(untitled - a poem)

Words hang in the crisp air, abandoned by their previous owners,
The skeletons of the wintering trees hang back, leafless limbs held up in silent shock.
The pre-dawn field's snow is unbroken and pristine
Except for the two sets of footprints in
and the one set of footprints out,
And the tentative tracks of a winter-thin deer.

She sat propped against the trunk of an elder birch,
eyes gazing north in apathetic disinterest.
Her left arm crooked around the blanket in her lap,
Her right hand clutching the crumpled page,
sodden from the landing snow.
A Dear Jane letter, we postulate as the paper edge whimpers in a passing breeze.

She is young, was young, and the shivering night has made her
a shade of blue unknown to the palette of mankind's skintone brush.
Mascara has bled into each crease around her eyelids,
Raccoon eyes rimed with frozen tears.
She wept, we can tell, before she died, though
no bruise mars the youthful blue of her neck or bare arms.

A few paces away south, Jackson finds clues -
Her name is Dora, was Dora, per the soggy envelope in the muddy-snowy thistles,
And beneath her thumb, inverted ink spells the sender's name as Robe..
We speculate the RT as Jackson trudges back from the marshy creek edges
Bearing a thin blue jacket and a crumpled pair of sodden gloves.
The gloves would fit the tiny blue hand before us.

A radio squawks from the distant county line roadbed; we turn toward it
As we stare back toward the elder birch in unspeakable sorrow,
and await the ambulance which need not hurry.
The town is small - she is one of our own - one of the children full of promise, as all children are.
Her death, a rift, will be a gaping hole in our smalltown continuity of life.
Her auburn hair riffles in a passing breeze, and -

The blanket gives a kick and an angry squall!
A fire of hope is sparked in each of us, and we stumble over our feet
To make it back to her side through the snow covered tall grasses.
An infant, shivering and irate, inhales shrill chilled breaths and exhales rage,
As we disentangle her tiny limbs from the icy folds.
Bert races to his squad car, barely touching the ground in his haste, and back with his rescue kit.

The ambulance, frantically radioed, now races up the county line road,
Crime scene be damned, a dozen snow boots trample the dead wheat stubble in a mad rush.
We name her Hope, and Becky and Jackson's wife Jan squabble over who houses her first.
Jan wins, but Becky is across the street and at the side of the loaned crib each day for hours.
Neither Dora's folks, long gone from our small town, nor Robe-RT step up.
We bury her out by St. Thomas' and all of us at the firehouse chip in for a small granite stone.

Picket Fences!

So.. I get this email the other day, urging us to boycott gas. The writer's idea: boycott specific stations and companies, informing them in advance that we are not buying from them until the prices get back under control. What the writer didn't tell us is what to do if the only gas station in town belongs to the company we're supposed to be boycotting or, worse, if the only gas station in town is the place we work.

The movie started playing in my mind:

Me: *dials the local gas station* **brrriiing brrriiing...** **brrriiing brrriiing...** **brrriiing brrriiing...**
Gas Stop Gas Stop. Mitch.
Me: Mitch? Yah. This is Casey up the road
Gas Stop: Hey Casey, how goes?
Me: Good. You?
Gas Stop: Good ta hear. Don't see you much anymore. How's the back?
Me: Good, good. No change there.

Gas Stop: Good ta hear. Hey, heard you were in the hospital.
Me: Nah. Someone got their wires crossed. How's Nancy?
Gas Stop: Good. She's took the kids up to her mom's for the weekend.
Me: Yah? How long's she up for?
Gas Stop: Week mebbe. Mebbe I'll get some fishin' in.
Me: Good, good. Enjoy.

Gas Stop: Need somethin'?
Me: Yah. Thought you should know I'm joinin' in on that there boycott.
Gas Stop: Yah? Okie.

Gas Stop:*pause* You ever get that Bronco back running?
Me: Nah. I don't drive much anymore, what with the back.
Gas Stop: Yah? Okie. *pause* You thinkin' to sell that yet?
Me: Yah maybe.?
Gas Stop: Bob'll be driving next year.
Me: Good car for a kid.
Gas Stop: '85, yah?
Me: Yah. Needs work. Starter, tranny. Still got that leak.
Gas Stop: Yah? I can fix that. *pause* So you think what you want for it?
Me: Yah. Let me get back to ya.

Gas Stop: Okie. *pause* So you're joinin' that boycott, eh?
Me:: Yah. Just thought you should know.

