Make Way for Ducklings

This just happened, on my way home from visiting Dad at the house. I was driving back south on Linden Street Road, and a mother duck and her duckling emerged (from the ditch by the trailer park). I brake for ducklings. So do a lot of people!

This is the statue in Boston's Public Garden.

This is the book by Robert McCloskey. The cover illustration is copyrighted.

My dad is fine.  The ducklings and their mother are fine. My mom is fine, too. I think we're all tired and relieved.

Busting Out

Background music:
"June is Bustin' Out All Over" from Carousel.

Blooming now:
Prairie Blue Eyes

Still blooming:
Day lilies (orange), blue and lavender spiderwort, golden columbine (on its last spindly legs), bright blue mountain bluet, and plenty of dianthus--in pink, white, hot pink, and peppermint striped.

My dad busted out of the hospital on Friday! Wooee. He came home on a perfect summer day. Blue sky, puffy white clouds, voluminous breeze. He ate a good lunch (non-hospital food), napped on the couch, and sat outside in a lawn chair gazing at the corn, the sky, the grass, and the not-lost vegetable garden. (Weeding, I found the carrots! Tiny.  And nearly ready-to-eat green peppers.)

Today he is having (right now!) his first home care visit from a nurse, and home care physical therapy will start next week. Thanks for all your good wishes.

Three Hour Tour

Background music: the theme from Gilligan's Island.

Foreground music: computer fan.

Sense of humor: intact.

I refer to my dad's sense of humor, as he recovers from surgery and considers la vita nuova, meaning "the new life" in the Transitional Care Unit (rehabilitation, physical therapy, and self care at the hospital facility) and living on the first floor of the farmhouse for a while once he gets home. He went to the ER on June 15, and it's been a bit more than a "three hour tour."

Jaunty sailing music.

The art above (called Three Hour Tour) is by Brian Taylor, who also, clearly, has a sense of humor. And coincidentally shares a last name with Keith Taylor, the poet up at Escape Into Life today.

Brian Taylor creates three-dimensional books, displayed open in shadow boxes. His photography and art adorns the other pages, too, which are now never to be seen again, part of the old life, so to speak, yet still evoked by the open pages. The one with the TV in the road is called The West, Then and Now.

The one below: Lake, Boy, Indian.

Poet Keith Taylor also has a doubleness in his poems--myth & memory, forgotten and remembered names, terror and secret joy, blind and seeing. Please take a look!

Rumble of Summer

I wake with the birds regularly in summer, but this morning there was also the rumble of thunder and a flicker of lightning in the eastern sky, so no lap swimming, making it a Blue Monday in the blog.

But the good news is that my dad came through leg surgery very well and the pain is gone! Whew! No doubt there will be new pains related to physical therapy and getting up on his feet again, but he's ready to get going and out of that hospital room! So, joy! My sister's here in town and at the hospital now, and I'll go visit again soon. My mom's back at her volunteer post at the reception desk at the history museum, so it's a regular "return to normalcy" in Bloomington-Normal, IL.

Meanwhile, there's a cloud of black birds in this book review of Dana Guthrie Martin's chapbook (in the space where i was) over at Prick of the Spindle. Beautiful, scary cover art by Naima Underwood for this Hyacinth Girl Press book!

Ah, it's also a Random Coinciday, I see. That girl is wrapped in bandages as tight as the bandages on my dad's leg! Also, in the same issue of Prick of the Spindle is one of my Cassandra poems, one that mixes baseball imagery with breakfast and mythological wackiness + back to normalcy. Plus two poems by the same Dana Guthrie Martin! And white wings in a poem by Sarah J. Sloat about a collapsing clementine.

Thanks to Wikipedia/Wikimedia for the two Furies (with very bandagey boots).

Off the Hook

Thanks to all of you who keep sending good wishes our way while my dad's in the hospital. Keep 'em coming, as he's having some surgery today. I've been on the phone a lot lately, though usually it's a cell phone, and now I carry a charger around with me, too, and I'm getting good use out of a "Phoney Pocket" made by Betty Toland. I do also have a rotary phone like this one, black not red, but it's not off the hook. This just represents the bit of disconnect I feel between my head and my ability to recall the day of the week.

Here in the blog, though, it's Slattern Day, and I have an untidy poem up at WGLT's Poetry Radio. Yes, it's called "Off the Hook," and it's about this kind of hook. As usual, in my origami brain, a source of disconnect has led to a kind of re-connect, and the poem is sort of word play wrapped in a fighting song. Brilliant WGLT producer Bruce Bergethon helped me see that by attaching music by Charnett Moffett: "Haitian Fight Song" from The Bridge: Solo Bass Works. I love this mad, mad world and its constant connections, though, lately, my origami brain feels a little squashed, like a wad of the newspaper funnies, in color, crunched when somebody sat on it.

In my anchoring search for Random Coinciday images, I was pleased to discover, via red phone, the blog of children's writer, poet, and book lover Martha Calderaro. And also Ninja star coat hooks, by Thinkgeek; my son would like these.

In addition, these paint brush coat hooks would hang well on the wall of our home (the home of an artist/carpenter), and we have the stiff brushes to prove it. (One, oddly, is in the freezer.)

These are created by Dominic Wilcox at Variations on Normal, a pretty irresistible name for this Normal (IL) woman. I hope it's OK to show you his work and link to his site. You can also find him here!