Fotos de Madrid

            En la Mañana

 

 

            Hoy es sábado, el doce de mayo. Mañana será el Día de las Madres en los Estados Unidos. ¡Besos y abrazos, madres! Mothers' Day, May 13th, 2012.

             This morning, our second day in Madrid, I set off to be adventurous - to find a café for breakfast different from the one the day before. However, the half-remembered map in my head, the original of which lay open on the nightstand in our hotel room next to my sleeping wife, turned out to be no match for the twists and turns, alleys and backstreets and unfamiliar thoroughfares of Old Madrid.

            Short as some streets and alleys are, others seemed to go on for blocks - except when there were no blocks or intersections, just row after row of buildings and shops that played with my sense of direction. Tracing the cobbled streets hunting for breakfast was like tracing the sketchy lines on my palm, some distinct, others faint.

            My grumbling stomach signaled surrender.

Feelin' Squirrelly - A Fable . . .

 

. . . or You Don't Have to be Paranoid to Have Enemies

            The squirrel said, "Nice day, huh?"

            Terry looked around. Nobody.

“My apologies," said the squirrel. "I’m being rude, interrupting your solitude."

            Terry looked up and saw a gray squirrel, perched on a pine branch not six feet above his head. Not knowing quite why, Terry said "What do you want?"

            "You humans fascinate me.”

            Terry imagined telling this one to Dr. Fischer, the shrink to whom he paid $150 an hour regularly on Tuesdays at three pm. "Take some time off," advised his brain doctor. "Go into the mountains, sit by a stream, don't even take a book."

            Okay. Overnight, no longer. Maybe enough time to temporarily turn off the police scanner that was his prefrontal cortex, the row of blue and red lights that flashed and chased each other back and forth along a black bandwidth of his mind. The job, the wife, kids, politics, the truck making a strange noise, his weight. The nameless dreads every morning. The walking worried, said the doc.

            Nothing Terry tried had worked -- self-help books, classes, yoga, meditation, all quickly abandoned. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was play-acting a centuries-old mystical tradition.

            So now, sitting on a camp table next to his backpack, in a clearing that let the sun shine in through dark green trees, Terry was having a conversation with a squirrel.

            He stared at the critter. "Fascinate?" The faraway drone of a small plane came and went.

            "Yep," said the squirrel. "Tell me, is this a beautiful spot or what? The weather's glorious. That burbly creek over there has been washing those river boulders -- singing its song -- longer even than you’ve had your job!”

            "What in the world do you know about having a job!" snapped Terry. "Your job is to forage for nuts. Yummy!"

            The furry-tailed beastie jumped down to a stump close by. It sat up on its hind legs and flicked its tail like squirrels do.

            "Do you know how much DNA is shared between you and me? We're not that far apart on the family tree."

            Being condescended to by a squirrel!

            “Okay, smart guy,” Terry said. “What’s the square root of minus one? Explain the space-time continuum. Brownian movement?"

            The squirrel smirked. "I’m not the one sitting out here jonesing, uncomfortable in my own skin. And it’s Brownian motion by the way."

            If squirrels can chuckle, this one did at the dig. Or maybe it was the snick-snick-snick they do anyway. The clever rodent went on. "Admit it, you humans with your massive brains have the illusion you can control things."

            "Illusion! And you’re under the illusion that that owl up there isn’t thinking of you as lunch.”

            "That owl is an illusion."

            "Oh great, now we're into Zen," said Terry. "Please don’t go all `lilies of the field’ on me."

            The squirrel seemed to think for a second, then hopped down and headed for the nearest tree.

            “Wait!” called Terry. “Hey, I’m sorry. Come back.”

            The squirrel scampered into the understory. It reappeared. “Up here,” it said. It dropped a pine cone onto the picnic table and returned. It demonstrated how to extract the caramel-colored pine seeds lodged tight in the brittle crevasses.

            "You ever eaten pine nuts?"

            "Not raw." Terry broke off the hard nubbins with his teeth and sampled a few. The blue and red lights were flickering, but only dimly. "Utterly ridiculous. I am losing my mind."

            “Not prime rib, I’m assuming,” said the squirrel, “but you’re being a good sport.”

            Suddenly tired, Terry started to relax -- but only for a second. Neither he nor the squirrel saw it coming. Like a guided missile, with outstretched claws and terrible hooked beak and blazing yellow eyes, a huge owl rocketed down out of the sky, then leveled off for an instant in a parabolic swoop before grabbing the stunned squirrel in its talons.

            Or it would have, except at the last instant Terry grabbed his backpack and swung it with all his might. The blow sent the bird, head over feathered tail, into a stand of manzanita -- from which it struggled, extracted itself, fluttered its wings once, and glaring eyes wide as saucers, escaped high into the distance and vanished.

            Terry's whole body shook. His head and heart were pounding. The squirrel had disappeared. He listened. No scratching or rustling in the underbrush, just the winsome sigh of an afternoon breeze in the canopy of evergreens.

