Weblog 324

April 29, 2012~ 12:00 am
This has been a week of HALLELUJAHS! My son Matt is back from Afghanistan, and here's the picture snapped at the Kansas City airport gate, just as his kiddoes spied him.



I wrote a poem (as I'm wont to do when deeply moved by any event.)

Homecoming

Who thought there'd be snow
at the end
of April - not here, but close by
heavy on limb, brazenly bright?
Who thought
that I'd wake
from nightmare
into a dream
where all the world seemed safe, the sky
a luxurious blue, my son come
home
a month sooner
than expected. Back
from
the graveyard
place, the burning middle
of the world? Who knew that God
drops
all his mercy
in one place
at once?
One gift,
one snow,
one wondrous happening, not slowly,
but full on - the weight of it
is
giddy, gobbling Light
and shooting it back,
the
incandescence


of this
moment.



You'd be hard-pressed to find a photo to equal this joy... thank GOD, he's home. That certainly put a bright spin on things for me so that... no matter what else was happening this week, I was thinking "Matt's home"- and the sun was shining everywhere.

After missing the grandkids last weekend, we made up for lost time visiting Holly and Gary and the Bill and Kay. What a wonderful feeling to get out of the car and see a FLYING KAY come dashing across the street, her arms raised and a smile a mile wide! Friday night was 'joke night'. Somehow we got onto telling old jokes that kids could appreciate and there was much yucking it up in the living room.

At one point Kay teared up because Bill guessed the punchline on her first attempt at being 'Henny Youngman'....lol.... but Wayne quickly took her into the kitchen to rehearse her next one-liner, and she beamed. A lovely night-- with sandwiches from Subway (and their marvelous Snickerdoodles and oatmeal raisin cookies for dessert.) The rain, which drizzled continually, had no chance to dampen our good spirits. We were 'in the zone and enjoying one another's company.

Thursday at work we had a chance to rescue a mother raccoon and her two 'kits'. Just born by the looks of them. It was high drama when the local police were first called (because they would have shot them, thinking them rabid with all the ruckus they were making in a shed beside the main building.) Luckily 'Animal Control' was also called, and THAT big fella brought a humane trap instead. It took him only a few minutes to wrestle the mother raccoon out, and when he did, with a loop-thing around her neck and negotiating her into the cage, we heard the LOUDEST squealing and chattering from inside the shed. BABIES!!! Two of them, and the tall fella with the HUGE SHOULDERS said they were the youngest he'd ever personally caught. They looked just like this.



Soon, all three were safely together again inside the cage.



We were told he'd be driving them way, way out in the country, as far from a residential area as possible, and he assured us that the mama would find a hollow tree in no time, the babies safe... and three little lives were saved.



The whole episode was exciting to watch, but heartwarming as well. (People are too damn quick to pick up a rifle as a solution. Thank heavens cooler heads prevailed.) I like to imagine them growing up happy in their tree, just like the picture above.

On Saturday, Wayne and I stopped at Family Video (since my Netflix rentals for this month were used up) and we chose 'IRON LADY'



in which Meryl Streep is IMPECCABLE as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I can't tell you how odd it felt to become somewhat sympathetic to a person I view just as culpable as Ronald Reagan in dismantling the middle class and making way for Wall Street to usurp all power in BOTH nations- Britain and the U.S. Her ambition was COLOSSAL- and I don't even think she knew it. I believe Thatcher chalked it up to British grit, altruism and the patriotism of the privileged, but underneath, she was still the 'politically-active grocer's daughter'. I believe spent her entire life trying to impress a father who was bigger than life to her, and a mother she needed to be as different from as possible- a quiet homemaker who shuffled into the background. Margaret's locomotive personality was only softened in her relationship with her husband- at least in the film: he saved her from becoming ENTIRELY 'iron' ..... heart and all.



She never forgot she was the only woman in the room and trying to be brasher, BIGGER, and more formidable that any man at the table. She became... her father's 'son'.

Streep was divine, and carried home a well-deserved 'Best Actress' for this role. I'm so glad we saw it. Direction, editing, casting..... everything was perfect. A gem of a film, moving enough, due to Streep, to make even that cement hairdo soften a bit. Jim Broadbent, who plays her husband, is remarkable in every role he plays, but in this film..... he has the Herculean task of 'humanizing' Margaret. Amazingly.... he succeeds.




April 29, 2012~ 8:00 pm
I found a delightful link while browsing the morning that took me to Neil Gaiman's blog. It's an interview he did for the U.K. Times with one of my favorite authors.



I've loved Stephen King since I read 'The Shining' in one sitting back in the 70's, and it was shivery good. Kept me up nights for a while. No one, and I mean no one tells a scary tale like King. As evidenced in 'Salem's Lot', 'The Body', which became the movie 'Stand By Me'- among many, many others -he writes kids truthfully in a way that allows the psyche to regress back to one's own childhood, and the vulnerability and imagination therein.

Gaiman is an admirer, and he generously has printed the interview 'in toto' on his blog, due to the U.K. paper making use of a paywall to get inside.

So here it is - the whole thing, and what a pleasant read it is. (You can also peck around in Neil's blog while you're there.... another fascinating author.) Enjoy.





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