Winter Sunset Coyotes

Making Tamales

'Tis year-end winter. 'Tis the season for making tamales. Mix your masa harina, squash it with savory fillings, then roll and tie your corn husks!

(To fully appreciate, see the Julia Child favorites at YouTube.)

Pet Peeve: Leg Tourniquet Socks

Says the website: "Learn about
the symptoms, causes and treatment of
sock-line hyperpigmentation,
a health issue caused by
tight socks with elastic bands.

I understand there is something chic about being dressed up and crossing your legs to reveal ankle and a little leg under one's trousers, naked skin and hair perfectly covered by smooth gentleman's socks held up against gravity and nature by bands of elastic.

Mind you, most of the year, if I do wear socks, they are the kind that don't reach the ankle bone. These short anklets, something I never had occasion to wear in Lower Alaska, don't provoke my peeve. But then, they really are not a gentleman's sock. They are more a sports sock and are related to the full sized, thick, white cotton crew or gym socks. You can readily get crew socks without overly constrictive elastic.

Summer uniform.

My school in Sydney, St. Aloysius College (may Allah bless the Jesuit priests), had a dress code. We wore uniforms. Grade school students wore shorts. The winter uniform was grey wool shorts and blazer. Summer was khaki cotton. Heaven help the kid who lost track of the seasonal change and showed up dressed in the wrong fabric. Regardless of the season, we had to wear grey shin socks pulled up taught to just below the knee. They had to be smoothly taught. A wrinkled mess of grey sock crumpled around the ankles was likely to earn a couple of hits on the palms with a thick leather strap.

We kept our socks hoisted using rubber bands, like the kind that bind asparagus, only a little thinner and more circumference. Like cuff links and tie clips to a gentleman of the 1960's, the rubber bands were a critical element of school dress.

Socks could not sag. Each morning we pulled a sock on, followed by a rubber band which we artfully hid by folding over the sock top. Kids with higher social status dress had newer socks with elastic collars woven into the fabric. My socks were so worn the original elastic had long since lost its vim and vigor.

The price of such uniform neatness was a deep concave ring around the flesh of one's calves. At my age, I don't really care whether my dark blue or brown socks slump in wrinkles around my ankles. I do care about deep concave rings around the flesh of my legs.

I refuse to wear suspenders.

You would think that at least some manufacturers of gentleman's socks would produce a style that didn't function as a tourniquet, but I defy you to find one. It's just a matter of how ridiculously constrictive they are. Even some athletic socks have lots of sadistically tight elastic woven into their tops. I know. I ended up buying several pairs.

What I do in my frustrated anger is to pull apart the sock tops as hard as I can to stretch and hopefully break the elastic. The elastic is way tougher than my pull, an indication of just how constrictive these gentleman's tourniquets can be. I have taken scissors to socks, making strategic cross-snips designed to sever at least some of the thick elastic tendons. It helps a little. The best solution is chance and wear: chance that a particular sock uses inferior elastic, and wearing and washing it enough that the sock sags. In drawers full of dozens of pairs of dress socks, only two pair have achieved perfection.

My solution, hardly perfect but quite practical, is to fold the top of the sock down to the narrowest part of my ankles.

Why are all dress socks, I do not exaggerate, all dress socks made with elastic so tight you can count the threads by the impressions they leave in your flesh? I don't get it. Thank goodness I work in a home office and a desert environment with not much need or occasion to wear dress socks.

Pet Peeves

Senator William Proxmire announced Golden Fleece Awards to ridicule what he thought was taxpayer waste. Rowan & Martin gave out a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award each episode of Laugh-In. Andy Rooney earned a good living in his dotage complaining for five out of Sixty Minutes about, "You know what bothers me . . ." Today we have Bill Maher and New Rules.

Pet peeves originate from daily lives. Simple things repeated over and over give rise to irritation. Some regular irritations are inherent in living: haircuts, root canals, the common cold, and tsunamis. Others are unavoidable because they are caused by others: pick-up trucks with Confederate flags or NRA stickers, McDonald's corporate food, and Christmas retail.

W. C. Fields had his three peeves: wet toilet paper, young children, and I forget the third. The bandits in Sierra Madre had no use for "stinkin' badges." You must have your pet dislikes.

