It wasn't an easy assignment that I gave myself. How do you write about love without sounding like Helen Steiner Rice? Answer: with a lot of struggle and revision and rewriting. At about ten o'clock last night, I had a poem. Then I did some art work to accompany it.
Pretty soon, I'm going to throw on a tie and head out to the wedding. It will be a wonderful, joyous event. And then the reception at the Marquette Children's Museum. I'm ready to relax a little bit.
Two years ago on this day, I was feeling a little nostalgic . . .
September 3, 2015: Foundling Home, Shirley Temple, Linda Gregg, "The Resurrection"
He thought about that crisp afternoon, years before, when the sky had opened and the world had seemed full of goodness, its meaning still baffling him . . . He remembered how, in the foundling home, the nuns gathered the children around a Christmas tree, and that one of the nuns had read aloud from a book: "And behold there was a star, a beacon in the night. And from the east there came angels and kings to worship the newborn son of God."
Ives becomes nostalgic for his childhood near the end of the novel, after he has found peace regarding his son's death. He is no longer angry or grief-stricken. He even thinks back to his time as an orphan in a foundling home wistfully, after years of feeling unwanted and abandoned. Ives has reached an age where he looks back with fondness on many things that used to cause him heartbreack and pain.
At some point in life, everyone becomes nostalgic for the past. I have been thinking about my daughter's first day of kindergarten. At the time, my life was in great turmoil. My wife and I were separated, and I was living the life of a single parent. I did everything to make my daughter's life happy. On her first day of school, I dropped her off with her Disney princess backpack. She toddled into the classroom, looking incredibly small and vulnerable.
I remember going home that morning and baking my daughter's favorite cookies: oatmeal butterscotch. I put them on a plate, placed them on a table near her chair in the living room, and counted down the hours until I could pick her up.
Yes, at the time I felt like my world was falling apart. Just getting up in the morning was a great chore. But I still wish I could have my little kindergartner back, instead of my 14-year-old ninth grader. We used to be best buds. She used to think I was cool. Now, I am simply the reason for much eye rolling and sighing.
Nostalgia is a strange thing. It makes painful memories seem not so painful, and it makes the good times seem like Shirley Temple movies, where everybody is crying and hugging and tapdancing at the end.
Saint Marty misses his Little Princess.
The Resurrection
by: Linda Gregg
Let the tower in your city burn. Let the steps
to the shadowed building by the lake burn
even though it is made of stone. Let the lion
house burn so that the roaring and burning
will be heard together. Let the old, poor,
wooden house where I lived go up in flames, even though
you returned and sat on the steps that led
up to where we used to exist. Let it all burn,
not to destroy them, but to give them the life
my life gives to them now. To make them flare
as they do in me, bright and hot, bright and burning.
And a poem about my friend whose son is getting married this afternoon:
Recipe
by: Martin Achatz
My friend reads cookbooks
The way I read poetry, hungry
For each line, each word chosen
Like tiles in a Byzantine Christ,
Pieced together, stone-by-stone,
Color-by-color, into a creation
Greater than its parts. My friend
Mixes twelve egg yolks, salt,
Sugar, lemon zest and juice,
Butter into lemon curd, spoons
It into vanilla cupcakes, follows
A recipe she discovered
In her grandmother's Betty Crocker,
Creates a poem of vanilla, citrus,
Something her mother's mother first made
As a young girl with whisk,
Heat, ice. As she licks her finger,
My friend reads the recipe again,
Sees where her grandmother
Crossed out "Makes 3 cups,"
Penciled in "5 cups" in careful
Letters, underlined it twice.
This revision, made over 40 years ago,
Reminds my friend of the white
Moons of her grandmother's fingernails,
Her kitchen stove, hot as July,
The abundance of curd in her bowl.
I think of Robert Frost working
In his notebook, scribbling his last line
And miles to go before I sleep,
Reading it over, then writing
And miles to go before I sleep
Again, as if he needed one more
Egg, a pinch of cinnamon, to fill
His pastry until it overflowed.
