Loose Leaf Notes

1. Lying in bed last week with something like the flu, I noticed a perfect swordfish shape in the knotty pine logs in my bedroom that I hadn’t noticed in all the 25 years I’ve lived in our cabin.

2. It figures:  Talking about being sick, in every email I typed FU by mistake, instead of FLU.

3. I can never tell a joke back well, like I can never think of a good April Fool’s prank.

4. On April 1st, I saw a picture on Facebook of a Springhouse Community School teacher/advisor with his desk in the bathroom pulled up to his chair, the toilet! 

5. I feel so out of the loop.  When my niece posted this on Facebook – If Rubble isn’t your favorite member of the Paw Patrol, you crazy – I had no idea what she meant.

6. While watching the American Country Music Awards Sunday night, THIS song, You Should be Here, reminded me of my sister Kathy and made me cry.

7. I just saw a video on “How to Parallel Park,” which made me think of the amusement park in the town I grew up with and the question “How to Paragon Park?”  You just pull in and have fun!

8. Bucket list: The world’s first underwater sculpture garden.  On the seabed off the coast of Cancun, British artist Jason deCaires Taylor is creating an extraordinary series of underwater artworks, concrete figures representing refugees and selfie-taking tourists that are transformed as they become slowly colonized by marine life. Wow. See it HERE. 

9. Being sick and chilled to the bone made me think and caused me to say to Joe, “If you ever need to send me to a nursing home, that’s okay as long as you bring me home on weekends and run me a hot bath.”

10. It’s a lament / for a lack of inspiration / It doesn’t have a beginning / or a meaningful ending / It’s a an exercise in practice / because a poet should have a poem / should have a good pick-up line / that’s more than a bluff / in sickness and in health … More from Placeholder Poem HERE.

11. “I think what a writer is supposed to do is to ask what is the human condition and what’s the deepest accounting I can give of my presence here.  Not to lie about it or whitewash it.” – David Payne talking about his new memoir Barefoot to Avalon on Charlie Rose

12.  Kudos to Bernie Sanders, who was the only presidential candidate who didn’t speak at the AIPAC (America Israel Public Affairs Committee) lobby rally. He, the only Jew in the group, offered to speak on video but was turned down.  All the other candidates that spoke (aka pandering) praised Israel but didn’t mention their decade’s long military occupation of Palestinian or that they continue to build illegal settlements where Palestinians live.   We give Israel more than 3 billion a year in military aid each year but don’t hold them accountable to UN resolutions that they are not in compliance with. We don’t hold them accountable for doing their part to create a two state solution in the region.   So I was happy to hear Bernie’s position on Palestinian civil rights and ending the occupation of Palestine. “If we are going to go forward, it cannot be that the United States just takes the side of Israel,” he has said. – More HERE. 

13. “Rather than people choosing to affirm their relationship to each other in love, they chose to extract something from the other person that the other person wasn’t willing to give and that was what was at the center our family and what went wrong with it.”  – David Payne on Barefoot to Avalon

_________Thirteen Thursday