Answer #161 - In stiletto heels, we wait

The special occasions…



Those days that we’re expected to do something wonderful, magical, amazing…

New Year’s Eve is one of them.

Every year, I expect to do something wonderful, magical, amazing.. I expect to hear the ringing of a bell and the sure knowledge that an angel has gotten its wings as the ball drops and the stars rise.

Birthdays, anniversaries.. hell, all the holidays.

Expectations of magic and wonder.

And yet, when we don’t expect it, that’s when magic and wonder happen.  When we’re not looking. When we’re blind-sided by the bright spotlight of Chance and Circumstance meeting on a dance floor somewhere.

She wears stiletto heels, Chance that is. Because she’s flirty and unpredictable. She runs hot and cold, but when she shows up, Josie and Betty Lou both avert their eyes.
They can’t touch her.

Circumstance, well, he’s steady… has a great day job – wears comfortable shoes, even if they’re more than likely Italian – and oh, when Chance walks in, they lock eyes and… well, suffice it to say that they’re responsible for the miraculous and immediate birth of the twin sprites – Magic and Wonder.

And there they are, unexpected. After that, they’re free spirits – can’t be cajoled into making an appearance by any living human, no matter the occasion. No, Magic and Wonder walk the world, looking for the space between night and day - only their parents can command an appearance.

And no amount of wishing will make it so.

No.. we wait in anxious hope, don’t we?

While the stars twinkle, and the red circle on the calendar recedes into the pink of twilight…

We wait. Maybe this year..

Answer #160 - This Earth, this Realm, this Michigan

Greetings from Michigan


Shakespeare never graced the shores of this lake.

Well, assuming Shakespeare was Shakespeare, and not an Indian Maiden tour guide for wayward explorers who penned soliloquies between river bends… there’s been so much speculation as to his/her true identity…

But probably not, no, Shakespeare was most likely never here.

Still.. it’s a glorious countryside here in the MidWest – which lends itself to art, unhampered by pretention or frippery. And somehow, maybe this wide open and fertile landscape has bred into its inhabitants and immigrants an openess that is unprecedented in other U.S. regions, and for varying reasons. Still, it’s unboundaried by age or economics. A kind of pervasive humility levels all playing fields, and for that reason, you rarely know who you might be talking to.

Pretention gets doors quietly and politely shut in your face. But forever. More or less.

We’re walking down the thin strip of beach on the western shore of Lake Michigan, just outside of Douglas. It’s beautiful and about 77 degrees, though the humidity is tougher than the wind can tickle.

We’re passing a group of teenagers and a mom - adorning beach chairs and sunglasses, surrounded by chattering sea gulls.


Where are we that there are there seagulls on a lake? I ask Adventure Boy.

Gulls aren’t that smart. Sea. Lake. Both one syllable. They can't spell so they don't know the difference.

Huh…

I’m smiling at the kids surrounded by gulls.

A bright-eyed, long-haired 17(?)-year old smiles big:

We’re feeding ‘em spicy chex mix! – and then he laughs.

The mom chimes in, And they love it!

And we don’t know them and they don’t know us.. and my first inclination is to worry about spice in the tummy of a gull, until I remember what incredible pestilence connoisseurs gulls are and I stop worrying.

And my second inclination is to laugh with them. 

We don’t know them and they don’t know us. But we’re in the MidWest, all of us, right here, right now, together, in the company of acrobatic birds, the sun and waves. What more do you need to know? 

And the gulls snap up beak fulls of chex mix and sand and I walk with Adventure Boy another mile or so until it’s time to get on the road again.  When we pass the group, the chex mix and gulls are gone.

They cleaned us out!  Kid says.  Now they're fishing, as he points to the sky above the lake and the circling, diving gulls.

Next show – Ann Arbor.


This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Michigan.

Answer #159 - A letter from the cliff

Dear Sir,
In response to your admonition - I'm wearing nothing close to rose-colored glasses. Quite the antithesis. Left, Right, no difference... it's become nothing more than a sensationalist summer camp (ala Lord of the Flies), replete with media censoring, big money spin-doctoring, and bile spitting back and forth.  We entertain ourselves, I think with this nice diversion while the new corporate Gods eat us whole.  Sadly, I've got no fight left in me for this, nor rose-colored glasses.  Maybe you'll get what you want, and the Right will get back in power, and then it'll all be... better?

But the fact is, a vote for Obama wasn't in all cases at all a vote against the man 'you folks' put in power.  A generation of children is looking at an impending implosion - and not much to hold onto.  While you argue the Constitution (and stubborn, hostile bombast doesn't mean you've won.. sometimes just means people get tired of beating their heads against a brick wall), they can see clearly that we're an organism on the brink.  Global warming or not.

