Well that was awkward. I recently experienced an impromptu live reading from my poetry collection, A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue. Even though I was not the reader, hearing my words read aloud to a group of strangers felt a bit weird at first, but it wasn’t all bad.
A good friend of mine periodically throws Sunday afternoon dinner parties at his home for no reason other than to celebrate food and fellowship among his friends and family. These gatherings are wonderful, almost therapeutic. Invitees often bring beverages, salads, side dishes, and desserts to share with everyone and the thirty or forty people who show up for these gatherings generally leave stuffed but happy. I seldom know more than a few people there, but that never seems to matter. There is always much laughter, no arguments started, no judgments passed, and everyone pretty much just wants to enjoy one another’s company.
And so it was on this cold Sunday in February when my wife Karen and I found ourselves seated around our friend Frank’s dining room table with a number of people, all but one of whom we had never met before, eating copious amounts of fantastic homemade food and talking about everything under the sun. After everyone had eaten and had settled into socializing, an attractive, dark haired stranger came into from another room and sat with me just long enough to extract the details behind the spinach mandarin salad I had brought. It’s a sought-after recipe that a work associate introduced to me twenty years ago and I was only too happy to pass it on to her.
Moments later, our host stepped in to see how everyone was doing, held up his copy of my book for everyone to see, talked it up for a quick minute, and then pointed to me adding, “…and this is the author; you should talk to him about it!” With that, Frank tossed the book onto the table and went off to visit several other tables that had been strategically set up throughout the first floor of his home to accommodate everybody. A flurry of questions ensued as people began passing my book around the table. What had I written? How did I write it? Why did I write it? I did my best to satisfy their curiosity.
An older gentleman, who had been sitting at one end of the table, began leafing through the book as our Q&A session continued. During a brief lull in the conversation, he held up one finger for attention and asked, “Michael, would it be alright if I read one of your poems to everyone?” Nobody had ever asked me this before.
“Of course,” I replied, having thought of no reason to object. And with that, the gentleman read his selection.
“May 28,” he began. I should point out that all but one of the poems have no titles, but are simply marked with a day of the year. “Sometimes I gently trace the contours of your lips with one finger,” he began. The entire table had fallen silent, hanging on every word. I tensed up when he got to the part about “…memorizing every aspect of your delightful mouth…” and prayed silently that no one would laugh out loud at my words. But when the reading had concluded, nobody was laughing. There was just this stillness, as if the words were still landing after having been read aloud.
I glanced over at my dear reader as he looked up from the book, drew a prolonged breath, and then exhaled slowly with lips pursed and eyebrows arched skyward, as if he had just set down something heavy. One of the ladies fanned herself as another uttered one word, “Wow.”
“That bad, eh?” I offered.
“No!”
“Not at all!” The responses came in a flurry.
“There’s just… no mistaking the feeling behind it.” I took that as a compliment as the conversation rolled along. A delightful lady who had joined our table just prior to our spontaneous poetry reading shared with me her own writing aspirations. I think the book idea she’s working on would be a hoot to read and I hope she sees it through to fruition.
An hour or so later, as my wife and I were preparing to depart, I went looking for our host, to bid him goodbye and thank him for his hospitality. “Hey, Frank,” I called out upon finding him, “you should have seen it. This one guy started reading my book out loud and…”
Frank stopped me in midstream. “I saw the whole thing,” he said with a knowing grin. “I was watching you guys from the hallway.” I guess it’s not easy to scoop my friend, especially in his own house.
I love gatherings like this because they remind me of the extended family gatherings of my youth. The attention that my book and I got, thanks to my friend, was merely icing on the cake, but the love, warmth, and camaraderie — to say nothing of all that fabulous food and drink — that was the cake!
The whole thing began as a game. From 2018 through 2020, I had been amusing myself by creating motivational posts across several social media platforms, just to see if I could keep it going. By the end of 2020, though, that game had gotten old. I enjoyed the mental stimulation that the creative exercise provides, but ironically, I discovered that I had been losing my motivation to write motivational blurbs. After all, there are only so many ways to convey the same principles. At some point, a person either gets it or they don’t. But I had no desire to stop creating. All I needed was a new challenge.
