I seem to be on a leaf and garden kick. Though two short cold snaps have sent 99% of the plants into dormancy (unless they’re evergreen), a few brave stalwarts instead focus on the above-average warm weather to pop one last bloom out. November 3-9 ranged 65-75F with just a dash of rain the final two days. And then the 12th through 16th blessed us with sunny days of 64-73F. Look at these little troupers:
I took a walk this morning as the newly risen sun filtered through the tops of trees. The ethereal lighting isn’t quite captured here, sadly. Nice to see the natives doing well.
Unlike most years here in central North Carolina, temperatures have been colder than normal and our first hard frost occurred this morning. The above photo from November 24th last year, shows the glory of our lone non-native tree to survive The Culling, a.k.a., the landscaping project of 2024-25. This year it still retains red leaves but they are dulling. Dogwood, which in years past held onto their dusky maroon-colored leaves, now stand bare, attesting to the weather with a solitary leaf here and there. Plants closer to the ground now are yellowing and soon will follow the trees.
On the personal front, fall seems an apt term the past two years. At this time last year we were winning our battle against Covid, entering our third week in its grip. This year a Covid-like virus laid me low all of October 26th through November 2nd, and its nasty little cousin showed up yesterday, an intestinal thing. (“Detestinal” thing?)
Dry, sunny weather accompanies these low temperatures, providing a yin to the biting yang of it. Our bird world changes almost overnight: the year-rounders come back to the feeders to start bulking up, others disappear, and soon birds of prey will become more prominent on their leafless perches. Last week a raven lingered in front of the house, a surprising sight.
This year brought an unusual amount of treework in our near neighborhood. Trees and large limbs fell frequently during unusually rainy weather this summer. Fearful homeowners culled trees simply because they stood near the owners’ houses. A red oak ‘shared’ with our neighbor—it has managed to grow across the property line—dropped a limb the size of a small tree onto the neighbor’s driveway in a spot which had held a car until a week or two before the limb fell. Our good friends around the corner were not so lucky, losing a vehicle when a limb fell on a minivan about six weeks ago.
NC weather continues its wonderfully contrarian ways, at least to born, bred, and experienced Northerners (a.k.a. “Yankees!” as the Southern epithet is uttered). Temperatures promise to level out and this coming weekend will rise as high as 76. Any day after Halloween which promises temperatures in the 70’s (let alone the 60’s) seems to be a gift, even after living here nearly 20 years. And the most anticipated weather event for the coming months? The knowledge that someday in our near, winter-weary future, a singular weather pattern will convince a 70+ degree day to appear in late December or January. Always a welcome respite, even if its appearance always remains a cameo.
People who truly, truly love books, love books about books. One of the most unique of these appears above. Henry Petroski’s book The Book On The Bookshelf traces the history of books from their earliest inception as scrolls through the Middle Ages when they were chained to the shelf, and proceeds in its history to the present day. It’s a lovely read. Petroski winds up the book with a chapter about bookshops, another on the shelving of books, and a final one about the care of books.
The phrase “books about books” includes those about reading them. My original photo for this Bibliophilia subplot is repeated here:
In the semi-arbitrary manner I use to organize my bookshelves, books about books (and reading them) precede those which address English and languages. Alberto Manguel, an Argentine-Canadian writer (and translator, editor, essayist, and director of the National Library of Argentina) has two entries, both wonderful. A History of Reading celebrates the reader. With chapters such as “Being Read To” and “The Missing First Page” Manguel explores all of the aspects of the author-reader experience. Manguel divides the book into two sections: “Acts of Reading” and “Powers of the Reader”. I particularly liked this second section with its chapters of “The Author as Reader” and “The Book Fool”.
Manguel’s other book, Into The Looking-Glass Wood contains essays about books and reading. These range more widely than his History of Reading. Essays include reviews, reactions to other authors, browsing for books, essays about wordplay, and other more wide-ranging topics.
Ronald B. Shwartz’s book For The Love Of Books gets included here, simply because it’s on the shelf, and I can’t bear to part with it despite its shortcomings. I’m not one for the types of books which sample a range of acclaimed artists about a certain topic. This book gets the subtitle “115 Celebrated Writers On The Books They Love Most”. Yeah, so? What makes their opinion better or even equal to the critic for the New York Times Review of Books? Or any literature professor at dozens of highly regarded universities? Or, frankly, me? Regardless, I succumbed when I saw the authors cited include Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, John Irving, Bruce Jay Friedman, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Witold Rybczynski, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, and Gay Talese. (Actually…I’m not sure I’ve ever completed this book! It still captures my imagination, and thus, it remains on my shelves.)
