5/21/23

 Sunday, May 21, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 5:20 from a dream in which I was conducting a physics class at UWM as a guest lecturer, not knowing what I was supposed to talk about, "winging it."  62℉, high of 71℉, sunny all day, WNW wind at 8 mph, 4 to 8 mph today with gusts up to 16 mph.  Sunrise at 5:21, sunset at 8:14, 14+52

LTMW at a chickadee working diligently to pull a twig out from the nesting materials Geri and I have packed into an empty suet cake holder.  Normally the chickadees are the quickest 'eat and run' birds at the feeders.  They zoom in at breakneck speed and then put on the brakes to land adroitly on the sunflower tube, grab a seed, and dash off as quickly as they zoomed in.  The goldfinches on the other hand are lingerers, especially on the niger tube.  We're not getting as much traffic on the niger tube as we did a couple of months ago, presumably because of the greater availability of food elsewhere as plant growth started in March and April.  It's easy to see why the niger seeds are so attractive to the goldfinches - they're about 1/3 or more edible oil and another 1/3 or more protein and soluble sugars.

The last of the flower petals on our three berry trees along County Line Road are falling in the gentle northwest wind, calling to mind Robert Frost's The Ovenbird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

and Gerard Manley Hopkins' Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Lost Day.  Yesterday was a lost day.  I woke up with my brain in a kind of fog, muddled, numb. and it pretty much stayed that way all day.  I had an exchange of emails with an old friend who was upset at not having heard from me for 4 months.

Food for Thought from Tracy Letts, playwright of August: Osage County.  "I think there comes a point in your life where you own your own damage.  You don't necessarily have it all figured out, you just say this is mine, these are things I have to be aware of, take care of, work around."  jotted down from the NYT Magazine 3/23/2014 and retrieved from basement workroom this morning.    A line from Barbara in the play/film: "Thank God we can't tell the future - we'd never get out of bed."

I watched the film August: Osage County this afternoon and added it to my long list of favorite movies.  Powerful performances, especially by Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.  I thought it must be one of Streep's finest performances ever.  The film paints a dark picture of a family's life, with the family disintegrating completely after the death of the father.  The three daughters Barbara, headstrong with a mean streak like her mother's, Ivy, delicate and vulnerable, and Karen, a bit of a flibbertigibbet, are bound by their roots and having grown up in the pathological Weston family, but whatever tenuous bond held them together comes unglued when Ivy falls in love with her cousin and discovers he is also her half-brother.  It's easy to discern Eugene O'Neill's and Tennessee Williams' influence on Tracy Letts.

My Rat's Nest.  I made substantial progress in cleaning up the rat's nest I maintain around my recliner in the television room.  I think I've been prone to clutterbugging much of my life but I've gotten worse in my old age.  I have one book of short stories on the side table now instead of four.  Also moved the red arm caddy from the recliner in my bedroom to the recliner in the tv room., hoping it doesn't interfere with the recliner mechanism.