Archy is a cockroach created in the 1930s by Don Marquis, who explains:
We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys.
He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward and his weight and the impact ot the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operting the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started…..
I copied this excerpt from b!X’s birthday present to me — a 1940 hard cover editon of the lives and times of archy and mehitabel. Mehitabel, one of Archy’s closest friends, is an alley cat who claims she was Cleopatra in a past life. I often quote from the Song of Mehitabel — “there’s a dance in the old dame yet.”
Archy’s writings, all in lower case with no punctuation marks (because he can’t use the “shift” key on the typewriter, having only the ability to pounce on one key at a time) include lots of commentary about life in America, which apparently hasn’t changed much since the 30s and 40s. For example:
what the ants are saying
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts
what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn
it wont be long now It won’t be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone
dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
I encountered Archy and Mehitabel sometime in the early 60s in a chapbook-type publication with pieces mostly about Mehitabel. I think I originally picked it up because of the illustrations by George Herriman, who did the Krazy Kat cartoons I remember from my youth.
There’s a lot of hokey wisdom in Archie’s words, and a lot of brave attitude in Mehitabel’s stories. Like the one that goes:
[snip]
one life up and the next life
down archy but always a lady
through it all and a
good mixer too always the
life of the party archy but never
anything vulgar always free footed
archy never tied down to
a job or housework yes looking
back on it all i can say is
i had some romantic
lives and some elegant times i
have seen better days archy but
whats the use of kicking kid its
all in the game like a gentleman
friend of mine used to say
toujours gai kid toujours gai he
was an elegant cat he used
to be a poet himself and he made up
some elegant poetry about me and him
lets hear it i said and
mehitabel recited
persian pussy from over the sea
demure and lazy and smug and fat
none of your ribbons and bells for me
ours is the zest of the alley cat
over the roofs from flat to flat
we prance with capers corybantic
what though a boost should break a slat
mehitabel us for the life romantic
[snip]
toujours gai

I’m talking about bloggers who, as individuals on this planet, you would never get to meet in this lifetime — people from other countries, other cultures. There are several such blogger/friends listed in my blogroll.
This time it’s John Baker, who stumbled on Kalilily Time as he was cruising around Techorati. HIs weblog is exactly what he says it is: reflections of a working writer and reader. And a working writer he is, with eight novels already in print: he’s also a working member of the “Murder Squad”! (Love the photo on that link.)
His wife, Anna, is a talented photographer, and you might want to check out her site as well. Her joint project called “Real Estate” involves coloured photographs of traditional allotment sheds. Structures that appear as the result of anarchic creativity. Click on the “Allotment Sheds” link on her site for some imagaes of these “rampant and haphazard”… “conglomerations of recycled materials, windows, carpets, old doors, corrugated iron, parts of ancient fencing, wire mesh, wooden laths, and swathes of plastic sheeting.”
And that’s the way it goes. Links, leading to links, leading to new finds, new friends.

Today is my birthday, and I begin celebrating it early this morming when my grandson knocks on the bedroom door where I’m sleeping, asks if he can come in, and when I say yes, skips in and cheerily chants, “Happy Birthday Grammy!” I’m not used to getting up so early, but the sun is shining, I went to bed early, and I’m far away from responsibilities. Perfect.
My daughter and son in law give me a pot of miniature calla lilies to plant in my garden. b!X calls from the Great Northwest.
My Ex emails my daughter with a birthday message for me:
Happy Birthday to you.
Happy Birthday to you.
You’re thrity years o-o-ld
For the thirty-sixth time.
He tells my that my sun-circling miles in 66 years, including Leap Days, now is at 38,762,448,000 miles. That’s billions and billions and billions.
Yup, there’s a lot of miles on this not-so-frail frame. And still miles to go before I sleep. But it’s the best birthday I’ve had in years.
This afternoon, we all sit together on the front steps and bask in the early spring warmth. Tonight, we’re having chocolate rasberry mousse for dessert. Life is good.
Except when my mother calls, upset because she can’t find the jewelry I know that she was wearing when I left. My sibling looks in all of my mom’s closets and drawers and purses. Even her pillowcase. No luck. I say look in her shoes, under the stack of bathroom towels. I don’t know where they are. I’ll look when I get back. She’ll just have to wait.
I’ve waited long enough for this recuperative visit. And it’s not lasting nearly long enough.

That’s the little wizard I’m talking about. The one with the magical laugh.
I’ll be back next week. Unless, of course, something unforseen happens here on the mountain.

OK, so if you got an offer for a credit card in the USPS mail that looked like the above, along with a letter offering “free breast implants with every card” and “free lip injections for every friend that you refer,” what would you think?
Would you think someone is playing a joke on you or would you take it seriously? Maybe even consider the offer?
If you’re like me, you get so many credit card offers in the mail every day that you just rip them up and throw them away as soon as you get them. But what if you took a minute to look at this one?
On the other hand, what if you found yourself on a website making the same offer — a website that lists a bank’s name, has a contact number, and an official application that you can fill out and submit?
Hmm, you might think. This looks legit. But, no, how can it be legit? But it’s got a designed web page and all the links on it that it should have. Nah! But what if it is? How could they make that kind of offer?
It’s odd, isn’t it, that we are more likely to believe what we see on the Internet than what we get in the regular mail. It’s odd. And it’s scary.
In this case, if one does a little digging, one discovers that you can also get to the same website using this URL, which is indicates a relationship to The Huffington Post. That says it all.
On the other hand, The Huffington Post has a link to a actual service that offers “the top political books summarized down to eight concise pages.” Really. For (a tax-deductible) $14.95 a month, you get one summary a week. Now I had to think twice about accepting that as legit. But it is.
It’s scary not to be sure what’s real and what’s not. Breasts included.
Maybe P.T. Barnum never said it, but it’s still true.

One of the most discouraging morsels of news in recent days is that President Bush was so enchanted by Michael Crichton’s novel purportedly debunking global warming that he asked Crichton to the White House to chat with him. HELP! Why can’t we ever get a break? Think what would happen if the president read the “The Da Vinci Code.”
So says the unsinkable Molly Ivins in her latest column on www.freepress.org as she takes a few on target swipes at the incompetence of the Bush administration and the continuing Pentagon-Halliburton corruption.

Ahh! I’ve resurfaced. I can breathe again. I can blog again.
Well, OK. It wasn’t a catstrophe on a scale with a tsunami, but b!X’s server, on which this weblog resides, crashed last week, sending Kalilily Time into the virtual void — along with my email address that is associated with it.
There’s a part of me that can’t help thinking it has something to do with the hundreds of spam comments I get every day that I try to go in and delete before I go to bed each night. If this torrent of comment spam continues, I might have to have a registration process for commentors — something that I’m loathe to do because there are at least three old posts of mine that are still obviously relevant to people I don’t know; steady streams of strangers are still keeping the conversations going.
Meanwhile, here at the real world, we are taking my mom to the doctor’s tomorrow because we think that her internal bleeding might have recurred. I have plans to drive out and visit my grandson next week. Right.
At this moment, she is watching American Idol with my brother; I have just finished watching Countdown. Now there’s a metaphor for this family.
I keep looking out the window at yet another snow covered scene. It’s March! Spring should be beginning to spring!
Because my server was down, I posted at Blogsisters the text of an Op Ed piece about torturing prisoners that my former-CIA friend had tried, unsuccessfully, to get published in several mainstream media. Link on over and read it while I continue to catch my breath.

