Lughnasa Honey Moon
Two slices of Americana, one yesterday and one today. The first pictures are from the Fabric Outlet Store, a place owned by a funny Jewish guy who liked my hat. The second are from an event that happens not 6 miles from our home every August, but to which we went for the first time today, the Nowthen Threshing Show. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
More limbing. Removal of weed trees, escaped amur maples. An attractive tree but one prone to wander too freely. I like using the limbing ax. Internal combustion engines I don’t like using. My dislike of them precedes but gets reinforced by my ecological consciousness. My feelings about them come in part from an inability to work with them well. Wrenches, screw drivers, fluids, pistons all that never leapt to my hands.
Like the house, I learned all my father knew about them. Nothing. For example. Car. Mower. Weedwhacker. Lawn tractor. Snow blower. The chainsaw is a limited and unusual exception. And yes, I admit it, I never did anything to improve my knowledge or skills, at least not anything that worked.
On another level I fantasized about those engines, read about them, watched and applauded people who did things with different versions. Fast things. Like formula 1. Indianapolis 500. Drag racing. Sports Car Graphic and Road and Track were two of my early magazine subscriptions. Summer nights on Madison Avenue saw Alexandria kids drag racing. A dangerous pursuit then, seen as the acme of juvenile self-destructiveness.
So there was this duality in my feelings: admiration and loathing. As I’ve gotten older, the admiration has diminished and the loathing increased. The Toyota folks at Carlson Toyota take care of our vehicle and I’m very glad for it. They’re good at what they do and I can’t escape driving. I’m left with a paradox, a contradiction, a necessary dilemma.
For those of you who love them, my admiration side understands. Totally. For those of you like me who would not be sorry to see them go. I’m with you. 100%.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
What a wonder. A black president speaking as a black man about the lived experience of young black men. Trayvon Martin, he said, could have been him 35 years ago. A young black man in hoodie, suspected of, what? WWB? Walking while black. Maybe about to do, something. And something, wrong. Bad. Hearing clicks on car door locks as you walk by. Being followed in stores. Indelible and seemingly inevitable.
Yet, of course, he is not Trayvon. No, he is the president of the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Maybe the most powerful it will ever know. And even he, with all that power at his disposal, literally at his command, can imagine himself into the life of a young man seen, paradoxically, as both powerless and invisible and all too visible and dangerous.
Racism and its even more evil progenitor, slavery, stand out as the original sin, the stain on this city on a hill, this beacon of freedom and hope. We white folk have done this and that, but not too much and now the time of our dominance is passing. This nation will become a colorful quilt with white as one shade among many rather than the shade against which all others stand inferior. May that day come soon.
There are many things I feel privileged to have witnessed. The civil rights movement. The anti-war movement. Feminism and the rise of women. A world in which the whole planet must be taken into account when making decisions. A man walking on the moon. Routine space flight. The discovery of extraterrestrial planets. The discovery of DNA. The global recognition that the people can challenge their government. And win. So many things. These and more.
But, this one, a black president speaking about the lived experience of being a young black man. This one is a miracle.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Home. Back in the early 90’s when we lived on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, I felt a sense of 
homecoming when I crossed Ford Parkway. I had crossed into home turf. It’s taken a long while for a similar feeling to take hold here in Andover, but now, as I turn off Highway 10 onto Round Lake Boulevard, that sense of homecoming greets me.
Yes, it’s marked by Baker’s Square, Wendy’s, Conoco, Burger King and a Holiday station, but, they’re our franchises, there for our use. The feeling gets even stronger going up Round Lake and begins to thicken at Round Lake itself where the water is on the left and the peat bog fields of Field’s Truck Farms are on the right. Those fields are the remains of an old lake, eutrophied completely, a process that has advanced a good ways in Round Lake.
As I turn onto 153rd Ave NW, our property shows up about 1,000 feet in and I see the 6 foot chain link fence we had installed because Celt, our earliest Irish Wolfhound, climbed the four-foot fences to go greet passers-by on the street. This particular fence was put in place after a derecho felled a large poplar and destroyed the one we had originally extended from four feet to six. There is, too, the truck gate, 10 feet wide that we had installed because we wanted to get trucks from nurseries and our own trucks back onto our property.
The trees have grown up, grapevines have covered them, the prairie grass has morphed 
over time but has a pleasing current configuration. On the six foot fence itself, the border of the prairie grass, grows our wild grapes. Wild grapes that we pick in the fall for jams and jellies.
