Don't it make my brown eyes blue

I want to live in a blue state. For a while, West Virginia went from red to pink, but this morning it's red again. And I just read an article that says that many West Virginians won't vote for Obama just because he is black and/or he's not endorsed by the NRA.

Now I like living in this beautiful state, and I at least admire the honesty of those people who speak their minds and say flat out what many people think but won't say. It's disheartening, but there it is.

Blue is my color. Blue skies. Bluebells. The Blue Man Group. Bluer than blue. True blue. Blue bayou. The blues. And the polls all tell me that at long last, blue will prevail a week from today. Still, I'm afraid of saying it out loud. No yard sign. No bumper sticker. It's almost as if I fear that voicing my support, my hope, will jinx the whole thing. Two close elections in 2000 and 2004. Two terrible disappointments. Will I finally be able to let out the breath I've been holding for eight long years?

On election night, I want to be in a blue state. But I'm just a few miles from Maryland, from Virginia and from Pennsylvania. And Shepherdstown is about as blue as it gets. That will be close enough for me.

Let the shoe be on the other foot. Let those who have had the power for so long know how it feels to watch from the sidelines. But then let there be a time of making up, of realizing we really are all in this together, of beating our swords into ploughshares, of forgiveness and reconcilement. If blue triumphs over red next week, just remember if you're red that we can feel your pain. We've been in solitary confinement for a long, long time. Maybe we'll finally see blue skies again.

I love this poem.

BRING me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!

Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy
Among astonished boughs;
How many trips the tortoise makes,
How many cups the bee partakes,—
The debauchee of dews!

Also, who laid the rainbow’s piers,
Also, who leads the docile spheres
By withes of supple blue?
Whose fingers string the stalactite,
Who counts the wampum of the night,
To see that none is due?

Who built this little Alban house
And shut the windows down so close
My spirit cannot see?
Who ’ll let me out some gala day,
With implements to fly away,
Passing pomposity?

Blown away

As he got older, our dad would often wonder aloud where everyone had gone. A noisy household had turned into a place where you could hear yourself think. While our parents were working long days to keep all of us going, we were slipping out the door to start our own grown-up lives, so that by the time Dad could break his stride and look around, we'd all sort of disappeared.

Seemed we'd all been blown away -- or, as he would say, "scattered to the winds." And me? I couldn't get away fast enough.

Which makes it all the more ironic that here I sit, in a house quiet enough that I can hear myself think, wondering where everyone has gone.

Oh, hi!

Sir Thomas Snugglebottom checking in! Lest my outfit makes you fear I've joined the Klan, never fear! I am simply relaxing in my hooded towel, squeaky clean after my bath.

Oh yes, I have to report my misfortune in having a mother who insists on bathing me on a regular basis. If it were up to me, I would skip that nonsense. Doesn't she have anything better to do than harass babies?

Well, I must be off. I have spit bubbles to blow and diapers to dirty. Cheers!

Hi All!

An update from Miss Cecilia hasn't happened in a while and I feel like I haven't had much interaction with you all as I should. So here I am, giving a quick update and just saying hi. I'm around less and less as the school year picks up. I am stage managing Anything Goes, the school musical, and playing field hockey. I'm completely wiped all the time but I'm generally happy. My world would be perfect if Kate was here but since she isn't I'm making due, although recently it has been very hard. I miss her a lot. Kevin and I are still getting along and there might be a visitor on Thanksgiving. Allison (my aunt) is now living with us with her two boys and driving me slightly nuts. I'm drinking bunches of hot chocolate, and trying to get some sleep. That is my current life, how is everyone out there.

In the soup

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It's soup time! But the only soups I seem to know how to make are beef vegetable, chili, and split pea, so I need help and recipes.

Can't make a decent chicken soup, no matter what. The chicken gets all string and stew-y. And what's the secret for great potato soup?

If you have suggestions, bring 'em on. Oh, did I mention that I don't do exotic or complicated? I just want plain, hearty, throw-it-in-a-pot soups. I've developed an allergy to cooking.

Wall Street meltdown

I'm venturing way out on a limb here, no doubt showing my ignorance of all things financial. And it's no time to make light of what's going on in the economy, but has anybody else ever wondered about the sanity of all these guys on the trading floor of the stock exchange? They always look so tortured, so serious -- like they all need to take a valium and go sit down somewhere.

Of course now we're seeing them with their heads sunk down, angst written all over their faces, but even on a good day, I think they are a strange sub-species.

