In the mood for a Bulgarian gardening book?

I stumbled upon Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. His latest book is “Death of the Gardener.” I’d been reading books about gardens. First, I listened to the memoir “In Kiltumpur: A Year in an Irish Garden” by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Then I read on Kindle “First Frost,” which is a magical-realist YA romance by Sarah Addison Allen about waiting for the impending frost on a North Carolina garden. It features an apple tree that blossoms in winter and throws its apples at people he/she/it doesn’t like. Allen also wrote “Garden Spells” which is on my list of Books I Discovered On Kindle That Surprised The Heck Out Of Me (BIDONKTSTHOOM). Allen’s new book will be out in the fall. She writes on her web site that she’s been battling cancer. Cancer comes into a household and changes everything.

Gardening is more than a metaphor for me. I am, or was, a gardener, with Sungold tomatoes and pole beans out back and petunias and four o’clocks in the front. I once tripped and fell head-first into the front garden. It was getting toward autumn and I might have been there until the first frost arrived if the local preacher hadn’t been walking his dog nearby. He is a small man, a cardiac patient too small rescue me from the garden. He roused my tiny wife and she roused our burly neighbor Marco and they set me upright on the porch. My wife asked the obvious question: “What were you doing?” My reply was typical: “Getting a closer look at the coneflowers.” At the time, she was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. She needed a laugh, or so I thought.

But back to Gospodinov’s book. It’s magnificent. A short book about the death of his father the gardener in the town of Y is Bulgaria. It is rich with empathy and sadness but laced with humor. Wit, you might say, humor that doesn’t call attention to itself. The best writers have the gift.

I cried, though, as his father faded away. G is unrelenting of the portrait of his father, a young man who went to the Balkan War and then was a failed entrepreneur and then an aging magnificent gardener at his modest house in Y. The writer gets me to care so much for this simple human who lived a dynamic family life despite his many failures during life under the Bulgarian commissars. There’s no pity here just plenty of attempts to understand. The writer attaches no blame to his father’s stern ways. Most importantly, there is no exploration of how this complicated man completely fucked up his life. You know, those Tales of a Dysfunctional Family that once filled the U.S. book charts.

There are plenty of those in the U.S. In my 21 years of writing and blogging, I may have written some. I apologize, Dad and Mom, as I had yet to have the grumpy wisdom of an aging father.

What does it take to write like Gospodinov of Bulgaria  and Williams of Ireland? I had to write a million words before I had the skills to write with any sort of wit and wisdom. Just to understand what propels their writing took me seven-and-half decades. I am so sad sometimes about my status as a disabled old man, a man who survived a widowmaker heart attack at 62 and a bout with septicemia at 73. A few months after I fell into the petunias, I underwent a spinal fusion that was supposed to help me walk again but did not. I still require a walker or scooter to get around. Poor pitiful me, as the ironic Warren Zevon song goes. Woe, woe, woe is me.

As I read Gospodinov, I kept thinking of my family members, ones that I had criticized in my mind and in print, usually in fiction. The fog began to clear. I thought about the richness of people’s lives, the sorrows and the joys.  Why are we what we are and what imprint do we leave? What can I write about that only I can grasp? My purview is mine alone.

I ponder all of these things. And write.

Gospodinov’s appreciation of his parents’ generation was summed up in James Woods’ New Yorker review of the book (11/10/25 issue):

In 2023, [Gospodinov’s novel] Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. In the new book, that good fortune is autofictionally transformed into this: “In May the novel I had dedicated to my mother and father won a big prize. On that London night, one of those few quickly jotted-down phrases in English was about the two of them, now quietly crying with joy in a little south-eastern town, I said, ‘Indeed, our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.’” 

Stooped shoulders? That’s on my mind as I write today.

Irish Catholics have been holding the line against Nativists for a long time

I read some Irish-American history this morning on Michael Fox's Substack. "The Irish Catholic 'Rock of Erin' that held the line at Gettysburg" tells this story: 

"The Irish Catholic immigrants who defeated Pickett's Charge and held the Union line at Gettysburg were the same people American nativists were burning out of their churches and deporting as paupers."

This speaks of the earlier iteration of MAGA as the Nativists of the Know-Nothing Party. A well-written account by Fox that I haven't fact-checked but will in due time. It's a rousing tale, made me proud to come from a long line of Irish-Catholics from Roscommon and elsewhere. I've been blogging about the Know-Nothings past and present for awhile now and Trump has added fuel to their fire that never went out just went underground like those fires that burn in old Pennsylvania coal fields. 

Read it yourself. A good way to celebrate this Fourth of July weekend that belongs to all of us.

The new Know Nothings tell the same old story

Read an excellent op-ed today in America The Jesuit Review, "The new know-nothings? Anti-Catholic political rhetoric is making a comeback." The writer is Anna Keating. Under a big photo of Secretary of War and Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth, she begins this way:

President Abraham Lincoln once said of the Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860: “If the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration of Independence] will read all men are created equal, except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”

As she notes, the Know Nothing Party shriveled up and died in 1860  but its attitudes have not. 

