The Word Thief

The Word Thief

(I've been holding this thought for a day, 
maybe two
There are more things to do
than just rhyme all the time)

He pilfers passages from people's pronouncements
Carefully culling, cutting, compiling.
To him they're more mosaics made momentarily
Hard to harvest, heard in his head, but hastening away.

He casts his net--a notebook--upon noticing nuggets
That come his way
Barely brought in by the bumbling hand,
harvested in hastily handwritten heaps.

Now and then they thicken into these thoughts,
and he assembles almost all, allowing few to escape.
They're his for a while, within what he's written,
then they go, glowing--but going, then gone.

Questions

Questions

Questions, they play a really important part in our lives, don't you know?  I've only recently been reminded.how important they can be (or is it are?).  Most of the time, when I see someone who is really out on a limb, or acting irrationally, it's because they have lost (or never had) the capacity to question themselves and their beliefs.  How valuable is that ability?  We look at life based on assumptions most of the time.  Beliefs we take for granted, things we've done out of habit.  But do we stop and think?  Not to pick on Muslims, because one of the beliefs I've been questioning is whether Muslims are wrong about most things, but ask yourself how a man (or a woman) who is parent of a girl about to be raised a Muslim accepts the notion that this child must be second class, hidden from society, subjugated because she is a female?

Now, I'm thinking that I might be getting lazy.   It's easier to amble through life not stopping to think over the things we take for granted.  Why do I think it's OK for me to spend most of my time taking care of me, and not really worrying about anyone else (most days)?  It really can preoccupy you, you know.  You just get all wrapped up in yourself.

But, you have to wake up some morning and question the importance of "taking care of yourself" first.  Try another priority.  Should the one you're doing almost without thinking be set aside now and then?  Maybe these are not the examples that grab you and make you question your assumptions.  They just happened to come to mind for me when I realized that some habitual thinking on a more personal level was carrying me in a direction I thought I'd never go.  Sure, I caught myself, and changed course, but it reminded me to question myself once in a while.  Is this really the path you want to be on, the thing you should be doing?  Or are you just in the habit of thinking this way because of some assumption you accepted or developed along the way as a shortcut, instead of asking yourself the hard questions.  I'll keep my eyes open for some better examples, but in the mean time, I'm going to be asking questions.

New Routines for the Thinking Person

New Routines for the Thinking Person

Experimentation--there's nothing more human to me than trying on a new routine or action.   It's how we grow, and I think it is part of what separates the thinking human from the rest of creation (such an old-time expression "creation").  The thinking human tries something new when what he's been doing hasn't worked, or he wants to improve on it.  He (or she) experiments and tracks the effectiveness of the new approach.  If it works, he will continue the experiment, if it fails, he will not.  Of course, the insane--and unthinking--human keeps trying the same old thing, while expecting different results.

Which brings up the question, is thinking and experimenting the opposite of insanity?  The definition of insanity, after all, is to continue doing the same thing and expecting different results, isn't it?  So, when life hands the thinking human a challenge, she experiments with new actions or approaches to see if they might be more effective (or even, God forbid, more fun).  Instead of the same old routine, which for one reason or another, you simply don't believe will work, try something new.

I know, you are probably sitting there asking whatever happened to the virtue of forming good habits and following them--exercise every day; eat small, but more frequent, meals; avoid high fat and high sugar foods, like donuts and coca-cola, and blah, blah, blah....  All well and good, but the situation I posed at the start was a situation where where "what he's been doing hasn't worked, or he wants to improve on it."  Some days are saved by good habits and routines, and some days require something new.

I knew today would be one of those that required something new.  Yesterday was especially tiring, we drove an hour and a half, worked almost ceaselessly until dark, then drove home, showered and went to bed.  Today, I'm scheduled to have a session with my personal trainer, then immediately drive forty-five minutes for a lesson, and, in the evening, play ball for an hour or two.  A nap will have to fit in there somewhere, but that's not new, and isn't enough to get me started right.  So today, just this once, I tried something new.  While waiting for my herbal tea to brew, I went to the freezer and helped myself to two spoonfuls of Cookies 'n' Cream Ice Cream made with real Oreo Cookies.  So far so good, I feel better already.  I'll have to let you know how the rest of the day goes--all in the interest of thoughtful experimentation, of course.

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?

