Susan’s Stuff Decorates Attire, Home & Other Furnishings

Ready for opera in a
Medici Gardens tie

By Moristotle

I wanted to give my son, cellist Geoffrey Dean, a special tie to wear for performing, so I asked abstract artist Susan C. Price about ties in her More Art in Your Life (And Not Just on Your Walls) web store.

    Voilà, two ties of the “Medici Gardens” design shown here arrived in my mailbox, one for my son and one for me!
    I urge you to visit Susan’s web store and see what’s available. Here are some examples of what you’ll see:

All Over the Place: For My Sister, Lori

By Michael H. Brownstein

—Today is her memorial service.
She will be missed.


She was beautiful
even when she was not—
brilliant
even when she pretended not to be—
a huge window of passion
even as passion was downsized—
and, yes, she was beautiful
even when she was not.

At Random: Tonga and the Gaia Hypothesis

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Listening to a BBC radio newscast about Tonga this morning, it occurred to me that maybe there is something to the Gaia Hypothesis after all, and its forces might be in play.
    While the rest of the world has been plagued by the pandemic for more than two years, Tonga has so far had only one Covid case. Isolation obviously has its advantages. Tonga’s luck ran out on another front, however. A massive volcanic eruption [“2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami”], described as a blast larger than an atomic bomb, spawned a tsunami that created great destruction. The extent of the damage is not yet fully known because of a damaged undersea cable, but relief efforts were launched.

Goines On: Had he died but not realized it?

Click image for more vignettes

As Goines began the day’s walk, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already died and was just walking around in a daze imagining he was still alive. If that were so, then – in some sense anyway – there was life after death. If you could call the way he was feeling life.
    Why do you feel this way? He asked himself – aloud, for he was dictating his thoughts into his iPhone. The day before had been one chore after another from getting out of bed at 6 a.m. until 4 p.m.: he did the usual daily household chores before they drove to Chapel Hill and Durham to do errands, and then carry in and put away their purchases at the Wild Bird Center (a 50-lb bag of sunflower chips, which the spunky young woman tending the place had easily carried to the car for him, but which he struggled to even get out of the car at home) and at Costco. And then help Mrs. Goines prepare lunch, and then eat lunch and clean up the kitchen again before doing a few more chores he couldn’t even remember now. But he did remember feeling at times as though he might fall down – not fall down and break something, but fall down dead, no delay.

At Random: How Government Works

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

A snowstorm may cover all, but it doesn’t hide the truth.
    I grew up on a ¼-mile dead end street with a cul-de-sac at the end that was approximately 40 yards in diameter. The street was bordered by 16 featureless brick houses built in 1958, all set to the front of ¼-acre featureless lawns. Our house, the 17th house on the street, was built in the 1850s – or maybe built in the 1700s and added to in the 1850s, depending on which rudimentary notes you choose to believe from that era. It sat off the street, on a partially wooded two-acre remnant of what was once a farm of several hundred acres.

The PocketRock Heart Project: What Do You Know, Flanagan? (Part 4)

By Maik Strosahl

I was four when we moved into the house my parents still live in, and very shy. As I explored the new backyard, never straying far from the sidewalk, I noticed a tall man walking on the other side of the grape vine, from the neighbor’s garage up to that green house.
    “What do you know, Flanagan^*?” he asked as he noticed me watching him. That was enough to get me running back inside.

Goines On: A red marketing plan

Click image for more vignettes^*

Goines’ friend Red asked him to read the novel he had just finished drafting. Red was concerned about the fact that both his wife and his and Goines’ mutual friend Pavel had read the draft and both of them thought Red should exclude the sex scenes – too risqué. But Red himself felt that the sex scenes were necessary to the story, so he wanted Goines’ opinion. Goines said sure, he’d read it, why not? Email it to him.
    But he was surprised that Pavel recommended removing the scenes, because Pavel liked to joke and talk about the great sex he had had, and was still having – he was some years younger than Red and Goines.

