Shadow Flutter

Tuesday: The Library, Part II Wednesday: Las Vegas, Part II

I do volunteer work at the library. My love of libraries has been a lifetime affair ever since my dad and mom first took me to the local library all those years ago.  If you have read my TBR post, you know that I was a reluctant, slow reader, and that this greatly concerned my dad, a lifelong, voracious reader. Every day, after supper, my dad and my mom would retire to the den where they would read for the next several hours. They each had their own comfortable chair, each bookending  the pot belly stove which was doing double duty as the fireplace. My mom would pull a magazine off the magazine rack and leaf through it backwards. A strange way of reading, but it worked for her. For years I copied her, leafing though Mad Magazine backwards, wondering how one read this way. It was only later, when someone pointed out you can't read that way, that I realized my mom was only looking at the pictures. She loved magazines like House and Garden and Better Homes, because the...

I buried my dad yesterday. He lived till 100 years of age, died in April, and was buried Tuesday, August 25, 2015, at Arlington cemetery, receiving full military honors.  That’s right.  We’ve fought so many wars, that there is now a 4 month backlog at Arlington.  One must wait in line to receive the honor.   My father, a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles,” served in the army during WWII, jumping at Normandy (D-Day), France, and Eindhoven-Veghel (Market Garden), Netherlands.  It was at Veghel, shrapnel from a mortar caught him in the head.  He wasn’t expected to live, but did, living another 60-plus years, until April 17 of this year. The ceremony is beautiful.  The honor guard walks the casket out of the chapel down the walk onto the caisson. The guard walks beside the caisson, as four white horses pull it along the path to the gravesite (a 1.7 mile walk).  As the funeral procession proceeds down ...

Today, on CNN, Donna Brazile, with mind fully focused on the transition of power in the Oval Office, referred to President Obama as President O'Biden.  Using but one word, Brazile merged president and vice-president into a single African-English-French-Irish-Superman -- what could be more American? -- AND used up all the hyphens in the typeset pool to boot. Congratulations, Donna Brazile.  Your efforts at synergy (and efficiency) stands as a model for us all.

I t is Sunday, another beautiful day.  It is the kind of day that makes you wish for a large garden in which to wander among late summer blooms while imbibing a kaleidoscope of colors and scents — a human hummingbird syphoning sweet, lovely nectar that is somehow never too sweet and never too lovely, no matter how much one overindulges.  The garden I am thinking of has country benches nestled alongside slightly trodden paths upon which one can sit and relax and release into the air the accumulation of woes and stresses that while imprisoned within scar the psyche.  The garden I’m thinking of is a place to gather one’s thoughts, to read a book, to sketch a landscape, even if one can’t draw.  The garden I’m thinking of is an inviolable, though temporary, sanctuary, a small refuge from which one shelters himself from the hustle and bustle for an hour or two. One can find gardens in greenhouses, but that is not the same thing.  Greenhouses are hermetically seal...

With the election season heating up, a thought or two on rhetoric. We live in an era of aggressive, highly sophisticated rhetoric, and it is destroying our ability to be honest with ourselves.  At one time rhetoric was about combining eloquent, commanding language with facts and reason to produce a persuasive argument that attempted to convince others of the rightness of a cause.  Not anymore.  Lies, distortions, and political correctness have become legitimate tools of the rhetorician, and our public discourse suffers as a result.  Take any issue, add rhetoric, and the public dialectic becomes about winning by deception or deflection or almost any other means, rather than about discussing and resolving differences.  Political correctness plays a singularly important role in modern rhetoric because it is used to control and limit the conversation on important, politically charged issues rather than open them up to debate. Facts are not things to play with; t...

Today, with not a cloud in the sky and the sun shining brightly, it is beautiful outside, so I sit here writing.  Such a day as this reminds me of my time in Las Vegas, where so many days were without clouds, the sun shone brightly, and it almost never rained.  We once had a two-year period with only a drizzle or two.  Of course, the temperature wasn’t as nice as here, but you can’t have everything.  At work, one time, we were visited by a colleague from Alaska.  It was early to mid-April, in the mid eighties, and she was not prepared for such heat.  For the entire visit she sweated and groused about the unrelenting desert heat.  No one who lives in Vegas sweats in April.  We wait for the temps to get upwards of 110 degrees before doing that.  But you will see a shiver or two on a cool, 80-degree day, 8% humidity, in April.  I guess it shows that many of our thoughts and feelings are relative.  I’m sure if I had visited Alaska ...

Coming Soon!!!  

The list of customers who registered at Ashley Madison -- the site where people can hook up and cheat on their spouse -- is now online.  I live such a boring life.  I can't find anyone on the list who I know.  Time for another nature walk.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when I first moved to the Washington D.C. area I did not have a car and chose public transportation over buying one.   See  http://shadowflutter.blogspot.com/2015/07/mass-transit-and-loneliness-of-commuter.html By the time I had decided to buy a car, my driver’s license had expired long ago.  In Sallyland — name changed to protect the guilty — when this happens, you have to take the written and driving tests over again.  This is no small matter, because I come from a long line of bad drivers.  My grandfather on my father’s side didn’t drive at all, and my dad didn’t learn until his late twenties, early thirties when he was in the army.  The story goes that upon refusing a superior’s order, he was banished to the car pool.  It was there he allegedly learned to drive, but not before wrecking the clutches of several jeeps and smashing another one or two into fences and walls.  (He was yanked out of ...

I’m a reader.  I read fiction of every genre and non-fiction of almost any type.  And not just books.  Food labels — did you know preservatives have unpronounceable polysyllabic names whose first letter often starts with  ‘X’ or ‘Z’?  Sounds carcinogenic just reading them. Household cleaner directions — if it gets in your eyes, call a doctor or go blind.  Clothing tags — “Don’t wear while ironing,” a tag designed to warn idiots and ward off law suits from same idiots.  Mattress tags — did you know they will arrest you if you tear off the tag?  The mattress cops lie under your bed waiting . . .  Tree Carvings — “Mike & Jim forever,” a recent one. Tattoos — “Larry and Lisa”  tattooed inside a heart, an irreversible mistake that will become the source of endless arguments between Larry and his future wife. “I was drunk.  I swear.  I don’t even remember Lisa.”  Bumper stickers — “Shit Happens,” and it does. ...

Continuing . . . I had to fly to San Francisco — at one time my favorite city, but no more — to attend two days of meetings.  Meetings are a great place to meet people and make friends, but a terrible place to get any work done, and maybe that is why we have so many meetings.  We meet and plan so often that we hold additional meetings to discuss the other meetings and plan the plans.   While living and working in Las Vegas, I was once commanded to attend a four-hour meeting in Washington D.C.  This took three days to accomplish: one day to fly there and stay over, a second day to attend the afternoon meeting and stay over, and a third day to fly back.  You justify that; I can’t.  And on an aside, the worst day of my life occurred on a separate trip to D.C., a 16-hour comedy of errors, each joke played at my expense.  But that is another story.  Anyway, I could leave during the morning of the first day and return from San Francisco...