The Blog is Dripping Slow

I'm back at my post. May, June, July, August have slid by. Let's recap. I remember meeting up with Karen, Fede and the girls in Philly over the Memorial Day weekend. Then in June we went up to Boston for the Early Music Festival. And on the Fourth of July weekend we went to New York for a visit to the Morris-Jumel mansion in uptown (way uptown!). While we were on a roll that day, we also stopped in at the Cloisters, my first visit there. A very hot, humid day, but we persevered.

At the end of July there was Saratoga Springs, and then the Chester Poetry Conference with my 9 returning fellow poets--our third year there now, we are really plugged into each other.

We arrived in Gilmanton in early August, spent a few lovely evenings at a new place called The Landing, on Chris and Heather's property near our house, where they had cleared away vegetation at this fabulous view spot. On August 10 we all saw a lovely sunset. The next morning, Sunday, August 11, Heather had a massive heart attack and died. Our dear friend Heather. Only 63. Very hard to believe. The summer proceeded on, there was an anniversary party for Linda and Pat planned for that very evening--we all came to cheer them up but everyone was thinking of Heather. The weather was lovely for the service we held for her at Loon Pond the next weekend--even the loons showed up. We had a very nice visit with Bruce and Janet at Kittery Point on our way home.

We're back in Lawrenceville for the autumn coming up, temperature a little cooler, nice clear air. I am taking aquatic exercises at the gym, hope to get in some canal walks and bicycling. I'm also doing layout for U.S.1 Worksheets, yet another job!

What Have I Been Thinking?

Long Beach harbor from our hotel room, December 31, 2012

My readers, all of them, must have thought the hurricane did us in. Why else haven't I written anything for this blog since November? Guess I've been busy. Christmas we spent here in L'ville, but in late December we flew to California. We had tickets to the Rose Bowl game. Featuring Wisconsin and Stanford--of course we were rooting for the Cards. They came through, our first thrill. Got to spend some time with my sister, walking the beaches of Laguna. South Pasadena, and then up to the Bay Area. Saw Holly and Mary in Palo Alto. I remember a charming Muni tram ride down to Dogpatch to eat breakfast at Just For You. We had a great breakfast in the Mission with Riley and Michelle, also got to see his apt.

Back home in February I started auditing two classes at Princeton. One was for all auditors, a class discussing various notable memoirs, from Nabokov to Mary McCarthy and Joan Didion. The other featured lectures on connections of Italian modern literature with gastronomy, from Svevo to Moravia. I got a little more out of the first class, since we could participate, whereas for the second one I was really just listening for nuggets here and there.

In March Bill and I took Amtrak to Boston. We had a great dinner with Vicki and Steve at the Atlantic Fish Company. Attended a lot of great readings and lectures at AWP (the reason we were there...). Dinner with Renato Rosaldo was another lovely evening. Quite a bit of snow. Right after I got home I gave a reading at the Princeton Public Library sponsored by the Delaware Valley Poets and U.S. 1 Poets Collective. My co-reader was Vasiliki Katsauru. I had been looking forward to this reading for several months, it was sort of my "Princeton debut." It seemed to go really well--I sold lots of books!

Easter weekend we spent with Karen and Fede and the girls. First Bill and I stayed in Lancaster, a

really interesting city with a small museum dedicated to the painter Charles Demuth and a fabulous farmers' market in a huge brick building. We met up with family in Hershey, then again in Gettysburg. The last day we took the CD-audio tour, starting and stopping at various points around the battlefield like Little Round Top and Devil's Den. Definitely a place we'd like to go back to.

April has been swimming by. We joined a gym (called Can Do) and there's a great pool there. Have also explored Pilates. Neither of us would call ourselves "in shape" yet. Tomorrow we're heading up to Guilford to attend the premiere of "Letter from Italy," an oratorio by Nan's sister, libretto by Nan. I just know it's going to be terrific, and it will be great to see folks.

So...what have I been thinking? Poems most recently about my family, they are starting to surface. I'd like to write more dramatic monologues about historical figures, maybe more about my ancestors, too. Lots of material, have to get organized so it can spill out.

Mitt is gone

Dave and Bill along the canal

Snow in our backyard

Clean slate here in Lawrenceville, pure white snow falling all evening. We went out to dinner in Princeton, having driven there to attend a poetry reading which was cancelled. We hardy Californians are always puttering about in the snow, doesn't stop us. What a wonderful world today, all traces of right-wing hysteria O-MITT-ed. Maybe it was the visit of our friend Dave Berry, Scotsman, that brought good luck. He has won all his local elections, serves the East Lothian Council. Last weekend before the ahem, hurricane, we walked along the D&R Canal and dined at the Blue Point Grill. The next day, my birthday (64th) we had breakfast in Lambertville. Then, the coolest thing was that the San Francisco Giants won the fourth game of the World Series, sweeping Detroit, and...it was still my birthday! Next day, Hurricane Sandy arrived. Terrifying winds, transformers outside our window cracking and flashing, then complete darkness. We stuck it out at home for a couple of days, temps dipping to 52 degrees inside at night. Spent the daytime picking up wifi in the Princeton Library and Small World Coffee. Then we jumped onto a Septa train and rode to Philly and the Hilton Garden Inn. A little thing like hot showers (why do we own yet another house with an electric water heater??). Pretended to be on vacation, tapas one night, Northern Italian the next. But nervous how long the power outage would be, not wanting to spend too many nights in our hotel. And then we needed to vote, which we were going to do in Trenton, but gloriously our neighbor emailed us that the lights were back on. So now we've been home for a few days. And tonight it's snowing. Should be sunny tomorrow, sun on snow, now that's a lovely sight.

