For Cee’s FOTD
For Cee’s FOTD
Upon Running into a Former Best Friend
Don’t give me cause to regret our reunion.
Don’t bring back to mind our former disunion.
Don’t lament my profession or cuss at my kids—
those actions that once put us into the skids—
dissolving our friendship and our former ties
when I’d had enough of your conniving lies.
Don’t inveigle or bemoan your lack of a pension.
Past times I’ve come through I won’t bother to mention.
And if you’ve a reaction and want to explode,
do me a favor. Take it on the road!!!
Prompt words today are inveigle, lament, reunion, cussed and reaction.
Looking Out, Looking In
I feel that Stuart’s decision to spend the afternoon with us is symbolic of his final acceptance of me after all these years. He’s been married to my friend Sarah for twenty-five years, helped raise her sons after their father’s death, but has always been suspicious of me. We have, however, spent the afternoon trading quips and now he is trying to show us the stars.
Sarah’s messing with the connection between the Smart TV and Stuart’s computer may serve to disunite their long union. He is frantically trying to undo whatever she has done so he can show us his video of the Grand Design Spiral Galaxy as well as a number of globular clusters .
Once he succeeds in showing it to us, our reactions to this amazing display are varied. He explains that the globular cluster comprised of hundreds of thousands of stars that is attached to our universe is perhaps the core of an old galaxy.
The present day galaxies he shows us are designated by a capital M followed by a number. Our reactions to this amazing display are varied. One of the galaxies looks like fireworks to my friend’s oldest son. I think M3 looks like the venation on a leaf and the other son sees M5 as a flower with the stem cut off. In the middle of M51 there is probably a black hole, Stuart tells us.
“Where does something go when it vanishes into a black hole?” I ask. “Matter can’t be created or destroyed, right?” That’s not especially true, says Stuart, who as a scientist is not accustomed to our level of ignorance about the workings of the Universe.
Nonetheless, he is patient in his attempts to show us the wider world, and this visit, I have begged him for a second nighttime viewing. The first time he showed me the world of our universe in his high powered telescope, I was amazed, feeling as thought I had perhaps had a new religious experience. As it is without, so it is within, I thought. Is there a black hole at our center? Is it going to swallow us? We are like two opposite ends of the spectrum, Stuart looking out and me looking within, each of us with a spot to fill that is suddenly a speck in a complex world.
Words of the day: venation, symbolic, frantic, disunite and reaction.
For Cee’s FOTD
Last night, the doorbell rang and it was Paisano and Patti, who entered my house with this gorgeous bouquet, singing “Las Mananitas.” Kristina, who is watching my house while I’m in the States for a month, joined in. So sweet.
Then at 7 a.m. this morning, after the man I’d called to drive me to the airport loaded my bags in a hard rain and we were starting to drive away, Yolanda and Oscar showed up two hours early for work and handed me a box. Inside was this lovely rosary. “It is handmade—for your protection,” she told me.
Although my birthday is actually tomorrow ,what a lovely birthday it has turned out to be, even before it has started.
After a packing frenzy, I finally fell asleep at 3 this morning, then got up at 5 to get ready for my ride to the airport in Guadalajara to catch a flight to Houston and then to Minneapolis for a family reunion. I started writing this at 8 a.m. in Guadalajara. It is now 2:28 in the afternoon and I am in Houston waiting for my next flight. I’ve spent an hour and a half in the Guadalajara Airport waiting room, one hour waiting in the plane for a mechanical error to be fixed, two hours in the air, another hour and a half walking through passport control, customs, baggage claim, baggage recheck (I hope) and another few miles walking from the end of one concourse to the end of the other.
I hope my two hours of sleep last night accounts for the fact that I absolutely cannot remember rechecking my 50 lb. checked bag after picking it up from the carousel here in Houston. I do remember lifting it off the carousel. I just can’t remember wheeling it though customs and rechecking it to Minneapolis! And I am not going to backtrack another 5 miles, so I may wind up in Minnesota with only my carry-on. The good news will be if this confusion is due to lack of sleep and not the onset of dementia. This poem, however, relates the story of the beginning of my journey this morning as I sat in the waiting room at the departure gate for my flight from Guadalajara.
Pre-Trip Snafu
I have a special movie I’ve been saving to see.
It’s loaded on my laptop here, balanced on my knee
but I cannot watch it due to an oversight,
even though I have two hours left before my flight.
So I’m sitting in the airport feeling sort of lost.
I need to buy some earphones, no matter what the cost.
I knew I’d forget something even though I checked and checked,
but this egregious oversight I neglected to detect.
I penned a careful overview of what I knew I’d packed,
unpacked my bags and looked again to double-check each fact.
My boisterous friends requested that before I go
we celebrate my birthday, but I had to say no.
I was too busy packing , unpacking and repacking––
checking off the items to see what I was lacking.
Phone, computer, curling iron, hair dryer and comb.
I couldn’t think of anything that I was leaving home.
Of course it was inevitable something would go wrong,
and the realization was sure to come along
after I passed all the shops and five miles down the aisle,
weary of lines and walking. Ready to rest awhile.
No magazines to pass the time. My phone is out of juice.
No earphones to enjoy my flick. I guess I’ve cooked my goose.
Too late to remedy my lack, too far into my botch,
but real life’s all around me. I guess that I’ll just watch!
Prompt words are off, overview, boisterous, egregious and lost.
For Cee’s FOTD
Rain, Rain
The yearly rains extinguish the cauldron of the sun—
gunmetal sky, one wisp of cloud like a smoking gun.
When our prayers for rain to cease go without an answer,
once again, we voice vague threats to hire a necromancer.
A cosmopolitan traveller, rain roams the thirsty world
allaying drought and hunger with silver bullets hurled
to break apart hard-crusted earth, allowing plants to grow—
cornstalks pushing through the dirt, fresh fields of hay to mow.
With every living creature dependent on the rains,
still we cannot help but silently repeat the strains
of “Rain, rain, go away and come again some other day,”
when for weeks the rain pelts down from skies sunless and gray.
Prompt words today are cauldron, cosmopolitan, prayer and allay.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos on this site are by me.
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For Cee’s Midweek Madness prompt, hosted by Bushboy this week: Getting Close at Home.
