Category: Series

9.3.2020 – things I want to know

things I want to know
are in books – friends will get me
a book I ain’t read

This is attributed to Mr. Abraham Lincoln.

Looking for a citation, the best I that can do is that Carl Sandburg has old Dennis Hanks recalling that his young cousin Abe Lincoln saying, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”

Mr Sandburg recorded this in his book, Abraham Lincoln Volume 1 The Prairie Years (Dell, New York, NY – 1927).

So did Mr. Lincoln say it?

Or did Mr. Sandburg imagine that Mr. Lincoln said it?

Would Mr. Lincoln had said it had it thought of it?

Well, maybe and yes and why not all at the same time.

Lincoln or Sandburg or Lincoln and Sandburg.

Someone said it and I like it.

It works for me.

Its good enough for me.

It is late in the day.

I got my new Kindle Fire that my wife got me on my last birthday.

She is my best friend.

I got lots of books on it I ain’t read.

Me for the back porch and the rocker.

Ps – the above painting is owned and displayed by the University of Michigan – I liked to go look at it as student …

8.26.2020 – when coffee not work

when coffee not work
thank goodness for back up plan
those smoothies at dawn

Some mornings I don’t drink coffee so much as I pour into my stomach and wait for the caffine to kick in.

No thought for the taste, aroma or the smooth liquid brown warmth that starts my day.

Its the kick.

The kick in the head.

The kick in the head that starts me up and off past all other complaints and concerns and gets me in a place to start my day.

Some days it isn’t there in the cup.

Then what?

The back up plan.

I get up and go to work on the kitchen counter.

I work there as the coffee usually goes to work.

And on the days that I go to work and the coffee doesn’t?

Well …

On those days,

I have Ellington.

Ellington is my son who is also stuck at home and working his way through his senior year in high school.

He is starting is day.

His day starts with a fruit smoothie.

A concoction that requires about about 10 kinds of fruit, fresh or frozen, that he puts into his smoothie maker.

A smoothie maker might have been called a blender but for one slight diffference.

I am not awake.

Not fully awake anyway.

And the mornings I need a real kick to get going are not my best mornings.

Sickly.

Headachy.

Thick headed.

Slow.

Then Ellington turns on the smoothie maker.

It doesn’t turn on as much as it goes off.

It goes off like a bomb.

Like a bomb three feet from my ears.

Like a shrieking siren.

Like a shrieking siren three feet from my ears.

I have never stood next to an F-16 fighter jet when it takes off.

But I would be surprised if its louder and produces a higher pitched squeal than that smoothie maker,

It wakes me up.

It wakes up the people in the next apartment I am sure.

Maybe the whole building.

It gets me going for a lot of reasons.

In the short story, Something to Say, James Thurber writes of Elliot Vereker, “Vereker always liked to have an electric fan going while he talked and he would stick a folded newspaper into the fan so that the revolving blades scuttered against it, making,a noise like the rattle of machine gun fire. This exhilarated him and exhilarated me, too, but I suppose that it exhilarated him more than it did me.”

I know just the point Thurber was after when Ellington hits the on switch on that smoothie maker.

Except that I am sure if the sound exhilarated Ellington and exhilarated me, too, I suppose that it exhilarated ME more than it did him.

My backup plan.

It’s good to have a plan.

It gets me back up.

8.9.2020 – where college football

where college football
deemed indispensable
as blood to the heart

Steve Hummer of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in his article, Bad day for college football could reverberate in the South, of the overall awfulness of a fall with out college football.

He wrote, “That has to deeply, on a gut level, concern those who live in warmer latitudes and in like-named cities. Places where college football is deemed as indispensable to the fall as helium is to the party balloon or blood is to the heart.

Huge dominoes have fallen. Are they crashing our way?

Know that it’s really big news when the coronavirus pushes back football in the Big Ten and the Pac-12. But also understand that if those in the SEC and ACC eventually are compelled to do the same, that would represent a seismic culture shock. Then we’d be talking about a family crisis.

Of course they love their college football in those other precincts, too. But Southerners have elevated the sport to a way of life. Some would say we have made it too important, but lose a season’s worth of games and then tell me that it didn’t hurt.

Perspective isn’t absent here. We know it has been close to seven months since the first case of the coronavirus was confirmed in the U.S. and that we’ve lived through far graver things than the putting off of a little tackle football. This disease has picked and picked and picked at the fabric of life, badly fraying it. Denying a Southerner his or her college football would be just another colorful thread pulled loose. Just so happens to be a thread tied at one end to the soul of the South.“

Before I could get up on mount my high horse to shout out a loud OH BLESS YOUR HEART I ran across this in a letter by EB White.

He was writing in the spring of 1957 to a friend of his who had just experienced the death of his father.

Mr. White wrote a warm, chatty letter about what traits we inherit from our parents and what traits we pass along.

He added a postscript, “It is also necessary at this season to establish firm emotional connections with a major league ball club, to share in the agonies of their defeats and the ecstasies of their triumphs. Without these simple marriages, none of us could survive.“

If Mr. White could feel that way, can Mr. Hummer be far off.

I, for myself, am not in a position to argue.

7.30.2020 – I dream a world where

I dream a world where
joy attends the needs of all
A world I dream where

From the poem, I Dream a World by Langston Hughes.

The poem was included in UNCOLLECTED POEMS in the 1941-1950 Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol2, University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Quoted today by teacher James Lawson at the Funeral of John Robert Lewis.

As President Barack Obama said in his remarks at the funeral, the work goes on.

The testing of his faith, proved his perservernece.

President Obama said that John Lewis, “Believed in us even when we no longer believe in us.”

I Dream A World

Langston Hughes

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!