Vernal Equinox

Last Sunday, when the equinox bumped into Boise, Idaho, the wind scattered last fall’s leaves around and around the patio. Sullen clouds in both the east and west grayed the day as the full moon reveled in its gravitational attachment to earth, or so I imagined. Betty and I ventured out and tried to capture on camera this “supermoon” but haze and clouds obscured our moment. Like some kind of super moment, I thought, or wished, a marriage of moon and season, but actually it was just another advent of spring.

 Most people I know like fall of the year best, but I think I am partial to spring. In Idaho, I definitely believe it is the best time of year. Southern Idaho is a harsh landscape to the eye, anyway, but now the grass will green and the hills will take on an ephemeral, emerald hue. In northern California, where Betty and I just visited, spring was erupting in greens and yellows. Like blares of horns announcing a new symphony, they showed up along the roads, in the meadows, in the marshes, in the vineyards, and the apple orchards. Yellow and green mixed with dabbles of fruiting-tree blossoms painted pink, and lavender and white.

When Betty and I lived in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, lambasting snowstorms roared in during spring. Twenty inches on the first day of April, and later in some years, and you would think that spring would never arrive. But when it did, the grass’s music rang as true as any tune out of the beaks of mountain bluebirds, and the pollen of Douglas fir scattered over the land like Moses’ manna, a dusky gold that blanketed cars, roads, patches of ice, the ferns that struggled to recover from a cold winter.

In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, spring, if any amount of rain showed up, would turn the sand and powdered caliche a short-lived green, peppered orange and purple with Indian wheat and filaree and six-weeks fescue, pink-eye weed, poppies and lupine with buds as big as the end of your thumb. Spring is a strange time in the Sonoran Desert, but balances on a short span of time caught between a winter, which many places call summer, and a summer which Dante might have imagined while penning The Inferno. I recall going to work one April morning at 4:30 under a clear, starlit sky. I rolled down the window and rain drops blew in. A storm front thirty miles away announced its life-giving arrival. In the star-spangled sky I was seeing Lynx and Leo, Canis Major while tasting the pure dew of raindrops on my tongue. The anomaly shocked me into understanding how the things we think are opposites are really just parts of the whole. 

In Vietnam, where I spent two springs, the first was wet and hot and delivered doses of heat prostration, leeches and bamboo vipers; the song of the AK-47 rang out, too. But lucky for me, the song was just slightly out of tune. My second spring was cold and wet—fog and mist and fog and mist and rain, rain, rain, and the song of napalm and M-16—death and decaying flesh’s stench were the only flowers I noticed in 1968. If beauty existed, I don’t recollect it. The only beauty I saw that spring was the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro when my plane landed in California, where it was ….green, green, green.

Back here in Boise, the starlings seem to be a harbinger of spring. Three weeks ago they arrived in my back yard, black bodies in late winter plumage, speckled with yellow and hints of red and indigo. They strutted around in my grass and then got on line like Marines policing the parade ground. They goose-stepped across from end to end, probing and gleaning I don’t know what…worms, larva? It’s gotten to be a ritual here: every year, just around the turn of spring, they show up, front yard and back, c leaning up whatever it is they clean up.

Last spring robins nested in the crook between a rain gutter, an eave and the corner of our house. That little drama went on for several months.  We photographed the three blue eggs, the nestlings dressed in their voracious voices, their first flights crashing on the ground; rising, then falling, then rising and flitting like tunes on an iPod over to the ash tree in the corner of the yard.

Once, in an earlier spring, Betty lay on the couch listening to robins in a neighbor’s pine tree. The young ones were raising a ruckus with their constant ravings for more food. But a raven barged in and gobbled them up. You could hear mom and pop robin as they shrieked for what…. for help, or to scare the raven away? I don’t know. Whatever their goal, it was futile. I watched it all transpire as Betty put her hands over her ears to defeat the dissonance.

