While reading, I jot down what resonates

The headlines on some of Thomas Sowell’s columns are  "Random Thoughts." Aha! There’s my leading: Report what was important enough to write down in my journal. So, beginning with today (23rd)  and going back through the month of May, that’s what I did. Here goes.

"Last year, the FCC defined high-speed Internet as a public utility and made connecting all American homes to the Web a priority." – C. Kang, New York Times/ Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "I’ve come to believe Internet is a human right. It’s clearly a huge disadvantage if you don’t have it." – J. Rice, Detroit, cited by Kang.

The Appalachian Trail is 2,190 miles long and spans from Georgia to Maine.

Places in Arkansas I hadn’t heard of yet: Combs, Crosses, Slow Tom Hollow, Clarkedale, Jericho, Freeman Springs and Parthenon.

The "Pacific Rim of Fire" is an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin." – AD-G’s feature, The World in Brief.

Kathleen Parker, whose columns appear in The Saline Courier, wrote Sunday about the voters of today: "…the vast middle mortals roam in wounded unity." And, "The high ground may be more molehill than mountain, but it still beats the gutter."

Given names noted on Sunday: Halana, Wilda, Konnie, Sybrina, Queen, Jussie, Jillena, Izabelle, Loris, Rion and Nez.

From News in Brief last Friday, this scenario, which I put into a cinquain form:

FROM HIS COUSIN
 Twenty-
nine years old, a
naked man’s rescued from
a neighbor’s chimney. His plea? Hide
and seek.
 Eek! He was definitely NOT "hiding himself into safety," the title of my next book.

The United Methodist Church has 12.7 million members worldwide and is the third largest faith group in the U. S. (AD-G)

Formosa is now Taiwan. (crossword puzzle). I probably knew that at one time.

The Federalist Party in 1816 "abandoned the field (of the presidential election) to the winner, and were never heard from again." (Comparison of 1816 and 2016) – S. Carter, Bloomberg News/ AD-G.

"It’s not up to other people to define success or failure for you, that’s up to you alone." – J. Steinmetz, University of Arkansas’s top administrator since January 1, 2016.

UFO’s new nomenclature, according to Hillary Clinton, is UAP: unexplained aerial phenomenon." – A. Chozck, New York Times.

Emma Morano, 116, from Italy, is the oldest person alive and the last person still alive who was born in the 1800s.

Wow! (Or Woe! Or Whoa!) 2,722 state employees make over $100,000 a year, a rise of 137 people. – M. Wickline, AD-G.

A book of poetic fiction, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter of London, garnered him the Dylan Thomas Prize of $43,000. Poetic fiction? I must check this out.

I didn’t know that "Pomp and Circumstance" came from Othello. "Farewell the . . . pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!" – D. Kelley, AD-G. And, "Think before you speak. Read before you think." – F. Lebowitz, cited by Kelley.

Quite a lot to think about, huh?

Letter to an old and dear friend

The late Lewis B. Taylor

 

 

Dear Lew,

I’m typing this on the end of a file called Letters to Lew. In re-reading the previous ones, I see I have sermonized right often. Sorry. Except that after today’s letter dated 10 May ’04, you’re likely to get another one.

 

Your letter: did you keep a carbon copy?—has several good first lines for poems. Or prose, essays, perhaps. Here’s one: “When you don’t know where you’re going/ any road will get you there.” Notice how inherently rhythmic it is: two feet per line. With a little tweaking, the first line of your letter could go with it: “Not that I have anything to say (anywhere to go), but we shall proceed from here and see how I saw it this time (how far a road will lead).” You have a way with words/ phrases/ sentences, as well as a great, understated, wry sense of humor. USE IT OR LOSE IT, LEW!!

 

How would your life change if, as your last line, page one, says: “I have been here herding kids, dogs, cats, and house,” if that’s what life dealt you RIGHT NOW? Can you see yourself pulling in, breathing deeply, tightening your metaphorical belt and getting on with your life/ responsibility/ purpose? Brainstorm what you could/ would do to take back the rest of your life.

