“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

~ Ray Bradbury

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Photograph of Ray Bradbury receiving the National Medal of Arts Award in 2004, with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, by Susan Sterner in the White House. Public domain.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along. Just do the following:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author too, so other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers.

My teasers:

“Here she was in broad daylight, searching for a dead stranger’s little toe in the bottom of her purse. But after a minute, she found it and handed it to Brenda.”

~ p. 193, I Still Dream About You, Fannie Flagg

Or tomorrow either, for that matter.

*****

This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice.

My niece posted on Facebook that for family night, they watched Bambi. She said she cried.

She didn’t say what the children did. The son is twelve and the daughter is only two, so I imagine Mom shed most of the tears.

How Dad fared, I don’t know. I remember that, as a nine-year-old, he wept into a dishtowel at the end of a non-Disney Sleeping Beauty. But that was back when I was in college. He might react differently now.

The mention of Bambi reminded me of the first time I saw it. That was 1988, a year before it was released on video. I was staying in Austin while my mother was in the hospital there. She was scheduled for radiology all afternoon, so I headed out for the movie.

This hospitalization had been unexpected, and it came at the end of two difficult years. Fifteen years before, she had made a remarkable recovery from a near-fatal heart attack, but lately her condition had deteriorated. She was unable to walk unassisted, and she had no energy for even conversation. Over the past months, she had become less and less communicative.

When at a regular appointment I told her cardiologist she had no short-term memory, he called for a phlebotomist, got a blood sugar reading of over 500, and told me to drive her to the hospital. Before we left, he explained that, because of his own failing health, he had dropped his hospital practice. One of his colleagues, Dr. M., would be in charge of her case.

Dr. M. made rounds that evening, handled the immediate problem, drug-induced diabetes, then proceeded to take Mother off all her usual meds and start anew.

I liked the doctor. Mother, however, in her foggy mental state, decided he had done away with her cardiologist. I couldn’t convince her otherwise. She spent the next two weeks being rude to Dr. M. As her mental condition improved, so did her talent for being snippy.

I spent the next two weeks apologizing for her and trying to make him understand that the person lying in that bed being snippy was not my mother.

Under other conditions, I would have thought it was funny. With diagnosis and prognosis uncertain, and Mother oblivious to everything except a doctor she suspected of kidnapping, I was miserable.

So I headed off to a matinee.

It was late August, and hot. The audience comprised a few dozen grandmothers with tots in tow, and me.

I sat near the back. The movie was beautiful, as the old Disney animations always are.

Then we got to the part about the fire. Bambi couldn’t find his mother. He called for her.

And out of the darkness came a little voice: “Where’s his mother?”

Then, from the other side of the room: “He can’t find her.”

One after another, the voices continued.

“Where is she?”

“Where did she go?”

“He wants his mother.”

That’s when I lost it.

I wanted my mother, too.

My story had a happier ending. Under the new regime, Mother improved. She returned home. A month later, she announced she would take over the kitchen again.

Six months later, I finally got her to understand that Dr. M. wasn’t a kidnapper. I also told her she’d been a stinker. We had a good laugh about it.

About Bambi, I don’t laugh. I remember the fawn looking for his mother, and the voices of children, who understood better than anyone else what the movie is about.

Screenshot from Bambi, by Walt Disney (Original Trailer (1942)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“[___] led the way on a 250-177 vote to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing limits on mercury pollution from cement factories. Supporters said the new rules would send American jobs overseas, where air quality standards are more lax or non-existent.”

I’ve omitted the first word. Who led the way isn’t of concern at the moment. This isn’t a political blog, and politics isn’t the issue.

Mercury causes nerve damage.

That’s the issue.

It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact.

It’s science.

“The EPA estimates that one in six women of childbearing age has enough mercury in her bloodstream to put her child at risk for health problems.” (“Why Mercury Is a Problem,” link below; also cited in other of the articles linked below.)

That has is present tense. With continuing exposure, the problem will get worse.

Brain damage, lower IQs, learning disabilities; numbness and mobility problems; contaminated land, water, air; contaminated food supply.

That’s it for tonight.

