Winter

You have to know how to love winter. Much like you have to know how to love summer, but few people think about that. Precautions like sunscreen, light clothes, and afternoons at the beach or the pool seem to come naturally. But winter seems almost universally loathed.
You have to learn how to love the cold, or at least how to bear it, as one bears the 100 degree temperatures of summer. A fireplace, a heater, a heavy blanket--if you think about it, we have more protections from cold than from heat. A good coat, gloves, hat, ear-muffs. Thermal underwear. Hot cocoa. You can grow to love these things. Then, fully equipped, to love walking out in the frozen air and even find it healing.
What is not to love about a blue-sky day with the late-rising sun creating a brighter-than-usual morning thanks to the whiteness of the world and the thinness of the air? White mountains, white fields, white houses, white trees. Sparkling, crisp air. Watch your own breath rise from your mouth and marvel at your own internal locomotive, that coal-burning fire within.
You can learn to love the winter, love the cold, and embrace the early dark. To open your eyes on a frosted morning with joy and peace that no other season provides.
Winter is quiet. Winter is lucid. Winter is peace.

Toy airplanes

They float, drifting through any color sky, from pale morning blue to December afternoon gray. They are noiseless, at least through my windshield. Through the windows at the office I can sometimes hear a low, unobtrusive rumbling reaching me from what seems like the wrong direction. Something about the way they move, like bubbles, or like puffs from a dandelion, compels me to watch. I can't look away as the tiny shape crawls across the blank sky and eventually vanishes behind a mountain, or beyond the frame of my window.
It was evening a week ago that I saw one lifting from an air field some miles ahead of me. It climbed silently up over the lake whose surface threw a reflection of the sky, of the hills beyond. They are supposed to be fast, but they always seem so slow looking from the ground with a craned neck, eyes squinting, flattened hand standing up on my brows. The color of bone, or of tooth, they seem to hang impossibly long in space.

We own the Bison

I wonder if they know they are publicly-owned, those American
Bison roaming and grazing this hump of earth stranded
in a lake of salt.

"Don't grow sentimental over the seven," the director spat,
"The animals are worthless - there isn't worse meat
on earth to eat."

Enormous, shaggy, drifting nomads hoisting heads big
as car tires; dark glossy eyes peering below curls. Why
would we eat them?

Pencil Sharpener

It hung at the front of the class beside the blackboard, which was usually green or blue. A heavy metal foot anchored to the wall an oval casing, graced with a metal dial of holes, each waiting its turn to be rotated over the round black eye that stared a line paralell to the wall all the way to the teacher's desk. Within that thin casing, two twisted horrors lurked, bound together and turned by a crank. Every child feared those gears, picturing their own finger inserting that channel where it was chewed, and turned to pulp among the piles of shavings.
Between lectures, you could cross the carpet and insert your pencil, and turn that crank, interrupting the silence with the grinding of those gears. You'd pull back a precise point, gleaming beneath the flourescents, needing only a quick puff from your lips to remove the chaff. The newly crisp line on your paper would bring a satisfied smile to your face, well worth braving the ominous sharpener's stare.
Years of school, and lots of practice, bring with them the hubris of ink. Blues, blacks, reds stand out more boldly and more permanently on the page. These marks cannot be erased, and so we believe they needn't be. And if not a pen, the insubstantial media of 1's and 0's, mediated by the keyboard that occupies the primary work space. The printer translates those tappings with its crisp laser, shooting out sheets of paper hot off the custom press. At the very least, the pencils we use are now mechanical, with tiny sticks of .5 graphite, ready at the click of the eraser.
Another childhood terror diminishes, becomes obsolete. If you hunt around your office, you'll find the token, grudging presence of their electric counterparts, sitting for the most part on some table in a room down the hall from your desk, ready to growl your old fashioned PaperMate down to a fine point and reinvoke that ghost of the past.

