Moldova

Why aren't more people paying attention to what's going on in Moldova right now? Except for a random drop here and there, I hear nothing about the situation in our media. Perhaps the general public is unaware of what's going on, that people are being put in jail, being threatened, even being killed there. I think everyone needs to know this. I'm posting a link to a blog that is keeping track of news stories related to the ongoing situation in Moldova. I hope you'll check this situation out and spread the information about the shocking conditions there via Twitter and other social feeds since the major media doesn't seem to be noticing. True Moldova

Scars

My knee is going to require surgery; the depth of cutting is the only mystery left. The nurse practitioner, once I finally hacked my way through the Nurse Nazi front-desk personnel to get to her, was sort of astonished that I had not known how bad it was. Apparently I tore out one of the damaged ligaments a long time ago. "Old damage," she called it. "Are you really athletic? 'Cause we usually see this type of damage in people who are..."

It's amazing how much I had hoped that it was all in my head instead of lurking in my knee. Now I'm facing at least six more weeks of crutches, other people doing even the simplest tasks, ever-multiplying medical bills, and another stupid set of scars. It's impossible for me to tell right now which aspect of it is worst.

I can't begin to express how tired I am of people cutting on me. It seems that every epoch of my life has to be marked by a trip to a cold tile room where people made anonymous and sinister by sterile masks and gloves treat me with a certain condescending kindness, render me unconscious, and then hurt me for my own good. How tired I am of waking up with a drip in my arm in rooms with generic art that doesn't quite make "soothing" or "cheerful" despite a lackluster effort. Tired of presurgery paperwork, tired of mean and indifferent nurses, tired of postsurgery checkups, tired of bloodwork, backless gowns, the little barcode I become once I hit the surgery ward the day I check in at whatever ungodly hour I have to report for my "procedure."

Maybe the scars are the worst. Of all of it, the scars don't go away. I've seen the scars that accompany serious knee surgery, too. I just can't wait to add those to my freakshow collection. The set I have on my knee now is not noticeable at all unless you really look hard for them. They're the small old scars of a scope, and they get lost in the freckles that appear on my fair skin with the lightest touch of the sun. Who knows what I'll have to look forward to after this?

I'm trying to put all this in the proper perspective. After all, at least I will get it fixed. I can still walk. I have both limbs. I am alive and can see the tops of the cherry tree outside my classroom glistening in the sun. Life is not ungood. I am just struggling right now with the knowledge that in my future a scalpel is waiting for me like a thin finger of ice tracing its way down my spine.

Missing Yoga

I haven't been able to do yoga in about a month. It's ridiculous how much I miss it. My gear bag is in the back of my car still, and every time I open the back door of the Cruiser to throw my school bags and crutches in, I see the black canvas with its white moon and bamboo design and I yearn. I want to unroll the pretty striped Tappas mat and go into down dog to feel that incredible stretch rolling up the back of my legs. I want to go through the ritual of the sun salutations and raise my hands to the sky. I want to know the stillness of tree pose, find my balance, feel my breath calm and my mind relax.

I can't do any of it right now. I can't even walk for long enough to push a cart through the grocery store without wanting to grit my teeth. It's beyond frustrating. Just when I found something that I really loved and that I felt good doing, my knee came apart on me.

Wednesday's MRI should give me some answers. I only hope that the answers it brings will be ones that will allow me to get back to yoga someday. I have to believe that I will. Anything else is just unacceptable.

Poetry Contest 09

I won! The poem I submitted, "Teaching the Death of Ophelia," won first prize in our local competition. I am so proud. The poem was written about something personal, and I believed in its strength, so I am more gratified than I can say that others thought it was worthy, too. I really want to start trying to see if any of my work is publishable in larger forums, too, but maybe I can start that process this summer. Even though I don't have a lot of time and energy for writing right now, this is an inspiration to try to find the time.

Kindle2

I finally got a Kindle2. I have been looking at the Kindles since they first came out, but I kept putting off getting one for a variety of reasons. The first generation ones were a little bulky and new technology, which is always scary, and I am always broke, which was another powerful inducement to wait. When the K2s came out, though, I had a much harder time waiting. They are sleek and many of the complaints early users had were gone. I went so far as to place one in my amazon cart several times, but I didn't get one until Saturday of last week.

It came Wednesday. It's already one of my favorite pieces of technology. I have read two books on it and am about halfway through a third. I have about 25 books downloaded onto it including some of my very favorite rereads. Almost all of the books I've found so far have been free, too, since they are old enough to be out of copyright protection. It's amazing.

