clouds

I have been absorbed into the Middle of the World, working on restoring what is now my new home. And moving there, of course. Moving residences shakes up everything, exhausts ya and allows one to see all the stuff accumulated over the years.


I have posted very little. Life has posted much. 
Clouds surround and change and twist and illuminate and cover and move on
as I have.


Clouds overhead. No Heaven. Clouds.

Holiday Hampton Place

Here it comes. It’s coming this way. Every year it comes. Closer and closer now. I sense with dread the impending cling and clang and car door, arguments over guest lists, fear of food failure, horror stories dripping in heavy salt and carbohydrates.

The Holiday Season..............is coming.

Way back in the town of my birth, in the MIddle of the World, our family went every Thanksgiving to my grandparents house on Hampton Place. Always impeccably neat and tidy, the house was a curiosity to me because of its faintly old-fashioned decoration and odd collectibles placed about. I liked the clean, white-painted woodwork and the mysterious, knotty-pine lined bedroom upstairs with built-in and oversized drawers.

Grandma Rose oversaw most of the cooking and seemed to stay in the kitchen long after the rest of us were well into our meal. Voices would rise up to cajole her into joining us, which she would eventually do. Years later when Grandma was unable to host this feast our mom took over and maintained this tradition of staying in the kitchen long after the meal began. 

Were prayers or thanks or blessings every given, ideas to the effect of being grateful proffered at the dinner table? Not that I can remember, but a poor memory is one of my strongest features.

I do recall ever so vividly that every single year at meal’s end my Grandpa Saul would grab his old box camera and tell us to face him for a family portrait. He had one of the old-style cameras where one looks down into the viewfinder situated on the camera’s top. His camera had an attached flash. And each year we would wait patiently while Grandpa set up his shot. We waited and waited and then waited some more. Finally, he would push the button on the camera and as surely as the sun would rise the next day, the flash bulb would fail to fire.

Every year we would laugh. Grandpa would try again. Same result. More laughter. 

That’s my favorite holiday memory.

Guest Writer: Poet Edward Grayson

constant dovetail

half plan constant dovetail,

each into another,

baby the furniture is old, the bones

brittle some break

sometime worry for mother

she even older even more frail

than the bridge

imagined spanning a dream

high up on an impossible

ridge where a friend

pulls a slab of beef

out of dark soup, where

rooms interlock and shift dimension

time is cracked, words wander,

meaning may be disguised, 

as in the world of our time,

baby we hold on, we

smile and joke to anchor

our bloody selves to the sky.

whole mind wakes

to another virgin morning,

before coffee is the stretch

from fading dreams towards

sunlight and weather and air

that is felt

completely

alone.

Seconds Pass

So busy that art gets left behind...no time or energy to paint. So busy that writing simple things - like this - gets left out of the day.

So: a simple walk in a state park surrounding a river on a perfect Fall November day when the sky is achingly clear and the temperature hovers in the upper 60’s and an easy breeze carries healing scents all around ya.

Walking with my gal and my head clears. Stepping along over a stagecoach path that once stretched from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. Many old ghosts simmering nearby.

I climb up a slight hill to hide behind an ancient fallen rock formation whose top is a fertile garden for all sorts of growing things. I’m there to pee, as other hikers don’t really need to be my audience. I look down upon a world of leaves, grasses, sticks and other assorted life forms. In my thoughts I hear the scientist speaking on NPR about theories suggesting that our universe is like a bubble in an infinite stretch of other bubbles. The endless relativity of large and small. These lovely leaves look up at me. Seconds pass. Then I walk away.

Ninth Grade School

My daughter is here with me a bit longer than usual this week, as her mom has left for Portland, Oregon, to visit her sister.

So, I have more time to take in the life of my teenager, a Junior in High School. The school experience so thoroughly takes over her life that everything else becomes peripheral activity. She struggles with Economics. I never took that subject and thank the gods for that.

My Junior year is a blur but my ninth-grade year was an anomaly because the Middletown School system had created an experiment that year - a “Ninth-Grade School” - and I was one of the guinea pigs. Every ninth grader from the surrounding district  went to this one school. They chose the old high-school building, in all its classical splendor, to be the site of this grand adventure.

From the start it became obvious to many of us that those in charge did not have a handle on things, that this new endeavor was fraught with problems, namely major holes in the security and disciplinary systems. As fifteen-year olds are want to do, we naturally exploited this at every opportunity. We snuck out, hid out, wandered about, fibbed, slid around and generally became unruly.

Our gym teacher was a genial, skinny fellow who happened to have a stutter and who had been my gym teach at elementary school. He was nearly ineffectual as a disciplinarian and so paid the price for his meekness.

During one lecture on “Health” issues, certain students silently and intermittently tossed pennies to the front of the room. Reaching a climax of irritation and anger, he raised his voice (such as it was), stutteringly telling us to cease or else and at the exact nano-second after he stopped...a penny landed with a clink at his feet.

Other guys found out during the year that I had especially good handwriting and could write in many styles. Of course I gave in to their requests for parental notes excusing them for running amok somewhere other than school. During the last week of classes, I had to go into the gym teacher's office for something. I stood next to his desk as he opened a large drawer and there, at the bottom, was a pile of parent notes......most of them mine.