (where in the HELL she found time to make jelly amidst the thrum of her life is mysterious!) Then she answered seventy two emails and other online correspondence, put together the last bit of a proposal to a designer and read the paper. All of this happens before my well fed arse saunters out of the guest digs. Martha is Mach 10, hair afire. And it looks it now with the coppery red-gold stripes her stylist just put in. You can almost see the smoke rising off of her.

Now. What were you going to say to question that women do 80 % of the world's work? Martha did it ALL. Before breakfast.

( Image: "Farm Women at Work," Georges Seurat, the Guggenheim Collection)

Lingering

From the Shadows - Acrylic on Canvas, Martha Marshall



by Tary Peace

Again the Dark Man beckons me
To lay with him a while.
He calls me to come to the cool darkness
And rest
There in the pitch of eternal night
With him who holds the mirror of all my sin.
He promises peace and forgiveness.
I fear I will only find the relentless gnawing
Of the tail-eating snake,
but stay and stay.

It’s the Bearer of Light that keeps me here.
She offers the golden day
And dew.
She calls to me with bird-songs shouting,
“Rise up! Be with me!
Come see the ibis and the stork.
Come see the sea-cow on the shore.
I am your breath and the marrow of your bones.
Be bathed in the beauty of this fine day,
And stay and stay!”

(Editor's note: A poem by Tari Peace, pulled From the Shadows of the comments page from the previous post and illustrated wonderfully by Martha's painting.)

Nightscape

Jane Mansfield blows me a kiss followed by a hair toss and moue from Marilyn Monroe. Coats and bags in hand, they are leaving the show bar next to the store in the dicey part of town with a gaggle of tipsy admirers. Transvestites hold court both on stage and off during show hours but it has long since closed with the last of the audience and performers drifting out onto rain soaked early morning streets to find cars parked in the alley and behind the club. One stoplight set to a perpetual wink at this hour paints the slicked pavement lurid red like nail polish poured out of a bottle. I am forewarned.

As I unlock the decrepit old door of the store, a beat up black Dodge van pulls up to the curb. The windows are smudged and darkened hiding a mysterious interior. A tall, thin man dressed in a coal colored wool coat, turtleneck and jeans gets out, greets me with a leather-gloved hand. Pale blue, almost white eyes encased in craggy and ominous features are softened by the lopsided smile he flashes me. Shaking back a fringe of shoulder-length dirty blond hair showing streaks of silver, he pulls a rickety wooden chair from the alley and places an upturned white plastic bucket next to it below the grimy store windows.

I return from the dark interior with two longneck Millers and we sit silently, watching the stragglers from the club totter out on size 12 high heels with sycophants in tow. The club owner is last. Locking up behind him, he executes a tired salute our way and walks off.

My visitor is quiet and I follow suit. It is an easy silence, much different than his other forays into my life where he chases me down dark passages as I try to run from him all the while encased in an invisible marshmallow, my slow-mo steps just a nick away from the hatchet or dagger he threatens me with. But tonight we’re at peace with each other. Half way through the beers we start talking about George, my cowboy lover from Montana in decades past. Jim, the Marlboro man who taught me how to rope, quick draw a Rueger Security 6, and make my own bullets is also on the bill tonight as we discuss my archetypes – the ones who desert me at every rough spot in the road and my penchant for attracting beautiful, interesting but very dangerous and rowdy men throughout my life.

Who better to hash this out with me than my very own Dark Man? He is anathema for all fears and unsettled business unnamed, still powerful. But tonight, he is my advocate as he has been on other nights, other occasions. We talk about how I still dream of Jim running off to another woman or worse yet, just leaving and not telling me. Jim leaves me in some pretty unrespectable sitches, facing imminent disasters of one stripe or another. Worse yet, embarrassing me by choosing some bimbo with boobs instead of brains. In real life, infidelity infrequently happened to me as it has in one form or another to almost every woman. But it is more the specter of being abandoned at my most needful times that we hash out along with hidden meanings for my dreams, my archetypes and their significance. Why can't I get over this?

Pretty slick having a dreamtime therapy session to work out issues with archetypes and my mental boo-boos with the Big Daddy Nasty archetype of all. We all have a Dark Man in our dreamscape. You know yours, don't you? I’m told that my dreams are more vivid and richer than most. I agree. Three D, Panavision and Technicolor with emotions, sounds and smells. Jeez.

