Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth.

I learned to make pastry dough and biked in the snow and cold. We flew to Atlanta and saw the nieces and sister and parents et al., then drove to Waynesville and saw some old friends and our old home, now in dire need of landscape assistance (and for people to stop topping the damn trees -- jeez). We hiked in North Carolina and Tennessee, had Central American food in Greenville, and walked the gardens at Callaway. We took MARTA across Atlanta twice (some whites say it stands for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, but actually it’s mostly used by white people), and had two Thanksgivings – one at a Southern Living-quality home on 350 acres. As we were preparing to go to the second dinner we got the news that Mike Call had died while swimming off the Kona coast, and not 20 minutes later Correy texted to say Mrs. Siltman was dead, too.

(Lolo on the first good day of skiing this season.)

(Callaway Gardens)

Mike was the editor at the Tooele Transcript Bulletin who hired me on a scraped-together portfolio of free-lance writing clippings. He wasn’t particularly happy in Tooele, but then who was? We became good friends, and I lived in his basement apartment for two years. Many nights, when Laura was over, we’d hear him walk across the living room floor and open the fireplace grate to smoke menthols and blow smoke up the chimney. We’d go upstairs and while Porter chased the cats listen to him complain and laugh, since none of it seemed too serious. Things looked up for Mike when he moved to the paper in Odgen, and got better still when he started editing the paper on Kona and came out. Not long after he moved to Kona he started jumping into the ocean first thing in the morning and swimming with the turtles which, as his obituary stated, “gave him great happiness and comfort”.

(Mike in Missoula, March 2, 2012)

(Greg on Fuji)

Mike came to Montana two winters ago, and we had a beer at Charlie B’s and he gave Cooper an outfit and a baseball cap which he looked cute in but soon outgrew. Not that long ago we were talking about he a trip he wanted to take to Europe. I was encouraging him to go to Turkey, but he was keen on Greece.

(Pre-Thanksgiving near Athens – not the Greek one)

(Light show at Callaway)

I don’t think I’d seen Mrs. Siltman twice since Mr. Siltman died – one of those times I took mail to her house that wound up at ours by mistake. Mr. Siltman used to sit on his front stoop, and when he was out and I was walking Coozy I’d take her over. Without fail, regardless of whether Coozy was docile or slobbering straining at the leash, he’d say with halting enthusiasm, “That’s a nice dog!”

(Pine Mountain, Georgia)

(Working the hydraulics at -5, Deep Creek)

Na so dis world be. Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth.

(Between terminals at ATL)

(Pastry dough)

(Pretending the salt shaker is a camera)

**This blog’s title refers to the 2000 novel by Ahmadou Kourouma, a writer from Côte d'Ivoire who died in 2003. The obvious line is from Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author.

(Woolly worm in Great Smoky Mountains National Park)