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Both At Once

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2011)

“Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Morning: A beautiful day in Mendocino, the rhododendrons madly blooming, the headlands a riot of wild roses and wild irises and wild mustard, while across the ocean a terrible thing is happening: four nuclear reactors in Japan are out of control, melting down, and turning vast areas of that nation into dead zones for thousands of years to come.

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.” Allen Ginsberg

Noon: A friend writes to say his business is doing well, his daughter about to get married, and he hasn’t felt so well in ages. In the same mail is a note from another friend telling me about his neighbor, a fellow from Japan, who now has five relatives living with him in his tiny apartment in Berkeley, the hope being they can somehow figure out a way to stay here once their tourist visas expire, because as far as they’re concerned there is no going back to Japan unless they want to die much sooner than later.

“There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.” Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Afternoon: I weed my burgeoning beets. Oh how they loved all the recent rain; and oh how they love the fulgent sunshine. Making tea, I turn on the radio and listen to Michio Kaku, the renowned physicist speaking to Amy Goodman. He believes the ongoing meltdowns of the nuclear power plants in Japan, along with the massive releases of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, must be dealt with promptly and thoroughly or there will soon be catastrophic consequences far beyond the already catastrophic consequences. When Amy asks him what the Japanese government should do, Michio says they should call out the army and do everything necessary to entomb the power plants as quickly as possible.

“The only thing you can believe in a newspaper is the date.” J.B.S. Haldane

Night: The Giants win a great game in the bottom of the tenth inning—a real thriller, the winning hit causing me to hoot for joy. On my way to bed, I check the interweb for news of the nuclear meltdowns, though I know such news might mess up my sleep, and I find a recent statement from Barack Obama saying nuclear power is definitely the way to go because nuclear is clean energy and won’t contribute to global warming.

“The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense—he is always satisfied with himself.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Morning: I make a pot of coffee and turn on our local public radio station and listen incredulously to a show purporting to be about energy. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. The hosts, two self-proclaimed experts on energy, are both extolling the virtues and safety of nuclear power. Having just read the latest nightmare news from Japan, I am about to call the show, when they take a call from a guy who says, “Hey, all power is nuclear, right? Solar power is nuclear, right? Comes from the sun, which is nuclear. Right? So…”

And the hosts agree. “That’s right, all power is nuclear. So…”

They take another call. A woman. I’m hoping she’ll say what I want to say, which is, “Are you out of your minds? There are four nuclear power plants in Japan in full meltdown, radiating the entire earth, sewing the seeds of millions of cases of cancer, and you dare call nuclear power safe?” But she says something about life being a beautiful dance “…and, like, so…enjoy the dance.”

I turn off the radio and do the dishes. I vacuum the house. I chop kindling. I mulch the potatoes. I grab my bucksaw and go down into the woods and find a fallen fir. I cut the tree into draggable lengths and lug them up the steep hill to the woodshed where I saw the logs into firewood. I chop some more kindling. I drive to town and park at Big River Beach and walk into town along the beach and up the stairs to the Presbyterian. I am so angry at those people for saying nuclear power is safe, I’m about to explode, and I figure if I keep working and walking and using the energy of my anger to get things done, I won’t explode.

At the post office, Sheila and I talk about the Giants. We’re both sorry De Rosa hurt his wrist, but, hey, the guy was a dead weight on the team, bad mojo, and without him we’re winning again. We’re both looking forward to Pablo coming back. I buy some Gregory Peck stamps. I didn’t know Greg was dead. Did you know a person has to be dead before he or she can be on a postage stamp? The one exception to this I know of was the stamp (3 cents?) commemorating the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II. Apparently, one or two of the men in that famous (staged) photograph were still alive when the stamp was issued.

Part of the official reason for America dropping not one but two atom bombs on hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese civilians at the end of World War II was so our armed forces wouldn’t have to invade Japan “Iwo Jima-style” and suffer thousands of “unnecessary casualties.” This was not the real reason the bombs were dropped. I don’t know what the real reasons were, though I have my suspicions. What I do know is that anyone who says nuclear power is safe and clean should immediately go to Japan and help entomb the nuclear power plants that are in full meltdown and radiating the planet.

