Weekend Wonk

Rollin’ on the River(s) and Other Doings of the Summertime Sheas

mcone — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:09:29 +0000

Jerome Shea
Saturday, August 28, 2010

The old wonker is back, after a very busy summer of traveling. I think the Long-suffering Diana and I—or at least I—were gone more than we were home, and I appreciate Matt’s having suggested that I take the summer off.* It was a good break, but I look forward now to banging out more wonks, teaching my classical tropes course, and, since Albuquerque persists in turning into Phoenix, getting a break from the summer heat.

So park y’r carcass right here for a bit and I will regale you (if you have lost your gale…hahaha.)

Briefly, I went to Kentucky for the annual Advanced Placement Reading; then the two of us drove out to SoCal to see Dan and our Laguna Beach friends, Bob and Brenda; then we spent a couple of nights back at the earth ships (see “Sailing the Mesa”) northwest of Taos with our daughter and her family; and then (drum roll!) we cruised the Danube from Budapest to Nuremberg (sandwiched between a stay with Diana’s folks on Cape Cod). Whew.

I (heart) Louisville, and the thought of going back June after June warms my cockles. I had never been there before. In fact, I had never been in Kentucky before, and the first reaction from friends was, “Poor you: Kentucky in the summer!” Not so.

But a word first about the reading. I had not been a table leader for about a dozen years and was nervous about that. But I had a wonderful table of readers (when will I get the “reader from hell” that is part of AP lore?) and got back up to speed pretty quickly. And the question was good if not great. Essentially it asked if humorists, who seem to be able to get away with saying things that the rest of us can’t, serve a vital role in society for that reason. No surprise that most of the comedians the kids cited I had never heard of (I’m not just old; I don’t even get cable). I was too embarrassed to ask why none of these youngsters mentioned Bob Hope or Milton Berle or Jack Benny. And I realized that I really must wear my hearing aid next year. The years go on and so does Shea.

Yes, it was hot and humid, but the convention center and our suite in the Galt House were air conditioned. Bobby Caughey, a friend of my son’s, was there (Bobby is a sometime bartender and full-time high school teacher north of San Diego) and we took a short run one evening in Waterfront Park. The humidity was actually a nice novelty, although the salt sweat really burned my eyes: next year, a headband. Special thanks to Bobby because his group, the Literature and Comp people, have been there for three or four years and he was happy to show me around town.

Louisville is on the Ohio, a serious river. It is about a half mile across to Indiana and deep enough to float real boats (unlike the Rio Grande here in Albuquerque, which often comes up only to your ankles). Educational Testing Service sprung for us table leaders to have a dinner cruise on a genuine riverboat. The Belle of Louisville was built in 1914 and is still a steam-powered stern wheeler. It was a grand evening aboard that grande dame. We churned about ten miles up the Ohio and back down. I wondered what it must have been like on a real river journey when young Sam Clemens was learning the ropes, or, rather, the shoals. “Mark Twain,” as they used to call out.

There is probably not twice as much to see and do in Louisville—Churchill Downs, the Mega Cavern, scads of museums and good restaurants, etc.—as in a comparable city, but the tourist board certainly makes it seem so, and I would like sometime to spend a real vacation there.

But there is more to Kentucky than Louisville and I had an old friend to see. So one evening I borrowed a car and went off to visit Judy Moffett (aka “Sally”) out near Lexington. At her suggestion I left I-64 and dropped south on KY 395. There is green and then there is…Kentucky, I thought, as I rolled through Waddy and Harrisonville and past the graveyard where generations of Baptist Moffetts await the final trumpet. Two lane and twisty, it was the perfect introduction to where Judy lives with her two dogs, Fleece and Feste, hidden away at the top of an impossible long driveway. I firmly believe in visiting old friends every forty years or so and after an awkward Stanley and Livingstone moment, we remembered why we were such good friends and fell to finishing each other’s sentences on into the evening. Judy Moffett is another excellent reason to get back to Kentucky year after year.

*Note: that’s “Matt’s having suggested,” not “Matt having suggested.” My latest peeve is that hardly anybody uses the possessive case with the gerund anymore. What’s up with that?

Postscript. I’ve been advised that Unmlive will no longer be posting my selected wonks, which they deem not academic enough. Well, it was a good run, and I am told that I will live forever on You Tube—a cheesy sort of immortality but the only one that your wonker expects to have, so he’ll take what he can get.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is shea@macinstruct.com.

Madison

mcone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:41:45 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 30, 2010

The other day I discovered a wonderful cache of old letters, and I would like to share some with you. This one has to do with Diana’s family’s place in Madison, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie, where we went every year when the kids were growing up. It seems a wonderful celebration of summer. I hope you enjoy this wonk, and enjoy this other summer that has come round again.

7/2/99

Dear Cos and Bren,

You asked about Madison. That deserves a real letter. What do we do there? What’s it like? Oh dear, oh dear.

