Requiem for a Reinhardt Chum

I met Steve when we were both in about the fourth grade at Reinhardt Elementary School. Though we were not or maybe were never in the same classes, we struck up a friendship. We played on football and baseball teams, attended Sunday school at Lakeview Christian, joined in Scouts and campouts together, took a summer camp adventure to Sky Ranch together, hiked the creeks (what about the cliff house where the man shot boys with salt-shotgun shells), rode bikes all night, walked endlessly to Casa Linda and Casa View, Lochwood and beyond, and generally lived as the epitome of free rein boys in the suburbs. A frequent destination on Saturdays was the Casa Linda Theatre, where we would watch the latest horror or Elvis movie. On the 7^th-grade Reinhardt football team, Steve stood out. The school colors were royal blue and white. We had to go out and scrounge up our own equipment. Steve showed up in a helmet that had huge white ram’s horns painted on the sides, obviously a distinctive painting by his dad Ken. As young adolescents, we also encouraged one another in various bad judgments such as smoking Tarytons, or Viceroys I stole from my parents. Our gateway was probably smoking grapevine on the Boy Scout campouts. We also were somewhat bookworms in that a destination always was a newsstand to flip through the latest Hot Rod, Car Craft, Mad magazine or Enquirer tabloid at the CV Rexall, CL Skillerns, or Centerville mart. We grew up in a world where there were no drugs, porn, criminal opportunities except shoplifting, no local race problems, STDs or bad parents. Maybe some nighttime bike rides to steal ripe peaches from fenced backyard peach trees.

(And then there was the time at about age 12, at midnight, we were riding our 20-inchers down Cayuga Dr. in the dark in the country, and two motorcycle riders came blasting toward us from the rear. Steve knew it was time to dive into the ditch. I kept riding because my bike was very fast. Circling around the 7-11 and behind as they pursued me with headlights blinding me, I dived under a parked car, then ran like a rabbit to some old garage and hid. Steve and I met back up soon—and shared our excitement about what adrenaline can do to us 12-year-olds.)

I spent many days and nights at Steve's house. His mom was always very kind and perky. She once confided to me her pleasure that Steve age 14 or so was reading big, thick library books back in his bedroom. When I had a sleepover there, Joey would require Steve and me at bedtime to pray together the Lord's Prayer, after we had cleaned in the Jack and Jill bathroom. She also encouraged me to share my Latin translation notes to Susan to assist her in her 9^th-grade Latin class at Gaston. My dad was an accountant and a bowler, and it mystified me that Steve had a dad who was an artist, a tennis player and also an accomplished sax jam musician. During one of those home visits, Steve showed me this enormous poster on an easel that Ken had done of the future LBJ freeway out in the north Dallas cornfields for his commercial art firm. How mysterious also was that Ken was a member of the Dallas Bonehead Club, very unusual for Millmar Cir surrounding conservative/John Birch neighborhoods. How mysterious in the early 60s for Millmar Cir folks to invest in land on Padre Island?

Ken was a wonderful dad. When Steve was about 15, Ken bought him an old non-running Model A (or was it T) to encourage Steve's interest in being a car mechanic (I had turned Steve on to the Henry Gregor Felson books Street Rod, Crash Club and Hot Rod, found in the Reinhardt library; Steve told me he always remembered that passage where the protagonist, at high speed on a highway, learned that applying more speed could save his life). But more importantly, Ken taught Steve the importance of having an entrepreneurial drive. At about age 12, we still on bicycles, Ken set Steve up to be in the business of painting address numbers on curbs. Steve was outfitted with various rubber stencil materials, cans of reflective green and white street paint and a brush. Steve invited me on one of these bicycle trips into distant neighborhoods to knock door-to-door to solicit buyers of his service--$2 a sign (Steve had explained the economics to me that with two $4.00 buckets of paint, we only had to paint four to start being in the black). Unfortunately on one trip many miles away near Mesquite, Steve had the two gallon buckets precariously balanced on his front basket. A nearly full gallon of green enamel busted and poured out onto the street (remnants probably still there) and we kept riding. I remember another instance when Ken drove Steve and me to a nursing home next to Doctor's Hospital in Casa Linda. Again, we were door-to-door salesmen, but I can't remember what we were selling--perhaps boy scout cookies. At any rate, Ken parked near the end of the nursing home and we snuck in a side door. Sticking our heads into each room, we solicited business. Finally an old women said to us, "Please, can't you just leave us old folks alone.” We skedaddled back to the car and reported to Ken that we had been evicted, and that we wanted to leave anyway because we couldn't stand the "old folks” smell. Ken gave out a big laugh--so much for that entrepreneurial misadventure.

