though i didn’t sign up for it, i receive emails from a source called uncover words. in the middle of the middle of all the chaos and destruction of this country, this is the word that i received one day recently: addle.
i could not help but grimace at the timing.
addle: to confuse or muddle; to make unable to think clearly.
gee…i wonder who that could describe.
might it be people who are being tossed around as if they are at the end of a crack-the-whip – flung from one inane or juicy-gossipy topic to another in an effort to cover up the really important things that are taking place in this country? might it be people who are absolutely and completely averse to fact-checking, to looking up anything that might distort their cultist admiring view of the current administration? might it be people who have been propagandized into sheer ignorance by watching a news channel that is overtly dedicated to the pedestalizing of this same administration? might it be people whose base anger has made them into spitting, spewing hate mongers? might it be people who react before thinking, who yell before talking, who see only red even when it brings harm to their very own families, people in their own communities?
to addle.
addled.
lost.
a second word in that email was maunder. maunder is a verb. it means to talk in a rambling manner, to wander aimlessly in speech or thought.
wow. that seems contemporaneously and politically connected to “addled”.
to maunder.
the addled.
to maunder to the addled.
to make the lost more lost.
hmmm.
a third word that came on that email was this: effulgence.
effulgence is a noun that is defined as: a brilliant radiance; a shining forth.
an auspicious word.
using that in a sentence:
let’s hope there is an effulgence that might awaken the addled among us.
yes.
otherwise, we are destined for this country’s democracy to be entirely mauled by a maunderer with a dedication to depraved darkness – the opposite of effulgence – while the shockingly addled stand by, complicit.
yes, yes, two heads are better than one, for sure. particularly now. between us, we can have a complete grocery list, a complete song, a complete conversation. it’s like mad-libs, but real life.
how is it that these words – practical words…not multiple-syllabic barely-used thesaurus type words or foreign expressions or highly technical jargon…just words like avocado or ravioli or well, i can’t remember any more examples…how is that these words disappear into thin air? they are seemingly irretrievable, escaping all the umms and uhhs buying time to try and unearth them.
it is fortunate that we most often choose partners who are in our approximate age bracket. for there is grace when you are both punting for a word, jaunting into the vast recesses of your brain with a flashlight and bucket – sieve-ready – like you are panning for gold in an old gem mine deep underground. only not.
instead, you are just trying to remember the round green things that go on top of chili.
i’m going to try and remember my grocery list from now on. standing there in the middle of the market – gawking at each other – blank looks on our faces – going through the alphabet, certain that the word we are seeking starts with some letter (one that turns out isn’t even in the word) – can be embarrassing. people are staring. they are wheeling their carts around us – two statues in the fresh veggie section, frozen by the broccoli and brussels sprouts. we are causing a rubberneck situation in the aisle. we are certain to remember what we need – as soon as we get home.
in the meanwhile, we know that our people are here too. they are the ones who glance over with sympathetic and understanding eye contact. they calmly – without disdain – walk around us. they smile. because they, too, have a few wrinkles and – every now and then – they stand still in some aisle, a lost look on their face, gazing around in search of some elusive item. and then – you can see it – their face lights up and you know. avocado. that’s it.
and we all skip to the check-out, hoping it is 5%-off senior day. because by now, we deserve it.
in the way that we don’t realize the impact our words have on someone else, pete’s words stay with me: “there are angels all around you.” i’m pretty sure he didn’t know how often i would shuffle over to his words, to hear them, savor them, be comforted by them one more time. even now, in the dimension where he soars his soul, he may have no idea what those six words would mean to me.
and the other day, hiking on our favorite trail, in the middle of the middle, i looked up to the sky. directly overhead, the angel wings were clear and i could distinctly hear, “there are angels all around you.”
in ways right now i am stepping back to step forward. it’s necessary. not funandgames, not frivolous, not indulgent, but necessary.
and i am reminded – we don’t stand alone. those-who-have-gone-before extend gossamer threads. those who are stalwart in our regular lives stand still and strong, rocks for when we are unsteady. there are those who are new – but mighty and sure – in our path with us.
the colors intensified as the day drew to a close from our little spot on the deck. i didn’t take any more pictures. instead, i watched it. sometimes, in the taking of photographs, it is possible to miss it, the moment. usually i take my chances with this, but not this particular evening. i just needed to hold tightly to the summer night’s glory, the east bounceback of the setting sun, the quiet.
though i appreciate all the filters out there – on my iphone, on photoshop, on snapseed, really on anything that edits images – i never use them. i come from a practice of manual 35mm cameras, sans filters – though they were available and you could screw them onto the end of the lens. i was always more of a purist in my photography. no filters.
and i’m from new york.
