Election Aftermath

A HOUSE WHERE WE'D LIKE TO THINK THAT
ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"We live in a perpetually burning building,
what we must save from it, all the time, is love."
~~ Tennessee Williams ~~

The Burning of the White House, 1814
painted in 2004 by American artist
Tom Freeman (1952 - 2015)

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Also on my book blog
A month ago, I shared some words of deep wisdom from my brother Bruce Carriker concerning the upcoming election. Now the day has come and gone, and in the wake of the event, I remain stunned that so many citizens aided and abetted in the election of a sociopath. I take no blame for that. And I dare them to look me in the eye without shame.

I resent the platitude going around that in the end we all share more similarities than differences. Guess what? No we don't! It's not just a difference of political opinion and we can now kiss and make up. This is utterly and absolutely abhorrent! This is about humanity vs inhumanity.

Every person who voted for Trump gave the message that it is acceptable to belittle women, to mimic disabilities . . . the list is so long, but I'll stop there. What more does one need? He showed us who he is -- believe him! I simply cannot fathom how anyone could condone his comportment. I'm dismayed to live in a country where nearly half the voters, both men and women, think that's okay. As my son Ben texted, as early as 10:30pm, when we began to see the writing on the wall: "What the actual f - - k?"

On the other hand, Ben also offered a ray of light: "The sky will sit a little lower, but it won't fall. America is robust to this sort of nonsense" (also, see comment from Ben below and click here for sobering and reassuring post - election thoughts from Bruce).

I still don't have an answer to the questions my friend Anna Loh asked: "How do we explain this to our children? How do we hold ourselves up as an example to the world? We just rewarded hatred, classless, bigoted behavior. . . . And please understand the message that the granddaughters of this country got last night. We'd rather have a hate filled, bigoted, angry man as president than a woman who has given her entire life to service."

Deplorable! That actually is the correct adjective, even though Hillary tried to apologize for saying it. Not me -- I will say it! Deplorable!

It has been a tough and tearful week.

In one of his recent articles, Tim Urban repeats a line that we have been encountering repeatedly to explain why people would vote for Trump:

"People vote for hope and change when they’re in pain."
What this comment seems to overlook or underrate is that for me and my friends -- and all those women who took their little daughters to the polls or voted in honor of their grandmothers -- a vote for Hillary wasn't a vote for the status quo -- it was a "vote for hope and change."

For now, I'm keeping the following passage in mind, because it seems to capture our collective broken heartedness:

"The world is violent and mercurial - it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love - love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love."
~ Tennessee Williams

P.S.
An Ironic Post Script to this Post Mortem
Unbeknownst to us at the time, we foretold the future . . .
Looking through my damning emails, I came across a note from November 2012, asking a friend if she had attended an election vigil in the neighborhood and telling her about the one at which I inadvertently found myself: "There were actual Romney / Mourdock supporters in the room. Can you believe?! It nearly made me sick to my stomach. Why would anyone knowingly invite mixed - party guests on election night? I felt so self - righteous but also obnoxious for putting my foot in my mouth before I realized -- and when I did realize, I felt as if I had been duped into attending. Even though Obama won, my soul is still shocked that the popular vote was so close, that we live in a country filled with so many deluded cold - hearted selfish greedy holier - than - thou asshats (and that I myself was at a party with some of them).

My eloquent facebook friend Michael Lipsey, also writing in 2012, expressed it so much better than my rant about being invited to a stupid party under false pretenses:

"I feel drained today; it’s been a perilous cliffhanger. Not that I think we’re about to embark on something great, but that we narrowly avoided something enormously worse that has metastasized out of greed, religious fanaticism & intolerance, and loony economic theory. The Republicans fought the New Deal, social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, national health care, inheritance taxes for the rich, integration, equal rights for blacks, women, minorities, immigration reform, gay rights, regulation of banks and Wall Street, environmental protection, Clean Water, consumer protection — just about everything decent thing the government has ever done these bastards have opposed.

