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52° this morning, and the fog was risen again from the wet ground.  But it burned off by mid-morning and reached the mid sixties again.  Violets are in bloom.  Rain fell after dark.

Bumble bees are bumbling.  

Hummingbirds are whizzing and making their squeaking music.

  

They are annoyed that Monica has not filled the feeder yet.

The Homework Hammock

Nico said he was bored, so we composed a limerick together:


There once was a pair of old gloves,
Who sat and talked of old loves,
They were both in a cupboard,
And they cried and they blubbered,
And drew little pictures of doves.

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This morning was foggy and wet - every surface of the cold spring morning held as many drops of water as it could.  The dawn temperature was 51°, but climbed quickly through the sixties by lunchtime.  Perhaps it had showered yesterday - we were in Pennsylvania gathered for an Easter weekend of over-eating and egg-hunts, and there it didn't rain.  

Since my intention over the coming weeks is to finish digging and planting a garden, as well as settling in a colony of honeybees, I should start keeping better records of the yearly cycle.  

Of interest to the bees:  After weeks of not much besides maples and skunk cabbage in bloom - here, in the last week of April, the first of the dandelions are beginning to blossom.  The daffodils are probably near the beginning of their peak.  Our few hyacinths are up.  The little blue flowers that I call gentians are mostly past after an uncommonly prolific April.  The violets have been out for over a week - the forsythia for at least a couple of weeks.

The buds on the currants and the quince seem ready to open, though they haven't yet.  The rhubarb is out with leaves a foot across, but no stalks long enough to cut.

The mockingbird was up in the firs, running through its repertoire most of the morning.  Two turkey vultures have gotten into the cat's carcass along the stone wall, and I'm reluctant to go and look at what they've left behind.  (The cat, Wilbur, struck down by a car before Thanksgiving, was buried by Monica, but apparently only deep enough to keep the body frozen through the winter.  Something dug it up after the thaw and nature's clean-up crew has been taking it's sweet gruesome time about returning the poor cat to the cycle.)

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I’ve found it hard to maintain my journal writing over the past months.  Writing is an important way of gathering thoughts together – bringing them to a discipline and organization that can lead to insight or clarity – but maybe I don’t want clarity.

Because the issue is that I’ve lost faith in a normal future – that is, I’ve lost faith in the agreed-upon future that serves as the channel for all the narrow decisions we’re supposed to be making – preparing the kids for college, setting aside something for retirement, paying down the mortgage, entertaining ourselves with mildly enriching hobbies, continuing to build up that paycheck, or whatever.  The belief that the future is going to be like the present – just a little better or maybe a little worse.

I’d like to believe in that future, banal and comforting as it is, but I’ve had to admit that such a future seems utterly chimerical.  I’m saddled with a scientific conscience, and to believe in that future requires me to believe too many things that simply don’t make sense – to accede into something that feels like a mass delusion.

That future requires me to believe that climate change unchecked isn’t going to wreck our ever more brittle food system; that it won’t roil the country with refugees from newly uninhabitable regions; it requires me to suspend my understanding of physics and thermodynamics, to accept that with a few tweaks we can perpetuate our lifestyle into a low-energy future.  

It requires me to believe that this economy, which can imagine no future but one of infinite growth, will somehow magically transcend the end of the cheap oil; that it will hum along though the foundering retreat of the bankrupt American Empire;  that it will not crush most people’s livelihoods into its gears as it ratchets down to a serious contraction; that the utterly corrupt and rapacious ruling classes were not already well on their way to draining out the wealth and vitality from the once mighty American middle class.  

It requires me to believe that we are going to solve our problems with some sudden, un-heralded burst of ingenuity or will – even though every trend is toward denial, willful ignorance and passivity; toward cynical pessimism or febrile and unfounded optimism.  It requires me to believe that we will rise to the occasion, and it requires me to ignore the fact that the occasion has probably already passed un-marked by any rising-to or by anything but cheerful denial.

I take a close look at the sources for complacency and optimism, and I see numbers that don’t add up, obvious caveats that aren’t applied, inconvenient truths swept under rugs. 

Maybe I’m wrong, as doomsayers have often, though not always, been wrong.  Figuring some of that out is what writing’s for, if I can stick to it.

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Underneath the granite cliffs of "High Ledges" there is a long, shoreless vernal pond.  Green mer-hair entwines the slow current, and within it the spring frogs make a raucous music.  They fall quiet and dive or float watchfully as we approach.  Purple claws of skunk cabbage glisten against the winter's dull leaf litter.  A fleck of that litter takes flight: a mourning cloak fluttering up into the blue shards of sky that seem to hold the leafless trees in their places.

