First a quote from my favorite book:Arthur: 'It's at times like this I wish I'd listened to my mother.'
Ford : 'Why, what did she say?'
Arthur: 'I don't know, I never listened.'”
Second, a poem I listened to on the radio a few months ago:
"The Lanyard" by Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly
—a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard,
a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission
that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even.
You may or may not have noticed, but sometimes I like to be vague & cryptic about my blogs. Sometimes it may seem like the blog is nothing more than a cool picture I took and a poem or quote. These usually have some crazy sounding name.
