Arrow of Time/Time Reversal

Early this morning, sometime between the hours of 3 and 4 am, I woke up worrying. In that quiet, with the dog snoring softly in the curve at the back of my knees, and my husband's cpap machine inhaling and exhaling on the other side of the bed, I worried and worried and couldn't make my poor old brain let go of it: Newton's Second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and the Arrow of Time. What these say, as I understand it, is that all warm things will grow cold, that over time things break down, fall apart, and ultimately disappear entirely. As in the universe and everything in it.

Now, what I was worrying about was this: there is a law of Conservation of energy which says that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant over time, and that energy can neither be created or destroyed, but only changed from one state to another. Even in the process of Annihilation particles are not actually annihilated, but are changed into new particles.

Then there is the thing called Time Reversal, T-symmetry, T-asymmetry. How do all these things manage to work together? Do they? Sounds like they are at odds to me. I'm just saying.

Can somebody help me out here, so I won't have to spend another sleepless night?

Purity of Opposites

Wasn't home much yesterday. We took the boys skating for an end-of-summer blast. And then had pizza. We got home late, and I stood out and watched the moon. The Moon is truly a beautiful thing seen through binoculars. You can see craters. Shadows. Rings of light. I stayed out a few minutes more and looked at stars and listened to crickets. One of my favorite Summer-Things-To-Do is watching stars and listening to crickets. Simultaneously. I do it every summer. I look forward to it, from June until November. It absolutely blows me away! The extremes of it! Like lounging in a steaming hot tub of water while it is snowing, and drinking an ice-cold glass of Coke. The purity of opposites!

How can I say it? It's looking and knowing that the stars are out there exploding immense fires and gasses thousands of light-years away--and thousands of years ago, their light just now making it to my eyes. And the crickets chirping in the grass. The immense and distant, and the tiny and near, in the same breath. Their reality.

The hotter the night, the faster the crickets chirp. As the weather cools, their chirping gets slower and slower. And finally, it stops, and they are gone. They say you can figure out the temperature by counting the number of a crickets chirps per minute. My brother, with his near-perfect pitch, can tell you, "That one is chirping in A-flat, and that one in C-sharp!"

The Madonnas of Leningrad

Last night in bed I noticed that I was reading about a woman who was noticing: "Finally, and not a moment too soon, a toilet.
It is delightful to make water after holding it for so long. She listens to the music of water on water and feels the wonderful release inside her. And to sit where it is warm and private, not squatting over a chamber pot in the bitter cold. One of the effects of this deterioration seems to be that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years. She keeps these observations to herself. She tried once to point out to Dimitri the bottomless beauty in her glass of tea. It looked like amber with buried embers of light, and when held just so, there was a rainbow in the glass that took her breath away. He nodded sympathetically but mostly looked concerned. What would he say if she told him her pee sounded like a symphony?"

Debra Dean, "The Madonnas of Leningrad"

'Til the Sun Goes Down

Saturday, October 1, 2011
'Til the Sun Goes Down


Okay, I notice I feel unsure of myself, because I don't know what I am supposed to be doing here and I wonder if I am doing it right, putting it where it's supposed to be put, and all 'a that, and I know that this is exactly how I feel beginning anything new. Am I trying too hard, or not hard enough?



The air conditioner behind me is pushing out cold air, and I feel the back of my neck starting to ice up, even though it is 90-something degrees outside. I know this because I was just out there to check on my tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers...all those other things are weeds. I do not have a green thumb, I am not an attentive farmer. I suspect I am a really lazy mother for these fuzzy, tender little plants.



I don't know any of you people here. Is this all about Joy? Joy that comes in the morning? Hm. My fingers smell like the tomato vine I just lifted onto a stick. It was growing horizontally like a bullthorn weed. Poor thing, with it's soft, hairy stems and tiny green fruits. The smell is pleasant.



Okay. Now what? The old man next door is mowing his lawn in all this heat. The lawnmower sounds like model airplanes my brother used to fly across the desert. They had little gas engines and were hooked to a wire that kept them flying in wide circles. The airplanes were hand-made of balsa wood and silk. When I was little, our house always smelled of balsa wood and airplane glue.



