Sunday, June 29th, 2003

Aye, me lassies and laddies, and 'tis the finest of days here that would probably be chosen as the spot to come together should all the goddesses and gods that e'er were decided to have a meeting - beauuuuuutiful Dakota, where the day 'twill be absolutely gorgeous. Aye, and 'tis a fine morning because the Twins responded to my telepathic urgings and came through with a win last night over the Brewers of Milwaukee - and gained a game on KC, who lost to St. Louis - the Twins are now a single game back in the Central Division that they lead by four not that long ago. Don't let up, boys! Get in there this afternoon and win your first series in five - you can do it, boys! Just get a grip on yourselves!

And 'tis a great day because I managed to get some work done to prepare for Chautauqua's visit to the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center at Washburn - and the reconstructed Fort Mandan on the banks of Missouri where Lewis & Clark wintered in 1804-1805 - a big tent will set up in the state for the twenty-fifth summer - 'tis the silver anniversary of humanities scholars put on a bit of costume and speaking in the character of famous dead Americans in preparation for a discussion with the audience - this year Chautauqua is hosted by Dolley Madison, the first lady of the United States for sixteen years (she served as widower Thomas Jefferson's first lady as well as for her husband) - and on successive evenings at Washburn at 7:00 p.m. CT following great local entertainment by area musicians and singers, scholars will present William Clark on Friday, July 11, Tecumseh on Saturday, July 12, York (Clark's slave, who went to the Pacific and back with the Corps of Discovery) on Sunday, July 13, John Jacob Astor on Monday, July 14, and Sacagawea on Tuesday, July 15. There's going to be a teacher institute and dozens of others programs, including presentations by area artists funded by the state arts council. If you're within a few thousand miles of Washburn, you owe it to yourself to get here for Chautauqua - aye, and 'twill be grand, as the Irish say. Members of the Humanities Council, the nonprofit organization that I try to serve, the group that revived Chautauqua here in North Dakota a quarter-century ago, will be meeting in Bismarck and going to Washburn as well. Six members of the governing board of eighteen will be retiring, and we'll we welcoming six new members. 'Tis our tradition to honor retiring members with song, parodies of such tunes as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," this year's tune - this year I've been working on six, an all-time record number. Ah, but had I a fraction of the gift of today's birthday boy, Frank Loesser, born on this day in 1910. Frank left the middle world in 1969 at the far-too-young age of fifty-nine - but before he did, he wrote some of the great lyrics and tunes of American popular culture. His family maintains one of the snappiest web sites I've ever seen - inviting and elegant -- have a look for yourself. Today's drink is V8's Smoothie, Citrus Blend, and Frank gets a big swig in memory of those great musicals like Guys and Dolls, his World War II songs like "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," and the great songs he wrote long before he embarked on his career of writing musicals - standards like "Heart and Soul," and one of my very favorite standard tunes, "Slow Boat to China" - Bing Crosby and Mary Martin (I think) sing it as you remember the lyrics:

I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China,
All to myself alone.
Get you to keep you in my arms evermore,
Leave all your lovers (lovelies)
Weeping on the faraway shore.

Out on the briny
With the moon big and shiny,
Melting your heart of stone.
I'd love to get you
On a slow boat to China,
All to myself alone.

There's a long story implied in these short verses, and they're the weest bit corny - plus, we have an idea that the fellow or gal singing this isn't doing very well at romance when he/she has to compete for the affection of the found so attractive. But still and all, 'tis a snappy tune.

Frank's World War II songs include the most famous - "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." It sold over two million records and one million copies of the sheet music - Loesser donated all royalties to the Navy Relief Society. The message needs no gloss - praying is fine, but we need bullets to save our butts:

"Praise The Lord, and pass the am-mu-ni-tion!
Praise The Lord, and pass the am-mu-ni-tion!
Praise The Lord, and pass the am-mu-ni-tion and we'll all stay free!

Praise The Lord, and swing in-to po-si-tion,
Can't af-ford to sit a-round a'-wish-in'
Praise The Lord, we're all be-tween per-dition
and the deep blue sea!"

Loesser's whimsy is wonderful - take for example these lines from the song "That Ain't Hay (That's the USA)" from the motion picture Sis Hopkins of 1941:

See the man, with the hoe,
Making the fields of cabbage grow?
Well that poor old hired hand
Put the cabbage all over this land.

The song bespeaks a different time in America, a time when everyone was involved in a common cause - and it probably was the last time citizens were so united - in spite of no few sorry mistakes and breaches of the terms of the social contract, including the outrageously socially injustice internment of Japanese Americans and the racist treatment of African Americans. Both Japanese Americans and African Americans served with patriotism and loyalty both at home and abroad, nonetheless. So did the American Indian, including young men from the reservations of North Dakota.

Jerome Kills Small, a great kola from Vermillion, South Dakota where he teaches at the University of South Dakota, interprets the great Shawnee leader, Tecumeh, for this year's program of the Great Plains Chautauqua Society. Jerome is Lakota - and a singer and drummer. He has put together many of the honor songs written for Indian soldiers in World War I and World War II - a fascinating program he will present at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 13 at Washburn, North Dakota, on the grounds of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. Kola, it's worth a round-trip from Australia to hear this program alone. Jerome is followed that evening at 7:00 by Chautauquan Charles Everett Pace (who has been coming to the state for a dozen years with the Great Plains Chautauqua) as York, the childhood companion and slave of William Clark whose experience presages that of the black American soldiers and airmen of World War II. York was treated much differently on the journey to the Pacific and back than he was before or after - during the journey, he was a member of the Corps who bore arms and was treated, more of less, as an equal. Afterwards, he became a slave once more - Clark actually beat him for impudence when York suggested he deserved better than slavery. And we know, of course, that the years following World War II were among the darkest in terms of racist treatment of returning African American veterans. Similarly, returning American Indian veterans were treated by non-Indian North Dakotans as second-class citizens at best.

In many ways, Chautauqua offers the best of the humanities in a non-threatening atmosphere that allows for the kind of give-and-take talk necessary for us Americans to learn to respect each other and to learn from each other. Totally unscripted, the evening programs with scholars are, in essence, a press conference hosted by a gracious conversationalist, Dolley Madison, who introduces us to the historical figures and moderates the questions we ask of such as Tecumseh. Following that, audiences have the opportunity to meet and talk with the scholars who interpret the historical figures - in short, scholars remove their wigs and come back to our time and place to discuss the historical figure's values and ideas. If yo have never experienced this time travel to the past for a press conference, you have missed the magic of what public humanities can be.

Back a quarter century ago when I and members of my Council contemplated bringing the humanities to North Dakotans in the summer, we had been moderately successful with using tents to attract folks to tradition humanities lectures and presentations. Tents don't belong to anyone in town as do bank hospitality rooms. Tents give the feel of having fun - as well as the opportunity to learn something. We had borrowed the concept of Chautauqua, thanks to my old friend Warren Henke, an historian who knew a good bit about the history of the historical Chautauqua, and to my mother, Hulda, who turned ninety this past year, who remembered with great fondness the chautauquas she had attended as a young girl in Oliver County. But the idea of scholars of the humanities speaking in the first person - something that is now emulated in more than twenty states and has become nationally prominent as one of the very best way of bringing the past to life - ala the work of North Dakota native son Clay Jenkinson's interpretations of Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis and many others as well as the ongoing work of George Frein and Carrol Peterson, expatriates of the Great Plains who present such as John Adams and Thomas Paine on the East Coast - the inspiration for my asking scholars like Jerry Tweton to talk as Theodore Roosevelt and the late Glenn Smith to become Wild Bill Langer was a remarkable man I never met and saw but twice on the campus of the University of Minnesota. the legendary Mulford Q. Sibley.

