National Library Week

April 11-17 is National Library Week! If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you've probably caught on that I love libraries. When I'm happy I go to the library and feel happier and when I'm sad I go and feel better. How can you not feel better? Surrounded by all those books. And they're free! You can check them out, bring them home with you and spend as long as you want (ok, three weeks, longer if there's no hold!), curled up reading, getting lost in another world, learning something new or just admiring the big stack on your living room floor.

Yeah that's where mine usually sit. I wonder where other people keep their library books? I like to have them close by so I can pick up one and read whenever I feel like it. I have books all over but usually the library books stay in the living room. It may not be much decor-wise but it makes me happy.Also it's easier to find them when they are due!

The biggest library I've been in is The British Library. I could gladly have stayed there forever and I left part of my heart behind when I left. Probably the smallest is the Niles Branch in Alameda County. And, in all honesty, I left part of my heart there also. I do every time I leave a library. And every time I close a book. I love books and I love to read. It's just such a magical thing to be able to pick up a book and read it.

Yesterday I read The Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Curled up on the couch with my cats and reading a book. I can't think of a better way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. I actually had this book, I'd bought it quite awhile ago but hadn't got around to reading it yet. But if I hadn't owned it I could have gone to the library and borrowed it.

When I have money I buy a lot of books but I still go to the library. I'm always surprised when someone tells me they don't go to libraries. How can you possibly read everything you want if you don't? You can find what you didn't know you needed by browsing the books! Even if I were wealthy someday (not very likely to happen!), I'd still go to the library. It would be impossible for me to ever buy all the books I want. And often there are books that I read that I don't want to keep. It's nice to be able to borrow, read and then return them.

This turned into something of a rambling post. My point with all this is to say Use Your Library! Support Libraries! And be thankful that they are available!

Musical Monday

Silent Sunday

Poems, poems, poems

This is the first poem by Ellen Bass that I've read and I really liked it. Check her web site to read a couple more if you'd like. They are very good.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

Said I'd post every day. . .

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

from The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

Seriously this is true. I haven't had a good April for at least 20 years. This month is definitely no exception. I was going to skip posting today but I really want to keep to my commitment of posting everyday. That means you're stuck listening to my boring tale because I'm still too miserable to think of anything else to post.

This has just been an awful week and the bad part is that probably 90% of it is my own fault. Oh fine I guess I should be honest - 100% of it is definitely my fault. I have done some massively stupid things in my life but I did two stupid things this week that make everything else I've done look smart. Sorry to be vague but they aren't really things I can post. I'm just bemoaning my stupidity and hoping I've learned from it. It makes me think of this quote: Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. - Franklin P. Jones

Unfortunately I recognized both as mistakes even before following through. You'd think someone my age - well you can finish the sentence I guess.So today is April 9th. I don't know, maybe the month can be salvaged but I'm not hopeful.

Next year I'm going to skip April. I'm not sure how but I have a year to figure something out.

Birds

I'm a little worried. I've been watching birds outside my window lately and wondering what kind they were. Last week I got a field guide to birds from the library so I could figure out what I was looking at. I don't know about the rest of you but my image of a birdwatcher is of someone about 70, kind of geeky and boring who goes around peering into a book or looking at the sky all the time. Oops aside from the age I guess that is me.

Seriously though I'm not mocking bird watchers! It's pretty interesting watching the birds but everytime I see one by the time I grab my camera and/or book the bird is gone. I think these are two that I've seen outside my window - a bluebird and a robin. I'm studying the book so that hopefully I'll eventually be able to identify them without having to page through the guide. I guess this is my newest hobby - birdwatching. Maybe I am old. At least it's something I can share with my cats!

Another poem

Don't forget April is National Poetry Month. Read a poem. Read two poems. You can start here. Today's poem is by Tony Hoagland. I particularly like these lines: you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D./in sensitivity.

When I was working in Berkeley a number of years ago, I used Merry Christmas in something I wrote for employee distribution. My boss said to me, "This is Berkeley darling, we say Happy Holidays." Indeed.


Here In Berkeley

the jogger with the Rastafarian sweats
runs past the mechanic reading Marx on lunch break
with a sprout sandwich for a bookmark
as the sunlight through a bottle of Perrier
wobbles little rainbows on his knee.

On the corner, someone wearing I Ching earrings
is talking about personal space,
how she just can’t take it anymore,
the way that Marcia’s codependency
defeats her own empowerment.
“The whole seminar is out of whack,” she says,
slapping a bouquet of daisies on her knee.

Close your eyes,
swing a baguette horizontally,
you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D.
in sensitivity,
someone who,
if not a therapist himself,
will offer you the number of his therapist,

which—it may take you years
to figure out—is a hostile act on his part
designed to send you on a wild-goose chase
through the orchard of your childhood
to fetch the tarnished apple of your mother’s love.

And if you don’t like it,
there might be something
wrong with you. You might be so
reincarnationally headed
in the wrong direction,
that you can’t hear the music hovering
above this zone of crystal vendors
and karmic mountaineers.

Now the traffic lights harmonically converge:
the traffic flows
past the bakeries and bookstores,
past the cappuccino depot and the acupuncture center.

No matter how you feel, you have to act
like you are very popular with yourself;
very relaxed and purposeful,
very unconfused
and not
like you are walking through the sunshine
singing
in chains.