Category: Life

Life

The Usual

Sally3 Comments

Karen used to come to our table to take our order.

“How about you?” she would say when it was my turn. “The usual?”

The usual, for me, was a turkey reuben with sweet potato fries. It was something I always enjoyed and one less decision that I needed to make when I was at the restaurant with my father.

We ate at the Doubleday every Thursday night during the last few years of my father’s life. It’s like the bar Cheers from the old television show. Good pub food. Everybody knows your name.

Karen was our waitress. The night that my father died, some of my children went to the Doubleday to tell Karen. She was practically part of the family. She knew that what my father needed even more than the burger he often ordered was a hug when he arrived and when he left. And she delivered, with a kiss on the cheek.

The Doubleday is still my favorite restaurant in town. Karen is still the waitress who usually serves us. However, I don’t order the turkey reuben often. Now I have the luxury of looking at the menu or choosing from the specials.

This is my submission to Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The word was “usual.” I read it and knew exactly what to write about.

I’m struggling to write these days though. Can you tell?

Life · poetry

Framing a Moment

Sally7 Comments

Look. Take a snapshot and frame a moment:
[The deer too near the road frozen in fear]
[Tourist on black tarmac, the bestowment
Of a lei, Hawaii’s first souvenir]

A magnifying glass serves as a frame
That convex lens enlarging [blades of grass]
If dry, the grass might swiftly burst in [flame]
[The magnifier aims sun rays en masse]

I can make [a frame with fingers and thumbs]
And raise them high, see [bits of sky and cloud]
[Wispy white] turns [thunder gray] as [storm comes]
See [lightning flash], hear thunder crash too loud

The best of poems (I think you’ll agree)
Capture something intangible and small
A dumb thing overlooked you wouldn’t see
Unless there was a frame that brooked it all

Be mindful. Stop whatever else you’re doing and notice. Allow yourself to be seized by this…

~~ Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

This is my response to this week’s W3 Challenge. The Poet of the Week instructed us to write a poem that utilises internal rhyme where possible and keep the length between 8 and 16 lines.

Blather · Life

Before HIPAA

Sally3 Comments

I’ll admit — it’s a semi-irrational fear that I have of getting a fishhook stuck through my skin.

It may date back to the days when my father’s office was just off the Emergency Room. HIPAA hadn’t been born yet. I would cut through the Emergency Room to get to his office.

Which was a trailer.

Yes, it’s what you picture — the kind of structure that fills trailer parks.

When I got into the trailer, his office was on the left, opposite his secretary’s desk. Sometimes she was transcribing his dictated notes and would let me listen to his voice on the transcription machine as he said things like, “The patient was a white female, age 47, who presented with…”

Clearly another HIPAA violation. But HIPAA wasn’t a thing then. And I wasn’t paying attention to the words as much as his voice.

True story: These days I recognize people by their voices. More than once I would have walked right past my high school boyfriend had he not greeted me by name.

The other day, another person that I knew years ago walked past me and said, “Hey, Sal!”

The words got my attention, but the voice identified the speaker. I immediately knew him.

I mean, seriously, most men over the age of 70 look remarkably similar to me: gray hair or balding, scruffy beard, blue jeans, etc. Add a baseball cap and I’m sunk — until I hear their voice.

But I digress. I guess that’s how it is with stream-of-consciousness writing.

So, as a kid, I would cut through the Emergency Room on a daily basis. My pattern was to swim at the gym after school and walk to the hospital for my ride home. I would wait for my father to finish his day and we would walk together to his vehicle which was ALWAYS parked in the farthest spot available.

“It’s good exercise,” he would say as I complained about walking to the car.

One time, I saw one of my classmates in the ER. He had stabbed a pitchfork through his foot. Actually, through his work boot, and his foot, and out the other side. He was crying and cursing, obviously not having a good day.

I remember his name — but I won’t say it here. HIPAA and all that, you know.

The fishhook thing must date from those days. I think I saw someone in the ER with a fishhook in their cheek.