This morning, we were at WalMart and I made the happy blunder of holding both Madison images and Yeats’s lovely “Lake Isle of Innisfree” in my mind at the same time. You will not be surprised to learn that I began to puddle up, right there in the kitchenware aisle (isle?). Well, if anybody noticed maybe they chalked it up to allergies or my fear of falling prices. I hope so.
(I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…)

A day at Madison is very, very low key. I get up. I pull on my shorts and mocs. I plug in the coffee pot if my mother-in-law hasn’t already. I mosey down to the Lake. If it’s roiling, I shout “Good morning, Canada!” If it’s silvery calm, mirror-like, transparent (what a sight!), I sit quiet on the jetty and watch the gliding fish. I wonder if someone, some happy, lucky grandson-in-law over in Canada, is sitting entranced just as I am. I grin. Maybe Diana comes down. I give her a squeeze and we watch together. (And I shall find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…)

If my father-in-law hasn’t beaten me to it, I run (figuratively) down to the little store in Chappeldale and get the Plain Dealer. And maybe some sticky breakfast goodies. Since it is roadworthy again (it was just the shocks, we found out), maybe I will have borrowed the old Jeep.

Back again. Most people are up and about now. The serious readers divvy up the PD. I plop into the old chaise lounge on the front porch (that’s the LAKE side, not the road side). I thoroughly digest the PD, one of this country’s better newspapers. If I am lucky, Dick Feigler, their best, has a column that morning. Then there’s chatter and catching up with whoever is around—Pat and Bob Dinsmore, or any of D’s sibs and their families. If my brother-in-law Andy and my sister-in-law Bonnie are there, the three of us tag-team the crossword puzzle. (Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings…)

Now most go off to swim; maybe some bro-in-laws go off to play golf up the street. I read for an hour or so, maybe desultory school stuff, maybe escapist stuff. Then I bethink myself of chores. Does Bob have anything in mind? So maybe we repair some screens or clean some gutters.

Time to run. I have a seven-mile out and back course. It’s not the best, but the roads aren’t too treacherous. Turn-around point is Arcola, a little park pointing out the iron works that used to be there and the wetland (estuary) that still is. Seven miles isn’t far, especially that near to sea level, so I set a brisk pace. If I haven’t started training for the fall marathon, this is my last chance.

The late afternoon works that special magic that comes only in an old house on an old place: clocks ticking, dust motes in the sunlight—the most powerful counterfeit of eternity that you are ever likely to find. And those huge silver maples sheltering the house, dappling everything.

Big dinner, probably on the front porch but maybe a cookout on the beach. Kids back in the lake one more time, intrepid grown-ups with them. And looking for the “green flash” as the sun finally (we’re at the far edge of the EDT) slips beneath the water. (…for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore / While I stand on the highway or on the pavements gray…)

Almost time to turn in. I pop a Genny Cream Ale and saunter down to the lake bluff (this is where I miss Moxie the Wonderdog the most: she was a good watcher and ruminator). With luck, I can see the lights of a lake freighter on the horizon, churning toward Buffalo. The ghost of Moxie tries to catch the ghost of a lightning bug.

I knock out my pipe, scrunch the Genny can, trudge back to the house and my bed. And that, my dear friends, is a day at Madison. (I hear it in the deep heart’s core.)

A couple of years after Grandma Reid died (at 100, in 2000), Madison passed out of the family. The new owners professed to be charmed by the “Cottage,” as the Reids always called it. Later I learned that they had the Cottage and its sheds razed and ripped up half the towering trees, so that they could slap together a McMansion. I have never had the stomach to go back.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Mappa Mundi

mcone — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:23:56 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 30, 2010

“Map” is a strange word. Broad-voweled but abrupt, it rhymes with yap, zap, slap, clap, and so on. It might be an acronym (Mercator Area Projection?) or the call of an ill-tempered tropical bird (“That infernal mapping kept us awake all night!”). In fact, it comes from the medieval Latin mappa, meaning a napkin, a cloth. Mappa Mundi means map of the world.

To put something on the map is to make it famous; to wipe it off the map is to obliterate it. Anything with physical features can be mapped. You can map the heavens. You can map the ocean floor. You can map your lover’s body. Maps rule.

For many of us, the romance of maps began with the pirate’s treasure map: “X marks the spot,” and all that. We probably did bury stuff in the back yard or, better, in the woods next door, then drew an elaborate map with appropriately ragged edges. “Thirteen paces due west from the big twisted tree with the secret sign carved in it….” Or we drew imagined treasure maps. Always on a desert isle, and the seeker had to skirt the monster’s cave, rappel down a sheer cliff, swim a raging river, and so forth. Half the fun was in embellishing those maps with spouting whales, mermaids, and all the rest. What started out as a route to buried riches became a child’s work of art. I remember spending whole summer days lost in my map-making until the map itself became the treasure, a wonderful bit of alchemy.

