Category Archives: people

Truth as a Defense 

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(The Missouri General Assembly is back in session and it, the governor, and assorted denizens of the hallways will be generating ample material for observation for the next four months or so.  We are giving Dr. Frank Crane a bit of a vacation until the end of the session so we might increase the number of appropriate observations pertinent to the times. While they might be of questionable value to you, they are good therapy for your obedient observer. We begin with a story of early United States history and how it might play out in our time.)

Journalists sometimes have to decide whether to break a law by publishing information beneficial to the public or whether to withhold the information and therefore do a disservice to the public.

That ethical dilemma for the journalist who decides to publish then can become a legal issue that is uncomfortable for prosecutors, among others, to consider. When First Amendment protections of the press enter the mix, the situation offers only awkward choices.

Case in point:  Governor Parson is confident the Cole County Prosecutor will file a charge against a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who discovered a flaw in a computer program that endangered the security of personal information of thousands of Missouri educators. The governor believes he breached state law on computer information accessibility.

The newspaper did not publish the findings until the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had fixed the problem.  Clearly, from this observer’s standpoint, the public was better served.  But also clearly from the governor’s standpoint, a law was broken. And as a former sheriff, he took umbrage with what he perceived as law-breaking.

Former Missourian Ulysses Grant, on being sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1869, proclaimed, “Laws are to govern all alike—those opposed as well as those who favor them.  I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”

The sentiment often is credited erroneously to Abraham Lincoln, perhaps based on an 1838 Lyceum speech in Springfield, Illinois.

Throughout our country’s history, the rigidity of law has been challenged by those who push against that rigidity. We could regard the Declaration of Independence as our country’s greatest challenge to existing law, for example.  Or the Civil Rights movement in more recent decades.

But more than fifty years before the Declaration of Independence, an important and surprising legal decision was made that seems to be important to the disagreement about the propriety of the report on education department computer security.

John Peter Zenger, the publisher of The New York Weekly Journal, was accused of libel by Royal Governor William S. Cosby in 1733 after Zenger accused him of various corruptions including rigging elections.  Under the laws of the time, any publication of information critical of government was considered libelous.

Zenger lawyer Andrew Hamilton, the most famous colonial attorney of his time, did not deny the accusations had been printed. But he demanded the prosecutor to prove they were false. The judge told the jury it had to convict Zenger if it found he had, indeed, printed the stories. But the jury stunned the judge, the governor, and many others when it returned after only about ten minutes of deliberation and found Zenger NOT guilty.

The finding was the first time in this country that truth was considered an absolute defense against the governor’s complaint that the law prohibited publication of information critical of government.

That ruling is considered by some historians as critical to the circulation of ideas that led to the Declaration, the American Revolution, and the development of our Constitution and Bill of Rights—and the First Amendment that includes press freedom.

Can the “truth is an absolute defense” be used in the case of the Post-Dispatch story?  We’ll see.  It is unlikely this series of events will rise to the historical significance of the Zenger case. But free public knowledge of truth must have value in a free society and a chance to emphasize that value in this time of the Big Lie should not be missed.

The principle established in a courtroom 288 years ago casts a light on the governor’s belief that a law must be strictly enforced despite the exposure of truth and the prosecutor’s decision about how to best address the issue of public benefit versus strict obedience.

The Center

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Jefferson City likes to think of itself as the center of the state and it is certainly the POLITICAL center of the state.

But, really, it IS the center of the state according to the census bureau and the post office.

If we could cut Missouri out of the United States (and 161 years ago that was tried unsuccessfully) and balance it on the point of a large pin with all of our people living where they live now and weighing the same, the state would balance on a point just south of Jefferson City.

After the folks at the Census Bureau get done counting national noses they start having fun with the numbers.  Missouri wins twice when they do.

A few weeks ago, the census geeks figured that the national population center is near Hartville, population 594, in southwest Missouri’s Wright County.  Now they’ve figured the population center of each state and Missouri’s balance point is near a bend in the Osage River east of Brazito, an unincorporated community about 12 or 13 miles from Jefferson City.

Brazito is served by the post office in Jefferson City and its street addresses have the Jefferson City zip code of 65109.

So Jefferson City IS the center of the state!  Wink, wink.

The designation as the state’s population center is one of two historical events connected with Brazito. The first is that it was named for a Christmas Day, 1846 battle in the Mexican War by members of the First Regiment Missouri Mounted Volunteers under Alexander Doniphan.

