The first Frost of the season

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(from “The Road Not Taken”)

Good fences make good neighbors. (from “Mending Wall”)

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. (from “Birches”)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
(from “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”)


Don’t like excerpts? Here are three in their entirety:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.


Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?


Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Cue the Woodpecker, or I am a camera

Speaking of Walter Winchell, the mid-twentieth-century American broadcaster/newsman always began his radio programs by saying, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea” with the sound of a telegraph in the background.

After beginning this blogpost with a reference to the previous one, I now continue it by saying, “Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Señoras y Señores, Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages, please direct your attention to the center ring this blogpost has absolutely nothing to do with Walter Winchell, ships at sea, or telegraphs.”

No, friends, the subject of this blogpost is still lifes.

I know, I need to work on my segues.

According to the well-known but admittedly non-authoritative online encyclopedia Wikipedia, “A still life (plural still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).”

There are an amazing number of paintings entitled “Still Life with...” and the subjects are many and varied. Some of the ones I found online are:

- Still Life with Pie, Silver Ewer, and Crab (Heda)
- Still Life with a Globe and a Parrot (Boel)
- Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Rembrandt)
- Still Life with Fruit, Flowers, Glasses and Lobster (de Heem)
- Still Life with Bouquet and Fan (Renoir)
- Still Life with Apples, Grapes, Melons, Bread, Jug and Bottle (Meléndez)
- Still Life with Silverware (Manieri)
- Still Life with Apples, a Pear, and a Ceramic Portrait Jug (Gaugain)
- Still Life with Cherub (Cézanne)
- Still Life with a Beer Mug (Léger)
- Still Life with Sunflowers (Gaugain)
- Still Life with Geraniums (Matisse)
- Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso)
- Still Life with Eggplants (Matisse)
- Still Life with Goldfish Bowl (Lichtenstein)

They go on and on and on.

Not to be outdone, here are three still life photographs I took in our home:

1. Still Life: Kitchen corner with Pencil Cactus (Euphorbia tirucalli), 1940s-era Wooden High Chair, Fruit Plaque, Ceramic Duck, and Grapes Painting by Renowned New Zealand Artist Kate Steeds:

2. Still Life: Cherry-Pineapple-Coconut-Pecan Dump Cake with Ice Cream and Aluminum (British: Aluminium) Foil:

3. Still Life: Coffee Mug with Methodist Hymnal on Blue Tablecloth:

The Methodist Hymnal above was given to me by Mrs. Joan M., who found it among her mother’s belongings after her mother died. It is quite small and contains lyrics only, no musical notes. The oldest item in my home, its title page shows a publication date of 1845:

In composing this post and sharing some of our still lifes with you, I felt my heart strangely warmed.

[Editor’s note. The last sentence is an allusion to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. It’s okay if you didn’t get it. --RWP]

Separated at birth?

20th-century American broadcaster/newsman Walter Winchell

Actor/writer/comedian Steve Martin

Read more about them here and here.

Green is not the color/colour of my true love’s hair

...but it is the color/colour of the outfit she wore at my recent “retiring-as-pianist-but-not-leaving” reception:

...and of some of the icing on the cake:

...and of the pastor’s shirt and the bag the marginata plant was in (here are 3 views of each):

It was even incorporated into the lei and the paper napkins:

Green is also the color/colour of my newest favorite thing, a gardenia bush planted three years ago by our back door. People sometimes say of English ivy that the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, and the third year it leaps. This saying applies as well to our gardenia bush, because after two years of sleeping and creeping, it suddenly began blooming this month for the very first time. Today I counted eleven gardenias growing on it, but I couldn’t get them all in one photograph:

Note to my loyal readers: Although I have not yet turned into a doddering old fool, I am well on the way to becoming one.

You do not have to agree with me in the comments.

