Farmers-Caretakers of the Earth

Though it’s not April, I am doing the A-Z challenge.  Today’s letter is F,  for farmer.

“And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise

and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’  So God made a farmer.

God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows,

work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of school board.

I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt, and watch it die, and

dry his eyes, and say, maybe next year.

I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make  harness out of hay wire...

Who, with planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, and then paying his tractor back, put in another 72 hours,’ so God made a farmer...”

Farmers-Caretakers of the Earth

I took the above excerpt from a commercial by Paul Harvey, aired during this year’s SuperBowl.  When I first heard it, I was in the midst of eight or ten boisterous football fans, who paused in their raucous behavior, to silently absorb the words being spoken.  There is more of the commercial, that I did not transcribe, but there is enough here to get the general idea.  Farmers are a tough breed and they work interminably long hours, every day of their lives.

Though I have grown a vegetable garden, practically every year of my life since 1974, I have never farmed.  I have worked in the auto parts industry, I have labored in the trades, and I have taught in the local school district.  When someone farms, he or she does not work in one industry, and also farm.  No, when a person farms, as Paul Harvey indicates, it’s a full-time occupation, and then some.

My son farms.  He grows vegetables and fruit organically, and he works the hours described above.  I have known him to work from dawn to dusk, and then don his head lamp, and work until midnight, while I stumble off to bed around eight o’clock, wondering to myself how anyone could have that kind of drive and ambition.

He and his partner run a CSA, a Community-Sponsored Agriculture program, supplying Northern Mendocino County with fresh, organic produce, on a weekly basis.  From May through October, he orchestrates his produce being available at three different farmers markets.  Even now, in February, with the temperature currently resting at 28 degrees, he has a tremendous amount of produce, happily growing, the more tender varieties housed in eight greenhouses of varying dimensions.

Though the earth up here consists of rolling hills, with almost no flat area, he has carved his farm out of the land, by using a technique more often associated with the ancient Incan culture.  He has carved steps out of the sloping land, the earliest ones done by hand, removed many of the pre-existing manzanita groves, sifted through the soil to remove the rocks, and planted his crops.  This is all back-breaking work, and exceeds my limited capabilities.  Of course, I am not thirty years old anymore.

Whether you pay attention the the politics of labeling food, and are aware of the travesty of GMO production, you must be aware that food grown organically is superior to food grown otherwise.  It not only tastes better, it is free of the harmful additives that allows corporate farming endeavors to produce the vast amounts of produce that stock the Safeway and Alpha Beta markets of America.    

Growing organically means that a certain percentage of what’s grown, becomes dinner for the insects, birds and rabbits of the area; think of it as a toll tax on the highway of healthy eating.  Certain crops do exceptionally well up here on the mountain:  garlic, brassicas (that would be broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, etc.) beets, carrots and a plethora of different salad greens.  Other crops do not fare as well, such as corn, and potatoes.  

In the summer, our hot-weather crop season starts around June first, maybe a tad later than desirable, but extends well into the fall, often into November, because the higher elevation (3,300 feet) keeps the frost away until later than in the valleys.  It’s all good, as Casey would say.  He keeps his customers supplied all year round.  

I should know, because I am his biggest fan.  Both Annie and I are thrilled to have one of our three sons up here on the land; it was one of the most significant reasons why we pulled up stakes in 1982, and moved out of San Jose, to settle up here in the rugged country of Northern Mendocino County.  Twenty acres is a lot of land to farm and Casey’s not there yet.  However, I have two other sons, both involved in the fire-fighting industry.  There may come a time when they decide to engage in a little less exciting field than fighting fires.  If so, then there is plenty of room and plenty of opportunity.  Until then, at least we know that when it comes to wildfires, someone’s got our back.

Meanwhile, help yourself to the salad greens, why don’t you?  Just remember to bring your own salad dressing.  

Eggplant

I have been mired in a writing slump for the past several months.  The reason is diabolically simple: I only want to write about Annie.  However, I have made an agreement not to do so, because she is uncomfortable being the subject of my prattling.  Therefore, in an effort to snap out of my [writing] funk, I have decided to adopt the strategy that many bloggers employ during the month of April, and begin an A-Z adventure.  Today’s letter is E, b for eggplant.  What?  It’s not April?  Sue me.

