RATTLE is a poetry journal that emails poetry each morning, including a weekly response to a current event. Today, I received a form poem that made me sit up and feel. What follows is the mother’s explanation of where her words were birthed and a link to the poem.
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We’ve been busy hustling back and forth, walking our 25 miles a week (and me running a few of those), working on our second home, and admiring everything we see.
Continue readingToday is my high school reunion, the 50th delayed to year 51, and it is also my elder son’s 41st birthday. I will be baking a vegan, gluten-free, refined sugar-free cake later today. Our family is coming. They’ve had good reason to stay safe, isolated, and healthy. So that is the best reason for staying home. But there’s also the pandemic, which is the real reason.
My 50th high school reunion is coming up in less than a week. It is actually our 51st graduation anniversary, but there was that pandemic. Actually, the pandemic is still raging, and locally it’s worse than ever with more cases daily than we saw in a month last year. I live in a tourism destination and we routinely see license plates from Texas and Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, not to mention plenty from Washington, Idaho, and California. Sometimes there are more cars from out of state than Oregon on the road. Who can blame them for coming?
Ripper: I don’t know how well I could stand up under torture.
Mandrake: Well of course the answer to that is, boy, no one ever does. And my advice to you, Jack, is to give me the code now. And if those devils come back and try any rough stuff, we’ll fight them together, boy, like we did just now, on the floor, eh? You with the old gun, and me with the belt and the ammo, feeding you, Jack! Feed me, you said, and I was feeding you, Jack.
—Dr. Strangelove: or,
How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
There was fog this morning, lovely fog and a bit of wind during my run. Yes, I ran. I am running a bit faster than ten minutes miles. My old easy “light run” pace was nine-minute miles, and that might be what muscle memory is giving me now. I thought my knee might be giving me trouble again, but it didn’t. Sore, but not impeded.
It’s been a crazy week, crazy for a number of reasons I will not try to explain. Gorgeous skies. Pelicans fishing right in front of us. Sand sweeping in. And struggling to find out information. Is it because I am old or because I am a fanatical researcher that I sometimes know more about other people’s jobs than they do? It’s been happening for years. Does that happen to anyone else?
Continue readingThe largest fire in the nation is burning south of us. The Bootleg Fire has destroyed nearly 400,000 acres, the third largest fire in Oregon history, and it merged with another fire on the 19th. It is only 38% contained. We have a family member currently fighting that fire. On top of that, firefighters have been testing positive for covid.
Maybe have a care?
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from Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson:
A year ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at 80 years old. As a young adult, Lewis was a “troublemaker,” breaking the laws of his state: the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.
. . .
Last June, Representative Lewis told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart that he was “inspired” by last summer’s peaceful protests in America and around the world against police violence. “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something,’” Lewis told Capehart. “And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.”
Capehart asked Lewis “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”
This is peculiar. I only noticed today because I wanted to add to it that my page about Covid-19 is entirely gone. Since early last year I kept a diary of deaths and impressions, news stories, recommendations, and quotations concerning Covid-19. During the chaos that ensued when I tried to update my “theme” this entire page went missing. It was a huge page, and it was important to me. I also discovered that both my “home” pages led to a menu, a literal restaurant menu. (Gone now.) There was a third “home” page which I deleted during the initial chaos. I suspect that was my “Covid Diary.”
I played around with other WordPress themes yesterday and managed to completely misplace the one I started with. Gone. The sidebar with personal and site information now appears way down at the bottom of this page. That is not convenient. I could pay the “Happiness Engineers” to help me, but I am so offended by that title (not to mention the cost) that I will put up with this ugliness. [Why did I ever think it was a good idea to leave Blogspot?] I do not like this layout, but it’s the best I can do.
Discuss.
[NOTE: Managed to find a “theme” with the sidebar, but now the header photos do not show on the home page and are overlaid on their own page. Better, though. imo. Yours?]
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