305.366 - 2016 project and small airplanes

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

small airplanes

no, I don't pilot.  the idea appealed to me when I was a kid and imagined everything was free.  once I began to understand how much time, energy, and money I'd put into just learning to fly, it became one of those dreams that has no charge on it.  if I ever got hysterically rich, I'd learn to pilot.  I later learned how much a plane would cost, how much a Lear jet would cost, how much fuel would cost, how fast a plane burned through fuel, and whatever residue of charge lingered vanished.  (a funny observation, or maybe it's only funny to me:  a book a cousin compiled on one stream of ancestors in America, the Buies, says of them that they were all good citizens, small farmers, or small shop owners.  I grinned when I read that.  I was perfectly willing to be a good engineering employee, even a damned good engineering employee, but felt no temptation to become a licensed engineer.  Later I saw this as a small ambition, related to what it took for good citizens to become small farmers or small shop owners.  there's nothing wrong with that I suppose, but it somehow doesn't share the American dream.)  but back to small airplanes.  I have been given rides in several.  I love the strange feeling of hanging in the air while the world  drifts by under you.  I knew this wasn't the proper explanation at all, but that's how it felt every time.  I think every time I've been up, I've been in a model which has the engine and propeller forward of the cabin, the wing mounted above the cabin, and the body stretched back to hold the tail (the rudder and stabilizers) in place.  I knew about thrust and drag, lift and gravity, how the airfoil worked, and so forth.  and I loved the ride, the strange peacefulness when everything is working right.  I'm happy to say I've never experienced the thrill when some force gets out of balance with its mate.  I'm perfectly willing to forego that.  I'm happy to continue appreciating small airplanes that are working well.

304.366 - 2016 project and the 1950s part 2

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the 1950s part 2

what a terrible time!  when I entered them I was 8, when they left I was 18.  when they arrived I was able to walk home from school in Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil; when they left, I was about to graduate from high school and start college.  neither of those were bad things, but the passage from one to the other was long and dreary.  we moved from the strange little house (it looked like a caricature of a kid's drawing of a house) to the blue-grey house (which looked like a real house, at least a real Brasilian house) and that should have been a good thing.  it should have meant we, the family, were moving up in the world.  isn't that supposed to mean happier times?  yeah, well.  then one day we packed up and flew to Miami and my mother and father and two brothers disappeared.  my sister and I traveled all day and all night to a place called St. Louis.  after about three months there we traveled to Perryton, Texas, where in fact we were happier, my sister and I.  we began to learn English as spoken by American kids our ages (12 and 10).  and our parents showed up, all smiles, except she wasn't the mother who had gone away, she was some other mother, slightly different.  we drove to Sherman, Texas, and picked up my brothers, who had no warning, and who'd thought we were all dead.  we drove to Clovis, New Mexico, and moved into a house we were told was our new home.  by that time none of us kids had any good associations with the word home. we lived there two years and moved to another home, then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.  President Eisenhower got us through the McCarthy years, and then, thankfully, the 1950s were over.  to travel through them another way, I entered them playing circus performer and carpenter, then moved and played explorer and pirate and spaceman, then moved and played cowboys and baseball-sorta, then moved and played cowboys and knights, then moved and played cowboys and boyfriend, then moved and played boyfriend and student, than moved and played paperboy and student.  there were flourishes and nuances on that trajectory, but it tells the main story.  we survived the 1950s.  it wasn't pretty but we did, then I left home and we were probably both the better for it.  my family moved to Richmond, Virginia, and they were finished moving, but that was already the 1960s.  I started college and finished being a kid, but again, that was the 1960s and a different story.  the 1950s were a dark and miasmic time, and I never missed them.  I can't imagine why anyone but white men would feel nostalgic for them.

303.366 - 2016 project and the 1950s

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the 1950s

what a terrible time!  the Red Scare:  communists everywhere, under your bicycle and your bed, behind the door and the rose bush, especially if the bush bore red roses, in your teapot, in your radio and your television if you had a television, in your tractor, under the hay wagon, inside service vans, everywhere, man!  uptightness was so busy that women wore girdles and men went about looking Very, Very Serious.  the President was allowed to smile, but only if his name was Eisenhower.  men owned their women and children and that was A Good Thing.  men had their wives committed.  parents had their daughters committed.  conformity was so strong that suburban men put on their grey flannel suits in unison on weekday mornings.  every family had a car, but it was an American car.  the first people to drive home Volkswagens were reported to the FBI.  if you wanted people to think you were a grownup, smoking was mandatory.  I smoked Pall Malls or Camels or Lucky Strikes.  innovation was permitted, but inventers were listed by the FBI.  segregation was rampant.  lynchings were commonplace.  and the USA was still somehow a better, more hopeful place to live than some parts of the world.  and the USA somehow came up with Elvis Presley, with the Beats, with jazz musicians who fled to France where people could hear their music without going to jail.  where minor chords were allowed.  under thick clouds of oppression and suppression, hope bubbled and gurgled.  it would erupt and explode in the sixties, but we didn't know that.  we thought the clouds would last forever.  I try to remember that when I read or hear what Trump's supporters want for us.

302.366 - 2016 project and history 2

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

history 2  (see also entry for DoY 051)

why is it worth circling way back and appreciating history again?  oh damn!  because I appreciate it that much!  oh gods yes!  one of my favorite books from my second grade books, which I had started before I started formal school, was called _Beginning History_.  (or so I remember.)  and its author warned that this could become a lifelong activity.  oh it did and has.  long after I escaped the horror of "Run Dick, run", I have read about Hastings and Waterloo and Bosworth Field and Gettysburg and Appomatox, what we know about Brian Boru, how George Washington fought off the British, how John might have been considered an effective king except that he lost crucial battles, the dreadful losses at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, how Bismarck forged Germany.  On the other hand, I have not learned much about the Moorish occupation of Spain and Portugal.  well, maybe soon.  anyway, you can see, I have read broadly and shallowly about history in Europe and in the United States.  and there's still so much to read about:  all of South America, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia even, and oh my goodness the mother of all mysteries, Africa.  history!  such an embarrassment, and such a pleasure!  yes, I appreciate it.

301.366 - 2016 project and Homer

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Homer

Homer!  OMG!  Homer, who invented poetry - as far as we know.  who invented novels at the same time!  who collected and told us such powerful stories of the Greek gods.  who told us how the Greeks of his time thought and lived - or at least how they might've if they'd lived up to their own ideals.  who knew how petty we can be, even when being leaders.  who knew how noble we can be in spite of ourselves.  who knew friendship and grief and honoring.  who understood whatever it is that makes soldiers soldiers.  who knew war in its vastness and in its details, in circumstance and in planning and in execution.  who knew the consequences in human lives, both male lives and female lives.  who knew reverence whether or not he knew worship.  who knew adventure and knew its immediate satisfaction and its eventual futility.  who knew how to engage us, whether we are children or young people or grownups or old folks.  Homer!  Dear gods!  Homer!

