On this day, Gwen graduates from kindergarten at a local community center.
It takes some urging to go on stage with her aunt April, but she walks on and is recognized.There are recitations by some of the kids, comments by teacher’s and invited guests, a small lunch afterwards.
We have no crystal balls to know the future.
We hope Gwen has many graduation ceremonies, has dreams and achieves them, takes advantage of her abilities, compensates for her shortcomings, finds the people she needs to find.
By the end of the ceremony, balloons are broken or fly up and away into the coconut trees.
Proud parents and relatives walk home with one hand on a paper certificate, the other holding the hand of their future.
Buildings on Marinduque run the gamut from simple to complex.
They can be as small as this tiny wood frame square box with a thatched roof, unscreened windows, padlocked front door, built off the ground, no air conditioning ,no electric, no plumbing.
They can also be more modern with fancy windows, air conditioning, tiled bathrooms and kitchens with huge refrigerators, huge electrical panels and hot water when you want it.
Buildings here are nailed or screwed together, formed in concrete pours by the wheelbarrow,walls bonded by rebar to hold up to flooding and typhoons that can last for days.
Local wisdom says to start your building from scratch in Mogpog to get the best value for your money.
Local legend has it that the last family to rent this little wood house saw their kids playing with ghosts and moved out in the middle of the same night.
It hasn’t been occupied since.
There are relic hunters who still roam the mountains and valleys on Marinduque searching for World War 2 memorabilia.
They sometimes find helmets, bayonets, mess kits, a lucky photograph of a wife or children in a leather pouch, pieces of uniforms and occasionally, by the side of downed aircraft, bleached bones.
This great world conflict, in the early 1940’s,finished eighty years ago and what we know of it now comes from secondary sources. The generation that fought the war has followed it into history and has left us boxes of stained photographs, old movies and books by historians who have no longer have any living soldiers or architects of the war to interview.
.At celebrations on Veteran’s Day there are a few grizzled vets left who fought in these Philippine jungles, but time has rolled over most of them.
By the side of the road, just outside Mogpog, is a tall piece of ordnance propped up outside a food mart. It is like the biggest ball of twine somewhere in the Midwest, an Indian teepee hotel along Route 66, the Brown Derby in Los Angeles.
To people in the Philippines, Japan is not liked. People remember their grandfather’s killed along with Americans, remember Japanese death marches.
World War 2 fades in significance, buried as generations pile one atop another.
Now, we are into the entertainment age and World Wars are far from people’s minds.
What is funny is that the people that were drawn into World War 11 weren’t thinking about it either.
Airports are portals to the world.
The Denver International Airport was built in cow pastures to the east of Denver, after Stapleton closed, and was turned into condos.
To fly out of Denver you follow I-70 east till you see white sails in the country, shuttle parking lots, arrival and departure ramps, east and west terminals. There are other ways to see our world but by air is the quickest and most dominant. Percentage wise, air travel is safer than walking to your local grocery.
Airports have not been designed for long term comfort though, which causes sleepless nights for those of us who travel.
This trip, the quietest place to sleep, is an interfaith chapel in the east terminal overlooking TSA processing on the commons below.. A note on the chapel doors reminds you not to put your feet on chairs, move furniture, leave trash, or interrupt prayers.
This spiritual portal should be full of travelers since we are all about to board aluminum cans and be carried thirty thousand feet up into the sky, but no one is here but me.
The screening to get on planes is daunting, but nothing compared to the screening we have to go through to get into Heaven.
I admire Mark Twain’s quip that ” I want to go to heaven for the climate, but go to Hell for the company. ”
Stuck in the airport till my flight boards for Manilla , early in the morning, I am feeling like Hell will not be a place I want to go even if Twain says the company is good.
I bet the seats down there will be several sizes too small and the sound system will be blasting rap music as loud as it will go.
Sales receipts are prosaic.
On most there are times and dates, food ordered and its price, balances due and how the bill was paid. There is a spot for taxes and gratuities. There can be series of numbers indicating stock numbers of merchandise, re-order times, discounts, adjustments, credits.
On this restaurant receipt, at the bottom, is the phrase, ” Keep Tulum weird. ”
This is weird for a number of reasons. Weird, according to the Oxford dictionary, should really be spelled wierd to follow the rule – i before e except after c. Wierd has been spelled wrong so many years that both spellings are acceptable.Weird is also pronounced – wird, so we have a screwy English language where how a word sounds is not how it is spelled.
“Have a good day” is often at the bottom of sales tickets
” We appreciate your business is sometimes at the bottom of sales receipts.
In Tulum,” Keep Tulum Weird ” is totally acceptable.
The creator of this receipt is probably a seventy year old hippie living an an airstream trailer in a fenced off lot on the beach bought in the fifties for several thousand dollars. He would sell but can’t move because his cat, Mister T, likes to nap on an old couch under the airstream awning, on top of a Pittsburg Pirates World Series Blanket.
For all its weirdness, Tulum is becoming very comfortable.
The location of this old Mayan city was well chosen.
It is a place Mayan elite lived for the best part of the year,entertained visitors, enjoyed food and drink on porches as their sun sank into the Caribbean sea. There were simple platforms built on the grounds upon which slaves and servants lived in thatched communal homes. There are altars that still overlook cliffs where offerings would have been made to the Mayan Gods.
Most of the old city has crumbled and front porches have been claimed by iguanas, prehistoric reptiles that survived the dinosaur extermination.The iguanas bask on the stone floors in palaces off limits to tourists, their coloring matching that of the stones around them perfectly. They run oddly with their tails swinging left to right and legs moving like robot legs, surprisingly quick, tongues testing the air as they move towards food or away from danger.
The pyramids still standing here tell the story of this ancient Mayan culture.
On top of the wide base have been stacked smaller and smaller blocks. At the top of the pyramid is a single living unit for the head of the society. There is no agonizing discussion of equality and fairness. All major decisions come from the top of the pyramid and all below the top support the King until they can’t and the pyramid crumbles.
It is strange to walk in one of history’s graveyards.
We have better toys today but we play in the same sandbox the ancients played in.
We have borders.
Our skin is our closest border, a barrier that keeps bacteria and viruses out, gives us our particular shape and size, allows us to be flexible and move with agility.
Our minds have borders that allow us to go as far as we think we can.
Countries also have borders that keep them independent and sovereign.
This border check, on Arizona Highway 19, is between Nogales and Tucson.
Cars going north, further into Arizona and the United States, come to a standstill as border agents stop us and ask – ” Are you American citizens?
German shepherd dogs, on leashes, walk around our vehicle with their specially trained noses looking for drugs and contraband. A uniformed Border Patrol agent peers through the car window at us as we go through his check and answer his questions till he gives us a quick visual once over and waves us through.
Open borders is a compassionate political theory, but, at night, do we leave our front doors open and hang a Welcome sign on our refrigerator?
Why does migration seem to be always going in the same direction, from less economically viable countries to places with more opportunity?
For better and worse, at some point, people always vote against borders with their feet.
Outside Hanger One at the Pima Aircraft Museum, in a dirt field, helicopters, prehistoric looking birds with rotating wings, are on display.
This Sikorski Utility helicopter was used at U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue stations in the seventies.
On night duty in U.S. Coast Guard Air Station radio rooms, part of my watch was relaying messages from aircraft to the Officer of the Day, answering calls from fishing widows wondering why their hubby wasn’t back in his easy chair with a beer in one hand and the channel changer in the other looking for football games.
Weather is always a consideration, and, in the gulf, squalls come up unexpectedly.. Hurricanes shut down oil rigs and personnel are routinely evacuated. Around water, you can always become a grisly statistic.
In those Vietnam years, us six foot sailors wore dress blues for ceremonies – dungarees, denim shirts, and white Dixie Cup hats for daily work.There were angry protests on the nightly news, signs in the streets, and burned American flags.
Now, decades after the tragic war, Vietnam is a thriving country instead of a place Americans had to lose a war in order to win it.
Some obligations can’t be run from, no matter how odious.
Countries, just like people, are not always smart about what they choose to do, or not to do.
The Pima Air Museum is an equal opportunity museum.
It has fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, experimental dreams, cargo planes, There are hangers filled with donated airplanes of every vintage, staffed with volunteers, and a large open field where aircraft have been retired from service. There are early primitive planes, and then more modern sleek riveted birds made out of metal, plastic and fiberglass that fly higher, faster, quieter.
From the bomber’s seat in the nose of a museum B-52, tattooed with buxom women, the bomber squinted through his viewfinder at the enemy target below. In his gun sights were manufacturing plants, bridges, military bases, railroad tracks, airstrips – strategic targets.
With the gentle push of a button, the bomber dropped his death packages, watched his bombs spiral towards Earth like wounded birds.Airmen, long after their missions were complete, could still hear screams in their mind as metal and stone ripped into people and pieces of cities fell like a child’s blocks knocked over by a careless hand.
Most planes on display in the museum have curved lines and their angles are sharp. Rivets on the older planes were done by hand by women in California factories and a volunteer tells Alan and I how Los Angeles plants, in WW11, were turning out one B-52 bomber a day that were immediately put into the war’s service and turned the war effort around.
Old dreams of flying like birds have come true and old dreams of conquering the world haven’t gone away.
The next Caesar, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Hitler is just around time’s bend, and, when they arrive, there will be plenty of firepower at their disposal.
Making weapons is a human obsession.
Drones, as defined in middle school, were worker bees who served the Queen, built and maintained the hive, and lived a dronish life.
In high school, drone became a word describing people working in cubicles who did jobs the CEO hadn’t figured out how to eliminate.
Now, much older, drones are flying in my neighborhood, rumored to be delivering packages but mostly collecting data for the C.I.A and Deep State..
Original drones were for hobbyists who moved to them from model airplanes. Drones have flexibility. They can hover, do quick turns, are lightweight, easy to maneuver, and can go places planes can’t. In later incarnations, surveillance cameras were added, and, in warfare, missiles were mounted that could be triggered in Virginia to take out insurgents in Iraq.
These DJI Phantom’s are for sale in Best Buy, not any more expensive than a computer,or a nice camera lens,or big screen TV. In the right hands, drones take breathtaking videos around the world that you can see on You Tube.
The move to make machines to execute our desire for power, pleasure,spying and money intensifies.
Drones are now a reality we are going to be hearing more about, whether we want to, or not.
Technology, as we all know, has lots of plus, and lots of minus.
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