I descend from revolutionaries and religious radicals

I was reading the family genealogy and came across another ancestor, John Rush, who fought against the redcoats in the Revolution.  And was also another Quaker, from a family that were some of the very first Quakers.

By the way, the name Quaker was one of the names various dissenting religious groups got tagged with by the English in the 17th century; others were Diggers, Seekers and Ranters.

 The family hailed from Hornton in Oxfordshire, England, probably living there for centuries. But the direct ancestor of my American Rushes was Captain John "Old Trooper" Rush (1620–1699). He served as a cavalry commander in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War, and converted to Quakerism in 1660. He and his family followed the William Penn colonists to America in 1683. They settled along Poquessing Creek in Byberry, Pennsylvania. 

I found it interesting that he is the ancestor of Dr. Benjamin Rush, surgeon, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, professor of chemistry, Christian Universalist and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It seems I am descended from a long line of radical Protestants who believed in liberty of conscience and who were also equally radical republican egalitarians. Nutters all, the English aristocrats would have called them. But they kicked King Charles's ass and King George's, too. And created America, God's own country, as they used to call it. 

We have a copy of The Soldier's Bible, the version published by the American Tract Society for Union troops during the Civil War. The original was created by Cromwell for his army, condensed from the Geneva Bible, mostly from the Old Testament.

It's baffling to me how much religious hatred there was in Europe in those days between Protestants and Catholics.  My Anabaptist German ancestors, the Dunkards, were tortured and burned alive by the Catholics and fled to America to escape them. The Martyr's Mirror recounts the horror in detail. There was Bloody Mary in England, and Cromwell did turnabout on the Catholics.  Then there was the Thirty Years War. I guess none of those guys had any use for Matthew Chapters 5 through 7, which to me is the heart of Christianity, and what I always try to keep in mind, despite my doubts and skepticism about, well, everything. Considering that those who founded our country emerged from that intolerant, murderous era, it is remarkable that America embraced from the beginning religious tolerance and freedom of religion as a fundamental tenet. I think it speaks well of us as a people. It was that liberty of conscience thing come to fruition on a fresh new continent.

Anyway, my John Rush was a member of the Sons of Liberty.  He fought at Brandywine, Germantown, White Marsh, Red Bank and the Siege of Ft. Mifflin, where he was badly wounded, having his leg and arm amputated. He was just sixteen years old. He had earlier survived the brutal Paoli Massacre, where the Brits showed no mercy, refusing to accept the surrender of wounded Americans and bayoneting them. If Rush had been killed in that massacre would I exist today?  I guess not.

Another of my ancestors, William Hebb, also fought at Brandywine and Germantown. I wonder if they knew each other. Hebb also survived a brutal assault by the Brits, the Baylor Massacre, when again the redcoats refused to accept the surrender of wounded Americans and bayoneted them. The behavior of the British against us in the Revolution was so monstrous that even a century later John Hay could tell Rudyard Kipling that the only thing that held the United States together was hatred of Britain. 

Oh, after the Revolution Hebb was such a vigorous abolitionist that he was chased out of the Old Dominion and settled in what is now West Virginia. Five of his great-grandsons served in the Union army.

One of the many oddities of history is that in the 20th century we fought on the side of Britain, our old arch foe, and they formed what they called "the special relationship" with us.

"Now, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him."
~ Ishmael, Moby Dick

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking about you

 “If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca 

“So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near―
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you ...."
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince  

 “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until the moment I was lifted and struck.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

 C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you know what time it is?

It's later than you think.

 It's later than anyone thinks.

 

 

Lastly, you who read; aye, you

Who this very line may scan:

Think of all you planned to do ...   

Have you done the best you can?

See! the tavern lights are low;

Black’s the night, and how you shrink!

God! and is it time to go?

Ah! the clock is always slow;

It is later than you think;

Sadly later than you think;

Far, far later than you think.

~ Robert W. Service

 

 

 

 

Reading

 I published this in an old blog I had, October 27, 2017. Since Annie Dillard passed away today, I thought I'd republish it.  Kathy Shaidle, the Canadian poet and social commenter, sent me a nice note about it. She liked Dillard, too, I guess. And reading. Shaidle has since passed away. She was an interesting person.  I learned a lot from her movie reviews, more than just about the movies. At one time she tried to be a "sex pot" but failed. She wrote about it. She did not know where her mother was buried and did not care. 

N.C. Wyeth, cover illustration for the March, 1922, issue of The Ladies Home Journal.

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” 
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of my favorite things to do is read.  It always has been, but I don't read now the way I read when I was younger.  Then, reading was a special, private door into an unknown and fabulous world of elsewhere, othertime and otherness.  Now I know they're just books.

“Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.” 
 
“I read with pure, exhilarating greed....  Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.”

"When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.” 
 
“What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.”  


“Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.”

~ Annie Dillard,  An American Childhood 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bra ha ha

 I don't wear a bra unless I have to and have been that way since puberty. I hate the things. And I recently read an article that supported my choice with, apparently, scientific evidence that bras cause all kinds of physical problems and don't prevent anything.

The study by a French sports scientist named Jean-Denis Rouillon followed 330 women who stopped wearing brass, ages 18 to 35,  over a span of 15 years, comparing them to a control group of women who continued to wear bras.  The results: For those who did not wear bras, breast tissue became firmer, not looser. Nipple position lifted, on average, by 7 millimeters per year. The internal supporting structures of the chest — Cooper’s ligaments, the pectoral muscles, the connective tissue — became measurably more active and more effective at holding tissue in position. 

