“Where did he go?” I sometimes wonder. I realize I haven’t seen someone at work in a long time, and wonder, whatever happened to so-and-so?
The big shots have tributes and farewell parties. They send farewell e-mails to “All,” and in the privacy of their cubicles, their friends shed tears and their enemies rejoice.
Sometimes a co-worker dies. I’ve been shaken to find out I’ll never see a certain person again, and find it odd that so often we come to the most decisive moments with no inkling whatever. It’s sad to think that he had worked there for 20 years, and surfed the Internet on the computer, and sat in that same stall in the bathroom countless times, but when he did those things for the very last time– when he turned in his keys and walked out that door, thinking he’d do the same things tomorrow– he had no idea that all that was finished.
Other people know well in advance how their retirement will play out. “Ten more years,” he thinks. Then, one more year, one more month, one more day…. It’s fun to talk with someone going through that. “Just think– this is your last time to walk across this floor on your way to your office!” She smiles, nods, and laughs. “How great it must be to know that,” I think, knowing there’s always the chance that I myself have arrived here to work for the very last time. If the giant human-eating crows from outer space invade Earth today, maybe none of us will be going to work tomorrow.
Maybe it’ll be a giant earthquake. An asteroid. Mount Rainier could blow its top. A tsunami could strike. A catastrophe at home.
But one must plan for the future. “Inshallah.” “God willing.” One needn’t say those things to deeply know how they are so true.
A lucky break might bring things to a sudden end.
Good luck is not a cloud that does not have a black lining, though. It’s akin to a great fallacy of sports analysis, wherein commentators imagine that if only that player hadn’t been picked off base, he would have scored when the next batter hit a home run. That’s easy to say, and the picked-off base runner has every reason to take that as true, but if he hadn’t been picked off, the dynamics of the game would have been different enough that the pitcher probably wouldn’t have thrown that same pitch that got hit for the home run, and the batter would not have been in the same frame of mind that prepared him to hit the home run.
So an observer can think, “What good luck for so-and-so! Now he can enjoy what he has and proceed with his life, knowing he is the type of person who has what he now has.”
Not true. He is the same person he was before his good fortune, except that now he has the burden of trying to justify his good luck by living as if he deserved it, which is the same thing as expecting him to live as if he had accomplished something he might have liked to accomplish, but never actually did.
If you can then live as a responsible custodian of your good fortune, you can respect yourself as someone who has been prepared by life to have the good character, sound judgment and common sense to not squander an opportunity.
Luck is not a thing we can be certain of, be it ostensibly good or bad, because we never know whether things are ultimately to the good, or bad, as one might have an all-encompassing vision of our places in the spacetime inclusive of now, then, and hereafter.
Within the overarching reality encompassing us all in unknown causes and effects, cosmology and eschatology, it’s refreshing to have an occasional moment of clarity to savor– school is out! To leave a job for the last time, and happily imagine others thinking, “Whatever happened to that guy who always used to be there?”

The kitchen door is open so the dog and the kid can run back and forth, indoors and outdoors, so flies fly back and forth, indoors and outdoors, at suppertime, with food on the table, so the flies alight on the food, taking off with tiny morsels, landing, doing whatever they do on the surfaces they land on.
“There’s your dinner!”
Well, great. By the time I get to it, flies have been swarming around it for 15 minutes, and we all know, where flies land, that’s where maggots come from.
Some days, one’s mood is such that one is repulsed by this and cannot eat the food, because maggots might already be nascent within the food, because I don’t know how long it takes for maggots to be born, but I know it’s fast, and even if that’s not a plausible, decisive issue, we all know where flies’ feet have been, and whatever they wipe their feet on is immediately unclean and gross.
At the Last Judgment, perhaps God will say, “Who here regarded maggots as gross?”
If any hands don’t go up, “You!” God will say. “I know you thought maggots were gross!” Every hand will be raised.
Off in the distance, on a silver cloud, 144,000 maggots will be in attendance, each with a little golden halo.
Those designated for this Purgatory will sheepishly, solemnly, slowly make their way to the silver maggot cloud. Before each maggot, each person will implore, “Forgive me!” and each maggot will happily squeak, “I forgive you!”

The ants showed up in our kitchen one day. From under the floor, they crawled up and helped themselves to our crumbs.
“Our” crumbs? I include the ants in that collective pronoun.
Were these ants newcomers? Travelers? Or had they been here all along, dormant for whatever reason beneath the tiles, between the tiles and whatever is between the tiles and the Earth, perhaps “in that quiet Earth?”
I don’t like killing ants. Neither does my wife. But these were tiny things, so easily squishable, and there was nothing else to do with them unless we allowed them an unhindered run of the place.
The Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, shows domestic scenes of Indian life I’ll always remember because of their radical difference from American domestic life. I remember a scene of a house with an interior courtyard. Pigeons nested near the roof, and flew back and forth, and walked around the house. I’d never seen anything like that.
In my experience, any alien life in a house– a spider, a fly, an ant– is unwelcome and alarming. Not accepted or tolerated.
Between inside the house and the outdoors should be an unpassable line. Humans inside, everything else– out.
But these ants in the kitchen– who could say how long they had been on the property? Is there any expanse of property that does not have ants? If they had been on the property all along, who were we to say that we were committed to their final annihilation simply because we didn’t want them in “our” house?
We found that mint deters them, so we put some around the places they emerged. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen any inside.
States have that in common with houses. The political powers of a state will claim the property, and define who belongs, and who doesn’t.
A common story of the last century is about how the indigenous people of some place were inconvenient and undesirable to another people, who had the advantages of wealth and military power. The stronger group would try to wipe out the weaker. That would be the end of that.
Time and again, a military defeat of indigenous people proved impossible in Ireland, India, Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan– anywhere and everywhere.
In the US, the native peoples were confined to sorely inadequate reservations, to the ongoing detriment of the natives and to the everlasting shame of the people who put them there and the people who continue to perpetuate the neglect of their rights and deny them the resources they need.
In Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank– more places than not– people are singled out, isolated, and mistreated because they are somehow out of step with the majority, or the powers that be, who separate citizens into first-class and second-class citizens.
There is no first-class citizen, or nationality, that is made so because it has relegated other people to second-class status.
There are no military solutions to the social problems that come with the governance of a diverse population.
Where people historically live, where they are born and die, it’s arbitrary politics to say they don’t have the right to be there.
A military solution is never a definitive, ideal solution. Not even with an ant.

It’s that Moon of the year again– Ramadan!
Observance of Ramadan is one of the precepts of Islam, and, ideally, includes another precept– the pilgrimage to Mecca.
From the sighting of the crescent Moon, Ramadan begins and lasts until the sighting of the next crescent Moon.
The daily rigor of Ramadan begins at sunrise. Until sunset, Muslims abstain from food, drink, and sexual indulgence. That can be taken literally, though of course, there is more to food and drink than eating and drinking, and more to sexual indulgence than what can be accomplished by the constituents of the body.
Ramadan is calculated by the lunar cycle, so it begins ten or so days earlier every year. That doesn’t mean much near the equator, but here up north, it’s huge to the point where I wonder how they manage.
Why aren’t Indians soccer players? Too hot. Why aren’t Eskimos Muslims? Because one can’t observe Ramadan when the Sun never sets.
One could say, we’ll do Ramadan according to the solar schedule of Mecca. That would be a fair compromise, I would say, if it was suggested by someone desperate to keep Ramadan but prevented from that by the sheer length of days at this time of year in this part of the world. Although, eating a single peanut and sipping the smallest drop from a Dixie cup during Ramadan while the Sun is up would be as psychologically unthinkable as eating a Cadbury cream egg on Good Friday.
It’s only 28 days, you think. An even four weeks. After a single week, you’re 25% of the way through. Before sunrise one can eat all one wants, although with the Sun rising before 5:30, after the short night of sleep that follows an exhausting day of deprivation, one would need all one’s rest to face the oncoming day.
After the Sun rises, no more coffee. No sugar. No breath mints. Everybody in the office is going out to lunch at a place you’ve always wanted to go before it closes down for good in a week, but you can’t have anything.
After sunset comes the elaborate meal to celebrate the breaking of the fast, and that means enduring all the hoopla when all you want to do is have a good meal in peace and quiet when it’s almost bedtime after a long, grueling day.
Ramadan is difficult in The Great Northwest. One is surrounded by people who are mostly tolerant and non-judgmental, but we also seem to be eating, drinking, and even sexually/sensually indulgent (i.e., our Summer fashions) all the time.
We have our mountains and forests and all sorts of opportunities for the most active of lifestyles, physically and culturally, but these things can be distractions for believers. We have a mild climate, between the equator and the North Pole, but wild variations in the lengths of days. One could live here for 20 years, while Ramadan takes place from October through March, and have a relatively easy time of it, or one could live here while Ramadan happens during the other six months of the year and have about as difficult a time of it as anyone ever has.
One day at work I was in the break room with a Muslim friend. A box of doughnuts was on the table. As we finished our doughnuts, he said, “Oh, crap! It’s Ramadan!”
Pray for our brothers and sisters, the Muslims, especially during Ramadan!

Happy 4th of July!
As the only Summer holiday (Labor Day is in September, which feels like Autumn) and the holiday of American independence, a heavy load weighs upon the 4th, but it’s Summer, so we have the whole great outdoors to spread out our picnic blankets and umbrellas and enjoy all this.
“America” contains an endless variety of contrasts and contradictions, but the 4th is a joy and a celebration. Not a day passes without somber thoughts about the state of the nation, the world, and the planet, and our shortcomings as individuals, as a nation, as world citizens, but we would be amiss not to take some time to focus on the positive.
This is the land of Alaska and Hawaii, polar bears and palm trees, deserts and rain forests, cowboys and Indians.
Immigrants settled in the Appalachians, and Cajun country, and were forcibly brought in chains from Africa. In these lands, these people play what The Blasters sang about: blues, folk, jazz, country, R & B, rockabilly, soul, rock ‘n roll, rap, house, hip hop: American music.
Under one flag: Wall Street and Woodstock, Mormons, Hippies, Earth First!, the Tea Party, Al Capone and John Brown, Walt Whitman and Alice Walker, Sojourner Truth and Robert Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chief Joseph, Humphrey Bogart and Handsome Dick Manitoba, Ansel Adams and the A-Bomb, Aretha Franklin and Frank Zappa, Porter Wagoner and Pee Wee Herman, Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss, Prohibition and legal marijuana, Gram Parsons and graham crackers, Amazon and meth labs, Cap’n Crunch, the Captain & Tennile, football, baseball, and basketball.
America is a work in progress.
How do we finetune the economy so the poor don’t always have to get poorer and poorer?
How do we protect ourselves at home, and how do we use our wealth, military, and influence for the betterment of not just ourselves, but the world as a whole?
How do we know who our true friends are?
How do we take care of our old folk without slighting our youth of the necessary educational, health, and financial resources?
How do we improve our national infrastructure and expand and maintain our wildlife and wilderness?
How do we welcome the masses who brave every threat and danger to have the same opportunities we have?
As an American, I believe this nation believes in the individual and brings out (OK, sometimes the worst) the best in people, so I’ll wave the flag and shoot off fireworks with a beer in one hand and a hamburger in the other, thankful that I’m an American!