8.28.2023 – when your turn is next

when your turn is next
sometimes person went before
is Simone Biles

Watching the latest performance of Simone Biles I am reminded of Jack Buck describing Kirk Gibson’s home run in Game 1 of the Oakland Athletics 1988 World Series.

If you don’t remember, Mr. Buck said, “I don’t believe what I just saw.”

I digress but while a lot of people remember the quote I don’t believe what I just saw, they remember that Vin Scully said it and they are wrong.

Vin Scully said, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.“

For my purposes both quotes work.

Watching Ms. Biles, I don’t believe what I just see as she makes the so improbable, the so impossible, happen.

Somewhere in this blog I relay the information that some physicist studied Ms. Biles and with the laws of physics PROVED that what she did was not possible to be done.

Something a long the lines that it takes longer to decide to swing a bat than it does for a pitched ball to reach the plate.

It must be magic.

I am content to leave it there and just enjoy it except that might just not be fair to not recognize the toughness of mind, body and training Ms. Biles has to go through to reach this level of magic.

But an odd thought came to me as I watched a clip of Ms. Biles in action.

As she finished, she ran off the mat and hugged another gynmast.

A gymnast watching the same performance.

A gymnast watching the same performance knowing it was her turn next.

To stand there and NOT SAY, NOPE – NOT ME – SOME ONE ELSE – GOTTA TIE MY SHOE – JUST TAKE THE NEXT PERSON … that alone also takes a lot of magic or something.

What could that next gymnast be thinking?

In the case of Ms. Biles, it does seem that there teammates are some of her biggest fans.

It happens often I guess.

Probably just as bad for the gymnast who went before Ms. Biles.

I remember once hearing a talk by a lawyer about how to handle difficult moments in court.

This lawyer said the dumbest thing you could do was try to hide something that everyone just saw.

You drop your files.

You tip over your coffee.

Don’t act like it didn’t happen, look at the jury and look at the judge and shrug or something.

This lawyer said tell the jury everything, especially as a young lawyer.

He took a question and someone asked what do you do if you are a young lawyer and the opposing attorney was Edward Bennett Williams(at the time a big name), what do you do?

The lawyer said tell the jury.

The lawyer said, tell the jury that you are a brand new, just starting attorney.

Then point to the other lawyer say to the jury, DO YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS?

THAT is Edward Bennett Williams!

Edward Bennett Williams!

DO YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS?

Make sure, the lawyer said, the jury knows who is David and who is Goliath.

The audience had a follow up question.

In that situation, if you are Edward Bennett Williams, what do you do?

Oh, said the lawyer, if you are Edward Bennett Williams, you will know what to do.

I for sorry for those of us who aren’t the Simone Biles of this world.

The race is not always given to the swift.

But in the case of gymnastics …

Like so many things in my life, if I can’t do, I will just enjoy watching those that can.

8.26.2023 – night and day sometimes

night and day sometimes
we live without noticing
or overtrying

Based on the poem Carpe Diem by Jim Harrison

Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain
snow where grizzlies look for a place
for the winter’s sleep and birth.
I just ate the year’s last tomato
in the year’s fatal whirl.
This is mid-October, apple time.
I picked them for years.
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.
It was the birth of love that year.
Sometimes we live without noticing it.
Overtrying makes it harder.
I fell down through the tree grabbing
branches to slow the fall, got the afternoon off.
We drove her aqua Ford convertible into the country
with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect
day with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves
into the future together seizing the day.
Fifty years later we hold each other looking
out the windows at birds, making dinner,
a life to live day after day, a life of
dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.

“Carpe Diem” by Jim Harrison from Dead Man’s Float, (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

I enjoy this poem.

Carpe Diem.

Or Seize the Day or more accurately Seize the Present!

And why?

Quam minimum credula postero.

For tomorrow, a new day comes.

Sunset on the May River from the bluff in Bluffton, SC 8/26/2023

8.19.2023 – but cannot in good

but cannot in good
conscience support candidate
unworthy unfit

I shall continue to affiliate with the Republican Party, but I cannot in good conscience support for President a candidate who was not the real choice of his party and whom I regard as unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive of this nation by the tests of ability, public policies, official record and independence of character.”

