Seven Quick Takes Friday! (Vol. 12)

ONE:

First, a big, loud shout-out to everyone who sent their prayers and condolences to me and my family on the passing of my brother, Bob. Thank you so much, everyone, for your kindness and consideration!

TWO:

So okay, three years of high-school debate and theater plus a semester college speech course don't a homilist make. But I found out last weekend that I can be pretty good at extemporaneous speaking with enough lead time. My nephew Aidan, though, promises to be better. But then, he's being trained as an actor and dancer!

THREE:

It was a packed weekend. First, the rosary and visitation on Friday. Then the Mass of the Resurrection on Saturday (and enough sandwiches to feed three times the people who showed up). Then Sunday, remembering 9/11, seeing some friends and relatives off and feasting once again. Finally, Monday, more people leaving and a final feast to celebrate Ted's 52nd birthday. Diet? What diet?

FOUR:

My brother-in-law, Mike, is a wonderful guy.

Over the last few months, the lawn has suffered from lackadaisical attention, with weeds overtaking the front plant beds and grasses growing high where once a vegetable garden thrived. Having nothing else to do on Sunday, Mike took it upon himself to rectify as much as he could, later getting help from my uncle Paul. (I joined in at the very end after my buddy Larry left for home ... at least long enough to trim some overgrowth and hoist a few bags of mulch.) There's still quite a bit to do, especially in the vegetable garden area, but the front looks much nicer than it did Saturday. And all because Mike hates inactivity.

FIVE:

Family get-togethers are great media for reminding oneself of how certain family expressions come into being.

One night, many years ago when Ted was stationed at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas, we were gathered at his house for Christmas. As often happened, we dragged out Trivial Pursuit^®, one of many games at which we Laynes take no prisoners and show no mercy. My mother had gone caffeine-free some time before; while we played, Ted made a pot of caffeine-laden java. Later, when he'd gotten a question that earned him a pie slice and put him in the lead, Mom, wired with the coffee, threatened to remove something important from his body with a rusty spoon.

I looked at Ted and put on my best Oxbridge accent: "I suggest a new strategy, Artoo: Let the Wookiee win."

Since my mother possesses a formidable temper, the tag stuck. And now, every once in a while, we can forestall her explosions and even get her to laugh if one of us looks at the other and says, "Let the Wookiee win!" Otherwise, we mentally grab our oh-God handles and duck for cover.

SIX:

Is there a way you can lay claim to a dead loved one's possession and not feel ghoulish about it? I now have Bob's flat-screen TV and Blu-Ray player in my room, and I still feel like the charwoman in A Christmas Carol who made off with Future Scrooge's bedcurtains even before his body grew cold. Granted, leaving the room just the way it was when we took him to Denton Regional just three weeks ago, right down to the half-full container of popcorn, would have been just as creepy, but still ....

SEVEN:

I've applied to GEICO for a job a couple of times in the past. Not even so much as a thank-you-but-we're-looking-at-other-applications e-mail ... not a bloody sausage. 

Well, now that I'm no longer needed as an in-home caregiver, I'm needed as a breadwinner. Tuesday I tried applying with GEICO again. Wednesday, I got an e-mail inviting me to test and interview for the job! Well, I got to HR on time despite a crammed parking lot that forced me to come in from the back forty, passed the test and had a great interview. So maybe Little Bro is helping me out from his corner of heaven ... thanks, Bob!

*     *     *

So that's all the news that's fit to print. Next week I hope to have a contribution for the Bright Maidens, and be back to my normal blogging patterns. Have a great weekend, and God bless!

The measure of our degeneracy

SparkNotes LLC has a mission: to enable your son or daughter to become a brain-dead slacker by pre-chewing and pre-digesting as much literature as possible, so no thought is unduly provoked.

Here's an example of this wretched travesty:

Original:

To be, or not to be? That is the question—

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—

No more—and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

No Fear Shakespeare:

The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve put the noise and commotion of life behind us. That’s certainly something to worry about. That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long. After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations—the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits? Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all.

