Yearly Archives: 2017

Art and Culture, Colorado, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Jefferson County, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Park County, Shadow Mountain, The Move, The West, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Coloradan

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

No snow. 10% humidity. A spate of small wildfires. Result: stage 1 fire restrictions put in place by Jeffco. In February. Winter has gone on holiday and the outlook for summer is fiery if we don’t get more moisture in March and April. Like death, oddly, I find the whole wildfire possibility invigorating. It motivates me to work on our lodgepole pine and aspen and it brings those of us who live in the mountains closer together. A common foe.

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Lodgepole pine. From our bedroom window I look out and up to a jagged line of tree tops. On clear nights stars often align with the tops of the pines, giving them a decorated for Christmas look. Sometimes stars also align with branches further down, emphasizing the effect.

Which reminds me. Monday or Tuesday night of this week I looked up at the pines, as I often do before falling asleep. They were lit up with what looked like lightning bugs. What? The phenomena went on for quite a while, small specks of light flashing off and on. Obviously in February and up here on Shadow Mountain, no lightning bugs. A complete mystery.

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While waiting on the Rav4 to finish its spa day at Stevinson Toyota I spent some time considering whether I had become a Coloradan yet. First thing. I left my prostate and significant portions of my left knee in Colorado. No flowers in my hair, but I do feel I’ve contributed in a meaningful, whole body sort of way. Then, living in the mountains. Everyday. Learning the rhythms of mountain seasons, the wildlife, the vast number of hikes and sights and sites to see. And we’re adjusted to life at 8,800 feet. A very Colorado and mountain thing.

Of course, there are Jon and Ruth and Gabe, family links to schools, synagogues, sports, life as a child in the Centennial State. Our dogs, too, as Dr. Palmini said, are mountain dogs now. Due to the spate of mountain lion attacks on dogs in the last month or so, I have a concern for their safety that is very Coloradan. In fact I bought a powerful LED flashlight and have my walking stick ready to do battle with a mountain lion if necessary.

Kings Peak near us 4 pm 12 29
Kings Peak near us 4 pm 12 29

Congregation Beth Evergreen, in addition to a religious community, also facilitates ties with people who live up here like the lawyer, Rich Levine, we saw last week. Many others, too. Kate has integrated quickly thanks to the two sewing groups she belongs to: Bailey Patchworkers and the Needlepointers. Her integration helps mine.

The town of Evergreen has many great restaurants, as does Morrison. We go to jazz and theater in Denver.

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That’s the coming to Colorado part of the story. The other is my relationship to Minnesota. Of course there are the Wooly friends, especially Tom, Mark and Bill and the docent friends, many of whom I connect with through Facebook, but also through visits, e-mails, the occasional phone call. Those connections are still strong, even though attenuated by distance.

Minnesota will always occupy a large, 40-year space in my heart. That’s a long time, enough to become home. So many memories, good ones and bad ones. But, it is just that now, a 40-year space in my heart. I do not want to return. Life is here, now, and that, more than anything else, tells me that, yes, I have become and am a Coloradan.

 

Colorado, Family, The Move

Velveteen Rabbit in Reverse

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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

Kate and I spent yesterday packing up the last of Jon’s dishes and books at his old house on Pontiac Street near Stapleton. We worked together as a good team, except for that last minute dispute about art. The process brought back memories of getting ready to make our move out here, memories that are still fresh enough to make moving again anytime soon very unlikely.

velveteen rabbit

There’s something sad about finishing up packing in a now empty house. The physical structure goes through a Velveteen Rabbit moment in reverse. Once real, once a  home, now it returns to just a house. Its walls soon to have someone else’s art. Its floors to have someone else’s furniture. Its kitchen to have new cooks. The backyard will have different plants.

Over the weekend Jon and some friends will move furniture, the stuff in the shed, the boxes Kate and I packed to a storage unit. On Monday the deal closes and the keys will go to the new owner, a mechanical engineer. That will finish up the house as a sticking point in the marital dissolution. I hope.

