Obituary

I started an entry for this long neglected blog yesterday. We are on Spring Break - and for once it is actually spring. I had intended to go on about how around here spring is the really windy season. Every season is a windy season, but spring is really special in that department, but I started with another sign of spring.

Our next-door neighbor's globe willow - sometimes called a desert willow - had started to green out. It is a wonderful sight - all those delicate skyward twigs start to change shade from decidedly gray to a vaguely gray-green then to a soft pale green then the entire crown of the tree seems to be shrouded by a pale green mist. I have watched the transformation for the nineteen springs that we have lived in this house.

I have photographed this tree in winter when it was dressed out in one of our rare snows. It has always seemed to me to have a particularly solid but graceful trunk dividing ever upward to the fine willow twigs at the top. Desert willows reach up, rather than drooping down like the willows I knew in the south.

Yesterday I was out and smiled at the tree as I saw the shade of the green mist deepening.

Today our neighbor took a chainsaw and killed it. First he took off the branches reaching up with their mist of green, then the outward reaching branches that supported the snow in winter. Last time I could stand to look, there was only a mutilated trunk standing there.

I'm sure he had a reason. I hope it was a good one. I hope it was not just to eliminate the shade that prevented the foreign grass from growing uniformly across their yard.

I have spent much of my life in desert places. Don't get me wrong, I love the desert and all its intensity and subtlety. But maybe all of my years with the desert have made me consider a tree one of the miracles of creation, and I shall mourn the passing of this one.

Wild Geese Flying

I love geese - well, I love the Canadas that hang around here - and fly around here. Those big white farmyard geese are another thing altogether.

One of the things that I keep in my permanent memory file is the morning that I arrived at the high school on a grey foggy morning (pretty rare around here) and heard the sound of geese flying - many geese. I stood there beside my car for fifteen minutes and watched and listened as hundreds of skeins of geese flew overhead, probably on their way to the Bosque refuge. They faded in and out of the fog, but the calling was continuous. One of the truly wild sights and sounds that we may experience even yet.

I guess we are sort of on the edge between summer and winter haunts for the Canadas, because we have a population that remains here year round. They commute from the big puddle over by one of the junior highs (excuse me, middle schools) to the water habitat at the zoo every morning at about the time I am leaving, At least, that is where I thought they were going - as it happens, the zoo backs up to the city golf course, and some clever fowl have taken up residence at one of the water hazards.

One morning, not many days ago, when construction had closed the direct route from there to here, I drove past the golf course and saw families out there with goslings. I suppose, except for the occasional hook or slice, that is generally a more peaceful environment for raising children than the zoo.

Happy Groundhog Day

You know what? It's cold. What we are having even qualifies as cold in the frozen northern wastelands. I looked out my bedroom window a while ago. The deck is covered with snow, except where reluctant dogs have scrabbled it clear, but that isn't the point. There is frost on the window frame - the inside of the window frame - shades of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books where the little girls woke up in the morning nice and warm because there were two or three inches of snow on top of their quilts.

I've seen cold weather before, but there are people around here who didn't even realize that temperatures could be represented with negative numbers. I served a tour in those frozen wastelands, not an experience that I care to repeat, but I could be swapping "cold" stories with the folks who are going around saying "Well, now, I remember back in '03 up in (fill in northern wasteland of choice), when it got sooooo cold that ..." Starting to sound like that story by Jack London - "To Build a Fire." But, like all those good folks, I don't live there any longer - and being able to tell stories like that is one of the reasons I don't.

But here we sit, the temperature hasn't come within sight of freezing for two days now. May not sound like much to some people, but around here - it is simply unheard of. Schools have been closed, schools have delayed starts - never cooperatively, of course. Where I work, we have started late for the last two days, and it is already scheduled for tomorrow. The word of doom is that pipes have started bursting here and there around campus, bringing on the cry "Back up your computers, people, the water may be rising." Today, the public schools in the town where I work were closed, yesterday they just did a two hour late start. The schools in the town where I live ran a normal schedule yesterday and were closed today. Orchestra was cancelled last night, and church choir tonight. Yesterday was election day (school board election) - we always vote, but I decided I just didn't care enough to go out again - after all, my children are out of school, and I don't work for them any more.