It is in a spirit of reconstructive frustration, albeit in a much more humble scope, that I offer my own examples of petty complaints.  After years and years of silently enduring silly irritations on a daily basis, Tucson Tom introduces his Pet Peeves.

Do not expect earth-shaking revelations, or even pointed social commentaries. This is the trivial stuff of modern life. This is stuff that is not so much inherent in nature as man-imposed for little social benefit.

I take it back. These are social commentaries on such fundamental matters as socks, underwear, garbage, blister-packaging, and software updates.

To Saunter

A few days ago I read something interesting on Facebook. As we all know, not everything on Facebook is uplifting. Most posts reflect current affairs which are downright depressing. I admit, I add to the depression by angrily posting about the Hair Product-in-Chief and the Republican single party tyranny. But there are also interesting posts, as was this quote from John Muir:

Hiking - I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word "saunter"? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "A la sainte terre," "To the Holy Land." And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them."

Sauntering on Rampart Ridge, Cascades.

I found it interesting not just because I delight in etymology, the origin of words, and not just because I have two decades of history hiking in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. It was interesting because I went sauntering with Nazar the Wonder Dog through the wash this past Sunday and I found myself reflecting on a memory triggered by John Muir's quote. It was an aphorism I had made up: The slower you go, the more you see.

It's something I first noticed motorcycling back roads some forty-four years ago. I clung to the back of my brother Géza as he drove his Suzuki motorcycle seven thousand miles from Milwaukee to Florida to Arizona to Utah and back to Milwaukee. It was a new phenomenon, proceeding through space with nothing but a helmet visor between me and the environment. We avoided freeways and stopped at many a scenic place: Smoky Mountains, Big Bend and Organ Pipe Cactus parks, Grand Canyon, the canyon lands of southern Utah, and a drive through Yellowstone.

Sauntering among tame Wyoming "bears".

(I remember the rangers at Yellowstone handing out leaflets warning drivers not to roll down their car windows to see the bears. We got stuck on a traffic jam where drivers and passengers rolled down their windows to see a mother bear and her cubs by the side of the road. Several eagerly encouraged Géza and me to look also, oblivious to the fact they were in their steel cages while we sat in the open, inching past the bears hoping the mother bear was not as irritated as we were.)

Then I took up bicycling as an outdoor activity. One can see a lot more at the pace of a bicycle, and feel more, too — in legs, buttocks and lungs.

Then I took up hiking in the mountains. That was mostly hiking, as in John Muir's definition, with only a little sauntering. Most saunters were after we made camp.

Hummingbird perched on an agave spine.

Now I like to sit and watch the saguaros grow. It takes a bit of effort for me to just sit. I always feel like I should be doing something. But if I do just sit, I see lizards scurrying and doing their push-ups, hummingbirds competing for access to the feeder, hawks soaring, monarch butterflies flapping to caesalpinia flowers, quail and dove pecking at seeds on the ground, even the occasional bobcat or coyote looking for prey. This is all stuff I miss walking, and not just because my attention is distracted. Walking by itself prompts the little critters to retreat into holes or hide behind scrub.

When I walk Nazar, I have to stop because he constantly stops to smell something or another. In those gaps, I stare at trees, the patterns of sand in the wash, the colors and textures of rocks, and the shadows and clouds over the Catalinas. I have my favorite porcupine cactus, two of them. I always stop to see how they are doing. Except for keeping an eye on the dog (he doesn't need a leash except on a road with traffic), it's a bit of a saunter.

Contrast a saunter with flying in an airliner, or driving on a freeway. How much do you see at six hundred or even seventy miles an hour?

Hence my aphorism, the slower you go, the more you see. Or the more present you are. Or the more awareness you have. In meditation terms, when one is completely still, one sees all. In saunter terms, one has attained the sacred land.

The South Point

The avalanche slope on the way to the South Point.

It's about one hundred and sixty steps from the front door of our house to the south point of our little acre of the Sonoran Desert. From that point one can see further south: the properties beneath us, a narrow but impressive view of Tucson and, about fifty miles distant, the Santa Rita Mountains, then seventy-five miles distant, I can see, at least in my mind's eye, Mexico.

It took years to get to that south point. First we had to cross the driveway, which, for the first couple of years, we never did without wearing boots. Then gradually, I began clearing the local varieties and equivalents of mulga (it's an Australian term; look it up) and digging benches into the hillsides to make trails and sitting areas.

