RE:turn to banagrams

Gotta make a note of these new words, otherwise I am likely to forget:
bogey (verb meaning to rouse trouble, also a golf term that means just one over par), bogie (framework mounted on wheels under a carriage), wen (a cyst, usually in scalp or genitals), paeon - my favorite word for tonight (a written, spoken or musical expression of enthusiastic praise or rapturous joy), clew (a skein, or a verb meaning to thread), loup (to leap or jump), loupe (a magnifying glass especially one of a jeweller or watchmaker).

RE:turn, whose turn?

Rich and intensive day yesterday: drove across Sears Highway, along the upper bay mud flats and bird sanctuaries, followed the Petaluma River northeast. Arrived at a wonderful little Taverna (Papa's) for a long visit with several good ol' close friends from college days.
Returned later in the evening to Berkeley and the chatter of young college girls from NYC who had gathered over the weekend to attend the funeral of a classmate, just engaged to be married, and who had died the week earlier of an overdose of heroin. Age 24, exodus from youth according to epidemiological studies? Drugs, exodus of immortals according to death reports. REminded me of the sixties and the summer of love, and felt my brain begin to sizzle in the cross currents of youthfull communication.
Still nursing a headache after the intensity of the day...coupled with my inability (age, hearing defect, lack of adequate references allergies and perhaps a glass to much) to integrate and process young female chatter ... which also made it difficult to make sense of bananagrams.
Today's competence development exercise: PALE + MUD = GEM, or better yet, don't try to swallow more than you can chew...

Salmon comeback 3:5

A pantoum for Bonnie

Sit down and strum along
gonna be a long playing album
ten or more slides to each track,
pictures that go a long way back.

Gonna be a long playing album,
to a beat that does not distort,
pictures that go a long way back
and rooster crows at the break of dawn.

To a beat that does not distort
memories of pecks and scratches,
and rooster crows at the break of dawn,
seen from your window, then gone.

Memories of pecks and scratches
come in on a record break,
seen from your window, then gone,
biting the dust in a groove.

Come in on a record break,
the times they are a changing,
biting the dust in a groove,
Roundtrip ticket to prove.

The times they are a changing,
no longer stuck in one place,
roundtrip ticket to prove
a magical mystery tour.

No longer stuck in one place
Pleased to see your face,
a magical mystery tour,
waiting to take me to...

Pleased to see your face
just as I was spinning
waiting to take me to...
hoping to bring you too.

Just as I was spinning
Country Joe and the Fish
hoping to bring you to
sea salmon on the run.

Country Joe and the Fish
up by the mouth of the river
sea salmon on the run
jumping, leaping and having fun.

Up by the mouth of the river
playing bass in Forever Young
jumping, leaping and having fun
on a magical mystery tour.

Playing bass in Forever Young
Can't say you never warned me
on a magical mystery tour
got hooked there once myself.

Re:turn 3:2

Thanks for another excuse to go through the tunnel, cross the bridge, and sit in a Stickley chair.
Poetry reading with Robin Ekiss (The Mansion of Happiness) and Cheryl Dumesnil (In Praise of Falling), ice cream sunday with Bonnie Mattison. And a bananagram.

Re:turn LP 3:1

What a comeback. Unable to escape the album covers that currently decorate the pink flamingo bedroom where I sleep on El Camino in Berkeley. Long play, between the earth and the night sky, 360 degrees all around, where four walls meet the ceiling, these albums continue to spin under my eyelids at 33.3 RPM REM. Rotations Per (ante meridian) Minute; Rapid Eye Movements. The stylus rides in the grooves of my brain, picking up the vibrations carved in the cortex, and is attached to a cantilever arm with a magnet (to the next generation) at the other end. What a bridge. What a comeback.
These are the album covers that currently decorate the pink flamingo bedroom where I sleep:

