Group Hug

It's a stunning fall day, and I am going back out in it. Students are back in school, with everything "back to Normal," as we say around here. Here's a short piece on the teacher who subdued the shooter at our local high school, who suggested a group hug today as his class resumed.

Meanwhile, the latest is that there were two more guns in the shooter's backpack, so it could have been quite bad. But it wasn't.

Good reflection in church on this yesterday: Open Your Ears. And today is World Suicide Prevention Day, so open your eyes, too. And your ears again, over at The Bloggess, for a music video.

Hang in there, everybody.

(Thank you, Mo Conlon, for the art, from Escape Into Life.)

Calming Down

Things have calmed down a bit here in our community, after yesterday's school shooting. No one was hurt, the police and school district handled things according to policy, and there will be counseling services on hand when school resumes Monday. Around here, we were glad for the weekend, so people could  handle their trauma with loved ones. My daughter is fine and had time with friends, so they are all feeling better. She was also able to retrieve her medical supplies from her school locker and, later in the day, her backpack from the classroom, where everything gets left behind as part of the lockdown procedure.

Here is a good account of what happened, praising first-year teacher Derrick Schonauer.

And here, again, is the great interview of Sean Kennedy by Charlie Schlenker of WGLT radio. It was linked at Huffington Post yesterday and got so many hits that the university's web server crashed. So go easy on it.

Thanks to Pamela Callahan for these birds, Heaven Sent.

Ouija, Lockdown

What a weird day. And we're still in it. Lockdown at the local high school, due to a shooting. No one hurt. But trouble there, for sure. Wild weather: sudden storm, surprise sun.

My husband is retrieving our daughter. Area businesses have provided food. I baked two banana breads while trying to stay updated. Heard from our daughter intermittently via borrowed cell phone, so we know all is well.

Ah!  She's home!

Meanwhile, over at Escape Into Life, I've been learning about the Ouija board writings of James Merrill. Two mini-interviews with EIL poets on an upcoming event and the Alison Lurie memoir, Familiar Spirits, about her friendship with Merrill and his Ouija board and life partner, David Jackson.  I had heard of this book, The Changing Light at Sandover, without ever realizing how it was composed.

But now I connect it with A Vision, by William Butler Yeats, written via his wife's activities as a medium. That's a weird fact I remember from high school English class!

Anyhoo, Richard Fox is part of an upcoming reading of selections from Changing Light, and Robert McDonald discusses Merrill re: Lurie in the EIL Blog. With fascinating broken-camera art by William Miller and these amazing paintings by Xue Jiye. Quija board is courtesy Wikipedia and public domain.

We've learned a little more about the lockdown situation now, and I send you to this amazing interview by Charlie Schlenker of WGLT radio, talking to Sean Kennedy, a fellow student of the shooter. We are glad everyone is safe, grateful for the courage of those in the classroom, and grateful, too, that the school system has a plan and had rehearsed it and could carry it out. Grateful to local police, as well, of course! Feeling bad for the shooter, who is clearly terribly troubled. I hope he'll get some real help now.

Next Time

This actual fortune was inside my fortune cookie this past weekend. My son was in town, with his friend who is a girl and also a roomie, and we all had great family wamily time, which included breakfast out, while my daughter was working the counter (but, alas, we/I got the timing wrong, so we had to sit in a booth instead of at the counter, where we could have tipped her big!), and Chinese carry-out because, well, I am not a good cook.

Also a double feature: Total Recall and The Avengers. Very loud, very sci fi, very wonderful. (More, perhaps, on Total Recall and Philip K. Dick later.)

We had extra cookies, so we had our choice of fortunes. My second fortune was this: "Your power is in your ability to decide." First I had to decide what the heck this meant. Was it about the nature of my power? How much I have? Whether and how to exercise it?  As in, Your future is in your own hands.

OR did it mean, as I just realized today, "Your power [resides in] your ability to decide," or, again in other words, "Your ability to make decisions determines how powerful you are." Ack! I am a crappy decision maker. This is not only a weakness of mine, but, because of past crappy decisions, an ongoing source of mild anxiety. No wonder I blocked this particular interpretation. Sigh...

Fortunately, since I had not ordered the shrimp (a crappy decision), and since my own boy had returned to Chicago and work, A Boy and His Lobster arrived in my mailbox today--that is, the Arsenic Lobster anthology 2012, including my poem, "Cassandra Observes the Midwestern Landscape in September" from the Spring 2012 issue online. There are neither lobsters nor shrimp in the Midwestern landscape around here, just sumac, windmills, and corn. But here is a box of lobsters, in a photo by editor Susan Yount. The cover art is by Heather Gorham.

This fabulous anthology is like a whole seafood platter! With French fries! And buttered rolls. Poems by Ricky Garni, Donna Vorreyer, Maureen Alsop, Kate Greenstreet, Rob Cook, Arielle Greenberg, Michaela A. Gabriel, Simon Perchik, George Kalamaras, Carlo Matos, and many, many more.

New Month, Math Challenge

I love a new month, a new beginning. How does this line up with sometimes not loving change? It doesn't. I also love change, even though sometimes I resist it.

Lately, I've realized that, given my childlike nature, I live more "in the now" than I was previously aware, and that whatever is (in the now) seems eternal to me. So change, I guess, disrupts that, briefly, until it resettles into whatever is (now).

Some people who know me might not realize I'm that way, just as I didn't realize it, because I am also stable, reliable, responsible, and always ticking things off a to-do list and looking ahead on the calendar to plan, to be available, to get the job done, etc.

I imagine many of us are aware of balancing the now with the oncoming future, the linear of our lives with the swirling nonlinear of it. But I think there are degrees of awareness, and mine must be acute (now) in this area. (And I'm aware that I'm unaware in other areas!)

This musing reminds me of a wonderful blog post on "growing up backwards" by Natalie the Singing Fool in her blog, The Cat Lady Sings. What a great name for a blog, eh?

And that, growing up backwards, reminds me that I wrote a poem about this same strange feeling. Sort of. "Alligator Pear" in the Plants issue of YB.

And that brings me to poetry and the September 1 tally in the 100 Rejections project! I heard about it from Brett Elizabeth Jenkins-Braun at her wonderfully funny blog, The Angry Grammarian. She started on September 1, and so did I, so here's where I am now:

120 packets sent since last September 1
64 rejections
34 acceptances
25 packets pending
gray area of math challenge = 3* (right?)

*some had to be withdrawn for technical reasons, etc.; some might be leftovers from before tally

So, as you see, I failed to reach 100 Rejections. Somehow, of course, this is good! It means I had more acceptances! Also, I did manage to exceed 100 submissions, which is the point. I will carry on with this till the end of the calendar year, tally again, and then, perhaps, just keep going, but without counting.

"And since no counting had begun / We lived a thousand years in one."  --Leonard Cohen, "Half the Perfect World," as sung by Madeleine Peyroux!

I can't believed I've sullied Slattern Day with my tidy tally...