October 9: Lovely Trip, Wisconsin Dells, Eric Torgersen, :"What Is Your Earliest Memory?," Adventures of Stickman

It had been a lovely trip, London everything they had wanted and imagined--for Annie, reading selections from several Dickens novels at the time, it was an enchantment, they took strolls through the Queen's gardens, fed the swans in Regents Park; tried to envision the shantytowns that Dickens had once written about, along the Thames, the city's architecture sometimes suspending their notion of modern time...

After years of depression and struggle, Ives and his wife, Annie, go on a trip to the British Isles.  London, especially.  Annie loves the words of Dickens, and Ives loves the work of artists like Seymour and Cruikshank, the first illustrators of Dickens' work.  Ives and Annie rekindle their love on this journey.  It gives them a fresh start.

Greetings from the Wisconsin Dells.  We arrived around 4 p.m.  The journey was unremarkable.  We didn't get lost once, the weather was sunny and cool.  This trip was the first we've made to the Kalahari Resort without the navigating skills of my sister, who couldn't come because of work conflicts.

This evening, I have been to an indoor amusement park and water park.  My son dragged me up to the top of several water slides.  My feet are sore, and I can still smell chlorine.  My wife just fell asleep, and my kids passed out about an hour ago.  After I am done with this post, I will be calling it a night, as well.

Just like Ives, I've needed this time away from my day-to-day existence.  Since the beginning of the semester, I've felt a little distracted, at the medical office and university.  Perhaps it's the stress of the summer finally catching up with me.  Or maybe it's grief.  I don't know.  Whatever the cause, I have not really been fully myself.  Perhaps these few days away will heal what's ailing me.

There will be no fairy tale this evening.  I'm taking a vacation from that, as well.

I do have a poem, however.  It's about memory, and fragility of time, things I've been thinking about a lot this past month.

Saint Marty is hoping to make a few happy memories over the next few days.  This year hasn't provided a whole lot of those.

What Is Your Earliest Memory?  What
Does It Mean?

by:  Eric Torgersen

Barbara the earliest thing I remember
is pushing a train of wooden blocks
sawed off the ends of two-by-fours
around the top of the concrete foundation
of the house my mother and father built
up Lyons Street at the end of the war.

It means we really were all there
together once, my father and mother,
my house, my brother and I,
my three sisters one after the other.

The foundation was a foundation
to hold up my little train
and I was a block on my brother
and sister and sister and sister.

I remember a little while later
my mother on the roof with a hammer.

The roof was a roof over our heads
but the house was never whole:
the bathroom no more than a shell,
around the back no shingles,
in the front yeard a big stump
we had no one to dig up and haul.
We cut and tunneled and burned but the stump
was bigger than all of us together.

The stump was the stump of a tree
I can't remember.  The tree was my father.

Adventures of STICKMAN