Woke up this morning with Perry Como singing this in my head:
Oh it’s a good day, for singing this song
and it’s a good day, for moving along
Yes it’s a good day, how could anything go wrong?
It’s a good day from morning till night
Yes it’s a good day for shining your shoes
and it’s a good day, for loosing the blues
everything to gain and nothing to loose
cause it’s a good day from morning till night (you’re right!)
I said to the sun, good morning sun
Rise and shine today
You know you got to get going if you’re gonna make a showin
And you know you’ll got that right away
Cause it’s a good day, for paying your bills
And it’s a good day, for curing your ills
So take a deep breath throw away all your pills
Cause it’s a good day from morning till night
Just this very day i said to the sun: ‘Good morning sun’
Rise and shine (why don’t you rise and shine)
You know you got to get going if you’re gonna make a showin
And you know you’ve got the right of way
Cause it’s a good day, for paying your bills
And it’s a good day, for curing your ills
So take a deep breath (ahhh) throw away all your pills
Cause it’s a good day from morning till night
say that again
yes it’s a good day from morning till night
that’s what he said
cause it’s a good day from morning till niiiiight!
Of course, the sun is shining and it feels like Spring, so my subconscious must have harkened back to those early 1950s days when life was just a bowl of cherries.
I know the feeling will last only as long as it takes for me to go over and wake up my mother. But it feels good while it lasts.

Non-blogger/friend myrln sent me the above cartoon a while ago. I wrote to the cartoonist to try to get permission to blog it, but I never got a response. Heh.
According to an op ed piece in today’s Times, A Pastime of Grandma and the ‘Golden Girls’ Evolves Into a Hip Hobby
Carol E. Lee, who chronicles the place of knitting in American culture, has discovered:
These days, young women knit during their lunch breaks, on the subway and in cafes. Trendy coffee shops offer knitting classes and sell yarn. Across the country, young women get together to “stitch ‘n’ bitch,” as a best-selling book is aptly titled. Amtrak is offering “Stitch ‘n Ride” cars out of Oakland for people who prefer the click of needles to the buzz of cellphones.
I knitted through my college days, my mothering days, and continue to do it through my aging days. The cartoon pretty much sums it up for me.
Today I went with my friend Joan — an amazing quilter — to a fabric art exhibit. She didn’t submit her work for the exhibit, but she certainly should have.
I spent most of my time looking at the yarn creations. It annoyed me somewhat that there were so many ponchos on display and for sale. I was making and selling them three years ago; unfortunately, my ideas were so ahead of the trend, that I gave up before the big wave hit. Figures.
I don’t participate in any of the knitting blogs. Practically, and spiritually, I don’t subscribe to patterns. I make it all up as I go along.

Over on Metafilter, there’s a flaky conversation about Dyngus Day, which they keep misspelling.
Smigus Dyngus (shming-oos-ding-oos) is an unusual tradition of Easter Monday. This day (Monday after Easter Sunday) is called also in Polish “Wet Monday”, in Polish: “Mokry Poniedzialek” or “Lany Poniedzialek”. Easter Monday is also a holiday in Poland. It was traditionally the day when boys tried to drench girls with squirt guns or buckets of water. “Smigus” comes from the word smigac meaning swish with a cane since men tap the ankles and legs of the girls. “Dyngus” comes probably from German word dingen which means to come to an agreement since the girls needed to give men money to stop being swish and splash. The more a girl is sprayed with water, the higher are her chances to get married. Usually groups of young boys are waiting for accidental passerby near the farmer markets or in the corners of the streets. Older men behave like gentlemen spraying their wives with cologne water rather than with the regular one. The girls got their chances for revenge the following day. They can spray boys with water as much as they wanted on Tuesday.
Dousing may have pagan roots, or it may reflect Christian rebirth and baptism. It may hark back to the baptism of Poland’s Mieszko I and his court on Easter Monday in 966. Whether the tradition is historic or religious in origin, Smigus-Dyngus remains a significant, well-loved Polish tradition.
My childhood Polish community in downstate New York didn’t celebrate Dyngus Day, and my mother says she never heard of it, even though she lived in Poland for eight years during her childhood.
Nevertheless, that it should show up on Metafilter is a hoot.

The following from Yahoo News via Toolz of the New School:
It’s not that Sam Kimery objects to the views expressed on Fox News. The creator of the “Fox Blocker” contends the channel is not news at all. Kimery figures he’s sold about 100 of the little silver bits of metal that screw into the back of most televisions, allowing people to filter Fox News from their sets, since its August debut.
The Tulsa, Okla., resident also has received thousands of e-mails, both angry and complimentary — as well as a few death threats.
“Apparently the making of terroristic threats against those who don’t share your views is a high art form among a certain core audience,” said Kimery, 45.
As John Ennis of Toolz, concludes:
Now if we could just screw that into the back of Bush’s head…

As I was posting the reference below to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, unbeknown to me, my mother was unearthing photographs of my daughter who, as a junior in high school, choreographed, costumed, and danced her own original interpretation of that piece. Her costume was flesh-colored and glittery. Her makeup dramatic. Her movements fierce. This in a school district community that, at the time, was quite unsophisticated. (Actually, given the large number of current unsophisticated national constituencies, it was apparently ahead of its time.)
Anway, I just love this photo, which, according to writing on the back, was taken and given to her by one of my daughter’s teachers.