My final choice came down to bad jokes or love poems and I chose the latter because I wasn’t sure whether I could come up with an original bad joke a day for a year. Love, on the other hand, has always been a favorite subject of mine and even though I didn’t fancy myself a poet, I was pretty sure I could deliver amorous free verse (short prose) poetry on a daily basis. And that’s exactly what I did. Every day from New Year’s Day through New Year’s Eve of 2021, I posted a different free verse love poem, never more than I could fit onto a square Instagram image. Nobody was ever going to equate me with William Shakespeare, but some of my followers enjoyed the ride and I had fun in the process.
While not every detail I wrote was autobiographical, the feelings behind them were genuine. Admittedly, that took some doing. Night after night, I reached back into every loving relationship I’d ever had and harvested all the positive physical and emotional sensations I could. Fortunately, I have a strong sense of recall so going back forty years or more wasn’t as difficult as one might think. And I only took the positive parts and none of the heartbreak, anger, or frustration.
About halfway through, I began to entertain thoughts of binding the poems into a book, after they had all been written, and self-publishing my year-long collection of romantic bits. And why not, I reasoned, it should be easy once all the poems had been written. Looking back now, I want to shout at that guy, “Oh, you foolish man, you!” I had grossly underestimated the task at hand. By a lot.
Seriously, I thought I’d have the darned book out within a year. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen, I made arrangements to steal away to a hotel up in Wisconsin for a few days to assess the job at hand and begin giving my proposed book some structure (see My Self-Imposed Seclusion). This was where I realized just what I had gotten myself into. First off, not all of my material was suitable for publication. It’s one thing to fire off a few lines of affection and post them on social media, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to arrange them into a book that people want to pay for. And the key word is arrange. Besides the edits, rewrites, and outright replacements that surely lay ahead. None of these poems — 365 of them — had been released in any kind of logical order. Holy cow! Well, at least I’d had the foresight to bring some good wine along.
Imagine looking at 365 randomly written poems that had to be sorted out somehow. They had a common theme, but there had been no clear flow between them, no story to be told. None of them even had titles. I began looking at them individually, not with the intent of editing but just to see if I could at least place them into buckets.
“That’s it, buckets!” I exclaimed aloud, startling myself, to say nothing of whoever may have been in the neighboring rooms at the time. But I had no time to lose. I went back to the beginning of the pile and began placing each raw, unedited poem into one of four imaginary buckets, each representing a three-month quarter. The first quarter represented beginnings: meeting someone, being attracted to someone, becoming smitten with someone, you know, the early stages of love, in whatever form it might take. The second quarter dealt more with earthy, physical affection. Advancement, if you will, but still at a gut level. The third bucket was for the poems that attempted to see past mere physical affection. And the last bunch were the ones reaching for fruition, for something more permanent than the earlier pieces.
Lacking titles, I assigned each poem to a day of the year. Everything was still tentative at this point, but at last I had a loose sense of logic regarding how these poems would be presented in book form. I even added a placeholder for a 366th poem, not yet written, that would be devoted to February 29, the Leap Day.
Three days later, I thought I knew what I was doing. I left my Wisconsin hideaway with a logical structure for the book and one month out of the twelve drafted. As it turns out, I would still be making adjustments to my plan for two more years. That’s a very important strategic principle, by the way. When things don’t go the way you thought they would, as long as you’re sure of the goal you set, you make changes to the plan, not the goal.
From the beginning, my intent had been to self-publish this book, mainly because so many of the poems, or raw versions of them, had been placed in public view on social media platforms. Self-publishing gives the author a lot of control over all aspects of the book, but with that control comes responsibility — and quite a bit of work. The final manuscript had to be delivered as a 100% print-ready file meeting a lengthy list of technical, artistic, and legal requirements, enough to make a newcomer’s head spin. And every little change, whether to the content, the layout, or even from one file type to another, was an opportunity for something else to go wrong.
The first full draft of the book, including all the front and back matter, was completed sometime during the second half of 2024. Knowing I am my own worst proofreader, I asked my wife, who had worked as a public relations writer and editor in a past life, to have at my manuscript and give me her suggested edits. This she did no fewer than five times, including the proof copy, finding things that had passed before my eyes unnoticed. Besides the usual typos and grammatical glitches, Karen drew my attention to passages that despite being correct as written, I was able to make better. This is what a good editor does.