My husband just brought me a tomato cage, and I'm going out now to prop up my plant. Well, maybe I'll wait 'til the sun goes down.

I Like Spiders

Good morning universe! Okay, I am up. Dreamed I was painting small, stamp-sized pictures with a PIN. I used to keep a dream journal just to see if I could make any sense of my dreams, most of them truly bizarre, in technicolor with a cast of thousands.... As far as I can tell, there are no great revelations here, no gold nuggets to be mined.



Let the dogs out. Someone peed on the just-cleaned carpet. Hm. Bet I know who it was! Ate a nourishing breakfast of Cheese Crackers with Peanut Butter, and warm Coke Zero left over from yesterday. No wonder I am fat. :(



Looking at the unused birdcage I have crawling with fake spiders of all sizes.... My grandkids ignore it now, but it still creeps out my daughters-in-law! LOL :D I like spiders.



Total silence (except for the ringing I hear in my ears--two layers of sound, one deeper, a hum, and another on a higher note, very high, oscillating, annoying). I don't hear well. Recently bought two hearing aids...one got sucked up in the vacuum cleaner (don't ask). The other still works. So it's only $2,000 down the tubes instead of $4,000.

Pepek the Assassin @ pindroppress.com

Joyce is a grandmother of eight. She is also a writer from Salt Lake City, Utah, where she resides with one husband, two dogs, and a lovebird. Her novel, Chrysalis, received a $5,000 publication grant and was nominated for the American Book Award. Her poetry book, In Willy’s House, won her a USPS Laureate Award. She co-authored a poetry textbook, On Extended Wings. Her blog, following the little god is a miscellany of opinions, pictures, and poems. The welcome mat is always out.

‘I would like to crawl inside Joyce Ellen Davis’ mind. In Willy’s House, she did exactly that with her great grandfather. With subtle energy and clean poetic choices she told a raw touching story which buried itself inside readers’ hearts. Now that highly creative, scientific mind gives us an “uncle,” Pepek the Assassin, whom the reader forgets is an invention: he and the other characters in his world are surprising, compelling, utterly real. And then Davis does it again, switching, in Telling Who Passed By, to an introspective examination of a woman’s life, every poem distinguished from the one before; each, startling; the whole, unburdened by naivete. I don’t think Pepek or these rare ruminations could have been born in anyone else’s mind.’ Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, author of keeping things small, Cheat Grass, Her Side of It

A Definite Plan

Okay. So, for a while now I have become bedazzled with, um, stuff, stuff like Fibonacci numbers, the Golden Mean, fractals, who is buried in Grant's tomb, information saved at the edges of the universe, and the Holographic Principle, and the Information Paradox. I'm doing my best to understand it all.

Bedazzled with The Fibonacci Sequence of Numbers, where the previous 2 numbers are added to get the next number in the sequence--and it's always the same series of numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55, etc. Like fractals, like Pi, it goes on forever. This arrangement is evident everywhere--in our DNA, in the shape of our ears, in the whorls of our fingertips and the proportions of our bodies, in the way smoke rises from a cigarette and oil flows through a pipeline, in the rise and fall of the stock market. It is evident in flowers, seashells, ocean waves, in planetary systems and in galaxies. It's applicable to the growth of every living thing, a single cell, a grain of wheat, a hive of bees.... Why? 'Tis a mystery!

I've been rereading "A Responsibility to Awe," by astronomer/poet Rebecca Elson, who envisions all of us, in a time before time, "drifting like a bright mist in a universe still young." The poem is called Antidotes to Fear of Death.

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
and all of us, and everything
Already there,
But unconstrained by form.

And sometimes it's enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.


I've also been reading Leonard Susskind's "The Black Hole War," in which he discusses Grant's Tomb, the Holographic Principle, amd the Information Paradox, where all information is never lost, but is stored on the boundary of space. (Wherever that is). INFORMATION that could conceivably, reconstitute itself -- information "precisely coded in Planckian bits far too small to see...think of everything within a million light-years of the sun...that contains interstellar galaxies, stars, planets, people, and all the rest," all coded by information, stored. What is the nature of reality? Everything you know and love is made of particles that contain information--you can scramble them, burn them, chop them up into infinitesimal pieces, but no matter what you do to them the information is not lost--and you could--if you knew how--retrieve the particles and reconstruct them.