Roads likely started out as game trails and became more packed down as native hunters followed those trails. Here in the States, settlers in wagons followed, turning the trails into rutted roads that were often quagmires. Then came the imperious automobile. The dicey roads got paved, gas-stationed, and motelled (or perhaps “motor courted,” a lovely seductive phrase). Our classic American east-west routes—US 20, US 30, US 40—all originated that way. Daniel Boone strode west through the shadowy forest and then in a trice, historically speaking, came a family in its ’34 Ford, the kids wailing, “Are we THERE yet?”

From a city map I have highlighted the ditch trails that run all through our North Valley (see “Water in the Ditch”). I have mapped the bosque trails and, with help from a friend with a GPS, I have assigned accurate mileages to each leg. The bosque trails originated, we think, when people ran cattle in there years ago. The cattle are gone but the trails keep changing anyway. A cottonwood falls in a windstorm so runners have to go around it. After a couple of months you don’t even remember the original piece of the trail. The trail heals itself, as it were, and renews itself.

That Kentucky map I mentioned in the last wonk has an exploded inset for “Bluegrass Country” with all the big horse farms noted. I have a roadmap of “Indian Country,” that big chunk that includes mostly Arizona, but also parts of New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Specialty maps abound, a map for every purpose under Heaven (which, unlike the heavens, has not been mapped yet as far as we know.)

I can look at a map and the memories come flooding back. Sitgreaves Pass on old 66 in Arizona. Skinny road like an arthritic snake, sheer drops, no guardrails, and the rising sun making you functionally blind. Wonderful! Framed in my study is a map of Florence (see “A Grouch Abroad”) that rode in my back pocket for a sweltering week. It is worn through at the four-fold point, which happens to be exactly at the Duomo. I still have the European roadmaps that I used a half century ago and can pinpoint where my old Vespa seized up on a rainy Sunday morning in Belgium and sent me skidding. And there is the spot along the French coast where I had that espresso, just me and the sleepy counter man, on a March morning that sparkled, like the Mediterranean, with all my life’s promise.

Last wonk, I asked which is more important, the journey or the destination. I suggested that you can have it both ways, and I still believe that. Surely to toggle between the one and the other is no great feat. But if I really had to choose? Well, I am looking at a map right now (I won’t tell you where, but I’ll be off soon) and I can imagine every little town, every chintzy motel (singles $24.95, weekly rates available), every indulgent greasy breakfast, every stop to keep my coffee cup filled, every patch of fog, every dip and rise and twist…and the Little Red Beast laughing with me all the way. And I think not of the White Rabbit but of another character in another children’s book:

Mr. Toad.

And the open road.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Maps

mcone — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:36:22 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 23, 2010

I love maps. I don’t even have to leave my recliner to haul up my eight pound world atlas (oof!) or my USA/Canada/Mexico road atlas. Should I see some place mentioned in the morning paper—Storm Lake, Iowa, say—I will grab the road atlas and have a looksee. Just to see, and maybe imagine my being there, imagine the Hawkeyes who live there, imagine what the campus of Buena Vista University looks like and wonder how a town of 9973 (in 2006) can support a university. And wonder why in the world a school in Iowa would be named “Buena Vista.” I might not get back to the Albuquerque Journal at all that morning.

Maps. Think of those maps one finds in old, old books; I mean the ones with the cherubim’s cheeks puffed out to represent each of the Four Winds. Those rococo maps look silly to us now. They are usually far off the mark, and the best part are those terra incognita spaces warning “Here be dragons!” Ooooo! Still, they are testimony to our need to find things out, to explore the unexplored, to map the world however crudely. We should not be smug with our satellites and global positioning devices. Accuracy gained but mystery, enchantment, lost. There is a reason why those old maps often fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Maps are guides, of course. They try their best to get us from here to there, which is why to be “all over the map” is to be in a kind of indecisive paralysis. This summer I will be visiting my friend Judy in Kentucky one evening. She can email me directions: “look for the junked old truck and turn right about a hundred yards farther on; then I’m the third driveway on the left.” Or she can provide me with a map (or, these days, I can Google up a map myself). I always go for the map. I crave pictures (maybe “diagrams” is a better word), not words. A couple of weeks ago I sprung for a more detailed roadmap of Kentucky instead of relying on the smaller map in my road atlas. It was as if a microscope adjustment had brought everything into focus. Now I see just the route I want to take, and it is not the one I previously had in mind. I stare at that loopy line and imagine myself now on a muggy summer evening, tooling through the bluegrass greenery on that twisty old road, wondering what is beyond each bend, over each rise.

And maps give choices. Some years ago, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, his first book, rocketed up the bestseller list. The title comes from the fact that on roadmaps way back—before interstates, children!—primary routes were printed in red, secondary routes in blue. Least Heat Moon decided to take only blue highways around this land of ours. The book has become a minor classic, for one thing because Least Heat Moon is a first class writer (a poet, really) and for another because something in all of us wants to get off the interstates or even the proto-interstates. Get off the red and mosey along on the blue, pilgrim.

