Mission Accomplished

If there was ever any question why U.S. troops will be in Iraq for 100 years, as predicted by Citizen McCain, take note of this bit of business news from Slate:

The New York Times leads with word that four big Western oil companies are on the verge of signing no-bid contracts with Iraq. The contracts would take Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total, and BP, who were the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, back to Iraq 36 years after Saddam Hussein kicked them out....Iraq is widely seen as one of the few countries in the world where oil production could expand by a significant amount in a short period of time, and more than 40 companies from around the world wanted in on the action. But Iraq's Oil Ministry decided to award no-bid contracts, which, as the NYT points out, "are unusual for the industry." ...under a clause in the draft contracts, the companies would be allowed to "match bids from competing companies to retain the work once it is opened to bidding."

Lest we forget what Calvin Coolidge reminded us some time ago, the bidness of Amerika is bidness, even when it's a cozy little no-bid bidness deal involving the takeover of the U.S. government. Now, back to Citizen McCain's campaign contributions from ExxonMobil.

strawberry fields forever

Good news and bad news, as far as the garden. Some experiments succeed, some fail miserably, and some you just learn from. Timing is everything.

I had big ideas in early spring about starting peppers from seed, and sister Jo Jo supplied packets of six different kinds of pepper seeds as a birthday present in the dead of winter. I made up six flats of seedlings, they were sprouting in the spare bathtub, and things were looking good.

But timing is everything. Those tiny seedlings would need light soon, and temperatures were just starting to rise outside. When it seemed warm enough to harden them off, I placed the flats of seedlings on long shelves beside a shed in the sunniest corner of the garden and started prepping the four beds where the 60-80 pepper plants would go. Optimism was running high.

Did I mention that timing is everything? In late May, about the time I should have been putting those baby plants in the ground, I took off out of town for a week, leaving them to sit in about half an inch of soil, in flats, on a shelf, in the sun. Not what a responsible farmer would do.

The weather warmed up, as it does Memorial Day weekend. Instead of everyday rain, we got everyday sunshine. Perfect for the timely gardeners who paid attention and planted their vegetables. Not so good for the 60-80 seedlings with two leaves each, baking on the shelf in their southern exposure. Hence there will be no pepper harvest this year.

The good news is the strawberry patch is having a banner year. We've been picking berries for about three weeks now, a big bowl full every weekend, with no end in sight. This bounty will end soon, of course, as strawbs are a seasonal phenomenon, but for now it is a treat to have fresh berries every day. Topped with whole milk Greek yoghurt, there is nothing quite like it.

Maybe I'll transplant strawberries in those other beds that were meant for peppers. Maybe the entire garden should be one big strawberry patch, except the part where the llamas and goats get to graze. Or maybe not.

Pistons-Celtics-Lakers

You had to be there. Cobo Arena, the Detroit riverfront, mid-1960s. The Palace, Auburn Hills, late-1980s. Charlie and Helen's living room, the Cumberland Plateau, 2008. Sawyer Auditorium, La Crosse, Wisconsin, late 1950s. Our driveway, anytime.

It was only fitting that the NBA playoffs were on ESPN while I was in Tennessee recently, and my Dad and I got to watch a couple of games between the Pistons and the Celtics. It was the rough and ready present-day Pistons, assembled by general manager Joe Dumars, the good guy of the Bad Boys of the 1990s, against the new-look Celtics, put together by general manager Danny Ainge, the irritant of the Bird-McHale-Parrish Celtics of the 1980s.

My Dad and I speak a kind of basketball shorthand: mention a player's name and it immediately evokes an entire lineup, plus coach, rivalries, successes, failures, who went to college where, and what a character so-and-so was. The theater of my youth and the man who introduced me to the game.

This year the Boston Celtics of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, et al., prevailed over the Detroit Pistons of Rip Hamilton, Chauncey Billups, Rasheed Wallace, et al., but it took seven games, so Detroit can hold its head high. Which means Boston goes on to the finals against Kobe and the Lakers, the made-for-TV matchup that has the network hypesters of hoops creaming their jeans with comparisons to Magic, Kareem, and Worthy versus Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parrish. It is showtime indeed.

Seeing this group, you can't help but think about an earlier generation of great teams with a different combination of skills and temperaments. Take the Pistons of the Isiah Thomas-Bill Laimbeer era - please. With the peerless rebounder Dennis Rodman (before the tattoos and technicolor hair), the enforcer Rick Mahorn, the low-key Dumars, and other role players, they were an oddly balanced bunch.