            Clearly, he'd imagined the whole thing. Dreamt it. But he noticed that his mind was clear for the first time in days. No kaleidoscope of thoughts racing through his head. The scanner was off.

            Terry looked around. There was some pine-like debris on the table, but the wind must have sent it down.

            I was not talking to a squirrel, he thought. Squirrels cannot talk. I fell asleep.

            He stood up and tucked in his shirt. He stretched and walked stiff-legged to his truck to get a soda. Then he stopped cold and stared at the top of the utility box in the truck bed. There were three individual ponderosa pine cones, not stacked actually but placed together, and caramel-colored seeds arranged just so around them.

            Terry retrieved his smart phone and double-checked. Yep, next Tuesday at three, Dr. Fischer.

Postcards from the Road - Stories (update)

Friends,

            Acknowledging up front the shameless self-promotion, I nonetheless want to celebrate the terrific reception "Postcards from the Road - Stories" has gotten. From the well-attended launch of the book in November to the recent delivery of a third print-run, it's been enjoyable and humbling at the same time.

            Briefly then, I'd like simply to remind folks that copies are on the shelves at Village Books in Bellingham, and also in my possession.

            Ordering from Village Books couldn't be easier or quicker. Go to the website (http://www.villagebooks.com/), enter the title, and voila! Or email me, and I'll send a copy pronto.

            Thanks for your wonderful readership.

                Dick

P.S. If you've already bought a book, please forgive the repetition . . .  and thank you!

The Bee

 

            Before telling about crossing the Big River, I will report that the unwelcome exposure to insects in the Ozarks was in fact the second event of its type on the trip.

            There are things you learn about each other on a journey such as the one we took. Not necessarily new things, but character quirks that are brought into more visible relief over long hours in X cubic feet of necessary confinement. We all know this when we weigh whether or not to take such a trip with a companion no matter how good a friend he or she may be.

            Cherie and I have enjoyed a long and happy marriage - two kids, two careers, two home remodels, wallpapering.  But now, in early retirement and in each other's company more often, perhaps feelings that hibernate below the surface would percolate to the top through mile after mile of silence on this the longest road trip we'd undertaken.  We travel well together as a rule, but over the years we've also enjoyed solitary time.  Made a point of it, in fact. Put simply, we're independent people who love each other. We make joint decisions; unless we don't.  My lovely wife's patience is legendary; I work at it.  Driving directions, map queries, restaurant and motel choices, potty stops might be fertile ground for disagreement.  Nothing as routine as that happened, but there were some surprises.

 

            I knew Cherie hated bugs - from the most harmless of moths and gangly crane flies to the B-52 houseflies that thrive in the Pacific Northwest. Don't even start about spiders. If an arachnid had been the subject of this brief episode, I likely would not be here to write about it.  Her tolerance for flying, buzzing critters is close to nonexistent. She comes by her aversion honestly: she grew up on the East Coast where some insects are the size of small birds - cockroaches in particular. Ugly, huge, Carboniferous Era, corner-lurking, night-crawling omnivores that roam in the dark, snacking on smudges of left-over pizza stuck to the box. The overhead light flashes on and the miscreants scatter, skittering into nooks and crannies too small for you to get at and sent it to the lower reaches of Hell.

            Clearly, I'm not fond of the little beasties either. And there's undoubtedly an important place for cockroaches in the ecosystem.  Maybe there's a Save The Roaches Society somewhere - t-shirts, monthly meetings, marches on Black Flag headquarters. The Franz Kafka Chapter in lower Manhattan, say.

            But, I digress.

 

            These vermin, are not the subject of this narrative.  Rather, members of the wonderful entomological order hymenoptera, consisting of bees, wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets. These industrious denizens of spring, summer, and fall perform wonders. Colonies live in beautifully constructed villages with intricate passages.  They protect and pay homage to a monarch, provide childcare, guards and workers, and roam far and wide to find food, yet make their way home. They band together and defend against enemies.  Bees even provide us food, however grudgingly.

            But they sting. Or bite.

            Like the one that flew in the driver's-side window, Cherie at the wheel, narrowly missing her head before disappearing somewhere in the car.  There aren't a lot of options when this happens in a vehicle traveling seventy-five miles an hour.  Skilled driver that she is - and screaming like she'd been shot - Cherie came as close as she's likely to come to a NASCAR sideways slide and pulled into a fortuitously wide driveway and jammed the brake.

            Where was the bee? Or wasp. Whatever.

            "It flew down there," she shrieked, pointing down beside her left leg, where, probably dazed by its collision with the window post, it was coming to its senses and assessing the wide cuff opening of Cherie's slacks.  Out the door she flew as fast as her tormentor had flown in.

            "So do something," she yelled from a good fifteen feet away.

            I got out of the car, stretched, and walked around the front. It was a bright sunny Utah afternoon, brown desert scrub to one side, distant green foothills in the other.  At the end of the curving driveway sat a small pair of buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence.  Then I noticed the sign. Terrific! The Carbon County Humane Society! I would commit brutal insecticide of one of God's elegant creations, whose only mistake it was to fly at an inopportune moment through airspace it had far more right to than we did, in full view of a humane society.

