Monotony

 

I stare down the hall.

Sunlight from the window

glares on the floor to

reveal the coating of dust

that clouds the surface,

particles of dirt and pollen

tracked in on shoes,

or shaken off clothing

as I undress

and slough off dead skin cells--

the minutiae of my life

lying there plain to see.

 

It lies there until I am moved

to drag out the vacuum and 

suck it all away,

only to look down the hall

a day or two later to see

the cloudy coating

staring back at me once more.

Rainbows and Amateurs

 This morning I sat on my front porch and observed something I don’t remember seeing before.  It was a rainbow, even a double rainbow at times.  What made it unique is that it was morning, the sun rising in the east, and this rainbow appeared on the west side of my house.  Most conditions that lead to rainbows happen during the storms that arise during the heat of the day.  A morning rainbow is rare.

 

I sat and watched for a good while as it brightened and faded, depending on the amount of sun breaking through the clouds in the east.  Sometimes brilliant with all the ROYGBIV colors easily observed, sometimes fading to a faint streak.  Over and over, it waxed and waned, and it reminded me of the impermanence of life. That everything is always changing in the world around us, in our bodies, in our mind.  I’ve always been so resistant to change, but I’m learning it’s just a reality of life. I am trying to be more at ease with it, less fearful of it, and open to it.

 

And just as I was watching this rainbow, I came across a reference to Anne of Green Gables. Anne Shirley is endlessly awed by the world around her.  Dr. Jonathan Rogers puts it this way:  

 

Anne sees royally beautiful things everywhere because she always has her eyes open for beauty and delight. "Isn't it splendid that there are so many things to like in the world?" she asks Matthew. That particular declaration is occasioned by the "jolly rumbling" of the wagon on a wooden bridge.

Anne is unusually sensitive to what CS Lewis called "joy," "the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing" that brings more satisfaction than any earthly consolation every could. Sehnsucht, as you may know already, is the German word for this longing.

If Anne seems out of touch with reality, it is because she is in touch with a deeper reality. Matthew and Marilla are good people, but they are pragmatic people, in bad need of a reminder that there is more to their world than meets the eye.

 

This is why I, along with millions of others, love Anne.  She reminds us of how we truly should be reacting to the world around us.  I want to be more like Anne.

 

So when I walk my road, which I have done hundreds of times, I try to pay attention.  It’s hard work, trying to keep out of my own head, to be aware of what this very moment holds.  On Monday as I approached an oak tree by the driveway, a small white something fell out of it and onto the ground.  I’d just the week before experienced what I am convinced was a squirrel throwing acorns out of an oak tree behind our house, but this white thing didn’t look like an acorn.  I went over and picked it up, and behold, it was an acorn, chewed all the way around by a squirrel.  I just happened to be there at that moment when the squirrel finished her breakfast and decided to get on with her day.

 

Such a small thing. 

 

But there I was, paying attention to it and delighting in it.

 

Dr. Rogers went on to share this passage:  

 

Robert Farrar Capon talks about amateurs, appealing to the etymological sense of the word: an amateur is a person who loves. An amateur makes and plays and works from motives of love rather than self-interest or pragmatism. And the world, according to Capon, needs all the amateurs it can get. I have quoted the following Capon passage before, but it seems so relevant to Anne Shirley that I'm just going to have to ask you to indulge me:

[The world] needs all the lovers – amateurs – it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral – it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness. In such a situation, the amateur – the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness is a sin and boredom a heresy – is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound, by his love, to speak... There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.

 

“To look the world back to grace.”  That’s what Anne does.

 

What a great role to play in the world!  

I think I’ll embrace it.

 

Guest Post by Phil Kiper: Charged by a Bull Moose

 Charged by a Bull Moose

This Happened to Me, and I Lived to Tell About It

On Wednesday, September 18, 2019, I was in the first week of my annual four week stay in Northwest Ontario, Canada.  I always try to plan my arrival around the opening of the ruffed grouse hunting season and some of Canada’s premier walleye and smallmouth bass fishing.

