Seabiscuit

Seabiscuit, An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand, is better than any other horse book I've ever read, including the greats of fiction. The picture is of jockey John "Red" Pollard and "the 'Biscuit" communing with each other.

I remember another horse: I was watching the Belmont on TV that day in 1973, when Secretariat trotted out ahead of the field and won by 31 lengths. (I also saw Raymond Floyd, on TV, do the equivalent of that feat with a golf club in the 1980s.)

I've never been a consistent sports enthusiast. It soured me on sports forever, I think, when we were playing "softball" at school with a huge ball that must have been iron with cord wrapped around it. Norma Jean was the pitcher and I was the batter, and her underhanded riser hit me square under the bottom of my chin and knocked me flat. That was the first time I ever saw stars in the daytime. Anyway, I still get a thrill out of real virtuoso performances in anything, even sports, and know something great when I see it.

The book by Hillenbrand relates an incident of three jockeys during a race: "Jockey Johnny Longden was once rammed in midrace, knocked from his stirrups and sent flying downward in front of a pack of horses. He was saved by a jockey riding alongside him, George Taniguchi, who was so powerful that he was able to catch Longden with one hand. Taniguchi didn't know his own strength, and in attempting to push Longden back into the saddle he instead hurled him right over the back of his horse. Longden found himself in the same predicament on the other side of his mount until jockey Rogelio Trejos, whose horse was about to run Longden down, lunged forward, snagged the jockey with the ease of an outfielder and righted him in the saddle, also with one hand. Incredibly, Longden won the race."

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I've got to get busy around here. There's too much going on this week, and I'm afraid I'm going to miss some of it. Thursday evening is the Friends of the Library book sale preview party. Friday afternoon Mary has book club, and the FOL sale is Friday and Saturday. Tomorrow at 11:00 a.m., I have to be at the library ready to read and talk about writing poetry, and what do I know except when one comes into your head, you'd better write it down or you'll lose it?

No chopping today

It's still raining this morning, so I guess there'll be no hewing and chopping today. I'm really dreading when it starts; don't see how all of that big tree can be piled on the curb for pickup. Plus those huge bushes down the west side of the house--I told him to cut them off even with the ground. But I'll be relieved when the pine tree in the back is down; it has a hole in it halfway up, and every time the wind blows, I'm afraid the top half will snap off. The hawk's nest is in the pine next to the damaged one--smart hawks!

Back in the winter, Jerry (in the little yellow house next door) cut down all of his small trees, I suppose for firewood. Josh said instead of stacking the wood he saws up against the house, he'll lay some 2x4s across the outer edge of the patio and stack it there, because it would cause mold on the bricks otherwise.

I need to make a trip to the John Deere nursery or someplace, for hydrangeas. I'm imagining hydrangeas all across the back of the lot under the trees. The few I've got at the side of the house will have to be moved when their shade is cut down. What's another shade-loving flower? Maybe a ground cover type.

Et cetera, et cetera

I've got so many things going at once, I don't know whichaway to spit.

I wonder if anyone else noticed, in the movie "The Sting," one of the fake horses on the ticker-tape was named "Whichaway."

Toward the end of my recent reading of Gone With the Wind, I noticed something I had never realized before. Shortly after Scarlett married Frank Kennedy, there's a spell of over 100 pages where Mammy is never mentioned. During that period, Scarlett ruins herself in Atlanta society, Gerald dies and Scarlett goes to Tara and tricks Ashley into coming to Atlanta. Did she go to Tara with Scarlett? Apparently not. It tells about all family members at Gerald's funeral, but Mammy isn't mentioned. The next time Mammy appears is when Scarlett's baby (Ella) is born. I consider this a flaw, a hole in the story.

I've got to get cracking. A man is coming this afternoon to give me an estimate on doing the yard work this year. Josh is coming Friday to cut down four trees, etc. I've got a poetry reading and (hopefully) "book" signing at the library April 1st. Also bills to pay.

In Robert Harris's book Imperium, Tiro (the secretary/slave) boasts that he invented the ampersand. Looks like it would be easier to write et than that backhanded squiggle. Maybe his ampersand was simpler than ours. "And" in Gregg shorthand is just a slanted curve ) or, in my simplification, just a dot.

leaping greenly spirits

i thank you God for most this
amazing day; for the leaping greenly spirits

of trees and a blue true dream

of sky; and for everything which is

natural which is infinite

which is yes

~ ee cummings

Wish I Could Go, Too!

