DEDICATIONS, PLEDGES, COMMITMENTS. "For the past. For my own path. For surprises. For mistakes that worked so well. For tomorrow if I'm there. For the next real thing. Then for carrying it all through whatever is necessary. For following the little god who speaks only to me." ~ William Stafford
I have lots of "unforgettable" things in my life. Lately I forget a lot of things: doctor's appointments, returning phone calls, where I've put my car keys, and leaving WalMart--where I've put my car! But most of the important, really important, things are unforgettable: The blue of my dad's eyes, the freckles on my mother's face, the sound of their voices, the day my husband proposed to me, the birth of each of our five boys...when the boys were little, at bedtime we had a litany of songs. This is one I sang to them for years and years. It's a poem of William Jay Smith's, and we had a recording of it on an album by Carly Simon called "The Lobster Quadrille." The cover was red. It is "unforgettable."
A PAVANE FOR THE NURSERY
Now touch the air softly, Step gently. One, two... I'll love you till roses Are robin's-egg blue; I'll love you till gravel Is eaten for bread, And lemons are orange, And lavender's red.
Now touch the air softly, Swing gently the broom. I'll love you till windows Are all of a room; And the table is laid. And the table is bare. And the ceiling reposes On bottomless air.
I'll love you till Night Rips the stars from his coat, And the moon rows away In a glass-bottomed boat; And Orion steps down Like a diver below, And Earth is ablaze, And the Ocean aglow.
So touch the air softly, And swing the broom high. We'll dust the gray mountains, And sweep the blue sky; And I'll love you as long As the furrow the plow, And However is Ever, And Ever is now.
(Even as I type this, the melody still runs through my head. I would be interested to know if any of my boys still remember it, too?)
Did you know this is National Friendship Week*? Three cheers to all of you, my cyberfriends: Hip-hip, Hurrah! Hip-hip, Hurrah! Hip-hip, Hurrah!
*Actually, nobody really seems to know if there is a special week for this, or what month we should celebrate it, or which week of that month...but, what the hay! I say this is as good a time as any. So CELEBRATE!
Noodles, my old dog (gone to her reward) and a ghost haunting our living room a few years ago. Here it is, from two different angles, unseen by me, the photographer, but looks to me like she saw something scarey.
What IS it???
I think it might be the ghost of Richard Nixon. Or Jimmy Durante. (But you guys are all too young to remember Jimmy Durante....)
GOODNIGHT, MRS CALLABASH, WHERE EVER YOU ARE!
And finally, a poem, an old one, but, whatever....
Liaison
This house is all enchanted. Wild things disturb the air behind the polished cupboard doors and underneath the stairs--
a tremolo of whisperings of drowsy, sleepy love, a hungering of haunted springs that foam and boil above
the gentle whorl of fingertips on cups of tea, the toast and jam, a fever under lock and key that burns a withered epigram.
This house is all enchanted. Wild things disturb the air behind the polished cupboard doors and underneath the stairs.
(This mornings newspaper had a story--back on page 8--headlined FEMA is sorry it staged briefings and it continues to say that the Agency's No. 2 official Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson apologized Friday for leading a staged news conference concerning the California wildfires, in which FEMA employees posed as reporters while real reporters were barred from asking questions. "We are reviewing our press procedures and will make the changes necessary to ensure that all of our communications are straightforward and transparent," he said in a four paragraph statement. "We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgement." "It was absolutely a bad decision," continued John "Pat" Philbin, FEMA'S Director of External Affairs. "Certainly...I should have stopped it."
But he didn't. And it was not simply "a bad decision," or an "error in judgement." It was a deliberate, outright LIE. This, trying to reestablish their credibility and integrity after their debacle in managing Hurricane Katrina. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino then said, "This is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House."
Yeah, right! "They should ALL be in jail," sez I. And it should have been on the front page.)
