Purdue Snazzy

Photo by Shelley Sacia Ayres ~ Thanks Shelley!
A few years ago, on the invitation for a campus reception, down in the corner where it would usually say something like "Black Tie," it said "Suggested Dress: Purdue Snazzy." I just loved that! Now, whenever we have to get dressed up for a Purdue event, we always say, Purdue Snazzy!

Hail Purdue!
[more fight songs with lyrics!]

To your call once more we rally,
Alma Mater, hear our praise;
Where the Wabash spreads its valley,
Filled with joy our voices raise.
From the skies in swelling echoes
Come the cheers that tell the tale
Of your vic'tries and your heroes,
Hail Purdue! We sing all hail!

Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!
All hail to our old gold and black!
Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!
Our friendship may she never lack,
Ever grateful, ever true,
Thus we raise our song anew,
Of the days we've spent with you
All hail our own Purdue.

When in after years we're turning,
Alma Mater, back to you,
May our hearts with love be yearning,
For the scenes of old Purdue.
Back among your pathways winding,
Let us seek what lies before,
Fondest hopes and aim e'er finding,
While we sing of days of yore.

The Purdue Fight Song, Copyrighted 1913
Music by E. J. Wotowa, Class of 1912
Lyrics by J. Morrison, Class of 1915

P.S.
Purdue's very own Compliment Guys
who rose to national fame back in 2009:

More Compliment Guys ~ National Tour ~ New York Times

*************

My Friend Victoria Amador . . .

. . . knows a thing or two about Purdue Snazzy!

**********

Vickie as a Boilermaker, back in the day!

The Rooms Come and Go

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo." ~ T. S. Eliot

Architectural Ceiling Detail
Fowler House Mansion ~ Lafayette, Indiana

*************
"I suppose a room is the summation
of all that has happened inside it."

"Yes, I think it is," agreed the Count. "And though I'm not exactly sure what has come of all the intermingling in this particular room, I am fairly certain that the world has been a better place because of it." (331)

by Amor Towles
from A Gentleman in Moscow

************* I was so excited to receive this marvelous, mysterious old - time postcard a few months ago from my friend Victoria Amador, who lived right here in town back in the 1970s. It's not often that a pen pal from far away sends you a postcard from your own city! [Vickie, have you been saving this card for me in your archives all these years?]

This one, as you can see, features
the "Wetherill Memorial Room
Tippecanoe County Historical Museum."

I had a feeling that the featured room must be a part of what is commonly referred to as the Fowler House, even though that name does not appear on the postcard caption. Hoping to verify the picture, I googled "Wetherill Room" to see if it came up as a room in Fowler House or maybe as a room in some other local historical mansion. No luck, but guess what did come up -- a copy of this vintage (1930s) postcard for sale on eBay for $10. So it looks like I owe Vickie some money!

Last month, when Gerry and I went for Sunday Brunch at the Fowler House, I took along the postcard in hopes of matching it to one of the rooms. An easy quest indeed, since it turns out we were sitting in the very room!

Same Fireplace

Same Chandelier

The only significant difference is the lace - curtain now hanging over the window, rather than the heavy wooden shutters seen in the post card; partially obscured behind an oriental screen, they nearly resemble a door.

It was a successful day of exploration at the Fowler House, checking out the upper rooms for friendly ghosts, enjoying a post - Christmas buffet with neighbors, and comparing the contemporary Wetherill Room to my archival postcard. Thanks Victoria!
*************

"Gathering up his things, the Count paid one last visit to his study. So many years before, he had bid adieu to a whole household. Then a few years later he had bid adieu to a suite. Now, he was to bid adieu to a room that was one hundred feet square. It was, without question, the smallest room that he had occupied in his life; yet somehow, within those four walls the world had come and gone." (438)

by Amor Towles
from A Gentleman in Moscow

*************

Brunch at Fowler House ~ Autumn 2018

Vickie Triumphant

Do what I just did:
read these ~ reviews,
and order an advance copy from amazon!
Congrats Professor Amador!

Victoria & Olivia
Having Champagne & Discussing the Memoirs

Victoria Day

"Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you"

lyrics from
"Bookends" by Simon & Garfunkel

Kitti, Vickie, Diane ~ Kirksville, Summer 1980

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY AMAZING FRIEND
Dr. Victoria Amador

I was lucky enough to see Vickie just last week . . .

and we discussed the meaning of life:

"It's like a universal radio.
Sometimes I get the message,
but usually it's just snow."

Additional words of wisdom from Victoria:
"Avoid the nettles!"

