RESIGNATION

Sometimes life just gangs up on you and hits you with a sequence of troubles which seem unfair. One wonders, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

You probably don’t want to know. The actions and reactions which govern Creation are perfectly balanced, and obey laws far over our heads.

If we received an answer to our whining, it would likely be an answer along the lines of the answer Job got, when he questioned God a bit too stridently about all the bad things he had to go through. God silenced Job, basically by asking Job, “Were you there when I created all this?” Once Job got around to contemplating the intricate details of Creation, the actions and reactions involved in all things, even things as simple as sap rising in the spring, he was humbled by how minor his own concerns were, in comparison.

The same revelation appears in the movie “Casablanca“, when Rick Blaine states, “…the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

In other words, one must let go of their selfish concerns about their personal desires, and have faith they are part of something bigger, which they don’t understand.

I was hit by a triple whammy of hardships which were hard to take, as they insulted my sense of myself as a family man, with strong “family values”.

First, despite all our loving efforts, dementia made my mother-in-law impossible to care for, and we had to put her in a “memory care” institution. She knows she is “locked up” but can’t remember why, and resents everyone’s efforts to make her comfortable. She wants to get back to the life she remembers, but her memory is so weak she no longer has the capacity, but she doesn’t remember she constantly loses her keys and wallet, and only remembers being capable. It’s the saddest thing, and strange as well, for she was an extremely self-reliant and capable woman from her early teens on, for seventy years, before coming to this confusing end. Saddest is that she can’t sit back and enjoy people trying to make her comfortable. You can put the nicest cushions on her rocking chair, but she defines the expression, “off her rocker.”

The things she did when off her rocker were amusing, if you don’t mind a bull in your china shop. My customers at my childcare would arrive to pick up their children, and she would come storming up to them and demand they find me or (more usually) my wife immediately, because it was “urgent”. So my customers, who are often quite young, would tell their children to wait and would rush off to do the good deed. And we would thank them, blushing, because we knew damn well what was “urgent” was that old lady couldn’t find her wallet, and thought it might have been stolen, when she in fact had hidden it under her pillow, but forgot she hid it.

Someday I may be able to write a post titled “Dementia” full of funny stories, but the joke gets old when it is the present tense. The question arises, “Why would God allow this to happen to someone?”

It is not a happy-ever-after ending to a long life, and it is not a situation where the caregivers involved get gratitude, for the elderly victim of dementia is in no mood to thank anyone. In any case, that was a long and exhausting decline I had to weather, and was challenge number one.

Second, a daughter went through a rough divorse and a custody battle involving whether her two small children would/will be brought up speaking Portuguese in Brazil or English in New Hampshire. There is no solution which is acceptable to both sides, so far, (which is a prime ingredient to any divorse).

Divorce has always struck me as stupid, ever since my own parents succumbed to it when I was a boy. Love is beautiful, and when you turn away from beauty then of course things get ugly. Why do people prefer ugliness? It is so stupid it is actually a funny joke, if you are able to reduce things to absurdity, as Laurel and Hardy did with their movie “Big Business” nearly a hundred years ago. There is nothing all that funny about the human tendency to escalate, and make bad situations worse, but they let us see the absurdity. If you have fifteen minutes, it’s a masterpiece.

However, as patriarch of a large family, I could not manage a funny post about a meat-loving Brazilian wedding a vegan American. Too much pain was involved as they made a bad situation worse, and I was ashamed I couldn’t stop it. It is worst when little children are involved.

Lastly, to top off my sense life was completely out of my control, my wife broke her ankle in three places, and was unable to do much of anything for six weeks, so I had to do the work of two. It was a situation where you do everything, but do nothing well. Every job is a slapdash job, and you never get time off.

Mind you, I’m 71 years old, suffering from COPD, and was under a fond illusion I could resign from my position of runner-of-a-childcare, place the business in my wife’s name, and quietly fade away like old soldiers are suppose to do. I didn’t start collecting Social Security until age 70 so I could get the maximum amount, and, in theory, I could help my wife doing old-man stuff like paperwork, or riding around on a lawnmower, but spend most of my time doing what seems productive to me, namely growing good food in a down-sized garden, and writing poems, and lastly writing my memoirs, which will contain some remarkable adventures. However….

God did not accept my resignation. The only resignation God accepts is resignation to His will. Consequently I have spent little time pottering about in my garden, nor writing my memoirs. Instead I’ve needed to rush about dealing with an old lady off her rocker, with a young couple more interested in drama than peace, and with witnessing the sunshine of my life become bedridden.

What surprised me was how little time I wasted whining, “Whatever did I do to deserve this?”

Not that I didn’t roll my eyes to heaven and mutter things, as trouble followed trouble, but I just dealt with things as they came, one after another, until it occurred to me I was a changed man. I surprised myself. Usually I loose it. Usually I tirade. Maybe I was just so worn down that I lacked the available energy to throw a fit. But do you want to know something? I sort of liked the peace I felt. Rather than weak I felt strong. You have to have some sort of strength to be in the middle of a hurricane, and to just plod along saying, “Ho hum. Another day, another breeze.”

Not that I get a bit of credit for this. Believe me, it was not in my plans. To God goes the glory, for He shapes those who honor him.

But now I’m curious. Could I withstand a complete reversal of my fortunes, and be hit by three wonderful events, and not be swayed into the opposite of a tantrum? Would I become wildly manic, or could I keep the peace?

Suppose I wrote a sonnet that went viral, and, as swiftly as Oliver Anthony became famous, I went from being shadow-banned to having millions of views, and my website went from being unknown to huge. Suppose I went from having to pay people to help me, to having people offer to pay me for being my helper? Could I keep my poise, and say, “Ho hum, another day; another breeze.” ???

My conclusion, at age 71, is that the ups and downs of this world breed happiness that doesn’t last and sorrow that doesn’t last. Nothing of this world is lasting. To build on this world is like building an igloo on an iceberg that is melting away. When we die the billionaire leaves earth as naked as he came, just as the debtor does. So, what really matters?

I assert what matters is resignation to the will of the Creator. His love is infinite, His compassion towards us is infinite, His bliss is infinite, His joy does not end, He wants us to join Him, and He is everlasting and eternal.

My old goat, (the sad, final survivor
Of my herd), hobbled out into spring's balm,
And I'll be darned if spring didn't revive her.
She refused to behave demure and calm
But gamboled and frolicked, despite her age.

So too does mankind, when it has been spared
A wintry death, go pursue the next rage
And skip into quicksand. I have despaired
From ever hoping we'll learn from mistakes.

God's mercy makes us so hugely joyous
We forget discipline, and forget what it takes
To be healed; we chase what will destroy us.
Spring's a reminder we're all April fools
And makes me most happy that God's mercy rules.

POTATOES

It definitely seems the lunatics are running the asylum. The entire “green energy” effort seems like an attempt to create a crisis where there wasn’t one. Global Warming will cause people to swelter, not because it is hotter outside, but because people will not be able to afford air conditioners inside.

I could go on and on, but you probably already are depressed by the state of affairs the world is getting sucked into, like poor bugs into a bathtub’s whirlpool. (Or perhaps, for those losers who think they are winning, like a moth circling around the seduction of a candle’s deadly flame). The spectacle is especially depressing when the mismanagement starts to make our food too expensive.

In their Ivory Towers, academics, without calluses on their hands, like to advise hard working men that they should not eat the food that sustains them. They scold that munching meat causes Global Warming due to the methane in bovine flatulence. Workers should instead eat tofu. The problem is that, on modernized farms, fossil fuels not only power the mechanized equipment, but also provide the fertilizer that grows the soy beans that make the tofu.

In other words, academics did not “think things through.” They had a first idea, and (perhaps due to marijuana) it seemed like sheer genius, so they never did the follow-up thinking, the feasibility studies.

Meanwhile the working man must do feasibility studies every day, just to survive. You don’t need to go to collage or smoke marijuana to have brilliant-seeming ideas, but they get checked on a regular basis by the harsh realities of life, unless you’re in an Ivory Tower.

Lastly, some academics forget they would starve without the working man. When they mock the working man, they are biting the hand that feeds. They are not as intelligent as they think. In fact, they are imbeciles, lunatics running a world which doesn’t have to be an asylum, but which mad-scientist academics make crazy.

