I enjoyed re-reading this:
I can’t remember when I became a werewolf. Looking back, I see a few staggered steps, like tracks in the snow, lurching from man to wolf and back again. There is no cause and effect, merely history, which can be told so many different ways. … [follow link to read the rest]
No one wants to take away guns from responsible gun owners. However, if you rage and howl about civil war and cold dead hands, you are NOT a responsible gun owner — you are a zealot. The angrier you are, the more dangerous you are with a gun — that’s not responsible.
Now, assuming you are calm and sensible, as I hope the majority of gun owners are, you have an extra responsibility to speak to the nuts and rein them in.
Stand down. Calm down. Work with others to develop gun measures that help reduce gun violence and also help punish those who use guns non-defensively. Stiff-arming us and shaking your weapons in the air while opposing everything as the paranoid “slippery slope” does no one any good. Help control gun violence. Prove you are responsible and decent, not a zealot.
My Mom died 35 years ago today. Life is short; death everlasting. Mom told Merri she knew I’d be angry about her death for a long time. Indeed, I was, but anger is a bitter memorial. She deserved better.
They say funerals are for the living, but Mom would have liked hers. The turnout, the finery — the hats! The Dixieland band playing a dirge as we rolled her coffin a mile down a busy street from the church to the cemetery, next to my Dad. My bear Teddy rode on her coffin. Patsy Coontz pleaded with me not to bury Teddy with Mom. (She’s long dead, now, too, but Teddy is with me.)
The band was upbeat on the return to the champagne reception afterwards. It was a good send-off.
That was more than half my lifetime ago. I’m older than Mom lived to be. I often mark this anniversary with a haircut — she loved my hair, as did I. The sacrifice is less each year.
Chris Hobgood, the minister, said he’d visited my mother in her final days in the hospital. She said she wanted to talk about her funeral yet every time changed the subject. At the memorial, he read this poem, appropriate as spiritual metaphor lacking conventional religious imagery.
I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze,
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch her until she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says: “There! She’s gone!”
Gone where? Gone from my sight – that is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side,
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of her destination.
Her diminished size is in me, and not in her.
And just at the moment
when someone at my side says: “There! She’s gone!”
there are other eyes that are watching for her coming;
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout:
“There she comes!”
(I’ve seen this attributed to Henry Van Dyke and Luther Beecher.)
Though one of beauty and strength, she *is* gone forever and nowhere else. I believe death is absolute and final. Still, her mitochondria swim within me, and many of my best traits were hers. I’m grateful to her for more than just my life. And sorry she didn’t have more of her own.
It occurs to me that David Koch died knowing he’d failed terribly. Yes, he used his wealth to push candidates and causes Progressives couldn’t abide. (Often through the cowardly use of “dark money.”) However, recall that Koch was not a Conservative Republican — Koch was a libertarian. (Note that “extreme” is always redundant with “libertarian” and it should never be capitalized because you don’t have any right to tell me otherwise.) Name a politically-successful libertarian. Justin Amash? He failed to save the GOP. Gary “Big J” Johnson? He helped elect Trump.
Koch must have hated Trump and he must have been furious that the unprincipled charlatan succeeded where Koch failed: in transforming the Republican party. Pity poor David Koch, whose vast wealth could not achieve his greatest dreams nor keep him from Death. (Perhaps, he took comfort in seeing the Federal government weakened and corrupted, though the empty bathtub costs more than ever.)
Starting at 9:36 p.m. EST Jan. 20, skywatchers will notice a “little notch is taken out of the moon,” according to Brian Murphy, director of Indiana’s Holcomb Observatory & Planetarium and Butler University professor.
“The moon starts to enter into the earth’s shadow in a portion called the umbra when the sun is totally blocked out,” he said. “Earth is moving from right to left through the shadow.”
At 10:34 p.m., it moves into a partial eclipse, and starting at 11:41 p.m., the full eclipse begins; a maximum eclipse occurs at 12:12 a.m. Jan. 21. The total eclipse ends at 12:44 a.m.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/03/super-blood-wolf-moon-eclipse-coming-soon-what-does-all-mean/2474960002/
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/17/686227606/heads-up-for-sunday-a-super-blood-moon-is-on-the-way
https://www.almanac.com/content/full-moon-names
Thirty-four years ago my Mom, Ernestine Justice Hinton, died of lymphoma at the end of days in a coma. Death cheats some people more than others. She has been dead more than half of my lifetime. I’m now older than she was when she died. I’m at a loss for a word to describe this. It’s not inconceivable, not really unbelievable, no longer unfair or unjust. It’s just un-Mom. It’s grief — interminable, but suppressible.
Mom is preserved in memories unchanging except through erosion. There’s nothing I could say to someone who didn’t know her that would do her justice. For those of us who remember her, another year’s leaves don’t obscure the trunk of the tree fallen in the forest. She is remembered, which isn’t half as good as living, but all one can hope for in time.
I said this better 14 years ago:
Ernestine Hinton loved all kinds of fabric. She frequented fabric stores, buying yards of cloth she liked, which she piled in an out-of-the-way corner solely to paw through, no specific project in mind. She loved sensual materials like satin, silk and velour. She loved color and was happy to put colors next to each other that some might call daring. When she remodeled the house — transformed it, really — she brought together golds, yellows, reds, greens, sage and Chinese lacquer, all unified by a carpet that might have pleased Jackson Pollack, a studiously patternless palette of color blotches that gave every first-time viewer pause. She wanted you to be comfortable but never complacent and she trusted you to know the difference.
Ernestine was a natural hostess, welcoming everyone with such genuine charm. Out and about, she spoke to people most others ignore, extending courtesy to everyone equally. She worked to improve the lives of many and was outraged by those who did the opposite. She did not suffer fools. She would be appalled by what we’ve become.
She preferred to be called Teen, but I could only call her Mom, or in occasional shock, Mother! And shock me, she did. She was her own woman and expected to be accepted as such. In conversation, she was alive and witty. She could turn a deft phrase to knock you off your feet and then pick you up and dust you off and make sure you were still OK. She was brilliant.
Although Teen was a feminist role model before that concept emerged, she loved being a mother and loved children without reserve. There was nothing more important or valuable than nurturing children. We make our future by teaching our children and by loving them.
Many people and events have shaped me; she did it first and gave the world what there is to work with.
Today, Mom would be 99, though she wouldn’t admit it. That is, had she not been killed by cancer. That was the event that convinced me that if there were a god, I would hate him with all my being.
Before she died, Mom told Mer she knew I’d be angry about her death for a long time. I’ll never stop being angry about that — she deserved a long life as much as anyone else — though I do better understand the burden of anger after all these years. Anger is a poor memorial. She deserves better.
My Mom didn’t like having her picture taken and she lived long before the digital age (though she did advise me to get into computers, which, at the time, I rejected as soulless). These are scans of prints.
Years ago, I read an article about a guy in his 90s who climbed a rock wall in the local gym each birthday. The message I got was “keep moving.” It’s a simple mantra.
Today, I read about a race-walker in Australia who is 92 years old. The message repeats itself.
Try to Keep Up With Australia’s Fastest 92-Year-Old Woman
