TheBanyanTree: Thermo Haline Conduit

[Dale M. Parish]

How good it is

Family, when you've sent your progeny out into the world to make
their own way, is a welcome slip back into the mores and morals of
the previous generations.  We try to instill into our offspring the
morals we think they will need to successfully compete in their
world, not really knowing how their world has changed from ours.

My brother came to visit tonight.  He wants to visit our dying
uncle, my dead father's last sibling, and I'm only too happy to
provide a place for him to stay the night and accompany him tomorrow
to visit our uncle.  But when Uncle Monroe dies, the rememberance of
a generation that we heard about as children-- the great
depression-- and all the hardships with which it forged boys into
men without their knowing it until they could look back forty or
fifty years and acknowledge it-- will be gone in my family.  

My brother Lane called to say he was coming, and ask for a place to
say, for which I was only too glad to accommodate.  Mike, our
younger brother, had other plans, and excused himself for his family
reasons.  I have little family left-- youngest son is in Korea
serving his country; youngest son is married and cleaving to his
wife, and I have divorced the boys mother because we had nothing in
common after 30 years of marriage except the two boys, so since the
boys have left the nest, there was no real excuse for a nest.  We
are, I think, both happier now.  And still friends.  

But Lane brings back to me the intellectual stimulation I miss from
family.  Or never got.  His new wife Barbara is a refreshing breath
after those he's brought into the family in the past 30 years.  She
told him on his birthday this month, "Well, I broke my previous
record."  On his asking what she meant by that, she replied, "Well,
Jim (her former husband) died at 52, and I've got you to 53, so I've
broken my previous record."  She has a refreshing sense of humor.
And I'm glad that my brother can put aside any jealousy of her
previous husband and children and accept her and them in all their
realities.  

But tonight, they braved the rains between Victoria and Lake Charles
to make it over.  I had the enchiladas almost ready to go into the
oven when they got here, and we started on the Amaretto and Peach
Brandy.  We were feeling full as we finished supper when Lane
announced that he wanted to have a fire in the fireplace.  I had a
backlog, but have not yet brought in the stove wood with which I
build a fire since it was near 70F today, but condescended.  He
challenged me to build a fire with one match while he cleared the
supper dished.  No contest.  I put all the unused matches in the
rocking chair he commandeered.  I had to turn up the air
conditioning to overcome the fireplace.  I didn't say anything, but
recalled that that rocking chair was our father's from up at the
ranch.  Cow hide bottom and back-- it was the main thing I wanted
for my inheritance-- it fit me.  Lane had bought me a rocking chair
a couple of years ago from a street vendor, but the arms were too
short.  A rocking chair should fit the body like a shirt or a good
fitting pair of pants.  This one does.  It apparently fits him, too.

Or else, he feels the affinity for Daddy that I do when I sit in it. 
But I'd gone out to one of the wood piles-- the one with the wheel
barrow on top-- to get some dry firewood.  I split the stove wood
and some kindling to start a fire and then tasked him with keeping
the fire going.  He rocked in Daddy's rocker; his wife Barbara
rocked in the wagon-spoke rocker, and I commandeered the glider.  We
turned down the overhead wagon wheel lamps and poured on the brandy.  

We were started into what's wrong with the current generation when
we diverged onto Lane's teaching Barbara's grandchildren about the
way of life we were raised-- country.   Apparently, her citified
grandchildren think Lane knows the best things and their other
grandparents know little fun things.  He was talking about the
strike-anywhere matches I keep at the fireplace and how we used to
make rockets from them with almuminum foil, and launchers from paper
clips.  I know a few years ago, I couldn't find any strike-anywhere
matches, and attributed it to "Homeland Secuirty" and the idiocy
that went with the post 9/11 craze.  You couldn't find
strike-anywhere matches around here-- I finally had a friend alert
me that the H.E.B. Food Store had them in Silsbee, and I stocked up,
but tonight, we both tried to make rockets, and finally decided that
they've reduced the amount of phosphorous on them to the point that
they have little of the lift they had 40 years ago.  I'll have to
experimetn more.  None of the rockets he and I tried would lift off
their paperclip.  

By this time, we were both getting loopy with the brandy, and the
quality of the debate was escalating after being filtered by brandy
memory.  We traversed what our kids would have to face, the quality
and direction of our national leadership, and the general direction
of our culture.  After debating the Atlantic thermo-haline conduit
and the balance of trade with China, we concluded that our children
would have interesting lives adopting to the changes that we
perceived over the temporal horizon.  Neither of us want our
children to starve, but hope that the changes we think likely will
take several generations to effect, although science now believes
that major ecological changes or shilfts have happened within only a
couple of decades in the past.  Maybe it won't matter.  Or matter to
us.  The race will probably go on.  It only takes a few survivors.

After all, that's what it's all about, isn't it?  That someone "like
me" survives to propogate the species.  

To the individual, there is no effect.  To the generations
following, it is important to have ancestors.  If your ancestors
didn't have sex, it is likely that you won't either.  

During the middle of this debate, my beaux called to adise that she
and her girlfriend have made it to near Alpine and expect to go into
Big Bend tomorrow.  I wish I were with them, looking at rocks and
trying to understand the processes through which the Big Bend area
of Texas was created and eroded to its present stated.  I've never
been to Big Bend-- the closest we ever got was Fort Davis, from
which we went north to McDonald Observatory, then turned back down
the Rio Grand valley and went into Mexico at Laredo.  Lane and I had
another brandy over our first cousin Ben, who was killed several
years ago but who wanted his ashes scattered in the Chisos Mountains
where he loved watching the sun rise.  I want to go there and see
that some day.  Sooner would be better.

It's amazing what a liberal amount of brandy can do to one's
perception.  Lane had found a bottle of mead in the pantry, and he
opened that while I worked on the peach brandy and amaretto.  After
an hour or two of feeding the fireplace and our bellies with liberal
doses of firewood and brandies, philosophy was elevated to heights
not previously known to occur in this household.  Barbara was amazed
at the gravitational fluxuations that Lane and I seemed to be
experiencing-- having never read Stephen Hawking, she was unawares
of the distortion that can occur around event horizons, with or
without the field effect of C12H22O11 and its variants.  Even now, I
feel the lingering effects and am not sure in which universe I
manifest myself.  

But as Crow Woman once told me, it matters not from whence you
started.  What matters if whether or not you fall face up or face
down in the snow.  Lucky we don't have snow here.

Hugs,
Dale
--
Dale M. Parish 
628 Parish Rd 
Orange TX 77632 
(409) 745-3899 FAX 745-1581 
http://hal.lamar.edu/~dmp8910