From overland.com/hints:

The following are some hints given folks who went west on wagon trains, like our ancestors did. A few:

Don’t grease your hair before starting or dust will stick there in sufficient quantities to make a respectable ‘tater’ patch.

Don’t swear, nor lop over on your neighbor while sleeping. Don’t ask how far it is to the next station until you get there.

Never attempt to fire a gun or pistol while on the road, it may frighten the team; and the careless handling and cocking of the weapon makes nervous people nervous.

Don’t discuss politics or religion, nor point out places on the road where horrible murders have been committed.

If a team runs away, sit still and take your chances; if you jump, nine times out of ten you will be hurt.

Spit on the leeward side of the coach.   

The best seat inside a stagecoach  is the one next to the driver–you will get less than half the bumps and jars than on any other seat. When any old “sly Eph,” who traveled thousands of miles on coaches, offers through sympathy to exchange his back or middle seat with you, don’t do it.

I have a snow man

who isn’t made of snow.

I met a man who knew him

before we two met and so

I wasn’t surprised to find

he was the other kind.

When ere the sun is out

his little arms they wave

and I guess this little habit

will follow him to the grave.

Sometimes I want to stop him,

offer him some tea,

see his black eyes twinkle

looking back at me.

Following his blueprint to a T

he works just like he ought.

Alas I am the other kind

who won’t work right for naught.

“Capping a painful year, 178-year-old British tour operator Thomas Cook collapsed Sunday night, potentially stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers.”

I spent quite a few minutes trying to figure if this was a misprint from the CNN business site or Thomas had really lived a long and charmed life.

I realized I didn’t explain:

The collapse of British travel giant Thomas Cook is having a ripple effect on the travel industry across the world, as destinations dependent on the group’s business are left high and dry.

The world’s oldest travel agency closed last week after banks and the British government refused its request for a bailout, leaving more than half a million travelers stranded.

Bill Moyers quoted Robert Hass, who quoted Joseph Campbell, who said that the beginning of all poetry is uneasiness about the food chain.

Bright autumn moon;

Pond snails crying

in the saucepan.

Can’t find the source–let me know if you have it.   Jill Dennison identified the poet as Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass, and after reading him I agree.  Thanks!

The poem howls while I’m asleep.

I know it’s there, away down deep.

It shakes my timbers and what’s more

it taps Morse code under the floor.

2015,  Time Wrinkles

Why does anyone care what someone else

believes? Unless their belief

leads to destructiveness to others, why

can we not respect the lifeline

to which they choose to cling?

I say go for it; good for you.

Evolution’s design for kinship selection

and its genetic preference for

similarities may have left us hardwired to

self-destruct. If so, hat will be a sad day.

Honesty, transparency, mutual respect,

curbing our own violence on the streets, in the home,

in our language, in our schools and video games,

our hearts, and in our leaders all remain decent

goals. What is indecent in the apparent inevitability

of our hardwiring winning.

In the words of Loren Eiseley:

Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall

steadily for a thousand years and hush in

its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown…The

long trail of Halley’s comet…will pass like a ghostly

match flame over the unwatched grave of the cities…*

*Eiseley,  The Invisible Pyramid

No, I didn’t enter, but I would have won if I had.   Written with my grandchildren in mind 8-10-19, at Tybee Island:

ODE TO THE OCEAN

At Tybee Island there’s a beach

Sea shells sparkling within your reach

The moon and tide dance together

Whether foul or fair the weather

Dolphin family shows itself

Camera’s sitting on the shelf

Use suntan lotion in the sun

A bag for shells, everyone!

The beach chair helps if you are old

Salt water too, or so I’m told.

Do shut your eyes and hear the sea

Ancient memories capture me

Lullaby of the sea, it sings

Of climate change and other things

Some folks do like to ride the wave

Others turn out to be less brave

When all is said and all is done

A trip to the beach is lots of fun.

What’s the difference between not being politically correct and being unconscionable? I mean, don’t we all have our little points of vulnerability here?  I mean it’s okay for me to laugh at being old, but…you?

 It’s obviously the pits if one should get a laugh  at someone developmentally delayed–like when  my Downs daughter, decked out to the wazoo in a great variety of Ohio State University paraphernalia chatted happily with the Ohio University’s new president at the International Street Fair…and then later helped carry the groceries from Krogers and put them in the wrong but identical car and even took out their trash.  I’ve laughed at myself all my life but I guess thagt’s to be expected, given who I am. But honestly, I know that much of the time it’s outrageous that I’m laughing instead of being appalled.

Seriously, I suspect that I was born with a tad of Tourette’s Syndrome. My father had it when he drank cheap wine and they say his father had it, but I was too young to notice.

I can’t show you the quirks I’ve overcome because I may start them  up again–it’s sufficiently dangerous to even recall them–but I do remember sitting in the congregation of the okld Methodist church of my childhood struggling with myself and the Devil not to shout out obscenities (though at that age they would have had minimal effect).

Although it’s not funny, for years I quietly and invisibly traced around the edge of things that fell within my puriew–both with my eyes and correspondingly, without noticeable movement, with a finger. Maybe all the foregoing is an apology for having laughed so hard and long at an article in the New Yorker–I think it was–about a gathering or convention or something–of folks with Tourette’s. I don’t believe the article was meant to be funny (how could it be?)  and though I’ve tried to find it again on Google to no avail, I’ve decided that’s the pits for me. There now, you know, you dingaling!   (Stronger word deleted  by blog editor).