New Year's Day Party - Who sang 'C'mon to my house. I'm gonna give you Figs and dates and grapes and cakes?'

I went to my sister Donna's Starbucks in Huntingdon Valley and bot two 'traveler's packs,' one regular and one decaf. Ellen took the regular home and I kept the decaf which I'm sipping right now.

But who took Carole D's scrumptious homemade cookies home? No one. Omigod, she also made tiny meatballs which were also delicious. Hmmm, maybe I can bring them to our next New Directions meeting on Tuesday nite and make everyone as plump as I am.

Right before the party began Tracey called! My heart always lights up when I see her name of the Caller ID. Unfortunately, she's got a bug - NO, not a stinkbug, that's me who has them flying around - but she's recuperating.

All the guests left by 7:45 pm. Why then am I ravenous with hunger? I ate everything in sight during the party and after.

Arleen bought her fig, date and goat cheese dip which was out of this world. After she left Carole D asked who made it?

I'd first eaten it at a Passover gathering at the Weinsteins' Elkins Park Condo. A felicitous blend of improbable ingredients that go great together.

The secret of a great party is having plenty of delicious food and wonderful guests.

Here's Arleen fixing her dip which she served with water crackers. I also introduced her to my Caraway Rye Triscuits which she really liked.

Here's her husband Stephen who took no chances and brot his own coffee.

Also for a successful party you've gotta organize yourself the day before. I scrubbed my two bathrooms, straightened the amazingly messy living room, stowed my diabetes supplies in the lower level of the house on the bed, which I made for the first time since summer. It's too cold to sleep down there.

Some of my guests were unaware that I finally got a story published in a prestigious online journal. Click here.

Trace is the blond bombshell on the right. Her BF Mark thinks so too. He bought her a diamond engagement ring. Ellen is on the left.

That was fast, Helen and I burbled.

Yin and Patrick Otis Cox. Yin used to run Le Coffee Salon in Hatboro, where I used to hold my poetry group plus we'd have our Coffeeshop Gigs there.

She brought her special steamed dumplings, filled with pork and maybe hamburger meat. After the party I wolfed them down.

Otis, a civil engineer, used to work for an environmental company before going out on his own. Here's his new company, Geo-Life Inc. Dunno if the link works.

Otis, a painter, used to sell paintings at Le Coffee Salon. We had a show n tell at my party and he brot a lot of his acrylics. He used to do oils but they took long to dry, so he switched to acrylics.

If you donate to his nonprofit, he'll let you have a painting. Here are the three I chose.

Oops! These are Ron Abrams photographs. Look at the face on the Hispanic guy with the hat.

Here's one of three of Otis's paintings I bot.

Ron walked past a beauty salon and wanted to go in and take pix. He asked the lady in charge and look at this marvelous cinema verite of Bea-Arthur lookalike (thanks Helen for pointing out the resemblance. Ron lives in Center City and so does my friend Evelyn who I haven't seen in twenty years!

Evelyn, also an artist, and I used to work at Art Matters monthly newspaper. I drove up to see her on Rattlesnake Road in Limerick, PA - with the hulking nuclear reactors. I did shiver when I drove by.

I wanted to feature one of Evelyn's magnificent paintings on the back cover of the Compass but it wouldn't fill the space. Now you can view her handiwork right here. A physician bought one of her paintings for his office, paying something like $900. Helen and applauded that.






Another view of the Doughertys. Great family, Bart really enjoyed himself and talked to just everybody at the party. I took him upstairs to show him my little clay sculptures. I did them after I was newly diagnosed w/BP and it helped heal me.

When an artist creates artwork she remains totally focused. You don't think about the past or the future, only the feel of the wet clay on your hands and the design that's being fashioned before your eyes.

Mistakes? Just put some water on the clay and refashion.


I had a dream about Obama last nite. My first. We were on an airplane except it really wasn't. He had huge polished shoes and was sitting right next to me. Always curious, I asked him if he believed in an Afterlife.

Nope, he said confidently. This is all there is. He may have trouble governing, but at least he was honest about his religious views.

Speaking of which I'm reading the excellent autobio of Christopher Hitchens, who died of esophogeal cancer in December. He was well-loved by his classy mother Yvonne who raised him on the island of Malta. She suffered from anhedonia (lack of pleasure from the root word 'hedonist' and was often bored.)

She left her husband, a British colonel, and ran off with a man who Hitchens describes as a raving wacko. They were in separate apartment suites somehwhere and he killed Yvonne first and then took his own life.

As a mom, he said, she was wonderful and gave him lots of confidence so he could become one of the greatest writer in the English language as he has been described.

Here's neighbor Patrick who we love. I've wrin a couple of poems about him including The Man in the Distance, Wesley, about his late dog, and The Blue Glass about the first time I met him and his wife.

Pat used to be a part-time wedding photographer, on duty for five long hours photographing weddings. To the bride he would say - Push your breasts out.

In the hubub of the party, I missed taking a pic of my lovely friend Tree, short for Teresa. She and husband Gerry have their own engineering company. What a responsbililty!

Part of our discussions concerned being a responsible adult. Couples opined that their partner has yet to grow up.

When Yin, the dumpling lady, closed the coffee shop she was able to visit her parents in China for the first time in three years. They did very well financially. Her dad retired as manager at an engine factory in Dalian, on the west coast of China near Japan.

Yin, who is as beautiful as she is smart, attends Temple University and is getting a double major in International Business and Internet Software.

She wore black spike heels.

My mom, 89-yo, wore ortho shoes from Trevose Family Shoes where I drove her last year.

She's recovering nicely from falling flat on her face in the kitchen. She removed the throw rug that she thought she tripped on. Whew! That was close. When she and Ellen left, I thanked Ellen for taken good c/o mom, then kissed mom and said I love you.

Alan and Elaine Klawans.

The last guests I invited to the party were Alan and Elaine Klawans - read my article about them here - who live a few blocks away on Division Ave. They are both artists living at home. I told Elaine whenever I hear Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 I think about her.

Here's the entire text, wrin by James Agee, also author of Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.

Low in the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.

The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.…They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

This is very profound. Who are you, Dear Reader! Speak if you know.

Here's one of Alan's digital prints. Elaine does the plastic arts but also makes jewelry, such as the blue earrings I wore at the party. Here's the necklace on the right:

Look at the striking jewelry Elaine is wearing. Claudia was fascinated by it.

We toasted in the New Year with some champagne I bought in one of our package stores. I asked for help since I know nothing about champagne, or basically about anything.

In fact I'm wearing yet another sweater fron the Sweater Mill, I thot the tag said $39 but it was really $69.

Bought it anyway.

Dyou believe I forgot to take a picture of Helen? She runs out daytime meeting at the Giant. She and husband Larry organize our Fall Bonfires.

Ruth, Evelyn, and Ellen.

Here's Larry looking at the - wipe your hands, Larry, it's very dusty - Replogle I bot a few years ago at Staples. When my kids were growing up, we always had one in the house.

Larry served in the Peace Corps after graduating from Bucknell and wanted to see if the West African country was on there.

It was. He was a gym teacher. They're trying to build up athletes in Africa - Kenya, Nigeria - as a way out of poverty.