Category Archives: Youth

Life Is Too Short to Be Afraid

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Staid: adjective: sedate, respectable and unadventurous. “staid law firms”
synonyms: sedate, respectable, quiet, serious, serious-minded, steady, conventional, traditional, unadventurous, unenterprising, set in one’s ways, sober, proper, decorous, formal, stuffy, stiff, priggish

Life Is Too Short To Be Afraid

Life is too short to be afraid,
caught, traditional and staid,
serious, steady, lacking flair,
always well-clothed and never bare.
We were not meant for formal fare,
pinched and tucked with perfect hair.

We’re meant to flap and drag and wear
with tattered bits and unkempt hair.
Life’s meant to mess us up a bit
as we make use of all of it.
Not just the parts traditional,
decorous and conditional.

Take a chance to win or fail.
Face the flood and face the gale.
Jump right in with both your feet
when adventure you chance to meet.
Go out to meet the world with grace,
hand extended, face-to-face.

In this great apple called mankind,
live in the fruit, not in the rind.
In the messy, fragrant, toothsome center
be an enjoyer, not a repenter.
Buy life full-price and not on clearance.
Live on the pith and not appearance.

For all too soon it will be over.
That field you rolled in, full of clover,
will sprout small stones that bruise your spine.
The rich mussels on which you dine
will be something you’ll have to pass
for fear that you might suffer gas.

The places where you want to go
can’t be got to when you’re slow.
You won’t have the energy
to travel fast and travel free—
to hitchhike, backpack, hop a train
when you have rheumatism pain.

So gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
“Real” life will wait another day.
Be silly and take chances now.
Forsake the contract, pledge and vow.
Too soon the walker and the cane.
You never will be young again.

The Prompt:No Time to Waste—Fill in the blank: “Life is too short to _____.” Now, write a post telling us how you’ve come to that conclusion.

 

 

Back and Forth

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Back and Forth

If I should find a time machine, I might or might not buy it.
And even once I bought it, I might or might not try it.
To think about the future always makes me sweat,
for I am trepidatious about how bad it might get.
I foresee live-in bubbles for one or two or three
who merely turn on YouTube for whomever else they see.
Pollution would be too advanced to venture far outside—
the world turned way too violent for most folks to abide.

If I visited the future, chances are I’d see
the death of friends and loved ones—perhaps the death of me!
See our country crumble due to earthquakes or to slaughter.
See Monsanto poison food crops after ruining our water.
Our seasons turned to drought, tornado, hurricane and flood—
by turn made dry or spinning or blown away or mud.
I know there are alternatives, but I can’t help but doubt
that current politicians will let it all work out.

But if I went into the past, perhaps I’d also rue it.
I might just be happier if I chose to eschew it
I might see as a toddler that I was just a brat—
a little squirming dervish—graceless, spoiled and fat.
I might hear that my singing voice was just a bit off-key
and see the looks the others gave as they were hearing me.
If I encountered me, we might just end up in a fight
like ones I had with sisters—and discover they were right!

Yet, this probably won’t happen and perhaps it might be fun
to have another look at what I’ve seen and what I’ve done.
And though to relive some things would leave me feeling queasier,
I know that it would certainly make memoir-writing easier.
What fun to relive Christmases from year to year to year,
To see my mom and dad again, what’s more, to get to hear
all the stories of my dad and this time to record them—
to spend time with my sisters and to show how I adored them.

What fun to watch me with my friends— Rita, Lynn and Billy—
to see when we were children if we were just as silly
as little kids I see today who just seem to be reeling
with energy and foolishness and excesses of feeling.
I’d drive on roads with fewer cars to spots no longer there.
Go roller skating in Draper gym. Fall on my derriére!
I’d have a Coke in Mack’s Café and then I’d shop at Gambles.
Buy love comics at Mowell’s Drug and then expand my rambles

down to the playground monkey bars, where I would do a flip.
Then to the Frosty Freeze where I would have another sip
of orange slush and then I’d have to buy a barbecue.
(I fear that in my tiny town, that’s all there was to do!)
I’d skip ahead, then, many years, to 1971,
and fly off to Australia for adventures in the sun.
Then Singapore and Bali, Ceylon and Africa.
See everything as it once was, when it was new and raw.

Regrets? Of course. I’m human, and so I’ve had a few,
but over precognition, I prefer déjà vu.

The Prompt: One-Way Street—Congrats! You’re the owner of a new time machine. The catch? It comes in two models, each traveling one way only: the past OR the future. Which do you choose, and why?

