Manners

One of my friends scooped up a blob of orange goo from the top of a sushi roll and flung at someone sharing our table. It ocurred to me just then that everyone has manners, it's just that some of them are really scary.
SPM

A mother can be an odd creature, but very important.

My family lived in Norway when I was a child and my mother once took a short trip to London while my brother, dad and self stayed home. In the hours between the end of school and dad’s getting out of work, by brother and I stayed at the house of a sweetly loopy woman named Maria. Maria had a spastic little son named Nodder and a very butch older daughter who collected comic books and pretended not to care about anyone because she actually cared about everyone and it left her a total mess. I do not remember the daughter’s name, but I do remember that she let me read as many comics as I liked and when she heard my mother was in London, she quoted a fragment of a poem that has been a favorite ever since. It is taken from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, c. 1939:

“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers
who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”

Still Fiesty

Mary Tyra has lived on the block of Sheridan between Hoyt and Thompson since the late 1940's and has declared herself boss of her block... Perhaps this is why her block is tidy. Mary is 81 today, and - I think - every bit as fiesty as she must've been fifty years back.
SPM

Faith and Coffee

I and a couple others were having coffee at the Red Eye and, as per usual, discussing everything that could possibly pass through the heads of four adults blessed with ADD... We covered food, funny smells, Scientology, street people, toe nail clippings, faith, and the condition of the districts on or near the Saginaw river.

In one of the topic swings, the Rev. Sarah Fosatti made an interesting observation:

"It used to be that you were martyred. Now, You go on South Park."

Detours

A lot of my friends date a lot of losers because they haven't learned yet that life is too short to spend it beating around anybody else's bush.
SPM