Medical Articles on Hormone Altering Chemical Pollution

According to Peter Eisler of USA Today, "Two billion pounds of insecticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals are applied each year to fields, gardens and forests in the USA. That accounts for a third of the $33 billion spent annually on pesticides worldwide."

And in 2003 Bush exempted pesticide companies from lawsuits!

Did you know that the half-life of DDT, the one of the most toxic pesticides ever used, is 57.5 years in temperate soils? It wasn't banned in the States until 1972...

Scariest part is that it will take a few more generations for all of its' effects to blossom, as it were.

I know I've had at least one conversation with all close to me about estrogenic environmental pollutants. Other than pesticides, whats the other huge estrogenic product? Plastic. We put everything in plastic, including our water, which with we absorb toxins through our skin more readily than through our digestive system.

There has also been research on linking higher levels of estrogen to cancer...

Here are the articles...

Developmental effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife and humans.

Compounds in Plastic Packaging Act as Environmental Estrogens and Can Alter Genes in Breast Tissue

Activation of Estrogen Signaling Pathways Promotes Cancer

Is industry creating more trans queers unwittingly through endocrine disruption? Ironically, it's just what mother nature needs for human population control...she is a dynamical system prepared to balance our amplifying feedback loops...

Farm Fresh Organic Produce!

The first few markets have been slow, but it's given my sis and I a great opportunity to just hang out and catch up on life. But the eggs have been selling like hotcakes... Saturdays 7:30am to sell out! N Locust and Ferguson at Soho Salon near Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX! Come and get fresh local eggs, veggies and greens!

Today I Found an Ancient Scroll

haha! Our old Dungeons and Dragon's dungeon map!!!

All American Farm Lunch

Gramma has trouble eating anything that isn't soft on account of her teeth being gone. She likes coffee and mayonnaise and it was a running joke growing up that if you go to her house for lunch she'd offer you SPAM or Vienna sausages in the can (Wienies, she'd call em). I made her this today with veggies and herbs from Cardo's Farm and a package of Annie's mac n cheese. I just chopped the beets and turnips and boiled them in with the noodle water. When the roots were slightly tender, I added the noodles, cooked the noodles in with the roots, then drained it, mixed it up with the cheese, and added chopped fresh dill, fennel and parsley. Gramma likes it better than the blueberries and cheerios she hardly ate this morning. It's half past noon and she's still working on her morning coffee and eating bites between cutting squares for the quilts we're all going to get some year...Christmas 2012?

Home on the Range

Sis' Prize Turnip
Prize Prickly Pear and White Not-Picket Fence
The Earthbag Dome
Rooster
Skull
The Toilet TP and Guard Eli
Annie the Cow

The Texas Roses are Blooming

Lightning Storms

As the sky bruised up with oranges and purples from the setting sun, the air became heavy and thick with humid static. Little lizards scrambled as I opened the door. The flashes and rolls of electric blue were distant. It wouldn't be until later, when I was sleeping in bed that the wind would rear up and Thor would crack the sky with his hammer as if it was a midnight egg.

Why It's No big deal to Miss Portland

Some things I miss about Portland, OR

Of Crows and Bacteria

Sashenka posted these talks from TED. These are really interesting presentations on the intelligence and communicative systems of crows and bacteria, respectively.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria talk

Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows

The Von Raven Legends

Both my mother and father can be linked mythologically to the raven, a bird of death and transmutation. On my father's side, we have traced the raven quite literally through the name. Before Texas, we began in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Great-grampa lived as well as the two generations before him. I never met him, but I heard he was an amazing old-timer and true cowboy who even had an Indian name: He Who Moves Slowly Through the Woods. My Great-great-great-grampa Ernest Gottfied died in Shelby, Michigan, but had come through New York (where he married Anna Ophelia Greene) from Herne, Germany where he was born in 1836. He was most likely fleeing the German Civil War that resulted in Prussian rule. In Germany they were blacksmiths, miners and papermakers, decidedly working class. Finally, in the deep, dark past of the 13th century, we allegedly hearkened from Ravensburg, Germany, home of the famous knight Herbord von Raven (his castle is pictured above). Most likely he was a brutal landlord who killed Pagans. At Darmstadt, Germany in 1767, a Von Raven founded a Masonic clerical order involving theosophy, alchemy and magic. True to the Masonic tradition, though, the knowledge was kept secret and the inside circle was considered superior to all others. Legend has it that one of our ancestors was a Knight who served in the Middle East in the 13th century, who probably slaughtered natives who didn't worship Christ. Lord...not too much has changed...

