Citizens (miscellaneous)
Two Poems
I. Kenilworth
Though I pass it daily on my walk,
it still feels strange
to put Kenilworth Castle into a poem,
like an affectation,
an empty gesture, a boast.
And now that it’s here, in this poem,
I don’t know what to do with it,
its ruined walls and towers
standing out above the poem’s
otherwise modest claims,
too bulky to be shaped into simile—
though the clichés circle
like rooks above the ruined keep,
cawing sic transit gloria mundi,
as if we needed another poem about mortality.
Written in Kenilworth, Warwickshire (Spring 2007)
II. Thinking of England in the Spring
England should have given me castles and cathedrals,
hedgerows and weather to write about,
and ruined abbeys, and sheep, and pots of Yorkshire tea.
I should have come home with new similes
like stamps in my passport to show where I had been.
But all I can think of now is how these tiny buds
must be like the Tardis to contain so much leaf.
Written in Northfield, Minnesota (Spring 2008)
Library Expansion Brainstorming - First in a Series, Tonight!
The Northfield Public Library is holding a series of “informational and brainstorming events to explore the challenges and possibilities for a library expansion at the current location.”
The first meeting is tonight, from 7:00-9:00p at St. John’s Lutheran Church (500 Third St. W.), and will focus on “Dreams and visions for the library and community.” The next one is Tuesday, May 27th, same time and place. “Ideas for ways to expand the library on its current location.” The last scheduled meeting will be Tuesday, June 10th, same time and place, will focus on concepts and options.
They’ve put up a good website/blog for this process, which I also included in a comment on our previous post in which Margit Johnson, Library board member, was a guest on our podcast.
I hope to hear comments from those who attend - I’ll be at the Planning Commission meeting tonight, so am not able to be there.
Bloom Tuesday
Around town, the magnolias look lovely and many gardens have the hardy pink azaleas in bloom as well. At my house, it’s still all about the bulbs. In the front, four types of tulips are blooming in close formation. In back, the grape hyacinth (Muscari) are blooming near some daffodils. (Though, I have to admit, the daffodils were very poorly placed (by me) and look too much like soldiers in a row, and not enough like a circle of friends. Clusters, not lines with bulbs.)
Three of my neighbors have azaleas in full bloom. Mine are dragging behind, which has been the pattern for several years. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, but it’s something, because my bushes are scraggly looking and bloom two weeks after everyone else’s plants. The exposure is identical (southeast, protected, near the house) so that is not it. Anyone know what could be the problem? These are the hardy Northern Lights azaleas (botanically they are Rhododendrons) and they were bred for this climate. Well, mine should be blooming by next week, and–judging by the amount of sneezing I’ve been doing lately–the lilacs should be in bloom next week as well.
Photographer Dan Iverson departs from the Northfield News
I saw Northfield News photographer Dan Iverson last Thursday night at the Sequi event. He told me that Friday was his last day at the paper, as he and other photographers at Mainstream Publications LLC newspapers (parent company of Northfield News) had been given layoff notices on last Monday.
As an amateur photographer, I’ve long-admired Dan’s work. Whenever I’d notice him at an event where I was also taking photos, I’d watch where he’d position himself and try to learn from it.
Last summer, I wrote in a blog comment that “I’d really like to see a photo gallery where lots more of Dan Iverson’s photos could be displayed, esp. ones that DON’T make the paper.” That finally happened last month with the creation of a Northfield News photo gallery where 9 albums of Dan’s work now reside. I wonder if the reporters who’ll evidently now be expected to take the photos will continue to contribute to the gallery.
The Eighth Grade Clock
Are You Mad Or Something?
He’s turned my slippers into a mid-afternoon snack. Several times. He’s gone after my nose as though removing it might be fun. He’s kept me up nights. And woken me with his tongue. He blew the yearly puppy budget three months in.
But, for the first time, I became truly mad at the savage beast this week. As I was taking a weekend afternoon snooze, he decided to find out how my eyeglasses tasted. Good, apparently, because he chewed one end down to the metal, leaving a point sharper than the edge on most knives in our kitchen. And he didn’t stop there, treating the other side as though it was a chicken bone.
It was stupid of me to leave the glasses anywhere within his reach. I know this. Still, I cursed and stomped off and ranted around the room. I think he got the hint as he stayed away, walking past me gingerly, looking up with reservation, as if to see if things were OK. No, they’re not OK. Do you know how much those glasses cost? The fact you don’t understand English is not an excuse at this moment.
