Category Archives: Myth and Story

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Weather +Climate

Oh, I See

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Sunday gratefuls: Snow. 8 degrees. More Snow, more Cold drooping down from the north, screaming in later from the west. Rigel and Kep. Kate. Our dialogue about doing things together. A warmer day yesterday. Happy Camper. Safeway. Ruby.

A light Snow, crystalline, falls outside. The temperature has dropped to 6 degrees. We are in a belt, once again, that could get up to 12-14 inches. Any amount of Snow and cold comes as a relief, not only here on Shadow Mountain, but also for those affected by the East Troublesome Fire and the Cameron Fire, well north of us, up in the Rocky Mountain National Park part of the state. I hope it’s enough to douse them, or at least bring them under control.

My favorite coffee mug has the Polar Express on it. I got it when Kate and I took then 7 year old grandson Gabe to an evening on board a Christmas train. He remarked, “We don’t celebrate this!” and huffed at the whole production. I got mad. Couldn’t he back off and enjoy the elves coming through with hot chocolate? Nope.

Gabe is not an observant Jew, even now several years later at the age of 12. But, he held fast that night. I admire it. I can say that now, but then, I thought, you ungrateful little killjoy!

You see this coming, right? What was really going on there? I loved Christmas. I loved the Polar Express. I did not associate it with Christianity by that point, but Gabe certainly did. Christmas is the great temptation for Hanukkah kids. Partly why Jewish children do so well at Hanukkah these days in terms of presents. Look! We have 8 days, they only have one night.

Not Christmas. Nope, Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. Not Silent Night. No Christmas Tree. No Santa Claus. No The Night Before Christmas. A clear demarcation line between them and us. Kate and I that night were them. Gabe defended his faith and his culture. Again, good for him.

Fast forward to a Hanukkah at our house a year or so later. My knee replacement had just happened. I was home but medicated, morphine. Big pain.

As Ruth and Gabe went through the stack of presents on the coffee table, I was hit with a sudden wave of despair. What was I doing here? Why was I celebrating Hanukkah? I’m a Christmas guy. How did I let myself get into this?

The same kind of holiday dysphoria, I think, that Gabe experienced on the Polar Express. Huh. What goes around, comes around.

Since that moment, which passed as the morphine went away and the knee healed, I’ve realized the exasperated finger needed to point back at myself. Both incidents indicated a deep longing, a childhood longing, for a holiday I knew as mine.

I love Santa Claus, twinkling lights, hot chocolate, candy canes. And, yes, the Christmas Tree. I don’t love the hassle of the Christmas Tree or the materialistic orgy. No. That was easy to leave behind. What are the presents for anyhow? Proof of love? What kid needs that? Or, at least, what kid should need that?

The whole mishmash of mistaking parental love for the giving of gifts let me walk away from Christmas. Kate helped of course because she got tired of decorating MY Christmas Tree. Can’t blame her for that.

I don’t need the whole crass side of Christmas. Neither do you, I imagine. Maybe nobody does.

But. Boy, do I need the songs and the lights and all that stuff about Santa and the North Pole. And, the Tree. This year I’m going to pick a Lodgepole in our yard as my Christmas Tree. No, I’ll not cut it down. Maybe I’ll find a living Evergreen Tree to have inside, a small one.

Its that Evergreen connection that makes religious sense. Evergreen, a resurrected God. See? I’ll continue this, but I want to post now, so I can get breakfast before my time with the ancient ones.

Music, Myth and Story, Politics, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

The Plastic Hour

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Fall: RBG Moon, Mars, Orion, and Venus in the morning sky

Friday gratefuls: Savannah, nurse at Cherry Hills. Dr. Gustave. Sandy, the nurse anesthetist. Right eye cut and healing. Zeiss. Alan. The intraocular lens. Those who invented, designed, and made it. Annie and Sarah. Kate, her wrist calming down. Carne asada from Tony’s.

Right eye patched. I see Dr. Gustave today at 10:30. A familiar routine. Even with the right eye still dilated, I can see the words I type with clarity. Not before, not without glasses. And, even then, fuzzy,

I feel younger. Silly? Yeah, but I feel it anyhow. I’m ready for a bonus round with life.

