Lucky Rock

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Vernal Haiku:
Equinox wonder
and worry; the Wabash has
overflowed its banks.

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

My dad worked at Rocketdyne from 1962 - 1967, writing systems & procedures manuals in the Quality Control department. Neosho is a small town in southwest Missouri, where I went to school K - 4th. This picture was taken when we went back to visit in 2002.

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For me, nothing tops those moments when Life offers its own theme to a strand of apparently accidental events, and everything hangs together for a moment in such an uncanny way that you'd swear it was all planned out somehow!

I can easily spend an entire day sidetracked from my initial focus by a trail of coincidences that I just have to follow. For example, not long ago, I went to facebook where my friend Jan mentioned her extra short story about a tell tale heart. So off I headed (www.jandonley.com) to hear the heart beat (very Wordsworthian!). Then back to facebook to ask some of Jan's friends to be my friend (mission accomplished). Then back to Jan's website to read "Trash Talk" (very reminiscent of my years in Philadelphia); and THAT is when I noticed Jan's link to my blog and for just a moment felt overwhelmed by her great faith in this enterprise.

Next, I had to check out Jan's play, "It's Just the Wind" (very Godot but funnier!) and make a mental note to ask if she had noticed that in Linda Pastan's poem, the father says "don't be afraid / it's just the wind." Then I had to feel guilty that I've loved this little poem for so long yet never taken the time to look up Pastan's reference to Goethe's "Der Erlkoenig" (which I then did, but that's another story):

from "The Months"
by Linda Pastan

March
When the Earl King came
to steal away the child
in Goethe's poem, the father said
don't be afraid,
it's just the wind...
As if it weren't the wind
that blows away the tender
fragments of this world—
leftover leaves in the corners
of the garden, a Lenten Rose
that thought it safe
to bloom so early.

And to top it all off, as I came downstairs this morning, planning in my head a letter for Jan, what were the first words I heard? My son Sam saying: "It's my lucky rock; Mom gave it to me." Turns out, Gerry was asking about the shiny rock that he had just seen Sam pick up from his desk and drop into his pocket. I was touched by Sam's belief in lucky rocks and by his sentiment of hanging on to a talisman from his crazy old mom. It was, however, no more than a fleeting morning moment -- yes, sweeter than most but still fleet -- until it suddenly took on a life of it's own. Why? How? Because, taking another moment to peruse Jan's website, my eyes fell on the title, "Pocket." How had I missed this entry, pocketed as it was, right there in between "Heart" & "Fable," which I had read several days ago? Well, can you imagine my astonishment when just a few lines into the story, I read her words, "Not even a lucky rock"? A lucky rock?

Sometimes, life is so full of coincidences that I think my head will split open trying to take them all in! It's enough to make me believe in the whole Universe at once! Here I was, sitting alone, reading a story about the very object my loved ones had been discussing a mere thirty minutes earlier. And not just any object, but a lucky, magic object, "something to keep forever." And now I know why I overlooked "Pocket," the other day -- the goddess was saving it up for me, a lucky story to read on a lucky Friday! Because we all need stories -- "clear, round, and easy to carry" -- in our hearts.

An Inheritance of Ephemera

SUNLIGHT AND SHADOW
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

William Kent Krueger: "It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another's, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories . . . are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer . . . is a construct both of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see" (from the novel Ordinary Grace, 302)

Over the summer, I have been sorting through half a dozen dusty old boxes of memorabilia saved by my mother and her mother: some clothes and dishes, notebooks and papers from my mom's childhood and college days, plus hundreds of family photos, some from over a hundred years ago. Against the guffawing of the naysayers, I dragged this stuff out of storage after my mother died and hauled it straight up here from Kansas into my dining room. It is a heartwarming but also heartbreaking task, so much sadness. It’s like my dining table has become a sea of ancient grief and worry and conflict; world wars, sickness, accidents, disappointments -- with some greeting cards on the side, an inheritance of ephemera.

While I sift through the "hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses" -- obituaries, letters from elderly cousins, long-lost railway tickets, Gerry sits in front of his screen, traveling the "path that weaves into and out of deep shadow" -- census reports, military records, forgotten addresses suddenly recalled to life. Surprising new names and old faces continue to appear at every level and branch of the family tree, as we follow the treasure hunt / obstacle course of genealogy.
[See also Wait But Why.]

I was intrigued to come across the following handwritten "note to self" in a stack of my mother's papers:

"A number of times I've thought my life has been an interesting, sometime almost unbelievable one, but then I suppose everyone thinks that at one time or another. At the times I've had those thoughts, I've wondered if I could get the myriad vignettes organized in a written form that would be of interest for my children and grandchildren. Yes, I would like for them to know more about the 'real' me than only being in their lives has been.

