1. Christy, Carol, and I met at my house this afternoon and talked about where things are at with Everett, and, in turn, with Christy. We'll get together again at my house on Wednesday, the 25th. Christy was, today, and will be on Wednesday, in conversation with different people at the hospital, discussing Everett's condition, care, where he's made some progress, where not, and how to proceed. I might have more to report in my blog tomorrow. For now, suffice it to say that Everett and Christy talk together (even share the occasional latte) and he is spending some time out of bed sitting up in a wheelchair. I'll just add how happy I am that Christy is retired and has the time to spend many hours with Everett. Her encouragement and good company is a constant boost to Everett's spirits and he deeply appreciates all Christy is doing for him.
2. Riley is doing well, especially given all the activity happening around him. When Everett was in CdA and Riley stayed with me, it took him from 30 to 60 minutes to stop pacing, howling, and crying. Now he's restless when he first arrives in the living room, goes right to the window to watch Christy leave, and, once she's out of sight, he settles right down. Today, as he often does, Paul took Riley for a run. Riley stayed at Carol and Paul's during our family meeting.
He's been a really good dog -- my impression over the years is that dogs thrive on regularity, things being as predictable as possible, and Riley has hung in there really well with Christy being gone during the day, going between my house and Carol and Paul's, and not having his life be quite as predictable as usual.
3. I poured myself a hot buttered rum, adding brown sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and a little bit of Ghirardelli hot chocolate powder to the rum, hot water, and butter in my mug, and settled in for this week's Tree House Concert. Tonight, Bill Davie invited Jim Page to share the concert with him. Jim was at home, in the space he calls the something den, but I can't remember the name as I write this, and Bill was also at home in the Tree House.
I've been listening to Jim Page for nearly at least thirty years -- he's been making music a lot longer than that. I'm not sure what words I would have used in the past to describe him outside of his being a genius song writer and a powerful performer. Tonight, I experienced Jim Page as soulful. His songs, as always were copious explorations of all regions of the soul, his, ours, and the collective soul. Jim's soulfulness, his quiet playing and singing, the power and range of his lyrics moved me.
Bill also sang soulful songs tonight -- no surrealism, no razor blades raining down on Tacoma, no Micronesian bullets -- tonight he took us to the Puget Sound, to a rough patch as a father to his son, to the memory of his father, and other sources of deep feeling and experience.
Jim and Bill have been corresponding for a year and half or so in verse, following the path of Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison and their book, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry.
I've been working my way, joyfully, through Jane Hirshfield's essay, "Seeing through Words: An Introduction to Basho, Haiku, and the Suppleness of Image". In writing a history of the haiku, Hirshfield spends some time writing about renga, a Japanese form of collaborative verse. The renga is a highly structured form of collaborative poetry in which poets build upon one another's verses, sending the developing poem back and forth.
Bill and Jim read a generous chunk of their correspondence in verse tonight. I experienced it as in the spirit of renga -- Bill and Jim's poems are in free verse; they aren't formal-- and loved listening to how they drew upon one another's poems and then left doors open for the the other to walk out of (or into) and develop another concept, insight, image cluster, memory, or idea. I am especially happy that I got to hear these poems. While I think they would be great to read silently or out loud to myself, they became animated works, living and breathing, as Bill and Jim gave them voice.
What a superb two hours of songs and poems, a concert given by two friends who have been performing together, from time to time, for nearly thirty-five years and, even though they were in different rooms in different houses, conveyed their love for each other and their joy in performing together as powerfully as if they'd been side by side on a stage.
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