Stray Felines, For Sale Signs and Free Samples

ProetryPlace Blog 16:    Stray Felines and For Sale Signs     (and more free samples)

    Twenty years ago I was a runner, not fast but frequent—three or four miles a day most days, maybe a 10K on the weekend, all for fun and feel-good. Now I walk several times a week. The more leisurely pace allows me to “read” an audiobook or listen attentively to a music album on my morning excursions around our subdivision. Occasionally I meet another neighbor-walker by chance, click off the iPod and exchange a mile or two of friendly gossip.

    One year ago my ambulatory ability was limited to transferring laboriously from my motorized, computerized talking bed to a chair four feet away and back during my 28-day hospital internment 250 miles from home. The surgeon made a small but nearly fatal error while removing my burst appendix and corrected it a week later by removing a few inches of bowel, so-called resection surgery.

    For almost 80 years my trusty appendix had stood by my side for no particular reason with never a whimper, twinge or protest. No black cat had crossed my path to hex my guts. I had not walked under any ladders or stepped on any cracks. No broken mirror. No spilt salt. No warning symptoms. Then—wham! A third surgery and 12-day hospital stint corrected the second surgery six months later.

    Now I am walking again. Today, no story or music or neighborly chat distracted me. I walked through our 200-some-home subdivision, almost exclusively occupied by retirees like me, a little more aware of the familiar surroundings. Only two undeveloped lots remain, both heavily wooded. And For Sale signs seem to have sprung up on the lush green lawns, like giant mushrooms, six or seven in total.

    Two of the signs have been in place for months, the owners somewhere in homes, unable to care for their properties or themselves. A third, of more recent vintage, belongs to a widow woman just remarried and removed to her new husbands abode. I do not know the owners of the remaining homes.

    I can imagine that these home sales were prompted by some happy circumstance, but the odds are against it. Given the average age of our property owners, there is a fairly constant sprinkling of these signs because of death or displacement of the owners. Makes one wonder when the estate sale or realtor sign will appear on our front lawn.

    A black cat with four white paws joined me for a few quiet paces today. We did not speak, and he turned off eventually in search of better entertainment. He did not cross my path, so we may be safe for a while yet.

And now, the free sample poetry (lowku):

feel gutsy today

bought a two-year subscription

paid in advance

bought LED bulbs

that last twenty years—not my

wisest investment

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - )>     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

FROM Bradbury TO Anderson

    We’ve had a lot of rain in Georgia this week. Cold too—temperatures almost ten degrees lower than the previous records. Extreme heat in the West. Floods in the North and East and here in Georgia too. Elsewhere the permafrost thaws, the polar ice melts and dissolves in a rising sea.

    Are we on the brink of some manmade climate catastrophe, a holocaust caused by ignorance rather than aggression? Bradbury’s poem and my flash fiction speak of the destruction of mankind, and rain.

    There Will Come Soft Rains is one of my favorite short stories by Ray Bradbury (or anyone else). The poem I quote here is embedded within his amazing tale, which takes place on August 4th and 5th, 2026.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground

And swallows circling with a shimmering sound

And frogs in the pool singing at night

And wild plum trees in tremulous white.

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence wire,

And not one will know of the war.

Not one will care at last when it is done

Not one will mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly.

And Spring herself when she wakes at dawn

Would scarcely know that we are gone.

     My short story, Hope’s Legacy, may have taken some inspiration from Bradbury’s writing. The first sentence was given as a prompt in a flash fiction contest. I don’t remember if it garnered a prize.

Hope’s Legacy

    Raindrops dripped from the branch of the barren oak tree.  That was yesterday.

    We had summoned our small energies to celebrate. A feast—one hard, dried trout from our meager cache, washed down with careful swallows of the heavenly gift of water, the first in twenty months.  

    The manmade drought had turned the landscape sere, brown and gray for all seasons. Clouds of dogwoods, glorious rhododendrons and bright azaleas had once dotted the lush, verdant canopy of sweet gum, oak, maple and pine during springtime. A few remaining trees and shrubs still resisted the pernicious radiation from sterile clouds that circled the globe, their brave roots gradually shriveling and dying while searching for moisture in the parched, hard clay.

    Starving, marauding hordes long ago had stripped fields of standing crops, leaving nothing to feed domestic or displaced wild animals.  Those contaminated carcasses then too were devoured by the dwindling remnants of humanity, leaving their cracked, white bones to dry in the sun.

