Vatican Rescue

At lunch the other day, one of my colleagues – a Psychology professor! – was saying that he finds the reality show  “Bar Rescue” irresistible- to the amazement of his wife.  This is a show where they take a really badly run, and run-down bar, and completely fix it up.

I thought to myself: in the light of an article I read yesterday in the Washington Post, it sounds like the Vatican could use something like that.  Just a week ago, Pope Benedict announced that he is resigning at the end of February, that basically he doesn’t have the health or stamina to do the job anymore.  I thought at the time that it might be his way of forcing the College of Cardinals to vote in a new pope now, instead of having him ( Benedict) stay on, getting less and less able, and having some Vatican cleric running the Church behind the scenes.  I think it’s a clear message from the Holy Spirit -  time to clean house, Vatican!  I don’t mean the Pope – I mean some of those unspiritual behind the scenes politicos and schemers in the Curia.  The Post article said that both John Paul II and Benedict were poor managers -  hey, that’s not really the Pope’s job!  But that they entrusted the management  of , for example, the finances, to clerics not nearly scrupulous and detached enough to prevent corruption .   I would tend to believe that.  I wish the college of cardinals would get together and fire everybody in the curia and replace them with more of the pure of heart.  That’s an idealist’s dream, I know.  But this is my church, and it does sicken me to think that the Pope would be undermined by the very people he entrusted to manage things for him.

Some resolution, and more books

I'm happy to report that Mrs. Brown called me back this morning, and I told there there is something wrong with the forwarding mechanism of their phones.  She said "I've heard that from others, too; I'd better look into that."  She turned out to be very pleasant on the phone, dispelling all my rants of yesterday.  There's still some glitch in my application, but it's due to reporting conflicts with our new Province.  I'm not worrying about it today.

Here are some more books I've been reading during this particular period of procrastination.  I should say that most of them I am listening to, not reading. The full texts are available from the library for download on my faithful ipod.  I save my eyes for school reading, and I will have plenty of that come tomorrow, when the papers and student poems come in.

Anyway, I began to listen to Jane Austen's Emma, but gave up on it. That one I need to read. Too many characters to keep track of .

I read this one years ago, and listened to it this time; again, I gave up on it halfway through, when I remembered the ending!
Tried to find The Day of the Jackal in the library, but no luck. So I watched it on Netflix; I had never seen the film. The film was really good, and the 1970's settings, especially Paris, were great. The actor who played the Jackal, Edward Fox, was another one of those handsome and charming Brits in the clan of Edward Petherbridge.  His 1970's clothes were fun, too:

Every other time the call went to another place

On the frustrations of bad phone connections at the Social Security Administration...

On April 27, I will turn 65.  I can hardly believe it.  But one reality which forces me to believe it is Social Security and Medicare.  My religious community wants me to sign on to it at 65, and so I will. Fortunately, we have a wonderful woman named Becky S. with the patience of a saint whose job it is to negotiate the quagmire of Health Insurance for all of us, under and over 65.  She's been helping me to do this, and she's been doing most of the phone work. 

Last week, though, I received a phone mail message from a Mrs. Brown, an agent in the Teleclaims department assigned to me. In her message she said she just had a few questions, and  asked me to call her back at 877-593-3955, extension 5734.  My paperwork is all in, except for the earnings statement from 2012; I figured this would be simple.  I had the flu last week, so I waited to call her back until today.  Well....  after more than an hour being bumped from one recorded message to another dead end, I gave up.  I emailed Becky S to report this, and she later emailed me back, saying

"Sister Anne,

This was a real challenge trying to get through to the phone number you were given. Every other time the call went to another place as it did with you. I looked up the application that I entered for another Sister the same day as yours was completed and the extension number given for her had 5 numbers and began with a “6” so I tried that and actually was given a voice mail for a representative. The name was not included on the voicemail but I did leave your name and cell phone number for a return call. Hopefully Mrs. Brown will call you back. "

After that, I at least felt I was not alone in this quagmire.  So we will see what will happen.

I guess I am predisposed to think badly of the Social Security Administration agents because back in 2002 I had such a miserable time with the social service agents I was assigned when I was applying for Medicaid for my parents.  It was torture, and I felt an attitude of cool disdain emanating from several of the women who handled my parents' case.  Now I know this is irrational, since we're talking about different agencies, but there it is.