From the Alwinac: 19th-century Cellists in the US: Theodore Ahrend

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]


Born in Germany in 1829 or 1830, cellist Theodore Ahrend studied in Brussels, where he may have worked with Francois Servais. In 1849 he performed solos at the Berlin Royal Opera and on the Leipzig Euterpe concerts. His first US appearance was in New York on Dec. 27, 1951, on a benefit concert for the American Musical Fund Society: “…Herr Ahrend, upon the Violoncello, was vehemently applauded, notwithstanding his decided inferiority to the lamented Knoop.” Over the next two years he performed as a soloist with Wood’s Minstrels in New York, on vocalist Caroline Richings’ concerts in Washington, D.C., and with the Concordia Concert Troupe for an extended summer 1853 engagement in Charleston, SC.
    It was in Charleston that Ahrend debuted as cello soloist with Kunkel’s Nightingale Opera Troupe, on October 24, 1853. Led by the banjo-playing bass George Kunkel and managed by J. T. Ford (at whose Washington D. C. theatre Lincoln was assassinated), the Baltimore-based Kunkel troupe was a minstrel company, touted as “the most versatile corps of Ethiopian Delineators now before the public[,]…introducing in their entertainments the Songs of the Boudoir and Plantation, embodying many new and pleasing features in their portraitures of Ethiopian life.” One of the Nightingales’ specialties was a pro-South version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin presenting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title character (portrayed in blackface by Kunkel) as contented with plantation life.

Ad in Washington D. C. Union
of Sunday, June 4, 1854, p. 3

Ahrend toured extensively with the Kunkels through at least 1856, and appears to have continued to perform….
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

All Over the Place:How the First Ink Came to Be

By Michael H. Brownstein

Pillars of Creation—the nebula of dust and gas towers—

tattoos of star and cloud—claw ripped across an atmosphere—

ink blue and brown, red and gold, skin deep and deeper—

and this is where we get the rock to make our fancy colors,

the Tattoo Artist of the Palisades tells the tourists

in the innermost sanctum of the Tattoo Garden of Cappella.

Acting Citizen: Will the show go on?

By James Knudsen

The other day, a student, sighing, said, “Two years. This pandemic’s been goin’ for two years.” Many people still cling to the idea – some actually promote or create ideas, meme, tropes, fairy-tales, op-eds, “news” – that the pandemic isn’t real. I’ve never suffered from any delusion, illusion, malocclusion (actually I might have that one): I have known it was real ever since March of 2020, when Andra and I stocked up on liquor hours before California went on lockdown. And recently I observed irrefutable proof that COVID-19 is real. Like so many things, this came to me via the theatre.

From “The Scratching Post”: Semper paratus

By Ken Marks

[Originally posted on The Scratching Post yesterday, January 20, 2022. Extracted here by permission of the author.]



I’ll turn 79 this month. A decade of septuagenarian existence is creaking to a close. Every actuary worth their salt knows the tracks run out not far ahead. This is not like being 69 and peering into one’s 70s. Not in the least. This is peering into the abyss.

Goines On: His last thought

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With the morning’s snow came a sense of foreboding. Was it a premonition? Goines couldn’t reliably say he had ever had a premonition – that he could remember anyway – a sense of disaster that came to pass. What did a premonition feel like? And did he even want to know that his sense of foreboding was a premonition? Wasn’t it better just to be afraid? Surely the feeling would pass; the disaster might not.
    Taking out the bird feeders, Goines almost slid and fell on the Goineses’ snow-covered northwest patio. Each hand held a feeder, so he gingerly shuffled his feet to the lawn before walking more safely to the stanchions.

The PocketRock Heart Project: The Runaway (Part 3)

By Maik Strosahl

I know that losing my faith didn’t really happen overnight. Truth is, although I really wanted to believe, I always felt empty inside.
    I did everything I could. A large part of my church was sharing the “Good News” of God’s approaching kingdom and its solutions for mankind’s woes. I took on the work full-time out of high school, even serving the congregation as a Ministerial Servant. I enjoyed helping others, writing and delivering biblical discourses, even handling other responsibilities at the meetings. But the more I did, the less honest I felt.

Want to Know Who Set the Tablefor the Big Lie?

Go Look in a Mirror

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Even though I’m 67 years old, fairly world-wise and extremely well-traveled, it wasn’t until five years ago – when my son was almost two years old – that I fully realized that a shocking number of people are innately and almost maniacally dishonest. I had always noted that many people – including “good” people, and definitely not just “bad” people – routinely used exaggeration, partials truths and “white” lies in their normal conversation with me, but it wasn’t until I saw them blatantly lying to my toddler-age son that the point hit home.

Three Keys and the Mob

6 Years and a Day

By Ed Rogers

[Editor’s Note: In the 6 years and a day since we published this memoir of Ed Rogers, I still haven’t met anyone else who has known as colorful characters as he has.]

I have known some colorful characters in my life. I have written two novels based on some of them: Boystown: The Cocaine Highway and Boystown: The Return.
    The story below is all true, however. I have changed the names for reasons that should be apparent to everyone.

All Over the Place:Carneades of the Word

By Michael H. Brownstein

And how many men I have seen in my time made stupid by rash avidity for learning! Carneades became so mad about it that he had no time left to take care of his hair and nails.
          —Michel de Montaigne, “Of the
          Education of Children,” 1588


Carneades of the shadow.
Carneades of the whisper.

