Category: Blogging

I’m afraid I attribute my recent sporadic postings to a certain inflexibility, as starting back to work, even though the hours are limited and sporadic, has interrupted my usual schedule.

I’ve gotten used to waking up, browsing the net for an hour or so, settling back and reading until I’m inspired to write an entry for my blog. After finishing the blog entry, I’d spend the rest of the day doing whatever I wanted to do. Now that I’ve started working at 9:00, however, I’m barely able to browse a few of my favorite sites, take a shower, make lunch, and put on that miserable tie before I need to leave for work.

I used to find it easy to work like this before retiring, but I now find it nearly impossible to pull my ideas together since getting used to doing it all in one long session.

To make matters worse, when the weekend comes I feel I’ve earned the right to loaf for a while. I spent the Martin Luther King weekend visiting Gavin and his parents in Tacoma. Taking advantage of a sunny day, we all visited the zoo:

The beautiful weather continued Sunday, so we drove up the Columbia River Gorge to a Yuppie restaurant that serves an outstanding meatloaf sandwich. Good food and a beautiful view are hard to beat:

01/15/2003

I became a grandparent for the third time today, as my son Tyson and his wife Jen were blessed with a 6lb 1oz baby boy, Logan Riley, today. It’s their first child and I expect a barrage of pictures shortly, which I’ll pass on for Dorothea.

I’m looking forward to playing with my new grandson as soon as I can get to Longmont, Colorado, though unfortunately that’s probably not until tax season is over.

There must be something about tax season that inspires child birth because this is the third grandchild that’s been born in January, but that’s batting three for three since I only have three grandchildren.

Many, many years ago when I was in ROTC summer camp, Army instructors taught me how to see in the dark. Although there were several techniques, the advice that has remained the longest was that you should never look directly at an object in the dark. Instead, keep your eyes moving back and forth, seeing the object just at the edges of your vision. Look directly at the object and it simply disappears into the darkness.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I was reminded of this advice while reading Bruce Weigl’s Archeology of the Circle, a collection of his poems that begins with his experiences in Vietnam. I doubt that if I hadn’t first discovered him through “What Saves Us” that I would be reading this volume now, because I have consciously avoided books and movies that focused on Vietnam.

I’ve only seen one Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now, and that was because it was based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of my favorite novels. On one hand, I figured that having been there I didn’t need some writer or movie director trying to tell me what I experienced. I knew all to well what the war was like and the effect that it had on soldiers. On the other hand, neither did I want to be reminded of what I discovered about human beings, and about myself.

That ‘s probably why to this day I have never been to a Vietnamese restaurant, despite the fact I’ve learned to love Thai food and Chinese food. However, hearing Vietnamese spoken sends the same chill down my spine that the sound of a helicopter does. There’s something about such sounds that strikes primitive nerves, nerves unprotected by all the layers of rationalization that keep me sane.

I also thought of this way of seeing the world in connection with my recent discussion of child abuse. I have little stomach for the kind of graphic revelations that are sometimes made about child abuse. As a caseworker and ex-spouse of a child protection caseworker, I already have too much direct knowledge of the kind of inhuman abuse that adults are capable of inflicting on children, and others, for that matter.

I think that’s why I admired Marie Howe’s portrayal of abuse. Although she revealed the kind of abuse that was going on, she generally focused on how that abuse affected her way of seeing the world and on her attempts to come to terms with the abuse and, ultimately, to overcome it.

I’m in the midst of reading Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, but unfortunately haven’t gotten far enough along to actually write anything yet.

I originally discovered a copy of her poem in Sixty Years of American Poetry and cited parts of it in a weblog entry. I really liked that poem, but I hadn’t gotten around to actually locating and purchasing a copy of her book. Lately, though, I’ve noticed an unusual number of searches on her name in my log, so I went back and re-read the excerpts from her poem and what I had written. Since I was already placing an order at Amazon, I bought a book of her poems.

I had planned on reading it today while waiting at the doctor’s office, but things were unusually hectic. I arrived late for the appointment and didn’t have to wait at all. I’ll try to finish one or two sections tomorrow, though I’m also planning on working in the garden since we are, once again, have unusually dry and warm weather in the Northwest, too good of weather to sit inside.

Strangely enough, my trip to the doctor reminded me how I got started writing these long entries. A year ago I was sitting at my computer waiting for the “yellow crud” to drip through the feeding tube. Unable to talk, eat, or work, I spent nearly fourteen hours a day glued to the computer or the TV. Reading poetry was my escape from “reality.”

A year later, though, I often find it difficult to find an hour or two to sit in front of the computer. It strikes me that I’m often too busy when I’m “well” to really enjoy being well.