Dad, I miss you

A couple of my dad's friends are over my house right now, talking to my sister. They've given her a scholarship every year since she's been at school--which she used once to purchase an expensive laptop computer which she ended up detesting and giving to me *eyes laptop lovingly*
Anyway I used to love these guys when I was younger, especially Bruce Chamberlain, who is roughly the size of a small elephant and the most amazing chef I have ever met. But now I'm wondering why the heck they're still here, because I really need to go shower and go buy some things for the project that I need to finish by tomorrow, but if I go upstairs I fear I'll be sucked in with the questions about school and life etc etc. Ack.

greg came home tonight....what can i say? you'd have needed one hell of a giant-sized eraser to wipe the smile off my face. it's still there now when i think of him.

when he got off the plane...he was in his little boy scout uniform, and hadn't showered, so of course he smelled pretty bad, and still i thought he was more beautiful then than i had ever seen him. i'd thought i had his face memorized, but seeing him reminded me that no memory can ever take the place of the real thing. it was like the two weeks without him were some weird dream, and suddenly there he was again. Poe wrote "Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream..."
Never have I been so happy to have that gossamer web torn to pieces. It's terrible: i made it through two weeks without him, but now after seeing him for so short a time tonight i don't know how i'll make it until tomorrow night...

Sweet dreams to all.

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold


of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)
~e.e. cummings

Wowie that was a big font. Well, it deserves big, because I'm so happy he's coming home!

Greg comes home tomorrow!

We got our scores for the AP exams about a week ago. I only think of it again now because the report is sitting right next to me, and its contradictory results are glaringly obvious. i already knew I had gotten a five in US History *yipee* I had suspected the worst of my Physics exam, the one I didn't actually bother to finish. Expected the worst and hoped for the best, that's what I did. I got the worst--a one! It doesn't bother me except in the abstract; I feel bad my for my poor physics teacher, so convinced we'd all get fours. No one I know got a four. Three is the highest I've heard of so far. He did make it sound ridiculously easy to achieve a three, and we shouldn't have believed him, but I hope he's not too disappointed in us.

Yawwwn. I offered to close for Kate tonight, since she works two jobs and was really tired....almost all the waitresses have two jobs..Kate does paper-pushing at GE, Rebecca does CAD programming at a construction company, Karen works at the cafe in the new Bushnell theater, where she's in love with the guy she works for. I like Karen, even though most of the others waitresses confided that they don't really like her because she's so weird. The first time I saw her, she had her close-cropped hair in a tiny ponytail on the top of her head like Pebbles from the Flintstones. She just came back to the US after living with some guy in Athens for five years. It didn't end well, apparently.
All waitresses love to gossip, naturally. It's the most interesting thing you can do to pass the time. Being only sixteen, I don't have much to put into these spicy conversations, but what I get out of them is always intriguing. Tonight, for example, I found out that Rebecca, who is 25, has been dating a 45-year old married man for several years now. He finally separated from his wife after he and Rebecca broke up over it more than once, and they're living together. Apparently, she throws him out regularly and did it again just last week. He also has kids who are Rebecca's age, who aren't taking dad's new relationship so well. They're planning to get married, eventually. In five years, Rebecca will be 30, and this man will be fifty. Truly, love is blind.
I also discovered that this woman Janet had my grandmother as her third grade teacher. She said that Mrs. Hennessey always made her write out "I will not talk in class" all over pieces of paper because she was so talkative. She also knows Mr. Dumais from Northwest, because his brother is married to her niece. Small world.

In conclusion, I am tired, and Greg comes home in two days. :-)