The most stressful part, for me, was the actual publishing. Despite having launched a half-dozen corporate websites, developed and contributed to various blogs, and even executed a few million-dollar direct-marketing campaigns during my professional career, I was as nervous as a kid on his first date putting out this little poetry book. There were so many choices to be made and questions to be answered, each a good bit of research. Then came the cover art, the marketing plan, and so forth. By the time I got to it, making the final click that would set everything in motion, was like pulling the trigger on a 10-gauge shotgun.
And then it’s over. A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue, available in paperback and ebook editions, was officially published on December 17, 2024. The copyright registration process, a task in itself, is underway, as are some basic marketing activities, but the book is done. It feels so good to say, “I did it,” but there is also a letdown from realizing that the job is finished. Almost 30 years ago, when I finished my first full-color product catalog project, I told the head of the agency that had handled the project that I was both glad and sorry to be done with it. “Yeah,” she replied, “it’s kind of like the postpartum period.” Being a guy, I can’t know firsthand what giving birth is like, but my sense of things is that she was correct.
Sometimes you find the holiday spirit and sometimes the holiday spirit finds you!
I had to be out of my mind, going to the evil empire (aka Walmart) the day before Thanksgiving, but I needed a few staple items to complete my contribution to the small feast being hosted by my sister. The store was a fifteen-minute drive from my home, not counting the pre-holiday afternoon traffic, and my list was a short one. How bad could it be?
AI image generated by ImageFX with inputs from Michael G. D’Aversa
Yeah, it could be pretty bad. Still, not everything was as bad as it should have been, or even as bad as it usually is. For example. the afternoon traffic in my hometown of 45,000 or so people begins to get slow and heavy after 2:00 PM, just about the time I was heading out, but my fifteen-minute drive took… fifteen minutes, if that much. The traffic was there, but it was moving smoothly, the traffic lights all seemed to be in my favor as I rolled along, and everything just seemed to flow.
As I turned in to the immense Walmart parking lot, I saw exactly what I expected to see, namely cars everywhere and drivers behaving badly. After observing a near-accident between two vehicles vying for the same few square feet of intersection at the same time, I turned into my usual lane and saw nothing ahead of me, except for a white SUV backing out of its space, thus providing me with the only parking spot to be found on that drive lane. I smiled in disbelief and pulled into my freshly vacated space. Assuming that there might be a shortage of shopping carts inside, I selected a usable cart with four fully functioning wheels from a nearby corral and walked on into the store, oddly enough, still smiling.
To put it nicely, the store was filled with humanity. Last-minute shoppers, like me, filled every aisle. They competed with numerous employees pushing pick carts and pulling orders. Nobody seemed to be smiling. I realized that I was still smiling, partly because I was only there to grab a few missing staples, but also because I was just enjoying my afternoon, despite being surrounded by negativity, frustration, resignation, and anger. Trust me, you could see it on their faces.
Some of them looked positively insulted to be there — or rather, that anybody else had the nerve to be there when they were trying to get their all-important shopping done. Some looked alarmed at the prices. Most looked rushed. I came across one lady carefully looking over a rack of almost-expired baked goods, hoping against hope to find something special with which to grace her holiday table. I was moved by the sight. I saw one most interesting couple, a determined and angry husband grabbing this and that item from the shelves while his wife followed a good couple of yards behind him, her face filled with resignation. I smiled at her, but she didn’t even see me.
In the midst of it all, one person did see me. A middle-aged employee, apparently of South Asian origin, brought her order picking cart to a sudden halt in order to avoid blocking me as I came around a blind corner with my shopping cart. She lowered her head, probably expecting me to be scowling at her for almost getting in my way, but she glanced up just in time see me nod and smile at her. The employee’s eyes brightened and she smiled back at me as we each continued along our intended path.
Surely the worst was yet to come. Wouldn’t you think so? But as interesting as my visit had been so far, this next part seems almost surreal in hindsight.
As I emerged from the shopping aisles and made my way toward the checkout lanes, much to my amazement, there was no queue! That is, the waiting lane, lined with all manner of candy bars and other impulse items, had nobody standing in it. Up at the front, where there is usually an employee directing each shopper to the next available self-checkout station, stood nobody. I walked right into the checkout area and, not being much for doing self-checkout if I can help it, I looked over and spotted a human-staffed checkout lane about to be vacated and completely open. On a Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving, with so many people crowding each and every aisle behind me? What are the odds!
