Happy, Happy Talkin’ Happy Talk —

Talk About Things You Like To Do

Boston College documented

That the super rich aren’t

Happy,

But that hasn’t stopped the

Super rich from striving to be

Happy

By acquiring more and more

And more and buying votes via

Happy

Lobbyists and anxious members

Of Congress who will be very

Happy

With a lot more money in their

Coffers for elections that keep

Happy

The duped electorate who buy

The lie of Das Führer Hitler’s

Happy

Marketing guy who said that

In order to keep the masses

Happy

You need to tell them the lie

Over and over and over with

Happy,

Happy, talkin’ happy talk,

Talk about things you like to do.

Happy!

The Clear Glass Fish

My wife picked up a Baccarat FAD #876 signed, clear glass, slender fish at the church indoor garage sale for a song. It sits on a petite wood holder with really petite metal arms to cradle the sleek Ichthus from the ancient French glass factory.  The flesh of my index finger caught on a sharp edge of the tail and we knew why it was in the sale.  I sanded and sanded with ultra fine sand paper.  The nick didn’t come out but it was smooth enough for the fish to flip out of my hands and our son in Colorado caught him with his 8’ #5 fly rod from a fresh, freezing cold, fast flowing spring creek on a streamer made by our grandson the fly-tier.  Once again it sits on that petite wood and metal holder just waiting for our son and grandson’s trip to Michigan to see it displayed on the coffee table near the window closest to the waterfall and pond where our seven-year-old gold-fish have endured as many years and twenty-eight seasons and still thrive because we don’t allow fishing, even catch and release in the backyard.

Showing up for worship we were welcomed with “Happy Pentecost!”

Looking at each other we knew I had retired from ministry.

Staring at all the red shirts, blouses, dresses, skirts and even slacks, any socks?

we then looked at our muted, beige, khaki, olive-green clothes and

 thought, actually we kind of like this, this escape from the tyranny of the church year.

Standing outside the church on the steps for the annual Pentecost

Family Picture, with my left thumb, I teasingly turned down the waist of my

Eddie Bauer slacks to reveal red, silk underwear.  Fortunately, the pastor was

Standing in front of me, so only we will know…as the fire engine red, flame

danced in our imaginations following the benediction

and into coffee hour.

Showing, looking, staring, standing, we whispered to each other across the room, “Happy

Pentecost, darling.”

The following is a Blue Ribbon winning essay by our grandson, Braden James Dahl. Braden will be nine years old on June 18 and has completed the third grade in the Boulder, CO school system:

Japan

Japan is a fantastic and wonderful place!  It is an island on the Pacific Ocean!  It’s located in Eastern Asia.  Many animals are located in Japan.  One animal is a japanese bob-tail.It is a type of cat.  Japanese kids really like to have cats as pets.  The Japanese bobtail has a very short tail.  There is also a dog called Akita.  Children really like dogs too.  Their favorite dog is the Akita. There is also an amazing fish, it’s a blue puffer fish.  When it’s in danger it blows itself up like a balloon so other animals won’t be able to eat it.  In Japan this fish is named Fugu.  Some Japanese like to eat Fugu because it is very yummy. But it’s very poisonous.  Only specially trained cheifs can prepare fugu.  They know how to remove the dangerous parts!  Japan is a very intresting place.

Dad’s Love of Classical Music

Where did your dad get his love of classical music

Asked my wife who never knew the man but knows

Me.

I said I didn’t have a clue.  Immigrant swede kid

Orphaned at thirteen and passed, by the skin of

His

Teeth, tenth grade on the south side of Chicago,

Who had the audacity to apply to the University of

Chicago

And get roundly rejected.  He built his own stereo

System and bought the Readers Digest Classical

Masterpieces

And Light Classical Music which had short bio-

Graphical blurbs with drawings or photos of the composers to

Go

With the selections to which I listened in the music

Room in our home, which had been my bedroom

Until

My sister got married and moved out and I got

her room.  Right now I’m listening to channel

943

Light Classical to a really nice little French Im-

Pressionistic piece by (I thought Debussy until

I

Looked and saw it was) Ravel and was quite pleased

With myself until my wife asked the question to which

I

Had no answer.

Ruined Rites of Passage

He dreamed about his mother last night

and in the daylight he thought about

rites of passage.

For high school graduation, his sister

reserved a table at a nice place and

his mother said

sorry but your dad died and I don’t

have any money for a present. For a

play in college,

his sister brought his mother and

her critique was about as harsh as

the reviewer who

wrote nothing about his part. When he

graduated his sister bought him a class

ring and his

mother just looked at it covetously.

Four years later when he graduated

from divinity school,

his mother told him that the president

had told her that her son

had a long

way to go, when in reality,

the president said he would go

a long way.

When he got his doctorate, his

mother told him not to let it go

to his head.

It didn’t go to his head, but his

heart ached and twenty-seven

years later and

long after his mother had died

at a ripe old age alone and

not very popular

he still had thoughts of that

ninety-five pound, ninety-three

year old woman

who lives on way beyond her

years in some nightly rituals

called bad dreams.

Tell Me About Your Life, Dad

At sixty-seven, I still feel like a little boy when I think about my dad who died when I was seventeen.

How could I feel any differently?  My life with dad never went past that.

I’m living time standing still and then in reverse.  I’m getting older and he’s getting younger and younger and

I’m tracing him through photos back in time to when he was a little, blond-haired, round-faced boy in scratchy, woolen

knickers standing next to his father, my grandfather,

an incredibly handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed man with a long slim face, my dad’s little hand on my grandfather’s forearm.

Tell me about your life, Dad, my little boy. Tell me, my poor boy, how sad it was to lose your full-bodied, big bosomed, round-faced,

beautiful, blonde mother and then that tall, dark handsome man within a few short years of each other while you were just a little boy and left all alone.

Tell me about it, Dad, and maybe, just maybe, I can help save you the terror and help you cope, cope, cope so that you wouldn’t leave me alone and fatherless at seventeen.

From Here to Eternity or From Gas to Liquid to Solid and Back Again

After he made poisonous gas for his country for WWI,

a really brainy German Jew confronted with

the limit of food available for his fellow

citizens put his

considerable acumen to the task of concentrating

on what needed to be concentrated and as he

breathed in he realized most of the

air in his

lungs was nitrogen, so he huffed and he puffed

and he blew the nitrogen into ammonia

and he huffed and he puffed and

he huffed some

more and the liquid became solid and

ammonium sulfate nitrogen was

born and the Germans got

their food and

so did former, self-sufficient hunting-gathering

Native Americans and everyone in between,

and the population grew beyond

all imaginings. And

then the genius Jew figured out a way to make

fertilizer into insecticide to protect the crops

that were the food for all. But

he had made

that poisonous gas for his country long before

he left Germany for safer shores and the pseudo-

Arians/pseudo-intellectuals remembered his

insecticide sitting on the shelf, took

a work of

genius and simply reversed the process from

solid to liquid to gas undoing the good the

brainy German Jew had done and

gassed some of

his relatives and good friends and about six

million more who were then considered

highly expendable, the population explosion

being a nice

excuse if need be, when in reality, the Jews just scared

them to death.  From afar, did the genius provider

of the world’s food supply second guess

himself when his

genius was used to kill his kin by

nationality and blood?

Every Sunday morning

she would put on her robe and stole

and wonder if anyone

would show.

They did,

not for her, usually,

but for themselves and

presumably God.