 And if that's too hard for you still, you can take a break from this milquetoast rendition of great English poetry to read up on how to get rid of hair frizz, your September horoscope or which female rocker is the cutest.

When Western civilization collapses, will anyone be paying attention?

A grief observed

Bobby at Midway Airport (©1999 Anthony S. Layne)

For the next few days, this blog and Outside the Asylum will be untended as we prepare for my younger brother Bobby's funeral. I've posted some final words and a tribute to him on The Other Blog. Thank you everyone who has so far expressed their condolences, and to those who shall do so in the next few days to come.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat ei.

Gibsongate: Obama starts to alienate his last supporters—UPDATED

Gibson Les Paul DC with gold hardware

There are two segments of American society that still place some credibility in the Obama Administration: The mainstream media and the entertainment industry ... if they can still be considered separate entities. Not above shooting itself in the foot, the administration is now eroding one of those power bases.

If you have any knowledge or love of guitars, you know about Gibson guitars. They have made three of the most iconic axes ever to be played on stage or in the studio, from the late Les Paul's eponymous single-cutaway to the SG carried by John Lennon to the Flying V owned by Sammy Hagar (and played by Dr. Gregory House on House MD ... not the same one, of course). You can't buy a Gibson Les Paul in good shape for less than $800 unless you catch a very hard-up musician; in fact, Gibson licenses Epiphone to make Les Pauls with cheaper woods and sell at lower prices. The Les Paul DC is just one of many variants; they're not normally made with gold hardware, nor do they always come with vibrato arms. (Do not, for Pete's sake, call it a "whammy bar", or any number of guitarists will descend upon you to slap the taste out of your mouth.)

Guitarists from all over the musical spectrum just love Gibson guitars for the smooth "humbucker" sound produced by the double-coil pickups and the flattened frets that allow a greater freedom of movement over the fretboard. They are the Rolls-Royce of luthiers.

And, for reasons yet to be fully comprehended, the Department of Justice raided their factory on August 24th, shutting them down and forbidding them to move any of their stock.

The apparent premise for the DoJ's action is their interpretation of an Indian law requiring wood from Indian trees to be finished by Indians. Under a 2009 amendment to the Lacey Act of 1900, manufacturers and suppliers who purchase wood from a foreign company must obey that country's laws. However, to date India has not complained of importation violations nor requested US intervention, and charges have yet to be filed.

Now, there's some suggestion that the effort is politically motivated. CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, according to Andrew Lawton of Landmark Report, is a major GOP contributor, and that C. F. Martin Guitars uses the same wood but hasn't been raided once (let alone twice, as has Gibson). Another rumor is that the raid was motivated by the American Lumber Union, though I have no linkable source on that at this writing (9/5/11 @ 10:07 PM CDT).

[UPDATE: In his press conference shortly after the raid, Juszkiewicz related a story he'd heard that the Lacey Act (at least the amendment) was passed by Congress to benefit the lumber unions, in order to push vendors and manufacturers to purchase American lumber. The YouTube clip is 29:14 long; the reference to the story comes in at 23:39. Juszkiewicz explicitly states that the story is "hearsay"; it isn't a direct accusation of the Lumber Workers Industrial Union or the Industrial Workers of the World, nor does Juszkiewicz accuse the government of bending to IWW/LWIU pressure.—TL]

But Triple Pundit's Raz Godelnik suggests that Juszkiewicz's claim to complete legality may not be all that it seems. The government still holds wood seized as evidence in 2009 stemming from a US Fish and Wildlife charge; Gibson filed a motion to overturn it but was denied. And in 2010, a plan Gibson developed with the Rainforest Alliance had as its first principle "eliminating risk in its supply chain by identifying potentially illegal or unsustainable sources, banning future purchases of ebony or rosewood from Madagascar, and requiring all future purchases are from documented legal sources”. Kudos to them for doing that, but not exactly inspiring confidence that their supply chain is/was uncontaminated by illegal wood.

