..and a Tip of the Hat

So long Steve, the world would have been so different without you. Your vision made it a better place.

Testosterone in the Heartland

Iowa recently passed a law to allow dove hunting. This has stirred up a passel of heated invective back and forth in blogs, letters to editors and other opportunistic venues for spleen. It's not like Iowa good old boys have nothing to hunt, Iowa has enough deer to feed an army of Daniel Boones to the point where they are referred to as "giant rats" because of the damage they do to the environment, gardens, grain storage and the like. There are seasons for pheasant, turkey, quail, rabbit, squirrel, grouse and deer in Iowa not to mention trapping for beaver, otter and bobcat. But this is not enough and the call went out from the mighty men of reknown that they needed a season to hung the mourning dove, an inoffensive little bird slightly bigger than a robin.

For the moment let's forget the fact that these "conservationists" (all avid hunters will try to convince you that only if they are allowed to kill anything that moves can our environment be saved - I have some difficulty with this but maybe I am just being dense) also lobbied mightily not to have their fun spoiled by requiring them to use steel shot thus saving the environment from the hazards of lead pellets.

In a letter to the local rag laughingly referred to as an actual newspaper, a letter was published expressing dismay that people felt the need to kill these birds. I added a comment saying "It takes a big brave man to kill a mourning dove." I suppose I should have known better. The rag in question used to allow sign in with an anonymous screen name (backed by their records regarding email address) but recently changed it to allowing only facebook login. Since I feel that I have nothing to hide I posted my comment under my facebook (real) name and today my comment was answered by one who thoroughly researched my facebook, my website and my blog to comment to all and sundry that this "computer geek who plays bassoon and likes opera and classical music knows nothing about bravery." The conversation went back and forth with his invective building as I posted replies flying way over his head. Finally I told him "you win - I admit that it DOES take a big brave man to kill a mourning dove." That the sarcasm of the last reply was even heavier than the original that started his diatribe completely escaped him. Nevertheless, I now have a gun toting "big brave man" out there somewhere that knows who I am and what city I live in. Now I have to start looking over my shoulder.

I've dealt with guys like this ever since I got my first pair of glasses in fourth grade. In grade school I was beaten regularly for being smaller and "geekier" than the neckless boys would like. When I suddenly got large in high school similar attempts ended in big surprises. I guess that intellectually I knew that the bullies are still out there - big when they are "carrying" but still cowards at heart. It does not surprise me that those that feel that they need to own a gun and kill things for amusement are largely of this ilk.

The sad part is that I, who have never owned a firearm, now feel I may need one to protect me from someone who feels threatened because I questioned his need to shoot small birds.

New Frontiers in Stupidity

We've dealt with stupidity before in these pages, particularly stupidity as it presents itself in the midwest from the belief that you can turn in any direction from any traffic lane to the belief that the number of times the floor buttons are pressed in an elevator determines how many people can get off at a given floor but new examples of new depths of stupidity appear almost daily.

For now we won't belabor the point that the Iowa straw poll indicates that a majority of Iowa republicans are just fine with someone obviously mentally challenged being president of the United States. If this opinion holds across the country then God help us all. Enough said on that topic.

The very latest example of human beings that function at or below the animal level involves children falling out of windows. This summer an epidemic of this has broken out in Des Moines. Every few days on the news we hear that a toddler has fallen from a second story or higher window. Setting aside how this points out that not every human being with working genital organs should be allowed to reproduce, the really mind boggling part is the response of the community. Des Moines is now setting up classes for parents on how to prevent children from falling out of windows. Yes, that's right, you didn't misunderstand - actual classes to teach presumably adult people how not to let their kids take the concrete plunge. What's the curriculum going to be? 101 - Proper use of screens? 102 - Windows, once opened, may be closed - a hands on approach? 103 - Putting down the crack pipe to watch the child - a survey of techniques?

The talking heads on the news seem to be soliciting sympathy for the parents. Sympathy my wrinkled ass! As corrupt and inefficient as Child and Family Services is, seize any kids belonging to these troglodytes and clap mom and dad (if dad is even around) in the slammer until child bearing age is past. The coddling of idiots in our society has got to cease.

Music Therapy

It had been a long tedious work day. Expiring deadlines coupled with unreasonable requests for last minute changes. Members of other departments calling for help rather than solving problems on their own. The ongoing process of new and exciting software bugs appearing requiring fruitless hours of troubleshooting. I was tired. Maybe not physically but certainly mentally fatigued. When I got home the last thing I wanted to do was go out again and exert any effort whatsoever.

But we had a double reed quartet rehearsal scheduled. After a quick frozen pizza refueling (frozen pizza hardly qualifying as food but simply fodder) I packed up the bassoon case, grabbed a stand and crawled into the car. My wife, in much better spirits than I, loaded her oboe and english horn and we headed for the interstate and a thirty minute drive to our second bassoonist's house.

