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Aging, Art, Bob Dylan, Daniel Kramer, Dispatch from the Diaspora, It's Not Dark Yet, Michael Gray, Photography, Positively 4th Street, Street Legal, Tangled up in Blue, Where Are You Tonight? Subterranean Homesick Blues
Happy Birthday Bob Dylan – Never Say Goodbye.
May 24 2019: Happy 78th Birthday Bob Dylan Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades. When was it when a Dylan song first mattered to me? I can’t be sure, yet I can’t remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue. In 1979, my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics who might consider themselves more qualified than I to measure the success of a Dylan song. (Not…
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About my hair. Seriously.
It was with a mix of delight and anxiety that I read in today’s Guardian that the perm is making a comeback. You read that right. Hair-rising news that takes me back to that day a few years ago when a middle-aged bald man reached across an impressive stretch of time and distance to announce on my Facebook page, “Hey!” “HEY!!!” “Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Indeed you did. Relentlessly. And, it was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC,…
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Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You
commencement exercises
Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me round I feel numb – born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground Head in the sky It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong… nothing At my daughter’s high school graduation, the Senior class filed into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). A perfectly hip processional, it was one of her father’s favorite songs, five minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. I had never been so…
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airing laundry . . . mother’s day in america
Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney Often I watched her lift it from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at achor. To test its heat by ear she spat in its iron face or held it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger. Soft thumps on the ironing board. Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen like the resentment of women To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel…