300.366 - 2016 project and jewelry

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

jewelry

oddly enough, yes, jewelry.  as a kid, I loved it that pirate treasure always included jewelry.  I think my mother had maybe three rings, other than her wedding ring and her engagement ring.  she always wore those last two, so I thought they were attached to her.  now and then, though, I would sneak into her room and open her treasure chest and admire the brooches, the three rings, and the necklaces.  I thought her pirate didn't do well by her.  before we left Brasil the first time, I tried on her rings maybe forty-leven times.  they never fit.  fast forward a bit through the Baton Rouge year, the strange little house in Recife, to the blue-grey house.  I think we were there when I was tennish to twelvish, and I don't remember ever trying on my mother's rings.  maybe it was some kind of empathy or sympathy.  she clearly had more than enough to cope with and I did better for both of us by staying away from her and from her stuff.  but I re-read The Odyssey, and there was treasure in it - I think I remember that Odysseus lost and found a fortune in jewels three times on his way home.  I've told you about some of my other reading.  I thought Robin Hood must have a treasure out there in Sherwood Forest.  he was always giving money away and mounting campaigns that had to cost a fortune.  just keeping everyone dressed in Lincoln green cost more than pennies, right?  at some point I figured out that those knights errant must each have a treasure that let him ride around looking for adventure.  and every treasure I read about had coins and a sword, sometimes armor, but always jewels and jewelry.  even dragons had great heaps of treasure, which included coins, psalteries, maps, and jewels and jewelry.  clearly jewels and jewelry were important.  but, as it turned out, I never grew up to be a pirate or a knight errant, so I never had a treasure.  but for a while in high school, I had a fight ring., a great big old nickel-silver setting for a turquoise stone.  I thought it would work kinda like brass knuckles.  I tried to explain it to my sensei, but he laughed and told me it'd more likely break my finger than the other guy's jaw.  I stomped home, sure he was wrong, but that evening I tossed it into my dresser drawer, from which it promptly disappeared.  treasure does that, right?  in any case, yes, I appreciate jewelry, but on someone else's fingers or wrists or upper arm or neck.  thank you, people who know how to wear it.  namaste.

299.366 - 2016 project and quilts

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

quilts

once upon a time, a quilt was homemade.  a bunch of women got together on a designated night and they hand-sewed pieces of rags, scraps, and remnants of cloth into the top and the back of what would become a quilt, more or less a rectangle, more or less the size to cover a double bed, fall past its sides on three sides, and maybe even tuck in at the bottom.  a substance called batting, reminiscent of cotton balls, would be attached to what would become the inside of the quilt, and the whole thing would be put together with thousands of stitches.  I heard about these nights as a child from an aunt who had gotten to participate when she was an older teenager, so her stitching had gotten good enough that she held her own with the grownup women.  apparently the women did all this immersed in hours of conversation that ranged over many, many subjects, and the women talking did so without missing a stitch.  (I say women talking because, in my experience, when a group of women talk, more than one is talking at the same time.  it's just part of being a woman, being able to talk and listen at the same time, and at the same time you're stitching a quilt and shaping a late teenager and making coffee or tea.  as well as I can tell, any woman can do two, three, four things at the same time, while a normal man can do up to one thing at a time.)  in any case, back in the late forties and maybe into the early fifties, quilts were homemade, each by a group of women.  some quilts were signed (in stitches) by each of the women who worked on it.  so those were the quilts I knew back in northeastern Brasil.  now you may wonder what on earth we needed quilts for in a place where a cold night might get down to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and I would answer what on earth kept new American missionary men wearing dark blue and black wool suits in the tropics or semi-tropics of northeastern Brasil?  they did.  if you want my guess at a "because", then because they knew what was right:  a man of god wore a dark blue or black wool suit.  when god could finally get their attention, he might point out that a linen suit of off-white made a lot more sense, but sometimes it took a while for god to get the attention of these men of god.  similarly, my mother knew that in winter, kids slept under a quilt, so we did.  it wasn't her fault that the snow never fell that close to the equator.  she did her part.  and the odd thing to me now is that it worked.  I didn't care that I didn't need it.  a quilt is warm and heavy.  (the physicist in me just screamed.  a quilt is not warm, but it insulates well, it holds in your body heat.  if you're not losing body heat, you say that you are warm.)  later on in Texas, where a cold night can get down below zero, no matter how much the politicians talk, my aunt covered me with thicker quilts, and when I'd get up to go to the bathroom, I'd learn how much good those quilts did!  even now in Los Angeles when our winter gets down to cool, I enjoy a quilt or an afghan - insulation and weight, comforts.  (I guess those associations go back to furs, - insulation and weight means comfort.)  and even commercially made quilts continue the tradition of a pattern on top.  someday an old man with a really good memory will try to explain the pattern on the top of quilts to the whipper-snapper running the company, and patterned tops will vanish.  there no doubt will be an explanation that shows how removing the pattern enhances the quality of our lives and the safety of our children, but maybe I won't be appreciating quilts by then.

298.366 - 2016 project and model trains

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

model trains

don't worry!  I'm not an enthusiast, not an addict.  just a more or less normal person who appreciates model railroads, and who can get lost for an hour or two admiring the detail someone else put into building the scenery for a good layout.  oh my goodness!  the hours a serious modeler puts into it, the detail!  I read somewhere about a man who built a model B-25 three times to get the details right for its crash on a model railroad's layout.  but model trains, model trains!  once upon a time while we lived in Brasil, someone sent me an electric model train.  I'm sure it was meant as a kindness, so it was probably my granddaddy.  (our family didn't have many kind or generous people, or I didn't notice them.)  it was a Lionel, and had six cars:  the engine, the coal tender, the boxcar, the tank car, a car for carrying aggregates (like gravel, pebbles, dirt, or sand), and the caboose.  oh man!  naturally I could hardly wait to set it up.  oops!  problem.  there was nowhere in the house big enough to set up the track - which could be set up in a circle, in a figure eight, an oval, or an oval with a round loop at one end - where it wasn't in the way.  second problem.  the Lionel track and engine were built for American electricity, not for Brasilian electricity.  now before you get busy mocking me for thinking electricity has a nationality, please understand that I know it hasn't.  However, different nations use different conventions for electrical power distribution.  the UnitedStatesian standard is 120 volts AC at 60 Hertz, or cps.  the Brasilian standard is or was nonexistent; however, where we were, the electrical standard was 220 volts at 60 Hz or 60 cps.  whew!  converting frequencies is harder than converting voltages.  all we needed was a step-down transformer, and we had several of those.  oops!  except they were doing real work for grownups.  oops!  problem three.  in northeastern Brasil in 1950, there was no Fry's, no equivalent.  I had to go to a real store when it was really open (not Christmas day) and spend real money to get a stepdown transformer which could stand the varying load in current that running a train demanded.  OMG!  which led to problem four.  I had no money, not even an allowance.  that meant I had to explain to my father what was needed.  do you remember that he and I did not share a language?  yes, I had to give him technical specifications across a no-common-language barrier.  and my father was a Very Busy Man who had time to generate kids but no time to raise them - my interpretation.  it took three tries, three different trips to an electrical store that had to be worked into a Very Busy Schedule.  but I give him his due, he did get me one, and one evening I got to set up the train and run it for the whole family.  now there are a couple of limitations on an electric train for a tennish-year-old boy who has read Robin Hood and Rob Roy and the Lone Ranger and Odysseus for boys and Tarzan and King Arthur and even Richard III.  it doesn't really do anything.  it goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again.  hunh.  Now you can tear the track apart and put it back together another way, and then your train goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again.  so you put it all away, and some time later, you pull it out and put it together a third way and the train goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again.  it kinda loses its charm.  somehow that train set came to "the States" and rejoined us in Clovis and the older of my younger brothers adopted it and got a lot more out of it.  years and years later, he built a really, really complex set of tracks in an oddly shaped bedroom that gave him plenty of challenge for building those tracks.  it was complex enough that two or three trains could run on it at the same time, and the trains could pass by each other without hitting!  he had painted the room with vistas from our southwest, so the trains ran through the desert and grasslands and foothills and mountains.  the trains stopped out in the middle of nowhere, or they stopped in a village or a town or a city.  he must have spent years building all that, and somehow it entertained him.  and I think it amused him that people like me came in and saw the layout and got all worked up about the details, and saw the train go around, then go around, then go around again without ever seeing the nuances of the stops and the changing loads and whatever else he saw.  so, yes, I appreciate model trains, but somewhere out there in the world I don't know, I have a younger brother who really appreciates them like they ought to be appreciated.

