230120 a week walking
Jan. 14
A Memphis song that K came across in his musical wanderings. I've been to Memphis, Lyle Lovett. I will put the link below. It is a live recorded performance (an oxymoron, sorry). His music is so "clean" somehow. Like clear water.
Saturday at #48: Robin is teaching me tai Kwon do. Been doing sudoku with him, too, and "space exploration, practice exercises" over in the hydro field, which involve simulated earth ages, being miniaturized, and simulated time travel, with star wars podracers thrown in for good measure. We have been to the field on practice missions twice today already. I am exhausted. Then there has been my own work - groceries at Shoppers' (WHAT?) and the veg store, both at Six Points, two more walks just Rocky and me, two loads of laundry, lunch prep - a big green salad to get in our leafy greens, and a sink full of dishes. Another walk, as the sun went down, took Rock and me to the park to watch the skating. The kids and Nick were not there, having gone to another place where there are dedicated leisure and hockey rinks. But I had a nice walk anyway and even ran into some close friends and exchanged a few frozen words before returning home refreshed, (It was a very cold day!).
*****
It has been interesting living with my library again. I have taken only a few books to Quebec, Austen, a Bradbury, Wallace Stevens and a couple of other poets. While there I pick up reading material at second-hand shops. Today I brought a selection of books up to our room for perusing. There is a LeGuin that I have not read, which may not be aimed at the younger person that I was. Being no longer "younger", (?Dylan's, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.") * , perhaps I will find it more interesting. Also a best of Bradbury, which I have not looked into. I pick up Ray Bradbury books second-hand when I see them. I wonder what they have chosen to be "vintage". Another book that I must have found tempting, I brought upstairs as well, The Bedside Dickens. I know now why they make these "bedside" compilations. They are for old people who know now that they will never read all the books (...in the world...). I feel as if I am letting that go and it is a burden and a sorrow lifted from my shoulders.
*****
Whether it was an unconscious prompt or a faint whisper from unplugged earbuds hanging round my neck, Night Train began to sing in my mind.
"Well, I'm living in the city/where the noise it never stops...Nobody looks you in the eye here, /walking around with clenched fists/I've been searching for a simple place,/Don't know if it exists.", Amos Lee.
I have been thinking of a "train songs" playlist ever since we made playlists on tapes! This will be my first song, then, for the list, before the more well-known ones: City of New Orleans, This Train, by Joni Mitchell, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Dylan; there are lots of good ones!
*****
I am getting rid of many of the trappings of living in a house for thirty years and being a collector of stuff. These are mosaic stock, which I am paring down to the pieces I want to use. I have often picked up things which I later realize I will never want to use - that I don't love. These I can recycle or if they are already damaged, I am throwing them away.
When I look at possessions : The beautiful or memorable items that I once wanted to have in my house in a place where I could see, enjoy and use them, after boisterous children were grown and gone. But I don't have, and will probably never now have, that house to myself (and K) where I can have them about me. So what to do with them? They are useless really, and beautiful yes, but worth nothing, except that I love them.
Is it that I do not want to break faith with that woman who loved that thing and wanted it in her life. That woman who loved things, having learned from her mother to love china and antiques? (What?! The things I begin to understand...)
I want to be careful that I do not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Would I have to admit that for all those years I was wrong? That I was making a mistake? That I was blind? So often I think of refugees who abandon all and walk hundreds of miles to safety with the clothes on their back and their children in their arms.
*****
It was six-thirty in the morning, Sunday, when Rocky needed to go for a walk. so we walked in the dark on the field. We scared off any wildlife - saw no-one. I did see a fox a few days earlier, crossing the hydro field, while five dogs cavorted and ran in the same field. Not one noticed him. I thought at first that he was a coyote, with his red-brown body and black face and tail but then I realized he was too small to be a coyote, must be a fox. Did I think to take a picture? No.... duh. He was far away and quickly gone; I think of the birders who walk around Colonel Samuel Smith Park with their large telescope lenses hanging ready round their necks.
An unlikely "sacred" pond, here in the hydro field:
And this pond, a hole dug in the field long ago, has been here since Betty, our first dog, was a pup. I still call it Betty's pond, because winter or summer Betty went in for a dip! Rocky, on the other hand, does not even like to get his feet wet!
These ponds are ones that usually fill up in the spring, after the cold, but we have had so little below-freezing days that the fields are soggy and wet. I went looking for a calendar of temperatures for the month and found this:
Very few cold days, those ones were sunny, but we have had grey-with-drizzle temperatures most of January. This is not normal, but, I am sure, evidence of climate change. There are pussy willows out, on a nearby bush. I was curious to look back at the month, because I could not believe what my memory was saying.
It turns out that, now, Rocky wants to go for a vigorous run and sniff in the dark every morning. This morning he pushed it to 6:23, murmling like a broken-wing bird, very softly. So up I get and walk with him. He goes so far off in the darkness and is not so responsive. My dogs have had this "obedience distance"; within its boundary they will attend. Outside the range, they just go on. It is as if their phone is out of signal range. Rock is so far ahead rushing along, nose to the ground, tail waving. I can see him by his movement if he is by a patch of snow, but then he disappears into the grass and bushes and could be anywhere. I walked him home on leash, on the sidewalks.
*****
It's Friday - still a sort of closing day for me though I have not been on a Monday to Friday schedule for many years. I have been working on this post since - well, since Saturday, last! Have had two more Tai Kwon Do lessons. They are hard work! My teacher is very good, though and leans on his good memory of his own classes and uses his teachers' methods to show me how.
I passed this little library on one of my walks this morning. They are very friendly and "community-minded"! I like that people use them! Imagine my delight when I saw two of my favorite authors there. One of these books, The Gate to Women's Country, is on my top ten recommended list. The other author is Anne Tyler. She is important to me because she brought to my attention some of the nuances of the word, "family", with her portrayal of people whose family is the people they live with, in addition to, or instead of, blood relatives, and in some cases more than. It is those we are in contact with daily, with whom we must work out the mechanics of living together, whom we must depend on, and who depend on us. Her writing is such that I have clear visual "memories" of her stories, as if I saw them in a movie rather than reading them in print. I brought home Saint Maybe to re-read. The LeGuin I have copies of in my own library, because it is partly a "lending" library and one must have extras of one's favorites to share.
*****
Found art: A bush seems to cast a shadow which is actually a broken branch from a nearby tree fallen at its feet.
Keep well and safe.
Mumma Yaga
Lyle Lovett, I've been to Memphis, Youtube. (The link didn't take!)
Dylan quote from My Back Pages.
Amos Lee, Night Train. It turns out YouTube has an upper-case t. And, again, the link didn't take. Maybe YouTube has changed something. Do you think that a century or two ago, grammar freaks were complaining about "it may be that" being contracted to "maybe"? Did it go through some evolutionary stages? The Online Epistemology Dictionary says "maybe" is "early 15c."
https://etymology.en-academic.com/23250/maybe
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