Bandwagons

Friday Feast No. 118

Appetizer
Do you believe there is intelligent life on other planets?

    No. Not without Fox Mulder around to convince me otherwise.

Soup
What is one thing you said you’d never do, but you eventually did?

    I always said I’d never let my children watch “too much” television. I’ve found that “too much” is a pretty amorphous term. Most days, Pi watches “Sesame Street” in the morning and a video with Rockford after he gets home from work. Under my pre-parenting definition, that would have been “too much.” These days, it’s just right.

Salad
Who is the teacher that influenced you the most in school?

    Her name escapes me right now, but it was my fifth-grade teacher. She forced me to memorize the multiplication tables. I think it was the first time I actually applied myself.

Main Course
If you could trade places with anyone for one day, who would it be and why?

    Oprah, but only on her day off.

Dessert
What is your favorite dish to prepare?

    Ice cream sundaes.

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

Reading

"The Birds"

American Life in Poetry: Column 086

By Ted Kooser,
U.S. poet laureate, 2004-2006
Linda Pastan, who lives in Maryland, is a master of the kind of water-clear writing that enables us to see into the depths. This is a poem about migrating birds, but also about how it feels to witness the passing of another year.

The Birds

are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather–
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.

Reprinted from “The Imperfect Paradise,” by Linda Pastan. Copyright (c) 1988 by Linda Pastan. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Ms. Pastan’s most recent book is “Queen of a Rainy Country,” W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. 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.

Screen time

I never was an Emmit Smith fan…

..when he played with the Cowboys. I didn’t like the team (They DEFINITELY weren’t/aren’t “America’s Team”), the coach(es) or anything about them and I thought Emmit Smtih was arrogant and cocky. This was a period of time when I was pulling for the 49ers so that may have something to do with how I felt. Regardless, Cowboys-and-anything-associated-therein = devil spawn.

However, “Dancing With The Stars” (DWTS), the guilty pleasure that I have enjoyed for the last 10 weeks, has succeeded in making me an Emmitt Smith fan. His dancing got progressively better each week and he was the only one who seemed to be having FUN when he was dancing! Therefore, I was (and still am) very happy that Mr. Smith won DWTS last night.

What do I watch now on Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Probably “House” on Tuesdays but Wednesdays are a barren waste land until February when “Lost” returns. *sigh*… maybe I’ll read a book.