I must not have taken any photos of her that evening since no others are turning up. I do remember sitting in the middle of the audience listening to the murmurs during her performance that probably had more to do with the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra under her leotard than with the choice of performance piece. I wish I could have taped the comments afterward from other parents as they tried to come up with something that would not give away their real opinions.

to stroke the skin of ripening
birches fringed like armies
of buckskinned arms, their fine-boned
fingers splattering buds like spots
of blood in the sky
The above is from one of my poems that was published back in the mid-eighties. The birches in the park haven’t yet begun to sprout, but there are these bushes doing something similar:

My favorite spring poem is this one by ee cummings (sorry, but the spacing doesn’t seem to come out the way it’s supposed to, even though it looks fine in the “entry” box).
in just-
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonman whistles
far
and
wee
Around here it is certainly JUST spring. The ice is just thinning. The mud is just emerging into something puddleluscious. The sky today is an Easter Bunny blue, but just how long it will last is anybody’s guess.

I have always done whatever spring cleaning I get around to doing with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring blaring in the background.
It’s time for revving up. C’mon Oestre. You go, girl.

A little early for April Fool’s Day, but this — from Scientific American via Too Much and Too Little — is too good to make wait.
from the Scientific American editorial
Okay, We Give Up

Okay, We Give Up
MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

After my daughter and her husband bought their little ranch on a dead-end street in a little town in western Massachusetts, they began to realize all of the things that are wrong with it. Mold behind the walls in the basement. Bathroom too small. Not enough closets after all. Windows need replacing.
But last week they watched out their kitchen window as eight deer cavorted around just behind the bush that separates their back yard (which badly needs re-grading) and the nature preserve that abuts their property.
And each day the same family of cardinals gathers at the bird feeder that graces the corner of their yard.
There’s very little traffic on their road, and the neighbor (who is my daughter’s age) two houses down runs a small day-care center where my grandson loves to hang out with the other kids while my daughter and her neighbor hang out in the background.
My son-in-law works at a new job that he likes that is less than a ten-minute drive from the house. Sometimes he even comes home for lunch.
The house can be fixed enough to be comfortable and safe, but a friendly neighborhood where deer meander past your back yard is, as they say, priceless — and, in the grand scheme of things, enough to balance out the bad.
I try to remind myself of that as I find myself back in my little apartment, across the hall from my mom. I think of the victims of the tsunami who are struggling to rebuild some kind — any kind — of roofs over their heads, and I think that what I have is enough. For now, anyway.
The Little Picture is what we make of it. We have no control over the Big One.
My three days of belly-laughing with my grandson is enough to balance out the stuff that sometimes doesn’t seem enough.

A basket lined with purple feathers and strings the colors of spring. Eggs within eggs within eggs within rest fossils from other places, other times. Moons and hares and runes (znaki) that my Polish pagan ancestors might or might not have used to help make sense of a unpredictable world.
Yesterday, on the Spring Equinox, we five women gathered for a pot-luck brunch and some sympathetic magic. Or maybe it was just our ritualistic way to manifest our yearnings for warm weather and green shoots and, in general, a world more to our liking.
Tomorrow I head out to see my grandson. Rain, snow, or any weather, he makes me feel as though it’s Spring. There is nothing I like more then spending some time in his joy-filled toddler world.
And I desperately need that feeling. My next door 77 year old neighbor, who was taken to the hospital in an ambulance three weeks ago, apparently has blood leaking into her brain. Another neighbor, who walks with a walker, fell down yesterday and broke her arm.
Today, I took my mother to my brother’s, where low clouds hovered over the Catskill Mountains, and, even though Spring showed no signs of even considering to make its approach, I was still soothed by the serenity of the monotoned wooded landscape.
I’m sure that there were creatures dying somewhere in those acres of trees and stones. But that’s not the same….not the same as when it happens within this concerete and steel warehouse (upscale though it is).
My mother is doing surprisingly well on new medication. She is much less anxious and unhappy. We play cards, laugh, wait together for Spring.
On the white doors along the long hallways in our building hang the various shapes and colors of Spring. There are silk calla lilies on mine. But there is no magic here. Lots of sympathy, but no magic.
Magic is an exhuberant two-and-a-half year old running out to greet his Grammy, who, of course, has brought him a surprise.
Spring will come. Like magic.

I can’t remember the last time I was out on a Saturday night. I can’t remember the last time I had a glass of wine out on a Saturday night.
So, this was a special occasion for me on several levels.
I started reading Dave Rogers’ original weblog, Time’s Shadow, when I began blogging, when we were all a part of AKMA’s fantasy University of Blogaria. (The Happy Tutor reminisces here about those good ol’ days, back in 2001-02))
Then Dave went dark for a while, and I lost track of him. He’s back in the blogosphere with Groundhog Day, and he was back in the Albany NY area this weekend to visit his sisters on the way to Syracuse to visit his folks.
So we made a date to meet. (I told my mother I was going to meet one of my girlfriends, since she panics every time she thinks that I might abandon her in favor of some guy. Dave brought his lovely teenage daughter along to protect him, just in case I proved to be an axe murderer.}
There’s something special about meeting, in person, someone whom you’ve gotten to know through his writing. We only had an hour to chat, though, since Dave had to leave early Sunday morning for his drive, with his offspring, to visit his parents.
But it was a wonderful hour of gossiping about other bloggers; sharing, in person, more details of what we share on our blogs; laughing and imbibing (him beer, me wine). We also shared in some of his daughter’s calorie-filled dessert. It really was like hanging out with a long-time and dear friend.
Dave lives in Florida, so who knows if we’ll ever have a chance for a meet-up again. But, you never know, since I have cousins in Florida, and I plan to visit them often when I’m free of caregiving responsibilities. Dave says he’s going to take ballroom dance lessons. Maybe he’ll give me a spin around the dance floor.
In the meanwhile, thanks for the memory, Dave.