Sibley was a professor of political philosophy - as well as an outspoken pacifist. Beginning in the 1960s, I think, Sibley taught a class in political science that eventually moved to the largest building on campus and was attended by many who were not enrolled - including me on but two occasions. He would appear as the political philosopher he would talk about on that day - so his students met Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, etc. - magical hours that his students never forgot.

Sibley was a serious scholar with definite political views of his own - and the scope of his influence was broad: at the Quaker meeting at which people spoke at his memorial service, one who was there says, "Activists of every kind and from every decade - feminists, Vietnam protestors, civil rights demonstrators, socialists - rose to testify about Sibley's impact on their lives." His book on conscientious objectors of World War II, written with Phillip E. Jacob, remains the definitive study: Conscription of Conscience: The American State and the Conscientious Objector, 1940-47 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952). But it's his commitment to teaching and to finding ways to communicate the best of what's been thought and said on the human questions that just won't go away that distinguishes him - and I toast him this morning with a huge gulp of my V8 Splash - in fact, one of these days I'm going to try to find a copy of his 1970 Political Ideas and Ideologies: A History of Political Thought - therein lies much of the interpretation he brought to his first-person characterizations.

Aye, and there's nothing like Chautauqua to focus one's energy, yea, even to forget for the weest what ails one - 'tis a glorious day to work for the sustenance of the minds and spirits of my fellow North Dakotans - and for yours, kola - come visit us during Chautauqua. Take care of yourselves, look out for each other, and hum a few bars of "Slow Boat to China" as you enjoy this glorious day.

Ev Albers

Saturday, June 28th, 2003

The first hour of this 28th day of June 2003 spun windlessly and coolly toward a candidate for perhaps the finest, most beauuuuuuutiful days in Dakota - although those usually happen here in this wondrous spot later in the fall. I did not consciously experience the second through the fifth hours - I spent those in sleep with windows open and awoke to the morning chorus of birds celebrating the sunny, near-windless day. Coffee-ed, grape juiced, and armed with the news of the day, I'm ready to negotiate my way to my office to make up for hours languishing in a hospital.

My boys in Minneapolis at the Metrodome last night were truly lumbered by the visiting Milwaukee Brewers - Twins lost 13-1. Now they are two games behind KC - the Royals won their game with interdivisional rival St. Louis. Ah, boys, you're breaking my heart. Don't know what will bring you out of this slump - you might have the weest chance to go into the All Star break no more than two down, but you must focus, focus, FOCUS, fellows! Serially speaking -- lose tonight, and thus lose the fifth series in a row, and you are going to find yourselves in a bad funk, boys. I'll do what I can for you from the comfort of my recliner tonight.

Big doing's in Bismarck - hundreds of teams playing in the granddaddy of all softball tournaments, the McQuade - and spending hundreds of thousands during the weekend. There are teams of guys and gals who are damned near as old as I am playing out there - although the injury rate for folks more than fifty tearing around softball fields is pretty high. Undaunted, they carry on with laughter and the help of a beer or two. Not too many of them will be toasting, as I am with my grape juice this morning, the life and legacy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, born on this day in 1712. One of the books I return to again and again is his 1762 Social Contract. Among the copies I have is a well-worn 1954 paperback edition, which I just retrieved from its near-permanent position in the downstairs bathroom. Rousseau lived a few days beyond his sixty-sixth birthday. He was not an ordinary bloke - paranoid and Protestant, Swiss to boot, he spend a good deal of time in France where advocated such notions as the noble savage and breast feeding infants. His book, Social Contract, presages democracy and nationalism and explores the idea that humankind is capable of forming a social compact made up of individuals who give up their natural liberty for the common good. In many ways, Rousseau offered the philosophical basis for modern democracy and the concept of majority rule. His ideas had a role in American and French Revolutions. 'Twas Rousseau whose cautionary words ring down more than 240 years - "No real democracy-taking this term in its most rigorous sense-ever existed, and none ever will exist. For the many to govern and the few to be governed is to go against natural order. Nor is that all: A people constantly assembled to dispatch public business is impossible to imagine; nor, evidently, can any people possibly set up agencies for that purpose without thereby bring about a change in its form of government." To even have a chance, says Rousseau, a democracy depends upon a) operating in "a very small state"; b) "great simplicity of mores," by which he means people sharing a few customs and beliefs; c) "a high degree of equality as regards rank and fortune"; and, d) "either no luxury at all, or very little."

"Luxury," says Rousseau, "corrupts the rich by making them possessive and the poor by making them covetous." The United States is not a democracy in the pure sense of course - it is a republic. Our social contract meets none of the four Rousseauian requirements for democracy. Concludes Rousseau, "While a people made up of gods, if one were to exist, would govern itself democratically, no such perfect form of government is advisable for one made up of mere men." Rousseau was right about one thing - pure "majority rules," were it to run rampant, could make the lives of any minority damned miserable. In 2003, we live in a most perilous time in our social contract, for we are chipping away, nearly every day, at individual rights in the interest of the common good. In our collective effort to secure our society, we continue to give up such individual rights - or condone such as targeting citizens from a heritage different from the majority for special scrutiny and invasion of their private lives.

Today is also the birthday (1905) of Ashley Montagu, who died in November 1999. Montagu, most famous for his compelling argument in favor of The Natural Superiority of Woman, once observed that "Human beings are the only creatures who are able to act irrationally in the name of reason." In the early years - mid 1970s -- of the North Dakota Humanities Council - then called the North Dakota Committee for the Humanities and Public Issues, I dined with Ashley Montagu before he gave a talk about the humanities questions one might ask about the proper role between humans and the environment in the wake of the burning issue of coal development in western North Dakota and eastern Montana. The event was a conference hosted jointly by the North Dakota and Montana affiliates of the National Endowment for the Humanities. There still are no easy answers to the questions Montagu raised that night: Who, and how many, benefit from energy development, and who, and how many, suffer loss of some kind? What is our obligation to future generations? What is the cost and benefit of development in terms of human happiness? Eventually, Montagu asked the big question, the one we humans have returned to for millennia: Are we humans capable of sustained rational action and of determining our own and our collective destiny rationally? The record would suggest, at best, an answer something like, "Not very often."

Why should we be so surprised? Our personal lives and private relationships are dominated by most irrational forces, methinks - we have explored many possibilities that offer explanations for why since the Enlightenment of the eighteen century wrought the American social contract - including the ideas of Freud, Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche. 'Tis with no small effort that we manage to forge a working agreement to live together. 'Tain't easy, kola, 'tain't easy at all.

I leave the last words to Ashley Montagu this morning. The kindest of men and most agreeable of conversationalists, Montagu was less optimistic about our being able to sustain a rational social contract. As to happiness - he had it right, methinks, when he said, "It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison." I'm sorry I didn't take that advice when I was young - I'm struggling mightily to catch up for lost time. While I subscribe to Montagu's notion that "The idea is to die young as late as possible," every rational electrical connection in my brain informs a conclusion that I probably won't have more than three decades to work, as Montagu had at my age. To work. Hope you have a happy and productive day, kola - do take care of yourselves and look out for each other - be one of those of whom Montagu says, "He knows that human beings are still learning, by trial and error, how to be human and that many fall by the way. He knows that compassionate understanding and sympathy is the approach of the humane, while blame and censoriousness is the approach of the insufficiently humane."

