Loose Leaf Notes

1. I made THIS clip for Joe who couldn’t go with me to hear The Kind for their first appearance at Dogtown Roadhouse Saturday night.  I really wanted to video tape them doing Tennessee Jed, which I sometimes mistakenly call Tennessee Ed or Ted, but I was too busy dancing to it.  

2. Speaking of Ripples, it’s the name of another Grateful Dead song that begins: “If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine / And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung / Would you hear my voice come through the music / Would you hold it near as it were your own?”  It’s also the name of a store in Roanoke. 

3. Is the computer keyboard an instrument for poets who write music with words?

4. Funny how a class announced in The Taubman Museum newsletter was listed as “Mobile World,” and I thought it was a class for making hanging mobiles, but, of course, it was about digital photography using smart phones.

5. I just said hello to a butterfly.

6. The above is the title of a poem I didn’t write.  

7. It was yellow, as common as mustard weed in spring, but a loner and a first of the season. “A social butterfly,” I said to my husband as it flitted about, back and forth, but would not commit to landing. “But not so social after all, if it won’t stop to say hello back,” I added.  

8. I just sold a Jim and Dan Stories – the book I wrote about losing my two brothers a month apart in 2001—  to a high school classmate of my brother Jimmy’s who heard about the book from a Facebook reunion page.  I only have about 7 books left but was happy to sell him one before he goes to their 50^th and last class reunion in Hull, Massachusetts where we all grew up.  

9. He emailed me the evening of the day he received the book and had read it in one day, saying he couldn’t put it down, which has not been an unusual reaction to the book and one that makes me wonder about a possible reprinting.  He told me that the closing lines in the book’s epilogue are his new motto:  “Take care, Have Fun. Let go. Go for it. Hold precious the life around you. Don’t let loss stop you from living. Let it remind you to live all the more.”

10. I just learned that Billy Shakes is a nickname for William Shakespeare.

11. Last week I mentioned that my dad loved That ‘70s Show and that he related to the father character Red.  I got a comment from a reader who said she related to the mother, Kitty, which made me stop and think and laugh when I realized that I related most to Steven Hyde, the shades and rock band t-shirt wearing anti-establishment thinking skeptic.

12. The idea that a red spider bit Peter Parker and turned him into Spiderman (see HERE), makes me wonder if Superman was bit by THIS.   

13. There is a road, no simple highway / Between the dawn and the dark of night / And if you go no one may follow / That path is for your steps alone.   Grateful Dead/Ripples

______Thirteen Thursday