The study was done in the early 2000s and there have been no follow-ups that I found, but it does seem to, um, uphold my impression.  Bras are necessary sometimes  — vigorous movements are uncomfortable without them. Guys may like looking at boobs bouncing up and down under your blouse or shirt but it is annoying (the bouncing, and sometimes the looking) and can even be a bit painful. Another reason is to be polite in public and not attract attention when it's inappropriate.

But otherwise I like to let the girls breathe free.  And that's not just a phrase.  Bras cause sweating, chaffing and other discomfort.  The sweat that can't evaporate causes rashes, even  back acne where the bra strap wraps around behind you. When I do wear a bra, it's such a relief to take the darn thing off. 

My breasts are naturally firm and don't sag. That seems to run in the women of my family.  My mom still has a nice rack and she rarely bothers with a bra, too.  I think I got the aversion to them from her.  She tells me her mother, my grandmother, also had firm breasts.  I remember her but honestly never paid any attention to her boobs.  I only mention my mother's breasts because we've talked about this, concluding some women need the support of a good bra and others, such as we, do not.  But we all need to wear a bra in public situations for the sake of decorum and social expectations.   

These days I only wear a bra when I go into town or have a business meeting. People assume certain things about you if you don't wear a bra, especially if you are on the large size, and who needs that when you are just running errands, and you certainly don't want any attention to your physical endowments when you are talking important matters and expect to be taken seriously.

But around the ranch on normal days, I almost never wear a bra. If I'm meeting people about ranch business, of course I do.

I wonder if bras will eventually become out of style, like girdles. Who wears a girdle anymore?  They used to be a common undergarment but I don't think I've ever seen one for sale when I've been out shopping. Maybe they are, but I just haven't noticed.  If I did, I would think they were some sort of prosthetic device or something. 

Hosiery is another item of wear that seems to be almost gone.  In my grandmother's day, nylon stockings were a must, held up by garter belts that you lashed on over your underpants. What a pain. In my mother's day that gave way to panty hose and now most people don't bother with stockings at all. Supposedly, they are making a come-back, but I wonder. I enjoy wearing thigh-highs and knee socks; I do it because it's a style I like.  But among the women I know, stockings are just one more thing not to have to bother with.  I can see a day when bras will be considered the same way.

If you watch old movies, especially pre-code ones, it's obvious the women aren't wearing bras. Or if they are, they are very flimsy. The modern support bra doesn't seem to have become common until the 1940s sweater girl era when bras were used to emphasize the shape of the breasts under the sweater.  Then came the Fifties with the nose-cone pointy bras. Ridiculous. But with the Sixties came the topless bathing suit, which turned out to be a, um, flop. Still, it was a sign the times were a-changing. Then came Carol Doda, who I think was the first topless dancer in 1964. A rock formation in Yosemite is named Doda Dome in honor of her.  (I just looked that up!)

Then in the Seventies came bra-burning in the name of women's liberation.  Guys may wonder what the connection was, but that one of the first things women did to express their "liberation" was torch their stupid bras tells you how much the things are hated.

Of course, men were baffled because they just think of breasts as sex objects -- sweater puppies, whoopie cushions. So letting them free seemed like some form of provocativeness, which it wasn't.

I especially hate to wear a bra when I am nursing and my breasts are leaking, swelling with milk, contracting after feeding. Clogged milk ducts, mastitis, thrush, even reduced milk production...gawd. All that goes away for me when I don't wear a bra. Okay, guys, if you want to look at my stupid boobs, look. Like you've never seen tits before. I don't care.  Of course, as I said, if I must go out in public, I have to bra up and strap on a nursing bra for the duration.  But I hate it. I think I said that.  Haha. 

Anyway, what a relief it is not to have to armor-up before going out the way women did back in the day, with granny panties, bullet-bra, girdle, stockings and garter belt. These days that's all history.  I have run down to the post office wearing just a sun dress and nothing more. There would have been a time not all that long ago when, had I done so, I would have been arrested.  These days the only thing that might happen is that one of the loafers lounging in front of the general store next door will say, "Oh, honey, you just made my day!" 

 

 

 

 

 

September

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 September was when it began.
Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs
Silent, moving like shadows on a wall;
And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind
We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;
Badgers and snakes, abandoning
Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten;
Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods
Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors
Rising from the earth - all these,
And more began that fall. Ravens flew round
The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,
We could hear the sound of beating clothes
All through the night. We could not count
All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.
And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous,
And heard the sound of rushing wind.
~ Weldon Kees

 Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
~ Carl Sandburg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So full, so shaken

 

“There are moments in life when the heart is so full of emotion

that if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble

Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,

Spilled on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The past superimposed on the present

It's funny how you think about the oddest things, unconnected stray thoughts bubbling up from your past when you are tired, sleep-deprived, dealing with stress caused by multiple things.  

