We Need to Talk

            It’s time for those of us who enjoy shooting to lead the push for sensible gun and ammo and magazine laws, for closing loopholes, and for more energetic enforcement of existing gun laws. For too long there has been no debate about guns in this country. That was allowed to happen because people were choosing sides and thinking the other side was unreasonable. Those who wanted more control thought of gun owners as holding the view that no laws should ever be passed restricting gun access in any way, period. On the other hand, gun owners and users have looked at those wanting some controls as if all they wanted was to take everyone’s guns away.

            We’ve got to stop the us and them thinking, friends. The real situation of real Americans is much more complicated. The fact that my father was shot to death with a Saturday-night Special does not keep me from enjoying target shooting with handguns and rifles of all calibers. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords owns a Glock that looks very much like the one Gerald Loughner shot her through the head with.

            More gun owners are the victims of accidental and deliberate gun violence than non-owners. Everyone has a stake in this and it’s an enormous problem that has to be addressed on all fronts.

            It’s people who pull the triggers, so it’s important to figure out how to deal better with the beginnings of domestic violence and mental health problems. This means more resources but it also means changing some attitudes and removing the stigma of seeking help for rage and other pathologies. It needs to be easier and more common to refer and recommend mental counseling, and even to require it.

            Most gun violence isn’t in schools or malls but in homes where guns are accessible to children or to family or friends who shouldn’t have them at that particular moment or perhaps ever. Cheaper and easier gun locks and real education for all members of gun-owning families can help here.

            We can’t stop all the killing by renewing the law banning assault weapons, but it would help. Yes, two or three clips will kill just as many as one big one, but Gerald Loughner was tackled while he was reloading. Everyone agrees that the Brady Act hasn’t solved all gun violence problems, but it has helped, and yet we ignore the enormous gunshow loophole in background checks.

            We need to talk. Gun owners could reassure their elected representatives that they won’t lose votes by sponsoring responsible gun laws. Trying to understand someone else’s point of view is never easy, but we’ll have to do it to stop the bleeding. Those who want some regulation need to try to reassure gun owners that no one intends to take away their three hundred million guns. It is not a matter of loving guns or hating them. It is not us and them. We need to talk.

Afghanistan

            Coming down the King’s Canyon trail near Tucson, I found myself thinking of a line from Kipling: “And you may hear a breech-bolt snick, though never a man is seen.” That canyon, aside from its saguaro and prickly pear, probably looks a good deal like some of the terrain in Afghanistan. I was thinking what a shame that we didn’t learn anything from the British experience there, or the Russian. Even supposing we had to eliminate the Al-Qaeda camps and destabilize the Taliban for a while, we could have hit them hard, chased them up into the high mountains for a while, and used what time we had to train ten thousand Afghans to be drill sergeants, and then GOT THE HELL OUT, leaving a trail of money behind us, and sending more unless and until the Taliban took over again. Ten years. Alas. With the number of dead, limbless, or brain-damaged only a small part of the ongoing cost of mental derangement and suicide. When I got home I looked up “The Ballad of East and West” and found that I’d had the line almost right. It’s really: “And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.” Those poor guys are still being ambushed, even after they get back to the States from their third or fourth deployment.

Dichos

            One day there showed up in our house a little book called Folk Wisdom of Mexico: Proverbios y dichos Mexicanos, collected by Jeff Sellers.  We read a few aloud and within minutes Matt and Dan started on a riff of invented dichos.  We found my stepfather’s favorite one, Menos burros, mas elotes, and Dan immediately topped it with Menos Sanchos, mas Quixotes.  Various proverbs about the troubles of the rich and the consolations of the poor, as well as a rise in the silliness quotient, evoked Matt’s La tortilla es la toalla de los pobres. 

As Crazy As the Wheels of Ezekiel

Listening to Dan's new album and the song called "Pennsylvania" sent me back to its inspiration in the Book of Ezekiel, which is a kind of byword in our house: "as crazy as the wheels of Ezekiel" we say about things especially nutty. At one point God tells Ezekiel he has to eat bread baked on human dung. And then--this is my favorite part--there is negotiation. Ezekiel says he's never eaten any carrion or unclean thing. And God relents and says, "okay, you can use cow dung. But you have to shave off your hair and beard." God may be willing to talk, but he always negotiates from a position of strength.

Our Own Eldon

In Candace Bergen's TV sitcom Murphy Brown, there was a running joke about a house painter named Eldon. When Murphy Brown came home after a long day, Eldon would still be there. When she walked into the living room with her morning cup of coffee, Eldon would be there on his ladder. This went on for many weeks.
     We've acquired our own Eldon at the desert house. His name is Ron. At first Ron replaced and maintained the evaporative coolers on the roof. Then we hired him for a larger project: installing air conditioning in the half of the house that has a duct system. Lately he's been doing a variety of jobs such as installing an outdoor shower and replacing electrical wiring, outlets, switches, and breaker boxes. This last job looks like stretching out into the indeterminable future, since Ron works alone and very deliberately. He also talks to himself as he works. "Boy, this guy dint have no clue what he was doing," he'll mutter. Or "Wow! This switch is really old. I ain't never seen one this old before."
     Ron is careful, smart, and thorough. I'm looking forward to seeing him with my morning coffee for a while to come.

