Saturday, February 23, 2013

Spring Peepers; Upside-down; Slinkies; A million-five, Beautiful Navajo tradition; 2nd growth


Item 1:  Spring Peepers are a-comin'
when muck warms,soon




(The original)

Yes, written on recycled elephant dung paper from Plowshares on Main St.  Our finest paper!



.........................
Item No. 2:
Dee's Blue Plate Special


Just a little supper Dee cooked up last night, 2-20-13.
Vegetable Upside-Down cake.
A recipe from the old ENCHANTED BROCCOLI FOREST COOKBOOK



One of the reasons we have lived so close to being seventy-seven
(77)
is that we have lived an enchanted life since Dee has been cooking for us, which is going on thirty (30) years now.  This is a delicious dish, good for a main meal, or even breakfast.
Anytime!

(enlarge to read)


Dee, originally from Pleasant Valley, Maryland.





..........

Item 3: 

.......A cartoon seen in this week's NEW YORKER......
^.^

 No 4:

A million-five; beautiful Navajo Tradition



(Sent to the SRN by Mary Zeitlow Sullivan, Waukesha)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 And 5:

The Morning Glory bud shown last week
re the Judith Williams Die-Hard
temporary (?) 2nd growth re-volunteer plant
is open presently, though snow is outside.


You are invited to use this flower for your screensaver image.
We are.



 2/22/13 Beyond the brave Morning Glory new bloom
a lone shoveler clears the snow from the 
vacant Clarke Hotel just after the street light 
was purposefully turned off.  He was a grim but determined
executive-type dressed in a woolen (looked like) 
formal topcoat and a gray woolen (looked like) stocking cap.

One must be inspired by such sightings;
hope springs eternal from all 'gossimer' shoulder-bent beings
in downtown Waukesha.....and it is going to RISE!


Haynes Bunker, pharmacy clerk and banjoist
strode to his 1940's downtown employment at
then Clarke's Walgreen Drugstore right behind
where that stalwart snow shoveler works 
this early morning.  Haynes was our grandfather.

Paraphasing Chief Seattle: 'Everything is connected,alright.'



..................

PS:



Saturday, February 16, 2013

Cat sleeps with dog, 2013; Downtown a carousel; While the city sleeps; Guns; Roses (Morning Glories)

KD Cat cozies up to ancient velvet pillow
resurrected from a dark closet.
Velvet worn off, stuffing fried
but the pillow takes the shape of the reposer
and the hooked canine completes
her attraction, we speculate.
Animals love company.
Species doesn't matter.

      Ellison Bay WI
.............


Downtown is a carousel

Architects eventually of towns
Aboriginals at first laid it out as trodden pathways
through forested land like spokes in a wheel
a merry go round to the trading posts

For me and others it is still a carousel
where we go round and round -
this downtown that we love so much
is like a Rogers and Hammerstein tune

The fairies in their buttercup blooms
threaded to a colorful 
but hallucinogenic mushroom
live dreamy lives

and everybody gets along

in the dark.



The street lights came back again last night.
In a way we miss them being out.
But the icy patches here and there
are much easier to see.






Rooming house on Wheeling Island WVA
with old carousel horses as front porch ornaments.
........







While the City Sleeps
Waukeshans complacently enjoy their town-grown-to-city
With it’s well-policed, clean, safe streets
And the cerulean blue skies overhead;
Or when it rains

The rain washing everything anew and flowing
If heavy
Away like dirty bathwater down the drain
Out of sight, out of mind;  oh yes,

We think of everything and take for granted
That the solid terra-firma plane on which we work and play
 IS as storybooked as it appears
And that the sky overhead here is relatively terrorless

That covers two of the three physical dimensions
But we never think about the seething subterranean world
Beneath the city where that dirty bathwater flows
Unless we happen to be with the Sanitation Department

And as far as I know, they aren’t talking;
My friends, we co-exist over a nether-world
About which we never think
And the Sewer Raccoons down there - that’s right - count on our ignorance;

Their profligacy festers beneath us
Growing daily, like whiskers becoming a dread-locked beard
But we don’t know it because we trust in our local government
And in what we see

The coons, woe to us!  phantoms of this opera are
Just a few feet beneath Waukesha in archen coves and caverns
Until nightfall when every storm grate at every corner
Becomes an open doorway into our elysian yards and gardens;

Marauders on velvet paws which they keep licking, masked,
They steal about under cover of nocturnal shadows, late,
When the windows of our proud houses show black; 
It’s then the Sewer Coons take over the town;   by day,

These slick creatures have free rein in their underworld
Bartering our garden produce in little shops and bazaars
In their sub-city
Where they swarm and reproduce like rabbits;

They have their own school district where all the little coons
Study burglary and ankle-nipping;
So far they are content with their lowly position, hence,
The Sanitation Department, the Mayor and the Aldermen

Only monitor them and do not tell us of their spreading presence
 An Amos or a Paul Revere I send this warning
For I live nearer the Fox River in one of the town’s ruder huts
And the Sewer Coons are, though proliferating

