Beauty That Surprises

The most memorable beauty is that which comes as a surprise. You are engaged in the most mundane task, then look up and are stunned by something indescribable. Human beings in 21st century America are perhaps the most overstimulating in all of human history. We are bombarded by images 24/7 by technological advances that didn’t exist for 99.99% of recorded history. And yet, we still have the capacity for wonder when we are presented with something like this…

I was on my way to Mission Barbecue to pick up dinner this Friday evening. As I pulled out of my driveway I noticed a strange light reflecting off the leafless trees across the way. It had been cloudy all day, but now it was breaking up and the setting sun behind me was piercing through the gloom. I stopped the car, rolled down the driver’s window and marveled. Then I took the picture.

By the time I got on  interstate 64 at the Gaskins road exit I had to pull over to the edge of the road. It was a stunning sight. I was dazzled and suddenly getting dinner at Mission Barbecue seemed unimportant.

The rest of the drive had my head on a swivel as the miraculous canopy swelled all around me. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more distracted while behind the wheel of an automobile. By the time I pulled into Mission’s parking lot the beauty was at its peak…

I went inside to order brisket and pulled pork, along with mac and cheese with kickin’ collard greens. When I walked back outside with our dinner in a paper bag, it was gone—all the grandeur and majesty vanished without a trace. Luckily, the same technological advancement that bombards us with filth and anxiety also doubles as a decent camera. I was able to capture some measure of the glorious beauty that came out of nowhere around 5:45.

What is this thing, the human capacity and hunger for beauty? Sometimes we don’t even realize how much we need it. Most of the time we trudge along without it. But then it appears like a gift, out of the blue, when we least expect. And we are mesmerized, taken away to someplace golden, if for only a few fleeting moments.

Thoughts on the Super Bowl

I managed to do something exceedingly rare yesterday. I watched an entire football game, including every second of the halftime show, for probably the first time in ten years. I’m not even sure why, since I’m not a huge pro football fan and I didn’t even have a rooting interest in either of the teams. But the Super Bowl is a cultural moment in America and a great excuse to eat delicious food with no discernible nutritional value—always a bonus. Plus, we had a house guest for several days leading up to Sunday, which although enjoyable, tends to tire you out. Once he left Pam and I both were in need of some mindless down time on the sofa, and there is nothing quite as mindless as watching the Super Bowl.

Pam put together all of my favorites for the spread…

Reuben dip

Pigs in a blanket

Veggies with spicy cheese

Mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce.

Of course, since I am surrounded by teachers, there had to be some sort of football bingo game played via texting with my teacher sister and her husband. The stakes were high, the loser having to buy Sunday lunch for the winner next Sunday. When I finally got five in a row and exclaimed BINGO!!!

At that point, Ron casually says, “Paula already got two bingos”

How are you supposed to respond to such a statement? Have these people never played BINGO before? It does nobody any good to simply get a bingo. Without shouting out BINGO!!!, or in this case, typing BINGO!!! In a text—you don’t got Jack, am I right? Since I was the first one to declare my BINGO!!!, I was the clear winner. To which, my clueless brother-in-law says, “We’ll call it a draw.”

The actual game was pretty good. Before kickoff I had told Pam that I thought that the Eagles were the better team, but that the Chiefs had the best player and since that player was their Quarterback, I thought that the Chiefs would win. Since that was exactly what happened you can make of that what you will.

As far as the commercials were concerned, I found them disappointing. None of them made me laugh. Many of them I found confusing. Not a single one of them made me more or less likely to purchase anything. Sitting here this morning I honestly can’t remember any of them very well. And yet, companies still eagerly shell out millions for their chance at thirty seconds of our attention.

Then there was the halftime show featuring the singer, Rihanna. It featured a very cool floating stage concept that thrusted the singers high above the field to dizzying heights. It was something to see, a true visual spectacle. As far as the performance was concerned, I was hampered by the fact that I didn’t know any of her songs, so for me they all melded together and sounded like one long song using the same four of five notes over and over again. Other than the spectacular floating stage thing, the rest of it seemed like a female singer dressed in a fire engine red balloon-y costume being chased by over a hundred amazingly coordinated dancing men in identical white balloon-y costumes, looking for all the world like sperm trying to hit an illusive target. Trouble was, she was already pregnant. Anyway, for the marketing colossus that it is the National Football League, I am not the target audience. This halftime show, in fact, the entire night wasn’t designed with 64 year old men in mind. So, basically my opinion doesn’t matter. But I imagine that if you were already a Rihanna fan you loved it. If you were unfamiliar with her or her work you were probably blown away by the stage levitation thing and confused by the rest of it, like me.