The above quote from Illinois Politician Harold Ickes appeared in the New York Times today, but 103 years ago in the article, H.L. ICKES DESERTS HARDING AS ‘UNFIT’. (NYT, August 19, 1920)

103 years ago, political parties were pushing candidates unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive.

Mr. Ickes was talking about Warren Gamaliel Harding, who had just been nominated by the Republican party for their candidate for President of the United States at the 1920 convention.

Mr. Ickes would later go one to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior for nearly 13 years from 1933 to 1946 under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.

The 1920 Republican convention was the one that made the term ‘smoke filled rooms’ famous.

The convention took 10 ballots to nominate Mr. Harding, who according to legend, was called into a meeting with the Party Bosses, in a smoke filled room and the Party Bosses asked Mr. Harding if there was anything … ANYTHING … in his background that might cause problems if he was nominated.

Mr. Harding, according to that legend, asked for 1 hour to think about it and came back and said nope, nothing in my background.

About Mr. Harding’s acceptance speech, Mr. Ickes said, “He proclaims himself a reactionary. He would turn back the hands of the clock and satisfy the aspirations of men’s souls by talking of a full stomach. No more uninspired and uninspiring utterance from a public man is on record in American political history.”

You remember Mr. Harding?

Even he himself felt the he was in over his head as President.

President Harding once said, “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind.

But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it!

There must be a man in the country somewhere who could weigh both sides and know the truth. Probably he is in some college or other.

But I don’t know where to find him. I don’t know who he is, and I don’t know how to get him.

My God, this is a hell of a place for a man like me to be!”

According to Wikipedia, “In 1923, Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco while on a western tour, and was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge.

Harding died as one of the most popular presidents in history, but the subsequent exposure of scandals eroded his popular regard, as did revelations of extramarital affairs. Harding’s interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, and his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, were each later tried for corruption in office. Fall was convicted though Daugherty was not. These trials greatly damaged Harding’s posthumous reputation. In historical rankings of the U.S. presidents during the decades after his term in office, Harding was often rated among the worst.

We, as a country, are once again in a cycle where the election mantra might be I cannot in good conscience support for President a candidate whom I regard as unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive.

Seems like folks who should be saying this, are not saying this.

For us and this country, my God, this is a hell of a place for us to be!

8.13.2023 – kind of joy you get

kind of joy you get
when stop hitting yourself on
head with the hammer

Don’t ask me why but I was thumbing through the books of Ernie Pyle the other night.

Ernie Pyle, according to wikipedia, was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II.

If you want a first hand account of life in the Army of the United States during World War 2, Mr. Pyle’s book’s are a great place to start.

In his book, Last Chapter, published posthumously (he was killed while on assignment on the island of Okinawa), I came across this story.

This book is famous for his word pictures of life aboard an aircraft carrier where the enemy was monotony which was fought with clean clothes, clean sheets and good food.

Mr. Pyle contrasted that lifestyle with the lifestyle of soldiers he was with in Italy and France and couldn’t quite get his arms around the differences.

As I said, I came across this story.

Thomas had been in the Pacific thirty- three months.

When it began to look as though he might as well count on settling down for life, he had married a Scottish girl some months back in Honolulu.

Shortly after that he was shipped on out here, and he hadn’t seen her since.

The morning of the day I sat in Thomas’s barber chair the Army was sending a few Japanese prisoners back to Hawaii by airplane and they had to have guards for them.

One of Thomas’s officers told him he would put him down for the trip so that he could get a couple of days in Hawaii to see his wife.

The officer meant to keep his word, but he had a bad memory for names. When he went to write down Thomas’s name for the trip, he wrote another guy’s name, thinking it was Thomas.

By the time Thomas found it out, it was too late. “I could have cried,” he said.

And I could have too.

I felt so terrible about it I couldn’t get it off my mind, and was talking about it to an officer that evening.

“Oh,” he said. “I happen to know about that. I’ll go and tell Thomas right away and he won’t feel so bad. We got orders not to send the prisoners after all, so the whole thing was called off. Nobody went.”

Which is the kind of joy you get when you stop hitting yourself on the head with the hammer, but at least it’s better than if you kept on hitting it.

Last chapter by Ernie Pyle, New York, H. Holt and Co., 1946

8.10.2023 – meek little wives feel

meek little wives feel
edge of the carving knife and
study husbands’ necks

There was a desert wind blowing that night.