It is even cold down deep in the heart of Texas, where my sister lives. They are looking at an overnight low of 13. Okay, that's cold - especially for the metroplex, but today our high was 12. And that is crazy cold here in the microplex. There really hasn't been all that much snow, but what there has been isn't melting. Highway 70 is clear and dry thanks to the winds that howl across these plains. The streets in town (either town) are really a mess.

This afternoon on the way home I saw some fairly spectacular artwork that had been executed by the wind. The fence on the east side of the road was drifted almost over and apparently there had been just enough sun to crust the snow on the tops of the drifts. Then the wind started up and sculpted fantastic wave forms under the crusted tops, amazing - beautiful. Not quite beautiful enough to persuade me to stop the car and take some photos - six degrees and 20 mph winds will keep me behind closed doors almost anytime, but remarkable and memorable all the same.

And another good thing: the Good Samaritan who stopped to help me this morning when my car stalled as I tried to shift from reverse into drive after backing out of my driveway. After trying to start it for several minutes, I decided that it was quite possible that someone might want to use the road - and would appreciate it if my beast was not blocking the entire roadway. I was pushing it in the general direction of the curb when a gentleman in an SUV came along. He helped me push it out of the way, and was about to offer me a lift to work until I told him where I worked. Still, he stood by until I actually got it going again. Thank you, sir; thank you very much.

"that my child may have peace"

I have debated about whether to comment at length in our new facebook book forum and decided that I didn't know these people well enough yet to go on at length. My chain of thought led pretty far afield from the book and situation under discussion. So this seems to be an alternate venue for me to comment at length on anything that I feel like - with reasonable confidence that no one is likely to read it. Okay, maybe a couple of people, but they know me well enough to ignore anything I say that really gets out of line.

The book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the subject was the evacuation of the children. The initial comment was from a young mother who is still appropriately giving the age of her youngest in weeks. The thought of sending the children away was very painful to her -- and I totally agree with her. The directors of the evacuation operation in the book did not allow parents to actually see their children off, because they believed that brave faces might slip and they would set sea with a boatload of sobbing terrified children. It was a decision forced by a devastating set of circumstances - and a typically British solution. I don't know of any other group of people who have done this sort of thing on such a scale. The people of London "soldiered on" during the blitz - and evacuated their children to the country. As the Guernsey islanders huddled in their beds with no fuel for heat or light and subsisted on potato peels and tree bark tea, as Londoners huddled together in subway tunnels as bombs destroyed their homes, they must have drawn some consolation from the thought that their children were spared what they were going through. Even so, it is hard to imagine how painful it must have been for all those parents - to surrender the care of their children to strangers for an indefinite period - which in many cases stretched into years.

That made me think about the people who did not evacuate their children. Those children endured the same privations and terrors that their parents did. What a choice.

All of that brought to mind two politicians. First, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of England who signed the Munich Agreement which essentially gave Hitler the opportunity to subjugate large sections of Europe without interference. He returned to England on the eve of WWII and paraphrased the book of common prayer by claiming that he had secured "peace for our time." The other actually predates Chamberlain by close to two hundred years. Thomas Paine roundly condemned a man who, with his eight-year-old by his side, called for "peace in my day." Paine's response, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." "Peace for our time" didn't work for Chamberlain. And I'm not sure it can be claimed that "that my child may have peace" really worked for Paine either, since no generation has passed without armed conflict of some sort. My grandfather fought on the Mexican border against the only actual incursion of hostile forces on the US mainland, then in WWI, and was one of the first veterans to return to active duty during WWII, my father's war. Maybe those parents who sent their children away at least partially succeeded in securing a form of peace for their children during a time of war - although at a painful price; a price we have never been called on to pay, because, with the obvious exception, we have generally fought our wars in other people's backyards.

