Ballad for an old friend

Can you call someone a friend if you haven’t seen him in 40 years?

On Monday, I heard the news of the death of my old friend David. He suffered a stroke and was being transferred to rehab in Daytona Beach when his body gave out. The news came to me on a Facebook post from Dave’s sister in L.A. I was shocked. He is not one of the first to die in my high school class – Class of ’69. We’ve all hit 70 now and the inevitable cohort replacement grinds on every day.

The last photo I saw of David showed him holding an AK-47 which he was using for target practice out in the Florida woods. He had a gun hobby. He also was a dedicated fisherman. He once ran a popular bait shop in Daytona. He could talk your ear off about fishing and often did. We went to high school together and were roommates once on a little acreage we called The Farm. It was anything but a farm. It was an old house on Hull Road in rural Ormond Beach. The road was named after the family who built the house, one of the area’s first human residents besides Native Americans and the occasional Spanish explorer looking for the Fountain of Youth or cities of gold. Our high school, Father Lopez, was named for the priest who accompanied Pedro Menendez de Aviles when he landed in St. Augustine in 1565 to kill French Huguenots. Ponce de Leon had claimed Florida for Spain in 1513 during his fruitless search for youth, something, I guess, many Floridians search for.

Our little house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, a massive fireplace, and an outdoor shower. Our girlfriends hated that shower even though we assured them that nobody could see them as our property was surrounded by forest. Didn’t seem to make a difference. They would take baths in our big iron tub or wait until they returned to their respective civilized indoor showers. Picky, picky.

The property was owned by a group of physicians who had bought it for an investment. This place will someday be filled with houses, they contended, and we laughed about it when we got stoned on the weed stashed on the farm by a friend who swore us to secrecy. Years later, as time marched on, the land was bought by a developer and now is a thriving neighborhood called Tymber Creek. That’s timber with a y as in “some tymber was sacrificed to build these spacious homes.”

I have fond memories of a man who meant so much to me long ago. In 1971-72, David and I were college dropouts. The military draft passed us by. I worked days as a hospital orderly and David worked evenings as a cook at a pizza joint. He brought home the leftover pizza that became our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We could exist on pizza because we were 21 and always on the move.   

Our futures had already started. I wandered the property with our dogs, always alert for rattlers and coral snakes. At twilight, we stopped at an open field and watched the bullbats. As they dive for insects, they make a strange whooshing sound. I’d come back to the house to write, always writing. David was out casting for bass or snook on the Little Tomoka River, looking for something out there on the Florida waters. I hope he found it.  

Anything was possible then.

During the 1970s, I went back to school and then returned to the area many times as I looked for work and finally decided to light out for the western territories. That’s where I am today. Still writing.

David, may the fish be plentiful and feisty in the Beyond.

I contemplate generational conflict in the blogosphere

Daughter Annie has been chronicling her graduation experience on her blog. She graduated from Laramie County Community College on May 14 and will head to UW in Laramie in mid-June.  She intends to be an English major. I have done my best to change her mind. "How about something useful, like pre-med or accounting?" or "Have you thought about a career as plumber?" 

Nevertheless, she persisted. She is a chip off the old block, offspring of an English major. I posted about the graduation here. She speaks openly about her long haul and her not always pleasant experiences along the way. I admire her honesty as I tend to skip deep feelings and fall back on humor to lighten life's heartbreaks. A generational difference, I guess. I am a first-wave Boomer and Annie is a second-wave Millennial. We share interests in reading, writing, classic rock, and movies. But we look at life through different lenses.

She knows more about my generation than I do hers. When I look at her generation, I see bright people looking on in disbelief at the chaos we older generations have wrought. I may have looked this same way in 1969 when the best and brightest wanted to kill me and millions of others. Annie has many artistic tattoos and introduces me to new music by changing the dial on my car radio. In reality, she doesn't need my car radio because she has her own car and car radio and myriad tech devices that pull in music, videos, and possibly signals from Tralfamadore. 

See how much fun you can have with generational conflict?

When I first signed on with Blogger in 2001, I admired the fresh voices, honest as the day is long. Not one of the bloggers I followed in those early days would use "honest as the day is long" (air quotes) which is, as you know, "as old as the hills." They were much more creative. In 2006, I gravitated to lefty political blogs which led to my selection as Wyoming's official embedded blogger at the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention in Denver where, at 57, I may have been the oldest practitioner at Blogger HQ outside the Pepsi Center. I received a scholarship to Netroots Nation 2011 in Minneapolis. I traveled in fall of 2011 with fellow nogoodniks to present a panel on progressive blogging at the University of South Dakota. Those were heady days. We were the future. I tied in with regional lefty bloggers and started posting and reposting on Daily Kos. Social media was in its infancy but pretty soon grew into the monster we know today. 

I started a blog for my workplace and a year later was called into the director's office to ask why I started a blog without permission. I said, gee, all the kids were doing it and he agreed that I should stop doing it immediately. At career's end, I was lord of our Wordpress blog and social media manager. My Millennial kids thought this was hilarious and I tended to agree.

So here we are in 2022. Blogs did not birth a thoughtful, more progressive, America. 

I blame myself.

Read part two of Annie's "How I got here: my time at LCCC.

Poets give voice to the voiceless gunned down in their schools

 

Reposted from a friend's Facebook page. Introduced me to a U.S. poet with Front Range connections whose work I didn't know. It brilliantly says what I am finding so hard to put into words. Thanks to Matt Hohner who has an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder. A friendly nod to Sam Hamill who published so much wonderful work at Copper Canyon Press during his time on the planet. He also initiated Poets Against the War to protest the 2003 Iraq War. 

It's true what they say about Nome: The first winter is hard on relationships

It's not often that you get to read a novel set in Alaska by an writer who almost died in an Alaska plane crash but now tours the U.S. performing his music and reading his poetry and prose. One more thing -- the novel was published in India. Even in our interconnected world, working with a publisher on the other side of the world comes with its own set of challenges.  

"Now Entering Alaska Time" by Ken Waldman recounts the adventures (and misadventures) of a poet and fiddler named Zan. Raised in The Lower 48, Zan travels to Alaska and immerses himself in the folk music scene. He totes his fiddle wherever he goes. He eventually decides to get his graduate degree in creative writing and then embarks on a Nome teaching job where he teaches online classes to students around the state, from the Arctic Circle to softer climes in small towns near Juneau.

The book sometimes reads like a travelogue, so much so that I had to keep a map of Alaska close at hand. As is the case with most U.S. writers schooled in the West, place is crucial. You could say the same thing about writers from the South or the Midwest. But for writers in the West (Alaska included), sometimes we're more concerned with the spaces between than the places themselves. You can assume that those spaces represent the gaping chasms people experience in their relationships. 

That's the thing about Waldman's novel. His characters come together and tear asunder with stunning frequency. About as often as the next plane to Nome. That's how humans get around in Alaska, mainly by plane. Each of these locales (Nome, Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks) have distinctive personalities, illuminating to someone like me who's never been to Alaska. But as a writer in Wyoming, I am familiar with the wide open spaces. As literature coordinator for 25 years with the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought in writers from all over to judge our fellowship competitions. More than one of them asked me if writers had to write about the state's landscapes, you know, the mountains, the high desert, cottonwoods, the incessant wind. No, I would say, but all of those are facts of life here, ones you can't ignore. Landscape is a character.

