Seen at the Airport August 30

The picture above is just a part of what you’re missing if you don’t boogie out to First Class Air at Springfield, Illinois’ Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport and see this immaculately restored B-17 on display and flying all day Sunday. Walk through tours begin at 9:00 am and cost $5 a person. You may take a ride in it (atout 45 minutes in the airplane; about 30 minutes in the air) for $425 per person. Springfield Chapter Illinois Pilots Association is selling hot dogs, chips, cookies, bottled water and soft drinks. Proceeds go to IPA. They will be happy to talk to you about this excellent flyers’ organization, and I will be happy to talk to you about my new book Springfield Aviation which goes on sale September 15.  It’s all history in the sharing from good folks to good folks. Ask for Darley at the refreshment tent table and then ask her where the bookseller is. She will connect.

This was the first gathering of aviation enthusiasts where I met a fellow who had not heard of John Gillespie MacGee, Jr., and his immortal poem High Flight. I told him I was probably the only fellow at the airport who could recite the poem (TERRIFIC POEM), and then in the middle of Hangar One at First Class Air, I recited it as the author might have intended it to be shared; my best guess at any rate. Suffice to say, even though the poem (now public domain) is not in my book, he took an order form so he can send me his check when it goes on sale in mid-September.

The whole arrangment — B-17 restoration extraordinaire, great IPA people and book-schlepping writer/photographer — are worth your time Sunday. I hope to see you there!

Live long . . . . . and proper.

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It’s So Nice to Have You, Barack, Where You Belong

You are inspiring me, your in-tune-with-the-21st-century-ness to aspire to higher. Those who I despise are despised by others and unworthy of a nanosecond of my concern. If I have something to share in celebration of a friend or associate or stranger, I will share it here. The rest, I shall certainly feel, but I shall feel unto myself.

Your success is my first celebration, Barack and with it your profound inspiration to me as a writer and a human being. Here’s to a world where you inspire others to pledge themselves to the same “higher angels,” as Abe called them.

God speed!

Live long . . . .  and proper.

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Supermarket Seen

In Walgreens last week I encountered a small open basket on the checkout counter. It contained an assortment of oranges, apples and bananas. They were for sale:  69 cents a piece.

Heading home from work last night I stopped at Shop & Save because I was running low on Hellman’s and I had a garden or ripening tomatoes that would be going nowhere without it. I also discovered Pringles on sale, 10 for 10 dollars. If I had  had $100 to spare, I’d have really stocked up, but I settled for 10. Filled an entire plastic sack with them.

As I waited in the checkout line savoring happy faces a-plenty awash with the American dream of going home for a long weekend, I noticed, barely visible on the “last chance” shelves offering irresistible (they hope) baubles to shopping buckes and belles, a definitively 21st century icon. It was a talking Simpson’s pizza cutter. I am not kidding you. That is what I saw. I thought, as I waited, cool and content, of picking it up, purchasing one and taking it home to save, like a Barbie Doll in the original box, to sell on e-Bay in 20 years.

“Naaaaw,”: I said to myself. “That won’t define me. I’m different.” Then I took my 10 stacks of Pringles, a jar of Hellman’s, a new bottle of Kraft Catalina dressing and a bunch of Dole bananas home to a memorable evening of speeches, nourished by leftover baked chicken, a stack of Cheddar Cheese Pringles and some hefty hits on a big jug of Burgundy with my name on it.

Live long . . . . .  and nutritionally balanced.

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Visit “Sentimental Journey” — the Boeing B-17 at AL Capital Airport This Weekend

The Arizona Wing of the Commemorative Air Force has flown its immaculately restored B-17 Flying Fortress to town where is is now parked at FIrst Class Air, the fixed base operator next to the airport terminal. This warbird is restored in the colors of a late-war machine which flew without the olive green and grey camouflage of its bretheren who came before. I have seen and toured “Sentimental Journey” before, and I will be helping with the big doings there this weekend. You owe it to yourself and your family to visit probably the most authentically restored B-17s flying today. Walk through tours are $5 a person; flights are $425 a head. It will be here through August 31.

Between World War I and 1941, the word “warbird,” meaning “former military airplane owned and flown by civilians,” was not a part of our lexicon. The word had not been invented! Today, they are handled with kid gloves by those who have learned how maintain them, often from aging veterans who flew them in uniform and after, in war and peace. All you encounter in a Commemorative Air Force uniform has dedicated significant parts of their time and bank balances to keeping warbirds in the air today. This is particularly true of “Sentimental’.”

