Reflections – Page 26 – Brimmings: up from the well

Why winter sucks!

Sometimes I think about moving out of Kentucky, maybe to some place like dry Arizona or milder Oregon or Washington. Had we the bucks, maybe a compromise like Ft. Meyers, FL in the winter. Hey, that would be a real plus, since it’d mean we’d see our beloved Bosox in their new digs.

You see, I think winter sucks!

Aw, can’t be that bad living winters in Kentucky. What about real winter hells like the upper Midwest. You haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen a blizzard sweep its way through South Dakota or January temps plummet to 30 below in Minnesota. How about a New England snowdrop of 20 inches?

Yeah, man, I know what you’re saying. In fact, I spent my boyhood in New England and lived in South Dakota and Minnesota, too. I should add Wyoming. Damn, that’s a place makes hell’s heat look easy!

Ok, guess it’s an age thing then. I still don’t like it right down to my sniffles and shivers. Let me count the reasons why:

1. Because winter keeps me indoors:

Me, I’m an outdoor guy who lives for his garden. Dawn means rising to eager endeavors of trimming roses, cutting the lawn, a bit of weeding here and there, off to Lowe’s for plants and fertilizer. Winter’s like wearing a monitor bracelet. I can look out, but I can’t really leave. TV sucks for the most part. Why I can’t even wash the car.

2. Because winter makes me feel blah

Think of it this way. Beginning with spring, nature turns technicolor, with daffodils, tulips and hyacinths bursting through winter’s cold, denuded earth, followed by summer’s contagion of color gone wild in sharp contrast to winter’s monochrome back and white. Is there a tie-in between weather and how you feel. You bet there is! I know summer buoys me and winter drags.

3. Because winter wars against my taste buds:

Winter means hothouse foods with their dull taste and often decimated nutrition. Warm weather means fresh food, farmer markets, and roadside stands; your own garden veggies just picked, free of sprays. While frozen veggies and berries help preserve nutrition in our stores during winter, nothing goes down better than just harvested strawberries or home grown tomatoes.

4. Because winter means shoveling snow:

When I was a kid, it was a different matter. Now it’s a damn nuisance that just won’t go away. It insists on getting done right away and, like housework, often comes right back. Used to be the kids did it. They have their own nests now. Suddenly I ‘m aware I’m up there with the big ones, the import nations like my own. Food, mail, other victuals–they have to find a way in and that means I’ve got to find a way out. Shoveling doesn’t get easier when you’re packing on years. Snow blower? Would have to dig a path to the shed just to retrieve it, plus more money to buy and “feed” it.

5. Because winter busts the budget:

Higher energy costs are now a salient feature of modern life and are destined to go still higher, maybe even skyrocket, given diminishing resources concurrent with increasing demand and environmental mandates. As is, we’re on the budget leveling formula to equalize monthly payments. Even that plan taxes the budget as winter weighs upon the summer months in shaping monthly outlay. Geothermal’s the way to go–that is, if you’re young, don’t plan to move, and have $30,000 handy.

6. Because winter menaces my health:

Case in point: my wife and I just had this conversation last night about taking-in Spielberg’s new Lincoln movie, only to decide we didn’t want to put up with the coughing, sneezing, throat-clearing cacophony of the movie audience. Germs like crowded contexts, multiplying sputum contact and dirty surfaces. Bad enough in the box stores, made worse by hacking coughers who don’t seem to mind sharing their misery in friendly fire in a crowded aisle. I can’t even say I feel safe visiting my doctor and enduring the waiting room of obviously people feeling quite miserable, T’is the season to be jolly? No, t’is the season to catch the flu!

7. Because winter inconveniences:

It’s no fun having to chip your windshield free of ice or dealing with handles refusing to budge; or irritating others in holding up traffic while you wait for the defroster to kick-in; or slipping on black ice along with other assorted evils. Winter driving can even get you to the hereafter sooner than expected or end in serious maiming or an expensive bumper encounter. It’s a risk you can lessen by escaping to a warmer sanctuary. Then there are those power outages, falling limbs, and advanced supermarket raids leaving shelves empty just when you need foodstuffs most. Last, very least, but still annoying–that dry skin that defies all lotion.