“The two divinest things this world has got,

A lovely woman in a rural spot.” Leigh Hunt

Marcia just came home from a three-week vacation in England, her first vacation in a very long time. She is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever known. We laugh sometimes about being artists and how people, lots of people, think artists have it easy and don’t work as hard as, say, dentists or hedge fund criminals. But we work seven days a week from morning until night. Yes, we take breaks and eat meals and go on walks and run errands, but we put in ten to sixteen hours of labor every day for which we may or may not get paid a cent. That’s our life. We work because to not work is to not answer the call of whatever is calling us, however esoteric that whatever may be.

One of the hardest things for me and probably for you, too, is not letting all the horrible terrible frightening sickening news depress us so much that we can’t work. Thus I intentionally limit my intake of news when I feel overwhelmed with fear and anger. A few days of ignorance may not create bliss, but it usually clears the lobes and allows me to focus on the few things I have some control over.

“There are only two emotions in Wall Street: fear and greed.” William Le Fevre

Buddha understood that fear was the great obstacle to peace, both personal and societal. When we’re afraid, we don’t fully experience the present moment, and therefore we are not fully alive or fully aware of what’s really going on. When we’re afraid, anger arises and seeks release. War might be said to be a massive release of anger masking fear.

“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.” William Sloan Coffin

I’m reading a letter from a friend full of news about his five-year-old daughter. I grin as I visualize his brilliant, beautiful child racing around, singing, talking, learning, when suddenly these big drops of water splat down on the page. I look up into the clear blue sky. How can it be raining? Oh. I’m weeping for joy at hearing about the miracles of his daughter’s happy childhood, and weeping for sorrow about the world we are leaving her—weeping about both at once in the same breath.

Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com

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Ball Bear Cat Piano

Photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2011)

“A hot dog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz.” Humphrey Bogart

Jon Miller, my favorite bard of baseball, recently used the words egregious, preposterous, cerulean, prodigious, and greensward whilst painting verbal pictures of our San Francisco Giants sweeping the Rockies and the Snakes, and making history as they did so. Jon revealed today during a lopsided loss to the Cubs, that no team in the long history of baseball had ever won six home games in a row in which they scored less than four runs in any of those six games. I agree that isn’t nearly as important as the ongoing meltdowns of the Fukushima nuclear power plants, but it does prove we have some mighty impressive pitching.

Sometimes Jon will quote the Bard (Shakespeare) himself. Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
 Hover through the fog…” might have been written expressly for baseball in San Francisco in July, except those prescient lines were written in England five hundred years ago. Yes, a baseball game announced by a gifted raconteur is an entirely different game than the same game seen on television. How can this be? Because television leaves nothing to the imagination, whereas visualizing a game while listening to an artfully improvised run of words is a prodigious imaginative feat; and every listener’s imagining of the game is unique.

Another wonderful thing about listening to intelligent, witty, insightful people (with great swaths of time to fill when nothing much is actually going on) is that they often say amazing and thought provoking things. Case in point: did you know that though the average major league baseball game takes roughly three hours to play, the action of the game—everything that actually happens other than the pitcher pitching and batters swinging or not swinging—takes only about six minutes of those three hours?

Here’s something else amazing that Jon recently imparted to us in his mellifluous voice. (Yes, I’ve heard Jon use the word mellifluous, too.) “From the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, it only takes the ball a quarter of a second to reach home plate. A quarter of a second. That’s how much time a batter has to decide whether to swing at the pitch or not.” Heck, I can’t snap my fingers in a quarter of a second, let alone swing a big old bat accurately enough to strike a nearly invisible little orb hurtling toward me at ninety-five miles an hour. Hence the famous quotation from Ted Williams, the last player to hit over .400 in a season (1941): “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.”