We are seeing a resurgence of anti-Catholic outbursts in the U.S. with the rise of the Trumpists and the outspoken nature of Pope Leo, an Irish-Catholic priest, then cardinal, now pope on the world's billion Catholics. Read Keating's article for the details. She writes about how fundies would stop her when she was growing up in Colorado Springs "and try to 'save' us." There also was this:

In fact, the Klu Klux Klan targeted my Catholic immigrant ancestors in the panhandle of Texas by burning crosses in their yards.

My grandfather, Martin Hett, an immigrant from County Roscommon, told us how the resurgent KKK burned crosses in his Irish-Catholic Denver neighborhood in the 1920s. My mother, Anna Marie Hett Shay, told us how she and her sister, dressed in their St. Francis Catholic School uniforms, had to run away from the South High School kids who chased them calling them "dirty Catholics" and "Catholic rednecks." This latter one was a new one on me. Grandpa explained (in his droll Irish way) that immigrants from Ireland were prone to red necks due to their fair skin and most jobs they could get in America were harvesting crops, digging ditches, and building railroads. Grandpa did not seem to bear any ill will toward these Know Nothing shitheads. But he had already been through hell and considered Colorado public school kids "small potatoes" when compared to his life as coal miner, railroad worker, and big fella who could take care of himself. 

I've written a bit about American Know Nothings. This has pissed off a few Republican friends who insist they are not Know-Nothings who get all sorts of news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. 

Know Nothings and the KKK play a role in my new novel, “Zeppelins Over Denver.”

For a look back at one of my blog posts, see Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestorsere.

Note the images that go along with it, cartoons of Irish immigrants as apes and drunkards. Those depictions tell a story that is as old as America.

P.S.: One of my first published stories was “REV,” about a fundamentalist Christian army marching across Arabia to whip an army of fundamentalist Muslims. I will see if I can dig it up.

May 4, 1970, Four Dead in Ohio, thousands in Vietnam and Cambodia, it never stops

Kent State Massacre, May 4, 1970; me (in uniform w/DEWAT rifle) marching at U of SC Navy ROTC drill, May 7, 1970; me (in civies) marching against the war on streets of D.C., May 9, 1970. Four dead in Ohio, two shot dead at Jackson State U, May 15; thousands in Vietnam, more in Cambodia, dozens of school children blown up by U.S. in Iran. It never ends.

The choice is clear for us Rogue Catholics

Fallen-away Catholics like me have a choice to make.

Catholic or not? Am I on the side of the outspoken Roman Catholic Pope Leo XIV or am I not? And, if I am, should I not be allied with the Catholic Church and what it stands for, even though I oppose its policies on abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, and its awful record of child abuse. I have long criticized the Catholic Church’s alliance with the Religious Right, which I’ve always called a pact with the devil.

But Pope Leo of Chicago is socking it to Donald Trump, the creepiest human to ever be elected U.S. president.  We know the agenda of the Religious Right as we’ve seen the movement in action all our adult lives. The underlying precept of the RR is hatred of Catholics. We worship false gods: saints, martyrs, The Holy Ghost, and the pope. We used to worship in a foreign tongue, Latin, and we think that a cracker and a bit of wine are the body and blood of Christ. We are demon Papists!

Meanwhile, the Christonationalists of the RR bows down to images of Trump and Christ together, best buds, not the holy trinity but the holy duo. We laugh. They nod and say amen. Let me tell you this, brothers and sisters. If you don’t know hypocrisy when you see it, you weren’t raised as an Irish-Catholic. I saw hypocrisy. What I really mean is irony. What I mean is that Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and irony of ironies, a Kennedy, are all humorless monsters. They are Nazis without the spiffy uniforms. Trump wouldn’t know humor if it bit him in the ass. He demolishes the White House. He plans to build the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile without any triomphe to his name. Have you seen the artist renderings of this monstrosity? Looks like he summoned Herr Speer from Hell.

I have to find a leader of stature who is not a nincompoop. I choose Pope Leo. Play ball! But please not the White Sox variety. Did you see how they surrendered to the Rays on Thursday? A 55-pitch ninth inning? Pope Leo, after you’ve vanquished Trump, the Sox need your blessings.

For another look at this topic, go to Matt Lewis's Substack article 

Get Out Now!

Poem of the world war, this one

This poem grabbed my attention because it captures the moment, as good poetry does.
It was posted on Facebook by friend and one-time writing professor
John Calderazzo in Colorado. Thanks, John.

Because Lorca was a poet, his country hushed him

 

Posted Jan. 9 on Facebook by the poet. Ninety long years ago,
Lorca was murdered by fascists. His spirit lives on.

Death by Lightning: To be gone, gone and forgotten

On the morning after I watched the conclusion of “Death by Lightning" on Netflix.

