My father, Bob Robertson
My sisters’ father, Carl Harper
My father, Bob Robertson
My sisters’ father, Carl Harper
What if the president of the United States showed up at the Emanuel AME church service in Charleston on Sunday?
What if we all showed up and prayed for the victims of the shootings Wednesday and an end to the hatred of hundreds of years?
What if we all showed up in Columbia and stood hand-in-hand at the state Capitol to ask that a symbol pernicious to most be taken from the flagpole?
Charleston is another turning point in our time. Facing evil probably never ends. But I believe many will show up.
OK, so we were hiding in the walk-in closet.
But it was one heck of a lightning storm and these things turn Coop into a panting, shivering, heavy-coated, tri-color mass of terrified Australian Shepherd. Probably what turned him into a stray in the first place — before he ended up at the animal shelter, all cut up by what I guessed was barbed wire.
This one sat right on top of us tonight, the latest in many in the 9 years since Coop moved in. A bolt hit close by and I smelled something burnt when I reopened the windows at 11:30 p.m.
It was a little stuffy in there — fortunately, the electricity and the AC were knocked out only for a minute — and there’s no escaping the thunder, but the closet is the only place in this house of big windows and no curtains where we can escape the lightning flashes. Cooper occasionally takes refuge in the adobe fireplace but it was no good tonight. My friend Isabel Sanchez had just sent me a roll of super-hero duck tape — apparently after reading my incisive entry on duck tape earlier in this blog — but even that wasn’t going to get us out of this jam.
I figured the best thing was to take shelter in the closet. I know some dog experts say don’t elevate their fears by doting on them, but Coop calmed a little. At least I got the trembling stopped. Fortunately, I already had a sneak-preview of a piece by my friend Peter Katel called up on my iPad and I read that through the storm as Coop burrowed in by my side.
And, so on to my amateur climate change theories — or maybe just climate weirdness. Anecdotal evidence so far this year: Snakes out a month late after that cool and super-wet May; summer-like clouds and storms starting a month early.
Academics will dispute this. I’m just saying. This is my experience from boots on the ground and butts in the closet.
Click on the little folder dealy-bob in the upper left hand corner for a “tag cloud” of previous posts.
Thanks, Winifred.
It was a dark and stormy afternoon.
Obituaries today for the famous editor John Carroll opened a window for me on late chapters of traditional newspapers and newsrooms.
The lede on the Washington Post obituary said this: “John S. Carroll, who guided the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky to Pulitzer Prizes and who was considered one of the most distinguished and inspiring newspaper editors of his time, died June 14 at his home in Lexington, Ky. He was 73.”
The New York Times led with this: “John S. Carroll, a widely admired newspaper editor who restored the reputation and credibility of The Los Angeles Times in the early 2000s even as he fought bitterly with the paper’s cost-conscious corporate parent, died on Sunday morning at his home in Lexington, Ky. He was 73.”
The sixth paragraph of the Los Angeles Times obit said this: “Carroll, a courageous editor whose instinct for the big story and unrelenting focus on the craft of journalism guided the Los Angeles Times to new heights, including a record 13 Pulitzer Prizes in five years, died Sunday in Lexington, Ky., of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a degenerative brain disease. He was 73.”
Both the Post and the New York Times went on to note one of Carroll’s best-known critics, David Simon, writer of the much-praised TV series The Wire and a Baltimore Sun police reporter who left the paper during Carroll’s reign.
This led me to read about David Simon. I came across a long piece by Mark Bowden, published in The Atlantic in 2008, called The Angriest Man in Television.
Bowden acknowledged that he was a friend of Carroll and that Simon had big criticisms of his story in The Atlantic. Bowden is critical of Simon.
I’d recommend reading each of these stories.
I came away admiring Carroll and fearing there are few like him left in the business.
Frustrated and depressed after a recent attempt to write about politics and the New Mexico Legislature, I decided to head out on my evening walk and, in the process of gathering my gear — house key, hat and headlamp — was reminded how reliant I am on duck tape.
The two — my frustration and tape — really have nothing to do with each other, but duck tape is handy stuff for pulling things together, maybe even loose thoughts.
At any rate, I resolved my frustration by starting to understand that I simply am tired of politics and impatient with politicians. 
I just retired after 40 years in the newspaper business, almost all of those years spent covering government and politics. I believe in the institutions and the process. But the rhetoric has worn thin.
Trying to write about it, I realized I was mostly expressing frustration with the tedious and difficult and probably inescapable ways of getting things done. Politicians are necessary, and many I respect. I just don’t have to cover them anymore.
I will watch and I will vote, I am telling myself. And I still might try the occasional potshot from my keyboard. I might even send some worthy would-be leader a dollar or two of my retiree chump change. I don’t like the modern brand of take-no-prisoners politics. I am tired of brinkmanship and, of course, platitudes. But I don’t think I can turn the battleships around.
I just hope I haven’t gotten lazy.
But I fear that’s maybe what’s suggested by all the duck tape around here.
My tools are gathering dust in the garage. I reach for duck tape for almost any kind of structural problem. I have gone far beyond using it for tears in tents and jackets and sleeping bags and rejoining the soles of ski boots — all of these now gathering dust, too. Now, I am going down the road of furniture and appliance repair.
But, you know, it works. And it’s quick if you keep it around. And colors make it all the more appealing. As a New Mexican, I am particularly partial to the turquoise made by none other than Duck brand Duck Tape.
As I researched my habits, I found a roll atop a can of pine tar on the kitchen counter. The pine tar was a gift I forgot to give to my sister Jane in Washington state, although it was a gag that she probably is tired of hearing about. She was famous once for using the sticky, blackish stuff for repairing and restoring anything, including her husband Bill’s white fiberglass boat. 
So, don’t feel bad about the pine tar, Jane. I have a confession to make.
I have a duck tape thing.
(Footnote: For those concerned about the usage of duck tape versus duct tape, here’s a fine piece published in Adweek in 2014).
Once upon a time, I was a teenager going to high school in Mill Valley, letting my hair grow long, smoking marijuana whenever I could, hitching rides in Twinkie wrapper-strewn cars with scroungy band members who became the Airplane, reading Kerouac and carrying a copy of Camus, heading to San Francisco for civil rights marches on the weekends and simply not seeing what older people thought were the great red and green menaces of commies and pot.
Hillary Clinton’s impending announcement for the Democratic presidential nomination made me think of this. I was reading a story about her mother in the New York Times and remembering that the daughter is 67 and I am nearly 66.
I also was thinking of JFK’s election at age 43, the “whiz kids” lining up with him, and the start of our disastrous, four-administration experience in Vietnam. And I don’t know what to think of President Barack Obama now sending 450 more military advisers — remember them? — to Iraq.
I never got U.S. policy in Vietnam — starting with Cold War view of the alleged red menace in Asia — and I’ve recently read arguments that ISIS is simply trying to suck us into full-fledged war in Syria. I have no interest in pot these days, and watching a younger brother lose to the temptations of drugs left me thinking that maybe “Reefer Madness,” although clearly weird propaganda, was most laughable for its production values.
This is not an endorsement. I’m just thinking that age 67 is not a bad thing, Maybe the bigger the window on time the better. Certainly I wish I had known at 43 what I know now.
Plus, just before the New York Times story, I had read an entertaining piece by my neighbors’ grown-up kid in my most local newspaper, the Sandoval County Signpost.
It was called, “Rafting the Grand Canyon with old people.”
It left me thinking about young people.
