In The Cigar Box

On top of the walnut secretary in my home office are several reminders of the war that dominated our young adulthood.  There is a book titled, The Wall.    The cover shows a little boy on the shoulder of a man dressed in his field khakis.  The boy is leaning to the wall and kissing a name permanently etched in the polished black granite.  One name from among 58,282 killed or missing soldiers.   There are two bronze busts next to the book.  Both are by Glenna Goodacre who sculpted the Vietnam Women’s Memorial that stands across from the Wall.  The first  is a nurse - most of the 265,000 women who served were nurses.  If you look into her eyes you can see the intensity of one who felt called to heal but you see more.  Written in her expression is the futility that led her home country to abandon its connection to those who went to serve.   The second sculpture is titled, Little Orphan .  It is the head and upper to...

Bookends don't always hold books.   Sunlight can't pierce the darkened dining room through the double airlock door that leads into the Fun House Pizza & Pub.  The old wooden doors are weathered from years of sun, rain, wind and thousands of hands, shoulders, or shoes pushing those doors open.  Nothing there shows any sign of change.  In a long ago memory I held door for Dad - just us out for supper.  At the time there were pennants on the wall above the pinball machines and next to a very large Wurlitzer juke box.   In fact, Pizza was a fairly new phenomenon in family fare.  Today, pennants still hang on the wall but the pinball machines have given way to Pac Man and other electronic video games plus other machines that challenge you to hoist a prize with grabber hooks.  They never stay closed long enough or tight enough to capture a stuffed bear or a sparkling rhinestone necklace.  On that first visit, one pennant displaye...

Last night my grandson and I watched Spiderman 3.  As an out of touch oldster, I’d missed 1 & 2.  Thomas filled me in on all of the important background about the relationship between Peter and MJ or with Peter’s long time friend who was also the Green Goblin.  Superheroes and Super-villains abounded.  Good and evil were not absolute - they shifted within the same being as emotions and circumstances shifted from scene to scene and their lives moved forward. During commercials, I used the time to check the baseball score, read my emails and played a round or two of Words With Friends.  All of that portrays an image that this oldster isn’t completely out of touch with 2012’s social reality but remember, I still can’t figure out Tweets or Facebook. When I decided to begin this blog, I resolved that I wouldn’t delve into political commentary and add to the noise that seems to pass for discourse.  However, one email I read, while super powers clash...

An American town that had only been known as PO Box 1663, got its name after the secret was out. Los Alamos.  Located on the mesas northwest of Santa Fe, it was secured by limiting access to a single, narrow, switchbacked mountain road.  About a year before I was born in this remote secret city, Little Boy, the uranium bomb devastated Hiroshima followed three days later the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, over Nagasaki.  These weapons were intended to avoid an invasion of Japan and show the futility of continuing the war.  Both bomb designs worked.  They worked technically and accomplished their intended purpose.  The explosions ended the war and scorched the earth announcing the birth of the atomic age.  But this blog post isn’t about the atomic bomb nor about my birth.  Mother’s Day came to a close just hours ago.  For every Mother’s Day I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by great women who are phenomenal mothers.  My wife, daugh...

Wonder what it would feel like.  A few evenings ago, I was sitting in my car waiting on my wife before we headed to a dinner with her artist friends.  The evening was getting started with a fresh breeze and the sunset fire-lighting horizontal streaks of clouds.  Admiring every available sunset is a permanent entry on my bucket list and part of my new found commitment to give some time each day to actually see the world surrounding me. In the midst of my reverie, I glanced down and saw a baby turtle sort of hopping as it tried to work his way across my driveway.  From his eye view this expanse of concrete had to look like walking across the Sahara desert.  This young turtle’s back was about the size of a Kennedy Half Dollar but oval like a well-honed river rock.  All of the markings of a mature shell were already there – little squares and dots that ran around his elliptical back with four retractable legs, a tail and his head. Turtles are thought ...

Twenty one years.  Enough time to become fully of age in the USA.  Enough time for children just born to have children of their own.  Ample time for the end of empires and the emergence of new countries or countries reborn.  For those who have been following this blog, you will notice that I’ve added an author’s photo - a drawing done while I visited The Arbat, Moscow, USSR twenty one years ago.  One of the nice things about Blogspot is the statistics they share with the author.  There seems to be a number of readers from Russia so as a nod to them, this is a reminiscence from my trip to Moscow. My daughter decided she wanted to participate in a program called Supercamp in the summer of 1990.  It was to be comprised of sixty American kids and a comparable number of Soviet kids.  The venue would be a technical school within the highway loop that circumscribes urban Moscow.  I volunteered to help chaperone sixty middle teenagers into...

Koko Hey Pokey! The blue lights have been turned out.  April 30th reached midnight and gave way to May.  This cigar box blog has returned to its native hue.  Autism goes on uninterrupted. In another week or so, I plan to go to Midnight Farm.  This is a working farm and residential home for developmentally disabled adults.  It is also a place where kids with autism can ride horses as a part of their therapy.  Mason will show me how he rides Koko.  He’ll demonstrate the communication skills he’s learning as his voice and body tell Koko to giddy-up or to whoa.  Every trip around the ring or along the cobblestone road helps him understand cause and effect.  He learns to use his words while Koko patiently understands. Pals come in all sizes and shapes.  Some are like Pokey.  They're the ones who let you rub their nose and look deeply into their eyes.  They probably understand what you’re saying better than...