There are so many people and sites out there putting out literature for free. I find that to be a wonderful thing. It's like having a huge free bookstore with thousands of titles for the asking. Granted, the latest best-sellers are not free, but that's not a big deal to me. I pay less to download the ones of those I'm interested in that I would pay to buy them from my local bookstore. Plus, I can get them when I want them, something I can't always say about my local book store.

I've also noticed that with my Kindle I read much faster. I don't know why that should be true, but it is. It may be because of the adjustable print size or the ease of use, but even though I've always been a fast reader, I'm really flying now. The day I got my Kindle, I read the 8th Sookie Stackhouse novel and half of a Lauren Willig book, too. I'm now working on rereading Beloved.

Are there things they could do better? Absolutely. Sure. It's a device in development. I know that future models will just get better and better. I love the one I have now, though, for what it is: the integration of literacy and technology. It's time the two met and were friendly.

Sookie Stackhouse Novels

I have become addicted to the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris lately. I started reading them last weekend, and so far I'm up to book 7. I am ripping through them with great gusto, and I can't wait until my Kindle gets here so I can download the last two. The series is nothing like I thought it would be.

It's really quite beyond genre classification. There are elements of horror, mystery, "chick lit" (whatever that is), and a healthy dollop of good old fashioned romance novel thrown in for makeweight. The heroine is admirable, strong-willed, and thoroughly Southern. The guys (and I guess I have to use that term rather loosely, all things considered) who pursue and woo her are interesting and exotic. My personal favorite is Eric. Despite his shortcomings, he's just...well...let's say he's the type one wouldn't kick out of bed for eating crackers (not that he would, again, all things considered).

Once I finish with this series, I think I'm going to start her Lily Bard series. I have one of them on the shelf, in fact, and now that I know how much I enjoy her writing, I think I'll explore other avenues to see if they're as pleasurable to stroll. In the meantime, I will go see what else I have on the "to read" shelf now that Spring Break is allowing me to indulge my voracious literary appetites.

Waiting on My Kindle

I have been drooling over the Kindle2 on amazon for a long time now, but I have resisted temptation successfully until yesterday. I finally gave in after several days of having one in my cart and bought it. Now I'm just waiting for my favorite UPS driver to roll up the driveway with it so the real fun can begin.

I love pretty gadgets, to be sure, but that's not the only reason why I wanted to get one. I have thought long and hard about the way I read, and it really made sense to me to get a Kindle. I tend to rip through pulp fiction very, very fast. I can destroy a novel in a day, two if I get really ambitious and nothing else is pressing. It's very tiring to have to try to guess whether or not I'm going to like a new series enough to purchase all the books for it in order to have them on-hand for a big reading spree.

I also ALWAYS have at least one book in my bag. I never go anywhere without a book in case a moment opens up to read. Long trips mean even more books need to be packed, and sometimes I just have the wild urge to read something random. The Kindle weighs less and will be like a portable library in my bag. I'm pretty excited about that. So many of my favorite books are public domain and therefore downloadable as free e-books. The cost of others is less than it would take to get them from our local bookstore, and they'll come instantly.

I made a custom skin for it on this awesome site called skinit.com. I uploaded a pastiche of bookcovers from some of my favorite books to make the skin, so my Kindle will be protected, literary, and colorful. One of my least favorite features of it is the plain whiteness, but that was a fairly easy fix. I always have to customize everything I own, anyway, so I would have skinned it no matter what color it came in. I actually looked at the skins on this site, iStyles, too, but I wanted to make my own, so I did it on the other one.

I got a nifty Janine King carrying case from eBay. The style is really funky in a fabric called Geisha Fans, and I liked it way more than any of the cases on amazon. I decided that it had a lot of personality, and I enjoyed that more than the basic black or leather ones I was seeing elsewhere. I don't know why designers don't understand that people like to tweak things. Is it just me?

I have been surfing for free e-books, and I've been thoroughly astonished by how much good stuff there is. I already have 11 free titles ready to download from the Project Gutenberg offshoot site when I get the Kindle Wednesday including the complete Emily Dickinson Poems, something I often turn to for solace, and a collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories, one of my "feel good" standbys. I haven't even dug around very much yet, either.

Well, I think it's time to start digging for more stuff. My Twitter tweeple have been really awesome pointing out tips. I think this was a good investment in something that I'm going to enjoy for a long time to come.

And Another Thing...

