small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place cradle to the grave
Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove.
Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope.
It is small wonder that men hold boats in the secret place of their mind, almost from the cradle to the grave.
From the essay The Sea and the Wind that Blows by E. B. White and published in The Ford Times, June 1963 and re-published in The Essays of EB White by EB White (Harper and Row, New York, 1977).
boxes on beach are empty shake ’em nails loosen they have been somewhere
Adapted from the poem Sand Scribblings by Carl Sandburg in Smoke and Steel as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1950.
The wind stops, the wind begins. The wind says stop, begin.
A sea shovel scrapes the sand floor. The shovel changes, the floor changes.
The sandpipers, maybe they know. Maybe a three-pointed foot can tell. Maybe the fog moon they fly to, guesses.
The sandpipers cheep ‘Here’ and get away. Five of them fly and keep together flying.
Night hair of some sea woman Curls on the sand when the sea leaves The salt tide without a good-by.
Boxes on the beach are empty. Shake ’em and the nails loosen. They have been somewhere.
This is special to me today as I know the boxes on the beach are empty.
They are empty because we emptied them.
We know they have been somewhere, because we filled them and moved them to the island … were we now live.
Got to go ride my bike to the NEARBY beach and scribble in the sand.
leaning against each other like drunken brothers at a funeral
Adapted from the poem, Even Numbers by Carl Sandburg as published in The People, Yes in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1950).
1
A HOUSE like a man all lean and coughing, a man with his two hands in the air at a cry,
“Hands up“
A house like a woman shrunken and stoop-shouldered, shrunken and done with dishes and dances
These two houses I saw going uphill in Cincinnati
2
Two houses leaning against each other like drunken brothers at a funeral,
Two houses facing each other like two blind wrestlers hunting a hold on each other.
These four scrawny houses I saw on a dead level cinder patch in Scranton, Pennsylvania
3
And by the light of a white moon m Waukesha, Wisconsin, I saw a lattice work in lilac time white-mist lavender a sweet moonlit lavender
Sorry but I just couldn’t resist.
Hey Little Brother!
Still in the drivers seat!
For those who know, they know,
For those who don’t know, that’s my little brother Pete watching me handle the reigns sitting in the drivers seat ( at the Dutch Village in Holland, Michigan).
I don’t have glasses yet and it looks like I still have my front teeth so this could have been the summer of 1968.
1969 was a rough year on my face.
I got glasses.
On my 9th birthday, I got hit in the face with a surf board that gashed my cheek open.
On Thanksgiving Day, running from my brother Timmy, I slipped and fell on the basement floor and chipped my left front tooth in half.
Still wear glasses.
Still have the scar.
One of grand daughters just lost her front teeth and asked her Mom if she could get a gold tooth like Pappa.
BTW, I should mention that this college basketball season, Michigan went undefeated on the road in the Big 10, something that hasn’t happened since 1976.
They tied the record of most regular season wins by a Big 10 team.
And in the process, the swept the home and away series with that team in East Lansing.
world so full should be happy as kings, and you know … how happy kings are
One sweet morning in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, a little old gentleman got up and threw wide the windows of his bedroom, letting in the living sun. A black-widow spider, who had been dozing on the balcony, slashed at him, and although she missed, she did not miss very far. The old gentleman went downstairs to the dining room and was just sitting down to a splendid breakfast when his grandson, a boy named Burt, pulled the chair from under him. The old man’s hip was strained, but it was fortunately not broken.
Out in the street, as he limped toward a little park with many trees, which was to him a green isle in the sea, the old man was tripped up by a gaily colored hoop sent rolling at him, with a kind of disinterested deliberation, by a grim little girl. Hobbling on a block farther, the old man was startled, but not exactly surprised, when a bold daylight robber stuck a gun in his ribs. “Put ‘em up, Mac,” said the robber, “and come across.” Mac put them up and came across with his watch and money and a gold ring his mother had given him when he was a boy.
When at last the old gentleman staggered into the little park, which had been to him a fountain and a shrine, he saw that half the trees had been killed by a blight and the other half by a bug. Their leaves were gone and they no longer afforded any protection from the skies, so the hundred planes which appeared suddenly overhead had an excellent view of the little old gentleman through their bombing sights.
Moral: The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings, and you know how happy kings are.
Further Fables VIII by James Thurber as was printed today, February 17, in the New Yorker Magazine back in 1940.
The first 2 stanzas of the moral are from the Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Happy Thought (XXIV) from Mr. Stevenson’s Child’s Book of Verse.
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
The final part, and you know how happy kings are, was a favorite Thurber quote.
Oh how I wish for a Thurber or a Mencken to experience this era …
But then, I wouldn’t wish this era on anyone.
As Mr. Thurber said, The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings, and you know how happy kings are.
The fable must have been too dark as it wasn’t picked to be the either Fables for Our Time, published in 1939 or Further Fables for Our Time published in 1955, but had to wait for the Collected Fables which didn’t come around until 2019.
No Haiku For You 