Northwest Ontario has some of the best grouse hunting in North America.  They are usually plentiful and easy to hunt.  I often drive old logging roads and try to shoot them with a .22 rifle.  Yes, it is legal and also not very sporting.  The .22 rifle and my bifocals make it more of a challenge.

My preferred way to hunt grouse is to go on long walks down old logging roads that have now grown into very narrow paths.  When the weather turns colder, the grouse move to these old roads for the clover that grows in the sunlight and other choice forage.  The bush in the fall has a memorable smell of damp earth, falling leaves, and decaying vegetation. Mushrooms are everywhere.

In this part of Canada, the vegetation is very dense.  It is often impossible to see more than a few feet off the trail.  As the leaves fall, the bush opens up to give a better view of the forest floor and surrounding area.  It is a country of mixed hardwoods along with every type of coniferous trees imaginable.  As you look into the bush from the trail, you have a view of fallen trees, thick underbrush, soggy lowlands, and rocky outcroppings.  This is very remote country.  These old trails run for miles.

On this particular afternoon, I was hunting on my favorite walking trail.  It is about an hour out and an hour back as you ease along, hoping to see a grouse.  I occasionally have my limit of five birds before I reach the end of the trail and often have at least a couple for a nice dinner.  They are delicious!  Their Latin name being “Bonassa Umbellus”, which means, good when roasted.

A third of the way down the trail and old abandoned beaver pond opens up the bush to allow for a better view.  Due to the beaver’s industrious work of building dams and flooding timber to build networks of ponds, these areas are often magnets for wildlife.  These ponds, consisting of intricate dams and numerous lodges, create a fantastic view of the fall foliage. They are great places to sit and take a break from walking and fill your lungs with cold, crisp air.  They are wild, and they are spectacular.

Moose live and thrive in these dense, soggy places, and I have had the pleasure of seeing several of them.  Last year I arrived at this pond and found a young bull moose standing on the far bank.  He had not seen me and was slowly walking back toward the bush.  I was hidden well, behind some vegetation growing around the pond, and so I cow called to him.  It is a voice call used by moose hunters to attract bulls during the fall breeding season.  The idea is to make this bull moose think that you are a cow moose.  Moose have great hearing and sense of smell, but they are notoriously near sighted. When he heard my call, he turned around and moved back out in to the open ground.  I was about fifty yards away on the opposite bank.  He stayed in the open for about fifteen minutes and then leisurely walked away.

Since he left in the opposite direction I was headed, I felt safe walking on down the trail and continuing my grouse hunt.  In just a short distance, a different bull moose walked out of the bush right in front of me and very close.  He saw me about the same time I saw him.  We had a stand-off from about thirty feet away.  I had no idea what to do so I took a phone video of him and didn’t move.  He was smaller than the first bull and eventually walked on down the trail. I followed for a short distance until he moved back into the bush and quickly evaporated.  It was amazing how quietly he moved through such thick cover.  I continued on down the trail with no further moose encounters.

I told a friend of mine about my encounters.  He had a cow archery tag and had been hunting hard with no success.  We thought with those bulls hanging around, there must be a cow somewhere nearby.  The next day he went out to the pond to sit awhile, hoping a cow might emerge.  After sitting for an hour, he decided to cow call. To his astonishment, a giant bull moose walked out into the open area of the pond.  My friend has a very shaky video of this moose.  

Big bull moose are amazing animals, and they can be very dangerous.  They are the largest member of the deer family, and while in rut, they are the only animal that may know that you are a human and just don’t care.  This bull was probably a 1100-1200 pound animal and capable of moving very quickly.  As soon as my friend could, he left the area.  We both felt fortunate to have been that close to three different bull moose without anything bad happening.

That was last year.  On this afternoon, I was walking out the same trail again.  I passed the first pond and headed out the trail toward the second pond.  This pond is an active beaver pond, where the beavers have flooded the whole trail,

making it nearly impossible to navigate around it.  As I drew near the pond, a grouse walked out in front of me.  I took a quick shot with my .20 gauge shotgun and missed.  I eased on to the pond, and to my surprise, ducks started rising up from all over the surface of the water.  There must have been close to 100.  They just kept coming off of the water.  It was very beautiful.  There were a couple of beavers swimming around, and so I sat down to rest for a few minutes and just enjoyed the beauty of the place.