The next day I was handed a card. “I’m so sorry I chewed your glasses, Tom,” it said below his picture, the one included in this post. “Please forgive me. I wuv you.”
So maybe he had help writing out the card. But how do I stay mad at that face?
Campus Seens
I dunno if it was the Mondays or the good weather or just some confluence of forces, but campus was full of unusual sights today:
- a kid riding one of those crazy home-made "tall bikes"
- grim-faced professors migrating in pairs and trios from their daytime nesting spots to the location of the evening's faculty meeting
- a barefoot undergrad using the rather dingy men's room in my building (shudder)
- roughly half the student population crashing on the Bald Spot (the campus quad) to soak up the sun
- at least three couples holding hands - almost stareworthy on a campus that's usually devoid of PDA
- a biggish group of students trying their skills on a tightrope strung just off the ground between two trees on the Bald Spot
Colleges are strange and wonderful places.
Mac Attack
I can't get enough of this story: a woman in White Plains, NY, had her Macintosh laptop stolen from her apartment. She cleverly used the Mac's own standard software and hardware to track down the thieves, and even used the computer's webcam to take a picture of one of the evildoers. Both thieves were arrested last week.
I hope they get the MacBook thrown at them - and that the laptop owner, an employee at an Apple Store, gets a huge raise. They don't apply the label of "genius" to Apple Store employees for nothing.
City Administrator Al Roder’s Friday Memo for week of May 5-9, 2008
Northfield City Administrator Al Roder publishes a memo to the mayor and city council each week on Friday. It summarizes many of the staff activities for the week. The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of his web page.
See his Friday memo for last week and then comment or ask questions about it here.
See the Northfield city calendar for public meetings that are scheduled this week.
NOTE: There’s a city council work session tonight at 7 pm.
Nobody seems to care about these environmental problems
During a walk in the Arb last week, I:
Left: saw evidence of vandalism
Right: had my personal body space invaded 4 times
Below: experienced severe noise pollution.
Click play to watch/listen. 11 seconds.
(I refuse to be upstaged in the fluff department by Tracy.)
A Sign from God, an Escaped Pet, or Mere Flying Street Rat?
I snapped these pics with my phone camera the other day by the municipal lot near the corner of Fourth and Washington.
At first glance it was a beautiful white dove. On second glance it looked like a plain, ordinary city pigeon with slightly unusual coloration (not an albino; the eyes appeared dark, and the wings were a very pale gray, almost white).
I’ve seen an albino squirrel or two near Central Park, but I’d never seen this bird before. Any other sightings?
Like a Bird on the Wire
In Memory of Ralph G. Adams
My wife’s grandfather, Ralph Adams, died at the end of last month. On May 3rd we attended his funeral in Sun City West, Arizona.
I never knew Ralph when he was in good health and at the height, or near the height, of his powers. I’ve been told that he had Shy-Drager syndrome, more recently known as multiple system atrophy - a degenerative neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s Disease. Formerly the life of the party, his illness made him quiet. I could only imagine his former self.
I learned of one touching moment from Ralph’s last year of life. Greatly debilitated by his disease, one of his daughters was attending to him one day when he said to her, “Is there anything I can do to make this easier for you?” It was a sign of his attention to others, even when he was suffering greatly himself.
Ralph was one of eight children from a remarkable Kansas farm family. From humble beginnings in the small town of Clay Center, Kansas, Ralph and his seven brothers and sisters went on to success in all corners of this country as doctors, business people, homemakers, and engineers. Ralph became a chemical engineer and an expert on asphalt, eventually rising to a high position at the Mobil Oil Corporation in its New York City headquarters.
Ralph and his wife Neva eventually retired to Sun City West, where he had more time to pursue his passion for playing bridge. Ralph was highly involved in community work his entire life, serving for a time as a city council member in Missouri and devoting time to Kiwanis and other organizations. He was instrumental in establishing Shepherd of the Hills United Methodist Church in Sun City West. See also Ralph’s obituary from the Daily News-Sun.
We are saddened by Ralph’s passing. Another member of a remarkable generation is gone, and we seek to build on what Ralph and others have given us.
Poem: “Green and Falling”
My friend Chris Schons asked me to post a poem I published in Minnesota Monthly back in the mid-nineties. It was kind of him to remember it, and I include it below.
Reading it again is bittersweet - sweet because I enjoyed reading it again, bitter because I have not been a good husband of the poetry muse. That is, I haven’t been writing poetry lately.
