Hopscotch and Jumprope

 

I walked out onto the playground, seeing the kids playing individually and in groups. The sawdust underfoot was frozen into a solid mass, the chunks on the surface frosted decoratively where they hadn’t been stepped on. The sky was a perfectly even gray, the Sun a white disk that you could look directly at. I imagined a flag, like the Japanese flag, but white on gray.

I looked around. A group of boys were throwing a football. I didn’t like football, or playing catch. Boys and girls were on the swings, but there weren’t any swings empty. The jungle gym was crowded. On the asphalt patch, groups of girls were playing hopscotch and jumprope and that weird game where one of them crouched down in the center and they formed a circle around her and sang a song while she stood up. Actually, maybe there was more than one game like that. I had a feeling I’d heard more than one song, anyway.

I didn’t like being on the asphalt during recess. I thought of playing on asphalt as an opportunity to fall down and tear your pants and gouge your hands. Still, I’d always wondered about the games girls played. I’d already learned that boys’ games were magic, and could take you to far-off places and allow you to live other lives, almost as well as books could, if you observed the rituals and didn’t mess with them. It was easy to mess up the magic, of course. What sort of magic did girls use, though? I decided I’d like to find out.

I walked over to where the girls were jumping rope. I saw that two girls were twirling the rope, and the girl in the middle was not watching for it – she was actually not facing towards it, and couldn’t see it coming. She was dancing in time to the rope’s swing, dancing with the rope, as its partner. So . . . .

I watched two girls playing Hopscotch. That was trickier, and finally I asked them to explain it. They were annoyed at being asked to explain, but tried to be polite. They even invited me to try it, but when I tossed the stick they were using, it landed outside of a square, and when I skipped down the squares, I didn’t land inside them, and wrong-footed, and didn’t understand their explanation of what I had done wrong, and went away annoyed.

I didn’t even try with the circle of singing girls.

And so I never did learn the secret of girl magic.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just

On My Way To Yes

 

“Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”

He bit his lip and stammered and finally smiled and said, “Well, clearly, Joe Biden is the President, so-”

“Please, that’s not what I asked you. The question is-”

“Look, he was sworn in on the 20^th of January, everybody saw it, so-.”

“Again, that’s not what I asked.”

“Are you trying to tangle me up in some kind of conspiracy theory?”

“With respect, Sir, I’m trying to disentangle you from a conspiracy theory. I’m asking you to formally renounce-.”

“Look, we all know who the President is, so can we move on from-”

“I’d really like to. So, can we settle the question: who won the 2020 election?”

“Look, the election is over and done with. Joe Biden was sworn in as President and that’s all finished, there’s no taking it back now.”

“But did Joe Biden win the 2020 election, yes or no?”

“I already told you he’s the President, what more do you want me to say? Can we move on?”

“We’re almost done here. The question is, who was the legitimate winner of the 2020-”

“What difference does it make who I think-”

“If you’re harboring secret reservations, I think it makes a great deal of difference in your ability to work with our President. So please give us an honest answer: is Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election?

“Sir?

“Well, I think this is the first time a member of Congress has walked off our set in the middle of an interview. Coming up next . . . .”

 

https://www.seafarerpress.com/works/finally-on-my-way-to-yes

Bless This Land, From The Top Of Its Head To The Bottom Of Its Feet

 

I got up, early in the morning, before the rest of my family. I couldn’t tell time by the clock yet, but I could tell by the light that it was just after Sunrise, earlier than I usually got up. I put my hands to my chest and then spread them wide, as I’d seen people do in cartoons after rising in the morning. Yes, it did feel good to do that. I walked around the living room in my pajamas, wondering what I would do next.

I had a strange feeling, something I couldn’t remember having before, as though I ought to give a hug and a kiss to my brothers, and to Mommy and Daddy, and then to all of the neighbors, and then to everybody else in town, and then to everybody else in the country. I pictured myself reaching out with some kind of magic to touch all of those people and tell them I liked them all and they were good people and tell them to be good. I wanted to tell all of them they should be happy and not to cry. It was a strange feeling I had never had before.

My brother came in and found me sitting on the couch staring at the wall.

“What are you doing?”