One of the final scenes really got to me. It’s First Lady Lucretia “Crete” Garfield (Betty Gilpin) confronting the assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew McFayden) in prison before he is hanged. She is angry and distraught about her husband’s death at the hands of this addle-brained miscreant, the likes of which we’ve seen too many times. Crete (President Garfield’s endearing name for her) tells Guiteau that she has halted the publishing of his tell-all book. “You will be forgotten!” She also knows that history will forget her husband, that he will be some sort of trivia question about the shortest-serving president. Nobody will remember what a fine man he was.

But this viewer now knows. President Garfield, streets will be named for you. Millard Fillmore too. In the 1980s I lived in the Cherry Creek block north of the funky-but-soon-to-be-ritzy Cherry Creek North Shopping District. Chris and I walked from our rental on Fillmore Street to the old Tattered Cover Bookstore when it actually had tattered covers for sale – cheap! – and the Cherry Cricket for football and beer and burgers.

Millard Fillmore. Yet another forgotten one. From Wikipedia:

Millard Fillmore was the 13^th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House and the last to be neither a Democrat or a Republican. A former member of the House of Representatives, Fillmore was elected vice president in 1848 and succeeded to the presidency when Zachary Taylor died in 1850. Fillmore was instrumental in passing the Compromise Act of 1850 which led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery.

"Brief truce” indeed.

He also later ran for president as a member of the Know Nothing Party.

Fillmore is now mostly a Jeopardy question: Who was the one-term 13^th president? Here’s a hint: There is a comic strip about a duck named for him.

Not surprisingly, there is also a comic strip named “Garfield” that features a misbehaving cat. Baby Boomers’ kids had Garfield stuffed animals.

You can look it up.

In Denver, Fillmore is situated between Detroit and Milwaukee streets. We rented a typical Denver bungalow brick house with a porch and a swastika on the chimney. I walked to the branch library and found that this swastika stood for auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s when the Nazis hijacked it.  

A writing colleague lived in our basement and another writer friend and his girlfriend lived in the big corner house on the next block. Fillmore was a friend to writers if only for a short time.

Now, Garfield. It was named in the 1880s. The street runs north and south and dead-ends on the north at the old City Park Golf Course and on the south at City Park. After Fillmore, Chris and I lived in a walk-up apartment on Cook Street that was so close to the Denver Zoo that we could hear peacocks screeching at all hours. Garfield was a few blocks east as you walked to Colorado Boulevard.

The unforgettable thing that happened to us on Cook Street was the Christmas blizzard of December 1982 that buried us in three feet of snow for a week. The infamous event in the neighborhood was the assassination of radio talk-show host Alan Berg in June 1984, by The Order Neo-Nazi gang. He was at 14^th and Adams, another street named for a president, actually two of them. They were not assassinated. They are not forgotten.

I have a library of presidential books willed to me by my father. No Garfield or Fillmore volumes in the collection. I have an original copy of Mark Twain’s hardcover bio of Ulysses S. Grant, known as one of the best memoirs in presidential history. I also have a trade paperback of it. Several other Grant bios.

We bought our first house in 1985 on South Grant Street in Platt Park in Denver. The next street over was Sherman. We all know the origins of those names. Street names you won’t find anywhere in the South. Our bungalow-style house was built in 1909 and needed work. Our son Kevin was born there. Neighbors were nice. We let them rent our two-car garage for their woodworking business which is how we got our living room furniture that we no longer have. I walked to work at Gates Rubber Company. I came home, got on my running clothes, and jogged to Wash Park where every Yuppie jogged after work. 

My mother grew up in the Wash Park neighborhood. Wash, of course, is short for Washington, our first president. In the 1920s, the resurgent KKK once burned crosses in this Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Public school kids used to harass my mom and sister when they walked home from St. Francis. Mom said that was the first time she was called a redneck. Their father, my grandfather, was an Irish immigrant whose neck had been burned many times. The streetcar ran nearby. Some of the original houses have been “scraped off” and now are monstrous million-dollar-plus townhomes.

I looked to see if there were any streets named for Garfield in my Florida county. Garfield Avenue runs through Deland, not far from Stetson University and the historic downtown. There is a house like ours for sale on S. Garfield.

Every day and everywhere, we live with ghosts.

Always a good time to read Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

I look to poetry to ease the pain I feel at the ransacking of my country's democratic principles -- and the destruction of our White House. I didn't automatically go to the poets and writers of the 1920s and 1930s, that era of uprisings in the writing world. I didn't go to the 1960s and 1970s, my time as a young man trying to understand why an America I worshipped was murdering people in Southeast Asia in my name. I sometimes send my readers to that past. But I came across Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" on the Poetry Foundation's web site. It speaks to this time, when fascists are in charge of the three branches of our government. I'd say read it and weep, but if you ain't weeping already, I have no words.

But Maya Angelou does:

Still I Rise (excerpt)

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

John Fabian Witt’s new book asks if the American Experiment can be saved

Beginning Oct. 16, I will be reading John Fabian Witt’s book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I ordered the book after reading his guest essay in Monday’s New York Times, “How to Save the American Experiment.” The graphics caught my eye, a drawing of a big red hand pushing down on a platform and a group of people pushing from below. The Big Red Hand looked like it belonged to a marble statue or a giant, ponderous and huge. During other times, the resisters might be labeled “the people” or “the masses,” The Masses being one of the leftist mags of the 19-teens (later New Masses).