So a few days ago I was listening to the Giants battle the Arizona Diamondbacks (the Snakes) when my phone rang and it was my neighbor Cindy calling to say there was a bear in their front yard finishing up some leftovers in the garbage can they hadn’t gotten back inside the bear-proof shed quite soon enough. This news interested me more than the game (that particular game at that particular moment) because I’ve lived in this house on this land adjoining a remote part of Big River State Park for six years and had yet to encounter one of our local bears. I had frequently seen the aftermaths of their visits—bear scat, flattened deer fences, broken boughs in apple trees where bruins had climbed in pursuit of apples—but I had yet to actually see a bear.

“How big is he, or she?” I asked, thinking I might tip toe through the huckleberries to get a peek at the bear.

“He’s sitting down,” said Cindy, “and his head and shoulders are visible over the front end of the overturned garbage can. One of those very big cans. What’s that? About three feet?”

Three feet to the shoulders while sitting down? Hmm. I decided not to go have a look, recalling a frightening documentary about bears in which it was said they can outrun humans, no problem. Or what if this was a sow with cubs lurking in the huckleberries? So I turned the game back on just as Cody Ross smacked a double—nice to have Cody getting his stroke back—and the phone rang again, Cindy telling me the bear was now heading my way on the footpath through the rhododendrons.

I went to the window at the west end of our living room and looked down the gravel driveway toward our woodpile, but my pickup truck was blocking the view of where the aforementioned footpath meets our driveway. I was certainly hoping to see a bear, but I wasn’t expecting to see such a big bear. This guy (I have good reason to believe the bear was male) was huge. And when he came around the nose of the pickup truck and went up onto his hind legs and looked in the passenger window of the truck, I gasped, because this bear was much taller than my truck. Indeed, this bear seemed to be roughly the same size as the truck. Of course he wasn’t really as big as the truck, but let us say that had he been human, he would have needed a bigger truck.

Seeing or smelling nothing worth eating in the diminutive vehicle, the bear dropped back down on all fours and continued into our front yard—a small meadow ringed by rhododendrons in glorious bloom and huckleberry bushes laden with blossoms presaging another abundant late summer harvest. I expected see the bear traverse the meadow and disappear into…

The bear came directly to the bottom of our front stairs. I know this because I was standing at the front door, the sliding glass variety, looking out at the bear looking up at me from six stairs down. That’s how many stairs there are: six. Then the bear rose up onto his hind legs again, perhaps to show me how big he was, or to reveal his gender, or to get a better look at me. In any case, he stayed upright for a long moment and then went back down on all fours and started up the stairs.

Two things struck me in that moment. Well, more than two things struck me, but two things struck me harder than the other things that were striking me. 1. For some reason I was not particularly frightened, though I thought I should be. 2. The bear looked goofy. He did not look anything like the bears I saw eons ago in Yosemite, nor did he look like the bears I’ve seen in National Geographics, the magazine or the documentary films. This bear looked goofy. He had lopsided floppy ears, and one rheumy eye noticeably larger than the other rheumy eye, and flies buzzing around his goofy face, which made me think he might be a very old bear with failing eyesight, which would explain why he was wandering around during the day instead of being appropriately nocturnal.

In any case, when he placed his enormous paw on the second step from the bottom, I banged on the glass, made what I hoped was a frightening face, and I growled. Roared, actually. To which that huge goofy bear responded by turning tail, so to speak, and hurrying away.

“Good pitching will beat good hitting any time, and vice versa.” Bob Veale

Relieved to have so easily vanquished the bear, I turned the radio back on just as Andres Torres smacked a double down the right field line—so nice to have Torres back in the leadoff spot—and I noticed our cats Hootie (slender and black) and Django (fat and gray) were nonchalantly sprawled on the sofa as if nothing untoward had just happened. Important factoid: Hootie and Django are cats who run and hide when I, the person who feeds them and pets them and calls them silly names, makes too sudden a movement or raises my voice much past a whisper. Hootie and Django will catch a whiff of something (a passing mountain lion?) and thereafter refuse to leave the house for days on end. These are cats who scurry under the bathtub when people they’ve met seventy times come to visit. Yet these scaredy cats seemed utterly clueless that a gigantic bear had just been moments away from breaking down the front door, ransacking the house, and eating them! Why were the cats so unmoved by the bear?