The map is from the book J. T. Hughes wrote about the exploits of the unit, Doniphan’s Expedition, published in 1847, shortly after the group returned from opening central Mexico to American military occupation after the later Battle of Chihuahua. It’s an epic story if you want to learn more about the march from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe, the Mexican capital taken without a shot being fired, and then south through the arid country side to the battle site near El Paso and then on to Chihuahua.

The other historical moment happened on August 9, 1974, about 39,000 feet over Brazito when Air Force One pilot, Col. Ralph Albertazzie, radioed Kansas City ground control from his blue and white Boeing 707, “This was Air Force One. Will you change our call sign to Sierra Alpha Mike 27-thousand?”  (That’s military language to make sure the receiving person knows it refers to the letters SAM.)

“Roger, Sierra Alpha Mike 27-thousand. Good luck to the President.”

“Roger.  27-thousand.”

It was three minutes, 25 seconds past noon.  Someone reached down and locked the box containing the secret military codes.

And the Boeing 707 was no longer Air Force One, the designation given to any Air Force plane carrying the President of the United States. It became another Air Force plane, tail number 27000.

The Airline Owners and Pilots Association says SAM27000 has the distinction of making 1,440 takeoffs as Air Force One, but it landed with that designation only 1,439 times.  This was that odd flight—on which Richard Nixon, heading back to California after his resignation in disgrace, officially left the office of President—

—over Brazito, Missouri when word came that Gerald Ford had been inaugurated as Nixon’s successor.

SAM27000 carried more presidents to more countries for more meetings and on more missions than any Air Force One.  Seven presidents beginning with John F. Kennedy, 445 missions. And, says the AOPA, “no luggage was ever lost.”

The airplane remains the property of the Air Force but it is on permanent loan to the Reagan Presidential Library. Should you find yourself there, you can go through the airplane where history was made over Missouri’s new population center 48 years ago.

(photo credit: AOPA)

 

 

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The Past, The Present, The Future

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(The beginning of a new year is a frequent opportunity to look back, to ponder how the past has led us to where we are, and the degree to which yesterday should shape tomorrow.  Dr. Crane tells us each has its place.)

PRECEDENT

Precedent is solidified experience. In the realm of ideas it is canned goods.

It is very useful when fresh ideas are not to be had.

There are advantages in doing things just because they always have been done. You know what will happen. When you do new things you do not know what will happen.

Success implies not only sound reasoning, but also the variable factor of how a thing will work, which is found out only by trying it.

Hence, the surest road to success is to use a mixture of precedent and initiative. Just how much of each you will require is a matter for your judgment.

To go entirely by precedent you become a mossback. You are safe, as a setting hen or a hiving bee is safe. Each succeeding generation acts the same way. There is a level of efficiency, but no progress.

Boards, trustees, and institutions lay great stress upon precedent, as they fear responsibility. To do as our predecessors did shifts the burden of blame a bit from our shoulders.

The precedent is the haven of refuge for them that fear to decide.

Courts of law follow precedent, on the general theory that experience is more just than individual decision.

Precedent, however, tends to carry forward the ignorance and injustice of the past.

Mankind is constantly learning, getting new views of truth, seeing new values in social justice. Precedent clogs this advance. It fixes and perpetuates the wrongs of man as much as the rights of man.

Hence, while the many must trust to precedent, a few must always endeavor to break it, to make way for juster conclusions.

Precedent is the root, independent thinking is the branch of the human tree. Our decisions must conform to the sum of human experience, yet there must be also the fresh green leaf of present intelligence.

We cannot cut the root of the tree and expect it to live, neither can we lop off all the leafage of the tree and expect it to live.

The great jurist, such as Marshall, is one who not only knows what the law is, but what the law ought to be. That is, to his knowledge of precedent he adds his vision of right under present conditions.

Precedent is often the inertia of monstrous iniquity. War, for instance, is due to the evil custom of nations who go on in the habit of war-preparedness. The problem of the twentieth century is to batter down this precedent by the blows of reason, to overturn it by an upheaval of humanity.

Evil precedent also lurks in social conditions, in business, and in all relations of human rights. The past constantly operates to enslave the present.

We must correct the errors of our fathers if we would enable our children to correct ours.

