a love letter

i love my wife very much - but you already knew that...i said it in my profile.  here's why:  she's beautiful, inside and out, and she's very, very smart.  beside her brain what impresses me is her kindness and generosity of spirit.  she accepts people far more readily than i ever would which should indicate how important it is to me to have her as my guide.  what further impresses me is her toughness.  she holds her own, even exceeds expectations, as the only woman partner in a several person ownership of a small business.  her thoughtfulness and experience are valuable additions to the operation.  i love you my darling and i hope you have the happiest of birthdays...followed by many, many more.  xo, hawk

civility

    just after blogging about the rise of incivility in the present day, i was hit with the ultimate example of civility.  on my morning coffee and newspaper run to our local food market, janssens, i was struck with a fleeting seizure.  not only did kathie, my server, recogniize i was in trouble and call for help, but paula, her supervisor, immediately called 911.  it didn't stop there.  i managed my home phone and paula called my wife who arrived post haste - in tandem with the ambulance.  because sally is a nurse practioner she knew the ambulance staff and they quickly communicated the problem and its resolution - case closed.  oh, one more thing...while i was being examined, paula and jerome delivered my car to our home.  you can't get much more civil than that...and my heartfelt thanks goes out to all involved. 

republican politics

please - give me a break...what is this lot of losers we [good conservative] republicans are foisting on the electorate?  it's an embarassment.  can you imagine perry on the international stage? no mormon will ever be elected to  national office no matter how "successful a small business'' man or how good a flap-jacker his wife is.  bachmann - ditto perry. gingrich - old news with baggage.  a dog strapped to  the roof of romney's car...what?  herman 999 - at least he's got a plan, weird as it might be.  this current guy is a beatable incumbent...these meatheads won't manage it.

what we need is a leader - something we don't presently have - not a campaigner - something we currently have.  my vote goes to chris christie - though i have minor reservations.  he's tough and thoughtful, but not too dogmatic.  no skeletons as yet, none likely.  and, christ almighty, don't let sarah palin in the door.  [who advised mccain on that one.]  just an old man's thoughts.

two quotes and a story

"every man carries within himself a world made up of all he has seen and loved; it is to this world he returns, incessantly."

"we should know how the past molds us but also be concerned with how it might bind us."



[with thanks to alice connolly and jack giles]


we figured out the carp were eating most of the corn we used to bait the ducks at the beach when one of the kids threw a line off the gazebo and caught one of about five pounds.  from then on we filled an old gunney sack with kernels and a couple  of rocks to sink it on friday afternoon when we arrived.  by cocktail time the fish were fairly jumping at the chance to eat our number four hooks camouflaged with green giant [canned] corn and a lot of fun was had by all.  mary, our cook, asked that we keep every one for she knew a way to make them edible but she didn't persuade me and the ones i caught went back.  they were all strong fighters, though not spectacular, and on light tackle - four pound test line - worthy adversaries.  the biggest landed went over twenty pounds, but the volume - numbers - was what interested me.  if it worked at the beach it was bound to work in the brandywine river, just outside our back door, so we lugged fifty pound bags of corn down to its banks and into a softly swirling eddy chucked their contents.  behold the "brandywine salmon".  with no deep river to work in the fish ploughed across the stream in serious and credible imitation, thrashing and shaking heavily.  several years later i watched on televsion a show featuring lefty kreh and flip pallot casting leech flies to feeding carp in the susquehanna river.  the carp were turning over stones with their noses, the fish easily seen in the clear water.  fascinated i arranged a trip and for two days cast fruitlessly to the few fish i saw.  i called lefty when i got home.  "hawk," he said.  "it took us two weeks to make that half hour program.  you watched us catch four fish and i guarantee flip and i cast better than you do."  i'm going to the beach next weekend....i'll take a bag of corn and a light spinning rod.

a quote

there's a lot of damn politicians who ought to think hard on this one.


   "those whom the gods would destroy, they first make drunk with power."





[with thanks to gil drake]

fun

where'd it go?  is it the fact that i'm getting older...has it drifted away in this new - maybe not so new - pc world or has it just slunk 'round a rock like a feral cat?  we used to have so much fun - a magician "in the round" at an eight adult dinner party - four of us, on a freezing january day, mooning the federal agents flying over us as we shot ducks on the chesapeake bay...fun, man, fun.  fun went away some years ago - maybe just took some time off, but everything seems somehow more sober now.  i'll give you an example of the pc business that so confused me it took all the fun out of catching them, and they are a fun, beautiful fish to catch and to eat.  i'm talking about dolphin.  that's what we used to call them, then they became dorado for some reason, now they're mahi mahi, just to separate them from the proper, air breathing lot.  for christ's sake...who can keep track.  one thing sally and i had fun with the other day was shooting dice at the local casino.  years ago she and i and my friend harry, a cop, went over to atlantic city one evening.  sally hadn't played the table games too much so we started with craps, won and went on to blackjack, won and went on to baccarat.  won there too.  as the sun came up behind us, traveling home on the ac expressway at "cop speed", sally in the front seat on my lap singing with me at the top of our lungs to rock tunes on the radio...hurling the thousands we'd won all over the place 'til we came up on a toll booth and harry told us to cool it...that was fun.  anyway,  we'd played blackjack the other day and, typical of these non-fun times, were down to our last $200.  i said let's go...sally said no, let's go to the craps table.  so we did - and won $1590 in twenty minutes.  a glimmer of fun.  and that's it, i guess.  fun has become a glimmer, fading as it ages in the speed of today's world, the hurly-burly of life.  too bad.  we could use more of it, don't you think?