There you have it, books about books. If we can happily descend into the depths of books about books, how dare we deplore those who delve into the backgrounds of various oeuvres such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? A nerd is a nerd is a nerd…
Having published a book review just an hour ago, it seems fitting to revisit my Bibliophilia series with what amounts to another review. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter impressed me to such an extent that I purchased another when I lost the book to a less-than-responsible work friend. For nearly a decade it bothered me that I couldn’t pick it up and show it to people when I said, “you’ve got to read this!” Finally, having purchased Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (which has proved so dense I’ve never finished it), I tracked down a used version of Marot from a bookstore in Santa Fe, NM. (I necessarily bought it used because it apparently was out of print.) It’s inching its way up the Read Me list, probably gaining the top position in 2026. But why gush about it? To answer that, I must detour to 1999.
In July 1999 my wife received news that the lump in her breast was a benign cyst, nothing to worry about. A little over a month later she received word that the tests had been mixed up and that she actually had cancer. This occurred on her birthday. After three surgery procedures in September, we took a vacation to the Oregon Coast just one week prior to her beginning the chemotherapy regime. We stayed in a wonderful condo on Yaquina Bay at Newport, OR. When we left, we took a leisurely drive up Highway 101 along the coast all the way to Astoria before turning east the next day toward home. Shortly before we arrived to Astoria we stopped at Seaside when a largish bookstore caught our eyes. There I found Hofstadter’s book. Loving language, I read the flap, learned it took up the challenge of translation, and that it also touched many other topics. From the flap:
…he not only did many of his own translations of Marot’s poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.
The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot’s little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.
Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.
What the flap only hints at I learned later. During the time Hofstadter gathered his many translations by consulting all those people, his own wife was dying of cancer. Thus, his “musings on life, loss, and death” dive deep into his soul and therefore ours. Add to that my own wife’s tussle with cancer—she won, unlike Hofstadter’s wife—and the work compels. As I worked my way through the book, I found it dealt with language at a very basic level some of the time: how do we mean things? How does one language differ from another? How does cognition play out in word choices? And on, and on…
When I finished it, I felt Le Ton beau de Marot had been one of the best books I’d read because it didn’t just deal with language or cognition or love or translation or meaning or any other of those things mentioned above. It dealt with all of them! I loaned the book to a co-worker whose daughter was headed off to college to pursue a degree in English and who wanted to be a writer. I undoubtedly didn’t make it clear enough that one day I expected the book back. When I handed it off, though, I held back my gloss notes, which instead of writing into the book I had written out on fine paper. (They were too extensive to write into the margins anyway!) The book meant so much that I still have the notes a dozen or more years later. Here’s one:
[p. 138-139] I would side with Frost, that poetry is what’s lost in translation. Not that it can’t be re-discovered in the new language, but it’s not the same poem. Thus the poet-translator is intent on supplying a twin, not the real thing.
Hofstadter’s work combined with my college readings on communication, media, and meaning to form my personal philosophy and understanding of all types of translation. I “see” the issue of meaning more deeply than many I engage with when discussing how a work translates from one language to another, how people in different cultures perceive things, how books become movies and vice versa, even in how Superman or Batman is translated every decade by a different director all of whom seemingly work from the same “text”. I even see the problems of translation as one of the issues currently plaguing United States politics.
Hofstadter’s book satisfied on so many levels, engaged so many pleasure neurons, that I can’t do it any justice. You’ll simply have to read it yourself if you love reading about language and the problems of translation…and cognition…and…
Watering Words: 52 Short Stories by Bridgette Kay.
Self-published 2025. ISBN: 979-8-218-58862-5
Artists differ from most of the rest of humanity. Artists tap emotions and experiences others prefer to hide or, at best, to reveal carefully to select individuals and audiences. Unlike the careful revelation practiced by most, artists display their work on the public walls like graffiti in subways. Wedged between “For a good time, call ###” and obscenities, the artist inserts a portrait, often rooted in pain or struggle and rendered in words, brushstrokes, sculpted metal, or other media. Where most humans rush to clothe their naked feelings, the artist drops such obscurations to the ground and invites the errant passerby to look, but more than that, to judge. This is how they differ: they invite comment upon creations rooted in their own psyches, their own souls.
