Now We Are Six (Months)

Vaska turned six months old a couple of weeks ago and I thought I'd document the little fellow's progress.

He seems to be through the most outrageous growth period, but he still surprises anyone who hasn't seen him for a couple of weeks. He weighs about 70 pounds; I'm guessing he'll be around 110 when he's through, but I wouldn't be surprised if he differed by 10 pounds either direction. Right now, he's rangy and his feet and his leg joints are still outsized, so he'll add a bit more height and considerable weight before he's through.

He's like a gangly 13-year-old and sometimes can run with the pack at the park and then suddenly, particularly on a turn, will lose his footing and will at least go into a slide if he doesn't wipe out completely. This morning, he had a couple of times when he tried to rocket up the steep river bank and had to take a second shot at it.

He really is at a "tweener" stage, where he'll wrestle and run with the big dogs, but then, at the last moment, give a funny little puppy pounce, because he still is just a baby. Similarly, he has become a real dog companion to me, and I can see the adult dog he's going to be, but then, suddenly, he's a puppy again -- often at night, when it's time to go to sleep and he suddenly decides it's time for a tickle-fight and starts biting my hands. As with all good tickle-fights, the initial annoyance quickly dissolves into fits of giggling and the chances of going to sleep all but disappear.

Here he is with two of his best buddies, Tanner the Pit Bull and Bogey the Chocolate Lab, all having a tug at a foot-long chunk of knotted rope. He and Bogey will go long distances, each holding an end of the rope or stick, trotting along as if they were yoked like oxen, as Bogey's owner and I walk the length of the dam site park, which is where we all get together while the dog park is closed for mud season.

With Tanner, the game is more apt to be wrestling, though they enjoy a good tug, and actually, all three dogs really enjoy keepaway more than actual tugging. But Vaska's ability to learn has been very evident in his wrestling, and Tanner's owner and I have watched him pick up moves and then pull them off himself in the next round. Tanner is a little over a year old and they first met when Vaska was still a wee pup. Tanner was very gracious in scaling down to the puppy's abilities then, but all that is over now as they merrily fling each other around.

What is particularly interesting with these three is how generous they are about alternating who is dominant and who is submissive at any point in the game. They never lose their tempers with each other and are quite happy on top or bottom, just so long as the game is fast and loud.

Here are Vaska and Bogey sharing a duck retrieving dummy which floated down the Connecticut River from god-knows-where and was around the park for more than a week, providing lots of good fetching and fighting over. One advantage of the dog park -- which opens again this coming weekend -- is that dog toys stay there until they begin to fall apart, while, in an open, unfenced park like this one, well-meaning people think they're seeing litter or abandoned objects and pick them up. Alas, the duck disappeared well before it had been completely dismantled.

In 25 years of owning them, I've never had a ridgeback that I thought was particularly clever. They're not stupid dogs, but they are hounds and no hound has ever won a Nobel Prize for innovative thinking. However, Vaska not only learns wrestling holds but can think his way around things, and I am not used to that. The back porch is covered but open, and I had a cable slung around one of the pillars so he could go out in the unfenced yard, enjoy the sun and gnaw on a bone. But I realized he was losing more than a foot of freedom by virtue of that pillar, so I tied a length of rope around the pillar and clipped the cable to that.

And we promptly had our first jailbreak, as the little dickens figured out that, if he gnawed through the rope, he'd be free, albeit "free" trailing 20 feet of cable behind him. Fortunately, he didn't go far, but he continued to ponder the matter and, the next time we went to the post office, by golly, didn't I come back out to find him attempting to gnaw through the leash that was tied to a lamppost there?

He now has a chain lead and I've hidden the bolt cutters.

His life is extremely harsh. I get up between four and five in the morning and spend the next two or three hours working on ComicStripoftheDay.com. However, if you picture my faithful hound sleeping at my feet, you are deluding yourself, because that would require the faithful hound to get out of bed and walk into the next room, which is far too much effort for that time of day. He gets up around seven, usually when I've filed the blog and am starting to rattle pans in the kitchen.

He has some breakfast while I catch up on the rest of my on-line reading for the morning and then we head down to the park for an hour or more of walking and playing with whoever has turned up. And there's a second session in the late afternoon before dinner and an early bed time around 8:30 or 9. So, of the roughly 13 hours he's out of bed, three or four of them are spent at the park, which is a pretty good ratio.

However, last week, we were recruited to doggy sit for Cousin Puck while Jed and family went down to NYC for a couple of days. During that sojourn, he and Puck managed to stretch the keepaway/tugofwar time to something more in the nature of seven hours a day.

That worked well because, while the property is not fenced, there is an Invisible Fence and Puck has the collar that keeps him inside it. So both dogs stayed on the property. Until we went back for Easter dinner and Vaska decided to test a theory he had apparently been pondering, which is that only Puck has to worry about the Invisible Fence. However, the neighbor was very nice and brought him back, since she didn't need help putting in her garden after all.

Here is two minutes and forty seconds of the aforementioned seven hours, shot during our dogsitting gig.

Why I am not horrified by the TSA search

(We've now had more that 24 hours of delighted, hour-topping broadcast outrage over a little girl getting a secondary pat-down in an airport. Perhaps if these drama school drop-outs had spent a little time in the trenches before they became anchorpeople, they'd have covered a few stories like this one. In which, I would note in hindsight, it appears that the chief investigator and I were having a contest to see who could be more dry.)

Press-Republican, Plattsburgh NY

Wednesday, March 18, 1992

By Mike Peterson

Staff Writer

ROUSES POINT - An arrest at Champlain last week led to the disruption of a smuggling ring that encompassed three continents and a half-dozen countries, as U.S. Customs inspectors and the New York State Police combined to foil the importation of a shipment of nearly pure heroin.

   The initial arrest came March 11, when Alex Afful, 34, a citizen of Ghana living in Montreal, attempted to cross the border at Champlain with his three-year-old daughter According to Customs Service Special Agent in Charge John O’Hara, a routine computer check turned up Afful's name as a possible drug smuggler, and he was brought over to the customs shed for a secondary inspection

   There, a customs inspector discovered a stuffed toy dinosaur that had been re-sewed on one seam, which he then inspected more closely and finally opened, revealing heroin in the form of 89 hard-packed, tape-wrapped cylinders the thickness of a thumb, which had been put into condoms and tied off with dental floss. A search of the child turned up 10 more condoms of heroin, secreted in her snow boots.

   When the drugs were found on his daughter, Afful confessed that he was bringing the heroin into the country, and that he had previously carried the drug into Canada from Ghana by ingesting 101 condoms of the drug, which had originated in Thailand.

   By the time it arrived in Montreal, the drug had passed through Afful’s system and he was reluctant to re-swallow the condoms for the trip to New York City He was reluctant to do so, drug investigators said, because he had been sick the first time and the prospect was less appetizing on this leg of the journey.

   Accordingly, he devised the alternate stratagem of using the toy and the child's boots.

   Customs officers and troopers, realizing they had only 99 of Afful's reported 101 condoms of the drug, took him to CVPH Medical Center, where he was inspected by physicians who found no solid indication of more condoms. However, after enemas, Afful passed an additional condom.

   After further observation, it was decided that no more remained, and he was taken from the hospital.

    Afful’s daughter was returned to the custody of her mother in Montreal.

   Faced with the realities of his situation. Afful was persuaded to cooperate with authorities and called his contact in New York City, offering a police-provided false explanation for the delay of several days in his scheduled arrival. He was told to drive to Albany, where he met with Toure Daboya, 20, and Lakazo Ouro-Adohi, 22, citizens of Togo living in the Bronx. The two Togoans were arrested and. in turn, led officials to Judith Adarikor, a citizen of Ghana living in Yonkers, who was described as a central figure in the West African drug-smuggling ring.

   A search of Adarikor's residence turned up more drugs, as well as between $15,000 and $20,000 in cash She was arrested Monday night.

   All four face federal charges of possession of heroin, O'Hara said State charges may also be brought, he said, unless the strength and severity of the federal charges suggest that state prosecution would be superfluous.

   O'Hara described the border arrest as a combination of good investigative work and good fortune, since it would have been extremely difficult to intercept Afful once he cleared the border and reached New York City, his original destination

   Officials set the value of the heroin, which would have been diluted eight to 10 times to reach the appropriate potency for street use, at $1 million. Afful was paid $5,000 when he picked up the drug in London and was to have been paid an additional $5,000 upon delivery. A good monthly wage in Ghana is $50, O’Hara said.

   While Afful faces up to 40 years in prison, his arrest and subsequent trip to CVPH may have saved his life.

   "When they removed that last condom from him, it had started to rupture," O'Hara said. "The dental floss was gone and the condom was starting to go."

   Had that happened even at the hospital, chances of saving the man were slim, O'Hara said. "We estimate this stuff is about 90-percent pure; he probably wouldn't have lasted more than a minute," O'Hara said. "Apparently, he didn't know the danger of it, or didn't think it was that significant. We were concerned about his health, but then again, too, we wouldn't have been able to make the convoy (to Albany) if he were dead.” 

747 Cockpit of NASA SOFIA plane. in California

I've just started getting weekly pics from 360Cities.net and have thought about passing them on. There are some spectacular landscapes as well as oddities like the interior of a classic library, which is the piece that Richard Thompson passed along on Facebook and that got me playing with this.

The controls make me feel like a gunner in a ball turret, but they are controllable. And I suspect this particular view will delight a few of the people I know are checking in. But do explore the rest of what's available, because you can also, for example, use the site to visit the Royal Gorge.

Lecture with music, or vice versa

One of the benefits of living in a small community with an Ivy League college is that, if you keep your ear to the ground, you can stumble across some pretty interesting events.

South African musician and activist Johnny Clegg came to Dartmouth this week, delivering some classroom lectures on Wednesday and then delivering a kickass concert Thursday night. It wasn't terribly well promoted, but I spotted some posters while I was walking Vaska and I managed to make both his public lecture at the end of the day Wednesday and his concert. That picture is from the lecture part, and most Johnny Clegg fans wouldn't recognize it, since he's generally more colorful, but they would recognize it in that his concerts are a sort of confessional in which he talks about himself and his life and his country's culture and then slams you with some fantastic music and spectacle.

The lecture was more restrained than that.

I've been a fan since sometime in the late 80s when he came to Montreal and, in addition to giving a concert, appeared on local TV. I didn't make the concert -- probably a combination of a job that was often more than 9-to-5 and being a single dad. But I was blown away by his interview and one song on the TV show and went out and got a couple of his CDs.

Clegg was born in England but lived in Zimbabwe (his mother was Rhodesian) as well as Zambia and Israel before settling in South Africa, where, at 15, he saw a man on the street playing Zulu guitar, an instrument that uses different string placements and tunings to convert a European instrument for African music. The player was a maintenance man, but in his off hours, he gave the young white boy lessons on the instrument, and Clegg began to hang around the hostels where the migrant workers lived.

These, he recounts, were large residences, where a couple of thousand workers might live, and, because "home districts" are critical to Zulu identity, it was not uncommon for entire floors of hostels, or even whole hostels themselves, to be taken over by men from the same or allied districts. They worked during the week, but, on weekends, you could find them selling various native things or vending traditional food and beer, while dance teams practiced or competed against each other in the streets.

"When I first saw the war dances, I was smitten," Clegg said. "I'd done karate, which comes from centuries of Japanese tradition, and when I saw the war dances, I saw some of the same thing." The way the Zulu men moved in the dance not only reflected their daily lives and culture, but "carried certain messages about masculinity, certain messages, values and concepts." He applied himself to learning those as well as the music, and became accepted as, he admits, "something of a mascot" to one of the dance teams.

In the mid-1960s, hanging around the hostels was a little dubious, but what was plainly illegal was when he visited his Zulu friends in their districts. But the dance team was headed up country, to visit a district with a powerful chief who had 35 wives and 160 kids, and the now-16-year-old Clegg went with them.

"I had certain romantic ideas of Zulus from seeing them living in the city," he says, but seeing them at home changed his perspective. "It was a wild place for me," he says, and the difference in seeing them there rather than in the urban environment was that he now saw how they incorporated a world of animals -- both the animals they hunted and the cattle they raised -- into basic aspects of their culture, especially in the ways the men expressed their identity in dance and in stick-fighting, a form of martial arts that defined their place in a very strongly structured pecking order and that informed the form of their dancing.

And on the third day, he was arrested by the security forces for being in an area forbidden to whites. He was threatened with deportation and his friends were charged with bringing him into a tribal area, and were only spared by a technicality -- the signs barring whites from the area without permits had not been erected.

But he continued to sneak into the tribal area to be with his friends and to learn more about their language, lives and culture, and at this point in his lecture, Clegg went into a discursion on cattle and, specifically, bulls.

A Zulu man is inextricably linked to the bull of his herd, he explained, and there are certain rites that must be observed, including that the man must rise in the morning before the bull and must take his morning piss before the bull takes his. It is a matter of pecking order. The bull is his "little brother" and must keep his place, but, of course, for that to happen, it's more a matter of the man asserting his status than expecting the bull to defer.

If the bull is sick, the man is sick, and, if the bull seems likely to die, it is critical that the man slaughter and replace it before that happens. For the bull to simply die would be a disaster for the man.

When two men have a serious rivalry, it was common to settle it by having their bulls fight, and Clegg managed to get video of one of these events, which are becoming rare. The two men shouted encouragement and "praise words" to their bulls, and supplied trash talk while the bulls, excited by the attention and atmosphere, began to paw the ground and go at each other. (I would point out that, at least in this particular instance, they didn't seem to inflict much damage, but rather did some pushing, shoving and clashing until one yielded, to the immense delight of its owner's human rival.)

Clegg noted that a bull has one horn with which he deflects blows and that he initiates his attack with the other horn. Similarly, in stick-fighting, the boy has a small shield -- very much smaller than a goalie's blocking pad -- on one hand and a stick with which to attack in the other. You could not only see the similarity to the bull's attack and defense in the video, but (and Clegg did not mention this) it was also apparent how this system of stick-fighting would translate very directly into use of the cowhide shield and the short spear, the assegai. I was also struck by the fact that Shaka, who invented the shorter form of the assegai around the turn of the 19th century, also devised an attack strategy that involved a double-flanking move and that was known as the "buffalo horns" formation.

Clegg's interest being musical, he noted that the bond between man and bull is such that there are "bull poems" recited that record the bull's history -- where it was bought, how it fought, etc. And the dance team is referred to as "oxen" when they do a group dance, and they are "plowing the dance" with a dance leader who carries a stick.

A man who seeks the "ugly heart" of the bull can become the type who constantly starts fights, but that "ugly heart" is also part of the paradox of masculinity, Clegg said: A man must work well with others, as one of the neutered oxen, but he must also be prepared to take life when that moment comes, as the fertile and intact bull.

"There's a lot of pecking order in their culture," Clegg said, "and, when a man walks into a room, it can be very funny seeing how he gets sorted out into his place."

I was fascinated by his lecture because I had never contemplated the nature of a warrior culture that raises cattle. Many of our own native people have a deep, rich warrior culture, but they don't have a strong identification with animal husbandry. After the coming of the whites, they did have horses, but only the Nez Perce are strongly associated with purposeful breeding of stock, and, while the coming of horses transformed many native cultures, this basic identity that Clegg spoke of simply doesn't exist within those cultures: American Indians have a strong identification with the animals they hunted, but that's an entirely different relationship.

The buffalo dance is simply not the same as the bull-influenced dances of the Zulu because no Lakota or Blackfoot ever felt compelled to drag himself out of bed in the morning so he could be sure to piss before the buffalo had pissed. It's a different relationship because the relationship with the buffalo is impersonal -- it is not "that" buffalo, but buffalo in general. The Zulu knows the specific bull with which he is linked the way he knows his wife or his child and he has a daily, working relationship with that bull.

So I walked around pondering all that new information for a day, and then went to Johnny's concert and got to see some of what he had spoken about. He had two young men who danced, and I have to say that, while everyone cheered and whistled, I sat there and thought to myself that I was seeing only a very small moment of something that, if I wanted to know what I was looking at, I should have started thinking about it when I was 15, and I should have been living in Johannesburg and I should have been willing to go over to the hostel to take guitar lessons, and to listen, and to learn.

Or I could have done it the simple way and be born into the Zulu culture. But I don't think there's another road to follow. And I think only Johnny Clegg can be Johnny Clegg.

Here he is in action. "Asimbonanga" translates as "we have not seen him" and refers to Mandela, as do the lyrics about looking across the water, since Mandela was being held in an island prison.







Of course, things have changed since the days when Johnny Clegg's integrated band couldn't be promoted (but sold thousands of albums anyway). Now, it looks more like this:

Me and Gerry, messin' with the media

The news of Geraldine Ferraro's death should leave a sense of loss for her position as a "first," and, though I don't much care for groundbreaker stories, I certainly talked to her about that one in this story from August, 1990. There are some other things we discussed, too, and I think this was a pretty good story. If you're curious, clicking on the illustration could make it large enough to read; if not, right clicking and saving it to your desktop would give you a legible copy.

But what I remember her for, what makes me chuckle every time, isn't in this article.

Working in Plattsburgh meant working in a competitive media market. It could have been very competitive, given the proximity to a major city, but the international border meant that, rather than being a suburb of Montreal, we were a nearby irrelevance. And, for print purposes, the combination of a state border and Lake Champlain made us of no interest to the Burlington Free Press.

But we did have three radio stations with commitments to local news (two of them commercial, which tells you how long ago this was), and, most of all, there was WPTZ, Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in the Burlington/Plattsburgh market. Although they served both sides of the lake, they were headquartered on the New York side and took their commitment to Plattsburgh seriously.

They were also, I will admit, pretty good at what they did, and one reporter in particular knew the market and went after things with a vengeance. If Carol Monroe was on the story, we'd better be, too, because people would see her reports at 6 and 11 and expect to see something as good, or better, in the Press-Republican the next morning. There were times she had something at 6 that would send us scrambling to keep up, and then there were the times she'd have something only at 11, by which time it was too late for us to make deadline. She'd have us.

The advantage we had was that they had to be visual and we really didn't. So at a news conference, rather than three minutes of talking heads, they would start shooting "reporters watch talking head" video to jazz things up a little, in which they would pan over us as we were writing in our notebooks. And I would write "Hi, Mom!" in my notebook and turn it to the camera to photobomb their shot. It wasn't like we were live, but it would mean a little more time in the editing booth.

In August, 1990, Geraldine Ferraro came to the area and spoke at a gathering in the late morning, then toured a factory or two and headed out on Lake Champlain with some local politicians and some people from the Department of Environmental Conservation. And one reporter, since I had cleared my decks and was dedicating the day to following her around.

There is always a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in these events, as well as transit time, and, when you're the only "Boy on the Bus," you get some substantial facetime. By the time we got into the middle of the afternoon, and into an open boat headed for Crab Island, there were maybe eight of us. I already knew the local pols, and so, by then, we were just a bunch of people going to look around at stuff, and it had become pretty chatty and casual.

As we returned to shore, it was about four in the afternoon, and we'd seen Crab Island and we'd talked about colleges (there was one visible on the hill) and lamprey (I hope you can read the sidebar on that article) and Pat Schroeder's kids (I used to live in Colorado) and now we're coming back to the long dock at the Peru Boat Launch, and, perched on the hill at the top of the long wooden steps, we can see the Channel 5 van, a tripod and a two-person reporter/video team.

They were there to get a few words with Geraldine Ferraro, having missed out on the first six hours of her visit. And I probably made some smartass remark about the necessary establishing shot of Geraldine Ferraro getting out of the boat and then walking up the dock and mounting the steps to the parkinglot. And she must have laughed. I do not remember the exact conversation that took place. Or who contributed what to what followed.

But the result was that Carol's necessary establishing shot turned out to be Geraldine Ferraro stepping out of the open boat onto the dock, then turning around and extending her hand to the reporter from the Press-Republican to help him up onto the dock, and then the two of us walking up that long dock and those long stairs, laughing, talking and all but arm-in-arm.

The only story that the necessary establishing shot could have been used for was "Geraldine Ferraro Comes To The North Country To Hang Out With Her Very Closest Friend, Mike Peterson."

This was not the story Carol had been hoping to file for a newscast that began in less than two hours.

"I'm going to kill you, Peterson," she hissed, as we passed. Her report that evening consisted of shots of her talking to Ferraro in the parking lot, asking a question and getting an answer and moving the handheld mic back and forth.

I still chuckle to myself when I think of it, not so much because of what I did to Carol so much as because I still can't believe a public figure of Geraldine Ferraro's stature would so cheerfully join in pranking the media.

Got a nice note from her a few days later, in which she enclosed Pat Schroeder's Christmas card from the year before, to resolve the issue of how old Schroeder's children were. (She was, of course, right.)

Fun, funny lady. If every day in the newsroom had been like that, I'd still be a reporter.

Update on a quiet friend

Awhile ago, I republished here a column I'd written in 1994 about barbershops and, specifically, about Bob Noody, who used to cut my hair, drive my school bus and usher in my church, and who, it turned out, had also been a member of the 101st Airborne and had dropped into Normandy on D-Day. That's him on June 5, 1944, looking at the camera over the pile of gear he was about to jump with.

I mentioned in the piece that he hadn't planned to go back for the 50th anniversary D-Day reunion, but just got a comment on the blog from his niece that he has gone back since, a couple of times, and is worth Googling. And, indeed, a search for him gets a lot of hits, including this one and this one.  In both cases, once you get to the page, you need to scroll down a bit. It's worth it.

Turns out this kind, gentle man who helped me understand the world did a lot more than parachute into Normandy and get wounded. Reading about his record is kind of jaw-dropping, in fact, because he not only was in the thick of things, but he kept going back for more. And learning about what he did reinforces the lesson I originally took away from him: It's not a simple as "some people talk and some people do," but it certainly is that there are people who do great things without letting that moment forever define them.

It reminds me of the time I tracked down Cpl. Rupert Trimingham, the black GI who wrote to Yank magazine during the war about being forced to go to the backdoor of a Jim Crow cafe at a Texas train station while German POWs ate at the counter.

By the time I found him, he was gone, but I spoke with his daughter, who said she had never read the letter and didn't know much about it, just that they used to say he wrote a letter that got published. Yes, and provoked a storm of hundreds of angry letters from black and white GIs around the world who were infuriated with the treatment he and his buddies had received while wearing the uniform of their country, and was turned into a radio program on Mercury Theater and was the basis of a short story in the New Yorker and has been stolen several times since for every story of black GIs in World War II. It was transformative, but he never thought to talk about it, apparently.

There are heroes among us whom we do not know. But here's the real lesson: I already knew that Bob was a good guy, and I'm always happy to see him. I'm hoping to go back to Star Lake for a weekend this summer, and I hope I see him then. And I'd feel that way about him without knowing he'd ever served in the army at all. But I do think that what he did under the circumstances in which he found himself was reflective of the things in his personality and character that make me like him so much.

There are probably people in Detroit who knew Rupert Trimingham and liked him, too, without ever knowing that he wrote that letter. Good people do good things, and the example they set is in their character, not in their deeds.

(Even when their deeds make you say "...wow...")

March 20, 1971

"After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after events ... but the moment of beauty was there." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald 

This is where I was, 40 years ago, and it was a good place to be. A warm, sunny day in Denver, the first day of spring and it felt like the end of a winter. It was John and Yoko's second anniversary, but we weren't aiming for that. It was simply a Saturday that worked for everyone, but it was a simply beautiful Saturday.

We'd thought about getting married on a mountaintop, specifically, the top of Mount Evans, because that was fashionable, at least in theory, and perhaps practical for marriages that neither family was going to attend anyway. But after driving up there and falling in love with the view, we realized that, given that our families did intend to show up, it would be asking a whole lot of our grandparents and several un-acclimated flatlanders to drag them up to a spot over 14,000 feet above sea level.

Instead, my soon-to-be brother-in-law set us up with a nice Episcopal Church in Denver where the father of his roommate at CU was not only rector, but enough of a social activist and mensch that he was willing to let us use the church and the parish hall, and to even sign the marriage license although the actual marriage was being performed by an ex-priest who had, as I understand it, left the Catholic clergy in a quarrel over his active support of the farmworkers. 

Not that Craig had a lot to do. We had not only written our vows and chosen our readings, but we had written the ceremony itself, and Craig was more of an emcee than a celebrant. But, since he was a friend of Kathy's family, he was able to say some nice things about marriage and drop in a few relevant specifics in his monologue, or preface or whatever it was. As I recall, in the write-up for the ceremony, it just said, "Craig" at that point, which left him a fair amount of latitude.

We wanted something that would express who we were, and that would reflect the culture of Boulder in which we had met, but we wanted something that looked like a wedding, too, and it did. 

Our readings were from Psalms -- I think 128 -- and Kahlil Gibran, and we included a poem that was familiar to all our Boulder friends but new to everyone else, and then we were horrified a few months later when it was set to music, recorded by Les Crane and released in the Top 40, where it became one of the great cringe-inducing cliches of the era. Well, it was fresh when we served it.

We were at the church well before anyone else. Kathy actually got there quite a bit before I did, setting up the reception in the parish hall with her aunt, while I was meeting the band in Boulder and leading them down to Denver and the church. "Magic Music" was a CSN-type group who lived in a pair of school buses up over Ward, which is at about 9,450 feet. I had made the original deal with them at one of their gigs in Boulder but then had to go find them to finalize it, and that involved a lot of driving around and asking people. But it was worth it; they were one of the area's, and the era's, great treasures.

Then, before the wedding, we went out front and greeted people. We all stood and talked until we decided it was time to shoo people in so we could make our entrance and get things rolling. Oh, and while everyone was socializing, we ducked inside with Craig, my older brother Rick, who was my best man, and our ushers, our roommate Dean, and Kathy's little brother Bill, and Kathy's maid of honor, Marcie, so we could have a quick rehearsal. Then my little sisters Lois and Martha handed everyone a carnation as they entered and we got married.

The wedding reception had only the necessary formalities -- the cutting of the cake and the tossing of the bouquet. The rest of the time, people stood around and talked, and it was a great, amicable mingling of people who would have never met in real life. The pictures here, by the way, were a wedding gift by a friend of Kathy's from the Colorado Springs Sun, where she had done two internships and had made friends, and most of what happened that day, except for the band, the cake and the wine, was a gift. That's also how things were, there and then.


It was a beautiful day, and one that went off with no visible hitches, that itself being a tribute to the era, because we all assumed it would work out and we didn't sweat the details. 


We had hidden our car a few blocks away, and Dean gave us a ride over there, whence we left for a one-night honeymoon before returning to Boulder and home.

The rest of the story? Well, we made it for 13 years and we produced a pair of really good kids, and we still get along just fine when fate and family obligations throw us together. 


And we had a great wedding on a beautiful day, 40 years ago. The moment of beauty was there, for sure.

I coulda been a contender

Yesterday, Daryl Cagle posted this cartoon, by the Spanish cartoonist KAP on Facebook calling it a "terrific cartoon about the terrible earthquake and #tsunami that hit Japan this morning." 

I did not feel it was particularly terrific, and, within moments, thought of a cartoon that was equally silly and could rise equally as quickly to the status of "instant regrettable pointless cliche."  

Timing of posts on Facebook after a certain point are by whole hours, so I don't know how many minutes it took to hunt up this artwork and add the haunting bit of glurge to turn it into a really stupid political cartoon. But it was less than an hour and I'd say likely more like 20 minutes, tops. I posted it as a sarcastic commentary on crappy cartooning.

This morning, as I go through the political cartoons of the past 24 hours, I spy this from professional, paid-to-do-this cartoonist Chan Lowe, who, I should note, is not a Facebook friend and would not have seen my rendering. He came up with this on his own. 

And I'm sure it took more than 20 minutes to complete, because, in addition to the 30 seconds spent thinking of it, he had to redraw the whole thing, not just add a tear.

 Sigh.

I have missed my calling.

All's well that ends well

This news clip, about a Georgia town where a police officer halted sidewalk sales of Girl Scout cookies at a strip mall because they didn't have a peddler's permit, showed up over at HuffPost with the usual "Stormtroopers Crack Down" headlines and the predictable "shame on those officers" comments from the readers who didn't take the occasion to slam the Girl Scouts or Michelle Obama.

Pardon me if I find the clip loaded with good news nearly all around.

First, there was a misunderstanding between the police officer and the Scout leaders, and we don't know how it actually unfolded. There isn't much direct indication that the officer was hostile or confrontational, though, and it's sad that one little girl thought the adults were all going to jail. But kids that age have pretty active imaginations and you can't always lay the blame for how their minds work on anything specific they've been told.

That aside, it looks like this was handled well. The police did a nice job of explaining their point of view, how the law is intended to act and what may have gone wrong. They apologized to the kids, let them go on with only one day's interruption in their sale and made a good attempt to repair whatever misconceptions those kids may have had over the role of police in the community.

And the TV news didn't insist that the first impression was going to be what was reported. The reporter appears to have gone out and gathered the facts before she decided how to report what happened. She didn't feel compelled to stick with the "storm troopers" angle and then add "but others say" in order to downgrade the information that didn't fit her predetermined narrative.

This shouldn't be rare enough to merit comment, but that's the fact, jack. And, as evidence of how rare it is, a look at Google News shows that the rest of the media seem to have all picked up the story as a chance to flog the big bad brutal cops, even though none appear to have seen anything more than the clip above.

I thought the police chief did an excellent, articulate job of explaining not only what happened but why the new law exists in the first place, and now we get into my own personal take on this sort of thing:

I haven't seen Girl Scouts out selling cookies to passing cars and I doubt I would. But I have long argued that  "boot drives" and other in-traffic fundraisers not only provide the kids with bad adult input on overall safety but are an incredibly sad and expensive lawsuit waiting to shut down the organizations that use them and the towns that allow them.

Which brings us to a very early strip in Bill Hinds' late lamented strip about youth sports, "Cleats," which you can still read in reruns here.

For Esme - With Love and Milk Bones

Vaska's "aunt" Esme, seen above beating the living bejabbers out of him shortly before he left Florida to come live here, had rather a good day at Westminster Monday:

61     GCH Kengalis Spirits R Zoomin' Fm JC
Breed: Rhodesian Ridgeback
Sex: Bitch
AKC: HP 30888105
Date of Birth: July 14, 2008
Breeder: Frank Murphy & Rhanda Glenn & Kathryn Vande Logt
Sire: Ch Adili's American Idol
Dam: Ch Wall St Zoom Zoom Zoom Of FM
Owner: Ginny Merchant & George Brown

There were far too many ridgebacks entered for my comfort -- 56, far and away the most numerous breed at the show. I have had ridgebacks since 1986 and used to have to explain them to nearly everyone we met. Now it's rare that people don't recognize them straight off. I hate seeing any breed become popular for fear that it will go into cookie-cutter sameness at one end of the breeding continuum and genetic chaos at the other end.

But it's nice to know that other people think Esme is a pretty girl. There were only five merit awards handed out, so it is significant, and she is listed first.

At the time that top picture was taken, Ginny told me that Esme had to regularly be shooed out of the whelping box because she was so fascinated with the puppies that she wanted to be with them all the time. This is a good thing, since she will have a chance now to create some of her own.

And they will all be lovely examples of the breed, though none of them will be nearly as cute as her former kennel mate who, you may note, is no longer living in Florida.

This is rather a long video, but if you skip to the end, Esme and Ginny appear at the one-minute (remaining) mark.

 Arlo Guthrie, Colorado Springs, Nov. 1980

This interview appeared in the Colorado Springs Sun, Nov. 21, 1980. The photos are by Scott Wright. I interviewed Arlo by phone the morning before the concert, then went to hear Tom Hayden speak on campus at Colorado College. Before the talk began, Arlo walked in and sat down behind me and we ended up talking for another 20 minutes or so. He's really a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. A few weeks after it appeared, I got a nice letter from Arlo's mother, Marjorie, which I thought was very cool.

Arlo Guthrie is a genuinely nice man.

After at least three other interviews and an energetic, substantial concert in the evening, he is standing backstage undergoing yet another cross-examination, this time by an earnest young student who wants to know if he thinks there will be an American war in the Persian Gulf.

He smiles his Arlo smile and takes a sip of beer, then begins an Arlo spiel in that same funny Arlo cadence so familiar from ''Alice's Restaurant" and "Reuben Clamzo." Is he serious? Does he really believe that we're contemplating a military annexation of Mexico to solve the energy crisis and the illegal alien problem in one fell swoop? The interviewer isn't certain, and jokes a little, but not too much ....

Twelve hours before, the cadence wasn't there. Maybe it only comes on after concerts. But when he was talking about his father and the hard-hitting biography, "Woody Guthrie: A Life," that has just hit the bookstores, his voice was lower, his tone serious, without the "ain'ts" and the "gonnas" that sprinkle his language in lighter moments. He has read Joe Klein's no-punches-pulled work.

"That's a really good book," he enthused with an almost salesman-like exuberance.

But wasn't it painful for the family?

Woody Guthrie's bout with Huntington's chorea is detailed without gloss or euphemism, from the sudden outbursts of violence to the daily continuing examples of behavior so bizarre that friends deserted him and rumors spread of alcoholism and advanced venereal disease, even after the nature of his illness was known. It must be very difficult to read about your father in this manner, when to most of the world he is still the happy, guitar-slinging little hobo.

"Well, one of the nice things about the book is that it makes up for that joke of a movie and some of the other things like that." In Arlo's world, it's better to be reminded of painful truth by Joe Klein than to endure the lies in David Carradine's fairytale," "Bound For Glory."

Both the title of Carradine's movie and the glorification of Woody Guthrie bring back a song in which Phil Ochs said of Woody;

Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore, 
But so few remember what he was fighting for.
Why sing the songs and forget about the aim?
He wrote them for a reason; why not sing them for the same?"

Ochs and the elder Guthrie had a kinship of their own: Both were topical singers in troubled times.

Woody Guthrie sang for the communist groups who were the organizers of labor unions in the '30s. His famous "This Land is Your Land" was written as a working man's version of "God Bless America," a version that would express love for the country without pretending that everyone in it had a good job and enough to eat.

Phil Ochs wrote civil rights and anti-war songs in the '60s and, together with Arlo Guthrie, was called as a witness at the trial of the Chicago Eight, though neither was allowed to testify.

The most chilling similarity, however, is that both balladeers became increasingly unstable towards the ends of their lives and lost most of their friends. Ochs committed suicide; Guthrie died in a hospital.

Arlo brought out an important point about Woody, however: "Phil was so interested, so driven to be attached to the anti-war movement, to the civil rights movement, that when it became less faddish, he was left without an identity. My old.man always retained his identity and brought it with him to the groups he was involved with, and it was who he was and what he thought of himself that was always getting him into trouble with them.
"It wasn't a case at all of trying to gain an identity by fitting in with a group. My father never fit into organized movements, he never fit in really with the communists."

Perhaps the communists' were too humorless, took too utilitarian an attitude towards life? 

 

"Not the people he was with," Arlo is quick to correct. "In fact, the only real criticism that has emerged about the book from my father's contemporaries is that Joe Klein was too hard on the Old Left, primarily because he was writing from a vantage point of 20 years of hindsight. He exaggerates somewhat and leaves the impression that they were really naive dupes.
"It's not that they had such a feel for communism so much as the personal involvement in those particular goals of social justice and so forth. Everything he says is true, every fact in there is right, but the facts he recites aren't counterbalanced by a feeling for the powerful personalities of the people involved. For them, it was a personal ideology, a desire to see a world where the rich guy wasn't always hitting the little guy over the head all the time."

So that whole group, so hard hit by the McCarthy hearings, weren't really communists after all?

"Well, to this day, if you ask Pete Seeger about his communist days, he invariably says, 'Well, you know, the American Indians are communist.” You can call it communism, but it's a lot more than simply a matter of the system in which the state relates to the individual. It's a way of life, no matter what you call yourself.
"All those people, you have to ask yourself, would they fit into a Communist system as it exists, say, in Russia? And you have to answer certainly not. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, those guys would be just as rebellious over there as they were over here. Which wouldn't work out for them.
"So when Phil Ochs and those people came along in the '60s, they realized this, but they didn't know what they should call themselves. They decided on 'New Left,' so you had the New Left and the Old Left, who were just as committed to the same things they'd been doing all along."

Arlo Guthrie is less dogmatically political in his art than either his father or more recent "topical" singers; but isn't afraid to sing from a soapbox on occasion, as he did last Thursday night: He assailed nuclear energy with a song that shares its tune with a multitude of old songs including one that was a campaign song for Harrison and Tyler in 1840. A traditional tune, certainly, but hardly a traditional topic.

"I consider myself a traditionalist with a small ‘t,’" he explained. “I have a big of disagreement with the capital 'T' Traditionalists who are only interested in ‘Traditional' music. I think good music becomes traditional, that it does come out of the air to isolated people, moving them, almost like the wind, you know, the wind that has always inspired people to write and sing. It's that common experience that a song may have with another song that is actually called Traditional.
"I'm not afraid to call 'Coming into Los Angeles' traditional, or something by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, because some of those songs become classics, like 'Yesterday.' A fellow came up to me after my last concert and said, 'How come you didn't do enough political songs? I thought you were going to come out here and get really angry at everybody. What happened to all those songs?'"

He paused to chuckle.

"Well, you know, what social value does 'Old Joe Clark' have? What was its social value at the time it was written? 'Old Joe Clark' was the disco of the 17th, 18th century. There's nothing anti-folk/traditional about doing fun songs.
"Folk music comes from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons, and some of it is funny and some of it is irrelevant and some, on the other hand, is deeply moving and really relevant.
"You can't get much deep meaning out of the words of 'Old Joe Clark,' but then, you can't dance to 'A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall,' either. I just try to incorporate what I think is real, incorporate that into the music I perform at a particular time."

Later that night, listening to a long-ago tale about Officer Obie and the eight-by-10 color glossy photos with the circles and arrows, you realize you are, indeed, listening to a traditional song, whether you call it that or not, because you're enjoying it and it's reminding you of things beyond just the song itself. What Arlo said in the morning, he proved on stage at night: That it doesn't matter what-you call a song, or a person. It's the underlying qualities which reveal its identity.

I came across this interview while I was looking for something else, but then this morning, I visited the outstanding folk music blog of a college coffeehouse colleague, Jim Moran, and thought maybe I should go ahead and scan this in. And now that you've read what I have to say, go see what he has to say. Yeah, and he plays better, too.

Why isn't this a more common sight?

These aren't starving African children at an aid station, eating donated rice. They aren't sick, they aren't covered with flies, they aren't malnourished.

These are healthy, happy African children in a desert climate, cheerfully eating African food from their families' gardens, good, nutritious, native food that doesn't require irrigation and that doesn't fail completely when the rains don't come.

It is not a difficult concept: There would be no people in those areas, if it were not possible for the land to support them. Starvation and famine are the result of encouraging people to plant non-native cash crops that will not thrive.

I've blogged about the Eden Foundation before, which I discovered through a website I was alerted to not because of the good work they are doing, but because Esther Garvi, whose family founded the program and who grew up in rural Niger, has a Rhodesian ridgeback whose pictures she posts on her own blog.

Now my cyberfriend and fellow ridgeback owner has started a new blog that is inspiring, informative and an absolute delight: www.edengardens.org

There you can see delightful pictures of her neighbors and read short accounts of their lives. The Eden approach is a way of thinking about, and of respecting, native people that needs to spread. As stated in the "About" section of the blog, "From the very beginning, Eden’s purpose has never been to tell people how to live their lives, but to supply them with options that will enable them to achieve a sustainable life, independent of external assistance."

In the past year, there were news reports that the rains had not come, the millet crop had failed and the poor people of Niger were reduced to eating leaves.

It sounded so dire, but, knowing the work of the Eden Foundation, I wondered. After all, I eat leaves regularly: Lettuce, cabbage, artichokes, spinach ... Could I be starving and not even know it?

Esther addressed the topic in a post and identified these particular leaves as malahiya, which she notes is not only delicious itself but can be sold at a good price in the city.

I try not to be too cynical, but when I contrast the approach of setting up aid stations (pulling people off their land instead of encouraging them to farm efficiently) with the Eden approach of helping people to learn to be self-supporting, it's hard not to look upon calls for international assistance with a wary eye.

Perhaps there are places where the Eden approach cannot work, but, again, I would have to ask, how did people live there for thousands of years, before there were trucks and airplanes and large bags of grain to be distributed?

In any case, Stories from Edenland is going on my daily bookmark list because I like to read about things that work and to see pictures of smiling children.

 While hair was cut, male generations were joined

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, June 12, 1994, 50 years after D-Day)

"The next generation is coming, and they need to know what happened," D-Day Veteran John Bacon told the Press-Republican. "Guys like me won't be around for the next 50 years to tell about it."

Of all the hundreds of thousands of words about D-Day over the past few weeks, none were more important than those: The next generation needs to know what happened, and there is only so much time left to gather the stories.

My grandfather was old enough to remember the first automobile in Ironwood, Mich., and lived long enough to see mankind walk on the moon, but he didn't tell many stories. He felt only old men did that, old men who bored their children with endless reminiscences of the Good Old Days.

My father has left more behind him, in the form of letters and a journal. And I will, no doubt, leave my children a haystack of published and unpublished memoirs to deal with when I'm gone.

But passing on stories from father to son, or grandfather to grandson, is not the same as passing on a cultural legacy from generation to generation.

For that, you need a marketplace, somewhere for the generations to meet.

Much of what I know about being a man, I learned at the barbershop. Women talk about the stories and lore that were passed on when women quilted, and there is even a play called "Quilters."

Maybe we need a play about men, called "Haircut."

There were two barbers in Star Lake, too many, really, for such a little place, and you had to choose to give your trade to Bob or to Charley, both of whom you knew, both of whom you would see at church, both of whom had children in school with you. Both of them were even school bus drivers.

You had to call them "Mr. Noody" and "Mr. Henry," but you thought of them as Bob and Charley, because that's what all the men at the barbershop called them.

When I was little, we went to Bob Noody, because it was handier for our dad to pick us up on his way home from work. The three of us took the bus there after school, got our hair cut and then sat and waited for our ride, while we looked at Sports Afield and listened to the men talking.

Bob had a picture on his wall of dogs playing poker, and another humorous picture depicting some hunting trip disaster. There were placards of combs and butch wax you could buy, and his barber college certificate hung on the wall. There wasn't much girlie stuff around; Bob's shop was attached to his home, and, anyway, he had more class than to have a lot of junk around the place, what with all of us kids coming in to get our hair cut.

I'm sure the jokes and stories were different when we weren't around, of course, because there were times someone would start to say something and Bob would cough and cock an eyebrow in our direction and then everyone would chuckle and pass on to another topic.