One crazy thing I have heard some academics proclaim is that the world is overpopulated and that it would be a good thing to reduce the population by seven billion. I can only respond by saying that, if academics reduce the population by seven billion the decline will not be due to overpopulation, but rather due to academics so devoid of humanity that they make Hitler and Stalin look like pipsqueaks.

Worst is that these idiots will not listen to reason. If you are patient and kind, and try to very gently lead them in the direction of follow-up studies, they become furious and cancel you. They are bound and determined to be idiots all the way.

What to do? I personally just shrug, and plant potatoes.

Potatoes do have a vulnerability, as the Irish learned when their crop turned to slime and they suffered their terrible “Potato Famine”, but most of the time it is an amazingly productive crop, and doesn’t turn to slime, and therefore potatoes are a good friend of the poor. The reason so many Irish starved was because their population had boomed, not due to any largess on the part of their greedy English overlords, but because they could fall back on potatoes as a crop. And though many Irish starved when the crop failed, (especially their poor children), many emigrated, and England’s loss was America’s gain. Eventually England lost Ireland, just as England lost America, which weakened England, for the Irish were some of its finest soldiers. Intellectuals can parse the reasons all they want, but the Great British Empire’s fate was not determined by intellectuals, but by potatoes.

Where I used to skip working out in a gym, and instead got a wonderful workout spading, hoeing and raking soil in the garden each spring, I now am an old man with COPD. I used to love the way all my muscles burned in the spring, due to so much digging, but now I’m pathetic, and huff and puff after forking a single forkful with my spading fork. If I had any brains I’d give it up, and focus on writing.

But when I went to buy food for my Childcare’s rabbit, goat and eleven chickens, I passed by the bins of seed potatoes. I just couldn’t resist. I knew I didn’t have time to slice potatoes and dust the cut sides with sulfur, so I poked through the bins for the smallest seed potatoes, which do not require cutting. I found around sixty.

Today I got the last potato planted. Even though I do such work when I am officially “off duty” at the Childcare, I am seemingly a magnet, and children are allowed by those “on duty” to rush over and “help” me. They are no help at all, but I do enjoy their interest. They ask all sorts of questions, including “why do you huff and puff so much.” The “older” children, (age five rather than age almost-three) tell the younger ones how much fun it is to dig up the potatoes, in the late summer and fall. It is an education few get these days.

There is still much work to do, to get a good crop. The potatoes need a light top dressing of manure, and then to be “hilled”, and then (as we use no pesticides) there is a war with potato bugs. (“Hilling” is interesting, for some potatoes produce all their new tubers by the potato you planted, while others produce tubers along the up-growing stem, so if you pile four feet of dirt atop the tuber you planted you get potatoes all along four feet of stem.)

I am well aware I’m getting a bit old for such work, and today I began the process of getting a graduate of my Childcare to be a sort of “intern”. Back in the day you could just hire a twelve-year-old after school without paperwork, but with the lunatics running the asylum there is a slew of paperwork, pertaining to child-labor-laws, and various tax codes. Hopefully we can just get that useless, bureaucratic stuff done with, and face what really matters, which is growing potatoes.

And if our work is blessed by God and prospers, what will planting sixty potatoes roughly the size of ping-pong balls be?

Twelve were “Pontiac Pinks”, which are the fastest to mature. Each little potato should produce around three potatoes the size of oranges, as well as numerous small potatoes the size of marbles or peas. These are thin-skinned “new” potatoes which, when served with salt, butter and chopped parsley (grown nearby), or boiled and turned into various potato salads, are quite popular with the small children. For some reason new, pink potatoes apparently have more vitamins and antioxidants than regular potatoes, but small children could care less about nutrition; I think their appetite is born from being part of the process. In any case their parents are amazed that their children devour them; “He never eats potatoes at home.” But, to stick to economics, we could get twelve pounds of pink potatoes from those twelve little seed-potatoes.

Twelve were “Yukon Golds”. They take longer to mature, and are remarkable because their flesh is yellow. If you mash them they look like they are already loaded with butter. But I like them because they produce very big potatoes. Whoppers. Treat them right , and you can plant a potato the size of a ping-pong ball and get at least one the size of a grapefruit. We could get twenty pounds.

