As Kobe and I were going for our walk this afternoon, I spotted this dwarf contorted camper down elm.  All its leaves dropped last week, but today the giant liquid amber across the street shared some.

The big news this morning in the Statesman Journal, our daily Salem newspaper, is a good illustration of how this little city is really a small town, and I like that. Wyoming is playing Boise State tonight. There is an article with pictures of both team’s quarterbacks because they are both local boys.  The game is so late that the Sunday edition of the paper will go to press before the game is over and the SJ is apologetic that the game news will not be in the Sunday paper, but it will be posted on their website.  My neighbors across the street were planning to skip the trip to the game this weekend to cheer for their grandson, the Cowboy quarterback. They changed their minds and called to ask if I could bring in their mail and papers because they couldn’t resist and were heading out through the beautiful gorge for Boise. I know that route very well. It always takes me twice as long as it should because I stop so many times to look at things.  I’ve always been a small town girl.

Doesn’t matter whether one has strong political views, or, instead, strong views on social justice; or if one often uses labels for everyone, or, instead, is never disparaging of anyone.  We can all agree that the recent attempt to bring an end to the USA’s being the last First World country without access to affordable health care is a tragedy.  No one on either side this debacle is evil or subversive, unless being a politician is inherently evil or subversive.  (Is there an emoticon for tongue-in-cheek?)

When something goes wrong, great or small, my response is not anger, but sadness.  I felt this the other night when I took a friend into the emergency room to get stitched up after a little mishap with a ball.

Both my friend and I are on Medicare and have excellent supplemental coverage.  Our charges are lot more than they should be because we pick up the costs for those who cannot afford insurance. (Have you ever seen the charge for a toothbrush on  your itemized hospital bill?)

In the emergency room was a too-young mother who was in labor and who had had no care during her pregnancy because she could not afford it. She was about to give birth to a high-risk, premature baby.  This baby is now very likely being supported by extensive intervention and will need special, expensive care all his life.

Over half my property tax goes for education.  I and none of my family has ever attended a school in this county, but I support public education. It’s just a good thing to live in a community (country) where people are educated. I’d rather pay for universal health care with taxes than the way I do now. It’s just a good thing to live in a community where people can see their doctor before they are contagious or exsanguinating.

I am very partial to empirical evidence.

Here’s  some more:

Once, I was in Seville with a daughter who had arrived in Spain with  Pacific poison oak (classified as  Rhus diversiloba at that time, but recently reclassified as Toxicodendron diversilobum).  It progressed into such a ghastly case that we went to the big teaching hospital emergency room where she received excellent attention and the same treatment she has received several times over the years in California. It included an initial injection of prednisone and a bottle of tablets of the same. It did not cost one peseta.  The people of Spain paid for it with their taxes.

One thing that seems to be forgotten is that insurance companies are electing to cancel low-cost policies (which people thought they could keep) because the companies wish to, not because they should or have to.  They are free to do so. That’s capitalism.  Whether one thinks capitalism is a swear word or thinks it is what free-interprise is all about is not relevant here.  I’m just sad.  That is my traditional response when things don’t go as planned.

Most of the year, this is just an ordinary, un-noteworthy bush at the back of my place; but every fall, when it loses its leaves, it shows off these amazing purple berries.  I always cut some branches and bring them in.  Its common name is Beauty Berry.  Fitting.

In this week’s New Yorker is an interview with a grownup Daniel Radcliff.  He may have missed attending a good English prep school because his formative years were spent on numerous Harry Potter locations; nevertheless, as he says in the article, his tutors did a good job for him, traditionally speaking.

His new film role, which is why he was in New York and being interviewed, is playing Alan Ginsberg.  About Ginsberg’s sort of poetry, Radcliff said, “Without rhyme or metre, there’s the danger of getting rather self-indulgent and pretentious and a little lazy. Robert Frost compared it to playing tennis without a net.  It might be fun, but it can never quite be satisfying.”

I didn’t have tutors, but I was trained up on Lawrence Perrine’s Sound and Sense.  (I’m sure it was the first edition. The now late Dr. Perrine was actually head of the English Department my freshman year.)   So I am of one mind with Radcliff on the question of what makes poetry.  Perrine began by giving us Tennyson’s “The Eagle” and then made us paraphrase it as though we were describing the great bird for a science textbook to get his point.

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.”

It pretty much does all the things a poem can do, not that a poem has to rhyme or scan or alliterate, but I know as much about eagles from this poem as I have learned out on the Willamette watching them fly back and forth, showing off for me in my little red kayak.

About poetry, I never, ever get the poetry in The New Yorker and they never get mine, although I have submitted one or two for their consideration in the past.  Here is the last one  — and I mean the very last one.  They will never “get” another one.

Dear New Yorker Poetry Editor:

It’s not like a tree, falling in a forest,
not making a sound because
you
are not there.
What I write is not
not poetry
because it falls on deaf ears.
It’s not about you.
It sounds and shakes and moves
me.
I am and
it is.