I always wonder what happens to really poor people with minimal literacy who have to negotiate these murky waters.

Another month gone by

and still I am mired in procrastination and a virtual writer's block.  However, I have written a number of drafts; just not ready to post them here yet.

I have just now emerged from ten or more days of the dreaded FLU.  Thought by February 6 it would have passed me by, but no such luck.  Very painful sore throat and fever for days as well as chest congestion.   I'm feeling much more normal now.  Did have some amazing dreams while feverish!

In the last two or three months I've procrastinated by reading a number of mysteries and police procedurals.  Among them:

Gone Girl  by Gillian Flynn
This was a compulsive read, but in the end I discovered I disliked the main characters so much that I ended up not liking the book.  I felt manipulated by it.

 More recently, I read one of Jonathan Kellerman's more recent mysteries, Bones. I really like Alex Delaware, his psychologist/detective narrator and Milo Sturges, the main detective  This was a good one,

 A few weeks back , I listened to John Harvey's Flesh and Blood as a book on CD. I read about his latest book in a favorable review in the Washington Post, so decided to try him, and liked him very much.  Very tragic, but good.

 I loved The Beautiful Mystery, Louise Penny's latest. This is another detective, French Canadian Armand Gamache, who is a favorite.  Penny delves into the feelings and motives of the characters in a way that I really enjoy.  This one was set in an isolated monastery in the hinterlands of the Province of Quebec.

 Another long time favorite, Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD, features in Michael Connelly's most recent novel, The Black Box.  This was great.

Sorry it's been so long...

We've had erratic weather. These photo show my garden , where daffodil and hyacinths are emerging way too early.  Don't tell me climate change is a myth!

 Daffodils

 Larkspur!

Hyacinth


The Daffodils and Hyacinths have antifreeze in their stems, my father used to say.  But that tender Hyacinth won't survive the cold that's surely returning.

And since Jan.12, when I took those photos, the cold has returned.

As for me and this long time of no blog entries...

No excuses.

Should have been writing.

I was working on the new course I'm teaching this semester: Poetry Writing.  Very happy to be teaching this course, but I had to work from scratch. Actually, I worked on it over Fall Break, too, but put the finishing touches on during the long Christmas Break.

Then, I had a call a few days after Christmas about a tragedy in the family of one of my close friends.
Her 36 year old son was found dead on Dec.29, in his home.  He was not married and owned his own home. The cause of death looks like an accidental drug overdose, but my friend still doesn't have a death certificate because the whole thing involved police , and an autopsy, and a toxicology report.
She has one other son who is five years older, married with children.  He found his brother's body. So both he and my friend are just devastated.  So I was up in West Chester for five days right after New Years, staying with our mutual friend and her husband, attending the wake and funeral and burial, and visiting.  Really a heartbreaker.

So school just began on Monday, and I am beginning to write poetry again, with my class.

I'm adding these drafts to my Eighth round of 30/30 ( which I haven't posted on the ITWS forum, but have posted some here)  and hope to post some of the new ones here in the next few days.

3:21PM on Christmas Eve

Apologies for almost a month of no posts. Lots of schoolwork and cookie baking and procrastinating.

Right now, it is snowing! So wonderful a surprise on Christmas Eve!It has put me in the Christmas spirit at last.

I watch from the chair in my bedroom ; the window scene is busy with birds. A Mourning Dove fills the entire plexiglass suction cup window feeder, chowing down on the chopped fine walnuts. A male Red-bellied woodpecker feasts on the Cranberry seed and nut cylinder attached to the screen and sitting on the windowsill. A Downy Woodpecker and a White-breasted Nuthatch wait their turn, a well as the Chickadees and Titmice.Not to mention theMockingbird, wary and skittish, but hungry. My fantasy is that I open my window wide and they all fly in and out, perching on my shoulders and hands, allowing me to speak lovingly to each of them and scratch their feathery heads, then flying back out.

Home and Hannah Coulter

Where are you going, Canada Geese who are not going to or from Canada?  You fly low and west, a squadron of you, not too far above my window on this full moon night. Now another squadron, or perhaps the same one joined by a battalion, flies east, on the far side of the field, toward Route 15, in the pink sky sunset.

