Innocent times
In those days when kids ate candy dots, assassination was unthinkable
Beauty shot
Last week, I laid a lot of yellow photos on you. Here is a straggler, a bike rack outside my local Don Pedro drive-in. I’ve never seen a bicycle anywhere near it.
Check in
Gratitude
I hope you will take time on Thanksgiving to reflect on what you are grateful for.
Amy Cowen, who creates Illustrated Life on Substack, posted some fine thoughts about the practice last week.
I hope you are thinking about gratitude, looking for gratitude, writing down the this’s and that’s each day, folding each gratitude or rolling it into a tiny scroll and slipping it into a jar. Or maybe you have the perfect ceramic bowl. Maybe you are folding each one into a crane. Or into a paper airplane. Maybe you have fortune cookies, and you are carefully sliding each slip of paper into a cookie. Maybe you are collaging a wall. Maybe you roll each one between your fingers and into thread that you wind around little spools. Maybe you are learning to spin.
As for me, I weave gratitude into the fabric of every day. When I awake, I breathe “thank you.” As I fall into sleep, I repeat “thank you.”
My heart is brimming. All that’s left is to share the gratitude. It is mine to constantly pay back in words and actions the gift of such great beauty.
I am so aware of the wonder of the world. How can I keep from singing?
Winter comes to Oregon
This is an essay I wrote for myself, after a drive downstate many years ago.
In the country, the fields wear November colors. No more the rich brown and dazzling emerald of spring planting; now they are yellow as a mustang’s hide. A few rare spots are improbably green, spiky winter wheat rising as leaves fall.
The stubborn leaves that still cling are improbable colors: russet brown and garish gold with a hint of green. If you saw those colors together on a palette, you would think them unnatural.
Trees are spiny, mostly bare, crabbed and not yet comfortable with their bareness. Except, that is, for the poplars, still yellow-leaved, straight and majestic.
A low mist hovers, so ephemeral it is more like a smudge.
On the road, in the dark afternoon, there are already headlights. Sheep are round balls in a field, a fold where the land really does fold in small ravines.
The tooth of winter is bared, but the blast of its breath is forestalled. Remember the promise of that improbable green.
A pond lies under shivering trees, dead silver, like mercury. This is not a friendly day.
In the highway’s median, a few shoots of barely green grass rise, coaxed by the fall rains from the dry stalks of August. Tangles of brambles trap lifeless leaves. There is a harshness in the air, an edge of cold that is not yet familiar.
We are not ready to wear scarves. Winter is coming, the dark is rising. But we have not forgotten our summer sensibilities.
Winter calls for forgiveness, trust and community. We bind ourselves to overcome, together, the selfishness we took from summer’s sun.
Candy dots
Back around Halloween, I was thinking about penny candy. I remembered one type in particular: strips of white paper, like adding machine tape, covered with little pastel sugary dots.
You could buy these at the corner store, the paper open to the elements, handled by who knew. It was a different time.
So there was no way, I thought, that this candy could’ve survived
But then, at Walgreens, I found dots on paper! They came wrapped in a plastic sleeve. These particular candies, in shades of yellow, orange and red, were hot, like intense cinnamon, but they were the candy dots of yore.
The company that makes the hot candies is Life is Sweet LLC of Cincinnati. You can buy them online in various places.
You can also make your own candy buttons using royal icing, which is made with sugar and egg white and dries hard. It’s the icing you know from iced shortbread.
More about adding machine tape
Besides as an easel for candy dots, I have another use for adding machine tape: sewing 2-1/2-inch scraps end to end. This techniques is called paper-piecing, and it keeps the fabric from stretching out of shape. You tear away the paper once you sew the strip to the quilt.
I like to hand-sew the scraps to the paper. It’s a good craft to pursue while listening to audiobooks or watching TV shows that are mostly dialog.
Here is a nest of paper I pieced, and also a detail from a quilt where I added a paper-pieced border.
Kennedy
Nov. 22, 2023, next Wednesday, will be the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Tributes are planned and ongoing.
