Help Thanks Wow

by chuckofish

Yesterday we were able to do some driveway sittin’ when the boy came over with the bud while Lottie was in dance class. The bud drove the little Raptor around and we had a gay ol’ time gabbing away. Truly there is nothing better on a lovely spring day than to sit and soak up some vitamin D under the blue, blue sky.

Meanwhile I have been crossing items off my to-do list. The Review is at the printer. I have been to the dentist. And so on. I am reading another Agatha Christie–Ordeal by Innocence, published in 1958. Life goes on at a retirement pace–I have no complaints.

In other news, the pope died. I will let Carl Trueman speak for me. “Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.”

I talked to my 90-year old Catholic friend yesterday about the pope’s passing. She thought he was great–he really cared about the environment. So go figure.

And news alert: there’s going to be a rare ‘smiley face’ celestial alignment in the morning sky this Friday, April 25, so make a note.

Or, at least, something like that.

My friend Carla gave me Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott for my birthday. I have read it, but I read it again (I do that a lot.)

When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow. Spring is crazy, being all hope and beauty and glory. She is the resurrection. Spring is Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” I read Hopkins for the first time in seventh grade, when I also first read Langston Hughes, and between the two of them, I was never the same.

Poetry is the official palace language of Wow.

Buds opening and releasing, mud and cutting winds, bright green grass and blue skies, nests full of baby birds. All of these are deserving of Wow–even though I have said elsewhere that spring is also about deer ticks–and everywhere you look, couples are falling in love, and the air is saturated with the scent of giddiness and doom. Petals are wafting and falling slowly through the air, and there is something so Ravel, languorous, reminding me to revel in the beauty of the things wafting.

Hang in there. It’s almost the weekend!