Though I'm old, and can't stand cold, the window's Calling me out. Without a cane I'll bear The pain to glean what a woodsman knows: To sniff a whiff of the autumnal air Like my old dog once did, as if the scent Was like a rose, or like a ruby glass Of wine, walking places we once went, Pausing by her grave, unable to pass Without inviting her wagging ghost to walk With me into the dusk of Halloween. And yes, the young may grin as they talk About the muttering old man they've seen Prowling the twilight, but I don't care. Me and my ghost-dog sniff night air.
We’ve suffered drought from summer into the fall, but we’ve been spared forest fires, so it only amounts to a whole lot of beautiful weather. It’s hard to complain about sunshine, especially if you have nothing to water. I did get a few things into the garden before I was hospitalized, but a friendly doe brought her twin fawns by to browse everything down to ground level, so I was spared the worry of watering. My daughter-in-law was meanwhile kept very busy with watering her section of the garden, which she had devoted to flowers. She had a plan to sell them. I was skeptical but kept my lip buttoned. Then a little stand appeared at the foot of our drive.
I remained skeptical, as she could not sit by her flowers and hawk her wares, because she had four small children to attend to. Therefore she just put up a sign by the bouquets stating they cost $15.00 each, with a box to put money into. Also she placed the stand where I was in the habit of backing up my vehicles for thirty-five years, and it was only a matter of time before I’d be careless and people would question whether I was getting too old to drive, as there would be a loud “CLUNK” and the poor woman’s flowers would be strewn on the street. But she was rather sweet about my eventual unhelpfulness, and about gathering up the mess and rearranging the bouquets, and also enthusiastic about the fact people had stopped and put money into her box, and she had swiftly paid for the packets of seeds she bought last spring.
And she was just getting started. Car after car pulled over to pick up a bouquet. I think she sold over thirty bouquets, and I told her it was the first time the farm showed any profit (besides Childcare) in around ten years. She was helped by the fact the weather stayed mild and the frosts were late, but the inevitable finally happened, and the happy colors in the garden were laid low and blackened by an abrupt blast from Canada. It promptly warmed up again, but once that first freeze hits, it’s all over for many blooms.
The maples of New England then go through an extraordinary process, not yet fully understood by naturalists, wherein they transform the chlorophyll in their leaves to other enzymes and chemicals and frantically produce sugar. This removes the green from their leaves and turns them red, orange and yellow. The leaves are still hard at work as they take on these colors, as is shown by the fact they are not blown from the trees even in gales and then, when their work is done, they drop from the trees even on a windless morning. Therefore I think to myself, as the landscape of New England becomes radiant with a beauty in the autumn, and people (called “leaf-peepers” by locals) travel from far and wide to see the radiance, that the trees are “making sugar”. Just as farmers harvest, reaping what they sow, trees are harvesting their crop of sugar.
There is a fair amount of mystery about the storage of the sugar. The trees apparently don’t draw it all down to the roots and then pump it back up in the spring, or, if they do, they employ some sort of engineering we don’t understand and therefore deem impossible. More likely is the possibility the sugar is extracted from the sap and stored in twigs and in sapwood, up where it will be needed in the spring, and the tree does not pump much water down at all. When water starts to rise in the usual manner in the spring the sugar is at hand to give maples (and some birches) a head-start over all other trees.
I like this idea as a symbol, because otherwise autumn can be a very depressing season. The growing darkness, the apparent cessation of growth, and even of life, is one reason Halloween has so many skulls and bones and creepy things. As I approach the end of my own life I don’t much like the idea of skulls, and prefer the idea of the creation of sugar for spring.
However this sugar-coating of the onset of winter creates a conflict with a grumpy and pragmatic side of me. In terms of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, I, as an artist, have too often been the grasshopper, and have faced fall with no harvest other than songs that didn’t sell. I have battled through many winters flat broke, learning the hard way to work like the ants did back in the summer, but working in the cold as the ants happily warmed their toes by fires and consumed the food they stored. Even now, in my decrepitude, I get no pension and work in my feeble way, as the ants have second homes in Florida, and in some cases more than one pension. It seems wiser to be an ant than a grasshopper. Yet…the sugar-coating persists.
We should quake in our boots, for we've no crops. We don't farm, instead eye-straining indoors At screens. We've not strung onions at tops Of our hovels, nor stored roots under our floors. We've gathered nothing, as days grow shorter And winds grow cold. We expect to drive warm cars To stocked stores, but dread a news reporter Speaking of empty shelves. Reality jars Our common sense, for through windows we see A landscape rejoicing. The crimson leaves Announce maples make sugar for spring. Sweet glee Defies dark with radiance. Darkness deceives For it knows only want, ignoring the gold Which shines in the light true harvesters hold.
One person who was likely aware a pension would do him no good was the poet John Keats. Though he likely hoped for longevity, he likely also knew he was doomed to die young, for he received training as a doctor and surgeon. He cared for his mother as she died of TB, and then his younger brother as he died of the same, and John also knew he had a persistent cough. At one point, coughing a spot of blood into his handkerchief, he apparently stated, “I know this blood. It is arterial blood. This spot is my death warrant.” And indeed he did die of TB before he was 26, and yet his poetry is in many ways a defiance of death. How so? Well, in many ways that is the mystery.
My best guess is that poets get a taste of the good life, when young, and then see it ruined by evil. A happy home gets smashed by death or divorce, and a joyous child is jolted into a posture of longing for what was lost. “You’ve got to pay the dues if you want to sing the blues.”
In the case of John Keats his father ran a prosperous carriage house on a late 1700’s highway, a stable and inn and also tavern, busy with comings and goings and chatter and laughter. Call it a Hilton Hotel of its era. But then the man died in some sort of accident, and the mother had to attempt to run the show alone, although her health was declining, and then she died. So John saw a happy situation become an unhappy one, but in some way he never gave up on the happiness he had lost. Poetry was his defiance. Beauty was his guide.
On September 13, 1819 John sat down and wrote “To Autumn”, which utterly amazes me. First, the rhyme scheme is difficult, but you hardly notice it as it makes the music more musical. (The poem deserves to be read aloud.) Second, his life was full of hardship, but he still whipped the three amazing stanzas off on a single afternoon. Be amazed. Third, it is the best appreciation I’ve seen of how there is a beauty in Autumn which overwhelms the doom and dread of an oncoming winter.
