Poem for Sunday

Work
By John Engman

    I wanted to be a rain salesman,
because rain makes the flowers grow,
but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,
certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,
because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows,
and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs
weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming
the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden...
                                        I am paid
to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive
leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:
this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.

    The woman who works the cubicle beside me has pretty knees
and smells of wild blossoms, but I am paid to work
my fingers up and down the keys, an almost sexy rhythm,
king of the chimpanzees picking fleas from his beloved.
I wanted to be a rain salesman , but that's a memory
I keep returning to my childhood for minor repairs:
the green sky cracking, then rain, and after,
those flowers growing faster than I can name them,
those flowers that fix me and and make me stare.

    I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department,
and so they left me dying behind this desk-adding bleeps,
subtracting clunks-and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms,
some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.
Above my desk, lounging in a bed of brushstroke flowers,
a woman beckons from my cheap Modigliani print, and I know
by the way she gazes that she sees something beautiful
in me. She has green eyes. I am paid to ignore her.

--------

"In prosperous America, the poet's economic reality usually involves working a crap job while scribbling nightly in a cheap apartment. Before my pal John Engman suffered a brain aneurysm in his 40s, he toiled in such obscurity," writes Mary Karr in Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "He lived in Minnesota, bussed tables, did standup comedy for a while, taught a class or two at a local community center, but only published two books...in 'Work,' his desire to be a 'rain salesman' suggests an obscure poet's longing to break free from selling his word processing skills and move toward the exalted skill of selling beauty to readers. We owe the construction of our cities and the frying of our burgers and the processing of our words to the efforts of unsung workers like Engman, who died in 1996."

The weather forecast this morning said that there might be storms in the afternoon, so although we had toyed with the idea of going to Solomon's or to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, we decided to postpone those plans and go downtown to the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress. The former has an exhibit closing soon on Arms and Armor in Shakespeare, which we figured would be fun to see before going to the Renfaire anyway. It wasn't a very large exhibit but there was some lovely stuff -- the Earl of Pembroke's suit of armor, a sword that had been underwater for 500 years after the siege of Castillon, a Native American staff -- plus there's a First Folio in a case in the same exhibition hall, and a new film about the library's preservation work.

A 1606 Danish publication of the treatise by celebrated sword master Salvator Fabris on the science of rapier combat.


The swept-hilt sword of a Munich town guard from ~1600, on loan from the Higgins Armory Museum in Massachusetts.


A buckler from the 1500s, probably made in Italy, similar in style to the ones worn by Englishmen over their belts for quick self-defense.


The aforementioned Earl of Pembroke's fashionable suit of armor.


A book with jousting instruction for exhibitions and against live opponents, published in Frankfurt in 1616.


From the theatre lobby, Michael Learned's costume from a 2003 Folger revival of Maxwell Anderson's 1930 play Elizabeth the Queen.


From the north facade of the library, a bas-relief panel by John Gregory depicting the central triangle of Hamlet...


...and another illustrating Bottom's adventure from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Library of Congress recently revamped its visitor center so that tourists as well as scholars can have access to some of its more interesting holdings. It has three fabulous exhibits right now: one on Thomas Jefferson's library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress after the British burned the original congressional library, another on the creation of the United States through its documents, with rough drafts and letters about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution written by Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Mason, et al (you can see in their own handwriting the argument about whether to abolish slavery), and a third on exploring the Americas, with a fantastic early map exhibit, a collection of naturalist studies and a study of the effects on the people already here of the colonists and vice versa. There's also a wonderful side display on pirates and piracy and a display of maps of Drake's voyages.

I found a DVD copy of Paul Mazursky's Tempest with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in the Folger gift shop and intended to watch it in the evening, but Adam was working on a school project that he needed help putting together and by the time I sat down, it was after 10. So instead we watched the Clemson/Alabama game (well, some of us watched and some of us mostly ignored it), and I'm going to bed early so I can wake up early and get dressed for the Renfaire!

Poem for Saturday

In Santiago, Chile
By Nicanor Parra
Translated by Liz Werner

In Santiago, Chile
The days are interminably long:
Several eternities in a day.

Like the vendors of seaweed
Travelling on the backs of mules:
You yawn -- you yawn again.

Yet the weeks are short
The months go racing by
And the years have wings.

--------

I spent lots of time Friday watching, reading and discussing the news (see previous post for details). The rest of my day wasn't all that eventful: I wrote a (short, uninspired, but fairly positive) review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Captain's Holiday", picked up Adam from school in the pouring rain, exchanged letters about Daniel's health class with his high school principal (likely conclusion: by the time we can get this resolved, it will be two weeks into the school year and not worth messing up his schedule), had dinner with my parents and found ancient treasures in the drawers in my old desk in my childhood bedroom...how the map of the world has changed in 30 years.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is in the news because it has a great white shark in its Outer Bay exhibit, which we saw when we were there in July. Here are some more photos from the aquarium, both inside the exhibits and from the balconies outside overlooking the water:

The Friday Five: How many times a day do you...
1. Brush your teeth? Two, sometimes three.
2. Shower? Usually once.
3. Check your E-mail? Dozens.
4. Check LJ? Once or twice.
5. Eat? Three meals, usually a couple of munchies.

Fannish 5: Name 5 characters you think are often misunderstood by fans.
1. Rose Tyler, Doctor Who.
2. Elizabeth Weir, Stargate: Atlantis.
3. Eowyn, The Lord of the Rings.
4. Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
5. Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager.

Hope everyone in Gustav's path is getting safely to high ground!

Veep

I've been talking about Sarah Palin in everyone else's journal, so I may as well just post here instead of waiting till tonight. There seem to be two schools of thought concerning Palin: fear that she's going to be damaging to the Democrats, and WTF!!! I'm definitely more in the latter category, at least from a political standpoint. I'm always so ambivalent when a woman with whom I disagree deeply and profoundly on major issues achieves great success, because if female solidarity really did outweigh other considerations, then Hillary Clinton would have locked up the Democratic nomination early on and we'd be having very different discussions right now. But it doesn't -- certainly not within nations or political parties.

I don't think Palin will hurt Obama's chances at election for several reasons. The biggest is that I don't think she'll draw in significant crossover voting for McCain. Women aren't stupid; the ones who strongly disagreed with Obama's politics or who were only supporting the Democrats because of Hillary Clinton were already looking for reasons to vote for McCain. They could have rationalized a VP candidate like Joe Lieberman, who's pro-choice, or Mitt Romney, who has a moderate voting record despite recent suck-ups to the far right, or any of the hawks who like to claim Obama will be weak on foreign policy. The women who'll jump parties for Palin were already looking to jump, and the ones who've paid any attention to Obama's voting record on women's issues won't bond together in significant numbers for Palin; after all, they didn't for Clinton.

I'm alternately amused and appalled that after all his "not ready to lead" ads, McCain picked someone with so much less experience than Obama. Moderates who inclined toward Clinton because she had so much more experience and exposure than Obama are not going to look at Palin's record and come away feeling good, particularly on a ticket with someone McCain's age -- call me ageist if you wish, but McCain's already sounding as senile as Reagan at times, and the choice of VP matters increasingly with the likelihood that he or she will need to take over the presidency. If the Republicans continue to harp on Obama's "inexperience," they're going to look ridiculous. Biden's blandness as a speaker is going to help him in debates with Palin; instead of attacking or condescending and being accused of sexism, he can merely state the facts of his career in his usual egghead fashion and look vastly more qualified than she is.

I'm expecting not to be happy with the media coverage of Palin and I'm nervous about how the Democrats will deal with her; given how much sexist garbage was thrown at the more qualified Clinton, who didn't get saddled with the Mommy baggage because Chelsea's an adult now, I'm assuming that I'm going to have to grit my teeth through a lot of proclamations about women's obligations and emotions and all the usual misogyny. That said, I think it will work to Obama's benefit in two ways. He can solidify his appeal to women by condemning it. And the virulent anti-Hillary Republicans don't want a woman president, period. How much flat-out sexism have we heard from those heartland church-going working class people whom we've been told are the key to this election? They're not going to be any more enthusiastic about a Republican woman than a Democrat. They'll accuse McCain of pandering to feminists by not picking an old white guy the same way they make accusations of pandering to feminists when a woman who's completely qualified for a job gets it. I expect a lot of those people will stay home and sit out the election, which helps Obama.

I'm less afraid of Palin than I was of Lieberman or Romney. I don't think she helps McCain with a major demographic. He already had the pro-life vote. He already had the gun lobby. I don't see Hispanics abandoning Obama for a candidate from a state that's more than 80% white and less than 5% Hispanic, a state that has passed English-only laws that had to be struck down by the Supreme Court. Palin's Native American husband is not going to sway the vote of someone like Cecilia Fire Thunder of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, who believes that anti-choice legislation violates Indian tribal sovereignty laws.

And Palin's choice to have a child with Down's Syndrome is not going to convince pro-choice women to admire her. Make no mistake, it was a choice -- she said in interviews that she and her husband researched the condition when they learned about it from prenatal testing -- and it's a choice that she now feels qualified to make for every woman in the U.S., regardless of the circumstances or condition of her pregnancy. As unfair as it may be to women, there's still a strong perception that the mother is or should be the primary caretaker of young children, though it's not limited to women; there were plenty of people who expressed reservations about John Edwards possibly becoming a single father as president when it was learned that his wife had untreatable cancer.

It would be hard enough to persuade a lot of older voters to pick a woman president who had two children under ten even without having a special needs child. Since Palin does have a special needs child, I think a lot of voters will assume there's no good way for her to balance the needs of the family and the needs of the country. Which is unfair to her and to all women, but since she supports anti-choice laws that will affect the lives of millions of other women, forcing them to have children they don't want without anything like Palin's support system to assist them, I can't really work up much sympathy.

So I'm actually relieved, even though I'm expecting to hear lots of depressing sexism as many Democrats and a subsection of unhappy Republicans start cutting Palin down. I don't think she's the best person for the job, and I don't think American women are stupid enough to support McCain just because he put her on his ticket.

Poem for Friday

The Guest House
By Jelaluddin Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

--------

It was a dim, rainy Thursday here, as what was left of Hurricane Fay dripped on us all morning and afternoon while Gustav and Hanna moved closer to the south. Perkypaduan came over and we went to the mall together to look at naughty Hot Topic Halloween accessories (not very many available yet, but the young cashier was definitely into Perkypaduan, heh), then to check out walking shoes and Bath & Body Works, and finally to grab some Japanese food to go. We came back to my house, ate teriyaki and watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, having decided that we were in the mood for Alan Rickman since I had just seen Bottle Shock and she was going to see it after leaving. Adam got home and announced that he needed a five subject notebook for science, so we picked up Daniel as he was walking home and went first to CVS, then to Giant, both of which were pretty wiped out of school supplies but we managed to track one down.

Here are some more photos from Yellowstone National Park last July.


Belgian Pool.


A marmot in the Upper Geyser Basin.


Giant Geyser across a field of wildflowers.


Yellowstone Falls.


Emerald Pool.


Bison near the Midway Geyser Basin.


A field near the Old Faithful Inn.

We had a political evening: watched Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (the latter had Mike Huckabee on, whom I knew would get me fervently in the mood to listen to Obama), then took a break to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Captain's Holiday" (which I need to review tomorrow, and which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected), then watched the DNC film about Obama before he came out to speak. Adam asked the all-important question, "Does he have a cat?" And though I know from the news that he's been looking for a dog for his daughters, I did not know the answer, and in the course of research (answer: he does not), I found Cats For Obama, which made us all smile. So did Obama's speech; I'm not sure he can put any of those tax or fuel plans in place without a strongly sympathetic Congress and I don't think he can stop a lot of the money-wasting to which even many Democrats have contributed, but he's so strongly positive, not only on things like equal pay and gay rights and ending poverty, but also on international relations and people in general. I love listening to Obama's passion for what I used to think the U.S. would always stand for.

Poem for Thursday

Nocturne I
By W.S. Merwin

The stars emerge one
by one into the names
that were last found for them
far back in other
darkness no one remembers
by watchers whose own
names were forgotten
later in the dark
and as the night deepens
other lumens begin
to appear around them
as though they were shining
through the same instant
from a single depth of age
though the time between
each one of them
and its nearest neighbor
may include in its span
the whole moment of the earth
turning in a light
that is not its own
with the complete course
of life upon it
born to brief reflection
recognition and anguish
from one cell evolving
to remember daylight
laughter and distant music

--------

This will be a rather cranky entry, I'm afraid. Some of you may recall my lengthy rant some months ago about the idiocy of public school health class requirements and scheduling. When we left things, the administration had promised to set things right for Daniel as soon as they were able, then everyone involved promptly went on vacation and never returned my calls. Fast forward to Daniel's first day of school, when -- big surprise -- he learned that he is scheduled to take health and not chamber choir, even though this may mean that he can't travel with the choir in the spring to the county and state performances and even though it means he has eight solid study courses. He is being a good sport about it -- he apparently had a good first day of school, despite not getting the calculus teacher he wanted -- but I am really furious.

Meanwhile, Adam has been complaining off and on for the past couple of days that one of his ears was bothering him, and this afternoon he came home saying that it hurt. I called the pediatrician, who said she could squeeze us in, so I was not really surprised (though also not really thrilled) to have to wait 45 minutes beyond the appointment time for her to tell us it looked like swimmer's ear, which we already suspected, and to prescribe antibiotic ear drops. What I wasn't expecting was for the pharmacy nearest my house first to put the doctor on hold for ten minutes, then to disconnect her after saying they would transfer her to the doctors-only line, and so on until nearly half an hour later, the nurse who took the phone from the doctor was able to call in the prescription. Then, two hours later when I went to pick it up, the pharmacy from which we have purchased untold dozens of medicines over the years announced that they didn't have our insurance information or address in the system, so I had to fill out paperwork and wait some more for them to adjust the price!

Speaking of waiting for things, here are some of the dozens of signs that lead the weary traveler to Wall Drug Store in South Dakota (all photos taken through the window, so sorry for splotches, discolorations and blur):

In the evening, after finishing their homework, the kids wanted to watch Jon Stewart's convention coverage, which I must admit was very funny. Then we left on Stephen Colbert, who was even funnier commenting on the Fox TV coverage ("When I make up words to put in Michelle Obama's mouth, I find what she says very offensive!"). Watched the highlights of Bill Clinton's speech -- thought it was great, he said all the things about Obama that the McCain people were insinuating Hillary must not believe because she didn't say -- and I liked seeing Biden's mom, though I really don't like speeches with chant-along sound bites, not that I will complain if Biden's help get Obama elected. If the voting public only wants sound bytes, I'm all for the Democrats coming up with good ones.

Poem for Wednesday

Troy
By Meghan O'Rourke

We had a drink and got in bed.
That's when the boat in my mouth set sail,
my fingers drifting in the shallows of your buzz cut.
And in the sound of your eye
a skiff coasted—boarding it
I found all the bric-a-brac of your attic gloom,
the knives from that other island trip,
the poison suckleroot lifted from God-knows-where.
O, all your ill-begotten loot—and yes, somewhere,
the words you never actually spoke,
the woven rope tethering
me to this rotting joint. Touch me,
and the boat and the city burn like whiskey
going down the throat. Or so it goes,
our love-wheedling myth, excessively baroque.

--------

Adam started seventh grade on Tuesday morning in the middle school that I attended -- well, it was a junior high school then, but it's still a bit surreal for me that I have somehow subjected one of my kids to three years in that building. He didn't seem terribly unhappy last year, at least, which is about the best one can hope for at that age, I think. Daniel had the day off, as his entire high school building is used for freshman orientation, so I took him out for bagels (his request), then home where I folded laundry and we watched The Fellowship of the Ring, which has kind of been a tradition for him and me on sick days. It's been many months since I've seen it, long enough for me to have forgotten all the things that disappoint me in The Return of the King, and it made me unexpectedly happy. When Adam got home, I spent quite a bit of time looking around the house for school supplies that the school hadn't bothered to put on the summer school supply list sent home weeks ago, then finished sorting out the kids' clothes -- the giveaway pile being bigger than what either son is keeping.

The Renaissance Vaudeville team, Rick and Jan, juggle knives while balancing on boards and playing "When the Saints Go Marching In" on harmonicas, with their trained dogs looking on.


One of the dogs in action while a little girl volunteer from the audience holds a hoop for her.


Actors portray the shipwreck that starts off The Tempest.


A refugee from the Mud Show, where every Shakespearean drama has the same ending: everyone gets very dirty and lives happily ever after.


I saw Barely Balanced get into this position and I still have no idea how they did it.


The Royal Falconer persuades one of his birds to land on his hand.


Aboard the pirate ship, one of the armory's officers holds an auction for unclaimed swords.


And the Royal Heralds announce the court in the afternoon.

Adam's best friend brought over Superhero Movie, which the kids insisted on watching -- fortunately it's short, and silly, and once again I got evidence that I am twelve because even though I've seen it before, I was more in the mood for that than all-night DNC blather. While the kids were getting ready for bed, we put on Across the Universe, figuring it would probably be possible to listen without really paying attention to the plot, but there was actually lots more talk and less Beatles than I was expecting...and Bono and Eddie Izzard in awesome cameos, which I didn't know about! The woman playing the sort-of-Janis-Joplin character was terrific, too, though the psychidelic sequences got to be a little much after a while. It's no Hair, which is what it seems to want to be with Beatles tunes, but it's worth seeing once.

The movie ended just as Hillary was starting to speak at the convention, so we got to hear her. I expected that I might be completely out of the mood -- every time I checked my RSS news feeds today, it was all "disgruntled Hillary supporters say they won't vote for Barack" until I wanted to throw up -- but I really appreciated her speech, as bittersweet as it must have been for her to get such an ovation. I wonder whether the news is ever going to cover the crisis in Georgia; right now they've gotten past a bear cub in a tree and moved on to puppy mill rescues. And every time I read something like this, my affection for Harry Potter dies a little bit more.

Poem for Tuesday

The Lost Sister
By Meghan O'Rourke

She was a master of childhood, very green,
very given to play, very sleepy, very grit of gray.
I, I was a shadow in a tree for no one to see,
I was a piece of ice in a tidal sweep.
When she laughed the sea made order of disorder.
I was a shadow in a tree, a stain
along the thawing bough for no one to see.

In her life, the hours pass casually.
Snow continues to pile on snow,
the dust in the corners of the old farmhouse
grows like mice in the winter.
I, I was the snow that fell too soon,
before the ground had frozen enough to catch me
and make me stick.

--------

Adam goes back to school in the morning -- the whole county goes back then, but Daniel's high school is entirely taken up with freshman orientation, so he doesn't have to be there till Wednesday -- meaning Monday was officially our last day of summer vacation. We went out for lunch after Adam "called" me, pretended to be his father and instructed me in faux bass voice to take the children to California Tortilla. *g* Then we stopped at the food store, because in addition to toilet paper, we were out of Cocoa Krispies. We drove by the pool on the way home and to my surprise it was open -- we'd thought it was weekends only starting today -- so the kids got to swim before working on their summer homework, book reports and long math review packets. I finished the laundry while they finished those.

Casey breathes fire during the Globe Theatre performance by Barely Balanced at the Pennsylvania RenFaire.


Cameron and Dreagn also juggled flaming torches over Casey while she swung around flaming maces.


The glassblowers work on a witch ball that has just come out of the fire.


The oven "explodes" at the Boarshead Inn in the middle of a brawl, causing people to fling themselves into the pool below.


Things are generally pretty dignified when the Ultimate Joust begins, but they never stay that way.


This year's story involves Sir Henry Lee marrying Lady Mary Hastings in secret and infuriating the Queen when Tsar Ivan wants Mary for his own. Ultimately Ivan demands that Mary burn at the stake, over Queen Elizabeth's objections!


Ivan's wicked, wicked knights unseat the English in the joust, but Henry rides in to rescue his love from the dreadful Muscovites. (Actually, according to the program, it's Sir Lukas most weekends, but Sir Lukas wasn't riding last Sunday.)


Naturally, the pyre gets lit anyway, so the Faire can have a giant bonfire before it concludes.

After dinner we watched No Reservations, which I didn't expect to interest the kids in the least -- it's also the last night of weekday video games for a long time -- but they both watched it. I've heard it's not nearly as good as the German film it's based on, but I enjoyed it anyway, though the resemblances to Ratatouille amused me, Catherine Zeta-Jones only spoke with a US accent about 2/3 of the time, and the family dynamics were a bit too Disney-perfect. The movie made me very hungry, which usually means a food movie did something right. *g* Then the kids went to bed -- school night hours -- and Paul and I watched Into the Unknown With Josh Bernstein on Discovery, in which they investigated whether there was a historical event upon which the story of Noah's Ark might have been based (conclusion: there's not much evidence for an ark with all the beasts of the world, but some evidence for the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh where it was only the beasts of the field rescued from the flood).

I only watched the highlights of the Democratic convention, even Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama; there's only so much political blather I can take. That said, I don't know which pisses me off more: the fact that John McCain thinks women might be such idiots that we'd vote for him just because Obama rather than Clinton got the Democratic nomination, or that there seem to be women who are such idiots. The McCain campaign has found several to quote, and I uncharitably assume that they are bigoted and ignorant as well as just plain dumb. I also want to smack all the net-neutrality people who are now saying they won't vote for Obama because Biden voted in support of the telecom companies for protection on surveillance and against file sharing, though that's surely a much smaller number. Do they think John "No Civil Liberties" McCain will be friendly to their interests? I hate having to live in a country with leaders elected by tantrum-throwing brats!

Ah well, I see CERN is reenacting Angels and Demons and People is trying to queer Obama/Biden...there is entertainment in the news.

Poem for Monday

Thermopylae
By Meghan O'Rourke

Bring me to your childhood room, where
the old captains never flinched, and push me to the floor.
The arrows of the Persians flew so thick
and came so fast they blotted out the sun.
All the better, the captains said; we will fight in the shade.
A far cry from the aunt's needlepoint by the door --
Bless this home and all who visit.
Downstairs the family sleeps like a tapestry;
the soldiers stood till noon, when the clouds parted
and sun drenched the battlefield.
Tiger shadows stripe our twisted legs, and even the books
seem to pull from the sight
of my being stitched to your sleeping limbs,
as if beyond the arrows of leaves
they spot a sun unhorsed from its chariot,
head to your breakable head, the shapes
across the pass at first indistinct,
then stiffened into bodies, limbs, thumbs.
One hand running over the bruised ridges of the wound,
the other tugging at the stiff black thread.

--------

Another by O'Rourke's Halflife from Poet's Choice in Sunday's Washington Post Book World. "In 'Thermopylae' (literally 'hot gates'), we see a love affair during a visit to a childhood home. A scene of passion is jump-cut with the famous battle of Thermopylae, the Greeks' failed resistance against invading Persians," writes Mary Karr. "The inspiring Spartans probably knew they were doomed, but their sacrifice permitted Athenians to escape. In the poem's lovemaking scene, the speaker is subversively stitched to her lover (his bookshelves suggesting he reads ancient history), as they join the family tapestry. In the final two lines, the ridges actually exist inside the woman's body, and the stiff tapestry thread evokes painfully tugged hair. Such dense cosmology permits O'Rourke her rich, psychological textures."

I had a great day at the Renfaire with my family and DementorDelta! When we got there, we saw Barely Balanced's acrobatics, then had fish & chips at the place near the stage while Empty Hats was playing. Then we went to the Boarshead Brawl -- the point of which is always to throw drinks in people's faces, toss people out of second-story windows, knock people into the big tub and make bathroom jokes, so the kids love it. We saw the Renaissance Vaudeville team, which includes their dogs ("this is what you can do with a liberal arts degree") and stayed at the Endgame Stage for the abbreviated version of The Tempest. Miranda was portrayed as a giggly bimbo, which I could have lived with, but they cut both Caliban's "Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises" and Prospero's "Our revels now are ended" speeches! Grrrr!

After the play, we walked a bit around the shops. At the mint, I had a coin made with the Chalice Well on one side and the Holy Grail on the other. We also stopped in the scriptorium/bookstore, several jewelry stores, the dragon hatchery (where they actually sell baby lizards), a couple of art galleries, the pirate ship armory and the glassworks. Late in the afternoon we went to see Barely Balanced's fire show at the Globe Theatre in which they not only perform acrobatics and juggling, but do so with knives and torches. Next on the schedule was the Ultimate Joust; with the theme this year being a visit to England by Ivan the Terrible and his knights, Russian villainy becomes the excuse for fighting and blowing things up. The Pennsylvania Faire has less serious jousting than its Maryland counterpart, but they always do a big bang at the finale and I really enjoyed seeing the number of women who ride as knights. Finally, we had dinner -- Spanish food (well, really Tex-Mex) for some of us, turkey legs and bread bowls for others. And we drove back to Maryland!

English and Muscovite knights clashed in the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire's jousting arena.


Before the competition, the queen greeted her loyal subjects.


Barely Balanced performed fabulous acrobatics during their morning show at the Boarshead Inn...


...and played with fire during their late show at the Globe Theatre.


This year the Faire includes demonstrations of falconry...


...and an abbreviated version of The Tempest in which both of these characters got their best speeches cut.


At the inn, Sir Robert Dudley and Sir Walter Raleigh managed to get a lot of people dunked.


And here are myself and DementorDelta looking perky in our bright wench garb.

