So I haven’t been writing much on the blog in the last few days. Guess I don’t have much to say right now. Sorry. I guess I’m assimilating, and hunkered down in the rain. We’re having a very wet winter here in the Santa Barbara area.

I like the rain. Don’t mind getting a little damp. It’s refreshing, and God knows we need the water. Our lakes and reservoirs were getting very low. I live in a top floor condo on a hill. I have a new roof. No need for concern about flooding or leaking. I can relax and enjoy the weather we’ll remember longingly this summer.

I used to live in a much different place, a guest house in a low area near the freeway. The neighbor’s land was higher. Of course, just some normal rain would soak in and drain away. But if we had heavy storms for a few days, then all the rain that fell on his lot drained to the back, and headed under the fence and right for my living room. It was a sunken living room, and the mud seal in the foundation was bad. In the 13 years I lived there, I think the place flooded about five times. There is nothing quite like getting up in the middle of the night of heavy rain and stepping barefoot into a carpet saturated with muddy water.

Eventually, the landlady spent a fortune on repairs and drainage, then sold the property. That was probably wise. And it gave me the nudge to get out. I’m warm and dry tonight, comfortable, and if forced to admit it, I’m not unhappy thank you.

I’m going to put a pin in this, for you to think about, and come back to it later:

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

-Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )

I’ve been trying to write tonight. Had an idea for a rather strange short story – the opening, anyway. Also, I’ve been photoshopping old family photos — my time machine. So in my absence, here’s something to ponder:

The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.

— Plato, ‘Phaedrus.’

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it,you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

-J.D. Salinger,writer (1919- )

From time to time, I get the urge to remind my friends that Poetry Is the Art Of Not Succeeding by insisting they read this beautiful poem by Joe Salerno.

I spent several hours doing a little project for my Mom, sorting through a big box of family photos. They go back to about 1905, when my grandfather (“Papa”) was an infant. But most of them were taken in my lifetime. I’m 43. They’re photos of Papa who died two years ago, and Grandma who’s been with Jesus five months. Also my folks, brother, aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, here in California, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Dogs, cats, horses, birds, a turtle and a rat. We’re pretty handy with our cameras, I guess.

My point isn’t just the poignancy of looking through so many pictures of a world in the process of sliding away into tule fog. It’s sad, sure; it’s joyous too. But you get a balanced, regular died of poignancy on this blog, and I know it. My point is that something just a little strange happened in my mind while I was doing this task. That fog seemed to break up just a little.

After several hours mentally back in Grandma and Papa’s house in that hot, cold, foggy town, where vineyards and orchards stretch to every horizon, I stood up and walked away. And I had the idea that I should go and visit them right away. I had the greatest desire to hear their voices, hug them, turn out the lights and sleep in that place. Just for an instant it was possible, because part of me has refused to believe they’re gone; because in a sense I forgot; I was back in twenty years ago. It was a waking dream, I guess, and it was sweet.

Driving Down the San Joaquin

It is so hard to leave

the old ones alone

with their painkillers, tomatoes,

blocks of cheese

in the icebox, bread frozen

for later, canned fish.

The clock that no one

can wind anymore.

It is hard to leave, to back

down the driveway, turn

and look back, the house leaning

into October. And all

down the valley

of San Joaquin tonight,

the harvest moon is weak,

becoming blind.

The vineyards reach

into that blindness,

go on like headstones

to the feet of the hills.

Just yards from the edge

of the road, the ghosts of

coyotes pace back and forth

along the fence,

strange friends of your

longing, sympathetic and sad.

The old dog, deaf and blind, stirs

in her blanket on the seat,

says nothing, then sleeps.

And the moon is up

but shrinking as it climbs.

Kyle Kimberlin

October, 1999

We speak of life as an oboe

speaks, in Summer colors

stirring the orchards

playing the windchimes by the door.

You put the telephone down

and your voice hangs

a little cloud of new rain

over the cold and restless sea.

I cannot hope to disconnect.

How can a man admit he loves

so well, so hopelessly

these clouds that only turn

maybe hover

do not descend, never touch.

