Life Without TV

Now Leny is a sweet dog who truly loves her dad. But if she never comes back to Clovis again it's okay with her. Why???? Dad got rid of cable.

Now, we have two households, the mud shashashack (you won't get that reference if you don't do Frank Zappa) and the house in Clovis. Now the shack has the HD T V and all the accoutrements. In Clovis there's a 13" Sharp I won in a sales contest. Got the picture??? No HD, bummer screen size----you know the drill. So I cancelled cable and got wireless internet for the MacBook. Google news works; I can watch a limited selection of streamed movies on Netflix; Hulu is a little boring; I've been watching Rookie Blue on ABC.com. What the heck---Summer is pretty much for reruns anyway!!!!! At least I caught the really important World Cup games in L.C. And the picture on the Mac is HD capable-------

So with retirement imminent and costs lowered---T V suffers. And I really don't care what a Pirate Dog thinks----They don't know it yet but there's gonna be lots of winter nights in the Nargle while we go to NMSU basketball games..........

Reaper

It's way past my bedtime as I sit here writing this post. We're having a majestic thunderstorm--pouring down rain, flashes of lightning, and loud rolling thunder. Since I can't get to sleep anyway, I'll pour a glass of the grape and do this...........

A special friend of one of the kids lost their father recently. This event has shaken up some personalities I thought were pretty stable and had the proverbial "it" together. Others in this group are watching disease and age perform its, to their minds, malicious work.

Now I've made light of death in this blog and been serious about loss as well . But the loss of a parent---------maybe we don't think of it often enough. My mother succumbed to lung cancer the summer after my senior year in high school, about two weeks before I left for college. Her illness put a definite chill in what should have been a triumphal year. My father died in the mid-90s. My maternal aunts were still alive so I was insulated from death being close in my future---so I believe one might think---those "old" people are in the front line, I'm ok on the bench behind them.

Last November the last of my mother's sisters died. Now my generation--my brother, two first cousins, me----we're the oldest generation, the front line if you will. Actually, just to highlight the absurdity, one of my first cousins has a daughter two months older than me even though I'm a generation ahead of her. And all things being equal, shouldn't the ole Reaper take the oldest generation first, in the natural order of things-----excepting man-made unnatural ends caused by cigarettes, car crashes, war, and those other human calamities that so rob us of our "best and brightest"............

So a parent's death puts one closer to that first line of humanity's defense against the irresistible power of the Grim Reaper. As long as that buffer generation is there, death is a long way off, not to be feared or even much contemplated. But it's still there, lurking, moving forward in the queue of thoughts our conscious mind ponders.

I'm reminded of the Star Trek movies, numbers two and three, when Captain James Tiberius Kirk (all my kids know his middle name) experiences the death of his best friend, Spock, and his son, David. Kirk always "cheated death", never "faced it like this." So like the attitude of the generation with parents or aunts and uncles preceding them. Don't need to confront the concept until you are the front line generation, when there are no more planted rows between you and the ultimate harvest.

I don't know if this post provides any comfort for the loss experienced. I guess one could always turn to Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." I'm sure some might seek solace in the Bible. Some might believe in re-incarnation (a Yankee fan finding Nirvana coming back as a Red Sox fan---sorry,fp). But I think the important lesson is that while you have life, enjoy it and live it. Celebrate the dead, the body is gone but the spirit joins eternity and will always BE.

Requiem for the Dark Lord

So strange----Monday night, for no apparent reason, I put in the dvd player "Episode VI" of George Lucas's masterpiece Star Wars, more commonly known as "Return of the Jedi." This is the episode in which Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi knight and defeats the emperor while besting Darth Vader in a duel of light sabers and rescuing the dormant Anakin Skywalker, Luke and Leia's father, from the evil Dark Lord that he had become (Vader).

Given the time difference between the East Coast and New Mexico, my viewing was possibly in conjunction with the death of the creator of the "Evil Empire"--George Steinbrenner died sometime Monday evening of a heart attack at 80 years old. Possibly while I was watching Luke remove the mask from Vader so his father could view him "with [his] own eyes." Such are the currents and eddies of the space-time continuum in which we humans exist...........

So what????

