When I Grow Up....

It's taken purt near two score and half a decade, but I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. Nevermind that I already come close to resembling a grown-up: a middling and muddling bureaucrat with 20-plus years of dedicated guv'mint service, a dad with two hungry (and gettin' hungrier) mouths to feed, rapidly graying chest hair and lengthening eyebrows, and the simple fact that I have no skills upon which to survive beyond the ability to yak in a friendly manner about things I know just barely enough about. I finally figgered it out.

I want to be a lighthouse keeper.

A drive up the Oregon Coast late last week confirmed it. I dragged the girls off the 101 wherever I thought I could get away with it and for as long as I thought they wouldn't whine too loudly. First stop was the Cape Blanco light (the upper photo) where I chatted with the elderly whale watching volunteers long enough to spy a couple of spouts a mile offshore in a brisk cold breeze.

A while later, we saved the 36 bucks it would've cost us to elevator down to the World Famous Sea Lion Caves for the more frugal $3 parking fee at the Heceta Head Lighthouse (photo numero dos). From there, I was able to put my limited cetacean knowledge to use with an impromptu whale talk of my own to a couple of Wisconsin tourists who probably wondered why I was excitedly yakkin' at 'em after spying several spouts slipping through the water from this tremendous viewpoint. My girls walked back down the hill without me, impatient to get to the hotel and on to Portland for 8th grade graduation dress shopping, the real purpose of this trip, not the lighthouses and whales that I'd come along for.

(Heceta Head is named, by the by, after Spanish sailor Bruno de Hezeta who piloted the first Spanish ship to dock in Trinidad Bay in the summer of 1775, stepping ashore on 10 June 1775. Hezeta, along with the captain of another small boat, Don Juan Francisco de Bodega y Quadra (of Bodega Bay fame) claimed the Humboldt coast for Spain on June 11th, the Holy Day of the Trinity, thus the name Trinidad.)

OK, I know being a real lighthouse keeper probably demands more work than I care to romanticize. The fog and the wind and the rain probably begin to eat on you after a while. As would the isolation, at least now and then, I suppose.

But I'm willing to give it a go. From the sunny perch of my spacious lighthouse tender's cabin (once I move the quaint and undoubtedly not inexpensive B&B operation off the Heceta Head cliffs), I will write all those great things I've been meaning to write. I will welcome just a few select visitors to the headlands and explore with them the birds and whales and tides and storms and history of the Pacific coast.

Now, if I can just figure out how the vintage bookstore fits into the keeper's house, I'll be ready for my version of adulthood to settle in.

Mind the Gap...again

....once again. I shall return once things settle down, assuming they do.

On and on, on and on, on and on.

She wins Rhode Island. He wins Vermont. She wins Ohio big, then edges him in the Texas primaries. But wait! He wins the Texas caucuses and earns a bigger piece of the delegate pie. And so it goes. On and on.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I watched Field of Dreams, the one movie that consistently makes grown men choke up and sniffle like women watching a Renee Zellweger flick. Then baseball's Spring Training kicked off on Valentine's Day, a day when two loves are satisfied in one sitting. Toss in the past couple weeks of Humboldt sunshine which brings our own gloves and balls out of the bottom of the sports basket in the garage. The scent of aged glove leather and the pop of balls in reformed pockets announce the beginning of spring.

Then on one of my thrice weekly browsings of Northtown Books, a copy of W.P Kinsella's magical novel, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy pops up on the sales table. It's the story of a 1908 exhibition game between the Chicago Cubs (Tinkers to Evers to Chance & the last Cubs' World Series) and the semi-pro Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars, a game lasting 2000 innings, replete with albinos, feisty dwarves, Hall of Fame names from baseball's glory days, floods, Indian spirits, and windows in time.

200 pages in with another 100 to go, the epic game's in its sixth day and somewhere around 300 innings. Day after day, the players slog on. When the visiting North Side nine score in the top of an inning, the hometown Iowa farm boys inevitably pull out a run to knot it in the bottom frame. They break for hot, full-course meals served by local Christian cultists, and for sleep, only to return to the field at dawn. And the game goes on.

Page 199 introduces Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem who's summoned from the Majors to umpire the game when the local man in blue misses a call that would've decided the game in the Cubs' favor.

"How long will you let the game go on?" calls a dapper, white-haired reporter.

"The game shall continue until it is resolved," says Klem.

"But why?" asks the reporter.

"Sir," says Klem, drawing himself up until he is as tall as the reporter, who is not very tall. "I need not justify my decisions, any more than I need to justify a call of ball or strike, safe or out. The game will continue because I believe that it should."

America's Democrats are not quite ready to see their epic game end either. While some grow weary of the back and forth, up and down, nasty and nice, We the People have spoken, and need not justify our actions. The game goes on as it has, as it will, until it is resolved. Perhaps it will take a 40-day flood, or the magical rub of an albino's mane, or the chanting of a long-dead Iowa Indian, but there will be resolution. As there should. We're on page 199. But there are 111 pages, and 10 states, left to our story.

As Stephen Bishop once crooned....

On and on
I just keep on trying
And I smile when I feel like crying
On and on, on and on, on and on

On and on, on and on, on and on
On and on, on and on, on and on