Nevertheless, the DoJ's immobility on the 2009 charges, when connected with this later raid, smells very fishy. The fact that the FWS charges weren't overturned, while carrying some presumptive bias, isn't a locked-tight guarantee that the accusations have good foundation; judges on all levels of the system have been known to make bad calls based on personal or political bias. And while I place very little credence in the claim of administration pressure on behalf of the American Lumber Union, I don't dismiss it out of hand; previous actions by the administration show that its interpretation of law — American or foreign — is very flexible when enforcing it against employers.

In fact, between raids on Amish milk producers, providing gay porn to school kids, forcing Catholic colleges to offer contraceptive coverage on employee health plans, bullying states to fund Planned Barrenhood and refusing to defend DOMA — oh, and linking to websites telling parents to let their kids masturbate — it appears the only thing the Obama Administration is prepared to enforce is its funhouse-mirror system of values. No wonder people like radio host Alex Jones are fed up with it:

Vatican II strikes back!

I am not a radical traditionalist.

I like Gregorian chant, sacred polyphony and the older English hymns; but I will sit through Masses with guitars and pianos because I'm there to receive the Body of my Lord, not to groove to the music. I don't think Vatican II was a mistake; it was perhaps ill-timed, and a lot of sins have been committed in its name, but it was a valid council nonetheless. I like mantillas and habits, but I also like t-shirts that say "What part of HOC EST CORPUS MEUM don't you understand?" and bumper stickers that proclaim, "We are Catholics. Sin is futile. Prepare to be baptized." I like fish on Fridays ... but I prefer steak. (Which is kind of the point, so I don't complain about it during Lent.)

As far as I know, I've never been to a Latin Mass ... at least, not in the last forty-three years. So I don't honestly know if I would prefer it or not. Any theological objections I had to the lame-duck ICEL translation of the Novus Ordo Mass have been answered by the new translation due to replace it on November 27th. Whichever Mass I go to, I want it celebrated reverently. That's the responsibility of the priest, who shouldn't be a doormat for his liturgists.

Nevertheless ...

I look at this first paragraph from Bp. Michael Warfel's Guidelines Regarding Celebration of the Extraordinary Form of Mass, and I shake my head in wonder:

 Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, (MPSP) article 5.2 notwithstanding, celebrating the Extraordinary Form on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation in parishes of the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings as a regular Mass of obligation is not allowed at this time. [Parishioners in these instances may be drawn away from celebrating at the regular Mass for Sunday or Holy Day].

 What part of this paragraph from the Ecclesia Dei Instruction on the Application of Summorum Pontificum is giving His Excellency trouble?

The Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI and the last edition prepared under Pope John XXIII, are two forms of the Roman Liturgy, defined respectively as ordinaria and extraordinaria: they are two usages of the one Roman Rite, one alongside the other. Both are the expression of the same lex orandi of the Church. [From Summorum Pontificum: "These two expressions of the Church's "Lex orandi" will in no any way lead to a division in the Church's "Lex credendi" (Law of belief). They are, in fact two usages of the one Roman rite."] On account of its venerable and ancient use, the forma extraordinaria is to be maintained with appropriate honor.

English is my native language. So I have no trouble understanding this passage: It means that the Extraordinary form is not inferior to the Ordinary Form. The Mass in the Extraordinary Form, if performed on Sundays or Holy Days, will fulfill obligations except those of the Easter Triduum. Therefore, Bp. Warfel's expressed concern — that people will somehow not fulfill their obligations if they don't attend an NO Mass on those days — is bogus. Are there too few people at the NO Masses?

But wait! It gets better!