What did I know of Mitt

So let's set the stage. Here I am with my brother, we're cleaning out my freshman room at Stanford. That's where Mitt went for his freshman year, before his mission in Paris, before completing his college years at BYU. So what did I know of Mitt...not much. But I DID sit next to him in Western Civ. Seeing as it's an election year, maybe I'll just jot down my impressions. Actually I already have, they are in this poem (see below). For me it all seems just like Yesterday, which of course was one of the big hits for that year.

Just another boy in the class

Seated next to me in the course formerly known as
Western Civilization was Mr. Mormon himself,
the one we see on television running for President.

Each week he wore a different-colored button-down
Oxford-cloth shirt, and because I was close by,
I could see how darker pixels mixed with white
to make pale lavender, or robin's-egg blue, or
the yellow that went particularly well with his tanned
complexion, his smoothed-back, un-ruffled coiffure.

The week we covered pantheism must have been
especially difficult for him. While he was undoubtedly
used to the concept of multiple wives, the idea that
different godheads might reside in various rocks
and streams must have been slightly threatening.

I remember he found talking easy, the way most of the
males in the class took to grandstanding, but can't
remember anything he said, which is the difficulty
he carries with him to the present day. Not surprisingly

I have become suspicious of latter-day saints,
rumpled agnostics win me over with their gritty allure.

New home

Wonderful to be able to read books again, I've read about 5 novels in the last few weeks. Can't do that when you're buying a house, no way. And once you're actually moved, there are more things to do, bookcases to buy, orchestrate the handyman, the electrician, the plumber. But we love it. Love the house, the neighborhood. We've been to New York recently, visited family in D.C., drove down to southern New Jersey in the pinelands. We're a bifurcated family--I got my NJ driver's license and plates but Bill is behind me, still a nutmegger. Love driving the countryside around here, lots of preserved farmland. And I am bicycling again--starting from my house across local parks, on the campus of Lawrenceville School, wherever my wheels take me. This last week poetry workshop was up north of here near a village called Ringoes, sometimes it's at various people's houses in Princeton. I am hosting in mid-June. Also, I am reading in a few weeks as representative for U.S. 1 Worksheets in West Caldwell, amazingly very close to where my Condit relatives lived. I am determined to solve my dead-end Dutch ancestry, the Sanfords and the Simonsons. I will either find them in sources at the New York Public Library, where I have a card (!) or maybe in the Trenton State Archives. Onward.

Hiatus

I know there must be someone out there following this blog. If so, you're probably wondering...when will she return? And what has she been doing in the meantime?? Well, all I can say is that from the end of summer until now we have been criss-crossing the country, thinking hard about the future, where we might want to live if we moved from here, and so there was no blog time for me. First we thought of buying my sister's cottage, left over from her bed-and-breakfast empire, in South Pasadena. A few blocks from Buster's, a few more blocks to my sister's house, and my nephew's family. So we had to fly out there and check it out. We decided the house didn't really feel like "us." So after a wonderful Thanksgiving vacation, which included a stop in New York, and a family visit in Washington, D.C., I stopped in at Princeton to look again at a house Bill and I had seen in early October. It spoke to us. We were listening. We made a hard choice. We don't have the house yet...but it is within our grasp. In fact, I may be blogging again in a few days, imagine that. We'll keep you all posted. In the meantime, the photo of the day is a family portrait my cousins sent me of my great-great-grandfather Patrick Henry Rafter, who came to New Jersey (him too!) from Ireland. Recently I was perusing a fantastic genealogy blog written by a descendant of the Miner family--it had so many great features I decided, well, to start my own. Based on his model. So if you get tired of waiting around for slopoet to tell all, you can head off to olsonsumner.wordpress.com, where you find lots of action, and more coming soon!

Gathering summer

I remember one spring day in Guilford, or maybe two. Then it rained again. Soon it was summer. In between there was a visit to Boston for the Early Music Festival, and we went with Harry to tour Frederick Law Olmsted's offices at his home in Brookline. There was a trolley program we put on for the GPA, and a quick visit to New York to see Jerry and Geri Fleming. Went with the Flemings to the Neue Galerie, a precious gallery on the upper East side. And Bill and I visited the Archives at Yale to read some of the 70,000 letters of William Graham Sumner stored there. We also discovered Chatfield Hollow, not so far from our house, a new place to hike and swim.

We reported dutifully to Gilmanton for the Fourth of July. Got to see Sarah and Jody's twins, Willa and Josie. And other little ones. Soon we were off to Canada, Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto. A lovely two-week trip bracketed with overnights in Vermont, one of our favorite states. We arrived back in Gilmanton at the end of July, and Jenny and Phil and the kids blew in a few hours later with a tent, a new van, and various bicycles tied on to the back. Soon there were more, Lorie and Thomas and their kids, lucky a lot of them actually liked sleeping in the tent. We celebrated the union of Abby and Wes, and their new daughter Talia, and commemorated the lives of Joe Urner and Jimmy Johnson at beloved Loon Pond. The Rock Party was the fitting conclusion, Roger and Liz walking down in front of us under the full August moon.

Now I am in Chester, Connecticut, with a few friends from last year's workshop at the Frost Place. We are going at it full bore. I have revised two poems already. Grateful for all comments.