I watched Scarlet Empress late last night, with Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great. It was a really intriguing movie, besides one roll-your-eyes bit in the beginning with the tall, dark, dashing general declaring his deep and abiding love for a young girl whom he has just met. Oh, and a charming demonstration of exactly what is meant by the phrase "a roll in the hay". Dietrich came off beautifully--as she does in every movie--showing Catherine from her beginnings as a sheltered German princess to a hardened woman, the most powerful in her time. They kept pretty true to Catherine's life (besides her and her lovers all being unattractive), and didn't sink to having her reunite with Mr. Oh-So-Handsome and Slept-With-Your-Predecessor general.
The costumes are wonderful, as well, though I can't imagine how those women managed! This was in the times when women got their waists cinched in until they could barely breathe, then got plopped into what amounted to a big wire birdcage, over which went all the skirts and petticoats. I read in Dietrich's autobiography that they couldn't fit her skirt in the studio's car when she was in costume, so they had to take her to the set in the back of a farm wagon. That was probably the reason that palaces always had double doors in those days, so that the girls could fit themselves through without turning sideways. It looked kind of ridiculous, the tiny waists and then huge skirts, but then again, I'm certain some of our modern fashions would make those women choke on their hot chocolate. I mean, compare how much skin they used to show, back in the days when seeing a woman's ankle was tantamount to foreplay, to what's revealed by your average cocktail dress today. Their negligee was less revealing most of what we wear every day. Obviously what we wear is more comfortable, but I think a lot of clothes leave too little to the imagination.
As for male fashion, it reached its peak in the days of the noble toga, and has been going downhill ever since.

If I had a superpower I know what it would be....it would be that when I touched someone, I could know their entire lives in an instant--where they grew up, their first love, how much they hate their job, their favorite brand of jeans, how many cups of coffee they drink in the morning. I'd know the color of their bathroom, how long it'd been since they'd been on a date, how their sheets felt, what the view was out their windows in the morning. I would get all that and more, every memory and thought and feeling, all the love and remorse and confusion and joy they'd ever experienced and I would know them, better than anyone else ever had, for just one second. And then it would all go away, like a dream, so that I could just recollect vaguely what it had all been about, but not the hows and whys....
I would take my new power everywhere, and I would use it all the time. Imagine being able to discern exactly what someone needed, and being able to just be that for them. Imagine what that could mean to someone who can't seem to express what they need, or might not even know it themselves.

Old people can be so annoying. Today I got sniped at by more than a few of these "redundantly living" for failing to seat them in the section by the window, which has an utterly fabulous view of asphalt. Only once so far have I ever tried to explain that there is sort of a formula for seating people, so that all the waitresses get an equal number of tables, and no one has too many or too few. I heartily regret that one error, because that little old lady glowered and complained until she got her premier parking-lot position. So now I just give them the seats they want, which doesn't win me points with the waitress working that section, either. And then they make no attempt to conceal the fact that they're complaining about me the next time I walk by.

oDE

o

the sweet & aged people
who rule this world(and me and
you if we're not very
careful)

O,

the darling benevolent mindless
HE-and-She
shaped waxworks filled
with dead ideas(the oh

quintillions of incredible
doddering godly toothless
always-so-much-interested-
in-everybody-else's-business

bipeds)OH
the bothering
dear unnecessary hairless
o

ld

~e.e. cummings

Seems that the man and I are of an accord.

Patterns


I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles
on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon --
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
"Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se'nnight."
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
"Any answer, Madam," said my footman.
"No," I told him.
"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer."
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, "It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
~Amy Lowell

Patterns, patterns, and more patterns....give me a vision of a woman, a proud woman, a face unlined but eyes ancient, lashed by the corset-strings to the great rack of a society that is breaking her just a little more with every turn. Show me the afterglow of a dream in ruins, and tell me that all this has a purpose.

What have I felt today?

Residual anger...it shouldn't have happened.

Loneliness. I miss the people who aren't with me, and I can't wait till they come home.

Trepidation. No one's ever sure of the future. But I look ahead and see so many maybes, so many could-bes, that I find it hard to pick and choose the ones I would want, because I know I can't have them all...

Frustration--sometimes I just wish that baloon would come and take me up beyond the churches and steeples, to the city in the sky filled with pretty people where everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves

Confusion, sadness, resentment. I never sorted out that jigsaw puzzle...I still can't seem to make sense of the picture. I feel energy building to some sort of a climax, but I can't foresee the outcome. All I know is I both want it and don't.

Mmmm....sometimes I wish I could write like e.e. cummings...and sometimes I just get frustrated and I'm like ok that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever!! More the former, though. I got his complete works from the library and was quite interested to discover that more than a few were rather sexually frank, if not downright explicit. I always imagined him to be this old man who only wrote about death and spring and puddles. They're not overly appealing since they're all written from a male point of view, and you get the feeling that he didn't like all of these woman. Either that, or in a very messed up way he thought using terms like "manure-shaped head", "white worm of her nakedness" and "vital vicious vegetable of her mouth" to describe his partners was flattering. *shakes head* I think I'd rather prefer thinking that he just didn't like them anymore.

