NaPoWriMo April 2

Inheritance

if I disappear
like the Cheshire cat
evaporating into a smile
remember that I taught you to laugh.

©2012 Noreen Braman

NAPOWRIMO - National Poetry Writing Month 2012 April 1

Urban Progression

Along the tracks,

manufacturing skeletons

bleached bones of industry

rotting carcasses of business

in the graveyard of commerce,

reborn as canvas for graffiti.

©2012 Noreen Braman

National Poetry Month, National Humor Month

Both National Poetry Month and National Humor Monthv start tomorrow. That means another "write a poem a day" challenge. How many can be funny (intentionally or not) remains to be seen.

Quotes that Speak to the Heart of the Blog

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
 Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke.”
 Garrison Keillor

"Marrying George Clooney: Confessions of a Midlife Crisis" — not what I expected

Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis by Amy Ferris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

corrections made 3-24-12

I wanted to love this book. I wanted to identify with someone from my age group writing about that certain time of life when the reality of mortality smacks women right in the reproductive gut. Unfortunately, some reviews I read in advance led me to believe that this was a humorous book. It is not. Sure, there are some moments of humor and irony, but mostly, it is a sad and angry book. The most poignant moments deal with her relationship with her mother, who is slipping further and further into dementia. The most annoying moments are disjointed, stream-of-consciousness rantings with large gaps between paragraphs (in the Kindle version, anyway.) I found her "vile" moods (her word, not mine) frightening, and I began to wonder if this is what I can expect from myself a bit further down the road. 

So, maybe I am a wee bit too close to the menopause/midlife crisis time of life. But if now wasn't the right time to read this book? When is? 

It is finally in the Epilogue that Ferris writes the most compelling prose of the book. The story of her mother, their relationship, their life together. This would have been a much stronger, more cohesive book if the parallels to Ferris' change of life and her mother's change of life had been more successfully woven together. 


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In the True Spirit of this Blog

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More Critters and Varmints in Central New Jersey

Dragons may be next.

It is a well known fact that I have battled with critters of all kinds in my house.  Rats, cats, bats, gnats - all the rhyming pests have been after me.  Outside the house, despite the constant hunting, chasing and barking by my dog Zelda, the yard is still under siege to squirrels and a groundhog. I am always cautious when opening the back door, in case I have visitors on the deck. Until now, I've considered my encounters with all this fauna to be typical for living in a suburban New Jersey town. I have even seen a coyote loping across an open field a few miles away, and deer are everywhere.

However, this past week I encountered a new critter that actually caused me to do a double take. I was in the driveway, with Zelda on a leash, ready to put her in the car to take her for a ride with me. Normally, this thrills her and she can't wait to jump in. This time, however, instead of jumping in the back seat, she tried to crawl under the car. I was holding her in place, but her feet were still pedaling along. With great effort I hauled her up and into the car, where she immediately jumped into the front seat and pressed her nose against the windshield, looking, looking, looking.

I figured that a cat, or some dry leaves or a stray piece of newspaper was under the car, I knew that if it was a cat, it would come running out the minute I started the car. When I revved up the engine, nothing ran out, so I thought, dry leaves or garbage. I started to back the car out when something reddish popped up in front of the car.  Something slow and feathery — a chicken! A chicken that was completely unperturbed by the engine of the car, a chicken who just ruffled up her feathers,  deposited some lovely chicken droppings on my driveway, and slowly waddled away. I've since realized that down the street, some is actually keeping chickens, and I swear, I heard a goat, too.

Who knows, maybe there is going to be a cattle drive down my street soon. I better keep the dog in the house.