8. Because winter interferes with my wanting to go almost naked:

I like jumping out of the car and into the store unencumbered by a coat. Much better to enter in near runner’s garb, move to the goal line quickly, hop back in and return home. No hat or gloves to fuss over or accidentally leave behind in a restaurant. No coat buttons to deal with.

Now don’t tell me you like winter. Only in places like Minnesota do people say crazy things like that. Here, you can take my shovel. I’ll not be needing it in Arizona.

Personal Reflections on Dave Brubeck

We lost a great jazz musician this week, Dave Brubeck. As I write, “Take Five” reverberates in my mind. The two seem connected automatically. Think of one, you think of the other. He didn’t compose it (that was Paul Desmond), but his fingerprints are all over it.

I didn’t know beans about jazz until one day, as a 19-year old air force serviceman stationed at Ellsworth AFB near Rapid City, SD, I was waiting to catch a bus back to base when I chanced upon one of those memorable chats we sometimes sereptiously run into with strangers we never meet again. For some reason, we fell upon jazz, or rather he introduced me to it, mentioning names I’d never heard of like George Shearing and Dave Brubeck.

In coming days, I began tuning in, beginning with those muffled, soothing keyboard sounds of Shearing, whom I came to adore. Soon I was into a growing repertoire of jazz greats–the likes of the inimical Duke, Mingus, Satchmo, Montgomery and, of course, Dave Brubeck. I was hooked!

Across the years, my love for jazz hasn’t diminished, though I confess I’m not enamored of the popular species passed around today as “smooth jazz,” which I won’t pursue here. I often like to think of jazz as today’s classical music. I thought I had coined an original in that observation till one day I came across a jazz notable, name forgotten, saying the same thing. Anyway, I appreciate the confirmation from a reputable source.

I also would contend that jazz has been our best art export, often taking on more popularity abroad in places like London and Paris than here at home where it seems relegated like poetry to backstage scenarios or college campuses, NPR and, sometimes, PBS. If you’re looking for some great live renditions, you can still find them of course in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Local gigs, alas, seem background to dinner conversation in most clubs these days, with dissonance smothering even the most sultry rhythms with one improvement: in the old days when public smoking was in, you’d be lucky even to make out the combo in the densely floating haze.

The thing I like most about jazz and that binds me to it fiercely is its heart-and-soul improvisation. If it isn’t there, hey, it ain’t jazz. Jazz is the music of freedom, doing it your own way, always in process, an ever happening. Jazz makes me feel free, speaks to my uniqueness and yours, captivates with its reverberations of old themes in new ways.

Brubeck was the master improviser, fiercely independent, even defiant. Ahead of his time, he ardently opposed segregation and refused to perform where it was practiced.

In music, he defined the octet, quartet and trio. At his most innovative, he departed from the traditional 4/4 jazz beat, composing or playing at 5/4 (e.g., “Take Five”). It didn’t stop there.

Few people know he barely survived the Battle of the Bulge, which saw his unit trapped behind enemy lines.

Or that he loved classical music deeply, especially Bach and Beethoven. Like many of his cohorts, his roots lay in classical music and continues in contemporaries like Herbie Hancock and Alicia Keyes. He aspired to writing serious pieces of his own, composing music for ballets, operas, and even a mass oratorio. (He became a Catholic in 1980.)

Or that his Time Out album (1959) was the first jazz album to exceed a million sales.

Back in the summer of 1986 while a stipend summer student at Yale, I came across Dave Brubeck within touching reach when he performed on the New Haven Green. And of course it included the mesmerizing “Take Five.” I regret I was then too shy to shake his hand.

Brubeck, a deeply religious man, once described heaven as where his friends Satchmo, the Duke, and Basie were jamming all day, everyday, forever. They’ve a new member now. and they’re jamming like crazy!