My father said, “They’ll just push it through and cut the barb.”

He made it sound easy.

But then, he didn’t have a fishhook in his cheek.

I remember my father explaining to me how the manure pitchfork through the foot presented a particular problem because of the risk of infection. Should they just pull it out? Cut the tip and pull it out? I think that’s what they did.

It doesn’t matter. The prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday wasn’t pitchfork. It was hook.

I can’t decide if I like stream-of-consciousness writing or not. It feels like a bunch of blather.

What do you think?

Life · poetry

I Am Lost

Sally7 Comments

A song to the tune: Beecher (aka Love Divine, All Loves Excelling)

I am lost —
Oh, can you help me?
To the airport I must go —
I don’t know
What language you’re speaking
Yet, to you, I tip my chapeau
You are one who knows this landscape
I am sadly ignorant
Yet, I trust you
To be honest
With this poor itinerant

I am lost —
Oh, can you help me?
I don’t know which way to turn!
Status quo?
Or major adjustment?
It’s so hard for me to discern!
Do I take some easy way out here?
Do I battle through some strife?
Someone, please, tell me what the way is
To steer safely through this life!

I am lost —
Oh, can you help me
Find the way to where I should be?
Life for me
Is so confusing
Do I make choice A or B?
C does really have some merit
D — I have ruled out thus far
Making choices
(Can I share it?)
Is so very hard for me

This is my response to the Unicorn Challenge. It’s easy-peasy, right? Except when it’s not. Write no more than 250 words and use the photo for a prompt.

Life is a struggle. I know, I know — this only happens to me. But it happens to me a lot.

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Life

Q is for Quiet

Sally4 Comments

Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound. Silence can’t be anything but silent. Quiet chooses to be silent. It holds its breath to listen. It waits and is still.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

The other day I was talking with a friend in the driveway when a flash of blue caught both our eyes. We followed it to the upper branches of a sugar maple.

“It’s not a bluebird,” my friend said.

“No. I know this one,” I told him. “It’s an Indigo Bunting.” I knew this because one had flown into the glass of a window and lay stunned on our deck some years ago. I took this photo to identify it and wrote a less-than-titillating post about it called “Bleh“

Aren’t the blues stunning?

What has this to do with quiet? Well, my favorite time of day has long been early morning. I get up before the sun to sit with a cup of coffee, a book, and a journal. I need the alone time. I need the quiet time.

Of late, I’ve been using Merlin to identify the birds that join me one at a time in my early morning quiet.

The robin is nearly always first — and monopolizes the conversation. I laugh when it’s the first — you know, getting the worm and all. But it’s quickly joined by sparrows and vireos, wrens and woodpeckers.

And indigo buntings.

The other morning, the bunting was outside my window and I snapped this photo:

Years ago, I had held one, stunned, in my hand and later watched it fly away.

Every morning now, I hold my breath in quiet and listen to the birds, remembering the resurrection of one, and marveling at life.

family · Life

Chrysalizing

Sally4 Comments

“Most highly creative people can remember ‘a moment, an encounter, a book that they read, a performance they attended, that spoke to them and led them to say, “This is the real me, this is what I would like to do, to devote my life to…”‘ says psychologist Howard Gardner.

That moment of memorable, dramatic contact with an activity of fascination is known as a ‘crystallizing experience.'”

Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create

Nothing crystallized for me
Instead, I chrysalized
Crawling into a pupating state
Of home
And children
And family

While my peers were
Making their mark
On the world
Through education
And career
And the upward mobility
Of recognition,
I was making soup
On the woodstove
And washing yet another load
Of laundry.

I folded shirts
Matched socks
Baked cookies
And bemoaned my untidy house

I read books
Upon books
Upon books
Aloud to my children

One by one
They left home
For higher education

One by one
(all eight of them)
Graduated
Found jobs
In their desired field(s)
Emerging from their chrysalides
To live adult lives

Meanwhile I
Am sorting
Through boxes of papers
They had written:
Poetry
Stories
Notes
Academic research

And I cry
Not for sadness
But for joy

They are beautiful people

Now it’s my turn
To crawl out from this protective shell

What will I be?