Humans hurt. We all hurt. We bear our wounds heroically, badly, simperingly, stoically, resentfully, and sometimes all of these and more depending on the time of day. Authors live with the uncomfortable knowledge that their wounds, their innermost thoughts, beliefs, prejudices, emotions, and most of all, memories, will bleed out—must bleed out—onto the pages they write, an emotional, psychic wound which perversely will not staunch without being exposed. It’s analogous to being handed a bite bar and hearing, “this is gonna hurt but you’ll thank me later.” Authors bleed out into their words and wait for the comments, but in truth, their healing began when the words gelled, the pages were printed, and the books displayed.
Commenting in any manner on such courageous behavior feels wrong. There cannot be a wrong way “to art.” As a teacher of English, though, I learned there exist many wrong ways to connect with an audience. And ultimately, anyone who publishes a book expects an audience to react to it. I’ve followed Kay’s blog Bridgette Tales for several years. Her personal revelations in that space represent why blogs need to be written. Done honestly and well, a blog sends joy and pain and struggle and hope out to the world, asking only to be heard. In the process, blogs show others, “Look! I hurt like you, love sunsets like you, see little clumps of moss like you, and I revel in it, even the painful stuff.” They build the global community. It came as a relief, then, when I discovered the stories were actually good. I’ve seen many a near-breathless author hand me something with excitement in their eyes and words, only to find upon reading it that the author hadn’t a clue either about constructing a story or writing one.
Don’t read Watering Words expecting John Cheever. These stories are not “high literature”—they instead represent what most readers look for: engaging stories with whimsy, a little magic, humor, and told with style. These stories speak less to the human condition than to one human’s condition. As one who has followed her blog, I see the pain, longing, fears, insecurities, joy, laughter, righteousness, sadness, glee, and maturity I’ve sensed in her near-daily posts. Two of the early stories stand out.
In the first story, “Waiting For The Bus”, every author will resonate with Kay’s personification of all those fears and excuses with which we keep ourselves from writing. The narrator’s ultimate triumph echoes Kay’s, I’m sure. And in “Final Goodbye” I invest my supposition that Kay writes of a home in her past (at least symbolically). I detect references to tragedies mentioned on her blog, but leave them for others to discover.
Read this book. Read it not for “high” literature but for “hi” literature: an author reaching out and saying, “Here I am. I’m saying it as best, as entertainingly as I can. Do you see me? Do you feel the same?
“Do your wounds match mine?”
River cruising resembles train travel: you journey from Here to There but don’t have to do the driving yourself. One thus experiences the journey. (Flying lacks this: one experiences only the point of departure and the destination. The experience of travel disappears, lost in abstract non-motion at 30,000+ feet.) Our afternoon cruising capped our morning in Speyer, just right for my still-recovering wife. Once moored at Rüdesheim, we chatted with the local ducks and enjoyed fine beverages. For me, that included this delightful Schwarzbier from Köstritzer.
…or Spires if you want the English name, presented a much-needed comfort level after the unanticipated end to our “Strasbourg Buildup” of expectations. Only 50,000 folks live in this city on the west bank of the Rhine. Yes, we now saw Germany on both sides of the Rhine. Midway through the night’s cruise to Speyer our ship had passed the point where the pentagonal border of France had turned to the northwest and left the Rhine behind. For the first time since Basel, we docked on the west bank of the river. We had the worst guide of the trip there, but a lovely time nonetheless—we simply ignored him and tried to stay within shouting distance of the group. (“Worst guide ever” equates to having him leave a third of our group at a crosswalk where the light had turned against us. He continued with the tour, and then admonished us when we saw a break in the traffic, crossed against the light, and ran to keep up with his idea of pacing a tour!)
Speyer’s cathedral dominated the city both in its placement on the edge of the bluff overlooking the river, and simply because its size completely outstripped any other building around it. I need two photographs to show all of it:
Parishioners built the cathedral in several distinct phases. Though our guide dryly and boringly explained it to us, I concentrated on photographs to his exclusion. I therefore can’t give you much history about the building’s timeline. I do remember that like all “touristy” cathedrals you will ever see, this one was the biggest in some category or other—I think “biggest at the time it was built.” If I remember correctly, the middle part of the building (seen in the second photograph) predated either end. Part of it had to be rebuilt after WWII, also. Look on the tower in the second photograph and you’ll see stones laid much more hodge-podge on the lower right of it. The rest gets a more uniform, geometric treatment.