Thank you, Dave, for the music. Thank you for the man you were.

The why of anxiety and the how of coping

How is it we learn to be anxious? Surely it’s rooted in our past, maybe even in our childhood: a teacher’s stinging reprimand, a parent’s rejecting scorn, unsuspecting betrayal by a friend, a passionate love not returned. We all carry wounds and though outwardly they heal, we trace the scars where the knife went in. Anxiety flourishes when subsequent instances get past our defenses and replay the past.

Anxiety also takes hold when we face threats to our well-being, as in encountering a new geography, job, or intimidating individual, since we find safety in the familiar. In extreme cases, it can develop into agoraphobia where leaving the house, for example, can trigger a panic response. I have known such people in their trembling and labored breathing, and my heart swells with compassion.

Anxiety always pervades when we want something too much, forgetting every gain, even when achieved, is encumbered with the threat of loss. Life’s tendency, after all, is to lend rather than grant and to choose when to take back. Anxiety anchors itself in musts, when the true law of happiness is to discern what we can’t control and when it’s time to let go. I once met a woman who clung to a self-centered man, who often treated her badly. Though she knew the relationship was faulty, her anxiety for validation precluded her doing the right thing. Sometimes when we think we’re loving others we’re demanding love for ourselves. When love eludes us in our early years, we look for it repeatedly through others.

In matters of declining health, the scenario can become very scary and our imagination runs wild, rendering us hypochondriacs. It’s easy to become anxious when our bodies no longer respond as they used to and what we once found easy becomes more labored. Like our cars, our bodies take-on mileage and parts begin to break down. Declining health can nullify carefully laid plans and jeopardize our happiness. We help ourselves when we make lifestyle changes affecting diet, exercise, stress and sleep.

Related to the former, our greatest anxiety flows from wrestling with our mortality. When we’re young we give it little regard. As we grow older, we know the actuary tables don’t lie. Indeed, we feel it in our bones. Religion with its tenet of an afterlife capitalizes on the universality of such anguish. Life’s temporal nature can’t be altered, but its dividend is to teach us to value what truly matters. Accepting our mortality and doing what we can to enhance our health, while not easy, works like ginger tea on a nervous stomach.

Living life happily in a context of limitation takes a raw, every day courage, and I’ve met and often read of such people with admiration. It’s not that these heroes escape anxiety, but they”re not wallowing in it. I’m very fond of baseball, not because it’s exciting, which it often isn’t, but because of all the sports I like such things as the constant replay of the face-to-face duel between pitcher and hitter as an exemplum of grace under pressure. The pitcher needs the out; the batter needs the hit. Neither must flinch. I’ve known of players who lose their cool and whom anxiety masters, ending their stardom.

It’s easy to talk about freeing ourselves of anxiety. The trick is in knowing how. Psychology is built upon helping us find our way past worry and dread and sometimes it resorts to pills to help us through, when the truth is the answer lies within ourselves and not a pill that merely treats symptoms. All anxiety is born of desire–whether for security, love, power, or fame.

To truly overcome anxiety requires our developing a sense of detachment and avoiding taking ourselves too seriously. Life needs to be lived in perspective. Wrong things, hurtful things happen, whether of man or nature’s making. The healing comes from not wanting anything overly, but living with acceptance of life’s rhythms one day at a time, doing what we can. Anxiety changes nothing, and often makes matters worse.

Living life free of anxiety is something akin to a would be swimmer, who before he can swim must first learn to float. It’s all in letting go.

Reflections on Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
That sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
—Emily Dickinson

Hope is a type of faith, a belief it will get better, whether today or tomorrow or then some.

Hope spurs the unemployed to seek work again; lies behind every college student’s quest; perseveres in the face of illness; is the new born child cradled in its mother’s arms.

Hope checkmates impossibility; colors every dream, informs all kindness.

Hope softens hardened grief; propels our good wishes; trumps experience.

