Fancy meeting you today, at Meadowbrook Farm, Deborah Fries / Poem: Fourth of July

Entrance to Meadowbrook.

Went back to Meadowbrook Farm, a garden nursery on Washington Lane, carrying a plastic bag full of troubles.

Sick leaves.

The first trouble was a fungus growing on my new blueberry bush. I bought it at Giant Supermarket as a gift for our guest speaker, Dr. John O'Reardon, who, ahem, didn't want it, opting instead for some white mums.

The blueberry bush was b'ful, at the time, and bearing blueberries.

John from Meadowbrook diagnosed the problem: transplantation difficulties. He advised watering it deeply but only once a week.

We regularly overwater it.

The next trouble is a groundcover, whose name I forget, which keeps on growing. Everywhere. The only way to get rid of it is Herbicide.

Ooh, don't you hate that suffix - "cide."

Let's see, who did I kill recently? Just some weeds which I hacked to death w/my digging knife.

I'm a lapsed believer in ahimsa.

A tall attractive woman of the suburbs was approaching w/her wagon full of fleurs. Just a gorgeous selection, verbena, gomphrena, and the like. At Meadowbrook, we put our fleurs in a green wagon.

Deborah Fries and two fragrant plants.

I looked twice at the tall woman and then I said:

HI DEBORAH!

RUTH! she said, remembering my name.

We hadn't seen each other in a few years, since she taught poetry at Cheltenham Township Adult Evening School.

OMG, the memories are flooding back now of all the people in the class.

- Roberta Ball, DO, psychiatric researcher, who I plucked from poetry to speak to my support group. She also helped me wean off Klonopin, in only 5 weeks. This was my final drug I took for bipolar disorder. Now I was free free free from medication.

For a while anyway.

One time when I called Roberta, she was down at the shore riding a bike.

- Myra, a take-charge nurse who enrolled in this year's Poetry Group w/Bill Kulik, but only came a couple times.

- Ed D'Ancona, a cute older gent, who wrote surprisingly good poetry

- The GREAT Etwan Crawford, who looked like the Black Buddah and was, in fact, a Buddhist.

- My friend Claudia Beechman

- My friend Linda Barrett.....and more

Remembering, comme ca, is a great brain exercise, as long as you don't "drown in your own dream."

How's Leah, I asked Deborah.

Oh, you remembered her name, she said.

She'll be coming home for 5 days of bonding.

I told her how I bonded w/my daughter Sarah. Her left kidney rides w/me everywhere I go.

Lemme tell you something.

Every day, you should have a moment of sheer gratitude. Stop your busywork and blogging. Just sit still, for a change, and think of what a wonderful life this has been.

And we're not through yet!

I told Deborah I had written a novel - she asked me the title - good title, she said - and gave me some great advice.

For a small fee, I will indeed seek leads on Writer's Relief.

As a reminder of the importance of my novel, I hung up the FedEx package my edited ms. came in. My editor was novelist Nicole Bokat.

When I took Deb's class she just had a book of poems published. I bot a copy of Various Modes of Departure at Barnes n Noble and then wrote a book review on Amazon.



A strange house resides on Washington Lane on the way to Meadowbrook. Who lives there? A Rockefeller? A Vanderbilt?

More big house.

Jimi Hendrix version of the Star-Spangled Banner is on the rad right now.

Here's how my mind works. I'm thinking up excuses to tell a very conservative man (who he?) who doesn't like Jimi taking liberties with our National Anthem.

If he were alive today, maybe Jimi would be a jazz-man. His version is quite brilliant. I spose they're playing it for the Fourth, which is why I've chosen - for my lucky viewers - my below poem, which was locked in the vault.

The last time I saw Deborah Fries before today was when we all said goodbye in the halls of Cheltenham High School.

We had a party on the last day, great food!

She chose one of my poems - Requiem for Cara - to publish in the Tookany Review, one of the few places where I've had my poems published. That's cuz they take everyone from the class.

And now, a series of photos from Meadowbrook Farm, taken last week when I visited to buy some ground cover. Bernard, photo below, helped me pick them out.







Bernard was very helpful. He knew ole Liddon Pennock, owner of the property and master of the mansion. Read this delightful article about Pennock in the Times. I told Bernard I took a tour of the house shortly before his death at age 90. By then, I said, he'd lost the finer workings of his mind but he still had that elegance about him as he greeted guests from his wheelchair. "Nice to see you again," he said. Hopefully, I said to Bernard, his caregivers didn't rip off the estate too badly. Bernard was the soul of discretion.

A series of postcards line my kitchen cupboards. All are different views of the 'backyard' of Pennock's estate, now owned by the PA Horticultural Society.

I wrote an article on Pennock for the Intelligencer. A very modest and gracious man.

FOURTH OF JULY


I have come to this peaceful cafe

to rest my legs and drink from

the bottomless pot of coffee

the waitress has set before me.

I am jittery and can barely pour

the cream without creating a splash.

This is to be expected on a day like today, a

red white and blue day that

proclaims the coming of the holiday.



The waitress glides by.

A swan on a ripply pond.

She has people to serve

in the other room,

the dark room,


the room with the bar.

I have seen them when I walk in,

solitary men in T-shirts

playing video games

in the middle of the day,

men with big bellies and baseball caps

watching wrestling from a television

that never sleeps,

I pass unnoticed,

a vine floating through

a space in the fence.


The waitress takes my order.

Does she want to talk?

I watch the smoothness

of her neck for a signal.

Her devotion is total,

like an abbess to her flock,

bound to her plates and soup bowls,

her pitchers of iced tea floating with lemon wheels.

Just the coffee, I tell her.

The cream goes in with a splash.


Against the wall, a legion of

tiny American flags

proclaim their clean, laundered loyalty

— to what, I am not sure —

bringing to mind the

music of Charles Ives

I have listened to in my bedroom

long ago. Where is he now, I wonder,

that daredevil cockatoo!

If only we had a stereo,

you could hear him play.

You’d know him anywhere -

the strut and clang of his marching band -

so unlike Sousa,

straying lavishly off course,

but full and sure,

stars and stripes, forever,

stepping into realms unheard of,

notes colliding with notes,

seas boundless and green,

Misted-over emeralds mined from zigzag depths

in colors yet unknown.

You’d like him, if you heard him,

But, careful, he comes in fast --

Gone in a wink.



The above poem was wrin about the Hulmeville Inn, photo above. I would eat there frequently when I worked as a therapist at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services. It was a nice relief from the hideously depressing set of offices where I worked.