In the copy I have, there's an author's note at the end, where Mr. Rounds explains that back in 1917/18, they had a blind range colt on their ranch in Montana. And, further, his father said that when he was a boy, he had a blind mare for a "Sunday horse."The blind colt began learning early the thousands and one things that a colt must know before he can take care of himself. Because he was blind he not only had to learn the things all colts must learn, but many others besides. For a week or so he stuck pretty close to the mare's side, and she saw to it that they stayed out where the ground was level with nothing for the colt to run into.
So it was only natural that he soon came to the conclusion that all the world was flat, and that he could travel safely anywhere.
What he did not know was that this Badlands country was criss-crossed and honeycombed with gulleys and washouts of every size, shape, and description, and that sooner or later he would have to learn about them.
Go to Barbara's post for more info, and discussion.My friend Ann Stewart - a writer who lives a few miles from me - is writing a book called Preparing My Heart for Motherhood: A Shower of Wisdom to Treasure - following on the heels of her Preparing My Heart for Advent and Preparing My Heart for Lent.
I kinda like how Motherhood ranks up there with times for spiritual reflection - only it lasts so long!!!!
She is looking for input from you...
My thanks to Representative Sali.President Ronald Reagan said, “Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.”
Each of us is here today because our mothers chose to let us live. They might not have expected or even wanted us at first, but they protected us when we were most vulnerable. Yet today, like every other day, nearly 3,000 mothers are making the decision to end the lives of the small children they carry.
We each have a responsibility to come next to these women and help them protect their children. We must be there for our sisters, our daughters, and our friends—to remind them that they are bearing a beautiful little human and that crushing that little life will not give them the independence they want. If we can’t protect our most innocent and helpless citizens, how can we pretend to provide justice and protection for anyone else?
I am committed, as your Congressman, to give a voice to those most vulnerable in our society, the unborn infant.
I haven't read the book. I've just flipped through it before putting it out for sale, but it looks interesting. Of course, I have a known weakness for noncelebrity memoirs, and for backcountry tales, and for history other than the shifting-boundaries-battles-and-rulers variety.In Trimotor and Trail Earl Cooley tells of times, places and events lost to history. Like that of the free trapper, the buffalo hunter, and the plains cowboy before him, the world Earl Cooley knew as a young man was quickly plowed and paved behind him. Future generations will know it only from journals like this one.
-Driven from a homestead in eastern Montana by drought, grasshoppers, and bank failure in the aftermath of World War I. ...
-The backbreaking struggle to survive the Great Depression as a farmhand in the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana. ...
-Working through forestry school as a lookout, smokechaser, and blasting specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. ...
-Volunteering for the first attempts to parachute firefighters to remote forest fires, including the two near fatalities on the first operational jump. ...
-Sustaining the smokejumper project through World War II by recruiting 4Fs and conscientious objectors, and by using cast-off parachutes. ...
-The War Department's secret battle against 10,000 bomb-carrying balloons launched from Japan. ...
-The Mann Gulch disaster in which 13 smokejumpers died after being trapped by an explosive forest fire. ...
-The life of a forest ranger among Idaho's "Salmon River Savages" and in the Cabinet Wilderness of western Montana. ...
-The evolution of Forest Service firefighting tactics and fire management policy. ...
Trimotor and Trail is more than the adventures of Earl Cooley, pioneer smokejumper and forest ranger. It is a chronicle of an America vibrant with frontier vigor and freedom as well as a testament to what men can do when confronted by an extraordinary challenge.
To leave the quote off there is admittedly to take things out of context. According to the Foreword, to the surprise of outsiders, the Navy put together a new Torpedo 8 squadron, which it threw straight into the Battle for the Solomons. The squadron's slogan went from "Attack" to "Attack - and Vengeance!" And get vengeance they did, it sounds like, sometimes by doing what might seem suicidal.The Japs wiped out the United States Navy Torpedo Squadron 8 in a few minutes at the Battle of Midway. The minutes were hot and rough. The squadron was like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan, and only three men came out of the action alive. One of these is no longer fit for combat duty...
Our Navy, too, has wiped out whole Jap squadrons in a few rough, hot minutes, and there has always been great curiosity on our part as to how the Jap airmen left to carry on were taking it... [snip] ...when these hammer blows fell, how did the comrades of the dead feel, the men who had to step into the dead men's shoes and follow down their awful path? What was their reaction when they heard this news and how did they feel when they were ordered into similar planes and locked themselves in to take off on similar missions? Did they have left in them any of the confidence in survival necessary for the efficient operation of complicated machinery and necessary for the pressing home of an attack? Or did they have in them the unnerving efficiency-destroying emotions of men ordered to commit suicide and determined to commit suicide?
We wanted to know. We were most anxious to know, and on November 12, toward the end of a bloody afternoon on Guadacanal, we found out. That was the day two squadrons of Jap torpedo bombers were obliterated. Two young Jap airmen had managed to live unhurt through the destruction of their plane and were taken prisoner. They were both asked how they had felt when twenty-five bombers were sent out and one came back, when twenty Zeros were sent out and none came back, when thirty-three planes were sent out and only one came back, when, day after day, on mission after mission, it was only the odd planes that survived. They answered with enough difference to show that they had not been coached and that they were answering honestly, to the best of their ability. They did not blame their planes, their training, or their officers, or develop any great fear of us. Instead, each said he felt, as all Jap airmen felt, that the dead were responsible for their own deaths, they had not done their work properly.