I would leave a link to the poem, but know some are too busy to chase links, and therefore will include the entire poem in this post. I urge people to read it aloud, softly in a secret corner if need be, and also to understand that, due to the petty politics of that time, the poetry publishers and their elite circle had decided John Keats was not worth reading.
TO AUTUMN
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The zen-like peace of Keat’s transcendental state of mind is attached to rural farms, yet detached from my pragmatic side, which can make a miser out of counting cabbages and a pension from a heap of potatoes. I’m all too aware you can’t take your pension with you when you depart this veil of tears, and remember the allegory Jesus told, involving the farmer who planned to build bigger barns to store up his bountiful harvest so his soul could eat and be merry, but that very night his soul was required of him. It is not the heaps of produce that make autumn so beautiful.
The darkening sneaks up on the summer Like a lion on a doe born too dreamy To live long, who sniffs blooms though bees whir Frantic to gather. Even bugs can foresee The dark growing cold. The monarchs flitter south Without maps. But the dreamy doe lazes And the lion halts, with opening mouth, Puzzled by the way nothing fazes The ludicrous doe. Soon a ludicrous Lion has forgotten to eat, bemused And perhaps enchanted. I'll not discuss What just happened. I'm too confused. The curtain of darkness descends on an act With a rare gentleness and softest impact.
Turn the radio off. I want to sit And listen to the crisp noise my knife makes Peeling apples. Outside there's wood to split And stack, but I've gotten too old. My aches And pains make mockery of my manhood But I can still peel apples. Just a job, but feeling useful breaks a smile. It's good For I dodge snared esteem that seeks to rob The beauty from life. The beauty is back: The slow, steady paring, and the perfume Of apples, and my wife's pale hands that pack The pies, as the oven warms the room. And then, just as moths are drawn to what's bright, Grandchildren appear and dance in delight.
I was expecting a very low sea-ice extent this September, and you can imagine the expression on my face when I saw the DMI graph take this turn:
The refusal of the sea-ice to set a new recent-time record for a low minimum must have caused moaning among Alarmists, but I haven’t had the time to lurk at the periphery of their websites. Rehab takes up too much time. But I have needed to recover from rehab, which allows me to idly sit around and think about all I’ve learned, over the past twenty years of studying the quirks of arctic sea-ice expansions and contractions. Often my thinking drifts off into a pleasant snooze, and I conclude the subject is far vaster and more marvelous than I could have imagined when I first began probing. It’s too big for my little brains, but I’m glad I’ve been a witness. It has in some ways been like walking through a sterile desert and abruptly coming out on the brink of the Grand Canyon.
Right from my first awareness of Alarmist theory I sensed they simplified far too much. I knew they were “wrong” because I knew Vikings had sailed in open boats and raised crops and herded 2000 cows and 100,000 sheep and goats where it can’t be done today, and therefore the arctic had been milder even as recently as 1000 years ago, without terrible repercussions. However I knew nothing about how this came to be. I became curious about what the cycles of more sea-ice and less sea-ice involved.
Now, at the end of my life, I feel I am glimpsing a oneness I wish I had started out with. I’ve spent a lifetime finding the starting line.
In a nutshell, what I see is this:
The sun goes through its cycles, and is so massive, compared to our speck of a planet, that its changes affect all levels of our world. The airy atmosphere is affected, and the fluid seas, and even the seemingly solid earth. (The earth is actually magma beneath the crust, so, though slower than water and air, it too is fluid and can be shifted by the whims of our sun).
Considering the enormity of what the sun could set in motion, it seemed downright comical Alarmists wanted to dismiss it all, and focus on a tiny fluctuation of a trace gas.
While I did waste time sinking to their level and debating about the quibble they focused on, (and you can look back to earlier posts on this site if you are interested in such quibble), what always interested me more was the history they did not want to look at. They would make nice, neat maps of how the sea-ice used to be solid but now was melted, but I could find historical records of whalers sailing where they said there was solid ice.
A major derangement of “normal” situations occurred around 1817, when there was a enormous discharge of sea-ice into the North Atlantic, creating a very cold summer in western Europe, but amazingly open waters towards the North Pole that whalers noticed. This historical event, “the year with no summer” in Europe and “Eighteen Hundred and froze to death” in New England, has been studied and linked to two of the biggest volcanic events of the millennium, in 1810, and 1815, and also with a lack of sunspots called “The Dalton Minimum.”
Initially I was scornful of the idea anything as gentle as a sunbeam could move something as mighty as a volcano, but, thinking about tides, I gradually came around, until I began to wonder if the current shortage of sunspots, which some call “The Modern Minimum,” might result in a major derangement of sea-ice, as occurred in 1817. Alarmists would gleefully state the flushing of ice was due to CO2, I supposed, but the derangement would just do its thing and ignore them.
To a degree my theory was verified, first by the spectacular Tonga Pacific eruption, and then by the hidden seismic events along the Mid Atlantic Ridge which apparently warmed the entire Atlantic Ocean. In any case, I began to expect a record low sea-ice extent this September, not because of CO2, but because of lava.
Things started out on course, with DMI records showing the lowest December, January, February and March levels “ever”, (or since 1979), but then things began to wobble in a new way. Briefly June was second warmest in the brief DMI record, but now we have seen September pass and only rank as fifteenth lowest.
This has caused a glitch in the Alarmist idea the sea-ice is steadily shrinking along a straight “trend line.” Records fit their “trend line”, over the past nineteen years, for the month of January:
However, for the month of September over the past nineteen years, it looks like the straight trend-line is getting badly bent:
It is an inconvenient truth, for Alarmists, that we have more sea-ice in September, 2025 than in 2006, because they stress the idea that the decline will be steady (and disastrous). Therefore they will need to say it only looks like there is more, but there is actually less. The figures will need to be “adjusted”, by men in white coats who speak with great authority about things such as the “volume” of the sea-ice, (which are difficult to do more than estimate).
It is also an inconvenient truth, for me, that things didn’t copy 1817. There was no vast cross-polar-flow flushing huge amounts of sea-ice into the North Atlantic. Therefore I need to shrug and admit I got it wrong, and then marvel over what actually happened.
What seems to have happened is that the seismic activity along the mid-Atlantic ridge quit, and the ocean has started to lose it’s heat. Not that it is not still warmer than normal, although, as hurricane after hurricane has curved out to sea (perhaps attracted by the warmth) there are some waters churned to below normal temperatures.