for rivers

,
i wrote this for a friend who lost her dog, rivers, in a tragic accident.  i should repeat here that i dont believe in god or creationism.



a dog is a marvelous beast.
god's wits were with him when
he dipped the cauldron of creation
and spooned a canine mix.
there is nothing in the animal world
so distinctly animal - and yet,
so nearly human.

a dog complements our every waking
moment, and guards our sleep.
he laughs when we laugh, plays
when we play and is reflective...
or sad, in turn.

in truth, he mirrors us, and,
always forgiving, is the perfect
foil for our faults.

a dog's time on earth is, by design,
far shorter than a man's,
his life a quickened version of our own.
the lucky ones have several dogs
and learn a little from the best.
in each, perhaps, they see their own
days spun a little faster.

remember, a dog does not know or
fear death.  to him each day is a new
adventure, to be put to rest at night.

rivers never lost a friend,
had his heart broken or spent a
sleepless night.
what fired his spirit, sparked his eye,
spiced his life,
was his love for you.

what made it all worthwhile
was that he knew he was loved
in return.

look up

we dont live in the deep country but we have some open spaces around us.  those spaces are populated by a remarkable variety of birds.  just the other day - besides the regular lot of sparrows, cardinals, and crows - i saw swifts, swallows, nighthawks, hummingbirds, doves, a red tail hawk, and a cooper's hawk.  we used to have turkey buzzards by the score but i haven't seen any lately and i have a theory about that...we do, now, have eagles [three that i've seen] and i believe they have driven the buzzards off.  they do, after all, feed on the same things.  i'm slightly worried for our cat -  and our new puppy - over the eagles.  two, a nesting pair i assume, i have spotted soaring high above our house.  the third flashes through our back yard from time to time...he's the one that worries me.  beetle, the cat, was hammered by a great horned owl not long ago...it happened in the middle of the night - i was awakened by the fight - but beetle was too fat to be carted off and $600 later, recovered from the talons wounds.  i'm sure it was an owl because i saw him sitting on the peak of our next door neighbor's roof at daylight shortly after...looking quite pleased with himself.  all this bird life reminds me of the old days - forty or so years ago - when we'd pack the surf rods and coolers in the back of an old land rover i had and head for the beach in the fall to chase the bluefish.  once there, when we looked up from the migrating fish, we'd see ducks, monarch butterflies, and hawks all making their ways south...signalling the onset of the winter to come.

a quote for one to ponder

"forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit"  virgil, the aeneid

loosely translated:  perhaps one day it will please us to look back on these things.

translated in more scholarly fashion:  a joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.


to further quote the scholar: " it is about loss, about overcoming the worst, but the word 'perhaps' is important.  it may not be a joy to remember.  it may be a bloody misery."  fagles

[with thanks to dick dupont]

what the fuck

ever happened to civility?  the only good thing to be said about incivility is you can usually see it coming...under one of those damn baseball caps.  more about that later.  i was born in europe during the forties and, believe me, as a youngster i was subjected to the severest civility lessons one could imagine - such as always standing when a lady entered the room, offering your seat on a crowded bus, and looking directly at a person when introduced - even to the extent of holding a woman's hand just a half second longer when you first met her.  oh, and doffing - there's an old fashioned word for you - your hat as you shook hands...which brings me back to baseball caps.  they are never doffed - at least in my experience...usually worn everywhere, inside and out, backwards and forwards - most of them adjustable so they'll fit all sizes of pinheads.  if i or my wife, who's small in stature, ever get banged into, practically knocked over again by some stupid teenager in a backwards worn baseball cap as happened the other day on the way into a restaurant they're gonna have to call the cops on me....and mind your back in the parking lot when some idiot on her cell phone comes hurtling after you.  i could go on...and on, but i'll close by saying that i think the thing most contributing to incivility on the modern world is the cell phone - and all the nattering nabobs on them.  the wickedest part of the whole cell phone scam is one can hardly live without one -- though i manage to.  it's uncivil in the extreme - what with the whole world howling about you, civility sucked up and whisked away in a vortex of noise.

henry beston, the outermost house, 1928

for the animal shall not be measured by man.  in a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  they are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

hunting

long ago i decided to avoid the hunter versus non-hunter debate as i felt it unwinnable by either side.  you either were or you weren't.

i am a very comfortable hunter.  i cannot articulate properly my deep sense of focus, of involvement, of being, while hunting to the non-hunter and have come to believe that the act of hunting, the fact of being a hunter is so deeply imbedded in my genes, so primal, that it is inexplicable.  the very activity may even precede language itself as a way of, a source of, life and therefore have no need of verbalization.

REALIZATION

the wind howls
 and ceases.

the snow swirls
 and eddies.

the world is white
 and very pure.

here comes the plow.