Albert Einstein has written: "The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangements of the books--a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

While I remain much like the child in Einstein's library, I do like the idea that the unique information that is encoded in all those I love, is saved somewhere out there, just waiting to be collected and reconstituted. Sometime. Somehow.

Pepek the Assassin

Available in June, 2011, from Pindrop Press.








YAY!

www.pindroppress.com/?page_id=25

What God Said:

image by cedric sorel

Spring is seeping north....

For the Bunyans, in far away frozen Minnesota: Spring is well on its way. Alleluia! Keep your eyes open! Here is a bud pushing through toward spring, photographed a few weeks ago at Slick's place. Annie Dillard says spring is seeping north at 14 miles a day. Today it was 54 degrees here. At 14 miles a day, how long do you have to wait? Annie Dillard says, "I don't want to miss spring this year. I want to be there on the spot the moment the grass turns green...I see it from a window, the yard so suddenly green...I could envy Nebuchadnezzar down on all fours eating grass."

The glaciers in your front yard will soon crack to water in the sun. Until then, throw another log on the fire and settle in. And think of me, down on all fours, eating grass!

Big Tent : looking at pictures

daddy's hard earned dimes

by chiminetty
my daddy grows lean
waiting at the scrubbed table
waiting at the scrubbed table
he reads the comic section
of the new york american
where der gink mit der viskers
is pursued by dose two liddle sissages
dose smarties
it iss vunderful

early evening
and he rests at last
in the twilight
of someone else's labor
all hard muscles
his sweat warm and random
in the loose weave of his shirt
waiting for the oven to bloom
with biscuits

my mother
superimposed on the edge
of his evening's rest
watches the bright horns
of the moon prick the horizon
and one by one the stars
write what they have seen
one by one they drop their
wide circles into her apron pocket
like daddy's hard earned dimes
spit-shined
turning the night silver

the biscuits are hot
the butter unwrinkles its
gold tongues down their brown skins
he reads
if I didn't belief it
I couldn't see it
let's go out for a row on der lake
liebchen

chass
und let us go qvickly

it iss vunderful


(My Dad at work)

Big Tent Poetry Food: Eating the Sun

EATING HUILZILOPOCHTLI

Why is it
No one hungers now,
Trusting only each other,
Their divine hands helpless
In their pockets,
Their beautiful faceless heads
Down against a lowering sky?

But this little one sees,
Remembers the road that is
A milky spill of suns,
Turns toward a past
Where dead souls know that
Huilzilopochtli is the god who
Ate fire as a sacrament,
Summoning back life,
The resurrection.

See how she tastes his fire,
Lets his sparks light their
Common ether,
Lets them sift through her
Ethereal sky-skin.

She carries away in her hand
Hot coals to light her way across,
To wherever it is
Ghosts go.


(Written to another of Rick Mobbs terrific paintings, The Kiss. Needs work, suggestions?)

Big Tent Poetry 1-1-11

LIST
Don't ask, "Are you afraid?"--
everyone is afraid. Ask, "Where
can we find to run?"


-William Stafford
More than Words Can Tell



"Where to run?" Stuck here
in our five-dimensional lives
enfolded in a multi-dimensional universe
we run, eat, sleep, make love,
and wonder. We lie in our beds
and watch the light creep in
illuminating cracks on the walls and the
maculate ceilings as constellations,continents,
faces, emblems, and chronicles, interpreting them
as Signs. We hear dogs barking,
touch one another, cry, say goodbye, run, pray,
write poems, ask questions, make lists,
and run, as if any of these things might suggest
true exploration of what really is,
as if they might be messages
from some far star
that will help us understand Where?
And Why? And What it means to be human?



(NOT my ceiling, btw. Just thot I'd mention that.:D )

Merry Christmas

FIRST, THERE WAS A BREAKING OF WATERS

Once wast Thou born of Mary's womb;
And now, newborn from out the Tomb,
O Christ, Thou bidd'st us rise with Thee
From death to immortality.

--Liber Usualis
Rex Sempiterne Caelitum


First, there was a breaking of waters,
like every other birth,
and pain, before the first cry.