And another thing: What is it with the clapping and the bell ringing when the market closes? Even when everything is tanking, people crowd around the closing bell and clap, for heaven's sake. What the heck?

It's hard for me to wrap my head around the latest financial crisis, even though I know it's big-time payback for all of the prosperity we've enjoyed while people are starving in many places all over the world. It's just that the people who will have the sky falling on their heads probably don't even own stock. Those suspicious white men in suits have been playing high-stakes poker with our lives, and I just can't imagine that any of them are going to bed without supper tonight.

I suspect none of us will escape unharmed. Without knowing just why, I've always thought "globalization" was just code for a lot of fat cats getting fatter. Now I find out that banks in Iceland are intertwined with banks in West Virginia. Who knew?

I take heart in knowing that our parents weathered the Great Depression, and I am ready to tighten the belt and do what I can. What else can we do, we peons of what the politicians quaintly call "Main Street"?

If it weren't for the collateral damage -- the innocents who will bear the burden, the trusting people whose money was being wagered -- I would find poetic justice in the meltdown on Wall Street. I leave you with a unusual shot of the famous Wall Street bull. I just can't resist.

538 Dot Com

Here's my favorite election-related link of the day: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/. The guy who runs this site, Nate Silver, is a sabermetrician (baseball statistician) and avid poker player. He was on the Colbert Report this afternoon, and it turns out that he is also a moderator on Mitch's on-line poker website. His models aggregate all the existing polls to produce a projection of the upcoming election results (methodology).

The number 538 is significant, of course, because that's how many members there are in the electoral college.

Our Ajax Rock political compass

With the presidential election right around the corner, I thought it was time to pull together our readers' responses to the political compass "test" we all took some months ago and see where we all stand.

Try as I might, I could not reproduce my beautiful, plotted graph online, but I'll do my best to sum things up.

Two people landed in the Authoritarian Left quadrant: Rita and Brother Don. But they were not extreme. That means that both of them are a little bit socially liberal and a little bit economically conservative.

We have one family member in the Authoritarian Right: Don K. It's interesting, though, that he's in good company with both McCain and Obama in that section. In fact, all of the presidential hopefuls except for Dennis Kuchinich fall in that square, with our current president being the most extreme and leaning toward fascism. Big surprise. Of course, we don't know if any of them actually took the quiz, but their results are based on their stated policies.

Again, we have one family member in the Libertarian Right: Mitch, of all people. He is very liberal on social issues and very conservative on economic issues. Interesting to note that he is a "wealth manager" for TIAA-CREF, which might explain his right-leaning economic viewpoints; but he's right down there with the rest of us liberals on the social scale.

Boy, that lower left quadrant is crowded! Along with Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama are a whole bunch of Ajax Rock readers: Laurie, Beth, Nan, Libby, George, Johnny, Cecilia, Don K. the Younger, Lois, John, Ms. Moon and Patti. But there is a lot of variation in the "liberal" crowd. George, for example, is near the middle socially but is surprisingly (to me) liberal economically. And John is nearest to the center.

In the "respectable left" are John, Laurie, Don the Younger, Patti and George. Loie is nearly in the middle of that box, being less liberal economically than socially, where she's quite open. Cecilia, too, is still in the sort-of-middle. Then we have the group of extremists in the bottom left, led by Beth as the most socially liberal of all of us and Suzi as the most economically liberal. The other leftists are Libby, Johnny, Ms. Moon and Nan. Best friends Nan and Suz are the most extreme economically, leaning dangerously toward both anarcharism and communism. Yikes! Guess I really am out in left field.

Now Beth may test as the most socially liberal of all, says her mother proudly, but she also let it slip that she thinks she would be the perfect benign dictator, deciding who is worthy of living and who should be, uh, done away with. So there may be a tad of latent fascism there. I guess she figures that she's so tolerant that if she can't make room for someone, that person has to go.

Nary a one of us is as conservative as John McCain, so my thought is that nobody has any reason to vote for him, but I suspect that's just my wishful thinking. Let's just all be proud that nobody we hang around with was anywhere near Hitler or Stalin -- or George W. Bush, for that matter.

Now there's a good reason to make sure we all get to the polls on election day.

In a pickle

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Our Loie is in a pickle. One minute she wants to give Louie away, and the next minute she's cooking special food for him.

When she reaches the end of her rope, he acts all submissive and contrite, appealing for another chance to prove he's a fine companion.

Which he is. When he wants to be. Problem is, he's a d-o-g, and he has these canine instincts, especially when it comes to food and guarding his precious bones. He doesn't understand the basic rule: Never bite the hand that feeds you.