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,slowing stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric fur,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new
~e.e. cummings

Can you imagine the havoc that must have wreaked on whichever typist did e.e.cumming's work? you can't use spellcheck because it would go insane. but then again, if he messed up, we'd never figure it out, and maybe neither would he.

I got paid today! Yay. 136 bucks, which means I now have around two hundred in the bank. Not bad, but I still have a long way to go if I want to pay for that HILL trip.
Oooh and more good news, I got a 5 on the AP History exam! My teacher, Fitz, called Heather's house to tell her--she got a five too--and found me and Sara there, watching the Marilyn Monroe movie How To Marry A Millionaire. (It is not, as a my mom mistakenly thought, connected to the reality show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire). We were all on the phone with him for quite a while, and it was highly amusing as Fitz always is when you're not in his class. History was frustrating as all hell this year because while he is hysterically funny most of the time, his totally over-the-top comments and jokes make my inner feminist rise to the occasion. Even our fights were generally amusing, to be sure, and I managed to produce two satirical ballads for him, to his great delight. Plus the aura in that class was so very male. I mean, we had Steve (with whom Fitz is in a love-adoration relationship), the class clowns/village idiots Tim and Conor, silent Andrew, Farmboy Jeff, sort of silent Luke, Steve's tall pal, and the ever-bigoted future dictator, Trevor. And for girls? Ones that stayed quiet or always agreed with him and laughed, except for the Back Row Girls which were me, Sara, Heather (always vocal. always.) Caitlin, and sometimes Ashley too. Fitz believed we were a subversive group, of which I was ringleader, out to undermine his control of the class. Actually we were just annoyed, and spent our time cracking jokes and passing notes openly. All this may have conspired to eqarn me the Most Likely to Drive A Teacher to Suicide in the Paper Plate Awards. Fitz likes me anyway.
Of course the class was a blast in many respects, even though I hate US history in general, but now he's bothering me to take his class next year. AP government. Well number one, I don't like politics. They bore me. Number two, I don't know if I wantt to take a third AP exam, along with Bio and English. However, I know I can ace Fitz' class, it looks good on the old transcript, and a part of me does miss the fat Irishman. Just dropping in wouldn't be like seeing his chubby face lighting up with malicious glee every day. Plus it's first period, not eighth, and it's only half a year. In conclusion, unless something happens to stop me I'm probably going to sign myself up. Rae's taking it too, I think. Sara tried to tell me not too, which was kind, but the more I think the more I kind of want to.
This is all moot, of course, if it won't fit my schedule. But---gasp---the best news of all?? Mrs. Kane RETIRED! Thank the good Lord above and hallelujah, because if I had to endure another year of her owlish face in the library dealing out detentions left and right, I'd throw a book at her. But what are the chances of a senior spending any time in the library anyway? It's me, so the chances are pretty good. Let's hope the classified ad for the position doesn't go: "Lonely, vitriolic old maid sought for librarian position in parochial school. Must be able to deliver forty-five minute speech on library donors to each and every freshman student. Ugliness a plus."
Fitz also told me that Haglund told him that our Bio class is all female. Interesting, I've never been in a single sex class before...unless you count Creative Writing this year, with poor Andrew the lone representative of his gender. I miss that class, though not the dreaded Lynchie.

Power went out today. This isn't an unknown occurrence, but it was the first time in memory when it went out and stayed out, for about two hours. There I was, in the fading light of dusk with a pile of oh-so tempting books fresh from the library, unable to read in front of the windows. I'm not particularly fond of trying to balance a flashlight and turn pages at the same time, so instead I lit a bunch of candles (enough to send my mom into a panic: "Didn't you hear about that house fire in Hartford that was started by a candle?!") in the kitchen and started on The Plague Tales, which fit the dark-ish environment. The effect of the candles was cool. It made everything so warm, made the room small and cozy. It felt as though the only real world was what was inside the radius of illumination, and that everything beyond loomed large and dark and foreign. I was actually rather annoyed when the lights came back on and the TV started up. I think we all underestimate the virtue of silence. So says the little philosopher, sitting here making an ungodly clacking on the keys while her music blares through the headphones! It really was nice, though.

