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. 

Cute meet...?

One time some years ago I was standing around and this guy came up to me, introduced himself and said he was going to marry me.  I said the hell you are, but the hell he did.

Some stuff went on in between, but that's how it happened.  What "stuff"? Well, like anytime we would cross paths he'd point his finger at me, pistol fashion, and say, "Gonna marry you!" and I'd say, "Dream on, sport!" Or something like that. If he was with some other guys and I passed by, he'd point me out to them and declare that I was his future wife.  And they would tell him something like "Right, like that's ever gonna happen. She's out of your league, Poindexter." 

But he never stopped.  There he always was, standing proud, talking loud, drawing a crowd. And yet... You know what? During all this time, he never asked me out, never so much as offered to buy me a cup of coffee. After a while it got to me, bugged me. Annoyed me.  Got under my skin. 

So one day when we passed by each other and he gave me the pistol finger and said he was going to marry me, I stopped him and said, look, kimo sabe, how do you think you are going to manage to marry me if you never actually do anything to make that happen? 

Do like what, he asked and I said, I don't know...ask me on a date or something. And he said, okay, how about a date? And I almost -- almost -- said no. I hesitated and he said it's your idea. So I was trapped.  I'd trapped myself.  Or he got me to trap myself. So I said yes. And the whole situation seemed so funny to me that I laughed. And he grinned.

And.... Well, I've been thinking about all that ensued, remembering a lot of stuff.  I'm not ready to write about it now.  Maybe later.  Maybe not. But that little episode tells you a lot about what kind of a guy he was.  If he wanted something, he went after it and got it.  From the moment he set his cap for me, I had no chance.

In later days, I asked him why me?  He just said that from the first moment he saw me, he knew that I was the girl he had wanted all his life. Everything faded away but me.  That could have just been a line, but when he said it, I sensed sincerity. Maybe I wanted to sense sincerity, wanted to believe something like that could be true. But, based on our life together forward from those days, I think it was really true.

And for me? It wasn't like that. I was reluctant, resistant.  I didn't want to fall in love. With him. With anybody.  I had my reasons. I've alluded to them in a previous post or two. But he overcame all my defenses. Maybe I let him.  Maybe I wanted him to.  I could have just blown him off. Walked away. But I didn't.

I guess I should write about how my feelings for him grew but I think I will leave it at this, at least for now. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carry on

 My head is weary.

 “My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”
― Barbara Newhall Follett 


“She was hurt to find life made up of so many little things. At first she believed most faithfully that they had a deeper meaning and a coherent larger purpose; but after a while she saw to her dismay that the deeper and larger things were merely shadows cast by the small. So she buried the whole great treasure of winged dreams and iridescent shades under an oak-tree in the farthest corner of her heart, and planted a bush of wild roses over it. A small grave of dreams. Secretly and silently she buried them, a little ashamed, as a burglar might be who had long pursued some gleaming ruby necklace, and, having by infinite stealth and risk obtained it, found that it was red glass.”
― Barbara Newhall Follett

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nine seconds

I saw some sweaty, breathing-hard guy fumbling with his phone's calculator and I asked him what he was trying to do and he said he had done 50 reps in seven-and-a-half minutes and he wanted to figure out how long each rep took and I said nine seconds.  He sort of glanced at me and kept messing with his calculator. A couple of men came up and they all began trying to figure out how to get the answer.  One said divide 50 by 7.5 and another said no divide 7.5 by 50 and I said again it's nine seconds.  No one paid any attention.  I walked away, leaving them there baffled and confused, frustrated and arguing.  I thought about turning around and shouting at them so the whole place could hear it's NINE SECONDS! But I didn't. 

This country is doomed.

********

My mother's Japanese friend has become increasingly annoying to me. She was visiting us over the Fourth of July holiday.  She'd just come from San Francisco, where she had renewed her passport -- her Japanese passport. She's been in this country almost half a century but has never applied for citizenship and has no interest in doing so.  She's an ex-patriot, not an immigrant.  In fact, while she and I and my mother were chatting about something she burst out, "I would never have come to this country except for economics!" Then she looked...not quite appalled...but as if she said something she shouldn't have, like she had let out a truth that she shouldn't have revealed to us.   

In the past, she has always praised America, but recently that has changed.  I've written about how she has changed before, but now it is worse. She also boldly asserted to us, her friends and hosts in whose home she was staying, white folks both, that white people have small heads (and small brains).  Wha...? Okay, pie face. Squintie. Pig nose. If that's the way you want to dance, let's rock and roll. 

My mother said that it was because she considered us her close friends that she talked that way to us.  She forgot we were white, Americans. We were no longer the other.  But once she said some of the things she said, she realized.

Okay.

Oh, another thing she did that pissed me off: While she was here I let her use one of our cars.  We had some big rain storms, gully washers and frog chokers, as my dad would have called them.  And there was one crossroads that got totally flooded, as it usually does.  I mean like under feet of water.  I had driven that way and had to turn back before I got to it because the highway department had put up signs saying it was flooded.  I mentioned it to my mother and her Japanese friend, saying I had to make a three-point turn in the middle of the road to go back and hoped another car wouldn't come barreling over the hill while I was doing it.  I didn't want to get T-boned.

