5.14.2022 – some mistakes are made

some mistakes are made
bit funnier than others
not have taken much

Based on an interview with one Rachel Graham.

Ms. Graham said, “We’re not really interested in fighting, we’re just pointing out the obvious that they should have looked it up themselves. It wouldn’t have taken much.”

“Mistakes are made,” she added. “Some are just a bit funnier than others.”

According to what I read this morning, Mark and Rachel Graham received a cease-and-desist letter from Condé Nast, the magazine publisher, asking them to change their pub’s name.

Their pub is in the town of Vogue, a hamlet in the parish of St Day, Cornwall, England.

Their pub is named, The Star Inn at Vogue.

Vogue the magazine sent them a cease and desist letter and threatened legal action if they would not change the name of the pub.

I found the Graham’s reaction to not react a bit refreshing in this day and age.

Again, Ms. Graham said, “We’re not really interested in fighting, we’re just pointing out the obvious that they should have looked it up themselves. It wouldn’t have taken much.”

Mistakes are made.

Some mistakes are funnier than others.

I think there even might have been people in Washington DC that agreed with this.

Sorry to say, though, that Abraham Lincoln hasn’t been around since 1865.

He may have been the last person to be able to not take themselves seriously inside the beltway.

Jim Harrison writes something along the line that if you look at the city of Washington and the buildings, how could some NOT BECOME POMPOUS once they got there.

He favored turning the Capitol building into a museum and putting Congress in a pole barn in Anacostia and then see how fast Congress took care of business.

I agree with this but want to make sure it is a pole barn without air conditioning.

I am also reminded of a time when the company I worked for decided to crack down on non-authorized online use of company content.

The company I worked for owned a lot of TV stations and other websites were embedding video and such without asking for permission or crediting the company.

The web team was told to go out and find these places and turn them over to corporate legal.

I was in Atlanta at the time and the very first place I found that was using WXIA TV video without permission was the Johnnie Cochran law firm.

I filled out the required paper work and sent it off to corporate legal.

That was the last I heard of the case and the project as a whole.

ANYWAY, Boy, HOWDY!

Mistakes are made.

Some mistakes are funnier than others.

It made me almost weep for a era seemingly long gone.

Do I have to move to the parish of St Day, Cornwall, England?

5.9.2022 – children screaming with

children screaming with
delight link generations
indestructible

Adapted from a paragraph in the EB White essay, Once More to the Lake.

Mr. White wrote: Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain.

My grand daughter was in town for a short visit and we were only able to squeeze in a quick trip to the beach.

The weather did not cooperate and instead of sunshine, sand and surf, we had gray skies and gray waves.

For May along the coast, the temperate was cool and the water was warmer than then air.

My grand daughter didn’t care and no matter how much we explained the time crunch and the uninviting weather, she was determined to see the water.

We walked out together along the walkways through the swamps.

She kept an eye out for alligators.

We got to the sand and got out of our shoes and barefooted, we walked down to the water.

With your toes in the Atlantic Ocean, I like to say, you have the entire country in back of you all the way to the Pacific.

My grand daughter didn’t mention the gray sky.

My grand daughter didn’t mention the gray waves.

My grand daughter didn’t mention that is was somewhat cool if not cold there on the beach.

She took my hand and walked into the water and wave after wave washed over our feet.

The occasion bigger wave would splash in and she would grab my arm and jump and I would lift her out of the way and set her back down.

And she would scream with delight.

Standing there, holding my hand, she looked out at the horizon.

“Poppa,” she said, “I love the ocean.”

5.7.2022 – that I last worked

that I last worked
one day, one afternoon, hours
all that I needed

It was in the spring of 1977 I think that I last really worked.

Worked really hard.

I may have been Kentucky Derby day and it stands out in my mind that way.

My Mom had a friend who, with her husband, was building a house.

Not working with a developer to pick out door knobs and windows, but doing as much of the actual construction as they could do themselves.

These people had purchased a lot in our neighborhood down on Gilpin St. and the basement had been dug out.