297.366 - 2016 project and musicals

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

musicals

musicals?  ack!  no, I hate musicals, don't I?  haven't I thought they were silly and vapid since I was a child?  doesn't matter.  no more than I've seen or heard of it, Hamilton has turned that on its head.  Hamilton really is art.  sigh.  and now that I can admit that, I can go back and hear (thank goodness without having to listen to them again) musicals that I've known or known about all my life.  oops!  Les Miserables was art too, wasn't it?  nothing vapid about that.  and didn't I really secretly like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers even though I cringed every time they broke into song?  all you women who have dragged me to a musical - usually a movie, occasionally on stage - I apologize.  I apologize for sitting there rigid, for the disapproval on my face, for the icky feeling crawling on my arms, for my incoherently trying to find something nice to say.  crimeney!  I have spent a week or more reading a biography of Hamilton, and learned more about him in two hours watching a documentary about the making of Hamilton!  oh geez!  this is embarrassing.  dammit, yes, I appreciate musicals, even if I'm rather stiffly selective about them.

296.366 - 2016 project and mechanical calculators

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

mechanical calculators

mechanical calculators!  whatever made me think of them?  they don't even exist any more, do they?  maybe in museums?  although there was never anything aesthetic about them.  they were about as pretty as a Volkswagen bug, or a boxer dog.  but pretty wasn't what they were built for.  back in those long ago days, electronics meant radios, or televisions, both of which were still built with tubes.  you may not even know what a tube is, or was.  it was a very, very different world then.  trust me, if you didn't know it, you want no part of it.  not even mechanical calculators.  but back in those days, when you had to do arithmetic on a long column of numbers - say a year's worth of daily profits - you were so glad you had access to a mechanical calculator.  you would enter the first number and hit the plus key and enter the second number and depress the crank and the calculator would rattle and ratchet and rumble and hiccough and stop, then you would hit the plus key and enter the third number and depress the crank and the calculator would rattle and ratchet and rumble and hiccough and stop, and you'd do that for 366 numbers or however many there were, and at the end you'd have a trial sum.  then you'd do it all over a second time, and if the two trial sums were the same, you either had an accurate sum or you'd made the same mistake twice.  given how meticulous most of us are, it was horrible.  the one part of this we haven't improved with electronic calculators is the human input part.  if we ever solve that part, we'll have heaven on earth.  but among mechanical calculators, the champion was the Friden.  I remember putting in astronomical numbers, really, like the distance from the sun to the earth or some such, and multiplying two of those for whatever insane reason I had, then watching and listening as that Friden chugged and chewed and...well you have the picture, for however long it took to run those numbers through.  the Friden was about twice as fast as a human at multiplying two really big numbers but it was maybe ten times more accurate.  it didn't make a mistake, except letting a human input the numbers.  damn, I admired those calculators and especially the Friden.  I just knew that if I were a real mechanical engineer, I'd've been able to envision whatever corresponded to the algorithm for adding or multiplying numbers with ratchets and gears.  me?  I couldn't even understand how a Hydramatic transmission worked, just that it did.  all hail mechanical engineers!  really!  but I'm so damn glad I got to work with electronic computers after the age of tubes.  so damn glad!

295.366 - 2016 project and Los Angeles

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Los Angeles

Los Angeles?  really?  well, yeah.  I must, right?  I've lived most of my life in Los Angeles, right?  that's an appreciation of sorts.  funny, or maybe just curious, since before this appreciation I've never really faced or admitted that I appreciated Los Angeles.  I've always been here because I couldn't help it.  c'mon!  grow up!  at least that much.  let's look at my history with Los Angeles, do you mind?  in 1965 I graduated from college, married, with a child, and took a job with The Boeing Company in Seattle.  by the end of 1965, The Boeing Company had assigned me to a project - the Lunar Orbiter - and, as it turned out, had consigned me to spend half of the next two and a half years in Los Angeles.  I think when that project completed, I had worked for The Boeing Company for three years, and spent a year and a half in Los Angeles, not consecutively, but for 8 weeks then for 10 weeks, and so on, with weeks in Seattle between those intervals.  now let me admit too that I was very work-oriented in those intervals in Los Angeles and in Seattle.  I might as well have been in Area 51.  in Seattle, my wife had to almost literally take my blinders off to get me to enjoy the house we had bought, the neighbors we had, the night spots we could afford, the tourist spots around us.  otherwise I might have had no experience of Seattle.  in Los Angeles, my lead engineer first, and my wife later when she came down for a while, had to take my hands off the keyboard or make me put down my pen (we used fountain pens in those long ago days) and take me out to strip clubs, fancy bars, an Italian restaurant, a place in the mountains where we could ride horses, Disneyland, a wild animal park, Knott's Berry Farm,  otherwise I might have had no experience of Los Angeles.  and when the project finished, I went back to Seattle expecting to live there the rest of my life.  well, duh, The Boeing Company sent me to Houston.  it should have been exciting as hell, I got to work on the Apollo Project!  but I got to work in a dirty little secret part of the Apollo Project that was analyzing what had been done up til the fire that burned three astronauts alive.  it was horrible.  I kept uncovering things that had been done that didn't cause the fire, but they were just bad engineering practices that, well, nobody wanted to hear about.  so I went to graduate school and made me, The Boeing Company, and the Apollo Project all happier.  five years later, I took a job with The Martin-Marietta Aerospace Division in Denver, where I worked on a sequence of projects and suddenly found myself on the way to Los Angeles again, to work on the Viking Project.  I thought it would be a three-month job here, but it got extended by 15 weeks then by three months and so forth, and eventually I had been here over two years and the project was over.  hunh!  well, as I remember it, Martin-Marietta wanted me to come back to Denver for less pay and less authority.  hunh.  instead, JPL offered me a job at the same pay and a slight increase in authority.  JPL won.  I worked there for ten years or so, and had a helluva good time in a string of projects in the unmanned exploration of space.  I worked my way into a dead end and left JPL, and spent ten years doing free-lance programming, but I wasn't very good at business.  I went back to work as an employee and worked for fifteen years as a computer professional for an insurance company.  so I've lived in Los Angeles (or if you'd rather, in Montrose and Glendale and Bell Gardens and North Hollywood and Canoga Park and Encino) for almost 42 years (out of 74 total).  most of that has been by choice - meaning I'd've had to work at getting out of Los Angeles instead of just cruising along in Los Angeles.  and the truth is, as I finally see tonight, that I've enjoyed and been amused by my work here, by the people I've met, by the diversity of the city, by the good feelings I've had here most of this time, by the awe I've sometimes felt, and lately, since January of 2010, by the poetry here and the fellowship I've found among Los Angeles' poets.  yes, I appreciate Los Angeles.