The sea-ice has been melted north of Svalbard, and Barents Sea has less ice than usual, but this is not conducive to warming the Arctic Sea. Water stays warmer when sheltered by a lid of ice, but much Atlantic heat will be squandered to the cold arctic skies before the sea-ice can regrow and shelter it.
Meanwhile, on the Pacific side, there has been seismic activity, north of Japan, and a very warm patch of Pacific water has developed, likely to cause the jet stream to become loopy this winter, which can chill North America if the jet loops north in Siberia and then digs south across Bering Strait.
Or maybe not. I’ll leave it to forecasters better than I to predict how that Pacific hot-spot will influence winter. I plan to sit back and watch. In some ways I’m like a retired ball-player; I can’t get out there and play, but I can admire the players.
I do wish I was just starting, for it seems young meteorologists have data it was difficult to even dream about, sixty years ago.
What is really interesting to do is to go back 150 years, and see what the meteorologists yearned to know. In those days they yearned to know more about the upper atmosphere. So they found a way. First it was weather balloons, and later satellites, but now they know, but it is not enough. Now they yearn to know more about the seas, and the currents below the surface, and even to know about the magma that slowly surges lava tides beneath the planet’s crust. And of course some look to the sun, and yearn to know more about the weather of what amounts to an unimaginably huge, long-term hydrogen bomb. And, while witnessing these genius minds attempting to find order, (which might allow prediction), in the massive scope of all these fields, one also witnesses odd, little people utterly focused on a small fluctuation of a trace gas.
The massive scope consists of the upper atmosphere, surface winds and temperatures, sea surface temperatures and currents, deep sea currents, and magma motions. It is huge and mighty like a lion. CO2 is a trace gas. To focus on CO2 is like focusing on a hair follicle of a lion.
Don’t get me wrong. A brilliant detective like Sherlock Holmes can learn a lot from a hair follicle. He would figure out it belonged to a lion, and his attention would shift in that direction. However Global Warming Alarmists don’t want Sherlock deducing in that direction.
Why not? Because they have subscribed to a conclusion which is incorrect. They believe the hair follicle is not a hair follicle, but actually the quill of a feather. Sherlock is therefore wrong to envision a lion.
Sherlock is not wrong, but Alarmists have an amazing trillion dollars funding their effort to portray a follicle as a quill, and to silence the likes of Sherlock. And, in their little world, they have succeeded, but in the real world the lion prowls and roars, and a trillion dollars cannot bribe an inch from the claw of the tides. A trillion dollars cannot move the sea-ice from its appointed shift. A trillion dollars cannot cow nature and make it behave stupidly, but it can make men be fools. They will state a follicle is a quill, and marginalize Sherlock, for a mere trillion. Meanwhile, in the real world, a follicle is more than a hair, it is part of a vibrant, roaring lion, brimming with power, danger, and fun.
Stay tuned.
P.S. The waters on the Pacific side, although ice-covered in terms of “ice extent” calculations, are actually in many ways open, for they consists of bergs floating about. Even water 85% open, covered with a smattering of 15% bergs, counts as “ice-covered” in some “extent” calculations. This slushy situation flash-freezes to more solid ice with amazing speed (very alarming to sailors who have described attempting to avoid being caught in the clutches of such freeze-up’s for over two hundred years,) But, for the moment, much exposed water is losing heat to the arctic night. It shows in the DMI polar air temperatures graph:
I suppose the Alarmist view is that such above-average temperatures show the Pole is warming, but I believe in actual fact it shows how our planet is squandering heat and losing it to the arctic night.
The Alarmist theory states open waters at the Pole will absorb more sunlight, and warm the waters. Indeed this actually happens in the marginal seas close to the coasts, helped by early summer’s flooding arctic rivers and a sun over thirty degrees up in the sky. However it doesn’t happen when the sun has sunk to five degrees. Open water then reflects more sunlight than dirty snow does. And, when the sun has actually set for months on end, open water can absorb no sunlight. All it can do is lose heat.
Drought has the lawn starting to sound a bit crisp, as I cross it doing my stupid COPD rehab exercises. I feel like a dog on a leash, with my oxygen tubing dragging along behind, and my range limited, but I prefer the long tubing of the stationary-oxygen-condenser to the portable-condenser’s short tubes and purse, which weighs ten pounds and makes an annoying growl and supplies less oxygen “on demand” than the stationary-condenser does “on steady flow”. They differ in their effect, even when set at the same level of “liters per minute.”
Fooling around with all my oxygen junk can be interesting, making my body into a sort of laboratory experiment, but at times it is just annoying. I rip the tubes from my nostrils, drop them on the lawn, and just go for a walk, in my doddering way, without any help, like an ordinary man. Then at least I can hear something besides stupid machines, (such as the lawn becoming crisp).
Going off the help of additional oxygen reminds me a little of swimming underwater as a boy. I once amazed my friends with how long I could stay under water, for I had good lungs, back before I discovered the joys of cigarettes. Also I learned a few tricks, involving a sort of hyperventilation before diving, that I gathered from reading about pearl divers. However I also learned to bear the discomfort, increasingly painful and panicky, of a body screaming for air.
It is important for a pearl diver not to panic about breathlessness for two reasons. First, he is suppose to be focused on looking for oysters, and not on his own body. Second, any sort of panicky thrashing uses up oxygen faster than moving serenely, and shortens the amount of time one can spend under water. In both cases the individual seeks to control the body, rather than the body being the boss.
While a pearl diver is motivated by the will to find material treasure, (which may be spiritual, if he is feeding his family by daring the depths and facing sharks), there are yogis who sit about depriving their body’s appetites for no material reason whatsoever. They deprive their appetite for food by fasting. Through celibacy they sacrifice the pleasure of gratification through sex. But it is through various sorts breathing exercises that they distort ordinary breathing in highly controlled manners, and reveal that, while they may not be after anything material, they do hanker after something. What are they after? Basically: visions.
To the worldly the pursuit of visions tends to look foolish, even laughable. It is synonymous with delusions and hallucinations. Also the ordinary man is made cynical by exposure to flashy salesmen who are forever promising heaven while delivering hell. One furthermore notices that so-called holy-men still need to eat, and the priest has his collection tray as the sadhu has his begging bowl. There seems no escape from the weight of the world, so I turn back towards my oxygen tubing. It seems ironic that, where I once would take a break from my deep thinking to fumble for a cigarette, I now stoop to pick up the forked tubing I thrust back into my nostrils.
