Archive for August, 2017

Letter From Claverack 08 29 2017 Praying for Houston…

August 29, 2017

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There are days we take to catch up and today was one of them for me.  Once it had warmed enough [and yes, we are reaching that part of the year], I went out to the deck and set up shop, sipping my morning coffee while Amazon’s “Sarah Vaughn Station” played [and plays] in the background.

A backlog of work got done today; some of it in preparation for “Prison Alley Tales” which will broadcast live from the Red Dot Restaurant and Bar on Warren Street in Hudson at 7:00 PM tonight.  If you’re in the listening area, that’s 90.7 on your FM dial and, if you’re not, it’s available at www.wgxc.org/listen.

It’s the umbrella title for a collection of stories, recollections, monologues and performance pieces from the WGXC Diamond Street Radio Players, an ad hoc group of local artists and performers.  It appears to be shaping up as a fun night and I’m really glad; I like fun nights.

The day resulted in my recycling about three pounds of paper that had piled on my desk and now, at the end of the day, I am on deck, working on one of my “letters.”

It has been a day of calm and music and fun work.

Every hour or so, I checked on Houston and it’s not good.  At last count, 2,000 rescues had been performed and another 185 were waiting to be performed.  Ten are dead which seems a blessing after Katrina and its hundreds.

My friend, Janice McDonald, is in Houston, reporting on it.  Look her up on Facebook for her first-hand reports.

There is some irony here.  Texas is experiencing one of the most horrific of natural events and its Federal legislators voted against help to Hurricane Sandy victims.  Let us hope that legislators in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy aren’t as mean spirited when Texas asks for help, as it will.

It will be years before this is undone.

Mark me in the column of glad I have a hybrid car as Hurricane Harvey may cause gas prices to rise by a dollar or more as 15% of the refinery resources in the country are being pummeled by this storm.

Also, mark me glad I quit smoking.  The price of cigarettes in New York City are now at $13.00 a pack, highest in the nation.  I feel better and I’m not as cash strapped as I would be if I were smoking.  It’s now been at least 15 years and only once in a great while do I feel the pull to a smoke; usually in a bar, martini in hand while having some deeply intellectual conversation that probably won’t be remembered in the morning.

That was another day.  Not today.

Today the creek is astoundingly clear; water rippling in the soft wind that has arrived.

While I was sitting on the deck, in the quiet of my life, the pudgy little dictator in North Korea sent a missile flying over Japan which is just inflaming those regional tensions.

Oh, yikes.  He needs a lot of attention that boy.

As does our President.  And that is part of what makes me creepily uncomfortable with him – the amount of attention he needs.  And demands.  And gets.

The Washington Post is reporting that while seeking the presidency, Mr. Trump was also seeking a deal in Russia to build a Trump Tower there.  Felix Sater, a Trump associate, was running around bragging the deal would get The Donald elected.  This one hasn’t/can’t be completely parsed out yet but the Russia thing is not going away and I wonder what is happening in Robert Mueller’s office at this very minute.

As I go to bed tonight, I will pray for Houston and be grateful I have not had to experience anything like what they are going through.  My whole life, for the most part, has been lucky.  I’ve not had any Sandy’s or Harvey’s in my life.  Irene went through here a few years ago and spared me; around me there was catastrophe but in my sweet spot of the earth, not much.

Let’s think of Houston. Pray for them.

 

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Letter From Claverack August 26, 2017 Keeping sunlight in everyday life…

August 27, 2017

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To comfortably sit out on the deck this evening, I had to go inside and put on long slacks and pull on a sweatshirt as there is a chill in the early evening air.  That done, I’m comfortable.

The cottage is interestingly quiet; no music plays, the only sound is that of the buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds.  The dogs next door are quiet; usually they are frolicking in the yard.

It is getting to be the end of summer and the number of days I will be able to sit here in the midst of green glory are dwindling.

My infernal and eternal clumsiness ruined another laptop and so I am here, back up again, thanks to Jonathan’s Computers in Hudson after 48 frustrating hours of having only my phone for communication.  Though, when it happened I thought: at least it’s not my PHONE.  Jonathan finds me, I suspect, curious as his office becomes littered with my dead laptops.  His patience was rewarded today with a bottle of Moet & Chandon.

Yesterday, I phoned my friend Mary Clare Eros to check on their son, Michael, who lives in Houston.  He was safely away, attending the Burning Man festival.  I breathed a sigh of relief.

As the storm bore down on Texas, officials asked those who chose to stay and “ride it out” to put their name and social security number on their forearms so that if they didn’t make the riding out thing work, rescuers could identify their bodies easily.

It is Saturday night and Hurricane Harvey reached Texas and is pelting the state with water.   Move to higher ground was the general warning in Houston.  Places inland are predicted to get as much as forty inches of rain, precipitating enormous flooding.  It is becoming a “deadly inland event.”  Places will be left uninhabitable for weeks or months.

Those kind of words and warnings hark to the horror that was Katrina.

Tonight, while Texans may be fighting for their lives, Floyd Mayweather and Conor MacGregor will be fighting in Vegas.  The hype that surrounds the event is huge and both contenders, as I read it today, will walk away with about a hundred million dollars each.  Think about that.

It is all about the money.  “Money Mayweather” is also giving the finger to HBO, a long-time adversary because it wouldn’t give him the money he felt he deserved for a match.  HBO has a fight coming up in September and can’t seem to get anyone to listen to their PR pitches because of all the noise about Mayweather/MacGregor, who is a martial arts fighter, not a boxer.

Mayweather is smart, probably the smartest of the boxers in our lifetimes when it comes to making money.

And the fact that this story is almost as big a story as Hurricane Harvey is a reflection on society.  It’s not new.  I’m sure there was more noise about a couple of good gladiators going at in the Coliseum in Rome than there was about how Marcus Aurelius was doing against the Germanic tribes that were breathing down the neck of the Empire.

It’s the way we are.  Most of us.

Today I watched a haunting ad on YouTube about lynching in America.  You can see it here.  In one of the photos was a handsome young man, someone I might want to have dated, just based on appearance and he was smiling into the camera after having witnessed a lynching.

We choose to ignore what has happened in this country with people of color.  We do.

Read Doug Blackmon’s book, “Slavery by Another Name.”  It has helped me understand what is going on about all the Confederate statues.  They were erected in a couple of waves, when whites were exerting their “superiority” over blacks.

The first wave was during the rise of “Jim Crow” and the second was after WWII, when African Americans were beginning their march to civil rights.

Throughout history we have had a problem with statues.  Pharaoh after Pharaoh destroyed the statues of the Pharaoh before them if they didn’t like them.  We lost a lot of great Greek and Roman statuary to “political correctness” in those times.   It’s almost a wonder we have any statues of Julius Caesar.

Statues have been a flash point all through history.

And, as Hurricane Harvey barreled down on Texas, President Trump pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  How not surprising is that?

It is now dark.  And not that late.  We are losing about three minutes of daylight a day this time of year.

Let us hope that we don’t lose daylight in our everyday lives.

 

 

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Letter From Claverack 08 15 2017 Sorting through history…

August 15, 2017

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Staring out my brother’s kitchen, the day is beautiful after a series of grey and gloomy ones.  After prevaricating for days, I have finally determined I will return home on Friday and am now looking forward to returning to the comforts of the cottage.  My kitchen is freshly painted and I will do a re-org of it upon my return.

This afternoon, I am going over to St. Paul to visit my cousin’s ex-wife at the home where she works with her mother, caring for developmentally challenged adults.

And then, this evening, I will be dining with Christine Olson, a friend from college days.  She dated one of my roommates; we have stayed close.  He and I have not.

Being in Minneapolis is always a time of sorting memories.  Yesterday, I had breakfast with my ex-sister-in-law, which is hard for me to say as she is still, in my mind, my sister-in-law, even if she and my brother are no longer married.  We, as we always do, laughed and giggled and had fun.

Last night, I dined with my nieces, Kristin and Theresa, Theresa’s son Emile, his girlfriend, Irene, and we, too, laughed and giggled and reminisced about some good things and some hard things.

And so there is a sorting of thoughts.  The rocking horse was my brother’s and I inherited it and rode it in our “rumpus room” in the basement long after he had last touched it.  Now it sits in his bedroom, a reminder of the past.

My best friend from high school came up from Chicago to see me this weekend and as we sat on Friday afternoon, working at this kitchen table, I looked up at him and laughed.  We both settle back in to being with each other in minutes and it is a comfort from knowing him a lifetime.

