Long-time readers may recall the on-going saga of the lilacs. I love lilacs, both their vibrant purple flowers (mine are, although many varieties are not) and their intense fragrance, but while growing lilacs in Cedar City isn’t particularly difficult, growing lilacs and being able to appreciate their full beauty and fragrance is more than a little problematic given the vagaries of the weather at 6,000 feet in the mountain west.

This year, I thought, there might be a good chance to enjoy the lilacs in their full glory. Begining in late January, the weather was so unseasonably warm that every day, the high temperature either flirted with the all-time high for that day or exceeded it. By early March, the nightly lows were above freezing and the daily high temperatures were in seventies (fahrenheit) or even the eighties. Snow and frost were non-existent.

The lilacs, usually slightly cautious, finally decided to start to bloom by around mid-March… and then just as the intensely purple flowers began to blossom, on the last Thursday in March… you guessed it, we had three nights of hard frost… immediately after which the temperatures returned to unseasonably high levels once more.

Perhaps half the lilacs sort of bloomed, and looked beautiful. The other half remained stunted and didn’t open, and none of them emitted even the slightest trace of the ineffable lilac fragrance.

What I’d like to know is, again, why the weather gods so delight in teasing me with the lilacs.

Cuba is inexorably crumbling. Its infrastructure is deteriorating, and no one appears to be willing or able to address the root cause, which is that the private sector doesn’t see any return on public service investment, and that the country’s too poor to raise taxes for capital investment and operation. This is the result of years of abuse by essentially unregulated private sector agricultural exploitation followed by decades of equally abusive pseudo-communism.

In the United States, there’s a similar conflict, but here, the scions of the private sector have amassed billions and aren’t happy with laws and policies restricting their operations and exorbitant profits, while those working for them feel more and more exploited as the costs of living increase faster than their income.

Both sides cite their ideals, but there’s sometimes a fine line between the earnest idealist and immovable ideologue, and, unhappily, the more one attacks someone’s beliefs, the more likely that person is to become the immoveable ideologue. And ideologues invariably want to force others to comply with their views.

It’s often been said that, while figures don’t lie, liars figure. That’s true about history as well, in that historians often see what they want to in history, as do politicians, especially Donald Trump and the rabid MAGA types. But it’s also true about everyday people. I have neighbors, good, solid people who are anything but idiots, and who’d do anything to help, who honestly believe that Trump hasn’t lied about anything, that the Somalian “mafia” control the state of Minnesota, and that most people on any form of government financial assistance are freeloaders.

I also know people who insist that police officers are the enforcement arm of the Patriarchy, that children should be bombarded with literature about gender identity before children are even old enough to understand gender identification and its ramifications, and that everyone has a right to more than minimum government assistance, regardless.

The problem with these inflexible true beliefs on a larger scale is that societies get less and less flexible and more and more rigid and polarized. And the less flexible a society or country is, the less likely that pressing problems get addressed as the country becomes increasingly authoritarian… and less free.

Over the weekend, I watched the last quarter of the Duke/UnConn NCAA basketball game.In something less than ten minutes, Duke squandered a nineteen-point lead, then gave up the ball on an unwise pass by freshman phenom Cameron Boozer that led to a last-second three-pointer by UConn that won the game. How did it happen to young Boozer, touted all year as the best first year, “one-and-done player” in the NCAA?

It happened because Boozer is an extremely talented, highly skilled FRESHMAN, surrounded by other freshmen. This is second year that this has happened to Duke. Last year, Duke had Cooper Flagg, another one-and-done phenom, and lost to Houston in the Final Four by blowing a fourteen-point lead.

In the UConn game, all Boozer had to do to guarantee the win was hold on to the ball, but he didn’t seem to realize how closely he was guarded and threw that unwise pass. Now it wasn’t all Boozer’s fault. In those last ten minutes, his largely freshman compatriots took unwise shots and made poor decisions.

For most of the year, such comparative sloppiness hasn’t been a problem because Duke’s overall talent level meant that Duke could simply overwhelm its opponents, but when a team gets to the sweet sixteen, just a few poor decisions and occasional sloppiness can do in a team like Duke, filled with an incredible amount of talent, but without commensurate experience and discipline, because young highly talented players have a tendency to think that their ability can compensate for that lack of experience and in-depth understanding. (There was a reason why first year college students were once called freshmen.)

But what’s happened to Duke two years in a row is just one example of a problem that extends well beyond basketball.

Over my lifetime, I’ve seen more young phenoms than I can count or remember burn out and crash because they relied far too highly on just their talent/skill.

My wife has seen the same thing in the field of classical singing, which is likely quietly but just as competitive as basketball. The most prestigious competition is the Metropolitan Opera Competition, in which this past year 1700 singers competed, with just six winners. Their rewards? Twenty-thousand dollars each and the exposure.

