My friend Laurie Devine has just published her bestselling hardcover book Nile as an e book and as a special promotion, is offering it free to download on Amazon Kindle for two more days. Directions are below.
Go here to download an Amazon Kindle version of Laurie’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Nile-Laurie-Devine-ebook/dp/B0D6PPG7L8/
See more information on this and Laurie’s other books using the above link.
In this morning’s post, I mentioned a polka dot prom dress my oldest sister wore and that my middle sister wore as a costume for her birthday costume party the year she turned 13. She is the last one on the right in the first photo. She even has a dance card tied to her wrist! I just found a picture of her in it as well as a picture I’d forgotten of me in a polka dot prom dress as well! Except I think I was just dressing up in my sister’s because although it was four years later, I was just 13 years old as well. That said, here is my polka dot addendum.
Click on photos to enlarge.
I am trying to remember a famous pair whose relationship was mainly through letters. They may have met, but were mainly remembered for their letters. Perhaps they got together in the end, but I think not. He was famous but she wasn’t and for some reason I think she was a librarian but I may be wrong about that. I think they lived in the early 1900s or perhaps the end of the 1800s. Does anyone know who I’m trying to remember? Driving me crazy. Seems she was remembered as Mrs. Something or other. Seems like he might have been a writer. She was his inspiration of sorts. I may be wrong about a number of these details, so if you have any idea who they may be, I’d appreciate your easing my mind.
I Googled this site and none of these couples are who I am thinking about: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63199/7-historys-most-famous-pairs-pen-pals
I also Googled this one and they perceived me as a threat and blocked me:
Famous Love Letters Throughout History
Any Ideas? It was actually Forgottenman’s idea to ask you, saying that he thought you were just the sort of folks who might know!!!! And I must say, I agree.
Out on a Liminal
The jolly crew over lunch yesterday. Happiest when the jefe is not in sight. He probably knows this and this is why the two older men eat in front of the house, the younger men on my patio in the back.
Liminal—I admit that I looked the word up, and I’m glad I did. I have always thought that since subliminal meant below the threshold of conscious thought, that liminal must refer to conscious thought. Wrong.
Liminal: of or relating to a sensory threshold. 2 : barely perceptible. 3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional
So, is my house in a liminal state between completion and constant repair and construction? If so, what is the state after liminal? Perhaps subliminal is the ultimate state rather than the one under liminal. Perhaps it is that state in which everything just goes along smoothly without having to think about it. Water flows, floors stay crack and salitre-free, lightbulbs stay perpetually lit.
Perhaps I’d better look up subliminal as well:
Subliminal: (of a stimulus or mental process) below the threshold of sensation or consciousness; perceived by or affecting someone’s mind without their being aware of it.
One out of two. It means exactly what I thought it did.
Today is the fourth day of construction at my house and the last day of the work week. Thankfully, only six men showed up instead of the usual nine, because that is how many beers I have in the fridge and I didn’t want to have to leave to buy more to treat them at the end of this short work day. The jefe and his assistant seem to have stayed home to leave the other younger men to complete tiling the kitchen and hammer-and-chiseling out the built-in large bathtub to transform it into a shower and construct a small wall to serve in lieu of shower curtain.
At first I was worried that the jefe hadn’t shown up because last night as I surveyed the day’s work, I noticed two problems. One was that the tiles on the front porch were not centered. I can understand that he was lining up the main tile with the tile in the inside of the house, but in fact the porch is more often viewed with the door shut, so as nice a it would have been if they’d taken this into account at the beginning, they didn’t, and so having the line under the door misaligned seems a smaller problem than having the entire porch off-center.
The second problem was that the bottom step in the hall leading down to my bedroom was 1/2 inch deeper on one side than the other. Now, these are the steps that have tripped me up three times in the past year, twice sending me careening headfirst into an edge where two walls meet and rendering me unconscious for a few seconds. So, I don’t need a further contributing factor to my own clumsiness. I do not need one slightly diagonal stair leading up to a square one!