How about the in-your-face speed of the Celtics when they had John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, and Jo Jo White. A generation earlier, of course, was the classic Celtic team of Coach Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, Satch Sanders, Tom Heinsohn, and several decent players who became better by being around them. Before that the Celtics were already perennial champions with Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, and the memorable Jim Luskitoff. Jim who? You know, Luskitoff, their hatchet man, who came in for a few minutes each game to put the muscle on the opposing team's hot scorer, knock him around a little, pick up a couple of fouls, and sit down.

Dad and I watched all these guys - in person, on TV - and felt like we knew them personally because we knew their work, their play, their weak spots, their basketball IQ. He started taking me to high school and college games when I was still learning to dribble, and La Crosse State had some good teams. Gar Ammerman and Gary Parker were a dynamite pair of guards one year. Why do I remember these names?

For the same reasons I remember seeing Elgin Baylor of the Lakers score 56 points in a game against the Pistons in the old Olympia Stadium, which was really a hockey arena, but they hadn't built Cobo yet, and the Pistons had just arrived from Fort Wayne. Elgin later teamed with Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain on one of the all-time great Laker teams. Why did we like the Lakers? Because before Los Angeles, they were the Minneapolis Lakers, of course. You remember George Mikan, right? Vern Mickelson? Hot Rot Hundley? Household names.

So the game is on, and we go on like this for a while, and Dad brings up Bill Bradley. Now here is an exemplary human being, and he hands me a copy of John McPhee's book A Sense of Where You Are, about Bradley's years at Princeton, and we remember his teammates on the New York Knicks of the early 1970s: Dave DeBusschere (University of Detroit, former Piston), Willis Reed (Grambling?), Jerry Lucas (Ohio State, former Cincinnati Royal), Walt Frazier (Southern Illinois), Earl the Pearl Monroe (Winston-Salem), and Phil Jackson, who must have learned something sitting on the bench, because now he's the mastermind coach of the Lakers (not to mention Michael Jordan's coach at the Bulls, but that's another story).

Have I missed anyone? Yes, I've left out hundreds of players, many of whom I've forgotten, and most of the teams, some of which don't exist anymore, but this is already way too esoteric. I mean who pays attention to these things, but I guess that's the point. There's a game on in the other room as I write this, and I sort of care whether this group of Celtics can beat this group of Lakers, and it's Father's Day, and I appreciate the connection.

You'll never guess who I bumped into at the MoMA

Jessi Golly put on a tux last weekend for a very special event at the Museum of Modern Art that he and Alex attended. There must have been quite a crowd. I heard through the grapevine that at one point he took a step backward but a hand restrained him. He turned around and saw that he had backed into Claire Danes.

La-dee-dah!

Qicycle

Spelled ch'i-cycle in the old Wade-Giles system, prounounced CHEE-sick-uhl, as if the makers of popsicles and creamsicles came out with a cheddar-flavored frozen treat on a stick! But no, it can't be found in the frozen food section because it was last seen making a left turn onto Plumb Road from Old 3C.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's just some guy on a bike pulling in and pushing out the life-force of the universe.

The other day I made an interesting discovery that has the potential to change my workouts significantly. I found out I can practice qigong (ch'i-kung) while riding a bike! In effect, I can grasp two sparrows with one stone, so to speak, and work out more kinks than I could before by doing a little self-healing while two-wheeling.

It's not like Madame Curie discovering radium, or Signor Columbo disovering Amerika, or Sir Isaac Newton discovering the laws of thermodynamics, but it will do for a Sunday afternoon in central swingstate. And among the millions of practitioners, Eastern and Western, who have done qigong, I'm sure a few have tried it on their Huffy, their Raleigh, their Trek, their Cannondale, or their Motobecane.

Notwithstanding all that, and keeping things in humble perspective, it felt like a a bit of a breakthrough when a little arm stretch out to both sides, kind of like wings extending from the shoulderblades, turned into a full-blown round of "Lift Qi Up, Pour Qi Down" while cruising up Tussic Road on my black Schwinn, Schvin.

But when I shared my insight with some friends at our Thursday night class, they were like "Uh-oh, we're gonna read about you in the paper one of these days." Not to worry, I'll be careful. Yes, you have to go no-handed to really do this, and I only go no-handed on smooth stretches of road or trail with minimal turns and traffic anyway, so it's not that different. I'll try to use common sense and not get too carried away with the sheer awesomeness of it.

There Be Dragons

Aye, and they be real, me hearties! Medieval maps showed them far from shore, at the edge of the world where you don't want to go, lest you fall to your doom.