the other day we were talking with friends about people asking other people questions. we live in the midwest so that’s not a simple matter. there’s a silence, a reticence to question here. even in some pretty disconcerting circumstances, confusing circumstances, circumstances that beg investigation, people hesitate to ask questions. they are even question-averse.
six days a week now, d and i blog. i’m quite certain that there is no one on earth who wishes to read every single word we write – sometimes a mountainous plethora of words-words. we have completely different styles of writing and, once you’ve read a few blogposts, you can recognize our individual voices. david’s posts tend to be informative, filled with teachings and learnings from writers, scholars, philosophers, artists. mine tend to be a bit smushy – thready – experience-based stories, like i’m tawwwking to you, my leading heart wide open. but both of us are sans filters. he spent years on the west coast and, remember, i’m from new york. so, yeah, no filters.
i would imagine that there are some readers reading who think, “whoa! that’s too much information! waaaay too much information!” and yes, i would say we can be pretty transparent. perhaps people would prefer filters (or less words or even opaqueness).
but this is art and the work of an artist is to be open, to communicate, to elicit emotion, to provoke thought. it’s to be vulnerable.
without filters.
otherwise, you will wonder every time you look at a photo of a sunset: is this real?
so, neither of us has any trouble with going on and on and on. nope, this is not new news to you (as you read, vehemently nodding your head in agreement, thinking that this is not rocket science.)
each day – now – suddenly – when we open our blogsites, there is a prompt at the top….as if we can’t think of anything to talk about. they are not profound prompts, existential questions, deeply probing and inventive. no…these prompts are kind of remedial…like today’s “tell us about your first day at something – school, work, as a parent, etc.”. seriously? the first one was “how do you feel about eating meat?” and there were others: “who do you envy?” and “what’s your favorite cartoon?”.
we wrote to wordpress – really expressing our dissatisfaction with these newly ever-present prompts. we pay for these sites and really just want blank space to blog. good grief. staaahhhhp it. but it was to no avail. they show up every day on the top of our screen. yada yada.
we – clearly – don’t need wordpress’ prompts to write. we seem to have plenty of words milling about in our minds and bodies, just waiting to surface and barrel out onto the page.
and then…there are the words that don’t make it to the page…that just flit about in the air. because we both tend to be thinkers, we are both often mulling things over in our heads…for me, that tends to be details and for him, well, it’s more a concepts sort of thing.
it is not unusual for one of us – or the other – to just start blahblah-ing about all that goobledegook going on – babble, folly, a few valid points thrown in for good measure. more on the verbose side of the coin than the succinct side. we are together a lot – and we love to share – so this is not a rarity. it is an accoutrement of our relationship, like a scarf in cold weather.
and, though we usually hold good discussions, have good conversation, compare viewpoints and learn tidbits from each other, there are those moments when one of us will just reach maximum input, one word over the line, just a smidge too much – like when you are filling the sink soap dispenser and reach the top and the dawn dishwashing liquid just starts spilling everywhere, which, incidentally, is not easy to clean up, though i suspect you already know that – and that one of us (more commonly me, but most definitely him too) just sort of shuts down. all hearing stops – and it kind of looks like staring into space…but it’s really just being boggled. completely and utterly boggled. time stands still for a few minutes and then, catapulting through space on the planet while standing there – frozen and boggled – it catches back up, listening resumes and the boggle un-boggles.
and we continue on our merry way, laughing at the temporary word-absorption-lull.
mondegreen. it’s a mondegreen. this is not an anomaly. mondegreens happen.
it is stunning how often we catch ourselves singing nonsensical lyrics to songs we have listened to through time: ever since the dark ages of record players in the living room to cassette players next to our beds to transistor radios on our beach towels to giant portable cd players with carrying handles equipped with batteries so you could lug them anywhere to ipods that plugged into the car to phones that had-it-all to, well, record players again.
at the top of our lungs we will sing these lyrics – they sound like what is being sung, but who really knows, anyway.
then, one day, you see them written down, you read the jacket (in caveman behavior), you glance at the with-lyrics youtube, you google them…and suddenly…you realize you had no idea what the song was about and you had made up words that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
or, in the case of “don’t bring me down” by ELO, they were the ones making no sense. because for years and years and years when they sing the chorus “don’t bring me dowwwwwwwn”, i – and the rest of the singing-along-world – would finish it with “bruce!” so it would go like this: don’t bring me dowwwwwwn…..bruce!….don’t bring me dowwwwwwn…….bruce!….don’t bring me dowwwwwn……bruce!….don’t bring me down!
but, though it made complete sense to me, it was not “bruce”. it was “groose”…just an ad-lib by jeff lynne. sigh. “you’re lookin’ good, just like a snake in the grass” – yup. made sense to me.