In any case, Witt’s essay grabbed my attention. How do we save the American experiment? I’ve been asking that very question since Trump took office for the second time. I have good days and bad. This essay gave me some hope.

Witt captured me when he talked about how a messy war and a pandemic bred a decade of strife that ended in a failed economy and then to a surprising resurgence.

Yes, the 1920s. A time of race riots and red-baiting and the Insurrection Act. Unions pushed workers to organize and the workers protested and were clubbed by guys that acted a lot like 2025 ICE Storm Troopers.

Hard times followed by harder times followed by a global war that birthed the U.S. as a global power. Until it lost its way.

I am obsessed with the 1920s. I just finished writing a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado. It will soon be published by Michigan’s Ridgeway Press. Its characters come to Colorado to start anew after war and sickness and failed dreams. They come to reinvent themselves. Colorado, Denver in particular, has always been a place for people to find themselves. Find gold, too, whether it be the actual metal or penny stocks or pot farms or the fresh powder of mountain ski slopes. As a native Denverite, I admire the magic but know the shortcomings. Historians such as the late David Halaas and Tom Noel have helped me delve into the past. I was a childhood fan of the Denver Public Library and spent many adult years in the Denver History Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A wonderful place. I don’t live there any more. Why? I’m, an American. I move on. It’s what we do. I’m now back to Florida. As you know from late-night comedians, Florida has its own problems.

Witt’s message is not so much “move on” but dig in, into those entities that make a difference. He writes about Charles Garland, a millionaire who used his fortune to fund the American Fund for Public Service or the Garland Fund. It was overseen by muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin. They funded entities that pushed for civil rights, a living wage, and, in the 1930s, Social Security. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency petered out and led to the totalitarian tendencies of Harding and then to rich-boy Democrat Roosevelt who surprised us all, both hard-right Wyoming ranchers and big-city liberal labor agitators.

America, the Arsenal of Democracy, helped win the war and reaped the fruits of its labor and good fortune to bring prosperity in the 1950s and its most annoying demographic cohort, the Boomers. Say what you will about us but we helped the good times roll and now, well, we face the same political shitstorm as our offspring.

So, I write scathing letters that seem to fall on deaf ears. I support organizations such as the ACLU and the Florida Democrats and Wikipedia which is now under attack by the MAGA crowd. I support the independent WyoFile in Wyoming and the Independent Florida Alligator at UF, my alma mater. They are all under attack and need us. Protests are great but pointless if you don’t act and then vote in 2026 and 2028.

As the actor astronauts in “Galaxy Quest say: “Never give up…and never surrender.”

As Pete Seeger sang: "We're waist deep in the Big Muddy, the Big Fool says to push on"

I've spent a lot of time in the 19-teens and 20s lately. A tumultuous time, even if you concentrate on one summer in America as does Bill Bryson in his nonfiction remembrance of 1927. Much of my time has been spent on America's involvement in World War 1 and the decade that followed. The time of my grandparents, you know, those olden days to me or to them, in many ways, golden days. It's shocking to delve deeply into a short span of history and see how much you don't know, how much I didn't know. 

I've written one novel based on my grandmother's diary as a nurse in France 1918-1919. It will be published soon by Ridgeway Press in Detroit. I've written another one set in 1922 in Colorado and other sites in the U.S. That one is in final edits. I read memoirs and fiction and poetry of the era. A few decades ago I read John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy. I dug out the trilogy from my local library. An amazing series, ahead of its time in its combination of fiction and nonfiction. I read many of the WW1 poets, the very angry ones and others. I read about fascism in its many forms, including its roots in Italy's tragedies in The Great War. 

I read plenty of material and saw many movies of those times. As I worked on my novels, I never thought that the war against fascism would come to America. That was a nightmare scenario best left to writers such as Philip K. Dick. 

But here we are, waist deep in The Big Muddy as sang Pete Seeger. The Big Muddy is 2025 America. Wars come home in so many ways. It also may become relevant as Trump sends his masked goons and National Guard soldiers to Memphis on the Mississippi. The fascist strain in American politics has risen again, much as it did prior to World War 2 with America First. I was shocked to learn how Italian fascist pilots vied with budding fascist Lindbergh to fly the Atlantic. They were welcomed as heroes by our homegrown fascists who sometimes battled protesters, communists and others, as they barnstormed the U.S. There were American fascists in 1927 and they are the progenitors of Trump's fascists (his father was one). 

I looked for feisty poets in the Poetry Foundation's category of "Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment." Subtitle: "Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises." Some great ones featured. I saw Maya Angelou's "And Still I Rise" and wondered how rabble-rousing it might be. Angelou was heroic in her resistance but also served as U.S. Poet Laureate and President Bill Clinton's inauguration speaker with "On the Pulse of Morning." These roles require a certain amount of diplomacy, a less-radical approach to topics. I worked in the corporate and government worlds so I know a bit about when to hold still and when to push on with my blog. But maybe I don't care anymore.