What they had so far was this big pit right out Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel.

They arranged for frames to be installed and concrete to be poured, but first the bottom of the pit had to be leveled out.

My Mom’s friend told my Mom that they needed a couple of strong boys to get down in the pit and shovel some dirt around from a few high places over to a few low places.

Just level it out.

My Mom may not have thought that she had some strong boys but she knew she had some boys who were pretty much, desperately lazy.

And the story moved my Mom’s heart, which was easy to do, she had a big heart, and the next thing that happened was that my brothers Pete and Steve and I were volunteered to spend a spring Saturday doing some shoveling.

I think we were told the night before that we had volunteered.

We were instructed to show up around noon which we did and we met the feller whose house it was that was being built.

He greeted us and pointed out his friend, James, who had a surveyors transit set up.

He then led us over to the side of the pit where there was a ladder and we climbed down into the pit.

You know how the mud smells at a construction sight?

That is what it smelled like.

The pit was a construction site and it stunk.

The guy picked up this long pole with had some black type wrapped around near the top.

He would set the end of the pole on the ground and James would site it with his transit and looking at the piece of black tape, announce “down 6 inches” or “up 3 inches.”

The guy would the point at spot and say we got to lower this area or we got to fill in this area.

After giving us the general layout, he pointed out shovels and told us to get to work.

We three boys looked at each other.

We were worried.

We were more than worried.

We got past worried when we climbed down into the pit.

This looked like real work.

The first thing my brother Pete did was to nudge me with an elbow and say, “Notice that JAMES isn’t coming down here.”

We had noticed that.

James was smart.

We also noticed that what were standing on wasn’t sand and it wasn’t dirt, it was clay.

Baked clay.

It was more like solid rock.

I picked up a shovel and let the the handle slide through my fingers to drop the point of the spade against the surface.

The shovel bounced back.

Pete picked up a shovel and tried to drive it into the clay and nothing happened.

Stevie just watched.

I took the shovel in both hands and chopped with against the surface.

Pete took his shovel and pushed the point down with one foot and managed to get the point down under the surface.

He then levered the shovel over and popped off a chunk of light brown clay.

Pete straightened up and says, “I’m done.”

The guy and that James feller both laughed.

Then they left.

I think Pete was serious but there we were.

I pushed harder and was able to the get my shovel into the clay and found out something else.

The hard clay was only about 2 or 3 inches thick.

Once you got through that 2 or 3 inched layer of hard clay, underneath was a bottomless quagmire of construction site muck.

I brought up a shovel full of that stuff and tossed it one side.

I looked at my brothers.

My brothers looked at me.

I am not sure what happened next but I remember we stayed the rest of the afternoon down in that pit.

I have this vague memory of walking around the floor of the pit, banging my shovel down, searching for softer places to dig but nothing more distinct than that.

They guy building the house and James had left and we kept at it.

None of us had a watch on so all we could do was make a guess at the time by watching the sun and shadows.

And we worked.

We didn’t suffer in silence but we kept at it.

Not sure how much of an improvement we made, but we tried.

Maybe a battalion of US Army Corps of Engineers with dynamite could have done better, but with who we were and what we had and what we were doing, we tried.

In my memory, the shadows along one side of the pit were getting deep and dark when the guy came back and called down to us that we were done.

We put the shovels in a corner and climbed up and out.

The guys wife had pulled up to the building site and in the trunk of her car was a cooler.

The cooler was filled with ice and Coca-Cola.

She had in her hands these giant Styrofoam cups that she filled first with ice and then Coke.

Never again has icy cold Coke been more icy cold and more welcome and more refreshing than those Cokes.

The guy thanked us and gave us each a $10 bill.

Never again did I feel such satisfaction from earning $10.

I can say that as I never again worked so hard in my life.

There is only so much satisfaction that you can get out of satisfaction.

Jim Harrison once wrote something along the line that society has yet to understand and label work done mentally, as hard work.

I support that concept.

On the other hand . . .

There is exhaustion.

There is mental exhaustion.

And there is physical exhaustion.

