Tag Archives: Daily Post

 “Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don’t support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck.”  —James Altucher

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“You’re So Lucky!”

 Too often those described as lucky
are actually only plucky.
It’s the decisions that they make
that make their lives a piece of cake.

If they have a cushy job,
far above the teeming mob,
it is because they chose to go
to college, so they made it so.

Or if they traveled after school,
when others said they were a fool,
and tell of their adventures young,
some people tend to come unstrung

and say they wish they’d had the chance
to participate in life’s wild dance
when they had the energy,
but, you know, traveling’s not free.

The truth is that most anybody
can go to college if they study
or travel anywhere they wish.
Life’s feast is a communal dish.

There is work that you can do
from Broken Hill to Timbuktu
if you are willing to do the tasks–
whatever the situation asks.

It’s true that there are places where
life is not equitable or fair–
places where a woman’s lot
keeps her chained to stove and cot,

or places where sheer poverty
limits all that you can be.
Yet  many who bemoan their fate
simply needed to leave their gate

and take the chance to see the world–
allow their lives to be unfurled.
But, lacking courage, they remained
in the place that fate ordained

was their lot in life and so
just maintained the status quo.
Many are happy where they are
and have no wish to roam afar,

but for those who moan and fuss,
saying all the luck’s with us
who have chosen to live in paradise
(and say it more than once or twice,)

I just want to say once more,
“Here is your suitcase, there’s the door.”
Luck is more often made than won,
and is, I fear, too quickly done.

So even if you’re old and gray,
do what you want to do today.
If you feel caught in the muck,
break free from it and make your luck!

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Doubter’s Alert.” What commonly accepted truth (or “truth”) do you think is wrong, or at least seriously doubt?  Why?

(Photo of lucky clover downloaded from internet.)

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The Prompt: Mouth Drop: Creatively describe one moment when your mouth dropped open, chin hit the ground, and tears rolled down your face!

Drop Jaw

Embarrassment or joy or mace
might cause tears to flood your face,
but did you ever really see
someone’s jaw down on his knee,
much less his chin upon the floor?
This feat seems like senseless lore.
So surely you can clearly see,
this prompt is pure hyperbole!

girls on wall
My sisters Betty, Patti and me, back in my pre-crush years. I remember being very proud that my legs had finally grown long enough to cross! Not too successfully, by the look of me.

Crushed!

When I was very small, I was notorious for hating boys.  My eleven-years-older sister once came into the living room and I was running around and around a big chair.  “What are you doing?” she asked. “Chasing boys!” was my answer. My sister was at an age when “chasing boys” meant something else entirely, but she got my drift.

When I was six, a lovely southern lady moved to town who enlivened the entire town.  She taught ballet and acrobatics to the girls and square dancing to everyone age 6 to 76.  This only lasted for a year or two, but twice a month most of the town would gather in the fairgrounds meeting room to do-se-do and alamand left.  I was usually paired with a little boy who was in my first grade class.  One night, after an especially invigorating “trade your partner,” when I was once again hand-in-hand with him, he gave me a big kiss.

I can’t remember my reaction, but I certainly remember his mother’s.  Abandoning her “trade your partner,” she came flying across the dance floor to shake her finger in his face.  “Shame on you, Brian!” she said, “Shame on you!”  (Not his real name.)  She then grabbed him by the upper arm and jerked him off the dance floor to go sit in a chair by the wall.  I was left without a partner and so had to dance with Will Prater, a grown man who was jerky and severe in his movements and who nearly dislocated my shoulder every time he swung me around.

Brian’s mother’s fervor in upbraiding him worked.  He never dated a girl, let alone kissed one, for his entire grade school and high school life.  He did ask me to the prom my sophomore year, but unfortunately I had accepted a date with another boy the night before.  By then I had a pretty big crush on him, fueled by his third grade tauntings of ‘Mayor’s daughter, mayor’s daughter,” when my dad was, indeed, mayor of the town, as well as a lifetime of torments in study hall, where he would break my pencils or pass me notes upbraiding me for scoring higher than he did on chemistry tests .  In my town, teasing was foreplay, but unfortunately in this case, the foreplay led to nothing, since he never repeated his offer of a date, in spite of his dad’s best efforts.

