Happiness

"And these days I remember the days
that have your name on them, like a name on a ship,
and how we saw through two open doors
one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds
with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers,
who waited for rain,
and how at night, when the world cooled off,
your body kept its warmth for a long time,
like the sea."
--Yehuda Amichai, "From Summer or Its End"

"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,' said Jojen. 'The man who never reads lives only one.'"
--George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

2011's bright and heroic moments. Things to celebrate.

"Dr. David Bowman, out food shopping on a Saturday morning in January with his wife at a Tuscon Safeway, hears gunfire and immediately begins to triage twenty-five shooting victims, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords..."

"During his morning commute on the New York subway, Joe Lozito disarms a knife-wielding attacker who had already killed four during a twenty-eight hour murder spree. Lozito is stabbed seven times before he is able to get the knife away from the man..."

"Ken Mehlman, former campaign manager for George W. Bush, who revealed last year that he is gay, sways four Republican state senators to vote for legalizing gay marriage in New York..."

"At least twenty-two states report budget surpluses in 2011..."

"State workers in Indiana are given bonus checks worth up to $1000 with the state's extra funds..."

"During an economics class, University of Washington faculty member Ali Tarhouni informs his students that he fled Libya as a young man in the early 1970s and was sentenced to death in absentia for his student activism against the Qaddafi regime. A month later, Tarhouni leaves to join the rebel forces in Bengazhi and is later appointed Libya's minister of finance..."

"Baffled by six-year-old Nicholas Volker's deadly intestinal disease, which forced him to eat through a feeding tube, doctors at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee sequence the boy's genome in an effort to diagnose and cure him--a medical first. Identifying a never-before-seen mutation in his DNA, they surgically rebuild his immune system through a cord-blood transplant. After a 121-day hospital stay, Nicholas Volker returns home to enjoy his favorite foods: steak and vanilla frozen custard..."

"Running a 5K cross-country race in Minnesota, Andover High junior Josh Ripley hears the screams of a fallen runner who is writhing in pain and bleeding profusely from his leg. Ripley lifts the boy and carries him half a mile back to his coaches at the starting line. While the injured runner is taken to the emergency room, Ripley sets off on the course again and completes the 5K..."

"The GI Bill expands education benefits for post 9/11 veterans to include nondegree vocational and technical schools, flight programs, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training..."

"Joseph Edwards, homeless and taking refuge from a cold winter night under a bridge in Merced, California, watches as a VW Beetle skids off the road and plunges nose-first into ten-foot-deep Bear Creek. Edwards dives into freezing water and pulls three people from the car. Told that there's one more person inside, Edwards dives down several more times before he locates an unconscious man trapped in his seat belt and pulls him to shore..." (this one reminds me of my old friend Martin)

"Convinced that police are pursuing the wrong leads, twelve-year-old Jessica Maple begins investigating a robbery at her great-grandmother's house in Atlanta. Within days Maple locates the stolen items in a pawnshop, traces them back to the two men, confronts one of the suspects and elicits a confession..."

"Leaving a career as a Burton snowboard designer at the age of forty, Douglass Powell enrolls in medical school and, after completing his residency at Madigan Army Medical Center, accepts his first assignment: brigade surgeon with the 4th Infantry Division in Afghanistan..."

"Tea Obreht, twenty-six, who flex Belgrade as a young girl during the Balkan war, publishes her first novel, The Tiger's Wife, written while she was a student at Cornell. In June, she becomes the youngest woman ever to win the Orange Prize for fiction; in October she's nominated for a National Book Award..." (I read this book last March and it is remarkable and certainly deserving of every last award.)

"After crashing a single-engine plane in the Tetons, Joseph Richards, seventy-four, regains consciousness and, despite suffering from a broken back and jaw, rewires the plane's transmitter. Rescuers locate the plane and Richards within four hours..." (this one is for my gramps)

"Animal Kingdom, a 20-1 long shot who had never raced on dirt, wins the Kentucky Derby by two and three-quarter lengths..."

"The thirty-two Afghan men and women who celebrated commencement at the American University in Afghanistan's first graduating class..."

"Drunk driving falls to its lowest level in seventeen years..."

"Violent crime falls to its lowest level in forty years..."

"Rates of teens giving birth fall to their lowest level in seventy years..."

"As rising floodwaters threatened their tiny studio in northern Vermont during Hurricane Irene and cut off communication in the area, the staff of WDEV, a local family-owned independent radio station, remained on the air throughout the night, opening their phone lines to relay listeners' reports of road washouts, downed power lines, destroyed homes, and stranded villagers..."

"While serving in Afghanistan, Army major Glenn Battschinger encounters a young boy holding his own leaking bladder, which was outside his body because of a rare birth defect. Battschinger has him flown to the United States, where doctors in New Jersey perform corrective surgery on the six-year-old, free of charge..."

"Seven months after she was shot in the forehead, Representative Gabrielle Giffords returns to the floor of the House of Representatives to cast her vote on the U.S. debt-ceiling bill..."

"The front page of the Detroit Free Press on September 22, with the headline "UAW Talks Shift to Ford" unintentionally creased in a vending machine..." (see below)


--Esquire Magazine, December 2011, "The Best" by Andrew Chaikivsky

A fantastic poem...and from someone I work with! I love being surprised about people. This is beautiful work.

Skin

My skin is mine it is not on loan
I met you and felt I had come home.
I got to know you and remembered my name

At last.
I had forgotten myself in the past.
I was trapped in darkness on the shelf
between Repressed Feelings
and Pursuit of Wealth.

You pulled me carefully down
Dusted my cover
Cracked my spine and stood back in wonder

At the magic that erupted
From my open pages
Fire and works never before seen by sages
Conversations continuing beyond ages
Sacred spirits set free from cages.

When our space and souls collide
The laws of nature are useless
The stuff of society seems so stupid

Fear and Anger cannot ruin it
The sickest thought cannot fumigate
This love for life and its human faces,
This love for you written on my pages.

My name is not immune to time
but I have breath that lives beyond life,
Salt on my skin from tears you have cried,
A beat in my heart that has known you’re alive.

- Chloe Sparacino

If I could dress for the job I wanted, I would have a wand and robe. Those robes look comfy!

Adele is truly fabulous.