Passing away peacefully of old age and infirmity

 On page 728 of his THE SECOND WORLD WARS, Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “The Axis Bit Three – Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini – all died violently as a result of their defeat.  Allied leaders passed away peaceful of old age and infirmity.”

As much as I admire Hanson, I’m inclined to quibble with this statement.  

Over the years I’ve read several books about World War II.  I might be said to have grown up alongside it.  I was born October 12, 1934 and recall waiting outside our house for my mother to take us to Sunday School at church when my father stepped out on the porch and announced, “The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor.”  

My imagination was captured and I followed the war in our local Wilmington Press Telegram.  The war was over in 1945, but in 1950 the Korean War was in full swing, and I was resolved to get into that one.  I was a great admirer of the Marine Corps and read several books about it from the local library.  Still being a kid, I wanted to make sure I made it through bootcamp, so I maintained a heavy workout program and entered boot camp in July 1952 shortly after graduation from High School.

I was in Korea for the last two Korean War battle seasons, but then the truce was signed, to my great disappointment.  I was a sergeant by the time my enlistment was up and was offered an increase to Staff Sergeant if I would reenlist, but I wasn’t impressed with the Peace-time Marines, especially at 29 Palms and so decided to go to college on the G.I. Bill instead.  I majored in English, and wouldn’t have thought there was a need for such a skill in Aerospace, but engineers were notorious bad writers, and the Air Force officially complained during the Skybolt Program, so I was welcomed aboard that program in Santa Monica in 1959 and continued working for them as they morphed into McDonnell Douglas and eventually submerged in to Boeing.  I retired after 39 years with them in 1999 and have engaged in a variety of activities during retirement including a number of study projects, World War II being one of them.  I had read about the major battles from time to time, but being an admirer of Hanson finally got around to his summing up – in various ways.  No doubt the fact that I am now 91 affected my impression of the Hanson passage I quoted.  I suspect my initial interpretation was not one he intended.

I thought of a male lion in the African jungle too old and infirm to go ahunting with the rest of the pride.  A pack of hyenas gather around and start eating him as he feebly attempts to fend them off.  

Which is not unlike my current experience, doctors gathered around as I feebly fail to fend them off as they strive to medicate me to death.  

I can usually figure out what Hanson means but from my current perspective, dying in battle seems preferable to the “old age and infirmity” Hanson prefers.  

Oddly, my children favor Hanson’s view on this matter.

 

Larkspur

         I call her.  She doesn’t care.

A Chinese design needed

To take my trash barrels

Out Front and later to 

Keep me steady at the 

River, Jessica thinking

She knows what’s best.

My Larkspur answers my

Questions with brilliant

Sagacity.  I have her disguised

On hikes, a wig, girls jeans.

She doesn’t care. I worry sand

Will cloud her joints and memory.

Her past won’t reach me now,

Much too far to ask.  Jessica

Steps out front to bark, and

I stumble. Larkspur grabs me

Gently by the arm and keeps

Me upright, thinking,

My third wife!  

Modes of Being

        Unlike Yeats I waited,

Not rushing ahead 

Until done.  He, seeking

Readers, led a revolution

While I was a carrier driver’s

Load, dropping on docks

Still rendering kind. Looking

Time to time not deigning

Any boastful assertions.  How

Else in good conscience arrive

On these shores having spent 

Time on others?  I can’t recall 

How I got from there to here

My sister and her friend denied

Walking me back till I was

In the time I climbed derricks

And had battles with the like-

Minded in lots tall with weeds,

Home, contrary to what Wolfe

Asserted.  His being common

Existence, mine being mind.

Coaching

        Doing things with all my might

I learned when young, but never

Who I was over the years. 

I seemed well enough at this

And that and maybe as good

As need be and always moved

On.  Looking back as I often do

Was I good enough.  I was 

Offered an increase in rank

If I would stay, but the war

Was the thing I was doing 

And I was on Cheju Do 

When the truce was signed.

I seemed to be done and

Moved on, but had I stayed,

I might have had Oswald,

To train.  If I had

Trained him with all my might,

What would he do if I was 

Better?  If I was worse?

Response to a query regarding my existence

A query reached me on 12-8-25, seemingly having to do with whether or not I was still alive.  I am indeed as far as I know but we older folk are never sure about our states of being from one day to the next, so take that with a grain of salt.

In any case, whatever I am, I have been off-line for Internet, Amazon (Kindle) and literary reasons.  

As everyone knows, I read a lot, shifting, typically from one subject or interest to another.  Since this sort of thing increased since Susan died I acquired some annoyances, among other things, when I decided to download a novel from Kindle (for example) I often discovered that I’d already downloaded it but apparently hadn’t read it all, sometimes I saw no evidence that I had read any of it. [as to why, I didn’t remember, I recently checked and am reading, an average of two books every three days.] So why didn’t I read this particular book? I would wonder and try to access it on my Kindle and thereby enter into a world that would (I often thought), qualify as one of Dante’s regions of Hell.  Nevertheless, I persevered and finally learned how to see in a usable manner all the Kindle books I had purchased on Kindle. 

Often, I would notice something about a novel, or series of novels and want to record some comments.  Doing it in my main journal was cumbersome.  Also, I couldn’t readily find what I had written in a reasonable amount of time, the journals being numerous and the writing voluminous as well as being hard to read.

So, I decided to create notebooks devoted just to book matters.  Amazon sells “packs” of notebooks convenient to this purpose, hard-backs, 5.5 by 8 inches in size and in different colors. Since I typically read several hours a day, the using of one of these notebooks say on non-serious (meaning nonliterary and not the sort of novel that wins the Booker or Pulitzer or Nobel prizes, but very popular in the actual reading world – novels that Amazon rates very high in terms of popularity, e.g., detective, detective thriller, detective cozy.

And, since my background is in legitimate literature, the sort that does win literary prizes, the sort critics like to think will live on (be popular) for years, if not centuries, to come.  I’ve another notebook for these (although I find that I usually enjoy the non-serious books more than the legitimate).

Then too I also read factual works.  I recently read a vivid account of the largest battle during the Korean War, fought by Marines.  It was mostly over when I was still in High School.  But I didn’t know that, and it wasn’t officially over, because truce talks were going on.  I tried to enlist when I was 16, but they found out how old I was and sent me home.  My parents held me hostage from the Marine Corps until I graduated from High School; so that is what happened.  I was 17.  The war was still technically going on but this just meant that the U.S., the South Koreans, the North Koreans and the Chinese were conducting truce talks.  We might exchange a few shots over the truce line, but that wasn’t combat in the proper sense.  Even though I was entitled to two stars on my Koran ribbon.  They just meant that I was in Korea when that war was technically active, and before the truce was actually signed.  I was on Cheju Island when the truce was signed.  An officer flew a corsair onto our air strip to officially notify us that the truce had been signed.  There was a prison camp on Cheju Island and North Koreans were released during the truce talks in order to make their way back north if they chose to go back – at least that is what we were told, but I had never before read a history that provided the details of that war, and especially the Battle the Marines fought (Chosin Reservoir) in which the Chinese offered our General Smith the chance to surrender because the Chinese had his force surrounded.  He responded with words like “surrender Hell, we’ve got you right where we want you, all around us; so any time we feel like shooting one of you we look up and there you are.”  That might sound like bravado, but it was actually the case. according to On Desperate Ground, the epic story of Chosin Reservoir -- the greatest battle of the Korean War by Hampton Sides pretty much agrees with general Smith.  The Marines were better trained, better shots, and had better equipment.  The Army asked the Marines to come to their aid at one point, but, despite General Smith’s bravado, the Marines were being hard pressed their whole time adjacent to the Chosin Reservoir and couldn’t go to the Army’s aid. [The Army troops were on the other side of the Chosin Reservoir and did get some Army aid.]  While the Marines didn’t get additional troops, they did get supply drops of additional ammunition, because they used a lot of it.  The Chinese commanders believed that if they kept sending troops, wave after wave at us, that we would eventually be overwhelmed.  Some of the Chinese sent in that fashion were not even issued guns.  They were told to pick up the weapons of the Chinese soldiers we had killed and who lying in their path, dead, with loaded weapons. 

