8.16.2022 – life in low country

life in low country
alligator attacks rare
but not surprising

The body of an 88-year-old woman who was killed by an alligator was discovered on Monday in a pond in a gated community near Hilton Head Island, S.C., officials said. It was at least the fourth deadly alligator attack in the United States so far this year.

The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office responded to a 911 call at 11:15 a.m. on Monday from a Sun City Hilton Head resident who reported that a large alligator was guarding a human body. “When we got there that’s exactly what we found,” said Maj. Angela Viens, a public information officer with the Beaufort County sheriff’s office.

“Alligator attacks are rare but not surprising,” Major Viens said of the area.

Two more alligator deaths have been recorded this year in Florida. One a 47-year old man apparently searching for a frisbee on May 31 and another an elderly woman, 80, who fell into a pond near a golf course on July 15.

47-year-old Sean Thomas McGuinness’ body was found missing three limbs at the lake at the John S Taylor Park in Largo, Florida.

Investigators now believe he had gone into the 53-acre freshwater lake looking for UFOs when he was attacked.

I am not sure if the alligator attack and the search for UFO’s are connected.

Advice for living near alligators is to:

Never swim at night –

Never feed them –

Keep pets and children away from the water’s edge –

Stay alert when you are in territory where they may live –

I took this photo in a local park last year.

Like the Great White Shark, all they do is sleep, eat and make little alligators.

You get used to it.

Earlier this summer, my wife was up in Michigan visiting.

Seeing the new home of one her sisters and that the property had a large pond, my wife cautioned, “make sure you watch out for alligators!”

It comes with the territory.

As Mr. Tolkien wrote: ‘It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.’

8.15.2022 – that mysterious

that mysterious
grandeur would be less grand if
less mysterious

In an essay titled, The Name and Nature of Poetry, A. E. Housman wrote:

That mysterious grandeur would be less grand if it were less mysterious; if the embryo ideas which are all that it contains should endue form and outline, and suggestion condense itself into thought.

Mr. Houseman was writing about poetry about which he also said, Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.

I think I understand what he is getting at.

Don’t look too hard for meaning when you can just enjoy something.

I have some favorite movies but movies that are my favorites not from the movie itself, but from the way the actors in the movie play their parts.

There is an old Charles Laughton movie titled Witness for the Prosecution that though painful to watch in some scenes, in others, there is much pleasure in watching Charles Laughton act.

Orson Welles courtroom address in Compulsion.

Robert Duvall and Robert Deniro in True Confessions.

Much of the writing of Jim Harrison for me is not in what he writes but in how he writes it.

It is time to stop wondering what it means and just enjoy what it is.

I took the day off today.

I wanted a day off and I had the time on my side of the ledger at work.

My dear wife signed up for the day off as well and after a lazy start and some errands we spent the day in the sand at the beach.

We stretched out in the sun along the salt water and the waves and enjoyed the granduer of ocean that can be mysterious.

We left it at that.

The sun, the sand, the salt, the surf.

It was grand.

A mysterious grandeur would be less grand if it were less mysterious.

A day off with nothing and it was everything I thought it could be.

It something they call down here, locals living like tourists.

A grand mystery.

8.14.2022 – it is something to

it is something to
face the sun know you are free
one day of life so

Based on the poem Clean Hands by Carl Sandburg in Smoke and Steel, 1922.

IT is something to face the sun and know you are free.
To hold your head in the shafts of daylight slanting the earth
And know your heart has kept a promise and the blood runs clean:
It is something.
To go one day of your life among all men with clean hands,
Clean for the day book today and the record of the after days,
Held at your side proud, satisfied to the last, and ready,
So to have clean hands:
God, it is something,
One day of life so
And a memory fastened till the stars sputter out
And a love washed as white linen in the noon drying.
Yes, go find the men of clean hands one day and see the life, the memory, the love they have, to stay longer than the plunging sea wets the shores or the fires heave under the crust of the earth.
O yes, clean hands is the chant and only one man knows its sob and its undersong and he dies clenching the secret more to him than any woman or chum.
And O the great brave men, the silent little brave men, proud of their hands – clutching the knuckles of their fingers into fists ready for death and the dark, ready for life and the fight, the pay and the memories – O the men proud of their hands.

8.13.2022 – conscience, cowardice

conscience, cowardice
one in the same action from
not doing nothing

Mr. Oscar Wilde said in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that “Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.“

In the novel, Basil Hallward is talking with Lord Henry.

Basil says, “…it was not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape.”

Lord Henry replies, “Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all”

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.

Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.

That is all.

Cannot say why this passage was on my mind of late.

But aren’t they interesting words?

Conscience.

Cowardice.

I looked up the words in the online Webster’s.

The sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good.

Lack of courage or firmness of purpose.

Really the same things.

That is all.

As Big Bill put it:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

(Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)

Very deep stuff for a Saturday.

Thankfully there is always Langston Hughes’ Motto:

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

Dig And Be Dug In Return.

Can we get that on our money?

8.12.2022 – they age according

they age according
to grief they experience
not the years they live

From the line, “We have a saying in Afghanistan: People age according to the grief they experience, not the years they live.” as written by By Fahim Abed in the article, We Are the Flour Between Two Millstones in the New York Times on August, 12, 2022.

In an article about the life of Afghans, not in Afghanistan, but here in the United States.

Mr. Abed writes, “I am in the United States now, and though I am physically safe, my psychological well-being is anything but. Everything is so different here, and I have no idea about how most things work: Where do I park my car? How do I pay my bills? And, by the way, how does American health insurance work?”

Park the car to how does American insurance work.

Gosh, who does know.

So many friends that I talked to feel the same way. As the anecdotes added up, I couldn’t help but think of another saying we have in Afghanistan: We are the flour between two millstones.

I shudder thinking about my generation being ground into powder, wedged between the anxiety of being refugees while watching the Taliban dismantle the country we grew up in.

Still Mr. Abed ends with, “But for now, all we can do is wake up, look at ourselves in the mirror, and hope that today, if even for a little bit, will be better.”

All we can do is wake up.

look at ourselves in the mirror.

Hope that today, if even for a little bit, will be better.

Americans, us as Americans, we got a pretty good deal.

Maybe time we should act like it.