Preserve Your Memories!
Valentine Collage ~ Old Favorites from Vickie & Diane

The River Simply Manifest

Summer evening on the Wabash,
taken from the window at McGraw's
"Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child, and it was exactly that, the river broad and shallow, the intricacies of its bed making rivulets of the slow water, bloom on the larger little islands and butterflies everywhere. And the trees meeting high above it, shading it, making the bottom earthily apparent wherever there was calm. They all loved the river, in all generations. . . . the river was simply manifest, a truth too seldom acknowledged. When she had been on her own, sometimes she had thought of it."
from Home, (283 - 84)
by Marilynne Robinson

P.S.
Happy Lughnasa ~ Feast of the First Corn
Midway Point between
the Summer Solstice & The Autumnal Equinox

Thanks to my friend Victoria Amador
for this beautiful photo from Wisconsin.

To Victoria & Steven ~ the first fruits are upon us!
Indeed a blessed conclusion to your Midwestern Summer --
and now begins your Sojourn Abroad
(I just had to capitalize those words, German style)!
Wishing you a lovely Lughnasa!
Dance wherever you may be -- land, air or sea!

Now For Our October Moons!

“Listen! The wind is rising,
and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings,
now for our October eves!”
~ Humbert Wolfe

~ Fun comments from my friends ~
Susan Gajderowicz:
The leaves have an eerie appearance - almost bat-like!
Ann de Forest: They do like bats!
Victoria Amador: Werewolves of London!

Facebook says "We could not find any faces to tag."
What? Don't they recognize the Man in the Moon?

"I see the moon
and the moon sees me!"

Come Back to the Present!

Wise advice sent to me from my friend Victoria Amador:

"See it clearly without judgment and let it go.
Come back to the present moment.
From now on until the moment of your death,
you could do this."

~ Pema Chodron ~

The Mighty Wabash out at Fort Quiatenon,
photographed in mid - October, yet the leaves are still so green!

Observation from the perspective of a naturalist:
"The Wabash Cannonball!
~ Listen to the whistle, the rumble and the roar! ~
It could have been the Wabash River
they are talking about as well as the train."

Burnetta, thanks for that outlook!

Springtime Before Corona

I know it's a daffodil!

. . . The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing. . . .

from the poem Daffodils
by Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)
in his book Birthday Letters: Poems

Scottish Daffodils (above & below)
Photographed by my friend Victoria Amador
~ Early Spring 2020 ~

I SPY SOMETHING YELLOW (& TEAL)!

May Day Birthday

Happy May Day to All!

Peonies, 1887
Charles Edward Perugini, 1839 - 1918
[Previous Peony Post]

&

Happy Birthday to Etta!

For my Christmas present this past December, my dear,
life - long friend Marietta gave me a big shopping bag
full of my old letters to her, thinking that I could use
them for my memoirs, and even better -- for blogging!
Thanks Et!

************

Thanks to my friend Mitzi
for sharing this photo from the Woodland Trust

Ah listen, for silence is not lonely!
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze.

from the poem -- about the painter -- "Corot"
by D. H. Lawrence
Burnetta writes: "Oh what scene, from my childhood in west Kentucky! I have to share this. I just makes me long for the "olden days" at least in landscape.

Indeed! My friend Vickie Amador and I often reminisce about wandering down a lovely path such as this, gathering wildflowers in a basket as a May Day surprise for our elders!

At Pere Lachaise

Read more about Paris & Pere Lachaise on my
latest Fortnightly blog post,
one of several Summer Travelogues . . .

At Pere Lachaise ~ Steven, Victoria, Kitti, Gerry

Click to see more photos from Steven's album:
Paris Graves

Oscar Wilde's Grave
Thanks to Victoria Amador for Parisian travel tips!

************************

Two Poems by Jim Barnes
from his book ParisVandals

Sitting beside Wilde's
solid block of sandy stone,
I recall two things:

he was earnest and Gide would
not stay where he once had stood.

Flowers at the tomb
are never fresh: today there's
graffiti I see

the first time in all the years
that I have been coming here.

Down and to the right, there Gertrude and Alice lie,
a date and place cut

wrong, another graffitied stone,
and I recall other wrongs

too many artists,
dead, still suffer from; the words
that fools have sprayed on

stone not so much as the words
from the learned living dead.

***********

Finding Oscar Wilde

After the riot in Pére Lachaise, streams
of teenage tourists flood the gates. Shadows
of the plane trees gray their faces. It seems
as if they want to mourn but cannot go
beyond the nervous laughter of rock dreams
and Coca-Cola days. Few drink Nouveau
Beaujolais now: it's just not chic enough.
Two green-haired girls smoke Gitanes and act tough.
We see two others writing Morrison
lives beneath Balzac, in chalk. Our map takes
us past more famous lines and past the sun,
where we pause to grab our breath and then shake
the summer sweat from our hair. Somewhere down
the hill, Abélard and Héloïse wake
again to try to free themselves from the stone
bed they have lain in centuries too long.