I bought the most interesting pants today. I haven't bought really tight pants in a while, so it was odd not feeling the usual swish of air when I moved. But the cool thing is that instead of a zipper, they lace up with rawhide in front. They'd be perfect if not for the fact that I really need to go get a belt. Cause they pretty much fall off when I sit down. Among the other purchases made were a pair of hot pink underwear with a duck on them!! :-) Really, I'm amazed that our fascination with these particular waterfowl has endured four years now. I wonder if we'll still be referring to them as the ducks when we're in college. Or when we see them at class reunions, god forbid.
Nine fifteen already. Whatever shall I do with myself now? Go back and read, probably. I forgot to get a book of crossword puzzles to keep me occupied at work. Reading Glamour and Cosmo is certainly intriguing for a while, but the interest pales quickly. I did get the entire collection of e.e. cumming's poems and thomas more's utopia. I shouldn't have gotten another classic read when I wanted to start the Republic, I know, but it was such a cute book.
When I am rich, instead of a personal shopper I will have a personal reader. This lucky individual will be payed by me, with full benefits, to spend their time reading books and finding ones that I would like. Of course they'd have to know me pretty well, but I could train them, right? Saves me the time. Book lists and reviews rarely help me; one because I have no intention of buying the books until I have read them and like them, and two because sometimes books that appeal to one reviewer would never click with me. I just can't rely on them. My friends and I all tend to read the same books, so they're not always a source of new material. They do get me moving sometimes, though. Example: Rae mentions Republic one day, Michelle goes home, digs up her copy, and finally opens it. Next day: hasn't gotten past opening it. Oops.

Yaaaawwwwn. I don't know why I bother staying up late at night. Then I'm just extra grumpy when Jen wakes me up to drive her to work. It is so amazing that I haven't hit anything, cause I'm on complete autopilot in the morning.
I have to stop reading those vampire books. I need a change of pace! I've read five of the seven Greg lent me. I think I'm going to work on Plato's Republic tomorrow anyway...that's one of the ones I've had but haven't gotten to. Rae was telling me today about how it supposedly promotes something oddly close to communism, so I intend to read and find out. I'm not quite expecting it to be a thriller of a read....my mom's not going to be trying to shoo me off to bed with me saying, "But mom! Socrates is going to totally put Thrasymachus in his place with his next speech!!" Yes, dear Thrasymachus really is a character. The others are Glaucon, Cleitophon, Cephalus, Adeimantus, and good old Polemarchus. Thank God for the English and names like Tom, Dick and Harry. And Greg.
Anyway Plato's not that bad. I really like the Last Days of Socrates. It made me sad, but at the same time I understood why he couldn't escape. Leaving would just have proved that he really was a bad influence on the society; in death he validated his own principles and practically made himself a martyr. Either the death scene translates really really well from Greek, or someone played with it a little, cause it is completely saddening. Although I don't think Greek really does translate well, cause I had a book of Sappho's poetry and some of it just didn't flow like I bet the original does. It's funny, but her poetry used to be on the Catholic Church's list of banned books. With the stuff you see today, hers is bedtime stories comparatively. She mentioned loving another woman--egads! All who read it shall be damned to eternal--er--damnation!
Oooh speaking of damnation, I want to read Dante's Inferno again. I made it through Purgatorio and Inferno, but never Paradiso. I told Mr. Janeiro that I thought that was too boring and he almost had an aneurysm. Apparently all the true meaning of the entire tale is to be found in that section. I have a sneaking suspicion that he means all the high-minded religious symbolism really comes into play up there, and I wasn't really reading for that. I was reading one for the inventive punishments and views of Hell, cause that was cool, and second because I found it ironically humorous how Dante used this classic as a jab at his contemporary enemies. The poor guy got driven out of Venice, and was pretty pissed about it. Note that all of his enemies suffer particularly horrible torments. Also I got one of my favorite quotes from the Inferno:
"There is no greater sorrow in this eternal woe, than to remember in pain our moment of happiness."
That was voiced by Paolo and Francesca, who were in one of the circles of Hell for adultery. Francesca was Paolo's brother's wife. Naughty, naughty! He caught them and killed them, and their punishment, since they valued the physical over all else, is to spend eternity as formless winds. They claim that their love triumphed and they're still together, but you';re supposed to infer (I read the notes) that they really didn't triumph, since they blame each other for being there.
My fingers, neck, back and feet all hurt. Time for bed.