“Ummm…I’m playing that I’m Santa Claus taking toys to everybody.”

“But you’re just sitting there.”

“I’m playing it inside my head.”     

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Have a good day. No, a really good day."

Toward a New Unknown

I walked into the Rexall and passed by shelves of products for conditions I had never had, or hoped never to have, or – I blushed – never could have – to the section of magazines. Here I had a similar problem: all of these magazines I had no use for, and among them the handful I had come in to look among.

Transorbital: last month’s, I already had it . . . Tales of Mystery and Imagination: already bought this issue, and shouldn’t have bothered – when will I learn? . . .  Contemplate: might buy it yet, if I get desperate – better decide quickly, there are only three copies left . . .Toward a New Unknown: that’s a new title, haven’t read it yet.

I pulled a copy of the first issue of Toward a New Unknown from the rack, trying to find one in perfect condition in case it might be worth money some day, paid my quarter for it and took it home. By the time I’d finished reading the stories in it, it was quite well-worn, of course, just like every other science fiction and fantasy magazine I bought when I was twelve, but that was all to the good. A book or magazine that came into my possession when I was twelve that wasn’t worn is one I didn’t read.

 

 

https://www.ststephensrva.org/download_file/view/1791/

Don't Show Your Breasts

 

It’s a nuisance, I know. You’d feel empowered and free, in the moment. You’d enjoy sharing that connection with another person that comes from sending a picture. And of course, you’re so certain that the person you’re sending it to will keep your picture secure, will never be careless with it, will never show it to anyone else, will never have a falling out with you, or if the two of you do have a falling out, will delete your pictures. Of course, you want that to be true. You presume, here and now, that it will be true. You can’t be certain that it will be true.

Remember that celebrities who can afford high-grade security on their images and their text files have had them stolen.

Even if you were to go the old-fashioned route, with hard copies, with Polaroids, those can be copied. Heck, they can be scanned on a printer and then boom, they’re on the Internet anyway.

In the fullness of time, this nonsense is going to run its course. There will come a day when every prominent woman in politics and the arts and letters has a bathroom selfie or a Mardi Gras photo or a beach shot, or if they don’t, they’ll have a deepfake that is so well done it’s difficult to plausibly deny. At that point, it really will be no big deal. Waving nude photos of someone will be a big so-what, and if they reflect badly on anyone, it will be on the clod who waves them around, just as it should be. But that day is not yet.

It’s a terrible shame, it’s a huge injustice, it absolutely shouldn’t be a big deal. I know all of that, but for the sake of your safety and peace of mind, I urge you most earnestly: don’t show your breasts.

 The Magic Eight-Ball says, "This isn't justice, it's just what is."

https://pollycastor.com/2018/10/05/be-a-lady-they-said-quote-by-camille-rainville

As The Legend Tells It

 

It can be frustrating- the way messy reality can turn into elegant legend so quickly. There is always the temptation to tweak events to fit into a narrative. Humans are story-telling creatures, and we see stories in human events the same way we see pictures in cracks in a ceiling.

But perhaps it’s better to go along with the legend. The saying is, when facts conflict with the legend, print the legend. This is usually cast as cynicism, to go with what sells, but perhaps it actually is better to inhabit the legend. What we call “objectivity” is just another way of interpreting events, after all – it could be that there is an advantage in taking a legendary approach, in saying, as Jung does, that even the most ordinary life is worthy of mythology, in casting every person as a character in an epic. Why not?

Why shouldn’t your marriage be one of the great loves of history? Why shouldn’t your country be a great nation, in ways that don’t do harm to its neighbors? What’s the harm in being a legend in your own mind?

 The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Yes, but actually...."

https://allpoetry.com/When-a-Woman-Feels-Alone

Some Words Are Messengers

 

“Did you hear about the new probe that’s just been launched toward Mercury?” I asked Ms. Messenger as I massaged the back of her thigh.

“No, I haven’t. I do usually follow news about space exploration, but I hadn’t heard about it. Who has launched it?”

“It was NASA. I thought you’d be interested, in particular, since its name is MESSENGER.”

“Hah. Well, that’s appropriate, for going to Mercury.”