Hope is the elixir of imagination; grants patience; teaches forgiveness.

Hope makes love possible; validates the future.

Hope is a tender flower. Nourish it and it will bloom.

Be well,

Let’s get rid of the SATS!

Call it the “Rites of Adolescence,” but every month millions of high school students will sweat through the ACT or SAT tests in hopes of earning scores that will get them in to the college of their choice.

I happen to think there’s a better way than assessing scores to determine “the worthy,” and fortunately the gig may soon be up for such tests anyway as more colleges are dropping the requirement or making it optional.

As is, the traditional way of ranking students on the basis of test results is fraught with cultural bias, even though testing originally had potential for leveling the playing field. Now all you had to do was prove your smarts, and no matter your ethnicity, gender, locale, or social-economics, you were guaranteed a place at the table. No more governing factors such as money and class. Whatever the nobility of the seminal motive, the system now in place hardly assures equity.

Consider that test results are sensitive to coaching and those who can afford it resort to this approach. Some take the test multiple times, trusting schools will consider their highest score only.

There’s also the risk of cheating as in this year’s Long Island scandal.

Additionally, some institutions wanting their way into U.S. News and World Report‘s annual rankings manipulate the data to their advantage, the most notorious example occurring at Claremont McKenna College in 2007, leading to the resignations of several administrators.

Those who defend testing contend it has value in assessing how well students will perform in their first year of college. I would counter that the new research indicates students outside the testing paradigm do fairly well so long as their grades were good in high school. After all, motivation plays a big part in succeeding as a college student, given the rigor of many college courses, and good grades throughout high school are strong markers of that needed discipline.

Advocates would also claim the tests indicate mastery of writing, reading, and reasoning, skills needed in college.

If the latter is true, you might think that SATs and the like are essentially IQ tests and you wouldn’t be wrong, since researchers have found a strong correlation. I think of IQ tests as setting up a kind of caste system, again with the more affluent at the top, reflecting greater access to good schools and high culture. It reminds me of playing Trivial Pursuit. If you win, does it mean you’re smarter than your fellow game players? On the contrary, it merely shows you may be more informed through greater exposure.

I have always thought we would do better by evaluating aptitude. We’re all different, and we all know people who are book smart, but rather clumsy at anything else. On the other hand, I’ve known everyday people with little education beyond high school whom I’ve relied upon to solve the daily complexities that often render me helpless. I don’t know about you, but I’m all thumbs when it comes to mechanics, carpentry, and things electrical. I have two graduate degrees, but I’m really horrendously bankrupt in so many areas. I may second guess my doctor, but never when it comes to my plumber!

In closing, consider the wise counsel of former Towson University president James L. Fisher:

“For more than 50-years, replicable research has indicated there is a better predictor than any combination of all the present predictors (class rank, GPA, and standardized test). The best predictor is an easily computer academic composite score derived from subjects taken in secondary schools and English, mathematics, grades received, certain science courses, foreign language and advanced placement courses with weights assigned based on grades received)”(www.tcp/news/).

Sorry Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Henry Ford that you didn’t get-in. Have you thought about joining the Army?

Raindrops keep falling on my head and I’m lovin’ it

What comes to your mind when you think of rain? I started thinking about this the other day after taking-in a round of pop music on my iPad. While love pervades as a music theme, the rain motif isn’t any slacker. I think of songs like

“Rain Rain Beautiful Rain”

“Rain”

“Broken Umbrella”

“The Gentle Rain”

“What Have They Done to the Rain?”

“Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”

“September in the Rain”

“Because of Rain”

“It never rains in California”

In brief, there are scores of songs featuring rain, often not apparent in song titles. So what gives?

To be sure, many of us find rain depressing. I knew a woman years ago who lived a year in Tacoma, and found she couldn’t bear it. Rain as a downturner is common even in some of our frequent idioms: “I don’t mean to rain on your parade.” Psychology confirms that rain can be a depressant and often employs a passed-around acronym, RAIN, to mark off the steps in overcoming the blues.

