What I’m Blogging

It’s been a kind of “run silent run deep” for the last week or so. I’ve fallen back to a posting the odd shot from the cameras, or a tidbit from the almanac now and then, but the urge to actually sit down and type something has been noticeably absent.

…wondrous memories and a thirst for more time…

I suppose the primary reason is that things around the domicile are in a little bit of an upset. My Mother-in-law has passed on. It appeared for a time that she was recovering. She was actually released from hospital and allowed to go to the home she had missed so much during her long stay. When she was home she was ecstatically happy and in good spirits, but by mid afternoon on the same day she passed away leaving the bittersweet taste of wondrous memories and a thirst for more time to those of us who remained.

So enjoy the tidbits as they come, and when the grieving has passed a little, the words will return.

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), George Orwell, born Eric Blair in a small village in Bengal, India (1903). He went to an English boarding school and then worked as a policeman in Burma before becoming a journalist.

…it wasn’t Fascism or Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme…

He wrote about the Spanish Civil War, and fought on the side of the loyalists, fighting against Franco. But he also witnessed the Stalinist faction of the communist party that began to suppress the other leftist groups, arresting them and censoring newspapers and organizing armed militias. Orwell himself had to go into hiding in order to avoid arrest or even execution by the Stalinists.

He eventually had to flee the country. The experience of the war changed his life. He came to believe that it wasn’t Fascism or Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme. At a time when most intellectuals still supported Communism in Russia, Orwell became one of the first leftist writers to speak out against Stalin. He began to work on a political allegory about the Communist revolution that became Animal Farm, about a group of farm animals that overthrow their farmer, Mr. Jones. Because England and Russia were still allies at the end of World War II, he had trouble publishing the book, but when Animal Farm finally came out after the war, it made Orwell famous.

Orwell spent the last years of his life writing Nineteen Eighty-four, about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

It was on this day in 1997 that the Pentagon attempted to end the speculation that the United States had ever intercepted a wrecked alien spacecraft, along with alien bodies, fifty years ago in Roswell, New Mexico. At a press briefing, Pentagon officials issued an official government document called “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” It was 231 pages long and stated that the United States had never captured any alien beings, either dead or alive, and that no alien spaceships had ever invaded U.S. airspace, especially not in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico.

…a UFO crash-landed near Roswell…

But the announcement only fueled more conspiracy theories. According to polls, 34 percent of Americans believe that intelligent beings from other planets have visited Earth; of those, 65 percent believe a UFO crash-landed near Roswell, and 80 percent believe the U.S. government knows more about extraterrestrials than it chooses to let on.

My Fathers’ Day gift rocks. It’s not a new power tool, it’s not a nifty new deck chair, it’s not a new techno gadget. My apologies to both Wall St. and Bay St., but my gift has nothing to do with a consumer good at all.

This Fathers’ Day, I am a man of simple pleasures and the best of all is that I’m surrounded by those who are the most important to me. My wife is home, recharging from visiting her mother in the hospital, this is the weekend that coincides with my kids coming to stay with me. Everyone is in the house at the same time and I get to enjoy their company. What’s better than that?

All too soon there will be a time when such junctions will become increasingly difficult to arrange. For now I enjoy them for what they are, a little piece of heaven, if only for a moment.