Waldman prose doesn't have to remind the reader that it is cold and dreary during Nome winters. When Zan lands at the Nome airport to start his job, he remembers "the story of the young woman who had originally beat him for the position, flown here, and then turned right around." Later, when he wanders into downtown's Anchor Bar, he chats over drinks with jaded city manager Press Atwater. He warns Zan that Nome's first winter is hard on relationships. Months later, when he and Melinda see Press at his usual perch at the bar, he says: "Say, you two are still talking and it's been, what, two or three months already." He laughs. What else could he do? 

The novel's second half focuses on the relationship between Zan and Melinda. What a wild ride it is. Waldman does a fine job delineating their personalities and the stresses that sabotage relationships. The author paints a more complete portrait of Zan because, well, the novel is based on his own Alaska experience. We sometimes wonder about Melinda's motives, especially as she strays later in the relationship. I won't go any deeper than that because it's a powder keg of a relationship and I don't want to spoil anything. 

Waldman and I met several decades ago at what was then called the AWP Conference. We've worked together several times since. He's on the road most of the time now that Covid is winding down (we hope). The book tells me the roots of the author's itinerant lifestyle. He's still roaming the wide open spaces. It's in his blood. 

"Now Entering Alaska Time" will be available for $18 USD at cyberwit.net after June 1. Waldman has launched a book tour with Alaska dates in Skagway, Haines, Juneau, Talkeetna, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Homer, and Denali Park. After that, he's in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Texas. He performed at the first outdoor Anchorage Folk Festival this past weekend and returns June 5 for a folk festival fundraiser. 

Happy graduation, Annie. You did it!

Annie Shay, happy graduate (LCCC photo)

Daughter Annie graduates from Laramie County Community College on Saturday.

We are so proud of her. It has been a long haul. She struggled with learning disabilities in elementary school. She was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was eight. During teen years, she struggled in school, the learning part and the socialization part. She began to depend on drugs and alcohol to get her through each day. She was bipolar and we sought help but nobody seemed to understand it. She spent months in treatment centers in Wyoming and Colorado. She was able to complete some of her school work but fell too far behind to graduate. She earned her G.E.D. and started school at LCCC. It was too soon. She decided to major in music and spent many hours rehearsing and singing with the school's choirs. She has a beautiful voice but is not so confident around colleagues and audiences. 

She dropped out and soon was off again to treatment centers, this time in California and Illinois and Utah and finally back to Colorado. The years passed. She was diagnosed with bipolar and personality disorder. Meds didn't seem to be the solution but she kept at it, finally underwent ECT at a hospital in Boulder. She improved and returned to Cheyenne to live with Chris and I and go back to school. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

That's one thing she always wanted -- an education. Through it all, she spoke of that often. She enrolled again at LCCC. She depended on the Help Center for guidance. She struggled at first. Nevertheless, she persisted. She passed her classes and discovered that she liked school, maybe for the first time. That's one thing that people don't always understand about community colleges. They allow all kinds of learners to get a second chance. May be you aren't ready at 18. Maybe you get married young and find out 20 years later that you want an education. Maybe you're a military veteran looking for new directions. 

I was a university dropout, a scholarship student at a big university who lost his way. I worked and traveled. Four years after graduating high school, I enrolled in the local community college and started in the fall of 1973. My classmates had already graduated from four-year universities and were negotiating adulthood. I felt a bit lost. But the classes I took were wonderful. Contemporary American Literature. Public Speaking. Art History. The teachers were terrific and somehow I was interested in each subject. At night, I worked as an orderly in the Substance Abuse Unit at the county hospital. The nurses locked me in with the alcoholics who had been scooped out of the gutters or arrested for raising a ruckus. This is where they came instead of jail. Many had been to jail. We played cards and smoked. They told tall tales, most of which were true, I suspect. I learned a lot. On quiet nights, I studied. On wild nights, we orderlies wrestled rowdy drunks. That was some year. By May, I had enough credits to graduate and returned to a four-year university where I graduated in two years. 

We all have our stories. Annie now has hers. She is very excited about graduating. So very excited. In mid-June, she moves to Laramie to start summer classes at UW.  She will be thirty-something by the time she graduates. She worries about that, wondering if she will fit in with younger students, make friends in the larger context of a university, be able to excel in upper division classes. Chris and I worry. Annie is an introvert with ongoing psychological issues. She likes her time alone but sometimes too much time alone is bad for her mental health. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

Happy graduation, Annie. Enjoy it all!

P.S.: Annie posted a blog today from her POV. Read "How I got here -- graduating from college class of 2022" at WyoGal. 

Trees can soothe the beast of depression

Fun fact for Arbor Day: 

There are now 99 elms encircling the CSU Oval and lining its walkways.

So reports an April 2022 story on Colorado State University's web site, Literally just 46 facts about CSU's trees. 

Literally, it was interesting stuff. 

Here's a few other items from the CSU list:

When CSU was first founded 1870, it was located on a treeless prairie. 

Some of the [elm] trees are 80 to 90 feet high, and their roots are 1.5 times their height. 

This one is a surprise:

The Heritage Arboretum/Woody Plant Demonstration and Research Area has the largest collection of woody plants in the region, with more than 1,100 different taxa represented. 

The Arboretum is on the south end of campus, within shouting distance of the new stadium. It's surprising because I passed through this site many times during grad school and didn't know it was an arboretum. Time now for a return visit.

The Oval elms are special. During the spring and summer of 1991, as I worked on my M.F.A. in creative writing, I was gobsmacked by severe depression, I found solace among the elms. As noted, they are sturdy and tall, providing shade for the lawn and itinerant students who need some elm goodness to buck up their spirits. I would bike on over to the Oval, prop myself against a tree, read and study. The tree gave me strength. At the time, I thought they were cottonwoods but it didn't really matter. Trees carry energy and silently impart strength to those humans who take the time to appreciate them. I took antidepressants for the first time but it took a long time for them to work. Meanwhile, I had trees. 

I'd dealt with depression before. When I was an undergrad, a break-up caused me to go sleepless for a week. That was the first time I saw a therapist and talked it through. This was 1975 and pre-Prozac. I was 24 and pleased. I faced the beast and came out the better for it. 

During the next couple decades, I muddled through. Married, had a kid, worked various jobs in Denver until I went to school. After I turned 40, family issues took me back to therapy and anti-Ds. I kicked the drugs several times but the result was always the same. Finally, a psychiatrist in Cheyenne issued a mandate: You'll be on these the rest of your life. And, thus far, I have been.

While the meds percolate through my system, I walk among the trees. It's never been a mystery to me that elms and maples have healing qualities. Psychology Today writes about "Forest Bathing in Japan." Full immersion in the forest. PT referenced a 2012 Outside magazine first-person article by Florence Williams, Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning. Here's the subhead:

These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. Florence Williams travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression—and even prevent cancer.

These days, I need assistance when walking. I'm missing out on forest bathing. But last time I was in the mountains, last September, I sat under pines as my family joined friends in a hike on Vedauwoo's Turtle Rock Trail. I'm usually the one leading these and may again if the docs can get to the bottom of my disability. I can park my rollator walker under any tree. And breathe deeply. 

Happy belated Arbor Day.