The last stop for my improvements was next to a mature palo verde tree on the south edge of the inner portion of our gully. That is about twenty-two steps south of the driveway. There I ended the water and low voltage electricity lines and planted a faucet, garden hose and landscape light.

The last sixty steps to the south point are mostly over two barren avalanches of loose dirt over rocks, scree and rubble. All I did there was plant a few surplus blue agave pups, plants that have grown rather large over the years and provide a little blue-green relief from the otherwise barren brown slopes.

On the other end of those sixty steps is the hillside survey pin that marks the southern point of our little acre. It took several years of slipping and sliding and peering under sagebrush and into rabbit and ground squirrel holes to find that pin.

I dug out a narrow bench so I could reach the point without falling down the slope. Over the years, that narrow bench has eroded because — well, because it traverses the steep slopes of two barren avalanches of loose dirt and rubble.

Did I mention that the slopes were unstable?

Until last weekend, my final possessory act regarding that South Point had been to carve out a triangular platform in the loose slope (triangular to match the property lines), implant an iron rebar by the survey pin and tie some saguaro ribs to the rebar as a sort of visible marker. The rebar served as the human equivalent of what a dog does to a local fire hydrant.

As seen on Facebook: the island
and the east enclosure.

In addition to the view, that platform area is private. It is hidden from the house to the east by the berm of the hill above and that neighbor's own backyard wall. On the other side, a thicket of palo verde trees hides the space from the house to the west which is situated below, on the other side of the gully.

Like a coyote surveying and marking its territory, I would traverse the avalanche slopes to that platform area to sit and enjoy my private view. But the unstable slope eroded the bench, and there was nothing to sit upon. I began imagining concrete blocks.

In the meantime, I worked on the backyard kitchen island and the east wall cum enclosure which were the subjects of my Facebook posts earlier this year.

The saguaro ribs tethered to the rebar is visible towards the right.
It marks the South Point survey pin.

Friday a week ago, the first in October, the weather changed. With cooler weather come inspiration, energy and motivation.

I bought concrete, gravel and concrete blocks, and carried them a few at a time over the eighty traverse steps to the South Point. I dug trenches and sifted dirt to collect rocks large enough to serve as a natural retaining wall. I bought mortar and bricks and carried them a few at a time to the South Point. The ol' back ain't what it used to be.

The blocks got stuccoed and painted this Friday and I topped my oddly shaped (on account of the property line) low walls of concrete blocks with red clay bricks.

All I have to do is re-work the bench that serves as the path that leads to the South Point. For that, I need to scrounge up some one-man boulders to anchor the slopes.

I have my motivation: access to a pleasant sitting area and a great private view.

The view from South Point

It's Happened Before

It's happened before, something you don't expect.

For weeks and weeks of three digit highs (Fahrenheit), we have lived in our underwear like trailer trash. By eight or nine in the morning it's time to take shelter inside the shuttered house. It's time for lizards, ground squirrels and chipmunks to do their thing, and much of that is digging holes in the ground for refuge. It's the time of year when folks dream about going to Hawaii to escape the heat.

The odd thing is shade. It's the direct sunshine that is fierce. Even in three-digit temperature, I can sit in the shade and marvel at all the life in the Sonoran Desert, life that thrives in a bit of shade. I sit in the shade of the house and think to myself, "Gotta make more shade in the yard." We are fortunate to have plenty of trees in the gully whose shelter encourages all sorts of plants to thrive, even in the heat. I could erect pandals, trellises, follies, gazebos and other open covered areas. Meanwhile, I am grateful I work for a living inside the house and we have cooling.

Did anyone catch sight of the full moon, now two weeks ago?

By evening, when the sun loses its power and the bugs and bats come out, it's pool time. We carefully manage the solar blanket to maintain a water temperature in the low nineties. These last few weeks have provided an amazing evening planetary show. I have been floating with my rubber noodle and gazing at the horizon-to-horizon moving arc of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the Moon as they reveal themselves in the twilight, followed by innumerable stars.

Now it's the first week of October and the first week highs are in the eighties. Lows are about sixty. Shucks. Instead of just flopping on top of the bed in my underwear, I have to cover myself with a sheet. It's actually almost cold in the mornings. The swimming pool is loosing heat.

It's a subtle but very definite change of season. It has been only a week since the end of the summer doldrums.

