1. Recently, rather than listening to the Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast live, I've been putting it on the Vizio some time between 5:30 and 7.
Today, Billy Collins played Paul Desmond to open the broadcast, and, for me, rather than his playing sounding like a dry martini, it sounded like a hot cup of Ghirardelli chocolate and cocoa spiked with Meyer's dark rum. That's what I fixed for myself to enjoy during the broadcast and it was a delicious accompaniment to the jazz and poetry.
Billy Collins read a selection of his own poem's today.
One hit me.
It's been echoing in my head ever since he read it and I have it here at home to reread.
It's called, "Central Park". In the poem, we learn that originally the carousel at Central Park was powered by a blind mule who was "strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen/room directly below the merry turning of the carousel."
The image of the blind mule underground spending its days walking in a circle to make a merry go round function haunts me, even as I write this blog post, and took me back to the same feeling of pity and horror I experienced when I read in Emile Zola's novel, Germinal about horses, called "pit ponies", employed to pull train cars of coal and loads of mining equipment. Some of these horses pulled loads in and out of the coal pits. Others pulled loads from one area in the pit to another, and, like the carousel mule, never saw the light of day while employed.
It's been over ten years since I read Germinal. I hardly remember the plot.
I'll never forget the horses, though, nor the blind mule powering the Central Park carousel.
2. Earlier in the day, I popped over to Yoke's for a flu shot. After she administered the vaccine, the pharmacist, Laurie, took time to ask me about my status on the kidney transplant list. Her concern moved me and took me back to when Mom was having trouble filling her pill box correctly and how Laurie and Sandy in the Yoke's pharmacy filled Mom's pill box for her, always with good cheer and concern for how she was doing, and, if needed, delivered the box to Mom at home.
I get offers in the mail from the prescription insurance company I'm enrolled with urging me to transfer my prescription to their company, receiving my pills by mail, and, evidently, saving money.
No way. In addition to their careful attention to helping Mom, I've had other experiences at the Yoke's pharmacy when the people working there have gone the extra distance to resolve a problem and have provided me with premium service. If I'm paying extra for their dedication to my well being, so be it.
3. I have some potatoes in the kitchen that are starting to get old. In order to use most of them, and, thanks to the weather being cooler, I decided to cook up a simple potato soup.
As I was putting together the potatoes, onion, celery, flour, chicken broth, and flour to get this soup going, I thought about what a neutral soup potato soup is. It's a soup without much flavor of its own and so, I thought, is a good soup to experiment with. I didn't go crazy, but, because it's among my favorite seasonings, I added cumin to my soup and, then, thinking a little heat would be fun, I added red pepper flakes.
I enjoyed the result a lot and it got me thinking about how I might play around with other spices I have in my collection when I make potato soup again -- especially the Mediterranean spices I bought several months ago from Penzeys.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
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