Rosh Chodesh Shevat

Today marks the first day of the eleventh month of the Jewish year, Shevat. It's a month marked by Tu B'Shevat, the fifteenth day. Once a tax deadline of sorts--in which fruit trees were pronounced a year older--Tu B'Shevat has evolved into an early marker for spring. Trees are purchased for planting in Israel at this time of year, and Jews in the Diaspora (that's any Jew living outside of Israel, to you) have used this holiday to highlight environmental concerns in their adopted homelands.

The lovely site ritualwell suggests that we celebrate the turning of the month and prepare for the "birthday of trees" with a fragrance seder, since scent represents the spirit in Jewish mysticism.

(um, doesn't pretty much everything represent the spirit in Jewish mysticism?)

Tu B'Shevat is an appealing holiday for youngsters, so JCCs all over America gear up to help their preschoolers celebrate. There's usually a little seed-planting project or a community garden in the works, plus a kiddie seder. It's very touching to have your little one come home bearing a seedling in its comfy little Dixie cup.

The Biblical significance of the month of Shevat is mainly concerned with Moshe (Moses) imparting the wisdom of Torah to the people. It is traditionally observed that Moshe was offering the Jews the fifth and final book of the Pentateuch, also known as The Old Testament. This book, Deuteronomy, contains the long list of mitzvot (good deeds) and other instructions for conducting a good life.

Though it's customary to eat 15 different fruits to celebrate Tu B'Shevat, there are actually only 7 named in the Bible, and all 7 grow in Israel, as described in the Torah: "...a land of WHEAT and BARLEY and (GRAPE) VINES and FIG trees and POMEGRANATES, a land of OLIVE trees and (DATE) honey," according to Torah Tots.

There are plenty of different rationales for picking (excuse the pun) your additional 8 fruits, but I'm like, how much more fruit can a person eat before the seder table becomes unbearable to others?

An avocado is a fruit, and so's a lemon, and a lime. So's a tomato, last I checked. Meaning if you make guacamole the way I do, right there you've taken care of four fruits.

Beans being the magical fruit, that'd make five. Add sangria--I mean, you need wine anyway--and you're more than done.

So it stands to reason that a Tex-Mex seder might be the way to go.

Or not.

Depends if you want them to speak to you again at Judaism 101.

(They already don't speak to me)

[photo via JCC Association's "This New Month" site]

Sunday Fragment

(No, forgive me, Pablo Neruda, for using part of your poem in this way.)

from "The Dead Woman"

… No, perdóname.
Si tú no vives,
si tú, querida, amor mío,
si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes,
pero seguiré vivo…

… No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you
have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,
but I shall stay alive...

Weekend Thoughts

Lied again! A thought to go home on:


"I try to take one day at a time -- but sometimes several days attack me at once."




[quote from Jennifer Unlimited, via Riannan. "Day in the Life of a Mom" & "A Screaming Banshee Does Taxes" courtesy of Hallmark e-cards. "Lucy's Scream" by Tom Everhart, via Animation USA]

Poetry Thursday: Elephants, Eyes, and Hands

I like this poem sequence from Primary Six. I found it while Googling a string that might perhaps sum up the week. I especially like this:



Song of the Elephant
by Stephanie

In the heat of the day,
An elephant tries to cool.

Its trunk which is as long as a tree,
And crinkled up like an old paper bag.


Or perhaps you are looking for professional poetry today. So try Peter Orlovsky's "Second Poem."

To wit:

Morning again, nothing has to be done,
                maybe buy a piano or make fudge.
At least clean the room up for sure like my farther I've done flick
              the ashes & butts over the bed side on the floor.
But frist of all wipe my glasses and drink the water
               to clean the smelly mouth.
A nock on the door, a cat walks in, behind her the Zoo's baby
elephant demanding fresh pancakes-I cant stand these
hallucinations aney more.
Time for another cigerette and then let the curtains rise, then I
knowtice the dirt makes a road to the garbage pan
No ice box so a dried up grapefruit.
Is there any one saintly thing I can do to my room, paint it pink
  maybe or instal an elevator from the bed to the floor,
  maybe take a bath on the bed?
Whats the use of liveing if I cant make paradise in my own
room-land?
For this drop of time upon my eyes
like the endurance of a red star on a cigerate
makes me feel life splits faster than sissors.
I know if I could shave myself the bugs around my face would
 disappear forever.
The holes in my shues are only temporary, I understand that.
My rug is dirty but whose that isent?
There comes a time in life when everybody must take a piss in
the sink -here let me paint the window black for a minute.
Thro a plate & brake it out of naughtiness-or maybe just
innocently accidentally drop it wile walking around the
tabol.
Before the mirror I look like a sahara desert gost,
 or on the bed I resemble a crying mummey hollaring for air,
 or on the tabol I feel like Napoleon.
But now for the main task of the day - wash my underwear -
 two months abused - what would the ants say about that?
How can I wash my clothes - why I'd, I'd, I'd be a woman if I did
 that.
No, I'd rather polish my sneakers than that and as for the floor
 its more creative to paint it then clean it up.
As for the dishes I can do that for I am thinking of getting a job in
 a lunchenette.
My life and my room are like two huge bugs following me
 around the globe.
Thank god I have an innocent eye for nature.
I was born to remember a song about love - on a hill a butterfly
 makes a cup that I drink from, walking over a bridge of
 flowers.

