Samain Thanksgiving Moon
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Take Me Out
Summer Moon of the Summer Solstice
Young Tyler, who helped me move slash, plays shortstop for the Conifer High School baseball team. He had to sell Rockies’ tickets as a fund-raiser, so I bought two tickets and took Jon to see the Rockies play the Arizona Diamondbacks.It felt very American to park, climb out of the underground lot to follow Dads and sons with baseball mitts, intense fans with jerseys of their favorite players, young couples holding hands and pass on-street vendors with cheap coolers filled with bottled water.
The brick facade of Coors Field has a retro feel. Oddly, this twenty-one year old baseball field is the third oldest in the National League.
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack. A contemporary fillip added to the experience is the presence of metal scanners, uniformed security personnel and small plastic holders for phone and keys. Jihad and the great American past time.
The promenade behind the lower level seats is spacious, dotted with kiosks and vendors: extreme hotdogs, Denver cheesesteak, Nathan’s kosher hot dogs, Diamond Drygoods, the Smokehouse, Gyros. A man walks past with a mutton-chop beard and a pale purple Rockies’ jersey open over a white t-shirt, its tails almost below his khaki shorts. The smell of funnel cake, roast Elk brats, popcorn blend with the view toward the green, green grass of home…and second and third.
Jon came by train, the new rail line to DIA runs near his house and goes in the other direction to the Union Depot near Coors Field. A foot-long hot dog and a Denver cheesesteak later the game was underway.
Baseball is a bit slow for my taste, but the total experience, the people watching and the traditional bits like grounds preparation, the first pitch, people streaming in and out, up and down, the sun setting is worth it once in awhile.
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We Love Violence
Imbolc New Valentine Moon
It’s here! It’s here! Superbowl Sunday. Christmas for a certain swath of the population. Chips, cheese, beer, groans and cheers.
Superbowl L. Oh, wait. They’re going with Superbowl 50. Abandoning the pretentious Roman numerals. Why? I imagine, too confusing. Superbowl L what? La de da? Laredo? Last?
The fan base is doing their predictably silly things. Yesterday in the Denver Post there was a guy with an orange Darth Vader mask. There will be, too, shirtless pot-bellied men slathered with team colors and shouting incoherently. What’s not to love about American football?
Smart money says Colorado weeps this evening as Cam Newton spirals over the Denver D and into Superbowl history. As the football equivalent of a Cubs fan, I still root for the Vikings. Sort of. So I don’t have the emotional investment that, say, grandson Gabe does. As Gabe says, “The Vikings suck! Broncos rule!”
We’ll be at Jon and Jen’s today, couched and snacked, watching CBS collect the fat rolls as the Superbowl commercial competition heats up again. Then, there’ll be the half-time show. With Coldplay? I thought nobody liked Coldplay. And in between all this fun grown, very large men will push each other around, run and jump, pirouette and smash.
And sneaking up on me occasionally will be this notion of professional football as slow motion human sacrifice. As one commentator on the article that used this phrase said about us Americans, “We love violence.”
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Orange and Blue
Yule Stock Show Moon
Orange and blue. Everywhere. The receptionists at Urology Associates on Friday. A couple at Tai Chi yesterday with Bronco’s sweatshirts and sweatpants. All Broncos all the time in the Denver Post and on Denver TV stations. This metro area is Bronconutso. For me it went, Vikings beat Packers. Yeah. Vikings lose to Seahawks. Packers win. Sigh. Packers lose. half hearted yeah. Now – nada. No colors for me. No excitement before the big game. Just NFLost.
A sunny but cool Sunday. Clear air. Sun dogs. Snow that could use some freshening. Very quiet, almost holiday quiet.
Kate and I drove over to Nono’s, one of several very good New Orleans style restaurants. I had the Ragin’ Cajun, grits and eggs. The place had pushed together tables, one with adults and the other with their kids. Noisy. Also why we never want to live in an age-segregated community. No vitality. Sun Zombie City.
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Fortuna, Fortuna Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Into Denver to the Village Inn last night to play sheepshead. We had 10 people, so two tables of five which is ideal. Not sure whether I’m more timid in a new group, got bad cards or am just playing poorly, but I got clobbered last night. Disappointed. Let it get to me on the way home. Disappointed in that, too.
Putting it out there like that helps me see the evening more clearly. I go for fun and come back unhappy? Hmmm. Something’s not right there. With my attitude. I do miss my old sheepshead gang, the three ex-Jesuits: Bill, Ed and Dick and the Dorothy Day Catholic, Roy. We had a solid, human bond.
