Settling down for bedtime - sjaa

via sjaa.posterous.com

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

OLD GUY AND A BUCKET OF SHRIMP.............

Why is this effective? What makes it "moving"?

From Evernote:

OLD GUY AND A BUCKET OF SHRIMP.............
OLD GUY AND A BUCKET OF SHRIMP.............

This is a true story.
  
It happened every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembled a giant orange and was starting to dip into the blue ocean.

Old Ed came strolling along the beach to his favorite pier.. Clutched in his bony hand was a bucket of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now.  

Everybody's gone, except for a few joggers on the beach.  Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts...and his bucket of shrimp.
  
Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier.
  
Before
  long, dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds.  As he does, if you listen closely, you can hear him say with a smile, 'Thank you.  Thank you.'
  
In a few short minutes the bucket is empty.  But Ed doesn't leave.

He stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place.  
  
When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly away.  And old Ed quietly makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.

If you were sitting there on the pier with! ! your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like 'a funny old duck,' as my dad used to say.  Or, 'a guy who's a sandwich shy of a picnic,' as my kids might say.   To
  onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.
  
To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem altogether unimportant ....maybe even a lot of nonsense.

Old folks often do strange things, at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters.

Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida . That's too bad. They'd do well to know him better.

His full name:  Eddie Rickenbacker.  He was a famous hero back in World War II.  On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and his seven-member crew went down.  Miraculously, all of the men survived, crawled out of their
 ! !  plane, and climbed into a life raft.

Captain Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks.  Most of all, they fought hunger.  By the eighth day their rations ran out. No food.  No water.  They were hundreds of miles from land and no one knew where they were.
  
They needed a miracle. That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle. They tried to nap  Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose. Time dragged.  All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft.
  
Suddenly, Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap.  It was a seagull!
  
Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next
  move.  With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab ! ! it and wring its neck..  He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal - a very slight meal for eight men - of it.  Then they used the intestines for bait..  With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait......and the cycle continued.  With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued (after 24 days at sea...).  

Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the
  sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull..  And he never stopped saying, 'Thank you.'  That's why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.

Reference: (Max Lucado, In The Eye of the Storm, pp..221, 225-226)

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: Text and Audio

Here is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, accompanied by my reading of it, which you can hear now or download as an mp3 file using the gizmo below.

Many consider this the greatest political speech ever given.  The Civil War cost 600,000 lives, counting both sides, more than in all other U.S. conflicts combined. Lincoln's main purpose was to preserve the Union (the Nation). He had hoped to avoid a war, but he was also determined to prevent the spread of slavery to the Missouri Territories as they became states. He hoped that the evil institution would come to an end as the Nation developed. 

The Dead of Night

November 23rd, 2010 11:53 am

The Dead of the Night

One big story that hasn’t yet made it across the Spanish-English divide is the epic of Don Alejo Garza, an elderly farmer who fought a one-man stand against a drug gang.  When they gave him a deadline to leave his property or else, Garza sent his ranch hands home and armed himself. There he waited. When the gang came in the dead of the night he met them with a fusilade and killed four and wounded two before the numerically superior drug enforcers finally took him out with gunfire and hand-grenades. The Mexican Marines arrived on the scene to find  bodies all over and an old man at the center of it all.

(more…)

via pajamasmedia.com

Sounds like the making of a Hollywood movie. Now this was a Don!

Ellen Handler Spitz Reviews "The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales Of The Brothers Grimm" | The New Republic

The Storytellers

Anne Anderson's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm

translated and edited by Maria Tatar

W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pp., $16.95

Year after year, we print and re-print fairy tales. What is it that makes them valuable? Should we keep telling them, and if so, why? What about their detractors, the self-appointed child protectors who complain about their violence and cruelty, not to mention a different set of worriers who protest their “false” happy endings? And surely the tales do not teach morality. Remember the egregious brutality of that spoiled princess in The Frog King who, after hurling the little animal who helped her against the wall, gets rewarded. And we quail at even a mention of The Jew in the Brambles, an outrageous portrayal of barbarism and prejudice, which, in Maria Tatar’s new selection of the Grimm fairy tales, wisely appears only in a separate section marked for adults. 

via tnr.com

See link for the rest.

MLA's Open Letter to Arizona Governor

There is no rational basis for making language ability an indicator of an individual’s citizenship or residency status.
via mla.org

That sentence appears in an open letter issued by the Moderrn Language Association (MLA)  to the Governor of Arizona in protest of the law passed by its legislature requiring law enforcement officers to check the residency status of anyone they lawfully stop for other reasons whose residency status the officer has reason to doubt.  The Supreme Court has already held that an officer who stopped a car full of people in the early morning and found that none could speak English and none had legal ID was within his rights in taking them to the Federal Immigration Center, where they were found to be "undocumented" (some say, "illegal aliens.')

"There is no rational basis" is a huge claim to defend. Why not claim instead that there is merely insufficient reational basis?  That while there may be SOME reason to think that people who cannot speak English may be foreigners and therefore may be undocumented, the preponderance of reason is on the other side, Surely, a skillful reasoner will defend the easier to defend proposition. But not the MLA. Instead, they make a demonstrably false claim. The reason for the blunder is that they want to influence a court: "no rational basis" is a legal term from Constitutional law. The Constitution of the United States holds that states may not discriminate against particular groups or individuals when there is no rational basis for doing so. Conversely, a rational basis will allow some laws to stand. States can and do discriminate against prostitutes, since it is rational to want to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.  The MLA wants to go on record as supporting the claim that Arizona had no rational basis "for making language ability an indicator of ... residency status." We could all agree that it would not make sense for language to be the sole indicator. But that is not what the MLA claims. They claim it cannot be an indicator at all. Contra Arizona, the MLA contends that one ought not to think a question of legal status is raised because of language and accent--even when taken together with other evidence.

Would a rational being doubt the proposition that if we wish to pressure illegal immigrants to return to their country of origin--nothing stops them from applying for citizenship--we must first find them? And while the ideal of the MLA is lovely--the law cannot even SUSPECT me just because I can't speak English and have no means of identifying myself--it remains true that we ALL get inconvenienced by the law from time to time. Arizona believes taht the rational basis test is well met when one considers the problems Arizona is trying to solve.

Is the MLA a scholarly organization or a political activist group? Nowadays the question may not even make sense to some.