Well, I'll tell you what----I'm a baby boomer, coming of age in the '50s and '60s. I grew up in southern Connecticut, not far from New York City. I was a serious Yankee fan my entire youth. I so applauded Don Larsen's perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series adding to the glory of "the Mick"'s triple-crown season. And I so cried when Bill Mazeroski, 2nd baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, Virginia, they really used to get to the World Series) had that walk-off home run in Game 7 in 1960. Barely cleared the fence as I recall. He was a lifetime .260 hitter, hitting .273 in the 1960 season. And he beat my Yankees!!!! And I loathed Roger Maris for getting that 61st home run. We all wanted Mickey Mantle to be THE ONE to break Babe Ruth's record. Maris was from the Kansas City A's, which weren't much better than a farm team for the Yankees back then.

Then Steinbrenner bought the Yankees. Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, A-Rod. Money and mediocrity. Jeter's number 2 may one day hang near Mickey's 7, Yogi's 8, Roger's 9. He's the only one of the crop Georgie bought who might deserve that honor. My allegiance shifted to the Red Sox and I've never looked back. How fitting that the owner of the Evil Empire in the Bronx may have met his end as I watched Darth meet his.

Rumor has it Darth's middle initial was "G" for "George."

Biking at Stahmann's

The Pirate Dogs invited a lot of their family and friends to go on a bike ride at Stahmann's Pecan farm Saturday July 3. Even though they didn't make it (too hard to pedal with dog legs), their parents did. So here are some pictures:

The invite said we'd bike through the orchard but it was really 5K down the highway and back. First the State Police shut down the southbound lane of N M Highway 28.

Some groups were decorated and ready to go:

One kid had a cool bike seat up in front of her dad:

Our dad was ready to roll:

This kid had a great bike----Tonka!!!!!

All we can say is "Tonka Trucking!!!!!"

So away the bikers go, down Highway 28 past the Stahmann Pecan Store and Gift Shop.

There were around 150 bikes that did the ride. This is an idea how it looked:

And though it was just before noon on a hot Saturday and we didn't go into the actual orchards, the ride was mostly on road like this:

Serious tree roof, baby!!!!

Hope next year they let us ride in the orchards on those dirt roads they use for machinery and along the irrigation ditches.

But definitely a ride worth taking. Joining us next year????

What a difference a Couple of Days Make

The last Friday in June found me making the 300 mile trek from Clovis to Las Cruces. It being so close to the summer solstice, the sun was still in the sky well into the trip. As I descended the 3500 feet from Apache Summit down through the Mescalero Apache reservation, I could still detect the orb's red glow like a fire over the mountains on the west side of the Tularosa Basin. If you aren't familiar with the geography of this region, the Tularosa Basin is about 50 miles wide bordered on the east by the Sacramento Mountains, dominated by 12,000+ft Sierra Blanca, and on the west by the San Andres and Organ ranges. The western mountains look like the shield wall in Frank Herbert's Dune. And that's a very pertinent analogy because those western mountains separate the shoot 'em up boys from the shoot 'em downers.

There's nothing like a good rain in the desert. Scents come alive. The very earth seems to change and welcome the moisture. The gypsum dunes that are White Sands seem to repel the droplets. But still they fall. It was just a surreal sight---the full moon rising but its body blocked by the thunderheads, its beams piercing through to light up the sky below the clouds. A flash of light, the rumble of thunder, rain so heavy the wipers could barely keep the windscreen clear. And THAT sign--"Welcome to the White Sands Missile Range"---and the first highway sign after what we supposed was a lightening strike marked the entrance to HELSTF (High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility). As the ipod commenced one of Jimi Hendrix's most way-out songs 1983 ("Hooray I awake from yesterday/Alive that the war is here to stay/So my love Katherina and me/Decide to take a last walk through the doors to the sea/Not to die but to be reborn/Away from this land all tattered and torn/forever....."), HELSTF was upon us---lights in the darkness, some activities unknown and unknowable in the New Mexico desert------was that really lightening? Was that storm really from Mother Nature? Land of Enchantment?

Sunday afternoon, sun bright, temps approaching 100F near the White Sands National Monument. All was quiet passing through the missile range. Steve Winwood's classic Mr. Fantasy filled the vehicle's speakers. No sign of any storm, natural or otherwise, just the desert and the gypsum dunes awaiting the next wanderer.............