The driveway, the sloped driveway that creates its own stories in the winter, goes up to the three car garage that makes our house look as if we live as an adjunct to the garages. On the right going up is a rusted and unused basketball hoop, an emblem, as at so many homes, of a boy, now gone. In the garage itself we have a unique five stall dog feeding set up that we used when our pack was at its peak and we had five Irish Wolfhounds at once.
Do you see what I mean? Home has an accretion of memories, memories attached to physical things like lakes and peat bogs, fences and basketball hoops. This is not somebody else’s memories but our memories, our family’s memories. It is those memories, those thick layers of past embraced constantly in the present, that make a 
home.
Inside the house are the same layers of memories, of guests and friends and immediate family, of dogs and workmen, nights and days, meals and passion. It is the thickness, the particularity of it all, that makes this our home and not someone elses. After 20 years, we have laid down many layers of smiles, tears, hard work and love. That’s why this is home.
Summer First Harvest Moon
Felled an oak today, about 8 inches thick. It was too close to other oaks, competing with them. As I build up our firewood supply, I also think about pruning the forest, trying to put into practice advice given to me years ago by a member of the DNR’s forestry team. It has taken about 18 years to get started; I don’t like to rush into things.
Every time I use a chainsaw it takes me back to the not-so Peaceable Kingdom. That was my first and most all-in back to the land moment. I gave up urban life, a good job and seminary to move onto the 80 acre farm Judy and I bought. You know the story, she leaves for good shortly after I get there.
That left with me a woodburning stove for heating and one for cooking, so I had to have firewood. On our 80 there was a small forest, larger than the one out here with plenty of firewood ready for harvest. I’d put my Jonsered in the bed of my green International Harvester pick-up, drive into the woods, cut down a tree or two, cut them up, toss them in the truck, then head back to the house.
I stacked the wood there, unless it was dry already. If it was dry, I’d start splitting it for use right away. The stuff that wasn’t dry waited until deep winter when the cold would do some of the work.
The wood cutting and using the wood stoves were highlights of that time, a modest form of self-sufficiency, off the grid as far as fuel oil went.
The muscle memory lingers and pops into play every time I yank the starter cord. Good memories.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
66 years ago today news began to leak out about an incident at Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The UFO incident and later reporting of more and more sightings has never fully abated. Classed with conspiracy theorists and aluminum foil hat guys for most of that time, there has nonetheless been widespread public interest as signified by the number of Hollywood movies on the theme: Close Encounters, E.T. and many, many others.
Even Carl Jung wrote a small book on the UFO phenomenon, characterizing it as a contemporary search for the numinous, a spiritual yearning at its heart.
It struck me today because, well, I’m 66. That means the UFO story and I share a common chronology. It even got intertwined when in 1957, at the age of 10, my friend Mike Hines (mentioned earlier in regard to explosions) looked up in the sky one clear August evening, we were standing in my backyard on Monroe Street, and saw three cigar shaped objects in the sky. Sure, cigar shaped objects were popular then, exactly the same of passenger planes, still pretty uncommon at the time. But here’s what got Mike and I reported in state and national newspapers: we saw these cigar shaped objects go behind the moon. And come out the other side! And yes, in retrospect, I can see it still. The blue dark sky, the full moon, the objects slowly moving toward the moon, then disappearing, only to reappear a bit later.
Here’s something else. My life span also covers the golden age of space travel, when men dared for the first time to fly in rockets out of the atmosphere, when they orbited the earth and eventually both went to the moon and landed on it. That time is in the past now with space travel reduced to expensive rocket-powered trucks delivering and retrieving guests from an international space hotel.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
Brother Mark has been traveling the nostalgia trail of late. He landed in Bloomington, Indiana last week, where both he and Mary went to college. Now he’s in Indianapolis and I imagine his next stop is Alexandria, not far from Naptown, as Hoosiers refer to Indy. He visited Tom Wolfe’s grave outside Asheville, North Carolina a couple of weeks ago and You Can’t Go Home Again might be on his mind.
It is on mine every time I return to Indiana. Alexandria was our home during our growing up years and it has that charged, magical valence that only the spot where childhood came alive can have. Yet the heart has its own rules, its own inclinations and prejudices and for me Alexandria simply does not mean home for me as an adult.
I’m looking forward to the conversation with the Woollies about home. At mine.
Summer Solstice Moon
July 4th is the midpoint of summer for me. It’s not in terms of the calendar or meteorology, but in my visceral sense of times ongoingness, the one that tells me when I am, I now am between the 4th and Labor Day. I suppose that harkens back to school days when there would be the 4th of July parade, then Labor Day marked the beginning of school. What remains is a vestigial feeling that 
the next big thing to happen is the ringing of school bells.
