Susan decided that we should celebrate her getting back on her feet from the summer of surgery by signing us up for ballroom dance lessons. Parks and Rec over in Winchester was offering a six week session on Rumba and Salsa, so off we went. Susan studied dance in college before graduating as a P.E. major, so she was prepared by talent, temperament and training. I, by contrast, have so little rhythm and such a total lack of physical elegance that I might be the anti-Astaire, a veritable black hole of terpsichorean ineptness. It was not always pretty (at least on my side of the proceedings), but I did enjoy it. And I discovered that the basic steps were strangely reminiscent of much of the rest of my life. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow, step away, circle back, you hold each other, side step, side step, walk forward, walk backward, quick quick slow. Hold tight, look at your partner and with a little grace and charity it all comes together. Well, if I can live it, maybe I can learn to dance it.

In farm news, the lamb count was up to twelve at evening feeding.

While loading up the now fully functional farm truck with the household trash to go off to the dump along with a variety of boxes and my mother-in-law's Christmas tree, I heard our local flock of crows making a major fuss. I looked up and saw them getting up the nerve to mob a large bird flapping over the upper pasture. From the size, I assumed it was a vulture, but the set of its wings and the way they moved was somehow wrong for either a black or a turkey vulture. The bird turned, flew closer, and I saw the unmistakable white head and tail of a Bald Eagle.

It has been my experience that we never have problems with just one car. Like children, they suffer injury and illness either in tandem or work as a tag team, going down one after another. On Saturday, older and younger son reported that the farm truck sounded funny and there seemed to be something wrapped around the drive shaft. I drove it out of the barnyard mud onto the grass and crawled underneath. Sure enough, somehow about four feet of heavy gauge wire had gotten tangled around the drive shaft. Since the drive shaft's sole purpose in life is to spin, the wire had accompanied the shaft on its revolutionary mission, tightening with each turn until it was tangled and twisted around like a poison ivy vine on an oak tree. I got a pair of pliers and some wire cutters and set to work. And promptly discovered that I needed much bigger wire cutters. Fortunately I had bought a set some while back for work on the fence. Unfortunately I wasn't sure where they were. The curse of the part-time farmer is that everything is done at odd times wedged into the rest of the schedule. This results in tools being used and stashed in places that seemed logical at the time but deeply confusing to your older self some weeks or months later. After a lengthy search they turned up in a rack with the branch loppers and hedge trimmers. I guess that day I was sorting and storing by form rather than function. With the proper tool in hand I was back upside down under the truck out in the pasture. After an hour or so of clipping and twisting, we had a sack of grease covered wire snippets and a drive shaft free to follow its destiny.

New lambs

The car window from yesterday's post is fixed. I learned in the process that 1.) The phrase "roll up your window" is now forever obsolete since all car makers have discontinued hand cranked windows. 2.) The former scissor style of window regulator, rugged and easily repairable, has been replaced with a cable system that is failure prone and must be replaced as an entire unit (a rather expensive unit) when it fails. Ain't progress wonderful.

Turning to farm news, three new lambs have arrived in the past two days. If the rain holds off I will try for pictures tomorrow.

This morning we woke up to a world in the teens, frost covered and colder than it's been since last winter. I scraped off the windshield of the Ford while older and younger son gathered their bookbags and headed out to join me. Younger son got to the front seat first and decided that, since you could clear dew off the window by lowering and raising it, it should work on frost as well. About halfway down you could hear the grinding of something going wrong with the works inside. No matter how he pressed the button, all he could do was drive the window lower and lower until it was irretrievably down, with no signs of rising again under it's own power. We were running late to the bus stop, so there was no slacking on the speed. The outside temperature was 18 degrees. Inside the car this was reduced by a thirty five to fifty mile per hour wind chill. Older son in the back was huddled down in his seat, hood up, hands in pockets, lips turning blue while muttering dire threats directed at his brother. I dropped them off, returned home and parked the car in the sun, hoping that the problem was cold related and it would thaw out before my first Court case later that morning. No such luck. I drove back to town, the temperature only risen to the 2o's, hair still damp from my morning shower with the heater on full blast to compensate, unsuccessfully, for the swirling frigid wind from the open window. As I stopped at the first light on the main drag through town, windblown and near frostbit, I turned on the cd player, forgetting that missing window provided a free concert for all passersby. I had also forgotten that the disc in the player was soprano Dawn Upshaw's recording of Broadway show tunes by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim, and Weill (which would have been a great law firm name if they had ever tired of the music racket). So picture this; a middle-aged man sits shivering in a Ford Explorer, mind on his upcoming misdemeanor trial when, at full volume, a piercing female voice suddenly proclaims to all within earshot that:

I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and bright,
And I pity
Any girl who isn't me tonight.

I feel charming,
Oh so charming--
Its alarming how charming I feel,
And so pretty
That I hardly can believe I'm real.

I will not describe the looks I got, except to say with the late Rodney Dangerfield that "Sometimes it ain't easy bein' me."

