On the day that is so often leapt

I'm thinking today

of a wart I had on my ring finger.

I was nine.

People asked me if I had been playing with frogs.

I hadn't. I was confused.

I thought frogs turned into princes

(but of course I didn't really think that).

I remember wanting to chew the wart off,

to get rid of it, to be done with it entirely.

Yes, I told them, I have been playing with frogs.

It all began...

with the seed of this man.

The Papster, daddy-o, Dickie-doo, Pappy Rat, ole man Hefner,
that long haired ukulele-playing hippie,
that banjo-picking, ice cream eating-contest-winning,
hybrid-driving, diet-trying,
kitty cat-loving, grammar-correcting
legend of a man.

They say you took the diaper money to buy guitar strings--
we say it's a lie!
They say you threw the keys down the mountain--
we say it's a lie!
They say you ate Burger King sausage one day after becoming a vegetarian--
we say it's a lie!

The man, the myth, the Papster!!!
Happy birthday, Dad. I love you.

Shouldn't you be writing?

blue peninsula

Tonight, I have the good fortune of organizing an event to celebrate blue peninsula. This powerful and poignant book written by Madge McKeithen chronicles the years after McKeithen's son, Ike, is diagnosed with a chronic, debilitating and undiagnosed disease. Fed up with the butterflies and affirmations of "how to grieve books," McKeithen turns to poetry (Dickinson and Doty; O'Hara and Rich), and with each poem and meditation in the book, we are so glad she did. Read the New York Times article: here.
In one passage called "In The Details," McKeithen quotes George MacDonald: "The merest trifles," he writes, "sometimes rivet the attention in deepest misery." McKeithen goes on to explore our need for details and her satisfaction with the fact that they can "be chosen and edited." She ends the section with this paragraph which, all morning (in between my cravings for dried apricots) I have read over and over:

I can hold details and know they are there, let go and know they once were. The way my grandmother's Buick smelled of clove chewing gum, the Richie Rich funny books they bought us in Southern Pines--my missing her takes some of its shape from the shape she occupied when she was here. I start a list of the things that Ike enjoys--a way to see the present moment as specifically as I have been chronicling the decline. Today, I make plans to take him to a basket ball game at his brother's college. I send him dried apricots for Valentine's Day.

The book's subtitle is essential words for a life of loss and change, and I truly recommend it to anyone whose life has ever felt dominated by those two things. Buy it: here.

Last Sunday's Church

And a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger on the Side

Yesterday, my dad called. Hey sis. Hey Pappy. What's going on? He tells me he just bought a hybrid. Groovy, I say. And, he says, I've decided to become a vegetarian. (This from a man who's been known to eat meatballs the size of small planets.)
Wow, I say. You know they don't eat meat, right?

Yea, yea. I'm going fresh. Fresh vegetables, fresh fruits. I'll live forever.

Great, I say. What's for lunch?

Oh, I just swung into Wendy's, got a salad and a small chili. It's real good if you just pour the chili right on top.

Uhm, dad, chili?

Well, it doesn't have that much meat in it. Just a smidge.

Ah...the smidge. Gets you every time.

;!!! ;!!! ;!!!

Those of you familiar with my obsession with syntax, may remember that I fell in love with the semicolon (not pictured here) in the winter of 1995; the wind blew; I was living in Oxford, walking for miles, developing what I'd come to realize were "corns" on my pinky toes, and then, in one poorly heated bar or another, someone said how about a semicolon; a what? I asked; a semicolon; hmm...I pictured that archaic symbol knowing it could do me no good; it allows you, he said (he was an Ivy Leaguer and thus spoke with great authority), to hold more than one thing in your mind at a time; like what? I asked, and we ordered another beer.

My father, having been through eighth grade at least three times, is a great proponent of the easily diagrammed simple sentence; my mother is more adept at sewing lacerations than stringing words together; my brother collects roadkill! I didn't even know I had it in me to use a semicolon; reader, I did. Last week, a student said to me, I wish I could be as passionate about anything as you are about the semicolon. I may have blushed; surely, this far into the semester my one crowning passion isn't the semicolon; thank you, I said.

And now, looky: here. My old college love sent me this link. Yes, the semicolon is alive; it is thriving; from deep in the underbelly of New York City to the mountains of Mexico that pretty little piece of syntax is rearing its pretty little dot of a head. Come on; try it; you'll love it; once you start you can't stop; you'll be shoveling the snow wondering when you can use one next; maybe between this and that, you'll say; maybe between that and this, and oh, who in their right mind wants the finality of a period?

Eclipse Tonight

Around 10:51.

Might wanna hang your head out the ole window and give it a gander.

Target Practice w/ Lovely Simile*

A box of clay pigeons:

carefully marked, Fragile as Eggs.

*Part of the "Fun with Figurative Language" series.

Square One

Yesterday, I took a photograph of a beatdown A-frame church. The sky in Joplin has been impossibly gray, and out in front of the church was a "For Sale" sign. The image itself seems the picture of bleak.

I had wanted to download it.

(Insert photo here.)

And then write something pithy about the heartland not being nearly as miserable as it appeared, but my camera isn't compatible with any of the computers in this house (this house that my husband's grandmother bought for herself on February 16, 1944 with the earnings from her beauty shop), and so I'm left just with words. Just words, which, when I think about it, may be all I've really ever had anyway.

