The look on that kids face as dad passes the tree. Dad will appreciate the hell out of that video in about 30 years or so. Lucky dawg. We didn’t get a video camera til the kid was about 12, in 1991. Fucker cost more’n a grand. Still have it somewhere, I think.
I miss my dad! is good news, I know I’ll be with him again someday! Happy Fathers Day, REW
Dirk
enn essJune 20, 2021, 9:07 AM
Just one reason why fathers are needed. I am truly sorry for those that don’t have one.
RichardJune 20, 2021, 9:16 AM
Thanks for everything, Dad. How is it possible that, you will have been gone physically 34 years, come this August. Yet, you live on in my memories and how you taught me to conduct myself as a man. You’re still the greatest man I’ve ever known, and I’m positive you’ll go unchallenged for that title. I was so incredibly blessed.
Lindsey kiddJune 20, 2021, 9:37 AM
It took five years to find all the peach pits my father hid around the house Each time resulted in rueful smiles and occasional tears.
Remembering how sharp and smart my dad was when I was young,
& how dumb and stupid he became when I hit my teens,
& how amazed I was at his acumen when I hit my twenties,
& how now, sixty years later, life lessons learned from him
still put me in good stead.
Bear Claw Chris LappJune 20, 2021, 12:00 PM
Weekly if not daily I still have a question pop in my head and say, Dad would know the answer. Same with my oldest brother and Mom as well. I do miss them and did not know how good I had it till Dad was gone. May God bless all fathers each and every day and welcome them into His kingdom when that day comes.
Ed in upstate NYJune 20, 2021, 12:48 PM
Part of the continuing downward spiral of “disadvantaged” families is the lack of fathers therein.
NoriJune 20, 2021, 8:52 PM
Sheer,unbridled joy in that little guy’s face. Dad knew his sprout would love it,just as he did.
Dads envision things that Moms just don’t. Even better,they act upon them.
Thank You,Lord,for men who care about their children. Even if they are’nt.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
Comments on this entry are closed.
The look on that kids face as dad passes the tree. Dad will appreciate the hell out of that video in about 30 years or so. Lucky dawg. We didn’t get a video camera til the kid was about 12, in 1991. Fucker cost more’n a grand. Still have it somewhere, I think.
I miss my dad! is good news, I know I’ll be with him again someday! Happy Fathers Day, REW
Dirk
Just one reason why fathers are needed. I am truly sorry for those that don’t have one.
Thanks for everything, Dad. How is it possible that, you will have been gone physically 34 years, come this August. Yet, you live on in my memories and how you taught me to conduct myself as a man. You’re still the greatest man I’ve ever known, and I’m positive you’ll go unchallenged for that title. I was so incredibly blessed.
It took five years to find all the peach pits my father hid around the house Each time resulted in rueful smiles and occasional tears.
Remembering how sharp and smart my dad was when I was young,
& how dumb and stupid he became when I hit my teens,
& how amazed I was at his acumen when I hit my twenties,
& how now, sixty years later, life lessons learned from him
still put me in good stead.
Weekly if not daily I still have a question pop in my head and say, Dad would know the answer. Same with my oldest brother and Mom as well. I do miss them and did not know how good I had it till Dad was gone. May God bless all fathers each and every day and welcome them into His kingdom when that day comes.
Part of the continuing downward spiral of “disadvantaged” families is the lack of fathers therein.
Sheer,unbridled joy in that little guy’s face. Dad knew his sprout would love it,just as he did.
Dads envision things that Moms just don’t. Even better,they act upon them.
Thank You,Lord,for men who care about their children. Even if they are’nt.