I stand for a while just breathing, like a pearl diver coming up for air. Slowly the sense I am holding my breath fades away. I feel less bossed about, but surely I am still a captive, like a dog on its leash.
This seems to be the usual effect of worldly attempts to escape worldly appetites. One does not actually escape the desire. In some cases the desire becomes a monster, so that an alchoholic like Spencer Tracy could be tipped off the wagon simply by partaking in sponge-cake, if it was soaked in rum. The friar or nun live in constant danger of seduction. The fasting man looks with longing at the clock, towards the ending of his fast. Rather than seeing visions, the seeker sees the world becomes more loud and distracting.
Some feel the escape is to be found in gratification of the desire. The glutton is no longer a glutton while patting his paunch after a twelve course meal; his appetite is completely sated. In like manner it was felt the way to handle heroin addiction was to prescribe regular doses of methadone, avoiding withdrawal by keeping the addict sated. (In fact this was my own approach with cigarettes; I’d buy them by the carton and never really think of them, chain-smoking until the carton was empty, when I’d get worried and rush off for another carton.)
In either alternative there seems to be no genuine escape from the worldly, which remains the boss. While this does tend to back up the cynical attitude that the world is all there is, and visions are mere poppycock, there is also a longing deep down in the human spirit for something more. This tends to manifest in two ways.
First, being sated doesn’t last. One may be fed, but one will need to be fed again later. And then one often notices repetition does not make the heart grow fonder. Familiarity breeds contempt. The beautiful blond becomes a bore. This leads to doubling doses, and tripling doses, until one goes too far, seeking to bring back the initial pleasure and excitement, and it also leads one to seek elsewhere.
Second, despite all the evidence that the physical is all that there is, human beings have an odd propensity to turn to the non-physical on the completion of a task. After the work-week comes the weekend, and rather than make money one spends it. Nor does one spend it entirely sensibly. Sometimes after an arduous cruise one spends like a sailor. One sings and one dances.
It is at this point those who dislike the prospect of spiritual reality being real become downright arduous in their efforts to belittle humanity. They downplay men and woman’s gracious sides. They argue: Does not a bird of paradise dance a highly complex mating dance? And it never attends dancing school. And does not a humpback whale repeat a long and intricate song? And it writes no sheets of music. So might not human rejoicing merely be guttural grunting gussied up with ribbons and bows? Heck, even a deaf man can make music; Beethoven is just an advanced ape.
I need not reply; only remember the dirtiest, hardest jobs I ever worked: Shoveling manure; caring for the cancerous; wading gore in a fish cannery; and I can recall the laughter despite the hardship. And, while I never served in the trenches of World War One, I can read Wilfred Owen’s great poem, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”, that begins, “I, too, saw God through mud–” and I know verification: Despite all the world’s hardship something otherworldly is in the wings.
And with that I drop the tubing to the lawn again, and go pearl diving.
Down at the end of the lawn, out of the reach of my oxygen tubing, is a patch of raspberries which not only bear fruit during the ordinary season in late June, but have a second crop in September. They are the pearls I seek.
Those berries have been an unlikely success. Around a decade ago my sister gave me a very special raspberry root from some hybridized plant that makes berries that are golden rather than red, and which fruits twice a summer, and is absolutely delicious. I thanked her profusely, but as soon as her back was turned I rolled my eyes. I was already working an eighty-hour-week and needed more work like I needed a hole in my head. But, because I didn’t have the heart to throw the root away, I just sliced the earth with a shovel and stuck the root underground “until I had time to plant it properly” (which meant never.) Then, to my astonishment, the blame thing didn’t die. In fact it spread, and now we have a patch of raspberries right in the middle of the flower garden. Unless…
…Unless the drought killed them.
I was worried, as I crunched down the lawn, that they had gone the way of some of my phlox, and had more than wilted in the hot winds; some of my phlox were downright crisp; and you knew they could not spring back with a good rain; those phlox plants were door-nail dead. Had the raspberries suffered such a fate?
At the very least I expected some dry berries. (I think there are few things worse than a dry berry, when you are looking forward to a nice, plump, juicy one). I braced myself to wax philosophical: Not every dive brings up a pearl; sometimes a pearl diver just brings up an oyster full of slime and gore, without a pearl.
In fact the berries were still green and hard. They were unripe, but I was surprised none looked withered. Usually a stressed plant will sacrifice some of its fruit to save a few survivors, but all the fruit seemed sound, so far. In fact the phlox it grew amidst looked dry, but not terribly wilted, and the aster and globe thistle looked like they were managing to get by as well. It looked like someone had watered the plants, but I knew it was trouble enough to lug oxygen hoses about; it was too much for me to bother with heavier water hoses, and also I knew my wife was too busy running our business without me to be dillydallying in the back yard. Why did these plants look better than the rest?
The grass by my feet spoke to me, by not crunching. It was green and lush. Of course! The leech field! But this takes me off on a tangent:
My daughter had been driving me crazy by turning our house into her private laundromat. She was forever rushing in and disturbing my peace with heaps of children’s clothing. Like the old, cantankerous coot that I am, I had growled I’d put a coffee can by the washer and drier and she’d have to pay eight quarters for each wash and four for each load dried, so I could pay for the electricity, (let alone the wear and tear on the machines), but, as always seems to be the case, some hidden benefit appears like a sunbeam from clouds. The benefit was that all that laundry-water drained into the leech-field, which may have clogged the leech-field with lint, but watered the raspberries, and also fertilized them. But the subject of fertilizer made me smile, as my mind drifted off on another tangent.
I recalled the laughing face of an old timer who told me he could not eat fresh raspberries in cream, nor as jam on toast, nor drink raspberry shrub as a beverage, because he as a boy had to fertilize between the rows, and the fertilizer was human fecal matter. It was a terrible job, but someone had to do it, and he didn’t mind the jingle of the silver coins he was paid.
It was in the 1930’s and 1940’s, before flush toilets made it this far from the cities, and outhouses were still in use. Out on the farms a new hole would be dug, the outhouse shifted over it, and the old hole filled in, but this practice couldn’t be applied in the crowded village. In the village the fecal matter piled up in large trays beneath the outhouses, and in the spring the reeking trays had to be hauled out and brought to the nearest raspberry patch, and the person stuck with this job was my old friend, but he was just a boy when he did it. He said the stench was enough to knock over an elephant, and ever since he couldn’t face a raspberry without remembering the awful smell, and gagging.
