The poem I couldn’t remember was by Billy Collins. Here’s another:
Flames
Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.
His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.
His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.
He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.
He is going to show them
how a professional does it.
I think the best part of publishing (?) a website is connecting with others. I get the most amazing email from strangers who google their way to my sites. Got a couple tonight. Maybe it’s the holidays. People are wondering about old friends:
“By chance I typed into Google the name Norman Shainberg as part of the research I’m helping my father with. Mr. Shainberg and my father were in the same room together at Stalag IX C known as Meiningen, during the WWII. IX C was a camp for Krieges who were recovering from wounds prior to being shipped out to more permanent locations. Dad’s note book indicates that Mr. Shainberg was the pilot of a Boston, and that he had lost his leg to the propellor upon bailing out over Pas de Calais, France in July 1944. Is Mr. Shainberg still alive? My father is well and lives in Montreal. I’ll have to direct Dad to your web site, he’ll be very interested.”
Unfortunately Mr. Shainberg died about 20 years ago. But it sounds like he lived an amazing life.
“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who wanted to be free.”
— George Carlin
Merlin, lives in San Francisco, California where he “drinks coffee and listens to Canadian power pop” and makes lists. Let’s add Merlin to the list of people I’d like to know just a little bit.
1. I’m sorry, but what does this have to do with human sacrifice?
2. Seriously, will you still be this interested in me after we’ve dated for a while?
3. Would you be able to tell if I were defecating right now?
4. I am French. Your money means nothing to me.
5. I can smell your panties through the phone.
“… linky journals. What matters most about them is not where anybody falls on the power curve, but that every writer inhabits a place where anybody can write anything about anything, with a good chance that, if it’s interesting, others will find it, remark upon it, and use it to scaffold a shared understanding of whatever-it-is, and then some.”
“The number of religious sites devoted to the King is just staggering: Church of Elvis, The Eighth Day Transfigurist Cult, Elvis Sance, The Elvis Shrine, The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis, The Gospel of Elvis, Little Shrine to the King, and Oracle of the Plywood Elvis, and of course, The First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine.”
The review above was written by Kimberly Villalba Wright. I’m pretty sure I don’t know Kimberly but according to the credits on the review, she “was born in Hollywood, Florida, and has spent most of her life in Mobile, Alabama. She earned a BA in English at the University of South Alabama in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in the Epiphany, Arrowsmith, Doggerel, Dicat Libre, El Locofoco, as well as Poetry Caf. This fall, Wright will begin working toward an MFA in creative Writing at the University of Memphis. Wright currently resides in Kennett, Missouri.”
Kimberly… I’ll be in town Christmas Eve. Let’s hook up, pound some Buds and remember The King.
Half a century ago, radios throughout the country were broadcasting the news that a woman had died in Missouri’s gas chamber… the first– and so far, the only –woman ever executed in a state prison. Bonnie Brown Heady of St. Joseph and her lover Carl Hall had been convicted less than a month earlier of the kidnapping and murder of a little Kansas City boy, Bobby Greenlease. Former prison caseworker Gail Hughes remembers the Heady execution in an interview with Bob Priddy.
A nice lady named Pat found her way to my KBOA830.com website (“I have no idea why my mother-in-law had this post card. You may keep it. I have decided I cannot keep everything.”). Google revealed that Aileene Hanks (Anna Aileene Hanks Williams) wrote and recorded a song called “In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions.” The song was recorded by The Blackwood Brothers in 1954 and later by Elvis in 1960 (You can hear Elvis’s version on “His Hand in Mine; Amazing Grace CD1). In a pre-Web world, Pat would never have found my KBOA site and I wouldn’t have been able to find out anything about Aileene Hanks or that Elvis had recorded her son. So, are we better off that we did? I believe so.
“And if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is.”
— Hannibal Lecter
I have a lot of photographs of my father when he was very young and quite a few from his later years, but not so many from the middle years. Among Mr. Rudy’s many treasures, was a cardboard poster promoting one of KBOA’s many news programs.
“John Mays on KBOA at 8:00 a.m. Monday through Saturday for Midwest Farms Regional News Report.” Note on the back said this was taken in 1967 so John would have been 41.