14 Comments

Consummation

Like a hijab,

A 60’s draft-card,

A 60’s liberated woman’s bra,

The Maid of Orleans, Everything but the heart

A Greyhound at Watkins Glen,

A Hendrix electric guitar,

A Hindu cleric,

Souls in the Seventh Circle,

Twin Manhattan Towers,

Hearts in Springtime…anytime,

A Triangle Shirtwaist factory maiden,

A Thanksgiving Turkey,

A Book.

s l m 103122

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Another reasons GK likes NYC more than St. Paul MN is that you don't have reporters going through your trash to wrte more erroneous, heinous stories about you. Talk about "vindictive!" You must have run over his dog to cause such retort.

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I was happy to be a reporter back in the day of Remington typewriters and copyboys and I hold no grudges at all. And no dog was run over.

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I was a reader, not a writer back then, but now I read more and write a little. Like here in this rectangle today. Let grudges belong to the unforgiving. Grudges put us in one of those rings of Dante's hell. No, thank you, please!

My springer spaniel was run over, though, whilst chasing a squirrel across the street. She met a Suburban SUV on the way to the hunt, and died what she loved doing. It's a good way to go! Perhaps, for us, at our keyboards, a stroke drops us to the floor and we are left with an unfinished quip.....there's nothing wrong with that.

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I am sorry about the loss of your dog and I am now resolved not to chase squirrels. I mean, what would I do if I caught it? That's the problem with ambition –– how to deal with success? It's always less attractive than it seems.

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Truly.

When you have success, you rarely have time to mull it. Often, the judgment of our success doesn’t happen until it’s gone. And, it’s never what we thought it might be.

I love that quote from Browning, “Ah, that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”

Thanks.

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In response to Tim MerMeer who was uncertain regarding whether you were jesting in your “lay/lie” statement (I knew you were!) and then offered his English teacher’s lesson... I can simplify things for him: hens lay, dogs lie; one may extrapolate the rest from there. (And Donald Trump does lie, himself. That statement does require a comma.) :-)

Carol Kelly

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For Mr. Termeer: lay/lie: transitive/intransitive. And, yes, I can hear MY English teacher from 58 years ago on the point.

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You are right. The principal parts are: lay, laid, laid (transitive) and: lie, lay, lain (intransitive). I don't think that the transitive "lay" (takes a direct object) is misused too much. If I remember correctly, the intransitive one is also reflexive in the other languages I have studied (German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and French). They would say: I lie (myself) down every afternoon for a nap. Yesterday he lay (himself) on the couch for two hours because he was sick. The cat has lain itself in its litter box for the past few nights. This reminds me of something that irritates me even more - when people misuse reflexive pronouns - using them instead of subject and object pronouns. They should refer back to (and agree with) the subject of the sentence.

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Garrison, once again you reference an incident of walking here, and the "galumphing" incident was due to a taxi ride. I'm thinking the driver's license was the least important thing in the wallet you were retrieving except for it being an identification. Do you even own a car or drive at all anymore? So NYC is the place to be if you don't right?

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I don't drive anymore due to lousy vision but it's still a useful I.D. so I keep it. But I don't intend to get a New York license when my MN expires. That would be too painful.

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I still find it amazing that I can plug “Skelton” into the internet and can immediately come up with photos of a church cemetery where GK’s ancestors might be buried. Such a pretty area. Worth a visit.

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I hope to get there someday, maybe next June.

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Regarding your thoughts on forgiveness and those who raise enormous amounts of money to “Tell lies…” In many of the cases I’m aware of, one of the cornerstones of those fund-raising campaigns is ethnicity/social class. Those “loies” rest on the foundation that “Our people are the best people.” Too bad the propounders of those lies didn’t go to Girl Scout camp with me. One of the songs I loved the best went as follows:’

No man is an island, No man stands alone

Each man’s joy is joy for me, Each man’s grief is my own.

We need one another, So I will defend

Each man as my brother, Each man as my friend.

I didn’t worry about the gender descriptors – we’re all of the genus/species Homo sapiens = “man.”

When , as an adult, I was “la patrona” on a farm, I felt that song in real life: playing volleyball with our Latino workers, being a courier to take paychecks and bags of oranges to their families in Mexico, buying work clothes at the urban “secondarias” for them, because they didn’t have the freedom to travel in California without worrying about the “Migra” and so forth.

When we partition our lives between “Like Me” and “Not Like Me,” we often do so without realizing the extent to which our lives interweave. We also lose the opportunity to “Walk a mile in another’s moccasins.”

“How can they live with themselves?” In the case of at least one of the “Major Lie-tellers” – it would seem that he is so tied up in himself, that he has never spent a moment trying to imagine what it would be like, to be someone else’s skin.

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