The two gulls spent several minutes squawking
back and forth to one another from a couple of craggy
rocks in the water. They flew off in tandem, alighting on
the air for a while, and then they gave the sidewalk
a bit of attention.

They strolled along, one behind the other,
for quite a stretch. Two old chums, it seemed.

                                                  Swept up by the sky.

Like everyone else, I have been thinking often about the picture of the New York City police officer kneeling down to help a homeless man put on a new pair of boots. I keep thinking about the man's feet, how cold and tired and sore they must have been. I think too about the officer's impulse, to go into the nearest shoe store and buy the man a warm pair of boots.  I think about the gentle approach of the officer and the way the photo came to us, a tourist taking the picture, noticing the beauty and sadness mingled in that moment. How she sent the picture to the police department and they put it up on their Facebook page without the officer knowing it. It says something, I think, that millions of people looked at the picture, liked it, shared it, tweeted it and mulled it over. I wonder where that man is now and if he is warm and safe.

I know this season is made up of thousands of such gestures, that there are Santas everywhere, young and old, finding quiet ways to give. But that moment on that bitterly cold Manhattan sidewalk will stay. 

I imagined what it would be like if one random December day everyone found a way 
to give another a pair of boots. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/nyregion/photo-of-officer-giving-boots-to-barefoot-man-warms-hearts-online.html

I pass this small scene almost every day,
two seemingly sturdy sets of stone stairs,
un-moored and fallen.

The Yale Art Gallery re-opens in full December 12th after renovations that went on for years. On Friday, much of it was open for a peek and so we peeked. All of it was worth the wait.

It made me think of those very first visionaries who thought up museums and public parks and libraries, those who said this beauty has to be shared! These acres of trees and meadows and rock, these stories and plays written hundreds of years back or just last year, this splash of color on canvas, this wooden mask, each must kept up and cared for and passed on to the next person and the next. 

Who wrapped it well in soft cloth until it ended up, somehow, here? So we could look closely and see and ponder. 

http://artgallery.yale.edu/

From The Daily Mail, August 1, 2012  
                                                  

Perhaps my favorite image of the Olympics was this one. The irrepressible Mayor of London stuck on a zipline above the gathering crowds.

Dangling there in a suit and sensible shoes, he quipped, "Get me a rope?” He called for a ladder and then he decided if was going to be there a while, he might as well root for the home team, waving the Union Jack.

Right there, Boris, the mayor, made it clear these Olympic Games weren’t going to be some kind of buttoned-up affair, more about pushing the limits athletically
and making merry. 

I miss the Olympics. The hope of them, the stories, the way the world felt those two weeks this past summer: smaller and wider and so full of  a kinder promise. 

I miss Boris. I miss the collective cheer, the new wonder.   

I miss Mary Carrillo riding around in a James Bond car 

and Missy Franklin and how she could break a world record and in the same breath seem to be saying, ‘ how fun is this, right?”  How her future held endorsement deals and probably more Olympic gold next time around but what she was really jazzed about was her senior swim season with her high school friends. 

I miss Mo Farah’s eyes. I'm not sure I'd ever seen a pair of eyes more intently focused on a finish line. Yet in  the last seconds of the 10,000 meters, he looked away to see where his friend and training partner was. He was there, behind him.  They placed first and second and, as they ran a victory lap, Mo Farah’s eyes, glittering and great, filled with tears. 

I miss Misty May Trainor and Kerri Walsh and how whenever they looked like they might falter on their way to beach volleyball gold, they flat-out refused. Before them, what I knew of volleyball was that in high school gym class the ball was always ricocheting off the wrong wall or someone else’s head, none of it pretty or easy on the forearms. Yet there I was swept up into a kind of beach volleyball mania. Those shots in sand ankle deep - how did they pull them off? Perhaps because they were a team at its most elemental, setting up shots, dusting each other off, whispering, shouting, cheering each other on, willing each other to win, in ways fierce and tender.  

And I miss Oscar Pistorius and how, as we  watched from our couches and living room chairs, he reminded us about guts and the notion that no matter what life hands us, the next day we have to rise up and move forward. Or we can  decide not to and live within `not to's’  boxy limits. 