Our double reed quartet is a fledgling effort, as yet gigless and still in search of coherence. We'd not met since the end of our orchestra season in May and I was hoping to make it through the evening with little heavy lifting. All four of us play in the same orchestra. The thirty something accountant second oboe with the blazing technique and amazing sight reading, the mid twenties band teacher second bassoon starting her family and my wife and myself, both of the latter of another generation.

The four of us are good friends and as we assembled instruments and fussed with reeds we caught up with each other. Second oboe was back from a weekend country music festival - wife and I had tales of horrible and amazing experiences playing for a community musical. As we began to rehearse we kept it light playing several tangos, a Gottschalk dance and a Csardas and as we played some of the things that keeps guys like me playing began to happen. When a group like this is formed there is a period when everyone may be playing their parts but the real ensemble, the "oneness" that is the goal of fine performance only comes with time, with familiarity with the other players and learning to feel what the other players will do, how they will form their expression and nuance almost before they do it. And finally, last night after three years of sporadic rehearsals searching for repertoire and a voice as a group, it began to happen. We began to sense how this player would interpret this phrase, that ritard. How two of us should articulate a passage together. How we begin to transcend the written dynamics and shape the rise and fall together. As the two hours came to an end we worked on a Bach prelude and finally for a brief moment we four became one voice - the voice of an organ - the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

Driving home I was no longer tired. My wife and I didn't speak much - we have been together long enough that we didn't need to. This is why we keep doing it. Because sometimes, sometimes the magic happens.

Watching the sun set on my country.

Having spent the last ten years with my jaw constantly dropping at the machinations of the republican party (yes, grammar police I know it should be capitalized but I refuse to grant even this tiniest morsel of respect) I think I have finally figured out their game plan. As we all know, half the people you meet are below average intelligence and the average has been on a major slide since the late 19th century. As a result of these facts, in the United States of America the vast majority of the population is stupid. Republicans have obviously realized that this is their voter base for the future. If they can just train them to get out of the house, stumble to the polls and read enough of the ballot to vote, they can't lose. How else can you explain the fact that Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, to name only two, are actually considered viable candidates for the presidency? And really, can you blame the republicans for grabbing this opportunity? You can twist history any way you want - none of your target constituency has any knowledge of it anyway. You can make up statistics, you can lie, you can proclaim family values while divorcing your cancer ridden wife since none of your target audience reads anything deeper than the TV listings and anything negative on the news must be the product of those damn commie liberals. Just hate women, minorities, proclaim your love for Jebus and the mouth breathing shamblers will gather like flies above fresh horse flop.

It's really no news to me that stupid is our country's new direction. I shouldn't be surprised when I see how our government at every level in the midst of a financial crisis refuses to eliminate waste caused by idiotic decisions. For example, how much good can be done for our country at home if our solution to everything in the world that irritates us is to try to bomb it out of existence? How many lives would be saved if instead of putting gruesome pictures on cigarette packages we just stopped subsidizing tobacco growers and manufacturers? How many future depressions or recessions could be avoided if bankers and Wall Street financiers were actually punished for swindling the American public? How much money could be saved and how many lives changed if we stopped pretending that locking up people for 20 years for possession of a roach and funding a completely failed "war on drugs" was having any effect whatsoever? I could go on for pages, and I'm sure anyone intelligent enough to read this blog could put up a long list of their own.

Sadly, I no longer believe that there are enough of us left to stop this slide into the kind of country we always tried to protect ourselves from in the years after World War II. I no longer believe that there are enough intelligent people willing to serve in a government that is paralyzed by partisanship and stupidity, not to mention horrible abuses of position such as attempts to sell Senate seats, molestation of aides and interns, flaunting of complete disregard for morals and ethics and ownership of members of congress by corporate interests which is not concealed nor denied. I've reached an age where I know I won't live long enough to see the full descent into the disappearance of the middle class and the division of the country into a huge poverty class toiling and supporting a tiny class of robber barons but I really see no way short of revolution out of it. Perhaps even my children will not see the ultimate result, but I fear for my grandchildren and all of their generation.

Grass wars

Spring has arrived in Iowa in it's usual abrupt way. Furnace running full blast one day, 90 degree temperatures the next. Each year when this precursor to a summer of devastating soul sucking heat and humidity arrives the wife and I start our annual attempt to grow grass.

Ten years ago when we bought our house our feelings were "Wow - look at the huge oak trees in the front and back yard". Now it is more like "These damn oak trees!" The trees in question are huge pin oaks probably in the neighborhood of eighty plus years old in excess of 6 feet in diameter and fifty feet tall. The trees are so large that when you view our address on Google Earth pictures taken in summer show our entire yard, parts of the house and parts of neighbors' yards completely obscured by foliage. They look impressive when leafed out as they were when we bought the place, but during the year they drop amazing amounts of dead wood during windy conditions - limbs ranging in size from the thickness of a thumb to that of my thigh; carpet our driveway, lawn and sidewalk with a solid layer of acorns in the fall; and drop leaves for two months that amount to at least forty-five thirty gallon bags full mulched and tamped down. And in addition to providing us with a year round opportunity for yard clean up they inhibit the grass.