Dec. 27th, 1957, Paris

[wall mural via Virtual Boricua]

Okay, I Lied

Maybe one eensy post more before Thursday:



"No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye."

--Elizabeth Bowen





(Which brings me to my second point: Don't, for the love of all that is sacred, Google images for the word eye, unless you'd like to be left really, really disturbed. "Eye see" is also pretty bad.)

Yeah. But you had to look, didn't you?

[Elephant illusion via bifaloo]

"I write stories about life as I have misunderstood it."

That's Amy Tan, speaking late in her book of essays The Opposite of Fate, which I received from Shawn last week as a surprise pass-it-on gift.

I'm not passing it on anytime soon.

I was up late reading the first essays and I was up early this morning reading the middle essays, and I was skipping ahead through the good parts of the last essays (I was that impatient) when I got another gift from Shawn:

A tiny, courteous, but unmistakeable underline. Of the quote above.

You have to know that if there are two camps of people, those who like to find underlines and those who don't, I belong in the first camp.

I used to buy exclusively at used bookstores for that very reason.

It doesn't work if there are too many.

But a few, or a poignant singlet like this one, represent an indelible moment of speaking, one reader to another, of saying, "This is what mattered to me."

And to me, too. Made all the nicer because I know the first reader.

It happens that you'll see less posting from me. I'll be trying to do Mondays and Thursdays for a while, and to work more fully and effectively within meat space (sorry Ri, not my coinage. It's claimed to be the original term of one of the all-time great cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, whom I avoided like the plague in the 80s when they were all the rage; and now here I am swiping from them.)

Full disclosure: Amy Cunningham is one of my oldest friends.

(And while I'm at it, so is dustlover.)

(Okay, and toethumbs.)

So who better to advise me on caring for the tools of my trade than Amy?

I have been blessed until now with no symptoms of the syndromes that can become the bane of a writer's or musician's existence: tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, spinal misalignment, and other woes of the desk and chair.

How have I escaped such a fate, you ask?

I'm glad you did. I can tell you in one word:

Procrastination!

For example, for all the good advice Amy offers in her post on the care and feeding of one's hands, I went right for the reading at the end, the one most likely to help me stave off the ill effects of writing by, uh, preventing me from writing.

You see how that works?

Thanks, Amy.

(For your one-step procrastination cure, just check out The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.)

[image by M.C. Escher, via Zvi Har'El's M.C. Escher Collection]

Poetry Thursday: Lawson Inada

Eatin' With Sticks

by Lawson Inada

When you think about it,
eatin' with 'sticks
is the natural thing to do;

that is, without getting all
sociological about it,
it makes logical sense

to handle your food
with these smooth extensions
of your fleshy fingers--

that way, the hot
is truly cool,
bit by bit making its way

south to your mouth
as you choose
what you chews,

chowing down on, say,
succulent shoots of bamboo
with sticks of bamboo

as you come full circle
in the ecological
sense of things

which makes good sense
and shouldn't
bamboozle any bambino

with a lick of sense,
a lick of taste,
and elders demonstrating

the social, logical value
of a world not to waste,
slash, stab at random,

not to just scoop around
like so many grains
of surplus and plenty.

Moreover, 'sticks
are never alone--
as in "sticks together"--

as they are paired together
like the very stereo
parts of the body--

arms, hands, legs, feet,
ears, eyes, molars,
nostrils of the nose,

with all of those
working together ricely,
in sync, as we eat...

But wait--What's missing?
Right--a whole person
does not a society make...