In interview after interview he was asked how he did what he did. When he was little, he said his mother would tell him, Oscar, put on your legs, as matter of factly as she’d tell his brother to put on his shoes.

Go on.

So Oscar went on

and on

and, for those two weeks, took us with him.

It's a funny thing about holidays. I love them so, yet they remind me of

time passing and the swirling changes that life brings. I think about 

earlier Thanksgivings, that huge crowd of us around the card tables at 

my grandmother's little Cape, cousins spilling out of every corner, 

making mischief, dashing around the backyard, stealing back in for pie.

There was a soft comfort as it grew dark and our parents and grandparents and

aunts and uncles played cards and told tales and laughed and laughed 

before we were all gathered up for home. 

I think of Thanksgivings at my aunt's house, fringed by a beautiful woods. I loved how the house filled up with people and conversation, my grandma's apple pie, my aunt's spinach bread, my mother's clam dip, my father's salad, the turkey.

One Thanksgiving, it snowed and I remember dancing about in that snow for a moment and the boys - more than a dozen of them - tried to get a snowball war going with the merest dusting of snow.

We laugh now conjuring up that first turkey I made in perhaps the world's tiniest kitchen, in San Diego, calling my father 3,000 miles away for turkey tips, my mother for tips on everything else.

Then suddenly, we were the parents and the aunts and uncles and the folding tables and chairs were set up at our house and our kids and the cousins ran about, making a little merry and mayhem, in the best of traditions.

And I want it all back, those moments when our kids were little and when we were, all of those in our family who are no longer here with us. All at once I am wistful, for all of them and for each of those moments.

Yet, here is another one. The turkey's in the oven and there's cider with cinnamon sticks and nutmeg and cranberries in a big pot on the stove; the pumpkin pie is on the counter. Soon enough, the house will fill up and get loud and the kids will run around and we'll eat and talk and eat and laugh.
We'll put the coffee on and talk some more, together.

The Locks at Ponte Vecchio

When we first passed this garland of padlocks near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, I had no idea that these were part of a legend on love.

I just knew that the bridge, which has stretched across the Arno River since 1345, was as beautiful as people had said. It lasted through world wars and massive flooding. The cobblestones that led up to it felt as if the footsteps of merchants and travelers from centuries past still echoed in them. 

The sun set slowly over the bridge, golden yellow and pink turning to a dusky blue-lavender and grey. Couples lingered there and leaned in close to one another. A guitarist played and sang.

Yet it was this strand of locks that struck me most. Legend has it that if a couple placed a padlock on or near the bridge and tossed the key into the river, their bond would never be broken. 

The problem was these locks started marring the bridge and its surroundings. The keys were filling up the bottom of the river. Now, couples can be fined for placing a lock there. Yet, each time the locks are cut away, locals told us, more locks turn up, from around the world. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I think about all this says about love.

Just the other day I was looking out the window
and the sun was starting to set and it wasn't quite
4:30 p.m.

Where did those July weeks go - when the sun won't quit
'til well after 8:00 p.m., when daylight stretches on and on?
The party ends far too soon on these dark-by-dinner-time,
nearly-December nights.

Then I remember the Husky season is upon us
and almost-winter doesn't look so bad.

Bliss.

I realize now I caught this gate on a tilt, a
jaunty angle. But still, I was captured by its endless detail
and for the stories I imagined it might whisper
to Stephen King or Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling
or perhaps Walt Whitman if they'd happened
upon this New Haven sidewalk and stopped for a look.

The pale yellow lights winked on and
it's beginning to look a lot like...!

Reasons #894 and #895 on why I love New York ~
Union Square Park

One of my very favorite New York moments happened a few Decembers ago. It was a cold night, flecks of snow falling from the sky. I was walking through the city and wound up in Union Square, stopping by for hot apple cider and a look at the holiday fair. But there sitting on a short concrete former fountain was a guy with an actual portable typewriter and a homemade sign that read "Poems." The sign said they were free but donations were certainly welcome.

