Ski Season

I hear it’s skiing weather again and I am all for it! True, here in the glacier scraped flatlands of North Missouri skiers are a rather insignificant part of the sporting population..unlike deer slayers, turkey hunters, rodent trappers, cat-fish snaggers and such..but I have fond memories of the skiing world.

Yes, I have skied. At one point in my life, in those insanity driven days of somewhat youthful motherhood, thinking it would serve to prepare them for “life beyond”, I often bombarded my suffering children and grandchildren with experiences over which I had no control. (Other than the ordinary day to day stuff over which I also had no control.)

The Great Ski Trip was on the list and I remember it well……we were living in Henry County back then and…

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The planning stage of this trip had gone well, I thought. Kathy, at Clinton’s “Going Places” travel agency had done a great job for us. Also there was a lot of communication beforehand. I remember a conversation with my oldest son, Les, calling from his home in Kansas City.

“Well, Hi, Son. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I just called to see what you were wearing to ski.”

“Oh, something warm I guess. You know how I hate to be cold. Something warm and lots of it.”

“Well, why don’t you let me pick you up something up here in Kansas City? How about ski bibs? (snowpants for big people)

“Well, I kind of thought I might wear my snowsuit. You know. The one I got the winter we kept the hogs.”

A long silence here. I think he was trying to remember what my snowsuit looked like.

“Mom, I don’t think they are wearing too many snowsuits on the slopes. Why don’t you let me pick you up some bibs? What color is your jacket?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute.” I had to lay the phone down to get to the side of the house where the window by the basketball hoop was.

“John, what color is that coat you said I could borrow?”

He said it was brown.

“It’s brown,” I tell Les, “Brown with tan arms. I remember now.”

Another silence. This conversation was beginning to drag.

“Mom, I don’t think they’re wearing too much brown anymore.”

By now I was getting bored and changed the subject. I hate conversations that don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Later, I had to admit, the kid was right. We didn’t see too many people in shiny-blue snowsuits. Mostly they wore matching mauve, pink, blue, yellow or gray ski suits with little square bottle warmers velcroed to their backsides.

My son turned out matched up like an advertisement for Johnny Walker, with gray ski bibs and matching jacket, gray and mauve-rimmed goggles and mauve and gray eiderdown gloves. The kid had turned into a yuppy!

At ski school my youngest son, John, and three of my nine grandchildren, Sean, 13, Stephanie, eight..(or maybe nine), Chris, nine..(or maybe eight,) and I struggled with “pies”, (that’s keeping the front of the skis in a pigeon-toed position), stopping, (anyway you can,) and “getting up off the ground.”

According to ski types there is an acceptable way and a disgusting way to get up. I tried to master the first, which involves tucking your knees under you and raising yourself with your arms. During this process I noticed that a disproportionate amount of body weight had recently and mysteriously settled below my waistline.

I opted for the disgusting way and you don’t want to hear about it.

We survived ski school and by afternoon were on Schoolmarm Trail a gentle trail designed for grandmothers in blue snowsuits and small children.

I only fell four times! I was ecstatic! What did it matter that I took the slope in the pie position? I could ski!

We stood in line to buy lunch and another to get a table to eat at. The only time we had a table to ourselves the whole weekend was when Chris threw up during a rest period the first day. I guess it was the altitude.

The next day, still beaming over my accomplishment on Schoolmarm Trail, I scrambled up the shuttle-bus steps in my overstuffed snow suit expecting another day of success on skis.

But it was not to be. This mountain was different. This mountain was not kind. My “pies” did not hold. My skis kept crossing, sending me somersaulting downwards and crossways.! If they didn’t cross I built up too much speed and bounced from snow bank to snow bank!

I was miserable.

At this point my son, the Yuppy, turned into a cross between the Nordic Ski Patrol and Ghengis Kahn.

“Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail! Get up! Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail!”

Like Erma Bombeck, I tried to remember those days before he was born and why I had wanted a child. There must have been a reason but I couldn’t think of any.

I fell seventeen times before I stopped counting. It was getting very tiresome. I was getting very angry. My son was beginning to exhibit signs of embarrassment I hadn’t seen since he was a teenager.

I tried to look at things from his point of view.

Yes, it must be embarrassing to look down at your fat little mother, in her out-dated snowsuit, groveling in the snow. Yes, I could understand that. Thinking of his problems helped me put the whole thing in perspective.

Calmly removing my skis I announced that I would walk to the next spot on which I felt competent to ski. “When pigs fly,” I muttered into the zipper tab of my snow suit.

By the look on my sons face you would have thought I had suggested trussing up my grandchildren and using them for snowshoes!

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“I walk on mountains,” say I.

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“You said that, Boy. You’re wrong. I walk on mountains,” I said.

“It’s against the rules,” he says. “Nobody walks on the mountain.”

“You know what they can do with that rule?” I say.

He looked at me and started to say something but didn’t. I think he was remembering the time I threw the chair at him for torturing his sister.

I walked down the mountain.

…But I DID SKI! For one day..I DID SKI!

Can We Do It?

As George Washington lay dying, strangling on his own phlegm and unable to swallow, he agonized over the future of the new country he was so instrumental in creating. The week or two prior to his sudden illness was spent thoughtfully preparing a statement to the nation on the danger the new country faced. It was never to be completed.

Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the new government, imperfect and embryonic as it was, stood ready to crumble and slide back into the old European mold of violence and privilege.

It was, of course, a matter of money. Of who had access to it and who did not. Bankrupt and debt ridden, the new government had turned to the genius of Alexander Hamilton, a bastard son of a Scots, West Indian planter and whose claim to financial aptitude was as bookkeeper of a West Indian Island store. Within weeks Hamilton had hammered out a financial system that, with the help of Salomen and other financiers, allowed the new government to stay afloat.

A glaring problem with Hamilton’s system was that it pretty much invalidated the continental scrip in which the men who had actually fought the war had been paid,, therefore leaving them penniless, while the men who had benefited greatly by the money changing hands, as it always does in war time, gained exponentially. In short it was paid for by the poor who had already been robbed of most of their livelihood for the years it took to win the war.

Tom Jefferson, that radical dreamer, and the stubborn genius of the little James Madison weighed in hard against this usurpation of the wealth of the “common man” with limited success.

And thus the new government fell into two factions, The Federalists, who believed only those with access to capital had the intelligence and no-how to govern and the Democrats, who had great faith in “the common man.”

Upon hearing of a plot by the Federalists to wrest the control of government from the people who had fought for it by instigating an electoral tie, and forcing an appointment of one of their own, Andy Jackson, out in Tennessee, called up 100 of his militia followers and prepared to march. The governors of both Virginia and Pennsylvania threatened to take similar action.

Compromises were made, deals were cut, the fragile new government survived.

Down through the years the two-party system has continued its ebb and flow, the struggle between privilege and poverty, the powerful and the disenfranchised.

The adversaries names and their agendas have altered and clouded at different points in history but the basic questions have remained the same. Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves?

And secondary but of supreme importance is the question; Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick? Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?

Time after time in our history this country has been torn down the middle, seemingly hopelessly divided.

The question of slavery threatened to strangle the new government in its crib. Only by kicking the can down the road to the next century did the founding fathers reach agreement.

News of the French Revolution and its excesses set neighbor against neighbor once again. Thugs roamed the streets of our port cities filling the taverns, threatening private businesses, ready to club and annihilate those of opposing views.

The Indian question, later settled so violently and illegally by Jackson who, defying the order of the U.S. Supreme Court, drove the Indians from their rich Georgia farms, split the country once again. The Louisianna purchase was derided and railed against as being an irresponsible assumption of debt the new nation could not afford. The purchase of Alaska, known as Seward’s folly, after the Senator who accomplished the acquisition of that distant and frozen wealth, divided Congress and the country.

And when the chickens came home to roost on the question of slavery and the right of a state to override the laws of the federal government finally had to be settled, our worst nightmare as a nation came to pass in the Civil War, leaving scars still apparent in our political and social system 150 years later.

In both World Wars this country argued the question of "Who's Side Are We On?" In both wars the reaction of our large German immigrant populations and the capitalists who made deals with German munitions companies had to be considered.

In 1940 FDR was fighting to resist tremendous Congressional and industrial pressure to get into the war ON THE SIDE OF THE GERMANS. Henry Ford personally demanded that the President plunge the country into support of the AXIS.

Desegregation rewrote the political landscape and set up a social and political division that has lasted for decades.

We have always been divided. We have always suffered fools. Greed always corrupts. Mediocrity and ignorance have always been celebrated in segments of our population. Good has not always triumphed. Justice is often delayed. Do these current divisions and celebrations of ignorance and crippled vision exceed our capacity to sort things out?

I don’t know. I do know that the question is, as it always has been;

Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves? Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick?

Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?

Pay Back Time!!

MY adorable granddaughter locked her mother and her big sister out on the deck last night and they had to call 911. She stretched out on the couch with the remote and Louie the dog, totally ignoring their frantic efforts to get her to unlock and let them in. The fireman had to crawl up a ladder and in the kitchen window to gain access.

She will be two years old next week.

She has a wonderful mother and all her friends are telling her what a great story this will be for when she gets older. Ha! I am the mother of her father and I can tell her...but won't..it's just the beginning.

We pulled John out of lakes, off of crick banks, from beneath tractors and chicken coops, down from tall trees..barn rafters..porch roofs.. and all this before he was four.

Then he became harder to track..the woods called..the creek wandered..people kept going off and leaving him because he was "too little" and his only recourse was to follow. Well, he did grow up.

And now he's got Ainsley. Hahahahahah!!!!

The Polish, the Revolution and That Danged Troublemaker Archibald Campbell

Casimir Pulaski was a Polish nobleman by birth and a military commander who fought against Russian domination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When this uprising failed, he emigrated to North America as a soldier of fortune. During the American Revolution, he saved the life of George Washington and became a general in the Continental Army. He was a cavalryman. He died of wounds suffered in the Battle of Savannah. Pulaski is one of only seven people to be awarded honorary membership in the United States.