"Where do I start? To write a chronological account doesn't appeal to me -- I've catalogued my memories in so many ways -- chronologically, yes; by songs and music; by trips; by people in my life; and by my pets -- to name a few."

Sadly, I have discovered no memoir beyond this introductory sketch. If she carried her ideas any further, I have not come across them anywhere -- in a notebook, on a computer disc, gone forever?

What I have instead is the timely suggestion from my friend Jonnie to read A Fraction of Darkness, a book in which poet Linda Pastan (1932) deals with the loss of her parents. For the time being, I will have to stretch these poems out wide enough to cover whatever else it was that my mother intended to say but left unsaid:

Last Will
Children,
when I am ash
read by the light of the fire
that consumes me
this document
whose subject is love.

I want to leave you everything: my life
divided into so many parts
there are enough to go around; the world
from this window: weather and a tree
which bequeaths
all of its leaves each year.

Today the lawyer plans
for your descendants,
telling a story
of generations
that seems to come true
even as he speaks.

My books will fill
your children’s shelves,
my small enameled spoons
invade their drawers. It is
the only way I know, so far,
to haunt.

Let me be a guest
at my own funeral
and at the reading of my will.
You I’ll reward first
for the moments of your births,
those three brief instants
when I understood my life.

But wisdom bends as light does
around the objects it touches.
The only legacy you need was left
by accident long ago:
a secret in the genes.
The rest is small change. ~ Linda Pastan

Shadows
Each night this house sinks into the shadows
under its weight of love and fear and pity.
Each morning it floats up again so lightly
it seems attached to sky instead of earth,
a place where we will always go on living
and there will be no dead to leave behind.

But when we think of whom we've left behind
already in the ever-hungry shadows,
even in the morning hum of living
we pause a minute and are filled with pity
for the lovely children of earth
who run up and down the stairs so lightly

and who weave their careless songs so lightly
through the hedges which they play behind
that the fruits and flowers of the earth
rise up on their stems above the shadows.
Perhaps even an apple can feel pity;
perhaps the lilac wants to go on living.

In this house where we have all been living
we bind the family together lightly
with knots made equally of love and pity
and the knowledge that we'll leave behind
only partial memories, scraps of shadows,
trinkets of our years upon the earth. . . .

Always save your pity for the living
who walk the eggshell crust of earth so lightly,
in front of them, behind them, only shadows. ~ Linda Pastan

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

" . . . the fruits and flowers of the earth
rise up on their stems above the shadows. . . ."

"All August is condensed in this one day!"
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, 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

Dogwood, Spring and Fall

THE DOGWOOD TREE, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

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

The dogwood tree next door to us:
above ~ April 2016, looking south;
below ~ October 2017, looking north.

At Auntie Jan's House
in the South of England ~ October 2016

The following autumnal "Elegy" from Linda Pastan
(thanks Katie Field & Writer's Almanac),
echoes a letter we received recently
from Gerry's 86 - year old Auntie Margaret,
over in Reading, England. Bracing for the first
frost, she writes, nearly sonnet - like:

18 October 2017 ~ "The weather is still quite mild
but I get depressed as the days shorten
and one after another I do the jobs
that need doing to get plants through the winter."

Auntie Margaret, the poet feels your pain!

*******************
Elegy

Our final dogwood leans
over the forest floor

offering berries
to the birds, the squirrels.

It’s a relic
of the days when dogwoods

flourished—creamy lace in April,
spilled milk in May—

their beauty delicate
but commonplace.

When I took for granted
that the world would remain

as it was, and I
would remain with it.

by Linda Pastan, American Poet (b 1932)
from Insomnia [see previous posts]

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

Gerry, in the Fall with Auntie Margaret (above) ~ October 2016
and in the Spring with Auntie Jan (below) ~ April 2017

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

a page from my scrapbook
45 - year - old dogwood leaf

May 1972 ~ Lindenwood College Campus
St. Charles, Missouri
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, October 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ More "Spring & Fall"
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

Look at these beautiful greeting cards
that I just ordered for the holidays!
Dogwood Berries by Sari Sauls

Hopefully

Posting early this week
in honor of Emily Dickinson's Birthday
Born this day in 1830
[died May 15, 1886]

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Photo of Dickinson's House by Stan Lichens

"Eden is that old - fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.
How fair, on looking back, the Day
We sauntered from the door,
Unconscious our returning
Discover it no more."

~ Emily Dickinson ~

[See also: Toni Morrison ~ Paradise]

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Does it bring you joy to indulge in an innocent little English usage error every occasionally (like that)? It does me! One of my favorites is the word hopefully. The handbooks will advise you that it means "with hope," as in, "I dropped my bike off hopefully" or "Hopefully, I entered the contest."

It does not mean "I hope," as in, "Hopefully I will win" or "Hopefully my bike can be fixed" (not to mention get rid of that passive verb). Even so, I like using it both ways, either way, ambiguously, whenever I feel like. Hopefully, you will agree with me when I say that we all need all the hope we can get!

What are you hoping for? What are the desires of your heart?

Do you get what you're hoping for
When you look behind you there's no open door
What are you hoping for?
Do you know?
--song by M. Masser / G. Goffin;
--sung by Diana Ross (and a few others)
I once came across a little proverb, so easy to remember, I didn't even have to write it down: "Want something long enough and you don't." It took me awhile to puzzle out the meaning. Once it starts happening, however, you grow to understand. It's not that you actively give up wanting or deliberately relinquish the object of your desire; it's just that one day you realize, hey I don't want that anymore, and in fact haven't wanted it for quite some time.

It's not so bad to stop wanting things you can't have. But it's also good to hope for what you might have. And the wisdom to know the difference. As Emily Dickinson says in one of her best loved poems:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all . . .
This stanza always reminds me of the Psalm: "Delight yourself in the Goodness of God and you will be given the Desires of Your Heart" (37:4). The trick, of course, is knowing what it is that you desire, what you're hoping for.

A few years ago in the Notre Dame Magazine, Elizabeth Austin told the story of a young friend who wanted to complete the last leg of an around-the-world journey. Asking his father's advice, he received this ambiguous reply: "I think it's a ridiculous idea . . . If it's just a whim forget about it. The only reason to do something like that is if it's your heart's desire. And if it's your heart's desire, then you have to do it."

The son was baffled: "What's that supposed to mean, my heart's desire?" Austin concludes her narrative with yet another conundrum: Discovering our heart's desire "must be, in the end, our heart's desire" (NDM, Winter 1997 - 98, p 79).

From some angles, Emily Dickinson's sequestered life appears so unruffled, but what about her heart's desire? What message did she discern when listening so carefully to that song without words, the one that never stopped?

Emily Dickinson
"We think of hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain."

poem by Linda Pastan, (U.S. Poet, b. 1932)
In her poem, "Lists," Pastan says:

"I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list."
I wonder if it's ever the case that the same is also true of what we're hoping for?

Looking at it a different way, author Susan Jeffers recommends not a "Hoping Life" but a "Wondering Life": " . . . with the magic of wondering, fear of the uncertain is replaced by curiosity . . . pressure about the future is relieved when we live in a wondering world" (Embracing Uncertainty, 20 - 21).

E.g., not I HOPE you are reading my blog,
but I WONDER if you are reading my blog.

For more on Emily Dickinson, see
"Emily From Different Angles
on Kitti's Book List




Young Girl Reading
by French artist
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
1732 - 1806





SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, December 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

Over a Hundred Years of Living

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"What have you seen in your hundred years?"
[Additional Contemporary Photos]

Memories of 443 as shared by a previous resident,
Robert W. Topping (1925 - 2009)
"The house at 443 Robinson Street needed both repair and paint when my parents and their three sons (aged 13, 7, and 4) moved into it in 1911. Grandpa Topping and Dad's wealthy Long Island aunts loaned him the money to buy the place -- the only residence Mother and Dad ever owned and my only childhood home.

Young Bob Topping on Robinson Street
Click to see more photos from the Topping Era

"Robinson Street was the main north - south thoroughfare on the extreme east side of West Lafayette, or at least east of Salisbury Street. It curved northwesterly up grade from the North River road, probably an original cow path traversing the clay - and - gravel bluffs along the west bank of the Wabash River meandering generally west and south as the natural division between Lafayette and West Lafayette.

"Our property comprised about three - fourths acre and lay about thirty to forty feet (I judge) above the Wabash flood plain and overlooked the river and most of Lafayette, especially a nondescrpt industrial building that sat like a dirty loaf of bread nearly along the river's edge with high, easily read letters that spelled "Lafayette Ice & Coal Company" on its west wall. Later, after the end of Prohibition, the sign was repainted a tawdry yellow with huge red letters trimmed in black that read "Home of YE TAVERN BREW." It advertised the local brewery that beer drinkers joked about. . . . Dad hated the sign and complained between clenched teeth that his view of the Wabash Valey and Lafayette was obstructed by the largest, ugliest monster ever . . .