Ev Albers

Friday, June 27th, 2003

​Ah, free at last! Sprung! I'm outta there - back home on Arthur Drive after four days and three long nights in what is certainly a fine health care facility here in Bismarck in beauuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota where 'twill be the most glorious of summer days. It's Friday, the sun is gonna shine, I'm gonna get to my office to work on the publication for Chautauqua's visit to our state beginning July 15th, and there'll be some grape juice within reaching distance most of the time to toast the kindness and love of kola like you. Oh, I'll don a mask to go back to the clinic this more to have blood tested and to get another shot of Neupogen - I won't even have to give it to myself! Who knows, by the end of the weekend, it might be safe to wander the weest among the general population on the outside as well. Oh, the grandness of the feeling of climbing back up the deepest part of nadir, being able once more to focus with enough energy to get something done. Those days of simply existing instead of having enough energy to do some living have been relatively few over the last nine months - some with considerable discomfort, others simply blah. I can honestly say that I have purchased more quality time than I've lost - quality in the sense of hours of life enjoyed with laughter and love and giving the weest contribution toward the common pot from which we humans all draw sustenance.

So I won't be in a chemo infusion unit over the Fourth of July - I'll postpone the next go-around down in Zion, Illinois, for three weeks and stick around the best place in the universe to be, Dakota, to meet with the members of the Humanities Council in a couple of weeks, savoring every minute.

The first toast of this glorious morning in Dakota goes to Emma Goldman, she who so pricked the conscious of the United States that she was banned from returning to American soil. Born on this day in 1869 in Russia, she died on May 14, 1940. I wrote about Emma and offered several links for more information back on May 14, 2003 - you can check it out by selecting that date above. Emma spent her entire life living instead of existing, and she sought social justice instead of satisfying her materialistic wants at the expense to any fellow human being. We Americans never like to be reminded that our incredible creature comfort and material wealth comes at the cost to someone else in the world - nor do the more privileged Americans in terms of money and a totally unequal share of the common pot like to hear about the possibility that their wealth is made possible by someone's unfairly compensated labor. Emma wouldn't let them forget, and Americans couldn't forgive her for that. Today, American billionaire H. Ross Perot turns seventy-three. Like Emma Goldman, Ross Perot believes in action - he once said, "Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read. . . ." Ross, of course, would have many differences with Emma about what makes for a good man (read human being). Ross said, "Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown." Emma would probably say, "Ross, that's because they don't have the stomach of the kind of game you play. It isn't that they give up - they could do it. They would prefer not to win at the expense of killing most of the opposing team." Emma and Ross would differ mightily on most matters - and all things considered, Ross seems the weest bit more concerned about winning than living -- while Emma, who once said something like "I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck," was ever bent on making it possible for all to enjoy the game.

This day in 2003, 27 June, Americans awoke to hear that the longest-serving, oldest-while-in-office Senator ever, Strom Thurmond, finished his passage in the middle world. Strom was still in office earlier this year at age 100, and went quietly and comfortably last night, according to his son. Like Ross Perot, Strom ran for president a couple of times, and like Ross, he was deeply suspicious of federal power - both always supported the general principle that the people's money, the resources of the common pot, should be controlled by government as local as possible. Strom's memory will always be clouded by his activism in favor of segregation, of course. He changed his mind about that. He also changed his mind about term limits - he said he favored them - just before his ran for yet another term a few years ago.

Well, kola, rosy-fingered dawn has come and gone, the sun shines, and 'tis time to do some living. Yes, I know that the Twins lost yesterday afternoon - the fourth series in a row - this in spite of my wearing my T-shirt and telepathically urging them to focus their energy. KC won, and KC is in first place in the Central Division this morning. Boys, you need to shape up the weest - you're not having fun with enough energy. Hope such is not the case with you, dear kola - hope you are taking good care of yourselves and looking out for each other with as much vim and vigor as you can muster, and that you laugh and love with Goldmanian abandon.

Ev Albers

Thursday, June 26th, 2003

Whew! Jacques Jones won it - 6-5 -- with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the eleventh inning in the game last night between the Twins and the White Sox. In no small part because I wore my Twins T-shirt, my favorite boys of summer managed to maintain a tie with Kansas City for first place in the Central Division. It took a lot of that extra energy I got from the two shots of Procrit yesterday to focus my telepathic powers on helping them call forth their indomitable spirit and win a critical game. Now, if they win this afternoon, they will have finally resumed their championship ways by taking a series with an opponent. I'd sure give the boys a toast with grape juice - and will when I get some great juice this morning, a fine, cool one here in beauuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota.

'Tis the seventy-second birthday of Colin Wilson, the British author of more than 100 books, including The Outsider, published in 1956 when he was but twenty-four. The book was received with great critical praise followed quickly by scorn from some. Wilson established himself as an original thinker and their thinker by college students and by young people who enjoyed the way in which he used a sweeping generalization to embrace and explain the lives of so many. I loved it when I came upon it in the early 1960s - 'tis on my top-ten list of books that influenced me mightily. In The Outsider, Wilson looked at the lives of such as Kafka, Camus, Eliot, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Shaw, Blake, Nietzche, and Dostoyevski, at "outsiders" who didn't care about what other's thought, who were so involved in their search for truth and for self that he/she totally disregards society's rules and stands for truth at all cost. Wilson said in an interview that "the Outsider" cared nothing for fame - and appreciated the irony that he found no little fame in offering his answer to the spiritual dilemma of post-World War II humankind. Wilson went on to write books about the occult, UFOs, and human myths and "strange" cultural phenomenon from Atlantis to the Sphinx. Wilson sees the history of human culture as a pendulum swinging between total materialism and what he says is "a curious desire of human beings to explore their own potentialities, a weird feeling that you know there's far more than the material world." He observed back in an 1990 interview that we were entering the backswing from the total materialism of the 1980s. Interesting stuff - especially his conclusion that human consciousness survives death:

Begin Wilson Quote
As a result of writing the book Afterlife, and studying this, I came almost reluctantly to the conclusion that it does survive, that there is survival after death.

It would not worry me terribly if there weren't, because it seems to me logical that when I fall asleep, I disappear. I could not really complain if that happened to me after I died. It would seem natural to say that the solution to the problem of human existence lies elsewhere than in the notion that we have got to continue to exist. And yet the evidence is that we do continue to exist. And I don't think that there's any possible doubt about it.
End Wilson Quote

Rosy-fingered dawn is not visible this morning - I just did a power walk from my bed to the large window on the fourth floor of St. Alexius Hospital in downtown Bismarck - a round trip of about nine feet. There's just the hint of pink beneath the pale blue on the eastern horizon in a sky dominated with cloud as I await my 6:00 a.m. blood draw and then the news about whether or not the counts are sufficient to spring me from this place. I have high hopes and realistic expectations - all things considered, I'll probably be here another day, at least, but I have high hopes. Yesterday wasn't the worst here in prison - a good breakfast and great lunch of roast pork, mashed potatoes and waxed beans - and a truly good cheese cake. Supper was horrible, but I ate more than I have in a good while. Besides, my loving spouse has provided me with a stash of jelly beans. But this is day four, and I'm stir crazy. If I kept here too long, I'll have to figure out how to get my hands on a good magic marker and write backwards on the this big window, "Help! I'm being held captive in room 4436!" I can always put out a general appeal on the web - at least until they cut off the phone - and, of course, I could just call most anyone I wished, but that would be too easy. Besides, they probably have bugged the phone line. But I have a particularly kind jailer, because she just managed to get blood from port - hence no arm stick -- and she brought me a little can of real grape juice. More than that, the sky is clear. Ah, kola, looks like 'twill be a good day - every day is a good one here in Dakota, where it needs to dry out so that they make hay, something that can't be done until the sun shines bright and clear. May your day be a great one kola, as you take care of yourselves and of each other.