The Seige of Savannah was an encounter of the American Revolutionary War in 1779. The year before, the city of Savannah, Georgia had been captured by a British expeditionary corps under Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell. The siege itself consisted of a joint Franco-American attempt to retake Savannah from September 16, 1779 to October 18, 1779. On October 9, 1779, a major assault against the British siege works failed. During the attack, Polish Count Kazimierz Pułaski, fighting on the American side, was mortally wounded. With the failure of the joint American-French attack, the siege failed, and the British remained in control of Georgia until July 1782, close to the end of the war.

The battle is much remembered in Haitian history; the Fontages Legion, consisting of over 500 gens de couleur—free men of color from Saint-Domingue—fought on the French/American side. Henri Christophe, who later became king of independent Haiti, is thought to have been among these troops.

In 2005 archaeologists with the Coastal Heritage Society and the LAMAR Institute discovered portions of the British fortifications at Spring Hill. The brunt of the combined French and American attack on October 9, 1779, was focused at that point. The find represents the first tangible remains of the battlefield. In 2008 the CHS/LAMAR Institute archaeology team discovered another segment of the British fortifications in Madison Square.

A Color Blind Revolution

The following piece is totally plagiarized, mostly from Wikipedia which plagiarized various Colonial source documents.)

Crispus Attucks, a Free Black American, was the first American martyr in an event prior to the Revolutionary War itself. The son of a native African and a Native American of the Natick tribe, Attucks ran away from his slave owner and became a sailor and whaler. He learned to read and write and to understand the basic principles of different types of government.

Attucks attended meetings with other patriots to discuss taxes levied by Britain, and wrote a letter of protest to Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the Tory governor of Massachusetts. On March 5, 1770, at Dock Square in Boston, Attucks was with a group of men who were defying the British Red Coats. He was the first man to die in the ensuing skirmish, later called the Boston Massacre.

As the first to die for the American cause, he was buried with honor, and a monument on the Boston Common was erected to immortalize his sacrifice.

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Salem Poor, a Free Black-American, married, and twenty-eight years old, enlisted in a Massachusetts militia company commanded by Benjamin Ames. Poor was also engaged at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

He has been described as having been among the most prominent and meritorious characters at the battle of Bunker's Hill. Indeed, the historical painting of that scene, by Col. Trumbull, an eyewitness, done in 1785, gives Peter Salem , with other black patriots, a conspicuous place.

That he distinguished himself is certain; six months after the battle, fourteen Massachusetts officers, all of whom had taken part in the battle, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to reward Salem Poor as follows.

"To the Honorable General Court of the Massachusetts Bay: The subscribers beg leave to report to your Honorable House (which we do in justice to the character of so brave a man), that, under our own observation, we declare that a negro man, called Salem Poor, of Col. Frye's regiment, Capt. Ames' company, in the late battle at Charlestown, behaved like an experienced officer, as well as an excellent soldier. To set forth particulars of his conduct would be tedious. We would beg leave to say, in the person of this said negro, centres a brave and gallant soldier. The reward due to so great and distinguished a character, we submit to the Congress."
Cambridge, Dec. 5, 1755.

Was Benjamin Franklin a Socialist?

I am now hearing that the mandating of health insurance of individuals so that the more responsible no longer pay for the irresponsible who can pay but don't is "Un-American and a Socialistic blasphemy".

I wonder what Benjamin Franklin would have to say about this attitude toward mandating individuals to meet a common need. HHHMmmmmmm!!

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Under (Benjamin) Franklin's goading, a group of thirty men of Philadelphia came together to form the Union Fire Company on December 7, 1736. Their equipment included "leather buckets, with strong bags and baskets (for packing and transporting goods), which were to be brought to every fire. The blaze battlers met monthly to talk about fire prevention and fire-fighting methods.

Homeowner's were mandated to have leather fire-fighting buckets in their houses.

Incidentally, the one thing that Franklin said gave him the most satisfaction of all his accomplishments was his co-founding, by a combination of public funding from the city of Philadelphia and private donors, of Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital in the Colonies, "to care for the sick, poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia".

Well, Today IS Another Day

The baby chicks my friend brought for me to chick-sit yesterday, (just before the power outage, and only those who have nurtured newly hatched chickens know how upsetting that was) are doing well.

I am working on this artsy-crafty thing for the reunion and on Reunion Day I want all smart alecky comments on the results held at a minimum please!

Let’s just say it involved wallpaper scraps, spray-on glue and Styrofoam..

Now, in addition to all my socks being brown from the newly applied floor stain that all but one experts polled say will NEVER dry, (I’m betting on the one) and the seat of all my jeans sticking to everything I sit on, my fingers are now semi-permanently webbed with an “industrial strength” tacky glue! And the wallpaper scraps never scrapped out right to my measurements (nothing ever does) so it looks a little like a Home Depot decoupage thing..

I think I’ll go out and watch the baby chickens and relax.