It's happened before. I already miss summer.

Tuareg Relatives

For my birthday, Shari and I mailed some of our saliva to be tested. Not for rabies. DNA.

We got our results earlier this week. They were a bit of a let-down. It turns out we are from Africa and we are related to people all over Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. That's not exactly a mind-numbing revelation.

Tom's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

I was hoping for evidence that I was Magyar and connected to folk in central and eastern Asia. In my Magyar pride, I would claim not to be Indo-European. The Magyar language is unrelated to any Indo-European language. It turns out language has precious little to do with genes. My central Asian connection, at least for the last ten generations or so, is a mere 1.3%.

I have a south Asian connection in India. I can only speculate that a Gypsy slipped somewhere into the bloodline.

My mothers' line (mitochondrial DNA, hapgroup H10h) is most common among the Tuaregs in the south of Libya, then with folks in Galicia, Wales and Spain (presumably Celts?) before we get to 39% of Hungarians. Now Mum is from a rural area in the Great Plains of Hungary, an area that is pretty much homogeneous ethnic Hungarian (whatever that means). I would expect lots of connections with central Asians and Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, plus Turks who, like the Gypsy, slipped into the bloodline. The Turks occupied Hungary for several centuries, so they have a better claim to have mixed in their DNA than the poor Gypsy. But her mitochondrial DNA is prevalent in only about twenty percent of the folks in central Asia and Turkey.

By comparison, Shari's mothers' line is haplogroup H1bm. Lots of Tuaregs in southern Libya are in that group, about sixty-one percent of Tuaregs. The group is also prominent among the Basques (27%), Portuguese (25%), Cantabrians in northern Spain (24%), and Andalucians in southern Spain (19%). That's a major connection with the Iberian peninsula that may account for Shari's ability to tan in the sun. Her mothers' line is prominent among 14% of Volga-Ural-Finno-Ugric folks (compared to my own mothers' line that is shared with 22% of such folks). Go figure. We can each claim Finno-Ugric ancestry.

My fathers' line (Y-DNA, haplogroup E-V13) is most prevalent among Albanians (one-third), then Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. My Dad is turning over in his grave. His family hails from what was northern Hungary, now Slovakia, which historically is a mixture of peoples, languages and ethnicity. He prided himself on being Hungarian (turns out, only a 9% connection) with occasional Slovak (8%), German (only 4%), and Italian (5%) ancestry. The good news for some of Dad's anger arising from Hungarian history, his haplogroup has no connection with anyone in Britain.

Mum's, Dad's and Shari's Mum's lines have representatives in French Guiana in South America, but not Dutch Suriname or British Guyana. I wonder if taking DNA tests is more common in French Guiana than Dutch Suriname or British Guyana.

Shari had to explain to me that she doesn't have a fathers' line, something to do with X and Y chromosomes, and that each person takes only some of the genetic material available from the parents' pools. Therefore, there can be significant variations between siblings of the same parents. So my report is most interesting when it ascribes the origins of my personal genetic material, going back about ten generations, about three hundred years. That's where the Indian gypsy and a sliver of Caucasian show up, as well as — gasp — British. It seems that some 17.6% of my DNA is shared with people who lived in various parts of Britain over the last three centuries. Dad just turned in his grave again.

Shari's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

Shari's relatives would be the envy of an Australian immigrant schoolboy. They are virtually all in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For this son of Hungarian immigrants attending a Jesuit school crammed with English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys, Shari's pedigree matches that dominant culture ethnicity. She would blend right in. Just like "Rees" or even "James" blends in the Anglo world much better than "Palotas."

I wish I had saved some spittle from Mum and Dad to see how much those results would mirror mine. Even more interesting would be to compare DNA results from my niece and nephew born of my Hungarian brother and his Chinese wife. I wonder if that mothers' line has any connection with the Tuaregs, or the fellow in French Guiana who ordered a DNA test.

To cite a trite cliché, the world is getting smaller. What is remarkably odd in these DNA reports is the superimposition of genetic distribution onto a map showing today's political boundaries. It's like Mexican restaurants in Hungary, or the largest community of Japanese (in Brazil) outside of Japan. It's all mixed up. Ethnicity doesn't really correlate with much of anything political or national. We may have our languages, cultures, and political boundaries (and the Hair Product in Chief's wall), but the notion of ethnicity really has no meaning. The notion of nationalism is equally arbitrary. The concept of different modern human races is patently absurd. Folks, we all came out of Africa and adapted. That is the mind-numbing revelation. We are all related.

