Dog Days of Summer

Congratulations to author and friend Tom Rogneby and Family for the addition of your new black Lab pup to the family. Our newest rescue, Sunny, the yellow Lab, was a handful as a pup, but adding her to our family was the best decision ever. 

Cool Dreams

Ninety-seven degrees and 51% humidity. I had hoped to go to the run this evening, but it would be sweltering.

I wish I could go out for a quick flight, just to be alone with the cool wind. And the solitude. The air. That is a solitude, one that wavers slowly while you lean back against the leather seat and close your eyes and breathe deep. Head thrown back, you stick your hand out into the air, the temperature of a lover's soft breath, trailing your hand in the wind. Time strolls by like a day at the seashore until the sun melts into the horizon. All you have is the breeze to cool you quick so you can rest, to blow out of your eyes and your brain and your blood all that's making you hot and weary. 

As the light fades, the sky turns silver, like the patina of hand-plastered walls in an old home. There's only a few clouds remaining as storms blew through earlier, laying broad and placid as the palms of hands smoothing the turbulence from the air. From the trees, a flock of birds streams up into a sky that tears their calls onward and away like fragments of paper gently blown by the wind.

 As you dip down towards home, you'll smell the scent of the land, which will remind you of so many fields in the past, the smell fresh and green, a dense smell of grass as the sun sets upon it. The scent lifts off the landscape just as night covers the day, the signal that you're close to the ground, the strip straight ahead. The wheels skip off the grass as the new moon glimmers upon you, a solitary creature riding the crest of cool night air, exhaling with the exhaust of the plane, ready to be home, to sleep cool dreams. - B.

Finding Madeleine

A little touch of just fun for a change, for my author friend Bill Emery, who wrote one of my favorite "gumshoe" novels ("Murder One by WL Emery), and a hat tip to my co-conspirator in this long-ago adventure - G. 

[ Slow jazz piano plays under the crackle of a dusty radio. A distant thunderclap rolls in. A match strikes. Cigarette inhaled.]

NARRATOR (gravelly, wry):

She sits in the corner of my garage like a dame in a cocktail dress at a VFW hall — outta place, outta season, and dreaming of summer. That’s Miss Madeleine Car. A Triumph. Restored and refined, she’s all chrome curves and quiet sighs, waiting for the kind of open country road where the only traffic light is the sun slipping behind a barn.

But me? I drive a beast. A full-size, extended cab 4x4 — the kind of rig that blocks out the sun and flattens the foolish. In the city, where stoplights are more like polite suggestions and every commuter’s auditioning for Talladega Nights, you need mass, momentum, and a decent deductible. Especially in Chicago — the birthplace of the pothole slalom, where the streets are booby-trapped by the Department of Reflex Testing. You don’t drive here. You dodge. You dance. You pray.

Still, I feel safer in that truck than I have in most relationships. It’s paid off, it’s high up, and nothing — and I mean nothing — clears a lane faster than a redhead with no estrogen and a lead foot behind the wheel of a rolling steel fist.

[ Jazz fades. A lighter clicks again. The narrator exhales.]

Work cars? I’ve had ’em. Issued by the Office of Official-Looking Business. You drove ’em like you were chaperoning nuns to bingo — by the book, by the hour, and always ten under the limit. Especially if you saw a patrol cruiser in the rearview. You did not want to end up as the punchline of the week for getting ticketed in what we affectionately called… the Squirrelmobile.

Back then, I was part of a little outfit we’ll just call the International Sneaky Service — a rogue division of Secret Squirrel Ltd. The work was varied, the rules many, and the surprises often had four legs and a tail.

We were on a recon mission, sort of. Midday pit stop outside a diner shaped like a pancake griddle, when the guy we called Lucky — a career op with a busted heart and two years left till freedom — wandered over to the adjacent parking lot where a pet adoption truck was doing its civic duty. He came back with the look of a man who’d just glimpsed salvation in a wagging tail. Said he’d found an old Lab. Gray muzzle, brown eyes, nobody wanted him.

He was asking me. For permission. Me— his team lead. I looked around. My crew was all hard cases: a shot-up combat pilot, a jarhead who cried over fallen K-9s, and a probie who still had that new-spook smell. I gave the nod.