Ev Albers

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003

'Tis early, this Wednesday, June 25, 2003 - the first hour has just come and gone, and I'm sitting here with a can of BlueJay prune juice - I asked for grape juice, but I think that the nurse just grabbed the first blue can she could find. I thought 'twould be OK to bug her with my request since she bugged me with getting my vitals - temperature below normal this morning, and I'm still getting broad-band antibiotics pumped in. Don't know what the prune juice will do to me.

Ah, the boys lost last night - my loving spouse brought in a radio so I could listen to the Twins play the White Soxs - they fell 2-1, and Kansas City won, so now they are more or less tied for the Division lead - boys, you did all right, but you got the lead-off man on several times in the late innings without coming through. Surely, you don't want the KC Royals to get ahead of you before the All Star break, so shape up, fellows! Of course, I may have contributed to the loss by being too lazy to get up and change into my Twins t-shirt - and this place frowns on one wearing anything but the old bare-backed, snap-away arms hospital gown. I'll wear it tonight, Twins.

Today's grape juice toast (hope none find my substitution of prune for grape irreverent) in memory of one who has completed passage in the middle world is drunk to Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson, who died at age eighty-six and a couple of weeks back in 1961. Better known as Ma (Miriam Amanda) Ferguson, this remarkable Texan was the second woman to serve as a governor of a state - she was preceded by Nellie Ross in Wyoming by but fifteen days back in 1925. The first time around she was defeated after a single term, as she was later in the Dirty Thirties when she served a term from 1933-35. Ma became as famous as her husband, Pa Ferguson (1871-1944), Governor of Texas, 1915-17. Indicted on embezzlement and other charges in 1917, soon after he was impeached by the Texas House and removed from office by the Texas Senate. During her first term, Ma caused quite a stir by pardoning convicts wholesale - she averaged about 100 a month. Some say that she and Pa received sweet real estate deals and other bribes - but Ma was for reducing the prison population. She also tried to fight the Ku Klux Klan and supported higher education. The second time she served, she continued her pardoning ways, but folks didn't get as upset because fewer prisoners meant lower costs of state government, a priority during the Great Depression. Ma is immortalized for a statement she once made in discussion, I suppose, of recognizing other languages - Spanish - and perhaps even teaching in that language. Ma said, "English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for the children of Texas." Pretty hard to argue with that.

Join me in swilling a second swig (whatever you have handy will do) in memory of Johnny Mercer, who completed his passage on this day in 1976 after some sixty-six years of journey in the middle world. He wrote some of the great lyrics in all of American song - I know that I've mentioned more than once that I like "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." There's so many great ones: "Dream (When You're Feeling Blue)," and perhaps the best of them all, "P.S. I Love You." The latter was introduced by Rudy Vallee and made famous by Frank Sinatra. Fact 'tis, Mercer was a genius:

What is there to write? What is there to say?
Same things happen everyday, not a thing to write, not a thing to say,
So I take my pen in hand and start the same old way.

Dear, I thought I'd drop a line, the weather's cool, the folks are fine,
I'm in bed each night at nine, P. S. I love you.
Yesterday we had some rain, but all in all, I can't complain,
Was it dusty on the train, P. S. I love you.

Write to the Browns just as soon as you're able,
They came around to call, and I burned a hole in the dining room table,
And let me see, I guess that's all.
Nothing else for me to say, and so I'll close but by the way,
Everybody's thinking of you, P. S. I love you.
I do my best to obey all your wishes, I put a sign up "Think"
But I gotta buy us a new set of dishes, or wash the ones that are piled in the sink.
Nothing else to tell you dear, except each day seems like a year,
Every night I'm dreaming of you, P. S. I love you.

Mercer was well-established as among the best lyricists around when he offered what has to be one of the great bits of musical putdowns. Speaking of a musical that didn't make it, Mercer said, "I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics."

Now, that's an expression of being less than impressed! Moreover, to could serve to pass judgment on anything written - as in "I could eat alphabet soup and shit a better poem." I couldn't possibly write anything better or kinder than so many of you have passed my way, kola, in the last couple of days. I'm going to be here at St. Alexius for longer than I wish under any circumstance - won't even know what bacteria infects me, so I have to stick around at least until my white count soars above 1.5 or so, and then perhaps I negotiation release to some sort of home care to get up to ten days of intravenous antibiotics - maybe I can get some sort of Ma Ferguson pardon. 'Tis a wondrous place with many caring folk, but each day checked into a hospital -- with all its protocol and periodic wake-ups for checks of vitals and peeing into output containers for measurement and bad food -- is as close to prison as I want to come. One can get alternatives to the regular meals that are brought around as a matter of course - so I get Ensure or Boost and a little container of ice cream now and again and can even order up coffee and grape juice more or less whenever you want - although I wouldn't want to push it by trying the nursing staff's patience at 5:00 in the morning or at midnight. I have been attended by four different physicians since I checked in to emergency room on Monday morning, and the nurses here on the fourth floor south in the oncology wing are most attentive - so I don't lack care. On the contrary, I get too much of it, which is most difficult for a curmudgeon of my ilk to accept on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis - as you know, kola, there's nothing like the weest bit of time to yourself. Moreover, since I feel so much better, well enough to get to my office and get a few little chores out of the way that can't possibly be done from a laptop, I feel a bit of frustration with wasting precious time.

The day in glorious Dakota today will be cool and wet - and beauuuuuuuutiful, of course. There will be rain - keeping this place unusually green. 'Twon't be a thunder storm today - we've been quite fortunate here in Dakota this year in heretofore being bypassed by tornadoes and hail storms. I was quite amazed for the past couple of days with the wild claims from Kansas that the hail storm that hit there featured the worst nature can deal - the chunks were only about ten times the size of a tennis ball - a mere three or four softballs. I need to call upon my friends to the east of Hannover Township, Oliver County, the Garden of the Universe. I recall a hail storm back in the late 60s or early 70s that was the equivalent of a huge sheet of eight-inch-thick ice breaking apart and falling to earth - one huge chunk fell through a barn roof, causing enormous damage. Other chunks fell willy-nilly around a small area, and a farmer from out in the eastern part of Oliver County brought one into Center, where it was stored for a time and shown in Bobb's Bar - to the utter amazement of all who say. It made that little chunk of three or four softballs from Kansas look like rain droplet in comparison - this was a big, jagged piece of ice that took up considerable space in that freezer. One of these days I'll find time to scour back issues of The Center Republican for a possibly reference to this phenomenon - or, perhaps, a kola from the area will recall, pinpoint the summer, and give the weest bit of additional information. You'll be the first to be updated, kola, when I hear anything or learn more. This is no instance of a guy from Hannover Township stretching the truth just the weest - 'tis not the kind of thing one would make up.

Today is the day back in 1876 when Custer was defeated on the banks of Greasy Grass, the river we call the Little Big Horn. 'Tis a special year in the marking the anniversaries of that event - there will be a dedication of an Indian Memorial at the site, finally in place a dozen years after money was approved for the project in 1991. According to a Park Service release, "The memorial will feature bronze spirit sculptures honoring three warriors of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. A spirit gate, meant to welcome the cavalry dead, will be about 100 yards from the soldiers' monument. Inside the memorial, visitors will glean information from features such as story panels, pictograph art, and writings from Indian leaders." I'm happy to be alive to see this day.