This is another Breadloaf creation that I like. It might help if you'd heard of Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote the Spoon River Anthology. Basically he created this fictional town called Spoon River, and every citizen who is buried in the cemetery gets to talk about their experiences, good or bad, from beyond the grave. Thel title of every poem was usually just the person's name. They were very understated, and you usually have to read between the lines to get out of it what he meant you to.
This is one of them, nowhere near the best but it was the first one that came up...
Judge Selah Lively
Suppose you stood just five feet two,
And had worked your way as a grocery clerk,
Studying law by candle light
Until you became an attorney at law?
And then suppose through your diligence,
And regular church attendance,
You became attorney for Thomas Rhodes,
Collecting notes and mortgages,
And representing all the widows
In the Probate Court? And through it all
They jeered at your size, and laughed at your clothes
And your polished boots? And then suppose
You became the County Judge?
And Jefferson Howard and Kinsey Keene,
And Harmon Whitney, and all the giants
Who had sneered at you, were forced to stand
Before the bar and say "Your Honor" --
Well, don't you think it was natural
That I made it hard for them?
~Edgar Lee Masters

This is another one I like.
Mrs. Charles Bliss
Reverend Wiley advised me not to divorce him
For the sake of the children,
And Judge Somers advised him the same.
So we stuck to the end of the path.
But two of the children thought he was right,
And two of the children thought I was right.
And the two who sided with him blamed me,
And the two who sided with me blamed him,
And they grieved for the one they sided with.
And all were torn with the guilt of judging,
And tortured in soul because they could not admire
Equally him and me.
Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars
Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.
And no mother would let her baby suck
Diseased milk from her breast.
Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls
Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,
No warmth, but only dampness and cold --
Preachers and judges!
~Edgar Lee Masters

Anyway, here's my attempt at creating another Spoon River denizen:

Mrs. Doctor Brown

We came to town as newlyweds;
he, a proud physician starting out on his own,
I, a newly minted woman
eager to prove herself with pots and pans, needle and thimble.
But too soon I found that winters in Spoon River are long and weary,
and too few nights is the doctor’s bed kept warm.
Cold, too cold was I those long winter nights—
and then suddenly I was warm again, happy and content
to be Mrs. Doctor. I was the wife of a good man.
But nine months later I choked back tears when he said
our baby had his mother’s eyes,
knowing full well that they were not.
Yet I kept my silence all my days;
I keep it still.

Now for this one, the original was pretty rough, but it had the germ of an idea. It took like four or five different versions before it did what I wanted it to do, but I like this one.

I realized today that I haven't written anything in quite a while. I'm never usually very prolific during the summers, but still some part of me feels sad when I don't have anything new to be playing around with. I have, however, been revising a lot of older stuff that has aged sufficiently to allow me to look at it objectively. Mostly stuff from Breadloaf, and damn, some of it's good! That atmosphere up there was so utterly perfect. I wrote more poems there in four days than I ever have before. Somewhere around thirty, and at least half of them were decent even on the first go-round.
One thing I saw in Vermont confirmed something I'd thought for a long time. You can always tell the more professional, long-term writers from the ones who've been writing for a shorter time or who never share their work. The latter group will always refuse to edit anything, believing that it comes out of them riding some crystal wave of spiritual clarity...divine, perfect, and something that should not be messed with under any circumstances. If you should suggest improvements to these people, unless they're totally obvious ones, they will respond by squirming, and being uncomfortable, and ignoring the advice. People who've had more experience writing, or just more exposure to pro writers, are more comfortable editing and letting people comment on their work. I just can't understand the non-editors. They always have this lengthy defense on how they really don't feel the need to edit, because they wrote at a very stressful time and that's pure emotion on that page, dude, and they write exactly what they feel, etc, etc. But they don't realize that writing a poem is so often like digging a gem out of a mine. It's pretty enough, in a raw sort of way, when you get it, but polish is the only thing that can make it shine. Just going back and changing a few words later on, after the passion has faded, can mean so much. Some of my poems have gone from "meh" to "yes!" just by rearranging things months after I wrote it. Plus if you go back and edit, there's always a chance you can salvage a few good lines or even one cool phrase from an otherwise terrible poem that should never see the light of say again.
Of course, further support for the pro-editing camp is the fact that if you want to be a writer, and you don't want to edit, you're pretty much screwed. All famous poets had to edit. Not just because they had bitchy editors who demanded it--every writer I've talked to has had at least one of those--but because they understood that editing their work helped it grow. That's why Walt Whitman had ten editions of Leaves of Grass. Ten! Every time, there were subtle differences, minute revisions. No way e.e. cummings made all those cool concrete poems and such on the first try. He had to go back and say, hey look, there's more words I can totally mangle!
I just finished re-editing this poem, another of the Breadloaf bunch. This could be a member of the subdivision Robert Frost poems. If you didn't know, Frost lived in Middlebury, Vermont, right down the road from the Breadloaf campus. The whole place is like a monument to his memory, and he gets quoted every two seconds.By the time I left, I was damned sick of the man, but I understood how he could retreat to someplace like that. It was so beautiful. Anyway, if you're familiar with some of his more famous poems, you'll notice that this one is stitched together with lines from of a few old favorites.