He looked like hope - an intelligent leader, a constitutional scholar, a change. A chance. Maybe it's easier to see us as whiny elitists, maybe it's easier to see us children with our fingers in our ears singing, 'la la la la la la if I click my heels three times...'  Fact is, it's just not true of the majority.

There are crackpots on both sides. There are idiots on both sides. There are bloody battles being waged on-line and sensationalist bastards selling books on both sides.  Ignorance breeds evil.  It's pervasive on both sides - ignorance. Ignorance breeds civil war. Could be the death of us if we're not careful.. propagating like mold. You indignantly see us as hapless hippies hastening the end of freedom (the government should be the father-figure none of us got), we indignantly see you as the small-minded redneck proponents of the annihilation of civil rights (as long as it's wearing red, white and blue and has hands folded in prayer, it must be true)  And fact is, feeding the beast of righteous-indignation is nothing more than that. But 110 days from now, be careful what you wish for. If I thought for 5 seconds that, in the hands of the Right we'd suddenly be the dream land you'd like us to think Obama has single-handedly obliterated, I'd vote along with you.  And I'd buy all the bridges in Brooklyn...and swim in tea...or oil, as the case may be..

But I've come to believe, lately, that the only real hope there is lies somehow in the realm of love - and respect in all things. So I read between the angry lines - and think on what you write.  Because the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the Middle. And maybe we'll survive ourselves long enough to find a way out of the quagmire without rose-colored glasses.   I want America to be the dream it once dreamed it was - and not built on the blood and bones of smaller, less funded nations. I want something to believe in that's based in intelligent choice and decency - not just the cloak of it or the pretty, winking picture of it. But more than all of that, I want to survive this time, as we stand on either side of a cliff's edge, Lemmings deciding whether or not to jump into the sluttish and rutted sea.  
Will we jump?

Nothing good will come of the hostility and insult. Nothing. Only more of the same. The only real hope there is lies somewhere in the realm of love - and respect in all things.

Which is all I offer you this morning.
Krista

Answer #158 - Maybe I'll abandon the order of things

I had the great fortune of having dinner last night with one of the most celebrated living Korean poets, Moon Chung-hee.  A warm and lovely woman, I felt at home, instantly.

I knew of her work because of a friend, and the English translators have done such a beautiful job, I can only assume.  Though I lived in Korea a year, I (obviously) don't read Hangul - so I have the translated version of her poetry collection, Windflower and the poem A Goodbye to a Butterfly -

In the shadow
of my building

a butterfly 
whose yellow wings
embraced the skies
lies in decay, sinless.

How you have struggled
and suffered 
to preserve
your golden wings.

Returning 
to the earth
is beautiful.

Do you know denying it
is dreadful? Do you know things
of vinyl and plastic
tumbling about the earth?

A warm body 
of the sun
destined to dissolve
is beauty.

Goodbye
the vanishing
of your lived body
bursts my heart.

- sparked a song that hasn't made it's way fully into form, but echoes the idea that the beauty of the natural world exceeds what humans can conjure, here between two voids in the short and fragile life and waking minutes we live.

And who knows what will come of it?  Still, it was a nice thing, when the spark flashed in my brain and the white noise gave way to a whisper.



This is no ballroom gown
Just some old thing I found
a silken threaded, ordinary ordinary brown

The yellow dust on your sleeve
fell from the legs of a bee
fell from a fast moving, ordinary thing

And all the ballroom glitter,
silver glitter falling through the air
will only line the shiny beds of mice, somewhere

There is no light that you'll describe to me 
that's better than the light I see. 
Don't bother.
A million swords have drawn, 
it's flashed upon the blades
- was there, and then was gone -
Don't sing it - move on.

A million manacles have bound the innocent
and in that same light did glint anyway, anyway

So there are lighted perils
and there are shiny perils
and pretty things are everywhere - 
and flashing on the sharp glass, there

I have reckoned all of this
will, by and by, into light pass
but with your hand upon my hip
In brown, I think I'll dance
Just now, I think I'll dance.

Answer #157 - When the dogs started howling outside the door

True life tales from the Occasional You're On Fire 4th of July Blow-Out

I'm Jerry's brother, he said, from just across the way.

He drove up in his lawn tractor onto the long gravel drive, pulling a two-wheeled trailer wagon behind him.
He was a diminutive version of David Crosby,with straggly long gray hair and a green, dime-store glass of what I assumed to be straight whiskey in his hand. He had a passenger - a woman of roughly the same age dressed in faded black t-shirt and shorts, sprawled in the wagon.

I don't know Jerry, I said, where does he live? In the background, the party guests chatted over the music and the boys in the yard threw firecrackers into the woods.

He lives just behind you - yonder.  We's just driving around to see what's going on in the neighborhood.

