March 19, 2001 - 17:27 MST

March 19, 2001

Wool Gathering

It is difficult for me to stay on course and focus when I can feel the surge of earth regenerating and ready to burst forth with the symphony of flowers and green growth. When the breeze is warmed by the sun and gently caresses my cheek.

My favorite columnist Gene Amole at the Rocky Mountain News here in Denver has a lot to say about things. I agree with most things he says and I think age speaks to age as we are near the same, have the same memories of growing up in Denver.

Any way to get back on track, here is part of what he had to say, "I have been listening for the first"thwop" of a baseball hitting a little boy's glove, and the voice of his dad saying, "Way to go Jimmy !" Ater school do they still play marbles ? Do little girls still skip rope and chant, "Down by the ocean, down by the sea, Billy broke a bottle and blamed it on me ?" Do they play hopscotch on the sidewalk ? And do kids at spring's twilight, end their hide-and-seek game by calling "Ollie, ollie, oxen free ?"

And I hope TV games and the high-tech world surrounding children hasn't robbed them of time to fly kites in March breezes. There is no sensation in the world quite like feeling your Hi-Flyer pull string through your fingers and connect your imagination to the wondrous world far beneath you.

Spring is almost here, can you feel it?" ----Gene Amole

We were out for a bit this afternoon, in bright sunshine driving dry city streets with our windows down.

Spring Is Coming

I did my share of feeling the twigs beginning to limber up. I can feel it tremble through my feet.

Also in the same paper today is a column by Charles Roos, retired political editor at the News who writes a column entitled this morning, "Christian Intolerance Has 400-year History In America." I realize I run the risk of losing the few friends I now have, but he points out some of the stuff that was hidden in the cracks behind the wardrobe when I was a kid in school. I quote, "The businesslike Puritans made little attempt to save souls. In the beginning, when they badly needed Indian help, their policy was cooperation, but according to American Heritage (Book of Indians) that was followed by dismissal, growing hostility, massacre, war and eviction. For example, the once powerful Pequot nation was destroyed by colonist attacks in 1636 and 1637.

Generaly speaking, white men either took or destroyed the native American's land, many lives, much of their sacred heritage, their livelihood, sometimes even their names. Nowadays as then, most white men know almost nothing and care less about their "blasphemous" religions."

Spring Is Coming

And Mr. Roos says, "QUOTE: Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell ?" "No," said the priest, "not if you didn't know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me ?" - - - Mr. Roos

We are, and I paint myself with the same brush, a very ambivalent, contentious and flighty people, IMHO.

I am an American, at least by definition and birth certificate. So, I can talk about those scandals hidden in history by obfuscation and lies, because its my family too. Another place in his column Mr. Roos in referring to someone speaking at a meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado about a tablet of the "Ten Commandments" which is on city property being moved to a church property. "One speaker demanding that the biblical tablet stay put, reminded everyone that, "It wasn't a load of Hindus who washed up on Plymouth Rock." Moving the tablet would be, "cultural genocide." Interesting word, "genocide."

Well we all know that the Mayflower didn't carry Hindus to Plymouth. It carried a load of Puritans, members of a particularly grim, strait-laced Christian sect fleeing religious oppression in Europe. (as humorist Artemus Ward once said, "The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoying his.)"

Mr. Roos wrote quite a column this morning and it seems true from all I have heard and read. Anyone who has been to and in the Four Corners area and has seen the desolate, unforgiving land the Navajos and other tribes have been forced into has a pretty good idea of what is being talked about.

Spring Is Coming

Tomorrow, I think I might put excerpts from a column by Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times dealing with the fallacy of school vouchers. As well as blithering the blather I usually do.

Back to the promise of a soft, gentle spring and the hopes for good crops later. What a conflict with the mammoth skeletons of steel clad concrete and glass surrounded by dirty sidewalks and blacktop. When I think of spring it is in the ever disappearing countryside, but as it was when I as a child first heard the liquid, lilting song of a Meadow Lark as we picnicked under a tree which had just enough leaves to give a bit of dappled shade.

Try as I might my mind is away in Spring, Wool Gathering . . . . .

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