From the 'Why Bother' File

The National Geographic Channel is free this month with my television satellite subscription. I usually enjoy the programs on this channel but sometimes disturbing information is shown. Yesterday I watched a program about three people who are each convinced they are Jesus returned.

One poor guy has no followers whatsoever. No one believes him. One guy is a former Christian minister from the Philippines who claims millions of followers around the world. He flies around in the sacred helicopter and lives in palatial surroundings and apparently all of his followers are beautiful and whole. The original Jesus never had it so good! The third guy wears white robes and seems terribly angelic.

Do we really think Jesus would have to announce to the world he is back? Would he have to wander the world barefoot without a single follower, or fly around in a helicopter and accept tithes in the millions of dollars? Would he really wear white robes and walk around like a ghost?

Why would these three people deserve a National Geographic program about them? I guess it is true that you get what you pay for.

My Ideas On 25 Years of Marriage

Right away I want to clarify that I am genuinely impressed when two people can remain married for twenty five years. Consider that in the last twenty five years of my life I have been married twice and divorced twice, resulting in a net sum of six years of holy matrimony. I hardly had time to memorize my married name(s) before I was at the courthouse signing divorce papers. A quarter of a century is an overwhelming amount of time, relatively speaking. Is it natural for people to remain married that long? Is it even possible without some sort of coercion?

I have seen photographs of couples who have remained married for fifty or sixty years, sometimes much longer. Their anniversary picture is often shown beside their wedding photograph, so it is plain to see what decades of marriage do to people. I have also observed that people tend to resemble one another after years of marriage. Women need to seriously consider this.

Raising a family might be a good reason to remain under the same roof for more than a few years. Buying food in bulk saves a lot of money and there are the family discounts at popular tourist attractions. If one or more of your offspring begin exhibiting a number of your spouse's disagreeable traits, would those savings really be worth it?

I have known some couples who remained married apparently to continue tormenting each other. Now that is an excellent reason to stay married in my mind. It is a reason I can understand, one I can whole-heartedly embrace. Think of the satisfaction twenty five years of daily irritants like hogging the remote or being forced to hold her purse.

There may be some secret to remaining married for two and one half decades, something I have yet to consider. Maybe separate controls for the electric blanket and the solemn agreement to not hang wallpaper together. I once read about a woman murdering her husband after a dispute involving wallpaper. I passed that information on to my daughter when she married, but in reality, what woman needs a lame excuse like that? When the time comes for my son to marry, you can bet I will warn him about wallpapering.

There could be biological reasons why people remain married. Maybe after a certain number of family vacations taken together in the family car, a genetic mutation occurs and people are then biologically compelled to remain married. I believe that is what happened to my own parents. When I think back, it was probably the year all seven of us went on vacation to Arkansas in a Rambler station wagon.

It was the Sixties. No seat belts, no air conditioning, and 80 mph was the minimum traveling speed. One of my brothers dropped a beebee into my youngest brother's ear, sending him screaming over the front seat in a panic. All fathers have a sex related gene behavior that prevents them from stopping for any reason on vacation. Either my mom mutated or simply lost her will at that instant. No way to really know what happened but my parents are still married.

Originally written for friends celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.

Shoe Dispersion Rates

It is not much of a mystery how a single shoe might come to be discarded along the pavement of any street or highway. The genuine mystery for me is the number of shoes, boots, high heels, athletic and baby shoes I have noticed over the years.

Maybe the work boots and heavy shoes fall off tool boxes or running boards when they are left by absent minded working men, perhaps after a few too many cold beers? Baby shoes might be thrown out by the babies themselves, or their bored siblings, or maybe they blow off the dash and out the window when Dad gets the family Ford up to speed.

The biggest mystery is how someone can lose a single, size 13 Air Jordan along the Interstate. While I have sometimes witnessed bare feet hanging out a passenger window, I have not seen nearly as many bare feet as I have seen single lost athletic shoes. Does an angry girlfriend throw out half of his footgear? Is the first guy to pass out on a road trip penalized by losing one of his shoes?

I have seen high heels the least often, but they too fall on the pavement, to lay abandoned and forlorn. There is always a fleeting fear that a woman was being transported against her will, but most likely a high heel is lost for the same reason all the other shoes are lost from vehicles.

