July 31: Innocent Bystander, Traveling All Day, a Little Drunk

When Dresden was destroyed later on, incidentally, Lazzaro did not exult.  He didn't have anything against the Germans, he said.  Also, he said he liked to take his enemies one at a time.  He was proud of never having hurt an innocent bystander.  "Nobody ever got it from Lazzaro," he said, "who didn't have it coming."

Okay, I have had a little bit to drink.  After traveling all day, I had a drink.  Then I went to the water park with my kids.  Then I had a couple more drinks.  Now, I'm faced with the task of writing a couple of blog posts.  Lazzaro says that he's never hurt an innocent bystander.  I'm afraid that, because of my alcohol consumption, a couple innocent bystanders may suffer collateral damage.  Thank God I have my wife to eliminate anything offensive or damaging.

I plan to sleep in tomorrow morning.  I'm not going to set an alarm.  When I wake up, I'm not going to have a set plan for the day.  I may go back to the water park.  I may go for a hike.  I may find a quiet corner and read all day.  Or I may find a clearing in the woods, sit down with my journal, and write some poems.  I have kept the next few days completely free.

Okay, that may be a little bit of a lie.  I do have a poetry workshop to lead on Thursday evening, so I will probably spend a couple hours planning out what I'm going to do.  But that really doesn't count as work.  I enjoy doing stuff like that.  In fact, if I could find a full-time job planning and conducting poetry workshops, I would feel like I'd won the lottery.  (Sorry for relying on cliches.  It's the alcohol.)

So, that will be the extent of my wisdom tonight.  I'm a little drunk and a little tired and totally relaxed.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for gin and tonic.

July 24: Lazy Sunday, Water Park Again, Classic Saint Marty

It was a lazy Sunday.  Woke up at 9 a.m.  That's late.  For me, anyway.  I took a shower and then had breakfast al fresco once more.  Oatmeal and blueberries.  The morning was not quite so humid.  It was overcast, and there was a breeze.

I sat outside, said my prayers.  Some mornings, I don't always allow myself enough time to read my devotions and say my prayers.  When I don't, I feel as if my whole day is a little off.  I wasn't off today.

We spent most of the day at the water park.  My daughter decided to be a typical 15-year-old girl.  She went on a couple water slides, spent a great deal of time in the hot tub, texting on her iPhone.  After 40 minutes, she announced that she wanted to return to our room to take a shower.  That would have meant that we spent about $5 per minute for her to be at the water park.  I informed her that she needed to spend a little more time being social with real people.  She begrudgingly stuck around for another hour-and-a-half.

That was the only bump in the road today.  Didn't have to rush anywhere.  We had a leisurely dinner.  I had a chocolate martini and a French dip sandwich.  Then, I made a couple of s'mores for my kids.  It is now a little after ten o'clock at night.  The hot tub is open.

I am not looking forward to the end of this weekend.  I don't know when I'm going to get another vacation.  Maybe in another five or six months.  That thought depresses me a little bit.  But I'm not going to get all melancholy.  Instead, I'm going to enjoy these last few hours in this lovely place in the woods.

Two years ago, I was contemplating hell, thanks to poet Billy Collins. 

July 24, 2014:  "Hell," Billy Collins, Bed

I'm looking forward to going to bed tonight.  The cool covers and pillows.  The fan blowing across us like some lost Alberta clipper.  Darkness, and the warmth of my wife's hand on my arm or shoulder.  That sounds like paradise to me right now.

Which explains why the poem below appealed to me tonight.  It's a hell of a poem (incredibly labored pun intended), and it touches upon many of Billy Collins' favorite subjects--the collision of poetry with life and love and the ridiculous.  And it has that breathless moment at the end when the poem opens up like a chrysalis.

Saint Marty would kill to write a poem like this.

Hell

by:  Billy Collins

I have a feeling that it is much worse
than shopping for a mattress at a mall,

of greater duration without question,
and there is no random pitchforking here,
no licking flames to fear,
only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.

