Next

The way I see a job is you just go do it. That's probably why I managed as a brick-layer. You come to the site on the first day and you see ten or twenty tons of bricks, all bailed up in one-ton cubes, and maybe there's a nice footing with lines tied up to corner posts, and maybe even some masonry nails driven into the footing plumb down from the X the lines make up there in the air somewhere (who am I kidding—I always did the plumbing down, and the pinning of the corners on the footing). If they've done the footing well, it's smooth enough that you can pop chalk lines off those pins. Then you have two references you can actually sight, lining up the string in the air with the chalk on the footing, which tells you if your layout is basically accurate. There's also the very good idea to measure up at various points, footing to lines, to see if the footing is fairly level, or where “hogging” has to happen (getting that first course level by splitting bricks here and there, or adding extra masonry if there are low spots). This is a nice beginning meditation. Nothing is yet set in stone. I have memories of quiet spring or fall mornings, no one around, just walking around the site, figuring this stuff out at my own pace.

Then there's the getting the bricks within reach, humping around with a barrow, making piles of bricks at the corners and so forth. On some sites they'd drop the cubes inside the perimeter of the building, which was normally quite the handy idea as long as there weren't going to be some cubes ending up on the wrong side of the building, marooned inside and ultimately underneath, which would never do. After a couple or three hours it'd be time to turn on the mixer and make some mortar, then start building those corners carefully, one at a time, with a lot of attention paid to the level and the lines, and be sure to count the bricks corner to corner so you know which way to turn the first one down, nothing much worse that meeting in the middle a couple of days hence and finding yourself with two halves, that definitely sucks, and almost as much as discovering that on one end you're on course 1, but on the other you're on course 0. (My very first solo job that happened and I had to tear out quite a few otherwise nicely laid bricks and start again, how embarrassing, but a fine lesson from reality.)

Anyways, that's what a job is to me. It's immersing and goes best if you don't be looking too far down the road except in the specific necessary ways I've just exampled above. And so as yesterday was my very last day at work, and the very last day the company was going to be operating as a retail business, I came to work as I always did and do, a tiny bit late because I had to stop to get an apple fritter from the Hess station that sells doughnuts as a sideline, because I was a little late leaving, because... Anyways I got there at five after or so, and started right in to my usual first task of the day, logging in the customers of the previous day, and after a while the first customer of the last day rolled onto the scale, and the day was commenced. When I got to lunch I found this in my lunch bag from Libby, who's made me great lunches nearly every day for the last eight years, and told me she had really enjoyed that connection, usually started after I was already asleep, and completed when I opened the lunch twelve hours later (unless we got a late customer, which happened now and again) and read the note she'd written in the deep night on the napkin. I saved this last one, it's so great:

I figured preserving it here on the blog is the best plan. It's really pretty hard to preserve a napkin for posterity. She'd put a thermos of Brunswick stew for the main course yesterday, her mom's great recipe of course. One of my employers, Joe, had also put a nice BoJangles sausage buscuit on my desk before I got in that five minutes late, so the whole fritter thing was quite unnecessary. I didn't starve my last day.

It got busier in the afternoon. The whole last week was much busier than it had been for months, which was why we were closing, and I wondered if we should have just done one of those “Going Out of Business” things a few months back, when scrap prices had fallen so low that people stopped bringing their steel to us, meaning we were in the red, the big scrap handing machines still burning diesel, the guys still getting paid. I think neither of the owners could stand to be tacky that way, but the past couple of weeks the place probably did get into the black again, week-to-week. It was still a big hole to climb out of, and particularly for two owners in their 70s.

The day marched on, weight after weight, scrap receipt after scrap receipt. The money still had to be counted carefully, each customer had to be treated with friendliness. A couple of days back, one customer, who was perpetually at odds with everyone who waited on him and seemed to view the world as a consistent, uniformly hostile place, was finally banned from using our services when I found him circling an employee, both men with fists up and at the ready. We'd already told this guy, a few months back, any more smoke from his direction and he would own the fire, no further discussion required. I ran outside and yelled, pointing at him, “You're banned NOW.” How exciting for a last week. One owner said at the end of the day, “we should have called the law on him years ago.” Probably so. We had a lot of sympathy for him, truth be known. He spent his days rifling dumpsters and finding bits of metal that sometimes would be worth next to nothing, and seldom yielded him more that $20. That's a grim life in my book. Urban prospector, and with that job description comes "badges, we don't need no stinking badges." He drove an old heap that had once long ago been a sports car, it's back window now lost to some shaft of pipe that had poked it out hitting a bump. He could have had little daylight time for anything else beyond his rounds, and came nearly daily and sometimes more than once. Sad he couldn't make it through the last week, to the end of the show. As usual his problem on banning day was his own obvious misunderstanding, plus a tendency he had to dislike people on the basis of race and ethnicity, in other words a man weighted down with prejudice and stewing in his own bile, living an existence you could find in a book of 12th Century Norse curses, or Dante's wheel. If he's not a Trump voter no one is, but he's probably not registered, or his chariot won't start come November.