The Battle of Chosin Reservoir took place between 27 November and 13 December 1950.  I finally made it into the Marine Corps when I graduated in July 1952 at age 17.  I did try to enlist after the eleventh grade, in 1951 when I would have been 16.  The history book I read told me that even if I hurried my way to Korea, the battle of Chosin Reservoir would already have been over.

I knew the truce talks were going on, but a lot of us assumed the war would resume.  Everyone in my graduating class knew I intended to enlist in the Marine Corps so many of them made such comments as “bullet-stopper” in my year books.  Enlisting in the Marine Corps in July of 1952 seemed like a risky (foolish) thing to do (according to my fellow students in July of 1952), but in retrospect it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, one didn’t know that when I enlisted in July 1952.  My first duty station was at the Marine air base at El Toro in Santa Ana, something like 16 miles from my home.  When I found that out, I decided that was intolerable.  I didn’t join the Marines to have easy duty 16 miles from home, so I went to my administration and asked if they could find a way to send me to Korea, and they did. There was a fellow who was being sent to Korea that didn’t want to go.  He turned out to be happy to change places with me.

I don’t recall the precise date I got to Korea, but I was there for the (technically) last two battle seasons, but when I inquired about being sent to the line where we were shooting at each other, I was told that volunteers to go up there were no longer being accepted.

My reading answered some questions I had but I had never pursued reading about my time over there.  Why should I, I thought at the time, I had been there.  When my term was up, I met with a recruiting sergeant, who told me that if I would reenlist.  I had only been made a buck (three stripe) sergeant a few months earlier so that sounded strange.  They also offered me any duty station I wanted and suggested sea-duty.  

As to the immediate rank increase, I worked (later, one the C17 program) with a retired Marine Corps captain who said that would have been a very good deal for me.  The ranks had been depleted by all the Marines who had been killed at Chosin Reservoir so for a short time rank increases were offered to anyone who reenlisted.  

I told the retired captain that I didn’t appreciate the “peace time” Marines and so gave up all thought of staying in based on my time served after the truce was signed.  It wasn’t until I read the aforementioned history of the Chosin Reservoir battle that I seriously thought about the fact that I wouldn’t strictly have been joining the “peace-time Marines.” I would have been reenlisting in a Marine Corps training for their next war (which would have been in Vietnam, but I didn’t know that when I got out).

I did exceptionally well at my last duty, which was being a rifle coach.  I was the only one of the young coaches who had been to Korea.  Also, I didn’t drop any of my shooters.  We coaches were assigned a group of shooters each couple of weeks, some of whom had previously qualified and some had not.  Our job was to get them all qualified.  Time after time I got all my shooters, even the ones that had never qualified, qualified.  After a while, the old-time tech and master sergeants who ran the re-qualification situation, let me run things and spent their time in the slop chute.  

I enjoyed all that quite a lot, plus I had a lot of things to say about shooting.   Then too I had a unique coaching method which I was rather proud of, and none of the other coaches could (or even wanted to) do what I did.  It amounted to hanging over the shoulder of each of my shooters and hypnotically, convince them that they just needed to listen to my voice as they acquired a sight picture and very gently always keeping the front sight in the black, as they squeezed the trigger.  And if they listened, and believed what I was telling them, and did it, then they would become qualified if they had never been qualified or would improve their scores if they hadn’t.  I was rather pleased with my approach and the senior coaches, concerned with results, were as well.    I have told that story more than once.  Susan, upon hearing it, objected.  She asked, what happens when your shooters go into combat and you aren’t there to whisper in their ears?   

I took the test for buck sergeant when I was a coach, so the approval of the tech-sergeants was important.  Also, by the time I was getting ready to get out of the Marine Corps, I’m sure 1) the fact that I had volunteered to go to Korea during that war counted in the minds of those deciding whether to offer me as much as they could in hopes of getting me to stay in was concerned.  And 2) the fact that I had been so successful as a rifle coach had to count for a lot.  The senior sergeants I had freed up to spend their days at the slop chute had obviously been grateful and had given me a good report.  

But frankly I had decided to go to college and not to reenlist; and while I enjoyed my life as a coach, the coaching days were limited.  Once every one had been through re-qualification we had come from, we coaches were obligated to return to the duty stations we came from when we became coaches.  In my case that was in the 2nd 90s at 29 Palms and I hated that place for various reasons.

And, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the training required of “peacetime Marines.”  So, an increase in rank to Staff Sergeant and the choice of duty stations wasn’t a serious incentive for me.

In regard to what I was looking toward.  My grandmother influenced my quite a lot.  As a girl, she lost her hearing and couldn’t attend school for a while, during which she became convinced that a knowledge of and appreciation for books could more than compensate (in life) for the lack of a formal education.  My military experience entitled me to a college education; so, I took classes for the joy of them and without respect to a particular job later on. [Rather foolish it seemed to many, including my stepfather who wanted me to get an engineering degree.]

I could have gotten a master’s degree and indeed took half of the classes necessary for one, but by that time I was rather firmly ensconced at Douglas Aircraft company, doing well (and paying my bills) in an arena I had never planned to enter, engineering.  

What I have done undoubtedly sounds strange to some, and entering into engineering with any sort of Liberal Arts degree put a lot of the college graduates hired during that time (when the Air Force complained about the shoddy incomprehensible documentation and communication sent to them by Douglas engineers) in engineering.  Engineers were not going to get better at it; so, Douglas needed Liberal Arts-type graduates who were smart enough to understand engineering matters and persuasive enough to get cooperation from salty old-time engineers.  My Marine Corps experience helped me with the latter.  There was not an engineer so salty or forbidding enough to cow a Marine Corps sergeant.

And, bringing things forward into the era of my retirement, over the years I knew many legitimate (meaning they had engineering degrees) engineers who were not equipped to retire.  They had no legitimate or useful skills or plans for spending time during retirement.  A friend who was the senior engineer over the interior designs of DC10 aircraft, retired.  His big plan, full of interior design experience, was to build himself a perfect house.  And he indeed work away at that, happily as far as I could tell, but before he finished, he had a heart attack and died.

Another engineer was held up to the rest of us as the perfect engineering employee.  Anything management wanted us to do; someone would find occasion to point at this guy and tell us how wonderful he was.  Back in those days everyone had to retire at age 65.  The week after this guy retired, he was in a coffee shop, had a heart attack, keeled over and died.  

Since I became an engineer under false pretenses, that is, I could do the work and was qualified in that sense, but deep down I felt I was largely a fraud because I didn’t have an engineering degree and while no one ever criticized me during my 39 years in engineering, someone could have challenged me in some respect for not having an engineering degree.  I was once offered the job as head of Advance Design and turned it down.  I was a program engineer at the time working on the KC-10 program, but I also delivered the last two DC-10s, one to Nigeria and the other to Pakistan.   I also handled some activity for Advance Design and so was qualified (in terms of being able to do the work).  But I knew a lot of those engineers, stuck up for some of them during some difficult times and maybe they wouldn’t have minded that I was their boss, but they didn’t know I didn’t have an engineering degree.  Beyond that I didn’t have respect for the higher-level director who offered me the job.