The Village Inn is in Denver, just past I-25 on Colorado Boulevard. It collects loners. A goth girl with a bumper-stickered laptop, a Chinese man and his autistic brother, “I would like 4 crackers. Could I have 4 crackers, please? I need 4 crackers.” A guy with a bad comb over, denim ranch jacket, looking at his philly steak sandwich with careful intent.
It also hosts, on Friday evenings, two different groups of card players, ours and a pinochle, canasta crowd that always has the table set in a small alcove. We end up with a round table, plus a couple of other tables. The atmosphere is one of faint urban desperation decorated with bright colors and cheery waitresses.
The sheepshead crowd is Polish Catholic Church for Wisconsinites and their friends. We come together, talk about the Packers, use German language terms like schneider and maurer, and play this odd game. Could be Milwaukee or Wittenberg or Sturgeon Bay. For two or three hours. Then it’s back to Colorado and Shadow Mountain.
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Sheepshead
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
Forecasts of 16-20 inches didn’t stop me from driving 45 minutes into Denver to play sheepshead. We had vigorous snow showers in the mid-afternoon, then nothing. No snow on the way in though there was heavy snow in southern Denver and in the close burbs coming back at 10:00 pm.
Cards were better for me last night. We had 7 players and 5 handed is the preferred form of the game. We had enough all evening to play it. The dealer and the person to their right sitting out didn’t seem as disruptive last night, partly because we had a round table.
We played for $.10 a point, the first time I’ve played sheepshead for money. When I left at 10 pm, I picked up my dime in winnings and left it on the table as a tip for the waitress. (whom I had tipped when I checked out, too.) That sounds like I didn’t do too well, but the only other player in the plus column was Terry, the Wittenberg, Wisconsin retired dairy farmer. He had 40 points when I left. Everyone one else sat in negative numbers, the best -5. So not too bad.
The drive from Conifer to the Village Inn goes on 4-lane Highway 285 north until Sheridan Avenue, then 285 continues as Hampden Street. It’s also four-lane most of the time, sometimes six, but has stop-lights. I actually enjoy the drive through the metro area, seeing the changing neighborhoods, the different retail and residential configurations.
Once I turn north on Colorado Avenue, the drive gets even more interesting. There is a stretch with several Mediterranean spots: The Marrakech, the Shawirma Palace, The Beirut. Just beyond them are some Asian restaurants including a couple of sushi joints. Colorado is a main street running from Hampden all the way into the northern neighborhoods of Denver.
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Who?
Imbolc Settling Moon II
As the dominant ethos of Minnesota lies in its wild lands to the north, the Boundary Waters Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park emblematic of it, so the dominant ethos of Colorado lies in its wrinkled skin, mountains thrusting up from north to south and from the Front Range to the west. Where Minnesota’s map is essentially flat, marked with depressions filled with either water or wetlands or peat bogs, Colorado’s map is tortured, angular chunks of rock shoved up this way and that, lonely roads tailing off into gulches and canyons and valleys.
These two states share a common theme, wild nature at their core. You may live in these states and never trek in the mountains or visit the lake country; it is possible, but if that is you, then you shun the basic wealth of the land which you call home. In these two states, as in several other western states like Idaho, Washington, Montana, Oregon the political borders that mark them out matter much less than the physical features that define them.
In these places the heart can listen to the world as it once was and could be again. This is a priceless and necessary gift. It may be found in its purest form in the areas designated as wilderness, but these lands participate in wild nature in their totality. Those of us lucky enough to live within them have a privilege known only by occasional journeys to city dwellers. With that privilege comes, as with all privilege, responsibility.
These places which speak so eloquently, so forcefully when seen are silent out of view. On the streets of Manhattan, inside the beltway of Washington, in the glitter of Las Vegas and the sprawl of Los Angeles these places shimmer only in photographs, movie and television representation, books and their power is not in them.
Who will speak for the mountains? Who will speak for the North Woods and its waters? Who will speak for the trees?
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Advancing to Mediocre from Next to Last
Imbolc Settling Moon II
Left Shadow Mountain at 4:30 pm for Denver. It was 49 here. When I got to Denver a half hour later, the temperature was 73. There were guys in shorts and short-sleeved shirts playing golf at a course along Hwy. 285.
After an errand down Santa Fe Drive to the south, I headed back north to Colorado Blvd. S. Went past shawirma joints, sushi places, Mexican of course, into the 1500 block where a 24 hour IHOP sat in a busy parking lot. It was empty.
8 of us from the Sheepshead meetup gathered. I met a woman who grew up in Muncie, Ann. Another older, balder gray haired guy named Jim joined Jeff and me as as the mature male contingent.