My friend Kat's grandson Liam, waking up from a nap. His parents and aunt and uncle (2 of Kat's daughters & their husbands), plus KitKat herself, are all on their way to Alaska to visit Kat's third daughter and Danica, the little girl grandbaby.
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I have started my spring cleaning. I have, I have! It's just sort of a slow start.

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I signed up for Maranda's fabric giveaway, but I was probably too late. She has lovely fabrics.

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I've decided on the pattern for my pink-and-black quilt, when I get around to it. There are other much prettier patterns, but I think the Martha Washington quilt is the best I can find for the contrast of colors so they don't run into each other. The block is an Ohio star, with a pinwheel in the center.

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The name "Liam" reminds me, they announced yesterday on TV that Liam Neeson's wife, actress Natasha Richardson, died from her brain injury. The only movie I saw her in was "Nell," with Neeson and Jody Foster, but I thought she was a good actress and very beautiful. I'm sorry she's gone.

Pink and Black

Sometimes I wake up in the morning with colors on my mind. When I was in the third grade, Camilla Wright brought a doll to school dressed in black velvet with pink sequins, and those colors have dwelt in the back of my mind all through the years.

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However, Friday is the first day of spring, and I am determined to SPRING CLEAN this house, from the back wall of the basement to the attic access in the hall. And then to finish Pat's Christmas quilt and Loryn's baby quilt or whatever, and then to finish my patchwork reproduction of an old applique quilt, and then--

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Well, I guess I can dream of making a pink-and-black quilt this year. Or next year.

Hope it's a happy day for everyone. The first two entries under "Music Links" in the left column have some sprightly Irish tunes.

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And here's a Surprise! (click it).

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"...I will not read them as if they were prose!"

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.

Nine beanrows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the beeloud glade.

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And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings.

There, midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

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I will arise and go now, for always, night and day,

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

More hard-times goodies

One day this winter I was without ready-made sweets of any kind. I was also a little bit miffed, because nobody gave me any chocolate-covered cherries for Christmas or my birthday; I used to get them every year. The more I thought about it, the miffed-er I got, thinking about the unfairness of it all.

So I dumped a box of powdered sugar into a mixing bowl and made a sort of hard fondant with some white Zinfandel. After rolling this out, I lined up some candied cherries leftover from Christmas and cut the candy into squares around the cherries, rolled them up into balls, and dipped them in a little pot of melted milk-chocolate that I had simmering on the stove. I left them sit on waxed paper until the chocolate hardened.

I cried when Brock stopped making their superior chocolate-covered cherries. But I'm here to tell you, the ones I made had Brock beat by an international mile. And you didn't get syrup all over your hand and down your arm and chin when you bit one, because I used candied instead of maraschino cherries. The insides were just soft enough and winey enough to make tears of joy well up behind your eyelids.

Depression Era Cooking

I usually throw out leftovers and any food that doesn't look just right. Now, that's not the way to get through hard times, is it?

Tonight I was about to throw away a few scrawny little potatoes, but instead peeled them and cut away the black parts and chopped and rinsed them. Then I chopped some cooked pork and threw it and the potatoes into a hot skillet with a little bit of oil and browned them. Then added a small amount of water, lowered the heat, slapped a lid on the skillet and simmered the whole mess until the potatoes were tender and the water boiled away. Of course, I had added salt, pepper, sage and other stuff. The result wasn't pretty, but I ate it up too fast to make a picture of it, anyway. The only way it would have been better would be if I had remembered to add some hot sauce.

Yesterday I was about to throw out a couple of eggs, noticed that the carton said they were good until March 9, so I got out a can of creamed corn and made the best corn casserole/pudding I've ever tasted. I just put in less than half a cup of flour, a sprinkle of corn meal, and some skim milk and salt and stuff, then baked it in a buttered casserole dish. I did remember to add the Louisiana hot sauce, which makes everything better except maybe dessert. Well, I had a hard time saving enough of the casserole for lunch today.

