a radio was on.

Through a glass darkly--the phrase comes from the Apostle Paul, who explains that we cannot see, except obscurely, that when we look, it is only through a clouded version of what is real.  When we die, perhaps, we will see clearly.  Maybe Paul is sure about that.   Someone I love was talking today about the young, the babies and the children, and how much closer they are to the mystery of what came before we took our first breath and began the process of forgetting.  Or, to put it another way, of looking back through a glass darkly. The poet Joy Harjo talks about her experiences with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who remember her from other lives.  We knew each other before, they tell her.   It was a long winter in many ways, followed by a spring filled with loss.  I don't know when to say the loss started, actually--it has been loud this whole year.  We have lost too many people from my metastatic cancer group.  When s...

Through a glass darkly--the phrase comes from the Apostle Paul, who explains that we cannot see, except obscurely, that when we look, it is only through a clouded version of what is real.  When we die, perhaps, we will see clearly.  Maybe Paul is sure about that.   Someone I love was talking today about the young, the babies and the children, and how much closer they are to the mystery of what came before we took our first breath and began the process of forgetting.  Or, to put it another way, of looking back through a glass darkly. The poet Joy Harjo talks about her experiences with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who remember her from other lives.  We knew each other before, they tell her.   It was a long winter in many ways, followed by a spring filled with loss.  I don't know when to say the loss started, actually--it has been loud this whole year.  We have lost too many people from my metastatic cancer group.  When s...

What a thing of beauty is my support group.  Zoom allows us to meet in way seemingly impossible before the pandemic--those who are house or bed-bound, those of us in the hospital, those of us in hospice--we can all Zoom.  There we are each week, all of us lined up in rows--we could be a book club, but we are not.  We are bound to one another through the diagnosis of metastatic cancer.  We have our own separate group--we don't hobnob with the breast cancer group, unless and until someone's disease progresses; we aren't invited to the young people with cancer group; we will never make it into the post-treatment group (that ship sailed at diagnosis, even if it took some of us longer than others to realize the ship was far from shore, headed to different waters).  I'm sure the theory is that there are commonalties, fears, concerns, terrors that make the metastatic group a closed community. I'm sure that these other groups don't want to sit companionably with someone...

What a thing of beauty is my support group.  Zoom allows us to meet in way seemingly impossible before the pandemic--those who are house or bed-bound, those of us in the hospital, those of us in hospice--we can all Zoom.  There we are each week, all of us lined up in rows--we could be a book club, but we are not.  We are bound to one another through the diagnosis of metastatic cancer.  We have our own separate group--we don't hobnob with the breast cancer group, unless and until someone's disease progresses; we aren't invited to the young people with cancer group; we will never make it into the post-treatment group (that ship sailed at diagnosis, even if it took some of us longer than others to realize the ship was far from shore, headed to different waters).  I'm sure the theory is that there are commonalties, fears, concerns, terrors that make the metastatic group a closed community. I'm sure that these other groups don't want to sit companionably with someone...

Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, wrote "a horse of the same color," meaning the same matter rather than a different one.  But by the mid-1800s, the phrase was used to point out difference rather than likeness. The horse of a different color was also the horse who drew the carriage containing Dorothy and friends as they entered Emerald City in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.   The horse would change its color from time to time, and apparently four horses were used to create the effect, because it took too long to completely scrub one horse and then re-color it for the scene.  The APSCA would not allow the horses to be dyed with chemicals, so they were painted with lemon, cherry and grape flavored powdered gelatin to create the colors.  Apparently the horses tried to lick their own coats between takes--which if you think about what gelatin is, makes the whole thing surreal and a little revolting, given a horse's predilection for grass and grain. Of course, a horse of a ...