The Outer Limits

I can say without fear of contradiction that if you sat down the ten smartest people in the world, you could ask them questions for which they had no answers. I read once that if human knowledge was seen as a growing island and its shoreline was the unknown, it could be said that the unknown grows, too, I suppose because new knowledge lets us ask new questions. I’ve long been a student of how we all come up against the limits of our knowledge for reasons such as aptitude, vocabulary, education, or whatever. I like to try and keep stretching and reaching for new territory. I hope I do not belabor the following metaphor:


Here at a scarred library
table salvaged from a one-
room country schoolhouse I sit
pondering fugitive thoughts.

Running bold and rowdy like
desperadoes in unmarked
territory, they escape
through dry desert arroyos

or ragged canyons that gnarl
and prejudice the terrain.
No map or highway signs
exist, and I walk unread

and unknowing. Pictures carved
on this desk have no meaning;
knowledge hid in the dark is
blocked in this narrow canyon.

Just a Few More Snippets

An old cowboy once told me, “Forgive your enemies, it messes with their minds.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
A big change took place in our household this week, we got hooked up to broadband internet, and I am enjoying myself one heck of a bunch by roaming around the internet as fast as I can read. Now, it won’t be so frustrating to download all those jokes and cartoons that so many people persist in forwarding. Now, I can download ‘em in a wink and trash those suckers before you know it. I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated personal messages, but we don’t get enough of them. With the changeover we have new email addresses, and I will forward them to the people in our address book.

A Montana internet radio station caught my attention a couple years back: www.kxzi.com. I was never able to receive it well with the old dial-up service and forgot about it. I rediscovered it again and have been playing it almost steady when I’m at my desk. He plays blues and bluegrass tunes which I like. He talks very little, mostly songs playing. It’s a great change from the same old stations I’m used to listening to.
. . . . . . . .
Spring approaches. I can tell since Mary is studying the seed catalogs for long stretches each day. This morning she’s attending a workshop at a local plant and tree store getting herself ready for the growing season. She has set a table up in the furnace room and is charming seeds to emerge from the pots with her magic flute and a fluorescent lamp.
. . . . . . . .
I heard a good Ole and Lena joke the other day. Ole was bragging to his buddy Sven about what a good hunter he was. When they got to their cabin in Canada north of Winnipeg, Ole said, “You start the fire and I’ll go shoot something for supper.” Ole walked in the woods only 3 or 4 minutes when he met a black bear. Dropping his gun, Ole hightailed it back to the cabin. Just as he reached the steps, he slipped and fell. The bear was running too fast to stop and skidded right in through the cabin door. Ole got up and slammed the door from the outside and shouted to Sven, “You go ahead and skin that one, and I’ll run out and get us another.”

More Snippets

More this-n-that

I wise cowboy once said, “Don’t name a calf you plan to eat.”
—
I just received an email from a cousin in California. They are making the most of their retirement years. She and her husband are leaving for Jordan soon, and, to add to the trip, will stop in Italy to visit friends. This trip is one of many they have taken to interesting spots in the world.
—
We need to take another step to join the modern world. Our dial-up connection is way too slow to enjoy much of what is on the internet. Since Bush plans on giving us some money back, I think we just might find a high-speed plan. I spend a lot of time in my study with a computer so why not have the latest!
—
Another wise cowboy quote, “Don’t corner something meaner than you.” I am in the middle of writing a poem about a fight to the death I witnessed as a young boy between a dog and a badger. The dog had been sicced on the wild one, but it was more than he could handle. The fight continued on to its miserable end.
—
I am reading a biography of Gerald R. Ford written by one of the newsmen assigned to reporting on the president. They became friends, and Ford told him much, so much that Ford swore him to promise, by jerking on his necktie, that he would not divulge the content of their conversations until after he died — Write It When I’m Gone by Thomas deFrank. Ford told him what he thought of Carter, Reagan, the Bush’s, and Clinton. Interesting.
—
Today is Valentine’s Day. I drove to our neighborhood store to buy flowers and a card. It so happened there were three of us in the same checkout line with flowers. I was amused by the gentleman behind me who said he just bought her a new car and thought that should be good enough. But no! He thought she was worth it, though. She’s been with him twenty-one years. The first one lasted nineteen.

