FEIRCE FEBRUARY FINISHES

Last Hyacinth Bloom

~*~

Library

Two New Audio Books

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The Almost Everything Local Store

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Overnight
Winds rattled, rose high and fell hard until they blew away all the soot and sadness.
Or, so it seemed when I opened my window on our world.

Monday Mail
Arrived from California...
.
...a precious bear,  a telephone answering machine and two videos

 Blessed be my good fortune in Friendship

Evening
Taking Refuge at the Zendo
a
Home Again


Tuesday Morning

"The wind has settled, the blossoms have fallen;
Birds sing, the mountains grow dark --
This is the wondrous power of Buddhism."
-Taigu Ryokan-

Thought

*
"GREEN BOOK"
Thanks to AMC $5 Tuesdays Club, I saw it with a neighbor late afternoon, and loved it. Some critics dismiss it as just predictable Cliches. Sure, but in 1962 those 'cliches' were actually  facts of life. Two quite brilliant actors deliver nuanced performances I found admirable, and the sound track was right out of my high school years when a classmate and i sometimes sneaked out of our separate ground floor apartments through back windows late at night when our respective mothers, both working widows, had fallen asleep, We walked to the local 'hang out' a block away where we played the Jukebox, sipped egg creams and flirted with older boys.

Bare Bones Plot
Dr. Don Shirley is a world-class African-American pianist about to embark on a concert tour in the Deep South in 1962. In need of a driver and protection, Shirley recruits Tony Lip, a tough-talking bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. Despite their differences, the two men soon develop an unexpected bond while confronting racism and danger in an era of blatant segregation.

 https://youtu.be/QkZxoko_HC0

Then we
VOTED
New York Public Advocate will govern till the end of this term.
Then there will be another election with the front runners who remain, but the final decision will depend on who the major parties elect to run in November and who we vote for then.

~*~

Bleak Wednesday Morning
The Sun Obscured on Day One of our Congressional Circus Broadcast with it's dogged reaffirmation of intractable divisions fully operational.

The BEST Headline

*
"The Examiner"
by W. H. Auden
Read by Tom O'Bedlam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH1_mbZfvCo&fbclid=IwAR3sYAa6k1RB2ILbU78LoD3c-bsrq-plHQetRsw_H8fCm2e8Xdqv6wYNhwk
 ~*~

Thursday Morning
Last day of February

 World Wildlife Fund
Anxious to abandon a difficult February, I turn a calendar page and know I'll miss this tiger gazing at me from just behind the laptop...

However, I'm prepared to subsist on my own smile when I see these Blue footed boobies, who subsist on fish from the Pacific Ocean. 

In the Mail:
A sweet note from Jude Hill
Nourishing and Encouraging

~*~

March First
It snowed again...

...just a little more.

(((more to come)))

NOVEMBER GRATITUDE

2014
Once upon a time in Massachusetts

In November
by Lisel Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.

But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.

You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.

But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.

Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.
~*~


2016
Today in New York City

 Our Superintendent dropped seeds into the Street side Planter in August. I'm Grateful that he has finally been rewarded with one absolutely perfect green gem.

I'm Grateful we have heat this morning, and grateful that this afternoon my Massachusetts friend Jenny, in town for a dance event tonight, was here for several sweet hours...

Grateful that my writing group was full of surprises tonight and Grateful for the dark night downtown when I emerged. A speeding bicyclist became invisible,
and so did I.

~*~

THREE THANKSGIVINGS

On my way to Massachusetts

 Last year it snowed on the 26th

 It was very beautiful and quite cold

Three Thanksgivings
by Ms.

1.
Always the odor of poultry fat
drippings, onions, sage, and
Fall falling or had fallen, some
years-snow, a fire in a hearth
not in those pines, 'where the
sun never shines' - Mortality.

Never the family entirely, but
some parts of it at each stop;
stop, crushing and dividing.
Footsteps falling or fallen
echo across times pastime.
Borders shift - Bird migration.

Migrating bits of' Thanks', 'No
thanks', no more of war stuff.
Stuffing, bread baking, berry
pie making, enough for all,
all for one Oh - If you suffer,
suffer my love to heal you.

2.
The Aunts; sturdy Anna, squat Margaret, and tiny Mamie Cunningham - How did all of us fit into that tiny Bronx apartment, along with Uncle Dan and Aunt Mary, cousins Danny, Dorothy and Anthony Ryan, plus Mom (a former Ryan), my brother and me?  It had a kitchen the size of a long thin hall, a living room that served as a bedroom when the couch was opened, and a bedroom split into three sections with curtains.  Thankfully, there was a screen door inside the apartment door that opened on to the building hall, so some air circulated in the stuffy, overheated rooms where the oven had been raising the temperature since before dawn.

A folding table, which usually sat flush against a wall, was opened to its full with extra planks, and set with the best utensils, plates, glasses, dishes of cream cheese filled celery, olives and pickled onions, two baskets of dinner rolls, butter, salt and pepper on a white linen cloth at the center of the living room turned dining room, extra chairs borrowed from neighbors all in place.  The couch sat four, a bit lower than was comfortable, so usually assigned to the most compliant.  Once seated we were wall to wall prisoners for the duration of a six course traditional meal plus dessert pies.  Then the discontents of fidgety kids begging to go out to the cool air an elevator ride away.  Aunt Anna, the stoic who made it her duty to read the stack of  mass card prayers for the dead daily, left them in her purse to help with clearing. Fragile Aunt Mamie sat poised, though half asleep, in a corner of the couch, while Aunt Margaret excused herself to lie down in the divided bedroom because of her famous 'upside-down stomach'.  Women snaked back and forth to the kitchen, scraping, washing drying and stacking.  The radio played a football game while Uncle Dan lit up another Pall Mall and ordered Anthony to get him a cold beer before going out.  My mother lit up and sat next to him for access to the ashtray.  There was a steady patter from the kitchen, dominated by Aunt Mary's Irish-lilting instructions about where everything belonged. 

So it was every November after Dad's death in 1953, and for many years through the disappearances that thinned our ranks--another death, then two left for other places, another stopped coming when she fell ill, and so it was till one day, it simply was no more.  My lamp is throwing a circle of light now upon the photographs, fading as we all will when we've finished our feasting.

3. (In process)

May all be well with all of you and every one else

See you in December

~*~