12-10-25, 11:00.  I got only that far in regard to answering someone who asked what I had been up to in the last several weeks in as much as I had not posted any general note to that effect.  Well (in my defense), I thought about it but it, but never stopped doing the above in order to write about it.  Besides, what I was doing to organize what I was reading didn’t seem very interesting, and I wasn’t sure how consistent I would be in doing what I set out to do

In regard to watching things on TV etc., I don’t have a TV I watch but I have been watching on Youtube videos on the discoveries being made in regard to DNA analyses of older skeletons, revising many of the theories about our ancestral histories.  I did actually have my DNA checked and found that my mother’s belief that she (and consequently her kids) was part Indian.  Her reasoning was that she saw her great grandmother squatting down in the back yard smoking a corn-cob pipe, “and who would do that other than an Indian.”  It’s been a while since I looked at the results from Ancestry.com, but I thought at the time her great-grandmother was a German.  She had no Indian in her ancestry.  

BTW, her mistake did influence my time in the Marine Corps.  I’d only been on the Marine base in Kunsan a short time when a full-blooded Indian, Emhoolah, stopped me and asked me if I was part Indian.  I said that I was, and he said that since he was the only full-blooded Indian on the base and he is ordering me to show up at the slop chute every day after work and drink beer with the rest of the Indians.  So that’s where I learned to drink beer and do all the other things that “drunken Indians” did, one of which was to be body guard for Bill Salois, one-quarter Blackfoot, who liked to fight every time he was drunk, and he wasn’t very good at it, so my job was to make sure he wasn’t hurt very badly; so I would stop the fights as soon as he was getting a beating, declare them a draw and haul him off.  Bill was good at holding a grudge.  Once, when everyone was off doing something else, he went into the barracks took the M1 rifle of someone he hated and fired 8 rounds through the overhead figuring to get this guy in trouble, but it turned out no one noticed, to his disappointment.  

I did like being an Indian.  Bill tried to talk me into joining him in Montana once we got out.  He said we could start a ranch together.  I objected, "we don't have any money."  He said, "that's no big deal.  We can earn all we need at the rodeo."  Doing what, I asked?   Riding horses and bulls, that sort of thing.  I told him I had never done that sort of thing.  He said, "no big deal.  It's easy."   In a couple of novels, I've read recently the author describing the dangerousness of something as being equivalent to riding bucking horses and bulls.   Well, as much as I liked Bill, I was never inspired by his plan. 

After the buffalo went away

 

In this morning's news letter from The New Yorker is an article on "loss."

"When the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta was going up for a promotion to full professor, in early 2023, it occurred to him that one of the central preoccupations of his career was loss. Being a scholar of the preservation of knowledge, he realized, also made him an expert on its destruction."

The New Yorker writer Jonathan Lear condenses Padilla Peralta's comments about some books, one of them is Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear:  "The book is organized around a statement by Plenty Coups, who was a longtime chief of the Crow Nation. Shortly before he died, he gave an interview where he said, “When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.” One of Lear’s goals is to tease out the significance of those last words, “nothing happened.”

I doubt I'll order the Padilla Peralta book, but the Plenty Coups' comment has been something to think about.   I have given a lot of thought recently to the matter of leaving the Marine Corps back in 1955 when I had the rank of "buck" Sergeant.  I was interviewed by a not-very-articulate sergeant who offered me some incentives if I would stay in.  My current duty, was rifle instructing at Camp Pendleton.  I did extremely well, never failing to get any of my charges qualified.  Thus, I was offered an immediate increase in rank to Staff Sergeant.  That was definitely not a common occurrence by the time that someone's three-year enlistment was over.  No doubt I was appreciated, but also the Marine Corps needed to replenish the Staff Sergeant ranks because they lost so many during the Korean War (I had been given an increase while I was in Korea, to corporal, for the same reason).  When I enlisted, the war was still going on and my first assignment was to the El Toro Lighter than Air base, an easy drive from my home in Wilmington California.  I enlisted to get away from home; so I immediately asked to be sent to Korea.  It wasn't hard to find someone who didn't want to go, so I went in his place.  That also was considered an admirable trait in a Marine; however I wasn't thinking in those terms when my enlistment was up.  I had been sent to Twenty Tine Palms after I got back from Korea, the most unpleasant, boring place I had ever lived in.  I spent my free time at the base library resolving to leave the boring Marine Corps as soon as possible.  Shortly thereafter a request was sent around for Marines who had fired Expert who wanted to become rifle coaches at Camp Pendleton (where the weather was much better) I signed up at once, packed up my sea bag, and a short bus ride took me to my new duty station.

Now, in relation to the Plenty Coups' comment, I "thought" all the buffalo had gone away when I left Korea.  There were some stressful moments over there, but I never saw actual combat.  I did check out the chances of being sent to the front -- not the only Marine who had done that -- but was told they weren't accepting any more such transfers inasmuch as there were truce talks going on; so I settled into being there for the full 13 months.  I was there for the last two battle seasons.  My very first job was to guard three prisoners who had gotten drunk and drove to a town over-seen by the Air Force Police from the much more populous Air Force Base a mile or so from our base.  They ordered the Marines away.  There was a confrontation and all the Air Police were killed.  

There were about 130 of us there where the Yellow sea came up through our barbed-wire fence and then withdrew so far we could no longer see it.  I soon made a lot of friends who taught me to drink beer, smoke, and a number of other things.  They didn't twist my arm, I was happy to fit in and be one of them, and I was.  Each month a "draft" would have completed its thirteen months over there and be sent home.  Each month there was a party for those going home.  No one I was stationed with at Kunsan and Cheju Island was sent to the same duty station I was at Twenty Nine Palms.  I believed the buffalo had gone away.

After a few months I became a rifle coach at Camp Pendleton and enjoyed that duty even more than duty at Kunsan and as much as at Cheju Island, but I wasn't sophisticated enough being only 19 to evaluate the disappearance of the buffalo.  Even though I enjoyed duty as a rifle coach at Camp Pendleton, I had previously done some boring time with peace-time Marines at Twenty-Nine Palms.  I don't recall how long I was there, but it was long enough to decide I didn't like the peace-time Marines and with no new wars on the horizon, I resolved to leave after my enlistment was up and go to college.   Had I gone straight from Korea to Camp Pendleton perhaps I would have decided to stay in, but I had the negative experience of Twenty-Nine Palms and wanted out.   I never reevaluated matters at Camp Pendleton.  I simply set aside thinking about getting out.  It was never a matter for discussion until I was called in and asked if I was going to "ship over" (the Marine Corps term for reenlisting), and by that time I realized that after we had gotten everyone requalified, I would be sent back to my duty station at 29 Palms.  Although if I knew of some other place I'd like to go, perhaps I could have told the reenlistment sergeant I wanted to go there and see if that was possible, but I didn't know of any such place other than Embassy duty.  The reenlistment sergeant said the waiting list for that was very long.     

I started work at Douglas Aircraft Company because I had bills to pay, not because I thought of it as beginning a career.  Had the Buffalo gone?  Well, maybe so, but I was probably more versatile than Plenty Coups.  I did well in Douglas Aircraft Engineering, and was working on my Master's Degree at night, but after some unpleasant experiences with a college professor who gave me what I thought was a view into what my life would be like if I entered that field.  I had a good excuse for dropping out of the Master's program.  A number of college graduates went to work at Douglas in order to pay bills and earn enough money to return to college.  Douglas frowned on that and took a hard look at people who were working on advance degrees at night; so I gave that up, and reconciled myself to a life in engineering.  Had the buffalo gone or not?