But that isn’t the way rain usually works for me. Sure, I rail against it when it spoils picnic plans, etc., or when there’s too much, too long. On the other hand, I often find rain an elixir in slowing my pace, a catalyst to deeper thought bringing me into better contact with myself and spilling over into reassessed, more appreciative relationships with loved ones. In this sense, I think of rain as a sweetener, or sugar, that can actually enhance life’s daily brew. Rain gives me time-out.

I suppose the latent psychology of this is why our movies so often foreground interims of reassessment as in The Bridges of Madison County.

It’s like this in serious literature, too, where rain often assumes the role of archetype, or innate symbolization in humanity, regardless of culture. While rain can connote death as fate in Heminway’s A Farewell to Arms, a novel that both begins ands with rain, it more often intuits regeneration as in the ancient myths. Rain offers hope, if there is any, in Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the poem’s thunder towards its end augurs salvation.

I can’t speak for you, but I love going to sleep at night to the soft snare drum of raindrops on the roof. And when I can’t have it that way, I’ll resort to my iPad Nature application with its bubbling brooks, ocean surf and, my favorite–the pitter-patter of falling rain. Who needs Ambien?

Insatient Romantic that I am, I’ll often fall into these moods with the first gentle Spring rains of April, and just wish I could stay outside all day in it.

And when I’m actually caught in such a shower, I’m transposed into Gene Kelly, replete with unfurled umbrella, and I’m singing, yes, I’m singing in the rain!

My conversion to the Left

Let me tell you of my conversion to the Left

1. The Great Recession: Our worst economic crisis since the stock market collapse in 1928, its genesis clearly lies with Wall Street speculators and the banking industry. With dollar signs for eyeballs, they lured many home buyers, often minorities, into high end mortgages fabricated by a bubble market swelled by over investment. Subprime and adjusted rate mortgages flourished. Ultimately, there were too many houses out there, reducing home mortgage values and, boom, the stock market debacle of 2008. I believe government banking reform might have preempted this crisis.

2. The transfer of wealth: Whatever gains in wealth we’ve made over the last 30 years have largely benefitted the wealthy. The collapse of the housing market is just one recent example, with middle class buyers exchanging their already limited capital for long-term indebtedness on over priced homes. While they may think they own their own homes, the reality is the banks own them for up to the next 30 years; in most cases, at huge profit. Just do the math. Ironically, the financiers responsible for the collapse have gotten away with their greed, some of them bailed out with tax payer money, even as they show no such charity towards those who default. Their current vogue is to buy up these foreclosures for potential investment, particularly by foreigners. Meanwhile, millions of other below-water “homeowners” struggle to honorably meet their monthly payments on houses no longer worth their purchase price in states where they have no recourse.

3. Tax inequity: Is it fair that a candidate for the presidency worth $240 million, owning several mansions, and with $100 million invested for his sons, should pay at a tax rate of only 14% on his income in the last two years while many of us with median middle class incomes pay proportionately more? This is but one example that surely could be multiplied by the thousands privileged to enjoy loopholes you and I can’t access. Even social security gets rigged in their favor, with the salary max for social security taxes on 2012 income capped at $110, 000. Talk about a windfall for the rich!

4. Deficient health care: Even the progressive Health Care Reform Act (to be fully implemented in 2014), fails to remedy what ails us–the lack of a single payer system such as Canada enjoys with consequential lower costs and universal access. As a fallout, you and I pay more for health care than in any of the developed nations, concurrently with limited options. I’m a retiree on Medicare, for example, yet must pay out of my pocket fully for eye glasses and hearing aids. And then there are the ever escalating medical costs for all Americans far in access of annual inflation. I say we can do better.

