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Potty Boy (Dennis Aubrey)
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Category Archives: Humor
Muskrat Heaven
A story in preparation for Earth Day, April 22, 2012
I stand looking through the picture window at the pond behind the house. The small nature raft in the middle of the small pond is peopled with Canadian geese preening in the mid-morning sun. To their left, three or four ducks paddle across the pond – but something is different.
They’re moving much faster than usual. They don’t seem frightened; they’re just moving faster.
Then I see why. A muskrat is chasing them – ten yards or so behind. I’ve seen this before – mallards and muskrats playing a game of catch us if you can. Speed up, slow down, speed up. Nobody ever catches anybody and nobody ever gets caught. They just chase and get chased. It’s play.
As the mallards paddle past the raft with the muskrat in hot pursuit, the muskrat makes a sudden 90 degree turn, races at full speed and leaps up for the raft, the geese flapping their wings, scattering in flight just as the muskrat lands and springs into the air. A flying-muskrat in hot pursuit, an air-Jordan muskrat suspended in mid-air, a flying goose wanna-be, leaping and laughing for joy. Muskrat heaven! Sheer unadulterated play.
I envy the muscrat, the ducks and the geese today. I know I’m making the story up, but the story I tell speaks aloud a yearning for more playfulness. An enjoyment of each other with natural games that keep away the boredom and challenge our pretensions.
Nature raft with Mallards
I watch the pond a lot these days to learn about myself and us. Oh, I know! There’s also terror and danger in that pond – the snapping turtle lurks beneath the surface, the fox roams the edges, and my neighbor sometimes stands on his deck with his shotgun aimed at the little muskrat who dares to burrow his home under his manicured lawn. But today all of that is beside the point – upstaged by ducks and geese and a muskrat in self-forgetful play. I stand looking through the window and give thanks for quacking mallards, honking geese and a funny little creature whose muskrat heaven restores my natural sense of play and joy.
The Convoy and the Man on the Bridge
Cup of coffee in hand, I read this story on the front page of the morning newspaper (click on): Truckers lined up rigs to save suicidal man.
Seeing a man clinging to an overpass high above Interstate 94, Carl Hoffman, a quick-thinking state trooper, “found an ingenious way to save him. He summoned a convoy of 18-wheelers…positioning them one by one to break a potential plunge to the pavement about 25 feet below.”
Carl Hoffman deserves a medal. So do the truck drivers. But the truckers got back on the road before anyone took their names. “The drama over, ‘we told the truckers to take off,’ trooper Hoffman said, leaving the identities of the Good Samaritans a mystery to authorities.” One of the truckers told the trooper that he had done this once before in Florida.
Trucker are a different breed of cat.
Take Wes, for example. Wes logged over a million miles as an over-the-road long-distance hauler. He and his wife, Alice, are members of Shepherd of the Hill Presbterian Church, the wonderful small church I like to call a collection of characters with character.
Wes and Alice are retired in their 80s. Wes was recently diagnosed with cancer that leaves him in great pain and some confusion.
I walk into his hospital room. His eyes are closed. I speak his name. He opens his eyes. His face breaks into a smile. His eyes grow wide. He reaches out his hand. “Oh, my! Look at you. You came all this way just to see me? Oh, my! Great to see you. You didn’t have to that. You didn’t have to come all that way…just to see me.”
“No problem,” said, “it only took me four hours.” We both laugh. It takes 25 minutes, and he knows it, although the cancer has taken its toll on his memory and cognitive skills. ‘Yeah, but you didn’t have to come.” He squeezes my hand and holds on.
Reading the paper this morning, I imagine Wes as one of those truckers lined up in the truck convoy under the bridge.
Like each of the those truckers, Wes has his own story. And he has lots of stories to tell.
Wes and Alice are the only people I know who have had a coyote for a pet. While Wes was was on the road with his rig, Alice was taking care of the farm with the coyote at her side for companionship and protection.
During one of those weeks, one of the calves was in trouble back on the farm. Alice called the veterinarian. When the vet arrived and reached to open the gate to the pasture, Alice stopped him. “Don’t go in there. That bull’s mean. Stay right here. Watch this.” Alice opened the gate enough for the coyote to enter the pasture. The coyote ran directly to the bull, stared him down, grabbed hold of the chain from the bull’s nose, yanked the chain tight, and led the submissive bull into the barn. No bull!
So…who saved the calf’s life? Alice? The veterinarian? Or the coyote that got the bull into the barn? Who rescued the despondent man on the I-94 overpass? The State Trooper? The firemen who cut through the fence and pulled the man to safety? The six truckers in the 18-wheeler convoy?
One of the long-distance haulers is coming down the home stretch asking why his pastor would “come all that way just to see me.” He and his fellow Good Samaritans know the answer better than the pastor.