“Just so. It’s an acronym, describing the kinds of instruments it’s going to be carrying, the things it’s going to be looking for. I forget what-all it’s doing. I believe one thing it will be doing is looking for ice.”

“Ice? Really?”

“Well, at the poles, in deep craters, there are shadowed places where the Sun never shines, so the temperature remains extremely low. Almost as cold as people imagined the back side of Mercury would be, when we thought it was tidally locked and always kept one face toward the Sun.”

I folded the sheet back over her leg and moved around to the head to fold it down to uncover her back. I tucked it into the waistband of her underpants to make sure they were protected and spread oil across her back.

“People thought that? I never heard that.”

“Yes, until the 1960s. The way the Moon is tidally locked to the Sun.”

“Whoa. If that happened, then the night side would never see the Sun at all…it would be so cold…whoa.”

“Yes. Colder than Pluto, which at least gets a tiny bit of Sunlight. It would be the coldest place in the Solar System.”

“Spooky.”

“I’d been meaning to ask you about your name. Do you know where it comes from?”

“I don’t. I only know my ancestry back about four generations, all in this country. I’ve been married twice, and kept it both times, because I couldn’t give it up.”

“Hey, if I married a woman named Messenger, I’d take her name.”

“Good for you.”

“Did you ever see that movie, The List of Adrian Messenger?”

“No, heard of it. That’s the one where a bunch of people turn out at the end to have been wearing heavy makeup to disguise themselves?”

“Yes. A weird gimmick. They didn’t quite have the technology to pull it off back then, you could pretty easily tell who the actors were, most of the time, but it was a fun movie anyway. One of those grisly murder comedies where a large number of people are killed in grotesque ways.”

“People are weird sometimes.”

I went on rubbing down her back.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91108/words-are-birds

Self-Reflection

I turned away from the keyboard to consider my options. In taking my wife’s half-finished manuscript, I wanted to carry out one final collaboration with her, to infuse her words with my own. I wanted to do this to feel closer to her. I thought I would feel that way, especially since the main characters in the story were obvious stand-ins for the two of us. In a way, it was already her own love letter to the two of us.

To do that, though, I had to wrestle with my own priorities, my own interests, and above all, my own viewpoint. I had to find my own way of looking at it. For instance, I was thinking that instead of writing it in third person as she had been doing it, I would write it in first person as Jack, my stand-in. Or maybe I should write it in alternating viewpoints, as Jack and also as Kate?

The one would require a good deal of self-reflection. The other would be…simply beyond my ability, I was sure. I was married to her for longer than I had been not-married to her, but I hadn’t been married to her for longer than she had been not-married to me. I had raised four children with her, but she had raised five children without me.

Besides that, though, another purpose of finishing The Lodge was to learn more about myself, as Kathe’s husband and as myself. I must learn more about myself as a being apart from Kathe, since that is who and what I am and shall be from now on. After more than a year of widowhood, I am still learning how to do it, how to be a widower, how to live my own life.

I saw a therapist for over a year. She was so good. I wish I were seeing one now. I talk with one occasionally, but we don’t connect as well. I’m not going to blame her, but we don’t make the kind of connections that I did with my previous counselor. So, I shall have to rely primarily upon my own reflections on my thoughts.

And finish The Lodge.

And finish Frankenstein’s World and post it for sale.

And get started on An American Victory.

And when I’m done with that, get started on The Black Coast.

I really do have a lot to do.

 

The Blue Nightgown by Toi Dericotte https://poets.org/poem/blue-nightgown

Somewhere Not Here

 

It had taken me eight days to pencil the border lines for the inscription, outline the letters in pencil, and begin chipping the letters into the concrete. I’d never done any kind of stonecarving, and here I was trying to inscribe more than half a hundred words of text into a vertical concrete wall. My arms and my back ached by the end of every day, and I considered a dozen times a day cutting the project short, scratching the remaining letters shallowly and penciling over them and leaving it at that. I had to keep sternly commanding myself to return to my task. I had decided to do this, and I was going to do it, period (no pun intended).

I let my aching arms drop and stepped back to look at the wall, where my memorial to Leslie was partly inscribed, partly penciled.