            Maybe I wouldn't find him. Maybe he, or it, had expired. Maybe . . . nope, there it was, crawling its sextipedal way over the door jam. From whence it harmlessly flew away without so much as a fare-thee-well.

            Am I overstating the drama? Grizzlies in Yellowstone?  I'll let the reader ask Cherie who shakily resumed her place behind the wheel and drove on, mumbling, while I resumed my place in the reclined passenger seat and fell back asleep.

            At this point, fairness compels me to add, speaking of character tics (not ticks!) that become more noticeable on such a long drive, I snore.  "Vigorously," it must be said.  Cherie didn't say a word about that over thousands of miles.

 

A Sense of Place

[Published in the Journal of the Santa Fe Writers Project - http://www.sfwp.com/a-sense-of-place-by-richard-little/ ]

A Sense of Place:  Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

    …round apples glowing red in the orchard and the rustle of the leaves make me pause to think how many other than human forces affect us . . . . I respond - how?

        Virginia Woolf - "A Sketch of the Past"

   

 

            There has to be an end to this hellish descent. Six miles so far in first gear over washboards and gullies, sometimes careening, then skidding to a stop and sending a cloud of dust and rocks over into an abyss.  Next, an open stretch across a bench several acres wide.  Maybe there will be an easy down grade from now on, but no, the road narrows and plunges into a funnel yet again, and the creeping and tumbling and inching down begins anew.  My uncomplaining truck clutches and shifts and brakes and wants to test its tipping point, so on we go.

 

            The worst patch of impossible road I can recall, and another six or seven miles to go and another thousand feet down.  I’m in northwest Colorado – Dinosaur National Monument -- high on the Uinta plateau above the confluence of the Yampa and Green Rivers.  I was told this would be worth it, a descent into Echo Park, the Center of the Universe; that the veil between earthbound reality and the eternal world of spiritual truth is thinner there than anywhere.

Truman Horton

 

 

Truman Horton

1922 - 2014

My friend Truman Horton liked poems.

 

            "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon,
            The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune . . . ."

            "When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the                                       glare,
            There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty and loaded for                                               bear."*

Or,

            "There are strange things done 'neath the midnight sun
            By the men who moil for gold.
            The arctic trails have their secret tales
            That would make your blood run cold."**

            I had occasion to re-read these great Robert Service works while preparing for Truman's funeral.  They've stuck in my mind off and on ever since the time I listened to him recite them - the time he asked me to tickle the ivories in the background while he read. 

            "Jag-time"?  Do people "moil" for gold?

 
Indeed they do.  For most of his ninety-one trips around the sun, Truman loved poems -- and reading and good writing -- because he loved words.

            Truman would say, "So and so's as happy as a sand boy."
            Me, after hearing this many times:  "Ok, Tru, so what's a sand boy?"
            Truman, thoughtfully:  "Don't really know.  Somebody that's happy."

I looked it up this week: It means exactly that, and it's been around since the eighteenth century!  Once, he bought me the collected works of Walt Whitman.

            The other day we were talking about dogs.

            Truman:  "We had a dog growing up.  His name was Slick."
             Me: "Slick?"
             Tru: "Yeah. We got him from Slick Willis."
             Me: "Wait a minute.  You named the dog after the guy you got him from?
             Tru: "Yep."

You can't make up dialogue like that! 

            We'd arrive at his and Mary's house and find him up in the woods above the creek weed-whacking and cutting brush.  Later, he'd put the usable branches against a big granite rock black with soot, split some logs, and start a fire where we'd roast hot dogs and make s'mores -- the smoke disappearing up into the trees. 

            Maybe he never outgrew the teenaged boy who hopped freight cars going west during the Depression, slept in hobo camps, and scrounged a piece of fresh pie when he could.  This was before he got himself educated and eventually retired after an engineering career on the Pacific Coast. 

            Truman wanted to build a boat, so he did.  From scratch.  He wanted to sail it to Hawaii,  so he and Mary did.  Twice.  They built their own house.  For twenty-five years he was the go-to guy at his church every time something went "clunk," from the belfry to the basement.  He wrote his memoir.  He was married to the wonderful Mary. 

            I loved him.  Lots of folks did.  Sail on, Truman Horton!  If God wants to hear a good story, Truman's his guy.

* The Shooting of Dan McGrew

** The Cremation of Sam McGee

Pharma

Warfarin to keep my blood from thickenin',

Flecainide to keep my ticker tickerin'.

Losartan keeps my BP low,

Atenolol blocks betas, my pulse to slow. 

EmergenC and Cold Snap start my day.

Airborne later keeps colds at bay.

Acetaminophen, chlortrimeton,

Lunesta at night - I'm good 'til dawn! 

It's not I mind taking all these pills

For one or another assorted ills.

But I sometimes wonder as each is popped,

What would happen if I stopped! 

Would I start to exfoliate,

Perhaps explode, self-immolate?

We'll never know, it's safe to say,

'Cuz I live life the Pharma Way.