Pondside Thoughts...

The Brain Says 10 but the hand says 9

My brain and my right hand are having bit of a tiff. I'm hoping my brain wins because right now my hand is OUT OF CONTROL.

On January 4th I returned to work after the lovely long New Year weekend. I was prepared. At about 10AM I attempted to sign a purchase order. It was a test. I knew it was coming. I signed my name. I printed my name. And then I said to myself, out loud (in my head), "JANUARY 4TH TWO THOUSAND TEN!". But there on the form, barely a moment later, appeared "1-4-09". How very odd. And this didn't happen only once. I am embarrassed to say that still, on this January 7th, I must stop what I am doing and sharply discipline my right hand by staring directly at it for a moment before I write. Otherwise the little bugger just writes whatever it darn well pleases, which invariably contains the number 9.

I'm wondering about the stages of brain/hand re-coordination. I propose the following:

1. Chaos - The brain thinks of a date in the current year; the hand freely writes the prior year. Occasionally the brain notices.

2. Anger - The brain sees the error every time and attempts to control the hand. It fails to do so regularly. Erasers are worn down, the backspace key cracks, papers are torn up and fill recycle bins. The hand feels no remorse.

3. Flattery- The brain praises the hand extravagantly each time it writes the correct year. The hand is pleased and feels good about itself.

4. Cooperation - The brain and the hand return to speaking terms and work together to get something, please, anything done.

I figure I'm in stage 2, about to move into stage 3. Nice hand. Good hand. Oh my lovely hand. Ya, that's the ticket. Now write '10', damn you! (oops, backsliding)

This is Alfred Lord a-Leaping Tennyson, one of the Ten Lords a-Lepaing on my New Year's Eve costume. Isn't Alfie a good leaper?
 

Zimmans. Mecca. Same diff.

Zimmans is a fabric store in Lynn, MA. But to say Zimmans is a fabric store is to say that the sun is warm. Or my grandpuppy Puma is cute. Absurdly vast understatements all.  Zimmans is a Metropolitan Museum and Merchant of Cloth through which one wanders, dazed and confused by the variety, beauty, number, color, complexity, shimmer, humor, pathos, hideousness, and aching loveliness of its inventory. Bolt after bolt of treasures ranging in price from three to well over one hundred dollars per yard.

I rarely go to Zimmans on a mission. I don't hunt at Zimmans. I go to bathe my eyes in its wonders until suddenly something grabs my attention and I realize that I, well, I NEED it. Yes, really need it for a project I hadn't realized existed until just that moment. A project that is critically important, critically essential to some basic component of my life. Thank heavens, I think, I am here in Zimmans and can purchase this lovely cloth for this life or death project. Thank the fabric gods.

 

Billy Collins to the rescue. Again.

The neighbor's dogs were out at about 5:45 this morning, greeting the first hints of daylight with hearty barks of joy. Joy for them; disorientation, disbelief and dismay for me as I had fallen asleep only about four hours earlier.  Once I am awake I'm generally not able to fall back to sleep. Too many thoughts of what needs to get done before heading out for the fabric store (yippee!) in the late morning. So as I lay in bed fighting off an unwelcome bout of crankiness I thought of another Billy Collins poem. That Billy Collins, he's got my number.

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

 - Billy Colllins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

 - Billy Colllins

Libraries without books, oh my

This morning I read an aritcle on boston.com about the headmaster of the Cushing Academy, a New Englad prep school, who has decided to rid the school of the 20,000 or so books in the school library and replace them with about a half million dollars worth of electronic workstations and devices and, oh, yes, a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

Headmaster James Tracy has decided that books are an outdated technology, like scrolls were before books. There has been a lot of dark science fiction written about a future in which books are banned, and this guy is taking it upon himself to eliminate those pesky, dusty old volumes the school has taken 144 years to amass.

So far as I can tell, this man should not be permitted to be within 100 yards of children, should be physically removed from the Cushing campus, and should be forced to deal with his soulless future vision in solitary confinement.

Clearly, he has never read Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia. And not much of anything else, I would guess.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

More White Stuff on the Way...

Aargh, this weekend holds the promise of more white crap falling from above. When did snow change from magical gift of the sky to dreaded toxic backache maker from the evil laughing gods? 

 

During the wet snow the other day I had to leave the house early, so I did not clear the murky whitish slop from the walk, steps, or front door porch. So now it is frozen completely solid, the consistency of concrete chemically bonded with high fire porcelain. It resists all attempts at chipping or salting away. I'm considering going after it this evening with nail scizzors. On hands and knees. I love winter in New England.