Poem for Sunday

Descent
By Meghan O'Rourke

after Apollinaire

I was born a bastard in an amphetamine spree,
lit through with a mother's quickenings,
and I burrowed into her, afraid she would not have me,
and she would not have me,
I dropped out down below the knees
of a rickrack halterdress, sheeted,
tented knees, water breaking, linoleum peeling,
and no one there to see but me,
I woke on the floor as if meant to put her back together,
to try to hold on to her
like a crate to a river, as if I'd been shipped down
to stand straight while
in the misgiving
she said I had a dream of thirty-six sticks floating down a river and a dog who couldn't swim and I could not swim,
I slipped from her grip in a room
where two orange cats stared like tidy strangers
at a world of larger strangeness,
and I had no name.
I was there at her breast
and I thought I could see her,
the swag of her hair, the jaw,
the fearing, but I barely saw,
I went sliding down the river from a house
in which it was sweet to sleep
and the cool of the sheets was never cool enough,
the imprint of the bedded bodies two geese diving at once.

--------

"With a fresh, wry voice, Meghan O'Rourke can make the quotidian sound strange," writes Mary Karr in Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "In 'Descent,' the speaker's own birth begins with a metaphoric shock. The refrain -- 'she would not have me' -- is a repeated fear and a statement of the baby's sense of undesirability. The speaker is, in a word, unbearable. The baby is then 'dropped,' followed by three prepositions meant to reiterate the considerable fall: 'out down below.' Relocating the birth in physical and fashion history, she notes the hem of her mother's mod halter dress. The word 'rickrack' both describes the trim and enacts sonically the back and forth of the poet's vision. The baby passes 'sheeted, tented knees, water breaking, linoleum peeling,/and no one there to see but me.' This is the poet's plight -- 'no one there to see but me' -- and she's born into both wonder and danger: 'I slipped from her grip/in a room where two orange cats stared/like tidy strangers at a world of larger strangeness,/and I had no name.'"

DementorDelta is here and we are going to the Pennsylvania RenFaire on Sunday! On Saturday we went to National Geographic Explorers Hall to see China's Forgotten Fleet: Voyages of Zheng He, about the eunuch admiral of the Ming Dynasty who sailed on seven voyages to India, Africa, the Arabian peninsula and many places in Europe, almost 100 years before Columbus set sail from Spain. The National Museum in China loaned National Geographic copies of his maps and the Quanzhou Maritime Museum provided ship models including a 10-foot-long replica of a treasure ship.

This is the replica of the treasure ship, with a representation of Columbus' Santa Maria beside it for size comparison.


This ship had four poop decks and the officers aboard lived quite nicely.


Ming porcelain produced in the Jingdezhen kilns; this blue-and-white pattern is known as qingbua.


A bronze bell from 1431, commissioned by Zheng He as a prayer offering during a winter monsoon.


Rubies from Sri Lanka were among the most valuable treasures of the fleet. Pirates initially tried to seize prizes from the treasure ships and were brutally put down.


Iron spearhead designed to fit on a shaft, bearing an inscription honoring Zheng He, created in Indonesia where the admiral is still honored during the San Po festival.


This copper censer with clouds and elephants decorating it was given as a gift to an East African leader.


A memorial to the sea goddess Tianfei erected at Changle in 1431 by Zheng He, telling of his efforts to treat people with kindness and virtue.

Paul made us lobster cakes for dinner while the kids were at the pool and we were watching Torchwood, then DementorDelta and I went to see Bottle Shock, which was enormous fun -- Alan Rickman got to make every sneering, eye-rolling expression in his repertoire and Bradley Whitford and Eliza Dushku had bit parts. I liked Chris Pine a lot, too, even though I was trying not to because there is no way I am ever going to see him as Captain Kirk. It's lighter than Sideways and also has a gratuitous blonde love interest, but it's very entertaining. After the movie, we thought about stopping at Gifford's for ice cream, but the line was so long that we opted for going to the grocery store and getting whipped cream, fudge, peanut butter sauce and Moose Tracks. Gronk!

Poem for Saturday

Song
By Seamus Heaney

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

--------

For Ethel King.

I had a weird day. Wrote a review of "Allegiance" in between making the kids lunch, sending them to the pool and washing their bed linens. Was all excited to see Great Big Sea at Wolf Trap in the evening; we got there just after the doors opened, sat on the lawn to eat dinner, then went into the house expecting to see Eddie From Ohio open for Great Big Sea; instead Great Big Sea opened, which instantly filled the house. The center aisles were mostly season ticket holders and stayed in their seats at first, but the sides, which is where we were sitting, were full of people with flags and Newfoundland Republican Army shirts who danced through the entire set (they did pretty much everything on the new CD -- "Walk on the Moon," "England," "Banks of Newfoundland," "Straight To Hell," "Company of Fools," etc. -- plus "Ordinary Day," "The Night Pat Murphy Died," "General Taylor," "Consequence Free" and lots of others). But younger son was shielding his eyes from the house lights, and we ended up leaving shortly after Eddie From Ohio came on after the interval, because nothing sucks more than being at a concert with a migraine, as I know. I am so glad GBS came on first!

There are no photos allowed in the Filene Center -- not that everyone was following the rules -- but I did leave the flash off, so none of my Great Big Sea photos are great.


There were a lot of empty seats when we got inside (I think a lot of people thought Eddie From Ohio would take the stage first) but they filled up quickly.


But I don't have any photos of Sean McCann dancing across the stage with the bodhran. Nor of Alan Doyle making up his own sign language to announce his bid for King of the United States.


Here from a greater distance is Eddie From Ohio; I don't know their music well enough to report on the songs in the part of their set we heard, though they sounded great (despite the name, they're local, from Virginia).


We met these two wild and crazy women on the lawn. They may wish to remain anonymous, however. *g*


Here are everyone's t-shirts for sale in the souvenir booth...


...and here's the upper deck of the Filene Center before the concert, for posterity.

Fannish5: Describe the five worst costuming choices in a tv show or movie.
I'm sure there are far more egregious examples from film that I'm not thinking of at the moment (not counting fun historical anachronisms like everything in Elizabeth or The Ten Commandments):
1. Seven of Nine's catsuit, Star Trek: Voyager.
2. Kirk's evil green wraparound, Star Trek.
3. Everything Inara wore, Firefly.
4. The nipple suit, Batman & Robin.
5. Guinevere's battle bikini, King Arthur.

I thought SGA was pretty well done until the end -- terrific performances from everyone but Jewel Staite who impresses me less the more things I see her in, and way outshone here as a character by Rodney's sister and by John...I know Elizabeth was not popular in some quarters as too much of a wimp, but from what I've seen, she would never have been so completely closed-minded about alien miracle cures even if she didn't want to risk the Wraith attacking, and the whole "I love you" bleeeecccch is the ultimate in bad TV romance writing, dictating a character's emotions to us that they've never shown us or justified through the character's actions...this rang totally wrong to me and I don't even pair Rodney with anyone else! I buy that Keller's his type (female, younger, not very bright) but not that he'd think this was love even when he was dying. John's refusal to say goodbye to Rodney sounded a lot more convincingly like love to me.

Also, SGA was outshone a bit for me by the SG-1 rerun that was on right afterward, which started with a discovery in a cave under Glastonbury -- I didn't realize they'd done an Avalon arc -- so of course I left it on. And then they revealed that Merlin built the device and gave up his ascended status to protect the other ascended Ancients, which just makes me grin. Plus it was a pretty good Sam episode, which I always enjoy.

Poem for Friday

Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Robert Alter

Close scrutiny of the past.
How my soul yearns within me like those souls
in the nineteenth century before the great wars,
like curtains that want to pull free
of the open window and fly.

We console ourselves with short breaths,
as, after running, we always recover.
We want to reach death hale and hearty,
like a murderer sentenced to death,
wounded when he was caught,
whose judges want him to heal before
he's brought to the gallows.

I think, how many still waters
can yield a single night of stillness
and how many green pastures, wide as deserts,
can yield the quiet of a single hour
and how many valleys of the shadow of death do we need
to be a compassionate shade in the unrelenting sun.

I look out the window: a hundred and fifty
psalms pass through the twilight,
a hundred and fifty psalms, great and small.
What a grand and glorious and transient fleet!

I say: the window is God
And the door is his prophet.

--------

We had a pretty quiet last Thursday before school starts; I made the kids try on clothes to see whether they actually have enough to wear, we all had bagels, then I sent them to the pool and worked on uploading trip photos to do a book while I have a freebie from Shutterfly (I actually won one in a Quaker Cereal contest!). My mother took the kids out for dinner so that Paul and I could go to Virginia unencumbered to see Iona...the boys are not always big folk music enthusiasts and we're taking them to Great Big Sea on Friday night, which is probably enough for the week.

Iona was playing for free outdoors at Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, where there are several restaurants, a boat launch, a used bookstore and a community center. I don't dare try to list everything they played, or in which combinations, as they always mix it up; they did "The Highwayman," "Donald MacGillavry," "Darby the Driver," "V'la le bon vent," "Hills of Connemara" (the one where "Barnaby" is the only word anyone remembers to sing along), a funny waulking song about women tired of working with sheep wool, and lots of Breton, Scottish and Irish songs whose names I can't transliterate well enough to Google and find correct titles. It was a terrific concert, though, and during the break between sets we got mocha at the coffee shop in the plaza -- a lovely evening.

Iona performing in front of the Baptist church at Reston's Lake Anne Plaza.


Lots of small children got up to run around, and Bernard Argent asked for volunteer adults to teach everyone a dance.


Lake Anne has both low-rise and high-rise residential apartments as well as the public areas...


...restaurants, clothing and book stores, plus several small markets...


...fountains, rental paddleboats and canoes.


There were plenty of folkies, but also many people listening to the concert just because they happened to be around.


Jim Queen, the newest member of Iona, plays fiddle as well as banjo after 30 years performing with the Air Force Band.


The musicians played till it was dark out. You can see Barbara Ryan's feet blur as she taps the rhythm.

Poem for Thursday

Here the Birds' Journey Ends
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

Here the birds' journey ends, our journey, the journey of words,
and after us there will be a horizon for the new birds.
We are the ones who forge the sky's copper, the sky that will carve roads
after us and make amends with our names above the distant cloud slopes.
Soon we will descend the widow's descent in the memory fields
and raise our tent to the final winds: blow, for the poem to live, and blow
on the poem's road. After us, the plants will grow and grow
over roads only we have walked and our obstinate steps inaugurated.
And we will etch on the final rocks, "Long live life, long live life,"
and fall into ourselves. And after us there'll be a horizon for the new birds.

--------

One more by Darwish, the Palestinian poet who died last week; this one snicked from this week's New Yorker.

Another day in the lead-up to the start of school next week, we made the inevitable Target run for school supplies and are now the proud owners of new dividers, lined and graph paper, composition books, colored pencils, a compass, and various other necessities (both kids swear they don't need new binders, which means that two weeks from now when Staples and Office Depot are both out of them, we will be frantically searching for one). We also stopped at the mall so Adam could sell back his Petz Catz game for half price and get a used copy of Puzzlequest Challenge Warlords, which apparently pleases him far more and the total was only about $9 more, so that worked out about as well as could be expected. Plus Adam discovered the nightmare that is Owls and proceeded to sing it to me all day, so he was in a good mood. Daniel got new clothes from both me and my mother, yet somehow this did not make him ecstatic.

Oddly enough, in the midst of all this fun, I got a murderous migraine and when the kids finally went to the pool at three, I collapsed on the couch under the influence of Imitrex for two hours. This helped a great deal, though not quickly enough for me to want to go see Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra even though they were playing for free in Fairfax (we're going to see Iona on Thursday night and Great Big Sea on Friday, so I can't really complain). Instead we stayed home and watched the rest of Amadeus -- not much new material added in the last hour of the director's cut, so it played out pretty much as I remember it from seeing it over and over in the theater my freshman year of college. The kids were extremely attentive, which they are not always during historical epics or classical music, so I felt very gratified.

Daniel requested Robot Chicken before Olympic diving, so we put on the second season and got to see the hilarious Harry Potter parody with Melanie Griffith as Hermione -- "Professor Snape, Harry and Ron have been cursed by the monster Pubertis!" And then Professor Snape tries to convince her to get into his hot tub, at which point she uses Rejecto Pedophilius on him, hee! Plus they did March of the Penguin -- Danny DeVito crossed with Morgan Freeman -- which also cracked us up because we are ALL twelve. Condolences on the cancellation of Stargate Atlantis -- I still haven't caught up on the first season, let alone on this season, but I know a lot of people are very sad!

