Two blog posts vanished into the ether, Internet crashes, WordPress glitches. What am I to do? There are links to be shared, artless unposed portraits of the Big Dog and other animals to be posted, a blurry still life of red tomatoes in a dish that might thrill readers beyond belief. I can’t chat in comments. My magical electronic S-pen has jammed in the slim cache of the Samsung Galaxy Note, not Tablet as I originally wrote, after wrongly telling friends that I have an iPad because names and brands mean so little to me. The housemate discovered the other day that I think the battered-but-solid 4×4 vehicle she drives is a Toyota, when in fact it is an Isuzu as anyone with any car-savvy can see. Is the stove Defy or Kelvinator? Is the Great Dane a pedigreed dog show-potential Great Dane? No, he is so not.
I’m reading the poet Frank O’Hara and memorising his poem Meditations in an Emergency because when the house is burning down and the world about to end and you have shouted for help and stopped waving a white T-shirt on a stick, there is nothing to do but meditate and keep calm in order to carry on, or not carry on. I can’t link to Frank O”Hara without WordPress throwing some kind of malevolent hissy fit, but Poetry Foundation and Google are your friends, people.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
That’s about right. Boundless love. In the meantime, I’m busy composing a minestrone soup for sick friends, laying vegetables, borlotti beans, pasta, shaving away at a mean hunk of Parmesan..A big meal in one bowl, brimming with unconditional love. Up on the hillside there are small children dying in a mini-epidemic of dysentery, a hard bitter wind is belting down through the mountains like some glittering angel of death, there is somebody in a house nearby on the brink of emergency and waiting for an ambulance, overhead whistle small planes flying low in order to spray crops just before harvest. The non-fiction chapter I drafted out on the cultural politics of post-colonial African countries has been swallowed up in an Internet gulp and spat into oblivion. On the other side of the mountain, the housemate is shouting on the phone about open sewage drains near a primary school. Boundless anger arising out of love. Children have a right to live I say to myself angrily while dicing carrots on a wooden board, but of course life is not a right, it is gift and subject to luck, chance, grace.
Frank O’Hara:
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
Bless you and your soup ministry! I think there is nothing so wonderful as food that someone has prepared for me. Probably equally wonderful is making it for someone else… the same warmth comes over me as I chop, slice, knead, etc.
This post made me giggle this morning. Thank you!
The poem on boundless love reminds me of my pre Al-Anon thinking!