Wondered what it meant to have Johnny Nash, the singer of “I Can See Clearly Now”, die in between the surgery on my left eye and the right one.

Checking on the idiot. Give me a sec. OMG. He’s worse. Prosecute Biden and Obama. A rally in Florida on Sunday. Won’t debate virtually. Going out in public when he should still be in quarantine. No boundaries. No sense. Aarrggh.

George Packer writes for the Atlantic. In the Plastic Hour, he wrote himself into hope after dispirited articles: “We are living in a failed state”, “Failure is a Contagion”. and, “The President is winning his war on American institutions.” He’s brilliant and has a feel for this time we’re in. Recommended. And, if you read it, what do you think?

Aging, Dreams, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Springtime of the Soul

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Thoracentesis. Valet who got our car from a distant garage. The imaging employee who found an unused machine for Kate’s catscan. Phase two of the three stage plan done. Remembering to take out the blue foam. Clear vision. Michaelmas yesterday. Cool morning.

Michaelmas. The Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael, he of Lucifer ejecting mythic fame. God’s great warrior. Also the name of the first term in British colleges and universities.

But best of all, the springtime of the soul. Rudolf Steiner. The growing season has finished. The external world had its glorious moment at the Fall Equinox, the celebration of the harvest. The body will be fed.

We turn our attention inward after Michaelmas. The nights grow longer, the angle of the sun shortens, and the days grow cold. Courage and sadness. A touch of melancholy encouraged.

When we drove down the hill yesterday, golden leaved Aspens had burst out among the Lodgepole Pine green. Framed by a typical clear blue Colorado sky the beauty made me gasp.

The beauty, the chill in the air. We know its brevity, like the beauty of the young. Those Aspen speak from the sides of Black Mountain, Conifer Mountain, Shadow Mountain. We are done now. Good bye. See you on the flip side. Their golden glamor a farewell to summer.

We know it. Many falls. The outrageous, over the top color of a Midwestern fall. The remnant of the Big Forest, the one that stretched from the east Coast to the Plains. Before the modern era a squirrel could travel tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Great Plains without ever touching the ground. So much melancholy in those colors, the abstract landscapes of a vivisectioned ecosystem.

Piles of Leaves in the yard, on the Forest floor. Running, jumping, landing in the piles. Dogs racing into them, through them. Do you remember, as I do, burning Leaves in the street? An acrid smell combining with earthy wetness. A strong seasonal memory.

One day soon Winds driven by the Cold slumping down from the Arctic will strip them all, Maple, Oak, Ironwood, Elm, Ash, Locust, Hickory, Sycamore, dislodge their Leaves and the tree naked against the coming winter. The Aspen gold rush will disappear and only the ghostly gray-white of their Trunks and Branches will remain.

A woman I learned ritual craft from thought this denuding of the deciduous Trees might explain Samain and the Celtic belief that the veil thinned between this world and the next during the transition.

Kate’s sister Sarah married Jeremiah Miller. A painter. Before I met her, Kate bought two of his very large paintings. One hangs in our bedroom. In it the Sky is a gunmetal blue and its complement of cumulus Clouds show as reflections in a Pond. Both Sky and Pond show through a Forest of bare Trunks and Branches, a before Winter comes scene we see all year.

This turn of the Great Wheel follows the gradual waning of the Light until the longest Night, the Winter Solstice. What better time for introspection, for the Soul to rise?

May this season of the Soul’s Springtime give you what you need for the next months and years of your journey, your ancientrail.

Aging, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Friends, GeekWorld, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Minnesota, Mussar, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Paying the Price

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Monday gratefuls: Groveland. The Ancient Ones. The ancientrails of wondering and friendship. The Darkness. The Stars, now steady. Kate’s stoma site. Getting clear and healthy. Kate. Just Kate, always Kate. Exposure. Fear. 28 degrees this a.m. The Gold in them thar Hills: Aspen. Magwa, the hero Rat. The clan.

So what happens to me. I over prepare. I go deep but the subject has only so much time. I’m disappointed. Did I give them anything? Did I intervene too little? Was I defensive? Will they want me back? Especially yesterday with It’s Beyond Me.

Zoom of course. Perhaps my choice of style, a discussion rather than a straight presentation. The inherent ambiguity of the topic. Felt off when it finished.

