Pearls My Mother Wore

Sweet Tranquility

This image is almost as comforting to me as the actual walk was.  I’m so fortunate to live near such natural beauty.

I think I wrote myself out on the last two, long blog posts.  I’ve had several people tell me they liked what I had to say about Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.  I’m glad I wrote that one.

My current lit-challenge is Anna Karenina.  That will take me awhile to get through.  My paperback copy is 855 pages and almost two inches thick with minuscule type.  I was happy to discover upon starting that the chapters are generally about five pages long, if that.  I like those small, bite-sized chapters.  I can really imagine getting through the whole thing, eventually.

Last Saturday night I participated in an open-mic event called “Random Acts.”  The event is held from 5:00 – 7:00, on the second Saturday of every month, at Readers’ Books here in Sonoma, and it’s open to anybody who cares to attend.  The fee is five dollars.  Anyone can put their name in a hat to be pulled in random order.  When your name is pulled, you get five minutes of microphone time to do with as you please: sing, play an instrument, tell a joke, do a trick, or read.  Many poems were read – a couple powerful ones by war veterans, a movie review was read for The King’s Speech, and a published letter-to-the-editor was read.  I read from my novel, Pearls My Mother Wore.  I kinda bombed.  I choked under the time constraint and just started reading from the first page.  I should have read less but provided the audience with more of an introduction to the story.  I’ll do it again, but with a better lead in.  Live and learn.  Nobody booed, and I got plenty of applause.

One of the poems that was read had to do with what will future generations call us.  Not the iron age or the stone age, the information age or the space age.  She named several different ages in history.  She prefaced her reading with how deeply affected she was by the horrors that were taking place in Tucson, Az.  Her voice was shrill, and she was obviously very shaken.  Although she didn’t answer her own question posed by the poem, it’s tenor suggested we would be referred to as the moronic age, or the age of ignorance and aggression, something bad and unflattering for sure.  I had been working all day and knew nothing of the murderous ambush.  The poet happened to be sitting next to me, and when she sat down, I could actually feel the heat of her body radiating off of her.  At the break I asked her what had happened.

All week I’ve been watching way more CNN than normal.  What I’m most struck by is the clash between love and hate, goodness and evil.  Those who were killed and injured and those who responded to them were so enormous in their heroism, and that young man was so enormous in his hate.  The outpouring of love is in such stark, stark contrast to that deranged mug-shot of a lone gunman.  The divide is painful to comprehend.  Heaven help us.

What I know is that I reside on the side of love.  I don’t mean for that to sound like I’m bragging.  Declaring this stance of general caring, compassion, and good will is only to say thank you to whatever force tips the scales.  Thank you that I was never tipped into the house of hate with all its wicked mirrors that reflects not what we are but what we lack.

Thanks for reading.  I’ll post again next Friday.  Have a great week.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2011 at 9:18 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.