294.366 - 2016 project and Harold II

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Harold II

Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.  damn!  why do I appreciate him?.  I don't know.  I just always have.   poor guy!  yes, he lost the Battle of Hastings.  died with an arrow through his eye.  yes, he lost his whole army in that battle.  sigh.  but before that, wasn't he such a hero about it?  I mean, he accepted - no, insisted on - the kingship, knowing the Norwegian king would invade, wanting to add England to his realm, and knowing William, Duke of Normandy, would invade to make himself king instead of Duke.  allegedly, unfavorable winds penned William in his own ports for seven months.  on 20 September 1066, the Norwegian king landed in England, up at the mouth of the river Tyne.  he handily defeated the two earls who should have driven him off, and Harold and his small army rushed (forced march of four days) north to meet the Norse at Stamford Bridge on 25 September.  Harold defeated the Norse and killed the king.  on 28 September, William landed in England.  as soon as Harold heard that, he marched his army 241 miles to intercept William at Hastings on 14 October.  there he died, and apparently Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman conquest died with him.  now that's not quite the story I learned as a kid.  in that history, Harold and his army pellmelled up to Stamford Bridge, tumbled off their horses, defeated the Norse invaders, got back on their horses and rode like hell for Hastings and fought a glorious but doomed battle there.  I don't know why I wanted the Anglo-Saxons to win, maybe because the Normans had the blessing of the Church.  but they didn't, and Harold became a hero-in-vain kinda like Roland at Roncesvalles and Davy Crockett at the Alamo.  again, I don't know why Harold became such a hero to me, but he did, and I appreciate him still.  he was robbed!  he shoulda won!  but I suppose that would have screwed up history.

293.366 - 2016 project and stamina

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

stamina

this is kind of a rueful appreciation.  I think I had plenty of stamina when I was young, and even a sufficiency of it when I should have been a grownup, but boy is it missing now!  I stayed out til 0200 (2:00 am for civilians) last night, which means I got home about 0300 (3:00 am).  now any of you who have musician friends know that is about noon.  my day typically starts at about 0330 (3:30 am) so my tomorrow was about to start when I got home "today".  when I was twenty, that would have meant I would change shirts and get on with the day.  when I was thirty I might need a cold shower and a change of clothes to get on with the day.  this morning there was no getting on with the day.  I had to have a nap just to wake up and field a phone call with Dutch (we have a daily phone call at 0530 (5:30 am) and I fell asleep during that.  and I slept til after noon (12:00 pm for civilians, I've never understood that).  I never sleep eight hours.  never never never never never.  never.  that's maybe the third time in my life that I know of.  (I don't count baby times and toddler times.)  seriously.  once upon a time when I was older than toddler but still little, I woke up, got dressed, and put on my shoes.  I remember it, or think I do, because it was the first time I tied my shoes by myself and got them right.  I remember, or think I do, looking at my tied laces, doing a double take, and wanting to whoop or run tell Mommy.  oops!  no.  I could either quietly sneak out of the house or go wake Mommy, but not both.  you know which won.  but this appreciation is about stamina, and really is about appreciating it when it's gone missing.  ("here, kitty, kitty, kitty!")  damn it was fun to have!  if you still have yours, cultivate it.  appreciate it.  nourish it.  it's the dickens to do without!

292.366 - 2016 project and stillness

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

stillness

you can hear it, you can feel it.  in Colorado when snow has begun to fall in the forest.  at a seashore when you're alone there at night and the foam runs up onto the sand then hisses away and there's a breath before the next wave curls over.  when you stop walking in the desert and for a moment nothing sounds.  even in the city, occasionally, late at night, like around three, the breeze stops long enough that the leaves still, no dog barks, no drunk sings, no car carouses, even the freeway empties, and for a moment you hold your breath.  and sometimes, sometimes, the babble in my mind quietens and I have a moment of stillness all my own just before a poem forms.

291.366 - 2016 project and childhood

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

childhood

I don't know if I ever had a childhood.  childhood is like "once upon a time" in that it's more a mythical interval than a real time, it's a time after you can walk and run and turn cartwheels and do somersaults, it's a time when you can get away from grownups and just have a wonderful time and then reappear in time for lunch or maybe supper, it's a time when you're perfectly willing to run to an adult - a mommy, I assume - and tell her "you know what I did?" then tell her what you did without fear of punishment, and a time when you recognize that not everything you do is to be shared with grownups because they don't have the imagination to recognize it as an adventure.  childhood is a special and a magical time.  if I ever had one it happened when I was three, four, and five, or maybe just four and five.  you may remember:  I was born in Albuquerque, stuff happened, then I was two-and-a-half, and we moved to Brasil, and my parents spent some time intensely learning something resembling Portuguese (my father) and a patois that let her get along (my mother).  I don't know that that was done on purpose, but that is what happened.  then in my memory, we moved to a little town so small that I could walk across it hanging on to my father's finger, and so small that I could slip out of the edge of it and be in brush dense enough that grownups didn't see me until I was ready to reappear.  that's when I think I had a childhood.  my father was gone most of the time, doing whatever horrible things missionaries do to people kind enough to welcome them and invite them into their communities.  my mother was busy taking care of a baby girl and growing a baby boy and running a house with servants who spoke a language she didn't but who did their damnedest to help her communicate even though they had no idea what she thought a house was supposed to look like and act like.  (she had grown up in the middle class in Louisiana; northeastern Brasil had nothing like what she was accustomed to, and she had no way to explain it, she could only show them what she wanted and she wasn't supposed to do that.  the world can be a horrible place, especially if you're a woman.)  which let me escape, first into our back yard, then when I noticed that no one watched me and there was an exit from our back yard, I could escape into a larger world, the brush outside town.  ooo!  animals I didn't know and who didn't know me.  snakes!  oddly shaped trees.  I think I once found a skull, but I'm not sure of that.  I did find a cave, but I've written of that elsewhere - it was a wonderful cave!  every little boy should find one and get away with exploring it!  I could hide at the edge of the brush and see men riding horses and working from horseback or getting off, working, and getting back on.  yes, if I ever had a childhood, that was it!  and then it was gone!  that's what happens to childhood, I think.  in our case, we moved into a big town where I had some adventures I wasn't supposed to, then we went back to "the States" for a year that turned into a year and a half.  I was introduced to school and learned to hate it.  we came back to Brasil, but not to our little town.  we stayed in Recife where I was re-introduced to school and learned not to hate it.  my adventures were reduced to walking home out of the way I was supposed to walk.  then all of a sudden we left Brasil and went to "the States" again only for keeps that time.  I was about twelve then, so anything like childhood was out of the question.  I had to crossover into being a teenager with no preparation at all for being a teenager, not even the right language.  it all worked out, I think.  I sorta caught up with my fellow teenagers and did the things teenagers weren't supposed to do, managed to survive grownups again, graduated from high school and started college.  it was a busy time,  and now fifty-plus years later, I look back at that time I call childhood and wonder at it, amaze at it, and appreciate it.