Call it 'negative energy', or the 'shadow self', or your 'personal demons', or your 'darkness', or that scary corner in the back of the closet. Winston Churchill called it his 'black dog'. Most people these days use the popular clinical term 'depression'. Rev. Susan, in a sermon a year or more ago, used the image of the dragon, which strikes me as more balanced and multifaceted.

The dragon might not be empirically known by Doctor Science or even acknowledged by others, but you know it when you encounter it. Like in the children's story, if you (or your mother) deny its existence, it gets bigger and bigger until it fills up the house.

It can be a metaphor for any number of powerful entities: a dangerous challenge ahead, a traumatic experience past, untapped internal energy, a source of creative/destructive power, or just some weird shit lurking just outside cognition. No doubt Freudians and Jungians and Adlerians all have taken their turn trying to slay or embrace or harness the dragon.

When I was little I had what in a later era would have been called a sleep disorder. I slept deeply, so when I was out, I was out. I had quite a few major league nightmares; some I remembered and some I didn't. My parents and siblings told me I would sleepwalk and do nutty things that I didn't recall in the morning. I guess that was my childhood dragon.

You can try to kill it or try to tame it, slay it or dance with it, fence it in or wall it out, appease it, drug it, give it space or try to channel it where you want it. Easier said than done, since the dragon is elusive, evasive, sneaky, inconsistent, and unpredictable as well as invisible.

I suspect that some dragons are manic; when they visit there is no stopping the energy and activity, it's go go go. Other dragons are depressive; there's no go at all, nothing much to do, and what's the point anyway. Maybe the dragon is bipolar. Like magnets, batteries, neurons, thunderstorms, the tao, digital technology, and a lot of other contained, high-energy entities.

I have a feeling I'm going to revisit this topic.

Zelda Golly, Shift Leader

Buy the book! See the movie! Action figure sold separately.

A few weeks ago, Zelda came home with something weighing on her mind, so she talked to her dad. This, in case you didn't know, is what her dad lives for.

Another branch of the store where she works has an opening for a shift leader, and her manager encouraged her to apply. A 'shift leader' is a step up in responsibility from a 'bookseller', the position at which she was hired about a year ago. She is thinking of applying, but she isn't sure for a number of reasons:

Is the retail bookstore business what she really wants to be doing "for the rest of her life"?

Would a job with more responsibility keep her in this line of work longer, and therefore keep her from doing what she eventually wants to do?

Will she like the new job, the new store environment, and the new people as much as she likes the job, the store, and the people where she is now?

Since most of these questions cannot be answered with certainty, should fear of the unknown keep her from a potentially good opportunity?

I didn't tell her anything she didn't already know, but I think we both benefited from unpacking some of the issues involved. At least I did, mainly by getting to witness the clear, methodical, Nordic thinking that was going on.

It's another one of many small steps forward in living an examined life, realistically assessing the situation, honestly evaluating your own abilities, attitudes, and motives in order to make informed choices. Beyond that point, other factors will determine what we don't ourselves control. I think I'm making progress toward graduation.

She decided to go for it.

Zelda turned 24 later that week, completing her second tour of the heavens and returning to the Year of the Rat, in which she was born under the constellation Taurus. Tough cookie.

She sent me a text message last night. She got the promotion.

If it's physical, it's therapy

When I was a TA in the phys ed department at Swingstate U. (go bucks) one of my students wore a T-shirt to class with that statement printed on the front. She was a physical therapy major, natch, and not only was she wise, but she looked good in the T-shirt. I subscribe to it. The statement, not the shirt.

The subject of physical therapy kept coming up during a recent trip to Tennessee. The soundtrack coming out of central swingstate swung from Moby to Steely Dan to Chopin to an elevated political discussion from Miami University to "Fresh Air" from WEKU in Richmond and "All Things Considered" from WNOX in Knoxville. The surrealistic movie in the foreground features an aging son going to see his parents for a few days to see if he can help. By four o'clock he was doing qigong in the shade of their back yard facing the first fairway when they got home from the two-week checkup with the neurosurgeon. Warning: Everything in this movie means at least two things.

Dr. Justice removed the staples from the top of Charlie's head, which appeared to have healed nicely, and pronounced him fit to gradually resume his normal activities. Driving the car is okay with a passenger to keep him company, so I've done some of that, and his driving is fine. No golf for awhile, easy on the lifting, bending, getting up, twisting, and turning. Golf, it turns out, is a fairly violent game if you consider the whip-like action through the hips, trunk, and shoulders, and we don't want to shake anything loose.

