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AMY SMITH LINTON

Musical Selection: Show Tunes

5/31/2016

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Special musical requests...

For every lone soul at the back of the crowd calling out, "Freebird!" at a concert, others of us have different wishes.

For instance, I'd like to hear Leonard Cohen's sultry, deeply melancholic take on something like "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 
Flower Drum Song.  


Not being disrespectful to any of the artists, seriously. And while the topic is pure piffle, I am quite sincere in wanting to hear a gruff, aware, and ironic version of lines like "with my eyelashes all in curls" such as he might produce.


Plus, I am thinking it might be fun for Mr. C. as well as for me ––  I imagine he'd be up for a dose of yang to work against his habitual yin.    
​

​And then again, I'd pay good money to get to hear David Bowie cover "Wrecking Ball."   
Too late, I know, but if Buffy has taught me anything, it's that a girl can dream. 
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The Small Dog Chronicles: Epilogue

5/27/2016

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We are not ready for another dog.

We weren't ready for a dog then, actually. Lilly-bean came to us under extraordinary circumstances. A Dog of Destiny. The kind to whom you can't say no.

Almost a year later (not quite a full trip around the sun, but this time last year it was obvious that Lilly was running out of road), the small dog-shaped gap in the day is not quite as sharp-edged.

Memorial Day is about remembering and honoring fallen soldiers from both Union and Confederate sides.

I know that, but my parents suggested that we kids spend part of the weekend cleaning up graves. Pick a cemetery (there were plenty of old farm cemeteries), pick a grave that has been neglected, and neaten it up. For Memorial Day.

Maybe "suggested" is too ambivalent a verb. 

I got out of the habit when I left farming country –– though it's a virtuous and pleasant tradition to spend part of this first summer weekend cleaning gravestones and trimming overgrown grass on an antique stranger's plot. 

Still, over the course of this year's Memorial Day weekend, I'll take a moment or two to contemplate and be grateful for the service of those who have gone ahead.
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Tweet Tweet

5/24/2016

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When my sister and I were green and youthful singletons*, sharing a happening beach apartment on Pass-a-Grille Beach, we witnessed a Christmas miracle. Of sorts.  
(*That time was roughly ten minutes or so ago on the geological time scale.)
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Okay: it was Christmas and our parents were both alive. Each member of our original nuclear family lived in the very same state.

Had we but known, it was pretty miraculous already.


Morning came with the insistent cooing of a pigeon. 

We were habitually careless about locking the apartment door –– it was difficult enough to navigate the patio gate when a person was sober and actually knew where the latch was hidden. So the bird was able to simply walk in.
Not just any old city bird, this was a pure white dove that stomped in its pigeon-toed way across the thin, sandy carpet of the living room, past the mod, mirrored wall of the dining room, straight into the bathroom where my sister was showering.  

"Caa-hooo! Caa-hooo!" the bird insisted.

The bird was nonplussed by the Bottacelli vision of my sister emerging from the shower. The reciprocal –– less so. My sister found the pearly-white creature creepy and unsettling in her personal space, but it was unmistakably a bird of peace, so we put out a dish of water, scattered some crumbs on the patio, and shooed it back outdoors.

The next morning, the dove barged through the door cooing. It waddled straight to her bedroom and hopped onto the pile of blankets covering my sister. "Well, F-ing-A Tweetie," my sister said.

We had a propensity to speak the intensifying phrase "F-ing-A" in a John Wayne accent that year. The sobriquet "Pilgrim" was also heard rather more frequently than one might have wished. 

​The bird fluffed its feathers and settled more comfortably onto the hump of blankets.

"F-ing-A Tweetie," my sister said. "A Christmas miracle."

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The dove said, "Humpf," in bird-language and left a small deposit on the blanket.

F-ing-A-Tweetie lived with us for a week, during the cold snap of that Christmas season. Quite tame, the bird suffered itself to be handled and was happy to settle on the back of the couch when we watched television. It was not banded, though it must have been someone's pet. Unless it truly was a Christmas miracle.  

At the turning of the year –– by the Festival of the Epiphany, say –– the visitation ended. Day dawned, and no cooing and no stomping around the house. Then another day and no bird, and another.  We hoped that F-ing A Tweetie hadn't been eaten or blown into the Gulf, but that might have been too miraculous to hope for a bird of peace flying around in the world. 



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Ephemera

5/20/2016

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Ephemera: items of fleeting use, or lasting a single day. A single item would be called an ephemeron.

​In the course of history, "ephemera" has described a fever (perhaps a 24-hour bug) and actual
insects like mayflies. But at present, ephemera usually refers to the scraps of paper that show a glimpse into the specific past.  

Like my grandmother's Red Cross Life Saving Corps certification card:
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And this a ticket stub:
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Which give a little color to this snapshot of Ruthie:
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Ninety years of fleeting days since she was a kid at college with her life a big unknown ahead of her. 
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Fiction Prompt: What's about to happen here?

5/17/2016

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One of my writer friends (Hi Kathy L!) says that she doesn't understand how other people DON'T constantly make up stories about stuff they see or hear. Me neither. 
Plant, Fiction Prompt
Story 1
The music pulsed and throbbed with a insistent beat that  [content removed. Unsuitable, obvious, and clichéd.]

