Grand Canyon hike

Delightful.

Empty

Empty head, heart, suit, fully parodied.

Running on empty https://t.co/JA2xNNBbs4

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 22, 2020

Your perfect right

This topic, deadly serious to many, still seems to me to merit John Cleese's "Life of Brian" response to Stan, which after all these years and despite the current atmosphere of gender-fluid correctness, still delights me...

I'm baffled by the debate over JKR

Am I right in thinking that if I tomorrow declare myself to be a woman, then anyone who doesn't accept that must hate me ?

This is a genuine request for information, even if the question itself seems odd to many older people ?

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 19, 2020

"Why are you always on about women, Stan?"

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 19, 2020

https://t.co/TRexowh7IK

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 19, 2020

Bob Gibson on race, baseball and what is next

Bob Gibson was my childhood hero, I read his ghosted autobiography From Ghetto to Glory at about age 12, which I think inspired me to pick up The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Big early influences.

Bob Gibson is 84 now. He has been fighting pancreatic cancer exactly as you would expect he would -- without complaint -- since he was diagnosed with it during the summer of 2019. The only thing for which he occasionally apologized during our phone conversation on Wednesday was when he would get a year or a detail wrong in the story he was telling. He would blame it on what he called “chemo brain.”

But the truth is, Gibson sounded like himself, which means tough, principled, decent and fiercely intelligent. He remains, even now, an essential baseball voice -- not just about his game, but about his country and what he sees from it these days.

“What I’m seeing now,” Gibson said, “is that nothing has changed. Period.”

(continues: https://www.mlb.com/news/bob-gibson-on-race-baseball)

Cooperstown

I was last there in 2000. Getting back is on the bucket list.

Watch this. The umpires are the best. https://t.co/qHAkGk52QV

— The Other Boys Of Summer (@NegroLeagueFilm) June 12, 2020

Picture Show: A Tribute Celebrating John Prine

Terrific tribute, live-streamed last night.

If you missed tonight's live-stream of "Picture Show: A Tribute Celebrating John Prine," here it is. (But don't take Fiona's word for what he thought about the prospect of an afterlife. "Buddy, when you're dead...") https://t.co/Oh6MIK6GGR via @YouTube

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 12, 2020

https://youtu.be/jv05dPfmx40

The really long view

At the end of time, time becomes meaningless. Nothing happens, and keeps happening forever.

So, seize the day.

"...we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species. Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Mike Rowe, Phil Plait, Janna Levin, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Alex Filippenko, and Martin Rees." Melodysheep

"By compressing all 13.8 billion years of time into a 10 minute scale, this video shows just how young we truly are, and just how ancient and vast our universe is. Starting with the big bang and culminating in the appearance of homo sapiens, this experience follows the unfolding of time at 22 million years per second, adhering closely to current scientific understanding." Melodysheep

Weathering

Fleur Adcock's poetic tribute to the comfortable self-acceptance that maturity can bring includes lines I'll be sure to share, next time Happiness class convenes. 

"...now that I am in love with a place/which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,/happy is how I look, and that’s all..."

A place can be geographic, like her and Wordsworth's beloved English Lake District, and it can also be a graceful arrival in the autumn of life. It's so good, having weathered many storms, finally to be "indifferent to mirrors." You get what you see, and you see it's good enough.

Thanks to David Whyte, again, for mentioning the "erotic librarian" from New Zealand.

Maria Popova has a nice appreciation, and the poet's rendition, here.

Walker Percy

It’s the birthday of Southern writer Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). Percy’s early life was marked by tragedy: his grandfather and father both committed suicide with shotguns, and his mother drowned when her car ran off the road into a stream. When his uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, adopted Percy and his little brothers, things took a turn for the better; it was there that he met his lifelong best friend, the neighbor boy Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner — Percy was so overwhelmed that he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch... WA

Mom

You’ve been gone for over a year  decade now. I owe you a call.

You always had a hard time with your emotional hard-wiring. I may have inherited traces of that too, at least some of its  behavioral indicators: a manically-heightened sensitivity to the seasons, for one thing. I’ve chosen to exploit the up-side of that disposition, not dwell so much on the SAD, “seasonally-affected, disordered” wintry tendency but try instead to cultivate the happy, energized, springy quality of experience delighting in its own possibilities. Carry the weather with you, as the poet says.  Easier said than done.

Is a mother’s influence mainly via nature or nurture? There was much in your nature that I should be proud to claim a piece of. Stubbornness? No, tenacity. A spontaneous openness to people of very different background and circumstance. An unforced quality of kindness and giving. Much more.

You were a gifted nurturer, by temperament and occupation. When I fell ill at your side at age 12, on our family vacation in Minneapolis, you made me feel ok before I felt better – before hospitalization and emergency surgery. When I fell ill another time, during my first month away at college, you dropped everything in your busy professional nursing life to drive 100 miles and take care of me.  In countless other ways through the years you sacrificed for me, for my sisters, for all of our extended family and for many others. No words of thanks suffice. But thanks. I love you, forever.

For all the Moms in my life: step-Mom, Mom-in-law, wife, friends: please, share the roses.

==

Originally published 5.10.09