My friend Bob celebrated his 64th birthday with us tonight.  Yes, I said "celebrated", and not observed or enjoyed, he celebrated among friends.  How old do you have to be before you just "observe" birthdays?  I hope it's a long time after the sixties.  I've known Bob since the Sixties, in fact.  We've known each other since college, which started forty-six years ago.  We haven't been in contact for all of those forty-six, probably lost contact for twenty or so years during that span.

But the miracle is that I live within five miles of two guys I graduated from college with in 1972.  Jim and I have been here since 2003, and visited intermittently from 1996 until then.  Bob made contact with us here in 2005? (I think).  But, he moved here in December, so we have the opportunity to celebrate birthdays together.  We will be following his example here, since he is the oldest among us.  A little wine, some reminiscing, good conversation and a feeling that you belong where you have wound up.  Not so bad.

Bob got to talking about the most renowned female winemaker he has known.  She runs a winery, called Barrett and Barrett.  Which prompted me to help memorialize the story with the following:

We drink wine from Barrett and Barrett,

"cause it's always just  twenty-four carat.

We no longer tipple

that darn old Ripple. 

   

Yes, I can't help myself sometimes.  Bob has helped me start playing golf again, my wife says I need a few more outside interests.  This is an interest that takes me outside, but I don't seem to have stirred much interest from the gods of golf.  I consistently top the ball off the tee, toe the ball when I try to hit an iron, and muff the ball when I chip.  Top, toe, muff and then putt.  Sound like fun?  Well, i have improved some, losing only two balls in the water this week (only nine holes).  I have hydrophobia--I  am afraid to swing a half club near any water at all.  But this is about Bob being sixty-four, not me shooting sixty-four (that's nine holes).  To return to golf, I still need him, and his Sharon still needs him for much more than that.  Will we still feed him?  Jim grilled some delicious lamb chops, which led him to mention his father never grilled lamb at his house, he called it mutton.  He was in Australia during WW II and all they fed him was mutton.  Which prompted another verse:

In World War II, Jim's Dad went to Brisbane,

But he wished oh so mightily it had been Lisbon.

Living in Brisbane, he never had nothin'

But that same old, same old terrible mutton.

Yes, we still need him, and we'll still feed him, even if he's sixty-four (thanks, John and Paul).  I'm thinking that getting to sixty four will be OK,  now that Bob's led the way.

What Surrounds Us

Watching the water sparkle as the sun wanes, and a breeze begins, I wonder how this show looked long before we were here.  In 1663, when William Hilton sailed and lent this headland over looking the marshland that made up the land mass in that area his name, did he watch the water sparkle or was he busily studying what charts he had to find a way back?

What Surrounds Us

I've read a bit about Columbus and his three (or was it four?) trips more than a century earlier from Spain to what was termed Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic).  To me his ability find his way back in a tiny boat using the stars to guide him is nothing short of a miracle.  I can't help but think methods and tools for navigation had changed much between the early 1500's and the mid 1600's.  Not like today when we moved from detailed charts buoys and lighthouses to GPS.

Captain Hilton, a resident of Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was twice commissioned by merchants in Massachusetts to explore and map the Carolina coastal land.  During his second trip aboard his ship Adventure, he spotted a headland which he used to mark the entrance to the Port Royal Sound.  This headland later became known as Hilton's Head and the island on which it stood, Hilton Head Island.

 As a longtime sailor and explorer, he probably wasn't struck by how the sun danced on the waters the way a city boy from Illinois is tonight.  The tide is coming in, lending motion to this water that the slight breeze lacks the strength to provide.  An old man trudges past with his tiny dog and stares in at us.  He too seems immune to the charms of the light dancing on the waters, finding us more fascinating for reasons I will never understand.  We've waved at times, but he seems not to notice, so perhaps he doesn't see us at all, and the faraway stare is really fixed on some memory or other.  I can't believe it's all that pleasant--his brow's too furrowed for that.

All too often we all seem to busy ourselves with other things and forget to take in what surrounds us. That probably goes for the people in our lives as well.  Probably ought to get in touch with some tonight....

Books Can Be Confusing

Books Can Be Confusing

If I seem a little muddled these days, blame it on the books.  Against my better judgement, I am reading four books at once these days.  For most of my post-educational life, I have only read one book at a time.   Not that there haven't been books I never finished, or books that I set aside and only picked up again much later.  But to consciously be carrying from place to place up to four different books, is, well, unprecedented.