Eggplant

Growing up without eggplant in my life was perfectly OK with me.  I had no experience with this fruit, and never expected to.  However, Annie changed all that, not overnight, but over the course of many years.  She began growing it up here on the mountain, sometime in the mid-eighties.  She would prepare it, offer it to me, and I would politely decline.  

However, one of the dishes she prepared was eggplant fritters, which consists of combining the eggplant with mushrooms, garlic and cheese, and other key ingredients, and then lightly frying them in oil.  As set in my eating habits as I was, when I first met Annie, the fragrance of this particular dish, wafting through the late summer afternoons, drove me to set aside my reservations, and sample it.  Ambrosia of the garden!

The nightshade, Solanum Melongena, also know as aubergine, brinjal eggplant, eggplant, melongene, brinjal or guinea squash, is a member of the plant Solanaceae.  As a nightshade, it is closely related to the tomato and potato.  This fruit is botanically classified as a berry, and contains numerous small, soft seeds which are edible, but have a bitter taste because they contain nicotinoid alkaloids; this is unsurprising as it is a close relative of tobacco. *

When eggplant is raw, it can have a somewhat bitter taste, but becomes tender when cooked, and develops a rich, complex flavor.  Annie always slices it up, salts it, rinses it off and drains the sliced fruit (known as de-gorging), to soften it and to reduce the amount of fat absorbed during cooking, but mainly to remove the bitterness.

Eggplant can be stewed, as in the French ratatouille, or deep-fried as in the Italian parmigiana di melanzane.  You can also batter and deep-fry eggplant and serve it with a sauce made of tahini and tamarind.  Annie has found some extraordinary ways to prepare eggplant, including one of my favorites: eggplant enchiladas.  She also grills it over the barbecue, and cooks a mean eggplant Szechwan.  

There are so many different varieties of eggplant, it’s ridiculous.  Annie has grown many of them, starting the seeds in pots, eight to ten weeks before the frost season is over, in a greenhouse.  Including the heirloom varieties, eggplant has to be one of the most beautiful of all fruits.  One normally thinks of eggplant as being purple, but also comes in white, and variegated (white and purple).  It is not difficult to grow, but does need rich soil and plenty of water.

One of the most common ways of cooking eggplant is eggplant parmigiana, often served in Italian restaurants.  I have had it served, and it usually seems to be mushy and drenched in some sort of marinara sauce, and not all that appealing.  When Annie cooks this particular dish, which can be the main course, or an accompaniment to other entrees, she  prepares it as I described above, and fries it lightly in oil, and serves it with either a home-prepared tomato sauce, or with a different topping, such as a ranch dressing, or even a blue cheese topping (sorry, JT).  The crunchy exterior, combined with the smooth texture of the interior of the fruit, is exquisite.  

I’m not going to try and convince you to rush out and start indulging in this often misunderstood fruit.  All I will say is, of all the different foods that I have grown to love, after having Annie convince me I should try them, eggplant remains the crown jewel!

* I took this word-for-word from Eggplant, Wikipedia.

Open Sesame

I have been mired in a writing slump for the past several months.  The reason is diabolically simple: I only want to write about Annie.  However, I have made an agreement not to do so, because she is uncomfortable being the subject of my prattling.  Therefore, in an effort to snap out of my [writing] funk, I have decided to adopt the strategy that many bloggers employ during the month of April, and begin an A-Z adventure.  Today’s letter is D,  for door.   What?  It’s not April?  Sue me.

Open Sesame

Marguerite de Angeli wrote a novel for young readers called Door in the Wall.  I taught it for many years while working in the middle school.  Succinctly summarized, this novel used the “door in the wall” as a metaphor for overcoming one’s obstacles that are encountered in this journey called life.  Like most people, I have encountered my share of doors, once I emerged from childhood to adulthood, the most imposing of them, my experience in the military.

However, prior to militarily case-hardened, steel door, there is one other I’d like to touch on; rather, it was a group of “Doors,” headed by the late Jim Morrison, et al.  The rock and roll band, The Doors, burst on the national scene, circa 1967, ushering in a period of the music industry, arguably the most significant in history.  It is merely coincidental that both the Doors, and I, hailed from the Los Angeles area.  They could have easily emerged on the East Coast, or the mid-west.  The fact that I saw them in concert, in the Hollywood Bowl, sometime in 1968, is irrelevant, because a band on tour, would have been likely to make that stop, no matter what its city of origin was.