Eighteen were “Russets”, which are baking potatoes. They tend to be elongated, like overly fat pickles, and have thick skins. The larger ones are good baked, and the smaller are great when arranged around a roast in the oven, browning and sucking up the the flavor of whatever meat you are roasting. If you treat this group well you could harvest a crop of twenty-five pounds.

Lastly I planted eighteen “Kennebecs”. (Named after a river in Maine). These are best mashed, though they can be baked. They seem to like our local climate, and often produce more potatoes per plant than the others, ranging from as small as a pea to as large as a grapefruit. Mashed, they are especially creamy. In a best-case scenario, planting eighteen little seed-potatoes the size of pingball balls could produce a crop of thirty pounds.

Most of the pink potatoes get eaten up during the summer, but one might, (if one avoids goofing off), be blessed with a fifty pound sack of other potatoes to face the winter with.

A doddering old man like me might also be expected to successfully raise ten winter squash vines, which could produce between two and six squash per vine, and squash tend to weigh five pounds, so I’d have somewhere around one to three hundred pounds of squash.

Then it is not so hard to grow a short row of turnips and winter cabbages, and short rows of carrots and beets, so your root cellar also holds maybe 20 pounds of turnips, fifteen big, fat ten-pound cabbages, (150 pounds), plus 20 pounds of carrots and 20 of beets.

Also, to hang in the attic, one should grow a row of onions, and some garlic.

In other words, if one has a patch of dirt, it is not so hard for even a doddering old fool like me to face next fall unafraid of famine. I’ll have hundreds of pounds of starch which even a toothless old crone like myself can mash, and not bother with chewing. As young mothers go to the grocery stores and weep, for the shelves are empty due to election-year craziness, an their children are hungry, I can just sit there with what my hard work produced, munching my mashed this and my mashed that and smacking my lips, ignoring the crying children.

Sigh. I don’t think so. I don’t think I could stomach the mashed potatoes, because woman and children have an unfair advantage over men. They are allowed to cry, where men are supposed to die.

I have already lived a good life and been blessed far more than wealthier people. I have been through adventures that would freeze the blood of the wealthy, and, to be honest, their lives seem tedious and boring in contrast. Where they sit by a pool, and sit by a pool, and sit by a pool, and call it luxury, I have been on a sailboat in a screaming gale where the seas were higher than the mast. So who was more fortunate?

In any case, as I approach my end I really can’t imagine I would hog all my potatoes and turnips and cabbages and carrots and beets and onions and garlic to myself. For one thing, it is a ego-trip to give stuff away. For another thing, personal fasting supposedly has a spiritual benefit. For a third thing, I am more interested in the next world than the complete balderdash this world is increasingly entangled in.

Famine will come as quite a shock to young mothers who are currently deeply concerned about their son’s “sexual identity”. Some of these witless females are wandering a wilderness of disturbed values. Was George Washington a racist? Was Jesus a sexist and Satan a saint? Are men men and are women women? They haven’t got a clue, but famine has a wonderful ability to clarify the mind. When faced with the fact their child is starving, politics can be damned; they want a potato.

I’ve known poverty and hunger, due to my foolish choices, and I can assure you that there are times holding a fat, baking potato in your hand is worth more than holding an ingot of gold. You can’t eat gold, but, poke a potato with a fork a couple of times, put it in the microwave, and even without salt or butter, your child will stop crying, even if the child is within yourself.

What this means is that, when hunger gets bad, people will “sell their birthright for a mass of pottage”. Evil takes advantage of this, bribing people with various sorts of potatoes. However evil grows no actual potatoes; it prints “money” which “guarantees” potatoes. But if you grow none, a day comes when your “money” can buy none.

(If you want to see how swiftly “money” can become worthless, study the Wiemar Republic of Germany in the year 1923.)

And should that day come soon, due to election-year craziness, I’ll be happy to hand out my potatoes. It will be an ego-trip, to see the same women who mocked me thanking me, for a potato.

I will then pray to God that he forgives me for my ego trip. I’ll ask that he help me focus on what really feels good: Feeding the hungry. That is truly good, and while I can’t multiply fishes and loaves, I can grow potatoes, and it is an honor to make children happy with what I grow.

