So, I stopped for gas and one
of the employees asked if I had
paid the $491.72 bill for the new

tires I bought two months ago.
Oops. I said I thought so but
that I would ask my wife who

has a degree in accounting and
was a Human Resources Senior
Professional in the corporate

world. My gas station guy just
looked at me quizzically. She
said, “I’ll check.” She found

the invoice with scribbled in-
itials indicating the bill had
been paid. But the bank state-

ment differed by fifteen dollars
more, to which my wife stated,
“Ah, there’s the rub. Must have

been a few bucks to top off the
gas tank.” I, neither a car repair
guy or an accountant, asked

factiously if my wife wanted
a job as a bookkeeper at our
friendly neighborhood gas

station as she sat finishing
another beautiful mixed-media
sculpture, a product of her new

vocation. She looked up from
the final tricky stitch and just
stared at me quizzically. I rum-

inated. I’m such a fortunate guy
to have so many talented people
in my life like great service station

guys and someone who keeps
track of bills and someone who
makes beautiful art. I guess I just

have the knack of attracting excel-
lence in so many forms. But the
service station guys still need a

bookkeeper and, well, that’s not
one of my many talents. And then
I saw a quizzical look in the mirror.

Fifteen days till Christmas —
This year not much fuss.
We’ll buy on line
And that has to be fine.
Get the presents in the mail
Or sent directly without fail
To the grandkids out there —
In states somewhere.
Let’s hope Santa knows
And points Rudolph’s nose
In the right direction
While Santa sings his signature inflection,
“Merry Christmas to all
And to all goodnight,
GOOD NIGHT! ALL RIGHT!”

“We need a leader; we need a leader,”
the professor from Yale pleaded. Who
am I, a product of middle western,
public (and in full disclosure — some

parochial) education to say, “We need
a leader.”? But even the Ivy League,
the best and the brightest, say, “We
need a leader.” Oh, wait, wasn’t it Ken-

nedy’s “best and brightest,” who got us
into the quagmire of Vietnam when the                    
quagmired French told us, “Don’t do it.                          
You need a leader.”? And Kennedy listen-

ed and then took a bullet (I was just 
turning the corner from Halsted onto 
144th Street that dark day in 1963.)
near a knoll in Dallas and the hayseed

from a Texas teacher’s college was
sworn in on an airplane and listened to
“the best and the brightest” instead of
himself and the protesters shouted, “We

need a leader,” and their voices echo
today, when in forty-some days we will
have a leader — educated at a state
university, a public school of American

higher education — educated as a
leader in the great and wonderful way
we (thanks to the 2020 Presidential
election) still have today — in the

democratic republic. But in all honesty,
the Ivy League does sometimes gets
it right, like the time Harvard beat Yale
at something when no one was watching.

He held the wooden clothespin
in his hand, turned it over,
squeezed the ends and watched
the jaws open and close.
For a few seconds he played a
ventriloquist. He would
talk to the clothespin and the
clothespin would answer.
He wondered if the dog noticed
that his lips moved when
the clothespin talked. He thought
back to the days
when laundry was hung on a
clothesline in the back-
yard — sheets, pillowcases, white,
cotton underwear (Bobby,
When you start washing your own
clothes, don’t ever mix colors.
It should be all whites or all colors.)
He stood in the kitchen
watching his mother in the yard wear-
ing her summer dress and
her ubiquitous apron while hanging
all the laundry with wooden
clothespins. Then he closed the bag
of white cheddar popcorn
sealed it with the old, wooden clothes-
pin and returned the bag
to the pantry where it would join the
other wooden clothespin and
a blue plastic clothespin charged 
with                                                                                  keeping the snacks fresh —
the delicious, mostly multi-colored snacks
in multi-colored bags.

They stuffed it so far down in the down mattress
The mites might never find it.
They dropped it off such a high cliff
The dinosaur bones ran when it plunged through the ground.
They shot it so high in the sky
The Russian monkey wet its diaper.
After all that, in utter exhaustion, they slumped to the floor
And it perched on the fireplace mantel,
Looked them straight in the eye
And simply said, “I love you.” It happens.

Once again, we wait
for the micro-revelation
in all of creation
down to the smallest DNA
compactly embodied
in one human
so we could see and touch
divine DNA
to go with the macro-revelation
in all of creation
up to the biggest DNA
lavishly embodied
in all of creation
so we could see and touch
divine DNA
and then we stand in awe
of creation
and with elation
look into ourselves
and see and touch
and revel in
divine DNA.

*idea from a meditation by Richard Rohr

Why does Washington hate us?
What did we ever do to you?
We, at least, pay taxes. That’s a plus.
We are the middle class, working class, lower class through and through.

We are the bedrock of the nation.
I would think you would celebrate who we are.
We need to lift those in economic trepidation
not abandon them to feathers and tar.

This may go down as the meanest administration
trying to cut off much of any support or aid
while feathering corporate beds to our consternation.
Do you hope that we all will just fade

away so more dollars can go into national defense,
a faux answer to fears and insecurities galore?
Don’t corporations know our contribution would be immense?
With economic security, we would buy that much more?

But Washington has been bought and sold
by lobbyists with one percenters’ money to burn
and legislators, mostly big, fat, white and old,
wouldn’t know an honest day’s wages to earn.

But we, the bedrock of the nation, caused a rout;
we flexed our muscle, voted and threw the biggest bum out.

I mean really you have to give
the guy credit. The audacity of
hope translated into the audacity

of grift in just a few short years.
I mean really he’s on his way out
the door and he’s got this pay

to play pardons game going. I
mean really apparently he can’t
help himself. It’s what he knows

and he only knows and so at
least he’s being true to himself,
which, of course, is what every

dyed in the wool solipsist would
do, because there isn’t anything
else for them to do and maybe

for that, just that, we can have
a bit of pity after he’s out the
door and in custody, that is,

maybe….

sun shone brightly; wind
whipped from the west over dunes
down shivering necks.

She said that they are selling their souls
faster than Amazon is selling stuff on
Cyber Monday, Tuesday and for however
long Amazon is going to carry out the
gimmick, which reflects the wholesale
gimmicky forfeiture of anything resemb-
ling integrity. At least with Amazon, she
thought, you get something in the mail
that has some use and right now she is
wondering just what use there is to the
legislative, cyber sell-off of soul after soul.