Thus, as any unshaven sage
in a mountain hermitage
will instruct you:

"Man, you need a bowl, baby!"
Which is to say:
"You can't go it alone!"

And even a hermit
wouldn't be here
if it weren't for

'sticks and bowls,
the whole enchilada
of Yin and Yang,

of boys and girls,
of what makes the world
worth sitting down with

wherever you are,
blessing the bowl
of food, community,

collective memory,
creative hermitage,
the grains, the noodles

that wouldn't have it
any other way:
"Eat us with sticks!"

[via hootenany]

Tuesday Thought

Via The History of Economic Thought at The New School for Social Research:

Much has been made of Frank H. Knight's (1921: p.20, Ch.7) famous distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty". In Knight's interpretation, "risk" refers to situations where the decision-maker can assign mathematical probabilities to the randomness which he is faced with. In contrast, Knight's "uncertainty" refers to situations when this randomness "cannot" be expressed in terms of specific mathematical probabilities. As John Maynard Keynes was later to express it:

"By `uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence...About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know." (J.M. Keynes, 1937)

Nonetheless, many economists dispute this distinction, arguing that Knightian risk and uncertainty are one and the same thing. For instance, they argue that in Knightian uncertainty, the problem is that the agent does not assign probabilities, and not that she actually cannot, i.e. that uncertainty is really an epistemological and not an ontological problem, a problem of "knowledge" of the relevant probabilities, not of their "existence". Going in the other direction, some economists argue that there are actually no probabilities out there to be "known" because probabilities are really only "beliefs". In other words, probabilities are merely subjectively-assigned expressions of beliefs and have no necessary connection to the true randomness of the world (if it is random at all!).

Dances with Raptors

Dr. Peter Kranz may be best known as the paleontologist who named "Capitalsaurus," D.C.'s very own dinosaur.

He's also a teacher and a parent who has a deep sense of mission about dinosaurs and kids. So he hires himself out for tours, parties, school projects, and presentations, with all proceeds to benefit The Dinosaur Fund.

Dr. Kranz is the author of kid-friendly books and presentations like I Can Find a Dinosaur Myself. For a reasonable donation, he will bring a truckload of dirt to your D.C. area school for a day's or a year's dig.

Closer to my heart, he's the guy who made my daughter's morning yesterday, when he offered a tour to twelve young minds at the American Museum of Natural History as part of Mona's birthday party.

He was waiting for us underneath the Tower of Time, wearing Converse sneakers and a pith helmet. For the next two hours, Dr. Kranz proceeded to straighten us out on matters paleontological, and then disappeared. He didn't even ask for cake.

What a guy.

My favorite part of the tour was the Race of the Fittest, carried out on the carpeting somewhere between the Devonian and Jurassic eras. One kid was an arthopod, another was a fish, and Mona was a dinosaur. They were to use their tentacles, fins, or limbs to move forward. According to Dr. Kranz, "The only rule is you can't suddenly evolve."

Seems to be a rule we're all forced to live by.

For a sense of what a day with Dr. Kranz might be like, click here.

["Dance Monkey Dance" via Riannan]

"Moisture Is the Essence of Wetness. Wetness Is the Essence of Beauty."

Every now and again I start thinking about something Derek Zoolander said. He's got so much to share and so little vocabulary to share it with.

If we'd been in another generation, we might have turned to the circular wisdom of Yogi Berra or of Billie Dawn, the original Dumb Blonde character created by Judy Holliday (IQ in real life, 172). Way smarter than your average hair.

And I'm throwing in Groucho Marx, because I can. He wasn't Born Yesterday, but he was born at a very early age.

And Boots of Britain...well, they're in here because I started doing their Detox program after having this long and satisfying conversation with the counter rep for their products at Target and...I don't know, it's something to do. It beats scrapbooking.

And this next thing is here because Michael turned me onto it and I thought it was a good time to share a really frickin' funny dumb blonde joke with my bluds.

a gleam in the eye

"Modernism in American Silver: 20th Century Design" runs through January 22 at the Renwick Gallery. The show highlights more than 200 works of silversmithing by designers such as Eliel Saarinen, Erik Magnussen, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Elsa Peretti and Richard Meier. Organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in my hometown, the work is drawn from the Dallas collection of some 400 fine silver pieces.



In other Smithsonian news, the Museum of American Art is slated to reopen in July, after major renovations. The rechristening exhibit will be William Wegman's "Funney/Strange."