I stood up and started walking back toward my truck.  I stopped because I heard a frog croaking from a water filled ditch beside the trail. This was very odd for late September, but it had been unusually warm.  Because I stopped for the frog, I heard something else.  It was the unmistakable deep throated sound of a bull moose grunt.  It wasn’t loud, but I knew what it was.  I stood for a minute, and I heard nothing else.  I decided to grunt at him.  He immediately grunted right back at me and then nothing else happened.  I had no idea how far away he was, but I knew he was to my left and up on a small ridge.

The vegetation was so thick that it was hard to see more than a few feet up the ridge.  I really wanted to see that bull moose.  I wanted to be able to say that I had called in a bull moose.  As a young boy, I had read every hunting magazine I could find, and I had been entranced by stories of hunters dressed in red woolen shirts calling bull moose out in to the open for a shot.  I faced the ridge and cow called a couple of times. I instantly heard three rapid, aggressive grunts and then the sound of small trees being knocked down. I looked up the ridge and saw the tops of the trees as they were unbelievably being pushed over.  He was coming down the ridge, and he was coming fast!  He was much closer than I expected.

The first glimpse I got of him was at about 90 feet.  I could only see him from his shoulder back, but his body was enormous.  I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Hey, Hey, Hey”.  He was running down the ridge at an angle.  At my yell, he paused for maybe a second and then turned and came straight at me, head down, incredibly wide antlers smashing everything in his path.  I had nowhere to go.  I remember thinking, “This is going to be bad!”  When he was about fifteen feet away, I pointed my shotgun over his head and fired a shot. I moved to my left and tried to get behind some cover. He stopped only a few feet away from me and turned to his left, showing me his giant antlers. He raised his head and looked back at me with his enormous dark eye.  I had never seen a bull moose that big in my life.  He was massive!  He stared at me for a second and then pivoted to his left.  I wasn’t sure if he was leaving or turning to charge again.  I took off on a dead run and heard him crashing away as he headed back up the ridge.  I was alive!

I made it back to my truck in what seemed like minutes, and I think I was both laughing and crying.  I drove the few minutes back to camp and found my friend walking down the road to his cabin. When I told him my story, he was amazed and asked me if I got a picture of the moose.  “No I didn’t get a picture of the moose,” I said. “I thought he was going to kill me.”  The experience was that powerful.

I didn’t sleep much that night.  I kept playing the scene over and over in my head.  I realized that he was the top bull in that area.  When he grunted, he was letting cows know where he was and telling other bulls to stay away.  When I grunted back at him, I was challenging him.  Then to add fuel to the fire, I cow called.  Now he thought I was a bull and that I had a cow with me.  I was on his turf, and he came down that ridge with the intention of running off an interloper.  He was ready to fight and kill.  

The only thing I really can’t describe is the sound he made as he came down that ridge.  I am sure it was part of the intimidation factor.  The only way I could replicate that sound would be to park a loaded dump truck up on that ridge, have someone release the emergency brake, and let it roll down the hill knocking everything down in its path and picking up speed as it is about to smash you to death.  Imagine standing in the path of that truck as it comes down that hill, and you will get a little idea of what it felt like.  The whole thing probably lasted less than thirty seconds.

When I was a boy in Illinois, we had a neighborhood barbershop where my father  took me to get my hair cut.  The barber was a hunter.  He always had a huge pile of Field & Steam and Outdoor Life magazines.  I would look forward to going to the barbershop and reading those stories as the barber cut my father’s hair.  Later, when I got older, I would walk to the barbershop on my own and just sit and read. He would call my house and let me know when he had some new magazines.

  Outdoor Life had a story each month about some hunter or fisherman having a near deadly encounter with a dangerous animal. The story was called, “This Happened to Me, and I Lived to Tell about It.” I am very grateful for my near death experience with a dangerous animal, and I am very grateful that “I Lived to Tell about It”.

