THIS HAS BEEN A JIM AND IRENE FUDGE WEEKEND. Yesterday we celebrated Jim's heroism sixty-five years ago in the Normandy Invasion, and today we celebrated Irene's birthday. They enrich our lives.

NOW LET US PRAISE FAMOUS MEN

My closest neighbor and one of my closest friends is a hero. James Fudge was a nineteen-year-old sailor on LST 54, a small naval ship designed to transport and deploy troops and supplies in World War II. His little ship was among those that delivered American troops into the fierce battle at Omaha Beach in the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944. Of the 50,000 brave Americans who were deployed into the battle, 5,000 were killed. Today’s BLOG entry is a salute to Jim and to all those who changed the course of history on that fateful day. If the battle had been lost, it is likely that the world would be a very different place today. President Barack Obama said in a tribute to the valiant Allied soldiers and sailors who participated in the invasion, "As we face down the hardships and struggles of our time and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."

I persuaded Jim to put on the Navy uniform that he wore when he was nineteen. He could still get into it, something I would not be able to do with anything I might have worn when I was nineteen. Everybody who knows Jim knows that he still wears that smile he was wearing when he was nineteen.The star on the top bar signifies Jim's participation in the Normandy Invasion.Jim looks out on Coronado Beach. One can only wonder what this place would be if the Nazis had been successful in their attempt to conquer the world.

A MORNING ON THE BAY AND ON CORONADO ISLAND

THE GLIDER PORT BEHIND THE SALK INSTITUTE provides a long view of the San Diego County Coast from La Jolla all the way up to Carlsbad and Oceanside. Mohammed, Ed, and I went there today so Mohammed (visiting from Germany) could see how beautiful our San Diego is and so I could try out my new lens on some long-distance shots. I'd guess I was standing a couple of miles away from The Cove in La Jolla when I took the pictures of town. The helicopter conveniently came along so I could stop it in mid-air. (Click on individual images to see them larger.)

I was riding my bicycle out near the IHOP restaurant this morning when I happened to run into an old friend of mine, Samuel Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain. I’ve tried to tell him before that I consider it an unnecessary pretension that he insisted on being known as Mark... and “Twain”... “What the hell kind of name is Twain,” I once said to him. It’s exactly the kind of use of uppity language that would have made our mutual friend Huckleberry Finn laugh.

Anyway, there he was sitting on a bench outside the IHOP. He was reading a little book of poems by Eric Johnson, another friend of mine... said he thought the poems were more than pretty good... “damned good,” was the way he put it. I told him about Eric’s poetry reading at Open Door Books in La Jolla on the 14th of this month. He said he knew the store. He likes the store mainly because they keep his books in stock.

He and I have been friends since we were kids. I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was Huckleberry who introduced us... or it may have been Tom Sawyer. Whoever it was, we’ve had a good, long friendship. As much as anybody else, he helped me gain important insights into the nature of American culture when I was a young, green teacher.

I didn’t want to get him going about schools. I remember he liked to make fun of academics, especially academic jargon. On that subject he said once, “As concerns this question, our inspired ...founder,” I think he said... “instructs us that the fealty due from the Ultimate in connection with the subjection to the intermediate and the inferential, these being of necessity subordinate to the Auto-Isothermal, limited subliminally by this contract, which is in all cases sporadic and incandescent, those that ascend to the Abode of the Blest are assimilated in thought and action by the objective influence of the truth which sets us free, otherwise they could not.” You see what I mean.

I was also careful today not to get him going by talking again about name changes. Another friend of mine has changed his name twice, and I suspect Sam, or Mark, if he insists, has thought of a bunch of other names that he’s like to wear for awhile. I once suggested he try “Jerral” for size to see what it’s like to have a name that nobody spells right or even wants to spell right. He was a stickler for names of things.

He once wrote a letter to the Sacramento Union, a newspaper now long defunct, in which he argued that the Pacific Ocean had been wrongly named. Lots of people agreed with him. This is what he said in his letter to the Sacramento Union: “We hear all our lives about the ‘“gentle, stormless Pacific,”’ and about the ‘“smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands,”’ and about the “‘steady blowing trades’” that never vary, never change, never ‘“chop around,”’ and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock (I guess he may have been referring to Point Loma) upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other Greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country’s banner, and named his great discovery “Pacific” - thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, “Now, if you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around on this conspiciuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back into the woods again, because you have jumped to a conclusion, and christened this sleeping boy-baby by a girl’s name, without stopping to inquire into the sex of it. In a word, the Pacific is “rough,” for seven or eight months in the year - not stormy, understand me - not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very “rough”. Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had “Wild,” or “Untamed,” to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.”

You see how he is when he gets going. While I was sitting there, my friend Ed called me on my cell phone; and you should have seen how Sam reacted. He thought at first that I had lost my mind right there on the spot and was talking into my hand. I tried to explain cell phones and how some people are completely lost if they go out of the house without their cell phone, and then I realized that I don’t understand cell phones at all, so I gave up on the explanation and just relaxed into a conversation about other things.

The Flowers and hills and sky in Mission Gorge were astoundingly bright and beautiful today after the morning gray lifted.WHITE

White and yellow belong together
with green
against a background of black
that’s how it is
with the natural world
some of the time

the bride in white comes
down the aisle
all eyes turn to her
and back again
to the groom and preacher in black
then it’s only maybe

a reminder that other times
nothing fits
everything falls away in pieces
like humpty dumpty
virginity can never be restored
just pick up and go on

then the whitest white in flowers
with green
against the bluest sky in June
turns around
melancholy loneliness and gray dreams
and life goes on.

Life is like that...
Beauty and danger come together sometimes.
The delicate violet border of the jimson weed blossom
enclosing white billows of five connected pure feminine petals
around the inviting center with erect male stamen
should be all the warning we need
about the dangers of seduction
by innocence.

OVERCAST DAY

On a sunny day light splinters...
But not today...

When clouds hang low enough to touch,
red drips,
gray and blue spread above and run below,
yellow scatters, purple wraps, green springs,
indigo and pink fill the spaces
between black and white
and everything ends in gray.

Alleluia, Alleluia, the mocking bird sang
And danced in the bottle-brush tree.
Lux perpetua, lux aeternum, his anthem rang.
He lifted his head and looked at me.

BILL AND RUTH DERISI have produced another spectacular epiphilim blossom.