Now birds are rising in the dial tone

with a motion as still and breathless

as the respirations of a dying seal.

A squadron of great brown pelicans

is lifted from the harbor

to investigate the coming night.

If they will watch the sky for me

maybe I can sleep.

— Kyle Kimberlin

I wrote this love poem about 10 years ago. It was entirely uncalled for, but what the hell, it’s what I do. Can’t be helped.

Riverbend has posted her first missive on Baghdad Burning since December 18. You don’t want to miss what she has to say about the upcoming election.

Well, the old clock on the wall says that not much remains of 2004. So it goes. It wasn’t a particularly loveable year, was it? Even if you had the good fortune to count its passage with, say, a Dilbert or Garfield calendar, or one with puppies or varieties of the orchid, your probably felt a certain suction. Like putting your hand over the bathtub drain when you were small, and the water was draining away. Now as the year makes its final swirl, let’s put the rubber ducky of hope safely in the soap dish and take a deep and sober breath.

In truth, it was a year of needless, heedless war. It was the year George Bush got elected in Ohio and Britney Spears got married in Vegas; events of comparable inanity. It was the year of the cow. And I don’t mean on the Chinese calendar. It was the year of bovine intelligence, deliberate ignorance. Millions of Americans still believe there were WMD in Iraq, and Saddam was behind 9/11.

For me, it was a year of God’s mercy because my own failures of productivity could have left me in much worse circumstances. I had family challenges and in the summer we lost our Grandma, but God is with us. I think my high point may have been my nephew’s third birthday in the Spring. That child is a steadfast and shining consolation, a joy.

The year closes with Tasha still with me; her small and selfless respirations continue apace in her place beneath the desk. For this – and the continued health of my family – I am profoundly grateful.

I’m at a loss to circumscribe the year with meaning, except to say that those of us who survived it, and watch it end now in sufficient affluence to do so in front of a computer, have seen the mounting of death tolls and the blooming of flowers. Most of us have attending funerals and weddings, and born our burdens with the means to pay way too much for coffee and gasoline. Those of us who write have had the leisure to write a lot about a little or vice versa, and it hasn’t changed much except to present us to the world in some form of hope. For me, I thank God for the Internet, but for which I would have murdered too many trees.

This blog will now observe the last hour of 2004 in silence, in prayerful, astounded sorrow for the loss in southern Asia.

Banished Words List :: Welcome: “That’s how Lake Superior State University selected words and phrases that make up its 30th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. “

I love this stuff. Look forward to the list every year, you bet. Of course they make some good points, and I think the language has been dissolving like alka-seltzer for at least 100 years. But I don’t know yet how I’m going to respond to banishment of blog, blogger, etc. They just told half of my URL, “You’re Fired.”

There is nothing for me here

but images and the passage of time.

I can’t find a center, can’t imagine

my place or purpose in all of this.

If I said Peace aloud, made it gentle

but emphatic, with my hat over my

heart, would anyone respond?

Can any word I imagine carry

meaning into an afternoon

of cold rain, wet wool, muddy shoes?

I see smiles under great

irrelevant clouds.

I should think of a word that can live

in such cold, rain slick hours.

I should say flower, ceramic,

grandmother, butterfly, light.

And from all of them, to which

I add clock for a flavor of time,

I choose grandmother,

then I turn and go home.

Kyle Kimberlin

Thursday, December 30, 2004

I’ve seen some opinion, blaming God for the deaths in Indonesia.

I’m far from qualified to stand as an apologist for the Almighty, but do you really think God wipes out people with Tsunamis? If He wanted them dead, they’d be dead. No big wet drama required. There are earthquakes, they displace the mass of water. So it goes. Life on our little blue ball is inherently dangerous.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the

children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the

long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

– Helen Keller

The destruction is the fault of diastrophism; plate tectonics. The deaths are the result. And if we weren’t so damn busy as a species making war and documenting the sexual cavorting of the hour’s celebrities, maybe the region would have had a warning system. Blaming God is, in a word, absurd.