[Draft of Song Lyric]

My father’s three sisters have gone to their rest

Not one of them getting an easy way out

And led there by loving and hard living men

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My father’s three brothers all did their best

Trying to do well for better or worse

Survivors destroyed by salvation in wars

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

The father I knew has been long in the dust

And the snow that I knew that he never would leave

And my brother and I will follow in dreams

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My children can’t live as we did in the West

My children won’t have any right of return

I ran from the love of the land and the blood,

Returning no more to my grandmother’s breast.

I want them to know that we did what we must,

Going back to the red clay and moss of the South

Reducing the wind and the sand to these words

Returning at last to my grandmother's breast

The numbing down of our everyday lives proceeds like a painless dentist.

Weird, when you have to retrieve your 15 year old boy who has without announcement skipped his sister's birthday dinner to have Shabbat dinner at the rabbi chaplain's table. You don't know the address, although you've been provided with a general description of the house. After dark, You can't count on finding a porch light on, so you have to squint for clues like a mezuzzah. You can't call him after dark, and the family doesn't know who you are or why you are there. A minute after starting to pound on the door, you're being shown into a brightly lit dining room and introduced to most of the dozen people at the table -- the rabbi's wife, three daughters, and son; a couple of chaplaincy students from the Army post. Three or four others are better known to you, schoolmates of your son's, and the son himself, in a Yemini-style kippah. You're supposed to extract him from a vegetarian Shabbos dinner in favor of Outback Steakhouse, but as he says, "This is the best challah I've ever tasted." I don't know how much of a diplomat my wife thinks I am, but if ever I needed to be, that was when.

DRAFT

I want to write a song of ourself, ourselves,

in which we see ourselves as mere spectators

of a game between this and that -- not them and us

and, God forbid, not good and evil,

and according to our disposition

betting or not betting on the outcome,

watching the clock or the inning expire,

agitated by the gross or subtle expression of the strong or the cagy

according to our disposition,

and participating just as much as the players do

that is, as most of us do, from a distance usually safe

from the fights and foul balls.

Finally, I pray, we will find the point

not to be strength or caginess, not to be deception or execution, but

endurance and energy over the passing of time.

We will see the actual drizzle and not the telephoto sheet of rain,

something that passes, as we do, ephemeral

as a desert creek at times yielding the delicate trout,

as we see and for a moment may be privileged to hear

the people on the lawn, the clay, the humble mat,

or if we insist the raked track or the blond hardwood floor,

released by what is not their work but their daily play

to say what makes them like ourselves,

as this song itself admits that itself is a version of something

well recalled from our grandfather's generation, and has a point.

I want to say our anxiety will burn off then and we will stand for the stretch

as a candlestick stands reflective (yes, and empty)

on the table of an everyday afternoon,

understanding and taking part in the clarity of light and air

where the terms of the contest are clear. That is enough.

I have been accused (and convicted) of throat-clearing in my writing, but there is plenty of space-time for it now, and the need for a clear throat has never been clearer. Sarah Palin's tweeting and now her TV show . . .

which I have not watched. So let me begin. Some of the words I would like to apply to this blog: "deliberate," so justly associated with Thoreau; "familiar," "conversational," and so forth; "allusive," but not so indirect as referenced, footnoted, and linked in the new style;

Moominpapa's Memoirs . . . what if I were to write the already written story? If it's not written about, it has no chance of having happened.

I had a feeling of 85% today. That is, I would fall short in every category, despite making a defensible effort. Then, I found the battery charger for the 10 year old Sony camera, one of my electronic friends. Watching its tiny icons darken on the LED screen as power flowed in, I learned once again that all is not lost, just misplaced.

Later,

As of 6:36 p.m., I have deactivated my Facebook account. I hardly like the word "deactivated," but I suppose it suggests that I may have defused a time bomb . . . that is, something which was going to blow up more of my time.

Like the Tea Partiers, I am getting belatedly interested in reading history. There is some comfort in knowing that the events, at least, are over, and we can't be held responsible for changing them. And there is an even greater challenge in knowing that these events have repercussions, ricochets, and rebound effects that are not over. Some things we might do better the more we know, or at least the more we think. "Heart of Darkness" leads back to "King Leopold's Ghost" and forward to "Apocalypse Now" and back to "Heart of Darkness," and so forth, and back. Unlike the Tea Partiers, I don't believe that the Europeans necessarily had better ideas than the people they overwhelmed.

It has taken two years and a series of recent events to make me quit Facebook. Ah, the humanity, illustrated by the dog and cat photos; oh, the futility, illustrated by the 2010 election commentary; ow, the microscopy, illustrated by my own short-sighted observations and the lack of energetic reaction to them; and certainly the reminder of mortality as my father-in-law died at NHC on Oct. 17 after living for more than a year as a stroke patient. He hadn't arranged for an obituary to be published or a memorial service to be conducted, so there couldn't be anything to say about it on Facebook. Here, there ought to be, and that is the sort of event which I hope to handle here.

I like books with footnotes. don't like searching for books, such as my son's two copies of "The Prince," in rooms I myself haven't maintained in order (either because I didn't do it myself, or because I didn't maintain order). I want to be able to get all my old stuff back and read it without the pain. And then I want to be able to burn it all myself. I wish I had written "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet." I am glad that things like punctuation and spacing still have meaning for me. I am glad that Dave Frishberg lyrics occur to me in connection with many of these things, but I know it is time to replace that with another set of occurrences. Maybe the one at Owl Creek Bridge would do for a start.