You made me what I am today (I hope you're satisfied)

fdsaf (space) jkl;j (space) (Remember?)

I have a lot of assistance. Not in the kitchen, where it is immediately apparent as soon as you walk in the house, but in this writing mode. I have a triumvir, kind of, except that all three of them are rolled up into one...

The first part of this three part helper, is my agent/financial advisor, who has an MBA from Fordham University. I have promised my agent 50% of the gross proceeds from sales of these articles (snicker, snicker, how much is 50% of 17 cents, the amount earned so far from Helium.com, payable when it reaches $25 in the year 2300 AD?) I guess the answer to that is $12.50 if we live that long, but please don 't think, "Do the Math" because math has nothing to do with it. Math is algebra, geometry, and calculus, and how many of your friends can do calculus, much less arrive at the square root of anything? We should say, do the Arithmetic. I know they all say Do the Math -- just check at Walmart. They used to have signs hanging from the ceiling saying just that -- it is because they can't spell arithmetic. I can help:

A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream

There. My Editor will be pleased that I made a difference in both Grammar and ciphering.

Speaking of which, the second part of the triumvir is my Editor, who has a Master's degree in English. Not very often does a typo, or a misplaced modifier escape the eagle eye of the Editor. I am going to double the Editor's salary. For budget purposes, how much would two times zero be? Do the arithmetic.

Perhaps the part of triumvir most important in this genre is the technical advisor, the techie, the one who puts all of this together, who understands the workings of outer space, the internet, the spiders, the googles, the digitals. Now listen, I have read Brave New World and I don't want to have any part of it. Sometimes, you can cut the exasperation of the technical advisor (who thinks I can do this as well as understand that) with a knife, but I think I have by reason of the application of heavy amounts of ennui outlasted this attitude. After all, I wasn't a part of the 300 at Thermopylae, or with Colonel Travis at the Alamo, but I understand being stubborn and not getting the message.

There are other kinds of outlets besides those in strip malls. To get yours, you must first live a long time, have educated children, and run with the ball when you are not throwing it to your dog.

CQ, CQ, CQ....or, Is Anybody Out There?

Dah didah dit... Dah dah didah

Such was the forerunner of chat rooms back in Amateur Radio days. You had to have a transmitter (with a transformer so heavy you had to grunt to lift it) and a receiver. You had to know Morse code with an efficiency of at least five words per minute. It was a lot more difficult than entering chat rooms today, though I never heard of sexual predators operating under these circmstances. I guess five words per minute was a little slow for those fast talkers.

When I was growing up during the thirties, my cousins and their friends all had these "ham" rigs, and in time I married a fighter pilot who entered his military career as a radio operator in the Signal Corps. Later on, as a Cub Scout Den Mother, I taught Morse Code to my den of six cub scouts for their merit badges, and one of them later entered the U.S. Navy and became a Signalman. I never mastered the flags or tried to, but I guess he did. Pinky, if you are still out there, I hope you are alive and well.

Part of our electronic experiment was to make crystal radios. Each Cub Scout had to bring an empty toilet paper roll, and we furnished the wire, the crystal feeler, and the headsets (we were in the radio business at the time). The toilet paper roll became the core we used to wrap the copper wire around, and the little "feeler" served as a tuning device placed gingerly along the coil until a signal was identified.

When the boys pulled an AM signal out of the empty air, you should have seen the looks on their faces. I suppose it can still be done, but the irony of using a toilet paper roll in order to "make" a radio was a novelty. No one was more surprised than I, but my husband, who masterminded the whole affair, just smiled. His Air Force uniform still hung in the closet, and we were trying to wring a business from out of nothing, but he had the time to share his knowledge and training with others -- some who became his competitors, and he did it with no reservations.

Amateur radio operators were active in those days as one of the first lines of civil defense when disaster (tornadoes, floods, and the like) struck. If you can imagine a world without cell phones, or the internet; still, we lived. Every now and then you can spot an automobile equipped with amateur radio by the antennas they carry, or by their license plate. The plates will be their call letters, like W5EJT, and their houses will look a bit like Cheyenne Mountain. The lower the radio band, the taller the antenna. That's where you may go when the electricity is out (they mostly have their own power supplies) and perhaps you want to know how your old parents are doing in Minneapolis. And he will call on his transmitter, CQ, CQ, CQ, Minnesota, is anybody out there? Come back.

