Loose Leaf Notes

We biked up to the top of Mill Mountain from the Roanoke River Greenway.

It was a steep switch-back climb. I Ieft Joe in the dust because my bike has an electric motor and his does not.

At the top is the world’s largest man-made star. Erected in 1949, the Mill Mountain Star sits 1,045 above the Roanoke city. It represents the spirit of the Star City and stands 88 feet tall. It lights up at night!

According to a Roanoke government webpage: “The site offers 500 acres of parkland atop Mill Mountain. In addition to a zoo, the site offers picnic areas, hiking trails, and two overlooks that provide 20 and 60-mile vistas across the City of Roanoke.”

I deserved a good IPA after the ride. I ordered this one at the Wasena City Tap Room because it was called Three Floyd’s Barbarian Haze, but it was from Indiana.

Joe took a video of me singing along with Love Potion #9 as I sipped my beer. I must have been a little drunk (It doesn’t take much) because when we left, we went next door to the Roanoke Mountain Adventures outfitters and I left my camera there.  We called the next day and it was still there! (which is why this post exists).

1. I was playing Old Maid with my youngest grandson and wondered out loud what a comparable word for an old maid would be for a man, and he suggested, “Old Butler.” It took me a moment.

2. As we played cards, my eldest grandson played some Master of Puppets Metallica on guitar.

3. Thug Life or Pub Life?

4. There was a lot of green to be seen at McDaniel’s Tavern at Buffalo Mountain Brewery last night and a new brew called Lucky Charm. I was already lucky because I had just come from The Great Clover Hunt with Muriel Alderman at Floyd’s Center for the Arts and found my first wild four-leaf clover. Ninety-year-old Muriel had a pop-up exhibit at the Center displaying her decades of luck finding the four-leaf rare variations of the common three-leaf clover, known in Ireland as the shamrock… Read all about it and see pictures HERE.

5. Faintly green / still spending its luck / a lottery shamrock / crisply pressed / Like a thousand dollar bill / of whimsical windfall / rich with what is possible / and suspending all doubt… Read In Clover in its entirety HERE. 

6. “Shamrock, or “seamrag” in Gaelic, means “little clover” which is so fitting because shamrocks and flour-leaf clovers belong to the white clover plant family. You can easily spot the difference between the two because shamrocks have three leaves (or leaflets, technically) while four-leaf clovers have, obviously, four leaflets. It takes a rare genetic mutation to get that extra leaf which is why it’s so difficult to find a four-leaf clover. Research places the difficulty at 1/10,000, so if you’re trying to find one of your own, you’re going to need to scan a large area.”

7. The older I get the more I have Déjà vu because it really did happen before.

8. Soul or solo?

9. The piece below, showcased at the Fibers of Nature Floyd Center for the Arts exhibit, is titled ‘Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn,’ but I think it’s more a ‘Cinderella’s Ball Fairy Godmother’s Creation.

10.  LOVE THIS. 

11. She said death is a launch / into another new morning / into an embryonic heaven / in a sea of outer space / where our cells defy gravity / and our minds lose their grasp / where dark matter pulls us together / and dark energy pushes us apart… Read The Speed of Light in its entirety HERE. 

12. “Poems meet the raw needs of our most vulnerable inner selves in a disarmingly primal way, using a simple tool no other sort of language mobilises in quite the same manner: predictable, physical, rhythmical repetition. Poetry chants and incants; it excites and lulls… Metred words, treated with reverence and care, have the unique potential to meet us halfway, uniting mind and body, conscious and unconscious self… From How poetry casts a spell through the rhythmic magic of metre

13. I’m looking for new focus / Some good luck / A power-up / A brainstorm to build on / A combination to unlock / I’ m searching for the next step / A sign to point the way / A word play / A game change / A poem to hold my place… Read Fill in the Blanks in its entirety HERE.

____________Thirteen Thursday

There was a lot of green to be seen at McDaniel’s Tavern at Buffalo Mountain Brewery last night and a new brew called Lucky Charm.

I was already lucky because I had just come from The Great Clover Hunt with Muriel Alderman at Floyd’s Center for the Arts and found my first wild four-leaf clover.

