Extended TDY

No family likes it when their soldier son, husband, brother, nephew goes TDY (tour of duty).  The separation is oh-so-noticeable.  My brother was an adventurous sort, though.  He loved to travel, and travel he surely did.  This final tour, the extended one, I imagine he will be doing what he did, what he loved to do,  his whole professional career: going on ahead, preparing the way for the safe, secure embarkation and arrival of others.

The sharp new tang of this, his last departure, tends to encroach and overwhelm the reality of the necessity to keep on keeping on.  I need to remind myself of my own duty here.  He surely would remind me, in tones and words not subtle or especially kind.

As I age and friends and family leave me behind, 1 Corinthians 15 has become for me much more vivid, real, and affirming.

John Sackett III is much more able now to perform his duty than ever he was here.  The perishable has become imperishable; the mortal, immortal.

A Fighting Man

“John’s Bar and Grill” is how my brother answered his phone last night.  The phone near his bed where he is hooked up to oxygen and a breathing machine in the new hospice in Tucson.

To our shame, my husband and I found it remarkable that brother Jay is so positive and upbeat.  He is a career military man, a soldier.  No warrior gives up; he fights the enemy to his last breath.  Jay is being a true soldier.

Stout heart won fair lady.  His wife Rose is determined, focused, loving, thinking only of her husband.  She shows up for him dressed as if going to a wedding or a fancy dinner party.  Hair, makeup, dress, high heels, jewelry.  She also is positive and upbeat in his presence.  She is a wife worthy of a warrior. She will not have her man fighting his last battle thinking he married a wimp.  She is there to support and encourage, to stand beside him.

Jay’s military buddies have been coming by to see him.  They talk about work, not about the obvious.

Jay is thinking of life, of others, of his duty.  His situation and attitude  resemble battle scenes written by Kipling about British soldiers pinned down by overwhelming enemy forces in India.  There is not a word of self-pity, regret, no bemoaning fate, no blaming other people or God.  What Jay presents is cheerful steadfastness while doing what God has set before him to do.

God Bless him.

Goose, Turkey, Goose, Roller Derby

Jay shot one Canada goose during the early season.  October 1st was the first day of turkey season.  Jay shot a nice 10+ pound hen.

Then yesterday was the first day of the youth weekend goose season.   Isabelle, Hawthorne and Jay went up back  early and came home with one goose!  I ate the liver, heart and half the gizzard for lunch.  Hawthorne got the other half.

Angela and Linda came for lunch.  Then, after supper, we went to the Ithaca Women’s Flat Roller Derby final game of the season.  The Suffer Jets won.  (Check out the video of the Sept. game to see a little bit what it is like.) There were 800+ people at Cass park rink.  I did not see anyone I knew other than the ladies I came with.  Over 30 years in Ithaca and there is still a new demographic to be explored! The Ithaca College Pep band played.  What a hoot!

Father of the True Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug died at age 95 of cancer complications this past weekend.

He was the living scientist I most admired.

From a WSJ article:

“Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America’s Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.”

Due to Borlaug, my 70’s undergraduate classes in international agriculture were full of hope on the one hand, because his pioneering research in plant breeding led to underdeveloped nations being able to feed their growing populations instead of suffering mass starvation,  and cynicism on the other, since shorter plant stems and use of chemical inputs brought their own problems.

But as he is quoted in the WSJ: “Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

In July he had written an editorial to the Wall Street Journal.  An excerpt:

“Even here at home, some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food. People should be able to purchase organic food if they have the will and financial means to do so, but not at the expense of the world’s hungry—25,000 of whom die each day from malnutrition.”

The WSJ obituary and  this article are best at describing who the man was.

Norman Borlaug on Why Famines still exist.  Hint: it is not because there is too little food.

A Real Circus

Saturday evening, thanks to a Very Generous Friend, three of us went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria in Syracuse.  What an enjoyable, eye-opening, entertaining experience!

It was my first circus.  The sheer masterful physicality and incredibly complex technical aspects were more intriguing and as beautiful as the  fascinating costuming and music.  Colors, textures,  light and shadow,  layers upon layers of movement and sound.

Gymnasts, singers, musicians, contortionists, fire spinners, trapeze artists, silly skits, graceful, beautiful bungee cord and metal hoop dancing, a blizzard of paper snow.

