To me he was . . .

I was talking to my mother on the phone tonight. After the usual questions about her current health and happiness she said:

I was thinking just the other day about all the things your father and I did in the 57 years we were together.

"You guys did have a busy life together." My father passed away in 2002 just three weeks before their 58th anniversary.

I was always so proud of him. No matter what, he made sure we paid our bills. Even the hospital bills for you and your brother.

The health insurance my dad got through his job was almost totally useless, and my parents paid almost all of our hospital bills themselves. "I know he worked hard, but what I remember most is that we always seemed to have fun."

He worked like a dog. But he never complained.

"No, he never did. And like I said, we always had fun."

Don't take money to have fun.

She was quiet for a couple seconds while we both remembered.

God, I miss him.

"Me too, Mom."

In a world that often treated my brother and me as something less than real men because we had hemophilia (and often didn't mind telling us quite bluntly), he never had anything but love and pride for us. When other fathers were abandoning their family or ignoring a son's existence because he was 'defective', my father was taking on another job so he could be sure we had the care we needed. When the world was telling my brother and me that we would never be anything but cripples and a drain on society, our father was teaching us how to work a short order grill, do rough carpentry, and run a bakery so we would always be able to make our own way.

In my last post I talked about how the gene for hemophilia can stay hidden for several generations. In our family it is just the opposite. My grandfather was a hemophiliac, two cousins, my brother and I, and now my grandson. I know my life has been infinitely easier than my grandfather's, and I am confident that my grandson's will be infinitely easier than mine. I just hope that he never has to hear some girl's father tell him not to come around anymore because Janice/Rosa/Sharon can't be wasting her time on a cripple; but if he does I hope he has someone like I did who will remind him that "your bleeds can be stopped, and you'll get better, but there isn't any cure for being a stupid jackass."

父ありてあけぼの見たし青田原

With my father/I would watch the dawn/Over the green fields.

Spammity spam. . .

Tonight I was looking through the 11 August 1945 issue of The New Yorker. I was reading that particular issue to see if they had made any comments relating to the bombing of Hiroshima. They did not, but in the 'Talk of the Town' section they did have an article about Jay Hormel. In it there was the following passage:

In his office at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, he keeps what he calls his Scurrilous File, in which he dumps the letters of abuse that are sent to him by soldiers everywhere in the world. "If they think Spam is terrible," Mr Hormel told us, "they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war. Maybe that's where the verb 'to beef' came from. Maybe the verb 'to spam' will come out of this war. Nothing would surprise me any more." He blinked his eyes. "The language people use!"

If he only knew.

二つ三つ星みいだすや啼く蛙

I can see/Two or three stars/Frogs are croaking.

サンタいません

私の紙と髭は白いで、あなかは太っていますから、小さい子供で「サンタ」
と言います。私がサンタいません！名前はガイ•ボスです。ヘーリー•アイダホ
で住まれましたけれども、出身はミシガンだと思います。とても小さな町の
　テｨークムセで成長しました。

大学の時にはたくさんアルバイトを含めて、共助員やトーリシト•ガイドや
フォーク•ミュージックの喫茶店のMCでした。大学の後ではペンキ屋や
大学の職員や作家でした。それから、教科書の経営者が二十三年間ありました。
今退職したです。

私の家はスコッツデルのオールド•タウンの近くにです。私たちの猫はそこに
住んでもいいです。何人かはそこか古くて小さいだと思います。しかし、私たち
はとても気持ちいがいいと思います。

私はたくさん趣味あります。文学を読んで、音楽を聞くが一番好きな二つです。
マルック•チワエン、ドゴラス•アダムザ、村上春樹などの作家は読みたい。音楽
はジャズとクラシックが特にすきです。私は本当にギターとドラムをするが
楽しんでいますから、あまり上手がありません。

どうぞよろしく。

And so we elect them again and again . . .

Several months ago the Democratic Party of Arizona sent me an email asking what I would like to see in the Democratic Platform for this election.