Ninety-year-old Muriel had a pop-up exhibit at the Center displaying her decades of luck finding the four-leaf rare variations of the common three-leaf clover, known in Ireland as the shamrock.

I found my first 4-leaf clover in a used book that I bought a book sale (which I wrote a poem about HERE) and the second in my brother Danny’s wallet (featured in THIS poem) after he died and this was the first time I found one in the grass. I was elated and felt like I had won the luck lottery!

But the Irish legacy is one of paradox. The luck of the Irish is super-imposed over Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong it will).  Twenty minutes after finding my first four leaf clover, I pulled out the art center and scraped my car against a driveway barrier. That’s not good luck, I thought to myself, but then when I got home, I saw no marks on the car, I found my white beret that I had been looking for and received free medication in the mail from Abbvie Patient Assistance for a very expensive drug I now need, so good luck maybe, after all.

Later, Joe and I enjoyed chatting with friends at the brewery and hearing a bag pipe performance by Geoffrey of the Appalachian Piping Academy.

We enjoyed a delicious Irish-Inspired menu from the Vittles food truck, as well as left over biscuits, the name of the featured band. Sing along HERE.

This is the picture our friend Lester took just before my shamrock pin fell in my Irish stew and we had to fish it out with a spoon.

HERE’S Joe singing The Star of County Down (the Irish song with  my name in it) to me four years ago. Maybe next year he’ll sing it at the tavern.

And HERE I am drinking green beer a few years ago at the Tavern. Sláinte!

Life is a number’s game
A countdown to morning
where I re-member myself
and start over each day

where I watch a patch of blue
follow it from my window
being pushed aside
by a flood of cloud cover

I have dark thoughts
I told a woman in a dream
She said don’t say dark
the dark is fertile

It comes from the ground
before it reaches for the sun
and returns to darkness
when its glory day is done

Life force is fuel
Time is invisible
A broken mirror
of chaos and order

I put on my suit
but wander off course
I write a poem I don’t like
and use my thoughts for navigation

She said don’t worry about a crash
or running out of gas
Destiny is the orbit
of a developmental path

And death is a launch
into another new morning
into an embryonic heaven
in a sea of outer space

where our cells defy gravity
and our minds lose their grasp
where dark matter keeps us together
and dark energy pushes us apart

________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United/dVerse Poets Pub

1. Because of my dyscalculia, Joe says, “If you were a band your name would be “Wrong Direction” instead of “One Direction.”

2. The new goal of my poetry readings is: “Reading Poetry that Jack Has Never Heard.”

3. I’ve read with carpenter poet Jack Callan at his Fairmount Five readings in Norfolk, as one in his ensemble readings for the Poetry Society of Virginia, at the Little River Poetry Festival and the Monthly Spoken Word nights at Café Del Sol. Now we have Jack-led open mic readings the third Wednesday of each month at the library.

4. Wiseman or wise guy?

5. “Are languages then just a collection of words, syntax, and semantics? I’d like to sometimes see them as seeds and sometimes as fields – alive as the minds, tongues, throats, bodies and air they pass through; germinating, growing roots, bearing fruit, evolving like beings. But also holding space, expanding out like a unique land of perception. A non-physical geography hosting human and non-human drama. A living medium, a speech-scape.”  -M. Yuvan

6. I’m a movie buff who loves to fashion watch, loves to watch musical performances, to see people succeed and give emotional speeches, so of course I love to watch the Academy Awards like others love the Super Bowl.

7. But we don’t get network channel ABC, so Joe and I rented a room in a local hotel that gets the channel in. It had a hot tub, and we made it a date night sleep over.

8. I met poet Naomi Shihab Nye indirectly through a friend when she was in Roanoke for a keynote talk at a Contemplative Higher Education Alliance Conference. He said she was interested in learning more about my and Katherine’s Soulful Aging Tour poetry readings, so I sent a description and he sent it to her, but then I read the below (with excerpted lines) poem she wrote, and, although I relate to it, I knew it meant that I would never hear from her, a successful busy poet who teaches at Texas State University.