Poem for Wednesday

The Candlelighter
By Simon Armitage

From Dove Cottage, I sloped out through the side gate
and climbed the corpse road past the coffin stone,
then curved through a mixed copse to a scree path
scored by rainwater into the hill's back.
I was hauled upward by a borrowed dog
on a makeshift leash, a yellow Labrador,
busy for every birdcall and blown leaf.
Over a hand-stacked wall, in the next fold,
under the driftwood bones of an old elm,
a red deer had dropped down from the high fell
with morning beaconed in its flaming horns.
With dawn-light cradled in its branching crown.
I stood in some blind spot of its dark eye,
and deer and dog were still and unaware
and stayed that way, divided by the wall,
wild stag and hunting hound in separate worlds,
before the deer pushed on through tinder thickets,
igniting the next wold. And the dog yawned.
Then I hacked up the ghyll to higher ground,
toward the hill's bare head, counting the dead
and the hikers striding along the ridge,
thinking of taking a drink from the tarn,
thinking of adding a new stone to the cairn.

--------

I took my kids out to Lebanese Taverna with me and , who has gotten a job downtown and won't be able to meet me in Rockville at lunchtime any more. We had lots of fantastic hummus and shawarma and walked around a bit in the stores nearby afterward -- there's a new children's store in the former Tower Records building that has housed the fantastic Halloween costume store the past two years, woe! We stopped in Bagel City to get bagels for breakfast, then came home and I sent the kids to the pool to work off lunch.

The deer and fawn across the street from the swimming pool (photo taken through windshield, sorry about the spots).


There was another adult deer with them -- we have seen this trio in the woods approaching our street as well.


I don't think it's a good thing that they're so fearless of people, though.


This heron is not only unafraid of the other geese in the lake, it is happy to peck them out of the way when it sees a fish it wants.


I never get tired of seeing turtles in neighborhood streams.


Or snakes, though this one lives at the Locust Grove Nature Center.


Potomac Overlook Park is not suffering from the honeybee crisis; their hive is in excellent health.


And a cat who has found a comforter to lie on (that was supposed to be put away by its owner!).

We put on Amadeus in the evening -- the director's cut, which is three hours long -- and though the kids were doing other things when we started, they both ended up coming in and watching, and we stopped it when it was time for them to go to bed so we can all watch the rest when they're awake tomorrow. We turned on the Olympics just as the balance beam competition was starting, so I got to see Shawn Johnson in the last women's gymnastics event of the Games.

Poem for Tuesday

Shells
By Kathleen Raine

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet or murex,
cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

--------

Another domestic day broken up by taking the kids to the pool, going to the post office, and various shopping chores. Both kids wanted to go out to spend the last of their birthday money on video games, since this is the last week they can play them on weekdays before school starts: Daniel wanted Final Fantasy IV, Adam wanted Petz Cats 2 which he apparently thought would be like a cat version of Nintendogs. It wasn't, and he was bitterly disappointed and spent the rest of the afternoon unhappy. I didn't know what to tell him, since I always tell them to check ratings and play demos before they spend their money on games. I'm wondering whether this particular game has glitches in it and that's why he can't make it do the things he thought it did, but I don't know enough about Nintedo DS games to have any idea!

The Air Mobility Command Museum was having a historic car, truck and cycle show when we visited last weekend.


Here, from the window of the C-141B Starlifter, is a view of some of the planes and other vehicles on display.


This is Lockheed's Hercules, built in the 1950s.


The outside of Hangar 1301, built in 1944 as the headquarters for the 4146th Base Unit for secret rocket testing...


...now the permanent home of the Air Mobility Command Museum, which keeps its most painstakingly restored planes inside.


Here's a view from the upper catwalk, which has a display on refueling in flight. The big plane in the foreground is a C-47, with a B-17 in the back.


Here's a yummy World War II paratrooper's dinner: SPAM, crackers, a Hershey bar, gum, and cigarettes. I'm surprised none of the men got scurvy.


The working airfields of Dover AFB are just beyond the museum.

I'm completely oversaturated on the Olympics -- we all are -- so in the evening we watched Deja Vu on On Demand, which was a much better movie than I was expecting...I'm not sure why I didn't expect to like it so much, considering it's a great cast and a neat sci-fi hook. I howled when they were first trying to send a message into the past and one of the tech guys yelled, "I need more cowbell!" And I liked the resolution of the obvious conundrum (the fact of two Denzel Washingtons in the past), but I'm completely mystified why, when he realized he couldn't go to the police with information from the future, he didn't call in an anonymous bomb threat, which should have been sufficient to get the ferry evacuated an hour before its launch!

I am worried, though, about the sea turtles that wandered into a restaurant and the baby whale that tried to bond with a yacht after its mother apparently abandoned it. At least there is good news for penguins who want to be knights.

Poem for Monday

Vers de Société
By Philip Larkin

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I'm afraid--

Funny how hard it is to be alone.
I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,
Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted
Over to catch the drivel of some bitch
Who's read nothing but Which;
Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled
With forks and faces, rather than repaid
Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,
And looking out to see the moon thinned
To an air-sharpened blade.
A life, and yet how sternly it's instilled

All solitude is selfish. No one now
Believes the hermit with his gown and dish
Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish
Is to have people nice to you, which means
Doing it back somehow.
Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?
Something that bores us, something we don't do well
(Asking that ass about his fool research)
But try to feel, because, however crudely,
It shows us what should be?
Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course--

--------

Another from Poet's Choice in Sunday's Washington Post Book World. "Philip Larkin almost tried to sound unattractive and misanthropic...ultra-conservative in politics and art, he praised Margaret Thatcher and mocked experimenters like Picasso," writes Mary Karr. "He didn't read in public and eschewed any fanfare...he never wasted a reader's time but spitefully resented his own being wasted through inane social activity. He opens "Vers de Société" by satirizing an invitation [yet] the poem concludes with Larkin's trademark fear of death, which leads him to accept the invite he initially scorned."

We talked about maybe going downtown today to see the exhibit on China's lost fleet at National Geographic or the one on Afghanistan's treasures at the National Gallery of Art, but laundry and getting organized ended up winning out. So I have nothing really exciting to report, not even on our neighborhood pool's dessert party, which was scheduled for tonight but apparently got switched at some point while we were out of town. The kids swam anyway and played with Adam's good friend, and I got some photos cropped and answered a pile of e-mail.

This "Flying Fortress" B-17, now housed at the Air Mobility Command Museum at Dover Air Force Base, has been painted with Sleepy Time Gal's nose art.


This plane had a crew of 10 when the Germans shot it down in 1944 during a flight out of England. The man standing on the far right is Harry Shirey, the tail gunner.


Shirey, from Delaware, was sitting here when the plane went down and was a POW for more than a year.


Here is one of Staff Sergeant Shirey's uniforms on display at the museum.


And here is Harry Shirey describing his experiences aboard the aircraft. Born in 1922 in Pennsylvania, a member of the 96th Bomb Group during the war, he now volunteers at the museum.


The ball turret beneath the plane was supposedly one of the safest places to be during flight, though one of the deadliest in the event of a crash.


I still find it hard to believe that a grown man could fit in here, or stay in it for any length of time without going crazy.


Here is a view into the B-17's bomb bay. It could carry 16,000 lbs of bombs.

From Juniperus, who got exactly the same result:

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test...

NBPC - The Daydreamer

Nature, Background, Big Picture, and Color

You perceive the world with particular attention to nature. You focus on the hidden treasures of life (the background) and how that fits into the larger picture. You are also particularly drawn towards the colors around you. Because of the value you place on nature, you tend to find comfort in more subdued settings and find energy in solitude. You like to ponder ideas and imagine the many possibilities of your life without worrying about the details or specifics. You are in tune with all that is around you and understand your life as part of a larger whole. You are a down-to-earth person who enjoys going with the flow.

The Perception Personality Types:

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

I love that version of the Exodus music that Anna Pavlova uses for her gymnastics floor routine at the Olympics. Does anyone know who did the recording? And whether Pavlova has ever commented on why she chose it? I can't believe her coach, the Russian team coordinator and Pavlova herself (is she related to the dancer of the same name?) are all unaware of the music's origin or what the film and the book it's based on are about.

Poem for Sunday

No Road
By Philip Larkin

Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers -- our neglect
Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be allowed. A little longer,
And time will be the stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others, is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.
Willing it, my ailment.

--------

From Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, in which Mary Karr writes, "My favorite poems by Larkin are...the more introspective lyrics that find a tragic failure to love in his urge to isolate. In 'No Road,' the lost lover is also a next-door neighbor. These last lines sound squeezed through clenched teeth -- the phrases growing shorter and shorter, as if losing steam. So as the poet's self-knowledge becomes more like an indictment of inadequacy, the poem tightens till it snaps shut, leaving us out, as Larkin willed it."

We're home after a relatively easy drive -- very little traffic approaching or going over the Bay Bridge despite the accident earlier in the week -- and a nice afternoon in Dover. I convinced Paul to stop at the beach after we checked out, so I got to stick my feet in the Atlantic one more time, and Adam was excited because there were piping plovers running up and down the sand looking for crabs the big waves were churning up. Then we drove to the Air Mobility Command Museum at Dover Air Force Base, where in addition to the historic planes and exhibits on the Berlin Airlift, Operation Nickel Grass, refueling in midair and the lives of enlisted men among other displays -- there was a World War II veteran talking about his time as the tail gunner on a B-17G that was shot down by the Germans, leading to the entire crew being taken prisoner, though all of them survived the war -- the museum was hosting a historic car, truck and cycle show. We ate lunch in the canteen, then drove into the center of Dover, the capital of Delaware. We visited the Biggs Museum of American Art, which has art both by Delaware artists and related to Delaware history, and toured the 1791 Georgian Old State House.

This is the Old State House in the center of Dover, surrounded by the Supreme Court and various other historical and government buildings.


This is where the legislature met on the second floor of the building. Some of the early representatives were the same men who voted to ratify the US Constitution, making Delaware the first state.


The Kent County legislature met in this building as well before they moved across the square to Legislative Hall, where each representative has a labeled parking spot.


The first floor of the Old State House served as a county courtroom, here set up as it would have looked in the 18th century. The tour guides described in detail the trials of local free blacks and Quakers convicted of helping slaves escape.


Here is a view of the courtroom from the top of the geometrical staircase. Most of the county's records are still housed nearby.


The Constitution was not ratified in this building, however, which was not completed at the time. Unsurprisingly, the delegates met in a tavern across the square for that historic event.


Many of the original settlers in Delaware were Dutch, though they were usurped in some areas by the Swedes. The Biggs Museum collections reflect that history.


The Green, the historic park linking the government buildings in Dover, has a reproduction of the Liberty Bell given to the people of Delaware.

Driving out of Dover, we discovered by accident that Dover has a terrific Pagan store, Bell, Book & Candle, where I demanded that we stop and find a parking space. Then we drove back across Kent Island and the Chesapeake Bay, electing not to stop for dinner till we were home because we knew we'd need a grocery store trip. Paul and Daniel had Jerry's pizza; Adam and I had sushi, really excellent spicy tuna rolls. The cats look like they can't quite figure out what we're doing here and why PerkyPaduan isn't here, but as long as they have bags to climb in and food in their dishes, they don't seem too stressed out! And yay for Michael Phelps!

Poem for Saturday

Ummi (My Mother)
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Ben Bennani

I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother.

And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a God
If I touch the depths of your heart.

If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand.

I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest.

--------

Another by Darwish, written 40 years ago when the poet was imprisoned in Israel, described in Linda Gradstein's Washington Post article as an anthem for many Palestinians after having been set to music by Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife. Historian Adel Manna, an Arab citizen of Israel who grew up near Darwish, said that his longtime friend "liberated the old Arabic poetry from its constraints and made it accessible to a big audience."

It rained all night but the sun was out at 8 am Friday, so we went to the ocean early. The water was a bit rougher and chillier than the day before, but this provided the advantage of an uncrowded beach. The lifeguards were asking people please not to use boogie boards because the big waves and riptides caused accidents with them. The kids dug big pits and built sand castles, and we found mole crabs and looked at their eggs. My parents came down in the late morning and we all went to the pool for a while, then to the seaside deli in the Sea Colony complex.

In the afternoon we returned to Viking Golf because we had promised Adam that he could go on the big water slides at Thunder Lagoon. I stayed with him while Paul played mini golf with Daniel, then we had some of the excellent caramel corn on the little boardwalk there. My parents had dinner plans with friends and we had planned in the evening to go see Mythica, a local Celtic band, in a free outdoor concert, but there was late afternoon lightning that closed Thunder Lagoon and then a hailstorm on the way back to Bethany Beach from Fenwick Island, so instead we had tacos at the beach house.

From the top of a World War II observation tower at Cape Henlopen, a view of another "ghost tower."


Here is the surveillance structure up close -- there are many of these along the Delaware shore, relics of fears of a German invasion.


A long spiral stair takes visitors up to three levels of narrow windows for lookouts and the top of the tower.


Fort Miles from the tower. There are barracks, research stations and several old guns on display there.


