Archives for category: Journal Entry

Time Marching On

April 3, 2013 //

(For Stephen)

Tonight I watched this incredible video of the moon rising from a link on a friend’s Facebook page.

I recommend you watch it too.

I don’t know about you, but for me, the swiftness of the passage of time always comes to mind when ever I witness the rising or setting of a heavenly body. There is just that finite number of sunrises, sunsets, moonrises and moonsets in a lifetime, epitomized in the one being witnessed, in the moment, and then *blip* there it goes, beyond that threshold of the horizon, being birthed and dying, daily.

The video reminded me of these snapshots I took with Steve at sunset on the shores of Paulina Lake in Oregon, WA years ago.

How often I choose to fill time with foolishness of one form or another, precious time gone. Words cannot express my gratitude for Steve’s patience, love and belief in me, even as time marches on. Ironically, it is through his capacity to wait, watch and wonder that I come to reflect on the USE of my time.

Finite time is really all we’ve got.

Tags Humility, Moonrise, The Heavens

Categories Journal Entry, Photos

Last Days

March 28, 2013 //

Last Days
(winner, 2013 Chaparral Poetry Forum)

A rusty pick-up camper slows,
backs into the next space.
An older man unbends from the cab,
sparse grey hair filtering the sun.
We nod. He eyes the nearest restrooms,
measuring the distance
between need and satisfaction.
A gust of wind staggers him.
His shirt flaps like a crossbow-kite.

He sits and sips a mug,
stacks a few dead branches.
As dusk settles, he invites me over.
“Name’s Jim,” he offers.
The campfire prods,
flickers on our life’s adventures.
“Ain’t much time left. Wife’s gone now, but
I got me some nice grandkids,” he says.

Early morning, a motor-home
dwarfs his truck. His campsite alive,
he and his grandchildren rig fishing poles,
laughing over mistakes. The parents
herd their kids to the lake and their cruiser,
leaving him to himself.

The evening sounds are fresh with childish wit.
Grandpa retires with the children.
I invite the well-lubricated parents over.
His son slurs the big picture.
“The old bugger clings to life, for what?
He’s no good to anyone,
sits on a pile of money he’ll never use.
The longer he lasts the less we get.”
I plead fatigue, leave them to themselves.

Next day they’re gone.
Evening frost in the air, I’m leaving, too.
I see the old fellow sitting alone
on the lake-shore, twilight waters
rippled by the stir of a faint breeze.

Tags can't do it alone, family, poetry, values

Categories Journal Entry

Veteran

December 19, 2012 //

The mass-killing this last week helped me (Steve) finish a poem
started over a year ago . . .

Veteran

Our neighbor, a decorated veteran,
lived in a small home, solitary,
an upstairs light on all night,
a flag unfurled year-round, alone.

Baggy combat fatigues on a spindly frame,
at 8am everyday he locked up, saluted,
began a sleight limp that metered him
along a sequence of the same streets .

He paused at overgrown bushes,
held a cigarette with hands that shook
and checked each house
with watery eyes and a far-away look.

He leaned through wind and rain,
stopped only when a siren blared
or an engine backfired.
Neighborhood dogs just stared.

He didn’t talk war, even when asked.
Some of us saw an American patriot,
wounded; others, a cripple, collateral damage
from our military-industrial nation.

Each thought they knew him right
by what they saw and heard at night.
On the day he missed
I heard the shot and caught a fright.

I found him slumped on his kitchen table,
the back of his head gone, the wall
splattered with blood, brain and bone,
a hollow-point .44 slug sent him home.

Near what remained of his head
a crumpled, splattered note read,
“I protected my country . . . who
protects them from each other___”

No one remembers him smile
but, once in awhile I did,
in his backyard, lying low,
watching his cat stalk a fat crow.

Categories Journal Entry

FaceBook Comment Fail

December 15, 2012 //

I still dig the poem I posted on a friend’s FaceBook wall, in a string of comments about PTSD and the Connecticut shootings yesterday. Although my choice to post it was perhaps perceived a bit too dark for that particular thread–as evidenced by the comments in the other direction–I posted it as a philosophical offering in the midst of soft psychological ones:

THE SECOND COMING

by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I equally favor the Mr. Rogers quote going around in response to this shooting, the 61st such mass shootings in the US in the past thirty years. Rogers speaks about his mother telling him to find the helpers, there are always many to be found in tragedies which he saw too in the news as a boy. I think of the children in my neighborhood here, who brought news of it to our doorstep. Oh, the humanity! What to bring out for them…but love.
For us adults, however, I believe firmly in getting philosophical even BEFORE the anger wears off. We swim in the same watering hole that Yeat’s beast has by now made its way into. Reloading, as it were.

To the children I can only model the “helpers” Mrs. Rogers told her boy to watch out for. My brand of help? Rhetoric And with a psychoanalyst (read: linguistic philosopher) partner with a dense bookshelf, I hope to touch and be touched by a few bigger minds.

What to do, what to do, *wrings hands*

To adults I say, “Giddyup, break a leg and sing pretty!” because schools ain’t bullet-proof, this trend of violence shows no sign of letting up. Perhaps if we could see the enemy coming on horseback? I find myself dreaming about the days when Chautauqua moved across the plains states out toward the west, that pioneering version of science-meets-art, roving band of educators and their team of players. Picture it with me–if only as metaphor: Chautauqua Revival: The Post-Modern, Integrated Salon, Made in the U.S.A.

