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Week 22 May 28 – Jun 3

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Week 20 May 14 – May 20

Driving her to school today, I heard President Obama say:

I come here not to dispute the suggestion that I haven’t yet achieved enough in my life. First of all, Michelle (Obama) concurs with that assessment. She has a long list of things that I have not yet done waiting for me when I get home.

I laughed. That was pretty darn funny, I thought to myself.

Emma wondered what what so funny. Not knowing how to explain the subtleties of interaction between husbands and wives, I bungled the attempt.

She laughed, and then told me “that wasn’t very funny, dad.” She then proceeded to tell me what’s funny:

A rooster gets on a stage and puts on a dress and then sings in a microphone to lots of roosters! Is that funny dad?

You know, it kinda is. And I stand corrected.

There are 41,000 children in Travis County confronted with food insecurity every day.

The average American consumes 1,950 pounds of food a year.

Mulitplying those gives us 79,950,000 pounds of food required for those 41,000 children.

A brown paper grocery bag can hold about 20 pounds of food. So that would be 3,997,500 paper grocery bags full of food.

The most recent estimate of Travis County’s population is 998,543, with 141,223 living in poverty. That means there are about 857,320 people in Travis County who are not (by the Federal Government’s definition) living in poverty.

If, over the course of a year, each one of those people filled 5 brown paper grocery bags full of food they would provide enough food to feed those 41,000 children.

Week 19 May 7 – May 13

“I think I’m going to have it,”
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
“Dear, you never have it, we deliver it.”
A judgment years proved true.
Certainly I’ve never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

(May 31st, 2009) I’ve entered the AmeriCorps Photo contest, with this photo of Capital Area Food Bank’s Communications VISTA, Carrie Gibson, helping build the Food Bank’s square foot teaching gardens.

You can visit my entry on the contest site just to, you know, drive up the page views.

(Not you, Shannon!)

1 year. 12 months. 52 weeks.
69 photos of flowers.
131 B&W photos.
144 photos of Emma.
168 photos from Disney World.
1480 photos posted.
9030 photos taken.

(And for those playing the home game, that’s an average of 24.7 photos taken a day.)