While I'm reading...

Based in part on my recent blog poll, I'm playing with this post while adding a few "monetize" things.  I'm not sure I'm keeping them but the Amazon links may prove useful to readers who want to preview or browse some of the books I recommend.  In the interests of full disclosure, I will of course be paid for referrals although I doubt that it's going to amount to much.  I will undoubtedly donate and monies to a literacy charity or a library.  I'll be sure to update all my readers.  The Amazon Associates process is easy.  There is a good selection of widgets.  Amazon Associates puts a right side bar beside my text editor which makes it easy to select links and images.  All the links in this article are to Amazon.

While I'm reading, I often sip a cup of coffee.  I drink a lot of coffee, 4-6 cups every day.  Coffee, java, a cup of Joe... should be very hot, and strong, and generally black... although a half scoop of Bluebell Homemade Vanilla in the cup is delish.   I'm enjoying my Keurig coffeemaker although my favorite K-Cup is the one I make with my Gevalia coffees, especially Kona and La Procope.  My favorite pre-prepped K-cups are:   Timothy's Nicaraguan Fair Trade Extra Bold and Green Mountain's Kona blend.  I'm not usually much on flavored coffees but I just adore
Green Mountain's Wild Moutain Blueberry.
While I'm reading, I often grab an apple and call it lunch.

While I'm reading, I often listen to music... instrumental only, lyrics are words and distract... not too loud.  I like lots of the New Age stuff ( Yanni is a particular favorite) as well as Classical and sometimes Jazz.  The links in this article are so far are text links to Amazon but I could also do image links like this.   Which may be a bit in your face.

While I'm reading, I often have a hand buried in Mandy's lush fur.

Do you find the scroll slideshow of books distracting?
I'm not sure the blue background works.
Is a monetized blog offensive?

Memorial Day: Patriotic Poetry

One of my favorite things is my church's fifth-Sunday sing-song at evening worship.  Last night we sang several patriotic songs at the request of DAR member and super-patriot Jenny F.  I remember singing some of these songs at church and school as a child.  Do children still learn patriotic songs in school?  I hope so for they are a part of our history and our heritage.  The songs we sing together affirm and create community. 

At least two of these patriotic songs were written by women.  Since I am always interested in the ways in which women made their voices heard at a time when they were denied equal access to public discourse, today's blog comments on these women and their patriotic songs and concludes with a poem I wrote.

1. Julia Ward Howe:  The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which as a child of the South I was not permitted to sing (as Uncle Shelby Calahan said, "we will not so dishonor the memory" of our ancestors who died in the War between the States) until I left home for college.  {I thought a hundred years and four or five generations was long enough to carry a grudge.}   Julia and her husband, Sam Howe, were abolitionists and during the war worked on the U.S. Sanitary Commission which was concerned with reforming unsanitary conditions in the Union camps and hospitals--disease, dysentery, typhoid, malaria killed two men for every one killed in battle.  (Other notable women of the Sanitary Commission include Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix.) The Howes' work with the commission was recognized by President Lincoln and in 1862 he invited them to the White House.   In Washington, Pastor James Freeman Clarke who had read some of Julia's poetry asked her to write a new song for the war to replace John Brown's Body.   Howe's account of inspiration while writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic:  I awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment, found that the wished-for-lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately....  I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling as if something very important had just happened to me."  The poem, published in the February 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly, made Julia Howe an instant celebrity.  I love this song because it clearly articulates the basis of social justice in Christ and in the "glory" of God.  "Our God is marching on."
2. Katherine Lee Bates:   American the Beautiful  was written in 1893, published in 1895 in The Congreationalist, and Bates revised the words in 1904 and again in 1913.   Before being published with the music Materna written by Samuel A. Ward in 1910, it was sung to other tunes, notably Auld Lang Syne.  Was Samuel Ward related to Julia Ward Howe?  I don't know.  As Michael T. said last night the original poem was a bit different:

O beautiful for halcyon skies,  
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!            
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through
wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!


O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice,
for man's avail
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!


O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

Finally, a poem I began on the morning of  11 September 2001 shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  I finished it several months later on Memorial Day 2002.  The poem is a riff on America the Beautiful or perhaps a dialog with Katherine Lee Bates.

