Good-Bye O.K.

A good neighbor and friend died Saturday morning. His funeral is tomorrow. We were awakened Saturday morning to the knock of an Omaha policeman, asking if we could come and stay with his wife until the mortuary fellows arrived. He wanted to die at home and he did.

O.K. was Oliver Kriss P., one of those best generation fellows that sailed the Pacific during WWII and the Korean war, manning the guns of the Destroyer, USS Brown. He was keen with dates, places and names and for 12 years he organized the Brown's Navy reunions. The Brown had docked in Hiroshima, Japan one month after the big bomb. O.K walked the streets of what remained of that city so shortly after the Enola Gay dropped the bomb that was the end of the war and the beginning of the Atomic Age.

O.K. always had a story ready and enjoyed a cup of coffee with a neighbor, I will miss him a lot.

Nebraska: The Good Life

A little swim, a little weeding, a little reading!

Knock, Knock, Who's There?

The knocking is on my forehead and I swear nobody's home. I wander around with no purpose except when I am in the pool with a brush chasing red algae. I log on and stare at a blank screen and wonder what I am doing.

I can't write so I hunt around for bloggers that make sense. I found three that I think are remarkable. First it was Hildred with her wonderful writing and beautiful photographs of her area in British Columbia; next it was a mother with five little boys reminding me what it was like to have five babies, although I only had four little boys; that blog's comments took me back to Omaha with Jeff who keeps our city safe and is a recently baptized Catholic convert. All three write so well and with such purpose. Sometimes maybe it is good to stop and read. Reading is good.

It is obvious to me that somebody is home out there.

Buffalo Commons Again

A cousin, Lawrence Brown, no longer living, wrote "Buffalo Commons Memoirs" in 1995. He spent a lot of pages on the debate of what should be 'done' with the Great Plains in the beginning of his book. He not only wrote to the Poppers, Frank who taught Environmental Studies at Rutgers University and Deborah who taught Urban Studies at New York University at the time, but he invited them out to his ranch in northwestern South Dakota to have a look at the land and people for themselves, which they did.

A Google alert led me to a hit this morning that starts "Summers are scorching and winters frigid. The wind whips through the grasslands year-round, its wailing adding to the hypnotic desolation of the Great Plains." Immediately under this statement is a photo of the animals of the Serengeti, while the text reads about our Great Plains and Kevin Costner's location of Dances With Wolves. How irritating I find it.

"It’s vindication of sorts for East Coast professors Frank Popper and his wife, Deborah Popper. The two were maligned by residents here for predicting 20 years ago that Plains population losses would be so dire that government one day would take over large expanses of the region and return them to their natural state by creating a “Buffalo Commons” — a national park where bison would roam." “Now, the Buffalo Commons has become a lot more plausible,” says Frank Popper, a land-use planner and professor at Rutgers University. “There are five to eight different ways this is all going on right now."

I found it interesting that the writer includes this statement of the location of my family reunion this summer. "Rural areas continue to grapple with young people leaving and old people dying. In Vale, a tiny town near Rapid City, S.D., the school closed and the Last Call Bar moved into the old schoolhouse. Alumni still gather there for reunions, owner Kathy Wood says. Weddings and banquets are held in the old gymnasium. Local children now are bused to a school 5 miles away."

My defensive feelings well up in me as I read through the article; it started with the zebra and gnu in the first picture and never got softened up by the last paragraph; "The Poppers are happy about the changes on the Plains."

“It’s got to be better economically,(Economic opportunities now include energy — oil wells are being drilled throughout the western Dakotas and investments in renewable energy sources (wind, solar) and bio-fuels are up — and tourism.) even if it’s a gamble, than the continued slow-leak decline,” Frank Popper says. “It’s got to be better than things like casinos, prisons and hazardous waste dumps. … What we’ve got is a Plan B for a region whose Plan A has been failing it for well over a century.”

This is probably true, albeit indelicately put by someone obviously not living in the area. I couldn't find the author. My name was required to leave a reply but I didn't know to whom I would be replying.

More Rocks

Sometimes He Who Must Be Obeyed brings gifts. On Monday I was ceremoniously presented two lighted rocks, one a rough pink quartz and one a single smoky quartz point; both are beautiful in their own right, but really quite spectacular when plugged in to sparkle our night wanderings.

That was the first; the second really set be back on my heels. He off loaded 400 pounds of South Dakota sandstone moss rock which he had hand picked, weighed, and then loaded into his pickup box. He actually handled the 400 pounds three times before I got my eyes on it.

Yesterday morning the minute HWMBO drove out to do his Omaha daughter duty, I got a little two wheeled appliance mover and hauled them over to a row of bushes beside a walk and proceeded to level the dirt and lay them in as orderly and logical manner as I could determine. I like the rocks, I like the results of my own sweat equity. The photos do not do them justice. They contain the color palette of my artist father's South Dakota landscapes.