Loose Leaf Notes

1. Our grandson Liam slept over on the weekend and we had a two-day game of monopoly. Guess who won?

2. I am useless when it comes to video games, but I grew up with pinball and can still play a decent game.

3. The day after playing pinball at the Pinball Museum in Roanoke, I was grating carrots to make coleslaw and realized my shoulders were sore from playing Pac Man.

4. I left my luggage in the village hangout / where I played pinball in the ‘60s / I left my sons’ baby clothes in a lock box / If I have to die I hope it’s by Cupid’s arrow / and that Mark Knopfler’s Golden Heart / is on the playlist… Read The Death Wish in its entirety HERE. 

5. Just imagine being at a full-house live-music party where there were so many friends that you couldn’t say hello to all of them. But we did all dance together, smiling all the while! Check out I Wear My Dogtown Wrist Band Like a Badge of Honor HERE.

6. John Mellencamp has the same birthday as my late brother Danny, is the same age and looks like Danny.  Recently I’ve been listening to his body of songs on youtube. He has a new song condemning gun violence called Hey God: “Weapons and guns, are they really my rights? / Laws written a long time ago / No one could imagine the sight of so many dead on the floor,” he laments, before beseeching: “Hey, God, if you’re still there, would you please come down? We can’t take it anymore.”

7. And HERE is my blog post of the Mellencamp concert I saw in Roanoke in 2015.

8. Yesterday I had a 7 words Scrabble (worth 50 extra points) “Chaired,” but couldn’t find a place for it on the board, so I reluctantly gave it up and made another play. But then I got an S and wrote “Shadier,” another Scrabble!

9. I’m reading a book from the library that I requested they purchase. It’s a Science fiction novel, a story based around real quantum physics theories called The Observer by Robert Lanza. Here is an excerpt: “’Quantum foam’ refers to the basic ‘stuff’ in the universe, the stuff that exists before you even get to basic particles such as electrons. ‘Superposition’ means that the quantum foam is not matter, nor energy, but the potential of becoming either. It is, basically, just a cloud of probabilities. That is really important. Even when you do have that electron – as a part of an atom, for instance – it too is just a quantum foam probability becoming a particle or becoming a wave of energy. Science has established that thoroughly and completely.”

10. Physicists and poets are not so unlike: both try to describe the unseen.

11. “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.” Carlo Rovelli, physicist

12. “We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow. Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden… In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture.”—Patti Smith, “M Train”

13. The weekly poem / keeps track like a ledger / It’s on the shopping list / with bagels and butter… Read The Weekly List in its entirety HERE.  

__________Thirteen Thursday