Solitude: Many Views

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning."
--James Joyce speaking through his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man



"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."
May Sarton



"The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties and pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Solitude of Self"



"Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used."
Tillie Olsen



"I am glad to study with ardor but the children wont let me, they go to bed late so it makes me tired, and I cant do my lessons."
Ida Lerner, Tillie Olsen's mother



[image by jenny holzer]

Poetry Thursday: Remembering the World

I actually forgot this was Poetry Thursday.

Today's offering is St. Francis of Asissi's Canticle of the Creatures. It's an appropriate way to close the day, for me, for many reasons. "Brother Sun" being the main one.

This song of praise evokes rhythms and repetitions found in The Mourner's Kaddish, a Jewish prayer so old it's in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

Two important, common-sense features distinguish Kaddish from other prayers. First, it must be said among a minyan--that's ten or more observant Jews--so the mourner, whose duty it is to say the prayer weekly, must come out of emotional or actual isolation at least weekly. Second, Kaddish never once mentions sorrow or loss. It is a prayer of praise, intended to help us say the words even when we don't yet feel them. It challenges mourners to engage with the world and remember its beauty.

Me, I'm not buying it. But that's not your problem. Here's the poem.


Canticle of the Creatures

Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor
And all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy
To pronounce your name.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them, bright
And precious and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all the weather's moods,
By which you cherish all that you have made.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,
So useful, lowly, precious and pure.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Through whom you brighten up the night.
How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces
Various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon
For love of you; through those who endure
Sickness and trial.
Happy are those who endure in peace,
By you, Most High, they will be crowned.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those She finds doing your will!
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.

[Image: "Brother Sun," via Planete Monde]

Apparent Disk of the Moon

This is what the U.S. Naval Observatory has to say today:

North is up, east is to the left.

This is a synthetic image of the Moon as it would be seen from the Earth at the date and time indicated, the latter expressed in Universal Time (UT). The image is recreated many times per day so that it always represents the current appearance of the Moon. Listed below the image are the lunar longitude and latitude (planetographic coordinates) of the sub-Earth and sub-solar points on the Moon, the phase (the fraction of the area of the apparent disk that appears illuminated), and the angular diameter of the disk in arcseconds.

This is what I have to say:
In January 1968 my brother wanted to show me the moon. He had a new telescope, he'd gotten it for Hannukah.

It was 1968, January. In 18 months' time, men would be walking around up there.

I took a look. I was unsure what to be excited about. I was just a little kid.

I don't know what happened to that telescope. I haven't come across it among his things.

All I know is this: if North is up, how the hell can east be to the left?

Write Your Name in Elvish

Just in time to be too late for Christmas, here I am with my first annual post on things elfin.

Okay, just on letters elfin.

Elvish. Tengwar. Whatever.

So, sure, it's cute when you start out here.

Then when you've warmed up to the idea, the site's author calmly suggests you consider an elvish tattoo.

Really, there isn't much I can offer to improve on this find from the blog of one Ned Gulley, whose obsessions come uncomfortably close to mine in key areas.

Do I want to rub elbows with elvish experts?

Sure.

Enough to go to Chris Wetherell's Elvish Name Generator and find my elf within, who happens to go by the fetching handle of Nessa Lossëhelin.

Enough to discover the very tippy tip of the iceberg in elvish lore, the derivation of elvish tongues high and low as portrayed by J.R.R. Tolkien in Lord of the Rings.

Enough to go to the wonderful site Omniglot to discover that Tolkien designed the alphabet for one of these tongues, Tengwar, along the lines of the Tibetan alphabet.

Enough, in fact, to make like an elf just when things are getting good and...

(disappear).

a day in the life

Nothing else I have found today beats the odd poetry of Their Circular Life: An Exploration About Human Behavior.

Elegant and restorative, the site documents the diurnal cycles of a canal, a municipal park trashcan, a railway station, a road, and a lake in Italy. The view uses a simple pointer to navigate the journey of day into night and back into day. You can go at whatever speed you choose, reverse direction, stop and start again.

The brainchild of Lorenzo Fonda and Davide Terenzi, Their Circular Life chooses the wording for its very few instructions with care, bringing language in to reinforce their images.

I particularly like the opening statement, in soft gray on gray:

CHOOSE.

No One Knows What It's Like To Be the Red One

This just in from Dave Barry's blog: the rights of lobsters will not go long neglected. For more on the hue and cry, click your pincers here.