I loved The Doors and still enjoy hearing their music.  I mention The Doors, because the late sixties marked the transition from the early rock and roll of Elvis and other early sixties artists, to the more modern era, represented at that time by such diverse bands as Jefferson Airplane, Cream, The Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, and a myriad of others.  I was more than happy to charge through this door, into more contemporary music.

When I was drafted in 1972, the last year that the draft existed, I was a very sheltered kid, having been raised in a large family, with the blanket of security which often exists in this type of setting.  However, the nice drill instructors did not ask that we perform the necessary tasks to get through boot camp-they demanded it.  So I was prodded through this doorway into my future, whether I liked it or not.  The only other option available to me, was a route that went through Canada, and there was no way I could ever have done that.  At least I knew that if I could survive the drill instructors, my time in the military would be limited to less than two years.

For the next forty years, except for the G.I. Bill, when I thought of the military, it was with bitterness and contempt.  However, beginning last August, I have applied for Veterans health care, and have been astonished at the quality of care I have received.  Yes, it takes time to get that appointment to replace my bifocals, and yes, I have to take potluck, when it comes to getting an appointment for an immediate problem, but when one has no other options, the VA starts to look pretty good.  

It’s not as though I planned to have no health care; the school district simply does not provide insurance, longer than five years after one retires.  So the door that has opened for health care, is the result of that two-year period, that was so dismal, so long ago.  Who’d have thought it?

People create doors for a multitude of reasons.  By getting my teaching credential, to keep the little school house on the mountain afloat, I propelled myself into a career of teaching down in the school district.  Here was a door to my sons’ educational process, one that I cherished at the time, and one that continues to fill me with satisfaction, that I was able to be such an integral part of such a critically important part of their education.

I’ve had doors slammed in my face.  Haven’t we all?  But the ones that I have managed to pass through, have left me feeling as though walls were created to be accessed.  It’s part of the human experience.  So the next time you encounter a  locked and bolted door, don’t give up and walk away.  Get a Sherman tank and blast your way through.  You never know when that locked door will come back to provide you with a key to survival, as the VA health care system is doing for me.

California

I have been mired in a writing slump for the past several months.  The reason is diabolically simple: I only want to write about Annie.  However, I have made an agreement not to do so, because she is uncomfortable being the subject of my prattling.  Therefore, in an effort to snap out of my [writing] funk, I have decided to adopt the strategy that many bloggers employ during the month of April, and begin an A-Z adventure.  Today’s letter is C,  for California.  What?  It’s not April?  Sue me.

California

I was lucky enough to have been born and raised in in Southern California, and though I have since relocated to the northern part of the state, it doesn’t really matter.  California, for me, is the best place in the country, if not the world, to live.  

No other state that I can imagine, holds the same promise as California.  Though I like to stay on the politically correct side of the street, I will just say that there is no other place which reflects the ideals and principles of life, that I hold most dear, than California.  People of all cultures and ethnic backgrounds reside in California.  My father worked in a steel factory during the formative years of my youth, and he told us stories of the other denizens of his worksite, consisting of mostly Mexican  and black men.  His best friend was a black man named Pete DeCarlo, and I remember visiting Pete and his family as a child.

Papa introduced tortillas and beans into the house in the early sixties, a result of being offered samples of these commodities at work, when he ate lunch with the guys.  This was many years preceding the advent of Taco Bell, or other fast-food Mexican outlets.  It wasn’t until the late sixties that the first of this type of restaurant opened in downtown La Puente, The Green Burrito, which my oldest brother Eric used to frequent.

The uptake of all this interaction with the men of the shop, was that Papa taught us from an early age, that skin color was irrelevant, when it came to deciding the worth of a person.  He had very little good to speak of, when it came to the management at State Steel, represented by, what else?  White men.  So I grew up with a healthy sense of appreciation for people of all diverse backgrounds.

While growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, in the fifties and sixties, we were within a half-hour’s travel time of the San Gabriel Mountains, with plenty of snow in the winter; we were within forty-five minutes travel time to the ocean, for either surfing or bagging rays; and we were within an hour and a half from the high desert, for hiking or just driving through for the views.  California had it all.

When I got to college-age, there was never any doubt that I would attend a school of higher education.  Though Papa was not an educated man, having settled for acquiring a G.E.D. at some point along the way, he was instrumental in instilling in all of us, that higher education was the only way to go, if we wanted to avoid a lifetime of factory work.  Of the nine of us kids, there are two P.H.D’s, at least three M.A’s, and the rest of us have degrees from four-year schools.

