Thinking of Wendy

There’s a poem in this week’s New Yorker (and I hardly ever read the New Yorker poems) that reminds me of my aunt, Wendy.

A Kosmos

You lay in your last sleep, not-sleep,
head tilted stiffly to the right on the pillow
at a sharper angle than when you bent over poems,
year after year, and we plucked at each other’s lines,

as if now you considered some even starker question.
Your I.V. tubes were gone. Your arms were bruised.
A blue cloth cap enfolded your pale, bald head.
It was too late to give you the lavender shawl I’d imagined

more for my sake than for yours.
Your mouth was suddenly tender, the mouth of a girl.
You had come very far, to come here.
Never one not to look at things squarely,

now you looked inward. Who knows what you saw.
And when, weeks later, we gathered
again at the house to say those formal farewells,
I went up to your study looking for “Leaves of Grass”

and found, instead, your orderly desk, unused,
your manuscripts neatly stacked, the framed
photographs of your girls, and, like a private message
from Whitman, who saw things whole, the small

dried body of a mouse. A kosmos, he, too. He, too, luckier.

- Rosanna Warren

Happy Halloween!

Corpse Bride is one of my favorite Halloween movies.

Tonight, I’ll be watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, though. I love Tim Burton.

Buying (and Transporting) Pumpkins

Last weekend I organized a halloween party for graduate students with children. Part of the preparation involved buying large numbers of small pumpkins for small children to decorate. This was more difficult than you might think: it seemed like there was a city-wide shortage of small, orange pumpkins, just as I needed them! In the end, I went through stacks of sugar pumpkins (good for pies, I believe) looking for small ones. Once bought, I piled them into my bicycle basket and headed into work. Much better than messing around with carrying bags. I suppose if I’d been really organized, I would have thought to take my panniers with me, but the basket managed the job perfectly well. Needless to say, the day after the halloween party, I went grocery shopping, and there, right at the entrance to the supermarket, was a huge crate of small, orange pumpkins, at a most reasonable price. If only they’d been there earlier in the week!

Greetings from Red Sox Nation

So it turns out it was a good thing I made it home in time to watch the end of the fourth game of the World Series. The Boston Red Sox are the 2007 World Series Champions!! It’s not entirely clear to me how I came to be a fan of the Red Sox, but I really do feel genuine fondness for the team. As a sport to watch, I like baseball very much. I became quite familiar with it in 1997 (10 years ago!) when I spent a year of high school exhange in Naples, NY (side note: I was amazed at how familiar the map was when I looked it up – I know exactly where the school was, and the street names bought back a flood of memories. I’d forgotten just how small Naples is, though). My host father was a huge baseball fan, and there wasn’t much else to do in Naples. By the end of the year I was extremely familiar with the game. I don’t think I watched any baseball when I lived in California (despite having a housemate who was a walking encyclopedia when it came to baseball statistics). However, as soon as I moved to Boston I became re-aquainted with the game. When my father came to visit me in my first year in Boston, I got tickets for a game at Fenway Park, and we enjoyed a perfect April Saturday afternoon in the bleachers. I was hooked: Fenway is an amazing ball park, full of feeling and history, and Boston is full of enthusiastic Sox fans. If there was any doubt in my devotion, it was removed with the Boston’s 2004 American League Championship and subsequent World Series Championship. Boston’s comeback in the American League Championship series, against archrivals, the New York Yankees, was truly amazing – one of those great "moments" (in this case 2 games, in particular) in sport. That they’d lost to the Yankees (in very disappointing circumstances) in the 2003 ALCS made the victory even sweeter. Watching them go onto with the World Series, and "Reverse the Curse", and being in Boston when it happened was magical (although the World Series was decidedly anticlimactic when compared to the ALCS). I suspect it has made me a member of Red Sox Nation for life.

Edited to add: it looks like I’m not the only person who has been recruited to Red Sox Nation (plus, some great photos).

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

This evening I went to see Sweeney Todd at the Colonial Theater in Boston’s theater district. I’d seen Sweeney Todd once before, when I was in high school. It was a high school production out of an all boys high school (although I think they did bring in some women from a girls school for the key female parts), and by the end of the night, the stage was swimming in blood. Needless to say, this was a much better (and much more professional) production.

Our seats were way in up in the nosebleed section, but the view to the stage was actually pretty good. It’s true that it was difficult to see the expressions on the faces of the actors, but the stage movement was perfectly clear, and I’m not sure you can ask for much more from cheap, student tickets.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the play was that the actors, as well as singing, also were playing instruments throughout (indeed, they were the musicians). I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, and it must have limited their casting call! I actually really enjoyed it – I really like seeing the musicians (I love semi-staged operas, for example).

Of course, I bought my ticket long before I knew that tonight could be the deciding game of the 2007 World Series (with the Red Sox in the running). Fortunately, they gave us a game update during intermission (1-0 Boston), and I made it home in time for the 7th innings. I’m still watching the game with interest! (I really hope Boston wins, if only so that my sleep has a chance of getting back to a normal schedule!)