The Dark Man beer and chat session happened between dreams that would make any creative blocked Hollywood screenwriter green with envy for storyline. One involved Croatian expatriates returning to their capitol with vital information involving an assassination attempt on a high-level government visitor from the United States. The three men are a journalist, professor of history, and a former military officer. Beset on every side and pursued by Croat terrorists, they hang precariously from rocks above the Black Sea, exchange gunfire, hide under bracken and freezing water to escape detection as they make their way from one safe house to another. Car chases, witness to brutal crimes, unexpected aid from a rebel in a dingy old motorboat, separation from the coffee colored ex-commando threatens their mission leave me gasping for breath, heart pounding.

The next dream involves a train chase with dump trucks rigged as rolling bombs. Counter agents, specialty forces, cops and innocent bystanders battle it out at high speeds by automatic weapons, high tech gadgetry -- all on trains. The mission: Bad guy elements from the current administration are going to blow up a depot used to temporarily store transported chemical and nuclear waste.

Instilling fear in a public rattled since 9/11, they will be able to use this latest staged terrorist act to implement an even more restrictive regime installing a defacto dictatorship who will not leave power when their temporary visit is up. Agents, both good and bad are dressed in white making it impossible to tell which side they’re on. One particularly vicious woman orders a rival agent dangled over the side of a boxcar so that he is smeared and dismembered along the side of another car in a train yard. Another gory segment involves a woman being burned alive as a bomb goes off in a dump truck she is locked into. This is all very realistic down to the crisping flesh, horrible screams and terribly toasty. They’ll need to get Industrial Light and Sound Studio to do the special effects.

Parts of this scenario are being filmed from a helicopter for media propaganda to cover the crime. Nasty Girl, who looks suspiciously like Condalezza Rice makes some of her goons redo a part where a dump truck drags a utility vehicle in front of the runaway train because the cab ends up too far from the tracks to be believable by a gullible public.

This takes place while an incendiary device on the train is ticking away in its last seconds. Does she care that they will be right THERE when it goes boom? Nah.

I wake up drenched and heart pounding from this one.

This is my typical sleep cycle. Fall asleep, dream, get up, pee, drink water, pet George the cat who has joined me in bed, go back to sleep, dream some more. Sometimes, I have several of these action adventure dreams. Other nights, I have serials or sequences where a dream takes off from a point I awoke from like a mini-series.

My dreams are unlike the soporific morphine induced dreams of pain. Yes. I've used. Legally. Given copious amounts of the drug during hospitalizations for accidents injuries and my one lone surgery, I can tell you that morphine dreams and the accompanying hallucinations are nothing to chase. Mine involved very Bosch-like amorphic beings with body parts that just ain't right which morph and slither against a very twisted landscape. Morphine dreams were ominous and all dark - Toto and Dorothy in an Oz gone very, very wrong. I have my share of symbolic dreams, of course. And I work out much of the hidden messages encoded there. But I much prefer nights in my private screening room.

Vampire wars, invasions by aliens from outer space (and Mexico), harrowing spy plots, international intrigue, bodice rippers from the 1700s, even comedy – all find a screening in my brain. I’ll always have plenty of ideas and entertainment. Sometimes, after a particularly active night I wake up exhausted. I guess I shouldn’t bitch.

Who can beat having your very own in-house psychotherapist to hash out past romantic blunders with no $175.00 an hour bills, no long discovery process to develop the analysand/analyst relationship, trust and rapport - it's all built in. But sometimes I ask, can’t a girl just sleep?

Putting the 'Win' in Spin

(Eds. Note: This was sent to me by my friend, Joan Rosen in Tallahassee, Florida. It's a topic close to my heart having studied linguistics at University and knowing how language changes culture, and NOT the other way around. Pay particular attention to the 'dumbing down of America' charges. It's something that I will touch on in future posts. - Dina)

This essay is a great bit of insight, and it explains an awful lot about the decline of almost every aspect of US society. I would go a little deeper, though, and suggest that the problem is not just a lack of language skills: more fundamentally, it's a massive -- and growing -- deficit in the area of cognitive skills generally. As we dumb down our public schools, our civic dialog, our media, and our parenting, we end up increasingly ineffective at both communicating and understanding information that is necessary for arriving at a desired outcome. We see the pervasive effects of this decline in everything we do, from ordering a pizza to mitigating international conflict.

