Elinor Nauen

How does my friend the flight attendant go back & forth to Europe, South America, or Africa every week, & I am laid up for 2 days if I go uptown? 

Headed back to NYC in a little while. Steve wrapped plastic bags around my shoes so I could make it through the SC swamp. I think this week of lounging & laughing has reassembled me enough to face the future...

Wayne warned me not to crush the stinkbug. 

Of course I'm not going to crush anything! I love all of god's creatures. Also, I'm afraid of god's creatures. 

The dogs, Ernie & Bert, run, eat, nap, run, eat, sleep. My life here is almost as simple: Read, eat pie, nap, read, marvel at my luck in being here. The first time I visited Steve on this same land, I was 19 & in South Carolina for the first time. I floated on the lake & for a minute felt so happy that I believed if I had drowned right then I wouldn't have minded. I'm glad I didn't & especially glad that I have had the last 50+ years of friendship & getting to visit here. I still feel happy enough here to die, although I still don't want to. I don't seem to have thought of better criteria or maybe it just means this is the place where I don't die but breathe freely, revel, feel surrounded by sky, plants, & most of all love.

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.
~ Harry Truman

I don't understand why the short way takes just as long as the long way. Maybe we took the short long way & not the long short way? Forrister was thriving & his dog & I fell in love. She lay on me. But Forrister, lying on you is like lying on the floor, whereas I'm a soft sofa. The mountains are always beautiful even with the fall colors and a lot of trees gone. 

Beyond happy to be in one of the places I love most in the world, with some of the people I love most in the world, who welcome me without reservation (although I do let them know I'm coming because I need to get picked up at the airport). Every minute here makes me feel better about the world. 

I am sitting on the deck absorbing the beauty of the years of mindful gardening. 

I am shaking out the towels for stinkbugs. 

I am breathing. 

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus. ~ Turskish proverb (unverified)

It's bracing to read the many thoughtful comments I've been seeing since Tuesday. It doesn't make it any easier to accept or absorb, but right now feeling none of us is alone in our horror/grief/shock/sorrow/fury is helpful. 

And in a few minutes I'm off for a week of R&R. I may not post regularly but if I do it'll be some stunning natural beauty. 

Sexism... racism... mis/disinformation... Putin... Musk... the failure of imagination that people could prefer a senile rapist to anybody. I know there'll be a ton of Monday morning quarterbacking & I'll eventually read some of it. My heart aches for the generation of my grandchildren. 

Didn't sleep, no more to say & tomorrow I'm off for a week's R&R in the Carolinas. May miss a day here & there. 

Anything encouraging to remind me? 

Everyone is so nervous that my plan to sleep until tomorrow night is not going to work. 

No predictions, no despair. 

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
~ Rose Macaulay

My motto!

I did it. I fell in love again. They're siblings, & cute as kittens when they cock their heads at the same angle. They look at me. They are interested. They can almost fly so I suppose I'll lose them again, but maybe they won't be murdered like the last pigeons I loved. No surprise that I ran out to vote on Thursday when the special one-day-only voter sticker was a pigeon trick-or-treating. 

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation."

~ Stephen Crane

He was my favorite poet in high school, probably my first favorite poet. I planned to get married on his November 1 birthday, though as it turns out I didn't.

Crane was an unusual predeliction for a teen, I think now, & while I am still a fan, I'm not sure what was so compelling to me then. Perhaps the directness of his language, something I still appreciate & aim for in my own work. Or the irony? 

I usually vote on Election Day ~ I love the lines, the excitement, the community ~ but when I saw these stickers I made an exception & rushed over. I am a little sorry that I can't anticipate voting because of having voted. Gosh, I hope it's not the last time I ever will get to.

Vote, my friends! 

This is a new low... Johnny & I have somehow mislaid a painting from our house. I have a photo the wall with painting from last year & now it's not there. The Johnny Stanton Art Lending Library has no record of who might have it. There are only 2 patrons & they both say no but I have my suspicions. He knows it's my favorite painting so would he have let go of it without saying anything? Where is it??????????

There's other stuff going on, possibly even dumber. Usually I tell but I am hoping for resolution & then it will dwindle to silence.

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

~ Alexandra Petri, in the October 26 Washington Post, following the announcement that the newspaper's owner quashed the paper's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Well worth tracking down the whole brilliant piece.

Many people have reacted by canceling their subscriptions. I see their point, of course, but that further hurts journalists & journalism ~ better to cancel Amazon Prime or your Whole Foods habit. Do the inconvenient rather than the performative thing. 

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

~ Edith Wharton

Getting this tattooed on my....

I had marveled that she was still alive & in fact she made it to 97. I first heard her a few years ago when I found her version of "I know where I'm going" (from a wonderful Archers movie of the same name, with a young Wendy Hiller). She sang with the Chambers Brothers & I learned that she was one of the few white singers who performed with black blues musicians in the 1950s & 60s. She stuck to her radical guns her entire life. No tricks in her voice but it came right at you. The same conviction in her songs as in her politics.