I also wonder why humans lose shoes out of their cars more than any other item. It seems a shirt or a hat would be the most likely to blow out of a window. I have seen far more shoes along the road than hats. When you think of the number of American feet and multiply that by the five or six pairs of shoes a person has at any stage of life, that makes a huge number of shoes traveling with us in our vehicles at any given time. While we might travel with one hat, we always travel with two shoes. But, a pair of shoes is far more necessary than a hat. It does not add up.

It is a true mystery.

There is probably a scientific explanation for this, maybe a dispersion theory that addresses the rate of lost shoes. When the number of shoes reaches a given density in a population, the rate of shoe dispersion across miles of highways is equal to the sum of disposable income divided by the rate of alcohol consumption, where X is the national rate of carelessness.

This does not begin to address the urban numbers of athletic shoes seen hanging from wires.

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Cyberkit provides this link to a wonderful web site dedicated to lost soles: here

Algebra = Chicken Feed

The rains arrived at last and all things are washed free of the thick burden of many weeks of dust. The prairie, now radiant in her red gown, is dressed for the winter. These timely, natural events wheel in with the turn of the season and I deeply appreciate them. I never know what lesson the natural world holds out for me. It can be as simple as chicken feed.

The chicken flock was decimated this summer by mysterious death and unfortunate predation, leaving only three experienced and wise chickens alive: two of the Weird sisters and the matriarch Tenzing Norgay. The other chickens are babies, one season old to just a few months. Essentially, they are the surviving of the fittest. They must be fairly smart.

The babies only know that I throw their scratch under a certain tree. Yesterday morning in the pouring rain, I attempted to show them I was throwing their scratch under the front porch deck. When they saw me, they knew it was time to eat. They came running, chuckling and murmuring in anticipation. When they saw the bright yellow cup, they began sorting out their pecking order because the feed was about to fall. When I called them a short distance away so they could see the feed fall on the ground beneath the porch, they stood looking at me, muttering worriedly among themselves.

Then Tenzing arrived on the scene. She is the smartest chicken I know. She understands that scratch can be tossed just about anywhere on any given day. Surely Tenzing would understand and lead the others to their dry breakfast, but she was stumped, too.

It was simply too many steps in the algebraic equation for them. It exceeded their logic capacity. I well know that feeling. It is not painful to exceed the limit of my working brain capacity. There is only a roaring silence as I wait for the universe to serve up something I can handle.

Given N + 2 = 4, I can solve for N. Confronted with: 6<=a+2<=-8+10, I am exactly like my chickens: uuuuh?

The Winter Friends

Orion

The winter constellations slowly wheeling above a mild November night are truly the most beautiful sight. Past midnight, mighty Orion stands upright in the south, flexing his eternal bow toward the West, and Sirius the dog star, the brightest star of all, follows faithfully at his heels.


Pleiades

High in the tree tops along the west bank of Spirit Creek are the Seven Sisters, daughters of Atlas, glowing in their blue gowns.

Nearby, Cassiopeia, the beautiful but vain queen, sails silent and sorrowful, eternally repenting the boast that her daughter Andromeda was more lovely than the nymph daughters of the sea. Poseidon condemned Cassiopeia to be tied to a throne in the sky.



Opposite Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper pours abundant blessings down from the northern sky. This time of year it hangs vertical in the sky.



Images by Jerry Lodriguss, Astrophotographer. Visit his website here.

Pleiades from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Visit the website here.

Bare Trees

Sunrise

Since I moved to Spirit Creek, I have noticed that the trees in this valley are much later to bud in the spring than the trees in Topeka, and these leaves fall several weeks earlier. Whenever I have mentioned this rather remarkable discrepancy - after all, it is less than thirty miles as the crow flies - some people insist it is due to the sheltered lives of city trees, that they are shielded from the ravages of the wind.

I do not agree with that argument. Only tornadoes and extreme straight winds blow leaves off their trees prematurely. Whatever natural mechanism that binds leaves tightly to the trees changes much earlier here then in town. The weather this fall has been relatively windless, but my trees began shedding their leaves far ahead of the city trees, as usual. I think it has more to do with the artificial light in a city than it has to do with wind. There are also many different species of trees in the city. Different trees might lose their leaves at a different rate than the ones growing along Spirit Creek.

