spring

Camouflage?

/ J. Thorp / 9 Comments

On my commute this morning, I was contemplating herons, and why they fly with their necks folded to a tight S, when cranes stretch long like geese. Any ideas?

I passed a dark pond backed with greening trees and was blessed to watched an egret descend on the water, uncoiling its long neck, heron-style, as dipped its feet lightly in the water. And I thought to myself, Startlingly white! To what end?*

And then occurred to me:

to fish, the egret
is a white cloud in blue skies
over green water

In fairness, it didn’t occur to me in 5-7-5 haiku format, although I do utter phrases of exactly 17 syllables more often that you might reasonably expect or attribute to chance.**

Anyway, it was more like this: an image of a fish from the egret’s viewpoint: bulbous eyes gazing skyward … Aha!

* * * * *

*The Jim-in-my-head talks exactly like this. Be thankful you don’t have to hear him all the time, like I do.

**And this is a prime example of a “poem” that is really just a somewhat interesting sentence with odd line breaks, right, Jinglebob?

Tuesday Evening Stream of Consciousness (or, Chilly Versus Chili …)

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Been kind of a cool, wet spring. Don’t get me wrong: I like the cool weather. I much prefer the coldest days of winter to the hottest days of summer. But it’s mid-May now. Time for sunshine and leafing and stuff.

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I enjoyed some edible warmth today in the form of the best Thai noodle dish, Drunkard’s Noodles from True Thai in Minneapolis. A friend and colleague who spends her vacations in Thailand volunteering at an orphanage calls True Thai the real deal. I don’t know about that, but I promise you that pain has never tasted better! Noodles, chicken, basil, onions, and plenty of dried chilis, seeds and all. Wow.

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A dear friend of mine who is actually a Minnesota native is my weather opposite. She lives for the hottest, most humid days of the year, when the air’s too thick and wet to breathe and you break a sweat sleeping. Kind of a tropical flower. Why she stays in the great white North, I’m not sure. But I’m grateful.

She loves the heat, and she plays the cello, and one day I got to thinking:

cello as chile
arms al fresco
slick with inspiration
she plucks and slices
the summer sun abundant
thick air ripe with possibility
her cello the fruit
resounding red
her bow a horsehair knife

j. thorp
10 june 04

It’s not the right time of year, perhaps, but her birthday was Sunday, and she likes Thai, too. So there. Belated happy birthday, my friend.

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Jodi went to visit another dear friend in Colorado a couple weeks back, and brought me home a surprise: a cookbook called The Red Chili Bible. Looks like great recipes. Another reason for warm weather: the chilis need sunshine!

Fool for April

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Blogger’s Note: I wrote this April 1, 2004, while headed to work. Jodi was working for Cargill at that time, and pregnant with Trevor. That April, unlike this one, was sunny and warm. I’m listless in this grey haze today, and I sincerely want to spend the next several days with my family, doing nothing. No such luck, I’m afraid.

I’m on the bus this Thursday morning. We’re not yet underway — fellow commuters straggle in in twos and threes. Cars, I mean — everyone drives his or her own car to the Park and Ride; every one a good American. At least we’ve embraced the bus to get us from here downtown, right? Folks are smiling this morning, sleepy but not tired. I know the feeling.

I’m a fool for April. Growing up in Michigan, or Minnesota for that matter, you know March is bound to be a mess of slush and mud. Like November, it’s going to be blustery and cold, with a fair chance of snow or sleet.

But April! It’s like a whole new world this morning — not a cloud for miles, the sun’s high in the sky already, and I drove the old pickup in this morning in a sweater and sunglasses. April Fool’s or not, I can’t help but but have hope that spring may have sprung at last.

Mornings like this, it feels like the world’s great eye opens wide and bright and stares back at us in wonder — what strange creatures are these, queued up and bound downtown to sit in cubes and punch keys on a morning made for loving, sleeping long and late, stretching, smiling, and blinking in the sunshine? Is the weekend rain any wonder? The heavens weep at our investments, our invented urgencies, and our ignorance.