"Pundits are saying that this now virtually lily-white, aging party with a base of fundamentalists and bitter, uneducated, conspiracy - minded extremists clinging to the fringes of the middle class, is going to have to become more inclusive or be doomed to perpetual minority status in a rapidly diversifying and more highly educated America. Given their record and having driven every liberal and progressive out of their party, I’m not holding my breath. Let’s hope that Obama, with four more years and free of the burden of reelection, will be able to take his shot at greatness, as the more sensible members of the Congressional majority are licking their wounds and rethinking their mantra of NO to anything the least progressive."

Michael so accurately described their deplorable methods -- opposing all that's decent and saying "no" to anything progressive -- yet it worked out for them, and here we are four years later not even in the same boat, but in a much much worse boat.

As Gerry has warned me many a time :
things can always get worse!
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday November 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Handed My Own Life

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
University of Glasgow Coat of Arms

VIA ~ VERITAS ~ VITA
WAY ~ TRUTH ~ LIFE
MENTORS ~ HEROES ~ FRIENDS
[Thanks to Peter Bunder & Good Shepherd for this photo & caption]
Back to school already! The calendar year is nearly two thirds gone, yet in semester - speak the year is just beginning! After a few decades on the academic calendar, it becomes hard to measure time in any other way. I began my Freshman year at Northeast Missouri State in the fall of 1975, finishing four years later with a B.A. in English, one of the mere fifty - two Bachelor of Arts candidates listed on the last page of the graduation program (Spring 1979). My educational goals were not shared by many of my peers (most of whose names were listed among the many hundreds preceding the B.A.'s). While I did not elect to obtain the then popular Bachelor of Science in Education, I somehow or other ended up teaching for a number of years and was imprinted by numerous examples of what it meant to be an educator.

The closest I've come to a mission field was teaching at the Community College of Philadelphia. I taught a class for students who were trying to qualify for Freshman English -- so pre-freshman English. A few had not graduated from high school, but they had special admission status as returning students. A few were traditional students (age 18 or so) who had just not been served well by the Philadelphia public school system. Most were returning students, African American women about my age (late 30s at the time) and many were grandmothers! They were always surprised to learn that I was the mother of toddlers, at my age. I was impressed by the commitment they brought to their course work, and their determination to improve the level of their writing skills. Their dedication was inspiring, and many times they seemed to surprise themselves and each other with the success of their achievements. My last semester there, Spring 1998, I participated in a departmental evaluation, in an attempt to reveal something of how these small successes were accomplished.

Always my goal was to reveal to the students their own capacity for intelligent thought, as mine was revealed to me. In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard vividly describes her initiation into the world of natural science, her early discovery, years before college, "that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself." I love her scenario of revelation, though the indifference of her privileged parents fills me with some misgiving:

“Mother . . . gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and Father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down [to check out her biology experiment in the basement]. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life” (148 - 49, emphasis added).

In Homegrown Democrat, Garrison Keillor writes of his education in very similar terms, describing himself as an undergraduate "with no money to speak of and no clear plan for the future but . . . teachers who engage him with gravity and fervor and that's enough. That was the true spirit of the university, the spirit of the professors who loved their work. That was the heart and soul of the place . . . ." He enumerates half a dozen of his most inspirational professors, concluding with a visit to the library where "that Niagara of scholarship holds you in its sway, the deluge and glory of learning, and you begin to see where work and play become one. And imagine working at something you love. And that was how the University of Minnesota gave me life" (94 - 96, emphasis added).

Several times during my undergraduate years, I too was "essentially handed my own life," not just in the English courses which catered to my "private passion" but once in a science class where we learned that "Much knowledge is gained in pursuit of even elusive goals," and once again in music appreciation where the professor explained that "we don't know what we like -- we like what we know" and then proceeded to teach us just how much there was in the world to know and like and love. Not only did I obtain personal attention when necessary, but upon one memorable occasion during my Freshman year when I arrived at an office door at the same time as a classmate, the instructor soon had us tutoring each other. My questions were answered by a peer whose questions in turn I was able to answer! Thus, even in uncertainty, my own competence was reinforced. I learned that I was capable of intelligent thought and that I could impart as well as absorb information. This was an invaluable discovery, which stood me in good stead as an educator. Though it was not always easy, I aimed for a similar transference of accountability during my years as a classroom teacher.