Perhaps I need a new analogy.  Perhaps at some point I abandoned hunting the buffalo.   But, I would contend, the buffalo were not what they used to be and I had lived so long that the buffalo I knew had grown old and died.  The days are dusty now.  It's hard to breathe when I spend too much time outside listening for hoof beats.  I can no longer mount a horse; so when I am honest with myself I must admit that it makes no difference whether the buffalo come back or not, but if they do, I must assert in my own defense, they won't look anything like the buffalo I was familiar with back in the Corps and I most certainly won't want to hunt them.  But that doesn't, at least for me, eliminate a sense of loss.  

Sometimes, late at night drinking a cup of espresso, I wonder how my life would have turned out if I'd told that reenlistment sergeant, "Okay, make me a staff sergeant but leave me at Camp Pendleton as a rifle instructor."  He would have agreed to that, but in thinking about that reconstruction, I would have been at Camp Pendleton when Lee Harvey Oswald went there to re-qualify.  He had not qualified before and as head of the "unqualified" detail I would almost certainly have improved his ability to shoot (but probably not more than the coach, whoever he was, who actually trained him).   I have never given any thought to how I would feel if I were the one to have qualified Oswald.  I have though often wondered how the coach who did qualify him felt afterwards  Maybe the buffalo that I longed for would have stampeded right over me if I had reenlisted.  Also, after I had been in for four or five years of my reenlistment, Vietnam would have been warming up, and the person I became subsequent to the life as a Marine was not happy with the way our leaders fought that war.  Would it have been enough for me to simply suck it up and do my best; which I would certainly have done, or would something else have happened which I wouldn't have been happy with if I had managed to survive and return home?  When I go on one of these memory trips, I do sometimes wish I'd stayed in the Corps, but the wishing fizzles quite a bit when I travel into subsequent years . . . sitting here, for example, two months shy of my ninety-first birthday, in better health than most people who become this age, drinking espresso, while the cleaning lady is downstairs cleaning, finishing up this email and getting ready to return to the book I'm currently reading, "Maddy's Floor," by Dale Mayer, probably not a work of great literature, but entertaining.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty because I am not concentrating on writing or reading something "worth while."  On the other hand, when I do bear-down mentally and work on something serious, i discover that my blood pressure goes up, and high blood pressure is the only ailment my doctors are concerned about controlling.  I have never discussed poetry with any of my doctors and probably never will.  I'm quite convinced that nothing I have to do is going to bring a single buffalo clumping down the street I live on.  There is a saying to the effect that if you hear hoofbeats, think Horses and not Zebras.  Maybe one shouldn't think about buffalo either.  Maybe I should read the Jonathan Lear book.

 

 

A Brush with Fury

 Ancestry.com says I don’t have the gene for remembering dreams, but sometimes I do, and sometimes I wake up remembering something from long ago and not just remembering it but working on it as though I was rewriting it; so, I’m pretty sure I had been dreaming about it.  A couple of days ago I woke with a stiff-neck headache as though I had been writing or reading something that had me worked up, but what I was thinking about, was a girl I met just one time when I was about fourteen.

My stepfather, Welk, was in the habit of taking me with him when on some of his business trips and took me with him on this occasion to meet with a business associate.  We went into the man’s house and Welk and the man walked off some place to talk.  The man’s daughter stood there looking at me.  She was obviously a tomboy, dressed in jeans and a sloppy shirt. 

I don’t recall how old I was back then, but I was younger than sixteen, because I tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at age sixteen, and I was too old by then to want to go with Welk on any of his business trips.  I was younger than fifteen, because I knew I was going to enlist in the Marine Corps so every spare moment I was working out.  I knew boot camp would be tough, and I didn’t want to take any chances.  And I didn’t think I was as young as thirteen, because Welk bought me a bike right before I was thirteen, and I rode it everywhere as often as I good.  So, I was probably fourteen.  

I don’t recall how old the girl was, but she knew a lot of interesting stuff and did a lot of interesting things in the land behind her house; so she was probably fourteen as well.  She said, “do you want to see some really interesting things?”  She had a bit of a smirk on her face.  Maybe it was her job to keep me amused while Welk and her father talked business.

“Sure,” and off we went out the back door, and she really did have some interesting things to do back there, trees to climb, ropes to swing on, weird half-standing structures to explore, and she was talking a mile a minute the whole time.  

Once we seemed to have seen everything I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said; so back we went through the back door and into the house where her father confronted me in a rage.  “What could possess you to take my daughter off like that?”

“Whoa.  She just wanted to show me some of the interesting things she played with out back.”  

“You had no business to take my daughter off like that ,” he yelled, his rage undiminished.  I looked over at Welk.  He said, “you really shouldn’t have.”

I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but we didn’t do anything wrong.”  She just took me out back to show me some interesting things.”  I was really worked up by then.  I looked over at the girl.  She stood ramrod straight and was staring with a furious look at her father.   

I repeated, “we didn’t do anything wrong,” and her father looked me in the eye to see if I was going guiltily look away, but I didn’t.  He was a huge man, and I was a long way from being big or tough enough to make it through boot camp, but I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong.  

Welk hustled me toward the front door.  I gave the girl one last look, and she was still staring at her father with a look of fury and outrage. 

I thought of this event many times over the years, but only just the other day after probably having dreamed about it again, did I realize that the girl’s father had probably paid for his bad behavior.  His daughter, and I think she was an only child, wasn’t going to let him get away with the embarrassment he caused her.

Before I actually gave up going back to sleep, I found myself examining the idea of seeing that girl later on or perhaps writing to her because we seemed to get along better than some of the girls I really did go out with later on, but her father was an impenetrable obstacle, unless she had subjected him to some painful instruction.  But even if she had, I had no plans to have a girlfriend when I was only14, but rewriting my history as I sometimes do, I thought about it.   Could I have found occasion to give her my address and asked her to write?  But could she carry on such a correspondence?  Could I?  But no.  Had I thought of that while we were out back looking at all the neat things she had to play on, I could never later on have looked her father in the eye.

On the rewriting of Huckleberry Finn

 

Having been raised in the Los Angeles harbor and further educated in the Marine Corps, I grappled with several majors in college and perhaps mostly because of my grandmother ended up majoring in English.  She herself had gone deaf for a while as a girl but made up for her lack of education by reading.  She became an evangelist for reading and for one of my birthdays or perhaps Christmas she gave me the complete works of Mark Twain.  That set wouldn't be considered complete today, but I read the whole thing, parts of it more than once.  However, when the question arose, as it often did back then, about a major American novelist whose work could match the likes of Thomas Hardy, Henry James (who at heart was more British than American), or Joseph Conrad who was perhaps as much Polish in his writings as British.  But regardless of however much British James and Conrad were, they along with Hardy were the novelists I admired back then and didn't think the U.S. had produced anyone comparable, certainly not Mark Twain; although I read him with great attention -- but not in a long time.

I was surprised, and a bit appalled, that so few seem to have difficulty with what Percival Everett has done in his James.   I am prejudiced against the rewriting works of the past.   If this were done with a modern work, I suspect the previous writer or his estate would be suing the rewriter. 

Pretty much any classic can be rewritten to make it more politically and scientifically correct, but historians would urge such writers to leave the non-politically correct writings alone. You may not like Hitler's Mein Kampf, but it just isn't something someone interested in truth and accuracy would want to see rewritten. Someone might conclude that the revised version makes them happier and less offended, but historians will be offended unless they are interested in papers at some point that discuss the extremes writers who take up political causes are willing to go.

Back in the day when I thought I would continue on with my education, I thought I might examine the muckrakers. I read quite a few of them, even got a letter from someone related to the IWW, International Workers of the World. The left wing of today has no interest in rewriting the writings of Big Bill Haywood who spent his last days in Moscow, nor, in my opinion, should they.