On the other side, the Lewes lighthouse, another observation tower, and the ferry from Cape May, New Jersey.


Cape Henlopen is also a popular fishing spot. People set up chairs on the boardwalk by the way and fish all night.


The bait shop is open late, though they do not sell fishing licenses, and everyone who wants to fish or catch crabs must have one of those.


On the way to the nature center and the crab walk, we saw lots of deer grazing near the woods.

The Friday Five: Music
1. What is your favorite song right now? Why? "Until a Drop Becomes a Flood" by Leela and Ellie Grace, because it's sweet and political and witty and passionate and very easy to sing along.
2. What genre of music makes you the happiest? Sometimes folk music, sometimes disco, sometimes Mozart, sometimes old musicals.
3. What would you name your band and what kind of music would you play? The Grifters, and we'd play pretty much anything awesome from the '60s-'80s -- rock, pop, schlock.
4. What is your favorite lyric of all time? Why? Paul Simon's "Graceland," because it's brilliant. "The Mississippi delta was shining like a National Guitar" the first line -- the image of the river both as a brand of silver guitar and as the national guitar set in the cradle of the blues (as well as the cradle of the Civil War, as the song says) -- and it just goes on from there.
5. What band/artist could you never live without? Why? The Indigo Girls. If you don't know why, you should listen to them some more.

Fannish5: Name 5 books with the most compelling first chapters.
1. Richard Bach, Illusions
2. Marina Warner, The Leto Bundle
3. Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain
4. Pete Hamill, Forever
5. Janette Turner Hospital, The Last Magician

We had a quiet evening packing, organizing and watching the "Return To Tomorrow" episode of Stargate Atlantis. Or is it the Battlestar Galactica episode? No matter how well any other actress imitates Tori Higginson's expressions, I want the real, original Elizabeth Weir back, dammit. Saturday we're driving home by way of Dover, where we want to visit a wildlife refuge.

Poem for Friday

Psalm 9
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Ben Bennani

O rose beyond the reach of time and of the senses
O kiss enveloped in the scarves of all the winds
surprise me with one dream
that my madness will recoil from you.

Recoiling from you
In order to approach you
I discovered time.

Approaching you
in order to recoil from you
I discovered my senses.

Between approach and recoil
there is a stone the size of a dream
It does not approach
It does not recoil.

You are my country
A stone is not what I am
therefore I do not like to face the sky
nor do I die level with the ground
but I am a stranger, always a stranger.

--------

Darwish died earlier this week and his funeral was yesterday. A Washington Post article by Linda Gradstein quoted a 17-year-old named Irjwan Assi as saying, "We lost a very important symbol of our nationalism and our cultural heritage," adding that she believes Darwish was even more important to Palestinians than Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian by birth whose family moved to Lebanon after the creation of Israel, then returned when he was in high school, Darwish lived much of his adult life abroad after being imprisoned both for having communist ties and for his association with the PLO, for which he wrote a manifesto intended to serve as a declaration of independence. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called him "the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human condition."

Thursday morning we went to the beach, where the weather was beautiful -- low 80s -- and the ocean was too, warm and wavy without it being too rough to swim. We went out on boogie boards for a while, and dove in waves, and found lots of big mole crabs with orange eggs. After a quick swim at the pool, we went back for lunch, then went fishing in the pond with my parents' friends and their kids and grandkids. Daniel caught and released another huge catfish; Adam, who caught a sunfish that my father wanted to use as bait to catch a bigger fish, was not at all happy about the hooking and maiming, and I must admit to feeling the same way.

In the afternoon we went to Rehoboth and took the kids to the boardwalk arcade. My parents joined us and we all went to Nicola's Pizza for Nic-o-bolis, an annual tradition at the beach dating back to my childhood. Then we left my parents, stopped in a couple of Rehoboth shops, and drove to Cape Henlopen State Park in Lewes, where we went to Fort Miles' observation tower, then to the seaside nature center for a ghost crab walk, which took us through a patch of deer-filled woods past bats and cicadas to the bay, where by the light of flashlights and a nearly full moon, we saw the translucent little crabs scuttling in the sand. It started to drizzle on the way back through the trees, a lovely cool night.

A ghost crab by the bay at Cape Henlopen.


A heron fishing in the pond outside our beach house.


And nearby, a dragonfly.


The sunfish caught by Adam.


Ducks are often in the pond as well, eating off the bottom and mooning anyone who happens to be around.


The snapping turtle and the tiny fish in the marshy area near the dock are always looking for lost bits of bait to gulp down.


There's a bunny who lives in the grassy area between the buildings on the way to the beach and sometimes climbs up on the dunes.


And there are quite a few spiders living all over the various boardwalks and wooden stairs.

Friday is our last full day in Delaware. What we will do depends in large part on the weather. If it's miserable out, we may go to Dover or Lewes, but if it's only overcast and there's no thunder, we want to go to the beach as much as possible!

Poem for Thursday

Dooryard Flower
By Ellen Bryant Voigt

Because you are sick I want to bring you flowers,
flowers from the landscape that you love—
because it is your birthday and you're sick
I want to bring the outdoors inside,
the natural and the wild, picked by hand,
but nothing is blooming here but daffodils,
archipelagic in the short green
early grass, erupted
bulbs planted decades before we came,
the edge of where a garden once was kept
extended now in a string of islands I straddle
as in a fairy tale, harvesting,
not taking the single blossom from a clump
but thinning where they're thickest, tall-stemmed
from the mother patch, dwarf to the west, most
fully opened, a loosened whorl,
one with a pale spider luffing her thread,
one with a slow beetle chewing the lip, a few
with what's almost a lion's mane,
and because there is a shadow on your lungs, your liver,
and elsewhere, hidden,
some of those with delicate green
streaks in the clown's ruff (corolla—
actually made from adapted leaves), and more
right this moment starting to unfold, I've gathered
my two fists full, I carry them like a bride,
I am bringing you the only glorious thing
in the yards and fields between my house and yours,
none of the tulips budded yet, the lilac
a sheaf of sticks, the apple trees
withheld, the birch unleaved—
it could still be winter here, were it not
for green dotted with gold, but you won't wait
for dogtoothed violets, trillium under the pines,
and who could bear azaleas, dogwood, early profuse rose
of somewhere else when you're assaulted here, early May,
not any calm narcissus, orange corona
on scalloped white, not even it's slender stalk
in a fountain of leaves, no stiff cornets of the honest
jonquils, gendered parts upthrust in brass and cream:
just this common flash in anyone's yard,
scrambled cluster of petals
crayon-yellow, as in a child's crawing of the sun,
I'm bringing you a sun, a children's choir, host
of transient voices, first bright
splash in the gray exhausted world, a feast
of the dooryard flower we call butter-and-egg.

--------

On Thursday we drove back to Maryland for the first time since we entered Delaware on Saturday, driving through Ocean City en route to Assateague Island National Seashore. We stopped at the Barrier Island visitor center to see the film about wildlife in the park and to look at the tanks of bay fish and shellfish, then drove over the bridge and saw ponies immediately in the marsh on the other side. There were also egrets, seagulls and a great blue heron in the tall grass. We went to the bayside boardwalk where people were fishing and crabbing, then to the North Beach Life Saving Station museum, which had always been closed when we visited before. Unhappily, I lost the cap for my VR lens after the cap leash broke, which is a real pain, as it will take several days to replace...I suspect I'll mostly be using the little Nikon for the rest of the trip, particularly with so much sand around.

Ponies graze in the grass while an egret flies off in the distance of Assateague Island. (Chincoteague, which is in Virginia, is another hour south.)


A girl fishing with a net in the shallow water of Sinepuxent Bay...


...for blue crabs like this one, though this little one was probably dropped back in (all crabs must be measured before being removed from the bay).


Fiddler crabs like this one live in holes at the edge of the water.


They are, however, eaten by the likes of this herring gull, laughing gulls, plovers, egrets, herons and other birds.


Most of the families we saw in the national park were gathered to fish or look for crabs near this station.


Beautiful egrets -- cattle egrets and snowy egrets -- can be seen in the tall grasses all over the region.


But I suspect this sight is why most people come to this park: wild ponies at the side of the road, crossing parking lots, walking on beaches and munching the grass.

Because it was already nearly two in the afternoon when we left, we stopped for lunch at a Subway in Ocean City, then came back to where we're staying and Paul and I took the kids to the beach for a late afternoon swim. The tide was nearly in and it wasn't very hot -- low 80s, perfect -- and the beach wasn't nearly as crowded as it gets in the mornings. We caught and released many mole crabs and saw seagulls and pelicans fishing for them. After the lifeguards left, we followed the kids to the pool and swam a bit before returning for dinner -- there's a grill in the beach house so dinner was hot dogs, sausages and BBQ chicken. Then we watched some Olympics and some Red Sox.

Poem for Wednesday

Heat
By Denis Johnson

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
         you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

--------

We went to the beach on Tuesday morning, where it was a bit cooler than the day before -- low 80s -- and the water wasn't quite as rough, so I swam for longer with Paul and Daniel. Adam, who didn't want to risk being knocked over by the waves and whose legs were itching from the salt water, went to the pool nearby in the beachfront part of the community. We ate a late lunch, then my father took the kids fishing at the catch-and-release pond right near our condo. Daniel caught a very big catfish and both kids caught smaller ones, but a lot of our excitement was watching the snapping turtle steal the bait and seeing the ducks, dragonflies, and other wildlife around.

In the late afternoon, the kids wanted to go to the indoor pool, so my father took them there while my mother, Paul and I went to Sea Shell City in Fenwick Island, home of the DiscoverSea Museum -- downstairs, a big touristy store which in addition to a huge collection of shells and hermit crabs has lots of cheesy pirate, tall ship and sea life souvenirs; upstairs, a collection of artifacts from local shipwrecks plus some famous non-local wrecks like the Titanic, the Edmund Fitzgerald and La Nuestra Senora de Atocha. In the evening after dinner we took a walk and saw bats in the trees, which I suspect the boys and I enjoyed more than my mother did.

Plates and other artifacts from the wreck of the Faithful Steward, which sank near Indian River Inlet, Delaware in 1785 while bound for Philadelphia.


Only 68 of the 249 passengers from Ireland survived, yet their coins continue to wash ashore to this day.


The DiscoverSea Museum has tanks to restore items from the sea to a more polished condition...


...though some items from famous wrecks have purposefully been left in the condition in which they were retrieved.


These items are from the remains of the RMS Empress of Ireland, which sank in 1914 with over 1000 people aboard after being struck by a Norwegian coal ship, the worst nautical disaster in Canadian history.


The museum's label on this Renaissance miniature sundial, about one inch across, is pretty self-explanatory.


From the RMS Republic, which sank in 1909 after a collision with the immigrant ship SS Florida -- though nearly everyone aboard was rescued, thanks to the newly invented Marconi wireless telegraph -- a collection of intact wine bottles.


This case contains a new display since we visited last summer, a diorama of a recovery dive above and below the water.

Wednesday we are planning to go to Assateague to see the ponies, deer and other wildlife!

Poem for Tuesday

Full Moon
By Robert E. Hayden

No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray,
no longer the bubble house of childhood's
tumbling Mother Goose man,

The emphatic moon ascends--
the brilliant challenger of rocket experts,
the white hope of communications men.

Some I love who are dead
were watchers of the moon and knew its lore;
planted seeds, trimmed their hair,

Pierced their ears for gold hoop earrings
as it waxed or waned.
It shines tonight upon their graves.

And burned in the garden of Gethsemane,
its light made holy by the dazzling tears
with which it mingled.

And spread its radiance on the exile's path
of Him who was The Glorious One,
its light made holy by His holiness.

Already a mooted goal and tomorrow perhaps
an arms base, a livid sector,
the full moon dominates the dark.

--------

The weather was beautiful after Sunday's storms, so we went to the beach in the late morning. My parents took a walk to visit friends of theirs, then went to the pool with Adam, whose legs were itching in the salt water after getting scraped in the marsh the other day. Daniel was swimming in the ocean and we hung out in the surf with him. Eventually we washed off, went back to the beach house for lunch, then went to Viking Golf -- an annual tradition -- where, after one round of mini golf which I believe my father won, my mother and I took Adam to the go-karts and snow cones while my father, Daniel and Paul played another round.

Kangor and Midgard, the fire-breathing dragons of the Norse sagas, breathe cool mist on hot days at Viking Golf.


A Viking warrior on horseback in Fenwick Island! (One putts underneath the horse.)


And this hole involves putting underneath the roots of a tree with a troll inside.


See, we didn't have to go all the way to Yellowstone to see a geyser -- Viking Golf has one imported from Iceland.


Trolls are present all over the golf course, go-kart area and water park next door.


See, they even show up in the waterfalls.


Thor and his hammer put in an appearance directing people to the go-karts.