As for my private passion, one of my most rewarding undergraduate challenges was to work as an editor of the student literary magazine, learning to test and question my own critical thinking skills in ways which continue to influence and inform every writing task I undertake. I knew when I arrived at Northeast that I wanted to major in English; and when I took Modern British Fiction, I knew what, one day, my field of specialization would be. Never before had I read such wonderful novels or worked on such exciting assignments! From a handful of professors, I encountered generous and enthusiastic encouragement, and was challenged by their faith in my work and by the valuable information which they choose to share.

Regardless of one's private passion, the public study of language and literature should yield a certain breadth of vision when it comes to solving problems, analyzing common or repeated themes, and dealing with human conflict in a humane way. To portray the inevitable links between existence and language, to create an environment of personal actualization in which a whole and steady vision might be realized, to repair the learned disjunction between speaker and utterance, to not be fooled by wordcraft or lazy thinking -- those were some of my goals as a teacher of English. Particularly in teaching composition it seems important, perhaps it is even a mission to show students how to be responsible to language, to own it, and to overcome indifference.

I pointed out to them the significance of their own authority in what Stanley Fish calls the "interpretive community" and the relevance of their own contributions to the discursive enterprise referred to by Robert Maynard Hutchins as the Great Conversation and the Civilization of the Dialogue:

"How, then, can higher education escape dogmatism, narrowness, the invasion of academic freedom, and failure in its proper intellectual task and still do its duty by morals and religion? A possible answer lies in the Great Conversation. The Great Conversation began with the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Hindus, and the Chinese and has continued to the present day. It is a conversation that deals, perhaps more extensively than it deals with anything else, with morals and religion. The questions of the nature and existence of God, the nature and destiny of humanity, and the organization and purpose of human society are the recurring themes of the Great Conversation.

"There may be many ways in which a college or university can continue the Great Conversation, but it would seem offhand that one of the best ways is through the reading and discussion by all the students of the books in which the Great Conversation has been carried on by the greatest writers and thinkers who have taken part in it. I emphasize discussion because of the contributions that this method makes to the moral and intellectual habits we desire; and I emphasize reading and discussion by all the students and faculty because in this way the formation of a community can be advanced. To continue and enrich the Great Conversation is the object of higher education.

"The Civilization of the Dialogue is the only civilization worth having and the only civilization in which the whole world can unite. It is, therefore, the only civilization we can hope for, because the world must unite or be blown to bits. The Civilization of the Dialogue requires communication. It requires a common language and a common stock of ideas. It assumes that everyone has reason and that everyone can use it. It preserves to all their independent judgment and, since it does so, it deprives any individual or any group of the privilege of forcing their judgment upon any other individual or any other group. The Civilization of the Dialogue is the negation of force. We have reached the point, in any event, when force cannot unite the world; it can merely destroy it. Through continuing and enriching the Great Conversation, higher education not only does its duty by morals and religion; it not performs its proper intellectual task; it also supports and symbolizes the highest hopes and the highest aspirations of humanity."

Robert Maynard Hutchins
from Morals, Religion, and Higher Education
In keeping with this focus on dialogue, I stressed the need to adhere to certain objective principles (use of the apostrophe, for example, or the conjugation of verbs!) not merely for the sake of following rules, but so that the students' contributions to the dialogue might be taken seriously; so that they do not undermine their own authority as readers, writers, and speakers; and so that they may learn to make the best use of that "tight economy of energy" which for Mina P. Shaughnessy characterized the transfer of meaning via the written or spoken word. In the developmental courses which I taught, I hoped for my students to discover that expressing themselves verbally went hand in hand with reading and expressing themselves in writing; and I tried to impress upon them that most human endeavor, education in particular, is a verbal undertaking. I urged them to think of each essay as "a try," an attempt to tackle one more problem and eliminate it before confronting another.

Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction contains a structural analysis of the curriculum in which he warns students that literary studies "are a question of the signifier, not of the signified. Those employed to teach you this form of discourse will remember whether or not you were able to speak it proficiently long after they have forgotten what you said." Despite the appeal of Eagleton's analogy, I always was, in fact, keenly interested in what my students had to say; and I continually reminded them that it is for this very reason -- the significance of their message -- that their mode of signification is so important. Myself a student of the message as well as the medium, I have to admire "that rare educator," described by Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "who was in love with information . . . [and desired] to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again" (209). If, as Angelou suspected, such an impulse was not motivated solely by a love for the students themselves, then certainly it derives from a sincere conviction that they proceed with awareness, as cognizant as possible of their role in creating and naming the world which surrounds them -- a way to give them life, to hand them their own lives!

Henricus de Alemannia Lecturing his Students
from Laurentius de Voltolina, 1350s

For more on higher / liberal education, see
my previous post: "Back to School: A Scent of Knowledge"
and this vintage video: Bryn Mawr College

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PS
For a bit of academic humor you might want to try
33 Teachers Who Got The Last Laugh,
or Your Teachers Were Funnier Than You All Along,
which I found to be very entertaining in a Breakfast Club kind of way!
In fact, it reminds me of another movie Class in which the English instructor is handing back papers with a negative remark for each one. When he gets to the last one, his comment is "This one offended ALL my sensibilities." It's been 30 years since I saw this movie -- (warning: it's a stupid movie; so this is not a recommendation) -- but I never forgot that one funny line!

That's the thing about being a student or a teacher: it always seems to involve grading! Reminiscing about these good and bad movies reminded my brother Bruce and me of our best grading stories.

Bruce wrote to say, "I once got a paper back with the international traffic symbol for "No" -- the circle with the slash through it -- covering most of the first page. In one of the few spaces not covered by the circle was the word "NO!" in big red letters. The rest of the pages just had big red Xs from corner to corner. The test was a final that I was required to take, but it wouldn't affect my grade. I only had to get something like a 40% on the final to get an A. So, I just went in and wrote drivel . . . didn't even study. The professor called me into his office and told me something like this: 'I know basically all you have to do is spell your name correctly on this test to get enough points for an A, but you ARE going to take this final.' He gave me an incomplete and I had to go take the finals when we got back from Christmas."

The prize correction / comment, which I still enjoy for it's sheer uselessness: "Revise for smoothness." This is the one and only comment that one of my dissertation readers put on the top of my 300 - page rough draft, without one single mark anywhere throughout the entire document (did he even read it? I think not). Now, whenever Gerry and I hear any piece of totally useless advice, we just say, "Revise for smoothness" (or sometimes "Go Over").

My advisor Leonard Orr (one of the inspiring professors invoked above) gave me some useful advise: He said to wait a couple of days, change a couple of words around, re-submit the paper, and say, "I revised for smoothness." Worked like a charm!

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SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, August 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Dagmar's Birthday

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Dagmar loved having lunch outside at little places like this!
Photo above taken in Brookston, Indiana
By Dagmar Murray, October 2010
Lunch Friends: Dagmar, Kitti, Katy, Cathy
(My Birthday Last Year)
I'm posting a day early this time ~ on the 13th instead of the 14th ~ because my friend Dagmar was born on April 13th, 1959, and today would have been her 52nd birthday.