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At 5:30 a.m. I set out for the airport with a cup of coffee and a smoothie warily circling one another in my stomach.  The Chevron station on Central Avenue was glowing in the darkness and I remembered that I had to fill up the tank in the rental car.  I pulled in around a CBS Channel Two News Van.  A blonde television reporter and her cadaverous, but affable camera man had been condemned to put together a pre-dawn price-shock-at-the-pump segment for the morning show, and they did their best to interview me as I groggily fumbled with my credit card and pumped the gas.  I tried not to sound like a moron.

Their questions and their chatting and their filming delayed me only a little and I made it to the airport in good time, circling into the rental car return lot.  I noticed with a sinking feeling that Enterprise didn't have a kiosk there, and I began to vaguely recall that once years before we had rented a car in Burbank, not so much at the airport as really near the airport.  And that had probably been Enterprise.  It was about 6 a.m. now, beginning to feel a little late considering my 7 a.m. flight, but clearly not late enough for any uniformed humans to be hanging around the rental car yard.  I wondered what would happen if I just returned the car to National instead.  Something really expensive, probably.  

Now began a process of driving that part of Burbank that could be considered really near the airport.  I tried to dredge up from memory the side street that Enterprise was located on.  All I could recall was that it was off a main street and the name of the street had been memorable for some reason.  6:05 . . . 6:10 . . . 6:15 . . . Winona Street - that's it!  and I screeched into a left turn and down Winona street.  The welcome green glow of an "e" showed me I was right.  Maybe they didn't want customers, yet, because they'd barricaded the entrance with a van and some pylons, but I sped into the "Shuttle Only" entrance, wound around to the back, handed a guy there my pink contract papers, and lugged my bags onto the airport shuttle.  

I try not to show up at security checkpoints sweating, since that's just asking for a lengthy pat down, but it couldn't be helped.  However, Burbank seemed to be expecting no trouble and I got to the gate in time.  In fact, by climbing in the back entrance of the plane (none of those fancy walky-tubes for Burbank - you cross the tarmac and climb the steps up to the plane like it's 1955), I actually got that seat by the emergency exit where no one sits in front of you.

Not that it mattered once someone noticed that an engine was leaking fuel.

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Alberto was in high spirits this morning, smoothing the front of his yellow guayabera with gnarled hands.  His pension is due tomorrow (a couple days early since the 3rd will fall on a Sunday), which means he'll have lotto money and can stop praying that his numbers don't come up while he's broke.  But even more importantly, the weather girls on the TV were calling for record setting heat.  The man blooms like a tropical plant in the heat, especially record-setting heat.

I don't.  I wilt like a thirsty jewel-weed.  And I made hard work of wandering around the concrete sink of Los Angeles.  It was 92 degrees and I was realizing that I needed at least a half dozen interpreters to make headway downtown (Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese . . . .)  About 3 o'clock it occurred to me that if I didn't get out I'd be trapped by rush hour and surely die.  So I rode the 110 up to Pasadena, where there were trees to survive under - and where enough people were willing to speak to me in English about the sorry state of the nation.

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Walking around the too-wide, too-straight streets of Bakersfield, California.  Fidgeting with a pen and a little black notebook that I don't write in, I ask people about why the economy sucks for them and for the people they know, and what can be done about it.  (This passive tense intentional.)  I'm being an anthropologist for one of the bigger unions, experimenting with frames and rhetorical gambits, exploring the cognitive terrain of labor, class, job, economy, and power.  I talk to machinists and truckers.  I talk to black guys smoking weed on the proverbial street corner.  I talk to teachers waving their signs in protest of another round of corrosive budget cuts.  I talk to a white woman fallen out of the middle class.  In Los Angeles I troll the food line at a neighborhood's Cesar Chavez celebration.  I talk to people in their gardens or in their cars or on a bench waiting for date.

Then I sit in restaurants and bars, or on the bed at Anna's apartment in Glendale with my little black notebook and I write about what I see and hear - and compare this cognitive terrain to the arguments that labor organizers want to use - the assumptions they rely on - and see where things mesh and where they just crumple against each other uselessly.  And mostly right now, it's a lot of crumpling.

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Las Vegas

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Zion

 

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Zion

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Grand Canyon

 

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Sunset Crater and Wapatki ruins

Sedona

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Carefree, Arizona to Beaver Flats, Sedona

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I moved a few days worth of firewood in from the pile, stacked it along the wood stove, ahead of the coming night's snowfall.  Under the crystalline blue skies I was sweating in the cold, cold wind.  Oak leaves cartwheeled across the pocked snow-crust.

46th birthday and time for reflection - (though a long Sunday with the family bouncing around the wind-bound house doesn't lend itself to reflection).  Porter and Nico decided to craft me a carrot cake.

