The Rocket's Red Glare

The bombs bursting in air...Who doesn't love fireworks?  Americans will seize on any occasion to celebrate it by setting off explosives, the bigger and more spectacular the better.  With the new year almost upon us, out fellow patriots will be preparing their arsenals for the midnight hour when they will light the sky with pyrotechnic devices (thank you China) and shattering the night's silence with explosions designed to scare away the evil spirits of the old disgraced year and welcome in the fresh new promise of pleasures galore.

My old friend William O. Bassett lived for whatever occasion allowed him to blow up the night with fire and thunder.  If it had a fuse, he had a match.  The Bassets and the Landers were driving from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine one time (that's another story) and passing through South Dakota Bassett spotted what to him was a little slice of Heaven: a giant year-around fireworks warehouse filled with stuff you could use for dam removal.  He filled his cart with some serious ordnance and in Minneapolis I had a friend who had access to a shipping dock where he worked. We sent Bassett's war chest home by UPS (Forgive us our trespasses).

So after our trip the Bassetts are holding a New Year's party, the climax of which will be a midnight presentation of South Dakota's finest.  The street in front of the Bassett's home is ablaze with strings of exploding firecrackers, sky bombs with spreading arcs of light.  Then a super rocket shoots straight up into the night sky, seems to circle around and then sails directly down to land on a neighbor's roof.   YIKES ! We race down and knock on the owner's door.  Not home. Back to Bassett's for a ladder.  Back to the target house.  Rocket's dead.  No damage (maybe a little black smudge but who would notice?)

Happy New Year ! Where are the sparklers?

Speaking of Rings

 One of the consequences of hiding in your apartment from the dreaded coronavirus attack, compounded by being older than springtime, is you spend an inordinate amount of time remembering episodes from various times in your life.  Like when I was working as a sales agent for Jostens of Minnesota, preying on high school students to sell them some or all of our product line: rings, caps and gowns for graduation, announcements, and other accessory items.

I'm in the main hallway at Benson High School in Portland, Oregon where I have set up my portable store (a four-foot-long display box showing samples of our class rings). It's between classes before the lunch break and coming down the hall to my station is a young lady who, by her attire, I judge to be trouble walking.  "Ooo," she says to me, "I love rings."

I say, "I don't think you are supposed be here during classes."

She laughs and says, "You're probably right.  What's new about class rings?"

I tell her, "Well, the new thing this year is a feature we call "Select-a-side" which means whatever your favorite activity is, we can put symbolism related to that activity on the side of your ring.

She giggles and says, "I'll bet they wouldn't put my favorite activity on a ring."

Just then the lunch break sounded.  Saved by the bell.

What's The Thing With The Ring?

I think I have mentioned in previous postings that I have great admiration for Bill Gates.  Everything about him, to me, registers as significant evidence of a man with a brilliant mind using the fruits of his achievements for the greater good of a humane society.  I watched him today on CNN's Jake Tapper show discussing the coronavirus pandemic to which he has focused large amounts of his personal involvement and resources from his charitable foundation.

Watching him on TV over time,  I noticed a small facet of his body language: when responding to a question he would engage his right hand with his left hand, and fiddle with his wedding ring. Being an admirer of him I imagined he was subconsciously acknowledging that all his good works came equally from his wife, Melinda.  The more likely explanation is that it is simply a nervous tic using the ring as something to fiddle with.

But today on the Tapper show his right hand would still engage with the left but...NO RING.  Where is Bill Gates's wedding ring?  Did he have a rash and his dermatologist wrote him a prescription for Terbinafine and told him not to wear the ring until the rash was gone?  Did he lose weight making a resize necessary?  Is everything still OK with him and Melinda?  If Jake was doing his job at his usual high degree of professionalism he would have said, "Hey, Bill, what's the deal with no wedding ring?"  Now we're all just left to wonder.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear

Later this month, Christmas Eve will find me awaiting the annual Holiday for the 90th time and I can compare this one with only one other: Christmas 1941.  Both days find the citizens of America facing a threatened future under siege from a devastating enemy attack; one by powerful allied military armies and the other by microscopic organisms that, while unseen, prove to be equally as deadly.

