90 days

So. 149 years since the ghastly, murderous battle of Shiloh began down in southern Tennessee. There's a happy thought on a spring morning, tender and green.

Happy birthday Merle Haggard, artists Gustave Moreau Raphael, a.k.a. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, born on the 6th of April, 1483, 528 years ago today. Died on his 37th birthday, In the wonderful - well, I thought it was - movie, The Ag. & the Ecs. there's a scene in which Raphael is proclaiming to sweaty, dirty, crabby Michelangelo, 'We are harlots, always peddling beauty at the doorsteps of the mighty.' So get over yourself. What did you think?

And as of today my cousin, fellow fan of Laura & Mary and Betsy & Tacy and Beatlemaniac of yesteryear, my cousin Myrna has accomplished sixty years of life. Once a very long time ago, her mom introduced her BFF (my mom) to her cousin who wound up being my dad. Now they're all up in heaven, maybe getting to meet Raphael in the Blue Beyond.

Anyway I was born on the day baby Myrna turned three months old. So you know what that means.

Sky Train

What elements of this day were present, I wonder, on those earlier days in former springs, when the 6th of April clicked in on the Big Wheel? In 1483, in Italy, when the wife of a court painter gave birth to baby Raphael, was the sunrise pink & pearly, as it was this morning? Was the sky full of fast-moving clouds, as it is just now, their rain-filled comrades following in the big, eastbound, round-the-old-world sky train? Ever-changing, ever-young mural over our heads – man oh man, just think of that little boy growing up to grind and mix oils with pigments, ultramarine and cerulean and white lead, all the better to replicate that same, but not the same, sky in a painting of another heaven over the heads of painted prophets and angels.