Baking bread and blogging a post. Sometimes you need a starter.
While I don’t use a bread starter because I have a bread machine, I needed a starter for this post, and I got it from Dave Rogers — a simple email with a simple question: How are you doing? And then a pop over to his weblog, where he refers to bread baking and includes a link to a bread blogger making his own starter.
Aha! So much synchronicity has to be a message from the “universe” that it’s time for me to post. Thanks, Dave, for the starter.
The frustrations and aggravations of taking care of my mom are what they are. She asks the same questions over and over again, and each time I answer, I lose a little more patience. She’s constantly fiddling with things, objects — folds and refolds towels (including paper ones), keeps putting on and taking off the rings she wears. (One is the grade school graduation ring of my father’s that he gave her because he couldn’t afford an engagement ring at the time. It has a ring guard on it so it doesn’t fall off, and she wears it on her middle finger. The other ring is a gold wedding band, which is too big for her middle finger, but she wears it anyway. I found the gold band on the floor the other day and tried to give it back to her. She said it wasn’t hers and she doesn’t know whose it is. I now wear it on the middle finger of my right hand.)
We celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday with her favorite lunch (kapusta, kielbasa, and potato salad — all of which I cooked) and invited two of her cousins and their mates to join the party. One of them made and brought chrusciki, and the other biscotti. (There just never seems to be a way or a time to start my much-needed diet.) My mom wasn’t always sure who everyone was, and her participation in the conversation resulted in blank looks all around. But she knew it was her birthday and knew it was her party, and, for one afternoon, she forgot her aches and pains and roster of complaints.
OK. So, what have I done for me lately? Been to the chiropractor twice. (Whaddya know! Medicare covers it!) I have a massage scheduled for next week. I’m planning to go out to visit with my grandson next month for my own birthday and, on the way back, stop in Albany for a couple of hours.
But, most importantly, I discovered the Unison Community Arts Center, where they have a Senior Citizen QiGong class, and they are going to again schedule West Coast Swing classes in the Spring. The Center is only about five miles away, and the QiGong classes are during the day, which works for me. Hopefully there will be other workshops I might like to attend. African dancing maybe?
This weekend at the Unison, there’s a Readers’ Theatre presentation of “Steiglitz Loves O’Keeffe”, which, if I can haul my butt out of here at night, I might go and see. But that’s not as important as getting out a couple of times a week for QiGong and dancing.
Meanwhile, Dave, and oddly enough, while so much of the rest of the Northeast was socked in by that big storm last week (my daughter had almost two feet over there in MA), we had less than six inches that melted quickly. Mother Mountain protects her own.
Tomorrow we take my mom to a neurologist to see what might be able to be done for pain management.
Life with mom isn’t going to change until some drastic change on her part, but I am making a major effort to do some fun things with whatever life I can squeeze out these days without her.
It’s a start.

Several grandmas I know have hooked themselves up with the Red Hat Society, begun in England as a gloriously goofy notion but now bastardized into a typically commercialized fad.
Yesterday, back in my old stomping grounds, Albany, a bunch of grandmas (and assorted supporters) gathered at a recruiting office to protest the war that’s destroying many of their grandchildren. According to the Troy Record,
COLONIE – A group of grandmothers gathered outside the Colonie Center Air Force recruiting center Tuesday to enlist for the war in Iraq.
They said they wanted to replace the soldiers who are currently doing third and fourth tours of duty overseas…. “We feel it is our patriotic duty to enlist in the U.S. military in order to replace our grandchildren, who have been deployed there far too long and are anxious to come home now while they are still alive and whole,” Patricia Beetle of Castleton.
“By this action, we are not supporting the use of military force in Iraq – in fact, we are totally against it – but inasmuch as it exists, our goal in joining up is only to protect young people from further death and maiming,” she added.
The group also took pot-shots at Bush Administration officials like Vice President Dick Cheney, who was successful in receiving numerous deferments from serving in the military during the Vietnam War…….
I never seem to be in the right place at the right time. Years ago, when we lived in Castleton, it was a really redneck town, and we were not so affectionately called “those communists on the hill.” Where was Patricia Beetle when I was protesting the Vietnam War??? (See my story about that on my old weblog;scroll down to “A Little History.”)
And, in Albany, I lived within walking distance of Colonie Center. I would have been right there with those kindred grannies.
Red Hat Society vs. Raging Grannies. Hmm. Which one sounds like my kinda group?
Actually, there is a New York Grandmothers Against the War (it’s really a New York City Group), which is affiliated with Grandmothers for Peace International.
There’s also a link from the home page of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to sign a global petition with “Women Who Say No to War.” Over on my sidebar is a link to Code Pink., the sponsors of the petition.
Meanwhile, love those Raging Grannies!

“…..we know nothing about 95 percent of the known universe…….. Seventy-five percent of it is dark energy, 20 percent of it is so-called dark matter, and the remaining 5 percent is what we can see”.
The above is a quote from NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, reflecting on the Hubble Space Telescope and the knowledge it continues to send back to us.
Imagine that! We can only see 5 percent of the 15 billion year (give or take a few billion years) old galaxies and other space phenomena that exist all around us who are marooned together on this small planet in a small solar system in the fancifully spiraling Milky Way galaxy.
Yet, so many of us seem to prefer to live in an intellectual darkness that rivals that of the unknown universe.
And in that darkness grows our fear of each other; our fear of the fact that there is no One watching over us from above, no great Truth of which we are the chosen custodians.
And so we kill each other over prophets and profits, out of a naive need to have what exists either black or white. We let cultural icons circumscribe our vision, following their faintly lit lead through the darker matters of our minds — so much easier than facing the many messy shades of gray.
We hobble ourselves out of fear of the dark, when we could hubble ourselves together in shared wonder.