Seventeen days before Christmas 1941, Japanese aircraft made their tactical attack on Pearl Harbor causing awful damage to American warships and military installations. While it was a shocking blow to an unprepared nation, key facts of the raid would prove critical to the final success of the American response.  The battleships damaged in the raid were not the aircraft carriers that would make the difference in coming sea battles with Japanese forces.  Also, the Japanese raiders failed to destroy the storage farms of petroleum fuel.

While the attack was greeted with wide celebrations in Japan, naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto had a more prescient assessment of the attack: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve," he wrote.  He was right.  America rose up under the masterful leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He organized the massive mobilization of the nation's industrial power while communicating with the souls of individual citizens. I remember sitting around our radio, Mama and Daddy and my two sisters,  listening to the calm voice (I can still hear his tone) of the President focusing our attention to the mission that would lead us to victory. He united the nation as it had never been before.  And never has been since.

What a difference in America today.  We find the gifts under the tree to be sour apples and spoiled dreams with over a quarter million of our fellow citizens dead from the silent enemy.  Other millions of children without food to eat. The economy in free fall. After the original attack there was no calm voice of a leader to unite us in a massive counter-attack with organizing plans and challenges to individual citizen warriors. We do have a lot to fear.

I still have the official card that identifies me as an air watch volunteer (Mama and me during a four hour shift once a week) to identify (we went to silhouette classes) any Japanese bombers we feared were coming in those early war months.  None of their aircraft got through on our watch.

I'll take Christmas 1941 over this one.  There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see.

                                                           

Update to September Skin Report

Since I posted that skin story last September, yesterday I had a visit with my dermatologist and learned some additional information.  So this update.

One thing the almost 350 million people who voted in the last election (even those in cemeteries) would be in full agreement on is the importance of personal hygiene. The guy in the elevator who didn't think that was important gets dagger looks from his fellow lifters.  Americans spend billions of dollars every year on soaps and cleansing lotion, paying tribute to the quest for an immaculate persona and the eradication of unpleasant odors.

It is said that Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, while celebrated for his erudition, avoided bathing for long periods of time. Seated in an eating establishment one evening, a lady at the next table addressed him saying, "Sir, you smell." "No, Madam," he replied, "you smell, I stink."

My grand niece, Drew Saylor, who is a dermatologist, agees that soap should be confined to breakfast dishes and underwear but not skin.  She tells us soap washes away beneficial oils and microbiome produced by the body.  Eliminate soap and at a minimum you avoid dry skin and, she thinks, there's a whole world beyond that. 

 Amazon will send you three bars of Cetaphil non-soap cleanser for $9.00,  Imagine this: after 90 years I end up shilling for Big Pharma.

NFL Observation

Sunday night football, November 22, 2020.  LA Raiders vs Kansas City Chiefs.  Sideline shot of Raider's coach Jon Gruden wearing required face mask, speaking on his phone, holding play-calling sheet in front of mask so opponent spys can't read his lips.  NFL always entertaining.

Palouse Perils

 I watched my Oregon Ducks play the Washington State Cougars in Pullman last Saturday.  The minute the game came on I rose from my couch and went to put on a sweater.  Memories of Pullman, Washington in November lowered my body temperature by 10 degrees.  Pullman is in the Palouse, a unique geographical area of rolling hills like giant sand dunes that welcome icy blasts of weather from the polar regions that my Aunt Helen, who knew that country, described as having nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence with the top strand down.

Sending young scholars to play football in Pullman in November could be classified as a crime against humanity.  Extreme cold causes materials (including live creatures) to contract and become brittle.  Engagement in any activity that involves violent collisions will make a person feel as if they are in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where shattered parts of your body are flying all around.

In the first half the Oregon team fell behind by two touchdowns and a field goal.  Shattered pieces of players were everywhere on the frozen tundra.  The Coug players were unaffected by the temperature because their trainers stick a long needle into their brains and turn off the hot/cold switch.  As the game went on the Oregon players became numb to the alien environment and fought back to win the game by a couple of touches.  As Oregon QB Tyler Shough took a knee to end the game, all he could think about, along with his teammates, was that locker room with those skin-ripping hot showers.  Who needs soap?

I suspect two years from now it will be difficult to get players from that game, still on the team, to willingly board the chartered aircraft headed for the Palouse.