Fireworks

The fourth of July fireworks show in Tucson this year had a strange hiatus; after the first few rockets exploded, silence. There was murmuring among all of us ranged along the streets at the base of Sentinel Peak--or "A" Mountain as it's usually called because of the huge "A" on its flank that the University of Arizona students refurbish each year. The fireworks are launched from near the top of Sentinel Peak. But nothing happened for a full half hour. The crowd began to disperse after ten minutes or so, and probably only half of us were still there when the show suddenly resumed, ran its normal thrity or forty minutes, and concluded with a noisy, colorful finale. We found out later one of the pyrotechnic crew needed medical assistance, so they stopped the show while they bundled him off to the hospital. But it was not, as many of us suspected, an injury form the fireworks themselves.
     As any live fireworks show does, this one made me recall the most spectacular fireworks display I've ever seen. During my high school years in Chandler, a hundred miles north of Tucson, the Independence Day show took place on the football field of Chandler High. My girl friend and I climbed into the bleachers early for the show in the last summer I lived there. A few ground displays were lighted, including the usual American flag in sparklers and pinwheels. Two rockets shot up; one exploded into color and the other gave a tremendous bang. Then a trail of fire shot diagonally across the field on the ground; a rocket had fallen over. A small fire started, and in its light we could see people running off the field in all directions. Almost instantly, with many crackles and bangs, everything went off. The field was covered with a hemisphere of fire--colored, intense light, ranging up perhaps fifty feet, but somehow, mercifully, contained on its sides. Had rockets fired into the bleachers we all, with no time to move or place to go, would have been doomed. As it was, we just stared. The blaze of light hovered over the field for perhaps thirty seconds. As it was succeeded by a layer of smoke, the fire engines stationed on the track moved slowly onto the field. Several minutes passed before anyone said anything.

Long and Short Months

If you can't remember--and I never can--Coleridge's rhyme about "thirty days hath September," try this: make two fists and put them together, with the knuckles up. Starting at the left, with the knuckle of the little finger of your left hand, let each knuckle and the depression between knuckles represent a month. January is the knuckle of your little finger, February the dip between that and the next knuckle, March the knuckle of your left ring finger, and so on. The knuckles are long months of 31 days, and the depressions are short ones, usually 30 days, but of course February is an exceptionally short one. This shows you graphically that, except for the two long months July and August, the knuckles of your left index and right index fingers, long and short months alternate through the year.

The Big Book

            I’ve been reading the third edition (1976) of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first edition of what A.A. members call “The Big Book” appeared in 1939. The important sections remain the same in subsequent editions, though appendices and additional personal stories have been added.

            The heart of the book is in the discussion of “How It Works”—this and subsequent chapters explain the implementation of the twelve steps—and in the two narratives of the movement’s co-founders: “Bill’s Story,” and “Doctor Bob’s Nightmare.” In the latter, “Doctor Bob” says that the company of the man who helped him get sober was important because “he was the first living human being with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience.” This keeping company with those who actually understand because they have been there seems to be part of the reason A.A. works, and the rest seems to be in the steps, including acceptance of one’s helplessness in the grip of alcoholism and the attempt at complete honesty with oneself and others.

            Another way in which the rest of us don’t get it shows up in the narratives, which seem to me to tell the same story and to each be very repetitive. I remember an A.A. meeting I attended in Tucson, where after the second person detailed her woes, I thought how cliché-ridden and predictable these narratives seemed to be, and tried to find some interest by looking around me. To my shock, everyone was listening intently and not a few of the listeners were in tears.

Food V

            Another life-changing food experience was our first trip to Spain in 1983. I started keeping a journal during this trip.  Katharine and I took a swing north from Madrid through Leon, Cantabria and the Rioja and then back to Madrid.  Later we were joined by three close friends for a drive down through La Mancha to Jaen and then on to Córdoba, Seville, Granada and the Mediterranean coast.  My journal records sightseeing, but it mostly talks about what we ate.  And the meals were worth recording.  It was my first exposure to many foods: my first baby eels, eaten as a first course for lunch in the basement comedor of the Alfonso XIII Hotel in Seville (eels Bilbao, with garlic and a trace of peppers), my first suckling pig, at Botín in Madrid, a restaurant famous for the dish.  At El Caballo Rojo in Córdoba I had my first taste of the meaty vegetable from the thistle plant, cardos, or cardoons in English.  Cardos are the bottoms of the European wild thistle, Cynara cardunculus, like a miniature artichoke heart, sweet and tender, served in this case in a cream sauce flavored with jamón serrano.  “Cardoons with ham’s cream” was the quaint translation on the menu for the English-only speaker.  Cardoons sounds distinctly Scotch, and I suppose Scotland is known for its thistles, but the cultivated cardunculus is a southern European phenomenon.  Other foods that I had disdained before, I found prepared in magical ways on this trip.  The homely eggplant in the hands of a cook in Almagro became a savory appetizer; elsewhere, prepared with ham or with cheese it had inspired the sixteenth-century poet Baltasar del Alcázar to sing its praises.  Spinach, never a favorite of mine, was transformed by sautéing with a little olive oil and pine nuts into a delicious side dish. In a marisquería in Madrid’s tapas zone around the Plaza Victoria my friend David Earnest introduced me to percebes, goose barnacles, steamed and requiring a fair amount of unwrapping of tough hide to get to the tender meat, juicy, salty, and with the slightest hint of iodine. The many novel tastes overwhelmed the other novelties of this trip.