There are practical reasons for some of this, I guess.  I have a kindle you can't read at the beach with all that glare of sunlight and reflected water, so I have two mysteries underway at once--one paperback for the beach and one e-book for at home.  Then there's the book on poetry, chock full of tangents I can run off on in writing small pieces.  Then there's the philosophy book I picked up to read while waiting at the barbershop.  The latter two don't bear the restrictions that come with a narrative approach (needing to be read in order, front-to-back, requiring a certain minimum period of focus to allow time to pick back up with the story and its characters, and even the characters themselves who gradually reveal themselves (or are revealed) by the parts they play in the narrative, etc.).

So, I tend to pick up the non-fiction books for shorter snatches, although a philosophy book requires more than a little concentration, and the poetry book tends to stimulate the desire to pick up a pen or sit down at a keyboard to try things on for size.  So, you see, reading just has a few too many choices, and the narratives a few too many characters and plot lines to remember. Couple the issues with narrative with the mystery writers' penchant for jumping from one plot line to another throughout the book as they paint their picture from various points of view or literally suspend you from one plot line and move to another.  Today there is more than one reason they call them suspenseful.

The philosophy book is meant to infuse its subject matter into everyday life (obvious, if you remember the title is Philosophy For Everyday Life), so you sometimes ramble into unusual territory in conversation--another reason those around you observe that you might be "losing it."  I mean, how often do you work into the conversation the concept of identity--as in how can you be the same person you were 20 years ago, when your cells change out over the span of six years or so?  Or, if you learned some things and have since forgotten them, is that brain the same one that was you back then?

The Poet's Glossary has me itching to try something new, or, in this case very old.  So, I'm tempted to chuck this whole story, but...  Books just have me confused today, where's the beach?

Clerihews Are All In Fun

Clerihews Are All In Fun

To the dismay of some, I am sure, a while back I was bitten by the poetry bug.  Lately I've been exploring a reference book on poetry that I ran across.  It's called A Poet's Glossary, by Edward Hirsch (you might remember another work of his--I think-- called Cultural Literacy, he's also a poet of some renown--published eight books of poetry).

But I digress, it is chock full of definitions of poetic terms most of us have never even heard of.  Case in point, there's a poetic form I found in Mr. Hirsch's Glossary called a Clerihew--which was someone's middle name a long time ago...blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, it is right there on page 112, between "classic" and "cliche."  Quoting Mr. Hirsch, "It consists of a skewed quatrain--two rhyming couplets of unequal length that whimsically encapsulate a person's biography..."  (How can you not just love a book full of definitions like this one?)  Usually, the name of the person being sent up appears in the first couplet.  He offers this example

Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser
But this never harmed the sales
Of his Canterbury Tales 

Below you will find a few of my own attempts--

Young President George W Bush
On rumors of Saddam's weapons, did not sit on his tush
He sent our armies in pursuit, but when all was said and done,
Those who went hunting chemical weapons found exactly none

Margarita Man, Jimmy Buffett
when he sailed off he had to rough it.
It seemed, he failed to pack the supplies
to make a cheeseburger in paradise.

Vladimir Putin
He's a bad man there's no disputin'
But in Crimea nearly everyone loves him s ton
If you believe those voting in the face of a gun.

Try it, it's fun, I swear it.

Hair's My Philosophy--The Barbershop Brings Out The Philosopher In Me

It all started last November.  I called my barbershop to make an appointment with the person who has cut my hair for the past eight years (this despite the fact that I have relayed some of the critiques offered by my dear wife of her work, once relaying the comment that my wife told me I looked like a "cone head" after one of her early efforts).  I was advised that my barber was on a "personal leave of absence," and her return was uncertain.  I accepted an appointment with her sister, and heard the same explanation being offered when people called in while I was there getting my haircut.  Her sister had no comment, but my wife liked her work even less than she had her sister's early work, so I was in trouble. As I looked at it, I decided my new (temporary) barber would need some training, or I needed to find my old one.  The next time I called for an appointment--once more asking for my original barber--I was advised that my former barber was no longer employed at their establishment.  In any event, at my next appointment, I finally got my barber's sister to tell me where her sister had gone--to another shop in town--and tracked down my original barber.