I am waiting to take a photo of the sunset and the silhouette of the campus I have loved for forty-six years.

Carolina Wren just visited the feeder on my window. Silhouette thunked arrival, grabbed a beakful of seeds, and sprang off, as the bells rang five.

Tonight, not last night, is the full moon night, and it’s clear.  I tried to take a photo of it from my window, but it’s not much of a photo. Here’s a much better one , from a blog called "Grace-filled thoughts", unidentified photographer:

Back to reading Hannah Coulter again for class tomorrow:

I read this description of Christmas Dinner as she described it in her first year as a young married woman, in 1941, in the little town of Port William:

“I was making myself at home. In the dark way of the world I had come to what would be my life’s place, though I could not yet know the life I would live in it.” (40)

 This made me think of Emmitsburg.  When I arrived here as an 18 year old girl, to the college, in 1966, I loved it right away.  But I did not know that it would be my life’s place.

“… You could say that Port William has never been the same place two minutes together. But I think any way it has ever been it will always be. It is an immortal place… (42)

That made me think of West Chester. I stopped and thought of driving West on Gay Street, through the main part of town, looking left, up at the Green Tree Building, crossing over High Street, looking at the building I knew as Woolworths that is now the Iron Hill Brewery. That street has been the scene of many dreams over the years. I think of it now and feel a deep sadness, an absence and emptiness, knowing that my parents are both dead and will never walk or drive down that street with me again.  In the years from about 1998 through 2007, when they were both still alive but so changed from the parents I grew up with, they were, in many ways, already gone, but their hearts were still beating on this earth, and their hands were still warm when I held them, and their eyes still turned to my face when I spoke to them. Now I feel their absence more strongly than I did during the first months after each of their deaths, as the combined reality of their combined death settles within me. West Chester may be immortal, but the human presence of Vince and Ellen was very mortal.  And it’s gone from the streets of West Chester, and I feel the absence.

Reading About Poetry

Lately I've been reading some books about writing poetry, in hopes of getting out of my rut/block.

I'm hoping the ideas of these writers will spark something in me.

These notes come from Miller Williams' book  Making a Poem.  The first is a poem:

From  Tree Animals   by Lawrence Lieberman

Owls

Help us to dream.

They enter our sleeping heads

And hoot. They drop some feathers.

 ( Barn Owl   by Clive Hicks-Jenkins)

 

 

Quotes from Miller Williams, with random thoughts from me:

 

"Every act of writing is an excursion into memory. This is especially true of poetry."

 

My dream last night of visiting Mark R. in Norfolk, and getting ready to visit Sister Stephanie in Portsmouth.  Mark finding me bus routes. Me saying to him , but why can’t you just drive me there? Then me remembering I had a car with me. Needing to go back to the other apartment to get my things.Mark living in a spare white apartment with a group of young women.

 

My waking realization that if I am 65, then Sister Stephanie is 80 years old, and Mark must be in his middle seventies. My waking realization that I haven't seen either of these people in over 40 years. Who knows where the time goes?

 

"Let the poem know what you’ve learned in your life.

...Suggestion always triggers the imagination."

 

"...Try making your poem a narrative, perhaps a dramatic monologue, rather than a momentary expression of an emotion."

 

David Baker: " Be faithful to the language you heard when you were growing up; every family has its own way of talking. "    ( I remember my father and mother using the term “poor mouth” with contempt.)

 

"A good poem is made only in small part by the one who holds the pen and in great part by the ghosts that live in the writer’s house."

 

Book title:  the ghosts in the house

 

Question: Who are the ghosts in my house?

The ghosts I seek on Google:  Sara Bardoe, Frank Reilly, Angele Sadlier...… ghosts I will never contact, but who I wish would contact me.

 

(98) "The imprint of geography and geology, weather, and the pace of life makes writing not only distinctive but also better than writing with little sign of where it came from.  The wrinkles, folds, and scratches caused by a land and those who live on it enrich a reader’s experience, sharpening the reader’s feeling of having been somewhere and found something… one cannot escape being shaped by the woman and man one came from and the houses one walked by on the way to school." (Williams 98)

 

Book Title:  Walking home on Miner Street …  Minor Street?   The street with mines?  The street where I mine the caves of my dreams?   How did the real Miner Street get named?