or what about toto missing the rains down in africa? nope. they are singing, “i bless the rains down in africa!” i have sung about their missing the rain since they released that song the year of my first wedding, now forty years ago.
i don’t even want to write what i was singing to the bruce-springsteen-manfred-mann-earth-band song “blinded by the light“, though i think simply everyone was singing THAT wrong.
after i learned this behavior had a name “mondegreen” – this “mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it new meaning. …created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.” (wikipedia) – i realized that there was some forgiveness in singing all the wrong words.
going back, though, after you come to grips with the real lyrics, tossing aside your memorized gibberish, you kind of have to wonder anew what the song is about.
and then you wonder…suddenly all at once and slowly dawning on you, both…what else didn’t i get?
revved up like a deuce??? a 1932 ford. oh. of course!
every weekday for four years is kind of a long time. we kicked off our mélange on february 12, 2018 with the intention to blog each day using a mutual image. we’d see where those images would take us: down backroads of memory, forays into wondering, dropping into the tiniest cracks of things that happen in our days. they would generate stories and pondering and poetry and a dedication to a practice we both love: writing.
1106 blogs later – in the context of the mélange – and we are just as committed now as we were then. in these tens of hundreds of posts, we have been both succinct and verbose, grateful and snarky, questioning and certain. mostly, we have sat next to each other – every single post – typed on laptops and read aloud to the other what the chosen image evoked. it has been an absolute gift.
from an analytical standpoint, we can see that people all over the world are reading. we marvel at the number of countries where someone has opened up what we have blathered. it is not without wonder that we -every so often- hear from someone from afar. and then, there are those days that the analytics suggest perhaps no one is interested and our writing is for naught. yet, we write anyway. because, we have discovered, this is for us – a gift we have given ourselves.
in the beginning our monday-friday topics included two cartoon days: chicken marsala monday and flawed cartoon wednesday. those days have since morphed and changed into merely-a-thought monday and not-so-flawed (and sometimes flawed) wednesday. in the beginning, too, every day had products i designed for that day. we had (actually, still have) five stores on society6 where people could purchase prints and canvases and tote bags, mugs and phone cases, throw pillows and leggings and shirts with our original work. hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of products. and so much fun to design. we have featured morsels of david’s paintings and youtubes or mp3s of my music, tiny snippets of color and texture and devoted artistry. we dove into the telling-the-tale of these pieces and we have shared the soul of our work.
soon it will be a year since we first added saturday morning smack-dab, our smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-middle-age cartoon. we’ll be setting up an additional separate page for smack-dab, the cartoon. some people want less words and that will be the place to go for the less-is-more approach. this cartoon is one of the delights of my week and the scripting, layout, colorizing, design work give me a distinct honor of co-cartoonist.
we have learned – in this practice – to photograph, to look, to listen – even more carefully and intently than before. so much to notice, to pay attention to. life is about how you take it in and respond to it all.
the learning curve on anything worthwhile can be steep. toughing out the vulnerability factor, finding your voice, using it to write, putting-it-out-there, brings a mélange of emotion. for us, it has been about 1106x joy.
“this is my autograph, here in the songs that I sing. here in my cry and my laugh, here in the love that i bring. to be always with you and you always with me.” (autograph – john denver)
on my 30th birthday – a sunny and auspicious day more than thirty years ago – at the zoo, in a freshly poured cement sidewalk, i wrote my name with a stick. i was not alone; i had witnesses to this moment in time. my mom and dad and niece and husband cheered me on as i left my tiny mark. years later, upon return to that zoo, it was still there. there was something encouraging and reassuring about that. i had not disappeared.
we were way up on the mountain, at the highest point of the trail we were hiking. the meadow stretched out of the woods and we sat for a time on a log, watching the breeze move the wildflowers as they bent to autumn. with a sharpie we left two tiny dots on that log. we had been there. we would remain there.
right off the side of the meadow as we re-entered the woods, there was this stump. like an opening flower blossom, it begged a look inside. i was surprised to find rocks of all sizes in there. a container of autographs, evidence for those who had passed by. we added ours to the assembly, rocks specifically chosen by hikers who placed their i-was-here into the hollow cavern of the stump. there is something about leaving a token behind, yes, encouraging and reassuring that upon our return someday – should we return to that very spot – it could be there and we would be reminded that we had passed that way.
the music, the art, the words – all linger temporarily. a little noisy. we have passed this way, that way, these very spots. music, the art, the words – they are expressions that give a bit of definition to the amorphous life we live. they say who we are and stamp our love into the world. and then they evaporate into the atmosphere.
and we know that, even if we never pass that way again, even if we never come across the hollow stump again, we have still left a silent autograph.