I don’t have what it takes to continue with this, much less to write the post I’d planned.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Related Articles

• Report Says Mercury Pollution is Health Threat (doyourpart.com)
• New Report Details 285 Lbs of Annual Mercury Pollution from New Jersey Power Plants (gloucestercitynews.net)
• NY Cement Factory Singled Out as Source of Mercury Pollution (news.change.org)
• EPA Limits Mercury Limits in Gold Mining Operations (environmentalleader.com)
• Of the 12 largest emitters of mercury air pollution among U.S. gold mines, 8 are in Nevada (yubanet.com)
• Texas Rep. Moves to Weaken Standards on Mercury Emissions (health.change.org)
• Natalie Portman Enlists The Help Of Scientists To Limit Mercury Pollution (ecorazzi.com)
• As Ravena study finds mercury in cement plant neighbors, GOP moves to block cement plant mercury limits (timesunion.com)
• Does Congress really want to encourage mercury pollution? (switchboard.nrdc.org)
• Why Mercury is a Problem (sierraclub.typepad.com)

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

~ Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”

I was poised to write a meditation on best-laid schemes going agley, and why Ogden Nash’s verse disappeared from the Valentine’s Day post, when two lines of Burn’s “To a Mouse” caught my eye and insisted on a comment.

Wikipedia, my source for the lines quoted above, displays parallel versions of the poem, Burns’ original on the left and the “standard English translation” on the right.

In stanza one, the poet addresses the mouse whose nest he has plowed  up, saying it needn’t run from him. The original reads thus:

Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!

The corresponding lines translated into standard English read this way:

You need not start away so hasty
With argumentative chatter!

That is just sad.

I checked the thesaurus for bickering. Alternatives include quarreling, fussing, quibbling, squabbling, and sassing.

Any one of those, I contend, would be superior to argumentative as an adjective describing chatter.

You need not start away so hasty
With quibbling chatter.

Quibbling’s near alliteration both mirrors that of the original (bickering brattle) and scans better.

I don’t know who came up with argumentative, but the scoundrel had a tin ear.

Now that matters of poetry have been taken care of, I turn to the reason the mouse is here at all–the idea that plans can fall through, and one of mine did, but after the fact.

On Valentine’s Day, I posted a three-line verse by Ogden Nash. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, the little word copyright floated through my head. And then the term fair use, and a question as to when Nash died, and then words such as infringement and cease and desist. And what are the rules about using contemporary poems in their entirety, and what is the status of this blog regarding fair use?

I’ve been hypersensitive about copyright since my library days. I went to conferences and heard stories about a certain mammoth entity that sent cease-and-desist letters to mothers who showed videos at five-year-olds’ birthday parties. The zinger was that if my school district ever received such a letter, it would be addressed to me.

I didn’t want one.

But instead of panicking at my poetic predicament, I decided my best course would be to remove the Nash poem pending the time I clear the cobwebs and get all the issues straight in my head. I used to know copyright for educators. The one thing this blog is not is educational.

I don’t think Ogden Nash would mind my using his little verse. I believe he would pronounce it just dandy that I put him on the web. Furthermore, I doubt his publisher or his estate or anyone else would come after me, my pockets being so shallow they’re almost dried up.

But there’s a moral issue. It’s Ogden Nash’s poem, and if I’m not supposed to use it, I’m not supposed to use it.

I wouldn’t want anyone using my words without permission either.

So I took the poem off and replaced it with one by Sir Philip Sidney, who has been dead for several hundred years, and about whom there should be no question.

Hurrah for the public domain.

What I really wanted to do, however, was to replace Nash with a verse by Robert Herrick: “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” I love that poem.

Somehow, though, it didn’t seem quite the thing for Valentine’s Day.

The day after Valentine’s, pushed to the brink by those lovely paintings, I cratered. That’s how that happened.

Thirty-two years ago–wow!–I complained to my seniors that when they walked out the door of the classroom, they left literature behind. I said they should take it with them, think about it, talk about it.

I must have been feeling very sorry for myself that day.

Anyway, the girls spoke up and said they did talk about what they’d read. Just the other day, in fact, while they were in the locker room, getting dressed after P.E., they had told the freshman girls about “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…

“Why,” I said, “did you tell the freshmen about that one?”

Another scheme gone agley.

The Class of ’79. That’s what my wow was about. That was thirty-two years ago.

Those kids are getting old.

They’re almost as old as I am.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…

Thank you, Andrew Marvell.

Measured against the deserts of vast eternity, their transgression seems small.

Carpe diem.

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Image of field mouse by jason bolonski, via flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

My true-love hath  my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given:
I hold his dear and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a better bargain driven.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one:
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
He loves my heart for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight;
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true love hath my heart and I have his.

~ Sir Philip Sidney

Image by Faith Goble via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

The photograph of Emily Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript displayed in yesterday’s post was illegible, so I offer a transcription.

*****

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!