Finding an old name and then the face to go with it.
The couple, married before me, before any of us, straight after college.
You think a couple is a good couple because of so many things, their combined physicality for instance. Their interests. They way they make each other laugh.
They were both tall and thin. I mean, really tall and really thin. Both hipsters, not artists themselves, on the periphery, but always the right choice in music and film and clothing.
Without looking for either of them, I found them both on Facebook.
So many people are still there, in Cleveland, the art scene still alive. If I had stayed in Kent, would I have begun to venture back to the east side? Would my poetry have cropped up again? Would my daughter have wanted to go to art school and really have accepted the acceptance at CIA?
I would not have found Sacred Harp singing, that’s for sure.
*
They were at my wedding with a new baby. How little I knew of babies then, but thought I did. Thought I knew so much.
(for the first time, I’ve figured out how to put a video directly from my Photo Booth to my blog without making it public on youtube. how could this have flummoxed me so in the past? does this date mean it’s from October or November? dang dates)
…since I haven’t posted since that last one, the longest I’ve ever gone without writing here. Makes me sad kinda like the rest of my life right now. twinkly
25 years ago at Thanksgiving dinner at our family friends’ house in a suburb of Detroit, I took my last drink of alcohol. I’m sure I had a glass of wine at least. More than one glass? A beer? That I don’t know. I was never picky. I loved all alcohol. If the occasion called for wine, that’s what I’d be drinking.
I remember driving north, probably on I-75, then I-94, to their house. I have no idea what suburb. Was it still Southfield where they lived or had they moved on? I remember the barren fields, the low winter sun, the flat landscape on the highway. Did we pass the huge tire on the side of the highway, did we pass one of the first super-flashy moving digitized billboards I’d ever seen in my life?
My mother lived in Farmington Hills, Michigan at the time. Paul and I would drive up on the weekends and visit her, stay in her ranch condo, rent about a dozen movies from the arty-farty video store a mile away, lock ourselves in the den and watch movies all weekend. Sometimes we would fight, inevitably we would have sex, sometimes we’d go out to eat, even if just for lunch, sometimes take a walk in the sterile “neighborhood” that was like all of the other hundreds of condo neighborhoods in the suburb I grew up in for a few years when I was still in elementary school. The condos and sprawl came later, after my family moved away to a suburb of Toledo.
I had skirted around AA for about a year, hanging out at Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings with another friend of mine from college. After the meetings, we’d go out and get drunk at one or two of my favorite townie bars in Kent.
When I finally went to my first AA meeting, after being invitied by a woman who I banquet waitressed with at a sprawling restaurant in Hudson, Ohio, I felt happy and at-home right away; not like I felt when I was around the dragged-down energy of the people in the ACoA meetings. The alcoholics were a happy, gregarious lot; the codependents were pissed off and low.
It only took me a month to know why I was so comfortable in the AA meetings. These were my people.
I love this photo and I made it my whateverthehell photo on Facebook. You know the photo that once you switch over to Timeline you can put up a photo that’s even bigger than your profile picture? This may have been from our last beach day. Was that still August? Yikes. No, I think it was already September. Jeez. I can’t remember and I don’t want to think as hard as I’d need to to figure it out, accuracy be damned!
I like this little float plane.
Today, the leaves were perfect. We drove up out of the Valley and as the air is colder at night up in the hill towns, the leaves were already looking like they had peaked. But they haven’t. Just some of them. It was raining and damp so the colors popped as you know they do.
I loved this little float plane and some kid must have left it on the beach because it was near sundown and the plane was all alone. I had my eye on it for a few hours. I wanted it. I wanted to take it home. As the tide came in, I kept moving it up the sand so it wouldn’t float away and pollute the water even more than however polluted it already is. As if this made any sense. Like Holden Caulfield in his innocence and naivety thinks he can save the kids.
When I finally approached the little float plane, it was much cheaper than I had imagined it was from a distance. I had this image in my head like it was some superior plastic and like it was a real plane somehow. It had the power to fly me away or to keep me overnight at the beach so I could live on the beach every day, just a tide of mornings with my little blue, solid and superior plastic plane, to a tide of nights. Me and my plane and the beach and the tides. An endless end of summer.
The plane was full of little gaps in the plastic, little seams that let the water seep in so that it didn’t really float like I thought it would when I placed it on top of the shallow ocean. It sort of tipped its wing and then I didn’t want it. I only wanted the perfect little plane of my imagination.
That is wrong on so many levels. First, I was going to steal the plane. I mean, really. That was the first thing. Then, when I got the courage up to get closer to it after a couple of hours of keeping my eye on it, I didn’t even want it because it wasn’t good enough. It’s just a crappy plastic plane made in China that will stay here on the earth for thousands of years, not breaking down, probably choking a beautiful aquatic mammal. But look. I got it. This is the way it was for me, the way I first saw it. I know you can see it, too. Look at the sand and the light. It really is perfect after all.
