After the shuttle’s dramatic overflight of our area this past Tuesday morning on its way to the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport, I couldn’t help thinking of this poem by Holmes, written when the U.S.S. Constitution was scheduled to be destroyed after years of exemplary service. 

Wikipedia:
Built in an era when a wooden ship had an expected service life of ten to fifteen years, Constitution was thirty-one years old in 1828. The commandant of the Charlestown Navy Yard, Charles Morris, estimated a repair cost of over $157,000 for Constitution. On 14 September 1830, an article appeared in the Boston Advertiser that erroneously claimed the Navy intended to scrap Constitution. Two days later, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem “Old Ironsides” was published in the same paper and later all over the country, igniting public indignation and inciting efforts to save “Old Ironsides” from the scrap yard. She began a leisurely repair period. 

On 24 June 1833 Constitution entered drydock and remained there until 21 June 1834 when she was returned to service.
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OLD IRONSIDES

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

September 16, 1830

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered bulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

When Discovery and its transport 747 glided past me that morning, I was struck how it, like the Constitution, was battered and charred by its service. Indeed, the shuttle Enterprise that Discovery replaced was originally named Constitution. The contrast between the initial plan to scrap Constitution and the warm and welcoming reception and preservation of Discovery was a striking one in my mind. Both vessels will be preserved for posterity: both are proud examples of American resolve, ingenuity and courage. Hence, my poem:

These are from Margaret Atwood. I am so crazy about her work and her personality as I understand it, that, were I not married, I would run away with her if she asked me. The likelihood of that is, admittedly, very low. DV

Enough distractions. Here are Marvelous Margaret’s Rules for Writing:

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. Who else uses the word “aeroplane” these days? Reason enough to be crazy about this lady.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type. I’ll have to start carrying a file. And pencils.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do. Uh…I dunno about writing on my arm with a pencil. Ouch. I can get a lot on a 3″ x 5″ card.

4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick. I had a hard disk fail last year. Fortunately I had most everything backed up on the cloud. A memory stick or two is just prudent.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. I have a series of yoga exercises I do for my back twice a day. Also a nice period of meditation at the same time. Ommmmm…

6 Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B. Yeah, sometimes I write something that bores me stiff. That’s what the “delete” key is for.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine. There’s no whining in writing. There is crying, however.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. Yep, you know where all the bodies are buried. So your mystery is not a mystery to you.

9 Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. Always possible to change everything. Throw it all out and start over again. It’s your choice.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book. I keep thinking of the Grail Light in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Whatever works for you. I visualize Meryl Streep as the female lead in the film version of my novel.

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This post is the eulogy my wife Becky wrote and delivered at the funeral yesterday for Florence Lion. You might not have known Florence, but I suspect that there is a Florence somewhere in your experience who suffered heartache during her life but kept giving and kept smiling.

Here’s a picture I took of a tree with the first leaves on it a couple of weeks ago. The green is so light it looks almost golden and of course this color does not last long as the leaves turn a darker green. I was reminded of a Robert Frost poem:

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. 

Beth Markley is a FB friend who lives half a world away in Japan. She posts the most interesting links, observations and pictures, all reminders of how this electronic media brings the world to us.

Beth’s daughter, Rachel, is at the University of Chicago, studyi ng to be an actuary. She’s taking calculus as a freshman and likes languages, having studied Serbian, Japanese and Latin (six years). She crochets, spins her own yarn and won a grant to ‘yarnbomb’ the campus with yarn made objects. One of her talents is making crochet animals.

Her proud mama adds, “I find her to be a delightful person.” 🙂

By going to the site below and clicking “like,” people can support her desire to learn to be in the circus.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150662641548225 &
set=o.185063821542169&type=1&theater

To which mom adds, “I know, right?”

It’s good to be back in the glass-enclosed brain center of the Biscuit City studios. There has been a little renovation work going on here while we were on spring break this past week. The old carpet is gone, although the new one is not in yet, and the chair where I sit writing this has a new vinyl pad under it to keep from scraping the hardwood floors. Unfortunately, the studio was built by the lowest bidder, which means that the floors aren’t exactly level. I sit down in the chair and it goes rolling back to the side wall. Not exactly what I had planned, but a nice trip anyhow.

My brother Ron is a wonderful renovator and repair man (even fixes acoustic guitars), and he says that projects have puppies. By this he means that you start out fixing one thing which causes something else to break or not work correctly so that you’re then working on two puppies from the original case. Or a project has puppies by not going as you expected it to.

I started a project this weekend using landscape timbers for edging the front of our front azalea bed. I had had experience last year with building some raised beds for a  couple of hydrangeas so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to run 40 or so feet of the timbers, one atop another to form a wall,  across the front of the bed.

Wrong again. The problem is that with the raised bed I was using about six-foot lengths of the lumber. The present project uses eight-foot lengths which have an unfortunate tendency to curl, twist and bend when placed in some semblance of a wall. I can pry and persuade and force them into place but that’s a whole lot more work than I thought it would be. The thought project puppy. Now there’s an app we can all do without!

Right now my “retaining wall” looks like strands of spaghetti at the end with the timbers going every which way. I’ll take a picture for illustrative purposes.  But I’ll get them into line with a combination of foot-long pieces of rebar, a bunch of six-inch lag screws, a long pry bar, some muscle (such as it is), most likely some personal injury (I manage to whang myself with the pry bar at least once during such proceedings–look for the mark on my forehead–ouch!), American ingenuity and some German persistence courtesy of my ancestors. Or, as my mother used to say, “Persistence or stupidity: I don’t know which it is with you.”

Here are the warped ties, in place but warped! Twisted! Misshapen!

And a couple of shots of completed sections where the timbers have been “persuaded” into place.