Because maybe the bear wasn’t a bear. Maybe the bear was a spirit being disguised as a bear. Wouldn’t that explain the goofy face and floppy ears? Maybe the bear was the embodiment of some old terror of mine, some old unfinished business that was now finished because I banged on the glass and made a terrible face and growled. I had become the bear. I had become my fear and thereby released the fear to be carried away into another dimension by the spirit bear being. Or maybe the cats knew this bear, knew he was goofy and harmless, and so were not afraid.

“A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.” Earl Wilson

So…after the Giants won a nail biter on Cody Ross’s walk off single in the bottom of the ninth, I sat down at the piano and played for a while. And as I played, one of my favorite things happened. Hootie hopped up beside me on the piano bench and listened to me play. Or maybe he wasn’t listening, maybe he was just hanging out and enjoying the vibe of the person who feeds him enjoying playing the piano.

I don’t play written down music. I improvise on themes and patterns and inventions I’ve found over forty years of playing every day for an hour or two or three. And on that day the bear came to visit, I played with the bear in mind, the music changing from somber to funny to nostalgic to grandiloquent to sweet—our little black cat sitting beside me the whole time.

Todd’s new CD of piano improvisations Ceremonies is available from underthetablebooks.com and downloadable from iTunes, Amazon, and CD Baby.

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Duck!

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2011)

“One cannot write of ducks without mentioning water.”  Ernest Thompson Seton

Just when we thought the apex of human stupidity was a toss up between building nuclear power plants and waging wars for gasoline, here comes…

Marcia and I strolling inland along the shores of Big River, a cool breeze wafting in from the Pacific, the sun playing peek-a-boo with wispy white clouds, when suddenly Marcia shouts, “Duck!”

And I reply (hoping for a glimpse of a mallard or possibly a merganser or improbably a McGregor’s Cuckooshrike), “Where?”

“Not a duck,” cries Marcia. “Duck! As in Get Down!”

So I do a belly flop in the sandy duff just as a loud report from a big gun presages a swarm of buckshot flying overhead and ripping a humongous chunk of bark out of an innocent redwood tree.

Okay, so that didn’t actually happen. But if the dingbats (and I chose that word carefully) of The California Outdoor Heritage Alliance have their way, flotillas of duck hunters may soon be motoring around the Big River estuary, blasting away at…

Okay, so that is highly improbable, too. But for the last few weeks rumors have been flying around Mendocino about duck hunters descending on Big River to massacre the few and far between ducks and geese that seasonally splash down in the picturesque waterway just south of the economically distressed hamlet of Mendocino. These rumors came out of meetings of various organizations responsible for protecting or sort of protecting those few pseudo-wilderness coastal areas not yet or not anymore under the control of rapacious private interests who wouldn’t know a fir from a spruce and could care less about endangered salamanders let alone a bunch of ducks.

I will not bore you with a list of acronyms because you’ll stop reading if I do, but suffice it to say that The California Outdoor Heritage Alliance, i.e. a well-financed hunting lobby dedicated to keeping as much California ground open to hunters as quasi-legally feasible, has been exerting pressure on the people composing the boards of various acronymic organizations (MLPA, NCRSG, F&G, to name a few) to not make permanent the No Hunting status we all thought the estuaries of Big River, Navarro River, and Ten Mile River enjoyed and would continue to enjoy in perpetuity.