AI image generated by ImageFX with inputs from Michael G. D’Aversa
The lane I had chosen was being manned by a thin, elderly gentleman with pure white hair and a ruddy complexion made more apparent by the red elf’s cap he was wearing. He looked up and smiled at me as I approached, seeming genuinely glad to be there waiting for me. Again, what are the odds? I returned his smile as I arrived at his station. “Good afternoon,” I said to the man as I began to empty my cart.
“Yes, it is a good afternoon,” he replied. At this point, I almost spun out of my shoes to look at him and I began to seriously wonder if there was a hidden camera somewhere. But no, the gaunt old gent proceeded to check me out without incident.
A rather dour-looking individual with a very full shopping cart had pulled in behind me, almost but not quite patiently waiting his turn as he inched ever closer into my personal space. I paid the poor soul no heed, as I had been thoroughly occupied enjoying my interaction with my cheerful checkout clerk, who then announced my total, processed my electronic payment, and cheerfully handed me my receipt. We eagerly bade each other a good afternoon and a happy Thanksgiving as I loaded my cart and headed out.
I tell you, nothing went as expected. As I approached the store exit, receipt in hand, the security specialist looked at me from a slight distance, smiled and waved me on toward the door. I looked at her again as I drew closer, wanting to give her a second chance to verify my purchases, but again she waved me on calling out, “You have a nice afternoon!” Wow.
Photo by Michael G. D’Aversa
And so it went. My drive home was as uneventful as my drive out, our Thanksgiving meal went off without a hitch, and the holiday season is now underway. And through it all, I keep thinking about that little old man and the oh-so-pleasant exchange we’d shared amidst the chaos. The whole thing seemed planned somehow.
Most years, especially since I have grown older, I struggle to get into the holiday spirit, often finding it just in time for Christmas Day. But not this year. For me, the magic started in the most unlikely of places. I hope the magic finds you, too.
I finally decided I’d had enough. After having spent months working with my life story coach to free up my suppressed creativity, I found myself spending less time than ever in pursuit of my creative endeavors. After having spent all of 2019 and 2020 creating daily motivational slide images and then devoting 2021 to creating 365 slide images, one per day, dedicated to the subject of love… nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was still my professional work, my day job, which is steeped heavily in business and marketing communications. There was also the occasional poetic slide published on social media — less than one per month — and the occasional (read: even more seldom) blog post here on MGD Time, but none of this could ever pass for forward progress, not after the things I’d already accomplished.
My excuse? Life. I work 35 miles from home, fighting traffic both ways. I’m tired when I get home at the end of the day. My wife, who suffered a debilitating injury a year ago, needs my help with common household chores. So I help, during the week and on weekends. This all sounds good, doesn’t it? But it’s bullshit. It’s not about time but priorities and when your actions do not serve your priorities, stress ensues — self-instigated stress, but stress nonetheless. There is no such thing as a writer who doesn’t write. Understanding that I had caused the problem, this began to bother me greatly. I needed to take massive, corrective action and fast. In other words, I needed a hard reset of sorts.
The Plan I had a bit of unused vacation time left at work, which would be lost if not taken soon. After consulting with my wife, I arranged to take the second week of October off and then use a portion of that week for a solitary, off-site writing retreat. Knowing full well that if I tried to do this at home, I would end up doing chores and then beating myself up for not following my own priorities, I began looking for affordable accommodations a safe distance from home, friends, and heavily populated areas. I set my sights on south central Wisconsin and soon found a place that met nearly all of my criteria.
I have ridden my motorcycle past the Round Barn Lodge, located in Spring Green, numerous times on my way home from other destinations over the past years. With its bright red buildings, the place caught my eye every time, yet I had no idea what the place was, nor did I really care until I began looking for rural accommodations with moderate rates and high-speed internet. As had been the case while riding by in real life, the Round Barn Lodge stood out like a sore thumb in my online search. Well-reviewed, fairly priced, and ideally situated, the lodge also offered a decent swimming pool, rooms with king-size beds, ample working space, and picturesque surroundings. Surely this must be the place, I thought to myself. After trading a few emails with their general manager, I booked her favorite room, a deluxe lodge-themed king room, facing away from the road and located on the second floor at the farthest end of the hall.
