First, a little about my hometown. There’s a connection between it and the Powder River Expedition of 1865.

The leader of that expedition, Patrick Connor, was also a member of the California Rangers, an ad hoc police force that hunted down and killed Joaquin Murieta, a noted Gold-Rush era criminal, in 1853. If you ask me, Connor’s comrades look scarier than most outlaws. Capt. Harry Love, center, was the Rangers’ leader.

It is hot in the Central Valley, where the Rangers caught up with the man (alleged to be) Murieta and shot him dead. Since the state government offered a $5,000 reward, the bandit’s head was preserved in alcohol in a large jar as evidence. The Rangers got their reward. Joaquin got to tour California until, mercifully, his head vanished in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

It’s probably apocryphal, but Joaquin’s mother is said to have lived on Chorro Street in the county seat, nearby San Luis Obispo, and one story has him buying drinks for all present, unless they were gringos.

By the 1880s, things had calmed down considerably in our county, except for the 1886 double lynching of two accused killers, a father and his fifteen-year-old son, and the occasional bank robbery or saloon killing, so in Arroyo Grande, my hometown, and there was an influx of Civil War veterans. Nearly all of them were farmers: Arroyo Grande was known then as it is today for the richness of its soil, and 1881 brought, with the completion of a narrow-gauge railway, connections to markets in San Francisco and (much smaller) Los Angeles.

That led to at least fifty—it’s now approaching sixty or more— Civil War veterans settling here. They were restless men—at least a third of them had moved twice from their home states to Arroyo Grande. And that fact, once I’d discovred it, led to a book.

And among them were two cavalrymen who’d served (and somehow survived) the Powder River expedtion.

Thomas Keown is one of them. Here’s a little about him and his wife, Phoebe, from a 1935 Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder.

One of Keown’s comrades in the expedition was James Anias Dowell, and there are still Dowells in our area; as a high-school history teacher, I taught one of them, Joanna. Here are James and his wife, Louisa, late in life. Allegedly, one local resident descended from a Union soldier who fought at Gettysburg has Dowell’s kepi; their families were friends.

And here are the two old soldiers at rest, and not far from each other, in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery.

The Expedition, of course, was a betrayal of the Fort Laramie Treaty. Gold negates honor. While I’m thankful that Gen. Connor never got his wish—to kill every Indian male over the age of twelve—the fact that your state shares a history with my hometown is gratifying. These are fraught times and, after nearly 250 years as a nation, we have far, far more in common than we might realize. We are Americans, all of us.

(Above): Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show visited San Luis Obispo twice, but that was long after one of his stars, Sitting Bull, was shot dead at the Standing Rock Reservation. When he toured, he was appalled at the poverty of urban children; he’s shown giving away money to Philadelphia children. At right is White Dove, one of his daughters.

I may have more than enough Irish melancholy in my personality, but there’s a flip side: The Irish can be stubbornly optimistic and many have a faith deeper than the Irish Sea.

Which is where my mother’s grandparents and great-grandparents came from: County Wicklow, on the Irish Sea.

That’s Mom with my big brother Bruce in 1948, and that’s Bruce, front row left, during his first year at Harloe, not long after we’d moved to Sunset Drive from Taft.

I just saw a Harloe mother walking down our street, bringing her towheaded little kindergarten boy home. She was wearing his backpack and had her towheaded daughter on her hip.

She was lovely. She reminded me of one of my favorite AGHS history students, Siena, here with her little girl. (Siena and Dylan now have a little boy, too.)

This young mother brought out the stubborn optimist and the deeply faithful in me. It’s a humid day, and she was starting to struggle just a little.

Her little boy was just behind her. He had to stop and touch EVERY PICKET in every picket fence. Sometimes he absently did small u-turns. I watched them go right at the corner when he—much like a Basset Hound—decided he’d had enough walking.

He sat in the shade on the curb.

If this young woman is a good mother, and I think she is, she’ll let drop that there are oreos and milk waiting for him at home.