I left Bryan Adams in the middle of my junior year and didn't see Steve as much. We continued to share many delinquent wrongdoings together I could tell stories about but also accomplished these with others, too. I think he moved to Denton with family (is it Spencer Denton?) at about age 20, leaving his Dallas printing job (eager to join his coz and BA-friend hippies and in an early midlife crisis best regarded as related to the extremely turbulent times of the late 60s), and I occasionally saw him at his Fort Worth Drive home, but soon we went our own ways. Via email, we renewed exchanges in the early 2000s, and about three years ago, Steve, driving a rented convertible, accepted my invitation to visit my longtime hometown of Denton. I believe he was in Texas visiting his sons and mother. We spent several hours driving around Denton to all his old haunts. It was a more bitter than sweet time for Steve. He shared stories of many bad times, painful losses and many regrets—at my age don’t we all have them--that saddened me and enlightened me to the source of his aversion to North Texas.

A continuous message was how much he loved his kids. He was like his dad in that way. I gathered that Ken was always supportive of Steve, except for a few times such as isolated mischiefs with Ken's Dodge Dart convertible. How could Steve be otherwise than an always loving father? He was also to me a close childhood friend and I know we all will continue to miss him.

My state Texas in musical performance at Palo Duro Canyon and Albany Texas

My Summer Vacation

Palo Duro Canyon Texas Outdoor Musical Romance and Albany Fandangle

June 25, 2017

My brother and sister went with me and mom and dad on a driving trip in our station wagon to see these two musicals. The Palo Duro Canyon Texas was June 14 and the Fandangle was a week later on Saturday night in Albany Texas

My dad is on another one of these things and is studying all this cowboy and indian history.  He said when he grew up he almost every night watched westerns like gunsmoke and davy crockett. Me and Fran and Dave don’t really care about cowboys and Indians and don’t like to spend all day in the back of the station wagon. I am the youngest and they make me sit on the floorboard or behind the back seat on the suitcases.

On the first Saturday dad made us walk through the Panhandle Plains west texas museum. He kept saying this is the most magnificent museum of southwest history and has a priceless collection. I got tired after about 2 hours of intense reading and study of what he said were artifacts. Then we had dinner at the Freedmans café and then check in to this very nice motel next to the college. Then Dad rushed us all in the car to drive out to the outdoor theater to watch this play. He was very happy that he said he did not even have to pay the regular entrance get to get into the Palo Duro Park. We barely made it out to the theater before this big fandangle started. We had very close in seats in the center. Dad said he had to pay a fortune to get us these seats.

God, I have so many vivid memories of that night. But by the time it was finally over, I was so sleepy that dad had to carry me back to the stationwagon. When he put me to bed at the motel, he said I should write up all my memories. Next Saturday night, I also should write down all my memories and then write up a report for school next fall on my summer vacation. He said it could be a comparison and contrast essay about the two performances.

So the next Saturday mom and dad piled us in the station wagon and drove us from Canyon to this very nice motel in albany texas, the Albany inn. Then we ate some great burgers at a place call the icehouse and then drove out to this outdoor theater to watch this fandangle musical.

Dad told me that for my report I first should think about all the similarities of the two plays. Well, both seemed to start out about the land and all the early Indians. Palo Duro canyon is the biggest canyon in the country with all these colors after the grand canyon. These comanches and kiowas spent a lot of time there too and made it their hideout after all these soldiers started to chase them. They had a lot of horses and spent a lot of time hunting buffalos. They could ride their horses from Oklahoma to Mexico straight in about two days and were no one to fuck with in the yano esticado.

Well, this old fort griffin land was vast prairies. In northwest texas where some of these first Texans tried to make homes and raise cows. The comanche Indians up in this area of north and west texas did not like the Texans and did many times what dad said were depredations.

So the two plays were similar in that both had these two very big outdoor stages and big loud speakers for all the music and what the actors had to say. Both plays started by talking about the beauty of these areas and how the natives had lived such wonderful lives. They were hard and not peaceful. They were like from another time and place, something dad said these early Texans and americans just could not make sense of.

So after these introductions, both plays begin these stories of how the settlers came, of how they made money from things like cows and buffaloes and how the Indians got real pissed off and tried to stop them.