Tags Chataqua, Massachussetts shooting, Mr. Rogers, Slouching toward Bethlehem, Yeats

Categories Journal Entry, Poetry

200 Years of Independence

December 3, 2012 //

This is the only quilt I have ever made–though I think only I helped with one or two squares. The same year it was constructed my parents took me out of school and drove my little brother and me from Grinnell, IA to our state’s capital of Des Moines to see the Liberty Bell, which was touring the U.S. by train. It was a big year for our country, and this was one of the ways we celebrated two-hundred years of independence from Great Britain’s rule. Some believe our nation and its governing body was just entering its adolescence around that time and I wonder whether we would send around such a national treasure today.

Our class’ quilt was auctioned off that December to the highest bidder at a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser. It was THE big ticket item, and sold for a whopping $50 to my mother. Being ten years old, I was slightly mortified by the cost, by the sight of my mother’s hand signaling her bids, and by the grand receipt of the quilt to thunderous applause in a gymnasium filled with my classmates, the entire Baily Park Elementary School student body, all our parents and teachers. It was the first time I remember being embarrassed by either of my parents, if I don’t count my mother streaking through my classroom each Halloween in primary school wearing stage make up and a witch costume, terrorizing everybody. Her convincing getup left plenty of room for plausible deniability if I just kept my head down.

Today this quilt warms the spot where I like sit in my Cle Elum, Washington studio, a cozy keepsake. It reminds me of the swiftness of time’s passing.

Elizabeth Maurer

Tags 1776, 1976, 4th of July, bicentennial, Halloween, keepsakes, Memories

Categories Journal Entry, Photo Faves

The Anxious Heart Beats Faster

July 18, 2012 //

Mixed media, found objects, for Doug Yount.

Tags Clocks, Death, Metafor, Suicide

Categories Journal Entry

Hearty Bills

June 10, 2012 //

This is a picture of Stephen in the arms of his maternal grandfather, William Hardy.
Incidentally, both Stephen and I had maternal grandfathers named William.

From our grandfathers’ Bill, we each learned a bit of naughty. When grandma was in the other room, Steve’s Grampa Bill taught him how to make “Mormon coffee” (with lots of cream and three table spoons of sugar, like candy). From mine I learned that there’s always time to stop for Baskin Robbins ice cream, even when we’re on the way home and late for grandmother’s dinner.

Both Bills’ daughters (our mothers) were cracker-jack wordsmiths. And we both believe we can spot grammatical and punctuation errors at twenty paces. One might wonder if having wordsmithy mothers influences us against using the quaint but frowned upon “ain’t” in everyday speech. In point of fact, it ain’t so. It may even encourage usage of such words in “proper” company . . .

Tags family, grammar, grandfathers, mormon, Mothers

Categories Journal Entry, Photos

Article #71: Naming Your Band

June 10, 2012 //

This is by Elizabeth.

In case of minors reading this, I wanted you to know that I in no way condone stealing or bad behavior such as those used herein to evoke some of the gender-specific angst of adolescence. While one might hope this could go without saying — it is a poem, after all — I’m aware of the demographic of a portion of our readership.

…And with that caveat,
I hope you enjoy the poem.

From A Compendium For Dreaming Childishly:
Article No. 71: Naming Your Band

For boys:
At fifteen, go to Goodwill Industries
where have-nots and recyclers shop.
Take your fictional bass player,
and drummer and dare one of them
to rub vaseline on the bottoms
of ladies shoes.
Jump on and off furniture
across the store
for a better view,
high on the risk
and expectation of chaos.
Harness those feelings
before the manager boots you out,
and jam a t-shirt off the rack
under your jacket.
The name of your band
will be on it:
“Exclusive of Design.”

For girls:
When naming your fictional band,
simply take your first name
nick it short
like Dreanne to Dre,
Trisha to Trish,
Monica to Mon,
then add the phrase “and Her Lost Boys.”
You’ll never feel alone.

Tags Adolescence, Angst, poetry, thrills, youth

Categories Journal Entry, Poetry

Couple of Old Dogs

June 7, 2012 //

Steve here.
I came home and shared this story with Elizabeth. After she stopped laughing, she asked me to write it down.

Here you go:

I’ve been irritable too long, so I saw the old Doc I’ve known for years. His familiar nurse cuffs me, weighs, measures and questions me. We bend over the lab report; my levels all look normal. So I tell her about the tinnitus, dry mouth and spaced feeling. They aren’t acceptable. She hears the clicking sounds escaping between my words, then ask how much fluid I’m getting.
“Enough,” I say.
“How much is enough?”
“Well, juice in the morning, and whenever I’m thirsty.”
“How often is that?”
I ponder, “Well, a couple of times . . . no, once or twice a day.”
“What color is your urine?”
“Well, yellow, of course!”
“Well, I want you drinking more water, at least 64 ounces a day. That’s four glasses before noon and four afterwards.
I’m flummoxed. This has got to be more complicated.
“Why?” I manage.
“Because I doubt you are getting enough and it is important.” I try to think but thinking’s been slow.
Finally I say, “I can’t.”
“Why?” she asks.
Silence.
Suddenly I blurt, “Because that’s my wife’s rant, her little hobby-horse!”
Deepening silence . . . I can’t believe I said that. It begins to strike me as childish and funny, then terribly funny and I begin to laugh. She smiles and joins in, just the two of us, sitting there laughing; a couple of old dogs, all too familiar with this conflict.

Tags dog, funny, health, marriage

Categories Journal Entry

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Time Marching On

Last Days

Veteran

FaceBook Comment Fail

200 Years of Independence

The Anxious Heart Beats Faster

Hearty Bills

Article #71: Naming Your Band

Couple of Old Dogs

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