Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

Vigor Trigger

13 Replies

Version 3

Vigor Trigger

What once passed for vigor, I fear has turned into a case of fine acting. If I walk with energy, it is a forced energy expressed in spurts in situations where once I ran. I hope this can be attributed to the dignity of my age; but when I see others my age outpacing me, the jig is up and I am revealed for what I am—someone who, in spite of what I have always believed would happen, is wearing out and falling into that part of the life cycle that includes wrinkling up and slowing down. Ugh. I hate to admit it, but perhaps if I do it will be a type of therapy and in confronting it, it will go away—or at least it will lessen in its effect.

The truth is that I fear acting old more than I fear looking old. I hate it that I struggle to get up from a kneeling position and that I can in no way do it gracefully. I put both hands against the floor in front of me, raise my butt in the air and walk up to my hands—only way it seems possible without a lot of grunting and straining. In animal behavior, I would probably appear sexy as I do so, but I do not delude myself that any human being would find it so.

An additional truth to face now that I am 69 is that I am turning into my mother. Having to do more than one thing at once befuddles me and sometimes even one thing at a time is a bit confusing. Numbers don’t behave as they once did. I add and subtract and multiply and divide just fine. I grew up in a time before computers and handheld devices, so I’m used to doing functions mentally that youth finds better relegated to machines. The problem is in the interrelation of functions––just how to convert dimensions expressed in feet and tenths of feet to feet and inches, to enable me to equate it to the past when all dimensions were expressed as such. Why describe in tenths of feet which are traditionally divided into twelve parts, not ten? Why not just convert to a decimal system entirely, which I could then translate easily to inches and then to feet and inches?

The world is no longer my oyster. Devices get smaller and smaller as my eyes get worse and worse. I can’t wait for all of today’s young programmers and systems designers to get to be 60 and to try to make use of the apps they’ve designed primarily for phones so tiny that you can barely find the phone, let alone make out pages as small as playing cards. And don’t even get me started on the designers of medicine labels!!! If it isn’t bad enough that they are in size 2 font, they then make them white on yellow or gray on blue so it is impossible to read them no matter what size they are. What are they thinking? The clincher was my optometrist’s card that was primarily empty space with the writing squeezed into one corner, so small that I doubt it could be read by anyone­­–glasses or no glasses, and remember, people come to optometrists primarily because they can’t see in the first place! In addition, it was one of those cards impossible to look at because the two colors used not only made it difficult to read, but tended to affect one’s astigmatism, or at the very least one’s sense of good taste.

I must admit that I have never been an athletic person. Zumba, yoga and pool aerobics have been my most successful and enduring modes of exercise. But what I have done, I have always done with great vigor. I work hard, in the past did all my own housework and gardening and have been a bit of a workaholic. But very recently, I find myself wearing out faster, sneaking off to a hidden corner to huff and puff a bit or lie down for a ten-minute rest. I find myself getting a bit testier and less patient when things go wrong, but blessedly usually express my frustration (aloud) primarily to myself.

It occurred to me earlier this year, however, that passing neighbors can probably hear me when I shout “Idiot” to myself—or worse. Or, when I yell at the dogs to stop barking or stop jumping up. “Judy, you’re worse than the dogs!” a friend sputtered, shaking his head one day as I roared “Frida, Diego, Morrie–stop!!!” as they executed a deafening chorus of deep barks when I arrived home and opened the garage door. So I guess that is one place where my energy remains unabated. When it comes to expressing myself, I have great vocal cords. You could even say I’m still capable of a vigorous rejoinder!!!

 

The prompt word today is “vigor.”

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

20 Replies

You Have Become the Art You Lived For

The caustic smell of metal in your sweat
that by the end could fill the room,
as though the bronzes you had formed
had now invaded you
and filled you, blood and fiber.
Art can’t hurt you,
declared your favorite T-shirt,
colorful and now the final irony
of your life.

My dear,
art brought about your ending
as surely as it made your life,
yet you would have loved the bittersweet joke
as your kids and I
dressed you in that T-Shirt
for your final viewing.