But….

Man does not live on potatoes alone. A filled paunch can’t end the ache of a hollow heart, while the aching of an empty stomach is greatly eased by the joy within a brimming heart, as you give your potatoes away.

Besides growing potatoes, I also grow poems. This is a different crop on a different level, a sort of inwardly Honest News, at a time too many genuflect to outward Fake News. In any case, even as I planted potatoes I harvested the following three sonnets,

Tonight I'll plant a garden in my mind.
I'll strew some stars and braid a comet's tail
And then stand back and hope the weather's kind
And doesn't shock my fields with nightmare's hail
But rather rains sweet honey, and the milk
From Milky Ways, so my strewn stars can sprout
Long rays. A child sees such rays in the black silk
Of night. Adults don't. For what brings about
Such rays are eyes full of tears, but dry 
Grow the eyes of so-called maturity.
Only in theaters do the grown-ups cry;
Only in the dark can the brighter stars show
The rays all deny, yet secretly grow. 

When you get old you are in no hurry
To go where you are going, for it's the grave,
And it seems a waste of time to worry
How one will be received. The peace we gave
Will await, so steep a tea of it now.
In the cool of the morning, be kind.
You need no wallet to smooth your creased brow
And still the roughed waters of your mind.
The fact is, we depart this world flat broke
And naked as we came, with our to-do list
Left behind, so it's something of a joke
To fret about tasks undone. What most have missed
Is the Peace that brings the sun up each day
Which has walked with us every step of the way. 

They're just clouds, but springtime transforms them
Into parades. A dream is nudging edges
Of the woken world; claw-branches again
Grow soft with lacy green; marsh's stark sedges
Also soften as an emerald stain
Expands like tea through the clear waters
Of azure skies...Am I awake? A strain
Of music dances unwritten. Otters
Poke up inquisitive. They're asking me
What I will write. I can't say. Like a calm
Before a storm, it's what you cannot see
That wants to manifest. Then, like a bomb
Of flowers, sudden sunrise will break
And end this dark dream we call being awake.

EVERYTHING WRONG

H.T. Webster was a cartoonist who was very popular in my parent’s and grandparent’s time, and who is now largely forgotten. Like the painter of Saturday Evening Post covers, Norman Rockwell, he felt it was his duty to help us to smile at ourselves. He didn’t much want to deal with the heavy duty stuff, such as racism and genocide, and preferred the innocent problems of old fashioned sexism, back when there were only two sexes. Of the over 15,000 cartoon panels he published in newspapers, hundreds were entitled either, “How To Torture Your Husband” or, “How To Torture Your Wife.” However even these cartoons tended to make the reader smile and shake their head over our insensitivity, rather than to infuriate people into holding demonstrations and fomenting riots and revolutions. Not that he was unaware of the horrors humanity is capable of bringing about. Rather he felt his job was not to further horror, but rather to make people smile. The cartoon below is from 1940, as the storm clouds of World War Two gathered.

The first cartoon is from 1938, when the suffering of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were to some degree lessening, though many were still hard pressed to get by. By poking fun at a schoolboy’s deep depression over a temporary state of affairs, to a degree where the schoolboy states “everything wrong”, it reminds us, as adults, that whatever hardship we face is only temporary. “This too will pass”, and even, “Some day we will laugh about this.”

H.T.Webster left the world shortly before I entered. Perhaps we waved at each other as we passed. In any case, a memorial anthology of his best cartoons was in my parent’s bookshelf, and as a small boy I recall very much liking the “everything wrong” cartoon. I very much identified with the boy in the cartoon.

Perhaps it is because there is a power in New England which is resistant to spring. The warm air surges north from the south, but can’t quite make it all the way north. Various meteorological factors are involved, including but nor limited to “back door cold fronts” and “cold air damming”, but in essence what resists the surging warmth is a mighty sea-breeze. The high sun warms the land so that air rises, and draws the cold air inland from over the chilled North Atlantic to fill the vacated space. This might be bearable if it was only on the coast, but it often is hundreds of miles inland, past the Hudson River to our west, and hundreds of miles south, sometimes to Virginia.