I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t Big River a state park? Yep. Isn’t it illegal to bring firearms into a state park? Yep. So what’s the problem? Well, the gun-toting dingbats claim that Big River estuary (roughly the first mile of the river inland from its mouth) though certainly born of the river and most certainly surrounded entirely by state park land, is itself something separate from the park. Huh? Yeah. That’s what I said, too. Huh? So your next thought, as it was mine, is how then are these duck killers going to get themselves with their guns onto the estuary if…

Well, they could kayak in from the ocean, or maybe ride the wild surf in those cool inflatable Zodiac rafts with big outboard motors, and then rumble up the river scaring the crap out of nursing mothers and little kids building sandcastles on the beach. And there is that little road off the Comptche-Ukiah Road that takes you down through Stanford Inn land to the bike and canoe shop. The duck assassins could drop their rafts down into the estuary from that dead end and…

There they’d be, heavily armed dingbats in rafts looking to shoot some ducks. True, they would be hunting under severe legal limitations because if they didn’t hit the duck they were aiming at, and their bullets or buckshot or depleted uranium projectiles happened to land onshore (state park land), they would then be guilty of a felony. And, of course, if they endangered someone’s life or actually wounded or killed someone…

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? The crazy gunslingers are not going to be allowed to hunt ducks on Big River or Navarro River or…so what’s this really all about? These trigger happy dingbats may be dingbats, but they must have some reason or reasons (however perverse) for calling into question the sanctity of these estuaries, and for even suggesting that heavily armed men should be allowed to wield their weaponry within range of people walking their dogs and families biking up the Haul Road and newlyweds necking on the bluffs.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes

What, I ask, is the hidden agenda of these mallard murderers? I have two theories based on past experiences. One of my very first professional writing gigs (in the early 1970’s) was to cover the meetings of the California Coastal Commission whenever the commission met in Santa Cruz, and to write a detailed report of what went on at those meetings. My client was a lawyer who was frequently consulted by unscrupulous developers who wanted to know how best to manipulate the commission so they could effectively bend the rules, so to speak, and build mansions and resorts where such things were not, by law, supposed to be built. These meetings were remarkable for the displays of kingly power wielded by people, mostly men, who had gained their positions on the commission through political appointment, for the blatant and recurrent misuse of this power for personal gain, and for how easy it was for organizations with sufficient money and political influence to get whatever they wanted, no matter how illegal and destructive their plans.

So my first theory, based on what I learned at those coastal commission meetings, is that hunting lobbyists are employing the primary tactic of all special interest groups and corporations, which is to ask for the moon and settle for something less. Thus I theorize that the Outdoor Heritage Alliance (as opposed to the Indoor Heritage Alliance) is pushing for access to all our precious and heretofore off-limits estuaries with the expectation of being turned away at Big River and Navarro, but hoping to gain access to more remote estuaries along the coast; and not just estuaries, but inland areas currently closed to hunting.

My second theory is that this sort of bureaucratic maneuvering is both intentionally clogging and obfuscating—clogging the regulatory processes with bogus silliness that eats up valuable time and money the state and counties can ill afford, and obfuscating larger more insidious aims. I come to this theory through my experience in those same 1970’s in Santa Cruz when I helped launch the organization that eventually saved Lighthouse Point, twenty acres of coastal land just north of the famous Santa Cruz Boardwalk, a parcel that was slated to become a resort hotel for the super wealthy, and is now all these decades later vacant land where Monarch butterflies share the fields with surfers and stoners and gophers and grass.

What became clear to me early on in the fight to save Lighthouse Point was that the developers of the Santa Cruz area, which at the time was still a sleepy and largely undeveloped town, were happy to engage our raggedy band of fledgling environmentalists in a long and costly battle to save a highly visible but not very important chunk of ground, so they could then blithely, and with little or no resistance, grossly over-develop every square inch of coastal property for miles and miles north and south of Lighthouse Point. We were too few and too inexperienced to know how to effectively fight them; and Santa Cruz swiftly became what it is today, a somewhat rustic Santa Monica north, a college town and bedroom community of ugly houses for the speedsters of Silicon Valley.

