Loose Leaf Notes

1. There’s marigold and Yukon gold in October.

2. Not to mention Halloween pirate gold.

3. The grandkids came on Saturday.  I went half the day wearing cat ears and they never said a word.

4. After supper, Joe and I took them to the Floyd Community Theatre’s Young Actors performance of Peter Pan and Wendy where 6-year-old Liam asked, “Why do they all go through the window and not the door?” See HERE.

5. Liam just turned six. For his birthday we sang him “the ants go marching six by six hurrah hurrah, instead of Happy Birthday, and made up verses like “the little ones stop to pick up sticks to put on Liam’s birthday cake.”

6. A Good as Gold flashback HERE.

7. That’s my friend Daniel Bower below, posing next to the Halloween window display at his Floyd antique shop, Finders Keepers. HERE is another Floyd pirate.

8. There are no cell phones on Neverland / So, Wendy emails Peter to say / that she’s joined a 12-step program / and is sewing new curtains for the Darling home nursery / “Oh, and by the way / bring some milk and bread home for dinner / Captain Hook is coming over,” she says / Peter wants a divorce but can’t afford the alimony / He storms off the island / Takes a job in construction / He won’t wear a tie to court  –  From my poem Wendy Wants a Bigger Island. More about Wendy HERE.

9. “Don’t follow leaders. Watch the parkin’ meters” — Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan

10. Haley Leopold, a Language Arts teacher at Springhouse Community School, recently posted a question on the Floyd Group’s Facebook page.  She was looking for someone to talk to her class about spoken word, poetry readings and slams, someone who knows something about writing the kind of poetry that asks ‘Who am I’ and ‘Who am I becoming?’   As a writer who co-hosted a monthly Spoken Word night at the Café Del Sol (now Dogtown Roadhouse) for seven years, as someone who once won $100 in a poetry slam competition at the London Pub in Blacksburg, as someone who frequently writes poetry about family roots and the inner life, and as someone who has called writing poetry “taking my psyche’s blood pressure,” I knew Haley was talking to me.  – Read about my visit to the Springhouse Community School HERE.

11. And then there’s the “pot of gold,” which in my world has less to do with being Irish and everything to do with tea. See HERE.

12. THIS is my favorite lazy jack-o-lantern.

13. Whenever my grandsons shoot bows and arrows with Joe, they remind me of Cupids, and I’m struck with love.

____Thirteen Thursday