A Real Message

The political campaign gets stale and starts smelling like dirty laundry. The candidates beg us to let them lead, and someone will get the majority of votes one day, but I wish it would hurry up and be done. Self-appointed experts, one and all. Having spent a working lifetime in education, I took plenty of classes from professors and read lots of books proclaiming wisdom in certain fields. After awhile it all started ringing hollow.

Yesterday, though, I listened to someone who had suffered a terrible rite of passage whose words carried lots of weight with me as well as most of the large crowd who heard her. She had EXPERIENCED the message she brought. Immaculee Ilibagiza spoke at the annual University of Mary Prayer Day to a crowd of about
2,500. She told how her life was dramatically transformed in 1994 during the Rwanda ethnic-cleansing genocide when she and seven other women huddled silently together in a cramped bathroom, three feet by four feet (Yes, 3' by 4'), in a local pastor’s house for 91 days! (Yes, 91 days) They were hiding from machete-wielding killers who were hunting for them. While in there her family members were killed along with about one million other Rwandans, mainly because they were not of the right tribe.

I still can hear her say “... just to feel the wind on my cheeks.” She had been denied that sensation for three months, and it was memorable for her to feel it again. She came to the United States, married, became a mother, and now works for the United Nations. Her message was one of forgiveness and how she had discovered the meaning of unconditional love — a love so strong that she was able to seek out and forgive her family’s killers.

Snippets

Snippets

Leave it to a cowboy poet to make this comparison: women are like cowpies. The older they get, the easier they are to pick up.
—
The granddaughter of President Eisenhower stated that she will support Obama in the election.
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Place a Christian army in the middle of Muslim territory, and you can expect problems.
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Harry Truman thought politicians should pattern their lives after Cincinnatus, a Roman patriot farmer, who was persuaded to lead his country in a time of peril, won the war, then willingly gave up his authority to return to his farm and plow.
—
The Mormon leader just died at the age of 97 years and had said about his longevity, “The wind is blowing, and I feel like the last leaf on the tree.”
It reminded me of the O. Henry short story entitled “The Last Leaf.” A man, very ill, lay on his hospital bed and noticed a vine outside his window losing its leaves to fall winds while his life slipped away commensurately. When the last one would fly he knew he would die. That night, an artist painted a leaf on the wall and the man, spotting the fake the next morning, survived his crisis and lived on.
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For the first time in my life I voted in the caucus. Obama received my vote. I was one of many.
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Newsweek magazine reports that in 2004 John McCain and Hillary Clinton had a vodka drinking contest. (Honest...2-11 issue)
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Reid's Poem

If I ever reach the Pearly Gates and give an accounting of my life to St. Peter, there will be many things I will not recall. Much of it is too mundane, but I will be able to recall major events and personalities that have inspired me for one reason or another. I will recount here one of those events and the personality who gave shape to it. The person and I became acquainted a long time ago with him being a high school student and me being the high school principal. My tenure at that school lasted three years, after which I left for other places and things to do. Our paths did not cross again until a time two or three years ago.

Standing in my front yard in the dusky sunset of an early fall day a pickup stopped and a young man jumped out and strode towards me with his hand outstretched in greeting. I recognized him almost right away and called him by name.

We visited for a long while that evening and I was uplifted by his bright, positive attitude, yet saddened when he told of the tumor in his brain. He had apparently experienced quite a struggle with his affliction, and I thought he spoke with a wisdom that was beyond his years. Some months later I got news that he had passed away, but he left me with the seeds of a poem that I am sure he never had time to write. I dedicate it to him.


Reid’s Poem

It’s funny the things that stick
with you: the bleat of a lamb
in a snowstorm, the whistling
of a blizzard in the eaves,
a meadowlark’s song in spring,

or spoken words that linger.
Reid, you stopped to talk and left
rich thoughts that beg to be etched
deeply into lines of verse.
You shared tales of the cancer

you carried inside your head,
plus proud news of family,
a business, and your horses —
draft horses you liked to hitch
and drive in the countryside.

There, I’m sure, you reflected
on your fate to form this line:
“I wonder what old men think
when they lean on a fencepost
and look out across the fields.”

Some months later, you succumbed,
but those wistful words still haunt
me. I’d said, “That’s poetry,
have you ever tried to write?”
“No, but I’ve thought about it.”

You knew there was little chance
to grow old or write poems,
but there, reins in hand, that scene
floated dreamlike through your thoughts:
you, leaning, looking, yearning.