True faith

Imagine you are Barack Obama in the Summer of 2016. Imagine you were born to mixed race parents and raised by a single mom. Imagine you spent your early years as a community organizer giving a voice to city dwellers who had no other champions.

Imagine you became President, and you presided over eight years of unparalleled growth and prosperity, bringing your country back from the brink of financial ruin.

Imagine you had a virtuoso command of the vast federal government, that you completed eight years governing without hint of a single abuse of power, not one member of the team you assembled shamed in controversy. Imagine that even in the face of blatant dog-whistle bigotry and complete hostile obstruction from Congress you provided enduring health care and prosperity to millions of citizens.

Imagine you had a world class mind and education, and were able to comprehend and digest densely written Presidential Daily Briefs provided by the very best national defense analysts. Imagine you received solid proof of Russian manipulation of a presidential election, that a raging demagogue had won by getting in bed with America's sworn enemy. Imagine Senate Majority Leader McConnell blocked you from revealing these facts to the American people.

Now imagine that as a lifelong scholar of the Constitution of the United States of America, knowing what you knew, and also knowing what the rule of law means to our very existence as a nation, that you followed the law you loved and defended, and invited President-elect Trump to the White House anyway.

Imagine you peacefully walked away, KNOWING you just watched a quisling traitor and deeply flawed human being installed as leader of the United States.

President Obama *knew* the facts, *knew* the choice he faced. And he chose to step away, assuring a peaceful transfer of power, explicitly placing his faith in the Constitution, the law, and the sovereign people of his country.

That ... was a profound ... deeply abiding ... and, I hope, enduring, act of extreme faith in our country.

And you ... being not any one of those things in fact ... need perform just one small act, perform just one small service, to taste and to demonstrate, your own share of that tremendous expression of love, faith, and devotion to the American Way of life:

VOTE

Happy Mother's Day

When I was nine years old I rode Rex in a 4-H Horse Show in Batavia, New York. He was a fat firm beautiful Quarter Horse gelding standing 16 and a half hands high, chestnut coat with a gorgeous golden red sheen when the sun lit his whithers just right.

I will always remember my riding coach Jean shouting out to me as I rode around the corral with my circle of dressage competitors: "You are in the wrong lead, Phillip!"

As I had been taught, I halted Rex and started him in his gallop again. I remember the judge telling me later at the ribbon ceremony, "I would have preferred you to rein him hard left then hard right, rather than stop him, to change his lead."

I also remember an extended, lengthy and completely confusing answer Jean once tried multiple ways to explain to me about just what a "gelding" was ... which I never completely grasped. The balls and breeding were still just a bit beyond me at that age. Of *course* Rex couldn't have babies ... he was a boy horse!

I had my own horse in 1965 only because my mother loved horses and wished to pass that on to me. I do not know exactly how she came to love horses, and I have lost every family member who could tell me why.

She grew up an Ohio farmgirl in the depth of the Great Depression. When my mother was nine years old, she heard every day in school how Hitler's Blitzkrieg was rolling over Poland. She had a schoolgirl friend, Jackie, whose family kept a corral and barn where they raised and trained horses on a couple of acres at the corner of Osborne and Station. I remember clearly an old black and white photograph in our family pictures no longer available to me. It showed a docile old horse out in a field, looking into the camera, his ears sticking through a floppy straw farmer's hat while sitting back on its' haunches in a comically large chair. Smiling, his teeth bared, lips in a nicker.

I never even began to interpret the depth of her love until I studied Greek twenty years later and learned to translate "Φίλιππος "

* * * * *

My dad was a rich miser who saw no value in such stupidly wasteful things ... horses were only a sentimental indulgence. Negative on the balance sheet - a huge debit with nothing in the asset column. I remember many arguments between them over the costs. He never did get it.

He sold Rex when we left upstate New York and moved to the Nevada desert in 1968. I was heartbroken and never rode a horse again. Oh, well.

* * * * *

When my first hitch in the Coast Guard ended in 1980, I returned home to Reno for college on the G.I. Bill. My parents' had just divorced after 32 years of marriage. He had proved to be an overwhelming bully, and after he left my mother Mona tried to express herself authentically, unencumbered by his heavy influence for the first time in her life.

She went to college, and I actually joined her once in some basic classes. It was an odd time for both of us. As our academic paths separated moving into upper level work, she also developed a rare form of ovarian cancer.

