Mount Shasta, July 7th, 2005: Daisy, our little white border collie is one year old. From the basement today Adrienne brought the plastic swimming pool. It’s just a Toys ‘R Us special, about four feet across and perhaps eight inches deep. She’d bought it for the dogs, for the hot weather.

On the back deck, she filled it up with cool, clear water.

Tonight after supper, with the sun aslant from beyond the mountains to the west, and the mountain beyond our back yard glowing peach-colored, we sat out back drinking iced tea after supper.

Daisy noticed, for the first time, the little fish printed on the bottom of the plastic pool.

At first I was puzzled at her dipping her head into the water, and biting at the water. Suddenly, I saw it. If I just forget what I know about the refraction of water, then what my eyes actually see are the painted fish wiggling as the water moves, and the wiggling fish are just barely below the surface.

Therefore, any good dog, who was quick enough, ought to be able to bite one of those wiggling fish!

Again and again she circled the edge of the plastic pool, biting into the water. Bite, bite, bite, bite, bite!

See funny Spot!

Plunging her head down into the water — bite, bite, bite, bite, bite! — and then she would lift up, to clear the water from her nose and mouth. She’d look at us, puzzled, as the water poured down from her chin.

We were laughing, and I greatly admired her persistance, and then this made me think about the Angels.

Angels always seem so solemn. They aren’t human, of course. So I wonder: Can Angels laugh?

Is it in them that they can laugh? Can they understand strife? Pain? Release? Freedom? Is anything funny to the Angels? Can you picture an Angel, laughing?

I hope they can.

I hope they can laugh. Because just as we can see how Daisy is caught up in illusion, so too must God see us, caught up, day by day, in illusion.

It must be very funny to God. At least, I’d like to think God is getting the good of it. And that’s why I hope that the Angels can laugh, because surely it will be so much more fun for God, if He’s got somebody to share the joke.

Bloggistry, noun, the artistry of blogging. From O.E. Blaugt, to fall into a well, yelling loudly, from Arch. Lat. Bloggum, to chew with one’s mouth open, in a loud and disgusting manner, showing one’s table-mates more than they wanted to see of the mastication process.

Earliest known quotation: “To bleaugh, to plough whyle burping, ’tis blaggy, blaggy dew. Bloggum, bloggum, all thee day long, ’tis not so naice of yew.” — from the Three Canticles of Clackmeyer mss., circa 1502.

Japan, Long Ago: The blind monk had spent the day visiting with a venerable master, high up in the mountains, and now the day was drawing to a close. The venerable master fetched the visitor’s staff and his cloak, and said, “Wait! I have prepared a lantern for your trip down the path.”

The blind monk laughed, saying, “Day and Night are alike to me. I do not need a lantern.”

But the master persisted, saying, “It is not for you. Your feet are sure. It is for the protection of other travelers in the dark, that they might see your lantern and not bump into you.”

“Oh,” said the blind monk. “How thoughtful. Very well.”

And holding the lantern on the end of his staff, he strode off into the night.

All went well for the first half of his journey.

But as he crossed over a narrow bridge over a great chasm, suddenly bump! He’d run into somebody! The blind monk was frightened, and then irate.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Didn’t you see my lantern!”

“Brother,” said the other traveler, “Your light has gone out.”

A small Japanese marketplace, 1959: My uncle Eugene, known as Commander Hurn in the Navy, was in charge of finances of a navy base in Japan, and had to learn to speak Japanese.

That’s why he understoodd what the men said behind him in the marketplace. One man laughed, turning to the other.

“Look at the Yankee Devil,” he said quietly, “and the red socks he wears.”

Commander Hurn stiffened, and turned slowly, all dignity, to glare down from his 5′ 11″ height at the shorter men.

“Those are not my socks,” he said slowly, in Japanese. “That is my underwear. And therefore it is not your concern.”

The Japanese embarass easily. The men blanched, glanced at each other, and scurried away in different directions.

Researchers from Technische University (Munich, Germany) reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that patients with migraine headaches were helped just as much by acupuncture needles stuck randomly into their bodiese as by needles at the precisely prescribed pressure points.

And nay-sayers claim that acupuncture doesn’t work!

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The Virginia Employment Agency, which handles unemployment compensation, recently laid off 400 of its workers. The reason was that unemployment in Virginia was so low that the unemployment workers had nothing to do.

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A support group for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome based in Nelson, New Zealand, said that its members would generally not attend the public International Awareness Day held to expand awareness of the debilitating illnes. The group chairman said that members would probably not attend, because the members are usually too tired for such events.

Some years ago, you probably saw that television advertisement for ‘Memorex’ brand recording tape, where the lady opera singer breaks a glass by singing a certain note. When you saw her doing that, you probably wanted to break a glass that way, too. I know I did.