Two Gallants Waves Of Grain Lyrics
Pray betray the deceased, such an infamous freedom, such a militant peace. How dare they distrust, do they know who we are? And Your progeny's brave, their tract houses waiting, pre-plucked and pre-paved: To the ends of the Earth, wife, kids and a car.
But oh no, no, I see them falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And all your children are reared by panic and fear. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And your word is yet done: Inbreed us 'till we're all the same.
And Your collection of tongues, you keep framed in your parlour, with your bibles and guns, the fetus of Christ with a fistful of scars. And your vision is clear, while you blind your own kind in a curtain of fear, your words twisted skywards distracted by stars.
But oh, no, no, the sky is falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And you pour out your prayers and weep 'cuase you care. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And you hide the dead while my friends head to die in your name.
And This playground is yours spoke God when you met, behind closed doors. Gesture your hand and the pawns shall subside And though you play alone, you never get lonely, you never get bored. Who needs a friend when God's on your side?
But oh, no, no, I see them falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And even I can't pretend we're not near the end. But what when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? When your days are done, I hope you've had fun with your game.
And you accepted as fact: Behold a white horse, with you on it's back, a bow in your hand, a crown through your hair. And the oceans shall rise and slap on the shores of mountainsides. Great waves of progress shall wet the air.
But oh, no, no, the sky is falling. Let's all pray for rain, Let's all pray for rain. And you fools in the back with your heads in your hats, What when all your fields are rotten, your waves of grain, amber waves of grain? And my words won't be done, they'll never be done 'till the end.
When he was three or so his Pa whittled a flute slipped the willow bark to wood smooth and white as cream in a brown bucket
At twelve too tall for his stallion he remembers the secret bones of his small hands stretched to match the long wooden bones
Rocking he sang John Daddle he dreamed that his daddy was dead and his daddy he dreamed that John Daddle was dead....
He remembers shadows of clustering leaves across the scrubbed walls of his house rising and falling like dark fish in clear water he remembers a whistling of barn owls blinded by sunrise remembers the wooden horse lifting him far beyond the horizon of cornfields on wind whistling over the hills like a slip-bark flute
From: In Willie's House. The photo is of my dad, taken circa 1910.
After forty years Your face is one I no longer recognize Among other half-remembered faces Of children grown Lovers gone Friends departed
In your endless rage I know only The red wilderness Of burnt Mercury I would be glad For some small thing of Earth A red carnation
Once keep-away Was something children played Now I listen to you breathe You sleep in pieces This part of you That part of you Awake
I think how as a boy You hid a pocket knife In the top of your Commando boots Had a nosebleed at Grand Canyon And threw your unsold newspapers Into gutters
Now you lie buried Belly down in pillows Mouth open The outlines of your dreams Of Guam, of flight, of Halley's Comet And the end of the world A trailing current Of your death
Blood of my blood your name remains unwritten on church records school rollbooks letters of intent or love or sympathy:
Ariane.
I write it here a message in a bottle cast out with the wild grace of my hope all that's left before your veiled eyes flickering down the dark carry it away with them
I have been lurking around the neighborhood with my camera the last few days. Here are the mountains to the east I see every morning, waiting with Simon for the school bus, waiting for the sun to rise. Now that there is snow on the tops they turn bright pink at sunset. There is the church, a few blocks to the north, where (until this last year) I taught various Sunday School classes, where my children were baptised, where, in the hush that followed the choir's performance of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus one Christmas, my four-year-old stood up on the bench and announced in a loud voice, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! What a DUMB song!" --where most of the neighborhood gathers for wedding receptions, basketball games, summer bar-b-ques, Halloween parties, Christmas dinners, the blessing of babies, funerals.... The canal, its banks lined with willow trees and weeds, runs just east of the church.