290.366 - 2016 project and pocket knives

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

pocket knives

do I appreciate pocket knives?  there are three within reach, at least a couple more in the dresser drawer across from me.  "what on earth might you need five knives within easy access?"  um.  I don't.  I was surprised to learn I had so many so near.  that's a way to measure how much I appreciate them though, isn't it?  that I have so many so near so unconsciously?  oh, and I should admit that two of them aren't really pocket knives, they're "Swiss Army" tools that happen to include a knife blade.  I include them for completeness.  you see, once upon a time I was a little kid, and one of the ways other people drove that home was that I was "too little" to carry my own.  a repeated source of awe in my little kid life would be that something would happen, and an older kid or a grownup would pull out his pocket knife - in my little kid life, girls never carried pocket knives, one of the ways we know the sixties happened is that some women do now - unfold the right blade, make the right cut, and we were all free to go on about our business safe in the knowledge that grownups wouldn't put a stop to it.  someday I was gonna be one of those grownup kids.  well, I have been.  I've cut a pant leg open so "we" could do first aid.  I've cut off a strip of cloth so we could devise a bandage, and once cut out a strip of jeans cloth so someone else could make a tourniquet.  I've cut off the insulation from an electrical cable so "we" could attach a plug, or from wire so "we" could re-solder a connection.  I've whittled away the damaged end of a tool handle so "we" could use the tool even if not as well as before.  I've used a pocket knife tip when no one had an X-acto knife for what was needed.  I've "sharpened" a pencil.  I've shorted out a power supply and ruined a knife blade when that was what was called for.  geez, I can probably add at least a dozen other useful things I've done with a pocket knife.  but 9/11 happened and we (UnitedStatesians) went nuts about surrendering freedoms so we could make believe we had security.  a security cop at work gently suggested that I not bring a pocket knife to work any more, that they were now classified as weapons, and people who carried them were automatically suspected of being terrorists.  fortunately, Lindy has pocket knives of her own so she's not likely to turn me in to the feds for having mine.  yes, I appreciate and respect pocket knives, but if they really do terrify my fellow citizens, then I'm willing to keep them at home and near places I work.  but so far, I haven't been willing to give them up.

289.366 - 2016 project and "I want"

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

"I want"

(wait a minute!  just let that in.  today is DoY 289, seventeen squared!  and there is no significance to it.  none.  not any!  it just seems unfair, doesn't it?)  here goes an appreciation for something that seems trivial, a whim, a flitter of will.  "I want!"  oh but it's not, is it?   for some of us, it's what keeps us alive, even when the other side of "I want!" is in fact something silly and trivial and something shake-your-head-able.  take me, for instance.  right now I want a Winchester Model 94 carbine so badly I can feel the black walnut stock in my hands,  I can feel the precision and hear the "snick-snick" of the lever-action throw, I can smell the burnt gunpowder after I've fired it.  goddam, shooting a gun is a sensual action!  how badly do I want it?  I've quit complaining about my exercises, aware that I can't very well go shooting if I have to lean on my walker to stand.  surely even those of you who can't fathom my wanting to own and shoot a gun surely can see the humor of wanting it getting me past whining about having to exercise.  no?  rats!  let's consider other examples of "I want".  I looked at Lindy, thought "I want!", and after six weeks of dust-gathering and shilly-shallying and procrastination called her up and happened to run into an "I want" of hers.  We went out that night, in a manner of speaking, and got engaged a week later and got married five months after that, and thirty-four years later are still married and in love!  years later, I walked into a Harley dealer's when it was time to replace my first Harley.  there must've been a herd of fifty Harleys in his dealership, but I saw one and "I want" hit and that was it.  oh man!  earlier than that, I read about physics and got curious about it and went to talk about physics to the only physics professor I knew.  now, to set the stage properly, you need to understand that he was a mousy little man, kind of a Woodrow-Wilson-when-he-was sick-kind of man and I was an earnest young-man-with-a-heart-murmur who admired Teddy Roosevelt sitting there listening to him.  he told me he had no idea what physics would be like for me, but told me what living physics had been for him, and I got out of his chair dazzled and fought through three days of college restrictions and requirements and other gobbledy-gook to change my major from electrical engineering to physics.  that's what "I want" is worth.  goddam.  yes, I appreciate "I want" and love it when it strikes.

288.366 - 2016 project and the internet

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the internet

once upon a time not so long ago, I sorta knew about the internet.  it was 1994, I think.  Lindy and I had had computers since the week before we got married in 1982.  my friends who were in on this new craze had had computers since 1976 or thereabouts.  I was kinda embarrassed to be getting into personal computers so late.  wasn't I a computer professional?  oops!  I've tangled three years, 1976, 1982, and 1994!  so let's get back to the simple story.  it's 1994, the year of the Northridge earthquake, but we didn't know that yet.  oh man!  I remember the trepidation with which I connected everything up, logged in to an internet provider service for the first time, logged onto the internet, and waited.  well?  wasn't it going to do anything?  Lindy had apparently read a little more than I had, she does that, and she'd unlimbered her browser, whatever the hell that was, and found a website, whatever the hell that was, and she was off beginning her new adventure while  I still waited for the internet to do something.  I hate to admit it, but it's been like that most of the time since then.  before very long I'd about half-mastered email and knew a dozen or so URLs that worked reliably and Lindy was building her first website of her own.  one year she did our taxes on the internet and the next year, PC Magazine did a survey on six different services that let you do your taxes on the internet.  it was a bracing new world!  if I typed an URL in wrong, I could find myself lost in the internet space and maybe watching human beings do things I hadn't known were possible.  for a few years, it was crazy.  but just like what happened to the Old West, pretty soon the timid townsfolk moved out and preachers and bankers came with them, and the internet became the tame, asphalted and sidewalked place we know today.  but even the tame internet is a pretty wonderful place.  I can read a Brasilian newspaper, listen to music I'd've never heard of before I began exploring, find information on topics I didn't ever know I was interested in, find poems by almost any poet I hear about.  people I know work crossword puzzles on the internet, or play interactive games on the internet, trade stocks and bonds on the internet, use internet money.  I still plod along, emailing and now texting or Skyping or reading a newspaper written in some place I'll never visit, or reading reading reading poems and about poets, getting gobsmacked by women I hadn't heard of yesterday but will be in big new movies tomorrow, reading about some new kind of math I can't understand, or a game teenagers are playing that I can't see the attraction of or understand the rules for, and listening to music old and new.  and every few days Lindy tells me "you really have to learn about ampersandzipanorama" or some other new feature of this magnificent invention, the internet.

287.366 - 2016 project and my big ole Schwinn bicycle

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

my big ole Schwinn bicycle

it weighed as much as I did.  that's probably not true, but I could just barely pick it up when it was delivered.  I say "when it was delivered" because one evening delivery men from Sears showed up and carried the bicycle to my granddaddy's porch and presented him with the bill.  "I didn't order this," he said.  somewhere else in Baton Rouge, some kid who'd gone to a lot of trouble to order a maroon and cream bicycle with white-wall tires and a tear-drop-shaped "tank" between the crossbars that showed it was a boy's bicycle was very disappointed.  where was his bicycle?  the Sears guys arrived and delivered the bicycle and presented the bill to my granddaddy and he was going to send it back!  I begged and I pleaded and I danced my excitement, and my granddaddy grumbled and grumped and gruffed but gave in and bought the damned bicycle.  that meant he and my mother and even my father had to spend time teaching me to ride the damned thing.  I don't remember that part, except that we did it across the street in the Dufroq School's huge playground after all the kids and teachers were gone.  and one day I could ride!  I was wobbly and I fell and I got back up and on and was gone again.  for a long while I was supposed to ride it just there, since no other kids meant I couldn't hurt anyone else.  of course I broke that rule, and rode it around the block where we lived.  and I did just fine until some poor soul backed their car out in front of me and I couldn't stop in time.  damn.we had to replace my front wheel and front fender.  I was so annoyed!  the new fender almost matched the maroon and cream of the rest of the bicycle.  and then another day some poor baby half my age walked out in front of me.  oh geez!  the baby didn't bend my front wheel or twist my fender, and I was damned lucky that I didn't hurt the baby either.  what an unfortunate way to learn how dangerous the world is!  for the baby and for me both.  I think we must have left the bicycle with my granddaddy when we sashayed off to Brasil.  but when the family got back together and moved to Clovis, New Mexico, pretty soon it showed up again, big and heavy and prone to bicycle-chain failures.  that's not quite right.  the bicycle chain itself never failed me, but it slid off the sprockets often.  I was so glad when the bicycle mechanic showed me how to fix the chain myself!  I explored nearly all of Clovis on that Schwinn!  I explored a lot of near-Clovis on that Schwinn!  it made possible my first paper route!  and then we moved to Albuquerque, and I explored the neighborhood on that Schwinn.  it didn't last very long in Albuquerque though.I was in the eighth grade when we arrived there, and I quickly learned that it wasn't cool.  I had no idea what cool was, but I was very clear that I didn't want to be not cool.  one day I parked it in the garage and just never took it out again.  but damn!  it sure carried me through a lot of growing up in this country!

286.366 - 2016 project and daring

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

daring

that's funny.  I don't know how to define daring.  oh, I can look it up in a dictionary.  but it isn't something heroic I mean.  maybe a way of living.  or of using language.  like Doug Kearney does.  like Donny Jackson does.  like e.e. cummings does, well, did.  so take the dictionary definition of daring, then apply it to language, make language work newly, make language glisten while it works, make it new and bold and strong.  set free the leopard in language.  boy, that helps, doesn't it?  let me try a different way:  suppose daring is the difference between van Gogh's creativity and Matisse's creativity.  it's what makes you sit up and wonder, "oh my goodness!  is that permitted?"  even as you look for ways to do something like it yourself.  "I know!  I'll ride a motorcycle instead of driving a car!"  something like that, only in how you use language, how you language.

285.366 - 2016 project and Miss Broiles

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Miss Broiles

when I came back to this country, I "knew English".  that is, I spoke English with my parents down in Brasil, and no one corrected me.  when we studied English as a foreign language in school, I excelled.  when I landed in Miami, no one could understand me.  maybe because they had more important things to do.  if I remember correctly, we landed and there was a flurry of activity, people identifying us and us collecting our baggage, and then my little sister and I were in the back seat of a car with two strangers in the front seats.  we drove and drove and drove.  the people in the front seats talked to each other, but I could barely hear them and they only every once in a while asked if we were all right.  as I recall, a nod was the safest answer.  eventually we arrived in St. Louis, and it turned out the strangers were an aunt and uncle, and they had kids I was supposed to know since we were cousins.  I think we lasted there about five months, but we were more trouble than my aunt and uncle had bargained for, so we went to Perryton, Texas, where a different aunt and uncle took care of us for my first semester of the sixth grade, I think.  (this morning I think that.  catch me on another morning and I think we were with my aunt and uncle in Perryton for a full school year.  it was a very confusing time.  my parents came to get us, and the four of us went to collect my little brothers, and the six of us went to live in Clovis, New Mexico.  that's where I discovered the Mexican kids could understand me.  if I remember correctly, they helped me learn to speak something closer to American.  (I believe I landed in Miami 'speaking English' by thinking what I wanted to say in Portuguese, then translating that to English, word by word, but pronouncing the English words as if they were Portuguese.)  by luck or kindness, I was put in Miss Broiles' seventh grade English class and she almost immediately put me in her after-hours remedial English class.  oh bless her, bless her, bless her, bless her, bless her!  I entered her remedial class not knowing one part of speech, and left knowing eight.  I entered not knowing how to conjugate a verb in English, and left knowing so many my head had swollen two sizes.  I learned vocabulary and spelling and pronunciation.  I learned to diagram a sentence, and still can.  I learned to read in front of the class without her correcting my pronunciation or my inflection.  in one short intense school year, I learned English - if English were spelling and grammar and pronunciation.  that is, I left her remedial English class speaking written English as it shows up in text books.  that is not a complaint.  I bless her every time I think of her.  She was a little (five feet tall, I think) old lady with a stiff leg who loved English, and did her best to make every child who came within her grasp leave knowing English, formal English.  it wasn't her fault that there is a whole other language that we don't acknowledge - spoken English.  or that there are actually at least two other languages, spoken English for males, and spoken English for females.  spoken English, male or female, relies on idioms.  I don't know if Miss Broiles would have fainted at the idea of peppering one's writing with phrases that meant nothing like what they appear to mean.  I think I've never learned to use them, and always hear or read them with suspicion.  but anyway, bless Miss Broiles!  bless her remedial English class.  It was just what a foreigner who was supposed to be a native needed.

284.366 - 2016 project and the piano

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the piano

it wasn't my fault.  I was a helpless bystander.  when we were little and lived in the blue-grey house, we didn't know the world was spiraling in on us, and whatever structure our parents had contrived was about to collapse.  we only knew the gloom and tension in the house, and escaped it into the yard, into the mango trees, and sometimes outside the wall into what seemed like a playground that lay between our house and the river.  (our playground was the ruins of a warehouse that had stood at the edge of the river, and been torn down when the suburbs swarmed out to surround it.)  but one day when we couldn't get out - I suppose it was raining fit to kill or something - I heard the piano playing and I heard my mother's voice in the kitchen.  a ghost?  a visitor?  I went to investigate.  oh my goodness!  my little sister sat on the piano stool and played a hymn.  oh my goodness!  she played it with all the body English that my mother used.  you see, sometimes when running the house and minding the kids and whatever else was going on in her life mounted up into Too Much To Bear, my mother would escape into the Room with a Piano.  it was her room.  we were definitely not supposed to be in there.  I had snuck in there several times, of course, but when I depressed one or another of the keys, the piano responded with a plinkety sound that had nothing to do with music.  I can still do that.  my little sister must have seen, heard, felt something other than I had.  she had twisted the piano stool up high enough that she could sit on it and reach the keys.  with her tiny little hands, she had figured out how to play more than one key at a time, and what to do with her left hand while the right hand played the melody.  honest to god!  she was playing a hymn and leaning into the piano, leaning right or leaning left, or leaning away from the piano, just like mother did when the piano rescued her from the mundane.  oh my goodness!  I knew trouble when I saw it.  before I could warn my little sister though, my mother stormed out of the kitchen, saw me standing lookout, and the hurricane began.  I was ordered to stand still right there.  the ruckus alerted my sister and she tried to jump off the piano stool.  piano stools are treacherous devices.  hers fell toward my mother while my little sister fell the other way, and a miracle happened.  my mother caught them both before either hit the floor.  well, she had to catch my little sister.  she was gonna yell at her!  you can't yell at someone who's already got a broken head!  and she had to catch that stool.  I don't know what all she had to do to get that piano, but no part of it was gonna get damaged!  anyway she caught them both and lost her storm in the process.  but not entirely.  she pronounced our dooms.  we were going to Learn Music!  dear god!  she hired some woman with great credentials, who probably was a lovely woman to some people, but not to miscreant students.  my knuckles still hurt when I think of her.  one thing you should know about me, at least for this story.  I have no music.  I have studied music on the piano, on a trombone, on a guitar twice.  I can make noise on all those instruments.  but my little fingers once learned scales and chords and chord progressions, without ever learning music.  my little sister and I were forced to take piano lessons in Brasil, and in Clovis, New Mexico, but not in Albuquerque.  thank you, Albuquerque.  and my little sister who taught herself how to play a hymn just watching my mother play learned to hate the piano and scales and chord progressions - or that's what I remember.  I appreciate the piano all right, but I do not love it.  thank goodness I can still appreciate someone else playing it, like in a jazz band, or a country-western band, or even onstage at a classical concert.  I love their music even if my knuckles do hurt.

283.366 - 2016 project and novels

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

novels

wait!  first let me admit I don't appreciate novels like a critic would, or like an English professor might.  I appreciate novels like an avid fan does, I think; maybe like a slightly perverted, but picky, avid fan does.  you see, I like science fiction and fantasy novels, and I'm sure that real aficionados don't count them.  you know, a novel is a novel, a hyphenated novel is not.  I do like some of the classics, I don't think I can claim to like them all.  I like, for instance, _Jude the Obscure_ by Thomas Hardy, even though an hour of Thomas Hardy's poems leaves me brushing cobwebs off my skin.  I probably like any Robert Graves novel, and I often turn to Robert Graves poems for inspiration.  when I was a kid, I loved Robert Louis Stevenson novels, but I think I don't now.  (how can I say that?  not like _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_?)  I like Orwell, I like Poul Anderson.  I like some of the strange novels of the late twentieth century, you know, the ones that seem loosely connected to reality as an engineer knows it.  I appreciate the work that goes into them - or think I do.  I've written three or four myself.  the first didn't sell, and the second earned a heap of scorn from a lady who'd done a lot of writing herself.  oh dear!  nevertheless, I've enjoyed reading novels since then, so I can honestly say, yes, I appreciate novels.

282.366 - 2016 project and motorcycles

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

motorcycles

take this with a grain of salt, at least.  one of my first push-around-on-the-floor toys was a plastic motorcycle-with-rider.  the rider wore a blue uniform with goggles and a peaked and billed cap.  obviously a cop, but what did I know about cops when I was months old.  that would come later.  but according to witnesses who have conveniently left, I loved that toy and damn near wore it out either gnawing on it or pushing it around on the floor.  also according to those witnesses, I early on learned to accompany the pushing around with "vroom!  vroom!"  fast forward 14 years to a boy who's doing well at being a paper boy and have his manager say something like "suppose I quintuple the size of your paper route, can you handle the responsibility?"  what does a boy who has no idea what that means but loves the idea of lots more money say?  "sure!"  that's what he says.  have his manager say, "okay report to your paper pickup corner next Wednesday with a motorscooter, and between now and then, memorize this map.  oh, and sign this contract and have your mother sign it, then mail it to the newspaper office downtown."  damn, things were simpler then, weren't they?"  since you're kind, have his grandfather be visiting, and have him jump into the boy's conversation with his parents.  "I'll co-sign," the grandfather says, then takes the boy to the bank the next morning where they borrow more money than a motorscooter will cost.  then they go to the Lambretta store because there was no such thing as a Harley-Davidson motorscooter.  and the granddaddy was right, of course.  you couldn't just buy a motorscooter,  you needed to buy a jacket and a cap and a pair of boots, at the very least.  but you also needed to buy a set of tools, a measuring bottle that would hold eight ounces of oil for when you needed to fill up with a gallon of gasoline.  and even then we weren't done.  we had to go to a coffee shop to celebrate, and for him to explain to me how big a deal I had taken on, that this wasn't a disguised gift, that I actually had to pay the money back.  didn't matter.  I was still dazzled by it all.  and while I had that paper route, I did pay my granddaddy back  and I rode that Lambretta everywhere except to school.  I only lived a block from school, so riding it to school would have been more trouble than it was worth.  let the world roll by about two decades,  I am in graduate school and have to start work at White Sands Missile Range again (I had worked there as an undergraduate) which means I have to get to the terminal where U.S. Army buses picked up workers and took them to the range.  a bicycle would have done, of course, but I could buy a motorcycle from a friend.  well, sort of a motorcycle:  a 55 cc step-through Honda.  two things made it a motorcycle instead of a motorscooter:  it had real wire-spoke strung wheels instead of those silly little balloon tire wheels, and its engine displacement was 55 cc instead of 50 cc.  and it worked fine until I missed the bus again, and again, and again.  I think that was it.  three times I rode that poor little barely motorcycle 60 miles to work, climbing 1500 feet and dropping 1500 feet on the other side of the pass on the way to and from the base.  oh dear.  I killed that little motorcycle.  so I bought a "real" motorcycle, a Honda 350 cc cruiser-ish.  and luck was with me.  a friend called with an offer of a real job in aerospace engineering again.  it paid a real salary.  but I had to move to Denver or thereabouts.  I accepted.  we moved.  I rode my new Honda 350 cc from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Denver, Colorado, and a motorcyclist was fixed, like a photograph is fixed during the development process.  I rode that Honda 350 cc twin everywhere, like I had my Lambretta.  onto and around Colorado's mountains, alongside Grand Lake, into Wyoming, to work and back from the foothills, everywhere.  my aerospace jobs continued, and I rode a Honda 400 cc triple, then a Yamaha 500 cc twin, then a Honda 750 cc four-cylinder.  Ooo!  then I bought a Harley, a Sportster, and rode that motorcycle everywhere for years, until finally I bought a Harley NightTrain.  oh my goodness!  I rode that to Oakland and back, to Milwaukee and back by way of Washington, D.C., and Knoxville and Dallas and Alamogordo and the Grand Canyon, to Denver and back, to Albuquerque and back!  oh damn, I loved that NightTrain!  and I outrode my strength for riding a Harley and had to give it up.  damn!  but I rode motorcycles, real motorcycles for forty years, and I rode one Harley and then another for twenty of those.  yes, I appreciate motorcycles.  still smile to hear them ride by, or to see a string of them on the freeway.  go riders!  especially go Harley-riders!