An Apology Well-Intentioned


I entered the yellow wood knowing full well what I would find,
Seeking validation, or perhaps only peace of mind
His oft-quoted poems replaying internally
I knew which road he meant for me to take, surely.
But the day had been long, with miles to go ere I slept,
And so I broke a promise that ought to have been kept.
With one sly glance about me, down the traveled path I stole,
Emerging from the woods again swiftly, but not quite whole.
This world may end in fire and it may end in ice
But before it does, I hope this apology will suffice:

Dear Sir: I realize now my foolish choice made little sense;
So I promise you that one day will I
Take the road less traveled by—
And I hope that you will not know the difference.

If I put the original up here, you might not really notice the difference. I added maybe three or four words and changed punctuation. But I can feel the difference between them. I actually came up with the last three lines first and them made a poem. I thought they were cool.

"And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."
Kahlil Gibran

Ain't that the truth. Dammit, I miss Greg!

I stayed up till about two fifteen in the morning the other day to reread the book I mentioned in my last post....it's actually called Howl's Moving Castle, not just Howl's Castle. And it's even better than I remembered! I hadn't read it in a long enough span of time that I'd pretty much forgotten the plot twists, though not the ending. Must have been two or three years at least. I realized, though, that this book had the same kind of age-transcendent qualities that Harry Potter does. I must have been around eleven or twelve when I first read this, and now at sixteen I still couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. It was only a few hundred pages, so it's not terribly long, but it really maanges to pack in the storyline. The author, Diana Wynne Jones--i couldn't remember her name, but I knew she had three of them--had a bunch of other really good books, especially the Nine of Lives of Christopher Chant and Witch Week, but they pale in comparison to this one. I think I'll have to go buy myself a copy, in case some terrible mishap destroys the library's. Seriously, though, read this book!

Song

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'est born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

~John Donne

The first stanza of this poem was in a book called Howl's Castle that I read years ago. It's a really good book actually; there's wizards and enchanted things and a demon that lives in the fireplace called Calcifer. And they pretty much describe Howl himself as a hottie, even if this is a book for youngerish teenagers. I actually don't know what age it's written for, since I never stuck to one reading level. I'm probably going to get it out again and reread it. It even has a sequel!
But I digress. There's this whole part of the book about this spell or curse that involves Howl. The spell is really the first stanza, it just wasn't credited so I thought the author made it up. It actually gets acted out in the book....Calcifer was a falling star, and Howl gave him his human heart to keep him alive...he ends up telling the truth for once to Sophie while they're in this fierce windstorm...it all plays out.
Anyway, I was quite surprised to spot the whole thing in a book of John Donne's poetry that I was reading the other day. There's a whole section of this book devoted to love poems, of which this song is one. But if you really read it, you notice the last few lines don't exactly sound loving. If you find someone true and fair, the narrator doesn't want to know about it, even if he might find her next door, because even if she were true to the person that found her, she would show her true colors eventually and be unfaithful to others. Hmmm...doesn't exactly sound like "My love is like a red, red rose", does it? Turns out every one of this fellow's so-called love poems revolve around the fact that Love Sucks. Or, more correctly, Women Are Evil and They Suck. They all end with him getting his heart trampled over, women being cruel and heartless bitches, and life generally being unpleasant. Aside from that, it's really good poetry.
Amazing, Donne had a long happy marriage to this woman named Anne, to whom he wrote really touching love poems that never make it into the books alongside the spicier, women-are-whores stuff. Apparently the works we see are those that reflect the cynicism that resulted from his earlier encounters with the female sex. He must have met some mighty nasty dames to be that angry about life.

Today I decided to play amateur librarian and organize my books downstairs. There were about a hundred or so on this shelf and I broke them into fiction, classics, and philosophy...then for no particular reason I separated the classics and philosophy sections into nationalities. English, American, Russian, German, Greek/Roman. Some of them I had to actually peruse the author bio to figure out where they went. George Orwell, for one, turned out to be English. And Rabelais turned out to be a a fourteenth century French monk. I actually think I knew that from freshman history, but I forgot. Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn't do, try as I might, was get rid of some of them. I have no more physical space for books. The books in my room barely count, since those are ones from younger years for the most part, sci-fi fantasy and the lot. One down stairs bookshelf is now full of my books, the other one has my mom's plus some random ones, my dad's take up the one in the den plus all the spaces under desks, and my sister's bookcase is overstuffed. There's nowhere for me to put them anymore. (Actually I realized this like a week ago, and guess what I did the next day? Visited this thrift store bookshop with Heather and bought eight more books, of course.) My mom suggested I "pare down" the ones I have. But for some reason I have a maniacal obsession with keeping every one of them. Some of them I have to keep because I haven't had time to read them yet. Some are ones that I keep meaning to force myself to read, like Emerson and Hemingway and *shudder* Marx and Engels. There are a few I started and gave up on because the foreign names got annoying, like Anna Karenina and Dostoyevksy's Crime and Punishment. I don't think either one had a happy ending anyway. The large majority, of course, are books that I read and liked and keep around in case I want to read them again. But there are books, like everyone damned one of the Tom Clancys, that I have read, and loved, but I know I will never ever pick up again. They are way too long, way too complicated, and once you know all the twists and turns there's no point. But still they sit, nine of them, taking up more than a foot of valuable book real estate, and I don't have the heart to make them leave. It's like a collector's impulse. The only one I don't have is The Bear and The Dragon, which of course I've read, but I know if I see it somewhere I'll buy it, just so it can join its siblings on the shelf. It's crazy.