But, see, we were taught to be responsible, and that includes being responsible for our bad and iffy decisions and making our own bed and lying down in it. How is it that some people seem to just cut their losses and walk away so easily? That just isn't the way we were taught to do things. We hang in there. Take care of things. Solve our problems or learn to live with them.

But one time when Lois and I were little, we were allowed to have a dog -- a beagle mix named Mr. Chips that we called Chipper. He wasn't allowed inside, so he was always barking and muddy and unruly. And it became clear that he needed a happier home. Our dad told us that he found him a nice farm in the country where he could run free. It was nearly 50 years later that I learned that Dad had just driven him out in the countryside and turned him loose, figuring he could hunt and fend for himself. Lois and I felt betrayed.

Maybe that's why she can't let Mr. Loo-Boo go. We still feel guilty that we didn't take better care of Chipper, that our first dog was thrown out on the side of the road like a beer can. Being responsible means paying a very steep price, doesn't it?

The captain of our ship

James Audren Simpkins
1912 - 2007

It's nearly one year since we lost our dad (grandad or great-grandad). One thing is for sure: He fought the good fight. Stood his ground. Never compromised his principles. And except for the last nine or ten months of his long life, he lived it on his own terms, no matter how maddening that could be for the rest of us sometimes.

Just a scrappy kid from the coalfields of Southeastern Ohio, he made something of himself. I'm not sure he ever lived up to his own biggest dreams, but he left a lasting impression on a lot of people. He could be larger than life, and he could be stubborn as a mule and dictatorial to a fault. But he could also spin a yarn, dance a jig and appreciate the simplest things in life with relish.

And he was always "Peck." Never tried to be something he wasn't. Never went along with the crowd because it was the easy way to go. And although I used to think he was dead wrong on a lot of things, more and more, as I got older, I realized he got it right.

And another thing. He guarded all of us as fiercely as a lion. He still does.

Which one of us doesn't hear his admonitions, his stories, his strong opinions being expressed, even now?

I hope he really is at peace. I hope he knew what a difference he made. I hope he knew how much we loved him. I hope he is knows how much we all miss him.

It is Alive!

As a habit I came back to Ajax Rock to just check up, you know, see how everyone is doing. The past few times I have done this there has been nothing. No new post, no new comments. just nothing. It felt as though the blog had ended, as though it was dead and gone. The numbers were just depressing against the 54 one month, the 2 posts of another was pathetic. So, imagine my surprise when, yet again, i came to visit and there was life! Even two posts in the last two days. I am overjoyed to know that there is movement on the rock again, keep it alive, sometimes it is the only connection we have left.

This is Louie

For those of you who haven't seen my dog, Louie, here's a great shot of him. Word of warning. Don't get depressed if you have a Shih Tzu. They don't come over and snuggle up to you to make you feel better or give you kisses. Oh, no. They see their chance and attack if 1) they sense you're omega that day and not alpha, and 2) you try to pick them up when their raw chicken bone is nearby.

Yep. Full on attack is what I got. I felt like Roy Horn but with no audience, and I don't kid myself that he was grabbing my hand to hld it lovingly. Do I need this? What kind of dog would be NICE to me even when I'm omega instead of alpha? I still miss Hazel, the crazy Aussie I had for 3 weeks but had to return to her foster home when she wouldn't get it my little car (only the big van) when I had to go to the motel, and she went into complete panic if I left her. Hazel would not have attacked, mouth wide open, coming down on my hand, when I was a bit down. No. She would've brought me the bone to make me feel better. At least I like to think so. Louie is in the dog house. Any alpha person out there who wants him, raise your hand. And don't tell me I need to train him better, and remember to stay ALPHA!! Yeah! BIG ALPHA DOG ME!! Woof woof! If there's one more thing I "need to do," I don't want to hear about it.

Holding the rope

Can there be many things more important than holding the rope for someone you love who is struggling to get back to shore?

It was Loie who first used that phrase in conversations with me when she was far away and I was foundering on the rocks. Sometimes it's the only -- and the best -- thing we can do for those we love. Many of our biggest battles rage within, and our family and friends stand by helplessly. But they have an important job: holding the rope.

Lois and I are both fighting what she calls "the black dog," having a hard time counting our blessings and feeling guilty that we can't rise to the occasion. We don't trust the drugs but reach for them anyway. We look and look for the bootstraps and wonder where they are. We share trials and hopes. Any victory or joy of my loved ones lifts me up. Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you.

But never underestimate the power of holding the rope.