Nuance isn't just some esoteric part of the creative writer's craft. Meaning matters. For example, when the TV "news" covers a motor vehicle crash (which they euphemistically call an "accident," as if it somehow "just happened" absent human intervention), they typically say that the driver "lost control" of the car. But hey, I guess we all know how it is: one moment you're driving along, everything proceeding normally, when out of the blue, *poof* -- "Hey, where did my driving skills go?!? Oh nooooo..." In reality, the driver *relinquished* control by consciously deciding to drive too fast for conditions or to divert their attention to another activity (e.g., applying makeup or making a phone call); they certainly didn't just "lose" control as the media would have us believe. This is a calculated strategy to appeal to the me-centric, no-responsibility, hyper-sensitive, feel-good baby-boomer sensibility, which categorically precludes hurting anyone's tender wittle feewings by making them appear responsible for their actions. Think about it...if we are manipulated to feel sympathy toward the driver's situation -- poor Driver! -- we feel all warm and fuzzy and good about ourselves, which makes us want to watch more of the news broadcast and warms us to the products displayed in the ads. If, on the other hand, the reporter says "this idiot switched lanes recklessly, overcompensated, and ended up spinning off the road into the canal," we might transfer some of that mean ol' critical negativity onto their precious advertisers, and that could end up hurting some shareholder's bottom line -- and we can't have that, now, can we?

That was a fairly innocuous example. But try this on: you've probably never noticed that the administration shills always say that "the terrorists" are out to git us -- not just "terrorists" or "a terrorist." This is a relatively amateurish (yet, when used on the mostly-dim American public, highly effective) attempt to convey an image of an organized, unitary, arbitrarily eee-vill adversarial force (of which we must, of course, be very afraid) rather than the dynamic, complex situation that actually exists. After all, demonizing Armies of Rabid Evildoers Bent on Chaos as if the real world were a comic book storyline helps whip up the fear better than objectivity ever could. And fear is what keeps getting SAIC, Northrop Grumman, Booz-Allen, and all the other "homeland security industrial complex" beltway bandits those fat corporate welfare contracts. The spinmeisters wouldn't dare refer to the actual problem by its real name, religious extremists, because that would alienate "the base" (you know, our own Taliban) and shed light on the growing deficiencies of the American intellect -- and we can't have that, now, can we?

So, why did so many people vote for Bush in 04? I'm afraid that a big part of the answer is that (in addition to relinquishing all interest in actually understanding current affairs -- dereliction of our citizenly duties, if you will), Americans have become utterly helpless in terms of their ability to critically parse even the most simplistic language, rendering us vulnerable to spin and propaganda on the grandest of scales.

Thank you Jesus for Fox News... Now. To the essay.
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08.29.2006
Kathleen Reardon

Why We Can't "Win" Any War
If you've read my previous blogs, you know that I explore beneath the surface of what people say and do in politics. Purposeful deceit does emerge, but more common are unexamined patterns of thinking. Socrates disparaged the unexamined life and spent much of his helping people discover their own limiting habits of thought.I'm putting on my blog philosopher hat for a few moments to endeavor to do the same.

If we're not alert to how language is used, how it shapes our thinking and thus our decisions, we make ourselves predictable, manageable and often wrong. We limit our options and close down any hope of creativity. Words are not harmless and using them as if they are is, at best, naive. They are shaped by thinking and shape thinking.

Words that work well in one context can also be borrowed for use in another where they actually do not belong (what modern philosopher Stephen Toulmin refers to in his book Return to Reason as language being "desituated" or "disembedded"). And that is what happens when the term "win' is applied without adequate forethought or for political advantage to the war in Iraq.

Consider this -- In the past, winning a war meant annihilating or in some fashion destroying by force an enemy's leadership and major forces. The defeated enemy's beleaguered followers were largely content to go home even if they harbored anger and disdain for the victors. That facilitated what could reasonably be called a "win." In short, a "win" was possible then. Many thousands of lives may have been lost, but a "win" of sorts could nevertheless be called, especially as the other side usually surrendered.

