Laura Young Photography

Worth Leaving My House For

Ooh, I'd even lay down $7 for a latte and fruit cup for lunch today and not flinch. When I first read Barbara Barrows statement that she is influenced by Mary Oliver, I almost had an attitude when I went to hear her at Waterline Writers last month. Too many times I have heard people say they were influenced by icons and then present absolute crap. I have, at such times fantasized that I was Samuel L. Jackson, ripping the pages out of the reader's hand, and saying, ala Unbreakable, "No No No No No."

But then Barbara read.

And I fell in love.

Waterline posted her reading one of my favorites of her selections here. And I am going to the most lovely little town of Geneva today to have lunch with her.

My life is awesome.

Every Color of the Rainbow.

Wow.

Destined for a Unibrow

Yeah, I was a hairy baby. My first day home...

A Random Find

Where Oh Where Has Our PK Gone?

Oh where oh where can it beeeeee?

 

Come on, Blackhawks, stop playing around, we know you're in there somewhere...

Squid Eyes

I watched on television last night how they have now probed the eye of a colossal squid (not shown). The men were very excited. All I could think was how ridiculous it was that anyone could come away believing that they might know anything about how that squid actually saw—how it interpreted the world it inhabited. The may have completely nailed the science. They may understand in exquisite detail how the squid neurons connect and what they respond to but no human will ever have a squid mind. No matter how hard we try, we will always interpret squid sight through a human psyche.

And that is where science and art diverge. It isn’t the perception but the subtle interpretations that will always elude us, ever so slightly, even from one human to another. If I died today, and someone were given my eyes, would they love watching the falling of golden leaves in the Autumn the way I do?

But even more importantly, will I have ever appreciated my eyes they way they would?

Red-Winged Blackbirds are Calling

I can hear the red-winged blackbirds calling and that tells me Spring has come and soon school will be out for the Summer.

It’s so funny how some feelings never leave you. I can still recall being in my classroom at St. Mary of the Lake on an overcast day, the kind of day where you can feel the thunderclouds gathering long before they arrive. The teacher cracked the window open, the first fresh air that classroom had contained in months. That’s when I heard them, the red-winged blackbirds.

They nested in the Dunes in the place we called “The Valley” at the end of our street (depicted here by a bad cell phone pic). It was a small patch of sand dunes that formed a bowl, Lake Michigan to the North, the lagoon to the South, Marquette Park to the East and my neighborhood to the West. At the  bottom of the depression was a marshy area that captivated me for untold hours as a child.

It absolutely teemed with life. Frogs, toads, even a muskrat. I still remember my neighbor Sue and I walking in the shallow water when it still had a thin layer of ice on it. Suddenly Sue looked down, “What is this against my leg?”

I looked over and examined the brown hues beneath the ice and said, “A log.”

“With feet?!”

We grabbed a large stick and tried to lift the legged driftwood up, breaking it though the ice only to find two bright eyes blinking at us before the muskrat regained his senses and scampered away.

I never did understand how he was so still against Sue’s leg. The only thing I can imagine is that he misjudged something under the ice and was running out of air but he certainly revived after our little escapade.

But back to the birds…they nested in the grasses and small bushes that rimmed the tiny patch of water at the bottom of the Valley’s bowl and persisted in dive bombing us at every opportunity even though we didn’t have the least interest in their nests. I never recall even be tempted to look in one. Mostely we hunted for frogs and did an awful lot of ducking as the birds scolded us nonstop.

I always took their calls as a sign that the frogs had returned to the bog and soon the muskrat pups would be playing on the shore and that I should return now, too. That it was time to go back home, to the river, where I belonged.

Money Man

So I’m here at Caribou and there is this man sitting at the table  in his suit and he’s intently studying the money page of the Trib and I can see  it so clearly.  He’s looking at numbers and graphs and lines going up and lines going down and it means something  to him.  It’s telling him something and I see he has this relationship with this money and the paper is telling him something about how the relationship is going.  Is he winning? Is he losing?  Does it love him? Is he safe? What is the score?

He’s intent and studying and I see how narrow his focus is.  It’s just him and the paper and the money.  Numbers going up and down, in and out and he’s a little out of shape, with a little belly to him and his face is kind, I think, if a bit nondescript and he looks at me and I can’t help but looking at him and I wonder if he understands that those numbers aren’t really the point of it all.  The numbers aren’t what is going to make him real. 

I wonder what is real to him.

I wonder if anyone else will look at him today.