"And Still I Rise" is fiery and beautiful when read by Ms. Angelou. I urge you to watch her recite it on YouTube. If the link fails, read it on the Poetry Foundation site.

Bill Bryson’s “One Summer, America 1927,” when “America First” came to call

As I read Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927,” I realized that our history is comprised of an amazing number of knuckleheads and heroes. And sometimes, they are one and the same.

Charles Lindbergh, for instance. He became a hero overnight when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic Ocean, the first solo flight by airplane. Many had attempted it. This scrawny bland fellow from Detroit accomplished it. Thousands of Parisians swarmed him when he landed at Le Bourget Airport. Ticker-tape parades in the U.S. followed. Crowds greeted him everywhere. He often took to his airplane to escape into the wild blue yonder.

By the time the U.S. entered World War II, he was disgraced by his embrace of eugenics and Nazism. He participated in the first “America First” campaign and proudly wore an air medal awarded him in Berlin by Herman Goering, one of the architects of the Nazi scourge. He survived to be one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. “Lucky Lindy” tried to redeem himself by training American pilots in the Pacific during the war. But damage had been done. His name was stripped from all those streets and schools and airfields named in his honor.

You can still see The Spirit of St. Louis displayed at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum along the National Mall in D.C. I’ve taken my family there many times. The plane, so flimsy and tiny when compared to modern aircraft. It’s quite possible those other aircraft wouldn’t exist without it.

Bryson has been one of my favorite writers since his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.” Writing humor is no mean feat and he does it with aplomb in so many books. Humor helps you understand contradictions such as Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone. But that’s why I read, to be entertained and educated in the ways of the world. This book did that. I almost quit several times.

My sister Eileen gave me the trade paperback a month ago. She enjoyed it and knew I was working on novels set in the 1920s. I am of an age where reading big books with small type is difficult. I read to page 80 in bright light but put it down. Then I remembered I have a Kindle Reader for such challenges and I borrowed the book from Libby. Ah, a lit screen and large type. Heavenly. I still put it aside for other things until Libby warned me that I had only five days left on my loan. I hunkered down and read the rest, including a bit of the back matter. So much research!

Sitting in front of another lit-up large screen, I wonder about a century from now, 2125, when a book comes out about 2025. The year of Trump and A.I. Who will be the heroes and villains? As someone who’s been resisting Trumpism since 2016, you can probably guess my answer. “One Summer: America 2025.” A nonfiction tale, told with panache by someone. First we have to survive this period of U.S.-bred fascism and racism. First that. Will books survive?

Big Bill Thompson was mayor of Chicago in 1927. Chicago is in the Trump crosshairs as are all cities in blue states. Big Bill knew that to rule the people must be kept clueless so, writes Bryson, “he started a campaign to remove unAmerican books from Chicago libraries.” He even scheduled a bonfire to burn “treasonous books.” One city employee upped the ante:

“The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. ‘I now have an America First library,’ he said proudly.”

America First? Will that be the fate of Chicago’s libraries now that Trump’s goon squads are on their way?

Alfred Joyce Kilmer on "Trees"

I salute the turkey oak tree in my backyard.

It's a tough little oak. I was looking out the sliding glass door a few weeks ago and saw its leaves detach in a strong wind. Looked like late September in Wyoming but it was late July in Ormond Station, Florida. The flurry of leaves caused me to call the city arborist and she asked if the leaves were brown on the edges. They were. "Needs water," she said. She was correct. I started hosing it down every day and now the leaves have magically returned. 

The tree is a denizen of the soupy landscape that makes up my neighborhood. We're not in the soup but I can see it from here. I live in the dry section of the wetlands. We are right at the periphery of  the Hull Swamp Conservation Area and the Relay Wildlife Management Area. Wildlife we got. A neighbor spotted a black bear in his backyard. A big ol' Eastern Diamondback was squashed by an F-250 near our PO boxes. We've seen turtles and birds galore. 

We are interlopers here. But, back to the trees.

One of my father's favorite poems was "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. It's beautiful, really, with memorable opening lines: "I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree."

Dad knew the poem by heart. It's easily memorized, rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter which makes for a memorable beat. Four iambs instead of the usual five in pentameter poems. I point this out because it would have been a great choice of poems to memorize during after-school detention at St. Francis Catholic Grade School in Wichita. If we seventh-graders transgressed enough to get detention, the nuns gave us a choice of poems to memorize. Because all 12- and 13-year-olds have places to go and things to do after school, we chose the shortest and easiest of rhymes. No free verse, thank you. No epics such as "Child Harold's Pilgrimage" or "Howl," although I am pretty sure Ginsberg and the Beats were not on the list of approved Catholic verse.

I once had a choice between "Charge of the Light Brigade" and some silly love poem. I chose the war poem and can still recite most of it. "Trees" was never on the list. Odd thing is, anything by Kilmer would have put me closer to war than Tennyson. He also would have brought me nearer to my Catholic roots had I known about the 1917 collection he edited, "Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets.