It always takes a few days to adjust to bare trees. Their leaves provide almost complete privacy from the road. They hide the view of neighbor's buildings and soften the noise of power tools or hammering, which are thankfully infrequent. The profusion of mature leaves dresses the land in the look of generosity and abundance. Once the leaves are gone, and the prairie plants have diminished, it seems empty and lonely and cold, except for the tall russet covering of big blue stem, Indian grass and the other hardy tall grasses.

I like the late fall and winter on the prairie. No insects, no snakes, no suffering through high heat and humidity, and I have to work pretty hard to get poison ivy. I do not mind the winter months. But like every living thing, I welcome the return of the leaves each spring.

Jack and the Blue Bicycle

I do not know why, but I have been remembering Jack the neighbor boy who was a year ahead of me in school. He was my nemesis in several categories. He asked fifth grade questions, confident I could not answer since I was merely in fourth grade. I hated that he was always right. Almost fifty years later it finally occurs to me that he could easily have been lying. No body is right ALL the time. I conceded to his older and wiser pronouncements whether I was right or wrong in his slightly mean-spirited Jack Jeopardy.

Though I was strong and tough from riding horses since I was old enough to sit up, Jack was a boy, and one year older, a worthy opponent. I wanted to win when we raced our bikes, or played tag, or war, or whatever game the neighborhood gang was playing. I do not remember losing foot races but I certainly remember losing when we raced bicycles. Jack had an old heavy metal bike, a relic from the last decade, maybe older, maybe even before WWII. I did not have a bike, so I had to race riding his bike, while he rode his older brother's "newer" bike. Though he normally won, I at least had a fighting chance.

Then, my mother ordered a brand new blue Sears and Roebuck 26" girl's bike for me. It had a battery powered light and white handle grips. There was a flat steel platform above the back fender, with white pin striping. I could beat Jack riding my brand new bike. For a short, glorious, euphoric stretch, I won every race against Jack, confidently hauling past him on my new blue bicycle, taunting him into a race to the end of the block, to the school, past Robinson's bushes. Those were sweet days of victory and vindication and outright gloating. I rubbed it in - deep.

But then, my mother, the woman who found a million and three ways to ruin my life at every opportunity, slammed a sudden and horrible handicap on my racing victories. There was only one reason money was spent for such an extravagant purchase: to help my mother. I walked to the little grocery store downtown at least every other day to purchase a few bags of groceries and cigarettes for my mother. If I had wheels, my mother could expect far speedier deliveries. My birthday falls a few days before Christmas, so getting a new bike in the summer was suspect from the first.

The full enormity of her diabolical plan was revealed when Grandpa showed up to install big, ugly wire baskets on either side of the rear tire. Now I could haul fifty pounds of groceries for my mother. I was the only kid in town with old-lady wire baskets on her bike. The thrill of whipping Jack at bike racing was severely diminished. It was difficult to be cool and fast when your bike looked like the Wicked Witch of the West's evil contraption.

My luck crashed even further for within a week or so of the wire basket installation, Jack and his brother and sister received brand new bicycles. They were made overseas of unobtainium, with narrow tires and sparkly paint. My big American steel roadster with wide tires and ugly baskets could not compete against Jack's racers. I clearly remember the depressing realization that I would never again win a bike race against Jack - not unless I could talk him into trading bikes. One time he consented to ride my old-lady bike and let me ride his golden Ferrari bicycle in a race. I won easily but it was the last time. After that, he would not trade bikes and I would not race him, no matter what he said to goad me. We were still friends, and we still rode bikes together, but there was no racing.

Several years ago for my birthday, my kids took me to a restaurant in Lawrence. In late December, in the dark and snow, chained to a light post by the front doors, where I could not miss it, was an old Sears girl's bike with a flat metal platform above the rear fender. It was the same color blue and had white pin striping. It had been restored. It was minus the baskets, but it was the very same model my mother had ordered out of the Sears catalog decades ago.

I was delighted and explained it was exactly like the brand new bicycle my mother had ordered for me one summer. My daughter said "It's Grandma saying happy birthday to ya, Mom." And so it was.

Not my original bike, but very, very close.