(Not a) New Poem

Love

(It's all you need.)

Defy Age, Grow Wings

Don't worry, this isn't merely a reiteration of my To-Do list. Thaw the halibut. Reverse metabolism. Pick up the cleaning. No, this ain't your mama's anti-aging! No messy creams or blueberries here. This is the real deal. Last night I was invited by a former student to see a lecture with this man:

Dr. Aubrey de Grey

Dr. de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and founder of the Methuselah Foundation. You may remember Methuselah from the Bible, the guy who lived to be 969. Well, Methusalah's got a little competition coming his way, and that competition looks a lot like me and you. If things go Dr. de Grey's way, in twenty or so years, we'll be able to undergo a few very scientific therapies that will propel us into the required rate of improvement that Dr. De Grey calls "longevity escape velocity."

Not only, he says, (barring any head-on's with a Greyhound) will we be able to live to be a thousand, we can also put off having children until we're well into our hundreds (sorry, dad). To top it all off, we can alter the size of our body parts (a-hem), and, if we're truly ambitious we can GROW WINGS. Dr. de Grey did, however, (begrudgingly) admit that this last act may be deemed unethical. (By who? I wonder. The Audobon Society?)

So, how about it? Wanna live to be a thousand and two?

Still Life with Dancing Mother-in-Law

The Flapping of Wings

This photograph was taken by a woman who is blind.Guided by her incredibly attuned ears,
she can hear the flapping of the bird's wings.
(Imagine.)
Read the full story.

Summer with Frogs

I can’t get my mind off the summer with frogs and how night after night—coming home from church or a ball game—dad ran over them with the van. The sound was so distinct that even now so many years later, far away and cold, I can hear it. It was the summer I liked to walk to the store with Becky Kearns. We’d buy Cheerwine and Pop Rocks and talk for miles. I was miserable, wanted to slit my wrists and let them bleed in a washtub.

This morning, reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema,” I find body for the feeling that haunted me that summer. In discussing a performance in which a shape that resembled a tadpole appears on the screen, Woolf writes, “It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged…For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous disease of the lunatic’s mind.” When Becky and I walked to the store I never mentioned my misery. We sifted carefully through words as the sun freckled our shoulders and baked the frogs deep into the asphalt.

What we couldn’t say then, we can’t say now. When I try to hold the unsaid in my mind, I think of what Woolf calls “some secret language which we feel and see but never speak.” That summer, someone in the neighborhood said it was the end of the world—frogs just falling from the sky—but they seem to have been wrong. There is laundry to be done, teeth to be brushed, and when I take a moment to forget about the winter, spring feels nothing if not inevitable.

Tittle

(proper name for the dot above the i;
can be used in common speech, as in,
I don't give a tittle what he thinks.)

Friends...

Some become strangers,
others become

podsnacks!
(Click me! Click me!)

Recent Keyword Activity

I'm often befuddled by the keyword activity that lands strangers from Urbana to Ukistan right here on the pages of The Blue Pitcher. You'd be amazed how many (hundreds of) 4 a.m. hits I get for "Sexy UPS men."

Not to be undone by "sexy pitcher."
Imagine wanting this:And getting this:

But they're not all sexy. This morning there was "Roses are Red AND fat AND blue"
and "Irish joke twin brother."But my favorite has to be this one that I've gotten not once but twice (notice the ALL CAPS):

PAST LIVES DEAD HUSBAND WEEPING WILLOW

I've put it in my pipe; I'm smoking it, and, heck, I still don't know what to do with it.

2-4

Still Life with Writers

Look who came out to the Ear Inn yesterday...

It was quite a show. Oakland poet, David Buuck, wowed us.
Really. This guy's brain is the stuff legends are made of.

There was also, quite famously, Dan Rosenberg's mother:

And a very mean Diana Roffman
(not to be bucked with):

All giggly love and crazy intensity, Dawn Lundy Martin:
and a luminous Rebecca Myers
who read a brilliant seven-part poem about a man
who was struck by lightning seven times. Meanwhile, Ada Limón just sat around oozing love and beauty.
And Nat Bennett
once again proved himself to be one of my favorite writers.
His characters are so real and his plots are so good.
(& the chicks dig him.)
Olivia Birdsall
was also on hand, draining the blue pitcher
of every last drop of metaphorical goodness.
All in all it was a wonderful reading
and a very happy groundhog's day
as depicted here in one of Margot Miller's lesser known works. My only question is...
did he see his shadow or not?

2-2

Ear Inn Reading Saturday @ 3 p.m.

Gonna be in Soho tomorrow afternoon?

Swing by the Ear Inn for a cold pint of brewsky, a chili dog and a reading I've put together.
I gave ten of my favorite writers ten words.
Their job: to write a piece that can be read in under five minutes.
Cold day; hot words. Don't miss it.

Readers: Nat Bennet, Katie Berg, David Buuck, Stephanie Hopkins, Andrea Luttrell, Dawn Lundy Martin, Becca Myers, Sanjana Nair, Dan Rosenberg and Christopher Wall.

326 Spring Street, west of Greenwich Street