At about 4:20 a guy showed up with a big trailer full of gutted appliances. He used to come a whole lot, but we hadn't seen him in months and months, probably because of the metal prices. He was our last customer. Last year he'd brought in magnetic NASCAR calendars for our refrigerators, and I asked him if he had brought new ones. “They've not come in yet,” he said, “but I got regular calendars with my phone number on 'em. I'll bring you one in.” He was obviously pretty exhausted from the loading of the appliances, and had parked outside the gate because he knew we wanted to block it with a big I-beam to mark the end of things. I walked out to his truck with him to get the calendar so's he wouldn't have to trudge back to the office, and we talked a bit about the cranes and who might get them, and why we were closing. He said he really liked working with us. “Other places make you unload yourself, your cranes make it easy.” He also felt we were very honest.

So when I got back to the office a number of the guys were already gone, and I didn't get the chance to shake all the hands of some excellent guys I'd been working with for a long time, day in, day out. A lot of it made me think of that great Hunter-Garcia song, Black Peter:

See here how everything lead us to this day,
And it's just like any other day that, ever been.
Sun comin' up and then, the sun it goin' down.
Shine through my window, and my friends they come around.

That's how it is. You lay the last brick, and if you're lucky and it's not quite dark you can sit down on a sheet-rock pail and drink a Pepsi and look at all of it for a few minutes. Then it's time to go.

That's the office, with the scale.

And this is Andy, who worked in the non-ferrous section. I did get to shake his hand.

The Larger Problem

Lance Mannion posted this a couple of days back. It's so good I copied and pasted the whole thing. As I've said before, you should go read him frequently, and send him dough when you can. As he told his recipient to pass it on, I'm hopeful that he's ok with me doing the same:

Dear Congressman, I’m going to tell Pope Francis on you!

When I heard about this I just assumed the yahoo Congressman passing out the bibles to his colleagues so they could consult the holy word for “guidance” on how to vote was a Right Wing Evangelical Christian. I wondered about his Italian last name but he’s a Tea Party type from Mississippi so I figured it was simply evidence of an ancestor who’d passed along his name but not his religion. Happens.

So I thought, what effrontery! What nerve! What arrogance! What ignorance! He gave a Christian bible to Keith Ellison? He handed one to Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel? He sent one to Nancy Pelosi and the many dozens of other Catholics in Congress? Doesn’t he know Catholics use a different Bible? Maybe he does, but he wouldn’t care. That’s the way they are. It’s part of their faith to push their beliefs on others. They think it’s their duty to offend you by telling you you’re going to hell if you don’t snap to it and get right with Jesus the way they’re right with Him. And of course, that’s the key part of the charade, letting you know you’re going to hell while they’re “saved.”

They being Right Wing Evangelicals and their holy-rolling ilk.

But, turns out, he’s Catholic.

I was floored.

So of course I wrote him a note that I’m sure some intern in his office has already deleted:

Dear Congressman Palazzo,

You’re a Catholic and you’re handing out bibles like some Gideon? Don’t you know we don’t work like that?

Although our beliefs are “informed” by scripture, officially literal readings of the Bible and individual interpretations are frowned upon. In fact, once upon a time they could get you burned at the stake. The Protestant Reformation was to a great degree an argument over that. The efficacy of Good Works also figured into it. Do you know which side took what position on either?

As a good Catholic, you’re better off consulting Pope Francis and the U.S. Conference of Bishops for guidance on how to vote. But as a good Right Wing Republican, you probably don’t like what they have to say.

For example, you just helped whip through the appallingly vindictive border bill which orders responses to the problem that the bishops have strongly condemned.

You think your colleagues need to vote their religion but you don’t think you need to take into account your own?

Or are you one of those cafeteria Catholics who think the Church is only about opposing abortion, contraception, and gay marriage?

The Church has a few things to teach about immigration, poverty, war, and the death penalty too. Where do you stand on those issues? How have you voted? How did your faith guide you through those votes?

Then there’s the whole Social Justice thing.

Maybe you need to think about changing the way you vote…

Or shut up about how people should mix up their religion with their politics.