“…adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.” (ralph waldo emerson)
no matter how hard we try, there is not one thing we can do to make the sun appear or the day warmer or the moon to rise or the snow to fall. we accept that time will come, time will pass, time will form and time will destroy. we give over to nature, anticipating that which we know, expecting the unexpected. we baby-step through this very time in the universe, our footprints barely visible on the timeline that is forever. we learn that no matter our stride, we are simply tiny beings. eventually, we learn, after giving over to patience, that that is enough.
the john denver sanctuary in aspen is a treasure trove. we have been there three times now. a garden of trails and large river boulders etched with lyrics and quotes, perennial daisies and aspen trees, it is a gentle sinking into peaceful. the city sounds of aspen fall away and the river and streams are lulling.
we wandered for hours, reading, sitting, pondering, the sun on our faces, the sound of quaking leaves slowing us down. i stood on a giant rock, like a stage under my feet, and bowed deeply to no one and to the brilliance of a man who knew how to tenderly shape melody and weave lyric into a fabric like a soft blanket.
we were immersed in poetry, in words, delicious to read aloud. we were quietly taking it all in, i in all my john-denver-glory, reliving the cassettes i wore out, rewinding, rewinding, listening again and again. this exquisite place, tempting all-day-hooky-playing, wielding a magic defined by thought, encouraging reflection, softly begging you to tumble in your own thoughts. this place slowing you down, reminding you that it is not stuff that defines you, it is not the stuff-of-you that will remain with others.
we wrestle with timing, with suspense, with expectation and disappointment. we measure against ladders of success and hold ourselves to higher higher higher standards of accomplishment.
nature quietly treks on, luminescent and glorious, patiently acknowledging every babystep moment of its impact, surrendering judgement and secretly, from the heart of the universe, signing its autograph on all of us, whispering to us to slow our pace.
i read her text more than once, “imagine, over 500,000 americans who will no longer contribute to the whole.” it is unfathomable to wrap your mind around this and, yet, the devastation continues. some of this country’s governors, whipping off their masks, merrily open their state-doors to this insidious disease and more americans will lose their lives, their parents, their spouses, their sons, their daughters. for what end? so that people might visit disney on spring vacation? so that people might step out of their covid-isolated lives and ignore all that has been scientifically proven as critical aids to move the country forward? so that people might selfishly tote variants back in their carry-ons from warm hot-spots, from tourist attractions, from margaritaville, from breaks that could break us all?
i wear a small chain on my left wrist. it is literally ceiling fan chain. we found the pack of chain on my dad’s workbench in florida years ago, sometime during the period of years that both of my parents were moving to a different plane of existence. both d and i chose to wrap this chain around our wrists to mark my poppo and each time i see it, i think of him. we speak of him. we speak of my sweet momma. i keep them around – purposefully, intentionally. i want their mark on the world to be present.
a family in boston lost their father, neil, only 78 years old, to covid last april. a man who embraced life with wide open arms, his family wants to memorialize him and find a way to keep his engaged and engaging spirit in the world. their plan? to get a word he made up for a college assignment years ago – orbisculate – into the dictionary. ‘when citrus fruit squirts on you’ is the ready definition. the complete and official definition is: 1) to accidentally squirt juice and/or pulp into one’s eye, as from a grapefruit when using a spoon to scoop out a section for eating. 2) to accidentally squirt the inner content from fruits, vegetables and other foods onto one’s face, body or clothing, or onto that of a person nearby. the website has a variety of links for blogposts and goals and faq’s, ways to contribute to the important charity this lovely family has chosen to support and a petition you can sign to help move this effort forward, keep their dad around.
after her text, i spent some time thinking about the 500,000 plus beautiful souls no longer on this earth – simply because of covid, a pandemic with some preventable losses. how might we memorialize each of these people? how might we keep them present – in their own concentric circles, in their community, in the whole wide world? how might we intentionally remember?
to what end are we willing to go to not lose any more people to this virus? to what end are we each willing to sacrifice the smaller picture for the bigger picture? to what end are we willing to agree to unite in a continued compassionate endeavor to mitigate this?
and, with a nod to the brilliant idea category of this bostonian family, how will the dictionary accommodate over 500,000 new words – all of which would be worthy were each of these mortals to have their own special thingamajig-word and definition. and i hope they do.
poppochain: (noun): 1) bracelet made of inexpensive ceiling fan chain, typically worn wrapped around wrist 2) a physical reminder of enormous love 3) memorial of my sweet poppo, 1920-2012.
i touch the poppochain on my left wrist and, suddenly, i want to go peel a grapefruit.
*****
we orbisculate over to you for your haiku-turn. let them know!
reverse threading 