The poem is one of only a handful that I managed to publish. It was written when I was living on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and teaching as an adjunct in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. It wrote it after a frosty night caused a tree outside my apartment window to lose its leaves, which were still green, in a single day. The ground around the tree was littered with these strangely green leaves. I could not resist the image and its metaphors.
Green and Falling
Night’s frost sank deep into the tree,
Plunged headlong with the mercury.
In morning each leaf fell, spiraling
Down—one, two, four, one—raining
Down green on a black, cold ground.
By afternoon it was through. I found
The bare branches stark, surprising.
Strange to be still green and falling.
Oh-oh — evacuation of coastal Delaware!
Here’s the Salem & Hope Creek reactors on the Delaware River, just across from Port Penn. Doesn’t flooding shut down nuclear plants?
Kent County is evacuating coastal communities… Delaware City, just north of Port Penn, is several inches deep on the main drag through town, and the trailer park is flooded worse.
From today’s STrib - better check the News Urinal too (below):
Evacuations in progress in coastal Delaware;tides, rain, flooding communities
Associated Press
May 12, 2008
KITTS HUMMOCK, Del. - Delaware officials say evacuations are in progress in flooded coastal communities.
Allen Metheny, assistant director of emergency management in Kent County, says rescuers are evacuating as many of the coastal communities as they can. High tides and heavy rains have flooded roads, requiring the assistance of the Delaware National Guard and the Delaware State Police in the evacuation operation.
Metheny says the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control is also providing assistance.
And here’s from the Delaware News Journal:
Storm knocks down trees, cuts power; evacuations ordered along Del. Bay
By DAMIAN GILETTO and JAMES MERRIWEATHER • The News Journal • May 12, 2008
Residents who need assistance should call 911.
At Kitts Hummock, emergency responders were taking evacuees to the Little Creek Fire Hall.
Anthony Willing waited near the evacuation zone to find out whether his father had been evacuated.
“I don’t know if they took him out – I’m down here to find out,” Willing said.
James Mariana said his father, mother and dog were evacuated from the area by boat at around 6 a.m.
At Bowers Beach, the flow was more than two feet above the height of a dock.
In Dover, the St. Jones River jumped its banks and broke a record for flow on this day.
Lake Forest School District reported buses were unable to reach some flooded areas.
In Delaware City, water several inches deep made travel difficult on Del. 9.
Children: Time Sinks
I vaulted out of bed at 5:42 when Vivi started calling. 126 minutes, three breakfasts, one cup of coffee, two and a half dressings, four puzzles, one shower, and one toilet-accident cleanup later, I'm going to be late for work. How can this be?
Reading Journal: "The Land of Spices"
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
—George Herbert
Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices (Virago Modern Classics)
The Land of Spices is set in an Irish convent school in the years before World War I. Reverend Mother, the head of the school, is an English woman raised in Brussels, where her Order has its mother house. Her Irish pupils and many of her fellow nuns perceive her as cold, formal, and foreign. She was, we learn, a brilliant student who revered her gentle, scholarly father until she learned something about him that shocked her into taking the veil. Over the years, she has become efficient at her work, and a favorite of the Mother General of her order, but she is detached and, her father fears, "merciless" in her demand for perfection. Then, in her third year at the Irish convert, she takes an interest in a little girl named Anna, the school's youngest pupil, who is similarly smart and detached, and who is also spiritually wounded at an impressionable age.
The novel is about having the humility and the patience and the understanding to love rather than to stand in judgment. Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) is a marvelous writer. The novel is full of humor, lyricism, conflict, wisdom, and grace. Some passages, I have to admit, were difficult to read through the tears stinging and blurring my eyes. Others—Reverend Mother's correspondence with the mother house in Brussels—slowed me down a bit because they were in French. The novel—with its pages of French, and its references to George Herbert and Henry Vaughn and Shakespeare and Schiller—was a bracing workout for my liberal arts education, but the story was always completely absorbing and my effort was amply rewarded. At one point in the novel, Reverend Mother drafts a letter to her Mère Générale asking to be recalled from her Irish post, where she is considered too foreign and where she has trouble understanding the Irish character. She says her work in Ireland has been un gaspillage d'efforts, a waste of effort. But she is rewarded for her patience and effort, and so is the reader. In a sense, the novel is a about the humanizing effect of education, about how art and literature broaden our sympathy and our understanding—as long as we learn not narrowly and pedantically, but with an open heart. Discipline and hard work are sometimes rewarded with epiphany—with "something understood" both intellectually and spiritually.