I think he will still get an answer. I hope so. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is still alive and well. Google it!

Social commentaries

The opinions expressed are personal.

They are not even widely accepted.

Remember the old time radio programs?

Life With Luigi: Luigi was an Italian immigrant and his life was intertwined with Pasquale, who had assisted in providing passage for him to this country. Pasquale was an entrepreneur interested primarily in enriching himself, and was always scheming about how to take Luigi to the cleaners. He would approach Luigi with "Luigi, my friend," and everyone knew that Luigi was in for it. The story always came to a conclusion with Luigi escaping Pasquale's clutches by some miracle, or by Pasquale getting what was coming to him. It made you feel good for the villain to be outsmarted by the simple folks with a little help from karma. We need a lot more of that today.

Bob and Ray: They always signed off their program with "Write if you get work, or hang by your thumbs." Hmm. Not much of a choice there, but it aired during and after the Depression, when options (good or bad) were pretty scarce, and all options seemed reasonable.

Ring! Ring! Ring! "Hello, Duffy's Tavern, where the elite meet to eat, Archie the manager speaking, Duffy ain't here." Duffy was never there, but a parade of neighborhood characters were, including but not limited to Digger O'Dell, the friendly undertaker...

Then there was Yukon King, the dog, who had to console himself that without Sergeant Preston, the show wouldn't have been so successful. Dogs are like that. They do the work, and others get the credit. Not fair, but "dese are de conditions which prevail(ed)" (Jimmy Durante).

Amos and Andy: This show was considered racist, but I could never understand why. I guess a simple peasant girl can't be expected to understand everything. Stephen Fetchet played a laid back Black and made a good living at it in the early movies, but the part was scrapped as a poor character example. As if someone like William Warfield could be mistaken for a lazy, needed-to-be-prodded person of color. He was acting, not running for Congress. Yet today, vampires, monsters, scoundrels, floozies, and bankers are considered heroes. The bad guys were identifiable in Amos and Andy's day, while it seems bad guys are those in a position of trust today. No doubt this is progress.

Speaking of racist, when the Daughters of the American Revolution prohibited Marian Anderson from singing in Independence Hall, I promptly resigned my membership and told them why. I never did receive a response back from them, and I never did reinstate my membership.

Let's talk about women's styles. I've noticed that everyday housewives are aping the TV and movie stars. In the boob department, little is left to the imagination. No longer are we restricted to cleavage confrontation, we are seeing the east and west side of two slim hangy-downs. Both of them. All of them as a matter of fact. No man's land to the north has been available for a long time, but I never expected the image to widen that far. The only modesty still available is reserved for nipples, those end providers of preferred sustenance for new children, I suppose spared from public view because of their practical purpose(s). I applaud such visual reticence on the part of designers. How long do you think it will last?

I don't mind lusty, under the proper circumstances (candles, dinner, soft music). But in the grocery store? Please. Go home. Get some clothes on. Spare me. I am aware of how you are built and I don't need to see it displayed or even deployed next to the artichokes. (I am not talking about actually nursing a baby, get off your high horse.) But one can't help but wonder and be in awe of a sudden turn to starboard and having things fly into space, knocking down nearby pedestrians, and leaving the occupant-owner to scramble to retrieve 'em. Now that might be fun to watch.

Twitter: To utter successive chirping noises

Let me tell you about Wilferd the Wren, who every year builds his nest on the corner of my mountain cabin. The nest itself is cozy inside a semi-hollow log, with a floor on the bottom and a sloping roof made from a wooden slab. There are so many sticks in it, they protrude out of the hole that is his front door. Wilferd keeps a vigil outside the nest, really a twittering expert, shaking his feathers and jumping up and down on the aspen tree that grows about six feet from his place. Sometimes, I see him flitting from treetop to treetop and singing the most joyous melodic songs. He strings the themes together as though he had been tutored by Simon and Garfunkle. I kind of wait for the guitar accompaniment but so far, nada. It is a capella.