9. The Art of Disappearing –  When they say Don’t I know you? / say no. / When they invite you to the party / remember what parties are like / If they say We should get together / say why? / When someone recognizes you in a grocery store / nod briefly and become a cabbage…

10. Before.

11. After.

12. A Hub for Clubs at the Floyd Country Store.

13. Fight, flight or freeze, daylight saved. It was like a face-off between winter and spring HERE.

__________Thirteen Thursday

Daylight Saved

Daffodils Chilled

Bouquet on Ice

Snow Kidding

A groove to move. The Parachute Brigade Lands at Dogtown. Thanks for the dance music!

But it was Knitting Bee

and Scrabble Social at the Floyd Country Store, a homey hub for lunch hour clubs.

1. The forsythia surrounds me like warm bowls of sun.

2. With the flick of a switch the daffodils are lit.

3. Climate changed blooms / come a month too soon / forsythia flowers died / the year Trump won election / tampered in his favor / by Russians and traitors / refugees had no place to go… 2017 HERE.

4. “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.” Dolly Parton

5. “What kind of white Planet of the Apes shit was that?!” – Chris Rock calling out the aggrieved white men who tried to overthrow the government that they run

6. About the infamous slap from Will Smith, Rock said,  ‘Anybody that says words hurt has never been punched in the face.’

7. On a lighter note, yesterday Joe and I went on a bike ride and we wrote this nursery rhyme: Joey Klein took his time / to make me his valentine / He drew a heart / and said, “That’s a start / Now we’ll never be apart.”

8. How to Make a Freckle:  There’s a danger in looking too long / so I close my eyes / I let the sun start a fire on my lids / turn from magenta to bright red / I imagine it making a freckle / or dropping a spark of inspiration / If I sit long enough in its glow / it might illuminate a truth I am blind to / It might melt a cold grudge / or fuse meaning where there was none…

9. Woke?  I’m always open to awakening.

10.  Moles or voles?

11. Moles are meat-eaters, and their diet consists of insects, grubs, and earthworms. Voles “V”, on the other hand, are vegetarians and eat the roots and stems of plants. A mole is 4 to 7 inches long with paddle-shaped feet and prominent digging claws. It has an elongated head and snout, small eyes, and no external ears It digs characteristic volcano-shaped hills in the lawn. The tunnels are dug at a rate of 18 feet per hour and can add 150 feet of new tunnels in the lawn each day. We have both!

12. TALKING ABOUT DEATH WON’T KILL YOU – Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise, describes our culture as death phobic and grief illiterate. And yet, there we were in the spirit of poetic memoir and depth psychology, delving into subjects so often avoided. Katherine left the bedside of a dying friend to share this encore call-and-response reading that she and I had done in November for 25 students of counseling at a Radford University Death and Bereavement class. She left her phone on vibrate… More HERE.

13. “Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means. What we call art is simply a gesture toward some authentic answer to these open questions, at once universal and intimately felt — questions aimed at the elemental truths of being alive, animated by a craving for beauty, haunted by the need to find a way of bearing our mortality. Without this elemental longing, without this authentic gesture, what is made is not art but something else…” David Bowie on art/creativity

___________Thirteen Thursday

Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise, describes our culture as death phobic and grief illiterate. And yet, there we were in the spirit of poetic memoir and depth psychology, delving into subjects so often avoided.

Katherine left the bedside of a dying friend to share this encore call-and-response reading that she and I had done in November for 25 students of counseling at a Radford University Death and Bereavement class. She left her phone on vibrate.

There was a small but attentive audience who gave up being outside on one of the warmest near-Spring days of the new year to listen, feel deeply and share.

They jotted down thoughts and poems that were inspired by the readings and shared them when our readings were done.

Our friend Judith (co-founder of Floyd’s Little River Poetry Festival) has a talent for writing on the spot. All I can remember now is a line about dancing down “hippie heaven” that made us laugh.

Jenkinson also says that dying is the fulfillment, not the end of life.

You vow not to forget… love’s lasting imprint… when life has been spent… and time no longer counts you…   

Thanks to everyone who came out and to Judith (pictured above) and Joann (the librarian) who took pictures. We love our library! My books Packing a Suitcase for the After Life, Objects are Closer Than They Appear and Poems from the Darkroom, and Chantal’s books, Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent and A Year of Haiku will be available for purchase at the event. They are also sold on Amazon and available in Floyd at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store.

P.S. Katherine made it back in time to see our friend off. “She has flown,” she just texted me.