Neighbors

Fall has lived up to its name. The leaves have fallen and I am busy picking up the ones that are not wanted in the garden for mulch. That brings me to a pet peeve. We have a neighbor who is, in most respects, very nice. But the leaves that fall in their yard aren't picked up until mid-December. That means I have to keep cleaning out our gardens because their leaves blow into our yard.
I don't think that they are doing it to annoy me. I suspect they're too cheap to pay to have the leaves removed more than once. I really can't say anything because they are retired teachers and might have to economize. But I can complain here. They don't use the Internet.
It's odd that some neighbors are wonderful and stay friends long after you or they move away and some, you never get to know at all. I guess I've been lucky. We've never had a truly rotten neighbor. Example: I remember a friend of my parents while I was growing up. He sued people. Sometimes it seemed as if he was consciously setting them up for a court case. Other than that, he was a bright, nice guy. But I'm really happy that we didn't live right next door to him.
There's a term that I hear used in the country, "neighborly". I can't give it a precise definition, only cite examples of "neighborliness". If, for example there is a hail storm coming, the neighborly will let people who have no garages park in his shed to protect their cars. Or if someone is putting up a fence and a neighbor has a post hole digger, he'll offer it to the guy putting up the fence. I don't think that I've managed to get a real hold on "neighborly", but I hope you know what I mean.

Book review

For some years, I reviewed romances for Compuserve. It was enjoyable and I got free books in the process. Even after Compuserve shut down its review board, I kept reading romance novels for the fun of it. But the last one I bought was a little disappointing.

"A Dash of Scandal" by Gloria Dale Skinner, writing as Amelia Grey
Jove Books, 2002
ISBN: 0-515-13401-5

The title attracted me. It was obviously a Regency romance. Ever since I read Jane Austen's stories, that period has held enjoyment. The story is of a country girl who visits an aunt in London for 'the season'. Her aunt is a gossip columnist and has had a fall which precludes her going to parties and gathering gossip. She persuades her niece to do the gathering while she continues to write her column. The niece meets a naughty earl and falls in love with him. In the mean time, a thief has been stealing from the homes at which the parties are held, including the earl's. After some misunderstanding, the niece and the earl form a team to catch the thief. He falls in love with her and all ends well.

A cute story and very well written. But there is a problem for me. The author has her characters saying some things that reek of Regency and others that might have come from her local high school right now. Her character's actions are not those of a pair of Regency gentles. In fact, they might have been a pair of high school lovers in Regency dress up.

Of course, each costume change of our heroine is detailed by the author. She also provides details of the dress of other female characters and some of the males... sometimes. I'm not sure if this is 'de rigeur' for a modern Regency writer. But between skipping those descriptions and the protracted, unlikely love scenes, this book was a very quick read.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the reading. The problem was more in non-Regency charactizations and speach. I think that Ms. Dale Skinner should re-read "Pride and Prejudice" to see what actions were more probable in the gentles of that period.

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Things are changing

We changed our clocks from daylight savings time to standard time last night. It beats me why our government insists on sticking with a system invented when all factories didn't have electric lights and used windows to let in sunlight for workers. But this post isn't about that or our government.
I like to garden. In fact, I'm a Master Gardener (courtesy of the University of Arkansas Extension Service). Yesterday and the day before, I began to get ready for winter. At my Master Gardener project, a group of us mulched plants and removed the summer annuals in preparation for planting winter ones. At home, my wife and I swept up leaves, weeded and I put in pansies for the winter.
The trees are changing and the leaves are falling. Maples make the prettiest show, especially here, among tthe pines and oaks. But the wild pear in the wood below our house has turned to orange. I usually notice it in the spring when white blossoms make it a candle in the bare woods. The lizards have disappeared from our rock garden and the acorns are dropping out of the oak woods, making walking up our back drive like strolling on ball bearings.
Days have become cooler. We can leave the windows open at night without smothering in heat and humidity. Since Little Rock has no ordinance against it, the smell of burning leaves can occasionally be scented on the breeze. Some of the birds are gone, already flown south for winter. Among those, the hummingbirds are most noticeable for their absence. I took the feeder down this morning. On the plus side, mosquitos are not in attendance. Bug gnats still manage to get up my nose.
Deer and pheasant seasons have begun in many states. The modern gun bear season opens here Monday. I don't hunt anymore. Well, I plan on trying to bag a pheasant in Kansas next week. But my deer and elk hunting is over. Both my son and son-in-law provide me with game when their hunts are successful. And the meat is already dressed and butchered into cuts for cooking. It's even better than buying meat at the grocery since they don't ask for money (well not often).
All those leaves are falling on our drive and into our little water feature. That means sweeping, dipping, cleaning and "sucking" them out of wherever they aren't wanted. That sucking is something that I managed to get Stihl to do for me. By turning their blower around, you can make it remove leaves from places that are inconvenient to blow. We still have to pick the leaves out of the lavender bushes and rosemary. The rosemary, by the way, is blooming again. Pretty purple blossoms that you don't notice at first.
Sage, salvia, roses, Japanese anemone are all blooming. Our front garden has all of those and looks quite patriotic with red, white and blue waving waist high.
Of course, the kids are back in school. Since I'm fairly old, this has only one effect for me... the traffic jams start about three in the afternoon and go on until the end of rush hour. Those yellow buses seem to be everywhere.