LESLIE CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE NOT HERE

I CALLED THEM LESLIE BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T TELL ME THEIR NAME

I THOUGHT IT WAS DISRESPECTFUL TO NOT CALL THEM ANYTHING

LESLIE COULDN’T EAT MOST OF THE FOOD I BROUGHT THEM,

AND WAS ALWAYS COLD,

BUT I DID WHAT I COULD TO MAKE THEM COMFORTABLE

LESLIE DIED BUT I DID WHAT I COULD FOR THEM

Leslie had wanted to avoid having anything to do with the authorities, and I had respected that for as long as they had remained alive. Once I was sure Leslie was dead, I had walked up to the University and found a biologist who would come down to the underpasses to look at “an odd specimen” I thought was worth examining. I mean, once Leslie was dead, there was no sense in just burying them, was there? Probably the worms wouldn’t even be able to get a meal off of them.

But I was going to leave a memorial to Leslie here. That seemed like a good thing to do.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You do what you can."

Particles of My DNA

 

Particles of my DNA can be found everywhere in this house. I have shed hairs and skin flakes and sweat and saliva in every room. I have left blood in this house while repairing its pipes and its wires, so even if you tore out the carpets and sanded away the paint and replaced the moldings, I’d still be in it. My blood, my sweat, my tears, my snot, my semen. I’ve made love with three wives and eight lovers in every room in this house, mourned the death of my grandmother and my mother and the stroke which has left my father a living dead man in every room in this house.

Come to think of it, my children also have part of my DNA, so you could mark my presence in this house by theirs: their skin and hair and semen and menstrual discharge.

Even the soil under this house has my mark on it, because I dug two-foot trenches in the eight-inch crawl space under it so I could work on the pipes, and left plenty of sweat and blood behind in the process.

So you just go ahead and evict me from this house, but you’d better know that I’m still in it, and you will never get me out of it.

 

 The Magic Eight-Ball says: "We all leave our traces."

https://poets.org/poem/brief-meditation-breath

What You Can’t Know

I turned the cardboard sleeve over in my hands, looking at the photograph on the front, the text on the back. I propped it up beside the television screen which my son thought of as “small”, though it seemed immense to me, as it sat on top of the dead machine that had once been a top of the line television-stereo record player. I opened up my laptop, found the album and began playing it.

Pete Seeger sang “If You Miss Me At The Back Of The Bus”. I recalled how cheery it had sounded when I was small, not really understanding the background, the struggle against cruelty and humiliation it represented. Lehi joined me in clapping along, smiling, but when it was over, he turned to me and said, “Why did they want black people to sit at the back?”

“It was so black people and white people didn’t sit together. They wanted to keep people separate so they didn’t get to know each other and learn that they were all just people.”

“Why are you playing the album off of YouTube, instead of putting the record on the stereo?”

“The stereo doesn’t work. I can’t play any of the records on the shelves, or the tapes in the boxes. I can only play music if I can find it online.”

Pete sang “Little Boxes” and I said, “I used to visit my aunt every year, and my father pointed out the houses across the way as we drove up to her house. They were the same little boxes that Malvina Reynolds was singing about.”

Pete sang “We Shall Overcome”, and as I leaned forward, hands clasped, my face tight with emotion, Lehi put his hand on my arm and said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes. This song just always affects me, a lot. It did when I was little, and it does even more now, because I understand it more.”

He put his arm around me. I put my arm around him. I noticed he was singing along, and I joined in. God, it felt good.

We Shall Overcome Someday….

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Damn right we shall."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49355/ninas-blues

As The August Earth Needs Rain

She had a dignity about her that I lacked. It was that gravitas, I think, that I found most attractive. Kissing her was not like kissing any woman I’d ever been with before. It was like receiving a medal. A knighthood, even. Not in the sense of being granted something out of magnanimity, but in the sense of its being something splendid and uplifting. I didn’t feel deprived when we took awhile to go farther than kissing and stroking. It seemed very appropriate to carry our physical relationship forward in stages. Anyway, kissing and stroking her was just…better than with anyone else. I understood why it was that until quite recently, what we call “making out” was what people meant when they said “making love”.

