Placebo effect?
A religious guy, he read several poems from his notebook that were inspired by the Psalms. You can't get any better than the Psalms. Rem Murphy said that when Steve comes back next week, he'd like to hear him read personal poems, rather than the Psalms of David.
Floyd had been having trouble with one of his foots. Floyd, I said, you MUST walk on it. Stop sitting around. His GF Lauren had tipped me off at the Ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday. Walk to restore circulation!
He brot the latest installment of his memoir "Super" - short for superintendent - of when he worked at a water treatment plant in D.C. He loved "making clean water" for a living but he hated the task of bringing in people for evaluations.
The conversations were as heated as they could get w/o coming to blows.
Let's have a Writers' Retreat down there, we said. I was not kidding.
Next week we'll meet at Beatriz's condo to make it easier for her to attend. We've met there a couple of times, including for this all-day writing seminar we had.
Stopped at my library after the group and Karen up at the counter told me Upper Moreland will be hosting a November is Novel-Writing Month.
You write a certain no. of words every single day and come out with your own Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Caine Mutiny, or Tender is the Night.
I was thinking of writing it from the point of view of my late bro, David, who had autism, or maybe even from 5-yo Grace Catherine's point of view.
My two fabulous grandchildren... Max, 2, and Grace, 5.
Allan Heller sent regards from our mutual friend Winnie Bannigan, who is going thru difficult chemo.
Hey, I'll send her one of my newly printed Yes I Can postcards.
So far I've sent out two: one to a woman who's waiting for her Zoloft to kick in. The other to a FB friend who is on Kidney Dialysis.
Yes I Can is a positive affirmation that you can do the difficult task.
The first, A PLETHORA OF PAGES concerned the author's despair at having to fill the blank page.
The second was about various characters - a circus clown knocking on his door, a vampire tapping on his window pane and a pair of Zombies ambling thru his yard.
Aha! He remembers its Halloween.
None of us like those new shows about Zombies or the Dysphoric Future. It's a generation thing, I believe. My daughter Sarah loves Buffy the Vampire.
Holy Toledo!
Toledo by El Greco.BUFFY is available on Netflix.
Shall I ruin my sleep and possibly my life by watching it?
Rem, which does not stand for Rapid Eye Movement, presented a lovely poem about his late wife, Valerie, dead of a heart attack in February at age 54.No history of heart problems. His poem was wrin in couplets, very well thought out, and he told us why he couldn't change a thing.
Here's a pic of the two of them he carries in his wallet.
- Like a spear of cattail, bent yet never broken
- Solid as titanium steel, yet delicate as a petal
And a great line about how - what was the word? - domineering? - she was at times.
Rem was wearing a Doobie Bros shirt. I remember he went to Camden, last week, I believe to hear them and the Steve Miller Band play.
She and David worked round the clock cleaning the dusty basement of the 60-year-old house where her grandmother lived.
Onyx, her favorite stone, is the name of her beloved cat, who is 80 years old. At this advanced age, Onyx has lost some weight and lost some hair esp. around his ears.
The kind vet, Dr Joo, said there's no need to bring him back for shots or even checkups, as Onyx will slowly fade away, like the daytime melting into evening.
That is sad. Marf read the poem for Donna.
I finished my first three columns of my new column for the Intell called Aging Gracefully. Should I worry about them not liking them?
Okay, I'll worry now for as long as it takes to type.
After finishing off the columns I began to work on His Invisible Friend. Brother Bernardo in his long black robes - yes, when my daughter and I visited Rome about 5 yrs ago - I took a foto of such a man, which is somewhere on my billion-page blog.
The brother is an intimate friend of Pope Francis.
The group liked it. I haven't yet read the comments, but Rem did me proud by saying he felt like he was right there in that Guesthouse behind the Vatican where the pontiff lives.
What a beard! I said to him. He posed gladly. He's helped me numerous times.
My poem of the day I will write and revise right here right now.
But, first, I must tell you I read something in the NY Times about recording a poem, a short story, a thought, on a NYC phone no.
I chose the shortest poem I could find - Fronts Sheered Off - and read it flawlessly out loud. If the dude likes it, he will animate it. Click to do it yourself.
NIGHT
WALK
The
night is dark
when
I set forth
for
my evening walk
my
hips ache from
sitting
or lying on
the
couch watching
Netflix.
All thought
vanishes
when I step
out
into the new world
of
sleeping birds and stilled
waters
in the birdbath,
where
an autumn leaf
floats
in silence, next to
a gray feather.
Down
the street I go
Carol
is still awake,
the ceiling fan twirls,
as she sits in her lounger
eighty-one with her cancer
on hold. Her Down syndrome
son, she told me the other day,
will live with his oldest brother
when she is no more.
I
tread on the new sidewalk
the
Columbians have put in
its smoothness like an ice rink
interrupted
only by pine cones
and
yellow tulip poplar leaves.
Why
is it I hear voices from the
Longmire
television series? The female
deputy,
Vic’s... and Longmire himself,
see his badge glimmer in the sun? A
fiercely angry man who screams at me
on my red couch as he catches his man.
My walk clears up the scattershot in
my brain, how easy it is with every
step I take. The crescent moon, the
one that looks like a sailing ship on
its side, beams its snowy-white light,
bright as a bridal gown, onto me.
Was that its intention when it detached
itself from the earth eons ago? My intention
is to sleep in my own sweet bed tonight
and days in the hereafter until I
exist no more.
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