But "Trees" lives on in collections. Kilmer converted to Catholicism in 1913 and wrote of his spiritual life. He joined up at 30 to fight in the Great War. Died at 31 at the Second Battle of the Marne. He was leading a patrol into No Man's Land and disappeared in a shellhole. When his troops caught up to him, he was quietly looking over the bombed-out landscape. He didn't respond. They shook him, then looked at his face to see dead eyes and a bullet hole in his forehead. Death by sniper. He's buried in the U.S. cemetery in France across from the farmer's field where he was killed.

He's been called "the last of the Romantic Era poets." His poems are predictable and schmaltzy. They rhyme, for goodness sake. Across the blasted tundra, the British war poets -- Sassoon, Owen, Graves -- were leading the charge into the revved-up post-war realism of the 1920s. You might see Kilmer's poem "Rouge Bouquet" in volumes of war poetry. It's about 21 soldiers of New York's Fighting 69th who were killed by a random German shelling. His legacy lives on in the names of schools, neighborhoods, and a national forest in North Carolina. The Philolexian Society at Columbia University sponsors The Annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest. Lest you think this is just an Ivy League Putdown, it is taken very seriously on campus. Here's a description from the scribes at Wikipedia (I donated to the cause and got a cool [EDIT] T-shirt):

The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest has been hosted annually by the Philolexian Society, a literary and debating group at Columbia University, since 1986, drawing crowds of 200–300 students and participants vying for the title of best of the worst. Columbia faculty members serve as judges. The event is usually held in November and is heralded by the appearance of "Bad Poetry in Motion" flyers around campus (satirizing the New York City Subway's "Poetry in Motion" series) featuring some of the best verses of the last 20 years, as well as door-to-door readings in the dorms, usually performed by prospective new members ("phreshlings").

The event is named for "bad" poet (and Philolexian alumnus) Joyce Kilmer. His most famous work, Trees, is read aloud by audience members at the contest's end. In 2012, the Columbia Daily Spectator listed the Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest #1 among its "Best Columbia Arts Traditions".

 As a writer and arts administrator, I commend the Society's efforts to promote poetry and its performance. I can see my father, an army radioman in The Great War Part 2 and accounting graduate of a small Catholic college, standing tall in the auditorium and reciting "Trees" with Ivy League youngsters and aging fans of an almost-forgotten poet. 

"Trees," Joyce Kilmer, those lovely, lovely trees.

Why did Bernice bob her hair?

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair," F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story published in the May 1, 1920, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It was his first story to receive national attention. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for the image. I  wear your [Edit] T-shirt when I'm editing.)

I lived in 1919 for five years. It was the mid-to-late twenty-teens and, physically, I was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but my mind was in 1919 Denver. This is the year my grandparents migrated to Colorado. War puts people in motion and the Great War  did that. But other factors were at work. Young people were restless, as we were to see in 1920s literature. We have always been part of a moveable feast in this country. We value the ability to get up and move. No state border guards to show our papers to. No permission needed if we decide to quit our job and move cross-country to take another one. Relationships break and partners seek new pastures, new people to connect with. 

Some move for their health. That was never more true than in the 19-teens when the flu pandemic and tuberculosis caused many to get up and go. In John Green's book "Tuberculosis is Everything," we see the rise of TB sanitoria throughout the western U.S., land of clean air, dry climates, and expansive vistas. Some cities got their starts with TB, places like Pasadena, Calif., and Colorado Springs, Colo. Denver's air, when it wasn't choked by those winter air inversions and coal smoke, was pristine, just the thing for lungers, as TB patients were called and not in a nice way.

So I spent much of my 20-teens in the 19-teens. I suppose part of me will always be there. The novel that arose from the project, "Zeppelins over Denver," is nearing publication. I've written a follow-up since, this one set in 1922. And I am always at work writing stories and blogs. I've surpassed my 10,000 hours of creative practice. I'm a bit tired of practicing and want to get on my way to doing and finishing and enjoying. 

I'm still hooked on the era. My Millennial daughter Annie phoned yesterday. She was deciding on a haircut for a job interview. She talked about getting a bob. 

"Bernice bobbed her hair," I said. 

Annie didn't recognize the literary reference but suspected it. "OK, Dad, who's Bernice?" 

"From the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, " 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair.' " 

"What happens, Dad. A sad ending, right?"

I had to think. "I don't remember. It's been awhile."

"It's not Gatsby-like, is it? Grim and filled with messages about a corrupt society?"

"I'll have to get back to you on that."

So I pulled up "Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories." I was about to send it to my Kindle when I came across an  audiobook version. I began listening to that, took a break for lunch, and when I returned, I found a "Bernice" graphic novel just released in 2024. The cover illustration intrigued me and I downloaded that. I stayed up late to read. Glad I did. My neighborhood is dark and quiet at midnight, as is my house. Peaceful. My laughs echoed down the hallway and might have reached my slumbering wife but she didn't mention it the next morning.