Our reverence for the past must be continually qualified by our reverence for the future…

The momentum of what has been must be supplemented by the steam of original conviction, and guided by the intelligence and courage of the present.

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Racial Centennial

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Lost in this year’s numerous Missouri BIcentennial observance is a CENtennial event that hints at the idea that there is a cultural problem in the telling of our history.  We cannot let this year slip away without observing that—-

A significant event from 1921 has been overlooked.

Republicans gained control of the Missouri House for the first time since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in 1921. There was something special about that crop of Republicans.

The flavor of the historic moment, and of the times, was captured in the Jefferson CityMissouri State Journal in January of ’21:

The Fifty-first General Assembly of Missouri was about to convene. The majestic corridors of Missouri’s new capitol with their classic lines were filled with people approaching the chambers of the two houses…The hall of the House of Representatives, with its imperial columns and lofty galleries, was he center of attraction…It was the Missouri of Thomas Hart Benton, Francis Preston Blair, William Joel Stone, Francis Marion Cockrell, George Graham Vest, Sterling Price, “Jo” Shelby, and a thousand figures of great renown…

Down the middle aisle filled with Missouri’s chosen, came a negro waiter from the City of St. Louis, fresh from the pots and pans of the City Club’s kitchen. He walked with the assurance of the state’s exalted. He strode with the confidence of one invested with new authority, and his black countenance shown with the pleasure of his new role, his eyes sparkled with delight. Passing beyond the lesser lights, he took his seat near the Speaker’s dais, and claimed his own.  Alone, of all the desks in the hall, his was piled mountain high with floral tributes from his race. Others were bare of decoration, but his was conspicuous for the profuseness of its splendor.

He was the representative-elect from the Sixth District of the state’s FIRST CITY—the wealthiest, most highly cultured constituency in the state. He was the first negro to be elected to the Missouri legislature. Albeit he had neglected to meet the constitutional qualifications of paying taxes, he had  been provided by the St. Louis machine which had selected him, with what is known as a “politician’s lot” a space of ground scarcely large enough to accommodate a good-sized box, with taxes of the princely rate of $1 a year. He had won at the polls, and he held his seat. Walther Hall Moore had become a full-fledged Missouri representative.

The formalities prescribed by the Constitution—fossilized relic of the white man’s rule—were complied with, and the House adjourned.  He stood at his place, with the broad smile, so natural with men of his race, and divided his roses among a congratulating group of Republican members and their wives, who surrounded him in their eager desire to grasp his hand. They bore forth his flowers proudly, while a little group of blacks in the galleries cheered and the Lieutenant Governor of the state—like himself, a St. Louis Republican—welcomed him to his new duties.

The name was WALTHALL, not Walther.  A few days after the condescending description of his entrance into the House chamber he introduced his first bill—making Lincoln Institute “into a State university for negroes” and providing a million-dollar appropriation for that purpose. One account said, “This is one of the things demanded from the Republicans by negroes during the last campaign, but the Republican platform convention refused to include it in the platform.”  Nonetheless, Moore got his bill passed.”

Moore’s district was three-quarters white.  He was not re-elected in 1922, but was elected in ’24, ’26, and ’28.  He was a postal clerk, not a waiter.  He was 34 years old when he first took his seat in the House. He was just short of 74 when he died in St. Louis in 1960.

The year he died, three African-Americans were elected to the House: Baptist minister William Wright, lawyer Hugh J. White, and retired postal worker Henry W. Wheeler. All were from St. Louis.

It took another forty years before the first black State Senator was elected (Theodore McNeal) and the state has yet to elect a person of color to any of its executive branch positions—a century after Walthall Moore walked down the center aisle of the House of Representative to take his seat.

Someday, though…….

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A Christmas Story

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It was a scrawny little tree, bought from the remnants on the tree lot just a few days before Christmas.  It only took one strand of blue lights to decorate it, it was so small and spare of limbs.  My mother had put some strips of cotton on the limbs to simulate snow.

Outside, the real snow was shoetop deep and slushy. The little Illinois town was about to button itself up for Christmas and I hadn’t bought my parents anything.  I was fourteen.

We’d done a lot of shopping in the last two weeks, a whole lot of shopping.  But not for Christmas.

About two weeks earlier, I had dashed out the front door of our farmhouse, avoided tripping over Mac the dog, who liked to run with me to the school bus, climbed aboard, found a seat and away we went without a backward glance at the house—-

—that was a smoldering hole in the ground the next time I went back to that corner.

