Many people twitter about hooking up for parties. My friend and poet Gail Larrick sends gems like these out into the world.
O SoulShine, blues all over the grass and dancing, blue sky to pewter and taupe, so low-down bottom register, band having fun. Fireworks!
Here she is just now updating her Facebook page.
Deep down blues over the town square, dancing baritone, whiskered sax man Willie, 25th-year love song sung by the lead guitar. Lead singer has more fun than anyone, lost in his growl and ramble: SoulShine, from Santa Rosa, under the fireworks in Windsor, California, this night. Happy 4th....
Gail and I worked together at HaL Computers, more years ago than I'd like to admit. She was our dedicated editor, which was a stroke of brilliance enacted by our manager, Marcia Allen. Few technical publication departments have a dedicated editor, particularly a REAL editor. By that I mean Gail knew her galley sheets, having spent much of her life in the book publishing business. Her purple, never red, comments graciously yet firmly guided us to be better writers, not just for technical audiences, but for any civilized reader. This gave our publications a unified voice unmatched by any subsequent employer. Most rely upon spell checkers and self-editing. Marcia knew better than to trust to such miserly complacency.
While Gail was an editor professionally, in her heart and home she is a poet. Now she has just begun to blog, and tweet as well. Like many good writers, few people have any awareness of her words. Here's the introduction to her her latest blog, written after visiting her mother in Santa Barbara.
Quail Lodge, the assisted living unit of Valle Verde senior residential community in Santa Barbara, is a good secret, with its small population, its rooms bigger than the independent-living studios, its own dining hall, a schedule of activities, and a lounge that becomes a church on Sundays, a bingo parlor a couple nights a week, and a movie theater every Sunday evening. My mother lives there. She calls it a “finishing school,” where “we’re waiting to finish.” The imminence of the end of life hangs in the curtains, the tablecloths at tea parties, the clothes that speak of leftover lives brought in with each personal history.
The blog goes on in this beautiful way until this end.
It is a waiting game, this life. I’ve come home convinced more than ever that the body needs tending and the mind needs pursuits. The urgency to finish things becomes the way of a beating heart: a patio garden, a novel, a book of poems, a memoir, all that shuffling of photo albums that needs to be done, a making of order, a sorting and letting go of the paper files of life. Sleeping alongside Death for a week has meant waking up to Life, fresh and eager.
To read what she writes in between, along with her other works, please visit her at
http://gaillarrick.blogspot.com/ at least until I can get her to consider posting here. ;)
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