MPSP, article 5.3 notwithstanding, celebration of ritual Masses (funerals, weddings, etc.) in the Extraordinary Form is not allowed at this time in the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings. A priest must contact the Bishop in advance to ask for any exception to this policy and demonstrate pastoral consideration by not imposing the Extraordinary Form on a parish in these instances.

Has this been a big problem — people getting up in arms because the wedding couple/decedent requested a Latin Mass? Apparently so:

N.B.: It is important to remember that the Extraordinary Form generally does not enable full, active participation by the assembly which was called for by Vatican II. While the Extraordinary Form holds a definite place in the liturgical tradition of the Church, it does not meet the spiritual needs of the large portion of Church membership today.

Oh, so that's it! If you're not chanting responses or singing with the choir, you're not fully, actively participating! I think what Bp. Warfel has in mind is this:

Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy. Such participation by the Christian people as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. 2:4-5), is their right and duty by reason of their baptism.

In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit; and therefore pastors of souls must zealously strive to achieve it, by means of the necessary instruction, in all their pastoral work. ...

To promote active participation, the people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes. And at the proper times all should observe a reverent silence (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §§14, 30).

Perhaps a Mass without "acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons, and songs" doesn't meet the needs of many of the people of the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings. But the intent of Summorum Pontificum wasn't for the spiritual needs of everyone; rather, it was meant for those who find themselves satisfied with the Tridentine liturgy. Rather, one of its purposes, as stated in the Instruction Ecclesia Dei, was to "effectively guarantee[] and ensur[e] the use of the forma extraordinaria for all who ask for it".

... [In] some regions, no small numbers of faithful adhered and continue to adhere with great love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms. These had so deeply marked their culture and their spirit that in 1984 the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II, moved by a concern for the pastoral care of these faithful, with the special indult Quattuor abhinc anno, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship, granted permission to use the Roman Missal published by Blessed John XXIII in the year 1962. Later, in the year 1988, John Paul II with the apostolic letter given as motu proprio, Ecclesia Dei, exhorted bishops to make generous use of this power in favor of all the faithful who so desired (Summorum Pontificum, Introduction).

Seems to me then that +Warfel, by appealing back to Vatican II, has determined that what the traditionalists, their pastors and the Holy Father want are irrelevant. The "very nature of the liturgy" demands full and active participation by the laity; it's the primary and indispensible source for true Christian spirit; so, dadgum it, they're gonna participate whether they like it or not!  

Not only are the guidelines of dubious liceity — Canon 392 pertains to the insurance that ecclesial laws are observed, but doesn't give the bishop power to override an apostolic motu proprio — they're wrongheaded and petulant.

Okay, I'll go ahead and say it ...

HUSKERS RULE!

Back to the Catholic Bloggers idea ...

Back in April, based on some preliminary work that Richard Collins of Linen on the Hedgerow was doing, I floated the idea of an informal Guild of Catholic Bloggers for our side of the pond, and even got so far as a preliminary set of organizing principles.

Then life got away from me. As I've said before, I'm not a natural organizer or project starter.

On Monday, Richard announced the first meeting of the Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma, an event that promises to be fun and faith-filled, including High Mass and a talk by His Hermeneuticalness (as Father Z is pleased to call him). On reading that, I felt a little guilty for abandoning my newborn idea ... but went about my week anyway.

I don't own the copyright.

Then came another prompt, in the form of an announcement of a meeting of the Catholic Writers Guild from The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named. (Okay, you'd have to read the comments on this post — and possibly this follow-up post — to get that joke.) "Guild," I said to myself ... and the word guild went wandering off in my mind in search of something to connect with.

Today, just out of curiosity, I decided to check out the membership requirements of CWG. It's $24 per year; they cater mostly to professional authors, though bloggers are welcome; membership includes access to a review board whose approval acts as a kind of non-canonical nihil obstat and imprimatur ... approved books can add the CWG seal for the comfort of harried and concerned Catholic booksellers.