Trolls are even advertised on the electronic sign for the attraction. (Sorry about Eric the Red -- not a fair or accurate depiction!)

We had dinner at the Cottage Cafe, then headed to the Bethany Beach boardwalk, where the kids got ice cream -- Daniel wanted soft serve dipped in hard chocolate shell, Adam wanted make-your-own-sundae -- and we walked on the beach and into a couple of stores. I got some salt water taffy to give as gifts, and a little Ameribag micro to keep around my waist with my cell phone and money when I don't feel like carrying the big purse. In the evening the kids played Scrabble with my mother, though the game was called on account of darkness!

Poem for Monday

Frederick Douglass
By Robert E. Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

--------

Another from Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, "which praises a different kind of sacrifice for another ancestor of his: the freed slave Frederick Douglass," writes Mary Karr. "In a loosely Petrarchan sonnet like this one, there's a turn in the last six lines when Douglass's vision is finally ushered into reality, not with bronze or rhetoric, as Hayden says, but with living creatures: 'lives grown out of his life.' Here's hoping we as a people are at last being united in that freedom." The poem appears in Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher.

I was woken up Sunday morning at 5:30 a.m. by sunlight streaming through my window, then again at 7:30 by thunder, which is a pretty reasonable summary of my day as well. In the morning after breakfast, younger son and I took a walk to see some local wildlife including turtles and the swans and geese that live in this community. By the time we got back, it had clouded over, and by the time we reached the beach, it was thundering so we had to turn around. It proceeded to storm for the next several hours, during which time we ate lunch and Paul and I went out to the Seaside Country Store and Float-Ors, plus the food store for fresh fruit and milk for the week. Eventually the rain stopped and my parents took the kids to the pool.

In the late afternoon, the sun came out and I finally got to go to the beach, where Adam and I found sand crabs and watched plovers and gulls. The sand was churned up and full of shell fragments from the storm, and the water was as warm as the air. Walking back, we saw a rabbit. My mother made lasagna for dinner and after eating, we all needed a walk, so we figured we would take the kids to get ice cream, but while we were in the store, another thunderstorm arrived and we ended up walking back in the rain with big bolts of lightning flashing across the sky.

A sea turtle made of sand on Bethany Beach, Delaware.


Plovers and laughing gulls are a common sight by the water, looking to eat...


...a sand crab, or mole crab, like this one caught by Adam before it was set down to scurry its way back into the wet sand.


Unfortunately, this is what the weather looked like on Sunday at lunchtime...


...though by late afternoon, the skies were clear and people had come back to the beach.


Within our community, about a mile from the shore near the wetlands, one finds plenty of robins and jays.


And the marshes are full of bullfrogs and turtles.


The fountains between the pizza and ice cream parlors are very popular with children on sunny days and look pretty at night in the rain.

In the evening Daniel tried to get my parents to watch Robot Chicken with little success, so we watched some Olympics and some of yesterday's Redskins pre-season game. Now I am fried from being woken up so early!

Poem for Sunday

Those Winter Sundays
By Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

--------

"Hayden's reminiscence of his own father dutifully stoking the morning fire [argues] that any sacrifice for love is an elevating one," writes Mary Karr in Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "The fact that Hayden's father -- black like Hayden -- also 'polished my good shoes,' enacting the shoeshine's traditionally servile role, makes the poem even more moving. The interesting biographical side note is, of course, that Hayden's biological parents gave him up to foster parents, but whether the 'memory' is an orphan's longing or a fragment of an actual memory, the power of the poem is the same. The final phrase about 'love's austere and lonely offices' has a grandeur and poise that elevate the duty to the level of religious ritual, as does the 14-line form of this sonnet, albeit in free verse.

We left for the beach this morning after a stop at my parents' house because they had driven off already and left behind not only the fishing rods but my father's tennis racket, which, considering we're staying in a community renowned for its tennis facilities, would have been a crisis! The traffic was slow across Kent Island, but otherwise pretty good for heading to the Eastern Shore in August. We stopped for lunch at the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center, where we saw raptors being rehabilitated as well as wooden blinds for observing eagles and ospreys. There was also a wildflower garden with butterflies and a bunny.

The unit where we're staying hadn't been cleaned from the previous week yet when we arrived, so we went for a walk with the kids to see if we could find turtles and frogs in the pond behind our condo. We saw both baby and adult snapping turtles, plus we chatted with the Goldmans, who were fishing off the dock (it's all catch-and-release here). For dinner, we went into Bethany Beach to eat at the Penguin Diner -- Adam lobbied for that one -- then took a walk on the beach for half an hour before going to hear the Beatles tribute band Fabmania. When leaving the boardwalk, we bumped into the younger sister of Vertigo66 and her family, so we may take all the kids to play mini golf or something together later in the week!

An injured barred owl in residence at the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center, which is operated by the Wildfowl Trust of North America.


In addition to the constructed blinds for viewing birds, this willow tree provided shade and cover for watching wild birds.


We also saw many wild birds -- gulls and cormorants -- on the lower struts of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge...


...which leads to Maryland's Eastern Shore.


We are staying in Bethany Beach, however, which is in Delaware between Rehoboth and Fenwick Island.


This is part of the view from our porch, which also encompasses a large fountain that creates rainbows out of sunlight.


And this is the underwater snapping turtle that was trying to eat both the fish and the bait for the fish brought by my parents' friends.


Fabmania, fine Beatles imitators, played many of their early hits on the Bethany Beach boardwalk.

Sunday I want to go back to the beach in the morning and see whether we see dolphins as well as the pelicans, gulls, and sand crabs that were around in the evening. The kids want to swim in the big pool here, and we may make one of our annual pilgrimages to the shipwreck museum, Viking Golf, the Seaside Country Store or the Irish shop in Rehoboth.

Poem for Saturday

Understanding
By Constantine Cavafy
Translated by John Ioannidis

The years of my youth, my sensual life --
how clearly I see their meaning now.

What needless repentances, how futile...
But I did not understand the meaning then.

In the dissolute life of my youth
the desires of my poetry were being formed,
the scope of my art was being plotted.

This is why my repentances were never stable.
And my resolutions to control myself, to change
lasted for two weeks at the very most.

--------

My day was mostly taken up with pre-trip chores -- picking up prescriptions, getting Adam's braces adjusted, taking the kids to California Tortilla for lunch, shopping for necessities, packing, writing a review of "Sins of the Father". Reading in disgust about John Edwards and being so very grateful that he was out of the race before doing any damage. Watching the Olympic opening ceremonies (absolutely no comment on US outfits) while organizing toiletries. Nearly everyone I know fannishly is either at the Harry Potter convention in Chicago or the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas this weekend, so I assume few people are reading this anyway!

Monkeys in the fantastic Lied Jungle at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo.


Also in the jungle exhibit, Asian tapirs...


...and scarlet macaws.


In the desert dome, rock hyraxes...


...and a sub-Saharan boomslang (whose skin is hopefully safe here from harvesting for Polyjuice potion).


Parakeets -- or budgerigars, depending on where you're from -- in the Budgie Encounter.


Flamingos below the trees and cattle egrets in nests in the trees in the aviary.


And in their enclosure outside the Scott Aquarium, little blue penguins.

The Friday Five: Memories
1. Smells, and memories. Do you have a scent that when you smell it, brings up a memory? Do share. Lots. Juniper bushes are being in my great aunt and uncle's backyard, Chinese food lunch trucks are being in front of my college library, anything sulfuric makes me think of being in Yellowstone.
2. Songs. Is there a particular song that brings back happy memories? Song title and memory, if you care to share that much. Again, lots. "Y.M.C.A." is several different weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, "Uncle John's Band" is driving on vacation, "These Are Days" is the summer I was pregnant with my first child.
3. How about a song that brings up painful memories? Song title and memory, if you care to share that much. "Dream On." Bad month.
4. Food. Is there a certain food that conjures up memories? Matzoh ball soup is my grandmothers, peanut noodles are summers between school years, chocolate chip pancakes are after midnight at IHOP when I had a movie to review in college.
5. Clothing? Do you have an item of clothing or if you see a certain item, does it make you think of a time/place or person? A lot of my favorite clothes were gifts -- some from my mother, some from Gblvr, some from DementorDelta, some from MamaDracula -- so they make me think of when they gave them to me and places we went together.

Fannish 5: Five reasons your OTP/a favorite pairing belong together.
Should I write about Kirk/Spock or Aubrey/Maturin? Oh, how about both?
1. Complementary personality types.
2. Common interests with different areas of expertise about them.
3. Logic-intution balance.
4. Extrovert-introvert balance.
5. Great mutual respect, affection, joy in one another's lives.

We are leaving Saturday morning for the beach in Delaware, stopping at several places on Maryland's Eastern Shore! PerkyPaduan has another date with my cats!

Poem for Friday

Confusion
By Judith Viorst

I can't figure out if it's gas or a coronary.
I can't figure out if it's hostile or benign.
I can't figure out if I'm turning into a hypochondriac, or just being sensible.
I can't figure out when we stop supporting our children.
(At twenty-one? At thirty? Forty-nine?)
I can't figure out if not bothering to change the sheets in the guest room in between houseguests is ever an option, or always reprehensible.

I can't figure out why men won't ask for directions.
(Is this genetic or could they be retrained?)
I can't figure out, when dressed in the height of fashion, if I'm looking incredibly chic or slightly ridiculous.
I can't figure out if my tale is enthralling or boring.
(What are those facial expressions? Spellbound? Or pained?)
I can't figure out if wanting all the hangers in my closet to face the same way means I'm obsessive-compulsive, or merely meticulous.

I can't figure out if I've gone from stable to stodgy.
(Is "reliable" what I want as my epitaph?)
I can't figure out if helping yourself to a shrimp from your spouse's plate ought to be viewed as intimacy or intrusion.
I can't figure out if I've lost my sense of humor
Or if, after fifty, it just gets harder to laugh.
And I can't figure out if everyone else has figured everything out, or whether we are all in a state of confusion.

--------

I was stuck in the house with no minivan for most of the day, so Perkypaduan took pity on me and came to visit so I wouldn't get jealous that my cats have seen more of her this summer than I have! Rosie promptly took over her lap and Daisy showed off her tail-chasing skills, though as soon as Paul came home, they snuck off feigning indifference. We watched 3:10 To Yuma which I think remains an extremely underrated film -- despite all the shooting, it's not really an action western but a philosophical one, and having recently watched American Gangster together, it was fun watching Russell Crowe on the other side of the law in a film which, like the newer one, assumes that corrupt people with legitimate power are much more villainous than outlaws. The IMDb says that 3:10 To Yuma was filmed entirely in New Mexico and Arizona, but I'd swear that bits of it were filmed in Utah, because I was sure I saw this formation:

We jokingly referred to this formation in Utah's Grand Staircase as Edoras because of the resemblance it bears to Edoras in The Two Towers. Well, minus the trees.


This formation in Capitol Reef National Park is known as The Castle. I imagine it's obvious why.


This is Capitol Gorge. The waterpocket fold that created the park's geology is clearly visible in the rock layers.


Eph Hanks Tower -- named for a pioneering Mormon explorer related to Abraham Lincoln's mother Nancy Hanks -- reaches 6,565 feet above sea level.


A side view of the Egyptian Temple, as this formation is known.


This area was once an inland sea, evidenced by the different layers of sandstone left after erosion of the uplifted Colorado Plateau.


Petroglyphs created by the Fremont Indians, who often lived in natural rock shelters as well as constructed pit houses and log huts.


This is Capitol Reef National Park's visitor center, in a valley beneath more magnificent stone structures.

Cool meme snicked from Thistlerose:
Go over to Wikipedia and enter your birth date and then pick 3 events, 2 births and 1 holiday that occurred on the day of your birthday.
Mine's December 11th.

Three Events:
1792 - King Louis XVI of France is put on trial for treason by the National Convention.
1917 - British troops take Jerusalem from the troops of the Ottoman Empire.
1972 - Apollo 17 becomes the sixth mission to land on the Moon.
Two Births:
1725 - George Mason, American statesman
1803 - Hector Berlioz, French composer
One Holiday:
Argentina - Tango Day, Buenos Aires

I had a really hard time narrowing events to three. The only thing I knew happened on my birth date was that Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. in 1941; I did not know that Llywelyn, the last native Prince of Wales, was killed on the date in 1282, that Indiana became the 19th U.S. state on the date in 1816, that the British Parliament enacted the Statute of Westminster on the date in 1931, that Edward VIII's abdication became effective on the date in 1936, nor that UNICEF was established on the date in 1946. And though I knew I shared a birthday with Rita Moreno, I did not know that I also shared it with Alfred de Musset, Fiorello La Guardia, Naguib Mahfouz, Grace Paley, John Kerry, Teri Garr, Mos Def, Ben Browder, and Gary Dourdan who was born on precisely the same day that I was.