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies...
In a world with too little room
on this Tuesday morning,
death hurtled through the clouds.
...for amber waves of grain...
While we dwelt in peace and plenty,
a hate harvest ripened,
an explosion of horror, watched.
...mountain majesty... fruited plain...
Dreadful September day
when innocence crumbled to ruin
and fear took us hostage.


America, America...
Pilgrims fleeing persecution,
patriots overthrowing tyranny
stood once where we now stand,
...sheltered by God-shed grace...
cried "Freedom;" paid the price.
More than once the price paid in blood;
common man sought uncommon good,
beyond the shining seas
for brotherhood does not
in isolation live.
Costly, too high, too dear—but, still—
America, America...
We are resolved; tears dim
our eyes, not our vision.
Still, alabaster cities gleam.

Lightnin' Strike

1972-1973.  Astrodome.  Cheap seats, just left of center field.  During mid-week Astros games, five bucks got us into the game and bought Cokes and hotdogs for supper, maybe popcorn or candy if there was a promotion like "ladies' night" or two-for-one dogs.  Some nights we took home change. We lived in Smith Square and walked to the game--didn't even have to pay parking. 
The size of the crowd in that section varied from every seat filled to a dozen or so regulars.  Sometimes there were Little League teams, fresh faced kids from the suburbs of Sharpstown and Westbury.  Some nights brought the player and band parents from Yates or Worthing High Schools.  Men just back from working the off-shore rigs and contruction workers crowded in on nights when beer was cheap. On those nights it could get a bit rough but by and large it was a congenial crowd--we all loved the game.

When we were lucky and the section wasn't too crowded, a black man (Negro had just passed from polite use, and Afro-American had yet to be introduced) in a slouch hat and somewhat garish jacket sat with a guitar.  The guitar was a thing of beauty.
Before the game and during lulls in the action, he played 12-bar blues with licks and progressions, and frequently a sustained bass.  Sometimes he sang or kinda hummed.  It was unlike any music I had ever heard and I loved it. 
Sometimes  he seemed to be just fooling around, free and loose.  Sometimes I thought he was composing a new song.  Come the 7th inning, he always had a mini-concert which I thought would have been well worth a cover charge that was more than double what the grad student with the working wife had budgeted for the evening.  Baseball and blues.  It just doesn't get any better.
One night, flush with both gratitude and a little cash, DMP offered to buy him a hotdog and Coke and he said, "Make it a beer."  My tee-totaling, church of Christer paused for a beat (during which the man did some pretty fancy drumming on the guitar case) and then said, "You got it." 
When we asked his name, he said, "My mamma named me Sam; most folks calls me Lightnin." Although we didn't know it at the time we had met Houston blues legend, Lightnin' Hopkins.

We spent the next few years with the U.S. Army in Maryland and when we came back to Houston rarely attended Astros games except with friends.  We seldom sat in the cheap seats, having grown prosperous and less rich.
I did continue to see Sam out and about, now and then.  At Herman Park Zoo a couple of times.  Very often at DMP's slow-pitch softball games for church or work teams when they played week night games at parks in the UH or TSU neighborhoods.  He'd be sitting at the top of the bleachers if there were any--on a picnic bench or railing or car bumper otherwise--with his guitar.  The man either loved a ball game or just liked to be playing a crowd.  I ran into him at a bus stop now and then.

The last couple of times I saw him was early in the 1980s.  He looked unwell. He was playing the blues in hospital lobbies at the Texas Medical Center. There is no unacknowledged pain in the blues; nonetheless there is something joyous and hopeful in that music.

 Listen to Lightnin' Hopkins on youtube.com
I chose this rendition of Cotton because I like the photos and because the songs I remember best were those that evoked my childhood growing up on the farm.  It was common ground.  "I never felt more like singin' the blues."
Yesterday's Houston Chronicle had an article about a proposed marker in honor of Lightnin' Hopkins on Dowling Street near the popular club which charged a cover to hear my friend play.  Sam was quite famous and not the poor old man I thought him to be, one of my "angels unaware."