Southbound on the Freeway

A tourist came in from Orbitsville,

parked in the air, and said:

The creatures of this star

are made of metal and glass.

Through the transparent parts

you can see their guts.

Their feet are round and roll on diagrams or long

measuring tapes, dark with white lines.

They have four eyes.

The two in back are red.

Sometimes you can see a five-eyed

one, with a red eye turning

on the top of his head.

He must be special—

the others respect him

and go slow

when he passes, winding

among them from behind.

They all hiss as they glide,

like inches down the marked

tapes.  Those soft shapes,

shadowy inside

the hard bodies—are they

their guts or their brains?

by May Swenson

classification:  social commentary

Excerpts from "Ulysses"

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
that loved me, and alone; on shore, 
...........
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! 
...................
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
..........................
you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. .....
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are---
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842

Guys Like That

Drive very nice cars, and from
where you sit in your dented
last-century version of the
most ordinary car in America, they

look dark-suited and neat and fast.
Guys like that look as if they are thinking
about wine and marble floors, but
really they are thinking about TiVo

and ESPN. Women think that guys
like that are different from the guys
driving the trucks that bring cattle
to slaughter, but guys like that are

planning worse things than the death
of a cow. Guys who look like that —
so clean and cool — are quietly moving
money across the border, cooking books,

making deals that leave some people
rich and some people poorer
than they were before guys like that
robbed them at the pump and on

their electricity bills, and even
now, guys like that are planning how
to divide up that little farm they just
passed, the one you used to call home.

by Joyce Sutphen. 

category:  Social Commentary

"Your Kind Will Never Understand War, Hobbit"

says your dad to me from time to time.

To which I respond:  "If more of us valued food and cheer over hoarded gold,
this would be a merrier world." (from the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

When tempers rise, your dad says "wait a minute, wait a minute, let's talk about this.
I'm not a rabbi for nothing you know..."(from the Movie Frisco Kid)

"The Stoning of the Organist" Acts 29

¹And it came to pass, when Paul was at Corinth, he and certain disciples came upon a mob that was stoning an organist.                                                                                     
                    ²And Paul said unto them, "What then hath he done unto thee that his head should be bruised?"                                            

³And the people cried with one voice, "He hath played too loud.  

⁴Yea, in the singing of psalms, he maketh our heads to ring as if they were beaten with hammers.                          

⁵Behold, he sitteth up high in the loft, and mighty are the pipes and mighty is the noise thereof, and though there be few of us below, he nonetheless playeth with all the stops, the Assyrian trumpet stop and the stop of the ram's horn and the stop that soundeth like the sawing of stone, and we cannot hear the words that cometh out of our own mouths.          

⁶He always tosseth in the variations that confuse us mightily and playeth loud and discordant and always in a militant tempo, so that we have not time to breathe as we sing.  

⁷Lo, he is a plague upon the faith and should be chastised."       

⁸Paul, hearing this, had himself picked up a small stone, and was about to cast it, but he set it down and bade the organist come forward.                                                                     

 ⁹He was a narrow man, pale of complexion, dry, flaking thin of hair.   

¹⁰And Paul said unto him, "Why hath thou so abused thy brethren?"       

¹¹And the organist replied, "I could not hear them singing from where I sat, and therefore played the louder so as to encourage them."
¹² Paul turned round to the mob and said loudly, "Let him who has never played an organ cast the first stone."                     

¹³And they cast stones for awhile until their arms were tired and Paul bade the organist repent and he did.  

¹⁴And Paul said unto him, "Thou shalt take up the flute and play it for thirty days, to cleanse thy spirit."                                             

¹⁵And afterward, they returned to Corinth and sang psalms unaccompanied and then had coffee and were refreshed in the faith.

By Garrison Keillor

Classification:  Humour

For Donna, also for the organist in our congregation who does indeed use the "Assyrian  Trumpet Stop"

Let Me Live So That When I Die, Even the Undertaker is Sorry

So let me live
That when I die
A tear will come
To every eye
In every heart
There'll be a spot
An empty place
Where I am not.
And folks will say
With grief inside:
"I sort of wish
She hadn't died."

Your Mom Learns to Cook

Once upon a time I planned to be

An artist of celebrity

A song I thought to write one day

And all the world would homage pay

I longed to write a noted book

But what I did was learn to cook.

For life with single tasks is filled

And I have not done what I willed

Yet when I see boy’s hungry eyes

I’m glad I make good apple pies

classification:  home and family

Did I ever tell you I didn't cook much when I was in my mother's home? Pasta, mostly, it seems.

In college I ate canned green beans since I shopped once a semester and mostly lived on charitable snacks from class-mates.  I learned to cook much later and set about learning the chemistry of how to actually MAKE things.  Now I am glad I did, and it pleases me very much to hear my children talk about cooking in their own households.