Yours in Christ,

Lance Mannion

Former altar boy

PS. Feel free to share this with your fellow cafeteria Catholics, Paul Ryan and John Boehner

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2014/08/read-your-bah-bull.html

I came home from work to the outrage of the murder, by police, of a black kid at a Walmart "brandishing" a bb-gun he wanted to buy. If he was white they wouldn't have even pressed him for his i.d.--or at least that's how it went down in Colorado last week under similar circumstances. Early in the week I read with dismay the story of a kid who was shot to death by his girl friend when he asked her to shoot him, believing the weapon was unloaded. She was convicted and given seven years in jail. The cops found pipe bombs and many weapons in his house. His parents asked that in lieu of flowers donations be sent to the NRA.

We have a full blown Cult of Gun in this country now. It's priests are the NRA. Just like certain sects of Christianity, the Cult of Gun is driven by fear. Jonathan Edwards concocted descriptions of hell of such operatic quality that he is handed down in the texts of American Literature as one of our early Great Writers. In his day he won converts. The Cult of Gun suggests that you are not safe without a gun at easy reach at all times. Corollary tenants point to every speck of crime, and particularly crimes involving black or other non-white people, as being primarily what the "news" is. Right now we have a further enhancing feature in our national news, with brown-toned people dressed all in black and brandishing weapons riding all over northwest Iraq and summarily executing people right and left. Military pundits on even MSNBC say that there's almost nothing to do about this. I didn't even watch what the professional fulminators on Fox were saying. Krauthammer no doubt wheezed out his outrage at the Kenyan Pretender. What's new.

It might be that we could actually drop a significant portion of the 101st Screaming Eagles close enough to the 40 thousand people trapped on the mountain that they might run off the ISIS forces. There's no doubt that after a decade and a half of combat, the 101st are a seasoned, veteran force capable of dealing with zelots in pickup trucks who are at the moment experiencing a sense of invulnerability as they terrorize and decimate unarmed civilians. So it was with the Nazis as they rushed across the Soviet Union towards Moscow. But the pundits on MSNBC say it's much more difficult than the scenario I just sketched out, and I'd expect they are actually right. It may be that the militaristic foreign policy that the previous eight year Bush Administration instituted broke so much that there is nothing to do about this stranded band of shepherd people. Bush-Cheney broke the whole region of the north-west middle east, and they broke the Republican Party as well, and possibly the US Army. Obviously they broke the VA system. Of course it's convenient that the Republicans are now on vacation, with Rand Paul, Presidential Candidate, exhibiting his jogging skills. Driftglass, by the way, has posted a series of exceptional photographic comments on the Rite Honorable Rand:

You can see many more of these at his blog, which I link permanently.

I came home from work with the feeling that we are, like it or not, going to get a complete Republican take over of Congress in November. I certainly hope that won't happen. I will vote for Democrats, assuming that when I get to the NC polling station they will accept my NC Drivers License as legitimate proof of my NC citizenship. In our state, already taken over by the hard right know-nothings, we have a new voter ID law which will certainly disenfranchise many typically Democratic voters. You'd be surprised at how many folks aren't even aware that their license has expired until we ask for it where I work. If you're too old to drive, you might not even think to pay the price for a new ID card. But you might be expecting to vote, like you always have.

What worries me is the fundamental intelligence of the electorate. How can it be this close, basically 51/49 one way or the other, all the time. And why do so many not vote at all? I saw this week that a guy who used to have some stature in the land back in the '70s has come out for some phantasmic "Third Way" yet again. Mr. Nader doesn't even admit that his absurd campaign saddled us with the catastrophe of the Bush years. A lot of my friends--pretty smart people I'd say, who can have a good conversation on most any subject--voted for Nader in 2000 because they were just too too to vote for a continuation of the Clinton administration. Mr. Obama is obviously and apparently not perfect, and neither is the Affordable Health Care law he got passed through a tangled maze of Congressional ineptitude. The choice will nontheless be a few more Democrats, or more of these lunatics, such as described by Mr. Mannion above.

Meanwhile, in my little county we now have two new boutique gun shoppes aimed at selling weapons to the hitherto unarmed white housewives. One of the joints is also going to "manufacture" AR-15s, which I'd imagine means assembling out of parts made in Turkey or Indonesia exciting semi-automatic assault weapons for them whats can afford to keep a collection, just in case the Black Helechopters start fluxing around they rooftops. New jobs, new jobs!

We used to laugh at something that happened in New Guinea right after World War II. It was called the Cargo Cult. Those silly primitives, we thought. Worshiping the mystery of planes that arrived with amazing new stuff they'd never seen before. But the Cargo Cult was better than the Gun Cult we now observe on every hand. Real stuff did arrive, and eventually the primitives did realize that the world was way much bigger than they thought, and that planes could take them to other places. My favorite coffee comes from Papua New Guinea. I can now touch those "primitives," and they, in turn, can touch me. I'm enjoying their coffee this damp, cool August morning, in fact.