 

On the other hand, it is now January, which means we have passed the magical date of December 22, the shortest day of the year.  It's hard to see it or feel it, but the days are getting longer and help is on its way. Soon we'll be traveling to and leaving work in daylight and we won't feel so much like troglodytes.

 

 

Giving Thanks

I woke up this morning filled with gratitude for all that is right with the world. This is a rare condition for me. More typically I wake up with a to-do list, a don't-wanna-do list, and a wish-I-had-done list.

But not today. Today I am basking in what my life has been and become, the family and friends that bless it, and the comfort and wealth (and we ain't talkin' money here) that surround me. Today I love my most comfortable bed in the world, my best hot shower a human being ever had, and my delicious anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner with so many of the people I love.

I know, this is so schmaltzy and I am generally so not. I don't know what has come over me and I promise to get well soon, but here I am, in this haze of joy grown out of gratitude, just plain (dare I say it) happy.

So, very quickly, before reality realizes I've stepped out, before the economy and the war and the sadness and worry remember me, I wish you a fabulously Happy Thanksgiving, and I wish you a day like my today.

Happy Birthday Nurse N - Ode to Tom Brady's Knee

Nurse N had a BIG birthday earlier this month and her friends gathered to give her the birthday bash she would most appreciate - a Patriots Party!  The party was a surprise. She was presented with a Tom Brady Patriots jersey, an appropriately garish birthday tiara, and our intention was to join her in worship of his Bradyness later in the day.  Instead, of course, we gathered on the day of Matt Cassel's debut.  Nurse N is nuts about Brady. Like crazy.  She was crushed by his recent injury and in this video she laments this tragedy and wonders why, given her close bond with TB, she didn't sense it in her gut at the moment of impact even though she was 3,000 miles away, on vacation in Washington State. Enjoy.

A bad case of TES (temporary existential syndrome)

Today my heart is heavy and my head is brimming with thoughts of mortality, life turning on a dime, the illusion of security, the mean trick of good health, candles in the wind, like that. Our dear friend and colleague, the Illuminated V, passed away this Thursday evening after a brief and tragic illness.

V was an illuminated man. He was wise and learned and he seemed lit from within, just a glowing person with a deeply calm energy and sweetness. Everyone enjoyed him. Really liked him, and not in a Sally Field kind of way. We all profoundly respected and enjoyed him. 

V simply preferred to be happy, while never losing his earnest commitment to the task at hand or his willingness to work as hard or harder than anyone on the team when he could easily have taken the manager's more detached role. Everyone around him felt a bit calmer and happier as a result. This was a powerful man.

Although V was brilliant - blessed with a clear and remarkable mind - and often the smartest person in the room, he never, ever behaved as if he knew that. Quite the contrary. Into every conversation V brought a completely open mind and an endearing eagerness to hear the thoughts of others.

He must have been a wonderful husband and father, although I did not know him socially. His eyes would light up when he spoke of the son he adored and his precious daughter. His youth and good health were no defense against the series of events that took his life.  We are all diminished by his loss.

Time Traveling

How I love the internet and blogging and classmates.com and LinkedIn and all the other magical fonts of connectedness.  Just the other day the following comment appeared in my post called "What's Your Name Again?":

"Are you the Gwen Blank that lived in Mineola NY and went to UConn? If so, you and I spent 2 wonderful summers together at Camp Kendale that I will remember for the rest of my life. You can reach me at .......... I'd love to hear from you!"

Oh joy! Leaping out of my past came the Adorable P, my high school honey, the first love of my life, my senior prom date, who I haven't seen or heard from since 1966.  My silly old heart skipped a beat or two and I called the number he left.  We talked for hours about our time together all those 42 years ago.  His wonderful Borgward Isabella, Camp Kendale, parents, brothers, dogs, and what a fool I was to break his heart, yes I was.  We talked about all that has transpired since, our marriages, children, careers, glory, and losses. We chatted away with teenage abandon, tossing out the stories of our lives as if reciting plots from TV soap operas. 

It was lovely to hear my life told by someone who adored me long ago. And it felt good and right to confess the bad boy stage that drew me away. I'm not one for playing what-if and if-only, and I'm pretty sure it would have ended badly in any case as I was a restless young woman twirling my way into my private Age of Aquarius, but oh, it was sweet to remember and regret.

Trauma Queen

Kal is an ambulance technician in Edinburgh who reports that he grew up on a tiny rock in the middle of the sea and he is a terrifically good writer and an even better photographer.

It's also Kal's birthday. So...                     

                Happy Birthday Kal!

Here's what Kal wants for his birthday. He wants everyone who reads his blog to say to a friend, “Dude, check this blog out, seriously.”  So that is what I am saying. Dude, check this blog out, seriously.

So do it. And then pass it on.