I recommend Robert Caro’s depiction of the events in The Path to Power, the fourth book in his exhaustive five-part series on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson.* Everything that happened in Dallas and in the months following is explained in incredible detail. I was transfixed.
*The fifth book in the series has not been published yet. Caro has been plugging away at it for years, nay, decades. He just turned 88.
Where were you?
Everyone in my generation remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot, much as we all recall our circumstances on Sept. 11, 2001.
I was in class at William Penn Junior High in Bloomington, Minn., getting ready to leave for an orthodonture appointment, when an announcement came over the loudspeaker. Kennedy had been shot. I didn’t know what to make of it.
I met my mom in the parking lot. She turned on the car radio. Kennedy was dead. She started to cry. That surprised me because she had not voted for the man.
Mom drove me to my appointment at the University of Minnesota dental school, where dental students worked on poor kids for free. The dentists, all Republicans, I assume, were joshing about the news. I hope it was just nerves, and that they really weren’t that crass.
Another dimension
We were innocent in those days. I mean, it never occurred to any of us that a president, or any public figure, could be assassinated. That was for men way in the past, like Lincoln, Garfield or McKinley.
In the bucolic ’50s and ’60s, aside from jitters about nuclear war, we felt safe.
Then sounded the drumbeat of political assassination: Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy. Presidents Reagan and Ford targeted. Harvey Milk and George Moscone gunned down in San Francisco. George Wallace in a wheelchair.
It got worse
Then, as the decades unfolded, came mass shootings. Young men shot their high school classmates. Shooters appeared at post offices, shopping malls and food stores, music venues and celebrations.
Finally, little kids. Sandy Hook. Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
Last month, Lewiston, Maine.
CNN reports:
There have been at least 69 school shootings in the United States so far this year, as of October 28. Twenty-four of those were on college campuses and the remaining 45 were on K-12 school grounds. The incidents have left at least 33 people dead and more than 77 injured.
And here’s the AP’s take:
The shooting in Maine’s second-largest city is the 36th mass killing in the United States this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
And it will go on. It will never, ever end. We are the captives of this tragic and macabre history.
But in 1963, when I was 13, all that was in the future.
The nation shuddered on November 22, 1963.
We were never the same again.
Writing poems for people
I pulled a trick I sometimes do at the Hillsdale Farmers Market last week. I park myself in my power chair with a sign that reads:
Let me write you a poem.
It’s free!Three people took me up on my offer. I gave each of them a poem and a piece of candy. One of them gave me a dollar.
A woman named Liz said she was having trouble understanding grief.
Grieving from afar
My friends’ friends have died. I’m sorry for them, But grief doesn’t reach me. I don’t know to grieve. Should I offer a hankie, A shoulder to cry on? How can I know What the true heart requires? Just this: I am present From moment to moment, Plucking out memories From my own crumpled past. Making a way Straight in the desert, A highway of feeling Aimed at the heart. Brimming with ardor, Placing my footfalls Straight on the pathway, I lift out my hand And pull my friends upward Warm in their embrace. See, I need my friends. In their grief I can grieve.
Susan Duncan and her mother, Elizabeth, wanted a poem about warmth.
Let’s get comfortable
Let’s get comfortable I’ll make you a quilt, Triangles and whirligigs Small pieces, surprises, Secrets woven in. Flannel for backing, Cozy for winter. Bring me some wool To spin into dreams. I love my bed, Cushioning eiderdown. Dreaming of chickens So warm in their nests. Edges and borders Dreams in the meadow. Comfort and warmth . . . My home, bring me home.
A musician named Pug wanted a poem about saving the planet.
Saving the planet
Earth’s caress Is gone missing Like rotten teeth, Leaving gaps in the gums. Boiling oceans, Dead coral reefs, Polar bears drowning. Ice melts, rivers swell. Rivers bear dead leaves, The residual of fall. Sand to the delta, It can’t matter now. Turn over in bed Let the thoughts of Earth follow. You can change and you can’t change. Earth’s heart beats regardless.
November in poetry
The Poetry Foundation website lists about 15 poems titled “November,” plus maybe 185 others with November in the title, like “November Philosophers,” by Katie Ford; “November for Beginners,” by Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate;* and “November Becomes the Sky With Suppers for the Dead,” by Gordon Henry Jr.