And speaking of children and war, I just finished reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. During the Ayatollah's war against Iraq, he recruited young boys, children not even in their teens, armed them with inoperative weapons and a "key to heaven" to hang around their necks and sent them into "battle" as human mine-sweepers to clear the mine fields for his real troops. Which in turn reminded me of an episode of MASH: a farmer was unwilling to risk his ox in a field which had been mined, so he sent his daughters ahead of it. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here. Our society is continually bombarded with slogans identifying our children as our future - usually from the educational establishment, the members of which studiously avoid any contact with that "future," thereby remaining unconflicted as they concoct new ways to secure personal profit at the expense of those children. And we as parents have been trained to meekly submit without question to whatever lunacy these "educators" and politicians think up. Not teachers, once an "inspirational" clinician asked me when I entered the room if I was an educator. I told him, "No, I'm a teacher." I'm talking about those who are not involved in the process who are making all the decisions based on whatever misinformation they have been fed by those with an axe to grind - or profit to secure. I'm not sure we have the right to condemn a man who has chosen to risk the lives of some of his children to preserve the lives of the others - granted, sacrificing daughters to enable him to provide food for his sons wouldn't play in the West, but it may have been appropriate in that time and place.

I quit. I think I probably need a live audience to shut me up when I start rambling. I promise to return to absolute silliness when I post again.

Turn the radio on ...

Yesterday was cold, no two ways about it. It may have climbed out of single digits by the time I left the house, but if it had, it was only just barely. I held my breath and crossed by fingers inside my mittens as I turned the key in the ignition, but the faithful old beast started right up. And, when the radio finished its blinky start-up thing, "Heatwave" was playing.

I think that represents a nice touch of irony on the part of the DJ. I guess I may stick with her after all. I have been considering switching stations because in the 70% of the time that they are not playing music (according to a semi-random sample which I conducted last semester for my statistics class) it seemed to me that she was devoting an inordinate amount of time to complaining about the weather. According to her, it is too hot or too cold, too dry or (very occasionally) too wet. If it accidentally looks like it might be a nice day - she always has a "yeahbut" the wind is going to blow. Seriously, around here it is big news if the wind is not going to blow. It is like Alice's dilemma - jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.

Added to that, there is the guy who DJs the afternoon show which is on while I am heading home. I know this is pure bigotry on my part, but I can't stand his accent. I know and have known others from his particular corner of the universe, but his voice/speech patterns/regional accent - whatever it is - are continually irritating to me. I am willing to concede that as a person he may not be smarmy and pretentious, but his accent certainly makes him sound that way.

The problem is that I am a "one-stop shopper." I prefer to pay $2.75 for a gallon of milk to making a second stop to get it for $2.00 at the market where it is the weekly loss leader. I have only one station programmed in my car. If it fails me, I have no backup plan. I can't even turn the idiotic thing off - I can turn it down to inaudible, but I still know that it's on.

It failed me last week when they broadcast a HS basketball tournament for something like twelve hours a day. A small school tournament. Seriously, we're talking about schools that may graduate 10 to 20 seniors a year. I know these schools, my first teaching job was in one of them. Trust me, everyone who cared about those games was AT those games. The gym at the small high school where I taught would accommodate the entire population of the town - and that of their opponent's hometown. Oh well, I suppose basketball is music to the ears of many, even basketball from schools where it is required that every boy and girl in the high school be on the roster to put a team on the court. Schools that don't even try to field a regulation squad for football and have dropped back from eight-man to six-man, and still sometimes forfeit games because they can't field a team.

In the end, I listened to basketball, because I don't have a backup station. After some reflection, the good doctor (PhD, not MD) who does their sports announcing does a rather nice line in play-by-play patter - and it certainly no worse than the usual smarmy and pretentious.

Snow is falling ...

Almost a month and nothing to say?  That seems extremely unlikely.  On consideration, I am going to blame it all on statistics -- and a sinus infection.  Each complicating the other in so many ways.  It is difficult to concentrate on confidence intervals and rejection regions when you can't breathe and it is hard to get enough sleep when the current problem set is written in friulan instead of English.  The course is over now, and apparently I did well enough, so I intend to enjoy the next few weeks before I have to start Stats II. 

Taking graduate coursework is a condition of employment for my job.  At the time, I thought "Such a deal!  They are going to pay me to do what I always wanted to do!"  Then they started telling me what I had to take.  I'd been looking forward to taking that Shakespeare course I never got around to as an undergraduate, or maybe music theory or anthropology.  No such luck.  Education and math.  And statistics.  I used to think that statistics was a branch of math.  Wrong --- the fact that it has its own course prefix (stat instead of math) is certainly a clue, but the biggie is that I actually like math, even (or especially) the difficult reality twisting types.