Once, I was resting on the picnic bench right under his nest and I noticed that he was unusually agitated. He chirped an urgent, strident call. I wondered if he had swallowed a worm the wrong way, but then he dove down towards the ground, barely missing me. I thought he was suggesting that I Move, but as I followed his dive I saw that there was a tiny green snake about five inches long that was scurrying just ahead of Wilferd towards the woodpile. Wilferd was defending his nest. He knew that Colorado is a Make My Day state.

As he regained his post in the tree, I got up and decided to rest inside the house to allay any fears that he might have about my own intentions. (I read later in a wildlife book that those green snakes are an endangered species in Colorado, and I know why. Too many of them have been in the wrong place -- close to a wren's nest -- and the wrong time -- when they are brooding -- to survive.)

There are other twitterers outside of my cabin. The mocking bird, Pasquale (I call him that because he is a tenor, and I can just see him in his clown's suit, pulling aside the curtain, and belting out, tears streaming down his cheeks, to the enthralled audience, that Laugh, Clown, Laugh song from Pagliacci.) (This was before television, kids, you may have to ask somebody to explain it to you.) Pasquale the mockingbird is looking for a mate. He hangs out in the tallest trees, on the tallest branch, or on the 50-foot-in-the-air light post. He tells the world his hopes, his dreams, his aspirations. He must be a young bird because he is not very big, and he sang all spring last year but never in the moonlight, which means that he never found a mate, and that is why his songs are so heartrending. (They stop singing when they find a partner, just like us humans.) Pasquale, we know the feeling. We hope you don't die of old age before you get lucky. Next year you'll be bigger. You'll have a better repertory. We are all rooting for you.

Frank and Jesse were a little different. When we first moved to Colorado, I wondered what kind of birds those fancy black and white ones were with the long tail feathers. I thought they might be called cop car birds, but I was informed that they were "Oklahoma pheasants," or magpies. The kid from the ranch next door told me that they were not really welcomed in the bird world: they stole babies from other birds' nests and used the housing for themselves, for example. I had to have a pair. I paid him a dollar to steal two fledglings for me, and he delivered them the next day. (I am sure he told his momma that the crazy lady from Texas wanted them.) Now I had two bandit birds and I didn't know what to feed them. I scrambled an egg and poked it into their beaks, making twittering noises myself, and sure enough, they ate it. We got along pretty well together, me digging worms from the garden and they making themselves at home in my living room for about two weeks until they got to the point that better thinking convinced me to turn them out, and I did. For a while, they would both come to the bedroom window and squawk at me, and I would squawk back at them. But after a while, they went on their scandalous ways and never came back like the teenagers they were.

Now, when I see a magpie flying over, I call out, "Is that you, Frank? Jesse?" But they keep on flying. After all, it was 35 years ago. It was a fun experience, once done, never repeated.

This year, I thought it would be cool, a great adjunct to the back yard, to start feeding the finches. Last year, I saw a few of them around the regular bird feeder, and I thought, Oh boy! Let's attract more of the darling little creatures.

The finch feeder I was able to obtain at the local hardware store is a sock about nine inches long made of small mesh. The food, thistle seeds, is poured into the sock and voila! it is armed and ready. I suspended it from the apricot tree, and sure enough, it wasn't long before several female finches appeared, and then some redheaded males, and one bird with a gold head. Bingo!

Sometimes, there are three to five little birds hanging upside down and sideways on that sock, working away, chowing down. Just some casual twittering: "Cheap. Cheap. Cheap-cheap." (A commentary on the sock? Everyone's a critic.) They are mostly friendly to each other, sharing the bounty selflessly, although yesterday I saw one female chase off a male. Mostly, the eaters just move over to make room for newcomers. Such grace. Such atmosphere. Such harmony, not often seen in nature.

Molly chases them off sometimes, but they come back, secure in the knowledge that dogs can't fly. I guess it is worth the $30 a month to have such a sideshow directly outside the kitchen window.