By my junior year, I was dating a boy from out of town.  “What are you doing dating that White River boy?” chided Brian’s dad every time I ran into him on the street or in our little town’s one  general store where I had gone to run an errand for my mom or to buy penny candy or a bag of Russian peanuts (our name for sunflower seeds.) “There are plenty of good boys right here in your own town!”

I knew he meant his own son, and had I not been in the throes of first lust with that “White River boy,” that would have been fine with me, as my longtime crush had continued.  But, alas, Brian never heeded his dad’s hints, either, until my sophomore year in college when, both home for the summer from college in different states, he finally asked me out. There is no crush like the one where contact is long delayed. I remember one very hot and heavy kissing session before we both went back to our separate lives.

We both married older people with children.  Both became swamped in our own lives.  I see him now and then at school reunions and of course crushes rarely survive a combination of reality and the passage of years.  But everyone needs a first crush, and perhaps he doesn’t remember that I might have been his, but he has the distinction of being mine.  I wonder if he would be surprised.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “First Crush.” Who was your first childhood crush? What would you say to that person if you saw him/her again?<

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Inside the Bubble.”  A contagious disease requires you to be put into quarantine for a whole month (don’t worry, you get well by the time you’re free to go!). How would you spend your time in isolation?

Bubble Think

If I were to be quarantined for a month, I would see it as serendipity’s way of forcing me to confront some tasks I’ve been putting off for too long.  First of all, there are the boxes in the garage cupboards that I have been neglecting to deal with for 14 years–old tax records going back to 1964, a life’s correspondence, sets of slides of Bob’s and my art that we used to jury into shows, Bob’s stone carving tools.

Also on the shelves are boxes of art made at the beach and boxes of art supplies from when I was doing art activities with the girls at La Olla orphanage last year. Other boxes of art supplies from this summer’s art camp sit on the floor in front of the cabinets along with assorted things taken out of the back of my car to enable other things to be put into it.

I want to deal with these things.  I want my garage restored to its former neat order, but I dread finding places for all the supplies and disrupting my studio I just got back into a semblance of order.  And I dread going through those old letters for two reasons.  First, because they may be too dull to deal with and secondly because they may not be and may dredge up old feelings, sadnesses or stupidities.  But most of all, because I saved all those things thinking I might someday want to write about them and if I read them, I might feel the obligation to do so.  Note that I didn’t say compulsion.  If I felt a compulsion, it would be wonderful; but then what things would I have to put off doing to make time for this new compulsion?  My blog? My art that I haven’t been doing for the past year anyway?

I don’t know why I put off things I would really like to do.  I just keep shoving them to the back of my mind, where they niggle at me from the darkness like an especially good chocolate bar saved  for last from my Halloween bag of pleasures.  They have been stashed for fourteen years or one year or six months.  The layers most easily dealt with are on the outside of the dread cupboards, saying, “Deal with me.” Why don’t I do so?

Perhaps it is because something is telling me to simplify and to do only what I want to do.  So I do the blog.  Overdo the blog.  I’m compulsive about it.  Is there a prompt left undone? The other thing I’m compulsive about is daily exercise in the pool.  Today is overcast and there was no hot water yesterday due to a break in the main pipe, so my compulsion rests for the day.  Friends are coming for Mexican Train and comida, so I have a replacement activity.  The pork loin and carrots are in the crock pot.  Spuds prepared for baking.  Lettuce for the salad disinfected and dried. My blog is about written (or so you perhaps hope.) Should I sort just one box? Or do another prompt?

