Comments are appreciated and answered.
Closely related to today’s Photo Friday submission: One person’s escape to a place is another person’s escape from a place. This part of the Neverending Saga hasn’t been written: a character will walk away from the California dreams that came true.
Because of Photo Friday, I didn’t post anything about crafting yesterday, but I did work on something. As I’ve mentioned, the large sketch book where I collect my completed coloring pages will be full soon, even though when I got to the back of the book, I began putting colored pages on the backs of used pages. I wondered if I had another sketchbook as large as that one, and I do, but the front cover isn’t made of reinforced paper or cardboard, so I don’t know if it will hold up to collaging and a lot of use, like the current one.
It’s an old sketch book of our late friend Steve’s. It only has a couple of sketches he started it in, but I’d forgotten I used it back in June of 2012, when I did the 30 Days of Creativity challenge. If you were around then, you might remember that I’d sketch something on a page, then use it for a backdrop with my wee plastic ram being a director of dolls or action figures, etc., doing scenes from different movies. Like, for example, one I did for the movie The Secret Life of Bees. On Friday, after running errands, including having photos printed from those 2012 challenges, I added the photos and explanations to the original sketches. Like this.
After a visit to Texas Art Supply on Thursday, I also started something else that I finished today. I’d found sticker books there with words and phrases that could be turned into poetry (like Magnetic Poetry, but more permanent).
I love these and put together a poem in my Inspire journal (all its pages are related in some way to the Neverending Saga and its characters). I finished that page today. I’m glad I did something creative to end the week, because today (March 8) is Riley’s birthday. One of the ways to resist, overcome, and stay steady when the world is full of chaos, confusion, conflict, and catastrophe, is a far more important “C” word: CREATE. I know Riley would be the first to agree with this. His life was often a series of struggles, and that’s when he sat at the piano or picked up a guitar and turned it all into music and lyrics. And even if the world, or at least some part of the world, will never acknowledge this, humanity does need art and find it healing. Sometimes it feels like the real division in the world is between haters and healers. I’ve learned a lot about that in the last couple of months.
One more thing I did today, in recognition of International Women’s Day, is post this composite to Instagram, described as “just a few of the women who nurtured, mentored, and taught me over the years, expanding my heart, mind, and soul. I thank them and all the others whose photos I don’t have.”
The other day, Tom walked by the writing sanctuary with a pair of socks in his hand and said, “These have worn places on them. I guess I should just throw them away?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, snatching the socks from him. “These are doll clothes!”
Then today, I heard that March 6 is National Dress Day. After I got home from a doctor’s appointment, I had a few other things to do, and then I picked a model from the doll closet, named her Roberta, and designed and crafted a dress for her from one of those socks.
In honor of the day, and the late Roberta Flack, songbird of the Seventies, here’s Roberta on an outing to a Peter Max exhibit, dressed in bespoke fashion from Becks.
From the National Today site: On National Dress Day March 6, we celebrate the most versatile and fun article of clothing there is — the dress! Fashion designer Ashley Lauren founded the day to help pay homage to dresses and the magical moments that happen when we wear them. “I remember the dresses I wore to my prom, first job interview, first date, competing in a pageant, my first red carpet event, the list goes on,” she says. “This is a fun day to cherish and celebrate those memories.”
Current Photo Friday theme: Tiled.
Had a little fun with this theme by using several of my own tiles (the New Orleans tile was my mother’s), ringed by Sowminoes™ ceramic dominos, along with Scrabble tiles and artist Jeff Fisher’s cover illustration for British writer Louis de Bernières’ 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. (My theme this week has been books.) Some sources say the cover was inspired by the art of Matisse; another speaks of how the figures are like those on Mediterranean pottery. I read the book several years ago (I think it’s excellent, by the way), and remembered as soon as I saw the Photo Friday theme how the illustration always made me think of old tiles, as well as the way the cover figures are like “keys” to people and things in the novel.
(P.S. You’ve now seen your Daily Cow, plus a bonus cow!)
Let’s begin with this photo of my Dan Fogelberg 1983 Greatest Hits album that was lost in the Harvey flood. I’m pretty sure I have all his work that was drowned on the CD collection I bought, but it’ll never be the same as lying in a candlelit room and listening to the albums, staring at his photo on the cover, and traveling through all the journeys he took me to all the places in my imagination.