I just enjoyed watching them. It did my heart good. In the last decade, we’ve been subjected to fear, cruelty, crudeness and supreme selfishness.

If just for five minutes, the sight of this good mother, like Siena, like Patricia Margaret Keefe Gregory, my mother, filled me with hope. The last decade, if just for five minutes, was a vague and unimportant blur.

Bette Davis, Jezebel (1938)

Davis’s Julie has a spat with her betrothed, banker Henry Fonda, who is graced with impossibly poofy hair. So her vengeance is showing up at a New Orleans ball, where young women traditonally wear white, in a red dress. She is disgraced. Fonda is humiliated by her upstagery, so heads north on Banking Business. When word comes that he is coming back to New Orleans, Julie, in a fever primp, is ecstatic over his return. He returns with a wife. Damn damn damn. Fortunately for both, yellow fever strike New Orleans, Fonda comes down with it, and the rest has Julie channeling Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Davis is deceitful, scheming, amoral, enormously flirty and quite mad. She is delightful.

Burt Lancaster, Seven Days in May (1964)

Lancaster is a four-star Air Force General, Chief of the Joint Chiefs, Medal of Honor awardee with enough “scrambled eggs” (braid) on the vistor of his dress cap for two Denver Omelets. And, by comparison, he makes Julie’s madness seem tame. He is paranoid and a megalomaniac who is planning a coup against the President so he can become America’s dictator. Darn, those old movie themes never quite go away, do they? Lancaster’s intense, coil-springed and impulsive villain is balanced by his aide, Kirk Douglas, a Marine colonel, who is still Kirk Douglasy intense but is also intuitive, thoughful and honorable. Gradually, Douglas unravels the plot and the rest of the cast attempts to stop the coup. Lancaster’s character reminds me also of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, immortalized by Sterling Hayden in a contemporary film, Dr. Strangelove. The film is also notable for old cars, most notably Douglas’s 1963 Thunderbird.

Bruce the Shark, Jaws (1975)

Unlike Lancaster, who chews up the scenery and several hundred yards of film in Seven Days in May, Bruce might be his scariest when he’s unseen, which prepares you for the Boogah Boogah! moments when he appears. And, granted they are both boogah and boogah. Part of that might be because the mechanized shark was so difficult to work with and broke down so often, but I re-watched the last 40 minutes a few nights ago—I stopped before Quint becomes the main course for Bruce—and the final chase sequence, when all you see of the shark are the racing yellow barrels, is brilliant. Spielberg scores it with what might be called happy pirate music, and the film’s mood, after Quint describing the Indianapolis horror, is actually exuberant. Even if you’d read the book, the chase sequence is such a skillful bit of misdirection that it makes the grisly scenes hit that much harder. I still remember, when I first saw Jaws, that the crowd groaned in unison and then grew very quiet. When Roy Scheider blows Bruce the Shark up, there were cheers. It was a grand communal moment.

Walter’s Birthday!

Brigid’s bath.

The Wilson tribute.

And one for Mollie.

Fiona has been with us a week now, and it’s only today when I was able to articulate why I adopted her a week ago today, Saturday.

She was abandoned in her carrier that Friday in the airport terminal at San Luis Obispo, this big steel-and-glass place where the people are always in a hurry. So was the man who left her inside. The backstory was that Fiona belonged to his longtime significant other. She died. He drinks, so he’s on his way to dying. That Saturday, he was on his way out of town. He called a relative of the woman he’d lived with to tell her couldn’t take care of the cat anymore and told her, too, where he would leave her.

Then he flew away.

Fiona’s experience is mirrored in my family’s history.

The little girl in the photo below is my mother. We think, but are not sure, that the snappily-dressed fellow with his hands on the chair is her father, Edmund Keefe, the son of County Wicklow Famine immigrants. We think he was handsome and charming. We know that he was a drunk. He also had a tendency during benders to “borrow” cars, in Taft, California, where I would be born in 1952, that didn’t belong to him. The articles are from April 1925.