The most gracious relationships in the novel are between mentor and student—between Reverend Mother and Mère Générale, between Reverend Mother and Anna. There is a distance built into the relationship—a distance that gives perspective and grace. Reverend Mother loves Anna generously, entirely without possessiveness, for the beautiful and independent flowering of her soul. This seems to be a model of divine love: "heaven in ordinarie," the love of God enacted in the sometimes surprisingly gracious relationships between human beings.
Reverend Mother is often at odds with the Irish culture and character, but she believes in a grace that goes deeper than these external differences. The love of God is all. She is Catholic and conservative—two things I am not—but I found her a marvelously compelling and sympathetic character. The novel ends in June 1914, as trouble and war are about to tear apart both Ireland and the world. Kate O'Brien wants us to look deeper than the external differences that set us apart, to find the human potential for grace that is in all of us.
Almost Perfect
One of my favorite chapters in the book is chapter thirteen, which chronicles the day Charles Bender was nearly perfect.
That day — exactly 98 years ago today — Bender faced 27 batters, the absolute minimum a complete-game winning pitcher can face in a nine-inning game. Bender and the Philadelphia Athletics beat the great Napoleon Lajoie and the rest of the well-built Cleveland lineup 4-0 at Shibe Park. The only man to reach base against Bender did so on a walk in the fourth inning. That man, Terry Turner, was promptly thrown out trying to steal second.
According to Major League Baseball, only 17 men have thrown perfect games. Bender nearly joined that small club on May 12, 1910, by mixing “smokeballs,” as one newspaper called them, with a new pitch — the one now referred to as the slider — in a way that baffled Cleveland hitters from the first out to the last.
“Brains played as much a part in the master triumph of Bender’s as mere strength of the arm,” the Philadelphia North American said. “He is a student as much as he is a pitcher.”
Prothonotary Warbler Down the Great River Road
We encouraged a visit from this brilliant yellow warbler by playing its call from a CD of birdcalls for a few minutes. We were rewarded within moments by a responding call from the trees and, soon thereafter, by a personal visit from the territorial male coming to challenge the supposed intruder. This was the first prothonotary warbler I had seen -- a life bird, as they say. I missed a great shot when the stunning little bird appeared against a dark tree trunk, but did catch this not-so-distinct photo (above, cropped close in, and below, less zoomed in) from which you can see the intense orange-yellow of the head and breast of this lovely bird. (Click on any of the photos for greater detail.)
We did not want to over-agitate the warbler, so we turned off the CD as soon as we had had the chance to see the bird for a couple of minutes. While on this little stake-out, we also saw and heard many other birds, including woodpeckers, a black-throated blue warbler and plenty of yellow-rumped warblers like the one below.
We were lucky that our trip wasn't later or that this year's late spring hadn't come earlier, since the trees were just starting to leaf out. Another couple of weeks of leaf growth and it's unlikely we would have been able to see these birds at all. As we drove further south and east, as far south as Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, spring advanced until we were seeing trees almost fully leafed out and lilacs and many other flowering shrubs and trees in bloom.
Mother's Day
Friday was the second anniversary of my mom's death and I miss her a lot. Happily, around fifteen years ago my brother compiled the recipes my mom used when she was feeding her eight children, and printed up a little cookbook called Cooking with Jane. A few years later the second edition, More Cooking with Jane, hit the street, and it also had recipes by us eight kids and our spouses. All of us use it for classics like meatloaf, beef stroganoff, lasagna, salad dressing, and spice cake with caramel frosting, my perennial birthday cake.
This morning, my two oldest kids pulled out the family cookbook and made a large heart-shaped oatmeal scone with a big 'M' cut into the middle of it for their mother. We put it on our red "You Are Special Today" plate and brought it upstairs with coffee, the Sunday newspaper, cards, and a present.
For dinner, I made my wife's favorite dessert, pound cake. I make a very simple pound cake, with butter, sugar, eggs, a little salt, and flour. I usually add a teaspoon of vanilla but with spring in the air I added a bit of lemon zest instead.
After a good dinner of grilled steak, home fries cooked in bacon drippings, and sauteed bok choy, we all sat around the dinner table eating thin slices of pound cake, everyone with their favorite way to nibble the buttery edges on the way to the softest, finest crumb found on any cake.
Happy Mother's Day to my sweet wife.
