Loose Leaf Notes

1. Everyday at 3:55 the kids at Great Oaks are on the edge of the pool waiting to hear the whistle that lets them know the adult swim is over and they can jump in.  Sometimes I’m the only one in the pool and I get out a few minutes before 4:00 so I can watch the action resume like keystone cops in bathing suits doing cannonballs.

2. At the pool, a friend came up to me while I was reading in a lounge chair.  “It ain’t exactly literature,” I told him, referring to the Steven Tyler memoir I was reading, and I’m only reading it because Tyler lives in Marshfield (or did) very close to where I grew up, because I ran into him once in a store and I knew the book would be an insider’s look at the music of my generation.

3. It’s honest but also should be rated R for raunchy. Best line in the whole book is, “People, too often, miss the silver lining because they were expecting gold.”

4. Science finally explains why rock stars die so young. They tend to live up to 25 years less on average than the rest of us, and have much higher rates of death by accident, suicide and homicide.  Read about how triggers in the environment can activate “fast life genes” HERE. 

5. It’s an Urban Hermitage in the middle of a city, where a Thoreau-like character named Greg lives simply and intentionally. It’s an art installation that fills up a house. The artist calls it “The Abandoned House Museum.”  – More from my Urban Walden discovery HERE. 

6. Even a shower curtain can be a work of art.  – Seen recently at the Baltimore Museum of Art, text by author Dave Eggers HERE. 

7. My grandson Bryce wore his black cap while playing a shark in the pool last week, so that it would stick out like a fin to scare his younger brother while I was humming the theme song to Jaws. See HERE.

8. Lately I can’t decide if my life is like that of a monk’s or a teenager’s. I used to be a stay-at-home mother, now I’m a stay-at-home senior. I mostly do what I want, go out dancing, play with my grandsons, write and enjoy (require) lots of solitude.

9. I should have named THIS Wordless Wednesday photo, Just Don’t Push My Buttons!”

10. My son Josh’s birthday cake is a pie and because his birthday is in July, it’s always been blueberry.  My blogger friend Patry used to bake a blueberry pie for muse every year.  HERE is a classified ad poem I once wrote while looking for my muse.

11. Pie Baking:  Rolling out pie dough / into continent shapes / first Asia, then Africa / I feel my grandmother’s wildness in me / navigating rough edges of coastline / as I steer the rolling pin like an oar / like an antique relic from her “roaring 20s” / it rocks back and forth …  Read the rest of this poem HERE.

12. As I search the bowl of blueberries / for the bluest black ones/ I remember 4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie/ and my son arranging battles/ between blueberries and grapes/ The blueberries always lost because he ate them …

13. Best song heard this week HERE. 

____Thirteen Thursday