All the Gun Cult delivers is an enhanced chance of death. That and more Republican votes.

The Buildings Move Up There

I write a poem now and then, some of which turn into songs, although this one probably will stay as it is. I sent this to my daughter Anna after I wrote it, early last fall, and I got a nice note from her about it just this morning. I'm up real early to stoke the stove. I went out for wood to do that. The sky was not quite black, and the wind was a solid, firm current, that cold dry high coming down from somewhere up near the Great Lakes. It's going to mix with wet, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico and probably knock our power out this coming night, and put all of us here in central NC in a state of stasis, all our travelling equipment irrelevant until warmer temperatures arrive in a few days. Nonetheless, the days are getting longer. I'm hoping trees don't come down across the driveway, or across our roof.

Anyways, below is how it looked last September, and a whisper of spring to come. I love all the seasons, and the great cycle of them. I love heating with wood, when we have enough cut ahead. Our last big winter blast, two weeks ago, an 89-year-old lady down the road slipped on the ice on her steps and huddled outside her own door for 24 hours before someone found her. Her body temperature had dropped to 72, but she miraculously survived ok, and was interviewed on the teevee a couple of nights ago, sitting in a recliner in her brick house, warm and toasty, with all the lights on. Her hairdresser alerted her folks because she hadn't shown up for an appointment, which was not like her. They went over to her house and found her. The lady said to the tv lady: "I guess the Lord had more for me to do."

The Buildings Move Up There

On some holiday, perhaps exhilarating Spring
I went with Anna to New York, arriving early;
We walked the empty streets observing vacant
Weedy places where in some while, as throngs
Expected gathered, they would move the bigger buildings,
For the day. People gathered annually
To celebrate and marvel this procession—Anna
Never having seen it, being a young teen—
Part of the fun was introducing her to this amazement,
And she said on the train home,
“Now I know why you come up here.”

I told her mom about it all, later, with the cats
Snuggled round our bed, the cool Fall air in the
Window. It was time to get up, feed them all,
Go to this job I have, where they bring in scrap metal.
What I see there is a big sycamore tree, leaves
Falling at the moment. Behind it are tired clouds
or a cloud bank, or blue sky. In the latter case,
There are also now and then contrails.
The man beyond the tracks burns off his summer garden.
And the shadow of our scale house creeps across the truck scale
In the dwindling afternoons.

--Silk Hope, 9/30/13

(Now and then the big cranes that unload trucks with a magnet roll up to where I sit and clean the scale of nails that might have fallen out of loads of scrap.)

"Those" People

[photo (c) Eric Tourneret, http://www.thehoneygatherers.com/html/photolibrary3.html ]


I have spent a lot of time lately excoriating William F. Buckley and, more, our act, as a culture, of putting him on a great grand pedestal of a PBS television show which ran for decades and implied that he was an intellectual par excellence, a seer, a wise voice counseling us all to at least "go slow," (to quote Nina Simone). I posted a segment of the long "debate" with James Baldwin which, for all that he lost the debate, somehow made his bones with the cultural elite which anointed him. Even in the debate itself, and as well in the subsequent anointing, Baldwin's point is made by Buckley and the culture--exemplified. Baldwin objects that he, as a black man in America, is taught his "place," that there is not even an alternative choice. And in Buckley's willingness to objectify "those people" and characterize them, he entirely admits Baldwin's thesis, that this is exactly what it's like.

This sort of thinking still persists, and is easily, almost randomly discovered. Only last weekend I encountered it immediately upon turning to a John Stossel television show, where I found some "libertarian" pundit discussing the need for a personal interaction between "those people" who receive public assistance, and the localized benefactor class who would he hoped replace so-called faceless bureaucrats who don't make eye contact because they are not in the same place. The whole rigamarole was about guilt and shame, and a libertarian utopian fantasy of what might possibly come "after" the end of our tattered and failing social safety net.

That this arrogance persists right along, generation after generation, is shocking, even if it is perhaps a terrible truth about human nature--something we as a whole are confined by even as we are confined in the tiny place our planet inhabits, and the tiny temporal frame of our hospitable environment--something we can even understand by just looking at fossils and glacier tracks, much less acknowledging that in tiny bits of seeming darkness in the night sky reside in fact billions of galaxies, which are as unreachable as the hope of entirely ending racism.



[Hat tip to Digby, who posted this video on her site today.]