Calling for an appointment at her new shop, I was advised that this shop did not offer appointments and was strictly walk-in.  It had taken me years to adjust to calling ahead for appointments at a barber shop in the first place, so I was baffled.  However, I showed up, and just waited for my barber's turn and got my haircut.  Sure, I had to wait, but it didn't take all that much longer than it would have if I had made an appointment, and now I no longer had to call a day or two ahead to get my haircut scheduled.  I just needed an open-ended afternoon to do it.  I was thinking I could live with that.

Hair's My Philosophy--The Barbershop Brings Out The Philosopher In Me

With that said, I didn't get my haircut last week when I wanted it, because I had no open-ended afternoon I could spend hanging around the barber shop waiting my turn.  I had too much going on.  I soldiered on with excessively unkempt hair until today, which my spouse advised was my final deadline   I was to get my haircut or else.  That meant I left this afternoon open, and headed for the shop shortly after noon.

As I headed over there (headed was just the only word that occurred to me to use there, it had nothing whatever to do with the size of my head covered in unkempt curls), I realized I was probably in for a wait and I had nothing to read.  I had seen the selection of the shop's reading materials on my previous visit--Guns  and Ammo, Skin and Ink--Tattoos and Tradition, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life,  and Cycle World, just to name a few.  I decided to make a quick stop at the bookstore and grab a Bargain Book to pass the time.  I picked up the first book that caught my eye.  It was a book entitled Philosophy For Everyday Life.  Its first few pages caught my interest.  As luck would have it, I was first in line and my regular barber had just returned from her lunch and her chair was empty.  In short, I had no time for the book.

Ah, but after my wife marveled at how much better my hair looked now that I had my old barber back, I pulled out the book, and spent a pleasant hour or so this evening renewing my acquaintance with Socrates, Descartes, Montaigne, even Pyrrho of Elis (one of the early Sceptics).  Heck, Philosophy was on my mind--or shall I say in my head, or at the roots of my hair?  Anyway, it's all connected....in some hair-brained way, I suspect.

Whatever you think, question it once in a while.

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

If you could split your time between two cities anywhere in the world, which would they be?  Too urban for you?  Make it a Tale of Two Places. I need to spend some time with this one.  I don't consider myself well-traveled so I doubt my selections will reflect anything other than the feel I have for those places I know.  At first blush, I thought of Hilton Head, SC and Saugatuck, MI, mostly because I am quite familiar with both and know people there, of course.

But if I looked at it as a choice of two "cities," I know that Chicago and San Francisco would be in the mix.   Zeroing in on those a bit, I think Sausalito might be my real San Francisco choice.  I'm liking this Sausalito choice even more.  I spent only a single afternoon there, but I know there's much more to explore and that San Francisco would be within easy reach.  People tell me that the three or four sunny days I spent there were not an accurate reflection of typical weather there, but I.m not too worried. Chicago would likely remain a downtown choice--somewhere near the lake, with a view perhaps.  Though Chicago was my home, I'm not certain of this one, since I've lived away for nearly thirty years.  But I think of major league baseball at Wrigley and whatever they are calling White Sox Park these days.  I think of the Lincoln Park zoo and the many afternoons we spent there with our two kids.  I remember lunch hours spent at the Cultural Center atop the old public library, a building lined with colored glass with Tiffany designs, I think.  Then there's the Art Institute...and the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum...

I have to go back and think this one through, TO BE CONTINUED

A SPECIAL THANKS TO SOMEONE I KNOW

A SPECIAL THANKS TO SOMEONE I KNOW

Though you might think it's a no-brainer
I’m here in the moment to thank my dear trainer.
She’s encouraged me through
a vast mountain of “Phew!”

That being neatly defined
as residue in the mind
of longstanding rust in these old joints and distortions
released only by work and some beastly contortions.

She awakened within me an impulse so small
I’d nearly forgotten it existed at all.
At once it called me to work and to strive
to do those things daily I’d need to survive.

She called forth from within me a will to improve
Softly challenging, not belittling the ground I could move.
My progress she measured in my will and not elsewhere,
slowly turning my head she talked me in out of nowhere.

Now she points out to me progress others can’t see.
Reassuring me now there’s a me she can see
That’s been cooped up inside me for so very long  
I’d forgotten the notes, yes, and even the song.

When I notice what we’ve done in the years we’ve spent
I see we’ve made progress but it’s scarcely a dent
in the long path stretching before me as just one
of the people she’s choosing to help, one-by-one.

Some days it’s all thankless, not easily done
But don’t let this day join those others as one,
Here’s a most heartfelt thanks
from just one of the ranks.