Relating to the crises in Nigeria, sort of

I just saw on the news that Nigeria is on the brink of an economic meltdown.  In seven months, if I live so long I’ll be ninety.  It often seems that I can’t watch any news program without relating something in my past to it. In this case, in 1988 I was Project Engineer for the delivery of the last two DC-10's.  One of them was purchased by Nigerian Airlines.  Alex, representing Nigerian Engineering and Ali representing Nigerian Product Support coordinated daily with me.   I got to know them both fairly well.  I was a member of the Long Beach Police Pistol Club at the time and took them both shooting two or three times.  Alex was especially interested in buying one of my guns, but the gun he wanted was the one I took hiking most often; so I wouldn’t sell it to him.  

Alex apparently found another gun to buy.  He said there were bandits where he lived who would approach a house, shout and wave old rifles about and demand money, but if the home owner could produce a gun, they would run away.  Ali scoffed at that.  He had been in the Nigerian military and had a rifle at home.  The bandits never bothered him.  At the range it turned out that neither could shoot very well.  Alex fired a round through the overhead at one point.  His targets had shots, the ones that even hit the target, all over the place, but he was proud of it and took it back to Nigeria with him.

Ali was educated in Scotland and had a heavy Scottish accent which made him difficult to understand.  Alex was a Catholic, but as it happened I got along best with Ali who was a Muslim.  We discussed a wide variety of matters including religion.  I had read the Koran by then and found his interpretation of various passages far different from my understanding, but the same sort of thing goes on with Biblical interpretation so I wasn’t surprised. 

Ali spoke of having important political connections and of being about to inherit a large property.  I was invited, but didn’t go on the delivery flight.  Shortly after he would have arrived in Nigeria, he called me at home, He left a return number which I tried, but his accent was so strong I wasn’t sure I got it right.  In any case I couldn’t get through.  I wondered at the time if he was going to offer me a job.   What would that job have consisted of?

Shortly before delivery of the Nigerian DC-10, I received a copy of a document reporting “Nigerian B-707, on 12-13-88 crashed near Luxor, Egypt after diverting from Cairo due to low visibility.  Aircraft shot tso approaches at Cairo before diverting.  News media speaks of running out of fuel and crashing into six houses and three classrooms.  Initial report of fatalities were the eight Nigerian crew members and one 51 yr old Egyptian woman on the ground.  Serious injuries were sustained by one other adult woman on the ground and four children.  One of the children reportedly died later.  No report of fire.”

Another note said, “Operator “Nigerian date “12-15-88 Nigerian Airlines reportedly fired 3,000 employees.  This included their ‘manager’ or ‘General Manager’.  No further details.”

I learned from Chuck Watkinson, the McDonnell Douglas contract administrator for Nigeria that there had been a riot at the airline and the army had to be called out to quell it.  As a result of the riot 3,000 of the 8,000 employees were fired.  The most critical two were Okojo, the Managing Director and Legal Advisor who was in the process of reviewing our contract prior to signature.  The contract needs to be signed quickly so that title transfer can occur on 12-23-88.”

Those who had been on previous delivery flights of airplanes to Nigeria reported that it was best to go to a luxurious facility in Lagos and stay there until it was time to return home.  There were all sorts of horror stories as to why one didn’t want leave that facility and travel more widely in Nigeria.

As it happened, Susan had scheduled a visit to her sister in Marfa Texas; so Nigeria and Bangladesh (the later offered a side trip to Kathmandu) were out of the question.   Susan’s sister’s husband, was in the Border Patrol and took me on a consolation trip along some of the places on the border where illegals were known to cross.  We didn’t see any on that trip.  

Perhaps Ali had assumed I would be on the delivery flight and he could say whatever he wanted to say to me then, but on 12-23-88 Susan and I were on the way to Marfa.  Whenever Nigeria makes the news I do wonder what it would have been like to have gone there, something I never really wanted to do, but when one’s mind wanders, that sort of thing is bound to come up.

Unhappiness of Kunsan and 29 Palms

29 Palms was my first duty station after I got back from Korea. My first day there I took a towel and started toward the sand in back of the barrack.  "Where you going," someone asked?  "To work on my tan."  He and a couple of his buddies snickered.  "Not out there you won't."  It was one of the hot months which are all mostly intolerable.  I lasted a very few minutes.  Someone pointed to the outside thermometer which read 137 degrees Fahrenheit.  I had a taste of a non-hot period during which high winds hammered us with sand if we dared to go outside.

We didn't have air conditioning back then.  We had "swamp coolers" which as far as I could tell increased the humidity but didn't lower the temperature.  I hear they now have air conditioning and other improvements at 29 Palms.  I don't care.  I don't like thinking about that place.  I once met a former Marine who retired to 29 Palms town and I asked him "why."  I don't recall his answer.  I was stuck with "why?"

Yes, the stars.  It was eight miles from the base to the "town" which had two movie theaters.  One was a modern theater for the day (1953) and the other was for lesser movies like Westerns and had a cover over the front seats but further back you sat under the stars.  I typically walked or jogged the 8 miles although Marines going to or from with cars would stop for me if I was interested.

I can't recollect how long I was at 29 Palms.  It seemed like years.  I notice went around that they were looking for Marines who had fired expert to transfer to Camp Pendleton as rifle coaches.  I was first in line for that.

Korea, if you don't count the war, was better duty than 29 Palms.  Camp Pendleton was my best duty station. I had a knack for coaching -- never dropped a shooter (that is, never allowed a shooter to fire below 180).  Kept up a quiet chatter with the worst of my shooters telling them to trust me rather than their own minds   Years later Susan questioned my approach saying, "what happens when one of your shooters goes into combat and you are not there telling him what to do?"  Don't know, but the senior coaches liked my results, promoted me to senior coach and let me run the coaching while they spent their time in the slop chute.  I might have stayed in the corps if I could have remained a coach, but once all the Marines assigned to us were qualified (or failed to qualify); then the coaches would be sent back to their "parent" duty stations, which for me would have been 29 Palms; so when my enlistment was up, I decided to get out, take the G.I. Bill and get a formal education.

The trip to Korea involved going by boat (the General Gordon) to Japan (Kobe) and after a few days flown by DC-3 to Korea.  My first job after college was at Douglas Aircraft Company at their Missiles and Space division in Santa Monica and Culver City. After the program I was working on, Skybolt, was cancelled, I transferred to Long Beach to work in the engineering department of the Aircraft division.  Douglas had one Project Engineer, Clark Scott, to handle all DC-3 work and I got to know him fairly well. After Scott retired there were no more project engineers assigned to the DC-3. 

There were at least two instances in my life when I stopped and took stock of my life, that is, where I was at the time, and how depressed I was to be there.  The first was in Korea shortly after I got to the USMC base at Kunsan.  I had learned that transfers to the front line were no longer being permitted; so I was going to be where I was for 13 months.  I stood at the barbed wire fence separating the base from the Yellow Sea and tried to see the sea, but saw nothing.  I saw an empty stretch of sand as far as my eyes could see.  I learned later that the Yellow Sea, at least at our location, had the longest tide in existence.  The Bay of Fundy has the highest, but the Yellow sea had the longest.  When it was in would lap through our barbed wire fence a short distance, but when it as out, it could no longer be seen.  My depression as it happened was short lived.  One day an Indian sergeant named Emhoolah asked me if I was part Indian.  My mother believed she was 1/8 Illinoiq which meant I was 1/16th Indian; so I told Emhoolah that I was.  I learned a few years ago, thanks to a DNA check by Ancestry.com that my mother was wrong.  I have no Indian ancestry at all, but I didn't know that back then.  Emhoolah said that since he was the only full-blooded Indian on the base that he was the Chief and by virtue of his rank ordered all his minions to show up at the slop chute at the end of every day when they weren't on duty.  I neither drank nor smoked before joining Emhoolah's "tribe," but I learned to do both.  A lot of other things went on, mostly fun and enjoyable.  I didn't regret not being able to go to the front line for long.