Turns out he was a college kid, trying to make a few bucks. Several people were in line. They told him what they wanted their poem to be about. He posed a few questions and he took a skinny strip of paper and typed the poem right there. I walked away but, curious, I returned. I waited my turn and then he asked me what I'd want the poem to be about and I said, "My husband." He asked me to describe him in one sentence, a kind of defining sentence. "He's a good man," I said. He asked for just a handful of other details. He was a poem or two behind, so he asked me to come back in 20 minutes.
When I did, there was a poem, real and true.
A poem that captured a guy he'd never met.
By then his hands were red with cold and more people were in line. I gave him $25 and I took
home that precious poem on a thin piece of light blue paper. I framed it and gave what might have been one of the best Christmas presents I've had the luck to give.

Take two/Union Square.
Last Saturday we were walking and came upon three guys in folding chairs holding up signs that said, "Advice 25 cents." Sure enough, there were people lined up. I stepped into line and posed a question to a guy named Scott. He was quite thoughtful about the question. He mulled it over. He took his time and talked it out. What he said gave me pause. "Are you a psychologist?" I asked, figuring he wasn't. No, he chuckled, he's a creative director and he showed me a bottle of juice he'd designed. The guy sitting next to him taught or went to MIT. I asked him what prompted him to set up his shingle there. He wanted to know the community more, hear what was on people's minds and offer something to them.

We walked back through the park much later in the day and he and others were still there, giving advice, piles of quarters and dimes and nickels in the cups on the ground in front of them.

A magic little box

When I got my Iphone almost two years ago, the guy selling it to me said, “I think you are the most excited person I have ever sold a phone to.” (He had been selling them for quite some time.)

“Gee willikers! Would you look at this; it’s a magic box!”

I seemed that naïve and goofy! But I didn’t care.

I was really stoked.

I still am.

This may be the second item I have owned in my life - an item that runs on some kind of power source - that I can totally rely on. (The first is our Toyota. It has 265,000 plus miles on it and it still travels  500 miles each week, most of the time willingly.)

But the car doesn’t fit in my pocket. It can’t take pictures. I can’t use it to find a new recipe for turkey stuffing or what time the next train leaves for Stamford.

It’s rare that I would say that something I bought changed my life but this has. It is unlike so many machines I've known, the fridge that froze everything on the second shelf no matter the temp, the washer that went on strike if it had to wash a couple extra towels, the computer monitor that tinged everything in a pale green and took two people to lug across a room or the computer that said “fatal error” now and then just to spice up an afternoon.  

This phone, well, it works! That’s just the very start of what makes it so fine.

I love that my photos can live on it, that they’re all here: the people I love, the places I’ve been lately, the adventures.

I can type in a few words and have so many, many questions answered; I can check a calendar, calculate a figure, search a map, read a book and flip through a half dozen newspapers and listen to music. Call, text and write family and friends. (No smoke signals? my husband always asks.)

It has a yellow legal pad that never runs out of pages and stores everything I need to write down, from the reminder to call the furnace guy to work notes, to the beginnings of a short story.  

There are the apps that let me:

Listen to lectures around the world I could never attend

Try to hit homeruns on a funny little baseball game I uploaded for one of my nephews

Play Words with Friends with friends miles away

Make a movie

Translate paragraphs into Italian

Receive a haiku daily

Play a teeny keyboard

Buy a plane ticket 

Check the weather in Chicago and Florence and Watch Hill, Rhode Island

Carry a flashlight

Look up at the stars in the sky and then hold the phone up and see

what might be hiding beyond what I can see in that deep black night,

other stars, planets and galaxies.

Magic box, indeed.

Handmade Wings

Each morning, I wake to a little gift in my inbox, a poem from Poets.org. I signed up for “A Poem a Day” a few years ago during National Poetry Month and each day a poem arrives. Sometimes, I don’t have time to read them but many days I do. Starting a morning with a poem, even for a quick minute, sets the world on a slightly different spin, a better one.

Today,  a poem arrived, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert. I remembered seeing the poem before and, after I read it, I knew why I loved it. It centers on the idea that what may look like a mistake or even a spectacular fall to the observer may not entirely be the case. Between the attempt at something and a fall or an end, there was life lived.

  

It can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16872

It begins this way:
"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly."  

