Sometimes it’s a couple little power hesitations and then she’s fine. Sometimes a couple of hesitations in power lead to slowing down regardless of whether I increase the throttle or not, she just…
Just yesterday I notice an emphasis of rentability for a building across the street that has been available for many months now. There were FOR RENT signs, three, one on the door and one placed in…
It was a motorcycle’s revving beneath my windows that woke me. But it is the Moon who’s lulled me into this wakefulness. Entranced by her attentions I finally rise & look out… I find her, full. Aglow…
I’ve long pondered sharing my knowledge gained in riding a “cheap Chinese scoot” successfully and happily (going on six years now) because they get such a negative beating in the ‘rep’ department. I…
“I’ve lost the ribbon that holds my place.”
A literal statement, as I’ve just discovered the pretty little ribbon (previously) sewn into my journal is missing. It is however, as a metaphor, amusing.
(…it has *only just now* occured to me that the image on my wall is actually a symbol of my mother.)
When I was 14 I’d stroll in the door from school and every once & awhile there would be my Mom sitting on the couch with a glass of iced tea, listening to a scratchy record of some old singer who I thought sounded funny. I didn’t like the record, but I think I liked her sitting there, enjoying it.
Since my mid-twenties there has been a framed photo of Billie Holiday on my living room wall. (Tiffany Club, Los Angeles, 1951, by Bob Willoughby) Seems it only took me getting out of my teens to “get it”.
Once I was given a cd of Billie’s from a lover because she knew it was one I didn’t have. Over the years I’ve collected many. I still have the cd.
Today, at this very moment, I am burning a disk of some of my Billie Holiday mp3’s for my mom to play in the stylish new stereo she’ll be getting from dad this year for Christmas and it has *only just now* occured to me that the image on my wall is actually a symbol of my mother. (In my mind the two will be forever connected by iced tea and a scratchy record.)
Soon, when she’s done with the deeds of the day and before anyone else gets home, she’ll sit in a comfortable spot and relax while listening to a digital reproduction of that scratchy record.
ONE. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.
… “The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face were addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
(Excerpt from: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens)
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me? …why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world… ad witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth…”
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost.
“Jacob,” he said imploringly. “Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob.”
“I have none to give,” the Ghost replied.
…”At this time of the rolling year,” the spectre said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down,…”
“I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. … You will be haunted,… by Three Spirits.”
Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s had done.
“Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?” He demanded, in a faltering voice.
“It is.”
(Excerpt From: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens)
“As he threw his head back in the chair,”
“…his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.”
(excerpt from: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens)