The ache has returned — that tight pit in my stomach that strains to contain my urges (selfish and otherwise) to escape this race and return home, buy flowers along the way, call Jodi home feigning sickness, lay out clean sheets and open all the windows, nap through lunch, eat late, pick up the kids early, and sit cross-legged on the floor with our sons and daughter, laughing as mommy soaks in the tub, the bubbles spoofing her round belly and popping in the attempt. Another day, another dollar, another baby on the way. The world should pay parents to stay together at home with their children. Leave the hard work to the young and ambitious, and the planning to elders, who have can see the big picture by virtue of being closer to heaven.

It’s both selfish and selfless, this urge to wrap my arms around these dear friends and hold them close. We are all brothers and sisters, though positioned at times as adversaries. A sister of mine recalls a verse: Owe no man anything except respect. We are all worth less than we let on and more than we’ll ever know — less because those things we often emphasize in ourselves matter least to those around us, and more because we’ve no perspective. The mirror distorts, the camera frames — only through contact and interaction are we manifest truly. Only in love, or lack thereof.

Spring Fever

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Blogger’s Query: Is there anything on God’s green earth as arrogant as a tom turkey during mating season?

tom foolery
it’s puffery — this fanned tail,
beard, and scarlet head-rush.
inflated egos, swollen pricks
pompous as they dance.

J. Thorp
02 April 01

A Hare’s Hare

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Blogger’s Note: Grandma Pam has all of my old newspaper columns in a single three-ring binder at the Venjohn house (courtesy of my mom; I was never so organized), and this one was on top. It originally ran in the April 7, 1998, edition of The Pioneer daily newspaper in Big Rapids, Michigan. You’ll see I remembered my correspondence with the Easter Rabbit differently then, but the sentiment was the same.

For me, the anticipation the night before Easter was second only to Christmas Eve.

It wasn’t the candy and presents that did it (well, not only the candy and presents). Halloween was better for candy, and that kind of dressing up was more fun; birthdays were better for presents – I never got a bike or a rifle for Easter.

It was the magic of the evening, I think – a night when a rabbit might hop through your door on his big hind paws, nose twitching, ears forward for the sound of wee ones stirring in the night. Despite father’s joking, no bullet could touch this rabbit – the bark of a nearby dog earns little more than the flick of one long, white ear. He is The Rabbit – no bunny, he – the grandfather of a million magic rabbits; a hare’s hare in his Easter best, with a top-hat all his own, bearing gifts of chocolate rabbits, jelly beans and candy eggs.

Is he white? Certainly, though perhaps not always. Some call him by the surname “Cottontail,” which suggests he once was brown; “Snowshoe,” on the other hand, might suggest a change from brown to white.

He is white – this much must be true, at his age. He is extremely old for a rabbit – it’s been 15 years and more since I asked him his age in a letter Easter’s Eve, and even then he replied, in long quill strokes like my father’s, that he was “as old as his teeth were long.” I have long been a lover of animal lore, and I knew even then his teeth kept growing – his age could be infinite.

Long in tooth, long in ear, long in whisker – the signs of a wise, old rabbit.

I know he’s real – I’ve seen his tracks in the snow, which, unlike the tracks of other hopping night visitors, led right up to our back door, mere inches away from our sleeping boxer, Bonz, who no doubt lay dreaming of Easter eggs (her favorite seasonal treat – she would carry them around in her mouth all morning, with only the tiniest flash of color showing beneath her graying jowls, until finally she dropped and cracked it – then it was eaten, shells and all).

My sister, in more recent years, has said that she created the rabbit tracks outside our door in an effort to further the illusion that there was, in fact, an Easter Rabbit.

She expects me to believe that, with size 10 feet. Who’s deluded here?

On such an enchanted evening as the night before Easter, it was not always easy to sleep, and sometimes hard to remember the morning as a holy day.

Faith was one thing – this, my friends, was the Easter Rabbit.

The Easter tradition is more than just eggs and rabbits, of course – I’ve only recently come to see how much more. There was another, it is said, whom death could not touch, who came to us in the face of danger bearing gifts to all believers.

The wise old Rabbit knows him, perhaps; perhaps the Rabbit is but a small part of the magic of Easter – a servant who gives children a reason to jump out of bed at least one Sunday a year.

If you can believe in one and rise early on Sunday, perhaps you can believe in the other.