People in the neighborhood are beginning to decorate for Halloween. Pumpkins sit in doorways, people are mowing their lawns for what is probably the last time this year before it snows. They're fixing their roofs and driveways, and jogging through the leaves on the road. The giant sunflower in my backyard has become a banquet for the birds. Just seconds before I took the photo, there were three or four birds feasting and scattering shells everywhere. My neighbor whose house is just across the fence suffered a stroke two weeks ago that weakened his right side and took some of his memory, but lately he has been out sitting in the sun, watching while his wife and two of their grown daughters put his vegetable garden to bed. My beautiful rose reminds me of the rose in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, with only her thorns to protect her when the snow flies next week....
The streets here are named Village Green, Greenfield, Meadow Downs, Meadowbrook, Willow, Dawn Drive. I live on Cloverdale.
The boys were excited to get their new Halloween costumes the other day and were anxious to try them on. Simon is Black Spiderman. Jake is Darth Vadar (who he calls "Hopper" because of the sound he makes when he breathes. Inhale: HAAAAAAAA Exhale: PERRRRRRRRR...go ahead, try it! Worn out, Jacob sleeps on the end of my bed, his walking stick on one side, his other arm around the dog.
To be truthful, the two boys in the leaf piles are my grandsons who live far away in Minnesota, having fun in THEIR front yard. The pictures are from their dad, via the miracle of the internet. All the rest are mine. I had other pictures in mind-- my weathered birdhouse, filled with acorns Simon collected and brought home in a bucket--but my card was full! I'll save that one for another day.
My grandson Simon is six-years-old. He recently lost a loose front tooth, and if you look carefully, you can see the new tooth emerging to take the lost tooth's place. The body has a remarkable ability to defend and repair itself, it even has a magical ability to renew, in that, at a cellular lever, we are constantly dying and being reborn. Heraclitus is supposed to have said that one can never step into the same river twice, and this is because the water is constantly being restored by new water rushing in. And this is true of the body. Deepak Chopra tells us that 98% of atoms in our body at the moment were not there a year ago. "The skeleton that seems so solid was not there three months ago," he writes. "The skin is new every month. You have a new stomach lining every four days....It is as if you lived in a building whose bricks were systematically taken out and replaced. If you keep the same blueprint, then it will look like the same building. But it won't be the same...." Eventually, entropy takes over.
Physicists use the phrase "The Arrow of Time" to explain the fact that events in time can only move forward, and can't be reversed. When a glass shatters on the floor, says Stephen Hawking, it can't pick up its pieces and rebuild itself into a whole glass. There are some things that cannot be fixed. "Not for all our piety, nor wit, nor tears." All in all, I think simply being alive is a miraculous achievement. When I woke this morning, I thought of the tremendous change in my life once the powerful catalytic agent CANCER was introduced. I've come to feel a certain indifference to the few dark horrors that my mind occasionally offers up. Things go on. No one on earth can give me a signed and notarized certificate saying that I still haven't got this damned disease. But I can adapt. Every change requires some re-ordering to accommodate it. And I find a certain tenacious peace-of-mind in prayer--not as a greedy child whining to an indulgent parent, nor as a beggar, but as a sort of opening up of cosmic pathways into my mind.
A note I discover among some old papers: Adversity helps men to rise above themselves. Is that true? I think so.
Doctor Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell: Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places...Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surface of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.
(Most of this was written years ago, taken out of my book CHRYSALIS. And I am still here to tell the tale. The book ends like this: So, this is a portrait of a birth. The butterfly is finally emerging. The book is finished, and I am painfully anxious that it be good. I stayed up until two or three in the morning for weeks trying to finish the final draft. Now I need to move on to something else. Maybe I'll just think in iambic pentameter for awhile. Maybe I'll write another book, a children's book this time.
I am full. Let me stay like this forever, lullabied by family, by friends, by an unrolling of irrevocable love and intoxicant life. I hold it as carefully as mortal fingers will allow. Thanks. Everything is as it should be, and nothing will change, not ever, I tell myself. Encircled by sleepy children, Mark sings:
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
A mere 20,000 light years from our Sun, is the nearby Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy's birth chamber of open stars, (I feel funny calling it OUR Milky Way, now that I know we might have been--kidnapped, actually STOLEN away like Sendak's ice baby--see previous post) that contains thousands of stars far bigger than our own Sun.