You surround me even now—
brought two thousand miles
from Northern California
to middle Mexico.
The life you hoped to live, I live with those
who know you only through
your spiral lamp of stone and liana and paper,
Chi Wara standing feathered, bronze and tall,
the nude I posed for, on her side
with sticks for head and feet and cassowary feathers
hanging down from them,
the spirit sled of beaten copper, rawhide and willow—
all of them as exotic as you
never felt yourself to be.

They were beautiful and rare
and loved as you were.
How maddening
that you could not be
convinced of it.

That is why, when I think of you
now, so many years after,
the air grows pungent
with your memory.

(click on first photo to enlarge all)

For some reason, this is the only photo I have of the spiral lamp. I’ll replace it with a better one later.

 

 

To see more of Bob’s art and read another poem about him, go HERE.

 

The prompt today is “pungent.”

Out on a Liminal

16 Replies

Out on a Liminal

img_9671The 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.

img_0002

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!

img_0004

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.

The prompt today was “Liminal.”

Chaos R Us

10 Replies

Lately I’ve had the feeling that my entire life is chaotic, but nothing this year has been the equal of having my whole life uprooted and moved to obscure corners and cupboards while they tile all of the floors in my house in one fell swoop. Nine men descended en masse a few days ago, took off all my doors (13 in all) and started turning my entire property into a workshop. Bags of adhesive form a wall between my street gate and front door. The pathways are paved my empty cardboard tile boxes. Men cut tile in my back yard, creating clouds of porcelain dust. Young men carry metal containers full of mixed adhesive and stacks of heavy porcelain tiles. Old men measure, spread adhesive and lay the tiles. Other men arrive to cut off the doors. Meanwhile, I am living in one small room and attached bathroom piled with assorted art objects, clothes and bathroom supplies, trying to find my way to the kitchen through the construction process. Not to mention keeping the dogs contained with every part of the house and yard being used. Here are some of the posts I’ve done over the past few days:

Elicit

The Tile Layers

Hide and Go Seek: Thursday Doors, Nov 24, 2016

It couldn’t be more appropriate to my life that the daily prompt word is “Chaotic“

Angel: Daily Prompt, Anticipation

17 Replies

dsc09091

Angel

In the bedroom, our alarm goes off faithfully at 6, and I see through the sliding glass door to the back porch, the lump of wood our neighbors’ dog, Angel, has left like a calling card. It tells me I’ve missed her invitation to throw the chunk and watch her hurtle down the mountainside in its pursuit. She has been known to run so fast that she wins the race with the stick, which hits her on the back of the head or lodges itself in her throat as she turns and lifts her head to catch it.

She first approached us in our driveway, where Bob was carving a stone boulder too large to move any further onto our property. With the stick placed on the ground in front of her, she would crouch with her haunches in the air, her front legs stretched straight out in front of her in anticipation. Her eyes would fix on the stick, then on us, then on the stick, her mouth stretched in a huge grin of expectation. How could we not throw?

Later, she ventured farther up the driveway and onto the porch if no cats were around. Now she knows every entry to our house and stops at each on her rounds, watching me make paper and Bob drill stone, occasionally lifting the stick and dropping it to the deck until we give in and throw again.

 At the time I first met Angel, I didn’t favor dogs, preferring my crabby cats. But I made an exception for this Australian dingo of a dog who was so happy to see me–so happy to see anyone who would throw a stick. This dog who now comes into my paper making studio to drink from my water bucket. Who once got pulp on her nose dipping into the wrong bucket. This dog who might show up covered in cement, and when the cement finally wears off, shows up covered in white paint, conjuring up images of workmen not patient enough to deal with a dog with sticks to chase.

This dog who seemed not to know about dog biscuits and who, the first time we threw one to her, retrieved it without eating it. This dog who for months would come no closer than five feet––friendly from a distance––fleeing away from any attempt to touch. Who had to be taught that an outstretched hand contained a pat or hug. This dog who sees the cats as bosses and who detours all the way around the house to retrieve a stick if one of the cats puts itself in her pathway. This dog who is an old dog but acts like a puppy.

She fills a place in my husband’s heart– a heart that needs the amount of child a dog can bring: companionship that doesn’t need to borrow the car, a stick chase that doesn’t involve any exercise more rigorous than pulling the arm back and letting the hand open as it swings forward. She is the way children should be when you’re in your sixties: being pleasant, being around without a lot of talking, fetching things for you.

Slowly, as we meet our neighbors at gatherings to try to stop the harvesting of the redwoods on the land adjoining ours or to discuss the cellular phone tower at the end of our mountain street, we find that they all know Angel in varying degrees. And we begin to understand that she needs to continue her rounds to find enough love, bit by bit, from all of us–like some children too ready with devotion toward strangers, too needing of attention from teachers or their friends’ parents. And that hard part of us that doesn’t want to love the person who needs it most can release a bit. Enough to throw a stick. Enough to teach a dog how to be petted. Enough to add a case of dog biscuit bones to our grocery cart at Costco, enough to try to get the matted cement from the tail, and to go to the woodshop to cut sticks. That part of us can thaw a bit, knowing that the dog will not take itself from us voluntarily. That she will stay with us as long as we will throw an occasional stick, talk to her every half hour or so, give a few pats, put down a pan of water. That she will stay with us for a minimum of our effort.

In this era of Angels pulling people from cliff tops and burning cars, in this time when Angels are the fad, we who usually shun trends, we who seek to be the exception, we who need no angels have an angel sitting in our driveway. Have evidence of her outside every door.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/anticipation/

Elicit

13 Replies

 A phone call to me today might elicit no response, but you will increase your chances if you stay on the phone long after the message machine has cut in.  The reasons for this are as follows:

At 9:05 a.m., nine men arrived at my front gate with a truck load of large porcelain tiles that look like paving stones with the intention of tiling my entire house with them–a process that will take between one and two weeks.

To facilitate said process, I’ve removed everything in my house except heavy furniture and put it either in the upstairs casita, the spare bedroom and bathroom, the dining room or kitchen.  When the rest of the house is tiled, we’ll move the heavy sculpture and furniture and doo-dads still in the guest bedroom (including me) and bath and kitchen and dining room into the tiled rooms and complete the tile process. Anyone who has ever been in my house will know this is tantamount to packing up a small museum and putting it into storage.

As a result of said shufflings, I can no longer locate my bathroom scale, 1/2 of every pair of shoes, my blood pressure records, 2 smoothies (prepared this morning and lost in turn) and the one phone that is still connected but divorced from its cradle.

In spite of the fact that I’ve just located my now-melted smoothie as well as my phone in the guest bathroom, which is now my only usable bathroom, the fact that five of the nine men are now using hammers and chisels to remove the tile trim on the walls above every floor in the house means it is impossible to hear the phone ring.  Just now, one of the men came to tell me I had a phone call (I call him my secretary now) but alas, whoever it was had hung up by the time I remembered where I’d stashed the phone.

If you’d like some idea of what we’ve been going through for the past two days, you might want to check out the below photos.

Except for the fact that I dropped my Mac on the floor and everything seems to be operating except for the trackpad, which means I can’t maneuver the photos to edit them or place them anywhere, including the desktop or my blog!

This is absolutely not my day.  But has it elicited a scream or even an oath?  It has not.  Has my blood pressure risen?  If I could find my cuff, I could tell you.

Okay, after hours of work and forgottenman’s help, I have edited the photos and he’s now putting them into this blog.  This is REALLY a dual effort today.

Click on first photo to enlarge and read the captions, which I am sure you will want to do as you are totally into this renovation.  Right?  Am I turning into one of those people who take a photo of every meal and post it on Facebook?