If life comes in thirds, the first 25 years are all about growth and adventure.  The second 25 bring the creep of entwining responsibilities and compromise, and the third 25 should be about the liberations of wisdom and peace.  I'm closing out that middle third.  And I'm going to take up beekeeping and plant a vegetable garden.

Monica will go to Japan instead.  And then together, when we can, we'll climb into the Sierra Nevadas where the earth and heaven overlap.

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The snow is down to 9 1/2 inches between the front door and herb garden.  But in the yard, where the sun shines the brightest, patches of grass show through.  Jake and Porter were pestering the Norway spruce with shuriken, and in their search for a ricochet they found a dead hawk under the rhododendron.   It was a red-tailed, the carcass pristine and undamaged - a magnificent animal.  Maybe in the confusion of wind it struck a branch and broke its neck - or maybe it ate a poisoned mouse - or maybe it was West Nile virus.  They boys carried it off into the woods.

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Dormancy . . . one of my favorite winter words.  I haven't been dormant entirely, not like the chipmunks or mourning cloaks, but clearly I haven't been writing in the blog.  In the yard, the snow that fell before Christmas is still on the ground.  12 inches deep between the front door and herb garden.  But it is steadily disappearing, shrinking away from anything that gathers the sun's heat.

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My great uncle Sam died a few days ago at age 85.  He was the last of his siblings; baby brother to my grandmother and her sisters.  Sam Tewksbury was one of the true characters of our childhoods.  A big, shambling man who never had a family of his own, for years he occupied a small room in my grandmother’s house, across the hall from Ya-Ya, the old Danish widow who rented the back apartment.  As a kid, the thing I found most remarkable about him was how he wouldn’t emerge in the morning until after 11.  Then he’d make himself something sweet for breakfast in the dented tin measuring cup that he used for most of his meals (except when he was forced into sitting at the table for one of the big family gatherings).  He was shy and slow with words.  If you asked him how he was, he’d always answer, “Oh, ‘bout the same.” 

I didn’t learn how to hold a conversation with Sam until I was 20 years old.  I must have found some patience by then.  If you’d say something to him, he’d respond with a non-committal “hmmm hmmm”.  But if you waited – I mean really waited while a minute or so of silence trickled by – saying nothing, asking nothing – he would give a real response to what you said.  And then you could respond as quickly or as slowly as you wanted and settle in for another long pause while Sam slowly cogitated and formulated his next statement.

I guess his sisters considered him a bit simple-minded, but he never struck me that way.  He repaired televisions and other electronics in the back room of my grandmother’s store, and tended to the customers a few hours of the day.  He never spent a nickel if he could avoid it and he was frugal to the point of pathology.  He let me drive his old gray station wagon when I was 15 and taught me how to save gas by coasting down hills.  There were people who would let him know when a deer had been killed on the roads, so he could gather a haunch for his dog before the vultures got to it.  Whatever cash money he had he played into the stock market, at least that’s what my parents said, since I never heard him speak of it.   Despite the frugality he finally moved out of my grandmother’s house and into his own place (maybe she pushed him out, but the rent was low because the building was condemned and gradually falling down).  A true child of the Great Depression, he never voluntarily threw anything away, and he filled the dark house to the ceilings and heated it with scrounged scrap lumber and rolled newspaper.  Above his entryway he hung a graceful sign that said “S TEWKSBURY”.  It was an uncharacteristic flourish and I asked him about it.  He told me it was his parents’ “TEWKSBURYS” sign that he’d split and re-arranged.

Maybe his judgment wasn’t always the best, but I’d play Sam’s assistant even when I didn’t understand what we were up to.  I remember hunching behind wooden shields up by the barn while we attempted to break old television tubes by hurtling rocks at them (He vaguely explained about them being toxic and a bit explosive).  I think my sister Chris has a couple of scars on her leg from helping him with soldering television cables.  And I spent at least one afternoon shimmying up trees  with an old car seatbelt to check on cables he had run up over Tyler Hill for some reason.  Other times it was just to drive out to gather beechnuts or pick apples in abandoned fencerows, or to let the dog hunt for groundhogs.  On those outings he kept a small acetylene torch handy for tent caterpillars.  He was a tremendously gentle man, but he bore a strange hatred for tent caterpillars.  It seemed to bring him great satisfaction to watch the silk retreat from the blue flame and the singed caterpillars come tumbling out.

But Sam was always good to me.  On summer afternoons, when we were visiting, he’d gather up his little collection of short, odd-shaped baseball bats and his flat, ancient ball glove and we’d go up to the little league field to hit the ball around for a while.  Even in his 50’s he was pretty good.

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Here's Congressman Jim Shimkus of Illinois, who is jockeying to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  He assures us that it's wrong to worry about climate change or human's destroying the Earth, because God, not man, will bring about the End.





Before the next election we will be dunking witches . . . .

h/t Juan Cole
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