    We do not know who started the war, who prevailed, who survived—or if others like us postpone death in desperate isolation. We resist for one reason alone:  that our infant child might grow to independence.  We subsist in the wild, like our ancient ancestors, on roots and nuts and dried fish from the now-withered streams.

    Our child, Hope, sits laughing against the trunk of the sad oak tree. The rain, the first of her experience, delighted her.  She curiously strokes the soft green sprouts that have burst forth from the moistened earth, as she stares with unsighted eyes toward the clear blue sky.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - (     ProetryPlace Blog 15     http://richardandersonbogs.blogspot.com

Curiosity, Cats, Computers and Cuneiform

ProetryPlace Blog 13C

(This is actually number 14, but since it references an unfortunate cat, I had to work in the number 13 for good luck. Hence 13C (for cat).)

CURIOSITY, CATS, COMPUTERS and CUNEIFORM

    Curiosity may have killed the cat, but there is more than one way to skin a sonnet.

    Don’t blame me for the lead-in. My muse forced this bit of linguistic and logical convolution on me as I pondered the subject and meaning of this blog. I’d been thinking at random about change and evolution as they have affected me and juxtaposed on various aspects of my life and writing. Curiosity has been at the bottom of it, at least where I had any control in the matter.

    T’was curiosity that propelled me into the sciences, into studying and attempting to understand how nature works.  While I did discover some new truths (or theories, as these temporary truths are known), I barely dented the vast surface of scientific inquiry after years of research. It is a sad fact that the more I learned, the less it seemed I knew.

    For example, 50 years ago as part of my research, I wrote some simple computer programs in FORTRAN language, manually entered it on punch cards—carefully avoiding hanging chads—collated the cards and fed them into a mainframe computer used primarily for the universities financial matters. With the advent of Personal Computers, I wrote some simple BASIC programs, yet another language. More than once I got so engrossed in the writing process that I forgot the purpose of the program before I finished it. Thus I welcomed programs written by others and available on floppy discs to achieve more extensive computations and analyses.

    I worked through a series of PCs and with them an evolution of operating systems from CPM and DOS to a variety of Windows versions. Each was supposedly more simple to use. Each, while more capable, was significantly more complex, requiring me to learn more and more about less and less. Windows eventually eliminated the need to remember commands that both DOS and CPM required; just click the mouse on the drop-down menu and voila—magic.

    With each step in the evolution , culminating at this point with a Windows 8 system with more memory than a room full of elephants, my ability to control the machine and deal with its problems diminished (yes, computers have problems of their own). Now, I simply accept that the machine is in charge. If it can’t fix itself or give me terse and obscure instructions downloaded from some remote website, the jig is up, the computer is down.

    What has evolved? Certainly the hardware—e.g. CPUs, USB ports, hard drives and flash memory sticks. Some say that silicone based systems are nearing extinction. A new species will replace them, biological in nature perhaps. And the language will continue to evolve or make a quantum change with radically different syntax and grammar from those I learned 50 years ago.

    I should not be surprised. My writing has undergone equally revolutionary change. For 50 years I used the precise and specialized lexicon of scientific disciplines to write and think about my research. As the purpose of my work shifted focus, so did my language. Initially, at the university, understanding was its own reward of so called basic research. Working in industry, understanding became the stepping stone to solving problems, and conceiving new products and manufacturing processes in the new world of  applied research.

    Writing demanded new skills and techniques as well, from the legalese of patent claims to management reports that concealed most of the science to highlight the possibility of innovation for profit.

    After retirement my writing morphed again, as radically as the change from cuneiform to computer language. Now the evolution was from the impersonal dialogue of science, technology and business to the far extreme of memoir and personal poetry, with the intent of revealing rather than concealing the author. I am aware of a similar shift in emphasis from my earlier blogs to more recent ones. I expect my muse will continue to dictate a varied content, at times austerely analytical, otherwise subjective and even poetic.

    Although the physical world still holds many intrigues for me, my questions now center more on why than on how. My expectations for clear cut answers have become less demanding. Some mysteries must remain unresolved or solutions accepted on faith alone.

    The compelling curiosity of my youth persists. It may have killed the cat, but it is what keeps me alive and writing. Unbounded opportunity exists for sampling the smorgasbord that life offers and for probing the mysteries of existence by whatever means the mind conceives and the soul accepts.