Also, I need this. I need to try something new. Learn something new. Be in this zoom moment as an actor, not only a passive observer.

Watched Social Dilemma on Netflix. The second of three documentary recommendations from the ancient ones. Again, not much new. Still, disturbing. I’m writing this in Firefox, using duckduckgo as my search engine. I practice good hygiene on Facebook and still love the old friends and Irish Wolfhounds. I heard the young, bright manipulators, but did not hear the path forward. Unless it’s regulation. Which is a duh unless you hate regulation as evil government intervention. I’m for it.

As I changed Kate’s bandage yesterday, we talked. I’m wondering how we can lift ourselves out of, or away from, this medicalization? I mean, I don’t want to see you as a patient all the time, but with all these appointments and treatments, it’s hard. Our life is not that. Yet, it is.

Right then, Rabbi Jamie called, wondering how Kate was? She mentioned this thought I’d just had. He listened. He had some time before Yom Kippur and wanted to connect with some folks. They miss us. We’ve been absent even from zoom mussar for over a month.

Covid. Makes all this hard. Kate can’t go to Patchworkers or Needleworkers. We don’t go to mussar at CBE. Or, services. Or the occasional program. It will soon be Sukkot and the booth is up, but we’re not there to participate. Yes, this is life now. Yes, it has its price.

God, this is cheery.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Health, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Torah, Writing

Unanswerable Questions.

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Orion, clear and distinct, like Descartes wanted his ideas. The night sky, visible again! Meatloaf from Easy Entrees. Learning to sleep all night on my side. The lens in my left eye. Kate, waiting for relief. Ruth will watch Kiss the Ground. Groveland wanting to hear me again after all these years. It’s Beyond Me.

Three days post-op now. Biggest surprise so far was Orion, there. No longer several bursting flares, but his own, distinct self. Rigel there, too, his left foot, bright and clear. Ah. It’s good to see an old friend looking well.

I no longer need glasses for television. But, I did order three pair of 2.5 cheaters off Amazon. I can still read now with my right eye, but that goes away on the 8th of October. With the artificial lens I can’t focus anymore.

This surgery is such a good metaphor I wonder why it’s not deployed more often. Our vision gradually becomes clouded, the world becomes less and less easy to see. What do we need to remove our political cataracts and gain a humane vision? Those cataracts that have developed over years of lesser evils and disappointing politicians. Do we all come with the cataracts of racism and classism or do we develop them over time? Who will be our surgeons?

Shifting. It’s Beyond Me. I’ve had fun gathering answers to Groveland UU’s question: What are the origins of religious beliefs?

Finding an anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, has worked on the subject pleased me. He’s a cognitive anthropologist, a specialty that had little footing when I studied anthropology back in the late 1960’s. They study the way our mind shapes our understanding, rather than the understandings themselves. Whitehouse’s work is bloodless, but it has high points.

This presentation has to be a discussion. It asks an unanswerable question, my favorite kind. Each of us has an intuition about the answer. It will be interesting to learn what others have concluded. I have several notions to throw into the pot, but the answer is lost in the long ago, far away.

Doing presentations is a delight. I get to do research. I get to think about a topic. My ideas and conclusions get an airing. Feedback comes. On occasion cash, too.

It’s also unsettling. The research has to stop. The thinking must end. No matter how tentative, the ideas must be articulated. Exposed. Naked. And, in person.

My work doesn’t include the realm of the certain. I cannot say what the origin of religion is. No one can. Then I here Wittgenstein, of that about which we cannot speak, we must be silent. I only speak about such matters. A challenge, for sure.

So right now I’m anxious, teeth a bit clenched. Zoom adds another layer of uncertainty. Also a layer of experiment, of trying something new.

Aging, Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Courage and Sadness

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Mabon (Vernal Equinox) and the RBG Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Kate resolving the missing $5,500.Rigel eager to get up this morning. Orion in the south. Mars in the west. Venus in the east. Sirius in the southeast. Small bursts of color. The Great Wheel, turning.

The vernal equinox. When the night hours increase. Daylight shortens. Crops come to fruit. The Earth begins to gather back to itself the plants that grew in fields and meadows.