Our guide left us no time to go inside the church. Instead, he took us into the center of the city, a small area of just a few blocks which extend westward from the church. As we turned westward from the cathedral, he noted (for our safety) an oddity I’ve not seen anywhere but Speyer: a city street routed through the plaza, marked only by regularly spaced concrete posts. It struck me simultaneously as beautifully quaint and dangerous.
Our guided trip into town proved blessedly short, after which we broke free and wandered at will. We quickly encountered a beautiful Orthodox church…I think.
We struck off from the main street through the city center and found little plazas tucked behind several other buildings. One hid a strikingly designed school of drama, if I read the German correctly. The streets off of the main drag lived up to my fantasies of narrow, old, and quaint. A sign informed us that many of these buildings were associated with the Jewish community. Speyer and the nearby cities of Worms and Mainz have been recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Near the photo on the right (below) we passed an old synagogue.
Walking back toward the cathedral to meet up with our group for the walk back to our buses, we finally had time to enter the cathedral. We made a good decision to allow time for that.
Speyer’s cathedral offered a delightful blend of modern furnishings contrasting with the centuries old structure. The minimalist lines of its furnishings complement the austerity of the stonework. It had several altars. I surmised different ones get used depending on the size of the congregation at that particular service. Perhaps at least one stands there for historical reasons. The most modern one sits far forward. The candles flanking it, both those on stands and the votives to the side, were displayed on modern metalwork which evoke the baroque in a minimalist way. The bishop’s chair sat halfway back in the sanctuary (altar area), to the right in the photo below. The next photo gives a sense of the depth of the sanctuary/chancel.
When looking at the photo above, you’ll remember the bishop’s chair is to the right of the first altar. In the lower right corner, note the raised floor. This is for the second altar. Light shone into the cathedral from many angles. At the top of the photo is the lowest tip of a suspended cross, caught in sunlight which casts a shadow on the back wall. See detail, left.
Our several tour groups boarded buses for a short trip to Worms where the good ship Hlin had tied up after getting a head start on the afternoon voyage to Rüdesheim. We couldn’t seem to take enough photos as the historical buildings glided past us. That evening we stayed aboard. Others had purchased one of two different dinner packages (one at a fort high atop an overlooking bluff).
With all apologies to Huey Lewis & and The News, I need a new song. Its lyrics will borrow from the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always do what you want,….but if you try sometimes, you just might find—you do what you need.” Yeah. That. We were told once to pay attention to our Inner Child, and I’ve done that far, far too much in my life. That little pouty bastard gets everything he wants to my usual detriment. I’m going to start listening to my Inner Parent. Maybe I’ll graduate to Inner Adult. (transactional analysis—I can’t escape the cultural references.)
Anyway, it’s fall y’all. The dusky red of the dogwood illumines in direct sunlight and dances a colored jig with the wind-bestirred poplar leaves behind them.
I planned our cruise on the Rhine River to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, and redeem the ruination of our 25th. I purposefully reserved a cruise which docked at Strasbourg on our anniversary, looking forward to all it promised. The Year 2020 had teamed up with my back to scuttle our (limited) plans for our 25th. As that day dawned, I experienced a spasm in my back which necessitated taking an emergency muscle relaxant I keep on hand for these occasional problems. A fine dinner which we had planned to cook for each other became a take-out pizza, and for my wife, some wine. I crawled into bed early. Therefore, 2025 promised to atone for all of that. The pandemic had subsided, we had our health, and, well, what could go wrong? The trip had far exceeded our expectations for four days.
The day promised much: Strasbourg with its cathedral and its amazing clock where I planned to walk inside of it and marvel. Then my wife croaked from bed, “I don’t feel well.” We traded our anniversary cards, and she dragged herself out to breakfast. I chose to forego the group tour of Strasbourg on the French side of the river. “I can catch the afternoon shuttle back into the city,” I told myself. “At least I can see the cathedral and that famous clock.” I tucked my wife into a deck chaise to soak up some sunshine and spent a few minutes observing the begging swans and a heron across the river…
Finally I decided to go wandering. I stopped first to admire the mooring strategy of our ship, the Hlin, wondering still why the woman at the guest services desk couldn’t explain to me why our ship’s bow pointed southward when we were cruising northward. Later I learned from our “hotel manager” that the captain turns the ship around when docking so that the bow points upstream whenever the river runs high and the current proves strong.