[Jazz fades into soft clarinet.]

Twenty minutes later, Lucky’s got a leash in one hand and a tail-wagging co-pilot in the other. But the ride home was tricky. We had one ride: the official Sneaky Service sedan. Probie’s eyes went wide like we were stuffing dynamite under the seat.

“You can’t put a civilian in the Sneaky car!” he whispered like J. Edgar Hoover was listening.

“Relax,” I said. “He’s not a civilian. He’s a canine. There’s no clause against dogs. No opposable thumbs, no subpoenas.” Besides, the mutt didn’t ask for hazard pay.

Still, Probie spent the ride curled up like a guilt burrito in the back seat, whispering doomsday.

“A DOG… in the SNEAKY car… we might as well be hauling a KILO of COCAINE!”

We got back. No fanfare. No sirens. But as we slid out of the car, our stealth mission met its first real danger: chemical warfare. The Lab had dropped a gas bomb in the back seat so lethal it peeled paint. We evacuated like paratroopers from a burning plane.

The next shift climbed in and recoiled like they’d discovered a crime scene.

“WHAT IS THAT SMELL?!” one of them bellowed.

“DEAR GOD, IT’S… IT’S ALIVE!”

We never admitted a thing. Lucky kept the dog. Named him Buddy. Buddy got a warm bed, table scraps, and a man who needed him more than he ever knew. And in those final years, that dog taught us a thing or two about loyalty… and strategic ventilation.

[ Music swells. Rain patters on a metal roof.]

That’s the tale, boys and girls. A Triumph waits in the garage. A redhead rules the road. And somewhere, in a quieter corner of the world, a dog once gassed a government vehicle… and got away with it.

[Cigarette stubbed out. Jazz fades to silence.]

 NARRATOR (quietly):

Justice wears many collars. Sometimes they’re leather. Sometimes… they drool.

 - Brigid

The Guardians

For Don and the crew at  

• Minutemen Coffee Company

Not only do they make the only decaf I'll drink (water-processed), but they also donate 30% of their profits to community First Responder and Veteran organizations. This chapter, from the International bestseller Small Town Roads, takes place after a tornado strikes the small community where the main character, police officer Rachel Raines, lives.

A Chapter From Small Town Roads - by LB Johnson - Gold Winner - Fiction (Religious Theme) Readers' Favorite International Book Award 

We don’t have to speak for our intentions to be read. Speech seems like a simple thing, a coordination of muscle and bone, nerves and tongue, something within us, just as the ability to control and guide both weapon and machine lay slumbering within the wrists and hands. We can stay silent, but the words are still there.

Man experiences things of great magnitude and cannot speak of them at all. An artist or craftsman creates something that was part of them, honed into art or machine. On completion, they say no words, they call no one, and they simply put down their tool or brush and stare at their vision, incarnate.

Veterans come home from battle empty of all words, bound together by only that identical experience which they can never forget and dare not speak of, lest by speaking of darkness, they are wrapped in its chains. First responders and law enforcement officers often relate as they too see so much death that never again, as long as they breathe, will they ever truly go to sleep alone.

Man experiences the mundane, the meaningless, tweeting and texting of it feverishly. It is as if, by doing so, inconsequential acts become more than the passing of time by the imminently bored. The words can uplift, but they can also sting like so many insects, their incessant noise, finally dimming to a hum.

We speak in different languages, and even when speaking the same language, we often don’t communicate, and when we do, we often don’t truly mean what we say. Promises can be nothing more than words and oaths, empty air, especially when election times near, wherein contests of fierce and empty oratory are somehow, retroactively, supposed to make us believe, any more than they can make us forget. 

We speak in the language of the past, chants unchanged in generations hanging in the air as God is placed into a golden cup, there underneath the eyes of angels. We speak in the language of silent prayer, calling upon God and our reserves, saying prayers without words, as we draw near our weapon as we enter what could be hell on earth. 

Words can support, they can heal. With gentle utterance after a nightmare in the still of the night, the soothing voice that smoothes the frayed edges of a day, with nothing more than the touch of supple prose. Words can injure, cutting like a knife, discharging like a spark of electricity; those words, from someone we love, marking us always with their wounding.