The Elk rut. That strange strangled cry of the bugling bull Elk. The cough of the mountain lion as they hunt in the dawn and twilight. Bears in their hyperphagia phase (a new word for me), 20,000 calories a day. Preparation for hibernation. Upturned trash cans, detritus on the roads.

Orion returns to the night sky. Getting the paper while feeding the dogs. In the dark now. Seeing the stars. Or, rather, their cataract driven explosions of light.

Earth/Sky, a favorite website, has a fascinating short article about the Chinese sense of autumn. This observation I found significant: “…it’s part of Chinese culture to maintain and add to ancient wisdom. In contrast, we in the Western world tend to replace old ideas with new ideas. So – although our Western way of thinking encourages advances in things like technology and economics – the Chinese understanding of natural cycles remains far deeper than ours.”

The emotions associated with autumn for the Chinese, courage and sadness, rise in full measure this 2020 harvest season. Sad. The feeling of Leaves falling, Grasses withering, light diminishing, the Sun’s angle shortening. RBG’s tzaddik death. The pandemic. Our beleaguered and chaotic nation. Isolation and its discontents. Courage. Facing the election, doing what’s necessary. Mourning, then fighting. Going on as the Vegetative world dies, changes. Living with the pandemic instead of in spite of it. Leaning into the third phase for those of us old hippies and radicals still here.

The Great Wheel is ancient Western knowledge. I have chosen to maintain it and, I hope, add to it. As the Earth/Sky article notes: “To the Chinese, nature means more than just the cycling of the seasons. Nature is within and around us…” It used to meant that in the West, too, but our emphasis on reason, on results, on arriving at destinations, on a monotheistic creator who controls nature, have become mature cataracts for us, occluding our vision.

We see what we believe useful. We find the laws of nature, then proceed to own them, use them. This gives us the impression that, like magic or miracles, we can control nature. The rapid warming of our planet gives the lie to that.

I’m neither a Luddite nor anti-reason, anti-science. I am sad about what we’ve lost in our rush to understand and after having understood, manipulate.

I find comfort in knowing as autumn comes to the Rockies, it has also come to me. My life has matured, has headed for the fallow season, the long season in which I return those borrowed elements, become again one with the universe. Though of course I’m one with it now, too.

Which makes me feel the turning of the wheel, it tugs on me, pulls me toward not only death, but also spring. The cyclical renewal. Who knows? Maybe autumn prepares us not for annihilation, but transformation and renewal. It does for Mother Earth. Why not us?

Aging, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Getting to 5781

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Kate. Always Kate. The night sky. Venus. Life on Venus? Rigel. Kep. Deb from on the move fitness. Her grief. The new workout. Cool morning. Mountain Waste. Rage, by Woodward. The internet. DSL. The Gift on Netflix. Borgen, too. Dark sky spots in Colorado: Dinosaur National Monument. Great Sand Dunes. Westcliffe. Black Canyon of the Gunnison. More.

Up early for the Clan call, forgot to post yesterday. Forgetting is rare, but it happened. Mary, Mark, Diane. Singapore, Riyadh, San Francisco. The wonders of our age. In real time, no lag other than the one I understand Zoom introduces to create smooth conversation.

Kate didn’t feel up to it. The pleura effusion continues to create problems for her. She now has some pain in her right chest, the side of the effusion. No imaging study scheduled yet, but she’s going to call today. It makes her shortness of breath worse, restricting her movement.

Some sleeplessness for me Sunday night. Wondering where things were headed with Kate. Rumination. Not my usual fare at night. Not for a long time.

We decided not to see Amber this week at Advanced Wound Care. We needed a quiet week. No medical appointments. With my upcoming cataract surgery I’ll have a few of my own.

As the Labor Day Moon wanes, it moves us toward the High Holidays. The Jewish lunar calendar starts each new month on a new moon, Rosh Chodesh. The head of the month. Rosh Hashanah, head of the year. Each new year celebrates the creation of Adam and Eve according to legend.

Since 2020, based on the Gregorian Calendar, has sucked, I recommend choosing 5781. No more of that 2020.

Got a new workout yesterday from Deb Brown. She lost her husband, Dave, to glioblastoma in the midst of early lockdown. I hear Dave’s voice often, I told her. I love to teach deadlift technique. Hold that band out from your chest as long as you can. She hears it, too, she said. Only louder and a lot.