So…will the hunting lobbyists, a few years hence, proclaim that they will abjure from shooting up our paltry estuaries while they take control of everything north of Cleone? I don’t know. We invite anyone with any sort of understanding of this matter, or those with cogent intuitive hunches, to gift us with your insights. Special thanks to William Lemos and Wendy Roberts for their assistance, and to Bruce Anderson who thought, despite the apparent absurdity of the idea of duck hunters descending on Big River, that it would be a good idea to look into the matter.

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Post Office Football

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2011)

“Carrier of news and knowledge, Instrument of trade and industry, Promoter of mutual acquaintance, Of peace and good-will Among men and nations.” inscription on southeast corner of post office in Washington, D.C. by Charles William Eliot

Though it may at first seem a stretch to compare the struggle to save the historic Ukiah Post Office with the current labor dispute between National Football League owners and the NFL players’ union, similarities abound. The root cause of the national postal crisis was the great commercial success of the Postal Service; and the root cause of the football crisis was the fantastic commercial success of football. In both cases, ownership i.e. the corporate elite, decided that their employees were making far too much money compared to, say, Mexican peasants, and they, ownership, wanted as much of their employee’s money as they could steal.

Because the Postal Service is a government entity, the overlords used their congressional puppets to pass a law forcing the Postal Service to begin each fiscal year by owing their own pension fund more than five billion dollars, thereby guaranteeing financial dissolution and providing an excuse for the overlords to wipe out thousands of community post offices and force millions of postal customers into the waiting arms of private carriers such as UPS and FED X.

The National Football League is a consortium of teams owned by billionaires, not mere millionaires. (The one exception is the ownership of the Green Bay Packers, otherwise known as the Communist Peoples of Green Bay Wisconsin.) Most of these billionaires, by the way, got their huge stadiums built with public money and massive local and state tax breaks, yet these supremely wealthy guys hate that their players, many of whom are African American, have a union and earn much more per year than, say, your average Haitian. Since the owners cannot pass a law forcing the players to work for less than the players are currently earning, the owners are threatening to cancel next season and forego billions of dollars profit in hopes of destroying the players’ union and getting a much larger chunk of the profit pie than they, the owners, currently get.

“Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.” Merle Kessler

Now lest you think it absurd to compare athletes earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (and in some cases millions of dollars per year) to postal employees making lower middle-class incomes, consider that the average length of an NFL player’s football career is three years. That is correct: three years. And when the average NFL player ends his brief professional football career and enters the real world for the first time, he is rarely possessed of more than moderate wealth, is still in his twenties, and has little or no training for anything but the game he can no longer play.

My question is: why don’t people with billions of dollars want other people to have anything? I don’t think that’s understating the phenomenon. Why don’t billionaires (remember: a billion is a thousand million) want us to have excellent affordable health care? Why don’t they want us to have totally groovy centrally located post offices, and why don’t they want football players who help them earn billions of dollars to have a fair share of the proceeds and decent retirement benefits and post-career educational opportunities?

I suppose if the postal employees or the football players wanted the billionaires to give up some of the billons of dollars those billionaires already have, the answer might be, well, nobody likes to have their stuff taken away from them no matter how much stuff they have, and these owners are not the most highly evolved individuals, so…

But here’s the thing. Nobody is asking for any part of what these obscenely rich people already have. Postal employees and football players and folks tying to save their post offices simply want a reasonable part of the future; and that is what these billionaires are so adamantly opposed to. They, the billionaires, apparently do not want anyone else to have anything. Ever.

“Messenger of sympathy and love, Servant of parted friends, Consoler of the lonely, Bond of the scattered family, Enlarger of the common life.” inscription on southwest corner of post office in Washington, D.C. by Charles William Eliot

Where else does such pathologically selfish behavior as exemplified by the billionaire oligarchs occur? I’ll tell you where; in two-year-olds, and in individuals stuck at the two-year-old stage of emotional development. I trust you have heard of the Terrible Twos. This expression refers to the ego development phase in which children between the ages of eighteen months and three years are in the throes of formulating their identities separate from Mama, and concurrently testing those boundaries established by their parents and society to prepare them for lives of healthy interactions with others. The two words most commonly associated with the Terrible Twos are Me and Mine.