Gas Stop: Okie. So's Frank up the hill.
Me:: Yah? Thought he moved away.
Gas Stop: Yah. He's back though.
Me: Ah okie.
Gas Stop: Okie. I got someone puliin' up. Let me know on that Bronco, eh?
Me:Yah sure. You bet.
Gas Stop: Later. *hangs up*

And thus the Great Boycott of Chevron stations begins, tempers raging, picket signs waving!

Well-Meaning Friends and Other Household Pests

A dear friend who shall remain utterly nameless called me up in a blithering panic the other day. Word travels fast through our disconnected circle of acquaintances and sometimes words get distorted by line noise - rather like the childhood game of telephone.

"Oh my GOD! Casey!!" She exclaimed in a deluge of frightened concern. "Are you oKAY? Are you all RIGHT? Are you out of the HOSPITAL?? Are you going to.. " she paused here to take a breath, "LIVE?"

I answered affirmative to all of the above and assured her that I had not technically been IN the hospital except as the visit to the emergency room placed me under the same roof, so technically I supposed I was...

She started sobbing hysterically. Hm. Was she hoping to have inherited my priceless collection of antique Corelle dinnerware or something?

Well, turns out that the word on the vine was that I was near death and perhaps already dead. After ALL, she related to me between sobs, DVT kills 2,000,000 people a MONTH!! I calmed her as best I could, pointed out that the figure was more like 200,000 a year, which is bad enough without inflating to proportions which would rival the Black Plague of my youth. I hope she heard me. She raced out of the conversation, intent on calling a few more folks to let them know that I was indeed among the living and actually SPEAKING. (Yes, she tends to talk in capital letters like that).

-=-

EGBOK - spread the word - and let's try not to inflate things and incite panic whilst we do so.

I've no idea what they plan to do except whatever the blood thinner medications do - warfarin, which sounds more like it should be reserved for combat duty.

Guess we'll all find out.

Bing!

For many years, I have been a member of the teensy market share held by Apple Computer. Some Windows users call us frothing fanatics. Some accuse us of bleeding in six colors. Some dare to call us elitists (just because we insist upon consistent user interfaces no matter what source - payware, shareware, freeware). Some just smile and shake their heads, weary of our complacent computing experiences, relatively untainted by crashes, viral attacks, incompatibilities and spyware.

Few realize just how addicted we Macaholics are, though.

I first met the Apple Macintosh under great duress. I'd seen a Lisa, listened to its owner wax poetic over its grace and beauty (although I never saw it with its power switched on - turns out the owner wasn't much of a computer user). But my first face-to-face encounter with the Mac was memorable mainly for its benign infiltration into my life.

It was a quiet day in November, a Tuesday, as I recall. I'd written a database for a customer, and they liked it - a lot. So much so that they wanted it to run on this new computer they'd acquired, with its itty bitty screen, perched silently like a predatory falcon or an owl waiting for prey.

Customer = always right. So I told Bill sure, I'll port the database over to that.. thing. But I'd need one on my desk to do it. (I was much younger then, and knew everything.)

The next day one of those ... things showed up on my desk, complete with a mouse. My realm of exposure to great computer products didn't at that time include rodents. I was command line or bust - DOS all the way. Windows was still a wild rumor that we laughed about around the water cooler and secretly prayed for once we were back at our command-line oriented desks.

I don't recall now if my IBM AT ever had one attached during its venerable lifetime. We performed very few modifications to that expensive box, although one afternoon in a fit of hubris usually reserved for mainframe board-level diagnostics, we swapped the onboard 512k RAM out and put in an entire MEG. Well, we didn't know about chip-matching; the process had to be repeated several times until we managed to get the entire secondary memory card populated with these chips without bending pins. The sole of my left foot still bears a tiny imprint near the heel where I 'found' one, which had to be discarded as a result. It had dropped into the carpet and turned invisible.

So there was the Mac on my desk, in all its miniature glory. Pretty tame looking when turned off. Safe. Quiet. Harmless.

I stared at this perched owl for about 10 minutes while I waited for the customer to show up. I stared at the mouse. I stared at the lack of manuals. There were none. To a hardcore IBM owner of the time, the lack of manuals was significantly disconcerting. How do you have a computer on your desk without the accompanying encyclopedia of knowledge?

Bill walked in and reached around to one side, and flicked a switch or waved a magic wand. A tiny Bing wafted from the device, followed by a tiny whir, and a tiny happy smiling face on the tiny window. Folks, there was something embedded in those first tiny Bings that was specially engineered to bring grins to faces. I was hooked.. it had me at hello.