The enemies America has now, many in Iraq, most elsewhere, are bred from near infancy to hate. They are as committed to their cause as those who lead them. Terminate their leaders and others emerge to take their places. Living to go home is not high among their priorities - beleaguered or not. Dying a martyr is. We've seen how those who hate America and Israel (soon to more evidently hate Europe, Australia and other countries, many lying low in the false hope of being spared) are emboldened by both failures and successes of their enemies. Both can be used to foster recruitment to the cause.

Today's terrorist enemies also don't seek to win a war; they seek to change the world. Losses along the way are expected when the goal is so substantial. They come as no surprise and are planned for in advance. This is an enemy that might be contained, outmaneuvered, driven back, controlled, and managed, but not one against which it's even sensible to seek, especially in the short term, a definitive, final "win."

Yet, thousands of lives, countless dollars, and valuable resources have been diverted from increasing and improving national security and the development of much needed intelligence operations in order to achieve such a "win" in Iraq. Ingenious people who are capable of coming up with counterintuitive strategies of the "Greeks-bearing-gifts" type should be gathering in Washington, D.C. right now as guests of the White House, no matter their political leanings, working day and night to outsmart this enemy. But, instead, the Bush Administration and many members of Congress cling to a win scenario they can't even define, let alone achieve. Predictability is the kiss of death in negotiation, politics and war, and yet we're extremely predictable in our need for a "win." Once predictable, we're manageable. And that can't be good. A much more clever means of succeeding will be needed. But it won't be found until simple, limiting constructions (win or lose) no longer shape the thinking of those who could make a difference.

While most of us think that ideas shape language, we are inadequately trained to notice how language shapes ideas and therefore decisions. And as we've seen, it can be used to excuse inexcusable actions.

If we don't, as a country, pay closer attention to how this works to our disadvantage and locate the fallacies hidden in our unquestioned assumptions, there is good reason to believe that the road we take will have one very unacceptable result: a place in the history books for a president and vice president who supposedly "won" a war but lost everything else that mattered.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-reardon/why-we-cant-win-any-wa_b_28241.html

And Out Again

Many thanks to the Deepwater Journal women for postings while I grieve. All of us need backup when our shoes are untied and there's wolves lurking on the grounds.

I'm actually up a bit. I had a 'visit' from Zebo last night. I heard him barking at the back door. It was the plaintive one he does that said, "Oh, please, please just open the door and let me in! I'm a good boy and I don't chew on your shoes and shop through the garbage can!"

I did manage to get SOME work done the past few weeks, albeit a bit close to the wire. I felt like a calf roper on a timer! Finished an Edwardian costume for Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan Friday night with a whole 30 minutes to spare before show-time. I've never let an actor down in over 40 years, even if I have to stitch them in at curtain! I'm rather proud of the costume - a teal peau de soie skirt with a pleated back held out with a bustle pad and black soutache trim at the hem, a silk blouse with a vintage applique at the squared neckline, pintucks down the front, 8" long lace cuffs, and tassled points. Then I made a shawl from Italian suiting in shades of teal, black, dull gold with long fringe for a scene change appearance. Took no pictures as usual so you'll just have to believe me.

For those of you who clicked on the Peter Pan link above, you have already spent some time with a character I met online years back who relieve believes he is Peter Pan. Enjoy his fashion pages. And before you write him off as a complete nut, read his life philosophy and mission statement. Now. Those of you who didn't click on the link will be just a little bit more curious.

All of us have a little Peter Pan in us. In me, it's the voice that wants to escape when I hear about wars, and crimes against women and children, and disease, and graft, and pollution, and Global Warming and the real life that blows up at my door like flotsam and jetsam. I usually come back after a bit, but escape to Neverland is always an option when faced with the spector of stark, hard reality.

My Neverland is often the Computer where I live a Virtual Life while waiting for realities to subside into a handleable level. Sometimes, Neverland is in a bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz. Focusing on 'should haves' and 'could haves' in the past is another trip to Neverland. Escape with friends is the more pleasant of all my Neverland trips. There, I can be someone important and meaningful and interesting because my posse sees me that way, bless them.

I'm right here in Neverland this minute as you read this. Ernesto is knocking on the back door of Florida and my Gulf Coast home outside Tampa. We do this thing in Hurricane Country where we collectively mind meld and try to send the destruction anywhere but here. This is my guilt over Katrina, ya'll. The crazy part of my bent psyche said that I had a part in turning that horror over to those poor people in NOLA and Alabama and Mississippi. That's very Napoleanic of me, but survives as a shard of the guilt I was brought up with. My little child's mind believed that every calamity that befell my family and my small world was due to some shortcoming of mine.