So this morning I encountered a beautiful acknowledgement of a great poet by a terrific blogger and writer:

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=68124

Gwendolyn Brooks has been dead for 13 years. While living she wrote some of the finest poems around. O'Malley quotes this one:

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

The sad thing about William F. Buckley is that he spent his whole life defending the indefensible. There is a tragic arrogance to his life's work that points directly to despair. It seems doubtful that Buckley ever allowed his obviously fine mind to look directly into this pit of horror. He was instead content to live in his luxury, enjoying his privilege, his "star" status, his yacht, his "place." No one ever came in from outside. There was never even one moment of reality to intrude on his racist fantasy. The best that can be said is, Gore Vidal really pissed him off.

Oh yes, indeed, human nature does nontheless trap us all. This lesson is deeper, and more subtle. We watch with some dismay as Mr. Obama, who must have thought he had a great opportunity to repair a lot of damage, is instead wrapped in the cocoon of inevitables which deliver him to drone strikes and wiretaps and all the rest, the great necessity of survival, the contradiction of power and mercy. Already nice liberals like Jonathan Alter have published books explaining that at least Obama has saved us--for now--from the advent of true Republican rule again.

Meanwhile, as we discover a hundred billion new (ancient) out-of-reach galaxies, we watch the Arctic Ocean melt away, and set our engineers the task of finding the oil and gas that lies beneath those dark blue waters. We are always busy as bees.

Houds Have Their Xmas, Wuzzy an Adventure

We'd made it through the stress of "actual" Christmas pretty great. Libby'd been fighting off the flu, I was working every day; getting the shopping and wrapping and all done in time was not an easy task for her, but it happened, and we drove over to Libby's sis's place in Greensboro with a truck full of presents and good cheer, and had a great afternoon with the extended family. We got home after dark to ravenous kitties, got them fed, went to bed early, and then I was back at work day after Christmas. We put off the Houdahenian Christmas till the next weekend, Sunday before New Years Eve, since they're not much up on dates and calendars anyways. (Or possibly cats are all quite aware that Jesus did not get born anywhere's near December 25, and that Isis and Ramses are the ones who have to do with bringing the sun back every year, and the spring floods that cause the rice to sprout, and bring all the mice that are soooo tasty and delicious. Some say the bargain they made with us was about cans, but did the Egyptians have cans, I ask you?)

At any rate, Sunday morning last we had Christmas for ourselves and the Boys. You can see them opening a present above. They all got new little cat beds, and a scratching pad salted with catnip which they really enjoyed and even kinda tussled over, in a brotherly way.

It was a bright, warmish morning, and after the presents were open and played with, all three of the Boys ran over to the slider and started begging to be let out, Wuzzy the foremost. Wuzzy has been getting a chance at the great Outside for some time. Libby lets him out to explore when she's here in the daytime, and he has been doing just fine with that, not getting into too much trouble, or vanishing, or finding something he can't deal with. We're far enough from the road that there's little chance of him venturing out to where the traffic lives. There've been no hunting dog packs lately, and no sign of raccoons or foxes. Momma is now living under the house, but she pretty much retreats into secrecy when there's any commotion of any kind. So we opened the slider and out they went, Wuzzy in the lead, and we enjoyed the pretty morning, picked up wrapping paper, had some sausage balls and coffee. After a while Mokey and then Puzzle came back in without coaxing. Wuzzy was still out, but that was expected. I'd said to Libby, when we let them out, that Wuzzy was about due to climb a tree--something he hadn't done. I wasn't thinking this was some kind of prediction or premonition.

Finally I went out and called him, and I heard him meowing. After a while I realzed he was right over head, in a small tree, probably about 25 feet or so up. The tree, I think it's a sassafras tree maybe, is not a big grower, and doesn't grow straight. This one has a trunk which has a fairly gradual incline for some distance. Wuzzy was sitting on a little branch just at the point the trunk, now little more than a limb of wrist size, took a vertical tack and went on up. Wuzzy was stuck and didn't know what to do. We tried to talk him down. The day wore on, with periods of talking, periods of leaving him alone. He tried and tried to figure out what to do, and after a while went to sleep sitting on the little branch which was also creating the problem of getting around for him. After more time, hours, he woke and cried some more. We humans were also getting more and more concerned. The night was predicted to be very cold. A hawk flew by. There were buzzards circling overhead. Really, there were, we see 'em a lot this time of year. Maybe they're grouping up for a trip to Finley, who knows.

As it seemed that a neighboring maple sapling was entangling Wuzzy's perch, I decided to cut it down and out of the way. When I did that--this was probably about 3 pm or so--it frightened Wuzzy and he climbed again. Much much higher. He was at the very top of the Sassafras now, amongst a web of tiny sticks. He could sit there, but it wasn't clear that he could do much else. Libby consulted the Google and found that cats frequently will climb when frightened. Indeed, there was a wealth of info on cats in trees. Some was calming. "Ain't no cat skeletons in trees." Others not so much. "My cat fell 30 feet and died of internal injuries three days later." "My cat fell into some rip rap and ran off. We never found him." I'd rescued a cat of ours once by climbing up onto a shed roof and then putting a ladder over to the limb he was on--he walked the ladder over to me. This was not such a situation. There was no ladder anywheres close to long enough, and no place to put it anyways. This was not a climbable tree.