Yes!!!! My sister finally has a social engagement that will remove her from the house until Saturday morning! Thank the Lord above. Jen's awfully lucky that I make a point to be at home as little as is humanly possible. I guess I have to trade really terrible summers for the bliss of being alone during the school year. It's so beautiful to have a house entirely to yourself all week. Of course my mom is physically present at certain hours, but we don't see each other much and we get along fabulously. That was my reward for fourteen years of living with my dad's continual presence: solitude. This year will be even better because now I have a car! My dad's car, ironically. It might be said that I profited in certain ways from his death, but I didn't really. As much as I appreciate being alone and having the truck, it's nowhere near a fair trade for a parent.
That's the reason that truck has always meant so much to me. My dad loved it so much that in my mind it's inextricably linked to him. Every morning I'd be getting up as he was leaving the house. I'd look out my window as he'd back the car out of the driveway, hop out, run around the other side of the car, flip open the mirror which is too wide to fit into the garage, hop back in, and drive away. It was funny to watch in the wintertime.
For a long time after he died, I'd be walking up the street coming home from school, and I'd come around the bend and see the Tahoe sitting there in the driveway and I'd let myself pretend that it had never happened. I'd pretend that he'd come home early from work, that he was down in the den doing paperwork and that when I stood in the doorway he'd look up and say "Hi honey, how was your day" with that sort of tired smile. I really almost believed it sometimes, when I could see the light was on downstairs, that maybe it really was some stupid dream and he hadn't died. But I could only pretend until I opened the front door and there was no one there. Those weren't the only times I pretended, of course. There were other times when I'd be in the car with my mom and I'd see a bright red Tahoe and I'd immediately check the driver to see if it was him. Those times I wished so hard that I'd see a big guywith glasses and thinning salt and pepper hair. Like maybe he'd just go cruising past us as though he had never been gone at all. Those were the kind of tricks I used to play on myself.
It's only been two years, and look how things have changed. I drive his truck now; he always said I was the only one tall enough to drive it anyway. He also said he'd never ever let me have it, but as it turned out he didn't get much of a say. Now when I come into the den, it's really my space, not his. I took over his desk, put away all his books and his stuff and put my decorations everywhere. The drawers are a disaster. A lot of the stuff is still around; this big paperweight that says "DAD", this rock that I cleverly painted to resemble a penguin, his weird lamp--the base of which is made of part of a pipe or something from a decommissioned reactor. And of course his books, from the Valve Designer's Handbook to the Handbook of Thermodynamics--none of which books actually come close to fitting in your hand. But it's like his presence is fading, and it's faded in the truck too since I stuffed my CDs in there, I've probably got makeup rolling around where he kept his car phone, and I have a hula hoop in my trunk for some ungodly reason. He's still there, though. That truck was more his than anything else he owned. Of course I love that it's big and powerful, and I love the feeling of being so far above the other puny little cars on the road. Most people assume that's the real reason it means so much to me, but that has nothing to do with it. My dad has everything to do with it. If something happened to it, nothing my mom could do to me would be worse than destroying a link to my dad, one of the few that I have left that I can really feel.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum...no, wait, that's not right. A funny thing happened on the way home from a friend's house--that's the one. Actually, not even on the way. In the driveway, where my beautiful, much-adored Tahoe refused to start. It had done so the previous evening at the Boy Scout Camp (more on that later), but it started the second time. This time it just made lots of noises that I couldn't identify and wouldn't go. So I had my buddy's mom come out and try it, because this one time in the Northwest parking lot my steering wheel locked and it wouldn't let me turn the key, so I had to go ask the manly football guys to come help me and of course they got it on the first try by brute force alone. Embarassing.
Anyway no one could make it start, so her dad poked around under the hood and eventually we called the AAA people. Fortunately my mom had recently furnished me with this nifty AAA card, which meant--in theory--that I could call them up and they'd come running to rescue the damsel in distress. Even if it was a national holiday. But no, my friends. As it turns out, tow truck operators have the option of refusing to tow you somewhere if they don't want to go that far away. Even if they work for AAA. Even if you are a card-carrying member of said organization, and your mother pays them a pretty penny for the service that they are currently refusing to render. In short, after waiting for the first tow truck, the guy wouldn't go to Windsor--he refused to leave Farmington at all. Since my friend's family was supposed to be at this party, they ended up leaving me and Sara behind in there house watching Shrek waiting for another repair guy to arrive and take us at break-neck speed back to Windsor.
Did I mention that I have an amazing propensity for being caught in such situations in embarrassing attire? When I got up today I said to Sara, I'm not putting my clothes on. I'm just going to go back to bed when I get home anyway. So Michelle got to get picked up wearing a bright pink tshirt and purple plaid boxers. Yipee for the fasion queen.

However, the upshot of it all is that I'm back in my comfortable home, surrounded by all the amenities of civilization. Such as air conditioning! *falls down in worship of the god of Central Air* I now have the power to make my house the equivalent temperature of an igloo, causing myself to run around looking for socks because my feet are freezing. I prefer to freeze rather than to fry. I have no idea how all those little Boy Scouts are managing down at Mattatuck, but I don't envy them. If they had that camp in the fall, that'd be great. That area must be incredible when the trees are turning colors. However, when the sun is hot enough to seriously tempt one into violating those pesky "indecent exposure" laws, I draw the line. Those laws were drawn up by a bunch of suits in an air conditioned legislature, for God's sake!
It really was worth all the physical discomfort to see Greg, though. It was funny, the night before I had a dream about seeing him at camp and his hair was longer...and lo and behold, his hair really was longer. At least he didn't ask me about potatoes like he did in the dream. That really pissed me off; I hadn't seen him in a week and he's asking about complex carbohydrates? Really. The nerve of that dream-greg. Although if dreams are the expression of your subconscious, what the heck is mine thinking? That he's got a potato fixation?
He's coming home on Saturday, though. That's very good, very very good, because seeing him last night just made me miss him more, and I already really missed him before that. I probably have an advantage though, seeing as how I get to miss him from within the creature comforts of my house, whereas he gets to miss me from a tent in the woods. The very warm woods, with all the bugs and smelly little boys. Yes, I think I prefer to miss him from Windsor...but I'd rather not miss him at all and have him all to myself. I love him.