January’s poems

The previous entry got many, many more views than my entries usually get. It’s gratifying, but I can’t rely on McKenzie and Uncle Fred for copy every time.

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“After Henry” by Joan Didion (R.I.P.) is the Library of America’s newest Story of the Week.

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This Christmas, Karin’s friend Nora bought some Mother Goose books for Samuel. They are illustrated by Rosemary Wells and edited by Iona Opie (who, along with Peter Opie, compiled that pleasing folk-book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren).

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My mother said

That I never should

Play with the pixies

In the wood;

The wood was dark,

The grass was green,

Up comes Sally

With a tambourine;

I went to the river,

I couldn’t get across,

I paid ten shillings

For an old blind horse;

I jumped on his back

And off in a crack,

Sally tell my mother

That I’m coming right back.

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I could read these rhymes to Samuel all day long.

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Donkey, donkey, old and gray,

Open your mouth and gently bray,

Lift your ears and blow your horn

To wake the world this sleepy morn.

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Karin bought some cheap musical instruments for Samuel. I played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the recorder for him. He thought it hilarious and walked around panting the notes like a laryngitic dog (which is how that recorder sounds, more or less).

R.I.P. Joan Didion

Today, in her honor, I read “The Getty” and “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album. The second item, especially, is moving.

I expect that the Library of America will soon exhibit another piece by Didion as a Story of the Week.

We have a mouse in our mud-room. I saw it dart behind a box. Jasper and Ziva rushed past their food and sniffed at the mouse but didn’t catch it. Later, Karin went into the mud-room and the mouse stared at her with its little brown face. We’d been using the mud-room to store cat food and other non-perishables; now, we must rethink this arrangement.

’Twas the night before Christmas / and all through the house / not a creature was stirring / not even a mouse.

Well, it depends on whether you count the mud-room as a part of the house.

We went to a Christmas Eve party and one of my uncles gave another of his biennial talks about the perils of the hantavirus. Don’t sweep up or vacuum after a mouse, he said. Use a wet cloth. Unlikely as it is that we’ll contract this virus, I figure the advice is worth posting because, who knows, it may save a life. One’s words might do tremendous good down the road. I told this to another of my uncles, who was lamenting that a paper he’d presented had involved a lot of work for a negligible result.

At least I didn’t get beaten up, he said. A group of Caribbean Christian brothers and sisters had been praying and fasting so that that wouldn’t happen.

His paper, which he gave at an evangelical theologians’ conference, argued for racial reparations.