It was important for me that he knew how much I loved him and how important it has been that he has been in my life.  I hope I succeeded.  We have reached the part of our lives where we definitely can’t see around the corners.

As usual, jazz plays as I write.  I care for jazz the way Sidney does in “Grantchester.”  It has become a thread in my life.

And it captures the melancholy that comes from sorting thoughts, working to put the pieces of the puzzle together, a never-ending process in life.

At dinner last night, we talked of my mother and one of my nieces shook her head.  Her grandmother was a complicated individual who sometimes delighted us and often vexed us.  Always kind to strangers, that kindness did not always extend to her kin.  As she aged and as dementia set in, her granddaughters occasionally saw her rage and it shook them.

As the rage of the White Supremacist movement shook me this weekend when one of them, barely an adult, drove his car into a group of counter protesters and killed a woman and injured nineteen in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Our president’s tepid “many sides” response to the incident has resulted in a series of resignations from Trump’s American Manufacturing Council.

The first to leave was Ken Frazier, CEO of pharmaceutical company, Merck.  Trump viciously attacked him for doing so.  Critics of Trump have pointed out that Frazier is black.

The others who have left are white and, so far, have not been targeted by the kind of ire that hit Frazier. They have also not mentioned Charlottesville.

FORTUNE, a magazine I do not think of as a bastion of liberal thought, has praised Frazier’s resignation as an act of courage.

The others have only been called “grand-standers” by Trump. The latest to go is Scott Paul, head of the American Manufacturing Alliance.  And Mr. Trump knows “plenty” who will replace these “grand-standers.”

As I begin to wind down my time in Minneapolis, I continue sorting my thoughts, fitting the past into my present.   As I must sort and parse the actions of a president whose reactions and words defy my understanding of his position and the kind of deportment it requires.

Here is a link to what Jimmy Fallon had to say and it was well said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Letter from Claverack 08 11 2017 Wanting to be home before the apocalypse…

August 11, 2017

As is not unusual, jazz is playing in the background as I am sitting at the kitchen table of my brother and sister-in-law’s home in Bloomington, MN.  Last night, after my arrival, a magnificent thunderstorm slashed across the sky and I sat for a while, watching out the window.  In a strange way, it felt warm and comfortable, evoking some good childhood memory.

Sleeping in later than usual, I found myself feeling plastered to the mattress from a heavy sleep that had wrapped itself around me.  Morpheus kept blowing tenderly on my face.

The weather today promised more thunderstorms though none arrived, though the sky is mostly leaden and threatening.  Soon a friend from high school will pick me up and we’ll go off to see other friends.

When and how I return to the cottage is undecided.  I arrived by train and maybe I will train back, maybe fly or drive or…

For reasons I don’t understand but which I accept, I am wanting not to feel boxed in by a defined schedule even though I am scheduling lots of time with family and friends.

Ah, I looked up and a soft rain has started.  Best I take my umbrella this evening.

This morning, I deleted every email that contained news.  I didn’t want to know until after a couple of cups of coffee because our world does seem more and more unsettled.  A few minutes ago, I opened Google News and the top story was “Meet Kim Jung Un, A Moody Man with a Nuclear Arsenal” from the New York Times.

Well, as I pondered whether I was going to click on the link, I thought of our president, who I think of a as a moody man and he has a bigger nuclear arsenal than Kim Jung Un and I just don’t know what to think any more about much of anything.

As I am away from my home as I write this, I jokingly [but not totally] said to a colleague, I want to be back home before the apocalypse.

The president has raised the verbal ante and has declared we are “locked and loaded,” which, according to reports from retired generals, we are not anywhere near.

China has declared it will remain neutral if North Korea strikes first and not if we do.  Russia is saying we are both being belligerent and they’re right.  We are. Well, President Trump is being belligerent; everyone else is trying to keep things calm.  I feel sorry for John Kelly, now Chief of Staff.  What a job he has! And not one I would want.

The president is taking on Mitch McConnell, which pundits are saying is not a wise move.

And do we expect wisdom from this president?

Not now, not ever, I am sad to say.

 

 

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Letter From Claverack 08 08 2017 Thoughts from a moving train…

August 9, 2017

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As I begin this, I am rolling through the lush green country of eastern Virginia; we will cross shortly into West Virginia and then begin moving leisurely north through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and then to Chicago for I am on Train #29, the Capitol Limited from Washington, DC to Chicago.

