I have a habit of starting a new year–or at least a new period–in a new journal notebook, with renewed intentions to fill it up.  Since I rarely fill it up, I set about tearing out the few pages I’ve filled and passing the newish blank Journal booklet to a daughter or other friend to use.  (The notebooks are bound and offer new possibilities to me for thoughts, poems and dreams.

Instead of putting all the torn out pages in recycle right away, I may save them–temporarily, at least–in my occasional blog post.  The following will help me salvage a little of what’s left blank in my booklet:

HOWL

No no no, I roar

Don’t continue closing

that car door!

My pinkie was entrapped

in the Cry-sler’s rear closure.

I wanted to retain my composure..

Today that pinkie

is no longer rose.

Thankful am I  that I didn’t dissolve…

But it helped me write a poem

that’s excusingly prose.

_______________________________

ANOTHER WORD FOR UNIQUENESS IS WEIRD

I’m going to run these singular truths about my long life in a paragraph so as not to take up too much space:

When I took radio speech in high school I filled a spot as a deejay on the radio Saturdays…One Christmas I rang the bell for the Salvation Army…I had chickenpox twice…My mother was a member of the Junior League and much later drove a jitney in Miami Beach…I never took geometry or calculus…I provided housing for a family who were on the Mule Train to Washington…At night I snuggle up to a C-pap machine…Once I could toss a pebble over a telephone pole with my toes…I once put a hamburger on the stove and went out to a movie!!…Making collages out of magazine images is a creative outlet for me…When my little sister came down with polio in Charlotte, I was smuggled out of the state quarantine to Maryland…I once fell in love with a gay man…I love the old movie Trip to Bountiful…I could never ice skate because my ankles buckled…I got hives from eating too many plums at the bazaar in Istanbul and drank vodka for relief…I let the oil run out of my Valiant…I cast an I Ching for one of my daughters only twice, and both times the spread came out with her name…For at least twenty years I was overactive as a volunteer producer on Public Access television…I participated in the Women’s Right to Choice march in Washington, D.C….In the 11th grade I attended 4 different high schools, in 3 different states (N.C., S.C. and Miami, Florida)…I think it was in Bulgaria that my former husband and I came across a friendly band of gypsies with a dancing bear…I was No. 1 on the Miami Jackson High School tennis team in 1953…During the summer of 1952 I wrote a weekly column for a North Miami weekly newspaper…In 1962 I was radio editor of the Miami Journal, and have a  signed thank you note from Arthur Godfrey for a positive mention..I think I have mentioned that we visited the site of Schlieman’s Troy while on one motor scooter…A very close relative ran a small grocery in colored town and I helped her count coins at night on the dining room table…I’m an agnostic who has decided she may have a guardian angel…I worked as a psychologist in a state prison for 12+ years…As a child, a gorilla at the Washington D.C. Zoo pulled off my mitten…I had a Kundalingi experience in a Quaker meeting once…I was a licensed clinical psychologist in both Georgia and Ohio…One summer I was managing editor of the university newspaper and had a weekly column…I once shook the hand of Martin Luther King Jr. while the auditorium was being searched for a reported bomb…I edited a newsletter for sex offenders after their release from prison and the sex offender treatment program…At a branch of the Miami Florida Public Library I was in charge of paper backs…I used to comb through rows in farm fields after a rain, collecting Indian arrowheads as an adolescent…I lacked only one course toward an M.A. in Anthropology when I conceived my firstborn, and decided archaeological digs were not ideal for child rearing…sorry if I’ve repeated an earlier blog, but after the election I’m worn down to the nub.  Oh, and sorry these weren’t in chronological order, just from differrent journal pages.  And sorry for the focus on me-me-me; I live alone.