I'm not...

I'm not as young as I was yesterday; and I was older then than the day before that.
One of my favorite rants is that I hope I get to Heaven because I want to talk to God about engineering. It seems bitterly unfair to me that my body wears out one thing at a time. It would be so much cleaner if we just fell to pieces all at once, like the "One Hoss Shay".*
This latest complaint has two sources. First, I injured my knee slightly a couple of days ago. That sort of thing used to heal in a couple of hours. But here it is two days later and the darned thing still hurts. It makes me limp when I walk. I hate that. And that is not the only thing that is wearing or has worn out. The second is, for me, really scary. I was talking to my wife this morning. It took me three tries to get a very simple point across. Afterwards I realized that she was not to blame. I had been vague and had not said exactly what I was trying to make her understand. I'm losing my communications skills. Hey, that's really frightening for a guy who wants to write.
My mother-in-law (That's her picture at the head of this post.) had Alzheimer's Disease. It was painful to watch a witty, sophisticated woman disappear, one memory at a time. The first thing we noticed gone were words. She began to call almost any animal a squirrel. Of course by that time, her short term memory was already shot. She hardly remembered what had been said at the beginning of a conversation. That meant we heard the same story often. I'm not complaining about that. She was a talented story teller. She was very good at compensating for memory loss. If you met her then, you would have thought her normal during a short conversation. We were lucky enough to care for her during six months of her illness. She was mobile and enjoyed travelling with us although she would often remark that she remembered a road that none of us had ever travelled.
I'm pretty sure that the regimen we used for her kept her going longer than another might have. After my wife helped her dress, we would have breakfrast. She had always been careful about her weight, but the combination of her disease and age reduced her appetite to the point we gave her nutritional drinks as often as she would take them. After breakfast, I would take her for a walk along our street. We walked up to three miles each morning; less if she felt tired. She would talk to me about her family and marriage. I loved that.
But in the normal course of Alzheimer's, she began to lose people. She addressed her grandchildren as if they were her children. She became increasingly concerned about getting lost. Our son is six feet four inches (96cm) tall. When we went into crowded places, Mother would cling to his arm. She said that holding onto the tallest thing in the crowd would allow us to find her no matter what. She began to wander, mostly in the house and we had to put up barriers to prevent her from falling down stairs or into the garage. She would not go outside without one of us because she was afraid of getting lost.
Dementia can effect people in different ways. The books we read on the subject warned us that her temperament might change, that she might get mean, irritable, even destructive. None of those things happened. Mother never was less than pleasant, never raised her voice or displayed any temper. I wondered if inside, she was fretting at her innability to tell us everything she wanted to say. It is more comforting to believe that she was as happy as she seemed.
Toward the end of her life, she didn't recognise any of her family except her husband. Him, she knew up to the day she died. He died soon after she did and they are buried side by side in the little prairie cemetary below the church they attended almost every week they were married.
Getting back to ME. I fear losing my memories and depending on others for everything. I fear becoming an inarticulate burden on my family. Dying is easy. But being so sick that I can't take care of myself, in unremitting pain that robs me of any other thought or emotion is terrifying.