(that’s me, second from the left on the first row)
The school bell has long ago faded and even the summer pace of work is gone, for me now almost 25 years. Yet that sense that summer has reached its climax and now speeds its way toward the denouement still sends its signals. The garden does pick up speed now with plants maturing, more and more vegetables ripening, fruit, too. The arc of the garden though does not know Labor Day, does not have a building and a bell in its lexicon. It knows the growing season, the gradual warming, then cooling of the daytime and nighttime temperatures.
With Latin on hold I’ve begun to work outside a bit more regularly since I no longer feel as crunched for time in the mornings. That means I can participate more fully in the garden’s life. Many garden plants, especially vegetables, run through their entire life cycle during the growing season, going from seed to stalk to leaves to fruit, then senescence. The school year that I inherited was one sensitive to this rhythm. It allowed the kids to come home from school during the months their labor was crucial on the farm, during the height of the growing season. The need for that passed long ago as the number of family farms has steadily declined.
Yet like my inner sense of time the school system continues on, its memory of the days of the family farm institutionally intact.
Summer Solstice Moon
It is now the spring, then summer, then winter of our discontents. We have had the Arab spring, now the vinegar rebellion in Brazil, the dislocation of Egypt’s president, widespread disruption in Istanbul. There are those who say China’s population boils just below the eruption point. We had the tea party rebellions here as well as the Occupy movement.
I’m not smart enough to know if these protests have some deep underlying connection, one feeding them in a Geist’s subtle movement, but I have my own experience of rebellion and protest. People rebel for noble reasons, pacifists against war, for self-interested reasons, being draft eligible during a war, for ideological reasons, to support the masses, for the thrill of it, for the fun, for the sex, for the party, for the rock and roll. And for various combinations of these reasons.
And, I think, increasingly because they can organize with greater ease. When the main means of communication were leaflets handed out or stapled to telephone poles, phone calls from landlines, or mass meetings, getting folks to one place for an event had more steps, entailed more volunteers, demanded more discipline. Now an e-mail can go out, a twitter feed, a facebook posting and all those connected can convene. If they do, and I’m sure they do, use the old organizers trick of having each person contacted invite two more, then all you need is the grain of wheat on one corner of a chess board to see how vast crowds can become. Fast.
It may be, just might be, that there is something in the water these days that says we’ve had enough. Of authoritarianism. Of despotism. Of ham handed religious pronouncements substituting for policy. Of the rich gathering in more and more while barricading themselves in enclaves of glass and steel. Of the rich putting cordons around privilege and assets. It’s bound to get noticed at some point, isn’t it?
Whatever it is, I find it hopeful. When people finally decide to act, politicians will learn the truth that all governments get their power from the consent of the governed. Some choose to give away their power because of fear or religious belief or ideological commitment, but push people far enough and those bandaids over the cancer of elitism and oligarchy will get ripped off.
That’s not to say that protest and rebellion are without their costs. It is no accident that the conservatives among us fight to ensure order against frivolous assault. The break down of public order is a dangerous moment, as much for the protester as for the protested against. And revolutions don’t have a wonderful track record of ushering in utopia. Far from it. But I consider these actions against the leaden weight of tradition and scorn. Whether in a particular instance they achieve the goals they seek may not be so important as demonstrating again, and again, and if necessary yet again, that no government can ignore its people, allow the unchecked aggregation of wealth and influence, without peril.
This is, I suppose, why that poster boy of the Tea Party crowd, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the following words, which we celebrate tomorrow:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Summer Solstice Moon
Funny how events that happen during a visit, often outside the particular place visited, shape memories. Last night Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe were in Minneapolis when a riptide of lightning pulled heavy rain in its tow. Jon said, “I knew if I could get to Columbia Heights, we’d be ok.” They saw manhole covers burst up and forded one high spot, but managed to get back to our merely soggy home about 9:30 pm.
On a visit to Denver a year ago right now, James Holmes shot up a theater full of late night movie goers watching Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. This was in Aurora, not far from where my hotel and Jon and Jen’s home. They teach in the Aurora school district, so the event hit them hard.
Back in 1968 I tried, briefly, to move to New York City. Stymied by uncertain draft status I couldn’t find work. But, I was there for Bobby Kennedy’s funeral held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Another trip a year earlier found me in Toronto during the time of what would become a historic John Cage concert, which I accidentally attended.