On my mother's side, the raven has appeared beautifully (and brutally) in the myths of her motherland.

Our gramma's maiden name was Ramey. The Ramey family, originally Remy, was from France. Many Remys became Huguenots, Protestants who broke away from the Catholic Church and the Pope in the 1400s. They worshiped in secret and began to be persecuted and massacred by the Catholics. Among the other Huguenots in exodus, Jacob Remy left France around 1654. Tens of thousands of our ancestors were killed because they were Huguenots, including Jacob's father, Pierre.

There are possibilities of the Rameys having roots in Gallic Druid tradition, the mysterious, archaeologically controversial, order of mystical healers, teachers and mages. The Gauls were a Celtic Pagan tribe in northern France, Belgium and Rhineland (Herne, where paternal Gottfied was born, is on the Rhine). The word Gaul, like the word Viking, may have been derived from a word meaning "pirate" or "raider". They put up quite a fight against the Roman Empire, much like the other Celtic tribes.

On a side note, I find it interesting that our paternal heritage is, for the most part, a patriarchal Christian order of Germanic Knights. I can almost see them in full pitch black armor on black stallions breathing fire and beheading peasants for the Church. On the other hand, our maternal heritage is one of Pagan rebel tribes, fighting the Church and Empire. I can almost see them dancing among the stones and drinking mead with faeries. But that's an awfully dualistic view and I digress...

Our great-gramma's maiden name was Lankford, which goes further back to Cornwall, the beautiful southwestern tip of Britain. The Cornish and the Welsh are the most clearly descended in blood and culture from the Pagan Iron Age Britons. Folklore speaks of faeries, giants, sorceresses, piskies and small people. The Danish Vikings, who were allies and probably interbred with the Cornish, brought stories of dwarves and elves. In Cornwall stand ancient monoliths testament to Celtic native princes' deeds. Standing stones, called menhir (literally "long stones"), are strewn by the hundreds amongst cairns and barrows alive with ghost and faerie stories. One great granite pillar is named Mên Scryfa or Screfys (which means "written stone").

A passage from Antiquities of West Cornwall by Ian Cooke says of the stone:

The inscription, probably made long after the menhir was orginally erected, reads
RIALOBRANI (Royal Raven)
CUNOVALI FILI ('Famous leader' or 'Glorious Prince')
The raven is a bird of carrion, linked with death and the battlefield and was believed to have magical power for those who worshipped it. The raven is one of the forms taken by the Irish Morrigan, goddess of war and death.

Celtic legend links the name of Bran (in RialoBRANi) to a ancient British warrior king, keeper of the cauldron of immortality, whose decapitated head continued to have powers of speech and was later buried on the site of the Tower of London, where ravens still live. Bran also appears in Arthurian legend under a variety of names and he was a Celtic solar war god.

The story of RIALOBRANI (Ryalvran) is clearly very ancient. An invader attacked the Glorious Prince, seized his lands and occupied the Lescudjack hillfort at Penzance, which protected the harbour. The defeated royalty fled possibly to the area around Carn Euny or the hillfort of Caer Bran (Raven Castle). The Royal Raven tried to reclaim his territory and a battle took place, but Ryalvran was killed and buried by the stone which apparently was the same height as the dead warrior.

The height of the stone that is legendarily the same as the warrior's is nine feet. Other legends say that he was buried with all his weapons and treasures, even that he was not dead but sleeping beneath it, ready to answer Cornwall's call in time of need.


The picture above is 2,500-year-old Chûn Castle, built on a summit near Mên Scryfa where the Royal Raven was buried.

More recently, the myths of the Raven is alive and thriving in Cornwall. This was posted in Gorseth Kernow News in 2002:

Due to habitat changes the Chough (pronounced "chuff" or, traditionally, "chaw") has not bred in the wild in Cornwall for 50 years, but a pair has now been sighted. It is a Raven with a red beak and red legs. The pair are thought to have come from Ireland or South Wales. It has been Cornwall's national emblem for so long that the Welsh word for a Chough is Bran Gernyw (Crow of Cornwall). It is believed to be the guardian of the spirit of King Arthur who will one day return to free his people.