When we finally did proceed to having sex, that was something special, too. The word “consummation” never seemed so right. Yes, even in bed – actually, it was on her living room floor, to be precise, and it doesn’t seem wrong to speak in detail about our sexual intimacy. Maybe because even there she had an amazing elegance and dignity. I found as the months went by that every time was a “consummation”, not just the first time.

It was very hot sex, too, by the way. She was the first lover I’d had who actually preferred anal sex over anything else. I was happy to oblige – she taught me quick but thorough hygiene that protected us both from infection. I learned to really enjoy rimming her through a dental dam. Yes, even that was dignified. Her anus absorbed the love of my tongue in an august and stately fashion, as ridiculous as that sounds.

We’d still be together today if she hadn’t had that stroke. Oh, well, shit happens. At least it was quick. And at least I took something of her away. I’m a much more dignified and settled person myself now.

 The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Well, that was unexpected."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42578/from-the-house-of-yemanja

R.I.P.,* Rush Limbaugh

 *Recede Into Pretermittence.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "From your keyboard to God's inbox".

Did George Floyd Die of a Drug Overdose?

 The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Imgur.com rejected this, did they...?"

Rain Does Not Dampen The Land

 Rain Does Not Dampen The Land

“It doesn’t?”

“No. Land drinks it right up. Sometimes it gets a little more than it can hold at the moment, but the land deals with it one way or another. None of it goes to waste.”

“I dunno, I think you’re stretching a point, there. There’s such a thing as soil erosion.”

“Well, maybe that wasn’t the perfect way of phrasing it, but my point is, the land and the water cycle work together, as they have for a long time. They adjust, they adapt, the land works things out. Maybe not to the perfect convenience and satisfaction of Homo sapiens, but we’re just one species, we can’t claim a privileged position.”

“Okay, now you’re headed into George Carlin territory.”

“And here I was actually trying to sound optimistic. And more than that, even, to look to the future, to the other planets. We’re learning so much about the water table on Mars, for instance. We’re a long way from being ready to begin terraforming, but we’re learning a lot about how the entire water cycle works, and even about how the cycle works on bodies like Titan, where the fluid at work isn’t even water.”

“No - there, the water is the soil.”

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Happy Mardi Gras."

 

https://www.facebook.com/poetryfoundation/posts/if-black-history-month-is-notviable-then-wind-does-notcarry-the-seeds-and-drop-t/10155000801099660/

And This Is What You Can Do

“. . .and this is what you can do.”

“Brighten up the corner you’re in.”

“Work with what they give you.”

“Take what you can get.”

“This war is bullshit, but it’s the only war we’ve got.”

“Those are the things that were written on the inside cover of her notebook. She’d obviously written them there over the course of years, one at a time, whenever she ran across a phrase which spoke to her condition.”

I chuckled.

“Now, there, see? That’s the funniest thing. You said ‘spoke to her condition’ - you used Quaker talk, because you’re a Quaker, same as she was, and yet, one of the phrases she put in her notebook was ‘the only war we’ve got’. That’s kind of weird.”

“Well, it’s not as though no Quaker ever went to war.”

“No, but I suspect fewer went to Vietnam than to any other war in the last three hundred years, and that’s a quote from the Vietnam war.”

“On the other hand, it’s a war that had a big effect on Quakers - a lot of people went to Vietnam and came back as Quakers, or some other kind of pacifist, and Quakers did a lot of work to heal Vietnam veterans, and to heal Vietnam.”

“Okay, so maybe it isn’t totally out of character for her. I do wish I could understand her better, though.”

“Well, we have her notebook, and her writing, and we have what her friends have to say about her, and that’s about all there is.”

“Yeah, that’s all there is, now.”

“Hey, it happens to everybody. We come into the world, we live in it, we go out of it. It’s life. If we lived a thousand years, we’d be sorry we didn’t live a million years.”

“I know. I still wish I’d known her better.”

“Good. That means she was worth knowing.”

 

http://yearsrisingmaryoliver.blogspot.com/2010/09/mozart-for-example-september-14-2010.html

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Get to know someone while you can."

I Could Sleep In This Educated Earth

I used to have a great horror of the thought of death, of the end of my existence and the loss of my individual awareness. I yearned for some guarantee of immortality, spiritual or technological, which could guarantee my continued existence. I don’t have that same craving any longer. I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that the world doesn’t need to cater to my personal vanity that way.