Having toiled as a teacher’s aide in preschools (first in my twenties and again in my fifties), and as a veteran babysitter, I have been privy to myriad variations on the following scene. Two-year-old Child #1 is playing with a toy and surrounded by several other toys. Child #2 picks up one of the unused toys and Child #1 howls, “No! Mine!” and tries to snatch the toy from Child #2. In response to Child #1’s hysterical aggression, Child #2 relinquishes the toy and picks up another toy, which causes Child #1 to snatch that toy away, too, and yowl, “No! Mine!” Etc.

At this point in the drama, it was my role to gently intervene and explain to Child #1 that the toys at our school belonged to all the children, and because he or she could only play with one or two toys at a time, sharing the surplus toys was the good and fair way to proceed. If Child #1 would still not willingly share toys with Child #2, Child # 1 needed a Time Out and further explanations and examples of why sharing was the preferred mode of behavior.

For most children, this all-for-me and none-for-you phase passes as a matter of course. But for some people this phase never ends; and among those for whom the Me-Mine-Never-Yours phase has never ended are the people who rule America and own the football teams and want to close our post offices. Thus it behooves us to understand in dealing with these sad people that they are not inherently evil, but mentally ill.

“Baseball is what we were.  Football is what we have become.” Mary McGrory

Speaking of post offices, I am convinced that a town’s post office is a prime indicator of the emotional and spiritual well being of a community. When my wife and I took a driving trip through northern California, Oregon, and Washington two years ago, we stopped at dozens of post offices to mail postcards and letters, and to check out the local vibes; and in every place where several small town post offices had been consolidated into a single factory-like annex warehouse postal depot, the people were as phantoms, the restaurants were lousy, and you couldn’t find a decent bookstore to save your life.

Epilogue: This just in from my pal Max Greenstreet, musician, movie maker, and handyman in Belford, New Jersey, alerting me to be on the lookout for a package he just mailed from his beloved post office.

Doreen (at the post office) says hi. “Mendocino…” she said, fondly.

“Have you ever been there?” I asked.

“No,” she said grinning, “but I’ve always wanted to. Never got as far west as the Pacific Ocean.”

“The coast is fabulous. It’s a beautiful drive from San Francisco.”

“Someday,” she said, a dreamy look in her eyes.

Then our talk turned to tiling and the infinite world of bathroom remodeling.

Todd’s award-winning collection of short stories Buddha In A Teacup is now available as a Kindle and Nook Book, and in glorious three-dimensions from Mulligan Books in Ukiah, Laughing Dog Books in Boonville, or via the Postal Service (and signed by the author) from Underthetablebooks.com

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Extortion, Anyone?

(This tidbit appeared originally in the Anderson Valley Advertiser May 2011)

So I opened this month’s PG&E bill and out fell a little piece of paper with the news that if I don’t want to have a radio active Smart Meter (radio active is PG&E’s own Freudian slip of a term), PG&E will turn off my Smart Meter, the one I don’t want, and I will be spared any possible deleterious effects of a radio active Smart Meter. However, for the initial deactivation of the Smart Meter, I will have to pay PG&E two hundred and seventy dollars, and fourteen dollars a month thereafter. That’s one hundred and sixty-eight dollars a year on top of the initial two hundred and seventy, for a grand total of four hundred and thirty-eight dollars for that first year of non-radio active living.

Oh, yes, and if I choose to pay that ransom for deactivation, I agree to be charged an exit fee should I ever vacate the premises where that Smart Meter was deactivated. The little piece of paper that came with my bill didn’t say how much the exit fee would be. I suppose they are still calculating how much they need to cover corporate junkets and golden parachutes and such. Luckily, they tell us, the Smart Meter deactivation program will be entirely voluntary, and if I allow them to keep my Smart Meter radio active, PG&E won’t charge me anything except the increased charges for the installation of the Smart Meters no one wants. Isn’t that great? Just thought you’d like to know that PG&E is always on the lookout for new ways to…what would you call it?