I held her hand in a large variety of doctor and hospital offices, until her surgeon finally came in one day to deliver his prognosis:

"Mrs. Wolf ... your cancer is a very slow metastasizing form, and we believe your hysterectomy has removed the majority, if not all of it. We see no signs of spread in your lymphatic system now.

It seems to me you have a pretty clear choice:

You can sit home and wait for signs your cancer has spread; or, you can go on living your own life."

* * * * *

The following year, my mother studied overseas at the University of Wien, Austria. She was a psychology major with a minor in German, and desired to trace the path of Freud, I am guessing. She would find it a charming coincidence that I unwittingly wrote this from the murky depths of the unconscious mind early in the morning of Sigmund's 160th birthday.

She was the first in the Wolf family to ever travel back to Europe. She wrote letters to me detailing her adventure. There were no electronic means of email or text back in 1983. She wrote excitedly about buying a gown to attend the Vienna Philharmonic performing Strauss on New Years' Eve, and, later, of observing the Lippizaner Stallions perform at the Spanish Riding School.

* * * * *

Months later, she tried to describe to me just how it felt to stand naked inside a paper gown in a very sparse Vienna doctor's office being diagnosed with a return of cancer. The struggled descriptions she wrote of waiting alone in a bare room for a Eurocare physician, who did not speak English very well, trying with her rudimentary German to communicate ... were not pretty.

Reading her torturous words written longhand to me, I was reminded of nothing more than Gregor Samsa attempting to understand why he had woken up one day to discover he was nothing but a bug, and no one could hear him speak.

I emphatically convinced her it was time to come home to America.
I would walk her through this.

* * * * *

I lost my mother less than a year later in 1985 at the far too early age of 55. Survivor's guilt today at my own age of 59 increases with tons of weight on every page of the calendar.

My mother, faced with her own very real mortality, showed the strength and courage to chase her lifelong dreams virtually alone.

I am as joyful as I hope she was knowing she waltzed to the Blue Danube played in Vienna, had watched and heard and smelled the beautiful Lippizaners prance, stomp and leap in the remembered rhythm of her early childhood dreams.

I also remember every year that my name is Phillip

Spring is glorious everywhere, but Spring in Virginia is especially glorious.

It was the fragile Flowering Dogwood fighting for the first rays of sunshine along the Colonial Parkway in March 1988 where Virginia stole my heart.

Memorial Day 2014

When I am home on Memorial Day, I set my flag at half-mast.
At noon, I am standing at parade rest with the halyard in my hands.
When the air is right, I can hear the saluting cannon at Training Center Yorktown begin their twenty-one gun salute.
At the sound of the 21st cannon shot at 12:20 I come to attention, give a hand salute, and two-block the National Ensign.

I love the fact that the echo of the cannon shots travel to me over the very ground upon which General George Washington accepted British General Cornwallis' sword in surrender and won this country's freedom.

Thank you to those who gave all

"I would love you if I could"

"I would love you if I could"

never held a sadder conversation in my life

she walks into a room like nobody's business

fine black suits her well and she knows it

laugh lines her squinting eyes only when she looks at me

stops me dead

powerful curves pack perfectly into a black cocktail dress

many powers she holds in her fingertips

granted to the few who know her well

oh the way she moves her hips

Can only imagine the conversations/what she feels
when she lays her soft gentle shoulder against the bedsheet late at night

touch her hunger belly
plunge her most intimate feminine depth
feel the fire inside
muss her hair all up

Mother's Day 2014

My mother was the first born of Pauline Lukas and George Flury in Columbia Station, Ohio, just outside the bluecollar West end of Cleveland. She was born in the loft of a dirt floor garage on the rural acreage her parents had just purchased. My grandpa later built a house with his own hands on the property where they eventually raised nine children.

I asked my grandmother once why she turned out to be a farmer's wife when I knew she had been raised in the city of Lakewood. Gramma told me, "I *never* wanted to live on a farm ... it was your grandpa who had some kind of dream and took us all out there. One year, he brought home a cow, handed the reins to me, and said 'Take care of this'."

So. My mom grew up on a rural farm miles from civilization during the depths of the Great Depression. I have her graduation picture from Columbia High School Class of 1948. She was beautiful, and smart, too ... she was a lifelong member of Mensa who always had stacks of library books with torn pieces of newspaper marking her place along with Life, Saturday Review, and Time magazines scattered all over the living room when I was growing up. She gave me toy computers twice at Christmases in my youth ... how she found computer kits you built and ran with rubber bands and marbles in the 1960s still astonishes me to this day.

She also had the lifelong habit of saving chewed pieces of Wrigley's Spearmint gum on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. I thought this was a really odd habit when I was growing up. Until I realized as an adult later that when she was a kid growing up in 1933 ... 1935 ... 1937 ... she *never knew* when she would have another penny to buy a new stick of chewing gum.

One year in the early '80s while I was in my twenties, I was living at home with mom, in college on the G.I. Bill. I took her out to John Ascuaga's Nugget Casino for a Mother's Day dinner. We had to put our names on a waiting list of about twenty minutes. Mom went to play her nickle slot machines, I stopped at a blackjack table and threw a $5 chip on the felt. When they called our names I had parlayed that into $180. We had a very nice dinner.

Before I could return to the Coast Guard in 1985, I had to settle my mother's estate. When I packed up her household goods from our three bedroom ranch house in Reno I found an empty big, red, tinfoil-wrapped heart-shaped chocolate box I had given her some previous Mother's Day, my Fourth Grade report cards of straight A's when a Science teacher finally lit a fire under my ass in school, and two pieces of chewed Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum on the windowsill over her kitchen sink.

Mona Marie Louise Flury
Born August 27, 1930
Died December 10, 1985

SEA STORIES

SEA STORIES

Sailors have been telling stories ever since men have gone to sea. And men have always gone to sea

When I was a snot-nosed teenager fresh from bootcamp I would stagger across the messdeck rolling across the waves after the evening meal had been cleaned up, past the old salts holding court. These sometimes gray-haired but always fat-bellied men of the ocean were surrounded by an adoring audience of fresh cheeked sycophants listening with apt attention, open mouthed, hoping to absorb some of the saltiness of these rowdy balladeers by osmosis.

Their stories, what little I heard in my passing as I hoped to avoid being singled out for abuse and laughter at my greenness, were packed with outrageous yarns. Heroic struggles against the raging seas ... buxom wenches conquered overnight in obscure ports-of-call ... wardrooms full of command ineptitude ... and, always, the central figure of which was whatever fat-bellied bristly speaker held the floor. "What a load of bilge water!" I would think to myself lurching past, banging off the bulkheads, "What bunch of lies! What a string of fools listening to bigger fools."

I can't quite recall when, over my years at sea, that I became a gray-haired fat-bellied old salty fool holding court myself.

Apprentices aboard ships keep their own mouths shut, keep their head down and try to blend in without standing out. Any attempt to launch into a story of your own meagre sea time, or even the mere telling of how one rogue wave climbed over the gunwale that very morning at 0530 to soak you to your boondockers while scraping greasy dregs out of the breakfast pans over the side, was met with derisive hoots. "Boot! Shut the fuck up!" Your job was to know your place and do the grimiest, filthiest, most humilitating bidding imaginable. There were Men at work here. You, you pitiful seaworm, would never make it.

In this environment, riding surplus World War Two Navy ships handed down to the Coast Guard of the 1970s, learning my trade, I quickly realized what these blowhards were actually doing was passing down exactly the lore and lurid history I needed to absorb. They were holding court alright - they had paid full retail price for the yarn, real blood sweat and tears, and here they were giving it away to anyone who respected the telling - passing along free what you needed to become a real sailor.

Down in seaman's berthing in the worst riding damp dark bowel of the ship there lurked a crowded motley gang of thugs, hoodlams, petty thieves, riff-raff that would hurt you if you did not watch your step. The Wardroom absolutely and the Petty Officers pretty much never concerned themselves with what went on down in that hole. But if you held your tongue and did what you were told to do with at least adequate energy and a sense of humor, you might, in a few weeks or months at sea, notice that senior seaman who kept to himself mostly and nobody fucked with.

He was the Seaman the Boatswain would hollar for out on deck when things got sloppy. He was the Seaman that always got called to go out on the boats when the sun was splashing diamonds across the wavecrests while you stayed on deck in filthy dungarees scraping slimey seacritters off buoys with a long-handled trowel. He never had to scrub shitters on cleanups. If you did not become one of the gangsters took your time and did not assume too much, he might show you how to tie a monkey's fist on a ropeyarn Sunday down in the Bosun's Hole. If the Senior Seaman accepted your friendship you were golden.

