It's better to hope than to mourn

When Blair Marvin started making and selling bread 15 years ago, she promised herself three things: She would never preslice it. She would never bake it in a pan. And she would certainly never sell it in plastic.
Amelia Nierenberg. NYT. 


When I stepped off the train ten years ago in this small Wisconsin town, I promised myself three things: I would never eat bananas. I would never talk about bananas. And I would never look like a banana.

But what with incipient scoliosis and an attack of yellow jaundice, I've had to do considerable backtracking, as I begin to resemble a Chiquita brand Genus Musa. That's just a high-falutin way of saying 'banana.' I'm addicted to fancy and convoluted language, probably because I make my living by carving tablets into living trees for the local yokels. That kind of activity breeds logorrhea. 

Before I started my tablet-carving career here in Wisconsin, I thought I was going to be a novelist. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel while living in Utah, and when I showed the first chapter to an old missionary companion he told me it was interesting but I used too many big words. Instead of thanking him for his honest input, I threw a banana at him and never saw him again. That why I've got this thing about bananas, I guess. I don't really go into it very deeply -- shallowness is all, as Shakespeare might have said if he ran around with the same crowd I did as a young man.

So now I look like a banana and am talking, or at least writing, about bananas. But I refuse to eat one. That, at least, is something I can still control.

What people mostly want carved into living wood on their property, here in the Wisconsin hinterland, is a family tree (pardon the pun.) You know: "Thomas Pedersen is the son of Alex Pedersen, who was the son of Olaf Pedersen, who came from Trondheim, Norway, in 1899, at the age of sixteen to shoe horses at the lumber mill." That kind of thing. 

It's a good living. Steady work. And people around here never stiff you on a job. I normally charge between a hundred and three-hundred dollars, depending on how intricate they want their tablet. I don't carve willows, mountain ash, or walnut -- those trees have very delicate vascular systems, and carving through the bark inevitably leads to the death of the tree. But oak, pine, and elm can withstand the whole Decalogue, and more, carved into their trunks with no permanent damage to the tree. I once carved the entire Declaration of Independence into a ginkgo for a guy who lived in a hillside cave and wore an NRA cap -- and that tree is still flourishing on top of his hill. The shortest tablet I ever carved, to date, had only one word: William. It was commissioned by a birdlike old lady who offered to pay me with pennies. I did it for free. 

If you really, truly want to know why I have such a thing against bananas, want to know specifically and accurately, it's because after extensive biblical studies I've come to the conclusion that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not tempted by a serpent -- that's a typo from the original Hebrew. They were tempted by a banana. Now, I don't generally advertise this theory of mine to anyone but close friends -- so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to anyone else. If it gets back to Salt Lake I could be in hot water.

It's against the law to marry if you're a woodworker in Wisconsin. They tell me this law was promulgated a hundred years ago because of the dismaying number of casualties among lumberjacks -- something like one in ten was sawed in half. So I'm not married, preferring to make Jack the Ripper love to the local trees. That's kind of a sick joke, I guess, but I've used it several times on nosy Parkers and it shuts them right up.

I bought a five acre lot a few years ago. Moved a mobile home onto it. It's heavily wooded, so now I use my spare time to carve the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" into every tree on my lot. I figure that when I get all the trees done it will become something of a tourist attraction. Maybe make me eligible for some kind of artistic grant or award, like the MacArthur Fellowship or something. And of course it will stand as a monument to me after I am gone. For maybe twenty year

I never tell my customers this, but when you carve into living wood the tree considers it a wound and eventually covers up the entire 'scar' in about twenty or thirty years. I guess if they asked me how long their tablet will last I'd have to tell them the truth.

 Still, in this life it's better to hope than to mourn.

The Red Tar Kettle

Wearing bright safety vests, the county highway workers followed the scalding, red tar kettle as it pumped out liquid rubber bandages, thick as melted butter, to cover the pavement’s worst gashes. From above, it looked like the flip side of skywriting — as if yellow cursors on the ground were carefully spelling out a message for unseen readers in the clouds.
Patricia Cohen. NYT.

The unseen auditors in the sky.
They know.
They know the red tar kettle will keep them au courant. 
They don't care that the molten tar, an evil molasses,
scalds our hands and arms.
Permeates our work clothes with the stink of corrupted fossils.
Visits our brains with hydrocarbons, trashing memory.
Fingernails a permanent dull black.
Teeth twisted like old boneyard tombstones.
Shrinking ears.
Mice in our hair. What's left of it.
Our lungs are now thick waffles.

