Carl Sandburg unpublished poem

                                                   The Gun

Here is a revolver.
It has an amazing language all its own.
It delivers unmistakable ultimatums.
It is the last word.
A simple, little human forefinger can tell a terrible story with it.
Hunger, fear, revenge, robbery hide behind it.
It is the claw of the jungle made quick and powerful.
It is the club of the savage turned to magnificent precision.
It is more rapid than any judge or court of law.
It is less subtle and treacherous than any one lawyer or ten.
When it has spoken, the case can not be appealed to the supreme
   court, nor any mandamus nor any injunction nor any stay of 
   execution in and interfere with the original purpose.
And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the 
   old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most
   revolvers.
                                      Carl Sandburg

Valentine's Day 2013

February 13 was my son-in-law's birthday.  As we ate dinner together, I said to the kids, "What's
special about your dad?"     His seventh grade son said, "He is still married to our mom."      His remark touched my heart.   By middle school, children have experienced the situations their friends face with divorced parents.    Blessings here which we should never take for granted.  

Reading

Normally, I feel that reading more than one book at a time is crazy-making.   However, it 

is January in Missouri and I am three weeks post-op and feeling rather low energy.    In February my book club plans to discuss Grapes of Wrath and watch the movie.    So to attack a classic work so monumentally depressing, I checked out several books from the library to vary the palate.    

I re-introduced myself to Steinbeck’s masterful prose, then read a few chapters of Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson.   I love to pretend to cook and Goldy Schultz, the caterer who solves mysteries, held my attention.   Presently I am obsessed with food because of my diet of small quantities of soft food.    I am reading the grocery advertisements that come with the newspaper, simply to fantasize.   I got Tom Joad on the road to leave Oklahoma with his family and finished cooking by proxy.     

Next I made a vicarious flight by small plane with Anna Pigeon to  Isle Royale, a National Park island in Lake Superior, almost in Canada, on a research project on wolves, Winter Study.  I interspersed the Dust Bowl with reading about the frigid group of workers with only a generator a few hours a day and no way to leave the island.    One frigid night, while Richard was attending my grand-daughter’s basketball game and I was home alone by the wood 

stove, a wolf-dog hybrid ate a member of Anna’s team and stalked them as they attempted a rescue.     The coyotes began howling down by the creek and freaked me.   No more fiction by Nevada Barr until daylight hours!  

I could not handle the monstrous mysterious tracks in the snow or the burial of Grandpa

Joad beside the campsite that evening; scanning television, I only saw people being assaulted and tortured,  so I turned to another book, Just Kids, a memoir by Patti Smith about her years in the sixties with Robert Maplethorpe.     Tales of two hippie artists, living on the streets of New York City and eating out of dumpsters, were hardly cheery, but their creative adventures did not scare the wits out of me and obviously, they subsequently became highly  successful in collages, prose and rock and roll.  

On to California with the migrant workers; Grandma dies and Roseasharon’s  husband takes leave.    Patti and Robert find work for pay, rent a cheap room, read poetry and classics, dwell with drugs, sex, lice and gonorrhea and meet Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol.

Truth and fiction are equally unsettling. Time now for me to read a mindless mystery.But too much light stuff makes me feel as if I have had yogurt for lunch.   

In Steinbeck’s words, “. . .man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes.   Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.”   

Eat, Drink and Be Merry!

I am savoring the taste of foods I have been unable to eat for three to five years!    Two weeks ago I
had surgery on my stomach (fundiplication) to treat severe acid reflux disorder.    A diet without fruit or
vegetables, spices, tomato sauce or chocolate  had caused me to lose weight, lose sleep and suffer.     I will be able to eat everything again in a few weeks; now I am eating small amounts of soft food. Orange juice, V-8, cooked carrots - all taste heavenly.   Friends have brought me flan and home-made chocolate pie.   How we take for granted these wonderful blessings!  

Word for Today

A new favorite word for me:   "shambolic"   British slang for chaotic and disorderly.     My garage
in winter is shambolic!

Keep Calm

On our Christmas visit to our family in London, we saw "Keep Calm and Carry On" products for sale everywhere.    Apparently the motto was initiated during the London Blitz and was unearthed in the last couple of years and re-popularized as a slogan for today's world.   With typical 9 year old humor, whenever my grandson saw it, he would say,   "Freak Out and Panic" - also a slogan appropriate for today's world.

Philharmonic Concert

Sharing a humorous story after a long break from the blog. . .I have been writing my memoir as a Christmas gift for my family. . .

Recently mentioned to my 14 year old grand-daughter who lives nearby that I had been to a Philharmonic Concert.    "Did you jump up and down and scream?"  she said.  
"Not that kind of concert, an orchestra concert," I explained.    "Oh, I thought it was a rock band -
you know, a man's name - Phil Harmonic."