Words, a movement of lips and tongue that can cause laughter or pain; that can divide or conquer. Even in a nation where English is the official language, in parts of our country, there are whole neighborhoods where you won’t hear it spoken. 

Sometimes one doesn’t need to speak at all.

On any given day, tragedy and the earth collide, a flood, a tornado, or the plunging of a mighty machine into a peaceful neighborhood. The details differ, but the response is always the same. When disaster strikes, the land itself turns mute, and those that remain stand simply as silent instruments unable to make a sound. 

I didn’t fully understand that until the tornado came through our town last night, leveling several homes a mile or so north, leaving others, like mine and most of my neighbors, miraculously standing. We were lucky in that there were no deaths, the majority of the homes having basements and a good tornado warning system. But as we emerged from our basement, our house untouched but for a tree that had taken out the front porch, it was as if what I saw was a completely different town. 

Harry, my elderly friend from across the street, was on the sidewalk, Evelyn holding on to him, shaken but unhurt. Ezekiel and Miriam waved from down the block, his shop roof damaged but the structure intact. But just down from Harry’s home, Betty, the widow who lives there, stood in front of what remained of her house of 60 years. It was one set further back from the road than the others; the back portion of the house was completely missing its roof and some walls, leaving no photos of her failed dreams, not even a trace, where the wind rushed through those rooms. She cried silently, in the faded robe she fled in, as one of the neighbors came over and put her arms around her. Behind all of the homes across the street from us, there were so many trees downed, limbs flung through windows, shattering them as if they were thrown like a lance.

A young woman, her face growing older by the minute, stumbled from the walkout basement of the home that had sold when I moved in, a solitary figure, clutching only a stuffed animal, making a path towards what is known. Her brother, serving in the military, was allowing her to live there to care for the place while she attended a community college in a town not too far east of us. We beckoned her to come over to us, and though I am probably only ten years older than she, like Evelyn does with me, I hold her in a mother’s protective embrace. 

The older couple from the corner of the block lost a brand-new outbuilding they had painstakingly constructed behind their house. They could now only look at the work of their sweat and tears strewn about for miles by the force of nature, the wind thick and warm, like blood spilled, pooling around what little remained. A lone tree stood among so many that were downed, torn out by the roots, its nervous branches bent down as if hoping not to be noticed.

The first responders arrived, standing for just a moment, still and mute, hands unmoving beneath the invisible stain of what was, always, needless blood. For just a moment, they stopped, as if by whispered breath or the movement of disturbed air, what little remains would crumble.

They gathered, moving in and around, the firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and law enforcement officers, all wearing blue, black, and yellow. Such garments, solemnly worn, exchanged for once ordinary lives, worn as they shape something from chaos, coaxing that terrible blood wind to give up a sound, the forlorn echo of someone who might have survived beneath the carnage. I waved at an officer I worked with, seeing the relief in his eyes that I was unhurt, feeling like I should be doing something more to help. I realized that I was still in shock as I held my neighbor to me to comfort, as beneath my bathrobe, my precious child lay safe.

It’s surprising how much noise there was in the silence of hope, of grief, of disbelief. It was a sound that one could almost, but not quite, capture, receding like a dwindling song until there were only shadows and quiet. And then a small voice, “Can anyone help me?” low and faint as the Vespers of sleep. It came from a home that didn’t have a walkout basement, and a tree had gone through the sunroom. I had been there, and that would have blocked the basement stairs. Hopefully, the person is fine and can get out once the tree is moved.

Survivors and saviors moved without sound, sending a message as loudly to the heavens as if they were one voice. People were helped from the rubble, the injured assessed, the grief-stricken comforted as best as one could, if only by a touch that resonated straight to the heart, bypassing a brain that could not accept its fate. There were no Teleprompters, there were no cue cards, and there were no words for boundless grief and regret. There was no language for this, no word, no sound; it’s defiant and imminent life, holding on.