Joan Baez Baptism > Rolling Stones Let it Bleed > Quicksilver Messenger Service > Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited > doors > Queen The Game > The Manhatten Transfer > Santana Araxas > Jefferson Airplane Takes Off > Magical Mystery Tour Beatles > Country joe and the Fish > The times they are a changin Bob Dylan > Steppenwolf > Tarrio Brewer and Shirley > Blues Breakers John Mayall with Eric Calpton > Black > Crown of Creation Jefferson Airplane > Rubber Soul > Stephen Stills > Born to be Wild > Tea for the Tillerman Cat Stevens > Asleep at the Well > Other side of this life> Ray rogers Chops not chaps > Surrealistic Pillow > Arlo Guthrie Running down the Road > Donovan Sunshine Superman > The Allman Brothers' Band Brothers and Sisters > Blind Faith Eric Clapton >The Rolling Stones > Israeli Gears Cream > Linda Ronstadt

Yesterday I just happened to run into one of my old classmates at parking lot in downtown Oakland and still recognized him though I hadn't seen him since we graduated from high school some 45 years ago. That was when I was visiting Joanie Blank, founder of the Good Vibrations sex toys shop on San Pablo and avid co-houser. Today I had a moving encounter (planned) with an old close friend whom I have not seen for over 30 years.

Re:turning a Penny

I bicycled down to Lake Merrit this morning to participate in a poetry writing workshop that I had seen posted on a bulletin board earlier in the week. This first workshop was led by Jennifer King, Director of the Downtown Oakland Senior Center. We turned out to be a heterogeneous gang of seven 'students' representing a variety of ethnic backgrounds and both genders.
After quick introductions, we were given a couple of short poems to read aloud: “Those Winter Sundays” and "Full Moon" by Robert Hayden, a black American poet from Detroit. When enough reflections on winter Sundays had warmed us up to the task at hand, Jennifer gave us each a penny and asked us to reflect on the date. Mine was 1993. This is what came out when a copper coin was inserted in the slot in front of me:

Returning a penny
Nineteen hundred and ninety three.
Three years after the fall of the wall
where would I be if the penny
had taken another turn.
Here I am sixteen years later
and still spinning around (the earth)
listening to the rooster crow
while you are making dinner,
waking up as you prepare to sleep.
You say it is below zero in Europe today
and I tell you the sun is shining.
What is right, wrong, your honor,
heads or tales, East or West?
Humpty dumpty, can you see me now,
even though we are on different sides
of the mirror?

(Special thanks today for workshop members: Jessie for your "List called Gratitude", Eleanor's pantoum "I'm not sorry", Jennifer's "If it pleases the King", and Mathias W at AAC Global, my facilitator on the other side.)

Local Berkeley vagrant rests today after a long bike ride and intensive workshop.
Comment from Stockholm: "She would have turned into ice if she were here."

Re:turn 2:5

Some new (to me) terms collected today at the bike store and while playing Bananagrams with M and P this evening:
pannier (side packs/baskets hung from back of a bike or horse), hove (past of heave), rajah (Indian prince), quean (an offensive term that deliberately insults a woman's morality), limn (to draw or paint a picture of someone, to outline or describe in words), git (a contemtible person, often a fool, from British slang), jo, xi, qi (questionable), and I know that ghoul is mispelled. We don't cheat, every game is subject to review. This is what I call one aspect of my competence development while in the US.

Re:turn 2:4

Last night I discovered a Christmas card propped on the desk in the bedroom where I am staying in Berkeley. Because I thought I recognized the naïve winter landscape on the cover I took a closer look to see if the artist was familiar. No, but on the other hand, when a loose page fell out of the card I recognized the handwriting. It was my own, and the ink was still green.

The fact that this was a Christmas card that I had written to M years ago made me not only curious, but obliged to reread. It seemed to be stamped with “Return to sender”. No need for furtive glances, painstaking research or theoretical studies when life in the specious present simply appears before my eyes. What could be a better point of departure for a chronicle of my current Re:turn.

The message inside the card was dated in Stockholm on December 10, 1983, over 26 years ago. Strangely enough, neither the card nor the letter paper had become discolored, nor had the green ink faded. The letter looked as though it could have been written yesterday. Where in the world, but in this old house in Berkeley, might such clear evidence of my past, simply turn up?

To this day, I continue to go back and forth at least once a year between Sweden and the US, gravitating to the San Francisco Bay Area where my parents and their parents grew up and where I went to high school and college. As I began to read the old card, my initial sense was that nothing in my life had changed much. Christmas holidays come and go.