 

 

(101) " ...our senses told us  that the sun went around the earth, that a road grew narrow as it ran into the distance. Our senses tell u that a table is solid.  What is the real world?" ( Williams1 01)

 

(103)  "Paradox:  the truth is that math and all other instruments and techniques are used by a scientist to pull away from the human condition. Insofar as one is a creature of love and hate, of fear and self-delusion and maniacal certainties, one cannot hope to serve science.  Only by escaping the endless contradictions and confusions of the purely human world, the world of poetry and pride, of sidewalk preaching and used-car dealers – all using the small language of words – only by setting aside these things can the scientist hope to deal with the phenomenological universe… The artist, on the other hand, the person who creates for us an illusion of natural experience in which we can participate, is less concerned with concept. The artist works with details, with particular things, with the furniture of this world, in order to stir our imaginations to a sense of experience, half vicarious, half empirical. The artist is content to let others arrive at any “truth” by means of that experience.  The poem is a thing, built of particularities, and insomuch as it loses its very particularity it loses its value as a poem. We are told, anyway, that this points to a difference, a significant difference, between the scientist and the humanist.  But is it?" (103)

"…The scientist begins with particulars, and from the nature of these particulars extrapolates principles; the engineer employs these principles to build a bridge or a rocket and so comes back full circle to the particular. But if we are to speak of the tow fields as one, then we can say that science  in the broadest sense watches the thing, figures out what general rules are directing it, causing it to behave in a certain way, and employs these same rules to be able to (1) anticipate behavior, and (2) to control it.

… the humanist – the philosopher, the theologian, the historian, also studies the thing, which is the human being, and tries to figure out what makes us act as we do, whether there is a system working through our comings and our goings.

…the humanist is concerned with the value of communications of an experience, with what meaning or insight is to be drawn from it."  (104)

Getting too far from things here.  The other Williams,  William Carlos Williams, said "No ideas but in things."  and I like that better.

Enough on this Full Moon night which is so overcast that I cannot see the moon.

( photo from blog  Grace-full Thoughts... unidentified photographer)

One of the many PERSONS for whom I am grateful

is Teresa , my student from almost forty years ago, who is now my friend.

Today I am grateful for her computer expertise, which showed me how to free this blog from the stranglehold of  the add-ons, or cache, or whatever was putting up those ads!

But I am grateful even more for her personal presence in my life - loyalty, creativity, humor... for inviting me into her family.

She is great!

One thing for which I am NOT thankful

Blogger has intruded on my blog by inserting all these unwanted ads.  My text is suddenly filled with underlined random words which, if the reader clicks on them, leads one to another site or ad.

Readers, please ignore these!  I did not put them in, but I can't figure out how to remove them!

So sorry for this annoyance.

Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?

One of my all-time favorite lines, from Theodore Roethke's villanelle   "The Waking"

It’s 5:13PM on Wednesday, November 21. The darkness will continue to grow for another month, until the Winter Solstice of December 21.

I love this time of the day in the late fall, love to have the time to sit by the window and watch the sky wash out from blue to pink to peach, to see the darkness grow. I love to watch the tree branches become silhouettes, and then disappear into the night.  I especially love the twilights when the sky is aflame with sunset.

One of the places I lived was a house on Alto Road in Baltimore, right on the edge of the city, on the edge of Leakin Park, in a very hilly neighborhood of hundred year old houses, including ours.  I loved my room there, on the corner with a window facing west and another two facing north. A great old red oak tree grew right at the edge of the porch roof by that north facing window.  The west facing window had a view of a crowd of younger trees, among them a tall and skinny maple.  So often I was treated to that flaming sunset sky on these November evenings.  The world outside the house was redolent with the smell of trees and leafmold, a high cold forest smell.  

The world outside my window here has some of that smell, but not quite the same.  I smell autumn earth and leaves, but more of a cold country air. It is the smell I always associate with Emmitsburg, with the days of my youth when I was a girl in college here, walking in this evening delight, smelling this earth smell.  Very different from the smell of suburban West Chester… partly because I wasn’t out walking in the dark very much when I lived in West Chester. Partly because I just didn’t notice the world the way I did when I came to Emmitsburg.