We thought maybe if we cut the tree, partly, we could hinge it down to more of a horizontal line, and Wuzzy could then make another effort to get down. We did that, and the tree did bend down some, but Wuzzy did not budge. It was dark and cold, and the warm Christmassy morning we'd had with the Boys seemed like a far distant time. We turned on the Cone lights, and Libby strung other lights out near the tree. We turned on all the house lights. We shone a strong flashlight up into the tree, playing it along the trunk below where Wuzzy perched, trying to get him interested in trying to come down just a bit at a time. After it was totally dark, and even colder, we could see his eyes glowing in the light. He would cry now and again.

I had to go to work the next day. Libby could not think of leaving him alone in the tree. She brought every pillow and cushion we could find and made a big padded area under when he was perched. Then she sat wrapped in a blanket at the foot of the tree and talked to him. I went to bed so I could go to work. About 5 am she came in and climbed in with me to get warm, and then she got a bit of sleep.

I usually get up about 5:30 or so to make coffee, and I got up. So did Libby. As soon as it was light I went out and tried coaxing Wuzzy some more between cups of coffee and Libby's pancakes. He didn't budge, but a remarkable thing happened I didn't in the least expect. Momma climbed the tree some ways up to try to show him what to do! I went too close and she retreated, but when I went away she came back and tried again. Even after the long separation, from last April, she obviously knew her little boy was in trouble. Moreover, her wonderful maternal instincts remained. She'd raised them safely. I wondered if, more than food or anything else, she was living here because of them.

I had to go to work. I left, hopeful that perhaps Momma would succeed where we'd failed. Wuzzy was a little black dot in the top of a spindly little tree, at least 40 feet off the ground, but he was still alert and energetic. I think Libby's presence under the tree all the cold night had kept him from dispairing. Libby was up, and she planned to make calls to tree people in the area. At work it was the busiest day of the year. There was no way for me to take off and come back to help, as I'd first hoped to do, till the end of the day. As rain was predicted for New Years Day, we'd decided that if nothing else, we'd have to cut the tree and try to ease it down somehow, with a rope. There was also a risk that the tree might hit the chimney or the roof. It wasn't a ten ton oak tree, but it was big enough to kill someone, or to knock a hole in the roof. A tree man, if we could find one on New Years Eve, would be a pretty good idea.

In the early afternoon, Libby called me to say she'd found a guy with a boom truck. He didn't do cat rescues he said, and it was his day off. After a second round of calls Libby prevailed on him to come out and just consult. This sounded promising to me when she told me. When I had a free minute I was thinking about how to use the rope to slow the tree's fall, if I was going to be cutting it at dusk after work. One of my employers said the cat would surely jump free before it hit the ground. I was not entirely reassured. Later on in the afternoon Libby called again. Mr. Tyndall, the tree man from Pittsboro, was cutting a way to the tree so's his boom truck could get there. Was that ever some good news!

You might can see the black dot that is Wuzzy, high up in the photo. He's definitely there. Libby says when the boom truck arrived he faced that way and knew he was going to be rescued. Mr. Tyndall went up with the cat carrier and he climbed right in. Back on the ground, Libby took him inside, where he purred a whole lot and ate a whole lot. Mr. Tyndall also dropped the tree safely for us. Here's the trunk, lying on the padding we didn't need after all.

It's a New Year, and we still have all three of the Houdahenians with us. It was mighty nice last night when they snuggled up in bed with us, after the ball had dropped, after the tree had dropped. Maybe Wuzzy was our own New Years Eve "ball." Maybe next New Years Eve we can just metaphorically drop him--like maybe lower him carefully from the loft, safe in his carrier. I think that might be a nice new tradition around here. Goes with the Xmas Cone thing. He'd probably be ok with it. My guess is by tomorrow he'll be whining at the slider again. Each day is a new one for the Boys. This is really not a bad way to operate.

________________________________

Oh yeah.



If you need some tree work in the Pittsboro, NC, area, Mr. Tyndall is a true professional, and a very nice guy. May he and his family have the very best of Happy New Years!

