Friends

A friend is someone who knows the song that's in your heart,

and can sing the lyrics to you when you forget how it goes.

sj

Can Sainthood Be Far Behind?

Has somebody gone completely NUTS?????

The Nobel Committee has just awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama.

When I read that, I thought, “This is a joke.”

It had to be political satire on the “Change” Candidate who turned out to be a Same-Old President at the stroke of midnight.

Let’s see what this guy has done to deserve that “Peace” prize:

• We’re STILL occupying Iraq and Gitmo prison is still going strong.
  

• Torture, rendition, murder, warrantless spying on Americans are all now practically institutions of the New America. You know, the one that looks a LOT like the Old Nazi Germany.

• Mr. Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan,
  
• started a new war with Pakistan,
  
• and is chomping at the bit to go to war with Iran.

For this, he gets the PEACE prize????

In other news, the Nobel Committee also awarded the prize for medicine to Jack the Ripper.

And the prize for literature went to an anonymous lunatic who wrote obscene grafitti on the bathroom wall with his own feces.

Idi Amin was posthumously awarded “Miss Congeniality.”

I guess standards ain’t what they used to be.

sj

Some Day

I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie

I have my freedom but I don't have much time

Faith has been broken, tears must be cried

Let's do some living after we die

Wild horses couldn't drag me away

Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them some day

- Wild Horses

Jagger/Richards

Fantasia Number Ten by Mudarra

It was a good day to be a horse.

So I played hookie today, put off a few things, to spend the afternoon with my partner. I arrived at the barn at an unusual hour, but he was right there waiting for me, like he knew I was coming.

How the hell does he DO that?

We took our time. Groomed. Shared a couple of apples. Told a few jokes. Saddled up and headed down the road. Took some warm-up time, walking beside him, enjoying the Autumn colors.

Some trees bare already.

An omen.

Mounted up and took on one of the old boy’s favorite hills. It has steeper parts and round-offs and dips and climbs. A good workout. Let him choose his own pace.

Reached the black-topped cross-road and turned back the way we came.

It was a long, long decline now.

From the crest of the first rise we could see practically all the way to the end.

Trees, dressed in red and gold, lined the road,

A breeze brought a handful of leaves across our path.

Like a ticker-tape parade.

And then…it was different.....

We ambled almost casually along the road and past the gates of the city.

Hundreds and hundreds of jubilant citizens lined the path, pressed together like a wall on each side. Parting before us like the Red Sea.

Cheering.

Shouting.

Laughing.

Waving.

Their voices blended together into a roar the way individual drops of water become indistinguishable in the ocean...

We were bone weary, and still stained with sweat and gore from the fight.

But we collected ourselves and entered the city with dignity and humility. I felt him quicken his pace under me, my hips alternately rising and falling with his steady gate.

I looked into faces. Some young. Some old.

I knew none of these people.

I had no friends or family here.

I knew only that now, they were safe.

And they knew it, too

A child, lifted up by a father with too few teeth in his grin.

Her tiny hand.

A blue flower.

I accepted it from her with a bow of my head, and stuck the stem into my compadre’s bridle, behind his ear.

He snorted.

We rode past the adulation to a fountain at the city center and I slipped down from his back. He drank deeply, ears twitching with each gulp, like a heartbeat.

I leaned over and plunged my head into the cool, crisp water, rubbed my face and stinging eyes hard.

Pulled out and let the water trickle down the back of my neck and tickle down my chest.

In my reflection, I could see that the stains on my face were now gone.

Those on my soul remained….

He nudged my shoulder gently with his nose.

Then bent low for one more sip from the stream.

I scratched him behind the ear, in that favorite spot of his.

“So,” I said. “You want to be a hero?”

He gave a moist snort in my direction to express his utter disdain for the notion. But I think he did protest too much.

“You incurable old romantic,” I teased.

He nudged me again.

Harder.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I won’t tell anybody.”

But I’m not sure if it was his fantasy or mine.

Or somebody else’s.

sj

What Did I Want?

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom.

I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!"

I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.

I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake.

I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon.

I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid.

I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.

- Robert Heinlein, "Glory Road"

Reflection

The way I feel
Is like a robin
Whose babes have flown to come no more
Like a tall oak tree
Alone and cryin'
When her birds have flown and the nest is bare

-Gordon Lightfoot, "The Way I Feel"

Rosemary and Time

I lost my pocket knife.

Had been meaning to pick up a replacement, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

Don’t know why.

Vital all-purpose tool.

Rumaging around in a box of junk, I found an old one. Supposed to be a “horsemans’” knife with a hoof pick, etc on it. Hard to open, though. Needed some oiling.

I laid it on my desk so I wouldn’t forget about it, and promptly forgot about it.

A week or so later, I was heading out to the barn, grabbed my hat, and for some reason remembered that knife and stuck it in my pocket.

When I arrived at the barn, something was up.

The ponies seemed agitated.

My partner K was at the far side of his paddock and as soon as he saw me, galloped – and I do mean galloped – over to me and called loudly.

What the hell?

I heard something like chain rattling and I looked across to where he’d been standing.

There’s a stand of trees there where some machinery is kept.

A disc harrow.

Couple other things.

I could glimpse one of the blonde girls in amongst those trees, rearing up, making that noise like Morley’s ghost.

I sprinted over and found Duchess had managed to entangle her halter on one of those mechanical monstrosities and was trying to pull free.

Soaked with sweat.

Not having a good time.

No way I could disentangle her.

I grabbed that knife out of my pocket, it opened up slick and easy, and I cut her halter off.

She snorted a few curses and bolted off.

Turned out she had some lacerations on her legs, but nothing serious.

Insert sigh of relief here.

Reminded me of something else.....

I was heading out early one morning, going to an “extrication” class at the fire academy.

That’s a class on how to get people quickly and safely out of smashed-up vehicles at traffic accidents by disassembling the vehicle.

Cutting up cars, basically.

I was already out the door juggling keys, coffee and turnout gear, when I had a sudden urge to go back. I found a packet of Kleenex tissue on the bathroom counter and stuck it in my pocket.

Don’t know what made me do that.

Didn’t think another thing about it.

That afternoon, one of the firefighters at the class got a tiny shard of glass in his eye.

An instructor, who’s a superb EMT, by the way, took over and asked if anyone had a clean tissue.

I dug out the Kleenex packet, extricated a virgin tissue from the middle.

Just what we needed right at that moment…

A lady I know recalls to me a time we were going out to dinner and I stopped for the light at a certain intersection.

When the light turned green, I waited instead of going ahead.

A second or two later, another vehicle came blazing through the intersection, not even slowing down for the red light, if he even saw it.

Had I gone ahead as usual, he’d have slammed into us broadside.

And I was in the death seat.

“How do you DO that?” she asked.

Good question.

Some people call it “synchronicity.”

If you’re waiting for me to explain just what the hell that is, you’ve got a long wait.

But I think it’s good that we don’t know all the answers.

Keeps you on your toes.

sj