Medicare Eligibility Day

Fox Noise Propaganda

If you get your information from Fox Noise, you are a sucker. If you vote based upon information from Fox Noise, then necessarily you have difficulty with accepting reality. Welcome Big Brother.

There should be rules about news broadcasts. Like, no advertising fifteen minutes before, during, or fifteen minutes after a news broadcast. For Murdoch & Company, news is tabloid and there is one born every minute. About 20% of the voting population, actually. I say dry up Fox Propaganda by drying up the profit motive.

We try to discourage government officials from accepting bribes. What about news networks that sell lies for profit?

San Simeon Spring

Flowers begin with aloes and yuccas, then hanging cactus, torch cactus and prickly pear. Palo verde trees are coated yellow from flowers, and mesquite trees and catsclaw acacia trees sprout golden catkins. Sweet acacias have fuzzy round balls for flowers, and the long canes of ocotillo sprout red flames on their tips. Then the tops of the giant saguaros sprout huge buds that open into white and yellow flowers that attract a particular species of bat from Mexico.

The desert can be subtle, but when it flowers, the colors are more outrageous than anything Frida Kahlo stuck in her hair.

Restored Zobor Vineyards - Great Grandfather and the Phylloxera Plague

Me, dad and Uncle Zoltán at the Paulik family
graves in Nitra. Photo taken in 1979.

My great grandparents on my father's side lived in the north of thousand-year-old Hungary, what is now Slovakia. Andor Paulik was my dad's grandfather. (My dad and his brother Zoltán "Hungarianized" the family name to Palotás in 1933.) My dad fled Hungary after the war (the second one) and Uncle Zoltán stayed behind.

My uncle liked ferreting out family records. Among my father's papers is a copy of a Slovak newspaper article from May of 1978. It is about Andor Paulik. My uncle was the source for the article. I know Uncle Zoltán wanted to preserve a bit of history in Upper Hungary (Felvidék or "Upper Region" in Hungarian), so he submitted the information to the newspaper.

As the concluding paragraph indicates, Zoltán also wanted to help preserve the Paulik family grave site where Andor Paulik (1840-1927), his wife Anna Pruzsinszky (1836-1910), and three of their children, Andor (1876-1880), Philmen (1873-1886), and Gyula (1869-1887) were buried.

Here is my translation of the Slovak newspaper article.

RESTORED ZOBOR VINEYARDS

In the second half of the last century, the most dangerous vineyard blight came to us from North America — Phylloxera aphid, which destroyed vineyards not only at home [in Slovakia] but throughout Europe. The city of Nitra was surprised to learn from a circular from the Ministry of Economy that Phylloxera infestation was found in nearby Klosterneuburg in Austria. The circular reached the city hall in Nitra on 21 October 1874. Despite great efforts, within a few years the surrounding vineyards were devastated.

It was a terrible blow for Nitra. Mountain villages Horno-i Dolnozoborska sought help from the Vineyards Commission to attack the problem, but they were helpless. Members of the Commission — K. Riszer, A. Misz, K. Mayer and St. Čačka — recommended the chairman of the Commission, István Bangha, to act for the good.

Some vineyards were neglected and abandoned, while others contemplated the destruction of their own vines in an effort to halt the spread of the infestation. Only a few decided to revive their vineyards by uprooting the vines that had been attacked and replacing them with more vigorous root stocks from America.

Most credit for restoring the vineyards belongs to Andrew Paulik, who in 1882 restored the episcopal vineyards with varieties of Klevner, Vlašsky riesling and Burgundy grapes on American roots. Assistance also came from America in 1886 in the forms of consultant František Szecsi, who had developed excellent table grape varieties, and Sadecky, who had developed new resistant varieties of root stocks that had been launched into mass production in America.

