Playing with paper pulp
Under
Redwood trees was the
Penultimate, but not the
Only
Special
Experience
Fulfilling my life.
Until I lose
Life, I hope to be
Living
It
Fully. Life is as
Exciting as we make it!
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” – Kurt Vonnegut
The prompt today was “Purpose.” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/purpose/
Blankety Blank
I’ve no one but myself to thank
for this prison cell so small and dank,
for when I went to rob that bank,
the truth is, if I’m being frank,
I was a doofus––a real wank.
In short, my planning really stank.
For when my gun I chanced to yank
to use against that man of rank
who challenged me as feckless crank,
my confident demeanor sank;
for I fear I drew a blank!
The prompt today was “Blank.” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/blank/
Fulfilling Order
How does one get orderly? I fear I must confess
the only way to get there is by first making a mess!
Since I have put this off for years, the fault is all my own.
Procrastinatiion is a fault for which I must atone.
I sort the photos into piles by topics or by years––
photographs of family and landscapes and my peers.
I wish my album stuffing were not in such arrears.
They’ll take a month to organize, or now it so appears.
I locate half-filled albums and plastic sleeves and pages.
It seems I haven’t filed a single photograph for ages.
I try to be most organized and get them into line,
then fall into reflection of the lives of me and mine.
I have company coming and a meal that I must cook.
I’ll find the table easier to clear if I don’t look,
but oh that slumber party that the boys decided to crash
and all those tame adventures where we thought we were so rash.
Who knew that all this sorting would lead to this great mess?
and yet I am enjoying it. Who would ever guess
that sorting under pressure would still lead me to this?
Memories of parties, of camp and that first kiss.
Sixty-seven years of life all spread out on my table.
I’ll clear them all by nightfall, then cook if I am able.
Too bad the nearest Colonel Sanders is so far away,
or I would save the cooking for another day.
One “find” in the thousands of photos I have yet to stow away in the headboard filing cabinet of my bed that has been recently cleared of poems was these photos of the night John Kuckleberg and Doug Tedrow raided our slumber party.
This was not as racy as it looks. The fellas were there before the shortie pajamas were donned, and by the looks of it, boys danced with boys and girls with girls. The fish, by the way, were plastic ones from my dad’s den in the next room. There has been some progress since the 7th and 8th grade party. Looks like I’d tiled the floor, my sister Patti and I had painted the walls and she had painted a somewhat strange mural of a man leaning against a cactus to take a siesta. I think this was my junior year. The ceiling had not yet been installed by my dad and me! It must have been Rita’s birthday as we seem to have been giving her a spank for each year.
The prompt for today was “Orderly” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/orderly/
These folks were the epitomes of every her and him.
The men were all smooth-shaven with haircuts short and trim.
The ladies of the fifties had their pearls and curly hair,
and fancy little house dresses were what they chose to wear.
Their kids were the epitomes of reproductive joy
who could serve as patterns for the perfect girl or boy.
They came out cute and perfect, created just to please.
They never fought or cheated or brought home F’s or D’s.
How do I know that what I say is not stretching the truth?
How do I know these folks were all red-blooded, honest, couth;
and that every one of them maintained the stauts quo?
I know for I’m that perfect child in the very front row
who somehow by the sixties got somewhat out of step
and later by the seventies had misplaced all her “hep,”
did not become a hippie until nineteen eighty seven,
and will join the moral majority much too late to get to heaven.
I am not the epitome of any group you know.
I do not wear the clothes you wear or go where you may go.
Epitome’s a talent that I forgot to hone,
and ever since I’ve chosen a pattern all my own.
The daily prompt was “Epitome.” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/epitome/
(These nice people were my parents and neighbors in the little town where I grew up and this poem is in no way meant to denigrate them. I’m sure they were all unique individuals, as well. It is the tendency of eras to turn into cliches that I am satirizing, not them.)
1967–Off on the SS Ryndam on a four month around-the-world study adventure. Ga Ga Dowd was the oldest student aboard. She seemed ancient, but was actually one year older than I am now. The other two girls, whom I had just met, were to be my best friends on the journey. They are Susan (in polka dots), who was also a U. of Wyoming student whom I had never met before and Pamn, from Berkeley. I don’t know why the wind chose to blow only my hair. Perhaps I had invested in less hairspray?