One of the first things we noticed when we moved in was that the lawn both front and back had bare patches ranging in size from three inches to two feet in diameter. The lady next door told us the prior owners had used a lawn service but had always had the problem. Thus began a ten year battle to grow grass where grass will not grow. At first I believed as others may that the trees were taking all the nutrients and water so lots of fertilizer and regular watering were applied to no avail.

Over the years we subsequently have tried:

Seasonal application of weed and feed type fertilizers: These seem to inhibit dandelions but let Creeping Charlie, Virginia Creeper and crabgrass run wild. As to the "feed" part, there has been no discernible affect on the grass.

Zoysia Grass: This comes in "plugs" which you space at one foot intervals over bare patches. It grows only in places where there is full blinding sunlight at least nine hours a day with no hint of shade. In the fall it turns yellow and remains yellow until well into late spring when it finally turns green. To be fair, where it will grow it grows thick and lush. We now have a patch approximately two feet by three feet in the extreme south east corner of our front lawn after an attempt at four hundred square feet of coverage nine years ago.

Conventional sun/shade grass seed mix: Yeah, I know we have no sun - we hoped the shade part would work out. Raked in and watered religiously it sprouted sparsely to a height of about one inch and promptly died. Didn't even get to mow it once. We actually tried this three times varying the time of planting, the amount of mulching and depth of planting. We learn hard.

Bugle weed: ground cover specifically for shady areas. Hoping this would just take over and we could forget grass. Bought enough plants last year to cover a one hundred square foot area. This spring not a single plant survived.

Canadian "miracle grass": guaranteed to grow in shade or sun - will germinate in five days. It did indeed germinate in five days and then died off in three weeks.

This spring is our last hurrah. After a winter of research we bought seed consisting mainly of fescues (supposedly the ultimate shade grasses). Fescues aren't for high traffic areas but most of the traffic in the back yard is sporadic and largely composed of small dachshund paws. Right now, seeding after tilling manure and compost into around two hundred square feet of test area we have a pretty fair stand of grass around two inches tall. However in the seeded areas there are still patches from two to four inches in diameter where the seed did not germinate. If this planting survives, next spring the remaining problem areas get the same treatment, but pardon me if I'm skeptical. If, on the other hand it fails like all the rest I wonder how hard it will be to convince the wife that green asphalt is a good idea?

Passages

Last summer my 91 year old parents passed away within 3 months of each other. Since then my sisters and I have been traveling back to the small town we grew up in to finalize the preparations for an estate auction and eventual sale of the house. The three of us are scattered across the country and gathering to complete this project involves considerable planning and expense. This week we'll make the third and hopefully final such trip. The longer this takes - it has been seven months since Dad died - the longer it takes for closure as the emotional wounds are to some extent reawakened on each visit.

Mom and Dad lived in this house in this little farming town for 65 years from the time Dad returned from Europe at the end of World War II. They remodeled the house in 1955, expanding the capacity for three children and belongings. During that period of time the storage areas of the house were leveraged to the maximum and they threw little away of records and memories of their lives together. Photographs that date back to the late nineteenth century were carefully stored in boxes when the sheer quantity overwhelmed the efforts to contain them all in albums. Records of expenses and purchases were meticulously filed never to be retrieved; receipts for car repairs on vehicles long since passed from all but vaguest memory, warranty information on household appliances replaced many times over, copies of letters to vendors and manufacturers seeking repairs or refunds for items now many years consigned to landfills, and newspaper clippings, report cards and piles of notebook paper filled with childish scrawls chronicling the passage of the three of us through our years of schooling.

What to do with all these things? We continue to return to the house and sort through items that in reality could be handed over to the auctioneers to separate into disposables and salables as if the continued attention to this process somehow suspends the finality of events that have already taken place. So many things. Things which each meant something to one or both of our parents and now must be disposed of. For myself I need little materially to remember them but for my sisters letting go seems to be more difficult. To dispose of their possessions seems disturbingly to discount their importance to those who chose to save them. Yet we all accumulate our own life's collection of memory's touchstones. I cannot find it in me to haul boxes of remembrances home to store them away and pass the task on to the next generation.

And yet - if we pronounce the job finished - then we must face the fact that this time when we close the door we close the door also on the beginning, the middle and the beginning of the end of our lives. The blessing we had of all these years of an intact family meeting for holidays in the family home is over. As these things pass through our hands, the minutia of a couple who spent sixty-nine years together and raised three children, and we realize that most of these things are ephemera that must be relinquished to mere memories we are acutely aware of our own mortality. We hold items in our hands whose only value is emotional and remember how as children our lives seemed to stretch on infinitely and now seem all too short.