Margaret Fieland: Poetry and Prose

My oldest son, then five, returned home from his first day of Kindergarten looking rather glum.

“How was school?” I prompted.

 ”My teacher says I have to write with my right hand.” Mike, a lefty, looked glum.

There comes a moment in the life of every parent when they realize that their child, though truthful, has somehow missed the point.

“Tell me exactly what she said,” I urged.

Mike thought for a moment.  “She picked up the chalk in her right hand and she wrote the alphabet on the board. Then she turned to us and said, ‘This is how you write the alphabet.’”

“Mike,” I reassured him,”your teacher is writes with her right hand because she’s a righty.  It’s OK if you write with your left hand because you’re a lefty,” adding, since he still looked unconvinced, “and we’ll ask her in the morning..”

 And that’s just what we did.

Well, the conference is over and my eyesight is still about the same as it was — not that it’s all that great at this point in my life, but at least it’s no worse.  The conference was great.  I learned lots, discovered a couple of nifty new sites to hang out at, met lots of really interesting people.

Right now I’m reading Christine Hamm’s new poetry book, “The Transparent Dinner.”  It’s  seemingly transparent, but it’s got just that bit of a twist to it that makes you stop and think.  I’m really enjoying it.  I’m hoping to interview Christine next weekend and will post it to my blog.  Stay tuned.

I notice that a number of my posts have screwed-up punctuation and I suspect that this is some problem with encodings from either microsoft or linux.  Anyway, this post has *some* punctuation and hopefully it will look the same when I post it as it does when I’m typing it in — but I’, not holding my breath.  In any case, apologies to my readers.
I’m “attending” the virtual writer’s conference  organized by Lea Schizas — it’s great.  Lots and lots of information, tons of email.  Thank goodness for the digest.

For the last couple of weeks I have been making an effort to get out every day and take a walk.  Up until the end of last week I had been walking around the block — not very interesting, even though I could stop in at the Dunkin Donuts on the corner if the spirit moved me — but late last week I returned to walking in the park near my office.  I haven’t walked there regularly in well over a year.  It’s very hilly.  Today as I walked up one of the steeper paths I could feel the muscles in my ass protesting.  It’s really pretty in there, though, and a lot more interesting than walking around a bunch of buildings.  I also end up taking longer walks (a good thing).

Yesterday as I was walking over I started to take a short cut over the grass to the park entrance instead of walking around the parking lot when it occurred to me that the purpose of the exercise was to spend time walking and not to go any place in particular — so I walked around the parking lot after all.