I am back from Thanksgiving break. My favorite part was the Mustard Museum. Habanero Horseradish = mmmmm. There was mango mustard too and a whole gallery of mustards from across the globe, including Azerbaijan! and a smuggled container of Cuban mustard. I also liked going to St. Donatus, Iowa, and seeing a hill full of sheep (and then trying to catch one). Amusing also was our obsession with trying to see our house from the Iowa side of the river, as if we could look down on our lives from outerspace (outerspace being Iowa). My uncle has been laid-off (again) and his medical plan will run out next month. Please support free medical support for all Americans.

For Thanksgiving I am thankful I am not a maid, because if I were Mr. Bear would sexually harass me.

I find a lot of comfort in poems. They save me from the absurd theories so many people create to explain what should really just be beans and rice.

And here is the cumnination of Robert Hass's poem "Songs to Survive the Summer" in his book Praise:

That is what I have
to give you, child, stories,
songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they
are the frailest stay against
our fears. Death

in the sweetness, in the bitter
and the sour, death
in the salt, your tears

this summer ripe and overripe.
It is a taste in the mouth,
child. We are the song

death takes its own time
singing. It calls us
as I call you child

to call myself. It is every
thing touched casually,
lovers, the images

of saviors, books, the coin
I carried in my pokcet
till it shone, it is

all things lustered
by the steady thoughtlessness
of human use.

The sun lowers on our backyard in Kansas,
and I am looking up through the circling spokes
of a bicycle asking my father as mindlessly
as I would ask if he ever saw DiMaggio or Mantle
why we dropped the bomb on those two towns
in Japan, and his face goes all wooden, the eyes
freezing like rabbits in headlights, the palm
of his hand slowly tapping the arm of a lawnchair
that has appeared in family photographs
since 1945, the shadow of my mother thrown
across it, the green Packard in the background
which my father said he bought because after Saipan,
and Tinian and Okinawa, "I felt they owed it to me."
These were names I didn't know. Where is Saipan?
Where is Okinawa? Where is the Pacific?
Could you see the cloud in the air like the smoke
from Eugene Messenbaum's semi, that huge cloud
when he rolled it out on highway 54 last winter?
The hand is hammering the chair arm, beating it,
and I know it's all wrong as I move backward
on the garage floor and watch his eyes watching
the sun in its evening burial and the spreading
silver light and then darkness over the farms
and vast, flat fields which I will grow so tired of,
so weary of years later that I will leave, watching
then as I do now his eyes as they take in the falling ray
of the sun, a level stare, a gaze that asks nothing
and gives nothing, the sun buring itself to ashes
constantly, the orange blackening in drought
and waste, and he can do nothing and neither can I.