Nukes in the news -- again

Not enough people have seen "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

It's satire, sure, with a concept that a loony nuke base commander could trigger a nuclear war. General Jack D. Ripper is obsessed with Commies poisoning "our precious bodily fluids." His executive officer, a British captain, comes close to derailing the general's plans but, as we all know, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and mega-kiloton atomic warheads.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Dr. Strangelove's closing lines, sung by Vera Lynn as the Russians' Doomsday Machine causes bombs to go off all over the world.

That's all, folks!

The movie's over. We laugh. Shake our heads. Punch the remote to "Bridgerton."

The premise seemed ridiculous to moviegoers in 1964. It seems ridiculous again. But not quite so. There is an unhinged megalomaniac in Russia threatening to use nukes if the West doesn't stop arming Ukraine. 

"Dr. Strangelove" got its start with a novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George. It's a thriller. I read it as a teen, that and "Fail-Safe," co-written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Also, Nevil Shute's "On the Beach." I read about nuclear Armageddon. It seemed so far-fetched. At the same time, I was reading the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. They sparked my imagination, turning me into a lifelong fan of fiction. Tom Swift's dirigible/biplane hybrid ("Tom Swift and His Airship, or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud") seemed as real to me as nuke bombers and missiles that could incinerate the planet. I was lost in a fantastic world that I never really grew out of.

At the same time, my father worked on installing Atlas missiles in hardened silos from Washington state to Kansas (Wyoming too). He was a contract specialist, an accountant with Martin Co. (Martin-Marietta). He was charged with making sure that the missiles and their underground homes were built correctly and within budget. We moved around with Dad and his work. I never really thought about how his job might lead to a cataclysm. But he did. He recommended that I watch Strangelove and read World War III novels. He didn't talk much about his work but I know he wanted me to be a reader and an informed citizen. 

Our family got a lot out of the Cold War. It never was a hot war, as some predicted, but it shaped me. 

So now, when Putin mouths off about nukes, I hear General Jack D. Ripper. I should take the guy more seriously as I live in the crosshairs of Nuclear Alley here in southeast Wyoming. If MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) arrives, I will have precious little time to worry about it. I never really stopped worrying nor did I learn to love the bomb. 

I revel in its absurdity.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Vera Lynn's singing takes us back to World War II. When Vera sang, British soldiers listened. They were in the fight of their lives around the globe. At home too, as Hitler waged a saturation bombing of a civilian population. Putin now saturates Ukraine with rockets and terror tactics. 

My father, a World War II G.I., liked Vera Lynn. Later, when I had a chance to think about it, I wondered if he minded that Vera Lynn's song had been used for a fiery conflagration that ended the world. He was especially fond of "The White Cliffs of Dover" which he must have heard many times in England as he trained for the Normandy invasion.

This:

There'll be bluebirds over/the White Cliffs of Dover/tomorrow,/just you wait and see

And this:

There'll be love and laughter/and peace there after,/tomorrow,/when the world is free

There may be a song like this for Ukraine. There should be.  

420 Day in Wyoming feels a lot like Wednesday

Happy 420 Day. 

Stoners in Boulder, Colo., used to treat this day as a smoke-filled holiday, known for one of the biggest 420 fests in the U.S. Legalization arrived via the voters in 2012. There now are hundreds of  marijuana dispensaries in the first state to start selling legal recreational weed. 

Wyoming, on the other hand, well, Wyoming is Wyoming. It will be the last state to approve it. Meanwhile, liquor rules the land. Prohibition (1920-1933) was a joke in this state while the temperance types in Colorado got an early start by prohibiting booze in 1916. Ah, Colorado, our sober southern neighbor.

Bootleggers abounded in WYO border towns for thirsty Coloradoans, Utahans, Nebraskans, Dakotans, Montanans, and Idahoans. Moonshine was an export commodity long before fireworks and fresh-faced UW grads. You can visit museums around the state that feature well-preserved stills from the 1930s. Museum volunteers lecture school groups on the bad old days when everyone was stewed to the gills with illicit hooch. Look how far we’ve come! Wyoming has a huge alcohol abuse problem. It also had the second-highest number of teen drug arrests in 2016, topped only by neighbor South Dakota and a bit more than neighbor Nebraska. Here’s a recent headline from the Cowboy State Daily: “Fentanyl Deaths in Wyoming Increasing; Federal, State Officials Worried.” 

My drugs of choice these days tend to be heavy on the Zs: Prozac, Zyrtec, Mirtazapine, Zestril. This is what happens when you have depression, get carted away with a heart attack, and sneeze your head off from May through October. These meds are prescribed liberally by physicians and pharmacists. Drug company reps hand out free samples. They need to be used with care as they carry a list of side effects (some alarming) listed on the three-page printout you get with each prescription. Oxycontin and Fentanyl carry similar warnings which nobody reads.

I’m pleased that the medical establishment gives us info so we can make decisions about what to take and what to jettison. No such lists were issued with the recreation drugs of the 60s and 70s. Our parents knew nothing nor did any adult we depended on for advice which we readily ignored. I was thinking about this the other day. KUWR’s Wyoming Sounds’ Throwback Thursday featured Grady Kirkpatrick playing songs on the forbidden list issued by an Illinois state law enforcement agency in 1971. The songs allegedly encouraged the use of illegal drugs. They included PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON (Peter, Paul, and Mary), HI-DE-HO (Blood, Sweat, and Tears) AND LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS (Beatles). 

The list was probably inspired by Nixon’s War on Drugs. "Puff" was targeted due to the fact that marijuana cigarettes needed to be puffed in 1971 (no edibles or ganja-infused beer). Too many puffs and you saw magic dragons. Lucy was obviously an abbreviation for LSD which, if you had the good stuff, you would definitely see magic dragons, sea nymphs, and Jesus. I have it on good authority that some frat boys saw our savior after imbibing too much Purple Jesus punch, a once-popular grain alcohol/Hawaiian Punch mixture.

I don’t get why “Hi-De-Ho” is on the banned list. Some lyrics:

Hi de ho

Hi de hi

Gonna get me a piece of the sky

Gonna get me some of that old sweet roll

Singing hi de hi de hi de hi de hooooo.

I looked up the song, originally sung by Dusty Springfield. I don’t see the drug references. Sure, some druggies may be reaching for a piece of sky. And stoners might satisfy a craving with sweet rolls such as the frisbee-sized concoctions served at Johnson’s Corner truck stop in Colorado. But it’s a stretch.

Hi-De-Ho was a phrase used liberally by Cab Calloway. He may have smoked weed as musicians seemed to like their drugs in the Roaring 20s and the Pretty Exciting but Impoverished 30s. The police noted that hip musicians tended to be African-American and their music was enjoyed mostly by jitterbugging minorities. Go to YouTube and watch jitterbugging clips. You could be stoned making those moves but I have my doubts. The fast-paced dance featured jittery music and lots of throwing around partners’ bodies. One false move and your date could end up a bleeding and broken thing on the bandstand.

The dances I remember from high school were not complicated but needed a bit of sobriety to carry off. The dances I remember from 1970s rock concerts were as groovy and free-flowing as a 20-minute Grateful Dead jam.

Hi-De-Ho.

Outer Range, set in Wyoming, asks the question: "What is that weird hole doing in my pasture?"