 

Guest Post by Phil Kiper: Two Deaths

Two Deaths

On April 30, 2011, I was in Washington, D.C.  I had been given the great honor of judging a national competition for high school students sponsored by “We the People”, a nationally acclaimed civic education program that focuses on history and principles of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The competition was “The Citizen and the Constitution”.

Panels of high school students are given very challenging legal scenarios, and the students must arrive at a position based on our constitution.  Seeing the quality of the student responses made me very proud to be an educator in a public school.

Late that afternoon I received a call from my father.  My mother was in the latter stages of Alzheimers, and he did not expect her to live through the night.  He did not want me to come home to Illinois; he thought it best if we just all wait.  I ended the call and felt an incredible feeling of sadness but also relief.  The long goodbye of this horrible disease was finally ending for my mother and our family.  If you have lost a loved one to this disease, you will understand the conflicting emotions.  My mother was dying.

I was invited to dinner by two of my friends, one an educator from our town in Tennessee and the other a former Oregon Supreme Court Justice and constitutional scholar.  There was nothing to be done, and so I joined them.  It was a relief to have something to take my mind off of my mother for a few hours.  My friend, the constitutional scholar, is a great educator and has a way of making the most difficult concepts easy to understand. I always enjoy my time with her.   

Pam and I have stayed in touch over the years and spent some time with her in Monterey, California, last year.  She always wants to know what I am reading.  I don’t get asked that question where I live.

My mother, Dorothy Moit, was born in 1929, a child of the Great Depression.  She was a twin, but her sister Doris died as an infant.  The family story was that my Grandmother, Florence, had the two girls in bed with her and that Doris somehow suffocated during the night.  I remember going to the cemetery with my mother every year to put flowers on the grave of her twin sister.  I always sensed the sadness of her loss.

In those days, times were hard and money was scarce.  When my mother was 13, my grandmother left my grandfather, and he moved to a different town.  My mother, the youngest, dropped out of school and went to live with him. Often she would live at the YWCA as my grandfather moved around looking for work. She supported herself as a teenager by working as a waitress at Boylan’s Candies on Front street in Bloomington, Illinois.  It was a diner with a candy counter.  The chocolate candy was made upstairs and hand dipped.  Each piece had a swirl on top to match the filling inside; “C” for chocolate, “O” for orange, “L” for Lemon, etc.  Years later, my father would always buy her a box of Boylan’s candy on Valentines Day.  She also worked at Kresge's department store as a cashier and eventually became the head cashier, making sure that all registers balanced at the end of the day.  She was still a teenager.  When I was a high school student, she returned to school and received her GED diploma. I think she just had something to prove to herself.

The next morning I was eating an early breakfast at the hotel when I received the call from my father that my mother had died.  We cried together and then discussed our plans.  He wanted me to complete my commitment in Washington. “It’s what Mom would have wanted”, he said.    He was right.  It was one of the many things she taught me.

As I started judging the morning competition, I felt like the death of my mother was a secret that I should tell my fellow judges, but it isn’t something you easily drop into a conversation with strangers. I heard my mother’s voice say, “Quit whining and finish your job”.  At lunch I had a chance to speak with one of my heroes, Mary Beth Tinker, who in 1965, as a 13 year old Junior High school student, along with her brother, had worn a black arm band to school in protest of the Vietnam War.  She was suspended from school.  The case went through the courts and in 1969, the U.S. Supreme court ruled for Tinker in the famous case of Tinker vs Des Moines.  The majority opinion was that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.  Mary Beth related a story to me that years after the decision, she met Dr. Seuss and asked him how he felt about the state of our country.  He replied as only he could, “We can…and we’ve got to…do better than this”.  My mother would have smiled to have heard of my experiences of that day.  I finished my schedule late that afternoon.  It was May 1, 2011, and my mother was dead. 