Americans do not blame the dead for their deaths. Our traditions and teachings are against it. The Fascists - and the Japanese are purer Fascists than the Germans or Italians, each of whom has had something of a democratic tradition - cannot seem to conceive of their state or their superiors being wrong, but automatically think of themselves as being wrong. So they blame their dead for having died. But we, as democrats, have too much respect for the individual man to blame, without overwhelming evidence, our dead for having died. This reaction is as automatic in us as the Fascist reaction is in them. Also, we are too realistic and too sensitive to the worth of each individual man to accept a state or those in authority over us as being infallible. Nor do we have any inclinations for suicide or for suicidal actions in war. Our traditions, our teaching, and the whole American temperament are against all such antics.
Torpedo 8's revenge is one of the most grimly satisfying events of the American part of the war thus far. It's a legend of the kind that made epic ballads in ancient days. And this is the story of the men who lived that legend, of why they went out for revenge, and how they got it, and how they felt while getting it...So, that's what the author was aiming at, if you're interested in books about the military, or history in general, or World War II in particular.
Our men volunteer for suicide missions, not to seem brave, not to win medals or promotion, but only when, independently of their officers, they decide the possible gain is worth the probable loss. They decline to volunteer only when their private arithmetic does not add up that way. They do things that seem crazy, but never for crazy reasons, almost always for reasons that stand the test of sound adult thought.Several paragraphs later, after elaborating on that theme, on page 13:
Contrast this with the Fascist notions of the Japanese soldiers, who cannot conceive of their superiors ever being wrong and continually try to carry out pipe-dreams and invariably go up in smoke. Their desk dreamers do not trust the judgment of their subordinates and many, many thousands of Japanese lives have been wasted on that account alone. The democratic process with the habits of thought it has produced in our fighting men, has given us a valuable, life-saving system of checks and balances in this war.That's generally speaking, I'm sure...
It's a humorous, gentle, but spirited look at a little boy's world, and I'll nominate the father for a Great Fictional Father award. For those of you who can't deal with it, I should probably mention that the father in this book puffs on his pipe while they're having this little chat. Otherwise, I can't see anything anyone's likely to find objectionable."And you'll be a wonderful little boy, too."
Chris giggled. "How did you know I wasn't very nice today?" he asked.
His father turned out the light in the hall. "Alexander told me," he said.
Another (page 10):Save us from comfortable sins, our Father, that grasp us and have us in their power:
the ritual of busy-ness that has no meaning,
the easy desecration of other people's character,
and the endless boredom because we attempt so little.
Help us to find satisfactions won through risks. Amen.
When we are strong enough to stop telling the Big Lie, O God, give us even more courage to stop telling the little smooth lies. Amen.Another (page 67):
God of the storms and of the calms, we praise thee not only for the times of tranquility but also for the times of fury when winds twist trees and life jumbles our plans - for the world without storms and our lives without agony would bring us nothing to grow on. Make us glad for stormy weather. Amen.P.S. A quick google shows that "J. Akuhead Pupule" was an invented name, belonging to one Hal Lewis. I have some (fading) memories of radio back in the 1960s. In my part of the world, at least, as I recall all the on-air radio personalities operated under names not their own, and usually on the silly side. For a while, the television weather lady did, too. (She went through several names, but I remember one of the long-running ones was Susie Snowflake.)
Food for thought, anyway..."Fortune tellers," Benito said before I could ask. "They tried to see the future by magic." ...
Then I recognized one of the damned.
A little elderly lady, very prim and proper. She'd been a teacher in my nephew's school. Now she walked with her head turned backward, and tears ran down her spine and between her buttocks. I screamed. The damned looked up at me.
"Mrs. Herrnstein! Why?" I shouted.
She looked away. Then she stopped and looked up. Face and back turned toward us. She's always been thin, and I'd never thought of her as particularly feminine. Certainly she wasn't feminine now. "I belong here, Mr. Carpentier," she called. "Please leave. I don't want to be watched."
"You belong here?" I could not see Mrs. Herrnstein with a crystal ball.
"Yes. Whenever I had a pupil who had difficulty learning to read, I used -- I was a bad teacher, Mr. Carpentier."
"You were a good teacher! You taught Hal more in a year than he learned in five!"
"I was a good teacher with good pupils. But I could not be bothered with the ones who weren't so bright. If they had trouble learning to read, I said they had dyslexia."
"Are you here because of bad diagnoses?" This was monstrous!
"Dyslexia is not a diagnosis, Mr. Carpentier. It is a prediction. It is a prediction that says that this child can never learn to read. And with that prediction on his record --- why, strangely enough, none of them ever do. Unless they happen on a teacher who doesn't believe in educationese witchcraft."
"But--"
"It was witchcraft, Mr. Carpentier. Please go now." She walked on, crying uncontrollably, her face toward us as she walked away. I watched until she was out of sight.
