Coronamusic

One of the bright spots of World War II was the music that emerged from the emotions of young lovers being separated by the call to arms of its citizen soldiers.  Beautiful music, heart-tugging lyrics. All that is missing in our war against Coronavirus.  Maybe we need to revisit those early '40s years and update their music.

I'll Walk Alone
old lyrics:
,I'll walk alone, because to tell you the truth, I'll be lonely
I don't mind being lonely
When my heart tells me you are lonely, too.

                                

New Lyrics:

I'll walk alone, we must stay six feet apart,

And you can't hold my hand,
Though you still hold my heart.

I think it does capture the vibe of our times although that may not rank as authentic heart-tugging. Here's another possibility:           

Don't Get Around Much Anymore
Old lyrics:

Missed the Saturday dance
Heard they crowded the floor
Couldn't bear it without you
Don't get around much anymore.

New Lyrics
Missed the Saturday dance
Found a lock on the door
Coronavirus surrounds me
Plenty here to deplore.

The experts tell us we will get through this and when we do we will need an updated version of a welcome home ballad to light up our lives:

It's Been a Long Long Time

Old lyrics:

Kiss me once, then kiss me twice

Then kiss me once again

It's been a long, long time.

Haven't felt like this, my dear

Since I can't remember when

It's been a long, long time.

New lyrics

Test me once, then test me twice
Then test me once again
It's isolation time.
Job gone south, sores in mouth
Temperature at 110
Our stocks aren't worth a dime.

Some of those probably need work but what the heck, time is the one thing of which I have an over supply. Better to be focused on creating high art than to keep banging my tin cup on the bars of my cell and screaming, "I'm innocent.  I'm innocent."

Pernicious Pestilence and Plagiarism

Let's deal with the issue of plagiarism right up front: some of the material in the following screed is lifted directly from the King James Bible, but so what?  I'm not the first to plagiarize Ezekiel and Kings and I will not be the last. At this point I need their wisdom to bolster my premise: the Corno 19 plague is all part of the master plan of that mythological clock Master that set the galaxies and the planets and the individual Earth-lives spinning in their assigned orbits.

Here is Ezekiel 5:17 telling us how the LORD made people see things His way: "So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee.  I, the LORD have spoken."

Listen to 1 Kings 8:37, in which Solomon describes how the LORD "sent a pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust, or if there be caterpillar; if their enemy besiege them in the land of their cities; whatsoever plague, whatsoever sickness there be..."

There are many more Biblical authors who beat the same drum, but the point they all agree on is that mighty forces prevail when men or mammals get out of line.  Who, us? Creatures of the Earth?  We get out of line? Let us count the ways:

Remember way back in that other century when those sex-crazed grasshoppers visited those Mormons in Utah and all the grasshoppers wanted to do was procreate and feast on the crops? See what happened. Yo, here come the sea gulls.

The LORD doesn't like it when His flock gets out of balance. Those hoppers weren't satisfied with just becoming fishing lures and providing entertainment for capture-inspired boys and girls.

And yes, you Adam and you too Eve.  You both accepted the mission to go out and multiply but you wayyy overdid it.  And what your progeny did to the Garden is beyond forgiveness. Extracting minerals and carbon-based material with no regard to the environment. Destroying the planet's lungs by cutting down most of its trees.  Filling earth's most precious treasure, its oceans, with plastic garbage and using the life-sustaining reservoir of air as a sewer is only a small list of the insults to the magnificent gifts that were given to a virgin planet.

Need we ask why a non-forgiving agent has come among us, thinning the herd?  No surprise that the ones with walkers and canes who can't keep up are the first to fall. Oh, you don't buy Guy-in-the-Sky meddling?  Try NATURE DEMANDS BALANCE (grasshoppers taken care of but what about these 12 trillion Homo sapiens?). Or something else. The one thing we do know for sure is that something put a really big you-know-what in our punch bowl.

Don't forget to wash your hands.

What If?

