“Do you know that Godzilla’s suit weighs 188lbs?”
after listening to an NPR “I Believe” essay by Joshua Yuchasz, entitled “We’re All Different in Our Own Ways”
Kids at Oak Valley make fun of me for liking
what I like the most, but we’re different,
and I can tell this to Bubba, my red-tailed
boa constrictor, and he’d understand it.
but other people don’t understand it,
the same way I didn’t understand what Asperger’s was
until I asked my mom, until she told me I wouldn’t die,
until she told me it was like I had blinders on,
except for all the time, not just occasionally.
If there was a Jeopardy category about Godzilla,
I’d win it, too, and no one would laugh at that,
or laugh when I become a gene engineer,
create the real Godzilla, one as tall as the first,
or maybe even better, that could tear down buildings,
but maybe this one wouldn’t…
I can dream, can’t I?
“When times are tough, I look to the Catalinas”
after listening to an NPR “I Believe” essay by Connie Spittler, entitled “Pink Moments”
It was sometime before he got cancer
that my husband and I took the trip to Ojai,
where we learned that the art of stopping everything
at the first moment of sunset came from Himalayan inhabitants.
It was sometime during the middle of my childhood
that I first fell for the Pink Moments, as the people of that town
call them, the moments when shards of color make their way to sky,
when the day starts exhaling in paint, the palate I first discovered
while hating doing the dishes – the love I discovered for time fading.
And it was sometime I can’t recall when I started accumulating
all of my life in terms of those mountains outside my window
in Tuscon, Arizona, when I started pulling strength from them,
when I started to realize they could handle the weight of pain,
and that they liked to listen,
and that I could color myself the same shade of light they took on,
and became certain that it would take a lot of tears to wear down a mountain.
(listen to this one by clicking here)
“I travel to see friends, even—or especially—those I’ve never met”
after listening to an NPR “I Believe” essay by Jim Haynes, entitled “Inviting the World to Dinner”
Marriage and babies have come from my dinner table,
the place where booksellers from Atlanta and Dutch political
cartoonists break bread together, and where I exercise
my freedoms as a citizen of the globe, roots all over the world.
I call it my Sunday salon, and anyone is welcome as long
as they call ahead, and the first 50 or 60 can come,
except when it’s nice outside and another twenty can spill
to the patio, and then we’ll all talk and make friends,
laugh about the way the whole wide world is one thread.
I have a good memory, so if you come, I’ll know your name
and remember it, and in the library of my head
I will add you to my collection of biographies,
and I’ll dream about the history in that, which includes you,
and dream of no more strangers any longer,
of no more hatred because we don’t understand…
because If I had my way, I would introduce everyone in the whole world to each other.
(listen to this one by clicking here)
1 comments:
marry me?
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