Friday
29 December 2017

— Golden layered sunrise this dawn

Good Morning All,

Johs asked me yesterday, “Do your devoted readers know that very soon these Day Books are coming to an end?”

I replied I thought so, all five of them, and hoped the others did, as well. 

“Nevertheless, you might want to mention it, lest when nothing arrives on 1 January they won’t worry you’ve expired.”

The word expired reminded me of the old joke about the woman who gets a letter to her husband pointing out his subscription to Sports Illustrated has expired, and she writes back: “So’s John.”

Anyway, the day after tomorrow, my Day Books will be a fait accompli. I’m more than a little excited by the prospect! Some of next year will be spent going through them a final time for small glitches and then run off maybe a hundred hardcover copies for family and friends. (Let me know if you are in the least bit interested!)

In the annoying illnesses department, I shall spare you the gruesome details, but most of yesterday and all of last night, I had a case of Montezuma’s Revenge surpassing any of the marathon visitations of that Aztec emperor in the past. On such occasions, you yourself may know as well as I exactly—as in to the half inch—how far your bed is from the facilities, and down to the second how long it takes you to cover that distance. We are talking here both Leon Trotsky and the great New York Islander center Bryan Trottier. At the moment, my status is limp dishrag, but think I may be on the mend.

Holly just came in from the field where she set up a time lapse iPhone to catch the sun’s journey across the low heavens today. Her friend Ryan bought her for her birthday a gizmo that will rotate the iPhone as the sun arcs. She’s just brought me a Coke (the medicine my mom swore by) and wished me a speedy recovery.

The poem below will be Iris’s last in these pages. It may not be one of her best, but it has a couple of nice moments in it. I do tend to like her poems better than the ones to which I put my own name:

 

Two Parts Fortitude, one Part Courage
Iris Noble

She was carefully cutting from the paper
A Dennis the Menace cartoon for her grandson
Down in Florida where who would live there
Without even a glimmer or hope of snow?

He would enjoy the joke at Mr. Wilson’s expense,
But the cutting had to be meticulous, the corners
Even, for though a child did not notice such things,
A child took in the importance of such care.

Elliot, at fifty, had dropped dead on the doorstep
When Jimmy was all of seven, Jill barely four;
She’d raised them with some neighborly help
And ran the small-town variety shop until all hours.

Sent the two of them to college, thanks to Twinkies
And cold six packs and last chance lottery tickets,
And they’d made her proud, one teacher, one doctor,
Who came to Vermont a whole week every Christmas.

December mornings, there were the bird feeders to refill,
Sometimes a trip to the old store for o.j. and oleo,
A chat with Molly and Bill on the world gone mad,
Which she did not believe, but talk was talk and good.

Jill’s cat Ezra always knew when a lap visit was needed;
There were all the cards to get out and during the long
January let down there was the Elliot in her head reminding
Her you did good, my girl, enjoy for us the morning light.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. One Holly snap and one Johs snap: