There are many things that could be done in a day.
There are many things that will not get done.
Choose one of each; others will follow.
—
Thank you to my shower, which gave me this thought.
Author: jelizabeth
– Dirty little secret
The infirm: orchid and cactus.
This weekend’s rain offers the already sturdy flowers, shrubs, and trees in the yard an extra boost. They’re green, flowered, and lush.
Compare them to the ailing figures in this photo, members of my rather meager population of houseplants. The one on the left is an orchid. Where are its characteristic blooms? The one on the right, pancake-like, was a robust, egg-shaped cactus only a month ago.
I like houseplants; I really do. But for a couple of unkillable Pothos, which “set the standard for tolerance of neglect,” however, I can’t seem to keep them alive for long.
– Walk into the dark
This excerpt is from a ruminative and sparkling post by writer and teacher Alexander Chee on today’s Koreanish:
Part of what is interesting to me about writing is how writing is a social act—a performance for others, a way to connect that has not one guarantee to it. You write and you don’t know that anyone will ever read it or care. You have to proceed in line after line, like someone descending a stairway towards an unknown space below and past an unknown number of stairs also. It may even be an eternal descent until death. You don’t know how much you’ll have to write before you begin to connect to others—that is the crisis of the student writer, for example, but all writers, I think, recognize that crisis as simply a student writer’s introduction to the idea that they could write for their whole lives and never succeed, and they won’t know, even if they write.
You are basically asking them to walk into the dark and trust that they’ll meet someone there. Someone to whom they’ll entrust all of this work. Most of the time you never say this to them because it is a terrible thing to encounter and everyone makes their own peace with it.
– Future professor
I offered to drop Eli off at school on my way into Cambridge this morning. As we got closer to the high school, right around the time of the first bell, activity intensified: cars, bikes, crossing guards, pedestrians, teens, teachers. As we were stopped at an intersection, a student crossed it diagonally. Tall, slight, curly-haired, and hunched under the weight of his pack, he continuously blinked, grimaced, and adjusted his head on his neck as he made his way across, as though the sun and the concrete world were just too much for him and intruded on his private musings.
“Look at that funny kid,” I said to Eli, and I pointed.
“Yeah, I noticed him,” he replied.
“Someday he’s going to be one of those absent-minded professors,” I said.
Eli paused. He smiled. “And yet, his students won’t not like him.”
I knew what he meant. “He’ll be both. You’re right.”
And on my way to work, alone in the car, I thought about being a student and, along with my friends, loving our funny, weird, and quirky teachers and, as a way to show how much we had studied the objects of our affection, performing for each other our elaborate impersonations of the well-loved teachers’ mannerisms. We would laugh, and the laughter was never mean-spirited. It was gleeful, buoyant, and conveyed recognition. And I dare say the impersonations and laughter knit us together, too.
– Best brief bio
Yes, I do read the “Contributors” section of magazines and journals and study the array of author and artist credentials, which are always publications, prizes, occupations, affiliations, and educations. Here’s one that stands out from all that:
FELIX SOCKWELL is a designer and illustrator living in Maplewood, New Jersey. The illustration on the cover of this magazine, “Truth Seeker,” is a piece that he has been developing, redeveloping, and agonizing over for fourteen years.
From Poetry, September 2008.
– Heaven is a place
Or, heaven might be Stitch House.
Stitch House, Dorchester
Thanks for keeping your eyes open and sending me the photo, Brian. I’m on my way…
– Seasonal shoe parade
Twice a year, on a sunny, dry day, I arrange in the driveway all the shoes that have accumulated in the front hall, mudroom, and garage, like so:
September's shoe parade
We all browse our own clusters of shoes and decide which to put away, which to keep in rotation (near the door), and which to say goodbye to. At the end of today, we had a big box of shoes that no longer fit or suit us, and only two or three pairs each in the mudroom.
—
Photo by Eli.
– Mending (a life)
Hem pants. Replace buttons. Re-hang shelves and pictures. Fix holes in screens. Weed garden. (Ignore crabgrass.) Deadhead annuals. Scrub enamel sink. Re-plant pachysandra bed. Adjust bike seats. Touch up dinged paint in hall. Oil squeaking hinge. Darn moth holes in favorite sweater, black. Launder curtains, and vacuum louvered blinds. Prune files. Treat stains. Find missing pieces. Sweep up glass, and — band-aid solution — cover broken pane with a cardboard rectangle. Proofread the syllabus, the assignment, the handout. Adjust temperature. Change sheets. Plane doors. Bring broken chairs to Manny; wait two weeks; pick up chairs from Manny. Glue tiny porcelain arm to tiny porcelain shoulder.
Take old desk and make it new.
So much of time seems filled with repairing, maintaining, and renewing what’s already been done. The moments of decision and creation — when life is composed — are few.
– I am Sarah Palin
When I was in college, at one of the Seven Sisters in the mid-1980s, meals were served in the dormitories by kitchen staff who were longtime employees of the college. This was before the big contractors, like Aramark, took over dining services everywhere. We knew our cook, Charlie his name was, and dinners were like dinner parties. We enjoyed what we ate, and we lingered over the table for hours. Sometimes I sat with a group, and sometimes I sat where there was an empty seat. It was easy to know everyone; there were maybe 150 residents in my dorm, Beebe Hall.
Because the nights were so similar to each other, they generally blur in my memory into one big mealtime. One night, though, when I was a freshman, I was sitting with Andrea, a junior from New Jersey. I don’t recall what I was telling her, but I was talking, and at the same time she was finishing dessert and licking her spoon: licking the bowl, licking the back, dipping it into the melted ice cream again, licking and licking.
She paused in her licking and listening and she interrupted me: “You know what’s a shame?”
“What?” I asked back.
“No matter that you’re here, no matter how smart you are, no matter how much education you get, people are always going to think you’re ignorant.”
What does one say in reply? I burned with sudden shame. “Um… why?” I stammered. Continue reading
– Last beach day
August 31, 2008. Cold Storage Beach, East Dennis.
Pages from August 31st notes
Verbatim:
“It’s Michael Krantz’s birthday,” Jimmy says when I ask him the date.
The family near us has a boy about Grace’s age with the same insulin pump as mine. I talk to the mother. Among many interesting things, she tells me about Cheating Destiny, and parts about history of insulin. At some point we talk about my parents’ crying when my brother was diagnosed, and the boy says, “I have seen my mother cry four times.” He grins and adds, “And it was because of me.”
Two families away there’s a guy my age who is fit, who knows it, who wears dark yellow trunks and, over his nape-length curly graying hair, a navy blue bandana tied pirate style. He’s reading a hard-covered book called God of Sex, I think, although all I can see on the black cover are the big words “God” and “Sex” — I filled in the preposition — and he holds a fluorescent yellow highlighter. His lady friend (no ring) is blond and wears a yellow bikini. They are listening to Jack Johnson. It’s loud, which drew my attention to them. That’s the point.
I am reading Stephen McCauley’s Alternatives to Sex.
In the channel out of the harbor, the lobster roll boat has struggled in the unusually choppy surf and turned around. $20 for a lobster roll and aborted boat ride. Lazy American recreation.
We all talk about the Lobster Roll Boat. “Think about boats,” Emily says: “what they mean to fishermen and what they mean to us.” Yes, I have been on boats and not ever to fish.
I go in the water. Partly out of guilt: my mother says, “Look at Lydia alone out there, she wants you with her.” Partly out of peer presssure. Em and Jay are out there, and it looks like fun and I want to be a fun one, too. Partly because I waded out to my waist then realized it was not too cold to bear. Out there, I lick my lips. They’re salty. I’m young again.
A young woman, brunette in a white bikini and Paris Hilton glasses sits in a bright pink and white striped chair. She’s with her father. (She’s not old enough to have such an older boyfriend.) Out of their cooler she takes a bag of Dole lettuce mix and a plastic container. She pours something from the sm. container into the Dole bag, then bunches closed the Dole bag and shakes. Ah, salad in a bag. Again and again she puts a fork into the bag, which she holds on her bare legs, and spears some salad. She eats and eats, the whole thing. Perhaps because she is so beachy glamorous, she makes this efficient eating, well, charming. No, cute.
Jason left and came back w/ Nutter Butters and Heineken. I haven’t had a drink on the beach since I was 15 or 16 and went to Maine w/ Heidi C. and her mother brought a pitcher of gin + tonic along w/ the picnic basket. I tell my mother this. She’s alarmed, too late. “Sandy let you drink?!” She shakes her head.
At 3:30 it feels like 5:30 did two months ago.
God/Sex pirate and his sexy wife (can’t be girlfriend) have three sexy teenage children. It’s not only that they’re all good-looking. They’re supple, and sit in poses. Louche.
Later, Grace walks out to end of jetty and Jimmy follows. Our caravan gradually leaves. My father and I still sit in canvas chairs. He remembers carrying Eli, as a toddler, out to the end of some jetty. He remembers carrying a little Eli from Boston Public Garden all the way back to Brookline. He and my mother — always walking. There are no more babies to carry; the grandchildren are all school age. I realize that a person only gets, at most, two turns at babies in his/her life: as parent and grandparent. My parents have had their two.
leaf stitch word 