2. I will, from now on, call writing poetry, poeming, without apologies and without explanation and even in submissions: Dear Editor of Journal I Will Likely Not See My Work Published In Ever: I have been poeming for x number of years. Kiss my ass.
3. not really. I will NEVER do that.
4. kiss my everloving tattooed ass hip
5. when I am alone driving, driving and crying go hand-in-hand
8. You know that month where people write a poem a day? It is called NaPoWriMo. I will probably never do that. I am one who falls into the camp of not finding prompts or deadlines or challenges particularly necessary or helpful for my writing though they can be fun and somewhat useful. But I have decided I will submit one batch of poems per day for 30 days. Started yesterday. Kiss my ass.
9. More Silos. No visuals, just the song. Listen to it before it gets copyright-infringed. Then buy the tune for your iPod. Don’t be a cheapskate. Our friend once categorized their music as “Domestic Rock.” Pretty accurate I’d say.
10. I had to have my necklace/bracelet (it is long enough to go twice around my neck and 5 times around my wrist) repaired because I never took it off. I wore it in the shower, to sleep, in the ocean, to yoga class, on bike rides, on hikes, in the bath tub. I was too hard on it.
11. I wrote hard on and I’m pointing it out to you as if you hadn’t noticed. How juvenile of us. But really, can we help it?
12. If I write kiss my ass in a post, I feel I owe a debt of gratitude and recognition to Erin O’Brien. Every time. As if she made up the phrase which I don’t think she did, but if someone told me that she did, I would totally believe it.
13. I get a lot of hits for “ass tattoo.” But mine is really on my hip, as you know. My acupuncturist knows.
14. I can’t find a good photo of my beautiful necklace (made by none other than Rebecca Rose), but you see it in many of my photos. I am going to post a photo of a gemstone from Amherst College that has roughly the same color blue as my necklace:
15. Okay. I have written a few “poems” lately. But what a mess.
16. It’s getting late. I gotta go so I can submit.
17. Ass Tattoo on Hip:
I know there’s a funny little bruise on my mid-section. So strange. And this is way before my cracked rib.
18. Consignment belt I love ♥! All those studs make me feel a. hip and b. skinny and c. tough
19. pink
20. Should I stop? Probably time to submit my poems. I hate this already.
the pink petals from the cherry tree that float down every year all over my yard, across the rooftop from the back to the front and side of the house, onto the back porch and bins of recyclables. their pink color fades when it rains
soon, when the cherry tree bears its fruit, a flock of cedar waxwings will visit. They only stay a day or two. I will try to remember to let you know when they are here. Maybe when I get a new camera, which I am determined will be within the next couple of months (you may recall if you’ve been keeping up, that my camera has had a water stain smack-dab in the middle of the lens for over 2 years), I will be able to get a picture (the following is not my photo)
that I could look up on the web the weather in Shanghai, China and also find that the peach blossom celebration there ended on April 10, but that perhaps Paul and Violet will still see and smell the peach blossoms when they get there
the word frilly
things that are frilly
frittilaria even though they won’t grow around here
the search terms people use that land them at twinklysparkles. Today’s best and one of the best of all time: what is a semi brachiator
That’s all I can muster today, but if you can give a definition of semi-brachiator, without looking it up, I’ll give you bonus points. I do not know what the bonus points are for, but I will think of something in good, twinkly time, which is really the best kind of time
I thought of posting some photos that I found on google images when I searched for various word combos with frilly
if you can guess what this is, more bonus points for you
I hope you didn’t notice (but I now confess) that I was uninspired last week on Music Monday. Sure, I love Raphael Saadiq, sure that’s a great song. I have thought of retiring this particular weekly stint until the spirit moves me again.
Tonight I asked my little one (not so little, as about 3 weeks ago, she became taller than me) “What song should I post on my blog?” and she answered “the music from that show [Ken Burns’ series The Civil War],” which she watched a portion of with Hubby earlier tonight. She’s been reading Across Five Aprils and did an extra project on the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) for school this week.
I don’t play an instrument (7 years of piano, all for naught), but if I could, I imagine it would be most pleasant to play this on the violin.
The deep, satisfying double stops; the familiar and homey nature of the tune; the way the rising melody hits a minor note before its descent and resolve; it is all so poignant and sweet.
I was going to post a version without images because war is too much to look at sometimes, but the one from the soundtrack* without images gets cut off before the end. I figure you all don’t listen all the way through anyway….you’ve got your iTunes and your iPod and your fancies. Me too. Just in case it is new to you, here:
*UPDATE, August 23, 2012: the version from the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ documentary was pulled and I just found out, so I’m posting another version. Visuals are terrible, but I didn’t care for the live video recording of Jay Unger and family. Ironic, isn’t it? Let’s see how long before they copyright and pull this one. It’ll probably take me a while to notice, if I ever do. Look, I know there’s some sort of doodad app to inform me if a video is pulled off of youtube. But I don’t have it set up. Crap.
twinklysparkles 