Another friend ~ www.jandonley.com ~ also born in April and often mentioned on my blogs, sent a link to the following poem the other day on facebook. Jan wasn't sending the poem, which she describes as "short and so, so beautiful," just to me. Nor did she send it in connection with Dagmar, who died last month, sadly and suddenly. However, as so often happens, Jan's message seemed to come at precisely the right time, thus I share Rilke's poem here today in honor of Dagmar's birthday:

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
from his Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Dinner Dance Friends: Dagmar, Katy, Cathy, Kitti
(Keith, Peter, Jack, Gerry)
Dinner Theatre Friends: Dagmar, Kitti, Katy, Cathy, Leta
(2 husbands visible; 3 others taking photographs)

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I also spent an afternoon last week reading Maya Angelou 's Letter to My Daughter because I wanted to find the sections that I heard Dagmar's daughters read at her memorial service. I believe these are the lines:

"I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.' I am besieged with painful awe at the vacuum left by the dead. Where did she go? Where is he now? . . . I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.

"When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

"Did I learn to be kinder,
To be more patient,
And more generous,
More loving,
More ready to laugh,
And more easy to accept honest tears?

"If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives." (107 - 08)

And this:

"Condolences: For a too brief moment in the universe the veil was lifted. They mysterious became known. Questions met answers somewhere behind the stars. Furrowed brows were smoothed and eyelids closed over long unblinking stares.

"Your beloved occupied the cosmos. You awoke to sunrays and nestled down to sleep in moonlight. All life was a gift open to you and burgeoning for you. Choirs sang to harps and your feet moved to ancestral drumbeats. For you were sustaining and being sustained by the arms of your beloved.

"Now the days stretch before you with the dryness and sameness of desert dunes. And in this season of grief we who love you have become invisible to you. Our words worry the empty air around you and you can sense no meaning in our speech.

"Yet we are here. We are still here. Our hearts ache to support you.

"We are always loving you.

"You are not alone." (111 - 12)

Millennium Park Mirror Ball, Chicago
Photo by Dagmar Murray, February 2009
Back in June 2009, when I started my daily blog ~ The Quotidian Kit ~ I asked Dagmar if I could use her photo of our reflections in the giant mirror ball as the header, because it goes so well with the quoted passage from Quinton Duval. The city looks to me like a big, rounded jar where big ideas might huddle, along with the miniaturized images of our lunch group. We may appear very tiny, but we are not alone!

Here are a couple more pictures taken on the same day:

Riding the Train to Chicago . . .
to have lunch at the Italian Village and see "Jersey Boys"

Dagmar, Kitti, Cathy . . .
at the Chagall Four Seasons Mosaic
First National Plaza
Corner South Dearborn & West Monroe Streets


"The stars were my best friends.
The air was full of legends and phantoms,
full of mythical and fair-tale creatures,
which suddenly flew away over the roof,
so that one was at one with the firmament."
Marc Chagall

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, April 28, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Lost & Found

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately . . . When it's so hard I think I shan't go on. I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley [a friend who died]. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything." [ellipses in original]

Karen Blixen, from the screenplay Out of Africa

*******************

"Stand on the edge of the abyss of despair and
when you feel that it is beyond your strength,
break off and have a cup of tea."

Sophrony (Sakharov)

*******************

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 to 1950
Pulitzer Prize Winner, 1956

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Last Spring, my friend Jan (www.jandonley.com) sent me this poem, sure that I would love it. What a fine poem! It was new to me, I did love it, and how timely! Because what Jan didn't know was that at my house around that time we were all going a little crazy looking for Gerry's watch (misplaced somewhere within the house and still unfound) and three tiny watch / calculator batteries that I had bought and promptly misplaced upon returning home from the store! I had just celebrated the one - week anniversary of the missing batteries by going out and purchasing a new batch, begrudging the wasted time and effort of the first trip, the fruitless search, the second trip. Even so, I was still obsessively determined to waste even more time by continuing my manic search for the originals.

Isn't that always the hard part? All that time down the drain and just not knowing when to stop? Reading Bishop's poem, I have to admire the way that she recommends letting go even of that "hour badly spent." Plus it helped me at the time to consider that the batteries themselves were "filled with the intent / to be lost." What chance did I stand against them?