Is all this confession too much information? I have a tendency to do that. Doris Weatherford said I didn't have a presumptuous bone in my body and was truly guileless. I can read that either way and contemplate that proclamation often. I had professors in University that told me on the Q.T. that I shouldn't be SO truthful and forthcoming. I still wonder exactly what the ramifications of that meant.

It all falls into part of Neverland, however. So now that you know how Peter Pan has touched my life. Now that Peter has flew in and back out the window, I'm going to focus on Peter's quintessential promoter and usurer, Disney. I have pirate skirts and bodices to make for my beautiful little Pirate Jenny in California. She and her Captain Sebastion can be seen cavorting around the Burbank Disney lot in pictures on my Deepwater Trading Company website gallery .

Thanks once more to beautiful Martha and Robin who took up the slack for me on this particular trip to Neverland.

Food Offerings

by Martha Marshall

When someone is grieving, it's traditional to offer food. Sometimes that is all one can do. Sometimes it's enough just to be there, but the presence of comforting food makes everyone feel better just for a little while.

Last week Dina called and I said to come by for supper. Having gone through the awful last weeks of her beloved dog Zebo's life, and not being ready yet to accept the reality of his passing, she seemed glad to be here and be wallowed all over by my three dogs. They all knew something was amiss. They all stuck close to her, a chin in her lap here, a head on her shoulder there, an occasional lick, a wagging tail bumping against her, and, later in the evening, a whole 20-pound dog asleep on her lap.

And so, as my dogs were doing their part to say "we know it hurts," I was making dinner and serving wine. That night we convinced her to stay, and we talked and talked some more about things that hurt.

Then yesterday Dina was here again with Phyllis for another one of our Powerful Women's Business Meetings. And again we had food -- of course! This time it was my Famous Alabama Chicken Stew. It's famous only because people here in Florida think Alabama is exotic.

This recipe is a version of Brunswick Stew. In Alabama it’s made with chicken, tomatoes, lima beans, potatoes, corn, onions, and black and red pepper (I like mine spicy.) When I was a kid, it was a 4th of July and Labor Day tradition for schools and churches and fire stations to make the stew in a huge iron pot, simmer it over a fire outside all day, stirring it with a big wooden paddle, and sell it by the bowl, the quart, or the gallon. The long simmering and stirring were necessary for the stew to thicken and the chicken to become so tender it would break up completely, and so that the fire would impart just the slightest smoky flavor. Then, probably some time in the 70s, the food police stepped in and shut down what had been a treasured tradition. No more open-air stew pots.

My sister later carried on the tradition for a lot of years, making the stew for her Baptist Church in the fellowship hall kitchen, until she turned the responsibility over to someone else. But she still has stew for me when I go "home." She and her husband have a cabin in the woods -- their little retreat -- and we go out there, fire up the iron pot outside and make our stew.

So yesterday I thought of chicken stew, a sublime comfort food if there ever was one. And Dina, I hope you know you are loved.

We Bring

by C. Robin Janning

we bring bits of sky
and play with
harmony

Sometimes

by C. Robin Janning

sometimes we stand
for a while at the edge
of a different place

A Transfer Of Light

by C. Robin Janning

we do all kinds
of things for each other
that's why we're here

one of the best things?
bringing some light
to a dark space

Old Friend

I forewarned you about my crappy time of year before. Other than the morose mood I'm in remembering my departed ones, I thought that I had gotten by relatively unscathed without a crisis this year. Alas, that's one of the foibles of having an old dog coinciding with a crappy season and other planetary transits.

His name is Zebo. He is a 14 year old shepard mix with an unusually beautiful face, body and demeanor. Dapper, really. I call him my Handsome Fella. If he had been a human male, he would have worn a tailcoat, tophat and gloves, sported a monocle, and would have carried a cane. Debra Plant, a friend who teaches Africana Studies up at the University of South Florida said, "He has deer feet".