Cool, I said, though we don't live in a neighborhood and can only see one neighbor, who recently ruined my little Ponderosa by moving his modular onto a patch of ground directly across the road from me.  Said neighbor, incidentally, has a white dog named Kilo and nipple rings.  I've put two and two together.  Though, admittedly, he seems pretty nice and his yard his kept considerably neater than mine - even with the electric fence that keeps Kilo in and Trespassers out.

Well,  you're welcome to come in, I offered, as I smiled at his passenger, who was sporting a surgical mask.

I got allergies, she said, as she pulled the mask aside and then carefully replaced it, explaining the mask.

I smiled at her.  I think I smiled. It was the way she was sprawled - it was the sprawl of it. She had a pillow under her head and blinked up at me, prone in the trailer, but completely relaxed. In the lawn trailer.  She never sat up.  Not even when he turned the tractor around, heading back down the driveway, and sat on the seat, looking back at me.  She stayed sprawled, hands folded on her chest, blinking.   

At what point did she decide to lay down in the trailer and be driven to points unknown - to see what was happening somewhere else?

Come on, I said.  There's horseshoes, though I wasn't entirely sure if he'd pass out on the lawn or what the woman might say when and if she sat up.  He nodded and held a hand up - a half-wave, an acknowledgment. He felt out of place, I know, but he wasn't.  He really wasn't.  Others had arrived in cars, sure, but plenty of them could've had glasses of straight whiskey at the time.  Despite appearances, things are never what they seem.  And his story was one I wanted to hear.  But he drove off when I turned away, probably tooling down the road at 10 miles an hour, to find a different party with more interesting people.

Answer #156 - Joel Washington

Had lunch in town today with my brother at the Village Deli.  Their motto is EAT AND GET OUT. We more or less did.

Coming out of the restaurant, I ran into Joel Washington, a friend and one of the talented painters in Bloomington.  He just did a commissioned portrait of Quincy Jones and presented it to him at the IU School of Music.  He has a show running currently in Bangkok.  I have a painting of his in my house.


Then I walked around the square to the Wandering Turtle and bought some thank you cards and a      Hmong Heart for a friend.                     

This is Jaime -  it's her store.   At least one of Joel's pieces is always in the Turtle. Jaime has a new store manager who just graduated with a degree in Music Business.  It's probable that I will get to know her better because I could use an education in music business and she was nice.

I walked across the street to Scholar's Inn Bakehouse and bought two loaves of bread - one day old.  Day old is 1/2 price.

Then I went to Big Red Liquors and picked up a bottle of Primitivo.

Adventure Boy and I are having dinner tonight with our good friend, Steve, and I've been instructed to bring bread and wine, my two favorite things.  He only looks like this at Halloween, though, and is generally in the company of an upright bass.  He'll tour with us in Michigan and Canada this month.  Say hello if you see him. He's very friendly.

 
After dinner, we will see a show at the Indiana Theatre, now called the Buskirk-Chumley.  We'll see Amjad Ali Khan   Carrie Newcomer and  
                                                 Tangamente as part of a World Music festival called The Lotus Festival.
  Who'll design this year's Lotus Poster, you ask?

This year, Joel Washington.  Can't wait to see it. 

Answer #155 - Deep Fried Oreos

The GPS lied and cost me an extra hour on the way to Holiday World this morning.

Still, it was worth it. 

Holiday World is located in Santa Claus, Indiana.

Think I'm kidding?  I'm not. This is one more reason that I can't leave Indiana.

I'm writing today from Halloween Land in Holiday World, where rides are named names like The Goblin and Hallow-Chair...  I'm heartened by many things: Happy families of all sorts and economic placements; smiling kids snapping mental pictures of highlights of kid life, for recall and embellishment later; but mostly, I'm heartened by my selflessness in agreeing to get in a car and drive this distance to sit on a bench and watch pasty Midwesterners (my tribe) walk by on the way to another cup of free soda.

All the water and soda at Holiday World is free.  I brought my own coffee, though.


"What's in that bag?", the nice white-haired lady asked me at the gate.


"Coffee, a laptop, some chips, some carrots."

"Why?"

"Er.. well, I'm mostly just here with other folks and I thought I'd sit somewhere and get some work done.  No rest for the wicked!"

(hesitantly) "Well... (eyeing the green picnic tote suspiciously) okay I guess."

"Honest,  I won't try to sell anybody my carrot sticks - how could I compete with the deep fried oreos? ha-ha.. heh.."

(nice lady's not laughing but still eyeing the bag, silently)

"Well.. guess I'll get in there then.  Bye!"  I say, cheerfully, and wishing there were something illegal or at least sellable in my bag.  There's not.

I sip my coffee and soy milk concoction in the shade.  The breeze is cool - the 77 degrees are perfect... and maybe, just maybe, I'll ride the Legend.