At the Texas, the story had this big curnel rancher, dad said he was modeled after Charles goodnight. He started being a bully to this poor young man who came back for his land from his father and just wanted to be a farmer. In Albany the main actors were these first families and how they had very hard lives. If you stole a horse, you would be hanged.

At Palo Duro this very pretty girl from Baltimore or maybe St Louis fell in love with this poor farmer. He seemed to have very strong opinions about everything and also was a very hard worker. She just fell head over heels in love with him and he was very stupid to not realize what a beautiful lady she was and give in to her. So a lot of this Texas play was how she fell for him, then decided she was so hurt that she had to go back to Baltimore.  Then finally the dull mullet took her in his arms, they fell in love and became rich at their farm and had many children.

At the Albany play there was a lot of this musical romance stuff too. But these womenfolk were pretty tough. They rode out on these horses side saddle. They knew what they were doing. Worked at this old west town griffin and ranches and towns like the Flat to provide for all the needs of the cowboys and buffalo hunters and soldiers. But the most important thing was some of these first women settlers stayed, raised very big and strong families and set a tradition that included love of god, good schools for children, incredible self sacrifice amid loss, and faith that their community could survive and prosper with much love and support among its people. Dad said he thinks Albany is one of the most incredible success stories for a small texas town because of these first settler women. He especially loved the acknowledgment that all these young boys and girls were brought together, taught to square dance together, sometimes at about age 15 learned to do se do together, have babies and live a life together.

In contrast, this Palo Duro story how these rich cattlemen, with these celebrity Indians like Quanah, looked down their nose at the poor farmers but the poor farmer got the girl. I did start to like the rich cattleman because he seemed to have a very sharp and sweet relationship with his old bag wife. And I especially liked that old woman who basically ran the place, fed the curnel and at old age decided to take in that smelly old miner dude for her lover. She was the best actor in the play.

At Palo Duro, Dad said I don’t know any thing about singing and dancing . He said the dancers and singers were absolutely incredible in their talent and skill He said they were college students from all over the south and were paid over the summer to live in canyon and get their first paid jobs. He said all these professional music and dance professors and directors spend much time pushing these young people to the best performance.

In albany, dad said he did not think anyone got paid anything, He said it is a very small town and all these people, from age 98 to 3 months old are just volunteers and just do this because they love this community and find this to be a wholesome, rewarding  and educational way to spend the early summer months. He also said director spends much time pushing these young people to the best performance

Dad said it might be a bad idea to try to write this essay as a comparison and contrast, because these two groups are different people with different intentions, resources, and traditions. He did say that Palo Duro amphitheatre in its first year invited the Albany players for its first performance. Then they paid some bigshot eastern musical writer to write the musical script for a lot of money. Then they wanted to add some jokes to the script and got in this big lawsuit with the writers family and had to pay 300000 dollars to be able to play and say what they wanted to on their stage.

Dad said the man who wrote the first fandangle did not want any money and gave it to his friends and family. Dad said the folks that every year do this don’t see much need to change anything, Dad said there is nothing in it that is politically incorrect or needs more fireworks, water shows, explosions, lightning, etc. These folks are doing the right thing and know what they are doing and don’t need any advice. Dad also said the man who wrote the fandangle taught English in the high school and was a very smart and loving man who had much positive influence on his community. Dad said next year we are going back to fandangle and tell all our friends to go too.

Dad said I should dedicate my essay to Robert Nail, one of whose enduring talents was his insight into childhood and youth.

Don Hancock, June 25, 2017

Reinhardt Elementary School

Dallas Texas

Texas our Texas all hail the mighty state

At Reinhardt in the late 50s, the schoolmasters recruited young boys for two tasks, to serve as school crossing guards in the 30 minutes or so before first bell and tardy bell and after final bell and to raise the US flag and Texas flag in the morning and lower it at the end of the day. Rain or shine, we were out as crossing guards. At the front door of the auditorium, we were allowed into this closet to get our school-issued galoshes and yellow slickers. If it was raining pretty hard, I don't think we raised the flags. The Texas legislators did not allow the Texas flag to fly in the rain or after dark.

In auditorium class, we began by first facing the Stars and Stripes to the left, placing right hand across chest on heart and reciting the pledge of allegiance, then to the left to honor the Texas flag, one state indivisible.

I have been reading about Texas history recently and happened to run across an online book, The History of Texas, which was the official state adopted Texas elementary Texas history text from about 1954 to the early 60s.