While browsing in a bookstore yesterday I noticed that the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction had a new story by Alexander Jablokov. I loved his first novel, Carve the Sky, and read anything else he published through the 90's. Sometime at the turn of the century, he dropped off the radar. There was a webpage, but it hadn't been updated in the years since the last novel was published. Intrigued, I bought the magazine, which is now waiting on the bedside table. I also turned to Google and found the old webpage updated here with the following explanation:

Disappearances

I never intended to disappear.

In the early to mid-nineties of the last century, I had a decent writing career, with five novels and one collection of short fiction published. A small but discerning group of people enjoyed my work. After my last novel, Deepdrive, I published a few more stories, and then…nothing.

I was not dead. I was not confined in a secure location for my own safety. I had not decided that text was obsolete as a means of communication or entertainment.

I hadn’t even stopped writing. I was writing less, because I now had a family, which required a demanding day job, but I wasn’t happy with anything I was producing. I even dropped out of my writing workshop for a few years.

But here I am again. I’ve written a number of stories in recent years, just sold one, am close to finishing a novel, have rejoined my workshop, and will be visible here and there in the world of science fiction. Wish me luck!

I look forward to reading the new work, and, as a family man with little enough time even for blogging, I sympathise and, as requested, wish him luck.

Owen over at The Ochlophobist has a long post on the decline of the "common man" that covers sex, professional sports, manual labor, class distinctions, mass media, the ipod, the cell phone, Dostoevsky, stereotypes, rampant consumerism, metal work, male-female roles, the "service" economy, law, drug dealing, G. K. Chesterton, body piercing, Belloc, C. S. Lewis, capitalism, human dignity and, at the end of it all, sanctity. It is uneven, even a bit over the top in spots, but worth your time nonetheless. In the years I have been presenting cases in front of local juries I have been noting a steady decline in common sense as the number of older farmers, craftsmen and small shopkeepers in the jury pool has declined and the number of people who push paper for a living has increased. While some of the first group may not have had much formal education and their experience of popular culture did not extend much past Flatt and Scruggs, their experience of living was far richer than most of the younger folks who only know what they have seen on tv. I miss them. I do not know if Owen is correct in his analysis, but I agree that we will not soon again see their like.

I chaired my first meeting as President of the Browntown Community Center Association tonight. The building in the picture was a country school until it was closed in 1970. My wife taught an aerobics class there a few years back, following in the footsteps of her grandmother and mother, who were both teachers when it was still the Browntown school house. Today it hosts a monthly Bluegrass jam, flea markets, Halloween parties, Christmas caroling, and best little Fourth of July celebration you will find anywhere. The parade through town may only take a few hundred yards, but a good time is had by all. Go to the link over on the right for pictures of past events. The schedule for 2007 will be up in a couple of weeks.

It is a quiet Sunday evening; steady rain outside, a late supper and old movies on DVD inside. Yesterday, by contrast, was a beautiful day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I needed the break today after taking a tumble off the farm truck at the dump yesterday, followed later by an incident involving a broken feed sack, and a mob attack by hungry sheep. The end result of the day's adventures were a few scrapes, some bruises and a reminder that I'm really not as young as I used to be.

Friday afternoon, sunset, looking south

When we drove up this evening, we had a sheep on the deck waiting for us. Dorie was a bottle lamb and occasionally gets the urge to go hang with the humans.

Mother and Daughter. This is the first picture taken of the lamb born just before Christmas. When I found her, she was only hours old, but was up and sucking on her own, quite competent at the job of being a young sheep. Over the past few years, we have been moving away from our finicky, high maintenance purebreds towards a hardier, more self-sufficient cross better suited to our hillside farm and its part time shepherds. And if they happen to have really neat spots and patterns in their wool, well that is just fine as well.

A new set of twins today. No pictures; we went out to feed just as the sun was setting. Most of the flock was clustered by the barnyard after seeing younger son with the feed sack. I looked across the little marshy area below the barnyard spring and saw a ewe hanging back. On one side of her was a black lamb. On the other was a second lamb, black in the front, white in the back, with black spots on the white half and white spots on the black, like a small fuzzy Holstein.

As you can tell, if you are still checking after the long silence, the new year has brought a return to blogging. You may consider it a resolution, if you wish. Some time off after Christmas has given me a chance to catch my breath and get back to a few things that fell by the wayside this Fall. 2006 was a year that was perhaps a little too full of, shall we say, "interesting challenges" for the family. Coming out the other side of a few of them, it is strange to find, in an odd an unexpected way, it was all blessing.

Last Saturday I was down at the barnyard drilling a hole with too small a drill with too small a bit into too large a post, making a hole for a pin to anchor the hinge on a farm gate. We replaced the old rusted out gate this summer but tried to fit the new gate on the old hardware. Like new wine in old skins, the pieces never meshed properly, but I didn't have the time, patience or tools to fix it. The result was that, by December, we did not have a gate so much as an unwieldy piece of metal waiting to be knocked down by persistent sheep whenever they wished to go walkabout in the upper field. I discovered Saturday that even with inadequate tools, the job could be done when approached with a little grace and a little patience. That, oddly enough is the lesson learned throughout much of the rest of the year. After more than a half century of working at this business of living I have begun to realize that if I wait for the perfect tool, the perfect circumstances, or for myself to finally become that perfect person, I will wait past most of the best opportunities for living. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Chesterton of all people was not interested in encouraging bad work. He knew though that the worst work is that which is not done at all and any work, done with heart, soul and prayer has the potential to be good work. This coming year I intend to hang a few more gates.