An Alien Abduction She Might Think

We've been watching Momma get more and more pregnant for weeks, almost since the moment we brought the kittens inside, back in April. It seemed imperative to catch her and get her neutered before yet more kittens arrived. There seemed absolutely no happy conclusion to a second litter. At best we might have tried to totally stay disengaged, let them grow up entirely wild, let Momma care for them till that point. It might well have worked out for at least a few of them, as she is one terrific mother. But doing it--staying aloof from the situation--I'm not sure it's in our DNA. As you probably have discerned, we suffer from empathy. It has its good and bad points.

Libby spent a good deal of her limited free time searching for the best catch-and-release trap to get. There's lots on the internet about them. I think I posted a youtube here a few posts back featuring a home-made one. We might have to build one of those for next year's rabies booster for Momma, as I'm not sure she'll ever venture into the Tomahawk trap we finally borrowed from Chatham County Animal Control on Monday. Lowe's was out of the things--which might be an indication of the state of small wild creatures here in the county this spring. One of my co-workers just had to deal with a family of skunks in his outbuilding. He was not so empathetic; cute does not necessarily trump all.

Anyways, having procured the loaner trap, we fed Momma just in its mouth for a few days (as is recommended), then on Wednesday I put a plate of tuna fish at the back past the trigger, after lining the floor with newspaper as recommended, and set the trap, with (as it turned out) her looking straight at me and the procedure from only a couple of feet away, under the house. Black is an awesome camouflage, and another facet of the cat universe from the one we've known for 18 previous years as owners of a white, fluffy cat. Anyways, I retreated inside, and in seconds she'd sprung the trap. I covered it with a towel and brought her in for the night. There was no room in there for anything such as food, litter, or water, but she was supposed to not eat for at least 12 hours before her scheduled surgery the next morning.

Libby and I got up early we put her into Libby's truck for the trip to Durham, where the mobile clinic for feral cats was located that day. This was about an hour or so trip. I went on to work, in the other direction. After a while I got a call--the vet told Libby that if Momma had feline AIDs she probably should be put down. They do a lot of standard tests when you bring a feral cat in. Libby and I talked about that and had about decided that we would veto that plan on the grounds that we didn't trap her so's to get her killed, but it turned out she was negative anyways, and healthy on all counts, an estimated 2 years old. The operation was successful (there were kittens, but not so far along as I'd fretted), she came home Thursday night and we transferred her to the larger kennel you can see in the picture. In the transfer she cooperated by retreating to the far end of the kennel so we could open the door and get the trap out.

Thursday night and Friday we talked a lot to her, put some food in the kennel, and litter, water, a little cat bed. There were some pain meds we ground up and put in the food. But while she does seem to have some sort of relationship with us, she is absolutely a wild creature. This morning the kennel was pretty much demolished, newspaper shredded, sheet cover on the floor, litter strewn everywhere, Momma sitting in the litter box glaring at me, and some food still in the dish. I took all this as a clear communication that she did not agree to be "our" cat, that she was not happy to have been examined and "probed" by us two-legged Martians she'd long ago learned to be very careful of, that, in brief, she wanted out. Unlike her kittens, who seemed to know instantly what a litter box was for, Momma was a cowgirl and knew the whole world was her litter box. Or perhaps she was consciously having her a prison riot--which is pretty much my conclusion.

I moved the kennel to the open kitchen door, opened the kennel door, took a few pictures. Wary, Momma stayed at the far back of the kennel. I walked around to the slider and back into the kitchen from behind the kennel. She was gone. (I tried to catch her scampering back towards the shed where the kittens had been born, but only got blurs not worth saving.) But--when she got to the shed she went inside. I took some food and water down there and put it on the step. She ventured out and was checking out the food as I was washing down the kennel with the hose--this spooked her and she ran away. But when I went back inside she returned and ate. I think she's back in the shed now, resting.

We hope she'll still adopt us, as a wild creature. We don't want her to come inside unless she wants to. She's a terrific hunter and was surviving on her own when she found the shed back in March. Neutered, the yellow tom might simply ignore her. And if we get real gung ho we might try catching the yellow tom and getting him neutered too. Meanwhile, the kittens are adolescents now, and quite full of beans. Here's a pic of two of 'em from the other day. They often sleep in a big pile, as Houdanenians are wont to do.

Last of Summer

(a photo of the Rhythm Devils from their website)

Last weekend I was up in central Michigan, at a wonderful music festival called "Wheatlands." It was the 38th annual event. I'd played at several of the early ones, back in the '70s, with the band that is not to be named. This time I was playing with the Formerly Knowns, and we even sold some of "their" records, having none of our own as yet. Friday night, up on the big stage, a band called the Starlight Six featured a lead singer who said she'd been to the first festival, when she was but a month old, and had attended every one since. That's pretty neat. There were a lot of fine bands and performers.

