April Ameliorations
(Sent on May 8, 2023)
Some people are more certain of everything
than I am of anything.
~Robert Ruben~
Greetings and May tidings from Bozeman,
I realized after sending last month’s newsletter that saying “happy March” for a March newsletter that was written in April is a bit confusing. I’ll stick to present-day greetings from now on.
April was a busy month. Meghan’s been kiln time in a pottery class (get it??) that finished up last week. Her goal was to have a bowl, a plant pot, and two coffee cups. What we have are four beautiful tiny pieces of artwork that will all make beautiful tiny plant pots—mostly because the glazing is questionable and we’re afraid to drink or eat out of them. Still, she likes it, and I think there will be more pottery in her future.
After finally getting my allergy shots transferred from Medford, OR to Bozeman, I’ve been squeezing in as many of them as I can each week. When I got back from Ukraine in December, I had no health insurance and I was on the wrong end of the country, so I fell pretty far behind. As of two weeks ago, I’m finally back up to the maintenance dose, which is a big relief. And the shot is now only once every 2-4 weeks.
Jack is doing swell and loving the daily access to the giant Montana dog parks. In spite of his new and excessive access to daytime window-television, he has had some occasional bouts of… anxiety. Believe it or not, we currently have a doggy prescription of Prozac sitting on the shelf. That’s right, SSRIs for dogs is a thing. We can’t decide if we want to try it, so we’re doubling down on the stress toys for now, which seem to help. I’ll be switching to longer shifts in June, and we’ll need to have a midday dog walker at the point. We’re hoping that will help satisfy the neediest dog this side of the Yellowstone River. If we do end up using the Prozac, it will be for a more significant cause of anxiety: the prairie dogs that haunt his dreams, day and night.
Speaking of daydreams, I’ve been staring at the Bridger Ridge mountains behind Bozeman since I got here in February, dreaming of getting up to some of those peaks. We finally got the chance to tackle Baldy Mountain a few weeks ago. It could not have been a better day for it, but the ridge is notoriously windy, and avalanche risks were not within our maximum comfort zone of 0%. We got about a hundred vertical feet from the top before turning around, which is good enough for us. Hopefully there will be other peaks this summer.
Most excitingly, my parents were on vacation and taking a little road trip across the country. They stopped by for a weekend of fun, food, Yellowstone hot springs, more food, scrabble, cribbage, and pickled vegetable recipes. It was good timing, especially since our last rental would not have allowed us to host any visitors. And, we got to see the northern lights for the first time!
Here are my favorite things I've listened to or read:
- I’ve listened to this reading of David Whyte’s poem “Leaving the Island” about fifty times.
- I enjoyed listening to the Trinity Forum’s excerpted conversation with Curt Thompson on his book The Soul of Desire.
- Thanks to a prompt, I went back and listened again to a very enjoyable interview with David Dark on the For the Life of the World podcast. (The phrase “robot soft exorcism” should pique your interest.)
- This email interview with N.S. Lyons, “Thoughts on Today's Upheaval and Its Implications,” is very much worth your time.
- I have not followed, or had much desire to follow, much of the Chat GPT business. But if you’re looking for a very good take on it, I recommend this essay from Baldur Bjarnason.
- Last but absolutely not least, Amy Peterson’s undelivered sermon on “enemies at the table” is also worth your time.
And her are a few things I wrote about in April:
- I wondered out loud what the liberal arts and humanities do outside of universities.
- “The poor you will always have with you.”
- An honest politics is a forgiving politics.
- I wrote about the all-to-common use of Psalm 11:3.
- Lastly, I wrote about the four self-help books I found myself reading (and enjoying) back to back.
That's all for April. We have now semi-officially extended and will be here until September 30th. Jack is the most excited about this. He hasn’t yet had enough time to finish his elaborate plan for killing all the gophers in the field across the street.
I'll leave you with something below from Richard Wilbur’s poem “In Limbo,” which I think pairs quite nicely with David Whyte’s poem above.
Donny
Now I could dream that all my selves and ages,
Pretenders to the shadowed face I wear,
Might, in this clearing of the wits, forgetting
Deaths and successions, parley and atone.
It is my voice which prays it; mine replies
With stammered passion or the speaker’s pause,
Rough banter, slogans, timid questionings—
Oh, all my broken dialects together;
And that slow tongue which mumbles to invent
The language of the mended soul is breathless,
Hearing an infant howl demand the world. […]Out of all that I fumble for the lamp-chain.
A room condenses and at once is true—
Curtains, a clock, a mirror which will frame
This blinking mask the light has clapped upon me.
How quickly, when we choose to live again,
As Er once told, the cloudier knowledge passes!
I am a truant portion of the all
Misshaped by time, incorrigible desire
And dear attachment to a sleeping hand,
Who lie here on a certain day and listen
To the first birdsong, homelessly at home.
Thanks for reading! For more commonplace stuff, you can go to tinyroofnail.micro.blog. Or you can email me at tinyroofnail@hey.com. Or you can just wait for next month's newsletter.