have one of those days?
those weeks? those months? then I said …
what else could happen?

I could ask if you ever had on of those …

But I am sure you have.

I mean, why else would we use the term, those days, if there wasn’t universal understanding of that meant.

It has been on those … for me.

If I will keep my feet on the ground and say it has been one of those weeks, and it started with the fun of traveling by plane even though I wasn’t the one traveling and you plan to be some where in 4 or 5 hours and you to get to that some where some 32 hours later.

Start there and build on that.

Or start on that and go down hill.

As the feller said in Yes Minister, “When things are going down hill fast, you need someone to jump in the drivers seat and step on the gas.”

Debit cards reported being used in Australia.

Credit cards declined.

If we didn’t have exploding thunderstorms and sky high humidity for weather we wouldn’t have any weather at all.

I threw gasoline on a fires.

I closed barn doors long after the horses were long gone.

I stepped on the gas going down hill.

What can you say?

As I remember it, and I am not going to bother to do The Google and try to find it, but there is a saying in Yiddish that translates to English as “May God do this to me and more.”

Nothing specific is mentioned.

Because there is no reason to give God any ideas, you see.

Still, when I felt I was coming out of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, I made a mistake and I said out loud, “What else could happen?”

I got home from work, went to my home office and started to connect my laptop to my work station … and my desk imploded.

It went splat, flat before my eyes.

It happened so fast I doubted what had just happened.

It happened so slowly that I felt I could have stopped time and wound it backwards and started the moment over.

I stood there and looked my desk and computers and monitors and cables all now just a pile on the floor and all I could say was, “really?“

Okay, I said some other things as well.

But really – who has a desk collapse?

I mean geeeeeeee whiz!!!

There was a time, back in the day, when I could enjoy a cigar and with some creative visualization, pack all my troubles into that cigar and feel them blow away with the smoke.

It was a bit of a stretch, but it worked or at least it worked for a while.

I could sit and smoke and read and my troubles drifted off.

Cigars burn blue smoke from one end and burned gray smoke from the other.

Different problems, I would say.

I still enjoy my cigar but somehow the ability to pack my troubles into the tobacco eludes me.

The visualization doesn’t work.

It’s been one of those day … those weeks … those months and I bet it would be just as bad, even in Australia.

how … how bad is your
regular life, that you think …
know what would be fun?

“As far as wanting to go places, I can’t believe people do it for fun. When I’m in airports, and I see people going on vacations, I think, ‘How horrible could your life be? How bad is your regular life, that you think, you know what would be fun? Let’s get the kids, go to the airport, with thousands of pieces of luggage, stand in these lines, be yelled at by a bunch of morons, leave late, be squished all together—and this is better than our actual life.”

Fran Lebowitz in Netflix’s ‘Pretend It’s a City’.

My wife wanted to fly from South Carolina to Michigan.

She booked a flight that left on Monday at 10am and she would arrive around 4pm.

Then there was a software glitch and her airline couldn’t schedule a flight crew and they cancelled all their flights on Monday.

She booked a new flight on a new airline for Tuesday.

She would take off again around 11am, layover in Charlotte, NC, for 90 minutes and take off and arrive at 4pm.

I dropped her off and wasn’t more than 5 minutes into my drive to work when she called that her flight was delayed by one hour due to crew scheduling.

This reduced her layover time in Charlotte to 30 minutes.

I checked the Airport map and her arrival gate was in a terminal that at least was next to the terminal where the departure gate was.

She talked to the Airline people and they were confident she would make the connection.

From my desk I watched airplane arrival and departure times.

When the plane did leave it looked like she would have a somewhat doable 35 minutes to make her next flight.

The next text I got, she had landed in Charlotte during a lightning storm and since no ground crews could be out on the tarmac, no one was allowed to get off the plane.

Not to worry said, the pilot, no planes could take off either.

From the map, my wife’s current plane and the connecting plane were butt to butt but stuck there with her waiting to get off and the other plane, full of people, waiting to take off.

The airport cleared the Ground Stop when the storm blew over and she raced to the next gate.

The gate was closed.

If that wasn’t bad enough, someone from the airline came along with two other passengers and let them board the flight.

Somehow they had been added to the manifest for the flight but my wife and another passenger where rejected as the flight plan had been filed with the existing passenger list.

Someone needs to explain to me how this works.