Ya gotta love Bill Maher
Gordon C. Stewart www.gordoncstewart.com March 23, 2012
Ya gotta love Bill Maher. Well, actually, you don’t have to, but I do.
I rarely miss “Real Time with Bill Maher” (HBO). Why? Because he’s real. So are his guests. Is Bill’s language outlandish? Is his tongue stuck in the 7th grade locker room? Yes. Despite the frequency of the ‘f’ word, the saintliest, as well as the unstaintliest, mouths from left , right and center consider it an honor to sit on the panel or be a featured guest. on Real Time. Go figure how Madeleine Albright, Amy Holmes, Cornel West, Herman Cain, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Rep. Keith Ellison, P.J. O’Roarke, Michael Moore, Andrew Sullivan, and David Frum appear on Maher’s show. They accept the invitation because it’s one place where manure is called what it is and where the real gutter talk is exposed for what it is. He’s not interested in being nice. He’s interested in truth. And he’s not afraid to engage the opposition in matters political, economic, or religious.
“If it weren’t for throwing conniption fits, we wouldn’t get any exercise,” he wrote (“Offense Intended – and that’s OK,” Star Tribune, 03.23.12). “I have a better idea. Let’s have an amnesty – from the left and from the right – on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, placated hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone said and pretend you can’t barely continue functioning until they apologize.”
Maher wasn’t born or raised in Minnesota where we’re proud of Minnesota Nice, most of the time .But you don’t have to have been raised elsewhere to know that Minnesota Nice often leaves us itching for some unpolished reality. How else do we explain the election of a tough-talking, often crude professional wrestler radio talk show host as our governor? Jesse Venturawas elected because he said what he thought and meant what he said in a world where candidates for political office rarely say what they mean or mean what they say. Underneath Minnesota Nice is a volcano of Minnesota mean, as well as nice.
Jesse is one weird dude. And that’s partly what attracted the people who were tired of taking Minnesota Nice too far. We want civility, but sometimes we get a little tired of not really talking about what we’re really talking about.
None of us really wants to live in Pleasantville. Remember “Pleasantville” – the film about two 1990s teenage siblings, Jennifer and David, who get sucked into their television set where they become characters in the make-believe town of Pleasantville, David’s favorite TV show? Nothing much ever happens in Pleasantville. There is no conflict, no real feelings; just polite, mannerly sameness that is insulated from and apathetic toward anything that might smack of unpleasantness. Pleasantville is a nice place – happy, smiling, repressed and suppressed, orderly…without color.
As Jennifer and David play along in the perfect and pure little town of Pleasantville, their presence soon cracks open the boredom of gray uniformity. Color begins to break through the grayness as the citizens of Pleasantville discover sex, art, books, music and the concept of non-conformity, leading the Mayor to campaign to turn Pleasantville back to what it once was – a nice place where nothing much ever happens, and no one speaks like Bill Maher.
Maher’s Op Ed piece concludes:
“I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends someone. That’s why we have Canada. That’s not for us. If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who say nothing but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant. In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney.”
This morning Unedited Politics posted an excerpt from 1994 Romney-Kennedy Debate on health care, veterans, spending, deficits.
A Higher Species of Life
If and when we find more highly developed life somewhere in the universes beyond our universe, might this be what we find? Click HERE to see a higher species.
Thanks to Photobotos for photo. Gotta love ’em, yes? And we think we’re so smart.
“Where are the ashes!!!”
Gordon C. Stewart, February 24, 2012
It happened on Ash Wednesday.
“They’re missing! Where are the ashes?!” It’s fifteen minutes before the Service. “Where are the ashes!”
Every year I put the ashes for the Ash Wednesday Service in the credenza in my office. I never gave it a second thought that we had moved the credenza out of my office last fall. I rush downstairs to look for it. No credenza anywhere. Then…I remember. We sold it at the Annual Fall Festival! Somebody has our ashes!
What to do with no ashes? Burn some newspapers? Smoke a cigar and use the ashes? No time.
I grab a pitcher and pour water into the baptism font.
I begin the Service with the story of the missing ashes. Smiles break out everywhere. Maybe even signs of relief. “Instead of the imposition of ashes this year, we will go to the font for the waters of baptism, the waters of the renewal of life.”
We have some fun justifying the change in the Service, focusing on the that part of the Gospel text for the day – the words of Jesus himself. “And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen my others….But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret…”(Mt. 6:16-18).
People come to the font, one-by-one, for “the Imposition of … [Water]”. I dip my hand into the font. “Pat, (making the sign of the cross on her forehead), “Dust to dust; ashes to ashes. You are a child of God. Live in this peace.”
After the Service is over, one of the worshipers asks whether anyone has done the same for me. She reaches her hand into the font. “Gordon, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. You are a child of God…..”
I’ll never forget it. Neither will they. And somewhere in this world someone has a credenza with a sack full of ashes. Whoever you are, feel free to keep them. They’re all yours.
Views from the Edge 