 While the poem is about a marriage or relationship that did end, he focuses on some of the moments in between; beautiful moments happened  that can’t be denied or forgotten.

I never was a fan of Greek mythology. I didn’t care much about Icarus until I shared a painting and another poem with a class of mine and some of the kids starting talking about how cool it was that Icarus actually did try to fly close to the sun to see it in all its brightness. They liked how he tried to soar, even if he was using wings made of wax and feathers, even though his dad said, “Hey, fly but don’t fly close to the sun.”  Being fourteen and fifteen years old, this made utter sense to them. Wings, sun, flying, a parent saying,  “Be careful!” - of course he would fly upward toward the sun.

But then of course, he falls.

In the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Brueghel,  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruegel,_Pieter_de_Oude_-_De_val_van_icarus_-_hi_res.jpg)

a small pair of legs stick out of the water and a whole landscape, several people, animals and a traveling ship seem to pay not a whit of attention. He tried to soar; he fell and no one notices.
Still, it mattered.  I think that is the point.

We are all flying around on these handmade wings, on journeys epic and small, toward love or a new job or a creative inclination, stepping off and out toward a possibility. The falls happen, so do the mistakes. In his poem Gilbert seems to be saying ah, but the attempt! 
The chances we chase and take, they are what make life quite sad sometimes but also good and, every now and then, absolutely grand.

After I read the poem, I wanted to see if I could write to Gilbert and tell him how much I liked the poem and so many others of his, "A Brief  for the Defense" and "Horses at Midnight without a Moon." I went in search of a mailing address this morning and, sadly, I found out that Gilbert died this week at 87 after years of fighting Alzheimer's. The poem sent this morning from Poets.org was a quiet tribute.
I went back to the poem and felt cheered by the last lines, his own hurrah:
"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph."

                                                ***                                        ***

Icarus turns up in a number of other poems like:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams

I’m more intrigued by Greek mythology now, thinking about how a story travels on and on across centuries and landscapes, how a myth leads to a painting. Then a poet writes a poem about a painting about a myth.

                                       ~                                 ~                              ~

                                                         Poetry on Wednesdays

Rallying around,
in all kinds of ways.

First Snow

The snow keeps dancing down
and it's just the seventh of November.
I made some corn chowder and it's warming
on the stove. Two candles flicker;
some quiet piano drifts around the room
and a good book waits nearby on the table.
A sweet little reprieve,
a night-time snow day.


 

Hope

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
and never stops at all..."

        ~ Emily Dickinson 

Six a.m. Election Day

The signs lined the road, curving along almost  all the way
into our polling place. Despite everything people had lived
through in these neighborhoods these last many days, 
there they were just after dawn, coming to vote.
The parking lots were full.

The woman who has been signing us in the last
couple of elections was there again, using a wooden ruler to neatly
cross each name off the list.

I looked around and saw some of the same men and women
manning the polls that I remembered from five or six moves
and 20 years ago. They were still here, fueled on coffee,
making the place hum.

And then it was just each of us and our ballots,
one name, one vote.

On the way out, more of the familiar:
a woman passing out the "I voted" stickers, the high school
band members and band moms and dads selling hot coffee and
oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, a candidate standing in the
frosty air as more people made their way in, shaking hands.

I thought of the people all over the country
doing this very same thing and I wondered what the
night would bring.

November 5th. I have always had a great affection for this date.

My sister arrived on November 5, barnstorming her way into the world,

the very thick of things and my heart. 

An irrepressible force of nature, 

of  good 

and utterly good fun.

I was six-and-a-half years old that lucky day.

Every minute she’s been here

the world’s been right. 

After what seems like the longest election season in my lifetime
and certainly the harshest, election day is finally upon us.
As I was thinking about Tuesday, November 6,
I happened upon this picture taken earlier this year and went
in search of Gandhi's wise words. I found these:

"A small body of determined spirits
fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter
the course of history."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

I hope and I wonder.

I search for color as the trees and bushes and
garden plots grow bare.

A thousand paper cranes and a wish for all those
who have spent four days and nights in the dark
and for all of those who have lost what they loved.