Got the minivan back, had dinner with my parents. Friday will be all about packing, with a break to review Star Trek!

Poem for Thursday

Trouble
By Matthew Dickman

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.

Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

--------

Swiped from this week's New Yorker.

Not an eventful Wednesday here, as I spent much of the day doing laundry so everything will be clean for our trip to the beach next week. Also, we had to drop the minivan off at the Toyota place to get it thoroughly checked out and make sure we won't have a repeat of any of the problems we had at the end of the last trip! I wanted to stop in the mall behind the car place at Lush, which was having a summer sampler party, and because we were already in the mall, we ended up having dinner there (cheap Thai food, mmmmm).

This article about tourists who got lost in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument while driving south from Bryce Canyon National Park made me nostalgic for Utah (though I am very glad we were using maps rather than GPS). Here are some more photos of Goblin Valley State Park, called Mushroom Valley by the first entrepreneur to explore it in depth:

Seen all over the place, swiped directly from with whom I will be sharing...because let's face it, as much as I love Snape, I wouldn't want to be married to him:

Your result for The Harry Potter Husband Test...

Mrs. Lupin

Your perfect HP man is Remus Lupin.

You like a nice, kind guy with a bit of a fierce streak and you don't mind if he comes damaged. Sure, he may take some convincing since his self-esteem's so low, but once you win him over, you know he's yours for life. Unless of course he has an attack of "I'm not good enough" and runs away, but luckily he's also good at making friends who will push him back into line if necessary.

Compared to other takers:
    * You scored 72% on Lupinity, higher than 95% of your peers.
    * You scored 60% on Snapesquity, higher than 72% of your peers.
    * You scored 51% on Harryness, higher than 23% of your peers.
    * You scored 52% on Ronness, higher than 75% of your peers.
    * You scored 12% on Lockhartiness, higher than 2% of your peers.
    * You scored 53% on Dumbledority, higher than 62% of your peers.
    * You scored 6% on Dudleyness, higher than 2% of your peers.
    * You scored 41% on Siriusness, higher than 5% of your peers.
    * You scored 31% on Mad-Eye-osity, higher than 8% of your peers.
    * You scored 59% on Nevillity, higher than 80% of your peers.
    * You scored 47% on Jamesiness, higher than 15% of your peers.
    * You scored 56% on Billiness, higher than 43% of your peers.
    * You scored 64% on Twinsosity, higher than 82% of your peers

Take The Harry Potter Husband Test at HelloQuizzy

I've been a bit on the fence about the Olympics: I generally take the position that politics should be set aside in favor of the Games, that Jimmy Carter made a mistake with the boycott and that restrictions should only be used in cases like South Africa at that time where it was clear that athletes of color were not being permitted to qualify at their own country's Olympic trials. It isn't like L.A. had a perfect record on pollution when the Olympics were held there, and it isn't like the US is in a good position to lecture anyone about human rights violations right now. But Joey Cheek's revoked visa really pisses me off. And as much as it irritates me when athletes drop to their knees to praise the Lord on national TV, like the Lord has nothing better to worry about than who's the fastest or the strongest, I completely believe it is their right to express their beliefs and it isn't anyone's place to forbid the athletes to do it.

Poem for Wednesday

The Slap
By Jane Shore

In 1959, at Horace Mann Elementary
in North Bergen, New Jersey,
wearing white on Wednesday meant you were a virgin,
wearing red on Thursday meant you were a lesbian,
wearing green on Friday meant you were a tramp.

The gymnasium, with its locker room and showers
and drains, moldered in the basement.
Sanitary napkin dispensers were always empty,
and the changing room with stalls for privacy
had white flapping curtains that didn't quite close.
I undressed, and put on my gray cotton symnsuit
out in the open with all the other girls.

The gym teacher, Miss Piano, wore a Dutch-boy haircut.
Her legs were as solid as a baby grand's.
She called us by our last names, like privates in the army,
and clapped, as each girl climbed the ropes
and disappeared into girders and beams
and caged light fixtures on the ceiling.
When my turn came,
I gripped the lowest knot and dangled down;
my legs drawn up, I looked like a dying spider.

On wooden bleachers, chummy as sorority sisters
the lucky girls who had their periods
gossiped and did their homework
after handing Miss Piano a note from the nurse.
Where was my excuse?

After gym class, I'd undress in my own stall,
stuffing my gym suit back into its mildewed bag.
But first, I'd examine my underpants
for the red smear of "the curse."
The last of my friends, the last of the last.
No luck. I'd swathe myself again
in my neutral clothing.

When one morning, I woke up,
two black ink blots staining my pajamas,
I dragged my mother out of bed to tell her.
We squeezed into the bathroom
as if into our clubhouse,
as if she were about to show me the secret handshake.

Blushing, leaking, I sat on the tub's rim,
as if poised over the mikveh, the ritual bath.
Stuffed inside my underpants,
the bulky Kotex, safety pins, and elastic sanitary belt
I had stored in my closet for over a year.
My mother took a seat on the toilet lid.
"Ma," I shyly said, "I got my period,"
then leaned over to receive her kiss,
her blessing.

She looked as though she were going to cry.
In her blue nylon nightgown, her hairnet
a cobweb stretched over her bristling curlers,
my mother laughed, tears in her eyes,
and yelled, "Mazel Tov! Now you are a woman!
Welcome to the club!"
and slapped me across the face--
for the first and last time ever--

"This should be the worst pain you ever know."

--------

I spent the whole awesome day with Dementor Delta, who brought me a big snakey! We went to Minerva with my family for Indian food, then sent the kids to the pool and watched Dead Again (because we were in a Branagh/Thompson mood and neither of us had seen since it was new nearly 20 years ago) and Hairspray (the 1988 John Waters original with Divine, Sonny Bono and Debbie Harry). Then after Paul came home we had pizza and contemplated going to see We're About 9 at the Columbia waterfront, but the weather report was iffy and it can be an hour drive from here at rush hour, so instead we went out and rented Vantage Point (the vote-winner with my kids) and watched that too.

Spoilers: I thought it was quite good as a thriller, well-filmed and superbly cast -- you can't go too wrong with Sigourney Weaver, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt and Dennis Quaid -- but it's entirely lacking the sort of depth of a film like Syriana. What's the point of giving us the narrative point of view of the terrorists without giving us the ideological point of view or some clue as to who they are, as though all terrorists are generic exotic-looking people locked in eternal struggle with the overbearing American empire and its allies? How can we feel anything for people whose struggles we don't understand? I thought the ending was an utter cop-out, and though some of the characters were well-drawn, it was ultimately impossible to care about any of them, even the little girl who seemed to be placed there entirely to manipulate people and serve as a catalyst for a big crash scene.

Llamas coping with the heat at Zoo Boise in Julia Davis Park.


The tiger found the one spot of shade in her enclosure...


...though the meerkats seemed unconcerned with the bright sun and played in the sand.


A squirrel went sneaking across the capibara exhibit in search of food.


This bright bird is a male Temminck's tragopan pheasant, or crimson-bellied pheasant.


This is a greater Malayan chevrotain, also known as a mouse deer.


If I ever saw a Madagascar hissing cockroach outside of a zoo, I suspect I would scream like a girl.


At any zoo with penguins, it always ends up being younger son's and my favorite exhibit.

While I'm talking about animals, I was thrilled to read that over 100,000 lowland gorillas have been found living in the Congo, nearly doubling the number estimated to survive in the wild. Let's hope they stay protected! Also, much to my surprise, Paris Hilton has delighted me!

Poem for Tuesday

The Idea of Ancestry
By Etheridge Knight

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews.They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.I know
their dark eyes, they know mine.I know their style,
they know mine.I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say). He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space. My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

--------

One more by Knight, Mary Karr's first poetry teacher. "He had a scraggly moustache and a soul patch above his chin. His jaw was lumpy and uneven, with patches of white skin edged in pink -- ragged and tear-shaped," she writes in Sunday's Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "Knight condensed his story this way: 'I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.' In his work, he's still living."

Adam has braces back on his upper teeth. Needless to say, he is not pleased about this development (and has a headache). I took the kids out to lunch since he was required to have mushy food and voted for sushi and udon noodles, then sent them to the pool for a couple of hours while I fought off my monthly migraine and tried to figure out what Facebook had done to its organization. I had ordered a book of Josephine Wall art, and studying fantasy goddesses is always relaxing for me.

I took lots and lots of gratuitous photos of HMS Surprise at the San Diego Maritime Museum. Here are some of them.


Here is her figurehead...


...and the view of San Diego through her rigging.


Picture Stephen Maturin sitting back here sulking because Jack wouldn't let him visit the Galapagos.


Though the crew is getting her ready to sail and there's an exhibit on pirates below, some of the guns and hammocks seen in the film are still in place.


This amused me because I'd never seen a photo of it before: the remote steering station built for the movie, so that when it looks like Billy Boyd or Russell Crowe is at the helm, a professional seaman could be down here controlling the hydraulics and Caterpillar diesel engines.


The great cabin has been refitted for cruises on San Diego Bay, so not all of the film exhibits are still aboard...


...but there is still a display of costumes from the film!

You get Master and Commander-related photos tonight because the kids made me watch Robot Chicken and one of the skits was about a woman who won Russell Crowe's trash in a contest and was wearing his unwashed underwear on her head. (The episode was "Atta Toy" since I am sure someone will ask!) Our other evening TV was The X-Files' "Little Green Men" and "The Host" -- we have a box set with those episodes through "One Breath" on VHS, and since we have none on DVD, we figured the second season was as good a place to watch as any. I didn't even realize how much I was missing the show till the movie...

Poem for Monday

A Poem For Myself
By Etheridge Knight

(or "Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy")

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
But, when I reached the age of twelve
I left that place for good.
My daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
Said my daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
When I left that Sunday morning
He was leaning on the barnyard gate.
Left my mama standing
With the sun shining in her eyes.
Left her standing in the yard
With the sun shining in her eyes.
And I headed North
As straight as the Wild Goose Flies,
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
Said I done strolled all those funky avenues
I'm still the same old black boy with the same old blues.
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good
Going back to Mississippi
This time to stay for good-
Gonna be free in Mississippi
Or dead in the Mississippi mud.

--------

Another by Knight, of whom Mary Karr writes in Sunday's Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, "Before there was spoken-word verse or poetry slams or hip-hop, there was Knight...he preached that poetry was an oral art, proclaiming his own from memory in bars and on street corners. Once he took students to 116th Street in Harlem to read aloud among the marginalized. We quickly learned that our hand-wringing, milquetoast lines could never draw a crowd the way Knight did. That evening, he half-sang his toast for folk hero Shine, who was a porter on the Titanic strong enough to swim to safety...Knight, who died in 1991, is perhaps best remembered for character narratives -- from lowly Shine to anointed Malcolm X."

We spent a nice relaxing Sunday in Pennsylvania with Paul's parents, who are leaving for a three-month drive across the US in two days much like the one we took last month, but with more stops along the way and more time to visit people (they'll spend nearly three weeks in the L.A. area, whereas we had only four days). My mother-in-law made pancakes, eggs and sausage for brunch, then we went for a walk in Codorus State Park -- the shaded part under the trees, not the open area with disc golf and groundhogs where we sometimes go. We got a bit lost on the trail at first, but eventually we figured out where we wanted to be. After hiking, we went back to their house to compare travel notes and have barbecue and birthday cake (belated for Adam, early for Daniel, since we were away for the former's birthday and they'll be away for the latter's).

A beetle in the cornfield that borders one of the trails at Codorus State Park.


The corn isn't quite ripe yet, but we saw lots of empty husks and weren't sure whether they were eaten by animals or people.


The start of this trail goes through a stand of tall evergreens...


...though we decided we had missed the trail somewhere when we came to this seeming dead end.


Eventually we found our way to the path along the lake. There was a nice breeze and boats were out.


Back at my in-laws' house, Maximus the groundhog put in an appearance! (Or perhaps this is one of his descendants -- I have a hard time telling groundhogs apart.)


And just as we were leaving in the evening, one of the bunnies came out as well!


And look -- my mother-in-law made me a knitted Slytherin Dalek! Here it is with my sons' Daleks, also made by her.

I was pleased to see that the Redskins beat the Colts in the Hall of Fame Game today -- mostly because Peyton Manning was out with an infection, probably! But Art Monk and Darrell Green both got inducted, two players from when I really cared about pro football, before it became too much about money and people's egos (well, I suppose it was always about those, but it seems a lot worse these days). Monday, Adam gets braces back on his teeth -- he is NOT happy about this development, but if it means no jaw problems later, it's all to the good. If you're reading this, happy birthday, Uncle Mickey!

