By Jack Gilbert
He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.
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I had a very frustrating morning and afternoon, but there was a happy ending, and I must sing the praises of Twitter's comcastcares. My internet connection stopped working about 10 this morning -- the modem was on and the "send" light was flashing with the "online" light off completely and the "receive" light blinking occasionally. I called Comcast. Paul called Comcast. We were walked through several steps I'd already taken on my own (turn the modem on and off, reboot the computer, disconnect and reconnect the router, etc.). Then they said they'd have to have someone come out and look at things, and they couldn't do that till Monday.
Well, I had a review to post, and I was really irritated that they didn't have a single suggestion beyond the extremely obvious, so I fired off a tweet to comcastcares asking why Comcast doesn't care enough to have technicians available on the weekend. I didn't really expect a response after being blown off on the phone, but Frank aka comcastcares tweeted back telling me to send him an e-mail describing the problem. An hour later, I got a phone call from someone on his team, and not long after that, a Comcast truck pulled up. It turns out the problem was an attenuator attached to the Comcast cable, put on when we first got it and so small I didn't realize it wasn't a part of the cable itself. It's gone now, and the cable guy who removed it turned out to be a Trekkie and Rennie who knows lots of people we've seen at the PA and MD Renfaires, so I had a lot of fun talking to him.
I have no additional Renfaire photos to post in his honor, but here are a few leftover photos of the Colonial Fair at Mount Vernon last fall, like this one of the Ship's Company Chanteymen performing in the shade of a pottery tent.
Hand-dyed and spun skeins of wool were available from several merchants...
...as were silver and pewter serving dishes and kitchen items.
Chocolate as it was consumed in George Washington's era was being produced here.
There were also handmade brooms and straw dusters.
The blacksmith took a break in the midday heat...
...as did the soap-maker.
And here is one of the joiners, staying in the shade of his tent.
The Friday Five: Food
1. If you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve? I can't cook to save my life, so it might as well be all desserts.
2. What is your favorite restaurant and why? Escabeche in the Prince of Wales Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
3. What is your favorite fast food place? California Tortilla.
4. If you had to choose only one type of food to eat for a year, what would it be? I assume this means Thai vs. French as opposed to pancakes vs. filet mignon, so I'll say Indian.
5. What is your favorite cereal? For breakfast: Cheerios in summer, Instant Quaker Oatmeal in winter. For indulgence: Cocoa Krispies.
Fannish5: List the five most surprising moments in any canon.
1. Dallas, Bobby Ewing in Pam's shower. I know it's a cliche and a joke now, but at the time, that was a total shocker!
2. Star Wars, "No, Luke. I am your father."
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tasha Yar's death. (I had no idea Denise Crosby had left the show.)
4. Pirates of the Caribbean, Will Turner's death. (His resurrection by contrast was utterly predictable.)
5. The West Wing, Simon's death in "Posse Comitatus." (I have no idea why this hit me so hard -- I blame the music.)
I did manage to finish and post my review of "The Wounded", though it made me late for dinner with my parents. We came home and watched Battlestar Galactica, which draws me like a train wreck...any time I start to develop the slightest attachment to any character, something promptly happens to trample that out of me, so at least watching everyone disintegrate over the final episodes will be far less painful than it was, say, watching Voyager's writers grind their characters into cliches one by one.
Spoilers: I always figured that if we ever got to see Roslin and Adama make love, it would be immediately preceded or followed by something to make me wish it had never happened, like Laura resigning the presidency and announcing that she Just Wants To Be A Woman, and while this was close, my real point of annoyance is that she apparently has not resigned the presidency, clinging to it in name though she has no intention of fulfilling its duties. No matter what I might think of Zarek and his ambitions, it's completely fair of him to be outraged that she's governing by proxy, and her decisions have made it that much easier for him and Gaeta to put their different senses of outrage together and believe they have common goals, or at least common interests. Why does she not have the guts to hand in that resignation...is she afraid that Bill only wants to sleep with President Roslin and not with Laura the woman who's less afraid to die of cancer than to try to help everyone recover from decisions she made?
Meanwhile, oh man, I could never stand Cally to begin with, but sheesh, did they have to wreck her so thoroughly posthumously -- is that to make it okay that I'm not sorry she's gone? And to make that baby 100 percent human, so it isn't a potential savior like Hera and the Tigh-Six baby Cylon...but wow, they really want to leave Tyrol with nothing, don't they? I suppose these writers feel that posthumously justifying his rant about Cally after her death is a good thing. Urgh, I feel like there is a misogynistic thread running deep here and yet I can't bring myself to wish Cally was still around! I'm not sure she was really more annoying anyway than Baltar, who's really not a very good Jesus, though I got a really good laugh out of him telling God to ask everyone for forgiveness. If they ARE all Cylons and killed all the original humans, that will bite him in the ass!
Daniel is taking the S.A.T. tomorrow. How did THAT happen?!
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