WAUKESHA SEWER RACCOON NEWS: Shaw-co-LAH'; Glass blowing; Panther in the window; Thomas Merton

~ CHOCOLATE ~

watch, click here:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXGfngjmwLfeature=youtu.be

From Kirsten Dobson to Raccoon

^,^

From another SRN reader

daughter Laurie Dix Kari of Wasilla AK

who saw this and remembered our trip to

a glass factory in the 1970s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID1BxbzMJns

and this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twlUXoJxHR0

^,^

How much is that (panther) in the window?
The one with the waggely tail.......
......I do hope that panther's for sale!

Screensaver priceless cost zero

I saw this formidible beast, a figurine, in the downstairs second-hand store window this past week.

In previous days I would have strode right in and asked how much was that panther in your window?

But that was then, and this is now.

I have Denise watching out - belatedly, since circa 2010 - over our purse strings

and we are so much the better for it. This mere trinket was only $39.99, but even so........

We are so much better off financially now under Dee's bookkeeping.

I contented myself with going back up and getting the camera to get a picture of the 'pretty'.

I will print a card stock picture of it, laminate it as a backsplash and inspiration at our cat KD's bowls on the floor That shall suffice.

THEN later that late night I got up for a midnight snack.

The cat, wishing for a snack of her own reached up and pawed my arm, per her custom. This time though, her overdue manicure - at another shop dowstairs, the pet-care studio - caused her to prick my arm with extended super-sharp claws. I hollered instinctively, awakening Dee in the back bedroom. It was a loud expletive. The cat rushed off and hid under the piano bench.

I returned to bed, and noticed my pricked arm felt kind of funny.

I dozed off, thinking of my Great Wonderment.

"What (at my august age) will finally kill me?"

I thought of Thomas Merton's unplanned end

in Bankgkok where he died quickly of surprise electrocution, tipping over

an electric heater in the bathroom.

* (See poem)

Could such a surpising and out-of -left-field end await me?

Would I quicky croak from a fetid cat claw prick?

Not a bad way to go, actually, if it happened fast like that.

But I awoke up in the morning apparently none the worse

for wear.

,,,,,,,,,,

Poem heralding Trappist Thomas Merton, about whom I was
reminded listening to Pope Francis addressing the US Congress -to much applause -
when he mentioned the four highiest-principled Americans who came to the his mind:

(Abraham Lincoln, Rev M.L. King, Dorothy Day, and Fr. Thomas Merton)

*

A Gaudy Butterfly Laid Me

On a milkweed leaf she laid me

with no great hope of my success,

for I was just one of a hundred eggs

she deposited,

flitting, pausing, flitting, pausing,

my mother's abdomen arching

each time and putting us down;

we pinheads were merely something

that made her feel good

or the result of an act that did;

or not even that;

I don't know and will never know.

I ate my full engorgement of clean furrows

in the white-juiced leaves until I grew

to a fat temptation for predators

that eat the likes of me,

but the numbers had it

that I was one of the few who survived,

never got picked off in the hard

mandibles of life.

No,

my disappointment was different;

I spun my waxy cocoon

according to pattern

and then, alas, instead of the transformation,

the metanoia,

I had my beauty taken from me

and my capsule gradually

turned black,

and as I lay dying inside,

rotting into a fetid inkiness,

a monarch's striving nature

nonetheless living still,

my little strength merged to

poke a pinhole in the bottom

of my enbindment, and by dint

of waning force I dripped this

message onto the leaf below,

and that is how you come

to read a distillation of all

I was ever to become,

a quotation, nothing more, but by a higher power than I:

What we have to be

Is what we are - Thomas Merton

DZD 2006

......

Fr. Thomas Merton

The Dalai Lama decorated Merton's grave
photo purchased at Berea College KY 2000
- a favorite vacation spot -
Simple grave is at the Trappist monestery Gethsemane KY
where Merton studied, wrote, and served.
A reason to go there and we did.

Decor is a Tibetan sign of high respect - the white scarf.