Tag Archives: family

To Whom Cares: Forum’s Working!

Posted on by
28

HERE’S A YOU-CAN-COLLAPSE-AND-SLEEP-NOW delicious name-your-favorite celebration cake for Chris our Webmaster! The forum’s up under “Community” on the menu bar effective now.

No rules for anybody except post something inappropriate and I’ll delete it and shut down your access. You’ve found what “inappropriate” means after you’ve been deleted.

Since I am fairly prim on coarse language and low-class ideas, assume I’m spring-loaded to the REJECT position, don’t mess with me and everything will be fine. Here’s a guide: so far there hasn’t been a single post on the site that I’ve found less that positive and thoughtful and appropriate for discussion.

Let me or Chris know any problems you have with the forum/discussion pages should you decide to play there and run into trouble.

You can pick up the title of any journal entries from the beginning of the site, if you feel like developing those ideas. Be careful about disagreeing with me, though. I shall allow only a hundred, that is, a single hundred disagreements on any one topic before I’ll begin to consider I might have said something wrong.

— Richard

Truthful Arguments

Posted on by
18

HER HUSBAND WAS UPSET.  ”I can’t believe you forgot our anniversary!  And you never remember, last year it was the same thing!  I’ve got to admit, you’re just plain thoughtless, you know how important this day is to me, and you don’t care one bit how I feel…I’d swear you go out of your way to hurt me!”

She listened.  When he paused, frustrated, she said, “Jack, I love you.  Your truthful argument, please?”

Continue reading →

A Different Family

Posted on by
11

THE PHOTO BELOW is the front lawn of Russ and Lou Ann Garner’s house, fronting one of the thousand lakes in central Florida.

Once a year, the Garners host an event, inviting a swarm of light seaplanes to descend first to the lake and thence to the lawn, pilots and spouses most of them long-time friends, getting together to fly and to talk about their adventures and their aircraft.

The Garners’ Landing Splash-In is a type-club splash, where all the aircraft are a single kind, a dozen or more amphibians, all of them SeaReys  (well, there was one Lake Amphibian, way out on the beach, flown in by your reporter).

A first-time visitor, not even a SeaRey owner, I was warmly welcomed, as would be anyone who said what I said: “What a pretty little airplane!”

Continue reading →

The New Book

Posted on by
17

Here’s what it looks like, first draft, first chapter, first page:

I’m some ten chapters into it, working title Deeper, which is OK for now.  It lacks a certain je ne sais quite quoi, but I don’t worry much about titles till the story’s finished, and then titles are, as Mark Twain might say, damn important.  For now, foof.

The thing that I come to you about for counsel, as mentioned in the last post, is what do I do now?

The book is a full-time fire-consuming process.

This website is a full-time fire-consuming process, too.

I love writing both.  I am one person (or rather I have been giving my consent to the belief that in this illusion of spacetime the I that I consider “me” may use only one body at a time), and in common with most people who love their work I’d sometimes relish the chance to run several bodies simultaneously.

The answer, as Jennifer suggested, is time/consciousness management.  That means, does it, cool the enthusiasm a bit, realize that there are dogwalks to take, dishes to wash, bills to pay?  Or does time management not mean cooling at all?

I’ll go back to my question, if you dare take time from your own experience to consider mine: how would you handle this lovely challenge?

Francais-faux et moi

Posted on by
6

I LOVE languages.  I speak none of them.

It took me a while to realize that my American is a bit quirky to others.  I can get along in the language, pass as American, but when I start talking freely I lapse into Writer, splash about in colors instead of the better-understandable.

I’m careful, in some quarters, to say, “My, it’s foggy!”  instead of the more natural, “It’s breathing marshmallows!”

Even when I write, there’s a voice: “Careful now.  Don’t push words too far.”  You can imagine.  Just the words to make me grab my paint-pot and set off running.

My high-school Spanish failed me in Madrid as I found that “Quiero te’,” to the waitress is preferred to, “Te quiero.”  But instead of killing me, she laughed.  I learned a volume from that laugh.