I saw Josh Brolin on Stephen Colbert this past week. He was promoting his new Amazon Prime series “Outer Range.” He said it was part contemporary western and part supernatural thriller. I am all for new takes on old themes, especially if they focus on the West. Streaming services have brought us “Yellowstone,” “1883,” and “Longmire.” Wyoming and vicinity are the setting for a lot of them. They are not filmed in the state (New Mexico and Alberta get the honors) but were created by Wyomingites C.J. Box and Craig Johnson, among others. “Outer Range” is set in fictional Amelia County, Wyoming, making it county number 25 after Johnson’s county 24, fictional Absaroka County. “Longmire” fans convene every summer in the very real town of Buffalo in Johnson County. I just read some interesting and not entirely complimentary stuff about the area in Helena Huntington Smith's 1966 book “The War on Powder River: The History of an Insurrection.”

In “Outer Range,” an evil cattle baron named Wayne Tillerson, most likely a descendant of one of the bad guys in the Johnson County War, is trying to steal prime land from a neighboring cattle baron (Royal “Roy” Abbott) who is burdened with debts, a dysfunctional family, and a bottomless hole the size of a barn in one of his pastures. The hole makes ethereal noises and, if you should fall in it, you will receive visions of the past and future before the hole spits you back out. An American bison, two arrows jutting from his hide, stands by the hole and snorts.

This is not your granddaddy’s ranch.

The most interesting part of the first two episodes is a showdown between Wayne and Royal. In the olden days, a couple shots of red-eye, six-guns and a dusty street would be involved. In 2022, Dwayne is a bed-ridden invalid who wears his cowboy hat in bed. His drink of choice is Clamato juice. Royal confronts him over the land grab. Here’s their exchange:

Wayne: Roy, you’re on my land (sips Clamato juice on ice)

Royal: Let’s be honest here Wayne, no one’s stealing anything but you.

Wayne: This is Wyoming, Roy. It’s only ever been stoled since the day it got its name (knocks back the rest of the Clamato).

Roy leaves, noting that the lawyers will have to figure this out.

I had to rewind several times to get down this exchange. Wayne’s lines may be the best since Owen Wister's Virginian told Trampas, “When you call me that, smile.”

I am a fan of western movies. I gravitate to quirky westerns such as “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “High Noon,” "True Grit," and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” I like the classics too. That includes anything by John Ford. Just watched the original “Stagecoach” on Netflix. During the pandemic, I finally watched “Lonesome Dove” and loved it.

I will watch the rest of “Outer Range.” The big hole on the prairie intrigues me. I like Josh Brolin and his gruff portrayals (remember “No Country for Old Men?”). There’s some weird details in the script (Clamato?) and I like weird details. Must be the Irish in me.

"Death Cleaning" is as pleasant as it sounds

The April 9 New York Times op-ed section featured a piece with this heading: " 'Death Cleaning': A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories." There were letters from more than 500 responses from the paper's request for personal stories about getting rid of a lifetime of possessions or those of a relative.

Responses were interesting and heartbreaking. Chris and I, both retired, have decided to clean out the clutter of our own lives as we contemplate a move to a retirement community. Her approach is "everything must go" and mine is "almost everything." This reveals the difference in our backgrounds. She is adopted, an army brat with one sister (also adopted) who had to help her mother purge much stuff for many moves. I am the oldest of nine. During our childhood, we moved quite a few times and, in adulthood, we've moved more that Chris's sister and her Navy lifer husband. We've done some purging over the years. Yet, now, we still have an entire household of stuff. We've lived here for 16 years. I look around my writing room and see photos of my kids at various stages and family photos of relatives. Books and papers are piled on every surface. And this is the tip of the iceberg. I have bookshelves filled with books and boxes upon boxes of books in the basement. 

When Chris retired a year ago, she embarked on a cleaning binge monumental in scale. Everything must go! And much did. A local nonprofit removed most of the furniture from the basement. We donated three sets of china to Goodwill, sparing boxes of teacups and saucers that went to the local botanic gardens for its Mother's Day teas. We remodeled our upstairs bathroom and redid the kitchen floor. Chris called the junkman who came and removed old lawnmowers and tools from the storage shed, even had them remove an old storage shed that was home to items dating back to the previous owner. She ripped up all of the carpets and exposed our very nice wood floors. 

Since I am partially disabled, I was tasked with sorting through books. How I sorted. Our daughter hauled a dozen boxes out the door to the library sales room where she volunteers. Still, many books remain. 

I also have two large plastic bins with dozens of journals dating back to 1972. I was going to donate them to my kids, both dedicated readers who like to write, and hope they would find some lasting value in them. I lasted one day reading through my life, gave up, and put the bins back in the closet. It's quite sobering to contemplate a life. Most entries are mundane, even boring. Some are embarrassing. I decided that the journals have to go but not yet, as I have more reminiscing to do. How long will I procrastinate? Until I am unable? Not exactly what I had in mind for my kids. And not what they had in mind either. 

I did not have to sort through my parents' goods. I lived far away at the time and my siblings took care of it. My mother died at 59 of ovarian cancer and my grieving father called in my four sisters to go through her things and they did it cordially. I inherited a third of my accountant father's library and all of his clothes as we were the same size. I still wear his Aran Islands sweater. My father bought it in Ireland and rarely has occasion to wear it in Central Florida. I live in Wyoming so the sweater is my friend most times of the year. I wear his sport coats and they will undoubtably go to Goodwill when the time comes. 

The books and the journals -- those are the sticking points in our Death Cleaning saga.

Botanist Trevor Bloom doesn't like what he sees in Wyoming's early wildflower blooms

This April 6 WyoFile post brings us more good news about global warming:

Wyoming botanist Trevor Bloom spotted his first springtime blooms of the year on March 28. Bloom, while tracing the footsteps of famed ecologist Frank Craighead at Blacktail Butte in Grand Teton National Park, saw the orogenia linearifolia, or snowdrop, wildflower. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wildflower, besides a dandelion, flowering in March,” Bloom said. The snowdrop bloom was nearly a month earlier than Craighead had recorded in the 1970s. “It means we’re probably going to have a very early spring this year. It probably means that we’re going to have very low water levels, and we’re probably going to have an increased risk of wildfire this year.”

So, early spring, lack of snow, low water levels, and more fires. Ah, summer in the Rockies, 2022.

Seems as if we are ahead of schedule as far as bulb plants. Some of mine already are flowering. The Cheyenne Botanic Gardens show some early blooms in its “Hero Garden” of native plants. Not sure what effects the wild winds have had. Most plants seem to be deciding if it’s safe to raise their heads or if we will have our usual spring of snow and wind and cold punctuated by 60-degree calm and sunny days.

My home gardening will be limited this year. During The Covid Year, I commandeered the kitchen table to sprout my seeds. When June arrived, the containers on the porch were filled, absorbing the sun and hiding from hail. It felt normal, as if a plague wasn’t decimating the globe. We all had our survival; tactics. Some gardened, some baked sourdough loaves, others watched endless video loops on YouTube and TikTok. I gardened and read and wrote. Also, Netflix and Hulu.

I will buy some seedlings and plant seeds. I need to grow something. Call it a celebration of summer’s arrival. It may bring drought and fire. But I’m going to grow flowers and cherry tomatoes beneath my rooftop solar array. The pensive William Wordsworth, wanderer of England’s Lake Country, loved to conjure daffodils when resting on his couch.