"Built in 1896, probably by a retired Tippecanoe farmer, our house was a three - story, massive - looking, white clapboard edifice classed as Queen Anne style architecture. From its outside, you saw a long sloping roof up to a ridge pole and on the northeast corner, a three - sided cupola and a red - brick chimney that vented a handsome Italian marble tile parlor fireplace that Dad and Mother never used. "Could burn the place down," Dad would say. Built on a high foundation with a rather shallow, brick - floor basement, the house also had a broad front porch; and since the lot sloped from rear to front, one had to climb seven wood steps to the porch and front door but only two at the screened back porch. There was also a north porch entry to the living room.

"Inside, the house boasted the aforesaid parlor, a front hall and a two - landing oak banistered, open stairway to the second floor, a living room,and a dining room. The front hall was impressive, its main feature the polished banister that frequently warmed the seats of the pants of all five Topping male offspring who believed its purpose was for sliding. But most impressive were the front hall bookcases. Three rows of glass fronts displayed the complete works of Mark Twain and most of those of Charles Dickens, several volumes of Victor Hugo, and Shakepeare, and one high book case that contained volume after volume of the Proceedings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. A halltree (we called it) held hooks for coats and hats and the seat was a lid beneath which we kept an assortment of knit hats, scarves, and gloves for winter. The odor of mothballs in it could knock you over. A smaller closet under the second stairway landing held more coats plus the family vacuum cleaner. . . . "

A few alterations, but you can see it just as Bob describes!

I want to share more of Bob's Robinson Street reminiscences, but for right now, I must stop to insert this poem whose opening stanza connects perfectly with the image of the Topping brothers sliding down the banister (or, as poet Linda Pastan writes:
" . . . the lovely children of earth
who run up and down the stairs so lightly . . ."

To An Old House

What have you seen in your hundred years?
If asked, what would you say,
Of the dozen families that lived in your walls,
Of the hundreds of children at play?
Did the boys slide down the bannister rail,
To a mother’s angry scolding?

How many laughs, and how many tears
Have marked the years unfolding?
Every time a floorboard creaks,
The sound tells a story.
A hundred summers in their heat,
A hundred Christmas glories.
Here in this kitchen, a dozen mothers
Have left their stories behind.
Open the cupboards, look and see,
There a tale you’ll find.
Old recipe on yellowed paper,
Phone numbers scribbled on doors,
A catalog from ’65,
1950’s floors.
A hundred years of living,
These walls have seen each day.
A dozen families loved this place . . .

But memories linger in these walls,
And memories always will.
Do ghosts hide here, in your shadows?
Are there secrets, hidden well?
Oh, that you could only speak,
The tales that you could tell.
To walk your halls in quiet step,
Just listen, hear the story
That an old house can clearly tell,
In matchless oratory.
“I am the years gone by . . . "

by Rick W. Cotton© 2018

It's true!
Here at 443 we have those friendly ghosts who have left behind
their names and numbers -- saved from who knows how long ago?
Immortalized down in the basement, on the brick.

Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ "443 Historic House Photos"
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.blogsppot.com

Shorter by the Day

THE WINTER SOLSTICE, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Whistling Boy ~ Marques E. Reitzel

On the Shortest Days

At almost four in the afternoon, the
wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods.

The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches
on fire in the heavy sky that flickers

with the disappearing sun. I wonder
what I owe the fading day, why I keep

my place at this dark desk by the window
measuring the force of the wind, gauging

how long a certain cloud will hold that pink
edge that even now has slipped into gray?

Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp
in every window and nests of stars

on the rooftops. Ladders lean against the hills
and people climb, rung by rung, into the night.

by Joyce Sutphen
found in Modern Love & Other Myths
© Red Dragonfly Press, 2015
(see facebook)

[See also "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper]

See the mystical oil painting above, as well as this nostalgic pastel,
at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette (Indiana)

Two Hour Delay by Ron Burgess

The shortest day -- and longest night -- of the year will be here before you know it: on December 21st, one week from today! For the next seven days, we will continue to lose approximately thirty seconds of light per day; and then magically after we round the Winter Solstice, start gaining it back again. So prepare your hearts. As the earth turns towards the solstice, so do we:

December

The white dove of winter
sheds its first
fine feathers;
they melt

as they touch
the warm ground
like notes
of a once familiar

music; the earth
shivers and
turns towards
the solstice.

Linda Pastan, American Poet (b 1932)

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, December 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