Growing up on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, I never knew my mom, but I was fortunate to be raised by my dad. He considered himself a bit of an engineering genius. He worked at Jiffy Lube until I was six when he was fired for his inebriated candid conversation about the tricks of the trade ripping off customers to a undercover local news team of investigative reporters from the reservation’s two-year college annex media program.

After that, being a Native American, he collected his welfare checks from the government which generously surpassed what he was making actually holding a job. He felt his time could be more effectively used to develop his engineering skills when he wasn’t drunk or passed out for days at a time. One of the crowning achievements was the iCheese Radio that he hoped to sell one day. Much like a potato, he was able to power a radio from a block of government cheese. He tried other cheeses, but he only had success with the government cheeses that were issued to him every other Thursday.

He died shortly after that during a microwave Cheeze Wiz accident that destroyed our trailer.

It’s Monday…go out and invent something…

Garfield
by Jim Davis

[h/t for a heads-up from friend Jayr...]

cicada
Yun Feng
Hand painted, rice paper

The weekend is more than welcome after the past few days. Family visiting from upstate, maybe fire up the jets on the grill and muddle up a couple of mojitos before dinner. Spring has settled in but not without a fight trying to get in the door. Time to celebrate the peace…

Where will you be reading this weekend?

- Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
 via A Sea of Quotes

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease
each pink pale section out of its case
so carefully without breaking
a single pearly cell
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Still Life With Tangerines and Crock
by Elizabeth Floyd

Wandering the stacks over at the local lending library, I always look first into Dewey’s essay and poetry sections. Serendipity led me to The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine.

Arnold’s poem above was the first  turned to. I immediately also thought of Elizabeth Floyd, an artist I’ve been following for several months. Seemed like a perfect pairing. Go see and read. Not a bad way to start the morning…

photo via Alex Belth and Bronx Banter

Stayed low and outside this week – life its ownself taking precedence. But good weather coming up for the weekend and time to get back out into the garden.

Got two books ready to go – To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate and Catching Cancer by Claudia Cornwall.

Lopate is an accomplished essayist and story teller and in this book, he gives us a bit of insight while acting as a tour guide into the craft. Doesn’t hurt that I’m also a fan of his brother Leonard’s show on NPR.

Cornwall’s book provides yet another view of the causes of cancer and details the research and frustrations of the scientists chasing this elusive disease. Even as a cancer survivor, once past the horror of what cancer does, it’s a disease that I constantly chase with my curiosity. This is on top of the various TED Talks I’ve been watching including the perspectives of approach and prevention with David Agus in his talk, A New Strategy in the War on Cancer.

Good weather, good books, and a lawn mower that finally starts. It’s a weekend that was worth waiting for…

He can afford to retire, but that would mean his customers, many of whom have been with him for decades, might have to resort to store-bought seltzer.

“I don’t want them to have to drink that dreck you buy in the supermarket,”

Mr. Miller said that when he began delivering, on March 10, 1960, there were perhaps 500 seltzer men in the city, and a half-dozen seltzer bottlers. Now he can count his delivery competition on one hand…

- As Old As the Bottles, New York Times, 4/26/2013

Eli Miller, 79, who has been delivering seltzer for more than 50 years.
photo by Dave Sanders for The New York Times

My grandfather was a seltzer man.

The story I carry in my head is that he left Poland when my grandmother was pregnant with my father. He found work but it took him years to earn enough money to bring her and her then two children, my oldest uncle and my father, over from the old country. My father finally met his father when he was seven years old.

I only have spare memories of my grandfather. He passed away when I was four years old. I never saw him in his work clothes but I always remember looking up at him from the squeakng wooden treads of the stairs when we visited, always in a tie and wire frame spectacles, with a welcoming smile as we rose up the staircase.

The first thing he would do when we arrived was make me a cherry soda, spooning thick red syrup into a clean jelly glass, then shpritzing in seltzer from an old blue bottle. I can still hear the bright sound of the seltzer hitting the sides of the tumbler and the tinking of the spoon as he mixed it in.

My grandmother lived nearly 30 years longer. But she always had a seltzer bottle in her refrigerator. Never the bottle from the supermarket. Only maybe a little ginger ale. That my grandfather also carried up the stairs.

If animals nurture their own (which they do) and care about their kin (they do that too) why would we not assume they mourn their dead?

In all animal research there is the ever-present risk of anthropomorphism. We refract their behavior through the prism of our own because that’s what we know best. But here it makes sense. All of the beasts — humans included — exist on a sort of continuum of intelligence, emotion and social complexity. Just because we’re at the top of that heap, doesn’t mean that the beasts below us don’t have experiences to ours — even if they’re briefer, blunter, simpler. Animals are social creatures and they’re also sentient creatures. The pain of death is likely not something they’re spared.

Orion
Vacaville CA, 2011
photo © Charlotte Dumas

Additional photos by Dumas and a larger article excerpt here…or click on photo above…

Homem lê o jornal, sentado num candeeiro público, enquanto
uma revolução acontece debaixo dele.
(Eng. Man reading newspaper, sitting on a public lamp,
while a revolution happens beneath him.)
photo by Carlos Gil
Image via Awesome People Reading

I’ll be wandering from room to room with a copy of After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey. Came across the review in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, which I don’t ordinarily read, but the subtitle “A Son’s Story” caught my eye. I’m always interested in son-for-father searches.

I was a bit put off by the description of Hainey’s style as “ nubby prose, favoring nouns over verbs…absurdly terse…other parts are packed.” But after a few paragraphs, I realized his style and cadence were exactly like mine.

You find friends in the strangest places…