Story 2
Pip's squad had been waiting for a very long time. It had been so long and they had grown so used to their position that they nearly missed the signal when it came. At least one of them would have given a bitter wheeze of laughter at that: all that time holding still and they miss the transport. Again.

But no. They had by God discipline, and when the Sarge gave an order...they scrambled. Oscar mike it was: shocking slow and messy as hell, they emerged from their bolt-hole and formed ranks. They knew they must look bad, could see it in the sideways glances of the exfiltration team, but the CO just returned their salute and asked if they were ready to come home. 

Story 3
She knew Groot, a vegetable hero. She knew "I'll Follow the Sun," though she didn't usually entertain a kindness for beetles. She knew the scope of her reach and the resonant feel of cooked clay. She knew the soft warning of impending rain and the shock of hosed water, and the passing interest of passers-by.  

She knew her up from down, but until the last moment, she had not understood the brutal truth about gravity.

​A shrug, a ripple, a wayward heartbeat from the ground below, and she was airborne. The fleeting unpleasantness followed by a longer-lasting one: she landed on concrete, terra-cotta opening like a set of shark's teeth all around her tender underparts.

​Everything felt wrong: the sun shone sideways, burning where it had never done before, and carefully hoarded molecules of water drifted off in the little breeze.  This is what is is to die, she thought, this is my end. And then: no, I will live some more. 
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Musical Selection: Not that Drake

5/13/2016

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Oh, Nick Drake. You checked out way too soon.
 



What a surprise it is to hear Elton Hercules John cover this tune in a soulful, muscular way.

Why yes, Hercules IS his middle name. Did I know that because of Karen C, a childhood friend and drummer who loved, loved, LOVED Sir Giant Glasses?  
And for a different direction...

Norah's version seems much brighter and less tragic, for all the traditional bluesy-jazzy trappings. (I first typed "traipsings," which is kind of true too.)
More Nick Drake and less "Day"? Why yes, I would like that. 
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Someone to Watch Over...

5/10/2016

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The impulse that sent a person up a ladder or onto her friend's shoulders to make these amendments –– it makes me smile and feel a little more hopeful about the world we share. 
Picture
Along an Isle of Wight footpath.
Picture
In Rome.
The decision to scratch a pair of wings onto a road-sign is a small, subversive act of humor and –– I believe –– genuine love. An act with no particular spiritual agenda aside from cheering up the next person who happens to notice. It's generous, random, and clever.  Thank you, artists.

Alternate interpretation: these are personal messages from the universe. As some of my spiritual friends will doubtless point out that once you start noticing, you'll see angels everywhere. Spinning in infinity, in the architecture, dancing on the heads of pins.  Agreed...but pariodolia. 
Picture
Lookie, lichen.
Creative writing teacher Terra Pressler used to tell us to consciously look for visual miracles. Keeping my eyes open, I have seen a nightjar sleeping on a traffic light, a skywritten smiley-face over Tampa, and pale green lichen growing in the shape of an angel.  
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Sailing Stories: What Didn't Happen Next

5/6/2016

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For each shipwreck and partial dismemberment and what-not on the bounding main, there are thousands of unlikely near-misses.

​Like history, sailing stories are told by the survivors.
I heard about this one afterward:  While sailing his A-cat catamaran out of Key Largo, my own dearest skipper tacked and somehow missed hooking his harness back into the trapeze hook.

​The trapeze is a contraption that allows a sailor to lean into the wind farther out from the deck of the boat. It's got a circus feel about it.

​Anyhow, during a tack, he missed the hook and slid mostly over the side  Nothing particularly unusual for an A-cat in that. Everyone misses his strap once in a while. But sadly, my skipper tangled in some line as he slid head-first toward the drink. 

He went not entirely overboard.
Jeff Linton, A-Class Catamaran
The wind was piping up, and as an A-cat is wont to do, the boat began to sail without human guidance. 

​
It charged along for perhaps a boat-length or so before attempting to tip over. Then came the sad truth:  the mainsheet, that rope used to trim the sail  –– the gas pedal, more or less –– was in fact tied around my skipper's right ankle.

via GIPHY

Mr. Linton was tethered to the boat on a rather short (three feet?) leash. Any effort to climb back aboard the wayward boat trimmed the sail, causing the boat to start hauling the mail again. Shortly thereafter, lacking a counterweight, the boat would heel over until the sea-anchor (inseam 32 inches, answers to the name of "Honey,") caught, and then the boat rounded up and went "whoa."
Like a greyhound reaching the end of its chain and yanking itself to a standstill, the boat sped up, tipped, stopped, smacked back down, sped up, tipped, stopped smacked back down, over and over, with our hero dangling by a thread.  

The boat couldn't properly tip over and the rider could neither dismount nor regain his seat. "He was heading for Cuba," one of the other sailors told me, strangely gleeful. 

"I didn't have a knife to cut myself free." Mr. Linton admitted. "Or anyway, it was in the mast-bag and I couldn't reach it."

Dunked repeatedly, pointed toward the open ocean, and rescue not close to hand –– the dunking went on until somehow –– somehow –– he managed to wiggle free.


This story seems to grow in horribilification* the more I think about it.  We are all here by luck and chance. One tiny mistake or a droplet of ill luck and ––

​Maybe maybe the stories are better left untold. 
Picture

​*Sure <shrugs defiantly> I made that word up. Horribilification. Big Whup. I think we all know what it means.
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