Fat Tuesday

I often forget that Fat Tuesday is actually one of the "eight days a week" of this blog. Now it actually is Fat Tuesday--Mardi Gras--so I have the opportunity to remember! We got a little cake for Valentine's Day and had just finished it up when my husband got another one to celebrate my birthday. We haven't eaten it yet because we had chocolate milkshakes as part of my requested carryout birthday dinner while we watched episodes of The Last of Us, based on a videogame, recommended by our kids. It contains some hungry people and some excellent eating, plus comic conflict over sandwiches. My birthday dinner involved a cheeseburger and fries. I am still full and still awake, and Fat Tuesday has arrived, and I've retrieved shiny Mardi Gras necklaces and hung them from doorknobs, planning to take some to decorate my mom's doorway when I visit tomorrow. Some are green and can stick around for St. Patrick's Day.

My life has a lot of this rolling, get-goofy-things-done quality these days. My tiny chalkboard poems have begun again. Yoga, for various reasons, has once again been set aside, so maybe a poem a day for Lent and a tiny poem a day on the chalkboard will be my new Yoga of Poetry. It's a new deep black chalkboard, as I felt the urge coming on and ordered it...when?! The green chalkboard I used before has been retired, like a basketball star's jersey, as it was the Welcome board for my daughter's wedding and still bears that greeting! In this tiny poem with no punctuation we are both growing older, the poet and the afternoon light.

I re-read A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, for a book group and to prepare for reading its sequel.* The goon of Time makes this a Random Coinciday in the blog, too. I loved this book, which feels really pertinent right now--the "pointers" (babies who like songs and point at them) seem like "influencers" on social media--as does The Last of Us, with a pandemic caused not by a virus but by fungi. There were no mushrooms on my cheeseburger.

*The Candy House. Yep, Fat Tuesday!