To improve those ancient feelings regarding love that’s past— all of those sad endings for love that didn’t last— relate the facts as comedy. Banter about life’s failings. Laughter serves you better than retroactive wailings!
Actually, the past love I’m fighting sad feelings about today is the 22 year old Royal Poinciana tree that they are cutting down today. It had root rot and was in danger of falling so it had to be done. So, unbeknownst to me, I gave myself good advice in writing this poem which started out to be about love of another variety. Here is the tree in all its former glory:
My love is ambidextrous, dispensed by either hand, dished out in two varieties: dried kibble or in canned. Bestowed in pats and scratchings on tummies or on ears, never controversial and never in arrears.
I am love’s first ambassador, affection’s main dispenser. No love is deeper, wider, or more heartfelt or denser.
Whether sleeping, eating, playing or in any other guise,
I admire thee from wagging tail to thy chalcedony eyes.
I promise to protect thee from draft or snow or rain, to deliver thee from hunger, thirst, distress and pain. I’ll be grateful acceptor of your leaps and licks and chewings, of all your puppy excesses and your destructive doings.
All that I ask you in return is that you love me, too, and express that love by going outside to pee and poo!!!!
Forgottenman said I have to write a birthday poem, so here it is:
Expired
I will not curb my inhibitions, and so I will not sail off on new adventures out beyond the pale. That powerful compunction to be off on an adventure, ever after, I declare to have my sincere censure.
Apathy is my new creed. I simply do not care to meet with any challenges or answer any dare. I’ll gaze upon my garden and watch its petals fall and when faced with challenges? Reject them one and all.
I’ve officially retired. I’m taking up TV. I’ll sit here eating popcorn, a cat upon my knee. I’ll make up for a lifetime of my lack of viewing and rail against what all the youngsters of today are doing.
I’m done with being active and current and involved. I’ve lost my former need for being current and evolved. Forget that I exist and let me moulder in my den. I’m both used up and giving up on all that I have been.
Three-quarters of a century’s enough for being me. Now I will investigate what else there is to be. I’ll expire before the date that I am due for expiration, and simply coast along for the rest of my duration.
I don’t have any patriotic clothing. I don’t own an American flag. And I’m hoping that the 4th of July parade in the small town where we are staying is rained out.
But last week at the ball game, I teared up at the Star Spangled Banner. It gets to me – even with all its militaristic excess. It’s that “land of the free and the home of the brave” that does me in.
I am ashamed of my country right now. Ashamed that institutions of governance – one after the other – fell prey to years’ long plots to disenfranchise the country’s majority. Ashamed that people doing normal things in a normal way can get caught up in an interaction with law enforcement that ends with their being riddled with bullets. Ashamed that adults charged with caring for the children of the world would icily tell a 10-year old…
“Halo everybody, Halo. Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair, so Halo everybody, Halo!” The remnants that dangle on the edge of memory when I awaken from a barely-accessible dream are not ones that my conscious mind sees fit to shove to the front of the crowd of past retorts, compliments, taunts, scraps of poetry, lines from old movies and musical ditties that upon occasion drift across it, but when the word “halo” is also repeated as a prompt in the first blog I look up to gather my prompts for the day’s poem, it seems too much of a coincidence to be coincidence.
This terrific Internet roadway that has led me to a worldwide circle of friends, combined with the scrap of memory from my dream, has led me backwards in time to an early morning seventy years before. My dad is long gone, out to feed the cattle or survey the wheat crop, my older sisters have vanished across the street to their classrooms at the first pealing of the school bell, my mother sits in my dad’s deserted rocker with coffee, toast and the morning paper, and I lie on my stomach in front of the Victrola, switching on the radio.
It is that time of the morning when Mother and I are content to let the morning languish away for awhile. It is a terrific time of freedom for my mother, who often insists she is lazy at heart but who in fact makes sure there is always a meal on the table, skirts hemmed, sheets ironed, Christmas presents piled under the tree in time for them to be admired for a week or more before Christmas, Easter eggs hidden just carefully enough in nests that peek out a tiny bit from beside the sofa or the bottom edge of the curtain.
And for me, it is a time when I have total control over what station the radio in our console record player/radio will be tuned to. Every morning, the Halo Shampoo song issues cheerily out into the morning air and already, in the dawn of media commercials, I have been influenced by what I hear. I have persuaded my mother to invest in our first bottle of Halo shampoo, and although I am five now and old enough to know the difference between metaphor and truth, still some part of me imagines the halo that will waft lightly over my head next Sunday as I flip my hair at the corner before setting out to cross the one street between our house and the Methodist Church. God will know the difference, I am sure, and at lunch after Church, when Mother serves Devil’s Food Cake, I have convinced myself that the former will surely cancel out the latter.
I received this email today. If meant as a joke, not the least bit funny. If not a joke, scary as Hell: I received this in an email. How can it even be legal to put such a threatening message on the Internet? SICK SICK SICK!!!!!