At any rate, I was dreading pointing this out to the grumpy foreman, but the young man I reported it to was very pleasant and equally helpful when I tripped over one of their damn line up wires for positioning the tiles (heavy fishing line strung between two nails pounded into the cracks between the tiles.) This is about the fifth time I’ve tripped over the dangerous things, but this one was tangled but still connected to the two nails even though the tile had long been set, so it would not release, and sent me careening down the front stairs, head-first down onto the terrace.
In all, I probably traveled seven feet horizontally and about a foot from house floor level down to terrace level. If it had been an Olympic event, I might have placed, but as is I just said a few very vile swear words–in English, not Spanish, so perhaps they didn’t have the same effect on listening ears. At any rate, the nice young man who had heard earlier complaints came running to take my camera out of my hands, (Yes, I was going to photograph the misaligned porch tiles.) to help me up and then to remove that damn fishing line that should have been removed two days ago.
So, all in all, I’d say my day so far has been anything but subliminal. But although my entire state for the past week as we moved everything out of the house and then dealt with four days of noise, dust and constant activity has certainly been transitional, it is certainly not been barely perceptible. And in spite of the fact that my stumble and fall over my literal threshold was totally sensory, still, taking the full definition of both terms into account, I seem to be in a state neither liminal nor subliminal.
I’m just lucky that after that nasty spill that my state isn’t terminal!!!! And I can safely say, I think, that my bone density is excellent. This entire discourse, of course, simply acts as an introduction, to The Verse!!!!!
The Threshold
I must say that it’s criminal
how I must deal with liminal
aspects of this threshold wire
that seem to signal I’ll expire
if they do not complete forthwith
this entryway. It seems a myth
that I will ever pass it freely
without tripping. Will I? Reallly?
I fear my life’s conditional
on it being transitional.
Image by “Possessed Photography” on Unsplash.
Forgottenman sent me the link to a video that confirms my worst fears about AI.
Go HERE to see his blog and hear it for yourself!
Click on Photos to Enlarge
I always thought that at some point I would have children, but by the time I finally found the man I wanted have them with, I was thirty-eight, and he already had eight living children. Four of these children were under the age of eight when we met. When I married their dad, I married them, too. This poem was written at a time when, as inept as I was at entertaining small children in an L.A. condo, I still believed in a sort of magic wherein stepfamilies could connect to become become real families.
Connections
Your daughter breaks her arm and something breaks with it.
She becomes manageable.
Her laugh, softer now sometimes.
She loves writing with her other hand.
Her broken one grows fingernails for the first time
which we manicure once a week.
Sometimes, I drive home slower
on the nights I know we’re going to have the kids,
hoarding a few more minutes alone.
My key in the lock brings them, wanting games at once.
You, exhausted, irritable on the sofa,
wanting them yet wanting them gone.
In a movie, Mary Tyler Moore saying
she can’t love the son who needs her love too much.
Can’t love on demand?
Dirty fingernails, torn knees on Levis—
Our rag-a-muffins,
driven down to our city life
where they demand the mall.
Not the way I pictured it.
They call me Mom immediately after the wedding.
I scrub their fingernails,
put medicine on cold sores,
tell Jodie not to wear those torn-out pants to school anymore.
The other kids, I say, will talk—
what my mother would have said to me.
When I tell them at the office
about the homemade Easter decorations
hung on our refrigerator,
about the one that reads “to Mom,”
Jim says he prefers Elliott’s stories.
When I tell them that the littlest grabbed my knees
and hugged and said, “I just love you,”
the clever crowd around the copier groans.
I’m not a mother, they all understand,
and once a week, I barely get good practice in.
But when your daughter breaks her arm,
I try to find a spell to stick us all together—
paper, scissors, colored pens.
I say, “Try to keep the glue off the dining room table.”
I say, “Try not to drop the magic markers on the floor.”
“Take off your shoes when walking on the white sofa.”
Books2024. New Generation Independent Book Award Finalist:
The China Bulldog And Other Tales of a Small-Town Girl
(Prose, poety and images of growing up in a small town in South Dakota. )
I just discovered that my book The China Bulldog (Available on Amazon and at Diane Pearl’s)
was a finalist for the 2024 New Generation Indie Book Awards in the Memoir category.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 