I am in a permanent state of song-stuck-in-the-head, except I have a whole album stuck in mine. Chris Thile's How to Grow a Woman from the Ground won't get out of my head. If I'm concentrating on something else, I always start to hum abstractedly, and lately, it's been tunes off that particular disc that have always been the running soundtrack waiting to pounce. It's not that I don't listen to other things, either. I have tried to drive it out with ZZ Top, the Stones, Howlin Wolf, Ella Fitzgerald, Third Day, TobyMac, good disco, and Bach. That mandolin won't go, though. How does he do that? It's not annoying, just weird, but if it goes on much longer, I think I'm going to start getting worried....

Late Nights

Well, with the time change, I'm back to my late night routines. I love daylight saving time. I like the way the light hovers in the trees and the sky glows that greenish blue for a long time after the sun has dropped. It makes me feel like going outside and dancing in the pastures.

Of course, this also means that once again, I am not getting my work done. Grr... I am now, deluded soul that I am, feeling that it is only 10:00, when in fact it is now 11:00. I am frantically throwing together the last preparations for tomorrow's work day despite the fact that I really want to be bopping around the house cleaning, reading, and well....playing for lack of a more adult term. I feel playful, sort of like a big cat with some string being dangled before it. Maybe I have spring fever?

Oh well. One more week to get through until I can have some legitimate late nights with Spring Break. I can do this. I know I can.

Poetry Contest

It's time again for our annual poetry competition, and I'm trying to get my entries ready for this year. I think I'm going to take T.'s advice and enter one of my essays from here as well, but I'm having a hard time trying to decide what to do about the poems. I have a couple that I've been polishing although I haven't produced anything new in awhile.

There is one that I feel may be better than anything I've done in a very long time, and I really want to try it in a bigger pool than our local competition, but I don't know how to do that. I wish I had a mentor or an editor that I could ask for advice on this. I think back to my teacher at college, a published and publishing poet, and I long for his guidance.

The first experiences I had in his class were a little traumatic, to be sure. He would mercilessly remove everything that was not good from a poem and help to reshape it. It was like passing metals through a refining fire to remove the dross. After the first shock of not hearing, "Oh, that's so goooood," anymore, though, I came to crave that kind of red pen slashing. If it isn't good, I don't want it in my work. He never tried to make me sound like anyone but myself; he just wanted me to grow into the best version of myself possible. I wish I were in a place now where I could take my stuff back to him again.

I also hope, as I think about it, that I am giving that sort of feedback to my own students. I try to keep his model in mind when I grade. My students, especially my upper-level students, are already so good at writing that they don't need head-patting any more than I did. They need someone to help cut away all that is not gold, to put facets on those rough diamonds. I hope that they can go away from the experience with some new idea about how to be the best writer they can be.

Maybe I will be able to find someone else who can help me. In the meantime, I will make some decisions and try to figure it out on my own.

A Brush with the Past

Yesterday as a part of the Welty Conference, we went to the Medgar Evers house museum, maintained by Tougaloo College. Even though we were there less than an hour, I cannot get the place out of my mind. The image of the little house in its small lot persists with a tenacity that will not let go.

To get there, one turns off a four-lane strip of badly-kept highway labeled with black and silver signs that proclaim that particular stretch of road to be Medgar Evers Boulevard. It's down an unassuming side street in a neighborhood of modest, fading ranch homes. The lot seems too small to hold so much history or sadness, and even now, so many years later, there is an emptiness to this place that cannot be explained by the fact the mere absence of constant habitation.

The house itself has been restored to its original cheerful 60's aqua paint, something that clashes sharply with the huge historical society dominating the space between the living room and bedroom windows. The black and bronze surface reminds even the most casual eye that this is a place where history turned, where blood was shed, and where a life was taken in hatred.

Our guide for the tour, the archivist at Tougaloo, took us through those last troubled days of Evers' life as we stood crowded together in what had been his living room. Our feet shuffled across the wooden floors he'd been so proud to provide for his family; light filtered weakly through the windows set just a little higher than normal in the safehaven he'd tried to make. We heard the story of how he'd come home from a war to fight others here, a war to make a home for his family in this middle-class black subdivision nestled among the white ones, a war to bring an end to the artificial divisions in his home state based on the color of skin, a war to be accepted when even those he was trying to help saw him as a threat to safety and security.