Tired but happy

Fran and I have been traveling almost non-stop for a month now. We've visited family, had high school reunions and met for historical investigations. Having time to do laundry and repack before hurrying off to someplace else we want to go is tiring. When we returned home last night, we piled into bed without unpacking and slept for 12 hours straight.
Today, the lawn needed mowing and there were lots of weeds that needed to be pulled in the garden. We did some, but not all. Tomorrow, I have to start preparing for another trip.
Now, don't get me wrong. I like to travel and each one of these voyages has been voluntary. Coming so close together has been trying. Hopefully, when I return from this next drive, I'll be able to rest for a few weeks before we head out again.
If you're reading this to say, "Poor me, poor me, poor me." You're right.

Jukebox

Every morning I can remember, there has been a tune running through my head. It's not the same tune every morning (how boring). The song is usually prompted by something I hear that morning or heard the night before.
While it's there, playing in my mind, I can sing the words if I know them, or whistle it through most of the day. It varies, as I said. Some mornings, there will be a theme from a classical piece, others a bit of country-western, rock and roll, or Latin music.
I love all these metiers. The happy, peppy Samba, the brooding, romantic tango, the wailing country-western, all of these get me singing. My first musical passion was classical. The enormous, creative variations on simple themes kept me engaged through the piece. Something as rich as Rachmoninoff's Variations on a Theme by Pagininni, I can play over and over, hearing something new each time I listen.
The tune will determing my mood for the day. Of course, I can change moods as the situation warrants, but I usually go back to where I started in the morning. My mind is a self choosing jukebox.
Ah, some of my younger readers might not know what a jukebox is. Ask your parents or grandparents.

no title

I'm in New Mexico today. Fran and I are visiting our daughter and granchildren. Grandson is playing JV football Monday night.
Weather is different here. It was hot and humid in Little Rock when we left. Up here, chamisa and mountain asters are blooming. The air is dry and we have a fire in the grate tonight. When I finish this, I'll join my son-in-law in watching football on TV.
Our children and grandchildren are sources of both great pride and casual disappointment to me. On the one hand, they work hard, have good lives and are, in the main, content. On the other, their domestic lives are chaotic. Thus, as a father, I worry that the contentment will not last.
I've said this to others. Children don't have less or more problems when they grow up. The problems just become more "interesting" (read more complex and harder to solve.) I suspect that most parents want to solve their children's problems for them, or at least give them good advice on how to deal with things.
I've given my share of advice, some of it even good. Sometimes, the kids follow my suggestions. All in all, not a bad track record.

Time for football!

Vietnam

In my talking about me, I mentioned that I was a Vietnam vet. It's important because my time there matured me and made some changes in the way I view the world.
My Army component was combat engineers. I was a demolition specialist. That meant that I got to disarm unfriendly ordnance as well as blow stuff up. I liked the latter and hated the former. Some memories of that duty were published in Soldier of Fortune back around 1990.
What brought this period to mind is an e-mail I received recently. A friend and another veteran sent me a notice that someone had defaced the Vietnam Wall. I do not understand. While America was in Vietnam, people transferred their anger at the administration to the soldiers who served there. Most of them had been drafted and no more wanted to fight in a foreign country than they wanted to eat dirt.
Angry peace protesters threw rocks at soldiers. They screamed epithets at them and treated them like criminals. The pain of that has lasted all these intervening years. Many of us still greet each other with the words we didn't hear then, "Welcome home."
Why were we there? As I said most were drafted. Some were professional soldiers who went where they were ordered and did what they had to in order to stay alive. I was a volunteer. The theory then was that Communism (you may have to Google that) would spread if not opposed. Twenty years had shown us that this economic/political philosophy did not move where it was actively, militarily opposed. So I guess I wanted to save the world.
While I was in Vietnam, I helped build bridges and schools, clear roads, install drainage systems and shot at people who shot at me. There were some beautiful parts and there were some scary, ugly parts. I may post some memories later. This post is to continue my introduction about me.
When I returned, I was a quieter person. My father guessed that it was because I was listening for someone who might try to kill me. Maybe that was part of it. But the major reason was that I had less to say. I didn't think that my every thought was worth telling. I still don't.
I have a world view that has been annealed by seeing people die, losing friends, being frightened for a solid year. Those events were hard to recover from. I had nightmares and flashbacks for several years after. Marrying the love of my life definitely improved the way I dealt with the memories, so did taking a degree in psychology. The latter was more self-help than learning a new profession.
The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is viewed by people who are just as dedicated to peace. But this time, they have separated the folks who take orders from those making policy.
If you're an old person, like me, who went to Vietnam, I conclude this with only one thing.