Reading Bishop's poem reminded me of another that I have known since my earliest teaching days: "No Loser, No Weeper," by Maya Angelou. I used to carry around a low-tech cassette player so that my students could listen to a scratchy recording I had of Angelou reading this poem. The two poems follow a similar pattern, starting with a concrete list of trinkets lost and found, ending with love, the greatest of all loss.

Bishop mentions a watch, keys, time, places, names, houses, cities, rivers, continents -- all lost. Perhaps her reference to such a vast geography is intended as a metaphor for something more intimate, closer to the heart. On the other hand, maybe not; maybe she really did lose all those big things. In the final stanza, she acquiesces bravely to lost love, not entirely convincing the reader that the art of losing is as easy to master as she claims. Not disaster? More likely the opposite is true. She may know how to "Write it!" yet is, in fact, devastated.

Angelou provides a very straightforward list -- a dime, a doll, a watch; and, in the end, her "lover - boy" -- and a straightforward tone to go with it. She hates to lose something and doesn't mind saying so:

No Loser, No Weeper
by Maya Angelou (b 1928)
American Autobiographer, Poet, and Shero
Pulitzer Prize Nominee, 1971

"I hate to lose something,"
then she bent her head
"even a dime, I wish I was dead.
I can't explain it. No more to be said.
Cept I hate to lose something."

"I lost a doll once and cried for a week.
She could open her eyes, and do all but speak.
I believe she was took, by some doll-snatching-sneak
I tell you, I hate to lose something."

"A watch of mine once, got up and walked away.
It had twelve numbers on it and for the time of day.
I'll never forget it and all I can say
Is I really hate to lose something."

"Now if I felt that way bout a watch and a toy,
What you think I feel bout my lover-boy?
I ain't threatening you madam, but he is my evening's joy.
And I mean I really hate to lose something."

A lost watch in both poems? A literary motif? A metaphor for lost time? Or merely one of your more commonly lost items, along with sunglasses and umbrellas? I like the way that Angelou's watch just "got up and walked away," motivated, apparently, by "the intent to be lost" described by Bishop. I pointed out to Gerry that perhaps he could take some comfort in knowing that his predicament was none other than the human condition! Well, he resorted to wearing his second - best watch but was not resigned.

Nor was all lost! Not only did his watch show up; but, a few days later, the missing batteries re-appeared as well. As for the watch, we could all agree that it had last been seen on the kitchen counter, and Sam remembered playing with it while sitting there reading the paper. So it was not a big surprise when the watch turned out to have been on Sam's dresser top the entire time. He must have absentmindedly been twisting it around in his hand, walked up to his room for something, set it down, and completely forgotten about doing so.

Of course, he'd been in and out of his room a hundred times since then but just never spied the watch amidst the other dresser-top items. He didn't want to admit his oversight to Gerry, so I came up with the idea to put the watch around our cat Beaumont's neck and call out, "Hey, does anyone recall that old Disney movie about the cat [Thomasina? No, it was That Darn Cat!] who wore a wristwatch for a collar?" As per usual, no one else laughed at my joke, but Beaumont cooperated with my prank, and I thought I was pretty funny. Haha.
[Beaumont: Puss in Box, Shopping For Boots]
More good news! A few days later, I went to the freezer for a package of frozen vegetables (lets say something classy like edamame), and there were the three little batteries! I had simply twisted the plastic grocery bag around the veggies before storing them, without ever noticing that the batteries were in the same bag. At the onset of my extended search, when I realized that I had never unpacked the batteries, I did shake out every single grocery bag -- without ever remembering that one had already been stuck away in the freezer. Ah ha! Who knew?

To conclude this narrative of the ridiculous, just a day or so after I finally went out and replaced the lost batteries, I received the following in a list of "thoughts for the day" from my brother Aaron, who knew nothing about our lost and found issues: "The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement."

It certainly worked for the batteries; and, if Gerry had purchased a new watch, it would have worked in that case too!

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ More Lost & Found
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com