Winged Freedom

 In that hour, when night is calmest, Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist,  in a voice so sweet and clear. That I could not choose but hear.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I've several bird feeders outside my dining room window, each holding different types of seeds for various birds, a suet holder or two, and a birdbath filled with fresh water twice a day in the summer. I enjoy watching and listening to them while having my coffee in the morning.

Most of the birds that I easily recognize are the sparrows, my favorite, the Cardinal, and the occasional dove. There are ways to tell birds apart other than by looks or color. You can study what they eat and, of course, what they won't eat, by whether they sleep high up or snuggled down safe in a low covering, and by whether they eat more in the morning or at night. By the shape and size of the nest, if there is one. By their connection to the nearest body of water, if one exists, and to what degree that close body of water is necessary, to some of us, more essential than anything we could ever realize. 

Birds are meant to fly free, not be caged in. I've had a couple of parakeets over the years, but I always felt a twinge of guilt for keeping them locked up, even in a large cage. After my last two, I said "no more" and changed my mind about getting another when I moved. When you hold a bird in your hand, it closes its eyes in resignation. Trust. Or fear?

I once had a neighbor in the country who kept a quail in a cage just so he could hear the "bobwhite" of its call. I'd watch the bird in there, reminding me of a prisoner in a small cell in a prison camp, sending out small Morse code signals in hopes of someone hearing him and rescuing him. But no one came to rescue him, and I could only think of him growing old and dying there in that tiny cage, his prison cell, his will deflating, his spirit becoming drab as his prison uniform over time. I don't believe the man did it to be cruel; he simply thought, like others, that he could take a wild thing in and tame it, that it would only require the creature to make an adjustment in its lifestyle, to shift the center of its desire from one thing to another. 

One day, while the neighbor was away, I went over and quietly opened the cage door. The bird was gone in a flash, with the urgency born of imprisoned spring and the awakening of burgeoning truth; to itself, the sun and the wind, not the man who caged it.

The air is smoky this morning, the remnants of someone burning off some brush after we had a good soaking rain first. From the smoke, the birds escape up into the clear sky, up from the dense remains of green into the veined complexity of sky, where space and freedom interface. From aloft, they spot my feeder, simply looking for some shelter and some food, while keeping the freedom of their wing.

For isn't that what we all desire

 - Brigid

On Timing

Doc Holliday:  What did you ever want?

Wyatt Earp:   Just to live a normal life.

Doc Holliday: There's no normal life, Wyatt, it's just life. Get on with it.

Wyatt Earp: Don't know how.

Doc Holliday: Sure you do. Say goodbye to me. Go grab that spirited actress and make her your own. Take that beauty from it, don't look back.  Live every second. Live right on to the end. Live Wyatt. Live for me.   Wyatt, if you were ever my friend -  if ya ever had even the slightest of feelin' for me,
leave now. Leave now... Please.

Timing is everything they say.

In ballistics, indeed so. In the outcome of a day, even more so.  I missed a flight on a plane some years ago because I woke up that day sick to my stomach. All aboard died.  My stomach bug was not the flu but an unknown and unplanned pregnancy.

How many of us, unknowingly, missed a vehicular accident, a violent crime, or a whack from Mother Nature simply because we forgot our phone and ran back into the house, decided to linger over that nice new book in the store, or simply had too much, or too little caffeine?
Timing.

Timing can be good.  It can also be lousy. Missed trains, missed job opportunities.  Missed dreams.  I've heard from more than one guy friend that he was bummed the "girl of his dreams" had found someone. Yet, he never asked her out, couldn't express the feelings until it was too late, sometimes remaining silent for months or even years, growing only older of bone and pride.

Timing.

When we were kids, we ran around with time simply carried in our pocket, as dense and round as a coin, many coins that jingle as we ran. We are told by some grownups that we soon will have to grow up and leave childish dreams behind, but we don't listen because we have nothing in our experience to gauge their caution by, to give the portent of a structured future any range and meaning.  Besides, we are too busy just doing things that kids do, even if that means just sitting and waiting for hours for a fish to bite a tiny hook.