I began school at Cal Poly, Pomona, got drafted and spent twenty-one months in the army at the end of the VietNam conflict.  When I got out, I moved up to San Jose, where I then attended San Jose State until I graduated in 1979.  Then I went back in a masters program, for another two years.  So out of twelve years, I attended school for ten of them, all at the most ridiculously inexpensive rate.  It cost $359.00 per semester at San Jose State, not counting books.  The G.I. Bill covered much of it in the seventies, so all was well.

When I relocated up to Mendocino County in May of 1982, I was convinced I had found paradise.  We bought twenty acres of land in 1975, for the paltry sum of four hundred dollars per acre.  Only in California?  I don’t know.  I just know that there can’t be a better place in the Union, with people who are so friendly and accepting.  I have spent time in the Mid-West, and time on the East Coast, but there is nowhere that I have found the people to be so true, as the people of California.

Baseball Been Very Good to Me

I have been mired in a writing slump for the past several months.  The reason is diabolically simple: I only want to write about Annie.  However, I have made an agreement not to do so, because she is uncomfortable being the subject of my prattling.  Therefore, in an effort to snap out of my [writing] funk, I have decided to adopt the strategy that many bloggers employ during the month of April, and begin an A-Z adventure.  Today’s letter is B for what else?  Baseball.  What?  It’s not April?  Sue me.

Baseball Been Very Good to Me

To quote the old Saturday Night Live show, “Baseball been very good to me.”  Mind you, I only stayed up late enough to watch SNL once, because I just can’t do those late nights.  The only reason I stayed up that late is because I was staying at JT’s house and Jimmy Buffet was making an appearance on TV.  At least the majority of baseball games are over by around ten or so, or maybe a little later if Brian Wilson is closing out...

I have so much to say about America’s Pastime, that I doubt I will be able to do it justice, but with Spring Training opening up yesterday, in the Arizona desert, I feel compelled to try.  Most of my life, dating back to 1959, the year the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series against the Chicago White Sox, I have been a fan, the consummate fanatic.  In a world filled with plenty of chaos, baseball brings a serenity to my life, unlike any other I have known.  

Over the course of the past fifty-two years, I have done most of my baseball imbibing via the radio, the last five years notwithstanding (Dish TV, you know).  The ebb and flow of the games, has allowed me to pursue a multitude of endeavors, from chopping/moving/stacking firewood, to writing complex term papers for school, to grading middle school papers, to simply lying down and napping.  One of my earliest memories was that of lying out under the stars, circa 1960, and listening to Frank Howard of the Dodgers, blast a ninth-inning home run to win a ball game for the home team.

And, of course, we played marathon games in the empty lot directly across the street from our home on Fellowship Street, gathering the neighborhood kids together after morning summer chores were done, and playing through the day until dinner.  I won’t go into detail, except to mention that one incident when my poor sister JT, got nailed by me with the baseball bat.  So much blood, but she forgave me, and we settled in to listen to the Dodgers on the radio.

Wait a second!  The Los Angeles Dodgers?  What’s up with that?  I am still savoring my beloved San Francisco Giants‘ second World Series triumph in the past three years.  How do the Dodgers thrust their motley presence into my thoughts?  Very simply stated, I bled Dodger Blue for the first twenty-two years of my life, until I moved up to San Jose in 1974, after being released from the Big Green Machine.  Being so heavily addicted to the game, and unable to get reception for the Dodgers any longer, in the pre-internet days of yore, I began listening to the San Francisco Giants.  

Ironically, while growing up in Southern California, following the Dodgers, the Giants always seemed to get the upper hand.  With the two Willies, Mays and McCovey, and superior pitching, the Giants were a habitual thorn in the side of the Boys in Blue.  After moving up to the Bay Area, and listening to the Giants on the radio, I switched my allegiance to the Orange and Black.  After all, it is virtually impossible to listen to a team on the radio over the course of a season, without gaining an appreciation for, and a love of, that team.  Make no mistake, I do love the Giants.

Having made the switch, I now saw what seemed a turnaround in the outcomes of the games played between these two opponents.  The Dodgers always seemed to be able to pull out the tight games, and went to the playoffs far more frequently than the Giants.  Overall, in head-to-head franchise competition, the Giants have prevailed in the win column, 1190-1166.  That’s twenty-four victories’ difference, between two teams, involved in what has frequently been called the most storied rivalry in professional sports history.  