The sun is still high in the west, the side of the train on which I am riding, ensconced in a bedroom compartment, about the size of my bathroom at the cottage; very amenities complete.  Dinner is at 6:45 and I am eager to find out who my dining companions will be.  Everyone in the past has been a memorable character and I see no reason why this time should be different.

For reasons that have eluded me, yesterday and today, I have been on the cranky side.  Yesterday was full of errands to be done before I left and every one of them took more time than allotted.  Racing up to Albany, I made a doctor’s appointment exactly on time when I was sure I was going to be late.  There was a delicious moment when I felt I had caught up with my day.

Then I was told I had arrived forty-five minutes too early.  Stunned, I decided to go get a cup of coffee as I had yet to have any.  Returning, there were different receptionists who chided me for being late.  Disbelieving of me telling them I had been on time, I finally convinced them.  The first receptionist had apparently misread the calendar.  Discovering they were all upset because I was to have tests I had not been told I was going to have, I did something very uncharacteristic of me:  I was not a good boy.

Taking the forms, I put them down on the counter and said I was upset and would call them when I returned from my trip.

Today was much better and still, though, a little on the cranky side until I rode out to the train with a woman from Greenville, SC.  She wanted to see a picture of my creek and when I showed it to her, she said:  you’re blessed.

And I am.  How quickly we get caught up in the shoelaces of our lives and forget the bigger picture.  Taking a very deep breath, I have now settled into my compartment and am enjoying the view out my window: trees in the full flush of green, a river and a bridge crossing it with the sound of clacking train wheels.  It is a good moment.

Not so good is the news flash that North Korea, with its pudgy, petulant and unpredictable little dictator has probably miniaturized nuclear warheads to go on top of those ICBMS he has been testing.

Our president has warned him in no uncertain terms that if he uses them he will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

So, we have an unpredictable barely man dictator with nuclear weapons facing an unpredictable aging man boy petulant president who has the nuclear codes to the biggest arsenal on earth.  Could this end badly?

Unfortunately, yes.

If it does, I want to be home. At the cottage, with jazz playing and a good martini in front of me because I will absolutely need it.

There are two very huge egos at play here and no one knows how the China card will play.  Probably, hopefully, pray God it is, this will all be okay.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, even more than my parents did, I knew, as a child, we were in a dangerous place.  We are again and don’t have a John Kennedy and his team,  for all his crazy faults, to pull us out.

We have Donald Trump, with all his crazy faults and few strengths I can find, and a team that seems more like The Three Stooges.

 

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Letter From Claverack 08 06 2017 Thoughts from Sunday…

August 8, 2017

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It is a quiet night; the creek is crystal clear and a squirrel has just paraded down the deck, padding along, obviously unafraid of me.

This morning I did coffee hour at church, bringing, as I frequently do, too much food though everyone was appreciative and there should be almost enough for coffee hour next week, when I am in Minneapolis.

Returning home, I put the extra food I had in the refrigerator and then returned to have a late lunch with my friends, Larry and Alicia.  Arriving early, I wrote a poem while waiting.

 

Sun and shadow dapple road,

curving toward town where

friends await.

 

A different life now,

slow, time for noticing

the dappled road;

 

for clasping close

all kind of friends.

To stretch my brain a bit, I am working to write a poem a day.  Most days I do, not always, but most days.

Looking up, there is a canopy of green above me and nature is humming around me.  It’s amazing that in the peace of my deck there is so much noise.  Insects and birds, soft sound of water, far off the sound of trucks now and again, traversing the highway almost half a mile away.

It’s been a day when I have not listened to news or read anything until just a bit ago.  There is, you know, only so much one can take.

It is interesting that Vice President Pence is going to great lengths to deny he is making “campaign style” visits to places.  Governor Kasich is, I think.  However, it is not possible to deny that even at this early stage Republicans are beginning to look to take the place of The Donald on the stage he now holds.

The Donald is in New Jersey at one of his golf clubs in a retreat from the White House will three million dollars plus in renovations are being made.  It was just last week that President Trump is reputed to have said the place was “a dump.”

Really, I hope not too much gold is being added.

Venezuela is tottering toward dictatorship and economic collapse which will not be good for gas prices, I keep reading.