Naked room. That’s Donald resting up for the rigors ahead. Will have to wait 4 more years to smash this pinata!
Looks empty and sad. That will change.
Stuff
And more stuff.
Interim resting spot. The Virgin shares her space.
Table filling up. Living room emptying out.
Bob’s and my spiral lamp creation deserved a dust cover of its own.
These ladies will witness it all.
Before. Giant bathtub I never use will come out in lieu of a new shower and bench. Tub side will be cut down to just above the floor for easy entry. A small wall like the one on the right but a bit higher will go beside the chest on the left to guard from shower spray.
Adventures in plumbing.
Ghost of a room.
The next time you see this hall, it will be very different.
Trying to fit everything from my bathroom undergoing a remodel into my guest bathroom. Yes, those are the boxes for my blood pressure machines, but not the machines themselves. I heard one go off spontaneously a half hour ago, but still couldn’t find it!
My new office/bedroom/sanctuary.
These tiles are now all spread out, being cut and shaped. Again, this is the entry to my house!
The obstacle course. This is the entry to my house!
Doesn’t show here, but there is a lot of variation between tiles, which look like stone. Note Morrie and Diego moving around according to where the action is.
Waiting for breakfast.
Off with the old.
I’ve found a number of these big fellas seeking shelter now that the pictures and retablos they lived behind have been taken away.
A cat knows how to find the most comfortable place no matter what the situation.
Annie thought she was top cat until she saw that the new cat on the block gets to be on the bed when she doesn’t!
Once they started cutting tile in the house, I put a huge plastic wall up over this arch. Now I have to go outside to get to the kitchen from my sanctuary.
The kitchen and dining room will be the last to be tiled, so they are acting as a repository of decorative items from other rooms.
Taking into account some of his recent appointments, I thought Donald needed a time out.

The prompt word today was “elicit.”

The Cloud

9 Replies

img_3777

The Cloud

The groom’s mother might be charismatic,
lovely, clever and dramatic,
but when she entered any room,
she was preceded by her perfume.

So her presence here was problematic—
in scope, approaching the traumatic—
for we had to institute some bans
to include her in our wedding plans.

For reasons we deemed bioclimatic,
(and her excesses aromatic)
when it came to finding her a seat,
we found it to be quite a feat.

For it’s hard to remain diplomatic
when the bride is prone to be asthmatic.
With no other possible schematic,
We had to seat her in the attic.

The prompt word today is “Aromatic.”

Uncorked

7 Replies

I first visited the lovely little fishing village of Cadaqués, Spain, with my friends Patty and Judy. We loved the place, which at the time was the home of Salvador Dali. When I returned there a few years later with the man who would within the year become my husband, he was equally charmed and our expected one-night stay swelled into four. The only marring detail was the black ash that blanketed the town, blown in from the miles of cork trees that had been burned in a flash fire earlier that year. This ash covered a patio table table recently cleaned off within an hour. Nonetheless, it was a lovely unspoiled village and we enjoyed watching the fishing boats go out in the morning and return at night and bathing in the warm Mediterranean.  When I saw the prompt “Scorched,” the image of those hills covered in blackened trees came immediately to mind. Unfortunately, I’m not at home right now so can’t publish an appropriate photo.

Uncorked

Cork trees grotesque in the Spanish sun,
scorched not by it, but one by one
caught by fire that stripped their skin
and then consumed that thing within
that forms the plug that seals our wine
and thus preserves fruits of the vine
for wintry nights–for tongue and lip
to savor every ruby sip.

Nature can be a surly thug
vandalizing nature’s plug
and thus we’re forced to man’s creation
to solve a vintner’s consternation.
These synthetics made of plastic
are neither natural nor elastic.
They do not breathe or swell or stain,
or decompose in sun or rain.
And yet when nature chose to burn
those hills of oak, it lost its turn.
What nature might choose to take from us,
will be replaced with little fuss
by hand of man who knows it all.
And thus began Adam’s first fall!

The prompt word today is “scorched.”

The Most Buck for Your Buck

9 Replies

img_9129

The Most Buck for Your Buck

Why would you stop at ostentatious
when three bucks more buys you bodacious?

The prompt today was “ostentatious.”

Works for Fandango’s prompt as well!

Myth or Liar? A Prevarication Primer

11 Replies

 

img_1210-1jdbphoto

Myth or Liar? (A Prevarication Primer)


What is the difference between a myth and lie?
Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie
clearly is a myth because it is impossible,
while your claim you baked that pie you bought is just implausible.

It seems the only difference is a matter of degree.
The biggest lie’s the only one to go down mythically.
If you aim small, it’s true they’ll only label you a liar.
If you want to be a legend, simply aim your lying higher!!!!

 

The prompt today is “Mythical.”