On a Clear Day

Today is a clear day, 77 degrees, 36% humidity, and I am reminding myself that this is November 14th.  It was a day like this in November 1984 that precipitated the great relocation from North Carolina to Florida the following year.  Ray and I are enjoying the front porch with laptop and Sunday paper after a fine pot luck lunch at the Meeting House around midday.

There were many joyful things this week and even the sad things gave opportunity for closeness to others.  Particular personal pleasures included several conversations with Rachel as she continues her strong recovery and having my administrator come in to do a walk through, then stay to enjoy some of the class, a very rare occurrence.

Among all the unfolding of work and home life this week, I saw Steve Jacob’s movie “Disgrace” based on J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel and finished reading Giles Foden’s most recent book, “Turbulence.”  No doubt, I should now read Coetzee’s novel and can await the release of the D-Day movie.  Interestingly, a review of Coetzee’s novel includes the following: “political and historical forces blow through the lives of individuals like nasty weather systems, bringing with them a destruction that is all the more cruel for being impersonal.” Foden’s book is, of course, all about the prediction of nasty weather systems and clear days, not to mention the random impact of impersonal historical forces.  I really appreciated both works.  Despite the pacing and spacing issues commented on by some reviewers in both Jacob’s movie and Foden’s novel, I found myself completely absorbed, finding in both the film and the book swirls and layers of rich meaning in the way each story was revealed.  I was disappointed to see a reviewer, for example, dismiss the ending of “Turbulence” without considering what it does to the story to have the narration shift to the quirky language of the German who learned English in America after the war; nor did the reviewer acknowledge the resonance of the joke in the final sentence.

We try so hard to predict the weather ahead and good predictions have saved many a life.  Still, we are subject to seasons, which are both predictable and endlessly evolving.

Here’s a poem from yesterday evening.

Knitting

There is no end

to the yarn

that winds

and unwinds

off the worn couch,

and rolls, rolls, rolls

under the feet of all

who pass by, and round

the corner, down the hill, beyond

the meadow that is

no more

nor less than mist and silent beasts,

breathing their own knowledge

into the child,

who runs ever

after the dwindling

ball.