Laura Ingalls Wilder

Home is the nicest word there is.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God. Don't waste it.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Noël Coward

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-Noël Coward

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?
-Noël Coward

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.
-Noël Coward

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
-Noël Coward

Work is much more fun than fun.
-Noël Coward

Lines For Winter

by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

-Mark Strand

Fear

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
-Andre Gide

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
-Henry Louis Mencken

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.
-George S. Patton

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
-Bertrand Russell

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
-Mark Twain

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.
-Albert Einstein

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
-Albert Einstein

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.
-Fulton Oursler

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
-Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Hide Himself From Himself

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?
-Richard Wright

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but he is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.
-Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

He Listens

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
-Jean Cocteau

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
-Robert Frost

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.
-William Blissett

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
-Jean Cocteau

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.
-Robert Frost

Thirty Years Ago

Thirty years ago I got a phone call in the night waking me up. My boyfriend had called from North Carolina to tell me that John Lennon had been shot.

I lived on Jewett Street, on Smith Hill in Providence. I got up at four every morning and walked to work in the dark. I was a waitress at Pete's Place, a diner on Smith Street. I had noticed that the regular customers' faces looked like what they ate every morning, which was my secret to remembering their orders. Mr Cheerios had a round face, with rough pasty skin and a dark nose. Ms Dry Italian Toast on the Side had high cheekbones, lightly flushed. The Sunny Side Up Couple arrived daily, parking their pale blue Volkswagen bug out front, then sitting opposite each other at the middle table, laughing and smiling.

Apron

I always wear a white kitchen apron. It's my shield, to cover my abdomen and protect my fragile intuitive gut. I wear it like a pinafore when I'm out in public, walking the dog, running chores. People just think I am baking or working, which is usually true.

When my Grandfather Died

For me the world stopped when my grandfather died, so I was surprised when I looked out the window of my little Oakland Ave third-floor triple-decker apartment and saw the Smith Street bus running by. I had imagined the busses would stop too. Grandpa was the first person who really loved me. He loved my blue eyes and bright round fair-skinned face. He loved that I loved science and words and his magic tricks, and that I looked just like him. He loved that I sniffed everything before tasting, and that I rubbed my nose with the palm of my hand when it itched, just like he did. I was his beloved grand-daughter, his only blue-eyed son, his identical twin. I was his twin even though I was a petite, slender, shy little girl and he was a short, round, vain, tanned, loud, gregarious smoker of cigars.

Reincarnation

My step-father drank coffee from a gigantic shiny percolator. The pot would sit between us at the breakfast table, and I would stare into its stainless-steel fun-house mirror. I loved the distortions of my reflected face and fingers, the breakfast dishes and tableware. My fingers were elongated when vertical and stubby when horizontal. It was never-ending fun.

One day I visited my biological father and his new wife and their two newly adopted children in Hartsdale NY. He and I were sitting in the sun in the backyard of his new house. For some reason he was trying to explain reincarnation to me. I was seven. My first thought was that after I die I wanted to come back as a coffee pot, identical to the one my step-father drank from every morning.

Phoebe Martone

Allowing people to just be who they are, delight in them and not try to possess them, seems to be difficult for most. I'm not sure why.

-Phoebe Martone

Groaning Shelves

Groaning shelves of books produce the wonderful side effects of deadening all sound and scenting the air with the drowsy, musty perfume of old wood pulp - intangible features of the world we are losing.
-Gregory Dicum, NYT, A Book Lover's San Francisco

Everything is an Image

Tuesdays are yellow and Saturdays are brown and wide.

Fridays have always been dark red, and narrower than Saturdays.

Joan Baez's singing is a maroon corridor.

Red wine tastes like a dusty couch in the sunlight.

People's voices on the telephone inspire imagery during a conversation. I see the color scheme of a kitchen, or the details of a hallway. Sometimes I'm right!

English is my second language, imagery my first.

Being Seven

Grandma Sophie and I rode in the front car of the subway from Brighton Beach to Manhattan. I stood to view the tracks as the car sped forward while swaying gently left to right. I pressed my nose against the sooty double-paned glass window in the shiny metal door while watching the tracks. I glanced into the little window of the conductor's booth, saw his navy-blue-suited shoulders and the back rim of his matching cap. I was relieved that he didn't turn to see me - faces suddenly appearing in windows always scared me.

We arrived underground, a white tile hallway of infinite corridors. We walked up to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas show. The line of chorus girls moving in unison mesmerized me. When the movie started I was completely distracted, worrying about leaving my purse or sweater behind in the theater and getting scolded by my mother. So I clutched my purse strap and sweater tightly. I was bored with the movie. I asked Grandma if I could sit outside. She said yes. She was completely engrossed in The Love Bug. I sat on the red carpet stairs in the lobby, waiting until the film was over.

These I would Praise

by Daniel Asa Rose

Reprinted with permission from the author.
First published in Obit-Mag.com, summer, 2009.

If I were locked in tornado winds 100 feet above my death; or no, if I were trapped in earthquake rubble 40 feet beneath the sunlight; or wait, if I were just pinned to an ordinary deathbed -- for these endings happen, too, even more frequently than the others -- I pray that I would have the grace to think back over my life and quietly count the everyday blessings that had been bestowed upon me. In tribute to the poet Rupert Brooke, who counted +his+ in the deathless poem “The Great Lover,” these I would praise:


- the slightly mad, utterly humorless gaze of a cockeyed goat who knows me solely as an instrument for bringing him hay

- clumps of leftover ice melting on green grass after a garden party

- how 10-year-old boys wear suit jackets begrudgingly, half shirking them off their shoulders, like ponies resisting saddles

- optometrists who straighten your glasses for free, or screw a loose arm back on for free, always saying “that’s ok, no need for any of that”

- the sound of a soap bar hitting the tub floor – such a sly thud!

- when the air temperature out of doors is the same as air temp in, suspending you in the most exquisite equipoise, like a diver’s neutral buoyancy, afloat in the best of both worlds; and making me think, rightly or wrongly, that there is a corresponding balance between the outside and inside of my body, that what’s mine is yours, yours mine, and it’s all just air to share

- faulty drums in a high school marching band

- looking out the back window of a train when it’s hurtling, or forward through the front of a speeding subway

- people mumbling to themselves on the phone: "now let's see, what'd I do with --"

- the filigree trail of a ladybug’s path in the steam of a bathroom window

- how strangers say “good morning” instead of just “hello.” How middle English!

- how strangers use any excuse to bond on the most commonplace things. “You like the Beatles more than the Rolling Stones? Me, too! I can’t believe it!”

- high school punks pretending to despise their afternoon jobs bagging at the local supermarket, but when you ask them where the water chestnuts are, they jump to despite themselves, smartly responding, “Sure thing. It’s in aisle 12, halfway down on the bottom of the left side”

- actors' holy spittle

- the miraculous overabundance of paraphernalia at a large sports department store. You mean we can play with all this?

- giving a 7-week-old his first bottle at 1:30 a.m. and seeing his eyes open wide with insight when the warm milk floods his mouth

- the sound of a dog lapping water

- when talking to a person at dinner and that person says "Uh huh" just as she's about to drink so you hear the "uh huh" inside her glass

- being called “hon” by shop girls of any age, any class, the homelier the better. Or a workman calling me “Danny.” Or a train conductor being chummy for no reason

- the historical fact that in the year 1763 a man who had been committed to an asylum for praying non-stop wrote hundreds of pages in which he attempted to praise God for every single aspect of his life, including the creation of his cat, Jeoffry, “for by stroking of him I have found out electricity”

- truck grills painted to resemble the jaws of a barracuda or other monster gaping fish

- the sight of an airplane banking in the evening sky. Or from an airplane, the miraculous flood of children being released from an elementary school

- the sound of a room service cart being wheeled down a hotel corridor, ringing with the juice glasses of pineapple and guava

- contemplating a wrench! What a heroic invention!

- fetching a newspaper on the late morning driveway, coming out of its plastic sheathing warmed by the sun; or getting a piece of paper out of the copy machine still warm from its innards; or beginning an afternoon nap, like crawling inside a warm chrysalis

- the sound of a baby biting into his first green pepper with brand new baby teeth

- biking in autumn and seeing a leaf drift downward in the distance and pedaling there in time for it to land against my chest and ride there with me awhile

- disrobing a carrot till it lies in all its naked resplendent carotene-ness, the stark newborn color of a natural vitamin

- the yearning exuberance of a freight train yowling past a cornfield in the middle of the night

- the silhouette of a plump black arm in the front row of the bus, lit up by passing headlights, at half past midnight near exit 62 on the Connecticut Turnpike

- riding my mower at dusk and being expertly missed by barn swallows sweeping the meadow for bugs

- the sound of boiled water in a kettle beginning its escape (little does it know it’s only to the confines of a teacup)

- driving west on a highway through a summer thunderstorm – the pelting, the near-despair, all-engorging purpleness; then the release and coming through the other side to white skies and the Gypsy Kings! Even better in a convertible!

- destination labels on subways and buses giddily spinning after they’ve reached their destination

- finding this morning's newspaper from Istanbul on a shuttle in Helsinki

- the thrum of Canada geese as they fly overhead

- after a snowfall, a 3-year-old begging for a trowel to help shovel the driveway

- watering the geranium, a plant I don’t even like, and hearing it crack and gurgle and release secret scents

- an autumn day so clean and sharp you can even smell the mothballs on the coats of children coming off the school bus

- a found barrette with a strand of a little girl's hair inside a grand piano

- coming out of a movie theater at night with the wind chill at 30 below and hugging onto one’s wife of 20 years whose flesh is as chilly and goosepimply as a virgin's

- when in a strange city, looking out on a Sunday morning from your hotel window into the empty office of the building next door, with lamps and desks arranged just so, as if for a play

- the scent of almond that they layer into the liquid soap in airplane bathrooms

- the smell of hot dogs grilling on the beach

- driving a convertible on a summer evening and seeing another convertible approach and both of you raise your arms to wave through your open roofs

- the sight of rich brown squiggles forming on the top of a glass of milk when you Hershey-fy, only to sink from view when you’re ready to stir

- the titles of poetry collections

- coming up with names for bands that will never exist: “Serious Veal.” “Furious Ballerinas.”

- the memory of a California girl running down the bike path, seen from a rooftop as the setting sun backlights her gold hair

- the business of dragonflies through a field of ferns in the midday sun

- hearing a guitar player take an extra long time to tune his instrument, then start in with a shy voice

- hilariously bad bar mitzvah thank you notes

- vacuum cleaner cords that retract automatically

- watching Gregory Peck eat breakfast (bacon and eggs never looked so good as in To Kill a Mockingbird)

- birds making their nests behind giant outdoor supermarket letters

- How at the end of a long day strangers silently riding the elevator with you will say “g’night” when you separate, perhaps forever

by Daniel Asa Rose

Street Gurus

The elderly folks I see walking in my town each day are what I call street gurus. They get their truth and down to earth wisdom from their commitment to walking every day, rain or shine!

Read Good Books

I walked with Lily to the library to pick up two books I ordered. On my way out I wandered over to the bargain book table and found Original Self by Thomas Moore a hardcover book with woodcuts, for a dollar! When I opened it these quotes jumped off the page.

The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books.
-Thomas Moore

The images that form the raw material of our imagination are most precious substance we have because from them we develop an attitude towards events and eventually a way of life. Education of the soul is largely a matter of creating a treasury of images and skills for dealing with them. It is as important for engineers and MBAs to read Shakespeare, a master image-maker, for this purpose as it is for the physician, the therapist, or the parent. A great deal depends on whether the books we read and the movies we see hone the imagination or make it blunt.
-Thomas Moore

If we brought half the intelligence to the making of souls that we bring to the making of machines, we would be people of character and imagination. We would be sharp and therefore less inclined to kill and cheat each other. We would know where to find the deep pleasures, so we would be less desperate for shallow entertainments and the ephemeral gratifications of gadgets.
-Thomas Moore

Adopted

The gray kitten siblings we rescued on Friday from the cemetery got adopted by one family who wants them both. Hurray!