Yet wandering past the jovial kings,
the more sensible queens,
and the cheerless singles
no scarlet sheet will ever cover,

I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,
which I could fully bring to mind
and recite in English or even Italian

if the salesman who has been following us--
a crumpled pack of Newports
visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt--
would stop insisting for a moment
that we test this one, then this softer one,

which we do by lying down side by side,
arms rigid, figures on a tomb,
powerless to imagine what it would be like

to sleep or love this way
under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,
which Dante might have included
had he been able to lie on his back between us here today.

What fresh hell is this?

July 23: Ethos of the Moment, Kids in the Universe, "Zootopia"

Last summer some muskrats had a den under this tree's roots on the bank; I think they are still there now.  Muskrats' wet fur rounds the domed clay walls of the den and slicks them smooth as any igloo.  They strew the floor with plant husks and seeds, rut in repeated bursts, and sleep humped and soaking, huddled in balls.  These, too, are part of what Buber calls "the infinite ethos of the moment."

I'm not quite sure of the context of the quote from Martin Buber (although I admire anyone named Martin).  I think it has something to do with finding something eternal in every lived moment.  There's something both very present in the muskrats for Dillard, and there's also something very timeless.  Muskrats doing what they've done for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, following some kind of divine plan that was put into motion way back in the Garden of Eden, when Adam looked at the first muskrat (or the first muskrat's ancestor) and named it.

Today, I tried to live in the ethos of the moment.  I didn't have any particular plan for my time.  I didn't set an alarm.  Woke up around 9 a.m., which is a good five hours later than I normally do.  I took a shower, made breakfast for myself, and then sat outside and dined al fresco.  It was a lovely beginning to the day.  In the moment.  Listening to cicadas sawing the morning in two.

Eventually, I ended up at the water park with my son and wife for about four hours.  My daughter went on a zip line tour, soaring through the forest canopies for three hours (talk about living in the moment).  She had a great time.  My son had a great time.  I always try to imagine what kind of kid Jesus was.  Did he beg Mary to go swimming in the River Jordan on really hot days?  Or climb olive trees and scare birds out of their nests?  That's what kids do.  They carve places for themselves in the universe.

Tonight, at dusk, I went to an outdoor screening of the movie Zootopia with my family.  My fifteen-year-old daughter loved it.  My seven-year-old son, who suffers from a severe aversion to sitting still, got incredibly uninterested after about twenty minutes.  He and my wife and my sister left early while I stayed to watch the end of the film with my daughter.  It reminded me of the drive-in movies I saw as a kid.  King Kong with Jessica Lange.  Freaky Friday with Jodie Foster.  Orca with Richard Harris.  Everything huge and wondrous under the moon and stars.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that everything today felt really new and really familiar, as well.

Saint Marty is going to sleep in again tomorrow morning.  Maybe have some oatmeal al fresco for breakfast.

Eating in the moment--another thing I believe in

July 22: Throng of Praise, Boyne Mountain Resort, Nickelodeon

Under the world's conifers--under the creekside cedar behind where I sit--a mantle of fungus wraps the soil in a weft, shooting out blind thread after frail thread of palest dissolved white.  From root tip to root tip, root hair to root hair, these filaments loop and wind; the thought of them always reminds me of Rimbaud's "I have stretched cords from steeple to steeple, garlands from window to window, chains of gold from star to star, and I dance."  King David leaped and danced naked before the ark of the Lord in a barren desert.  Here the very looped soil is an intricate throng of praise.  Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

Dillard is all about praise.  She praises God for the whole universe, from the roots in the ground to cosmic dust expanding through the cosmos.  Everything is an opportunity to dance like King David, shake your booty before the ark of the Lord.  It's all a matter of connecting the dots, seeing the picture that emerges, and then celebrating.