There was a star, perhaps a supernova
spilling fluorescent gases into the void,
perhaps a confluence of planets -- whatever...

whatever, His first words may have been Egyptian,
but the Jewish schoolboys, He among them,
circled at the Rabbi's feet, learned Torah,

learned sacrifice, and love, and loss.
He drew us in by blood, by suffering;
every one of us balancing in air, all newly-blossomed, and Reborn.

Hallelujah.


WISHING YOU WARMTH IN YOUR HEART, PEACE IN YOUR HOME, AND EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR LIFE.

Suit of Lights

25 Random Things About Me

1. I used to think I could fly (I even wore a cape!).
2. Everybody I ever loved I still love.
3. I have an irrational--almost insane--love for animals (even bugs).
4. I have an irrational--almost insane--love for books--the latest, from Amazon, Mary Oliver's OWLS AND OTHER FANTASIES.
5. I decided to be a writer when I was 12, and began to write the Great American Novel. My novel CHRYSALIS was nominated for the American Book Award by the publisher. Didn't win. (This was not the same one I wrote when I was 12, btw).
6. My great-grandpa was a polygamist. How many of you can say that?
7. I have loved 3 sailors (and that's all I have to say about that).
8. I met my best friend Jan when I was in college, and she is still my best friend, after all these years. We are like Lucy and Ethel, like LaVerne and Shirley.
9. I was a shy and obedient child, a shy and quietly rebellious adolescent; as a young adult I was a hippie, and now I am a shy and obedient old lady (with strong hippie tendencies).
10. In Theater school I learned to become people other than myself....
11. I once got a standing ovation, which will have to last for the rest of my life.
12. If I had been a comedian I would have been George Carlin.
13. I once met Edward Teller, "The Father of the Atomic Bomb."
14. I once toasted a mouse (in the toaster, accidentally).
15. Like Anne Frank, I believe that people are good at heart.
16. Except for stockbrokers and CEO's of megacompanies, who are greedy and evil SOB's!
17. I dream in lurid Technicolor, with casts of thousands.
18. I have five brilliant sons.
19. I have eight beautiful grandchildren.
20. I am afraid of fire.
21. I think I am a good poet and writer.
22. I love my computer.
23. I am grateful that my kids are all smarter than I am!
24. I am still smarter than Tom Cruise (although this may not be true).
25. I don't have 25 friends who have not already done this meme.

My new camera! Me wearing my Suit of Lights!

To Ashley

Why I Love Poetry


You know, the number of people who love poetry is about the same as the number of people who love to wear Davy Crockett hats. So we are a rare and wonderful people!
I think I was, maybe 9 or 10 when I discovered poetry let you say things you could say no other way, and when I was 15 or so, I found that poetry offered a way of understanding things I never understood before. Poetry sparked a new way of feeling, of insights and images I had never imagined: that someone could write The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer moved me to tears.

Edna St Vincent Millay was my first love. Dylan Thomas was my second. After that there were suddenly too many to count, like stars on a good night, after the first one or two.

Mary Oliver writes of praying in words I think apply to poetry as well:

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but a doorway

into thanks, and a small silence in which
another voice may speak.

Like Abbe Joseph says in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, stretching his hands toward heaven, his fingers like ten lamps of fire, "If you will, you can become all flame." And we all understand what that is like, don't we? And we've all come through the doorway into thanks, and most of us have found the silence in which another voice may speak....

And if this isn't clear enough to be useful to you, stick around. Hopefully one day it will be, and you can become "all flame."

Just pay attention.

I write poetry because sometimes it takes me where I need to go, it says what I need to say, and it ALWAYS says more than the words alone say. Sometimes the meaning of the poem is in the white spaces between the words. And sometimes, after a poem is finished, I am as surprised as anybody at how it happens. It is a doorway. It is a small silence in which another voice may speak, and just sometimes, I do become all flame. It lets me say what I can't say any other way. It lets me be more than I am. And if you can pass the poem on to someone else, that's just gravy!

That is why I read poetry, that is why I write it.

Love, Gram Cracker

Christmas 1975

December 14, 1975


Dear Folks,

Here it is, Christmastime already. Our tree is up and decorated with paper chains and painted salt & flour cookies, the stockings are hanging by the fireplace, the Christ Child and Mary, Joseph, and assorted shepherds, wise men, cows, sheep and a donkey (and the angel) in our nativity set have found a place in our Bar-B-Q.

