六十. lok-sat. soixante. LX. шестьдесят. 60.

credit: Rebecca Beatrice Miller, 8/2013

Conflagration cake
With battalions of candles
Frizzling the icing.

Trala!

I started celebrating yesterday with a studio visit with Ashley Cooper and then lunch. So glad to see her new work . . . And for dinner my husband made a grand feast for friends, and afterward painter and soprano Yolanda Sharpe sang Haydn and Handel arias for us. Lovely.

Of course, today is drear and rainy (a real Ishmael November day), more appropriate for the deaths of Kennedy and poor C. S. Lewis, overlooked in the wake of presidential assassination. It's also pee day in Rome, New York for the wrestling team . . . a tedious boy duty that seems to take eons longer than it should and is in the way. Nevertheless, frolics shall be had!

One month from today...

This is 59.
Photo: Rebecca Beatrice Miller, August 2013

One month from today, it will be the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I might not remember my tenth birthday were it not for that day when our teachers rolled in tall stands with big black and white televisions and let us watch the long parade of cars and Jackie Kennedy--who had three months earlier lost a newborn--not cowering in fear but crawling, reaching for pieces of her husband's head. No doubt there was an instant when her face was seen wearing the cross hairs of the sniper's rifle scope.

I grew and changed, remembering that president on every birthday, especially on the early ones when he was most remembered, and especially at 10-year increments when the day was noted more clearly. On November 22nd, it will be a half-century since that day in Dealey Plaza when a woman still grieving the loss of a child reached for scattered pieces of her husband's flesh and bone. Half a century. As everyone notices sooner or later, the mysterious substance of time goes by quickly.

And what of me? I will be sixty.

When I was the child who would have thought the me of today quite old, I was an obsessed reader. I read in the tub, on the toilet, in bed with hoarded flashlights, and under my desk at school, at least until I ran into Mr. Phil Brown in fifth grade, as he was determined to cure me of that practice! (He had a certain amount of luck, being both easy to look at and vigilant.) An early tragedy in my life helped make me passionate about falling into imagined worlds. Early on, people said that I would be a writer.

Although never very savvy about networking and marketing and such things--well, they weren't quite as possible as they are now in the net-lands--and often living in off-the-beaten-track places with few writers, I persisted on my winding path. And now here I am, almost sixty, with eleven books of poetry and fiction and more forthcoming. I'm still rather obscure (see the secret quotes in the left margin! I should have been collecting them), and perhaps that has been for the best; I don't know. For a while I taught but gave up my tenure because I felt that teaching took away from my writing, and that others could replace me as a teacher. I married and became the mother of two sons and a daughter, now ranging in age from 16 to 24. Over almost sixty years, good and bad has happened, some of each my own doing, some not. But I have been blessed and am thankful.

In the coming month I will be busy with running a household and with writing, my usual mode. I need to do some revisions on a couple of manuscripts. Then I'll be going to Wofford College, where Jeremy L. C. Jones is teaching A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and Thaliad. I'll do a reading at Hub City Books. And I'll visit my mother before I go home. She is a kind of model for me of what getting older can mean. She volunteers for a day at the regional arboretum every week; she has always been a wonderful gardener. She also weaves on two looms, one a 4-harness and one an 8-harness, and makes beautiful shawls, scarves, and many other things. Not long ago I caught her saying something about delivering meals "to the old people." Clearly she was not one of them! She keeps up with friends from the university where she was head of serials in the library and is active in her church. I hope that I'll have the luck and grace to have coming years like hers, years without self-pity, years of giving and making, years to be thankful for.

But there's no doubt that sixty is a border crossing. Shall I do something special for my blog, I wonder? Certainly I'll do something to celebrate the day in the real world, although I haven't had time to think as yet! If you have a thought or a request for the blog, please leave a comment. And if you want to give me a present (some have threatened already), please just buy yourself or a friend a copy of one of my last four books, all still in print--The Throne of Psyche, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, or The Foliate Head. The gift of a reader makes a writer glad.

Next year will bring Glimmerglass and a reprint of Catherwood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.) The year after will see that pulpily-titled Texas story, Maze of Blood. Soon I will finish polishing The Book of the Red King and some fiction and a children's book. There's still a lot of work to do.

I celebrate my Thanksgiving birthday with Keats--

I give thanks for a conflagration of cake with yet another birthday with an excerpt from a document written on November 22nd in 1817--a letter from John Keats to his friend Benjamin Bailey that is full of dear concern for a friend, bright musings, and the ideal. He may have despaired that his name was "writ in water," but it was the kind of water that splits rocks or springs up as new life...

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty. In a word, you may know my favorite speculation by my first book, and the little song I send in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters. The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning - and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts! It is a 'Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me, - for it has come as auxiliary to another favorite speculation of mine, - that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger as you do after truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness - to compare great things with small - have you never by being Surprised with an old Melody - in a delicious place - by a delicious voice, felt over again your very Speculations and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul - do you not remember forming to yourself the singer's face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so - even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high - that the Protrotype must be here after - that delicius face you will see. What a time! I am continually running away from the subject - sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind - one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits - who would exist partly on Sensation partly on thought - to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind - such an one I consider your's and therefore it is necessary to your eternal Happiness that you not only drink this old Wine of Heaven, which I shall call the redigestion of our most ethereal Musings on Earth; but also increase in knowledge and know all things.

The Lydian Stones

Announcement, announcement!

I am going to be starting a little side project on the 22nd, for no better reason than that it is my birthday and I feel like giving you (yes, you) a present.

It will be in blog format, and so far it is proving to be highly enjoyable for me and, I hope, will be for you.

Many people will be involved, the living and the dead, and I hope it will add a site for poetry that is worthwhile.

So come up the garden steps with me! More news on this later on as the work progresses.

Happy Birthday from the Hills



Shiny! Look at the hardware...
I put money where other people's mouths are.
Little brother on his sister's birthday, age 13.



I hate to bump Meri Wells from the top spot before today is finished (go see!) but just felt like saying a big, echoing, tunnel-mad Happy Birthday! to my third and youngest child. Fourteen years ago on this day a little runt and I were both trying our best to die from toxemia. But we were hurled blessedly back to life. Today he is a long, skinny drink of water who is mad about sports and Scout camping, does well in school, volunteers a lot, and is the only thurifer hereabouts. Happy Birthday! And have a grand summer here and at the three kinds of camp you like!

And that makes me as old as them thar hills, I reckon, but them thar hills are covered with balsam and laurel and rife with seams of gold and gems and dwarves with pickaxes and places where stones are set up because of fiery visitations from the otherworld and lively nooks and crannies with storytellers and poets and wild mountain prophets reciting no matter who does or doesn't listen...



Aw! Mr. Skinny is April 2011 Student of the Month.

      


Not sure if that's making 4' 4" on the high jump or messing up 4' 6."
He is a maniac for wrestling, but loves football and track.
The idea of just jumping unaided over a bar or hurdling or wrestling

or football used to be fairly alien to me.

I'm a hill!