I still haven’t unfurled my first-ever yoga mat, contrary to the surely good advice of so many friends, but with a strained hamstring and plantar fasciitis in the same appendage I did this morning use my stand-up desk for coffee and bird-watching and slathered raspberry jam only on the leftover crusts of my fried Spam sandwich.
… is very long, lndeed.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.
The blurry byline on the copy of “A Singing Heard in Selma’s Mud” is my father’s — Bob Robertson — who covered the “final” 1965 Selma to Montgomery march.
Rain wakes me at 7 a.m., the day before Christmas. I decide to read Joan Didion with coffee. She died yesterday. Later I will read Slouching Toward Bethlehem . This morning I choose her essay on Ernest Hemingway, Last Words.
There will be fried potatoes and green chile for breakfast.
Cowboy ate his kibble and found a warm place in my bed.
“The Doughnuts,” about a boy and a doughnut machine gone wild, has always been my favorite Homer Price story and today I brought it home.
I don’t know how old Homer was when the doughnut machine showed up in his life. I think Robert McCloskey wrote and illustrated the story for publication in 1943. I might have read it eight or so years after my birth in 1949. Homer lived in Centerburg, Ohio. I knew right off the bat that we had something in common. I was born in Newark, Ohio, although we lived in married-student housing on the nearby Denison University campus in Granville, Ohio, right in the doughnut hole of that so very settled state. I’m guessing that Robert McCloskey and I had a fondness for doughnuts in common, too. And there was a name thing. My grandfather was Homer Wilbur Robertson. He was from central Ohio and liked anything sweet, in addition to profoundly stinky limburger cheese.
At any rate, at age 72, with McCloskey’s story still wafting around my brain and Homer Price collections still on my bookshelf, I just made my first batch of doughnuts here in Placitas, New Mexico.
I’m not sure why I never attempted this before but what sent my into action was discovering a recipe for baked apple cider doughnuts in the New York Times. It might have been the baked rather than fried part that turned the trick. I also like anything with apples. Thank you, Erin Jeanne McDowell and, of course, Robert McCloskey.
See Granville ….
I rose this morning to listen to the rain. It’s so rare. I went to sleep as the weather came in, soothed by the sound of the wind, knowing it brought a storm. I discovered on rising a little snow on the Sandias to the south, a little more on the Jemez to the north. The clouds pulled away quickly, leaving thirsty hills behind. The creeks between me and the mountains dried years ago. We’re on edge in the West about how much more snow will come. We’ve been warned there will be less and less. These are our times, when we need to see for thousands of years but still pin our hopes on each day. I swung my tiny camera west to Cabezon. A light show played over the old volcano, putting me in my place.
Well scare turned out to be just a bad pump. Some hope for snow in the forecast later this week. Most of the rest of the news not good but we took a day off.
Young Ladderback eyeing my feeder; snow on the mountain; possibly New Mexico’s toughest Christmas cactus blooming; first Western Bluebird sightings at 6,000 feet.
Disorganized late night research led to my iPhone photograph of dawn this morning. It started with Season 6, Episode 7 of Grantchester on Sunday night and my fascination with Leonard’s sermon on forgiveness to fellow prisoners. This led to the sermon’s biblical root, Esphesians 4:32, and an email to the Grantchester episode’s writer, Daisy Coulam, in Wales. Leonard expands the 4:32 message into a broader, practical thought but I don’t know if it is the work of Christian scholars or Ms. Coulam. Soon I was backtracking to Ephesus, which I have visited, and tripping on all the history that extends from there. By the time I started to nod off, dreaming of a return to Turkey, the sun was rising. And later today I’m still not sure if my retirement is directionless or not.
dreamranch 