My cards were mediocre, but I ended up in the middle of the pack for the evening. That’s up from next to the bottom where I stood last time. The trend is encouraging.
We played until 9:45 or so and the restaurant was empty most of the time, but as 9:00 came and went groups of teenagers came in, Latinos mostly, laughing and looking shyly at each other, the usual awkward courting rituals.
As I drove home, the almost full Settling Moon II moved across the southern sky toward the west, highlighting the mountains as I drove into them, going home.
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A Silvered Boat Afloat on an Ocean of Down
Winter Settling Moon II
Yesterday. Business meeting at the Wildflower Cafe in Evergreen again. The waitress gave us menus, but said, “You probably don’t need to look at them!” Felt good to be recognized.
The drive there and back along our road, variously Brook Forest Road, Black Mountain Drive and Shadow Mountain Drive holds so many beautiful spots: rocky outcroppings covered with snow, distant peaks with snow dusted conifers, homes built from stone and timber, meadows with frost sparkling shrubs. The Rockies here may not have much variation in fall foliage, aspens and hardly anything else, but they change their look with each change in weather. No drive into Evergreen has looked the same. (this house is along Brook Forest Road and sold for $745,000 in 2013)
Afterward I came up here to the loft and began assembling bookshelves. This is an exciting task for me since it moves my library closer to its Shadow Mountain configuration.
We’ve still got a lot to do, hence Settling Moon II, yet this is already home.
Later in the afternoon I headed out to Aurora for sheepshead with a Meetup group, folks I didn’t know: Bill, organizer of the meetup, Ryan, a dad with two young girls, Mark, with a young child and an older stepson living at home and Terry, Mark’s dad, a retired dairy farmer from Wittenberg, Wisconsin who lives in Denver during the winter, Wisconsin during the growing season.
Originally we were to play at Helga’s German Restaurant in Aurora, but it was full, so we moved to an IHOP nearby on Mississippi Avenue. We had to get used to each others’ conventions and playing style. That didn’t take long. The evening went until 9 pm, my current bed time, so I felt like a real Bohemian. Out late, drinking coffee, playing cards.
Fortuna did not smile on me. I had one hand I played alone and lost by one point and another that I buried, but could have had another play it alone hand. I was timid in my play, not usual for me, but new circumstances. Too, each of the others had played since childhood, taught in their families. Lots of good card sense around the table.
The evening though was a winner. I made some new acquaintances whom I liked, laughed often and enjoyed the solitary drive through Denver and back into the mountains. A sickle Settling Moon II had its horns upturned, bright behind clouds that at times made it look like a silvered boat afloat on an ocean of down. A good day.
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The Dawn Wall of Human Insight
Winter Settling Moon
The Dawn Wall climb completed by Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell yesterday collided with some reading I’ve been doing in a book by Arthur Danto titled, What Is Art?
In a later chapter of the book Danto referenced this work by Piero della Francesca, painted in 1460, “The Resurrection.” I knew the painting so the image immediately floated into consciousness and attached itself to Caldwell and Jorgeson emerging at the top of the Dawn Wall, a climb realized by using only their hands and feet. Ropes attached to them were there only to prevent a fatal fall, otherwise this was a human powered, human body only effort.
In Francesca’s painting the human body has failed the guards placed at the tomb. They were there to prevent grave robbers from stealing Jesus’ body and declaring him resurrected. But they fell asleep. Even with the guards asleep it takes a supernatural force to circumvent the tomb.
This all occurs, as we can tell from the pale light creeping up over the hills on the painting’s horizon, at dawn. Countless are the number of sunrise services held to celebrate just this moment.
Coldwell and Jorgeson started at the base of El Capitan on its face that has greeted that same rising sun for aeons, at least 100 million years. Imagine their climb as the literal embodiment of the human spirit rising, on its own terms, to the top, to the summit, of this wall that celebrates the rising sun, the first time this wall has been climbed using hands and feet in 100 million years.
Now imagine El Capitan as the sheer rock face of our human attempt to understand this absurd world into which we were thrown at birth and let the summit represent adequate insight into that question, adequate to guide a life. Supernatural metaphysics posited that we humans must hoist ourselves to the top using pitons and ropes supplied by the supernatural being of our choice. In this analogy Caldwell and Jorgeson represent the humanist, the pagan free-climbing the Dawn Wall of human insight, using only the tools granted to them at birth.
It was this notion that flashed across my mind when reading Danto and considering their feat. Their emergence at the summit of the Dawn Wall overlaid Francesca’s beautiful painting, putting these two climbers in the place of the risen Jesus while blinkered humanity lay asleep below or clung to the cliff tangled up in the ropes of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity.