MOLLY

                                                         

It has been a while since I wrote about Molly. For those of you who are new to this column, Molly is my Labrador dog. When you look into race and genetics in the Minnesota dog world, it would be fair to say there are more labs and half labs in this state then there are Norwegians in Norway. I heard of a woman who put an add in the paper for her lost Lab. It read in part.” Lost Black lab with red collar. If found please bring to the address in this add for a generous reward.” She said they brought 4 of them before she got the right one.

Labs are known for having good dispositions and Molly is no exception. If another dog growls at her she looks over her shoulder at who is behind her, because they can’t possible be mad at her. They are natural hunters and I guess with careful training they can make a good hunting companion. Not sure how long that takes but in Molly’s case it would probably be most of her useful lifetime. She hunts all right; it’s just that she isn’t picky about her selection of prey. If it moves and runs away from her she’s right on it’s tail. In the case of a skunk she might be right under the tail and has been. Pew!

I told you she gets along with other people and other dogs. In Arizona I have to keep her leashed when I walk her. She has pulled me flat out on the ground three times, in a charge to make a new acquaintance. Her favorite charge is a 180-degree backwards thrust with the leash between my legs when I’m walking forward. You can imagine the logistics of that. Once I was picking up what she had just done in the grass; my hand was inches from the stinky pile, when she took off, which sent my hand into the middle of the pile of excrement, a mile from home. A half mile from home I met an acquaintance that always likes a hearty handshake and I managed to get my soiled hand in my pocket and extend the other hand upside down which brought a, “What the hell look,” from him and a short end to a clean pair of pants. I just sewed the pocket shut after that.

Every time I take her to the vet they tell me she needs to lose more weight. What I feed her would starve a Teacup Poodle-- I was going to say Mexican Chihuahua but I couldn’t spell it--Oh all right, for cripes sake I looked it up, okay. Anyway its what she finds to eat that gets her in trouble. Molly’s theory is just eat it and if it don’t set well, throw it up by the patio doors when he’s asleep and he will step in it in the morning when he lets me out. I have analyzed a lot of dog vomit and fifty percent of the time I don’t have a clue what she ate. Then there is the begging at the table and the dishes to lick afterwards. What? Do you realize how much water I save by not rinsing my dishes? Molly sleeps by herself at night. Her idea not mine, but I think for the better. The other night I got up during the night to—you know what I got up for—and she’s on the couch where she doesn’t belong. I took the lid off a tote and put it on the couch so she wouldn’t get back up there and went back to bed.  Then I got right back up and did what I was going to do in the first place, before I wet myself and she’s back on the couch. She threw the tote lid down the basement stairs.

SUNSHINE BOYS

                                                         

We have long had this group of old men and sometimes even a couple of ladies that would get together for coffee in the mornings in town. I have written about them before under the label of ‘Sunshine boys.”  But Illness, death and moving away have thinned the ranks and now there are fewer left.  Oh, every fall, we always lost a few snowbirds for the winter but even then we seemed to have a quorum and guess what? I’m now a snowbird too. I’m not talking about a quorum in a legal sense but rather enough for us to have a meaningful conversation.

Sometimes groups like this exist for a while and then disappear because the reasons for meeting had a particular topic in mind. For instance a group that once worked together or alumnus. But this group is unique, never having a definite purpose or any ties that went beyond being old, living around Crosslake and just wanting to socialize. For many of us it is just a way to break up the day and share some old jokes and maybe a few experiences. Complain about the state of world affairs and that awful younger generation, all something old men seem to be drawn to.

There were a couple of topics that weren’t officially banned but topics we did stay clear of. Human nature and the experience of a lifetime of living, told most of us they could be sensitive and controversial. After all respect for each other had to come first. So religion and politics remained on the back burner. When the group first started getting together, or at least when I first started getting together with them, I was one of the younger ones. That has changed somewhat. I haven’t got any younger and they’re simply aren’t many younger ones and that’s the reason for this essay. 

When I was a young man I often thought that if I were to be happy in life maybe a log cabin on a mountainside far from the madding crowd would be my cup of tea. There would be no one to criticize me or no one to order me around. No one to fear or steal my stuff. No one, to be compared too. I would be my own boss. What I didn’t realize at the time, coming from a large family, was how lonely that kind of life can be and what were the ramifications of having no one to love. Ironically my Grandson who is just 21 once said the same thing to me. He’s getting married next summer and I’m betting he’s given up on that idea, just like I did.

But back to the sunshine boys and what has happened.  I’ve wracked my brain for some sort of reasoning for the declining ranks. Is having friends like that no longer cool anymore? Has the dynamics of people sharing their lives like that changed that much? Or are we way to busy for that sort of thing or is the reasoning-- what’s in it for me? Maybe we were all just in another time and place back then, where we just clicked. Then maybe it’s just me and I’m reading way too much into it—or perhaps writing too much into it, I don’t know. Anyway, years ago Bob Hope had a theme song called “Thanks for the Memories.” To Morrie, Rusty, Dick, Norm, and now Gordy, who have gone on to that big booth in the sky with the never-ending coffee cup, I too say, “Thanks for the memories.” To Lee we all say, “get well our friend. “To all of the others and especially you Fergie-- I’ll see you in the spring.

GRACE

                                                          

I have on my dining room wall a painting called “Grace”. It’s a painting of a elderly man with his hands folded, saying a prayer over a small table, with a very simple meal on it. Its origins go back to a photography studio in Northern Minnesota and the year was 1918. Also on the table was a book that many felt represented the Bible. Whether it was a Bible or not, I don’t know, but the implication is there. But it’s the sheer humbleness and simplicity of the scene that took me in when I first saw it. It could have been turkey and all the trimmings, with a bottle of fine wine or cognac but instead it was this simple bowl of soup and a loaf of dry bread. It could have been a man in a three-piece suit with a gold watch fob but in all actuality history tells us, it was a simple peddler chosen for this photo.

Maybe its because I grew up in a house where we had plenty of simple meals that I was touched. I used to see the hurt in mothers eyes, when what she had to dish up, wasn’t much. Maybe it was because my father demanded we pray before we eat, no matter how meager the meal was that this picture hit home for me. I think of people in this world who go to bed hungry all the time and there are nights when I wish it were in my power to whisk my meal off to someone who needs it far more then me.

We are a somewhat benevolent nation with our soup kitchens and food shelves so maybe in a way I’m preaching to the choir. But I look at the rest of the world and it makes me cry sometimes. Why are bombs and rockets raining down on people instead of food? It simply makes no sense. The price of one cruise missile, 1.4 million dollars, could feed the hungry of a small country for quite some time. Who do you think would like you better? People who see you help them feed their starving children or people you shoot missiles at.

Being nice to others used to be second nature. It wasn’t something that needed to be taught. We have a man in the Whitehouse who doesn’t like being nice to others because he feels he will get better results if he threatens and bullies people. That in it self doesn’t bother me so much. The fact that he has followers that seem to endorse this behavior is what bothers the most. There seems to be no limit to what they will put up with from him because party victory cannot be accomplished any other way but through him. It shows us where our country has gone in the last century. It has happened in the past too but in the past it was largely stifled. People said “ouch. I can’t go that far.” The damage that is being done to our democratic system and to our shrinking fan base around the world may take decades to recover from-- if it all.

I had a grandfather who was the most humble honest man I ever knew. In all of the years I knew him, I never knew him to utter a harsh word about others. He led by a quiet example and as a man of the cloth he had a great following. I remember standing by his open casket with my father. My father sobbing and saying “Oh how I wish I could have been the man he was.” I tried to defend my father and told him “you are a good man.” Dad told me grandpa was more then a good man. He was a great man. “There lay’s your mentor my son.”

            

ANOTHER NATURE STUDY

                                             

I stood looking out the window this morning, watching the leaves fall from my birch clump. There wasn’t any breeze; it was a calm day, leaving the lake shimmering like a sheet of glass. The falling leaves from the tree seemed to be giving up and surrendering their grip on the tree they had lived on all summer. The leaves seemed to imply it was over-for now and they were telling the tree the time had come to let go. That the close family relationship they had enjoyed since spring had come to an inevitable end. For the leaves it was the end, but for the tree it is just a brief hiatus, for it knows that life will go on. That come spring it will replenish itself.

The tree and its leaves are codependent to some extent and one cannot live without the other. Except that the tree has within its powers the ability to go dormant without its leaves and then reincarnate itself come spring. It cannot remain dormant indefinitely. Yet it doesn’t have to wither and die and then reseed itself to propagate either. It must go through this process to live because of the waning sunlight and weather extremes that are outside of what it needs to sustain life.

Joyce Kilmer wrote in his poem  “Trees,”  “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest. Against the earth’s sweet breast.” It suggests that not only is the tree dependent on the leaves but it is also dependent on the earth that it stands rooted in. That same earth in turn is dependent to some degree on those same leaves that die and decay, providing nutrients to feed the tree in the next growing cycle. Kilmer goes on to talk about another facet-- the birds that live within its branches. “A tree that may in summer wear. A nest of robins in her hair.”

It seems so fascinating when we talk about the intricacies’ of nature. For when you don’t limit yourself to seeing just the tree-- but you see the whole picture and all the details that come into it.  It’s within this that we realize how nature can only exist when it lives in harmony with each other. Take away the tree and the leaves die. Sterilize or poison the earth and the trees die. Take away the tree and the habitat it provides and the birds and animals have no place to live, no place to shelter in.

We have no assurances that the tree will come back to life in the spring but nature is pretty resilient and it has been through this process more times then we care to study. So we hope yes-- but beyond that we leave it to a greater power. Back to Kilmer, “Poems are made by fools like me. But only God can make a tree.” We can help nature exist and in some ways we can even change it for the better but the whole master plan for nature seems to defy explanation, at least at our level.

In this sometimes-complicated world we live in, filled with so many plants and animals, we sometimes struggle to understand the complexity of nature and how in the grand picture, it all fits so nicely together. There are many people on this earth that wouldn’t for a minute be intrigued by the falling leaves like I was. They couldn’t care less about what lives and dies. Only their own selfish desires to accumulate wealth and power and often with no regard for nature.