The Burrow

It's gone, vanished from my radio dial with a whimper and a moment of blank air space.  Neal Conan won't be riding along with me as I come back from Pilates or drive over to G'ma or run out to pick up the kids at early dismissal.  Just as Diane Rehm greets me in the mornings, I've come to associate Neal Conan with "what am I having for lunch today?" He will be missed. Ted Koppel was the final guest for the final hour; the conversation covered hopes and fears for the world to come.  It was hard for the host to stay impersonal.  Leaving an employer who'd signed your paychecks for the past 36 years isn't easy. Young people, innovation, the internet, civic engagement... most of the callers were positive and forward looking.  Only Neal was holding back the tide. Did his words really slow down as the final few minutes approached, or was that my imagination dragging it out for as long as I possibly could?  I know that he was reluctant to say goodbye; he...

Opening my eyes hurts.  There are flashing lights shimmering at the edges of my field of vision.  Trying to focus makes them grow.  Ignoring them while trying to focus on something else doesn't work,either.  They are there, dancing in a semi-circle, blocking my peripheral vision with glass-block-like-impermeability. They are the precursors to the headache that is going to consume my afternoon.  Knowing that it is on its way doesn't help.  I can concentrate on the shimmering lights, or I can worry about the pounding that will be taking place behind my left temple when they disappear. It doesn't matter.  The day is shot. I took medicine - Excedrin Migraine - and lay quietly across the foot of the bed as the pills dissolved and made their way to the pain centers and the aura centers and the fix-me-quick centers of my head.  TBG had his hand on the clicker, so I never had to listen to commercials. I heard about Maria Sharapova and Aaron Hernandez ...

Someone with standing on the issue thinks that she may well have been a short, brief, gift from God.  Bringing joy to a tragic morning, leaving on another sunny day nine years later, was her life meant to be circumscribed by those events? Was she so full of life because her time was to be so short?   In a crowd of one hundred children, she was the one you noticed.   I've said it so often that I have to stop and remind myself that it is more than a catch phrase.  It's true. There was a lot packed into the body and soul and heart and mind that made up Christina-Taylor Green.  One might almost say it was a full life, condensed, too much to be held in so it burst from her eyes and her arms and enveloped you in the wonder that was her life. These are hard concepts for me.  I turned my back on formal religion early and definitively. My relationship with a higher being is a private one, one that does not need external rituals.  There's something out there...

You make it work.  You don't have a choice.  You just do it.  That's what separates the grown-ups from the children.  Knowing that there's no one else who can solve the problem is the scary side of the equation. Recognizing that you have the skills and the power to take control of the situation is the uplifting piece, the part that successful adults embrace with relish. We spent the weekend with some new, old friends. We heard about them at the same time, years ago, from HDK.  First one to see him was TBG, then he came to visit the desert with a really odd companion, and then he brought her along.  The relationship kept getting better and better the more time we spent together.   They drive from the boondocks in Northern California to our oasis in the desert; the pool beckons before the suitcases are unpacked.  No one minds that the heater is still un-repaired; the water is wet and that's all that matters. We are laughing and nodding an...

We stick Monsoon between Summer and Fall. Although NOAA may have decreed that Monsoon begins on June 15th, those of us who were here before bureaucrats decided to micro-manage the weather know that monsoon begins  after 3 consecutive days with the dew point over 54, as I ranted here in 2010.   Up until then, it's just hot, with a side of breeze. The tiny yellow blossoms have fallen from the mesquite and the palo verde.  They've been swept away and replaced by seed pods. I passed a man harvesting them from the lower  branches  of a neighbor's tree.  If anyone is interested, mine are available for picking, too.  The native people  created  foodstuffs from the pulverized seeds; I'm not enough of a cook to create my own ingredients, too.   The seed pods are falling onto the driveway and the pool deck and are an unpleasant surprise to bare feet.   The saguaro flowers never really did much this year, but the casings are st...

I'm enrolled in a four week seminar on Rhetoric.  We've read Thucydides and Homer and Sappho.  Plato's Gorgias and Apology, dialogues I've read before and will read again; as always, I learned something new from a new teacher.  I kept up with the conversations.  I followed the thread of the arguments. I understood the words written on the page and I was able to deduce a meaning.  It might not be "the right" meaning, but at least the words all made sense, strung together in a pleasing whole. This week we read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Look at how beautiful it is in Greek : Book 1 πᾶσα   τέχνη   καὶ   πᾶσα   μέθοδος ,  ὁμοίως   δὲ   πρᾶξίς   τε   καὶ προαίρεσις ,  ἀγαθοῦ   τινὸς   ἐφίεσθαι   δοκεῖ :  διὸ   καλῶς ἀπεφήναντο   τἀγαθόν ,  οὗ   πάντ᾽   ἐφίεται .  διαφορὰ   δέ   τις φαίνεται   τῶν   τελῶν :  τὰ   μὲν   γά...

electionsmeter.com Posit this:  You are parenting a 15 year old boy.  He has access to Twitter and Facebook and on-line gaming.  He's one of five children. You, the Dad, work out of town.  You have a job that puts you in the public eye.  You have deeply held religious beliefs.  You've stood up for what you think is right, even though 90% of your constituents disagreed with you.  You took your boys on a survival trip to the Marshall Islands, and posted a video edited by that 15 year old boy on YouTube. You are rated 92% by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition , whose mandate includes this platform: Protest anti-Christian bigotry and defend the rights of people of faith. You sat on the stage next to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, USN Commander Mark Kelly in front of 2000 well-wishers at a memorial service on the UofA mall.  I met you then.  You smiled, you shook my hand, you posed for pictures with your wife ...