Recently I quoted someone to the effect that if you didn’t have a language how could you think.  I’ll write more about that some day, but for now my head is being flooded with thoughts–maybe a manic episode.  So many things pushing to get the limelight, to make it to paper and to Word Press.  Silly, isn’t it.  My readers they number maybe three. That’s okay if many of my  followers are commercial.  It’s getting it all out of me that counts.

For instance, I realize that the way I’m surviving a caustic world is by padding myself with Ann Perry books.  Occasionally lines float down into my consciousness from somewhere. Today it was “How Great Thou Art.”  When I was writing a poem the other day the tune “Help Me Make It Through the Night” played repeatedly on my mental victrola.

When I’m being good to myself I select memories that comfort me.  One I treasure is from a visit to my aristocratic grandparents in Chevy Chase from down home on Tremont Avenue next to the city dump in Charlotte, North Carolina.  We were at the dinner table flanked with candles and  finger bowls and my grandfather was observing that men like the Shriners were declasse–tho I’m sure he didn’t use that word–“common,”  maybe, whereupon I piped up immediately, with certainty. “Unh unh!  My uncle _____  back home is a Shriner,”  whereupon he very gently said, “Then I must be wrong.”  The love and caring behind those words still warm me.