Well, the very next day, Ms Japan drove that road, ignored the warning signs, didn't stop at the flooded intersection and drove right into it.  She got amazingly far into the water before the car stalled and she was marooned, water inside the car rising to the top of the dash. She's lucky she didn't drown. She couldn't call for help because her phone was ruined. The only thing that saved her was that there were two guys stopped on the other side of the intersection. One tied his truck's winch cable (this is Montana, every pick-up has a winch) around his waist and waded and swam out to her car, fighting the current, broke the window (the door was held shut by water pressure) and hauled her sorry hind-end out.  Then the other guy winched them back to shore.

They called me (everybody knows everybody around here and everybody's business, including who's visiting whom) and I drove out the long way around in the pouring rain to avoid the flooded intersection and got her. It was not fun driving with my arm in a cast (reasons for this previously stated) and heavily pregnant.  I handled getting the car towed, dealing with the insurance company, the highway patrol and all the rest of it.  

The guys, those small-headed white men, those casual heroes, what happened to them? When they saw I had everything under control, they waved and went on their way.  I told them to stop by the ranch and clean up and get some dry clothes at the bunkhouse and have something to eat at the cookhouse. Tell them I sent you. Come hunting season, I will let them hunt elk on the ranch.  And if they ever need a job, I'll find something for them.  That's the way we do it out here.

Of course, the car was totaled. I expected our Japanese friend to pay for it. But she didn't.  She didn't even apologize. I wanted to ask her why she went that way when I had told her the road was closed.  And didn't she see the signs warning the intersection was flooded? Why, oh, why didn't she stop when she saw the water? Why did she drive into it? But I said nothing. She was clearly very upset, still scared from what had happened hours after she was home and safe. I had to keep in mind that she had been through a shocking, frightening ordeal. And it didn't matter why what happened, happened. It only mattered that it happened and that I had to deal with the aftermath.

 But I did not need all that stress piled on top of everything else I'm dealing with.  The buck stops with me now.  For everything.  I am it.  There is no one else.  So I was in a mood and I had to get out of it and act calmly and rationally to resolve the situation. 

Looking at something like $50,000 to replace the car, plus all the hassle I had to deal with, I asked my mother why her friend didn't at least offer to pay and she told me that the old girl was having financial difficulties.  I was surprised because I thought she had millions, having been a very successful business woman. But my mother said she had lost a lot of money gambling and was cash strapped.  I couldn't believe it.  How could anyone be so stupid as to lose a fortune gambling? You hear about such things, but to.... I couldn't get my head around it. You mean she's broke, I asked my mother and she frowned and nodded.

********

I remembered a dream I had where I was flying a night mission over Afghanistan and had just strafed some bad guys as per request and I continued orbiting on station scanning with the FLIR camera. I watched their bodies gradually fade into the background as the heat left them.  It was as if I were watching their souls leave. 

I wondered if, when their mothers were pregnant with them, when they were nursing them, playing with them as toddlers, that they imagined that this was what was waiting for their little boys out there in the future. I wondered what was waiting for me out there in the future. 

On my run in, I had seen flashes bigger than those made by a ZPU, so probably a ZU-23. I remembered my father, who first began flying combat mission in 1972 during Linebacker II, then in the Tanker War, the Gulf War and finally OIF, telling me the way to stay alive in a high-threat-environment ground attack was "once and away." Hit and git. Don't stick around.  Don't make a second pass. And here I was sticking around, waiting to see if our guys on the ground wanted a second pass. If they did, due to terrain and other factors the bad guys would know I would be coming back the same way as the first pass and would be ready.  They wouldn't aim at me, just throw up a wall of fire I'd have to fly through. I wondered if I was hit whether I should eject or would it be better to ride it in and call it a day, call it a life. It didn't bear thinking about what the Taliban would do to me should I fall into their hands.

I recalled hearing about F4D pilot Major Bob Lodge who, in 1972 over North Viet Nam was shot down in a dogfight with MiG-19s. He told his WSO to eject but he wasn't going to. He knew when they were captured that they would be tortured and he was afraid he wouldn't be able to take it and would break. So he decided to ride it in. And he did. 

His WSO, Capt. Roger Locher, ejected, evaded capture and was rescued 23 days later west of Hanoi in what was among the most harrowing rescue missions of the war. Sheer, amazing luck was with that guy. I decided I wouldn't have that kind of luck and if I were shot down I would ride it in like Maj. Lodge.

Then I realized it wasn't a dream but a memory that I'd pushed into a far corner of my mind, forgotten about, and here it was shouldering its way back into today. 

 

 Direct link to the song:

Fighter Pilot Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Dreams

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”
― A.A. Milne
 

“When you compare the sorrows of real life to the happiness of your dreams, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”
― Alexandre Dumas

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bright Star

My father once said that when I was a wee one I reminded him of the little girl in this radio play.  Well, maybe not quite -- I still can't figure out that ESP smudge thing. 

"Star Bright" is a short story written by Mark Clifton first published in the July, 1952, issue of Galaxy magazine. It tells the story of a very intelligent little girl who divides humanity into brights, 'tweens and stupids. She causes adults in her orbit, including her father, a great deal of trouble.  

The story was turned into a radio play by George Lefferts, an NBC Radio staff writer. It was first broadcast on April 10, 1956, as an episode of the series X Minus One. The role of the little girl Star is portrayed by Sara Fussell, a veteran voice actress who specialized in child roles. She was 39 when she brought to life three-year-old Star. Her father was voiced by Lawson Zerbe, a core staple of the New York-based radio actors talent pool. He was 40 at the time. It's a charming story. Why not give it a listen? 

 Star Bright on X Minus One  is the link (opens in a new tab) if the  above doesn't work for you.

  If you want to read the original story, it is here.