Like, I was wide awake, nursing, and I suddenly believed with absolute certainty that I was still in the Navy and I had to fly that day and I began thinking how I could get in the cockpit without anyone seeing my baby and how I was going to manage nursing her.  I was really puzzling that out and turning over different methods in my mind for several minutes -- and no, I wasn't dreaming: I was fully awake, aware of a blue jay squawking at a cat outside the open window, looking at the apples on the apple tree down the yard. Yet I was feeling a fresh sea breeze in my face while smelling a funk blended of JP-5, jet exhaust, hydraulic fluid, laundry soap, greasy, oily, steamy fumes -- that good old carrier smell. At the same time, I was in the cockpit, airborne, feeling that constant, deep-seated rumble from the engines, aware of the rush of wind just inches away outside the canopy, my shoulders warm from the sun...all of it.

I mention this because I just made a post about a test I took that told me my personality was such that I am not susceptible to these sorts of phantasms. And I thought the test revealed an accurate aspect of my personality.  I ain't no Terrence McKenna. But, nonetheless, there I was in the midst of a kind of secular rapture, for lack of a better description.

I guess there actually is a reason saints and mystics and seekers disappear into the desert or the mountain reaches, fast and flagellate until they begin having visions.  American Indians went on vision quests to discover their spirit animal. Such a quest would involve something like running non-stop for three days without eating or drinking until you collapsed and began having visions, hallucinating  on the verge of death, at which point your spirit animal would reveal itself to you. It seems that even I am susceptible to that, at least to some degree. Not a fan of it. Won't pursue it. The here and now is good enough for me. I have enough trouble trying to understand that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baby blues

 Worst I've ever experienced.  I would nod off without knowing it for a few minutes and wake up crying, calling out for my husband. I was terrified he was going to die and then I realized that he had and I just totally crashed emotionally.

Thank God my mom has been here with me. 

My lower body feels like I've been beaten with a baseball bat, really heavy bleeding, lots of big clots, my stupid boobs are swollen, sore and throbbing. My...oh, never mind. It may be worse that it ever has been, but I know it will pass.  I just have to hang on to that thought. 

And you know what? I have a baby girl! I almost didn't. But I do!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, gee whiz

 Sigh.  I guess my plans to become a mystic on a mountain top shall come to naught. 

Bummer, man.

Well, at least this explains why I can't become hypnotized -- I volunteered for that during a college class and it totally didn't work. I thought about faking it for the lulz but I didn't. 

(I have pretended to be hypnotized in other circumstances so I could do things I otherwise wouldn't do -- I had no control over what I did! I was hypnotized! And a swell time was had by all. Heh.)

It also explains why sciencey stuff is my thing while touchy-feely, woo-woo stuff is not.  I guess it also explains why I become bored in church or with philosophical blathering, psychoanalysis, dream interpretation....  I tend to view it all as phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock and roll. I try not to.  I really do. I do want to believe. And once in a while I manage it. But there is always this little voice at the back of my mind giving the raspberry to it all. 

 

 

If y'all want to take this yhar test, here she be.

Speaking of accents -- we were weren't we? No? Well, Ima segue anyhoo -- I was at a roadside rest stop sitting at a picnic table waiting for my mom while she visited the restroom and a couple was walking nearby. The woman was looking at the sky and suddenly she stopped and stared at something.  Then she pointed and said to her husband (I assume), "Is that a flyink sawsuh?" 

He looked where she pointed, shading his eyes with his hand. "Well, it's certainly something," he said. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like it before."

I looked where they were looking and saw far up in the sky a buzzard (okay, a vulture) lazily circling, riding a thermal. A pretty common sight in these parts. I assumed the couple were tourists from back east somewhere, New York or thereabouts, city people unfamiliar with nature.  I thought about telling them what they were watching was a bird, or, as I suppose the woman would have said, a boid, but I didn't. Let them believe they were seeing something outré they could tell their friends about.

I guess that anecdote expresses my practical mindset.  If I see something unfamiliar in the sky, I don't automatically leap to the conclusion that it is an alien spacecraft from another planet piloted by little green men out to kidnap nubile babes and steal their orgone energy. I just go, "Huh, wonder what that is." 

See? I'm so dull.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I have lots of things to write about but my mind is kind of out of focus these days, casualty of a psychological IED, if you will.  But a good night's sleep or two will take care of it in the by and by. Been here before but this time has been a little rougher for...reasons. Nomsayn?

“Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.”
― David Gelernter 

 “'Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.” 
― Annie Dillard 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old -- and not so old -- couples

A repost from May 9, 2023.  Neither my mother nor I knew what was waiting for us in the months to come.  Sometimes they don't abandon you, God takes them from you. What might the next years take from us? My mind shies away....

_____________________________ 

 What makes a marriage last?

I've asked both my mom and dad that.  Boomers, they married late after having very rich and, some would say, adventuresome youths -- my father being a naval aviator participating in Linebacker II, the Christmas bombing, etc., during the Viet Nam War, my mother being an Army nurse during the same conflict and then a volunteer with the Barsky Unit of CMRI in Saigon after her service.  They'd both seen a lot of the world, including visiting the Soviet Union; in fact they first met on a ship sailing from Yokohama to Vladivostok, although they didn't date seriously for a couple of years after and marry a couple of years after that.  Then, once they married, we kids, two brothers and me, the youngest, came along some years after that.  And this year they will celebrate their 46th wedding anniversary.