The physical therapist did a kind of stress test on arms, legs, and balance, and it appears that the major motor neurons on both right and left sides are functioning, which is very good news, so no PT was prescribed. Dr. Justice will schedule a CT scan before Dad's next check-up in six weeks. Then we will see a digital image of how completely the gray matter is returning to its regular shape after the pressure of the bruise was released.

In the meantime, there was a lawn to mow, an old water heater to dispose of, and weeds to pull. In many ways, it was like any other visit with the folks, except their main job was to keep me busy doing the things they would have done if they were 100 percent. So we scrubbed some deck chairs and painted the railing, put screens in the screen doors, and took the water heater to the recycling center. It was fun hanging out together and satisfying to get a few things done.

Dad and I went for a drive around the Glade, took a tour of the new Wellness Center and its impressive array of exercise equipment, and checked out the Recreation Center next door. Charlie and Helen are pretty good driving in their neighborhood, but it can get a little tense out on the highway, so I did most of the driving outside the Glade. We did an errand at Ace Hardware and the Green Grocer, then cruised past the new Food City supermarket, soon to open in a very close and convenient spot.

Mom and Dad saw people they know everywhere we'd go, some casual acquaintances and some fast friends. They are well-connected in their community via church and golf and other social networks, and I get the feeling that people value those connections highly. I think I shook hands with a hundred nice people during the week and even remembered a couple of their names. It's easy to see how comfortable Charlie and Helen are in this small Cumberland Plateau community of largely like-minded midwestern people.

Dad keeps in touch with the guys by phone, finding alternates to fill places in the regular foursomes, and diligently maintains the records of The Mulligans league, including raw scores, handicaps, net scores, team scores, standings, skins, dues, and winnings. They count on him to keep track, and he delivers up-to-date scorecards on time. Note to self: make your OCD work for you.

Every day we would have breakfast together in their kitchen and start the day's activities. There was ample time to relax and talk in between chores, and I would duck out to the flagstone terrace in the back yard once or twice a day to do a taiji or qigong form. Mom was curious enough to spend an hour one day learning a couple of basic stances in an effort to use the pull of gravity to straighten and lengthen her forward-bending spine.

Dad was a tougher sell, although he yielded when I pushed the idea of looking into a membership at the Wellness Center. The in-your-face salespersonal trainer we talked to did not win his confidence through enthusiastic exhortation to "do something," and I had to admit that the information they presented was unconvincing. But I couldn't let the subject rest.

The day I was to leave, I was thinking outloud that ideally Max, my nephew who is the athletic trainer at the College of DuPage (COD) in Chicago, would spend a day or two with his grandparents putting together a suitable rehab program. I made the case that Max knows more than all the personal trainers put together, and we know and trust him. Charlie was open to the idea, so I talked to Max on the phone. Lo and behold, COD's seasons are over for the year, so he had a one-week window and quickly agreed to come to Tennessee for the weekend.

Pinch me.

Arriving back in central swingstate was the surreal part, so I made myself a Magritta (tequila, lemon juice, triple sec, tonic) and a salad. There is an ironing board leaning on the front of my dresser. The warm red-orange kitchen has been repainted and rearranged in black and white. Where am I? I read the paper and call the folks to tell them I am home. I think this transition will take a while.

transcendental aesthetic

Music Sunday caught me completely off guard. I was looking forward to this special annual event at the Old North Church, but I wasn't expecting it to penetrate the armor protecting the quivering mass of emotional goo inside. I must have walked in at 10:30 with a few unresolved issues, and in some ways it has been a trying couple of weeks, but by 11:30 my heart chakra was working overtime.

You could say the music got to me. It wasn't so much the choir's rousing, up-beat setting of a verse from the Heart Sutra, "Gate Gate," although that probably put me in a certain frame of mind. And it wasn't Sarabeth's soprano solo of a traditional spiritual, although that too was rivetting.

It was when Steve was turning the pages while Daniel, his nine-year-old son, played a beautifully nuanced "Fur Elise" on the piano. It was a father-daughter flute duet of Tchaikovsky's "Reverie" during the offering. It was Wade Jones, the church accompanist, performing his own arrangement of the great John Fahey guitar piece renamed "Let Music Span Both East and West."