The Execution On Wednesday, October 12, I left my home in Plainfield under less-than-ideal conditions and things deteriorated from there. A frontal passage had been moving from the southwest toward the northeast and if I was going to reach my destination as planned, I would be driving through what appeared on the radar as a near-vertical line of red. Light drizzle gave way to moderate rain. Moderate rain gave way to heavy rain. The low point of my trip occurred near the Illinois/Wisconsin border, where my phone began chirping an alert from NWS of a tornado warning in my area. In all candor, the rain had already lightened up as the warning alert sounded, but just to be safe, I pulled off at the Wisconsin Welcome Center at Beloit and checked the radar. Sure enough, I had driven up behind the brunt of the storm, which was already east of my location. So it shouldn’t be a total loss, I made some small talk with someone at the tourism information desk, who turned out to be an active writer. She proceeded to hand over numerous publications that she thought I might find useful. I was grateful and we were both grinning ear-to-ear as we bade each other farewell.
As I continued north, moderate rain gave way to drizzle and before long, gray clouds gave way to beautiful blue skies. My first scheduled stop was just a few miles northeast of my final destination. My wife and I first began visiting Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac back in the mid-to-late 1980s. The late Bob Wollersheim was still living at the time and as I remember it, the main entrance to the winery was the arched doorway of what is now the entrance to their bistro. There was no beautiful, winding walkway back then as there is now. In fact, if I remember right, the parking lot hadn’t even been paved yet. But, oh, we adored this place and every weekend trip we took to that area included a stop at the winery.
Now celebrating its 50th year of operation, the Wollersheim complex includes not only a winery and vineyard but also a distillery — and a pretty good one at that. Me, I came for the wine and left with a half-case of my favorite selections, some of which I would drink during my self-imposed retreat.
The Round Barn Lodge turned out to be exactly what I had been looking for. As far as lodging goes, this place is a little unique. It’s situated on the edge of town, not that the town is all that big. It’s eco-friendly, as its field of solar panels indicates. The staff is helpful as well as personable. And if my room was any indication, the accommodations are comfortable, though not luxurious, and as clean as they come for an inn of this class. As soon as I checked in and unloaded my car, I knew I was going to do just fine there.
Rather than go out to eat on my first night, I opted to visit a local market, where I picked up some locally-made cheese, a box of crackers upon which to put the cheese, and some almond biscotti to enjoy for breakfast on mornings when I didn’t go out. Then I settled in and began to do what I had come to do.
The Work I spent all of 2021 producing daily free verse love poems for social media, 365 of them in all, published once daily using the hashtag #365daysoflove. At some point, I had in mind that I would publish a bound hardcopy version of the series. Unfortunately, I had produced the poems in no particular order — I just wrote them as they came to me — and it hadn’t occurred to me to somehow arrange them into a series as I wrote each piece. So arranging the series became my first hurdle, one that I had started months ago but never finished, until around 11 PM that first night. I went to bed tired but happy.
When I first began dropping my unedited love poems into a preformatted Word template, they seemed incomplete. What I had originally produced for social media looked nice and fit well on a tiny square image, but upon revisiting them, each piece seemed more like part of a free verse poem instead of the whole enchilada. So my second hurdle quickly became fleshing out the remainder of each poem, one at a time. This was not going to happen fast if I wanted them to be any good. At the end of day two, I had finished rewriting all of ten poems, less than three percent of the total. I went to bed tired but hopeful.
While finishing the task at hand was out of the question, quantifying it was not. I got up on day three, the last full day of my stay, with that outcome in mind. The only time I left my room was to have supper. Up until that time, and also after I got back, I worked on my poems. At the end of the night, I had rewritten my way through the month of January. Using that as my gauge, I reckoned that it would take the equivalent of six weeks in seclusion to finish the rewrite — not practical but still a very useful measurement, something to take home with me and put to good use. I went to bed utterly exhausted but satisfied and just a little more knowledgeable about my project as a whole.
