Pie Safe

My Grandmother Rovilla Lindsey's Old Pie Safe

Thanks to my sister - in - law Marion for filling this beloved kitchen cabinet with living history for all of us to admire and enjoy -- some old, some new, some American, some German, some daily artifacts, some treasured heirlooms -- all pulled together by Marion with her special skill and artistic eye.

It gives me as much joy as an adult to stand and admire Marion's fabulous display of collected treasures on these shelves, as it did when I was a child and Grandma Lindsey would let me pull open the drawers and sort through all of the writing paper and cards and address stickers that she kept in there.

Old Furniture

I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers.
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.

I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.

On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.

On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.

And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.

Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one today
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

Open House ~ Open Heart
Marion's Beautiful Bay Window
Looking in at Dusk

A Black Cat Comes

Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eye
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

by Thomas Hardy

Many thanks to Gerry's Auntie Jan for introducing us to
this great restaurant, the above poem by Thomas Hardy,
and "London Snow" by Robert Bridges

The Cat Inn & Pub in West Hoathly, England
Purr-fect for a pre-Christmas lunch on a sunny winter day!

The Twain

Twin Towers Medallion & Titanic Medallion
The Convergence of the Twain
by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

. . . compare to . . .
The Convergence of the Twain
by Simon Armitage (b 26 May 1963)

[about the tragic events of September 11th]

I
Here is an architecture of air.
Where dust has cleared,
nothing stands but free sky, unlimited and sheer.

II
Smoke's dark bruise
has paled, soothed
by wind, dabbed at and eased by rain, exposing the wound.

III
Over the spoil of junk,
rescuers prod and pick,
shout into tangled holes. What answers back is aftershock.

IV
All land lines are down.
Reports of mobile phones
are false. One half-excoriated Apple Mac still quotes the Dow Jones.

V
Shop windows are papered
with faces of the disappeared.
As if they might walk from the ruins - chosen, spared.

VI
With hindsight now we track
the vapour-trail of each flight-path
arcing through blue morning, like a curved thought.

VII
And in retrospect plot
the weird prospect
of a passenger plane beading an office-block.

VIII
But long before that dawn,
with those towers drawing
in worth and name to their full height, an opposite was forming,

IX
a force
still years and miles off,
yet moving headlong forwards, locked on a collision course.

X
Then time and space
contracted, so whatever distance
held those worlds apart thinned to an instant.

XI
During which, cameras framed
moments of grace
before the furious contact wherein earth and heaven fused.

~ Click for More Similarities between these Twin Disasters ~

*****************
Previous 9 / 11 Posts

2009: Not a Normal Day

2010: Poem for Today and Tomorrow

2010: 9 / 11 Retrospective (Fortnightly)

2011: Alabaster Cities

2012: My Country's Heart

2013: On the Eve of that Other Perfect Day

2014: Back Before 9 / 11

2016: The Twain

2019: Who Knew?

Christmas Eve ~ So Fair a Fancy

Christmas Pageant 1966 ~ Us Four Little Kids

Look closely and you can also see photos of older sibs
Peg (10th grade) & Dave (Vietnam) on mantelpiece.

And, one on each end:
two big gallon jars of "hard rock candy Christmas."

This was in our house at
704 Baxter Street Road ~ Neosho, Missouri

With me as Bath Towel Madonna,
my younger sister Diane as the Angel ~
and her doll Floppy as Baby Jesus;
my twin brother Bruce as Joseph;
my younger brother Aaron as Shepherd ~
and Big Doggy as sheep.
[Don't ask me why, but we had a way back then of describing our toys
rather than actually naming them, as with my Boy Doll;
and Aaron's Tractor - Boy and Blue - Eyed Bear.]
The Oxen (1915)
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.


Yuletide in a Younger World (1927)
We believed in highdays then,
And could glimpse at night
On Christmas Eve
Imminent oncomings of radiant revel—
Doings of delight:—
Now we have no such sight.

We had eyes for phantoms then,
And at bridge or stile
On Christmas Eve
Clear beheld those countless ones who had crossed it
Cross again in file:—
Such has ceased longwhile!

We liked divination then,
And, as they homeward wound
On Christmas Eve,
We could read men's dreams within them spinning
Even as wheels spin round:—
Now we are blinker-bound.

We heard still small voices then,
And, in the dim serene
Of Christmas Eve,
Caught the far-time tones of fire-filled prophets
Long on earth unseen:—
Can such ever have been?

both poems by Thomas Hardy, 1840 - 1928
English novelist, poet, and Victorian realist

The Grief that Saps the Mind

ON MEMORIAL DAY:
"Ring out the grief that saps the mind
for those that here we see no more."
~ Tennyson ~


Sign by Robert Montgomery, Post-Situationist Public Artist
Painted wood & solar-powered LED lights
De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill, East Sussex
When it comes to "the grief that saps the mind," no one has described it better than my literary friend Lee Perron, in the following section of his poem, "From Desire, A Sequence" (fondly referred to in my family as "The Nose Poem"):

your mate dies, or parents
or one of your other friends
there is nothing fearful in the death
the deadman is not the problem
his letters perhaps
some phrase he spoke that rings every after
the way he died, what the surgeons did to his brain, or kidneys,
or heart
what you & he would have been doing now
next week, all summer long as you always did
the deadman did not die
your plans died
and this is what is so upsetting
this makes us so sick we cannot even think

~ Lee Perron

"Seasons of blankness" is Thomas Hardy's way to describe this upsetting, sickening sense of loss. Gerry's Auntie Margaret fondly refers to Hardy as "such as misery," which is true. Yet, his irony appeals to me: the things we want to stay are going; the things we want to go are staying. But just at the point where we might easily turn to cynicism, Hardy offers neutrality: yes, we lose the good things, the best things, the "prime"; but some of the mind - sapping grief dissipates as well.

The May Moon ~ We Wish It Would Stay!


Going and Staying

I

The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

II

Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.

III

Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving.

~ Thomas Hardy ~


A Closlier Look at the Full Moon
~ Cosmic Photography by Jay Beets ~
[P.S. Closelier is Hardy's own special made - up word, so much better than just plain old closer.]

A closing thought
from The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green:

" . . . then I realized there was no one else to call,
which was the saddest thing.
The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters's death was Augustus Waters. . . .
In the last weeks, we'd been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing:
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me,
because there was no longer anyone to remember with.
It felt like losing your co - rememberer
meant losing the memory itself,
as if the things we'd done were less real and important
than they had been hours before. (262)

Now, that's the grief that saps the mind . . .
the grief that makes us so sick we cannot even think . . .
See also my earlier post "Indifferent Universe"

Indifferent Universe

Above: Some Things We Wish Would Stay!

Brian Andreas:
"It's not a personal world, he told me,
no matter how much of it recognizes you on the street."
~StoryPeople~

Me:
Something else to make me cry . . .

Gerry:
True. The universe is indifferent. It doesn’t even hate us.

Thomas Hardy:
Going and Staying
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.

Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving. (1922)
See also my later post "The Grief That Saps the Mind"