I call this ad lib cooking, and it nearly always turns out better than when I follow a recipe.

Poem for Sunday

A poem about Granddaddy Cage (written Jan. 14, 1973 by JRC):

Something Green

Whatever sprig he touched would leaf and bloom,
Returning flowers for the tunes he sang;
And he himself seemed taller in the sun,
His white head heightened by its pallid gold.
He loved the grass and all green springing life,
And robins followed him around the lawn
As chickens trail the farmer’s wife. His hands
Were large as God’s, of whom he never spoke;
There, too, perhaps he probed under the mulch
Of the old magic, feeling a stir of growth;
Believed that sunlight, watering and weeding
Could coax the earth to grow a thing to worship;
Knew if he sowed and waited for the spring,
Something green was bound to come of it.



Last night I watched "White Fang" on TV. Klaus Maria What's-His-Name, and some young guy. Good little movie. Lots of snow. Wolf-dog. I hated the part where the crooks made the dogs fight. The best part (to me) was near the beginning, where the great grizzly had the young guy cornered and was about to eat him; W.F. Wolf-dog got between them and scared the bear away. Of course, it was really Bart the Bear; I doubt a real wild grizzly would slink away from a wolf who was 3/4 dog.

Happy Dr. Suess's Birthday!

When I was in third grade, one of our reading books contained the story, "The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins."

I donated all my Dr. Suess books to the Leeds Middle School. There was a large stack of them, including one very old copy of Bart. Cubbins.

Snowbound On Sunday

Mo woke me at 6 a.m., and then he didn't want to go out because snow was falling, little teeny crystals. But he went out anyway. As the morning wore on, the snowflakes got bigger, and after a while there was a lot of white stuff around.










Jerry's little yellow house ................Forsythia blooming in snow

More snow today than last year. Pictures below were made Jan. 19, 2008.

Favorite Movies

Today I added Gone With the Wind to my favorite movies. I always said that it was beautiful but not a good film, because (1) the main actors were too old except Gable, (2) Vivien Leigh's attempt at a southern accent made me sick, (3) they cast a big ugly horse-faced woman as Ellen O'Hara, (4) they made Pork sound like an idiot, (5) Clark Gable's hair looked like black shoe polish, etc.

The film was shown on TV one day recently, and I watched snatches and then the tail end of it. I don't think I've ever watched the whole movie at one sitting, but now I want to. I ordered a copy of the book, because I can't find my old worn-out one which I probably threw away after reading it all to pieces. I may get the DVD.

Vivien Leigh, Hattie MacDaniel, Leslie Howard, Olivia DeHavilland, Thomas Mitchell and Victor Jory were perfect. Gable was Gable.

In 1950, when I went north with Douglas, Betty Lou and Homer, we all spent a few days with Pat and John Stecks at John's nursery farm outside Chicago. We met a couple of their friends, who looked so much like O. DeHavilland and L. Howard it was astonishing.

Anyway, now I have to see GWTW from start to finish.

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I also watched Titanic twice in the past week or so (on TV). It seems incredible that it was made in 1997. Incredible that 1997 was 12 years ago. Photos below (Titanic menu; the real Titanic, anchored at night off Cherbourg) were made by Frank Browne in 1912. "Father Browne" survived the disaster.

Thunder in the Thicket

I slept very late this morning (probably because of the soothing sounds of rain and thunder), and am just now getting limbered up and coffee-revived. Sold 2 books while I was asleep. My kind of a job: work while you sleep. Nice work, if it would only happen more often.

The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes

I had never read this story before, or didn't remember it. "More strange things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of..."

The trials and uncertainties of bookselling
Yesterday I received an order for an old book about angels, written by a female preacher. It had been a beautiful book before somebody highlighted almost the entire text with a yellow marker, and underlined passages with ink. My Amazon listing was the lowest price for that title, $32.97. I was afraid to price it any lower, as "lowballing" incenses higher sellers almost to the point of violence. Sometimes even that far. Anyway, I had described it in detail, and somebody bought it. So I enclosed a $5 bill in it, with a note explaining that I was trying to be fair, and that would at least refund his postage charge. Minus the shipping and handling, I made about $23 bucks anyway. That was only my second sale in February.