All well and good; I'm considering joining myself. But the meeting, a five-day retreat, sounds a lot more formal than I was thinking about (more along the lines of "a Mass and a blognic"). CWG is a professional organization; my idea is more of a social guild. No review boards, no political tests, no particular required stance on Mass in Latin or Michael Voris or the USCCB or the Gather Hymnal or dresses-versus-pants. Just a chance to get together with the people behind the blog posts, to chat, swap stories, exchange tips, maybe bowl (or golf or play darts), and worship together in our mutual faith.

So once again I ask: Who's still interested? Who didn't know about this before but is interested now?

Shameless Pope-ery

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: 
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, 
And drinking largely sobers us again. 
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts, 
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts, 
While from the bounded Level of our Mind, 
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind, 
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize 
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise! 
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try, 
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky; 
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past, 
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last: 
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey 
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way, 
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes, 
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

—Alexander Pope, "An Essay On Criticism" (1709), ll. 215-232

With apologies for the title to Joe Heschmeyer!

Tell me again how ridiculous the "slippery slope" argument is

From LifeSiteNews.com:

BASEL, August 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kindergarten children in Basel, Switzerland will be presented this year with fabric models of human genitalia in a “sex box” to teach them that “contacting body parts can be pleasurable.” [For this they need a class yet! Reminds me of the Bill Cosby joke: "Intellectuals go to class to study things that people do naturally."]

The kit for teachers to give sex-education lessons to primary school children uses models and recommends having children massage each other or to rub themselves with warm sand bags, accompanied by soft music [perhaps a saxophone?], according to The Local, a Swiss newspaper in English.

“Children should be encouraged to develop and experience their sexuality in a pleasurable way,” Daniel Schneider, a deputy kindergarten rector for Basel who helped develop the sex ed curriculum along with experts, had said earlier this year.

He added, “It’s important that they learn to say no if they don’t want to be touched in a certain area.” [But it's apparently more important that they learn to say yes if they do.]

Education officials who have reportedly been flooded with over 3000 complaints from outraged parents have agreed to change the program’s name, but will do nothing to stop the materials from being distributed in schools, according to The Local. [Typical leftist idiocy: "You object to our program? Oh, we'll change the name so it sounds better!"]

Christoph Eymann, Basel education minister and member of the liberal democrat party (LDP), told the paper SonntagsBlick, “It was no doubt stupid to call it a ‘sex box’ [Ya think?] – we will change that.

“But we will stick to our goal: to get across to children that sexuality is something natural. Without forcing anything upon them or taking anything away from their parents.” [This guy must have missed the class "How to Be a Hypocrite without Anyone Noticing".]

 Of course, the real goal of the class is to undermine sexual discipline, sexuality will develop whether the children do anything about it or not. Once the little darlings are accustomed — and potentially addicted — to sexual stimulation, they'll have less resistance to stimulation by adults. Because, as we all know, children are "not inherently incapable of consent".

What "slippery slope"? Don't be ridiculous! Nobody takes that argument seriously anymore! That kind of thing could never, NEVER, NEVER happen here!

*sigh* No, I don't think they're all pedophiles. I just think they're all asshats.

A life on the road

©2011 Omaha World-Herald.

From 1970 to 1981, many a family trip started by crossing the Mormon Bridge on I-680 from Omaha to north of Council Bluffs. It was a flat start to miles and miles of farm-dotted hillsides, endless swaths of corn and grain, interrupted here and there by the occasional truck stop or Stuckey's.

At least once a year, it was off to Tuscola, Illinois, and later to State Line, Indiana, to spend either Easter or Thanksgiving — usually the latter — with my Grandma Layne. Almost always, Dad's sister, Ann Reese, and her family would be there; Grandma's sister Helen (Grandma's name was Beatrice) would often show up as well. Sometimes the trip included a visit to Grandma's farmland, where we would visit the tenant farmer, Bill Stoerger, and his family.

