Monthly Archives: October 2006

blessings, Family matters

No place I’d rather be.

After a week of heat, it finally started to feel like fall today. It rained in the morning, and Poppy and I spent most of the day playing in our living room. I watched the leaves change color outside our apartment as the day passed.

Rockford came home from work and danced with our daughter. We had dinner; Poppy had a bath and went to bed. And now Rockford and I are sitting in the living room, listening to My Morning Jacket on the record player. I’m not wild about My Morning Jacket; I was singing along, making up my own lyrics (which might have been mocking, a little), and Rockford said, “You know, there’s no place I’d rather be right now.”

I agree. This was a good day.

Bandwagons

Friday Feast No. 114

Appetizer
Name a song you know by heart.

    “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”

Soup
What will you absolutely not do in front of another person?

    I prefer not to use the bathroom in front of anyone else, but sometimes Poppy makes that difficult.

Salad
How often do you use mouthwash and what kind do you like?

    Very, very rarely. But I like the minty-fresh kind.

Main Course
Finish this sentence: I am embarrassed when…

    I am embarrassed when discussing my bathroom habits.

Dessert
What was the last food you craved?

    Nachoes. The answer is almost always nachoes.

The Friday Feast is a weekly meme intended to “feed your mind by asking thought-provoking, mind-stimulating questions.”

Reading

"Elegy for an Old Boxer"

American Life in Poetry: Column 080

By Ted Kooser,
U.S. poet laureate, 2004-2006
One of poetry’s traditional public services is the presentation of elegies in honor of the dead. Here James McKean remembers a colorful friend and neighbor.

Elegy for an Old Boxer

From my window
I watch the roots of a willow
push your house crooked,
women rummage through boxes,
your sons cart away the TV, its cord
trailing like your useless arms.
Only weeks ago we watched the heavyweights,
and between rounds you pummeled the air,
drank whiskey, admonished “Know your competition!”
You did, Kansas, the ’20s
when you measured the town champ
as he danced the same dance over and over:
left foot, right lead, head down,
the move you’d dreamt about for days.
Then right on cue your hay-bale uppercut
compressed his spine. You know. That was that.
Now your mail piles up, RESIDENT circled
“not here.” Your lawn goes to seed. Dandelions
burst in the wind. From my window
I see you flat on your back on some canvas,
above you a wrinkled face, its clippy bow tie
bobbing toward ten. There’s someone behind you,
resting easy against the ropes,
a last minute substitute on the card you knew
so well, vaguely familiar, taken for granted,
with a sucker punch you don’t remember
ever having seen.

Reprinted from “Headlong,” University of Utah Press, 1987, by permission of the author. First published in “Prairie Schooner,” Vol. 53, No. 3, (Fall 1979). Copyright (c) 1979 by James McKean, whose latest book is nonfiction, “Home Stand: Growing up in Sports”, Michigan State University Press, 2005. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.