If you have an especially visual imagination, you can perhaps envision me with a thought bubble coming up out of my head.  “What to do?” it reads.  I sit in front of my laptop at the dining room table.  I’m still in my nightgown.  Morrie sleeps in a curlicue at my feet.  Guests are not due for another four hours.  What to do?

If I were quarantined for one month, I wouldn’t have to choose.  I’d have time to do them all.

Newer boxes taken out of the car and never dealt with are boxes of art made at the beach and kids’ art supplies that need to

“Las Mananitas” and Other Less Lovely Bastardizations of the Spanish Language

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“Las Mananitas” and Other Less Lovely Bastardizations of a Foreign Language

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The prompt: What was the #1 song when you were born?  Write about how the song relates (or not!) to your personality.

The #1 song in the U.S. on the day I was born was “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba Chihuahua (My Bambino Go to Sleep) ” by Perry Como.  Although I would advise against it, you can hear it HERE.

I guess the song, which I had never heard before today, reflected the attitude of most U.S. citizens at the time–that being that any language other than English was just gobbledegook and no one would notice that you weren’t speaking it if every once in a while you threw in a word they would recognize (in this case “Chihuahua”) which at even that early date had managed to blast its way over the border. Somehow, it escaped notice that “bambino” was Italian and “chihuahua” Spanish.

The song itself crosses all borders from innocuous, irritating and of small musical originality to mildly insulting to the culture.  It is probably in atonement that at the age of 54, I myself crossed that border going in the opposite direction and although I, too, butcher the Spanish language a bit, at least I use real words to do so.

So here I am, Mexico, many years later and a bit worse for wear but here to atone for the ills of my birth year.  Do with me what you will.  Stream slightly off-key banda music into my ears nightly from regions down below. Awaken me to the strains of “Las Mananitas” (Little Mornings)–a lovely serenading song that unlike that other silly song meant to lull me to sleep so many years ago, does not offend at all.

On any given morning somewhere in Mexico, its strains may be heard outside some early morning window.  It might be used to propose, to declare love or to honor a mother on mother’s day, but it has also come to be the traditional song sung on birthdays.  The first time I heard it, and still the most lovely rendition I have heard, was in the movie ” Boys on the Side” with Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and Mary-Louise Parker.

Here is Mexico’s favorite, Vicente Fernandez, singing that song.

And HERE is where you can watch “Boys on the Side”–one of my all-time favorite films.

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Druthers

What child does not plot and yearn to turn into a teen?
What teen does not look forward to leaving that age between?

Adults can drive and travel and stay up rather late.
They never have to introduce their parents to their date.

Adults do as they wish. They live at their own bidding–
at least until they marry and start in their own kidding.

Then once again they hustle to their family’s beck and call,
so it would seem that no one has a favorite phase at all.

For family life may leave us feeling exhausted and harried.
I guess the ideal phase, then, is perpetually unmarried!

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Golden Age.” If you had to live forever as either a child, an adolescent, or an adult, which would you choose — and why?

Seer

Her statement that she’d had a vision
was met by general derision;
so though she tried to warn them all,
they heeded nothing but “last call!”

So while she stocked up her provisions,
they hemmed and hawed with their decisions
and had a round of boozy toasts–
gave their laments, boasted their boasts.

Then they went west while she went east
and thus were eaten by the beast
or overtaken by the flood.
Soaked in water or in blood.

The moral of this little tale
is heed your mystics, or learn to bail
or run faster than the beast
lest you become his morning’s feast

or starve to death in time of drought.
Her warnings met with only doubt
instead of action to stem the tide,
by those who stood as one. And died.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Decisions, Decisions.”How are you more likely to make an important decision — by reasoning through it, or by going with your gut?

Reading

The book I’ve chosen for the plane ride
sits open on my lap
as the stranger on the plane
opens himself—
his life pulled leaf by leaf from his family tree.
His words come faltering and sputtering at first,
like water from a tap newly opened,
then rush out cool and even,
telling of a life that is a richness
of jobs held, wives loved, children raised.