This seems to suggest that even when a hidden benefit is revealed, as is the case when the reek of human manure is transformed into the delicious flavor of raspberries, the weight of the world can win out, and prevent enjoyment. However as that old man told me his tale he was laughing. Where did his joy come from? It certainly wasn’t from raspberries.
I could feel myself becoming breathless, but didn’t want to head back to my oxygen tubing. Instead I resorted to “pursed lipped breathing”, which is a technique the rehab nurses taught us to use if our equipment fails. (It compresses air deeper into your lungs so that you get more oxygen with each gasp.) I like to think of it as a sort of yoga. And it does allow you to breathe faster when you feel the tinges of panic, which is something a pearl diver can’t do. A pearl diver can’t huff and puff like I was doing. And perhaps it was for this reason I recalled Jimi Hendrick singing, “They said it was impossible for a man to live and breathe underwater.” (I had to look it up: It’s from his 1968 hit, “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be“.)
The unexpected memory stunned me, and made me stand musing, midst the sullen shrillness of the drought’s crickets. It seems incredible that more than a half century has passed since Hendrick joined “The 27 Club” (so named because a tragic number of young musicians died at age twenty-seven, when I was a teenager.)
Twenty-seven seems very young to me now, but it was old enough for Hendrick to be a mentor when I was sixteen, and, whereas all the focus now seems to be on Hendrick’s guitar-playing, as teenagers we focused on his words, which were about a better world, an “Electric Ladyland,” which I suppose qualifies it as a “vision”, (and thus also as a “hallusination” or “delusion”, to mockers). (Hendrik did not withstand mockery very well, despite his front of egotistical arrogance).
People tend to theorize that all the creativity displayed by artists of those times was the product of drugs. This is not the truth. Hendrix was describing his “better world” before he discovered hallucinogens. For that matter, the Beatles had already read “Autobiography of a Yogi”, and had traveled to India seeking a miraculous guru, before they smoked marijuana for the first time in Bermuda. Drugs did not create the creativity or their vision of a “better world.” Drugs only inflamed the “visions” and, sadly, in the end, often destroyed the visionaries.
There are some dark places I do not want my mind to wander into, and, in my case, the death of Hendrik is one of them. Call it a sort of PTSD, but I avoid the topic, usually. It involves many dangerous thoughts, once I get going, so I try not to start. I rarely even remember Hendrick any more, though he was practically my guru at age sixteen. Why not? I’m working on figuring that out, in the proper time and place. Now was not the proper time, but it seemed only natural that, as soon as I recalled him, I heard, soft but definite, a roll of thunder to the west.
Thunder might seem a hopeful thing in a drought, but I felt cynical as I shuffled back up to where the lawn got crisp, and bent over to pick up my tubing. This storm would likely dry up, like the others.
One thing I can do, despite my COPD, is lean against the side of the house with my cellphone and scroll through various weather-geek sites and track thunderstorms, and watch how they tend to dry up approaching New England, when the summer gets dry.
This summer’s gotten dry. Sometimes you could hear the distant thunder approach, but with longer and longer intervals between rolls, and then stop entirely. One time, scrolling to the “lightning map,” I saw the closest bolt was only two miles away, but all we got from that storm’s arrival was the slightest pattering of drops, puffing the dust. Another cell flashed lightning right overhead, but miles up; you could count past ten, between the flash and the soft sky-thunder; that one gave us a brief but steady mist that wet the grass about as much as a morning dew, (though often we do not even get morning dew any more). None gave us the gully-washers we need to blunt the drought’s power.
After catching my breath I again dropped the tubing and again went pearl diving, this time heading straight across the lawn. I wanted to get away from the house and all its noise. Between the washer and drier and my oxygen pumps and the whirring refrigerator there was a constant racket that got on my nerves. I felt like I was getting cabin fever in the summer, which just isn’t right. I wanted to get away to where I could only hear the crickets, and the prowling of the thunder far away.
I actually found myself holding my breath, to hear, which is not the right thing to do, so I remembered to practice “pursed lip breathing”, albeit as quietly as I could. Again I heard distant roll of gentle thunder. Overhead I could see the silver feathers of cirrus from a big storm’s anvil top. I had reason to forecast that this storm would not be like the others, and we might get some free fireworks.
However one thing I have learned from my study of meteorology is that no forecast is ever 100% correct. Forecasting is too mortal, too human, too liable to contain projection and “wish-casting” and politics, and never as magnificent as what actually occurs. Not that I can’t be in awe of great forecasters who can be 90% correct, but I reserve my greatest awe for nature, as it actually exists. I enjoy seeing what I “got wrong” because I enjoy what is right. Perhaps I should capitalize that. I enjoy what is Right.
This has often put me at odds with Global Warming fanatics, because they are so focused on their forecast they seem blind to what actually occurs. Or what has occurred. They are forever claiming that the slightest ripples of grandeur in the tapestry of weather are “unprecedented” and “caused by Global Warming”, when all you need to do is study history and you see a Majesty that towers above their beliefs.
Of course, to avoid hypocrisy I need to apply the same standards to my self, and confess my own forecasts display a certain blindness. For one thing, I focused on hurricanes, and not on drought. It is interesting to look back to 2012, before I began this website, when the following was published on the Watts Up With That website.
Back then I was a young man of 59, still working like a horse and smoking like a chimney, feeling brave and invulnerable to all the cancel culture nonsense we’ve seen since then. It was before the peculiar website algorithms (which I like to call “Al Gore isms”) afflicted me with shadow banning, and I was delighting in hundreds of visitors to this website every day. I was seduced by the ways of the world, until I got marginalized. Then it was hard not to sulk and pout. But it didn’t afflict the weather one bit, that I could see. What, then, did I see?
One thing I saw, or seemed to be seeing, was that just because history could repeat itself, it might not do so in my lifetime. Ever since I first heard my father and mother describe their separate experiences of the 1938 hurricane, I think during the passage of Donna in 1960, and heard my father be a bit scornful of Donna (which had weakened to a tropical storm), I had wanted to see the real deal, a hurricane like the 1938 storm. I’ve now waited 65 years, and it occurs to me I might not ever see it. I’m now glad. I’m too old to deal with such a shambles.
Another thing that I saw, or seemed to be seeing, was that besides fretting and generating alarm-ism about hurricanes and floods, one could do the same with droughts and wildfires. Besides the 1938 hurricane, before I was born, there was the drought of 1947, and the terrible fires that wiped out entire towns in Maine, before I was born.