Concentrated only in our poorer neighborhoods at the present time;
By the railroad tracks and the Fox River waterway,
But the storm sewer web is beneath us all, free and accessible
And even now no one is safe

I have again lately seen the coons emerge from the grate at our corner
As has my wife;  we know the desolation
Of having our grapes stolen from our vines;
We’ve actually heard the coons’ little “chick-chick-chick” sounds;

Close-up, we’ve seen the phosphorescent reflection of their eyes
In our flashlight beams; they run, are not brazen yet – oh, no -
Carrying little bindles over their hump-ed shoulders
And make their dash back to their grated holes,

Furred hit-and-run warriors, in place,
Waiting for their messiah to come, perhaps from Milwaukee or Chicago
The Really Big 'Coon, to marshal them into an invading army,
Meanwhile waxing stronger in secret on grapes and sacked left-overs;

And sometimes we think we can hear muffled “tink”s
As they pound on their tiny anvils under Arcadian Avenue
Making suits of armor on foot-pumped forges; flaring
Light seems to flash from the gratings after the clock has struck twelve

And I go out and listen at my corner sewer entrance
And hear their “YO-OH, HO HO!” chants
Echoing softly up from below;
The Sewer Raccoons are coming, the Sewer Raccoons are coming!

[David Dix 9-19-2002]

(and to be continued in 2013; it's only getting better)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEI55-gQ0fQ&feature=youtu.be
 .....

 



On Point 
2-12-13
NPR's Tom Ashbrook interviews Tim Dickinson, author
of Rolling Stone recent feature article
Subject:  THE NRA vs AMERICA


PLAY:  http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/02/12/nra
It''s an hour broadcast; sit back and listen.

^.^


DZD, US Army, Fort Leonard Wood MO 1958
Hon. Discharge 1962
all the gunning I ever wanted
and then some
....................


Photo by Jeffrey Means, (Mr. Means Photography) Brooklyn NY
(Dee's brother)

................
Morning Glory redux
2nd growth from last year's errant seed
(see previous posts)
shown Friday 2-15-13;
a blossom appears, one.
Will there be more,
will the vine ascend to the window-top again?
Some things are Die Hard at the Odd Fellows.


Saturday, February 9, 2013

Darkness prevails in the downtown; KD plays piano;Cat on wheels; Stool redux; Etc.


Dave's Cafe survives black-out



"Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
WH Auden, Sept. 1939

5 AM, .Wed. 2-6-13, Waukesha:

Dave's, good old Dave's.  Their interior lights illumined the outer dark, their sign blared OPEN.
The downtown  street lights have been out, (and still out Sat. 2-9!) but Dave's blazes on.

Those two street lights outside our Odd Fellows windows, being OFF, cast an unnatural gloom
on the Five Points except for Dave's and the life-saving Alano Club.  But wait a minute!

What's that?  A 'quadruped' wearing a mask with a gunny sack over his shoulder? Dashing from
doorway to darkened doorway, peering for things to steal that are on the king's shopping list?


The waiting underground raccoon king, of course, has dispatched his coon runners
out into the night, gently burgling,and even more facilely filling their bags, now that the streets are dark. They are looking for 'slices of pizza in the gutter, broken glass, bottle caps, and pieces of metal bent just so.' Whatever the king wants he's listed for the obedient raccoons. 

Heigh-Ho!  Every night is New Years Eve for the masked raccoons in the shadows of downtown!



There's a burglar down at the end of the still store-lit street.
What are these trinkets in that window?  They look like beads. and beads are on the shopping list, 
the coon burglar notes. I must grab some while they're still there. I've got the broken glass and bottle caps:
~ check~.

Burgling is a good downtown business right now, the masked rascal muses.

Folks are too busy squabbling wth each other to notice his near painless purloin-ments
Small gunny sacks are burgeoning downtown, and with the cop-cams disabled due to darkness
from the outed street lights, some enterprising shadowy merchants, including the sewer raccoons,
are making a killing!


An escape into the sewer assures delivery of the goods to the meeting hall
legendarily under the old post office.



By day we blind our eyes;


but  now by dark of night we're free to roam.........

at least until the warring city forces (and/or Dep't of Public Works) get the street lights back on........

SEE THE WAUKESHA FREEMAN FOR MORE DETAILS

........................



KD Cat completes her rendition of Kitten on the Keys





She does her halloween dance

.................................
Another cat shows new steps
thanks to high school project:




.....................

ANTIQUE STOOL GETS GOLD LEAF
After spending years outside up against the bug house
in a red incarnation signifying danger



this steel factory stool is now blue,
has Arcadian Roxo bottling company labels
attached and lives to serve at the
ODD FELLOWS HALL another day.





The studio north light is good to paint by.



And onward we daub.......


(To be continued)

.....................




HAPPY VALENTINE
cookie and plant:

Dee made some dozens of heart
cookies for a Valentine Party
for East Terrace residents Sunday
after church.

I held one of them next to the
new growth on a vine we thought was dead
the morning glory volunteer from last year
that lived a full year's life and then seemed to die

But no, it was only resting apparently
and has sprouted new life on the 'mordant' stem
and is again headed upward to the window top.
The leaves are heart-shaped, like the cookie.