Not content with covering animal rights issues from a merely conventional standpoint, Barry courageously forges new ground in the protection of homebuyers from inadequate information about wildlife during those crucial days before a closing.

All this via Riannan, who might be considered a viable candidate for the great gap left by Mr. Barry's retirement from his sabbatical from his column, which won't include retirement from his blog or occasional "columns," which we will call "columns" to avoid confusing them with his "column."

[image: the Visualization Lab at SUNY-Stony Brook]

Fuzzy Logic Friday

Is this excerpt fiction? Is it poetry?

And when it's this good, who cares?

...from "The Body"
Julianna Spallholz

The body is not perfect but it could be. The body remembers boys on the school bus making fun of its nose and teeth. The body knows not to smoke but it smokes anyway. The body scratches its head too hard and gets blood beneath its fingernails. The body has long legs but notices spider veins. The body spent some time not eating and then some time in baggy clothes. The body is vegetarian but likes the smell of ham. The body does not like to run. The body drinks too much. The body gets headaches often and earaches in the spring. The body has been told that it is tense. The body has been told that it is tall. The body has been told that it is graceful but also that it moves like some strange animal. The body didn’t know how to take that.





[originally published in Folio, the Literary Journal of the American University]

For more, see "Conversation," "Pretend," or some of her more intriguing illuminations of the poetry of William Blake when she was a student at Union College.

I love the Internet.

Truth in disclosure: I've never met the woman, though the fragment quoted above has stayed in my head for nearly two years. She's also featured in Gargoyle 50, edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole (a huge compendium that also features "Lucky" by R. Gilad Schamess).

Poetry Thursday: Art, Politics, and Tikkun

Does it matter that the acting prime minster of Israel, Ehud Olmert, is married to artist Aliza Olmert? As the rest of the world debates the policy vacuum created by Ariel Sharon's sudden massive stroke yesterday, we in the United States ought to contemplate our own curious vacuum: the shocking absence of artists from places of real political power. Is this choice or culture? Does the presence of citizen-artists in positions of leadership elsewhere in the world make a difference? And if so, always peaceward? These are open questions.

Here is an incomplete selection of poets and artists to help us wonder.

Gabriela Mistral
Octavio Paz
Pablo Neruda
Vaclav Havel
Czeslaw Milosz
Winston Churchill
Ben Nighthorse Campbell

Though the limits of time and knowledge hamper me greatly, I also lucked upon Hmong painter and Minnesota State Representative Cy Thao in St. Paul.

And with that ragged edge of a list pending, here is today's poem.

Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ridethinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night
with plans and the simple breath
that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

[art by Aliza Olmert, from Tikkun]

My Colors

Michael made me do it.

(Oh yes you did).

He sent me one little email joke about conservatives and liberals that was supposed to be funny and all, and, well, I just went off.

Hours later, I have a few things to show for it.

Like this, from Sadly, No!

I will be adding this cheeky blog to my sidebar soon. I don't know what they're on about half the time, but they make me think and they make me laugh, and there's little else I require to cement a friendship.

I miss Abbie Hoffman. He knew all about the theatre of the street. Wonder what he would have made of our new theatre of the ether?

INTERVIEWER: "Are you saying there should be protected free speech for everything? That you should be able to stand up in a crowded theatre and shout fire?"
HOFFMAN (Standing up): FIRE!!!

There are those who say Flash is good for nothing.

I say, sometimes a little mediocre Flash in the right hands goes a long, long way.

Wiki Wednesday

Since it seems to be the week for me to show my strings, I might as well give Wikipedia the credit it so richly deserves.

And also expose the seamy underbelly of one of my favorite web sources.

Back from Slack

A new day is dawning at my house.

It's called Tuesday.

2006, the new 2005

I went ahead and gave the blog a fresher look, plus a more user-friendly interface since we all know what you're really here for. Click here to see.

[inspired by ihath]

new leaf

Recent comments on this blog have reminded me to give back to my best audience as this holiday season draws to its inevitable close. So I've donated an undisclosed amount to the ASPCA on behalf of our kids.

See, we reserve the last night of Hanukkah (which happens to be tonight) to give from the family rather than within. The kids have stayed with their perennial and unanimous favorite: animals. I chose the Academy of American Poets, and Stuart chose Habitat for Humanity.


Companions, poetry, and shelter: I think that says it all.

What will your donations say?

Happy New Year, one and all.