 

The way I see it, you have given up. You seem to have no hope. Is that what aging does to one? Aging unhappily? I guess at a certain year Old Man Age snares us with his cane-around-the-ankle-around-the-eyes weaknesses. Just hope I can pelt him/ her/ it long enough to get done what I have to do, and then do a little of what I’d like to. Which is . . . I don’t know now, but I’ll know when it’s time.

 

Thank you for your kind words, speaking of aging. Your eyesight must have slipped. I have wrinkles and have gained more than a pound in ten years, but thanks anyway. I knew looking young would one day act in my favor. When I first began teaching, I had to buy cord golf dresses and sling-heeled wedgies to look older than the high schoolers in my classes. Now, that’s gotta be genes, for I didn’t wear makeup, couldn’t afford cool clothes, etc. So, yes, a lot of it’s inherited. Mom at 92 still goes to family parties and gatherings, and church. She plans on attending the family reunion the last of this month.

 

You didn’t answer my question about whether or not Lucidity Larks (round-robin poetry critiques) was helping you. Guess there could be other reasons for participating, right?

 

Doris F. has put their house on the market; as soon as they can, they are moving back to Texas to a retirement village. Her husband has Alzheimer’s, and they’re both in their 80s. She’s too small and fragile in case he gets violent. She walks a tightrope with him—a PhD educator, world traveler, etc.

 

Thanks for thinking about me. I think about you at times, too, and smile. Which reminds me, I have an unfinished poem. Dare I finish it and send it through the Larks???

That would be a lark, huh?

Fences—no steel bridge, but an electric pole, hedges, edgers, rocks, flowers . . .

Electric pole "fence"--Couchwood

 

I have always been interested in the steel bridge that used to be on Boone Road in southwest Bryant. My Grandmother Couch, so family lore goes, was walking a footbridge across that part of the Hurricane River when she fell, an accident that crippled her for life. I haven’t researched the bridge across that body of water—nor the one we traveled over as a family of eight farther up in the county that we knew as Steel Bridge or North Fork (Saline River.) That was our "swimming hole."
 

Several years ago, both bridges were cut away, hoisted to nearby roadsides and replaced with nondescript spans like oblong cake pans. How nice, I thought, one of those bridges would look on my south property line. The state bridge official I called knew nothing. Now, I realize it would have been too large, and besides, the scrap metal thieves would have cut it up in no time.

So when First Electric changed out the poles in our neighborhood one year, I asked if I could have the old one. The man seemed delighted and laid it where I directed. What to do with it? Oh, I'd think about that tomorrow.

Soon after that was Mother’s Day, and I’d asked my children to give me—not gifts to hold in my hand or place on a table—but a Saturday-before or Saturday-after workday around the outside of the home place.

A huge branch of a huge, poison-ivy-covered hackberry had cracked off and fallen into the north yard. One young sassafras in the small grove had died.

So one day, Son brought his chain saw and started in. He cut the pole into 12, 14 and 16 inch segments, which Daughter helped space every six inches on the south property line. They remain there to this day.

The south roadside "fence" is a hedge-like morass of privet, saw briars, japonica, yellow bell, ivy, euonymus and wild cherry saplings. The one youngish willow oak met Asplundh’s saws this year because of new, stronger power lines being added. Eventually, it would have grown into them.

Along the road in front of the house, "fences" are concrete blocks filled with flowers, and white rocks. Beyond the mail and paper boxes are more rocks, a yucca-and-iris bed, a deutzia (I think) and a long row of buttercups. Then a sassafras grove (which, luckily, was reprieved from the electric company’s saws because of the small growth patterns), a japonica and privet. Recently, we added a huge quartz rock dug up from what used to be our hayfield. The foreman on the subdivision being built brought me several loads of similar rocks that had been given to me by the builder, Dee Fiser.

Other fences on other sides of the acre? I’ll tell you about them soon. First, there’s Mother’s Day, then Friday, the 13th.