the facts in the case

 

In 2003, we bought a couple of suitcases for the China trip to gather the family together. There's the red one, which I use pretty much every time I'm gone for a few days, and the black one, its twin in every respect save for color. These cases went to China, England, China again, and Michigan, repeatedly. 

We're trying to slim down, ably obstacled by my own second-guessing, wishing for a tithe of "keep" in every batch that goes out, and trying hard not to act on it. My stomach churned on seeing this stand by the curb for two solid days, including light rains and showers. I hoped someone would come and claim it for their own future adventures. They didn't.

Today I went out to move the bins, because driveway sealers were doing their work, and I didn't want out trash guys to be inconvenienced. "We're gone in five minutes!" the man said as I wheeled the barrels, and I explained that our trash guys show up at the darnedest times and all. "Then I hope they take that stuff," I said, indicating the above cornucopia. "I took the suitcase!" said my new hero.

"YES!" I said. "That's a good fucking suitcase. We went all over with it, and it's still as good as it ever was. I didn't want to give it away in the first place, and I'm glad it's going where somebody'll use it! That suitcase is older than my daughter (I may have been off by a few months here), and we got it 23 years ago (off by one)." 

And I went on in, feeling GOOD about the suitcase, and hoping it has great adventures in the future. Only regret now is that I didn't put a sticker inside that said it had been to China, England, Escanaba. But a happy ending is a happy ending, especially when it's a beginning.

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for June 27, 2025

Fawn trailing a doe
Wonders why I mow the lawn.
Me too, kid. Me, too. 

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theme for two guys in a car helping people

There's a hood holed up in Chi Town!
In St. Lou they fixed the fight!
There's a doubting priest in Joplin
Who might never see the light!
Berdoo's got a missing kid!
Flagstaff's gonna flip its lid...

ROUTE 66, WHERE ARE YOU??
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the Copper

"Monster! (cried I) Hound of Satan!
Every way I turn, you're waiting!
So obsequiously waiting, waiting at my chamber door.
As the victim of your haunting,
Will you tell me what you're wanting?
Tell me once and leave off taunting,
Lift thy blight, O rumpled bore!"
Quoth the copper: "One thing more..."

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Frost Report

Two roads diverged in a sunny wood,
And as I could not exist on both,
I chose the fire and hoped for good

I may regret I threw those dice,
I haven't yet, but life surprises.
I might've done as well with ice.
Or a million other otherwises.

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up

The dizziness seems to be going away when I sit up in bed now, and when I lie down. It gave up when I decided it was five seconds of being high for free. Now sitting up in bed is reserved strictly for wee-hours angst, as it should be. (My brain has actually learned on this one, that I will no longer lend credence to the things it tells me at this hour. It can't be trusted.) Sitting up was my signature achievement, though. 

In sixth grade, we were still feeling the bad effects from Jack Kennedy's physical fitness mania, setting aside a portion of the year for The President's Fitness Thing, whatever they called it, which was a wall-to-wall exposition of Everything Kip Can't Do. They had a distance written down that I should be able to throw a softball, and I couldn't, and how many pushups I should be able to do, how far I should be able to jump, and other whimsical markers of inadequacy. (It didn't help that I was most of a year younger than the rest of the class, physically, and farther than that emotionally.) 

So for a week or a year or however long it was, every moment outside was spent being subnormal, much to the amusement of the bullies I'd been sharing classrooms with since second grade. Coach has your back, though. If anything happens, he'll make you run laps around the playground for a while. 

The surprise was the situps. Someone had decided, with 100% obvious objectivity, that the goal was 100 situps. Don't worry, a guy'll hold your ankles! I don't know what made this happen, whether it was one insult too many or what, but I did 100 situps. Objectively did them all, with an adult counting each one. I made it to 100 and stopped. No power on Earth could have made me do another. And after that, I was cool. I was the king of the classroom. I made it!

 Just kidding. I don't think there was an echo or a dead cat bounce. Situps were quietly removed from the list of things to make fun of me for, and that was that. Nothing else changed. Years later, I was an older college student (not much older, I was about 23 to start), and I had to take a PE class, something I'd successfully avoided since high school (see: being threatened in the locker room). I still couldn't "run" a mile, but I knew deep inside that I was going to blow them away on the situps. Except I didn't. I did a handful and then turned my attention to the exercise of breathing without losing my last three meals. Oh, well. I guess I had 100 in me, total. 

Another twenty years after that, I was a member of the Male Chorus in The Mikado, really liking the inadvertent discovery that at least some of my fellow thespians had imperfect graydar and thought I was maybe pushing thirty. I didn't fool myself that I looked good, but please don't fault me for feeling good that I didn't look used up yet. 