But, I made it through all four and a half hours of the thing, so I’m feeling a bit more American this morning.

…and just a little dazed and confused.

Our Internet Apocylpse

So, this was quite a weekend. First Pam and I, along with 40 other couples, took part in a marriage class at my church called The Book on Love. We were one of the longest tenured couples there, but it’s never too late to learn how to get better at something. Lots of good information, not all of it new, but all of it beneficial.

Then we wake up Sunday morning only to discover that our entire neighborhood has been cast back into the dark ages—there is no cable or internet. This frightening condition was first discovered when I stumbled into the kitchen and mumbled the usual phrase to Alexa—“good morning”. This is her cue to turn on a preselected group of lights downstairs necessary to the efficient discharge of my morning responsibilities. Instead of her creepy/cheery response of “OK!!” I hear something that sounded like it was delivered with a bit of attitude, “I’m sorry, I am having trouble understanding your request.”

I tried two more times to get through to her alleged artificial intelligence and two more times I get this “having trouble” line. But without coffee I was incapable of a proper retort. After my chores were completed I took my place on the sofa and opened my laptop whereupon it dawned on me what Alexa’s issue was. No internet. Pam promptly reset the router and we waited for our AI-powered house to come to life. Soon we discovered the awful news that there would be no coming to life this day. No, there was a “problem.” Verizon sent out the first alert soon after informing us that they were working hard to resolve the “issue” and hoped to have it resolved by Wednesday the 8th. 

As this email crawled its way through each home in Wythe Trace, we could hear the primal screams building from each cul-de-sac like the wave at a football game. Parents were frantically trying to figure how they could possibly survive the day without television, YouTube or Instagram. Children were renting their garments over the prospect of having to play outside. Remote working husbands and wives fighting over which would get to work from Panera. When Pam and I got back from church we saw our next door neighbor, Jamie, pulling out of her driveway. I approached her car and in solidarity said, “How are you guys holding up? Going through withdrawals yet?” She then looked at me with a poorly disguised smirk and said, “Oh?? Our internet is working just fine. We have Comcast.”

It is not a happy moment when one discovers that one is on the wrong side of a haves and have’s not dichotomy. Suddenly, our neighborhood had been remade into Verizon people and Comcast people. Even though there were far more of us, the Comcast group had taken on an edgy superiority—“By all means, you can tap in to our network. Its running just fine. I’m sure Verizon will fix everything…eventually…bruhahahahaha!!!” Typical Comcasters.

Fortunately, by 8:00 last night the nightmare was over and peace and equality was restored. 

But as I read through the email exchange between neighbors this morning I see all the expected back and forth about what might have been the reason for the outage. An accidental severing of a line, a squirrel chewed through a cable box-where is Dunnevant when you need him?? But am I the only one who suspects the real culprit? Wythe Trace loses the internet at the exact same time as that Chinese balloon is floating overhead!! Come on people. Wake up!!

January Recap

In keeping with my 2023 plan to slow down The Tempest, I published only five regular posts during the month of January. The rest were either short stories, an ill-conceived attempt to rewrite a 35 year old story, and more recently—the first seven chapters of a novel I wrote called A Life of Dreams. Judging by the readership numbers it is safe to say that you guys are not fans!! Ha! Apparently, Tempest readers prefer my contemporaneous ramblings to my fiction—by a wide margin. For this I apologize. However, I plan on continuing it for the foreseeable future. Its actually been quite nice keeping my opinions to myself for a change. The world is still a hot mess as far as the eye can see and has managed this without my snarky input.

Has there been anything going on out there in January about which I felt tempted to comment? Sure. The six year old kid who shot his teacher was a soul-crusher. The bumper crop of mass-shootings in California were infuriating. The number of dead squirrels that magically wind up in my yard remains a mystery. But mostly January has been about getting another year started at work, doing the work of reviewing millions of dollars of investment holdings in hundreds of accounts belonging to my clients. Its the sort of work that clarifies the mind and focuses the attention.