Surrounding this nursery are "natal clouds of glowing interstellar gas and...dust, sculpted by energizing stellar radiation and winds."
Photo by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Collaboration, J Maiz Appellaniz, et al, and David de Martin.
*Sigh* It would've made an awesome picture for the family album. Oh, well. Click it for a truly amazing view!
We were not born here! All this time we've believed the Milky Way galaxy was our home. All this time we've assumed that we're family.
We have wondered why we are not oriented to the galaxy's ecliptic, like everybody else, but hey, it's like having blue eyes when all the relatives are brown-eyed, right? Nothing but a pesky annoyance. Well, it turns out we're adopted.
You heard it right. Some scientists are saying we're adopted. The Milky Way is not our parent galaxy. We are from another galaxy entirely, one in the process of joining with the Milky Way-- being eaten alive, as it were. We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy. This explains why, according to Steven Majewski, head of a project called 2MASS (the Two Micro All Star Survey) going on at the U. Va. and the University of Massachusetts, the Milky Way is always sideways in the night sky! That odd angle shows our Sun (and us) are influenced by some other system, and for the last 2 billion years our real parent galaxy is slowly being consumed. We exist in a trail of debris surrounding the outer edges of the Milky Way.
Imagine 60 miles above Midway The silica tiles glowing At 2300 degrees Fahrenheit With a red light, or white Or blue like any other early Star, and somewhere Off the coast of Florida The sun rises and a flight Of pelicans waits inland For splashdown 36 sunrises after ignition The blue-flame engines burn Meteorlike, it falls
The birds fall and rise Above the blue-green glitter Of the tide Imagine 6-tenths of a second after The last bird dives into a wave The slight deceleration The last roll reversal at Mach 2.6 A tail of flame and a double Sonic boom Followed by a whir Of wings
(Photo: Brown Pelicans in the Sunrise, by Shuttershrink)
Rethabile Masilo, @ Poefrika, an awesome poet from Lesotho, in a recent post of his that asks "who's your hero?" lists (among others) Steven Biko, as a person who "faces injustice and speaks out against it." This is for you, Rethabile. And for Steven.
AFRIC MAPS
Geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.
--Jonathan Swift
Biko, Naked and manacled In the back of a Land-Rover Cannot be convinced of Mankind's essential goodness.
Biko, The men who have done this Go out to kill Believing in the mercy of God,
Biko, In the music of love.
Biko, Humankind moves in a celluloid dream, Subscribes to pain. When we wake, Your bruised black limbs Will have pushed out roots Watered from your blood. Black women will prepare them Like gari, Black men will eat of them,
I keep diaries in my head at night I write on sealed pages in dream codes, a sort of dot-dot-dash Morse himself couldn't read, keeps them private old loves recur, taller than they were twice as bold dressed in dimestore suits and ties I never saw them wear.
And my father who never heard of Neruda Gu Cheng or the Cultural Revolution rocks calmly on the porch and speaks to me of bread and milk I'm sick he says and wants to say goodbye as if he were not already dead.
This is a book my grandchildren will never read the key is not in my hand not even in my pocket never will my children say Mama tell us of Olden Times and turn these pages that open upon old houses, old rooms that suck me in
like Alice through the glass. This world is mine alone where the voices and the windows the old mingling of bodies and the landscapes are buried what's here is one raw nerve, exposed and aching to go where I never can to grasp the fleeting things that would disappear.