He is going back to Mexico for the saints day
of the small pueblo where he was born.
The parade. The effigies. The life-sized santos
standing in their boats to tour the lake like kings.
I’ve been to this celebration; and as he speaks,
I sit like an honored guest beside him,
reading my memory as well

“Come,“ he tells me, giving me directions and a date.
I do not tell him I have been to that fiesta years ago.
“Perhaps,” I say, sliding his instructions to his family’s house
to form a bookmark in the book now closed upon my lap,
then go on, listening.

What were we born for
if it was not to read each other?

In the rush from the plane, that old man falls behind
and it is you I see as I come out into the world of Mexico,
leaving the plane ride, immigration and customs
in its place behind the swinging doors.
This flower that you give me is a mystery book.
I read it—stamen, pistil and corolla—
as well as the hand that holds it out to me
and then the warm embrace that you enfold me in.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Middle Seat.” It turns out that your neighbor on the plane/bus/train (or the person sitting at the next table at the coffee shop) is a very, very chatty tourist. Do you try to switch seats, go for a non-committal brief small talk, or make this person your new best friend?

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Take a Chance on Me.” This is by no means the biggest chance I ever took, but sometimes we should really heed that inner voice that says we should not do something.  In this case, it involved eating at a restaurant when from the beginning, I felt there was something wrong!

DSC00991 How a hamburger and fries should look!

                                                           Dinner at Uncle Zack’s

It’s hard to believe that someone has had a presentiment of disaster after it has happened, but since I am the one who had the premonition, I’m going to remain true to myself and admit that I had a feeling of disaster the minute we walked into the restaurant. It wasn’t our first choice, or even our second, but we knew the first choice was closed and when we arrived at the second, although it seemed full of people having some kind of a meeting, the sign on the door said, “Closed.” I was all for stopping by McDonald’s for a fast hamburger, but my friend said she didn’t like fast food, so we settled on our third or fourth alternative, depending on which of us was making the choice. We opted for Uncle Zack’s.

It was a stark room with two other tables of diners and a table near the kitchen that sported a big chunk of prime rib that someone must have been carving on since lunch time, since when my friend asked if they had any rare, the owner, overhearing, came and said that they had carved away all the rare meat. Hard to believe, since one would think the rare meat would be in the middle, but I judged her to be lucky not to be eating any meat that must have been sitting there most of the afternoon. It was 5 o’clock, we were fresh out of seeing the movie “Blue Jasmine,” a bit depressed and pretty hungry for a dinner that would lift our mood.

Right.

Our adventure began when my friend asked the waiter if they could serve her a Cosmo. “Well, I don’t know what that is, but I could probably figure out how to mix you one,” he admitted, without too much enthusiasm.

My friend opted for water, unsure of whether she wanted a barman/waiter who had never heard of a Cosmo to mix her one.

“Well, to me alcohol is just something you clean out a wound with,” he admitted, as he hurried off for her water and my Diet Coke. I swear to God he said this.

They arrived in tall glasses with plenty of ice and a lemon slice. Her water was fine .   My Coke was flat and tasted of disinfectant.

When the waiter came back for our orders, my friend was unsure of what she wanted to order. I told the waiter about the Diet Coke and asked for a glass of water and a hamburger, well-done with fries.

A very very very long time later, our waiter returned, apologizing by saying he had been attending to my last complaint. By that I took it that they were washing the disinfectant off the soda dispenser and aerating it, yet he offered me no new glass of Coke, and I had no intention of ordering another one.

My friend asked if the turkey Reuben was fresh turkey or luncheon meat. After a trip to the kitchen, he admitted it was luncheon meat but then in a flash of inspiration, admitted they might be able to use the turkey they were cutting off the same steam table that contained the bones of the Prime Rib.

In the interim between the time we ordered and the time we finally got our meals, I experienced a few additional sights that made me regret our decision to eat with Uncle Zack. The first was the sight of the other waiter picking pieces off the prime rib and eating them. The other was the sight of him scratching his nostril soon after and making no hasty exit to the sink to wash his hands.

