Thursday, A Day Late

Sometimes a fellow just doesn’t have much to say. Of course, it’s probably got something to do with yesterday. I donated blood again, or more specifically half of it was plasma and the other half red blood cells. My iron count wasn’t high enough to give double red blood cells so they determined half of that was what they’d take. Whatever the decision, the process of being a donor always steals energy from me, so today I’m dragging around like a lazy dog. However, I still look on it as my little way of payback to society, so I plan to continue doing it. I’ve received blood transfusions on two different occasions in my life, and I won’t forget that somebody had to donate it for me.

I keep working at my second book and search for inspiration under every rock. It goes slowly. The problem might be that I’ve already started the third volume in my head, a fact which detracts me from the one at hand. The third one with have a unified theme, while this one as well as the first one I published bounced all over the place with poems of whatever took my fancy. The last piece I completed starts with this stanza:

Every small town bar has one, an unprincipled expert
of political issues, a verbal bull who will gore
and skewer his opponents with his horns in a quarrel…

I had lots of fun writing that one, and I only had to go so far as to dip into my own barrel of experience to dredge it up. The third volume’s theme will concern the early transportation enterprise that cut trails through my home territory. It’s a good story, and I hope I can do it justice.

Health Care

In regards to the current health insurance debate I suspected all along that something like the following was the case . My local paper yesterday carried a political cartoon where a patient wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with “No Gov’t Healthcare” sat in a doctor’s office with his mouth wide open saying “aaaahhh” and the doctor says “All that yelling and screaming at town hall meetings has damaged your throat!” The second panel shows the patient asking, “So, will my Medicare cover it?”

A few days ago another similar episode occurred where a placard reading “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” was spotted in a crowd. Bill Maher, a clever commentator on current events said, “That’s a bit like driving a thousand miles on a highway to protest road construction.”

I don’t know what health care reform will look like when it’s over, but I do wish that people would study the issue and try to think it through a bit before shooting their mouths off. They make themselves look stupid. I heard one guy tell an interviewer that he doesn’t get his news from regular network newsmen; he doesn’t trust them; instead he listens to the Fox network. (?!%@#)

For awhile the kooks were saying, “Don’t pull the plug on Grannie!” Talk about sound bites. I’m just glad I qualify for Medicare. It takes a lot of stress off from the budget. So long.

100 Degrees Today

Stiffness sets into my joints so that my body tells me of my age even though my brain still does not recognize it. Somebody has said “At the threshold of old age it will take only a few steps to walk through and enter the room.” The day will probably come when I will go to a doctor and he will say he has both good news and bad news. I will say, “Lay it on me, Doc. What’s the bad news?” He’ll say, “You have Alzheimer’s!” After gulping, I’ll say, “Good heavens! What’s the good news?” “You can go home and forget about it.”
Then I’ll put a bumper sticker on my car that says “I’m speeding because I have to get there before I forget where I’m going.”
…
I suppose I should write about the past since there is more and more of it, and I’ll never run out of material. In Winnipeg we visited a graveyard adjacent to the St. Boniface Cathedral; in it rest the remains of one Louis Riel, known as the leader of the Metis, named thus because they were part-Indian and part-Frenchmen. They felt they were encroached upon by the government of Canada which wanted to claim the lands they had been living on for years. It interests me because the Metis, by the hundreds, drove the ox-cart trails which I am presently studying. It is significant to me because the period of the Metis’ unrest and outright rebellion was 1869-70, a fact which coincides with the ox-cart freighting taking place in the part of the state where I was born and raised. From Riel’s life I am gleaning lots of information regarding the people and culture of the drovers who cut deep ruts through the prairie and forded the Sheyenne River to get to Fort Ransom.

A timeline of the years 1867-1870 reveals several events pertaining to transportation: the golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah; transcontinental rail service began; the Suez Canal opened; first railroad bridge across the Missouri at Kansas City; construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began; etc. plus one more interesting one. In June of 1867 2000 Chinese workers on the western railroad struck because they had not been paid in weeks. They also demanded the whippings stop and that hours spent in hot tunnels be limited to eight hours a day. The Central Pacific manager cut off the strikers’ food supply and threatened to fire the workers. The strike collapsed after a week.

A Trip to Winnipeg

We returned last evening from a trip to Winnipeg where we took in a half dozen shows of Folklorama, their large multi-ethnic celebration of the many cultures that live in and mix with that city. We’ve been there a couple times before, but each season the two week long production is different. This year we attended the pavilions of Africa, Scotland, and Colombia the first evening and Israel, Russia, and Korea the second.

Each of the two nights we ate appetizers at the first location, the main course at the second, and dessert at the third. Some of the food was good, some not so. My favorite was the main course we ate at the Russian venue; it seemed like real food. Scotland’s main course included haggis, a dish I’d heard much about. It was a dark lump of heavily seasoned sausage-like tripe that I did not care for, but then some people don’t think much of lutefisk and lefse either, so I can’t condemn that whole culture because of their favorite dish.

Music performances from each of the countries were a great crowd pleaser, even though some of it was loud. Korea included a demonstration of tae kwon do; I would not want to pick a fight with any of those people because of what they showed they could do to an opponent.

Israel’s show was held on a Jewish campus in the city, and I could not help but notice the patches on the uniforms of the men directing parking. They identified them at that campus’s private security force. With Jews under attack from terrorists in so many parts of the world, this Winnipeg enclave of Jews obviously planned to take no chances by leaving themselves open to attack.

Winnipeg’s mural painters are given exterior walls of businesses to create their large scale art which gives the city an attractive, decorated look. The city overall has a clean proud look about it that makes it a pleasure to visit.