A few days before Christmas, I headed home early to head back out for some last minute shopping. When I walked through the door, older son told me we had the first lamb of the season. With camera in hand, I tracked down mother and daughter out in the field near the house. The ewe tolerated a brief photo session before heading out with her lamb to graze in pastures free from annoying paparazzi.

From Washington D.C. to Ancient China and back

My friend Jonathan Chaves will be presenting a reading from his new translation of the poetry of Zhang Ji, Cloud Gate Song at Chapters Bookstore in D.C. this Saturday.  The translation is an experiment which attempts to convey the original Chinese rhyme schemes to the English reader.  I would post a sample, but I have not yet received my copy from Amazon, which swears that it will ship it any day now.  Besides being a scholar and poet, Jonathan is a great reader and I would highly recommend the event to anyone in the area.

 

Until then, here is a sample from an earlier volume, Pilgrim of the Clouds; Poems and Essays from Ming China.  It seems particularly appropriate with the changes wrought by the recent election.  As each defeated incumbent slinks home, in his wake go dozens of aides, functionaries and officials all now jobless.  This is a story that would have been more than familiar to the scholar bureaucrats of ancient China.  Some elements of politics transcend time, place and culture.  However, I do not know if our own modern functionaries will have quite the same perspective in defeat:

 

ON RECEIVING News of My Termination

The time has come to devote myself to my hiker's stick;

I must have been a Buddhist monk in a former life!

Sick, I see returning home a kind of pardon.

A stranger here--being fired is like being promoted.

In my cup, thick wine; I get crazy-drunk,

eat my fill, then stagger up the green mountain.

The southern sect, the northern sect, I've tried them all;

this hermit has his own school of Zen philosophy.

Rainy Tuesday morning. Where did the mountain go?

About a week ago I had a visit to the blog from Sue Bell (no relation that I know). She is an aspiring jazz singer from Seattle who, in addition to saying nice things about the blog, provided a link to her own web page where one can listen to samples from her album. I listened, liked what I heard and followed the link to CD Baby and ordered the CD. Is she the next great voice in jazz or pop? No, but I like her. Why? It's hard to explain, but let me try.

Picture this: You are in a little jazz club. The band is great, all old pros who are tearing it up while trying to keep the music accessible to the casual drinker off the street. The club is almost empty. At the table with you is a talented friend who has sat in with the guys before. They invite her up on stage to do a few songs. Not show tunes or jazz standards, but some of those tunes from the seventies that you secretly liked but were too cool to admit to while putting your Clash or Elvis Costello lps on the turn table. She sounds great. Not a perfect voice, but she sings the hell out of those sappy old songs, stripping out the schmaltz and leaving the honest sentiment behind. And the band sounds like they are having the time of their lives. It's over, and as you walk out, you leave smiling.

While down with the flu this weekend I had the rare treat of being awakened out of a feverish sleep by phone call after phone call only to discover that it was not my wife checking in from her business trip, or my in-laws calling with an emergency or any of our neighbors reporting errant livestock. Instead, it was some damnable recorded voice droning on (and on and on) in behalf of one or the other of the rival candidates in the particularly nasty race for the Senate here in Virginia. It does you no good to scream at a robot, but I tried anyhow, croaking from my sickbed as I slammed the receiver down. And don't even get me started on the omnipresent t.v. ads. The professionals who run these campaigns must truly believe the voting populace consists of idiots who can be swayed by nothing more than a breathless voiceover magnifying the real or imagined sins of the rival candidate. I actually began this election cycle with a certain measure of respect for both George Allen and James Webb, which has declined steadily as their staff and supporters have done what they think is necessary to win my vote. Their thinking is, to say the least, flawed. While it may be unjust to judge the man by his minions, if their campaign staffs are a measure of the candidates' character, I no longer trust either of them to be my Senator. In fact, I am not sure I would trust either of them to be the guy who pushes my trash down with a pole at our local dump station before pushing the big red button on the compactor. Nonetheless, at some point tomorrow I will stand up in a polling place and be faced with the choice between one of the two. This leads me to introduce my own idea for election reform; Vote None of the Above.

I propose a law that would require that in any race there be an additional option to vote for "None of the Above" positioned immediately after the candidates' names. If "None of the Above" leads by a plurality of the vote at the conclusion of the election, then a new election would be held within a reasonable time to allow the parties to reconsider their choices. The parties could, if they were so inclined, re-nominate the same candidates and independents would be allowed to run again. If however "None of the Above" wins an absolute majority, none of the previous candidates would be allowed on the new ballot.

It could be argued that this crackpot proposal would potentially delay the filling of public office and throw our system of government in disarray. Well, as they say in the computer world, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Vote None of the Above!