Life · Writing

Decision Making

Sally8 Comments

My youngest daughter is faced with a challenging decision. She and her current roommate are moving into a new apartment. It’s two bedroom, two bath, but one of the bedrooms has a bath attached while the other bedroom would use the common bathroom.

“The one with the private bath is clearly the better one,” she told me. “How do we choose who gets it?”

Draw straws? Flip a coin?

One of her sisters suggested they each bid on the room. How much more would they be willing to pay for the room with the private bath? Later, though, she said that would kill their friendship. Both girls would feel resentful — one for the privacy, the other for the money.

I asked dilemma-daughter again the other day. “Did you figure it out?”

“No,” she said sadly. “This is so hard!”

And yet I think we both know that if this is the hardest decision she has to make in her life, her life will have been pretty easy.

It’s less about making the right decision, and more about being able to sit with whatever decision is made. She will have another hard decision next week, next month, next year. Another opportunity to move on and not second-guess.

I think that’s called living.

This is my post for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, where the prompt was “Straw.”

It’s been a while since I’ve participated in this weekly prompt, but I’m trying to get those creative juices flowing again.

Life · poetry

Red Herrings

Sally9 Comments

A life full of red herrings
Misdirection left and right
The shoulds crop up — they’re stinking
Misguiding smell and sight

You shoulda done this, you shoulda done that
Path strewn with stinking fish
I look around and listen
But can’t say what I wish

No one has lived my life but I
And I’ve lived it best I could
I say to those who shoulda me –
Have you stood where I’ve stood?

In truth, I do not say those words
But I struggle ‘neath the weight
For had I chosen different paths
What would be my fate?

Honestly I embrace my life
With all its faults and flaws
And when someone says shoulda
I just take a breath and pause

This week’s W3 prompt:

Write a poem that gives voice to what is usually left unsaid — a buried truth, a silenced voice, a hidden struggle, or the quiet ache of the heart. Let your words speak for what the world tends to overlook: an internal conflict, a marginalized experience, a truth tucked between breaths.

You may write from personal experience, an imagined lens, or even embody the voice of an inanimate object or force of nature. All forms and lengths are welcome — whether you choose free verse, haiku, sonnet, prose poetry, or something entirely your own.

Optional: Weave in metaphors of sound, silence, echoes, or resonance to deepen your imagery.

This prompt invites vulnerability, transformation, and truth-telling. Let your poem be a space where the unspeakable is finally heard.

This is my response to the W3 prompt. No one should look back at their life with shoulds. (See what I did there?)

Life · poetry

Personal Creed

Sally39 Comments

Life is hard for ev’ryone
Stumbling. Deaf. Dumb. Blind
Focus NOT on Number-One
Be thoughtful. Be kind.

Humans can be inhumane-
Ground up by the grind
Bearing Christ or Mark of Cain
Be thoughtful. Be kind.

Weary, weary, so exhausted
Brawn, might — must I find?
No! None should feel accosted!
Be thoughtful. Be kind.

God, let me be supportive –
Let me know Your mind
Not strong-armed or extortive
Be thoughtful. Be kind.

This is my response to this week’s W3 challenge. The Poet of the Week, Murisopsis (Val — congrats!!) challenged us to write a poem using the theme of our Creed or Spirituality. The poem must include a refrain.

I opted to keep trying Celtic forms. This one is the Cro Cumaisc Etir Casbairdni Ocus Lethrannaigecht.(Try saying that three times fast!) Below are the rules

  • Quatrain (or four-line) stanzas
  • Seven syllables in lines one and three; five syllables in lines two and four
  • Lines one and three end with a three-syllable word
  • Lines two and four end with a one-syllable word
  • Rhyme scheme in each stanza: abab