It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.

On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Anything can happen.

So starts the short novel or long short story, “Red Wind” in the collection of short novels or long short stories, Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler, (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

How Mr. Chandler took some very simple words and connected them in such a way that lets you feel the heat and dust and see the scene in your mind, the scene with the meek little wife and the knife and the husbands neck, and you can see it as clearly as if it were a scene in a Spielberg movie is beyond me.

A neat trick.

If I knew how Mr. Chandler did that (IE – It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window …) I would do it.

Somehow, deep in my soul, I am sure and reassured that AI or CHATgtp or any computer could NOT write that sentence is just that way.

It has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

It is the Low Country because it is so low above sea level.

A couple of miles from the Atlantic Coast and, according to my smart phone, 27 feet above sea level, where I am writing from the 3rd floor of our apartment building.

And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

We are in the whatever day of a prolonged heat advisory.

My wife and I both enjoy the climate here, for the most part.

We don’t miss snow.

We don’t miss extended cold weather.

I claim that I lived a half of a century in West Michigan and my bones have yet to thaw out.

And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

Just off the coast, it has not been the dry hot of the Santa Anna Wind Mr. Chandler refers to.

Humidity is also off the charts.

I am not sure what that means as humidity is one of those things that cannot be greater than 100%.

100% humidity means rain.

So humidity here hovers around 97%.

The temperature today will peak around 97 degrees.

The same smart phone that tells me the elevation above sea level also says that the temp with the humidity, will feel like 110 degrees.

I am used to windchill.

Reports that with a temperature of 28 degrees and a 15mph wind, it will feel like 8 degrees outside.

Going the other way is new to me.

Cold air, below freezing is crisp and clear.

Hot air, in the 90’s with humidity in the 90’s is thick and visible.

Cold air is a slap in the face.

Hot, humid air, is a big dog that sits on your chest and slowly squeezes the oxygen out of your blood.

Coming inside from cold air, heat embraces you, wraps you up, comforts you.

Coming inside from hot, humid air, the air conditioning attacks you, assaults your senses and leaves you senseless.

And when you come inside, down in here in the low country, during a prolonged head advisory, it is like walking into a meat locker.

You can feel the fingers of cold wrap around your skin.

You remember the scene in the movie, “The Day After” where the helicopter pilot opens the door and the freeze line moves across his face.

They say life in the south would not be possible without air conditioning.

But life at what cost?

Garrison Keillor once wrote something along the line that the seeds of decay of the Western World were in Air Conditioning.

My Dad was one of those people who thought Air Conditioning saved the Western World.

My Dad always held that in a car, the comfort of the driver was supreme therefore the driver (on trips that meant my Dad) set the level of air conditioning.

For my Dad, that meant full blast.

As cold as it get which was determined how long it was on. at full blast.

On long summer trips in a station wagon filled with suitcases and kids, the middle seat was my Mom’s domain and it seems like my sisters also had dibs on the middle row.

For us boys that meant that back of the station wagon which in those days was a flat cargo area.

We would put some cushions back there and some pillows but for the most part you sat cross legged and tried to get comfortable.

Or it was the front seat.

The front seat with Dad.

The front seat with the air conditioning blowing out 34 degrees of cold air at 50mph.

5 minutes you got cold.

10 minutes you were frozen.

15 minutes you were in agony AND you had to use the bathroom so bad you thought you might explode any second.

I remember one family trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when I was around 11 years and I was near tears, I was frozen, my feet were blocks of ice, I couldn’t feel my fingers and I had to go so bad.

My Dad spotted a gas station and pulled in.

There was a RESTROOM sign with an arrow pointing around the side of the building and I was out of the car before it came to stop.

Running as fast I could, I came wide around the corner and saw the two doors for restrooms and I shoved a door open and took care of things.

I sat in there, with the crisis retreating as I warmed up and relief spread through my body in many ways.

As I came back to the conscious world I became aware of my brothers voices.

It came to me that they were in the restroom.

The restroom next door.

I heard one of my brothers say, ‘I wonder where Mike is?’

I noticed the restroom I was in was all done in pink.

Air conditioning curls your hair and makes your nerves jump and your skin itch.

On frozen nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Anything can happen.