Blog – Top of JC’s Mind

because

Why is it that I never seem to be able to type the word “because” accurately? I know how to spell it, but somehow my fingers always seem to rush the U in before the A. Is it just me? If you have a word you can’t seem to type right, please share in comments.

One-Liner Wednesday: Ignorance

“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.”
– Albert Einstein

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday. Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/15/one-liner-wednesday-end-of-story/

Anne Frank: A Global Tribute… Tuesday 14th April, 2015

Anne Frank: A Global Tribute… Tuesday 14th April, 2015.

Thanks to Rowena for posting about this special tribute to Anne Frank on the 70th anniversary of her death.  I would participate if I weren’t so technically challenged on the video-recording front, but hope that some of my friends will consider taking part.

theater organ

I just saw a piece on the Today Show about the only remaining theater organ in Seattle, which in the 1920s had fifty in silent film and stage theaters. The organ in the piece was a Wurlitzer, which was one of the most common manufacturers of the day.

It reminded me of the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York, which housed a Link theater organ, built by the firm of a local family. Edwin Link went on to found Link Flight Simulation, which used the technology of the organ business to craft the first mass-produced flight simulators, the Blue Boxes that trained many pilots in World War II.

When we moved here in the 1980s, I studied organ with M. Searle Wright, who was an enormously talented classical organist, teacher, and composer, and, at an age when most people are retired, then the Link Organ Professor at the State University of New York-Binghamton. He also was one of the few remaining masters of theater organ, able to sit at the console and accompany silent films, bringing to life the sounds of the world and the moods of the characters.  It was an amazing experience to hear him accompany a film!  Talented younger organists would travel up from New York CIty to study theater organ techniques from him.

We more often heard Searle’s theater organ talents when he played a 45 minute prelude of classic American songbook and Broadway tunes before each Binghamton Pops concert on the Morton theater organ at the Forum. On the music stand, he would have only a list of the pieces (perhaps with the key structure, he planned to include that day and would weave those songs together, showing off the fun aspects of theater organs, the literal bells and whistles.

A magical art, which is, thankfully, still being kept alive by those to whom an older generation of organist like Searle Wright passed on to them.

SoCS: crisis du jour

OK – this is another one of those weeks where I am writing on Friday morning and scheduling the post for publication tomorrow. The weekend is going to be busy as there will be open mic poetry tonight – my second time reading, if I make it – you can read about the first here.  Saturday morning we will scoot up to Syrcause to pick up our younger daughter to bring her home in time for my dad’s rescheduled 90th birthday dinner. There will be a post about why it had to be re-scheduled eventually. Have I mentioned yet how I’m sort of behind on posting?

At any rate, my sisters and families will be coming up for the festivities which will be at a local Mediterranean restaurant, so there will be much yumminess and laughter and storytelling and dessert.

Provided things don’t get derailed by the crisis du jour.

It’s become a bit of a standing joke with me that I can’t make a plan because something will intervene. I wrote about the most dramatic of these events here. Long post but the condensed version is that my parents unexpectedly wound up in the hospital for two days at the same time with two totally unrelated problems.

Right now, I am waiting to hear back from my mother-in-law to see if we need to get her to her doc or to get an X-ray to investigate why her back pain has ramped up – after we thought we finally had her pain meds adjusted properly. I admit I’m operating on not a lot of sleep, mostly because I was worried about what is going on.

Right now, I’m trying to breathe and not make something into a crisis before its time. Maybe it’s just a pulled muscle from PT. Not really crisis du jour.

Please?

[Update from Friday night:  My mother-in-law’s doctor decided to just let things ride for the weekend and she improved through the day today. So fingers crossed that we make it through the weekend crisis-free, awaiting a previously scheduled Monday afternoon doctor’s appointment.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “-jour-“: add a prefix or suffix to complete it or use it as the French word for “day.”

Please join us!  Details on how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1115/

socs-badge

Friday night fun – part one

On a Friday evening in March, I read at open mic poetry night for the first time. I had attended with my husband for the first time in January and planned to read in February, but, instead, we had to travel for my aunt’s funeral that weekend. So that brought us to March. B wasn’t feeling well, so I went alone.

There were fewer people this time then in January, but over half of us were reading at open mic for the first time.  (Actually, we meet at RiverRead Books and don’t need to use a mic, but it’s called open mic anyway.) I had signed up to read second, so that I could enjoy hearing the other poets without the distraction of having to think about my own reading.

Barrett, who began the monthly open mic program at RiverRead five years ago, did a welcome and read first, including a new poem he had just completed about visiting the Holocaust Museum. (Barrett is part of the group of poets that I began meeting with last August. We meet twice a month to hear each other’s work and offer comments. Were it not for that, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to show up and read.)