I did not remember the track of this story. I must have read it in grade school, junior high, high school. Now I do remember another notable story of that era, "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty. Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" was an eye-opener. They all were in the same Catholic Church-approved collection as "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" by Nelson Algren and something by Hemingway probably one of the Nick Adams stories. I linger over those stories now. They are deep, wild, and funny, what I missed out on as a teen.

I loved "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." I had so much fun with the graphic novel adapted and illustrated by John Paizs and published by Graphic Publications. The story was first published in May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post. Its popularity cased the Post to publish another Bernice Story in November that included a color illustration of Bernice. Fitzgerald was paid real money by the Post and it helped launch his career. In 1920, writers earned a living by writing stories for popular magazines. This has not been true during my time as a writer. 

Go read "Bernice." A pleasant journey during troubled times.

Thumbs up to new public art on National Mall

 

New sculpture on National Mall in D.C. This is the kind of public art
we want to see. 

Word Back: Let’s Make America Again Again

Again.

Make America Great Again

I’ve been exploring this phrase as it has taken over conversations, rallies, bots, blather, mind games, etc.

It’s a work of genius, really. It gets everyone on the same page. It does, if you are a true believer in Trumpism. That’s what 70-some million people voted for, right? America is no longer great so we needed to fix it. And we will put in place a supervisor who really has never done anything I could call great. But let’s pretend he has and see what magic time in our recent history he wants to return to, revisit, make great again.

So many T voters were elderly as am I. They remember a time when a middle-class suburban lifestyle ruled lives and airwaves. Our Southwest Denver neighborhood was mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP. Not the kind of WASP who grew up in suburban New York City or Chicago. Our Dads made less money than yours. I say Dads because that’s who left the house to work.

Mom was a housewife or householder – she held the place together. Dad was a contract something-or-other for the Martin Company in Lakewood. I never really know what Dad did for a living. Martin eventually merged with American-Marietta and then Lockheed to become part of aerospace and defense work. Martin got his start building airplanes and so did Lockheed. Martin ranked 14^th among defense contractors and built the B-26 Marauder bomber and the B-29 Superfortress that dropped The Big Ones on Japan. Lockheed was most famous for building the P-38 Lightning, the twin-tailed warplane that all of us kids bought in model kits.

We knew our warplanes in the fifties. We were fed by movies, TV,  and comic books. We heard some stories from our fathers but nothing of great import because that’s the way it was. Dad was an infantryman, a Signal Corps radioman who marched through Europe with the rest of the grunts. His unit was lost in the Ardennes during the Bulge but eventually made it back to American lines. I wondered what it was like, being lost in a war zone, but he never elaborated on it. I saw the fellow vets huddled around the patio bar at or the grill during parties and knew they were telling war stories but we were never invited in. So we had to read about them in books or imagine them.

Most of the neighbor men were soldiers and sailors. No fighter pilots on our street and we would have known if there were any. The dad of the kid next door was a plumber. The kid’s name was John and last name Lennon. He went on to become famous as one of the Beatles. Just kidding. I don’t know what happened to him. On our other side lived an older childless couple. They were nice enough. What I wonder about is what they thought about living next to us, one of the largest families on the street. We were a rowdy bunch. Loud. They complained when Dad installed a set of monkey bars in the backyard. It was perilously close to the older neighbors’ fence and it apparently gave them nightmares about one of us swinging wildly on the bars and breaking our backs on their fence. Looking back, we think it hilarious but, older now, we have our own nightmares about injured children and grandchildren.

The man who lived behind us was an army mess sergeant. An FBI agent lived down the street. Across from, him was the only Hispanic family on the block and Catholics like us. One of the boys was the age of me and my brother and we rode bikes together. He took a spill and was impaled by his handlebars. They rushed him to the hospital. When he reappeared, he showed us his stitches and said his spleen was removed. A spleen? Who knew we had one?

We rode our bikes to Bear Creek and played war. Firecracker wars! No danger there. The creek tumbled from the high peaks but was tame by the time it reached the flatlands. Our father once pole-vaulted across the creek and we thought it amazing. Dad showed us how to skip rocks. We rode our bikes down steep hills and crashed in a cloud of dust and rocks. We explored the mall digs, daring each other to ride down into the holes.

We walked to school four blocks away. It was rare, even when it snowed, to see Moms bundle the kids into station wagons and shuttle them to school. I drive past my local elementary school at the end of the day and there is a traffic jam of SUVs idling on the street. Maybe that’s what MAGA people want? Make schools close enough to walk to! Well, that would mean more schools and more taxes to pay for them and the school library might have a book about two dads or a boy who wants to be a girl and all hell would break loose at PTA meetings.

Why can’t we go back to the days of PTA meetings where the only squabble was how many cakes to bake for the Halloween Walk? You remember that, right? Kind of like musical chairs but if you win you get to take a cake home and hope you are there early enough, dressed in your Popeye costume, to win a chocolate one and not one of those yucky coconut ones. A coconut cake! That mom must be a commie!

Ah, those good ol’ days.