This weekend, some of the Kubik nephews and nieces will be joining my daughter Gretchen and her friend Michael at a Lake outside of Alexandria, Minnesota - I love to see extended families taking care of each other and enjoying each other's company. Joseph Hans Kubik will be there with his friend Kifah, along with Jay and Jessie Bleth and her friend. Joseph Hans is the son of Hans Joseph Kubik, my wife, Leslie's, youngest brother, whom we all miss sorely - brother Joe completed his passage in the middle world a year ago this April at far too young an age. His son, Hans, who celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday a month ago, on May 25, carries on his father's tradition - a voracious reader, a most humorous fellow, and guy who brightens your existence just by being alive, Hans will keep them entertained this weekend. Hope it doesn't rain - or if it does, you don't really care, Kubik Cousins and friends! And I hope you are taking care, kola, and looking out for each other. Help me help the Twins tonight by sending winning vibes to the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Ev Albers

Tuesday, June 24th, 2003

Good morning from the rosy-fingered dawn watch here in Dakota where 'tis indeed a beauuuuuuuuutiful day - at least appears so from the fourth floor of St. Alexius Hospital where I came yesterday morning after my temperature soared to over 100.5 (eventually over 102) - and being abed for the entire weekend. I won't know for a couple of days what kind of infection I picked up when my white count plummeted to below 400 - but I'm being treated with broad band antibiotics - three different varieties. Kola, I couldn't even find the energy to write yesterday - besides the chills made me the weest shaky, so I probably would have offered more typos than usual. This morning 'tis better, although I fear I'll have the life of the bubble boy for a few day -folks that come in to see me wear masks, and I can't have anything really good to eat - like sour-cream raisin pie - meringue or the sour cream might have a new bug. Praise whatever goddesses or gods may be for the ilk of Boost or Ensure - for I could not face the strange and wonderful hot dish brought in last night - all things considered, nadirs may be the best weight-reduction tool out there - I'm just about down to the fighting weight I carried when I starred on the Center Wildcat football team the two years we didn't win a game - but we did tie one. But that's another story from another season - this is summer in glorious Dakota, where dawn hides this day behind considerable cloud cover. Nonetheless, I feeling fairly chipper - temperature down to 99.6, I have a bit of energy, and I'm feisty enough to be disgruntled with the fact that the staff couldn't manage to draw blood from my port, so I had to be stuck again. Small matter.What isn't such a small matter is not having a half-gallon of grape juice seven steps down to my kitchen or on hand in the motel - or the absence of morning coffee when one can really use it, not when folks get around to serving breakfast - that could be the middle of the morning! Then there's the three-times nightly vital check - just at the time dreams were getting the weest interesting. All things, considered, I would rather be anywhere but in a hospital, but there's naught to be done - I'll be here for several days, minimum. This, too, shall pass - and I'll be able to return to my wondrously disordered office and the tasks that await me.

Trust that 'tis as beauuuuuuuutiful wherever you are as 'tis here in Dakota. Take care of yourselves, and look out for each other - have a swig of grape juice for me if you have one on hand --

Ev Albers

Sunday, June 22nd, 2003

Two and twenty June, 2003, on a beauuuuuuuutiful, cloudy and cool day in Dakota, home of wondrously knitted extended families. Take, for example - blessed with the finest of sisters- and brothers-in-law and eighteen nephews and nieces who shower me with the kind of love and attention my own children do - and I get more than any man could ever possibly deserve from Albert and Gretchen. One of them celebrates his twenty-ninth birthday today - Jay Bleth, son of Leslie' youngest sister, Janet. A childhood mentor to my own son (he's three years older), a hard-worker and handsome fellow with a great sense of humor, this guy gladdens one's existence as few can. Now an investment counselor in Dickinson, his home town and the home town of the Kubik clan into which I so wisely married, Jay lived here in Bismarck for a time when he worked as an engineer for a major commercial loading equipment and farm implement manufacturer. This guy doesn't allow any grass to grow under his feet - and that's quite a feat this year, when Dakota is as green as the Emerald Isle - except for places out west. Jay Bleth is the kind of guy that will come over and wash your car or mow your lawn just for the hell of it - he's a keeper for any woman lucky enough to get him - and although he's steadily dating, he's not hooked yet. I don't dare tell you much more about him or post his photograph on this site less he be bombarded and besieged by women in search of the best that Dakota has to offer by way of men with their heads screwed on right. His single fault may be a lack of discrimination, for he reads what I offer here most every day - of course, I'm flattered. Happy Birthday, Jay Bleth!

'Tis early afternoon, and I've been abed for about thirty-six hours, laid low with that fatigue that swamps one in the nadir. My sleep has been disturbed by thoughts of what I need to get done at the office - and there's no better time than the weekends - but I can't muster the energy to move. I also fret about high temperatures and the possibility of infection - so I avoid going out as much as I can at these time - bubble boy on Arthur Drive in Bismarck, just east of the mighty (howbeit, tamed) Missouri. Perhaps the Twin will rally from two defeats over in Milwaukee - the one last night the weest bit of a clobbering - and win at least one game of the three-game series this afternoon -- and offer an alternative from wallowing in the nadir blues - which I loath more than the physical discomfort.

Among the dreams which came during the past thirty-six hours were those of my father's tool shed on the farm in the Garden of the Universe in the heart of Oliver County in Dakota. For those of you old enough to remember - precious few, I fear - Fibber McGee's closet and the way in which everything that did not have a place anywhere else would come tumbling out when Fibber opened it - treble and quadruple the disorder you imagined when you heard the crash during those radio broadcasts. Nothing fell out when one opened the door to my father's tool shed - well, maybe once in a while. But there was stuff - stored in a way that belies the old saw, "Well, your father probably knew exactly where everything was in what appeared to you to be disorder." The hell he did - no one could. My dad might spend three hours looking for a backward-threaded bolt in one of the dozens of three-pound coffee cans of bolts, nuts, washers, and other stuff. There was a vise in the middle of the shed - if one could get to it without major rearranging of the stuff in the shed - and the tools were stacked, even though there were places on the wall to hang them. In fact, the only thing that wasn't put in the shed willy-nilly among the cans and stacks of steel rods and fence posts and gunney sacks and the thousand and one things one needs on our kind of subsistence farm were the saws, set and sharpened by some old guy who knew what he was doing from New Salem or Center. These hung in their proper spots - because the weest bit of impact with other stuff could ruin a good hand saw. Three-fourths of the stuff had no probable use - parts for machinery traded off, old plow shares beyond ever being sharpen, mower sickles bent crooked and rusty - things would have to get pretty tough before an attempt was made to put new triangle blades on them and reuse them. There was a possible use for some of the stuff we never would use - a neighbor might remember that we had an old horse mower and that there might be a part in that shed - and my father would always take time to look with thorough diligence.

Having the equivalent of my father's tool shed is part of my natural inheritance, I fear - mine is my office, where every inch of a table and the floor is stacked with hundreds of CDs which must store many gigabytes of data - some twenty years of books, Council activity, reports, graphics - it could easily take someone trying to sort it all out months to even catalog what's on those CDs, let alone the hard copy of reports and meanderings, position papers, old proposals, etc. etc. etc. Then there are books - mine and some borrowed, and projects which have been on hold for many months - some for years. Many have tried to help me bring order to my office - it was always disastrous, because no one can be certain that what they throw away is exactly what I will need in the next hour - it's happened. Which is not to say that I don't have a lot of stuff that could be tossed - but, like my father, only I know for sure what is junk and what is not.