I knew if I mentioned this to my friend, that we would be out of there. He was not our waiter, we hadn’t ordered the prime rib, so I remained mute. It was her hometown. I didn’t want to embarrass her, and to be truthful, I didn’t want to embarrass myself by appearing to be a difficult customer. Hindsight. Only in hindsight did I gain the knowledge that we should have left then.

Our meals arrived some time later. I bit into a fry enthusiastically, only to discover that it was soggy on the outside, raw on the inside. When I commented, my friend slid the only crisp French Fry out of the stack and pronounced it fine. I then handed her one of the limp others, which she agreed was still raw. I bit into the hamburger, which sort of rebounded off my teeth. It was the consistency of rubber—slightly resistant to chewing. When I tried to cut it, I had to saw at it as thought I was trying to slice a rubber ball. I took a bite. Tasteless. I cut it in half horizontally, thinking it might help and that I could at least eat the cheese and bacon, but they were equally tasteless.

My friend ate most of her Reuben, which she pronounced as tasteless as the hamburger, if not as difficult to masticate.

At the end of our meal, the young man waiter asked if I wanted a doggy bag for my hamburger and fries. No. I did not. When he brought the check, he asked if we had enjoyed our meals. No. We had not. I suggested that he instruct the cook to actually cook the fries and that the hamburger had a rubber consistency reminiscent of meat left in the freezer too long. “Oh,” he said.

“I’m now going to McDonald’s to get a real hamburger and fries” I said. We paid the bill, left a 20 % tip to let him know we weren’t just trying to stiff the establishment and the waiter, and drove to McDonald’s, where in place of an order of fries (I was totally “off” hamburgers at that point) and a Diet Coke, we were served a regular Coke and a Diet Coke instead.

As we sat at the drive-up window waiting for our correct order, my friend told me that when the people in the booth next to us were served their prime rib, she heard the waiter apologize and say, “The next time you come, we’ll give you a bigger serving. We sorta ran out of prime rib tonight.” Will they be back? Will we?

Sometimes, it’s better to eat at home.

Note: The name of the restaurant has been changed to protect the guilty.  Perhaps it was just an off-day?

Abba – Take A Chance On Me

The Dating Game

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The Dating Game

The prompt I generated on JNW’s Prompt Generator was: “tender opportunity.” I hit the generator button again and got “repulsive industry,” When I saw both prompts together, a perfect topic came  to mind. These prompts, in tandem, seemed to describe the two sides of the online social-introduction industry perfectly, so I decided to try to use both prompts. Although this poem sounds a bit bitter, it is really meant tongue-in-cheek as the first phrase was tweaked a bit by the second. I’ve met some really nice guys in the past six years I’ve been on social sites, but just none where both of us wanted to make it permanent.

In the past couple of years, OKC has changed a lot and doesn’t seem to be the special place it once was. They’ve taken away journals, forums, awards, search engines and erased the first few years of information. I’ve pretty much replaced it with blogging, which seems to work better for really getting to know people and the focus has changed from searching for love in all the wrong places to forming real bonds with words, not faces. A few good friends have even followed me from OKC. You know who you are. Here is my little ditty on the subject of the two prompts mentioned above:

When I Joined OkCupid

I considered it to be
a tender opportunity.
Instead I fear it just became
a sort of endless dating game.

Crabby grandpas, lying spouses,
hermits shut up in their houses,
voyeurs looking for a thrill,
twenty-somethings with time to kill.

Men who say they want to talk
who, when asked questions, merely balk.
Whatever it claims to be,
It’s a repulsive industry—

a place that doesn’t want to match us
but rather just to try to catch us
in a web of constant circulation–
a type of lovelorn masturbation.

Years later, I’ve made special friends
and yet the cycle never ends.
Though I’d like love with every fiber,
I fear my love life remains cyber.

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