I bought the Alegria DVD to share with family and friends.  It was filmed in Sydney, Australia a few years ago in a very large space packed with people.  We have watched 30 minutes of it so far.

Truthfully, what we saw and experienced Saturday was as good as and in most ways better than what is on record.  It seems to me that this show has been allowed to change and morph and develop as time and people have changed and moved.   Here is a review from the Albany show.  Alegria has been performing for 25 years!

The performers were obviously so pleased to be performing, so happy to be in front of an appreciative audience.  They were young, in their first physical flush, and proud that they could amaze and entertain and be paid to do what they enjoyed.  They were also mostly not from this country, so one wonders about available opportunities and freedoms here versus where they are from.

I wonder if Cirque du Soleil is the place snapping up new circus-type talent in the world today?

The set was huge, and complex.  Safety was in the forefront: I think one kind of clown (ridiculously costumed and masked persons wearing lots of extra padding to make them look fat and old) served the same function as clowns in a rodeo: they were there to ensure and help with safety.  The skills exhibited were near Olympian level.

To think everything gets broken down, packed up and moved to a new city on an almost weekly basis!  Feeding everyone, washing costumes, hauling it all, practicing in between times, what an undertaking.

What I Did at State Fair

-ate a corn dog for the first time

-ate from a deep fried blooming onion

-saw the butter and sand sculptures

-listened to part of a cooking pot salesman’s demonstration spiel

-watched two mimes who looked like a white marble king and queen and the numerous people who wanted their picture or their childrens’ picture taken interacting with them; most of the little children wanted nothing to do with totally marble white strangers

-followed two colorful costumed  “riders” on two tall, large, long, and highly colored and feathered dinotopian-like birds in order to figure out that they were in fact men on stilts with elaborate puppets.  Wonderful!

-saw the sheep; my favorites were the Suffolk market lambs; I raised Suffolks when I was Isabelle’s age

-saw the goats and llamas and pigs and the vast sows with tiny cute piglets

-bought soap at the agricultural museum

-saw the chickens, birds and rabbits; this barn in particular has had the number of entries fall by over half in the past few years; the winning grand prize chicken is a Gold Campine pullet

-walked through the dairy and horse barns

-admired the flower arrangements by children in the Horticulture building

-admired the live hawks, falcons and owls that were on display outside the hort. building

-saw the winning quilts, knitting and other assorted handicrafts

-walked through the wool booth

-enjoyed Donna’s company

This was in the three hours between the public talks and the presentations of awards.

Beautiful and Excellent

Those are the words the girl and I will be studying for a while.  They describe the public presentation recitation she gave at the State Fair yesterday in the State 4H Public Presentation competition.

This past spring she was required by her 4H leader and her mother to choose a subject and style of participation for the 4H public presentation in this county.  After exhaustive, excruciating deliberation she finally decided to choose four poems about horses from an anthology of horse poetry she found at the book sale and give a recitation.

A recitation includes an introduction, descriptions and discussions of what you are reciting and a conclusion.  She did all the writing and preparing with a modicum of motherly input.  She did well enough at the local level to go on to area presentations and did well enough there to be chosen for state level.

She had to present her recitation at the local, little fair in July where she received some good advise from adults.  A former State Gold Medal winner came and worked with her one afternoon on gestures, of which she had none.

She worked on her speech and wrote it out incorporating the gestures.  I had minor editing input.  I did listen and time her presentation frequently towards the end.  She gave it to relatives and friends–anyone we could coax to listen to her.

Yesterday about noon she gave her presentation in an incredibly noisy area, wearing a head mic for the first time in her life.  She did a superb job.  So superb that she was awarded a gold on her certificate.  It is the equivalent of a blue ribbon.  Her point total was only 6 shy of a perfect score.  It was totally unexpected.  Several persons who heard her in July said they were astounded at the progress she had made in the interval between then and yesterday.

There are three days of presentations for students across the state.  The last day is Saturday.  Then awards will be handed out for excellence in the whole population of  presenters this year.

She did so well yesterday she will not be allowed to come back at a state level with a recitation ever again, but will have to choose from other forms of public presentations: speech, demonstration, illustrated talk, or dramatic presentation.