In general, my wife has prevented me from bringing this genetic predisposition to messes home - Leslie has a high order need, proving once more that the more fortunate of us marry what we need as well as someone we love. There have been failures - Leslie periodically gives me as a gift those wall-hanging storage units with two or three dozen little compartments -- I fear that most of the nuts and bolts and nails I need are in a coffee can, and my tools are stacked in three or four places, willy-nilly - except for the saw, which hangs in the garage, I think - but maybe not. I haven't used it for about a decade. The only difference in this matter between my father and me is I rarely look long for what I need - it's just too much fun to go out in buy new bolts or nails or cords or whatever - used to drive my father crazy when he came to visit - "Everett, I think you have that in one of those cans downstairs." Moreover, there's more than just a bit of laziness in my continuing a family tradition - for my father, I think, 'twas more a matter of a self-imposed test of his memory and acumen in remembering where he probably could find what he needed and no small pride in getting by with resources on hand. 'Tis not totally unlike my Germanic stubbornness in spending hours, days, and weeks trying to fix something that should be thrown out - most often at at least twice the cost of buying a new one - as in computers, for example.

Ah, kola, 'tis time for the Twins - they need all of my focused attention. I salute and toast the memory of my dad and his wood shed, take a big swig of grape juice with my birthday wish to Jay Bleth, and wish you all, kola, the best of this fine day - take care of yourselves and look out for each other. Oh, I also pledge to perhaps clean up my office one of these days, as soon as I get caught up with the rest of my tasks.

Ev Albers

Saturday, June 21st, 2003

Temperature in the 70s, slight breeze, glorious wee hours of the first day of summer in beauuuuuuuuutiful Dakota where the folks are friendly, the mosquitos big as humming birds, and the grass still green on 21 June - there's been many a year that the grass was more brown than green - a more subtle beauty in earth tones. I watched the Twins last night through their extra-inning game with interleague rivals Milwaukee - the starting pitcher Radke went seven innings and did a great job, the Twins' defense was a thing of beauty and joy forever, and the boys did pretty well at the plate - and lost in the bottom of the tenth inning. Since the Royals of KC won, the Twins lead in the Central Division slipped to a single game. They're going to need all the help we can give them to hang on - but I'm confident they will come through tonight.

I'm equally optimistic about my chances of getting through the current nadir in relative good shape. Nadir is the curious adjective used by oncologists for the period a week to ten days after chemo treatment when blood counts go down dramatically. Mine did yesterday, and I found myself spending a few hours arranging for and getting a transfusion of platelets to stop the bruising and to prevent bleeding to death, which is not a good thing to do, especially when one has consumed a good chunk of available medical resources in an effort to fend off the insidious invader. Not that long ago, the treatment would have laid folks much lower than I go - I shoot up with white-blood-cell-producing Neupogen, and, during treatment this last go-around, I had a magical shot of the stuff made in the ovaries of Chinese hamsters to encourage production of red blood cells, Aranesp. The trick to surviving the nadir and climbing back to the zenith is to avoid bacterial or viral infection - and when one's white cell count plummets, chances of the common crap around all of us all of the time doing dirty work are great. My spouse constantly - and correctly and most emphatically - tells me to wash my hands - "Make sure you sing 'Happy Birthday' all the way through - you do it a couple of times, and use plenty of soap'." The nadir comes on suddenly - just a couple of days ago, I was soaring beyond the best I've been in a good long while. The most cursed symptom is a loss of energy - but this, too, shall pass. It's also a good idea to avoid bumping into walls or whatever, because the weest bit of klutziness can result in bruises that make one look like he has been in an extreme fight.

All things considered, 'tis a glorious longest day of the year that stretches before me on this day when Cyrus McCormick patented the reaper in 1834. Now there was a great invention! North Dakotans know all about Cyrus - although I've never met a North Dakotan named Cyrus. I have known several guys named Cletus, but I don't know a single Cyrus. Fact is, up until a couple of decades ago, there were probably less than a handful of folk in the entire state who didn't know who Cyrus McCormick was or what he invented, and most knew what a reaper did. This place has become urban in the last twenty years - in 2003, more folks make their living selling clothes, furniture, groceries, or other stuff than do in any agricultural related activity, and there's very few North Dakotans who actually live on farms.

When I was growing up in the Garden of the Universe in Hannover Township in Oliver County, I only knew about ten people who didn't live on a farm - the preacher's family, the storekeeper's, the buttermaker's, and the richest man in the township, the guy who owned the John Deere implement dealership and hardware store. There were folks living in houses next to each other in the county seat, Center, a town of about 300-400 six miles away. That's where the telephone exchange was for the entire county - one had to call the Center operator on our open-party-line crank phones to call anyone outside of the township. In Center, there were Catholics and Methodists and other folk who didn't confess our brand of German Lutheranism - including Lutherans who the weest bit liberal for us Hannoverites. The county's greatest mechanic, Tommy Brown, the son of a Methodist minister, lived in Center. He worked for an Oliver implement dealership, and he spend a good deal of time on our farm, because my father bought an Oliver "square" baler from the dealer - one of the few truly bad decisions my dad made, for that baler cost him years of his life; aggravated his hemorrhoids, my brother's, and mine; and, when it worked, produced a man-killing "square" (the bales were much longer than wide, but who ever heard of a rectangular baler?) of alfalfa or hay held together with twine that is the stuff of nightmares. I may not know a Cyrus, but I knew from my earliest days at the country school across the pasture what a great thing one Cyrus McCormick had wrought - whoever came up with the square baler was not Cyrus McCormick, I'll tell you that, kola. It was probably a guy named Cletus. Whoever 'twas, there's a special ring in hell for the guy, if there's any justice. Dealing with that baler and the squares it produced were the nadir of the summer in the Garden of the Universe.

There was life before the baler - idyllically bucolic, something out of a French or Dutch painting of haystacks. Hay was stacked with a loader or by hand in the fields or, in our case, forked into wagons and lifted into one of those huge barns that still stand sentinel on many an abandoned homestead. The barns were so big and so tall so there would be room for the hay. Ours had a wide doorway through the middle bisecting the long sides. Hay was carried aloft by slings, two of which were placed in the wagon like a fish net - one across the bottom and another after the wagon was half full. The ends of the slings came together and were attached to a rope, which went through a pulley in the center of the driveway. We used horses - later a tractor drawing the rope through another pulley at ground level, to pull a slingful of hay aloft. When the sling reached the top of the barn, one could send it either to the left loft or the right loft by starting it in that direction. Sometimes the slings were pretty heavy - that's why so many barns have that dip in the middle - ours did, and it drove my dad crazy - so one wet year we fixed it with the help of an ingenious carpenter who sent about eight guys aloft to turn turnbuckles in the middle of steel cables he had placed at intervals on the roof joists - as we drew the steel cables together in unison, the top of the roof popped back up.

But back to that cursed baler and what it produced - first, the baler itself never worked for two days in a row - rarely for a full day. After my father's most valiant efforts to take care of the problem himself, he would have to call in Tommy Brown, the genius mechanic - except for Oliver balers, which probably weren't meant to be fixed. The major fault of the Cletusian device - and there were many - was a periodic glitch in the "timing" of the knives that shoved back the hay through a chute and compacted the hay until it reached a certain length, at which point curved steel needles would arise through the chute from the bottom and bring twine around the bale to a "knotter," where the bale was tied. The knotter had its own problems, which resulted in dropping untied bales, much to the utter disgust of my father, who used certain language only when he was working on that baler or attempting to make bales with it. But the timing problem resulted in broken steel needles, which were a huge pain you know where to replace, and then the timing would have to be reset - something my father was not able to do very often, so even though he had many spare steel needles on hand - a costly proposition - he might go through two or three sets before calling in Tommy, who would tinker with things for about an hour - a little longer if my mother didn't have lunch ready - until he declared it "fixed." Whatever Tommy did had more to do with magic than mechanical skill. Unfortunately, what Tommy fixed didn't last that long - or there would be a problem with the knotter a couple of hours later.