Rather than the winds from a benign “Bermuda High” to our south, from the southwest and balmy and dry, we get winds from a high pressure to the north called “The Newfoundland Wheel”, and get cold east winds and drizzle. You want to play baseball but the base paths are muddy and the grass is wet. You can’t garden because the soil is clinging mud. Perhaps the only good thing is that sometimes the temperatures drop below fifty, and then even the black flies and mosquitoes go dormant and don’t bite. But for the most part one has the discouraged, depressed sense “everything wrong.”

Perhaps I should add to this the fact that, as the end of the school year approached, time slowed down, and it seemed the end of school would never come. Even back then, just as is true now, being normal could get you sneered-at in schools.

The so-called “teachers” doing this “disciplining” may change their definitions all they want, but sneering remains sneering, and boys remain boys. What was politically correct may be very different now from what it was in 1959 when Eisnerhower was president, but teachers are still bullies, for all their mouthing about how bullying is bad, and ordinary boys are “disciplined” by sneering as badly now, if not worse, than in 1959. Which makes boys yearn for the end of such a cold wind. They long for the summer, when the awful school is shut down, and the sneering ceases. But it seems summer will take forever to get here. And so “everything wrong”.

However, after what seemed like five or six forevers, the future would at last arrive, and I’d escape the sneering, and enjoy a wonderful time of healing, called “summer vacation”.

I don’t get to have summer vacations any more. I haven’t had one in over fifty years. But I still entertain the idea a beautiful future will arrive, and be much better than the present.

Back in 1923 H.T. Weber penned a cartoon imagining life a hundred years in the future, in 2023. It is interesting how he, without describing computers, glimpsed Spell Check and AI.

JUSTIFIABLE GENOCIDE

There is something annoyingly phony about the protests currently going on on collage campuses. The youths involved are either paid protesters, (and some aren’t so young), or else party protesters. The former would not be there if it wasn’t for the money, and the latter wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the fun. The indignation they muster is either about as superficial as a child dressed up as a monster on Halloween, or it is the genuine indignation of a person squirted by water. A surprising number of the protesters have only a vague idea what they are protesting about. Many chant slogans they are told to chant, but when asked to discuss the issues with some semblance of depth, they can’t do it.

One annoying consequence of this superficiality is that it waters down quite serious topics, such as racism and genocide. When just about anything you do can be called racism, genuine racism gets ignored. The chief example of this is the incredible statement, “All people with white skin are racist”, which, despite being a racist statement, blurs the distinction between what is racism and what is not.

People need to think more deeply than they do, and muster what is called “discernment.” There is an actual difference between good and evil, and people need to draw the distinction. However those who profit off selling snake oil prefer false advertising to Truth, prefer Fake News to Truth, and even like to confuse the weak-minded by saying Truth is a relativity, a subjective preference, and is so variable it doesn’t exist; cultures differ; Vikings felt warfare was heaven; Buddhists did not; if you say war is good you are racist against Buddhists, and if you say war is bad you are racist against Vikings; Therefore you are not allowed to have any opinion at all.

Yet, after creating this moral apathy, these same people can get as moralistic as a fussbudget, when it comes to anyone who opposes their watering-down of distinctions. If you point out there is a distinction between good and evil, you are not only racist and sexist and various other “ists”, but, by trying to defeat evil, you are guilty of “genocide”.

Well, let us think about that. If you state a certain viewpoint is wrong, are you guilty of attempting to obliterate another?

The word “genocide” didn’t even exist until it was created by a Pole who experienced the horrors of World War Two. It is defined, by the United Nations, as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

But what about Nazi’s? Were they not a “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”? Is not the United Nations guilty of hypocrisy, when on one hand they advocate an end to genocide, but on the other hand they agree Nazi’s should be wiped from the face of the earth?

I personally detest Nazi’s, and only bring this up to demonstrate how, without the distinction between good and evil, almost any resistance can be seen as genocide, and racist.

Which is exactly what skulls-full-of-mush protestors are doing, when they accuse Israel of genocide, for fighting back against Hamas, whose very charter advocates the genocide of the Jews.

What Hamas did on October 7, 2023 was unspeakably vile and inexcusably evil. If it is genocide to want such behavior wiped from the face of the earth, so be it. It is justifiable genocide.