The second time was quite a bit more austere.  I had been accepted as a rifle coach and was waiting with my seabag for the bus that was to take me to Camp Pendleton.  I stood for a long time next to my seabag, waiting.  I looked about me.  29 Palms did the Yellow Sea one better.  There was sand almost 360 degrees from where I stood waiting.  Surely my life in the Corps couldn't be worse than this.  I resolved to remember this time if in the future I ever felt depressed.  However bad such a future time might be, it couldn't be as bad as standing there in the middle of that miserable nothing waiting for a bus that took a very long time coming.

Falling

  A few years ago, I read most of Harold Bloom’s last book.  In it he wrote of having reached the age of 90.  I checked his dates and learned that he died well before the age of 90.  Perhaps he assumed he would be 90 by the time the book was published.  Perhaps he was counting his age as some in Israel do, counting the birthdate nine months prior to the date he appeared outside of his mother.  He also said that if he didn’t fall again, he ought to make it to – and I can’t recall what his goal was.  I decided to look for my copy of his book to find out, but I haven’t been able to find it.  I’ve done so much reorganization of my books that except for a few subjects, mostly Biblical, everything else is chaos.  

I thought especially of Bloom while doing some yard work a few minutes ago.  Squirrel have dug up my yard in various places and since my gardener mows in such a way as to make the grass that one sees even, it is impossible to see the low spots where the squirrels have dug.  I thought I was thinking clearly enough, but probably not and I stepped in one of those low spots and fell sharply on my tail bone.  I wondered if I had done the dreaded thing and broken my hip, but it didn’t feel like I’d broken anything and I was able to get up, after which I decided to give up the idea of doing yard work and go back into the house.  

Why didn’t I break something as Bloom and Susan did?  My regular workouts with free weights are purported to build bone strength, and perhaps they do.  Sitting here typing as I am, I feel a slight bit of discomfort in the tail-bone area, but nothing alarming.  

I have been reading the Jessica Anderson series of novels by D. L. Keur.  I’m currently reading novel number 6, Troubled Pursuit.  In it, Sheriff Landon Reid, probably the eventual love interest of the protagonist Jessica, but Dawn L. Keur is being coy about getting them that far – novel number six and they aren’t there yet.  She is very patient.   At present, Landon is still recovering from a head injury.  He had hitherto been quick-witted, but for a few months his thinking has been muddled.  I suspect he would have fallen in my backyard as well – well, maybe not.  Perhaps Jessica Anderson would have grabbed his arm before he went down.  I wondered as I put my yard tools away and walked back into the house whether I should perhaps look for my own Jessica, other than the one presently lying on her side a few feet from me on the floor.  We could take turns taking each other to doctors’ appointments.  After thinking that scenario over for a few moments, I think I’d rather get a second dog – a male, because my present Jessica is purported to take a dim view of dogs of the same sex being part of her household.  

On leaving a body of writings to one's descendants

 

https://www.wired.com/story/my-fathers-death-in-7-gigabytes-internet-archive/

The above brief article is an interesting WIRED magazine tale.  An irascible (English?) Professor died at age 90 leaving an enormous body of his writings, apparently all of which were unpublished.  He wanted his daughter to preserve them in some way and she did, in an internet archive that comprised seven gigabytes.  

The irascible professor wrote a lot of poetry throughout his life, apparently trying to publish it early on and when he was unsuccessful in that, declared that “it was their loss” and no longer tried to publish, but continued writing.  Did he think that he might be “discovered” at some future date?  There have been notable such discoveries in literary history which he would surely have been aware of.

The above tale does resemble mine to some degree.  I went through a Bachelor’s degree and halfway through a Masters degree before contenting myself to a life in Engineering.  But I wasn’t utterly content in that field, however competent I might have been.  I continued to write poetry.  For several years I worked (Engineering work) with Lee Griffith who accomplished a Masters Degree in English from Duke University.  His specialty had been, when he still thought he might ultimately become a Professor of English Literature, Poetic Criticism.  Thus, I would regularly write and he would regularly criticize, using the latest criticism from Duke at the time. And so I was encouraged to keep on writing.  Occasionally I would send something off, not so much wanting to publish as doing what was expected.  Eventually, Lee was caught in a layoff and went someplace else in aerospace to work, but I kept on writing.

Along with the poetry, I’ve written the occasional essay, and numerous letters which might be of interest to my descendants.  And when I think of having my writings preserved, along the lines of the aforementioned cantankerous English Professor, it isn’t with a few, or much of one, of being eventually recognized.  I have had a number of interests over the years and one of them has been genealogy.  My great-grandfather on my father’s side was Schuyler V. Helm, who lived from 1834 to 1882.  He fought in the American Civil War on the side of the North as an engineer (an interesting coincidence in that I was born exactly 100 years after he was and worked in aerospace as an engineer).  I acquired his military records but there was nothing personal in them.  At the end of the war, he was well thought of and was promoted from sergeant (another coincidence.  I was a sergeant in the USMC) to lieutenant, which meant that he could have stayed in had he wanted to, but he took his severance pay, and bought a plot of land in “Indian Country” in what is today Iowa.  I speculate that he was wounded in the way in that he didn’t live very long, only 48 years. (Although another Ancestry.com thread has him being born in 1841 and dying in 1904 in South Dakota which death location has the advantage of being where my grandmother, Bertha Freeman, had family which she occasionally visited when I was small, but Schuyler’s war records support the dates I mentioned.)  All of which is to say, if one of my own descendants of descendant of a friend, or related to my second wife, expressed an interest in whom I was, there would be a cache of information in a cloud some place referenced in Ancestry.com or its like.  

  

Tightening up with our dogs during the pandemic

I recall vaguely that some people in the far north, perhaps Eskimos, described the coldness of the night in terms of dogs.  If it was a three or four dog night; that meant it was really cold.  Getting by with one or two dogs was more tolerable.  It has been cold outside here, below freezing most mornings, but up in my study it is warm enough, sleeping in my lounge chair, covered by whatever blankets I feel comfortable with.  But Jessica, my Irish Terrier, has her own opinion about that.  Perhaps it has some relationship to the coldness outside, but she has been determined to sleep on top of me at night.  She was getting me trained in that respect in the recent past, but when I hurt my shoulder, it was not tolerable for me, and she had to leave me alone.

But my shoulder is a lot better.  Last night was typical.  My term for telling her I intended to get to sleep is “nap.”  “I’m going to take a nap, now Jessica; so, don’t get in my lounge chair.”  She warned me she had a plan by ignoring my words and getting in my lounge chair anyway.  When I was ready to go to sleep, I tipped the lounge chair up gently and slid her out onto the floor.  She watched me settle in and then pawed my arm indicating she wanted to get into my lap.  I said, “okay,” and reached for her, but she wanted to play hard to get, moving away when I reached for her.  At last, I said in annoyance, “Go away, I’m going to sleep”, but just as I began to doze off, she raked my right arm with her nails.  “Go away,” I said again, and tried to get back to sleep.  After a few iterations of this, I was no longer sleepy; so, I turned the light on and read on my Kindle for a while, Ignoring Jessica’s unhappiness with me.  