Down with the cloudy elite!
Down with the red tar kettle!
Spill it into the ditch. 
Sorry, tadpoles . . . 
But revolution scorches many until it can burn
 clean and pure.
We take to the tar smeared streets.
Our boots burning with rage.
Stomp out all the writing. Mess it around.
Make the inscrutable readers in the clouds
as ignorant as we are!

Who are they? Where did they come from?
Why put them in charge?
When will they come down to our level?
I know just this:
When I was a child they came bearing gifts.
Yardsticks made of candy.
Talking feathers.
Walter Cronkite dolls.
Hats that kept out the sorrow.
Flying light bulbs. 
A machine that turned hiccups into potable water.
All they asked in return was a home in our clouds, and the daily news spelled out in tar on rural roads.
Governments said sure, no problem.
But they gave the actual grunt work to me and my like.
Made us quit our cushy office jobs, leave our homes and families, and travel up and down two lane asphalt roads 
with a steaming kettle of tar. 
No days off.
Bad food.
Limited access to Netflix.
Attacked by owls and woodchucks.
And for many long years, we took it.
We bowed our heads and took it.

But no more.
The smell of cold puddles of tar is the smell of freedom.
And what did the aloof cloud dwellers do about it?
They killed all the birds and made bumble bees as large 
as cats.
Then they left.
So now we live in a world
of bright safety vests
and lots of calamine lotion.
But we are free and happy.
At least . . . I'm free and happy.
Sometimes.
But not often.

One Shepherd

. . . for there is one God and one Shepherd over all the earth.
1 Nephi 13:41

Partisan the Earth may be,

full of loud diversity;

but below this seething throng

there is only one good song.

One song only that all sing:

Christ the Lord is our true King.

When arrives the quiet day,

when all pride is stripped away,

when the world lays chastened so --

then Jesus Christ we all will know.

Misabo

Misabo, a gloomy boar with a mountain on his head who wears whale overalls hiked up to his snout, has the daunting job of promoting the village as a tourism destination. He waddled into the world in 2013, as a mascot craze swept Japan and hundreds of the country’s graying and shrinking towns turned to colorful, often wacky characters to lure visitors and investment.

Now, as their tax bases dwindle along with their populations, communities like Misato are increasingly questioning whether the whimsy is worth the cost in public spending. In the absence of much evidence that the characters are delivering economic benefits, the answer for many towns in the grip of Japan’s demographic crisis has been to quietly mothball them.

Ben Dooley. NYT. 

First of all, I'm not a boar. I'm an aardvark, for the cats sake.

Second, there is no truth to the rumor I'm being mothballed, downsized, warehoused, superannuated, or in any other way losing my status and position.

And third, I don't know who is spewing out these so-called 'demographics,' but they are absolutely talking through their hats when they say our cities our 'graying' or becoming 'elderful.' 

Bosh, I say. It's just the opposite. On my mascot rounds I find an increasing number of adorable little babies in hovels and condos -- in fact, most elderly couples now have four or five infants crawling around the house, and you have to wonder where they all come from. At least I wonder about it. 

I asked one elderly matron, who was nursing twins, where these little children were coming from. She didn't want to tell me at first, but the power of a mascot is awfully strong -- you can't look into my bouncing button eyes for very long before falling under my spell, so she finally spilled the beans.

"We pay to have them kidnapped from various slums around the world and brought to us in the middle of the night" she told me, grimacing as one of the twins suddenly clamped down on a nipple. "We raise them as our own, until we die, and then they get all our savings -- because our first set of children have abandoned us and want nothing to do with us. They are afraid of senility and death."

I was stunned by this brutal revelation -- but I had to admit the truth of it. I hadn't been in contact with my own elderly parents in over ten years; I didn't want to find out if they had died or had become gibbering bed-ridden zombies. I wasn't even sure where they lived, and told my sister that if she knew where they were she was not to tell me their location or tell them my location. Or what I did for a living.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a mascot. Some great figures in history started out as mascots, like Charles Dickens and Bismarck. The pay is good and you get a good physical workout each day -- it's the equivalent of running a five mile marathon. Wrapped in burlap. 