I wonder if everyone plays the "What if?" game from time to time? That is, what if this happened instead of what really happened and how that would have changed a complex series of events?  Like you start out your front door and then remember you forgot to bring the letter you wanted to mail and you go back to get it, just as a piano falling from the 12th floor crashes onto your entrance.  And would have ended your stay on this planet had you not returned for the letter. What if?

What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people.  A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old.  We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me.  Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.

One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday.  I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come."  I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.

At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."

She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot.  What if?

A 50th Year Anniversary

Whoever first observed that "time flies" nailed it. Yes it does on bumblebee wings.

The year, 2019, we now see in our rearview mirror, marks the time 50 years ago when I received a call from newly appointed University of Oregon Athletic Director Norv Ritchey.  "Let's have lunch," he said. We did and he offered me the job of public relations director for the athletic department. I asked him to give me three seconds to think it over.  He would later promote me to Assistant Director.

Goodbye Bon Marche feather merchant, hello player in the big time intercollegiate athletics game.  Plus, I would get paid to work there.  The next six years were the most fun I ever had in any work environment.  Who's to say what we accomplished 50 years ago did not lay the foundation for Oregon's current dominance in the Pac-12 star-lit universe? Some things just take time to kick in:

Football Conference Champion/Rose Bowl Champion

Basketball Champion-Men/ Payton Pritchard, Player of the Year

Basketball Champion-Women/Sabrina Ionescu, Player of the Year
Both men's and women's teams given #1 seed in March Madness regional brackets

(March Madness will play without spectators but still have bracket pools)

The friendships I developed in those years give me a basket full of name for dropping in conversations with fellow inmates in my current commune.  Let anyone bring up any sport and I have my list ready (c'mon memory, don't fail me now)..  And every name is attached to a half-dozen stories, while every story has a half-dozen variations.  That is, the protocol of sports stories dictates that you never let facts screw up a good yarn.

So get comfortable in your chair.  I'm going to tell you about that blazing hot Spring day in Husky Stadium where the Ducks were in a dual track meet with U-Dub. Wunderkind Steve Prefontaine would compete in the 5,000 meters on the artificial track surface that looped around the football field. The track had been heating up for hours and was at grilling temperature by the start of the race. After Pre won the event, he took off his shoes to reveal how his feet had been fried to a mass of bloody, burst blisters served up medium rare. His time for the win was excellent.

At This Point

I blame John Dean, the Watergate miscreant who now makes his living appearing on television recounting how he tried to warn Trickey Dickey that the feces was in the air-conditioning unit. I'm almost certain he was the first to use the phrase , "At this point in time". Like a vocabulary virus it made its insidiously evil way into the national newspeak.  And over the years since Watergate it has transmogrified from hideously pretentious nonsense to accepted corruption of intelligent discourse.

Listen to supposedly educated TV talkers say, "At this point in time, yadda, yadda, yadda."

At this point in time, irregardless of...  Double insults.

"So what?" you might ask,  It doesn't send you to the hospital or cause a tax audit so who cares?  I do.  Because adding that verbiage to make a simple declaration poetic is just wrong.  Like picking your nose.  So stop it.

Hooked

It all started so innocently.  In casual conversation with my friend, Lou Barrett, a fellow inmate here at Russellville Park,  I mention that I liked caramel corn.  I don't know why I said that because I hadn't eaten caramel corn since I don't know when. But Lou replied that his wife, Mary, also liked caramel corn.

It was probably a week or two later that I went to the Lloyd center to buy some pants; as I left Macy's with my purchase I smelled...caramel corn.  The distinctive aroma was wafting out of Joe Brown's Carmel Corn store in the Mall and it triggered that innocuous conversation with Lou a week or two before.  Hey! Why not bring Mary Barrett a box of caramel corn?

Let's understand what's going on here. Don't compare Joe's Carmel Corn with what you might pick up at the market that was made six months to a year ago.  No, no. Joe rolled his succulent, fresh concoction out of his machine just a short while before your arrival.