I was most taken with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, who play kick-ass cajun music, and whose young fiddler, Chris Segura, is an intuitive genius. If you care to buy their most recent CD, "Devil on a String," check out cut 7, "Je peux pas dormir le soir." You will never hear more remarkable fiddling, at least not this side of Stephan Grapelli at his finest. The Devils also feature the great singing of Randy Vadrine, who is channelling D.L. Menard and just a little of Mac McGaha, and Yvette Landry, who rivets the attention with her joy in music, plays a great bass line, and knows how to sing. Of course the Devils have a website. The seem to play mostly around home. Too bad for us, and damn the oil companies anyways. It's getting very hard to tour by automobile.

The festival itself was a gathering of like minds. People who care about each other, about the land, about the planet. There was a lot of tie-dye. There was a hint of "the chronic." All weekend I was met with the talsmanic phrase, "Happy Wheatland." These folks were getting ready for a Michigan winter. It was a festival of the countryside. We drove ten miles or so on a straight gravel road, through mostly woods, to get to the entrance to the grounds. I didn't see a fast food joint or a grocery store all weekend, and on the last day a stand called "Bob's" gave away it's last ears of fresh picked corn so they could pack up and get going before the bitter end. It was corn so fresh it reminded me of blues tossed out of the skiff and into the frying pan, down on the Banks.

I had to wonder if all these nice folks are going to go out and vote next year, if they are willing to stand against a gathering tide of full-tilt crazy that's coming at the country like gang-busters. I'm afraid a lot of these people are so disgusted by the Right that they're more likely to just focus on local things--put your head down, get up the firewood, grow the corn for the next hog, deal with the day to day, play acoustic music for the dance down at the grange. Keep your head down.

This was my generation's approach to Vietnam and Nixon. It might not be sensible, but disgust is a hard thing. In the liberal blogs I read there are signs of disgust in reaction to the Republican Debates. One person writes of a Republican party where germ theory is now in question. At Digby's place I find the following:

I must say that my reaction to this from out here in terrestrial paradise has been one of motivated anger, yes, but also gut-wrenching fear. At the risk of violating Godwin's law, never before in my 30-year lifetime, not even during the Bush years, have I felt this country was more keenly teetering on the precipice of totalitarianism than it is today. The people on that stage last night, and more especially the people in the audience, have murder on the mind. They have been whipped into a state of near frenzy against their perceived liberal, "freeloader" and "big government" enemies, and the bloodlust is running at a fever pitch. One of the candidates even openly advocated for eliminating social security based on the model adopted by Chilean mass murderer and fascist Augusto Pinochet.

There can be little doubt that if America were in the hands of these people, the country would already be locked in a pseudo-theocratic totalitarian death spiral. That's not the hallucinatory fantasy of a hysterical progressive blogger. That's just reality on its face. If these people manage to gain control of all levers of American power, it could very well mean the end of our nearly 250-year experiment in representative democracy. [David Atkins, 9/13/11]

That's pretty dire talk. And I think his perceptions are accurate from what I've glimpsed of these debates, though I certainly don't propose to watch any of them, or to even consider voting for a Republican, now or ever, period. Indeed, I'd rather watch a full night of "Sons of Anarchy," a family oriented teevee show about criminal bikers and their doings, and the womenfolk who love 'em. I started to tivo a few episodes they were rerunning, but Libby said I'd put it on the wrong hard drive and she wanted to watch Jon Stewart, so the tivo got nixed. Nothing was missed of course--but that's a symptom of putting your head down I think, creeping up on me from home tired from work.

As I keep saying, all we have here is a two party system, a binary situation, just like on a computer. It's not something the vaunted Founders gave us, but it's what we have. Libertoonians and Trotskyists are merely political fantasists, pretending to vote for something that isn't there. If you don't vote at all, you're actually voting for the wrong guy. That's how it works here.

Roy Edroso is so depressed he ended a piece the other day with the suggestion that we all consider dual citizenship. What a sad state of affairs. And then I have to remember all those nice folks, having fun in the ending summer last weekend. And the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, who play so good you will find yourself dancing with an astonishment akin to David Byrne's "How Did I Get Here?" There is water on the bottom of the ocean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RLitow_1LU

Update. Re never voting Republican, here in NC our Republican majority legislature just voted to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot next May which, if passed, outlaws same-sex marriage. The point of this exercise is to use and encourage homophobia to get out the vote in NC for Republican candidates. That is to say, this Republican majority is quite willing to scapegoat real people--real families with real children, their fellow Carolineans all--for the sake of votes. I can think of nothing more craven, small, selfish, and downright evil that this legislative action, thought there are plenty of challengers of course. NC Republicans did it. Let them live with it. Indeed, let them all be voted out of office, every damn one. This is exactly what James Hoffa was saying last week, and why.