October 16: Pears

Standards on the radio,
rain falling hard--
the middle of my life.

March 5: One of those songs

Driving home after dinner with friends in Rockland, listening to a "slow dance" mix CD recently sent to me by a DJ friend. A song came on that was one of my favorites back in grad school over 20 years ago: "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak. I used to put it on repeat and lie on the floor of my apartment while it played over and over, the plaintive guitar and his mellow croon touching the sensitive poet's soul that I was nurturing with both my MFA studies and a complex relationship I was in at the time.

Listening to it now made me think how as I've gotten older I don't respond to music as viscerally as in the high-emotion era of my youth living out those moments when, as musician Ani DiFranco sang, "Every pop song on the radio was suddenly speaking to me..."* So I turned it up loud and sang along as I drove the familiar streets home, recalling the exquisite, bittersweet angst of my mid-20s as I did so.

This song takes me back.
Ah, to be 24 again.
And yet so grateful I'm not.


* Lyrics from another old favorite, her song "Superhero," released in 1996

February 19: Elephants

My mom took my two young nieces and I to Hope Elephants this morning to see Rosie and Opal, a pair of beautiful old circus elephants who have been retired to a farm here in coastal Maine to be given a unique form of water therapy and rehabilitation for joint issues. They are 41 and 43 respectively, and their wrinkled heads and and wide-open, intense eyes lent them the full wisdom of age. The educator at the farm told us that an elephant is one of the few animals that can recognize itself in the mirror. Maybe because my birthday's coming up, I couldn't help but wonder if they look older to themselves now than they used to.

Watching two old elephants--
tomorrow I will be older
than either of them.