Welcome home, and thank you.

dialect

Last Saturday, I headed to the Farmer's Market in downtown Little Rock. There are a number of farmers who sell there whose roots are in southeast Asia. They're good farmers and their produce is first rate.

Until last Saturday, I had dealt with the children of my friend's farm. Raised in Arkansas, they sounded local. But school had started. The kids who weren't away at college were home doing schoolwork. So I dealt with the father. He spoke good English, but as he had learned it here, with a definite Arkansas accent. His lignuistic background came through never-the-less. Now, gentle readers, contemplate if you will, a rural southern accent with a Vietnamese accent superimposed. Awsome.

That incident reminded me of happy days in business. Our Japanese joint venture had an employee who visited regularly. K liked America and he liked Americans. But his special weakness was Mexican mariachi music. He had hundreds of disks at home, played them in the office and visited Mexican restaurants whenever he could.

One night, he and I were entertaining some customers ala 'Japan, Incorporated'. That is, we ate, drank and sang. For everyone but K, it was their first Mexican meal. Knowing that tastes differ, I asked the waitress (I'll get back to her) to bring each of us a Margarita, a tequila sunrise and a bottle of Dos Equis. While the Japanese are great drinkers, especially of beer, the sweet drinks were new and delightful. Soon they were trying to sing the lyrics of the recorded music. Of course, K succeeded belting out Spanish lyrics with a heavy Japanese accent. Several of the cooks left the kitchen to regard him with awe.

Now, as for that waitress; She was a truly beautiful woman, tall, long black hair and a fully developed bossom. She wore a colorful Mexican skirt and a low cut peasant blouse. There was sufficient tequila in the air that I don't remember if she wore anything under that blouse. But it didn't matter. This was thirty years ago. Our Japanese customers stared at her as she passed our table, serving to others. Their eyes followed every bounce or jiggle under that blouse. I can not recall ever seeing such yearning in so many eyes at the same time.

I speak some French and I am not immune to the superimposed accents. I learned my French in a small village in the Alcase Lorraigne area. The local accent is quite heavy. So now my French is laden with that local accent with American superimposed. The French give me looks that I have been unable to translate so far. Perhaps they are admiring, or just shocked to hear what I do l'Academie's language.

For me, however, the best place to go for accents is the British Isles. Most of you will know the broad ones, Scots, Irish, Cockney. But in the country, those accents can become impenetrable. I suspect that they are mixed with words that predate both the Norman and Saxon invasions. If you want to hear some of the above, rent "Cold Comfort Farm". It's a British comedy that was made in 1995 by BBC/Thames.

That's it for now. I'll have a book review for you later.

2 OCT 07

Little Rock, where I live, has its share of bad drivers.
We have the cell phone user who S_L_O_W_L_Y moves away from a traffic light, then weaves all over the road. What the heck? He pays taxes. It is, after all, His road.
Then we have the amazing 'blue hair'. This is usually a woman, but not always. She drags along the Interstate at about 25 miles per hour slower than the speed limit. When she hits the city streets, she gooses what she's driving and sort of averages it all out.
But the thing that annoyed me more than most of the others was the driver who would wait and wait after the light was green. Usually, this left time for two cars, three at the most, to get through the light. Last night, I realized that this was a survival tool. Our local drivers usually ignore or don't see traffic signs and signals. That means that moving smartly away from a stop when the light is green could get you broadsided by someone who didn't see or ignored the red light.
My patience just got a shot in the arm. I'm back to where I was when I left the Army. Now I can wait with equanimity while the drivers ahead of me check for oncoming juggernauts. I even look for lines to wait in.