My Favorite Day of the Year

December 21 is always my favorite day of the year. No matter what.

It's the winter solstice, which may seem weird as a favorite day, until you consider that it only gets lighter from there on out. And light, in this part of the country, is at a premium from the end of October until the middle of February. The sun doesn't make it over the mountains until almost nine a.m., and by 4:20 p.m., it's pretty much dead dark.
I know it's not Alaska, or Iceland, but still. It's dark here. And wet.

This December 21--yesterday--offered a little more excitement than usual, and a lot more natural light than we normally have. It started snowing at 3 p.m. on December 20 and it didn't let up until 2 a.m. this morning, December 22. Essentially, the winter solstice was one big thirty-six hour blizzard. And it was a heck of a lot of fun.

We skied in the neighborhood, hung out on the street corners with neighbors we'd never met before while their kids sledded down the hills. No one even thought about getting in their cars, as the 8 inches of snow we received fell on the inch of snow and ice that had coated the roads (and never melted) two days before. The city was (is, still) paralyzed, last minute Christmas shoppers gave up and instead built snowmen in the traffic circles and helped their elderly neighbors shovel their walks.

Of course, the whole happy scene happened all over again today. Because that snow just kept on falling, until the wee hours of this morning.

And the light--oh, the light! Instead of gray, our world is white and setting off colors we don't normally notice at this time of year.
All a reminder that every day only gets longer from here on out!
(Oh, and that license plate? I've pretty much never seen icicles like that in Seattle, no matter what day of the year it is.)

Photos: icicles in Seattle
Oliver pulling Mike on skis
snow in the bamboo
snow on the crabapples
our house, Seattle; December 22, 2008

Tenacity

Hypomene

Somehow, that wasn't the way I had envisioned that word.

I've heard it so many times, in sermons taught by Earl. I saw it in my mind's eye as: upo meno . . .

I don't suppose it really matters how the Greek is spelled, what matters is the meaning.

Perserverance, tenacity. Stick-to-it-ness (Earl's definition.)

We're all in this together. Bad economic times, job loss, collapse. Billion dollar bailouts we can't afford--printing more money? Will that really help?

I challenge you to use your gift dollars this Holiday season to help restock the dwindling inventory at your local food bank. Or to donate all those old clothes you don't wear anymore (especially the warm shoes) to your local Salvation Army.

We are all in this together. And it's going to take tenacity to see us through.

Hypomene
Stick-to-it-ness
Merry Christmas!

Photo: Tree, Umtanum Canyon; April, 2005

Bother Each Other

From: The Snows of Kilimanjaro; Ernest Hemingway

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

"The marvelous thing is that it is painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."

"Is it really?"

"Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you."

"Don't. Please don't!"

"Look at them," he said. "Now, is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of the mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain three of the big birds squatted obsceneley, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

"They've been there since the day the truck broke down," he said. "Today's the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That's funny now."

"I wish you wouldn't," she said.

"I'm only talking," he said. "It's much easier if I talk. But I don't want to bother you.

Photo: peg and kristin, Mt. Kilimanjaro; August, 2004

Our Next President, and . . . A Little Fun

OBAMA'S USE OF COMPLETE SENTENCES STIRS CONTROVERSY

A STARK DEPARTURE FROM THE LAST EIGHT YEARS

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it,stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov.Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

I would annotate this entry, if I knew who to annotate. But I don't. Please enjoy, but know I did not write it, and I have no idea from where it came.

Photo: View from Chimayo; December, 2007

Garrison Keillor on Barack Obama

"No Need to Look Canadian"
November 12, 2008

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn't gloating, it's satisfaction at a job well done.

He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor-- he said, "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us A 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He'll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law.

I just can't imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference -- the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis -- you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early '90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur. The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

But, enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now.

The mind reels.

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor.
All rights reserved.Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Photo: The Ranch; Creede, CO

Wine Talons

[Given the extensive list in my blog post from November 10 http://chimayobound2.blogspot.com/2008/11/where-are-women_2964.html]

". . . it seems reasonable to ask if some link exists between alcoholism and creativity. Over the years, many of our best [American] artists have accepted such a connection. In fact, several have claimed they had little choice but to drink, and heavily at that, if they were to perform at their creative peak.

In this view, creativity flowers at its fullest when the constrictions inhibiting everyday life are swept aside by alcohol. Thus drinking is believed to open the windows of the soul; true vision is achieved only when the mind has been liberated by liquour:

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence---
Hart Crane; "The Wine Menagerie"

Sincerely believing that steady drinking must surely be the right approach to the muse, the writers considered in this book (Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and O'Neill) embarked on writing and drinking careers together, with deadly effect on their creative powers.

A closer look at the long list of alcoholic writers reveals that four were suicides, while nearly all the rest burned themselves out at surprisingly early stages of their careers . . . producing increasingly feeble works, a situation suggesting the relevance here of Fitzgerald's much-quoted remark 'There are no second acts in American lives.' We had many brilliant beginnings in American writers but far fewer sustained careers." From: "The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer," by Tom Dardis

Photo:
zebra carcass; Hell's Gate, Kenya
June, 2004

A Tribute to Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba . . .
A great loss to our world. But, at least, we can rest easy knowing she saw the election of the first African American president on November 4.

Please watch, and listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6w1u8o9ZBc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow40LQs0ue4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-VrfadKbco&feature=related

And please read from, 'Times Online," the article reprinted, in part, below:

Nelson Mandela was among thousands of South Africans to pay tribute today to the singer and activist, Miriam Makeba, who died suddenly after taking part in a concert against the Italian Mafia. Her death provoked shock and widespread mourning in a country enchanted by the sweetness and shining sound of her singing.

Mandela, now in his 91st year and who rarely makes public statements any more, led the tributes to Makeba. "She was South Africa's first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika," he said. "The sudden passing of our beloved Miriam has saddened us … For many decades, starting in the years before we went to prison, MaMiriam featured prominently in our lives and we enjoyed her moving performances. When she went into exile she continued to make us proud as she used her worldwide fame to focus attention on the abomination of apartheid. Her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours. It was fitting that her last moments were spent on a stage, enriching the hearts and lives of others - and again in support of a good cause."

Relatives and friends who first encouraged Makeba to sing compared her voice to that of a nightingale. Her distinctive style, which bewitched the world in the 1960s and 1970s, combined traditional African melodies, jazz and folk with the unique and dynamic rhythms of South Africa's black townships.

While she toured with Harry Belafonte and sang with Marilyn Monroe at John F. Kennedy's birthday party at Madison Square Garden in 1962, her music was banned in South Africa by apartheid governments. When she first travelled to New York in 1960 to perform with Belafonte, the Pretoria government refused to allow her to return home.
She lived in exile for the next 31 years. Mandela asked her to come home after his release from life imprisonment in February 1990 and when she arrived in Johannesburg she said: "I never understood why I couldn't come home. I never committed any crime."

Makeba collapsed shortly after a performance in the southern Italian town of Castel Volturno yesterday evening and died in hospital early today. She was paying homage to six Africans killed by the Camorra mafia two months ago and to the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano who exposed the murders and was himself threatened with death.

South Africa's foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement: "One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing. Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song."

Makeba's body is being flown back to South Africa for a funeral and burial in Johannesburg.

Photos: Loitoktok, Kenya; August, 2004; Kijabe Town, Kenya; July, 2004