In 1955, ten years after the end of World War II, just a few past the Korean War, most Americans were content to almost forget about war. But as the last of the fighter planes and bombers were finally retired from more menial, less lethal duties in the services, a group of pilots living south of the Mason-Dixon Line organized to save military machines destined to be hacked to pieces and melted into aluminum ingots for new life as sauce pans. The organization was known for decades as the Confederate Air Force. A few years ago, it was renamed the Commemorative Air Force, and it’s a change for the better.

Sponsoring the visit, and helping with fund raising efforts including the sale of donuts, light lunch and beverages, are members of the Springfield Chapter, Illinois Pilots Association. If you encounter a guy in a young beard greeting visitors and passing out flyers about his new book entitled Springfield Aviation, be sure to say “hello.” I look forward to meeting you and introducing you to the rest of the clubhouse gang, some pretty good people and one magnificent airplane!

Fly long . . . . . . and proper.

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Tall Corn

It’s been a nutty week getting together my stories for the next Springfield Business Journal. The picture above was taken during the effort, though it has nothing to do with my articles. I saw a pattern I liked, and I photographed it; didn’t realize how good (to moi) it looked until I downloaded it. That’s the big diff between working with a camera and working with a keyboard. I’m so busy in essence “taking notes” with the shutter button that the best I can hope for is to compose the picture correctly as I encounter scenes with eyes away from the viewfinder and zero in often to shoot a chosen few. Unless I’m shooting a pictoral, what I have to say about the article in the image must be said in only one; two, tops. The text can reveal many angles; the picture only one. The picture is sometimes “the poem” to the 500 word story, but sometimes it’s a simply a synopsis. Either way, that’s okay. When a picture does NOT work, that’s because it’s less than either; it’s a snapshot. And that’s okay when snapshots are required.

My assignment was to photograph concrete. Maybe that’s why the green made an impression this week. The corn “looks like it’s rising clear up to the sky.” As Curly Joe might have said in Oklahoma: “Oh, what a beautiful afternoon.”

I’m peeved that if I were simply shooting snapshots, I could tell you where I was and what I was doing, but I can’t now because the point of my effort this week must be revealed in about a week. THEN I’ll explain the rest.

Things are nearing summer zenith, even though the daylight hours have been getting shorter for more than a month. Strange how the harvest comes after the crest of the season, after the perigee of the northern hemisphere’s spin around the sun. Is life more beautiful, in the garden, the field, the community of friends and family than it is after the apogee?

I think it is not. “These are the days of miracle and wonder” as Simon sings. “Cherish is a word that more than applies,” as the Association sang. “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.” Bob Dylan said that.

Live long . . . . . and proper.  — I said that.

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updated poem – Ripples

Ripples
By Job Conger

From the stone skipped on the water
Ripples eminate beyond.
From the bouquet, gladly given,
Ripples, yes, and common bond.

In the storm-tossed voyage onward,
Breaking waves on bow and shore,
Consequence of stones and roses::
Ripples of our lives and more.

Words that seem so clear and certain
Scandalize with angry splash
Unconsidered when first written
Sullied page screams truth as trash.

Some with unprotected beaches
Disappear beneath the wave
When the tide of dreams mis-spoken
Steals the land; leaves naught to save.

But the shoreline girded rocky
Takes the angry ripples well
Insight or blight, waters amble
Equally to breaking swell.

Ripples come in many ways from
Love and spite and joy and pain,
Shaping who we are, exchanging
What we lose for what we gain.

In the quest for life’s safe harbor
Fortress-building on the shore,
Come the waves from hearts in motion:
Ripples of our lives and more.

I modified this poem written in 1999 (published in my book Wit’s End) to share here at H&Q today. The point in the modified version is that sometimes, what we think is so obvious and true, the best soup ever put to your lips, touches the lips (and eyes and ears) of others as a vile concoction unfit for human consumption. Sometimes negative thoughts are intended to generate positive outcomes. Other times they are shared in the hope of demeaning and punishing those who inspire negative reactions. As long as feedback to this blog is addressed to issues presented and not to sharers of points of view, every posting will be passed on to you, the valued Honey & Quinine reader. Feedback that demeans me — and others who post here — will not be shared starting now. My shoreline is girded rocky, and I will not disappear. I hope the same is true for all readers visiting this post.

Live long . . . . . . and proper.

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“He’s a Fool” quoth the Ravin’

Since my arrival here at the edge of the world, I’ve been at arms’ length with the office manager whose hours were reduced to accommodate the additional talent I brought to the business. If she were a wolverine she would hiss and spit when she talks, and the family resemblance doesn’t end there. I’m no longer “the cockeyed optimist” as she and the rest of the employees rail at the distracted but generally likable proprietor, and we agree how Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is destined to spend part of his retirement from politics in the old “Greybar Hotel” as Dave Letterman would say. Today we were politely conversing about the Blagovernor when our mutual accord became evident to both of us. The start down the path to common bond ended abruptly when I asked if she had gone downtown to watch the big event Saturday.