Grandma Layne was almost the stereotype grandmother you used to see in commercials and television. She knitted and crocheted. She stitched comforters, one of which was always spread neatly over her cherrywood queen-sized bed (which I inherited and had to give up, and I still feel sick about it). Her study was filled with neat little bric-a-brac and delicate porcellain pieces. She wore dresses and wore horn-rimmed glasses. She spoke in a quiet, grandmotherly tone and had a quiet sense of humor. 

(One night, my brother Bob and I were lying awake in our sleeping bags in the study while she was eating some ice cream and speaking to someone else — Mom and Dad? Anyway, we heard the clatter of the spoon in her bowl as she announced, "I can't eat another bite" ... and then we heard the unthinkable: Grandma belched. Quite loudly. Grandmothers don't burp! And they don't follow it up with a quip like, "Oh, well, maybe I can eat a little bit more!" Bob and I howled over that.)

The last time I crossed the Mormon Bridge to go to Illinois was in August of 1985. It was to lay Grandma in the cemetery in Tuscola, where a site beside Grandpa had been waiting for her since 1972. It would be the last time I saw my cousin Wayne, who died in an accident a few years ago, or my uncle George, who passed away just a couple of years ago. I don't remember when Great-aunt Gertrude passed; there were so many years when we just lost contact with our relatives out there.

The last time I crossed the Mormon Bridge was 2008. I'd gone back with Bob to Omaha on a weekend visit. While I was there, my friends and I decided to eat a prime rib dinner at the Pink Poodle in Crescent. As far as I know, the Poodle is still there, serving a pretty decent cut of meat.

But the stretch of I-680 from the Mormon Bridge to I-29 (pictured above) has been destroyed. 

Massive melt-offs up in the northern reaches of Montana and Wyoming, from where the Missouri River springs, led to high river levels all along the waterway, spilling over the banks between Ft. Calhoun several miles north of Omaha and Missouri Valley a few miles south of Council Bluffs. According to the Omaha World-Herald, "parts of the road and its supports ran against the grain of how floodwaters flowed and washed away like a weakened dam;" assuming an aggressive schedule, repairs will take until at least Thanksgiving of 2012.

Yes, the road will be repaired. Nothing to get all gloom and doom about. But ....

I used to drive an ice-cream (technically "frozen novelties") truck in a great, circuitous route from Blair to Fremont. As I drove down US 30 from Kennard to Arlington, the heat shimmering off the concrete, I would see a couple stretches of dilapidated, abandoned macadam that the concrete had replaced. They're still there, if you'd like to take a look. Old Lincoln Highway, which used to be connected to West Dodge Road at about 174th (now Burt St. acts as an access road), still takes you to Elkhorn on bricks ... but historical preservation ends at Cedar St. There was a time when I would see such cobblestone bricks on Old Military Road as it ran west of 168th Street, in patches where the blacktop had chunked off.

And as I drove along these pieces of 20th-century history, I would daydream and wonder about the people who had been that way before me, when the bricks and the blacktop had been fresh and new, who had driven their Fords and Chevys and Oldsmobiles to church — to market — to their jobs — to the recruiting stations and wartime factories. Perhaps they'd listed to the radio like we did on our way to Illinois; when the signal gave out, they'd sung songs and told stories just as we had. And when they got hungry, they'd find a roadside diner just as we found a Stuckey's; when they needed gas or a "comfort break", they'd find a Texaco or Standard with CLEAN RESTROOMS and a vending machine that dispensed twelve-ounce glass bottles of Coke or Pepsi.

And now I wonder: Fifty years from now, will that stretch of I-680 be obsolete as we flit around the skies like the Jetsons? Or will it be abandoned and surrendering to entropy as those now-crumbling chunks of what used to be US 30, because our country suffered an economic cascade failure?

And will anyone in that future, be it utopian or dystopian, look upon the ruins of I-680 and see the ghost of a little boy going over the river and through the long Iowa fields to visit his grandmother?