Augie Adams, an angular, friendly fellow who rented our pasture for his horses, greeted me that afternoon when I was summoned to the principal’s office from my PE class.  “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked me, a tension in his voice I remember but did not then recognize.  “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I told him—my dad was a district manager for a farm equipment company and still wasn’t allowed to drive because of a summer heart attack.  Augie immediately relaxed and then told me, “Your house burned down and we pulled her car out of the garage but we couldn’t find her.”

And that was how I learned just before Christmas that all I had was what I was wearing.

Just before Christmas.

My parents rushed to the school to pick me up and then we went out to see what there was to see. The fire department had no chance to save the house or the garage.  They did put out a pile of brush nearby.

My parents stayed with a farm family down the road. I stayed with a classmate in town that night and the next morning we headed to Decatur and to the Montgomery Ward store to start our lives over.  We found an upstairs apartment in a house in town.  The president of the student council at Sullivan High School came into study hall a few days later and gave me an envelope, saying, “The student council thought you could use this.”

Inside was a $100 bill.

All these years later, I think about what I lost in that fire—a baseball card collection that might put my grandchildren through college if I still had it: fifty years of National Geographics a spinster aunt had given me when she broke up housekeeping and went to live with relatives, a rolltop desk, a model airplane collection.  I think about the pictures and other things that were the family archives.  I think about my parents, who had survived the Depression and the Kansas Dust Bowl, and the World War, and now dealt with starting all over.

I don’t remember what I got that Christmas—maybe because what was under the tree was so secondary to what we’d had to get for the previous couple of weeks.

But I do remember that I had to get something for my parents.   And so that evening, maybe it was Christmas Eve—I don’t recall—

Dad gave me four dollars and I set out for downtown before the stores closed to find something.   And in Anderson’s Gift Shop, I found something kind of special—-remember, this was 1955—-liquid pencils.

(Ballpoint pens had only been around for about ten years by then and the first ones I had didn’t work very well. We were still a pencil and fountain pen family, as were many families.)

The liquid pencils looked just like the familiar yellow pencils we used at school but they had a ballpoint cartridge in them with black ink so the writing kind of looked like number two pencil writing.

So we had Christmas with that little tree. We probably spent part of Christmas Day having a big dinner (dinner was a mid-day meal then, supper was at night). I don’t remember but this was in the days when families still had a lot of relatives within 30 or 40 miles and holiday and weekend Sunday afternoons were often spent visiting Aunt This or Uncle That.

A few years ago, the alumni association back home asked me to emcee the homecoming banquet.  I asked the student council president to join us that night to let all of the old grads know what was going on at the “new” high school—which then was about fifty years old.  And when he was done, I repaid the student council for its Christmas present to me in 1955.   That hundred dollar bill all those years ago was the equivalent to about $800 now.  But I decided to round up the total a little bit and gave the council $2,000 for a fund to help some other students who might suffer a devastating loss in the future.

Sometimes a Christmas gift deserves a gift in return, even if it’s not for several decades.

This isn’t the stuff of a Hallmark movie.  It’s just a Christmas story and there’s a lot I don’t recall about that time—-I do remember that by New Year’s Day we’d gotten a 36-foot trailer to rent and had moved it out to the site of our old house, there to house my parents, my grandmother, me, and Mac the dog. My father and I spent New Year’s Day pulling buckets of water out of the cistern and dumping them on the coal pile in the basement that was still burning inside three weeks after the house burned.

We built a new house, the dirt from the basement filling the ashes-filled hole where the old house had stood. And we celebrated several Christmases there before Mom moved to a place in town. We had trees every year but I don’t remember them.

But I do remember a tree that was so forlorn in the tree lot that nobody else wanted it and what it meant with its blue lights and its cotton snow as my family rebuilt our lives as well as our new house.

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Christmas is a time for story-telling.  For remembering.  Perhaps you had—or will have in these next few days—-a Christmas of special meaning.  If you’d like to share that story, use all the space in the comment box with this entry.

 

 

Dr. Crane: The meaning of Christmas

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(Here we are, the last days before Christmas. For some it’s a time of great anticipation—finding things under the tree or in the stocking, visiting friends and relatives—or panic about what to get someone who has already bought everything during the year or hoping that a last-minute inspiration will jump off a store shelf and into your arms, immediately solving the gift problem at the last minute. We publish Dr. Frank Crane’s thoughts on Christmas every year because they are timeless and never lose their meaning).