“You mean Obama?” she said as though tentatively touching an exposed electrical wire with her tongue to see if it was “hot.”

“Absolutely,” I said. ”Who else?”

“He’s a fool!”

END OF CONVERSATION! I said nothing; didn’t even shake my head. I just beat a tempered retreat to my part-time office out of ear, eye and buckshot.  

It doesn’t matter that so much of what the presumed nominee stands for would benefit her . . . . and me. The fat-cats she despises, the heartless meanies who don’t give her what she deserves will pay more taxes and the likes of her and me will pay less, but she doesn’t care. That he wants to restore the very high esteem in which most of the world held the USA before #43′s litany of lies and anti-freedom tyrannies began matters not to her. For our country to become again the moral example for those suffering indescribably from leaders who pillaged truth like a thief in the night pillages your grandmother’s silverware. . . . for the USA to be as good as she knows it used to be, that no longer concerns her. My associate would rather endure the swampy status quo instead of standing for justice and the hope of justice.

“He’s a fool!”

Why?

Because she can see no further than the color of his skin.

How cheaply we trade our comfort and promise of comfort for the greasy satisfaction of bigotry.

Live long . . . . . . and prosper.

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Starting a Beard (again) & Sunday Catchup

Friday the publisher PR person e’d me with two more forms to complete for the PR kit Arcadia is sending out with my new book to national media in early September. Part of it includes a picture, and the one that works best for me is one that caught me in a hangar a few years ago with a well sculpted young beard. Today I decided let my new growth from not shaving since Friday continue so I can match the handsome galute in the picture. Whether under facial hair or smooth as a baby’s bottom, my face has not been a positive or negative in allowing me to bring in the big bucks. If I’m not going home with babesters, at least I’m not scaring children. I generally feel artsier with a beard, not that it makes me think any gooder, but simply being able to grow a full beard seems a talent or at least a blessing in itself. As a substitute teacher the new growth will give students and faculty something to monitor as well as the year goes on.

I’m been shoulder-to-the-grindstone this weekend, semi-obsessing with transcribing magazine notes into computer format to I can later post the info at the airplane web site. This is tedious work that require mostly reading my handwriting on note cards I completed 30 years ago.I am kept emotionally afloat engaging it for up to two hours at a time mostly from a sense of calling that tells me there aren’t many who KNOW what a Brezniak & Isayev BI-1 is, so for future generations, I must throw myself into the work. (It was world’s first rocket-powered fighter prototype, built by the Soviet Union in WW II.  I believe future generations will benefit from my lofty aspirations and ACTIONS, and if they don’t, at least I won’t be shamed by the indifference of future generations as I have been by present generations. Ooo blah dee, Ooo blah dah. Yada three.

I was close to the Obama/Biden event in Springfield Saturday, but I watched it on TV. Biden’s speech brought me to the edge of my chair, no lie, and what many viewers used to do at the end of Lassie TV shows, I did at the end of Biden’s wonderful speech:  I went to the bathroom. No, actually I shed a tear or two of joy, glad that I’m still human enough to be so happy watching history in the making.

The news shows were terrific this morning, Caroline Kennedy in particular on Meet the Press; Obama’s campaign strategest on This Week with George S. was candid and seemed like a guy who knows the profession.  George Will on Geo. S. hit me with his indignation. Much more of it and I expected to see him cough up a fur ball.  Rudy Giuliani was a shriveled charicature of the ace attorney who did so much for the City of New York before he got into politics. A book about his prosecuting state’s attorney days called Tiger In the Courtroom published in the late 60s truly inspired me after I bought it through the Playboy Book Club (to which I belonged at the time. It was a terrific club; great pictures too!) but today I would not want to share the same city with him. What a loss for the state of New York, what he’s become. What a loss for our nation.

I’m making decent progress with the magazine index transcribing, but I have much more to do before calling it quits.

I hope you’ve had a productive weekend too.

Live long . . . .  and proper.

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BIDEN!

Though there have been exceptions along the way, life since #43 first oozed into the White House has been of litany of actions I never considered possible given what I always assumed to be natural law: water flowing UP, frostbite in the summer, beef tasting like cotton candy, rocks floating in the sea and flagrant violations of the constitution which I considered inviolate because of the words it contained and the immortal integrity and patriotism of those who created it.

