:::this is the way the world ends:::
I was reading Atlas Obscura this afternoon, and they talked about a beautiful clock in Glastonbury. A deeply embedded memory of this surfaced:
It was 25 years ago, around this time that I first saw that clock. 25 years ago, exactly, I was in Norwich packing up to start my Navy Dumb training. Now to get some Toasted Tea biscuits for Jerod.
Garfield, I haven’t come back to in appreciation yet. I still think it’s pretty juvenile. While I hope my kids find it and love it like I did, I also hope they outgrow it 😉
This and tomorrow’s entry do something to Garfield that makes it interesting, much more interesting than it would be on its own.
I present: Garfield as Garfield.
I’ve had three phases of my life in relationship to Peanuts.
One thing that has helped my appreciation of comic strips are projects like this, and I’ve got a few more to share in the upcoming days.
Hilarious and nostalgic at the same time…a couple of these are mildly NSFW.
In the Attic by Seamus Heaney
1.
Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,
The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals—
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands
That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again . . . “But he was dead enough,â€
The story says, “being both shot and drowned.â€
2.
A birch tree planted twenty years ago
Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned
In his own loft, a boy
Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced
By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.
3.
Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma
Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears
Above me just back from the matinée,
His voice awaver like the draft-prone screen
They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier.
“And Isaac Hands,†he asks, “was Isaac in it?â€
His memory of the name awaver, too,
His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.
4.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
Every time I think of Coca-Cola, I think of The Blinks.
Click on the image to go to the article.
I do find this article fascinating, however, and am reminded how surrounded we are my technological marvels. Collective miracles, since no one person holds the key to delivering a can of Coke. There’s also a part of me that wonders if all this effort is worth it, too. And what pittance I pay for a Coke…it seems like it is “worth” more — even if I’ve come to expect it cheaper than water, in some cases.
She was defiantly independent, unbelievably loyal, tender with our kids, and territorial. She was living proof that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, as she got smarter and smarter the longer she lived, learning to communicate what she wanted more and more efficiently. She hated getting wet. She protected Eliot and Sara from a raging pitbull, and I slept sitting up with her when she couldn’t lie down from the pain of the injuries she had sustained in the fight. When I came home from the vet after learning that she had advanced lymphoma, my family was gone and she licked the tears from my face. The night before last, she couldn’t climb the stairs to go out at night to go to the bathroom, and I carried her up. Later that night, I found she had climbed the stairs to my bedroom to be beside me during a storm. She was a fighter and stubborn, and one of my best friends. Dogs are a marvel. And I miss her very much.
Agnes September 1999 – July 2011
Here’s the first in a series dedicated to the BP spill. This image was created with ink, oil, and water (and Photoshop). The initial splotch was created, incidentally, in a sketchbook given to me by Toby.
Last night I came home late. Sara informed me the kids were asleep. When I went to kiss them goodnight, Eliot was missing from his bed. I found him in our bed with the reading lamp on and this in his hands.
None of it feels better than seeing Ian McKellan appear in Gandalf’s seat again.
If you haven’t watched these, I highly recommend. It leans a little crasser than my sense of humor usually does, but in this case I think it’s deserved.
Click on the bearded one to view:
…Darth’s:
in a sick sort of way… “May the Force be with you”.
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