All Paris is stone, and there are those graves
everywhere as lonely as Oscar Wilde's
broad tomb. Rioting Morrison fans behaved
as a herd behaves, coming in droves to mill
round redundancy. No solitaire to save
the senseless crowd the agony of hell
showed up. There will never be a crowd round
the other slab where Oscar Wilde kneels down,

the tall wings booked by his writing hand.
Nor need there be. The legend of his life
is not his work. The work, the art, remains.
We lean relaxed upon his stone. At five
we hear the whistles blow for our return,
a prelude to the closing gates and evening
song of sparrows. Leaving we touch a fast
farewell to his high brow and what may last.

You can find more poems of Paris on my post:
"Paris: Ferlinghetti, Fenton & Forche"

And more poems by Jim Barnes on these previous posts:
Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy,
Missouri Poets, Parallax, No One With a Nose
Penelope, Shakespeare & Co.

Bastille Day Dress

Electrifying Fashion Design by Coco Chanel
Stunning Sticker Embellishments by Victoria Amador

Red Grosgrain Silk Chiffon Dress
Summer 1932 ~ Paris
by Gabrielle Chanel (1883 - 1971)

And on the other nights, did she dress up in flaming red gowns and dance the night away, carefree, silly, wild? No. She did laundry and mending, and went to bed early with an orange and a thick book with lots of close print.

from The Daughter of the Moon
by Gregory Maguire (b 1954)

Wishing you a summer of lovely
beach days & red bathing costumes!

María Petrona Viera Garino (1895 – 1960)

Clo in a Bathing Suit (1937)
Einar Jolin (1890 - 1976)

Additionally . . .

this old favorite from the 80s:
Lady in Red

&

Kate Bush ~ Wuthering Heights Day
(Red Dress Version!)

Sequins

Decorative Arabian Pillow Case
Beloved and sequin - covered present from Victoria!

Victoria Amador: "It's wonderful that we both believe in cards & the written word & stamps & stickers & confetti!"

Josephine Tey: " . . . perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer."

~from The Daughter of Time (56, emphasis added)

Dreamscape

"It is almost impossible
to watch a sunset and not dream."
Bern Williams

Photograph by Marguerite Chapman:
Sunset over Tulsa Mosque
November 7, 2014

"All that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream."
Edgar Allan Poe
These dreamy sunset thoughts bring to mind an essay that I taught years ago, entitled "Language and Thought," by Susanne K. Langer. Langer distinguishes between symbol and sign, and identifies dreaming as "a basic function of human brains," drawing the conclusion that what sets humans apart as a species is our inexhaustible, involuntary dreamscape. An intriguing concept!

As highly intelligent animals, we can scan the sky for signs. For example, the color of the sunset may foretell the coming weather or a turning point in the year. As a signifier of "presence . . . being, condition," a vividly colored or pastel sky can be useful, even beautiful. But we want the sunset to mean something more "glorious" than that! We want not merely the object at hand but the "kaleidoscope of ideas" and the "stream of thought" that the symbol brings to mind:

"We want to go places and do things, own all sorts of gadgets that we do not absolutely need, and when we sit down to take it easy we want to talk. Rights and property, social position, special talents and virtues, and above all our ideas, are what we live for. We have gone off on a tangent that takes us far away from the mere biological cycle that animal generations accomplish; and that is because we can use not only signs but symbols. . . . The difference between a sign and a symbol is, in brief, that a sign causes us to think or act in the face of the thing signified, whereas a symbol causes us to think about the thing symbolized. Therein lies the great importance of symbolism for human life, its power to make this life so different . . .

"The process of transforming all direct experience into imagery . . . has so completely taken possession of the human mind that it is not only a special talent but a dominant, organic need. All our sense impressions leave their traces in our memory not only as signs . . . but also as symbols, images representing our ideas of things . . . It seems to be what our brain most naturally and spontaneously does. Therefore our primitive mental function is not judging reality, but dreaming our desires." [from paragraphs 5, 7, 8]

Dreaming our desires!
Isn't that what these sunsets symbolize?

Photograph by Nancy Allen:
"I just never get tired of these sunsets -- feeling thankful!"
October 23, 2014
Also by Nancy: Late Summer Sunset & Groundhog Fog
Thanks to Sara Carriker & Victoria Amador for the dreamy quotations!