A lot of it is photos with tourists, sure; but there's more to it than that. I visit hospitals and prisons, shaking hands and bobbling my eyes around to give the unfortunate hope and giggles. I also deliver ice to hockey arenas on weekends.

And there's national policy involved, as well. Most people don't know this, but the Premier bases many of his decisions on the input of the dozens of mascots that roam the countryside talking to high and low. The people open up to us in a way that they never do to glad-handing office seekers or pettifogging pen pushers. We take the pulse of the public, so to speak, and pass the results on to the highest circles. The police also use us extensively to monitor criminal activity, especially in rural communities. I personally have helped put away at least a dozen high binders with my testimony in the past twelve years. I have a photographic memory, because a mascot never forgets.

So you can see that when some snub-nosed reporter writes that we're only good for 'whimsy' and don't contribute anything of worth to the community or the national infrastructure, he or she is dead wrong. A good mascot not only pulls his or her own weight, but helps communities to flourish. And as soon as all those kidnapped babies begin to grow up and read newspapers, those scandal-mongering journalists will be hoisted with their pants on their own petard! 

But with righteousness shall he judge the poor

But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.
Isaiah 11:4

Judge not the poor or view the meek

as burdens with a prospect bleak.

In humbleness a child was born

without a home and doomed to scorn,

who rose redeeming in the air

and soon will smite the earth with care

so that the greedy and purse proud

are slain, but others stay unbowed.

May I, O Lord, be of that throng

who shelter 'neath thy wing span strong! 

Cas Mudde is a no good stinker. (Prose Poem)

But experts in the brain injury field said the delayed response and confusion were primarily caused by a problem both the military and civilian world have struggled with for more than a decade: There is no reliable way to determine who has a brain injury and who does not.

Dave Philipps & Thomas Gibbons-Neff.  NYT.

Does anybody really know anything?

I mean, they can't tell if your brain is damaged or not

until you keel over in a coma.

There could be nematodes in my brain right now, and I

wouldn't have a clue right up to the moment they erupted from my ear drums like steel wool.

That's why I carry shiny pebbles with me.

Always.

Not just any ordinary shiny pebbles, but the kind

you pick up off the beach. Which are really sea glass.

Pieces of broken glass bottles that have rolled around

the ocean floor for centuries until they become smooth

shiny pebbles, which are then cast up on the seashore.

Like ambergris.

These shiny pebbles have had long years to absorb the

mysteries of the ocean -- its healing powers and 

deep wisdom.

So some of that inevitably must rub off on me if I carry 

around enough of them.

It stands to reason.

But I don't stop there. Not by any means.

I mail bits of sea glass to politicians, philosophers, and celebrities, asking them to rub the sea glass in the palm of their hands for a few seconds and then mail them back to me. 

I figure it can't hurt, 

and maybe it'll do me some good.

But one time I sent a particularly translucent piece of green sea glass to Cas Mudde, a big shot professor in Holland.

And he never sent it back.

I waited and I waited and I waited.

One whole year I waited. Then I wrote him asking for my

shinny pebble back. 

There was no reply.

So I flew to Holland, at my own expense, to look him up

and ask for my sea glass back.

I found him eating raw herring on a shale beach, with a storm coming in.  

The turbulent waves made the idea of civilization laughable.

He spoke excellent English.

He remembered my bit of sea glass.

He refused to give it back to me.

It was bringing him much luck in his academic pursuits.

 He had also never felt healthier in his life.

And he was a heavy smoker and beer drinker.

Since the age of sixteen.

So no -- I couldn't have it back.

Possession is nine tenths of the law, and all that.

Goaded by the lusty smell of bruised kelp, 

I yelled "You're nothin' but a big fat stinker!"

And I lunged at him.

For a heavy smoker, he ran pretty fast.

I chased him down the beach for ten minutes.

Then he stumbled and fell, rolling over and over

until a large breaker snatched him up and pulled

him out to sea.

I read later that a Japanese trawler had picked him up but refused to take him back to Holland. He had to go all the way to Yokohama with them. 

Serves him right.

That plane ticket to Holland was expensive. 

When I got home all my succulents were dead.

They had been overwatered by my sister during my absence.

Plus she had thrown away my collection of sea glass -- the stuff I wasn't carrying with me in Holland, which was only about two pounds worth.

"It attracts corvids" she told me. "You don't want a crow poking your eye out some morning, do you?"

She refused to sell her car to reimburse me.

Does anybody really care about anything?