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Saturday, January 11, 2014

Eclair de Lune

True, I am doing my daughter's laundry today (ack, tidying up on a Slattern Day!) before she goes back to school, but, otherwise, I might be a bad mom. "What's for breakfast?" she asked, upon rising, rather late, since she and her beau went to see Her last night, the 10:10 show.

"Uh, lemon cake?" was my slatternly reply. Thinking aloud: "Oh, that's not very healthy. Well, it's no worse than a donut."

"Donuts," she said, with the quiet drooling concentration of Homer Simpson.

This conversation ended with me giving her a $20 to go to Denny's Donuts drive-through for Bavarians, the closest we could come to eclairs, for which I had a hankering, and for Highlander Grog, my favorite coffee flavor, and also Denny's favorite, apparently still on hand as a tribute to him.* So, yay!

Perhaps you will also enjoy the pastries (uh, feathered and blood-spattered) at Thirteen Myna Birds today, a new issue full of wonderful and provocative poems. I love the line, "The fog is manifest appetite--eating all in its path," by Annette Marie Hyder, in her poem "A Thick Stem." I have seen that kind of fog, been eaten by it, and have incorporated it into poems of my own, too. But not in my two poems in this issue.

My poems, "History" and "At Joliet," are from a series of poems about small towns. Headed south to Peoria by car, we pass Morton, and once our car broke down there, so I feel very fond of its police department and a particular auto repair place. Headed to Chicago on the train, I get a close up view of the prison at Joliet, made of the blond stone dug from the quarry there.

And why did I have a hankering for eclairs? Well, 1) I pretty much always have a hankering for eclairs and 2) I saw this delightful French thing on Facebook this morning (thanks to Sandy Longhorn), and it has various yummy things in it, including eclairs and hunk chocolate, so, naturally...

Speaking (of) French, I found this Creative Commons image, by Bertranfenne, while searching for virtual eclairs. It is a fermeture eclair, or zipper. An eclair is a flash of lightning! And a fermeture is a closing, or fastening. So a fermeture eclair is a closing that flashes open, eh? Voila!

*Dennis (Denny) Marquardt (1954-2011)

4 comments:

  1. After a long back-to-school week with kids who can't zip their jeans, I am grateful for this way cool zipper eclair sculpture. I will meditate upon it when I'm on restroom duty.

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  2. Uh, donut day #2 (finishing the box). Plus milk, juice, banana.

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  3. French words for modern inventions sometimes tend to be a bit clunky, but I really like "fermeture eclair".

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  4. I like it, too! And I like the flash or slash or gash in a chocolate eclair because of the cream!

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