Poem for Sunday

Cell Song
By Etheridge Knight

Night Music Slanted
Light strike the cave of sleep. I alone
tread the red circle
and twist the space with speech

Come now, etheridge, don't
be a savior; take your words and scrape
the sky, shake rain

on the desert, sprinkle
salt on the tail
of a girl,

can there anything
good come out of
prison

--------

From Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, a column by Mary Karr about her first poetry treacher, "a rusty-handed Mississippian...whose first collection was printed while he was still in jail, where he'd come under the tutelage of Gwendolyn Brooks, grande dame of black American letters." Her favorites of Knight's poems "show how a prisoner's affliction can push him painfully inside himself. Like Dickinson, whom he loved, he often uses capitalization and line breaks to startling effect. Then, the voice shifts, as he chastises himself for self-pity."

Our chore for Saturday was getting everyone haircuts, so we bracketed that activity by going to the movies and then to a concert. The kids wanted to see The Dark Knight, but we overruled them and took the family to I Want To Believe, because if I was going to sit through a movie with murders in it, it was going to have Mulder and Scully. And while I could go on about plot holes and potentially squicky sexual politics in the latest X-Files installment, they did not make a dent in my enjoyment of the film. I still have unabashed love for Dana Scully, and I Want To Believe is very much a Scully episode -- medical-based, Catholicism as a theme, no aliens mentioned, a plot that hinges on her faith and her admiration for Mulder's passion even when she can't share his beliefs. This is one of my unswervable 'ships and I loved seeing them working together on a case like this without the fate of the world at stake.

Spoilers: Plot is never why I watched XF -- I could probably work myself up about the pedophile's victim who wants to put his husband's head on the body of a woman to save his life and the gratuitous deaths of female agents, but that would require making sense out of the organ-stealing scheme and figuring out why the guy who was dying was the one who attacked the first agent and things that may not in the end make any more sense than the alien mythology ultimately did. I would much rather be grateful for Scully returning to a career where she is the progressive, open-minded one at a hospital run by people who want to leave things in God's hands, where she is with Mulder on her own terms and forces both of them to rethink their relationship...oh, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't also delighted to see Bush picked on, and a gratuitous Skinner/Mulder snuggle (not my pairing but I like filmmakers who are willing to play to all their fan bases).

We packed a picnic and went to Potomac Overlook Park to see Laurie Rose Griffith and Peter Mealy, who were the perfect complement, really, to Mulder and Scully -- they're married, longtime musical partners, and they convey not nail-biting passion so much as two people who seem to really know each other well. (They're also pretty honest about relationship stuff -- Peter wrote a song called "Hard Times in the Middle" that starts, "We had a slight misunderstanding/It might have sounded like a fight/Maybe I was too demanding/Maybe you were even right.") In addition to a bunch of Peter's other songs, they did some Paul Simon ("Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard"), Bob Dylan ("Shelter from the Storm"), Dave Matthews ("Two Step" as bluegrass folk song), Peter Gabriel ("Solsbury Hill" as African folk song), plus two songs I love from their CDs, Bruce Dalzell's "Tocoi Light" and Susan Graham White's "Anchor." We had to sit in the rain for about 20 minutes, but then the sky cleared and it was a beautiful evening. The bathrooms are located in the park's nature center, which pleased the kids because in addition to the birds and bats we could see in the sky, there are lots of animals inside.

Peter Mealy, Laurie Rose Griffith and Kent Ippolito performing at Potomac Overlook Park.


It rained at the beginning of the concert, which didn't seem to put too much of a damper on this kid's birthday party.


The park's nature center is open late on concert evenings...


...with displays of stuffed examples of local animals...


...plus many live animals, including at least five snakes (garter, corn, rat, copperhead and rattlesnake) and this box turtle.


The walk from the parking lot to the nature center has a display of the relative distances of the planets like the one on the National Mall leading to the Air & Space Museum. (Pluto isn't a planet here, waaah.)


The concert went on using the solar-powered stage till well after sunset, with bats flapping in the evening sky as it darkened...


...and though it stopped raining early on, even after the interval, you could see the water in the air.

On Sunday we are going to visit Paul's parents in Hanover!

Poem for Saturday

Chair (A Dream)
By Adonis
Translated by Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar

Long ago I screamed at the city:
Husk of the world,
I'm holding you in my hand.
Long ago I muttered at the ship,
my song in a rose-red blaze:
all or nothing.

As for you, my grandchildren, I'm tired,
tired of myself, tired of the seas.
Bring me that chair.

--------

Not a very eventful Lughnasadh, though I did spend some time reading about the descent of the Goddess. Took the kids to the pool, kicked around some numbers for Adam's Bar Mitzvah next spring and stressed out about it, finally finished putting away my jewelry and little things from the trip (silly, since I have to pack a week from tonight for the trip to the beach), wrote a review of "The Offspring" (and speaking of Star Trek, PerkyPaduan sent me reasons to be worried about Abrams' upcoming reboot, which made me smile as I completely agree).

Watched Doctor Who's "Journey's End" on the widescreen TV -- the things I loathed about it the first time around still make me very unhappy, but I still adore Catherine Tate's performance and David Tennant is compulsively watchable too, and really, how many shows are there where there are five female characters I adore, even if I'm aggravated with things about how they're written in any given episode? Then watched Stargate Atlantis and realized I really must see the first few episodes of the season to follow what's been going on, though it was worth seeing just for the fact that when Rodney got the drive going, Paul and I were both making Han Solo hyperdrive jokes, and then Ronon had his tantrum and John said, "Easy, Chewie!" Hee!

And we received in the mail today something that I first saw when we were in a market across the country, then wrote when we got home to the woman who ran the stall to ask if she still had it and if she would ship it to me. It's a present for both Adam and the cats:

Daisy contemplates making herself comfortable in this penguin fishie cat bed by Jonah's Pet Beds.


I first discovered its existence at this stall at the Saturday Market in Salem on July 5th; we were afraid it would not survive a cross-country trip.


Cinnamon was first to come inspect it when it arrived...


...and she was contemplating going inside when Daisy arrived.


Daisy at first feigned disinterest...


...but as soon as Cinnamon left, she got in and flopped over, tipping the fishie.


She slept like that for quite a while.


And after she ate, she lay down in it upright!

Friday Fiver Catch-up:
The Friday Five August 1: Name One
1. Name one movie you wish everybody could watch. Jesus Christ Superstar
2. Name two books you wish everybody could read. Hamlet and The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
3. Name three goals you wish everybody could achieve. Health, happiness, leaving the world a better place.
4. Name four people you wish everybody could know. Their parents, soulmate and BFF.
5. Name five places you wish everybody could visit. The ocean, the mountains, the forest, the desert, the open plains.

The Friday Five July 25: Hair!
1. What type of hair do you have? (Thin, Normal, Thick, Frizzy, etc.) Very curly frizzy thinning hair.
2. What color is your hair currently? Dark brown turning gray.
3. What colors have you dyed/highlighted your hair? None, except for Halloween.
4. If you could dye your hair any color, what would it be? ...
5. What is your hair's length? Just past my shoulders when dry, halfway down my back when wet and straight.

The Friday Five July 17: Philosophical Stuff
1. If you could change one life-changing event in the life of someone important to you, would you? If I could run into traffic and save someone's kid, yes, but I don't believe in playing God and bringing back the dead or anything like that.
2. Which do you think is easier to do, being friends for many years, or being life partners for many years? Ideally, both.
3. Have you ever walked away from someone you considered a friend? Not by my own choice, but yes, when she made it clear that she didn't want me in her life.
4. If you had to choose between telling the truth and hurting a friend or lying and making them happy, which would you choose? That's much too vague a question -- are we talking about "Do you like my dress" or "Do you think I should apply for that Defense Department job"?
5. Which would you rather hear--the truth which will hurt, or the comforting lie? Again, it completely depends on the context. Usually the truth, but in life-or-death situations, who knows.

The Friday Five July 11: Charity
1. Do you have a favourite cause that you support? Both animal causes and ACLU/Planned Parenthood/NARAL.
2. If so, how do you support it? Donations and lots of running my mouth about the issues.
3. Have you been an active member of an organization (attending meetings, volunteering etc)? Yes.
4. Have you ever led any group? Not of that sort.
5. If so, how was your experience with it? Or if not, why, is it a conscious choice, of lack of opportunity? I haven't had great experiences in such groups in academia so I tend not to go looking for leadership situations like that.

The Friday Five July 4: Drinks
1. What drink wakes you up best in the morning? Hot tea.
2. During the day, what do you drink to keep going? Water or cranberry juice.
3. Do you drink the recommended 8 glasses of water per day? Why/why not? Probably some days I do, some days I don't. I drink when I'm thirsty.
4. What are the ingredients of your favorite mixed drink? (Doesn't have to be alcoholic!) Chocolate milk. Or virgin pina coladas -- I don't mind the rum but I also don't need it.
5. Are you a coffee drinker? How do you take your coffee, if so? My favorite is Thai iced coffee with lots of sweet cream. In general I prefer coffee with lots of milk and lots of sugar.

Fannish 5 July 25: Name five plot points/arcs you hated in fandoms you ordinarily love.
1. Deep Space Nine, Worf and Jadzia's rough Klingon sex as kink that can put you in the hospital or get someone killed.
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy falling in love with the man (well, vampire) who tried to rape her.
3. Xena: Warrior Princess, pretty much the entire Bad Seed Hope arc.
4. Harry Potter, Tonks being turned into a brainless automaton to establish Remus Lupin's heterosexuality and provide him with a child.
5. Sharpe, marrying pathetic Jane and then getting jerked around by her.

Fannish 5 July 11: Name the 5 best pilot episodes of tv series.
1. "Caretaker," Star Trek Voyager
2. "In His Own Image," Heroes
3. "Emissary," Deep Space Nine
4. "Pie-lette," Pushing Daisies
5. "12:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.," 24

Fannish 5 July 4: Crossover relationships: Match five characters with their soulmates - from another fandom.
1. Max Guevara/Mohinder Suresh (Dark Angel/Heroes)
2. Jack Harkness/Methos (Torchwood/Highlander)
3. Doctor/Elizabeth Swann (Doctor Who/Pirates of the Caribbean)
4. Fox Mulder/Sarah Jane Smith (X-Files/The Sarah Jane Adventures)
5. Alan Shore/James T. Kirk (Boston Legal/Star Trek)

Poem for Friday

Many
By Grace Paley

I needed to talk to my sister
talk to her on the telephone     I mean
just as I used to every morning
in the evening too whenever the
grandchildren said a sentence that
clasped both our hearts.

I called her phone rang four times
you can imagine my breath stopped     then
there was a terrible telephonic noise
a voice said     this number is no
longer in use     how wonderful I
thought     I can
call again they have not yet assigned
her number to another person despite
two years of absence due to death

--------

From Paley's book Fidelity, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, republished in "Absence, Opera, Beans, Dreams", a selection of verse from new collections from The Washington Post Book World's poetry issue the week of April 20th.

I spent most of Thursday doing stuff with my kids -- watching them demonstrate things on the Wii Fit, having lunch with Gblvr and her kids at CiCi's (along with Paul, who wanted pizza buffet too), stopping with them at GameStop and HobbyWorks across the street from the restaurant, taking my kids to the pool, having dinner with my parents who are going to New York over the weekend to visit my uncle, e-mailing articles about animals doing funny things, and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Offspring," which is as good as I remembered.

Even better than I remembered: The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I last saw when I was about 15 and the movie was new. I didn't appreciate it then -- I disliked both incarnations of Sarah, thought she was selfish and cruel as Charles said, and now I am thrilled by this fabulous feminist character who insists on having her own life as an artist and an independent woman before she allows her obsessed suitor, who is having his own issues breaking away from Victorian propriety, to find her, or before she lets him go before their passion ruins both their lives, depending on which version of Fowles' ending one takes as canon. Getting to see Torbay and London and Windermere is wonderful too, as are Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons' brilliant paired performances -- this is one of my favorite Irons films, and though I don't always love Streep the way most critics do, she's wonderful in this.

We interrupt trip photos for a public service message from Daisy, who made a very frustrating cat-and-mouse discovery the other night.


An adorable little mouse comes at night to clean up spilled seeds from the bird feeder on the deck!


And due to infuriating glass doors between Daisy and the deck, she can't do anything about it!


Worse yet, a giant moth has decided to attack the kitchen door in the hope of flying into the light.


It has demonic red flashbulb eyes!


And there's no angle from which Daisy can jump off the table to scare it away!


No wonder she has to comfort herself by curling up and sleeping in the sink!


Silly kitten! The older cats resist such indignities. Until there's an aluminum foil ball.

News articles that entertained our family: in addition to the lost 44-pound cat in New Jersey and the golden retriever that adopted tiger cubs, not to mention the turtle-led marijuana bust, there was the Puerto Rico shipwreck discovery and Manny Ramirez moving west. Maybe now younger son will stop hating the Red Sox so much!