March 7: Dickens House, God's Love Number Eighteen, Rita Dove, "Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem," New Cartoon

On the afternoon he received the first postcard, [Rameriz] read it to [his wife, Carmen].  In the first postcard Ives and Annie mentioned that London was a revelation, "nothing like Harlem . . . or Brooklyn."  The black men spoke like English lords and everything was storybook tidy.  And they had gone to the Dickens House museum, 48 Doughty Street, to see where Charles Dickens had once lived and worked, and Carmen, coming around momentarily, said "Ay que nice?"  But then she said, perhaps remembering one of the lectures Annie had taken her to, "Ah, Charles Dickens, el gran escritor."

The reason I chose this passage particular passage from Mr. Ives' Christmas is because it's about Charles Dickens and the Dickens House, a place I have always wanted to visit.  Ives and Annie go there on their trip to the British Isles, Annie because she's always loved Dickens and Ives because he loves Annie.  It's a new beginning for them, a rekindling of their passion for each other.  And it's freakin' Charles Dickens' house, where he wrote A Christmas Carol.

It has been a very busy day.  Cleaning.  Shuttling my daughter back and forth to a party.  Going to church.  Making some phones calls I'd put off for a while.  I'm pretty beat.  After I'm done with this post, I plan on putting on my pajamas and maybe working on a new poem.

Charles Dickens always kept himself busy.  I've read Peter Ackroyd's one-thousand-plus-page biography of Dickens, and the one thing that struck me was how Dickens was in a constant state of movement.  He'd write all morning and afternoon, go out to dinner with friends (or go to the theater), and then sometimes walk all night long (twenty or more miles).  A few people have postulated that Dickens may have had bipolar disorder.  Certainly, I had that impression as I was reading Ackroyd's book.  And Dickens, at times, was a very difficult man to live with.  Quicksilver in temper and disposition.

I am lucky when it comes to my wife's bipolar disorder.  My wife takes her medications, goes to her doctor's appointments, and experiences very little of the normal mental illness roller coaster.  That's God's love number eighteen.  My wife controls her mental illness.  Her mental illness doesn't control her.

I have a final Rita Dove poem tonight.  A poem of love and longing and loss.

Pretty much a standard Saturday night for Saint Marty

Old Folk's Home, Jerusalem

by:  Rita Dove

for Harry Timar

Evening, the bees fled, the honeysuckle

in its golden dotage, all the sickrooms ajar.

Law of the Innocents:  What doesn't end, sloshes over . . .

even here, where destiny girds the cucumber.

So you wrote a few poems.  The horned

thumbnail hooked into an ear doesn't care.

The gray underwear wadded over a belt says So what.

The night air is minimalist,

a needlepoint with raw moon as signature.

In this desert the question's not

Can you see? but How far off?

Valley settlements put on their lights

like armor; there's finch chit and my sandal's

inconsequential crunch.

Everyone waiting here was once in love.

Confessions of Saint Marty