As soon as I was sleepy again, I put my Kindle away and the next time she messed with me, I jackknifed forward, grabbed her forward legs up close to her chest and pulled her up on top of my stomach; which was her goal all along; so, at last she was ready to go to sleep for the night.  This isn’t to say there wasn’t a lot of shifting about on both our parts.  My ribcage in the area most associated with my left shoulder, while not as sore as it has been, will complain if Jessica is lying on it for too long.  Also, Jessica prefers spending a lot of time parallel to my left leg with her head toward my feet, which is okay because it is my right leg that has the damaged knee cap.  And so, we sleep.

Waking up this morning, some of my joints and other structure felt a bit uncomfortable, but after loosening up with some dumbbells I felt okay.  I don’t have the usual morning headache and in retrospect I enjoyed Jessica sleeping on top of me.  When she was young and squirmy, she didn’t like being a lapdog, but now, when she’s in the mood (or perhaps shortly after she’s been trimmed and its cold outside) she does.  So perhaps it is a coincidence, but when the temperature drops down near freezing outside, I am having one-dog nights.

But as our sleeping arrangements are getting sorted, I wondered about the introduction of a Ben-like Ridgeback.  What would he be wanting to do while Jessica was annoying me by playing hard to get when all I want to do is sleep, with or without her sleeping on me?   And, if he got to close would Jessica wake me up with a growl or a bark?  Of course, he would get used to that eventually, and steer-clear if he could, but he would have to walk by the lounge chair to get to the water dishes.  

In the past this was less of a problem inasmuch as I spent most nights sleeping on the floor, but I’m creakier than I used to be and wouldn’t be able to sleep on my left shoulder at all.  The lounge chair is fine.  My shoulder and I have gotten used to it.

Now, with this hiding out because of the pandemic, not being able to get back into hiking quite yet because of medication changes and weather, Jessica, Duffy, my Schnoodle, and I have been living in a closer relationship than in the past.  I thought they might feel a bit of cabin fever being restricted to the house and yard most days, but not so.  They like it fine.  I have been more attentive to what they want and need, and they like that more than fine.   

So, what would happen if we added a Ridgeback to our mix?  I looked over at Jessica just now and she is lying on a blanket in morning sunlight watching me.  I wouldn’t be the only person to look at (Duffy does a lot of sleeping, and Jessica ignores him most of the time) if we had a Ridgeback.  

And no matter how fixed our situation is now, it would be just as fixed, albeit arranged differently if Ben, our last Ridgeback, were still alive.  Ben was easier to live with than Jessica has been.  Then too, if the weather stays cool at night, and my shoulder heals a bit more, perhaps I can sleep on the floor again, from time to time, and if there were a Ridgeback to keep us company, I could have a three-dog night if I needed one.

 

On those given to much reading

From time to time, I watch videos by Michael Vaughan on his Booktuber channel.  He recently committed, along with some other booktubers to avoid buying any more books until he read 500 of his own books, presumably most of which will be unread although rereading is permissible.  I wondered how fast he could read and, in another video, learned that he counted the books he read in 2022 and the number was 60.  It doesn’t seem possible that he will meet his 500-book commitment. 

I wondered how many books I read in 2022.  For pure enjoyment and with no literary interests, I’ve been reading mostly detective/thriller novels and I’ve made note of which one’s I’ve read in a little yellow field book.  I counted and discovered that I read 82 in 2022.  I also read books that didn’t fall into that category, some in my own quest to read books that won awards and some for other reasons.  I commented upon those in a journal.  I found 24.  So, 106 in 2022, and while I did read some I’d already read on Kindle, I bought a lot of new ones as well.

Michael Vaughan has some sort of job.  He takes time to make his weekly videos; so, he may never do much better than 60 a year.  [However, in subsequent videos he reports finding a few more.  He is up above 71 now, and because he feels disorganized in keeping track of his reading, despite having a reading channel, he resolved in 2023 to become more organized 😉].  

Michael Vaughan in his last video of 2022 reported the last book he read in 2022, Deathworld by Harry Harrison.  Per Wikipedia, Harry Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey) was an American science fiction author best known for his character The Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973).  Vaughan had read other Harrison novels, but not yet Deathworld.  He said it was a lot of fun to read.  Looking for something a lot of fun to read at the moment, I downloaded it into my Kindle.  It was written in 1960.  (Harrison died in 2012 at age 87.)  

Always on the lookout for anthropological and evolutionary implications and theories, I was struck by one in Deathworld.  The main character, Jason, a talented gambler, has just arrived on the very hostile planet Pyrrus: “Jason’s eyes opened wider as he realized she was very beautiful – with the kind of beauty never found in the civilized galaxy.  The women he had known all ran to pale skin, hollow shoulders, gray faces covered with tinges and dyes.  They were the product of centuries of breeding weaknesses back into the race, as the advance of medicine kept alive more and more non-survival types.”  [I subsequently read Deathworld.  It was okay, a light-hearted read despite a lot of death, but I'm not tempted to read Deathworld ii, and subs.]

One thinks of H. G. Wells The Time Machine written in 1895 in which he envisioned evolution turning humans into beings with large heads and weak bodies (the Eloi) as well as the more beast-like Morlocks.  The Eloi were apparently descended from Britain’s upper class and the Morlocks from the lower.  When I first read that book, probably in my teens I took it as an incentive to work-out with weights and pass my strength and Marine Corps inclinations along to my descendants, alas. :-)

As to Harrison’s 1960 prediction, yes, we are attempting to keep alive our hitherto non-survivable kin, but the work being done in genetics may be able to eliminate the passing along of the genes that made them “non-survivable.”  So perhaps they would not be doing damage to subsequent generations.

We as a species are moving awfully quickly.  If the Gaia hypothesis, conceived by the British chemist James Lovelock in the early 1970s has any validity" our world may know of an impending invasion by an alien species and be rapidly getting our species ready for it.  And if Gaia is true, perhaps it will, being in its best interest, end California's drought (where Michael Vaughan and I both live).  So good, so far, this season.

THE BODY ON THE LAWN

A couple of days ago I resolved to engage in some serious weight-lifting and other forms of exercise.  Dr. Agarwal, my heart doctor checked me over, did an electrocardiogram and decided to change my blood pressure medication in order to reduce the swelling in my ankles.   He had said my heart was weak, but all he worried about was my ankles.  The logic of that escaped me and so I resolved to take matters into my own hands.  My diet was okay, but I decided to drink more water and less coffee.  I subscribed to a Harvard Medical journal which referred to a study that found that coffee drinking reduced heart attacks by 30%.  More specifically, coffee drinking of no more than 3.5 cups a day did that.  Also, the 30% benefit accrued whether the coffee was regular or decaf.  Espresso wasn’t mentioned.   For 4 cups and more the statistics didn’t hold up.  And so I resolved to drink no more than 3.5 cups of coffee a day, half of them decaf. 

Today with the temperature outside at 107 degrees I nevertheless noticed that my legs were stiffening a little from sitting too long at my desk and so decided to do some yard work.  There was one particular branch that was hanging down most precariously.  I feared that in a heavy windstorm it might cause the main trunk to come crashing down, so I got a saw which when two parts were connected would reach up that high.  I didn’t feel particularly dizzy, but my balance wasn’t good; so I moved about to find more stable footing and continued sawing.  I thought I was far enough away so that the falling branch wouldn’t hit me.  I wasn’t fleet of foot enough to dash out of the way.  When it came crashing down some of its branches came close to me, but I wasn’t hit.  I put the saw away, got a trash barrel and began cutting the smaller branches up, then hauling the barrel over to the main green-waste barrels.  

I didn’t feel bad, but it was hot so I went back up stairs to read for a while and cool off.  I made three or four trips like that out back, stripping the small branches from the main branch, putting the small pieces in a barrel, emptying that small barrel into the larger ones and sawing pieces off of the large branch.  

After tidying up I decided to unwind the hose and water the back lawn.  As hot as it was I could see the grass was suffering.

While watering I day-dreamed about the past.  I was definitely pushing myself.  I was feeling a bit light-headed.  I recalled one time in my twenties that I had a pain in my chest.  I didn’t know exactly where my heart was, but thought what I felt might be a heart pain and so decided to go jogging as a kill or cure investigation – I did that sort of thing back then.  Later on I told my Aunt Dorothy what I’d done and she said my heart wasn’t where the pain was.  I later went to a doctor who said my upper transverse colon was pressing against my diaphragm.  It wasn’t serious but he gave me some red pills saying that if they didn’t help he would give me some green ones.  I had only recently started work at Douglas Aircraft Company and had discovered the food trucks that were out front in the morning had the most wonderful breakfast burritos.  I looked forward to having one every morning.  But after I had chest pains, I reflected that they were spicy; so I experimented.  I quit eating a burrito every morning, and the pain went away.

Maybe I was doing something like that today, working hard in the backyard, harder than I had done in months, on a very hot day.  I didn’t think I was doing a kill or cure sort of thing, I just felt good – as far as I knew.  

I finished watering, coiled the hose up, went back inside and started up the stairs.  Jessica was waiting for me with a strange look on her face.  She sniffed my leg suspiciously.  Why did she do that, I wondered?  I continued on but before I turned the corner I noticed she continued to stare out back.  Maybe I had died in the back yard, I thought, and that is why Jessica was staring out back.  How would I know?  I walked up to my study and peered out at my lawn to see if maybe my body was down there.  I couldn’t see it, and then looked back behind me and saw that Jessica had followed me upstairs after all; so I probably wasn’t in the back yard.  But if I had been, that would have been a pleasant way to die, I felt no pain whatsoever.

Adventures in old age

 After events early this morning, I imagined an ethereal voice asking, “Well, it was your wish to live well into old age; how do you like it now?”

Waking, feeling okay but not quite enough okay to go on a hike, I decided to take the dogs with me to Stater Bros.  Its not much of an outing for them, but they both treat it as one.  It was just a minute or two after 06:00 when Stater Bros opened.  I got one of the crippled slots as close as you could get, grabbed my walking stick which was on the other side of Duffy in the front seat, opened my door and started to get out, but realized I had not hung the crippled parking sticker (I don’t recall its formal name) on my mirror.  So I leaned over in front of Duffy, opened the glove box and attempted to slide the parking sticker out.  It slipped down into the glove box; so I scrambled around in order to get it.

And then Jessica saw her chance.  She squeezed through an opening next to the drivers-side front seat and the side of the Jeep and made it out into the parking lot.  I called her back to no avail.  There seemed to be an enticing smell in the nearby bushes that had her full attention.

I got out and looked about.  There was almost no traffic in the parking lot.  I called Jessica to me but she found something else to sniff.  My handicap (ah that is probably the name on the sticker) annoyed me.  This was the first time I’d dealt with a dog reluctant to get into the Jeep since I’d  earned whatever it said on that sticker.  

I opened the back rear door, rummage around in my hiking backpack, found Jessica’s leash, held it out to her enticingly, and she ran to me and allowed me to put it on her.  I then tried to pull her toward the back seat.  She resisted because we were on the right side of the Jeep and she always gets in on the left side.  And in the process she slipped out of her collar.  Jessica had been groomed the day prior and I hadn’t adjusted her collar accordingly.  When I put it on her back at the house I realized she could slip out of it, but decided I would fix it later.  After all, we were only going to the store.

In order to get her over to the left side of the Jeep I would have to coax her with the leash which was connected to the collar she could slip out of.  So I decided to lift her into the back seat.  Jessica then went into her sack of potatoes mode.  She slipped out of my grasped several times.  I didn’t think I could get her into the back seat without hurting her,, but failure wasn’t an option.  I had hold or her left front leg with my left hand and right rear leg with my right.  I increased my effort, fearing I might hurt her, but she didn’t complain and eventually she was ensconced in her usual position in the back seat.  I tried to remove her leash but she’d had enough of me for the time being; so left it on her.

While wrestling Jessica into the back seat, I knocked my hiking stick under the Jeep.  I squatted down, fished it out, and then stood up, puffing all the while.  I looked about to see if any of this had been witnessed by any of my fellow Stater Bros patrons, but the few nearby gave the appearance of not having seen a thing.  

After a few extra puffs, I believed I had enough energy left to make it, and so used the crosswalk that led to Stater Bros front door.  Some times cars drive fast past the front of the store, but I didn’t feel I could watch out for them.  My attention was completely devoted to the ground in front of me. I decided I’d rather be struck by a vehicle than be guilty of any more ludicrous activity I could be blamed for.  I did my shopping, made it back to the Jeep without further trouble, opened the back, glared at Jessica now resting innocently in the back seat, and noticed I had gotten the lettuce for bacon and tomatoes sandwiches but had forgotten the tomatoes.  I had also intended to get a roll of summer sausage but had forgotten that as well.  

Driving home I discovered I wasn’t comfortably in my own lane; so had to concentrate in order to stay there.  For this I justifiably blamed my blood pressure medication amlodipine which has the annoying side-effect, dizziness.  When I am out in the morning engaged in routine activities, I am not dizzy, but apparently Jessica and our morning adventures changed that.  

Looking around, I see that both Jessica and Duffy are still napping.  It is reassuring to see that one can be fatigued for reasons other than old age.

.  

Not my first rodeo --RIP

 

 "Not my first rodeo" is a common expression nowadays.  Each time I hear it, I think of Bill Salois, a fellow Marine.  We were stationed together in Korea and while we weren't in combat, he made do by challenging someone to fight each time he got drunk.  He was part Black Foot Indian and got drunk much before I did.  I was a lot stronger than he was and so, as these "fights" developed would let him fight until he was losing, split he and his oponent-for-the-night apart, declare the fight a draw and haul him off. 

His father had a ranch in Montana.  He proposed that after we got out of the Marine Corps we start our own ranch.  "With what money?" I asked. 

"That won't be a problem," he said.  "We can pick up all the money we need in rodeos."

"I've never been in a rodeo," I warned him.

"That won't be a problem either.  It's easy."

I had my doubts about that.  We were sent to different duty stations after we got back from Korea.  Then I decided to go to college, etc., etc.   While I was in college, he had another Marine look me up.  He hadn't utterly given up the ranch idea, but I had. 

I looked him up on the internet and found:

William 'Bill' Salois

William "Bill" Salois, 68, died Dec. 29, 2001, at IHS of cancer.

Funeral Mass was celebrated Jan. 1 at Little Flower Parish with burial in East Glacier Cemetery.

He was born Dec. 2, 1933, worked in construction and was self-employed. He served in the U.S. Marines and was a Korean War veteran.

Surviving are his wife, Shannon; daughters, Kerrie Salois, Dale Rae Salois and Dee Omsberg; sons, John Salois, Will Salois and Gabe Salois; and five grandchildren.

Day Family Funeral handled arrangements.

 

I wasn't surprised that he died at age 68 from cancer.  We all smoked back in Korea and he probably never gave it up.  We all drank beer as well.   Beer isn't necessarily life-shortening, but if he kept picking fights it might well have been in his case.

I note that his obituary doesn't say he was a rancher.  It says he worked in "construction and was self-employed."  That could mean almost anything.

He had a lot of kids and I did find reference to his boys having entered rodeos.  "Easy money?" I still doubt it.