The Fun Whenever I travel, I enjoy visiting local restaurants, drive-ins, bars, etc. that I could not experience while staying home. Even though I did spend some mealtimes snacking in my room, this trip was no exception. On the morning of my second day, I ventured out to Arena, Wisconsin to enjoy breakfast at Grandma Mary’s Café. I knew I was in a good place when I saw most of the parking spaces filled and several tables inside populated with locals — you know, farmers, senior citizens, and the like — all chattering away. I ordered my usual, a couple of pancakes with a side of bacon and a cup of black coffee, all of which I enjoyed very much.
That meal alone kept me full until suppertime, when I ventured all the way across the road from the lodge to a classic roadside establishment called RumbleSeats Drive-In, where I indulged in a burger called the Marilyn Monroe. Not for the faint-of-heart or the weak-of-arteries, the Marilyn is definitely not health food. In fact, it’s not even finger food! I had to use a fork and knife to eat this wonderful creation. I should point out that there is a major chain fast food joint nearby that probably had a line at their drive-thru. This place was much less busy. Why? Because the other place is a major chain, I guess, and by comparison, this place looks a little worn and dated. But hey, that’s part of the charm! Me, I’ll choose a decent local joint every time. If the food is good and service friendly, places like this deserve our business. When in doubt, go for that experience.
On my last night, the only time I had left my room that whole day, I went just a few doors further across the road to Arthur’s Supper Club for, what else, a traditional Wisconsin Friday fish fry. I started my meal off right, with a brandy old-fashioned that was big enough to last me through the entire meal. I opted to include the soup and salad bar, which was basic but very fresh. My batter-fried cod was crispy, flakey, and utterly delicious. The tartar sauce appeared to be homemade and was very flavorful. All in all, I enjoyed my meal as much as I possibly could while eating alone. Another good choice.
The Run for Home For the most part, the weather during my stay had been overcast and chilly with occasional drizzle. By contrast, there was nary a cloud in the sky when I packed up and headed for home. Having had a decent taste of personal productivity, there was a part of me that wanted to stay longer, but my objectives had been fulfilled. It was time to go home and apply what I had learned.
On my way out of the area, I stopped in Arena again, this time at Arena Cheese, the proclaimed home of Co-Jack, located directly across the street from Grandma Mary’s. After admiring their large fiberglass mouse outside, I went in and picked up a few different types of cheese for my wife and me to enjoy later. They only make fresh curds during the week, so I had to settle for day-old curds, but they still squeaked. Good stuff!
Before crossing back into Illinois, I pulled off in Beloit to get gas and fill up my abdominal cavity one more time. A little roadside research on my phone turned up a gem of a place called Doc’s Seriously Good Food. They weren’t kidding! Think fast food, only not quite so fast, and much better in terms of quality and flavor. That’s Doc’s. Here is one more instance where I would choose a place like this over a chain any day. I’ll be back.
The Lesson Did my controlled run away from home help? Yes it did, in several ways. For openers, it was fundamentally therapeutic for me to spend that many uninterrupted hours working at my craft, writing. Beyond getting something done, beyond working toward a goal that I had set sometime in 2021, I was living my guiding purpose. Everybody has one, that essential reason for living that gives meaning to their existence. Mine is that of a storyteller and guide, to share experiences, feelings, and ideas with others. This endeavor got me away from the distractions of my present life and back in touch with myself and my purpose. That’s what made it worth my time and money. No regrets.
Think about this. For a period of days, I was hiding. Only two people in the world, my wife and the general manager of that lodge, knew where I was staying. Yet throughout my time away, I was sharing glimpses on Facebook and now, just a few days afterward, I am telling you all about it here on my blog site. Why? To what end? Because this is what I do! And everything that I do means less to me if not shared.
There is a nice crescent-shaped pool at the Round Barn that looked most inviting. Even though I always carry a pair of trunks when I travel, I did not swim once during this stay. I would have had the pool to myself most of the time. No matter. I don’t care to swim alone, especially in a nice pool like that. For me, what’s the point if I can’t look across at someone and ask, “Isn’t this great?”
There was a large flat-panel television in my room that I never once turned on during my stay. I hadn’t driven 235 miles to watch TV alone. I came to work on something that would eventually be shared. The collection of poems will eventually be published and whether I sell ten copies or a million, I’ll have fulfilled my purpose once again, just as I’m going to do the moment I share this post.
