INPUT/OUTPUT

This is where you throw the rings. You work so hard to grab them, but the park people don't want you to take them away, so you're challenged to throw them here. If you hoard them, they're gone from the currency, and there's no free flow, no exchange. It's like respiration, breathe in, breathe out. You are supposed to take in the world, and then give it back out, changed, worked on, hopefully a bit improved, or mended, or enriched. If you just take in all the time, no matter how good you are at taking in. you're not keeping up your share in the world's energy creation. Just keep throwing those rings back, even if they miss the clown's mouth. It takes timing, and constancy, and will, and then just plain abandon.

CLOUDS OVER I-287

Heading south, July afternoon, on the way to Allentown for the night, remembered now because now I'm not free to punch in the music or novel on tape and set my sights for the west and south. Remembering the white line, the trucks, the hills, the signs for NYC, and you are relieved to be heading west, away from the City, away from the parkways and turnpikes and bridges that jam and hold up cars in miles long lines. You're on the way down to Pennsylvania and on to Virgina, following the great valley between the Blue Ridge and the Cumberlands, down past Winchester and Newmarket, then Harrisonburg, and Staunton, and down to where the valley and down to the southern Blue Ride, where the valley narrows and the highway sweeps past Roanoke and Salem, past Fairfield where we broke down one New Year's Eve and the three children and I were towed three hours to Kingport, Kate and Zack riding high in the station wagon up on the Jerri-dan, Caleb and I in the cab with the tow truck driver, on down to Wytheville and Marion and Abingdon and into Tennessee, then south over the mountains to Asheville.

Hah -- you thought I was going to say something pithy and philosophical, to accompany the cloud pic? Nah, just telling you about the picture.

That evening, in Allentown, two boys explored the backyard pond.

IN WHICH I FLOUT BOTH COPYRIGHT AND PATRIOTISM

In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd's always lively column addresses the subject of President Bush's reading program, one that seems quite ambitious for one unused to literary reading, philosophical consideration. It includes Camus' The Stranger, as well as some English classics. Funny coincidence, or maybe not, that on Friday a colleague of mine who is both a local poet and a high school teacher of English literature, and, importantly, Canadian, emailed me a picture which I shamelessly show you here, flouting all regard for copyright. My rationale is that you might not otherwise see it. Most of us have limited exposure to the Canadian press, though I suspect we'd be better if we had more.




I'm told the billboard is "in Canada, where else?!"

Oooohh, Google Spreadsheets!

My Partly Edible Garden

Inspired by Zack's big garden in a box I have small peppers in pots. As they ripen they will turn from purple to red to orange to pale yellow, all colors existing at once on a late-summer plant. Watching them will be a friendly companion from the world of nature and summer as I'm drawn feet first into the vortex of The School Year, the 180 Days.

You can eat the nasturtiums and the bronze fennel that shields my chair from the street. I've shown Phaedra and Eilonwy which flowers they can eat, and told them that you Have to Ask Someone who Knows, a Grownup. They're old enough for this nature lesson.