So youth pastor & "Christian" musician Zach Radcliff, of Michigan (Washtenaw County, which includes Ann Arbor), known to say hideous things about lesbians, gays, & the like, was arrested for 10 years worth of child sex abuse. Hey buddy, clean up your own disgusting self before you have an opinion on anyone else. His father is the pastor of the church & spews his own ugly sentiments.

These kinds of crimes are so common that it's almost not worth commenting on them. Who ARE these hypocrites? Why are they so often wearing MAGA hats?

Jeg elsker norsk og norsklæreren min. Hun er tålmodig, oppmuntrende og morsom. I dag var min første privattime. Hun hadde utviklet en god timeplan for meg. Jeg kan nesten norsk. Jeg skal snakke norsk!

Why would it be hoarding if I had thousands of shoes or socks or plates or sad-eyed Keanes but not books? Is it hoarding to have more than a functional number of friends? Obviously not. Books are as various & necessary ~ the friend you see once a year to go to the opera, the same-time-next-year baseball game goer, the friend you talk to every day, the friend you call to share good news, the one you commiserate with about relationships. You can have books, like friends, for any or all occasions. 

And even though I own more books than I can ever read, I buy or check out more all the time. I wouldn't buy a pair of shoes I didn't intend to wear, but I buy books all the time knowing I'll never open them. If that's any equivalence to a gambling (say) addiction, I totally get it. It's the moment of acquisition, the rush of the bet/purchase. What comes after is a different emotion entirely. 

And yet, if I had to, I would walk away from (almost all of) my books. I have them because I can, because I don't have to walk away (yet). 

A home without books is a home without laughter, without love, without curiosity, without friendship. 

I do try to keep them on the shelves & not spilling over to the floor or chairs. It might be time for a wee purge to get back to that status. Sigh.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind.

~ Marcel Proust

If this doesn't cheer you up, you have a heart of stone. 

As Oscar Wilde said, One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

I forgot to say I'd be off Thursday & Friday for the holidays. Next Thursday & Friday too. Ate outdoors in a hut half-open to the sky to remind myself of the impermanence & fragility of this life. It's a perfect fall day. That's enough for now. 

My neighbor, Jojo, modeling a lobster Halloween hat for cats. Originally worn by Buster of blessed memory. 

Would the cats eat Halloween pumpkins? The mellocreme kind not the farm-raised vegetable. 

Not by me! I'm in love with this poem. 

Prayer (I)

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. 

~ Claude Debussy

Still trying to come up with something to say about this. I agree ~ & don't. Sometimes starting with rules opens up the work enough to become art. I don't think he's saying the opposite of that. 

Bomb threat & my synagogue was evacuated. Back in after a thorough search. 

Why not just set a bomb & take off? Why the warning? To sow terror but not cause mayhem? 

Nonetheless, I feel cleansed.

Fighting a cold isn't the best way to get in the spirit of the last of the days of awe, when our fate (written on Rosh Hashanah) will be sealed. Certainly not able to explain why the symbolism & centuries of pondering by great thinkers makes me want to be part of this profound day.

Going back to sleep in the hopes that I can stagger to the synagogue for Kol Nidre. 

See ya on the other side... 

A friend who uses a wheelchair asked me to go with her while she picked up her new one & then drive the old one back to her place. Sure! I'm a driver, I can drive a wheelchair, I figured.

It isn't that hard, once you get the hang of the joystick & the way it can do tight turns. I wasn't ready to maneuver onto the bus so we went the whole way in the streets: narrow sidewalks, broken curbs, cars & pedestrians blocking our path. It was nervewracking. I went bamming through puddles before I learned that my little motor could get me up to the sidewalk without needing a running start. I understand a wheelchair makes it easier for people who have mobility issues, but boy, don't be in any rush. 

The highlight was when I was leaving my friend's building after parking the second chair. She told me the doorman would probably be puzzled, so as I walked out & he was doing a discreet doubletake, I threw up my hands & said, It's a miracle! Oh, did he laugh! That was fucking awesome, he said, excuse my language. It WAS fucking awesome, I said, & he laughed harder. You got me good, he said. 

P.s. If you are interested in donating to a very worthy organization, Free Wheelchair Mission makes & sends simple, sturdy, "off-road" wheelchairs to people in dozens of developing countries, making it possible for them to go to school, work, & maintain family ties. 

P.s. I'm exhausted!

It's too awful to think of the storm so Ii turned to the poet: 

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.

It's kind of unreal to have two storms like Helene & Milton hit less than two weeks apart. I don't get how so many people in Florida still can't see climate change in what's going on. And will be begging the government for help while rejecting its legitimacy.