UNIVERSAL, PERPETUAL JOY

Christmas means the indestructibility of joy

Christmas is the protest of the human race against gloom.

The one thing neither time nor force can suppress is instinct.

In days past, religion tried to stamp out earthly gladness, play, fun, the joy of man and maid. As well one might endeavor to dam the waters of the Mississippi.

When we have clamped human nature down with our reasonings and revelations, along comes Instinct, and to use the words of Bennett*, blandly remarks:

“Don’t pester me with Right and Wrong. I am Right and Wrong. I shall suit my own convenience and no one but nature (with a big, big N) shall talk to me!”

In the Fourth Century, the Christian World was pretty dismal. This world was considered a dreadful place, to get away from as soon as possible. Consequently, the girls and boys were lured off into heathen sports, for the heathen alone raced and danced and frolicked.

Then the church established the Christmas festival, which was one of her wisest strokes of policy.

In 342 A.D., the good Bishop Tiberius preached the first Christmas sermon, in Rome.

Into this opening poured the play instinct of the world.

This time of the winter solstice strangely enough had been the jovial period of the year everywhere.  Then the Swedes of old used to light fires on the hills in honor of Mother Friga, goddess of Love. Then the Romans indulged in their Saturnalia, the one carnival of democracy and equality during the twelve months of tyranny and slavery. Then the Greeks lit torches upon Helicon in praise of Dionysus. In Egypt of this period the population bore palms for the god Horus, in Persia they celebrated the birth of Mithras, and the Hindus of India sang their songs to Vishnu.

Many of these festivals had become very corrupt. Excess and license darkened the hour of national joy.

The wisest things the Christians ever did was to turn this feast day over to a child.

The child Jesus stands for the childhood of the world, perpetual, evergreen, inexhaustible.

It’s a weary world to those who have lived wrong or too long, but to those who remain healthy in their tastes, it’s a wonderful world, full of undying youth running with sap, recurrent with primal joy.

Christmas means the supreme fact about life, namely: that it is joyful.

It is the opinion of many the greatest music ever composed is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As a climax for this orchestral composition the master chose a chorus to sing Schiller’s “Hymn to Joy.”

Christmas means that when this world and all its purposes and deeds are wound up, and the last men and women stand at the end of time and contemplate the complete story of humanity, they will not wail or hang their heads, but they will shout and exult.

The truest, most everlasting element of mankind is play, accompanied by laughter.

*Dr. Crane is referring to English novelist essayist, and journalist Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). The quote comes from his book, Friendship and Happiness and Other Essays, published in 1921.

Alright alright alright

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—-As potential next Texas Governor Matthew McConaughey says.

Governor Parson is going to ask the legislature next year to give salaried state workers a 5.5% pay raise and pay hourly workers $15 an hour.

The governor proposes; the legislature disposes.  We’ve all heard that.  So proposing is one thing. Accomplishing something is something else.  But this is a good move.

The state minimum wage is now $11.15.   And salaries for our state workers consistently have been among the bottom five or six states.  Openpayrolls.com calculates the average state employee last year made $28,871, 56.2% below the national average for government employees.

The minimum wage boost would affect about 11,000 state workers.

A review of state employee salaries five years ago by the data-mining study organization, Stacker.com ranked Missouri 47th out of 51 with the highest and the lowest salaries in the same general field—education.  With the average monthly salary of state and local employees then, the average monthly pay for all state and local employees was $3,746. The highest paid industry was listed as “Education,” where the average higher education monthly pay was $6,796. The lowest monthly salary then was in elementary and secondary education: $2.394.

Myron Cohen, a comedian who was a frequent guest on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” show, used to tell the story of a fellow who came home from work early and found a naked man in his bedroom closet.  “What are you doing in there?” he is asked.  “Well,” says the naked man, “w-well…..everybody has to be somewhere.”

Somebody has to be at the low end of everything, including state employees.  Missouri has been content to be that “somebody” in too many categories for far too long.  The governor’s proposal is not likely to raise Missouri’s state workers very many notches on the poorly-paid lists.  But a pay raise of about five percent for hourly workers and 5.5% for salaried employees will be a big jump for our friends and neighbors who don’t deserve the disdain they often feel when they disappear each day into the offices and cubicles where the business of a 6.1-million member corporation called Missouri is run.

