Category Archives: National Blog Posting Month

National Blog Posting Month, Reading

Return of the Poetry Foundation

NaBloPoMo!I used to post the American Life in Poetry poems all the time, and then I didn’t. Today, though, having nothing in particular to say for this post, it seems like a nice day to share a poem.

How Wonderful
by Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood,
to just sit here while some kind person
relieves you of the awful burden
of having to explain yourself, of having
to find other words to say what you meant,
or what you think you thought you meant,
and of the worse burden of finding no words,
of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person
has found just the right words for you—and you
have only to sit here and be grateful
for words so quiet so discerning they seem
not words but literate light, in which
your merely lucid blossomiong grows lustrous.
How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is
not to be understood, not at all, to, well,
just sit here while someone not unkindly
is saying those impossibly wrong things,
or quite possbily they’re the right things
if you are, which you’re not, that somone
—a difference, finally, so indifferent
it would be conceit not to let it pass,
unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.
And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage
of those high murmurings over your head,
having found, after all, you are grateful
—and you understand this, how wonderful!—
that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,
like a root growing wise in darkness
under the light litter, the falling words.
Irving Feldman, “How Wonderful” from Collected Poems: 1954-2004, published by Schocken Books. Copyright © 2004 by Irving Feldman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Collected Poems: 1954-2004 (2004)

Family matters, National Blog Posting Month

Extracurricular activities

9 Comments

We’ve been attending Music NaBloPoMo!Together classes for about two years now. It’s a terrific program, and I definitely recommend it for the under-5 set. After two years, though, Poppy has gotten so much more … oh, let’s call it outgoing.* She’s gotten much more outgoing than the other kids, so we’ve decided that she’s ready for a new activity.

We’ve talked at length about dance classes — because I’d like her to be far more coordinated than her mother — and she’s expressed an interest in trying gymnastics again. She’s also said she wants to do tae kwon do. (That one stems from taking a music class in a tae kwon do studio.) I’d like to just say, “Let’s try them all! Then we’ll see which one she likes best.” But then I’d have to pay for them all, and that’s not an option (particularly since Petey is still going to be doing Music Together). Oh, and I’d have to leave the house more than once a week. And then there’s also the possibility that she’d love all of them and I’d have to crush her spirit. Which we’d rather avoid.

So we need to pick one, is what I’m saying.

Did you take any outside-of-school lessons growing up? Did you love them? Should I try to make my girl a ballerina or a fighting machine?**

*She starts the songs, hands out the instruments and basically takes over. She’s also a good year older than most of the kids there, because the kids her age are now in preschool and thus aren’t going to music classes during the day.
**I know tae kwon do isn’t all about fighting. (I think.) But “fighting machine” is just kind of fun, isn’t it?