More people, more towns, more roads, more choices. A look at a roadmap of the whole USA will show this starkly. The East is swarming with roads, with choices. If you can’t get there from here in New Jersey, it’s not the fault of the highway department. The Midwest continues to hold its own. But then you get to the West and you realize what we mean by wide open spaces: darned few roads. One of the disappointments of the West is that for all practical purposes you often can get there from here only on endless, shimmering interstates, cruise control heaven. You have to get to California before you have more choices again (and, ironically, even more interstates and expressways).

Maps are only terrestrial. By that I mean the crashingly obvious point that there are no roads in the ocean (“whale paths” notwithstanding) or in the air. There are routes, I guess, routes determined by compass bearings and more sophisticated methods that are beyond me. But only dry land lets us put our imprint on it. There is another side to that coin, I suppose. At sea, as long as I keep an eye out for icebergs and shoals and whatnot, I can pretty much steer whatever course I want, even as my “road” closes up behind me. On the other hand, maybe if I had the world’s most formidable tank I could go from here to El Paso by dead reckoning, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. Roads call the tune. They give us freedom but it’s a restricted freedom even if we seldom realize it.

Should one savor the journey or the destination? That old trope has been kicking about for years. I think one is supposed to plump for the journey and all its attendant virtues: take your time, smell the roses, don’t be like that crazy, destination-obsessed white rabbit. I suppose that is true if you really are traveling aimlessly, something we should all do at least once. But a road map can be like a treasure map, too. Oh, you don’t have to dig around to find South Laguna. It’s there in plain sight, just north of Dana Point. But South Laguna is where our old friends Bob and Brenda are waiting for us. They’re the treasure. It’s all one and all good as far as I’m concerned.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Pandora

mcone — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:14:04 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 8, 2010

Quite often there is something new at the stump in the bosque. Last week it was that rosary; on tomorrow’s run I’ll probably find something else. About a month ago, I found this note, protected from the elements with plastic:

Letter to the Cross Remover

To the person who removed the cross from our stump and who may or may not be the person who removed an earlier cross from the stump that a trail worker carved years ago to remember a fallen loved one and to create a place for others to meditate and pray.

This is not to admonish you or threaten you, but to inform you that your act is one of the most reprehensible inhumane actions others have done for centuries and, regrettably, still do. You did what some Spanish settlers did when they came upon a Kachina.

To my Trail/Stump Comrades: I’ll replace the cross with one more difficult to remove, and I’ll say a prayer for you and yours in Church on Easter. [By the way, for full disclosure, I have not been to church for ten years, am not a “religious” person, and have limited my prayer places to our stump, where I feel spiritual healing.] Amor Love/Esqh, GP*

Well. Now I knew a little bit about the history of the stump, and I knew that it had a fierce guardian. I trotted on in a brown study. I knew that the little stump was nothing if not ecumenical. We had the crosses and New Testament verses, the mezuzah, the smudge sticks and dream catchers, and the Buddhist prayer flags. I wondered why we hadn’t heard from the Druids, though a Druid could claim the stump itself, I suppose. But here was discord in Paradise. A Christian squaring off against a putative atheist, by the look of it. Rodney King’s plaintive words came to me: Can’t we all just get along? A couple of weeks later the letter was gone and an appropriately rude cross—two bosque sticks wired together—was in its place. More mystery, but something—peace, I hope—had been restored.

About two weeks ago now, I was nearing the stump at a trot and saw two men chatting there. I stopped, bade them good morning, and made some remark about the stump. I wound up talking for at least twenty minutes to George Peknik, the guardian of the stump and writer of the letter. He is an interesting—no, a remarkable—man.

The first thing one notices about George—although his speech is clear enough—is the twist to his mouth, typical evidence of nerve damage, and the story was not long in coming. About three years ago, when the Pekniks lived up in Colorado, George went out in the yard to clean up after a windstorm. As he stood under the three big cottonwoods in his front yard, a microburst occurred and “ a half ton of limbs and branches from high in two trees fell on my head and shoulders.”

An event like that is either life-ending or life-changing. George was lucky. He spent weeks in a coma and months in recuperation. He became ambivalent about trees, especially cottonwoods, the defining tree of the bosque, and who can blame him? But about six months ago he and his wife moved to Albuquerque, where their son and grandsons live, to a place right on the edge of the bosque. He could no longer afford the ambivalence. He became a Trail Watch Volunteer and a denizen of the bosque. He became a mystic, a poet, a philosopher. He became the Druid that I had been musing about! In his writings—yes, George is a writer, too—he refers to his “rewired brain and reinvigorated heart.” A decent man before the accident, be became an even more spiritual and caring man after it.