Greetings from the Boyne Mountain Resort.  It's been a day of travel and reunion.  The sun was shining, sky so blue it hurt the eyes.  When we stopped at a rest area, my son went wading in Lake Michigan.  When we were walking up from the beach, a lady who'd been watching him in the water said to me, "That reminded me of when I was a little girl on a trip with my dad."

We picked up our daughter in Gaylord, Michigan.  She's been on a trip all week with a friend's family.  There was a water park, a bowling alley, an arcade.  She went to a music museum and learned what a real nickelodeon was (not the cable kids' channel, but a nickel jukebox).  Yet, when she was sitting next to me having lunch, she said, "I was like homesick on Tuesday."  She missed us.  Amazing.

We are in a condo right now that has a private hot tub.  We went water parking tonight, and then we just walked around.  My daughter got thirsty, so I went up to little outdoor bar and asked if I could have a cup of water.  He didn't have cups of water, but he reached into his refrigerator and took out a bottled water.  I shook my head and said, "I don't have money to pay for that."  The bartender smiled and said, "Naw, man.  Don't worry about it.  Have a great night."

Are you getting the picture?  I encountered moments of grace all day long.

So Saint Marty is dancing tonight, shaking it for all the day's goodness.

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

August 5: A Trip, Sharon Olds, "First Weeks"

Tomorrow, I will be going on a trip with my family.  We will be staying at a wonderful resort with a water park, hay rides, and zip lining.  I will slide down water slides.  I will get hay in my underwear.  I will not attach myself to a cable and send myself careening down a hill to certain death.  And I will have a great time with my kids, my wife, and my sister.

So, tomorrow, I will begin blogging from downstate Michigan, relaxing, eating pizza, watching my children be children.

Tonight's poem from Sharon Olds is about a mother and a child.  The small moments that imprint themselves on your heart.

It speaks to Saint Marty tonight.

First Weeks

by:  Sharon Olds

Those first weeks, I hardly knew how to
love our daughter.  Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry--and not even
despairing, but just disheartened, a look of
endurance.  The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced.  And smallish, 6.13,
wizened--she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving.  The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines.  She was ten days early,
sleepy, the breast engorged, standing out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
And when we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously.  I didn't blame her,
she'd been born to my mother's daughter.  I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her.  And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me.  She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back.  When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.

A small moment

August 1: First Night of Vacation

As of 5 p.m. this evening, I am on vacation.  For eleven days, I do not have to drag myself out of bed at 4 a.m., drag myself to the medical office, drag myself through a day of work, and then, at 5 p.m., drag myself home.

I have a few obligations next week.  On Monday, I have to travel to exotic Rudyard and Paradise for a pair of poetry readings.  Then, next Friday, I have a book signing at a bookstore in Marquette.  In between Monday and Friday, I'm taking my family to a hotel and water park for a couple of days.

Usually, I don't like taking long car trips when I'm on vacation.  I hate car trips.  I have a feeling that, by next Friday night, I'm going to be pretty tired.  And broke.

Tonight, however, I'm going to pretend to be a man of leisure, with not a worry in the world.

Saint Marty needs to find his silk pajamas.

See you on the beach in Paradise...

October 14: One More Note About Friday the 12th

Just one last post about our arrival at the Wisconsin Dells on Friday.  After the bed bugs were taken care of, my daughter and I hit the indoor water park at the Kalahari Resort, and we had a great time.  Especially my daughter, as you can tell by the picture below.  She spent a lot of time travelling down the water slides.  She also spent a lot of time surfing.  I, on the other hand, spent a lot of time in a rented cabana, trying to relax after a pretty stressful few hours.

We got back to our new suite of rooms at around 10:30 p.m., Wisconsin time.  It was a long day, and my daughter had to get up at 6:30 in the morning to get to the dance convention by 7:15 a.m. 

Saint Marty did not go surfing.  He only went on one water slide.  He was not a party pooper.  He was a pooped party.

My daughter, hangin' ten at the surf pool