Though it was an album of greatest hits, it also had a couple of new songs on it, and one of those was “Make Love Stay.” I wondered from the first moment I heard it if it was inspired by Tom Robbins’s novel Still Life With Woodpecker. Of all his novels, this is one of two that I’ve read so many times they have a permanent residence in my brain. Because of this book, for years, I kept a sealed pack of Camel cigarettes in one desk drawer after another in every home, school, and business office I was in.
From the novel, this excerpt:
“Who knows how to make love stay?”
1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”
Though I can in no way approach the kind of writing Tom Robbins creates, I know with every fiber of my being that the heart of one character I created would sing when he read this–and he’d read it over and over.
I think that passage probably had that same effect on Dan Fogelberg. In his own words:
Fogelberg later described “Make Love Stay” in the liner notes to a retrospective album as a “sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker”and as “a musical question that, unfortunately, eludes me still.”
From this wee book, I’ve found an opportunity to elaborate on my week’s theme: Time. Or rather, I’m letting a couple of poets do it for me. Right now, I seem to be letting others do the heavy lifting on most of my other social media. I’ll elaborate on that some other day so that I can revel in the delight today’s post provides me. I hope it adds something good to your day, as well.
I’ve never been better prepared by my past interests and my theme for this page. I LITERALLY followed directions.
poem
what time is it? it is by every star
a different time, and each most falsely true;
or so subhuman superminds declare
— not all their times encompass me and you:
when we are never, but forever now
(hosts of eternity; not guests of seem)
believe me, dear, clocks have enough to do
without confusing timelessness and time.
Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell —
Measure imagine, mystery, a kiss
— not though mankind would rather know than feel:
mistrusting utterly that timelessness
whose absence would make your whole life and my
(and infinite our) merely to undie
And this beautiful one, for which I’ll provide the lyrics, but also a moving rendition you might have seen in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Interestingly, the original version of this poem was written to be performed on stage in a play.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
I can’t believe it’s been almost three years since I went to the fantastic Houston indie bookstore Kaboom Books. It may have been where I picked up this Joni Mitchell book.
Long before I lost a ton of albums in the Harvey flood, I had other albums that were water damaged from a leaking pipe in one of my graduate school-era houses. I’m not sure if I lost my Joni Mitchell albums then, or if I gave them away during one of several purges (I moved a LOT as a grad student, and purges were helpful). I had roommates over different times who were Joni fans, and very often, if I met someone who was passionate about an artist, I’d give them my vinyl.
Sidebar: My friend Ed was a huge fan of the band Chicago, and I had almost all of their albums on vinyl collected over many years. It was a pleasure to give him those albums, and it was even before he once let me drag him from church to help my brother move an insanely heavy sofa bed up some stairs and inside my new apartment, thereby giving me something to sleep on. A couple of years later, both Ed and his brother Joe were two of Tom’s groomsmen in our wedding (where my brother walked me down the aisle–I wonder if David and Ed remembered that damn sofa bed, which was so heavy that I left it in the apartment when I moved out!). The same year Tom and I married, Joe married my friend Susan, who I’d met when we both worked at the same horrible law firm during one of my grad school breaks (I introduced Susan and Joe, and they’re still going strong!). I wonder if Ed still has those Chicago albums. =)
Back to the subject of Joni. I don’t own any of her music now, but I stream her whenever I’m in the mood. The above two pages from the book got me into a deep dive of her relationship with James Taylor (the song “Blue,” lyrics shown here, is allegedly about him, and the sketch is also–allegedly!–of him).
All the relationships among the musicians of Laurel Canyon in the ’60s and ’70s are a frequent research topic because they include many of my favorite artists (and several of Joni Mitchell’s lovers). If I could get my head out of the terrible places current news takes me and write, I’m stalled in the middle of a chapter set in 1975, wherein a couple of good friends are trying to keep another friend away from that Laurel Canyon scene. It amuses me to write against my fascination with that time and those artists to keep myself from throwing my character to the wolves… or coyotes… “Coyote” is one of my personal favorite Joni Mitchell songs, one that’s allegedly about her relationship with the late playwright/actor/director/ screenwriter/author Sam Shepard.