By this time I'd dabbed a few tears, taken my glasses off and on several times, and you know what, I don't care, if you can't show some feeling in church, what's the point anyway, even if it is Ralph Waldo Emerson's uncommon denomination of almighty Reason. So when Kurt did the show-stopping baritone solo "Somewhere" from West Side Story that would have made Lenny Bernstein proud, I pretty much had to get out of there.

So instead of staying for the meet-and-greet and being all sociable and normal, I headed for the exit to get some fresh air and try to come down. They say Kant used to go for a long walk every day at five o'clock, or so the philosophical legend goes, and few more reasonable souls than him have walked the planet. Transcendental aesthetic was Kant's term for (paraphrasing horribly) the quality of deep, complex feeling found in art and other experience that surpasses any explaining.

And there I was, leaning against my truck on a windy May morning scribbling on the front of the order of service, trying to explain why a bunch of songs reduced me to a sappy slab of free association. It's the words, no it's the melody, no it's the rhythm, no it's the conviction of the performer, no it's the political message, no it's the shared personal experience, but when they all come together it's something else. When I saw Marlene, the choir director on the way to her car and mumbled my thanks, I think she knew what I meant. It's something else.

character matters

For those cynics, policy wonks, or so-called realists who don't believe "character" is an issue in an election, new light is shed by Slate on this crazy presidential race.

The LAT[imes] asks handwriting experts to analyze signatures and writing samples from Obama, Clinton, and McCain to find out what they say about each of the presidential contenders. It turns out that Obama and McCain have some things in common. They both have illegible signatures, "which suggests a need for privacy or an aversion to transparency," and emphasize their first names, which shows "a desire to distance themselves from their fathers." For her part, Clinton's signature "is readable, but lacks emotion and warmth." As for their writing, Clinton's is "disciplined" while Obama's is "flexible" and McCain's is "disconnected, forceful and intense."

Okay, on second thought, our resident graphologist hasn't told us anything we didn't already know. We've got a clear choice between the bro, the ho, and the wacko. If we unpack the euphemistic language of the experts, the written characters they inscribe in ink reveal, in turn, secretiveness, aloofness, coldness, rigidity, opportunism, isolation, and brutality.

Chinese ink painters were judged on both their mastery of the skill in handling the brush, according to the standards of their tradition, and the inherent personal qi that is expressed in every stroke. In other words, making characters on paper reveals character. A gold Cross ballpoint or a Pilot V-ball extra fine is not a rabbit-fur calligraphy brush, but still. In which scholar-official's hand do we want the fountain pen of state?

Maybe I'll reconsider the whole character issue and just focus on policy, or, as they still sometimes say, 'issues'. One thing is certain: this group is not lacking in 'issues' of their own. But if policy is to be gauged by their policy statements, what statement by the three aforementioned obsessive-compulsive paranoid schizophrenics could be believed?

hard-headed

Tuesday morning e-mail from my brother Rock Golly:

Dad is in the hospital with some kind of bleeding on the brain. He's being taken to the hospital tonight, surgery in the morning. Mom is going to call me as soon as she knows something. I've talked to A, she is calling MJ and J. Please call me as soon as you can.

When I reached Rock on the phone in Pittsburgh, I got a little more information:

When he hit his head in a car accident a few weeks ago, it caused a subdural hematoma. The dura is the lining inside the scull, and a hematoma is basically a bruise. There was bleeding and fluid buildup over several weeks between the dura and the brain, which gradually caused pressure, pain, dizziness, and minor physical impairment.

If you know the patriarch Chas Golly, you know he's too tough to let a little subdural hematoma slow him down. But in the midst of his usual routine of golf, yard work, and fixing things, he started getting headaches and feeling uncharacteristically drowsy. Mom finally persuaded him to see a doctor, thank goodness. His golf game was beginning to suffer.

The surgeon made four incisions in the scalp, each about an inch long, drilled about 3/4" holes in the skull, then made incisions in the dura to drain the fluid. Then from Tuesday night to Friday morning he had tubes through two of the incisions to drain the rest of the fluid.

By Wednesday evening, Anna Banana had arrived from Detroit and Rock was back from Pittsburgh:

He was doing pretty well today, sort of up and down, tired a lot of the time. We're hoping to talk to the doctor Thursday morning. As of now, he will not be going home earlier than Friday.