Once the bales were made, they had to be picked up and brought to the farm to be stacked - or thrown into the loft of the barn. Kola, those green green fields of alfalfa - the stuff that features those gorgeous little pale blue flowers when in bloom - are what were cut, gathered into long windrows, and baled. Some of those bales weighed 150 pounds, and we would throw them on a wagon to someone who would stack them, then bring them to the farm to stack them again or throw them up onto the lofts. Those alfalfa bales were cripplers. Often, my father would bale the alfalfa when it was too wet - the trick was to get the alfalfa when it was at the height of its nutritional value, before it had dried out in the sun as it lay in windrows. If the windrows were rained on, they had to be turned over with a rake before they could be baled, and too much moisture in the alfalfa mean certain disaster, mechanical failure of the baler. Undaunted by summers of bad experiences with baling alfalfa, determined to store the best possible bale for his beloved Holsteins who produced the mainstay of his operation, my dad would bale away when he knew it was the weest bit too wet - and, worse - have us put them in the barn. Stacked on top of each other in that confined space - where the temperature might soar to 110 in August when a second alfalfa crop might be harvested were the year wet enough - like this one - the bales would generate heat from within and become hot enough to spontaneously combust into flames. The preventive measure necessary to keep this from happening was to salt down the bales - and many an afternoon and even night, my father would be in the hay loft salting down alfalfa bales.

The only time the baler seemed to work fine was when it baled straw. Before my dad finally broke down and brought in combiners (the combine is the modern version of McCormick's reaper), we threshed - on our own for many years with a small machine after the big threshing rings were broken up with the new technology. My father would bale straw from the piles left when we threshed - straw that had about a dozen times the chaff that straw left in rows by a combine - combining resulted in most of the chaff blowing away. Dad considered chaff critical to the cleanliness of his Holsteins in the winter - chaff absorbed the waste the cows might accidentally leave where they might lay down in their stanchions in rows in the barn - chaff was good. Baling chaff was pure misery - the stuff invaded your clothing and made you itch in a way you could never forget - and barely endure at the time. I don't remember that baler ever breaking down when we were baling straw - I guess Oliver balers were made for the lighter material. Many an afternoon in late summer or early fall I would pray for such a breakdown, just to get the weest relief from the unrelenting swirl of the chaff, but it was not to be.

The heyday of the square bale (actually, they were much longer than wide) was short - much shorter for most of our neighbors than for us. I've inherited from my father a certain tenacity in loyalty - but mine is to the Minnesota Twins, not an Oliver baler. The next generation of balers - probably invented by a guy named Cyrus, not Cletus - produced huge round bales that can be moved only with machinery - they weigh up to three-quarters of a ton, I hear. Moreover, there's only a fraction of the hay or alfalfa or straw or whatever exposed, so the essential nutrients are better kept. And there was no way such bales could ever be put in a hay loft. May whatever goddesses and gods that be richly bless and eternally reward him or her who came up with the idea. My father never had a round baler - he sold the herd of Holsteins, who were costing him money to milk twice a day, before he had to admit that the old square baler might have to go.

Here's first-day-of-summer salute, a swig of grape juice in toast to Cyrus and all of his ilk that came up with things that actually worked, like the reaper - along with a silent curse on any Cletus out there who might be contemplating an invention that brings misery, like the "square" baler. Blessings be to you, my kola - do take care of each other - may this day be one when you soar to the zenith of your potential for taking good care of each other and for making each others' lives happier.

Ev Albers

Friday, June 20th, 2003

​The third great Friday in a great summer in beauuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota and the northern Great Plains where the weest bit of rain in the last couple of months have turned this place into a Garden. But one week past, I was finally becoming conscious after a Thursday afternoon procedure involving sending a scope down my throat to do a little scrub job of the steel stents in my bile ducts at the Midwestern Regional Medical Center in Zion, Illinois. I was – according to my loving spouse -- ambulatory, ornery, and apparently functional for several hours after getting dressed hurriedly and leaving the recovery room. I don't remember any of it – some sort of hangover from the anesthesia, I suppose, that prevented me from waking to consciousness. About this time – 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. – that I awoke in that bed at the Illinois Beach Resort Hotel and wondered where the hell I had been. I felt terrific – and I've felt mighty fine for the most part in the week since my last go-around with chemo at that marvelous Cancer Treatment Center of America – so far, none of the worst of the "nadir" which followed the other cycles – my immune system is functioning, and yesterday I had what comes close to the best of Dakota lunches – a cup of knoephla soup and a piece of sour-cream raisin pie with a big glass of orange juice at one of Bismarck's finest, Kroll's Kitchen. I also got to see my nephew Ian and his mom, Kris – Ian is the youngest of Kubik Cousins, the son of my wife's late brother Joe. Ian has a wonderful wry sense of humor and the ability to take life as it comes and enjoy the best it offers that would make his dad mightily proud – I toast him and his summer plans to do as little as he possibly can in terms of any kind of work he doesn't absolutely enjoy.

Naturally, I wore my Twins t-shirt to lunch – they responded to our efforts to energize them telepathically yesterday afternoon by whuppin' the Kansas City Royals 16-2 and increasing their lead in the Central Division of the American League to two games – ah, but 'twas sweet, especially after the drubbing the boys got from the Royals on Tuesday night and the frustration of three losses in a row to the KC bunch. Of course, they have to guard against being too cocky after redeeming themselves – tonight they play their rivals in the other League from neighboring Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Brewers. Focus, boys, focus!

'Twas hard to focus yesterday afternoon after receiving a e-mail from my old pal Ray Wheeler from Dickinson, who just returned from a bus trip to Phoenix where he and his lovely partner Deborah visited his mother. Ray doesn't take to flying – in fact, he won't do it, so he took the bus. I can't wait to read Ray's descriptions of that trip – Ray is a fellow who does not suffer fools gladly, nor does he have the highest of tolerance for situations that he doesn't control or from which he has no escape – and one doesn't control things in a bus barreling south to Phoenix. But his incredible journey in his sixth decade of passage in the middle world is not what made me lose focus – 'twas his old knack of planting a preoccupying song or idea – this time 'twas a reference to John D. Loudermilk's great 1967 song made famous by the Casinos and a number-one country hit by Eddy Arnold – "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye." Ray said he couldn't get the tune off his mind – now I can't.

Kiss me each morning for a million years
Hold me each evening by your side
Tell me you love me for a million years
Then if it don't work out, if it don't work out
Then you can tell me goodbye

Sweeten my coffee with a morning kiss
Soften my dreams with your sigh
Tell me you love me for a million years
Then if it don't work out, if it don't work out
Then you can tell me goodbye

If you must go I won't grieve
If you, in a lifetime, before you leave
But if you must go, I won't tell you "no"
Just so we can say we tried

Tell me you love me for a million years
Then if it don't work out, if it don't work out
Then you can tell me goodbye

It is a great song, but like all great things, too much is not good – and now, thanks to Ray, I can't get it out of my mind. Besides, everything is working out quite well – so why worry? I have far less and far more mundane concerns than I did six short months ago – because I don't feel like I have to say goodbye to this middle world any time real soon, in spite of the continued presence of the invader, pancreatic cancer. Now, I'm not only getting it treated – the treatment is far less costly in terms of discomfort than it's ever been. If my platelets don't drop too far – and there's always transfusion – I should be able to go back for another dose of the keeping-alive stuff the first week of July --

Two days past, Wednesday, June 18, 2003, 'twas cause for great celebration that deserves to continue for decades to come – 'twas the birthday of two of the finest kolas a man might ever hope for -- Jerry Waldera and Jim Lund, who both hang out in retirement with their lovely spouses Jean and Shirley in the Detroit Lakes area. Both are great storytellers – liars of the kind no society worth living in should be without, guys who might stretch the truth for effect – although the most outrageous of their tales are probably absolutely factual. I've known Jerry and Jean for some thirty-five years – they taught at Dickinson State where I did before going to work for the Humanities Council – as our mutual friend Ray Wheeler still does. 'Tis hard to believe that Jerry Waldera is seventy-two – he doesn't act his age, I'll tell you that – both he and his buddy, sixty-six-year-old Jim Lund (whom Jerry and Jean have known since their college days at Fargo four, going on five decades ago) act as though they are just beginning to contemplate midlife crisis instead of any respectable dotage.

