Dear April,
My dear sister April, I am sad to see you arrive, because it means you will leave, too, and as long as you are still coming, I never think about your end. May, I'll spend being blue that you have gone, and then June, too; by July you will seem so far away that I will settle for the very unsatisfying 'next year.'
Dear Listeners,
Today, your song. It's the musical answer to your question. The music came from my DJ, and the artist came to me through Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Dear Calling,
The cat calls pretty often, maybe the most often- both the One and the Two cat are vocal, needy- but these are human words for humans. Who knows what the cat is hoping to get from me? At least I know it is a cat.
The other calls, well, they are pretty unknown. I got a letter a few days ago, and the Caller said just leave it a few days and open it later. I opened it now, and it came in the center of the mind I was reading about in a book. I have been hearing another call for about 70 pages: start reading The First Bad Man too, it might belong with Surrender the Pink.
(I started, it does.)
I guess a beckon is more it, anyway, not precisely a call. The breeze I can see through the window beckons, the to-do list beckons. But those are the easy ones; the Caller you can identify.
I was looking on my jam-packed looking device and there were these beautiful diary quilts that a woman had made, was making. That called too- run out and grab some fabric and start piecing! That word, that wonderful word, piece, piecing. It is full of the potential for making a whole. What could be nicer than that?
Anyway, you can see that a call to make a quilt in the center of reading about a mind and whatever the hell is on the to-do list is making for a pretty busy day, and what I really was called to do was to contemplate the nature of whom the Caller is. So much sifting to do, keep this, get back to that, existence is ludicrously dense, and then, in small instants, completely spacious and empty.
Oh, and don't forget, your song for today: Der Telefon Anruf.
Dear Spring,
Apologies, no one feels like dancing, because we are all so terrible at keeping the world beautiful. Still, it is your first day, and I don't want you to feel like you are waiting on the platform for a welcome that never comes! So, let me say, thanks for coming again, and please excuse the mess.
Neither the old shoe, nor the new, but another shoe entirely.
Dear Y'all,
Did you ever have a memory in your foot? An embodied thing, like everyone likes to say now; a step that felt in a shoe today like a step from long ago in a totally different shoe? A sort of déjà shoe? I got some new shoes a week ago, I could fill a page with talk of the way shoes are sold now, as 'recovery' wear, for instance, but that too is another digression. And yet. You know you don't come here for the straight talk. You come here to beat about the bush, to stalk the topic, slowly, discursively, with no particular place to go, maybe even hoping we never arrive....
And yet, these new shoes are an odd amalgam of very soft materials (unwoven felt, I'd say) and very tough materials (a beefy Vibram rubber sole). Well, I couldn't resist that strange union, I guess, but the point is, I got them, and I am wearing them, and they have another contemporary shoe detail, they have that heel that is hinged with elastic; you are meant to shove your foot in hastily and let the back of the shoe flatten out under your heel. Wearing them like this, in a manner I imagine would horrify certain aged cobblers in Italy, there is a specific fold of material felt under your heel, and it was this that my foot remembered: another shoe, another day.
They were clunky, chocolate brown lug-soled sandals with large buckles- a noisy clomping shoe, that I used more and more 'around the house' after I'd worn them to fairly shabby looking over 3 or 4 years; and when I wore them around the house, I'd skip the back heel strap, and just leave it folded under my heels. And that is what my foot remembered.
Dear Women,
Have you ever read The House of Mirth? I think maybe that Edith Wharton wanted me to feel, at least in part, that Lily Got What Lily Deserved, and then died happily ever after in redemptive glory. I just couldn't, though. I felt like Lily was sold down the river before she was born; I felt like I did one day when my friend was really tired and unable to cope, and she was asking her fool boyfriend for some help, in an indirect but utterly desperate way, and this person, this Man acted like he didn't understand her need, when even a stranger across a room could have read it.
Perhaps Edith Wharton just wrote it, and said it like it was, and left the figuring out what to feel for Lily Bart to the reader. There is also a chance, and this disturbs me greatly, that romanticizing the suffering of tragic women leads to acceptance of the Patriarchy, and what am I to do with that, I ask you?
The thing is, people need help from each other, all the time, for lots of things they cannot cope with alone. Let us know that, and let us offer help and seek help from each other as often as we can; taking care not to romanticize our suffering, and if we cannot, then we will keep on waiting for the man.
Dear Dodo-istes,
Do you know that I have 64 drafts posts, spanning all 12 years of Dodo? There are topics like harina de arroz, spinning Churro wool, the dark songs of California, fairy eggs, Joan Brown, and ordinal numbers. What happens to these dust-gathering half completed posts is that the time is not right. Maybe it is a summer topic, and it is storming and cold out in January now (not), so I wait to post it. Sometimes the theme is too slight or light for the times, sometimes I just don't feel it myself, and sometimes I am unsure of how to complete these orphan posts.
Today, though, today is just to bring you the song of the day, which I got from my DJ last week.