Well, Bill started talking about what software was available, and how the database could be ported into this other software, and how he was sure I could figure it out, but frankly I didn't hear much of the discourse. I was driving my first Mac. I did little the rest of the morning except drive that little Mac around my desktop, entranced and enthralled at every turn. It whirred, it purred, it chirped, it hiccuped when it ejected its floppy. And I didn't get a blessed thing done for the entire morning, except get hooked like a wide-mouth bass.

After the first few hours, which ended with a reluctant unhooking, I turned back to the PC on my desk and tried to get the requisite work done. It loomed above the little perched owl of a thing, smirking in thinly disguised disgust. I found myself frustrated by the command line and searching for the mouse.

Bill called shortly after lunch to see how things were going. Did I like the Mac? I tried my best to be nonchalant, but the truth slipped out within a few minutes. I had to have one of these. Oh, Bill grinned through the phone. So how's the database port going? I explained that I had not quite gotten there (without confessing to not having pushed in the floppy containing the necessary items). I would do so tomorrow morning.

I could make this into a very long story, even longer than it's already become. But for those of you who are either yawning from sheer boredom or bristling at the thought of a *gasp* Macintosh doing anything productive - yes, I got the database done. Yes, they came and took my beloved Mac off my desk and back to the customer's site. My relationship with the IBM AT went downhill from that point, and I ended up with the first of a series of Macs on my desk within the following week of its departure. They ranged from the tiny to the huge, from the desktop version to the tower, back to the desktop to a portable, to the eMac I have in front of me now which is within eyesight of my laptop. Times have changed, and the Mac OS has raced forward to Tiger.

And I'm still hooked like a wide-mouth bass.

A friend of mine...

A friend of mine is being inundated with personal crises. Every time he turns around, yet another person has gotten sick, yet another roadblock has been thrown on his road, yet another layer of stress has been added to his existence. He has never once complained - not to me, at least.

In fact, when we start talking, invariably the first thing from his mouth (or typing fingers) is a cheerful greeting and a 'how are you doing?' Not just the reflex 'how ya doing' and then turn topic to something else.. he genuinely cares.

I'm beginning to think that friendships are in classes like cars...

there's the zippy and dang expensive foreign sports model - moves real fast, zooms up and cheers up with a flashy paint job, then zooms off around the next curve, leaving you scratching your head and grinning - very high maintenance and can frequently break down while idling. Easily stolen, gets lost with amazing regularity, and no, you can't drive it unless you are a recent graduate of a racing school's 4-day intensive course at the Brickyard.

There's the big luxury model - moves at a goodly rate of speed, difficult to park, spends a lot of time in the repair shops consuming friendship flowers and mugs - high maintenance but great if you can afford one. You could sleep four in the back seat and still have room to crowd around the mini-bar.

There's the two-door model - room for you and the friend, a small purse or briefcase - easy to park, easy to shift gears, pretty dang reliable - requires regular maintenance (as all good cars do) but gets surprisingly great mileage. Once in awhile you get to drive while friend naps.

There's the minivan model - seats a dozen!, stops at all major intersections and picks up more friends or drops off a few, parking can be difficult as it tends not to stop moving for long enough to park - maintenance required but can be ride-shared with ease, and nobody's going to notice if you fall asleep in the back seat while the thing rolls along. Usually only one or two 'trusted drivers' get to pilot.

There's its big cousin, the SUV - just like a minivan only lots bigger, can offroad with ease, climbs vertical surfaces like a mountain goat, can hold nine kayaks, five surfboards, and a small cow - breaks down only when it is conveniently positioned 97 miles from civilization but if its Onstar system fails, the 37 cell phones, built-in GPS, two spare ham radio sets, grizzled wilderness tracker and his band of Boy Scouts should be able to get things back on track quickly - requires maintenance in the form of an onboard specialized mechanic/software engineer, but hey, it's FUN!

There's the four-door model - room for a good group but you can still can stretch your legs, makes long runs with ease, with pretty great mileage, carries enough luggage to keep all passengers well clothed and fed over a nice week-long trip - requires maintenance but what doesn't? - runs on regular gas, occasional phone calls, and corn oil in a pinch. Everyone takes turns behind the wheel.

What kind of friendship is yours?

-=-

Blood clot in leg is being aggressively 'managed' - film at 11.

New Storefront

http://www.myferngarden.com

Finally got done painting the storefront and putting up all the aisle signs. Pretty durn nice, if I do say so myself, and visitors seem to be able to find things without the problems they were having before. So I'd say that progress has most definitely been made.

Mom's surgery went very well, she says, though she still sounds pretty out of it, even after five days post-surgery. EGBOK though.