A few of my current favorite things

1. At the retirement party last Sunday, each table was adorned with a bud vase containing red and yellow roses with baby’s breath. After the party, Suzi R. gathered them all up into two absolutely gorgeous bouquets and presented them to us. Here they are on the huntboard in our kitchen, along with a framed example of Mrs. RWP’s counted-cross-stitch embroidery and some of her mother’s crochet work under a pillar candle:

2. We received many beautiful cards as well as this beautiful marginata plant from Jane and Roger C. and a stunning terrarium from Tammy and Charlie H. that included a grand piano, a candelabrum worthy of Liberace, and even a little white dog. Do they know us or what?:

3. The cargo space of our new vehicle (new to us, anyway), a 2006 Nissan Murano:

4. An enormous biscuit (not to same scale as previous item) from Pappas’s Restaurant in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. I consumed this particular biscuit back in the first week of June, nearly three months ago, but -- as we all know -- nothing ever really goes away on the internet:

5. Mrs. RWP’s famous Cherry-Pineapple Dump Cake, the last piece of which I would have enjoyed at our church’s monthly fellowship luncheon if our friend Becky R. hadn’t got there first:

6. The non-politically-correct woman (no photo available) I met yesterday in a doctor’s waiting room (no photo available) who announced the following to the entire room after someone said the staff elevator had been acting up all morning:

“I would never get on that elevator. I hate elevators. If there is any chance I might get stuck in one, I will not get on it. And I won’t get on an elevator if more than eight people are in it. My children will tell you, when they were small they would count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Mama, we’ll have to wait for the next elevator. And I hate albinos. And midgets. And clowns. I’m afraid of them. I have a fear of albinos and midgets and clowns. Lord, if I got on an elevator and an albino midget clown walked in, I would probably drop dead right there.”

It was like something in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Her eyes grew big when I volunteered, “Perhaps you're attracting them.”

Retirement party

Yesterday the little Methodist church I attend put together a reception for me upon my retirement after five years as their pianist.

There is an old joke that “Old musicians never die; they just decompose.”

I will pause until the groaning stops.

In my own case, the following photograph is proof that I did not retire, I was lei’d off.

I hasten to add that I was neither “lei’d off” nor forced out. It was my own decision and completely voluntary. I started being a church pianist/organist when I was about 13 and I will soon be 75. With the possible exception of breathing, I think 62 years is enough time to spend on any activity.

Mrs. RWP and I are not leaving the congregation; I am merely stepping down from the weekly musical tasks. How could we leave the most loving people in the world?

Let the decomposing begin.

Distant echoes, half-remembered hills

A poem I like a lot is “Song for Lost Youth” by one Neil Theasby of Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe. I liked the poem enough to add it a while back to my sidebar over on the right side of the screen.

If your eyeballs are simply too tired or too lazy to make the trip or you gave up scrolling for Lent and never resumed the practice, I have reproduced the poem below for your reading convenience:


Song for Lost Youth

Perhaps I should have cradled it
Like a dove
Kept it safe with tender love
But I squandered it -
Gushing-blundering-raging
Like a wild mountain stream
Desperate for an ocean
That was but a distant dream.
...I just never thought
That I could have loitered in the shallows
Reflecting the blueness of the sky
- Concealing silver fishes
- Quietly biding my time
- Stretching it out.
And so, and so it’s gone now
- My ephemeral youth
- That precious once only gift
- That honeyed sweetness,
Leaving only the trembling resonance
Of distant echoes
From half-remembered hills.

(Neil Theasby, 2013. Used by permission.)


You can have your Tennysons, your Byrons, your Whitmans, your Brownings. Today I’ll take Theasby. His poem resonates with me.

I think I have figured out why I like Neil’s poem so much. For me, it’s not just about youth. It’s about life.

I’m no spring chicken, and there are very few hills left for me. To be more accurate, probably none. On my next birthday -- still several months away -- I’ll be 75 years old. I’ve reached the coastal plain. I’m getting nearer to the sea all the time. I can feel the breezes. I can hear the sea birds. I can smell the seawater.

Some people say life is like climbing a mountain and that we struggle ever upward, surmounting obstacle after obstacle, until at last, after always ascending, we finally reach the summit. “Song for Lost Youth” turns that metaphor on its head and describes life as a descent instead, a headlong plunge that finds us cascading from the dizzying heights, ever downward, to the inevitable place where we join all who have come before us and all who will come after.

You have to hand it to poets. They can come up with some nifty metaphors.

For example, William Wordworth (1770 - 1850) wrote the following in “Ode on Intimations of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood” about birth:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”

...and William Cullen Bryant (1794 - 1878) wrote in “Thanatopsis” about death:

“So shalt thou rest -- and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men--
The youth in life’s fresh spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn, shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”


All that having been said, all those metaphors having gone under the bridge or over the dam or nighty-night to bed or down the trail with the camels (pick one), I hope to keep on breathing until I am 108 and outlive the lot of you.