We met on Zoom. A little clunky for this purpose, but it worked. The exercises: goblet squat, flat bench press, dipper, staggered stance row on stability ball, bicep curl, skullcrusher, stability ball prone back extension, plank, 1 leg balance with transverse step.

I like switching up my workout every six to eight weeks. It helps keep me interested, but more important, it changes up muscle use. Muscles don’t become acclimated to the routine.

Easy Entree tonight. Cod in a white wine and tomato sauce.

And, a trip to Happy Camper this morning.

Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Memories, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Travel, US History, World History

Still alive in my heart

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The Ancient friends. Health. Healthspan. Working out. Cool weather. Low humidity and dewpoint. Extreme fire weather. Rain yesterday and Friday. Stress.

Drifting to sleep, roaming places that reached into my heart. In no particular order:

Delos, the small Greek island where Apollo and Artemis were born

Delphi, home to the Delphic Oracle in the Temple of Apollo

Ephesus, the most complete Roman city I’ve seen. Near Patmos. The grave of John the Evangelist is there. Maybe.

The Chilean Fjords. 120 miles of islands, ocean, and glaciers.

Ushuaia. The furthest south city in the Americas.

Angkor Wat, temples of the Khmer devi-rajas, God-Kings.

The Maglev train in Korea

The Forbidden City and the Great Wall

Pompeii

The Uffizi

The Sistine Chapel

Inverness, Scotland

St. Deniol’s Residential library

Winifred’s Holy Well

Cahokia

Chaco

Lake Superior

Northern Minnesota

Shadow Mountain and its neighbors

Manhattan

The Cloisters

Bangkok’s China Town and its night restaurants on the sidewalks

Minneapolis and St. Paul

The Panama Canal

Oaxaca

Mexico City: the zocalo and Garibaldi Square and Xochimilco and the Anthropology Museum

Merida

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Myth and Story, Politics, Third Phase, US History

A Second Act

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Kate. Amber. Rigel. Kep. Cool morning. The Pandemic. Trump. BLM. Prostate cancer. Lung disease. Sjogren’s. CBE. Mussar. Tara. Electric cars. The dying of the extractive fossil fuel industries. Climate change. The Book of Revelation.

Predicting the end of the world is a parlor game played by intellectuals and cranks. It never fails to terrify, alarm, or make someone laugh. Think of all the cartoons with the bearded man and the sign: The End is Near.

Apocalypse. It’s hard to put the word aside these days: Murder Hornets, Covid, Trump, Climate Change (remember climate change?), that asteroid, Hurricane Laura. It has me checking the clouds for a guy in a flowing robe and an angry tilt to his eyebrows.

Remember 2012? Y2K? The first models of what the Coronavirus might do? Evangelicals support Israel because they think it will encourage the second coming. No, really.

Instead, I hear T.S. Eliot, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” Our sense of drama wants, needs a bang, but I’d say the most likely scenario for the end of humanity comes after centuries of an Earth made too hot for us by our own actions. A self-destructive species, us Humans.

You’ll probably not guess where I’m going with this. It means to me that our nation will survive the Donald, will take him, the pandemic, even the Asteroid and murder Hornets, and recreate ourselves.

There may be no second acts in America, but I believe there will be a second act for America. The last four years, colored even darker by the “if it were fiction, it wouldn’t be believable.” nature of the last few months, have had certain oddly positive effects.

The racist (and, classcist) strands in our history have been written clearly in blood and anger. Black Lives Matter and its counter protesters in the alt-right have put on a medieval morality play in cities across the country. See Kenosha. Portland. Minneapolis. The reactions of police and the denizens of the right-wing demimonde have clarified what’s at stake for our nations future. I believe we will see positive policy changes in cities and in our nation, especially after the election.

The orange excrescence has performed a similar service for the small d democrats here. Who are, I believe, most of us on the left and right. We now know how important not only the constitutional nature of our government is, but the norms and traditions it has developed over 200 years of history as well.

That’s why I’m seeing a sign on a Brookforest yard that reads: I’m a Republican, but I’m no Fool: Vote Biden. That’s why all those national security folks have gone on record as supporting Trump. Even George Bush. George Will. Many other prominent members of what used to be the GOP.