The forestry engineer Andrew Paulik was born the son of a miller in the bishopric county of Nitra on November 29, 1840, in Podvazi, Povazska Bystrica. After completing middle school in Czech Tešíně, he attended the forestry technical school in Sovinci, Bruntal district, and interned at the Bytča estates. After graduating from the forestry school in 1860, he helped to map and measure the Strečnanske estates, then to survey the estates of Likavske Castle, first as an assistant engineer, then as an independent engineer. For nearly 10 years, he managed the forests of Drietom, and then he moved to Nitra where he worked as a forest engineer at the Nitra bishopric until he retired on April 1, 1911. In Nitra, he lived in the first floor of the house at no. 16 Hraclnova Street, but it was mostly a winter house in the courtyard terrace, accessible only from Vazilova Street. Summers he spent in his vineyard in Martinská [Marton] valley. Of his four sons, only one lived to manhood. Two died prematurely and the third was accidently killed at age 18 in a hunting accident near Radošina. Today his grandson, Zoltán Palotás, lives in Budapest.

Andrew Paulik was not only a forestry engineer, but also an excellent grower of fruit trees and wine grapes. He died in Nitra and is buried in a family tomb near the northern wall, not far from the corner of the cemetery.

All who today manage vineyards or appreciate the harvest and the soul of a good Zobor wine should remember the debt we owe to Andrew Paulik. After his death in 1927, his friends and relatives wanted to appreciate his good work by locating [his vineyard] in Martinská Valley, but this plan was ruined by the economic crisis [of the Great Depression]. Today, hardly anybody remembers A. Paulik, so it is important to keep his memory at least in the place of his subdued rest.

Air Miles

I write emails to myself on my Droid as an initial draft of ideas for a post. I do it sitting in my recliner with my morning coffee, as I write now, and I've done it on airplane flights.

I had occasion to fly to Sacramento a week or so ago. Each time I fly I get an urge to jot down all the flights I have taken. Maybe staring at the fold-up table embedded in the back of the seat in front of you brings up associations with all the other seat-back tables I have stared at over decades. My flights go back to about 1965 when as a kid, I flew alone on a Ansett-ANA airlines DC-3 between Sydney and Brisbane, and returned on a then ultra-modern Boeing 727. On this my most recent flight, to pass the airborne time between Tucson and Las Vegas, I jotted down a list of airline flights in an email to myself.

The numbers get staggering, both in terms of take-offs and landings, travel time, and distance. Not counting a couple of times my brother Paul took me up in single engine planes, or the one time I went soaring in a glider, or the distances traveled circling around airports on account of weather or waiting for a parking place, I reckon I have been on over two hundred flights for a cumulative distance (as the crow flies) of over fourteen times around the earth's circumference. That works out to 450,000 miles.

The most quaint flights? Clearly on a tail-wheeled DC-3 with wings in flight oscillating all too freely. I had the pleasure of flying in a DC-3 thrice, the second being from Auckland to Wellington in 1966 (Air New Zealand) and the third from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido in 1982 (Lineas Aereas Oaxaqueñas).

The first time the passengers broke into spontaneous applause upon a landing? Manaus. The flight crews of domestic airlines in Brazil delighted in repeating in-flight announcements in multiple languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and German. That is, until the flight from Rio hit wicked thunderstorms around the mid-Amazon city of Manaus. Then the announcements about a delayed landing, having to circle, and alternate airfields in case of fuel issues came only in Portuguese. It was a long and anxious time rocking about in black clouds looking out the windows and seeing lightning flashes in the sky and nothing but dense jungle below. When the plane finally approached the landing strip, hit ground (it was a rough landing), and settled down, the passengers clapped in relief.

Lots and lots of people have flown much, much more than I have, whether for work or pleasure, so I am not claiming any great achievement. Still, countless lives have been spent in the narrow confines of medieval villages or within a radius of a few blocks in Brooklyn. True, humans accumulated huge distances of travel over the course of lives as hunter-gatherers, seasonal nomads, caravan traders across Asia, seamen sailing the oceans, and flight crews at work and their dependents flying stand-by for free. But I am a regular, only moderately adventuresome person with a sedentary job.

To have traveled by air over fourteen times around the world says a lot about modern times and how small this planet has become. I am just not quite sure what it says, given human inability to understand its own varied cultures or refrain from spoiling its planet, but it surely says something.

Sleeping Rattler

This sleeping rattle snake was no problem. I was watering the oleander when I noticed this coiled up rattler getting wet. It never flinched from its mid-afternoon nap. Shari called Rural Metro and presto! The snake barely moved as the fireman scooped it up and plopped it into a plastic bucket.

