Winter Solstice

Today is a crisp and blue December morning. I want my writing to be just like this: boundless and open and crystal clear. Winter solstice is my birthday, and this year I am celebrating the joy of words. I love to draw and paint, but now recognize that words are the medium I have always chosen first. Words are in my old diaries, journals and sketchbooks. Words have always been integral parts of my various jobs and words made up the poem first published when I was 9. Words float around me at all times and I think of them as prized possessions. Words flow out of my mouth, I gulp them down to eat and I watch them twinkle a little longer until they are defined. When I listen I am always gifted with as many words as I can snatch out of the air.  Today I paint with a fully loaded palette wherever I am whenever I want and with as many colors as I choose.

It Goes to Eleven

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a tour-de-force of a song when played by three middle school violin players, but boy, add one out of tune cello and, well, it's really rockin! This is why the middle school member of my family chose to play last Saturday in a Festival. (That, and the extra credit points towards the second trimester report card.) So with happy thoughts and in cleaner clothes than usual, we trucked across a county line for his premier performance. We pulled in to the parking lot and wound up in a space next to another late-arriving member of the ensemble. Imagine our surprise when he got out of the car sans instrument.

 "I don't have it" was all he said.  Nigel Tufnel could not have done any better.  Fortunately, the kid bartered his lunch for a week and was able to secure a violin from a superb and imminently annoyed classmate, so the show was on.  But I came away with an epiphany of sorts.  I realize that there is a secret coded message in the movie This is Spinal Tap. "It goes to eleven" does not refer to a Marshall amp, oh no.  It refers to critical thinking skills maxing out at the middle school age of eleven!