How Pluto Lost His Status

It is a common fact that most of the great conflicts have been started over a single dame, called a damsel. (Only the Trojan War was fought over a married woman, called off limits.) The Revolutionary War erupted because the British capture Pocahontas. The Spanish-American War came about when some senorita, rumors say, ran off with Roy Rogers. And even World War II was started only after a British woman named Fraulein had tea with Mussolini.

I remember several years ago that Pluto was voted off of the planetary scale. I am sure the old fellow was quite put out. After being invented by some earthling almost 80 years ago, he had been sitting prettily—and perhaps quite coolly—out some several billion miles away as a planet. “It was an honor,” he once told me, “to be labeled as one and run with ‘big boys’ like ol’ Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and to be able to flirt with Venus” because he was considered a planet.

Actually, I think flirting with Venus got him in trouble. There he was winking his cold blue eyes at her and that whippersnapper Mercury—you need to watch those young fleet-of-foot fellows—became a little heated under the collar. “He left a memo at the Astronomers’ Club—that’s where the astronauts, scientists, and astro-physicists hang out while they’re waiting for an amateur astronomer to discover a new star for them to name,” an anonymous source at the College of Space and Stuff (alright, so it was the janitor’s assistant) told the unassociated press, “saying, ‘If this schmuck is not off my block by the time it takes me to take a spin around the sun, I’ll…’” And he never finished his threat because he was already around the sun for the another spin.

The astronomers—they’re excitable people. You report an asteroid descending towards the earth or tell them that some solar flares are jumping off the sun again, and you’ll have them scrambling for their calculators, gazing through their telescopes and writing down equations and counter-equations a mathematician can’t even fathom. Next thing you’ll know there’s a state of emergency and they will devise someway of throwing the earth in reverse to barely dodge a Hollywood apocalypse. They really are quaint old sorts who take their jobs quite seriously.

Anyhow, as I was saying, the astronomers gather for a convention and named it something important like, the 2006 International Convention of Astronomers for the Determination and Termination of Pluto as a Planet (ICADTPP). They sent an invitation to Pluto so that he could defend himself, but Pluto was too far away to hear and missed his queue. Regardless, between coffee breaks, someone—it was the janitor’s assistant again—made a motion to impeach Pluto as a planet.

The reasons were quite ludicrous. They said he was smaller than earth. Of course, that got Mars upset and he turned red. Venus didn’t care because she said she wasn’t small but “petite.” Mercury did not comment. However, to calm the raging god of war, who appeared to be blowing a blood vessel, they—that’s the janitor and his assistant—said that the other “smaller” planets would be grandfathered in. Therefore they wrote three volumes of footnotes with calculation and diagrams and statistics to make their claim look too complicated to be wrong. (It convinced me!)

Throughout all of this, Pluto had still not made his appearance. It’s hard to blame him since the messenger thought some other large floating rock was Pluto and gave that fellow the message.

The five scientists present—the rest were lounging at the hotel’s pool or were visiting the various clubs and other landmarks—thought it would be a good prank to pull on Pluto. So they agreed. And Pluto was ousted.

Of course, Venus wrote her dear John letter. “How would it look,” she said, “for a girl like me to be dating some overgrown asteroid or dwarf planet? I ask you.” She was never a very sensitive woman. In fact, she might have been once a New Yorker. For she always says what she thinks, or feels, and gets away with murder.

Correctness in Feminism

I believe men have developed the unique capability of being silent sufferers. Golf has helped in this. In that sport most words are hardly spoken above a hush and are often short phrases whose climax contains no more than four letters. This apparent mellowness has the characteristics of meekness. Women may say men are proud; I say men are meek.

It wasn't so very long ago when men were not so. Only about 10,000 years ago--I remember it as if it were yesterday--Thug sauntered out of his cave, yawned, stretched, and gazed steadfastly into the horizon with a gleam in the eyes only seen on recruitment posters or in a woman hunting for a husband. Neither flinching nor stalling, he stepped out into the dawn, his hand clutching a piece of oak like Babe Ruth.

"There goes Thug," a neighboring cave-dweller was heard to remark quite briskly, "off wife-hunting, I suppose."

That was, however, 10,000 years ago when men were too thick-skulled to know that one does not hit a lady and when the ladies were too thick-skulled to care. Things have flip-flopped now. Women slug their men and think nothing of it. Men simply think nothing.

While many men, glancing with that half-closed-eye look of a Britain summoning Jeeves for more tea, complain that women are "not what they used to be" and women, excitable as hares on a May morning, complain that men are "what they used to be," no one seems to see the real source of the problem. Of course, if you ask an adult, the blame, with Adam-like swiftness, is laid out against the children--"They're not what they used to be." That comes, nonetheless, from the parents, who, being more infantile than childish, are not as they used to be. Come to think of it, neither are the toys and the toymakers. In fact, nothing, except hypocrisy, seems to be what it once was.