Christmas will be a little leaner this year, as I suppose it will be for many people. Money doesn't stretch very far, but I guess the things that are really important we have in abundance. Linn wrote this little Christmas Carol last week. He and his teacher are playing it as a violin/cello duet for the school Christmas program on December 18th. It's part of our Christmas present to you.

I was thinking of last Christmas and how good Jer was with the tree and packages--but this year I wouldn't dare leave one package or ornament within an inch of Marc (we call him Coco now, thanks to Jeremy). His hands are constantly moving, opening, breaking, tearing, getting into.... He has several favorite places to play:
in the fireplace (it's so nice and ashy), in the trash, in the toilet, in the Kleenex box, in the cupboards (I find cans of soup and tuna fish in the weirdest places), and in the pots and pans (they make lots of noise). He still has not found the courage to walk more than three or four steps at a time. Hands and knees work fine for him!

Jeremy is still a very thoughtful, considerate, a gentle little soul. In the nursery at Relief Society, while the other toddlers are busy hoarding toys, or taking things away from someone else, making them cry, Jer is busy taking toys to whoever is hurt, or crying, and he sweetly comforts them.

Kit is Joseph in the Sunday school program next week. I took the beard off his pirate mask to help his robe-and-towel costume. It looks really good. He's also supposed to wear a nightshirt for the school Christmas program. He's resigned now, but at first he said it looked like a DRESS!

We have snow again (after 2 weeks of summer in December), and long icicles are hanging from the roof.

December 18th


Just heard Linn play his music. It sounded really pretty! He's a good violin player nowadays.

Got your letter today (and read it 3 times), and the package came yesterday. Many thanks! We're going to fill our Santa and Snowball candy dish up this weekend. I'm not going to make any gingerbread houses this year. I had six little Cub Scouts over Tuesday making cookies and fudge. What a bunch of boys, when I already have five to begin with! Last week we made decorations from decoupaged Christmas cards. Maybe we'll go caroling next week. They're nice little boys.

I have 15 pages of a story started. I'll send it and you can see what you think. I wonder about keeping it in present tense. Maybe it's too hard to read. What do you think? Got a card from Sis. Jones last week--brings us up to 4 cards so far....

Jeremy knows "Claus' this year. You should hear him sing Jingle Bells. He can sing a lot of TV commercials, right on key! And now he walks around going, "Ho,Ho, Ho!" Nutcracker tickets are all gone. So are Messiah tickets, almost as soon as they went on sale. Costs too much anyway. Well, the fairies didn't wash the dishes while I was gone, and I doubt they'll do them while I'm here--so, adios.

December 19th


Linn's school chorus is singing at Cottonwood Mall next week. Jeremy slipped on the ice this morning and landed on a pipe with his eyebrow. It's all swollen up this afternoon (the eye, not the pipe, of course!). Poor eyebrow!

Tonight we're going to go listen to the Tabernacle Choir rehearse--if we can get a babysitter.

(We couldn't.)

I love Christmas, and the tree, and the lights, and Christmas music, and wrapping and giving gifts. I love to look at the boys faces, at their eyes, as they wait for Christmas to come. I love the excitement I catch from them....

CHRISTMAS DAY, 12:30

We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! It snowed last night, so we have a white Christmas. I noticed that Santa is still carrying around your presents and ALL the Christmas cards we should've mailed in his briefcase....

Marvin and the babies are catching up on lost sleep, the boys are out playing in the snow, and I suppose I'd better start thinking about dinner. Fa la la la la, la la, la, la. We have five little Rock Cornish game hens to roast, poor things.

Marc walks now. He's getting his top two molars and it's sure making him miserable. But he's a very agreeable little person--says "yeah" to everything. Everyone seems happy with their new toys. I glued my thumb to BeeGee's new helicopter's rudder with instant-bonding super-glue. PANIC. Thought for a minute I'd have to have my thumb amputated or else wear a helicopter on my thumb forever...it's sort of like freezing your tongue to the ice tray.

Bye for now, & all our love. Happy New Year! XOXO

J

(Click twice on the pictures to see full size!)

Giving Thanks 1975

November 1975
Thanksgiving Day
9:30 a.m.