5. Foreign policy: We’re meddlers strutting our imperialism with a Daddy knows all approach. We lavish more on the military than all the world’s countries combined, including Russia and China. We’re beholden to Israel, an apartheid nation that would happily snare us into waging their conflicts for them and is busy killing Gaza civilians as I write. In America, every decade seems to threaten a new war. Now there’s pending trouble with Iran. Our children bleed and die. Iraq was a terrible folly and Afghanistan seems increasingly pointless. We got our man. Let’s go home. Now!

6. Environment: Those on the Right simply laugh off or prove indifferent to climate change, some even proclaiming it a hoax. For them, it’s business as usual, with profits their end-game. As such, they remind me of those anti-evolution die-heads of years ago, still latent in today’s creationists. While a few may admit to climate change, they downgrade its human component. More coal, more oil. Now their rage for Keystone. For the sake of a wounded Earth and for future generations, I cast my lot with the Left in its vibrancy as to what’s at stake..

7. The crazies: Conservatives, neo-cons, tea party devotees–they make me shiver–all those tirades against pro-choice, gays, immigrants, stem cell research, health care reform; denigrators of the UN, deniers of global warming, the need for cap and trade, alternative fuels, they wed themselves to the past. I dislike, too, their moral politics fettered to a religious view: the creationists conflating theism with science, the zealots for capital punishment while decrying abortion; the unfeeling purists on death with dignity legislation, which they defeated in my native state of Massachusetts two weeks ago. It’s company I choose not to keep. I prefer the affirmers, not the deniers; those who foster fairness and reconciliation, not callousness and division; those who champion change, not stultifying tradition; those who embrace optimism, not pessimism.

While I love my country dearly, I think it can do better. Like Bruce Springsteen, I’m proud to be born in the USA. It’s a really great place. That is, if you’re on top.

Be well,

When culture turns tyrant

The voices of authority in many guises, abundant and strident, relentlessly prey upon us. To be fair, they aren’t always sinister voices, as they sometimes serve as the glue holding a society together, establishing the ground rules by which we all get our turn or fair share. Often they transmit the legacy of experience, minimizing the social anarchy that results when people play by their own rules.

But frequently these voices, of tradition or culture, inhibit us from finding our best selves when they assume tyrannical shape, demonizing new ways of thinking and doing, frequently to protect a vested interest. Often they cloak themselves in religion and demonizing politics. We don’t hang witches anymore, but we do have Jihad abroad and demogogues at home, who would deprive women of choice and the undocumented from participation in the nation’s agenda. Culture turns deadly when it becomes ideology, resorting to reductionism, fear and bullying.

On the other hand, healthy societies are always dynamic, open to change, adaptive to new exigencies. As such, they exhibit similarity to the evolutionary laws that assure biological survival. Take our bodies, for example, that slough off the old and degenerative: a new skin every month; every six weeks, a new liver; every three months, new bones (David Agus, The End of Illness, p. 106). Healthy societies are like that, casting of the ineffectual and regenerating themselves.

Dynamic societies know when it’s time to change their wardrobe. In this regard, the advanced industrial nations have taken-on some remarkable transitions that, in many instances, transcend those achieved through technological savvy in contributing to well-being. It’s one thing to have airplanes, cars, television and, now computers. It’s quite another to abolish slavery, emancipate women, enfranchise minorities, including gays, and promote human dignity.

Material progress never guarantees the latter, anyway. Take Saudi Arabia, for example, where a woman can’t drive, unless accompanied by a family male.

When I think about it, I sometimes find it hard to believe that American women just got the right to vote less than a hundred years ago. Swiss women gained that right only a few years ago.

Presently the emancipation of gays is underway and in future years I’m betting our children will look askance at our malice based on custom’s insatiate dislike of divergence.

There remains much to do, both at home and abroad. Several challenges come to mind, and I think you can add others::

Electing a woman president of the USA.

2. Abolishing capital punishment.

3. Equitable taxation

4. Death with dignity legislation

5. Immigration reform

6. Population growth

7. Resources management

8. Animal emancipation

9. Child abuse

10. Single payer healthcare

You may not like some of my priorities. I’m okay with that, so long as it isn’t custom driving your censure. Perhaps the insidious threat custom imposes is that it drops upon us like the weather and, seemingly everywhere and always, it is what it is. We get used to it, accepting the pattern as the norm.

