jumpingfish

0. What I won’t discuss

Yesterday the sky was blue and the sun shined down from the sky as Trudy and I ran our six-mile long run.

Yesterday our Rain Lilies exploded into a white-and-yellow supernova, attracting butterflies away from the other delights here and there in the back and front yard.

Yesterday, I saw a Monarch imbibing on the blossom of a Blue Mist Flower, drunk perhaps with the nectar of it, focused perhaps on making it to Costa Rica for the winter.

But I will not discuss these things.

Rather I have three links to share. In the past weeks, they helped me be (in some sense) more joyful than I might otherwise have been.

They helped me put my head together.

1. Black Jeopardy

SNL has been hitting it out of the park, lately. The skits have been funny, which we might expect of them. But they have been (in my opinion) deep. Perhaps the most significant in my limited sampling of SNL (which I do not watch per se, because we do watch TV and frankly don’t care to devote that much time to something that had of late descended into irrelevance) is the Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks as a good-ol-boy Trump supporter.

It was funny. But more importantly, it was… important. It showed the turning of our left-right political spectrum back on itself. It showed the red and blue ends meeting in some kind of intersection (without over-romanticizing it). This was something I tried to talk about here. It’s something that the establishment (pundits, politicians, bureaucrats, the press) managed to completely ignore.

It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. There’s a very important message for the left to be derived from it.

2. Live From New York

You’ve probably seen the Clinton skits on SNL. They’ve been going on for a while, and if nothing else they have given Kate McKinnon a chance to show how good she is. In particular, the SNL cold open debate skits in which she and Alec Baldwin parodied Trump and Clinton have been blockbusters.

Last night, McKinnon played Clinton at the piano singing Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja. 

This isn’t comedy. This isn’t what I think of as SNL. It’s literature. It’s philosophy. It’s consolation. And it is something quite different from what I have come to expect from television.

3. Culture Matters

This Golem XIV article is a long read. It’s worth it. I can’t do it justice here.

There’s Brexit. There are immigrants on the beach. There’s a painful clash of cultures. There’s globalism and free trade and the emptiness of being nothing more than an economic entity in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.

The writing is spectacular. The discussion is provocative and profound. It outlines an intellectual framework for making sense of a lot of things that have been bouncing around our society.

So you think that you’ve got trouble.
Well, trouble’s a bubble.
So tell ol’ Mr. Trouble to get lost.
Why not hold your head up high an’
Stop crying’, start tryin’.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.

When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’ and givin’,
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down,
So smile and that frown’ll defrost.
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.

You might know the tune. Here’s Dick singing it himself. Good tune for a sad day. Sorry, that’s all I got.

1.

“What’s that?” Trudy asked.

It was dark. It was 4:30 in the morning. Someone outside was yelling — yelling at the top of his lungs.

There’d been some shenanigans at the rental house across the street last week, so I figured it was one of the evicted discontents come back to harass. As I walked from the bedroom out into the living room, I could hear better.

“Get out!” he screamed. “Get out! Get out! GET OUT!”

There was a frantic, desperate sound to his voice. After a few steps into the living room, I saw why. The yelling wasn’t from across the street. It was behind us, on the other side of the alley, just beyond the fence. 

“Trudy!” I yelled. “Call the fire department.”

“What!?”

“Call 9-1-1. There’s a fire in the alley.”

2.

On the other side of our backyard, one house over from us, a roaring inferno was climbing into the black night sky. A duplex was on fire, and the flames had already consumed the backside of the building so that there was nothing to see but orange flames. 

The fire roared and popped. It rose up above the two-story duplex. It rose into the canopy of the trees with dry autumn leaves beginning to fall to the ground. One of the trees caught on fire, and a huge ball of flame went hurdling skyward in an instant. Streams of glowing embers raced upwards into the darkness.

I started a sprinkler at full blast in the back of the yard. The fence behind the neighbor’s house was on fire, but Ron was out there with a hose, and he put it out.