Dear Folks,

Happy Thanksgiving! We are sorry we can't all be together today--I really miss these times together, they come so far apart, and if I could be anywhere in the world today I'd rather be where the rest of you are. It looks as if Marv isn't even going to be here. He had to take two busloads of people up to Park City last night (the last one at midnight), and he got up at 5:30 this morning to take another bus from the airport up to Snowbird. It's snowing like crazy outside. He was going to try to come back to eat this afternoon and then go back up, but I think the weather will be too bad. So I guess Thanksgiving will be one Pilgrim (me) and five little Indians.

The boys have taken their sleds off to the hill at school. I have baked 2 loaves of bread and a pan of cinnamon rolls this morning--now I'm hoping this turkey will thaw soon so I can stuff him. I turned off the parades and cartoons and turned on Beethoven (not very Thanksgiving-ish). Jerry is helping me write this: he's sitting on my lap, pointing to the page, saying "A...B...C...."

With the weather so snowy I guess it's just as well we don't have a long way to drive. We'll light the fire tonight and be glad we're home. But I've surely been thinking of you this morning!

Lee just came bursting in--his face is red as an apple. He's been burying his head in the snow, "making snow-faces," he said. And here come the rest, dropping little balls of snow off their coats all over the floor. They want a piece of warm bread.

10:30

The old turkey (bless his heart) is in the oven. Linn says, "Just think about how he used to be alive and running around!" I told him I try NOT to think about that. He said, "It's for a good cause." I suppose so, if you're not the turkey, I tell him. "Well, we're not turkeys," he says. So much for this bit of wisdom.

The TV is on again, and singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. What happened to Thanksgiving? The snow has almost stopped. It's pretty out.Clouds are laying in the canyons and ridges on the mountains, the trees and bushes are all lacy. I finished writing the roadshow. I think it's pretty good. The play is called The Duyvel and Diederich Katters-kill. It has the Devil in it, and the Ghost of Captain Kidd, and buried treasure, and a lazy man (Diederich) who trades his soul to the Devil for the treasure, and his greedy Wife--all at the time just before the Revolutionary War. It ends with the devil "collecting" as the first shot that begins the war is fired. I'm trying to do the music, too. Anyway, it's fun and it keeps me from getting bored.

We've all had coughs and drippy noses for a couple of weeks--seems like forever. Linn has been taking skiing lessons. He likes it. Gosh, I'm going to try to make a pumpkin pie, so I'd better get going on it. Marv might make it home after all. Darn people who want to go skiing when they ought to stay home with their families and let others do the same.

12:30

The pie is in the oven, the sweet potatoes are boiling. It's snowing again. I am sleepy. They wanted to see Marv in the Bishop's office last night, but he wasn't home until midnight (he stayed about 5 minutes) when he brought the turkey. I was beginning to think we'd have hot dogs for Thanksgiving.... I wonder what they wanted him for? Poor Marvin, I guess he's having a free dinner up in the mountains at a beautiful ski chalet, surrounded by jolly skiiers in wooly sweaters beside a roaring fireplace...when he could be here watching Pippi Longstocking and Mr. McGoo and sniffling along with us!

I must go and change Marc's pants. The smell is drowning out the turkey and pie.

One O'Clock

Marvin came home. Hurrah! But he has to go back in half an hour, and the old turkey won't get done. He's nice and brown, but the popper-thing won't pop up. Everything else is done and waiting. Jeremy is still napping here on the bed beside me. He keeps laughing in his sleep. It must be a really funny dream.

10:30 p.m.

Dinner is over, the mess is over, everybody is full and asleep, except me. (Marvin's not home yet). We had a really nice Thanksgiving after all. It has been a good day. I've been thinking of other Thanksgivings over the years--all of the turkeys and potatoes and pies, all the family together--Grandma and John and his bottle of Four Roses, Aunt Lauree and Uncle Frank and all the cousins--and the Thanksgiving you made the pie and forgot to put the pumpkin in it. I hope you know how much we love you, and how often we think of you. Many hugs and kisses from us all. XOXO,

J.

En Sof

"See how Christ's blood streams through the firmament; one drop of it will save me. Oh my Christ."

--Christopher Marlowe