Blue

Back in the 1920s on the bald-headed prairie of Alberta, my uncles, Bruce and Ed, would rear a pig once a year.  They knew the ultimate fate for the pigs was to be butchered.  However, they would move the pen every day for cleanliness, wash down the pigs, and they would name them.  As we all know, you don't name food.

Ultimately, my grandmother would announce that the time had come.  My mother remembered the horrible sobbing of her brothers - every time.  My grandmother was a widow and very poor.  When a pig was slaughtered and butchered, she would get half and the man who did the deed got half.  We're an extremely brutal species, don't you think?

This photo was taken by Donna Dickson, a woman with whom I used to work.

Another crocus...

We lived in a little trailer in England from September 1954 until July 1957.  We got some snow each winter.  At the end of the trailer, my mom planted a flower garden which included crocuses.  They would bloom very early and poke through the snow.  They were very beautiful.

An excerpt from President Obama's inauguration speech on January 21, 2013


You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course.

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.

One Today by Richard Blanco - Read at President Obama's second inauguration.

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.  One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights, fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us, on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through, the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined, the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming, or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain the empty desks of twenty children marked absent today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light breathing color into stained glass windows, life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs, buses launching down avenues, the symphony of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways, the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling, or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom, buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días in the language my mother taught me—in every language spoken into one wind carrying our lives without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands: weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report for the boss on time, stitching another wound or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait, or the last floor on the Freedom Tower jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes tired from work: some days guessing at the weather of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother who knew how to give, or forgiving a father who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home, always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop and every window, of one country—all of us—facing the stars
hope—a new constellation waiting for us to map it, waiting for us to name it—together.

When the presidential debates started, I attempted to watch.  I lasted for 30 minutes of the first.  I departed each subsequent debate even earlier.  It was the second one that dredged up old memories of my parents fighting.  It's amazing what memories come to the surface when the mind is stimulated.  My parents were always fighting about money.

It was silly of me to try to watch any of these because, of course, I'm voting for President Obama.

Today, I watched the Endeavour fly by atop a jumbo jet.  Very thrilling.