Lots of cool stuff happening at my church so far this year. This coming Thursday thru Saturday Pam and I have signed up for something called The Book on Love, a class for married couples. Ever since we’ve been at Hope we have heard people raving about this class, so we decided to give it a shot despite the fact that we have been married almost 39 years. I wonder if we will get some sort of prize for being the oldest people there? Nevertheless, I believe that you are never too old or too experienced to learn how to get better at stuff. Apparently there’s homework involved, so I’m a little concerned about that since I have never been good at homework. But hey…if this class results in Pam becoming a better wife then I’m all for it……JUST KIDDING!!!!

So, readers of The Tempest, thank you for chopping my writer’s ego down to size by your disinterest. Humility is always a lesson worth learning. 

I close with this:

Two cats are having a swimming race. The first cat is called “One two three” the second cat is called “Un deux trois”. Which cat won?

“One two three”…because “Un deux trois” cat sank

Horrible Commercials and a Show Idea

After not watching hardly any football during the regular season, I have followed the action during the playoffs starting last weekend and again yesterday and today. The games have been pretty good as far as that goes, but for the love of all that is holy—the commercials have been painful to watch. There’s one in particular that is so imbecilic and grating I have been reduced to hitting the mute button.

I have Verizon. I have been happy with them for as long as I can remember even having a cellphone. But their commercial featuring the Einstein character makes me want to find a new carrier. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Some woman is sitting atop a huge VERIZON in the middle of what looks like a college campus. What its doing there and why she is sitting atop it are not explained. Then something very sad happens. A really fine actor who was absolutely fabulous in the HBO mini-series where he played John Adams, strolls into the scene with a ridiculous wig on complaining that his cell service has “gone kaput”. Why the great Paul Giamatti would stoop to this infantile spot boggles the mind. Verizon must have agreed to pay him crazy money to coerce him to so debase himself, leading me to think that perhaps that money might have been better spent lowering my outrageous bill.

Anyway, the woman sitting on the VERIZON display holding a Thesaurus in her hand then jumps down to extol the virtues of Verizon’s wireless plans. Einstein declares her “brilliant!!” then shuffles off to sign up leaving the bike he wasn’t riding to start with behind. The only good thing about this moronic ad is that it is only thirty seconds. Positively dreadful.

Then there are the endless promotional ads for all the shows that network television has to offer, the shows that nobody watches. They all seem to be some version of crime detection, either forensic or otherwise. All feature huge explosions. I have not been persuaded to watch any of them. I WOULD, however, watch a detective crime drama where they are trying to solve murders that take place in redneck communities. Let those hotshot forensic scientist try to solve a murder where everybody’s DNA is the same and nobody has dental records!

Nurse Lucy

As many of you know, Pam has been down with COVID for almost a week now. She’s fine and her symptoms aren’t terrible but it has wiped her out. Consequently she has spent a lot of time in bed trying to get her strength back. Of course, in hopes that she wouldn’t give it to me, we have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for a week and basically trying to avoid each other whenever possible. So far its worked, I am still COVID-free. But this radical change in the status quo has presented Miss Lucy with quite the conundrum.

Our Golden Retriever craves normalcy. She also much prefers it when all three of us are together in the same room. (For anyone on my side of the family, they will understand when I say that we should have named her “Christina”.) Well, this past six days have been anything but normal. On the first night that Pam slept in Patrick’s old room, Lucy was quite perplexed. You could see it on her face…what the hekkin deal is dis? For most of her life she has slept in our huge king sized bed with us. But, when forced to make a choice, she quickly kicked me to the curb. Every night since Pam has been sick, Lucy has slept with Pam in her “sick room.” But that’s not all. Pam has spent much of her days in that room as well. Almost the entire time, Lucy refuses to leave her. A couple of mornings ago, Pam slept late so I had to let Lucy out of the sick room so she could eat breakfast and do her business. Once she was done, I sat down at my desk in the library, while she headed back upstairs. After several minutes I heard her whining at the top of the stairs. Then it dawned on me that I had pulled the door shut to Pam’s room. Lucy was whining for me to open it so she could go back to manning her post!

I managed to get this photograph of her at some point one day. Pam was busy on the computer but still in bed…and there was Lucy, faithful and true.

Dogs understand us better than we understand ourselves. Their intuition and instincts are phenomenal. We do not deserve them.