“The Zoad In The Road”
by Dr. Seuss
Did I ever tell you about the young Zoad?
Who came to a sign at the fork of the road?
He looked one way and the other way too –
the Zoad had to make up his mind what to do.
Well, the Zoad scratched his head, and his chin, and his pants.
And he said to himself, “I’ll be taking a chance.
If I go to Place One, that place may be hot
So how will I know if I like it or not.
On the other hand, though, I’ll feel such a fool
If I go to Place Two and find it’s too cool
In that case I may catch a chill and turn blue.
So Place One may be best and not Place Two.
Play safe,” cried the Zoad, “I’ll play safe, I’m no dunce.
I’ll simply start off to both places at once.”
And that’s how the Zoad who would not take a chance
Went no place at all with a split in his pants.
Born in a time before television and the internet and even private telephone lines, (we shared ours with two other households), periodicals took on a special importance. We subscribed to three newspapers: The Murdo Coyote (my hometown rag), The Mitchell Daily Republic and Grit–a newsy national weekly newspaper. My dad subscribed to Saga, Real West, True West, Argosy and probably a few others; and my Mom got Saturday Evening Post, Journal, McCall’s and Redbook.
One special feature of Redbook over the years I was growing up was that they published the poetry of Dr.Seuss. I don’t know if the poem above was ever published anywhere else, but it was one of my family’s favorites, and I think I still have it out in a plastic storage case with other old letters and paper memorabilia. It is well-worn and wrinkled and yellowed, glued to a piece of cardboard to aid in its preservation. I think I had used it as one of the poems I chose to memorize (along with “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” ” The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Children’s Hour”) when I was in grade school.
I don’t know how much I actually listened to the messages of poems back then, but I do know that something prompted me not to just dream of those forks in the road but to make a decision and to take a chance. Perhaps it was this poem. Perhaps it was the fact that my parents rarely held me back when I had a chance to travel or experience something different. Well, no, they didn’t let me take the Seventeen trip to Europe when I was eleven, but short of that, they encouraged me to reach out and experience life away from the town of 700 where I lived.
When I was a teenager, I traveled all over the state for district meetings for my MYF. I attended church camps in the Black Hills and Lake Poinsett and traveled by bus to a U.N. Seminar when I was a junior in high school.
When it came time to go to college, I was quick to choose an out-of-state college and in my junior year again chose to travel–this time around the world on the U.S.S. Ryndaam as a student on World Camput Afloat––a university extension of Chapman College in Orange, CA. We traveled for four months, stopping in countries around the world, studying their cultures, taking practicum side trips and in some cases taking off on our own. The first country I did this in was in Kenya, where my newly met friend Pamn and I rented a little Fiat and took off on our own to have a few adventures.
My sister told me afterwards that she had been the one to encourage my folks to let me go, telling them it would get the travel bug out of my system, but if you’ve been following my blog for long, you know that just didn’t happen. Immediatley after college, I emigrated to Australia and after a few years there, I traveled overland as much as possible to Africa, where I stayed for two years. After that travel was a summer and vacation experience until I moved to California thirty-five years ago and then Mexico fifteen years ago. At each of these junctures, there was a fork in the road of my ife and each time, I made the decision and took it. Nine times, by my own counting, and in that time, although I’ve split a few pants seams, it was more due to local cuisine than to indecision.
(To get a larger view of photos and to read captions, please click on first photo and arrows. To get back to read the essay, click on X at upper left of photo screen.)
Wheat
A stalk of it usually extended from between his teeth when he was out inspecting a field come June or July. It collected in his pants cuffs and in the hat band of his broad-brimmed work hat. Bags of it wintered in a huge pile that filled our garage one year when there had been a good crop and all the barns and silos were full to bursting. The cars stood outside in the gravel driveway just off the alley and behind the garage that winter and our house was strangely empty of mice as they took shelter in the garage instead. Our outside cat grew fat even though he rarely came to the back door to be fed.
Ours was a little ecological system all its own. Mice feasted on grain spilled from burst seams in the garage. The cat feasted on the mice and we feasted on the steaks of Black Angus cattle who had eaten the ensilage from wheat stripped of its grains.
If I have always worked hard to furnish the bread and butter of my life, it is wheat that has furnished the dessert–my college education, my first car and, after my dad died and I inherited 1/6 interest in the farm and ranch, my first house.
Our lives were run by wheat and cattle. During the summer, no time for family vacations. Wheat and cattle were my dad’s alarm clock. He rose before sunrise every morning and was often asleep in his chair before sunset, wheat spilling out of his pants cuffs or high top boots or stuck by the hooked spines of its beards to the fabric footstool in front of his rocker.
He slept hard, my father, and rose early to insure everything worked to the cycle of the nature that had surrounded him from the time, as a three-year-old boy, he had stepped off the Union Pacific train that had brought him and his mother to the little South Dakota town both he and later I grew up in. As they descended the metal steps, my grandmother had held one hand down to grasp the hand of my three-year-old father. The other was extended upward, holding a cage with two canaries. My grandfather and teenaged aunts were there to greet him and my grandmother, who, even though she had been the one who decreed that they should leave their safe security in Iowa to claim a homestead on the Dakota prairie, had not traveled by wagon, but instead had sent her young girls and husband on ahead to prepare a way for her and her youngest.
My grandfather––a Dutch immigrant who was not a farmer, but rather a baker better suited for working with wheat in its miled state––did what most people did when my grandmother issued demands. He complied. It made for a hard life for them all–fighting the harsh South Dakota winters out on the plains as well as prairie fires, plagues of grasshoppers and schizophrenic weather that could furnish either drought, unseasonal rain or hail–all of which could ruin a wheat crop. So that later, when I asked my dad why he never frequented the games parlor where the other men played poker and lofted a beer or two, he said that he had no need for games of chance. His whole life as a rancher and farmer had been the biggest gamble of all.
My grandparents never did learn the correct formula, but my father, surrounded by the prairie from age three to seventy, learned its secrets well. Enough to buy out his parents as well as others who tried and failed. Enough to ensure the comfort of his wife and children and his grandchildren. Enough to die at what, now that I am nearly 69, seems like the young age of 70.
Year after year, as he tilled the rich South Dakota soil to plant the grains of wheat he’d saved to seed a new crop––he seeded my life as well, along with that of my mother, my sisters, my nieces and nephews–all of our lives growing and prospering from those millions of shafts of grain that he planted and watched over and harvested and stored and replanted over a period of fifty years.
The WordPress prompt today was “Grain.”
Phases of history, cycles of moon––
as we grow older, the thought is jejune
that everything passes too soon, oh too soon.
The days seem to eat up our time with a spoon.
When I was younger, the days went so slow,
with nothing to do and nowhere to go,
and every day, every day––all were the same.
I needed adventure, but it rarely came.
Animals’ phases allow them to dare
to turn into something more special and rare.
Tadpoles swim landwards, developing legs.
Pupae to butterflies, chickens from eggs.
Rain falls and water runs west to the sea.
We try to go with it, my sister and me.
With leaves for our sails and vine pods for our ships,
what we wish for remains behind eyelids and lips.
The gutters are swollen and culverts are full.
We harness our boats, and we push and we pull.
But still they escape––rush away on their own.
I envy their future–unfettered, unknown.
In faraway places, I thought I’d be free
to discover new parts I was fated to be;
so I went after life like a kid at a fair,
from her carousel horse, reaching out through the air.
I could not resist the chance of surprise––
to grab the brass ring and capture the prize.
And yes, I did travel and how I did roam.
Life got faster the farther I wandered from home.
Now I’ve been through the phases from child to wife.
I’ve traveled and struggled and had a free life.
I’ve been on large vessels for months at a time,
and on most of my travels, I’ve had a good time.
If I’d known that the slow times were not going to last,
I would not have hoped for my time to go fast.
For now when the ending comes faster and faster,
The pace of my life is just courting disaster.
Though other seas beckon, my boat is well tethered.
My new dreams are tamer, my old dreams well weathered.
Now that I can go anywhere, do many things,
I wish for more time just to fold up my wings.
Morning Blues
Another day is dawning. The birds are full of tweet.
So I decide to take a little stroll out on the street.
I have no need for makeup. I prefer my features bare.
I choose my clothes most carefully, but do not brush my hair.
