flying

I flew Delta from LAX to Minneapolis to Hartford . Red eye special . Good arrival time for my friend to pick me up , except that I got confused on the day . The day I flew in he had a gig and had to pick me up a little later . I waited in an airport bar and had a couple of expensive airport beers ,  local Connecticut stuff .

Now I’m home again . Same flight in reverse , except that this time it wasn’t a red eye .

Three hours in Minneapolis . Coming in from L.A. , I saw snow covering the parking structures outside . On the return trip , two weeks later ,  no snow . The airport is stretched out along endless concourses . Concourses . When do you walk concourses  outside of airports ? Am I missing something ? There are moving sidewalks and a tram .  Endless concourses . Food courts . Shops .  WiFi access .

I had a few mini-bottles of Scotch in my carry-on bag . They’re allowed . My friend Willie told me that last year . He gave me a couple of them to test his statement . No problem .  I showed them to the snoops , thinking that they might confiscate them . No . Willie was right .

To order the same shot of Scotch during the flight would have cost me seven dollars , I think . Drinking one of the bottles during the flight I felt as if I were now out of the red , outsmarting Delta , pushing the envelope . The little bottles cost only 99 cents in Connecticut .  If I had had a few more mini-bottles I’d be sitting pretty , ahead of the game , actually beginning to show a profit . Well , almost   .

I once went from Berlin to London on Ryan Airlines . Ryan , if I remember correctly ,was the airline that seriously considered charging a fee to use the restroom . Nice .I would have gone broke .  I got to the Berlin Airport , Freuninggulingen ……., no Shaeuftshaffen ……. no Sheinifeld ? , Shoenefeld ? , at six in the morning . I had come from Poland by taxi that morning . Got there overly early , as is my way .

I was second in line . We were the only two customers to have arrived so early for the flight .  I had one bag to check . There were two conveyor belts moving luggage along : to London  and to  Ankara . I didn’t see the clerk put my lonely bag on the Ankara belt . I should have been watching , I guess . When I got to London I had no clothes . 10 days in England and no  clothes other than what I was wearing . I won’t tell you the whole sad story . My bag met me in London on the 10th day , having , I assume , enjoyed its own vacation in Turkey . We flew back to Berlin together , but we didn’t talk to each other the entire flight .

Another Berlin to London flight on British Airways was exciting after the pilot announced  over the scratchy PA system that he thought the landing gear was stuck . We were going to have to go in on our shiney sleek aluminum belly . The pilot’s voice was almost inaudible and he had a heavy English accent . One of the many . Dorset , maybe . Rs everywhere . Like old movie pirates :  Aarrh , matey ! Wharr yer headin’ ? Shiver me timbers !  Emarrgency vehicles aarrh be preparrhin’ fer arrh landin’  . Aarh.

The plane was full of Germans . I , a native English speaker , was barely getting what the pilot was saying . I didn’t think that many of the Germans got much of it . But , on the other hand , maybe they had learned English from the English . Good possibility that they understood a lot more than I did , now that I think of it .

When we approached Gatwick , or was it Heathrow ? , the emergency vehicles were lined up along the runway . There were plenty of them : fire trucks , ambulances , police , hearses . Well , maybe not hearses .   I had confidence in the pilot and the plane . I don’t think anyone else in the plane could say the same , judging by their panicked expressions . Those pilots , highly trained ,  could slide it in on its fusilage belly .

Buckle your seat belt ; it’s gonna be a bumpy ride . 

But the landing gear came down and we all rolled to a stop .  Anticlimatic . I’m not complaining .  Billy Bob Thornton said ,” I’m not afraid of flying . I’m afraid of crashing . ”   That about sums it up .

About these English accents :

Ada and I flew from LAX to London once and I had arranged , in advance ,a rental car from the airport . I never sleep on flights and by the time we reached the car rental desk in London I was exhausted . I couldn’t , for the life of me , understand what the English girl at the counter was telling me . It was a Friday . I thought that she was telling me that my car wouldn’t be available until Monday . She wasn’t , of course . She was trying to tell me that my car would be a Mondeo .  I was losing my temper .

” Not Monday !” I said . ” Now “

Ada had to translate . Mediate . Ada grew up in Poland .

” Tell him…” the English girl would say .

” Tell her ….” I would say .

Oh.  The car is called Mondeo. Nothing about Monday . It’s waiting for us . Oh . O.K. Why didn’t she say so ?

I don’t mind flying much . Once in awhile . It’s quick once you leave the ground .  Gets you places you might not otherwise go . Somewhat uncomfortable . Never enough leg room . And they always remind you how a seat belt works ; they show you ; give a demonstration . That comes in handy because sometimes , if you haven’t used one in a few hours , you might have forgotten .

Sometimes you should bring along an English-American dictionary , or , at least a phrase book . Several English speakers from various corners of the earth learned English English from the English . Beware .  And consider bringing  some little bottles of booze . If nothing else , it gives you a sense that you’re getting away with something .  Even if you’re not a drinker bring some  —– trade one  for a few more tiny bags of peanuts or pretzels . If you ride Ryan Air , bribe the stewardess to use the head without paying the fee . Endless possibilities . Endless.

some random photos

in the mountains

We have this little A-frame in the mountains . It’s a small place , but the roof is steep and high . Some of the roof shingles near the peak came loose a couple of months ago and I’ve been thinking ever since how to get it fixed . Maybe in my younger days I could have scrambled up that roof and nailed them up ; but now I’m a little beyond that . So I thought about what to do . Something had to be done before the entire roof slumped and slid down . Gravity , you know ! And wind , and rain , and snow ……….

I asked Dave , my neighbor . He didn’t know any roofers or anyone in the area who might do that kind of work . He told me to call Randy . Randy does lots of maintenance jobs in the area . Maybe Randy would do the repair ; at least he’d know someone who did that kind of work .

So I called Randy . No , he doesn’t do roofing and he doesn’t know anyone who does . No one on the mountain does it , he told me . I explained to him that the problem was the height . It’s an easy repair , but to get up to it is the problem . Randy said he could find for me a couple of roofers down the hill . He’d text me their names .

Ada and I came up to the cabin today . Nice weather . Dave’s friend Don was about to visit . Don’s got a cabin up here , too . He and Dave ride mountain bikes through the forest on Sundays . Dave has an air-conditioning company and does sheet metal work . I thought I’d ask Don if he had any suggestions for me to solve my roof problem .

” I’ve got a ladder long enough ,” he said . ” We need roofing nails , and a little caulking would help ,” he said .

” What we need is a guy young enough to go up there , ” I said .

” They wouldn’t do it ,” he said , ” They don’t want to work . I’ll go up there .” Don is seventy .

So he did . I , luckily , had the right nails and a hammer . I even had , as it turned out , a long enough ladder . Dave had the caulking . Don climbed up the ladder and did a masterful repair job . He mentioned that it wasn’t perfect . Three or four of the nail heads showed . He couldn’t hide them under the shingle flaps . I don’t care . To me it was perfect . Saved me a lot of anguish .

Best of all , no one got hurt . No hammer fell on anyone’s head . The ladder didn’t slip . Don didn’t fall from the ladder .

We , Don and Dave and I , shared a couple of beers later and had a pleasant conversation about life , and bears , and rattlesnakes , and Arizona , and airplanes . Ada joined us until the sun began to fade . Don said that he had to leave , that he hadn’t seen his cabin in two or three months . He had just stopped by to say hello to Dave .

I thanked him for the work . It saved me a lot of worry . It saved me a lot of money . Don brushed it off , said that’s what friends are for . ” We all look out for one another ,” he said .

That’s what I like about our little getaway up here on the mountain. Lots of people around here seem to have that attitude . It’s refreshing .

revenant

I had an article from , I think , the New York Times sitting in my computer waiting for me to read it. Today , finally , I did .

It seems a skeleton of a young person was found with a padlock around an ankle . Ah , this is considered to be the bones of a revenant dating back to somewhere , I think , in Medieval times . In Europe.

A revenant is someone who returns , especially someone who returns from the dead . Maybe to bother the living . The revenant evidently wasn’t comfortable in it’s grave , was restless , antsy , so it gets out and takes out its discomfort on the living .

It seems this kind of thing went on regularly in parts of Europe during Medieval times , so the living had to come up with ways to deal with this . Men would go out to the graveyard and dig up the body and maybe turn the corpse over so in case it tried to escape into the world of the living again it would , instead of gnawing through the coffin would only be able to chew dirt . Better was to , maybe , put a brick into the mouth of the corpse so that it wouldn’t be able to………….well, same thing . Another method would be to nail the corpse down into its grave , or padlock an ankle to the coffin . Well , you get the idea .’

Apparently , this revenant stuff was a big problem in those days . A priest might go out to the boneyard with the men who would dig up the corpse just to see what had been going on . Sometimes , I’ve heard , fresh blood was seen on the mouth of the corpse lying in the grave , or fresh fingernail scrapes were seen on the coffin .

In subsequent years the revenant stories somehow developed into werewolf stories and then reports of vampires searching for human blood .

By chance , Ada and I were watching some Norwegian movie about mysterious murders found , fairly soon as it happened , to have been committed by a werewolf . Unfortunately , the police chief’s daughter was bitten by the werewolf and , as everyone knows who knows how these thing happen , she became a werewolf too .

And I’m continuing to read the book that Ada gave to me , The Geography of Bliss . The writer is in Iceland now , wondering if people there are happy . Were they happy in the Netherlands or Bhutan or Quatar ? He was in those places already . Who knows !

Anyway , he asks an Icelander about the old Icelandic tales of elves and other magical creatures . Does this guy believe in them ? The Icelander flashes him a sly smile and tells him that , no , he doesn’t believe in those things , but that a lot of people in Iceland do and knowledge of that fact makes life for this Icelander much more interesting .

What this all has to do with an exploration of happiness I don’t know ; but for now we’ll just get on with it .

The Iceland story reminds me of the old Irish woman living in the Irish countryside who was asked if she believed in leprechauns. ” Of course not ,” she said , ” but they’re out there just the same.”

I was explaining the revenant stuff that I’d just read about to Ada as we were, as it happens , driving through the Sonoran Desert in Arizona . She remembered a story told a long time ago by an old friend of mine who started a teaching career at the same time as I had way back when . Financial sense got the better of him after a few years , however , and he abandoned teaching for a career in the insurance game . After he retired from a long insurance industry career he got back into teaching and did that for several years. But that’s neither here nor there , so let’s get on with this meandering post .

My friend, Joe , and I taught at a small elementary school in Venice , CA . He taught 6th grade and I taught fifth when we started out . I , in later years , went on to teach middle school and Joe , after he retired from the insurance business , taught junior college . But that’s still neither here nor there . Sorry .

It seems Joe was called upon to suddenly substitute in a 2nd -grade classroom . Evidently the 2nd grade teacher had left abruptly that day and there were no lesson plans . Joe went from a 6th grade group to little 2nd graders . So he decided the best thing to do was to tell them a story .

He made up the story on the spot . It was about a big rabbit . The big rabbit did this and the big rabbit did that and the big rabbit had these adventures and the big rabbit had those adventures . Joe was winging it to fill some time until the recess bell .

One student asked if the big rabbit was dangerous . No , Joe said , unless you didn’t believe in it .

So the story spun out until finally the recess bell rang. Joe lined the kids up and they walked one by one through the classroom door out to play . One of the little girls stopped in the doorway , though , and began to cry and screech . She wouldn’t move. Joe couldn’t see any apparent reason for this frightening behavior and asked the little girl what was the problem .

So she told him . ” I don’t believe in the big rabbit and he’s going to get me ! ” she said .

Well , that for me sort of sums up what religion is to most people ; but that’s a topic for another time .

Meanwhile , I’m wondering what Icelandic elves have to do with happiness just as you might be wondering what revenants have to do with little girls being terrified of the big rabbit because they don’t believe in it and what the Sonoran Desert has to do with anything . Ah ! Life is a mystery.

titanic

The ship Titanic sank on its maiden voyage , April 15 , 1912 . The Carpathia came to rescue ship- wrecked passengers.

flying down to LA

I was thinking during the last few days about the time that I met God . I won’t describe Him because He can change shape , of course , and I’m sure He does all the time . Maybe becomes a Her . Or a They/Them .

I don’t want to get philosophical ( couldn’t even if I wanted too ). I know the nuns said God is everywhere ; is in everything . But , this was a guy , a little dude , a non-descript sort of a guy , wearing a beret . God wasn’t in him ; he was God . He said so .

He walked into the counseling center where I worked ( I use the term ‘worked’ lightly ; figuratively , catachrestically ) as a so-called security guard . No uniform . I just hung around there as the counselors did their things in their little cubical therapy rooms . Talked to the young secretary and chatted sometimes with the building director . Raymond Chandler might have called me out as a dumb crumb , the fall guy . If anything went wrong then I would be the one on the hook . Should’a been obvious . Philip Marlowe could’a clued me in to that. Told me to lam.

But God came in just at closing time one evening . The counselors were emerging from their cubicles ready to go home . God kind of messed that up because we couldn’t leave a guy at the front desk and all go home .

The young secretary was good ; quick on her feet , so to speak . She thrust a bunch of intake forms at the guy in the beret . ” Fill these out ,” she said . It bought some time as the handful of highly educated counselors pondered what to do . Couldn’t just throw the guy out even though it was closing time . Wouldn’t be right .

There had been a city agency that would have sent out what they called a Pep Team to handle surprises like this , and take care of people , but their funding had been cut and the Pep Teams had vanished a month or so before that night .

As God filled out the forms , because He had been told to do by the young secretary, he greeting each counselor. To the latina he spoke in fluent Spanish . To the man who happened to be recently from France , He spoke in fluent French . The secretary asked Him how he’d happened to get to our agency .

” I flew ,” he said . He said he flew from San Rafael , California . (I think he meant California .) She asked him what airline he had taken . ” No , I flew ,” he said as he flapped him arms up and down . He flew .

I watched him fill out the forms . WHO RECOMMENDED YOU ? He wrote ‘Lenny Bruce’. EDUCATION . He wrote ‘ Cosmic Universe ‘. NAME He wrote ‘ GOD ‘.

The gaggle of confounded counselors, standing a few feet away and discussing their options to do the right thing with this guy , didn’t have any wonderful ideas . The best that they came up with in desperation was to call a taxi for the guy . It seemed like a bad idea to me , sloppy thinking . Where would the taxi take him ? God only knew !

But a taxi quietly pulled up . We could all see it out the window behind the man wearing the beret . He was facing away from the window . He couldn’t have seen or heard the taxi as it arrived .

” Well , my ride is here ! “,he suddenly said , nevertheless , and he turned and walked out . He had handed the intake forms , all filled out , back to the young secretary . I asked for them and she surrendered them . I have the word of God somewhere in my garage !

My former tenant and friend , Michael G. , might have asked ,” Did you touch him ? It would’ve been better luck if you’d touched him “. ( I assume the superstitions about a humming bird once temporarily trapped inside of my house would apply to God too . Why not ? When I told Michael G. about the humming bird , he asked if I had touched it . ).

My mother , on the other hand , when I told her my hummingbird story , said to me ,” That’s bad luck . A bird in the house is bad luck ! “

I don’t know about God , good luck or bad luck . Maybe , by this time , I’ve become a pagan . Anyway , I didn’t touch the guy . I told those highly educated counselors that night , when the man with the beret had walked out and stepped into the taxi : “I think it was God .”

God works in mysterious ways . I think the nuns said that .

whisky is whiskey

I’ve been scrolling down along comments about an article that Ada sent along about the difference between Bushmills and Jamieson as far as what religion they are . They’re both Irish whiskeys , of course . The author of the article seems to conclude that the controversy about whether one’s Catholic and the other’s Protestant is just myth .

The more interesting part of my reading was to see some of the many comments attached . I sometimes peruse comments after some such bit of writing and wonder : These people ( commenters ) have a lot of time on their hands ! Get a life !

Of course I’m one of the time spenders from time to time on such frivolous pursuits . But , oh well ! , here we go .

The article writer makes a couple of points such as that the Jamieson original brewery was started by a Scottish immigrant to Ireland . The English imported Scots to Ireland to displace the native ( Catholic ) population ; but that was way back in centuries . The myth originates, the article said , in the fact that Bushmills is made in a Protestant part of Ireland and Jamiesons is made in a Catholic part .

One commenter calls the article superficial . Oh , they expected , rather , a historical analysis written by a university tenured professor ? Hey , a magazine writer’s got to make a living too ! It’s Saint Patrick’s Day time , after all !

Some of the commenters were from Ireland . Some wrote in from the UK . Many of them said that whiskey is whiskey . The Irish commenters suggested that we all just enjoy the best whiskey in the world , Irish whiskey . A few mentioned that whiskey doesn’t have a religion .

As far as I scrolled down through the comments , only one guy mentioned that the Bushmills company at one time discriminated against Catholics. Wouldn’t hire Catholics is the way I heard it .

The reason I was caught up for a few minutes with this article is that it is St. Paddy’s Day and I remember a reunion several years ago that my mother’s siblings were able to have . My mom was the hostess and when the group arrived my mother offered them a drink . How about a whiskey ?

My Uncle Dick , always a jokester , inquired whether it was Catholic whiskey or Protestant whiskey . He’d drink the Catholic whiskey , he said , but not the Protestant stuff . He was saying that for the reaction , of course . He didn’t give a hoot what kind of whiskey it was .

My mother began to protest by proclaiming that ‘whisky is whiskey’ . It’s not Catholic or Protestant , she said . My uncle replied whatever his comments were that came next to fire up the controversy . It was all ( mostly ) light-hearted . Pretty soon they were all offering their takes on the issue . Uncle Dick had got the reaction that he wanted , a little animated foolish banter about Irish whiskey .

At least it was a bit of fun for a few minutes to start their family reunion off on a humorous note . No one ( as far as I know ) sat down afterward to write a treatise on Bushmills or Jamieson being Catholic or Protestant . And , have we heard from the other religious groups yet ? How about the atheist perspective ?

One of the commenters after the aforementioned article said that anyone who has to seriously discuss what religion a whiskey is or isn’t probably shouldn’t be drinking whiskey anyway . I couldn’t agree more .

Happy St. Patrick’s Day !

hateful things

I recently wrote a post ( I thought at first to say ‘penned a post’ . Alliteration , you know ; but I don’t use a pen , of course , so I left ‘penned a post’ out . ) about things I hate . It was tongue-in-cheek , of course . I don’t hate possums , for example . Another blogger pointed out a few of the good things possums do in the world . They help control the spread of Lyme disease , for example , because they eat ticks . Good for them , I say ! I hope no possums read my post .

I don’t really hate politicians , either , or stock brokers , or whomever I happened to mention in my past post ( There ! Got the alliteration in ! ) . I am , I have to say , irritated by people who park in the middle in front of my house and block the space for a second vehicle to park , but , well , hate would be an exaggeration for my feelings about that . Who could hate someone for doing something febrile like that ! ( Okay , so febrile isn’t the right word ; but it’s a good word . How about ‘peripheral’ ? No , not quite .)

Anyway , I just finished reading a short essay by a woman who was a royal court lady in 10th Century Japan entitled ‘Hateful Things’ . Evidently a lot of things irritated her . The essay is included in a book that my friend Joe , the writer , poet , musician , insurance man, and teacher sent me . He and I taught together way back when in a previous century . Joe abandoned the teaching game for several years until he finally realized the error of his ways and got back into it after he retired from the insurance gig . Did I mention in my previous post ( Yeah , alliteration again .) how I hate insurance companies ? Oh well , as they like to say on cable news these days : There’s a lot to unpack there ! We’ll discuss that later .

The essay is one of the many in the book that Joe sent entitled ‘The Art of the Personal Essay’ written by a man named Phillip Lopate . Well , he didn’t author the essays ; he selected them and wrote the introduction . Joe said that he used the book in his literature classes . Or did he say his rhetoric classes and rhetoric classes were more or less the same thing as literature classes . Anyway , if his students paid any attention whatever and put in some effort , I’m sure those students , all adults I think , benefitted from Joe’s instruction .

Joe thought that I might like to read the book . If I tried to read it cover-to-cover it would take me years to do it ; but that’s neither here nor there . I started with the ‘ Hateful Things ‘ essay . That writer’s work was a tad more polished than my previous post ( ! ) , but she and I are , more or less , on the same track with the hate concept .

Joe and I used to teach with a quirky guy named Reynold , who was Assistant Principal at the school and , by the way , my mentor teacher . Reynold once announced at a faculty meeting that he was one of the great minds of the century . He let a short pause go by . Then he finished with : ” ……of the 15th Century “. (Reynold was a little old fashioned . A bit rigid. There’s a lot to unpack there , as they say ; but I’ll let that go . We won’t get to that later .)

My next post will be ‘ An Apology to Possums ‘ ( No it won’t . Possums , as far as I know , can’t read .) Anyone else insulted by my hating them in the post will have to wait a few months until I finish ‘The Art of the Personal Essay’ . ( And to think : I could’ve just taken the course ! ) When I finish reading that collection I might just get around to addressing my other various mentioned hates . Time will tell .

Well , you’ve slogged through another meandering post about something febrile . ( But febrile is definitely the wrong word . I can’t come up with a more appropriate one . I hate that ! )

Animals don’t hate. And we’re supposed to be better than them —–Elvis Presley said that .