My last post, My Apolitical Take on Masking, went over like a lead balloon with my readers. Okay, I get that. I’m neither a health and science writer nor a political writer, so that was a bit of a curveball. Fair enough.
These have been most unusual times for many of us, in so many ways. I have close friends who are not yet able to articulate their fears about what has been going on in their lives. I am sympathetic to them because I have things going on in my own life that I don’t talk about, either. Moreover, circumstances are such that I have a deal of free, solitary, discretionary time, during my evenings and weekends, that I assure you, I never wanted to have. But I have it. So I did what any writer would do… er. well, almost.
I’ve been taking a poetry class. Not so that I could begin spewing out love sonnets — although that would be something — but because I wanted to push my boundaries further with regard to the way I use words to convey not just thoughts and ideas but also emotions and sensory experiences. Poetry.
The course I’m taking recently had a session on metaphor and included a writing prompt on crafting a conceit, where the entire poem becomes an extended metaphor. My readers can breathe easy because I didn’t write a poem about masking. No, I wrote something I called The Ride. It did okay in peer review, so I thought I’d share it here.
Sounds like a good title for an article about global warming, right? I assure you I have no such lofty ambition. But it was an unusually warm, sunny day here in Chicagoland today and with very little residual salt visible on the roads to deter me, I decided to take Miss Scarlett out for a run.
First I had to clean her up a bit, as I have yet to put my dust cover on the bike this winter. I use a product called Plexus on my windshield. It’s a very effective cleaner, leaves a protective coating behind, and does not have a yellowing effect on clear plastics. For all the bodywork, my favorite product for years has been Original Bike Spirits Spray Cleaner and Polish. As waterless detailing goes, these two products have given me very satisfactory results.
After a quick check of my tires and air suspension pressure, I disconnected my smart charger and fired up the bike. Sweet music indeed! I suited up and took a shakedown cruise through the neighborhood—always a good idea after spending more than a few weeks off the bike—before heading southwest toward Starved Rock State Park, a major attraction in the state of Illinois.
Major attraction indeed! The large parking lot by the Visitor Center was packed, with cars illegally parked along the outer drive lane. Later on I discovered, on my way out of the park, that the overflow parking lots had gotten pretty full as well. Ah, but what would one expect on such a beautiful day?
I don’t consider myself a good “alone” person, but today, following a rather trying week at work, I was in serious need of this wind therapy and personal down time. As I rolled along Illinois 71, between Yorkville and Ottawa, I left all the stresses of the past week behind me. Once I had gotten to the state park and began my ascent to the top of Starved Rock, I had let go even more. By the time I’d reached the summit huffing and puffing, I’d forgotten what I was so stressed out about.
I walked around the top of Starved Rock for a while and then walked to the end of the paved walking path before returning to my bike to head home. Under other circumstances, I might have been less than pleased about the number of attendees present. Instead, every time I passed a squirming rug rat or an errant dog, I smiled from within, only too happy to have walked amongst all this humanity.
I’ve been coming to this park since I was five, maybe longer. It’s beautiful. If you live in the region and you want to see something cool, please check this place out.
I like to cook, but sometimes I can’t leave well enough alone. I like foods a certain way and seldom follow a recipe to the letter. Most of what I learned about cooking, putting certain foods together, etc., I learned by watching my mother. She seldom followed a recipe, either. I don’t go crazy yet ordinary often isn’t quite good enough. My arena, therefore, falls somewhere between the two.
About a year ago, I began toying with the idea for an unconventional cookbook that, despite having no conventional recipes per se, explores my approach to a variety of dishes, including creative uses for the leftovers. All of this would be interspersed with anecdotes relating to the food and the people who caused them to happen, whether directly or indirectly. The working title of this book continues to be What Recipe?
During most of 2016, What Recipe? remained essentially an idea and nothing more. I developed a preliminary outline and penned a chapter or two, but that was it… until last December. Since then, thanks to the constant encouragement (okay, pestering) of a close friend, this book is actually taking shape.
I can’t say how soon What Recipe? will become available for order, but it’s a safe bet that my online followers will be among the first to hear about it. Wish me luck, and thanks for hanging with me.
This Is MGD Time 