(This is an old one. Sorry if you have seen it before)
We took a spin up into the mountaintops to see the fall colors. It rained a little, and snowed a little, and shined a little. Grandpa and Simon took a hike, and went rock climbing. Jacob and I were freezing, so we went back to the museum and looked at some furry/boney owl poop, a bear's skull, and a cross-cut tree-rings journey through time. On the trail, Simon's loose tooth came out, and he LOST it, and they had to retrace their steps back a ways, and they FOUND it! I am sure the Tooth Fairy rejoiced!
Yesterday was also the first day of autumn. Rejoice!
"This is a place of mystery ... a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.
Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds a way into his heart."
--Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind.
This is Baby R reading in the sunshine of his back yard. The first book I remember was Epamanondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant. Epamanondas, who carried the butter home as he had carried the cake, "wrapped up in leaves and put in his hat as he came along home... But soon the sun began to shine brightly. It shone down on the trees and down on the bushes and down on Epamanondas hat... and the drops trickled down his neck, inside his collar, and under his shirt.
"Epamanondas, what do you have in your hat?"
"Butter, Mama. Grandpa gave it to me."
"Epamanondas, sometimes you haven't got the sense you were born with. That's not the way to carry butter. The way to carry butter is to wrap it up in leaves, then take it down to the brook to cool it and cool it in the water. Now, will you remember that?"
"Yes, Mama. I'll remember. I'll remember."
I was about three when my Mama read this to me, and I still love it. Next week my neighborhood book club is reviewing Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine," another book that (several years later) I lived with and dreamed with, that's still in my heart. What's the first book you remember? What book is still in your heart?
THE BURNING "In Dreams you are never eighty" --Anne Sexton
At last, Love, the girl sighs, melting into the embrace of the blueberry- eyed sailor she'll never again lie down with in this life except in dreams of sixty years past, where her skin on his skin is rosy and warm with life.
I have waited for you, she whispers, for so long, so long, and the sweat beads like silver on her upper lip. Her laughter is mild, yet under her bare feet the stairs burn, consuming the kitchen with its frills of daisies and jam, the study with its tiresome globes and catalogs, the bedrooms with their odor of babies being born, semen and blood.
All the doors are open to the burning stairs. She would say O my God, my Love, at last, but there are no words because his lips are on her lips and the blaze licks at her sleeves, her skirt curling like a paper doll's.
When she wakes, between her thighs is a wrinkle rough as woolens, deep as a pit. Her tongue's a knot. Her face is gray as a potato and full of eyes.
Just like the message my Uncle Pepek wrote, put in a green glass bottle and threw into the Atlantic, to give to the Gulf Stream to give to the Baltic Sea to send it home, Voyager 1 was cast out into the black sea of interstellar space 30 years ago. This 12-inch gold plated disk is a message from us, containing some Bach, a little Mozart, DaVinci's "Vitruvian Man," some people saying "Hello" in several languages, songs of birds and whales, and some pictures of ourselves and our various cultures, and our location in the Milky Way galaxy. There are instructions for playing and interpreting this record-- for whatever ears, a million years out-- may listen.
This carries such a powerful message of optimism in the face of incredible odds, and the idea that travels with it moves me to tears.
MINDSCAPE
(an excerpt)
... And if the sun should cool enough to freeze us or explode to supernova and thus incinerate us all what alien ears, on hearing a concerto of whales a cry of birds sent out in orphan Voyager may celebrate our fragile hope our itching curiosity with what in alien delight may pass for sacramental bread and wine? ...
Be sure to check out the new Tuesday poetry/prose site at http://writersisland.wordpress.com
Writers Island's inaugural prompt is "My Imaginary Life"--(poem, short story, essay, or prose comment) to begin on Tuesday, September 11, at 12:01 EST. Pass the word along!
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region to all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider-- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake, or breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe-- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
-- William Stafford
(William Stafford (1914-1993) taught English at Lewis & Clark for three decades, and was, in 1975, appointed Oregon Poet Laureate.)
Not mine, but a better one, to leave with you all...first posted on February 26, 2006.
