The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...: hope you aren't tired of bird pictures and gratitude

Friday, May 10, 2013

hope you aren't tired of bird pictures and gratitude

Regis said yesterday that it was the highlight of his birding career...this many beautiful birds at the same time. In some ways, I could say it doesn't take much to tickle us but in other ways this is miraculous, to have this beautiful wildlife right outside our living room window.

This week, I met two people face-to-face, Michele and Victoria, who I have only known on Facebook. I have two other people I consider friends, Karen in Nevada and Karen, TC, who I have never met in person, only in cyberspace. It's a big, old goofy world.

Regis made Philadelphia style hoagies for dinner last night. I told him if he wanted them to be authentic, he would have to take charge. He did a great job, even dressing them with oil and vinegar and using thin-sliced baloney which would never have occurred to me.

I'm infamous for midwesternizing East Coast iconic food. When Regis first moved here, I made spaghetti...fat noodles with sauce so thick it simply laid on top and you could cut it with a fork. Like a hotdish. The first time I was given a spoon with pasta, I used it to cut the noodles up so how would I know? What can I say...I learned to make spaghetti from my dad, a native of North Dakota where they don't know spaghetti from shit. Regis is lucky I don't make curly noodle goulash. Funeral hotdish we call it here in Minnesota.

We're starting our weekend in a nice way. Joanne is stopping for a late afternoon glass of wine on the patio. We're old teaching buddies and even though we don't get to see each other very often, it's always sweet. I gave Joanne a pair of shiny purple leggings for her birthday one year. Maybe she'll wear them today.

A couple years ago, I left the house on St. Patrick's Day on my way to the parade in quite a get-up that included a long red curly wig, shamrock sunglasses, striped green and white tights, and 4-inch sparkly green heels. My devout Baptist neighbor only raised his eyebrows. It's a big, old goofy world.

Tomorrow night, we're going to a comedy show with Tom and Betty. I am looking forward to laughing until I ache. Laughing is like praying...it clears out the stress bubbles in your body.

Sunday we're celebrating Matriarch's Day (honoring all women) by having a Detroit Coney Island hotdog party on the patio. In Detroit, they put chili, cheese, and onions on their hotdogs. We also have a variety of other topping options for the squeamish. The little kids are coming (and some of the grown-ups) and we'll have a fine time. Wish my mom could be here with us.

We just saw a hummingbird, a female grosbeak, and a downy woodpecker in the garden. Also three bunnies doing amazing vertical leaps. Regis thinks they are preparing to mate and I think they're playing. Maybe they're doing both.

Happy Friday. Remember to put HAVE FUN on your list of things to do this weekend!

1 comment:

tccomments2013 said...: dear teresa,

please know that i don't mean to intrude on your comment space, especailly with bad news. but i've always felt such a connection with you, and loved that you called me your friend.

my darling hugh passed away suddenly last sunday, may 5th. i found him in our bed, no heartbeat, no respirations. 911 sent 2 highly skilled units to oour home, and on the 3rd try, they got a heartbeat. he was taken tothe cardiac ICU, put into hyppothermia, and then into a coma to give him a chance to recover. but it wasn't to be. thank goodness he had a living will. after going through the protocol of re-warming him, reducing the sedation, it was determined he would never be able to live - his poor brain had been without oxygen for too long, and he died within 90 seconds of being taken off the ventilator. the irony is that he died while still in remission from multiple myeloma. as you know, i am NED, so it seems especially cruel that just as we were going to travel the world and make so many other dreams come true, it all ended so quickly. we think perhaps he had a brain tumor that affected the control center of vital functions.

but here is what i want you to know. we lived every day as fully and joyfully as possible. even if it was good coffee and the NYT's, the beautiful view of our garden in springtime, and being with people we loved - we always were just so damned happy to be together. there was nothing left unsaid, nothing to feel deep regrets about, only gratitude for each other and for what gift was presented each day. i feel very glad that i always had your blog as a touchstone to reaffirm that it is true - joy and contentment in ordinary days is such a blessing.

you can remove this post - i will understand. just know that i will continue to read your blog for comfort and connection to you and your beautiful words.

love, XOXO, karen, TC; 11:27 PM

Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over; your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Permission Granted

by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan,

from Strong-Armed Angels.

Gratitude by Barbara Crooker

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war

grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,

or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of

for twenty or thirty miserable years—

And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man

with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times

have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines

through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves

as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree

that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:

cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,

so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,

Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world

sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s

sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,

the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,

finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,

know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing

on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Friday, May 10, 2013

hope you aren't tired of bird pictures and gratitude

1 comment:

observations from my first day of school