Anyway, the chat among Us Regular College Guys somehow turned to situps. Bryan said he could do X number. Fred maybe suggested a higher figure. Then they looked at me. I could have done the Old thing, and told them all about my grade school triumph, being careful to describe the motor cars on the street and the popular TV shows of the day. I didn't. Instead, I said "I arrange my day ahead of time so that I don't have to sit up," and that was the Right Answer, because I can talk to the young people. I speak their language! 

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going sideways

I posted a couple of times this year, but they went sideways, and not in a great way. I wrote two short posts and didn't notice that they went into the wrong account and were posted into a parallel universe where they didn't get any comments either. The one I keep thinking about is about my cool tip for practicing, which is "turn the tablet sideways."

Figure 1: The tablet (tabloid)

I impressed Dad with this, several years ago, by showing that a screen which showed a whole page in a reduction somewhere between full size and miniature score sized, so that he could read Ravel right off the tablet. Of course, that also meant far fewer lines visible at a time, and this was enough of a handicap, I thought, that I mostly didn't avail myself of it, except for PDFs of music that were Landscape orientated. 

Recently, though, my eyes prevailed upon my hands to turn it sideways during some tough passages, and I found a new world, actually. I didn't realize it at first, because I was trying to see it at that size and still keep scrolling while playing up to speed. Yeah, THAT COULD WORK. 

Figre 2: The tablet (landscape)

 Contrariwise, what works for me is the Zen state of having two or three lines (if squinching a little gets me more) and not leaving them. Practice those measures and keep doing them for a while. Do it until you can't hide that one error you keep making from yourself and then deal with that by (say it with me) taking the measure apart as far down as necessary to make the brain understand what happens in it. 

That means playing the hands separately. That means if you have to use both hands to play one of the hands' parts a few times, you do that, until your fingers know the exact choreography of the dance from this white key to that black key and you begin to perceive the topography of the playing field as both massive and as if viewed from far above. It's like the old saying: Practice Makes Incrementally Better.

I feel a strange excitement now when I reach to rotate the tablet to oblong view. It's like my eyes are better. It's like I don't have to rush from one measure to the next.

And, by the greatest of fortune, I find that I now enjoy playing passages over and over. I have an excuse now: I'm practicing. 

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dimly recalling work

In 1990, days before I graduated community college with an AA in Commercial Art, a counselor told me there was a company interested in me (for which I should have thanked the counselor, in hindsight), so I went over and interviewed and was hired before I was even out on the street. For the next fifteen (or sixteen) years, I had an almost scary sort of job security in a relatively family-like environment of co-workers and bosses I saw every day. I worked for a garden center, but not in it-- the corporate office was on the other side of the parking lot, and the garden center (the flagship center of a small chain, in Hampton, Virginia) was handy but not compulsory.

I was to learn QuarkXPress and Illustrator (no Photoshop yet, but a couple of years of diligent scrounging netted a limited version of it that came with a scanner, and it had an upgrade path I was eventually able to persuade them to fund) and turn out ads and literature for these three (or so, over the years) stores, as well as all the signage. I thought about a classmate at my school who was really a good artist, but in a sort of death slump resulting from our teacher's "lose a letter grade for every day late" policy, and I thought about how much work it looked like and then I actually opened my mouth and said "This is really a job for two. There's a guy at the school you could probably hire for the signs," and darn if I didn't end up working next to him for most of a decade, before his obvious abilities got him recruited away for more money at one of the newspapers we dealt with.

My boss often said that the owner of the company was a visionary, and he seemed to be. I later came to believe she was the visionary, and he was smart enough to go along with most of her ideas. Bit by bit, she got us the hardware and software and supplies to keep the customer's attention on our products. And we delivered! The newspaper ads I made for them are painful to look upon now, but we generated business. The customer newsletter had a circulation around 35,000, and we had a return rate on our coupons that got double-takes from our media reps. The newsletter went from a monochrome trifold to a full-color tabloid, and I designed a web page that got us eyeballs (with strict procedures to keep the thing fresh each time someone went to look at it). I got to play with a lot of swell equipment, once the chief could see how much it brought back to us.

There were exciting times. I asked my boss to prioritize the numerous piles of paper on my desk, and she said "This one is first priority. So is this one. This one here is only second priority, but it has the earliest deadline so you'll have to do it first." We threw festivals that required dozens (and more every year) of vendors to set up booths, with publications for each. 

