Author’s note: For 134 Tuesdays in a row, I have published a short, selected memoir at this Substack site. If you have not been with me from the beginning, I want you to know that all 134 are available if you follow the menu backwards to “Yellowstone.” If you find yourself fidgeting in your seat on a three-hour flight, this menu might come in handy. Each chapter is a stand-alone.
After the first year, I started to branch out from memoir. You will run into a trail of voices not my own, maybe a little humor, and then politics starts to seep in. I am well aware that politics as we know it today is driving some of us crazy, but the word that nudged me in that direction was… relevance.
The penny arcade is a venue for coin-operated entertainment devices, an establishment that was popular in the 1930s. From here on out, the penny arcade might be the metaphor for my Substack offerings, a place where each entertainment device, whether a story or a vignette, is its own singular artifact.
2011
It’s 7 AM here at the Belknap residence at the northeast edge of Placitas, New Mexico. I am at the tail end of a 2-week house-sit. I walk a quarter mile along a dirt road to fetch the morning paper. The Chesapeake Bay retriever Lalo leads the way. This morning Lalo and I walked past an escaped llama who was eating the leaves off a small aspen. Last week Lalo and I were chased up the dry Las Huertas Creek embankment by two wild horses. I suppose if those wild horses had caught me, they could have dragged me away.
At Truthdig, Mr. Fish interviewed Mr. Gravy, "the famed altruistic hippie-clown, self-titled psychedelic relic and professional self-parody." At 75, Wavy Gravy is sick of his own schtick. Through him, we can witness the disintegration of the Sixties, as the iconic names fade and disappear like a sand castle at high tide. Mr. Fish pinpoints the watering down of the revolution as a factor in its loss of steam. The Sixties was co-opted and softened "by defanging the snake of radicalism so that everybody could safely hold it." It was a pipe dream to believe that "compassion and joy and togetherness was enough to save us all from self-annihilation." In the comments that followed, one reader described the Sixties as “a mass jailbreak.”
Today, the last day of Seattle's meager summer, I spent five sunny hours on Vashon Island. At 10:10 I walked onto the car ferry Issaquah. At 10:30 Geoff picked me up at the dock. As we drove the few miles to the Vashon village center, we talked politics. Among his current friends, Geoff counts no Republicans. In all four of the locations that I visit annually… Seattle, Missoula, Placitas, Nashville… I have one Republican friend. In a scene from Woody Allen's latest film, "Midnight in Paris," the father of the bride-to-be chastises his future son-in-law for disparaging the Tea Party. “They are decent people trying to take back the country. They are not crypto-fascist airhead zombies.”
I'm house-sitting for my brother in Seattle. Over coffee, I flip through the morning paper. Baby seals are showing up on Alki Beach and sunning themselves. Volunteers protect the seals from those who want to pet them or pick up the little cuties. If a baby seal graces the front page of the Seattle Times, does that mean we've at last achieved world peace?
Ten years after 9/11, the Muslims have finally opened their community center, two blocks from Ground Zero. Do you recall the hullabaloo created by the right wing, marching and yelling in the streets of New York, expressing outrage at the Muslim cleric's blatant act of desecration too near one of our holy sites? This was never a real issue, not in a country that stands for freedom of religion.
The Rapture is an eschatological position held by some Christians, particularly those of American evangelicalism, consisting of an end-time event when all dead Christian believers will be resurrected and, joined with Christians who are still alive, together will rise "in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air."
Quoth the Reverend, "God will punish America and the rest of the world for Gay Pride and same-sex marriages, just as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished with fire and brimstone. The Earth will stick around for a few months of chaos and suffering before being obliterated." Of the dozens of Evangelicals who gathered in the Arizona desert last May, each carrying one suitcase, none were chosen to ascend to Heaven. For them, the Rapture was a flameout.
“Drive, He Said.” Seattle to Missoula…Missoula to Salina, Utah… Salina to Placitas… 1710 miles. My next house-sit has begun. A story in today's Albuquerque Journal solved a mystery. Last week at dawn, I pulled out of Salina onto I-70 and headed east. I had just shifted into fifth gear when I saw on the shoulder a colorful duck, standing there, looking stunned.
"Thousands of migrating waterfowl crash-landed onto parking lots and other hard surfaces in southern Utah, prompting a huge volunteer effort to save their lives and collect the dead. The birds were grebes, a duck-like aquatic bird that typically migrates at this time of year from Alaska and Canada to the coasts of California and northwest Mexico. When they came across low overcast skies and city lights in St. George, Utah, they confused a Wal-Mart parking lot and other flat paved surfaces for bodies of water, injuring or killing themselves on impact."
It’s a cold night in New Mexico. Contemplating the Rapture reminded me of one of my favorite Bible quotes… “Many are called but few are chosen.” In the Montana version of the Bible, the scripture teaches, “Many are cold but few are frozen.”