Here’s how to do it …

First you get a glass. A fancy wine glass might be better than a jelly jar, but I’m not sure.

Next, you determine the ‘natural frequency of vibration’ of the glass. You do this by tapping on the glass with a little teensy thing, hard enough to make it sound a note, but not hard enough to break it. There is ‘spozed to be some special tool used for tapping bottles, but I’ve never seen such a tool.

Next, you must sing the exact same note that the glass made, and increase your volume to 130 decibels, and hold that note at that volume for a time. When you get this sound just right, the glass will begin to vibrate and then it will shatter, throwing glass all over the floor. This should be very satisfying.

If that doesn’t work, then just pick it up and throw it on the floor.

Mount Shasta, March 19, 2007: Last night I dreamed that I wandered a meandering music store and I bought a bass. After taking it home, I chatted with a friend in the kitchen, and noticed a stranger coming up my back steps, across the back porch, and entering the room. Between us was a gauzy curtain, and as the stranger leaned to peer into our room, I did the same from my side, and I made a horrible loud growl.

This scared the stranger, who back-pedalled across the porch and fell backwards down the steps.

Gosh. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I love dreams like that, don’t you?

But it went on.

As it happened, my friend with whom I chatted then changed into a woman puttering in the garden shed, and I learned that she was the sister of my high-school pal Dexter Plumlee. What a surprise!

(In my actual life, during high school, Dexter worked with me at the A&P Grocery Store, and later he went to a different college and became a chemist, and then worked in the U.S. Bureau of Mines, for my Uncle Richard, who actually did the early smog research in Los Angeles. Why was a department of mines doing chemical engineering? Well, that’s another story.)

So in the dream, I asked her to call Dexter, because she said he was a bass player now, and he was playing a gig here in town. So she made a call, and then looking up the street from my back porch I saw my friend Dexter come jogging up the street. He looked exactly the same except for an additional 45 years of wear and weathering. It was great to see him again, and then I woke up because my dog Daisy stuck her nose on my neck.

Over coffee with Adrienne, I learned that she’d dreamed that Mary Beth Burrows, the always-tidily-dressed manager at our bank, was sitting in a cafeteria at the local Humane Society, and that Mary Beth had taken Kim, the shelter manager into another room, from which everyone in the cafeteria could hear Kim crying and Mary Beth shouting angrily. Adrienne and Bette Midler and everyone in the cafeteria rolled their eyes.

So Adrienne asked Eric Clapton why Mary Beth had been so calm all morning at her desk, and then was so wild in dressing-down Kim. Eric nodded.

“Mary Beth had some other things to do first,” he said.

There you have it. The latest news from the unconscious psyches at our house.

And now to the point.

Adrienne pointed to our little dog Charlie, who was snoozing after his breakfast on the couch.

“He reminds me of a five-year-old boy,” she said. “I had girls, but my friends with boys just had to drag them out of bed in the morning. Sometimes they arrived at school with pajamas still on, and their mothers trying to dress them in the car.”

“My girls were no problem,” she continued, “The key is party shoes.” (By this she means those shiny shoes that were called ‘patent-leather’ shoes by little girls when I grew up.)

“I got my girls party shoes,” she said, “and they nearly wore them to bed. They’d get up and wanted to put on those party shoes. And to do that they had to dress. Then they’d clean the party shoes with vaseline, to make them extra shiny. And then off to school.”

“My girls” she said, “where probably the only ones who got to wear party shoes to school. But I’d learned the secret to getting them to school. Party shoes.”

Mothers of young girls, you heard it here first.

Somewhere in the South Pacific, Christmas Day, 1942: Back on my grandparents’ farm, the three brothers had grown up together.

My uncle Eugene, the oldest, and Richard had joined the navy. My uncle Robert, the youngest, had joined the army. Eugene and Richard were assigned different duties and different ships because they were family members. So each was alone, like any sailor or soldier in wartime.

Robert became a medic in the army, and was stationed in the South Pacific, and so when he saw a certain ship in port, he hurried down to mail call, hoping to ask for news of Eugene, for Eugene had been on that ship some months earlier.

The canteen building was crowded, elbow to elbow, sailors and soldiers jostling for their mail, which sometimes held treasures of cookies or cakes! The sargent read out the names, and Robert was again disappointed. No mail today, on Christmas day. No word from folks back home; no word from his brothers far away.

“Sailor,” he said to the fellow next to him, “are you on the ship in the harbor?” The sailor nodded.

“Yes, sir!” the sailor replied.

“Do you know anything of a navy man named Eugene Hurn?” my uncle Robert asked of the sailor. The sailor shook his head.

But from behind where Robert was standing, a man spoke out.

“Why, Bob!” the man said, “What are you doing here?”

[Merry Christmas to you and your family from our family.]