oboyoboy

By now I think you know I fall behind on posting when we have guests or we are on vacation or the kids are sick - basically when I don't have a prolonged period of alone time.

Today was one of the first days in a while that I've been able to sit here and type and now, of course, I'm not sure what to write about.

We had swimming again today and it was the first time of the new session that both kids were fit to swim. Jeez, what a day. While I was able to schedule both on the same day, there's a 45-minute gap between the classes, so we don't get home from 8:20am to 6pm. Which can be a lot. Especially if one of us is still recuperating from a week of fever and cough.

But we made it.

In different news, I've decided to try to learn a few more things by heart, partly because I get bored on solo walks around the neighborhood and partly because my lengthy ear-popping cold has gotten me off the iPod for a while.

I've learned all of Burns' "To a Mouse" - with accent and all - and was starting on Arnold's "Dover Beach" when I realized that "Dover Beach" doesn't flow off the tongue as well. I like it, but I can't figure out how to say it right.

You can't prove it (other from my mangled punctuation), but this is the last verse from memory:

Ah, love, let us be true

to one another. For the world which seems

to lie before us in a land of dreams

so various, so beautiful, so new

hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

and we are here as on a darkling plain

swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight,

where ignorant armies clash by night.

I also learned - perhaps you sense a theme - the beginning of Yeats' "Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

the best lack all conviction; while the worst

are full of passionate intensity.

I should go back to Pippa's Song, no?

I welcome suggestions what to learn next. I might be going on a fifth-grade field trip to Gettysburg, so I'm thinking of learning Lincoln's speech.

By the way, if you don't mind talking to yourself as you walk, I recommend this. It is quite fun to learn lines while wandering about. "To a Mouse" took me more than a week, I think.