The entire book can be read at

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3212770-The-History-of-Texas-1954-FULL.html

I had insomnia last night and made it through the book pretty much nonstop.I honestly don't remember ever reading from it or having a teacher such as 7th grade homeroom teacher Mrs. Willis force us to memorize any of this stuff. I vaguely remember studying a Texas map that a teacher rolled out from atop the blackboard to see the names and locations of the seven major rivers of Texas.

If it was in fact Mrs. Willis's job to teach us Texas history, the only thing I remember her talking about was the governor's race at the time. I believe Bill Clements was one of the candidates. She read and followed the news about the Texas governor's race kind of like my wife follows Donald Trump. She said it was very important to be a citizen and vote. She was a tall woman with a pock-marked face from, I guess, an early case of acne. She was very smart. I have since regarded my 7th grade homeroom teacher as among the finest specimens of 1950s Texas women who could do anything but had few choices of profession, and teaching was one. She probably knew immediately that this textbook was just a bunch of claptrap.

At the time, this book was apparently not very controversial, though it does make blatant derogatory comments about Indians, colored people and the Yankees who cost the lives during the Civil War of so many Texas boys and also persecuted the true citizens of Texas during Reconstruction, in part by allowing carpetbaggers and scalawags and also by putting negroes into political office and allowing them to vote. We also learn some positive aspects of the service of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. The authors were both jr. high principals; one was a woman. The writing was really fairly good. They did seem to have some ambivalence toward Mexicans and women. Women were very good at holding down the fort and making the menfolk more cultivated.

In 8th grade at Gaston, my American history teacher Mr. Smith was a real bigot when it came to discussing the history of native Americans in the New World. He told one questioning boy that it was very "dangerous" for the boy to question whether some Indians at some times were ill treated. The boy had raised his hand and prefaced his comment that his older brother was in graduate school to become a historian and had made this comment to him about possible ill treatment of Indians. It was "dangerous" talk in Mr. Smith's class.  Now that sort of squelched any classroom discussion or questions.When Mr. Smith looked the boy in the eyes and said any more talk like this was "dangerous," I did not know what to think but this this boy was in some very deep shit. Was it going to be lickings, being suspended or expelled and maybe something even worse; was the boy going to get a failing grade for the six weeks and also the entire year's class? I believe Mr. Smith was some kind of officer in the Texas public schools history association.

KERA published last fall an interesting article that surveys many historians today about their impressions of this textbook.

http://keranews.org/post/what-1950s-texas-textbook-can-teach-us-about-todays-textbook-fight

I am still trying to find a copy of my 1950s music class textbook. That was the best.

Breaking news on the farm

I'm pretty much a couch potato when it comes to modern approaches to animal husbandry and recognize it's a tough world out there for both the ewes and the rams but it must be in God's plan for how life keeps going on.

http://youtu.be/3Z13en8MaKc

Mom's Riddle

My mother, age 92 living an an assisted living residence in Plano, TX, told this "riddle" to me and Pam--really just a joke circulating at the place: "If you had the choice of taking $100,000 now or waiting 31 days for the amount equal to a penny compounding 100% everyday for 31 days, which would you pick?" I after a long pause: "I need to get out my slide rule." Pam: "I'd wait 30 days." Mom, looking at my knit brow in calculation: "Don't try to figure it. You can't." I: "Okay, I'll take the hundred thousand now." Mom: "I took the 31 days [wry smile]. I'm a gambler." Pam: "So what's the answer?" Mom: "Thirty one days. You'd have 100 million." Mom, wry smile: " I'm 92 years old. I'd take the hundred thousand now. I don't know if I'll be around in 31 days."

Woman never had direct communication with God anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtLflH3-Jl4

"Larry said: 'You must make the leap outside of the womb, destroy your connections.'

"'I know', I said, 'that this is an important talk, and that it will be at this moment that we each go different ways. Perhaps Henry and Larry will go the same way, but I will have to go another, the woman's way.'

..."All I know is that I am right, right for me. If today I can talk both woman's and man's language, if I can translate woman to man and man to woman, it is because I do not believe in man's objectivity. In all his ideas, systems, philosophies, arts come from a personal source he does not wish to admit. Henry and Larry are pretending to be impersonal.