Transylvania

For more October postcards
and wit & wisdom from Victoria Amador
please see my current post

"October Light, October Heavy"

@ Kitti's List

~ 28 October 2002 ~

"Happy Halloween!
Happy Samhain!
Happy All Souls Day!
Happy Dia do los Muertos!
Happy Wiccan New Year!
Have a marvelous & scary time!
Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo!

Well, it wasn't Paris, but I enjoy being back in Romania.
Next year I am doing the Transylvania Tour!
I didn't see any ghosts, but I certainly met a lot of odd people.
It has triggered a renewed interest in ghosts and paranormal activity.
What's your take on the afterlife?
Are there famous haunted sites in Philly?"

******************************

In Other Halloween News:
Many thanks to our sweet neighbor Tami,
who has kindly made sure that we would not be
without trick - or - treaters this year!

Look who has already been seen on our front porch:
Happy Halloween to this fearsome T - Rex!

~ GET YOUR SCARE ON! ~

Related amusing video: "This is why I don't
let my family pick me up from the bus anymore!"

A Clear Path

An autumn walk with my friend Cate at
Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens

"Tread carefully daily,
stay on a clear path,
and avoid the nettles."

Advice from Victoria Amador
Contemporary American writer and teacher

P.S. And from The Reverend Nancy Eberhard:
"Lift yourself above the traffic of everyday life."

One Who Knows

Happy Birthday, Victoria!
I don't always wear a shirt featuring a painting by Van Gogh,
but when I do, I like to visit the Chicago Art Insitute
with my friend Vickie Amador!
“I talk to you in my mind because
I know you understand the things I want to mean.

There are those who know and those who don't know.
And for every ten thousand who don't know
there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time --
the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.
It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat . . . But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know.

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

Why has this miracle of ignorance endured? Obscurantism.”

Carson McCullers
from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
[emphasis added]

and
"We divided people into two groups: those who knew, and those who didn't know. Aldous Huxley [b. 26 July 1894] and Carson McCullers knew. Roy Rogers and Doris Day didn't. [Joan Baez and a] crazy singer called Bob Dylan knew."
Sara Davidson
from Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties
(also a movie)
For more on "Those Who Know"
see my new post
on The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Journey On

In The Land of Brigadoon ~ Kip DeVore

"Evening comes, the voices
of our homeland echo far away,
Evening comes, our hearts
will dream of childhood till the break of day.
Singing of the sadness of broken hearts and weary souls,
Dreaming of the promise of happiness that will unfold.
Sweetly singing far away, sweetly singing far away.
Come, then let us journey on."

Girls' Chorus from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin
Performed by St. Matthew's Choir, London*
Though not from Brigadoon, Tchaikovsky's tune of homesickness conveys a similar wistful sentiment, as does the following Pueblo Indian Blessing:

Hold On
"Hold on to what is good
even if it is a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe
even if it is a tree that stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do
even if it is a long way from here.

Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.

Hold on to my hand even when . . . "
I journey on.

Go the sidebar at right ~> ~>
and scroll down for more
"Simple Words at Parting"
P.S.
Thanks to Mary Kate McKenna
for posting the Pueblo Blessing

* An even lovelier version of the Girls' Chorus from "Eugene Onegin" can be found on the CD Tchaikovsky Discovers America, part of the highly instructive and entertaining Classical Kids Collection.

P.P.S.
2014: Brigadoon in Chicago with Victoria Amador & Steven LaVigne.

Mantelpiece

Mantel display, reflecting all fleeting seasons!

So many decorations from so many good friends: Lily of the Valley Egg from Susan Endress Blubaugh @Pysanky Spirit, Pumpkin Couple & Jane Austen Earrings from Katy Bunder, Sugar Skull Couple & Bronte Earrings from Victoria Amador, Pop - up Bats from Vicky McLaughlin, Witch - hat Candlesticks from Diane Cox, Shakespeare Not Stirred from Jonnie Guerra.

Across the top -- vintage Humpty - Dumpty Egg Cup from England, painted egg from Poland, Nativity (including elephant!) from Smithsonian. Far left on the wall: Gerry brought me the wall clock from the Sagrada Família, Barcelona; far right: the Castle of Love wall plaques are from Warwick Castle. Lower right, Sacagawea from T. J. Maxx. And, last but not least, the white pumpkins are from Walmart, early 21st Century!

Detail:
Dia de los Muertos Bride & Groom
from Auntie Wickie

Lily of the Valley Plate from years ago,
belonging to my Grandmother Rovilla Lindsey

Other Seasons
Christmas 2016
(photo 2017 - 02 - 03 / see also 2017 - 01 - 11)

Valentine's Day 2018
(photo 2018 - 03 -21)

Easter 2018
(photo 2018 - 04 - 01)

Winter Dreams
January 2011