I would like it, though, it would please me, if the Akashic Record really did exist: if there really were some level of the universe upon which every event which has happened, every word which has been spoken, even every thought which has crossed every mind, persists. And there’s reason to think, given what we know about quantum physics, that it might.

Given that, I could surrender my bones to join the rest of the dead, knowing that nothing was lost, that I was joining a well-educated Earth.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Everything changes, everything ends."

More Than Just A Name

I am more than just a name on a list.

I am more than just a picture you can pretend you saw on an Internet search for stock images of “bearded old man”.

More, even, than an image that appears on your screen if I turn my webcam on.

More than you can know if we were to sit down together and talk all through the evening, and lie together in the darkness and talk all through the night besides.

The same is true of you.

Each of us is so much more than can be communicated to another in a lifetime.

Each individual contains so much knowledge, so much experience, so much wisdom, so much perspective, such an unique view of the world…the uniqueness of every person deserves recognition.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are unique, just like everyone else."

Contact Light 2020

 Contact lIght

 

Contact light, for the year 2020 [Annus Horribilis], the annual newsletter from John M. Burt, sent to all friends and relatives of John and Kathe, originating from 1012 NW Fillmore Avenue, Corvallis, Oregon 97330 USA // Also originating from john_m_burt@hotmail.com // 541-602-6026 // Also posted to john_m_burt.blogspot.com

Well . . . 2020. Did anybody have a good year? If you did, please have the decency to keep your trap shut. Seriously, what HAPPENED? I mean, in January we knew donald was going to squat in our White House for another year, so we knew it wasn’t going to be one of your totally swell years, but did anybody think we were going to be living in a John T. Sladek novel? [Or maybe a Robert A. Heinlein novelette? This really did seem like it was The Year of the Jackpot.]

If you’re reading this at all, you probably know why this was my least-favorite year of all time. Late in 2019, I began noticing that Kathe was forgetting words in a way that didn’t seem like anything that had happened to her before. She blew it off repeatedly, but finally I persuaded her to see a neurologist. It turned out to be someone I had seen for a minor issue a couple of years before, and by the end of our appointment, he was well and truly alarmed. Kathe just wasn’t anything like the woman he had met before. Evidently, his alarm was persuasive where mine wasn’t: she agreed to get a CAT scan. When we went in to discuss the results with him, the source of Kathe’s confusion was very, very obvious: she had a plum-sized tumor pressing on her speech centers. It was a bad news, worse news situation, though. The diagnostic name Glioblastoma multiforme provided the worse news:  besides the battleship, there was a whole flotilla of cruisers all over her brain. Kathe never had a chance.

She did have a choice, though: after having the big tumor out, she could have radiation and chemo for two or three years, or comfort measures for two or three months. The landscape ahead didn’t look appealing, so she chose the short trip. The comfort measures were definitely comforting. Kathe was clear-headed once she recovered from the surgery, and wasn’t in any pain, even at the end. I noticed that once we had passed the 8^th of February, the three-month mark, she started getting a trifle…short-tempered, as though she were impatient once the “deadline” had passed. The end came on the 11^th, while we watched a compilation of music videos which were in rotation in the early years of MTV, when it was a utility, supplying music videos on demand, 24 hours a day. It was a period of great creativity, with good music and good videos. They were also the videos we watched in the Summer of 1984 while we were getting to know one another. Really, the only way it could have been better is if we’d been able to play a hand of Anomaly, the card game we’d invented around the kitchen table that Summer, to make use of a strange mix of incomplete card decks. I held her hand, watching videos with her until her eyes closed, and then watching videos by myself, holding her hand, noticing how her breathing was slowing to an unnatural pace, with long pauses, until finally she took a breath which didn’t look any different from the last one, except that it was not followed by another.