Unlike the weather, we can do something about culture gone wrong. It takes vigilance and means asking questions. Why this and not that? As Michael Pollan astutely observes, “Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s still exerting its hold on your culture” (In Defense of Food, p. 51).

Because societies can and do evolve, more so in a world of diminishing boundaries, initial conflict is likely to ensue as universals find themselves confronted by newly introduced alternatives. Paradoxically, in this dissonance lie the seeds of healing, as history confirms such exchanges enrich rather than diminish.

In this new world, or global village, we might even “shake hands” as Pete Seeger sings it, and “study war no more.”

Imagine!

Be well,

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day. It’s a quiet Sunday morning as I write, but quieter still for those who’ve given their lives in supreme sacrifice to their country. Not so for the many maimed physically and psychologically by war who must live daily with its ravages.

I think more recently of Iraq and Afghanistan, those strange sounding names of places so far away most of us scarcely knew they existed, save a chance photo spread in National Geographic while waiting in a doctor’s office. Places now as familiar as weekday names.

Something intrudes, one of those ghosts that inevitably haunt heavy thinking. It takes shape in a poem I’ve read and taught for so many years to young adults on a college campus: Robert Lowell’s poignant “For the Union Dead,” reminiscing the decline in enthusiasm for any cause, military, political or otherwise:

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse…

The stone statues of the abstract Union soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year__
wasp-wasted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns. . .

There are no statues for the last war here:
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the”Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast.
. . .
Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward ;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

A decade ago I visited our war dead at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where the elevated resting place of our Normandy heroes overlooks that once bloodied Omaha Beach. Ten thousand, row upon row, their graves facing Westward to their homeland, their life threads severed early. They would not see America again or wed or become parents or enjoy the rarity of a warm November day. Mortality is our collective lot, but for these, the shades were drawn early.

12 p.m, and the malls have just opened. Veterans Day, like Memorial Day, now serves as commercial fodder, or like the Mosler Safe in a culture that’s found new servitude in the material quest.

Nixon ended the draft back in 1971. So now it’s become easier to forget those who defend, bleed and die for us. I was a young fellow, a former veteran, during the Vietnam era of national division over a far-off war, spilling over into public defiance and, sometimes, violence at home. Vietnam was a very long war. Until Afghanistan. Where are today’s protestors? How much easier to rent surrogates.

It’s a beautiful fall day, an Indian Summer day, the autumn maples ripe in their red dress. The malls will do well.

Let me count the ways I love Twitter

In recent weeks I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter. In, fact, it’s now a daily staple, or something like that fast pick-up you get with that morning coffee. Forgive me, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but let me count the ways I dig Twitter:

It connects me to a whole lot bigger world to rattle my culture and routine beliefs against. If I can shed defensiveness, Twitter helps me grow aware and thus become more tolerant.
I like that a lot gets said in very few words. A few sips gives you the flavor.
I relish following people and trends I find interesting.
It flatters my shameless ego every time someone follows me. I understand now why my Bichon likes being petted. Hey, you can pet me anytime!
It grows my interests as I come upon how many there really are out there.
It feeds my fly-on-the-wall instinct to spy on newsmakers, starlets, celebrities and sports icons. Secretly, I hope they’ll tweet me back!
It saves me on subscription costs as I get free admission to the big mags and splendid articles.
I like how it puts you in real time as things happen and people get impacted; take Syria for example and its freedom fighters or at home, recent Sandy.
I admire its uncensored access. Here you’ll find the good, bad, and ugly: the saints and anarchists; tolerant and militant; the sane and, yes, the crazies. It’s like waking up in San Francisco.
It helps my blog. I can see what interests and find outlet for my own.

Twitter, I can’t really number all the ways I’m fond of you, but suffice it to say, Je t’aime!

Do well. Be well!

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