However, the last time the Dodgers were in the Show was 1988.  Those are sweet words to these old ears.  More importantly, the Giants, as I mentioned, have won the whole enchilada, two of the last three years, using phenomenal pitching, timely hitting, and employing a young catcher named Buster Posey, the Heart and Soul of the Orange and Black.  Listening to the four best announcers in baseball, whether Jon and Dave on the radio, or Kruk and Kuip on the tube, is the ultimate summer entertainment.

With the San Francisco pitchers and catchers reporting to Scottsdale yesterday, (Have you checked out Timmy’s new “do?”) the 2013 baseball campaign is gearing up, and the Giants are primed for another run at the title.  Of course, the pundits will inform us that the Dodgers are the favorite to take the division, with their 230 million dollar payroll.  

Well, I am here to tell you, payrolls don’t win baseball games, guts and determination-not to mention pitching-do.  The Dodgers can buy some of the best players available, but they can’t buy a pennant.  That has to be won on the diamond.  I am here to tell you that I’ll put our starting lineup against any that the Dodgers can trot out, and sit back to listen to/watch 150-plus games, and in the end, we’ll view the Dodgers from our rear-view mirrors, as they once again shake their heads in disbelief.  

Grab some pine, Bums, as Kruk would say; you’re out of here.

Brother, Can You Lend Me a Hand?

I have been mired in a writing slump for the past several months.  The reason is diabolically simple: I only want to write about Annie.  However, I have made an agreement not to do so, because she is uncomfortable being the subject of my prattling.  Therefore, in an effort to snap out of my [writing] funk, I have decided to adopt the strategy that many bloggers employ during the month of April, and begin an A-Z adventure, beginning with the ever-present concept of aging.  What?  It’s not April?  Sue me.

Brother, Can You Lend Me a Hand?

Aging is a good-news, bad-news proposition.  The bad news is I’m getting old; the good news is I’m getting old.  Yes, it’s a double-edged sword.  I have always maintained that a person either gets old or dies.  Not very profound, but at least it helps to recognize this fact, when struggling to merely stand up, after being seated for a spell, or when trying to get one’s boots on.

I have aches and pains associated with getting old.  I have heard about this process all my life.  My esteemed mother (now ninety years young and still going strong in her apartment in Willits) used to tell us when we were small, that we would come home from school one day, and find that she had turned into a pile of bones, right in the middle of the kitchen floor.

One of my most vivid recollections of my eighth grade school year, is having my father take me and JT aside, and having him inform us that, unless we pitched in and helped her, Mama would not survive her pregnancy, a condition that produced my youngest brother, Kevin.  Papa warned us that Mama had a heart condition that robbed her of her strength and was likely to result in an early demise, unless she got the help she needed.  I remember re-prioritizing my life, so as to help JT do the breakfast dishes every morning, before we left for school.  Mama turned forty-four that year and I have no doubt that Papa firmly believed that what he told us was true. 

Now, as I travel through my sixtieth year of life, I experience the pitfalls of the aging process.  Having retired from teaching in the middle school in 2006, I have found it necessary to return to the construction industry, in order to keep financially solvent.  The irony is that I worked in this field from 1982 until the start of my teaching career, and only stopped because of the toll being taken on my body.  I suffered from back issues, which cropped up frequently enough to require that I seek employment in a more sedentary manner.  Hence, I returned to the classroom and obtained my teaching credential.  

Now that I have been back pounding nails for several years, what about those issues which caused me to stop in the first place?  Have they magically dissipated?  What do you think?  I am twenty-four years older and immersed in a young man’s game.  I am not going to regale you with tales of youthful vigor and enthusiasm.  One does what one has to in order to get by.  I am only going to assert that there is plenty of work, and that with Casey, my thirty-year-old son, I have made a strong comeback, with modifications.

Modifications?  indubitably.  For instance, I rarely work more than six hours a day, and frequently it’s more like four hours.   When I work with Casey, he has my back, and does not allow me to do the heavy lifting and toting.  When I am working by myself, I take the necessary precautions to allow me to get through the time I have set aside, without injuring myself.  It seems to be working out pretty well.

Yes, my knees give me grief; yes my surgically repaired right shoulder is cranky; and yes, my left hip reminds me constantly that I am sixty years old.  The up side is that I am now maintaining two households, our home up here on the mountain, and an abode in the city of Willits, an hour to the south of Bell Springs.  I derive a great deal of satisfaction, knowing I can still accomplish that which needs to be done, in order to provide for the needs of my sweetest of apple blossoms, as well as my own.