There is a special part of the bosque that George has dubbed Pandora, after the forest planet in Avatar. It is easy to see—literally—why. The bosque has been cleared of underbrush to lessen the fire danger and those cottonwoods seem to writhe and dance before your eyes. To say they are living would be understatement. The stump is the epicenter of Pandora. And I think George’s pique at whoever removed the cross was more spiritual than narrowly religious: when people leave things on the stump, they are meant to stay there. No one gets to edit the stump! Oh, and I was wrong about the stump’s being the Bank of the Bosque. A fellow whose old dog is in bad shape collects whatever money is left on the stump once a week, adds to it, and gives it to the Animal Humane Society.

The origin of the stump is a bit of a mystery. Some people say that a forest worker first put a cross on the stump five or six years ago to honor a (fallen?) friend and that act inspired others to add their own offerings, their own mementoes. I guess we’ll never really know. And that’s as it should be.

* “Esqh” means “love” in Farsi. George and his wife spent many years in the Middle East.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Holy Mackerel

mcone — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:25:03 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 25, 2010

The bala haunts me.

I mean the bala shark I wrote about last week. For twenty years he has resided in our living room fish tank. Twenty years. Back and forth (or, in a daring reversal, forth and back; actually he just hangs still, mostly). Think what has happened in that time. Four presidential administrations. The fall of the Berlin Wall. 9/11. Our two kids’ growing up, suffering through their adolescence, and leaving the nest. And still the bala just hung in there, staring glumly. A cloistered monk is a cosmopolite compared to poor Bala.

Sometimes one would like to be a bird, to revel in the freedom of the skies. Or a grizzly bear, monarch of the North. Or a galloping steed. But I can’t imagine anyone aspiring to be a fish; no one, I’ll warrant, has piscine dreams.

Just for starters, what kind of life is it without arms or legs? Oh, fins, yeah. Big deal. And can fish make any vocal noises, aren’t they forever mute? Ah, enchanting whale song, you say—forgetting that whales are not fish.

Consider those fish that live in the abyssal zone, the very deepest parts of the oceans, five, six miles down, at enormous pressure and temperatures hovering just above freezing. Grotesque, they are, most of them—the stuff of fever dreams. Most if not all are blind. But shed no tears for them. No light ever penetrates this abysmal inky black, so there is absolutely nothing to see. They live their whole lives in the dark and cold.

Or consider the benthic fishes, specifically the flatfish. “Benthic” in this regard means that they spend most of their time lying on the bottom instead of cruising above the sea floor, like your shark or your haddock. The halibut, sometimes called the cow of the sea, is a good example. (Halibut actually means “holy flatfish,” because it was favored for meatless holy days.) Like the flounder, it begins life on an even keel, so to speak, just like a bass or a salmon. But then, when it hits the equivalent of piscine puberty, its eyes begin to migrate to one side of its head! And you thought your adolescence, your voice squeaky and zits breaking out, was traumatic! Ha! A halibut then spends the rest of its life mostly lying flat on the bottom, making just occasional forays to the upper reaches, awkward and, well, floundering. And to top it off, it has to endure that tiresome pun, “I did it just for the halibut.” Oh please.

Spare a thought for the salmon, while you’re at it. Magnificent fish, the salmon. We all know the life story: how the young salmon leave the spawning ground for the open ocean and then after a time the urge to procreate becomes so overwhelming that they head hellbent for wherever they had started out, swimming upstream in multitudes, leaping over obstacles with balletic grace and power. An epic journey indeed. And if they don’t become lunch for that grizzly in the second paragraph, they do finally, exhausted but triumphant, arrive home. Where they procreate and then more or less promptly die. Not for me, thank you.

One often sees the fish symbol on Christian cars—I mean cars owned by professing Christians—these days. Fish and Christians go way back. (I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the phrase “Holy mackerel,” but Irish immigrants were called “mackerel snappers,” because they were Catholics; it was not a compliment.) Tradition has it that most of the apostles were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Christ, always quick with a metaphor, promised that he would make them fishers of men, and he blessed the five loaves and two fishes in that famous miracle. Until fairly recently, Catholics ate no meat (i.e., flesh as opposed to fish) on Fridays. During the early days of persecution, it is said, the simple fish shape—two curves intersecting at one end—identified Christians to each other. A (closet) Christian would draw the top curve and another would draw the bottom curve, revealing himself. Often this was drawn in the dirt so it could be quickly erased. Thus evolved the fish symbol that you see today on the back of your neighbor’s SUV.

And then them smart aleck Darwinians come along and stick feet on it. Fish don’t get no respect.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Stump

mcone — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:54:22 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 2, 2010

Along my current running route in the Rio Grande bosque, not far from where Borghi, our late cat, rests, is a modest little stump. A foot and a half high, perhaps, and maybe seven inches across. It is not even cut cleanly through: though it definitely was sawed, the sawyer seems to have got discouraged at some point and tried again from one angle and again from another. I assume it is the stump of a young cottonwood.