I started my reading with “Moonlight” because it is my most well-received poem and my good luck charm.  It is the poem that I submitted for National Poetry Month in 2013 to “Off the Page,” a local program on WSKG public radio; they put listeners’ poems up on their website every April. (Well, they used to. The host retired in 2013, so that year turned out to be the last hurrah.)  I was so excited when it was chosen to be read on air! The host, Bill Jaker, read it. It was the first time I had heard someone else read my work aloud.

I say that “Moonlight” is my good luck charm because one of the guests on the program was Nicole Santalucia, who began the Binghamton Poetry Project (BPP). That was how I first learned about it, which led to my attending the spring 2014 workshop. I included “Moonlight” in our anthology for that session and read it at our public reading.  After the summer session, our instructor helped me find and join the critique group where I met Barrett and eight other local poets. With their and BPP’s help, I have learned a lot about poetry, about myself as a poet, and about how to make my work stronger and better. And it all started because of:
Moonlight

In the narrow valley of youth,
the moon was distant,
as though at perpetual apogee.
Cocooned in darkness,
I slept soundly.

In the broad valley of adulthood,
the moon is close,
casting sharp shadows.
Bathed in eerie light,
I lie awake.

I also read two newer poems, “(Not) the Aunt I Remember” and “Downy,” which I can’t post here because I hope to submit them to journals. My reading went well- I didn’t drop anything or lose my place – and then I got to sit and enjoy everyone else’s work. We had eleven poets read, with the first-time readers outnumbering the veteran readers six to five.

A curious thing happened. I had to remind Barrett and the other poets from our group that it was the first time I had read at open mic. While I am painfully aware of my newness as a poet-in-public, it appears that I can project at least some level of competence, which feels good.

Or it could be my silver hair just makes it seem that I must have been around a long time…

 

a new wrinkle

Besides joining in with Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays, my other Wednesday staple is facilitating a spirituality study group at my church. For the last decade at least, this group has been all women  – with me, at 54, the youngest in attendance.

Today, a young man joined us.

He is about the age of my daughters, in his twenties, which makes him the age of some of the grandchildren of the other women.

It’s going to be an adjustment.  Part of it is the gender difference. Part of it is the age difference. The biggest adjustment, though, is that most of the women in this class have been studying and pondering spiritual topics for decades and have a lot of background and experience with different authors’ perspective. Even for us, Richard Rohr, whose book Immortal Diamond we are currently studying, is sometimes difficult to grasp at first hearing, as the concepts are so deep and rich. It must be daunting to be thrown into the midst of the book with no preparation.

I will have to contemplate how best to offer background and explanations.

If the poor man is brave enough to return next week…

One-Liner Wednesday: painting and poetry

In honor of US National Poetry Month:
Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.
– Leonardo da Vinci

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday! Details here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/08/one-liner-wednesday-life-is-too-short/

notification weirdness

I’m not sure why, but my email has just gotten a bunch of WordPress notifications that range over the last four days. I’m hoping I haven’t missed anything in my commenting and replies, but it’s possible. It’s ironic because I have been making a concerted effort to slog through my email backlog that developed while I was tending to family health stuff and had finally knocked it back to under 250 messages – until this new torrent of WordPress messages arrived. Oh, well! Back to work!

Drought, farms, and climate change

On the morning news, I heard the staggering statistics that California, which is in extreme drought, uses 80% of its water for agriculture, growing a third of the US supply of fruits and vegetables. It has already taken some farmland out of production or substituted crops that use less water. Meanwhile, it is in its fourth year of drought with snowpack under 5% of normal. As in over 95% of normally expected runoff water will not be there this year.

This should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells across the country. We need to shift our food production to more local areas and sustainable practices. Now, not in some distant future. We need to change our expectation of what foods we eat in which season of the year. When I was growing up, we ate fresh sweet corn in mid- to late-summer, when nearby farms were harvesting. We would prepare extra corn, cut it off the cob, and freeze it to eat at other times of year. We need to get back to this sense of eating fresh foods locally and preserving the extra produce to eat later rather than expecting California to send us strawberries in February. Certainly some crops, like citrus fruits, will not grow throughout the country, but others, like salad greens, can be grown close to where they are consumed, even in northern urban centers in winter where they can be grown indoors.

During the long slog fighting against shale gas development in New York State, I used many arguments against various aspects of this industrialization of our state. One of them was that, in this time of shifting climate, we needed to preserve our New York farms and forests for food production. Much of the farmland in the US is projected to have major droughts and heat waves as atmospheric carbon increases, including California and the Great Plains/Midwest farm belt. The Northeast, while expected to warm, is not expected to have severe issues with water supply. New York must assiduously protect its soils, water, and air from pollution in order to feed itself and other states as climate stressors increase.