I think, if I am still allowed to do so because heaven knows I am no longer permitted to hold and preach my own opinion for fear of annoyance, the problem is a shallow one. It's not shallow because the reason is shallow, but because the cause of the reason is shallow--man. As the old statement says, "If a women hears a tree fall in a forest, a man is still wrong." Firstly, I shall be very clear: women are right that men are wrong. But men are wrong not because women are right. Men are wrong because women are "as they used to be." Women have, since Adam became the first organ donor, wanted men to be manly and to be in charge. For that reason, while women may not have liked it, the daughters of Eve never held conventions to complain about Thug twacking his bride-to-be. That's not to say they enjoyed the beaming. Absolutely not. But they wanted the security. If Thug, their reasoning is, was bold enough to clobber his soon-to-be-Mrs. just once, he was bold enough to control a household and a host of children.

Regardless, Thug still remained a brute. He was so not because he wanted to control his house, but because he thought it manly and necessary to knock out his heart's-delight to prove his love. The principle is true, but the action is not. A woman, I am told, desires a man who can put his foot down, not on her toes but on the threshold of his house, and keep it there regardless of his brutish inclinations and her feminine whims and wiles.

Because of their desires, yesterdays feminists had always been fighting for a great cause--not the emancipation of women, but the masculinization of men. Carrie Nation began waving a hatchet not because she hated alcohol, but because men stopped waving clubs and had begun drinking to solve their problems. Susan B. Anthony began crying for population control not because she hated population, but because she hated a leaderless population. Both reactions were wrong for the right reasons. That is, however, how the feminists--and most heretics, for that matter--work.

As she turned away

As she turned away and parted,
"Love," I said, "is worth the grieving."
From the moment love-looks started,
As she turned away and parted,
We swore to be both faithful-hearted.
Who was I, poor fool, deceiving
As she turned away and parted--
"Love," I said, "is worth the grieving"?

The Lilac Girl

From boards, a broken box, a shelf,
She made her homemade hideaway
Where she would watch the spiders weave
Their webs, and wear away the day.
There were no heartaches for herself
In her new home among the lilac leaves.

Within the foliage, she had hid
A doll adorned in wedding white,
A battered book in which she’d weave
A child’s dream, some coins, a kite,
A treasure chest without a lid –
She laid these there among her lilac leaves.

Too soon, too soon, the days decayed
From bird-sung spring to autumn time;
Her youth, which wonder weaved
And waxed tremendous and sublime,
Began to wane away. She played
No more among the fading lilac leaves.

The sun set coldly through the clouds,
And summer ceased—she came no more:
No more she watched the spiders weave
Nor kept her prizes as before.
Her doll in weather-beaten shrouds
Laid brokenhearted in the lilac leaves.

Yet every day I pass that way
With hopes to see her still, her book
In hand, and listen while she weaves
Her girlish schemes that came and took
Her far—so very far away—
Beyond her home among the lilac leaves.

The Bagpiper

No more the high pitched pipes will wail,
No more will chill the tepid souls,
No more the patriotic tale.
But now, now noiseless,
They rest like shades in holes,
Impatient and joyless
Until the piper warms again the vale
Where men shall drink his songs like ale.

The minstrels too are gone away
As if in search for places where
Men love the wild and woeful lays
And want the groaning
Of the discontented airs
With their mournful monotoning;
For homes and castle hearths play they
Whose songs are melancholically gay.

But here, alas, no piper winds
His notes where men are more like beasts
Than men, where men are deaf and blind
With their own dignity –
There is no room for song-filled feasts
Or warrior sanguinity.
He sets out now with hopes to find
A world of wonder still left behind.

Sometimes, I wander through the night
And sit among the ruins where
The ghostly bard in doleful delight
Once played his dirges
Merrily and majestically clear
As the moon emerges
Sullen with the gloom of night
Yet lamentingly low and light.

Ah! often I recall those airs
I used to hear—they stir me still,
The rousing and reverberant heirs.
Still they are haunting
With Plutonic and primeval thrills;
Though dim, still daunting,
In some solitary sepulcher
Waiting to rise and shake the tepid air.

The Tale of Blackburn Tavern: Part I

“I would claim
A place among that knighthood of the sea.”
Henry Van Dyke “Hudson’s Last Voyage.”

Follow the shallow spring, the babbling brook,
And watch the gentle trickle, slithering past
The ancient elms and oaks, begin to grow
As streams pay tribute one by one until the creek
Becomes impatient, seething and whirling down
The mountain’s side. Onward it goes, growing mad
And swelling and surging onward down the slopes.
Within this maddening flood, a war is waged
Among the waves as each, with ardent hopes
Of arriving first on the golden beach, contends
With each and every wave – a mad dash, a race.

Follow, if you dare, these falling crests.
They leap and bound in their bacchanal dance,
Their fits of fury, frenzied waltzes, whirling streams.
Follow, if you dare, the crowning caps
That spring o’er boulders like the hunted hart
Who hurdles brush and bush when howling hounds
Attempt to close and thwart her fated flight.
Follow, if you dare, these waters that feed
Not lakes and ponds, but Neptune’s realm,
The opulent ocean and the surging seas.
Follow it and do not dare to turn away
Until you’ve seen the shore, the craggy cliffs
That jut out of the ancient face of stone.

Recline among the rugged rocks and hear
The wisdom rumored through the raucous winds,
Repeated on the shore with each new wave
That crashes on the toothéd stone. Hear the echo
Of days departed. Hear the sounds of sons
Exclaiming words of love above the roar—
The thundering boom—of waves, to breathless maids,
Who hang upon each stuttered, stammered word.
Attend the words—no longer spoken loud—
Of love, and see the ruby lips of her,
The lady of his heart, hold the world
In silence with her smile. And watch her face
Compete with roses as her maiden blush
Informs the gulls of what her heart has heard.
Hear as mothers call their children home
From play; the laughing songs of children’s games,
Transported by the wind, that calms the hearts
Which hurts and aches made heavy in their grief.
And hearken to the sound that cuts the dusk
As fathers stroll their homeward course—the airs
Which fathers sing, of love and life, the chimes
Of happy hearths, of merry maids and wives.
And hear the jingles ring within the streets
And hear the cheerful feet that scurry out
To meet the sires coming home with fish
And catch and plenty. Hear the sounds of joy,
The harmony of happy homes, now lost.
Hear these sounds remembered only by the wind;
Unearth in them a momentary peace
Away from present pains, and drink these draughts
Fermented well within the crypt of Time.

The breezes here still moan for ancient days—
Days dead and gone—blown like autumn leaves.
They live, they die, they are no more. The tomes
Of history—even those—do not contain this past.
But like a wave once spread upon the shore,
Whose force is spent, will slink back to the sea,
Is lost from sight forever, So too the tales,
The ancient legends, once their virtue’s gone,
Must tiptoe into the annals of a time
Unknown, to be forgotten by the world.
This is the world of Blackburn Tavern: lost.
It lies beside the sea, forgotten but for scars
Of tides, of yesteryear. Here beer once flowed
Like rivers leaping to the sea and sailors told
The mysteries of the deep in ghostly tones
As only sailors can. Here one among the best,
A legend in his time, a myth among his own,
Still sits, his pipe within his mouth as he
Plays host to seamen souls. And Blackburn is
His name, the keeper of the inn, who fills
The flowing bowls with beer, and ears with tales
Of days upon the sea, how he once sailed
Off Newfoundland’s fjord for fish and went
Adrift upon the artic waves, how he…
And here he stops and drums his finger-stumps
Upon the counter made from oak as he
Within his soul recalls the frightful days
He spent with his dead dory mate. But then
His tale he tells, and tears at times infest
His eyes.

The Song of Rachel

I stood and stared into my hands
As if they screamed out guiltily.
“I have no scorn nor reprimands,
A wild beast has taken him,” said she.

The mother, seeped in sorrow, clasped
The bloodied body to her breast –
The body seconds earlier had gasped
His final sobs, then went to rest.

No sound, but silence thicker than
The blackness of the bestial sea
Was there until she said again,
“A beast has taken him from me.”

She struck the heavens dumb with sighs.
“Some beast,” she sighed, “I know not whom –
She turned and gazed into my eyes –
Took the only child of my virgin womb.

“He took and tossed his life away
Like litter, a tempest-tattered bag.
He tore him with his teeth; he played
Him like a useless piece of rag.

“But I forgive. How was the beast
To know he was my only boy,
Who suckled softly at my breast,
Who gave my life its life – my joy!”

I watched the teardrops swelling in
Her ocean-eyes and trickle down
The whiteness of her cheek and chin
And fall like stones upon the ground.

I tried to solace her with words,
But she would not be comforted.
Her heart was pierced by seven swords
And in her arms her son was dead.

“A beast has killed…” and sorrow stilled
All words she might have said to me;
I stared into my hands, and guilt
Stared dreadfully like blood at me.