A growl of thunder rose above the shrilling cry of crickets, and I practiced “pursed lipped breathing” so I could wait a bit longed before returning to my air hose. But I was getting a little excited, which uses up a pearl diver’s oxygen faster. I was like a pearl diver who had discovered a whole bed of oysters. So I retreated to my hose to catch my breath, but then promptly dropped it to walk away and simply listen. I heard another roll of thunder, louder and braver.
One thing fascinating to watch is the powers of flood versus the powers of drought, fighting to control North America. I don’t claim to understand why one predominates one year and not the next. But I simply witness what they do, which at best is to balance out and give neither drought nor flood, but rather sunshine and rains in perfect measure. But how is the balance achieved?
I haven’t a clue. However I simply know that when a powerful “heat dome” gets established it needs a tropical storm to slam into it to interrupt its drought-self-perpetuation. On the other hand, when a hurricane gets too ferocious is needs some dry air injected into it to calm it down.
This year had seen no hurricanes or tropical storms or even tropical depressions moistening the heartlands, so the weak summer cold fronts had no muggy, moist air injected from the tropics to build big thunderstorms with. The summer baked the heartlands, and the only hope of moisture was the Great Lakes, which did intensify storms, but they then dried up heading east. The Adirondacks of New York and Green Mountains of Vermont squeezed the clouds like sponges, and there was nothing left. Meteorologists described such fronts as “washed out.” Any moisture drawn in from the Atlantic was cold and clammy and knocked the bottom from thunderstorms, killing storms more than helping them. But I felt this particular front might be different.
Why? Because, though no Atlantic hurricane was involved, a Pacific hurricane had curved northeast into Mexico and crossed into West Texas at El Paso and headed east. It had completely lost its identity as a tropical entity. It had lost its circular shape in satellite photos, and had broken into bits and pieces in radar imagery, but I had a feeling it was not “gone”. While some may dismiss former tropical entities as mere “junk”, or as mere moisture in the warm sector before a cold front, I always notice that, as the wreckage passes, rains are heavier than expected, and a few gusts of wind surprise you.
Thunder boomed more loudly to the west, and the sun abruptly vanished behind a silver lining. Then there were two more rumbles, quieter, one to the northwest and one to the southwest. This storm was not washing out. And then I heard it. In the dead calm there was a roaring like wind, but it was raindrops, marching my way through the crisp leaves of drought.
Western thunder announced it would stripe green Through the brownscape of drought, and kept its word, So that when the moon rose the night was clean And dripping stars from twigs; a mockingbird Sung after dark; mild night winds heaved a sigh Of contentment. Yet five miles away the rains Missed them; lawns still crunch when crossed; Don't try Treading barefoot! A little child complains He's banned from toasting by fire. Folk there don't fear Thunder to the south, but the whiff of smoke Makes them and deer alert. Five miles! It's made clear I breath content while my neighbors choke. I stand moonstruck, with no way of guessing What I have done to deserve the rain's blessing.
Although August is still summer, it is tinged with a prescience I’ve never much liked: The reality summer doesn’t last forever. (Not this far north, at any rate.) Even as a boy I felt a certain melancholy when I picked my first sun-ripened blackberry. It was my favorite flavor, especially when the berry was sun-warmed and juicy-ripe, but behind that deliciousness stood the ominous specter of the first day of school. Why could the good days not go on?
Now I’m old, and have the same feeling about life in general. Why can’t the good days go on? My COPD was worsened a lot this summer, and I could no longer sweat in a garden the way I enjoy, nor splash in the surf. I count myself lucky to have a modern gizmo that extracts oxygen from the air, so I don’t have to wheel a tank of oxygen behind me when I shop, but rather carry a ten pound purse. It makes a constant growling noise. Some dogs growl back as I pass. I should think they’d laugh to see a human leashed, albeit to tubes.
I can’t do many of the jobs I used to do, but still can sit at a desk. In fact I am pretty much on doctors orders to sit at a desk. If I huff and puff too much my blood pressure goes through the roof, which will lead to further problems if I don’t cut it out. Therefore everything is backwards from how it used to be. I used to get in trouble for sitting at a desk and composing sonnets. “Why aren’t you working?!!!” Now I’m just an old dog told to, “Sit! Sit!!! Stay…”
I am currently moving fifty years worth of boxed papers from my attic to the office at the Childcare. Moving a single box counts as my “rehab” for the day, as it involves steep hills and stairs, so the move will take a while. However I’m hoping to spend the winter producing an interesting autobiography of a foolish hippy, for I saved all my writing and drawings from those days. I think that, while writing about how another person is foolish might seem mean-minded, describing my own foolishness will seem more allowable and humorous, especially when I include written examples.
The hard thing will be to have such writing look forwards. Merely looking back doesn’t appeal to me at all. History is only interesting when you see what people were looking forward to, for life is an ongoing process.
In which case perhaps it is foolishness for me to want summer to stay. Oh, I might like weather like Florida’s for a while, but eventually a sense of stagnation would set in. Like the birds, I’d want to fly away.
Speaking of which, the Robins depart in August. You notice, when their second brood is fledged and their nests are abandoned, they look anxious. (And yes, the faces of birds do register emotions.) The other day I saw one that looked positively guilty when he saw I knew he was ditching the north. (Well, a bit of projection may have been involved with that one.) I knew what was coming, and then it came. I woke in the morning and there was no song.
Sunrise is suddenly stunned to silence With the robins gone. They don't bid adieu With any sort of fuss. I see the fence Is posts without birds. I see the lawn's dew Shows no hopping early-bird's footprints But they have left a print that is bird shaped: A dent in time's fabric which my old eye squints To see, but is in fact just a veil draped And hiding the Real. All things that I see Fly away in the end. Nothing's lasting Except the Invisible Eternity Beyond the veils. I should start fasting For all I can bite is turned into shit While What Can't Be Seen makes me more fit.
I guess I’ll attempt an update, as I seem to have survived.
Around a month ago I suffered a bad case of CO2-poisoning due to misusing my COPD equipment, and was whisked by helicopter down to Portsmouth (where I suppose the Navy knows about too-much-CO2 due to submarines,) where I was bitterly disappointed to discover I had absolutely no memory of the first helicopter ride of my life. I do remember some kind young nurses, for too brief a time, before I was plunked back at home, weaker than a kitten and more humbled than I find it at all natural to be.