Transilience and the Navajo Blessing

The juniper, pine and desert earth smelled of the watery hint of night burning off when we started out in the car to Gallup, New Mexico. Dawn transmuted the sky from jet to azure, the sounds of coyotes to birds. The three of us, my mother, brother and I, breathed in and smiled with the green mesas of the Zuni Mountains while the prairie dogs poked up on the fringes of the road to watch us pass. The day before, we had punctured a tire on a piece of igneous rock in the middle of El Malpais, the volcanic badlands filled with nothing but sharp rocks, cinder cones, spiky shrubs and carrion birds. We changed the tire and were going to get new tires in Gallup. The drive takes about an hour, but we were looking forward to the views and conversation. We would descend about one thousand feet, so the trees and vegetation would transform slightly.

Somehow, we got on the subject of gender and pronouns: the duality of gender in western society. I already had told my brother, who is also transgendered, about my acceptance of my leap across, beyond, over gender lines. A couple of times in the last few days, my mother, who only seen me a few months ago, had not recognized me standing in the yard. She thought I was another man from the community visiting. In a convoluted oblivion of words, I finally told my mother that I am transgendered. I felt I had not told her clearly enough, but my brother was backing me up and she was confirming that something was different. I reminded her that I had not changed, only grown more comfortable with myself and talking about my identity as somewhere between man and woman. Through the car journey, we explained that hormones and surgery were a form of body modification to feel more oneself, not a form of self-denial. She runs a beauty salon and so saw that people liked to shape certain physical aspects to feel beautiful: plucking brows, coloring hair, building nails sets. Make-up, hair and nails are modifications people choose that shapes their gender. I told her I am choosing to pursue taking testosterone to androgynize my body. My brother and I explained a bit of biology and social bias. I recommended a book to her, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights by Deborah Rudacille. Some biologists now say there should be at least five genders. Socially, the Western dualistic power structure, whose proponents feel threatened by feminists, queers and all types of civil rights activists, is rooted in the perpetuation of the view that things cannot change from one realm into the other. The working class cannot be allowed to have the power of the landowner. Women cannot be men. Trans people embody everything that threatens the hierarchies, down to the very notions of what it is to be human. Here's the key, I reasoned to her, I do not want male power, rather I want to destroy the wall. Our explanations seemed to placate her concerns. We approached the city and our conversations drifted to other subjects.

We dropped my brother off at the college, the car at the tire shop, and mom and I wandered downtown Gallup on foot. The sun was relentless and we ran out of water within thirty minutes. A Zuni man stopped us on the street and showed us the stone fetishes he had hand-carved. She was drawn to the snake and the horny toad. The snake was carved in a coil with a feather etched in the side. It represents wind and guards the garden. Snakes shed their skin and snake medicine is the alchemy of transformation. The horny toad is sacred, good luck. When you come across one, you rub it on your heart. She bought both.

We picked up the car and my brother and went for supplies. My brother and I went into Thunderbird, a jewelry supply store, and Ma stayed outside, perhaps to smoke. We took a while inside and when we came out she was seated next to a Navajo elder with his hand clasped in hers and her eyes nearly brimming. Her manner was as if she'd known him her entire life. She introduced us as her sons.

The man shook my hand, looked long into my eyes, and stopped himself from speaking. I was left with insatiable wonder over what he was going to say when he shook my brother's hand. Without letting go, he took my mother's hand and asked us to join hands so he could bless us. We closed the circle and he began speaking in Navajo. The sounds of the language came like a waterfall in a arid canyon as his hands shook from alcohol. A few words were in English, something about Jesus Christ, blessings, a safe journey. Ma let out a sob. He blessed us again, taught us how to say hello in Navajo: Yá'át'ééh. Have a safe journey, he said again, his eyes fervent and smiling.

We got in the car. I was blank with overwhelm. Ma said she had showed him the horny toad and he opened up to her with excitement and rubbed the fetish against his heart. She had told him that our family had gone through many hardships. She had endured decades of a marriage that created an abusive and dangerous home for her children. She told him about a time when a coyote had crossed in front of her. He told her that to undo the mischief the coyote makes when he crosses your path, you must draw a line where the coyote walked across before you pass the coyote's trail. He asked her if she had done that. No, she hadn't, but now she knows.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Navajos were forced to leave their homelands and walk over 300 miles to a New Mexico fort, where they were imprisoned for four years. Thousands died on the journey.

Safe journey, I remember him saying repeatedly.

Two days passed in a daze and it came time to leave New Mexico for Texas with Ma. Our last night in New Mexico we spent in the Valleys of Fire. I still had the blessings of safe journey in my head. The morning we were to break camp in the valley and return to the land of my birth, we decided to take a walk up the hill to the overlook. We walked with the sun up through the stones. Ma kept talking about watching for snakes because she had seen a rattler last time she was here. Sure enough, a snake crossed our path. It was harmless, but it brought my gaze downward, where, just off the path sat a horny toad sunning on a rock . I moved closer and it grasped the ground tightly every time I moved in, but it did not run. Ma said they were docile, you could pick them up and they would hardly squirm, she remembers that from growing up in El Paso. I timidly reached for it and picked it up. It was a little startled but stayed in my hand. I opened my shirt and held it against my heart.

With dawn, the coyotes' howls transformed into bird's cries and the ravens began to feed on yesteryear's shame. That was the day I came home.

Our First Farmer's Market!

Today Cardo's Sprout Farm had their first farmer's market at the lawn of Soho Salon in Denton! This is the farm where my sister has worked and lived for years. They operate with biodynamic principles, have a cow, over a hundred free range chickens, a garden for the CSA that just started up and wheatgrass and sunflower sprouts. I've had the honor of being more involved volunteering the past four years when I'm not traveling elsewhere, from chicken harvesting to helping with the construction of an earthbag dome shelter. Yesterday I helped my sister harvest and package vegetables, greens and flowers for bouquets and today we ran the very first market day on the lawn of my mother's beauty salon. We didn't come close to selling out, but it's the first day. Also, what's more important is the community involvement, sharing the priorities of growing your own food and supporting local farmers. We sold all nine dozen eggs, all our beets and quite a few greens. The rest will go to charity. We'll have market every Saturday at 7:30am and every Wednesday at 6pm at Soho Salon on the corner of Locust and Ferguson. Sundays are Community Day at Cardo's Sprout Farm in Ponder, 10am to 4pm. Thanks everybody for your support and we hope to see you Wednesday evening!

P.S. check out my brother Max's blog...

http://wyrmwood.blogspot.com/

Conan the Barbarian is from Texas

Yesterday I found this photo in Gramma's room. She tells me her brother worked on an oil rig in Cross Plains, Texas, where her whole family lived a at least a couple of decades.

Gramma says, "I had one aunt that was with the FBI and she came to Cross Plains and examined a bunch of things. Well, there was all thangs, bootlegging and what all...there was a lot of stuff goin' on about the oil. The guys runnin' the rigs. My brother worked on a rig. That's kinda dangerous work and Cross Plains was a pretty good oil field for a while. There was a boom, what they call a boom, where everybody comes to try to get a job and this and that...It wasn't making mother very popular that her sister was with the FBI. We had to keep a lot of stuff quiet. There was just a crowd that lived in Cross Plains and then there was one that came in, you know, that lived here and there. They were working the oil fields. They were just living kinda, you know, away from home and takin' thuh best of it."

Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, moved to Cross Plains in 1919. Gramma says he stayed at their house for a while. Apparently, gramma's mother Flaura and Howard were friends and shared an interest in writing. The oil rig roughnecks, whose carousing and living outside the law attracted even the attention of the FBI, must have had an impact on his writing, soon to be popular for pioneering an entire genre of swords and sorcery and most famous for his character Conan. There were enough stories in the boomtowns to inspire the weirdest of fantasy.

In 1936, while Gramma was a senior in college here in my hometown of Denton, Robert, suffering from lifelong depression, shot himself with a .38 pistol upon hearing his mother was in a coma. He died at age thirty in Cross Plains, Texas, where my Gramma and her family spent at least twenty years.

To Climb More Trees!

I climbed this tree today. I don't climb enough trees. When was the last time you climbed a tree?

It's the International Year of Astronomy!

Check out this website! It's a beautiful collaborative project by scientists from around the world, designed to bring astronomy to the masses!

Portal to the Universe

As a kid, I avidly learned the constellations, kept journals of the moon phases and followed the planets as they moved through the sky. One year, my parents got me a cherry red handmade ten inch reflector telescope on a Dobsonian mount. It came with the complete volumes of the Burnham's Celestial Handbook. I now had an excuse to get out of the house at night!

In 1994, when I was thirteen, the skies implored me to look repeatedly and I have not stopped watching since. May 10th, 1994, I watched the annular solar eclipse with my family through a piece of welder's glass. I sketched the sun every few minutes until the eclipse passed completely. Later in July, I watched the larger fragments of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 hit Jupiter through "Cherry", the telescope. Like the 13-year-old I've been since, I let out cries of "Whoa!" and "Dude!" as dark plumes of impact the size of Earth spread across Jupiter. The estimated energy equivalent of Fragment G was 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (about 600 times the estimated arsenal of the world). Then, that August, the Perseid Meteor Shower rained hundreds of fast, bright meteors through the sky, caused by particles from Comet Swift-Tuttle burning through our atmosphere at around 132,000 miles per hour. One large fireball seared halfway through the sky, left a vapor trail that stayed for seconds after it burned away and could be heard crackling through the air!

In March 1996, the Comet Hyakutake passed very near Earth with its incredibly long tail, becoming the brightest comet seen since Comet West in 1976. Then almost exactly a year later the extraordinarily bright Comet Hale-Bopp passed Earth with its amazing display of split dust and ion tails. If Hale-Bopp had passed as close as Hyakutake, it would have been the brightest comet ever witnessed through human recorded history.

I feel lucky to have witnessed these things firsthand, not through books or television. These experiences allowed me to begin feeling like a part of the universe.

Earth is such a beautiful cell, but the body of the universe is magnificent, so keep looking up!

Ma and Gramma on Love

Ma, aged a year shy of fifty, whirls up and cries to Gramma, "Oh, Sara, I think I'm in love!"

Gramma, aged three years shy of one hundred, replies, "Oh no, well, you'd better think!"

We didn't have a TV then, but we had a Commodore 64...

Yeah, you weren't the only one, everyone had a mullet that year.

Evening with Gramma

“I can see my fingers. They look pretty awful. They look like carrots. They really do look like a bunch o' carrots.”

“Well, it looks just like what it is, a pile o’ mess. We don’t know what we’re doin’ with all these squares. I guess we’re making a quilt…three quilts.”

Candy Kitchen, New Mexico

Candy Kitchen is named after the Candy Kitchen Ranch at the end of my brother's road in the Zuni Mountains of northwest New Mexico. According to legend, in the prohibition era Candy Kitchen Ranch made candy as a front for a speakeasy operation. The candy store accounted for all the sugar they were buying to make booze. The ranch is now a wolf sanctuary, so at night you can hear the dissonant howls of the pack on the hill.

My brother and his partner live in an old Spartan trailer with their three dogs, Hansi, Ogi and Sparky, two cats, Squishy and Thorne and some odd chickens.

I stayed long enough to help them haul water a few times from the neighbor's well, plant a bed of cabbage, chard and kale, dance around a maypole, help install a swamp cooler in their trailer, milk a neighbor's goat, drink the rest of Max's homebrewed honey beer and catch a meteor so bright in the ink black sky that I could see it crackle, break and vaporize.

I left Candy Kitchen for north Texas a week ago. The smell of juniper and the sounds of ravens' wings stays with me even though I'm now surrounded by the lush Texan jungle of this year's rainy spring. If I stayed too long my feet would begin to root with my heart there. Ah, but brother, my heart is a colony...

I do feel more at home out there in the country than in the city. This realization has been dawning on me for a lifetime and is now becoming too powerful to ignore. Yes, I am excited about returning to study at the university, yes, I am in love with the libraries, but as a permanent home, I cannot take the city. Since I was little I knew that what I wanted was to learn food and shelter for myself. The greatest pain in studying history was recognizing that most of the peoples of the world have been subjugated and homogenized by the empires of the earth. To a certain extent the schools and libraries are struggling to replace the learning that we have lost from the oral traditions of our elders. It's not that this education is necessarily oppressive or meant to belittle traditional knowledge. But, separated so far from our native knowledge, this booklearning is the closest we can come to learning again what we have lost from tradition. Closest, of course, next to listening to nature around us, to what the trees and animals have not forgotten, what the stones have held for longer even than the trees.