*Rita Dove was the subject of one of the cleverest heads ever written: “Lovely Meter Rita Made.” Alas, I did not write that one.
One November poem that’s in the public domain is by Thomas Hood (1799-1845). He liked puns and wordplay. In The Golden Treasury of Poetry, the great companion of my teenage years, Louis Untermeyer (the editor) quoted him:
I have to be a lively Hood, If I would earn my livelihood.
I can’t find that quotation on the Internet. But I like it. And there may be a lesson here: the Internet doesn’t have just everything. Or Untermeyer made it up. Not likely.
No!
By Thomas Hood
No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon—
No dawn—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing ’em—
No knowing ’em!
No traveling at all—no locomotion,
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go”—by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!
Thanksgiving recipes
This bright orange-red soup is perfect for Thanksgiving.
According to my recipe notes, I developed it in November 1999.
It’s very easy to make: Just blend roasted squash with a jar of roasted red peppers.
Use delicata squash, a tender-skinned, sweet orange squash. Don’t worry too much about the proportions; it will all work out.
Red pepper-delicata squash soup
Makes about 2 servings
Roast a medium delicata squash. Cool, then scoop out flesh. Run through a food processor or food mill with a jar of roasted red peppers, drained, and a bit of grated fresh ginger. Pour into a pan, add a cup or two of chicken broth, and heat.
Top with cream, sour cream, Mexican crema or yogurt, if desired.
If you have some roasted pumpkin seeds, sprinkle them on top. Here is my much-stained recipe for pumpkin seeds. I used to make them every fall with jack-o’-lantern innards.
Check out
Traces of other people
I find things, sometimes, in books. I think I already wrote about the 50-shekel Israeli note I found in a used copy of The View from Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg.
Last week, when I was thinking, photographing and writing about yellow, I borrowed some books from the library with “yellow” in the title.
They were an interesting bunch, including a lovely book of essays by Wesley Yang, an American of Korean descent, called The Souls of Yellow Folk. I’m working my way through that, and also To Fill a Yellow House, by Sussie Anie, in which a little boy whose folks are from Ghana navigates his new home in London, a house where many pretty ladies get fancied up and walk into the night.
In that book, I found a discarded hold slip with an interesting hyphenated name. Someone who checked this book out in January. I hope she enjoyed it. Strange how this insignificant scrap of paper makes me feel close to her, a fellow reader.
(Finding a name like that can’t happen now. To keep users private, the library has changed hold slips to include only the first four letters of the last name, in my case GARD, and the last four digits of that person’s library card number.)
Tucked into the back jacket of The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom (about her family’s home in New Orleans, which was destroyed by Katrina), I found two boarding passes for a flight from Las Vegas to Portland in March 2022. I wonder who these two women were, flying Spirit Airlines just as the covid restrictions were starting to ease.
In The Transcendental Murders, a mystery I discovered 50-plus years ago in the Tulare, Calif., public library, Jane Langston created a character who collects discarded papers from the street: gum wrappers, dry cleaning receipts, whatever. “Messages from Jesus!” she tells people. “Take them! Take them!”
Maybe these discarded slips of paper really are messages.
Now, remember
As you move through your week, you will find breadcrumbs of connection like those I’ve described here. I’m constantly amazed at how ideas and objects and experiences intersect. Who knows, maybe the woman in line ahead of me at New Seasons was on that 9:45 am flight from Las Vegas in 2022. Maybe the people I write poetry for will find in my work a new, bright connection to something they never considered before.
We are always crisscrossing one another’s existence.
Keep your antennae out and tuned. Pay attention. Soon synchronicities will overwhelm you.
Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving.
—30—
Thank you for the mention, Fran, and I am sorry I am behind in reading. So many beautiful elements here. I really love the language of the essay about the drive. "A low mist hovers, so ephemeral it is more like a smudge."
The tracking of shootings, morphing to mass shootings, through history is chilling, for sure.
Great line: "We are always crisscrossing one another’s existence."
Caro's series on LBJ is exceptional. I hope he finishes it.