A Message for Henry Selick

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The Prompt: Make It Count—You’ve been given the opportunity to send one message to one person you wouldn’t normally have access to (for example: the President. Kim Kardashian. A coffee grower in Ethiopia). Who’s the person you choose, and what’s the message?

A Message for Henry Selick

In our age of information—
and also instant confirmation
of every little truth and fact,
it’s necessary to react
with some protection, I understand.
The famous of us take a hand
to protect themselves from the clamoring band
of those who call for their attention
to win a conference or audition,
an interview or invitation
to meet for food or a libation
as a means to talk about
ideas that we have need to flout.
And so I see why I could not
reach the person whom I sought
to pitch my Christmas storybook.
The plot is good. I have a hook.
The characters are funny and
the artist has an expert hand.
I even know the person who
I wish to do my pitching to.
But he’s grown famous through the years
and our acquaintance is in arrears—
his movies scarier by far
than any of my stories are.
But readers tell me that in a pinch,
my Christmas story beats the Grinch!
A Christmas classic the film would be
if only Hollywood could see
the book that no one yet has seen
because my Facebook notes have been
seen by no one and I have not
a way to advertise my lot.
So here I make a heartfelt plea
for Henry Selick to contact me!

(To further jog your memory:
Your wife Heather had a job
teaching with my husband Bob.)

The book is Sock Talk: A Christmas Story, and you can see more about it here.


Blog Sock Talk

Waiting for the Bell

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DSC07814Nine Minutes to Nine–Retablo by Judy Dykstra-Brown ( 5.5 X 7 X 1.25 inches)

Waiting for the Bell

From my upstairs bedroom window, I could see it all:
who got to school early to be first for tether ball,
the teachers driving up the street, avoiding children running
some children in the sandbox, and other children sunning
stretched out on the teeter-totters, waiting for a ride—
their friend the perfect size to balance, still locked up inside
cleaning off the chalkboards and dusting the erasers
with others who’d been tardy, or perhaps desktop-defacers.

We could hear the school bell toll the warning for
just one more bite of Cream of Wheat—no time for any more.
I stood and watched as sisters sprinted out the door.
Going on without me, for I was only four.
I waited then for recess, spread out on the grass
waiting for the hours and minutes just to pass.
Through open windows, I could hear all the teacher voices
quizzing all the children and listening to their choices.

The teacher on piano, the class singing along—
long before my school days, I’d memorized each song.
At 10:15, the bell was rung and big doors thrown out wide—
one hundred children, all at once, released to the outside.
Some ran to claim the swings and slides, or lined up for the games:
choosing sides for “Send ‘Em” by calling out their names.
But the creaking of the swing chains and whoops up on the slide
could not reveal the mysteries of what was sealed inside.

Year after year I watched and listened, storing up the clues
for the day that I could put on my new school shoes.
I’d have my school bag at my side while mother curled my curls
and keep it with me as I ate my breakfast with the girls,
spooning up my Cream of Wheat but listening for the bell
that warned the time was getting short for me to run pell-mell
across the street and up the stairs in brand new skirt and blouse.
I knew which room to look for.  I could see it from my house.

And then perhaps my mom would stand under our big elm tree
and the singing that she listened for would finally include me!

 The Prompt: August Blues—As a kid, were you happy or anxious about going back to school?

A Girl Like Me

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The Prompt: What’s the best (or rather, worst) backhanded compliment you’ve ever received?

There was a guy in college who was the best friend of my best friend’s boyfriend. I had a crush on him but he never asked me out. Years later, I admitted this to my friend and she told me that he had told her boyfriend, “I want to marry a girl like Judy, but I don’t want to date one in college!” Hmmm. Want to speculate about what he meant?

Changing Lines

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Changing Lines

Would passion carry the same voltage
or heartbreak the sting
if from the beginning we knew
that every extreme
brings us a step closer to its opposite?
It is that great pendulum of the I Ching—
that flowing from the yin to yang—
that foretells the fall of great regimes
glorious in their altruism
who, reaching their apex,
must head back again
towards cruel tyranny.

If we’d known this from the start,
each Summer Solstice would become
a day of mourning,
knowing that having reached one summit,
there is no further height to climb to.
And tomorrow, the start of our slow descent
will bring us closer to that other summit
where dark will reign.

Part of the power of youth’s sweet ecstasy
as well as bitter heartbreak is that it seems as though
they’ll last forever.
This is the spice of life.
Its bread comes later,
as we recognize that
everything,
everything                   everything
changes          into its
opposite.

Since today is June 21, today’s prompt was to write about the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.