Oh well, the semester has ended, I have both awarded and received grades - and unlike most conventional workplaces, where one moves immediately from the present crisis to the coming crisis, we have a little downtime before the next semester starts.  The part of my job that is not teaching continues during this interval - but that is actually a very good thing.  It is a good thing a) because they continue to pay me that part of my salary and b) because it is possible to get some work done with students and most faculty away.

This morning I am sitting at my desk at home in my housecoat (with a $10 space heater at my feet) instead of hitting the road south.  I'll be going very late today for reasons which are beyond my control (like so many things in my life). 

There is a dusting of snow out there.  I had to push the puppy out the door this morning, after all, why would he want to go out? He had already tended to business in the bathroom.  When I brought the dogs back in half an hour later, however, he was having so much fun that he didn't want to come in - the big dogs were ready, though.  The snow is barely falling but it is pretty chilly.

Snow is fairly rare around here.  We get "Severe Weather Warnings" on our weather site and threats of 1- 4 inches of accumulation, but usually all we get is visible but not really measureable.  I'm not complaining.  I lived a few years in the frozen northern wastelands (anything north of an extended Mason-Dixon Line) and I can live without the miraculous white covering obscuring all imperfections, snowball fights, and snow angels -- and drifts the size of small cars in my driveway, knee-deep slush, and black ice.  Every now and then we catch it, I have pictures of the swimming pool full of snow and a ten-inch cap on my old van - but then, I spent a Christmas in New Orleans with the temperatures never rising above 40 - as long as these things remain rare, I'm ok with it.  I have driven to conferences over in the middle of the state and had to stop under every overpass to clean the windshield because the defroster in the car was not up to the situation. and on one memorable occasion it took me forty-five minutes to drive from the parking lot at the high school to my house - which I could see from the edge of the school property.  Those who want it can have it, thank you very much.

Drifting along ...

The tumbleweed pinball season is starting!  There were some mildly brisk intermittent breezes this morning and the small weeds were breaking loose and hitting the road.  There were a few rugged individualists and many traveling in what a colleague of mine refers to as "herds."  With attention and care it is usually possible to dodge the singles, but the herds are tough.  Added is the directional factor.  The road is officially designated Highway 70 South - BUT the stretch I drive is certainly not that simple.  It starts out heading south, all right, but about half way down you come to the Big Curve and then a little farther on the Other Curve.  After that point, the road is actually heading southwest - and with that the driver is dealing with wind from a totally different quarter with respect to the vehicle.  This morning the wind was basically out of the north - which means that the herds were running right down the road for the first part of the trip.  The gusts were supposed to be up to 35 mph, but even my rambling wreck goes faster than that and there is no way to dodge them all.  After the Curves, they were running obliquely across the road - a very different challenge.

Along the sides of the road the Big Mamas were beginning to strain against their root systems and soon it will be really exciting.  We had some visitors out here from some place back on the East Coast once.  They rented a car and drove the hundred miles from the airport to the campus.  They were could hardly wait to tell us:
    "And then we got hit by a tumbleweed!"
    "How big was it?"
    "Oh, about the size of a basketball."
    "Wait until you run into one the size of Volkswagen ... bus."
Exaggeration? Well, maybe a little, but the babies out there this morning running in herds were the size of basketballs and this is definitely only the beginning.

Down where I come from (much as a military brat "comes from" any place in particular), it is, or used to be, fairly common for folks to go out and pick their Christmas tree from the available crop of tumbleweeds.  My great-aunt had a terrific tree one year made of three tumbleweeds in graduated sizes stacked artistically and spray-painted white.  It was about seven feet tall.  The color is optional - I have seen silver ones, gold ones, red ones, even green ones as well as the avant garde - in their natural color.  There were also occasional spectacular fires at the homes of those who insisted on putting lights on them - maybe these new LED Christmas lights are cool enough to be at least comparatively safe.  But that tree of Aunt Jane's was a wonder - and hung with red and green chiles - absolutely beautiful.

Around here, their function runs to sport rather than decor.  More about scoring when the season heats up.