Greetings from the Big Sky. Summer is in full retreat. The air has the feel and smell of Fall. That stretch when it gets to feeling like you are about to melt, better go jump in the lake, only hit a couple of times and lasted a couple of days. It was a very busy summer up here in Lakeside, so much so that all of a sudden tomorrow is September. The traffic is still insane by our standards. The lake is inviting and the launch areas are so busy they would benefit from traffic signals while the boat-free trailers rest along the side streets, their burden lifted for now. Driving by them, at least we don't have to worry about sudden movements, as we would with the deer. These great beasts do not seem inclined to either freeze in the middle of the road or dart across it at the last minute. Parked is parked. The deer, incidentally, are in hiding until deep into the night. By then, the trailers and their burdens are gone again.
I am trying very hard to battle my addiction and consciously not write about politics. Of course, writing about not writing about politics is a way of writing about politics, isn't it?
My grandson is ten years old. He doesn't think about politics at all. Unless Super Mario World is a political app, that is. When I was ten I was advising my father on hoiw to vote in the 1960 presidential election. Different times, different people. I think my father wanted me to be prepared. After the Great War no one believed there could be another. Yet the cannon fired within twenty years. After World War Two (now they were numbered) no one would be naive enough to call an end to all wars. Papa took his family out of Europe in part because it was a battlefield waiting for new battles. But with America one of the two major powers left in the world, he wanted me politically and historically aware at a tender age. Perhaps I was his canary—my reactions to the news told him what to expect.
No one wants our kids to grow up too fast, on the one hand, yet we rush them into the larger world on the other. Politics no, trade skills yes. History, not so much; computer skills definitely, most assuredly. Smell the flowers as long as they are virtual and trust us that we get the scent correct.
Xander does have an interest in war. Academically. He is learning the game of Risk. He also plays video games in which things blow up. He likes to blow up balloons. It's fun, and certainly not very threatening to ward off an attack of killer balloons in formation. I used to do something similar with my toy soldiers, staging massive battles in which almost everybody died just to stand up again at the end for Round 2, and look at me. I never held an assault rifle or set foot in a hostile land, yet I hate wars with a passion. Maybe it's all those marines and Civil War soldiers I killed over the years, I don't know. The body count is higher than I care to admit: I played war a great deal, and I turned out all right. Maybe Xander will, too, as long as we don't stifle him and as long as we remind him that killing, really killing another human being, is one of the “Nots” on that very old, very important list etched in stone that so many of us seem to ignore.
I guess if we didn't need a list, there wouldn't be one.
