Common Scents

Yesterday we ran into the man who used to be the gardener at Oak Hill cemetery and when he greeted Lily his cologne rubbed onto Lily's head and neck. When I went back to my desk, I was so distracted by Lily wearing his scent that I took her to the muddy park puddle knowing she would lounge in the stinky swamp water! I preferred that scent to cologne. When we got home I hosed her off.

Goodbye to the Old Life

by Wesley McNair

Goodbye to the old life,
to the sadness of rooms
where my family slept as I sat

late at night on my island
of light among papers.
Goodbye to the papers

and to the school for the rich
where I drove them, dressed up
in a tie to declare who I was.

Goodbye to all the ties
and to the life I lost
by declaring, and a fond goodbye

to the two junk cars that lurched
and banged through the campus
making sure I would never fit in.

Goodbye to the finest campus
money could buy, and one
final goodbye to the paycheck

that was always gone
before it got home.
Farewell to the home,

and a heartfelt goodbye
to all the tenants who rented
the upstairs apartment,

particularly Mrs. Doucette,
whose washer overflowed
down the walls of our bathroom

every other week, and Mr. Green,
determined in spite of the evidence
to learn the electric guitar.

And to you there, the young man
on the roof turning the antenna
and trying not to look down

on how far love has taken you,
and to the faithful wife
in the downstairs window

shouting, "That's as good
as we're going to get it,"
and to the four hopeful children

staying with the whole program
despite the rolling picture
and the snow - goodbye,

wealth and joy to us all
in the new life, goodbye!

-Wesley McNair

Mud, Apples, Milk

by Michael Walsh

Of all things to miss, it's silly
to miss how cows drowse in mud.
They blink slow as toads.
Instead I should miss
light on the blond corn
or trails of gravel dust
that rose like kites and vanished.

But I don't miss that.
I miss how I could bring
bruised apples, press them
like smelling salts
to sleepy noses.
You had to let go
real fast or risk a finger
to the lick and snap.

I miss their udders too,
the mud fresh as wax
on the swollen skin.
Each day I broke the seals
with hot rags, and milk
flooded my palm—
a white creek down
the gully of my wrist.

-Michael Walsh

Spring

Spring is always poignant because nothing stays. It must be caught and appreciated on the wing, for soon it will be gone. And with so many of my friends now in their eighties it is more poignant than usual for me this year.
-May Sarton, The House By The Sea

Creosote Cologne

Last night before bed I bent down and smooched Lily on the snout as I do every night. Her face smelled like creosote. I realized the hot weather had made the telephone poles sweat creosote, and when she approached them on yesterday's walk, sniffing eagerly, she picked up a bit of creosote cologne on her nose, giving her a most distinguished fragrance.

S Shape!

Once I was in the waiting room at Sears getting a new battery put into my car. The TV was blasting and flickering colors and motion, and I wanted to look away. It was Oprah and she had a guest named Doctor Oz. The doctor was telling women that their shit, when perfectly healthy, should land in the shape of an "S." As if women needed more shapes to worry about!

Wesley McNair

Sleep

by Wesley McNair

The young dog would like to know
why we sit so long in one place
intent on a box that makes the same
noises and has no smell whatever.
Get out! Get out! we tell him
when he asks us by licking the back
of our hand, which has small hairs,
almost like his. Other times he finds us
motionless with papers in our lap,
or at a desk looking into a humming
square of light. Soon the dog understands
we are not looking, exactly, but sleeping
with our eyes open, then goes to sleep
himself. Is it us he cries out to,
moving his legs somewhere beyond
the rooms where we spend our lives?
We don't think to ask, upset
as we are in the end with the dog,
who has begun throwing the old,
shabby coat of himself down on every
floor or rug in the apartment, sleep,
we say, all that damn dog does is sleep.
-Wesley McNair

May Sarton

It is time I caught on to the fact that people who say, "I make no demands" are the ones, of course, who, whether they know it or not, are out for the blood in one's body, are out to catch the soul, and to dominate a life. The least they demand (but that is everything) is one's attention.
-May Sarton, The House By The Sea

John Hall Wheelock

As life goes on, it becomes more intense because there are tremendous numbers of associations and so many memories. So many people you loved are gone. It's almost two societies, the living and the dead, and you live with them both.
-John Hall Wheelock, quoted in May Sarton's The House By The Sea

May Sarton

I am begining a new phase. Perhaps one must always feel absolutely naked and abandoned and desolate to be ready for the inner world to open again. Perhaps one has to dare that. This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit - lonliness like starvation.
-May Sarton, The House By The Sea

Muddy Waters

I'M A KING BEE

Well I'm a king bee
Buzzing around your hive
Well I'm a king bee, baby
Buzzing around your hive
Yeah I can make honey baby
Let me come inside

Well I'm a king bee
Want you to be my queen
Well I'm a king bee, baby
Want you to be my queen
Together we can make honey
The world has never seen

Well, buzz a while...
Sting you bad...