When the archivist related to us Mrs. Evers' remembrances of the night her husband was assassinated, standing there inside that small room with the 1960's furniture and the piano in the corner, a feeling I cannot describe came over me. The story, so well-known, of the shot from the dark, the bullet that ended a man's life, came into the house, tore through the kitchen, and ultimately landed in the sink, was no abstract history lesson. It was no dusty fact to be cataloged or checked off. It was the stuff of real people's real lives, and I was standing there on the parlor rug, looking at the knickknacks on the shelves and the china breakfront, inserted into those lives, at least in some way. It was all too horrible to tell, too horrible to hear, too horrible to stand in that place, crowded as we were, and not be able to run away from. In that place, not ten feet even from where I stood, a man whose only "crime" had been to try to destroy evil had been slain in the most craven of ways right on his very doorstep with his wife and his children in the back of the house.

We toured through the rooms, looking into the reconstructed image of the Evers family's life. In the tiny kitchen, aqua blue appliances sit quietly, the refrigerator with the hole in the door from the shooting long since gone. In Mr. and Mrs. Evers' room, a cheerful pink chenille spread covers the bed, and a wedding photo sits on top of the dresser. In the children's room, the curtains were a bright colorful 60's animal print, dolls and sock monkeys sat in small rocking chairs, and the mattresses of the beds were on the floor to prevent a stray bullet from killing the occupants of that room in their innocent slumber.

When I got back on the bus, as others were finishing up their tours and comments, I spent time just staring at the outside of the little turquoise dwelling there hidden in the middle of Jackson. It seemed as if were too fragile, somehow, to bear up under the weight of that much sadness. I think a fortress of solid steel would have been more appropriate than plastered interior walls and a black shingled-roof. Those two small steps, one slightly larger than the other, that lead into the entrance from the carport were also much too small a stage for such a momentous event to have occurred upon them. Then again, history rarely happens in places where the setting is suitably grandiose.

I came away from the Evers House Museum with a new sense of urgency about knowing about my state's and my nation's troubled past. I have lived here, barring trips away, all my life, and until yesterday, I had never seen that place. It is a chunk of history as profound in its way as Plymouth Rock, yet it sits hidden, quiet, unassuming in the soft shadows of Mississippi's capital city. What else am I missing? I think I'd better find out, even though it may not be comfortable to know.

My Birthday

It's 12:09 am, so technically, my birthday is over. I haven't gone to bed yet, though, so it's still rolling as far as I'm concerned. It's just been a wonderful day.

I started planning this birthday informally last year. Last year, I got so sad over my birthday that it took a minor miracle to pull me out of the funk and depression of it. Once I got my head on right again, I promised that this year wouldn't be allowed to do that to me again. Therefore, I started looking for little ways to make sure this year turned into a celebration rather than some sort of wake.

When the program of events for our local theater arrived, I had my first idea. I would make a week of it. Thus was born the idea for the Week of Senseless Indulgences. I went to see Punch Brothers. I got a new yoga mat. I took myself out for meals I like. I bought lots of books and took the time to read them even if other things didn't get done. I left school at a reasonable hour. I made a concentrated effort to analyze why I was getting so stressed out over silly little things I had no control over and that don't matter in the long run anyway. It's been fabulous.

The cornerstones of the entire week, though, were today's Eudora Welty Conference at Millsaps and tonight's frolic with my best friend. The Welty Conference took us to the Medgar Evers home and to Eudora's house before returning to Millsaps to discuss the Welty short story "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" I will blog about the Evers house probably tomorrow. It was more moving than I can tell you, and I want time to get the words and the feelings together before I dive in to that subject. Right now, it's late, I'm tired, and my poor befuddled brain has had too much sugar and too little sleep to handle that subject with the care it deserves.

The dinner with my best friend was wonderful. We talked for hours, about the present and the past. Just getting to be myself again and not having to be someone else's responsible party or teacher was like shedding a heavy winter coat being worn in a hot room. I felt like dancing on tables. It was liberating, renewing, reviving, a cup of water on a wilting plant. I laughed like I haven't laughed in months. Even now, I feel my lips curving into a smile at the memory of some of our conversations. It was healing and good, and in many ways, it was the best birthday present I could have gotten.

I probably could say more, and later I may come back and talk about it again, about this new contentment with everything that has descended with 33, but right now, there is soft rain on the roof, a warm cat at the foot of my bed, and I am weary with laughing. I cannot think of a more enticing inducement to bed than that.

The Way I Wish I Could Resolve to Live

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain

The Good Ones

As I'm listening to these two discs, Punch and How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, I find myself snared by the clever lyrics. Snared, in some cases, moved, and, in that place where I try to be honest with myself, a little jealous.