Writing has felt impossible. I think one has to possess a certain arrogance to think their opinions matter, and death has a way of puncturing such arrogance. In any case, here I am, still alive, and such a physical weakling that writing is just about the only thing I can do.
Irony of all sorts is involved. One irony is that, after years of saying CO2 is not a danger, it nearly kills me. Oddly, what create the overdose of CO2 was apparently an overdose of oxygen.
I can’t claim to fully understand how I screwed up the machinery that supplies me with extra oxygen, but apparently the platelets of red blood in my veins initially welcomed the oxygen, which is brought where it is needed and replaced by CO2, which must be expelled to make room for the next delivery of oxygen. The problem arises because the platelets take longer to expell the CO2 than they take to absorb the Oxygen. Your body then wants Oxygen, but the platelets lack room for more. One increases the supply, which is a short term solution which, in the longer term, increases the backlog of CO2 waiting to be expelled. It becomes a vicious cycle. The more Oxygen you inhale the more suffocated by CO2 you become. And I assure you the La-la land you then enter is sheer hell. Or it was for me. (And I am a veteran of some “bad trips” from dippy-hippy days, over fifty years ago.) This was worse. Words cannot describe how creepy it was. About the only good is: I apparently can still scare young whippersnappers! Even at age seventy-two! And they apparently decided it was wiser to just drug me than to deal with me. Next thing I knew I was in Portsmouth.
Now I’m in “rehab”, with nurses visiting my home twice a week. It is a been-here-an-done-that experience, so I guess it should be called “re-rehab.” It is also damn depressing, because I have to work to get back to where I already was. In some ways COPD is like a game of snakes and ladders where the snakes are always longer than the ladders. You never know what you will next discover is difficult, that never was difficult before. For example: Scrubbing the dirt off of a potato at the kitchen sink. I never thought of that as being a particularly rigorous exercise, but now I have to stop and catch my breath.
This arrives me at a second irony. As a writer, all my life I’ve tried to find a way around work, so I could sit back and nibble an eraser and contemplate clouds. I failed. No one was going to allow me to goof off in such a manner. I had to find ways to goof off while producing a bare minimum of actual grunt-work. And, as the decades past, I did learn a thing or two about singing while on the job, and you might even say I became good at it. Now all of a sudden I’m told I can’t work any more. What the…!!!
You’d think I’d be happy. Now at long last I don’t have to make up excuses for undone homework. I can park in handicap spaces. But I discovered that I’d become accustomed to the pace, and the ratty race, and actually didn’t want to avoid what I’d spent fifty years shirking. (Now, if that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.)
My Creator made short work of my resistance, chopping me down with a one-two sequence of jabs, one during bitter blasts of winter which sent the so-called “Real Feel” temperatures crashing to -25, and the second during a torrid heat wave with “Real Feel” temperatures over 100 on Independence Day. Discovered I’m not so tough, twice winding up in the hospital, and twice requiring rehab to get back on my feet. And so here I now am, a man behind a desk, freed from physical work, declared independent.
Or…well…sort of independent. A desk is not a good shelter from bills.
I wonder what may come of this. We shall see what we shall see.
We are at the end of the school year, made a bit more poignant this year as we are closing our Daycare after eighteen years.
The extension of the Azores high we call the Bermuda High is bringing north hot and humid air to battle with cool Canadian air, and we are alternating between cool drizzle brought off the north Atlantic by a Polar High’s east winds, and heat, humidity and thunder brought north by the Bermuda High.
Whatever the weather is, the children are dressed inappropriately. I can’t really blame the parents, for they are dressed inappropriately as well. The fact of the matter is that no one is sure what the weather will do, this time of year, when we live along the edges of summer and spring.
I myself wear layers, which I can discard if the day grows hot and humid, but can put back on when a sea-breeze becomes a “back door cold front” and presses Gulf of Maine fogs all the way to the Hudson Valley, so that Rip Van Winkle dreams of lobster.
I feel a bit like old Rip at times. Not that I’ve napped for twenty years (yet) but politics has changed nearly as rapidly as the changes he saw. But some things are the same, and one thing that got me remembering was the sight of a disgruntled boy going to school on a very hot day.
The longest days Can be most cruel When days in June Are spent in school
As a boy my definition of hell Was a classroom in June: Clock a stuck blot On the wall. The one lesson I learned well Was: How to endure. No room was as hot As that room, where no thought could be thought Midst a cloying, purple mimeograph smell By a red devil teacher. Woe to those caught Smiling, for to smile was illegal, But happily hell wasn't eternal. Blue waters beckoned beyond the red flame; Green shade spread past gray linoleum; Time changed beyond the scoldings and shame; And true learning bloomed past learning to keep mum. In fact if real hell happily ended punishment It might be a worthwhile place to be sent.
We’ve just received our first slug of summer heat, with temperatures topping 90 degrees (32 Celsius) for the first time since last August. I don’t handle it as well as I used to. I used to be bathed in sweat at a blink of an eye, and a hot spell was like a free sauna. Now my COPD gets exacerbated, and I’m gasping if I lift a pinkie. Still, it gives me an excuse to sit around and do nothing, which in the eyes of some is a definition of a writer.
My favorite time in a heat wave is the gloaming before dawn, when the sweltering sleepers have finally found the cool side of the pillow and have plunged into brief but profound peace, even as all the birds wake up and yell. Even the construction workers seem to sleep a half hour later, and the roads are empty and peaceful as first light grows.
Today purple cumulus were also growing against the pinkening horizon, and abruptly there was the tearing cloth of thunder crossing the sky. Very unusual. Usually the lack of daytime heating discourages morning thunder; the uplift is missing and clouds cannot bloom. Nor, when I clicked on my computer, did the radar show any rain, Nor did the lightning map show approaching strikes. This storm was blossoming right on top of me.
Because my computor was on I could not avoid the news about Elon Musk and Trump quarreling. I turned it off. If I was going to be trolled, it could wait until I finished my coffee. I figured Elon wanted to increase car sales, and one way to do so was to appear to turn against Trump. Who knows what such people are up to?
One thing did make me smile, and that was the display of Freedom of Speech. Cancel Culture would censor such dissidence. But dictators can never understand the power that comes from allowing others to talk. They think power lies in making others shut up.
Then they miss hearing the rare morning thunder.