We will have an opportunity, if we choose to take it, to reimagine this nation. Our founding documents and our founders will play a strange role in this reimagining.

That 3/5th’s “compromise.” Sally Hemmings. All those George Washington owned slaves. The white, male, property owner requirement for voting. Not who we want or need to be anymore. Let them now live on as the sins of the fathers that were visited on our generation, but finally expiated.

I’ve taken mild liberties with the text, but this should serve as a template for the next four years:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men of us are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men all men and women, 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.

We gray beards and gray heads have a role to play in this exciting time. Just what it is, I’m not sure, but it has something to do with insisting on our better natures. Will you join me as we search for Rumi’s field out beyond right and wrong?

Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Remarkable

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Monday gratefuls: Feeling loved. Ruth. Jon. Gabe. Chuck roast in the instapot. Pull apart good. The Maids coming tomorrow. The cool nights. Having the lawn furniture up closer to the house. The Ancient Ones. The duckling rescue. The heart of Bill Schmidt. The openness of Mark Odegard. The sensitivity of Tom Crane. The doggedness of Paul Strickland. My buddies for over thirty years.

Remarkable. Yesterday was remarkable. That is, I will re-mark it again and again as a special day. Let me tell you why.

Ducklings in the sewer. When I meet on zoom with my ancient friends, mentioned above, Tom, Bill, Mark, and Paul, we have a topic chosen by each of us in a rotation. Yesterday was Bill’s day and he gave us this song to investigate, especially it’s lyrics.

This was his prompt: “Bob Dylan is an insightful writer/singer.  Here’s a link to his song, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and the lyrics are attached in a pdf file. It was released in early 1965 and every verse is for this time, right now.  Listen, reflect, and share.  Hi light for us any part of this song that says something to you.”

It’s the task of the topic creator to sort of gently guide the discussion, so it was strange when Bill didn’t show up on the call. When we’d all popped up on the screen except Bill, Tom told us Bill had called and said he had discovered a distraught duck mother quacking and looking into a sewer grate. 6 of her ducklings had fallen into the storm sewer.

Bill. I called 911. I said this, This isn’t an emergency, but it’s important. A bit later three trucks and six men show up. A fire and rescue truck among them.

These men didn’t quit. They took the sewer grate off, climbed down. Meanwhile, I talked to the duck mother, tried to calm her down. Eventually I sat down on the curb beside her.

They got five ducklings up and returned them to the mother, who then stopped quacking and waddled off with what she thought was all of her ducklings.

No. I hear another one. One of the rescue guys. One of the ducklings had gone the opposite way from the others, sewer drain pipes lead off in both directions. I hear him. I’ll get him. They flushed out the sixth duckling.

When they got out of the sewer, the mother had disappeared. Four of them took the sixth duckling and began searching for the mother to reunite them all. They found her.

Bill made it back to his apartment before we finished and told us this story. What you do to the least of these, you do unto me. Yes. Bill. Yes.

The mailbox. Jon installed our new mailbox. It took an hour plus, but he worked away at it. I helped a little bit, but not much. My help really consisted of trying to get the old one removed. I told you yesterday how that turned out.

This morning I went out to get the Denver Post, an every morning jaunt. The new mailbox was there and I opened the road facing door. Was it smooth? Yes. It was.

Oh, wait. What’s that? There were two cloth bags inside it, one labeled grandma and the other grandpop. I put Kate’s at her place at the table and brought my bag upstairs with me.

Inside it were several small items. A Donald Duck stuffed animal, a Pokemon card, a picture of a smiling gap toothed man glued to a piece of paper, a small iron coyote baying at the moon, a bracelet, and, a piece of lined note paper.

Ruth. Dear Grandpop, I wanted to do something for you that would help to brighten your day and mood. I collected and made all of these things to make you happy. I made the bracelet of these colors because they reminded me of the sun which I think of as a very bright and happy thing in our solar system, so I hope that when you see it you will feel happy.

Her note goes on this spirit. She found the coyote in a box of her special things, Donald Duck was her favorite Disney Character. “I figured he could be your buddy in the loft.”

“I hope this brightens your day, and mood! Love, Ruthie.” How about my life? She’s brightened it from the beginning.

As I said, a remarkable day.