Carneades who could not blink his eyes following letters across a page.

It is good to know prosperity.
It is good to have loyal servants.

A Couple of Maroons: Grand Prismatic Spring

“Grand Prismatic Spring”
Click image to enlarge

Where Are All
the Rainbows?

Photo by Craig McCollum
Text by Maik Strosahl

There is a place in Wyoming where the rainbows brew into the clouds as they cross the mountains. They call it the Grand Prismatic Spring.
    In 1807-08, after the Lewis and Clark Expeditions, one of the members of the group named John Colter spent a lot of time exploring this region. When he returned to civilization, his reports of geysers, bubbling mud pots, and steaming pools of water were ridiculed, and the area was jokingly called Colter’s Hell. In 1839, fur trappers are also recorded as coming upon a “boiling lake” in this region.
    Grand Prismatic is the largest spring in the US and third largest in the world. The colors in the spring mirror those of rainbows, but change with the seasons and the level of microbes that thrive in the hot waters.
    It was the clouds that grabbed my attention here, backed up over the mountains. Perhaps they have problems they deal with in these Covid times?

Where Are All the Rainbows?

The Leprechauns are all waiting,
checking their Facebook statuses,
upgrade walls on Clash of Clans
while supply chain woes
back up their pots of gold
in the distant skies of China.

Do not blame the clouds
waiting in mountain harbors,
storms just waiting to burst
o’or an em’rald green,
nor the cauldron of molten prisms
boiling clear to Excelsior,
bubbling full production,
overfilling underground shelves.

Copyright © 2022 by Craig McCollum & Maik Strosahl
Originally a flat lander, Craig A. McCollum received his degree in photography and headed west. He lives in Montana with his wife and two sons, exploring the outdoors while hiking, biking, and chasing moose – the latter only with a camera, of course.
Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.

When we’re 80, let’s celebrate!

Or celebrate

however old we are....

By Tony Lavely

[Editor’s Note: Tony Lavely is the secretary of the Yale Class of 1964, and I was among those of his classmates blessed to receive an email from him last evening. With his permission, I am pleased to share his thoughts with our readers of all ages.]

Those born in 1942 will be celebrating their 80th birthdays this year. Some of us turned 80 earlier and others may not hit this milestone until later, but it’s a cohort celebration, nevertheless. Despite our aches and pains, it’s a time to reflect and be grateful for the bounty of our lives.

From the Alwinac: The UNC Greensboro Cello Collections, in Four Haikus

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Before the winter break I spent a few days among the Cello Collections at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Although I have visited the collections a number of times over the years, this last visit was especially memorable because I was helping oversee the cataloging of my own collection there.
    When I donated the bulk of the sheet music, books, and recordings that make up the collection, I had thought of it as a Bulgarian cello music collection and proposed naming it along those lines. But Stacey Krim, UNCG professor and curator of manuscripts, insisted that the collection should be under my name. I remember feeling very sheepish about the idea of my name appearing alongside such cello greats as Janos Starker, whom I could scarcely muster the courage to look in the eye as an IU graduate student thirty years ago. During my initial conversations with Prof. Krim, I poured my conflicting emotions into a poem:

Bulgarian bits
Near the Hungarian’s hits—
What Starker contrast?

And this one, a memory of Paul Tortelier’s fall 1989 visit to Bloomington, when I, to my own astonishment, was among the students “in the room where it happened” when he and Starker sightread a two-cello piece Tortelier had composed on the plane from his previous stopover, in Korea....
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Highways and Byways: The Harvestman

By Maik Strosahl

In a Poetry Foundation podcast focused on the poetry of Keats Conley (“Bird in a Drawer,” December 7, 2021), Ms. Conley talks about the daddy long legs spider, also called the Harvestman, then reads a poem she wrote about it. ^*
    I like some of Conley’s poems, and while I enjoyed listening to the podcast, my brain had already been exploring the possibilities of a daddy long legs poem, and I found myself a little disappointed in hers—not that there was anything wrong with hers, but it didn’t go anywhere near where I was going.

January 11: Maybe Something to That Astrology Stuff After All?

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Zodiac. Astrology. Palm readers. Fortune cookies. Horoscope. They all go together. When I was growing up, our local paper printed the daily horoscope right next to the comics. That made the point, said all that needed to be said.
    At least that’s what I thought, until my son was about 14 months old. He was always precocious – took his first step a week before his seventh month birthday, insisted on walking into his 12-month doctor’s appointment on his own, “hands off dad, I got this!” – but shortly after he turned a year old, he began to outdo himself.