Gramma's Ninety Seventh Birthday

It's been a beautiful and crisply cool day for mid-May here in north Texas, so I drove Gramma and the poodle Elliot around my hometown Denton, where she graduated college. She always talks about the University of North Texas and, as she graduated in the 1930s, it has grown a lot since she had been there. It's been the rainiest spring in about one hundred years, so the grass and trees are green, sprouting against the clear blue sky. Gramma put herself through school in the middle of the Great Depression, graduated with a degree in art and managed to get herself a job teaching in west Texas. She's an amazing woman who, with her knit hood and wooden staff, looks every bit a wizard sage. We ate homemade pumpkin ice cream from Beth Marie's and sat on the old 1895 Downtown Courthouse lawn.

She recalls, "I was in a dorm just one summer. One of the girls staying in my dorm was in the New London School Explosion. Her roommate was just gone. She had found her roommate and put her in the car and made her look like she was drivin' the car. I guess you just don't know what you're doin' with somethin' like that. You see she shoulda been helpin' people instead of doin' somethin' crazy."

At the time in 1937, the New London School Explosion was the second deadliest disaster in Texas after the Hurricane in Galveston of 1900. A gas leak caused the explosion and 298 people died. It was after this disaster that the foul smelling mercaptan began being put in gas so that its odor would give away the leak.

"My dad was a Methodist minister. He retired from an injury in the Spanish American War...One time he was walking along Octavia Street in Denton (Octavia street is actually in El Paso, Texas, where she moved in the 1950's) just a huggin' another man. Turns out they were in the war together."

"We (she and her parents) had a boarding house. It was just a little boarding house but it was for college boys...and one of the boys got married and brought his wife over. When they left, the girl started drivin' the car. That was the biggest sight. They didn't know what in the world to think...That was just a treat to see a girl to drive a car. It wasn't long after that that I drove a car."

"When I was out of school I wanted the biggest salary I could get. My first teaching job was Monahans, TX. Shoes, tires and 'bout everything were rationed. I think gasoline was too. You just couldn't buy stuff like that...people that were in the army, they could get around but...I had to drive across Texas and I had three flat tires. I had to buy them on the black market. By the time I had my third one I was almost there. I just got out and walked the rest of the way into town."

"There was a carbon black plant there (in Monahans). So there were lots of young men. I took my meals with a young lady and she had those men over too. Some of 'em didn't have to go (to war), cuz they had important jobs for America like gas...But most of 'em did go."

"I went with a bunch o’ girls who wanted jobs (to the Pyote Air Base). I went out just to be with 'em, I didn't want a job. But the man wanted me to drive a scooter on the base. He wouldn't take anyone but me. I told that man I didn't want a job and he said, "Sign that girl up!" Army guys do any kind of way, I do believe. But I did like that job. All I had to do was deposit the money at the bank on the scooter. I had about more guards than needed. 'Bout ten guards."

"Funniest thing that happened to me in Monahans was at the airport (sic). Well, I was drivin' a scooter and the soldiers went all at attention to watch me on the scooter...and boy, did they laugh when the dogs got at me on that thing. They just stood at attention and laughed. They really did think that was funny. A girl drivin' a scooter and a dog after her. They prolly got reprimanded for it."

She worked on the Rattlesnake Bomber Base in Pyote, Texas. It was constructed in 1942. After WWII, more than 4,000 bombers and planes, including Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb, were sent to the base to be melted for scrap.

"During the war, we (she and her first grade class) went out into the field to pick up iron and they put it on the troop trains to make ammunition."

"The air base was pretty big. A lot of 'em got killed just trying to learn to fly. That was differn't flyin' than flyin' for pleasure. I was drivin' from Monahans into Pyote and one pilot landed his plane in the middle of the road in front of me."

"I was a USO girl. Not a very good one, but...you had to be (in the USO) to go to some of the dances and I really liked to go dancing so...The air force was always pretty good at payin' for things. They could get whichever band they wanted...more than some of 'em. But they'd get the best. You met lots of people but they were just here one minute and gone the next. That was the bad thing about that. Maybe they'd be there long enough to be there for the date and be gone that afternoon. They went straight from that place to where they were goin'. In the air force you don't wait for a troop train, you just take off in a plane. Get back the next day. Maybe. Maybe you'd get back. It was pretty sad."

"But we won the war."