Unfortunately, there are reports of legislatures in several states that are seeing all of the federal COVID relief and infrastructure funds pouring in and they have started thinking of cutting taxes instead of realizing the advantages that come from the one-time infusion while maintaining competent levels of service under current taxing levels.

We hope Missouri’s legislature will not adopt the same attitude—-although we know there are those who will continue the state’s tradition of taking steps that make it harder for the state to pay for the promises it has made to its citizens for services and programs.

Just this once, let the deserving folks in cubicles have a little financial elbow room.

 

 

It’s the Time for Friends

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(The Christmas season is a time when we think of, and gather with, family and friends, the one time of year when we might pause even amidst the consuming activities of preparing and celebrating to consider the values of friendship and to cherish those especially close to us regardless of whether they are relations.  Dr. Frank Crane found himself in just such a reflective mood many years ago as he sought to define—-)

THE FRIEND

A friend is a person who is “for you,” always, under any suspicions.

He never investigates you…

He likes you just as you are. He does not want to alter you.

Whatever kind of coat you are wearing suits him. Whether you have on a dress suit or a hickory shirt with no collar, he thinks it’s fine.

He likes your moods and enjoys your pessimism as much as your optimism.

He likes your success. And your failure endears you to him the more.

He is better than a lover because he is never jealous.

He wants nothing from you, except that you be yourself.

He is the one being with whom you can feel SAFE. With him you can  utter your heart, its badness and its goodness. You don’t have to be careful.

In his presence you can be indiscreet, which means you can rest.

There are many faithful wives and husbands; there are few faithful friends.

Friendship is the most admirable, amazing, and rare article among human beings.

Anybody may stand by you when you are right; a friend stands by you even when you are wrong.

The highest known form of friendship is that of the dog to his master.  You are in luck if you can find one man or one woman on earth who has that kind of affection for you and fidelity to you.

Like the shade of a great tree in the noonday heat is a friend.

Like the home port, with your country’s flag flying, after long journeys, is a friend.

A friend is an impregnable citadel of refuge in the strife of existence.

It is he that keeps alive your faith in human nature, that makes you believe it is a good universe.

He is the antidote to despair, the elixir of hope, the tonic for depression, the medicine to cure suicide.

When you are vigorous and spirited you like to take your pleasures with him; when you are in trouble you want to tell him; when you are sick you want to see him; when you are dying you want him near.

You give to him without reluctance and borrow from him without embarrassment.

If you can live fifty years and find one absolute friend you are fortunate.

For of the thousands of human creatures that crawl the earth, few are such stuff as friends are made of.

Notes from the road

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(Abandoning the quiet street for a few days in search of adventure.)

Our recent trip to Colorado, via Kansas of course, featured a munchkin toilet, a Ferris wheel inside a store, a revelation of what’s in a cheeseburger (or so it seemed), and a place where dart-throwing is a game for sissies.  And, oh yes, we DID see some mountains this time.

We drove across Kansas, which we kind of like to do.  The Flint Hills in the eastern part, the wide open sky and countryside, the windmills lazily—most of the time—creating electricity, the scattered houses and small towns on the high prairie on the west side.

Whenever we make that trip, we cannot help but compare I-70 in Kansas to I-70 in Missouri.  We were at peace on the highway in Kansas. It’s smooth, quiet, and features FEW billboards.  We all know about I-70 in Missouri, a butt-ugly disgrace of sardinesque traffic cans that cram cars, trucks, bigger trucks, campers, RVs, pickups, motorcycles and Heaven knows what else into a tight space at 80 mph, with elbow to elbow billboards advertising everything from Ann’s bras to somebody’s porn shop.  Driving on I-70 in Missouri is a tiring slog through mile after mile of advertising sludge.  Crossing into Kansas generates an instant feeling of freedom.

If you make it to Goodland, about 18 miles short of Colorado, and if you stay at the Quality Inn, do not let the clerk give you Room 102.  It’s a nice room for normal-sized people.  But if you have to use the bathroom—-

That’s our tablet in front of the toilet to give you an idea of the scale of the fixture. The tablet is 8.25 inches tall. The, uh, facility must have been purchased from Munchkin Plumbing just down the road from Dorothy’s farm.  It’s good for a pre-schooler, probably. But for adults?