Then, seemingly overnight, we fell into that grown-up, carefully measured, and timed world, picking up our watch in the process. The dreams of childhood passed behind as we jumped on board a fast-moving train, losing our innocence before we even fully realized we possessed it.
As adults, we are governed by time, watches, cell phones, alarm clocks, and schedules.  Mechanical clocks and biological ones. We rush headlong into actions without consideration as if the sheer and simple arranged succession of days was not fast enough, constituted without capacity enough, so that weeks and months and years of living had to be condensed down into one moment, and it is today, now.  We, as a society and as individuals, are not able to closely watch and wait for that which is worth waiting for.  We feverishly work for things we do not need, and we vote without thought for those who promise us prosperity without effort, success without sacrifice.

Everything is based on now. Do not pass GO; do not collect $200. What do you mean you haven't got a date, a spouse, a house, or a baby? We need to talk to you about those extra 25 pounds.  Everything is on a time schedule, and it's not necessarily ours. Meals are microwaved, we speed date, express wash, Kwik-e-Mart, and you know what? We find that in rushing toward what we're supposed to want, we miss the things that can truly change our lives.

Reset your clock.

Just once, turn off your computer, cell phone, and social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and clear your calendar for a few hours.

Pick up that old firearm that may have been your Dad's or your Grandfather's and head out into the country.  If you don't hunt, then pick up a camera, a drawing pad, and a pencil.  But take some tool that will open up the wilderness to you and go.
Go out into that rapid and fading backcountry that is retreating as the tide is, walk out into that land that was ours, is ours, field and forest, bayou and orchard, grain and dust, harbor, and thicket. Go on out and decide what is important and what is not, among all the flotsam and jetsam in your life, where it is going and how much control you're going to give to others over it.

Go out into that land that still carries the tracks of those that crossed this nation to build, to grow; men, and women and children, bringing with them their tools and trades, goods and gear, by steamer, by wagon wheel by train, by big slow rivers that sometimes revealed no current and sometimes ran backward, running not to hide, but to dream, all the way to the ocean. It was a land on which a man ate only by the sweat of his brow, the ability to plow a straight furrow or chop down a limb without removing one of his own.  It was a land of milk and honey, steelhead and gold, which offered itself up on rare occasions from the earth as compensation for torn lives and broken bones, a payment which neither man nor his government proffered for the weak or the foolish.

Find a spot in this expanse of history and sit, taking it all in.

There is so much that might have been, could have been, wrong place, wrong time, so boundless in capacity is man's imagination to burn and scatter away the refuse of probability, leaving only yearning and dreams. No time, space, or distance can keep you from what matters, even if to the world, your dreams for your life and the kind of world you wish to live in are little more than transparent scratchings on depthless glass.
In his last months, I'd sit by my brother's bedside as the chemicals went into his body that would or would not kill the cancer that was consuming him with fire that bore no warmth. There was the steady whoosh from machinery in the room, the movement of unsleeping blood, and the intake of air. The room was simple, but its corners and edges held the quiet, complex lives of two very secret people who long ago escaped from a place that had only pain. There, in that season between thunder and any thought of rain, they found their own shelter with a new family.  Now, we had no season; the hospital room alternates day and night in a vacuum, in which light was only a hope.

As you sit out there in that countryside, think of these words. Stop and look and breathe. Pick up a discarded piece of wood. Think of what you have, what means the world to you, and what and who you will fight for as an individual, as part of a family, and as a citizen.
Then carve your name on that little piece of wood, carve the name of the one you fight for, or simply carve "Freedom", the letters bearing one clear, unfettered voice that sounds out, through the delicate attenuation of your actions, through the ringing bells of your worth, through the tone that is the weight of silent guns - I WAS here, I AM here, there IS still time.

Then go back home to your home and your memories.  A heart-shaped locket with a young woman and a man in an airman's uniform, months before the war, separated them for years. A shirt that could fit a thousand others but which only one wore so long that you will forever know its wearer by the simple feel of the fabric underneath your fingertips, the echo of sandalwood that clings to blue cotton. Go back to your present. A photo on the wall of those who still live to tell you their stories, to hold firm your past, memories that are borne on the air that you still breathe, invisible, yet essential as air itself. Go back to your future. A flag on a wall, one for which your loved ones gave up much of their life, or even life itself.

Go back and claim what is there while there is still time.
 - Brigid