We’ve been at this with Jon since last May. Jon and I went out for supper to a Mexican place in Aurora near his school. He said, “Jen and I are getting divorced.” Oh. My. First I’d heard of or suspected it. Since then Jon’s had a very rough experience. Nine months later it’s still tough for him. With the possibility of a new home purchase now that the Pontiac house has sold I hope he’ll find his attention diverted to making a place anew for him and Ruth and Gabe.

Valparaiso, Chile 2011
Valparaiso, Chile 2011

He spends a lot of time drawing new houses on graph paper utilizing shipping containers for various rooms, new structures. He’s got a lot of skills and will be able to take an older house and transform it into something beautiful. That’s one of the sad parts about pulling away from Pontiac. He redid the upstairs himself, including two bathrooms, one in which he installed a walk-in, tiled shower. He also built beds for Ruth and Gabe. He created several closets in a house that previously had little storage. He finished the kitchen, built a dining room table and counters out of old bowling alley wood and put in a productive garden.

Soon, sooner I hope, he’ll be able to do that work on a house of his own, touching here and there and making it real. Making it a home.

GeekWorld

A Blessing and a Curse

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

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Computers. As in biblical covenants, they are a blessing and a curse. A blessing, usually, when they work and a curse when they don’t. I bought a new computer because this old Gateway has begun to disappoint me regularly. However, setting up a new computer is a chore, requiring much hemming and hawing (at least for me), so when this old computer (a new TV show! This Old Computer) came back to life, I put off installing the new one.

The Gateway is well over six years old, maybe seven. Desktops have a lifespan and I’m past it with this one. When the screens started going blank on me yesterday, I thought, well, that’s what you get for not setting up the new computer. Problem being, though, that without access to this one, the Gateway, it’s a lot harder to set up the new one. So, I spent a while this morning searching for answers.

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Don’t know if I found one, but it has not happened again. So far. Most problems on a computer have been encountered many times before so if you type into google a description of what’s going on, things to try usually appear. I tried all of the obvious ones, then tried uninstalling the video card driver and reinstalling it by rebooting. This bothered me a bit because the ongoing and seemingly intractable problem for this old computer was an occasional unwillingness to stop playing with itself after rebooting, just that little windows circle that means, I’m working.

Got it back, finally, after three reboots. In computing, at least at my level of knowledge (small), the definition of insanity-trying the same thing and hoping for  different results-does not apply. I keep trying until things go my way. Or, they don’t. So far, most of the time, crazy as it sounds, this approach works.

The lesson here? Setup the new computer. Right away.

 

Politics, US History

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis?

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Well. That happened. The 70’s.

I remember that decade as a time where great rock went to die and when the movement began to decline. The reaction against the cultural revolution, hippies and back to the land and free sex and rock and roll and feminism and black power, began to gain momentum. Last year, on November 8th, we saw the culmination of that fulmination. And, it’s ugly.

I’ve asked myself many times in the intervening years whether the 60’s were a mistake, a wrong turn, excess turned into a political rationale. There is no easy answer. Yes, excesses were common, drugs and sex in particular. Some of them though pushed us past the traditional barriers erected by our parents and the people in power. Those excesses allowed us to fight a weighty establishment which had sat on freedom for women, for blacks, even for soldiers caught in a miserable foreign policy, for decades and in some cases centuries.

Today we have the revenge of the cis-gender, straight, white, males and their allies. Shunted aside in the rush for liberty from traditional sexual and racial mores, these folks heard a man who claimed to understand their situation. To them, making America great again meant a return to a time of unconscious and unearned privilege, a time when they had good jobs and could support their families.

As I’ve written here before, how you define is how you solve. These folks see globalization and line-jumping as the primary source of their woes. Not that simple. Automation turns out to be the culprit. We’re manufacturing more than ever before; we’re just doing it with many fewer employees. Shaming corporations into leaving plants here will not do the trick, neither will tariffs on imports. We need a complete rethink of work, of the social safety net, of our common obligations to each other.

