I'm Working On The Poem For This Weekend Now

And naturally, it has to include references to Columbus Day (in the USA, observed today the second Monday of October but traditionally the twelfth of October, for it's that day in the year 1492 that land was first sighted by a member of Columbus' expedition). I know, the story's a lot more complicated than that, but in my defense I say that – being in my early forties right now – I do not remember Columbus Day when I was in school coming with a lot of guilt or necessarily a lot of backstory. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” . . . which is both good and bad, when you stop to think about it. Which let me admit is not much.

Columbus discovered America!
at least when I was a kid, it was safe

to say that … but now he and
     his expeditionary
successors are accused on every side

It was a bummer that our niece Breanna had to spend her eighteenth birthday in the hospital, but that is where Martha, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I visited her Sunday afternoon after we'd gotten home from church where I taught the first lesson of our new rotation, the story of David and Goliath, to a class of fourth and fifth graders (and learned, like I didn't already know, that sometimes a plan that looks so good on paper flaps like a fish in my pan, especially when some of the kids are on a sugar high – do their parents truly not think of this?) and also got my family a Papa Murphy's take-and-bake bacon cheeseburger pizza, cheesy bread, and s'mores dessert pizza. Serves us for three meals ;)

OF every -cide (so far save regicide,

I think) and the right of God-created
men women children to live and not fear
offending, effendi, or offend
Thee. Flash forward five centuries, one score

Also, yesterday, was the seventh anniversary of my father's death, so the thirteenth of October is a mite bittersweet for me. My father Robert Alvin would have been eighty-seven years old, and I keep saying to myself I need to remember him, I need to remember him … but it's hard. Now that I'm a father myself, I'm beginning to understand some of the pride and frustrations that comes with what Sarah and Jeffrey do that's great and, eh, not so great. Of course, that is the story of civilization, isn't it? The great and the not so great, the judgments and the sentences, the progress and the congress – and if you get the pun in that, then YES there is hope for you!

and one more – we look at yet another

federal government shutdown, and in
fact a power play, no more petulant
than Claudius' day.

I'll bring out more poem tomorrow, David