    Sonnets are somewhere on my bucket list.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - ()          http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

$1.98 (And Free Samples!)

ProetryPlace Blog 13 $1.98 (And Free Samples)

    I called old friends a few days ago. They live in the North, and we have not seen them in several years. Just an occasional email or late night phone call, but we hadn’t heard from them recently. At our age you start to worry when the risqué humor or political commentary doesn’t arrive for a few weeks or months. Did I say something offensive last time? Are they out of town? Is he in the hospital again? With a few old friends that has been the end of it. No further contact. No forwarding address.

    Turns out my Yankee friends are fine. They had been at their summer cottage. He said he had just resigned his position as secretary/treasurer at the annual POA meeting. He had been elected once and re-elected 13 times to the one-year job. He said for the first time in 14 years he was short on balancing the books. $1.98. Kept him up at night rummaging records, recalculating, cranking up computer files.

    I have managed the family finances for years, since long before PCs, online banking and even electronic calculators. The first calculator I bought was from Texas Instruments roughly 50 years ago. It was the size of a small shoebox and plugged into a wall outlet. It cost $99.95 and could add, subtract, multiply and divide. Amazing, but  I didn’t always trust it and often checked the results with my own manual calculation. In the end, the numbers agreed to the penny, no matter how long it took.

    As to my friend, I know he is an excellent record keeper. We worked together once in research. My forte was designing and analyzing experiments. My weakness was keeping good records. I relied on him to carefully record our work in his notebook, and it was always there.

    Then I would scrutinize the data to draw some meaning from it—enter it into a spreadsheet, plot it on a graph, subject it to statistical analysis, design equations or macros to look for correlations or dependencies between variables. The data didn’t always yield to my analysis, and I would rely on qualitative descriptions in my reports. That’s when my writing skills got a boost, but I liked messing with the numbers best.

    I still do our books and taxes at home. Even with Quicken and TurboTax, balancing the family check book each month and computing our annual contribution to the Federal Treasury have become odious agonies. A fairly competent theoretical mathematician (Albert Einstein) once said that the income tax was the hardest thing in the world to understand. I still make sure the numbers add up exactly on our tax return, but if I am a few cents off from the checkbook bank statement, it is not worth my precious time or tranquility to resolve the error. A quick note—balance adjustment—solves it in seconds.

    My friend’s $1.98? I was thinking of sending him a check for $2.00 and telling him to keep the change, but he found the omission and is sleeping nights again.

    That’s my two cents worth for now.

Now here are your free samples from Another Season Spent, the poetry of Richard Allen Anderson,

available online from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Vabella Publishing.

April Anathema

The taxman cometh each spring of the year

demanding cruel tribute. (For what? I’m not clear.)

I’ll give up my share—but not one cent more—

enticing deductions like a skilled matador,

while crunching the numbers like a financier.

I’ve read the 1040 instructions, oblique and austere,

completed all worksheets—incredibly queer,

plugged in numbers ten hours or more

till blood pressure readings staggered and soared

like the national debt.  The taxman cometh!

Forms, schedules and records litter the floor—

one big I-R-S pain in the pos-ter-i-or.

Ignoring one detail would be cavalier,

Sure to be found by a tax scrutineer

sniffing deep in a mainframe like a Black Labrador.

The terrible deadline draws crucially near

and thoughts of an audit send shivers of fear.

Maybe I need some professional help

to fend off or deal with that Labrador’s yelp

when April is here and the taxman cometh.

Address Book

A ragged paperback,

four and a half by seven, divided alphabetically

with space for names, addresses and telephone numbers,

a palimpsest of frequent change, notes and cruel cancellations.

Some faded entries,

used for regular communication

or even just at special times,

come readily to memory’s recall.

With others, we take some moments pause

to think—now who on earth was that?

Too many are neglected and unused.

Marginal reminders on scarred and blemished pages

signal bridges and crossroads—the Rubicons of Life—

birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and divorce.

Turning page to tattered page

a special sign appears, prompting

a quiet utterance or a sharp intake of breath—

the thin and poignant pencil line that deletes

without erasing: out of service, due to death.

Or we might laugh.

“We should replace this book, this paleography,”

we say, “start a fresh one, clean and new.”

Then slowly, like the reluctant fading of the light

at eventide, we fold the covers closed, once more.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - )>     Http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com