December 2011
Seattle Culinary Artist Dies at 34 →
today.seattletimes.com
A close friend and family member of mine lost his sister, Christina, last night. She was an extraordinary person in many ways and a lot of people I love dearly are in an almost unimaginable amount of pain today. Please keep them in your thoughts and hearts in the days and weeks ahead.
The amount of knowledge I’m supposed to have as a a parent is truly astounding. You never know what random questions you’ll be expected to know the answer to from an ever curious 5 year old and her hyper verbal 2 1/2 year old brother. But oh, there will be questions!
A sampling of things I was expected to know yesterday, for example:
“Why does this song not having singing in it?”
“How come a week is how much time it is?”
“Do we live in Bethleham?”
“Why do they call a parade a parade?”
“How come the moon always follows us around?”
“Why are some words longer than other words?”
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” —William Blake, Songs of Innocence
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” —William Blake, Songs of Innocence
“Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you up and rocked you and watched you speechlessly as you slept, are blank. Later, as you grow up, the relationship is muddled with practicality, with the resentment and the accidents, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behavior, tantrums and tiredness. And that’s what you know of your childhood. You remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when you slept in an ocean of love and your father never forgets and it never goes away and it will come to you.”
—
A.A. Gill, “Fatherhood” - from Is Further Away
(via winesburgohio)
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“The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.”
—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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a bright wall in a dark room.: It's A Wonderful Life (1946) →
brightwalldarkroom.tumblr.com
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our…
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A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.
- Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
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“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
—Charles Dickens