281.366 - 2016 project and Quetzalcoatl

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

Quetzalcoatl

when I was sevenish and we had returned to Brasil but now lived in a wide, wide city, so wide you could fly over it for minutes, maybe an hour, and still be over the city, I ran into Quetzalcoatl.  not physically!  wouldn't that have been something!  but in some simple, apparently harmless book that I read.  it was just one story among many, probably the only story I ever read in which the protagonist was an Aztec boy.  I don't remember it well enough to tell you any details except these.  the boy gets himself into an ever so, oh so scary situation, and prays to Quetzalcoatl for strength and courage.  holy Toledo!  he doesn't get any extra strength, and he doesn't notice getting any extra courage, but instead of hiding in the shadows, shivering and sweating, he sneaks out and does what needs to be done.  whoa!  here was another god just as reliable and useful as the one I knew!  I don't think I physically turned a cartwheel in place, but it was that kind of eye-opening idea.  so I looked up Quetzalcoatl in the Book of Knowledge, and there he or it was, an Aztec god, a feathered serpent.  I don't remember that anything else stuck.  I sat there about to burst with excitement, desperately wanting to tell someone else, someone who'd appreciate it just like I had.  other people had other gods!  their gods were just as helpful to them as ours was to me!  one such god was a feathered serpent instead of some fierce old grandfather in a dress!  and I couldn't tell a soul!  telling anyone in my family would have started a hurricane of a fooferaw!  telling one of my teachers (I went to a Baptist school) would have unleashed at least a tornado.  the kids at school barely knew Mexico existed, thought New Mexico was part of Mexico, and had heard of the Aztecs, but kinda like they'd heard of whales and condors, things just more real, maybe, than elves and pixies.  nope, Quetzalcoatl and the ideas he'd brought me were mine and had to be kept secret, but what delicious secrets!

280.366 - 2016 project and the pinto

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the pinto

once upon a time long ago when I was little, I had learned to read by myself so I could read books my parents had set out for me, but I could also read books they had left on shelves low enough that I could reach.  I soon found out that most of those were too mysterious:  old, dusty, with few pictures, and those of frowning fat men or buildings like nothing I saw in wherever we lived in Brasil.  I had to sound out the words and then they still didn't make sense.  if I asked my mother what olumtubuligata meant, she soon figured out what book I had been reading and put it on a different shelf.  but even the books for children had wonderful stories, and occasionally new books would appear there.  one day I found a new book about a Navajo boy and his little sister and their grandfather and their pinto horses.  whoa!  the book didn't tell me many things.  that is, it didn't tell me that they lived on a reservation, or that white men kept devising schemes to steal their land or their horses.  it did tell me that they were shepherds, and that somehow the old man had time to also be a jeweler.  that is, somehow the grandfather tended a herd of sheep and crafted beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and rings using turquoise stones and silver and iron that he found lying about on the reservation.  I came to suspect that whoever wrote the book knew just barely more than I did about Navajos.  but the book did have beautiful pictures of the characters and their wonderful horses posed against wonderful backgrounds of desert land that could not have supported sheep any more than I could have found silver and iron and turquoise lying about in my back yard.  I loved the pictures of the pintos, and wondered why they had no part in the story, but then the story never actually did anything anyway.  the Navajo family had to move to their winter grazing and set up living, then they had to move to their summer grazing and set up living.  the boy found some turquoise when his grandfather had about given up.  the horses and the sister came into the story when necessary, but mostly were not there.  but then the sheep were only there when they needed the Navajo to find, collect, and move them.  it was a dissatisfying book, marginally better than "Run Dick, run."  but it had Navajos and pinto horses and I've been fascinated by them ever since.  like many things that have fascinated me but were not part of physics and engineering, I never actually did anything to learn more about them.  but there you have it, pinto horses, and a book that made a huge impression on a little boy despite being so badly written a little boy knew it.  yea pintos!

279.366 - 2016 project and van Gogh

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

van Gogh

"Starry Night"  "Worn Out"  "Sorrow"  "Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette"  "Courtesan"  "The Yellow House"  or to put it differently, 880 paintings in about 10 years.  or to put it differently, Western painting can be roughly divided into two periods:  before van Gogh and after van Gogh.  and he was drifting in and out of madness, more appropriate to the twentieth century than the nineteenth.  van Gogh.  what I know about painting wouldn't fill a thimble, but oh my goodness!  van Gogh.

278.366 - 2016 project and princesses

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

princesses

first of all, I should remind you that I recently appreciated my shallowness.  secondly, I'm a story-maker.  now you have the context.  yes, I love to see a little girl dressing up as a princess.  For one thing, it gives me confidence that my imaginativeness hasn't gone out of style.  I also love seeing a girl-youngwoman being a princess.  I claim it means she knows she is in her parents'  eyes, and she expects it in the eyes of a would be suitor.  I love to see it in the style and demeanor of a young woman newly entering her work life.  may it protect her!  we provide so many jerks in the jungle around her.  a special friend of mine has carried it into her fifties, and she is a joy to watch, no matter what she does.  and you can count on it:  princesses show up in my stories.  royal princesses, aristocratic princesses, princesses-because-they-say-so, princesses-because-they-haven't-learned-better yet.  when a real princess steps into one of my narrator's life, into one of my protagonist's life, you can almost count on heartbreak.  it is part of a princess' job to enchant us, to charm us, to make us fall in love with her, but it is no part of a princess' job to satisfy the wants and whims of a commoner.  it is part of a princess' job to enroll whatever hero she can find into taking on her battle, but it is no part of a princess' job to reward him unless maybe with battle's spoils or a royal thank you.  it is part of a princess' job to bring adventure into lives around her, but it is also part of a princess' job to stay untouchable.  it's a helluva job, but aren't you glad some young women take it on for us?  I am.

277.366 - 2016 project and among poets again II

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

among poets again II

tonight Lindy and I excursed again out among the poets of Los Angeles.  in particular, we drove to Altadena to celebrate with Khadija the release of her _Poets & Allies for Resistance: 2015 Anthology_.  about 20 of us showed up for the celebration, so Khadija included a brief open mic.  thank you ma'am!  what we heard was passionate, intense poems well delivered.  thank you poets in the anthology.  thank you open mic poets.  what a good time we had!  what good poems we heard!  and thank you to all the poets and friends who welcomed me back.  I thought that was so cool!

276.366 - 2016 project and among poets again

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

among poets again

let me be clear:  I have excursed once.  it is at least a start.  and it was a wonderful start!  I love hearing poetry.  I love listening to poetry.  (yes, they are two different activities.)  in particular yesterday I loved hearing poetry and I loved listening to poetry.  I enjoyed visiting with poets.  I liked being welcomed back into the community.  I knock on wood that I have started my return.  one of my favorite pieces of yesterday may have only happened in my mind.  in the open mic, I read first, and when I finished my first poem, a lady in the front row burst out "you wrote that?"  "yes ma'am," I said.  "goddam," she responded.  "that sounded like a real poet wrote it."  thank you, ma'am.

275.366 - 2016 project and the jury

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the jury

who are they?  the members of the jury, I mean.  William Carlos Williams, of course.  he started this whole thing.  or if he didn't, Robert Burns, Bobby Burns did - the poet who survived my high school introduction to poetry.  (don't they do a fine job of making you hate poems and anyone who would write them?)  Robert Graves, the man who made poetry seem it might be one coherent study.  Keith Wilson, my mentor.  Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  oh, go ahead and admit it, Donald Hall.  W.H. Auden too.  both my wives, Sue Lynn and Lindy.  two of the women I loved between wives, Savannah and Mikey.  I'm forgetting someone, maybe two someones.  oh yes, and the Goddess Herself, the heart of humanity and the darkness we all conspire to weave, the Muse, and possibly Death herself.  so, if you're counting, you see this is not a civil jury, and no, they are not civil at all.  but if you listen, you can hear their grudging approval or at least acceptance of the verses that escape from me out among you.