Things have changed, the fireman told us, since Rural Metro dumped their collected rattlers at Reddington Pass.  See Mileage Marker 4. It seems Fish & Wildlife did not approve, so now the Rural Metro firemen dump snakes a mile or a mile and a half up-wash from where they are removed.

"How far do these rattlers range?" I asked the fireman.
"About a mile or so."

I suppose we may be seeing this critter again. If it is still like Sleepy of the Seven Dwarves, should be no problem.

Binghamton Cemetery

Just down the road from us is the Binghamton Cemetery founded by Mormons in 1899. The Mormons were an early Anglo presence in Arizona. They established a farming community by the Rillito River and named it Binghamton. The farming dried out as water became increasingly scarce, but there is still a Mormon church and community in town, and probably a dozen grave markers bearing the Bingham name.

"TO BE OPENED BY GOD"

I like to take Nazar the Wonder Dog there for walks because I can let him wander off leash and do what dogs do — smell things. The graveyard is a popular hangout not only for the occasional dog-walker and dead people, but also for local packs of coyotes.

I like to go there and reflect on the graves.

For a year or more our morning walks have been in the Finger Rock Wash, so it was with fresh eyes that Nazar and I recently wandered back into the graveyard. In addition to the fresh mounds of dirt evidencing the internment of new residents, there was evidence of upscale improvements.

"HANDCART PIONEER"
Contrary to wagon trains depicted
in Western movies, most people
could not afford a team of horses
or a covered wagon. They
pulled or pushed handcarts.

The main dirt driveway and the side ones that organize jumbles of graves into lines and rectangles had been marked with decorative metalwork street signs. The main driveway had been named Bingham Lane, suggesting the others were also named after illustrious pioneer Mormon residents: Webb Lane, Young Lane, Hardy Lane, Abegg Lane, and Farr Lane.

Additional land had been cleared of sage and creosote brush and a fifth side driveway, Nelson Lane, leveled out. Apparently, there is ongoing demand for cemetery plots.

Despite the recent improvements, and despite a sign by the gate warning that grave decorations require approval, the cemetery remains major funky.

The place is delightfully littered with sandy soil, desert scrub, the occasional mesquite, palo verde and acacia tree, plastic flowers, faded US flags and Christmas decorations, children's toys, and shiny marbles, souvenirs, mirrors and baubles like the trinkets Europeans used to trade for ivory and animal hides. There are lots of whimsical sentiments carved in stone. The overall effect is very organic, not at all as sterile and unreal as the usual manicured, regimented, restfully green, formal cemetery. Binghamton is a cemetery on a much more human level. Consequently it is a very inviting place in which to wander and ponder.

"MY IMMORTALITY IS IN MY BOYS"

Cemeteries are places that evoke metaphysical perspectives. The most obvious to me is the admonition in Ecclesiastes: all is vanity. Nothing in life is permanent. It is a sentiment that underlies all spiritual traditions; not just impermanence, but also that reality is an illusion and a delusion.

There is a joke about how to make God laugh. Tell Him your plans.

People generally do not deal well with reality. There are people, many people, who have a hard time with a reality that is impermanent, spontaneous and unpredictable, so they box it inside a conspiracy theory. Religion ends up catering to such people who want simple answers to questions that have none, at least no explanation that can be expressed in words.

Grave markers with one date.

Living people bring many different perspectives to a graveyard. Some bring sadness as they visit partners, parents, siblings and children. Even a casual graveyard visitor, like I am, experiences the unavoidable sense of residents who have been forgotten. Some mounds are marked "unknown." Others are untended and suggest abandonment. Understandably, we want lives with meaning, and to be remembered in life and beyond is evidence of meaning.

In Binghamton, it seems there are too many buried children. Some, sadly, have but a single date on their headstones. One was stillborn. Others died as teenagers or young adults. Their graves are the most tended and decorated.

Graveyards express our ideas and hopes about eternity. Most residents in Binghampton are of the Mormon persuasion. There are lots of Mormon beliefs carved in stone.

Mormons have very literal ideas about eternity. The Mormon Church teaches that its services are indispensable for a happy eternity. Followers are not just married, they are "sealed" in Mormon temples. Families, like a day in the life of Bill Murray's character in the movie Groundhog Day, are forever. Except even in the movie the repetitive loop ended. For Mormons, there is no such relief. According to their beliefs, they are stuck with family forever. Come some happy time after death, we all get back together again — at least those "sealed" by the Mormon Church — just like before.

