Happy Easter! Happy belated Passover! Happy Spring! I like it when the holiday(s) fall late. Kids aren’t wearing parkas over spring dresses, flowers are throwing out their brightly colored lures to bees and eyes both weary of the gray blanket of the past months.
Like many I know, I love Fall — it’s vivid crispness softening summer’s hazy gilt. However, every spring as nature awakens with its bright lemon greens, islands of daffodils, and my lovely tulip trees (someday there will be one at my house), I reassess why I think I like any other season.
I’m not a pastel girl (ok, except for my skin which resolutely varies between ivory and pinker ivory in the summer) — one of the most wonderful back-handed compliments I ever received was that I wasn’t a very lukewarm person, and my wardrobe isn’t either — my youngest with her love of black comes by it honestly as I spent a great majority of my life imitating Audrey Hepburn and Joan Jett (funky combo, but it works).. However, when the peonies bloom all those pinks, the daffodils mass in 50 shades of yellow, and crayon box tulips — I crave softer colors, paler and iced hues of the vibrant colors I generally wear.
Poems on spring are there (my favorite goes all the way to Whitman), but Jollimore’s sardonic origin poem on love and life had me smiling before the halfway point! He’s a professor at Cal State and is classified as a poet, philosopher and literary critic — which makes me want to sing the “one of these things is not like the other,” song… Enjoy!
Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.
–> On The Origins Of Things by Troy Jollimore
new day music:
- Back Home (Andy Grammar) — every story begins somewhere, he makes me smile
- I’m Beginning to See the Light (Kelly Rowland) — one of those billion cover songs, if you don’t choose the classic Ellington version — Rowland, formerly of Destiny’s Child, just delights her way through the song.
- Que Sera Sera (Pink Martini) — completely a Doris Day song, but did you realize it got it’s start in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much — I think Pink Martini’s version is closer to the creep factor
- Morning Glory (the SubDudes) — they don’t get enough love — they are from New Orleans and have the musical languages of home mixed into their rock
- Til the Morning Comes (Grateful Dead) — always look for live versions, seeing them live was like hanging with the coolest garage band
- Carolina in the Morning (Dean Martin) — he has the right swing, though maybe a singer with a southern accent might work as well
- It Might as Well be Spring (Frank Sinatra) — his cover of the showstopper from State Fair is lushly romantic
- Mary’s Place (Bruce Springsteen) — part of The Rising, released in the wake of 9/11, part of the beginning again
- Afterlife (Ingrid Michaelson) — gorgeous voice, gorgeous song
- 5 O’clock in the morning (Lily Allen) — quirky song from a novel performer about the beginning of a relationship
- Just Keep Breathing (We the Kings) — everyday begins a new story
- It’s a Bsautiful Day (Michael Bublé) — a great wake up the morning song
- On a High (Duncan Sheik) — quite possibly, a nearly perfect song
- I Can’t get Started (Coleman Hawkins) — a jazz standard performed by a jazz master
- Right Back Where we Started From (Maxine Nightingale) — one of those 70s songs that becomes an ear worm, sorry!
- Can’t Hardly Wait (the Replacements) — each day, each season, each new adventure should begin with this!
- Love Don’t Die (the Fray) — the circle of life, via rock and roll
The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created spring.–> Bern Williams
Take care,
Aly
History Thru the Looking Glass 