Watching their interactions, it's clear they enjoy each other's company and are happy and comfortable together.  They will sit in the sun room and talk with each other for, it seems, hours about any subject under the sun -- current politics, the stock market, friends and relatives, their careers, places they been and things they've done, recipes and what to have for dinner, their children and grandchildren...just anything.  Now and again, they fall silent.  One may gaze out the window while the other reads something or checks his or her phone, then the conversation picks up again.  

Of course, that's not their whole day, and often they are apart for most of it, if not all of it, doing their separate things. And of course, when they  were working, often they would be apart for long stretches.  When my father was on a cruise, he would be gone for months.  During the Gulf War, he was away for eleven months. 

So what's the secret to their long marriage?  They shrug.  They don't know.  Just take it easy, don't be a self-centered jerk, be considerate, think of the other person first, always remember why you fell in love with them, and so forth.

But I think there could also be a predisposition to staying married, an inherited or genetic component.  One of my sets of grandparents were married for 51 years before the husband died, and another set was married for 68 years before the husband died.  Neither wife remarried, not that that was realistically expected to happen at their ages -- at least, I wouldn't think so.  

My mother did say, when we talked about this, that you should not rush into marriage hastily, but get to know the person quite well, analyze your own emotions and make sure you are not projecting a personality on the individual that is not really theirs.  Don't ignore or dismiss their faults but think about whether you can live with them.  And don't ignore or dismiss your own faults.  Be pitiless in your self-evaluation.  Try to see yourself as the other person sees you.

I would add, based on my experience, imagine what it would be like if the person you love, whose life means more to you than your own, should abandon you.  What black depths of despair would you endure?  Why would you let that happen? So, dear friend, do all that you can do to see that that never, ever happens.  Love, yes.  But also be worthy yourself of being loved.

 Two musical takes on the same thing; if you can do anything to prevent it happening to you, do so:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was an accident

 I've written about how my husband decided I was the one for him the first time he saw me; love at first sight as you might say.  But it wasn't that way for me.  My love for him just sort of came to be without me realizing it.  Then one day he was all the world to me and I had no idea how it happened.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heaven Too

Don't take it for granted.  It's not. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number Five

 

Well, I'm due any time now.  I'm looking forward to getting it over with, and I'm praying my baby will be born safely and healthily.  It has seemed like something didn't want me to have this baby.  First, the shock of losing my husband, and everything that has happened because of that. Then my mother, whose help I rely on in so many things, including helping care for my children, fell and broke her hip and has endured a health struggle since then. Then I fell off a ladder and badly injured myself, including having a punctured lung. Then I tripped and fell heavily, breaking my arm and wrist.  There were other things. And just a week ago I got the tiniest little cut on my right hand and it got badly infected and my hand blew up to the size of a catcher's mitt in just a few hours. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. Fortunately, I was already at our house in town near the hospital and a regimen of Amoxicillin is handling it.  Amoxicillin is considered safe to take while pregnant. I have my fingers crossed that all will be okay.

My mother is with me and though she uses a cane to get around, she is determined to take care of me and the new baby.  I do so need her. My mini-me wanted to come with me but I needed her to be with our toddler. My aunt is staying with her and looking after the boys, who have been very subdued, lately, so I hope everything is under control. 

This will be my last baby, the last from my dear Jeff.  Whatever has been trying to cause me to lose it, I hope it will, in the end, have failed. 

Okay, that's it.  I'll see you on the flip side. 

 

 

 

 

 

Cowboying

 China being our biggest export market for our beef, I've been learning a lot about that trade and the politics involving it.  For one thing, I was wrong about Trump.  I thought he was to blame for all the troubles we've been having selling to China, but that is not the case.  Until his first administration in 2017, China completely banned the import of American beef. Trump got that ban lifted. I was still in the Navy then  and never paid any attention to such things. I should have.

As of today, China allows the import of 164,000 metric tons of American beef annually.  That's until 2028, when the deal will have to be re-negotiated.  The Chicoms will probably dither on that until they see who the next president will be.  The tariff on U.S. beef is 22 percent.  That's compared to the 12 percent tariff the Chinese impose on Brazilian beef imports. And the quota for Brazilian beef is 1,106,000 metric tons this year, scheduled to go up to 1.13 million metric tons next year and 1.15 million metric tons in 2028.  Is it any wonder I am looking to invest in or buy a Brazilian fazenda, as a cattle ranch is called down there?

The Argentine quota is 511,000 metric tons for beef, that's why we invested there.  As a data point, Australia's is 211,000 metric tons.  The US of A's quota is the smallest and we even only have that thanks to Trump.  Bless you, sir. With reservations. The on again-off again tariff battle of the last few years has played havoc with our business and any planning for the future we try to do. As to what Tump announced today, Lord, Lord.

And that's not even considering all the other obstacles to beef production we face.  Not long ago we lost a BLM lease after the Bureau decided to classify buffalo (bison) as livestock (long, complicated story), so we opened up some of our marginal grazing land we had left fallow for years and drilled water wells (anticipating one cow-calf pair per 10 acres) but have since had to abandon that plan and, in fact, have reduced our herd, while expanding our operation in Argentina.

Oh, and I bought a sheep ranch in Argentina because there is no export quota on Argentine mutton to China while American mutton is totally banned from China. 

One advantage we have is that  American beef is regarded in the Chinese market as a high-end, premium product and is desired by wealthier consumers and specialty markets, so we can charge a pretty penny for it. The Chicoms love heavily marbled grain-fed beef, and that we can supply. American beef really is excellent.

But American beef is subject to strict Chinese regulation, including a Ractopamine ban, no beta-agonist drugs allowed at all and it must be certified by the USDA as having never been administered growth-promoting additives or synthetic hormones.  Our cattle meet those requirements.  A lot of American (and Canadian) ranches' cattle cannot. (Enjoy your MacDoogle's "all beef patty," suckers!  Haha.)

 Also, all our exports must comply with China's nationwide electronic traceability framework, which requires verifiable digital tracking records from our ranch to the Chinese port of entry. And believe you me this requires a lot -- a lot lot lot -- of paperwork that must be absolutely accurate to the last jot and tittle. For egg-zample, all 9060-5 series documents (don't you worry what those are -- but I have to!) for China must be physically (not digitally) signed by a USDA Food and Safety Inspection Service Public Health Veterinarian, who includes his or her DVM degree credentials and District or Circuit codes with the signature. A standard inspector’s signature won't cut it. And so on down the line.  Just thinking about all this gives me a headache. 

We also export to South Korea, which has its own set of strict requirements and unique demands.  For example, the beef must be certified to come from cattle no older than 30 months. We export to Japan and Taiwan, as well, each with their unique requirements, compliance with which can drive you batty. As they say on Ork, shazbat! 

I have had to learn all this stuff this year, and so much more -- had to, to keep the ranch from going belly up. Nobody else but me and the ranch foreman, God bless him and his crew.  A ranch is not just a bunch of cowboys roping and riding, singing git along little doggie and hollering yippie-kay-aye. It is a complicated business. 

I sure never thought I would be doing this for a living.  And to think when I first came here after leaving the Navy I couldn't figure out what to do with myself, even trying to help out at the cookhouse to make myself useful, then becoming a flying chauffeur, and now look at me, knee deep in paperwork, not enough hours in the day to deal with it all. Well, I'll get a handle on it eventually and it will become routine.  That's always the way it is. Frazzled almost out of my mind at first with some new challenge, then, finally, it becomes routine and I just do it without thinking much about it. At least, I hope it's going to become that way. That's what I tell myself anyway. Fingers crossed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A wish, a fear and a hope

 
Let Me Please Look Into My Window

by Gerald Stern

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.

Let me walk up Broadway past Zak's, past the Melody Fruit Store,
past Stein's Eyes, past the New Moon Inn, past the Olympia.

Let me leave quietly by Gate 29

and fall asleep as we pull away from the ramp
into the tunnel.

Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light.

The League of Minor Characters

by Kathleen Flenniken

The main character sits on his childhood bed
naming everything that's gone—ex-job, ex-wife,
ex-best friend--and finally apprehends

the breakdown we've felt coming since chapter five.
When his doctor calls with test results, most of us
decide to remain minor characters

like the quixotic neighbor growing
bonsai sequoias, or the waitress with thick
glasses and a passion for chess,

because the main character, in the thrall
of a relentless plot, can't help hurtling toward
the crumbling cliff edge. And who needs that?

Some inherit genes from generations
of minor players, some must learn to guard
those sunny Sundays with the paper

full of heroes in distant gunfire. And some of us
who've gotten smug over the years turn another page,
turn on the football game, until one day

the doorbell rings. We close our books,
adjust our eyes, and the protagonist
sweeps in insisting himself into our lives

with his entourage of lust and language,
sorrow, brio. Hero, anti-hero, it hardly matters
with the lights this bright. The music crests

and it's time to speak.

 

Kindness to Animals

by Anonymous

Little children, never give
Pain to things that feel and live:
Let the gentle robin come
For the crumbs you save at home,—
As his meal you throw along
He'll repay you with a song;
Never hurt the timid hare
Peeping from her green grass lair,
Let her come and sport and play
On the lawn at close of day;
The little lark goes soaring high.
To the bright windows of the sky,
Singing as if 'twere always spring,
And fluttering on an untired wing,—
Oh! let him sing his happy song,
Nor do these gentle creatures wrong.  

 

 

It's all true!...or not.

 This below is from the paperback book Stranger than Fiction by Frank Edwards published in 1959. It's a collection of curious or unexplained incidents that Edwards collected and retold in his syndicated radio program of the same name. Edwards was one of the most widely listened to broadcasters in the country in the 1940s and '50s, specializing in investigative journalism.  Later he turned his attention to Fortean-type oddities such as are recorded in Stranger.

I used to be a sucker for this kind of stuff when I was a kid, believing every word.  It was published in a book, wasn't it? So it had to be true.  Nobody would write and publish things that weren't true.  That would be wrong. 

The paperback I scanned this story from my mom got from the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club, Scolastic Book Service or some other school book-order program when she was a kid. She can't remember which one.  But she was enamored of these kinds of stories, too.  And you know what? Now my mini me is reading it and she loves it.  B-b-but but...thanks to the darned internet, she's looking up the incidents and taking all the mystery out of them. She doesn't bother to ask her mom or her grandma if they are really true, she just asks Mrs. AI, that know-it-all smarty pants and buzz kill. Thus dieth one of childhood's pleasures: wonder. Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. 