Through the night mist on the mountain I see far away a light in a farmhouse window on the plain, the mist mellowing it until it grows yellow as the kerosene lamp of my boyhood by which I first studied, the lamp of a home far away in the mist. I travel down the rays like a homing insect beating the moth wings of thought until I stand by a drab house at the edge of town. Peering in, as though through time, at a little window at the oilcloth table, at my mother, my father, at myself a child of five, reading a primer, mouthing the letters.
...
Time, why did you run? Where is the polished brass lamp the oilcloth, where is the warm stove with the isinglass windows by which we dressed in the cold mornings, where is the old frame bed in which I huddled with warm bricks at my feet? Where are even the words of that time, some lost, no longer spoken by living men? Father, mother, take me back even though life was harsh in the small kitchen. Who would have dreamed the universe so large?
...
Can there not be a miniature time? Some place where one stays forever at the kitchen table, on the same page of one's book, with one's parents looking on, an old photograph perhaps, but that would have faded. We would not truly be there. Through the night mist on the mountain I put out my hands but the light is gone, a fog is descending. I do not recognize this alien grown-up body. I will not recognize it ever. I am there, there, in the yellow light in the kitchen, reading on the stained oilcloth. We are all there. I did not grow up.
...
I have rushed like a moth through time toward the light in the kitchen. I am safe now. I never grew up. I am no longer lost here in the mist on the mountain.
Another interesting thing I learned from Michael Ballam last week: You are familiar with this painting Michelangelo made called The Creation of Adam, and you probably know he was rather famous for digging up dead bodies and making detailed drawings of muscles and organs and etc....but, have you ever noticed that in this painting, behind God, there is a heart? Or maybe, God and these angels are inside this human heart!
I have been to the mountain again! This wonderful week has ended (BYU Education Week) and I can't begin to tell you how amazing it was. The mountains were gorgeous, the flowers were in full bloom, and the teachers were superb. While they offered a variety of classes in Communication and Finance, History, Religion, Government and Political Science, Law, Literature, Psychology, and the Arts --this year I spent all my time in Music classes.
Marvin Goldstein is a concert pianist and comedian (in that order): "Two fellows, a Jew and a Chinaman, walk into a bar...The Jew punches the Chinaman in the nose and knocks him to the floor. He gets up and brushes himself off. "What was THAT for?" he asks. "That," says the Jew, "was for Pearl Harbor!" The Chinaman replies, "But WE didn't have anything to do with Pearl Harbor. That was the Japanese!" "Japanese, Chinese, they're all the same," says the Jew. The next day the same two fellows are in the bar and the Chinaman punches the Jew. He gets up off the floor and brushes himself off. "What was THAT for?" The Chinaman says, "For the Titanic!" The Jew says, "The TItanic! WE didn't have anything to do with the Titanic! That was an iceberg!" "Iceberg, Goldberg, they're all the same!" LOL (And no, I am not a racist, nor is Marvin Goldstein, but he was born in Israel, where he practiced and practiced the piano until he got really really good! His friend Marvin Payne, who does fantastic R & B, joined him. "You're Marvin and I'm Marvin," said Goldstein. "Who would do that to a little child? But your father is Marvin, too, isn't he? My father is SAM!" he boasts. Later, picking up Paynes guitar (which he cannot play), he strummed a spontaneously atonal little chord. "I used to be a Jew," he sang. "And I still am!" Even though he converted to Mormonism several years ago....
Jenny Oaks Baker is a concert violinist with many CD's to her credit. She used to be first violinist in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. She graduated from Julliard and Curtis Institute of Music, but is now raising 4 children under the age of 6. One of the phenomenal pieces she performed was Paganini's piece for unaccompanied violin, which she did flawlessly 10 years ago. "I'm going to try it again," she said, "but it's really,really HARD!" Her fingers flew across the strings. At one point she made a mistake, and started again. Then stopped, and started again, apologising. "Oh, my gosh!" she said. "I did it better than this in the bathroom this morning!" But she got a standing ovation anyway!