And I’m certain that my more experienced readers can come up with examples from their fields, all of which raises the question as to why there’s so much emphasis on young or fresh faces in so many fields.

At present, we have three dachshunds. I’ve almost always had dogs, initially largish dogs, including a Siberian Husky, a vain and near-brainless Samoyed, several other canines of mixed parentage, and then Toffee, aka Toffee Royale, a pure-bred female chocolate Labrador retriever, who weighed almost eighty pounds without an ounce of fat on her and who could and would retrieve tennis balls longer than any of my teenaged offspring could throw them (and all of them were athletes). Toffee even broke up a local softball game in New Hampshire by “retrieving” the softball and refusing to surrender it.

But until I met and married my wife the professor and opera singer, I’d never made the acquaintance of any dachshund – except in passing. I just thought they were short-legged, often obnoxious, bark-boxes. After Toffee’s passing (at seventeen, no less), my wife longed for another dachshund, because her last dachshund had died before we met. We found a rescue long-haired red dachshund puppy we immediately named Siegfried. He was cute, playful, affectionate – and an escape artist. To this day, I often could never discover how he got out on more than a few occasions.

One of us would have to go out and call him… and then, suddenly, he was right beside whoever took on recovery duty with this expression that proclaimed, “What’s the fuss? I’ve been here all along.”

Because dogs really do better with other dogs, especially according to my wife (and I will not- quite-grudgingly admit that they are pack animals), we soon added a black and tan smooth-coat miniature dachshund named Hildegarde, who was incredibly sweet to people, and a ferocious defender of her territory, all ten pounds of her. She and Siegfried chased off German shepherds and all manner of intruders -– although they never actually bit any person or dog. (And yes, it’s that Hildegard I inserted into The One-Eyed Man.) Hildegard was, however, a bit of a “breedist,” that is, she would only be social with other dachshunds. Other breeds were to be distained.

Our next dachshund was, and is, Buddy Mozart, who was supposed to be an English cream, but turned out to be a wheaten short-coat dachshund (i.e., half wirehair dachshund and half longhair dachshund). He was the inspiration for Rudy, the protagonist of “The Unexpected Dachshund.” He arrived at our house shortly after Dolly, another rescue from a puppy mill. Dolly is incredibly sweet and gentle, and when Buddy Mozart was a puppy, she never barked. So, his requests to us, to this day, are whines, as opposed to barks (which is also crucial to the story).

The latest addition to the dachshund pack is Wolfgang, now only ten months old, affectionate, and an incredibly beautiful English Cream longhair, with razor sharp teeth designed to “de-squeak” any squeaking dog toy known to man or woman, which leaves Buddy Mozart often forlorn because he likes to play with the squeaking dog toys (especially miniature rubber pigs), rather than destroying them, while Wolfgang’s sole mission in his young life seems to be to de-squeak Buddy Mozart’s pig toys. While I try to put the pigs out of reach when Buddy Mozart is finished, I often fail, especially when I’m writing, and that’s I why order the pig toys in large quantities.

NOTE: This post is for a faithful reader who requested anything, even about dachshunds, that didn’t deal with horrible occurrences in the U.S. political arena.

I seem to be missing something. As I write this, TSA employees are unpaid, and consequently many TSA agents can’t pay their bills and are quitting or calling in sick/unavailable. The administration’s latest proposal appears to be sending ICE agents to airports, as if ICE presence could do anything other than make the situation worse.

The Democrats refuse to allow consideration of TSA and other DHS funding until the funding legislation contains legal requirements for ICE agents to wear name badges, carry body cameras, NOT wear masks, and have legal judicial warrants to break into houses and buildings. In other words, to operate under the same legal requirements as all other U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Yet the Republicans and the President find these modest requirements so repugnant that they’re willing to paralyze scores of major airports rather than agree.

In short, the Republicans and the President are demanding funding for a federal law enforcement agency that is exempt from the protections embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively supporting an agency that provides the President with the powers of an authoritarian dictator.

What I fail to understand is why all the law-and-order Republicans are supporting something that is essentially unlawful.

Oh, yes… I suppose it’s no different than ignoring that the President remains a convicted felon and that the man who ran on not getting us into foreign wars has gotten us into Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran, as well as attempting to annex Greenland, Canada, and now Cuba. Did I mention spending a billion dollars a day bombing and otherwise assaulting Iran and its proxies, without even going to Congress in advance? And with no real plans for actually stopping Iranian terrorism or for ensuring we’re not in another long-running war?

But… according to the Republican Congressional leadership and the President, the Democrats are the unreasonable ones for insisting ICE adhere to the Constitution.

Tell me how that’s unreasonable.