Might have been my first ship, maybe my second, where I first heard the prototypical sailor's yarn. I have certainly heard it repeated at sea a hundred times since. Some old crusty fuck with gnarled knuckles wizened eyes lifer stripes and most definitely a short-timer would get a wistful far off look and declare to anyone within earshot, "When I retire, I swear I am gonna take an oar, hoist it aloft on me shoulder, and walk straight for the mountains. And the first lubber what asks me, 'Hey mate, what is that thing yer carryin'?' I swears I am going to plant that oar right in the ground and that is where I am goin' to make my stand." A full ten years after I ever did first hear that story spun I discovered while reading Homer from 850 B.C. that sailor's lament is a full 3,000 years old. And some old sailor told it to Homer.

There are certain conventions to be followed in telling a sea story well. Prodigeous amounts of alcohol work well in kicking one off. In a ship full of men far from home for months at a time the conquest of a fair maiden gets every sailor's attention every time. Academy Officers who know even less than the lowliest scullery maid issuing dumbass orders are always fair game, even far better if you have one on the X.O. (the Skipper is OFF-limits unless heroic) But without doubt the most common convention that draws the crew near and pulls their ear ...

"Now listen up. This one here is a No shitter ...."

BasilMarceauxdotcom ... the next Governor of Tennessee

My only niece wrote to me, I finally replied

Dear Serena ...

Thank you so very much for you very kind and luxuriously hand-written note to me from June.

I regret very much that I have taken far too long to reply, and I regret very much that I am at this point in my life simply too ADHD to take time to write in longhand. Please, please accept this poor electronic substitute for a written letter ... my concern is no less, I assure you.

I would like to write a short biography of your grandmother for you. Do you have access to standard word processing software, so I may send you the bio in a *.DOC file? Please let me know so I can get started, and I will forward it to you as an email attachment.

The short version is: my mother died from the spread of ovarian cancer.

I wish to write the most pertinent details leading up to her ugly hospitalization, treatment, and ultimate early death. I won't make you wait for the medical history you have asked for: I will open with a one-paragraph summary so you can get an immediate answer to your primary question. However, in due respect for her, it would please me if you would read it thoroughly. I am quite willing to go further into any areas where you still have questions after you read my biography.

After her death, I rejoined the service in 1987 and spent my first year back stationed on Yerba Buena Island. I was a 31 year old roustabout on a sea-going construction tender. My tools were chain hooks, a sledge hammer, a cutting torch, anchors shackles buoy scrapers. The extreme physical labor was the best cure available for my sorrow over losing mom.

When I had leisure time I would drive my 1964 Volvo 122S to the Sunset neighborhood. I liked the restaurants and movie theatre. (Wish I had bought that $200,000 home I had looked at.) I would also go frequently to Land's End and sit in the fog next to the seagrass, listening to the Golden Gate horn bellow.

I adore the life you and Cole have fashioned. I think of you as our family's Chelsea Clinton, except you are not a money-grubbing investment banker. I admire your husband although we have never met. I wish I were in position to rejoin our family but I do not think I have the years left to do so. One of my fondest photographs is one of you elbow deep in a jack-o-lantern we were cutting in the backyard of your home in Albuquerque. The year would have been 1982 or 83 I guess.

Please reply so I will know you have received this.

Thank you for your patience.
Uncle Phillip
Yorktown, Virginia

Grandma gave me this kitchen

I know you and mom are lying together peacefully at last in Middleburg Heights. I hope you both take time once in a while to look in on me. Say "hi" to gramps for me.

God bless you Gram.

I can't wait to taste your muffin

Man, do I LOVE Spring ...

------------------------------
HER DIARY:
Tonight I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at
a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long so I
thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no
comment on it. Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested that we go
somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn't say much. I asked
him what was wrong; he said, 'Nothing.' I asked him if it was my fault that
he was upset. He said he wasn't upset, that it had nothing to do with me,
and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He
smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can't explain his behavior. I don't
know why he didn't say, 'I love you, too.' When we got home, I felt as if I
had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He
just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and
absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About
15 minutes later, he came to bed. To my surprise, he responded to my
caress, and we made love. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his
thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep - I cried. I don't know what
to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a
disaster.

HIS NOTEBOOK:
Harley wouldn't start today. Can't figure it out but at least I got laid

Change

Yes, We Can

About damn time an adult ran this country

Al Franken clobbers 4th ranking Republican Senator

Happy Thanksgiving

"There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office ... and then, there are moments like this: when I pardon a turkey and send it to Disney Land."

So we say goodbye to those who now belong to eternity

Country yucks (oh how the mighty have fallen)