Recently in Life Category

Who knows what can happen when a crowd gets together to talk about poetry. In Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday, a deer made its entrance by crashing through a church window. No one mentions the topic of discussion. It would be excellent if they had been discussing William Stafford's "Travelling Through the Dark."

Ann and I spent the morning hiking through the Sonora Desert Museum. The pictures below show some deserts are not traps, like Death Valley or the Sahara, though I wouldn't want to be in middle of the Sonora on a hot summer day without water.

Ann and I went to the top of Mount Lemmon today, 29 miles from Tucson and a difference of over 30 degrees. Hot in Tucson. Cool at the top of the Santa Catalina mountains. Here are some pictures of the trip up and down the mountain.

The yearly Poco gathering this year at Wildwood Resort was a special occasion. Rusty and Mary were married today at noon. In attendance were Poco fans from numerous states, even from other countries; members of Rusty and Mary's families; and a dog. Some people arrived as early as Thursday and were already well into the festivities when I pulled into the rustic resort Friday afternoon with two cases of wedding champagne. It's funny that I delivered it. My wife is the Poco Nut. I like the music, too, especially when Rusty plays the steel guitar, but what I like most about this yearly gathering is the people. Except for a crazy cowboy Friday night and a woman who preferred jail to a motel--"Look at me," she said. "Do I look crazy?"--everyone there was friendly. Many of us know one another from the previous years at Wildwood. So all in all the wedding was an intimate occasion. Rusty and Mary looked wonderful, the sun warmed up the morning chill, the sky was blue, and the champagne was cold.

John Kerry's blog says 15,000 were at Union Station in St. Louis for the start of his Whistle Stop ride across Missouri. I was one of them, though I never got inside the station but had to stand behind some railing. All in all it was a good rally. I especially liked Kerry's statement that "health care is a right." If he sticks to that position he just might get my vote. If not, I'll vote for Nader again.

Kerry talked a lot about plans. But that's rhetoric. I'd like to know the details of the plans. Saying I have a plan just isn't enough. Anyone can say I have a plan. He doesn't go into detail about his plan for health care, but to say health care is a right is to say come hell or high water everyone will get the care that's needed.

The rally had a big brother aspect to it. Volunteers were constantly telling you you had to complete a sign-up sheet that had spaces for your name, your address, your phone number, and your email. One volunteer said you had to sign for security reasons. I signed Jorge Shrub but refused to give the Casa Blanca as my address. Another volunteer said the rally was getting names for its data base. Sounds like a list to me.

The line snaked by Hard Rock (do you really believe Hard Rock is out to save the planet?) with a table set up with $3 dollar hot dogs and hamburgers. Those little packets of mustard and ketchup included. I stopped afterwards at QT for a 99 cents hot dog, complete with chili, onions, cheese, and jalepenos.

I've been a fan of Cowboy Junkies since Trinity Session in 1986. I like them so much I went tonight with Ann to hear them play The Pageant in St. Louis. I usually hate going to concerts. I last went, other than to a symphony or chorus, in 1982, before Cowboy Junkies, when I took a van-load of my graduate professors' kids to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas to hear Journey. Ann says I must have been looking for a bump in my grades. The only other group I'd consider going to see is Pink Floyd. It's not that I don't like other bands. It's that I hate large crowds and loud spaces. The Pageant, however, is an intimate venue, and Margo Timmin's voice is a blend of Neil Young's harmonica and Yoyo Ma's cello.

I was born at 11:17 pm on July 3, 1951. "Almost a firecracker," as adults used to tell me when I was a boy. The 4th was a wonderful annual event, for me, growing up on Lake James, near Angola, Indiana, and for everybody in America. I remember M-80s and bottle rockets, cherry bombs and sparklers, Kool-ade and Meyers hot dogs, marshmallows and Sunbeam bread, watermelons (chockful of slippery black seeds, for good spitting) and corn-on-the-cob. Oh yeah, and blueberry pie. That was and still is my intoxicant of choice on the 3rd of July.

The 3rd was my day on the beach at Glen Eden, then later on Glen Eyre. All the summer kids were there . . . meaning that on my birthday nobody had to do his math tables, read aloud for the teacher, practice writing, play a flutophone, sit still at his desk. All day in the shallow water or puttering around in the Alumi-craft or, a few birthdays on, swimming out to the pontoon raft anchored just where the lake bottom dropped away to a murky-green depth. The one with the fibreglass diving board and splintery planks whitewashed every spring by some grown-up or other. Dive off the shore side into a gold-flecked, warm shallow, find stones & shells. Dive off the other side into a black-green bottomless cold of weeds.

And the best gifts in the world! Bongoes one year. Always a new bathing suit, rubber flippers, face mask, snorkeling tube. Sometimes a baseball glove, a whiffleball or badminton set. One year, a subscription to Boy's Life. (Now I subscribe to My Generation.) Joe, my younger brother and the youngest of six, always a little steamed that I'm getting all this plus national attention.

Just at sundown, the boat parade. A flotilla of wooden Chris Crafts, fibreglass Crosbys, SkiNautiques, FloteBotes, and assorted trolling craft, canoes, skiffs, small catamarans, Sunfish. All the soft-throated outboard motors set at idle: Johnsons, Evinrudes, Mercuries. Some boats pulling inner tubes full of revellers. Everybody strung with lights and shooting bottle rockets off their starboards & ports, blaring horns, the big inboards growling & snorting, and of course, Old Glory flying from the stern of every floating thing. It's a wonder nobody ever drowned or got ground up in a propeller.

