Sunday, February 26, 2017

CONCERT

                                                

Last night Pat and I went to a Fleetwood Mack concert down here in the retirement community we live in. It was quite a different experience because we do go to concerts back in Minnesota too but keep in mind back there, some people under age sixty-five attend too. I was drawn back to a concert fifty years ago that I attended in the twin cities when I was in my forties. I went home practically stoned because of the pot smoke cloud I was enveloped in and I wasn’t even a willing participant but I did enjoy the singing. The odor at the concert last night was far more subtle, being somewhere in between ‘Evening in Paris’ and ‘Ben Gay.’

For a time last night everybody just sat and enjoyed the band but then came a moment when we were all asked to standup and get with it, meaning the music. Now I remember a time when dancing was when you held your significant other and you tried to move with the music.  What was happening last night was more like---well let me put it this way. If you went out on the street and gyrated like that, I am sure someone would intervene and you would probably end up sitting on a couch someplace, talking to some bespectacled therapist with a clipboard in a white coat. At least anyway after all the usual physical ailments that could cause such jerking and twitching had been ruled out. Due to a sore back lately I could only do something that looked like I was thumbing a ride.

Music has changed dramatically over the ages and I’m not sure what really is music anymore. I used to like holding her, her head on my shoulder as we floated around the floor, she felt so good and smelled so nice. We could actually talk to each other in a normal voice. We could understand the words and hum along. Now in between the vocal outbursts and deep knee bends, pelvic thrusts and back bends the musicians do, they’re simultaneously physically assaulting a steel guitar or a set of drums. I do think they are more athletes then musicians and I applaud them for their dexterity and multi tasking.


Now to be fair there are people who can really sing, that still do sing and that is my cup of tea. People like Carrie Underwood and Josh Groban.  For me to pretend that I enjoy this other metallic mayhem that some people enjoy, would be disingenuous so I’m not going to go there. However I will state, that if some people do enjoy this, them more power to them and I believe that if you look hard enough you will find an amendment to the constitution that says to people like me, “butt out and go find something else to do”. Like writing an essay about how terrible our music is. I have tried hard during my life to listen to different forms of music saying maybe I would develop a taste for something other than the country western singers. True I did lose my wife, had a dog and a pickup truck, so I did once fit the mold. I tried once to listen to classical music like Mozart and Beethoven. I even bought some tapes but then one day on a long motor trip I feel asleep somewhere in Mozart’s sonata number 12 and ran of the road and hit a haystack so due to concerns for my well being, I quit that kick. Guess I’ll just watch for a while.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

GOING WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE

                                   
Back in the early 20th century, the British Empire was still ruling a large portion of the world. It was a very expensive operation as British troops were needed in many places to keep the peace and World War I had been very costly. Yet even with all of the expense they were always up to a new challenge, mapping and exploring far away places and one of them was the countries of Tibet and Nepal. In the early part of the 1920’s they made several trips to this area, which remained mostly reclusive because of its vast geography of mountains and glaciers. It was here that Mt. Everest was a big part of the mystery. They had not seen or conquered it, so not only did they map and photograph it; they actually made plans to climb it. The Brits had long been interested and active in mountain climbing and had mastered most of the Alpine peaks in Europe over the years. But here was a mountain that was many thousands of feet higher then anything the Alps had, had to offer and it had remained a mystery and unclimbed. Something the British thought was a challenge they just couldn’t pass up. There were a lot of reasons not to climb to the top of this peak but they ignored them. They just couldn’t pass this up.

Some of the most obvious reasons, not to climb this mountain, were the unknown. How would people react to breathing air that was one-fourth the oxygen level of what they were used to breathing? How would they cope with the cold and winds that constantly swept the mountain? How would they react to the mental challenges of being one wrong step from death for weeks at a time? They were about to find out and a young man by the name of George Mallory would spearhead their efforts. Mallory climbed on Everest three times before he was killed in a fall along with his partner Sandy Irvine. So great were the risks that his death was a death, he felt was inevitable, if he kept climbing there. His mummified body was found in 1999 and it remains where it was found. After his death the Brits kept trying to climb Everest but it was not until 1953 that the mountain was first climbed to the summit, by a New Zealander, namely Sir Edmund Hillary. The Brits have long argued that there was no conclusive evidence that Mallory and his partner Irvine did not reach the top in 1924 and were killed on the way down but the fact remains, that to be successful you have to get down alive or at least have a photo of yourself, standing on the top.

So where am I going with this history lesson? Just to say that I so admire people who’s level of personal achievement in life means taking risks to get there. Sometime in the future, people will blast out into space to conquer what may be the only frontier left to explore. We have climbed the tallest Mountain on earth and been to the deepest part of the seas. There will always be risks associated with this kind of exploration and even to this day climbing Mt. Everest is not without its perils, although clipping into a rope and climbing up a well worn path today, just isn’t the same as having to find your way. No one can control the weather and that is and always will be the biggest problem. There wasn’t any pot of gold on top of Everest and there won’t be one in space either. The only reward will be in conquering the unknown. Sir Edmund Hillary said and I quote, “Its not the mountain we conquer, it is ourselves.”



