I walked downtown today--that is, uptown, as in beautiful Uptown Normal--in order to hear the speeches at the opening ceremony for the new transportation center. I admired the collaboration and dedication and excellent planning it took to build Uptown Station and renovate our little town.
There we all stood--important people (well, they were sitting), townspeople, the media, and union laborers in orange shirts--listening to the congratulatory, grateful, and inspiring speeches of our town mayor, Amtrak's board chairman, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Senator Dick Durbin. It was joyful, respectful, and bipartisan! You can read about it or watch a video here, via local radio station WJBC.
There was a rumor that President Obama might be there--he was invited to this event back in April--but he wasn't, unless they were hiding him inside the station, to go on the first tour of the station's interior with the other important people. But I think the Secret Service we saw at the event was there for the Senator and the Transportation Secretary. President Obama was there in praises and applause and the stimulus package.
In poetry news, my poem "Goodwill," a valentine to Martin Luther King, Jr., about the civil rights movement, arrived in the mail, inside Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. I am glad and grateful any time I can "express the inexpressible" in a poem that finds its true readers. Today, I am thinking of public transportation and am glad again to have that poem "The Human Community" in Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
There you were down by the station early in the morning. Did you see the little pufferbellies all in a row?
ReplyDeleteGood question from Collagemama--maybe "pufferbellies" is another word for "politicians"?
ReplyDeleteNormal sounds lovely! Congratulations on your new transportation center. It must be nice to live in a town named after an adjective.
I wondered about the pufferbellies, too, and the politician possibility, which sounds reasonable and may have emerged as a real association. But in the song and in the online references, a pufferbelly is a steam locomotive!
ReplyDeleteThanks Kathleen for making me droooool!!!! My wife made a shake with rasberries, blueberries and natural vanila yogurt for dessert. We're attempting to get healthy which hopefully will allows us a way to also lose lbs.
ReplyDeleteMy wife has made strawberry and bluenerry cobbler before and, OH MY!!!
Hope you have a good week, mi amiga
You have a good week, too, nene, and enjoy the berries, shakes, and cobblers of summer!
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