88

My gosh, according to the Wickibots, the marble Aphrodite was discovered on the Greek island of Milos, on this day in 1820. All but her arms, which must have been lovely if there were anything like that which survived all those years upon years upon years. Life is short. Art is long.

89

stuff I want the Almighty to do right this minute:

1. Use Her Mighty Tweezers and pluck Not-President Gbagbo w/ the deviant hobbit name OUt of his bunker in the Ivory Coast and flick him into the ocean like a booger.

2. Muammar Gaddafi: the same These fellows so make me appreciate old, long-gone George Washington, having sufficient moral fiber to enable him to walk away from power, standing tall.

3. I'm going to sign off but I'll be thinking of some more.

4. Oh yes. It's Billie Holliday's birthday - 96 years ago today. same year the Lusitania went down.... James Garner's 83 today? Can this be true?

5. sheesh

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.

what will be...

So a little over a week ago I had a death grip on my little red hoopie's steering wheel, praying that I wouldn't kill anyone or be killed in the midst of a whirling snowstorm, though had I accidentally slammed into one of the many barely visible cars, its equally dim driver would have had it coming seeing as he or she had NOT been blessed w/ the brain power generally bequeathed to a run of the mill hamster & hadn't switched on his or her headlights = too dumb to drive and/or live . Now today (Doris Day's birthday, bless her heart forever, a birthday shared w/ the remarkable, far-traveling Washington Irving, the subject of my last [ever?] bona fide picture book - it was handsome, no foolin' - done before the publishing biz turned upside down and the National Geographic dumped me) it was about 90º

Sheesh.

On the other hand, I sculpted today. Played with clay. How I loved talking to all those hundreds of children in Hopkins Co., KY and in Jackson, MO - do you know that there's a little piano there that was brought over from Europe by ship, by flatboat, by oxcart in 1815? There totally is.

How I'd love to do that more often, entertain kids, having serious fun w/ teachers, librarians, & their fizzy gaggles of young clients. How I love being home alone, talking to no one, seeing no one.

A bit of a conflict, huh? she wrote to no one in particular. your basic tree falling in the forest.

whirlwind!

"I am an artist...I am here to live out loud." So said the French writer, Émile Zola, who was born this day, April 2, in 1840, on Hans Christian Andersen's 35th birthday. I wish I could say the same - well, I could, of course, but I mean say it and have it be true. W/ me it's more like here to live in fits & starts, curled up in my little rooms w/ my little dog OR, as I've done this past couple of weeks, bunging the little dog into the friendly slammer run by her vet then hitting the road. Off to talk to kids brought by the busload to Warrensburg, MO, for the U. of CM's 43rd annual CLF. Then east & away & over the Mississippi, across the Land o' A.L., over the Wabash, into Indiana, over the Ohio – mindful, mindful, mindful of dugout canoes, flatboats, keelboats, & steamboats – and into Kentucky.

Not until I worked on my book about Dan'l Boone did I discover that he hollowed out a massive tulip poplar tree to make a 60-ft. canoe for his family's move from KY >MO, 'bout 5 years before Hans C. A. was born. Can you imagine?

Anyway, 4 days in once-much-contested coal & forest-rich land of the Shawnee to entertain kids in 9 different schools then home again, home again. Part of the journey a hand-trembling, breathless crossing of the Father of Waters in a snowstorm in which Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen might well have been whirling, sharing the barely visible road w/ blockheads who care only that they can see and care not whether their cars can be seen. Either that or they're broke and their headlights are coin-operated. Talk about dim bulbs.

Just back I am from doing approximately 11 presentations in one long, joyous day at South Elementary School in Jackson, MO, 'bout 350 miles away, down 'round Cape Girardeau. Along the way home I stopped to do a walkabout in Ste. Genevieve. Fresh in my mind is the beauty of stone buildings built when John Adams was young. Green painted shutters...

So, okay, well, if nothing else, it's a far out way of putting off getting down to work, checking out who was born [future 10th President John Tyler, 1790] and who croaked [King Gustav III of Sweden, at what must have been a thrilling masked ball, all smelling of perfume, powders, pomade, and candle wax, on a spring night in 1792.... man oh man, picture those fleeting glances and embroidered party clothes..], on this day in history. Better to revisit Luciano Pavarotti's glorious death scene than think about my tax appointment an hour from now. And here in the next little while I've got to get serious about doing a painting of what Hiram Young's yoke and wagon 'manufactory' might have looked like in the 1840s, here in Independence, the Queen City of the Trails. Do you know about him? Oh baby - look him up! A great and resourceful overcomer he was.

and then again...

A somber sort of thrill it was, driving 'cross the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Wabash and the Kaskaskia Rivers. And the Ohio, stealing glimpses of that wide expanse of pale pewter while maintaining my lane, thinking of all of those long-gone river travelers. Dan'l Boone. Lewis & Clark. I remember painting a picture of the Lincolns crossing over to Indiana in 1816. Can't help thinking of a flotilla of dugouts, canoes, flatboats, rafts, keelboats, and steamboats. Oars and paddle wheels, cutting, rippling, churning. All those trapped in bondage, busting to cross the Ohio to get to the free land on the other side.