A few days after Kathe died, something brought to my mind a song I hadn’t heard in years. Before I met Kathe, I bought an audiocassette tape from a company that no longer exists, Off-Centaur Press, which sold collections of filk songs, science fiction folksongs most often heard at SF conventions.  When I remembered “Time and Stars”, it struck me very powerfully in Kathe’s absence. I haven't been able to find “Time and Stars” on YouTube or anywhere else, oddly enough, neither a recording of its being performed nor of its lyrics, but I had no trouble remembering them:

 

Our lives are brief as falling stars

That streak the sky like tears

My life is stretched by a slender thread

Across a million years

The Weaver of Dreams has spun our lives

Our webs of joy and pain

She casts them forth for a little while

And gathers them in again

Although 'til now my thread was drawn

In solitary ways

I think your dreams weave through my nights

Your memories through my days

Life's tangled skein takes shape upon

The Loom of What Will Be

Our lives entwine in the warp and weft

Of the Weaver's Tapestry

For there is a Pattern vast as time

The stars weave 'round the Earth

In smaller rhythms weave our years

The promise of rebirth

When the Weaver draws our threads across

Another where or when

I will meet and know and remember you

And love you once again

 

Returning to card game metaphors, are you as impressed as I am at how many of the trumpery are still doubling down, trying to bluff President-Elect Biden into folding? My father told a story like that from his time in the Air Force, of playing cards with some guys, one of whom kept raising and raising, wearing a smile that he was sure was, along with his huge raises, going to get the other remaining player to fold. Problem was, they were playing stud poker, and he had something like a Trey and Five of Clubs and a pair of Deuces showing, and the other guy had something like three Kings up. Mathematically, there was no way his hole card could possibly turn the mess he had showing into a winning hand. The two players who had already folded were looking sad. The guy who was about to rake in a ridiculously large pot looked sick. But there was also no way, by the gentlemanly rules of poker, that any of them could point out to him his blunder. They just had to wait for the poor sap to figure it out for himself, or run out of money with which to raise. That’s pretty much exactly how I feel, reading these ridiculous rants from the trumpery.

The worst of it is, donald himself isn’t the guy bluffing: he’s a kibitzer who keeps pushing one five dollar bill after another at the stupid player, reminding him each time, “Six for five on payday, my dude.”

Besides losing Kathe, I also lost Blackberry House. That house, where I spent most of my life, had always been as much a burden as a blessing. It was a huge old house, in extremely poor condition when Kathe and her previous husband bought it. It was charming in its decrepit way (I once overheard one of my kids on the phone, giving directions to a friend coming over for a play date. He told them to look for “the one that looks like a haunted house”). Kathe worked on it for every year she was physically able to. I helped, as her previous husband had, and the kids, but at the root, the house was Kathe’ project. She did most or all of the roofing (it had a completely sound roof when we sold it), the plumbing (she dug trenches in the crawlspace to get around down there), and oh, boy, did she work on the wiring: one day, finishing a circuit repair, she gave a Tarzan yell and called out, “Everything in this house that works, works because I made it work!”, which had our daughter Mestowet come out of her room to cry, “I want to be like you!”

Another problem the house had was the mortgage. Under circumstances I never fully understood, we had become trapped in a usurious mortgage which essentially meant we could never pay it off - it would simply loom over us, while we paid the sale price a second time, and then a third, without the principle ever shrinking.

There was a tree, too. Oh, what a tree: a cedar that rose majestically into the sky from the corner of the lot, its top a good deal taller than the house, its branches pruned so that they overhung the sidewalk in a way that was charming, although definitely in violation of the sidewalk code. We’d often look outside and see new arrivals and courting couples getting photographs taken inside the frame of those branches. If we were fast, we’d get a chance to run out and offer to take the photo.

We loved that house, but after the kids had left, and as none of them showed any interest in owning the house themselves, it was more house than we really needed. When the city began harassing us about the condition of the attached shed, and we saw just what a disastrous state it was actually in, the next time someone made us an offer on the house, we considered our options and accepted. We were especially happy to be selling to this buyer, because he loved the house and talked about how he looked forward to continuing Kathe’s restoration work. He had an in with the city planning department, and was confident that he could restore the house without interference from the city, and get it the historic designation it deserved.

It was easier to be parted from the house when we knew it was going to a buyer who appreciated it the way we did. When we told Gideon that we had sold the house, his first question was, “What about the tree?”, which endeared him to me all the more. We told him that the buyer would be responsible for protecting the tree from now on, and we would have to accept that.