So my wife got another flight to Chicago that would connect with another flight.

She should arrive around 11pm with long waits in Charlotte and Chicago.

Finally getting on the plane to Chicago, another storm hits the windy city.

She lands there late.

No worries as O’Hare is also being delayed by the storm and who knows what else.

Her departure was set to 11:30pm.

Then we realized that was Central Time.

What ELSE could happen.

Then another passenger looks at my wife and says, ‘I hope this crew doesn’t time out …‘

But the crew didn’t time out and the last text I got was at 1:44am Wednesday Morning.

‘Landed‘ it said.

She should have been there around 4pm on Monday.

Just starting with her take off time on Tuesday, we could have driven there faster.

I am reminded of the time my Wife and I toured the Wright Brothers Cycle Factory in Greenfield Village in Detroit.

The docent gave us a sketch of the lives of the Wright’s and how they sold bikes during the day and worked on their airplane at night.

I asked, “Was it true that they custom designed their engine and that on the morning of that first flight, it took them a couple of hours to get the engine started and running correctly?“

The docent said that yes, that was true.

“So,” I said, “The Wright Brothers invented flight delay before they invented flight?“

We need that on a postage stamp.

we will be known for
feelings of the heart – small, hard,
and full of meanness

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Of the Empire by Mary Oliver.

My sister Lisa and I try to connect and talk about once a month.

I’ll get asked, what do you talk about and I say, ‘Oh just stuff.‘

The thing is as I pass through my days and weeks and I see things and I hear things and feel things and I taste things and I read things, I think, I have to remember to tell this to Lisa.

And when we can, we just talk.

Beyond my understanding, my sister often reads these things I write and lets me know when something makes a point.

It was Lisa who connected me with the poems of Mary Oliver.

I find it interesting that Ms. Oliver wrote this poem, Of the Empire, back in 2008.

Maybe she saw this coming back then.

Maybe we aren’t so different from where we were in 2008.

It’s just that there are those today who can read this poem and say ‘so what?’

Nevertheless, Of the Empire, reads as an indictment, a description of today in a way that is chilling.

Painting with words that tingles in your toes.

I have to also that those last two sentences bring my sister Lisa to mind.

Not because it describes her but just the opposite.

I have known my sister my entire life.

And let me tell you, her heart?

Her heart has never been small.

Her heart has never been hard.

Her heart has never been full of meanness.

Her heart is huge, open and soft and full of love.

life indelible
summertime, oh summertime,
summer without end

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat …

From Once More to the Lake, as published in Essays of E.B. White by E. B. White, New York, Harper Colophon Books, 1979.

In his forward to the book of essays, Mr. White writes, “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self -centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

Sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Is that not fabulous?

And spot on for all these goofy essays that seem to spill off of my keyboard.

Now here is the odd thing.

I hate to type.

I will go to the greatest lengths imaginable to find a bit of text that I can copy and paste rather than type myself.

I had it in mind to use this bit of story, Once More to the Lake by Mr. White.

But far be it from me to want to retype the the text I wanted so I searched for something I could copy which led me to an electronic copy of the Essay’s of Mr. White which led me to re-read his forward to the essays which led me to copy and past that little bit of text from the forward I just quoted.

In doing so, the word belief in the phrase sustained by the childish belief was copied as the word behef or sustained by the childish behef.

Spell check tossed it out so I looked it up.

Maybe behef was a word the Mr. White selected as a bit of word play.

The closest word I could find was from the Middle English and that behef was a variation of the word biheve (according to the online dictionary of Middle English available from the University of Michigan which as an institution has been working on the Dictionary of Middle English for as long as I can remember) which is an adjective meaning of things: needed; beneficial; appropriate, fitting.

Things needed, beneficial, appropriate and fitting.

I love that.

Though closer inspection did prove that the word Mr. White wanted was belief, I like the sentence very much with behef.

The sentence could have read, Sustained by the childish need that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest which is altogether beneficial, appropriate and fitting.

Summertime, oh summertime.

Summer without end.

Needed, beneficial, appropriate and fitting.

Life indelible.

BTW – the photo above is of my sister Lisa along the shore of Lake Michigan was taken by my Father sometime in the late 1960’s.

My family has had a long association with the West Michigan artist Armond Merizon.

This photo could have been painted by him.

Life indelible.