Better learn French from just plain reading the language, figuring it out, I thought, instead of the agonizing declensions memorized, scores and hundreds of them.  And look there; my machine doesn’t have keys for the subscripts and superscripts, as if I knew what they are and where to put them.

So for the longest time I was stricken dumb by my conviction that whatever I said, I’d say it wrong.

Enter my Epiphany of the Day and thanks to the waitress:  Who cares?

Continue reading →

When school kills (it does), and when it dies (it will), where’s education?

Posted on by
3

I COULD PICK any country, but I’ll pick the United States of America, because I’ve flown over it most of my life.  But this flight, your permission, I’ll do something different.

I’ve fit my flying goggles with these Mark IV Education Lenses.  Invented by me.  Look through the glass and see a quick green line for every person on the ground who has a college degree, a brown line for every other person, the un-degreed.

We see farther as we fly higher, of course, so let us cruise super high, for a biplane, way up at 11,000 feet.

(I hear the airline pilots snickering: “ ‘Way up at eleven thousand.’  Oooh…that’s really high! Snicker-snicker.)

Very well, you with the gold stripes on your shoulders, this is a thought-experiment, OK?  Just sit there in the front cockpit for a minute and look out through your Mark Fours.  I have something to show you!

Continue reading →

Lucky and me

Posted on by
14

 

HERE’S THE LAST photo I took of my dog Lucky before he died.

We had been together ten years, nearly every day, or about 6,000 walks together.  Sometimes he’d bark at things, he’d chase after rabbits to watch ‘em run, bark at deer to see ‘em run, go charging at me and away, get me to run, too.

He had a gait, a pace that was split-second rhythm, a furry steam-locomotive set to Long Distance Cruise: chuf-chuf-chuf-chuf-chuf…it was sheer beauty to watch that dog coming back to me after a rabbit-training session.

He’d get burrs in his fur, and stand patiently while I brushed them out, he’d lie on his observation-post at the hilltop by the house, looking over the island, checking all was peaceful in the valley below.

When we brought Zsa-Zsa home as a puppy, he looked at us. “A puppy.  Are you sure you want to do this?”

Continue reading →

Autographology

Posted on by
1

I USED TO WONDER about autographs.

What is so important, what is the compelling magnetism in someone’s signature of their own name?  Everybody has their own way of writing, of course they do, but what difference does it make, how we trace our letters?

Every once in a while I’d find a signed copy of a book, glance at the inscription: Jane Johnson.  Or Best Wishes, Jane Johnson.  Why would anybody cherish a copy of a book because someone had…well, because they had wrecked the thing by writing in it?

Then for a while, I don’t know why maybe because my higher self got tired of hearing me whining about why autographs, I wondered on graphology.  Do we really scroll our inner character along with the characters we write by hand?  Not hardly, I thought, but I’ll read whatever you have to say of what you’ve learned, Mr. Handwriting Expert.

I finished the book, changed.  Why, It does have meaning, after all, those lines we make on paper!

Continue reading →

Fams

Posted on by
7

IF SOMEONE we believe is famous, let’s say the American actor George Clooney, really likes the work of someone else we think is famous, let’s say the Italian actress Sophia Loren, and she in turn really likes George Clooney’s films, who’s the fan?

Both of them?

When they meet, knowing this, do they treat each other as fans?

I know this sounds silly, but there’s a point to my little thought-experiment, and it turns around the word “fan.”

Continue reading →

If this story is political, I’m takin’ it down.

Posted on by
6

YOU’D THINK the New York Times and I would be great friends.

The newspaper published a little story I wrote long ago about managing to win a game from a highly touted chess computer.  (IBM claimed that it was a computer error that allowed a mistake and would I please go away and not come back.)

Then the Times sent me a news item, that Jonathan Seagull had been declared an enemy of the Chinese people (along with Beethoven, as I recall), and did I care to comment.

I did care to comment, and my demand for satisfaction from Premier Chou En-lai, that we resolve the issue through a winner-take-all table tennis match between him and me was issued on the pages of that newspaper.  I may have inferred that I possessed skill and speed in serves and returns somewhat in excess of the truth, but no matter, my challenge was sufficiently ferocious that the Premier did not respond, and I consider myself victor by default.

Continue reading →