The Hare

A couple of weeks ago on BBC Radio4 the book f the week was "The Running Hare," by John Lewis Stempel, an English farmer and author. Like most British writers about nature, his use of language and imagery takes you right there. This book is about his wish to develop a field where hares would settle. He leased a little over two acres of land a few miles from his own farm. His plan was to sow a wheat field interspersed with a wide variety of native species of wildflowers of many colors. (Along the way he tells us how the cornflower got its name. It seems that centuries ago the seeds got mixed in with corn seeds and bloomed along with the growing corn.)
He starts his field in the very early spring, and  describes  the process of the plowing and sowing and waiting for the hares to show up, the first being a female, which he calls a Jill. Before long, there are several pairs, and then the leverettes, the babies. He takes the reader through the seasons of the year, with the colors, the feel of the sun and the air and the scents, it is just a very fine and lovely experience to share.When asked how one becomes proficient as a nature writer. his advice is to go outside and sit in it.
Hares are related to rabbits, but have much longer and larger ears and very strong hindquarters. The first time I saw hares close up was a rather macabre experience. I was in the large central market in Florence. It was around Christmas  time and the place was a sensory feast. Strolling along enjoying the sights and sounds, I found myself suddenly confronting a counter lined with giant hares, skinned except for their furry heads. Their dead eyes were the size and color of purple plums. I could not unsee this sight. European butcher shops do not put things in little plastic packages. They know what they are eating, Inguess.
I have had rabbit before. When I was a senior in college a couple of my friends had gotten married and invited me for dinner frequently. One was of German descent. Her father would trap rabbits in his yard in Cleveland Heights and my friend Nancy would make hasenpfeffer, crumbling ginger snaps into the gravy. When she got the rabbits,  her father had already cut them up like chicken, so I never had to see a rabbit looking like the Italian hares in the Italian market with their furry little heads on.
My other married friend was from Vienna, and I learned never to ask her what the meat was. She had told me that where she was from they used every part of the animal possible. We never had rabbit there, though.
The next time I saw hares was from a distance, and was a much more pleasant experience. Emily and I were returning on the train to Erding after a day in Munich. It was late afternoon and I noticed what looked like a couple of dogs running through a field. Then I realized they were leaping, and had very long ears sticking up, and they were hares, alive and well  and enjoying a frolic. I was amazed at the size of them.
They may have eventually ended up in ginger snap infused gravy, but for that late afternoon life was good. The hares running in Stempel's two acre flower filled wheat field no doubt looked the same.

Genevieve

See that car? I have a long story about it, so get a cup of coffee. Or a shot of bourbon and settle down.
Several months ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published an article about an area man and his first car, a 1929 Model A Ford woodie. The man's name is Kirk. When he was in his teens he worked on a farm up near Lake Erie, where his parents had a summer home. He and  another teenage  boy discovered in a shed on the farm a decrepit  station wagon, with no tires, with the middle and back seats removed so it could be used to haul hay. They were intrigued, and asked the farmer if they could have it. Neither boy had a driver's license yet, but like most boys that age, they knew how to drive. The farmer let them have it, figuring they probably couldn't get it running anyway.
They scrounged around the area junk shops, finding parts they needed and soon had it running, loving every minute. They named her Genevieve. They bounced around in the fields on the tire deprived
rims most  of the summer. Somehow they managed later to find tires for it.
The older boy, Kirk, graduated from high school and enlisted in the Navy. It was 1945, and the second world war was still on. The younger boy took the car back to his hometown fifty miles south of the farm. He painted it gray.
When Kirk got out of the navy, after the war, he looked up his friend and bought the car back.  He was on his way to Cornell University, and painted it red and white, the school colors. He used it all the way through college, and finally sold it after he married. He lost  track of both the car and his fellow farm worker.
A few years ago, he tracked down Genevieve, I believe through the Ford Model A Club, and has restored her in all her glory, as shown in the above  photo.
This story was what I read in the paper. Since it was about boys who were now my own age, I  related to it, and loved their ingenuity and those days of the past, when my older brother Bill and his friends
I'm had fixed up an old Midel T Ford when they were in high school. Cars and boys!
Two days after the story was in the paper, my friend Cynthia Lynn, who helps me by driving me here and there, picked me up from a doctor's appointment. She started telling me about a conversation she had recently had with her mother. She had asked her about when she had started dating her father. Her mother said that she was fourteen and he used to come by her house in his old woodie Genevieve.
"What?"
"Yeah he had this old woodie and he''d take her out for ice cream and.."
"Wait a minute, a woodie named Genevieve?" I told her about the article. Neither she nor her family get the Akron paper, so I knew she  had no idea about the article. I knew her family had for generations summered up by Lake Erie. Also the article had said that the younger by had taken
The car to Warren, where her father had grown up.
When we got to my house I rushed in to show her the article, but, alas, it had already gone to the
recycling truck the day before. I did show her the online article, and she was sure it was the same
Genevieve her father had talked about, as well as the farm work he had done during his teen years. At this point, her parents were at their winter home in Florida. I told her to give me her father''s phone number, and that I would  e-mail the reporter who had written the article to  give it to Kirk.
Cynthia's father is one of those active, athletic men who love to hunt, fish, play tennis and perform other manly tasks. However, of late he has suffered a number of debilitating health problems which have caused depression and discouragement about having to limit himself. Cynthia called me a couple of days after the revelation  about Genevieve to tell me that Kirk had called her father, that Kirk told him he'd been trying to find him for over 70 years, and that as soon as Bob and his wife were back in Ohio, they were going to get together and take a ride in Genevieve.The effect on Bob Lynn has been a complete turnaround and given him a new lease on life.They have talked a number of times since that first phone call, and Kirk has invited Cynthia and her sister Judy to dinner and kept in touch.
I contacted the reporter again to give her an update on this remarkable result of her original story, which she did, being very much pleased at such a positive outcome for these two octogenarian men.
Last night I was invited to dinner with Cynthia by Kirk and his wife Do't at the posh retirement community where they live in Hudson. In front of their house sat Genevieve, gleaming in the late afternoon sun. We drove in it to the dining hall in style.
i felt a little guilty riding in it before the Lynns get to.
The horn goes "Ah-yooogah

Comeuppance and Schadenfreude

I did this drawing for a post I wrote in 2012, when it was obvious that the GOP was losing its collective mind. The party seemed in thrall to the wackier elements of the Tea Party, focusing on Obama's birthplace, fans of Fox News, denying evolution and climate change,  disparaging Europe, favoring fundamentalist religiosity and other extreme right wingism issues, all with an undercurrent of anger at the way things were in the country ( which some of us interpreted as fury over the fact that the president does not look like them.) Mitt Romney, who had been a moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, bought into this wackiness and lost  the presidential election.
Now the Republican primary  voters, angry white men mostly, have reclaimed much of that 2012 dogma, opting to support a demagogue who is about as prepared to lead the country as any of them are. The GOP has been breeding these folks, adding fear to the mix, and now they're up the proverbial creek. This should make me happy, but it's a very sad situation. We've gotten so far away from any kind of intelligent discourse in this country, or, apparently have a serious lack of informed voters, that despair seems the only possible response.
The GOP convention is about thirty miles up the road from where I live. I guess the bars during the week will be full of morose Republicans hoping for some dues ex  machina to rescue them. Maybe the Cuyahoga River will catch fire again and distract the delegates or catch the billionare's hair on fire as happened to Mayor Perk  many years ago. Without that hair  he's even less than nothing.