Jerry spent some time in the North Dakota State Legislature back in the 80s, and he stayed with us during the session. He and my spouse, Leslie, share a tolerance for – yea, even a like of – bad movies. Many a night they stayed up until the wee hours watching the ilk of Conan the Barbarian. Our family has spent many of the very best days of our lives with Jean and Jerry at their lake cottage on Lake Melissa over in Becker County, Minnesota – our children Albert and Gretchen will never forget the golden moments fishing on the pontoon and being regaled by tales of growing up in Geneseo as only Jerry can tell them. For more than thirty years, Jerry Waldera has been like the best of big brothers to me and my family – may you live as long as you wish and enjoy every day as much as we always enjoyed every minute with you and Jean, Jerry Waldera! Here's a huge gulp of grape juice in salute to your health and happiness.

'Twas Jean and Jerry who introduced Leslie and me to the Lunds, the kind of folks who brighten your lives from the moment you meet them. Jim has sent me among the most encouraging, life-sustaining e-mails during the past nine months since I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – he's the kind of friend who finds ways to help one help himself stay alive and enjoy life – besides being perhaps the best pie maker in the upper Midwest – perhaps the best of anyone currently traveling in the middle world. Jim, may you live long and prosper – and may you find enough gooseberries to make a pie – and don't forget to invite me when you do!

Both Jerry and Jim should be writing books – these guys have something to say with laughter and love that deserves an audience larger than the one reading Hillary Clinton. I hope they're around "for a million years" to delight their friends – and I want to be around to be delighted by them and by you, dear kola, who make life so precious that one will do most anything to continue the journey. Take care of yourselves today, kola – keep up that good telepathic encouragement of the Twins, and look out for each other – maybe tell a tale or two as you celebrate this beauuuuuuuuuuutiful summer day with laughter and love –

Ev Albers

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

'Twas OMF (Our Mutual Friend) Thomas Matthew McGrath, epic poet of the twentieth century and Dakota's gift to the millennia, who said something like "The way in and the way out are the same . . . but how can we tell?" in one of his poems, which I should have memorized but don't – 'twas news from the labyrinth or more news from the same place that Tom offered. Here in glorious Dakota in the still cool morning of yet another beauuuuuuuuutiful day, I'm pondering these words and those of Blaise Pascal, the French thinker and mathematician born on this day in 1623. Pascal, who made it to age thirty-nine before he left this labyrinth, said, "Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed." Blaise, that's a hard one – cause if we don't know where we came from or have any idea where we are, how are we supposed to know where we're going? Pascal is most famous, of course, for what is considered his wager in defense of the existence of God with a capital G – and in a argument for believing in God: if we don't believe and God does exist, we're in for some real misery after our passage here in the middle world; if we believe and God doesn't exist, we haven't lost anything, really; so it's a good bet to believe in God. We have everything to gain and not much to lose. Pascal does answer the big question in his Pensées -- How does one go about believing in God? Says Pascal,

Begin Pascal Quote
You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. . . .

But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.
End Pascal Quote

The secret to success, says Pascal, is to act the way you want to be and you'll become that way. Pascal often said that we spend too much time running around acting busy instead of sitting and thinking – and thus refusing to consider who we are --

Begin Pascal Quote
Men are entrusted from infancy with the care of their honour, their property, their friends, and even with the property and honour of their friends. They are overwhelmed with business, with the study of languages, and with physical exercise; and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honour, their fortune and that of their friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy. Thus they are given cares and business which make them bustle about from the break of day.-- It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy! What more could be done to make them miserable!-- Indeed, what could be done? We should only have to relieve them from all these cares; for then they would see themselves: they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much. And this is why, after having given them so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, in play, and to be always fully occupied. How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!
End Pascal Quote

In essence, Pascal says we strive for "perfect happiness" in all our relationship with others and the outside world and ignore our need to think about who we are – leaving us "hollow and full of ribaldry."Too much laughing and singing and not enough reflecting, says Pascal, who would not have approved of the ways of Garfield, the great cartoon cat created by Jim Davis who first appeared in newspapers on this day in 1978 – it's Garfield's silver anniversary! For Pascal, Garfield relaxes just the weest too much – in fact, Garfield is the epitome of materialism and creature comfort, the essence of the kind of "happiness" Pascal finds so hollow.

I'm not sure that I even understand what Pascal is talking about – for the most part, I find myself incapable of sustained cogitation and thinking on a subject, and I don't recall ever consciously deciding that I was going to sit down and think and reflect for a time. Moreover, I avoid lying awake – I must be doing something – often something that's not unlike what Garfield does best, but something far less than reflective meditation. Fact is, I don't know how. Perhaps Pascal is right about what is needed – and I've been avoiding myself for six decades. I'm contemplating changing that. His advice to those who would become believers – and thus wagerers that God exists – seems pretty shallow business to me – in fact, this morning, all things considered, I'm not very impressed with Blaise Pascal and his ideas. I'm more for laughter and song – and for doing something with the rest of humanity instead of sitting and reflecting. Which is not to suggest that I'm at all opposed to day-dreaming, musing, meandering, or wondering – I intend to do no small amount of that today, kola.

I take a swig of grape juice in salute to Pascal – and another for Moe Howard, the guy with the bangs and the leader of the Three Stooges – born on this day in 1897. Moe almost made it to his seventy-eighth birthday. I've often sat and watched Moe and the boys – Curly and Larry – instead meditating. The Stooges, of course, gave us example after example of the trouble we're in for if we act without thinking first – but they always had a hell of a good time. Speaking of thinking, there's something wrong with the way my beloved Twins' pitchers are going about their business, which demands the weest bit of mental discipline. Yes, the Twins lost again last night -–the fifth loss in a row, the third to the AL Central Division second-place – now by a single game – Kansas City Royals. The Twins hitters matched the Royals with thirteen, but the pitching was not good at all, kola. Don't know what I'm going to do with those boys – wearing my t-shirts and hat and focusing positive encouragement just isn't working. Maybe someone should take those pitchers aside and have them exercise a weest bit of Pascalian meditation. More likely, the contrary is true – they're thinking too much about it instead of going out and having fun playing the game. At least the score was respectable – 8-6. Perhaps they'll get a grip on themselves and win one this afternoon – I'll be doing my best, but they need help from wherever they can get it.

Happy birthday, Moe, Blaise, and a one-day belated birthday wish to my brother-in-law, my sister Faye's husband Jim Harrison, who turned sixty-three yesterday and looks forward to retirement from being an accountant with one of the region's largest construction companies. Jim is a quiet fellow who always has this bemused smile – he knows something that the rest of us don't about making the most of our passage through the middle world. Jim loves the music of the 50s and 60s and keeps me honest when I attempt to comment on that music – and he's one hell of a nice guy. A big swig of grape juice to you, Jim – live long and continue to prosper – one of these days I'm gonna sit down and visit with you about what keeps you smiling.

I wish you smiles and laughter and a bit of song today, kola – take care of yourselves and look out for each other – and don't take my word for what Pascal's worth – read him for yourself and let me know what you think. Give me some help with the Twins this afternoon if you think of it.

Ev Albers