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Remembering The Great 1972 Rainbow Family Scare in Colorado

The Colorado Sun reposted this piece by Jason Blevins in the Outsider newsletter:

The Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes plans to return to Colorado this summer to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The weeks-long confab that draws tens of thousands of hippie campers to public lands announced this week that the national gathering of possibly 30,000 would be returning to Colorado. 

The group’s national bacchanal was last in Colorado in 2006, with about 10,000 people camping on Forest Service land in north Routt County outside Steamboat Springs. Before that, they were 19,000-strong outside Paonia in 1992. The first national gathering was near Granby in 1972. 

My girlfriend Sharon and I hitched through Colorado during the summer of ’72. We weren’t card-carrying members of the Rainbow Family but your average observer couldn’t tell. My hair was long, my jeans scruffy. Sharon wore braids, a halter top, and jeans that were definitely not scruffy.

We wondered why we got flipped off as we stood with our thumbs out on the side of the road. We were both just good-natured college dropouts on a spree. Why don’t people like us?

You dirty hippies!

I took a shower yesterday.

Me too.

Can’t please some people.

When we arrived in Denver, we found out about the Rainbow Family Gathering of Tribes soon to descend on Colorado. The citizenry was up in arms about hordes of longhairs in scruffy jeans invading their mountains. The interlopers allegedly were going to smoke lots of illegal weed the quality of which would pale in comparison with the mind-blowing cannabis now grown all over Colorado and sold legally at your corner dispensary. Colorado newspapers raised the alarm that Rainbow Family members were going to trip on LSD, now the favorite micro-dosing drug of the techie who built your VR headset. The citizenry feared that Rainbowites on magic mushrooms might swarm their city, recruiting Colorado young people to psilocybin. Thing is, in the last CO election cycle, psilocybin was decriminalized by your grandmother’s pickleball group in Longmont.

My, my.

Colorado was a different place in 1972. My Uncle Bill sold insurance and Aunt Mary played bridge with her pals every week. They voted for Republicans and cursed hippies. Thing is, when Sharon and I turned up on their front porch in Denver, they took us in, fed us, and housed us -- in separate rooms, of course. We hung out with my cousins. Uncle Bill wouldn’t let them go full-hippie but they smoked pot with us anyway. Went with the cousins to Elitch’s Amusement Park, the old one in West Denver. We played miniature golf and drank a lot of 3.2 Coors. Went to a Red Rocks concert. Their friends didn’t care that we were dirty hippies as we were all young together, having fun. On the Fourth of July, we traveled up to Estes Park to watch fireworks from a friend’s lofty cabin.

Sharon and I eventually hit the road for points west. Many adventures along the way. Saw the sights. Swam in the Pacific Ocean. Went to some concerts. Met a lot of cool people. Visited a high school pal at Berkeley. At summer’s end, we hitched to Boston where we lived and worked for awhile. The relationship ended and I headed back to Florida, worked and went back to school.

Never really got close that summer to Strawberry Lake near Granby where the Rainbow Family was rocking out. They were doing their thing. Now their kids and grandkids are coming back to Colorado to rile the populace. I’m old enough now to curse the damn hippies but I know better. Besides, I live in Wyoming, the live-and-let-live-state. The Rainbow Family has gathered three times in Wyoming. Not sure about any casualties. It’s 2022 but all the good drugs are still illegal in The Equality State. While here, you will have to buy your weed from some shady guy on the street corner. Bring your own is the best bet. WYO is flanked by pot-friendly states Colorado and Montana.

According to the Marijuana Policy Project:

Wyoming is one of just a few states that continues to criminalize adults and patients for possessing and using cannabis.

My guess is that the Rainbow Family will choose any one of the weed-friendly states for future get-togethers. Besides the two already mentioned: California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona. Millions of acres of forestland await you. Be careful with fires, though, as it doesn’t take much to start a conflagration. Edibles are a better choice.

Happy trails.

Russia will need another Tolstoy to write about Putin's war on Ukraine

Odd in 2022 to be rooting for an underdog European country against a maniacal dictator bent on war.

Seems like 1939. Not that I experienced it first-hand -- I didn’t arrive on this planet for another 11 years. In that span, World War II began and ended and other wars erupted. One maniacal dictator was defeated and another one rose. We can’t get rid of these guys. Face it, almost all are guys. In America’s zeal to blunt Stalin, Khrushchev, etc., we waged war in Vietnam and sponsored dozens of proxy wars in Latin America. We jumped into Korea. My father, a World War II veteran who only returned to the States in 1946, faced a call-up for Korea just when he was celebrating the birth of his first child, me. He wasn’t called up but wondered in a letter: “I thought they gave us 20 years between wars?”

They do, as it turned out. His father fought in The War To End All Wars (TWTEAW) and 23 years later, Dad enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the early 1960s, the U.S. waged war in Vietnam with “advisors” and, just a few years later, draftees were being flown to Ton Son Nhut. I wasn’t one of them, thankfully, but many were, reluctantly going overseas to fight yet another war. Twenty years later, we were in Southwest Asia to fight Saddam and back again 10 years later to fight Saddam and Osama and the Taliban. We were in Afghanistan 20 years.

War never ends. Each generation gets it taste and a generation later elects warmakers that send their sons and daughters off to be killed in a foreign land.

So it goes.

After living through that history, I find it ironic that I cheer on the Ukrainians. In my head, I watch the coverage and say in my head, “Kill the Russians.” I don’t say it out loud but the sentiment is there, floating around the ether. Putin is the bad guy here and we try to stop him with economic sanctions and solidarity with NATO countries. It may work. But what happens if Putin uses chemical weapons or nukes? We have to respond. Kill the Russians! I say it although I know that it's young conscripts and civilians doing the dying while Putin plays Risk in his bunker. 

Inside of me is the part that read Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I remember Tolstoy’s writing about his horrific experiences as a Russian officer in the Caucasus campaign ("Hadji Murat") and Crimean War ("Sevastopol Sketches"). In the Caucasus, Chechens waged a guerrilla war against Russian troops. They responded by torching the forests so the enemy had no place to hide and decimating villages that lent aid to the guerrillas (sound familiar?). Says one of Tolstoy's Chechen fighters returning to his burnt-out village:

“Nobody spoke about hatred towards the Russians. What they all felt, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, but an unwillingness even to acknowledge these Russian dogs as people.”

The Crimean War spawned Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” that I once had to memorize in detention at Catholic School. It also brought ministrations of Florence Nightingale to our attention. It was as bloody as the one in Chechnya and Tolstoy described his vanity and that of his fellow officers this way:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Maybe there’s a Tolstoy among the troops assaulting Mariupol or closing in on Kyiv. Someone who goes off to war in high spirits but comes home in tatters.

The day after St. Patrick's Day 2022

I don't have a hangover, that's the main thing. Many prior St. Patrick's Day holidays involved drinking and then hangovers. Some stray guilt feelings. Calling in sick to work.

But not this time. I attended a family-style party last night. Wife stayed home with a sick daughter. We recited Irish poems. Remembered trips to Ireland -- friendly people but kissing the Blarney Stone is a rather disgusting ritual. Devoured Irish Stew and a delicious Guinness chocolate cake built to look like a pint on an Irish pub bar. I drank one Irish Ale made in Kansas City. Stayed away from the Writers' Tears Irish whiskey as I have enough of my own. We sang along to "Zombie" by the Cranberries and remembered Dolores O'Riordan who died too young.