Birdsong and thunder mingle in the morning: Incongruous moods; sunrise roses and blood; Thorns on a bloom; a smile in a warning; A fey ballerina falls with a thud; A rending and tearing rips across sky And modulates into the trill of a flute. Then both are silent. They stand eye to eye. How long can both remain so very mute? But then, as a joke, a sleepy old owl Bids dawn good-night with an echoing hoot And the red sky responds with a growl As the hermit thrush sings. It doesn't compute. Why don't the jays and crows cry alarms? And how can a clash have such charms?
As a so-called “Child Care Professional”, one irrational tendency I’ve noticed among the very young is the belief that their parents are the best. This is not to say the small are respectful. Indeed I often witness modern behavior in bratty little children that I’d have been spanked silly for, if I had ever tried it when I was young. However, underlying such rudeness is a faith, often badly shattered, but amazingly resilient and persistent.
In fact one bizarre occurrence is seen among children who have been rescued from terrible neglect, caused by parents handicapped by addictions. Even when moved to foster care by the kindest, from filthy conditions to clean, and from shivering to comfort, the children display a loyalty towards (and preference for) their natural parents, who don’t deserve it. As disconcerting as this may be to social workers and foster-parents, it seems to in the make up of mankind. “My parents are best,” or, “My Dad’s better than your Dad.”
This also goes against the general belief that parents (or social workers) have, which assumes they are in charge, and a child is something they “make.” It is closer to reality to say a child is something they are “given”. They certainly didn’t make a child’s faith.
A child’s faith is not a thing children develop by testing the world out, and concluding it can be trusted. The lusty cries of an infant experiencing hunger for the first time are done in faith there will be a response. If the mother is passed-out, and the child is neglected, then the poor infant experiences the shattering of faith, but faith was there as a given, before the shattering. No parent creates faith. Parents just strive to be worthy of it. Some are, and some aren’t.
As a Child Care Professional I never felt it was my business to tell a parent how to raise a child. I’ve seen more approaches to parenting than you can shake a stick at, and imperfection seems to be the rule. I might give advice if a parent asked me, but they almost never did. They make their own beds and must sleep in them, and spill their own milk and can’t cry about it, and generally flounder in a joyous morass of contradictions called child-rearing, where even the word “rearing” has a confusion to it, (as etymology reveals “rearing” has two roots, “risan” from Old English which means “uplift”, and “rerewarde” from Middle English which basically means “to back up”(Opposite of “forewarde”). (They’ve got you both coming and going.)
The State never asked me for advise. Instead it insisted I take classes and accrue sixteen hours of “continuing education” each year. Multiply sixteen hours by eighteen years, and you have 288 hours of my life (more than a solid week) being talked-at by people who often had no children, though I’d raised five, and sometimes were half or even (more recently) a third my age, and who never once asked me what I knew. And they made money while I had to pay for this abuse. And what did I learn?
Well, I learned every ten years the authorities change their minds. Time-outs are “vital to a child’s development”, until time-outs “stunt a child’s development”. Playground fences “limit freedom”, until they “are necessary for a child’s sense of security”. And so on and so forth, ignoring what I took to be obvious: Every day is fresh and new, and Lord knows what the child will need that day. There are no rules set in stone. It is like canoeing down rapids; there are no lanes and no stop lights; what you see is what you get.
And one treasure you get is a child’s precious faith, especially beautiful in a loved child, but there even in shocked, stunned and even mutilated children, albeit in a distorted form. This faith is the simple acceptance of what is given, and is completely opposed to a differing side of children which tantrums at restraints, and which demands justice with the vehemence of a Foghorn, even for piffling matters. The ambiguity involved may seem impossible, the two tendencies may seem as different as day and night, but, considering we live on a planet where day and night are daily events, we need to get used to it.
One extremely common complaint children vent is, “It isn’t fair”, which is the truth. The common response is, “Life isn’t fair”, which happens to be a falsehood, though it involves the clash between what we can see and what we can’t.
The fact is that, if we could remember what we were up to, before we were born, we would see life is extremely fair. The fact enormously different circumstances exist, wherein one child is “fortunate” and another is “unfortunate”, exists because we have differing karma, which creates needs that differ like our fingerprints, but they all have one thing in common: They would lead us to achieving the Goal of creation, if only we lived life right. But…(sigh)…
Some people treat little children as if they are computers that have no memory until they are programed. The ego of the parent or teacher is then greatly inflated, but so is the sense of shame if the child doesn’t turn out perfect. Teachers blame parents and parents blame teachers.
In actual fact a child is older than we see. They may be handicapped by the fact their brand new brain requires training, but they are already 100% human and 100% alive, and possess the intuition they are perfectly placed with the perfect parents to fulfill their karma (without creating new karma) that may allow them to achieve the Greatest of all goals. That is what gives them such hope and wonder, and fills them with a faith I have always marveled at. The faith of an infant rivals that of superman saints, and, considering my own faith is often as flabby as a punctured balloon, I feel no sense of superiority to a squalling brat.
Once you start to admit the possibility of reincarnation, you also admit the possibility the child you are dealing with might be someone you once knew, trying a very different approach, and in some ways unrecognizable. For example, someone who discovered intelligence did not bring about happiness might be trying out life as a happy simpleton. How could I recognize them? People tend to be curious about their opposite, and there are a kaleidoscope of lives one could lead, all predetermined by karmic equations I don’t claim to comprehend, but I do know small children are not un-programmed computers, and also that the ones who seem most aware of this fact are not highly educated psychologists, but rather are young mothers.
Not that young mothers believe in reincarnation, but they simply have infinitely more respect for infants than some psychologists do. I will skip a long intellectual preamble about intellectuals, and especially psychologists, and simply state a fact: Mothers know how to love, and love respects infants. Some young fathers also know how to love, and gather their children in their muscular arms cooing and chuckling in a totally non-macho and non-intellectual manner.
I, however, am an intellectual, and, because this writing is suppose to be my autobiography, I will work my way back to explaining why it is true that my dad is better than your dad.
Not that I didn’t waste some time complaining about my parents, (a mere two or three decades), but, having climbed the mountain of time, I have gained the farsightedness of retrospect, and understand they were perfect.
If only people understood the perfection of Karma they would not gripe so much about the givens in life, and wheedle so incessantly that they want to be different from what they are. They would instead become like a little child, helpless but full of wondrous faith. There is a difference between appreciating and utilizing creation, and attempting to recreate the whole blame thing.
Sunrise's Swansong 
