The best e-mails

My Pa sends the best emails. He is the squarest beatnik poet you'll ever meet. Here is one of his best missives:

"have arrived, gotten all of the stuff in (not put up yet) changed to MY YALLER PANTS and long sleeved Razorback white shirt, enjoyed the trip to LR and the food and seeing Thomas and meeting Ronnie and the conversation (Carol) and the picture show and all the rest. The drive home was good but windy and how, blowed all the Curl out of my hair. Oh! and I got the mail have not opened it yet. Got an interesting note from a dog setter in Wash thanks Callie ( will try to drop U a line later). All is well that ends well.

Love Big Pa"

He has style.

And he's referring to my last email at the end, where I discuss the travails of dogsitting for three demented dogs. Not all at once. One ran off and was feeling his oats and making me feel guilty, but apparently he's just been off in the woods having an Iron John moment. Another one wasn't demented, but if she didn't want to go out, there was no way she'd go out. The third is an ancient little crone — incontinent, with skin problems and anger issues. I brought her over to the home of the other two dogs on an overlapping day and she, um, expressed her anger or just couldn't control herself all over the kitchen floor. I was just grateful it wasn't on the homeowners' authentic, silk Arabian carpet. She's much better now that she's back in her own home and she's a wonderful companion anyway.

I wish I had some YALLER PANTS. And I wish I could find a wind strong enough to blow the Curl out of my hair.

Post-prandial stompin'

So Thanksgiving doesn't seem like the likeliest holiday to go with shopping at 5 a.m. the next day, what with the massive consumption of (if you were at the home I was at for TG) turkey, wine, roasted yams, cranberry relish, caviar, capicola, shrimp cocktail, pumpkin cake (in a roll, with cream cheese frosting), pumpkin pie, green beans, oyster stuffing and lots of yummy appetizers. It seems like a morning spent sleeping in is the best remedy.

However, there are apparently a lot of people who enjoy getting up early and heading to the local big box store to wait for an early opening to buy specially discounted electronic (and sundry) goods.

I'm beginning to wonder if these one-time-only discounts aren't for more than just attracting consumers, because apparently consumers just want to shop early on Black Friday anyway. I'm beginning to wonder if these deals are meant to inspire good security camera material for the overlords' Christmas parties.

Think about it.

Who do the Wal-Marts of the world hire? Poor, unsophisticated people. What do they do to them while they work there? They strip them of their human dignity and make them put their kids on state health insurance programs. Why do they do it? There's profit to be made.

But something happened on this side of teaching them to sing the company song and do the butt wiggle at the center dash of Wal-Mart. There became a cruelty in the degredation; a pleasure in being telling a woman worker they didn't have to pay for time she spent in the bathroom.

I can just imagine some corporate man of industry telling his cronies, "I'm sure the $30 DVD players will attract the masses to shop ... but let's only stock a few so we can watch the fur fly." Because who buys $30 DVD players because of a marketing circular? Poor, unsophisticated people (and me, but I got mine in the off-season with no lost dignity). It's like two jolly-makers in one.

I bet there is not a person reading this post that didn't watch their local news in some state of horror over the crowds at the big boxes, and the commotions that were caused by the "deals" inside. Or that didn't see some permutation of the 73-y-o grandmother whose leg was broken in the crush to get a cheap laptop computer story in their local paper.

You can say the stampeders were acting like animals, and you wouldn't be half wrong, but there's something wrong with a world that sets up conditions for people to feel crazed and greedy like that. And if it seems crazy that something like this exists in America, well, I sure feel that way.

Justify my FMW

Talked to dad yesterday. He's got a dietician now, and he was talking about good-for-you foods with her. She was mild-mannered about his food choices until he brought up the Frosted Mini Wheats — a cereal he has derided as sugary junk and mocked me for eating so much of — and she went nuts! She got dad convinced that the FMW is about as good as it gets in terms of breakfast food.

So, to all the FMW haters, in your face.

From Russia with Love

These dudes are from the Pallada at the Tall Ships festival in Tacoma way way back in July. The Pallada is a teaching ship that does not carry weapons (unless you count the plumes of cigarette smoke) and isn't even military. They just love the uniform, however, in other countries and so they keep them, with their epaulets and braid and whatnot.

The sailors of the Cuauhtemoc and I could speak in Spanish and I got a couple free posters as well as an illuminating conversation about how they'd been away from Acapulco for a ghastly amount of time and continental civilization for even longer (previous two ports of call were in Alaska and Honolulu, which is unaffordable to regular American sailors, much less Mexican sailors, and they'd been at sea forever. A friend of mine who was a docent and did a little translation told me the sailors asked him where to get typical American food and where to find girls in Tacoma).

From the Russians, though, I left only footprints and took only photos of these strangely peaches-and-cream-skinned chain smokers. All we could say to each other were nonsense phrases like "Da Svidanya," "Perestroika," "Michael Jackson," and "Smoke! Smoke! Ha ha ha ha! Smoke? Nyet? (shrug)"

Stephen and Noga went to Vietnam

You should check it out.

Some Wilmoths, for a change

Rob and Hannah, to be precise. They're my blonde, curly-headed relatives, and this is after Grandma's funeral.

Rob and Carol came in from Steamboat, and it's always great to be around them. They always have such stories to tell. In fact, in June, Rob and I tooled around Etowah and Lepanto and he pointed out all the fields the high school kids used to pull into to have sex back in the day. Northeast Arkansas is as flat as a pancake, and it didn't seem to be very private to be in a field that was essentially in the middle of town, but I suppose the towns are so small not only does everyone know who is doing who anyway, but no one would be around to necessarily witness goings-on in Old Man Whoever's field.

Extreme Reporter

This is me, back at work. Ish. Lee Giles, the photog, jokes that I'm an X-treme reporter because I am not afraid to climb up and down 21 flights of see-through stairs to get to the bridge worksite, nor be on top of the bridge towers (I've been on top of both the new bridge and the one that is currently in use, which can't be called the old one because the actual old one was torn down by wind and then rebuilt). I've also been in a stunt plane, done a Polar Bear jump on New Year's, petted a polar bear (it was under sedation for a root canal at the time), been on a salmon fishing boat and done other various and sundry "extreme" things I can't recall.

Well, I guess you could say this is how I roll.

Charles documents Dad's exercise

Dad was doing really good at his 20-minutes-a-day exercise routine before I left, and it was thanks to the heart monitor on the exercycle (recumbent) that dad realized his heart was beating too fast. In this scene, you may be able to see a bit of the Greenland fishing village puzzle Charles and I worked on. That's Shelby in his little bed. Just watching dad work out wears him out.

Since dad has been doing physical therapy, he's the star patient and the rehabbers are trying to get him to enter a half marathon, which is still more than 13 miles. He seems keen, but if I recall correctly, didn't he have knee surgery at some point?

Charles was later seen helping my aunt Sandy recuperate from her own surgery, upon the heels of which came a hurricane. I'm telling you, this has NOT been the White Family Year of Great Fortune. Sandy is doing great, I hear, and, like with my dad, the surgery didn't end up being as humongous as the doctors at first thought it was going to be.

People, eat your veggies, do your exercise.