Calm as these things go. Someone asked if they celebrated St. Patrick's Day in Ireland. Apparently, it's a religious holiday there. They ratchet up the festivities for American tourists. The Irish seem bemused by American spectacle. I've never been to Ireland so haven't had the chance to embarrass myself in person. But apparently the American idea of drinking green beer and singing fake Irish songs is not appreciated. U.S. tourist money is. 

I've blogged before about my mixed views on the holiday. Read those here and here and here. My grandfather from Roscommon Martin Hett (no, not O'Hett or McHett) never returned to the old sod. As a teen, I was pontificating about the legendary cruelty of the Brits to the Irish and my grandfather interrupted. "The English treated me better that the Irish ever did." That shocked me due to the fact that I was 16 and knew everything there was to know about the world. Grandpa went on to explain that his evil stepmother kicked him out of the house at 12. He made his way to England and worked in the coalfields until he saved enough money to sail to the U.S. at a 15-year-old. He worked hard in America and ended up in Denver where my mother was born and later, me. He liked being an American more than he liked being Irish. 

What, exactly, is an Irish-American? There is no easy explanation. We come in all shapes and sizes and all political persuasions including Trumpian which is disgusting -- recall how many wackos with Irish surnames served Herr Trump -- Flynn, Bannon, McCarthy, etc. Most of us mark St. Patrick's Day in some fashion. Corned beef and cabbage is a family favorite not always enjoyed by everyone in the family. My mother didn't like it probably because she ate a lot of it growing up. When she had food, which wasn't always the case during the Great Depression. One Christmas, she woke up to an orange in her stocking. That was the only present. I'm not sure if this is true because the Irish embellish almost everything.

I like to think that my proclivity for storytelling was passed on to me by my Irish ancestors. None of my immediate family are writers. Readers, yes. Writers, no. No aunts and uncles or cousins are writers. I am probably the only English major they know. We are known for our cutting humor, which seems to be an Irish trait. And my siblings and I all look Irish and our DNA attests to it. My red hair and freckles earned me lots of ridicule and a few fights. "Red on the head/like the dick on my dog." That's one taunt I remember. Red, Freckle Face, Rusty. They're all good. Shows some creativity. I don't think I sustained any permanent damage growing up white and freckled in America. 

As we read poetry at last night's party, I noticed it was rather light-hearted. I wanted to read something by Eavaan Boland ("The Lost Land") or Yeats ("The Second Coming") but never got the chance. Good Irish writing seems to balance the horrible and the humorous. Roddy Doyle is a great example. So is Flann O'Brien, whose satiric novel "The Poor Mouth" is one of my favorites. Flannery O'Connor too, who combined Irish-American wit with Southern Gothic grotesque to create her unique style.

Go read an Irish writer today. You will probably be glad you did, although it's hard to say.  

"The Weight of a Body" collection now available in print version

The print version of my book is now available to order on Amazon. "The Weight of a Body: A Collection of Short Stories" features 12 stories set (in no particular order) Wyoming, Colorado, and Florida. The collection was originally published by Denver's now-defunct Ghost Road Press and I decided earlier in the year to republish it as an e-book and now a print version. Here's the cover:

The act of republishing on KDP Amazon entails formatting, design, and editing. I formatted my MS Word files on Draft2Digital (D2D). I then brought that over to KDP to transform it into an e-book. It took me awhile to read an e-book on my Kindle and even longer to make one. My guide through the process was writer and critique group colleague Liz Roadifer. Read her books here. 

Here's a teaser from the opening story, "Roadkill:"

The shapes grew out of the smoke and fog -- three pronghorn antelope, running hard. Matthew Kincannon mashed the car's brakes and swung the wheel hard left. He missed the first two, collided with the third on its white-tufted rump which rose like a balloon before its rear legs smacked the windshield, its hooves scraping the glass like sharpened fists.

This won't be my only project on KDP. Stay tuned for news about my second collection later this year. Most of those stories are set in Wyoming and Colorado. 

Sunday morning round-up: Legislature weirdness, online publishing, and "The War on Powder River"

Russia invaded Ukraine this week. Putin does not want a democracy on its border. The Ukrainians are fighting back. The U.S. knows what joining the fight would bring. So we work with sanctions and what’s left of our free press. We also send war materiel to help Ukrainians fight the despot’s hordes. Any student of warfare knows a declaration of war would bring disaster. So what do we do?

I hope to have the print edition of my book of stories up on Amazon this week. The e-book is already on the site. Working with Kindle Direct Publishing can be a challenge. A traditional press would do most of this work. Formatting the text, deciding on a book cover, overseeing the printing process, sending out proofs, publicity. It’s all up to me now. Not sure if I’m going to put my second book of stories on KDP. I just want to have books in hand instead of taking up space in the Cloud. This blog is more of a journal than a publishing platform. Wish me luck.

The Wyoming State Legislature is in town. They will do plenty of damage in 20 days. We now experience first-hand what gerrymandering and voter suppression can do. Also Trump. And right-wing social media and TV. The nuts are out in force to suppress mask mandates, UW’s gender studies curriculum, American racism discussions in K-12 classrooms, gender equity, party-switching at election primaries, voting access, and any talk about Medicaid expansion for the state’s working poor. I’m sure more ridiculous proposals will emerge from the muck in the next two weeks. Wyoming voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and 2020. We now live in a Trumpist fiefdom.

I did not expect a nonfiction account of the Johnson County War to be shot through with irreverent humor. But that's what I got when I picked up Helena Huntington Smith's “The War on Powder River: The History of an Insurrection.” The book was published in 1966 as a Bison Books imprint from the University of Nebraska Press. This 1890s event is often referred to as the Johnson County War. It pitted the rich owners of large cattle herds against the little guy who owned a few head or a few hundred. The cattle cabal wanted to keep the open range in WYO. The little guys wanted to keep the maverick cattle that they found, stragglers from massive herds brought to Powder River Country by rich Easterners and Brits with the hope of amassing beef fortunes. Smith did an amazing job at taking a jaundiced view of an 1890s event that many people outside of Wyoming know little about. Smith’s research is impressive although this non-historian cannot vouch for all of the details. She cracks wise when describing the gentry founded ranches in Powder River Country which they enjoy in summer and desert once the first snow flies. Cowboys remain behind to watch the herds. While the winters of 1884-86 were balmy by WYO standards, the winter and spring of 1986-87 was a whopper. Many thousands of cattle froze to death on the overcrowded prairie. When the beef barons returned from the south of France, they left the round-up of strays to cowboys and got pissed off when small landholders rustled a few cattle. They got their payback in 1892, and also their comeuppance. It is easy to see the hubris of 1892 in Wyoming’s present.

Smith was an Easterner who spent some time in WYO. The TA Ranch south of Buffalo has named one of its dude ranch accommodations for Smith. The TA has the last surviving structures from the range war. Smith was a combat correspondent for Crowell-Collier magazines (Collier’s, Victory, Woman’s Home Companion) during World War II. In 1957, American Heritage magazine republished her account of the Battle of the Bulge. She recounts the breakout of Panzer divisions and how rear echelon soldiers, mechanics and engineers, were issued bazookas and ordered to stop Nazi tanks. Some of them were surprisingly successful and earned medals. Smith’s account has all the battlefield dark humor one finds in a good soldier’s memoirs. She brought that same humor to her account of the Johnson County War. I couldn’t find a full bio online but discovered she was a Smith College grad and wrote for magazines and wrote several books. The UW Heritage Center and State Archives probably has some good info on her. She obviously loved a good story.