That parade, who organized it? Nobody ever seemed to know, it just happened spontaneously across the lake as the afternoon closed, every July 4th, with a hundred or more boaters falling into this giant conga line snaking its way through Lake James' three big basins. We waved from the shore, ran to the ends of our docks and waved and cheered. We pumped our forearms to get 'em to blow their horns loud, louder, loudest. What a birthday . . . America's and mine.

July 3 and 4, 2004. The 3rd is a Saturday which, as a good friend observed, is perhaps the best day of the week to celebrate a birthday. You get Friday night to prepare and all day Sunday to recover. You get, if you like, because it's still your day, an all-day respite from chores. Perfect strangers are in a celebratory frame of mind. The air pops & whizzes. Your mom calls. The blueberry pie's in the oven. On this day you're nobody's enemy.

On the 4th, we walk over to Ron and Alex's apartment in the 12-story tower across the street. We're invited to dinner and to watch the fireworks after dark. They live temporarily in a two-bedroom unit ten floors up while they finish building a new townhome. The apartment has a balcony with a southern view. From here we can see little downtown McLean, our town. From here we can see Tysons Corner, Gallerias I and II (which I affectionately call Sodom and Gomorrah). We can see a goodly swath of Northern Virginia, with Alexandria to the left, and the Potomac and Northwest D.C. to the right.

Ron's making risotto, his signature dish. He's worried about it, but he's confident too. He orders his arborio rice only from some town in Italy . . . not the kind grown in Texas or Louisiana or California. I watch him work the saucepans and pots and wooden spoons and knives. He's orderly, thinks ahead. He knows the steps & the timing. He produces . . . a perfect curry risotto. I am getting a day-after-birthday buzz (yes, a hair of the dog that bit me on my birthday) on champagne and, when that runs dry, red wine. How fine, how fine.

And then, as we finish our meal, the most spectacular thing happens. A July 4th spectacular thing. One or two fiery, sparkling blossoms appear out on the Virginia skyline, just now turning deep blue, then purple, then cobalt. One or two more colored star-bursts further along the horizon, with delayed rumbles and pops. And soon the entire skyline, from Potomac, Maryland up north to Alexandria, Virginia to our southeast--a full panorama of star bursts, smoke clouds, arcing tracers--lights up as every town with an Independence Day budget puts on its show. Vienna, Fairfax, Falls Church, Great Falls, Reston, Herndon, Arlington, Manassas, Fair Oaks.

It's one thing to picnic at your local community park to watch the fireworks close at hand. That's a good thing. That's America. But to see them all from a height, well, glory be! That's one for the ages. Like I said, what a birthday . . . America's and mine.

Yesterday during the power outage here in St. Louis, I thought of a childhood acquaintance who decades ago had a summer job reading meters for Carolina Power & Light in Wilmington, NC. I hadn't thought of David Huffine in ages. The last time I saw him might have been twenty years ago when I held a temporary teaching position at UNC-W.

Also yesterday Kerry named John Edwards to fill the VP slot on the democratic presidential ticket. This article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch includes a quote by David on Edwards' law school days at Chapel Hill.

The near syncrhonicity of these two events--the memory evoked by the aftermath of a violent thunderstorm and the quote related to what could be a momentous election--could be fodder for a story, perhaps a flash fiction piece, even a poem.

Just as I was getting ready yesterday to add to the blog the mother of all thunderstorms blew through St.Louis and knocked the power out. Shit, I thought, there goes my chance to add another July 4th entry to the millions already clogging the blogosphere. Can't tell about the fireworks from the Eads bridge Saturday night or about the Wallflowers and the fireworks under the Arch Sunday night. Or about the BBQ Monday afternoon. Just as I was firing up the laptop BAM! And the power was out until this afternoon. This is the second year in a row that I've been through a major storm. Last year in De Soto, after straight line winds, I learned how to remove fallen trees. All you need is a chainsaw, a wood splitter, and a chipper. Yesterday wasn't so severe, but today I did have to climb on top of the garage to remove some fallen limbs, and throughout the day I filled 10 yard waste bags. All in all a fun but hecic July 4 weekend.

Well, I missed it. Ronald Reagan's death, embalming, lying in state, feet-first parade up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, arsenal of salutes, all happened while I was away from town. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting a friend whose terminally ill condition hits far closer to home.

The precision, the planning, the speed (with a pregnant moment or two for casket touching), the well-mediated solmenity had all the depth of a Miss America Pageant. Hard to believe that a nation can get a revered president in the ground, so to speak, with so much pomp and so much alacrity and not miss a beat, stub a toe, make a wrong turn, overlook a plaudit, expose a wart.

The televised media made hay with the Reagan hagiography. CNN and Fox had great days recounting how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War (Gorbachev, of course, was the outwitted, outgunned, out-charmed other half of the terminating equation). What a narrative those news execs weave! The Great Communicator. The Smiling Pragmatist. The Savvy Somnabulator.

By the time we returned last weekend to the Capital area, the whole thing had blown out of town, westward ho. The t-shirt vendors' racks of Reagan-wear already were looking wilted. The covers of Time and Newsweek already bore whiskers. Now it's Bill Clinton's official portrait, and George Bush squirming, having to praise the guy in a White House installation ceremony.

How to connect this stuff to poetry? Oh, I know. I recall Anne Sexton once describing a finished poem as "last season's bad cold." So with the "news" in Washington, D.C.