Poem for Friday

Saints
By Louise Gluck

In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

My grandmother's was tranquil, even at the end.
She was like a person walking in calm water;
for some reason
the sea couldn't bring itself to hurt her.
When my aunt took the same path,
the waves broke over her, they attacked her,
which is how the Fates respond
to a true spiritual nature.

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that's why she escaped suffering.
My aunt's escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

Still she won't experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence.

--------

I started my Thursday in the usual fashion, waking up with Adam to buy stuff for our Superpoke Pets. (The sunrise beach is very pretty, and I had to have a mariachi-singing tiger.) Then I did lots of stuff too boring to talk about until he got home from school. (No, really, you don't want to know about the cat barf.) At that point, my mother picked us up and we went to meet with the Bar Mitzvah photographer, who lives in a pretty neighborhood near the Potomac River. (We liked her work and her style very much -- she's friendly, easygoing, and interesting -- though she horrified us by telling us that she removes the nests with baby birds surrounding her porch because she doesn't want bird poop on the porch.) Speaking of birds, here are some more adorable goslings from Lake Whetstone:

















We watched Smallville under the mistaken impression that it might be the season finale, which it clearly was not, since no one met a tragic fate and very little stuff blew up. Spoilers: I still loathe and despise the Chloe/Davis storyline and I suspect from Erica Durance's comments that it ends badly for Chloe, which I might be able to stomach if everyone from Clark to Oliver did not spend more time telling her off than telling her how unbelievably strong she is, how they could never do what she does. I am so bummed that Lois was not there this week to talk sense to her -- with all the boys bossing her around, I so wanted her to talk to another woman about what's essentially a domestic abuse situation. In fact the only real redeeming moment for me was Oliver's, "Clark, I know you want to save everybody, but eventually you're going to have to make the tough decisions -- it's what heroes do." Clark needs to grow the hell up.

I've been quite happy with Obama during his first hundred days -- not everything, not several privacy and environmental decisions in particular. But even if I had been thoroughly disgusted with him, David Souter reminded me tonight of the single most important reason I supported Obama and I would have supported any Democrat in the race who got the nomination. I haven't been enthralled with Souter all the time either, but considering who appointed him, we got very lucky.

I am now at Dreamwidth.org under this username. Haven't bought a paid account yet, though I probably will in near future because I've been impressed with the site thus far and am happy to support advertising-free, user-friendly blogging. But I'm not planning on leaving Blogger or LiveJournal, nor am I planning on making Dreamwidth my primary reading list, so you are welcome to keep reading me here or switch there or find me on InsaneJournal...whatever makes you happy!