Author Paul Lisicky, a writer whose work I always enjoy, and a contributor to our (as in Timothy J. Lambert and my) January 2014 anthology (11 years!) Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, has a new book coming out, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell (on sale February 25, 2025). I’m looking forward to reading this. As Harper Collins describes it, A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.
Musicians and writers and artists–they inspire me, and I’m still hopeful they’re the best antidote to the things that are currently overwhelming my voice and state of mind.
Things that inspire me.
Clockwise from bottom left: Crystal “create” stone from Timmy. Other stones: carnelian, the creative powerhouse; citrine, the light of inspiration; quartz crystal seer stone egg. Essential oils; pictured here: lavender. Stars and candlelight. Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words: Simple Poetry Prompts That Unlock The Creativity in Everyone. Electric and acoustic guitars at 1:6 scale and an enamel pin showing a drum kit to represent music and musicians. Fine art, represented by postcard books with selected Mark Rothko paintings and selections from The Art of Florence.
I chose to take a poetry prompt from Fasano’s book about a new year.
Here’s how I wrote the poem.
New Year Poem: A Visitor
While everyone is counting in the year,
their hands full of confetti,
their eyes full of clocks,
I will do it differently:
I will walk out purposefully through the noise
and sit alone beneath the trees
and wait for you, muse.
Quietly, quietly, I will wait.
And if you come, if you speak,
if you reveal your wish,
I will hear.
I will be there.
Things that are gray. Or grey, as that spelling seems a little more magical than “gray,” and to me, all of these items have magic.
From bottom left, a rat sent by Lisa in Iowa years ago when we had to remove rats from our attic in The Compound amid much drama and mishap. In the end, the rats were gone, the house was secured, and despite it all, there were moments of humor, and Lisa’s rat symbolizes that. It was, in fact, that kind of magic that brought Lisa into our lives when she read the humorous TJB books, wrote us a letter, and a bond was formed. It included a visit to The Compound and meetings at Saints and Sinners, and it endures to this day.
Next up is little Dedo, a gift from me to Tom one year. Dedo is a small gargoyle on the Notre Dame Cathedral who is said to have a protective, caring presence. Dedo is a symbol of kindness and safeguarding. Sounds like Tom. Sometimes when you want to wander across the Internet, look up stories and legends about Dedo and his likenesses.
Then there’s Batman, whose sartorial choice for this look is a gray bodysuit. Through the decades, his bodysuit has had bold colors of several hues, zebra stripes, a mummy bandage look, brown, and black, but most often, he’s in gray. Batman is a symbol of hope and justice. He has no superhuman qualities, but he represents the best of humans in his quest to protect others, disable villains without killing them, and give people a belief in a better future.
An elephant, besides being my college mascot, symbolizes many things in different cultures. A list includes: power, wisdom, loyalty, fertility, strength, high moral character, longevity, stamina, moderation, eternity, memory, vitality, majesty, and intelligence. Speaking of magic, many years ago, over coffee, a professor told me a fact about elephants that made me rethink a certain bias I had, planting a seed that would fully bloom in the 1990s and change my life for good and for better.
Oh, the shark bites…the book. He’s only being playful. I doubt I ever gave any thought to sharks at all until one night when a few of us were hanging out in the lone convenience store in the wee town where I went to high school. (As I recall, the sister of one of my friends worked there, and she didn’t care if we gathered there. There was nothing else to do.) I picked up a book, read the first few pages of Jaws, thought, Eek! Not for me! and put it down. Later, I saw the movie when it came out, loved it (and also ended up loving the novel), and from then on, sharks held a fascination for me. I appreciate seeing them in their natural environment thanks to skilled photographers. I like seeing them in cartoons. They continue to have mystery and, like the elephant, a majesty to me.
Finally, we have what I dub a “melancholy of Eeyores.” In the pantheon of characters who inhabit Hundred Acre Wood, Eeyore seems to have a theme for many people, who think he’s: sad, depressed, pessimistic, downtrodden, negative, gloomy, and hypersensitive. However, he’s also a thinker and a planner. The magic of Eeyore is that he’s greatly loved by his friends. They don’t exclude him, berate him, try to change him, or avoid him. He brings a balance to their group, and they love him without conditions.