Goines On: Happy his birthday

Click image for more vignettes

On his 79th birthday, Goines discovered something amazing: He enjoyed more happiness saying “Happy My Birthday” to other people than he derived from hearing them say “Happy Birthday” to him or from receiving their birthday cards – not that their saying “Happy Birthday” to him or sending him a birthday card was not enjoyable; it was.

All Over the Place: Poetry Workshop

By Michael H. Brownstein

You must suffer to be beautiful, the fat woman said.

You must let the poet’s poem be the poet’s poem, the workshop leader intoned.

You must let God be in both pain and surf, the old man stated from across the table.

Poetry & Portraits: Theseus

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Theseus
By Eric Meub

[Editor’s Note: I chose to republish this Poetry & Portrait pairing today because, 79 years ago today, my mother gave birth to me, and I noticed that the last time I republished the pairing was the day after my 78th birthday – though no god gave ME the body of an ad for underwear. Eric’s poem & Susan’s drawing first graced us as Second Saturday’s Sonnet on June 14, 2014, which happened to be the date of my late sister Flo Elowee’s 84^th birthday. I trust that her husband, Don Story, DID have such a body….]


The king gave me protection, and the god
the body of an ad for underwear,
but on the docks of Troezen in a fraud
of both I tempted every sailor there.

As the World Turns: A fish story*

By Ed Rogers

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague Paul Clark (aka motomynd) brought to my attention a news story out of British Columbia about a fisherman being sentenced to a lifetime fishing ban and prohibited from ever being aboard a fishing vessel again (story by David Strege, MSN). Paul asked whether Vancouver Harbour isn’t on the fringe of my old Northwest haunts.
    Indeed it is. The city of Vancouver is right across the border from Washington. My friend Edda’s brother and sister lived there. Fishing and crabbing are highly controlled in both Canada and Washington. A lot of people up there live off the water, and generations of people know no other way of life. New laws come along telling them not to do things that their family has always done, and that leads to problems like the guy in the news story had.

The PocketRock Heart Project: Turtle (Part 2)

By Maik Strosahl

Note: Because the first part began with reference to my truck-driving, this project was launched in my Highways & Byways column. However, as this project is a special, limited series, we have decided to give it its own overall heading. Also, there was confusion about its title due to finding someone else who is using “The Pocket Heart Project” to hand out little hand-sewn hearts to be carried in pockets of first-responders. My project was not inspired by, nor does it have any association with, that cause. To eliminate any confusion, we have adjusted my project’s title to “The PocketRock Heart Project.

Turtle

Katie was always special. Perhaps it is in some part because of the loss that came before her.
    My older sister Kori was due to have her first child in the summer of 1990. We were very close then, and I was looking forward to having her new child in attendance at my wedding in November. Tragically, we all experienced heartbreak when he arrived stillborn, a victim of spinal bifida.

Goines On: Whose fault had it been?

Click image for more vignettes

Goines had received no reply to any of his emails of recent years to his old work-colleague friend Keith, of 30+ years ago at IBM. Today, Goines was wondering, once again, what he might have done to drive Keith away. He had always assumed that he, himself, had “done” something. But today, a new possibility occurred to Goines, one that could, when generalized, explain the retreat, the falling away of other old friends and acquaintances.

Bellator Senex: People are a lot like cars

[Editor’s Note: Both Ed & I were born the year of this pickup –
him on today’s date, me 5 days later]

By Ed Rogers

People are a lot like cars. When new, they all (except for a few lemons now and then) run great, look great, and are able to fly down the road.
    Not all cars are equal, however. Some have parts that wear out before others. Some are driven too hard and just can’t endure the strain; they end up in the junkyard before their time. Others are cared for and pampered, but still break down.

All Over the Place: Alternatives

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

I first met him in my classroom,
a fifth grader already too old,
struggling with his name in cursive.
he knew only beginning consonants,

had memorized his way four blocks square,

never dared go his way downtown, would not catch a bus,

read only single syllable words and loud vowels.

Sometimes “the” was too hard to remember.

Slouching towards Bethlehem?

Joan Didion died 9 days ago,
on December 23, 2021

Yeats said it first

By Moristotle

A dear friend warned me this morning that a massive change is coming along with a truth that will rock the entire world, but when I asked him what the changes would be and whether they would involve the Second Coming, he was willing to characterize them only as “another chance for human kind to straighten up and fly right and be nice to each other.” I was reminded of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poetic description of big changes he saw coming over a hundred years ago. I read it again today, and I invite you to read it too: