Sneak Peeks by Louise Yeiser McAlpin

Hup Two Three Four

There's a reason it comes in like a lion.

The word 'March' comes from the Roman 'Martius'. This was originally the first month of the Roman calendar and was named after Mars, the god of war.

―Author Unknown

 

 

October Song

Listen! the wind is rising,
and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings,
now for October eves!

~  Humbert Wolfe

Summer's End

This Explains Much

 

Soul simply does not allow me to excel at things that move my life in the wrong direction.

-Collette Caron, The Spirit of Writing

Sweet

Just in time, words that rhyme, well bless your soul.
Now I'll fill your hands with kisses and a Tootsie Roll.

--from Art Gartfunkel's "Disney Girls", Breakaway album

A Home for Wishes

 

“Where there is great love, there are always wishes.”

-Willa Cather

Waiting For a Star to Fall

But there’s another kind of love.  One that gives you the courage to be better than you are, not less than you are....  I want you to know that you can have that.  You deserve it.

Mother to Daughter

Nights in Rodanthe

 

 

April Fools!

"Louise–Weasie we had always called her–is a real character.  You’ll love her.”

“I thought you said she was a fruitcake,” her father interrupted.

“Well, she’s a bit eccentric.  That’s because she’s an arty type.  She’s an actress.”

“Thought she lived with a god-damned bunch of cats.”

“Yes, she did last time I checked.  But she lives in a nice old house in a good safe area.”

--written by Sandra Bunting, For A Song Published in Criterion

A Piece of Salt Water

Salt water always makes me feel so sane; the height of the waves, and the flick of fish, and the huge press of it on the ocean floor all notwithstanding.  There is a little housing estate coming down to the shore, a child on a bicycle, blank with curiosity, and, after I turn at the road's end, a grey wall enclosing a small field.  And in that field―it is quite small―is a Celtic cross that says:

I get out of the car to look at it.

From The Gathering, by Anne Enright

from Balzac

Outside, on the boulevards,

the plump white hands of the creditors

stroke moustaches and cravats,

young ladies dream of Chateaubriand

and promenade with the young men, while

empty carriages rattle by, smelling

of axle-grease and leather.

--expert from Fires by Raymond Carver

Today

Something inside me has reached a place where the world is breathing.

-Kabir

To pay attention.  This is our endless and proper work.

-Mary Oliver

3/4

Faith―is the pierless bridge supporting what we see

Unto the scene that we do not.

           written by Emily Dickinson

------

I wanted to look at them when they flowered.  And not just look at them―as you could do from the street―but to get underneath those branches, to lie down on my back with my head against the trunk of the tree and to see how it rose, as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom.  Also to see if there were bits of sky showing through, so that I could screw up my eyes to make them the foreground not background, bright-blue fragments on that puffy white sea.  There was a formality about this idea that I longed for.  It was almost like kneeling down in church....

           written by Alice Munro, "Lying Under the Apple Tree"

------

   “The gloaming,” he said, suddenly.....

    He gave a smile, then looked at her searchingly.  “I always thought it hurt you somehow that the day was over, but you said it was a beautiful time because for a few moments the purple light made the whole world look like the Scottish highlands on a summer night.”

   “Yes.  As if all the earth was covered with heather.”

           written by Alice Elliott Dark, "In the Gloaming"

------

My Life in Three Sentences

“That reminds me, I read something in the paper,” Helen said.  She pushed on the tip of her nose with a finger and narrowed her eyes.  “I can't remember what it was now,” she said.

--Raymond Carver, Will you Please Be Quiet, Please?

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

--Katherine Anne Porter

The Brevity Man Speaketh

The average twenty-year old, by no fault of his own, doesn’t want the hard truth.  He still wants to be reassured.  He wants to believe that the answer is simple: if we act well, things turn out well; if we act badly, we are punished.  It is only when we get older—most of us, that is—that we’re able to understand with any depth just how arbitrary, unfair, mysterious, odd, and slanted is that thing we call reality.

--Dinty W. Moore, posted on Inside Higher Ed, 11.30.07

Finally! Someone Who Understands Me!

"Imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering."

quote by Brenda Ueland

Fall in Earnest

November's my favorite month,

                                      the downside of autumn

And winter in first array, . . .

A pale light on the bright side of the dark,

Everything starting to glide and refract,

                                        moving just under water . . .

by Charles Wright

Colors

Dream delivers us to dream and there is no end to illusion.  Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.  From the mountain you see the mountain.  We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Love Spin

"If I love you, you can have everything.  You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's time―everything.  If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts, I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family.  I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.  I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else."

--Elizabeth Gilbert

Dorothy Parker, Is That You?

Actually, it was Charlotte Brontë, who wrote in Jane Eyre, "And to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading."

Things That Make You Go, "Hmm"

I knew I was in for a ride when all the dust on my bathroom floor turned to ants and crawled away.

--Anonymous

Marchin' Toward the Edge

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today

I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

--Hughes Mearns, The Psychoed

Feb Fave

From The Velveteen Rabbit

written by Margery Williams

illustrated by William Nicholson

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.  “It’s a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

"Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.  “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse.  “You become.  It takes a long time.  That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very nappy.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Just Because

When I was walking the other day I saw some workmen digging up the street, that happens very often and I always ask them what they are doing and why they are doing it.  It is a way I have, and means nothing except that while I am walking I like to stop and say a few words to some one.

--Gertrude Stein

Winter Ringer

Don't forget your second wind

Sooner or later you'll feel that momentum kick in

---Billy Joel---

Tragedy as Comedy

Once upon a time, Sissy Spacek played an emotionally iffy, neglected wife in Crimes of the Heart, based on the play of the same name.  One of the extraordinary things about this film was its female star power.  I was wowed to see Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg), and Sissy Spacek (Babe) all on the same big screen, in a poignant story about family love and dysfunction, loss and hope.

One day, Babe was depressed.  Cornered by circumstances and choices, she stood on a wooden chair, tied a thick rope around her neck, knotted it to the overhead chandelier, and knocked the chair out from under her.  As her weight crashed to the end of the rope, the chandelier flew out of the ceiling, and Babe, rope, chandelier, yards and yards of electric line, and huge chunks of plaster fell past the 2nd floor, past the stairwell, and into the front hall.  Not to be daunted by this unforeseen glitch, Babe got to her feet, and dragged the chandelier (still attached to her neck), bumping and scraping across the floor, down the hall, and into the kitchen.  She went straight to the stove, flung all the burners on, threw open the oven door, and hurled her body in, headfirst, with the sound of gas hissing menacingly in the background.  Enter Meg, running.  Meg yanks Babe out of the oven, throws her into a chair, turns off all the burners, flies back across the kitchen floor, and kneels at her feet.

"Why'd you do it, Babe?" she asks of her panting, gasping sister, while she frantically saws at the rope with a dull blade from a pair scissors that had been lying on the table (the first weapon of Babe's botched suicide attempts).

"I've had a really bad day," Babe replies.

You would think that would be the punchline, wouldn't you?  But it only gets better.

"Babe, you have just got to find some other way to deal with those bad days."

Crimes of the Heart

play and screenplay by Beth Henley

The Magic, Happiness, and Heartbreak of a Fallen Nature

Under the gun, under a deadline that has caught me flat-footed.  So.  I take the easy way out and offer, instead of a Monday piece, a First-of-the-Month musing.

A Little Elf

A little elf
Sat in a tree
Painting leaves
To throw at me.

Leaves of yellow
And leaves of red
Came tumbling down
About my head.   ~  CanTeach Songs & Poems

October's poplars are flaming torches

lighting the way to winter.  ~  Nova Bair

Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.   ~   Elizabeth Lawrence

Delicious autumn!  My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.   ~  George Eliot

Sorrow and the scarlet leaf, Sad thoughts and sunny weather; Ah me! this glory and this grief Agree not well together!     ~  Thomas W. Parsons

Bittersweet October.  The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.   ~  Carol Bishop Hipps

After summer was over
we knew winter would come:
we knew silence would wait,
tall, patient calm.  ~  William Stafford, Tragic Song

Fall is here.  It’s time for my pre-winter depression.  ~  Louise Yeiser, utterly annual or annually uttered

September's Songs

Singing a song, humming a song, singing a song.
Loving a song, laughing a song, singing a song.

Good Morning, Starshine lyrics, Hair, 1968.

          ---o0o---

I CELEBRATE myself and sing myself;

       And what I assume you shall assume;

       For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

Walt Whitman. "Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass, 1855. 

My August Offering, A Self Justification

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

EM Forser

Well there you are, as my grandmother would say.

Louise

Coming and Going

What is dying?

A ship sails and I stand watching

till she fades on the horizon,

and someone at my side

says, “She is gone”.

Gone where?  Gone from my sight,

that is all; she is just as

large as when I saw her. . .

the diminished size and total

loss of sight is in me, not in her,

and just at the moment

when someone at my side

says “she is gone”, there are others

who are watching her coming,

and other voices take up the glad shout,

“there she comes!” . . . and that is dying.

by Bishop Charles Henry Brent