Suzie died yesterday. We who watched the inevitable were not surprised but, oh, yes we were. Just as I hate that the sound of the Singing Bowl leaves me, I hate that death sends a very real Self away from existence as we know it.

My acquaintance, a published storyteller, messaged me:

“you have been successfully programed by CNN.

There’s little you can do. It’s unlikely that you can find spiders and insects enough to feed a brood every 20 minutes. Let nature take its course.”

I saw it first at 4a.m.

I don’t think so.

I’m drawn to all this because my mom, Alice, was born in May, 1918, in Bisbee, Arizona and while the infant mortality rate hurled high, while thousands were dying and many more suffered the flu, my mom and her parents, survived.

This isn’t Christmas card suitable, this thought. It’s more like, “Merry Christmas! Let me mess up the traditional message.” 

Ah! I open my computer and in the upper right-hand corner (ding!) comes the announcement: Today is Barb Pine’s Birthday. And so it is. I woke (4:48am) with that thought and here was my second (as I climbed over the bed’s end-board so as not to wake the now twelve week old puppy, Scooter, whose sleeping crate is situated on the floor next to my side of the bed and who would love to wake and keep me in playful company in this early hour. But, no. I have morning thoughts I wish to record in my mostly neglected 2019 journal, and so to coffee and computer I quietly, ungracefully, adjourn. 

In previous blogs when I spoke of Absence, I didn’t notice the impossibility of it without having first expected it . . .

Oh, Skoshi . . . Did we . . .what if we had . . . should we have . . .could we have . . .

Did you know that when you decide to move (I’m reaching for my coffee mug now at 4:15a.m.), the brain’s frontal lobe emits an electrical signal ahead of one’s thought, that is, it prepares for the thought (to move) before it’s thought.

You can see where I’m going, no doubt. In absence, great presence is preserved. It causes us to wonder how . . .

Grief rides in on unwanted information. It doesn’t matter how many grieving I have been experienced before, it always arrives as fresh and readily identifiable as the first bite of a ripe peach off the tree on a hot summer’s day, dripping with distinctive flavor.

I am a Christian. I have a Christian worldview, but . . .

Pirahas hum, sing, whistle, yell, and speak their language. Oh yes, the men whistle conversation when they hunt in the jungle. Go ahead gentlemen, whistle the words to a Robert Frost poem. 

And for grammar snobs — no past or future tense, no recursion; that is, no relative clauses, ever. You will not find a phrase within a phrase. Sorry, Chomsky, nope. Now, concerning the words for Enemy and Friend.

someday, this compared-to-us giant will burn down its hydrogen, convert to using its short source of helium, expand enough to consume Mercury, Venus, and Earth, then, having made a mess of life as we know it, Ka-boom! 

Our window was lifted, not flung. So, before approaching the Thought that drew me from the bed an hour earlier than usual, I’m following a distraction: an image. A window. Flung.

Yeah, but. . . .

Look, I’m not complaining (spin), it’s just that since we moved to this small apartment and I rid myself of probably half my books, there are occasions when—like this morning—I need a particular book