With my new haircut, tousled’s in. I’m told to leave it there.
“Just run your fingers though your mop as though you do not care!”
The trees are bursting verdant, dry grass the hue of wheat.
Smiles stretch across the face of every man I meet.
I find their moods infectious, so I smile back at them.
I’m sporting a new haircut, so I feel very femme.
Corner after corner I round to see what’s there.
I straighten out my collar and toss my brand new hair
as I stroll by the house the new guy’s living in.
I check my watch and see it’s only eight-oh-ten.
Perhaps he’s a late riser, so I walk right on by.
If he had been in evidence, I might have murmured, “Hi!”
and maybe he’d have talked to me and asked me for a date.
Perhaps I’m not too early. Perhaps I am too late!
One day I’m sure I’ll meet him, but I am wondering when.
It’s not that I’m accustomed to running after men,
but it’s especially pretty, this block where I’ve just been.
I turn around so I can stroll through it once again.
The second time I pass his door, I see it opening.
As he comes out my spirits soar. My heart begins to ping.
I know this is the man for me. He’s pleasant, handsome, tall.
I’d go and introduce myself if only I’d the gall.
When his eyes light on my face, he smiles like all the rest.
Of all the smiles I’ve seen today, this smile is the best.
I croon hello and smile back and yes, I flirt a bit—
his grin so wide I know that I must have scored a hit.
I pass on by but I am sure we’ll meet another day,
and judging by his smile, he’ll have much more to say.
As I retrace my steps again, I’m feeling very pert.
Perhaps I’ll lose a few more pounds. It surely wouldn’t hurt.
I climb the hill to my house and open up the door.
The perking of the coffee pot drowns out my roommate’s snore.
I pour a cup and take it back to work upon my blog,
and all this time my roomie is sleeping like a log.
An hour passes, she awakes and stumbles by my door.
Until she has her first cup, she’s grouchy to the core.
Five minutes pass and she comes in and plops into a chair,
her grin so wide, I wonder if she’s going to diss my hair.
“I took a walk,” I tell her, and her eyes go really wide.
“Like that?” she said, “You mean that you have really been outside?”
“My hair’s supposed to look this way. The natural look is in!”
I said to her most huffily, my patience wearing thin.
“I finally saw the new guy, and he’s really cute.”
I told her, and I saw her look, because I’m so astute.
“What,” I asked her, “is your problem? Don’t you like my hair?”
I met her answering guffaw with an angry glare.
“Your hair is not your problem,” she said and grabbed my hand,
pushing me into her room, where she made me stand
before a full length mirror, where finally I could see
perhaps why all my neighbors had deigned to smile at me.
For my whole face was covered with last night’s facial goo—
dried upon my face to form a vivid shade of blue!
Not quite the statement I had hoped to make that fateful day,
and since that time I fear my confidence began to fray.
I’ve given up long walks for neighborhoods much nearer,
and I never leave my house without checking out the mirror!
For other sagas, check out this URL:https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/saga/
Singlish
When Papa grabbed his squeezebox and baby hit the gong,
all the other children ran up to play along.
Henry played the drums and Molly the kazoo.
Oscar blew the tuba ’til he started to turn blue.
Sally on the saxophone and Henry on the flute,
Wanda on the trumpet went rootie tootie toot.
Mama led the singing and Grandma hummed along
as one-by-one the children joined them in their song.
All the kids went swaying, rocking on their toes
as they sang a song embellished by cardinals and crows.
The cattle in the pasture joined in with soothing moos—
the cockerels crooning descants with their cockadoodledoos.
The mourning doves sang background, telling of their woes,
while all the little sparrows cheeped neatly from their rows.
The horses voiced their whinnies and sheep all baaaahed along
until the world surrounding us had joined in on the song.
Woodpeckers beat percussion until our song was done,
joining us in music that proved that we were one.
Goldfinches and burros were next to join the throng,
all speaking the same language in this singalong.
I heard it from the mockingbird who heard it from the jay.
It was a pretty chorus that rose up from that day.
Now most days thereafter, we’ve sung in harmony.
If everyone would join us, how grand the world could be.
Words are as versatile as bricks. Whether they build a sidewalk or a wall is up to the one who uses them.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 