The men talked about hunting and fishing, about baseball and hockey, and about politics. And they talked about the war.

There was more than one war, of course. I was a middle child in my family, so my dad went to World War II. Some of my friends were the oldest in their families; their dads had been in Korea. Some of the older men had been in World War I.

One time, they got to talking about World War II, and Bob stopped cutting hair for a moment to pull up his trouser leg. He had a couple of round scars on his legs, about the size of quarters, from where he got shot while he was parachuting. Later, my dad told me Bob was a Ranger, and that the other guys in the army all knew the Rangers were the toughest guys around. I remember the tone of respect, almost awe, with which he spoke.

That made me look at Bob a little differently. He was kind and he always had a twinkle in his eye when he said hello to you, and he always had something special to say to you, on the bus or in church or whenever he saw you away from the barber shop. He always let you know that he was your friend, and that you were his friend, too. I think he was as pleased as I was, the day I was finally tall enough that I didn't need him to put the padded board across the arms of the barber chair.

I thought guys who jumped out of airplanes and shot people were mean and tough, but Bob wasn't mean at all. But, if he was a Ranger, that meant he was tough. It made me stop and think that maybe being tough isn't the same thing as being mean.

I don't know if there is anything more important for a boy to know than that.

I talked to my mom the other day, and she said Bob saw some of his friends on television, the guys from the 101st Airborne who were going to jump again on D-Day. Bob didn't go back to Normandy, but I'm sure he gave it more than a brief thought.

My dad didn't get to Europe until sometime after D-Day, and his stories from the war had less to do with combat than with hungry, frightened people left in the wake of the Nazi defeat. But I knew something of D-Day because of Bob, and being at Bob's barbershop.

It's ironic that, when my generation's war came along, we stopped going to barbershops. It wasn't a political decision; it was a question of fashion. We had our girlfriends cut our hair, because they knew more about dealing with long hair than the barbers did, back then.

Today, the barbershops are nearly gone. I don't know that either of my boys have ever been in a real barbershop, "real" in the sense of having Sports Afield on the table and pictures on the walls of dogs playing poker. "Real" in the sense that your mother might drop you off, but she wouldn't come in.

"Real" in the sense that a boy got a lot more at a barbershop than just a haircut.

Bob Noody in 2004

Another friend from home

When I wrote about my friend Bill, I mentioned one of the last times we spoke.  "It was a fine conversation, with Bill and our friend Crandall, whose story is worth a whole other post." 

This is that post. That's Crandall, #44, next to Bill. A genuinely good man, but someone who, as a kid, had a steep hill to climb, not because of his own situation, but because of a situation he found himself in. He had strong character, good parents and solid values. But he had the wrong last name.

Here's a column I wrote in 1995 for the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY:

When my buddy came to school each September, the teacher always had a welcoming speech ready:  "Sit down and shut up. I don't want any trouble from you."

You see, he had the misfortune to be on the Faculty Mafia's hit-list.

The Faculty Mafia is a lot like the real thing: If you ask, everyone tells you it doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's no such thing.

And that's correct, to this extent: There is no formal organization, there is no recorded hit list, there is no way to trace anything. But the fact remains that every school has a core of teachers who, if you get on the wrong side of one, whether you are a kid, an untenured teacher or even an administrator with a delicate constitution, you might just as well pack up your books and move on down the road.

My friend had cousins and uncles who raised hell, and that was enough. When the family name turned up on the class roster, the old hands would roll their eyes and groan about the awful things to be expected from him, and declare that the only thing to do was to jump right on him before things got out of control.

My dad was constantly confused, because he was both my dad and a school board member, which meant he'd meet my friends in real life and get to know them, and then he'd hear about them at school board meetings and wonder how they had suddenly turned into such monsters.

In this case, he remembered my buddy from Cub Scouts, and from altar boys, and he couldn't understand why the teachers had so much trouble with him. What was confusing him, of course, was that he still thought of my friends as nice kids, so he treated them like nice kids, and so they behaved toward him like nice kids.

Most folks are like that.

Anyway, I remember sitting with my buddy in a diner late one afternoon. He was telling me that he had decided to drop out and take a job in Rochester that, I kept trying to tell him, was never going to get him anywhere.

But the only place he wanted to get was out of town, and I was hard-pressed to explain why he should stay in school. He'd flunked two years and was now only a sophomore to my senior. For me, staying in school meant a few more months; for him it was another two and half years, more if they nailed him again.

And you have to know how that time would be spent: If I were out in the hall without a pass, I'd get yelled at. He'd be put on detention at the very least. It had been that way for years, and I couldn't advise him to stick around where he clearly wasn't wanted.

So he left for Rochester and I finished school and went on to college, and we didn't see each other again for quite a while.

Then I came home for vacation and there he was, in the bar where we all hung out. He limped over, cane in hand, and we embraced in the middle of the floor, two 20-year-olds with a friendship that went back a decade-and-a-half.

We bought each other several beers, and he told me about Vietnam, and about his time rehabbing in stateside hospitals and how he was hopeful of being 100 percent before too much time had gone by.

He wasn't at all bitter. In fact, while he hadn't enjoyed being blown up, he'd had a pretty decent time since he left town, all things considered.

In the space between his words, I heard his story.

Basic training strips you of your identity, and you're only a number to the military.

Well, maybe that's bad, if you've gotten special privileges because of your name.

But he must have found a wonderful liberation at Parris Island, when those screaming, bullying drill instructors saw the name tag on his clothes and didn't even bother to read it.

They treated him like garbage, but he was used to that. What he wasn't used to was that they treated everyone like garbage. Not only that, but it seems his physical strength and mental toughness were seen as positive attributes, not the warning signs of a low-bred, hillbilly troublemaker.

In other words, he started on exactly the same footing as everyone else, and then was judged solely on his own actions and abilities, and he responded by becoming a good Marine.

It's a nice story, but those days are past. With cuts in defense, high-school dropouts can't get into the service anymore, and the only way today's kids could have that experience would be for us to declare war on somebody.

Might I suggest the Faculty Mafia?

Of course, since then we have gotten back into a war, which opens the doors of opportunity once more. I would still prefer that there be other ways for a young person of good character to succeed.