One down, one to go for eternity,

The good is celebrated but "the bad is oft interred with their bones," wrote the Bard. Only positive sentiments are carved in the stones of graveyards. It is a fantasy, like our ideas of eternity.

"Dear Mommie, we love you and
we will see you in heaven"
"Good bye for just a little while"

"Families are forever." Which families? Aunts, second cousins, great, great grandfathers and descendants you will never meet?

"Forever young" is commonly carved on the graves of children. They are stuck in time. Residents whose lives spanned six, seven or eight decades are not marked with the sentiment, "Forever old" or "Forever deathly sick". Who decides at what age we live out an eternity? And, if your family is today's normal, why would you want to spend eternity with childhood traumas and sibling rivalries?

The thing is, even in Mormon graveyards there is evidence that eternity is not as tidy as a Mormon "seal" would suggest.

There a many grave sites set aside in eternity for the "sealed" couple. One spouse dies and the final date is chiseled into the joint grave marker. The temporarily surviving spouse is already named and birth dated. There are spaces for the corpse and the date of death.

Except, it seems, that sometimes the surviving spouse has a change of heart. The most obvious example is the modernistic sandstone grave marker for Mr. and Mrs. Mason. Sandra Beth lies buried. We do not know the name of her husband. His name was chiseled out and his plot lies empty. Did he find a new mate for eternity and remarry? One can imagine Mr. Mason stealthily entering the cemetery with hammer and chisel, then going to work on his side of the "Mason" marker.

The Durham grave, 2018

The Durham grave, 2007

More subtle, and now hidden by a clean-up crew, is the unknown story of Armond and Juanita Durham.

Their's is a beautiful site. There are only two hills in the cemetery. One is reserved for the U.S. flag and a couple of park benches. The Durhams' joint burial plot is on the other hill.

A decade ago when I first was wandering around Binghampton Cemetery, I saw the simple plots where Armond was buried in 1981 and Juanita's site was waiting for the inevitable. Whoever decorated the grave had planted a saguaro cactus at the head of each grave site. What I saw a decade ago was that the saguaro planted by Armond's buried head had withered and died. The one waiting for Juanita was healthy and growing.

Since then, a groundskeeper or whoever has cleared out the dead saguaro, and Juanita's saguaro has continued to flourish. It has grown unusually tall and bears many arms.

Now maybe those two saguaros were already growing when Armond was buried. Juanita's saguaro certainly seems older than thirty-seven years. Typically saguaros begin growing branches after fifty or seventy years.

"GONE TO THERAPY"

Regardless whether a Durham or God planted the saguaros, there is no escaping the observation that the fate of the two saguaros is reflected in the death and life of the Durhams. Armond is dead and buried. Juanita was nine years younger than Armond and was only forty-three when he died. If she is still alive, she is eighty-three. Maybe her time has not yet come to be buried beside Armond.

I prefer to think that after Armond died, she went on to live a happy and fruitful life, just like her saguaro.

The Window Install

It's nothing brawny men can't handle. Lift, carry, turn upright, make sure the outside face is facing outside, ease one side in, then center. Piece of cake.

It makes me wonder whether the pyramids were built using suction cups to carry the blocks of stone.

The Window Crash

 

The window seal was broken when we bought the house ten years ago. The streaks inside the double pane were irritating enough, but the rotted frame in which it sat was even more troubling. Previous owners had heavily watered the flower bed below the window without regard to the damage it was causing. The initial rot introduced, multiple patches over the decade, whether caulk, Bondo or epoxy, cracked and failed with time. It was time to bite the bullet and replace the window.

The good news is that the rot was limited to the old wooden window frame and the two-by-sixes on which it sat. Only a few inches of stucco and backing had to be cut away to make room to jam in two new two-by-sixes made of treated lumber. It was an all-day job for two, working from sun-up to sun-down.

They say the replacement window will weigh about four hundred pounds. Judging by the weight of the broken glass (most, but not all of it) that is sitting in our trash can waiting to be picked up (hopefully) this morning, I believe it. Four guys with big suction caps placing a four hundred pound piece of glass in its aluminum frame? Stay tuned for the installation, hopefully within a week or so