Though I never understood how the pre-school, pampers-intellect word “flipflop” (“flip-flop” if you prefer) could be used as though it were a four-letter obscenity hurled by #43 at all with opinions that changed, honestly, with the input of additional facts, I also believed that a proven patriot, aviator and respected senator would have sold his soul to the evangelisto Republicano extreme RIGHT to clinch his party’s nomination to run for the office of President of the United States. And I believe he did. This is why the most extreme of that pack, those truest to their beliefes, trust him today as they trusted him in 2000 (which is not at all) and why they will not compromise what they honestly feel by supporting him now.

Barack Obama’s choice for the man to share the top of the ticket showed me that despite all the shadowed cackling about he caved into the Clinton contingent by sharing the national convention generously with Hillary and Bill,  he still has the backbone of honest conviction. For Barack Obama and Joe Biden, there is no summer frostbite, water flows down and rocks do not float in the sea.

I drank coffee later than usual into Friday night because I had a hunch the promised text messaging would come early into Saturday morning. At the top of Nightline (ABC, 11:05 pm) it was reported a business jet had been despatched to Biden’s turf and Secret Service personnel had been assigned to his home. That could have been a diversion, the way the Allies massed military hardware across the English Channel from Calais in 1944, successfully convincing the enemy the invasion would hit the beach there instead of further north. So I listened to local radio that has regular national newscasts until 2:30 am when I HOPED to catch the late news on ABC TV. That was when I learned there is no early ABC news on Saturday mornings. When I finally retired, though, I was confident from what I had heard, Biden was in. I regretted there was no wine in the house, an excuse to bend an elbow in the direction of Delaware. Instead I finished the last of a can of Pringles with a tall glass of fresh iced tea while reading a tremendous The New Yorker article about life today in Myanmar.

I was asleep before my head hit the pillow a little after 3 a today.

The fun has just begun.

Live long . . . . . . and proper.

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SPAAAASH! The kewl saturation of writing obligation.

I took the picture a few weeks ago from the open showroom door “at the edge of the world” during heavy precipitation. When journalism opportunity reigns here at “Casa de Poet and Writher,” it pours as well. I wish every day were as affirming as the last few. Writing is the only essential item in my life, and love is nothing more than “nice work if I can get it;” a happy and divine coincidence.

Yesterday I finished my hip-high slog through my friend’s book he had sent for my promised review. And I wrote him last night after I finished the last page. I told him I would print NOTHING at my review site until I verify with local reviewing media that they have received his book AND his music CD sold separately, and had decided to review them or leave them alone. Two reasons for my caution: I don’t want local media, who probably know my book review web site as well as most of us know the far side of the moon, to squelch their intended attention after encountering my unavoidably biased (I AM the bloke’s friend) opinion. I also want to read other opinions before I post my review, not because other opinions determine what I share, but because I want to read a review or two by some folks who know what they’re writing about. I will learn from those reviews. That said, I will be sketching some facts into my review file this weekend.

Today I planned to tackle a major piece for a local monthly: transcribing notes from an interview with a local “Mover” conducted earlier this week. He may be a “Shaker” as well, but his office furniture suggested he is not.

BUT

Waiting for me when I hit my e first thing this morning was a note from Arcadia Publishing’s PR department asking me to complete templated forms for “Author Interview” and “About the Author” sheets slated to be included in the press kits next week. It was great fun, but as you might expect from me, it took me all morning, not because I had so much to say (which is true), but because I enjoyed the work. I like to linger where I want to be and be “all business” where other subject matter is involved.

The afternoon was devoted to the feature article. I also have no problem focusing when I’m doing what I want to do, and the transcribing was a breeze. I don’t know how I’m going to frame the article. I’m going to think about it all weekend, talk to some more people over the phone Monday and send the thing in by late afternoon. There was one impediment transiting through the time-space continuum, howebba.

No matter where I am — at the home office or ensconced behind the counter at the edge of the world — I go OFF LINE when NPR’s Fresh Air comes on at 3p. Unless the prime interviewee is a rock star from a far corner of England or Alabama, I belong to that program. Today I belonged to the program (fascinating talk about programming Republican and Democrat presidential nomination conventions) until 4p and returned, refreshed and focused; completed the transcription with gusto. Didn’t go near the blogosphere until about 5:15.

Tonight I return to matters AeroKnowy and PBS TV.

Only a full time employer, hot water and a soft hand on my shoulder or elsewhere could improve on this. In the meantime, I’m counting my blessings. . . . . . . . This will take awhile. I”ll check back with you tomorrow.

Live long . . . . and proper.

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