Dear M
Just thought I’d let the good will of the holiday season take priority over your chronically unchronicled (for me) life. So what’s new? Got caught up on you a bit on my visit last March. In fact, that visit somehow helped me to get caught up on myself...

So perhaps I’m getting caught up again on old friends like M whom I visited just six months ago, but more importantly with myself. It appears that M is a harbinger, somehow instrumental in my life. Our relationship began in the fall of 1965 when she was heckling her brother C who had called to invite me to see the Nutcracker at the Hyatt House, off the Bayshore freeway. As it turned out my very first date with C in December 1965 was the beginning of a long and memorable first love that spanned several critical years that would include many more incredible performances at The Hyatt House Theater. We quickly became an institution among friends and family and viewed as ‘intended’.
We were both young and ambitious. I was an energetic young undergraduate student of history at Berkeley, and C was a tall, dark and handsome Stanford fellow who had just begun Berkeley graduate school. His clever tongue, his wit and antics were charming. He was also full of adventure.



...Time flies and we hardly reflect over what is happening. This year seems a bit different. Why? This year marked my first feeling of being able just to "drop in" on the Bay Area...nothing I planned and saved for months to do, but just happened..and can and undoubtedly will happen again...with the job I have now. I pay a price for this mobility...

Re:turning

Re:turn 1:1
Dec. 30, 2009 (Aboard United flight 901)
I am midway in midair between Stockholm and San Francisco as I write, and the sun refuses to set. I am on unfinished business. That it remains light, despite the hour, is a solace. Why flounder and flail in the darkest days of the Swedish year, trudge through snow and slush, and sleep deeply while the sun is shining elsewhere? While it's shining on my roots, to boot?


Re:turn 1:2
January 2, 2010 (Magnolia 29, Berkeley CA)
As we grow older, we need more light, and given the recent displacement of my biological clock this past week of holidays, it suits me well to turn the clock back nine hours or more. I can let the hour hand run amuck, spin like a top or pirouette like a prima ballerina, and apparently still maintain balance. It felt great to cut a rug after midnight on New Year's Eve, hit the sack at 3 a.m. (PST) and wake at noon (PST) on the first. Since high noon here is 9 p.m. in Stockholm my day is suddenly upside down and I feel fine.


Re:turn 1:3
I have been planning this trip for months, preparing as much as I can (not the least getting acquainted with the new computer interfaces that I will be using in my work), and accepting and even welcoming what I cannot foresee.
For years I have had a recurring dream that I had returned to Berkeley to finish my education and get some new degree. I say some degree, because I graduated and received my B.A. degree from Berkeley in 1971. Though I enrolled as a member of the class of 1969, my graduation was deferred to leave room for a year of travel and optional courses. The date on my diploma is even later because my budget didn’t suffice to pay my tuition in full the last term; my 50 dollar debt was evidently waived after 5 years when a diploma was finally issued.
In my dream, however, every time I enroll, I find myself being distracted by the expense, neglecting the required reading, and forgetting the dates of all the exams and papers. Thus, while falling short of all my formal intentions, and obtaining no proof or any credentials I might need to claim some authority, I always enjoy the experience of the dream. I always marvel at all the familiar and unfamiliar sites, the people I meet, the music I hear, how much at home I feel in the unfamiliar, as well as the familiar. I suppose that is a wishful dream. I wake to a real sense that I have been somewhere.
I find it curious that as soon as I decided last summer to take this trip to the US, the recurrent dream has ceased to recur. I suppose it’s because I’m living it, pursuing business, continuing education, embracing the familiar and unfamiliar, knowing full well that it is not another diploma I seek - nor a return – but a turn.
It is now my turn to face the fact that I am no longer a spring chicken, the young woman who had just graduated from the excitement and stimulation of an education at Berkeley, from the confusion of turbulent times for my entire generation as well as for me personally, or from the hope that such education bestows on a young and promising student whose life is mostly ahead rather than behind.
My ‘boss’ has referred to this trip as my obligatory ‘competence development’, as though he had seen my recurring dream, and interpreted it to mean that not only the company I work for, but I too, stand to gain from this excursion. It is high time to turn off of my all too beaten Swedish track and move onto an American...