MLK Speech given September 12, 1962

In lieu of a main item today, please take a few minutes to read (or listen to) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Delivered in New York City on September 12, 1962, King’s address made sure to celebrate the United States’ founding ideals—and the ideals Lincoln espoused in the Proclamation—before turning to the myriad ways the country was failing to live up to them. Here are some key passages:

If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable.

The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.

Our pride and our progress would be unqualified if the story ended here. But history reveals that America has been a schizophrenic personality where these two documents are concerned. On the one hand she has proudly professed the basic principles inherent in both documents. On the other hand she has sadly practiced the antithesis of these principles.

The unresolved race question is a pathological infection in our social and political anatomy, which has sickened us throughout our history, and is still today a largely untreated disease.

How has our social health been injured by this condition? The legacy is the impairment of the lives of nearly twenty-million of our citizens. Based solely on their color, they have been condemned to a sub-existence, never sharing the fruits of progress equally. The average income of Negroes is approximately thirty-three hundred dollars per family annually, against fifty-eight hundred dollars for white citizens. This differential tells only part of the story, however, the more terrible aspect is found in the inner structure and quality of the Negro community. It is a community artificially but effectively separated from the dominant culture of our society. It has a pathetically small, grotesquely distorted, middle class. There are virtually no Negro bankers, no industrialists; few commercial enterprises worthy of the name of businesses, the overwhelming majority of Negroes are domestics, laborers, and always the largest segment of the unemployed. If employment entails heavy work, if the wages are miserable, if the filth is revolting, the job belongs to the Negro.

And every Negro knows these truths and his personality is corroded by a sense of inferiority, generated by this degraded status. Negroes, north and south, still live in segregation, housed in slums, eat in segregation, pray in segregation and die in segregation. The life experience of the Negro in integration remains an exception even in the north.

The imposition of inferiority, externally and internally, are the slave chains of today. What the Emancipation Proclamation proscribed in a legal and formal sense has never been eliminated in human terms. By burning in the consciousness of white Americans a conviction that Negroes are by nature subnormal, much of the myth was absorbed by the Negro himself, stultifying his energy, his ambition and his self-respect. The Proclamation of Inferiority has contended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, negating its liberating force. Inferiority has justified the low living standards of the Negro, sanctioned his separation from the majority culture, and enslaved him physically and psychologically. Inferiority as a fetter is more subtle and sophisticated than iron chains; it is invisible and its victim helps to fashion his own bonds.

This somber picture may induce the somber thought that there is nothing to commemorate about the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.

But tragic disappointments and undeserved defeats do not put an end to life, nor do they wipe out the positive, however submerged it may have become beneath floods of negative experience.

The Emancipation Proclamation had four enduring results. First, it gave force to the executive power to change conditions in the national interest on a broad and far-reaching scale. Second, it dealt a devastating blow to a system of slave-holding and an economy built upon it, which had been muscular enough to engage in warfare on the Federal government. Third, it enabled the Negro to play a significant role in his own liberation with the ability to organize and to struggle, with less of the bestial retaliation his slave status had permitted to his masters. Fourth, it resurrected and restated the principle of equality upon which the founding of the nation rested.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Our truly great presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question. Jefferson with keen perception saw that the festering sore of slavery debilitated white masters as well as the Negro. He feared for the future of white children who were taught a false supremacy. His concern can be summed up in one quotation: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Lincoln’s torments are well known, his vacillations were facts. In the seething cauldron of sixty-two and sixty-three Lincoln was called the “Baboon President” in the North, and “coward”, assassin, and savage in the South. Yet he searched his way to the conclusions embodied in these words; words already quoted this evening: “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.” On this moral foundation he personally prepared the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and to emphasize the decisiveness of his course he called his cabinet together and declared he was not seeking their advice as to its wisdom but only suggestions on subject matter. Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His hesitation had not stayed his hand when historic necessity charted but one course. No President can be great, or even fit for office, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.

The Negro will never cease his struggle to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation by making his emancipation real. If enough Americans in numbers and influence join him, the nation we both labored to build may yet realize its glorious dream.

There is too much greatness in our heritage to tolerate the pettiness of race hate. The Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation deserve to live in sacred honor; many generations of Americans suffered, bled and died, confident that those who followed them would preserve the purity of our ideals. Negroes have declared they will die if need be for these freedoms. All Americans must enlist in a crusade finally to make the race question an ugly relic of a dark past. When that day dawns, the Emancipation Proclamation will be commemorated in luminous glory