Tuesday, I am heading to Minnesota where, to my dismay, a mosque was bombed in Bloomington, the suburb in which my brother lives.  That was not “Minnesota nice.”

The world is a very strange place.  I mean really, really, strange and, you know, this has gone on forever but it just seems like somehow we should have moved beyond  so many of these things and, hopefully, we will in generations to come.

It is there I must place hope.

In this time of my life, I am being as active as I can and, at the same time, treasuring more than I ever have the wonders of my life:  an interesting life now and in my past, a creek that flows quietly by a home I think I imagined once and made reality, good friends, good dinners, times of good conversation, some travel for good reasons, a sense I have been luckier than most in keeping alive friendships from my past and carrying than into my present.

There is a tree along the creek that is always the first harbinger of fall and it is beginning to tell me fall is coming.

I’m not ready for it.  Though I will accept it as one must.

 

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Letter from Claverack 08 02 2017 Worn down but not out…

August 2, 2017

The last several days, my deck has been my living room, my office and my dining room.  It’s here I have spent the daylight hours. As I type now, a storm threatens with distant thunderclaps.

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The water in the creek is so clear I can see stones that line its bottom.  The day is cooling as I sit here; having been warm and humid.

On August 8th, I am departing Hudson and journeying by train to Minneapolis for a reunion of old friends.  Whenever I tell people I am making a trip by train they ask me if I am afraid to fly?  No, says the man who, for a time in his life, flew at least a hundred thousand miles a year.

Trains are interesting because there is a sense of a journey when taking them.  It’s not a magic carpet ride from place to place [though these days rarely is flying a magic carpet ride].  It is a journey, as you pass places and towns, sit for meals, read, look up and see surprising things and meet surprising people.  You have an incredible sense of going from place to place and I love it.

It will give me a chance to think, contemplate, speculate, dream, postulate and hopefully not pontificate.

And then, when I am ready, I will fly home from Minneapolis.  My trip is a bit open ended, a reflection of the joys of my life right now.

While the water in the creek is clear, so very little else is clear.We have lived through the extraordinary and extraordinarily short tenure of the foul-mouthed Anthony Scaramucci as White House Communications Director.  In that brief time, he missed the birth of his son and was served with divorce papers by his wife.

He texted his congratulations to her on the birth of their son.  Might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back…

Seth Rich was a young man working for the DNC.  He was murdered.  Fox News suggested he was murdered because he had leaked emails from the DNC.  A lawsuit has been filed by a Fox contributor that claims Fox colluded with the White House on the story that Mr. Rich was the leaker when he was not.

How convoluted this all is.

Politics has always been a dirty business and it seems dirtier than ever right now. Or, at least in my memory.

As “any father would,” Donald Trump helped craft the statement Donald Trump, Jr. made about his meeting with some Russians, who promised him dirt on Hillary.  That’s the story from the White House. Other, less kind versions, have him dictating the statement his son gave.

It’s another JDLR – just doesn’t look right.

After six months, I am worn out.

Really, I am. Every day when I wake up, I wonder what new roil I am going to encounter in the news.  There is no shortage of them.

General John Kelly has been named Chief of Staff at the White House.  Is there a more painful job in the world right now?  I mean, really!?  Kelly kicked Scaramucci’s butt out which shows he is exercising control and has demanded the President pay attention.

Good luck with that.   Trump’s tweets early this morning goaded his new Chief of Staff about not promoting the stock market heights it has achieved may indicate his attention span lasted the night.  It’s not your Chief of Staff’s job, Mr. Trump, to spend his second day in his job telling people how great the market under you is.  That, arguably, is for your Communications Director.

Oh, yes, you don’t have one right now, do you, Mr. Trump?

And, as several friends remind me, we will survive Trump.

Thank goodness.  At times, I think of the Roman Empire which survived a hundred bad Emperors, carried along by the bureaucracy that supported it.  As we will be, by the bureaucracy we have built but we may have lost the dream, I’m afraid.

John F. Kennedy was one of our most flawed presidents and yet he inspired us.

And, while there have been monsters enough in human history, we now have ones with nuclear weapons, like the North Korean dictator who is testing ICMB’s, an acronym whose meaning had almost slipped from my mind since the Cold War.

Yikes!

Every Sunday since January 20th, I have lit a candle for us, the people of the United States, as well as all the other people out there who are living on this crazy planet.  And for solutions to the craziness…

 

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