Many cell phone minutes later, all five of us had touched base and heard some version of the story. I spoke with Jo Jo Golly in Atlanta and Jeanie Beanie Golly-Gee in Florida, and finally talked to Anna Banana and Mom on Saturday. It has been a little harrowing for Mom, but fortunately Anna and Rock have been there with her. Dad was anxious to go home, but everything indicated that it might be better to spend a couple of days in a nearby rehab facility first. By Sunday evening:

In a surprise development, Dad was released today. The doctor saw him first thing and pronounced him ready to go. So in spite of what we had heard yesterday, he is home and very happy to be so. He is not 100 percent but is greatly improved from a couple of days ago. Moving around pretty well, eating well, talking well, but a little forgetful now and then.

We had Mothers' Day dinner at their house in the afternoon, and shortly after he was feeling pretty tired and went for a nap. At this point we feel like it will take some days or weeks to fully recover from the anesthetic and medication, not so much the accident and surgery.

Anna is heading home to Michigan in a couple of days, and Jo Jo is coming up to be with Mom and Dad in Tennessee during the next phase of his recovery. I will take a turn for a few days before and during Memorial Day weekend. It will be interesting, as they are so used to being completely independent and in control.

Dad is so far being agreeable to taking it easy, although we haven't really defined what that means - driving, golfing, working in the yard, etc. Over the next couple of days we'll see how active he wants to be. The doctor did not give any specific restrictions or orders for rehab or therapy. We will be following up on that Monday, along with a lot of other things. He is to see the doctor in about 10 days for a checkup and to have the staples removed.

So we have circled the wagons and rallied round the chief. I have no doubt that he will bounce back and be fine in time for his 88th birthday in August, but this is a first for this kind of thing, so we are all adjusting to being in new territory. Healing thoughts and prayers are welcome.

earth, air, fire, water

My weekend contained all the elements of a springtime ritual.

I tore myself away from some overdue garden tasks late Saturday afternoon to drive a couple of hours north. Meaning I didn't get much of anything done at home: didn't mow, didn't prep beds, didn't build coldframes, didn't turn the compost, didn't remove the pile of trimmed branches. The morning rain gave way to a clear afternoon. Traffic was light, so I got to Northeast Swingstate University in good time and met my freshman roommate RF at the Days Inn.

It was so windy that most of the candles were blown out during the candlelight vigil, but at least it didn't rain. The group that gathered on the Commons was the usual mix of old and young faculty, staff, students, and former students. Afterward, we found a carry-out - he got Bud Lite and I got Heineken - and went back to the motel to catch up. His daughter, an elementary school principal, has a new job as director of curriculum in a neighboring school district; his son, a carpenter, has been building horse barns in Kentucky all winter. His sister is a retired school librarian; his brother is a high school teacher and coach; his nephew plays quarterback at Toledo. My son works in a bookstore and lives in New York; my daughter works in a bookstore and lives at home. We watch part of a remarkably bad "Diehard" movie and a hilariously campy black-and-white thriller about a crazed scientist who keeps his girlfriend's head alive in the laboratory after a fatal accident.

We met for breakfast, per the usual routine, and the fieldhand omelette at Mike's Place was excellent, as usual. The conversation turns to politics, as it always does, and we compare the positions, political skills, and electability of Obama and Hillary. We don't agree on everything. RF doesn't like cities, for example. We do agree on having low expectations of even an election as historic as the one upcoming. Things change incrementally if at all. This is not a revolution.

It was Sunday morning, so I decided to go to church, and the UU church on Gougler St. was easy to find, conveniently located across the street from a little park along the Cuyahoga River. Since I had some time, I took a walk from one end of the park to the other, sunned myself on the rocks beside the rapids, just like the turtles, and did a taiji form on a little observation deck the city was nice enough to provide.

The church itself, an little old red brick structure facing a main street, felt very welcoming. Some of the people there knew people at my church, so I felt at home away from home. It was a lay-led service, without the regular minister, and it was Beltane, so there were scads of flowers, big bowls of water, little stones, candles, and songs about fertility and the earth.

I made it back to campus in time for most of the afternoon program on a sunny hillside. A couple of student activists received scholarships for their efforts. They gave a plaque to a couple of professors who wrote a book together and have given support to the annual event. One of them was my political science professor, a young untenured instructor who played touch football (this was before the invention of flag football) with our dorm intramural team, but he is no spring chicken now.

William Kuntzler's daughter gave a speech about her late father's work. An ex-Marine gave a fiery speech about continuing to resist the war machine that kills its own young. I bought a new baseball cap at the student center bookstore and wore it home. I took route 3 instead of the interstate for variety, and it only took an extra half hour. After a quick bite to eat, I still had time for a good 90-minute bike ride down to Inniswood and up to Plumb Road and back before the sun went down, all of which made me feel more grounded, even though I still hadn't finished my chores.