Finally, I included the writing prompts book Complete The Story. I feel as if I’ve story-told enough in this post already, so I’ll leave you with the prompt below. Maybe something among the worlds of gargoyles, heroes, and animals pictured will trigger your imagination or a memory that helps you create a story of your own. The story begins…
On the 4th day of the 10-day selfie challenge, I wished I’d never bought a smart phone. The photo of me was innocent enough, but what I accidentally captured in the background opened up a whole world of trouble. I had been walking…
Happy imagining and writing!
Over the past few days, I’ve seen too many photos and read too many stories from the city of my 
, Los Angeles. My heart aches for all those homes lost. People lost. Businesses and jobs lost. The daunting prospects of recovery and rebuilding. Not everyone there is wealthy, nor are all those neighborhoods filled with the residences of celebrities.
I’ve seen videos of terrified wildlife fleeing from fires, including a cougar with her two cubs running behind her—so beautiful, so scared. I’ve seen horses being rescued and taken to shelter in safe sites, and offerings from other communities of the number of horses they can take in. Many pets have been placed in shelters until their families can figure out where they’ll be staying or going next.
So many have lost their homes, all their homes’ contents, and sometimes even their vehicles. Meaning to be reassuring, people offer, They’re just things. They can be replaced.
Not all things can be replaced.
I thought of my decades of photos, my own and my mother’s. My father’s art. My lifetime of journals. My father’s military records. My mother’s genealogical records.
I thought of all the mementos and items Tom’s parents have saved his entire life and given to him on special occasions. His rocking horse. His family Christmas ornaments, including some from his grandmother. His parents’ art.
My teddy bear. My dolls, and I don’t mean that massive collection of Barbies so much as my baby dolls and the dolls my father brought back from Korea and Japan. Some of the Barbies do have deep sentimental value, too.
I thought about Tim’s violin, built by his grandfather. The portrait of Rex done by a local artist and gifted to him by Laura. The plant he brought back from his grandmother’s funeral that he’s kept thriving for several years. Lynne, too, has two plants, one that came through various relatives from her grandmother to her; another that was her mother’s, who died in 1978. I thought of the carousel horses that were gifts from her late husband.
Debby lost some very precious keepsakes related to her children during our flood in 2017, and a couple of things I valued from my teenage years went missing, maybe inadvertently thrown out with larger items. We’ve lost a lot over the years, but we’ve never lost everything, as is happening to so many right now because of the L.A. fires.
Some things can never be replaced because most of their value exists only in our hearts and memories. Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, those things give us something tangible to cling to, just as our companion animals give us the will to be strong, to keep going.
Yesterday, I watched a video of a stranger, maybe someone’s neighbor or a passerby, as she realized she saw movement on a property, and used her hands to pull two surviving fish and two turtles, all struggling, but alive, out of someone’s koi pond in their yard next to their burned down house. She put them in a cooler that she filled with their water to transport them. (There were others, fish at least, that hadn’t made it.) Imagine losing everything but what you could take with you, and then being reunited with those four little survivors, and what they might mean to those people. The kindness of that woman is immeasurable, and she’s just one of so many who are trying to do something, anything, for their fellow Angelenos.
There’s so much heartbreak in these losses, but there’s also heartbreak in the vitriol from the usual choir of cruelty. I can’t understand, don’t even want to understand, how people can be so small, so hard, instead of just kind. Even in thoughts. In words. Just kindness. It costs nothing to be kind.
Do intentions matter? Yes. I absolutely believe they do.
Over these days, I’ve turned to music from the CDs that live in the sanctuary closet with a lot of the things I once used in my practice. They’re meant to comfort. To help someone relax. To be a channel to healing. I have more, but these were ones I pulled out so far.
I’m grateful for artists and their music, as I am for all those who provide the movies and television shows we watch, the books we read, the art that intrigues us. So much of the creative output that entertains and enriches us comes from that concentrated part of the west coast.
There are two realities I hold on to. First, our strength and resilience are the reason we persevere and rebuild. It’s how San Francisco has come back from earthquakes. How New Orleans came back from Katrina. How New York came back from terrorist attacks. I’m picking big cities because right now it’s Los Angeles, but across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, the West and Northwest, this same spirit has driven us, as it will North Carolina and other areas impacted by disasters, whatever their causes.
And second, the abundant kindness we show to those who experience catastrophe reflects the best in us. Whether we give our time or material support or let our thoughts, words, actions, and prayers come from kindness, infused with the energy of good intentions, we get to choose to be a part of one another’s healing instead of their suffering.