Trump and the Fourth

A one man spectacle is Trump; he needs no fireworks.

He entertains us one and all with many bizarre quirks.

So on the Fourth just light his fuse, and let him bombinate;

The Greatest Show on Earth is now our own chief magistrate.

The destiny of America was divinely decreed

Ezra Taft Benson. 13th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

The destiny of America was divinely decreed. The events which established our great nation were foreknown to God and revealed to prophets of old. As in an enacted drama, the players who came on the scene were rehearsed and selected for their parts. Their talents, abilities, capacities, and weaknesses were known before they were born.

Ezra Taft Benson

Other nations there have been

generating quite a din;

but our country, newly formed,

under God's own care was warmed.

Men and women, good and bad,

made us liberty's launch pad --

but today can we remain

godly freedom's true domain?

Lord of Hosts please grant us aid

in staying true and unafraid!

Your Comment on It’s a Question No One Says They Want to Ask. But the Women Running for President Keep Hearing It.

Your comment has been approved! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community. tim torkildson | utah A women as next president/would set a splendid precedent/they never rattle sabers, nor/grind the faces of the poor/In other countries they do well/but with OUR bias/who can tell? View your comment If you're having trouble viewing your comment, please copy and paste this link in your browser: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/us/politics/women-presidential-candidates-2020.html#commentsContainer&permid=101270334:101270334 All of our comments are moderated for civility. Have feedback? Let us know. If you would like your comment to be considered for publication as a letter to the editor, please email a copy of your comment to letters@nytimes.com – along with your name, city/town and phone number (the latter for verification only). ABOUT THIS EMAIL  This is an automated notification. Please do not reply directly to this email. You received this message because you signed up for email notifications from The New York Times. Unsubscribe | Manage Notifications | Privacy Policy | Contact Copyright 2019 | The New York Times Company | 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Your Comment on 2,000 Cameras Will Be Watching How You Drive in New York City has posted in the New York Times

Your comment has been approved! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community. tim torkildson | utah Driving in New York will mean/you are on the silver screen/Traffic cops will stop and laugh/asking for your autograph/Should you choose to wear a mask/in the Bastille you will bask. View your comment If you're having trouble viewing your comment, please copy and paste this link in your browser: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/nyregion/speeding-cameras-nyc.html#commentsContainer&permid=101237913:101237913 All of our comments are moderated for civility. Have feedback? Let us know. If you would like your comment to be considered for publication as a letter to the editor, please email a copy of your comment to letters@nytimes.com – along with your name, city/town and phone number (the latter for verification only).

ABOUT THIS EMAIL  This is an automated notification. Please do not reply directly to this email. You received this message because you signed up for email notifications from The New York Times. Unsubscribe | Manage Notifications | Privacy Policy | Contact Copyright 2019 | The New York Times Company | 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Your Comment on Hong Kong Protest Live Updates: Standoff in Legislature Building as Broader March Continues

Your comment has been approved! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community. tim torkildson | utah In Hong Kong the protester's age/gives them a much keener rage/Confucius might say/when youth has its way/there's no use for unruffled sage. View your comment If you're having trouble viewing your comment, please copy and paste this link in your browser: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/world/asia/hong-kong-protest-live-updates.html#commentsContainer&permid=101226472:101226472 All of our comments are moderated for civility. Have feedback? Let us know. If you would like your comment to be considered for publication as a letter to the editor, please email a copy of your comment to letters@nytimes.com – along with your name, city/town and phone number (the latter for verification only). ABOUT THIS EMAIL  This is an automated notification. Please do not reply directly to this email. You received this message because you signed up for email notifications from The New York Times. Unsubscribe | Manage Notifications | Privacy Policy | Contact Copyright 2019 | The New York Times Company | 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Though I stumble and slip

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
Psalms 16:11

To be in thy presence should be all my study and toil.

Eternal pleasure resides with thee, and nowhere else.

Hollow the man who finds solace outside of thy grace.

Help me to celebrate, and to repent, without stint.

So may my path lead to thee, though I stumble and slip.

Of Clown Wigs and Barbers

The author's natural hair; of which he is very vain.

The New York Post ran a stimulating article the other day, which began thus:

California is poised to become the first state to ban discrimination against people with natural hair, according to reports.