Monday, February 13, 2017

A DAY IN THE SOUTHWEST

                                                   
I thought I would switch gears and just for craps and giggles write about our stay in Arizona. Since the 1st of the year, Pat and I and our two dogs have resided in Maricopa, which is south of Phoenix and fifteen miles from Casa Grande, if that means anything to you. Our house is in a retirement community so unless someone’s grandchildren are visiting it’s pretty much the haunt of the silver heads. Just like in the Army, lights out, is around 9.30 p.m and wakeup is around 6.30 a.m. although you don’t see too many people exiting their abodes before 8 a.m, unless it’s women in their housecoats to get the newspaper or old men in their---aw forget it.

One of our early morning activities is walking the dogs. I did walk Molly up north too but there are some changes. #1 is Molly has to be on a leash and this automatically turns this seventy-five pound Lab into a sled dog and I have worn the heels out of my shoes and probably will need roto-cuff surgery when I get back to Minnesota. #2 is up north, Molly poops in the woods and my theory is if it’s good enough for the bears, it’s good enough for Molly. Not down here. No woods and no bears and strict orders to pick up after your pet. Most people you meet with pets have a leash in one hand and a bag of excrement in the other. Blows my theory about not taking any crap from anyone. The place is clean so everybody for the most part participates. The contents of the bags go into the garbage, along with the plastic bag, which isn’t supposed to, but I draw the line at cleaning out the bags and recycling them.

We have lots of rabbits along the trails, which by the way are beautiful trails winding their way through ponds, and green meadows and along the backyards of beautiful homes. The ‘Sound of Music,’ could have been filmed here instead of traveling over to Bavaria or wherever they went, but back to the rabbits. Pats dog Bailey is very good at flushing rabbits out of the bushes so she-- Bailey not Pat-- dives in and Molly remains outside ready to pounce on the prey. This necessitates me into burying a deadhead to hold myself back when the rabbit runs out and Molly takes chase. I can tell by my shirtsleeve length that my right arm-- my leash holding arm-- is now an inch longer then the left.  The rabbits have no real enemies here, save for the occasional encounter with a Grand Cherokee driven by someone with 60 80 vision, who has trouble distinguishing anything beyond the hood ornament.

Needless to say dogs waste elimination, is not limited to solid wastes. The liquid waste you can’t pick up. Molly is some kind of self-proclaimed doggie urinalysis analyzer, so this necessitates many stops for her to really breathe in the aroma. It’s like pou- pouri for dogs. They say a dogs nose is hundreds of times more sensitive then humans so for us to really draw a parallel to this, it would be like sticking your head in a full diaper pail. Not really finding the attraction here.


Since I’m limited to about 6oo words in this column I have spent the whole allotment talking about the unsavory bathroom habits of dogs and I have no room left to tell you how nice it is here, but you’re in Minnesota and I’m down here and you don’t want to hear it about it anyway, so Ta Ta until next week.---Mike

Friday, February 10, 2017

LAUGHTER

                                                          

I remember so well my dad and his brothers and sisters getting together in what could only be described as a forever-ongoing family roast. Although they differed a lot in their religious views and political views, whenever the family got together all of that was pushed to the background by their humor. In short they loved to laugh and they didn’t mind being laughed at either. My father had the uncanny ability to keep somewhere in his frontal lobe, within easy recall, a list of jokes that would be the envy of Johnny Carson. I used to tell people, “Dad had a million jokes and I heard them all a million times.” The irony of it all was they seemed funnier every time he told them and he always laughed the hardest.

At the time I thought all of this family goofiness was my dads attempt to be an entertainer. But as the years went on and I became more in tuned with his wit, I noticed how so many times dad would use this humor to defuse situations that had gotten out of hand. In short he just wanted everyone to get along. As the years have gone by, I have noticed how some of dads humorous spirit in his descendants, has turned to rancor. Apparently it’s not something that stays in your D.N.A or if it is, it’s being bred out of it.

Years ago humor was appreciated much more then it is today. If you went to a movie you always got your spirits lifted by the Bowery Boys, The Three Stooges, The little Rascals, followed by a cartoon. Who could forget Tweety and Sylvester, the Roadrunner and the Fox or that swashbuckling Pepe le pew the romantic skunk? Television had its humor too. People like Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and a whole cast of characters that didn’t have to be filthy to be funny. Carol Brunette had one of the funniest casts anyone ever put together in a television show and even today it beats anything modern day television now has to offer. Was all of the good humor just used up? I don’t think so. I think they just quit trying.

We’ve lost our ability to laugh. We would rather engage in conflicting and often inflammatory views of what goes on in this troubled world to each other. We love to blame someone else for every bad thing that happens because for some reason in our seriously mixed up minds, that seems to make it all right. We no longer want to just correct someone-- we want to humiliate him or her. What is so troubling about this is, the more we live like this, the more depression and sadness there is in our world. And the more people are depressed and sad; the more they turn to alcohol and drugs to make them happy and we all know the consequences of that.


There is a man in our church who loves to laugh. I don’t know him that well but I do know life has not always been a bed of daises for him and his wife. Yet his group of friends seems to grow as he has had this Pied Piper effect on people with his humor. I have occasionally stayed on the sidelines and watched as he talks with people and noticed how he always leaves them laughing. Lately I’ve made an effort to know him better, simply because well-- he’s my kind of guy. I too like to be personable with people and especially with those who like a good laugh.