A Post-Debate Political Interlude

 OMFG

In a Non-Related Story

 

My imagination is sore--hiding, licking its wounds as reality trumps it with every headline. So here is a picture that could represent autumn in suburbia, anytown, USA. It is the view from my front porch. Nowhere to be seen is there any indication of the world that Google News presents to me this morning. 

To wit: 

Trump, Biden first debate: Everything you need to know

Trump denies New York Times report on his taxes ahead of first presidential debate

California wildfire burns through Napa Valley wineries

'Multiple' people dead following 'hostage situation' in Salem, Oregon State Police investigating

Don't install this Windows 10 update Microsoft just pushed out

Grand juror claims Ky. attorney general misled public on Breonna Taylor

Coronavirus: Global Covid-19 death toll passes one million

Cyberattack hobbles major hospital chain's US facilities

. . . and so on. 

There is some good news. They found underground liquid water on Mars. Today is Coffee Day, I guess, and there are places that are offering free coffee!

I guess that's it for the good news, if you skip the "entertainment" section, which is mostly incomprehensible to me. Well, I guess the Kansas City Chiefs won their ball game, despite their politically incorrect name and mascot. 

I'm going outside. 

Get Your Kicks . . .

 I graduated high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1968, and in the following late September I drove to Independence, Missouri.  I did it just for the hell of it at first, but decided to stay. I returned to Palo Alto a couple years later but retreated back to Missouri about the time rents and real estate costs in the Bay Area made it too difficult to live there. (I believe the vast majority of my school mates no longer live in the area, having scattered to more liveable areas around the West Coast. Mostly Oregon, I suspect.) 

But in 1968, about the time Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and my generation were burning their bras and their draft cards and some Americans flew around the moon and most Americans were wondering who shot J.R., hopping in my 1957 Chevrolet "Sedan Delivery" wagon to drive half-way across the country on the already legendary U.S. Route 66 was a great adventure. 

I wasn't quite eighteen yet so that was even better. I quit my job at a Texaco gas station on El Camino Real and hit the open road with no particular ETA, no job, and no place to live, in particular. For the rest of my life so far I have never duplicated the feeling of freedom that gave me. 

At the time, construction on the new Interstate Highway system had barely begun, so almost all of Route 66 was two-lane blacktop. It went right through the middle of every little town it served, so that one minute you would be cruising along a seemingly endless ribbon of desolate highway, and the next, idling at a stop sign at a four-way intersection flanked by a diner and a hardware store. As the song goes, you might see a flatbed Ford in Winslow, Arizona--though today the Interstate skirts around it so you hardly know you're there. 

I was there in 1968, but to be honest I may not have noticed anyway. It was about a two-thousand mile drive from Palo Alto to Kansas City, and it might be more accurate to say it has its exciting moments than to say it has its boring moments. The first half of that journey is desert, once you get out of California's Great Valley and before you reach Albuquerque.  One could be forgiven for being less than totally alert the whole way. 

For most of my life I thought of this trip as a high point of my life, but in truth, it was just the interstice between two things, my life as a Californian and the rest of my life as a Missourian. It took twelve years after that to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, when I finally got a "real" job and got married and all the rest. I have to say that I'm a slow learner. 

Since my wife died about five years ago, I've come to think of those two eras as two lives. Actually, I've always felt that way, a perspective perhaps facilitated by the geographic separation of them. It must be very strange, I'm thinking, to be an adult in the same place you went to Kindergarten. As it is, I feel well insulated from that life that ended with the completion of high school in 1968--well insulated by a buffer of two thousand miles of desert and farmland, connected only by the memory of a thin ribbon of highway that doesn't even exist anymore. 

On to life 3.0.  So far, so good. 

The New, Perhaps More Narrowly Defined Normal

It's a couple of weeks before my birthday. I have no expectations, good or bad. Jo and I have made it so far without catching the Coronavirus, or Covid-19. I have no expectations there, either, except a dim hope that someday there will be a vaccine for it and we can all return to something that reminds us of normalcy at a time when it might just be that there is no such thing anymore. 

For lunch we drove to a Wendy's and got take-out. At the drive-through, the disembodied voice from the speaker belonged to a young woman, I think. She was little help in clarifying the usual cryptic billboard that seemed to only reluctantly reveal the various ordering options. Did "small," "medium," and "large" refer to the combo's drink size, french-fry size, or both? There was no clue, so I mumbled something and let the young lady follow her heart. 

We then drove to a park to eat in the car. South of the Truman Presidential Library is a park with a playground, tennis courts, and trees and some pleasant scenery, so we opted for the latter and I parked my car accordingly. My thought as we sat there and looked around at the neighboring tree lined streets and small, well-kept houses, was that Independence might be one of those places where being "poor" doesn't mean you are white trash. Everybody's poor. (hyperbolic statement) It makes a difference. I explained to Jo that possibly the reason for this was that Independence has been here for a very long time, and has experience only very slow growth. Nowadays, there is really nowhere for it to grow anymore, except to its east where development only occurs when there is farmland for sale, and then, again, only slowly. 