This bird world is a nasty place sometimes—spring, summer, winter, fall—but not unlike our own world (and I mean that in the sense of our own ken). I suspect the drama of birds reflects the drama of our own existence, without the BMW or the HD TV, but still it reflects, emulates; birth, life, nurturing and death. Winter and spring.

Social Networking…..OR…the Cyrillic Alphabet

 A couple of evenings ago, my cell phone jangled me out of my concentration. I don’t get a lot of calls—peopled generally text or e-mail me—so it jarred me away from reading a story someone asked me to critique. The call was from my daughter telling me a gentleman had left a message on her answering machine (in San Francisco) for me (who lives in Idaho) to call him. “Something about Marines and movies,” she said, “and I wonder how he got my phone number.”

I called him (he lives outside of Austin, Texas) and left a message and he soon called back and wanted to talk about a young Marine we both knew who was killed on March 28, 1968, during the siege of Khe Sanh. One of the most interesting aspects of this moment was that he was the second previously-unknown-to-me individual with whom I have talked about the death of Greg Kent. The first one occurred last August when Betty and I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to take some pictures and videos. It was an early Sunday morning, before the late August heat and humidity stewed enough to sweat us dry-skinned Boise folk back into air conditioning, when we ran into a man looking for Greg Kent’s name on The Wall. Unlike the gentleman who called me, Greg and he had not been friends in the Marines, but had run high school track together in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Both men loved him much, but for different reasons, and that’s a subject for another blog. What interests me here is that this all came about because of social networking.

I must confess that unless I was in a bar, tuned up with Coors, Rumplemint and Johnny Walker, I was never much of a networker, choosing to spend my time in a corner not talking to people. So I have little experience as a networker and for most of my life have felt that the social networking realm was best left to bullshitters and sales folks.

Yet, my definition of social networking is getting wider by the moment and includes meeting people through centuries’ old methods such as being pleasant to someone you meet out in the world (which is how I generated the Greg Kent conversation at The Wall), to YouTube videos posted on the Internet.  The latter is where the other guy who called the other night got wind of me and what I am up to….or what Betty and I are up to. Making movies, writing blogs, making YouTube videos of poets, video book reviews.  I teach writing classes on-line, have a webpage (more than one if I think about it), and a Twitter account that I am still not sure how to best use. I use FaceBook and have found it a reliable way to generate interest in most things.

So, what’s my point?

I’m not sure and maybe I’ll figure it out on the way to sizing up the importance of blogs and Twitter at which I am toiling today. And in that vein, I also cleaned up my website spam accounts, one of the more bizarre head-busting aspects of the social networking world. Spam messages from people seeking to get me to link to their websites. How dumb am I? I guess pretty damned dumb considering the list of e-mail monikers and messages that showed up in the last few days in the comments section of my web pages. Some examples of this type of social networking follow:

Bolt Path

Viagra

Porno Online

Smoking Side Effects

“As if!”

Henkscrewd

Something written in Cyrillic script (stuff that looks like….њЩЦѲд) and I have no clue what it means, or whether it is Serbian, Russian, ancient Bulgarian or something sent to me in Greek.

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“When I saw the title of this post, I found it silly.”

CheapChristianLouboutinShoesOnline

Chevy Camaro

Tattoos on Wrists

TraneGasWaterHeaterReviews

“I will re-use.”

and finally, Horny Bitches says, “I like this blog, is a master peace.”

Peace or piece? You’d think that someone intent on enticing me to allow them to link with my sites would have the good sense to make it look like they can spell better than I can.

Anyway, it’s social networking. I think it works. I know it works in some cases. For instance, the Internet is one of the great democratizers of the 21st Century. Witness Twitter, YouTube and FaceBook in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. People can communicate, show video horrors, mass demonstrations. And like all forms of the new mixed with the old, delivers a variety of results, truth and lies, good and bad.

I’m pretty satisfied with my dive into the social networking arena; it earned me conversations with men who knew Greg Kent in different contexts than I did. Twitter and YouTube seem to deliver results even though I get cryptic messages in some form of Cyrillic, or misspelled messages from Horny Bitches.

Now that one might get me out of the proverbial corner.