WISHING SOMEONE ELSE COULD

 35 of #100daychallenge

There was quite the birdshow out my library window this morning. Fortunately, the cats were nowhere around as two finches ... might have been a female lesser goldfinch ... no color to catch the eye ... all but flew into my open, screenless window. They were cute, and give me a bird's-butt-eye-view as they balanced on the window ledge about 20 inches away from my face. I didn't have my mobil 'phone near me, so no pictures.

Janet's dominoes pals aren't meeting today and she can't get interested in anything on the television so she just goes back to bed. I don't quite know what to do with her on days like this. Yesterday, I managed to convince her to sit out in the front where I later found that she had actually picked up a newspaper and had done some perusing. I try to get her interested in various things on tv as we have lots of options, but only shit shows like Everyone Loves Raymond, Mom, Golden Girls, Shark Tank, Two and A Half-Men, and Big Bang Theory keep her on the same station for any amount of time. I suppose with the laugh tracks they are somehow soothing. I bought her a pair of reading glasses in the hopes that she would try to do some of that, but no success yet. 

Although I should be re-reading How The Irish Saved Civilization for the Kermit Place Readers this week, I am still stumbling around Delia Ephron's Sister Mother Husband Dog (Etc.). If one takes the wheat with the chaff, there are redeeming aspects or aphorisms or fleeting thoughts that make the book worthwhile enough. This one definitely goes on the beach reading or airplane reading list as you can breeze through it and leave it in the hotel or airplane seat.

"There are things a person does that you could talk about forever. They are the key. They reveal character, they unlock secrets."

There is something about this that rings true. Back when I had just moved to Berkeley and was poor and depressed (a pretty big swath of time), I wrote to my friend ET in Boston, lamenting many things among them that I had lost or destroyed my copy of Live Dead. I don't think ET was full of cash herself in those days, however, she pooled her resources and sent me a copy. That was an act of kindness and care that has lingered with me for forty years.

That said, ET's excellence and concern for others is no kind of secret. 

McCoy in the garden.

In another essay or two, Ephron makes some passing comments about power.

"Her [Nora's] sporadic, unpredictable seal of approval was brilliant power-wise—power was something she had an innate understanding of—because it could keep a person hoping."

Personally, I don't want to be in (a) relationship(s) that keep anyone hoping for anything that I can likely give them. And I less want to be in the situation where withholding for power's sake is part of the game plan. Yeech.

This though, I thought was more interesting.

"Telling is also a loss of control. Of power. The person with the secret is the person with the power."

I recently, in a tipsy moment, told a new friend something I don't like to discuss. The next day when I remembered, I was horrified that I would be judged. (Didn't happen that way.) I did spend some time beating myself up, though. Meanwhile, I am going to chew on the concepts of secrets and power.

RUBBING LAMPS

Things besides

Aladdin’s and

the golden cabe

fish’s lamps

grant wishes.

In fact,

most lamps

aren’t lamp-

shapes and

happen by

accident: an

ordinary knob

goes lambent

as you twist

or a cloth turns

to silver mesh

against a dish—

something

so odd and

filled with promise

for a minute

that you spend 

your only wish

wishing someone else

could see it.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Grove Press, New York, 2010

Also, HBD to my BFF, Betts.