Pie for Breakfast (Ellis Delaney)

[thanks to PeterF for this wonderful graphic!]

It is Memorial Day, a federal holiday in the United States for honoring and mourning military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. I should be using In Flanders Fields (which I recall memorizing in sixth grade) as today's poem. Thank you for your service... ❤

Obviously, no picnics are happening, both because of the coronavirus as well as the torrential downpours experienced today and yesterday.  I continue to be in hibernation mode, segueing from this weekend's Sex and The City marathon to The Starless Sea novel, which still captivates.  We were supposed to have a family meet-up this morning and now, instead, hubby and I will pop over to the Hollybrook library (like I need more books, right?), which re-opens today.  One person at a time. Understood.  One of us will browse, while the other stands in the doorway, then switch...  :-)

Had the most wonderful experience Saturday night, when I was invited by my long-time friend BrianW (The Breadman!) to a Virtual Campfire of Camp Jews Don't Camp (his tribe in real-life every year at the Kerrville Folk Festival, which normally begins every Memorial Day weekend and goes on for 18 days).  What?!?  Yes!  I went once, in 1999 (with BW), only for the weekend, and the memories are forever warm and vivid.

So, Brian and a few friends organized an event on Zoom, from 10 p.m. to after midnight, one tune per person, just like a song circle, which takes place post-festival until the wee hours.  I was mostly there for those whose music I've loved and admired for decades:  Eric Schwartz, Annie Wenz, Eric Gerber, Ellis Delaney, Cliff Eberhardt, David LaMotte, Chris Chandler, Dan Pelletier, Chuck Brodsky, Gina Forsyth, Gregg Cagno... and semi-newbies Kirsten Maxwell, Kora Feder, Scott Cook, Louise Mosrie, Shanna in a Dress.  The songs pendulumed between hilarious and heartwarming, and I finally broke my two-month non-drinking streak with some hibiscus-cucumber sparkling sake I had in the fridge (hey, I wasn't alone, right?).  The entire evening was positively (on so many levels) soul-filling, and Brian did such a great job coordinating and emceeing.  I was so wired that, when I finally opted out about 1 a.m., I staying up for another two hours watching the aforementioned SATC marathon (the second-time-around Aidan years:  "you broke my heart!!!").

Speaking of Ellis, before she sang the subject song (my new sig line)...

"strange days we're living in, 
like some kind of dream
we've got the world in our pocket, 
popping up on little screens
I've got a distracted mind, 
wrapped up in a restless heart
how do we break free to see the lighter side 
of the way things are?"

...she related it to the times we were in, stating that people were baking now more than ever.  Oooh, pie!  This recipe sounds yum, and easily veganized...  :-)


SONG:  Pie for Breakfast by Ellis Delaney

BOOK:  Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

POEM:  Self by James Oppenheim

Once I freed myself of my duties to tasks and people and went down to the cleansing sea...
The air was like wine to my spirit,
The sky bathed my eyes with infinity,
The sun followed me, casting golden snares on the tide,
And the ocean—masses of molten surfaces, faintly
      gray-blue—sang to my heart...

Then I found myself, all here in the body and brain, and all there on the shore:
Content to be myself: free, and strong, and enlarged:
Then I knew the depths of myself were the depths of space.
And all living beings were of those depths (my brothers and sisters)
And that by going inward and away from duties, cities, street-cars and greetings,
I was dipping behind all surfaces, piercing cities and people,
And entering in and possessing them, more than a brother,
The surge of all life in them and in me...

So I swore I would be myself (there by the ocean)
And I swore I would cease to neglect myself, but would take myself as my mate,
Solemn marriage and deep: midnights of thought to be:
Long mornings of sacred communion, and twilights of talk,
Myself and I, long parted, clasping and married till death.

QUOTE:  "The only cure I have ever known for fear and doubt and loneliness is an immense love of self." ~ Alison Malee

Hey, Ho (Dave Carter)

Taking my mind off our private war for a while...

SONG: Hey, Ho by Dave Carter

BOOK: Who's Calling the Shots?: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play, War Toys and Violent TV by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Diane E. Levin

POEM: Memorial Day by Steve Kowit

Because our sons adore their plastic missile launchers,

electronic space bazookas, neutron death-ray guns,

a decade down the pike it won't prove difficult

to trick them out in combat boots

& camouflage fatigues,

rouse them with a frenzy of parades, the heady

rhetoric of country, camaraderie & God,

the drum & bugle & the sudden

thunder of the cannon as they march

into Hell singing.

Which is the order of things.

Obedient to a fault, the people will do as they are told.

However dispirited by grief at the graves

of their fallen, the mother returns at last to her loom,

the father to his lathe,

& the inconsolable widow home to raise sons

ardent for the next imperial bloodbath;

Ilium. Thermopylae. Verdun. Pork Chop Hill.

QUOTE: "Perform, then, this one act of remembrance before this Day passes - Remember there is an army of defense and advance that never dies and never surrenders, but is increasingly recruited from the eternal sources of the American spirit and from the generations of American youth." ~ W.J. Cameron

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (Pete Seeger)

From the Writer's Almanac: Today is Memorial Day, first observed on this day in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where members of both the Union and Confederate Armies were buried. It was the idea of Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, who said he was creating Memorial Day, "For the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land."

SONG: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy by Pete Seeger

BOOK: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

POEM: To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century by Howard Nemerov

because reverence has never been america's thing,
this verse in your honor will not begin "o thou."
but the great respect our country has to give
may you all continue to deserve, and have.

* * *

here at the fulcrum of us all,
the feather of truth against the soul
is weighed, and had better be found to balance
lest our enterprise collapse in silence.

for here the million varying wills
get melted down, get hammered out
until the movie's reduced to stills
that tell us what the law's about.

conflict's endemic in the mind:
your job's to hear it in the wind
and compass it in opposites,
and bring the antagonists by your wits

to being one, and that the law
thenceforth, until you change your minds
against and with the shifting winds
that this and that way blow the straw.

so it's a republic, as Franklin said,
if you can keep it; and we did
thus far, and hope to keep our quarrel
funny and just. though with this moral:—

praise without end for the go-ahead zeal
of whoever it was invented the wheel;
but never a word for the poor soul's sake
that thought ahead, and invented the brake.

QUOTE: "War does not determine who is right but who is left."