Leftie

A plump, generously-glazed donut occupied my dominant right hand this morning when I sat down at my desk. It didn't take long to realize I'd have to transfer the donut to my left hand and lick off a fair amount of residual sugar in order to operate my mouse. It seemed a lot easier to reach across with my left and work the mouse that way until the donut was gone.
That maneuver got old quickly, so on a whim, I pulled the mouse to the other side of my keyboard, remembering even in the act that my dad had made the artificial switch to left-moused-ness years ago. So many years ago that he may have switched back by now, I'm not sure. I didn't make too big a deal of this: I am coming to grips with the increasing similarities I see between myself and my father. It comes as no surprise that the monotony of the office would eventually lead me down the same paths. I am willing to bet that somewhere around 80% of all office workers have toyed with left-moused-ness at some point in there inauspicious careers.
One of my first left-handed actions was to open up the Control Panel and invert the buttons on the mouse so my pointer finger was still performing primary functions while my middle finger would be in charge of secondary functions, or "right-clicking" with the left button. This of course sets off the buzzer, "Wait, why is it called right-clicking if at least 10% of the population may be using the mouse with their left hands? that's going to mess me up all day..."
It does mess me up all day.
It takes a couple of hours before I am back in the control panel looking for a way to flip the cursor so that it is pointing to the right instead of to the left, which is a bit disorienting to me. Since the mouse is on the left of the screen, it feels like the pointer should be coming from that side. I look through all the menus in the mouse control box and can't find such an option.
One of my coworkers passes by my desk.
"Hey Robert, you're left-handed aren't you?"
"Yes, I am."
"I thought so. Do you use your mouse with your right hand or your left?"
"I use it right-handed. I mean, when I first encountered computers, the mouse was always on the right side of the keyboard. It wasn't like a motor skill that I'd developed up to that point, so I don't think it was any different than learning to use a mouse with my left hand would have been."
"Huh, I never thought of that."
"Yeah, I was actually just barely listening to a podcast about left-handedness. You must have felt some left-hand vibes coming across the wall. I don't really think there are very many scenarios where it really matters which hand you use, you know?"
He's probably right.
My left hand my be a bit more dexterous than the left hands of my other right-handed peers, owing to my long years of piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and even experimentation with the guitar, all of which require a fair amount of fine motor control in both hands. I remember that Jimi Hendrix - or was it Carlos Santana? Or both? - learned to play the guitar backwards because he was left-handed.
Around lunch time, I realize my left forearm is a little sore. I never would have considered pushing a mouse around for hours a day to be strenuous, but I'm feeling some admittedly minor effects even in my upper arm. "Maybe this will help ease that knot in my shoulder," I think to myself. Of course it will - changing hands changes my entire posture. My left arm is not accustomed to resting on the desk the way my right arm is.
Eight hours go by and I don't notice a dramatic increase in my left-mousing skills. My speed is still probably around half as quick, and I feel like I pick the mouse up way more than I did with my right hand. I can't figure out which finger I'm supposed to use on the scrolling wheel in the middle of the mouse My right hand is not a team player on the keyboard, making all those little contributory keystrokes that are all but unconscious with my left hand (hey, ctrl+z, ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v -- they are all in the lower left corner of the keyboard, much easier to pull off with the left hand). If the mouse is the steering wheel of this operation, than the keyboard makes up the gear shift, the pedals, turn signals, wiper blades, headlights, and all those other functions of driving that don't get as much credit as they're due.
Miniscule observations like these don't mean much on their own, but taken together, they are just another example of the steamrolling of a group of people because of the ignorance or inconsideration of the majority. With handedness, the differences amount to trivial inconveniences and irritations. With other factors that contribute to diversity and differentiate one person from another - sightedness, religion, culture, upbringing - those differences still exist, and try as I might, I will never fully appreciate what another individual experiences.

Jumped Fence

Just before 1 AM, I heard the tell-tale rattle of a chain-link fence outside my bedroom window. In two steps I'm at the window with my fingers sliding apart two slats of the deep red blinds to look down into my back yard.
There, just passing beneath one of our large pine trees, threading his way through a labyrinth of toys left scattered across the grass by my kids earlier as they splashed in the blow-up pool, I see a tall figure illuminated in a white-blue light coming from the nearly full moon.
There's something slightly less than sinister about that loping unfamiliar figure, not hurrying, just strolling through the lawn I've only mowed a dozen times, towards the patio where earlier that evening we ate dinner with my in-laws. He's not heading for the house, just skirting along the back fence across the yard like he was cutting through a public park.
But that's not a public park and he doesn't belong there. I'm tired, nearly asleep, but I shout in a surprisingly robust voice through the screen in my bedroom window, "Stay out of my yard!"
Without turning or even starting, the figure bends into a jog continuing across the yard, unexpectedly tossing a "Sorry" over his lowered shoulder. It sounds obligatory and not at all contrite, as if he's hopped the fence a dozen times and attributes any sense of wrong-doing to outmoded views of property ownership that need revision.
The deck coming off the kitchen obscures my view of the part of the yard that he's in now, so I leave the bedroom. Instead of turning into the kitchen for a better view of the back, I veer to the living room window, wide open to let in the cooler night air. My house is a corner lot, so I expect this trespasser hopped my fence to cut the corner, though I can't see how it would save him any time. If that had been his route he should have reach the street by now. Peering as best I can down the road running parallel with my window I don't see a soul on the sidewalk.
After a short wait, I turn to the kitchen and scan the now-empty shadows. No movement, only the steady crickets texturing the darkness with their trilling.
Back in bed, Traci and I converse briefly about the intruder. She soon rolls over and sleeps. I lie awake. The crickets' chirping is tantamount to silence as I wait for other sounds. Though I'm nearly certain my yard is empty now, the silence fails to comfort me. I wait.

The first time I saw people cutting through my front yard, I was annoyed. Neighborhood kids did it on their way to school in the morning. A couple of loud-mouthed women had run across it one night months ago, tripping in a narrow rut running from the sidewalk to the front porch and dropping a nearly-full package of cigarettes which I threw in the trash the next morning with great relish.
The easiest solution to the problem would be to extend the fence line that enclosed my back yard along the west edge of my front lawn. Even the low four-foot chain link one would discourage most people. But apparently not everyone. To some, fences exist only to be jumped: there are no boundaries to some people's sense of self-entitlement, or their contempt for others.
I could put up a taller fence, perhaps a nicer-looking vinyl one. But I don't like the idea. A fence is not a friendly thing. In trying to wall too many things out, I fear I would only wall out more good than bad, while leaving myself feeling walled in. Transforming my yard into a prison, barring me from conversations with my elderly pigeon-keeping neighbors or friendly passers-by, would take a much greater toll on me than the guy who may just as soon scale an 8 foot fence.

Around 2:30 I call the police to report the neighbors to the east who are laughing loudly on their back porch and playing music, keeping me awake at least as much as my unease. Maybe that's why I didn't see him on the street: my yard was a more direct route to the backyard of my neighbors. Perhaps he lives right up the street from me. Or perhaps he's the owner of the small purple coupe parked on the corner by the fence that he jumped.
Either way, I don't know who he is, but he has an easy way to identify me. I'm the one coming out the front door of the large brown house on the corner with the low fences, trying to reconstruct an imaginary line that can't be crossed.

test

My computer was crippled by heat. Funny, I would have thought it immune to something so medieval.