There is no substitute for hard work.

And I have worked hard to avoid it ever since that afternoon in the pit.

There is a family legend about my Dad.

My Grandfather was a Dentist.

When my Dad graduated from Grand Rapids Creston High School in 1936, my Grand Father, according to the legend, told my Dad that he would buy him a farm or send him to Dental School.

This side of the family were farmers who had emigrated from the Netherlands and still lived and farmed in the Jamestown area of Ottawa County, Michigan.

My Dad was then sent out to spend a week working on some relatives’ farm.

According to the legend, after that week, my Dad came home and asked when Dental School started.

I had thought about being a Dentist then I met a class called organic chemistry.

I had planned on being a history teacher.

I fell into a career of website design and management.

But when I climbed out of that put in 1977, all I wanted to know was, when did school start?

5.4.2022 – enhanced use of force

enhanced use of force
deescalation training
so who but the Lord

Deadly force “is always the last resort” and that philosophy, as well as de-escalation training, needs to be ingrained into the department’s policies, Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winstrom told The Detroit News Tuesday.

So starts an article in the Detroit News with the headline, “Grand Rapids police need enhanced use of force, de-escalation training, chief says” by Leonard N. Fleming.

The words, enhanced use of force, de-escalation training, strung together in a line, the syllables clicking in a row like the sound of the wheels of a train over gaps in the tracks, grabbed and held my attention.

The article details the efforts of the Police Chief of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where I grew up) to address publicly the death of Patrick Lyoya, 26, who was shot in the back of the head by officer Christopher Schurr on April 4 following a tussle on the ground … after a traffic stop.

Mr. Fleming quotes the Chief as saying, “From what I’m hearing from the community, a real vocal part of the community is there’s no rebuilding trust. You’ve got to build it because it was never there.“

Chief Winstrom said that on April 26th, 2022.

In 1947, in the magazine, Poetry, Langston Hughes published this poem.

I looked and I saw
That man they call the Law.
He was coming
Down the street at me!
I had visions in my head
Of being laid out cold and dead,
Or else murdered
By the third degree.

I said, O, Lord, if you can,
Save me from that man!
Don’t let him make a pulp out of me!
But the Lord he was not quick.
The Law raised up his stick
And beat the living hell
Out of me!

Now, I do not understand
Why God don’t protect a man
From police brutality.
Being poor and black,
I’ve no weapon to strike back
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?

We’ll see.

The title of the poem is ‘Who but the Lord?‘

A footnote in the “The collected poems of Langston Hughes” (Knopf, 1994) says that the last line was added when the poem was reprinted in the book, The Panther and the Lash.

That was in 1967.

That last line again?

We’ll see.

I gots no real standing as a social critic so I will take refuge (hide) under the cover of saying I am only a social commentator.

I just hold up the mirror and you can see what you want to see.

The Rev. Al once said something along the lines of, “You can use a mirror to reflect yourself or you can use a mirror to correct yourself.”

You’ve got to build trust because it was never there.

We’ll see.

4.19.2022 – then, even before

then, even before
I was six, books began
to happen to me

Adapted from this passage in the book, The Big Sea, An Autobiography by Langston Hughes.

In Topeka, as a small child, my mother took me with her to the little vine-covered library on the grounds of the Capitol.

There I first fell in love with librarians, and I have been in love with them ever since- those very nice women who help you find wonderful books!

The silence inside the library, the big chairs, and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it – all of that made me love it.

And right then, even before I was six, books began to happen to me, so that after a while, there came a time when I believed in books more than in people – which, of course, was wrong.

That was why, when I went to Africa, I threw all the books into the sea.

Not any sort of insecurity about it.

I’ll pass over any discussion about working at a library and being aware of tax-payer funding and other such insecurities to focus on the magic and wonderfulness of that line, ‘[didn’t have] any sort of insecurity about it.’

Mr. Bono sings, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

Sometimes what you are looking for is right under your nose.

A place with out any sort of insecurity about it would check a lot of boxes on anyone’s search form.

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

Langston Hughes