..."As to all that nonsense Henry and Larry talked about, the necessity of 'I am God' in order to create (I suppose they mean 'I am God, I am not a woman'). Woman never had direct communication with God anyway, but only through man, the priest. She never created directly except through man, was never able to create as a woman. But what neither Larry nor Henry understands is that woman's creation far from being like man's must be exactly like her creation of children, that is it must come out of her own blood, englobed by her womb, nourished with her own milk. It must be a human creation, of flesh, it must be different from man's abstractions. As to this 'I am God', which makes creation an act of solitude and pride, this image of God alone making sky, earth, sea, it is this image which has confused woman. (Man too, because he thinks God did it all alone, and he thinks he did it all alone. And behind every achievement of man lies a woman, and I am sure God was helped too but never acknowledged it.)

"Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her. If she forgets this she is lost. What will be marvelous to contemplate will not be her solitude but this image of woman being visited at night by man and the marvelous things she will give birth to in the morning. God alone, creating, may be a beautiful spectacle. I don't know. Man's objectivity may be an imitation of this God so detached from us and human emotion. But a woman alone creating is not a beautiful spectacle. The woman was born mother, mistress, wife, sister, she was born to represent union, communion, communication, she was born to give birth to life, and not to insanity. It is man's separateness, his so-called objectivity, which has made him lose contact, and then his reason. Woman was born to be the connecting link between man and his human self. Between abstract ideas and the personal pattern which creates them. Man, to create, must become man.

"Woman has this life-role, but the woman artist has to fuse creation and life in her own way, or in her own womb if you prefer. She has to create something different from man. Man created a world cut off from nature. Woman has to create within the mystery, storms, terrors, the infernos of sex, the battle against abstractions and art. She has to sever herself from the myth man creates, from being created by him, she has to struggle with her own cycles, storms, terrors, which man does not understand. Woman wants to destroy aloneness, recover the original paradise. The art of woman must be born in the womb-cells of the mind. She must be the link between the synthetic products of man's mind and the-elements.

"I do not delude myself as man does, that I create in proud isolation. I say we are bound, interdependent. Woman is not deluded. She must create without these proud delusions of man, without megalomania, without schizophrenia, without madness. She must create that unity which man first destroyed by his proud consciousness.

..."Man today is like a tree that is withering at the roots. And most women painted and wrote nothing but imitations of phalluses. The world was filled with phalluses, like totem poles, and no womb anywhere. I must go the opposite way from Proust who found eternal moments in creation. I must find them in life. My work must be the closest to the life flow. I must install myself inside of the seed, growth, mysteries. I must prove the possibility of instantaneous, immediate, spontaneous art. My art must be like a miracle. Before it goes through the conduits of the brain and becomes an abstraction, a fiction, a lie. It must be for woman, more like a personified ancient ritual, where every spiritual thought was made visible, enacted, represented.

"A sense of the infinite in the present, as the child has.

"Woman's role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don't mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquillity and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.

"She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious. Her creation will be to make articulate this obscure world which dominates man, which he denies being dominated by, but which asserts its domination in destructive proofs of its presence, madness.

"Note by Durrell: 'Anaïs is unanswerable. Completely unanswerable. I fold up and give in. What she says is biologically true from the very navel strings'."

Work dogs and show dogs/ moms and daughters--Franzen's Freedom

I finally finished this 563 pp behemoth and the last 100 pp or so are excellent, including this paragraph:

Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. So much so, indeed, that Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother's life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she'd also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica's overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was "Great post!" When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who'd dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica's belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty's age. And when Jessica's heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation — the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding — but mostly because she depends on Jessica's love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.

Antidote for antimaterialism

From Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse (1929)

It was not my fortune to be Marias only lover, nor even her favorite one. I was one of many. Often she had no time for me, often only an hour at midday, seldom a night. She took no money from me. Hermine saw to that. She was glad of presents, however, and when I gave her, perhaps, a new little purse of red lacquered leather there might be two or three gold pieces inside it. As a matter of fact, she laughed at me over the red purse. It was charming, but a bargain, and no longer in fashion. In these matters, about which up to that time I was as little learned as in any language of the Eskimos, I learned a great deal from Maria. Before all else I learned that these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the dancing show, from ring to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

New arrivals at the farm

Day in the Life, Part 2

I counted 15 last night while freshening water, but oldest ram was hobbling, like me, with bad arthritis. I wonder if he just keeled over, or coyotes took down the weakest. By 10 am, nature had pretty much taken back what it had given

Late Breaking News on the Farm

Predators

At right is our chicken coop, containing five hens and a rooster. The coop is portable; I drag it around the yard so the birds can find fresh greens, worms and bugs.