Note to my son: Thank you for sending me the book “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal to Share His Life and Love.” I will fill out some of the pages but most memories can be found on these pages which I’ve been keeping for 20 years. Most stories are true, although I have been known to take liberties. If I still covered high school sports for A Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I would be much more careful in my reporting. I would take time for better fact-checking and less snark. Enjoy!

Word Back: Trump reached his goal: Make America Grate Again

Make America GREAT Again

Great as in...The Greatest Generation.

As he wrote his famous book on his Montana ranch, Tom Brokaw gave a lot of thought to the GREAT-est Generation. He gets credit for popularizing the term although its first documented use is by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet ("our greatest General" Pres. Truman called him) during the Korean War. Brokaw might cover it in the book but, well, you see, I never read it. As offspring of that generation, I already knew how great they were. 

It took some time to realize it. 

My parents, two Denver natives, born 1923 and 1925, who found themselves growing up in The Great Wall Street Collapse of 1929, the Great Depression, The Great War Part Deux, and America's post-war boom which, as far as I know, does not have "great" attached to it. Great Caesar's Ghost! That was a term The Daily Planet Editor Perry White in "The Adventures of Superman" made famous, first in 1946 on the radio show and then on TV in the 1950s. We Boomer kids loved Perry White's apoplectic outbursts. We loved cub reporter Jimmy Olsen getting blasted by White: "And don't call me chief!" And his outbursts at Clark Kent, "mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily." "Great Caesar's Ghost, Kent!" Kent just took the abuse as underneath all the mild manners and big eye glasses was a super man from another planet who "could leap tall buildings in a single bound" and round up passels of bad guys before breakfast. 

We loved Superman. Our parents were not so sure about this hero worship. But our first heroes were our World War II fathers. We sort of knew their good deeds. We played with his medals and shoulder patches and uniforms. He had a helmet and machine guns, booty from the war. We played war, having no idea what it was preparing us for. But our parents' generation accomplished great things and we knew it.

Vietnam and assassinations and Watergate almost banished the greatness. Today marks the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings. The end of the war was in sight. Our fathers were still in great danger and we wouldn't know the stories first-hand had they been killed on that day and the others that followed in 1944-45. Death on all fronts. Our Denver neighborhoods swarmed with our fathers' memories and the ghosts of those who made it home or made it home and died later or were not quite right. You'd think all of that would be enough to lift a nation, cause it to avoid pointless wars and entanglements. You would think it would be enough to stop a charlatan and his goons from taking over our great country. 

Researching this post, I came across all kinds of references to great. I watched the first season of "The Great," a satiric retelling of the Greats of Russia: Peter and Katherine Very funny. Educational too.  

I came across this reference: "Literae humaniores, nicknamed Greats, is an undergraduate course focused on the classics (Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Latin, ancient Greek, and philosophy) at the University of Oxford in England and some other universities."

Make America THE GREATS Again!

Finally, the Online Dictionary writes this: "great is sometimes confused with grate."

We can certainly see that Grate is a far better term for what America has become. Make America Grate Again. Yes, MAGA is grating, it grates the nerves. It's prime spokesperson, POTUS, may be the most grating person on the planet. His online rants are beyond grating, they get on my last serve.  Not so great.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fulfills General Jack D. Ripper’s deepest delusion

"Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation, fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." 

No, that's not health czar Kennedy speaking. He's busy swimming with his family in D.C.'s free-flowing and polluted Rock Creek. It's not Trump himself, as he is pals with at least one batch of communists (Putin's gang) and is trying to strangle other communists in a place that rhyme's with whina, as in "Whina isn't China bowing to my precious tariffs?" It's not even Florida's Glorious Leader Ron DeSantis who, yesterday, signed a bill in Trump-like fashion to ban fluoride in Florida's water.

No, the lead-in quotes belong to the fictional General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Gen. Ripper unleashed Armageddon due to 1950s-style paranoia about the addition of fluoride to America's drinking water. 

This was a fear pushed by the conservative John Birch Society who saw a commie behind every tree, within every Liberal, even in Republican POTUS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Birchers stoked the Red Scare and opposed the Earl Warren's Supreme Court's effort to integrate public schools. Their "Impeach Earl Warren" signs adorned highways all over the U.S. but especially in the unreconstructed South. Birchers even hated Mr. Rogers for his niceness and inclusivity. We once called them Right-Wing Nuts, then shortened it to Wingnuts, and, now, MAGA.

Project 2025 is the place where the John Birch Society meets Christian Nationalism. Their goal to remake America in their paranoid vision would be ridiculous if it weren't so frightening. They have been fomenting this hatred for generations and now it has come to pass. We are the fools who believed that America was at heart a good and strong and generous country, a place for everybody, while these nutcases were plotting their takeover. Sure, we still have humor, but there is a good portion of Americans who "don't get it." They have no sense of humor so Gen. Ripper's quotes fall on deaf ears. Trump has no wit and no humor; all he has is his greed and egomania. And his reins on a world superpower -- us, the U.S., America the formerly beautiful.