Category Archives: Family

Ethics Escaped Their Heads Long Ago

July 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

73 bar falls 30.07 1mh ENE dew-point 48 Sunny, pleasant

New Moon (Thunder Moon)

The little red car has its new head. Phhew! Even so, new heads require inspection to be sure their connections are good, so it won’t come home until Saturday. Too bad we don’t inspect the heads of decision makers as well. Say, hmmm. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Each one of this trinity of corruption and incompetence has a bad leak somewhere, for sure all their ethics escaped their heads long ago.

Kate and I had lunch at Saji-ya in St. Paul. This is an old hangout for me, but I hadn’t been there in several years. They had redecorated. When I mentioned it to the host, he said, “Oh, 3-4 years ago.” Sashimi is a great lunch, light and healthy. Kate had her usual tempura.

We both agreed that if we ever moved back to an urban area that it would be St. Paul. It has leafy streets, older homes, distinct neighborhoods and a generally laid back approach to urban living. The main large avenue, Summit Avenue, has a long, relatively intact stand of Victorian homes, many large enough to qualify as mansions. Rice Creek Park, which has the Ordway Center (music and performing arts center), the central Public Library, the James J. Hill Library, the St. Paul Hotel and the Landmark Center (former federal building) remains my favorite urban space. The center city is compact and contains many buildings from the turn of the century (the last century) so modernism has not stained its skyline as it has Minneapolis.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra plays the kind of classical music I love. The state capitol and the main government offices are just up the hill from downtown. The Mississippi river winds through its heart and, as a result, the street system has a charming eccentricity. Many people from Minneapolis claim they can’t drive in St. Paul. Too confusing. I have the same problem in the western suburbs.

We’ve had another money meeting with the woman I think of as our financial strategist. She helps us with the practical side of money management and she is very good. After a period of lackadaisal attention to the financial aspect of our life, we have developed a steady routine, a consistency that has allowed us to build up cash reserves, save plenty of money for retirement and still enjoy travel, taking care of our family and our home.

Family, Garden, Writing

Garlic Harvest

June 29, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

77 bar steady 29.93 5mph N dew-point 49 Summer, hot and sunny

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

Wrote this AM. Appended chapter 3 of Superior Wolf to its page on this website. Next week I’ll take down chapter 1 and put chapter 4 and so it will go until I have written myself to the end. We’ll see where it goes.

Moved mulch, created by renting the super chipper from Home Depot and grinding up branches, tree trunks and chunks of shrubs. The mulch goes on the perennial bed first, keeping the weeds down as we move into high summer and also cooling the soil just a bit. This involves a wheel-barrow, a pitchfork and a lot of moving from one place to another.

After a nap I unburdened the kitchen table of a couple of months of magazines, catalogues and desparate fund-raising pleas. This involved a paper-sack, a lot of sorting and moving from one place to another.

Now I’m gonna cook supper, red beans and rice with some prime rib left overs thrown to make it interesting. The now standard fare of lettuce, onions and cilantro from our gardens inside and out will join store purchased tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers for a colorful salad. Later in the season we will have all of these ingredients.

I also learned from a piece of paper recovered from the literary overburden of the table that I can harvest the garlic now. Somehow garlic has become my favorite crop. Don’t know why.

Family, Garden, Great Wheel

Cool House Plants

June 26, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

69 bar rises 29.73 0mph NNW dew-point 57 A summer night

Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

This time period, after the iris bloom and the lilacs have died back, we have annuals like petunias, begonias, geraniums and vinca plus the odd Siberian Iris and peony, not many late June perennials in our garden. We await now the Asiatic lilies. My favorite among our flowers many of the lilies in our garden came from lily fanciers who live in the upper midwest. Purchased at a lily growers special season sale at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, they come in beautiful colors and many, like the Star Gazer, have scents that beguile. A bit later the hemerocallis, day lilies, will begin to bloom. They will take us into September along with the Liguria, the bug bane and the bush Clematis.

It is a clear night. Stars light the sky, ancient messengers of events and objects of long past. They are deep history, a counterpoint to the now. Insects chirp. The occasional owl hoots. Maybe the sound of some small animal scurrying through the grass in search of food. A bats quick, furtive flight crosses the moon’s half lit face.

These nights offer a softness and elegance found only in the natural world. There is no need for fancy dress, cocktails or dance music. All you have to do is walk outside and share the company. Your clothing or lack of it will not matter. Some of the party may find you irrestible, of course. Yes, unwanted attention sometimes mars a quiet night. It does show, though, that you have a niche. You are the canape.

Kate and I spoke to Mary on Skype today. Arranging a physical connection with Singapore has its modest challenges. She called us, for example, at 11:00 PM today, though it was 10:00 AM here. Today has long since turned into tomorrow there. She’s off this week finishing the revisions to her dissertation. Then it heads out to her supervisor for one last check, then onto external readers. More revisions likely. Finally, the oral defense sometime from now. Later, awarding of the doctorate. Pretty cool.

She may visit the temperate latitudes building at the Botanical Gardens as a treat for finishing. That’s where they have trees and plants adapted to cold weather, a mirror to our conservatories with their palms and philodendrons and other tropical vegetation. A strange notion from the perspective of Minnesota.

Family, Politics

The 13th Amendment

June 24, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

70 bar steady 29.87 0mph SW dew-point 53 Summer, night and warm

Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Grocery shopping this afternoon. There is nothing as grounding for me as grocery shopping. It’s something I’ve done since college and I continue to enjoy it. A domestic task.

Pulled the tulip’s dead leaves and stalks out this afternoon, too. Some annual can go in their place now that the bulbs have stored energy for next year’s growth.

Watched a movie, Human Trafficking, with Donald Sutherland and Mia Sorvino. The last scene grabbed me because Mia’s character gives a speech at the very end referencing the 13th amendment which outlaws slavery or involuntary servitude. After 48 lectures on the Civil War that particular amendment stands out with neon lights.

Kate had a late night at the office and I’m up later than I want to be, so I’m off to bed. Taking the red car into Carlson’s in the morning for a head gasket and having the heads ground. Pricy. But important.

Family, Travel

Home

June 22, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

63 bar rises 29.95 0mph NNE dew-point 54 Summer, night and cool

Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Back home. The corn is past knee high; the garlic has finished its growth; the tomato plants that began from heritage seeds have fruit; the beans have begun to bush out and the onions have sky rocketed. A wonderful pastel copper/brown bearded iris has bloomed and the Siberian iris have thrown up dark blue flags all over the garden. There is, of course, the occasional weed, but that’s Monday’s task. Perhaps Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, too.

Driving as I did, a bit over 3,000 miles, movement dominates. Even in Montgomery I drove to Maxwell four times, an equal number of times out for meals. In the car. Out of the car. Stop for gas. Now the movement slows down. A walk in the garden. Up and down stairs. To the refrigerator.

Here Kate welcomes me. At the various motels slightly aware receptionists said how can i help you. Here I get a hug, a meal, a smile. An “I missed you.” “Me, too.” The dogs jump up and down, lean against my leg. This is a place I know and where I am known.

Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Radical Individualist

June 9, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

58 bar rises 29.69 0mph S dew-point 51 Beltane, night and cool

First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Woolly’s on Wildness. Some of us thought wildness was wilderness, or being in wilderness. Others of us thought wildness lay in the the natural, the natural state, unconstrained by civilization. Yet others believed wildness was one aspect of our psyche that needed integration into the larger, mature person we become over time.

I realized in the middle of the conversation that I am a radical individualist, along with Emerson and the Existentialists. More on this at another time.

How to make another see the inherent worth they have, the beauty and the glory of their person? The depth of their soul and the bounty they represent in the world? I don’t know right now and I wish I did.

Family, Garden

No Impairment of Our View

June 9, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

71 bar steady 29.64 0mph SE dew-point 51 Beltane, Sunny and warm

First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Ah, Costco. A vast and cavernous market, as much a temple to the American obsession with stuff as store. Two 40 pound bags of mature dog dogfood, Kirkland, and a box of dog biscuits plus $100 on the Costco gas card, a sort of futures market in which I bet that Costco prices will be under those of the competitor gas stations. After a trip in which each tankfull of 11 gallons or so cost over $44 in my compact Toyota Celica, it seems like a good wager. Through the lines with others and their carts, as American as fast food and credit cards, I spent $161 dollars on dog nourishment and car nourishment.

Back home I put the dogfood in the container we use for it, then went out to the shed that Jon built. It houses the chainsaw. When I found it needed gas, I had to schlep out to the further shed where I store the sharp and mechanical tools as well as gas and oil.

Filled up I hiked out to the front yard and began pruning branches off Amur maples. The first one to go was the one I mentioned yesterday, broken in some storm or another. Then a couple that had long impinged on a spruce and a Norway pine. At another clump of Amur’s I pruned some large dead branches, small trunks really all of these, and a few low hanging live ones.

While Kate mowed, I moved these cumbersome items down the hill and into the huge storm water drainage depression we share with our neighbor. This wise feature is as far across as our lot and goes back about three hundred feet. It slopes on all four sides down to a level bottom. This ensures that the run off our roofs and yards soak into the soil, rather than into nearby wetlands or Roundlake. Since it has no other purpose and is large, it can hide many branches, even tree trunks with no impairment of our view.

Kate’s finished mowing and I’m taking her out to lunch. Bye.

Family, Politics

Cast Out Your Doubts. Carpe Diem.

June 8, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

68 bar steady 29.67 3mph NE dew-point 56 Beltane, cloudy and warm

Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

A wise thought from our third greatest president (after GW and Abe). What we doubt we can do today will not happen tomorrow. It may even fade from the horizon line of possibility altogether. A terrible example is the 3/5’s compromise. The generation which founded our country had many leaders who knew slavery was a burden too great for the Republic to bear. Among them were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Too many, though, doubted a solution to slavery was possible at this time and so agreed to count 3/5’s of the slave population when it came to census figures determining congressional representation. This doubt obscured slavery’s tragedy, a holocaust of freedom, in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and liberty for all.

The payment for these doubts came due in 1861 with the Confederate shelling of Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor. The next four years would exact a price in blood so high and a rent in the body politic so deep that this nation has not recovered. The tragedy compounded during reconstruction as freed slaves became tenant farmers, sharecroppers in states with Jim Crow laws. Lynchings. The KKK. Segregation. Limited practical voting rights. Employment discrimination.

Think how much further along our society would be in a movement toward a common culture, one shared by all Americans regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference or national origin if our founding fathers (yes, fathers) had set aside their doubts and made real the full promise of the American revolution.

With Obama’s candidacy we may be ready for a third movement forward toward such a culture. The Civil War was one. The 1950’s and 1960’s were another with Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights act and the struggles of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims–especially Malcom X, CORE, the NAACP, SNICC and grass roots uprisings in many American cities.

Take stock of the doubts you have today about what you may realize tomorrow. They are the great barrier reef in your psyche between the ego’s fears and the manifestation of your full Self.

Some time outside this morning laying down weed preventer. This is prologomena to a thorough weeding this week before I take off for Alabama. A major focus this week will be helping Kate. She’s going to be here with the dogs for 10 days, again, after 6 days last week. Anything I can do now to make those days easier will be good.

Faith and Spirituality, Family

Circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the mark of the covenant between you and me.

June 6, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

68 bar falls 29.22 2mph SSW dew-point 62 Beltane, cloudy and rainy

Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon (English)

Coming back from a journey throws the traveler back into daily life, matters that have been suspended on the road. This trip is no exception. Stefan’s wife, Lonnie, has surgery today for her adenocarcinoma. Kate’s got some problems at work. The tomato plant has not fruited. E-mail to catch up on. That pesky novel still calling to me. That sort of thing.

Let’s go back to the bris for a minute.

Here is the passage from the Torah that provides the theological rationale. It comes from Genesis 17:

1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said: “I am God the Almighty. Walk in my presence and be blameless. 2 Between you and me I will establish my covenant, and I will multiply you exceedingly.” 3 When Abram prostrated himself, God continued to speak to him: 4 “My covenant with you is this: you are to become the father of a host of nations. 5 2 No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, for I am making you the father of a host of nations. 6 I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you. 7 I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession; and I will be their God.” 9 God also said to Abraham: “On your part, you and your descendants after you must keep my covenant throughout the ages. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you that you must keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 Circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the mark of the covenant between you and me. 12 Throughout the ages, every male among you, when he is eight days old, shall be circumcised, including houseborn slaves and those acquired with money from any foreigner who is not of your blood. 13 Yes, both the houseborn slaves and those acquired with money must be circumcised. Thus my covenant shall be in your flesh as an everlasting pact. 14 If a male is uncircumcised, that is, if the flesh of his foreskin has not been cut away, such a one shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

Verse 10 and 14 have the operative language. (no pun intended) First, circumcision is a sign of the covenant between Yahweh and the descendants of Abraham and Sara. Second, Gabe, in order to not be cut off from his people had to have his foreskin circumcised.

In the living room of Jon and Jen’s home the mohel, Jay Feder, set his instruments on a wooden table top. I asked him questions and in the process he and I bonded over our shared knowledge. Educated in several yeshiva and, for the purpose of the bris, in Jerusalem, Jay, a full time jeweler, is a bright and learned man. He’s also very funny.

His shtick included these off hand remarks, “Oh, I see Adrian (a six month old boy) is here. I hope he doesn’t remember me!” When Jon laid Gabe on the pillow (where Jay performs the circumcision), he laid him with his head toward Jay, who said, “So. Do you like his nose? You’re ok with it shorter?” Jon turned Gabe around on the pillow. He then turned to Jon and said, “All right. The father performs the bris. Are you ready?” And so on.

The chair in front of the table with the cloth on it is the Elijah chair. I asked Jay the significance of the Elijah chair. He told me the story of Elijah. You may remember Elijah. He challenged Ahab and his priest, Obadiah, to a contest of efficacy, their gods, Baal and Ahserah, against his, Yahweh. Long story short. Yahweh sends down fire and burns a sacrifical bull, and not only the bull, but the altar as well. Baal and Asherah did not. Later on, however, Elijah complains to Yahweh that the people of Israel have not been keeping the covenant. After this comment, Elijah suffers a demotion and has to anoint his student, Elisha, as his successor.

Later, Elijah leaves earth for heaven in a whirlwind, on a chariot of fire. He is the only character in the Tanakh who does not die. Rabbinic scholars have made much of the study of Elijah and they conclude that Elijah became a perpetual witness to those events in Jewish ritual life that affirm the covenant. “The rabbis say this may be a reward or it may be a punishment.” Elijah’s chair, then, gives concrete expression to Elijah’s presence at this most basic of all affirmations of the Abrahamic covenant.

This is Jon (my stepson) and Gabe with his knitted yarmulke. I wore one, too, but I don’t have a picture. Asked about the significance of the yarmulke, Jay said, “There are many answers, but one I like is that it shows where we stop and God takes over.”

After the bris itself, Gabe received his Hebrew name, Gavriel. This is Jon and Jen, Ruth and Gabe with Jay giving Gabe several sips of sweet wine.

Why wine? Glad you asked, Jay said. “The body starts deteriorating from the moment of birth until it finally gives up and dies. It is the reverse in the spiritual life. As life goes on our spiritual life becomes richer and richer until we make the transition after death. Wine is one of the things we know that follows the same path. As it gets older and older, it gets better and better.”

One of the things I admire and respect about Judaism is its emphasis on home-based worship and ritual. This event sacralized Jon and Jen’s living room. While Jay sang some of the blessings, I saw many of Jon and Jen’s neighbors pass by on the street. It was an interesting blend of cultures.

Family

Jay, the Mohel

June 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

Quite an afternoon and early evening.

At 3:30 Gabe had his first post hospital infusion of factor 8, the clotting factor largely absent from his blood. We drove a circuitous route through the new homes built on the site of the old Stapleton Airport.

We crossed out of that development into a poorer neighborhood, the one in which Jon and Jen both teach. It is also the location of a former Army base now occupied by the university of Colorado. It is also the site of the old Army hospital plus several new buildings that now constitute the University hospital.

In an old Army hospital building, with a wonderful Art Deco lobby, and old, undecorated halls and rooms is the hemophilia and thrombosis center. In there the women who staff it made kind noises and praised Gabe’s beauty.

We went back into a procedure room and there the nurse practitioner found a vein near Gabe’s left ear and slid in a needle attached to a line. She first drew blood to retest his factor level (occasional misdiagnosis), then inserted the hypodermic containing the factor into the line and pushed it into his bloodstream.

It works immediately and in fact aids in clotting the puncture created by the needle.

Gabe whimpered, then went quiet. In a minute Amy had a gauze patch over the puncture site and held it for about five minutes, just to be sure.

2 hours later, at Jon and Jen’s home, Rabbi and Jeweler, Jay performed a wonderful ritual. Jay and I hit it off. I held Gabe’s legs while Jay, the mohel, cut the foreskin in two practiced movements. There’s more to this, but I’m in a hotel lobby and I feel the need to move on. Later.