Farewell P.J. O'Rourke: The best humor illuminates hard truths

Satirist P.J. O'Rourke passed away this week. His humor writing, especially during the National Lampoon era, influenced my writing. National Lampoon gave us Baby Boomers something to read that was as cantankerous as we were. O'Rourke was at the center of the mag for most of the seventies. Then he set off to be a freelancer and author, referring to himself as a "Republican Lounge Lizard." I was entranced by his 1988 essay collection, "Holidays in Hell." I laughed out loud at his misadventures in war-torn Beirut and in Managua during the Contra War. His takedown of the Sandalista Liberals giving aid to the Sandinistas was hilarious and heartbreaking. 

The year of the book's publication, I spent Super Bowl Week in Nicaragua delivering supplies to Habitat for Humanity projects. My Liberal self was accompanied by a group of Habitat volunteers from Denver and my Republican brother Dan from Florida. The most fun Dan had that week was setting off with a couple other gringos in a gypsy cab to find a place to watch Super Bowl. He saw about five minutes of the Super Bowl (Denver was wiped out by Washington) but got wildly drunk. I stayed back at the motel and watched (sober) most of the game on a tiny TV. 

The oddest moment happened when my brother get hauled out of a so-called informational meeting with Sandinista cultural ministers. I thought we had lost our one GOPer to the gulag but he returned 15 minutes later and said he'd been asked a bunch of questions such as whom had he voted for in the most recent U.S. presidential election. Reagan was the answer, probably the wrong answer, but Dan survived the trip.

He might not be so lucky now. The current government, headed by former revolutionary Daniel Ortega, specifically targets those people who openly criticize Daniel Ortega. In September, the U.S. State Department placed Nicaragua on its highest Level 4 alert with this warning: 

Do not travel to Nicaragua due to COVID-19. Reconsider travel to Nicaragua due to limited healthcare availability and arbitrary enforcement of laws. Exercise increased caution in Nicaragua due to crime.

On the other hand, the waves are bitchin'. 

O'Rourke pointed out the ridiculousness of the human condition. You could hear him at his best on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me." I sometimes bristled at his comments on Bill Maher but I think the iconoclastic host was delighted with the humorist because he kept bringing P.J. back. He had the Irish in him, the likes of Jonathan Swift and Flann O'Brien. He also had the English in him, some George Orwell from his "Homage to Catalonia" days. Orwell had his own holidays in hell during the Ethiopian War and Spanish Civil War. Later, he was at his satiric best in "Animal Farm." 

My writing has been influenced by O'Rourke, Woody Allen (his books), and Alan Coren. Monty Python, too. But the biggest influences were New Yorker humorists S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Ring Lardner. These city slickers knew how to turn a phrase. This suburban kid, whose only NYC experience was "just passing through," loved this work. I see it also in Grace Paley's stories. Humor transcends the telling of jokes to enter into some hard truths. And then we laugh.

Satire is not for the timid. You are often misunderstood and not understood at all by the Blunt Skulls. 

Nevertheless, he (O'Rourke) persisted.

Wyoming Tribune-Eagle reports on racist behavior in Cheyenne

It was a cringe-worthy headline above the fold in Saturday's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: 

Air Force base leaders speak out against COMMUNITY RACISM

Yes, that last part was all caps and for good reason. Cheyenne's Warren AFB is home of the 90th Missile Wing and scores of nukes. Like most military bases, it’s self-contained to a certain extent but its airmen and airwomen and civilian employees interact with the community. 

Those interactions, lately, have been nasty. Missile Wing Commander Col. Catherine Barrington called for a meeting with community leaders after Black Air Force families reported racist incidents.

USAF dependents attend K-12 schools located around the county. Many are African-American because, well, it's the United States Air Force and not the Wyoming Air Force. As such, it is made up of young men and women from all over the U.S. and the world. Many have experienced multiple overseas deployments to far-flung bases and war zones. Some have been called racist epithets and discriminated against because of their color in Cheyenne, the place I call home.

The worst local offender reported in the article seems to be McCormick Junior High. This doesn’t surprise me as our daughter was terribly bullied when she attended McCormick. Its students tend to be white and from the mostly prosperous north side of the city where I still live. This doesn’t prevent them from being bullies and racists. 

[Col.] Barrington explained that multiple students have been bullied and called racial slurs at McCormick Junior High. A ninth-grade girl got off the bus the first day of the school year and was immediately called the N-word more than one time.

The girl opted to attend Cheyenne Virtual School rather than to be in this nest of vipers. Others were bullied and called racial slurs which led to fights where black students were suspended and fined. 

One wonders where these 13-year-olds might have learned such behavior. Look to the racist behavior of parents, those people you see at Trump rallies and ranting about Critical Race Theory and face masks at school board meetings. There are consequences for such loathsome behavior.

It's not only school children. One uniformed Black airman bought a gun at a local shop. When he returned in civvies to get the gun serviced, the proprietor said she didn’t have time to serve him.

“Other airmen have also experienced this,” said Warren's Command Chief Master Sergeant Nicholas Taylor. “And when they went in to buy ammunition, they would not sell ammunition to airmen of color at all. So they had to ask their Caucasian counterparts to go in and buy ammunition on behalf of them.”

Let’s be clear – in Cheyenne, we live at the intersection of Guns & Ammo. We have a couple dozen stores and pawn shops where you can buy shootin' irons. We have at least two outdoor firing ranges and one indoors. On Sundays, you can hear the Warren security detachment’s firearm drills. I would venture that everyone in my neighborhood owns at least one firearm. It’s not unusual to see gun stickers on front doors that read “This home protected by Smith & Wesson;” similar four-wheel-oriented stickers adorn pickups. Lest you think only conservatives own guns, you obviously don’t know any Wyoming Democrats. The Second Amendment is religion here, even among heathen Liberals.

So, when you hear that a Black airman cannot buy bullets in a Cheyenne shop when his latest deployment may have placed him armed with a fully-loaded taxpayer-funded weapon in a war zone, you have to say WTF or something similar.

James Peebles also spoke at the public meeting. He’s the director of the Sankofa African Heritage Awareness, Inc., in Cheyenne. His organization conducts seminars about systemic racism, the history of slavery, and the civil rights struggles. All things we desperately need to know about if racist behavior is to stop. Timely subjects during Black History Month.

Peebles described watching the social dynamic in Cheyenne change, with Black families leaving after experiencing racism. There also has been pandemic-driven anti-Asian rhetoric in the past five years.

After a recent ugly incident, Peebles added that “the last year was the first time he even questioned his safety here after living in Cheyenne for 12 years.”

Thanks to reporter Jasmine Hall for covering this meeting and a big thanks to the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle for featuring it so prominently. We need our newspapers to show us when our neighbors behave badly.

A salute to those books that taught me humor, satire, and the absurdity of being human

All this book-banning makes me think of all of those books I read that might meet disapproval now from the GOP Know Nothings. 