You either get old, or you die.  Right now, I am enjoying the ride too much to bail out on life, so what the heck?  I will keep plugging along until my time arrives.  Until then, you will not hear me whine about getting old, or how much my body hurts.  No one wants to hear it, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it anyway.

Hey, can you grab one end of that twenty-foot two by six?  It’s so green it must have been milled this morning.  Thanks, I needed that...

   

In the Trenches

In the Trenches

The San Francisco Forty-Niners will win the 2013 Superbowl for three primary reasons: the offensive line, their defense and history.  If that sounds arrogant on my part, so be it.  No one from the Baltimore Ravens will ever see this post, so it can’t come back to haunt the Forty-Niners.  Normally I would not be so bold as to state the obvious, for fear of upsetting the football gods, but the fact remains that only one team can emerge victorious, and the Niners are the better team.

Begin with the offensive line.  The Niners drafted Anthony Davis and Mike Iupati in 2010 and they have started every game since.  General manager Trent Baalke traded up two spots to draft Davis with the number eleven overall pick, while Iupati was chosen number seventeen, overall.  When a team uses number one draft selections for offensive linemen, you have to figure that these guys are for real.  

Jonathon Goodwin is the center for the Forty-Niners.  He is one of four Niners to start a Superbowl in the past, having played for the champion New Orleans Saints, in 2009.  Joe Staley, named to both the 2012 and 2013 pro-bowls, is the fourth member of the offensive line.    And let’s not leave out six-foot-eight Alex Boone, who plays right guard, and holds down his position with tenacity.  Together these players dominate a game, and dictate the terms upon which the Niners’ success depends. 

You can regale me with many reasons why Colin Kaepernick will win with both his arm and his legs; you can ramble on about Frank Gore, and his franchise-best rushing yards; and you can list countless reasons why tight end Vernon Davis and wide-outs Randy Moss and Michael Crabtree will dazzle defenders.  However, without the offensive line doing its thing with force and experience, the rest is just a crapshoot.  Football games are won in the trenches, and the Niners have the warriors to handle the havoc of the trenches.

The second reason the Forty-Niners will win the Superbowl is because of their defense.  Yes, the Baltimore Ravens have Ray Lewis.  I have heard a lot about the power and inspiration of this single player, not to mention the forty-five tackles he has registered in the three play-off games this season.  Yes, he is an impressive and inspirational player.  But he is only one guy.  Oh, Ed Reed is also there, and it was Cary Williams who intercepted the second of Tom Brady’s picks in the AFC title game, but they’re not going to be enough.

What the Forty-Niners present is a group of individuals, fused together to function as a unit, bent on dominating games, to allow the Forty-Niners to emerge on top.  I am aware of the seventeen-point deficit that the Falcons accrued in the NFC title game, and the 28-point comeback that Tom Brady engineered on that Sunday night, only six weeks ago.  But when push comes to shove in the NFL, no defensive unit is capable of producing the kind of havoc that the Forty-Niners have demonstrated, throughout the season.  They are truly indomitable.  

They never panicked against the Falcons, even though that seventeen-point deficit actually materialized twice, both instances in the first half.  In the second half, the Niner defense stiffened up, and they threw a collective shut-out against Matt Ryan, and the highly-touted Falcon offense.  That’s what I’m saying/talking about.  

Much has been written about Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman, the two punishing linebackers of the Forty-Niners.  Add to them Dashon Goldson and Donte Whitner, the two starting safeties, and you have a nucleus of incredible talent, to spur the Niners to defensive success.  Opposing wide receivers start out games with great fanfare, but after being tackled by the Niners’ hard-hitting safeties, they begin hearing footsteps.  It helps explain how Atlanta’s Julio Jones accounted for eight catches for148 yards in the first two-thirds of the game last Sunday.  After being lambasted by Whitner, he was able to garner only two catches for ten yards the remainder of the game, when it was most critical.

Finally, there is history.  There are those of us who witnessed the Niners netting only two victories per season, in back-to-back years prior to a 6-10 season, and then their 1981, 13-3 season, followed by franchise-first Superbowl victory.  If they make it to the “Show,” they will not back down.  No other team, which has been to more than one Superbowl, is undefeated.  The Forty-Niners have five Superbowl victories to their credit, with no defeats.  Those who are too young to remember these events, have had ample opportunity to read about them.  Do not sell the Niners short; they don’t shoot blanks.