Too bad, then, that a couple of months after we sold the house, we rode a bus past our old address and the house was gone, and so was the tree. Evidently, the city double-crossed him, and forced him to demolish it. I really don’t think he was buttering us up to get a good deal on the house.

The apartment isn’t bad, mind. Kind of lonely. It’s definitely tricky to think of the space as not having room for just anything - we sold and gave away so much when we moved. Mainly because for decades we had been acquiring things, saying, “Someone will want this.” Quite a few people DID want things we had on hand. We loved giving people things they needed. On one memorable occasion, a hitchhiker passing through Corvallis needed this, that and the other thing (I believe it was three quite different items) and we managed to provide him with all of them. Our hearts were warmed by being able to do this - although our mood was somewhat soured by his then scolding us for being so hung up on material things. Sigh.

Well, now I have two storage lockers full of things I can’t fit into the apartment (down from three), as well as ungainly piles of stuff around the apartment. Once I get some shelves set up, that will help a lot. I still do have things to get rid of. We were selling “Books By The Inch”, and I’ll probably go back to that sometime in 2021.

"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.” -- John Ruskin

 Kathe loved this quotation. She had in mind to carve it into a plaque and build it into our house.

That’s the house that has now been demolished, of course. If she had, in fact, placed it, that plaque would now be in splinters in the Coffin Butte Landfill. Her years of labor were not truly for nothing, though. That's no more true than to say her life is irrelevant because she's dead now. She lived in that house, as did her children, as did I, and others besides. We all loved that house. It is a shame that the house is gone, though. She built well. Generations more could have loved it.

 

Notes (in case you’re reading this in a format where the Hyperlinks don’t work)

The Year of the Jackpot: http://www.weylmann.com/The_Year_of_the_Jackpot.pdf

John Ruskin: https://goodreads.com/quotes/7583630

Filk songs: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FilkSong

Glioblastoma Multiforme: https://www.aans.org/en/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Glioblastoma-Multiforme

 

 

Exultation Is The Going of an Inland Soul to Sea

The waters along the Oregon Coast are seldom warm enough for comfortable swimming - at least by my standards. After a few childhood experiments, I gave up all pretense of going to the beach to swim. Instead, I went to lie on a blanket on the sand in August and listen to the waves come in, or to walk briskly along the beach in February with my jacket zipped up, admiring the dramatic crash of the wind-tossed surf.

“I loved your ad,” Eos said as she walked at my side. “It’s true, everyone says they like ‘long walks on the beach’, but where are they? We’ve been walking on the beach every day this week, and we’re almost always the only people walking. That’s why I clicked on it and sent you a message.”

“Really? Not because I said I’d always liked older women, but at my age there aren’t many left?”

She laughed.

“That was probably a contributing factor.”

“You really are almost the only woman younger than I am that I’ve ever…had designs on.”

She laughed louder at that.

“You’re not anything like old enough to use a phrase like that.”

“Very few people are alive who’re old enough fo it to really fit. Anyway, my options are limited. I’m definitely too old to call it ‘dating’, and we haven’t done more than kiss so far, so I shouldn’t call you my lover.”

“That’s a fair point. Then again, I kind of like the idea of calling you my ‘boyfriend’.”

She showed me how much she liked it by stopping me with her arm and pulling me into a long and very enjoyable kiss.

“Oh, my, Grace…how would you feel about stopping in at my place and doing more than kiss? Or anyway, have some more kisses like that one?”

“That sounds really good. I could feel your body responding to that kiss, and that made me want to kiss you a bunch more.”

We resumed walking, about half a kilometer from my apartment building (we’d taken the bus to the south end of town for our walk). Even though I was looking forward to a hot “makeout session with my girlfriend” (and Eos had a point - there was something exciting in using language like that at my age), I didn’t feel any urge to rush. There was still wind and surf to hear, frothy waves to see, hardpacked sand to feel underfoot.

There was still Eos to walk beside.

 https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/exultation-is-the-going/

[Interesting. Just last night, I happened over a quote from Moby Dick about the thrill that passes through you when your ship passes out of land. It didn't come up in the lines I composed, but I was struck by the coincidence while reading the poem.]

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Take the plunge."