Month: May 2020

think it or feel it doesn’t mean I have to articulate it. Lots of thinking/feeling things going on right now and while I would love to dump it all out somewhere, it just isn’t appropriate. At least not for me. I realize there are some folks who are very forthcoming in ‘public’; I am not one of those people.

I did post a bit about it on Facebook and my friends were oh so very supportive and kind, bless them, every one! But there is so much more and even as I am writing this, with all that is going on, I am crying. It’s not the end of the world and no one died but my brain is full of good and bad thoughts. What are you gonna do, eh?

As I was scrolling through blogs this afternoon, I realized there are blogs that I read every word of, no matter how many words there are, and others that I scan perhaps the first paragraph and then click off – sometimes because the topic has no interest or sometimes it is a post that is too long. And if it doesn’t catch my attention in the first paragraph I know I’m not going to be interested in the whole thing.

I’m that way with books as well. There was a time that if I started a book I finished it – no matter if I liked it or not. Not no more. I will give a book one chapter, just one, if it doesn’t have my attention then – bloop – closed, done, finished, over.

Perhaps because I am old, subconsciously I feel that I don’t have all that much time left so my patience is thin with anything that does not deliver instant delight. No time to waste here folks, no time to waste.

This morning as I was putting on my earrings I had my usual struggle with my left ear. I thought, geeze, I’ve had pierced ears since I was 16 and the holes are just the same size now as then. And then I thought about other things, like…

I was born in 1946, keeping that in mind, I never, as a kid, was told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. Think about that for a minute. I did not experience gender discrimination until the late 1970’s when I was told that I couldn’t have a job I wanted because “women just don’t do that”.

Oh my father would often make remarks like “Girls don’t an education” which didn’t really affect me because my parents were not involved in my life. I made all my own school decisions. I wanted to go to college so I enrolled myself in the academic (or as they might call it now – college prep) courses in high school. I think I was a junior in high school when my father found out I was NOT taking a secretarial course! Oh yes, I forged my parent’s signatures on all school paperwork starting back in 6th grade.

I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s believing I could be anything I wanted because I was surrounded by women who worked at professions that were probably, at that time, male dominated. In 6th grade (a pivotal year for me) when my teacher dubbed me a ‘poetess’ I corrected her – I was a poet, the word being a neuter noun.

My doctor was a woman. The sister of a friend of mine was an ordained minister. In my world there were women who worked in just about every profession that, at that time, would have been considered ‘men’s’ jobs. Doctors, lawyers, professors, accountants, clergy, writers, artists – all women who I knew.

These people were not members of my family, we were completely working class, blue collar people; the men worked at manual labor, the women worked in factories. My world existed outside my family confines, looking back it was rather a big world.

And while I was thinking back on all these things, I thought “I shall write about this and ask the question – What colored your world?”

And then I thought – “Isn’t there a song with a title like that? Sure enough there is. I had completely forgotten about this song and how much I liked it way back when…monotonous as the tune is, hearing it again, I still like it, silly sentimental fool that I am –

I was not a big talker from the moment I was born. Coming out of the womb I knew that it was in my best interests to maintain a low profile. I was close to 3 years old (so I was told) before I spoke my first sentence. My vocabulary up to that point consisted of 4 words – Ma, Pa, John, and No.






Now that I have been living in social isolation for the last 12 years whenever I have the opportunity to speak to another human being I babble, so much so that my husband has apologized for me because, you know, sometimes people only want a yes or no answer!

While I still don’t really like the sound of the human voice it appears that doesn’t apply to mine!

I absolutely can NOT stand people talking. I can’t abide the sound of the human voice.

My husband is one of those people who can’t just say something once, oh no, it must be said again in a different way and then he has to explain what he just said and I’m – I GOT IT! PLEASE STOP TALKING! I’ll walk away and still he talks on until I come back and say “You’re still talking!”

I have never, ever, ever EVER liked people reading to me. Drives me bat-shit. Audio books – oh a special sort of hell to me.

In school the only way I could get through lecture classes (which is every class after all) was to write down every word I heard so I didn’t have to actually listen – I was always – “Just give the reading list and let me know when to come back and take the test”.

That’s probably why I’ve never been much of a tv or movie watcher – it’s just people talking. They are not talking to me, they’re just talking. Oh for god’s sakes, is this written down anywhere? Just give it to me and I’ll read it. Just stop talking.

Lately I’ve been watching tv shows in other languages with English subtitles, that way I am actively engaged. Plus I’m learning bits and pieces of other languages. Kind of a win-win there.

All this people talking – it’s passive. I can’t participate. I can’t ask questions. I can’t get them to move on. Move on! Get to the point!

I don’t do audible learning. I don’t process information that way – it’s just noise. Show me, hand to brain. Or give me the damn book or manual or whatever and I’ll read it. But don’t talk at me!

I had to have a hearing test some years ago (long story, not very interesting) and it turns out I have exceptional hearing in the upper and lower registers; the middle register not so much. There are sounds only me and dogs can hear. Probably why I love bass voices and I’m not overly fond of tenors and sopranos.

I’ve always been sensitive to sound – loud upsets me so much. High pitched sounds literally drive me mad, turn me into a quivering mass of tears and trembling.

Now I’m noticing that the sound of someone talking gets on my very last nerve. Whether they are talking to me, at me, or I overhear a conversation – human voices – Make them stop.

I’m not sure if I could even have a conversation with someone now – even tho I would be participating and it wouldn’t be a passive situation. I just don’t want to hear a human voice. I want silence.

Please – for the love of all that’s holy – Shut the hell up!

(I was cleaning out files and found this – so beautiful. This is not my work, I wish I was this good. The photo doesn’t seem to have an attribution and the writer is, of course, duly noted. I’ve made her name a clickable link to her web site. This is the most smashing thing I have read perhaps ever!)

Beneath the Sweater and the Skin
Jeannette Encinias

How many years of beauty do I have left?
she asks me.
How many more do you want?
Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.

When you are 80 years old
and your beauty rises in ways
your cells cannot even imagine now
and your wild bones grow luminous and
ripe, having carried the weight
of a passionate life.

When your hair is aflame
with winter
and you have decades of
learning and leaving and loving
sewn into
the corners of your eyes
and your children come home
to find their own history
in your face.

When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
and have gained the
capacity
to rise and rise and rise again.

When you can make your tea
on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon
and still have a song in your heart
Queen owl wings beating
beneath the cotton of your sweater.

Because your beauty began there
beneath the sweater and the skin,
remember?

This is when I will take you
into my arms and coo
YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING
you’ve come so far.
I see you.
Your beauty is breathtaking.

With my new schedule I don’t actually start interacting with the interwebs until early to mid afternoon. Sure, in the morning, after I’ve read the newspaper and I’m still half asleep and sitting at the dining table, I use my iPad to scroll (and delete) email from my main email account. I don’t check the account associated with this blog so I don’t see any of the day’s new posts until the afternoon when I sit down to my desk and my ‘big’ computer. Sometimes over lunch I scan, still via my iPad, some of the new posts in my reader but rarely would I comment because typing on an iPad is a PITA.  And yes I have a bluetooth keyboard for it but that is also a PITA.  I can, OTOH, click the like button and sometimes I will do that. This is just so you know why I might seem to be missing your posts, especially those of you in some way different time zone (Looking at you Rory).

Next up – the impossibly quirky English language – Buddy71 had a post today – Wednesday Whisper. I saw this in my email – just the title “Closer” and the photo. Closer, in my mind, read as someone or something that closes, as opposed to open. Imagine my surprise when I went to his site and it was a whole ‘nother thing. “Closer” is a heteronym – (“each of two or more words that are spelled identically but have different sounds and meanings, such as tear meaning “rip” and tear meaning “liquid from the eye.””) Just for some fun here is a link to, supposedly,  the complete list heteronyms in the English language.

And then – what the frick is wrong with people? You send someone a hefty check as a gift, and the only way you know if they ever received it is when you get a notification from the bank that the check has cleared. How hard is it, how much time does it take, to type 8 letters and a space – either in a text, and email, or even a message via FB? I am sorely tempted to never send that person another thing – ever – of any kind. Unfortunately that person is my husband’s middle child who already hates my guts. I don’t expect her to acknowledge me in any way but I do expect her to acknowledge her father. (Yes, I write and sign the checks and cards but still – her father’s name is on them.) I am so pissed!

There’s more to talk about but I’m tired of typing!

Emily Dickinson “This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me” – just that line (or actually two lines).

Some 52 years ago, (that would have been around 1968) when I was young and starry eyed, I took a poetry workshop course at what was then known as The New School for Social Research (which later became The New School University and is currently The New School – an establishment from which I received my BA in 1982).

The course was taught/presented by Jose Garcia Villa. He was a famous poet, which I actually did not know at the time. One of the first poems I presented in class was roundly derided and criticized by my fellow 20-somethings as sounding like Emily Dickinson. Quite frankly I did not see that as a bad thing but they did.  I had only recently discovered Miss Dickinson and I was deeply enamoured of her work but that particular poem had been written before she and I had met (so to speak).

The cool thing was Mr. Villa liked the poem! He said it was musical. If fuzzy memory serves me, he liked most, or part, of all the poems I presented in class because they were musical. (I think he was in a musical phase at the time).

He said his favorite poem was –

Butterfly
Flutterby
You’d better fly

I’m not too sure what to make of that. Nor do I know if he wrote it, or someone else. Doesn’t matter, it has stuck in my head all these years. Indeed one of my alter egos is Margo Flutterby – it’s musical!

Which just all turns back to my stubborn insistence that poetry must be musical else it is prose. Afterall isn’t what differentiates poetry from prose is the rhythm and meter? And isn’t music rhythm and meter? Hence, poetry must be musical.

You can rhyme or not rhyme but you must sing.

(NOTE: this started out to be about my lack of social interactions and then off it went to something else. Another example of ping-pong brain, squirrel brain, pinball brain – call it what you will.)