This sentence caused me to jump up and splutter "by the great horn spoon!" while nibbling on a slice of sprouted wheat bread toast. This in turn brought on a fit of violent coughing when I inadvertently inhaled a few crumbs. I live alone, so there was no one to give me a good pounding on the back -- I had to do it myself, with a broom handle I keep around to beat off paparazzi. Once I caught my breath I finished the toast, then began flossing -- and reminiscing. The reason that particular newspaper sentence had agitated me so much was because it brought into sharp focus an episode from my motley past. A time when I had donned the cap and bells for Ringling Brothers as one of their clowns, and felt I was being persecuted for using my own natural hair.

At that time, some forty years ago, most professional circus clowns wore a wig -- usually something fiery red that stuck up like pampas grass, or else a bald wig made of cotton t-shirt material. Only a few clowns, like Otto Griebling and Dougie Ashton, used their own locks while performing. Being veterans in clown alley of long standing, they could get away with it. A martyr to craniofacial hyperhidrosis (excessive head sweating), I also used my own hair when clowning. This did not go down well with the big enchiladas of circus management. 

At first it was merely a passing remark from the boss clown, LeVoi Hipps, or from the Performance Director, Charlie Baumann. Hadn't I better get a professional wig, they asked, now that I was in the big league and making good money? Since a professional wig, made of yak hair, would set me back a month's salary, I politely ignored their comments. How could anyone not like my naturally wavy brown hair?

 Then my old pal Tim Holst, who had started as a First of May with me in clown alley and was now nimbly climbing up the Ringling corporate ladder, put me on the qui vive:

"Tork" he said, "you gotta get a wig; Kenny Feld [the circus owner's son] hates your hair -- he says it looks like a rat's nest. He's gonna make sure you don't get a new contract in Chicago if you don't get one soon!" Chicago, I should add, was where the show played in the fall, and where all the seasonal contracts for the clowns were renewed.

This scared the bejabbers out of me; I loved clowning and intended to make it my life's work. Where else, I reasoned, could I get paid so well for goofing off -- outside of a government job?

So I asked Prince Paul, a Ringling warhorse and whiteface, to sell me one of his cotton t-shirt bald wigs for a test run. He kept dozens of them in his clown trunk, laundered, perfumed, and starched like handkerchiefs in a chiffonier. But I couldn't stand wearing it for more than one show -- the sweat streamed down my forehead in unrelenting rivulets, eroding my greasepaint.  

Next I decided to dye my own hair fire engine red -- that should do the trick, and keep those bossy honyockers off my back.

  Ever the pinch penny, I refused to go to a beauty parlor to have it done. I simply bought a bottle of Rit Dye and blithely did the deed myself in the men's room of the Von Braun Civic Center, in Huntsville Alabama. That particular brand of dye, lamentably, is meant only for fabrics, not hair. I had skimmed over the instructions. The resulting botch forced me to find a barber with jittering dispatch and have him shave my insulted mane down to the nubbin. 

And that is what finally turned the tide. That natural cue ball effect, without benefit of a confining bald wig, went splendidly with my clown makeup -- like chicken with waffles. The next time I saw Kenny Feld he stopped to chat with me in a most affable manner -- asking me if I was ready to re-up for another hitch when the show hit Chicago. 

 I spent the rest of the season getting scalped once a week. Back then you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a barber college, where fifty cents got me scrapped to the bone. And for an additional half dollar I could get a shave with a hot towel wrapped around my face. I don't know how they perfumed that warm lather that purred out of a white enamel dispenser, but it always put me in mind of a Turkish harem and the Taj Mahal.  

 Today, long after my big top rambles are finished, I've let my hair grow out again. Because I'm still a pinch penny, and haircuts around here are now going for twenty bucks a pop. 

Me with my long brown locks, back in the day.

Your Comment on How Big Mike, a Barbershop Painter, Broke Into the Art World is Posted in the New York Times

Your comment has been approved! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community. tim torkildson | utah Big Mike has a feel with his mitts/that cuts through the dreck and the glitz/His style is no style/just absence of guile/You'll never find him at St. Kitts. View your comment If you're having trouble viewing your comment, please copy and paste this link in your browser: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/nyregion/how-big-mike-a-barbershop-painter-broke-into-the-art-world.html#commentsContainer&permid=101189369:101189369 All of our comments are moderated for civility. Have feedback? Let us know. If you would like your comment to be considered for publication as a letter to the editor, please email a copy of your comment to letters@nytimes.com – along with your name, city/town and phone number (the latter for verification only). ABOUT THIS EMAIL  This is an automated notification. Please do not reply directly to this email. You received this message because you signed up for email notifications from The New York Times. Unsubscribe | Manage Notifications | Privacy Policy | Contact Copyright 2019 | The New York Times Company | 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

The Museum of Invisible Things was located in Spencer, Iowa.