Though I wasn't the sign maker, I somehow spent enough time making signs to have learned a few things. We had metal shelves of equipment and supplies, and I loved having all the different colors of paper stock to choose from. Many of the signs went outside, displayed in sun and rain and waterings, and I learned the mysteries of laminating-- how one tiny flaw will suck water into a sign like a sponge, making it ugly and contorted. Lamination was one of our triumphs. We started out with a machine that could laminate letter-size paper in pre-cut plastic envelopes you ran through it. This led to such a demand that we expanded to a monster of a machine (with its own monstrous problems), and we could feed monster-size sheets through that, and agonize over whether a banner went in too crooked to make it.

I sometimes ended up running the thing for a while, and when I was at my peak, I'd hear the voices of the Three Easily Impressed Extras, exclaiming:

"See! He LAMINATES!"

"Aiieee! He laminates like a beast! A beast of LAMINATION!"

"(makes religious gesture) Never have these eyes of mine beheld such laminating!"

I learned things about handouts and how best to defend them against the inevitable moisture plants need-- we ended up with sheltered racks, and reformatted everything to 5.5" x 8.5", because larger things bend sooner.

I went to an expo with Pat (my boss and friend) and we admired a padding machine which cost a couple hundred dollars. "We can make one of these," I said. When I got back to the office, I drew a design and gave it to the handyman with an explanation, and he brought it back SLIGHTLY IMPROVED, even! It was some pieces of wood screwed together, and we made pads with it for years!

We learned about our worst enemy: The Sun. Red printing was a big thing for us, as nothing catches eyeballs like the *Judicious* use of an eye-catching color. The thing was, though, that red anything faded faster than black anything, or even blue. We could see it in our signs and banners. I could see it in the bumper sticker of a truck I used to see in the employee lot, in red and blue (on white), showing a flag and defiantly promising THESE COLORS WON'T RUN. Knowing what I knew about red, I smiled knowingly each time I looked at that lonely little field of stars that had been a US flag, and wondered if the makers of the sticker or its users would ever notice that they now said THESE COLORS    RUN!

I learned a lot about photocopying and color printing, too. It was particularly educational when black areas in printing were physically sliding right off the paper. (I used the information I got from that to reconstruct a gravestone photo in Massachusetts later on.)

I learned that I didn't care much for coffee, and cigarette smell got old as dirt even before I'd spent one year across the hall from the breakroom. The number of employees we had meant each of us cleaned the thing for a month, and now all coffee smells like grounds to me. We fought ants.

And now it's all over with, gone with the wind, its players scattered, and the red parts faded by the sun. The Hampton location-- the original, the main location-- no longer exists and is probably crappy self-storage warehouses by now, like everything else in the area was striving to become when I left. Last time I heard from someone there was some kind of LinkdIn scam which I ignored, from a name that was like the AI version of someone I'd worked with (though I got a nice reception once when I called to get some info-- Georgia was still answering the front phone).

Anyway, it was nice to remember all the paper stock and whatnot. Pat let me use the big Xerox copier/printer as much as I liked, provided I brought in a ream of paper now and then, and I used the hell out of that, printing sheet music on punched paper for my traveling books. The drive to and from eventually became practice for taking pictures from a moving car. For a year after we moved, I still was doing some things like the web page and newsletter remotely while my replacement got oriented. That's how big the job became: I had a couple days of training. Now I'm old, and I think I wouldn't mind maybe a half day in the office once a week or so, just for the social aspect, but if I must be retired, OH WELL.

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king of the butterflies

In grade school, there was a regular ritual for the Monarch butterflies. Sixth graders cruised the ditches and roadsides for milkweed plants, looking for the signs. Eventually, there'd be chrysalises in the classroom that would be taken home to hatch at someone's house. I may have gone through this twice, once for the Cub Scouts. It's all fuzzy.

Less fuzzy is the sight of a couple of accidents: Linda's little brother or sister (several to choose from) got too curious about the chrysalises and disturbed them, and the result was a couple of unfinished butterflies, stretching their hopeless wings in doomed futility, trying to do the thing they knew how to do. 

A couple of years after that, my family was out in the van, a half mile or so from home on the road to the landfill, and we were suddenly engulfed by Monarchs. They swarmed and surrounded the vehicle, brushing lightly against the window, each for its fraction of a second of wing beating before being replaced by an identical specimen of the concept of Monarch butterfly. It lasted half a minute or more, with no view outside (Mom pulled off right away, and it was a quiet stretch), just the wings.

When Sarah was about six, we visited a butterfly place. We walked around, surrounded by brightly colored fluttering patterns that sometimes landed on one of us. We attended a talk on raptors with a bird rescuer. We left with a Monarch chrysalis on a twig, and took it home to hatch.