He does have deer feet. They are small and dainty and cream colored as he's aged with his handsome face becoming more grizzled as we've aged together. My son brought him home from a friend's home where he'd ended up after having spent almost a year of his life tied to a tree because he was too big a dog to handle for the gentle little girl he was a present for. Feeling sorry for him, my son brings in this bounding energy of a bundle who when let off the leash runs and runs and runs and runs all over the neighborhood to make up for lost days being tied to a tree.

We eventually got a fence built and he would run the yard. His ability to open the gate and tear off on a neighborhood run earned him the nickname of Houdini as well. We would have to start up the car, go down the road and open the door. See. He loves him a car ride as much as he loves a run. You don't have to drive him very far either - just down to the bridge and back is a big deal.

His other hobby was attacking any wildlife he could catch and he was pretty fast. I was forever grabbing him up by the haunches with coon or possum attached in his mouth to make him drop it before he killed it. I think he had such a hate for them because when he was tied to that tree for all that time, they would taunt him just out of reach of his chain. Time after time, a fellow of even temperment could be justified in going a little postal on the arrogant critters that dared to come into his domain and within his reach.

The last few years he's slowed down tremendously as he developed a raging case of arthritis in his spine, hips and back legs. He's become totally deaf. He can't hear a word or noise like the pounding of lightning that would send him shaking up under me wherever I was in his healthy days. He preferred my sewing machine back when he could hear the thunder and once ruined a beautiful old Bernina I've owned since 1976 by laying on the pedal and 'sewing' until it seized up.

If you give him a hot dog, he will hold it in his mouth like a cigar, make it disappear into his maw and then slide it back out. He thinks this is wonderfully funny. He has a great sense of humor and would even wink at you! I quit giving him hot dogs because I felt the nitrates couldn't possibly be helping him any.

So. I was really concerned when he started laying around and quit following me from room to room as he usually did. Where I went, he was. Right up under foot. Phyllis calls him River Zebo because it got to where you had to manuever your way over him to get anywhere in my house when she comes to visit or I needed to go to the kitchen. He just hates getting up. And getting up and laying down and moving of any sort was painful. You could hear him moan, sigh and yip with it. Then he got to where he couldn't go up the steps without help. Now. This is a huge and painful undertaking for me since I have the human penchant for back problems and he is a really big boy. He started to fall down the steps and needed help up the steps, me working the back end and him crawling up in with his front. So I took him to the vet last Wednesday.

Dr. Marks tells me that his arthritis has gotten really bad and is pinching on the nerves in his body, which explains why he was peeing and pooping on the floor and then coming to get me to go out. He gave him a shot of cortisone for the arthur and some tablets for me to give him. I don't like cortisone. It did a number on my daddy's bones and I think that it's really hard on the body. Tary Peace, who's also a nurse confirmed this for me when I talked to her Friday. He was getting really bad, was in a lot of pain and panting to prove it.

So Friday he fell in the frog pond and I had to drag him out. This has hurt his dignity because he was always very careful about his composure and deportment. Then he got really, really bad and couldn't get up and didn't seem to want to. I gave him ice cubes and his treats, but he wouldn't touch his oats and honey cereal with milk which is his most favorite treat. His pain was very evident. So I talked to him. Like I wrote to you in the post Talking To The Dead, I practiced what I preached. I told him to let me know if it was time when the pain and the indignity and the effort to put one deer foot in front of the other.

That's why we visited the vet Saturday. I stayed in the room with him and held his face and looked in his eyes and told him I loved him when the vet gave him the shot. He just let go. No more pain. No more accidents he couldn't help and felt embarrassed about. The techs wrapped him up in his car riding sheet for his last ride home. Alan, my nephew came over and helped me bury him. I wanted to put him next to where Molly and Sugar Bear were buried but have let it grow up so much, I couldn't get through it.

So he's next to the mulberry tree with the jasmine growing in it. My heart is broken. I have cried and caterwalled and moaned and hurt. I will get no more dogs. Or cats. As I've gotten older and lost family members, it gets unbearable for any loss of someone I love. Those of you who have an animal will understand this. For those of you that don't get it, I won't even try to explain.

Now this is for you my good old friend Zebo. This is for all the times you laid your head in my lap when I was feeling bad, wagged yourself silly when I got home because you were genuinely happy to see me then cussed me out with loud barks for not taking you along. This is for all the silly and funny things you did that made the house feel full even when there was no one but me in it. This is because I will miss your gold, soft ears and black saddle to stroke when I'm having a rough time sleeping. I will miss you, my old friend.