I was invited by another friend, a proponent of civics education, working in D.C., to join him and a friend of mine for a dinner at Dupont Circle.  It was great conversation.  He was a close friend of retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor and told great stories of events surrounding her tenure.  He told me that he would be happy to arrange a meeting with her if we were ever in the same town at the same time. My mother would have liked that too.

On our way back to the hotel we drove by the White House and you could see that a group of people were assembling.  My friend remarked that this was unusual at this time of night and that  “something was going on”.  I got back in my hotel room, turned on the TV, and all of the news stations were alerting the public that the president was about to make an important announcement.  Rumors were flying around and so I decided to go to the lobby and see if anybody knew anything.  The giant TV in the lobby was on, and in a few minutes, President Barack Obama walked to the microphone in the White House and announced to the world that special forces of the U.S. military had killed Osama Bin Laden in a raid.  The most wanted man in the world and the architect of the 9-1-01 attack was dead.  

Some other people from our group were in the lobby.  One of them suggested that we go to the White House.  I jumped into a cab with a couple of guys I really didn’t know and rode the few minutes to the White House.  We arrived when the crowd was fairly small, but within minutes, the crowd grew in size and enthusiasm. Chants of “USA”, “USA”, were everywhere.  I was living, in person, a moment of American history.  I had never in my life cheered the death of a human being, but I cheered that night.  This went on for awhile until the crowd became drunk and disorderly.  I stepped back into the shadows to watch.  It was May 1, 2011, and Osama Bin Laden was dead and so was my mother.  I caught a cab by myself and went back to my room.

The next morning I flew back home, Chicago to Bloomington.  I spent some time with my dad and tried to relay to him my conflicting emotions surrounding these two deaths and the amazing experience of the past few hours. My father was a World War II and Korean War veteran, and I’m sure he recognized the power of these conflicting emotions.  It was May 2, 2011, and I was still grieving one death and celebrating the other.

Almanac: Quarantine Sunday

Almanac: Quarantine Sunday

Weather:  cloudy and cold, occasional light rain

Flora:  oaks shedding seed pods, 

tulip poplars full of blooms

Fauna:  blue-tailed skink on the porch, 

squirrel raiding the bird feeder

Customs:  worship service and Sunday School

Food:  odd lunch for Sunday-- chili and hot dogs, cupcakes for dessert

Clothing:  blazer, scarf, jewelry—first time in days

Postcard picture:  valley green with stripes and patches of plowed earth

Today’s headlines:  More than fifty thousand deaths

Biggest fear:  Opening up too soon

Saved From Oblivion

Today's prompt was to write a poem about a handmade item.  This poem is about a canoe my friend Shauna carved for me.  It was meant to be put in the Sequatchie River to take a journey, but he was too cute to part with.  I used to do a unit inspired by book Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling.

Saved From Oblivion

The boy sits in his canoe,

hands poised to hold his fishing pole,

his round face and bright eyes

turned up to see the world

passing by his little boat.

Supplies are packed all around him,

kept dry by waterproof coverings.

He is prepared for his long journey,

his paddle to the sea,

a trip he never made because

I couldn’t part with him,

too dear a gift to send away

out into the unknown.

I saved him from destruction,

even oblivion,

but then,

he didn’t get to see the wide world,

and for that I am sorry.

AV 1982

Today's prompt was to write about an out-dated technology.

AV 1982

 Film is loaded and fed 

through spindles and slots

with a rapid fire 

click click click click.

Light flickers;

an image begins to appear.

Sound is more unpredictable,

lips may mouth words 

spoken seconds before or after.

It is so distracting one can hardly focus.

Care must be taken 

so there will be no melted celluloid.

But the students are abuzz with excitement.

We watch in the strobing light 

as exotic things parade through our classroom.

More engaging than the slides 

that click past in frozen silence

or the still frames of filmstrips that are 

every day fare in the classroom, 

the films bring the far away into view—

            George Washington visits from Mount Vernon,

            an armless woman cuts her son’s hair,

            a red balloon floats through the streets of Paris,

until we hear the 

flap flap flap flap 

as the film slaps

 signaling the end of the reel.