When I was in the fourth grade, my father told me I could read any book in his library. I tackled the war books, first, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle and Up Front by Bill Mauldin, which included his Willie and Joe cartoons. He had some boys' adventure books from his childhood, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe. But I was more interested in the WWII books, as my father had been a radioman with an infantry unit in France, Belgium, and Germany. They seemed like boys' adventures to me. I read all of the Life magazines that my grandparents had saved for my dad while he was overseas. I watched war movies with my dad, as did my younger brother. We played war with our friends. 

None of my teachers ever assigned books on 20th century wars. They reached into the heroic past. The Revolutionary War had spawned books such as Johnny Tremayne and tales of Paul Revere and George Washington. The Civil War was acceptable reading as we all grew up knowing that the Yankees were the good guys and the Rebs the bad guys. This was way before we moved to the South and heard the term War of Northern Aggression. So many of the books I read as an English major and later were by writers of the American South. Their Southern Gothic tales owed their existence to the region's tortured history which included the Civil War, whatever you want to call it.

Now in my 70s, I look back on my reading as nostalgic. I also know more about the workings of the world. War can be heroic. It's also nasty, brutish, and final. Soldiers carry their experiences into old age, if they make it that far. There are brilliant antiwar books told from the warrior's POV. And books by observers, such as Red Badge of Courage and Dispatches, Michael Herr's wild book about life among the grunts in Vietnam (Herr got writing credits for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket). 

Just about every book I ever read could be fodder for the book banners. My non-authorized reading at my Catholic high school included three oft-banned novels that influenced me more than anything I read in class: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They are now considered classics and are read in some high school classrooms when Know Nothings are not disappearing books like Dunbar. They were telling me a truth that I barely knew at 18, that the world is a strange and terrifying place. 

Humor, satire, and sci-fi are great vehicles for getting at the truth. I passed Catch-22 along to my Class of '69 pals and we laughed at the absurdities. The dead man in Yossarian's tent. Major Major Major's name. Orr's pastime of ditching his bomber into the ocean to practice for his escape from war. Hilarious. We only felt a small tremor of the earthquake beneath. We could have watched the absurdity of televised military reports from Vietnam. Body count, Vietnamization, destroy the village in order to save it. It was all right there in front of us but we didn't know. 

Reading good books gave us a bit of a head start on adulthood. Still, you have to live it to really know. You can be an absurdist and still be an engaged human. You can love satire but also fall in love. Humor makes the ride fun even when it's challenging. 

I'd have none of that without the reading.

Meditation after another trip to the dermatologist

Angel Kisses

The sun’s first ray taps the crown of my head. I’m the tallest creature on the ocean, me, a young man bobbing just outside of the breaking waves. Light from 93 million miles away cascades over my torso, lights up the many colors of my surfboard, paints my body with freckles that will only become visible when winter comes. Soon all the surfers will be illuminated, their multi-colored boards, the stripes on their baggies. The sun will crawl over the beach and the early-bird walkers and houses perched on the dunes and the town and Florida entire. It will unleash the heat, fire up the humidity of a July morning.  Decades later, a Wyoming dermatologist talks about his family’s Colorado ski vacation as he scoops skin from this young surfer turned old man. Cancer may have been there all of this time, a remnant of the sun’s touch during hundreds of mornings in the semi-tropical sun. My crown, my nose, my ears have all been biopsied, scraped and sown. Nothing awful, nothing like melanoma that killed my brother. I wonder if the dermatologist slaps on sunscreen before he negotiates Steamboat runs named High Noon, One O’clock, Two O’clock for the prime meridian times that January sun reaches the west-facing mountains. If sunscreen had been a thing in 1967, I would have used it. Maybe. I know one thing – I would never trade one second of those mornings for blemish-free skin. Every scar a dance with sun and ocean, every freckle the kiss from the heavens. “Freckles are angel kisses,” my mom told me when I believed in angels. I now know the science behind melanin and derma, ephelides and solar lentigines. But during my seventieth year on the planet, angel kisses seem exactly right. Just perfect.

The universe of the heart is a strange and lonely place in "Bewilderment"

In Richard Powers' novel "Bewilderment," Theo Byrne’s nine-year-old son Robin may have ADHD or Asberger’s or is somewhere on the autism “spectrum.” He is suspended when he clocks a kid at school. He always says the wrong thing. Therapists try to convince Theo to put Robin on medication such as Ritalin or Concerta. Theo, an astrobiologist searching for the universe’s exoplanets, refuses to do so. He’s a single parent, his environmentalist wife Alyssa killed in a car wreck when she swerved to avoid a possum.

Father spends many hours hiking and camping with his son. Together, they travel to imaginary planets that Theo only knows through the signatures of critical elements picked up from thousands of light years away. Those are wonderful chapters, journeying to quirky planets that come right out of the scientific imagination. Their names include Stasis, Isola, and Tedia which, not surprisingly, reflect their namesakes of isolation, loneliness, and tedium. One planet doesn’t spin on its axis due to the pull of competing suns. The planet’s few living things can only exist in a narrow band of twilight because they would die from heat on one side or freeze to death on the other.

Theo the astrophysicist discusses various terms regarding the existence of life on other planets. The Fermi Paradox asks the question once asked by Enrico Fermi: Where are the aliens? Drake Equation measures the probability of exoplanets that support life long enough for intelligent beings to emerge. In the novel, Theo proposes other possibilities. No sentient lifeforms anywhere. Civilizations so far away that we would never meet them. Some posit the idea that there is intelligent life in the universe but those beings want nothing to do with us. So they are silent.

All of this returns to Theo’s struggle to understand his son and deal with the death of his wife. A colleague opens a research project that might have answer. It involves a kind of neurofeedback, the AI linking of a person with electronic energy created by others. Neurodivergent Robin becomes part of the study, linking up with some feedback loops his mother made when alive. He gradually gets a better grasp on his behavior and exceeds the researchers’ goals. But disappointment awaits -- and a surprise ending. Think “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. “Charly,” the movie based on the book, really got to me when I saw it in 1968.

Powers is a powerful writer and “Bewilderment” resonated with me for several reasons. This tale got real early on. My wife and I put our son with ADHD on Ritalin when he was five in 1990. I resisted. I couldn’t imagine my little dynamo on drugs. But he needed help. His working parents needed help. Directors of preschools and kindergarten teachers pushed us to go the medication route. Three decades later, I can still feel the pain. I had to stop reading Powers’ novel at some points because the author does such a great job of describing the pain of the bewildered parent.

“Bewilderment” also asks this question: Are we as alone in the universe as we are on Earth? The book says yes but also provides the reader with transcendent moments.

Still, loneliness may be as endemic to the universe as hydrogen and helium. We may never see intelligent lifeforms. If they exist, they are far away and the distances too great. We are early in the exploration stage. I will be stardust by the time humans leave our solar system for another.

Powers creates a world where the reader feels the weight of the universe and the weight of people’s attempts to know ourselves and our loved ones. I finished the book, sat back in my recliner, said “we are all alone,” and then grabbed a beer. I have family and friends, a wife and two grown children. They will miss me when I am gone. But the earth will keep spinning, a sunrise will be followed by a sunset. One generation will be replaced by another and another and another.

Today I am going to pretend that I am not alone. I will reach out to those important to me. What else can I do?