At center is a large bird, I believe a turkey vulture, who, on a windy day, soaring high drafts with fellows, spotted something he might like to eat and decided to check it out.

Removing stains from red wine

Older people can extend their lives by drinking several glasses of red wine in the evening. A hazard is that red wine spills occur. In my case, I often have an unfinished glass on my bedside table. During the night, I reach for the nose drops and accidentally knock over the glass of wine, which spills on the bedclothes and floor.
Remedy 1: Cursing helps relieve tension. I usually say some combination of goddamit, fuck.
Remedy 2: Don't leave the wine glass anywhere near where you are sleeping.
Remedy 3. Step 1.Remove all the stained bedclothes, clothing, etc., ASAP, and soak in water. You'll notice that the bright red turns purple. Attempt to flush the stain.
Step 2. Some people recommend soaking the cloth with white wine. I have never tried this. Others recommend using a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, which is a mild bleach, and vinegar. (Of course, we all know that we can use regular bleach if the cloth is white.)
Step 3. After vigorously flushing material in sink, applying remedies such as HP, bleach, stain remover, etc., we use regular hot water washing cycle (not overloading but underloading to provide maximum flushing action).
Red wine can extend our lives but can be messy. Prompt action after an accident can prevent stains or the need to replace permanently stained fabrics.
p.s., I don't have any white, shag carpets, which can be hell, but only have finished wood flooring all over my house, so that's not a problem. Also, the last couch we bought at Rooms to Go has some kind of miracle petroleum fabric that is impermeable to wine spills if you wipe and flush.

Spring Fever

The delicate new blossoms on my plum tree are being ravaged today by a motley band of bees, flies and wasps in orgiastic frenzy. I wish the flowers had more time to grow up.

Heralds of Spring

The sun came out briefly this afternoon and pushed out a few white plum blossoms,

then cast a pinkness across the southern clouds and horizon.

For a Eulogy or a Wedding Toast --(Did Salinger think he was a Buddhist or a poet?)

J.D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters."

The title of the story is the first line of a message left by Boo Boo Glass for Seymour on the bathroom mirror of the family's apartment, which Buddy discovers towards the end of the story. The message itself begins with a line taken from Sappho's fragment LP 111:

“Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.”

Here's a eulogy someone wrote drawing from the line:

“In Medieval times, when a great man was soon to travel from one domicile to another, it was customary to alert forthcoming hosts to prepare to house a VERY consequential guest, a person of value and stature. Heaven should prepare now to raise high its roof beams.”

More quotations from Salinger’s works.

• You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns.'"
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 22

• "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

• "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Ch. 24

http://classiclit.about.com/od/catcherintherye/a/aa_catcherquote_2.htm

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

“Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried to grap for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she's fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

“Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. -Holden Caulfield"
— J.D. Salinger

“Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!"
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

“I would like you to clear up for me just what the hell your motives are for saying it." He hesitated, but not long enough to give Franny a chance to cut in on him. "As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure--or even intellectual treasure--and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.""
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"However contradictory the coroner's report - whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death - isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience."
— J.D. Salinger

"But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

:What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
— J.D. Salinger

"Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"But quilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

'Are you a poet?' he asked.
'A poet?' Nicholson said. 'Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?'
'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.' "
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/819789.J_D_Salinger

That's Vanity

Walker Percy does a short jog, working up a sweat, in French despair a la Camus, and finds a glimpse of God. Cormac McCarthy trudges in agony for a lifetime and finds nothing.




[This dramatic reading shows the screenwriters' faithful but creative adaptation of the original.]

To watch video, try this link:

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/auvideo/2008-03/14/content_6537967.htm

I shouldn't diminish Percy's effort, though his happy ending in The Moviegoer seems an aim at Hollywood comedy a la The Graduate rather than Christian optimism. Here's a few more lines from the novel:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

And the novel's epigraph taken from Kierkegaard:

. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.

I Hate Plastic and Subdivisions

“Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

An Ordinary Catholic Woman

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.

"But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent." Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. "He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast." She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.

This Explains Everything Part 3

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini

Salesmen, advertisers and other compliance professionals manipulate us through use of these six principles of persuasion:
--our human sense of reciprocity
--need for internal commitment/consistency
--attraction to scarcity
--being influenced by liking someone or something,
--appeals to authority, and
--social proofs.