I really resent it when I get a lovely book that someone has defaced. Notwithstanding the fact that I used to write in books all the time. At least, I don't think I ever wrote in them with ink. Maybe I did write my name with ink in some. My Oscar Williams book of American poetry, the first book I ever bought with my own money (in 1954), is full of penciled notes, all of which have faded to pale gray smudges on the pages and could be erased with some kneaded eraser.
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Loryn's quilt top split and ripped when I tried to remove the machine-stitching across one side of it. It must be quite old. I wrote and told her that I would make her a pillow sham or something out of the undamaged side, maybe a baby quilt.

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

"When I come back to Bombay," said Punch on his recovery, "I will come by the road--in a broom-gharri. This is a very naughty ship."

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Punch and Judy's story reminds me of so many things that happened to me in childhood, although the families I lived with were not physically cruel to me, of course. I might have turned out better if I had received an offhand blow upside the head every now and then. But then, I might have turned out worse.

For the record

Anyone who reads my blog, take note. If you click on "Free Books" in the left column, you'll see a list of my books available free (except for postage) if you sign up for Bookins (a free site). However, if you want anything on the list, just let me know and you can have it free, from me, without "points" and without paying $4.49 postage to have it mailed to you. Just thought you'd like to know.

While you're clicking, you can also look at "My Bookstore."

I Volunteered!!!!!

The mailman brought me a medium-sized box, and in it was Loryn's quilt top. It has the batting and lining partly basted to it, and someone had started machine-quilting it with fine sewing thread. It's going to be a pill getting it all apart and put back together, but I told her I'd quilt it for her. Fortunately, it's small, only about 60 inches square, except for the wide border (which doesn't suit) sewed around it. Surprise, surprise, Loryn! The "after" photo is going to look a whole lot different.

She said if I decided not to quilt it, I could wad it up and throw it in the garbage. Au contraire, GF! I think it'll make a very pretty quilt. Where's my magic wand? (Ha ha.)

Whaddaday!

This morning I woke up thinking, You might as well call Murray's to come and get the car. That nice man who answers the phone at Murray's garage sounds like a Blackwood or Stamps Quartet bass, on the phone, but his voice is pretty normal in person. He sent a man to jump-start the car, and I drove it around and around Leeds for a while, then to the shop for them to check the battery and change the oil. They said the battery is good, just needed the connections cleaned and wires replaced or something. When all was said and done, I paid them more money than I had, by way of the Visa card.

Thank goodness spring is near. My utility bills this month will take all of my state retirement check, mainly thanks to Alabama Gas. And I've been cold at least half of the time this winter. When I'm cold, y'all know it's cold.

But spring will come, and the ice will break. I'm already broke as a haint.

I hate to quit procrastinating!

I'm just resting from about an hour in the basement. I cleaned out the north port of the garage, hoping that a vehicle can get in there, close enough to my car to jump-start the motor. In a few minutes I'm going to take a long hot shower, then gargle half a bottle of peroxide in hopes of washing off or killing any basement germs. It might be nice to be grounded for a week, if not for worrying about all the places I should be going and things I should be doing. Not to mention running out of cigarettes and cat food, whiskey and shotgun shells and things.

Pat's blog entry about Beverley Nichols got me looking at biographies of old British writers. In my biographical scrapbook, there's an article about Roald Dahl, English eccentric, RAF hero, 30-year husband of actress Patricia Neal, and writer of the most controversial children's stories since the demystification of the Brothers Grimm. His plane ran out of gas in the 1940s and he crashed in the middle of the Libyan desert, fractured his skull and mashed his nose in. He wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, Boy, and Matilda, and many others, then died at age 74 in 1990.

It's strange how handsome Englishmen get so ugly when they get old, while handsome American men just get better looking; cf. Dick Van Dyke, Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Harry Belafonte, Tony (the singer whose last name I have trouble remembering), et al. Tony Bennett? I say Clint Eastwood, remembering Susan's blog entry about him, although Clint was never any Marvin Behlke. But then, who is?

That is, unless the handsome American goes and gets plastic surgery. Richard Chamberlain and James Garner, two of the handsomest actors ever, both looked like freaks after their facelifts.

To the showers!