Well I'm a king bee
Can buzz all night long
Well I'm a king bee, baby
Can buzz all night long
Yeah I can buzz better baby
When your man is gone

-Muddy Waters

Trout Fishing in Manville

I saw Gene yesterday sitting at one of the barn-red picnic tables at the Castle Luncheonette shelling peanuts. "Where's Rita?" I asked. Rita is his sister. Gene and Rita walk several miles each day around Woonsocket.
"She doesn't come down on Saturdays - she takes a day off. Tomorrow she'll be here. She lives in Manville."
"I love Manville," I said, "I get my honey there from the honey people on Old River Road." "I go trout fishing there," Gene said.
"Do you eat them?"
"My sister does."
I'd love to go trout fishing with Gene in Manville.

Church Bells

Last night I went to bed at 8 PM exhausted from a day of sinus headaches. I woke at midnight and went to my studio. Forty-five minutes later I heard church bells ring, and then at one AM they rang about 12 times more. I realized it was Father Onisi's church around the corner on Elbow Street. They must have just finished a midnight Easter Mass. Bill woke up - he had been dreaming that someone was ringing our front doorbell!

April In Woonsocket

Yesterday morning Lily and I walked to the holding pond down my street - I knew it would be full from the rain. Lily approached the water and a bunch of chubby tadpoles the size of goldfish swam away. I had Lily on the extra long leash as she gently stepped into the water. Then we walked up to North Main Street. I spotted a row of rhubarb poking out high on a wall that separates a garage from a parking lot. I love rhubarb! A church had a large wooden cross draped in purple fabric that had tangled in the wind out front, and the cross had a circular crown of real thorns. I admired the butcher shop's colorful hand-painted signs tacked up on the front of the building and on the sandwich boards in the parking lot. April in Paris was the first sax tune I ever learned. This was April in Woonsocket!

As I approached Barbara's Place, two old guys were wheeling up in their motorized wheelchairs. Big signs hung off the chair backs labeled D.A.V. - disabled American veterans. One guy was getting up to lock his wheelchair to the bench. "Last year someone stole my chair," he shouted to his friend. I sat down on the bench with Lily. Barbara came out to water the red, yellow, and purple tulips and then took the man's order from his chair. "I want something different," he said. "How about a cheesburger?" Barbara asked. "Okay." Then he told me his name was Matt and that he had bought five baseball lottery tickets that morning. "I won two dollars, and then I won fifty dollars on the second card." I listened and drank some water. The other man came out and unlocked his chair but the keys fell to the sidewalk. I handed them to him. "Keys to heaven," he said, and we laughed. "She's my key to heaven," I said, pointing to Lily. "She's a nice dog," he said. "I'd like to have a Chihuahua."

May Sarton

Far greater risks than the risks attendant upon an uprooted, floating-free life that may at first glance appear "adventurous" and/or "dangerous"? The leap into commitment, in love, or in work, or in religion, demands far greater courage.
-May Sarton, The House by The Sea

John Thorne

When I dropped out of college in 1961, I ended up in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, with the bathtub next to the kitchen sink. But this was still a time when cooking seemed relatively obvious, and when it wasn't, you looked at the directions on the package. My problems came about when I bought food that was not part of the family repertoire, chicken gizzards, for example. I had no idea what to expect from them, so I had no idea as to whether I had cooked them properly. It reminds me of the time my mother encountered an avocado but confused it with an artichoke. Close, in a way, no? Still, the results were not a success. I ate a lot of scrambled eggs at first, then branched out to cooking hamburger and chopped onion, then stirring in frozen peas. And on and on. Anyone for more kasha and chicken gizzards?
-John Thorne

John Thorne

Perfection is as false an economy in cooking as it is in love, since, with carrots or potatoes as with lovers, the perfectly beautiful are all the same; the imperfect, different in their beauty, every one.
-John Thorne, Simple Cooking

Carl Finch

I'll buy into a lot of stuff that many people would think is too
musically shallow or manipulative and usually not mind being so easily
persuaded, cause I'm also easily transported. It’s a cheap way to travel.

-Carl Finch, Brave Combo

Library

I read in the paper today that there's a library in North Scituate RI where along with books and DVD's you can borrow a fishing pole, an extra large cake pan or a puppet! Is that cool or what?

Baritone Fool

April Fool's Day! Today is my 5th anniversary of playing the baritone saxophone!