Life's Little Ironies

93:4

Seven years ago...

Interesting times.
By his strips we are heald, read the board held
Ironically, by a pig who would bake.
Day two of our visiting my mom
Owed me only, I heard, a good night of sleep.
Praise for land in the center of the world
Come, don't come, can't come oft enough to knead
In rows the corn mom feared to eat, for us.
To Shane on his thirty-seventh birthday.
To help three people go direct, unseen
Yet for twenty years. Half the wilderness
Revels plenty. Let's go in the garden
And we'll listen to the flowers sing. Ear
Now, closer to the bedside we will meet
Neil with Ginger, the hound Jeffrey found-find
Yahweh's Servant, to interpretation.
When you need me and don't want me
                  I will stay.
When you want me and don't need me
                  I will go.
How's THAT for a metaphysical paradox?


Strictly speaking, this ISN'T a journal entry of mine. It is my poetic rendering of a day from our family vacation spent visiting my mom and her family in Kentucky in 2010; I was taking notes throughout the trip of things we saw and did and people we met with and tied this in to the Minor Prophets, the last twelve books of the Old Testament. My first book of poetry comes in twelve parts because of that, Obadiah being the fourth book into the Minor Prophets, and it's called nor long remember (ISBN 9781475103380) not only for the line from the Gettysburg Address but also because it's something I want to remember. I'll leave people guessing for years what I really mean!


And you can also order the whole poem online wherever books are sold!


But most of it's pretty straightforward ... I did see a ceramic pig dressed as a chef holding the board with those words I say in line 2, and my mom did freak out when we went to see her in the nursing home that day and wouldn't touch the corn she was served in line 8, and it was my cousin Shane's thirty-seventh birthday that day in line 9, which makes him forty-four today. One of the kids (or was it Mom?) said "Let's go in the garden/And we'll listen to the flowers sing." in lines 12 and 13, Ginger was the hound that came up to Jeffrey in the hallway which we brought back to Neil in lines 14 and 15, and the Hebrew name Obadiah means "Yahweh's Servant" in line 16, and then I end with what I called the "metaphysical paradox" from Nanny McPhee in lines 17 through 21.


Oh, I start a new job with Trinity Health on the third of July!


And this poem -- or at least this part of the poem, depending how you're reading it -- has twenty-one lines for the book of Obadiah has twenty-one verses. And no pictures, at least not contemporary ones. By the time LIFE Magazine debuted as a weekly newsmagazine from 1936 to 1972, practically anybody with a camera could capture the moment as it was the moment. My brain's freezing on where I got 1973's collection The Best of LIFE (ISBN 0809417006) a few weeks ago, but I had to bring it to work because Martha was starting to choke on the dust when I opened it. Which is OK with me -- for me to bring a book to work, that is, not Martha or any of my household choking on anything that interests me.


I'll be working in Materials Management as a warehouse assistant.


One thing I forgot to mention about Tuesday; Minot where I live had its first city council elections under a new structure. Last year we voted on reducing the size of Minot's city council from fourteen people to six, and we had a ballot of nine candidates to choose from for thise six positions. There had been early elections the previous week and I went to vote when I had some free time Friday afternoon ... it is weird to walk into a polling place and besides the poll workers being THE ONLY PERSON in the room! Still an even number of councilors (not counselors, though they may soon need some themselves) and now in the event of a tie on any matter they vote on, the mayor breaks the tie with his own vote. America's Got Talent could learn something from this. 


If two say yea and two say nay, it seems unfair to not have to break the tie with another person's vote.

But I digress. The Dover Thrift edition of H. G. Wells's third novel, 1896's The Island of Dr. Moreau (ISBN 9780486290270; his third novel after The Time Machine and The Wonderful Visit) reads well enough, and in the decades before anyone knew anything about DNA and genetic engineering the primary method of grafting the characteristics of one animal onto another was considered vivisection. Not for the squeamish, and I'd forgotten where the narrator Prendick at first thought Moreau was turning animals into humans and not the other way around. "...presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale." When I was younger and read that in an illustrated version of this story, that stuck. Now?


With 93 hours and 4 minutes left at Fast Cash?


David