We will not elaborate. You can use your imagination.

Goodland’s a nice, small town known for having the largest easel painting in the world.  In fact, it’s a Van Gogh painting.  Van Gogh was never in Kansas but he was famous for his five paintings of sunflowers.  And we know what the state flower of Kansas is.

The easel is 80 feet tall (That’s Nancy underneath it for perspective) and is visible from the highway as you come into town from the East.  It’s on your right and easy to miss from a distance.

Kansas has two things that have come to symbolize the state, other than sunflowers.  It has windmills, 3500 of them.  And grain elevators.  One of those in Goodland reminds us of a great ship of the plains waiting to load its cargo.

A lot of first-time travelers to Colorado are disappointed when they don’t see mountains as soon as they cross the state line.  It takes a while before they start to rise against the western horizon. The traveler begins to see them about 45-50 miles from Denver.  But in July, we couldn’t see them at all from there and they were only vague shadows in the western forest fires smoke when we were as close as four or five miles.  Here’s the picture we used in our July 31 entry. It was taken from six miles away:

But the day after Thanksgiving, we drove out to the same area, or close to it:

Or, looking south:

It never quite looked like Colorado in July.  But it sure looked like it at Thanksgiving.

We went to Loveland one day, to a place that seemed to be a cross between Bass Pro/Cabella’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  We saw a woman walking around with her cat in her backpack, which had a clear plastic cover and air holes to give Puff air.

Can’t see the cat?  Look at the lower right, just above the right air hole and you’ll see two yellow eyes.  Several folks had their dogs with them. Not service dogs.  Just dog dogs. It’s part of Colorado’s laid-back culture.

The place had a Ferris wheel right in the middle. Big sucker.  We haven’t been on one in years so we rode it and got a good look at both stories of the store.

We expected Colorado to be Colorado in late November and early December—a few years ago we ran ahead of an ice storm all the way back home as far as Salina holed up for the night while the storm passed and then came the rest of the way to Jefferson City on a cold, wet day with cleared roads but ice and freezing rain on the trees and roadsides.  So we packed appropriate cool or cold weather clothes.

It was in the 60s or low 70s every day but one.  The day before Thanksgiving it was a raw, gray day in the low 40s. There were even a few tiny snow things in the air.

We had an eye-opening experience on the way home to Missouri. We stopped for lunch at a famous fast food place in Burlington, Colorado and learned:

Wow!  And all this time I thought those things were 100% ground beef!

Here’s another discovery from Kansas:   There’s a bar in Topeka that doesn’t seem to have much interest in dart-throwing.

 

Kansas was a place where a 6-foot-tall scowling temperance crusader named Carrie Nation stormed through the doors with an axe in her hand and started breaking up bars.

I don’t know if I’d want to spend much time in a place where there’s a lot of drinking going on and people are throwing axes.

But, you see, there ARE interesting places in Kansas.  Just don’t get in the way of an axe or, if you have bad knees, check into Room 102.

 

Of Me I Sing

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(Many of us are too modest to display our singing talents in public, preferring to save our performances to times when there is water flowing about us.  But The Carpenters advised us many years ago:

“Sing, sing a song.  Sing out loud.  Sing out Strong.  Sing of good things not bad. Sing of happy not sad….Make it simple to last your whole life long.  Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing, sing a song.”

Long before the Carpenters were born, Dr. Frank Crane considered a similar sentiment—)

THE INWARD SONG

The poet speaks of those

“Who carry music in their heart

Through dusty lane and wrangling mart,

Plying their daily task with busier feet,

Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”

It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.

How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to their tasks?

It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel* has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.

“Orpheus with his lute made trees,

And the mountain tops that freeze,

Bow their heads when he did sing.”

Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”

This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.

There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief. FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.

Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men and events.

“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it leads you to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”

None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a noble God.

What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and pleasure-mongers who only know

“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,

Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”

What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and tuneless!

Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the clear blue 50sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”

Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.

*Ithuriel is one of two angels sent by the archangel Gabriel in Milton’s Paradise Lost  to find Satan, who is in the Garden of Eden.  He is found in the shape of a toad, speaking to a sleeping Eve in an effort to corrupt her. Ithuriel touches him with his spear, causing Satan to resume his true form, after which he is taken to Gabriel.