Oh, if you want to read Stranger, you can borrow it from the Internet Archives. But for heaven's sake don't fact-check the stories.  Just be a Fox Mulder and tell yourself, "I want to believe!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A good guy

 “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
~ Cicero 

********

 For some reason I've been thinking about Ralph Holloway today, probably because I've been musing about how off-track my life has gotten since I had it all planned out when I was in university. If I went back in time and told my teen-age self what was going to happen to me and what I would actually do with my life I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have considered it even possible. Oh, well.

  Here's a short note I jotted down about Holloway on his passing. 

 I corresponded with Dr. Ralph Holloway of Columbia when I was a grad student.  He was a very interesting man in so many way and I doubt his career path could be replicated today.  He called human beings the most dangerous species on the planet because our brains create, via arbitrary symbols, delusional systems of patterned insanity. Lot of room for enormously interesting blue-skying there. But to do that blue-skying you have to know  comparative neuroscience, molecular neurogenetics, and paleoneurology, things cultural anthropologists know nothing about, dismiss as irrelevant and leading to Nazithought.

Anyway, he started out at Drexel studying metallurgical engineering in a program that was half classroom and half working in industry, in his case at a company manufacturing stainless steel.  But his family moved to New Mexico so he transferred to the university there, deciding that metallurgy was boring and he wanted to study anthropology but his dad told him he'd never get a job with that degree and he should study geology and get a job with an oil company.

To pay his way through college he didn't get a student loan or have pop pay, he went to work as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. Alas, when he graduated he couldn't get a job with the oil companies but he did find work with Lockheed working on heat-resistant metals, just what he had been studying at Drexel.  So getting a geology degree was a total waste.

Metallurgy still bored him and he still was interested in anthropology so he entered a Ph.D. program at Cal where he became interested in the evolution of the brain but was told there was nothing to learn there.  His mentor wanted him to study baboon behavior in order to understand human behavior but Holloway thought that was stupid and found a mentor who would let him study the brain and he did his dissertation on certain aspects of the primate brain that was so well received he received multiple job offers, accepting the one from Columbia because his wife was a New Yorker.

Thus began his long career, starting off with studies of  the lunate sulcus, which defines the anterior boundary of the primary visual striate cortex. The cortex anterior to the lunate sulcus is the parietal and temporal lobe association cortex, where higher cognitive functions occur.  

One big controversy he got into was whether an increase in brain size had to precede any organizational shift in brain components.  It was generally believed that the brain did not reorganize until after there was an increase in brain size, and Holloway believed that reorganization took place before the increase in brain volume. He was convinced that the earliest hominids had brains that were fundamentally different from those of apes, despite their small size, and they were capable of more complex social behaviors than apes, as would be expected if the hominid brain's reduction in the primary visual cortex signaled a relative increase in the parietal association cortex.

Holloway also got into the differences between male and female brains, for example  discovering that females have larger corpus callosa (connecting the brain hemispheres and facilitating communication and coordination of sensory, motor, and cognitive functions) relative to brain size than do males and that the splenium (important for processing visual and spatial information) in particular is more bulbous in females than in males.

Holloway's life was, as he put it, a quest for truth, replication, and letting data trump emotional biases.  He got in trouble for insisting that an understanding of the roles of nature and nurture in how IQ scores vary among populations is impossible without knowing how the human brain varies and why it does so. He also got in trouble for saying that human physical and mental variation should be celebrated and its study encouraged, rather than the opposite.  It is strange that while the dominant culture shouts that diversity is our strength, discovering just what that diversity consists of and why is forbidden.

________

I bet that you have never heard of Dr. Holloway. But I bet you have heard of Stephen Jay Gould.  Holloway called Gould a charlatan. Grist for the mill.

******** 

   “We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.”
 ~ Anaïs Nin

 

 

 

 

 

 

500 Miles

 “If you read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton  

********

 A few years ago, I hiked in to an old hippy compound in far northern California. Up an old logging road becoming lost to second-growth Coast Redwood and Douglas Fir to a half-dozen long-abandoned geodesic dome houses. Home-made furniture rotted inside, where in one I found a disintegrating copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, paperback editions of The Limits of Growth, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Steal This Book, and Report from Iron Mountain. The back to the land movement of the love and peace era had died long ago, leaving only echoes of Buckminster Fuller, Ludditism, idealism and anti-...well, anti pretty much everything.

The man I was with was dismissive of it all. He’d bought the land and was going to build his own homestead for his trad family (once he found a trad wife) far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife. He planned to construct his own log cabin from trees he’d cut down with his axe. Dig a well, plant a garden, have a cow and a goat, some chickens and ducks, a good dog, and let the rest of the world go by

When I suggested he was the modern-day version of a hippy, he rejected the idea.  He was nothing like them. I asked if he played the guitar, banjo or the flute. He said he played the guitar and the pan flute and was planning to get a banjo. That night around the campfire as an owl couple hooted back and forth and the moon rose through the trees and stars he sang "500 Miles" and I thought about becoming a trad wife.

Some days I wish I had. 

 

********

  “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke ― though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns ― and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
    ― Herman Melville 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aviatrixes

 

Women make up about 12 percent of naval aviators. The first female aviators joined the fleet in 1974. Following the repeal of the Combat Exclusion Act in 1993, Navy Lt. Kimberly Dyson was the first female aviator who flew combat missions. In 1994, she flew her F/A-18 Hornet over Iraq, and in 1995 over Bosnia, where she was joined by a dozen other female aviators during Operations Southern Watch and Deny Flight. In 1998, Lt. Kendra Williams was the first female naval aviator to drop bombs on an enemy position, during Operation Desert Fox in Iraq.