Trojans and Other Non-Prophylactic Concerns

Got your attention with that title maybe. Actually, I'm referring to the Trojan Horse Downloader.Agent.4.AV that popped up as an extra special gift on this computer I'm using. Mine got zapped in Friday night's lightning storm.

Tampa Bay is the Lightning Capital of the World, don't you know. So. I have zap protectors plugged into other zap protectors. But this zap was particularly sneaky sly and found it's way through the cable hookup. My computer guys will try to save Ol' Betsey and will salvage my store board for my files if that's not possible. I'm going to see if I can find a zap protector gizmo for the cable hookup. Damn.

Now. Back to trojans. I have always been bemused by the fact that individuals would sit around using their genius or just aping knowledge gleaned from some seedy website about causing mayhem on other people's systems. I have to assume that they have no social life and are not in therapy to relieve the symptoms of boredom or anti-social behavior issues they may have had since birth. There is also the assumption on my part that these individuals are pimply faced nerds without much to offer socially because I can't imagine an adult having the time to putz around with this crap. Simply said: They need to get a life.

Trojans and viruses and worms, oh my! All contribute to the general state of confusion and lack of direction we humans seem to have gotten ourselves into. We're warring against civilians in the guise of furthering state safety and agendas and fighting terrorism on just about every continent on the globe. Sad state of affairs for us now. I know why the rapturists are excitedly clamboring about the End Of Days. And nerdlets who design Trojans and viruses and worms and hacks contribute mightily to the travail and tribulation. They're just stupid.

In the scheme of things, can you imagine an ex-nerdlet trojan designer sitting their grandchild on their knee - assuming, of course that said nerdlet got away from the keyboard long enough to bond and mate with a reciprocal nerdlette and had progeny, provided they knew how to have sex. "Now, sonny, when I was your age, I designed a virus that shut down all the computers in the Healthsouth network! You wouldn't believe how they scrambled around trying to find patient records with allergy alerts. 'Course there were a few casualties, but what the hell! I'm famous!"

Oh. I forgot. The grand designers of malware can't really crow about their accomplishments, can they? Except to other nerds. They can sit around and snork and adjust their pens in their pocket protectors. Or maybe they substitute a good ol' trojan for the real thing in sex. Can you hear the disdain in my words?

See. I have very little time for idiots that waste it. This Cosmic Cotillion called Life that we're all invited to is the only dance here that we are aware of, if you ascribe to the Waved Space theory of the physicists. But while we're here, shouldn't we be trying to make our works be monumental, or at the least, significant? When there's so much turmoil and hate and destruction in us, shouldn't we be trying to highlight those characteristics that make us excell? Should we be giving the Grand Wazoo powers-that-be another idiot reason to wipe our collective asses off the face of this jewel of a ball?

I believe in Karma. Whether we judge ourselves at the end of our days or someone takes the job for us, I feel that what goes around comes around. Maybe it's laid out in a panalopy of images of what we've done in our lives - all of it from the mundane to the really bad. Maybe it's in the last flickering moments of conciousness before our signal goes to gray. I have to believe that whatever reflection comes we'll have to weigh whether downloading a trojan onto some old lady's computer really counts for squat in the Scheme of Things.

Don't Forget to Water the Flowers

  
By Martha Marshall, from 1998

Mama always had a green thumb. She could pinch off the smallest piece of any growing thing, poke it down into some water in a drinking glass that had maybe once held Bama blackberry jelly, and before you knew it that little piece of coleus, or strawberry begonia, or hen and chickens (she could tell you the most glorious names and knew them all on sight) would be happily curling its way around the kitchen window. She had plants everywhere – in every available space on a wall shelf, every window sill, and spread out halfway across the floor, most of them having had similar water-borne beginnings, or were treasures she occasionally would bring home from the Sears garden store.

The ones in pots may or may not have had anything under them to catch the overflow and protect the furniture when you watered them. More often than not, it would be a used Morton’s chicken pot pie pan, or a lid from a plastic refrigerator bowl that had long since lost its mate, or just a piece torn from a cardboard box with aluminum foil placed underneath. Things always got a second chance at life with my Mama.