Fewer than five minutes after Trudy called 9-1-1, fire engines began to roll in from both directions. As their lights flashed, and as two hook and ladders began to spray water down from the sky, things began to explode — loud pops and bangs and flashes of bright orange light. Gas cans for mowers? Gas tanks of cars? Then some kind of electrical explosions began to snap, loud pops and buzzing sounds and flashes of bright white light. Breaker panels?

3.

That was early this morning.

This evening I wandered into the back of our yard to peer over the fence. It is a complete loss — the carport burned to the ground, the backside of the duplex charred and most of the siding pulled away, leaving only a skeleton of the building that was there yesterday.

There were nine people and one dog in sleeping there last night. All ten escaped. And they escaped because of that man, their neighbor, who had been sleeping with his window open and woke up when the fire started crackling.

That man who woke up and began to frantically yell and scream. Until they got out.

Dude!

Oh, man. It’s you?

Dude, what did you mean that you managed to steal away with Jenny…?

What!?

What did you mean by that?

By what? We went kayaking. We had peanut butter sandwiches. What on earth are you talking about?

That’s not what you wrote. I read what you wrote, and I see no mention of said kayak. You wrote that you managed to steal away with Jenny while Burt was cutting trees in the woods. And I happen to know that when your fair and industrious Trudy reads about this, well… I’m just sayin’ it ain’t gonna be pretty.

What? Wait. Look here… Oh no.

I think you need to start proof reading your stuff a bit closer, man.

Dude. For once you’re right.

1.

When he was a puppy, Guinness went to Puppy School. Let’s just say… that he was not a high achiever.

As Trudy tells the story, he had trouble with the very first lessons in which the dogs were taught to sit. Still, he and she kept at it, day after day. And in the last session, the instructor brought over a towel and set it on the ground so that Guinness might have something cozier than cold ground to sit on. She had Trudy try the command again. 

“Sit,” Trudy said. And sit he did.

You see, he was a good dog. Even if he barked when he wasn’t supposed to bark. Even if he jumped when he wasn’t supposed to jump. Even when the ground was cold and the best approximation of a sit he could muster was lowering his rear end just a smidgen.

At the end of that Puppy School class, he got an award: Best Tail Wag. That was Trudy’s boy. Despite everything, he always had a big tail wag.

2. 

His last week was hard. He must have hurt so much that he stopped drinking from his water dish, opting instead for the pond from which he could drink without bending down.

And he stopped eating. Although, he’d stand in the kitchen wagging his tail slightly and look up at Trudy as if to ask if she could offer him something else, try again, because he loved it so much when she gave him snaaacks.

“I’m hungry,” his dark eyes would say, but he wouldn’t eat, and he was slowly wasting away.

And then last week, he bit my mom. Maybe she woke him from his favorite place on the Papasan cushion. Or maybe she touched his sore ears. Or maybe she came around him from behind and startled him. Whatever it was, he snapped at her and gave her a nasty bite that took us to the emergency room.

He felt bad. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t mean to do it. But he didn’t have a way to say he was sorry. Because he was old. Because he was deaf. Because he had cataracts. Because he hurt so much. Because he was perpetually thirsty. Because he was having a hard week. Because he was a dog. Because he was dying.

3.

Late last night he and Trudy walked in the back yard. It was after midnight.

They went over to the pond where he drank for a while. They wandered around the yard — this yard that has been his Eden for 16 years. They stood in the half-light of the moon, visiting all his favorite places in the coolness of the evening.

He was saying goodbye to all his beloved places. He was walking his mommy around the yard to remind her what a happy life he had, how happy he was that she had rescued him, that she had been his mommy. He was saying goodbye to her last night as he must have been saying goodbye to me this morning on the bed, me with my hand on his head, he with his dark eyes staring gently into mine.

This afternoon, we buried him in the backyard. In a sunny spot in the butterfly garden beside the blooming Mist Flower and Golden Eye. We dug a deep hole and laid him in it, putting lavender-colored blossoms on his still-warm body.

Goodbye Mr. Guinness.