Learning

My dad gave my mom (then his ex-wife) one of his little hairless dogs and supplied a male to breed the dog to. The dog had two pups and, a couple of months later, slipped out and was run over by a car. The two pups did fine.

Rascal, the male pup, was mom's constant companion. She was diagnosed with advanced multiple myloma (cancer) when Rascal was young. She spent most of the rest of her nine months of life in her recliner with Rascal there with her. She hand fed him. After she died, her husband wanted to get rid of Rascal. Rascal's sister was mom's husband's favorite.

We ended up with Rascal and loved him from the start. When we moved into our home last June we decided to "fence" Rascal using the electric wire and shock collar. (Don't get bent out of shape--the "shock" is akin to a static shock from touching someone after walking across the carpet--surprising, but harmless.) We spent a few months walking him when he needed to go out, then got the collar and wire last week.

We ran the wire and put up flags to warn Rascal where he would get a shock. Rascal approached the flags tentatively and sniffed at them, then he yelped and jumped back. He wandered a few steps and tried again, with similar results. Then he hastily walked to the front door to be let in.

That day and most of the next, Rascal was scared to go outside. Then the day after, he ventured out. He has not been shocked again. He is a fast learner.

Saved!

I missed the last meeting of my large writing group. I heard they just talked politics and not writing. Today they mostly talked politics. I read some of Suffrage and we read two poems--one of which was political. Then most of them talked politics.

I like to talk politics with people who analyze the issues, but my writing group has an emotional approach to politics. They believe that politicians can "help us" and think in terms of good and evil.

Here is an armchair analysis, as opposed to emotion. I have heard that the president can "create jobs." Politicians could create jobs by hiring people to stand under trees to catch falling leaves. That will also destroy jobs, since the "leafcatcher" salaries will be appropriated from people who are now, with their spending, paying other people's salaries.

Private markets, left alone, can create jobs only when those workers create value for consumers. If the private market has not already created leafcatcher jobs then those jobs must not support enough value in the market to pay the workers' salaries and benefits.

The politician will create more jobs than he destroys only if government is smarter at spending your dollars than you are--if the most massive bureaucracy in existence is more smart, knowledgable, and efficient at pleasing us than we are. Alas, I am begging the question, since the answer is obvious.

This kind of analysis leads me to believe that politicians do not have much power to make our lives better. We have that power, and politicians can help us by giving us more power to act in our own interest and in the interest of others, but they cannot, by their own actions, make us better off.

Alas, few politicians want to run on the platform, "I am going to leave you alone." (I can just hear the response those with the emotional approach, "Leave us alone? Please don't! We don't want to be alone.")

The writerly types and others in the publishing industry seem oriented toward emotional, rather than analytical approaches to policy. Perhaps I will always be the quiet one in the room, since I do not want to try to convert the convinced. Policy is more of a religious matter with those folks and I do not want to try to talk them out of their religion.

Originality

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wrote about his love for the river's beauty. But then he became a pilot.

The river transformed into currents that revealed the bottom contours, snags to navigate by, depth measurements at crossings, portents of future weather on the wind and in the clouds, and everything else that went into his two years of training to be a pilot. He could no longer see or hear the river's poetry.

We cannot write anything that is original. I realize this, but I slipped. I thought I had written something original. But now I see that Mark Twain nailed the point that I explored in my poem, Scholar. He even discussed how a doctor would see a beautiful woman as the sum of her hideous parts.

Damn you, Mark Twain!

Celebration

As I handed out the test today a student said, "You should give us bonus points to celebrate the election." Other students voiced their agreement.

I replied, "To celebrate the election, I am going to take points from people with high grades and add those points to people with low grades."

I got a five-star laugh.

I kept going. "I just want to spread the points around."

Another five-star laugh.

It got my test experience started off right. I am not sure if it helped them much.

Weakness

Mom was an excellent cook. Except that her pancakes were always tough. Looking back, I think she must have beat the batter too much.

One morning she tried again--made us pancakes for breakfast. We could not eat them. She got mad and threw them out the kitchen window.

The following day I found our yellow cat dead in the back yard. His mouth was full of mom's pancakes. Mom never lived it down.

Neither, of course, did the cat.

Wheels Included

My family, in order, camped in a tent, pop-up camper, pickup camper, and then a motor home. We bought the motor home used. I guess it was a Boise Cascade, since that was the only name I ever saw on it. It was medium sized for a motor home. It would have been monstrous for a loaf of bread. It had good beds, an icebox, a stove, and even a bathroom.

We camped in the Ozarks, on the beaches of Louisiana and Texas, through some of Mississippi (I don't know why), Illinois, and Tennessee. We went to lots of festivals.

There was no casastrophe that made us get rid of the thing. I think my brother and I just got tired of so much travelling.

We had the best breakfast ever--sausages, eggs, and toast on a grille--on a cold morning in Tyler State Park. My brother threw a flounder and hit me in the face. Our dog chased chipmunks in Missouri. We skinny-dipped in a freezing spring-fed creek just off the road in the middle of nowhere. Mom concocted a slumgullion that she called "Chinese-cajun surprise" at Johnson's Bayou, that included freshly caught crab, bean sprouts, cheese, and bread crumbs (mom was an excellent cook). When nobody on the pier at Padre Island had caught more than one or two fish, my little brother took the fish off their hands and we had a smorgasboard of croaker, whiting, sea bass, drum, snapper, and I don't remember what else. We fed a hoard of gulls on the Aransas Pass ferry. When thugs in Vicksburg jumped up on our trailer at night, dad pulled the .44 magnum and they high-tailed it. And we talked about our hairless dogs from one end of our trips to the other.

After my first son was born, dad advised me, "Make whatever sacrifices you have to and and buy a motor home when he's young."

I didn't. I regret it.

Pickup

After the pop-up camper we got a pick-up camper. For everyone who has never seen a pick-up camper, it fits in the back of a pick-up. It had a stove and icebox (that used a 25 pound block of ice). It had a bed over the cab of the truck and a dining table that broke down into a bed.

On some vacations we went to art shows, huge flea markets, and festivals. Mom had always painted in oils and she began to display her art. She started selling and dad built a trailer for her.

She eventually found her real market--oil paintings based on steamboats, plantation houses, and old photographs of ancestors siting around a lumber camp with huge crosscut saws, or leaning on hitching posts, or standing on the front porch of the old homestead.

My brother and I painted rocks, glued googley eyes on them and sold them. We arranged flowers on driftwood and in bottles. We sold spin-art. Dad made the spin-art machine with a fan motor that turned a turnable. The mechanism was mounted in a box. We would put a piece of paper on the turntable and turn the fan motor on--the paper would whirl and for fifty cents, a kid could drip paint from bottles onto the spinning paper, making circular or spiral designs.

We enjoyed making money and attending the events. We also went on normal vacations where we did not sell anything. Unlike with our tent and our pop-up camper, we did not have a mishap that caused us to abandon the pick-up camper. The folks just finally saved up enough to buy a motor home.