The author, contemplating opening a waxworks.

There's a little bit of carny in all of us -- a smidgen of delight at absurdities on display. That is why I read with much interest a recent article in the New York Times that included this inspiring paragraph:

“The troll museum is probably the silliest idea I had in my life,” she said. “But people responded to it, so I have to keep it going. If more people carried out their silly ideas, then the world would be a more interesting place.”

Yes indeed -- making the world a better and safer place may be the primary goal for most people, but I have always subscribed to the belief that making things interesting first and foremost will inevitably lead to utopia -- where parking meters pay ME and Bismarck herring run in shoals past my front door, free for the netting. 

And that's why I became the proprietor of the Museum of Invisible Things in the town of Spencer, Iowa, back in the year of grace 2007.

I came to Spencer at the behest of radio station KICD, which was in need of a news director -- the previous one having departed for the bright lights and State Fair butter cows of Des Moines. I had passed through Spencer the previous year, fronting for the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, and left my business card with the radio station manager. He was a fellow Brownie -- a graduate of the Brown Institute of Broadcasting in Minneapolis, which I had also attended. Brownies, like Harvard men, stick together.  He offered me the position at a crisis moment in my circus career -- disgusted that my circus salary was several weeks in arrears, I had vowed to spurn the big top in favor of the saner music and weaker wine of regular employment. 

With my ballyhoo instincts at full throttle, it wasn't long before I had whipped the news department at KICD into a well-oiled machine that ground out local news bulletins like sausage; a few news patties for the morning program at 7, more substantial baloney at noon, and plenty of prerecorded leftovers for the evening news roundup at 6. This left me with time on my hands, which I used to open a museum.

During my years of travel with various circuses I'd run across some fascinating museums in Iowa -- such as the Hobo Museum in Britt; the Squirrel Cage Jail Museum in Council Bluffs; and the Vesterheim Norwegian Museum in Decorah. These are spots to warm the cockles of any nomadic heart. In Spencer, unfortunately, there was only the Clay County Historical Museum -- which featured a large array of the latest calico sun bonnets (circa 1870), corncob candelabra, and a dispiriting display case chock-a-block with cast iron bedpans. Dissecting pudding would generate more interest. 

 So I opened the Museum of Invisible Things in my spacious apartment, above the HyVee grocery store on Grand Avenue. I got the idea from an old Candid Camera segment -- where a large bowl full of water and nothing else was put on public display with a sign reading "Invisible Goldfish." Dozens of people were subsequently filmed squinting into the bowl in a vain attempt to locate the non-existent fishies. 

I had a placard made up which the HyVee produce manager let me tape to the wall next to the staircase leading to my apartment:

TORKILDSON'S MUSEUM OF INVISIBLE THINGS.

Upstairs on the Second Floor.

Open Friday, Saturday, and Sundays only. 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Admission free to children, pet owners, and latitudinarians.

Admission for all others:  $1.00.

I featured the goldfish, of course. I also had an invisible original Picasso, entitled 'Family of Saltines.' There was an invisible diamond tiara from the Romanoffs; an imperceptible shrunken head stolen from the Sea Dayaks of Borneo; the impalpable stuffed carcass of Schrodinger's cat; and a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth (you could see the baseball, but not the autograph -- the Babe had jokingly used invisible ink.)

  I put up a used crib, with a sign reading: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE INVISIBLE LEPRECHAUN MIMES.

There were other exhibitions as well, as the fancy struck me;  but after six months I had to admit that I wasn't exactly doing a land office business. Even though I had slyly promoted my museum during a few news broadcasts at KICD, my visitor's book showed a grand total of seven names for the past six months -- and two of those had been housewives under the mistaken impression that I was part of HyVee's produce department and could tell them how much red cabbage was per pound. When I left Spencer for greener pastures a year later there was no mourning in the streets for the loss of my treasury of invisible wonders.

Since then I have given brief and fleeting thought to opening a Linoleum Museum, or displaying a Diorama of Paint Drying -- but they all came to naught. With the current administration dispensing so much silliness already, why try to compete?   Today I am content with putting an egg in a jar of vinegar and then showing the results to my grand kids a month later. SEE THE AMAZING RUBBER EGG! 

There's one born every minute.

zen poem #2

A quail feeding on my patio;

the cast off leavings of house finches above.

Does it care where its sustenance

comes from?

Winner winner, chicken dinner.