Joe knows what he's doing to keep you coming back for more.  He fills your $5.00 box to the top then puts it into a cello bag and dumps two more scoops on top that spill over into the bag.  Look at that.  Mary won't miss a few of those slop-overs so I take a couple to sample and then a couple more. OK, maybe a few more after that. Then I leave the bag of caramel corn at the Barrett's door.

We see each other at lunch the next day and I learn that Mary did indeed like the caramel corn.
She adds that the next time I go to the Lloyd center she would like me to bring her more. So a few days later I brought Mary an $8.00 box and since she was paying for it I knew it would be unethical of me to pilfer her overflow kernels, so I buy a bag for myself.

Time to face the truth:  Both Mary and I are hooked.  A day or two later I see the Barretts across the room at lunch, eating with a friend. Mary sees me and without moving her lips, sends the message with her eyes: GET MORE CARAMEL CORN.

Not only that but she's now hooked her friend who I now must include in the caramel corn runs.  What to do?  We know it's not good for us.  All that sugar.  All that butter.  But it's there and  available.  We can buy all we want and it's cheap and it's legal and it tastes so darn good.

I know others will become hooked and soon I will be making daily runs for larger and larger numbers of the $8.00 boxes.  Where will it end?  Probably with the after-midnight knock on my door and the Russellville Park Security Team taking me to their interrogation room.

Busted. How do I tell my children?

Spelunking 101

If you enjoy cold, damp places that might create feelings of claustrophobia in normal people, you could be into exploring caves.  You know, a spelunker.  Or if you are even more enthusiastic about underground adventures you probably call yourself a "caver."  Whichever name you use, include me out. Been there.  Done that.

The Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon define a large part of the border with California and there are caves inside some of those mountains, the most famous being the National Monument, Oregon Caves south and west of Grants Pass where I was raised.  Marble Mountain, in the foot hills of the Siskiyous, a few miles south of our home, was the site of an open pit mine that produced a mineral used in making cement.  The father of one of my school friends worked at the mine and told my friend that a recent blasting of rock had uncovered an entrance to a cave.

Imagine that.  A cave. Like in Tom Sawyer.  Time to make some plans, I told my two pals, the Wardrip brothers, Bob and Lee.  Bob and I were 12 and Lee was two years older.  The excitement of exploring a real cave grew the more we talked about it and so our plan:

We knew the owners of the mine would not welcome our visit, so we would go up the mountain on a Sunday.  We had a large ball of kite string we would feed out from the entrance so as to not get lost in the caverns.  We had my father's railroad lantern. What could go wrong?

On an early Sunday morning we rode our bikes to where the mine access road started up the mountain. The steep slog to the landing was about two miles but we reached it by mid-morning and soon spotted what had to be the entrance to the cave. The mine crew had put railroad ties against the rock wall face to seal the opening and we easily removed them. What we uncovered was not encouraging.

 The opening started about three feet up at a 45% slash that went another 10 feet and stopped. The entrance was shaped like a hinged lid being lifted off a box with no opening on the left but about 15 or 20 inches on the right. Shining the light into the hole we could see a flat shelf that went a few feet and then dropped off into a large, dark, cavern. "Well," I said, "You're the oldest, Lee, so you go first."

"No,"  Lee said, "We've got to be smart about this. Bob's the smallest so he should wiggle in and see what it looks like."

"Not me," Bob said. "This wasn't my idea."

"OK," I said, "You two chickens wait out here. I'll go in."

I started into the hole with my two arms sticking out in front of me, the lantern in my right hand. As I wiggled in, the rock above me got lower and as  I had my legs almost all the way in I thought I felt the ceiling coming down and I went into complete terror panic.  I think I was screaming as I started violently wiggling, bumping my head, frantically making my escape from the cave.

As I escaped the collapsing mountain that was actually still in stable condition, I sank to the floor of the landing with both of my elbows bruised and bumps on my head. "What the hell are you hollering about?" Lee said to me.

I didn't answer him.  Bob said, "I think this was a bad idea.  I'm going home."

It was plain that the adventure was over and without more conversation we headed back down the road.  We probably should have put the railroad ties back to cover the cave entrance but we didn't.

I