My short answer was: A backbone.

I would like to see our nation's leader have the strength of character to stand up to the Religious Right and tell them it is none of their business who or what someone believes in, if at all. Furthermore, they are free to practice their religion only so long as it does not conflict with the freedom and welfare of others. Just as freedom of speech does not include the freedom to yell "fire" in a crowded building, freedom of religion does not include the freedom to exploit or abuse others, or to force others to follow the dictates of their beliefs.

I would like to see them take the firm stance that marriage is a civil contract. It is a public declaration that two people have formed a partnership to deal with the day to day issues of survival, give assistance to each other during times of hardship, and share the responsibilities of raising any children that may result. As such it doesn't matter if the partners are a man and a woman, two men, two women or any combination of the above. As long as both, or all, partners have entered the agreement freely and knowingly without being coerced or forced to do so then they are married. If you wish to bring religion into it that is your and your partner's decision, and those complications are of your own devising and have nothing to do with me.

I would like to see the Democrats finally have the courage to declare that in a nation as rich as the United States there is no justifiable reason every man, woman and child is not provided with the best medical treatment in existence. For a fraction of what we have spent getting our youth killed in Iraq we could have given every citizen, or alien, state of the art medical aide. (In the long run it would have even saved the nation billions of dollars by preventing hundreds of thousands of conditions from becoming even worse, and therefore more costly, or perhaps even occurring at all.)

I would like to see the Democrats finally state publicly and without apology that all of the hysteria over illegal aliens is nothing more than disgustingly shameful bigotry and racism. Unless you are 100% Native American or First Nation you or your family probably got here without a visa. Whenever the immigration authorities, or our publicity addicted sheriff, make a sweep rounding up the 'illegals' they are caught working in restaurants, construction sites or doing some other bottom rung job no 'citizen' would take. They are working. The drug dealers and thieves responsible for our high crime rate are our own, home grown product. The woman with six children from six different fathers draining our welfare system is a citizen and not one of those filthy wetbacks.

There's more. So much more.

秋風や石積んだ馬の動かざる

Autumn wind/A horse loaded with stones/Doesn't move

I Don't Want Your Botheration . . .

My horoscope this morning said I wasn't grouchy, I was just in a bad mood. The difference between 'grouchy' and 'bad mood' is too much of an exercise in Talmudic hairsplitting for me at the moment, so let's just agree that this probably isn't the day to be pointing out that my socks don't match. If I was to be totally honest this irritability is probably a reaction to staring into the darkness last night wondering if I would ever do anything even slightly above mediocre before I died; but this is an election year and total honesty has been exiled until it has learned to behave itself. Therefore, I will do what every good American would do in my situation, and place the blame squarely on 'Them.'

Green Light . . .

You’ve seen me. You won’t remember it, but if you ever visited the University you saw me as I made my way across the campus—or perhaps you caught a glimpse of me sitting in the safety of my office.

Maybe you were here to visit a son or daughter or sweetheart and, pointing me out to your companion, you asked him or her, “What does that fellow do?”

Perhaps they told you, in a manner suggesting they had a profound understanding of the inner workings of the University, that I was probably a professor of this or that subject; or, in a way that implied they had deeper more important truths to worry about, waved their hand in dismissal saying, “Him? Who knows? Probably nothing.”

It’s an attitude we understand.

It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .6番

Thomas’s ankle was quite sore, and each time he took a step a little white-hot flash of pain would shoot through it so he decided he would stop and have a cup of tea and rest a bit. It turned out that this was one of the three times this century it has been verified that a Starbucks was not the closest place to Thomas’s current location. The first time was on a trip he took to Murdo, South Dakota. When asked why he had gone to Murdo all he will say is he had already seen the corn palace. The other time was when he had to spend the night in Orem, Utah. He refuses to say anything about that night, but his analyst grins uncontrollably whenever he hears the city's name. Orem passed a law banning the sales of mango-coconut gelatin and feather dusters soon afterward, but no one really knows why.