I watched river ships carrying freight along the Rhine. Gases, coal, cars, and livestock all sailed past me. As I walked south, the river to my right and the park to my left, I saw a strange tree not far ahead. It proved to be a manmade thing, demonstrating the Germans’ ingenuity while reinforcing stereotypes about their precision and exactitude. The ‘tree’ looked real enough, and the whimsy of opening a neighborhood for sociable birds seemed admirable, but I couldn’t help noticing how the houses spiraled around the trunk in a near-perfect corkscrew. Other pedestrians paid it no mind, apparently inured to its presence.
I reversed course and headed north. The children’s waterpark to my left had become a bit too boisterous for me.
I soon encountered a small marker in the ground, its painted message cracked from the sun’s rays and the weather, modestly announced, “Biblischer Garten/Jardin bibliqu” the remainder of the French title cut off by the sign’s erosion. I intuited it announced a Bible Garden and intrigued, set off on the graveled path. I learned at the end of the path its plan had been for residents to approach the river from land not vice versa; I had walked it backward. It made little difference. Each stop along the path—there were 17—announced an important aspect of the Judeo-Christian Bible, and not entirely the ones I expected. Yes, The Resurrection received a marker, and so too Pentecost but The Field of the Dead? And some I didn’t understand until I could translate them. (I didn’t think to use my smartphone.) Here are a few:
I especially like how The Last Supper rose up out of the shadows in my photo and how wheat had been planted in support of the marker.
The marker for Paradise evoked humankind’s ignorance of what is to come: it consisted only of a shiny cylinder rising out of a simple terra cotta marker similar to the others. A separate, hexagonal marker had the names of six different churches on it of varying denominations. I realized they had paid for the installation and marveled how such a thing could be placed in what seemed to be a public park, given the “separation of church and state” we have in America.
I returned to the Hlin and my wife, took her to lunch on board, and then tucked her into bed because she felt even worse than before. For my part, I planned to catch the 2 p.m. shuttle to Strasbourg. One learns to be prompt on board, so I gathered in the ‘lobby’ of the ship at 1:55 to walk with the other guests to the bus which we had been told would take 15 minutes. Remember that pedestrian bridge in the background of the photo above? That was the first bridge. The bus would be parked at the next bridge downriver. When I arrived at the gathering point, I surmised something might be amiss when I found myself alone with the guest services representative. She informed me the bus left at 2 p.m., not the group of guests walking to it. “But you still might be able to make it,” said the chipper (and overly optimistic) young lady. Google Maps tells me the hike should take twelve minutes; I had five. The distance (900 meters) equates to more than a half mile. I tried, really I did, but I simply can’t walk six miles per hour, and at my age and physical shape running isn’t an option. I missed the bus. I watched it/them drive across the bridge when I still needed about two more minutes.
Dejected, I attempted to see the upside. Yes, I had just force-marched myself through 92+ degree weather (Fahrenheit), but my wife might appreciate some medicines, right? And the steward for our deck had mentioned a pharmacy very close to the ship. I walked toward the center of Kehl. Along the way, I encountered a very, very strange sign:
I located the pharmacy. Kehl is charmingly small (38,000), similar to so many small cities in America. Its downtown proved easily negotiable, and my first encounter with a European pharmacy enlightening. The ability to get a physician’s assistant-grade consult from the clerk impressed me. I returned with aspirin and throat lozenges. As I walked back to the ship, not sure exactly where I needed to go, I realized I would need to drop off the meds, turn around, and immediately march my way back across the park again to catch the final bus shuttle at 3 p.m. My first exercise session in mid-90’s weather had caused my shirt to stick to my back and chest. I realized some things are not to be. My wife and I would need to return, together, to experience Strasbourg as we had intended. Meds delivered, I grabbed my tablet, retired to the lounge for my first beer, and fired up an eBook. Later, the setting sun seemed to say, “You did alright today, sir.”
all the voices in my head 