After we ate we walked around the Independence Courthouse Square, which is a modest, barely-alive business district around an old, stately courthouse building that looks much like it did when Harry Truman returned from Washington D.C. for good and took walks in the afternoons. The square was a little more vital, back then. Nowadays over half the stores are closed, since the only activity around seems to be those few things involved in county government, some courthouse activity and associated lawyers. Shops that are still in business are run sporadically--meaning when you arrive they may or may not be open. Maybe business was so slow that day so they closed up and went home. Restaurants seemed to be still cautiously closed due to the Corona virus. To be fair, we were there around 2:30 in the afternoon, a slow time in any era. 

The most striking thing to me was that even though I first arrived in Independence when I drove out here from California in 1968, the year when Americans had just learned how to send a manned spacecraft around the moon and back, Sixty Minutes first aired on television and the Tet Offensive was launched in Viet Nam, little has changed.

My Week

 This is getting awkward. At this point I have no intention of letting up on either masks or social distancing until after I’ve gotten vaccinated (if indeed that comes about,) but more and more people I know have given up and are socializing “normally.”  This makes me look and feel like I’m being overly paranoid—in a liberal sort of way—and I’m sure at least some people I know have given up on me.

I used to go to a breakfast on Wednesdays with a bunch of guys I worked with at the phone company. We had stopped, and now it is back on again, but I won’t go sit in a restaurant for two hours with either no mask on while eating, or a mask on while trying to talk across a table.

Some friends invited us over, assuring us that there is room in their living room for us to keep our distance, but since I have no idea if or how often “the kids” come over with the grandchildren, we are hesitant. We invited them over to our place where we can sit on the deck, where at least it’s outside and so a little “safer.”  (He says their patio has mosquitoes.) No word back, so they don’t want to, I assume.

So, it’s all kind of annoying.

Sorry. I just needed to ventilate.

OK, not quite done yet. Since I live with another person, it is NOT up to me, as an individual, to decide how careful or not careful I want to be. It has to be a unanimous decision between the two of us.

Now I’m done. 

In further stunning developments, I whirled some grass seed onto the lawn, followed by fertilizer, and then some sort of substance meant to hold in moisture and keep the seed from slipping down the slope on the side of the house.  Another project involves a drainage problem by the back basement door, so I started digging that out so I can rake it out in a way that will allow rain water to drain away. However, now that we are running the lawn sprinklers three (3!) times a day so the new grass seeds will grow, I have had to put aside work on that. Slowly, the number of rakes, shovels and various implements of destruction is building up along the inside walls of the garage. This is something I hoped to avoid, but apparently it is my fate. I don’t actually have to mow, as we have an HOA that manages that, along with leaf and snow removal, and trash pickup. So, sort of a bonus there, except they perform that service on giant riding mowers that zoom back and forth among the trees and buildings, leaving tire tracks and grass that was cut so high and at such speed that it looks more like a bad haircut. 

But it's not ALL bad. Amongst all this negative doom and gloom are some good things. 

I'll get back to you on that. 

Fall

The sunlight slants farther now

Cold is creeping    

Trees are sleeping

leaves are dreaming

of summer sun.

Free Floating

I am just going to have to resort to free association in order to come up with a bog post. (Oops, sorry, Freud, I mean BLOG post.)  Just on GP, as we used to say. (general principles)  When I was in grade school, somewhere between 3rd and 5th grade we were given a spelling test and for the words it was ultimately revealed that we misspelled we were each to come up with a mnemonic to help us remember the correct spelling. Our school principal was in the classroom, and he explained how the word principle meant one thing, but his title, principal, meant something else. He explained that he was the "princi pal" of all of us kids. So, I never forgot that, silly as it was. My misspelled word was knowledge. Yeah, I know. Can't believe I misspelled that.  The company, GE, was failing, and they called upon the mysterious but well educated Mr. K to come in to save it. So, because of his knowledge,  K now led GE. Don't judge me. A girl misspelled captain, so her mnemonic was, the captain "eats out of a tin." Yikes.

I'm having so much trouble working on either one of my two books that I set it all aside in order to do some reading. My high school alumni web page (Palo Alto High School) has a list of authors who came from my graduating class, so I went there and peeked at some novels using Amazon's "see inside" feature, and I bought a couple written by Keith Raffel, one about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one about a character whose Rabbi grandfather requested he continue his search for the Ark of the Covenant. Pretty juicy stuff, right? Reading the Ark book first (Temple Mount) and it's kind of good. It is a real page-turner, which means, for me, I am actually able to progress through it normally without having such long gaps between reading sessions that I have to back up a page or two to remind me where I am. I have said before that this sometimes means I work backwards through books if I don't read beyond my previous stopping point. As I read, I am always asking myself, could I do this well? I think maybe not, in this case, but then, maybe.