It takes up to three years to earn your wings (depending on the type of aircraft you are trained to fly) — that’s after you complete OCS as a Student Naval Aviator (after having a four-year college degree). Drop-out rate for OCS can be as high as 35 percent. (You can also enter the pipeline via ROTC and the Academy but I don't know about that.) 

After OCS, you are sent to Aviation Pre-flight Indoctrination school. It is six weeks of classroom and field study involving weather, navigation, engines, and aerodynamics. Tests every other day. Studying hard here is a must. 

There is also swim and survival training which teaches you how to escape from a ditched aircraft, including being upside down under water wearing a blackout helmet. If you are not a strong swimmer or panic easily, you will not pass. The drop-out rate is about 20 percent.

The next step used to be Introductory Flight Screening, where you were taught to fly in a Cessna 172, being required to solo after no more than 15 hours dual instruction. Then you had to make three solo flights, including one solo cross-country flight. Total of 24 flight hours. That program has been changed recently and I don’t know the details. The drop-out rate was about five percent.

Then you went on to Primary Flight Training in a T-6B, six months of rigorous flight training lasting six months with a drop-out rate of about 10 percent.

After that came Advance training with different pipelines for different aircraft — helos, tilt-rotors, multi-engine and strike fighters. The attrition rate varied by aircraft type, five to 10 percent.

Strike training in the T-45 took about six months. You were trained in mission skills and tactical maneuvers, then taught how to land on an aircraft carrier, first with 100 simulated carrier traps on land (Field Carrier Landing Practice), then on an actual carrier where you had to complete 10 traps and six touch-and-goes (aka crash-and-dash); that is, you landed and immediately took off without catching a wire. This segment of the training has been changed recently but I don’t know about it.

After completing all that, you earned your wings and were assigned to your RAG (Replacement Air Group), officially called a Fleet Replacement Squadron, where you honed your skills for up to a year before being assigned to a carrier air wing.

Once you are winged, you are obligated to serve for a certain number of years.

********

One of the reasons there are so few black naval aviators might be the dunker test, which teaches you how to escape from a ditched fixed-wing or helo. (There were only 15 black naval aviators when I checked a couple of years ago, about the time one of them killed himself crashing into the tanker while attempting a night refueling. He killed the crew of the tanker, too.  Not blaming him. These things happen. It's a dangerous profession.)

A crane drops this thing called a METS (Modular Egress Training Simulator) into a pool of water. You are strapped into it in all your gear. It sinks and the first time you have to unbuckle and get out the nearest escape hatch and swim to the surface within a specified time. The next time you have to get out a specific escape hatch not near you that is also being exited by others rushing to get out. Try to avoid being kicked in the face. The third time the dunker rotates upside down and you do it hanging from your straps. The fourth time you do it upright but with a blackout helmet so you can't see anything, and the fifth time you do that upside down and blind.

It seems that black candidates have the most difficulty with this part of training and are the most likely to panic. I don't think there is any physical reason why they couldn't pass this test as well as anyone. I think it is a psychological problem, like some people being afraid of heights. 

Heaven

We spent months of our lives walking
from Sears to Penney's, back when we were
vague, a couple of ideas forming ourselves
against the certainty of merchandise,
in the presence of strangers, when no one
knew us or wished to know us or could even
perceive us as we passed, two girls, unsmiling,
unwilling, not finished. When I think
of what we looked like then I think
of newborn horses: stunned and exhausted,
still slick with the cumbersome fluids of birth.
You were the leader. You'd stop
at the waterfall by the food court, dig a coin
from your pocket, and toss it over your shoulder
into the fiberglass river, then turn, press a coin
into my palm, and say, "Now you do it."
We were hopeful. Our quarters slapped the water
and disappeared beneath it. The little river
went on, past the shoe store. And we followed it—
we followed it as long as we could, longing
toward this: the unseen, unwished-for present. 

 ~ Carrie Fountain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Boulevard

 A post of years ago from an old blog.

 

I just wanted to send an update to let you know how things are going out here on the good ship USS Buttercup. We're in our seventh week of deployment and have 108 days to go. We began combat operations on June 21st and have been flying over the beach almost every day since then. This is the most flying that I've done in a while. Naval aviators are limited by instruction to 30 flight hours a month and, to exceed that, you must have a written waiver by the Flight Surgeon. As of today I have 65 hours in the last 29 days.

Our missions are regularly 6 hours long. It’s an hour transit to and from the ship just to get on station in southern Afghanistan. All the air traffic travels up a common air route that we call the boulevard that traverses Pakistan and crosses the border into Afghanistan. All the traffic on the boulevard is either Naval aircraft from our ship or Air Force tankers coming from Qatar.

Most of our missions thus far have been in southern Afghanistan near the city of Kandahar. That is where a lot of the enemy forces are dug in. On a typical mission, we check in with a Joint Tactical Air Controller (JTAC) on the ground who is part of a ground unit. The JTAC is trained to communicate with aircraft and if necessary call in for air support in case some shooting starts. They used to be called Forward Air Controllers.

Thus far I have worked with American Army Special Forces, Delta Forces, Marine Special Operators and SEALs, as well as British SAS. It is very interesting to see the mix of troops on the ground. But it’s nice to see that all the procedures are very standardized no matter what unit or what nationality you are supporting. 