Now, some time before this Sarah was collecting acorns from the trees that overhung our back yard, and sometimes there were tiny yellow bugs in them, barely big enough to register as caterpillars, and after being annoyed that they were in her acorns, she collected them and put a couple of them in a jar with a twig and some leaves and expected them, as kids will, to form pupas and become butterflies. And one day, the surviving cocoon hatched out and we took it to the porch where it tried its wings and left on a breeze. Sarah was a little sad it wasn't a butterfly, but I was amazed and delighted that it made it all the way.

And so did our Monarch. After the requisite time, it burst out and we took it to the front porch where it posed for a bit on the edge of its container before fluttering upward into, I thought, one of the tall trees that neighbored our tiny lot. Once again, it made it.

I see so few butterflies now. They don't even have to be Monarchs. I rejoice in any and all, moths too. I'd be so happy if the lightning bugs came back here again. And now US Wildlife has announced that our Monarchs-- the paragon of butterflies-- are added to the list of threatened species in this country.

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Propriety

Without haste or care,
Winds lightly deal our piled leaves
Back to their own yards.
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revelation

Yellow. Orange. Red.
At the sun's silent signal,
The green mask slides off.
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today's report

The North Wind, laughing
At soft pink buds that believed
Its lying zephyrs.

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Kip's Wonderful World of Color presents:

PAINT THE BIRDS

Paint the birds, tuppence a can
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a can
"Paint the birds," that's what she says
While wings make rainbows above in the sky

In Saint Paul's shadows, the colorless statues
Of famously suffering saints
Look on in wonder, their eyebrows ascending
To see how she peddles her paints.

Though the cans are tiny and cheap
Listen- Listen- She's making a heap!
"Paint the birds, tuppence a can
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a can!"

Sparrows and pigeons, despondent and jumpy
All grey as the smoke from the coal
Unloved and stepped on, depressing and dumpy,
Bright colors could perk up their soul.

"Buy a can, buy one for your kid.
Two full ounces, a brush in the lid.
Paint the birds, tuppence a can.
Long last! Dries fast! Tuppence a can!"
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Christmas stuffing

 I finally got the cards started. The cards themselves are fully realized, corporeally existing, bearing individual proofs, visible to me, of the haste and trauma of their creation. "Thouth" jumped out at me first, the sign of not having time for a round of having the sisters look at it for me once. There's a small "f" that's partly obscured by the signatures (now ten or twelve years old). I hope I'm the only one who "notices" that the photos weren't really optimized this year. I just went with them the way they were, RGB, not CMYK. Not resized to the printed pixel. Just let it go as is, merry Christmas.

The labels exist, part of the same marathon session at Fedex (formerly Kinko's, copy shop of my single years), coping with recalcitrant machines and NOT adding to the burden of the two women doing all the work. They knew I was there and always came when they could, and I am genuinely grateful and told the one who checked me out that it had been easier than I was expecting. (I didn't mention that I almost got there the first time and couldn't find a mask in the car and went home for one.)

The postage exists. I waited in pleasant silence. Was there no background music at all? It was just a guy getting through a stack of packages and flats to go out, weighing each or whatever. I didn't watch him. There was one other guy in there, waiting quietly far in the rear, maybe pondering the steel gated area where lines wait for service during non-Sunday hours. I enjoyed that part. The envelopes were already home, left over from other years.

So I'm stuffing the envelopes first, manila-colored 6" x 9" ones. I'm very pleased to see that these are self-sealing, so I won't have to moisten any sponges this year. My first dry card day. There are three empty labels at the end, showing where I deleted an address for someone who'd died this year, and for whom no one else remains to open a card. My end-of-the-year reel of people who I've exchanged jokes with, run into here and there, gone to their house. Rest in peace, Howard. You were always smiling, and I think you always got a raw deal. Rest in peace, Terry. I was sad when Mary went, and now I'm sad again. Rest in peace, Dad. I remember you.

And here's a label for my oldest friend, by which I mean the human I'm not related to who I've known the longest. I met and played with him when I was almost three, and the last time I saw him was 1990 or earlier, and I remember when he was impressed that I knew Photoshop (he's a painter and digital artist) his annual cards have been a triumph of impossible photorealism for years, but I haven't gotten one in a while. Three years? Five years? I don't know how many years things are. I consider peeling the label off and discarding it, or writing a note. I expect I'll just send a card and hope for a Hallmark moment.

Back to the envelopes.

 

ps: Holy cow, I already have a label that says "christmas holiday death." 

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