Then, sometime in 1925, he disappeared, never to be heard from again. This is my grandmother and my mom at about that time. My niece, Emily, found this 1925 clipping from the Oakland Tribune. (His first name varies in the old papers: “Edmund” or “Edward”).

My mother never knew what happened to him, but the melancholy he left behind stalked her for her entire life. She died at 48. What she left behind—-I can’t quite find the right word—was imperfect but loving and brilliant momsmanship. (Below: as a third grader; with my big brother Bruce, with my big sister Roberta.)

So adopting this abandoned cat was natural to me. She needed a place where she would be safe, where she would never go hungry, and where she would always feel loved. She needs what was taken away from my mother, the very woman who taught me how to give gifts like these.

Since I am emotionally about fourteen years old, I enjoy the Jason Bourne spy movies.

Bourne is an American intelligence assassin so thoroughly trained by his handlers that he can’t remember his real name.

I love the Jason Bourne car chases, the motorcylce chases, the moped chases, the snipers and hitmen he foils, the locales in Europe and New York City, the deft leaps from rooftop to rooftop or from high suspension bridges into any river you’d care to name. I also enjoy, to be honest, the fight scenes, especially the one where Damon’s Bourne subdues his would-be killer with a rolled-up newspaper.

AND Bourne can speak at least five languages effortlessly, has a secret Swiss bank account—no one has ever offered me a secret Swiss bank account, and wherever he is—Istanbul, Moscow, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, London, New York City—you want to be there, too. Without the killers, of course.

Damon is a wonderful actor (Yes, I’ll grant you Good Will Hunting, but that’s because of Robin Williams, too) but his turn as a stranded astronaut in The Martian is my favorite. It includes the immortal line I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this, when Damon realizes how chancy his survival is. It helps that he uses his own poop to fertilize the potatoes that sustain him.

Having acknowledged what a fine actor Damon is, I think that this young woman, Oksana Akinshina, is even better. The emotions that cross her face are kaleidoscopic—terror, disbelief, shock, grief.

There is also a fleeting moment, when she smiles, that shows she is sympathetic. That’s indelible.

Our niece Emily, lives in Brooklyn and works the usual three-plus jobs so that she can earn food and rent money between auditions.

Emily can act like this. She is brilliant and brave, and I am so proud of her..

My high-school teaching career began at Mission Prep, a Catholic high school, in San Luis Obispo. We older folks were hit smack in the face by the New Wave movement, and we were suitably horrified, mostly by Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. Her stuff was not Catholic School Approved, after all. And young ladies do NOT wear rosaries as necklaces, although shattered rosaries unearthed during an archaeological dig in the Immaculate Heart Academy’s privy indicate teenaged Bolsheviks as far back in San Luis Obispo Catholicism as the 1870s.

This song, then, was a shocker to those of us from the Boomer Generation.

“Like A Virgin” made me a little uneasy, too, so it wasn’t the first Madonna song that I grudgingly liked. This one, charming, was. I bought the album because of it.

There’s a little bit of genius in what she does with this song twenty years later. Madonna grunge.

My generation, of course, grew up with Marilyn. Even though I was only ten when she died, I had a little-boy fondness for her—even little boys, given the right upbringing, can sense vulnerability in others—and so this song, a wonderful homage, resonated with me.

Yes, I know that this is a tangent, but Nicole Kidman channeled MM well, too, in the Baz Lurhmann film that, on its ending, made me realize that my jaws hurt. I’d been smiling for two hours– up until Satine’s demise.

I’ve got many Madonna songs on my MP3 player, but the incredible pace of this video production of “Ray of Light” makes that song one of my favorites.

At the opposite pole from “Borderline,” this song is heart-breaking, with elements of Irish keening. We’ve all known people like this. The Frozen govern us today.

Happy Birthday, Madonna. Thank you.