Being a person who is in every way fascinated by words, I enjoy good songwriters. Don't get me wrong; you will also find me blazing down the highway at lightspeed singing along with stuff that has almost no depth at all to it other than "loud" or "happy." Sometimes, I don't want to think or listen intently. Other times, though, I need the wall of sound to resolve itself into meaning, maybe because so much that goes on around me is so frequently meaningless.

There's a danger to the good ones, though. It's the same allure that's always there with my favorite print poets. Where there is genuine craft, there is something generating it, there is a magic shimmering just under a seemingly-calm surface that might pull you in before you even know you've been grabbed, take you on a journey that might be pleasant or painful, but will leave fingerprints on you either way.

Dickinson said, amongst other quotes of hers related to what poetry feels like, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." I have felt that way once or twice in the presence of really good songs or poems. There have been poems that have left me jawdropped, either saying or thinking, "Yes, oh yes. Just so. This is what I've always wanted to say. Now that it has been written, nothing more needs ever to be said about this topic again." Some of them have been so right and keen that the reading or hearing of them was like being struck with a thin, razor-sharp blade in the heart, a moment of perfect pain. What I said on reading those probably isn't fit to print. Still others writhe through the veins like an intoxicant, bringing to the mind a slow, slow smile and memories.

A couple of these songs have this kind of evocative, almost physical, power, too. Track 13 on How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, "I'm Yours If You Want Me," is the auditory equivalent of being pinned to a wall and slowly, lusciously, voluptuously kissed senseless. There is such a raw honesty, self-doubt, and need in the lyrics and that is mirrored in the stripped-down nature of the music that by the time Thile gets the promise at the end, one wonders who ever could walk away? The string quintet on Punch has the same power but with different emotions and to different ends. The music is lovely, but it's the lyrics that are captivating me. These are the words of somebody who had the heart ripped right out of his chest and destroyed but is living on at least to tell the tale.

If these are the genuine article he's showing, if he's doling out little bits of his soul into what he is singing, then I admire what he's able to do more than I can say. My own personal "muse" has been largely silent now for about a year. I don't know if it is because of my schedule (teach, grade, come home, fall down, teach grade, come home, fall down...), because I am not pursuing those things that make the words and the blood flow (for me, love and travel), or because the migraine medicine I'm taking is suffocating said source of inspiration along with keeping me from being able to name common everyday things and focus properly. (Sometimes I feel like a whole team of engineers rewired my brain and did it badly. Maybe it was badly wired to start with, and that was the problem all the time....) Regardless, Thile's lyrics as much as the glorious riot of the group's music are going to keep me coming back to these discs and looking at whatever they come out with in the future. Maybe if I surround myself with that kind of power, some of it might awaken the spark in me, if it still burns at all.

A Poem I Found and Love

I found this in an anthology recently, and I am putting it out here to share with you my gentle readers. I loved this imagery. It makes my soul sing to think about it. Enjoy.


Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven

They call each other `E.' Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing 'I Taste A Liquor
Never Brewed' to the tune of 'Love Me Tender.'

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing without
feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.

Hans Ostrom

Punch Brothers

I just got home from the Punch Brothers concert, the treat with which I kicked off my birthday week Secret Celebration of Senseless Indulgence. I came home from school, actually sat on my couch long enough to eat a meal, got up and put on clothing that wasn't "teacher person" clothing, and went back to our beautiful restored theater for the show.

It felt a bit like making a prison break to get to go back to town at night for anything, much less not be wearing my standard issue "uniform," but it just kept getting better. I somehow managed to get my trusty seat next to the support pole again. Don't ask me how, but every single time I get tickets for this theater, I always wind up in either the seat I had tonight or the one on the other side of this same pole. I'm not complaining; there is more leg room and you don't have to fight anyone for an armrest. I just find it highly amusing. The place seats about 1000. How is it the computer just "knows" it's me? I'm pretty sure I didn't carve my name in the arm or anything....

Anyway, I got to the theater early enough to sit and enjoy the quiet and the beauty of it. For reasons recorded in earlier blogs, I feel a deep affection and almost a proprietary pride in this theater. I have known about it almost my whole life and longed to see it like it is now, so every time I go to see a performance in it and see it so full of life and beauty and hear performers pleased with it, I feel, for no good reason at all, as if someone complemented me on something I had a part in. As I walked up the staircase, I remembered tonight as I always do what it used to look like, and as I looked up into the repainted and gilded ceiling, I had no trouble recalling the strips of paint and paper that once hung there. Just being in that little jewelbox of a place fills me with satisfaction every time.