In the winter time, all the potted plants out on the porch would take up residence inside, where it was already crowded enough. She would lovingly make a space for them among all the rest, making it impossible to get by them in tight corners without extreme caution. She would gleefully anticipate the annual blooming of the Christmas cactus. Her watering ritual seemed to take at least forty-five minutes. Somehow she always knew which ones needed how much water, how much light they needed, and from what direction, and when to take the spent flowers off so they would keep blooming.

She had a prized African violet collection, which had their special window in order to take advantage of just the right light. I remember, over the years, countless individual African violet leaves sticking down through waxed paper into water glasses on their way to becoming new plants. You could see the pain come over her face if any one of them got knocked off by a dog or a cat – or worse, by one of us in one of our wild chases through the house.

She raised two daughters, and neither of us turned out to be particularly gifted at growing ornamental things. We both could grow tomatoes, corn, okra, and kids – things that we thought really meant something. But we just never had an aptitude for growing things in pots. This could have had something to do with the fact that Mama sometimes seemed to care more about all those potted plants than she did about us. We thought at times, even though we never said it out loud, that she could have concerned herself just the tiniest bit more with us and whatever was on our minds on a particular day. I think we were more than a little bit jealous of those plants.

When Mama went somewhere for a few days, Daddy would take care of his dogs and she would say to us, “Don’t forget to water the flowers.” And by “flowers” she meant the whole assortment of plants, flowering or not. And if you didn’t, she would know. She knew them all and had nurtured every one, many times having carefully relocated them when we moved from house to house. She had put so much time and love into them, you just couldn’t contemplate being the one to cause their early demise. For me, that meant I would sometimes be overly anxious and water a plant too much, and that would be just as bad as if I had left it alone. A time or two, when that happened, I would think of replacing it with a brand new one, but then I would immediately realize that it was no use; she would know. So I would just prepare to face whatever disappointment I might cause her.

My sister tells the story that when I was about ten, she was already working full time and couldn’t go with us on a family beach vacation. She received just one communication from us. It was a post card from Mama, with a picture of the beach on the front and one line on the back, which simply said, “Are you watering my flowers?”

When I left town with my young family, my sister and her family remained nearby. The tradition of taking care of Mama’s plants for her continued when she made a trip out of town with Daddy. Then later on, after Daddy died, it was just Mama and her plants. When she went somewhere, which seemed like all the time, my sister still would go over to Mama’s every few days to “water the flowers.”

Now that Mama is in the nursing home, my sister is still the one who lives nearby, and sits with her just about every day. She has made sure Mama always has a living plant or two in the window sill. It used to give Mama such pleasure just to see something alive and growing, that she felt she was caring for, even though, as time went by, she really wasn’t able to keep them going without a lot of help. If one started looking a little droopy, my sister would quietly replace it with a new one, and Mama really didn’t know the difference. Now, as she becomes more feeble, I don’t think she even notices the plants at all.

My sister and I both have tried over the years -- really tried -- to have potted plants of our own, but with sad results every time. Our lives made more urgent demands of us. My worst offense has always been the watering. I think I have finally mastered not watering them too much, but I’ve had difficulty giving them enough. At different times for each of us, we have simply given up, again and again. Mama was the best, and we could never begin to measure up.

Over a period of about two years after Mama went to the nursing home, we distributed her things among family members. I brought home one of those prehistoric-looking succulents with new baby plants all along the edges of the leaves, and tried to make it grow. Seeming to resent having been uprooted, and in spite of my weeks of fretting over it, it flatly refused. I had failed again.

But something may be changing this summer. I have been creating hanging pots with mixed annuals and greenery, and putting them out back on the screened porch, where we can enjoy them from inside the house. Their presence helps create the feeling of refuge and peace that I try to produce in our surroundings. I sometimes think those plants are even grateful to me for taking good care of them this season. They seem to sense what a supreme effort this is. I sit out there with those hanging baskets around me, in the cool early morning with my coffee, watching the cardinals and blue jays as they gently nudge this year’s teenagers toward adulthood, and reflect on what I can possibly do to make it work out this time, that will make the difference, so that these beautiful plants can survive the summer with me. I yawn, stretch, and head back inside to prepare for another busy day. And then, as if calling after me, I hear Mama’s voice – young, and strong, and clear, saying, “Don’t forget to water the flowers.”