Michael Ballam (the guy with white hair) can't be compared to anyone else. He is the main reason I keep going back He's sung all over the world, and in New York, has made a ton of CD's. Now he is the founder and general director of the Utah Festival Opera Company. He is The Most Impressive of All. I'd follow him anywhere. He spoke on Music and the Brain. "In the arts there should be no wrong answer," he says. "The arts should be a safe environment, where you have permission to be unique." He also began the Utah Children's Opera in the public schools, where kids between the 2nd and 5th grades write, direct, perform, paint sets, publicize and finance their own operas with no adult input. They have 3 rules. Nobody Gets Hurt. Everybody Participates. It's Entirely the Children's Own Work. He went to the Utah school with the lowest grade averages, in the worst part of town, and gave every child a violin. They all learned to play. They performed. They practised the first 15 minutes of every class. (The math teachers were angry, at first, telling him they had little enough time to teach math as it was). Surprisingly, the academic scores began to rise, and now they're among the top in the state. The math teachers now have their own violins and they all play together for the first 15 minutes of class. "Not very well," admits Ballam. "But that's not what matters." He says, "The most important things a child can gain from education are a sense of community, the ability to communicate beyond words, and creative thinking. THese are much more important to know than that the capitol of Vermont is Montpelier."
James Oneil Miner played a lot of Golden Oldies: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Autumn Leaves, Misty, that sort of thing....
Btw, I kept hearing myself describing things as "Cool." Isn't it just the most asinine thing to hear a woman old enough to be your grandma saying "Cool?" All I needed were some bongos and a headband.
Anyway, to make a long story longer, I took scads of notes. The turkey and cranberry and cream cheese sandwiches were out of this world, as was the burnt almond fudge ice cream cone I had. The weather was nice. And I am tired.
Lost in Translation: The legendary stone marker that announces the motto of BYU should read "The World is our Campus." The photo is not mine, and was probably meant as a joke, but it works for me either way. The campus is a world unto itself, as well as being a part of the world at large. BYU has a couple of other mottos: "The glory of God is intelligence," and "Enter to learn, go forth to serve." Next time I'll be more careful (or use my own camera). Thanks, slick.
Are square A and square B the same color? Trust me. They are! This illusion (called, appropriately, the Same Color Illusion) shows that some scientific observations, even seemingly direct visual observation, may be inaccurate.
I woke up this morning having dreamed of a tarantula on a rock. He was the same color as the rock, sort of a disguise (what is that called?), and when I poked him, he climbed off and crawled away....
This is one of the most detailed photos of the Tarantula Nebula, in our own local group of galaxies, taken by the ESO Observatory's Wide Field Imager. If the Tarantula was as close to us as the Orion Nebula, it would take up fully half the sky. Imagine that!
1. In dreams I am often young and thin with long blond hair.
2. In real life I am no longer young, or thin, or blonde.
3. My back hurts.
4. I hate to sleep alone. (Fortunately I don't have to!)
5. My great grandfather had 2 wives at once.
6. I wish I had more self-discipline. (I was once fired from a teaching position in a private school because they said I was "too unstructured and undisciplined." --Who, me??? Naaaahhh....)
7. I do not blame my parents for this. Once, at a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told me my little boy was "spacey." We ALL are, I told her. The whole fan damily is spacey. She thought I was kidding. I wasn't.
8. I used to travel with a theater reperatory company. My parents weren't happy about this.
9. My mother was afraid that I would run off and paint flowers on my cheeks and live in a commune, and grow vegetables. I once smoked pot. ONE TIME.
10. I don't drink or smoke. (Or swear, much. Well, I drink milk, and water, and orange juice, and stuff. Cocoa. I love Pepsi.) 11. Most of my friends are invisible. 12.
I am a poet and a writer.
All of my writing on these pages is copyrighted. Borrowing (without acknowledgment) is a sin.