Once the music began, though, it was more than enough to take me out of contemplation of the furnishings. I had bought a CD of Punch Brothers when I first saw their program blurb in this year's concert listings for our theater. The description of their musical style intrigued me, and after listening to a couple of online clips, I had trusty Amazon send me their latest offering. I have been enjoying it for some time now. Nothing, though, can compare to seeing this group live. I love to watch the interplay between musicians, how they cue each other and sync together, and this group works together so well.

The style of their music pleases me, too. I love it when people take the time to master traditional styles and then innovate. I heard both tonight, and all of it was done well. I heard harmonies dissolve into pools of seeming dissonance only to resolve themselves sweetly at the right moment. I saw a string quintet wonderfully done with instruments more commonly found in other sorts of arrangements. You really have to know what you're doing to pull things like this off, and you really have to love it, too. This group tonight had both qualities.

I only hope we were a good audience for them. I sort of think, as usual, we weren't. We clapped in the wrong places, something I know is irritating from my experiences with my musician friends. I don't think the audience really got how good the banjo player really was, either, because playing the banjo doesn't require or even really allow the same sort of showy hand motions that guitar and mandolin will provide to cue an uninformed audience as to exertion. Our hearts were in the right place, though, so maybe that counts.

All in all, I had a good night. I got their other CD, came away from it feeling better and more like a person as opposed to the dreaded "dead teacher" than I have in weeks, developed a new musical line of inquiry, and, if I'm honest, got to look at a really cute guy (the banjo player) for a couple of hours. Pretty good start to the old birthday week.

Yoga

I have long been interested in yoga classes in a theoretical way. Taking one has been one of those things that looks pretty from a distance, one of those things that I keep saying that I should really check out more thoroughly some time but that I never quite get around to doing. I used to practice on my own in a tiny way through a Gaiam DVD recommended to me by a very yoga-chic friend, and I always found even that small routine very relaxing.

Rifling through the electronic version of our local paper, I came across an add for our branch of one of our state universities. They have decided to offer a yoga class, and it turned out that one of my all-time favorite professors was teaching it. I had to sign up.

The resulting flurry of emails back and forth yielded the information that there should be "space left," something of an understatement since I think there were fewer than 20 of us in the class, but I was still pretty happy to have been included. The class itself was just exactly what I was looking for. I didn't have to feel afraid since my professor was the one teaching, and since many of the people there were beginners, I didn't have to feel self-conscious (any more than I usually do, anyway) or intimidated.

It felt good to use my body again. I am stiff and tight as I knew I would be. I don't know how long it will take all the old rags and bones to limber up again, but since one of my main goals for this is flexibility (along with stress relief), I'm willing to be patient and work on it. Just the doing of it, no matter whether or not I am ever any good at it or not, is a victory for me.

George Orwell Quote

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

Silver Anniversary

This year marks 25 years of playing a keyboard instrument for me. I had that odd realization recently. It's hard to believe that much time has gone by since I was a small child struggling with my Brownie book and getting shaped erasers for a weekly lesson well-played.

Music is such an ingrained part of my life that I can hardly remember a time when I wasn't playing. I began taking lessons in first grade, and I can still recall walking down the cracked sidewalks carrying my music books to the tiny room in the gym that housed the piano. Later on, I started taking lessons from the lady who was the organist at our church, and she taught me to play the organ as well. Now, I play the organ much more than the piano as the night organist for my church.

The playing gives me so much pleasure, but I don't really have any gift for it. It sounds okay when I play, but the sort of dedication and art necessary to take the playing from performance to power have always been beyond me. I have a friend who has that power, and to hear him play (on the rare occasions our two spheres cross anymore) is to hear what is possible, what should be.

As I look forward toward the future, I will continue to enjoy what I can do in my small way and continue to appreciate the greater gifts of those who have been blessed with them. I am grateful for the richness music has added to these 25 years.

No Cancer

I got the results from my biopsy, and I'm free of cancer. The telling of it was simple. The aftermath of it was odd. Once the results were told, my doctor started talking to me about options for my future. Most of them were serious, intense, and life-changing. Since I'm not ready to have a baby right now and by myself, the most extreme changes are not going to happen. I can't say I didn't think about it. I just don't feel that's what I'm supposed to do right now.

It's a relief to know that I'm, well, I don't guess I can say healthy, but at least not fighting cancer. Everything else I can fight and endure. It was a good feeling, disturbing conversations about motherhood aside.