What sets this little stump apart from all the others in the bosque is that it is festooned with…stuff. Most of the stuff is of a religious or at least spiritual nature. Other contributions—many people have contributed to it, and continue to—are more secular and mystifying. For example, there are several of those little pink flags that I think landscapers use. And there is the odd nickel or dime or quarter. Someone actually seems to have done an accounting and left a record of the money (about $8.75 at last audit). Is this a kind of bosque bank, a rustic credit union where some make deposits and others take out loans, all on the honor system? Beats me. Not a bad idea, though.

Here is a partial inventory of articles found on top of, draped around, or leaning against, the stump: little sea shells, including some cowry shells; colored yarn; smudge sticks; dream catchers; rude crosses; holy cards and medals; Bible verses, printed or in longhand; Tibetan prayer flags; earrings; cuff links (I think); secular medallions; a small abstract statue (a broken chessman?); a couple of door keys; key chains (fobs); and dog tags (for real dogs, not GIs). On my run this morning, I noticed a rosary, a new addition, though I will bet it is not the first rosary to adorn the stump. Also in this secular/religious clutter is, if I am not mistaken, a mezuzah case, the kind that holds a rolled up scripture and is found on the door posts of Jewish homes. (The Star of David and Hebrew letters are unmistakable, and there are small holes at each end for the fastening brads.)

I almost forgot: also a very clunky man’s wristwatch—I mean the wristwatch is clunky; I haven’t a clue about the man (well, from his taste, maybe I do). Big steel expansion band and, on the dial, a photograph of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Allen has his right hand raised (a blessing for the wearer?). The watch ticks no more, I should add. Neither, of course, does Allen.

“Almost forgot” #2: a shell casing, Smith and Wesson 40 caliber. Serious firepower. But spent: maybe that’s the message, though I suspect there is no message.

I do suspect that many of these contributions mean nothing at all beyond a kind of magpie spirit that lives in all of us (though it is always tempting to try to supply a meaning, and anyone can play). Is the Ginsberg watch some homage to the Beats? Or maybe, rather, to the god Chronos? Is the shell casing an eloquent commentary on violence, or non-violence? I doubt it, in both cases. All of us magpies collect stuff, and the shinier the better. I pull out the drawer in this desk and, lo, there are a fifty pence piece, some trolley tokens, a single prism from some trashed chandelier, an angel medallion (shoot! I meant to take that down to the stump!), the world’s tiniest bubble level, many old rabies tags, the spare key to our unlamented Dodge Aries, and so on. When our kids pore through these drawers after the funeral, they will probably say, “What a buncha crap the old man saved!” But I think—I hope—they will say it with wry grins. We all have these silly troves, and somehow I think they do us credit.

And what of the crosses, the smudge sticks, the mezuzah, the holy cards? Well, they are clearly religious or at least spiritual (we can wrestle with that distinction later). And the bosque is the obvious place for them. How many philosophers, after all, have said that nature—make that Nature-- was our first church? The folks who have put the spiritual symbols on the stump, the same, I would guess, who stop there when they and their dogs walk that peaceful, secluded bosque trail—they “get it,” as we say these days. They know what the bosque means.

This morning I was communing beside the Rio Grande, just a few yards from the trail, when I heard this guy yammering away loudly with one of those Bluetooth devices stuck in his ear. He was walking his two dogs, but the poor animals were being pretty much dragged along, so absorbed was he in some inane conversation. At first I got really angry—I’m Irish, after all—but then I thought, “You poor bastard. You think you’re so wonderfully ‘connected.’ But here in this holy bosque you are not at all connected with what matters. And you don’t even know it.”

Meet Your Macinstructor

Something Fishy This Way Comes

mcone — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:00:53 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 11, 2010

Lately I have been thinking about fish. Maybe you should too. We pay too little attention, I think, to what goes on in the deep blue sea and even in the aquarium and the fish pond. On the other hand, what goes on may be little more exciting than watching algae grow.

A case in the last point is the fish that the Sheas have: a dozen or more goldfish in the fish pond in the back yard, and our bala shark in the living room aquarium tank. Suffice it to say, there is not a drama queen in the lot. Truth is, we seldom know they are there, except perhaps for the bala shark, which we pass on the way to the john.

I dug the fish pond over twenty years ago and lined it with enough cement to build a highway overpass (a sign of the true amateur engineer). The goldfish are the very common variety, the ones you win at the carnival (and eventually flush down the toilet) or feed to your caiman (which, thankfully, I don’t have anymore). I like to think they are grateful that I rescued them. The pond has no inlet or outlet but I try to keep it clean in the summer, when I muck it out and rig a pump and makeshift fountain. We are supposed to sit beside it in the morning and enjoy its Zen-like tranquility, but we seldom do. Come October, the leaves fall in and I do my insufficient best to rake them out and flush the pond to dilute the crud. In the winter I chop the ice out—sometimes it is about four inches thick, which leaves precious little room for the fish, who are patiently waiting out the winter. But they are always still there in the spring like poor relations, hungry for food and the attention that they will never get. Actually I did find a deceased goldfish yesterday, which quite surprised me. First casualty in three or four years. I will chalk it up to old age—the fish’s, that is--although I have only the haziest idea of goldfish longevity.