On most of our missions we provide Armed Reconnaissance, which has us watching over a friendly ground patrol, in vehicles or on foot, and looking ahead of their route of travel to try and find enemy fighters or potential spotting positions.

We do most of our searching using our FLIR camera which is an infrared camera that has the ability to zoom in pretty close. The JTACS on the ground can also link up with our FLIR camera and see what we are seeing on their laptop. A lot of times the JTACS give us coordinates of known bad-guy locations and have us watch for movement or activity.

A few nights ago I was talking to a JTAC and I could hear gunfire over the radio and he calmly said they were taking fire from an unknown location and wanted me to scan the hills surrounding them to try and locate the source. A few days ago I was watching over an Army Special Forces unit. There were about 15 to 20 guys all riding four-wheelers in the hills overlooking a small village. The were using my FLIR to spot the bad guys shooting at them, but they were so scattered there was nothing I could really do to help beyond that.

 On average we drop four or five bombs per mission as well as conduct strafing runs on enemy positions. In addition to supporting troops in direct contact, we look for bad guys in groups digging holes for mines or placing roadside bombs and eliminate them.  I recently made a strafing run on individuals who were driving away after digging and placing a bomb at a roadside intersection. It was at night, complicating the complexity of shooting at a small moving target from an aircraft flying at 500 mph in terrain that would get your attention in daytime let alone in the dark. The skills you need to do that are, if I do say so myself, something to be proud of.

We also do a lot of Shows of Force, which are simply a high-speed low-altitude pass over an enemy position to get them to stop shooting or even run. That's done due to ROE requiring us to reduce the possibility of civilian casualties.

I enjoy working with the guys on the ground. I think it’s a comforting feeling for them to know that we are overhead and can deliver a devastatingly accurate blow within seconds of asking for it. Even if we don't find bad guys, I feel a lot of job satisfaction just being up there and talking to the guys on the ground. These guys are pretty awesome. I will hear them say something like, "We are taking fire from an unknown location so we are going to get out of our vehicles and move into the open so we can try to locate where the fire is coming from." Amazing bravery. 

Some of the most harrowing parts of our missions are refueling, particularly in the dark or in bad weather. On a typical six-hour mission, we refuel off of big wing Air Force tankers three times. The tankers all hold at specific points and altitudes around the country. I know before I launch what my tanker's call sign is, what point he will be at, what time I'm supposed to be there, what altitude he will be at and what frequency I will talk to him on. 

There is an overarching control agency that runs the tanker plan and it is constantly changing, usually based on the fight that is going on the ground. A lot of times tankers get pushed over an area where there is fighting so that the airborne assets don't waste time trying to get to their tanker and back into the fight. Once one tanker moves, it starts a domino effect that affects almost everyone. It’s like a shell game. They are constantly shuffling tankers around. I don't think I've launched on a single mission and hit all my tankers that I was originally scheduled for. The other day I was on a tanker and two Air Force fighters were waiting in line with me at 22,000 feet for their gas because their tanker had been sent elsewhere at the last minute. 

When the mission is over we hit the tanker one last time before exiting the country and fly the boulevard south the hour back to the carrier. There is a point on the boulevard that once I cross it I know that if I have had a problem with my tanker, I do not have enough fuel to get back to the carrier, so that last refuel is vital. 

When it’s all done I get to look forward to that night carrier landing. Luckily, the North Arabian Sea is calm and the weather has been good over the carrier. No pitching deck out here so far. 

By the end of the mission I'm usually starving. I try and take food and water with me in the cockpit and typically I get a chance to eat and drink something on the trip back to the carrier. Thank goodness for altitude hold.  But you don't want to drink too much because that presents a whole new problem in a single seat cockpit.

The cockpit gets pretty crowded with all of our extra gear. We have our standard-issue gear for going in-country which includes our pistol and two magazines, a camel back full of water sewn into our flight vest and our blood chit, which is basically a piece a paper that we use in case we find ourselves on the ground. It is written in several different native languages and basically says, "I'm an American and you will be paid if you help me return to friendly American forces."

On every mission we go on we have a stack of papers that have coordinates and radio frequencies. I also have my new helmet-mounted targeting system. It clips to the regular helmet and projects vital information on to my visor.  It is honestly the best piece of gear that I carry with me. I can type in the coordinates for a friendly unit on the ground and then look outside the cockpit and a diamond will be projected on my visor directly over the position of that unit. 

It also helps me find things in the air. Yesterday, I saw my tanker from 28 miles away because my helmet puts a box around the radar contact that I have locked up so I know exactly where to look. Pretty cool. 

I also take a pair of NVGs on every flight. Night-vision goggles are absolutely necessary once the sun goes down. The ground units use a lot of infrared lights to help mark their positions or the positions of enemy units and I can see all of that from 20,000 feet with my NVGs on.

Well I've written way more than I should have. I hope I haven't bored you. This is to try to help you understand what I've been doing. It in no way is meant to be tooting my own horn. The guys on the ground are the real heroes. I'm simply a supporting element in the fight.

I want to say thank you for the care packages. They were very much appreciated by me and everyone in my ready room. Keep watching the news. If you hear about airstrikes in Southern Afghanistan there is a good chance it came from my air wing.