Hi ho, MMMLogerinos!

Sometimes I listen to Coast2Coast late night show on Streamlink the next day. This morning I heard George Norry reading yesterday's strange news of a thirty-nine year old man in China who has married himself--a life size foam cutout of himself wearing a woman's bridal dress, to be specific. Apparently, he was expressing his dissatisfaction with reality. Hmmmm, causes one to wonder if wedding planning is any easier in his Marry Yourself reality? Does the bride/groom argue with himself about the guest list, color of the attendants' dresses or tuxes, chicken or beef, live band or DJ?

We're given these fascinating strange news bits that can get us all stirred up, but there's rarely any follow up information. What happened after that--whatever that was? In this case, wouldn't you love to ask the newly married man:
"How's married to yourself life treating you?"
"Any plans for children?"
"If you divorce, who gets what?"
"Before you jumped into this, wouldn't it have been easier to get back on the medication or the booze and find a nice girl who's equally dissatisfied with reality and interested enough in alternative lifestyles to hook up with you--wherever you are?"

See, there are interesting questions inquiring minds want to know, but so seldom get answers to. Hey, now I realize I'm dissatisfied with this reality, too. Think I'll go express my dissatifaction at Tully's coffee shop and buy myself a tall, extra hot, nonfat cocoa with whip and a drizzle of caramel. That's a tasty reality that satisfies me every time.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmelinda

Hi ho, MMMLogerinos!

I never know who's reading MMMLog. It's so exciting to hear from a fellow Airedale lover looking for a groomer; a writer from the Veronica Mars TV show or a PR pro representing 217 Records' Whittier Bicentennial Recording Project. After I'd posted my fond memory of my mother's reciting John Greenleaf Whittier's masterwork poem, Snow-Bound, I received an email from Tami Kennedy about the Whittier Recording Project. She kindly sent me the Project's first audio CD of Snow-Bound read by Michael Maglaras, founder of 217 Records. Click on excerpt to listen to a sample.

The Snow-Bound CD features music that conjures twilight and an impending winter storm. Then Maglaras's soothing voice further invokes the setting . . .

The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.

Though the words and music seem gloomy and lonely, Maglaras's recitation is calm and heartfelt. At first, this seemed a mismatch to me. Then I realized that I'd heard this poem recited by my mother in a rhythmic presentation that was fast paced. When I'd read the poem I'd heard it in my head in much the same way. Maglaras performs the piece as if it were a tender memory of his own childhood, perhaps as Whittier himself would have read it. Listening is such a different experience than reading, and I soon found myself deeply relaxed and dreaming along with the author remembering his winter idyl so long ago.

I'm very grateful to have heard this marvelous CD of Whittier's epic poem. I will be sending it along to my mother so that she may enjoy being Snow-Bound in the high desert of northwestern Arizona.

MMMMMMMMMmmmmmelinda
"The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air."
Snow-Bound, John Greenleaf Whittier

Hi ho, MMMLogerinos!

Yet more snow in Seattle and nearly a week in the cold, slick and grey hell, I've had lots of time to think and remember. When my mother was in school students were expected to memorize and perform recitations of poems, important documents and speeches such as the preamble to the Constitution and the Gettysburg address. And she still remembers a good bit of what she learned so long ago. One of the more memorable poems I liked that she recited to us when we were little was Whittier's Snow Bound. The only line I remember at the moment is "Shut in from all the world without."

I hadn't read the entire poem and just went online to Google and Humanities Web where I found the dedication and the poem. I pasted the dedication here as I find it a fascinating and delightful preamble to the magnificent poem. There are many story ideas within the dedication and the poem that a romance or any author could follow down the rabbit hole. See for yourself . . .

Mmmmmmmmmmelinda

Poems Subjective and Remniscent
Snow-Bound by John Greenleaf Whittier


A Winter Idyl

To The Memory

Of

The Household it Describes,

This poem is dedicated by the author

The inmates of the family at the Whittier homestead who are
referred to in the poem were my father, mother, my brother and two
sisters, and my uncle and aunt both unmarried. In addition, there
was the district school-master who boarded with us. The "not
unfeared, half-welcome guest" was Harriet Livermore, daughter of
Judge Livermore, of New Hampshire, a young woman of fine natural
ability, enthusiastic, eccentric, with slight control over her
violent temper, which sometimes made her religious profession
doubtful. She was equally ready to exhort in school-house
prayer-meetings and dance in a Washington ball-room, while her
father was a member of Congress. She early embraced the doctrine of
the Second Advent, and felt it her duty to proclaim the Lord's
speedy coming. With this message she crossed the Atlantic and spent
the greater part of a long life in travelling over Europe and Asia.
She lived some time with Lady Hester Stanhope, a woman as fantastic
and mentally strained as herself, on the slope of Mt. Lebanon, but
finally quarrelled with her in regard to two white horses with red
marks on their backs which suggested the idea of saddles, on which
her titled hostess expected to ride into Jerusalem with the Lord. A
friend of mine found her, when quite an old woman, wandering in
Syria with a tribe of Arabs, who with the Oriental notion that
madness is inspiration, accepted her as their prophetess and
leader. At the time referred to in Snow-Bound she was boarding at
the Rocks Village about two miles from us.

In my boyhood, in our lonely farm-house, we had scanty sources of
information; few books and only a small weekly newspaper. Our only
annual was the Almanac. Under such circumstances story-telling was
a necessary resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a
young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us
of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn
in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his record of
hunting and fishing and, it must be confessed, with stories which
he at least half believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My
mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth,
New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads
of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors. She
described strange people who lived on the Piscataqua and Cocheco,
among whom was Bantam the sorcerer. I have in my possession the
wizard's "conjuring book," which he solemnly opened when consulted.
It is a copy of Cornelius Agrippa's Magic printed in 1651,
dedicated to Dr. Robert Child, who, like Michael Scott, had
learned "the art of glammorie In Padua beyond the sea," and who is
famous in the annals of Massachusetts, where he was at one time a
resident, as the first man who dared petition the General Court for
liberty of conscience. The full title of the book is Three Books of
Occult Philosophy, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, Doctor of
both Laws, Counsellor to Caesar's Sacred Majesty and Judge of the
Prerogative Court.

"As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good
Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the
Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as
the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire
of Wood doth the same."--Cor. AGRIPPA, Occult Philosophy, Book I.
ch. v.

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the rivet and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm."
Emerson. The Snow Storm.

Hi ho, MMMLogerinos!

The storm hit with high strangeness on Wednesday afternoon and dumped six inches here at Casa Haynes in a little over an hour bringing much traffic to a standstill. Seattle drivers don't do snow all that well, even if they're behind the wheel of a SUV with four wheel drive. Rolling such a vehicle often gives drivers a false sense of, oh, ability or security, I guess. They'll drive exactly the same on snow and ice as they would on rain damp or dry pavement, for a few feet anyway. Then someone pushes them off to the side of the road, street, freeway and they abandon their cars. So drivers who know how to drive in such conditions, such as my DH who was raised in Montana where the snow doesn't melt, it just wears out, has to thread carefully through the abandoned cars to get home. He, too, drives an SUV, his QX4 which he operates perfectly in all kinds of road conditions.

I don't take my Red Therapy out on slick days because the little roadster is like a pig on ice and I was raised in Arizona. Snow/ice driving tends to freak me. My friend Darcy, who drives Black Beauty the Lexus sports convertible, got caught in this storm. Everything was good and fine downtown Renton when I called her to say it was snowing like fury up here in the Highlands. By the time she got to the Highlands, the snow and cars had piled up and people were driving so crazy, she couldn't get BB to maintain forward momentum. They pushed her off to the side of the road and her DH rescued her in his Jeep. He's from Omak, WA up near the Canadian border so can also snow drive. However, when he and his son went to retrieve Darcy's BB yesterday, it got stuck twice and had to be pulled out by his son in the Jeep before they got the car home. Goes to show the car one drives may determine where one may drive. Perhaps if my DH had sallied forth in Red Therapy that fine morning, he might have found himself beside the road and hoofing it home, too.

Emma the Airedale, pictured above, had no problem getting around in the snow. She just plows ahead of her feet by sticking her nose down in the stuff and shovels a path around the yard. She eats as much of it as she can, too, so no worries about snow dunes on either side of her trail, though one has to watch out where the Airedale goes and not eat that yellow snow.

MMMMmmmmmelinda

Hi ho, MMMLogerinos!

This day many longs ago in Las Vegas, I sailed down the central aisle of University United Methodist Church in matron of honor Lynn Piercy's wake to vow many good things with one Mr. N. Robert Haynes. I can't find the wedding pictures at this moment, but here is a photo of the DH and MMMM with a ROK soldier guarding as we stand very briefly in North Korea in the DMZ north of Seoul, Korea last month.

If our marriage has had a theme, it's been travel. We've moved house many times, living in foreign countries and many U.S. states. We've vacationed in five star hotels in Europe and South America, cruise ships to the Caribbean, Alaska, and the Mediterranean, starless bed and breakfasts, national park lodges, resorts, tents in the desert, camped from Kentucky to Washington in a fifteen foot travel trailer, and toured the western U.S. in a new motorhome. This year we've taken two fabulous cruises as well as our Christmas trip to Seoul to visit our son. Speaking of him, I remember when he came home from middle school one day and informed us that our family had nomadism, according to one of his teachers--geography or psychology or Gary Larsen's Far Side, maybe. Apparently, we convinced him that it was a good thing, for he shares our travel passion. He's lived overseas since leaving our Seattle home for college and now his work keeps him traveling.

The only wear and tear that our travelling together over the years has suffered is the engraved detail has worn off the DH's gold wedding band. We went to the jewelry store yesterday and selected a new wedding bling for him that ought to last another thirty years and then some.

MMMMmmmmmmmelinda