Poet

Those of you who know me, know that I'm an aspiring writer. What you might not know, is that I also dabble in poetry from time to time. Here's one I came up with just this morning:

Ah, oh. Spaghetti-0.

You just spit up all over your clothes.

Genius, I know. Don't worry. There are more where that came from. 

The Adult Table

Photographer Justin Hackworth sends out a photo of the day. (Sign up here to be added to the list). Yesterday there was a photo of the adult table at Thanksgiving. Oh, the adult table. As a kid, I really wanted to sit there. Over there they talked about business, and politics, and the neighbors. Why couldn’t the kids sit with the adults anyway?

 

Both of my grandmothers would set “kid” and “adult” tables when they hosted Thanksgiving. There was one Thanksgiving, however, when my grandma Webster didn’t just set a kid table, she served kid food. At Thanksgiving.

 

I love Thanksgiving. Always have. I love the turkey. I love the dressing. I love mashed potatoes and yams. I love everything about Thanksgiving, but I especially love the food. As a child, even, I loved the food. I looked forward to Thanksgiving all year.

 

That year, we went to Grandma Webster’s. We kids all sat down at the kid table. Grandma served us chicken nuggets. What???? Chicken nuggets. I hated chicken nuggets. She had to be kidding. She wasn’t. In fact, she was excited that she’d thought of it. Kids don’t like grown up food. They don’t want turkey. They want chicken nuggets. I didn’t. I wanted turkey. Can I have turkey? No. You can have chicken nuggets. That’s what kids like: chicken nuggets. No sense wasting a turkey on children who don’t even like it. But I like turkey. I do. But I made chicken nuggets for the kids. If you’re at the kid table, you eat chicken nuggets. So I did. And I really, really wanted to be sitting at the adult table. Not just for the gossip and politics, but for the turkey.

 

After our chicken nugget dinner we had mincemeat pie, because all kids love mincemeat pie.

The Rollover

Three days ago, my baby rolled from his back to his tummy. He doesn't like being on his tummy, so I put him back on his back. He rolled over again. We repeated this several times. I don't want him rolling over. That means he's growing up. My husband and I always say that we wish we could freeze time. Freeze our kids just where they are and watch them be little and adorable forever. But we can't. I supposed, really, truly, we wouldn't do it even if we could. I don't think we're supposed to. That's why man invented the camera.

Laughter

My baby boy cried the very first day he was born. It's taken eighty-five days for him to figure out how to laugh. I hope he never forgets.

May none of us forget how. To laugh. 

Real Men Love Pink

I have a baby boy. He's just over two months now and what a blessing he is. My oldest, a girl, had colic and cried non-stop. When I say non-stop, I mean NON-STOP. It was horrible. I think I only survived because I didn't know any better. In comparison, my second (also a girl) was an angel. At least I thought so until now. Now I have this brand new baby and my, oh my. He's the happiest baby I ever did see. Of course he cries. Of course he had nights he doesn't sleep. Of course he had times when he's fussy and just won't settle down. Mostly though, I'm able to comfort him and meet his needs. 

He's been smiling for a while, but lately he coos too. It's my very favorite thing. The cooing, the smiles, the way his face lights  up. There is joy here, just all of us watching him. 

He takes a binky, which my girls never did. We have a couple blue ones, a green one, a yellow one. But the one he loves most is pink. Bright pink with a purple handle. It was one of his sister's before him; it was never used, until now. He, however, chomps away at it, his legs kicking and his arms flailing like he's leading a choir. Someday soon, the binky will wear out. I can't find any just like it in stores. Someday too, he'll look at a baby photo and be horrified, I'm sure, that I let him have a pink binky. Oh well. Someday when he has a colicky baby of his own he'll understand. In the meantime I'll tell him that real men love pink.

Weird Thing

This is weird. Today I was thinking about Death of a Salesman, and how I love that play. It's been forever since I saw it or read it. "I should read that again sometime soon" I thought to myself. 

Then tonight I log onto Writer's Almanac. I don't check it much. Somehow the poetry is not the same in my head as it is when Garrison Keillor reads it on air, with a voice that is only his. I scroll to the bottom and read this:

It's the birthday of Arthur Miller, (books by this author) born in New York City in 1915. His family was wealthy, but they lost all their money during the stock market crash, so they moved to Brooklyn and lived with the whole extended family. Arthur's uncle was a storyteller and a big liar. He became an inspiration for Arthur, who said, "His unpredictable manipulations of fact freed my mind to lope and skip among fantasies of my own." While Arthur Miller was writing his playDeath of a Salesman (1949), he went to bed at night and realized that his face was wet from crying, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. He said, "The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."

Hmmmm. Weird. 

Amazon.com

Never get on Amazon late at night when you promised yourself you'd be writing your own masterpiece. It will only make you regret not buying a copy of The Underneath when you had a chance, even though it seemed like too much money at the time. Now it's been nominated for a national book award and you (meaning I) haven't read it. It's written by Kathi Appelt who was at the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop this past summer. When she read from her memoir My Father's Summers I gasped audibly because the writing was that good. Audible gasping good. It takes a lot for me to gasp audibly, believe me. Oh, I do love writing that makes me gasp. It's sort of like a cross between tasting the world's finest chocolate and having the wind knocked out of you.