The bala shark is not a true shark, as any fish fancier knows. It is, rather, a balantiocheilos melanopteros, native to Southeast Asia and a very popular denizen of your 50-gallon aquarium. It is called a shark, I imagine, because of its streamlined shape and very prominent dorsal fin. I can tell you that balas live longer than goldfish. I checked with the Long Suffering Diana. She says we got him about 20 years ago! For 20 years that fellow has swum back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with, sometimes, a couple of algae-eating plecostomusses (plecostomi?) for company. For quite a while he had a silver dollar for a tank mate, a dollar, alas, no longer in circulation. He looks to be about eight inches long, and he is actually quite handsome, with dark edging on his elegant, feathery fins.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Or floating mid-level like a becalmed submarine (I just checked on him; he gave me slim greeting). It is tempting to cobble up a romantic story of his being scooped up in the Mekong Delta by an old Vietnamese fisherman who instantly deemed him too special (and too small) to eat and sent him to his grandson’s pet shop in Albuquerque. I suspect instead that he never saw the wild at all, but was born on a factory fish farm. Maybe that was a kindness. And something tells me that it would not be a kindness to smuggle him out the Rio Grande and release him. (Never underestimate the mischief that a guilty conscience can make.)

What I am trying to do—a fool’s errand, yes—is to get inside a fish’s head. It is so hard to get out of one’s own (human) head. You’ll have guessed that I find that poor bala’s life absolutely intolerable (back and forth, back and forth…). But maybe it’s not. Maybe he has such a low-wattage brain (now I’m insulting the poor scaly beast!) that such a life is just hunky-dory with him. Hell for me, heaven for him. Food every night, and if he has other urgings of the flesh he is not very demonstrative about them.

I guess there is just no empathizing or even sympathizing with fish. I’d put them somewhere above daffodils and oysters but far below the acumen and sensitivity of, oh, your average frog.

On the other hand, maybe his intellect and awareness are far superior to mine. Perhaps in his little piscine brain he is writing, line by tortured line, an epic of bala sharks since their beginnings. Perhaps he is composing deathless music (a new pantheon: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bala!). Perhaps last weekend he discovered the secret that still eludes our most brilliant nuclear physicists. And then promptly forgot it and went on to ponder more profound mysteries.

Back and forth, back and forth…. Lord knows he has little else to do.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Sic Transit

mcone — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:24:39 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 28, 2010

A friend died last week.

But because there are so many ways to leave this life, let me be more specific. Hector Torres, my friend and colleague in the UNM English Department, was murdered. This happened because his girlfriend, Stephania Gray, had an ex-boyfriend who shot them both dead. I don’t feel constrained by the legal nicety of referring to him as the “alleged” killer, because he turned himself in the next day. Had things gone differently—the police, the courts, and other involved agencies are, too late, blaming each other—this horrible thing might not have happened. Now, too late, we are seeking justice. But that’s a wonk for another day. Right now I haven’t the stomach for it.

No one gets out of this world alive runs the platitude. But when I got home from Hector’s funeral last Saturday, I emailed a couple of old friends. I don’t know if I wanted to relieve some of the emotional pressure of the morning or perhaps—and I don’t think this perverse—keep the morning/mourning alive. I certainly was in a mood to reflect upon death and loss and last things. Judy emailed back, allowed as how she had never attended the funeral of someone who had been murdered and surely that must have added a powerful extra ration of sadness and outrage for the mourners. The saddest funeral she had ever attended was that of a child who died of a brain tumor, and after much suffering. That’s sad, too, of course; the death of the young and innocent always has a special poignancy. One can imagine the parents, hollow-eyed and drained. But “much suffering” struck a chord with both of us. When someone suffers a long and painful and irreversible illness, something in us wants to shout, “Free at last, free at last!” and rejoice in that person’s deliverance. We even have a phrase for this: to be out of one’s misery.

My mother’s death was like that. For two years she suffered more pain than I can imagine. In an awful irony, her pain helped us through her death. Everyone at the funeral was quick to say that she at least suffered no more, and that was true. We all grabbed hold of that. Had she died in some senseless traffic accident, or from a sudden heart attack, toggled in an instant from vibrant life to death, that would have added another layer of bewildered rage. Nonetheless, my father was never the same again. The dead do leave us, after all, and at some unconscious level it is hard for us to forgive them that.

I guess what I am struggling with here is the old concept of the “good death.” Is there such a thing? The traditional picture I suppose, right out of Hollywood or Dickens, is of the old patriarch slipping away, in his own bed and attended by his old wife and his children. He has lived a long life and lived it honorably. He murmurs his last, wise, words and is gone. A good death for a good man. If I say that such a death is devoutly to be wished, you will probably respond with the flippant, “Yeah right, you wish!” and so would I.

We have to accept death, having no choice, but we are under no obligation to accept it gracefully. “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, and then, in one of the most beautiful headlong lines I know: “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.”

Death is contemptible.

Which brings us back to Hector Torres and Stephania Gray. There is absolutely nothing you can come up with to mitigate the evil that was visited upon them. You can’t use the cancer scenario and squeeze a hard comfort from that suffering. You can’t put it down to randomness, to being in the wrong place at the wrong time (even a drunk driver doesn’t intend to kill, let alone to kill specific, targeted people). This man, this monster, said—Sweet Christ, I don’t know what he said, except that it clearly was all about himself, he being his own death-dealing god.

We did the best we could at the funeral. We sang the good, healing hymns, Hector’s kin and a couple of close friends spoke simply and eloquently about the man they had known, and the priest was the best lobbyist that the afterlife could have. On the way out, we cried and hugged.

After all, what else could we do?

Meet Your Macinstructor

What Mac Brazel Found, or What Would We Do Without Weather Balloons?

mcone — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:48:05 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Longsuffering Diana and I spent last weekend staying with friends in Roswell, New Mexico. We breezed through Roswell many years ago, but this time we discovered a little city with a lot to offer. Roswell is home to the venerable New Mexico Military Institute and to the Roswell Industrial Air Center. It boasts the Roswell Museum and Art Centre, and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. (Don Anderson, a capable artist in his own right, and his brother Robert founded the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company. With those hefty profits, Don sponsors ten artists a year who live at his compound and paint or sculpt to their hearts’ content, the only stipulation being to create something to leave behind for the museum.) The Roswell area also contains probably the largest concentration of dairy farms in the Southwest, and those thousands of milk cows feed a huge cheese plant that churns out mozzarella and Parmesan like that mill that grinds salt at the bottom of the sea. Their only customers are Kraft Foods and Domino’s Pizza.

So there’s a lot going on in Roswell. But unless you have been living under the proverbial rock all your life, you know what Roswell is really, indelibly, and internationally known for. That’s right: the “Roswell Incident” back in 1947. As if the conspiracy bloggers and the X-Files types haven’t given it robust life, Roswell itself has got into the act. Our first visit was to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, on North Main Street in the old Plains movie theater building.

Here, briefly, is the story. On 4 July 1947, there were violent thunderstorms in east central New Mexico. On the morning of 5 July, Mac Brazel was checking for damage on his ranch near Corona, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, the nearest town of any size. He found a lot of mysterious debris strewn about, the result of some kind of crash. He gathered up this mysterious metallic stuff and took it to Sheriff Wilcox in Roswell the next day. Wilcox took it to the folks at Roswell Army Air Field, and then the fun began.

The army sent investigators to Corona, and the crash area was cordoned off. In a grisly turn, they asked a local undertaker, Glenn Dennis, how many child-sized caskets he could lay hands on. A nurse witnessed doctors performing autopsies on what were clearly not human life forms. She was hustled away. In a move that really astounds me, Col. William Blanchard, commanding officer of RAAF, then told his Public Information Officer, Lt. Walter Haut, to issue a press release (8 July 1947) to the effect that a “flying disk” (aka, a flying saucer, a UFO) had crashed up in Corona. Either Blanchard was incredibly naïve about army procedures or pathologically credulous and honest. At any rate, before you could say “Fox Mulder,” the “flying disk” had turned into that old standby, a weather balloon. (I swear, if half of New Mexico witnessed a huge flying saucer with aliens waving out the portholes while singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the authorities would say it was a…weather balloon.)

Well, things eventually died down. Several people said they were crudely intimidated. That nurse was transferred to England. Brazel never talked about it again (but refused to believe it was a weather balloon). Then, thirty years later, people began to come forward, people who said they had indeed seen the bodies, and so forth. And these were reputable people, not loons. Best guess on the bodies now is that they are in a sub-basement cooler up at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio or sequestered at that wonderful catch-all of the extraterrestrial, Area 51 in the Nevada desert. In the early 1990s, Haut and Dennis spearheaded the effort to establish the UFO museum.

So what do you think? Or what do I think? I pride myself on being skeptical in such matters. Lord knows we have had our share of dubious UFO sightings and of alien abduction stories from people who are clearly unstable. But too many very stable people are coming forward now. Col. Blanchard appeared to believe whatever it was that his investigators first reported. Glenn Dennis did not dream up that request for child-sized caskets. And then there’s that nurse. And the more the army—later the Air Force—tried to explain it away, the more desperately absurd, even contradictory, their explanations got.

Something truly weird happened out there. Something.

Meet Your Macinstructor