If we consider the 60’s as the thesis and the 50 years or so since then as the antithesis, we may now be moving toward the synthesis. That, I hope, is what the next decade or so will bring. I’d love to see the new culture arising from this dialectical struggle, so I hope it begins to take shape before I die.

Family, Garden, Shadow Mountain, Woolly Mammoths

Three Score and Ten

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Imbolc                                                                             Valentine Moon

Got a birthday card yesterday. 70, it said, in large numerals. Wow. A new decade begun under a three quarters Valentine Moon.

vintage-valentine-with-swans

We finally got around to having our estate plan updated yesterday. We saw Rich Levine, a member of Beth Evergreen. We wanted to know whether our documents needed any changes to make them comply with Colorado law. “The law is very good with dead people,” he said, “Everybody dies and we inherited English common law.” He meant there was a significant body of law already in place about death and how to tidy up after it. “So, the good news is that most documents are good across states. Yours are fine.” They just need a codicil here or there.

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Health care directives are a different matter. There, state law differs, so he’ll have new ones drafted for us. Kate asked about right to die since Colorado enacted it last year.
“It requires two doctors to certify that you have a medical situation that qualifies, so there’s nothing we can do about preplanning for that.”

All good stuff to get done as I join Kate in the 70’s. Yes, we wink out at some point, as Rich said, “Everybody dies.” I find the certainty of death and its relative closeness invigorating.

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Over the years, with so many dogs, so many of them Irish Wolfhounds who die very young, I’ve come to treasure each moment with each one of them. I know they won’t be with us forever. Of course, there’s sadness associated with that, but there’s also an incredible intimacy that comes from sharing their time with us, knowing we will see their death. I’ve begun, of late, to transfer that awareness to myself, to Kate, to the time we have left with our grandchildren, children and friends. This awareness is visceral, felt in the deepest part of the heart, and so valuable.

My 70th decade will find that awareness grow and become more and more a guide to my life. I know it.

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Literature, Politics, Science, US History

An Endangered Species

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Imbolc                                                                               Valentine Moon

Let’s call alt-facts what they are: propaganda. Psychological warfare against our own citizens. Though specific attacks on the environment, refugees, people of color and regulations keeping rapacious financiers at bay are horrible, an assault on the nature of truth is deadly.

How can we keep a political dialogue going if facts are subject to derision and distortion and obfuscation? The tobacco/cancer link deniers, the pesticide purveyors, the climate change deniers, the colorful and varied tweets of our Twitler, his outright lies about his inauguration crowd and the massive voter fraud and his distance from his businesses are all instances of outright deception, propaganda presented as fact.

Facts are, of course, subject to interpretation and reasonable people can disagree about their implications. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is changing the facts, ignoring them, hiding them (see the Whitehouse website, for example). Our democracy cannot survive a buffet attitude toward the truth.

I’m not sure that the Trump folks even know the difference between facts and lies. Their ideology or their venal natures may allow them to see only what they want to see. Whatever it is, I hope we can work as a nation to protect truth-sayers, fact-gatherers, lie confounders. Science is a conspiracy, yes, a conspiracy to understand the nature of reality.

So, hard as it is for many to fathom, are the humanities. In studying literature, philosophy, theater, language, cinema we gain the tools to separate fact from fiction. Critical thinking may be the most powerful tool we have in fighting the rise of a nationalist fascism. Critical thinking is taught in the humanities. In them we also learn the value of fiction, when it can enlighten us, when it can deceive us.

Right now facts and the truth they undergird need protection under the Endangered Species act.

Family, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate, Writing

Dry

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Imbolc                                                                            Valentine Moon

I’m finding myself dry today. Starting and restarting topics, not settling into flow. Yesterday was busy and I missed my post. I also didn’t get my 750 words in on Superior Wolf though I did get my workout in at 6 am. Missed my newly started Latin work, too. Rhythm, for me, is critical to long term projects and rhythm needs consistency, even missing a day can disrupt a hitherto productive schedule.

Ruth in a
Ruth in the hat

There are matters more important than productivity. Quite a few of them. Two of them showed up here on Friday night: Ruth and Gabe. Yesterday morning saw me at Beth Evergreen twice, once earlier and once for a wonderful seder for Tu B’shevat. After that, it was nap time.

Gabe at his concert
Gabe at his concert

Following the nap Kate and I took Ruth into Denver for a birthday party for her buddy, Augie. They did parkour. Before taking her to the party, however, she and Ruth went shopping at Joann Fabrics. They found material to complete her costume for her Destination Imagination play. She’s the main character, a dragon. They also found cloth for Renaissance Festival costumes. Kate, Ruth, Gabe and I are going to dress up and go. Ruth wants to be a wealthy medieval woman. Gabe will be a version of Robin Hood. I’m leveraging my sparse white hair and white beard for the role of a wizard. Kate, I’m not sure what she’s going to do.

After dropping Ruth off at Augie’s home in the new urbanism shaped grounds of the former Stapleton Airport, Kate and I went to the New York Deli for supper. Kate had her favorite, chicken noodle soup with a matzo ball and I had the featured dinner, corned beef and cabbage with new potatoes. This place is an authentic Jewish deli and is a mile-high city branch of a deli of the same name in New York. In fact, their baked goods are still made in New York and flown frozen to the Denver location. They believe New York City tap water is the key to good flavor in their bagels and bread.

It was raining in Denver and in the 60’s. By the time we reached Shadow Mountain it was 32 degrees and snowing. It was good to be home.

 

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History, World History

Interesting Times

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Imbolc                                                                     Valentine Moon

I’ve been reading a lot. Still. Always. A lot of my recent reading has focused on politics. Surprise! There is no simple analysis, but certain outlines have become clearer to me.

choiceFirst, the main struggle right now, in both Europe and here, is between globalists, people like me, and blood and soil nationalists, like Trump’s America First. It’s not an either/or, of course, but most of us tend to lean toward one end of a continuum, more concerned about home or more concerned about the world as a whole.

This split has a geographic manifestation. Globalists tend to live in highly populated metropolitan areas while nationalists tend to live in rural or small town settings. If you can recall the red and blue maps of the recent election, you saw this phenomena in color, lots and lots of red, not so much blue. But, if you put population numbers on the map, the blues exceed the red.

Second, this election and its current aftermath has laid bare a disturbing reality of contemporary America. There are former middle class and working class whites whose lives have been upended by globalization and automation and union busting. When today’s world is seen from within their perspective, it looks both bleak and punishing.

mindthegapThe bleakness is the lack of good-paying jobs for those with less education. The punishment comes from seeing others getting in line ahead of you for the American Dream. This line-jumping (Hochschild’s analysis), as it is perceived by white working class folks, has been created by the left’s very successful focus on identity politics: women’s rights, LGBT rights, civil rights. Put these two together, the bleakness and the punishment, and it’s no wonder we have a reactionary revolt underway, just look at your Facebook feed for proof.

Third, there is an abysmal chasm between the 1% and the 99% and the former methods for upward mobility, especially education, seem to be failing. I say this because much of the asset and income gap can be explained by examining the economic situations of those with college degrees and those without them. This education gap reinforces and sustains the growing imbalance in a world where 5 men have as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population.

white dreamFourth, after reading Hochschild’s book, I’m no longer convinced that a focus on economic policies will adequately address the working class movement toward nationalism. I say this because Strangers in Their Own Land opened my eyes to the cultural values of much of the working class and the huge barrier they present to any kind of political conciliation. The barrier is large enough that Marilyn Saltzman, of Beth Evergreen, and I, discussing the book, wondered if this might lead to civil war.

If you can see the interlocking dynamics among all these points, then you understand the depth of the problem we face as a nation. How will all this playout? I don’t know. In the immediate future, at least four years, much of the work will of necessity be tactical, resisting the most egregious moves of Trump and his gang of mediocres; but, it cannot be only that or the electoral political situation will remain the same or worsen.

Interesting times.